I’m writing today to announce a little project, one that’s of natural interest to very few but potential interest to a few more. At my feet sits a large box of papers, photos, and ephemera that once belonged to my father and his father. My grandfather John died in 1969, twelve years before I was born;  my mother, who figures heavily if obliquely in the papers from the later years, in 1989; and my father, in 1997. I have little left of my parents but memories, and nothing of my grandfather, save this, the paper.

We had, my siblings and I, my father’s old computers — an IBM 8086, its plastic yellowing, the 386 that played so many of our favorite games, the 486 that was my father’s office computer for ages. They’re gone now. Even if they endured physically, though, what would we be able to extract? The magnetic media would have died long ago, even if could find some way to open it, ancient hard drives and 5¼-inch floppies. I’m sure that, at great expense, if I had that stuff I could have some experts laboriously extract whatever remained of the data. But for all practical purposes, that stuff is gone, including things I know I would like to have, like a copy of my father’s CV. In contrast, letters from the 1910s sit, in fine and readable condition, at my feet. And today’s SSDs and flash memory are hardly better than old magnetic media in terms of longevity. Everybody says, oh well, everything will live in the cloud…. But who would pass on a password to a cloud service, assuming it didn’t become defunct, the way that this old box has been passed down to me? I think it’s a good example of the petty arrogance of the digital age. If I had a son or grandson, what would they have to hold onto of mine? It makes me want to print out my stuff.

That’s an ironic way, I realize, to announce a digitization project. I’m starting a Tumblr to host some highlights from the collection. Nothing private, obviously, though there’s little of that in here. And nothing systematic. Just papers, photos, publications, clippings, and assorted trinkets of their lives, that are beautiful or interesting or just worth looking at. I do this mainly to make some of them accessible to my siblings and others who knew and loved my father; it’s unfair for them that only I should have access to this stuff. But I also want to share on the off-chance that anyone else wants to see some of this stuff, because so much of it is so lovely. My father was a lifelong member of the theater, in New York and elsewhere, and an academic, and his papers are absolutely filled with gems. You can see his old academic work; a few years ago, when I labored to complete my preliminary exams on the history of rhetoric, little did I know that in a box by my computer sat papers my father once wrote on the rhetoric of Sir Francis Bacon in his own grad days. You can see his transition from traditional Western theater to black box to the East Asian puppetry and dance that would become his central concern. You can see my grandmother’s high school photo. There’s old programs from my father’s plays, letters where he and my grandfather have good-natured squabbles, slides, wonderful old theater photos, papers from college and grad school, magazine and newspaper clippings, correspondence from his attempts to secure the rights to put on productions of out-of-print plays, old hippie publications, letters from publishers begging my father to finish revisions to pieces he was writing, and all sorts of ephemera from the worlds of the academy, the theater, and the counterculture in the 20th century. There’s so many beautiful designs. They are records of lives that are, like all lives, gradually disappearing. I thought I’d share them.

So I’ve posted up a half-dozen things already, to give you a flavor of the kind of things I’ll be hosting here. I figure I’ll probably post, I don’t know, three things a week? And there’s probably enough here to keep it going for a couple years at least. Anyway, if you’re into design, or theater, or academics, you might want to check it out. The Tumblr is here.

I have already posted a letter from Henry deBoer, dated March 23rd, 1939. I do not know who Henry deBoer was, beyond the obvious fact that he must have been a relative — I don’t know what his relationship was to my grandfather, to my father, or to me. But he leaves behind a letter that expresses a sentiment I find worth sharing, 75 years after the fact. His letter reads,

Dear Mother,

Monday, March 21 will be 15 years that Pa has been taken from us to his eternal abode. Even after 15 years we mourn his departure. How we have missed him in these troublesome years that lie behind us. We missed him in our family life, in our church and school life and in our business. We often longed for his advice, for his words of encouragement, of comfort and consideration in our troubles and in our sorrows. Just to have him around was joy and contentment, we would feel at ease.

But we do not wish him back, that should be selfish on our part, because surely, he would not desire it.

Our best memory of him can be found inscribed on his monument:

“I have fought a good life
 I have finished the course
 I have kept the faith.”

It should be the prayer of all of us that when our eyes, too, shall close in death, we shall be able to say, “I have kept the faith.”