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.