Writer’s note: This is the first of a short series of Weelunk pictorials from the collection of retired West Liberty State College (now university) Professor Robert (Bob) Schramm.
As a colleague, friend and neighbor, I had the privilege of getting to know Bob Schramm. Bob passed away at his home in West Liberty on June 21, 2014. Within the last few weeks, I have been working with members of the Schramm family to go through Bob’s extensive collections.The family members have given me permission to make some of the photographs from those collections public. Because he was the official photographer and archivist for West Liberty State College/University, Bob’s photographic collection is extensive. He was also an avid collector of historic postcards.
The following excerpt from Bob’s obituary as published in the Wheeling News-Register gives a good account of some of his activities:
Following his retirement from WLSC, Bob continued his contributions to The Linsly School, co-founding their Archives and Museum, and serving as Archivist and Museum curator.
He authored four pictorial histories: West Liberty State College (2001), The Linsly School (2003), Moundsville (2004) and Wheeling Island (2006). A fifth book, a pictorial history of radio station WWVA, is currently in production. A work of fiction, The Apocryphal Tales of Sherlock Holmes (written under the pen name R. Wolfgang Schramm) was published in 2010. At the time of his passing, he was working on a pictorial history of the town of West Liberty.
One of only 40 Daguerreotypists in the U.S, he hand-built and assembled all of the equipment needed to create Daguerreotypes, a photographic process invented in the mid-1830s by Louis Daguerre. In addition, he was skilled in making platinotypes, chrysotypes, cyanotypes and uranotypes. (SchrammStudio.com)
In 1990, he and his wife Jeanne designed and constructed a women’s history museum “on wheels,” housed inside a refurbished school bus. His exhibits later became the first permanently installed collection in the National Women’s History Museum in Alexandria, Virginia.
The remainder of this document consists of some of the historic postcards from Bob Schramm’s collection. We hope that you enjoy looking at them.
To conclude this posting, I would like to thank the members of the Schramm family for allowing me to scan their historic postcard collection and to make some of those scans public. In addition to the postcard collection, the family has allowed me to scan or copy Bob’s historic photographs. That collection includes around 800 items. We will share some of those photographs in future postings.
