Collection of chiefly newspaper clippings compiled by Georgana Foster documenting the response of the western Massachusetts community to a variety of local and national topics such as the Vietnam War, communes, the re-elections of Congressmen Silvio Conte and John Olver, the Amherst Peace Vigil, the Peace Pagoda in Leverett, and the Iraq War.
The Friends of Quabbin, Inc. was formed in 1984 as a non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to increasing public awareness and appreciation of the unique natural and historical resources of the Quabbin Reservoir and Reservation. Through educational, recreational and interpretive programs they help to protect and preserve the pristine natural beauty and the water and environmental quality of Quabbin for future generations.
The record of the Friends of Quabbin, Inc., include oral histories, printed materials, correspondence, and photographs. The organization’s oral history project captured several hundred audio and videotaped interviews with former Swift River Valley residents and people who worked on the construction of Quabbin Reservoir. Their quarterly newsletter, Quabbin Voices, is full of news, information, poetry, photos and stories from Quabbin’s past and present, as well as events that may well shape its future.
Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.
Yasuko Fukumi graduated from Tsuda College in Tokyo in 1949 with a B.A. in English. From 1949 to 1952, she worked in the library of the Narimasu High and Junior High Schools, before becoming an Assistant Librarian at the American School in Japan. In 1962, Fukumi moved to the United States to pursue a graduate degree in library science at Kansas State Teachers College. She held two positions at other American libraries before joining the staff of the UMass Amherst Library as a cataloger and later as the East Asian Studies Librarian. Fukumi first discovered the Benjamin Smith Lyman Collection, housed then at the Forbes Library in Northampton, in 1979. From that time forward, she worked tirelessly to bring the collection to the attention of the faculty at UMass and to the scholarly world at large. In 1987, she mounted a campaign to raise the $200,000 necessary to purchase the collection from the Forbes Library and secure it a permanent home in the UMass Amherst Special Collection and University Archives.
Fukumi’s papers focus on her extensive research both on Benjamin Smith Lyman and on the Japanese books that comprised his collection, books now housed along with his papers at UMass Amherst. Materials include Lyman family history and genealogy, Lyman’s contributions to Japan’s coal, oil, and mineral reserves during the latter of the 19th century, and Fukumi’s bibliography of Lyman’s library. The collection also contains limited material on Fukumi’s employment at the university library and a large selection of her Haiku poems.
Lexicographer and former English faculty at Indiana State University, John Edward Gates is the author of numerous scholarly articles on idiomatic phrases and the principles and practice of dictionary making, as well as the co-editor of the Dictionary of Idioms for the Deaf. Reflecting his work as a lexicographer, this collection consists of research notes and proofs of articles and book reviews.
An organizer, consultant, and educator in the alternative agriculture movement, Grace Gershuny has been active in the field since the 1970s when she worked for the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), developing its first organic certification program. As a leader in the movement, Gershuny helped to establish both the Organic Trade Association and the Organic Farmer: The Digest of Sustainable Agriculture. Today she continues to write and teach on the subject, serving as a faculty member at a number of colleges, most recently Green Mountain College.
The collection consists chiefly of printed material from a run of the Organic Farmer to Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas (ATTRA) publications and organizational newsletters, such as the Rural Education Center. Amongst these publications are a few small but significant groups of materials including notes from Gershuny’s role as the NOFA VT coordinator in 1979 and her drafts and notes for the second editions of The Soul of Soil.
Dr. Kathleen Grandison, a family practitioner and pregnancy/birthing specialist with an interest
in homeopathy, was part of the first class of Kansas University School of Medicine at Wichita (1975) and
completed her residency in family medicine in Fort Worth, Texas. She joined the Sufi community near Unadilla, New York in the late 1970s and opened her family practice at the Light of Life Health Center there in January 1980. The Abode of New Life Birthing Room opened above the family practice with Grandison as its director and a goal of providing a safe alternative to hospital births. Along with other alternative-birth/parenting advocates including Murshida Vera Corda, Tom and Gail Brewer, and Angela Colclough, Grandison organized and spoke at the 1980 symposium Birth: The Transformation of Being. Grandison went on to continue her family practice in Western Massachusetts. With a consideration for spiritual health as well as physical, Grandison is also a certified Raphaelite Work practitioner.
Includes documentation of Grandison’s talks on and practices in pregnancy, birth, parenting, and spiritual health; lecture slides and class descriptions; publications detailing Grandison’s time at Kansas University Wichita; personal correspondence with Ina May-Gaskin (prominent American midwife, The Farm, Tennessee); documentation of the Abode of the New Life Birthing Center and Light of life Health Center; an autobiography excerpt; 57 cassette tapes of lectures from Birth: The Transformation of Being.
Writer, editor, and educator, Anne Halley was born in Bremerhaven, Germany in 1928. A child during the Holocaust, she relocated with her family to Olean, New York during the late 1930s so that her father, who was Jewish, could resume his practice of medicine. Graduating from Wellesley and the University of Minnesota, Halley married a fellow writer and educator, Jules Chametzky, in 1958. Together they raised three sons in Amherst, Massachusetts where Chametzky was a professor of English at UMass and Halley taught and wrote. It was during the late 1960s through the 1970s that she produced the first two of her three published collections of poetry. The last was published in 2003 the year before she died from complications of multiple myeloma at the age of 75.
Drafts of published and unpublished short stories and poems comprise the bulk of this collection. Letters to and from Halley, in particular those that depict her education at Wellesley and her professional life during the 1960s-1980s, make up another significant portion of her papers. Publisher’s correspondence and a draft of Halley’s afterward document the Chametzkys effort to release a new edition of Mary Doyle Curran’s book, The Parish and the Hill, for which Halley and Chametzky oversaw the literary rights. Photographs of Halley’s childhood in Germany and New York as well as later photographs that illustrate the growth of her own family in Minnesota and Massachusetts offer a visual representation of her remarkable professional and pesonal life.
Born in 1902, Carl Halpern grew up in the Bronx where he attended elementary school. Upon leaving school, he took several jobs, including shoe salesman and accounting clerk, before he was hired as an errand boy in 1917 at the Electro-Chemical Engraving Company. Halpern stayed with the company for more than 40 years, retiring as an Executive Vice President.
The collection consists chiefly of materials relating to Halpern’s tenure at Electro-Chemical Engraving Company, including company reports and inter-company memos, advertisements for products, and other materials related to the business. Of singular importance is Halpern’s memoir, which intertwines his personal history with that of the company during the nearly five decades he was associated with the business.
Phyllis Hamilton was a recently divorced mother of a young daughter when she joined the Brotherhood of the Spirit in 1970. Encouraged to visit the commune by two young friends, Phyllis was attracted to the spiritual values of the group and relocated herself and her daughter from Worcester to Heath, making her at the age of 40 one of the oldest members of the community. She quickly used her more mature demeanor and appearance to the group’s advantage. In an area where realtors were increasingly reluctant to work with “hippies,” Phyllis was able to negotiate and purchase the Warwick property with the assistance of another member; together they signed the deed over to the Brotherhood after the sale was final. Her age was not her only distinction, however, she was also an artist, and used her artistic capabilities to capture the familiar faces of her fellow commune members.
The collection consists of 146 sketches of members of the Brotherhood of the Spirit (renamed the Renaissance Community in 1974) from 1970-1989. About half of the drawings were identified by the artist’s daughter, the others are of unidentified individuals.
Tim Hammond’s pioneering contributions to the genital autonomy movement began in 1989 with the co-founding of the National Organization of Restoring Men and includes founding NOHARMM, producing “Whose Body, Whose Rights?”, publishing two large scale circumcision harm documentation surveys and a survey of 1,800 foreskin restorers, webmaster for the Global Survey of Circumcision Harm, co-founding the Children’s Health & Human Rights Partnership/Canada. Hammond is an Honorary Member of the Brussels Collaboration on Bodily Integrity and is honored to be the first Board president of the Genital Autonomy Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Vast collection of materials documenting the movement for genital autonomy including published works, interviews, photographs, videos, banners, shirts, and organizational records from American Academy of Pediatrics, Children’s Health & Human Rights Partnership, Amnesty International, Attorneys for the Rights of the Child, Bloodstained Men, and International Council on Genital Autonomy among others. For materials in the collection that are available online, URLs are provided within the finding aid. Many other items are available electronically and can be requested by contacting the department at scua@library.umass.edu or Tim Hammond at circharmsurvey@gmail.com.
