Collections: S

Pat Spaulding camera returning home, 1956 Sept.

In 1956, the graphic designer Pat Spaulding left for a tour of Europe. During her seven months abroad, she and her friend Maureen Jones traveled by motor scooter through France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, staying in hostels and taking in the sights. Perhaps most memorably, Spaulding tore her Achilles tendon while visiting in Siena, Italy, receiving generous care from her hosts during the four-week period of her recovery.

A refreshing record of two young American women traveling alone in Europe during the mid-1950s, this scrapbook is populated with dozens of well laid-out photographs of sites seen, along with Spaulding’s letters home and a raft of ephemera such as picture postcards, copies of ticket stubs and passport pages, an international driver’s license, smallpox immunization certificate, maps, newsclippings, and beer coasters. Notably, the album also includes a number of beautiful, skillfully-rendered line drawings.

The photojournalist John Spragens spent the better part of a decade living in Southeast Asia from 1966-1974, working for a variety of relief and peace organizations.

Taken by John Spragens late in 1983, the black-and-white photographs in this collection document Cambodia shortly after the Vietnamese Army defeated Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge and installed a new order.

Marshall Spriggs was an educational activist at UMass/Amherst while an undergraduate from 1969 through 1974. He eventually became the chair of the Academic Affairs Committee of the Undergraduate Student Senate , the voice of undergraduates in their institution’s educational policy. After leaving Amherst, he served as a reading teacher in New York City and as an Assistant Community Representative with the Massachusetts Office for Children. In the late 1970s, he became the Managing Editor of the Boston People’s Yellow Pages published by Vocations for Social Change in 1980. The PYP attempted to catalog all the groups doing progressive political work in the Boston area. In the 1980s and beyond, he served as the Publications Director for statewide legal services, a founder of an international environmental organization, and filled various posts at Harvard University and MIT.

The Marshall Spriggs Collection features social change publications including the People’s Yellow Pages, Black Bart Brigade: The Outlaw Mag, AFSC New England Regional Office printed material, and What’s Left in Boston as well as articles on educational reform, student power, and racism.

In the early 1970s, the Springfield Environmental Coalition emerged as one of the grassroots organizations dedicated to environmental causes in the lower Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. Under the leadership of its president, Wilfred R. Lenville, the Coalition took part in regional planning efforts relating to urban expansion in the city of Springfield as well as issues relating to regional land use, agriculture, and water quality in the Connecticut River.

A tightly-focused assemblage of formally and informally published materials from the lower Pioneer Valley, the SEC collection addresses a range of issues in regional planning during the early 1970s, including land use, agriculture, water resources, zoning, and urban growth. Of particular note are a series of interesting typewritten studies of individual neighborhoods in Springfield, 1970-1972. The collection includes one folder of correspondence regarding the Coalition’s work.

Polish family who emigrated to the United States in 1912-1913 and settled in Chicopee, Massachusetts, working in meat packing firms and textile factories, and also as seamstresses and farmers.

Includes birth and wedding certificates, military and employment documentation, residential and passport applications, photographs, and lists of baptisms, weddings, and deaths. Also contains a family history written by Gary Sroka, correspondence, payment book for the Society of St. Joseph (Chicopee, Massachusetts), and a news clipping. All materials exist as photocopies and are written primarily in Polish, German, and Hungarian, though some are in English, Ukrainian, and Russian.

The St. Kazimier Society was an early mutual aid society formed in the Polish community in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Established in 1904, the Society preceded the founding of Our Lady of Czestochowa Church by five years.

Records of the St. Kazimier Society of Turners Falls include administrative files, financial records, educational materials, and photographs. Account books generally reflect members’ premium payments and benefits, the income and expenses of the society itself, and of the club.

A renowned independent film maker and founder of Gabriel Films, Jonathan Stack has written and produced over two dozen documentary films and fifty television programs. Born in New York City in 1957, Stack graduated from UMass Amherst in 1979. From the time of his film Damned in the USA (1992), Stack has taken on challenging subjects, earning a reputation for gaining access into forbidden and often dangerous situations, from crack dens in Harlem to war-torn Liberia. The recipient of numerous honors in his career, Stack has been awarded five Emmy Awards, has twice been nominated for the Academy Award, and his film The Farm, on Angola Prison, won Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize in 1998.

The films and videos in the Stack collection include copies of his work in Liberia and Haiti and material from his documentary on prison rodeos at Angola Prison. The collection includes film from Damned in the USA (1992), Final Judgment (1996), and The Farm (1998), as well as footage from Harlem, Angola Prison, St. Gabriel Women’s Prison, and on body piercing, rodeo, and the prisoner Vincent Simmons.

Russell Stacy (2nd from L, front row) and Squadron, ca. 1942

When drafted into the Army Air Corps in late December 1942, Russell Stacy (1922-2009) was as apprentice at the General Electric plant in Pittsfield, Mass., and was pursuing an engineering degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Training for active duty aboard the new B-29 Superfortress, it was not until April 1944 that planes were ready for operations, at which point Staff Sgt. Stacy became the central fire control gunner on the plane “Totin’ to Tokyo.” As part of the 793d Squadron, 468th Bomb Group, 20th Bomber Command, he was based in Kharagpur, India, with a forward base on Chengdu, China, and took part in bombing raids throughout southeast Asia, including the first mission to bomb Japan from China in July 1944. The logistical challenges of operating from China led the Air Corps to abandon the base in Jan. 1945, at which time Stacy returned to the United States for additional training. After the war’s end, he continued as a draftsman at GE, later working as an engineer in New England and Virginia for nearly forty years. Russell’s father, William H. Stacey served in France during World War I, as did his mother, Mary Ellen Barns, a Red Cross nurse.

Writing home consistently throughout the war at least once a week, Stacy left a remarkably dense and thorough record of his service. Beginning at the point of his induction, the letters provide discussions of training to become a B-29 gunner; his time in India and China; bombing raids over Japan and Sumatra, and China; and his return to the States for additional training. Well written, though somewhat lacking in detail due to censorship, the collection provides a valuable perspective on a crew members’ experience in the China-Burma-India theater. Other parts of the collection detail the Stacy and Barnes family, and their war service dating back to the era of the American colonies, particularly William Stacy’s service as an ambulance driver and Mary Ellen Barnes’s service as a Red Cross nurse, both in World War I.

A theater company of older adults based in Oakland, Calif., Stagebridge is recognized as a pioneer in the field of creative aging. Founded by Stuart Kandell in 1978, the organization sponsors workshops, performances, and other opportunities for lifelong learning that provide a creative means to transform the lives of older adults and their communities through the performing arts. Organized “for and of” older adults, Stagebridge is testimony to the ways in which elders enrich our culture and communities.

The Stagebridge collection contains scrapbooks, photograph albums, news clippings, and some scripts beginning in the earliest years of the organization. Digital materials in the collection are even richer, ranging from videos of performances to promotional materials and organizational records.

George Clifford Stamper was a movie projectionist in the 4th Special Services during World War II. Born and raised in Somerville, Massachusetts, he enlisted in the U.S. Army on September 1, 1943 and participated in the European Theater from April 6, 1944 until December 12, 1945, when he was sent home and then honorably discharged in January 1946.

The papers of G. Clifford Stamper consist primarily of his incoming and outgoing letters during his training and service from 1943-1945. Correspondence is mostly with his family, but also includes his letters with neighbors, as well as friends that were serving. The collection contains, too, Stamper’s post-war letters received from 1946-1955. In addition, the outgoing letters of James C. Doyle, Jr. during his service in the U.S. Marines from 1958-1959 are a part of this collection. Doyle’s connection to Stamper is unclear.