Preservation Week: Personal Archives and Hi(STORIES)

Welcome to Preservation Week!  This week long event is celebrated by libraries, archives, and other institutions to emphasize what communities can do to preserve personal and shared collections.  Frequently, the American Heritage Center (AHC) talks about the collections within in its holdings but we believe personal archives are just as important.

To give examples about what a personal archives is or what it can mean to you or your family, this week AHC staff and members from the community will share stories about their personal archives; what it means to have personal items preserved; as well as an experience of trying to find family history here at the AHC when information isn’t always available at home.  I will start the week with my own stories.

My grandmother (left) with a colleague during WWII.

Both my grandmothers saved family records and some of the records they kept were passed on to me.  I could tell multiple stories about the records they kept but I will only share a few.  My grandmothers saved items from World War II: one grandmother experienced the home front while the other was a nurse in North Africa.  I have written accounts and photos from my grandmother who was in North Africa and ration points from my other grandmother who stayed stateside.  The contrast of place and experience of World War II between family members is fascinating to me.  My maternal grandmother also gave me multiple photographs from different generations of the family.  A couple of my favorite photographs are of relations sitting on the porch eating watermelon as children.  One photograph is my grandfather with his siblings and the second photograph is my mom with her siblings.  I also appreciate the photo with my mom and her siblings because I know it was one of my grandmother’s favorites.

Gasoline rations points saved by my grandmother who stayed stateside.

My grandmothers weren’t the only ones who saved records.  For a year my grandfather attended my alma mater.  He and I are the only two people in my family to attend this university.  I have his yearbook and I feel a special connection to him when I think about attending the same university, even if it isn’t where he ended up graduating.

My great-grandparents’ wedding invitation.

The wedding invitation I have from brother’s wedding a few years ago is also a special item in my personal archives.  Many people think that in order for an item to be archival it has to be “old.”  The records we create today can be passed on for generations.  In fact items can never become old if they aren’t saved.  My brother’s invitation is the fourth generation of wedding invitations in my possession.  Something “new” continues our family legacy.

My grandparent’s wedding invitation.

My family records mean a lot to me.  With the few stories I have shared already I hope to convey the importance I feel to keep and maintain personal family records.  When I look at these records I learn more about where my family came from and how I came to be who I am.

-Amanda Stow, Reference Archivist

Frederick Gutheim: Conservation Activist and Planning Policy Mastermind

Frederick A. Gutheim, circa 1930. Frederick Albert Gutheim papers, #7470, Box G142, Folder 25. UW American Heritage Center.

Frederick Gutheim was born on March 3, 1908, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was raised in Washington, D.C., where he attended Sidwell Friends School and later Dr. Devitt’s Preparatory School. He earned a degree from the Experimental College of the University of Wisconsin in 1931 and pursued graduate study at the University of Chicago. His early association with mentors like John Gaus and Lewis Mumford lead him to the study of urban and regional planning. Gutheim pursued this interest as a bureaucrat, a writer and academic, a practitioner, and as an activist.  The American Heritage Center is pleased to announce that the Frederick Albert Gutheim papers have been recently processed and a new online inventory is available.

Gutheim became professionally acquainted with housing and planning policy while a staff member at the Brookings Institution. Between 1933 and 1947, he worked for federal agencies involved with housing and planning, serving the U.S. Army in the National Housing Agency during World War II. During this period, he also married Mary “Polly” Purdon, in 1935. He worked closely with Catherine Bauer at the U.S. Housing Authority as the assistant director of the Division of Research and Information. In 1933, he wrote portions of the TVA Act concerning planning.

Sketch on a postcard, Frederick Albert Gutheim papers, #07470, Box G142, Folder 25. UW American Heritage Center.

Gutheim may be best known as a writer and a teacher. He was a staff writer on architecture and planning for the New York Herald Tribune between 1947 and 1949. He published The Potomac in 1949, a classic example of regionally-focused environmental history. Over the course of his career, Gutheim wrote and edited for numerous magazines and journals including the Magazine of Art and the journal of the American Institute of Architects. He founded the Washington Center for Metropolitan Studies as well as the historic preservation program at George Washington University. He advised and taught at the university from 1975, when he established the program, up to the time of his death.

Gutheim, circa 1962, with a ‘portable’ bicycle. Box G142, Folder 27,

Gutheim used his knowledge of bureaucracy and his academic prowess in a series of private consulting businesses, among them Galaxy, Inc., and Gutheim, Seelig, Erickson. Under the auspices of these firms, he advised organizations like the United Nations, the Canadian government, and the city of Newport, Rhode Island.

As an activist, Gutheim sought to protect the integrity of the landscape surrounding his home in Montgomery County, Maryland. In 1974, he established Sugarloaf Regional Trails, a non-profit organization dedicated to historic preservation and land conservation. He served as a trustee of the Accokeek foundation and was instrumental in the opening of the National Colonial Farm, which was active in preserving native agricultural practices. He served on an array of historic preservation and planning boards from 1950 until his death in 1993. Gutheim perceived himself to be a catalyst for change, whose work in the background made the more apparent success of others possible.

–Shaun Hayes, Processing Archivist

Preservation Week! Coming Soon!

Join us for the Kick-Off event on April 20th at the Horse Barn Theater on the campus of the Territorial Prison Museum!

 

Hopalong Cassidy: Cowboy Hero and Franchise Empire

“Git ‘em up, podner!” Photo included in William Boyd scrapbook, Box 173, William Boyd Papers, #8038. UW American Heritage Center.

One the most popular collections at the American Heritage Center is the papers of William Boyd, who played cowboy Hopalong Cassidy for many years on radio, television, and film. Hopalong Cassidy was originally created by author Clarence E. Mulford in 1904 in a series of short stories and novels. William Boyd first brought Hoppy to life in a 1934 film adaptation of Mulford’s story. He portrayed Hoppy in many more films, on a television series beginning in 1949, and voiced Hoppy in a radio show. The character became enormously popular and Boyd acquired all rights to the Hopalong character in 1948. He consolidated all Hopalong enterprises and began a highly profitable business through promotion of the character. Boyd donated some of his profits to children’s hospitals and homes. Boyd married actress Grace Bradley in 1937. He retired in 1953, and died in 1972.

Hopalong Cassidy with children in Hoppy costumes and his horse,Topper. Photofile: William L. Boyd. UW American Heritage Center.

The William Boyd collection contains a wide variety of materials; everyone is sure to find something in the collection that would pique their interest. The collection has materials concerning Boyd’s portrayal of Hopalong Cassidy and his many related promotional and business ventures. It contains correspondence, legal files, financial files, newspaper clippings, promotional and publicity materials, and other business records. In the collection, you can also find Hopalong Cassidy scripts and comics, sheet music, phonograph records, and photographs of William Boyd. There are also a large number of artifacts, including Hopalong Cassidy costume items, toys, and other merchandise. A small amount of William Boyd’s personal files are also present.

Example of a Hoppy Birthday card, Box 112, Folder – “Birthday cards, undated.” William Boyd Papers, #8038. UW American Heritage Center.

Hopalong Cassidy on parade, Box 115, Negative Number 27916. William Boyd Papers, #8038. UW American Heritage Center.

Due to Hopalong Cassidy’s immense popularity, he had merchandising and tie-in deals with a wide range of brands and products. Interestingly, three products he most heavily seemed to promote were bread, tuna, and dairy products (especially ice cream). This is due, in part, to his popularity with children. Of course little Timmy wants his sandwiches to be made with Hoppy’s favorite bread and tuna! Not only does the collection contain correspondence and other business files pertaining to his merchandising and promotional deals, but you can also find examples of the original packaging used for various products. Hopalong Cassidy games, toys, and children’s cowboy clothes (sanctioned by Hopalong Cassidy, of course!) are also contained in the collection.

Hoppy’s branding efforts even reached Chicken of the Sea! Box 113, Folder – “Packaging with Hopalong Cassidy, undated.” Tuna label has a date of 1952 stamped on the back. William Boyd Papers, #8038. UW American Heritage Center.

There are numerous scripts in the collection for his radio, television, and film productions, as well as contracts and copyright agreements for the stories. In the 1950s, a Hopalong Cassidy comic strip was produced by King Features Syndicate. The collection contains a nearly complete run of these comics, which are a blast to read though. Would you like to see Hopalong Cassidy’s saddle, boots, hats, and other apparel? The collection has these, too! How about his holster and six-shooters? Yep, these can also be found at the AHC! Do you want to learn how to play all the old Hopalong Cassidy songs? Well, we’ve got the sheet music just for you! Did you write a fan letter to Hoppy as a child? Maybe you can find it in the fan mail folder!

One of the strips distributed by King Features Syndicate. Box 156, Folder – “Knockout Comics – entire magazine, 1957-1959.” William Boyd Papers, #8038. UW American Heritage Center.

There are also a large number of scrapbooks filled with newspaper and magazine clippings detailing William Boyd’s activities as Hopalong Cassidy, as well as a large number of photographs. The photographs include movie stills from his various productions, publicity photographs of William Boyd at various events, and a number of photographs with him and his wife, Grace Bradley Boyd. Whether you’re looking to do serious research or just experience a blast from the past by looking at old toys, games, and original Hoppy apparel, this collection has it all.

Letter from Mulford to Boyd discussing film options for a story by Mulford. Box 150, folder – “Correspondence – letter (copy) from Clarence E. Mulford to Boyd re: making Hopalong Cassidy film, 1948.” William Boyd Papers, #8038. UW American Heritage Center.

–Emily Christopherson, Processing Archivist

Cat Women of the Moon: When Felines Attack!

I’ve been beginning blog posts recently by writing about this or that gem that I found in the Forrest J. Ackerman Collection. After watching enough movies and looking through the artifacts that are in the collection I’m starting to realize that there is very little in the collection that isn’t a “gem.”

Dear Reader, I submit for your approval (I’ve always wanted to use that phrase!) . . . Cat Women of the Moon.  Cat Women of the Moon is a bizarre spectacle. Like so many films of its time, it shows a nefarious feminine presence, resolved through good, ole-fashioned, masculine wherewithal in which the day is saved through a sort of proper gender performance.

One of the posters for the release of the film. Forrest J. Ackerman papers, Box 140. UW American Heritage Center.

In the film a group of astronauts travel to the moon. The crew is comprised of men except for the female navigator, Helen, who has been compromised by a mysterious, telepathic force. When the crew arrives on the moon, they are greeted by a barren landscape that is devoid of life (the hostile environment is expressed by one crew member’s cigarette that spontaneously combusts, obviously because fire in space is both scary and possible). The crew is led to a cave by Helen, where they are taken captive by a seductive race of cat women (what? why? really?). One crew member is easily killed by the cat women, who use his sexually aggressive nature against him. Another member of the crew is easily seduced and controlled by his misguided trust of women.

Photograph from production of the film. Forrest J. Ackerman papers, Box 105, Folder 108. UW American Heritage Center.

The wariest and most alert crew member soon learns that the cat women want to take over the earth, in the process destroying all men. Their method: guide a woman to become the navigator of man’s mission to the moon (it is assumed that she would not have been as capable as a man in this endeavor), to steal the ship, and then to take over earth. Simple enough. Yet simply averted by the surviving crew member’s ability  to take emotional and mental control over one of the cat women, hence thwarting the end of the earth.

Cat Women of the Moon is a wonderful film because it’s so transparent. The parts are ably cast (although at a certain point actresses started realizing they were only being cast as villains or heroines) and the sets are imaginative. The spaceship reminds me of the spaceships my sister and I would create when growing up (because you really can make a spaceship out of anything when you imagine it, and I’m not being ironic). The interior walls of the ship are made out of corrugated tin and the seats of the spaceship look like they came from a movie studio’s accounting department (imagine frustrated accountants trying to stand while doing their work, telling themselves that they possibly couldn’t be paid enough for this work).

But authenticity wasn’t the point. When the idea of space travel was still so fantastic, people would have willingly paid to watch a movie featuring strong-jawed space cowboys traveling to the stars in a cardboard box.

Perhaps it’s a good idea then, to sit back and enjoy Cat Women of the Moon as a film of its time. Because all of it seems so fantastic and ludicrous that it really just is a fun film to watch. And that’s what is so great about the gems of the Forrest Ackerman collection, because they reflect on an era that was deeply troubled as well as fun, which is a perfect combination for academic investigation.

–Shaun Milligan, AHC/American Studies Intern

The Wasp Woman: A Makeover Gone Murderous

One of my favorite “B” movies from the 1950s is a film called The Wasp Woman, released in 1959. The film is about a woman named Janice Starlin who is the CEO of a cosmetics company. As she is quickly losing her youthful looks, she decides to inject herself with the queen wasp’s jelly. Coincidentally, a string of murders rocks the city. It becomes obvious that Janice’s vanity is the culprit. If she hadn’t been so intent upon recapturing her youth, the vile creature that emerges when she injects the jelly would not have been unleashed upon the city.

Promotional poster from the film. Forrest J. Ackerman papers, Collection #2358, Box 137.

At the same time, Janice is constantly criticized for her looks. It is presumed that she was only the CEO of the company due to her former beauty. The gang of cronies waiting to take her place is a group of men in gray flannel suits, snickering behind her back and anxiously awaiting her downfall. And of course, they aren’t the ones who bring on that downfall. She does the work for them.

There are some interesting elements to consider in The Wasp Woman. The timing of the plot is similar to many other sci-fi “B” movies of the time as the movie is only about an hour long. Janice’s downfall comes in a matter of minutes, and although most of the film is about how her character develops from a beauty queen to a vile monster, I sort of wished the ending of the film offered a longer reflection on what the story meant. There are so many similar themes to King Kong, a film that would have been familiar to both the creators of the film and its audience due to King Kong’s many re-releases, particularly in the fifties. The idea that beauty killed the beast is predominant in both stories. Particularly in The Wasp Woman, there is a sense that beauty is somehow sinister. The possessors of beauty, young women, can’t be trusted. It is tolerated for its aesthetic power in youth, but when it is no longer there the power that has been afforded to the beautiful is now overwhelming. Therefore, women can’t be trusted with power because the need for aesthetic recognition can turn them, quite literally, into monsters.

This is a common sentiment in film throughout the postwar era, particularly in science fiction. In many films, women are seductresses with malevolent intentions. The interesting thing about The Wasp Woman is that the main character doesn’t start out a monster, like so many other feminine characters in other post-war films. Instead, she merely is a person who is prone to insecurity. The feminine element in The Wasp Woman is a great deal more human (literally) than in other films. If the fear of the aesthetic, or the power of beauty, is so paramount on so many different levels it is clear that appearances were more intimidating than they originally seemed in postwar America. Hence, women could easily be turned into objects of fear and attraction when in all actuality America was still a misogynistic environment.

The Forrest J. Ackerman collection has a great movie poster from The Wasp Woman. It’s a wonderful artifact, although it doesn’t seem to relate to the film as much as it could. The poster portrays Janice as a gigantic wasp with a woman’s face, while in the movie she is the opposite–a woman’s body with a wasp’s face. However, the movie poster does upend the usual monster-holding-woman formula as this time Janice, the wasp woman, is holding a man. It’s interesting to consider what happens when the woman is made out to be the monster rather than the helpless heroine. After the fifties science-fiction films began to feature female protagonists. Barbarella, a film featuring a sexually aggressive Jane Fonda, was released in 1968. Perhaps the best, and my favorite, female protagonist in science-fiction film history is showcased in a film that was released exactly two decades after The Wasp Woman. Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, the protagonist of the Alien series, is one of the most compelling characters in science fiction. She is certainly one of the toughest, meanest, and oddly powerful characters in the history of film. Her mastery of the fearsome is something that couldn’t have quite been conceived in the late 1950s. I don’t think that Ripley could have existed without the realization of the dark feminine power that drives films like The Wasp Woman. Perhaps that is why I take such satisfaction in watching science fiction films from the 1950s, as they were not very afraid of experimenting with feminine power, even if those experiments usually resulted in malevolent depictions of women. And if it weren’t for the Forrest Ackerman collection, I would have never known about The Wasp Woman. Thankfully, I have had the honor of working through it. This is a great film to watch, and luckily for anyone with internet access, the film can be found on YouTube.

–Shaun Milligan, AHC and American Studies Intern

The AHC’s Carlson Intern sheds some light on the process of processing!

Hello there!  My name is Renee Barrera and I am a first year history graduate student and this past August I had the pleasure of being hired as the Carlson Intern at the American Heritage Center. The Carlson Internship is funded through an endowment generously donated by Gerald Meyer, past Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.  The endowment provides funding for an upper division undergraduate or graduate student to process and help manage records of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Over the last six months I have been trained and instructed on how to process collections from beginning to end. I have been able to process the collection of Mary Slavens Clark and Wilmer E. Stevens. Currently, I am in process of working on the UW Music Department collection and the Adrian Bantjes collection. One collection that proved to be most interesting was the Wilmer E. Stevens Collection.

Wilmer E. Stevens was born sometime in the early 1900s and not only did he graduate from the University of Wyoming, he was also a faculty member after his graduation. Stevens was a UW English professor from 1925 until approximately 1960. During his tenure, Professor Stevens was in charge of the UW Debate Team, and involved in the Rocky Mountain Forensic League, and Colorado-Wyoming Debate League. The UW Debate Team hosted many debates on campus and also traveled to debates in cities such as Denver, CO, Missoula, MT and Redlands. CA. The collection includes speeches and debates from students, Box 1 Folder 11 and 12, and also newspaper clippings of the UW Debate team hosting a debate team from a university in Texas. One interesting tidbit about Professor Stevens is that he was involved in the Student use of English Committee from 1925-1931. The committees functioned as a resource for students to improve their use of English and included in the collection are various worksheets and a small handbook on proper use of English.

An article from the May 14, 1924 edition of the Branding Iron that discusses Stevens’ debate performance. Wilmer Stevens papers, Box 1, Folder 3.

There were times that I was caught up in reading the various speeches, debates and correspondence that Professor Stevens collected or wrote. The Stevens Collection provides a brief glimpse of life in the UW English Department in the 1930s and is an interesting collection to peruse if one has a fascination with debates and speeches.

Letter to faculty from the Committee on Student Use of English, offering supplementary English coaching for those students in need of additional tutelage. Wilmer Stevens papers, Box 1, Folder 42.

–Renee Barrera, Carlson Intern