For more than three decades, Salisbury native Mel Toadvine documented the events that impacted the Eastern Shore as the editor and a photojournalist for The Daily Times. Today, his work lives on in the Nabb Research Center exhibit: “Capturing the Times: The Photojournalism of Mel Toadvine”
As a photojournalist and editor at The Daily Times in Salisbury, Mel Toadvine captured the news and events that shaped Delmarva from the 1960s through the 1990s. Now, an exhibit of his photograph collection from the Nabb Research Center at Salisbury University features highlights from a historic collection of almost 2000 photographs.
Mel Toadvine’s work documented some of the Shore’s most impactful events, including the Freedom Riders equality protest in Cambridge in 1963 and devastating flooding in Ocean City after the Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962. He also covered the appearances of prominent Peninsula visitors, including Senator Joseph Biden’s tour of the Salisbury Times in 1976 and musician Duke Ellington, pictured with Mel, in the lead photo, in 1968.
For over 30 years, Toadvine had his pen and camera on the pulse of the region. Born in Salisbury, Toadvine started his career as a photographer and feature writer in 1961. Mel was on the scene with his camera to cover national events such as the civil rights movement, presidential visits and disasters that struck the region.
After his retirement from The Daily Times, Toadvine donated his photograph archive to the Nabb Research Center. Capturing the Times features only a small sampling of the nearly 2,000 images in the Mel Toadvine collection. After a major digitization effort, the full collection is now available to the public on the Nabb Research Center’s Flickr page. The exhibit will be on display in the lobby of the Guerrieri Academic Commons through December 10. CS