New Year, New Blog

Art courtesy George Arents Collection, The New York Public Library. 
Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e4-8261-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Starting January 4, 2016, we invite all Blogger.com and Blogspot.com readers -- and everyone interested in corporate history and business anniversaries -- to follow us at our blog's new home, http://www.corporatehistory.net/blog/

The CorporateHistory.net team sends best wishes for a superb New Year's weekend!

Oral history of a 1950s company town

Norm and Betty Jo Anderson, Piketon, Ohio 2015.
Credit: Lewis Wallace, Marketplace.org

Kudos to Lewis Wallace of Marketplace.org for a fascinating oral history of Piketon, Ohio, which is struggling with Cold War era nuclear cleanup. It was once the quintessential company town. Great use of voices, especially those of Norm and Betty Jo Anderson. Norm: 

“It’s hard to tell people of the magnitude of those buildings,” [The one he worked in had 33 acres to a floor.] "And those were concrete floors. Can you imagine pouring 33 acres of concrete?” Now they're demolishing it.

Nuclear cleanup work sustains ailing Ohio town | Marketplace.org
http://www.portsvirtualmuseum.org/history-goodyear.htm
 

Fred Harvey: Rise & Fall of a Pioneering Brand

What does a corporate historian do for summer reading? Mine included Stephen Fried's fascinating business history Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West--One Meal at a Time. (The subtitle is a bit overstated. There were native civilizations in the west for millennia; they just weren't WASPs like British immigrant Fred.) It was named one of the 10 best books of 2010 by both The Wall Street Journal and the Philadelphia Inquirer, yet it might well be difficult for such a book even to find a mainstream publisher today. The level of detail is exhaustive.

The hospitality company that bore Fred Harvey's name really did pioneer "the chaining of America" well before Howard Johnson, McDonald's Ray Kroc, and all the other chains that now proliferate. The company is best remembered for its female employees, fictionalized in a novel and an MGM musical with Judy Garland. I enjoyed learning about them via Leslie Poling-Kempes's The Harvey Girls: The Women Who Opened the West (1989), a narrative built around oral histories done in the 1980s. I'm looking forward to downloading a one-hour Harvey Girls video by Assertion Films (2014), cover shown above.

How sad that the Fred Harvey Company never produced a corporate history. Nor did the execs or heirs invest in proper archiving. Chunks and bits of Harvey history are scattered across histories of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, physical locations, and numerous websites. Too many of the latter yield "Page Not Found" error messages -- including, inexcusably, that of Xanterra, the conglomerate that now owns the Harvey name and the historic Grand Canyon South Rim holdings. There's a nod to Harvey on Xanterra's one-paragraph About Us page, but that's all. What a wasted opportunity! Commandment 3 of CorporateHistory.net's 10 Commandments of About Us Pages: Reveal Thy Personality.

3 Lessons Learned from a Painful Public Speaker

1. Match the speaker to the occasion. A rat-a-tat military man may not be the right choice for a roomful of benign trustees at the annual meeting of a co-operative organization.
2. If the bad match is a fait accompli, build a bridge. The speaker made no effort to localize, customize, or otherwise bridge his (supposedly) motivational presentation. No corporate storytelling. No mention of the org's 100+ years of company history and community support. I suspect this fellow didn't make even the most basic inquiries. 
3. Never, ever phone it in. Public speakers are actors, performers, professionals. When we step to the podium, it's show time, every time. A loud voice and speed do not equal energy. If we don't project true energy and interest, we shouldn't be speaking. Barreling through a PowerPoint doesn't cut it.

I won't name names because the evening was presented in good faith. But I felt pain as I watched fellow audience members wincing, feigning interest, or snoozing. Best I can say is that Mr. X provided a wake-up call for my next presentation and, I hope, for yours.

Exemplary 125th Anniversary Website by Barnard

Barnard College does almost everything right on its 125th anniversary website:

• Good video with a mix of old and new
• "125 Scrapbook" invites students and alumnae to share their Barnard stories -- oral histories with a soft touch
• Ultra-thorough timeline; the parallax design is confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it, it's easy to slice and dice by category 
• Photos of alumnae from all fields tell a story of accomplishment. It's not clear at first that you can click on each one for a short bio (in fact, you can do that); I would have liked to have heard the voice of the person pictured as well, wherever possible. 

In all, excellent organizational storytelling and a fine use of archival material. It's a site that should also work well as a recruiting tool. (And keep in mind that this praise emanates from someone who made it a point not to attend an all-female college.)

Happy 250th, Hartford Courant

The Hartford Courant celebrates 250 years of continuous publication today. As other print newspapers close, this one survives, in part by staying true to its Connecticut roots. It started as a weekly and is older than the US itself.

Fittingly, the Connecticut Historical Society is running an exhibit through November 1 that showcases The Courant’s rich history. I harbor a fondness for Hartford since my first corporate history was a 150-year chronicle of The Phoenix Companies, a copy of which book is enclosed in a time capsule buried on Hartford's Constitution Plaza. The newspaper's website has a great selection of photos. Wish they'd done more with oral histories there.
 
In the words of the Society, The Courant is "the newspaper in which George Washington placed an ad to lease part of his Mount Vernon land. Thomas Jefferson sued this newspaper for libel—and lost. And Mark Twain tried to buy stock in this paper but his offer was turned down." May it enjoy another 250 years of publication. 

Archiving secrets revealed

Good glimpse of what an archivist does in this New York Times article, which profiles Mary Hedge in her daily work at New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority and as she prepares for an exhibit that will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. The exhibit opens on October 30 at the New York Transit Museum in downtown Brooklyn. The 1920s newspaper (image at right, courtesy MTA Bridges & Tunnels Special Archive) was an imaginary depiction that came true when the V-N opened in 1964. 

My favorite part of the piece: The archivist "records oral histories when longtime transit executives approach the end of their service. She interviewed the officers who were on duty in the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel on Sept. 11, 2001, as people fled Manhattan following the terrorist attack, and after Hurricane Sandy she recorded the stories of staff members who were involved in dealing with the storm and cleanup. 'Retirements and disasters,' she said." 

CorporateHistory.net recently helped recruit an archivist for one of our current clients. She and an assistant did a tremendous amount of work in a single week, bringing box-level order to almost 40 years worth of paper. This material will support other projects in the client's history plan. The client was thrilled and is considering bringing the team back to archive its digital items. It was a good reminder that companies can keep archives under their own roof (no need to pay monthly fees to a warehouse) -- and that even a small investment in archiving pays ongoing dividends. 

JFK oral histories

One of the most effective museums I've ever visited is the Sixth Floor Museum of the former Texas School Book Depository in downtown Dallas, now owned by the JFK Library and redesigned as a memorial to the day of President Kennedy's assassination. What makes it so meaningful, in part, is the use of oral histories. The local disk jockey who was covering the motorcade on AM radio, the Parkland Hospital nurse who was the first to respond when the stretcher arrived, the motorcycle policeman who flanked the car on Jackie's side. . .their voices ring loud and clear through the headphones that the museum issues to each visitor.

Robert MacNeil (formerly of the MacNeil-Lehrer Report) covered that event too--he was in the motorcade. He lends his talent to a new oral history program that draws on recently discovered interviews. We Knew JFK: Unheard Stories from the Kennedy Archives can be heard in its entirety online at WeKnewJFK.org and is highlighted during this week's "On the Media" on public radio stations. as well. Worth a listen, especially for those of us who remember exactly where we were that fateful day.