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.

Image credit: Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection, Museum of History & Industry, Seattle; All Rights Reserved.

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.