A couple of years ago, during a particularly productive fall, I was invited to give a talk in Irvine, CA. Accepting that allowed me to tack on a day to do some quick "grab 'n go" research in San Diego, where I'd heard there was a particularly rich collection of local YWCA papers. As has become my habit, I swooped in and spent a furious 5 hours or so scanning everything that seemed remotely interesting. When I got home, the semester was heating up, my cyst flared, and things just generally fell apart for me. In other words, I did even get a chance to file what I had collected, let alone do any sort of analysis.
Fast forward two years, and I finally pulled what I had collected back out and decided to work on one of the major themes in the records: the impact of building, maintaining, and updating a downtown building on a social service/social change organization. This meshed with the work I'd been doing on the Women's Building in San Francisco, so I threw them together into a conference proposal for the Society for American City and Regional Planning History this coming fall. I'm now at work on that paper, particularly the YWCA section.
All through the collections are snippets of notes and a grant proposal for researching the Y's history produced by a particular woman. Obviously an academic of some sort, I finally decided this morning to look her up... only to find that she died just a couple of weeks ago. Her obituary ran just 3 days ago. Is that a little creepy? I've known her name for over two years, but only today did I look her up? And she just died? Hmmm... hard to shake these thoughts as I work through papers she collected and drafts she marked up for editing...
No comments:
Post a Comment