Rumor has it that Beloit alumnus Roy Chapman Andrews (1906) was the inspiration for movie hero, Indiana Jones. Certainly, the explorers shared similar feats of derring-do and boasted larger-than-life panache. 

During 30 years working in the Beloit College Archives, I sometimes find myself thinking about Indiana Jones, especially when combing the campus for archival treasures. Although I’ve never fought my way out of a booby-trapped Peruvian cave or faced down a chamber teeming with poisonous snakes, I have explored mysterious, dimly lit basements, attics, and storage rooms.

I remember pushing through a curtain of sticky cobwebs and crashing into a bank of file cabinets rusted to a cement floor. A battered drawer pulled open with a painful creak, and there was 1930s-era administrative correspondence, each folder tab precisely gnawed off by some ancestral mouse, which left the Franklin Delano Roosevelt letter – and all the others – still safely tucked away, pristine.

Sneezing through more than a century of dust in the attic of Middle College, I retrieved long-lost photographs of the “Black Demands” of 1969. A forgotten closet revealed a dusty stack of film reels dating from the 1920s to the 1950s. We’ve also recovered 19th-century ledgers from dormitory floodwater, salvaged a smoke-blackened brick from the fire-ravaged First Congregational Church, and beaten off mold, mildew, and possible wrack and ruin.