One of the best parts about working in archives is getting to “discover” things – maybe a first edition in a box of uncataloged books, or fascinating images in a box only labeled “negatives” – things that weren’t lost, exactly, but whose awesomeness went previously unrecognized.

A few months ago, I was gathering together all of our material on the Amherst College student radio station, WAMH (previously WAMF). They had recently donated a couple boxes of records and I wanted to integrate and make a finding aid for all the material they have given us over the years (WAMH/WAMF Records). I found three boxes of reel to reel audio tapes of shows that had been broadcast in the 1950s-70s and given to us in 1989. The tapes included all kinds of intriguing topics from Neils Bohr lecturing on Atomic Theory in 1957 to students protesting the Vietnam War. Most interesting was one reel reading: Martin Luther King, Pres. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, speaking at the New School for Social Research on “The Summer of Our Discontent” from February 1964. An internet search quickly revealed that the New School Archives holds a recording of the question and answer session from this lecture, but not a recording of the lecture itself, and that this is most likely a unique recording of the speech. We had the tape digitized and got in touch with our colleagues at The New School Archives, who were pleased to learn that we had found this additional documentation from an important event in their history.

LISTEN TO THE SPEECH HERE

Dr. King speaking at The New School

In the Spring of 1964, The New School hosted a 15 lecture series, The American Race Crisis Lecture Series, featuring 15 civil rights leaders in the United States and attended by hundreds of students. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. opened the series on February 6 with a lecture on the tumultuous summer of 1963. King began by asking the question, why 1963? The answers included disillusionment with progress in desegregation, the failure of political parties to live up to their promises, administrative action focused solely on voting rights and the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation highlighting the paucity of progress since 1863. After a review of the history of African American political action since the Emancipation Proclamation, finishing with the events of 1963 in Birmingham, King brought to the fore the value of nonviolent tactics to the movement. In closing, King called for continued action in 1964, including the passage of the Civil Rights Bill (which happened four days after the speech). The bulk of the speech was published, revised and much expanded, in the first two chapters of King’s 1964 book, Why We Can’t Wait.

The question and answer period following the speech (available in The New School Digital Collections) is just as fascinating as the speech itself. King responds to questions about the Black Muslim movement, a perceived “bog down” in civil rights activity following the March on Washington, and affirmative action (although not by that name). The story of the initial discovery of The New School’s recording and their subsequent exhibition on the American Race Crisis Lecture Series can be found in the following articles:

• Listen: After 48 Years of Silence, a Lost King Speech Finds New Life, by The New School Free Press
• Found After Decades, a Forgotten Tape of King “Thinking on his Feet”, by The New York Times
• MLK Returns to the New School, by The New School News

On December 8th, 1964, at 6pm, Amherst College students could have tuned in to WAMF and heard Dr. King’s speech rebroadcast on the Lecture Hall program. The Lecture Hall was a twice weekly program of pre-recorded lectures, some given at Amherst College and some obtained through agreements with other institutions. Les Black, class of 1966, was the program manager of WAMF in 1964 and hosted the Lecture Hall program. It is his voice that you hear at the beginning and end of the recording linked above. He recalls that at the time, “a lot was going on and there was no Facebook, no YouTube, not much alternative media yet. College radio stations like WAMF played a key role by giving students a way to hear about it.”

While it is very exciting to be able to add this small piece to the documentation of the rich and important life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., this recording can be heard not just as an historical artifact, but as a call to reflect on current events. 2014 and 2015 have also been years of turmoil, protest and nonviolent action against racism. And while the terrain has shifted, many of King’s analyses and calls to action are still relevant today.

Many thanks to Wendy Scheir of The New School Archives for generously sharing her experience and background materials, Les Black for his recollections of WAMF and the Lecture Hall program, SceneSavers in Covington, KY for digitizing the audio reel, and WAMH for starting this whole thing off! 

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.

Publicity photo of Polack Bros. Circus 1965 clowns. Reference code AM281-S8-: CVA 180-6027.

If you like clowns, we have several images of clowns that performed at the P.N.E. The Polack Bros. Circus shown above was a popular one-ring show usually sponsored by local Shriners organizations.

Kent Chastain, Joe Grega, Jim Douglass and Minnie the dog. Reference code: AM281-S8-: CVA 180-6028.

This is a close-up of some of the clowns in the first photograph, and includes the dog.

The Aerialovelies aerial acrobats in 1965. AM281-S8-: CVA 180-6026.

The Aerialovelies were a female aerialist troupe who performed with the Polack Bros. Circus. When originally formed, the troupe was trained and directed by Barbette, a famous and influential aerialist who performed in drag.

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

Legendary ballerina Dame Alicia Markova reminisces about the past and plans for the future.  Interviewed in 1967 by the Herald-Tribune’s dance critic Walter Terry, Dame Alicia dismisses feeling any nostalgia for her performing days. She has been preparing for this transition all her life, always interesting herself in backstage details, even taking lessons in lighting, so she could move seamlessly from in front of the footlights to behind them. She speaks of auditioning for Diaghilev at the age of ten and professes to be horrified at having been billed as “The Child Pavlova.” In her new role, as Director of Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera, she gingerly handles the question of why the job has proved a challenge to so many previous dancers and choreographers. The key, she insists, is to love opera, which she does. Indeed she danced in many operas when with the Ballets Russes. Her aim is “to get the ballet and opera living side by side, peacefully.” When asked to compare the two arts she makes the interesting distinction of seeing ballet as more “Latin”  and “light” while opera is “Nordic” and “heavy.”

Talk turns to the Ballet Evening which the company is putting on. She speaks glowingly of presenting the world premiere of Anthony Tudor’s Concerning Oracles and the US premiere of his Echoing Trumpets. Terry tries to get her to fantasize about a future expansion of the opera’s ballet, with more of these dance-centered events, but Dame Alicia seems quite firm and level-headed about just how much freedom she will be allowed. It is, she points out, the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, not the other way around.

English ballerina and choreographer Alicia Markova photographed in 1963.

(Photo by Jack Mitchell/Getty)

Dame Alicia Markova was born Lillian Alicia Marks in London in 1910. Diagnosed with flat feet and weak knees, she was sent to a dance academy for therapeutic reasons. There, she astonished the teachers with her skill. As Tina Sutton, in her biography The Making of Markova, reports:

“Within months, the naïve teen became the youngest ever soloist at the world famous Ballets Russes and star of Balanchine’s first full-length choreographic work for the company, The Nightingale. As London newspaper The Independent would later comment: “Alicia’s incredible virtuosity thrilled Balanchine. He included double tours en l’air, a turning jump from the male lexicon, and devised a diagonal of jouettés that gave the impression of a little bird hopping.” The ballet launched both of their careers. However, Lilian Alicia Marks would not be listed on the program. Being a prima ballerina in the 1920s “necessitated” a Russian name. “Who would pay to see Marks dance?” scoffed Diaghilev, who quickly rechristened her Alicia Markova.”

After Diaghilev’s death, Markova became active in British ballet, helping to establish both the Ballet Rambert and the Vic-Wells Ballet (which would later become the Royal Ballet.) She continued her career as a guest soloist with companies all over the world, gaining the greatest fame for her interpretation of Giselle, a part she “owned” for many years. The transition she refers to in this interview, from ballerina to administrator, surprised many in the dance world. As dance critic Jack Anderson remembers, in the New York Times:

“Dame Alicia, who had occasionally made guest appearances in the ballet sequences of works in the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera, astonished the dance world in 1963 when she accepted an invitation to direct the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. The Met’s dance troupe had never been considered important and the opera management had seldom shown much interest in ballet. Nevertheless, in her six years as director, Dame Alicia raised the dancers’ technical level and made it possible for the ballet company to present programs of its own.”

But when one reads more about Markova’s life one is not at all surprised at the continued success she had upon retiring. She was a hardworking woman, utterly obsessed with her craft, who never married, performed every night of the week, twice on Saturdays, and danced to an advanced age through extraordinary pain. As The Independent newspaper noted:

“In pre-First World War England, a frail, exotic-looking Jewish girl who learnt to dance in Muswell Hill and was so shy that she barely spoke a word until age six and was so sickly she needed to be home-schooled turned herself into a superstar and became the most famous ballerina in the world.”

Markova had to overcome poverty, sexism, anti-Semitism, and not being considered “pretty” enough to succeed….becoming the world’s first openly Jewish prima ballerina assoluta – the highest (and rarest) rank of a classical female dancer.

Dame Alicia Markova died in 2004.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection

WNYC archives id: 150009
Municipal archives id: T2262

I am pleased to announce a new pilot project from the Office of Innovation at the National Archives called the “History Hub.” This new platform may be thought of as an external collaboration network, a place where subject matter experts from the National Archives can engage with researchers and the public, to share information, work more easily together, and find people based on their experience and interests. The platform offers discussion boards, blogs, profiles, and other interactive tools for communication and collaboration.

We aim to use the History Hub to explore new ways of connecting with and serving customers interested in historical topics relating to our holdings. This project helps us to achieve NARA’s strategic goal to Connect with Customers, in particular, to expand public participation and our use of crowdsourcing tools. The project is also part of NARA’s Open Government Plan and supports the aim of achieving government transparency, as well as citizen participation and collaboration with the federal government. The History Hub provides us a platform for eventually working with other cultural organizations—such as the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress—to offer the public a one-stop shop for crowdsourcing information.

The History Hub is a limited six-month pilot project so that we can test the platform for its use and usefulness as a crowdsourcing platform. We will use the pilot period to benchmark level of effort on the part of NARA staff and to better understand public engagement metrics. We are developing a robust set of evaluation criteria to evaluate the pilot and ensure good use of NARA’s resources.

The History Hub project will include participation from staff subject matter experts who have both an interest and expertise in these topics. For the pilot, we are working on a narrow set of topics that have been identified as good test cases for this platform. For example, we know that the popularity and complexity of Native American research makes it a good candidate for discussion on this platform and NARA has an opportunity to collaborate with other federal resources, such as the Smithsonian, to better serve researchers.

The idea for this project has been under discussion for several years, and I am excited about the potential for this pilot project, as it is a great opportunity to engage National Archives staff experts, the public, as well as colleagues at other institutions to further NARA’s mission and strategic goals.

But we really don’t know how the History Hub will actually be used.  We just know that all of our great plans for it will surely miss some of the new ways people will use the tool. That’s the nature of innovative projects, we need to launch and then learn from them.

Do you have research questions you’ve always wanted answered? Do you want advice on how to get started with genealogical research? Give it a try and ask a question at historyhub.archives.gov.

*Update – we’ve taken portions of the original quiz and made a version of our own! You can access it here, or take it below. We’re taking it a little easier on you by giving you answers to choose from, rather than forcing you to guess blindly as our critics and authors did. We’ve also shortened it and rooted out the works and questions that have been rendered obscure by time.

Good Luck!*

Last year, my wife Julie and I suffered through what has to be one of the worst Trivial Pursuit beat-downs in the game’s history. Our opponents, her parents Lester and Debra Maness, were gracious in their victory, but I think we both felt a very real frustration at our rather pitiful performance. Julie and I are decently cultured, even knowledgeable in spots, and while weren’t certain we would win going in, we did not at all expect the drubbing we received. It left us reeling, struggling for answers in more ways than one: Had our wits been dulled by the ubiquity of Google? Did we underestimate the wealth of knowledge stored in our elders? Is a narwhal a whale? Methinks it is a whale… (That’s yes to all three, by the way.)

But maybe there was another reason why a victory was not to be. Other evidence had in fact piled up: the board was a little too worn, the questions oddly dated. As it turns, the version of Trivial Pursuit that had been punishing us for hours had been released in 1983. Time had marched on to a stretch of over thirty years. The game stood stubbornly in its trenches. It almost felt like we’d dug out a time capsule, but one left to taunt us, scolding our embarrassing ignorance of the state-of-the-world in 1983.

Great literature, the topic of this quiz, is thankfully timeless.

This 1953 recording from the inaugural WNYC Book Festival pits ”the Critics” – Charles Poore of The New York Times Book Review alongside Columbia University Professor of Philosophy Irwin Edman –  against “the Authors” – Alfred Kazin of The New Yorker, paired with Jan Struther, the creator of “Mrs. Miniver” – in a challenge of their knowledge of literary pursuits.

Questions provide a tour of the five boroughs traversed via book title, a round of literary “potent potables” and Yummy Books, and notable first and last lines of English literature – fans of schadenfreude will be pleased to note that these literary lights miss entirely the opening line of one of the best known and most acclaimed writings in the history of the English language – “Who’s there?”

Perhaps one day Julie and I will revenge our foul and most unnatural loss, until then it’s nice to know we can hone our trivia skills on the job.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150182
Municipal archives id: LT2776

We’re hard at work on our spring exhibition and event series, “Portals: The History of the Future,” and in the process we’ve been coming across books, movies, and other stuff that gets us in the Portals spirit. So we decided to share some suggested reading (and listening, and watching…) here. We’re also going to post this (and update it) on the Portals website, which should be live soon.

Portals: Recommended Reading (And Watching, and Listening)

Short Reads

• William Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981). Available in the collection Burning Chrome. Ocean State Libraries (Text can also be found online.)
• Wikipedia entry for Charles Piazzi Smyth, particularly the “Pyramidological researches” section. For a sense of the range of schemes proposed during the debate over unified time.
• Edmund Arthur Engler, “Time-Keeping in Paris,” Popular Science Monthly, vol. 20 (1882). Online

Long Reads

• Paul J. Nahin, Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1999). For the nitty-gritty details of how to keep your time machine in working order. WorldCat
• I.F. Clarke, The Pattern of Expectation, 1644-2001 (New York: Basic Books, 1979). WorldCat
• Joseph J. Corn & Brian Horrigan, Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Ocean State Libraries
• Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time (New York: W.W. Norton: 2003). PPL
• Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). PPL

Podcasts

• Gizmodo’s Meanwhile in the Future podcast. Soundcloud, iTunes, Overcast
• Radiolab’s “Beyond Time” episode.
• On the Media’s “Digital Dark Age” episode.

Music

• Sun Ra Arkestra – The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra
• Joseph Haydn – Il Mondo della Luna
• Joe Meek – I Hear a New World
• Bjork – Biophilia

Film & Television

• Metropolis (1927), Netflix, PPL
• Tron (1982) PPL
• Primer (2004) Netflix
• Black Mirror (2011-), Netflix
• The Matrix (1999) PPL
• Children of Men (2006) Ocean State Libraries
• Pleasantville (1998) PPL
• Her (2013) PPL
• Commune (2005) Netflix

The Florida County and City Histories Collection comprises two boxes of essays written by students at the Florida State College for Women in 1922 and 1923. These essays consist of research into the history and culture of certain cities and counties across the state of Florida from Dade County, to Jacksonville, to Pensacola. The essays provide an interesting glimpse into the methods of 1920s academic writing, whereby papers were researched without the convenience of the Internet and were written by hand, absent of formatting, style guides, and citations. This collection is now digitized and available through the FSU Digital Library.

In order to digitally scan the Florida County and City Histories Collection the ties and brads that bound the essays together had to carefully and meticulously be removed so as not to damage the nearly century-old documents. This practice, the delicate removal of hardware and binding materials, is part of a process aptly called processing, in which the archivist takes steps to ensure the preservation of the archival documents.

Once the ties and hardware were removed from the essays the individual pages were ready to be digitized. In the cultural heritage field, we use a fancy word called digitization to refer to the digital photographing or scanning and online presentation of physical materials. In this case, the records were scanned on a  state-of-the-art flatbed scanner (which is worth more than my car) in order to capture high quality images in a short amount of time.

In order to provide access to the images of the essays online, one of the most important steps of digitization is collecting and organizing the metadata. Metadata, in my opinion, is a scary word that refers to the abstract concept of information about information. In all reality, metadata is the set of data that describes a piece of information. In this case the piece of information is the essay and the data describing it includes details such as the language it was written in and size of the paper. After organizing the metadata into a spreadsheet it is then converted into a code, presumably by means of magic or sorcery, by the Metadata Librarian.

The last step of digitization is to gather up all the metadata code and the digital images into a queue that is uploaded onto the Digital Library’s server and arranged according to the instructions in the code. Because the magical code tells all the little bits of information how to look and how to behave, the text and images appear in a way that is ergonomically and aesthetically pleasing to the viewer.

And that’s the behind the scenes of the digitization process. Check out the Florida County and City Histories to evaluate for yourselves!

Britt Boler is currently the graduate assistant for FSU’s Special Collections & Archives division.

Today’s Bad Child of History comes from Maria H. Bulfinch’s 1867 volume Frank Stirling’s Choice. His name is Charlie, and while it’s not 100% clear what he’s doing in this illustration, it obviously isn’t something a responsible adult would condone.

Is Charlie climbing the furniture while wielding a Vienna sausage on a chopstick? Is his upright posture defying the laws of physics? Why is he gesturing at that rustic, twiggy cross? What does Frank think of this whole endeavor?

Frank Stirling’s Choice also contains one of the best footnotes I’ve seen in 2016:

Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, folks.

After a brief pause for breath over the xmas holidays we’re looking forward to kicking off the new year in style with a number of exciting events to report.

Our Hosts & Champions exhibition continues its tour around Scotland opening this month in Stranraer Museum and moving on to the Auld Kirk Museum in Kirkintilloch in March. We’re also in discussion with a number of other venues around the country and hope to extend our tour into the summer months. We’ll also be speaking about the Hosts & Champions project and the Commonwealth Games Scotland Archive at the Sport in Museums Network Conference in Nottingham on 11^th February.

Our colleagues at The Musicians’ Union: A Social History project at the University of Glasgow are holding a major conference at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, on 14^th and 15^th January. The project has made great use of the Musicians’ Union Archive during their research and has put together an exhibition on the history of the union which will be on display at the Mitchell Library from the 11^th – 31^st January. Players Work Time, a social history of the Musicians’ Union will be published in Spring 2016.

‘Staring at the Ceiling, Looking at the Stars’ is an exhibition of new artwork co-created by patients at Bellsdyke Hospital and the artist Sharon Quigley inspired by the stories of patients in the Stirling District Asylum. It opens in the university’s Pathfoot Building on Saturday 23^rd January. To coincide with this exhibition a public talk on nineteenth century asylums, with particular reference to Stirling District Asylum, will be given by Dr Ian Hutchison on Thursday 11^th February. The Stirling District Asylum Archive has now been cataloged and is available for use by researchers. Full details can be found here.

We’ll continue to provide updates of further projects and events throughout the year, including a trip to Paris in April for one of our ‘Treasures’…

The Presidential Rank Award Program was created to recognize “sustained extraordinary accomplishment” by career senior executives in the Federal Government.  In a highly competitive process, executives nominated by their agency heads are evaluated by citizen panels and designated by the President of the United States.  Recipients are deemed to be strong leaders, professionals, or scientists who achieve results and consistently demonstrate strength, integrity, industry, and a relentless commitment to excellence in public service.

I am so pleased, proud, and honored that Sheryl J. Shenberger, Director of our National Declassification Center has been named a Meritorious Executive Presidential Rank Award recipient—the first National Archives and Records Administration executive to be so recognized.

Sheryl Shenberger, Director of the National Declassification Center. Photo courtesy of the Gulf Times

As the inaugural Director of the National Declassification Center, Sheryl is recognized as the Federal Government expert for executing the review, declassification, and release of permanent government records.  Her accomplishments are an example of our commitment to the Administration’s Open Government Initiative.  Her sustained leadership in coordination of the adjudication of multi-equity referrals as well as balancing transparency and openness with the protection of still-sensitive information is extremely important work.

Learn more about the National Declassification Center’s work at www.archives.gov/declassification/ndc

Technology, information, and education; what the future looked like…in 1966. In this edition of Main Currents, host Lee Graham conducts a roundtable discussion with five representatives of the information technology field. They are Charles DeCarlo, IBM’s Director of Automation Research, John Tebbel, a professor of journalism at NYU, Raymond Hagel, an education publisher at Crowell-Collier, Marlon McLaughlin representing the United States Commission of Education, and Quentin Carroll from the Public Relations Society of America.

The question that seems to be on everyone’s mind when it comes to automation is, Which jobs will it replace? Professor Tebbel, asked about newspapers, assures listeners that, “Machines do not threaten the editorial side of newspapers. No machine can replace a reporter.” IBM’s DeCarlo broadens this to a more general statement that fear concerning the loss of jobs, “is very much overrated.” Most of the replacement will take place in the field of “hand-eye motions.” It’s telling that all the references here are to “machines,” not computers. As for education, a particular concern of the panel, they unanimously reject the idea that technology will replace the teacher. Hagel, the educational publisher, envisions a classroom where the teacher will have more, not less, one-on-one contact with her students, as machines will “free her time from relatively rote functions.” DeCarlo makes a plea, eerily and depressingly relevant fifty years later, for increasing the number of teachers and reducing class sizes.

Once they have dismissed the notion that technology itself could have any deleterious effects, the panelists do go on to (accurately) foresee some of the ethical questions increased communication will pose. What were formerly questions only of interest to specialists will now be of interest to “the common man,” as well. Some mostly good-natured twitting is directed at Carroll, the public relations representative (who, it is implied, has been imposed on the show by its sponsor) about press releases and other forms of “canned” news. Much is made of a perceived shift toward science and technology in the light of the Soviet launch of Sputnik and the ensuing Space Race. McLaughlin, the government education representative, assures the others that colleges have recognized this growing gap and are “making a real effort to combine science and the humanities.” DeCarlo sees technology, with its sudden advances, as creating a need for increased adult education, as people retrain for new jobs. He also points out how deprived segments of society could benefit from technology, concluding that ultimately what we need “is more human contact, not more machines.” Nowhere in this discussion does it occur to anyone that the sheer monetary savings offered by technology could have adverse and, in some cases, catastrophic impact on labor relations, the status of teachers, or on the social fabric in general.

Of more concern is the dawn of what we now call globalization. Graham refers to the recently launched Early Bird Satellite which, if it were joined by two more, could provide instant person-to-person contact. She mentions an outlandish prediction by Arthur C. Clarke that in the future people will all have mobile phones and be available at any time, a prospect she  finds “dreadful.” One of the panelists warns that while we are “a center of rationalized culture,” enhanced communication with the “Oriental spiritual or mystical world” could prove unsettling for both sides. In general, though, optimism reigns. There has always been suspicion of new technology, it is pointed out. The feelings of the group are summed up by one member who proclaims, “I can’t remember an age when the options are better.”

Of the panelists, DeCarlo and Tebbel do most of the talking. Charles DeCarlo (1921-2004) later served as president of Sarah Lawrence College. He also wrote books on education and social change. John Tebell (1912-2004) worked in a variety of fields relating to journalism and publishing. In addition to a long career as a teacher, he wrote many books, the best-known being the four volume A History of Book Publishing in the United States.

The conversation itself, meandering and, at times, muddled though it may sound now, with its pauses, its considered asides, its deference to opposing points of view and actual acknowledgement of what the other person is saying, could, one might argue, serve as an example of the very qualities that have been lost or certainly shunted aside as technology, in media as everywhere else, has imposed its own brand of “efficiency” and consequent glibness on social discourse. 

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection

WNYC archives id: 150017
Municipal archives id: T1827-1828

After the successful transport and unloading of the Marsha Gontarski Children’s Literature Collection, I began the process of creating an inventory of all the books in the collection — an excel spreadsheet that is currently at 300 entries and steadily growing. This spreadsheet will serve not only as a record of all the books received in the donation but also as a place to keep track of all the categorizations, ephemera, and notes that came with the collection.

For each book, I am recording the title, author, illustrator, publisher, date of publication, and category/subject, as well as any notes about articles, book reviews, and author/illustrator signatures included in the books. Newspaper clippings and publisher’s press releases laid in need to be removed in order to prevent acidic inks and papers from causing damage to the books, but making notes of where everything came from on the spreadsheet will allow us to go back and link books and archival materials where they are relevant to understanding the collection.

The real, searchable, catalog entries for each book will be created by our Cataloging and Description Department in the next stage of the accessioning journey. The inventory spreadsheet is informal in that it does not use any of the standard languages that our catalogers use to improve information accessibility, but it will be important to us in understanding and thus promoting the collection to potential researchers.

While spreadsheet creation and data entry may not seem like the most thrilling line of work, going through this collection book by book has been a lot of fun. The real challenge is not stopping to read each book along the way. Some of the highlights I have come across so far include works by well-known illustrators like Patricia Polacco, Victoria Chess, Molly Bang, Trina Schart Hyman, and James Marshall. Many of these works are signed, often with delightful little drawings, like the one by James Marshall pictured above. There are also many different versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” in the collection – classic versions, modern retellings, foreign language editions, and even highly abstract interpretations like the French edition (shown above left) illustrated by Warja Lavater. The same story is told each time – but the way the stories are written, illustrated, and published offer telling clues about the cultures and times in which they were produced.

On January 1st, 1966 at 8:02 am the last trains rolled out to New Yorkers. Over the next twelve days all subway and bus service was brought to a standstill while Mayor John Lindsay battled with Mike Quill, President of the Transit Workers Union.

The longest service strike in New York history culminated with the arrest of nine TWU committee members, including Quill, on the grounds that the strike violated an injunction filed under the 1947 Condon-Wadlin Act. The strike began on Mayor Lindsay’s first day in office and was the first of several municipal employee strikes that dogged his tenure.

A notice posted to the public during the strike

(Courtesy of New York Transit Museum)

Fifty years ago today Mike Quill gave a press conference to reinforce the unyielding stance of the transit workers, “We will not settle for one penny less!” He assured the reporters that negotiations will continue with other representatives in the union in his absence and responded slyly to questions from the huddle of reporters. 

Quill was notorious for his quick wit and salty language. When asked how many times he has been in jail he replied, “All my family were a group of jailbirds…it was was years, I cannot count them all. I lost their long and bloody score.” When one reporter asks who he holds responsible for the arrest Quill fires back, “The editorial writers for the New York Times!”

Later, a reporter described the scene as the men were arrested, “The pandemonium broke loose, the reporters, photographers, everybody just crowded in… into a tremendous knot around Mr. Quill.”

Though you couldn’t tell from his vigor in this recording, Quill was suffering from heart problems and released to a hospital shortly after being arrested. Though his health seemed to improve, on January 28th he suffered a fatal heart attack, three days after the strike was fully settled. The negotiations resulted in a package worth over $60 million in wage increases and benefits. 

Originally from a small village in Ireland, Quill participated in the Irish Civil War as a dispatch rider for the IRA. He moved to the United States when he was 21 and began working with his uncle at the privately owned IRT, the original New York subway line, a system which corresponds to the modern day numbered transit lines. 

Recordings of Mayor Lindsay on the 1966 Transit Strike:

January 2nd, 1966 – Press Conference

January 3rd, 1966 – Press Conference

January 3rd, 1966 – Press Conference

THE ORIGINS OF THIS COLLECTION

A Childhood Spent Preparing

I think it was actually a confluence of four factors that led me, enabled me, to conduct The Distinguished Contemporaries Collection of Interviews.

First, I am a lifetime insomniac. Beginning at age six, I never missed Barry Gray, “The Father of Talk Radio” from 11PM—1AM on WMCA, New York, and the over-nighters like Long John Nebel and Barry Farber. They kept me company. I could see them, the guests, and their studios in my mind’s eye.

Second, my environment as a kid was not typical. I can’t ever remember playing ball. But I’m full of memories of acting as DJ with my neighbor Mike Hayes as engineer in our basement studio, where we had a low-power, FCC-approved, neighborhood radio station. Just down the hall, Mike’s parents, Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healy, earlier of theater, film, Vegas, and television notoriety, played hosts to well-known guests on WOR radio every morning. At times they would call on me to report the weather (my other avocation). Sometimes I’d chat with a guest like Pat Boone or watch Peter upstairs in the “Red Room” recording telephone interviews with Richard Nixon or Bob Hope. I later used this forum when a distant guest had minimal availability, recording telephone conversations with Arthur Hailey, Milton Friedman, Wernher Von Braun, Ann Landers and others.

Access to the airwaves and to celebrities came early for me. I clearly remember when Walter Cronkite guested on the Hayes’ program; he popped his head into our studio, sat down and took questions “on air,” though we didn’t have the good sense to record it as teenagers.

While at The Lawrenceville School, in New Jersey, I got my on-air fixes only on holidays (though I hid a radio inside my pillow to take in WOR’s Jean Shepherd at night). As a senior, I was in the Radio Club, and we started an FM station run from my dorm room. Soon after, the school designated the rather ancient Bath House as our new headquarters for WLSR. As a news fanatic, my journalistic coup was to scoop the weekly student paper by interviewing the head master or coaches before their stories appeared in print.

In late December 1967, my best friend, Sherwin Harris, and I were home from our respective schools. My parents held a small, black-tie party for their anniversary. It was just after Christmas, and the gift given me that holiday was the latest in home entertainment, a black-and-white, reel-to-reel video recorder. When I learned that Walter Cronkite would be a guest at the party, Sherwin and I yanked out the Who’s Who in America and made notes on his biggest stories and also the issues of that day, such as Vietnam. At 11 PM, toward the end of the party, Cronkite sat down and gave us a twenty minutes that you’d never hear on TV. And, although that early video tape didn’t survive, still thanks to my dear friend’s foresight, a photo and the audio recording remain for you to see and hear.

The Cadence of a Weekly Program

In the fall of 1968, I entered Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and quickly located the basement offices and studios of WRTC, an FM station with a broadcast radius of about thirty miles. The campus was as consumed with the issues of the day—war, race, feminism—as with coursework.  In light of the school’s heavily male vs. female ratio, a lot of guys were focused on weekend road trips to the closest all-night party. For me, however, the lure was going to New York or to the celebrity homes where I’d made interview appointments with the likes of Salvador Dalí at the St. Regis Hotel in the City, where he wintered, or with Norman Rockwell in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

I encountered excellent cooperation from the campus weekly, The Trinity Tripod. The editor gave me good space, and often a photo for the program, which they dubbed, “Cooper’s Show.” The paper did not see us as a competitor, but as a collaborator in education and public service. This homage to “the public good” a few years later became crucial in my successes lining up a syndicate of commercial radio stations.

At my graduation in 1972, I received a B.A. in English, with Spanish as a minor, de rigueur in the era of the “well-rounded” liberal arts major. I was flanked by two honorary degree recipients at polar extremes of the arts vs. sciences: Edward Albee, who’d been dismissed years earlier from Lawrenceville AND Trinity for failure to attend classes, and my Dad, Dr. Irving S. Cooper, for his pioneering discoveries as a neurosurgeon (although he was a liberal arts man too, writing an M.S. thesis, Medical Aspects of the Death of Desdemona).

Having honed my research and articulation skills, the former deep in the remote shelves of the Watkinson Library, the latter conducting and editing my weekly show and reading news copy live on the air, I shortly landed a weekly slot on a powerful FM station, WKSS, serving Hartford, New Britain, and Middletown, Connecticut, with a broadcast radius of 75 miles.

I fell back on a few reliable guests and then switched to local elites. I taped a broadcast with Dick Newfield, President of Hartman Tobacco. Who knew Connecticut grew superlative cigar tobacco leaf? My interview with outspoken Hartford Mayor George Athanson, though, ended my run at the station. The mayor was witty and charming but also expressed arch liberal views on getting out of Vietnam. The station manager refused to air the program in its regularly scheduled Sunday half hour. I said nothing, walked down the spiral stairway and out WKSS’ glass doors for the last time.

Public Interest vs Commerce in 1970s Broadcasting

Thomas Wolfe wrote that, “You can’t go home again,” but I must’ve missed that class: I drove straight home to Pelham in the Westchester County suburbs of New York City, and signed up for graduate business courses that fall at Iona College, a commuter school about seven miles away in New Rochelle. There I found that George O’Brien, in retirement from WQXR, had carved out an arm of the School’s development office, and called it “Radio Activities.” In his office and studio in an upstairs corner of the Ryan Library, he created interviews to run as “soft marketing” for Iona on an undefined schedule at a hundred stations across the country.

His shows, hosting faculty members and occasional outside guests, were in the mold of the FCC’s public service and education model: it was cost efficient for the stations, met the regulations on delivering public affairs to their audiences, and could be isolated outside valuable commercial prime time.

But George was not averse to my vision for “Radio,” as we shorthanded it. Why not assemble a collection of Metropolitan-area stations and feature eminent guests, to conjoin the name Iona College with respected thinkers across all the humanities, and presented exclusively in the region from which the student body was drawn?

This brings me to the vital third and fourth ingredients in my interview show’s genesis. The late 1960s and early 1970s were the last days of public service radio on commercial outlets before de-regulation began apace. It was an open door for my style of program to fill that need.

The fourth important feature of what I’ll call the opportunity terrain, was access to prominent guests. By that I mean, locate/contact/convince each prospect, a triad which, I contend, was more easily accomplished then than it would be today.

Having been salaried as assistant director with a budget, a staff of three, and the ability to dictate letters or play tapes for transcription by a large secretarial pool, I initiated the process of meeting with station managers, editing my existing tape collection to begin regular broadcasts, and arranging with the local newspaper to run transcripts, with a photo, as a weekly feature.

A syndicate of 30 stations, including the non-commercial WNYC, came together quickly. The quid pro quo was simple: give me a fixed broadcast time which I could promote, and I’d provide impressive content, reliably, and at no cost. They “bought in.”

Douglas P. Cooper with John Chancellor in 1973.

(Photo courtesy of Douglas P. Cooper/WNYC Archive Collections)

As for on-going access to top-notch guests, presented exclusively, I had three things going for me: I could write or call targeted personalities with a good story as to who’d been recent guests, and offer a mass audience. I knew how to research out the man or woman’s street address to write to them. I could also ask the operator to connect me with  “information” for their particular town (celebrities were shielded, hidden, back then, from today’s nation-wide 411 and the web, which has pushed them to be unlisted and “underground”). I could make it nearly impossible for my prospective celebrity guests to say “no,” by requesting, “You name the time, and you name the place.”

Only three people turned me down between 1967 and 1974: Nobel Prize-winning writer Pearl Buck (The Good Earth). Her personal assistant asked for a fee. Author John Updike, wrote that he’d done enough interviews for a lifetime. And science fiction great Isaac Asimov called me on the telephone and said, “But I just did an interview for TV, and they paid me $500.”

I had another asset when I arrived for the interviews. I was in my early twenties at the time. My guests were mostly at the end of their careers and I was “a kid.” The artist Thomas Hart Benton, comparing me to himself, called me a “baby.” James Michener asked why I hadn’t stayed at his house instead of a motel, then took me to town for lunch as did former Kansas Governor Alf Landon. No matter how foolish my questions, each guest responded as though I’d had an insightful epiphany that demanded an unabridged and serious response.

George O’Brien ultimately stood down, making me Iona’s Director of Radio. But I kept him engaged as he was still commuting from New Jersey three days a week. One day we invited Charlie O’Donnell, Dean of the Business School, to take the Eastern Shuttle to Boston, for a morning session with psychologist B. F. Skinner, at his Cambridge home, and an afternoon meeting in O’Donnell’s “bailiwick”: the office of Nobel economist Paul Samuelson at M.I.T.

About that time, I got a call from the President of Educational Dimensions in Connecticut. They were selling cassette tapes with slides to schools around the country. In the 1970s, before the internet became commonplace, this was a very popular format. I did a set of career interviews for them: beauty operator, plumber, etc. But more importantly, it triggered the idea of founding my own company, Sound Perspectives. My girlfriend’s art-director father put together a great mailing piece on my theme: In-depth Interviews with people who don’t give interviews. It included a flexible plastic record, our announcer identifying the purposes of the recordings, interspersed with clips from W. H. Auden in his dank St. Marks apartment, Walter Cronkite at CBS, James (Michener at his Pennsylvania home, Norman Rockwell at his Stockbridge, Massachusetts, studio, and B.F. Skinner in his basement office near Harvard.

(insert Sound perspectives sampler here)

Iona College drafted a document by which I was salaried and given a budget to produce the interviews as radio PR for them. But I would remain the permanent owner. This gave me the opportunity to make of the collection an irrevocable gift to the Public Radio archives of WNYC and WQXR, a representative composite of which we invite you to hear:

Douglas Cooper interviewing Dr. Benjamin Spock in the early 1970s.

(Photo courtesy of Douglas Cooper/WNYC Archive Collections)

 

We’ve recently pulled a selection of calendars and almanacs as source material for a top-secret* creative collaboration.

*It’s not actually that secret, but “as-yet unpublicized” doesn’t sound quite as thrilling.

Tomorrow (Tuesday) from 10-1, during our weekly Art//Archives visual research open hours, we’ll have these books on display for your reference and enjoyment.

The most visually stimulating of the bunch is undoubtedly the 1866 The Life of Man, Symbolised by the Months of the Year in a Series of Illustrations by John Leighton, F.S.A. and Pourtrayed in Their Seasons and Phases, with Passages Selected from Ancient and Modern Authors by Richard Pigot.

The oversized book has an illustration for each month of the year:

I’m a real sucker for the wings of time-themed frame. Also, look at that emaciated wolf-like animal and the “tender offspring” who is completely lacking seasonally-appropriate attire, presumably as he was just “rescued from the snow”.

Each month’s facing page shows the corresponding age of man:

These are followed by a selection of seasonally-appropriate quotes and poems set in a variety of type faces:

Here’s a particularly good wintry poem:

The January chapter ends with this impressive seasonal crest of sorts:

Stop by tomorrow if you’d like to see what typographic and artistic delights the other 11 months hold!