From McFarlin Tower

Not every person represented in our collection is “famous”. Many items in our collection capture seemingly insignificant pinpoints in time, letters and notes and photographs of people just living their lives. Sometimes the items can be sad, confusing, or even silly!

Sometimes I think about how archives will look hundreds of years from now, when snippets from our lives are in archives. The letters of yesterday have become the texts and emails of today. Texts we send to one another and photos that we put on our favorite social media sites may be removed from their context and put in an archive, where people can look back and see how we lived.

On the last post of Women’s History Month, I decided to flip through some photographs of women in our digital collection.

This first photos are from the Perry Douglas Erwin WW1 Letters. Erwin was a Lieutenant stationed at Ft. Sill during the war and his wife, Vivian, wrote him nearly every day. The photo was tucked into a letter and it is believed to be Vivian, but we don’t know for sure.

Woman with a rifle

That photograph and this one were included in the same letter to Erwin dated May 3 1918 and I really wish I knew more about the women in the picture. The title of the photograph is “2 women playing leapfrog”. They have cigarettes hanging out of their mouths while they play!

2 Women Playing Leapfrog

This next photo is from the same time period. From the William Hurtford Hutchins archive, made up of a diary, photo album, and some memorabilia. I can feel and hear this photograph, and with the weather warming up I definitely wish I was in that field with lambs!

Woman and her lambs

This final photograph is not of . A part of the Roger Blais collection of Sious Uprising of 1862 Photographs, which are photographs of people who may have been involved in the Dakota War of 1862. It’s a portrait of Azayamankawin, also known as “Old Bets”, a Dakotan woman who was known among Minnesotans for her bravery and kindness.

Portrait of Azayamankawn

These little slices of history and many others can be found as digital materials right on our website. If you would like to learn more about them or other items in our collections, don’t hesitate to email us at speccoll@utulsa.edu. We are still closed to the public, but TU students and affiliates can come and see us with an appointment.

Stevie Smith, the English poet and novelist, passed away 50 years ago this week on March 7, 1951. Special Collections has a sizable collection of hers, with 30 document boxes containing manuscripts, drawings, and original poem drafts. We also have over 1,000 books from her personal library that includes her own books and novels by other authors.

Our collection also includes photographs and correspondence. We have photographs of her that span her whole life. These two are my favorite because she looks so happy in them, especially the one of young Stevie standing in a boat.

Smith wrote three novels, all fiction based on her own life, however, she is most known for her poetry. Our collection comprises of over 800 sheets of poem drafts and her library has some annotated copies of her published poetry. She struggled with depression and nervousness for most of her life and it is evident in her writings, many with themes of death and separation. Her best known poem is “Not Waving but Drowning”, a poem about a dying man.

This poem made me chuckle

Most of her poetry is accompanied by her own illustrations. These illustrations appear quite whimsical when viewed independently from the often dark subject matter of her poems. She was a big fan of cats and in her papers are many poems, stories, and illustrations of them. She even published a coffee table book dedicated to the inner lives of cats entitled “Cats in Colour” (1959), of which we have an original copy.

Galloping cat illustration

Cute little doodle of a yawning cat

When I flip through Stevie Smith’s papers, I am struck by the quantity of writing, drawing, and editing that she must have done in her 69 years. Most margins are filled with handwritten poems and illustrations, there are typed drafts on the backs of manuscripts, and even small scraps of paper have content. Her mind seems like it never stopped creating. Stevie Smith won multiple awards for her writings and a play with a film adaptation was written about her life. She died of a brain tumor in 1971 and her legacy lives on.

If you would like to see anything from our Stevie Smith collection or any others, we are still open by appointment to TU students and affiliates. You can make requests or ask us questions by emailing speccoll@utulsa.edu.

If you were to come into our office today, you would be immediately captivated by the large poster hanging on the wall in our lobby. Measuring over six feet tall and about three and a half feet wide, this movie poster is an exciting recent acquisition that is an advertisement for a movie called “The Bull-Dogger”, filmed in Oklahoma and starring William Pickett.

I apologize for the glare, the poster is framed behind archival glass to protect it from the damaging UV light

The movie was a silent film released in 1922 and is sadly lost, so we will never get to see it. Very little information about the film itself survives and we are fortunate to have this poster in such good condition as a part of our collection.

William Pickett (1870-1932) was a Black and Cherokee cowboy and was original steer wrestler from Texas. One of 13 children, Pickett became a ranch hand at 11 years old. He is known for creating the technique called “bulldogging”, or a method of wrestling a bull to the ground by the horns and biting it on the lip or nose and pulling it down onto its back. He taught this technique to many other ranch hands and cowboys and it eventually evolved into steer wrestling, which we can still see at rodeos today.

Photo of Pickett from the Oklahoma Historical Society

In 1907, Pickett moved with his family to Oklahoma and performed with the 101 Ranch Wild West Show. He became a famous rodeo performer, travelling in the summers through Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. He is credited as the first Black cowboy star and was the first Black honoree to be inducted into the Cowboy Hall of Fame in 1971.

The film also features Anita Bush (1883-1974), a Black actress who founded the Anita Bush All-Colored Dramatic Stock Company in 1915, a company that kickstarted the careers of other Black actors of the time.  Bush starred alongside Pickett in “The Crimson Skull” and “The Bull-Dogger”, both filmed in Oklahoma and directed by Richard Norman in the 1920’s.

Steve Reynolds, whose character is featured in the top center of the poster, was an actor also known as “Peg” because he was a stuntman without a right leg. If you look closely at the poster, you’ll see the peg leg. (I did not know that was what was being depicted in the image until I looked the actor up, I was wondering why we got a full-body shot of him but not of any of the other characters). I also think it’s interesting that the titular character, Bill Pickett himself, does not have a portrait but is instead pictured wrestling a bull at the bottom of the poster. There are other posters that only feature his face and name with none of the other actors listed.

Hopefully one day soon we will be open to the public again and you can come see the poster in-person. As always, if you need anything please email us at speccoll@utulsa.edu. Stay safe and warm!

As a (fledgling) birder, hiker, and once-upon-a-time wildlife biologist, anytime I see anything on our shelves that says “bird”, my interest is piqued. I have been walking past this stack of boxes for almost two years now, but the slides they contain are so small that I had resigned myself to never writing about them. How was I ever going to write a blog post when the pictures are no bigger than a postage stamp? There are many objects in our archives that are preserved in outdated ways (you should see some of the tapes we have!), and it can sometimes be so frustrating when we can’t see them the way we’d like to.

Tiny bird picture

The boxes on the shelves

I was lamenting over this predicament when my counterpart, Jacalyn, reminded me that there are apps for everything. Within minutes I had the app downloaded and the subjects picked out, I was going to (finally!) get a better look at these slides I have been waiting to see.

My initial choice was probably a poor one. I decided that a hummingbird would be a cute one to show you guys, because who doesn’t love hummingbirds? Like many bird enthusiasts, Farris used good cameras. We know that the photographs on these slides were taken with a Nikon Nikormat camera with Zoom Nikor Automatic 200mm, 300mm Soligar, or Reflex Nikor 500mm lenses. But even with those fancy lenses, hummingbirds are just… really small birds.

Can you see the tiny hummingbird?!

Robert J. Farris took these photographs between 1974-1983. Some of them are included in the “American Birding Association Checklist of North American Birds”, published in 1975. Our four boxes comprise of about 2,200 slides, a fraction of the total number of slides produced by Farris. In total, he made about 16,000 bird slides which are spread out throughout Tulsa. Some of them are at the Oxley Nature Center and the rest of them reside with the Tulsa Audubon Society.

A Common Screech Owl nestled in a hollow

The slides themselves are annotated with information about the species of bird and occasionally the location where they were photographed. Some of them say things like “Philbrook” or “North Tulsa”. They were not all photographed here, but as Farris was a Tulsa resident, he did much of his work here in the Tulsa area. I wonder if I have seen any of these birds great-great-great-great(a few more greats…) grandchildren flying around?

Oklahoma State Bird, the Scissor-tailed Flycatcher

This last photo is of a bird you haven’t seen around here for a while. The Scissor-tailed Flycatcher only spends the summer in Oklahoma, as they prefer to spend their winters somewhere warmer. When it starts to warm up outside, keep an eye out for these guys perched on barbed wire, road signs, or telephone wires.

We have many, many other treasures and outdated technologies here in the Special Collections Department. If you would like to see any of it, please send us an email at speccoll@utulsa.edu.