As readers can learn more about in our feature elsewhere in this issue, thealmost lost a century’s worth of history a few months ago. Mold had been found on the bound volumes that hold every edition of the newspaper, and library officials feared they could not be saved.Thanks to the quick thinking of Livingston Fire Department president and historian Tom Cooney, though, it appears that those decades of history will be preserved. The mold will be removed during a painstaking months long process (with help from the Fire Department 100th Anniversary Committee and the Camuso elves), after which they will be stored in the Camuso barn on the Oval, hopefully a dryer location than where they had been stored in the library.These volumes allow us to produce our semi-annual history sections, as well as our weekly 40 Years Ago columns. They are a wonderful scrapbook of the Tribune through the years (93 of them to be exact, since the paper first published in 1929). But even more so, they are a snapshot of Livingston and the people who have embodied it over the years. Were we to lose these books, we would have lost a good portion of our shared history, lives lived and stories told. It was quite a scare to think how close we came to losing these priceless artifacts.Thank you to Tom Cooney for saving the Tribune’s hard copies and preserving the history of Livingston. Like a true first responder, he saw something that needed saving and took it upon himself to do just that. We are truly grateful that he has taken on this effort and saved these books for generations to come.
