On January 1st, the copyright expired for some of our holdings: they are now in the public domain in Canada. Digital materials are no longer restricted to being viewed only at the Archives, but are available online to all. Here’s a quick look at some of the digital objects that have become easier to view and re-use.

Tattooed man pulling on rope, by Clixby Watson, 1950s. Reference code AM1562-: 72-633

Charles “Clixby” Watson was a British painter and illustrator. We don’t know if this was a work of imagination or modelled from life or why this was created.

Melanope, by Alexander Paterson, 19-. Reference code AM1562-: 72-476

The Melanope was launched in 1876 and sailed as a windjammer until 1906, when it was damaged on its way to Washington State. It was converted to a barge and sold to Canadian Pacific Railway, where it was used as a coal ship into the 1940s.

The return of the prophet of the Squamish, Maisie Armytage-Moore, 1942

Maisie Armytage-Moore, also known as Maisie Hurley and Maisie Murphy, was a local activist for First Nations’ rights from the 1940s until her death in 1964. Born in Wales, she was not aboriginal herself. She founded and published The Native Voice newspaper. See this Vancouver Sun post for more on her colourful life.

This is just a small selection of the items which have recently come into the public domain.

On January 29, 1888, Edward Lear quietly passed away with only a servant by his side. A lifelong nomad, Lear was often alone as he hunted for new painting grounds. He was first and foremost a landscape artist and spend a good deal of his life wandering the Italian countryside in search of a new view to paint.

His Book of Nonsense, a result of trying to entertain the children of one of his patrons, would be his greatest achievement however. First published in 1846, it led to dozens of editions and re-imagings by other authors and artists over the years as well as Lear himself who revisited the “nonsenses” as he called them in the 1860s and 1870s. It also was one of the first publication instances of the limerick. The Learian Limerick was named in Lear’s honor to specify the style Lear used in composing the short poems to accompany his character sketches.

In 1884, Lear contracted bronchitis and never fully recovered from it for the rest of his life. His health continued to deteriorate until his death in 1888 in San Remo, Italy, the closest place to a home the wandering poet and painter ever knew.

We have many of Lear’s Nonsense books in our digital library as well as a set of letters from Lear to one of his many patrons, all part of our John MacKay Shaw Childhood in Poetry collection.

With a voice that is gentle yet insistent and relentless in its search for truth, Ariel Dorfman describes his and every caring person’s obligation to not forget those secretly killed by totalitarian regimes. In this 1988 talk interspersed with poems, the Chilean-American novelist, playwright, essayist and poet asks us to remember “the remote dead . . . those whom we can hardly remember, who can’t speak anymore.” Dorfman’s experience of loss is immediate and intimate: many of his friends were murdered during the regime of Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator.

In this forty-five minute recording, Dorfman uses several short, carefully crafted poems to try to capture the brutal abstract and solitary experience of the dead and the dreadful feeling of loss felt by the living. He reads his poem “Hope”, a plangent tale of parents seeking word of a lost son, who find surreal solace from reports of him screaming in pain while being tortured in jail; such news means he may still be alive. In “Corncake”, the poet weaves a vignette of despair – a mother stolen from her family, who is now remembered by a kettle on the stove. In “Nuptial” a lover converses with his missing spouse, telling her “in my dream you scream and I can’t make you stop.”

Dorfman seems fated to have become a leading voice for the souls of desaparecidos, those who have been “disappeared” for speaking out against brutal dictatorships. Born May 6, 1942 in Buenos Aires — the son of Eastern European Jews who fled Hitler’s Europe at the outbreak of World War II — he spent his early years in the United States, where his father taught economics. In 1954, the family moved to Chile, where he studied literature at the Universidad de Chile and achieved early acclaim criticizing North America’s influence on Latin American culture. In 1970, Salvador Allende, then the democratically elected Socialist president of Chile, appointed Dorfman to his cabinet as Cultural Adviser.

Coup of September 11, 1973. Bombing of La Moneda, the Chilean Presidential palace

(Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile/Wikimedia Commons)

On September 10, 1973, the night before General Pinochet launched his infamous coup, Dorfman unknowingly switched shifts at the presidential palace with his good friend, Claudio Jimeno. His friend was murdered along with Allende by Pinochet henchmen. Spared death, Dorfman fled Chile with his young family, traveling to Paris, Amsterdam and, finally, the United States. During his exile and continuing upon his periodic returns to Chile before and after the reemergence of democracy there, Dorfman has been on a mission to bear witness, to use words to bring back those who have been denied by political evil their time and space in life.

In works like his play Death and the Maiden and novels such as Hard Rain, Widows, and The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, Dorfman explores how a state exerts control over its people by imposing death. He notes that Hitler first perfected the technique of making people disappear for political reasons, transporting victims to distant death sites so that their graves could not become a rallying point or memorial. By keeping corpses hidden, the repressors deny the bereaved an object for mourning, extending sorrow into an endless process. This technique was perversely refined in numerous Latin American countries such as Uruguay, Argentina, Guatemala, Honduras, and, of course, Chile. The refinement: citizens were disappeared not by an occupying force, but by their own state. In Chile, the state’s efforts to extend control went beyond death. Thus, when a village found that thirteen of its men were executed and their bodies dumped in a mine, the government sealed the mine to prevent it from becoming a grieving place.

But Dorfman insists that the mind can go where the body cannot. So while a repressive state may be able to destroy thousands of its people, it is not able to destroy the imagination of the living, who remain tied to a nostalgia connected to the past. Dorfman believes that it falls to writers like himself to make the future possible by creating the words that allow the dead to speak even to those who are yet to be born.

_____________________________________

Note: The Ariel Dorfman talk was originally presented at the Celeste Bartos Forum of the New York Public Library on April 14, 1988 and broadcast as part of the Voices at the NYPL series over WNYC on April 4, 1993. The talk is followed by a short documentary report (twelve minutes) describing the various international organizations that assist those who have experienced the loss of loved ones at the hands of totalitarian regimes or have survived politically imposed torture and exile.

Christmas Day 1947 brought the biggest snowstorm in New York City’s history up to that time (only surpassed in 2006), unexpectedly dumping over 26 inches of snow in Central Park and paralyzing the Long Island Railroad. A few months later, reporters acting out the Inner Circle’s annual lampooning of the city’s administration were able to look back on the event with levity. Listen to two snippets above: a version of “winter wonderland” describing the blizzard, and a skit featuring a stranded Long Island commuter.

As it turned out, the blizzard would turn out to be the least of Mayor O’Dwyer’s worries.

 Most of the materials need some TLC if they’re going to last.

As a rule, it’s probably not the best thing to begin a political speech by defining yourself by what you’re not. But that’s just what Brooklyn Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm did 43 years ago today when she announced she was running for the Presidency on the Democratic line. She said she was not the candidate of black America, “although black and proud,” and not the candidate of the women’s movement, “although a woman and equally proud.” But there was no denying the obviousness of this historic moment. Shirley Chisholm was indeed the nation’s first African-American Congresswoman and the first African-American from a major political party to run for the presidency.

The announcement location could also be characterized by what it was not. It was not in a smoky political back room, nor from the podium of a glitzy hotel ballroom, but from the stage of a parochial school auditorium in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Still, it was totally in character with the outspoken former teacher who was idealistic and well ahead of her time as she sought “to repudiate the ridiculous notion that the American people will not vote for a qualified candidate simply because he is not white or because she is not a male.”

Shirley Chisholm was born Anita St. Hill on November 20, 1924, in Brooklyn, New York. She was the oldest of four daughters of a factory laborer from Guyana and a seamstress from Barbados. For part of her childhood, she lived in Barbados on her maternal grandparents’ farm, receiving a British education. Later she attended public schools in Brooklyn and went to Brooklyn College on a scholarship, graduating cum laude with a B.A. in sociology in 1946. From 1946 to 1953, Chisholm worked as a nursery school teacher and then as the director of two daycare centers. She married Conrad Q. Chisholm, a private investigator, in 1949. Three years later she earned an M.A. in early childhood education from Columbia University. Chisholm served as an educational consultant for New York City’s Division of Day Care from 1959 to 1964. In 1964, she was elected to the New York state legislature and was the second African–American woman to serve in Albany. She was first elected to Congress in 1968.

For more on Chisholm’s career and legacy see: CHISHOLM.

Christmas came early to the Archives & Special Collections when we received two boxes of books by Native American authors from Amherst College alumnus Peter Webb (Class of 1974) just before we closed up shop for our holiday break. There are many exciting items in this very generous gift, including copies of some of Charles Eastman’s books in their original dust jackets, but this item eclipses all the others:

Samson Occom. A Sermon… (1772)

Hmmm…a piece of an old newspaper?

Samson Occom. A Sermon… (1772)

Someone used the first page of the October 14, 1783 issue of the Connecticut Courant and Weekly Intelligencer to make a protective cover for their copy of the 1772 first edition of Samson Occom’s Sermon. Not only are we delighted to now hold a true first printing of this important work, but that wrapper tells us that just over a decade after it was printed, someone thought it was worth wrapping up for a little extra protection. Most likely that person was in the vicinity of Hartford, CT, but it’s almost impossible to be certain — newspapers certainly traveled far and wide, and the only certainty about the date the Courant was sewn to the Sermon is no earlier than October 1783.

I am at the start of a more extensive research project into the publishing history of this sermon and its many reprintings, which I will report on in the months ahead. For now, it brings me great bibliographical pleasure to see these search results in our online catalog:

In addition to the generosity of our alumni, we also depend on the wonderful world of the antiquarian book trade to build our collections. This week it was Tom Congalton of Between the Covers Rare Books who called an amazingly rare item to our attention: The Experience of George A. Spywood.

The Experience of George A. Spywood.

As you can see from the cover, this pamphlet was printed to raise money to save George A. Spywood’s house. One reason I love booksellers so much is that they often save us a lot of work by doing extensive research about their books. Here is a very helpful excerpt about this item:

“Spywood happily pursued the sailor’s trade until after several voyages his friend, the captain, took ill and died. He later renounced his vices and took to the ministry after a vision. In 1844 he was given the pastorship of the Colored M.E. Church of Hartford, Connecticut, and took an active part in precipitating the schism of the A.M.E. Zionists from the Weslyans. It is possible that Spywood stressed his Native American heritage over his African for the purposes of this pamphlet, anticipating more sympathy if he hid his African ancestry. Perhaps most likely he was of mixed Native American and African ancestry. Carter G. Woodson references him as a Bishop in the Zionist faction in his study The Negro Church without referring to his ethnicity, and he is mentioned in several other histories of the Church. OCLC locates a single copy with the above publishing information, but this issue appears complete (collating 1-28pp., with separate wrappers) and contains no printing information. While we obviously have a vested interest in establishing the precedence of this version of the pamphlet, we strongly conclude that this copy has the feel of fulfilling the object of a mendicant pamphlet, and is likely both earlier than the 1843 version, and may indeed be unique. In any event it is rare.”

And here is the first page of the memoir:

I had a brief conversation with Native Studies professor Lisa Brooks earlier this morning and her reaction is that Spywood’s specificity regarding his tribal ancestry — naming the “Marshpee” and the “Pumham” — suggests he is being honest about that heritage. False claims of Indigenous ancestry are usually more vague. Lisa’s other comment was that we may very well be able to track down Spywood’s descendants, or some traces of them.

This book will soon be added to our online catalog and we will also add it to our queue for digitization.

From an early age, Claude Pepper possessed the desire to serve in public office and as a nine year old boy, once carved his name into a tree along with the title ‘U.S. Senator’ underneath. Close to thirty years later, Pepper would realize his lifelong dream after successfully gaining a senate seat during the mid term elections of 1936, where he became and would remain a strong supporter of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies.

On January 3, 1937, Pepper and his new bride, Mildred arrived in the nation’s capital after spending their honeymoon in Havana, Cuba. That night, the young senator wrote in his diary:

“Mildred and I arrived from our honeymoon 1 A.M. or thereabout and to Wardman Park [hotel] to the bedroom suite we had obtained until our apartment was ready. So here we are, a young bride and groom and young Senator and Senatress in the Capital. We have lots of hard work. No doubt many heartaches ahead of us; but I hope our stay shall be as long as we like it and we shall be able to do a good job and at the same time find our lives here stimulating and challenging. No more thrilling time to be here.”

Claude would not have to wait long for his predictions to come true. On January 5, 1937, Claude Pepper was officially sworn in for his first term in office alongside fellow Florida Senator Charles O. Andrews.

The bulk of his first month in office was spent becoming acquainted with his new surroundings on Capital Hill, meeting fellow Senate and House colleagues and moving into more permanent living quarters near DuPont Circle. From his arrival in Washington, Pepper was determined to make a name for himself among his peers and on February 4, 1937 successfully proposed his first of many bills, this one allowing for a harbor dredging project to commence in Port St. Joe, Florida. Just a few weeks later, Claude would break precedent for freshman senators and speak on the senate floor, an act which brought his formidable oratory skills to the attention of President Roosevelt, who would come to lean on Claude to be his mouthpiece for New Deal Legislation in the south. Senator Pepper would also go on to become a strong supporter of the newly created Social Security Act and the chief architect of the Lend Lease Bill, all the while continuing to become one of the more dynamic figures in national politics during the late 1930’s.

Volunteers are AMAZING. Recently, we have been working on the Ashmolean Museum’s lantern slide collection, and their volunteers have been helping to clean and catalogue the slides. One of the team presented us with this – a purchase from the Headington Oxfam charity shop, where she also volunteers:

It’s a box of lantern slide binding strips! Lantern slides are made up of the image sandwiched between two thin plates of glass. The glass sheets are held together by the binding strips which seal the edges and keep the whole object secure:

Most photographers made up their own lantern slides at home using these special strips. Here’s what they look like inside the box:

Inside the box: pristine!

Reading the instructions, it turns out that applying the strips must have been a fiddly and time consuming job. You needed tweezers, a bowl of hot water, blotting paper and lots of patience. On the other hand there was no TV or internet, so what better way to spend the evening than to settle down with a pile of binding strips and a pair of tweezers?

Wet the binder both sides by holding one end with tweezers and plunging the whole binder very quickly through a dish of hot water, drawing it out quickly over the edge in such a way as to scrape off excess water from the sticky side.

Lay binder, cement uppermost, on a blotter, allow a minute to become ‘tacky.’ Pick up a slide and cover glass and press one edge firmly to a length of binder, being careful to see that the width of the binder projects equally on each side of the slide; then rub down the projecting portions on to the front and back respectively of the slide.

Continue with the remaining three sides in a similar manner, and having completed the slide allow to dry out and set.

We’ll let you know what happens if we find a moment to repair any of our damaged slides. Anyone got any blotting paper?

Kat Saunt and Erika Freyr have just started working in the University Archives. They are assisting Elizabeth Yamada in the Wellcome Trust funded project to conserve the records of the Royal Scottish National Hospital.

Kat and Erika in the conservation room

The work placements have been designed for recent graduates or those about to apply for courses in conservation. They are intended to provide valuable experience of working in an archive on a large scale project in an academic environment.

Folded application

The work requires a very high level of manual dexterity due to the degraded condition of the paper records. Each case file has to be carefully unfolded by hand before being flattened and cleaned, so that crucial repairs can be done. The aim is to stabilise the documents so that they can be safely handled by researchers and archivists.

One difficult aspect of this project is the sheer volume of paper to be treated over just ten weeks. This time constraint means that objects are treated according to their condition, and not all damage will be addressed. The goal in archive conservation is to protect the integrity of the data on each object rather than treating the aesthetics. This means that treatment is limited to dry cleaning and mending of tears. More extensive repairs, washing or alkalising can be done at a later stage if necessary, but would be beyond the remit of a project such as this.

Flattened applications

Time management and allocation of resources is a constant consideration. For example, with a limited supply of pressing boards, some boxes of files are being cleaned while others are still flattening, so it is important to be mindful of the order in which the work is completed.

Rusted paper fasteners

Almost all of the case files were held together with metal fixings which rust. Rust causes a chemical reaction in the paper which destroys the structural integrity of the sheet. Each fixing must therefore be removed, which is a delicate and time consuming task. (If fixings are necessary, brass is ideal. Please keep your future conservators in mind as you file!)

Once flattened, the sheets are cleaned using a latex chemical sponge. Dirt adheres to the latex better than to the paper and so it is lifted away without the need for abrasion. This is much gentler than using an eraser and much more effective than using a brush, giving the best cleaning result with the least risk to the very brittle paper.

Conservation tools

The next step will be to start the process of repairing and rehousing the cleaned paper files. This will be the subject for a later blog.

On January 21, 1801, Charles Louis Napoleon Achille Murat was born to Joachim and Caroline Bonaparte Murat, Napoleon Bonaparte’s youngest sister. Through the family’s connections with the Emperor, Joachim was eventually made King of Naples, hence the Prince Murat title. Upon the Emperor’s second defeat in 1815, Achille’s father was executed and his mother fled with her children to Vienna.

Achille would emigrate to America upon his 21st birthday in 1821 and became a naturalized citizen fairly soon after, renouncing all his titles. After roaming the country, he settled in Washington DC where he happened to become friends with Richard Keith Call, Florida’s territorial delegate to Congress who told the young man of the many opportunities in the newly acquired territory.

Murat settled first in St. Augustine but later purchased his Lipona Plantation outside Tallahassee after much prodding from the Marquis de Lafayette.  Murat became involved in local politics quickly, serving as alderman and mayor until appointed postmaster in 1826, a post he held until 1838. It was also in Tallahassee that Murat met his future wife, Catherine Daingerfield Willis Gray, great grandniece of George Washington. Murat was also a part of Florida’s militia and would hold the rank of colonel for the rest of his life following the Seminole Wars.

A man of many interests, Murat was a writer. He, along with his fellow countryman Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote much on American culture and lifestyle during his lifetime though Murat’s writing never became as popular as Tocqueville. He also had a close friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson whom he met in St. Augustine in 1826.

After an attempt to regain some of his family’s fortune in the July Revolution of 1830 and several unsuccessful years in New Orleans, Murat and his wife moved back in Tallahassee in the mid 1830s and Murat would remain here the rest of his life. Murat died in 1847 and is buried  in the St. John’s Episcopal Church cemetery in Tallahassee.

Recently, through the efforts of a local group, the historic marker outside the cemetery where Murat and his wife are buried was restored after mysteriously vanishing a year ago. You can read about the new marker and those who helped get it back in place on the Tallahassee Democrat’s website.

It should come as no surprise that as a city-owned and operated station, WNYC maintained a good relationship with the New York City Police Department, serving early on as part of its communications apparatus for locating missing persons. In fact, the Missing Persons Alarms or reports are among the oldest of WNYC’s regularly broadcast features, beginning with the launch of the station in July, 1924. The NYPD Missing Persons Bureau was then only six years old and under the direction of Captain John H. Ayers (1897-1943). Initially, the programs were nothing more than the names and descriptions of people who had disappeared and were sought by friends and relatives. Said Ayers:

“When the detective rings off, I direct that a radio broadcast regarding Bennett’s disappearance be made through Municipal Broadcasting Station WNYC. We give a complete description of the missing man; his age, height, weight, color of his hair, eyes, the clothing he wore, his teeth, scars, birthmarks.”[1]

WNYC Missing Persons Alarm, December 2, 1931.

Captain John H. Ayres, first Chief of the NYPD Missing Persons Bureau in 1922.

(WNYC Archive Collections)

Later, the broadcasts included short ‘sermons’ or homilies about why it is unwise to run away from home and the like, written by the announcing officers themselves. Profiling the reports in 1940, New York Sun writer Samuel Kaufman got a bit hyperbolic when he described the daily five-minute program as “packed with more drama, pathos and human interest than many stations present in a full day’s broadcast.”[2]

From 1934 to 1943, the NYPD Missing Persons Bureau was headed up by Captain John G. Stein (1879-1972), who, following in Ayres’ footsteps, also broadcast regularly from WNYC in “a clear flexible voice” radio experts called “ideal for broadcasting.”[3] Within a year of taking command of the bureau, Stein took the show from five to fifteen minutes daily and brought in four additional detectives who first had to pass an audition and reportedly opened each program with “the wail of a police siren.”[4] Among the new reader-detectives was George L. O’Connor, profiled by writer and veteran newspaperman Joseph Mitchell.

“…Every weekend throughout the winter he goes swimming among the ice floes and grapefruit rinds in the surf at Coney Island; he is in fact, President of the Icebergs Athletic Club. He writes sentimental poetry. He used to be a tap dancer with a Primrose and Dockstader minstrel show, and at 48 is still able to make a lot of noise with his shoes. ‘However,’ he said today, ‘I think my most important accomplishment is my Missing Persons human interest broadcast. I am a keen student of psychology, and I take these stories from the original files, stories of broken home ties, and broadcast them over WNYC, the municipal broadcasting station, at 1 P.M. on Sundays. I write a poem about each case and finish up with that, and I feel the broadcast is an important police service…’ ”[5]

Stein wrote the broadcasts brought in many tips and responses, including word from the missing themselves, who knew to tune in “on the

NYPD Captain John G. Stein in 1934.

(New York Times)

chance of hearing themselves described, then ‘phone in and complain if they weren’t.”[6]  The progressive tabloid PM noted that a lot of women listened  to Captain Stein over WNYC.  Because of this, Stein explained he would not broadcast the name and description of missing young women until several days had passed, at the risk of soiling a girl’s reputation.

“Why should everybody in Flatbush know Mabel wasn’t home last night? Suppose a year from now Mabel gets married. Say she married Harry. They put it in the papers. The neighbors read about it. Should they be able to discuss with each other, ‘I wonder if Harry knows about that night Mabel didn’t come home? It was on the radio. I heard it myself! Most of these things are only overnight disappearances. Girls around 16, the foolish age, when they think they know everything. Women, women!” [7]

The Missing Persons broadcasts were highlighted with the opening of the station’s new WPA-built studios on October 23, 1937. In the day’s featured radio drama, The Voice of the People, Mayor La Guardia and other officials played themselves as they extolled the virtues of the city’s radio station through a series of vignettes. In one dramatized segment a boy listener complains to his father that WNYC is boring, “No movie stars or nothin’. ”  His father, however, points out the excitement inherent in the daily Missing Persons Report direct from police headquarters. “There’s material for a dozen novels, and all true stories, too,” says the father before he describes one case solved with WNYC’s help that segues to the drama. [8] Even Time Magazine recognized the broadcast’s effectiveness in helping to find runaway girls in the big city, noting, “an appreciable few went home in response to the Bureau’s famed daily five minutes of missing persons alarms over ‘New York City’s Own Station,’ WNYC, kindly father of this sort of broadcasting…”[9] 

After what appears to be a brief hiatus, the missing person reports were reintroduced in March, 1956 with five-minute bulletins four times a week. A WNYC press release referred to the broadcasts as ‘missing persons alarms,’ that “will expedite the location of many amnesia cases, runaway youngsters and others who are reported lost by their worried families.”[10] Below, courtesy of the Municipal Archives, is the inaugural broadcast for the renewed bulletins.

At this writing it is not clear when this ‘renewed’ Missing Persons report came to an end, but the station cited the broadcasts in a submission to the FCC as late as 1982, saying, “WNYC maintains a permanent remote facility at the Police Department’s Missing Persons Bureau. On a regular basis, as it has for over 40 years, the station reports information therefrom at 1:50 PM. Finding persons as a result of the broadcasts has had noteworthy results.”[11]

Nevertheless, cooperation between the city-owned WNYC and the NYPD was part of the station’s DNA and extended to various public relations and community-oriented programs. Among the police-sponsored shows were Pals of the P.A.L. a youth variety show and a singing safety policeman  on The Police Safety Program, a show for younger children. The police and WNYC also worked closely on most issues around civil defense and on Election Day with the communications involved with the release of polling returns through the police department’s facilities. 

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[1] Ayers, John H., and Carol Bird, Missing Men, The Story of the Missing Persons Bureau of the New York Police Department, 1932, pg.15. The screenplay for the 1933 film Bureau of Missing Persons, starring Bette Davis, was adapted from this book. 

[2] Kaufman, Samuel, “Drama in Capsule Form,” The New York Sun, 1940.

[3] Livingston, Armstrong, and John G. Stein, The Murdered and the Missing, Stephen-Paul Publishers, New York, 1947, pg. 66.

[4] “To Hunt Missing by Radio,” The New York Times, September 22, 1935, pg. N11.

[5] Mitchell, Joseph, The New York World Telegram,  May 9, 1936

[6]  Livingston, Armstrong, and Capt. John G. Stein, pg. 103.

[7] Ager, Cecelia, “The Missing Girl’s Best Friend,” PM, May 4, 1942, pg. 22.

[8] Original WNYC script for The Voice of the People, October 23, 1937 

[9] Time Magazine, February 27, 1939.

[10] WNYC Press Release, March 1, 1956.

[11] Federal Communications Commission Reports, Volume 91, Second Series, October 1982-April 1983,  Application for Special Service Authorization, Docket # 11227, September 23, 1982, pg. 773.

WNYC, the city-owned and operated station, maintained a good relationship with the New York City Police Department, serving early on as part of its communications apparatus for locating both criminals and missing persons. In fact, WNYC continued the progress initiated by WLAW, the police department’s first fully functional broadcast facility, operating between September, 1922 and August, 1924.[1].

Radio Bloodhound

In fact, long before Fox’s America’s Most Wanted and the FBI enlisting of the national media to apprehend The Ten Most Wanted List, the NYPD used WNYC to help track down criminals. In January, 1925, magazine writer James C. Young described it this way:

“The mission of WNYC is not always entertainment or instruction. It has a grim purpose, in part. Every night at 7:30 and 10:30 a man in a blue coat and prominent brass buttons sits down at the microphone. ‘WNYC broadcast,’ he says, ‘for the New York Police Department. General alarm for Harry Martin, age 30, 5 ft. 6 in. tall, weight about 140 pounds. Dark face with bold features and frowning eyes. Has a slight limp. Dangerous man. Escaped from Welfare Island early today. Believed traveling west.’ The listener rather catches his breath at such use of radio. It is an eerie thing–this pursuit of a man by air. An observer wonders what chance there will be of detecting Harry Martin among all the other men in the country of that general appearance. But his speculations are cut short by a new description, which the officer is spreading far and wide. This time another man is wanted. And presently it is another, until the department has sent out the particulars of some twelve or fifteen men whom the law demands.” [2]

The writer claimed the programming worked and that “no quicker method is known to criminal procedure, and it has the power of drama.” Similarly, he added, stolen automobiles were tracked down and missing persons found. [3]

As late as December 1994, WNYC, the NYPD and the New York City Police Foundation were planning a regular half-hour show to broadcast the mug shots and criminal records of accused murderers, thieves and violators of parole and probation over WNYC-TV, Channel 31. The program was scheduled for weeknights and offered viewers rewards of up to $1,000 for information that would lead to the arrest and conviction of suspects. [4]

Police Booth & Station House Communications

In June, 1925 The Christian Science Monitor reported on a soon-to-debut special police frequency using WNYC “to light a signal light at any police station or booth in the city,…all of them simultaneously or…in any number of selected precincts at once.” The paper explained, “the signaling is accomplished by sending dot and dash combinations of musical tone over the wavelength…The radio police alarm system is believed to mark an advance in rapid communication for the prevention of crime and the arrest of criminals…” [5]  The Bell Labs-developed system (pictured above in part) became a model for other departments. It was described in great detail in the October, 1926 Bell technical journal, which noted the NYPD planned to “equip the precinct houses and police booths located  in various parts of the city with receiving sets with which they could listen in on communications from the headquarters station WNYC.”[6]

Radio News, July, 1926.

(WNYC Archive Collections)

Cooperation between WNYC and the NYPD extended to various public relations and community-oriented programs as well. These included Pals of the P.A.L. a youth variety show and a singing safety policeman on The Police Safety Program, a show for younger children. The police and WNYC also worked closely on most issues around civil defense and on Election Day with the communications involved with the release of polling returns through the police department’s facilities.  

_________________________________________

[1] Jaker, Bill, Frank Sulek and Peter Kanze, The Airwaves of New York, “WLAW,” McFarland & Company, 1998,  pg. 109.

[2] Young, James C., “Radio-Voice of the City,” Radio Broadcast, Vol. 6, No. 3., January, 1925, p.446. Editor’s Note: WNYC was among the earliest, but the not the first. Our research indicates Municipal station WRR in Dallas, Texas was the first licensed radio station to be used by the police to capture suspected outlaws.

[3] Ibid.

[4] “N.Y.P.D. Blue” is about to face some new competition — from the N.Y.P.D. itself,” The New York Times, December 21, 1994. 

[5] “Radio Police Signal Perfected, Christian Science Monitor, June 5, 1925, p.12.

[6] Anderson, S.E., “Radio Signaling System for the New York Police Department,” The Bell System Technical Journal, October, 1926, pg. 529.

In November, 1961, reporter Eleanor Fischer went to Atlanta, Georgia to interview Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., his wife Coretta Scott King (1927-2006) and his father, Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. for her CBC documentary portrait of Atlanta released the following year. The audio presented here is from Fischer’s original raw field recording and has not previously been released in this form.

Mrs. King begins by talking about her family background, upbringing and education as well as how she met Dr. King when they were both in school in Boston. She spoke of their both wanting to return to the South to give back to the community although she would have preferred to spend more time in school. She explained that her husband felt he could serve humanity best through the ministry and that she was impressed by him. Initially, they shared a quiet year prior to the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott, at which point she had just given birth to their first child.

Mrs. King describes in some detail the beginning of the boycott and her husband’s role in it. She says the philosophy of non-violence evolved as things went along. Being a Christian minister, he was well versed in it, but it took a bit to get people to accept the theory and practice.  She explains that they did so first out of their respect for the movement leadership, suggesting a deeper meaning came later. They came, she believes, to understand that civil disobedience is not passive and that it “takes more courage to stand up to the assault than to fight back.”

Mrs. King says it’s difficult to say why the movement’s strategy worked in Montgomery and not in other places. But she speculates that there are periods in history when the time, situation and individuals on hand provide the right catalyst for change. She refers to boycott as a “new reawakening for whites in the South” that in the end brought about “respect for the Negro.” Fischer asks her to reflect on the day her home was bombed and her husband’s continued calls for a non-violent response.

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Special thanks to Elizabeth Starkey.

Our digital collections are growing with regular ingests of digitized material from the Archives & Special Collections.  Past highlighted ingests have included our Emily Dickinson manuscripts, selections from the Younghee Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection, material from the Doshisha Collection, Amherst College Olios and Catalogs, and more.

This month marks the addition of the William E. Barton Walt Whitman Collection and more of the Edward and Orra White Hitchcock Collection.

Edward Hitchcock

Walt Whitman

Series 8 of the Edward and Orra White Hitchcock Collection, now accessible in ACDC, contains more than a dozen distinct images of Hitchcock, in a range of formats including engravings, lithographs, and albumen prints. Many of the portraits were taken for yearly Class Albums compiled for the students at Amherst College. All the images are of Hitchcock as an adult.

Series 8 also includes snapshots of Hitchcock’s family homes and a photograph of Hitchcock’s gravestone.

There is also one photograph album which includes identified photographs of Edward and Orra White Hitchcock and some immediate family members.

The William E. Barton Walt Whitman Collection contains prints, photographs, post cards, and correspondence.

The Walt Whitman Collection also includes original prose manuscripts and galley proofs collected by William E. Barton (1861 – 1930).

These digitized items and more from the Edward and Orra White Hitchcock Collection and the William E. Barton Walt Whitman Collection can be found in the Amherst College Digital Collections, and of course the originals are located in the Archives & Special Collections.

It is with a heavy heart that we learn about the passing of FSU Professor Emeritus Dr. Fred Standley. Dr.  Standley, the Daisy Flory Parker Professor Emeritus in English, taught at FSU for 50 years until his retirement in 2013. His academic pursuits specialized in both British literature and works of African-American writers, and taught a popular course on banned books that was originally developed for FSU’s London program. His banned books course led to the tradition of the annual banned books read-out, where students and faculty members read aloud passages from previously banned books at Strozier Library.

Fred Standley’s involvement at FSU extended beyond the classroom. Dr. Standley served as chair of the English department from 1973 to 1982, and again from 1997 to 1999. He is credited with ushering the program into the modern era, and connected faculty members with opportunities for book contracts and conference presentations. He also served as the president of FSU’s Faculty Senate for two terms, chaired the search committee in 1976 (which led to the hire of Bernie Sliger), president of the friends of the Library (1989-1995; 2006-2008), and director of land acquisition from 1989-1994.

Dr. Standley’s accomplishments and contributions didn’t go unacknowledged. The Distinguished Service Professor Award (2003), the Friends of Strozier Library Distinguished Service Award (2006), and the FSU Torch Award (2013) are few among the many honors he received while at FSU. Awards have also been created in his honor, including the Fred L. Standley Award for Outstanding Teacher and the Friends of Strozier Library Fred L. Standley Award for the Academic Librarian of the Year. The Fred L. Standley Award “honors an outstanding faculty member within the University Libraries at the Florida State University for significant contributions to campus, state, national and/or international research librarianship and library development.”

A celebration of Fred L. Standley’s life will be held at FSU at a later date.