A Day in the Life of Albion College

The Winter Holiday Edition...

This edition of "A Day in the Life" includes images from winter holidays past--dressing up as Santa Claus, putting up the Christmas tree, making snowmen, going to holiday concerts, hanging out with friends, drinking eggnog, opening gifts, and reading special editions of the Pleiad. The images used here are from a variety of sources, including the Pleiad and the College Archives' photograph collection, as well as scrapbooks from deceased alumni, Frederick Goodrich and Glennie Weston, and others documenting Dean Hall and the Music Department.

Our scrapbook collection is unique in that, many times, the images found here cannot be located anywhere else in the College Archives' collections. Scrapbooks also provide context for the images and other items included within that one doesn't find in a singular photograph, for instance--the combination of items sometimes speaks volumes. The amalgamation of physical objects in a scrapbook carries, in addition to mere information, evidence of the use of the objects, through wear and stains and notes written in the margins; as well as evidence of the creator's thought processes and the culture and fashion of the time implied by color choices, fonts, and stylized drawings.

Unfortunately, due to the acidic paper and glues used in creating scrapbooks and the many different types of materials that are usually used in scrapbooks (everything from leather, dried flowers, felt, human hair, cloth, metal, and photographs to different types of paper documents), they are some of the most fragile items in our collections. They are difficult to provide physical access to because they are so brittle and because many of the items inside have become detached over the years. Scrapbooks are also equally difficult to digitize, due to their large size, in order to reduce handling of the originals. For these purposes, however, we scanned parts of pages in order to provide a peek into this thorny part of the archival world.

Click on thumbnail for larger image or pdf file of document

Program for the Philharmonic Society's 1910 performance of "The Messiah"	Glennie Weston's scrapbook page for Christmas 1911-12	Frederick Goodrich's scrapbook page for Christmas 1913
"The Brutal Sport--Christmasing!" Pleiad 12/13/28	Holiday programs for Christmas Musicale and the Entre Vous Club from 1942 scrapbook	Photograph from Dean Hall scrapbook, Winter 1945
Photograph of "Christmas Spread" from Dean Hall scrapbook, 1948-49	Unidentified photograph from College Archives Photograph Files, not dated (n.d.)	Women's Judiciary Board, 1965-66: Marcia DuVal Lile, Lynn Puffer Budd, Sally Pettengill Ginter, Ann Herrold Peterson,  Maryetta Andrews Sachs, and Ginny Hopper. Thanks to Marcia for helping us identify this photo!
Celebrating with eggnog, from Dean Hall scrapbook, Christmas 1965-66	Female Santa Claus, from Dean Hall scrapbook, Christmas 1965-66	Christmas 1996-67 page from Dean Hall scrapbook
The Pleiad 12/16/14 This edition contains a number of poems, short stories, and essays concerning Christmas, mixed in with the usual news, advertisements, and alumni notes.

If you recognize any of the individuals in the unidentified photographs or have Albion memories of your own that you want to share or donate to the College Archives, please let me know!

Thank you for taking the time to check out Special Collections' section of "Thinking Albion!" I'm really excited to be able to share with you some of the photographs, correspondence, scrapbooks, ephemera, newspaper clippings, and institutional records from the College Archives that make this job more enjoyable every day! For each issue, I will offer some newly digitized materials from our collections for you to enjoy that will be related to events that occurred on that specific date in the history of the college.

Often, when I am asked what I do for a living, and I respond enthusiastically, "I'm an archivist!" I receive a blank look that I know means, "You're a what?" Recently a national archives organization held a competition to determine the best answer to this question. The winning response was that “Archivists bring the past to the present. [We’re] records collectors and protectors, keepers of memory. [We] organize unique, historical materials, making them available for current and future research.” This is a fairly academic definition of what we do. In a more informal way, what we do here is connect people with their great-great grandmothers through our alumni and pastor files, help individuals recreate lost memories through film, sound recordings, and photographs, and assist the institution with defining its mission for the future by providing information into understanding our past.

The next edition of "A Day in the Life" will come out January 9, 2009. Happy holidays to you and yours! Stay safe and warm.