Third in a series about the BC Sugar records

Office work has changed dramatically over the last few decades. This fact is driven home daily as I process 100 years of BC Sugar records. This is especially true with regard to the company’s correspondence, and I’d like to share my archivist’s observations on the way these records were produced and organized over the years. 

BC Sugar office interior circa 1920s. Reference code: AM1592-1-S2-F2: 2011-092.0400.

The vast majority of the correspondence created in most offices today is email. Most of us create new email threads every day without a thought to the medium’s rather short history and the convenience of this form of communication. Emails are sent around the world and between people who sit within a few steps of each other with the same ease and amount of thought. Not that long ago, office technology was very different.

Three BC Sugar office workers in 1927. Can you imagine what a normal work day would be like for them? Reference code: AM1592-1-S2-F2: 2011-092.0389.

Here is a small taste of office technologies that I have come across in the BC Sugar records so far…

A few of the bound letter books in the BC Sugar fonds. Note the necessary water damage on the edges of the very fine paper.

The company’s bound letter books contain copies of outgoing letters. A special non-blotting ink would be used to write (or type) the letter and then within 24 hours the person copying would put a dampened pad between the pages of the letter book and sandwich the letter between it and an oiled cloth. Pressure would then be applied with a mechanical letter copying press.   

Sample pages from inside a 1925 letter book. A white piece of paper has been placed behind the right leaf to make it easier to see. Reference code: pending.

Each page of a letter book was numbered so that individual letters could easily be referred to and to ensure that if an individual page was removed it would be missed from the sequence. Using the page numbers, it is also possible to keep a log by last name of addressee in the front index section.

This system was used from the start of the company in 1890 up until the late 1940s. BC Sugar records also include many personal records of the Rogers family including personal outgoing letter books of Benjamin Tingley Rogers.

Does this look familiar to you?

Once upon a time, offices kept carbon copies of outgoing correspondence filed alphabetically by the last name of the author and by date. This system of carbon copies of typed outgoing letters was used at BC Sugar for over 20 years, from the 1950s to the late 1970s. A sheet of carbon paper was placed between two sheets of paper and pressure applied through the typewriter to the top sheet caused the pigment from the carbon paper to make a mark on the copy. Multiple copies can be made by stacking several sheets each with a carbon paper layer. It is through the use of carbon paper that the term “carbon copy” and the abbreviation “cc” came into common use for anyone receiving a copy of an original letter.

Boxes specially designed for housing carbon copies of outgoing correspondence. Box reads: January 1, 1959 – December 31, 1961; Tissue copies of Rogers and other confidential letters.

This is a carbon copy of a letter sent to Mr. W.R. Hetherington, Vice-President of the Manitoba Sugar Company, regarding the Canadian Sugar Institute. It was filed under “H” the last name of the addressee. Reference code pending.

The BC Sugar records also include transcriptions of long-distance telephone conversations, mostly dating from the 1940s. Many transcriptions include the words ‘CHANGE OF CYLINDER’, which means that the conversation was being recorded by engraving lines on a wax cylinder with a stylus. Popular office cylinder recorders were made by Dictaphone.

The recorder would be attached to the telephone to capture both sides of the conversation. Secretarial staff would play back the cylinder to transcribe the conversation, then the lines on the cylinder would be scraped off and it would be ready for repeated re-use in this way until all the wax had been removed. By the end of the 1940s, wax cylinder recording had been nearly phased out of office work. The Archives holds no examples of wax cylinders, we just have the evidence of them through meticulous transcription.

A page of a transcription of a long-distance telephone conversation. Reference code: AM1592-S12-F75.

In the above example note the offhand mention of ‘Displaced persons;’ Mr. Wood was helping some Jews who arrived from Holland.

The binders which housed the telex conversations were arranged neatly by date.

Telex was a way of sending text messages  through a separate network of modified telephone lines. The sender would usually code a message by punching holes into paper tape, then the message would be sent by running the tape through the Telex machine and would be printed at the receiving end. Telex could also be used in real time to have a conversation. Telex was invented in Germany in 1926 and first became operational there in 1933. By the time Telex first became available in Canada in 1956, Canadian Telex customers could connect with several dozen countries. Telex was used at BC Sugar from first year the service was available until 1975.

The real fun is inside the company’s Telex binders where you can read the conversations that took place typed across oceans. Here is a sample page from 1956. Take a moment to count the countries mentioned and consider just how international and sophisticated the sugar market was.

Sample page from a Telex binder (1956). Reference code: AM1592-S1-4-F1 (1 of 2).

One of the advantages that Telex had over faxing was the ability to verify the identity of the recipient. At the beginning and end of an exchange the sender would transmit a WRU (Who aRe yoU) code and the recipient machine would automatically send an identifying code. BC Sugar used Telex mostly for the purchase and negotiation of buying raw sugar. They were called the Czarnikow Telexes, as Czarnikow & Co was, and still is, the major player in the global trade of sugar. If you visit their website, you can view a gallery of Czarnikow office photos from 1922. The gallery includes a photo of A.T. Jenkinson and H.J. Sayers of the Canadian department.

I recently found out that my Dad used a Telex machine at his work in the 1970s. It was way cooler than faxing, with real-time typed conversations at a speed of 66 words per minute! It had all the inside jokes and instantaneousness of texting but on paper – among others, CU L8R was a common Telex shorthand.

One final bit of ephemera found in with the records and correspondence was a bottle of Comptometer Oil, which was for the proper care of the  office Comptometer, an electronic desktop calculator patented in 1887.

Comptometer oil bottle and case.

The directions on the cardboard case begin: “If machine is used only once or twice a week, oil every three months. If used regularly eight hours a day by a rapid operator, oil each Monday morning.”

BC Sugar office staff posing at work in 1913. Reference code: AM1592-1-S5: 2011-092.1745.

Did reading this remind you of an office experience from your past? Did you oil the comptometer each Monday morning? We would love to hear from you about the office technologies you have used over the years. The mundane office processes and technologies even from the near past are foreign to those who were born digital. Please share your stories.

Over the course of the next couple of years the textual records, photographs, moving image materials, architectural drawings, and other materials in the BC Sugar fonds will be preserved, arranged, described and made available to researchers. We look forward to providing access to and sharing more stories and highlights from this exciting fonds!

“Like a stopped clock,” the author Lewis Mumford asserts in this 1961 appearance at a Books and Authors Luncheon, he has been exactly right twice.  

The first time was when he wrote The Culture of Cities in 1938. This book “pointed out the imminent disaster of cities” in face of the rising tide of Fascism. Mumford recounts with pride how his book was smuggled into Occupied Europe and used by many underground networks to educate the young town planners in how they would reconfigure their urban environment after defeating the Nazis. This time, Mumford claims, we in the United States face a similar threat, not from Fascism, but from “the motorcar.” 

The city, he warns, “has been disintegrating before our eyes.” He uses, as a warning, Greensboro, N.C., which is called the Parking Lot City. What this increased emphasis on cars has done is diminish the value of the city as “a place where people meet face-to-face.” European cities are also becoming Americanized, to the extent that one can no longer enjoy a drink outside a Parisian café without being overcome by noise and fumes. Confronting this gloomy future, Mumford hopes his current book, The City in History (1961), will offer some hints for deterrence. He also points out  two recent glimmers of hope: the movement thwarting Robert Moses’ plan to have a four-lane highway go through Washington Square and the residents of New Jersey rising up against a proposed “jetport” in the Meadowlands.  

Born in 1885, Mumford was that rare and peculiarly American phenomenon, the self-educated scholar. Though he studied at the City College of New York and the New School For Social Research, ill health prevented him from taking a degree. It did not impede, however, his far-ranging intellect. His early works were of literary criticism, rediscoveries of the Transcendentalists and Herman Melville. But what he is chiefly remembered for today is his fascination with the city, its architecture, and the study of the urban phenomenon in general. As Mumford indicates in this talk, the subject was clearly one whose time had come. The Humanities and Social Sciences website h-net.org notes:

The Culture of Cities…publication in 1938 marked a turning point in his extraordinary six-decade writing career, thrusting him into the international spotlight and onto the cover of Time. So sweeping and insightful was Mumford’s analysis that thereafter he was acknowledged as an authority on urbanism in its multitudinous aspects: historical, formal, social, economic, and political.

Mumford de-emphasized technology as man’s defining achievement, arguing that language and communication were the essential elements of civilization and that the city, where all kinds of relationships could be established, was in fact the great invention of society. For this reason he eschewed the word “technology” and preferred the word “technics,” which encompasses both the human and social aspects of invention and tool-building progress. Although a prolific writer (he was for many years architecture critic for The New Yorker magazine) Mumford also gained a considerable following from his personal appearances. His biographer Donald L. Miller noted: “As a lecturer, he exuded strength and power, and an almost Olympian certainty.”

Mumford’s opinions often epitomized the direction of progressive thought at the time, arguing vehemently for the United States’ entrance into World War II and just as forcefully, 30 years later, for the country’s exit from Vietnam.  His early work extolled the potential the new urban lifestyle held, while his gradually souring on the city over time reflects the disillusionment of a generation. (Ironically, he left New York City rather early, settling in a small house in the town of Amenia in Dutchess County. This too could be seen as presaging the “white flight” that so devastated cities after World War II.) But, as the New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger notes:

Mumford was among the first critics to remind us that bigger is not always better; in his later years, he came to exaggerate that view so much that he seemed almost to be saying that big must be bad. Yet even at his most angry, Mumford’s criticism was always informed by a desire to see architecture in a social context. His eye was never seduced by the beauty of form; he consistently sought to view architecture in terms of social purpose, and made his judgments accordingly. Today, as we come to the end of a decade of visual overkill and social indifference, his standards seem in one sense out of step, in another, desperately needed.

Indeed, the problems Mumford posed in The City in History (which won the National Book Award) are still those bedeviling urban planners and city-dwellers today. In their holistic approach to technology and its place in the social fabric, his arguments have taken on an even greater urgency in the computer age. Eugene Halton, writing for the University of Notre Dame website, recounts how:

…he shows in lucid detail how the modern ethos released a Pandora’s box of mechanical marvels which eventually threatened to absorb all human purposes into the Myth of the Machine, the title he used for his two-volume late work. Mumford strongly believed that so long as men and women desire face-to-face contact, cities will endure in one form or another. Accordingly, the Culture of Cities will remain a relevant text for the present-day and future reader who will necessarily place a higher value on such contact as cyberspace renders it less frequent. Cities can become “eutopias”, good places, but only if men and women will them to be so. Never was a goal so simple or so elusive.

Mumford died in 1990 at the age of 94.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

“I’m not an author. I’m merely a victim” is the unwittingly prescient opening statement from Robert Moses at this 1952 Books and Authors Luncheon. 

The book Moses references in his talk is not, of course, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974), which indelibly fixed Moses’s reputation as the man who destroyed neighborhoods, ignored mass transit, and precipitated the “white flight” to the suburbs that almost brought the city down in the 1960s. He is referring instead to the just-published, adulatory Robert Moses: Builder for Democracy (1952), by his friend Cleveland Rodgers.  

Moses devotes most of his talk to lamenting the atmosphere of distrust that has arisen around government, the result of “altogether too many newspapers” conducting too many investigations. He insists that most of the state and municipal functionaries he deals with are “honest, hard-working, and interested in their job.” He likes how Rodgers’ book shows how things get done at the time, not with an “ex post facto brightness.” Moses goes on to paint a somewhat dire picture of the city’s future, in which traffic, safety, housing, and transportation will all be threatened by rising population. Tellingly, he looks forward to the time when “conditions get so bad that people have to entrust somebody with ability and experience and courage with the job of straightening the thing out.” He concludes with a paean to the concept of public service, and again, perhaps unintentionally defending himself against the storm of criticism he was to face in later life, tells the audience “…don’t be too critical of those of us who are trying our best in this particular vineyard.”  

Robert Moses was born in 1888. His ideas for reforming government attracted the attention of Al Smith, under whose patronage Moses rose to become a notable figure in New York state politics. Although neither an architect nor a builder, Moses became such an expert at drafting bills that were able to get through the state legislature that he soon accrued a vast amount of power; with the coming of the New Deal and its vast public works projects, Moses found himself in the perfect position to take advantage of federal largesse. Among his early accomplishments were the creation of Jones Beach, the New York parkway system (which opened up vast swathes of Long Island to motorists), and the Triborough Bridge (now called the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge). These and other projects not only profoundly reshaped New York City, but served as a template for the nation as a whole. As Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New York Times, wrote in Moses’s obituary:

Although he disdained theories, he was a major theoretical influence on the shape of the American city, because the works he created in New York proved a model for the nation at large. His vision of a city of highways and towers — which in his later years came to be discredited by younger planners — influenced the planning of cities around the nation. His guiding hand made New York, known as a city of mass transit, also the nation’s first city for the automobile age. Under Mr. Moses, the metropolitan area came to have more highway miles than Los Angeles does; Moses projects anticipated such later automobile-oriented efforts as the Los Angeles freeway system.

These early achievements, gained at the expense of rich landowners and corrupt politicians, made Moses into something of a folk hero. Perhaps the height of his popularity came with the 1939 World’s Fair, in which his masterful handling of logistics, politics, and construction all came into play. Writing for The Atlantic at the time, Rodgers painted a typically sympathetic portrait of Moses:

In a period of prodigious public expenditures, Robert Moses emerges as the most farsighted and constructive of public spenders. He has demonstrated in brilliant fashion that democracy can be made to work by skillful, resolute handling, and that ‘public improvements’ can be given a surprising amount of beauty.

But after World War II, Moses’s autocratic style, his emphasis on the automobile over mass transit, and his proclivity towards razing “slums” and replacing them with huge impersonal towers dominating vacant windswept squares caused a groundswell of reaction. As the city’s fortunes deteriorated, he was accused of racism, of destroying neighborhoods, and of ruining municipal finances, and was even blamed for the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants baseball teams. This time his enemies were not the rich and corrupt, but community activists and urban preservationists. An attempt to recapture some of his former glory with the 1964 World’s Fair failed, and in 1974, Caro’s majestic 1,246-page biography presented quite a different picture than that offered by Moses’s friend Rodgers. This meticulously researched, excoriating attack fit in perfectly with the sense that New York City had taken a fatefully wrong turn. It was critically acclaimed and, despite Moses’s outraged denunciations,  won the Pulitzer Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize. Seldom has one book so decisively influenced its subject’s reputation.

Recently, though, there has been a movement to recognize Moses’s body of work, especially in the face of the seeming impossibility of the city ever being able to initiate any sort of public works project. As The New York Times reported in 2007:

That Moses was highhanded, racist, and contemptuous of the poor draws no argument even from the most ardent revisionists. But his grand vision and iron will, they say, seeded New York with highways, parks, swimming pools, and cultural halls, from the Belt Parkway to Lincoln Center, and thus allowed the modern city to flower.

Moses, who died in 1981 at the age of 92, remained unrepentant. “Those who can, build,” he said. “Those who can’t, criticize.”

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

The Public Interest Declassification Board will host an open meeting on Thursday, December 6, 2012 to discuss its recommendations to the President on Transforming the Security Classification System.  The full Report to the President will be published online on December 6th at http://www.archives.gov/declassification/pidb.  The meeting will focus on the Board’s fourteen recommendations for transformation.  The recommendations center on the need for new policies for classifying information, new processes for declassifying information, and the imperative for using and integrating technology into these processes.  Press and media are welcome to attend.

When: Thursday, December 6, 2012 from 9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.
Doors Open: 8:45 a.m.
Where: The Archivist’s Reception Room, Room 105 in the National Archives Building
Address: 700 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C.
(Note:  Attendees must enter through the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance.)

RSVP: pidb@nara.gov

Space is limited and attendees must register via pidb@nara.gov; provide your name and professional affiliation (if applicable).  You will receive a confirmation e-mail from the Public Interest Declassification Board staff confirming your reservation.  Please note that one form of Government-issued photo identification (e.g. driver’s license) is required to gain admittance.

In anticipation of the report’s release, today the Board will re-engage its followers by re-opening its blog, Transforming Classification, where it will post summaries of some of the key recommendations in the report.  Be sure to stay connected to the Board’s activities and look for more information about the Board on its website: http://www.archives.gov/declassification/pidb.

The Public Interest Declassification Board is pleased to announce the completion of its report, Transforming the Security Classification System.  The President asked that we study the security classification system and make recommendations for its transformation to better meet the needs of users in the digital age.

The report will be released to the public on the Board’s website on Thursday, December 6, 2012.

The Board consulted extensively with experts from the Government Openness advocacy community, civil society and transparency groups, archival researchers, and technologists and solicited opinions from distinguished civil servants, Executive department and agency officials and the Congress.  Our efforts were designed to gain a broad perspective on issues confronting the classification system and led to the fourteen core recommendations in this report.

The classification system exists to protect national security, but its outdated design and implementation often hinders that mission.  The system is compromised by over-classification and, not coincidentally, by increasing instances of unauthorized disclosures.  This undermines the credibility of the classification system, blurs the focus on what truly requires protection, and fails to serve the public interest.  Notwithstanding the best efforts of information security professionals, the current system is outmoded and unsustainable; transformation is not simply advisable but imperative.

We believe transformation will require a White House-led steering committee to drive reform, led by a chair that is carefully selected and appointed with specific authorities granted by the President.  In anticipation of the report’s release, we will re-engage our followers by re-opening our blog, Transforming Classification, where we will post summaries of some of the key recommendations in the report beginning Monday, November 26, 2012.  Be sure to stay connected to the Board’s activities and look for more information about the Board on our website: http://www.archives.gov/declassification/pidb.

From the cover of The Linking Ring, May 1954:

Inside the magazine Lady Francis (Frances R. Francis) is described as “one of the top femme magicians in the country.” Her own article is titled “Afraid of Television?” and offers advice like the following to magicians considering stepping in front of the camera: “The next thing in line of equipment is the camera. This mechanical robot is never to be feared. Get a look at it close up, ask the engineer about the various lenses and how it operates.” On the most important question, Frances offers the following:

If you are in doubt about performing on television just look in the mirror and if you can’t stand watching yourself doing a trick, then have pity on the millions of people who would be watching you!

Bryan Hall decorated with Odd Team colors, circa 1917-1921. (Marion Laura Stine Collection, 1917-1921.)

Held on the morning preceding the annual Florida State College for Women’s Thanksgiving Day basketball game, Color Rush first made its campus appearance around 1917. Color Rush was a series of races, by Odd and Even members, in which each team attempted to “capture” campus buildings by affixing their team’s colors to the highest point. The two squads tried to one-up the other, so much so that poles with red, white, and purple or green and gold ribbons extended beyond the rooftops. Later, for safety reasons, the colors were attached to the front doors of major campus buildings and other landmarks. Color Rush officially began with the morning bell, signaling the runners to race out of their dormitory rooms to tag the Administration Building, the Education Building, the dormitories, and other designated target points.

In 1919, it was decreed that the fountain, a gift from the classes of 1915 and 1917, was “forever Odd,” and from then on, only Odd colors of red, purple, and white would adorn it. The entrance arch and brick piers, or main gates, presented to the college by the classes of 1916 and 1918, were declared “forever Even” and reserved for only green and gold from then on. Evens decorated the Dining Hall in even numbered years, and Odds in odd numbered years. As for the other buildings, the possession of the structure was determined by the runner from the side that first touched it.

In 1921, the rules were changed again: from then on, each team selected a runner that lined up in front of Business Manager, John G. Kellum’s house at the corner of Copeland Street and College Avenue, just outside the main gates. From there, the runners raced to the campus buildings where official judges determined the winner. After the objectives were secured for the team, other members helped with the decorating of the buildings. Traditionally, Dr. Ralph Bellamy was the official starter for the Color Rush race for the Administration Building. Instead of using a whistle to start the race, he used his shotgun, with “On your mark, get set.” BOOM! After the event, the campus was said to be radiant with color.

Color Rush, November 25, 1925. (Carolyne Doyle Richardson Scrapbook, circa 1925-1926.)

Born in New Orleans, Ernest Posey earned a degree in Fine Arts from Louisiana State University and a degree in architecture from Tulane. In the 1970s Ernest moved to Mendocino County, where he bought a small cabin and a working studio. In the fall of 2007, Ernest was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and passed away shortly thereafter.

Posey’s estate has donated a series of journals to the GLBT Historical Society in which Ernest drew sketches, mockups of art installations, wrote dream descriptions and kept various ephemera from his daily life. The journals span 1968 to 2007, and are a fascinating glance into the creative life and work of Ernest Posey.

The collection is open for research at the GLBT Historical Society. In addition, the estate of Ernest Posey has created a website where you may view selections of Ernest’s artwork, and read a biography.

In 1997 President and Mrs. Clinton created the White House Millennium Council with the theme “Honor the Past—Imagine the Future.”  The Council asked former presidential and congressional medal winners and students from across the country to identify artifacts, ideas, and accomplishments which represent America at that time in history for inclusion in a National Millennium Time Capsule.  The sounds of Louis Armstrong, a photograph of U.S. troops liberating a concentration camp, children’s art, and a model of the Liberty Bell are some of the more than 1300 contributions made.  And a package of Twinkies!

The Time Capsule now resides at the National Archives and I had a chance to talk with some of the staff involved in processing the contents of the capsule for long term preservation.  “In perpetuity” is imbedded in the DNA of the National Archives, after all.  So…how did the Twinkies stand up to our rigorous standards?  While they do have a reportedly long shelflife—14 years in one source—they failed the perpetuity test.  The fact that Twinkies had been originally included was, of course, documented, but in the end they were eaten!

Photo courtesy of Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I have a long history with Twinkies, culminating in winning the New Year’s Eve Dessert Contest while at the MIT Libraries with my Sarah’s Surprise recipe. … [ Read all ]