A journalism professor at Western University has donated 13 scrapbooks to the Lambton County Archives in Wyoming.
The books include clippings of newspaper articles Mark Kearney wrote when he worked as the Sarnia bureau chief of the London Free Press from 1977 to 1979.
Kearney said it was a busy time for news in the community.
"The big stories were about downtown revitalization," said Kearney. "Mayor Andy Brandt was the guy in charge then and he had a lot to say about it. The other thing was, there was a bit of friction between the city and Sarnia Township, there was talk of amalgamation or annexation, so there was a lot of back and forth on that."
He said there are articles about Chemical Valley and stories about interesting people with interesting projects.
Kearney said he wrote as many as seven stories a day, and was a regular reporter at city council, county council and board of education meetings.
"The Free Press had six bureaus outside of London, and Sarnia was the biggest city of the six. Whoever was in the bureau, you were the person. So it made for long days. You'd work Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. until 10:30 p.m. and file stories as you went for the next day's paper," he said.
Archive Supervisor Nicole Aszalos said the information will be a great source for researchers.
"We'll be taking scans of all of the newspaper articles that are contained within the scrapbooks," said Aszalos. "We do this because newspaper is highly acidic, which can be detrimental to a lot of the other documents in the collection."
She said the scans will be separated by topic and placed in coordinating files.
Kearney is planning to donate more scrapbooks to the archives at the London Public Library. They include stories he wrote while working in London at the Free Press.