Her name was Margreta Snell. She was a classics teacher, and when she retired from Delta 53 years ago there was such an outpouring of love that her farewell made the Canadian edition of Time magazine.

On the night the school said goodbye, she declared: "I believe in the value of a difficult subject, hard work and lively competition."

Now Miss Snell lives again, on YouTube. She was lost for decades, her image in a can on a dusty shelf. But these days, at the Hamilton-Wentworth board of education archives, there's a 24-year-old with a passion for history beyond his years.

Ben Dyment has been digitizing all kinds of really old AV material for the Hamilton Wentworth District School Board. | Barry Gray/The Hamilton Spectator

Ben Dyment is the archives technician. And when he came across this beloved teacher, up there on the stage at the Delta auditorium, he knew he had to get her back into circulation.

He's now doing that with hundreds of other long-lost artifacts — VHS, Beta, 8 mm and 16 mm films, audio reels.

The board of ed's archives recently moved into big quarters at the back of the former Hill Park Secondary, near Upper Wentworth and Mohawk. And where they used to have auto mechanics, a dance studio and shop classes, there is one of the largest repositories of its kind in Canada.

You can't just walk in, but anyone can make an appointment to visit. There are yearbooks by the hundreds, from the 1890s on. There are textbooks, rows and rows of them, from the Dick and Jane variety to Coles Notes on Shakespeare's King Lear.

There are school t-shirts by the dozens, modelled by a mannequin named Elaine who's really been around. There are football jackets and pennants and old school desks.

Elaine is a valued staffer at the archives and loves to model old school gear. | HWDSB Archives

There are trophies, an ancient printing press, a Zerox 820-II computer from 1982 that still fires up just fine, a huge 1915 stone map of the Americas, blueprints, newspaper clippings, programs, plaques, anniversary buttons and pins, banners, pennants, projectors, paintings and photographs that used to hang in schools long gone.

And files by the thousands of attendance records, from the late 1800s to 2004. We know that at Queen Mary School on Sept. 28, 1927, Helen McClung missed half a day.

Retired principal Hal Hillgren took over from the late John Aikman as manager of the archives. He has a team of volunteers who do intake and cataloging. And now he has Ben Dyment.

Dyment has long hair, but recently shaved off his beard. That may have been a mistake, because he was already getting people saying, "You're not old enough to know this stuff." By the time he's done with them, they've changed their minds.

Dyment loves history and old tech, handy for the audio-visual portion of the collection.

"You find some treasure and you get it out to the public," he says. "It feels great."

It had sat largely untouched, harder to access than just flipping open an old book. Some was on Beta, the format that lost out to VHS, which lost out to DVDs. And now it's streaming.

The archives include many paintings, including this one of Dundas District High School by William Biddle. Today the building is condos.| HWDSB Archives

Dyment tracked down a Beta machine on Kijiji and started in. He's had old films digitized, and they're tops for image quality. The 16 mm stuff is footage the board might have hired someone to shoot.

Sports Day at Memorial School in 1950, for instance, shot in vivid Kodacolor. The day kicked off with a parade. The kids showed up with their bikes and trikes festooned with crepe paper and streamers and home-made animals.

When Dyment cracked opened the tin on that one, the vinegar smell was a sign deterioration would be setting in.

There are films the board made itself, like one from some 30 years ago called Middle School Album, complete with an awkward school dance, bowl haircuts and lots of teachers with beards, decades before hipsters brought them back.

There's the 1939 Royal Visit to Hamilton. And a precious segment, probably late '80s, of the Grade 5/6 class at the old King George school doing Everly Brothers classic All I Have To Do is Dream.

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There's more gold every day. Search "HWDSB Educational Archives" for the YouTube Channel and Instagram page. "It's Hamilton history," Dyment says. "It deserves to be seen."

Paul Wilson's column appears Tuesdays.

PaulWilson.Hamilton@gmail.com