Reflecting the broad interests and expertise of women architects around the world, these books discuss a range of topics. Texts on the Russian Avantgarde movement and Soviet civil planning are accompanied by analyses of the intersection between gender and architecture; Viennese garden design theory and fireplace innovations accompany contemporary criticism and Caribbean architecture textbooks. Biographies and anthologies complement conference proceedings and exhibition catalogs.
Autobiographies often exist at the intersection of archives and literature. This blog will highlight a selection of autobiographies from the IAWA collections. Spanning three different eras of practice, these texts offer a glimpse into the private experiences and public struggles of early women in architecture. These books are available to view in the public reading room at Newman Library.
Wendy Bertrand Enamored with place: as woman + as architect (2012) [NA1997 .B48 2012]
Wendy Bertrand is a registered architect from California. A student of both the cole des Beaux Arts (1964-65) and University of California, Berkeley, her extensive career has included major projects for the U.S. Navyand the U.S. Forest Service. Her archival papers are maintained by the IAWA. An excerpt from the authors page captures the book as follows:
“As a single mother, Wendy Bertrand accepted job security over the potential glamour, prestige, or celebrity of private practice, where architectural stars shine. She tells us how she pursued a career while continuing to value her perspective and insight as a woman, a mother, and someone who cares passionately about social equity. Her love of place infuses every aspect of her personal and professional life. She tells us of her adventures in travel, education, marriage, childbirth, motherhood, and work. This is also a story about a woman coming into her own as she matures, enjoys the fiber arts, and embraces the elements of her life that have enduring value.” (Excerpted from http://wendybertrand.com/enamored-with-place/)
Karola Bloch (born Piotrowska, 1905) was a Polish-German architect who practiced in Austria, France, Czechoslovakia, the United States, and Germany. Her German-language autobiography is rich with unforgettable stories, including an eyewitness account of the October Revolution in Moscow, her tenure as a Soviet informant in Austria, a Nazi raid on her home in a Berlin artists colony, the loss of her immediate family in the Treblinka concentration camp, and anecdotes from her marriage to Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. Karola Bloch was a founding member of the International Union of Women Architects, accompanied by several other women represented in the IAWA. Archival materials from her life are housed by the Ernst Bloch Archives in Ludwigshafen.
Lois Gottlieb A way of life : an apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright (2001) [NA737.W7 G67 2001]
I started working with Special Collections in September. I wasn’t sure what to really expect. I had previously done artifact analyses at my high school, but the work I have done here has been a bit different. The majority of collections I have worked on with Special Collections are either Civil War related or Engineering related. Both types had their own quirks. The Civil War soldiers and writers thought it was necessary to store hair in their letters and the engineers took few good pictures, though both were surprisingly good at sketching.
A letter from a Civil War Soldier in 1862. Collection Finding Aid:http://search.vaheritage.org/vivaxtf/view?docId=vt/viblbv01811.xml
As I read through each collection, these people’s lives, I consistently learned something new. I organized and processed a collection by a Chemical Engineer from Alaska who produced rocket fuel and science fiction. His name was John D. Clark. In addition, I organized the files of an Aerospace Engineer named Blake W. Corson, Jr. I found these two men particularly inspiring because they both believed it was their responsibility to serve the people around them with the skills they had. In engineering classes we are taught many things, part of the curriculum are ethics. Part of ethics are to use the skills you have to better the world. Both Clark and Corson embodied these ethics and consistently strove to make the communities surrounding them better. Corson, for example, created multiple documents detailing a better waste management system for Newport News, Virginia, that he eventually mailed to President Jimmy Carter. As I uncovered more documentation on these men I learned a great deal about their lives and I grew to admire them.
Correspondence Receipts from the Blake W. Corson, Jr. Papers (In Processing)
I was also reminded of my on mortality, many of the people who I now hold in high esteem are dead. Every collection I have processed was for someone who died. Many were eloquent in the way they worded their thoughts others went from talking about an execution to the minced pies they were eating. In my opinion some of the soldiers were heroes and some of them weren’t and some of them just wanted to see their families one more time. The engineers are heroes in their own way as well. Both were key cogs in the space agency machine working towards the goal of getting rockets off of the ground and making better aircraft for the military. All are dead. Sometimes I do not notice that these people are buried somewhere near their families or in an undiscovered grave waiting for the next Civil War historian to discover them. When I remember these things I remember why I sit at a desk for a minimum of two hours at a time writing a person’s name once or even a hundred times. The idea is that this person will be remembered and their distant relatives might find their names. They will be found as a relic from the past that a family can reminisce over or claim as their heritage. I am glad that I have been a part of that process, even if only for a little while.
Apollo Escape Craft Sketch from the Blake W. Corson Jr. collection (In Processing)Apollo Escape Craft from the Blake W. Corson, Jr. Collection (In Processing)
Since I have talked a lot about the things that I have processed I want to give you an idea of work I do. The steps seem repetitive, but I actually find the work relaxing and remedial.As a processing intern, my responsibilities have been relatively straight forward and simple. I wanted to end on these steps because they are the dictionary definition of what I do as opposed to my personal definition of what I do.
Step 1: Look at files. Read the files if they do not span longer than a cubic foot of box.
Step 2: Organize and catalog each document in the collection. Personally I color code with plastic clips.
Step 3: Review organization and file order, reorder.
Step 4: Label each folder with a box number and folder number.
In the days before World War II, the Annual Thanksgiving Day Military Classic was played in Roanoke between Virginia Polytechnic Institute (V.P.I.) and Virginia Military Institute (V.M.I.) to determine the state football championship. In addition to the game, there were many festivities, parades, dances at the major Roanoke hotels, dinners, and parties in Roanoke followed by formal dances at the German Club and Cotillion Club when the cadets returned to Blacksburg.
John J. “Pop” Owens, Mess Steward
In 1917 Pop Owens served his first Thanksgiving dinner for more than 500 hundred on the Sunday after Thanksgiving at the Mess Hall. Young ladies who remained over from the dances were guests in the private dinning hall along with their dates. The Thanksgiving repast became a much anticipated tradition at V.P.I. for as long as Pop Owens lived.
John Joseph Owens (V.A.M.C. class of 1879) was appointed Mess Steward for the 1917-1918 school year to replace the late John H. Shultz. Owens had experience with large dining operations at the University of Chicago and at Johns Hopkins University as well as with the Roanoke Elks Club. Under his stewardship, Mess Hall (soon to become the Dining Hall) took on a new excellence, and he became a favorite of the cadets and earned the affectionate nickname Pop. For Christmas 1917, the members of Company B presented him with a $50 gold piece in a handsomely wrapped box.
Pop Owens was legendary as the dining hall steward. Of course, there were a few bumps along the road. Owens introduced soft-boiled eggs for breakfast that first October. The eggs all disappeared up the sleeves of the cadets. None were eaten. After the cadets marched back to barracks and were dismissed, the air was suddenly filled with flying eggs in a brief but fierce battle. Pop never served soft-boiled eggs again.
1921 Thanksgiving Menu1921 Thanksgiving Dinner Menu
Thanksgiving week of 1921 was an exciting time as the Corps of Cadets was invited to participate in the celebration in Richmond in honor of Ferdinand Foch, Marshall of France and Generalissimo of the Allied Armies during World War I. At the Thanksgiving Day classic the next day, V.P.I. triumphed over V.M.I., 26 – 7.
The 1921 Thanksgiving Dinner menu includes Fatimas, a brand of cigarette marketed as exotic Turkish tobaccos but produced in the United States by the Liggett & Myers tobacco company. Collectible cards of popular actresses of the day were included with each pack.
1929 Thanksgiving Dinner MenuFloyd Mead and Turkey at a Football Game
The outcome of the 1929 Annual Thanksgiving Day Military Classic of the South would once again determine the state football championship. Although Floyd Hard Times Mead drove a pair of turkeys instead of the usual one, regaled in orange and maroon ribbons, V.M.I. won the game 14 – 0.
1929 Thanksgiving Dinner MenuBack of the 1929 Thanksgiving Dinner MenuBack of 1930 Thanksgiving Dinner Menu
V.P.I. avenged the past three years of losses to V.M.I. with a 24 – 0 win in the 1930 Thanksgiving Classic. Once again V.P.I. claimed the title of State Champions.
1930 Thanksgiving Dinner Menu
The 1930 Thanksgiving menu indicates a locavore concern with eating local foods with the Montgomery County raised turkey and Virginia salt peanuts and creamery butter.
View of the Quadrangle from the Air, from the 1931 Bugle
To learn more about the history of Virginia Tech, visit Special Collections on the first floor of Newman Library.
Source: Harry Downing Temple, The Bugle’s Echo: A Chronology of Cadet Life (Blacksburg, Virginia: Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets, Inc., 1998), vol. III, IV, and V.
One of our many roles in Special Collections is to shed light upon hidden histories, uncovering communities that are traditionally marginalized or forgotten by time. The long history of African-Americans in Appalachia, for example, has traditionally been overlooked. Through the communities of New Town, Wake Forest, and Nellies Cave (among others), Montgomery County has a particularly rich legacy to explore. We work with historians, genealogists, community members, and other institutions to document and preserve these stories for future generations.
Newman Library currently hosts New Town: Across the Color Line, an exhibit documenting a predominantly African-American community that bordered the Virginia Tech campus until the late 20th century. Developed by the Virginia Tech Public History program, the exhibit includes items from the Blacksburg Odd Fellows Records (Ms1988-009) held by Special Collections. The exhibit will be open from October 5 through November 20.
The Odd Fellows Records help document an important African-American civic institution in early 20th century Blacksburg. Researchers interested in the experiences of African-Americans in Montgomery County and greater Appalachia can find many other resources in Special Collections.Manuscript collections, photographs, oral history interviews, and rare books provide insight into the experiences of African-American communities from antebellum times through the present day. The Christiansburg Industrial Institute Historical Documents (Ms1991-033) represent a collaboration between the Christiansburg Industrial Institute Alumni Association and Special Collections to document the prestigious institutionthat educated generations of Virginia students from the 1860sthrough school integration.
Baily-Morris Hall on Christiansburg Institute campus with teachers, date unknown.
Another collection, entitled Hidden History: The Black Experience in the Roanoke Valley Cassette Tapes and Transcripts (Ms1992-049), includes approximately forty-six interviews with African-American residents of Roanoke, Virginia about the cultural, social, and political history of their community. The research papers of historian and community activist Richard Dickenson (Richard B. Dickenson Papers, Ms2011-043) include a wealth of information about local African-American history, including the free communities of antebellum Montgomery County and the many civic institutions of Christiansburg. The John Nicolay Papers, (Ms1987-027) include research files and oral histories that provide insight into churches, local institutions, and the historic African-American community of Wake Forest.
These collections represent a small fraction of the primary sources and publications that document African-American history in Special Collections. More importantly, these resources point to an abundant history still waiting to be uncovered.
Special Collections is collaborating with the Department of History, the Ex Lapide Alumni Society (the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer alumni network at Virginia Tech), HokiePRIDE, and the LGBT Faculty/Staff Caucus in an oral history project that seeks to document the LGBTQ experience at Virginia Tech. The University Archives started the project at the request of the Ex Lapide Society.
Beginning in the fall of 2014, David Cline and the students in his oral history classes studied LGBTQ history and began collecting oral histories to document the history of LGBTQ life in the 20th century American South and specifically at Virginia Tech. Cline is Associate Director, Public History Program in the Virginia Tech Department of History. Megan Lee Myklegard of Ocala, Florida, a junior majoring in marketing management in the Pamplin College of Business, collected additional oral history interviews. Myklegard received an Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) Creativity and Innovation Grant to collect and transcribe nine interviews. The University Archives also conducted oral history interviews for the project.
A new web archive created in Omeka by Adrienne Serra, technical archivist for Special Collections, features full text and sound of the interviews, along with images, historical documents, and a timeline of significant events in the LGBTQ history of Virginia Tech http://digitalsc.lib.vt.edu/exhibits/show/vtlgbtq-history. The new site uses Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) to enhance access to the oral histories, providing a word-level search capability and allowing users to move from the interview index to the corresponding moment of the recorded interview online.
Sharing Our Voices: A Celebration of the Virginia Tech LGBTQ Oral History Project will include an exhibit of Special Collections materials and web launch on Saturday, October 10, 2015 on the first floor of Virginia Techs Newman Library. The exhibit will be open on Saturday from 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm and on Monday, October 12 from noon to 4:00 pm.
The exhibit will have two parts. Each of the eight screens in the multipurpose room will feature different materials related to the project or to the interviewees. The projects web site and timeline will be on display so that users can explore the site. One screen will show a video of the 1986 AIDS Conference held at Virginia Tech. Its Reigning Queens in Appalachia, a film by Carol Burch-Brown, Professor, Studio Art and Creative Technology in the School of Visual Arts, will be screened. The film includes audio clips and photographs from the Shamrock Bar, a gay bar in Bluefield, West Virginia. Megan Lee Myklegard prepared a short film to highlight the oral histories she did through her ACC grant. Luther Brices chemical magic show will be shown. Brice, also known as Merlin the Magician, won both the Wine and Sporn awards for excellence in teaching at Virginia Tech. Mark Webers (class of 1987) student slide show on transvestites will be on display. Images from campus groups, including HokiePRIDE, o-STEM, QPOC (Queer People of Color), and the LGBT Faculty/Staff Caucus will be highlighted on another screen.
The second part of exhibit will be in the skylight area of Special Collections and will feature books, art, and archival materials related to the LGBTQ experience or created by individuals who identify as LGBTQ. Laurel Rozema, Processing and Special Projects Archivist, and Anthony Wright, Resident Librarian curated the exhibit.
During the month of October, there will also be a special seating area outside the multipurpose room with screens where one might access the new LGBTQ timeline on the web site and other relevant materials. A selection of books from Newman Library will be available to read or check out. Books include Gregory Edward Allen’s Lambda Horizons Collection and winners of the Stonewall, Lambda Literary, and Rainbow List awards.
Refreshments will be served at the Saturday celebration. The event is free, and the public is welcome.
All Strange Away by Samuel Beckett, Illustrated by Edward Gorey; published by Gotham Book Mart, 1976
A few days ago, for no apparent reason, except, perhaps all the rain we’ve been having, I thought of a quote from a book by Samuel Beckett. Even though it had been about forty years since I first read it, I remembered the quote quite well. The in-and-of-the-world lyrical beginning was especially unusual for Beckett, in my experience. Still, I could not remember which book it came from. Beckett was a favorite in those days, and I had read a lot of his work (maybe more than was good for me) in a pretty short period of time. I didn’t think it was a particularly famous quote. For example, it wasn’t the end of The Unnamable:
. . . you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
Nope, not that one. It wasn’t from the scene in Molloy that involves sixteen sucking stones, a number of pockets in a greatcoat (and trousers), and an attempt to place the stones in those pockets in such a way that Beckett’s character could most easily assure himself of sucking those stones in equal measure over time.
And it wasn’t the passage that begins with, “I can’t help it, gas escapes from my fundament on the least pretext” and ends with, “Extraordinary how mathematics help you to know yourself.” This is also from Molloy, and I’ll let you imagine what comes between those two fragments.
At about the same time I was trying to remember which book “my” quote came from, I realized that I’d never seen nor gone in search of a book by Beckett in Special Collections. This, of course sent me to the stacks (ok, to Addison, first) in search of Beckett. I know we have a large collection of modernist fiction, but over more than seven years . . . no call for Beckett. What I came up with surprised me. Not only was it a book I’d never seen before, it was one I’d never heard of. This required a bit of sleuthing.
The book, All Strange Away, was written in 1963–64, but not published until 1976 in the special edition we have in Special (naturally) Collections . . . an edition illustrated by Edward Gorey! (! The idea of a collaboration between Gorey and Beckett is amazing itself !) That’s a picture of Gorey at the top of this post, along with one of Beckett and the covers and spine from All Strange Away. Gorey wrote more than 100 books and illustrated many more. His dark sensibilities are often front-and-center in books like The Gashlycrumb Tinies in which twenty-six children whose names begin, in sequence, with each letter of the alphabet, have their deaths described (and illustrated) in one of twenty-six ways . . . all in rhyme, of course. (“M” is for Maud who was swept out to sea. “N” is for Neville who died of ennui.) Beckett’s text in All Strange Away begins:
Imagination dead imagine. A place, that again. Never another question. A place, then someone in it, that again. Crawl out of the frowsy deathbed and drag it to a place to die in. Out of the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war, no, not that again. Five foot square, six high, no way in, none out, try for him there.
All Strange Away, title page
Like several of Beckett’s works from the mid-sixties, All Strange Away takes place in a bare space, or nearly bare. A stool is present, but the only dynamic seems to be imagination, that and the alternate presence and absence of light. Oh, and, maybe, the space changes size. In this text, the space is called the Rotunda and only one person inhabits it. In The Lost Ones, started by Beckett in 1966 and published in 1970, the space is a flattened cylinder 50 meters around with rubber walls 18 meters high. Two hundred people inhabit this space, which leaves about 1 square meter per person. Light and heat fluctuate, and there are ladders with which to climb the walls, and recessed spaces in the upper parts of the wall to occupy. I remember reading The Lost Ones, too.
Gorey’s illustrations, one or two per page, grace the margins of All Strange Away. Here are three of them:
But wait, there’s more. How did Beckett and Gorey, who could be seen as an ideal illustrator for Beckett, ever get together in the first place? The key lies in the publisher, the Gotham Book Mart of New York. First, if you’ve never had the opportunity to visit the Gotham Book Mart, forget it. You missed your chance. This literary bookshop and meeting place—the kind of place that just doesn’t exist anymore—closed in 2007 after operating continuously somewhere in midtown Manhattan (it did move a few times) since 1920. It was still enjoying its long heyday when I used to visit in the 1970s and 80s. The James Joyce Society, for example, was founded there in 1947 with the founder and owner of the shop, Frances Steloff, serving as the society’s first treasurer.
If you lived in New York and were interested in things literary, it was a regular stop. If you were visiting town, you’d go to see books that you’d see nowhere else, along with dozens and dozens of photographs of writers, often in the shop, perhaps standing where you were standing.
Gotham Book Mart reception, 9 November 1948. Among the authors present: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Gore Vidal, Delmore Schwartz, Tennessee Williams, Randall Jarrell
Although Gorey’s first book, The Unstrung Harp was published in 1953 and The Doubtful Guest (1958), did much to establish his standing among a wider readership, it was his friendship with Andreas Brown, owner of the Gotham beginning in 1967, that really propelled his career. Actually, the Gotham Book Mart published more than a dozen of Gorey’s books, exhibited his illustrations, and, generally, brought him and his work to something like a mass audience. (Gorey’s annimation appears every time Mystery! is introduced on PBS.) One presumes that Brown may have brought the Beckett to Gorey, but I know of no details on the matter. I now know that Gotham Book Mart also published another collaboration between the two, Beginning to End, in 1989, just before Beckett died.
And . . . did I mention that the book is signed by both Beckett and Gorey . . . and numbered! Our copy is number 136 of 200.
All in all, this was quite the find. You never know what will show up in Special Collections until you have reason to look. (Today, I found out that we have a first [1854] edition of Thoreau’s Walden. But that’s a story for another day.)
So what was the quote that provided the germ for this post? It was from a work of Beckett’s called The End, written in 1946:
The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.
On July 30, 2015, the Lyric Theatre presejtedLiLiA!, a one-woman show performed by actress/playwright Libby Skala from the Groundlings Theatre in Los Angeles and the Arclight Theatre Off-Broadway to festivals in Seattle, London, Toronto, Vancouver, Edinburgh, Berlin, Dresden, and beyond. Reviewers have called it absolutely dazzling magical and alchemical, a unique and spellbinding production at once appealing and a privilege to view, and a thoughtful piece of history – political, theatrical and personal. Although the Lyric is no stranger to great performances, you might find yourself wondering how such a prestigious production came to tread the Blacksburg boards.
In 2003, Special Collections added a portfolio of architectural drawings by a woman named Lilia Skala to the International Archives of Women in Architecture. The collection (Ms2003-015) primarily comprises her work as a student of architecture at the University of Dresden from 1915 to 1920. Her student work includes architectural drawings, ink and charcoal sketches, and watercolor paintings. The collection also includes copies of her academic records, printed material about the architectural program at the University of Dresden at the turn of the century, articles by and about Lilia, and press material forLiLiA!
Special Collectionsjoined the cast in 2003, but thereal story – Lilias story – begins much earlier.
In 1896, Lilia Sofer Skala was born in Vienna, Austria. Although she had an early passion for the performing arts, Lilias family wanted her to have a more respectable career. Having graduated Summa cum Laude with a degree in architecture from the University of Dresden, Lilia became the first woman member of the Austrian Association of Engineers and Architects. She practiced professionally in Vienna for a time and, with the encouragement of her husband, began performing with the Max Reinhardt Repertory Theatre. Lilia gained wide acclaim in Europe for her stage and screen roles, but continued to claim her title, Frau-Diplom Ingenieur.
When her Jewish husband was arrested in the wake of the Anschluss – the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany – Lilia secured his release from a Viennese prison and fled with her family to the United States. Her portfolio of student work was among the personal belongings with which she escaped. As a political refugee in New York, Lilia attended night school to learn English and worked in a Queens zipper factory for her first two years in America.
Lilia returned to the stage as a housekeeper in the 1941 Broadway production Letters to Lucerne. She continued to work steadily on and off Broadway, with occasional television roles. In 1963, Lilia earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress as Mother Maria opposite Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field. She later received a Golden Globe nomination for her role in 1977s Roseland.An industrious performer, Lilia continued to work in film, television, and theatre throughout the 1980s. Among her many accolades was the Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, which she received in 1981 for her role in Heartlands. Lilias final stage appearance was in Lorraine Hansberry’s Broadway showLes Blancs (1989), at the age of 94.
In December 1994, Lilia passed away from natural causes in her New York home. Her granddaughter, Elizabeth Libby Skala, is also an accomplished actress and playwright. She began developingLiLiA!, a one-woman show based on her grandmothers phenomenal life, in 1995. Libby Skala was invited to perform this show during the 18th Congress of the International Union of Women Architects (UIFA), which was jointly hosted by the IAWA in July 2015. Her audience included Blacksburg locals and women architects from Argentina, Eastern Europe, Germany, Israel, Japan, Mongolia, Spain, and beyond. Many of the architects recounted that the performance was a highlight of the conference.
Special Collections currently has an exhibit on display featuring selections from Lilias portfolio and materials advertising the LiLiA! play.
Lilia Skala Portfolio Exhibit, July 2015
More selections from the SkalaPortfolio,Special Collections:
Lilia Skala’s passport photo, 1915
Charcoal sketch, University of Dresden coursework
Detail drawing of exterior door, University of Dresden coursework
Section drawing of house, University of Dresden course
Ink sketch, unknown building, University of Dresden coursework
Typescript Cover for Manuscript Proceedings and Notes, First Rochester Conference on High Energy PhysicsRobert Marshak in 1979
Original materials. One-of-a-kind documents. This is what one expects to find in Special Collections. Any Special Collections. All Special Collections. It is our business. But every once in a while, you come across a unique document and, “surely,” you say to yourself, “there must be another copy of it somewhere.” Yes, it is unique because it is a particular individual’s copy, maybe with his or her annotations, but this can’t possibly be the only copy that exists! And then you find out, maybe, it is. Could the proceedings from the first Rochester Conference on High Energy Physics, part of the Robert E. Marshak Papers, 1947-1990, be such a document?
The first Conference on High Energy Physics to be held in Rochester, NY took place on 16 December 1950. It was organized largely by Robert Marshak, then the new chair of the Physics Department at the University of Rochester. Marshak had started at Rochester in 1939 and, following the outbreak of the war, worked first in Boston on furthering the development of radar and then, in Montreal, contributing to the British effort to produce an atomic bomb. In 1944, he joined the American atomic effort at Los Alamos, where he was a deputy group leader in theoretical physics. With the end of the war, however, inquiry into the realm of nuclear and particle physics no longer needed to be restricted to its practical aspects.
That first meeting in Rochester followed by 20 months the last of the three Shelter Island conferences that had been organized by Robert Oppenheimer between 1947 and 1949. Marshak, who attended these meetings and at which he first proposed the influential two-meson theory, described them as having been “limited to a small number of theorists, with a couple of ‘token’ experimentalists,”* nearly all American. The goal for the Shelter Island meetings, which involved approximately 25 attendees, was to assess the post-war status of particle physics and to provide an outlook for future developments. Marshak’s vision was to invite a more equal mix of theorists, accelerator experimentalists, and cosmic ray experimentalists and to make the meeting truly international. The increased emphasis on the experimental aspect of the field reflected not only Marshak’s interests, but also the fact that five new high-energy accelerators had been built in the U.S. since the end of the war—including one at Rochester—and they were producing results.
An early proposal for the Rochester conference was sent to the University of Rochester’s provost, Donald Gilbert, on 11 January 1949, before the last of the three Shelter Island meetings. The proposal was for a five-day event that included a one-day trip to the accelerator facilities at Cornell. It came with a request to the university for $7500. A letter written by Marshak to Joseph C. Wilson, head of The Haloid Company (which would become Xerox Corp.), dated 22 January 1950, makes clear that funding for the proposal would need to come from private sources.
By the fall of 1950, the conference was planned as a one-day event and scheduled for 16 December. The Physics building on campus would remain open the following day for post-conference meetings/ presentations and Professor Wolfgang Panofsky extended his visit for a week to include a public lecture and special colloquia on new frontiers and recent experiments. A first round of invitations to general attendees may have been sent out in late October or early November, as the earliest acceptance among the materials is dated 7 November. Another general invitation in the collection is dated 29 November. Invitations were sent to approximately 100 top physicists as well to interested representatives of local industries, including Haloid, which provided financial support for the conference.
Interestingly, in a hand-written reply to a request that he participate in some of the post-conference discussion, Richard Feynman wrote:
Richard Feynman’s Reply, 13 December 1950
O.K. I’ll stick around a couple of days more and talk things over. We’ll worry about what the lectures are later. In the meantime something general like ‘Field Theory’ or something will do as a title I guess. You make the title, I’ll talk on it.
Three sessions were scheduled for the day-long program: a morning session dealing with experiments with nucleons, chaired by Abraham Pais; an afternoon session on experiments with mesons, chaired by Robert Oppenheimer; and an evening session chaired by Hans Bethe on experiments with photons and electrons. In a June 1970 article for “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,” Marshak wrote:
There were three sessions of invited papers at this first Rochester Conference, chiefly experimental reports on nucleon elastic scattering and meson production by nucleons and photons. Theoretical discussion on the experimental findings was useful, but I do not recall any breakthroughs.
The manuscript of the proceedings begins with a 6-page summary of the morning session written up by R.S., possibly R. Scalettar, a colleague of Marshak’s from Rochester’s Physics Department. What follows are approximately 120 pages of marked-up typescript, a transcript of the days presentations and discussion. As is clear from the manuscript, the days events were recorded on audio tape, which provided the basis for the transcription. (The fate of the original tape is anyone’s guess.) In addition to notes on various pages regarding “reel” and “side” numbers, the following note is found very early in the transcription of the morning presentation:
about 3 minutes of Ramsey’s speech is not available to us at this point because the plug to the recording machine was kicked out of wall.
Is it comforting—or, perhaps, simply humbling—to recognize that our knowledge of this conference of the most esteemed representatives of the most advanced technology of the day depended, in part, on the recognition that an electric plug had been kicked out of the wall?
There is also the following note from the person producing the transcript:
(broke tape at this point, after spending nearly two hours learning operation of machine and taking notes. It took from 30 to 45 minutes to learn the machine and listen to the speech once and the rest of the time was taking notes, a few words at a time and rewinding frequently when I couldn’t keep up or missed a word. B.)
There is some indication that written proceedings were to be distributed to the participants in the conference. It remains unclear whether this was done, but it appears doubtful. John Polkinghorne, in his 1989 book, Rochester Roundabout: The Story of High Energy Physics, states unequivocally, “No Proceedings are publicly available of the first Conference.” (p.198). I have found no others. In his 1986 book, Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World, Abraham Pais, a participant in the 1950 conference, notes his thanks to Robert Marshak for “making available to me an unedited transcript of that meeting.” (note, p.461). These are, presumably, copies of the typescript held here in the Marshak Papers. Lastly, in June 2014, a set of the proceedings of the First through Seventh Rochester Conferences on High Energy Physics was sold through Bonhams auction house. The description specifies:
Vol. I: mimeographed typescript draft with ms corrections, in 3-ring binder, with ms note to Abraham Pais from Robert Marshak, founder of the Rochester Conferences. (http://www.bonhams.com/auctions/21652/lot/130/ last viewed 10 July 2015)
Can we presume that this is the copy Pais refers to in his book? Are there any others? Perhaps not.
Marshak’s initial conference grew to become the event of lasting and international significance that he envisioned. The Third Conference, held December 18–20, 1952, had 150 participants, had governmental support for the first time, and included scientists from Great Britain, Italy, Australia, France, Holland, and Japan, among other countries. The Sixth Conference, held in April 1956, saw the attendance of the first Soviet delegation. The following year, 300 scientists from 24 countries attended the Seventh Conference, which ran for 5 days. It had become what John Wheeler, physicist from Princeton, called the “premier opportunity for the physicists of the world to exchange ideas.” After the Seventh Conference, the newly organized High Energy Commission of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) decided to establish a three-way rotation for the annual conference with the 1958 meeting in Geneva and the 1959 meeting in Kiev. In 1960, the Tenth Conference&—lasting eight days and with 36 scientific secretaries also participating—was back in Rochester, but for the last time before the officially named International Conference on High Energy Physics left permanently for more varied venues and a biennial schedule.
Robert Marshak joins faculty at Virginia Tech, 1 Sept. 1979
In 1970 Marshak left Rochester to become president of the City College of New York, and in the fall of 1979 became a University Distinguished Professor of Physics at Virginia Tech. He retired as Emeritus University Distinguished Professor in 1987. Robert E. Marshak died on 23 December 1992.
Although the conference that began with Marshak’s small one-day event is now being held around the world, it is still commonly referred to as the Rochester conference. The proceedings of that first meeting are now publicly available, likely for the first time.
First Rochester Conference, Manuscript Notes and Proceedings, page 1
All of this material and more will eventually find its way to this department’s platform for digital content, Special Collections Online, but until then, for this material, this post will have to serve in its place.
Notes:
*Marshak, Robert E., Scientific impact of the first decade of the Rochester conferences (1950–1960, in Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s, Laurie M. Brown, Dresden, and Hoddeson, eds., New York: Cambridge University Press, 198
Special Collections staff will be traveling to two events on July 17, the 2015 Virginia Cattle & Dairy Expo Field Day at Virginia Tech’s Kentland Farm and the “Women’s Weekend at Virginia Tech: Connect to Self, Others and Virginia Tech” at the Holtzman Alumni Center.
The Virginia Cattlemen’s Association expo will highlight Virginia Tech’s new Dairy Science Complex, a state-of-the-art facility.
Kentland manor house image taken March 1989 by Jimmie L. Price
Visitors will also have the opportunity to tour the Kentland manor house, which is part of the Kentland Farm Historic and Archaeological District that constitutes the core area of an extensive nineteenth-century holding located on the New River in northwestern Montgomery County. The brick house was built in 1834-35 by Montgomery County’s largest antebellum landholder, James Randal Kent (1792-1867).
Image from oil painting of James Randal Kent. Image by John Nicolay, 1982.
Kent acquired the land, then known as Buchanan’s Bottom, through his wife Mary when her father, Gordon Cloyd, gave the 1,630-acre tract to her in 1818. The house has sophisticated Federal and Greek revival detailing. The district also includes a hexagonal brick meat house. A two-story four-room brick kitchen used to stand between the manor house and the smoke house. Bricks used in building the house and outbuildings were handmade by enslaved artisans.
Four-room kitchen, on left, and meat houseRear view of Kentland Manor with Porch
At one time James Kent was Montgomery County’s most prosperous planter. In 1860 he owned about 6,000 acres, kept 40 horses and 1,100 other livestock, and owned additional personal property valued at $196,000. However, his fortunes took a turn for the worse during the Civil War. In his will of 1867, he gave the Buchanan’s Bottom property to his youngest daughter, Margaret. She married Major John T. Cowan (1840-1929) of Clarksburg, now West Virginia, and they lived at Kentland for the remainder of their lives. Cowan was a member of the original Board of Visitors at Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College. He served with the Confederacy and represented Montgomery County, Virginia in the legislature. He raised shorthorn cattle at Kentland.
Working sketch of Kentland made by Jimmie L. Price per Frank Bannister
Selected materials related to Kentland from the University Libraries’ Special Collections Department will be on display in the manor house, including items from the James R. Kent, John T. Cowan, and Elizabeth Kent Adams collections. If you are unable to visit Kentland on Friday, you are invited to visit the Special Collections reading room on the first floor of Newman Library to learn more about Kentland and those who lived there. The reading room is open Monday through Friday from 8-5.
Women’s Weekend at Virginia Tech
Archivists Sam Winn and Laurel Rozema will be at the Women’s Weekend reception on Friday with a digital exhibit called “Climbing the Water Tower: How Women Went from Intruders to Leaders at Virginia Tech.” The water tower story features the exploit of Ruth Terrett, one of the first five women to enroll as full-time students at Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute, popularly called Virginia Polytechnic Institute or VPI, in 1921. Another seven part-time coeds also enrolled that year.
To commemorate this anniversary, the IAWA has partnered with the International Union of Women Architects ( UIFA) to host the 18th International Congress in Washington, D.C. and Blacksburg, Virginia. This event will bring professional architects from around the world to the Virginia Tech campus for a week of research presentations, collaboration, and networking. In the months leading up to the congress, weve been working with members of the IAWA advisory board to research and prepare exhibit materials that capture the depth, breadth, and uniqueness of the IAWA holdings. It has been an amazing opportunity to connect with the real-world community represented in the collections.
Formally established in the summer of 1985, the IAWA began with the work of one tireless educator and architectural historian. In 1983, Dr. Milka Bliznakov wrote over 1,000 letters to women architects around the world, hoping to learn how they planned to preserve their legacies. Dr. Bliznakov was inspired in part by conversations with her students, who asked why they never studied or read about the work of women architects. Dr. Bliznakov sawthe consequences of leaving preservation to chance when the accomplishments of her own colleagues were marginalized or lost to history. Shewas determined to correct the omission of women from architectural history, ensuring that future generations, simply because of a lack of information [cannot] say women architects never did anything. [1]
Copy of the first letter sent out on behalf of the IAWA, encouraging women to donate their records.
Since that first summer, the IAWA has grown to document the legaciesand experiences of more than 400 women in architecture and design. In Special Collections, we collect, preserve, and provide access to approximately 2000 cubic feet of IAWA materials which include personal correspondence, detailed architectural models, exhibit panels, artifacts, and visual materials capturing every step of the design process.
The women represented in the collectionslived, taught, and practicedin more thanthirty countries across five continents. Drawing upon their rich and varied experiences, the IAWA collections contribute to a broad understanding of what it means to be a woman in architecture. For example, a visitor to Special Collections could learn about:
The AIA Fellow who, when asked by a prospective male employer if she cried on the job, responded, “I don’t, but I’ve made a few contractors cry.”
Many of the women whose records we maintain were trailblazers and pioneers. Their stories also speak to universal experiences, whether the woman worked in partnership with her spouse, managed her own firm, or deferred her career to support her family. Perhaps the most exciting part of working with the IAWA collections is that – much like the global community of women architects – they are always growing. We look forward to sharing some of these stories with UIFA delegates from around the world this summer.
