Monthly Archives: April 2020

Walking with Edwin Way Teale at Trail Wood

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On April 26, 1962, Edwin Way Teale, at Trail Wood, his home in Hampton, Connecticut, wrote this passage:

A little after 5 am, just as the sun was rising above the trees along the brook, this morning, I walk down Veery Lane, up over the tundra and to Juniper Hill the long way. The air – down to 35 [degrees] — has an autumn sparkle. I see the earliest tent caterpillar nests shining silver in the crotch of a wild cherry sapling. All the ravines are filled with the yellow-green stippling of the spicebush blooms. Where a maple has fallen across the path near the crossing before Juniper Hill, I see where some animal has gnawed the bark from several branches near the ground. What was it – a rabbit? Because only the lower and smaller branches were attacked a rabbit seems to be the most likely possibility rather than a deer or porcupine…

Edwin Way Teale (1899-1980) was a naturalist, photographer and writer, born in the Midwest but who lived in New York after earning his masters degree at Columbia University. In the 1930s he worked as a writer and photographer for the magazine Popular Science and began his career as the author over 30 books on natural history topics. His books include Dune Boy: The Early Years of a Naturalist (1943), The Lost Woods (1945), North With the Spring (1951), Journey into Summer (1960), and Wandering Through Winter (1965), for which he won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

In 1959 Teale and his wife Nellie left suburban Long Island for 130 acres of farmland in Hampton. They named the property Trail Wood and developed a series of looping trails, which the Teales walked almost daily. He describes the property in such books as A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm (1974) and A Walk Through the Year (1978).

A constant writer, for much of his life Teale kept a daily journal with the details of his habits and musings. He also kept a special journal – The Trail Wood Journal – about his observations of the change of seasons of the landscape of his beloved patch of land.

Fifty-eight years after Teale wrote the journal entry noted above, the author of this blog post visited Trail Wood, which is now managed as a nature preserve by the Connecticut Audubon Society and open to the public. It is my impression that the landscape I walked on my visit on April 25, 2020, was fairly close to that of which Teale wrote about on April 26, 1962, excepting the existence of trail signs installed along the way for visitors. The streams of this mid-Spring were running freely, the day was warm and the bugs abuzz. While I cannot claim to be as observant a nature lover or as skilled a writer as Edwin Way Teale, I can claim the same joy he must have felt whenever he strode the trails, discovering whatever revealed itself to him.

Archives & Special Collections holds Edwin Way Teale’s extensive papers and photographs, truly one of our premier collections. Some of the photographs, as well as Trail Wood Journal, can be found online in our digital repository.

The finding aid to the Edwin Way Teale Papers is at https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/788

Trail Wood Journal, in our digital repository: http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:860204261

Photographs of and by Teale photos in digital repository: http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:MSS19810009

In late 2016 and the first half of 2017 author Richard Telford spent many months intensively researching the Teale collection in preparation for a book he was writing on Teale’s life. Mr. Telford contributed many posts to our blog, which are drafts from the book. In them the details of Teale’s life, as revealed in the diaries, correspondence and publications, are beautifully placed into context. You can find Telford’s writings, which he titled Reexamining the Life and Writing of Edwin Way Teale in our blog:

Great Years, Great Crises, Great Impact, November 2016: https://blogs.lib.uconn.edu/archives/2016/11/30/great-years-great-crises-great-impact-reexamining-the-life-and-writing-of-edwin-way-teale/

The Lonely Suffering of the Fallible Heart, January 2017: https://blogs.lib.uconn.edu/archives/2017/01/12/the-lonely-suffering-of-the-fallible-heart-reexamining-the-life-and-writing-of-edwin-way-teale/

Throwing Bricks at the Temple, February 2017: https://blogs.lib.uconn.edu/archives/2017/02/14/throwing-bricks-at-the-temple-reexamining-the-life-and-writing-of-edwin-way-teale/

Losing the Remembrance of Former Things, March 2017: https://blogs.lib.uconn.edu/archives/2017/03/16/losing-the-remembrance-of-former-things-reexamining-the-life-and-writing-of-edwin-way-teale/

Into the Beautiful, Free Country, May 2017: https://blogs.lib.uconn.edu/archives/2017/05/25/prologue-into-the-beautiful-free-country-reexamining-the-life-and-writing-of-edwin-way-teale/

Chasing the Erratic Spotlight of Memory, June 2017: https://blogs.lib.uconn.edu/archives/2017/06/29/chasing-the-erratic-spotlight-of-memory-reexamining-the-life-and-writing-of-edwin-way-teale/

Nobody and Somebody: The Loving Ways of Lone Oak, August 2017: https://blogs.lib.uconn.edu/archives/2017/08/24/nobody-and-somebody-the-loving-ways-of-lone-oak-reexamining-the-life-and-writing-of-edwin-way-teale/

The Connecticut Audubon Society, which maintains Trail Wood, has information about Edwin Way and Nellie Teale online and on the signs throughout the trails. Happily most of the boards are reproduced on their website. You can find this information at these links:

Trail Wood website: https://www.ctaudubon.org/trail-wood-home/

Trail Wood signs: https://www.ctaudubon.org/trail-wood-the-teales-legacy/

Teale bio: https://www.ctaudubon.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/tealebio1.pdf

Sales catalogs of the E. Ingraham Company, makers of clocks and watches

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For more than a century, the E. Ingraham Company was a prominent family-operated manufacturer of clocks and watches, with headquarters and plants located in Bristol, Connecticut. Most of its employees were natives of the Bristol region, and members of the Ingraham family of Bristol controlled its management.

The company was founded in 1831 by Elias Ingraham (1805-1885), who opened his own shop in Bristol as a cabinetmaker and designer of clock cases. After several mergers with other companies and name changes the company was known as E. Ingraham and Company by 1884. From 1884 to 1958, the period during which most of the surviving company records were created, the firm was known as E. Ingraham Company. In 1958, the name was changed to Ingraham Company, and in November 1967, when the company was sold to McGraw Edison Company, it became Ingraham Industries.Through much of the company’s history, members of the Ingraham family served as its presidents and in other official capacities. The last to hold the office of president was Dudley Ingraham, until 1954.

E. Ingraham Company’s products throughout its history reflected technological advances and changing consumer demands for timepieces. Until about 1890, the company manufactured only pendulum clocks. During the 1890s, they began making lever escapement time clocks and alarm clocks. Radical changes in manufacturing methods during the following decade enabled E. Ingraham Company to produce 30-hour alarm clocks, pocket watches (1914), and 8-day alarm lever and timepieces (1915). In 1913 the company began to manufacture the popular “dollar watch.” In 1930, Ingraham added non-jeweled wrist watches and in 1931 began marketing electric clocks.

The depression of the 1930s did not affect E. Ingraham Company as severely as it did many other businesses. Employment never dropped more than 15% and wage and salaries were not cut. By the beginning of the Second World War, the company was producing clocks and watches at maximum capacity in order to meet the great export need after many European supplies were cut off. However, in 1942 the War Production Board ordered E. Ingraham Company to cease manufacture of all clocks and watches. By August 1942 the company had entirely re-tooled for production of items of critical war use, such as mechanical time-fuse parts for Army and Navy anti-aircraft and artillery. Full production of clocks and watches was not resumed until 1946, but the years 1946 to 1948 were boom years for company sales.

The company was sold to McGraw Edison Company in November 1967 and its name changed to Ingraham Industries.

In 1980 the company donated its records to the University of Connecticut Library. They consist of account books, general business records, correspondence, printed materials, photographs, maps and drawings which document the company’s history from 1840-1967. Also included are general accounting and administrative records; records relating to sales, purchasing, production, and labor; subsidiary company records. The general correspondence, which comprises more than half of the records, is particularly voluminous for the years 1916-1947. 

Now available online in the UConn Archives digital repository is a set of sales catalogs of the E. Ingraham Company’s clocks and watches, beginning at http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:19800034Catalogs. These catalogs are a terrific resource for clock collectors and historians.

Outside Over There: Maurice Sendak and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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Maurice Sendak signs books at the UConn Coop bookstore on April 28, 1981. Photo: Jo Lincoln, Archives & Special Collections, UConn Library.

“All of my pictures are created against a background of music. More often than not, my instinctive choice of composer or musical form for the day has the galvanizing effect of making me conscious of my direction. I find something uncanny in the way a musical phrase, a sensuous vocal line, or a patch of Wagnerian color will clarify an entire approach or style for a new work.”

-The Shape of Music, Maurice Sendak, 1964

…

Maurice Sendak, celebrated and renowned author and illustrator of children’s books such as the revolutionary 1963 Where the Wild Things Are and 1970 In the Night Kitchen, held a life-long and deeply intimate and interwoven relationship with music. Holding in high esteem composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Wolfgang and Franz Schubert, he was in the habit of listening to music while working on his creations, and often, references to music crept into his preliminary and final drawings. A significant example occurs in the artwork for the 1981 Outside Over There.

Musically inspired and layered with resounding personal overtures, Sendak was already working on Outside Over There when stage director Frank Corsaro asked him in 1978 to design the costumes and sets on a production of “The Magic Flute” for the Houston Grand Opera. A catalyst for the creation of Outside Over There, Sendak explained: “In some way, Outside Over There is my attempt to make concrete my love of Mozart, and to do it as authentically and honestly in regard to his time as I could conceive it, so that every color, every shape is like part of his portrait. The book is a portrait of Mozart, only it has this form-commonly called a picture book. This was the closest I could get to what he looked like to me. It is my imagining of Mozart’s life.”[i]

In the 1964 essay, The Shape of Music, Sendak describes in beautiful terms the definition of “quicken” as it relates to illustration and animation and that to him to quicken “suggests a beat-a heartbeat, a musical beat, the beginning of a dance.” In other words, to “quicken” is to bring life into the inanimate – a source of rhythm so that a picture grows alive in the flow of imagery, color, and shape, or more succinctly, music in physical form. Outside Over There follows Ida, a young girl bearing the brunt of responsibility for caring for her baby sister while her father is away at sea and her mother immobile from melancholy. While music, or rather the act of Ida playing on her wonder horn and neglecting to attend to her sister, helps to cause the kidnapping of the baby by the goblins, music is the tool or action which redeems Ida. For by playing on her wonder horn, Ida drives and melts the goblins away and results in the siblings’ reunion and reconciliation.  

Sendak acknowledged that “right in the middle of Outside Over There, everything turned Mozart. Mozart became the godhead.”[ii] Dully, Mozart is seen in profile during the children’s return journey from “outside over there,” omnipresent to the scene and story but in shadow across the river in his Waldhütte, the creative cabin in the woods that becomes a recurrent Romantic theme for Sendak.[iii] In the final artwork for Outside Over There, for some drawings Sendak included not only notations for the creation dates, but also, the exact music which helped to inspire his illustrations. For example, for the artwork for page 13, a scene where Ida is playing the wonder horn and an ice baby is substituted by the goblins for the real child, the notation reads “Dec. 28, 77-Dec 30, 77 (tracing & inking)-Jan. 2, 78-Jan. 18, 78.” Above these dates, “string quartet in C- Mozart” is written in pencil. Mozart, by way of this inscription, receives his due acknowledgement as muse.

Outside Over There, after Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, is heralded as the final book in a trilogy of “variations of a theme” in which children cope with the day-to-day pressures of life by way of fantasy.[iv] Maurice Sendak, in speaking of Ida, says, “What she did is what I did and what I know for the first time in my life I have done. The book is a release of something that has long pressured my internal self. It sounds hyperbolic but it’s true; it’s like profound salvation. If for only once in my life, I have touched the place where I wanted to go, and when Ida goes home, I go home too.”[v] If Sendak’s love of Mozart helped to guide the textual and visual feel of Outside Over There and Ida’s journey, it is the underlying touch of the intangible which roams within the other world only to finally return home and perhaps, it is this element which ultimately touches the images and “quickens” them within their physical boundaries.

…

A curated playlist is available on Spotify based on notes made by Maurice Sendak on final drawings on deposit at UConn Archives & Special Collections. Follow the link to listen: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3YCXQ975xKzXhsWZ4aciG3?si=nrc-j7aKR7i5O0TZ8MYRjw

[i] Jonathan Cott, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children’s Literature (New York: Random House, 1983), 74.

[ii] Steven Heller, ed., “Maurice Sendak,” in Innovators of American Illustration (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1986), 81.

[iii] John Cech, Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 218.

[iv] Heller, ed., “Maurice Sendak,” 81.

[v] “Sendak on Sendak as Told to Jean F. Mercier,” Publishers Weekly, 10 April 1981, 46.

Resources in the Archives on Medical History

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As we now experience the shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us in self-quarantine, our thoughts turn to those who are essential to caring for those afflicted by the deadly virus. Doctors, nurses, EMTs, hospital workers and others in the medical fields are providing services for the sick and selflessly keeping us all safe. People across the country are rightly acknowledging and thanking them for their devotion to their work and to our well-being.

In the scheme of things at this moment in time the work of archivists seems pretty inconsequential, although my colleagues and I will contend that any event that we are dealing with in the present can, and should, be looked at through the lens of history. So that’s where we come in. That’s what we do.

The UConn Archives has an ample number of resources about the tireless work of those who care for others.

We hold an extensive number of collections on the history of nursing, many of which provide context and support to the materials found in the University of Connecticut School of Nursing Archives. This area is particularly strong in its documentation of the professional development, status, and legal activities associated with nursing by the organizations in Connecticut on behalf of their members as well as 20th century nurse training. There is limited, but significant, documentation of information on 19th century nursing activities during the American Civil War in the Josephine Dolan Collection. Formats accepted include manuscripts, diaries, correspondence, photographs, ephemera, sound recordings, and moving images. More information about these collections can be found in our collection management system at https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/classifications/9 but a few of the more significant collections are highlighted here:

UConn School of Nursing Records.  As early as 1937, public health personnel in the state explored the possibility of organizing courses for public health nurses at Connecticut State College but, lacking funds, the project was shelved. In 1940, a committee of 18 members was formed and in 1941 presented a report entitled “A School of Nursing for Connecticut.” The proposal envisaged a program for registered nurses leading to the Bachelor of Science degree and a curriculum which would include 33 to 36 credits in required general courses plus a major in Nursing Education, School Nursing/Health Teaching or Public Health Nursing. The newly created University of Connecticut (named changed in 1939) Administration decided that a School of Nursing that would provide basic preparation in nursing as well as curricula for registered nurses would meet the need expressed in the report. The new School of Nursing was established in Fall 1942; the first Dean, Carolyn Ladd Widmer, was appointed in July, 1942, and arrived on campus in August. The finding aid to the collection can be found at  https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/668

UConn School of Nursing War Veteran Oral History Collection, of interviews with nurses who served during military conflicts: http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:20100100

Josephine A. Dolan Collection of Nursing History consists of materials gathered by Dolan, the first nursing professor at the University of Connecticut School of Nursing, consisting primarily of correspondence of the Wolcott family, articles and proceedings of various nursing organizations.https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/346. Items related to wartime nursing and the Wolcott family can be found in the digital repository at  http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:199500288

Ona M. Wilcox School of Nursing, of records associated with this nursing school affiliated with Middlesex Hospital in Middletown — https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/923

Connecticut Nurses’ Association Records — https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/311

Connecticut League for Nursing History — https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/310

Connecticut Training School for Nurses Records, first school for nurses in Connecticut, open from 1873 to 1926 — https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/331

Eastern Nursing Research Society Records — https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/360

North East Organization for Nursing Records — https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/555

Meriden-Wallingford Hospital School of Nursing Records — https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/542

Eleanor Herrmann Nursing History Collection; professor of nursing at UConn from 1987 to 1997 and a member of the American Association for the History of Nursing, was one of its past presidents, and served on editorial boards and review panels for several professional journals. She also was a member of Sigma Theta Tau Nursing Honor Society; a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing — https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/43

The digital repository has a large number of photographs of the 2016 School of Nursing Commencement, available beginning here: https://collections.ctdigitalarchive.org/islandora/search/nursing%20commencement?type=edismax&cp=20002%3AUniversityofConnecticut

Records of the UConn Health Center. Founded in 1961 the University of Connecticut Health Center is composed of the School of Medicine and School of Dental Medicine, John Dempsey Hospital, the UConn Medical Group and University Dentists pursues a mission of providing outstanding health care education in an environment of exemplary patient care, research and public service. The Health Center’s main campus is situated in Farmington, Connecticut. The finding aid to the Heath Center records can be found at https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/713

UConn Health Board of Directors Records — http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:19970129BOD

Oral History interviews of those familiar with the early history of the Health Center —  http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:19970129OH

UConn Health Center Library’s publication Update, 1995-2002: http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20004:19970129Update

UConn School of Medicine:

Faculty Forums, 2006-2020 — http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:19970129FF

School of Medicine Governance — http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:19970129SOMResCouncil

Records of the UConn School of Pharmacy. The Connecticut College of Pharmacy was established in 1925 and located in New Haven, Connecticut. the course in pharmacy was extended from two to three years (1927) and to four years in 1932 (B.S. degree). In 1941, the Connecticut General Assembly incorporated the College as a School of the University of Connecticut. Beginning in 1942 diplomas were awarded in Storrs rather than in independent ceremonies at Yale University as had been the practice to date. In 1951, the School moved to the Storrs Campus of the University of Connecticut.   The collection contains an extensive collection of clippings (scrapbooks) concerning the program and its faculty, students and graduates in addition to historical papers, documents and reports about pharmacy and the program at the University. The finding aid to the collection can be found at https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/592 and a small number of items associated with the School of Pharmacy are in the digital repository at http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20004:19930077

Other collections touching on medical issues:

George W. Hanford correspondence from World War I. Hanford worked in the medical corps in the war and wrote to his parents in Kensington, Connecticut. The letters, from 1917 to 1918, can be found at http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:20050140

In Remembrance of Our Friend Tomie dePaola

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“An idea for me must be ‘heartfelt’–something that rings true for me–something worthy to share with children.” – from an interview with Tomie dePaola by Phyllis Boyson, Tomie dePaola: Storyteller of a New Era, New Era, Vol. 62, Issue 3, 1981

We are saddened to hear of the passing of beloved illustrator and author Tomie dePaola, donor, supporter and friend to the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection, held in the Archives & Special Collections at the University of Connecticut Library.

Tomie dePaola was born September 15, 1934 in Meriden, Connecticut. He received a Bachelor’s degree from Pratt Institute in 1956 and later a Master’s degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. dePaola shared his ideas with children in over 250 books over his 55-year career, and for that effort has won many accolades. In 1976, he was awarded a Caldecott Honor for Strega Nona and in 2000 a Newbery Medal Honor for the autobiographical work, 26 Fairmount Avenue. The Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, awarded dePaola the biennial Children’s Literature Legacy Award in 2011. A year later, the Society of Illustrators honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

In the interest of assuring that children and others would have an opportunity to explore the process of turning worthy ideas into award winning children’s books, dePaola assembled and donated 70 linear feet of archival material to the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection in 1999. dePaola was urged to preserve his papers by his former professor at Pratt Institute, Roger L. Crossgrove, who had also been Department Head at the School of Fine Arts at UConn and was co-founder of the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection. The mission of the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection to preserve the history of the creation of our best literature written for children with an emphasis on illustration as an art form appealed to dePaola’s concern for showing the entire creative process, including the errors, revisions, and failures that occur prior to an idea becoming a successful publication. dePaola continued to donate material through 2015, lending additional depth to the collection through illustrations, book manuscripts, new publications, and original artwork.

The Tomie dePaola Papers contain artwork and sketchbooks, manuscripts, research files and reference works, printed material, marketing products, and video recordings from 1949-2015. The strength of the collection is in the number of paintings and sketches produced by dePaola from 1953-1978, during his early artistic career. The collection also includes dePaola’s reference library, mainly graphic design, illustration, and art and craft magazines and encyclopedic book collections on the ages of man and historically important painters. Actively used by students and researchers, works from the collection are often shown and loaned for exhibition. All of Our Angels, a picture book dePaola created for a Pratt class project was recently exhibited in The Picture Book Re-Imagined: the Children’s Book Legacy of Pratt Institute and the Bank Street College of Education (Pratt Manhattan Gallery, 2016).

dePaola was a fervent supporter of UConn not only with the generous donation of his collection but also through his participation in the Connecticut Children’s Book Fair. In the 23-year history of the Fair, he joined us 9 times, most recently in 2018. A popular guest, he seemed to relish in the idea of bringing together children from all over the state to tell his stories, and to hear theirs. In fact, the committee learned early on that they would need to rearrange both the presentation room and signing spaces to accommodate the large crowds he drew.

In 1999 the University honored dePaola with an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, which was celebrated in true Tomie dePaola fashion with a lighthearted roast and plenty of singing. In 2007 the Library honored him with the inaugural Northeast Children’s Literature Collection Distinguished Service Award for his long-standing contribution to the field of children’s literature and support of the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection.

While dePaola’s legacy will live on in the archives, we will miss his personality and passion for children’s literature. We send our condolences to his friends and family.