Library of Congress's Blog, page 52

Hollywood, Houdini and the Halloween Seance of 1936

Houdini, performing suspended upside down outside B.F. Keith’s Theatre, 15th and G St. NW, Washington, D.C., Jan. 1922. Photo: National Photo Company. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by Mark Dimunation, chief of the Rare Book & Special Collections Division.

It was a setting befitting the showmanship of Harry Houdini:

The bright, clear, cold evening of Halloween, 1936, atop the roof of Hollywood’s high-profile Knickerbocker Hotel. There, the lights of Los Angeles glittered in the distance. Here, at 8 p.m., a dimly lit séance. Atop a table in the center of the attraction lay a pair of locked handcuffs on a silk pillow. A trumpet. A tambourine. Nearby, an invitation-only audience of 300 was crammed into a set of bleachers, waiting to see if the dead might come to life.

This was Bess Houdini’s final attempt to contact the spirit of her husband, the master illusionist who had died on Halloween 10 years earlier, and the expectations were high.

“The zero hour of the 10th anniversary of our departed friend is fast nearing the end,” began Edward Saint, the séance’s moderator, in a melodramatic flourish.

The session atop the hotel was recorded and, if you’re interested in more on the world of magic, you can also survey the Houdini and the McManus/Young Collections in the Rare Book and Special collections Division at the Library. They’ll take you deep inside the world of Houdini, one of the early 20th century’s most compelling personalities.

Bess Houdini, seated, at the last seance, and Edward Saint, right, with beard. Other men unidentified. Photo: New York World-Telegram and the Sun  Newspaper Collection. Prints and Photographs Division.

That Halloween night in L.A., Saint sat in a huge, oversized chair, the back of which extended well above his head. It was perched by the side of a small shrine to Houdini, replete with the man’s photograph beneath a dim bulb. Bess sat in an identical chair on the other side of the shrine. The set was near the edge of the hotel’s roof, so that the city’s HOLLYWOODLAND sign (as it then read) was clearly visible behind them. Across the country, more than 20 simultaneous séances were also getting underway, all reaching out for Houdini, as Saint said, “to come through.”

Among the others seated around the table were Charles Fricke, judge of the California High Court; two journalists; the past president of the California Spiritualist Organization; and several other high-end magicians and seers. As they had done each Halloween for the nine years since Houdini’s death, the group gathered in an attempt to contact Houdini’s spirit. This 10th attempt was, by an agreement Harry and Bess had made before his death, to be the last.

For the family and friends of a man who spent much of his career debunking spiritualism, sponsoring a Houdini séance seemed a serious contradiction.

He had, after all, attended séances in an attempt to contact his deceased mother and found them to be stuff and nonsense. He challenged mediums to demonstrate any ghostly communication that he could not, as a magician, replicate by a trick. The rapping on the table, the ghostly moans, things floating in the air … he showed that it was all done with special effects, hidden wires and the like.

But before Houdini’s death, he and Bess made a pact that the first to die would try to contact the survivor from the beyond.  If contact was not made within 10 years, the pact would be broken and the notion of communication with the dead refuted. Houdini promised Bess that his spirit would deliver a message in code and open a pair of locked silver handcuffs. Their secret code word was “Rosabelle,” followed by the phrase: “answer – tell – pray – answer – look – tell – answer – answer – tell” – a shorthand used between the two when they had been on stage together. In their code, it spelled “Believe.”

That coded promise was, as it turned out, final proof of the man’s genius.

After his death, spiritualists across the country, if not the world, said Houdini had contacted them. In Chicago, his ghost supposedly walked in to a room. In Kansas City, the ghost wrote a letter. In New Zealand, it drank a cup of tea. But — thanks to Houdini’s foresight — none could claim he had spoken in the code that only his wife knew.

Therefore, this séance was the last gasp.

Saint, who conducted most of the ceremony, was Bess Houdini’s business manager and companion — and a former carnival showman. He had the dramatic patter down, delivering a 10-minute oration on Houdini’s career before intoning a solemn Christian prayer.

Then:

“Ooooohhh, thou disembodied spirits,” he begins, “those of you who have grown old in the mysterious laws of spirit land, we greet thee….. Houdini … are you here? … Are you here, Houdini?” he said, his voice rising, “Please manifest yourself in any way possible … We have waited Houdini, oh so long…now this is the night of nights…SPEAK HARRY!”

“Pomp and Circumstance” followed, the stage music Houdini had used for his show openings and closings. The group waited for contact, for a message from Houdini. It never came. On the last part of the séance played to the radio audience, Bess announced: “Houdini did not come through. My last hope is gone. I do not believe that Houdini can come back to me or to anyone. … It is now my personal and positive belief that spirit communication in any form is impossible. I do not believe that ghosts or spirits exist. The Houdini shrine has burned for ten years … I now, reverently, turn out the light. It is finished. Good night, Harry!”

It was over.

The Rare Book Division holds the documentation of this event, including the radio script. Once viewed, of course, it becomes clear that the entire séance was scripted beforehand. It is replete with speaking instructions – “Pause.  Speak slowly.” It was all show business, kids. Nobody on the stage thought Houdini was going to “come through.” Perhaps a fitting bit of artifice to end Houdini’s life-long crusade against fraudulent spiritualists.

In 1943, nearing death, Bess recalled her decade-long vigil. She wasn’t sorry she had stopped, saying, “10 years is long enough to wait for any man.” And, on that score, we can agree, she closed the book.

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That Magical, Mystical Book On Witchcraft from 1584

 

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And so it begins…the title page of Reginald Scot’s 1584 edition of “The Discoverie of Witchcraft.” Rare Book & Special Collections Division.

We first ran this piece last year at Halloween. It proved so popular year-round that we reprint it this Halloween season. It was co-researched and co-written by digital library specialist Elizabeth Gettins, who also had the brilliant idea for the piece.

An ancient tome delving into the dark arts of witchcraft and magic…a book of doom…yet it lives…at the Library of Congress.

You’re forgiven if you think we’re talking about H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional book of magic, “Necronomicon,” the basis for the plot device in “The Evil Dead” films, or something Harry Potter might have found in the Dark Arts class at Hogwarts.

But, as the darkness of Halloween descends, we’re not kidding. A first edition of “The Discouerie of Witchcraft,” Reginald Scot’s 1584 shocker that outraged King James I, survives at your favorite national library in the Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room. (The Library has a copy of the original edition, as well as a 1651 edition.)

It is believed to be the first book published on witchcraft in English and extremely influential on the practice of stage magic. Shakespeare likely researched it for the witches scene in “Macbeth.” It was consulted and plagiarized by stage magicians for hundreds of years. Today, you can peruse its dark secrets online. How could your wicked little fingers resist? Scot promises to reveal “lewde dealings of witches and witchmongers”! The “pestilent practices of Pythonists”!  The “vertue and power of natural magike”!

Also, juggling.

It is one of the  foundational examples of grimoire, a textbook on magic, groundbreaking for its time and nearly encyclopedic in its information. Scot’s research included consulting dozens of previous thinkers on various topics such as occult, science and magic, including Agrippa von Nettesheim’s “De Occulta Philosophia,” in 1531 and John Dee’s “Monas Hieroglyphica” in 1564. The result is a most impressive compendium.

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The heavens, as used in witchcraft. “The Discoverie of Witchcraft,” P. 283. Rare Book & Special Collections.

But Scot wasn’t lurking about in a hooded cape, looking for eyes of newts and toes of frogs to bewitch mortals. A skeptic, he wrote to make it plain that “witches” were not evil, but instead were resourceful and capable women who practiced the art of folk healing as well as sleight of hand. Their apparently miraculous feats were in no way wicked. He wrote, “At this day it is indifferent to say in the English tongue, ‘she is a witch’ or ‘she is a wise woman.’ ”

Born in 1538 in Kent under the rule of Henry VIII, Scot was landed gentry. He was educated and a member of Parliament. He admired, and may have joined, the Family of Love, a small sect comprised of elites who dismissed major Christian religions in favor of arriving at spiritual enlightenment through love for all. By publishing “Witchcraft,” he meant to expose it as superstition, hoping to better England by forwarding knowledge. Since most people who were accused – and often hanged – for it were impoverished women on the margins of society, he hoped to garner social empathy for them and other scapegoats.

He also hoped to dispel the common belief in magic tricks performed on stage before gasping audiences. To do this, he researched and explained how magicians carried out their illusions. Beheadings? See the diagrams!

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Detail from “To cut off ones head, and to laie it in a a platter, which the jugglers call the decollation of John Baptist.” P. 282, “The Discoverie of Witchcraft,” Rare Book & Special Collections Division.

How to appear to “thrust a bodkin (needle) into your head” and survive? See page 280!

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Detail on how to use a false bodkin. P. 280, “The Discoverie of Witchcraft.” Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

This noble effort, as the kids say, went left.

The book was blasted by the religious faithful, according to “The Reception of Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft: Witchcraft, Magic and Radical Religion,” a study by S.F. Davies in the Journal of the History of Ideas, published in 2013. The King of Scotland, James VI, was outraged. Like many of his subjects, he was convinced that witches worked in concert with the devil. He thought a coven of witches was trying to kill him. He published “Daemonologie” in 1597, in part to refute Scot’s work. He also became King James I of England in 1603. There’s a legend that he ordered all copies of Scot’s book burned, but the historical record is silent on the subject. Still, it’s clear James I loathed the book. There was growing concern at the time that women’s use of so-called magic was counter to the aims of the state and church. Thus, James sought to instill fear in female communities and spoke out directly against witches and their perceived occultisms.

“Almost every English author who subsequently wrote on the subject of witchcraft mentioned Scot disparagingly,” Davies writes of the period. Scot died in 1599; the book was not republished during his lifetime. There was an abridged Dutch translation published in 1609, Davies notes, but was not republished in England until 1651, nearly three quarters of a century after its initial publication.

Still, the book survived, “mined as a source on witchcraft and folklore,” and his material on practical magic and sleight of hand “found a large audience,” Davies writes. For Scot’s original aims, that wasn’t good. Rather than debunking stage magic for the masses as he’d hoped, “Discoverie” became a handbook for magicians in Europe and America, well into the 17th and 18th centuries. Famous works such as “Hocus Pocus ” and the “The Juggler’s Oracle“ drew heavily on “Witchcraft,” thus spreading the very mysteries that Scot had hoped to quell. Davies: “[I]t travelled in directions Scot himself may never have imagined.”

Today, 435 years after it was published, the book sits on the shelf, silent, patient, having done the work its author did not want it to do. It’s almost as if…the thing had a hex on it.

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The First Book of Illustrated Witchcraft — 15th Century Visions

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Shape-shifting witches, flying on a pitchfork, causing a thunderstorm. Artist unknown. From “De Lamiis et Pythonicis Mulieribus,” 1489. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

This is a guest post by Mark Dimunation, chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Check back tomorrow when we reprint a witchy Halloween post from last year. 

Toward the end of the 15th century in central Europe, the craze for hunting witches was stoked to the level of hysteria, in part by a pair of highly influential works that formed a literary cornerstone of Europe’s fascination with and abhorrence of the occult and supernatural forces. More than 600 years later, copies of both are held in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

Our story begins in 1485, when Heinrich Institoris (Heinrich Kramer), an Austrian priest and Dominican inquisitor, launched a series of witch trials of such viciousness that they were ultimately shut down. He went on to further his campaign by writing, at the request of the pope, the most influential work on witchcraft at the time, “Malleus Maleficarum” (“Hammer of the Witches”), which became the second best-selling book of the era, trailing only the Bible. His cohort in this publication was James Sprenger, a prominent German priest. It was a work in three parts, with the most sensational section describing witches’ sabbaths, or secret night-time rituals that allegedly included witches eating children, having sex with the devil and causing deadly mayhem to the wider community. The last part of the book described and authorized the torture and executions of witches. Essentially, anyone could be charged with being a witch and, once charged, was presumed guilty and subject to horrific tortures that often ended in death.

These sort of draconian charges did not go uncontested. Ulrich Molitor was a legal scholar in the region of southern Germany and northern Italy when he was approached to write a discourse on the nature and power of witchcraft as a rebuttal to Kramer. He issued an early treatise, “De Lamiis et Pythonicis Mulieribus” (“Of Witches and Fortunetellers/Diviner Women”) in 1489. Given the inflamed notions regarding witchcraft at the time, Molitor was seen as a moderate. He supported execution for the guilty, but dismissed the idea of witches’ sabbaths as demonic illusions.

Molitor worked in the court of the Archduke Sigismund of Austria, who sought to provide a calm voice in the debate. Sigismund objected to the level of torture heaped upon suspects, for fear that “punishments incites men to say what is contrary to the nature of the facts.” Molitor’s book was printed widely across the realm.

But even though Molitor spoke as a moderate, his work would come to have a dark, lasting impact on society. “De Lamiis” was the first illustrated discussion of witchcraft, with several woodcut images depicting witches. These images, widely reprinted, delivered an impact wildly different from Molitor’s intent.

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“Double, double toil and trouble/fire burn and cauldron bubble…” Shakespeare’s witches scene in “Macbeth” was written some 150 years after this depiction in “De Lamiis.” Rare Book & Special Collections Division.

The illustrations portrayed popular notions of the behavior of witches, thus unwittingly entrenching those fantasies more firmly in the public mind. Rather than leveling the conversation with reason, they added fuel to the already heated discussion. Six images that referenced items in Molitor’s text appeared in the work, but they took on their own documentary meaning. There was a woman shooting an arrow; three shape-shifting witches flying on a pitchfork; a male witch riding a wolf; the devil seducing a woman; two witches before a cauldron; and three women feasting outdoors.

The images did not suggest mere “demonic illusion” as his text did. These witches seemed real and corporeal, the physical manifestations of the devil. Their impact was profound and threatening.

It was a common notion, for example, that although witches could take the form of animals, they would never fully cast aside their true identity as a human. Therefore, the book shows that even as those pitchfork-riding witches have transformed into beings with the heads of animals, they still have female bodies.

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The devil, in partially human form, seduces a woman in ” De Lamiis.” Rare Book & Special Collections Division.

Conversely, this was true of the devil. Regardless of his transformations into human forms, he always kept some remnant of his beastly self. In the image of the woman being seduced by the devil, for example, he betrays himself with clawed feet and a tail.

“De Lamiis” went through 43 editions between 1489 and 1669, many more than that of the fiercely influential “Malleus Maleficarum.” The imagery of witchcraft thus became entrenched over these centuries, with witchcraft trials and executions lasting until about 1750.

Today, scholars see these 15th-century depictions as windows into understanding the notions of gender and sexuality in the era, as well as the social and cultural impact of religious practice.

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Houdini and the Spirit Realm? Transcribe Hockley’s World of “The Beyond”

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Poster of Houdini performance

Stephanie Stillo and Amanda Zimmerman, both in the the Rare Book & Special Collections Division, contributed to this story.

You can have a lot of Halloween fun without COVID-19 worries, and one of the most original is to help out with the Library’s brand new crowdsourcing transcription campaign, “Seers, Spiritualists, and the Spirit World: The Experiments of Frederick Hockley.” Weird, strange and maybe a little bit creepy? Why, sure! Check out his sketch of the spiritual realm:

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Kind of a drag that Hades is next door to Earth, but, really, are you that surprised?

Hockley was a 19th-century British Spiritualist, Freemason and member of the Rosicrucian Society, a secret worldwide brotherhood whose members believed they had access to ancient, mystical knowledge. He spent over 60 years researching Spiritualism and experimenting with ways of communicating with “the beyond.” Through a medium — someone thought to have a special ability to reach across death’s locked door — Hockley attempted to connect with those inhabiting this other realm. The 11 bound volumes of his notebooks, each about 400 pages, are mostly in question/answer format, with Hockley posing questions to the spirit(s) and writing the answers that come through the crystal or mirror. There is also some automatic writing and astrological readings and charts.

Houdini, who researched magic and Spiritualism relentlessly, added the notebooks to his extensive collection on the subjects. They were included in his donations to the Library.

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A title page from “The Crystal,” Hockley’s notes from this conversations with the dead. Rare Books and Special Collections Division. 

The Hockley campaign is one of many crowdsourcing efforts the Library and an army of volunteers have taken up recently, ranging from the papers of poet Walt Whitman to those of baseball icon Branch Rickey. Trying your hand is free, of course, and you can sign up on the above link.

To help kick things off with this mystical campaign, Mark Dimunation, chief of the Rare Book & Special Collections Division, will present “Harry Houdini: Life, Library, and Legacy,” on Oct. 29 (Thursday) at 3 p.m. EST.  Dimunation will tell the story of Houdini’s remarkable life and his premature end on October 31, 1926. Dimunation also will discuss Houdini’s massive book collection and papers at the Library. It’s nearly four thousand volumes on psychic phenomena, Spiritualism, magic, witchcraft, demonology and evil spirits.

That’s not all, though! A couple of weeks later, join the always charming Amanda Zimmerman, Reference Librarian in the same division, for “Through a Glass Darkly: Frederick Hockley, Harry Houdini, and the Quest for Knowledge.” This talk explores the life of Hockley who, though a firm believer in Spiritualism (Houdini was the ultimate skeptic), shared Houdini’s unrelenting desire to pursue knowledge that would lead to the truth about Spiritualism. Details on both presentations are listed below.

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That’s a “spirit Indian” floating just below a monument at the spiritualist Camp Chesterfield, Indiana. 1944. Photo: Robert Chaney. Prints and Photographs Division.

Despite Houdini’s best efforts, the idea of a ghostly spirit world in the shadows of our own continued long after his death. His wife, Bess, tried to contact his spirit via seances for a decade after he died, to no avail. In another example, Spiritualists in Chesterfield, Indiana, set up a camp in 1890. In 1944, during the midst of World War II, it was still going strong and mystical things seemed to happen all the time. Ghosts didn’t mind showing up for photographs. “Psychic photographer” Robert Chaney took a picture of a stone carving of a Native American that year. When he developed the film — (creepy organ music here) — the print revealed a “spirit Indian,” in full feathered regalia, lurking in the shadows. Amazing.

Camp Chesterfield is still there, by the way, a peaceful 44-acre realm that is on the National Register of Historic Places and operates, per its website, as a “religion, philosophy and science.” Hockley would, no doubt, be proud of this legacy.

Event Details:

“Harry Houdini: Life, Library, and Legacy”

Thursday October 29, 2020 @ 3:00pm

Meeting number (access code): 199 302 8752

Meeting password: Houdini@LC-123

Join by phone @ +1-510-210-8882

WebEx Virtual Room will open 15 minutes prior to start time

Event Details:

“Through a Glass Darkly: Frederick Hockley, Harry Houdini, and the Quest for Knowledge”

Thursday November 12, 2020 @3:00pm

Meeting number (access code): 199 974 0579

Meeting password: Houdini@LC-123

Join by phone @ +1-510-210-8882

WebEx Virtual Room will open 15 minutes prior to start time

Request ADA accommodations five days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ada@loc.gov.

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Free to Use and Reuse: Autumn and Halloween Photographs and Prints

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“The Haunted Lane,” an 1889 stereograph, purporting to show a ghost scaring a man and a boy. Photo: Melander. Prints and Photographs Division. 

October, sweet October, drifts down upon us. A breath of fall, a morning chill, an early orange twilight. The farewell to summer, the beckoning of autumn.

And, just around the bend, the descent of winter.

It can be a magical season, so we offer you dozens of Free to Use and Reuse sets of autumn and Halloween copyright-free images from the Library’s vast collections of prints and photographs for you to use in any way, as cheerful or chilling as you wish. They’re part of the Library’s storehouse of images and we group some of them in sets, such as classic movie theaters,  travel posters, weddings,  genealogy, discovery and exploration and so on.

For this month, let’s get started with the ghostly image above, a 19th-century stereograph that shows a female specter of a certain age scaring the daylights out of a man and a teenage boy. The plausible explanation is that this apparition is a mom who, even in the afterlife, just cannot believe Junior and Dad still can’t keep this place together. That picnic basket isn’t going to pick itself up, for heaven’s sake!

Then again, it might also just demonstrate that even in the early days of photography, the idea of creating ginned-up images of ghosts and haints and spirits and duppys was a popular idea, giving us evidence that our forebears were just as scared of the dark as horror movies suggest we might be today. Also, that cheesy photographic stunts were as popular then as cheesy TikToks are now.

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Farmhouse and old barns, Monroe County, West Virginia, 2015. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith. Prints and Photographs Division.

Then again, autumn is also the harvest season, the gorgeous changing of the leaves when the relentless green of summer gives way to a burst of reds, yellows, golds, oranges and ambers.  Autumn, imagined: A long walk in the hills, the crackle of fallen leaves underfoot, a thin strip of road curving away into the stands of maples, oaks and aspens that tower above, casting early shadows.

This isn’t just the stuff of postcards from Vermont. Photographer Carol Highsmith worked her way through Monroe County, W.V., a few years ago, capturing the quiet beauty of a rural country homestead, as seen above.

We could talk about the composition and colors — the rectangular modern house, the aged barns with the triangular roofs; the bright yellow, the sun-faded red, the way the trees seem to be a palette of them all — but let’s just look at that wooden fence. It sags. The steel gate sags. There’s no latch, no loop of chain or stretch of wire to hold the pen closed. While the grass outside the fence is neatly mowed, the  barnyard is hopelessly overgrown. It combines to show, through the ways of man and nature, that life in the house continues apace, while the barn and its workings fade into rust, memory and rot. Is there still livestock on the place? If grandpa is still alive in that bright yellow house, one thinks, he’s long past being able to tend anything kept outside. You’re pretty sure that the family dogs, kept in the yard a generation ago, are now house pets.

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Halloween-season attraction in Fort Worth, Texas, 2014. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith. Prints and Photographs Division.

You’ve been here, surely.

The state fair, the traveling carnival, the roving circus. They show up in fairgrounds or parking lots on the outskirts of town this time of year, the lights flickering on at dusk. It’s a couple of acres of rides, sideshows, games that feature huge stuffed animals as prizes and, if you’re old enough to remember, ridiculous freak-show attractions that you knew better than to pay to see but did so anyhow.

Above, Highsmith happened across this impressive half-skull with fangs — or maybe just sharp canines — as the entrance way to something at a “Halloween-season attraction” in Fort Worth, Texas, the photographer’s notes say. It’s a gaping skull ready to eat patrons, sure, but the main barrier is a cheap black tarp imprinted with cats’ eyes that suggest you wouldn’t want to pay more than a couple of bucks for the thrills inside. That looming parking-lot light pole in the background emphasizes that you’re not in sophisticated territory.

Still, you’re not gonna come all this way and not go inside, are you? What, you scared?

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Mystery Photo Contest: You Solved Four of Them!

Cary O’Dell at the Library’s National Recording Registry runs our Mystery Photo Contest. He most recently wrote about twelve of our most difficult to identify entries. Readers solved four of them.

Well, we never said that it would be easy. We recently posted a dozen of Library’s last unidentified photos from a huge show biz cache we received a couple of years ago and once again asked readers to take a crack at identifying them. We had started with more than 800, whittled it down to 38, and this array from that group might have been enough to make even the most hardcore TCM fan turn off the TV and call it a day.

But you guys rose to the challenge, identifying four of the twelve, a stunning thirty-three percent success rate. In baseball, that’s a Hall of Fame performance. Nearly miraculous, too, considering how tough these last ones are.

Let’s see our success stories!

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Over the years, the most common guesses for this lady were Phylicia Rashad and her equally famous sister, Debbie Allen. Readers also thought she looked like actress Anna Maria Horsford, British athlete Denise Lewis or supermodel Beverly Johnson.

Instead, alert reader Collin Larsen took a look and had no doubt, posting: “Number 5 is April Washington Chandler.”  I went to Google. It turns out Chandler is a media personality and head of HBK Multimedia, a Maryland-based entertainment and lifestyle marketing agency, specializing in producing live concerts and special events. She sure did look like the lady in the picture.  I reached out to her via her company, sending our photo. She replied, “Yep, that’s me.” Bingo! Thank you, Collin!

That’s not our only thanks to Collin, though.

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I had long thought that this casually-dressed gent was a film producer, director or screenwriter and this headshot had been misplaced from a larger press kit.  Who was he? Well, let’s cut back to Collin. His second comment on the blog asked, “Is #4 Larry Brezner?”

Brezner produced films such as “Good Morning, Vietnam,” “Throw Mama from the Train” and, shortly before his death at age 73 in 2015, “Ride Along” with Ice Cube and Kevin Hart. He produced 31 films or television shows or specials during a 35-year career, according to his credits on the Internet Movie Database. I was able to track down one of his daughters, Lauren Azbill. She was thrilled and touched to see this photo of her late dad, a picture she had never seen before. That my email arrived a few days before the anniversary of his passing, she said, made this out-of-the-blue missive from the Library all the more meaningful. Thanks again, Collin!

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After we published our recent Mystery Photo array, it got reposted to various threads on Reddit. Someone saw it there and wrote, “This is SO BIZARRE!  That is some of my extended family!  That’s Jean and James Cantrell and some of their 12 children.  They were from Pleasant Hill, Oregon, most of the family still lives around there.”

At first, I thought this was a hoax. The writer was really detailed, I thought. Maybe a little too detailed. This sort of attempted trickery has happened before. Still, I figured, if this family really did have 12 kids, I should be able to track down at least one of them.

And I did. I reached Shawn (Cantrell) Williams after first phoning the realty company she co-owns with some of her sisters.  I asked for two of them before she said, “Can I help you?  I’m related to them.”  Indeed, she could! I introduced myself and what I had, photo-wise.

To my great surprise, she seemed to know exactly the picture I was describing even before I emailed it to her.

This shot was taken when Shawn, the youngest of the family, became and latest and last to graduate from the local high school. The local newspaper did a story on the family. Woman’s World magazine picked up the tale and this photo for their June 1986 issue.

Shawn is the sassy-looking one in front. “The photographer told me to make a funny photo, so I tried,” she says. Shawn’s dad is up in the upper right corner.  Her mom is next to him and her brother James, Jr. is on the end. The other brother, Joe, is not pictured; the family were farmers and Joe was in the field when the camera guy came by. The girls (left to right):  Shelley, Connie, Chris, Kerry, Willie, Molly, Gail, Holly, and Kathy.

I told Shawn that we had had quite a time trying to “solve” this photo.  I said, “We thought you were an ‘80s comedy.” She replied, “Oh, it was!”

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For curious reader Mike Nozzi, this photo stirred up a memory of a production that he saw of “Knickerbocker Holiday,” in New York in 1975 at the Hotel Dixie. Talk about a memory! Armed with that info, I reached out to the Kurt Weill Foundation For Music, which documents all productions of all of Weill’s works, and confirmed that this was so.  At far left, that’s actor Tom Sminkey (leaning over); at far right, with the thick mustache, is Otto Walberg. We’re hoping to identify the other actors.

Meanwhile, stay tuned! We’re down to 34 unidentified photos, and we’ll post another round next month.

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A Soundtrack of World War II

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A vintage illustration shows the recording project in the field. U.S. Marine Corps.

This story appears in the July/August copy of the Library of Congress Magazine.

On Okinawa, Marines chat about the weather as machine-gun rounds zip overhead. On Iwo Jima, tanks clank ashore under heavy fire. In Nagasaki, an American general instructs Japanese officers to honor the terms of surrender.

These are the sounds of the Marine Corps at war, preserved in thousands of hours of recordings made on battlefields of the Pacific Theater during World War II, then stored away for decades. In recent years, the Library has given them new, digital life and made them accessible in its Recorded Sound Research Center.

The Marines — using Library training and recording equipment — sent two-man teams into combat during the war to document the experiences of troops and provide real-time accounts of some of the toughest fights in Corps lore: Kwajalein, Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa.

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Correspondent Art King interviews two Marines. U.S. Marine Corps.

During lulls in the fighting, the correspondents would talk to Marines: What did you do in the fight? Anything you’d like to say to the folks back home? Many of the recordings were quickly transferred to vinyl, sent to the States and broadcast on radio to Americans anxious for news about loved ones serving on faraway shores.

All of the recordings — made at first on wire and later on film stock — were transferred to vinyl by the Marines after the war, then sent to the Library for safekeeping. During the 1960s and ’70s, Library technicians transferred the vinyl records to reel-to-reel tapes.

Then the tapes just sat, mostly unused.

Beginning in 2010, the Library and the Marines jointly undertook a project to give the recordings a digital format — and a new audience. Audio engineers at the Library’s Packard Campus digitized the tapes, and interns broke the digitized recordings into segments and created a descriptive record for each. The digital files were ingested into the Library’s archive and copies sent to the Marines.

Interns at Quantico then created detailed summaries of the contents and linked the recordings to photos, articles and records from the Corps archives — documents of the war as Marines heard it and lived it on far-flung battlefields across the vast expanses of the Pacific.

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My Job: Andrew Huber — Helping Veterans Tell Their Stories

Andrew Huber, a liaison specialist in the Veterans History Project, tells us what it’s like to help veterans tell their stories.

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Andrew Huber. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Describe your work at the Library.

My work is really a microcosm of all the work the Veterans History Project (VHP) does. Ultimately, what I and my fellow liaison specialists do is introduce people to VHP and teach them how to participate and create collections materials. Our processing team catalogues and preserves those collections, and our librarians and archivists make them available to Library patrons.

This takes many forms and is almost never a solo effort. One day we may be briefing a congressional office so they can do VHP interviews in their district. The next, we might be behind a table at a local veterans resource fair or leading online workshops teaching volunteers how to do oral history. Some days we are in our studio conducting interviews. Many are spent entirely on the phone or writing emails, chasing leads and making arrangements to make all those things happen.

My colleagues and I all have our own strengths and specialties. Lisa Taylor oversees the production of our award-winning public service announcements, Owen Rogers is a board member for oral history in the mid-Atlantic region, and Kerry Ward works with Gold Star families, helping them tell the stories of those who gave their lives in service to our country. I love helping student veterans organize on-campus interview events. But really everyone does a little bit of everything — nothing in VHP is done in a vacuum.

How did you prepare for your position?

I studied anthropology in college, but my previous job helped the most. I worked for a trade association organizing volunteers from member companies to create projects that would help promote the industry. It’s easier to convince someone to spend their weekend recording war stories than it is to convince a materials engineer to spend their weekend in a trade show booth.

What have been your most memorable experiences at the Library?

It’s too hard to choose just one. The most rewarding experiences are when we get to see how our work affects people. I helped a Student Veterans of America chapter at a community college organize an event to interview local veterans, and every business in town had their flyer posted right in the window.

People were so proud to come and tell their stories and so moved that someone cared enough about their service to interview them. There were a lot of hugs and tears. The most satisfying experiences are when a big collaborative effort comes together, like in November when we all worked together to put on a full week of live programming showcasing veterans in the arts. The most unique experience I had was spending a week in the Yakima Nation, learning traditional healing methods for PTSD and interviewing Native veterans.

What are your favorite collection items and why?

Again, there are just too many to pick just one. The very first interview I did was my father, an Air Force veteran, so obviously that one is very special to me. Another is the Wendy Cram collection. Wendy was a skier who qualified for the 1940 Olympics, but when the games were canceled due to the war he was drafted and sent to Colorado to train 10th Mountain Division officers how to ski. He donated a whole photo album documenting his service, which included some very intense fighting in the Italian Alps.

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Jason Reynolds: Grab the Mic October Newsletter

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This is a monthly guest post by Jason Reynolds,  the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. His last column was about the National Book Festival.

And just like that, summer is over. The weather is beginning to break. The morning air is crisp, and suddenly there are pumpkins everywhere. And though the seasons are transitioning, which means we’re about to experience the strange time warp that comes from consecutive holidays, all I can seem to think about is you. Because you are in school. At least, a form of school. Most of you are at home sitting in front of your computers learning from a distance. Your kitchen tables now classroom desks, your refrigerator now the cafeteria. And because I know all this is going on, it’s hard to discuss my plans to carve my face into a pumpkin and leave it on my older brother’s doorstep as a joke. Or how I’m so curious about what it’ll be like to attend a Halloween party over Zoom. Maybe I should figure out how to be Zoom for Halloween! I don’t know. The point is, I haven’t had the energy to really think about any of that, because I can’t stop thinking about … you.

So, here are five things I want you to know as you continue on this strange journey of distance learning:

This isn’t awesome for anyone, so be easy on yourself. I talked to some young people recently about this, and they were expressing how sometimes it’s harder to grasp the concepts being taught, because the teacher may be moving too fast (we all learn differently) or the Wi-Fi at home isn’t strong enough (all signals aren’t created equal) or there are distractions in the home that are sometimes hard to avoid (Grandma, please turn “Let’s Make A Deal” down!). Listen, as someone who also uses Zoom all day every day, I feel you. It’s brutal. And it’s not just you. We’re all having a hard time. So be gentle with yourself and do the best you can.
And speaking of us all having a hard time, your teachers are also struggling. Have you ever tried to talk to someone through a window? Like, with the window down? I mean, down when you’re in the house, up when you’re in the car. You get what I’m trying to. … You ever tried to explain something to someone through a thin piece of glass? You would think it wouldn’t be so hard, but the fact is, as humans, we communicate best without filters between us. Oh, there’s a great joke about social media that I should put right here, but I’m trying to stay focused, even though it’s just so hard to stay focused during these times. Ugh. But anyway, your teachers are trying to communicate with you through a filter. And the trippy part is, it doesn’t sound muffled, but it is. It’s the difference between a song on the radio and a live show. At the live show, even if you know all the words to a song you’ve been singing for years, it feels different when you’re right there in front of the singer. Also, more importantly, your teachers are teaching for six hours a day and most of that time is spent just talking to a black screen. Which is wild. And hard. And exhausting. So, yeah … we’re all doing our best.
If you have friends who live around you, and you feel like it would be better to work with them than to do all this by yourself (and you’re sure everyone is safe and healthy), distance learn with them. I think we’re calling these “pods.” Basically, a study group. It creates a silo of human energy and provides multiple sets of eyes and ears to weigh in on the same things so that if one person misses something, someone else may have it. I’ve been preaching this idea that collaboration is key. Right now, it’s never been more necessary. Plus, there’s more space for jokes. A little laughter changes the temperature of things. Seriously, it’s important. Find a pod, so you can laugh … and learn.
This one is tricky. If — and I want to stress this — IF you are comfortable having your camera on, which means you don’t mind the weirdness of people looking into your home (which, by the way, I totally get if you do), then turn it on. You know why? Because there’s something about a teacher seeing you that helps you pay attention. Accountability works in strange ways, and this is one of them. As a matter of fact, maybe just turn it on during the classes you’re having a hard time in. It’s the equivalent of choosing to sit in the front of the class because you need to concentrate. Again, I know we all live in different environments with all sorts of things going on around us. So, if you can’t, don’t. But if you can, do. I think it’ll help. It’ll help the teacher tighten up too.
And this is the one I want you to take seriously. Well, I want you to take them all seriously, but this one I want you to really take seriously. If you think there’s a way to make this better, if you think there are cool and interesting ways to engage through the screen, PLEASE suggest it to your teacher. Or have your parent suggest it. The truth is, we’re in unprecedented times, which means there have been, and will be, growing pains. But what it also means is that there’s room for creativity. Which means there’s space for your voices. Say something. If you heard of a cool game that could help with the learning process, suggest it. This goes for the teachers, also. Why not ask your students if there’s a way to add some energy to this experience? A way to ensure that we’re all still connected around education and still excited about the opportunity to learn. We have to push ourselves a bit, but that’s OK. We’ll be OK. We are OK.

There’s no number six, but if there were one, it would simply be to remind yourself that you are more than grades. You’re a person, whole and complex. A vessel of imagination and fear and possibility and potential. There’s pain there. But there’s purpose there too. You are big. Way too big to be whittled into a single alphabet meant to qualify your brilliance. So, try as hard as you can. I repeat, TRY AS HARD AS YOU CAN. And after that, smile.

OK?

Seriously, OK?

Cool.

Jason Reynolds: Drop the Mic October Newsletter

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This is a monthly guest post by Jason Reynolds,  the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. His last column was about the National Book Festival.

And just like that, summer is over. The weather is beginning to break. The morning air is crisp, and suddenly there are pumpkins everywhere. And though the seasons are transitioning, which means we’re about to experience the strange time warp that comes from consecutive holidays, all I can seem to think about is you. Because you are in school. At least, a form of school. Most of you are at home sitting in front of your computers learning from a distance. Your kitchen tables now classroom desks, your refrigerator now the cafeteria. And because I know all this is going on, it’s hard to discuss my plans to carve my face into a pumpkin and leave it on my older brother’s doorstep as a joke. Or how I’m so curious about what it’ll be like to attend a Halloween party over Zoom. Maybe I should figure out how to be Zoom for Halloween! I don’t know. The point is, I haven’t had the energy to really think about any of that, because I can’t stop thinking about … you.

So, here are five things I want you to know as you continue on this strange journey of distance learning:

This isn’t awesome for anyone, so be easy on yourself. I talked to some young people recently about this, and they were expressing how sometimes it’s harder to grasp the concepts being taught, because the teacher may be moving too fast (we all learn differently) or the Wi-Fi at home isn’t strong enough (all signals aren’t created equal) or there are distractions in the home that are sometimes hard to avoid (Grandma, please turn “Let’s Make A Deal” down!). Listen, as someone who also uses Zoom all day every day, I feel you. It’s brutal. And it’s not just you. We’re all having a hard time. So be gentle with yourself and do the best you can.
And speaking of us all having a hard time, your teachers are also struggling. Have you ever tried to talk to someone through a window? Like, with the window down? I mean, down when you’re in the house, up when you’re in the car. You get what I’m trying to. … You ever tried to explain something to someone through a thin piece of glass? You would think it wouldn’t be so hard, but the fact is, as humans, we communicate best without filters between us. Oh, there’s a great joke about social media that I should put right here, but I’m trying to stay focused, even though it’s just so hard to stay focused during these times. Ugh. But anyway, your teachers are trying to communicate with you through a filter. And the trippy part is, it doesn’t sound muffled, but it is. It’s the difference between a song on the radio and a live show. At the live show, even if you know all the words to a song you’ve been singing for years, it feels different when you’re right there in front of the singer. Also, more importantly, your teachers are teaching for six hours a day and most of that time is spent just talking to a black screen. Which is wild. And hard. And exhausting. So, yeah … we’re all doing our best.
If you have friends who live around you, and you feel like it would be better to work with them than to do all this by yourself (and you’re sure everyone is safe and healthy), distance learn with them. I think we’re calling these “pods.” Basically, a study group. It creates a silo of human energy and provides multiple sets of eyes and ears to weigh in on the same things so that if one person misses something, someone else may have it. I’ve been preaching this idea that collaboration is key. Right now, it’s never been more necessary. Plus, there’s more space for jokes. A little laughter changes the temperature of things. Seriously, it’s important. Find a pod, so you can laugh … and learn.
This one is tricky. If — and I want to stress this — IF you are comfortable having your camera on, which means you don’t mind the weirdness of people looking into your home (which, by the way, I totally get if you do), then turn it on. You know why? Because there’s something about a teacher seeing you that helps you pay attention. Accountability works in strange ways, and this is one of them. As a matter of fact, maybe just turn it on during the classes you’re having a hard time in. It’s the equivalent of choosing to sit in the front of the class because you need to concentrate. Again, I know we all live in different environments with all sorts of things going on around us. So, if you can’t, don’t. But if you can, do. I think it’ll help. It’ll help the teacher tighten up too.
And this is the one I want you to take seriously. Well, I want you to take them all seriously, but this one I want you to really take seriously. If you think there’s a way to make this better, if you think there are cool and interesting ways to engage through the screen, PLEASE suggest it to your teacher. Or have your parent suggest it. The truth is, we’re in unprecedented times, which means there have been, and will be, growing pains. But what it also means is that there’s room for creativity. Which means there’s space for your voices. Say something. If you heard of a cool game that could help with the learning process, suggest it. This goes for the teachers, also. Why not ask your students if there’s a way to add some energy to this experience? A way to ensure that we’re all still connected around education and still excited about the opportunity to learn. We have to push ourselves a bit, but that’s OK. We’ll be OK. We are OK.

There’s no number six, but if there were one, it would simply be to remind yourself that you are more than grades. You’re a person, whole and complex. A vessel of imagination and fear and possibility and potential. There’s pain there. But there’s purpose there too. You are big. Way too big to be whittled into a single alphabet meant to qualify your brilliance. So, try as hard as you can. I repeat, TRY AS HARD AS YOU CAN. And after that, smile.

OK?

Seriously, OK?

Cool.