By Gary Topping—
Our blogger-in-chief, Mike O’Brien, has shared with us many colorful and inspiring stories of his boyhood with the Trappist monks at Huntsville, Utah. I don’t have any stories like those, except I thought I might expand upon my summer of 2010 which I began recounting last week. I spent a small part of that summer as a “history monk.”
Fremont, Ohio is a sleepy little midwestern town built around two institutions, so far as I could tell: the Hunt’s ketchup factory and the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library. I won a one-week fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities that summer to study the Gilded Age at the library. The Hayes library was the first of the Presidential libraries, and it is an incredibly rich resource for studying almost anything in the late nineteenth century. It is located in a place called Spiegel Grove, one of the most beautiful and peaceful places in the world. “Spiegel” in German means “mirror,” and it refers to the big reflecting pools of rain water that develop in that humid climate.
Our studies were directed by a team of great Gilded Age scholars, each of whom spent about two days with us. Outside their formal lectures, they were available for individual and small group consultations. The first one was Rebecca Edwards of Vassar College, a young woman with an intensity that was truly intimidating. Before the first hour of her presentation was over, I found myself wondering what I had gotten myself into. Great scholars are great because they are intense. I soon learned, though, that at the personal level she was very friendly and approachable, and I learned a great deal from her. Her book, New Spirits, is a major reinterpretation of the Gilded Age.
I said I was a monk. Most of us stayed in rooms at a converted convent on the grounds of a nearby Catholic school. My personal “cell” was a tiny room equipped only with a sink, a mirror, a small wooden table with a straight-back wooden chair, and a bed. No TV, no radio, no telephone, not even a clock. The bed did have a thin mattress—a lone concession to creature comforts. We took our meals in the former refectory where breakfast and supper were catered in. Lunch was provided at the library. It was great: we all sat around tables and ate and talked—about history, of course! After breakfast we walked over to Spiegel Grove in small groups, and after supper, many of us went back to the library to work until closing time. I would sit there happily wallowing in the increasing pile of books and manuscripts that the archivists kept stacking on my table. No medieval monk ever spent his days in a more concentrated focus than that.
One evening, though, we spent in the un-monkish pursuit of listening to music in the Gilded Age format of Edison cylinders. Steve Culbertson, director of the Gilded Age program, is a collector of Edson phonographs and cylinders. He claims that despite their limitations, the cylinders were actually a better recording system than the shellac discs that replaced them. As I mentioned in last week’s blog, Thomas Edison was a friend of the Hayes family. Steve told us that Edison had visited the First Family one evening in the White House and actually made recordings of President Hayes speaking. Unfortunately, the recordings, which were made on disposable coverings on the cylinders, were ripped up after one playing. The recordings still exist, but no one has figured out how to repair them to listenable condition. Hayes was the first President to have his voice recorded, but we can’t (as yet) listen to it!
One day the lecturer was the great literary scholar Sanford Marovitz, who led a discussion of William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, which we had all read before coming to Fremont. Lunch that day was a picnic served under a big tent out on the lawn. I picked up my hamburger and happened to notice that Marovitz was sitting over by the edge of the tent all by himself. I wasn’t about to pass up that opportunity, so I asked if I could join him and he cordially agreed. So we spent an entire hour joyfully discussing our mutual passion for Howells’s novels. (Sandy, if you’re still alive and happen to be reading this, thank you for one of the best lunch hours of my life!)
So that was my mini-monk experience, no doubt very dissimilar to Mike’s experiences among the real monks at Huntsville. But it was a high point of my life as a historian, and I would leap at the chance to repeat it.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
