How personal collections make NU’s archives invaluable

Steven Spielberg’s 1981 masterpiece, Raiders of the Lost Ark, has an unforgettable final scene.

The workman wheels the Ark of the Covenant, boxed and labeled with No. 9906763, into Hangar 51, a seemingly endless storage facility. The viewer is left to believe the U.S. government reneged on its promise and did not make the ark available to scholars.

Fortunately, Northwestern University has a different approach to research, a cornerstone of its educational mission. Kevin Leonard, appointed in December 2023 as Northwestern’s first university historian, gave the RoundTable a look behind the scenes of Northwestern’s archives.

A tour with NU’s ‘foremost’ historian

Leonard is described in a 2023 promotion announcement as “the foremost authority on the history of the University.”

Before he was the university historian, Leonard was an archivist. One of his responsibilities was to identify, approach and cultivate relationships with alumni and Northwestern employees whose professional files and memorabilia would add value to Northwestern’s archives.

Once he identified a prospect, he was unfailingly polite yet relentless in his approach. (Read about his first meeting with Garry Marshall.) He continues to communicate with many of the people (and their descendants) whose papers are part of the archives.

“My responsibility is to collect the noncurrent official records of Northwestern that have value for administrative people or historical purposes,” Leonard said. “We’ve carved out an area where we can go after the personal papers of individuals associated with Northwestern, such as faculty or staff or alumni and friends of the university.

“So what it means is that most of our material consists of written records, handwritten or typewritten documents. But we also have serial publications out of Northwestern. We have diaries, scrapbooks of individuals, correspondence files.”

Memorabilia from noteworthy individuals

Normally the Charles Deering Memorial Library is the nexus for the archives, but over the next year, the library is closed for renovation. In the interim, researchers and students may request files and read them in temporary reading rooms located nearby. Library employees or work-study students oversee the reading rooms.

The collections are available to the public for research. Requests typically take a day or two to be processed. Organized and catalogued collections reside in temperature-controlled environments. Labeled, acid-free folders hold similar items. Folders sit in acid-free boxes. Each folder receives a unique barcode.

Many frequently requested items reside on campus, but there are off-site storage locations as well. The collections are valuable; security measures protect them. Certain areas of the RoundTable visit were off-limits to photography.

Memorabilia includes personal correspondence, manuscripts, scripts, drafts with notations, personal artifacts, objects and pretty much anything related to the subject. Emails move from online to print. A technically skilled staff member “opens” old computers; passwords be damned. It’s a forensic look at the past.

For biographers studying an individual’s personal and professional background, these files are invaluable.

Plenty of sports memorabilia

Athletic memorabilia spans several sports. Football-related items — helmets through the years, media guides going back 70 years, tapes and films of games — take up the most space. A basketball rim and net from a historic game are also housed there.

There is memorabilia from alumnus Fred Williamson, aka “The Hammer,” who played football at Northwestern. After a pro football career, he pursued a second successful career in movies and TV.

The football helmet collection was a happy accident. An employee in the athletic department had saved them over the years. He called Leonard to ask if he’d be interested in some old helmets.

Northwestern also has a collection of unique scrapbooks assembled by the wife and mother of the legendary pro football quarterback Otto Graham. Graham grew up in Waukegan — he weighed 14 pounds, 12 ounces at birth in 1921 — and enrolled at Northwestern on a basketball scholarship. Although he became a legendary football player, he continued to play basketball and baseball throughout college.

The alumni community’s hunger for sports information is almost insatiable, Leonard said. He regularly receives queries about dates of games, who was on the team and other relevant data.

“People are trying to gather information about a game because they’re interested in the game, because they played in the game, because their father, grandfather or great-grandfather played in the game,” Leonard said. “So we have rosters of the athletic teams. We have photographs of the people who are on teams. We have scores and other statistics from the games, things like that. Over the years I’ve probably spent 10-15% of my time on reference and inquiries related to sports.”

Notable names in performing arts

Performance art is also well represented in the archives. Agnes Nixon, Patricia Neal, Garry Marshall and Bob Banner donated personal collections to the university. The actor Richard Kind has begun to donate his personal and professional memorabilia, as well.

Nixon was a prolific television writer and producer. She created and wrote One Life to Live, All My Children, Loving and The City. All of her scripts are at Northwestern. She convinced three colleagues — Fred Johnson, Susan White Kirshenbaum and Judith Bancroft — to donate their papers to Northwestern. This group forms a strong repository for those interested in serial broadcasting.

Neal was a film and stage actress. She won an Academy Award for Best Actress for the 1963 film Hud. Her file includes her unused tickets to the Academy Awards ceremony that year. (She was eight months pregnant and unable to travel to Los Angeles.)

Banner was a producer, writer and director; he coproduced The Carol Burnett Show. In 1948 he received a master’s degree from Northwestern. Banner then enrolled as a doctoral candidate and taught radio courses on campus. In the evenings he worked on the NBC television show Kukla, Fran and Ollie. When he received a job offer in 1949 in television based in New York, Banner wanted to pursue this new field and left Northwestern 11 hours short of completing his degree.

Richard Kind is an actor in film, Broadway and television (Curb Your Enthusiasm) and does voice work for many movies (A Bug’s Life, Inside Out). International Movie Database credits him with nearly 300 roles. His NU files, exquisitely detailed, include his birth announcement, early promotional posters, magazine articles and other ephemera.

Sir Fraser Stoddart, one of two Nobel Prize winners

The Nobel laureate Sir Fraser Stoddart, a pioneer in nanoscience and a Board of Trustees professor at Northwestern, died Dec. 30. Stoddart received the 2016 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the design and synthesis of molecular machines. He shared the award with Ben Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage.

Stoddart was regularly donating his papers to the university for several years. In 2023, the balance of his papers arrived in two moving vans. They reside on campus neatly stacked in library storage corridors. Leonard estimates it will take at least a year to review and organize Stoddart’s papers. The library will probably need to hire several students to review the individual contents of the files.

Newt and Josephine Minow

Nearby were files and memorabilia from the late Newton (Newt) Minow and Josephine (Jo) Baskin Minow, both Northwestern alumni. They met on campus as undergraduates. Holding up Minow’s worn leather briefcase, Leonard said, “My belief is you need to find the occasional three-dimensional object to catch someone’s eye, to get them off the path, to look at the display.”

Minow “was hugely important as an attorney, as a figure involved in politics, involved in the communication industry. He figured prominently in a long series of presidential campaign debates. He was important in the establishment of public broadcasting for the nation. She was prominent in cultural affairs,” said Leonard.

Beatles manuscripts

Original copies of song lyrics from The Beatles are perhaps the most famous part of the collection. Facsimiles hang in Room 208 of the library. They are part of the John Cage Notations Collection. The Deering Library and the British Library are the only two libraries in the world that hold handwritten Beatles lyrics.

The university acquired the Beatles manuscripts in 1973. The originals are kept in a guarded, secret, locked location and rarely shown. Copies are framed and on display in Deering.

In the 1960s, the composer John Cage began collecting manuscripts from musicians. He did not know the Beatles. He did know the artist Yoko Ono, who was dating Beatle John Lennon. She arranged for a few manuscripts to be sent to Cage.

From the Beatles Manuscript page on the library’s website: “Cage received lyric sheets for seven songs: “The Word,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” “Yellow Submarine” (on two sheets), “Good Day Sunshine,” “And Your Bird Can Sing” (showing the working title “You Don’t Get Me”), and “For No One” (with the working title “Why Did It Die?” and some lyrics not heard in the recorded version). All songs are from the Revolver album (1966), except for “The Word,” from Rubber Soul (1965).”

All the manuscripts together are known as the John Cage Notations Project Collection.

How personal collections make NU’s archives invaluable is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.