This Blog's Purpose

I am a US Air Force historian stationed at Yokota Air Base in Tokyo, Japan, and one of my long-term projects has been to preserve my office's collection of old base newspapers. The process for preservation that I have developed is the following: I gently unbind the papers, make a full-sized copy of each page on 11x17 paper, and then scan the copies as 300-dpi gray-scale PDFs. Though getting the papers to PDFs takes a lot of work they look beautiful, and of course they're easy to view and distribute without having to touch the fragile originals.
Once I have copied and scanned a newspaper I place it in a Gaylord archival box where it will likely stay forever unless something happens to the copy. The photocopies, I must say, are generally superior to the originals, especially because they are a true black and white rather than old-newspaper yellow (unless you happen to be nostalgic for that color, which I am not).

Naturally the newspapers as a whole are an invaluable historical resource, but the focus of this blog is to show the graphics that were used throughout the papers, most of which was drawn locally in the old days. Therefore, unless you were stationed at Yokota Air Base in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and read the Afterburner or Fuji Flyer, most of these materials should be completely new.
My plan, if I can keep it up, is to simply go chronologically from January through December of a particular year and show whatever graphics I find, from cartoons to PSAs to banners and so forth. If I can add some background information about the artist I will, and I will also always try to provide context for each image.
To start out I have included the Yokota newspaper's flag as it appeared on 14 January 1959. Note the jets encircling the name -- a nice touch that definitely says "Air Force."