Datebooks

I'm a terrible diarist but an overly compulsive record-keeper. And I'm a pack rat, so I have much too much ancient paper, almost all of it of interest only to me (at most!). I first kept a journal at the beginning of my year as an AFS exchange student to West Germany (1963-1964). My German "father" gave me a Deutsche Bank pocket calendar that I used to keep track of homework assignments and events during that year. The Harvard Coop produced similar pocket calendars, and I used them fairly consistently for decades. I started keeping my datebook as a computer file on 8/13/2005, so the datebook files below from late 2005 to present are quite accurate. I gave up on Coop pocket calendars a few years later.

Now that I'm retired, I have the time to peruse some of the original sources (listed below) and I have entered some data from those sources. It's wonderful to rediscover one's own past, and internet detective work can be very rewarding. For example: I very clearly remember attending a fabulous Sviatoslav Richter concert at Royal Festival Hall in London with my mom in summer 1966. From my expense book, I find that the date was 6/15/66 and that our drinks at the concert cost 5/6 (no ticket cost listed, so I presume my mom paid for them); from Richter's online chronology, I learn that he played Schubert D. 575, Franck, and the Liszt b minor, and that contemporary critics felt as I did about his astonishing performance, though I didn't much like the huge Liszt sonata then or now.

I maintain web pages with baseball, cultural event, film, restaurant, and tennis data, and my Greece and India pages are brief travel journals. I've kept film and tennis data in electronic form for decades, since the early 1980s. Some data from those pages are also included in datebooks, some are not. I wish it were all consistent, but it ain't.

Datebooks available as .txt files:
1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

Here's a roughly chronological list of my datebooks and journals, the primary sources for dates. I keep a more detailed inventory in .csv.

datebooks