Artifacts

Have you ever come across something that represented an earlier time in your academic or professional discipline or a piece of local history? I'm not talking about things labeled as "collectables" but bits of the material issue from people in our shared pasts by dint of geography, vocation, or even more personal connections.

Exhibit A: I found this 4-disc set at a local Goodwill a few years ago. Candied Yam Jackson was a Yale College Radio personality who was originally from Wartrace, TN. Even though I have been told he was a fixture on WSM, I can't find documentation of it beyond some sources identifying him as a character and raconteur. His biggest claim to fame is being the originator of the phrase, "Screw the pooch," which was co-opted by a classmate, John Rawlings, who went on to work on the NASA Mercury Program.

 

We do a magazine every year that's filled with takeout pieces centered around a theme. The past couple of years have focused on local nuggets from the town's 200-year history. In doing the research I dived into our paper's archives and found some really old papers that are basically No. 1 of 1 at this point.
One was the paper from when JFK was shot. A couple others were anniversary editions from the 1920s, 50s and 60s that looked back on the town's history to that point. It was weird reading the one from the 1920s. They referenced things that happened in the 70s and 80s, like we would today talking about the 1970s and 80s, but then I realized they meant the 1870s and 1880s.

 

As a historian - and I don't mean someone who is a history geek; I actually have the title Historian - every little seemingly insignificant scrap of anything holds wonder to me.

 

A friend of mine found full-color front pages of the Titanic sinking and several others. Illinois historical society wanted him to donate them. He said fuck that, kept them and had them framed.

 

I have a Palm Pilot buried in a closet somewhere.

 

I have in my possession the last dummy sheet drawn at my last newspaper before we went to pagination (because I did that page) and the pneumatic tube in which it was sent to the composing room.

 

I used to be bad about keeping everything under the sun, but over the last couple of years I have discarded a bunch of that stuff.
I kept every press pass I ever got. I had boxes of them upstairs.
I finally decided that no one would ever really be interested in the fact that I covered the 1999 state wrestling tournament, so I tossed that stuff.

 

Someplace I have a box full of my numbers at road races, with the dates, times and splits written on most of them. Maybe I'll look for them, if only to rediscover that yes, I was once fairly fast for an amateur (35:34 10K PR).

Still have a couple football programs from college, one of which I just checked and it was from a game the late Ray Guy played in. I like looking at the advertisements and checking out the prices, and how many of the advertisers are still in business.

 

I volunteer as an archive assistant at a small-town museum. Some years back we were digitally cataloguing the museum's holdings, and I got to examine items that belonged to a 19th-century congressman. In the pile were invitations to the inaugural balls for Rutherford Hayes, Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland. They were pristine, still in original envelopes.
Also among the belongings was a small notebook. Apparently the congressman took his young daughter on a tour of the nation's capital, and she recorded her observations. She noted that they visited the Washington Monument, IIRC, along with the chambers in the Capitol. And then, she wrote, "we visited the White House and had a nice chat with President Harrison." That tickled me quite a bit, that the president could find time to talk to the daughter of a not particularly prominent congressman (although he was, like Harrison, a Republican).

 

On the XC drive to LA last year I stayed in McLean Texas, panhandle.

McLean has a pretty cool museum about itself. A British businessman began the town.

Not long afterward he took a little boat ride and never came home to McLean.

 

My college journalism textbooks are on the bottom shelf.

 

Yep. I had boxes of race bibs from 5Ks with times written on them. They went when the press passes did.
I do still have my marathon bib and one from a bike race I won that was important to me.
All the random charity race stuff got tossed.