NOSTALGIA

When Kevin Costner needed a Civil War soldier’s diary for “Dances With Wolves,” his production company went straight to Ada Fitzsimmons. Oliver Stone’s crew relied on her for a ‘60s-style cigarette package and rock posters for “The Doors,” and she supplied “For the Boys” with period sheet music and other items. These and other requests just proved what Ada Fitzsimmons has always believed: That everything is worth the paper it’s printed on. From cigar bands to Victorian calling cards, her archives chronicle U.S. history with items most people would throw in the garbage.

The 63-year-old connoisseur of chronicles grew up in a coal miners’ camp in West Virginia, where the written word was a rarity. “My parents were immigrants,” she says. “We were dirt-poor. I’d never seen a magazine until I went to college.” So, after graduating with an education degree, she set about making up for lost time, scouring flea markets and libraries for old newspapers and magazines to use teaching American history. “Real accounts of the Civil War written by the soldiers who went to battle are much more interesting than the textbook versions,” she says. “The kids loved it. History was captured inside those old magazines, letters and newspapers, and that was extremely exciting to me.”

The antique dealers, however, thought she was crazy. “Nobody wanted paper back then. There were times in the early ‘60s when I’d go to an auction and we’d have to hire a moving van. When the Pacific Far East Steamship Line went under, I stood in the pouring rain waiting for the auctioneer to get to the barrels of paper artifacts. I bought it all, including 40,000 old postcards and 16,000 sewing kits.”

Not surprisingly, “The Paper Pile,” her tiny Palm Springs shop, is mushrooming. She’s never parked a car in her garage; there’s no room. Besides thousands of magazines, Fitzsimmons owns hundreds of valentines, Christmas cards, canceled checks, political buttons, product labels, photographs and posters dating back to the mid-1800s, indexed and housed in the shop, as well as two small warehouses and a retail store near San Anselmo. “Every search is an exciting adventure for someone who enjoys history. I have the ‘girlie’ cards of the ‘30s, permission slips Civil War soldiers carried allowing them to bring their slaves to the battlefield, and greeting cards from the suffragette movement. The script from one reads, ‘A woman is not a heroine just because she’s dying for a man.’ ” Now that’s history.