“If We Don’t Tell Their Story, Who Will?”

The Memphis and Shelby County Room preserves the history and culture of our region.

by

In 1948, Willie Mays signed his first professional baseball contract, agreeing to a monthly salary of $250 to play as a center fielder for the Birmingham Black Barons, a team owned by the operator of a Memphis funeral parlor.

On a small folded sheet of plain notepaper, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent a personal message, apparently by messenger, to Tennessee Senator Kenneth McKellar, writing in pencil, “Dear Kenneth, I do hope you’ll go along with my Utilities Bill … and get all the rest to help,” signing it simply “FDR.”

A fragile document dated September 5, 1790, acknowledged payment of one dollar a day to one “William Mizell” for his services as an “interpreter from the Fort at the Chickasaw Bluffs.”

And a beautifully hued card invited guests to a “Night of the Carnival” Mardi Gras party, held in Memphis on February 14, 1888, when our city celebrated this event on the same scale as New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama.

These four pieces of paper, which could have been so easily discarded over the years, represent a tiny sample of the more than one million — yes, one million — fragile, irreplaceable, and priceless items that have been carefully preserved, collected, and archived by the staff of the Memphis and Shelby County Room. Housed on the fourth floor of the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library on Poplar, the collection includes thousands of rare books, journals, manuscripts, letters, official reports and documents of all kinds, photographs, diaries, newspapers, magazines, audio recordings, record albums, home movies, school yearbooks, and so much more. It is, in short, a treasure trove for anyone from the seasoned professional researching local or regional history, to people of all ages and backgrounds who are simply curious about the life and times of those who have passed before us.

“We consider it our job to preserve the history and culture of this city and the people who live here,” says G. Wayne Dowdy, senior manager of the Memphis and Shelby County Room since 2010. “That includes our relationship with the rest of the world. What’s more, we also regard everyone who has ever walked the earth as a historical figure. And if we don’t tell their story, who will?”

“Everybody has made a contribution to society of some kind,” says Dowdy. “So we want to talk with people and preserve their stories. If you want to know about a prominent person, there are a hundred different ways you can find out about them. But for many other people, their stories are lost.”

— Wayne Dowdy

“We absolutely stress that,” says Gina Cordell, curator of the Memphis and Shelby County Room since 2012, who began working at the library in 2000. “I preach that we have materials from many notable Memphians. We have the papers of Maxine Smith, Benjamin Hooks, Boss Crump. But those slice-of-life collections are just as important in their own way. Many times, they are what people care the most about.”

“A cabinet of curiosities”

The present-day Memphis and Shelby County Room had humble beginnings. This community went more than 70 years before city leaders opened the first public library in 1893. The Cossitt Library, housed in a beautiful red sandstone castle on the river bluffs, quickly acquired an impressive collection of books and professional journals. But, as libraries often do, it soon became a repository for all sorts of other objects. Long before the Memphis Pink Palace Museum opened, Cossitt became the city’s only museum, complete with such things as taxidermied animals. “It really was like a cabinet of curiosities,” says Cordell.

Meanwhile, just a few blocks away, at Third and Madison, a family donation allowed for the creation of the Goodwyn Institute. Here, Memphians could attend lectures in a large auditorium and peruse the materials in that organization’s library. Then, when the city of Memphis acquired grocery-store magnate Clarence Saunders’ “Pink Palace” mansion on Central, other objects from the past found a home there. But these groups weren’t linked, and nobody had a system for deciding what went where, when families wanted to donate items from their personal collections.

When Cossitt first opened, official reports from city government and the school board were housed in the director’s office. “The collection really began to grow in 1928, when the library hired Mary Davant,” says Dowdy. “Mary was a native Memphian, had gone to library school, and was hired as our first reference librarian. Over time she was put in charge of all Memphis reference material, expanding it greatly.”

The Memphis and Shelby County Room wasn’t officially established until 1971. The city had opened the main branch on Peabody in 1955, and when they expanded that building, they set aside a dedicated room in the history department, beginning with the materials Davant had been gathering over the years. After she retired, Danny Yanchisin became manager, and “he really began to actively collect,” says Dowdy. “He didn’t just grow the collection, but put in place procedures that helped us keep up with what we had. He created donor files, for example, to help us keep accurate records of who had donated what.”

Dr. Jim Johnson took over the Memphis and Shelby County Room in 1982, serving until his retirement in 2010, when Dowdy, who had joined the library staff in 1994, was named senior manager. He and Cordell, with support from Verjeana Hunt, the library system’s public services supervisor, worked with librarians who held a special interest in local history — among them, Patricia LaPointe and Barbara Flanary — to develop the rapidly expanding history collections.

Even in the new space, the main reading room was small, and the collections quickly outgrew the limited storage space. The photograph collection was stored on different floors, so a request for two photographs might mean a trip by the librarian to two completely different areas of the building. In 2000, when developers demolished the old J.B. Hunter department store at 3030 Poplar and began construction of an ultra-modern, four-story library, they provided space on the top floor dedicated to the Memphis and Shelby County Room.

That area today includes a spacious reading room, with sturdy wooden work tables taken from the original Cossitt Library, rows of filing cabinets for microfilmed newspapers, storage rooms with shelves for the various collections, work spaces where the staff can collect, organize, and preserve documents, and office areas for the hardworking staff. Thanks to a generous grant from the Plough Foundation, there’s even a soundproof recording studio, where the library staff, under the direction of Scott Lillard, can record interviews for its “901 Voices” collection of audio interviews with people from all walks of life.

“Everybody has made a contribution to society of some kind,” says Dowdy. “So we want to talk with people and preserve their stories. If you want to know about a prominent person, there are a hundred different ways you can find out about them. But for many other people, their stories are lost.”

At present, the “901 Voices” project has recorded more than 200 interviews, with college students, school teachers, community activists, newspaper reporters, and the president of the Chinese Historical Society. Some 70 of those have also been transcribed, and the plan is to provide written transcripts of every interview, as time allows.

“Memphis is engaging with the world.”

The manuscript and photo collections are the largest of all the Memphis and Shelby County Room’s holdings. “The first real historical collection came to us in the late 1950s — the papers of U.S. Senator Kenneth McKellar [1869-1957], who donated them to us in his will,” says Dowdy. Collected into more than a thousand boxes, “It was our first and it remains our largest collection.” (This was where the library found the note from President Roosevelt mentioned earlier, along with other letters FDR sent to McKellar, often addressing him cordially as “Mack.”)

“We don’t cherry-pick or choose what to save,” says Dowdy. “That’s Archives 101. We may discard or recycle duplicate materials to save space, but otherwise it goes in our collections.”

A good example of that, he says, is Phoebe Omlie, the Memphis aviatrix who gained national fame in the 1920s and ’30s. “The bulk of her collection is about her career as a flyer,” says Dowdy. “But towards the end of her life, she became very politically minded, writing lots of letters to editors, so a big portion of her collection focuses on that as well. Katherine Hinds Smythe is another example. Her family owns Memorial Park, but a lot of her collection focuses on the Crystal Shrine Grotto and the artist [Dionicio Rodriquez] who created that.”

Library visitors may sometimes be surprised to find so many items in the collections that seemingly have little relation to Memphis.

“Memphis is engaging with the world in a variety of ways,” says Dowdy. “So people may donate things about their experiences or interests outside of Memphis. Saul Brown, for example, was a well-known press photographer here, and he would go to Europe regularly and take pictures there. But we didn’t take those out of the collection here, saying, ‘Well, this has nothing to do with Memphis.’ It is a Memphian’s view of Europe.”

The Memphis and Shelby County Room has shelves lined end-to-end with books — novels, poetry, textbooks, just about anything printed on paper. “Some of the fiction isn’t set in Memphis, or the textbooks have nothing to do with Memphis. But they were written by Memphians, so in order to be as complete as possible, we collect materials that involved Memphians.”

The library doesn’t actively pursue collections; they don’t have the staff or funding to purchase materials. Whenever possible, though, they encourage the donation of items. “We hold ‘digitization days,’” says Dowdy. “We ask people to bring in materials, but often they want those back. So we will scan them, return their originals, and give them a digital scan. We then put the scans online.”

Dowdy and his staff have collected home movies in this way. One of their treasures is an 8mm home movie, apparently filmed in 1929, showing the Sterick Building under construction, which opened the following year. “This guy was just walking or driving around and filmed what he saw,” says Dowdy. “There are images of Overton Park with snow on the ground, and other images clearly taken in the spring. There’s footage of friends canoeing down the Wolf River.”

Many collections are so vast — the “E.H. Crump Collection” fills 227 boxes — that users would be overwhelmed if it were not for the library’s finding aids.

At some point, this gentleman — his name unknown — donated his films to the Memphis Chamber of Commerce, and years later, the Memphis and Shelby County Room digitized the film. “So now we have a good digital copy of it,” says Dowdy. “We are not equipped to be a film archive, because that requires expertise we don’t have, and additional storage we don’t have. Old films need to be climate-controlled — in fact, they need to be kept very cold.”

The library does have a few original home movies that have been donated. “These are actual films that we keep and take care of,” he says, “but digitizing them at some point is the best way to preserve them.”

The Memphis and Shelby County Room photo collection contains some 25,000 print images. Over the years, most of these have been painstakingly pasted onto sturdy cardboard backing, for easier handling and photocopying. At least 10,000 of these images are available online, on the Dig Memphis site (see below), where they can be downloaded at no charge. Others, however, remain in file cabinets, and years ago, somebody devised an old-fashioned, yet effective, way to find the exact image they needed.

“That was a Barbara Flanary project,” says Dowdy, referring to an earlier curator. “Her husband took all the photos for the contact print index.” A card catalog contains a card representing every photo in the collection. The cards are arranged alphabetically by subject, and then by dates. And on each card is a thumbnail of the photograph, with a number. Flip through the cards, study the thumbnail, turn in the card number, and a librarian will bring out the actual photograph.

Some historical treasures turn up by accident. When Roy Good Appliance Store moved into a building on Lamar, employees found four photo albums gathering dust in the basement. They donated them to the library, but it took several months before anybody could take the time to look through them. What they discovered were more than 900 high-quality, never-before-seen snapshots of East End Park, the amusement complex that stood where Overton Square is today, as well as other landmarks around town. Library employee Laura Cunningham scrutinized the photos, cleaned and archived them, and organized the “Joe Bennett Collection” — named for the East End Park bandleader who took the original photos.

Cordell says, “Not a day goes by that I don’t find something on my desk that somebody has donated to our collection, and to that I say, yes, yes, yes!” There have been a few times, however, when she had to say no.

“The weirdest request we ever had — and I won’t say her name — involved a very prominent Memphian whose husband was an interior designer. He had designed for her a very lavish bathroom. He passed away, and she was getting up in years, so she offered to donate her bathroom to us — only if we put it on display in the middle of the Memphis and Shelby County Room.”

“We want everything accessible.”

With websites like ANCESTRY.COM and NEWSPAPERS.COM, the need for access to the original newspapers has declined. The Memphis and Shelby County Room has stacks of old bound volumes of The Commercial Appeal and the Memphis Press-Scimitar, but the newsprint is so yellow and brittle that they are often impossible to use. They also have several dozen file cabinets containing microfilm reels for those newspapers, as well as hundreds of others published in the United States over the years.

Obviously, though, the best solution was to join the digital revolution, and Dig Memphis — “The Digital Archives of Memphis Public Libraries” — has become the go-to source for almost 40 collections. According to Cordell, the most popular is “Memphis Streetscapes,” with hundreds of photos of local streets, roads, and alleys that were taken as far back as the 1800s. Local photographers — Willy Bearden, Saul Brown, and Roy Cajero among them — have also donated their life’s work to Dig Memphis.

Some collections are rather specialized. The “Hallelujah! Collection” is composed of images, manuscripts, and other materials related to Hallelujah!, considered the first “Hollywood” movie filmed in Memphis, in 1929. Longtime Commercial Appeal dining critic Fredric Koeppel donated his collection of restaurant menus to the library, forming the basis for the current “Restaurant and Menu Collection.” When a donor contributed more than 1,500 Memphis postcards, spanning decades, to the library, they formed the “Postcards from Memphis Collection.”

Perhaps the most unusual of these separate collections is the “1920s French Fashion Collection.” This contains more than a hundred original, hand-colored illustrations that originally appeared in Tres Parisien!, described in the library’s finding aid as “an art deco French fashion journal featuring haute couture fashion plates and articles on fashion collections, designers, and patterns.”

Many collections are so vast — the “E.H. Crump Collection” fills 227 boxes — that users would be overwhelmed if it were not for the library’s finding aids. Compiled by the Memphis and Shelby County Room staff members, these are far more than indexes. Instead, they are extremely detailed descriptions of every single item in that particular collection.

“We want to make everything accessible,” says Dowdy. “We want our materials to be easy to use, instead of just dumping a bunch of stuff on a table and saying, ‘Have at it.’ We need to be as precise as we can, because often the questions we get are very precise.”

Materials are donated to the library in various ways. “Sometimes we get stuff in nasty plastic bags, boxes, rubber bins, you name it,” he continues. “So the first step is to process and protect the items, using archival means and methods. But the next step is the finding aid, which serves as the go-between with the researcher or customer and the materials themselves.”

Besides being a comprehensive description of the items in a collection, the finding aid “captures the knowledge that the processor has gathered, because no one will know that particular collection better than that individual. So the finding aid is there to capture their thoughts, their ideas, and the knowledge they’ve learned from the materials.”

“I think that’s pretty cool.”

“One of the things that is unique about the Memphis and Shelby County Room,” says Dowdy, “is that people come to work here and then become experts on various aspects of local history.” Curator Gina Cordell, for example, earned a master’s degree in sociology from the University of Memphis, but has since become a prominent historian, the co-author of Historic Photos of Memphis. Dowdy holds a master’s degree in history from the University of Arkansas, and has published nine books on specific historical topics, such as Scouting in Memphis, Mayor Crump Don’t Like It, and Lost Restaurants of Memphis. He is currently working on a book on Memphis wrestling.

Brett Prather’s work as a library assistant has provoked a rather special interest: true crime. Recently the Memphis and Shelby County Room began working with the Memphis Police Department to digitize thousands of official homicide reports stretching back to 1917. These are usually one-page typed or hand-written reports, which over the years have been stored in three-ring binders.

Prather is not only converting the paper reports to digital versions, but linking the reports to newspaper accounts of each crime, and any other related materials she can find. “Brett brings a depth of knowledge that we didn’t really have before,” says Dowdy, “and also doing research to find the outcome of each homicide investigation.”

Dowdy believes the police department wanted to build a working relationship with his team, which also includes Marilyn Umfress, Kyle Liotta, Cindy Wolff, Bonnie Pinkston, Laura Talley, and SeCoya McNeil. “They knew we could find old newspaper articles,” he says, “along with other materials that would help them in their cold cases.”

The results were better than expected. “We actually helped solve at least three cases with them,” he says. “I think that’s pretty cool.”

And it’s probably a special level of service that Memphians never expected from the staff of the Memphis and Shelby County Room.