Tag: david mccartney

Nov 30 2021

It’s in the details: a closer look at Old Armory fire in an unlikely place

Posted on by Elizabeth Riordan

The following is written by University Archivist David McCartney

Image of the fire from the 1971 Hawkeye Yearbook

In the early morning hours of Saturday, May 9, 1970, the building housing the Dept. of Rhetoric mysteriously caught fire and was declared a total loss. Although the cause of the blaze was never determined, many to this day believe it was the work of arsonists. No one was injured. The building, Old Armory Temporary – nicknamed “Big Pink” – was a wooden frame structure situated roughly where the Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building is now, just east of EPB and across the railroad tracks.The building’s destruction came just days after the deadly Kent State shootings in Ohio on May 4, 1970, and was emblematic of the anti-war protest movement that closed or threatened to close campuses across the U.S. that spring. While UI remained open, students were given the option to complete their semester’s work early and leave the campus, or remain on campus until semester’s end.Fast forward 51 years. In the Dept. of Special Collections & Archives, University Archives Assistant Denise Anderson is processing the Rhetoric Department’s records and recently noted a set of files that appear to have been singed on the papers’ edges. We are speculating that these records survived the 1970 fire, and were saved by Rhetoric staff.

Evidence of burnt edges on the file of Paul J. Kleinberger

Among the surviving records are documents concerning Paul J. Kleinberger, a graduate assistant in Rhetoric who in late 1967 had been suspended from his position by the university following his participation in the Dec. 5, 1967 Dow Chemical protest at the Iowa Memorial Union. Newspaper clippings, correspondence, and other records document this tumultuous chapter. Kleinberger was reinstated in early 1968 and continued to teach, but we don’t know what became of him; his last listing in the student directory is in the 1967-68 edition.Mr. Kleinberger’s letter to the dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Dewey Stuit, dated February 4, 1968, is his appeal to be reinstated. Also included here are a January 1968 article appearing in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, reporting his plan to appeal, and a portion of the Dept. of Rhetoric newsletter, dated November 9, 1967, about a month before the Kleinberger controversy unfolded.

Rhetoric Bulletin from 1967
Kleinberger letter to Dean Stuit
Press Citizen article on Kleinberger appeal
Oil painting of Ellen Hale
Feb 14 2020

Ellen Day Hale Paints Her Way into UI History

Posted on by Elizabeth Riordan

Through some great research, our University Archivist David McCartney discovers some of the “unknown” facts that are part of new UI Presidential Portrait Gallery in the Main Library, as he explains below. 

When the UI Presidential Portrait Gallery was formally dedicated late last year, staff in Special Collections responsible for this display knew that there were still some ‘gaps’ in some of the portraits’ stories. For example, labels accompanying some of the displayed portraits note that the artist is unknown. But as we continue to learn more of the history of this collection and how it came into being, we update and correct our records – and labels – as needed.

oil portrait of George Thacher
Oil on canvas of George Thacher by Ellen Day Hale

The George Thacher portrait is a case in point. Thacher (1817-1878) was the University’s fifth president, serving from 1871 to 1877. His portrait is an oil-on-canvas, dark in tone and realistic, a style appropriate for the late nineteenth century. The artist’s name was somehow lost in the records as the portrait, along with others in the collection, moved from one campus location to another for nearly a century, until settling in the Main Library.

Well, now we can fill in this gap. Recently, a closer examination of the portrait revealed a nearly-obscured name in the lower left corner: “E.D. Hale.” The signature is difficult but not impossible to ascertain. From this, we were able to confirm via an internet search that the artist was Ellen Day Hale (1855-1940). Our sources for this include the Smithsonian Archives of American Art and an entry on American Gallery online.  

According to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Ellen Day Hale was “among the wave of American artists, both men and women, who traveled to Europe

Oil painting of Ellen Hale
Ellen Day Hale Self Portrait, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston

for training in the last quarter of the 19th century. She is best known for her Impressionist figure studies. Hale, the only daughter of the noted orator and author Edward Everett Hale and Emily Baldwin Perkins, came from a family filled with notable figures. Her great-great-uncle Nathan Hale was a Revolutionary War patriot; her great-aunt Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and her brother Philip and his wife Lilian Westcott Hale were also professional painters.”

The Boston Art Club was the setting for the first exhibition of her work in 1876. Because both she and George Thacher were from New England, we can speculate that the portrait was completed during the last one or two years of his life, after he left Iowa to return to the northeast to be close to family in light of illness. Hale was perhaps in her early twenties when she completed the portrait, likely one of the first works of a long and distinguished career. She was also the first woman to produce a presidential portrait for the university. 

View the portrait gallery online or view in person on the Main Library’s fifth floor.

Oct 17 2018

From University Archivist David McCartney: Top 10 historical things at the UI

Posted on by Meaghan Lemmenes
In honor of Homecoming week here at the University of Iowa, we asked our University Archivist David McCartney to pick the top ten favorite historical things here at the University. The items are in no particular order. 
 

10. The Birthplace of Prime-time TV.

W9XK signal reached into several states during the 1930s.
 Sure, Westinghouse, General Electric, AT&T and other labs were testing television in the 1930s, but from 1933 to 1938, the State University of Iowa was broadcasting regularly-scheduled TV programs, the first in the nation to do so. Experimental station W9XK featured lectures, instruction, and musical and dramatic performances two or three evenings each week. Viewers from as far as Oklahoma and Indiana reported receiving the signal.
 
9. Nile Kinnick.
By all accounts, an outstanding athlete, gentleman, and scholar. The 1939 Heisman Trophy recipient. A consensus All-American. Phi Beta Kappa. Humanitarian. Kinnick died during a flight training mission while serving as an aviator in the U.S. Navy during World War II.
 
8. Master of Fine Arts Degrees Were Conferred Here First.

The UI was the first university in the nation to accept creative works in lieu of theses as requirements for advanced degrees in the arts, beginning in the 1920s. In 1940, it was the first in the nation to confer the MFA. Recipients of the newly-minted degree that year were Elizabeth Catlett, Jewel Peterson, and

Van Allen Hall machine shop for satellite program, 1970.

Harry Edward Stinson. Catlett, a sculptor, was also the first African-American woman to receive the MFA.

 
7. A Space Exploration Hub.
James Van Allen advanced U.S. space research using satellites beginning in 1958, but did you know that Donald Gurnett of the Department of Physics and Astronomy is likely the only person on the planet to oversee space missions exploring the extremes of our solar system? Helios 1 and 2, which launched in 1976, explored the sun’s characteristics up close, while Voyager 1, which launched in1977, reached interstellar spaced in 2012- the first human-made object to do so.
 

6. Gay Liberation Front.

First UI gay pride float, in 1970 Homecoming parade (image from 1971 Hawkeye annual).
In 1970, the university recognized Gay Liberation Front (today, Spectrum) as an official student organization, the first in the nation. A generation later, in 1993, the UI extended spousal benefits to same-sex partners. It was another first among U.S. public universities. 
 
5. The UI Stanley Museum of Art.
To paraphrase UI President Willard “Sandy” Boyd sometime in the 1970s, “Our football team is struggling but we have the best art museum in the Big Ten.” It’s still true today: Over 14,000 objects reflect broad and deep collections from diverse cultures and time periods. Jackson Pollock’s Mural will return to its permanent home for display after the new museum opens on campus adjacent to the Main Library.
 
4. The Afro-American Cultural Center, Leading the Way for Other Centers.
This year the Afro House celebrates 50 years as a space for African-American students to socialize, mutually support, and grow. Other centers on campus have followed, including those serving Latinx, Native American, Asian, LGBTQ, and other communities.
 
3. Those Rolaids Guys.
They invented not only Rolaids, but also Bufferin. William D. “Shorty” Paul, M.D., and Joseph Routh, Ph.D., were UI faculty members whose collaboration resulted in the two remedies found in many homes and workplaces today. Dr. Paul was the Hawkeyes’ team physician for over 30 years, beginning in 1939, and tried finding ways to provide safe, immediate relief to injured players. Working with Routh, they devised a formula to “buffer” the effect of aspirin without taking away its strength. Voila!
 

2. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and UNESCO City of Literature.

Margaret Walker in 1966, an alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Wilber Schramm established Iowa’s creative writing program in 1936, with Paul Engle to follow as its director from 1941 to 1965. Under their tenure, the Workshop became internationally recognized as a locus of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. To date, Workshop faculty and graduates have won 29 Pulitzer Prizes.*
 
And finally,
 
1. The Wave.
It’s been in practice for only a year, but ESPN and other sports sources already call it the best tradition in college football today: The Wave. At Iowa home football games, the crowd- visitors as well as Hawkeye fans- turn east to the UIHC Stead Family Children’s Hospital across the street and wave en masse at the young patients looking on. Need we say more?
 
Runners up include: Dance Marathon, Soapbox Soundoff in the IMU during the 1960s, Grant Wood, and the power plant whistle. 
 
**Images all from F.W. Kent Collection (RG 30.0001.001), University Archives
 
Dec 05 2017

50 Years Ago Today; A Campus in Conflict

Posted on by Colleen Theisen

By David McCartney, University Archivist

 

Tuesday, December 5, marks the 50-year anniversary of what was to that date the largest anti-war protest on the UI campus. Over 200 demonstrators gathered outside the Iowa Memorial to protest the presence of Dow Chemical representatives who were on campus to interview prospective employees. There were 18 arrests and the day’s events ushered in a new era of protest, both locally and nationally. Less than four months later, President Lyndon B. Johnson, citing eroding public support for his administration’s policy on Vietnam, announced he would not seek re-election to another term.

Go here (http://dailyiowan.lib.uiowa.edu/DI/1967/di1967-12-06.pdf) for the Daily Iowan’s account of that day.

 

 

 

The day’s events were filmed and recorded by Robert Coover, an assistant professor of English, whose documentary is featured on our online exhibit, “Uptight and Laid-back: Iowa City in the 1960s.” To view the film in the online exhibit, go to https://dsps.lib.uiowa.edu/sixties/, scroll to videos, and click ‘On a Confrontation in Iowa City.’

Or see below: