Collecting area: Arts & literature

Educator, rhetorician, author, President of the Speech Association of America in 1954, and Professor of Speech at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1968-1973.

Includes the accumulated research notes and materials written and used by Wallace in his career as a teacher and author; drafts, reprints, and proofs of his speeches, papers, articles, and books, both published and unpublished, often with accompanying correspondence, research notes, and/or contracts; lecture notes and classroom materials dating from his years as a student through those as a teacher; drafts and reprints of papers and articles by students and colleagues; correspondence; the reports, memoranda, correspondence, resolutions, agenda, notes on meetings, minutes, committee recommendations, position papers, newsletters, audit reports, budget recommendations, membership lists, itineraries, and programs indicative of his leadership and active participation in the Speech Association of America and other professional organizations, conferences, and university committees.

Born in Wisconsin but raised and educated in Kansas, Frank Waugh got his first teaching job at Oklahoma State University. He went on to teach at the University of Vermont and finally settled down in Amherst, as a professor at Massachusetts Agricultural College. While at Mass Aggie, he became well know for establishing the second landscape gardening department in the country, later the department of landscape architecture. At a time when the field of landscape architecture was still taking root, Waugh’s influence was significant in shaping the profession. His contributions include numerous articles and books, the designs he planned and implemented, and the many students he taught and mentored. A natural offshoot of his work as a landscape architect, Waugh pursued other artistic avenues as well, most notably photography and etching. He served at MAC, later Massachusetts State College, for nearly forty years before retiring in 1939.

The collection includes an extensive representation of Waugh’s published articles along with biographical materials. The centerpiece, however, is the large number of photographs, lantern slides, and etchings. While his publications reveal the mind of a pioneer in his field, together these images portray the heart and soul of Waugh as an artist.

The botanical illustrator and writer Una Foster Weatherby (1878-1957) was an early student of New England gravestones. Born in Texas in 1878, Una Leonora Foster met a young pteridologist Charles Alfred Weatherby (1875-1949) while traveling abroad in 1910, and seven years later, the couple wed. As Charles advanced in his career to a position at the Gray Herbarium at Harvard, Una became his close associate, working with in the field and as illustrator and photographer. Among the many interests the couple developed was a fascination with photographing early American gravestones, and over the last three decades of her life, Una published occasionally on the subject. She died in Cambridge on August 17, 1957, and is interred with her husband at Center Cemetery in East Hartford, Conn.

The Weatherby collection consists of a substantial typed manuscript illustrating early American gravestones, mostly from New England. Meticulously assembled, the manuscript is divided into six thematic sections based on gravestone design (death’s heads, winged cherubs, wingless cherubs, portrait stones, symbolic stones, and designs and willows). Each stone is represented by a single photograph pasted onto a page, along with a transcription of the epitaph and occasional comments on the design and date on which the information was recorded. Although most stones are from Connecticut and Massachusetts, a few stones from Virginia and South Carolina are included.

From 1977 through 2001, the Wendell Post newspaper was published by and for the residents of Wendell, Mass. With its distinctive local perspective, the Post covered local politics, people, and events, but also issues with national implications, including the anti-nuclear movement, environmental concerns, recycling, and peacework.

The Wendell Post collection contains nearly every issue of a community newspaper produced in a small, rural New England town. Most issues include reports on town meetings and elections, the schools, and public works, but the Post also carried news of the stuff of daily life such as births and deaths, high school graduations, anniversaries and Old Home Day, profiles of town residents and town history, and the crime report.

Since 2004, the Florence Poets Society has been a hub of the poetry communities in Western Massachusetts, promoting the sharing, reading, and publication of works by its members. The group has sponsored outdoor poetry festivals, poetry slams, and readings and it has encouraged publication of poetry through its annual review, The Silkworm, and through chapbooks of its members

Established in partnership with Rich Puchalsky and the Florence Poets Society, the Western New England Poetry Collection constitutes an effort to document the vibrant poetry communities in Western New England. The collection includes all forms of poetry, from the written to the spoken word, in all formats, but with a particular emphasis upon locally produced and often difficult to find chapbooks, small press books, unpublished works, and limited run periodicals. The collection is not limited to members of the Florence Poets Society, and additions from poets in Western New England are eagerly welcomed.

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

The first public radio station in western New England, WFCR Five College Radio has provided a mix of high quality, locally-produced and nationally syndicated programming since May 1961. In 2012, the station reached over 175,000 listeners per week, with a mix of classical and jazz music, news, and entertainment.

The WFCR Collection contains nearly 4,500 reel to reel recordings of locally-produced radio programs, reflecting over fifty years of the cultural and intellectual life of western Massachusetts. Drawing upon the talents of the faculty and students of the Five Colleges (Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and UMass Amherst), the collection offers a remarkable breadth of content, ranging from public affairs to community and national news, cultural programming, children’s programming, news and current events, scholarly lectures, classical music, and jazz.

Television station WGBY began broadcasting in Springfield, Massachusetts, in May 1955, as the public television station for the residents of the Pioneer Valley and western Massachusetts. Owned by Boston’s WGBH, the station produces its own original content and maintains its own web presence.

The WGBY collection consists entirely of photographic stills sent to the station for use in promoting its broadcasts. Featured artists include a number of actors and musicians popular during the 1980s and 1990s, including Judy Collins, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, the Three Tenors, and Oprah Winfrey. Most of the shows represented were produced or distributed by PBS.

Charles Lewis Whipple was a noted journalist, editor, and the first ombudsperson for the Boston Globe. As a student at Harvard in the 1930s, Whipple joined the Young Communist League, carrying his radical politics with him when he joined the Globe’s staff in 1936 and became an active member of the American Newspaper Guild. Although classified as unfit for military duty due to the loss of vision in one eye, Whipple joined the Red Cross during the Second World War, and served with distinction with over thirty months of overseas service. After returning to civilian life and severing ties with the Communist Party, he resumed his position at the Globe, rising steadily to become editor of the opinion page in 1962 and ombudsperson in 1975. An editorial he wrote in 1967 is considered the first editorial in a major American newspaper to oppose the war in Vietnam. Although he formally retired from the Globe in 1979. Whipple worked an additional three years with the Xinhua News Agency in Beijing as editor of the Beijing Review and the China Daily, China’s first English-language daily. Whipple died in Northampton, Mass., in 1991, following complications from surgery.

A mixture of personal and professional correspondence, writing, and subject and clipping files, the Charles Whipple Papers document a long and exceptional career in journalism. The diverse roles that Whipple filled at the Boston Globe from the 1930s through 1970s resulted in rich documentation of his work as an organizer for the American Newspaper Guild on the eve of the Second World War; his writing and editorial work during the Vietnam War and as the Globe’s Ombudsman in the 1970s; and the three years he spent in China setting up an English-language newspaper during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

A physical education teacher from Rome, New York, Elizabeth W. Whitaker became an avid recorder of gravestone inscriptions in the 1940s. She died in 1992 at the age of 93.

The core of the Whitaker collection consists of 25 receipts and accounts relating to the early marble industry in western Massachusetts. The key figures in this series are Rufus Willson and his father-in-law, John Burghardt, who quarried stone near West Stockbridge, Mass., conveying it to Hudson, N.Y. The collection also includes a selection of photographs and postcards of gravestones, mostly in New England and New York; two folders of typed transcriptions and newspaper clippings of epitaphs from the same region, ranging in date from the early colonial period to the mid-19th century; and a price list of Barre granite from Wetmore and Morse Granite Co., 1934.

Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.

A not-for-profit media company based in Burlington, Vermont, White Light Communications produced dozens of videos during the late 1980s and early 1990s reflecting the voices and experiences of psychiatric survivors. With initial funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, Executive Director Paul Engels and his colleagues, all psychiatric survivors themselves, built a fully-equipped television production studio and conducted nearly one hundred interviews with ex-patients and leaders in the antipsychiatry movement. Although most of the interviews were conducted in Burlington, they also produced documentaries, and covered national events such as the final two Alternatives conferences and “Self Help Live,” a broadcast that focused on highlighting consumer/survivor leaders.

The hundreds of video interviews and other productions that comprise the White Light Communications collection were produced by, for, and about psychiatric survivors. Paul Engels interviewed nearly a hundred ex-patients including important leaders in the movement such as Judi Chamberlin, Sally Zinman, Howie the Harp, and George Ebert, and several episodes focused on the mental health system and activism in Vermont. The subjects of the interviews range widely from homelessness to involuntary treatment, peer support, suicide, surviving the mental health system, and the history of the psychiatric survivors movement.