Collections: mss

Known as Girl’s City Club until 1954, the Young Women’s City Club was a non-sectarian, self-governing, and largely self-supporting club in Northampton, Massachusetts, that developed educational and recreational opportunities for young women through programs, social events, volunteer services, and fund-raising activities. The club met regularly under the auspices of the People’s Institute until November 1979 when their rooms at James House were taken over by the Highland Valley Elder Service and the club relocated to the People’s Institute.

The records of the Young Women’s City Club document the growth and activities of the club from 1939 to 1981, with the exception of the decade 1961 to 1971. Consisting of photocopies of originals still held by the People’s Institute, the collection includes minutes of council and business meetings and scrapbook pages.

The physician Philip E. Zanfagna was a prominent early opponent of fluoridation of the public water supply. Born in Lawrence, Mass., in January 1909, Zanfagna earned his MD at Boston University and spent the bulk of his professional career as a specialist in allergic diseases at Lawrence General Hospital. Placed in command of a military hospital in Tennessee during the Second World War, he became immersed in pharmaceuticals research, through which he became aware of the health effects of fluoride. Over the next three decades, he emerged as a prominent opponent of fluoridation of the public water supply and of the suppression of debate over the topic within the scientific community. He published widely on the topic during the 1960s and 1970s and was recognized as an important antifluoridation activist, becoming a founder and first president of the International Society for Fluoride Research and a leading figure in the Massachusetts Citizens Rights Association. Zanfagna died in June 1982 at the age of 73.

A small but interesting collection, the Zanfagna papers contain a small quantity of correspondence relating to antifluoridation activism and research, 1969-1972; a set of audiotapes of the Frankfurt Conference of the International Society for Fluoridation Research, October 1967; and a handful of research reports of fluoride toxicity. The collection also includes a paperback copy of Zanfagna’s best known book (co-authored with Gladys Caldwell), Fluoridation and Truth Decay (1974).

Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Zickler of Leominster, Massachusetts began a 3 month cross-country road trip on March 27, 1952. Mrs. Zickler created a scrapbook to document the trip. The scrapbook includes souvenir and original photographs, postcards, maps, and other miscellaneous memorabilia from the journey. Their stops include various tourist attractions as well as scenic areas throughout the Midwest and Southwest of the United States. Most of their time was spent in Oraibi, the oldest continuously inhabited community in North America, on the Navajo Gospel Mission. The Zicklers returned to Leominster in July 1952, having traveled a total of 10,404 miles.

The scrapbook spans the entirety of the Zickler’s trip. It includes postcards, souvenir photographs from tourist locations such as the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park, the Big Rock Candy Mountain, Hoover Dam, the Petrified Forest (as well as a piece of wood from the Forest), placemats and matchboxes from Las Vegas, and numerous souvenir photographs of the Navajo Gospel Mission.

Sally Zinman, ca. 1985

At the age of 34, Sally Zinman woke up one morning believing that she was not Sally Zinman. Her family put her in the care of psychotherapist John Nathaniel Rosen from 1971 to 1973, during which time Sally suffered physical abuse at the hands of Rosen and his aides, including beatings, restraint, and seclusion. After leaving Rosen’s care–lying and pretending to have recovered so that she could get away–and recovering on an organic farm she bought in Florida, Zinman hired a private investigator to expose Rosen’s abuse. Motivated by her experience, Zinman decided to dedicate her life to fighting for the civil rights of mental patients. She helped found several self-help organizations, including the Mental Patients’ Rights Association in Florida, and–after moving to California–the Berkeley Drop-In Center, the California Network for Mental Health Clients, and the California Association of Mental Health Peer Run Organizations. She was also involved in several national organizations and activism efforts. Zinman remained an active and crucial figure in the psychiatric survivors movement until her death in August 2022.

The Sally Zinman Papers contain material from the earliest years of the psychiatric survivors movement to the present, including documents from the organizations and conferences with which Zinman was involved, newsletters, awards, documents related to her investigation into John Rosen, copies of speeches and presentations, photographs, and memorabilia.

Frankie “Ashbuloh” Ziths, born Frank Gumbs, Jr. on December 6, 1933 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, was a vital member of the Black Panther Party, joining in the late 1960s. Ziths served as the official New York photographer for the Party’s newspaper, The Black Panther, and covered the Panther 21 trial first for The Black Panther, then for Right On!, the East Coast Panther newspaper. As more of the members of the Harlem Branch were arrested and jailed or forced underground, Ziths kept the Branch’s business and programs moving forward until it closed in 1981. One of the programs Ziths took over was the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, which raised awareness and funds to support political prisoners in the US. Through the NCDPP, Ziths maintained long-standing correspondences with incarcerated fellow activists and sent them money, often from his own pocket. In the late 1970s, Ziths began honing his skills as a photographer and became a respected New York paparazzi, eventually working as one of the city’s most sought-after news photographers and a stringer for the Associated Press and The New York Times. Ziths died of lung cancer on December 31, 1990.

Prompted by his wife Barbara Dee Ziths (now Barbara Heller), who recognized the historical significance of the work of Black community activists in New York, Ziths began preserving material documenting the Panther 21 trial, and eventually the activities of the Harlem Branch of the Black Panther Party. Heller and Ziths saved all the material that was in the branch when it closed in 1981. The Frankie Ziths Collection includes administrative files, publications, posters, original artwork and layouts, and memorabilia from the Party’s Harlem Branch, documenting the ideological split of the Black Panther Party in 1971 and support for the Black Liberation Army; administrative files and correspondence from the NCDPP; Ziths own notebooks and journals, including notebooks recording his experiences at the Panther 21 trial; and Ziths complete archive of photographic negatives, slides, and prints, representing his career as a paparazzi and press photographer and documenting activism in New York and elsewhere in the East Coast Black Panther Party community.

After undergraduate work at Brandeis, the geneticist Susan Zusman became the first graduate student in the Princeton lab of Eric Wieschaus, the future Nobel laureate. Beginning in 1981, Zusman studied the early development in Drosophila by inducing mutations in genes used in gastrulation, using genetic mosaics and gynandromorphs. After completing her degree in 1987, she went on to a post-doctoral project in Paul Schedl’s lab, also at Princeton, using antibodies to determine the location of the dorsal protein in Drosophila embryos, and then moved to a three-year Howard Hughes Postdoctoral Associate at the Cancer Institute at MIT (1988-1991), working with Richard Hynes to explore the function of extracellular matrix molecules and integrins in Drosophila. She subsequently joined the faculty at the University of Rochester before leaving for positions in industry. After leaving Rochester in 1998, she served as Executive Director of Functional Genomics for Novartis then, in 2002, became a founder and CEO of Genetic Services, Inc.

The Zusman collection documents one woman’s successful career in Drosohpila studies. Beginning with some materials from her undergraduate program, the collection includes notes, drafts, photographs (both technical and personal), and data generated in her studies, reflecting much of the modern development of embryological and genetic techniques prior to the impact of gene sequencing. There is relatively little content from her time in industry.