Collecting area: Arts & literature

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.

Frederic Allen Whiting at his typewriter

Frederic Allen Whiting Jr., the “Poet Laureate of Perkins Cove”, was born on January 10, 1906 in Boston Massachusetts to Olive Elizabeth Cook, a singer, and Frederic Allen Whiting Sr., a philanthropist and museum director and president of the American Federation of Arts. They moved to Cleveland in 1912 where Frederic Sr. became the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Having a father as the director of a cultural heritage institution, exposed young Frederic to the intellectual class. He met poets, scholars, and others from the world of arts and letters including Sir Lawrence Binyon, Langdon Warner, Carl Purington Rollins, and Thomas Whitney Surette. He attended the private Hawken School in Cleveland and Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, which he referred to later as “redolent of witchcraft and Indian massacres, and compliance with chamber of commerce goals and attitudes”. He went to Harvard for two years before becoming a freelance writer.

Adopting the pen name Allen Whiting, his first foray into writing began when he wrote commentary and criticism for the Magazine of Art, the organ of the American Federation of the Arts, where he was also editor from 1931-1942. Some of his pieces for the magazine were republished in the New York Herald Tribune and The Washington Post. Under his tenure, the circulation rose and he became familiar with all aspects of magazine production and made contacts with members and chapters of the American Federation of Arts, which consisted of artists, writers, teachers, museum officials, art dealers, and officials working with U.S. government cultural projects. On one occasion in 1940, Whiting took charge of the Federation’s annual convention, which met in San Francisco. He left the magazine in May 1942 to participate in the war effort.

Whiting was appointed Chief of the Office of War Information’s Overseas Exhibit Section. Charged with developing programming and staff, Whiting aimed to project positive visual images of the United States to Europeans. He was responsible for planning and carrying through creative programming, administrative duties, and liaison work with other civilian agencies, Army & Navy administrators, business leaders, and the press. Following the end of the war, he was brought to Washington by Elmer Davis to develop an exhibit aimed at explaining to liberated Europe the demand on resources of the continuing war in the Pacific. The project was abandoned following the surrender of Japan in August of 1945.

Following the war, Whiting became a freelance writer and photo editor, wrote two novels, short stories, and non-fiction pieces on a variety of subjects, including politics, the arts, and food. He designed and produced a brochure for a New England children’s camp and was a contracted photo research and editor for the State Department.

In 1951 he was recruited to work as a civilian information specialist with the Department of the Army’s Reorientation Division for occupied areas, which was responsible for supplying materials used to re-educate the people of Japan and the Ryukyu Islands. Out of an office in New York, he supplied the U.S. Information Centers in Japan with musical recordings and other media. The job ended following the end of the U.S. occupation in December, when he resumed freelance writing and editing. He moved his parents from Florida to Ogunquit, Maine in 1952, where he became the Associate Director of the Museum of Art of Ogunquit where he assembled a Winslow Homer exhibit but was later “politely fired” by Henry Strater.

Throughout the 1950s Whiting’s wife Rose suffered from several strokes and eventually died in 1960. Whiting was also caring for his aging parents, which caused much stress and led to excessive drinking where his “control over beverage alcohol had left me behind”. His mother died in 1955. During this time he found solace in the Roman Catholic Church and was committed to the Augusta State Hospital in 1957. Whiting’s battles with alcoholism and simultaneous search for God was explored in his unpublished 1965 autobiographical novel, Minutes of the Days.

The collection contains evidence of an attempt to start an organization called The Society of Servants of Rose Hill, whose aim was to “bring to bear in a practical manner the venerable and curative offices of prayer and work upon those in particular need of them”. The goal was to create cooperatively governed outpatient retreat centers in bucolic settings for people recently released from psychiatric institutions. The mission statement stated that no one would be turned away for financial or religious reasons. There is no evidence that the organization ever came to fruition.

Whiting’s career as a published poet began in the 4th grade. He was eventually published in several magazines including Spirit: A Magazine of Poetry, The American Poetry Magazine, The Harvard Advocate, Voices, and The Cecelian. He spent much of his creative life in Ogunquit, Maine reading his work at informal gatherings of “mostly young people of creative bent, gathered in the vicinity of Perkins Cove”. In 1952 he completed his first novel, The Gift of Merlon Crag.

The collection consists of copies, drafts, published and unpublished copies of Whiting’s poetry written throughout his lifetime. The manuscript of his unpublished autobiographical novel, Minutes of the Days is also contained herein. Some biographical information, written by Whiting while planning to release Minutes of the Days, is in the collection as well.

The editor, writer, and photographer Gray Williams was born in New York City in 1932, and spent most of his life in Chappaqua (Westchester County), N.Y. A 1954 graduate of Yale, Williams worked in the publishing industry for many years, including for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, and since 1988, he has been a freelance writer, editor, and photographer. Long dedicated to history and historical preservation, he has served as New Castle Town Historian, chair of the New Castle Landmarks Advisory Committee, trustee of the Westchester County Historical Society, and as a member of the Property Council at the National Trust property Lyndhurst. He is the author of Picturing Our Past: National Register Sites in Westchester County (Westchester County Historical Society, 2003). A specialist in the early stone carvers of New York and Connecticut, as well as the use of grave monuments to illuminate and enrich the study of American history, art, and culture, Williams is a former trustee of the Association for Gravestone Studies and has contributed articles to its annual journal, Markers, and its Quarterly. In 2007, he was awarded the Association’s Harriette Merrifield Forbes Award for contributions to scholarship and preservation in the field.

The photographs and research materials he has contributed to the Association for Gravestone Studies are largely devoted to the subjects of three articles in the AAGS journal, Markers: “‘Md. by Thomas Gold’: The Gravestones of a New Haven Carver,” in collaboration with Meredith M. Williams, Markers V (1988); “Solomon Brewer: A Connecticut Valley Yankee in Westchester County,” Markers XI (1994); “By Their Characters You Shall Know Them: Using Styles of Lettering to Identify Gravestone Carvers,” Markers XVII (2000). The collection also includes photographs taken during AGS conferences, principally in New England, as well as a small group taken in Natchez Cemetery in Mississippi.

Born in 1948 in Boston, Paul Williams was an avid reader of science fiction and published his first fanzine, Within, in 1962 at the age of 14. A few years later, after completing his first semester at Swarthmore, Williams hitchhiked to New York City. There he wrote and published—typing up the mimeo stencils himself—the first issue of Crawdaddy! With the birth of this publication, Williams is widely recognized as the founder of serious rock and roll journalism. He left Crawdaddy! in 1968 and went on to establish Entwhistle Books with David Hartwell, Chester Anderson, and Joel Hack. Williams continued to write, collecting his early works on rock and roll in two books and contributing articles as a freelancer for Rolling Stone. During the early 1970s, Williams lived on several intentional communities, including the Fort Hill Community in Cambridge, and wrote the surprise best seller Das Energi and its follow-up, Apple Bay during this period. In 1975, his profile of friend Philip K. Dick launched P.K.D. to a national audience, and Williams later served as the literary executor of the Dick estate following the death of his friend in 1982. His extensive writing on Bob Dylan spanned forty years and resulted in a significant body of publications including a multi-volume work on the artist. In 1995, Williams suffered a near fatal bike accident that left him partially disabled. A remarkable initial recovery proved to be short-lived and within a few years after the accident, Williams began exhibiting symptoms of early-onset dementia, a result of the traumatic brain injury he sustained. He died in 2013 leaving behind a tremendous legacy as author, editor, and publisher.

The Paul Williams Papers is comprehensive collection of materials that documents the writings and relationships that shaped the field of rock and roll journalism. Alongside manuscripts of the numerous books and articles Williams wrote are notebooks, correspondence, and media. Early issues of Crawdaddy! and Williams’s writings on science fiction author Philip K. Dick (including audio cassette tapes of the 1974 P.K.D. interview) are featured as well as his working files on Bob Dylan. Correspondence includes Theodore, Sturgeon, Chester Anderson, David Hartwell, Susan Ann Protter, Julian Moody, Raymond Mungo among many others.

An obstetrician from Rutherford, N.J., William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was a key figure in modernist poetry in the United States. Innovative and experimental in his poetry, Williams was a member of the avant garde poetically and politically, writing in a simple though never simplistic style that was unencumbered by the formalism and literary allusion of peers such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

This collection consists of a small group of eleven letters and postcards written by Williams during the years 1946-1962, the majority of which were sent to Marie Leone, a nurse at the Passaic General Hospital in Passaic, New Jersey. In these letters Williams thanks Marie and her coworkers for the cards, good wishes, and gifts they sent to cheer him up. The letters are friendly and humorous even though they are for the most part written from Williams’s hospital bed during one of the frequent illnesses he suffered from in the later years of his life.

In 1857, Frederick L. H. Willis earned the singular distinction of being expelled from Harvard Divinity School for acting as a spirit medium. An important figure in the post-Civil War Spiritualist movement, Willis lived a long and eclectic life in which he was at turns an intimate of the family of Bronson Alcott, an ardent proponent of Spiritualism, a lecturer, preacher, homeopathic physician, and writer.

A wide-ranging intellect and steadfast opposition to orthodoxy suffuse the Willis Papers. The heart of the collection is an extensive collection of sermons, lectures, and essays by Frederick L. H. Willis dating from the late 1850s to the turn of the twentieth century. These works veer into commentary on ancient history, art and aesthetics, medicine, astrology, Eastern religion, and social reform, but are rooted firmly in the framework of a Spiritualist worldview. The collection also includes a large number of family photographs, some correspondence, and a few works by Willis’s wife, Love, and daughter, Edith.

As an undergraduate at UMass Amherst, John S. Wilson undertook of study of gravestones in New Salem, Mass. Working under George Armelagos, he receiving a BA in Anthropology with honors (1971) for his work on the “social dimension of New England mortuary art,” and returned for an MA in (1976). Wilson later worked as Regional Historic Preservation Officer and Archaeologist for the Northeast Region of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Part of the collections of the Association for Gravestone Studies, the collection includes two copies of John Wilson’s senior honors thesis, a card file associated with the thesis, and several dozen slides (both color and black and white) of New Salem headstones. Some images appear to be later prints of images taken in 1970-1971.

Unidentified DJ in the WMUA master control room, ca. 1985

WMUA is UMass’ student/community run non-commercial FM radio station. In continuous operation since 1948, initially as an AM station, it serves the campus and surrounding communities in the Pioneer Valley and can be heard from the Connecticut to the Vermont border. Beginning in 1948, as students were first establishing the station, WMUA has been a constant presence on campus, weathering budget cuts, leadership upheavals and the rise and fall of radio as a dominant medium.

The records of WMUA document the history of a particularly long-lived organization at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst and reflect the changing culture of the campus. In addition to some administrative and financial records, the collection includes a number of promotional materials, newsclippings, photographs and recordings that reflect the history of the organization. Also noteworthy is a history of WMUA written in 1963 to commemorate its 15th anniversary as well as several oral histories with station alum from different eras. There are also press clippings, ephemera, press releases and recordings from the acclaimed Magic Triangle Jazz Series.

Additionally, there are hundreds of analog and digital recordings of shows that span three decades of the station’s history, with the bulk from 1987-2012. A separate, growing, inventory of the recordings is also available which includes descriptions, dates, and formats of the recordings.

A documentary about WMUA in the 1960s was produced by Stuart Goldman, an alumnus of the station, in 2021.

A photographer from Washington, D.C., Lloyd Wolf is a well known photojournalist and documentarian who often works on topics in social change. During the course of a career that began in the late 1970s, Wolf has worked on projects ranging from documenting the impact of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., to Jewish mothers and fathers, Moroccan Jewry, drug rehabilitation in prison, and Black-Jewish dialog.

The 13 images in the collection are part of Wolf’s series, “Acid Reign,” a project conducted in 1989 with a sociologist from UNC-Greensboro, Rebecca Adams, exploring the lives of dedicated Deadheads. The prints were made for exhibition at the symposium, Unbroken Chain: the Grateful Dead in Music, Culture, and Memory, held at UMass Amherst in November 2007. All rights remain with Lloyd Wolf.