- Welcome to another program of the Monroe County History Club and my name is Michael Carter and welcome
- to my wife Paulette, my brother Steve, my cousins over there and also thanks for the support I get from
- the old Bloomington High School classmates and I do mean old. Some there and sprinkled out throughout
- the place. I left some sheets of paper on all the tables you may have seen them. They list all the upcoming
- programs from the History Club going all the way into next year.
- First of all, I want to give many thanks to the American Legion for allowing us to have all these programs
- these years. We've been partners in presenting and preserving local history for 13 years, over 13 years.
- And thanks so much to their white staff and the kitchen staff who do such a great job every time. Amanda
- and Misty are working the place today and be sure to
- Be grateful to them. Oh, I'd also like to thank CATS TV, of course. Justin's back there as the cameraman
- today. They've been doing these programs for 10 and a half years now, which is fantastic. Yeah, I'd
- like to represent the guy who's been doing a lot of these
- It's been a very important service as it allows us to upload each program to YouTube for people who
- can't make it to the live programs. And people from all over the country watch these because they tell
- me about it, that they're glad that they could get these living in California or on the East Coast,
- different places. And also thanks to our loyal history enthusiasts who attend these programs.
- That's great. We really appreciate your support.
- And you know, those people who watch the programs on YouTube are much appreciated. It's great that the
- transplanted blue metonians all over the place can see these. The programs we present here are so diverse
- with many different subjects covered over the years. And in my opinion, we're all helping promote and
- preserve our local history. It's fun, but at the same time, very rewarding. How many new attendees?
- Do we have any new people that will admit it? OK.
- Leave your email addresses with us so we can get direct communication each month and not see it through
- Facebook or someplace. You can leave it with me and I'll give it to Mr. Brewer over there and he'll
- take care of it. Now, first of all, Daniel Slegel, the director of the Nook County History Center, would
- like to make a few comments.
- Thank you Michael. I just had a couple quick things for everyone. We have some new exhibits up on display
- from the 30 Revolutionary War Patriots that were moved all the way west to Bloomington, Indiana at that
- time and died and were buried here in one of the cemeteries in Monroe County. We have biographies and
- information about all of them that will be up through the end of this year
- And Barb Hawkins, that's both our volunteer and she's with the DAR, made a really nice pamphlet about
- those and we have them at the History Center. If you've seen or heard those or would like one, please
- come out and visit us. We have an exhibit on First Amendment rights, which is up and on display talking
- about how Monroe County
- has exercised those rights over the decades. So please come out and see that. And then we've also introduced
- a barnyard play area. So it's more of our tactile, being able to touch things at a museum. So that just
- opened maybe two weeks ago. So very, very new. So definitely feel free to bring some little ones with
- you if you have any. Or if you need to get out of the house and away from the little ones, you can still
- come see us. That's good as well.
- And I realized after I got here, we've been doing a lot of outreach and I gave away all of my garage
- sale slips. I know there's always people that come by and see me to get those. I didn't realize I ran
- out talking about that garage sale so much and forgot to replenish those slips. So I will have some
- or you're more than welcome to come over and talk to me. And we have some new items from the store that
- I have over there at the table. So feel free to come by or visit us downtown at the corner of 6 and
- Washington.
- Thank you. And that is correct. So as we are working on our move for the garage sale site to go into
- Ellitsville, we are not going to have a November sale this year. So thank you for that reminder, Pam.
- I do appreciate that. OK. Well, thank you, everyone. Thank you, Michael. Thanks, Daniel. And now one
- of our former presenters, David Norton, would like to make a couple of comments. David?
- Good afternoon, everybody. My name's Dave Nord, and I have the most embarrassing title to bring up in
- a group like this of Monroe County Historian. I'm among all the Monroe County Historians, but that's
- actually a title. It's a title conferred upon somebody to be a liaison with the State Historical Society
- and the State Historical Bureau. And that's what I'm here to do.
- mentioned to you today. One of the things that the Indiana Historical Bureau does is recruits and approves
- state historical markers. And the latest one in this county is a marker for Gary Kisters, who's Bloomington's
- most highly decorated World War II serviceman, the first American serviceman to receive both
- the Congressional Medal of Honor
- and the Distinguished Service Cross in two separate engagements in 1943. And that marker is done.
- It's put up. It's at the airport, also known as Kister's Field. And we're having a dedication of that
- state marker at the end of August, August 28 at 4 o'clock. And you're all invited to that.
- We'll put more information up, I think, on the History Center website. But I will come back a month
- from now on Tuesday of that week and remind you that that week, Friday the 28th of August,
- is this dedication. It'll involve some ceremony. Collar Guard from the American Legion, it'll also involve
- some historic history.
- with brief talks about, particularly, about Kistors himself, about his return to Bloomington, about
- other veterans in Bloomington and Monroe County, and also a little bit of history of these particular
- campaigns in Sicily and Italy in the early part of the European campaign.
- of World War II. So I hope you can think about that. Some of you probably knew Kisters. You know the
- Kisters family. He's buried in Rose Hill Cemetery. But this is a historic, a state historic marker now
- at the airport. Also, I might mention to you that this will be the 12th state marker in Monroe County.
- There are 11 others. And if you look at Wikipedia and just ask for a list of
- of state historic markers in Indiana. You can see where all of these other 11 are. And I encourage you
- to take a look at these markers. Most are in Bloomington, but some are in the countryside. You won't
- actually find 11. You'll find 10, because the one at Ferry Bridge on the White River across from Gosport
- was stolen. So it's missing at the moment. But the others are there.
- We hope you can come at the end of August. Thanks much. Thanks, David. And it brings us to today's program.
- Our speaker today will be Dina Kellums. She's director of Indiana University Archives. And the name
- of her program has become an IU history insider. They have more than 44,000 cubic feet of records and
- papers at the archives, so she has a lot to draw from.
- Dina is a native Hoosier, came to Bloomington in the 1990s to attend school, and never left, she says.
- Following a graduate school internship at the IU Archives in 1999, she joined the staff and has spent
- more than two decades helping preserve and share the university's history. She became director of the
- archives in 2015. And she's since given a couple of very successful programs for us. And here's another
- one. Dina?
- Okay, we're good, we're good.
- I just want to make sure I can turn around and talk to you all. Thank you so much, Michael, for that
- and thank you all for having me back again. I know that I see a lot of familiar faces and I'm familiar
- to maybe some of you because I've been here before. It did make me actually kind of tidy up and change
- up my introduction because I start all of my talks with a little bit of an introduction to the university
- archives and what it is that we do. Just because I assume that every time I get in front of an audience,
- it's the first time that they've, if they've heard of the university archives, really don't understand what it
- you know why we exist and so I take every opportunity I can to blah blah blah about the university archives so.
- You're welcome. So the mission of the University Archives is to collect, preserve, and make available
- university records of enduring value. What that means is that we work with university offices, departments,
- institutes, centers, et cetera, to help them identify those records that have long-term historical,
- legal, evidential, or research value, and get those over to the University Archives so that we can make
- them available to researchers, students, instructors, to the fullest extent possible. And so working
- with these departments
- You know, we bring in a wide array of record types. You know, as Michael said, we have an estimated
- over 44,000 cubic feet of materials. And of course, we're talking about photographs and correspondence
- and student publications and audio visual material, architectural drawings. And I put this picture in
- here. This is an increasing number of born digital records. This is our digital archivist, Dinah, trying
- to take apart an
- old Mac PC, or Power Mac, I should say, to try to extract the data off of there. So it's a lot of stuff.
- But in addition to university records, we are also fortunate in that we are able to collect the personal
- papers of IU faculty, staff, and alumni, selectively of course. There's too many to collect everything.
- With faculty, we like to document them as a member of the university community, as a scholar, as a teacher,
- and I always tell them as a person, you know, they are people too. And so their papers tend to come
- to us in the form of correspondence with colleagues both within the university and outside IU.
- committee files, departmental files, teaching files, etc. Oftentimes we have to use faculty papers to
- kind of fill in the gaps because while there is a records policy for the university, I always joke with
- our university records manager that she is still not getting out there and breaking kneecaps to get
- the records into us. So sometimes we have to kind of be creative to try to fill in gaps.
- And so faculty records, and we have a wide variety. We have really great representation from folklore,
- music. It's really a little bit of everything. With alumni papers, we like to focus on their time at
- Indiana University. It's typically undergraduates, because graduate students, they're pretty busy. They're
- not necessarily getting involved in campus life. The alumni papers really help us
- provide some color, I always say, to the Indiana University story. Their papers tend to come to us in
- the form of correspondence sent and received while they were students at IU, diaries, journals, scrapbooks,
- photographs, oral histories maybe collected years later, and we have some, these are actually my favorite
- collections in the archives, and we have some amazing collections. One of our earliest student-life-y
- type materials is
- a diary from a student from the 1850s, and he writes about traveling from the Kansas territory to come
- to Bloomington to go to school. And you know, as he writes about his professors, there are names that
- are now street names, you know, in Bloomington, Amzie Atwater. You know, it's just really amazing and
- fascinating. And then sometimes our alumni papers really kind of help us fill in gaps. So for example,
- and I know you folks on the far edges may not be able to see this very well, but it'll be on YouTube,
- this image
- in the middle here and says skating on Jordan field from the scrapbook photograph album of Ward Graybiddle
- circa 1915. We knew from IDS newspaper articles that they would sometimes flood
- Jordan Field, which was an athletic field located now where the IMU parking lot is, so that students
- could ice skate on it. But we only had a couple of really tiny images in the yearbook of it. And then
- within the time that I've been at the University Archives, Biddle's family donated some of his papers
- that included the scrapbook from when he was a student. And now we have just, this is the only known
- photograph that we have of them skating on Jordan Field.
- That's just so fascinating. And then this one over here. And if some of you may have heard me do a talk
- previously about IU baseball teams trip to Japan in 1922.
- As alums have sadly passed away, their families have passed things along to us. We have some
- good administrative documentation about it, but then they've given us diaries, they've given us photo
- albums, scrapbooks, tickets, all sorts of wonderful things, and included in one of the photo albums
- was this photograph.
- The entire baseball team was not able to travel. They were selective about who they were taking along.
- So there was a handful of them that decided, you know what, I'm going on this trip. And so they ended
- up getting jobs on the ship so that they could travel with the team. And the fellow who I've circled
- here at the end, he was not a baseball player. That's Ernie Pyle when he was a student.
- Ernie also wanted to go along, and he thought that what he would do is he would write stories for the
- Associated Press and sell those to make some money while he was there. But he was very saddened. When
- they got to Japan and the fellows tried to get off the ship, the ship captain said, where do you think
- you're going? He said, you're my employees. Get your butts back on the ship. And so he did not get to
- write and sell stories about the baseball team.
- I sometimes get long-winded. This is the only photograph we have of Ernie Pyle on that trip on the ship.
- So that is because alums thought to donate materials to us. And so we're very appreciative. So that
- tells you a little bit of the why, why we collect all of this.
- But there's a lot of different reasons. So of course, we are the institutional memory of Indiana University.
- But we work with classes and do a lot of instruction to try to allow students to work with primary sources
- and learn how to ask their own questions, their own research questions. What voices are missing from
- this? Where would I want to go to if I wanted to find more information about this?
- Scholars work with us. This is the most recent issue of the Indiana Magazine of History. They have reprinted some of
- Theophilus Wiley's diary, which we hold in the university archives from the Civil War period. We do
- a lot of outreach. I was on Fox 59 whenever they were doing all sorts of publicity about the Rose Bowl
- last year. We do outreach to the campus. This is our university records manager with Eugene the records
- management squirrel. Don't scroll your records away, call the IU archives today. Trademarked.
- And then right here of in this upper right hand corner as we did
- We you never know how the university archives might be utilized right now with them filming little five
- here in town They have come to us quite a bit to get photographs and materials so that they can do costumes
- and sets and then they've also Reprinted some auditorium posters and if you go outside the fine arts
- Plaza You'll see some reprints from the collection because they're going to be doing some filming around
- the Plaza. So that's a 1991 92 auditorium poster they did a little bit of photoshop
- shopping to change it. So it says 87, 88. So we do a lot of outreach. You know, we really try to ensure
- that folks know about the materials and know what we have and know that they can come to us for any
- sort of assistance.
- And then the last thing before I actually get to the talk, and some of you, a lot of you have probably
- already seen me do this, but this is one of my favorites. So sometimes, you know, archives are just
- fun. We have this stuff because it's fun. Several years ago, I had posted on our Facebook page about this
- scrapbook we had received from an alum. She was a Delta, Delta, Delta. She graduated in the 1920s and
- her scrapbook was just chock full of documentation about her time on campus. You know, dates that she
- went on, shows that she went to, athletic
- you know, events that she attended. It was just, you know, Dot, her name was Dot, Dot Dorland. She did
- not miss an opportunity. She was just soaking up that opportunity here at IU. So I shared this on our
- Facebook page. And for us,
- Now, to kind of put it in context, at this time, we had about 1,000 followers. And my post right before
- this and the post right after this got about 300 impressions. 300 people saw it. This one got over 32,000
- and was reshared numerous times. And the reason is because of this page.
- So I'm going to describe it. And again, folks on the edges, you can get online later on. But it's three
- columns, numbers, names, fraternal affiliations. And then up at the top, Dot has written, boys I have
- dated. There's 117 on this list. Go Dot.
- I will say that Dot did marry number 63, John Lazarder. She just had to be sure. But what happened with
- this is folks had the same sort of reaction you did. They started looking at the names of these guys.
- posting pictures that they could find of them, find out what they did for careers. This one was an insurance
- agent. This one, blah, blah. I mean, they just kept posting and reposting. It was so much fun to watch
- them engage with the content. But it was this one where somebody said, who's Dodd? I want to hear the
- rest of the story. And Taylor Nicole Lewis commented, I love history like this.
- Often, the only thing future generations get to hear about is tragedy or celebrity. I want more regular
- people history. And that's what archives and special collections can do. We save and share the stories
- of regular people because everybody has a story. Dot did, for sure. Okay, so that's my little bit of
- an introduction about the archives. So let me tell you about today's talk. It's called
- Become an IU history insider. And I put this together last year. You know, if you've ever spoken for
- many universities, they ask you like six months in advance what you want to talk about and give you
- a description, give them a description so they can put it in their catalog. And I thought, I don't know.
- So I decided on become an IU history insider. And I thought, you know what, I'm going to just put together
- stuff that I like from the archives, things that I've found interesting and just kind of weave it into
- the story. And so that's what I've done today. And you probably saw us playing around a little bit with
- the sound. I've also brought along a couple of clips of videos from the University Archives. You all
- may have heard about the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative that was launched
- 10 plus years ago at Indiana University. And that was a major project to digitize as much audiovisual
- material as possible because time is not a friend of those materials. It was fantastic. What that means
- is we have tens of thousands of digitized materials that say side A, side B.
- outtakes or very, very minimally described. So we're very slowly making our way through, but we're finding
- some fantastic things. And I thought I would share this first one today. Given everything that's going
- on right now in the last week, two weeks here in Bloomington, I thought you all might enjoy it. And
- I'm hoping that the sound is going to work okay. I'm gonna just put the microphone by my laptop and
- let's see how it goes.
- If it doesn't go well, I've got another one. We can just try to skip it. Wow, that loads up.
- Indiana University campus as students returned to Bloomington last fall. 20th Century Fox was in town
- to shoot a feature-length film entitled Breaking Away. Director Peter Yates used the campus and the
- famous Little 500 bicycle race as the backdrop for romance and action on the screen. Steve Tesich, an
- IU graduate and former Little 500 rider, wrote the screenplay and Katie Larson from IU's TV station
- WTIU asked him why.
- Actually, the idea evolved out of Peter and I talking. And what I did then is I wrote a two, three-page
- synopsis that we sent to Fox. From that, I was commissioned to write the first draft, and then countless
- other drafts followed. I lost track. And so Peter was really very instrumental, certainly not in the
- writing of things.
- But he was very instrumental, let's say, after the first draft was done, in the kind of things he felt
- were either overemphasized or underemphasized. It's been terribly helpful, even in the creation of the
- script. Director Peter Yates' recent movie hits include Bullet and The Deep. First of all, Steve Tesich
- was an alumni of Indiana University.
- and he had written the script entirely about Bloomington. So it was natural that we should
- come to Bloomington and see whether it was going to work and whether it was going to fit into Bloomington.
- And we've tried to make this as un-Hollywood a picture as possible and really try and present Indiana
- University and Bloomington as it is and then set the sort of the bizarre and the unusual against the
- backgrounds
- I think the backgrounds are going to surprise a lot of people. I don't know, for so often, films about
- the Midwest have been made to look as if the Midwest was a sort of down place. You know, I've always
- seen these films like The Last Picture Show and all this. You will really look and you think, oh, I
- never want to go there. But really, we've tried to find locations which all exist around Bloomington,
- which are extremely colorful. I mean, like the quarries and like the little 500 rates.
- so many of the buildings in the university, which I think are really beautiful. And I'm afraid we may
- be responsible for bringing an awful lot of tourists to Bloomington, looking for the beautiful surrounding
- countryside that they'll see in this picture. The biggest event of the shooting was the restaging of
- the Little 500 bike race in the 10th Street Stadium. The movie, originally titled Bambino and later
- changed to Breaking Away, reaches its climax during the race.
- and thousands of students and extras and even some local dignitaries showed up for the event. President
- Ryan, are you playing the president of the university in this movie? Well, yes. I'm in the movie because
- they have a scene with the president and they allowed me to play that role.
- And you said something like 16 lines? Couldn't get Ronald Goldman. 16 lines and two words on the 17th
- line. Will you be compromising your role as president with these 16 lines, or are they things that you
- would tend to say? No, they just, they make me look awfully good, I think. Chancellor Wells, I see they
- recruited some very notable extras in this movie. Do you have a speaking part? No, I have no speaking
- part. I'm certainly not a principal. Mr. Armstrong, is this your big day for being in the movie? Well,
- it's my big day for being in the movie. It's my debut.
- But I've been ready for years. Do you have your lines memorized? My lines are all memorized and I'm
- just ready for the take. And when they have Daughter of Bambino, you'll be ready for that one too, right?
- Oh, I'm ready for the second and third one because I'll be just right. It was all great fun and will
- even be more fun when Breaking Away has its world premiere in Bloomington at the IU Auditorium next
- spring during the Little 500 weekend.
- So that was a 1978 basketball halftime show, yeah. I'm so glad that that worked out. I was rewatching
- this the other day as I was preparing for this and I was like, oh my gosh, Daughter of Bambino and here
- it's coming, you know. So obviously that's an update from when I did the mini university last year.
- You know, not only because of everything that's happening right now, but I also wanted to talk about,
- you know, Steve Tesich, who was the author and the alum, his papers recently came to the university
- archives. And so we are very, very fortunate that we are able to provide access to
- He mentioned that it was originally called the Bambino. He mentioned that he went through several drafts.
- We have those drafts. It was the Eagle of Knapp Town is one of the things that it was originally called.
- And it's all based on his buddy, David Blaze, who was a writer and was his fraternity brother. And this
- guy would have been able to ride the entire race himself, all of the laps, except for the little 500
- rules would not allow for that to happen. And so in the collection, we have, and this is hard to see,
- but this is, so let
- tell you how this came to us actually last fall last winter I got a call I picked it up and the woman
- on the other end said hi
- I'm Becky Tesich, and my husband was Steve Tesich. Do you know who that is, and do you want his papers?
- And I knew. I said yes, and yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And so when talking with her, she said, well, I'm
- sorry to tell you that I don't. It's got all of these drafts, and it has some of his plays, and novels,
- and short stories. It's really a rich, beautiful collection.
- I don't have the screenplay for breaking away because I loaned it to somebody and they never gave it
- back. And I was like, well, that's...
- too bad, but that's fine. We still are very interested in it. Well, when the boxes came to the archives
- and we started going through it, no, it didn't have Breaking Away, but it had Bambino by Steve Tesich,
- February 1978. It had The Cutters, which was another one. It had the Eagle of Naphtown. So we had all
- these different versions of the production, which was just so fascinating. And there's a lot of notes
- in there about changes that he and the production company wanted
- make to the screenplay before they shot it or as they were shooting it. It has Bambino cast lists. So
- this is where Dennis Quaid lived in 1978. It has his address and his telephone number. I checked. He
- probably doesn't live there anymore. I looked it up. So I'm OK with sharing it. And it has all of this
- press. And that's the case for all of the materials that we received from him. It has the drafts of
- the materials. And then oftentimes, it has copies, folders full of press
- related to it. So it's just this really rich, fantastic collection. I said that a lot of times we like
- to focus on, you know, alums' times at Indiana University, you know, their undergraduate years. But
- we will collect from before or after that. You know, this is exactly an example of where there's no
- way I was going to say no. So fun, fun stuff.
- And so now I'd like to take us into a little bit of a history of IU's fires, of which there are many,
- and that is not unusual for institutions of higher education.
- IU's first major fire occurred on April 9th, 1854, and the wee hours of the morning, the college building,
- which is depicted here on the right, was destroyed. Once the alarm was raised by a brakeman on a passing
- freight train, responders found that the fire ran through the stairwell, making it impossible for them
- to do much to save the building. According to newspapers, all that remained was the exterior walls,
- an estimated $15,000 worth of damage, which of course in 1854 was extensive. We're still not really
- certain what caused the fire. IU historian Thomas Clark said that, wrote that a plausible guess was
- that students had been making and smoking cigars at the base of the stairs and then thrown lighted butts
- into the janitor's trash pile.
- So Clark had a guess there, but locals had a different thought. The Bloomington public believed that
- a man named Alexander H. Buchanan and another unnamed individual were guilty of causing the fire. And
- in August 1854, they burned these gentlemen in effigy in downtown Bloomington. This Bloomington Newsletter
- article reports
- And here, I'm going to get out my drama. I used to be in place. We heard the frequent shouts of, who
- burnt the college? Answered Alexander H. Buchanan. As the effigy of Buchanan was burned, they shouted,
- there's the man that burnt the college. Very, very dramatic.
- I still have not found any records that definitively indicate who Buchanan was. He wasn't a student,
- he wasn't a member of the faculty or the staff. There's an 1850 census that lists Alex Buchanan as a
- farmer who lived in Lawrence County. I don't know if that is the person and what it is about Indiana
- University that had him all, his feathers all ruffled. And I still haven't turned up anything
- that explains why he and this other unnamed person were thought to be the cause of the fire. Although
- this article from the New Albany Daily Tribune says that IU President William Daley had, quote, positive
- evidence as to the culpability of Buchanan. We have very little records from Daley's presidency, so
- I have not really been able to dig into it and see what we can find. It's just one of those mysteries
- still to be explored.
- It wasn't known if IU, still a very young university at this time, was going to be able to survive this
- tragedy. So it was 1854. First classes began in 1825, so not even 30 years. They had lost the entirety
- of the library, all of the school's records, all of its equipment. The building was not insured. The
- building was not insured. But IU rallied. Thinking creatively as to how to raise funds,
- the university established scholarships that were available for purchase. And I'm going to talk about
- this today, but I do want to mention that in January, John Summerlot is going to be returning to your
- group to talk about these scholarships in much more detail, and he has really dug into them.
- So this is, think of this as a little, hey, so little teaser. So they have these scholarships available
- for purchase. $25 would give you a two-year scholarship.
- $50 a four-year scholarship and $100 would get you a perpetual scholarship.
- perpetual scholarship. There were a number of rules that would along with the scholarship, but it was
- a really good deal, and IU sold approximately 60 scholarships. Under the established regulations of
- the perpetual scholarship, one scholar at a time could use the scholarship, and it could only be passed
- down to the son or grandson of the purchaser, because at that time, 1854, it was all still sons and
- grandsons. There were no women at Indiana University.
- the son or grandson of the purchaser after the death of the purchaser. At that time, quote, the right
- of tuition shall descend by perpetuity to such descendant or other person as may be specified in the
- will of the purchaser. And the right shall descend from generation to generation by will and not otherwise.
- The tuition could only cover the academic and literary departments that did not apply to the law school,
- which was one of the few separate schools that we had at the time.
- In 1890, the Board of Trustees discussed the scholarships with the Committee on Legal Affairs advising
- the board. Your committee is informed that a large number of students are now attending the university
- upon such scholarships who are not entitled. So apparently they weren't really keeping track of the
- rules of the scholarship. They recommended that after the current term, the university announced they
- would be tightening the acceptance of the scholarship to ensure they are only accepted following the
- established rules.
- The trustees minutes show that the matter has come up periodically and my colleague John Summerlot has
- been digging into it and says that someone actually came forward with a claim as recent as 2017. Yeah,
- but the last student I can confirm who used one of the perpetual scholarships was in 1989 when a student
- brought forth his great, great, great grandfather certificate. At that time, IU determined that legally,
- They didn't have to accept it, but they chose to do so. They went ahead and they honored it. So we know
- from John's research that they are still floating around. And since I've been at the archives, I've
- worked with general counsel, the university's lawyers, to do some research on it. And they came up with
- some new guidelines in 2007 that
- wrote up eligibility requirements that says that the holder must document that they received
- their certificate through a chain of transfers by will, specifically by will, that trace back to the
- original purchase. They did determine, however, that meeting that requirement, they did not need to
- be a direct descendant of the purchaser.
- So this was a bit of creative fundraising that the university was taking up to try to rebuild. So in
- addition to this, the community donated smaller amounts to raise $10,000 in total. Also out of this
- tragedy rose the Alumni Association, initiated by IU President William Daley, who recognized that the
- struggling institution needed friends and advocates. IU was on its way to being back on its feet, from
- this tragedy at least.
- By the end of 1855, IU completed a replacement building known by various names throughout its lifetime,
- but mainly as the first university building. So here's a little bit of good insider information for
- you that you can wow your friends and family with. So I've circled this little bit of the architectural
- detail on this building here. Let's zoom in a little bit more.
- Zoom in a little closer. So there were these two porticoes that were salvaged from the building for
- IU's use. One proposal was to, later on, one proposal was to use the arches as a campus gateway at Kirkwood
- Avenue. This predated the sample gates by nearly 100 years. But it was determined that they were too
- small for this purpose. Trustee and alum Theodore Rose had another suggestion.
- How about they use the structure over the campus cistern? So if you go to campus and you visit the Well
- House, you're going to be seeing a piece of the first university building from Seminary Square campus.
- Yeah. So it went through a couple of design proposals, but we now know the final result as the Theodore
- F. Rose Well House as Rose paid for construction of the house in honor of the class of 1875. It was
- completed in time for the 1908 commencement celebrations.
- So that was all good news until back to fires. I did this photoshopping, I don't know, years ago, and
- I know it's horrible, but I cannot let it go, because it's so amazing at the same time, am I right?
- So now 30 years after the 1854 fire, IU faced its next devastating fire, that of Science Hall in 1883,
- which had just been completed 10 years prior. This fire was a real turning point for Indiana University.
- Does it remain in Bloomington? Which was a question that came up a lot. I was chatting with somebody
- right before Bedford came up as a suggestion. Indianapolis came up time and time again as moving the
- university up there.
- Does it remain in town? Does it rebuild on site? I even read an editorial that suggested that IU and
- the quote state normal school, now Indiana State University, consolidate with Purdue. It was determined
- that the current site, in the end, the current site was just not going to work out because in the time
- that IU had settled at Seminary Square,
- the railroad had come in. And so if they wanted to expand to the west, they were going to have railroad
- tracks running through the campus. And in addition, there was this stream on campus that really prevented
- some additional construction in the area. So they shopped around to try to see what they could find.
- The county donated $50,000 to keep IU in Monroe County. And university leaders decided to remain in
- town, but it was time to relocate.
- So here's a picture from about 1885 of Indiana University. They purchased 20 acres from the Dunn family
- northeast of Seminary Square, and construction was underway by spring of 1884. So these are some really
- early pictures of Wiley Hall and Owen Hall, the first two buildings on the new campus.
- So here's a little bit of a fun fact, a little insider information. If you've walked around campus,
- you might have noticed that Owen and Wiley Hall are the only two brick buildings on campus. Everything
- else is limestone or some other sort of more recently cement for the Eskenazi and whatnot. That's because Owen Hall
- was at least partially constructed utilizing bricks and stones that were salvaged from the destroyed
- science hall. They wanted to get started as quickly as they could. And IU has always been green, reduce,
- reuse, recycle. So they were reusing some of those materials. So let's just take in this little close-up
- look at Wiley Hall. It's hard to see through the trees, I know. But if you look closely, you can see
- that there's a tower in Wiley Hall.
- And I've circled it here so it kind of jumps out a little bit more.
- Yeah, that burned down. Fires, I'm telling you, fires all the way through. So this is February 7th,
- 1900. This is the only known photo of the Wiley Hall fire, and this was pulled from the yearbook. We
- don't actually own a photograph of it. No one was present for what was determined to be a chemical fire,
- which mostly destroyed the second and third floors. In order to reach the only phone on campus, which
- was located in nearby Maxwell Hall, then Professor William
- and later president of the university, hoisted another professor on his shoulder and helped him to the
- transom at Maxwell Hall so they could get to the only telephone on campus and call the fire department.
- And so that was memorialized in the student yearbook later in the year. So you can see President Brian
- here, well, Professor Brian at the time, hoisted him up there.
- Upon reconstruction, it was decided that instead of rebuilding that tower, enrollment just continued
- to climb as it always has. It just climbs and climbs and climbs. So they ended up just putting new floor
- on there so that they would have more classroom space.
- So staying in the theme of fires, some of you might have been here and might remember that we used to
- have this East Hall that was located where the Musical Arts Center is located right now. So after World
- War II, and this is a fascinating history, but after World War II,
- President Wells really worked with his administration and with the federal government to bring all sorts
- of military surplus buildings to campus so that they could repurpose them for student housing. They
- brought for student housing, for offices, for classroom space. And this is actually a repurposed barrack
- that was on what's now Eagleson Avenue where the musical arts center is located now that was used for
- music and for operas.
- It was, you know, any temporary, these were all supposed to be temporary, so this came right after World
- War II. It was in place until the 1960s. There was a fire, saw its final performance in July 1967 with
- plans for raising. It was the victim of an electrical fire in January 1968, and we have a photo of that
- here. So I gave this talk,
- I talked about this at the University Club earlier this year. And Terry Claypacks, who is Vice President
- Emeritus of IU, some of you might recognize his name, he told me afterwards, he said, you know, Dina,
- he said, we were actually in a meeting talking about raising East Hall. And someone at the table made
- a joke that, boy, it sure would be a shame if lightning struck and took it down. And ta-da, it happened.
- So things happen.
- Jumping ahead just a little bit, in 1969, the main library, now known as Franklin Hall, was struck by
- arson not once, but twice.
- Yeah, the fires led to over a million dollars in property damage with the same monetary loss in collections.
- This was a significant fire. These were fires. While damaged, the building was saved. And by this time,
- the now Wells Library was already well underway of construction. And it was far enough along that the
- library could take up residence. And so they decided to go ahead and start moving the collection over
- to the new building, although
- They did not have the actual dedication until fall of 1970. So it took a little bit of time while they
- finished it up. So this photo, if you can see it, not real well, but there is some smoke billowing out
- some of the windows there. And we actually have some records in the archives that have been stored in
- the basement that are tinged a little bit from smoke. And there's still some materials in the library's
- collection as well that have some smoke damage from this fire. These fires, I keep fires.
- And so the last fire that I'd like to talk to you about today is that of the student building which
- occurred December 17 1990.
- At the time, the building was under renovation and it was determined that the fire was caused by hot
- coals not fully distinguished by the welders. I have talked to folks who have said that, you know, if
- you were standing outside the building here, you could hear the custom-made bells from the Netherlands
- just crashing down the tower and hitting, you know, the bottom as they were falling.
- But they did decide to save the damaged bells, and they put them in storage for years and years, for
- several years. And then just whenever Indiana University was celebrating
- it's bicentennial, university administration decided to repurpose the bells and they melted them down
- and they had bicentennial medals created that were given to many of IU's employees, alumni, and friends
- during the bicentennial celebrations that were leading up to 2020. This is one of them. This is one
- of my favorite pictures. This is IU alum and late faculty member Ruth Dipple. She graduated with her
- bachelor's in 1943, got her PhD in
- sociology in 1950. She was awarded a Bicentennial Medal on her 100th birthday in 2020. While working
- on her PhD in the 1940s in Tracy Sonneborn's lab, the team racked up tons of awards and recognitions.
- The same year, in fact, that Dr. Dippel was awarded her PhD, she was elected a fellow of the American
- Association for the Advancement of Science. So she went on to spend the entirety of her career at IU
- researching and teaching.
- But you knew her, Chris, I'm guessing. No? OK. So I do have actually, and sound doesn't matter for this
- one, Hmong says I was going through some of our digitized media. You just never know what you're going
- to find. I did actually find some video of the student building fire that was taken by folks on campus.
- And I'll just play a little bit of it.
- You can see that it was really... Terry mentioned that it really did just mostly target the tower. You
- can see the windows glowing, but he said that there wasn't really much damage down in those areas. It
- really was focused on the tower. Pretty amazing what we're able to find in the archives. Okay, all right,
- let's move away from...
- fires now for a little while so one of the other things you know when I said I put this talk together
- and I decided I was just going to piece together things that I liked and that made that I thought were
- interesting you know working in the archives I get asked quite a bit like what's your favorite thing
- It's hard to say, and honestly, I really mean this. It depends on the day, what I've come across that
- day. But this is the thing that I probably mention most frequently, and it's what we call the pairing
- letter. This letter was written by Cornelius and Susanna Hine pairing in, oh, I think I said 1835. It's
- actually 1833. Cousins of the Wyleys, they emigrated from England, settling in Bloomington in 1833 so
- that Cornelius could teach at the Monroe County Female Seminary.
- In this letter that the couple wrote back to friends in England, Cornelius and Susanna offer a detailed
- account of Monroe County, including a description of the, quote, New College or Indiana College, as
- IU was known at the time. So the information shared in the letter is amazing. And I told Michael that
- this has all been transcribed. And I can send him a link so that he could share it with the club. But
- it's also beautiful. So I'll zoom in a little bit.
- This in the middle here, Peering was also an artist. And so these are very detailed watercolor paintings
- that he did in the middle of this letter to show his family what it was that he was writing about. And
- zooming in here, this is, I am so,
- When I see the letter was transcribed, it was not me, thank goodness. So this was written using
- cross-hatching or cross-writing. So in order to save money and postage, the paper and postage, what
- they did is they wrote in one direction and then they turned the paper and they wrote in the other direction
- as well. So it was almost like a code to be able to sit and read.
- And so thankfully, the archives over the years have had many, many, many dedicated volunteers, and one
- of them took on the task of transcribing this, thankfully. So let's see, I think I said all of that.
- Yep, I sure did. Okay, so zooming in on some of these images, he writes then about what he was drawing,
- and so I'm gonna read you some little bits and pieces of the letter. So of this, he wrote, quote,
- a tidy log building and will give you an idea of three fourths of the country farmhouses in this state.
- Near it ought to be a small barn or stable and smokehouse, which I could not get in. You will see a
- small specimen of fence most in use at the sides and in front near the road. The chimney is a brick
- and always put up outside. When the house is built, the logs are cut away the size of the fireplace
- and the chimney constructed. So you can kind of see
- the fence in the background here where it's set up, crisscross. This was Cornelius's view of downtown
- Bloomington. He wrote, quote, the center of this town, the middle building, is the courthouse where
- all the judicial business is transacted. On the left of it is the jail. On the right, the clerk's office
- and county library. Yay. The white weather boardhouse on the right forms the angle of the street.
- A courthouse exists in every county town and all that I have seen have been built in precisely the same
- manner. A square brick building with three windows above and one on each side below. A cupola inspire
- as high above the roof as that is from the ground. A parapet brick wall surrounds these buildings.
- Near the house, which is occupied as a store, is a rack, as it is called, to which persons coming in
- from the country fasten their horses. You will see a log or two lying about in the street, which is
- not unusual in a country town. 16 years ago, a gentleman told me he could scarcely ride through Louisville
- for logs and mud holes, which was then an inconsiderable place. It has now fine, wide paved streets,
- shops as gay as any in Bristol,
- blended hotels, public gardens, Hackney coaches, and cabs in abundance. And then this was his view of
- campus. He wrote,
- The new college is the center picture, which is not yet finished in the interior. The building on the
- left is the one at present occupied. It will remind you more of Mr. Rister's factory than the princely
- halls of Oxford and Cambridge. But I have no doubt as good scholars will be turned out from the humble
- edifice as from the more celebrated seats of learning in England. The president and professors are men
- of great talent and would do honor to any university in the world. The president, Dr. Wiley, is one
- of the most
- eminent scholars in the United States. He occupies the chair of moral philosophy. There are several
- young men who will graduate this session. The students are from various states. We have some from Louisville,
- Tennessee, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Illinois besides those from this state. They board
- in town from $1.25 to $2 per week.
- The admission fees are only $15 a year, which it is expected will be soon altogether dispensed with
- as the college is richly endowed by the state. The president's salary is $1,000 a year and a third of
- the tuition fees. Each of the professors $800 and a third of the fees.
- You will observe that the land has been recently cleared and that the stumps of the trees are not yet
- entirely rotten. Trees are always cut down with the axe, a foot or two from the ground, and the stumps
- left to rot, which they do in eight or 10 years. Some persons in clearing merely cut away the low brush
- wood where it exists and deaden the trees by cutting a circle around them with the axe toe two or three
- inches deep.
- In a year or two, the trees are quite dead, and the first high wind blows them down when they are rolled
- into a pile and burnt. So I would have stopped it a little bit about the school, but I always
- When I see these drawings, I'm like, why is all that garbage there? And so there was a plan. There was
- a reason. So I've got another video that I want to finish with here today. But I think that the pairing
- letter is a really good example, again, of archives and what they can tell us. I mean, this is from
- 1833. There is not a whole lot of records and materials available from that time period. And here he
- has told us what the classrooms look like, what the buildings look like on the inside, what the people
- were like, if you read through the letter,
- They were having a whole lot of trouble getting domestic help at their house. And so that was very much
- concerned Mrs. Perry. So I think that if I had to say leave you all with some sort of tie it up in a
- bow, it's just that archives matter. And archives make your lives richer and bring history home. OK.
- So I've got one more video, so I'm going to get that playing for you. And I guess I'll go ahead and
- I'll introduce this one a little bit. So this was a halftime show from the late 1980s, I think it was.
- And it's going to show a kind of controversial figure, but he did a lot of good for the university.
- And so I thought I wanted to share this, because it might show you a side that you didn't know. I hear
- some chuckling. I think some folks know who I'm going
- I took Bobby Knight's coaching and basketball class because he is one of the best coaches in the country
- and I thought from taking a class from him that I would get a good sound basic knowledge to go out and
- be able to start maybe my own program or help assist on
- a coaching program when I go out to teach. Coach Knight has been an excellent teacher. Everybody knows
- him as a media figure, but they don't realize that he's a very effective teacher in the classroom. And
- his assistants have been doing an excellent job. Coach, how is this class organized in the sense of
- what can students expect to get involved in during the class? Well, first of all, we have two lab periods
- each week. And the class lasts a total of eight weeks, so we have 16 lab periods for each student.
- and 16 lecture periods for each student. Now, what we do in the class is we go in two different directions.
- I try to talk about teaching and coaching, not the teaching and coaching of basketball, but just what
- I think is important in the teaching profession, what I think the kids are going to encounter once they
- become teachers and dealing with the parents, communities, administrations, and so forth. Then the second
- phase of this class involves the game of basketball. We try to teach
- basketball as we play it not basketball as basketball but simply as we play it we try to go through
- the drills that we use the development of fundamentals that we use here at the university providing
- these kids with a background that they can call upon should they go on from graduation here to actually
- teach or coach basketball at some level. In the typical class what is the mix of students in other words
- are some in
- some wanting to be coaches, you have the novice who's just in there to learn something. I think the
- vast majority of our kids are probably kids who have some aspiration of coaching basketball. Others
- are just going into coaching period and some just take the class to take the class as an elective. It's
- part of a comprehensive sports program that's offered by
- the physical education people and methods of coaching various sports. What is the role that your staff
- plays in this? Well, the staff handles all the basketball. They teach the lab classes, they show the
- drills, they go over the things that we try to do offensively and defensively. With the game of basketball,
- we try to give them some things that they're going to be able to use later on in coaching, things that
- we've gone through and that we've learned in our coaching experience.
- Well, what we hope to do is just be in a position where people are learning fundamentals in a way or
- in a hope that they'll be able to teach those fundamentals. You had your first major college coaching
- position at the age, I believe, of 24. What advice would you have for a person, a young person today
- who would like to go into coaching? The student or the person who wants to go into coaching has got
- to be able to evaluate and examine his own personality.
- And if he can't make stands, if he can't be decisive, if he can't stand alone, if he can't do some things
- that are gonna be unpopular, if he worries about whether people like him are not coaching, is not the
- profession for the guy to go into in the first place. Like Harry Truman wrote a letter to his brother
- once. And he said, some days I make decisions that are roundly applauded and I receive acclaims from
- all corners of the country. On other days,
- I make decisions that are equally good for the country and am thoroughly criticized. So I've simply
- decided to examine every situation, do what I think is best in the hell with things. I think that's
- great advice for a guy going into coaching. That's fun. And that's what I've got for you today. So thank
- you so much. I don't know if there's time. If you have any questions, if I'm able to answer them, I will.
- Yes, I see a hand back there. Yeah, so the question was about can the public come to the University
- Archives and how do you make arrangements for that? We do ask that folks schedule appointments just
- because we are located in the Wells Library. We're in E460 East Tower, fourth floor.
- And the bulk of our collection is stored off site. So we need to have some time to pull together materials
- that you might like to see. The reading room is open from 9 to 445, Monday through Friday. Now, we do
- have some things on site that you're welcome to just pop in and take a look at, such as the yearbooks
- and those sorts of things. But for most, it's best if you make an appointment and let us know. And the
- email is really easy, archives at iu.edu. And just send a note, and we'll take care of you. Yes?
- I'm coming. One of your first slides, you had the woman with Ernie Pyle on the baseball team. In the
- lower right-hand corner was a picture of Leon Vargen. What is he doing in the archives? He should be
- in the archives. Yes. So Leon Vargen, he was a graduate student at Indiana University in the 70s. And
- he was just this campus prankster.
- And so many folks remember him. But it was all very good natured prankster. And he did a public access
- television show called Vern and Evelyn. And we have some of those videos, the Eumatics. He had a newspaper
- called Fun City that he published and put out. And we have a really rich collection of Leon Varjan materials.
- His family, his sister gave those to us not too long ago.
- I say not too long ago, it's probably 15 years ago now at this point. And it's fascinating. I mean,
- it's just a really fascinating look at what was going on on campus at the time. He ran for trustee,
- he ran for Bloomington mayor, and it was always under this really goofy party. I can't remember what,
- the birthday party, it was the birthday party.
- So, and he actually went on to be an award-winning teacher, high school teacher, math teacher. We've
- had folks who have said that he changed their lives. He unfortunately died too young. I think he was
- in his 50s. But yeah, so yeah, we have Leon Barjan's papers at the archives. Yes. The Banana Olympics.
- He hosted the Banana Olympics in Dunmeto. Oh my gosh. Any other? Yes.
- that burned for the student building. The IU Foundation of course used those in a lot of donor recognition.
- We always wondered how much there was in there because they were stretched out in terms of uses but
- they were also used for that.
- Well, I encourage you, if you're really interested in those perpetual scholarships, John has really
- dug into those and has some really fun stories to share with you in January. So of course you should
- come every month, but you can get a little bit more info on that. And I have up at this table my business
- cards if anybody wants to follow up with anything else. And then let me just say that we are fundraising
- to digitize the Indiana Daily student. If anybody is interested, there's information about that up there
- as well. Thank you. Thank you so much.