Eagle Archives, Jan. 10, 1940: Local woman's diary-keeping record surpassed by former resident of Berkshire Massachusetts

From berkshireeagle.com

From the Jan. 10, 1940, Eagle 

Fifty-one years is a long time, but keeping a diary for that period kept the championship for that particular type of journal in the possession of Mrs. Henry J. Eldridge of 19 Harvard Street for only one week.

Today it was learned that George C. Dunbar of Westfield, a former resident of this city, had been making daily notations pertaining to himself and his family for 59 years. As Mr. Dunbar stated in a letter to The Eagle:

“I am not willing to have a woman beat me out, even though it is a leap year.”

The one time Pittsfield man who was employed by the Pittsfield Electric Company as an engineer started to chronicle his life story on Jan. 1, 1881, and hasn’t missed a day since. He has all of the diaries except for the first four which he recently destroyed, retaining their record.

As the years passed, Mr. Dunbar’s children became interested in his painstaking efforts, and requested that he provide each one of them with a copy. Therefore in 1932, he started to type up all of his diaries. He used carbon paper, and made three copies, one for each of his children.

According to his figures, the history covered 184 closely-written pages, and contained 86,400 words. Actual typing required 210 hours.

He wrote a dedicatory preface to each of his children, and then had the manuscript bound in book form under the title of “My Diary Book, 1885-1933.”

With the passage of eight more years, Mr. Dunbar feels it soon will be time to add the intervening records in manuscript form as a supplement to the original volume.

All of the important events of his life, the activity of his children from birth to maturity, and most of the important national and local happenings of the past half century are included in the diaries. There is a very complete section on the World War, and a detailed story of the March (1888) blizzard.

For many years, Mr. Dunbar was supervisor of the Westfield Power Company. He is a brother-in-law of Frank Howard of this city, having married Miss Celestia Howard at her South Street home Oct. 10, 1888. Rev. I. C. Smart, then pastor of the South Congregational Church, officiated.

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