Detroit Tigers scrapbook, 1940-1941

by Marian Matyn

I processed a Detroit Tigers scrapbook, 1940-1941.

The scrapbook has a blue and gold decorative cover and measures 11.5x14.5x1.5 inches. Billy Caldwell created it beginning in 1940 (documented on first page). The pages are acidic. The scrapbook consists almost entirely of Detroit Free Press clippings of the Detroit Tigers, 1940-1941. About two-thirds of the pages have clippings pasted on them, the rest are loose, some with dates and the title of newspaper. Also included is a Gem Theater advertising flier for Ithaca (Mich.) mail route residents for June 1941. The flier, along with genealogical information added from ancestrylibrary.com, is in one folder inside the front cover of the scrapbook.

Billy Caldwell was William O Caldwell, Jr. (1928-2012). He was the son of William Sr. and Thelma G. Caldwell and had a sister, Betty Ann. He lived, worked at Total Petroleum for 28 years, died and was buried in Ithaca (Mich.). (This information is from ancestrylibrary.com, accessed in Aug. 2016.) The Gem Theater was in Saint Louis (Mich.) located near Ithaca.

The Gem Theater flier was critical to me to place Billy Caldwell in a specific Michigan location and discover his history.

In 1940, the Detroit Tigers were American League Champs. They lost the world series 4-3 to the Cincinnati Reds. In 1941, they finished 4th in the American League. (This info from baseball.reference.com)

Sad Tiger Cartoon

Creator's name and date on first page

Triumphant Tigers

Fun portraits

leaving the dugout. Dig those traditional uniform pants

Gem theater flier

Home game; cool imagery

American League Champs

Cover

Tigers leaving on a train (this doesn't happen today) for the World Series

Historical Alpena Newspapers Now Available

Back in January, the Clarke hosted the Michigan Digital Newspaper Grant Contest. Over 100,000 Tweets and 8,000 postcards were cast as votes by supporters of the five finalist communities. And the winner, at the end of the flurry of votes, was Alpena.

Today, we are pleased to announce that the Alpena Evening News (1899-1905, 1909-10) and the Labor Journal (1885-1890) are now available via the Digital Michigan Newspapers website. These two titles are the first titles that we added to our digitized newspapers after the switch to our new digital document interface.

Congrats again to Alpena. Welcome to the Digital Michigan Newspapers Database!

New CMU Libraries Digital Collections Website Now Available

We are excited to announce that our new digital document interface is up and running. For the past eight months, staff members from the Clarke Historical Library, the CMU Libraries, and DL Consulting in New Zealand have been working to convert all of the digitized documents found in the CMU Online Digital Object Repository (CONDOR) to a new interface. This new interface, powered by Veridian collection management software, separates the digital collections found in CONDOR into four broad groups:

• Digital Michigan Newspapers
• Documents related to the history of Central Michigan University
• Scholarly and Creative works of the CMU Community, including dissertations and theses
• Selected documents from the Clarke's collections pertaining to Michigan history and children's literature

The CMU Libraries Digital Collection (digitalcollections.cmich.edu) gives you access to over 30,000 documents - that's nearly 450,000 digitized pages! If you were used to getting to digital documents by typing "condor.cmich.edu" into your web browser, you can continue to do so and you will be automatically redirected to the new site. While "condor.cmich.edu" will still work, other links will be affected. If you have saved links to specific documents or titles in CONDOR, you will have until the end of December to update them to the new Veridian interface. After December, the links to documents in CONDOR will no longer be available.

We are pleased to bring you this exciting new website. We invite you to jump in and explore. For users and for staff at the CMU Libraries, there may be some stumbling blocks with our new setup. Please let us know if you are having any trouble, any technical issues, or you have any comments. We will address them as soon as we can.

Highlights of the New Interface 

 

Click on the image for a larger view

Some of the highlights of the new Veridian interface include the opportunity to customize your experience with several options available at the top of the page (see number 1 in the image above). You can also register your own account, which will allow to save your searches for future reference (number 2). Also, because computers are not perfect when it comes to interpreting typed words on a digital page (called text recognition or optical character recognition), you can correct the errors made by computers when you are registered. Statistics about the number of text corrections made by individual users are logged and displayed on the front page of the Veridian interface via a Text Corrector Leaderboard (number 6).

The Veridian interface also uses a standard library search bar that many users are familiar with in order to do keyword searches of the full text (number 3) or you can select the Advanced Search function to limit by date or title as well. And now, searches for phrases can be wrapped in "quotation marks" to search for that exact phrase. If you are interested in seeing a random document in the holdings, take a look at the random item for the collection (number 4). For the Digital Michigan Newspapers, this random document is actually a newspaper from this day in history. Finally, if you have an idea of a title or date range of interest to you, but you don't want to search for keywords, you can browse the entirety of the collections by date or title (number 5).

When viewing a document, the Veridian interface lays out the pages in order horizontally, allowing you to view the document by scrolling to the right, or virtually turning to the next page. You can also search for a specific keyword within a document and you can view the transcript of the recognized text to the left of the reading pane (which allows you to correct the text if you are registered and logged in).

Mount Pleasant Indian School In National Archives Newsletter

The National Archives at Chicago distributed their August newsletter recently with a feature article about Native American boarding schools. Among the more prominently mentioned boarding schools is the Mount Pleasant Indian School, which was in operation in Mount Pleasant from 1893-1933.

The Clarke maintains a great deal of information about the boarding school in Mount Pleasant including photographs, reprints of annual reports from the National Archives, and remembrances of those who attended the school. But the series of materials at the Clarke is by no means complete and the information highlighted by the National Archives at Chicago shows that any serious researcher of the history of the Mount Pleasant Indian School, the students who attended, or the people who worked there certainly must consult more records than those available at the Clarke.

You can read the most recent newsletter via this link. If you would like to view past issues of the National Archives at Chicago newsletter or sign up to receive the newsletter in your inbox, head over to the National Archives page for more information.

What's That Little Green Hat All About?

by Colton Hengesbach and Bryan Whitledge

The Clarke recently received a donation of an interesting little green beanie that holds more CMU history than one might think. The hat, which belonged to Central State Teachers College alum, Myron Georgia (BS 1935), was a freshman cap from 1932. Back in the day (1920s-40s), freshmen at Central were required by upperclassmen to wear green caps while on campus as a way to distinguish freshmen from the rest of the student body. To the freshmen, it was hazing. But to others, it was tradition and a fun way to create class rivalry and distinction.

At some point during the academic year, the upperclassmen would designate one day "Cap Day," a day in which freshmen could shed their badge of dishonor and publicly burn the hats. Or, in the case of this cap and luckily for the Clarke, a student might keep it as a fun memento of his or her freshman year. To prolong the amusement of the upperclassmen, you can bet that "Cap Day" was delayed until the last week of classes each year forcing the freshmen to walk around with their ridiculous hats for as long as possible. Girls who didn’t want to wear the hats were allowed to wear green ribbons to signify their freshman status at Central.

Freshman with their caps being hazed, CM Life, 9/28/1938, p. 4

The green cap was not exclusive to Central during the 1920s-40s. Other college campuses such as Penn State, University of Kansas, and Purdue University had similar traditions. Some consequences of being caught without your green cap could include an involuntary dip in a nearby body of water or a minor beating, all at the hands of upperclassmen who enforced the tradition

Since receiving it, the Clarke has transferred the cap to CMU's Museum of Cultural and Natural History where it will be stored with a multitude of other objects related to Central's history. For a variety of very good reasons, the green cap tradition is no longer with us -- and we are sure that the thousands of incoming freshman this fall appreciate that. But the memory of past injustices committed against young and naive freshman can be remembered forever thanks to a small amount of green felt and some digging in the archives.