The Best Practices Exchange has posted their 2012 conference presentations online. These presentations focus on managing e-records, web archiving, managing digital photographs, and disaster recovery of digital material.

You can link to all of the presentations here: http://bpexchange.org/

1849

2012

Before we get to the star of today’s post, a bit of context. Between 1838 and 1840, John Tallis published a series of 88 London Street Views which served as street directories “to assist strangers visiting the metropolis through all its mazes without a guide.”

Link to the full image at Tufts: http://hdl.handle.net/10427/53163

Each pamphlet included architectural elevations, and an index of every business on the street. The publication costs were covered by advertisements purchased by many of the businesses.

Link to the full image at Tufts: http://hdl.handle.net/10427/53164

Link to the full image at Tufts: http://hdl.handle.net/10427/53307

As noted by the Canadian Centre for Architecture: “Each engraved illustration, spread over facing pages, shows a London thoroughfare in a schematized plan view with elevations of the street’s facades. Tallis framed each of his views with a pictorial vignette and an accurate map of the vicinity of the featured street. The entire scheme seems to have had no direct precedents among representations of the urban environment and reviews of the time show his street views to have been highly regarded and enthusiastically received.” Tufts University has digitized their collection of the series.

Link to the full image at Tufts: http://hdl.handle.net/10427/53167

We recently acquired a book called Grand architectural panorama of London: Regent Street to Westminster Abbey: from original drawings made expressly for the work by R. Sandeman, architect, and executed on wood by G.C. Leighton. Published by I. Whitelaw in 1849, it surely took its idea from Tallis’s Street Views.

The rather ordinary brown cloth binding hides a surprise, though, because unlike Tallis’s average sized pamphlets, this panorama turns out to be printed on an accordion-folded strip measuring over 22 feet! We had to rearrange the tables in our reading room to unfold it completely:

Businesses are listed under the image with their street numbers, or simply by their names on the store fronts. To include businesses located in other parts of London, billboards are used on carriages, or on hand-held signs. In the examples below, you can see that the lithographer included his own studio, and Madame Tussaud’s admission cost 1 shilling. (As with all images in this post, click on the image to see a larger version.)

The route begins at St. Margaret’s church in front of Westminster Abbey, and ends at All Souls’ Church on Langham Place. The format of the single strip gives the impression that this is a straight line, but here is what it looks like on a map:

The route of the panorama

Besides all the architectural detail, the artist included hundreds of pedestrians, animals, and various kinds of carriages. Every inch contains something of social interest, and this book could be a great way to spark curiosity for learning more about Victorian era London. Listed businesses include “Photographers on paper,” “Photographist,” and “Patentee of the Daguerotype” — what was happening in the history of photography in 1849? Or, what questions might arise about medical practice in this time period from noting listings for a “Chiropodist,” “Surgical Instrument Maker,” or “Agent for Morrison’s Pills”? What was a “Cosmorama”? And what on earth is going on here:

What’s going on here? (Hint: think May Day festivities)

You can view the entire frieze in Oberlin College’s Digital Collection, or stop in to Amherst College’s Archives & Special Collections to see it in person.

Focused, uncompromising, and yet essentially pragmatic, Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League, answers questions at this 1966 meeting of the Overseas Press Club. 

Young was one of the most powerful voices calling for achieving racial equality by working within the system. His tragic death five years later coincided with the rise of a different type of black leader, and a different type of civil rights movement.

Just back from Vietnam, he weighs in on the plight of blacks in the military, as well as on many domestic issues, including the soon-to-be-built World Trade Center, the War on Poverty, the Black Power movement, and the disturbing phenomenon of urban riots.  Young starts by lambasting the anti-busing demonstrations in Boston and elsewhere, attributing them to the protestors’ insecurity. “They believe they’re superior to the Negro. That’s their only claim to fame.” As for Vietnam, he avoids commenting on the war directly, emphasizing (with considerable eloquence) how black soldiers are being allowed to prove themselves in the Army as they are not allowed to prove themselves back home. Yet all the press talks about are the negative aspects of the war. He calls for the World Trade Center to be built in Harlem, to revitalize a neighborhood where “even the houses of prostitution have moved downtown.” He is most scathing about “Black Power,” a slogan he finds incomprehensible. Money and education confer power, not skin color. During the question period he scoffs at accusations that Communists are behind the recent race riots. “No mother whose child’s toe has been bitten by a rat needs Mao or Castro…to come over and say, ‘Your child has been bitten by a rat.’ ” He rejects the increasingly apocalyptic tone of some black leaders, concluding, “white society may collapse…because of its moral bankruptcy, but I can’t plan a program waiting on that.” 

Young was born in 1921. His father was the principal of a black boarding school and his mother was the first black postmistress in the state of Kentucky. From an early age, Young showed striking organizational skills. He trained both as an electrical engineer and as a social worker. By 1961, had become executive director of the National Urban League. Taking over a cautious, some would say moribund, institution, Young energized it. As the organization’s website recounts:

…he substantially expanded the League’s fund-raising ability and, most critically, made the League a full partner in the civil rights movement. Although the League’s tax-exempt status barred it from protest activities, it hosted at its New York headquarters the planning meetings of A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights leaders for the 1963 March on Washington. Young was also a forceful advocate for greater government and private-sector efforts to eradicate poverty. His call for a domestic Marshall Plan, a 10-point program designed to close  the huge social and economic gap between black and white Americans, significantly influenced the discussion of the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty legislation.

Young represented a less radical but no less determined wing of the civil rights movement. The Urban League’s emphasis was on gaining blacks equal opportunity in the workplace, in education, and in housing. This resolve to advance by peaceful means often set him in unwilling opposition to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. One can hear, in this press conference, Young walking a tightrope, not criticizing Johnson’s Vietnam policy (which King recently had), while trying to bend the conversation toward the plight of the black soldier and black veteran. One also glimpses how he and other “first generation” civil rights leaders would soon be overtaken by the Black Power movement of the later 1960s. Young’s incomprehension at the press coverage given to what he sees as a small, half-baked group more interested in street theater than tangible political gains is made even more explicit by this comment about the slogan’s inventor, Stokely Carmichael:

“Anyone can arouse the poor, the despairing, the helpless. That’s no trick. Sure they’ll shout ‘black power,’ but why doesn’t the mass media find out how many of those people will follow those leaders to a separate state or back to Africa?”

But the more extreme approach, particularly after King’s assassination in 1968, would increasingly become the public “face” of the movement. One sees in Young’s career a path not taken, or at least not sufficiently publicized, in the black struggle for equality. Yet his achievements were, by any means of calculating, impressive. The Gale Encyclopedia of Biography reports:

Young saw his role as one of trying to maintain contacts and liaison between increasingly polarizing white and black groups in American society. He admonished black civil rights protesters against violence and at the same time warned white decision makers that, unless substantial gains were made, violence from blacks could be expected, if not condoned. Under Young’s leadership, the National Urban League received grants from government and private sources to work on such projects as job training, open housing, minority executive recruitment, and “street academies” (schools in ghetto communities for students who have dropped out of regular school).

Whether reason alone would have ever been enough to force white America to acknowledge the unique dilemma blacks faced is still a question open to historical debate. It was not one Young would live to see resolved. In 1971, attending a conference in Lagos, Nigeria, Young drowned while swimming with friends. He was 49.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

“Love is a wild wonder

And stars that sing,

Rocks that burst asunder

And mountains that take wing.”

Shakespeare in Harlem by Langston Hughes, with drawings by E. McKnight Kauffer, first edition, author signed presentation copy

– – H A P P Y   B I R T H D A Y   L A N G S T O N   H U G H E S – –

It was the Great Depression. Nine young black men were hoboing, riding a freight train to Memphis, Tennessee in search of work, but their ride was cut short. At Scottsboro, Alabama the police hauled them off the train: the young men, ages 13 to 21, were accused of raping two white women who were on the train. For black men in the 1930s in the Deep South, such a charge could be fatal. Like so many others who had died by trial or lynching, the Scottsboro Boys (as they came to be called) were falsely accused, a fact that meant almost nothing. In March, 1931 eight of them were sentenced to death, while the fate of the ninth, 13-year-old Roy Wright, hovered dangerously close to life in prison before ending in a mistrial.

The case of the Scottsboro Boys (Charlie Weems, Willie Robeson, Olen Montgomery, Ozzie Powell, Eugene Williams, Roy and Andy Wright, Clarence Norris, and Heywood Paterson) became a worldwide cause célèbre, a symbol of American injustice. Although they were not put to death, altogether the Scottsboro Boys spent more than 100 years in jail for a crime they did not commit. While the case is a largely forgotten landmark in American civil rights history, for many, blacks and whites, the Scottsboro Boys and memories of those times in the South remain vivid and indelible.

As far as Scottsboro’s impact on the law is concerned, there were two major U.S. Supreme Court rulings in this case: one upheld a defendant’s right to effective counsel under due process; the other prohibited the exclusion of jurors based on race. These two decisions were effectively the first substantive legal efforts undermining the climate of fear and intimidation that reigned over African-Americans in the South –what historian James Goodman simply calls “southern injustice”: “To know that [type of] injustice as black people knew it, it was necessary to know it in the parts of the body that produce nausea, chills sweat, and tears, to have it knock the wind out of you and triple the beat of your heart…”[1]  In his compelling 1994 work Stories of Scottsboro, Goodman goes on to write:

     Knowledge of southern injustice came in part from fear of it; and fear came from the knowledge that the color of your skin made you a  suspect–a suspect that looked just like the prime suspect–every time the police were looking for a black man. It came from knowledge that if arrested, you were likely to be subject to the third degree; if indicted, you were likely to be unrepresented; if convicted, sentenced to a longer term in prison or on the chain gang than a white man convicted of the same crime. The fear came from the near inescapability of the danger, the sense that no matter how careful and deliberate your every expression, word and deed, no matter how unblemished your past, how fine or widely recognized your reputation, no matter how prosperous you were or how well placed, no matter how unshakable your alibi, you were not immune from false accusation, mistaken identity, wrongful conviction, and punishment.[2]

This audio documentary takes a look at that injustice through the voices of some of the people who were involved in the Scottsboro case, including defendant Clarence Norris, as well as those who have studied the case. The program was produced and narrated by Andy Lanset. It was originally broadcast by WNYC and the NPR Horizons series in 1992.

Special thanks to Donna Limerick, CBS Archives, Gary Daughters, Leonard Lopate, David Rapkin, and the late David Nolan, with engineering by Manoli Wetherell and Neal Rauch at NPR in New York.

The nine Scottsboro defendants with National Guardsmen outside of the Scottsboro jail, March 26, 1931, the day after they were arrested. From left to right: Clarence Norris, Olen Montgomery, Andy Wright, Willie Roberson, Olin Powell, Eugene Williams, Charlie Weems, Roy Wright and Haywood Patterson. (© Bettmann/CORBIS/Corbis Images)

[1] Goodman, James, Stories of Scottsboro, Vintage Books, 1995, pg. 248.

[2] Ibid.                   

In the early 1930s many radio stations broadcast syndicated radio newsreel programs like The March of Time and The News in Review. Because the programs largely pre-date the widespread availability of truly portable recording equipment, these early ‘news’ shows were typically reenactments or dramatizations of the week’s leading news stories, and were often a bit sloppy when it came to the facts and journalistic standards. In this rare November 20, 1932 episode of The News Parade broadcast over WMCA in New York, the Scottsboro case is brought up through the first of its two U.S. Supreme Court decisions, concluding with the dramatization of a Communist Party demonstration on the steps of the Capitol in support of a fair retrial for the Scottsboro defendants.

____________________________

In this episode of New York Considered, hear excerpts from New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s community meeting in Jackson Heights. The Mayor speaks about issues concerning the city, with particular emphasis on Queens: immigration, housing, street safety, transportation.

New York Considered was a public affairs series produced by Marty Goldensohn and Peter Freyberg.

When you’re always wearing a bib, you’re always ready for BBQ.

How many puns (written and pictorial) on his name can you find in the poem and engraving?

“All that I have told in this story is true, down to the last butterfly or flower,” claims Marguerite Young in this talk at a 1966 Books and Authors Luncheon. 

The author of the just published Miss MacIntosh, My Darling then proceeds to evoke a parade of outlandish personalities and events, all centering upon the utopian communities of New Harmony, Indiana. Millennial cult leaders, visionary labor theorists, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, even the Emperor of Russia, all make appearances in very loose chronological and thematic order until Young suddenly breaks off. Apologizing that she had “misunderstood the time,” she leaves a confused, if tantalized, audience. 

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965), a mixture of history and fiction, overlaps in some ways with Young’s earlier Angel in the Forest (1943), a more factual study of the two successive utopian communities founded in the town of New Harmony. This ambitious book, 18 years in the making, created a sensation when it was published, both for its rambling Joycean style and its length (1,198 pages). It has been called the longest American novel to be published in one volume. Critics charge that, despite its cult status, few if any people have actually read the novel all the way through. In this talk, Young certainly makes the Rappite and Owenite experiments in communal life sound fascinating. Her own other-worldliness is also on display. After narrating how George Rapp castrated one son (who died from the procedure), and then caused the death of another, she pauses to announce that she will now address some of the community’s “flaws.” 

Young was born in 1908 in Indianapolis. Raised by her grandmother, she was already a schoolteacher and a published poet when her mother and stepfather invited her to live with them in New Harmony, Ind., the site of two utopian communities that briefly flourished in the early 19th century. Young’s fascination with Harmony Society of Johann Georg Rapp and the socialist community of Robert Owen led to her writing Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias, which was praised by The New York Herald Tribune as being:

….a true book, conceived as great poems are conceived, and composed with the same exciting, inexhaustible energy. In the end it is history, too — more than exists elsewhere. But all the while it has the supreme advantage of feeling and sounding true, both about its subject and about human life wherever it is lived. A sober history of New Harmony would not be a true history, for New Harmony was not a sober thing. It was more or less a mad thing. Miss Young, though with method, is appropriately and beautifully mad.

Already one can see the mixture of research and fabulation that was to become the hallmark of Young’s style. The book’s success resulted in her signing a contract with Scribner’s for Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. During the book’s unusually long composition, Young became a well-known figure in the Greenwich Village literary scene. The New York Times described her as:

…the woman with the pageboy haircut who looked like W.H. Auden, wrote like James Joyce, strode through the Village in her signature serapes, had breakfast at Bigelow’s with Richard Wright, got drunk at the White Horse Tavern with Dylan Thomas, palled around with Truman Capote and Carson McCullers, kept a vast collection of dolls in her Bleecker Street apartment, and regaled intimates with tales of her romantic conquests.

When the book finally appeared, it was dismissed by some as unreadable and self-indulgent while lauded by others as a significant expanding of the American novel’s range. The critic Richard Ellmann wrote:

“Marguerite Young’s first novel, famously in gestation for many years, proves to be more or less than a novel. It is an anatomy not so much of melancholy as of reality. Through a dozen characters, manifested in as many hundreds of pages, Miss Young explores with single-minded passion the residual questions in all fiction, including the validity of dreams, the deception of appearances, the confusion of identities, and the multiplicity of selves that cluster in each seemingly integral being. …The effect of this style is of some vast, uninterrupted discourse, as if life were being patiently heaped and endorsed rather than hotheadedly seized and rendered up. It is an extraordinary cosmos, shorn of fixities and definites, subservient to a central theme, ultimately abstract in purport, ambitious beyond fulfillment.”

Young then devoted many years to a biography of James Whitcomb Riley, which she eventually abandoned. Her final project, which occupied the remainder of her life, was a reflection on Eugene V. Debs. This work was left incomplete at her death. The manuscript of over 2,500 pages was subsequently edited down to a more manageable size and published as Harp Song for a Radical (1999).

Young is certainly an outlier of American letters. Her sprawling, fantastic concoctions straddle literary genres and ignore the rules of conventional prose. In her fictive world, scope seems more important than depth. As she told an interviewer for the Paris Review in 1977:

Peculiarly enough, as a person, I am not interested much in individuals, even my closest friends. They could have deep secrets, and I would never ask them to tell me. As a writer, I would never spend pages analyzing the love life of a character. I have a muralist imagination. I like to see the epic swing of the thing, the many as opposed to the one. I am a pluralist in that sense.

Marguerite Young died in 1995, at the age of 87.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

In this brief monologue, the novelist Richard Wright sends home the most glowing postcard of France one could possibly imagine. 

Saying that once he arrived, “I’ve never felt a moment of sorrow,” Wright extolls his adopted city of Paris, raving first about the landscape, the architecture, and vistas, noting how even the poorer parts of the city have beautiful trees, unlike New York, where “Spanish Harlem is left to rot in dirt and garbage.” 

There is also “no terrifying bigness” in Paris. The city is planned, unlike New York, which at times reminded him of a frontier town. Again in contrast to the United States, French artists are versatile, not grimly toiling away at one genre but extending their talent over many. He cites Cocteau — who writes poetry, novels, journalism, and theater — as well as Jacques Prévert, and Sartre. The French people themselves have “no illusions, life is accepted for what it is, the grim along with the beautiful.” He has found in France “no race-tension or conflict…no social snobbery.” In all this rapturous description one can hear an implicit (when not explicit) critique of the United States Wright had left behind, nowhere more so than when he pointedly states, “The spirit of the mob is the very opposite of French life.” 

Wright was born in 1908. His talent for writing was recognized early, as was his stubbornly independent nature that refused to allow him to settle for the limited opportunities afforded a young black artist at that time. In the Communist party Wright found at least a partial acceptance and recognition, which had been completely lacking in more mainstream institutions of the white community. But Wright was not one to be confined by the rigid orthodoxies of any ideology, and certainly not those of Marxism-Leninism. With the publication of the short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), and then with the spectacular critical and commercial success of Native Son (1940), Wright presented a stark contrast to the earnest, pleading African-American literature of the past that seemed to address itself more to the white community than its own people. As the critic Irving Howe wrote:

The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever. It made impossible a repetition of the old lies [and] brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture.

After publishing the autobiographical Black Boy (1945), Wright was invited by the French government to visit France. The instant love affair he commenced with the country and its people is movingly described in this talk. There was a backlash among his American supporters, though, some of whom accused him of abandoning the fight for equal rights back home. Addressing this, his biographer Constance Webb suggested Wright was looking to place the problem of race-relations in a more global context:

Wright was a man bursting with curiosity, enthusiasm, and ideas. He was interested in everyone and everything. His eagerness in quest of ideas, new emotions, new ways of looking at and understanding the world made him forever incompatible with any radical group. He was not a spirit which could be caged. He received, and still receives, criticism from Americans for going to France to live. Surely, the argument goes, he should have stayed with the struggle driving his people, not only for the sake of the freedom to be won but for the sake of his own writing. But…Dick never abandoned the struggle for freedom. His The Color Curtain anticipates much of what is happening today and his Black Power, though limited in certain respects, bursts with enthusiasm for the new world which only now, in the last 1960 U.N. meeting, makes irrevocably clear the third force separate from the barbarism of either East or West.

Whatever his intentions, Wright’s work fell off badly during his time in France. He was accused of being out of touch with his audience. His renunciation of Communism in the widely read collection The God That Failed (1950) led some to suspect that he was being pressured by the U.S. State Department, whose permission he needed in order to remain abroad.  Wright was a considerable “prize,” sought after by both the West and the Soviet Union. But his final importance is more literary than political. As the Oxford Companion to African-American Literature points out:

Richard Wright changed the landscape of possibility for African-American writers. Wright’s defiance, his refusal to give the reading public what it had hitherto demanded of the African-American writer, his insistence on the expression of an African-American voice, allowed later writers to do the same, allowed Toni Morrison, for example, to write as she would — without concern for explaining her sometimes obscure meanings (e.g., her references to news events from long ago or words or phrases from African-American vernacular speech) to a mainstream reading public. For other African-American writers, positioning themselves against Wright allowed them to write about African-American culture in a more positive way, to assume a posture not requiring that the subject of the fiction, the African-American, be seen as victim.

Richard Wright died in Paris in 1960, at age 52.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

Sabrina goes all Sweeney Todd

Early in the fall semester of 1850 a group of guys from the Class of 1852 sat around waiting for Professor of Greek William S. Tyler to show up for his class. At one point the small talk turned to the subject of shaving – what do you want to bet that one of them had cut himself that morning and was sporting a nice rip in his face? The others would have noticed it and teased him about it but they would all have had the same experience. Back then, shaving was a real chore. It required a straight razor, tools for honing and stropping, and a knowledge of how to keep a blade sharp enough to get a good shave.  It would also take practice to get good at it and keep the nicks and cuts to a minimum. A man could go to a barber for a professional shave, but most of the time he probably had to fend for himself. On a winter day in a dorm room this could mean freezing water and stiff fingers wielding an unforgiving blade. No doubt the men waiting for Professor Tyler agreed that it would be nice not to have to shave at all. And so the Philopogonia Society – the Society of Beard-Lovers — was born that day.

Professor William S. Tyler sporting a…what is this look?  Please do not emulate him.  Tyler’s absence from class one fall day led to the glorious founding of the Philopogonia Society.

A committee was formed – a committee must always be formed – to announce a resolution to forego shaving for the term. The Committee of Vigilance put forth a broadside:

The proclamation of the Philopogonia Society. The handwritten “1853″ must be an error, perhaps carried over from the “3″ in “October 3rd.” The records say that the Class of 1852 issued the proclamation in its junior year, which would be 1850-51.

Seven men put their names to the document.

The Committee of Vigilance of the Philopogonia Society, photographed in 1852. From the top, left to right: Don Carlos Taft, Henry Sabin, Daniel Bliss, Henry D. Root, Charles H. Payson, William E. Glenn, and William H. Adams.  Please to note the founder, Daniel Bliss, of the American University of Beirut (formerly the Syrian Protestant College) in the center.  FOD (Friend of Dickinson) Henry Root is below him to the left.

Herman Norton Barnum, who described the Society

Herman Norton Barnum, a member of the Class of 1852, described the Philopogonia Society in a letter written in 1869 from Turkey, where he was a missionary:

“Early in the first term of our Junior year, we were, one day, assembled for our recitation in Greek, and as our Professor did not come, we remained for a little chat, when a motion was made and carried that a committee be appointed to collect and retain, till the vacation, all the razors in the class. The wearing of beards was not so common then as now. Another committee was chosen to draw up a constitution, and the class was formed into an anti-shaving society called Philopogonia. During the term, the society had a public celebration in one of the village halls, at which an oration and a poem were delivered, and the occasion was a decided success. This anti-shaving scheme caused a good deal of innocent fun in the College during that term, and gave the Juniors a good deal of eclat. All the members of the class, except some of the youngest, were fully bewhiskered; but at the close of the term the razors were distributed, and we were ourselves again.”

Herman Barnum, ca. 1870. Membership in the Philopogonia Society had lasting consequences.

According to George R. Cutting’s Student Life at Amherst College (1871), “a grand supper was held in Sweetser’s Hall; on which occasion, Don Carlos Taft [in group photo above], having the longest beard, delivered an oration, and Seneca Hills, having the next longer, a poem. The literary performances are said to have been of a high order.”

The Archives is still looking for documentation of that supper, but we know that eight or nine months earlier, in January of 1850, Sweetser’s Hall had also been the site of a raucous meeting called to discuss the rum establishments in town and decide whether the town ought to close them down. By comparison, the meeting at the close of the year to celebrate the success of the Philopogonia Society must have seemed like tame stuff.

As the year is still “new” and resolutions still able to be formed, perhaps it is time for a new generation of Philopogonians.  Anyone?

January 26 is Australia Day, Australia’s national day. We have records that show some of Vancouver’s interactions with Australia and Australians. Here are a few examples.

The Young Australia League is a youth organization founded in 1905 that promotes “education through travel”, among other activities. They stopped in Vancouver during their 1929 overseas tour, along with a burro they picked up in their travels.

Members of the Young Australia League with burro, May 1929. Stuart Thomson, photographer. Reference code AM1535-: CVA 99-2027

They posed on some of our giant lumber:

Young Australia League posed on lumber stack, May 1929. Stuart Thomson, photographer. Reference code AM1535-: CVA 99-2029 (detail)

In 1911, the Vancouver High School Cadets had visitors from Australia. According to Major Matthews,

Australian Cadets, in uniform, visited Vancouver in 1911, 1915 and again in 1920.

Cadets of Vancouver High School entertaining their visitors from Australia, December 1911. Reference code AM54-S4-: Mil P180.

In 1912, Vancouver High School Cadets visited Australasia and created this souvenir of the experience, decorated with a kangaroo and a beaver.

Souvenir of Vancouver High School Cadets Australasian Tour. Stuart Thomson, photographer. Reference code AM1535-: CVA 99-279.

Australian athletes have visited Vancouver. Here’s Mayor L.D. Taylor and a visiting cricket team in 1932, playing at Brockton Oval.

Mayor L.D. Taylor bowls the first ball during Australian cricket team visit, 1932. Alderman E.W. Dean is second from right. Dominion Photo Co., photographer. Reference code AM1477-1-S2-: CVA 1477-71.

Opportunities for communication and travel between Vancouver and Australia increased when air service started. Major Matthews tells us that on

. . . the 18^th Sept 1946 at 5:15 p.m. the Australian National Airways airplane “WARANA”, with thirty three passengers on board, inaugurated the first regular mail and passenger service between Australia and Canada. She landed at the Vancouver Airport.

Greetings from the Mayor of Brisbane to the Mayor of Vancouver marked this event.

Letter of greetings on the occasion of the first Trans-Pacific Air Mail Service between Canada and Australia from the elected official of the City of Brisbane. Reference code COV-S483 file First flight Canada-Australia – aeroplane “Warana”, 34-C-5 folder 2.

Matthews also states that, on September 20, 1949, a few months after Canadian Pacific Airlines started weekly flights from Canada to Australia, the Lord Mayor of Sydney flew to Vancouver and presented the flag of the City of Sydney to the citizens of Vancouver.

Mayor Thompson of Vancouver flew to Australia the next year on an official visit. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation invited our Mayor to broadcast his impressions of Australian cattle while he was there, but the itinerary of his visit does not show a stop at the cattle showground.

Telegram from Australian Broadcasting Commission to Mayor Thompson, January 1950. Reference code COV-S483 file Visit to Australia – Mayor Thompson, 34-F-3 folder 5.

During his visit, Mayor Thompson gave a speech. An excerpt:

Long ago, when geographical knowledge of the Pacific was scant, it was proposed that British Columbia should become a colony of New South Wales, and be governed from here (Sydney). Perhaps we should congratulate each other that we both escaped.

He also noted the thousands of Australians who came to British Columbia when gold was discovered in the Cariboo, and the ranch they established there. He described the Garden of Remembrance in Stanley Park, which had been recently dedicated to the Australian, New Zealand and Canadian air services.

Happy Australia Day to our Australian friends!

All quotes are from City of Vancouver Archives, Reference code AM54-S23-2, file Australia and Canada.

Herman Wouk, appearing in this 1955  Books and Authors Luncheon, contests what he perceives as the common view of his being “a conformist.” 

Smarting, perhaps, from the highbrow literary world’s disdain for his current best-seller, Marjorie Morningstar (1955), Wouk methodically lists the ways in which he swims against the current of the contemporary cultural scene. He is, for starters, “the only Jew in the literary field who lives an Orthodox Jewish life.” In The Caine Mutiny, his blockbuster of 1952, he scrupulously avoided all obscenities, breaking “a convention in war novels that had become almost as rigid as the sonnet form.” More seriously, he expressed in that book an unfashionable admiration for the men, however brutal and flawed they may have been, who “won the war.” And now, in Marjorie Morningstar, he has fearlessly bucked trends yet again, by insisting that a young girl’s “virginity was precious to her; that her first experience was a catastrophe or a revelation, but at any rate a key turn in her life.” 

In this counterblast to the prevailing Modernist creed of the day, Wouk explicitly aligns himself with Shakespeare and Dickens. Yes, he admits, during the 1920s, when H.L. Mencken and other critics “smashed idols,” they were justified, because the mindless optimism they attacked was false and needed debunking. But now, in the face of “a dynamic and vigorous system diametrically opposed to it,” he finds himself, when he sits down to write, “telling good things about the United States. And I am not ashamed of that.” 

Wouk was born in New York City in 1915. The son of immigrant parents, he worked for several years in radio, eventually becoming a writer for the famous comedian Fred Allen. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Wouk served with distinction in the U.S. Navy. During his off-duty hours he began to write what would become his first published novel, Aurora Dawn (1947). Its success encouraged him to devote himself to fiction full-time. Among his early successes were The Caine Mutiny (1952), which presented a more complex and nuanced view of war and command than most novels dealing with the recent conflict, and Marjorie Morningstar, about a young Jewish girl who rebels against her family’s middle-class values. The Caine Mutiny was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, adapted for the stage, and then turned into a film starring Humphrey Bogart. Marjorie Morningstar was also filmed, with Natalie Wood in the title role. 

Wouk had led a secular life until his early 20s. Earlier, though, he had been influenced by the religious beliefs of his grandfather, Mendel Leib Levine, who had been a rabbi in Minsk. This led to his eventual adoption of more Orthodox practices. In 1959 he published This Is My God, an explanation of the Orthodox Jewish life. 

Wouk’s next major project was an overarching all-encompassing retelling of World War II and the Holocaust. This necessitated his moving to Washington and immersing himself in research at the Library of Congress and the National Archives as well as traveling extensively throughout Europe and Israel. The result was The Winds of War (1971), followed by War and Remembrance (1978). Both of these books, in addition to being best-sellers, were made into TV mini-series, at that time a relatively new concept in television. Of The Winds of War, The New York Times reported:

At about $40 million, it was the single most expensive television event up to that time. Filmed over a period of 13 months in over 400 locations, this TV saga captured a massive audience…

Although rarely receiving the imprimatur of the literary establishment, Wouk’s novels have had a major influence both in the United States and abroad. Covering a symposium on his work hosted by the Library of Congress, The Daily Beast pointed out:

Henry Kissinger once called the novels [The Winds of War, War and Remembrance] “the war itself” …Robert Caro described the impact of reading Wouk’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Caine Mutiny on the subway as a teenager. William Safire marveled that Wouk’s depiction of U.S.-Israeli relations during the early 1970s in his novel The Glory was so eerily accurate that Wouk had understood what most historians had not — not only events, but motivations.

In recent years, Wouk has returned to what he calls his “avocation, Judaic studies,” with The Will to Live On (2000), and a study of physics and faith inspired by his friendship with the physicist Richard Feynman, The Language God Talks (2010).

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

Note: Some poor audio quality due to condition of original recording.