Margery Blaine, Who Rescued 90,000 Pages From The Bin, Dies At 84
For thirty-one years she collected the paper a federal records annexe was throwing away, indexed it by hand on 11,400 cards, refused four offers to buy it, and left the lot to a public library on one condition.
SCRANTON, Pa. — Margery Blaine died on 26 July at her home in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She was 84. The cause, according to the Lackawanna County coroner's office, was congestive heart failure.
For thirty-one years, beginning in 1988, she drove twice a week to a federal records annexe outside Philadelphia and collected the paper it was throwing away.
The lock-up
It was legal, and this is the first thing every account of her gets wrong. Material scheduled for destruction and released to the public is released to the public. Mrs Blaine simply turned up, filled out the form, and took what nobody else wanted, week after week, for three decades.
She rented a lock-up on Cedar Avenue and indexed everything by hand on five-by-three cards: agency, series, date range, and a one-line description in a small upright hand that her daughter says never changed.
By 2019, when arthritis stopped her driving, the collection ran to about 90,000 pages under 11,400 cards.
"People always ask what was in it," her daughter, Theodora Blaine-Ncube, said. "Travel vouchers. Building maintenance. Cafeteria contracts. Forty years of somebody's expense claims. She used to say the interesting thing about a bureaucracy is not its secrets, it is its lunches."
What she refused
She was offered money for the collection at least four times, twice by researchers and twice by people who would not say what they wanted it for. She refused all four and, characteristically, indexed the offers: card 11,388, "OFFERS — see folder."
The folder contains the letters.
What she left
The whole of it went, on her instruction, to a public library in Scranton, with one condition: that the index cards go with the paper, and that nobody re-catalogue it.
Alonso Petrakis-Wu, who received the collection, has agreed. "Her system is better than the one we would have imposed," he said. "It is the system of a person who read everything. Ours would be the system of people who scanned it."
The collection opened to readers on 3 August. The first researcher through the door was a graduate student writing about federal cafeteria procurement in the 1970s, which Mrs Blaine would have enjoyed enormously and which her daughter says would have been the only outcome she considered a success.
She is survived by her daughter, two grandchildren, and card 11,401, which is blank and which she left in the tray.
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Sources & Method
An obituary. The cause of death is taken from the public record of the county coroner's office and is stated plainly. This newspaper's standing rule on this series is that we record the manner of death and decline to draw an inference from it. Readers write in weekly asking us to bend the rule. We print their letters and we do not bend it.
Who we spoke to
- Theodora Blaine-Ncube, Her daughter. Interviewed in person in Scranton 31 July 2026
- Alonso Petrakis-Wu, Head of special collections at the receiving library. Interviewed by telephone 1 August 2026
- Lackawanna County coroner's office, Public record. Written record request 1 August 2026 Cause of death recorded as congestive heart failure.
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