I’ve worked in History and museums for the better part of 20 years …
So, it was natural my cousin sent someone to me when they found something odd while removing an old chimney in an old house in Nebraska. “What is it?” they asked. It was a little card with some words and letters and numbers printed on it. The longer I looked, the less sense it made. I had no idea. In fact, it’s been a few years since they asked, and I still have no idea.
Running across this photo again I’d kept for reference, I got back in touch with the finder and asked if he had any answers — Still no.
I’d lost any details I’d had, so he kindly sent me more info: The card is 2″ wide, 3.5″ tall and totally blank on the back. Much smaller than I assumed it would be.
With an ornamental border it reads:
a 10 G. Robbins Miss Harrison, J. F. Hull Gracie Battis M
Learning how to date things is both science and art. Of course, I don’t mean engaging in a romantic experience with the objects, but telling how old a thing is.
Like you’ve probably heard about bank tellers, who are trained to spot counterfeit currency by handling a lot of real currency, the same is true for museum and archive professionals. We learn to recognize things for what they are by handling a lot of similar stuff. Well seasoned collectors are the same. Being able to observe characteristics of an object allows us to learn more than is on the surface.
Curators track not only the history of the artifacts they care for in the way the object was used, but also how it is used after it enters a museum’s collections, like if it was studied for a publication, or if it appeared in an exhibit somewhere. This includes keeping an archive of related materials, like news clippings from exhibits. I recently received a news clipping from an exhibit, but there was no date on the clipping, from the newspaper or otherwise (a handwritten date is also great if it’s done). So, I wanted the clipping, but when did it come out?
Clues
On the front of the article, the gentleman on the left (not in the painting) looked all too familiar. No, he’s not me, but he could have been at one time. I remember the mid-1990s well, and that’s exactly how I dressed and most young men dressed at the time. But, what year, exactly? I can’t really tell from the photo if it’s 1993 or 1998. I know the exhibit and museum are in Nebraska (I am too), so I know wearing a flannel shirt and jeans really isn’t a good indicator of the season, so I’m can’t be sure of the month just from this photo. So, on the front of the article, the part I want, there’s not much to tell me the exact date of the article beyond it’s from the mid-1990s. Probably.
Flipping the clipping over, there are a few other bits that may be helpful, but best of all, there’s a movie schedule!
Today, many of these Omaha theaters are now gone, or if they still exist have been bought out. They also probably don’t have records on hand for when they showed which movies. Luckily for us, we have IMDB. I recognized some of these movies but didn’t remember exactly when they came out. (Who could forget Beverly Hills Ninja? Just me? Ok.) Fortunately, there were enough films here to hone in on a date where movies on the way out, and movies that had just debuted overlap. Charting it, we’ve got it down to the last two weeks in January 1997. That’s a pretty narrow window, and frankly good enough for documenting this article for my files.
To get the date even closer I could go through microfilm/digitized copies from those weeks and find the article, but that would take time I just can’t devote when January 1997 is good enough.
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Curatorial Pipe Dreams
Admittedly, I lucked out on this clipping. I’ve got many others in our archives that just don’t have much to go on at all. In fact, it’s so obscure I can only hope one day someone develops the technology where I can run an image recognition of the scanned clipping and it’ll find the correct article within the digitized newspaper somewhere online. Wouldn’t that me amazing? Maybe someday.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes historical mysteries and works as a history museum curator.
What I love about working in museums is that there’s actually a lot of variety in the work. So, what can a ‘typical’ week as a museum curator look like? Meetings, duh, but let’s skip them. Lots of research as well this week. We get a few research requests every day. Some are easy, some are not so easy, and some we need to use a lot of creativity to get an answer. I also did some fun stuff, of course.
Back Into the Recording Studio
I read and recorded scripts for more history videos since our last ones have been a big hit. If you’d like to check those out, they are now live on Vimeo:
A replica medieval Irish reliquary was given to my organization’s founder during his visit to his native Ireland in 1947: https://vimeo.com/181851600
Poking around the dark corners of our recording studio, I found this gem. If your sound engineer is good enough to have worked at Opryland, they’re good enough for me:
More filming
The videos have been a big hit among administration, so we’re doing more! Here, one of our staff photographers is getting the goods on a crowd favorite artifact.
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Anything but typical.
These are just a couple things I did this week that wasn’t looking through folders filled with papers and staring at my scanner waiting for it to decide to cooperate. And I wouldn’t trade it for just about anything.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes historical mysteries and works as a history museum curator.
I subscribe to more than my share of email newsletters. I read many of them every week, but one I genuinely look forward to getting is Austin Kleon‘s. Austin is a writer/artist/creative who cheers for us all in our creative efforts (you’ve probably seen his Steal Like An Artist), and he puts out a great weekly newsletter.
So, who is George Brown Goode?
In this week’s newsletter, Austin talks about starting his new notebooks by selecting a “guardian spirit” for it. I love this idea. I always have two notebooks. I keep a notebook for personal stuff, fiction, whatever — *my* stuff. I also keep one for work, officially my Curator’s Log. Now, in personal notebooks I’ll add a “guardian spirit”, but it requires a bit of thought.
For my Curator’s Log, there’s only one choice: George Brown Goode. Wikipedia has a good, though brief, article on him. I found him during my studies in Museum Science back when I was a curator larva. Goode was way ahead of his time on museum theory and understanding, believing that museums were really a place for everyone and not only that museums have a duty to the public. It will likely shock some, but these can be revolutionary ideas even today in many institutions. GBG also basically worked himself to death by the age of 45 — basically by ignoring what we now call ‘self-care,’ something that people who are deeply passionate about their work also need to remember.
So, I made this and pasted it into my Curator’s Log this morning, featuring GBG with one of my favorite quotes from him:
“The Future of Museums” by George Brown Goode, 1901.
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With you while you curate…
So, thank you Austin Kleon for the great idea and George Brown Goode for the inspiration. Do you keep a notebook? Do you have a Spirit Guardians for your passions? I’d love to learn about them! Leave a comment!
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes historical mysteries and works as a history museum curator.
Remember the post IN THE MUSEUM: A JFK AUTOGRAPH MYSTERY? Well, the video produced out of that work is now live, and apparently has been for a while, but I missed it.
Anyway, the gist of the video: A very young, not yet famous John F. Kennedy signed a copy of his book Why England Slept to Father Edward J. Flanagan, founder of Boys Town. We’re not sure when/ how/ where that happened, but it did. I do have a photo of a very young JFK signing a copy of this book to Spencer Tracy dressed as a priest on a movie shoot. Given the timing, Tracy could have been in the middle of shooting the sequel to the movie Boys Town, Men of Boys Town. Maybe, Spencer had JFK sign a copy to Fr. Flanagan. No word from the Tracy estate that he had a signed copy too. Fr. Flanagan was out to California for some shooting at different times, but we don’t know for sure when, so he may be just out of shot on this too. Who knows.
So, this video was a lot of fun to work on with our in-house writers, videographers, and editing people. Our organization is pretty big and focused on child care, so getting to use these amazing resources toward history and the museum, in particular, was a real treat.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
A very hectic week in the #museumtrenches with construction underway on a new exhibit, and lots of IT upgrades. But, I still managed to squeeze in some research. Turns out J. Edgar Hoover gave a high school commencement address in 1941. Curious if we had a copy of this speech I was delighted to find this card in the folder with the text of the speech.
So very official-looking. Usually, you get a letter or maybe a boring sheet of paper. I’ve seen similar cards before, but this one struck me as kinda cool. It makes me think I need one for my museum and archive. Maybe not with borders and Federal typography, but something reflective of the institution. I may need to think about this a little.
FBI Research Unit
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
Not every day in the museum involves solving mysteries surrounding JFK, tracking holy relics and appearing on TV. Some days, you’re working on exhibits about hearing aids.
These hearing aids are built into a pair of glasses. I wear glasses every day and these would be awful, even tiring to wear they’re so heavy.
And no, there’s no big reveal like these were found at Area 51 or were bequeathed to Elvis from Sasquatch. These are simply one evolutionary step in our current technology that helps so many people around the world hear.
Days like these may not sound very exciting, but every day is different and I wouldn’t have it any other way!
I admit, it doesn’t look like much, but the cameraman’s tone stung. This book is a treasure at the museum where I’m curator. But with a book collector’s eye, yes it’s in tough shape. But what a story behind it!
Someone somewhere in our large organization decided to create and promote some short videos about fascinating objects in our collections. They needed a list of suggested artifacts and this one was high on our list.
In 1940, a young John F. Kennedy’s senior thesis at Harvard was published as Why England Slept. Not long after that, an autographed copy from the young man from a prominent family was given to Father Edward J. Flanagan, of Boys Town fame. Father Flanagan was one of the most famous Catholics in the United States in 1940, just two years following the film that earned Spencer Tracy his second Oscar.
Circa 1940 signature of John F. Kennedy
We’re still not 100% sure how the book came to have been gifted to Father Flanagan, but he and young Jack Kennedy’s sister Eunice Schriverserved on a committee studying juvenile delinquency around that time, and that was the best guess according to long-time staff at the museum.
Then I found this November 1940 photo online at the JFK Presidential Library of young JFK signing the book for Spencer Tracy. Father Flanagan wasn’t the only priest played by Tracy, but he did play him twice. First in 1938 in Boys Town, and a little-known sequel Men of Boys Town in 1940.
It makes sense if this was on the set of Men of Boys Town with Tracy reprising his role as Father Flanagan. Did young Jack Kennedy sign a copy for Father at the same time as Tracy’s? Someone on staff asked if JFK made it out to Father Flanagan, giving it to Tracy!
Nothing turns up in our archives of correspondence between Tracy and Flanagan about the book, but there’s a decent probability Father Flanagan was on set at Men of Boys Town, so he could be just out of frame in this photo! We’ll probably never know.
We do know that we’ll have a nice video telling the fascinating story behind this particular book and the strange and roundabout way it came to the museum.
Being the age I am, I remember home video being a new thing. As a youngster, my family going for a Friday night/ weekend splurge to the Video Station (I think that’s what it was called) and renting VHS tapes and a VCR. We didn’t own one ourselves. They had VHS and Beta tapes and players I remember, but there was way more selection on VHS, so that’s what we always got. The players came in this big hard plastic carrying case. It was a while before we had our own VCR. My Dad won it in a sales competition at the car dealership where he worked then.
The first thing I ever bought online was a VHS tape. (I think. There’s a good chance it was actually a book, but for the sake of this blog post, it was a VHS tape.) I had read somewhere that the greatest cinematic car chase ever put on film was in the 1960s for an early Michael Caine caper film called The Italian Job. The cover of my copy had this mobster guy and this sexy lady back with a map on it — neither image really had much to do with the movie. It did get some looks on my shelf of tapes in college, though.
The people at the Video Station had never heard of it. The people at every video store in town had never heard of it. No one at the library had heard of it. But, Web 1.0 certainly knew about it! As quick as you please, the tape was on my doorstep! I couldn’t believe how simple it was.
The cover of my copy had this mobster guy lounging and this sexy lady’s back with a map on it — neither image really had much to do with the movie. It did get some looks on my shelf of tapes in college, though. (“Uh, what kind of movie is this?”) If you’ve never seen it, it’s actually a lot of fun. Not really a mystery, but crime/ thriller/ caper film. It does have one of the greatest car chase scenes of the pre-CGI era.
So, what does VHS obsolescence mean for us in museum and archive land? We need to be sure we have good equipment on the shelf and know how to maintain and clean it. We also need a plan to migrate our VHS tapes to other formats. Afterall, you don’t want all that great content being stranded on formats you can’t access. We have enough of that already (I’m looking at you 3M Sound On Slides)
Tapes on tapes on tapes
Will VHS become collectible some day? Will there be rare video shops, like rare book shops? Will devotees come in and say things like “It smells so good in here, reminds me of a Video Station circa 1986.” Will the analog tape speak to photography-on-film buffs? Will people start to glow talking about the grain of the film? Will they be like vinyl records some day?
I have my doubts. Beta already has a cult following that is decades old. On that front of the video format wars, VHS lost. I think it’ll be the people searching for the content more than the pleasure of the format.
Tip-tapping out some new words in my current story and my main character uses “Warm water and a handful of paper towels…” And it occurs to me, ‘Wait. When were paper towels invented?’ (I readily admit, this doesn’t sound like the most riveting action, but … you’ll see.)
I don’t stop every time a question like this occurs to me while writing. It kills flow. Usually, I put a bracket [] around it and come back to it — I drop brackets in for fact checks, or anything that needs extra attention after the first draft is done, like when I need character names. Sometimes I just don’t have a name ready, so I write [bad guy’s favorite plumber] or whatever so I know who it is and find a suitable name. But a quick glance at Wikipedia
By 1921 (when this promotional photograph was taken, the brown, folded paper towels from Nibroc Paper Towels were everywhere. Similar products are still in use today. Photo courtesy of the Brown Company Collection, Plymouth State University.
should answer this important paper towel question for me. Right?
According to the article I found on Wikipedia, paper towels were invented in 1907 and look to be commonplace by the 1920s. Perfect. For my later 1930s story, my main character could totally use him some paper towels.
Running an image search, I found a wonderful, in-depth history of the leading manufacturer of paper towels in the period, the Brown Company of New Hampshire. The article mentioned that during the Depression (i.e. during my later 1930s story), “Demand decreased. Profits shrank. In 1935, Brown Company filed for bankruptcy and the Brown family lost ownership.”
So, the later 1930s were not a booming time to be in the paper towel business, nor a great time of using them. So, it looks like instead of “Warm water and a handful of paper towels…” it’s going to be something different. For now. The whole scene may get scrapped in revision, but that moment is now far better, and a small moment to reveal more of my Character’s character, and that’s a good thing.
As a National History Day judge, I’m among the chorus of historians who bemoan the use of Wikipedia as the only stop for research by students. Not that Wikipedia isn’t amazing. Not all that long ago, the question of when paper towels were invented would probably leave me at the mercy of an old-ish marketing pamphlet giving precious little actual information, and I’d have to wait a few days to get that answer through a research librarian. But really, Wikipedia is only a starting point. Without what was there (and first of all, let’s appreciate the fact there was an entry on the history of paper towels in the first place!), I wouldn’t have had my other information for search criteria to dig just a little deeper.
If I really had to know as close to 100% as possible, I’d dig up financials of places like the place my hero is using paper towels at the state, county, or city archives. I’d check with the corporate collections, and even try to interview some people who were alive in that place and time. But this is just paper towels. Wikipedia saying yes they were available would be fine for 99.999% of readers. The only reader whose reading experience would be ruined would be the timber industry historian, but you know what; I want that person to read and enjoy my books too.
So, thank God for the internet, but really, thank you for the people putting their research ‘out there’ never really knowing how, when, or to whom it may prove useful.
Not every day in the museum involves 
“That’s it?!”
It makes sense if this was on the set of Men of Boys Town with Tracy reprising his role as Father Flanagan. Did young Jack Kennedy sign a copy for Father at the same time as Tracy’s? Someone on staff asked if JFK made it out to Father Flanagan, giving it to Tracy!
