Remembering Jim Sweeney

A lifelong volunteer who helped preserve the history of American nudism

Jim Sweeney, longtime volunteer and digital archivist for the American Nudist Research Library (ANRL), has died. A resident of Cypress Cove since 1981, Jim devoted more than forty years to the preservation of nudist history, becoming one of the most influential figures in the library’s story and a quiet force behind its modernization. He was 95.

Born in Ohio and raised in Indiana, Jim served in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Korean War before earning a degree in mechanical engineering. He worked for General Motors and later for Martin Marietta in Orlando, where he retired in 1985 as Director of Engineering for an airborne fire-control system still used by the U.S. Air Force. Soon after retirement, he and his wife Barbara began spending much of each year sailing the Bahamas, but Cypress Cove always remained their home base.

Jim first visited the Cove in 1965 and joined the American Nudist Research Library as a volunteer in 1982, just a few years after its founding. His technical background quickly proved invaluable. In an era when the library’s collection was indexed entirely on paper, Jim began developing a computer database to track books, magazines, and newsletters—an innovation that set the stage for everything that followed. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he helped catalog the growing collection, created searchable inventories, and introduced digital record-keeping to the library’s daily operations.

Jim’s meticulous work was instrumental in building the foundation for what later became the Nudist Research Library Consortium—a cooperative effort between ANRL, the Western Nudist Research Library, the Naturist Education Foundation Research Library, the AANR-NW Archive, and the Federation of Canadian Naturists Research Library—to share digitized materials and improve access for researchers. His vision of making historical nudist resources searchable and secure is now a reality for scholars and historians.

Even as technology and leadership changed around him, Jim remained a constant presence at ANRL. His colleagues described him as forward-thinking, methodical, and endlessly dependable. “Don’t let his age fool you,” former ANRL director Paul LeValley once wrote. “Jim has always been one of our youngest-thinking staff members.”

He formally retired from active volunteer duty in 2022, after more than four decades of service—longer than anyone in the library’s history. The systems he created, the archives he digitized, and the institutional continuity he preserved will continue to serve generations of researchers and nudists to come. And Jim Sweeney’s name is woven into the history he spent a lifetime protecting. 🪐