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| Photo: Glenn Matsumura |
how many stanford graduates
have served on the Supreme Court? Did JFK really attend
classes on the Farm? Would the University be interested
in having my Wilbur Hall T-shirt from the 1960s? For
the past 15 years, Maggie Kimball has fielded questions
like these in her role as University archivist. Working
out of a small office in Green Library, Kimball, ’80,
keeps track of a vast and growing collection of antique
campus photographs, student letters and journals, faculty
papers and Stanford bric-a-brac. The most priceless
material, though, is inside her head—she’s
a walking encyclopedia of Cardinal facts and figures,
always ready to help students, faculty and staff with
their research, no matter how arcane. “I always
tell people that I don’t know everything,”
the historian says, “but I know where to start
looking.” At the 2003 commencement, colleagues
gave Kimball a Cuthbertson Award for her exceptional
contributions to the University.
It’s a whole lot of stuff.
Kimball estimates that the Stanford Archives houses
about 30,000 linear feet of material—that’s
a hundred football fields’ worth of gray, acid-free
archival boxes. The collection grows from 500 to 1,000
linear feet per year. “A typical faculty member’s
papers might take up 10 linear feet,” she says,
while the papers of a Nobel laureate like the late Stanford
physicist Arthur Schawlow might measure 10 times that.
The collection includes some 30,000 doctoral dissertations
and master’s theses—so many that they had
to be moved this year to a new climate-controlled storage
facility in Livermore.
Cleanliness counts.
While the archives are open to anyone with a legitimate
research interest, strict rules keep the materials safe.
Visitors, who average about five a day, must register
at the front desk of Green’s Field Room and stash
all their belongings (except for pencils, loose paper
and laptop computers) in nearby lockers. They’re
given just one box at a time and taught how to keep
things in order within its folders. “I’m
pretty much of a stickler for not allowing pens in any
of our spaces,” Kimball says.
Diaries are priceless.
Of all the items in the archives, Kimball says, the
most fascinating may be a journal kept by a young student
named Mary Freeman Crabbe in the 1890s. “She talks
about the parties they had, going to class, what it
was like to listen to a zoology lecture, the issue of
women’s suffrage,” Kimball says. Other vivid
documents include letters that young Leland Stanford
wrote to his parents when he was establishing himself
in Sacramento, and student letters describing the aftermath
of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Attention all pack rats.
In addition to written materials, the archives house
weird and wonderful artifacts, ranging from a female
student’s 1890s fencing vest to psychedelic campus
posters from the 1970s. Sometimes antiques dealers alert
Kimball to particularly exciting pieces, which she purchases
with the help of a small acquisitions fund. More often,
she’ll get calls from folks cleaning out their
attics, offering stuff for free. “One faculty
member said, ‘I have a rock that came through
my window in the 1960s. Do you want that?” Kimball
recalls, laughing. (The answer was no, thanks.) Among
the more memorable items: an empty tortoise shell that
supposedly appeared during a séance in Thomas
Welton Stanford’s house, a collection of class
hats from the turn of the century, and a still-full
bottle of wine from the Stanford estate.
She’s the answer person.
In addition to caring for the collection, Kimball answers
up to 20 inquiries a day by letter, phone and e-mail.
Often the questioners are genealogical researchers trying
to verify that a relative went to Stanford. Administrators
will ring, asking her to pin down some facts for inclusion
in a speech. Academic departments contact her when they’re
writing history pages for their websites, or redecorating
their offices. (These days, framed reproductions of
old campus photographs are de rigueur.) One
time, President John Hennessy asked Kimball to make
him a pocket-sized version of the University’s
Founding Grant.
Save those e-mails.
Like many historians, Kimball is worried that modern
Americans aren’t writing thoughtful letters or
keeping diaries as they used to. “It’s a
real problem,” she laments. “The way students
and parents communicate today—instant messaging
and talking on the cell phone every day—is very
different from the past. We’re moving back to
a much more oral tradition, and there are going to be
a lot of questions raised in the future about what was
real and what was not.” Her plea to Stanford parents:
“Print out those e-mails from your kids.”
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