Library News

From Andrew Holbrook, Operations and Archives Librarian

Pencils, pens, and puzzles. Coffee mugs and candies. Even a yo-yo.

In honor of the recent Homecoming festivities, the library is pleased to present “Always an Eagle: Alumni Memorabilia from the Edgewood College Archives.”

When you graduate, most of what you’ll take with you will be your friendships and memories plus the knowledge and experiences gained from courses and extracurriculars. But maybe there will be a keepsake as well, some small item to serve as a reminder of your time on campus. Each object in our display does just that. From buttons to bumper stickers, they tell the stories of the Eagles who came before us.

“Always an Eagle” is located on the first floor of the library. When you come through the main entrance, turn left at the book display, head toward the Learning Lab, and look for our exhibit case along the wall.

Compiled by Andrew Holbrook, Graduate Assistant

In 2001, Edgewood hosts a conference on Black women writers, featuring author readings, musical performances, book signings, and a panel discussion. Keynote speaker A'Lelia Bundles (below left), a journalist and news producer, had recently published a biography of her great-great-grandmother, Madam C.J. Walker, who is widely cited as the first female self-made millionaire in the United States.

Attallah Shabazz (below right), daughter of Malcolm X, speaks at a Black History Month presentation in the Edgedome in 1990.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Edgewood’s enrollment of Black students triples. African American students come not only from Madison and Milwaukee but also from Chicago, Miami, and San Diego. Many countries in Africa and the African diaspora are represented, with international students arriving from Liberia, Nigeria, Ghana, and Trinidad. 

Political activist, professor, and author Angela Davis presents an address entitled “The Struggle Continues” at a Women’s History Month event in 1992. She is pictured below with Jonathan Øverby, host of “The Road to Higher Ground” on Wisconsin Public Radio. Dr. Øverby is an Edgewood alum several times over, having earned both a master’s and a doctorate in higher education administration. Dr. Øverby later became Edgewood’s first-ever postdoctoral fellow and is a member of the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame.

Chinosole Chitunda returns to campus as a distinguished alum in 1986 to speak on “the progression of self and social awareness through literature.” After graduating from Edgewood, Dr. Chitunda earned a PhD at the University of Oregon and taught around the country – and the world. “I want to take my audience on a journey beginning at Edgewood, to New Orleans, San Francisco, Africa, of course, and back to the United States,” Dr. Chitunda wrote in a letter (above right) accepting the invitation to speak at her alma mater.

from Andrew Holbrook, Graduate Assistant

Not all souvenirs come on keychains or in the shape of a three-inch-tall Statue of Liberty. We recently digitized two interesting souvenirs from the Edgewood College Archives that highlight notable people and places in our history.

“Souvenir of Edgewood Villa” is a small booklet from around 1910, commemorating Wisconsin governor Cadwallader Washburn’s donation of his Edgewood Villa estate to the Dominican Sisters of Sinsinawa in 1881. The governor’s former house became home to Saint Regina Academy, a school run by the sisters that had previously been located in downtown Madison. Sadly, the villa burned in 1893, but two years later, a new building arose and the school reopened as Sacred Heart Academy – which eventually evolved into the Edgewood High School and Edgewood Campus School we know today.

The booklet includes hand lettering on the cover and beautiful photographs and engravings inside. There’s also a quotation from Washburn: “I hope that you may find the place as pleasant and attractive to you and your school as I have ever found it.”

Fast-forward more than a century to the dedication of the Henry J. Predolin Humanities Center on September 29, 2000. Our second souvenir is a program from the Predolin dedication that was autographed by distinguished guest and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, who delivered readings in contemporary poetry during the ceremony.

Walcott was a poet and playwright from Saint Lucia. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. The award committee said his works displayed "great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment."

Learn more about Derek Walcott by checking out a book or online resource, and read more about Edgewood history in our digital collections.

from Elynor Gregorich, Graduate Assistant

The Torch yearbook was published between 1944 and 1972. Until recently, the archives had at least one copy of almost every yearbook- we happened to be missing 1954. By chance, a copy of our only missing yearbook was found in the memorabilia collection held by the Edgewood College Alumni Office, and through their generosity, our collection is now complete! The 1954 Torch has joined its fellows in our physical archives and been fully digitized- with a searchable transcript- for our Digital Collections.

But the 1954 Torch is not the only hidden gem presented to the archives by the Alumni Office. If you browse the yearbooks in our Digital Collections by year, you will notice that there are no entries for 1945, 1957, or 1970. What about those missing yearbooks? It turns out that they aren't missing, they just never existed. For one reason or another, no yearbook was created for those three years- or so we thought.

Mary Alice Clark Moore '57 stepped in to create her own version when insufficient funds prevented her class of seniors that from enjoying a traditional Torch. The Senior Memories 1957 photo album she made focuses on the Class of '57- their portraits, proms, studies, and social lives at Edgewood College. Unlike some volumes of The Torch, for which close to a dozen copies are safely preserved in the archives, this DIY yearbook is totally one-of-a-kind. Without people to preserve them, without the Alumni Office and the alumni themselves, unique objects and the memories they sustain might be lost. Special thanks are due to Rita Schmelzer Dufner '57 who identified Mary Alice as the creator of the album and to Alumni Relations Director Abby Bjerke who helped the album find its way to the archives.

Now, you can browse the pages of the Senior Memories 1957 album in our Yearbooks Digital Collection along with the rest of the yearbooks in our collection- including those published after The Torch ceased publication: the 1974-75 Edgewood College Journal, and three volumes of The Edge, 1990-1992. Looking for someone specific? Each yearbook has a searchable transcript! Just remember to include nicknames (Sue for Susan, Bill for William) and maiden names in your search, if known.

Toothpaste, Radium, and the Golden Age of Radio

A cryptic caption in a scrapbook from 1940s inspired an archives quest with two research objectives: 1) Who is Irium Girl? And 2) was she poisoned by radium seventy-five years ago? 

We found the caption “She uses irium” next to a photograph of a laughing woman with a bright smile. What on earth could irium be, and what had it to do with the woman in the photo? Upon realizing that irium sounds a bit like radium, and remembering that in the early 1900s, radium was a trendy health product, we got a little worried and did some frantic googling. Was this Edgewood College student poisoning herself with radioactivity? 

As it turns out, radium-sounding names helped to sell all kinds of products even when they did not contain any radium. Besides, by the 1920s (well before this photo was taken) people had begun to connect radium to some truly horrible health problems.  

Luckily for the student in the photo, irium does not actually exist! It is a made-up ingredient of Pepsodent Tooth Paste. Its name was a marketing contrivance designed to dazzle consumers into buying a product with a magic ingredient, and its use in the photo caption was probably a reference to the subject’s beaming white smile. 

This photo is found in an album from the late 1940s, though. Radium’s ill-effects had been known for decades, thanks to some nasty cases of radiation poisoning that went public. The recent film Radium Girls (2018) traces a particularly famous lawsuit by factory workers whose job was to paint watch faces with glow-in-the-dark radium paint. They suffered notoriously and horribly as a result of ingesting radium on the job, and in a very public trial, sued their employers for poisoning in 1928. 

So why were people still talking about irium in Pepsodent toothpaste, twenty-odd years after the Radium Girls case made it quite clear that ingesting radium is bad? Pepsodent toothpaste became very successful indeed, but it did not do so on the strength of its magic ingredient alone. Instead, its fame was tied to popular programming from the Golden Age of Radio. 

In 1929 Pepsodent used its Tooth Paste to sponsor the weekly radio show Amos and Andy which became extremely popular through the next decade; so popular, in fact, that movie theatres delayed the start of films that overlapped with the radio show’s timeslot. In 1938, the toothpaste moved on to sponsor The Pepsodent Show Starring Bob Hope, which ran until 1948.  

Check out this short, interactive article, A Success Story: From Near Extinction To Top Selling Brand by Danny Goodwin by Danny Goodwin to read more about how the toothpaste rose to fame and the shows through which it found success. You can even listen to the advertising jingle featuring Poor Miriam, whose beau were frightened away by her icky smile -- until she started using Pepsodent Tooth Paste!  “Dear Miriam, poor Miriam, neglected using irium...”   

Looking through objects from the archives, we often find things we don’t understand; missing labels, lost context, and unexplained references pique our curiosity. In this case, we had two mysteries to solve- the irium mentioned in the caption and the person featured in the photo. Who was Irium Girl? We combed the rest of the scrapbook in an attempt to find the answer. 

The scrapbook in question is Marshallites-Towerites 1946-7 Volume IV, a scrapbook created by residents of the Tower and Marshall Hall at Edgewood College as “a treasury of well-known and well-loved faces and of many delightful festivities we shared together,” as it says in the hand-lettered Foreward.   

Each woman (Edgewood College was not co-educational until 1970) has a profile page with her room number, a headshot, and a writeup. A few memorable activities are noted and illustrated in the calendar section, and the rest of the pages contain black and white photographs fixed in photo corners and captioned by few words; the human subjects are seldom identified by name.  

Among photos labeled simply (“the dance” and “winter sports”) are more playful captions: “A date with -- Gym” (four women in exercise clothes) and “I’m too beautiful for one man alone” (the subject standing at a distance with arms casually folded and ankles crossed, looking down at the photographer who stands below).  

When the curious “She uses irium” caption caught our eye, we naturally wanted to know who Irium Girl was. Our detective work consisted of flipping the brittle pages of the album back and forth to compare profiles, muttering things like “is the nose right?” "I can’t see her eyebrows because she’s wearing glasses.” “No, this can’t be her. The chin is a different shape” until we arrived at the tentative identification of Irium Girl as Virginia Kiefer, resident in #7 Marshall Hall. Here is her profile, nicknaming her “Tomah’s Tops”.  She contributed to the writeups in the Marshallites-Towerites 1946-7 and was part of the staff of the Torch yearbook, too. (You can read about her other activities in our Digital Collections.) 

Plenty of items in the Edgewood College Archives have made their way into our history without the specific intention of their creators. That is to say, people who make things don't always consider  how an audience will interpret or react to that creation in the future. Slang, inside jokes, and references just beyond the reader/viewer’s grasp make historical items vivid and evocative, but we audiences like to savor the specifics, too. So remember to write down names, dates, and details in your photo albums! The combination of familiarity and strangeness might be the most captivating part of an object from the past.   

If you enjoyed hearing about the Golden Age of Radio, be sure to check out Vintage Hitchcock: A Live Radio Play this weekend here at Edgewood College! Tune your campus radio to 100.1 FM or grab tickets for the performance in person at the Diane Ballweg Theater!   

Want a closer look at the Marshallites-Towerites scrapbook, or anything else in our archives? It's easy to make an research request! Just contact the library via email and tell us what kind of materials you would like to view or the topic you are interested in. We also have many photos and materials available online on our Digital Collections page. 

Image credit: Metal bottle of 'Pepsodent' tooth powder, London, England,. Science Museum, London. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) 

To celebrate Preservation Week, we bring you a behind-the-scenes look at Edgewood College Archives. Through photos, you’ll get a close-up look at some of the materials we store and care for.   

Archives suffer from stereotypes, just like anything else: dusty and unused. Disorganized. Full of “lost” treasures. Well, dust is certainly our enemy, but archivists, librarians, and curators work to make collections available, useable, and organized. In most cases, we want you to visit!  

Visitors are limited right now due to the pandemic, but this photo tour is your chance to catch a glimpse. Right this way!  

Factors like temperature, humidity, and light can all have a harmful effect on stored materials, so we keep the lights off and the door closed when no one is in the room. Our goal is to provide a nice, stable environment, relatively cool and dry.  

To make the most of our space, we use high-density shelving. Whole rows of shelving units can be moved along tracks on the floor, allowing just enough space for one aisle. If you need to access the materials in a different row, you have to turn the crank on the end of each unit until the aisle space is in the correct spot. Let’s start on the left, where we store the periodicals.  

Like many academic libraries, we have stopped receiving physical copies of some journals. Instead, we purchase e-subscriptions or licenses to databases. Lots of journals no longer even offer print subscriptions, just online access. Once you see our older issues of some journals, though, you’ll know why a year’s worth of issues is called a volume: at the end of the year, all of the issues would be bound into a book! 

 Looking at these bound periodicals, without even opening them, gives us a window into the past and how people thought about and interacted with printed materials. The photo above shows an early volume of Atlantic Monthly from 1863, held up next to many later volumes (the last bound volume in storage is from 1982). Most of them are bound in practical, hard-wearing red library bindings. But even though they are not as durable, the older, fancier examples contain some interesting secrets! Here’s the 1866 volume. Because the binding is cracked, you can see the newspaper used to reinforce the spine. It’s a hidden text, not an official part of the magazine, so it wouldn’t be included in any digitized version.  

From 1850 to 2019, our bound volumes of Harper’s magazine are another demonstration of changing times. That’s 169 years of history on two bookcases, and in a variety of different binding styles!  

Not all our periodicals go back so far or exist in so fragile a condition. From art to nursing to theology to education, our collection of journals spans a wide range of research interests, and we often respond to requests for a specific article to be scanned. That’s one of the most common quests the library staff make into the archives.  
Don’t forget the microfilm! For a little while, microfilm and microfiche were the most exciting way to preserve large amounts of content in a small space. The film itself is very durable, one of the most stable long-term preservation formats. No format is eternal, though, and microform has its drawbacks, such as the difficulty of accessing and sharing items using large, fussy machines. Our library still keeps a microform reader, but it is seldom used. Once digital technology entered the scene, microforms were mostly put aside.  Walking along the aisles in the archives though, the occasional microform box pops up, especially around ca. 1985, from the period when microforms were the hottest preservation technology!  

Moving on from the periodicals, next we come to the rare books. These are listed in the library catalog even though they cannot be checked out. Many have fine leather or publisher’s bindings or contain engravings or illustrations. The oldest is from approximately 1603, but most of them are not quite that old! About 80% of the 75 volumes are from after 1800. Here are a pair of volumes by Dante and splendidly illustrated by Gustave Doré: 

 If you took the Preservation Pop Quiz last week, you know that oversize books can pose a problem on the shelves. They need to be supported, or over time their own weight can result in damage to the binding structures. We don’t have the space upstairs for a separate section to shelve the oversize books, but here in the archives, there is a little more room. From volumes barely bigger than your palm to the hefty tomes larger than your head, each one is arranged in the best possible position.  

The books small enough to be shelved vertically are arranged by size so that along the row, each book supports the ones next to it. Some of the delicate, brittle, or damaged bindings are secured with fabric ties. You’ll also notice that the identifying information for each book is located on a slip of paper between the pages. No spine labels or barcode stickers on these books!  

 We’ve come to the end of the row on the left side of the aisle in the archives. Up next on the right side, starting along the far wall, are the maps and yearbooks. From 1994-1972, the Edgewood College yearbooks were called The Torch; from 1974-75 they were dubbed Edgewood College Journal, then later known as The Edge from 1990-1992. You can get a closer look, browse by year, and watch the changes in cover design through the decades by visiting our Digital Collections page for yearbooks.  

Now, we have reached  the final stage of our archives tour: on your right are the boxed collections which contain the greatest variety of records and artefacts.  These boxes all look the same from the outside, but inside you might find anything from old versions of the student handbook, to committee minutes from years past, to the writings and artefact collections of faculty members throughout their careers.  

The document boxes are specially designed for archival storage. The ones you see pictured here are for letter-sized papers. If you look closely, you can see the metal edge reinforcements at the seams and the loop of string at the bottom, a convenient feature if you need to remove a box from a crowded shelf without disturbing its neighbors.   

The boxes are made to store paper, so they are made from materials free from acid and lignin. Those substances are found in paper, and they contribute to its breakdown over time. Old newsprint on cheap paper is especially notorious for how quickly it becomes brittle and yellow. In a scrapbook or among other papers in a folder, the acidic newspaper can leave brown shadows on the surrounding pages as the acid affects everything nearby. Acid- and lignin-free boxes and folders mitigate some of that damage as the papers age.   

A big part of preservation is making sure collections are housed in stable enclosures. That is one of the reasons new collections, like this one, need to be processed when they arrive in the archives. Each item is different, and requires housing in the safest folder, box, or sleeve, with any useful information carefully recorded for future visitors to use in their research.  

This concludes our Preservation Week photo-tour of the Edgewood College Archives. Please remember to shut off the lights and re-lock the door!   

We hope you will visit us in person as soon as it is safe to do so. In the meantime, explore our Digital Collections through the library’s Special Collections website and reach out to us with any questions at LibAnswers@edgewood.edu.