No-No Boy by John Okada

In October of 2021, CC Special Collections acquired a first edition of John Okada’s No-No Boy. The 1957 novel, a staple of Asian American literature, tells the story of Ichiro Yamada, a man who answers “no” to the two so-called “loyalty” questions in a 1943 questionnaire for Japanese Americans: “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty wherever ordered?” and “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, to any other foreign government, power or organization?”

We’re especially excited to have the book here at CC because it connects with our collections on Camp Amache and also because it’s the first edition of a title with a complex and fraught publishing history — see “Dispute Arises Over ‘No-No Boy’” in the New York Times.

UPDATE September 2023: Colorado Senator Michael Bennet visited Special Collections in April of 2023 to view this book and research the history of Japanese American incarceration. In September, this article appeared in the CC alumni magazine, with input from CC faculty Aline Lo and Brandon Shimoda.

The Nob Hill Observatory

Harvard astronomer Edward Pickering had ties with CC’s Nob Hill Observatory!

This is the only known photograph of the Nob Hill Observatory, taken about 1905. We believe it was located around 2112 East Uintah, currently “Lunar Park.” (Both “Nob Hill” and “Knob Hill” spellings were in use; CC seems to have used “Nob.”)

Pickering visited Colorado Springs in 1887, accompanied by his wife Lizzie, his brother William, and Anna Palmer Draper. They were here to consider Pikes Peak as a site for an observatory. (See Dava Sobel’s 2016 book The Glass Universe for details.) Frank Loud, CC professor of physics, soon got involved. Here are two newspaper articles about that visit:

In 1903, CC began planning for its own observatory, and in 1904, Loud, Pickering, and three others (Herbert Howe, Edward Giddings, and Otis Johnson) formed The Western Association for Stellar Photography. It’s likely Pickering participated from afar, as his signature does not appear on the early documents. We can see from the By-Laws and Minutes that the instruments at Nob Hill belonged to the Harvard College Observatory.


I wish we knew more about the conversations Loud had with Pickering. I wonder if they talked about having CC women catalog the stars. (Pickering hired many women for this purpose at Harvard, among them Annie Jump Cannon and Henrietta Swan Leavitt.)

Mary Chenoweth’s “Choo Choo”

Look at this fantastic one-of-a-kind scroll-book by Mary Chenoweth that we just got as a gift from Eve Tilley!

Just look at it!

The pencil is there to show scale. The text of the scroll reads:

Toot all a bored 1997 coal more and more coal hemanaigs [?] trunk line heavy poof down-n-out short list slate pleez run on time oil books books ABC lift cracker barrels Xercise off hours without spectacles bug footloose accordion to Sante Fe NM lake of [eye]’s? well worn out past hurts rent a car only five more or maybe seven american eagle oops Rocky Mountains either way just decide cross country advertisers end

Reverse: Mary Chenoweth June 1997 for Trudie Gregory all aboard

Black newspapers digitized!

In honor of the Black Lives Matter movement, Special Collections digitized several Black newspapers in Colorado Springs, including The Colorado Springs Eagle (1912, ed. Julia Embry), The Voice of Colorado (1936-1937, ed. Tandy Stroud), and Colorado Springs Crusader (1982, ed. Dorothy Middleton). We also digitized two CC student publications, Black Literary Magazine 1978-1981, and Fight the Power 1991-1994. Searchable PDF files, and more, are linked from this page. Below are some excerpts.

Pandemic Projects

You may be wondering what CC Special Collections is doing while it’s closed for in-person research. The answer is: a lot! But different things than usual.

We are helping researchers remotely, mostly by email. We are using the focused attention that comes with uninterrupted time to process manuscript collections such as the Van Briggle Pottery and Tile Company Records, which started out like this:

and are now fully cataloged, with a finding aid available upon request. We can’t usually use our reading room tables for this kind of thing, so there are some benefits to being closed! We are also doing little projects that we always meant to do but somehow never quite had time for, like home-making a foam holder for our cuneiforms:

We’ve also been digitizing up a storm. More about that in the next post!

Stokely Carmichael / Kwame Ture at Colorado College

In Spike Lee’s 2018 film BlacKkKlansman, based on Ron Stallworth’s memoir Black Klansman (Flatiron Books, 2018), the Colorado College Black Student Union invites Stokely Carmichael (also known as Kwame Ture) to speak on campus in the early 1970s.

Did that really happen?

YES! But not exactly in the way the film suggests.

In real life, Carmichael / Ture visited Colorado Springs in 1977 and spoke at Bell’s Nightingale Club. According to the memoir, Stallworth attended that event, but it was not connected to CC in any official or documented way.

Two years later, the Black Student Union at CC sponsored a visit. Carmichael / Ture spoke on campus in the lounge of Bemis Hall on April 12, 1979.  One local newspaper (the Colorado Springs Sun) described his subject as “The Plight of African People in America and What Must Be Done”; the CC student newspaper (the Catalyst) gave the title as “College Students and the American Socio-Economic Order.”

Seven years after that, the Black Student Union invited Carmichael / Ture to campus again. He spoke at on April 22, 1986 in Packard Hall.

 

1918 Flu at Colorado College

Here we are in April of 2020, undergoing a global pandemic, with Colorado College students distance-learning, and CC faculty and staff mostly working from home. Naturally, I’ve been getting some questions (via email) about the closest thing we have to a parallel situation in CC’s history, the 1918 flu pandemic.

We learn from Robert Loevy’s 1999 book Colorado College: A Place of Learning (p. 111):

“In the fall of 1918 an influenza epidemic swept the United States, and Colorado College was not spared. Eight of the young men in the Army radio school died in one month, and a young instructor in Physics, William W. Crawford, also succumbed to the disease. The College was quarantined by the local Health Department, classes were suspended, and Ticknor Hall was converted into an infirmary for the large numbers of ailing military personnel. … The influenza quarantine was lifted on December 13, 1918, and classes quickly resumed.”

The Colorado College student newspaper of the time, the Tiger, is digitized and freely available here:  https://archive.org/details/tigerstudentnews21colo/page/n5/mode/2up. The front page of the October 4, 1918 issue has this headline: “No Necessity for Closing Classes Yet.” The December 6 issue of the Tiger, however, states that classes closed on October 4. Presumably, then, the paper came out just as the situation changed drastically.

The October 11 Tiger has “Epidemic of Influenza is Practically Arrested,” and in the weeks following, headlines include “Epidemic of Influenza Slowly Losing its Grip,” “Only 18 Patients Left in Hospital in Ticknor Hall,” and “Radio School to Re-Open Monday Morning.” These cheery headlines hide the fact, revealed in the issue of December 8, that by October 5, five men in the SATC (Students’ Army Training Corps) had died, with more to come. Additional influenza outbreaks occurred in the winter and spring, with somewhat less-severe quarantine restrictions and no further deaths at CC.

Reading through the 1918 paper, I found similar instructions to today’s. People aren’t to gather in large groups; if you are sick, you’re to stay home. The October 15 issue recommends the use of a mask with this rhyme: “Cover up each cough and sneeze, / If you don’t you’ll spread disease.”

There’s also evidence of dark humor: the October 18 issue contains this rueful aside under the headline “I Beg Your Pardon, Sir”: “We understand that we missed the chance of a life-time in the last Tiger by not having one of the prominent headlines read thusly: EPIDEMIC OF INFLUENZA LOSES ITS GRIPPE. Perhaps so, but we quit calling it the grippe after the second funeral.”

Not all the men who died are identified in the student newspaper, but I found these names: William W. Crawford, Private Carey, Private Leland James, Abe Chayuten, and Private A. F. Kerns.

I’ll end with the paper’s gratitude for the work of medical staff, from the October 18 issue:

“Too much praise cannot be bestowed upon Mrs. Weinshausen and Mr. Hartog, who, with their corps of nurses and assistants so defeated this menace threatening the health and life of every
soldier in the unit. Considering the fact that fully 200 patients were treated, the mortality rate was unusually light. As soon as the hospital was well organized, all men having the least symptom of the influenza were cared for until completely cured. It is due to this fact that the disease was so successfully and completely checked in a comparative short time.”

busy times in Special Collections

Starting in 2015, Jamal Ratchford (“Dr. J.” to his students) has invited-slash-required his classes to visit the Archives to research race and racism at Colorado College.  It’s always exciting to have a room full of students working on related topics, and I particularly enjoy witnessing the way the students in these classes help each other find resources and talk about them. In Block 3 of this school year, November 2019, 23 students in “Introduction to the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity” were in and out of our reading room almost every day, and at the end of the block we had a TON of reshelving to do, so much that I snapped a photo:

Of course, what I really SHOULD have done is capture a photo of the STUDENTS, but my staff and I were so busy helping them that I never thought to do it!

 

Addendum: Dr. J provided two photos:

 

Divya Victor’s new book from the Press at Colorado College

Divya Victor, author of CURB, the newest book from the Press at Colorado College, visited campus last week to give a reading. Special Collections hosted Victor, printer Aaron Cohick, and Natanya Pulley’s Diverse Voices / Diverse Forms class for an advance preview of the book and a special small-group talk with the author.

CURB documents the assault and killing of Indian-Americans and Indian immigrants in public spaces in the United States. It will be for sale this fall.

 

It’s a truly jaw-dropping achievement from the Press.

Overheard in the reading room at this moment: “There’s books in this book!”

Useful Tips to Keep You Out of the Asylum

In blocks 7 and 8, two Colorado College classes (Tomi Ann Roberts’s Feminist Psychology of Embodiment and Tricia Waters’s Women and Madness) visited Special Collections to view our mini-exhibition, Books About Sex. (Subtitle: “These books may be about sex, but we can’t promise you will find them sexy”).  In addition to the materials in the display, students looked at 16th-century-and-forward health manuals such as the two described here, annual reports of the the Colorado State Hospital, 20th century books on how to please your husband, Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood pamphlets, and more.

Students imagined what they would highlight if they were doing their own exhibitions. One student noticed that some women, but never any men, were admitted to the then-named Colorado Insane Asylum in the 19th century because of “domestic trouble.” Another student looked for what we would now call “consent” in Marabel Morgan’s 1973 advice book The Total Woman. Yet another student pointed out that the women in the exercise illustrations in Sex Revelations and the New Eugenics (1936) wore high heeled shoes and very little else. We all appreciated the “Remedy for Hysterics (or Mother-Fits)” in John Homan’s 1856 Long Lost Friend: A Compendium of Mysterious & Invaluable Arts & Remedies, which involves pressing one’s thumb against one’s chest and reciting “Matrix, patrix, lay thyself right and safe…”

A possible title for the classes’ imaginary exhibitions emerged: “Useful Tips to Keep You Out of the Asylum.”