Collecting area: UMass history

Known among his peers for his wit, “Gerry” Jones was an active presence on campus as Secretary and Treasurer for the class of 1903, and as a member of the QTV Fraternity, the staff of the Index, and the class football and baseball teams. Jones went on to become a well-respected figure in the Amherst community, serving on the board of investment for the Amherst Savings Bank during the mid-1930s and as a representative to the General Court from Hampshire County.

The papers of Gerry Jones contain a mix of ephemera dating from his days as one an active member of the MAC Class of 1903. Beginning with a fine record book documenting meetings of the class from their freshman year through graduation, the collection includes menus, programs, and dance cards related to class events. Of particular interest is a menu from the first football banquet in 1902, celebrating one of the most successful teams of the MAC era, the one-loss team of 1901.

Over the course of his esteemed dance career, Richard Jones performed with Eleo Pomare Company, the Miguel Godreau Dance Company, and the Xochipillian Dance Group. Jones was appointed to the staff of the University of Massachusetts on September 1, 1973, and remained with the department until his death in 1991. While at the University, Jones was the founding artistic director of the Amdans Theater, and was the artistic director of the University Dancers from 1979 to 1991.

The Jones Papers are a collection of photographs and reviews of Jones’s choreography during the 1970s and 1980s. A copy of Jones’s original essay, “Costuming for Three Styles of Dance,” (circa 1975) appears in the collection, as do photographs, playbills, posters, Amdans Theatre and University Dancers reviews. The Papers also contain letters to Jones from the Boston Ballet and the American College Dance Festival, as well as reviews of Jones’s choreography for professional companies outside the University.

A poet, expert on the works of Ernest Hemingway, Robert Francis, and D.H. Lawrence, and a 1953 graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Donald Junkins directed the Master of Fine Arts in English program from 1966. Junkins juggled his career as a poet with his work at the University, focusing his teaching energy on literature, not creative writing, to save his creative resources. Before turning to poetry, Junkins studied theology at Boston University School of Theology. Through meeting poet Robert Francis and taking courses with Robert Lowell, Junkins discovered his love of poetry, and his life path was forever changed. After leaving Boston University, Junkins taught creative writing at Chico State University before returning to UMass to teach.

The Donald Junkins Papers document his youth in Saugus, Mass., his experiences as a student at UMass, and his professional and creative life. The collection includes correspondence with his family throughout his life, photographs documenting his family in Eastern Mass., his records as head of the MFA in English program, and his personal and professional correspondence.

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

An eminent scholar of African American history and activist, Sidney Kaplan was raised in New York City and graduated from City College in 1942. After wartime service as a Lieutenant in the Army, Kaplan returned to his education, completing an MA in history from Boston University (1948) and PhD at Harvard (1960), taking up the study of African American history at a time when few white scholars showed interest. Joining the English Department at UMass in 1946, Kaplan’s influence was widely felt at UMass Amherst and in the local community: he was among the founders of the Department of Afro-American Studies, a founder of the UMass Press, a founder and editor of the Massachusetts Review, and he was the editor of Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press. Over more than thirty years at UMass, he worked on diverse projects in history, literature, and the arts, often in partnership with his wife Emma Nogrady, a librarian at Smith College whom he married in 1933, ranging from studies of Poe and Melville to a biographical dictionary of African Americans and a study of Shays’ Rebellion. In 1973, they were co-authors of the first comprehensive study of depictions of African Americans in the visual arts, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution (based on an exhibition planned for the National Portrait Gallery), and in 1991, the UMass Press published a collection of Sidney’s essays, American Studies in Black and White. A Fulbright lecturer in Greece and Yugoslavia and exchange Professor at the University of Kent, Kaplan was the recipient of the Bancroft Award from the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History for best article of the year in the Journal of Negro History, and he was awarded the UMass Amherst Chancellor’s Medal in 1979, one year after his retirement. Sidney Kaplan died in 1993 at age 80 and was followed by Emma in 2010.

The Kaplan Papers document a long career devoted to the study of African American history and life. The extensive correspondence, research notes, and drafts of articles and other materials offer important insight into the growth of African American studies from the 1950s through 1970s as well as the growth of UMass Amherst into a major research university.

Barbara Kerewsky Halpern was an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts. She was also a prodigious writer, researcher, and lecturer. After earning a bachelors in geography from Barnard College (1953), she accompanied her new husband, Joel M. Halpern, to Serbia, helping him with his field project which would later result in his Ph.D. thesis and book, A Serbian Village (1958). She continued to work with her husband on numerous projects. After her youngest daughter was school age, she went back to college, earning a Master of Arts degree in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts, followed by a Ph.D. in Anthropology in 1979. In 1983, she published a book entitled “These Are Your Neighbors” published by the Cambridge Book Company. She was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in the mid-1970’s, which motivated her to investigate various medical issues within Anthropology, eventually becoming a medical anthropologist. She became a certified practitioner of the Feldenkrais method, establishing her own practice under the name, “Mind Over Movement”. She gave presentations throughout her life, lecturing on various topics. In 1992, she served as an expert witness in the trial of Sadri Krasniqi, an Albanian man falsely accused of sexually molesting his daughter. In 1995, she was interviewed on the television program 20/20 by Hugh Downs about the case.

The Barbara Halpern Papers consists of many letters received from her childhood pen pals, college friends and family members. Documents from her early schooling as well as those of college and professional work as a lecturer and Feldenkrais practitioner form the bulk of the collection. Correspondence with Ethel (nee Russell) Breen, a young British girl, began in 1942 and continued to Breen’s death in 1996. The bulk of these letters, dated from 1942 to 1952, mention World War II, and other elements of daily life at that period.

Born in Syracuse, New York, in 1927, David C. Knapp studied at Syracuse University (BA, 1947) and the University of Chicago (M.A., 1948; PhD, 1953)., before joining the faculty in government at the University of New Hampshire. Recognized as an able administrator from early in his career, Knapp was appointed assistant to the university president and then Dean of the College of Liberal Arts (1961-1962). Leaving UNH in 1963, he served successively as associate director of the Study of American Colleges of Agriculture, director of the Institute of College and University Administrators of the American Council on Education, and Dean of the New York State College of Human Ecology at Cornell University (1968-1974) before being elected president of the University of Massachusetts in 1978. He retired in 1990.

The Knapp Papers consist primarily of materials relating to efforts in the early 1990s to designate Hokkaido and Massachusetts as sister states, to celebrate the long relationship Between UMass and the University of Hokkaido, and to commemorate the legacy of Benjamin Smith Lyman. In addition to correspondence with the Massachusetts Hokkaido Society and Hokkaido University, the collection includes memorabilia associated with Knapp’s connections with Japan.

Marion Ingraham was born January 6, 1911, the youngest of four children of George Hunt Ingraham and Ruth Forster Ingraham. She grew up on a farm in Millis, Mass., and was active in the Junior Extension Service programs run by Massachusetts Agricultural College, including Camp Gilbert. At least two of her siblings graduated from MAC (Edward in 1925 and Mary in 1927), as did her daughter. Marion Ingraham married Otto Kohler and lived in South Hadley. She died in 2000.

This small collection focuses on young Marion’s activities with the Junior Extension Service and includes ephemera, copies of the Camp Gilbert News newsletter, photographs, and pages from a scrapbook.

With an MFA in theater from UMass Amherst (1979), Doug Kraner built a career of thirty five years that grew from scenic design for the stage into production design for feature films and television. After his time in Amherst, Kraner taught at SUNY Stonybrook and worked on and off-Broadway, but by 1981, he moved to Hollywood and began a film career as set decorator for My Dinner With Andre (1981). Among dozens of credits as art director or production designer, Kraner worked on commercially successful films such as Uncle Buck, Lean on Me, Sleeping with the Enemy (which was the start of a long and productive working relationship with the director Danny Cannon), Extreme Measures, and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. He received an Emmy nomination in 1983 for Little Gloria… Happy at Last, and in his work on the television show Gotham in 2014-2015 earned both Emmy and Art Directors Guild Award nominations. After a lengthy struggle with cancer, Kraner died on April 4, 2016.

Organized project by project, the Kraner collection includes a cross-section of work from a production designer in the film and television industries from the 1980s to 2010s. Although the depth of coverage and contents vary from film to film, the files may contain anything from rough concept sketches to finished designs, photographs of three-dimensional models, and schematics for the construction of sets, and in the aggregate, the work documents the transition from paper-based to purely digital production techniques. Kraner retained a small number of sketches from his time as a graduate student at UMass Amherst, two sketchbooks, and a portfolio of his work for film.

Joseph Langland with his wife, Judith

The poet Joseph Langland was raised on the family farm in northeastern Iowa, and earned both a BA (1940) and MA (1941) from the famed writing program at the University of Iowa, before being inducted into the military service during the Second World War. While still in Germany serving with the Allied military government, Langland had printed for his family his first book of poetry, a chapbook titled For Harold (1945), for his younger brother who had been killed in action in the Philippines. Returning home, he taught part-time at Iowa, then joined the faculty at the University of Wyoming (1948-1959), and finally UMass Amherst. Part of a wave of energetic young writers and scholars to arrive on campus, Langland became active in the early years of the Massachusetts Review and became founder the university’s MFA Program for Poets and Writers. A prolific writer, he contributed regularly to literary magazines and was author of The Green Town (1956), The Wheel of Summer (1963), The Sacrifice Poems (1975), Any Body’s Song (1980), and Selected Poems (1991). Langland was recipient of the National Council of the Arts Award, the Melville Cane Award, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship, and a Ford Faculty Fellowship, among other honors. After his retirement from UMass in 1979, he served as emeritus until his death in 2007.

The Langland Papers include a substantial number of original manuscripts of poetry, many unpublished, correspondence with major poets, and an extensive run of Langland’s letters written home to his wife and family during the war. Other Langland Papers are housed at Luther College in Iowa.

Marshall O. Lanphear spent forty-five years at Massachusetts Agricultural College, earning his B.A in 1918 and a Master’s in 1926, after which he taught agronomy and served as college registrar. After service as an infantryman at the end of the first World War, Lanphear worked briefly as an instructor at the Mount Hermon School before returning to MAC for graduate study. Known to his colleagues as “Whitey,” he taught courses on farm management, dairying, and pomology and on his retirement, Lanphear was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters. He died on April 24, 1993 at the age of 98.

The Marshall O. Lanphear Papers include a number of his published articles, correspondence regarding his honorary degree, speeches, lecture notes and personal items including illustrated Christmas cards from 1915, his 1917 driver’s license, and correspondence related to his retirement. There is also a folder of business records from the college farm.