In Part One, Tim described his feelings towards libraries, discovered that the Peggy Charren/ACT archive was close to his home, and inspected the Harvard Gutman library’s online index of Charren/ACT papers.
Take the feeling I described in Part One about walking through a library and seeing many interesting book titles, but now filter it to a favorite topic: television and advertising in the second half of the 20th century. What a thrill it is to have a nice college work study student wheel in a cart with several boxes on those topic! They’re all for me! And in a few days when I get through them, I can request more. Even the folders I hadn’t earmarked were ones I wanted to read! What might I find in them?
I want to be clear that most of what I saw was text pieces from newspapers and magazines. There were some full color ads torn out of NAPTE booklets, and the “Sectaurs” folder did have a copy of Marvel Comics’ Sectaurs issue #1 (given out at Toy Fair, perhaps?), but most of the images throughout all of this were of adult FCC Commissioners or kids sitting on couches, as most of what I read were articles about television, government regulation, and marketing. There was no gold mine of unmade G.I. Joe toys or unproduced G.I. Joe episodes. In fact, there wasn’t even a grain of gold dust like that. Certainly almost nothing behind-the-scenes at Hasbro or Sunbow that we didn’t know already. Generally, something would happen in real life, like ACT would sue an entity or Congress would consider a new law, and then three to 10 articles would cover that over a week or a month in 1970s or 1980s-time as I went chronologically through 15 years of news. An L.A. Times article might cover such a development, and then Variety the same day, and the Washington Post the same day, and then the New York Times the next day, and a third of these would be not hard news reporting but editorials in reaction. A lot of redundancy, but that’s not a bad thing.
You know that scene in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” when Mikael Blomkvist is researching the Children’s Day Parade at the photography archive of the Hedestad Courier? That’s my favorite scene in that book. You know the end shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with a multitude of crates? What if that wasn’t a matte painting? What if I was in there with a crowbar and a flashlight? Getting back to reality at Gutman, it turned out that if I requested three or four folders within a single box, it was easier to bring in the entire box. Those folders would be marked, but if I wanted to inspect the other folders inside, no one was going to say no.
So, yes, Dino-Riders, though they aren’t mentioned in my book, and Tyco barely gets a sentence. And even though I can always request more boxes, or in months ahead request a box again, there was a feeling to all of this that it needed to happen now (winter ’24) and it needed an endpoint. That once I was through everything, I shouldn’t go back. I certainly needed to read any articles in the “Program-Length Commercial” folder. But it was easy to get lost in all of this. Many days, I did. I’d forget I was looking for specific facts about G.I. Joe, toy advertising, or broadcast rules. There were so many great profiles on Peggy Charren and the interesting work that she did that I started to imagine that I was writing a big blog post on Charren and ACT.
All of us nostalgics are interfacing with our childhoods in various ways, buying old toys or new ones that resemble them, or sharing our childhood comics and episodes with our young family members. There was an added layer to this in the Gutman Reading Room. While my mom wasn’t a member of ACT in the 1980s, she did join a different TV consumer advocacy organization (one that tried to save shows canceled by the networks), and I could imagine some of ACT’s criticism and accolades filtering to my family had we been paying attention differently, had I been a little older, had my mom caught that one episode of Nightline where Ted Koppel interviewed Charrena and Filmation’s Lou Scheimer. And I’ve spent 20 years vaguely thinking that Charren was a a bit of a villain, but reading all of her snappy press releases and fascinating interviews, I found myself often agreeing with her. Geez, maybe these shows did blur the line between commercial speech and editorial speech in a questionable way. But again, an endpoint vaguely loomed — gotta get back to fixing Chapter 2 and 4, gotta finish up here at the library.
A key aspect to research is that you discover more than you need. And then you have to filter and filter down. After reading or skimming hundreds of articles, visiting Gutman two to four days a week for two to four hours per visit for two months, I figured I now had around 40 new facts or quotations to fit into my G.I. Joe history book. But there isn’t room. In March, when I took off my “researching” hat and put back on my “writer” one, and reopened all the current drafts for Chapters 2 through 8, I realized that in actuality there’s only room for maybe 10 or 15 new facts and quotes. And the inverted scale of it all started to hit me. That was a lot of time and effort for just a few sentences. But it was all worth it because those new sentences are important, like the budget of an episode of G.I. Joe! (I had guesses from two people who were there, now I have a 1985 Tom Griffin quote.) Also, because all the other information I absorbed subtly informs how I insert the new material. And if I’m doing a podcast or writing a blog post, or maybe one day on a book tour and in a Q&A, I can wax on some related topic.
But I keep coming back to a feeling of gratitude. Sure, Newsweek and Time covered toys and television, and I can easily access those publications. But what about all the ones I had never heard of, like Madison Ave or Facts Figures & Film: News for Television Executives? Maybe these are available online, but let’s assume not. In such a case, I’d never know what I didn’t know if I hadn’t gone to Gutman. But this is a never-ending spiral, actually. The truth about research libraries and archives is that they have more stuff than they can fully sort. Sure, I had access to hundreds of boxes. But I’m told there are “hundreds” of additional boxes of unsorted clippings and papers! Why was the “G.I. Joe” folder so full while the “DuckTales” one was so slim? Not necessarily because journalists wrote about ARAH and no one wrote about Scrooge and the gang, but rather, because maybe those other assets haven’t been pulled out, looked at, and filed into the “DuckTales” folder. Or the “Polls, 1959-1984” folder, or the “Poverty, 1986-1991” folder. More than half of the Charren/ACT archive is unsorted and unavailable. I don’t know what’s in that other half! It’s not indexed! I can’t request it! Someone would need to donate funds so this library could hire someone to start up cataloguing again. And that someone would need to have some library training.
Effectively, I will never know what else is in that vault.
An example: Two summers back I went to my college reunion and got a tour of that library’s Special Collections vault. It was locked, climate controlled, and only available to employees and a few guests. It was filled with old school papers, one of a kind artist’s books, and more. I also got to see the cataloging room, where regular, circulating books were processed. There were stacks of hundreds of French-language graphic novels, which a donor had gifted two years prior. But the library staff was small, and couldn’t spare someone to sort them. That would require looking over each book, noting the authors and publication info, creating records (like a sentence summary), and labeling the books. But these books were in French! The librarians didn’t speak French. A Canadian professor in the Illustration department did a little volunteer work on this project, but she already had a full course load. And so, two years later, when I showed up, a librarian lamented that this collection still couldn’t circulate, much less be searched by students or the community. These books were technically in the collection, but not available.
Back to Gutman and G.I. Joe, I decided that I couldn’t focus on what I couldn’t read. Instead, I had to be grateful for the facts that I did get from the Charren/ACT archive. It’s a little like my chat with a certain gent who drew for the 1980s G.I. Joe cartoon. We spoke by phone in 2002. I asked if he still had any art or papers. He said “I had a whole bunch of stuff for years and years. I had all the binders of all the stuff and had copies of all the stuff I’d done for The Movie and all that. I kept all of it for a long, long time and… just last year I threw it all out.” Heartbreaking, but I can’t linger on that.
The actual work at Gutman was quite lovely. I was in the Special Collections reading room, which had a big table and a big window. If the head librarian or the work study student in the office next door took a lunch break, I had to leave for a half hour so they could lock the doors and keep the collection materials secure. (I could do other work in the regular stacks a few feet away.) Even though the clippings and photocopies I was inspecting weren’t monetarily valuable in a traditional sense, they were treated like rare books. They are irreplaceable. There was a nice cafeteria downstairs, although I tried not to take lunch breaks so as to have uninterrupted blocks of work time.
I had to make appointments for each day I’d show up. My materials were brought into that room, which was locked until my arrival. I had to tell the librarian or work study student when I was leaving, and they would lock that room again until later, when they would cart my requested materials to a separate, climate-controlled holding room, so that other researchers could use the Reading Room with their own requests when I wasn’t there.
Some days I was on my own, the only sounds from the air conditioning vents above, or muffled students through the glass wall. Other days I was joined by some other researcher. One day it was a documentarian making a film about her family. She had requested rare books in Italian. These were textbooks from Mussolini’s time, that her grandfather would have read in Italy. She mentioned the songs that kids would learn as the Fascist government started to seed its ideas into primary education. Another day a book conservator from the Harvard library system’s Preservation Services came in and sat for a few hours across from me. She wielded a small tool called a paper knife. It looked like a letter opener, but I believe was sharpened in a different way. The book conservator wasn’t doing the reading or researching, but rather, prepping. These books were also in Italian, and also of interest to that documentarian. Years earlier someone had donated them, but they hadn’t ever been cataloged. Someone knew about them and told Gutman’s current head librarian, who did a special search and found them. But the pages hadn’t been cut, so you couldn’t flip through or read them. (Fold a piece of paper in half. Now run a knife along the fold. Books are bound with folded pages, and are trimmed in guillotines. But books used to come uncut, and you the reader would cut them.) The paper knife was sharp, and the archivist moved her arm in a specific way. As I watched her, I thought about musicians whose fingers and hands move across their instruments, and artists and calligraphers who achieve specific marks from drawing and writing tools. And even though 100-year old Italian books had nothing to do with American television regulation in the 1970s, I was very glad to have witnessed some of what else goes on in a Special Collections reading room.
Am I getting off-topic? Do you want something G.I. Joe-related?
I used to tell my students this when it came time to write their Animation History midterms and finals: There’s this idea in pop culture that librarians are old ladies who are only there to shush you. I think this comes from two generations of TV ads for snack foods, where a kid eats Go-Gurt or drinks Capri-Sun and their head expands or they bounce off the wall because of the extreme flavor. Such a scene, always live-action with visual effects, ends with a librarian telling the kids to be quiet. That stereotype is unhelpful. Librarians have degrees in Library Sciences! They are educators and archivists. They are guardians and docents of knowledge, and they wish to help you! If you don’t know how to research your essay, like you want to know about Walt Disney the person but mostly get hits on Walt Disney the company, that’s what a librarian is for! I have known and appreciated many librarians over the years. I’d like to tip my hat to Carla Lillvik, who helped me with the Peggy Charren/ACT archives. She initially responded with a list of the library’s holdings. And for some of the two months I read in the Special Collections Reading Room, she was in her office next door working with students, inspecting catalogs, emailing with professors, and coordinating with other independent researchers. After all, there are many other rare items in the Monroe C. Gutman Library collection besides articles about American television in the late 20th century! As I wrapped up going through all the boxes I’d requested, she wrapped up almost 35 years at Harvard, and days after my final visit, she was set to retire. Enjoy your next adventure, Carla!
[Jump back to Part One] [Random post: unproduced Cobra toy] [Random Mortal Kombat post]
Next week: My 2024 JoeFest report!
A Real American Book! 