Juan Monroy

The last time I was in College Park, Maryland was in 2006 to visit the National Archives. While the National Archives is housed in a Greek Revival building in Washington, D.C., easily accessible from the Archives–Navy Memorial–Penn Quarter Metro station, most of the archive’s materials are housed off-site in College Park.

While in College Park, you can also visit the Broadcast Archives at the University of Maryland. The archive consists of two collections: a collection devoted to public broadcasting and the Library of American Broadcasting. This archive was featured in a recent video on the Washington Post website, where Post reporter John Kelly donates some television-related memorabilia.

Most of the artifacts in the video, such as the Partridge Family and the Starsky and Hutch board games should be familiar to most contemporary pop-culture fans, but you might not recognize Swayze. At first, I didn’t recognize it either, but, as I suspected, Swayze was named for John Cameron Swayze. Between 1949 and 1956, Swayze hosted the Camel News Caravan, which was also called the Plymouth News Caravan after 1955, when the automaker and cigarette maker began co-sponsoring the program on alternating days.

Swayze was a news trivia game made by Milton Bradley, produced around 1954. Apparently, you can find a copy for sale on Ebay, the Internet’s largest unofficial archive of ephemeral culture.