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Frank Absher simply refused to let history be tossed into the garbage.
During a 1987 lunch meeting with fellow board members from the Press Club of Metropolitan St. Louis, Absher said the conversation focused on possible community outreach endeavors. Absher brought up an issue that he had been wrestling with for quite some time.
“I mentioned that I would like to find a way to keep media stuff from being thrown away and lost,” said Absher, a former KMOX broadcaster who also worked for many years in writing and advertising. “I was very concerned that so much of the wonderful work that had been done throughout the media industry over the years could be gone forever.”
And losing that work, Absher believed, meant losing a significant connection to St. Louis’s past.
“Not so much from a perspective of, ‘Oh, this is a really big deal in history,’ but rather that these works – newspaper articles, recordings of radio or TV broadcasts, local advertisements – all of this great stuff offers us a wonderful representation of what things were like in everyday life,” Absher said. “It is truly like opening up a window and looking back 50, 60, 70 years. The ability to see this stuff instead of just reading about it, to actually hold it in your hands, to have the ability to listen to live broadcasts from the Prohibition Era, it really is amazing.”
So Absher decided to take it upon himself to collect as much media memorabilia as he could, no matter where that trek took him.
“That’s involved everything from combing eBay on a daily basis to dumpster diving when an ad agency went out of business,” Absher said. “People don’t realize that today’s stuff is tomorrow’s history, and as a result of that, I’ve tried to get as much as I can.”
Absher’s collection quickly grew pretty large, not to mention expensive. The St. Louis Public Library offered Absher space at its downtown branch, where he could store and catalog these goodies, but it became obvious to Absher that his one-man crusade needed more help.
“I knew that I was going to have to explore the possibility of setting up a charitable foundation for something like this,” Absher said.
That realization led to the formation of the St. Louis Media History Foundation. A non-profit organization established in 2010, the St. Louis Media History Foundation consists of local professionals from the broadcast, communications and marketing fields who volunteer their time and efforts in support of the mission to preserve, archive and promote the rich history of St. Louis media.