Following the 2025 VCF SoCal, arrangements were made for former CMA and Claremont Graduate University staff to tour the collection at SDSU – to see what would need to be done to make the collection usable to researchers.
CGU Professor Joshua Goode, who oversees the Paul Gray PC Museum, and Anna Atkeson, the then-executive director of the PGPCM, were joined by former CMA Executive Director David Weil and former acquisitions manager Jim Trageser.
When the CMA lost its funding from Coleman College in 2005, staff had only 30 days to wrap up everything. Once SDSU agreed to take in the collection, there were only days left. The CMA warehouse had the shelves emptied and loaded onto semi trucks and hauled to the SDSU Library, where they were unloaded. After that, several more truckloads brought the collection over, where it was hurriedly placed on shelves – and when those ran out, stacked on the floor.
During our April 2025 visit, we found the collection pretty much as it had been offloaded 21 years earlier.