Collections: F

Since the merger of the Boston Monthly Meeting with the Independent Cambridge Monthly during the second quarter of the twentieth century, the Society of Friends has expanded in the Boston area. Fresh Pond began as an allowed meeting under Cambridge Monthly in 1989 and was set off as a monthly meeting of its own in 1991. It has been under care of Salem Quarterly Meeting since its inception.

The records from Fresh Pond include a nearly complete set of minutes for the meeting’s first five years and a nearly comprehensive set of newsletters.

A voice of the radical working class during the Great Depression, Jack Conroy was the son of a union organizer, born and raised in the mining camps near Moberly, Mo. His novels The Disinherited (1933) and A World to Win (1935) were among the best known works of “proletarian” American fiction to appear in the 1930s.

The Conroy Collection includes a series of 24 letters from Jack Conroy to Lewis Fried, a professor of English at Kent State University and UMass PhD, along with a small number of letters by associates of Conroy, and a selection of publications associated with or including work by him. Of particular interest are Fried’s oral history interviews with Conroy (1971) and Sally Goodman (1978).

Alice Howell Friedman, a professor in the School of Nursing from 1967 until her retirement in 1984, was a strong advocate for the professionalization of nursing, and an activist for unionization and equitable compensation for nurses. Friedman arrived during a period of rapid growth for the School of Nursing and her push to broaden the educational content of nursing students played a significant role in the further growth and success of the program. This approach is exemplified in the International Experiences program she founded. After retirement, Friedman remained very involved in the field of nursing and, among many significant activities, focused on the history of nursing, becoming a tireless lay-archivist, forming the Nursing Archives at Boston University and developing the School of Nursing collections at UMass Amherst.

The Alice Howell Friedman papers document Friedman’s time as an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing at UMass and her work as a labor activist, including lecture notes, publications, correspondence, clippings, and biographical materials.

Born in June 1922, Harvey Friedman attended Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and enrolled in the Boston University School of Law in 1941. After serving as a non-commissioned officer with an Army medical unit in France from 1942-1946, Friedman returned home to Massachusetts and became a member of the bar in 1948. For the next fifteen years, he was the Assistant New England Director for the Amalgamated Clothing Worker Union, AFL-CIO. After refusing the position several times, Friedman accepted an offer from the University of Massachusetts Amherst to become Assistant Director of the Labor Relations and Research Center in 1965, earning promotion to Director in 1970. During his tenure at UMass, Friedman taught classes in Political Science, Legal Studies, Government, and Education. He retired from UMass in 1990 and passed away in 1992.

The Friedman Papers contain correspondence, newsclippings, and course materials dating from Friedman’s time at UMass. Also included are materials related to unions with which Friedman worked and documentation of his relationship with the American Arbitration Association.

A professor of design in the Department of Art, Architecture, and Art History, Arnold Friedmann worked throughout his career to professionalize interior design and enhance the quality of daily life through good design. Born into a “gut Buergerlich” Jewish family in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1925, and raised in comfortable circumstances, Friedmann’s life was deflected by the political turmoil of the twentieth century. After Kristallnacht drove home the political realities of the Nazi era, Friedmann’s father used connections to secure permission for the family to emigrate to Palestine, where, impoverished and with his education disrupted, Arnold apprenticed to a cabinetmaker. Following service in the British army and later the Israeli army, Friedmann resumed his education, entering the Pratt Institute to study interior design. Earning both his bachelors and masters degrees (his doctorate from the Union Institute followed in 1976), Friedmann freelanced in interior design and furniture design while teaching at Pratt, eventually becoming chair of his Department. From 1972 until his retirement in 1990, Friedmann served as Professor of Design at UMass Amherst. A founding member of the Interior Design Educators Council, Friedmann was recognized within the profession as an honorary fellow of the Design Institute of Australia (1985) and as a recipient of the IKEA Award (1989).

The Friedmann Papers contain a wealth of unpublished and published writings by Friedmann on design, stemming primarily from his years at UMass Amherst. A small sheaf of photographs depicting his design work, and a series of Department of Interior Design newsletters from Pratt, 1963-1967.

The present-day Friends Meeting at Cambridge began as an independent, informal, unprogrammed meeting for worship that met between 1899 and 1901, and then again beginning in 1911. After holding joint meetings with neighboring Boston Monthly Meeting starting in 1926, Cambridge became an official independent monthly meeting in 1937, and during the Quaker union of 1944, merged with Boston Monthly to create the new Friends Meeting at Cambridge.

Although records from Cambridge are beset with significant gaps, they nevertheless provide a rich opportunity for examining the growth of a monthly meeting in New England during the post-World War II era and the commitment shown by its members to creating social justice. The collection includes extensive records of the Peace and Social Concerns Committee (and related endeavors), documenting peace activism during the Cold War and Vietnam years, and initiatives to fight poverty and racial injustice.

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.

In October 2003, a group of residents from the North Quabbin region in Massachusetts came together to oppose plans to develop a large tract overlooking the southeast shore of Tully Lake. Concerned about the environmental and social impact of the proposed development and asserting the rights of the towns and residents affected to have a say, the Friends of Tully Lake waged a five-year campaign that ultimately succeeded in convincing the Board of Planning in the town of Athol to reject the proposal.

The records of the Friends of Tully Lake document a successful grassroots initiative to prevent private development on a lake in the North Quabbin region. Maintained by Aaron Ellison and Elizabeth Farnsworth, leaders in the Friends, the collection includes notes and minutes of Friends’ meetings, communication with environmental consultants, exchanges with the Athol Planning Board, and some background information environmental regulations in Massachusetts.

Raised in suburban Boston, Charlie Frizzell became a well-known photographer of the music scene during the height of the folk revival of the early 1960s. At the age of 14, Frizzell took up photography after landing his first job at a camera shop, and he developed his talents under the mentorship of a local commerical photographer, Bob O’Shaughnessy. As a regular at Club 47 in Cambridge, Frizzell photographed the most popular performers of the era, from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to Geoff and Maria Muldaur and Jim Kweskin. He left Massachusetts in the late 1960s for Berkeley, Calif., and according to folklorist Millie Rahn, created a sort of conduit between the music scenes in Berkeley and Cambridge. Frizzell died in Berkeley on May 29, 2004, following complications from a liver transplant.

Dating primarily from the mid-1960s, the collection includes approximately 50 prints and some negatives from Charlie Frizzell, including images of Jim Kweskin, Maria Muldaur, Bob Siggins, and Bonnie Dobson, along with images of performances at Newport Folk Festival.

A Cape Cod Quaker, and lifelong member of the West Falmouth Friends Meeting, Cecilia Bowerman Fuglister was born in West Falmouth, Mass., in 1906. After receiving a BA in mathematics and biology at Earlham College in 1928, she went on to earn an MA in Library Science from Columbia (1932), where she remained as a librarian. Two years after marrying the oceanographer Frederck C. Fuglister in 1939, however, she returned to Cape Cod when he took a position at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. She helped to establish the document library at Woods Hole and served as its librarian until her retirement in 1977. She died in Falmouth on Jan. 14, 2005, at the age of 98.

The Fuglister collection consists of a miscellaneous assemblage of records, mostly from Sandwich Monthly Meeting from 1797 through the 1840s, with a few later items. The collection also included fifteen memoirs and memorials for Friends, nearly all from the mid-nineteenth century.