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Reading Club tasked with saving its heritage

Reading Club of Durango members, from left, Gayle Brown, club President Maile Kane and Deb Barnes, work on March 12 to restore the organization’s historic scrapbooks. The club, which was founded in 1882, is one of the oldest women’s clubs in Colorado, and it has donated its scrapbooks and records to the archives at the Center of Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College.

Being connected to something that is historically important is an honor, but it’s also a responsibility.

For the members of the Reading Club of Durango, founded in 1882, the fun part is the gentility, the Gentlewomen’s Rules, the elegance of a bygone age. The responsibility entails guarding the traditions that matter and being flexible about adapting to modern times about the traditions that don’t. For example, until about 15 years ago, members were listed in the yearbook as Mrs. John Brown (Jane). Then for about five years, it was Mrs. Jane Brown (John), until finally arriving at Jane Brown (John). (I didn’t say the change was quick or that it doesn’t progress over time, just that it happens!)

The other responsibility is one of guarding the club’s history and accomplishments. I can think of no better way of ending Women’s History Month than with an item about the history of early Durango’s female movers and shakers, because that’s who founded the club.

It is no small undertaking. In the mid-2000s, the club donated its archives, which had been moldering in a filing cabinet in the basement of the old Durango Public Library for decades, to Center of Southwest Studies. They were quickly put in archival boxes and handled with care, but of course none of the scrapbooks had been made with archival materials, so the deterioration that had already started continued to some degree.

Yours truly raised an alarm last spring after Linda MacCannell and I used the scrapbooks to create a program for the 50th anniversary of Beverly Darmour’s membership. She has by far the longest tenure in the club now, although a few women in earlier years belonged for 60 and 70 years. Effie Etheridge, who died at 102, definitely comes to mind. As we went through the scrapbooks – and we, of course, started in 1964 with the relatively newer scrapbooks – we found photos falling out, Polaroids fading into a blur and articles clipped from The Durango Herald yellowing and crumbling.

Enter this year’s club president, Maile Kane, who decided to do something about it. She gathered a crew, including Gayle Brown, Deb Barnes, Mary Jane Basye, Carol Grenoble, Ann Norris, Dot Larson, Susan Davies, Bridget Irish and Sharon Abshagen – although not all women go all the time.

They divided the task into two projects, with the first being to plan for creating better and more consistent archival scrapbooks for the future. The scrapbooks are created by the historian and the immediate past president each year, and they have varied based on individual talents, interests and amount of time people have to devote to it. (Probably no one in the current membership will top artist Laurel Vogl’s scrapbook, but we’ll give it a shot.)

The second project is preserving the past. Committee members are looking at each page of each scrapbook and analyzing its condition and deciding what needs to be done. They have come to an agreement with Nik Kendziorski, archives manager, that students will digitize the older scrapbooks because every time they are handled, even with white (if not kid) gloves, they are damaged. Because the records now belong to the center, it will keep one copy for researchers’ use, and the club will have its own copy.

(This isn’t something they do for everyone’s records, but Reading Club, in addition to donating its archives, has also made a donation every year for their maintenance, so this is a courtesy recognizing that.)

Meanwhile, the club continues generating material for this year’s scrapbook. The theme this year is Canada, and programs have included Lynn May’s look at Niagara Falls, Basye on author Farley Mowat, Gisele Pansze on common themes in works by Canada’s immigrant authors and MacCannell on author Alistair MacLeod. (It is MacCannell’s part-time residency in Canada, after living there full-time for decades, that inspired the theme.)

Most recently, on Thursday, Eileen Wasserbach compared the experiences of Native Americans in the U.S. and the First Nations in Canada. Let’s just say Canada’s European settlers were not generous or kind to their country’s native peoples either. At one point, among other constitutional amendments, they had to get governmental permission to wear their traditional regalia, and they were prohibited from selling produce in the prairie provinces, so they didn’t compete with white settlers.

HHH

If these folks don’t have spring fever for their birthdays, they must be hibernating in a cave – Margi Coxwell, Martha Simpson, Mary Foreman, Lee Ann Harbison, Irene Short, Sue Cowan, Paige Porter, Niki Moore, Chris Aalund, Wanda Caldwell, Emrys Tyler, Matthew Lavengood, Alex Salter, Marty Knickerbocker, Andy Schaaf, Patti Baranowski, Marilyn Garst, Charlie Buhl, Brian Drover, Sara Tyler, Melissa Watt and Evelyn Ireton Gaylor.

Special greetings to one of my favorite ladies, Bette Hart, on her 90th birthday.

HHH

It’s always fun to hear from former Durango residents, and it’s particularly nice to hear that a Durango High School graduate is thriving.

John and Betti Marvel – he was president of First National Bank of Durango, and both were quite involved in the community – who are now in Pueblo wanted to share the good news that their son Dr. John Marvel was just named medical staff president at Flagstaff Medical Center in Arizona.

A 1989 graduate of DHS, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Northern Arizona University.

(I remember some stories about speeding tickets on the Navajo Reservation when his parents were going to visit him at NAU, but we won’t go there.)

After earning his medical degree at Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine in Missouri, Dr. Marvel – to differentiate him from his dad – completed his anesthesiology residency at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he was one of two chief residents. Dr. Marvel was honored with Anesthesia Resident of the Year awards at both Johns Hopkins and the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City.

Dr. Marvel was elected to the position by his fellow physicians and will also sit on the medical center’s board.

HHH

In case you haven’t seen it, the Fort Lewis College Common Reading Experience book for 2015 is Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures.

Grandin, the groundbreaking developer of humane livestock management, autism activist and subject of an award-winning HBO film, will be in Durango in the fall, and I can assure you, we are in for a treat.

I sat next to her at a La Plata-Archuleta Cattlemen’s Banquet several years ago when she was the featured speaker, then got to interview her afterward. She was the most informative speaker on what autism is and how the autistic brain works I have ever heard.

I can’t think in pictures, but I do have a better sense of it after meeting Grandin, and I am profoundly grateful for that.

HHH

Tulips are starting to appear for the anniversary of Jack and Lauri Kloepfer.

HHH

Here’s how to reach me: neighbors@durangoherald.com; phone 375-4584; mail items to the Herald; or drop them off at the front desk.



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