To the Editor:

As virtually everyone who has an attic knows, given enough time, the contents transmogrify into a cobweb of mystery and forgotten memories.

“It's up in the attic, I think” is heard more and more as the years slide through the hourglass.

And so it is with digital attics. Rather than sorting and cleaning out items, it’s easier to just buy a bigger external hard drive and add to the pile. File names that we were sure we would remember become a labyrinth of codes and odd names with cryptic meaning.

Of course the beauty of a real attic is that it’s easy, with very little mystery, to find out what’s inside. Just open the envelope, just open the box and simply look inside. With a digital attic, it’s as though virtually every item was placed in a similar box with an ambiguous label.

However, every once in a while, one gets lucky. In rummaging through my considerable digital attic (as a professional photographer and video producer I literally have hundreds of thousands of images) I stumbled across a file that caused me to stop and stare with a mix of disbelief and joy.

As the Greeks say, eureka.

October 2025 was the 35th anniversary of Altamont’s Centennial celebration and the production of “Altamont It Shall Be,” a half-hour video that I produced, directed, and shot with the help of Rebecca Fishel and her husband, David Edler, as well as Roger Keenholz, both town and village historian at the time, and numerous others listed in the credits at the end of the film. “Altamont It Shall Be” also aired on WMHT.

I took a digital copy into Joe Burke at the Altamont Free Library and, while he was aware of its existence, he’d never seen it as the only copy the library had was a VHS tape. So the digital copy of the video is in the library’s capable hands and if anyone would like to see it, simply contact the library. You won’t have to go rummaging through the dust and cobwebs.

Harvey Vlahos

Altamont