Do you know what the PAA auction invitation looked like in 1964? Well, you can now look it up thanks to the diligent work of our Archives committee.

Rita Flynn chairs the group of five wonderful women who spend hours every month organizing and archiving all documents that are currently stored in boxes at the PAA office. They have organized over 300 items of paper from auctions, events, invitations, newspaper clippings, etc. They have stored it all on acid free paper and uploaded most of it to the cloud making it available for anyone who is interested in doing research on our organization and its history.

Want to know who chaired our benefit in 1975? It’s there, along with the invitation (many invitations are works of art themselves!), committee members, pictures and anything else related to the event.

These wonderful ladies created three new categories to organize our historical documents. The first, PAA members, contains information or publicity on past members of the PAA. The second is Friends of the PAA which contains information on people who have been closely connected to the organization. The last is Publicity which includes all the past newspaper articles covering the PAA and its activities over the years.

Over the years the PAA has done incredible work and the effort of the Archives committee preserves it all for generations to come. Their work is so important in fact, that for the 2023-24 year the chair of the Archives committee will be a Board position.

–Elsa Behney