To kick off the citywide 1962 Seattle World’s Fair 50th anniversary celebrations, the Seattle Public Library will host an afternoon of events this Friday, November 19, 2011, at the Central Library in downtown Seattle. These include an author reading by Paula Becker and Alan Stein, as well as a chance to take a test drive of SPL’s new Century 21 Digital Collection.
Complete information about Friday’s programs is available here.
Screen shot of new Special Collections homepage
At last Wednesday’s Division meeting, the redesigned Special Collections Web site was unveiled to staff. Feel free to send in your comments or other feedback during this testing period. The new site is scheduled to go live on October 19, 2011.
Crowd gathered for a speech in the Stadium Bowl, Tacoma, circa 1911
A special behind-the-scenes tour of the Washington State Historical Society’s extensive ephemera collection will be held at the WSHS Research Center in Tacoma on Saturday, May 14th from 12:00-4:00 pm.
Ed Nolan of the Washington State Historical Society will lead this introductory tour of the WSHS Ephemera Collection, discussing the steps in acquiring, cataloging and storing ephemera, and the many uses to which it is put.
Following the tour, Mr. Nolan will give a talk on a particular interest of his — Northern Pacific Railroad land and tourism promotional material from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
This free event, which forms part of the Northwest Regional meeting of the Ephemera Society of America, will be the first in what the organizers hope will be an on-going series of get-togethers of those interested in ephemera. The formal tour begins at 12:30 pm, but attendees are asked to have their lunch before the tour and to arrive around noon.
Numbers for the tour are limited! To reserve your spot, e-mail imprints@oldimprints.com or call Elisabeth Burdon at 503-234-3538.
The WSHS Research Center is located at 315 North Stadium Way, Tacoma, Washington. Full directions can be found here.
Image credit: University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections, Order No. WAS1048
Antonio Salazar's photographs of Chicano activists form the core of this exhibit.
UW Activists and the Farmworkers’ Movement
Special Collections, Allen Library South Basement :: April – June 2011
A new Labor Archives of Washington State, UW Special Collections exhibit illustrating the history of activism on the UW campus featuring the photographs of Antonio Salazar, artifacts from Professor Erasmo Gamboa’s personal collection and material from the UW Libraries Special Collections.
For more information, visit the event website.
Prudence Penny department staff member shopping at Pike Place Market, Seattle, 1939
Fresh vegetables just waiting to be popped into a lovely crisp salad, inspired Prudence Penny to plan a Spring Salad Show for tomorrow’s Bon Marché matinee at 2 o’clock.
Prudence Penny’s telephones are open from 8:30 until 5 with a staff of experts to help with any household questions. Just telephone Main 2000, the Prudence Penny department will be glad to assist. Read the daily feature and the Wednesday food pages for up-to-the-minute ideas and listen to the following menus discussed over KOMO daily at 12 o’clock:
SUNDAY: Banana, grapefruit and nut salad with cheese dressing is followed by pig knuckles and pineapple with rice and bean sprouts. Butterscotch meringue pie is the dessert.
Not an April Fool’s Day hoax, but an actual menu excerpted from one of the Prudence Penny clippings (minus date) found in a John Redington scrapbook. April 1st coincidentally was the date that Bernice Redington claimed to have begun working at the P-I and also is the anniversary of this blog’s first public post, so I felt doubly compelled to follow up on yesterday’s entry!
And in the don’t-try-this-at-home department, I must confess that in the course of compiling information on Bernice Redington I gave into the temptation of dialing the Prudence Penny telephone number. No one answered.
Bernice Redington and her sisters in Tacoma, Washington, 1902
As Women’s History Month 2011 draws to a close, I bring to you part of the story of Puyallup-born journalist and home economist Bernice Redington (1891-1966). Bernice Redington first revealed herself while we were in the process of getting the scrapbooks of her father, John W(atermelon) Redington cataloged. A colorful character in his own right, John W. Redington was an enterprising jack-of-all-trades. He found a niche as a newspaperman in Oregon and Washington, along the way becoming the father of four daughters, each of whom (as clippings in his scrapbooks proudly attest) seemed to have had some involvement with journalism and/or writing at various points in their lives. Of the four, Bernice was the only one who never married and who remained the most connected with the Puget Sound region, although, like her father, she was quite peripatetic.
Bernice Redington began working for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1923, while attending the University of Washington part-time, where she apparently changed her major with some regularity. She had worked for a time as a dietitian for the Washington State School for the Blind in Vancouver, Washington and at Seattle advertising agencies before joining the staff of the P-I. She published a weekly food page and a daily column under her own byline for about two years, but her role began to expand during the time of Royal Brougham’s editorship of the newspaper (1925-1928). By the early 1930s, Bernice had added the moniker, “Prudence Penny” to her column, sometimes in tandem with her own name, sometimes on its own.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Prudence Penny letterhead
A pseudonym shared by numerous home economics columnists at various Hearst publications, Prudence Penny, was described in a 1924 article in Time Magazine, as “an institution through which Mr. Hearst dispenses good advice, human kindness, and valuable aid in exchange for the good will of prospective newspaper buyers.” The Seattle Prudence Penny department grew to be a quite large and profitable concern — at its height, the newspaper hosted its own “Dream Kitchen” on site, provided a daily radio broadcast each weekday morning (with suggestions for that evening’s menu), and required the services of eight women to handle incoming telephone calls.
Cover of "Cosmopolitan Seattle" (1935)
It was exciting to try to learn more about the Prudence Penny phenomenon and to discover that we had two related items already cataloged in Special Collections, including Cosmopolitan Seattle, a 1935 edition of an earlier pamphlet that compiled recipes from a variety of “ethnic” and other restaurants. A quick perusal of the finding aids database also showed that there was some correspondence between Bernice Redington and Edmond S. Meany contained in the latter’s papers, which yielded two examples of Prudence Penny letterhead, the “Dream Kitchen Bulletin” (pictured above) and one for “Prudence Penny’s Recipe Studio.” A couple of digitized Prudence Penny photographs led Deidre and I to make a field trip to the MOHAI Library and Archives on a soggy day to try to see if we could turn up an elusive portrait of Bernice Redington in her Prudence Penny persona. Although we did not locate one, we were very fortunate to be shown an assortment of negatives from the Seattle P-I Collection which depicted the enormous crowds that attended Prudence Penny cooking schools and other events held in Seattle through the decades (thanks, MOHAI!).
Perhaps the most unexpected and informative discovery, however, was an interview with Bernice Redington conducted in 1959 that was housed in the Roger A. Simpson papers. The Redington interview was one of several that formed part of the research for the book, Unionism or Hearst (1978), a study of the American Newspaper Guild’s 1936 strike against the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which Simpson co-authored with William E. Ames. As Bernice Redington recounts her own experience in the transcript, she had grown dissatisfied with working conditions at the P-I by the end of 1935, not having much of a say as the more experienced women on her staff were suddenly being replaced by lower-paid, less experienced ones. Perhaps sensing the writing on the wall, she decided to quit her P-I job to focus on finally completing her degree and quit abruptly in early 1936. Although she professed not to be much of a union sympathizer (“because my father was a small-town newspaper publisher and didn’t allow you to even mention the word unions”), she did testify before the National Labor Federation and supplied the “Molly Mixer” food columns for the Guild Daily newspaper (put out by the Guild during the strike).
After receiving her degree, Bernice found employment for part of the year with the Ball Brothers (glass fruit jar) company and the rest of the time as a social worker in Kitsap County. She eventually left for Hawaii, where she returned to journalism, working for several publications, including the Honolulu Star Bulletin (1946-1948) and also completing an (unpublished) novel. She returned to Washington State in 1948 and became the head of the test kitchen for the Fisher Flouring Mills, also appearing on radio broadcasts for Fisher. She settled in Normandy Park, where she continued to do freelance writing and also was involved in community affairs until her death.
Bernice Redington at age 13
Although only a very partial portrait emerges from these few scattered facts, it seems pretty clear that Bernice Redington was a strong-minded woman who did her best to live up to the journalist’s credo she expressed in an interview so much later in her life. In addition to the materials at the UW, the University of Oregon Special Collections and University Archives also holds its own set of John Redington papers (AX 93), as well as a collection on Bernice Redington (AX 92), which contains correspondence on food preparation, fashion, and careers in home economics, as well as a number of cookbooks.
Pacific Waterways: Connecting Local, Regional, and Global Histories is the theme of this year’s PWNHG conference, which takes place tomorrow at the Museum of History & Industry. Among the panels on offer is a session, “A Report from the Archives,” which will include a presentation on the Labor Archives of Washington State.
You also can go out of the library and head over to the Henry Art Gallery for this evening’s reception and panel discussion for the opening of the exhibition, Shadows of a Fleeting World: Pictorial Photography and the Seattle Camera Club. The show draws heavily on material from Special Collections, including the Frank Kunishige Photograph Collection (PH Coll 343) and the Kyo Koike Photograph Collection (PH Coll 262). The panel discussion, features Henry Chief Curator, Elizabeth Brown, as well as David F. Martin and Special Collections Visual Materials Curator, Nicolette Bromberg, who co-authored the catalog for the exhibition. The event begins at 7:00 P.M. in the Henry Auditorium; it is free with museum admission or membership, but seating is limited.
If you can’t make it tonight, the exhibition runs from February 12 – May8, 2011.
White board from inaugural meeting of the Puget Sound Special Collections Interest Group
Today marked the first meeting of the Puget Sound Special Collections Interest Group at the Seattle Public Library, which has been convened in an effort to encourage collaboration and communication among the various stakeholders in the local special collections and archives community. I didn’t take a head count, but about thirty-five or so people made it to what was a very lively meeting. As you can see, the group came up with a very ambitious and lengthy “to-do” list. Thanks to Jodee Fenton of SPL and Sean Lanksbury of the Washington State Library for organizing the meeting.
Tomorrow the rest of you can drop by SPL to take in the annual Archives Fair extravaganza. Happy Archives Month, everyone (there, got it in, just in the nick of time)!
With the change of seasons, our thoughts turn to those of our colleagues who have moved on (or soon will be). A wave of wanderlust seems to have struck Special Collections this summer, with Europe being the destination of choice.
Researcher extraordinaire, Jessie Sherwood, departed Seattle last month to undertake a post-doctoral fellowship at l’Université de Nantes. In a well deserved reprieve from chapbooks and scrapbooks, she will complete her M.L.I.S. from the University of Washington online.
Accessioning Specialist, Jeni Spamer (in a nod to Philip Barry?), has decided to take advantage of her EU status passport and is heading off to sample life on the Continent. After touching down in the land of her ancestors, she will be throwing away the road map for real. Jeni brought good vibes, dedicated professionalism, and tasty recipes to Special Collections. Her unfailing good humor, patience, and can-do spirit will be much missed.
Although green with envy, we wish both our wanderers well and hope that they will send further word of their adventures.
A few months ago, Nicolette Bromberg (Visual Materials Curator @ UW Special Collections) brought in a collection of photographs from Richard M. Kovak of the Nile Shrine Center in Mountlake Terrace, Washington. The collection documents the membership and activities of Seattle Shriners (members of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, Nile Temple).
According to the history on the Nile Shrine website, the AAONMS (an offshoot of Freemasonry) was “originally established [in 1872] to provide fun and fellowship for its members.” The Nile Temple of Seattle was formed by splitting off from the Afifi Temple of Tacoma in 1908; the following photograph was probably taken around that time.
Officers of Seattle
In elaborate costumes, these Shriners certainly appear to be enjoying fun and fellowship!
A major portion of the collection consists of member portraits, many of them identified. In most portraits, the member wears a fez hat which is decorated with the title of that member’s role or office, such as “Recorder” and “Potentate.” There is also a series of panoramic group photographs which show how membership and customs changed over the first half of the twentieth century.
Later snapshots collected in photo albums show the Shriners’ social and community activities, such as their participation in the children’s hospitals they fund, visits to schools, and their appearances in local parades, often dressed in homemade costumes of “Disnay” characters like Pinocchio and Mickey Mouse.
The collection is unprocessed and unsorted, but a preliminary finding aid is available.
Back in March, I reported on our “Shifty Business” of moving offsite holdings to a new warehouse. Naturally, such a move caused many mysteries and forgotten projects to surface, one of which is the set of discards from the Luke S. May Papers. The papers of this prominent Seattle detective have been accessible only by permission of May’s heirs since their donation in 1969; read more about “America’s Sherlock Holmes” in this HistoryLink article.
In 2004, a volunteer removed “evidence objects” and deteriorating photographic negatives from May’s case files and segregated these into six boxes of discards, but no further action was taken to remove the items from the collection. After our warehouse move, rather than simply assign new space to the discards, Special Collections’ staffer Nan Cohen has taken on the project of reviewing and attempting to deal with this “detritus” appropriately. I first learned of Nan’s task when she stopped by my desk one day to casually complain about the smelly negatives and crumbling “evidence” she was handling, including “a murder weapon.” Sure enough, among the files of discards she had found a rusty pocketknife wrapped in a crumpled sheet of paper. But is the “rust” actually something more sinister? We leave that to your imagination.
Evidence object weeded from the Luke S. May Papers, Accession No. 1299-001
All in a day’s work at UW Special Collections Division!
Lowman & Hanford Company booksellers store interior, circa 1908
Hour 2 on the Service Desk and only a few creatures are stirring.
Happy holidays, everyone!
Image credit: Order no. SEA1809, Seattle Photograph Collection.
Ah, the approaching end of the old year and the beginning of a new one naturally can lead one to be reflective.
One of the very last items to be cataloged during 2009 (statistically speaking, that is) definitely provoked a few moments of introspection on my part. In reviewing a spreadsheet listing several hundred (!) Special Collections items that needed cataloging attention, I was bemused upon coming across the title, “Whitman in Fiction,” that my immediate thought was “Marcus?” rather than “Walt!” Very embarrassing for an English major. Or maybe I just need a vacation.
With that title now handily (re)cataloged (thanks to a massive assist from Jessie), I began to ponder over whether or not I could come up with any suitably esoteric connection between Walt Whitman and the Pacific Northwest for this blog. Taking up that (unsolicited) challenge, I suddenly was reminded of a certain Levi’s commercial that has been shown incessantly in movie theaters over the past several months. I think you know the one I mean. It features a quick series of shots of a succession of attractive, but unkempt, youths cavorting in what, even to this infrequent visitor to the Rose City, appear to be some recognizable Portland area locations, while an actor (Will Geer) reads parts of the famous Whitman poem, Pioneers! O Pioneers!, on the soundtrack.
Further investigation reveals that the commercial is indeed the work of Portland-based advertising agency, Weiden + Kennedy, as part of new ad campaign for the denim giant that has sparked considerable online chatter (for a representative example, you could go here).
If you haven’t come across this commercial yet, I”ll leave it up to you to decide for yourselves whether you find it riveting or annoying:
Or perhaps you may prefer to read a book. Whether it’s on your Kindle, or if you choose to venture into the Special Collections Division (where regular hours resume on Monday, January 4, 2010), a wealth of material (even the work of Walt Whitman) awaits your reading pleasure. To paraphrase Walt, may those particular “sources and rills of the Northwest” indeed prove to be inexhaustible in 2010.
Happy new year!
James E. Bradford with two unidentified men
With our own Flickr Commons site still in the offing, what better way to while away a Friday afternoon than to try to identify who is in this photograph and what are they doing?
Since another election day is just around the corner (remember to vote!), here is one of the eight loose photographs we discovered while cataloging the James E. Bradford scrapbooks last fall. If you compare the image from his election flier, you will see that one of these men is an older version of Bradford (sorry for the low resolution scans). The rest is up to you!
We seem to have missed the call for papers, but the program for this year’s Pacific Northwest Historians Guild conference has been announced. The theme of the conference, “A Time for Reconsideration,” which will take place on March 5, 2010 at the Museum of History & Industry, is on trails and treaties in the Pacific Northwest. Full program description is available here.
"Mixed Pickles," leaf from the Westmoreland Album (1864/70), watercolor and ink photocollage designed by Victoria Alexandrina Anderson-Pelham, Countess of Yarborough and Eva Macdonald.
While back visiting New York recently, I unexpectedly encountered this delightful exhibition during a routine trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage displays the heretofore little known work of nineteenth century women who compiled these meticulously crafted albums, which contain individual leaves that creatively and often humorously juxtapose and incorporate cut up pieces of studio portrait photography within the artist’s own watercolor designs.
Do these sound like scrapbooks to you?
While I don’t think we have any examples in our collection of scrapbooks that are quite as classy, we have uncovered some pretty interesting ones during the course of the ongoing scrapbook cataloging and preservation project.
And who knows what wonders may be found among the Special Collections Division’s collection of photographic albums? You may get your chance to ask, when Visual Materials Curator, Nicolette Bromberg, gives a presentation on the photographs of Viretta Denny at the next Seattle Area Archivists membership meeting on March 11, 2010. You can read more about that event on their blog.
In the meantime, I have checked out the Libraries’ only copy of the exhibition catalog of the photocollage show, but promise to return it soon.
Ranapar Studio publicity photograph for Rainier National Park Company
Way back when, I think threatened to do a post relating to some of the work of the still-ongoing RLG Partners Social Metadata Working Group. Since we currently are in the process of preparing to present the varied results of our multifaceted research over the past year plus, I will hold off for now. But nearing the conclusion of this project made me look upon the long-anticipated launch of the UW Libraries Flickr Commons site late last month with even more interest.
On February 22, 2010, the UW Libraries became only the second academic library in the United States to join this initiative, which was begun by the Library of Congress in late 2008. Since then, some 33 (and counting) cultural heritage institutions worldwide have joined The Commons. Although one of the initial goals of the Library of Congress in partnering with Flickr had been to solicit user-tagging of unidentified photographs, the phenomenon has since expanded to include much more.
The UW Libraries Digital Collections Flickr site is offering up a selection of digitized images with no known copyright restrictions that have been available previously (and still are!) through the UW Libraries Digital Collections site. Many of these original items on the Digital Collections site are, of course, from the collections of the UW Special Collections Division. While the UW Libraries’ primary goal in participating in Flickr Commons is to share our unique holdings with an even broader public, people definitely also have been taking the opportunity to supply metadata!
Timed to coincide with the the 2010 Winter Olympics, the first UW Flickr collection offered up a set of photographs with a winter sports theme. When I first contemplated writing this post, the most-commented upon (at 13) was the one above, although a related one of a staged toboggan accident and one of an early Yukon curling team subsequently have proven to be equally popular (why is 13 the magic number, I wonder?). As a cataloger, it certainly is instructive to see what other people feel is important to describe. To me, “bravery” undoubtedly was the most unusual tag for this picture.
It will be interesting to see what comes of this experiment. Will we ever truly understand what this image really represents? I also note, for the record, that two examples of the Libraries’ own supplied metadata describe this item in at least two slightly different ways. See here and here.
New UW image sets will be added monthly to Flickr on the second Wednesday of the month. I guess that’s tomorrow! Happy tagging!
Portrait of Bertha Knight Landes at unidentified ship launching, circa 1918.
The Seattle Municipal Archives celebrates its 25 years of existence with two special events this month; separate lectures by City Archivist, Scott Cline, and historian, Paul Dorpat. Both of these programs are free and open to the public. For full information, see their online flier.
Hazel Wolf (far right) with others looking at field guide, Seattle Audubon Society Field Day, May 1966.
March is Women’s History Month. The life of Hazel Anna Wolf (1898-2000), longtime environmentalist and political activist, is an example of the highest personal contributions made by a Washington State woman to community service. When Wolf died at the age of 101, more than 900 of her friends and acquaintances crowded Seattle’s Town Hall to honor her memory and share the outrageous “Hazel stories” they had collected over the years.
As a youngster, Hazel Wolf caroused in the salt water of the Gorge in the inlet intersecting Victoria, British Columbia. Her daily playing, swimming, and rough-housing with friends translated into an equally action-packed adulthood of fighting for human rights, feminism, labor, and environmental protection. Wolf was a prominent member of the Seattle Audubon Society, served as its secretary for over 35 years, and was awarded the National Audubon Society’s Medal of Excellence in 1997. She frequently lectured at schools and universities across the nation, lobbied Congress on many environmental and peace issues, and corresponded with global leaders. Wolf also revitalized the Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs and edited the organizations newsletter, “Outdoors West.” In addition to these and many other activities, she laid groundwork for a unique coalition of Native Americans and environmentalists who began working together on issues relating to nuclear energy, fisheries, and oil pipelines.
Part of Hazel Wolf’s success had to do with getting people to laugh. She had a knack for telling short stories that were full of anecdotes and one-liners and ended with a punch line. Wolf admitted that she often wondered where those one-liners came from: “They just pop into my head and out […] It’s part of fighting the establishment, I think.” In Hazel Wolf: Fighting the Establishment (University of Washington Press, 2002), Susan Starbuck, biographer, follows Wolf’s “lifetime of burning with a fierce desire for justice […] Whether organizing for labor rights or founding chapters of the Audubon society, battling to save old-growth forests or fighting deportation to her native Canada as a Communist, over and over she put herself in the line of fire. ‘I was just there,’ Wolf said, ‘powerless and strong, someone who wouldn’t chicken out.’”
Preliminary Guide to the Hazel Wolf Papers 1916-2000
Image credit: University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections Division, Seattle Audubon Society Photograph Collection, PH Coll 671.
Submitted by Chery
To close out Women’s History Month, I looked into our records for the Department of Women Studies at UW. The department recently transferred its meeting minutes for the Women Studies Advisory Committee (WSAC), dating back to 1974, which piqued my interest; I wondered when the Women Studies program was initiated and how it has developed over the years.
The progressive atmosphere pervasive on college campuses across the country in the 1960s was healthy and active here in Seattle. Sue-Ellen Jacobs, now professor emeritus, was one of the individuals responsible for the fledgling efforts to organize a Women Studies program at UW, beginning in 1969. San Diego State University is credited with establishing the first official Women’s Studies academic program, in May of 1970; at the same time, in Spring quarter 1970, the first session of “Women 101″ was offered at the University of Washington [classified as General & Interdisciplinary Studies (GIS) 407]. Jacobs became the program’s first director in 1974, when the Women Studies major was officially offered under the “General Studies” bracket of the College of Arts and Sciences.
In Winter quarter, 1974, the first two courses classified as Women Studies (rather than GIS) appeared in the catalogue. The following academic year (1974-1975), seven courses were offered, along with more related classes from other departments than ever before. Yet despite this growth, a letter was submitted in February of 1975 by representatives of “the Women Studies Student Union” to director Jacobs, the WSAC, College of Arts and Sciences Dean George Beckmann, and UW President John Hogness, which bemoaned lack of funding for the Women Studies program and limited course offerings for students that wished to major:
“At present the number of courses being taught is woefully inadequate. What a let down to hear that we only had twelve courses funded for next year. This is not enough. There are forty-five majors in our program and we do not believe that we can seriously purchase an education with a core offering of only twelve courses in a total year. We demand a minimum of eight to twelve courses per quarter.”
In the WSAC meeting minutes from this period, the possibility of offering some Women Studies courses despite lack of funding was debated. Members worried that allowing instructors to teach for free could be construed as “exploiting faculty wives” and “setting a precedent of having women teach in the program without pay.” Among these records, I found the following excerpt from a statement Sue-Ellen Jacobs wrote in May 1975 as a response to the students’ letter:
“In 1975, we are women in a world mostly governed and defined by men. In 2001, we may be women in a world governed and defined by women and men. But we have a lot of work to do in many areas before this latter can happen. [...] From my point of view, Women Studies must survive and grow in academia. If it does not, then we will have abdicated our share of responsibility for the whole movement, and thereby, I would say, for the whole of humanity.”
In 2001, Jacobs (still serving as Director of the Undergraduate program) would find that the Department of Women Studies was again facing budget reductions and defending its curriculum to the Dean – however, this time with a total of 71 courses offered during the last academic year. At present, 79 courses will have been offered for the year, with eleven faculty and three lecturers on staff. It might have taken more than twenty years to fulfill students Theresa Miles, Karen Rudolph and Liz Ilig’s request that a Graduate program be established, but this slow and steady growth is exactly what Jacobs prescribed. These students also wrote of their hope for a Women’s Center at UW, serving students as well as the wider community – another vision that has since come to fruition.
This month, we should salute the students and instructors in Women Studies for all that they have contributed to the department’s mission, “…to push the analytic edge of scholarship foregrounding gender, race and sexuality as integral components of local and global social structures, particularly within the contexts of capitalism, globalization, nationalism and neoliberalism.”
The records of the UW Department of Women Studies are open to the public, and detailed inventories are available in the Special Collections reading room.
The students writing in 1975 also pointed to the "outrageous" budget allocation of five dollars per month for paper and office supplies; had they been better funded, perhaps they might have been able to create more attractive event fliers than this mimeographed example! (From accession no. 10-001)
Flier for show at Ballard's Aster Coffee Lounge
Looking for something to do this weekend? Why not take in the Second Saturday Art Walk in Ballard?
This coming Saturday, April 10, 2010, is the opening and reception for a display of images from the University of Washington Special Collections at the Aster Coffee Lounge. The show has been organized by CSS Photography, which assists with the photographic needs of the UW community and beyond. This event is a rare opportunity to look at our photographs while drinking coffee (or even wine or beer)! Read more here.
While on the reference desk this afternoon, a patron returned our copy of the one year anniversary edition of The Green Lake News. Any Seattlite readers will be familiar with Green Lake, home of “the busiest park in the state.” This anniversary issue, dated 26 November 1903, was devoted to celebrating and promoting life in Green Lake, and several tidbits caught my eye, this one in particular:
From “Green Lake = = An Ideal Home Place” by A. H. Rogers
It is the purpose of this article to set forth with as much brevity and conciseness as is possible, a few reasons which will serve to explain the fact that the writer has chosen Green Lake as a place of residence.
In search of a permanent home I came to Puget Sound in 1891, after visiting all the larger cities and most of the smaller towns of the Northwest.
Something worthy of praise was found in each, but concluding that there will be one city destined to lead all others, we located in the Queen City, Seattle.
Our next move was to determine what part of this fair city should we adopt as our future home. We looked Seattle over from every view point but it was the beautiful mirrored Green Lake district, that completely captured us and we never have had occasion to regret our decision.
Very nice, very nice. Then comes the interesting bit:
Gradually the whole civilized world has come to believe that every human being has a right to a decent and healthful place to eat and sleep in if for nothing more… Every business man of common sense knows that the farther away he gets in the evening from his daily commercial associations the better off he is and the wiser life he leads. As to the women, it is a safe assertion that the great majority, if given their own free choice, would live out in the suburbs, away from the nerve-distracting tumult and hubub of the city…
Laying aside the amusing comment implying that women’s “free choice” was something to be given or withheld, this passage interests me because of its contrast to the contemporary trend of living as close to work as possible, even to the point of working from home, which is increasingly common and desirable. Whether we are “better off” or “wiser” for it, I leave to your speculation!
Frank La Roche portrait of C.T. Conover and S.L. Crawford on Fifth Avenue, between Cherry and Columbia Streets (circa 1889)
I couldn’t let Preservation Week go by completely unremarked, so I thought I’d share a snippet of some semi-forgotten history gleaned from the scrapbook cataloging project.
Charles T. Conover and Samuel L. Crawford were journalists, turned Seattle boosters and real estate tycoons at the close of the 19th century and start of the twentieth. The substance of their biographies (and scrapbooks) could take up several posts (and I may get around to it some day), but the archivist in me found the following incident in the life of Crawford (which is recounted slightly differently in other sources) to be of special appeal. As Conover (the longer-lived of the pair) recalled in his “Just Cogitating” column in the July 8, 1950 edition of the Seattle Times:
A dominant trait in my old partner, Samuel L. Crawford, was his unswerving loyalty to his friends and the things he believed in. … He had helped to nurture and sustain The Post-Intelligencer since its birth, had, at one time, been part owner, and in the great fire of 1889 he lugged the files of the paper up the hill to safety through the smoke and blistering heat before showing up at the office of Crawford & Conover to help salvage our effects.
Little did he know how it would turn out some 120 years later.
To be continued…
Moore Theatre - Orpheum Circuit, Oct. 1922
Before television and the internet, there was vaudeville. Seattle, like much of the rest of the country, had several competing vaudeville theaters throughout the early twentieth century, including a string of Orpheum Theatres. Carl Reiter, manager of Orpheum Theatres in Seattle, as well as in Omaha and Portland, kept scrapbooks of newspaper clippings and ephemera, like the program below, from and about the theaters he managed. He included reviews, interviews and stories about the Orpheum’s and its competitors’ acts, including such luminaries as Sarah Bernhardt, Harry Houdini, and Marie and Alice Lloyd. There are also advertisements, programs, notes (in both English and Chinese) in the margins, and other ephemera.
Orpheum Circuit News and Program, Sept. 1916
Reiter’s Orpheum Circuit Scrapbooks, sixteen volumes in all, date from 1904 to 1924. Clippings about Seattle’s Orpheum, Moore, and Alhambra Theatres, are predominant, but there are a couple of volumes dedicated to the Orpheum Theatres of Omaha and St. Joseph, Nebraska and Portland, Oregon.
Image credits:
Man harvesting oysters; J.J. Brenner Oyster Co.
It may not be an ‘r’ month, but we recently dug up the Oyster industry scrapbooks from the J.J. Brenner Oyster Co. in Olympia. These scrapbooks are full of clippings and advertisements, recipes and pamphlets, as well as a few photographs, letters, and posters. They also contain numerous clippings and letters concerning water pollution in the South Sound and its effects on native Olympia oysters. Oyster growers’ fight with Rayonier, which had a pulp mill dumping “sulphite waste liquor” in the South Sound during the 1950s, is particularly well-documented. There is also a plethora of oyster advertising, including a World War II era poster urging people to contribute to the rationing of meat by eating oysters instead. My personal favourite, however, may be the ‘diet’ which involves consuming nothing but oysters and alcohol with the promise of becoming the best-looking alcoholic around. There’s nothing like a little truth in advertising.
The Oyster industry scrapbooks consist of four volumes dating from the early 1920s through the 1980s. The first three volumes, with materials from the 1920s through the 1960s, appear to have been compiled by Earl G. Brenner, J.J. Brenner’s son. As part of Washington Sea Grant’s ’100 Years of Oyster Culture’ celebration, these three volumes were copied into Washington Oysters: A Scrapbook. The fourth volume, clippings from the 1980s, appears to have been the work Brenner’s son Earl R. Brenner.
Image Credits:
J.J. Brenner Oyster Co., Oyster Industry Scrapbooks, vol. 1.
Advertising brochure for Hotel Savoy, Seattle, Washington (circa 1908)
I’m not much of a fan of puns, but I do enjoy some forms of wordplay. Recently I was trying to supply a date for yet another lovely piece of ephemera I had to catalog. The item in question (back cover panel pictured above) was an advertising brochure for Seattle’s Hotel Savoy, which boasted of that lodging as being the perfect place to stay while taking in the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (remember that?). Clearly, the brochure must have been distributed some time around 1909, although the language of the announcement, which still made the AYPE seem a future prospect, made a slightly earlier date of “publication” a possibility. I decided to double check quickly to see if the Hotel Savoy predated the fair. I soon came across a handy publication entitled, The Heritage of Seattle Hotels, which included the following information:
Nothing approached the Rainier-Grand’s bon vivant popularity until THE SAVOY HOTEL opened in 1906. Not pretentious by any means, advertised as “12 stories of solid comfort,” there happened to be elaborate French-period accommodations on the top floor…jokingly dubbed, by men-about-town, as “the vice-Presidential Suite.
For some reason, that passage immediately made me think of the television series, Mad Men. Were those bon vivants who patronized the Savoy the “mad men” of their day? Then I realized that one of the running jokes from the show’s season premiere had been the numerous references to “floors” made throughout the episode, culminating in Don Draper’s proposed slogan for a swimsuit ad campaign: “So well built, we can’t show you the second floor.” Scary coincidence? Even more strange was that the fictional client in the show was real life Northwest company, Jantzen (currently celebrating a centenary).
Floors? Stories? Get it?
The date I decided to use for the brochure in the catalog record was 1908 — as good as truth or fiction. I’ll leave you all to decode the deeper meanings of Mad Men for yourselves.
Image credit: Washington State Historical Society Digital Collections Accession ID No. 2004.24.1
Member of the Reed family? Unidentified photograph from Reed Family Papers (UAF-1968-21-CO), Alaska & Polar Regions, Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Could this be a photograph of Ida McKenny Reed? She was a member of a pioneer family from Thurston County, Washington who penned a short piece about the land that became Olympia’s Point Priest Park, as well as some other stories for magazines.
Maybe it’s because SAA is around the corner, but in the spirit of MPLP and “progressive bibliography,” I decided that we should try to do a little less work on (re)cataloging material from the NPam shelves, while still getting some work done. A quick pass through that section in search of titles that would provide some good practice in assigning LC classification yielded some curious finds. Among the most intriguing was a pamphlet entitled, Damask Roses: A Tale of Point Priest Park and the Legend of Ellis Cove by a certain “Ida McK. Reed.” Although there was already a record in OCLC suitable for copy cataloging purposes, it gave a publication date of 19–?. I came tantalizingly close to nailing down a more definite date of publication, but decided to leave the rest of the fun to future catalogers.
A quick online search turned up the Constance Reed Haller papers at the Washington State Library, which identified Ida McKenny Reed as the mother of Constance and the wife of Thomas Milburne Reed, Jr. in its catalog record. Another hit sent me to the Alaska Digital Archives, which contained a link to a collection level record for the Reed family papers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, along with a number of digitized photographs. While the description for the papers gave a brief rundown of Thomas Milburne Reed’s career in Alaska, as well as the activities of other family members, Ida McKenny Reed was somewhat absent. Did she also go to Alaska? And was she in any of these photographs?
I chose this picture as a possible Ida because the woman is smiling, but there are a few other images of another (different) older woman who also may be a likely candidate.
Oh, and in another bit of scariness, I discovered that UAF also holds the Don Draper papers. But it’s definitely another Don Draper.
