"Thank God For California"

Joan Didion graduated from UC Berkeley in 1956 with a degree in English. Between 1955-1960, she wrote a number of letters to her friend Peggy La Violette detailing her cross-country train travels, life at home in Sacramento and as a senior at UC Berkeley, and her work at Vogue in New York. Her letters were great fun to read and I think fans of her writing will find her salutations particularly charming.


Written on a Thursday from her home in Sacramento

Written on a Wednesday evening from the La Salle Hotel in Chicago

--- M. Bryer

Miss Rural Electrification

Jan Brown, a student at Angelo State College in Texas, was named "Miss Rural Electrification of 1966" at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association's (NRECA) annual meeting in Las Vegas. Brown represented the Central Texas Electrical Co-Op at Fredericksburg. The cover story noted that she "proved that beauty and brains go admirably together." If we view pageants not merely as trivial or exploitative, but as civic rituals that produce political subjects, then we can see Brown as the feminine embodiment of the values of the co-op she represented.

According to its website, NRECA was organized in 1942 to overcome shortages of electric construction materials during WWII, get insurance for newly constructed rural electrical cooperatives and "mitigate wholesale power problems." "Rural Electrification: Non-Partisan, Non-Profit, One-Cent Electricity for Rural America," was the Association's monthly publication. Today, NRECA represents "the national interests of cooperative electric utilities and the consumers they serve." They still publish "Rural Electric Magazine" on a monthly basis.

We found this issue in the Grace McDonald papers (BANC MSS 85/139). McDonald, a consumer advocate, helped form the California Farm Research and Legislative Committee and was Executive Secretary of the California Farmer Consumer Information Committee. In addition to lobbying on behalf of farm laborers, McDonald also worked on occupational health and safety issues. Her 1951 novel, "Swing Shift," written under the pseudonym Margaret Graham, told the story of organized and unorganized railroad men, miners and tobacco workers.

--- M. Bryer

Therese Bonney- famous photographer, cheese lover!

When I ran across this collection in the stacks one day while surveying, I was immediately charmed by the diversity of its contents. The three main sections of the Therese Bonney manuscript collection (in catalog as BANC MSS 83/111) reflect three major focuses of her career: early fashion photography, war correspondence, and her personal love of and fascination with -- you guessed it -- cheese. I was surprised that a woman with such a serious career- famous for her work exposing the horrors experienced by child victims of World War II- would also be infatuated enough with cheese to capture several hundred images of it and to keep boxes of notecards describing different varieties of cheese (see picture above.)

While there are many paper documents and several photographs and a few negatives in the Therese Bonney papers held by our manuscripts division, I knew there were also a very significant number of photographs and negatives in our photograph collection (BANC PIC 1982.111--PIC). Photo archivist Sara Ferguson was working on them at that time, so I asked her to provide some details about Bonney's collection and Sara's project work overall.

Pictorial Stabilization Project Archivist Sara Ferguson’s primary role is to coordinate the move of Bancroft’s acetate photographic film collections into the library’s new on site cold storage facility and to establish procedures for their access. In addition, Sara has been identifying major photographic collections in need of processing and re-housing work, such as the Therese Bonney Photographic Collection.

Sara Ferguson:

What I love about working on this collection is being able to see the progression of Bonney’s life, from model to author and publisher to photographer, to see how her life experiences influenced the direction her work took.

The collection includes Bonney’s early fashion and editorial work in Paris, but primarily consists of her work throughout Western Europe during WWII. Bonney’s best known photographs illustrate the effects of war and exile on children, taken with the hope of securing aid for civilian victims.

However the collection as a whole shows her work was even more ambitious and far reaching. She photographed not only the effect of war on children but documented daily life in war time society. She recorded entire communities: their families, customs, and industries, their artists and politicians, their schools and their churches. Taken as a whole, the Bonney collection shows not only the horrors of war but the hope and perseverance of those who lived through it.

Sara does not mention the cheese, but she confirmed verbally to me that there are many, many images of cheese in the Therese Bonney Photographic collection in addition to the more serious matter discussed above. I personally find it heartening that a professional who used her profession to deal so eloquently with such weighty issues could also indulge interests of a lighter nature. It shows great dimension to her personality-- and I never knew how many kinds of cheese there were!

-- D. Miller.

(Left: Some of the "cheese files" in the manuscript collection. The blue folder at top is labeled "cheese correspondence.")

(Right: cheese labels on a folder marked, "cheese research." Triple Creme Brie anyone?)

Experiencing Borneo with Agnes Newton Keith

Agnes Newton Keith was a UC Berkeley grad and a writer who wrote about her experiences living in exotic locations around the world, most famously in Northern Borneo, but also the Philippines and Libya. Keith, who had some harrowing experiences early in her professional life as a journalist at the San Francisco Examiner, married Englishman Henry "Harry" Keith in 1934 and returned with him to Malaysia where he worked for the Government of North Borneo while Borneo was a British protectorate.

Agnes lived with Harry in Sandakan, Borneo for five years. She wrote about her experiences and at Harry's urging she entered and won the 1939 Atlantic Monthly Non-fiction Prize. These writings, which were serialized in the magazine, became her first book, Land Below the Wind, published later that same year to great interest and much positive response.

Some of the publicity materials (1940) for her first book are pictured below.

Also pictured is an unidentified pencil sketch found among her papers which depicts a Borneo jungle scene.

The Keith's first child George was born in Sandakan in April of 1940. Two years later when Japanese forces invaded Borneo, Agnes and baby George were interned in a POW camp near their home, while Harry was interned nearby. The family spent three and a half years shifting between three different internment camps before they were liberated by Australian forces in 1945. In 1947 the Keiths returned to Borneo and Agnes told their story of survival in her bestseller, Three Came Home, which was later turned into a Hollywood movie in 1950. The Keith's daughter Jean was born shortly thereafter*, and Agnes wrote yet again of their return to a changed post-war Borneo in White Man Returns.

The Keiths had further adventures living in the Philippines and Libya throughout the 1950s and 1960s, experiences which she continued to write about in her later non-fiction works. Keith wrote her first novel in 1972 after the Keiths had retired to British Columbia, and she completed her last book in 1975. Remnants of her life abroad that surface in the Bancroft's collection include the daily diaries that were direct sources for her books as well as hundreds of unidentified but nonetheless fascinating photographs.

The Agnes Newton Keith papers are an intriguing (and charming, for this archivist!) look at exotic parts of the globe from a mid-20th century American woman's perspective. They can be requested through the Bancroft off-site request system using title Agnes Newton Kieth Papers and call number Banc MSS 86/161.

-- D. Miller.

* A correction was provided by Jill, a site visitor: "Agnes' daughter Alison Jean was born when Agnes was about 26 years old ( probably within the period of her first marriage which did not work out). In 2007, Jean and her granddaughter Leslie, attended a special ceremony in memory of her mother who would have been 106 years old on that day. Jean was 80 years old and it was her first visit back back to Borneo since she was 17 years old. (Refer to "The Tea House Chronicle" August 2007 -Sandakan) [Alison Jean] was not born in the 1950's as is inferred in this article." (This would mean Agnes Keith's daughter, her first child, was born in 1927.)