If you haven’t had a chance yet to come see our “Out of the Box” exhibit, there’s still time! This exhibit is our first to take place in the newly renovated Goodrich Room on the 4th floor of Mudd Library. We’re highlighting some of the cool (and sometimes weird) objects in our collection, like the hats and clubs pictured above. The clubs, especially, are an interesting story. We only had minimal documentation on them until Emeritus Professor of Chemistry Norman Craig stopped by to see the exhibit and, recognizing the clubs, decided to share some of his knowledge with us.

Though we typically think of these as juggling clubs, these are actually what are known as Indian clubs, popular exercise tools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that were used in a variety of swinging routines. In India, larger versions of clubs like these were used by wrestlers to develop strength. The practice was taken up by the British in the Victorian era and then popularized in the U.S.  These specific clubs were owned by Fred E. Leonard, a professor of Physical Education at Oberlin from 1888-1922. Werner Bromund, a professor Chemistry from 1937-75, was a Big Ten champion in the Indian clubs routine as a student at the University of Chicago. Bromund would frequently demonstrate his skills with the clubs during Illumination at Oberlin.

If you have a minute, stop by the Archives and check them out!

For those of you following this blog and wondering what happened to James, he’s in Berlin doing a semester abroad.  Here’s a message from him:  “I’m having a great time in Berlin. It’s an amazing city with so much history - I live only a block away from where the Berlin wall used to run along separating the entire city in half.”  Here he is (right) with a giant propeller (or is it a sculpture?).

Oberlin and the Civil War

            Hi, I’m Gregory Wikstrom. I have been the Webmaster of the Archives for a little over a year now. My job doesn’t only involve our website; I assist however else I am needed. Usually this means I get to carry around heavy boxes and put them in inconveniently high places. But I also see the inner workings of daily life at the Archives, and get to help finding information and processing collections. I am a Studio Art major and a senior. I like photography, film and music.                        

            This past weekend my senior thesis show, “The Collection” opened in Fisher Gallery. We built an 8-foot wall to divide the gallery into two spaces. In the first space you entered, we had created “The Office of the Collection,” a research organization of ambiguous mission and nature.  There was no limit to the sorts of things they seemed to be researching; on one table was a taken apart sewing machine, each individual piece labeled meticulously. On another table there lay fifteen photographs from the cell phone of a Chinese gangster, a tattooed man in various exotic places, grinning with stacks of yuan. The Office of the Collection represents the presence of surveillance and the collection of our information in our daily lives.

            As we designed the space, I couldn’t help but noticing the ways in which I was inspired by my work at the Archives. We had filled the space to the brim with collections of papers and photos and broken electronics, and couldn’t figure out how to install it all to be distinct within the space. I wanted the collections to look like research experiments; I wanted each one to look important. I began to think about the collections at the Archives, the fundamental common denominators between all of the different types of stuff. I thought of one afternoon I spent at the Archives putting fifty-or-so ancient Chinese coins into individual bags. I thought of the aesthetic transformation that had occurred with the objects over the day. At first, there was a box filled with irregular metal objects, scraping and clanking against one another, an archivist’s nightmare.  When I had finished, there was no longer any irregularity, only tiny Ziplocs silently sliding around in a manila folder, and a guide to their significances in a taupe box. I realized: I had processed that collection. In order to look significant, my objects needed to look processed.

            And so I applied that aesthetic as I directed the installation of the space. I numbered and labeled everything I could. I created literature to accompany the objects in the form of lists and diagrams. It didn’t matter to me whether or not the viewer could decipher what was being cataloged and why. It just needed to look, in a way, almost like the Archives. The office needed to seem to be confronted with a wealth of raw material in different media, and determining how they would manage it all.

            Towards the end of the installation, I added a finishing touch to imply a temporality, or evidence that “The Collection” had been going on for a while. I recycled some of the Archives’ old boxes that had lost their acid-free value, relabeled them to say “The Office of the Collection,” and built a shelf for them. While this one shelf paled in comparison to the ranges in the back of the Archives, I hope the stately, metal-edge boxes suggested the power of collection. Archivists, investigators, security personnel, and all collectors assume a role that requires them to step outside of reality in order to observe and preserve it. By assuming that role and working or existing in that space, they dictate how we are understood and how we are remembered. For us, the subjects, that knowledge is indispensible.

Postcard of drawing by Bristow Adams, c.1903

Here’s a little gem for you all today, straight from the Archives postcard collection. This postcard features an illustration by journalist, professor, forester, and artist Bristow Adams (1875-1957). Notice the crimson and gold sky - the spirit of Oberlin is truly in the air. To get a sense of the accuracy of Adams’ illustration, compare to this photograph from our Digital Collections.

Aside from the creation of this postcard, Bristow Adams had nothing to do with Oberlin. He was a Stanford grad, and as a student he founded one of our country’s longest running humor magazines, the Stanford Chaparral. He also did some scientific illustration of fur seals in the Bering Sea while still a student, which can be viewed at the University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections here. He remains most famous, however, for his illustrations of college athletics, a few more of which can be found over at the Library of Congress site here. For more information on Bristow Adams, head on over to the site of a fellow archive at the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University Library.

-James

WOBC: The Birth of a Station

For the past three weeks or so, I’ve been working on reorganizing the collection of WOBC papers, documents, and photographs that we have at the Archives. I had a radio show last year and have a bunch of friends with radio shows now, so all of this WOBC stuff is super cool to me.

One of the things I came across that particularly sparked my interest was a document called “Report of the Proposed Radio Station.”  It was written by Roger W. Brucker, an Oberlin student from the class of ’51 and the founder of what’s now known as WOBC.

The report, created in 1949, begins with pages of typed information concerning all aspects of starting the station to be known as KOCN (changed to WOBC a few years later). The issues addressed are often dense and technical — budget information, issues regarding broadcasting frequencies, anxieties over incoming FCC regulations, and plenty of other radio jargon that’s over my head.            

Following all this, though, the report almost becomes an art object. There are pages of hand drawn diagrams showing the necessary wiring networks across the college campus, the floor plan of the station itself, and even beautiful colored illustrations of the interior of the imagined station (pictured above) drawn by Brucker himself and pasted into the bound report.

The original station as Brucker imagined it would have been in the basement of Burton, likely in the exact same space now occupied by the Grape offices. The station’s launch budget of $600 didn’t allow for this, however, and so when the station actually materialized a year later in 1950, it was in the now demolished Publications Building at 32 East College St, directly above the then Oberlin Review offices.

Brucker ended up appointing his classmate Bob Chamberlain as KOCN’s first station manager. Curious to see where Brucker went after Oberlin, I did a quick bit of Googling – turns out he went on to become a famous cave explorer and have nothing to do with radio at all. Go figure!

So much awesome stuff to go through, and it’s all just another day here working at the Archives.

 -James