Don Graham has the perfect hobby. It's one his wife actually encourages him to continue even though he's spent tons of money on it and scheduled most of their vacations around it.

The only problem is he should have retired earlier so everyone else could enjoy it sooner.

Graham, 71, is scanning his collection of Fort Wayne Daisies, Zollner Pistons basketball and softball, Fort Wayne Komets, and Fort Wayne amateur baseball programs, photos and scrapbooks into the Allen County Public Library's digital archive. It's an unbelievable treasure trove of Fort Wayne sports history.

“I knew that he had a great interest and has a lot of Fort Wayne sports history,” said Curt Witcher, manager of the library's genealogy center. “I just asked him about preserving some of this, and he finally realized I was serious about it. He's kidded with me that he can't possibly live long enough to get all this done.”

Graham retired in March 2008 as a personnel and labor relations consultant, and now he's spending two days a week digitizing his collection. Eventually the library will build him a page on its Web site, possibly by the end of the summer, Witcher said, so everyone can see Graham's work.

“When you first start, it's feeling your way through the process with the machine and how it works and the little tricks,” Graham said. “Now I can hardly wait to get back here to go again.”

Some of his collection is on display at the Northeast Indiana Baseball Association Museum inside the Dean Kruse World War II Victory Museum in Auburn, including a golf club presented to Babe Ruth when he played in Fort Wayne in 1927. The rest is taking up space in the Grahams' basement.

“If something had happened to him, he had never told me what I was supposed to do with it all,” Marge Graham said. “You know what I said when he didn't answer? I kept threatening to have the biggest auction you ever saw. He would just chew me out, so I knew I couldn't do that.”

Marge Graham has worked at the library as a professional researcher since 1981. Whenever a sports question comes up that no one else can answer, she tells the library personnel to call her husband.

Graham's collection started 25 years ago when he found a 1950 Brooklyn Dodgers program. He paid about $40 for it and was hooked. Besides looking online, Graham would go to auctions or antique shops. He found a large newspaper front page in Iowa that featured the Daisies.

“I've been over to auctions in Ohio where you can find Fort Wayne stuff and just steal it practically because people don't care about it,” he said. “That stuff belongs here, not in Timbuktu. It's just a history that I was afraid was going to fade into the distance because nobody else was doing it. I used to go to those games, and I remember some of that stuff.”

Most of the pieces have local origins, but Graham also has some major-league memorabilia, including a 1960 World Series ticket for Game 7 between the Pittsburgh Pirates and New York Yankees that ended when Bill Mazeroski hit a walk-off home run.

After finishing the Pistons softball material over the last four months, Graham estimates he's 15 percent done with the project. Now he's working on the basketball. There are about 30 pages in each program. Along with the programs, he has 50 Komets scrapbooks, and he also has gathered Fort Wayne sports items from the collections of the late baseball historian Bob Parker and former Daisies player Dottie Collins.

Graham said he has no idea how long the scanning will take but doubts he'll live long enough. Witcher has promised more volunteer help.

“I used to worry about what he was going to do when he retired,” Marge Graham said. “I didn't want him to sit in the chair and watch TV all the time and drive me nuts. When he told me about this, I tried to get him to retire sooner.”