War Scrapbooking: Charles Rinaldi's Project and Media Legacy

Every year during Chalcedon Term, Dr. Schlect and Dr. Dorney take their classes on a tour of the Washington State University library. While exploring the vast recesses of resources that taxpayer funding can provide, students learn to research and source information for historical theses. Among the resources they encounter are journals and online historical newspaper archives. What students must avoid in their research is the dreaded “curated collection": catalogues of copy and ads, or topical articles, which have been decontextualized for the researcher. But that’s far from saying such collections have no value, and today I’d like to highlight such a collection that you may have noticed in the library this term.

This fascinating scrapbook of World War II was assembled by Mrs. Schlect’s grandfather, Charles Rinaldi. The attached plaque reads,

Throughout the Second World War, Charles Rinaldi took in the morning newspaper along with his coffee. He knew he was living through momentous times, so he preserved a record of the war as it unfolded. He added scissors and paste into his morning routine throughout the war, and this scrapbook is the result.

The scrapbook bears witness to the war’s impact on the home front. Americans followed the war closely, unlike the relative inattention we paid to our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Newspapers carried information about the war to news-hungry readers in every community throughout the country. Charles lived in Kellogg, a small mining community in northern Idaho, where he read The Spokesman-Review, a mid-sized paper distributed out of Spokane, Washington.

Charles built up his scrapbook from December of 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, through August of 1945, when Japan finally surrendered.

Charles Albert Rinaldi (1904–1996) was born in Italy, in the small town of Besano near the Swiss border. The Rinaldi family immigrated to the United States in 1910, when Charles was six years old. The Rinaldis were among many Italians who found work in northern Idaho’s mining district. In 1930, Charles married the Rose D’Andrea, the daughter of another Italian immigrant, and the couple raised four children. The family remained in Kellogg, where Charles worked for a mining company as an accountant.

Charles Rinaldi is Brenda Schlect’s grandfather. We are grateful to Brenda’s parents, Joseph and Barbara Rinaldi, who preserved this scrapbook so we can enjoy it today.

I highly recommend taking a few minutes to turn some pages and examine them. The rewarding experience and wonderful story of this book led me to ask myself: Could such a project make sense today? Are we creating such mementos for future generations to treasure for their historical value? In many ways, I would say no. The information age has largely stripped our capacity for this kind of thing. Our desire for instantaneous knowledge of any event anywhere in the world, although certainly a driver of newspaper history, has led us to forego physical copy altogether.

To say the newspaper has always been a staple of human life isn’t true, certainly not until the printing press revolutionized popular literacy. The 17th century saw their spread across Europe, and some survive today. The United Kingdom’s The Gazette has been the official paper of record since 1665! The wonder and tradition attached to such an accumulating and expanding media is easy to understand, even if it is a relatively modern innovation.

By the time Charles Rinaldi was reading them, newspapers had become extremely prevalent and very affordable. Although they had already been widespread, it was the pioneering of Benjamin Day in the 1830s, who utilized a new wood-pulp paper and significantly reduced production costs. His paper, The New York Sun, was the first of the “penny papers,” so-called on account of their cost to the consumer (a sixth of what newspapers previously cost). The Spokesman-Review, Rinaldi’s source for the wartime news, began in 1833 and is still in publication today. Of course, due to inflation, a subscription will set you back a bit more these days, and their digital services are more heavily promoted than hard copies.

Digital media, for reasons both apparent and subtle, has a nearly exclusive purchase on the American news intake. Instantaneous, editable, archivable, space efficient—in nearly every practical way, it improves. Yet something is certainly lost in them, perhaps the way something was lost with the printing press. Mr. Pinkall gives the freshmen a Rhetoric prompt that asks whether physical books or ebooks are better, and the analogy to newspapers and news sites is strong. If only the content matters, the medium doesn’t. But perhaps that’s not the case. For instance, should preservability count for something? And if it does, which is actually more permanent, the website or the copy?

Although digital media has eclipsed the newspaper, there are other ways in which we can pass on history to the next generation. My family recently discovered a box of my great-grandfather’s journals, beginning shortly before the 20th century with entries nearly every day for decades. I began transcribing some last summer, typing them up digitally (and more legibly) in hopes that I can one day print them in hardbound volumes as a historical source and memento. The journals lasted through two world wars and a global depression, times of hardship and love, loss and resurrection.

Whether taking a few minutes each evening to jot down what God has brought you that day or recording the newspaper headlines at breakfast, many of our grandparents believed in preserving elements of their time as a heritage for their children. I would encourage you: think about these things. What stories are you creating? What events are you recording? Will your grandchildren be able to point out that you were a college student? A churchgoer? How about what you observed, and how God shaped your character over the course of your life? Ponder them well. What you choose to preserve and pass on—whether you are a grandparent or a teenager—will play into how your posterity remembers you.