WELCOME TO MARINA DEL REY HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Dear Members, Friends, and Archivists,

A very Happy New Year to all of you. It’s a very exciting time at the Marina del Rey Historical Society as we not only begin a new year, but start our third decade in the preservation of the Marina’s history.

In 2018, we completed the expansion project of our exhibit space and gift shop in Fisherman’s Village. In 2019, we moved our archives to a new, larger climate-controlled facility in order to organize our historical items for digitization and ultimately, for website retrieval.
MDRHS now has an archivist intern, Anna Parmelee, who joined us toward the end of last year and has helped us tremendously in organizing our archives and taught us the best solutions in the preservation process. This helped to curate The Dinghy magazines, (the Marina’s first local newspaper) to prepare them for digitization. LA as Subject (LAAS) an umbrella archivist association sponsored by the University of Southern California (USC), acquired a grant to hire three archivists to train interns on the digitization process. They are now digitizing The Dinghy’s for us so that they will be accessible on our website in the near future. With the help of Supervisor Janice Hahn we acquired funding to purchase a flatbed scanner to do digitization in-house which moves us one step closer to opening a research center for public use.

Your support in the past has brought us a long way towards preserving the history of Marina del Rey through gathering documents, photographs, and oral histories. Our board of directors recognizes the special need to digitize our archives for ultimate storage and retrieval for public access and research.

This is our fundraising request for 2020. Funding is needed for additional scanning services as well as to upgrade our website. We also look forward to resuming event presentations of the Marina’s history and will be hosting another Speaker Series with George Drury Smith on Thursday, February 6th at 7pm at the Community Room in Burton Chace Park.

Your donations have been critical in the past, to fund our efforts to bring reality to our preservation goals, to enhance community pride, and to increase public awareness of Marina del Rey. Please complete the enclosed card and return with your check donation in the self-addressed envelope…OR…you may donate online through our website: www.marinadelreyhistoricalsociety.org

Please stop by the Marina del Rey Historical Society in Fisherman’s Village and see where our efforts have taken us so far and where we look to be in the future.

With sincerest appreciation for your support,

Howard Wenger, President
, Marina del Rey Historical Society