Collections A p u b l i c at i o n o f t h e B e n t l e y H i s t o r i c a l L i b r a r y at t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f M i c h i g a n
ANN B .
DAVIS
spring 2016
From the brady bunch to the bentley library
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Contents DIRECTOR ’S NOTES 1 – Writing the Handbook on Teaching with Archives AB RI D G EM ENTS 2 – Sound Bites from the Stacks
RE FERENCES 18 – The Gift of Genius 19 – The Forgotten Feminists On the Cover Groovy! This far out illustration of Ann B. Davis is a new take on the iconic image of her Brady Bunch character, Alice. Mellow out and read all about her life and her collection at the Bentley on page four. Cover illustration by John Tebeau
CATH OL EPISTEM IA D 20 – The Big Picture B ENTL EY U NB OU ND 22 – Jazz, Guns, and Governments 24 – Perfect Harmony FEATU RES
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Here’s the Story of a Lovely Lady
You know Ann B. Davis as Alice the housekeeper, the beloved heart of The Brady Bunch. But you may not know the two-time Emmy winner, author, and comedienne left Hollywood to pursue a life at the center of a different home—one founded on the tenets of the Episcopal faith.
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The Fault in His Stars
Mark Harrington was a brilliant botanist and meteorologist as well as a lumberjack and boxcar jumper. His tragic battle with mental illness would drive him from positions of prestige, taking him across oceans, to flop houses and sugar plantations, and eventually to an East Coast asylum.
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D i r ec to r ’s not es
Writing the Handbook on Teaching with Archives
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1150 B EA L 16 – Bound and Determined
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ach year, more than 1,000 undergraduate students come to the Bentley to engage with its archival collections. Some are here for “orientations” to the collections, some to be trained for longer-term research projects in their courses, and some will spend the year here doing research for an honors thesis. It would be nice if there were a kind of “handbook” of best practices for faculty and archivists who wish to stimulate and encourage the interest of these students. But surprisingly such a thing does not exist. So we at the Bentley have decided to write it ourselves. In January, five archivists from the Library and eight members of the University’s tenure-track teaching faculty began meeting weekly in an attempt to perfect the way that University faculty use archival collections for teaching here and elsewhere.
That this seminar is happening at all is the result of an award to the Bentley of $760,000 from the Provost’s Third-Century Fund. Each year, a campus-wide panel of faculty members selects, after intense competition, the projects that it believes will make the greatest contribution to “engaged education” on the campus. We were proud and pleased to be selected for this award last May. Engaged education today refers to activities outside the traditional classroom, which display and enhance the special characteristics of residential university education in the 21st century. The Bentley is a perfect example of this kind of engagement because its archival holdings make it a kind of laboratory for historical research across disciplines. Everyone in the seminar this year is a veteran user of the Bentley archives in a variety of courses: how to write history, the history of wars in America, the architecture of Albert Kahn, Jewish students at the University of Michigan, African American history in Michigan, and the general history of the University
Pride and Prejudice
When Jim Toy stood up and delivered a speech at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Detroit in 1970, he became the first person in the state of Michigan to publicly come out as gay. The equality pioneer has spent his life working to change the gay rights landscape in Michigan and beyond. Photos n (Top) Scott Soderberg, Michigan Photography; (bottom) Don Hammond
itself. Our archivists come from University collections and reference. We’re busy getting to know one another, learning about one another’s expertise and experience, sharing syllabi, assignments, and expectations. Already we know one important thing: Working together with a shared understanding of what we hope to accomplish by bringing the students to the archives will lead to a better outcome for them. The seminar will run annually for up to five years. In addition, three of us have received a prestigious M-CUBED research grant that we will use to conduct research about whether the ideas we generate in the seminar actually work better in the classroom. We will report on this important work from time to time. Terrence J. McDonald Arthur F. Thurnau Professor Professor of History and Director
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Abe Lincoln’s John Hancock
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Abridgements
If consistent with the public interest, I shall be glad for the written request to be granted. A. Lincoln, April 8, 1864 Reply to Hattie Knight, wife of Civil War solider Robert T. Knight, who initially wrote to Lincoln asking that her ailing husband be allowed to sell goods at the Soldier’s Rest in Alexandria, Virginia.
“Arrived here ok. Having the best time ever.” Postcards from Flint in the Bentley’s collection showcase the city in better times.
Series A
$11,532
Total amount raised by the Bentley Historical Library on Giving Blueday, an online fundraising campaign by the University of Michigan. Bentley support for Giving Blueday went directly toward digitizing all issues of The Michigan Daily into a searchable, online database.
Name for the thousands of photos taken by U-M News and Information photographers between 1946 and 1957. Bentley volunteer Les High recently entered all the negatives into a database, greatly increasing accessibility to photos of commencement speakers such as Arthur Miller and Douglas MacArthur, as well as campus moments including summer days when the Good Humor Man visited U-M.
KAHN! The name of the most accessed collection at the Bentley in the past six months is the Albert Kahn Papers, which span 1896 to 2014 and feature the famed architect’s correspondence, professional papers, scrapbooks, and much more. Kahn, who lived from 1869 to 1942, has more than 60 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places.
24 The number of years Suzanne Sareini served the Dearborn City Council, the first Arab American elected to that position. After six terms, she retired from the council in 2013, and the Bentley acquired her papers in 2015.
@UmichBentley: There are worse ways to spend a workday! Sorting #umich football game-day programs from the 1990s.
Think of our country’s glory, All dimm’d with Afric’s tears—
@Evagro: Doing research at @UmichBentley is such a pleasure. Great resources and great customer service!
Her broad flag stain’d and gory With the hoarded guilt of years! Think of the frantic mother, Lamenting for her child, Till falling lashes smother Her cries of anguish wild! Think of the prayers ascending,
“After a great search of inside suit coat pockets, the cards that the President used for his Ann Arbor speech were found. It was a pleasure for him to sign them and have me send them to you.” Text of a letter to the Bentley Historical Library accompanying a ring of index cards used in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society speech, given during the University of Michigan’s commencement on May 22, 1964.
Yet shriek’d, alas! in vain, When heart from heart is rending Ne’er to be join’d again. Shall we behold, unheeding, Life’s holiest feelings crush’d?— When woman’s heart is bleeding, Shall woman’s voice be hush’d? Think of Our Country’s Glory by Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, the first female American poet to make the topics of slavery and abolition the cornerstone of her writing. In 1830, she moved with her aunt and brother, Thomas, to the Michigan Territory, settling in Lenawee County near the village of Tecumseh. Following a bout with fever, she died November 2, 1834 at the age of 26. Her papers reside at the Bentley.
bentley.mivideo.it.umich.edu Website where you can access more than 1,600 recordings that have been digitized through the Bentley’s new Digital Media Library. The site features interviews, oral histories, musical performances, radio broadcasts, and more.
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Here’s the Story of a Lovely Lady…
When you think of Ann B. Davis, it’s as the center square of a grid, surrounded by the loving people who weren’t related to her but nonetheless—somehow, as the song said—formed a family. So what led her to life in a religious communal home in Colorado?
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ith a twinkle in her eye, a sturdy hairstyle, and a no-nonsense blue dress, Alice the housekeeper was the nucleus of the The Brady Bunch family, serving up Swiss steak, homemade cookies, and one-liners. The kids are fighting? Call in Alice. How about a snack after school? Alice is your gal. Need to laugh at someone while she flirts with Sam the Butcher? Alice. As Alice, Ann B. Davis, a 1948 U-M graduate, carved out a special place in pop culture history. She would go on to reprise the roll in spinoffs and specials once the show ended its five-season run; she would create a cookbook based on recipes related to the show; she would star in a Swiffer ad. Surely you, consumer, want to clean with the same product as the world’s most recognizable housekeeper, right? And people did. Davis was “the glue that held The Brady Brunch together,” said Barry Williams, who played Greg on the show, when Davis passed away in 2014.
From Chemistry to Schultzy
By Katie Vloet
Illustration n John Tebeau
Davis’s journey to fame and a 1970’s version of fortune is highlighted throughout the collection of her papers and photographs at the Bentley Historical Library. She grew up in Schenectady, New York, where she,
Photo n HS15012
her twin sister, and their brother and parents performed variety shows in the living room. She and her twin sister, along with their mother, performed in community theater and comedy sketches at school.
The twin Davis girls then moved to Ann Arbor, where Ann decided to study pre-med. “I got as far as my second semester,” she wrote in autobiographical papers that are part of her collection. “That’s when I hit chemistry and that’s when I decided I didn’t have the brains for a medical career.” She switched to speech and drama, and took whatever comedic roles she could find. After graduating in 1948, Davis
found roles in summer stock, then community theater in a California town “the size of a small living room.” She was, however, on the cusp of getting her big break. A friend wrote material, and the two of them performed it in a cabaret venue at the unfashionable end of Sunset Boulevard. Jack Lemmon came. Liberace came. Davis got an audition for a show starring comedian Bob Cummings; she tried out for Cummings and a very encouraging George Burns. She became “Schultzy,” the Girl Friday on The Bob Cummings Show, and two Emmy Awards for the part secured her stardom. She then returned to the stage, including a time when she replaced Carol Burnett on Broadway in Once Upon A Mattress. Then her father and a close friend died, leaving Davis uncertain about her next steps. “Personally and professionally I was in the pits,” Davis wrote. A USO trip to Vietnam changed everything and “began to turn my life around.” Then came the second big break of her career: Her casting on The Brady Bunch, which became an iconic television show that now airs every day in reruns around the world. Davis’s character, Alice, was cast as the housekeeper who took care of Mike Brady and his boys, then stayed on when the Brady men joined households with the lovely lady, Carol, and her three golden-haired girls.
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A Very BraDy Quiz Much More than a Hunch The Bentley collection sheds light on this era of Astroturf and polyester, with original scripts such as “The Hair-Brained Scheme” episode, along with remembrances from Davis and castmates. For anyone who grew up watching the Brady family from 1969 to 1974 or during reruns in later years, the Bentley collection is full of nostalgia and revelations—such as the fact that fellow cast members kept in touch with Davis many years after they worked together.
A letter from Susan Olsen, who played Cindy, updated Davis about her boyfriend and her life. “I really hope you can meet him sometime soon. No rush, I have a feeling he’ll be around for a long time,” Olsen wrote. “I enjoyed seeing both you and Flo in Naked Gun 33 1/3,” wrote Barry Williams in another letter, addressed to “Annie B.” Their affection for her is genuine, and with good reason. “Alice was very real because that’s the way Ann is. My best memories are of her quietly doing her needlework, waiting for her next scene while complete havoc
was going on around her,” Florence Henderson (Carol Brady) said. Davis loved the big family, onscreen and off, and they loved her. So it makes sense, in a way, that Davis later moved into a communal home where she shared the housekeeping duties, sorted other people’s socks, and offered advice to parents and teens. The difference was: This didn’t happen on television. It happened in real life, far away from Hollywood, in the mountains of Colorado, when Davis stopped worshipping show business and started worshipping God.
After The Brady Bunch, Davis— a self-described cradle Episcopalian— began to seek more fulfillment through religious life. This led to her meeting Colorado Bishop William C. Frey and his wife, and ultimately took her far from the Hollywood hills. She spoke to groups about her faith, volunteered to help homeless people, and never missed her old life.
“It’s a little surprising to get to my age and find out I’m getting to the good part.” “All the things in the world that are supposed to make you happy were mine. Money, travel, awards, the acknowledgment of my peers, fame. But I wasn’t satisfied; something was missing,” she said in a 1985 interview about her move to Colorado. “It’s a little surprising to get to my age and find out I’m getting to the good part.” Davis moved with Bishop Frey and his wife in 1996 to San Antonio, where she passed away in 2014 at age 88. Her papers were donated to the Bentley in March 2015 and are open to the public. n
1. Which of these actors and athletes did not appear on The Brady Bunch? A. Joe Namath B. Desi Arnaz Jr. c. Richard Pryor d. Davy Jones
2. Which of these shows did not actually air? a. Family Feud, in which Robert Reed, Florence Henderson, Maureen McCormick, Christopher Knight, and Susan Olsen played against actors from The Petticoat Junction. b. Gilligan’s Bunch, a mash-up of Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch, featuring a failed attempt to get off the island. c. The Love Boat, on which Mike and Carol talk about how they can take a cruise since the kids are all grown up. d. The Brady 500, in which Bobby is paralyzed from the waist down due to an auto racing accident.
3. Which of these recipes doesn’t appear in Alice’s Brady Bunch Cookbook ? a. Kitty Karryall Cavatappi b. Color Television Coffee Cake c. Tightened Braces Tomato Soup d. Oh My Nose Oatmeal Cookies
4. What up-and-coming star was the show creator’s original pick to play Mike Brady? a. Gene Hackman b. Sylvester Stallone c. Burt Reynolds d. Al Pacino
5. Which of these is an actual Ann B. Davis quote? a. “I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.” b. “You do not choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.” c. “I hate housework. You make the beds, you wash the dishes, and six months later you have to start all over again.” d. “Wouldn’t we all love to have belonged to a perfect family, with brothers and sisters to lean on and where every problem is solved in 23 ½ minutes?”
Answers
(previous page ) Sunshine, lollipops, and Ann B. Davis along with the rest of the cast from The Brady Bunch. (this page, clockwise from far left ) Davis as the character Schultzy with Bob Cummings on the set of the The Bob Cummings Show; at the Emmy awards in April 1958; playing the role of Princess Winnifred in Once Upon a Mattress in 1964; on the set for the pilot of R.B. and Myrnalene in 1961; suited up for Bob the Gorilla Trainer in January 1958. (opposite page ) The cover for Alice’s Brady Bunch Cookbook, which contains recipes such as Marcia Marcia Marcia Muffins as well as stories from the set of the iconic show. Photos n (Clockwise from far left) HS15010, HS15009, HS15014, HS15013, HS15019
1. C (Though he did guest-star on The Partridge Family); 2. B; 3. A (But Kitty Karryall Cocoa is in the book.); 4. A; 5. D (A is from Dr. Seuss; B is Desmond Tutu; C is Joan Rivers.)
Photos n (Left to right) HS15011, Lon Horwedel
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Before much was understood about mental illness, before calls for compassionate treatment were raised, before a genius in the throes of a disorder could get help, there was Mark Walrod Harrington, a U-M professor and third director of the Detroit Observatory. His descent into madness would take him around the world, before landing him in an East Coast hospital where he could always name constellations, but never himself.
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n “A Log Jam”
by J. MacDonald
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The Fault in His Stars By Fritz Swanson
n 1901, logs covered the water in great dense rafts, all flowing down toward Port Blakely, Washington. One particular worker, wearing his spiked boots and holding his long hook, could make it across the logs with careful ease. He could roll the logs, he could run over them lightly, and, with his keen eye, he could tell moments before a jam would form, and pull the logs straight so that they could flow safely to the mill. He had seen men pulled under in the flow, the logs parting and then closing, the bodies never found. But that never happened to him. He was focused and attentive. The only problem was that most of the days he couldn’t remember who he was. When he would come home in the evening to the dirtfloored cabin built with great fir logs, he would take down a copy of Pliny’s Natural History and effortlessly read the Latin. After a time, he would close the book and see that in the front was written his name: Mark Walrod Harrington. Some days, he might remember his name all day long. From his little window he would take note of the position of the stars, and he might also say their names aloud. He could, from his cabin on Bainbridge Island by the lumber mill, see across the narrow water to the lights of the young city of Seattle on the other side. Perhaps he might recall that he used to live over there in the city when he was president of the University of Washington in Seattle.
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Cry Havoc
Harrington worked conscientiously as the new director of the Observatory, doing substantive work observing the asteroid Vesta, as well as the trifid nebula in the Hercules constellation. Yet his real innovation was equipping the Observatory with meteorological instruments, turning it into a weather station. As part of this work he founded, and served as editor of, the American Meteorological Journal. He was director of the Observatory for 12 peaceful and largely uneventful years.
Mark Walrod Harrington was a botanist, astronomer, meteorologist, field entomologist, and a geologist. He knew a halfdozen languages. He was director of the University of Michigan’s Detroit Observatory, the first civilian head of the U.S. Weather Bureau, a State Department liaison in China, and president of the University of Washington in Seattle. And then he was a lunatic.
And Let Slip the Dogs of War
Harrington was born in Illinois in 1848. He attended the University of Michigan from 1865 to 1871, earning his bachelor’s degree and then his master’s. Before he was even finished with his undergraduate work, he became a teaching assistant to Alexander Winchell, chair of the Department of Geology, Zoology, and Botany. As he began his master’s work, he was teaching a biology class (at the request of President Haven) and acting as entomologist on a University expedition to the northern shore of Lake Superior. In the early 1870s, he turned down a Regental appointment as a mathematics and French instructor to go with the Coast Guard to the Aleutian Islands, where he was the expedition’s astronomer. For the next two years, Harrington sent U-M more than 1,000 botanical and geological specimens representing about 300 different species from California to Alaska. Harrington returned to U-M in 1873 as an assistant professor of botany. In 1874, he married Rose Martha Smith, a woman from his hometown in Illinois. They quickly had a boy together but, in 1876, their young son died. Harrington had planned a year’s sabbatical alone in Germany, but given the loss, he and his wife both went abroad. While in Europe he and Rose learned German, lived simply, and mourned. Finally, he turned his attention back to botany, traveling to Kew Gardens in England. There he wrote the very first botanical paper identified with the University of Michigan, and on the strength of this publication, Harrington was elected Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. He was the first Michigan scholar elected to serve in a society that included Darwin among its members. In 1877, Harrington left U-M to join the State Department, which had hired him as a professor of astronomy at its Cadet School in Peking, China. He produced and published a translation of the Official Chinese Almanac for the American Journal of Science in 1878, but shortly thereafter, the State Department forced him home for reasons of “ill health.” Kenneth Lester Jones, a U-M professor of botany, describes Harrington’s career in a pamphlet for The Michigan Academician held in the Bentley Historical Library. Jones draws heavily on letters between Harrington and many of his
Photos n (Top to bottom) HS15028, BL001683
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He is a Dreamer; Let us Leave Him
friends at the University of Michigan, as well as the numerous books and articles Harrington wrote over his career. Jones notes this may have been a pivotal mental health moment in Harrington’s life, based on letters at the time. At least two, including one to U-M asking for his job back, were written in “an unusual broad hand” in contrast to his normally “close, tidy hand.” In his letter to U-M, he includes a brief C.V., but forgets to mention that he ever earned a master’s degree.
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resident Angell had also served in China as a diplomat and seemed very happy to bring Harrington back. His old professorial job was filled so, instead, Angell appointed Harrington to be the director of the Detroit Observatory in 1879. In 1882, the Harringtons had a second son, Mark Raymond. The boy, like his father, had a capacious curiosity. Harrington spent his days at the Observatory and his evenings and weekends with his son scouring the hills of the Ann Arbor countryside for plants and rocks and arrowheads. (opening spread) An engraving from the April 2, 1887 issue of Harper’s Weekly depicts lumberjacks rolling logs downriver to a mill, one of many odd jobs Mark Harrington had after he left his wife and son in 1889. (this page top to bottom) A portrait of Harrington taken circa 1890; the Detroit Observatory in 1888, when Harrington would have been its director. (opposite page) A June 1902 headline about Harrington appeared in The New York Times.
In 1891, he was appointed the first civilian chief of the U. S. Weather Bureau and relocated with his family to Washington, D.C. He published extensively on issues of the weather, setting the groundwork for the public consumption of technical weather information. He also worked on his book About the Weather, an introduction to meteorology for the layman. But in 1895, he was fired from the bureau by Grover Cleveland. It seems the bureau, which was composed of many military men from its days as the Army Signal Corps, could not tolerate Harrington’s erratic management style. In 1896, he became president of the University of Washington. By the spring of the next year, he had resigned. A special committee was established to report on his one-year term, and wrote this about his resignation: “[W]e are constrained to recommend that his resignation be accepted…particularly in view of the fact that…he has neglected his duties, left them to be performed by others, and proved himself incompetent to fill the office of President of the University.” In the fall of 1898, Harrington was a section director for the Weather Bureau in Puerto Rico, but again “health” drove him from the work. In the summer of 1899, he retired to his home in Mount Vernon, New York, with his wife and their now 17-year-old son. That same year, About the Weather finally came into print. Later that same summer, he told his wife that he had a dinner appointment. He stepped out the door and was gone.
The Ides of March are Come
For the next 10 years, Rose and her son knew nothing of Harrington’s whereabouts. It wasn’t until 1908, when Mark Raymond was out west collecting Native American artifacts, that he read a report in a local newspaper about a strange new admission to the Morris Plains Asylum for the Insane. He contacted his mother immediately, and she discovered that the man, admitted as John Doe the 8th, was in fact her husband. In 1909, the Detroit Free Press described Harrington’s situation this way: Former Michigan Man in New Jersey Madhouse Recognizes All the Stars, but Can’t Recall His Own Name
This was not the first newspaper to report on Harrington over the years. In 1901, the St. Louis Post Dispatch reported on Harrington’s time logging in the Pacific Northwest. In June 1902, The New York Times wrote about Harrington in a Chicago flophouse: “An Ex-College President Among the Tramps.” In the article, Harrington describes his time jumping boxcars with other men as they journeyed from Georgia to Louisiana. And then, in 1907, Harrington came to the Morris Plains Asylum without any memory whatsoever. He could still converse in several languages, and read Latin as easily as English. This caught the attention of yet another journalist whose article ultimately ended up in the hands of Harrington’s son. Rose came as soon as she heard, and confirmed his identity on sight. He refused his name, however, insisting she call him John Doe. He would allow the nurses and doctors to call him Harrington, but never Rose. According to the Detroit Free Press, after leaving his wife and son that night in New York in 1899, the next few years were a tapestry of journeys and sickness: Harrington traveled back to China, where he tutored students in English, became ill, and then saved up enough money to sail back home. He landed in the American South after passing through the Panama Canal. He worked on sugar plantations, then traveled west to stake a claim, and to work as a lumberman. From there he returned to the Chicago flophouse, and ultimately on to New Jersey, where his memory finally and completely failed. Alone and afraid in Newark, he came to a local police precinct seeking shelter from the rain. The specifics of his global perambulations are unknowable. The cause of his madness, likewise, is unknown. As far as Rose was concerned, however, the cause was specific. According to the University of Washington in Seattle, Rose claimed that Mark, while investigating clouds over campus during his brief tenure there, was struck by lightning. Mark Walrod Harrington died at the Morris Plains Asylum on September 10, 1926. n
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By Robert Havey
Jim Toy stood on the front lines of the gay rights movement in its earliest days, when physical harm, arrest, and harassment were par for the course. Now 85, the equality pioneer has donated his papers to the Bentley, showcasing years of perseverance that changed the face of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and well beyond.
Pride and Prejudice W
hen Jim Toy entered the small basement of St. Joeseph’s Episcopal Church in Detroit in December 1969, he felt nearly paralyzed with both excitement and fear. He and a few other men and women were meeting to form the Gay Liberation Front of Detroit, the first gay rights organization in Michigan. It can be difficult to imagine now, but meetings like this where potentially very dangerous for the participants. Sitting down on a folding chair in that church basement, Toy was outing himself as a gay man, putting himself at risk of being ostracized, jailed, or worse. But excitement was in that room as well, because Toy was there at the start of a political and social movement that would transform the entire country.
Photos n (This page) Doug Coombe; (opposite) Jim Toy
Disturbing the Peace
“Growing up in an Ohio village in the 1930s and 1940s, I felt totally alone,” Toy says. Homosexuality itself wasn’t quite a crime during Toy’s adolescence, but it might as well have been. Police in many cities (including Ann Arbor) would regularly arrest patrons of gay bars and charge them with the euphemistic crimes of “public indecency” or “disturbing the peace.” Until 1973, homosexuality was regarded as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association, appearing in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders alongside depression and schizophrenia. In December 1969, resentment of ill treatment by the police came to a head
when riots broke out after a raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York City. This bar in Greenwich Village, frequented by the gay community, was often a target of police raids, but this night was different. A crowd of hundreds gathered as patrons were loaded into police cars, shouting and jeering. Soon a full-scale, two-day riot broke out, resulting in the arrest of dozens of people. News of the melee quickly spread around the country. The Stonewall Riots proved to be the clarion call for the gay rights movement. A few short months later, Toy was surprised to see a notice for the “Gay Meeting” tacked on the bulletin board of his church. Toy had been the organist for the church since 1957, and was used to the radical politics in which the
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members and staff were involved, but any frank discussion of homosexuality was new. Toy talked with the church priest, asking what the meeting was and if they were even allowed to hold it in the church. Toy recalled the priest’s reply in a 2011 Huffington Post article: “If we can’t have a gay meeting here— whatever a gay meeting is—we might as well shut this God Box down.” Toy and the others founded the Detroit Gay Liberation Movement on January 15, 1970. A month later, Toy came to Ann Arbor to start a Gay Liberation Front branch. His commitment to the cause was complete. In a speech at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Detroit, Toy became the first person in the state of Michigan to publicly come out as gay. There was no turning back.
Organizing, Aligning, Ignoring
The real work soon began. Turning political willpower and angst into tangible results required countless meetings to set priorities, form committees, make contacts in the community—in other words, to organize. The leadership determined early on that the Ann Arbor Gay Liberation Front (AAGLF) should ally with other left-leaning political movements, particularly Civil Rights and feminist groups. Toy himself marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, D.C., in June 1963. Toy’s work was primarily focused in Ann Arbor, but without any official University of Michigan sanction. In 1971, the AAGLF wanted to host a statewide conference and applied for space. Their request was denied in a letter sent from the office of University President Robben Flemming, citing the need for additional “police presence” on campus. The conference went forward
Photo n Doug Coombe
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The Accumulation of Small Changes
Toy helped implement anti-discrimination laws in several towns and cities in Michigan, including Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Detroit. anyway after the vice president of the student council volunteered the keys to the Student Activities Building. Things might have ended there, as the administration sent an anonymous representative to the conference in secret to report on this burgeoning political movement. A warning of trouble from this person would have surely doomed the group to exile from campus. Toy later said the report described the meeting as “low numbers, low energy. If you ignore this group, they’ll go away.” As a result, Toy was soon able to secure space in the Michigan Union for an official student organization, the Human Sexuality Office.
Now called the Spectrum Center, the Human Sexuality Office opened in September 1971. It was the first organization of its kind not just at U-M, but the whole country. Its beginnings were very humble. Toy and his co-founder, Cynthia Gair, were given quarter-time appointments as program advisors and crammed into a tiny room with just two desks and four chairs. Since there was no model to follow with an organization of this kind, everything had to be done from scratch. Outreach and peer counseling were obviously priorities, but gay rights advocacy and community organizing were also crucial. Toy and Gair worked on many fronts to dispel myths and stereotypes of homosexuality. They gave talks, offered classroom presentations, and organized “consciousness-raising” sessions for University units that were involved directly with gay students, such as University Health Services and resident advisors. At one point, Toy’s office housed a 24-hour “gay hotline” for troubled students to call should they need emergency counseling. The AIDS crisis in the 1980s and ’90s put the organization to the test. The disease was claiming thousands of lives while the social backlash threatened to undo all of the progress the gay rights movement had made. Lines of communication to members of the gay community proved to be invaluable, providing informational flyers to bars, churches, and student groups. The political influence allowed them to combat radical, unhelpful plans proposed by anti-gay legislators, including one proposal to quarantine all people who were HIV-positive. With homosexuality becoming more and more socially accepted in
Pioneering Papers The Jim Toy collection is one of several at the Bentley that showcases the important work of LGBTQ leaders. Archived photos, papers, and correspondence illustrate advocacy, outreach, and activism in many facets of the gay rights movement. Washtenaw Rainbow Action Project, now the Jim Toy Community Center, was founded in 1995 to encourage increased visibility and acceptance of the LGBTQ community through education and political action. Craig Covey was the first openly gay mayor in the state of Michigan when he was elected in Ferndale in 2007. Covey also was the CEO of the Midwest AIDS Prevention Project and the Michigan AIDS Coalition. Office of Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Affairs at the University of Michigan deals with sexuality issues among students, faculty, and staff, including outreach programs, advocacy, and community organizing. Kathleen Russell, the assistant dean of students and director of Project YES at Eastern Michigan University, helped organize the Ruth Ellis Center, a center for homeless LGBT youth. Daniel R. Sivil was an activist and founding member of the Michigan Organization for Human Rights. He photographed many important moments of the gay rights movement in the 1970s and ’80s. Billie Louise Edwards was a Marine Corps photographer dishonorably discharged due to her sexual orientation. She became a preacher at the Metropolitan Community Church and the co-director of the U-M Lesbian-Gay Male Programs Office in 1987. Greg Kamm, a student activist during his time at Western Michigan University, was involved with the GLF group Toy founded in 1970. He joined the Peace Corps after college and traveled the world teaching English. (lead photo and page 14) Jim Toy photographed at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Ann Arbor in March 2015. (photo page 13) Toy’s collection includes images from a 1985 protest for gay rights in Ann Arbor.
Photos n (Left to right) BL018531, BL018532
society, Toy began to focus on political change. He started small, lobbying U-M to amend anti-harassment bylaws to cover sexual orientation. After success at the University, Toy helped implement anti-discrimination laws in several towns and cities in Michigan, including Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Detroit. Small, methodical legislative changes kept accumulating. In 2004, Michigan voters passed a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Seemingly a devastating blow to gay rights advocates, Toy was not flustered. He said in an interview published in a community center newspaper that he was “disappointed, but not surprised.” He had encountered vehement resistance to his ideas in the past and knew that this wasn’t the end of the fight. Instead of stewing in defeat, Toy redirected energy back to nondiscrimination policies, health care for transgender youth, and adoption rights. Michigan’s anti-gay marriage statute was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2015. Even without this ruling, it’s very possible that the amendment would have been repealed before too long. Support for gay marriage has surged over time, representing not just a generational change, but people changing their minds on the issue writ large. The patience shown by Toy and other activists has paid off. At age 85, Toy is still working, still giving interviews and talks to audiences around the country. Inevitably, he is asked to reflect on his life’s work, to pick an achievement that he is most proud of. He brings up his time counseling young gay people. “Hearing years later from people who were clients of mine that have said, ‘If it hadn’t been for you, I’d have killed myself.’ It’s not pride, but gratitude. I’m grateful I had the opportunity.” n
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Bound and Determined The class of 1849 was tenacious in its efforts to preserve memories of life at U-M
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hen the members of the University of Michigan class of 1849 graduated, they had daguerreotypes made, preserving their likenesses on a polished silver surface covered with glass. Their individual portraits were mounted in an ornate mahogany frame intended to be displayed permanently in the U-M library. When the class members returned for their 40th anniversary in 1889, they found that their framed portraits had faded and had been removed and forgotten, shoved under the eaves in the attic of Old Mason Hall. Determined to memorialize themselves, the class of 1849 reproduced the daguerreotype images on paper and prepared biographies of all 23 graduating class members along with information on non-graduating classmates. They added their recollections of the campus, faculty, and student life. In November 1898, the Regents officially received the book and voted unanimously for the following resolution:
This gilded volume can now be found in the Bentley’s archives. The book is open to the public—as the class of 1849 most certainly would have wanted.
Each alumni entry begins with a copy of a daguerreotype image taken in 1849 and concludes with photos taken decades later, such as the example of Theodore Russell Chase here.
That the University of Michigan tenders its thanks to her beloved sons of the Class of 1849 for making her the possessor of this precious record, and pledges them that she will carefully guard and keep it for the benefit of coming generations.
(left) A sketch of campus shows two buildings and four professors’ houses. A cistern supplied students’ water, and a wood yard contained firewood purchased from local farmers, which had to be carried up stairs to heat the sparse rooms. (right) A drawing of the student suites in the North Wing (Old Mason Hall) shows a much more rustic student experience that included a room for storing firewood.
The class of 1849 was the fifth class to graduate in the University of Michigan’s young history.
One hundred twenty-eight years after this volume was created (and 167 since the class of 1849 graduated), the handwritten text for each alumnus is still legible.
The album includes what is probably the first photograph of the University: a picture of North Wing and South College, two academic buildings that also served as dormitory, chapel, library, museum, classroom, and laboratory— the heart of University life.
A skilled bookbinder was asked “to make the volume last 500 years, regardless of expense.” The class invested $150 in the 800-page project.
Photos n Lon Horwedel; BL004479
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Re f erences By Lara Zielin
The Gift of Genius
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The work to tell the story of a remarkable inventor leads to a donation to support the Bentley By Lara Zielin
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tan Ovshinsky was a self-educated scientist and a prolific inventor with more than 400 patents to his name. In 1960, he and his second wife, Iris Ovshinsky, founded in Detroit the Energy Conversion Laboratory, which later became Energy Conversion Devices and resulted in many groundbreaking innovations in energy conversion and information. Ovshinsky was also a political activist, an artist, a voracious reader, and an entrepreneur. He was named “Hero of the Planet” by TIME magazine in 1999, among numerous other accolades and accomplishments. Lillian Hoddeson, an esteemed physicist-turnedhistorian, has been working on a biography of Ovshinsky since 2006, piecing together his complex life and work that “was dedicated to using science and technology to make the world better,” Hoddeson says. When Ovshinsky died in October 2012, many of his personal papers came to the Bentley Historical Library, while papers from Energy Conversion Devices were shredded. “A lot of materials that would have made the book easier to write were gone,” Hoddeson says. Fortunately, Ovshinsky preserved many papers in his home and in the offices of his later company, Ovshinsky Innovation, which subsequently came to the Bentley. To help fill in the missing pieces of Ovshinsky’s complex and innovative life, Hoddeson enlisted the help of Ovshinsky’s third wife, Rosa, a physicist who had worked with Ovshinsky Photo n Lee Balterman/Getty Images
on various energy technologies. Hoddeson and Rosa have become personal friends since Ovshinsky’s death, and Rosa was keen to help. “It is very challenging, very difficult, to write about Stan’s life,” Rosa says. Rosa lives in California and Hoddeson in Illinois, but in September 2015 they met at the Bentley Historical Library to dig through the archive together and to iron out details of Ovshinsky’s complex scientific and business dealings. “We scanned and copied many documents,” Rosa says. “Without the archive, it would be very difficult for Lillian to finish her work.” Hoddeson’s husband, Peter Garrett, also there to help sift through the archive’s many boxes, has joined Hoddeson as coauthor of the biography, to be published in 2017 by MIT Press. It is titled The Man Who Saw Tomorrow: the Life and Inventions of Stanford Ovshinsky. “It has loads of footnotes and references, but not as many as a full scholarly book,” says Hoddeson, whose work is often highly scientific but accessible to popular audiences. Rosa, meanwhile, was so impressed by the Bentley staff and their on-site help that she donated $25,000 to the Library last fall. “It’s so easy for a researcher to find what they need,” she says. “I made the donation to show my appreciation. The Bentley is with my heart because Stan’s archive is there.”
The Forgotten Feminists One U-M class uncovers lost aspects of Civil Rights history and makes them available online
hen U-M senior Shirley Rivas walked into the Bentley as part of Maria Cotera’s Latina Practices of Oral History course, she’d never been in an archive before. She’d never filmed a person’s oral history and most definitely she’d never been part of contributing to a digital archive. But all those things—and many more—happened during Cotera’s class, which focused on uncovering, documenting, and archiving Chicana/Latina activism in the 1960s and ’70s. “This course taught me more than I ever thought I’d know about the process of archiving materials and recording history,” Rivas wrote in her final assessment in an online blog. “[W]e did something about the systemic exclusion of a few women’s histories and…students were given the power to create history.” The course helps expand documentation about Chicana political and cultural activity, especially during the Civil Rights era. “Few history books include women or Chicanas,” Cotera explains. “The activism of these women has largely been left out of the historiography of the Civil Rights era.” As part of her coursework, Rivas recorded the oral history of a woman named Juana, and also helped scan historical items that were residing in Juana’s drawers and closets—not perceived, until now, as having historic value. Before jumping in, Rivas and her classmates came to the Bentley for a two-hour in-depth workshop about archiving materials. “Many of them were going to be handling archives in a person’s home for the first time,” Cotera says, “and the workshop helped them get a clearer picture of how institutional archives are handled. It also taught them how to follow clues an archival document might give them—what they could find out about a flier that doesn’t have a date on it, for example.” The class’s Bentley visit also showcased the limitations of archives in recording underrepresented histories. “The archive is alive and well for the wealthy, the elite, and the knowing,” one student wrote in his online analysis. “It is because of these inaccessible qualities that we get that difficult feedback loop where those interpreting the archive are those very same minds and bodies that are appraising what goes in the archive in the first place.” In spite of the challenges, the students were able to catalog, describe, and tag their archival materials, then upload them into Chicana por mi Raza, a digital repository documenting the development of Chicana feminist thought during the Civil Rights era (chicanapormiraza.org). The materials are now available to scholars, teachers, and community members. “Even though many students remained critical of the way history is told to us, they also came to appreciate history, and were astounded to uncover a history they knew nothing about,” Cotera says. Maria Cotera and her students interview Ana Cardona at her home in 2015 to document and archive Cardona’s oral history about Latina activism in the 1960s and ’70s.
Stan Ovshinsky in his lab, August 1969.
Photos n Courtesy of Maria Cotera
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The Big Picture
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By Brian A. Williams
John Jefferson Gibson was one of several commercial photographers vying for business in Ann Arbor in the last decades of the 19th century. Gibson’s studio was responsible for a remarkable series of images depicting the University’s facilities, laboratories, and classrooms featured as part of a U-M exhibit at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. We’ve selected a handful of images from Gibson’s vast collection at the Bentley, each a snapshot of U-M’s past.
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8. Extinct Edifice (background image) Campus buildings made good photographic subject matter. The buildings didn’t move, and students and alumni purchased the prints for souvenirs of their University days. U-M’s first library, which held 200,000 books and included an art gallery, was a campus showpiece. It was declared unsafe in 1915 and torn down. Today, the north building of the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library stands in its place. Last Picture Show Gibson died of tuberculosis on October 8, 1902. Samples of his photos are found in many of the Bentley’s collections and most are available online. Visit http://bentley.umich.edu/newsevents/ magazine for a deeper dive into his work.
Photos n 1. BL003660 2. BL002014 3a. BL002086 3b. BL002085 4. BL002091 5. BL000945 6. HS12743 7. BL006214 8. BL005185
1. Medical Pioneer Alice Hamilton had her portrait made as a member of the Medical School class of 1893. Hamilton was a pioneer in occupational medicine, was a resident of the Jane Addams Hull House in Chicago, and in 1919 became the first woman appointed to the Harvard faculty. 2. Lab Life U-M’s exhibit at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition included interior views of laboratories, hospitals, recitation rooms, and the library—all intended to “present to the visitor a somewhat comprehensive idea of the University as a whole,” according to the June 1893 University Record. Here, the Laboratory of Pharmacology showcases the facilities and a researcher hard at work. 3a/b. Faking the Grade In this before and after sequence, Gibson records the same group of medical students with one posing as the anatomy specimen being dissected, and then joining the group after the specimen’s skeleton has been revealed. 4. Anatomy of a Class Women studied anatomy in a separate facility from their male counterparts. This image of the women’s anatomy laboratory was made from the original 8x10 glass plate negative, the only known surviving Gibson negative in the Bentley Library. 5. Pigskin Pictures Athletics was a popular photographic subject, and Gibson took several of the early U-M team photos. This 1895 photo of the U-M football team was used to advertise the Gibson & Clark Studio. 6. Head of the Class Some of Gibson’s most remarkable work includes interiors, offering insight into rarely before seen parts of campus. This photograph features Francis Kelsey, professor of Latin language and literature, in a classroom in 1893. 7. Voices of the Past A formal portrait of the 1892-3 Banjo Club.
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Jazz, Guns, and Governments A U.S.-led effort in 1965 to win over Communist hearts and minds through music landed U-M Jazz Band members in the middle of gunfire in the Dominican Republic. This strange tale of U-M students, concerts, and Red Scare politics is showcased in a new collection at the Bentley, 50 years in the making. By Dan Shine
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lthough it probably didn’t occur to Lanny Austin (U-M ’66, ’67 M.A.) as the bullets started to fly on that Dominican Republic hotel lawn back in April 1965, he had to be thankful that he played baritone saxophone and not, say, the flute. Austin was part of a University of Michigan Jazz Band goodwill tour to Central and South America and the Caribbean when a rebellion broke out in the Dominican Republic’s capital city of Santo Domingo while the band was there. While waiting for the U.S. military to come get them, rebels ran through the crowd firing at a man running away. “It was automatic gunfire. People were screaming,” Austin, now 71, says. “I hid behind my saxophone case. It was very scary.” No one in the group was hurt in the shooting, and the Marines soon rescued the musicians, putting them on a ship to Puerto Rico, where they eventually caught a flight to Jamaica to complete the last stops on the three-month, 15-country tour. “The guys cheered when the [airplane] wheels finally hit the ground in Miami,” says Austin, a retired school music teacher and bandleader of the
Detroit-area AustinMoro Big Band. The Detroit media—and anxious parents—were waiting for them when they landed at Willow Run Airport. Despite the chaos in the Dominican Republic, the budget accommodations, and bouts of severe gastroenteritis that sometimes left the band shorthanded for performances, the 18-member ensemble wanted to commemorate the tour and their memories therein. Late in 2015, the trip’s 50th anniversary year, Austin and others in the ensemble began donating items to the Bentley. These items included photos, newspaper clippings, performance posters in Spanish, itineraries, pamphlets on each country, and brochures given to the band from the U.S. Department of State with titles such as “Democracy vs. Dictators” and “U.S. Policy toward Cuba.” Austin says many in the Jazz Band also played in the U-M Symphony Band
Photo n (This page and opposite) Lanny Austin, University of Michigan Band Collection
and knew members who had toured the Soviet Union in 1961 in a similar goodwill mission. Austin attended a reunion of the Symphony Band a few years ago to further coalesce former U-M musicians who had toured abroad in hopes of promoting future trips for students. “While at the reunion, I met some Bentley Library folks who had started preserving the ’61 tour, and at their suggestion I pursued the idea of also preserving our ’65 jazz tour,” he says. Uncle Sam Wants You That the band was even asked to participate in the ’65 jazz tour was a surprise. The U-M Jazz Band was student-led, wasn’t given a suitable rehearsal spot on campus, and while officially recognized
by the School of Music, it got little support from the school or the famed University director of bands, William Revelli, who was not a jazz fan. But the band performed well at a jazz festival at the University of Notre Dame— the band paid its own way—which was attended by three U.S. State Department officials looking for a jazz group for its Cultural Presentations Program. The government considered cultural tours like the one done by the Jazz Band to be a good way to win the hearts and minds of people in countries where Communism might be a consideration. To calm concerned parents, government officials told them “Uncle Sam has his finger on the pulse of Latin American politics,” Austin recalls. He and roommate and friend Joe Mallare (U-M ’66, ’67 M.A.) saw it simply as a chance to travel the globe and play music. “Lanny’s dad was a writer. My dad was a factory worker,” says Mallare, 71, a retired school band director who also donated tour items to the Bentley to ensure the trip is never forgotten. “Everyone we talked to thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime trip.” And the potential threats? “I was 20. I was invincible,” Mallare says with a laugh. The band flew to Guatemala in January 1965 for its first stop. U.S. embassies in each country arranged the concerts, which ranged from free shows in village squares, local schools, and universities, to performances with paid admission at local theaters. Audiences varied—from the very poor who didn’t know a thing about jazz and covered their ears—to aficionados who invited band members back to their home to see their extensive jazz record collections. There were moments of antiAmerican catcalls at
shows, but nothing threatening, Austin and Mallare say. As they entered each country, the band members received a packet about what to do and not do, what to eat and drink, and what to avoid. One piece of advice: keep your mouth closed while showering. Band members often brushed their teeth with Coca-Cola or beer. Bossa Nova and Bullets The tour was headed toward Haiti when it was decided that dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier—who studied public health at U-M—might exploit the band’s appearance for political gain. A detour to the supposedly safer Dominican Republic was hastily arranged. The band played a couple of concerts in and around Santo Domingo, and began to notice naval ships anchoring off the coast and military vehicles patrolling the streets. In the middle of one night, the band was told to grab what they could because they were moving to a hotel a mile down the road. From the roof of their new hotel, the band watched as their old hotel was strafed and bombed by military jets. The Dominican Civil War, which would last until September 1965 and eventually involve the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic, had begun.
Quickly, the hotel workers left, the candy machine was emptied, and the musicians went two days without food. Then came whispered words to assemble on the hotel front lawn at 4:30 a.m. Austin packed one suitcase and stuffed souvenirs down the bell of his sax. The sun came up on a quiet morning—no skirmishes between rebels and the military— so a couple of band members pulled out guitars and an alto sax to play bossa nova—a relatively new style of Brazilian music at that time—for the hundred or so Americans on the lawn. “All of a sudden bullets started to fly,” Mallare says. “Everyone dropped to the ground. We found out later they weren’t shooting at us. It was not that close, but close enough to duck behind cars.” Or saxophone cases. “I was the trip photographer, but I was ducking for cover,” Austin says. The stories of the tour— and especially from the Dominican Republic—have given the group great cocktail party conversation fodder over the years. Mallare and Austin, who live about seven miles from each other and play tennis frequently, often retold tales from the tour. “Lanny and I always talked about it,” Mallare says. “It was not the most glamorous tour someone could take, but what memories. But I will say our wives are tired of listening to us talk about it.”
(opposite page) The University of Michigan Jazz Band on a leg of their goodwill tour to Central and South America in 1965. (this page) After being told to gather on the lawn of their Dominican Republic hotel to await rescue by U.S. troops, shooting erupted and several band members hid behind cars in the hotel parking lot.
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Perfect Harmony
By Robert Havey
Detroit’s Harmonie Club was once the hub of German singing groups, whose music fueled fellowship and cultural pride. When the Harmonie Club went belly up, its historic German music was in danger of being lost forever— but found a safe home at the Bentley.
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(top ) This illustration comes from a songbook in the Harmonie Club collection, which has metal studs embedded into its cover (left ), presumably to keep it from getting stained if placed where beer has been spilled.
Photos n Lon Horwedel
he mid-1800s saw a surge of immigration to the United States from Europe, in particular from Germany. As the vast number of migrants spread out from the East Coast and settled in cities across the Midwest, many of their customs became immediately integrated into the American melting pot. From Christmas trees to hot dogs, unique German traits became simply American. German culture would persevere, however, in the rathskellers and concert halls all over the country with two great German loves: group singing and great beer. In 1893, members of the Gesang Verein Harmonie Singing Society—known later as, simply, the Harmonie Club—opened a building in downtown Detroit to serve as a gathering place for the city’s German-American population. The building featured a restaurant and basement bar, as well as a large auditorium and rehearsal spaces for singing groups. These groups, known as sängerbunds, were choirs that sang traditional German songs. The Harmonie Club had professional sängerbunds, but also kinderchors for children and many groups in between. Membership in the newly opened club soared. It was the heart of German-American life in Detroit. Massive singing festivals, or sängerfests, allowed choirs to meet other groups from all over the Midwest. The Detroit Sängerfest in 1930 had more than 4,000 singers from 110 groups. Each sängerfest would start with performances from individual choruses and end with every singer packed on stage in a “mass chorus.” The sound of thousands of singers belting classical German songs was enough to shake the walls of the auditorium. The Harmonie Club building still stands in Detroit, but no sängerbunds call it home after it went bankrupt in 1974. The music was saved and moved to multiple locations, eventually combining with music from the Concordia Club in Birmingham, Michigan. In 2015, the Bentley acquired six boxes of records from Karl W. Heidemann in Rogers City, Michigan, tracing the more than 100-year history of the Harmonie Singing Society. One artifact in particular survived and is stored at the Bentley: a songbook bound beautifully in leather with four brass studs attached to its front and back. Why the studs? To prevent the music from getting ruined after being set down on a beer-sloshed bar in between songs!
Collections, the magazine of the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, is published twice each year. Terrence J. McDonald Arthur F. Thurnau Professor Professor of History and Director Nancy Bartlett Associate Director Lara Zielin Editorial Director Robert Havey Communications Specialist Hammond Design Art Direction/Design Copyright ©2016 Regents of the University of Michigan Articles may be reprinted by obtaining permission from: Editor, Bentley Historical Library 1150 Beal Avenue Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2113
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The 1886 University of Michigan baseball team was managed by Frank A. Rasch, holding a top hat in this official team photo taken by John Jefferson Gibson. See more unusual and iconic U-M moments through Gibson’s lens on page 20.
Photo n BBT 1886A
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