Collection highlights, news about acquisitions, events and exhibits, and behind-the-scenes looks at the work and services of Rare Books & Special Collections (RBSC) at Notre Dame.
The exhibition Notre Dame Football Kills Prejudice: Citizenship and Faith in 1924 is now open and will run through the end of January 2025.
Curators Gregory Bond and Elizabeth Hogan will host exhibit open houses on select Friday afternoons before Notre Dame home football games, including on October 11, November 8, and November 15. The drop-in open houses will run from 3:00–4:30 and will feature brief remarks by the curators at 3:30.
Tours of the exhibit may be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Greg Bond at gbond2@nd.edu.
The October spotlight exhibits are Wollstonecraft: Revolution & Textual Evidence (September – December 2024) and A Fourteenth-Century Chanson de Geste Fragment (September – November 2024).
RBSC will be open regular hours (9:30am – 4:30pm) during the University of Notre Dame’s Fall Break, October 19 – 27.
Rare Books and Special Collections welcomes students, faculty, staff, researchers, and visitors back to campus for Fall ’24! We want to let you know about a variety of things to watch for in the coming semester.
Fall 2024 Exhibition: Notre Dame Football Kills Prejudice: Citizenship and Faith in 1924
“Notre Dame football is a new crusade: it kills prejudice and stimulates faith.” — Rev. John F. O’Hara, C.S.C., Prefect of Religion, Religious Bulletin, November 17, 1924
In the fall of 1924, the University of Notre Dame found great success on the football field and confronted a dangerous and divisive political moment. The undefeated Fighting Irish football team, cemented forever in national memory by Grantland Rice’s legendary “Four Horsemen” column, beat the best opponents from all regions of the country and won the Rose Bowl to claim a consensus national championship. Off the field, Notre Dame battled a reactionary nativist political environment that, in its most extreme manifestation, birthed the second version of the Ku Klux Klan. Sympathizers of this “100% Americanism” movement celebrated white, male, Protestant citizenship and attacked other groups—including Catholics and immigrants—who challenged this restrictive understanding of American identity.
In the national spotlight, Notre Dame leaders unabashedly embraced their Catholic identity. They consciously leveraged the unprecedented visibility and acclaim of the football team to promote—within the very real political constraints of the era—a more inclusive and welcoming standard of citizenship. Attracting a broad and diverse fan base, the 1924 national champion Fighting Irish discredited nativist politics and helped stake the claim of Notre Dame—and Catholics and immigrants—to full citizenship and undisputed Americanness.
Curators will host exhibit open houses on select Friday afternoons before Notre Dame home football games, including on September 6, September 27, and October 11. The drop-in open houses will run from 3:00–4:30 and will feature brief remarks by the curators at 3:30.
Other curator-led tours open to the public will be announced soon. Tours of the exhibit may be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Greg Bond at gbond2@nd.edu.
This exhibition is curated by Gregory Bond (Curator of the Joyce Sports Research Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections) and Elizabeth Hogan (Senior Archivist for Photographs and Graphic Materials, University Archives).
Stop in regularly to see our Collections Spotlights
Currently on Display: Making Books Count: Early Modern Books in the History of Mathematics
Discover how books shaped science and our understanding of nature. The history of mathematics guides our understanding of astronomy, as revealed in works by Galileo, Copernicus, and others. Through ancient texts tracing the evolution of mathematical thought, visitors can explore the dialogue between mathematics and nature.
The last public spotlight tour is scheduled for August 28 at 1:30 pm.
This dual case spotlight is curated by Caterina Agostini (Indiana University Bloomington, Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine). She previously served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values and the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship. She is Co-PI in the Harriot Papers project.
Opening Soon: September Spotlights
RBSC spotlight exhibits will switch over for the fall during September. Two new exhibits will feature recently acquired editions of books by Mary Wollstonecraft and two manuscript fragments of French poetry. Stay tuned for more information!
These and other exhibits within the Hesburgh Libraries are generously supported by the McBrien Special Collections Endowment.
All exhibits are free and open to the public during business hours.
Special Collections’ Classes & Workshops
Throughout the semester, curators will lead instructional sessions related to our holdings to undergraduate and graduate students from Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College, and Holy Cross College. Curators may also be available to show special collections materials to visiting classes, from preschool through adults. If you would like to arrange a group visit and class with a curator, please contact Special Collections.
Events
These programs are free and open to the public.
Thursday, October 3 at 5:00pm | The Fall 2024 Italian Research Seminar and Lectures will begin with a lecture by Giovanna Corazza (Università Ca’ Foscari), “Dante’s Chorographies: From the Territory to the Comedy.”
National Women’s Football League CollectionA Revised Martyrology for 16th Century German CatholicsWomen in Irish Prisons: Autographs of Prisoners in 1923Influencing Opinion by Mapping the Early American Civil WarSome of the recent acquisitions highlighted on the blog in the past year.
Anticipated Closures
Rare Books and Special Collections is regularly open 9:30am to 4:30pm, Monday through Friday. The department will be closed for the following holidays and events:
September 2, for Labor Day (Monday) September 13, for Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C., Presidential Inauguration Events (Friday, afternoon only) November 28-29, for Thanksgiving (Thursday and Friday)
Our last day open before the campus closure for Christmas Celebration will be December 20 (the Friday of final exams week).
When they qualified for the 1932 Los Angeles games sprinters Louise Stokes and Tidye Pickett were the first African American women to make the United States Olympic team. Based on their strong times at the Olympic trials, Stokes and Pickett were named to the pool of six women that would be chosen for the 4×100 relay team (in those years the final official team was chosen a short time prior to the actual competitions).
The 18-year-old Stokes (from Malden, Massachusetts) and 17-year-old Pickett (from Chicago) were the only African Americans on the U.S. women’s team. But a large contingent of women athletes was, itself, relatively new. Only a few women had appeared in the first several Olympics. Starting with the 1928 games, though, the International Olympic Committee sanctioned women’s competition in a broader range of events, including more strenuous activities like track and field
The Fred L. Steers Papers in the Joyce Sports Research Collection holds manuscript material that documents the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics experience of Stokes, Pickett, and their teammates. Steers, a track athlete and 1911 graduate of Notre Dame, worked as a lawyer in Chicago and was a long-time administrator for the Amateur Athletic Union and the American Olympic Committee, the forerunner of the modern United States Olympic Committee. During the 1928, 1932, and 1936 Olympics, Steers was the Manager of the United States Women’s Track and Field Teams where he was in contact with the two African American women Olympians.
Historians who have written about Stokes and Pickett note that they frequently faced discrimination during their time on the Olympic team. Their own teammates sometime hazed them. They also routinely encountered the color line and were often not allowed to eat with the rest of the team—including in the dining room of the team hotel in Los Angeles.
Nevertheless, due to their fast qualifying times Stokes and Pickett had originally been expected to be members of the final American 4×100 relay team. Before the event, however, athletic administrators reshuffled the lineup and replaced the African Americans with two of their white teammates. The Chicago Defender, one of the country’s most influential African American newspapers blamed “this bit of back room treachery” on “lily-whiteism” and reported that “the injustice of this move is being placarded by track followers out here but to no avail” (“Tydia Pickett May Lose Olympic Spot,” Chicago Defender 30 July 1932, p. 8).
Unfortunately, the Steers Papers does not contain any additional information about the decision to bench Stokes and Pickett. But the collection does include documentation about their presence with the U.S. Olympic team. One of the most prominent items is a rare photograph of Stokes and Pickett posing together in street clothes (MSSP 5000-56: X Olympiad, Los Angeles. Photographs, 1932). A clipping from the Los Angeles Herald Express includes a large picture titled “American Girls’ Track Team Arrives” showing Stokes (standing, right) and Pickett (kneeling, second from left) with their teammates (MSSP 5000-57: X Olympiad, Los Angeles. Newspaper clippings, 1932).
The Steers Papers does contain an original manuscript item attesting to some of the discriminatory treatment encountered by the two African American women. A passenger list and reservations receipt for the train trip that the U.S. women’s Olympic track and field team took from Chicago to Denver en route to L.A. suggests that Steers racially segregated the athletes while they were on the train. The passenger card shows the lodging arrangements for the team and indicates that Steers placed Louise Stokes and Tidye Pickett in berths 11 and 12 of Pullman Car #341—separate from and two bunks away from the rest of their white teammates (MSSP 5000-54: X Olympiad, Los Angeles. Miscellaneous ephemera, 1932).
Other documents describe the presence of the two Black athletes as members of the U.S. contingent. A July 16, 1932, telegram from Fred Steers to the American Olympic Committee, for instance, lists the full official roster of the women’s track and field team. The handwritten telegram includes Louise Stokes and Tidye Pickett on line 5 as members of the relay team (MSSP 5000-52: X Olympiad, Los Angeles. Fred L. Steers correspondence, 1932).
The collection contains a multitude of other ephemera related more generally to the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. Significant items include a referee’s badge from the “Final Olympic Track & Field Tryouts for Women” held at Northwestern University’s Dyche Stadium on July 16, 1932 (MSSP 5000-55: X Olympiad, Los Angeles. Miscellaneous ephemera, 1932), and an unused ticket for events at the “Track and Field Olympic Stadium” on August 6, 1932 (MSSP 5000-54: X Olympiad, Los Angeles. Miscellaneous ephemera, 1932).
Louise Stokes and Tidye Pickett were again members of the U.S. team for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Their trailblazing athletic careers helped pave the way for future generations of African American women Olympians.
The Fred L. Steers Papers contains plentiful records related to the United States Olympic Teams and other amateur sports from 1916–1967. The collection is open to the public and available for research.
“Welcome to Gay Sports. As we all know—sports are an integral part of American society. This love of competition is as exciting to the Gay Community as it is to the Straight Community. In the months to come, this publication will bring you information about Gay men and women athletes competing in sporting events locally and nationally. Gay Sports is your publication. Keep us informed of what you are doing.”
—Gay Sports Nov. 1982 (vol. 1, no. 1), page 4.
Publisher Mark Brown’s introductory note in the inaugural 1982 issue of the San Francisco-based Gay Sports announced the purpose of the new publication to readers. The monthly publication—one of the earliest serials devoted to sports in the gay community—would cover national sports news, but the focus of the magazine was on publicizing and building community among gay and lesbian athletes and their allies. In honor of LGBTQ Pride Month, Rare Books & Special Collections (RBSC) highlights the recent acquisition of two issues (vol 1, no. 1 – November 1982; and vol 2, no. 7 – September 1983) of this scarce publication.
The cover story in the first issue of Gay Sports—then called Bay Area Gay Sports—was a feature by Duke Joyce (Nov. 1982, p. 5) about former major league baseball player Glenn Burke, who had recently publicly acknowledged that he was gay. Burke played for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Oakland A’s from 1976 to 1979, but he had struggled with his identity as a gay man while playing professional baseball. As the article explains, he “endured subtle, yet cruel innuendos” and discrimination from management. In the end, he wanted to be “truthful to himself” and not lead a “double life,” so he retired from baseball.
Joyce wrote that “being a homosexual in any homophobic environment is agonizing enough, but in the revered Major League, it is damn near sacreligious,” and he observed that there would likely be no room for “Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, and Queers” any time soon. He applauded Burke’s courage in going public and hoped that he had “managed to further erode the stereotypical image of gays.” In closing, Glenn Burke, himself, observed: “It’s your life, and nobody else is going to live it for you. You’ve got to have self respect.”
Pictures from the 1983 Gay World Series in Chicago. (Gay Sports September 1983, pp. 12-13)
Glenn Burke’s coming out was a prominent national news story, but most of the articles in Gay Sports focused on local and community-based sports leagues or competitions for gay athletes. The annual Gay World Series softball tournament routinely received lots of attention, as did the quadrennial Gay Games. (For more information about the Gay Games, please see also the Gay Games Collection, MSSP 10070, in RBSC or the recent digital exhibit “Papers Alight: Contextualizing Mike Curato’s Flamer“).
Images from the 1983 Bay Area Women’s Softball League. (Gay Sports September 1983, pp. 6-7)
Most articles focused on local leagues and organizations that helped build communities and networks of support for gay and lesbian athletes in the Bay Area or in other cities around the country. These two issues are replete with articles about local softball leagues, tennis tournaments, swimming competitions, hiking outings, bicycling groups, billiards leagues, bowling tournaments, flag football teams, and many other types of sports and athletics.
Members of the San Francisco Different Spokes Cycling Club pose on the cover of the September 1983 issue of Gay Sports.
These sporting activities served a variety of roles and were an important part of many people’s lives. The organizer of an overseas bicycling trip described, for example, “the ease and comfort of traveling with an all gay group” (Sept. 1983, p. 8). The leader of a San Francisco cycling club noted the value in “informally representing a portion of the gay community to the bicycling world” (Sept. 1983, p. 10). But, for the most part, the various sports leagues were about safe spaces for friendship and community. The author of an article about bowling leagues simply wrote that competitors “come together not only to enjoy the sport, but also more importantly, to enjoy each other . . . . for therein lies the magic!” (Sept. 1983, p. 18).
These issues of Gay Sports are available to researchers. RBSC welcomes new donations of Gay Sports magazine to expand our holdings of this important title.
Major League Baseball (MLB) recently announced that it has updated its official record book to include Negro Leagues statistics from the years 1920–1948. MLB has belatedly recognized that the highest levels of African American baseball during the era of segregation constituted “major league” competition.
The expanded inclusive record book now counts player statistics from the Negro Leagues on an equal basis with those from the National League and the American League. In these years, organized white baseball leagues notoriously excluded Black players from the playing field until Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 (read a recent RBSC blog post about Jackie Robinson).
MLB’s rewritten record book now officially recognizes the statistical accomplishments of legendary African American baseball players like power-hitting catcher Josh Gibson, MLB’s new all-time leader in batting average and slugging percentage, and pitcher Satchel Paige, who now boasts MLB’s the third-lowest single-season earned run average.
In recognition of this announcement and in honor of the upcoming Juneteenth holiday, Rare Books & Special Collections highlights material from its collections that document the history of African American baseball. These resources will allow researchers to better contextualize and understand the statistics and the history of the Negro Leagues.
The Birmingham Black Barons Records (MSSP 0001) is a unique and important collection that documents the financial operation of the Black Barons, an influential Negro National League team. The collection includes a thick financial ledger book that lists the debits and credits—including salaries, fines, advances, expenses, etc.—for players from the 1926 through the 1930 seasons, a span which includes Leroy “Satchel” Paige’s rookie year. The Black Barons ledger book allows a rare opportunity for researchers to see the day-to-day finances of a major Negro League team. The complete ledge book has been fully digitized and is available to view through Marble.
The Birmingham Black Barons ledger book pages for Leroy “Satchel” Paige in 1928 show monthly salary credits of $80.00 and include debits on April 7th for shoes from Gray’s Sporting Goods ($7.50); unidentified debits on June 21st and June 30th to “Dr. Bradford” ($10.00 and $15.00); and fines on July 30th for “Not appearing in uniform in St. Louis” ($5.00) and “Staying out all night at Chicago” ($10.00).
The Negro Leagues Pennant Collection (MSSP 10079) contains nine vintage (c. 1930s-1940s) felt pennants advertising African American baseball teams. These rare original souvenirs document the fan experience and the iconography of the Negro Leagues.
MSSP 10079-02 and 10079-03: The Negro League Pennant Collection includes two variants of pennants for the Homestead Grays, Josh Gibson’s primary Negro Leagues team.The Negro League Pennant Collection includes pennants from numerous important teams, including the New York Black Yankees (MSSP 10079-05), the Baltimore Elite Giants (MSSP10079–01), the Newark Eagles (MSSP10079-04), and the Philadelphia Stars (MSSP10079-007).
RBSC holds a scarce original copy of Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball [Special Coll.Vault • GV 863 .A1 W45 1907], an incredibly important 1908 book by manager and former player Sol White. One of the first comprehensive histories of African Americans in baseball, White’s research documented the early experiences of Black baseball players before the establishment of the formal Negro Leagues. Since it original publication, this book has been an essential source for the historiography of African American baseball. The profusely illustrated 120-page volume has been digitized and is available to be viewed via Marble.
Photograph and biography of Sol White, Baseball Hall of Famer and pioneering historian of African American baseball.The champion 1902 Philadelphia Giants team picture is one more than 50 photographs printed and preserved in Sol White’s book.
The advertising pamphlet for the Illinois Giants of Chicago declared that “Our team attained almost unbeatable form at that period and bowled over the leading semi-pro teams of Michigan and Wisconsin in rapid succession.” As an indication of the complicated racial politics of the era, the flier emphasized that the Giants were “under WHITE MANAGEMENT” perhaps to make games against the team more palatable to white fans.
The Negro Baseball Yearbook [Rare Books Large • GV 875 .N34 N46], published annually in the mid-1940s, celebrated and recorded the yearly accomplishments of African American baseball players.
This collage of team pictures and individual photographs from the 1945 Negro Leagues season prominently features an image of Homestead Grays third baseman Howard Easterling in his military uniform. The publishers likely hoped to emphasize to readers the service and patriotism of African Americans.
These and other sources are all open to the public and available to researchers who would like to learn more about and to better understand the Negro Leagues and the experiences of African American baseball players during the age of segregation.
“Girls Really Play Baseball.” So reported the cover of the Official National Girls Baseball League Magazine in August 1950, beneath a picture of power-hitting infielder Freda Savona. The National Girls Baseball League (NGBL), a Chicago-based rival of the better-known All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), took the field from 1944 to 1954 and provided high-level athletic opportunities for women. The Joyce Sports Collection recently acquired a collection of printed material and ephemera documenting the NGBL. The opening week of the Major League Baseball season seems an appropriate time to revisit the National Girls Baseball League Collection (MSSP 10071).
The National Girls Baseball League has faded into obscurity since its heyday, while the AAGPBL has been popularized by the movie and the Amazon streaming showA League of Their Own. But, at the time, the two women’s leagues were fierce and sometimes bitter rivals, routinely competing for players and fans. Founded by Charles Bidwell, owner of the National Football League’s Chicago Cardinals, and Emery Parichy, a local businessman, the NGBL dominated the lucrative Chicago market and attracted some of the best women athletes in the country. The NGBL emphasized the athletic ability of league players, and as the August 1950 official league magazine explained:
When one thinks of girls baseball they also think of a “powder puff” setup in which the feminine athletes do everything with a sort of “weaker sex” idea—that the ladies wielding bats couldn’t knock your hat off.
Nothing is farther from the truth, and, if you don’t happen to be a regular patron of National Girls Baseball League games, a trip to one of the parks will convince you that the ladies swing a bat, throw, and field pretty much like your favorite major league baseball player.
Spread from the June 1, 1950 issue of the official league magazine featuring scenes from around the NGBL.
The league was popular in Chicago and often drew thousands of fans to games in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These pages below from the July 1949 issue of the official league magazine show league founder Emery Parichy in the crowded stands and also document a game visit by Chicago mayor Martin Kennelly. The magazine also featured a bold black-and-white advertisement for players, reading: “Wanted Girls From Any Part of the Country to Play in the National Girls Baseball League.”
Parichy owned the Bloomer Girls, league champions in 1947 and 1948, and was a driving force of the league. The owner of a roofing and house remodeling business, Parichy had begun sponsoring women’s baseball and softball teams in the 1930s, and he built Parichy Memorial Stadium in Forest Park, which would eventually become the home of his NGBL Bloomer Girls. As seen in this advertisement from the outside back cover of the July 1953 official league magazine, Parichy used the Bloomer Girls to help promote his roofing business.
Although players frequently jumped back and forth between the two leagues (as documented in this previous blog post about RBSC’s AAGPBL collection), there were some important distinctions between the the two leagues. The National Girls Baseball League only fielded teams in the Chicagoland area, while the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League placed teams in cities and towns across the midwest. The AAGPBL adopted overhand pitching in 1948, while the NGBL only allowed underhand pitching throughout its existence. The NGBL allowed players to wear shorts while on the diamond—as seen in this collection of promotional glossy postcards sold by the league—while AAGPBL uniforms always included skirts.
The postcards feature four players from the Queens, league champions in 1950, 1951, and 1952: second baseman Freda Savona, one of the best players in the league, who was inducted into the ASA National Softball Hall of Fame in 1998; catcher Dorothy Pitts; catcher Alice Kolski (the sister of Ed Kolski, ND ’32, the owner of the Queens); and shortstop Olympia Savona, Freda Savona’s sister.
The NGBL also sanctioned a marginally more diverse cast of players than its rival league. Although AAGPBL rosters included several Latina players over the years, the rest of the players in the league were white. The ranks of the National Girls Baseball League also featured Latina players like Helene Machado and Lillian Lopez. The AAGPBL famously never signed any African American players during its 12 years of existence, but in 1951 African American outfielder Betty Chapman played with the Music Maids of the NGBL. In addition, during the early years of the National Girls Baseball League, one of the best pitchers was Chinese American Gwen Wong. And, in 1953, Japanese American shortstop Nancy Ito starred for the Wilson-Jones Bloomer Girls and made the NGBL all-star team.
The National Girls Baseball League Collection contains printed material—including a nearly complete run of the Official NGBL Magazine from June 1949 through September 1953—ephemera such as postcards and team newsletters, and realia, including a signed official NGBL baseball. The Joyce Sports Collection hopes to better document the history of the NGBL League and seeks donations of material related to the National Girls Baseball League and its players.
As the Major League Baseball season kicks off this year, let’s remember the boys and the girls of summer!
Rare Books and Special Collections welcomes students, faculty, staff, researchers, and visitors back to campus for Spring ’24! Here are a variety of things to watch for in Special Collections during the coming semester.
Spring 2024 Exhibition: Mapping the Middle Ages: Marking Time, Space, and Knowledge
The tension between literal and figurative arrangements of space, time, and knowledge during the Middle Ages is brought to the fore through the primary objects that remain. Geography, whether real or imagined, manifests on the page to convey a variety of spatial arrangements: topography, pilgrimage, peripatetic liturgical procession, and boundary marking. The materiality of medieval manuscript books expresses a similar reality: geographic colophons, the regional markings of book production, devotional locals, and even the dispersing of manuscripts through modern-day biblioclasty.
To map the Middle Ages is to journey through the space created by the objects and the individuals who used them. The manuscripts in this installation are drawn from the collection of the University of Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library.
Curated by David T. Gura, PhD, Curator of Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts.
This exhibition is being held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, which will be hosted March 14–16, 2024, at the University of Notre Dame.
Stop in regularly to see our Collections Spotlights
Fall Spotlight, continued through the end of January: Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities
This exhibit features a selection of sources from the Joyce Sports Research Collection that document and preserve the history of football at Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs). During the era of Jim Crow segregation, the vast majority of African American college students and student athletes attended HBCUs.
Many of the yearly gridiron contests between rival institutions developed into highly anticipated annual events that combined football with larger celebrations of African American achievement and excellence. The programs, media guides, ephemera, guidebooks, and other printed material on display document the athletic accomplishments, the celebrations, the spectacle, and the community-building that accompany football at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
December-January Spotlight: A Warning Against Rum in Early America
Displayed in the spotlight is a 1835 poster commemorating a Salem, Massachusetts minister’s attack on a neighbor for distilling and selling rum. This particular copy was partially hand-colored in watercolor, preserved with a cloth backing, folded, and bound into a pocket-sized leather cover. The broadside is part of Hesburgh Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections’ collection of prints, posters, and broadsides.
These and other exhibits within the Hesburgh Libraries are generously supported by the McBrien Special Collections Endowment.
All exhibits are free and open to the public during regular hours.
Special Collections’ Classes & Workshops
Throughout the semester, curators will teach sessions related to our holdings to undergraduate and graduate students from Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College, and Holy Cross College. Curators may also be available to show special collections to visiting classes, from preschool through adults. If you would like to arrange a group visit and class with a curator, please contact Special Collections.
Upcoming Events
Thursday, February 1st at 5:00pm | The Spring 2024 Italian Research Seminar and Lectures will begin with a lecture by Francesca Fiorani (University of Virginia), “Leonardo da Vinci’s Way of Seeing Water. Wetlands, Mapping, and the Art of Painting.”
Early-20th-century souvenir programs of the Union Printers National Baseball League Tournament.An 18th century work advocating converting Ireland’s Catholics to ProtestantismA collection of materials relating to the National Women’s Football League.A revised martyrology for 16th century German Catholics.Some of the recent acquisitions highlighted on the blog during the fall semester.
Rare Books and Special Collections is open Monday through Thursday this week (December 18-21, 2023) — appointments are recommended. After that, we will be closed from Friday, December 22, 2023, through Monday, January 1, 2024, in participation with the campus-wide holiday break for all faculty, staff, and students.
Special Collections will reopen on Tuesday, January 2, 2024.
This is the last blog post for 2023. Happy Holidays to you and yours from Notre Dame’s Rare Books and Special Collections!
This post features images—including this colorful jack-in-the-box Christmas cover—from the Lake Michigan Yachting News, the official publication of the Chicago Yacht Club. The Yachting News covered all aspects of yachting and boating on Lake Michigan, reporting about sailing races, popular excursion routes, environmental conditions, sailing technology and equipment, and the social activities of the Midwestern yachting set.
The Yachting News also frequently relied on humor and satire in its columns as shown by the “Just a Few Merry Christmas Hints” column below. The journal’s tongue-in-cheek holiday gift suggestions included this advice:
If you have a friend who is a racing skipper you may give him a bunch of your old safety razor blades for splitting hairs on questions of rules. If you have a friend on the Race Committee, give him a drink—he will need it.
Hesburgh Libraries recently acquired a bound volume with 18 issues of the Lake Michigan Yachting News for the years 1925 and 1926. Worldcat lists only three other libraries with scattered holdings of this scarce publication.
Thus wrote former Southern Methodist University football player turned professional wrestler Jack Adkisson to Dallas-area wrestling promoter Ed McLemore in a September 1953 letter. Using the inside language of professional wrestling, Adkisson was explaining that he had found success wrestling as a villain—or “heel”—instead of as a fan favorite—or “babyface.”
Adkisson, a Texas native, got his start as a professional wrestler under McLemore and then traveled to New England to get more seasoning under the tutelage of promoter Tony Santos, Sr. Adkisson elaborated on his new “heel” persona to McLemore: “I have been working as Fritz Von Eric, the German Giant from Munich, Germany.”
Less than a decade after the end of World War II, Adkisson gained prominence in the ring by riling up and angering wrestling crowds with his Nazi-infuenced German villain. He explained to McLemore:
“I have gone over exceptionally well with the crowds as a heel, and once or twice I have had to literally fight my way to the dressing room. In Revere [Massachusetts], Santos was trying to hold the crowd back from me, and he was practically trampled. That was one night that my heart was in my throat. I couldn’t have felt more helpless in a cage of wildcats.”
The star-crossed von Erich family, a mainstay of professional wrestling in the second half of the twentieth century, is the subject of a soon-to-be-released motion picture The Iron Claw starring Zac Efron. The origin story of Fritz von Erich, the family’s patriarch, is partially documented in the Jack Pfefer Wrestling Collection—one of the most popular and heavily used manuscript collections in the Joyce Sports Research Collection.
Jack Pfefer was a wrestling manager and promoter whose influential career lasted from the 1920s through the 1960s. Pfefer unapologetically embraced the showmanship and theatrical spectacle of professional wrestling, and he routinely advertised and emphasized the entertainment aspects of his bouts.
Envelope advertising Ed McLemore’s Dallas-based wrestling shows at the famous Sportatorium. Adkisson used this envelope to mail a letter to Jack Pfefer in 1953. (PFE850-12-77)
Pfefer also meticulously saved his records. His papers, which Hesburgh Library acquired in the 1970s, fill more than 200 boxes and include voluminous correspondence, financial records, thousands of programs, and tens of thousands of photographs. The Pfefer Collection is one of the largest publicly accessible wrestling archival or manuscript collections in the country, and it documents nearly all aspects of professional wrestling during the middle years of the twentieth century.
The full five-page letter Jack Adkisson sent to Ed McLemore in 1953 describing his success wrestling as “Fritz von Eric” in New England. (PFE850-12-77)
The 1953 letter from Adkisson to McLemore eventually wound up in Pfefer’s possession, and, along with other material in the Pfefer collection, helps to to chart the rise of Fritz von Erich to legendary wrestling status.
But in 1953, Addkisson was still toiling near the bottom of the industry, and he complained to McLemore:
“I am making a living from this, but that is all. I am not saving anything to speak of. And if a guy can’t save some money in this business, what’s the use in staying? I have got to put away some money…”
Nevertheless, Adkisson remained hopeful: “I am more optimistic about my potential as a bad boy,”
The November 1963 issue of Big Time Wrestling magazine featured an article on Fritz von Erich. The headline claimed that von Erich had insured his right hand, which he used for the Iron Claw, for one million dollars. (PFE780-1-2)
Adkisson was right about his potential. Using his signature maneuver, the “Iron Claw,” von Erich and his German “bad boy” routine, rose up the ranks of the sport to make him one of professional wrestling’s more famous and bankable stars in the 1960s.
Publicity photo of “Fritz von Erich the Worlds Greatest Athlete,” c. 1960. (PFE700-36-6)
von Erich did eventually succeed in saving money, and he became a wrestling promoter in his own right, particularly in his home state of Texas. Fritz von Erich also had six sons, five of whom followed him into the ring. Tragically, five of the von Erich sons died young, leading to talk of a family curse. Fritz von Erich died at the age of 68 in 1997.
The movie Iron Claw, which tells the story of the ill-fated von Erich family, opens widely in theaters on December 22, 2023. The Jack Pfefer Wrestling Collection is open and available to the public for research.
The exhibition Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States is now open and will run through the fall semester.
Tours of the exhibit may also be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Rachel Bohlmann at (574) 631-1575 or Rachel.Bohlmann.2@nd.edu.
The December spotlight exhibits are Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (August – December 2023) and TBD (December 2023 – November 2024).
Rare Books and Special Collections will be closed for Notre Dame’s Christmas and New Year’s Break (December 22, 2023, through January 1, 2024).
We otherwise remain open for our regular hours during Reading Days and Exams, and welcome those looking for a quiet place to study.
