Albion College Stockwell-Mudd Libraries

Find Out More

Other Links

A Legacy of Library Friends
Click on the images below for a larger view

Ray Babcock

Russell B. Babcock

Russell Babcock was born in Galien, Michigan on September 9, 1905. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Albion College in 1927 and his Masters degree in education from the Graduate Teachers College of Winnetka, Illinois. Babcock completed other graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied philosophy from 1927-28, Northwestern University, and the University of London, England. From 1928 to 1931, he was an English teacher at Robert College in Istanbul, Turkey.

Following that experience and a year of graduate work at the University of London afterwards, Babcock returned to the United States and began teaching in the Winnetka Public School system in Illinois, where his pioneering work in sex education did not go unrecognized. He stayed at Winnetka for 9 years.

He served in the armed forces during World War II, and then in 1946 took a position as the Director of Education for the Chicago Department of Race Relations. He went to Liberia and West Africa, as a consultant to the former Secretary of State, Stettinius. When Babcock returned to Illinois, he served under Adlai Stevenson, until accepting a position as field director of the Illinois Council of Economic Education at Northwestern.

During the Depression years (1933-46) he was very active in the social reform movement (New America). Later, joining the Democrats in 1976, as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention for the nomination of Jimmy Carter.

In 1960 he moved to Galien, MI, where he worked as a teacher in the public school system he graduated from in 1922. He retired from Galien in 1968, and continued to live there with his wife, Wanda Taeschner (University of Illinois alumnus), until her death and, a few years later, his own. He was 96.

Babcock was a staunch supporter of Albion College. A member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, he was also a star guard and one of the “Iron Men” on the College basketball team in 1926 and 1927. His 3 brothers, a cousin and several nephews and nieces have also attended Albion. In 1991, Babcock established the Philip C. Curtis Visiting Artist Endowment at Albion in honor of his friend, whom he had known, loved, and corresponded with for nearly 70 years. See Albion College Special Collections for information on the Russell Babcock Collection.

Dwayne Bagley, First United Methodist Church of Albion

Beatrice A. Bard, Class of 1962

H.M. Battenhouse

Battle Creek Women's Club

The Battle Creek Women's Club collection was the precedent for the Battle Creek public library, the Willard. The group had no active recruiting and were essentially dying out as an organization in the early 1990s. They needed to find a home for their collection, and the Willard was not interested, so they contacted the Albion College Library Director, John Kondelik. Dr. Kondelik was amazed by the books in their collection, which included a number of rare botanical and travel volumes, and agreed to accession them into the library's Rare Books collection. The centerpiece of the collection would have to be Francois Andre Michaux's Histoire des arbres forestiers de l'Amérique Septentrionale (The North American sylva : or, A description of the forest trees of the United States, Canada, and Nova Scotia. Considered particularly with respect to their use in the arts and their introduction into commerce. To which is added a description of the most useful of the European forest trees), a five volume set from 1865, translated from the French by John Jay Smith.

Drs. Jorg and Ingeborg Baumgartner

Clive Bell

Bernice Bennett, Class of 1919

Bernice Luella Bennett, 1919 graduate of Albion College, was a teacher at St. John's High School in Marshall from 1919 to 1921, Michigan; West Intermediate School in Jackson from 1921 to 1922, and Marshall High School from 1922 to her retirement in 1934.

She was born May 16, 1897 in Charlotte to Rollo and Mabel C. (Van Armen) Bennett. She came to Marshall in 1910 and was graduated from high school there.

She was a member of the Brooks Memorial Methodist Church; member and past regent of the Daughters of the American Revolution; member of the Marshall Teachers Club; and active in the Camp Fire Girls affairs. She had also been a member of the Marshall Order of Eastern Star.

While at Albion College, she was affiliated with Alpha Xi Delta sorority; and, in the 1940s, was president of the Albion Alumni Club of Marshall.

She died at 71 in June of 1968.

Mrs. Barbara Weeks Bentley

Mrs. John P. Bentley

Elizabeth R. Bichl, Class of 1948

Drs. Craig Bieler & Lisa Lewis

Merritt A. Bigelow II, Class of 1967

Mark K. Binnig, Class of 1969

Thomas T. Bishop, Class of 1972

Dewey Bitney

The Dewey Bitney Record Collection

Cheryl Blackwell

Leonella Wilcox Jameson Blanke, Class of 1949

The Leonella Jameson Blanke Collection consists of books, periodicals videos and magazines in support of the curriculum and activities of the Nancy Held Equestrian Center. Leonella (Wilcox) Jameson Blanke—"Lee"—Class of 1949, donated the collection in 2004 and continues to support the development of the collection through donations. While at Albion, Lee was a member of Kappa Delta and majored in history, political science and French. She received her Masters degree in Library Science from the University of Michigan in 1951 and was a librarian for the Kalamazoo Public Schools. In 1992 she married Jack R. Blanke, a retired school principal.

Elaine E. Bogus, Class of 1969

Frank Boles

Dr. Albert Bolitho

Dr. Albert Bolitho is a retired associate professor of music and organist for Albion College. He is former director of music and organist at North Church and was the choir director when the church held its first service in their newer facility in December, 1955. He is also former director of music and organist for the First United Methodist Church in Albion. He was dean of the Lansing chapter of the American Guild of Organists and has worked as director of the summer Church Music Workshop, sponsored by Michigan State University. In 1968, Bolitho was the first organist to be awarded a Ph.D. in applied music, literature and theory from Michigan State University. His dissertation was entitled "The Organ Sonatas of Paul Hindemith" and supplemented three public organ recitals performed in Lansing. He has studied under many teachers, including Robert Noehren, Marilyn Mason and Corliss Arnold and has attended master classes under Marcel Dupre.

Dr. Mark E. Bollman

Dr. & Mrs. Bruce Borthwick

Reverend George Borthwick

Dr. Robert E. Boyd, III

Sabrina Bracco

Beverly & Donald Brankovich

C. Hedger Breed

J Harlen Bretz (1882-1981)

J Harlen Bretz was born in 1882 in Saranac, Michigan and was raised a Methodist, at one time planning to be a missionary. He was one of 5 children of Oliver and Rhoda Bretz. In addition to Harlen, three of his siblings attended Albion: Bina, ’09; Martha, ’15; and Ernest Bretz, ’17. “Albion gave me my start – especially Professor Barr,” Bretz said, and The Pleiad, which published his first geological paper.

Bretz is best known for his interpretation, in 1923, of the cause of the Pacific Northwest Scablands. He claimed the landforms as evidence of moving water from a single, catastrophic flood that had lasted at most a few days over 12,000 years ago. The scablands are 2,000 square miles of raw, peeled ground that stretches from Spokane west to the Cascades and south to the Snake River. Since a flood of that proportion had never been seen, Bretz’s interpretation of the cause of the scablands was rejected as heresy by other geologists of his day. But Bretz was correct. In 1942, thanks to the research of Joseph T. Pardee, the source of the giant flood was finally identified in Montana, an enormous prehistoric ice-dammed lake, named Lake Missoula.

The floodwaters from Glacial Lake Missoula were found to have moved through eastern Washington on a 430-mile journey to the Pacific, forever changing the landscape, carving an immense channel system across the state.

In 1928, Bretz described the scene: “The popular name is an expressive metaphor. The scablands are wounds only partially healed…great wound in the epidermis of soil with which Nature protects the underlying rock.” Bretz’s research in this area was later used to hypothesize the causes of certain similar Martian landforms.

In 1966, to launch the creation of the college’s geology department, Bretz donated his library, valued then at $10,000, to Albion, including valuable reprints and textbooks, many which bear the signatures of other world famous geologists, such as Chamberlin, Dana, Gilbert and Schuchert.

In 1970, Bretz donated his valuable collection of boulders and minerals to the geology department. The boulders, from such places as the Arctic, the top of Pikes Peak, Bermuda and Canada, were placed in the courtyard of the Science Center complex.

Despite his work in the scablands, Bretz’s primary interest was caves, and much of the present scientific base of speleology rests on his firsthand study of limestone caves in 17 states, Mexico and Bermuda.

In 1979, Bretz was honored for his life’s work when he received geology’s highest honor, the Penrose Medal. Bretz was also the recipient of the Neil Miner Award for excellence in teaching geology and an Albion College Distinguished Alumni Award. In 1971, Albion honored him with the dedication of the J Harlen Bretz Laboratory for Geomorphology and Sedimentation.

One tourist site on the scablands has been dedicated to Bretz, Dry Falls in Grand Coulee. A plaque there bears words Bretz wrote in 1928: “Ideas without precedent are generally looked upon with disfavor and men are shocked if their conceptions of an orderly world are challenged.”