The memory keeper: Preserving the lives lost in the Pan Am 103 tragedy now falls to Cara Howe

A few weeks ago, Cara Howe, the new Pan Am 103 assistant archivist, returned from a brief meeting, took a seat at her wrap-around desk and began to unpack a large white box.

For 20 minutes or so, Howe sorted the box's contents — mostly papers and books from a FBI investigator — into manila folders and gave each its appropriate label. Howe, 25, sat stooped over, and with her curly brown hair, black flats and jeans neatly rolled up, she looked like a college kid cramming for an exam.

She soon came across a black album, which held color pictures of Stephen Boland, one of the Syracuse University students killed on Pan Am 103. In several pictures, he wore a suit and tie, his thick tuff of ‘80s hair parted to the left, and smiled broadly. Toward the back of the album were recent photos of his parents, and several shots of a blond child with an equally large smile: the niece Boland never met. Howe leaned forward, placing her hand on her knees.

"Albums are tricky. I'm actually going to take a training seminar just on albums," she said.

Unpacking boxes like these willdominateat least the first 18 months at Howe's job, which requires her to be part historian, part salesman and part graveyard attendant. While neither Howe nor her boss, Ed Galvin, director of archives and records management, would confirm that the Pan Am collection is the archives' most important collection; very few turn up to see Chancellor Tolley's personal papers or watch a film from the 1974 Syracuse-Kent State football game. Yet visitors regularly view the Pan Am collection, or at least some part of it. The BBC visited. So did a British member of Parliament.

Despite accounting for less than .01 percent of SU's total archives, the Pan Am collection is also the only one with an archivist devoted solely to its contents

The Pan Am collection's importance and popularity dictates Howe's complicated job requirements. She is responsible for maintaining the memories of all 270 victims killed in the crash, including the 35 SU students. It's a daunting task for a person who, a year ago, worried about finishing her SU graduate degree in library and information sciences and planning her wedding.

SU Archives conducted a job search last fall to fill the Pan Am position, and Howe, who was already working in the archives to fulfill an internship requirement for her graduate degree, applied for the job. She started March 16. Now,with Galvin's guidance, Howe will learn to manage both the physical archives and the people immortalized within it.

Bird Library's sixth floor houses the Pan Am collection. It sits in a large room,with rows of cream-colored bookcases stretching wall to wall, making it look like the warehouse from the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." The archivists call the room the stacks. On half of Row 68 and Row 69, white boxes hold some of the large Pan Am memorabilia and gray ones support smaller items. When you open a box to look at one victim's item, the emotional weight becomes palpable. There's a copy of Scott Cory's birth certificate from Lawrence and Memorial Hospital in New London, Conn. Pencil sketches of flitting butterflies by Shannon Davis. Christopher Jones' treasured and now faded, blue Red Sox ball cap with its brim bent up.

"It's like a cemetery in there," said Christopher's father, Ken, who visits the archives often. "And it's not just Christopher's stories there, it's all of them."

The stories reside in Rows 68 and 69, but each item's exact location and each box's specific contents can stump even Galvin, an older man with graying hair and a wide, pleasant face, who has overseen the Pan Am collection since his arrival in 1995. Since then, the collection grew from 25 boxes to about 225 boxes — too fast for Galvin to manage alone.

About 40 percent of the collection remains unprocessed. To formally organize everything, Howe must sort and catalogue each unprocessed box. The boxes' contents will go in manila folders. Small plastic clips will replace any staples because metal corrodes easily. Eventually,a description of each item will appear on the archives' website. And when Howe finishes the unprocessed boxes, the processed ones will be re-processed.

Galvin pulled down a processed gray box and opened it. Inside were cards sent to Daniel and Susan Cohen offering condolences on the death of their daughter, Theo. One was from President George H.W. Bush,written on White House stationary and later mounted on cardboard. When Galvin saw the Bush letter, he scowled.

"A White House letter should not be sitting on a piece of acidic cardboard. We need to get it to a safer environment," he said, pointing at the letter.

Processing would require a great amount of time and care even if the collection stopped growing. But each year more arrives, and SU has tasked Galvin, and now Howe, to actively solicit further donations; largely because, thanks to Galvin's fundraising efforts, the archives have about $800,000 to spend. Each time Howe and Galvin talk, they frequently discuss potential donors at least once.

When asked about the pressure to bring new donations, Howe said, "I think I'm up to the task, but obviously, it's not something you want to fail at. You don't want to let anyone down in this instance."

Each family donates different amounts at different rates. The Cohens gave the most — around 15 full boxes. They gave manuscripts from their Pan Am book, "Pan Am 103: The Bombing, the Betrayals and a Bereaved Family's Search for Justice," news clippings and government documents, along with some of Theo's personal documents, like her unopened death certificate. Susan Cohen, Theo's mother, still plans to send more, like a recent interview with Australian journalists. 

"Now I'll remember to send the tape of the Australians to Syracuse," she said a couple weeks ago after talking about her contributions.