Historical Bits

Something from long ago

2011-09-02T12:46:00.000-07:00

I was looking through some old files today and came across a poem written in 1857 by William C. Cutter and published in Robert Merry's Museum. The poem was written at a time when ice skating was gaining popularity and it is a call for women to learn to skate. I thought it was interesting and fun. Enjoy the poem and the Labor Day weekend!

Skating - Women's Rights
By: William C. Cutter

Why may not a woman skate?
She can walk, and run, and ride - -
In dance, or hop, she's always great - -
Prithee, why not skate and slide?
Skating is a useful art,
Full of dignity and grace;
Exercises limb and heart,
Gives the blood a healthful pace.

Why may not a woman skate?

Swan-like grace and queenly sway
Mark the vigorous, blooming Kate,
Sailling down yon glittering way.
Look! what conscious grace and power,
In those broad, out-sweeping strides,
As down the sliver-gleaming floor,
With still increasing speed she glides.

Why may not a woman skate?

Often on the frozen Scheldt,
Buxom Dutch girls, early, late,
For the prize of speed have dealt.
Sometimes, from the inland town
To the city mart, or fair,
They be merry bands glide down,
And their precious burdens bear.

Why may not a woman skate?

To a friend's, long miles away,
Oft they sail, with heart elate,
To make a call - - or pass the day.
Often so do lovers meet,
Whispering, wooing, billing, cooing,
While upon their iron feet,
Miles and miles of talk they're doing.

Why may not a woman skate?

What though ankles she reveal?
Skater's ankles, critics state,
Are not over-much genteel.
What of that! - - a trifling charge!
There's a right for every wrong - -
If the ankle's somewhat large,
May be 'tis well set and strong.

Why may not a woman skate?

Six times we have put the question;
No one rising in debate,
No one offering a suggestion.
Silence gives consent. So, then,
Pretty girls, and woman too,
No less than rude boys, and men,
May put on the iron shoe.

Try it girls - - ay, try the skate - -

Good for service, seldom tired,
Able to sustain its weight,
Never weak, or loosely wired,
The well-tried ankle you will find
In your need hour, just the one - -
Bind your skates on - - never mind! - -
You will find it right good fun.

A Facebook Page!

2011-08-24T17:34:00.000-07:00

Progress, progress, progress!

We are working on a Facebook page. If you have Facebook please "like" us! If you search "National Speedskating Museum and Hall of Fame" the page should come up. As I understand it we need to get 25 "likes" in order to become Facebook official.

I think I may start migrating posts to Facebook instead of the blog as Facebook potentially reaches more people. Please share your thoughts!

A Pretty Cool Place to Work

2011-08-19T12:42:00.000-07:00

I wanted to share a little bit of information about the building that is home to the Hall of Fame and where I come to work! It's interesting stuff.

The Pettit National Ice Center will be celebrating its twentieth anniversary next year and that is pretty exciting. The staff is already gearing up to celebrate all year long. I bring this up because as I was working on processing some documents today and came across some articles about the PNIC when it was first constructed back in 1992. I come to the PNIC a few times a week to work on the National Speed Skating Museum and Hall of Fame collections, but rarely think about how amazing the building where I do my work actually is. This place is impressive so I thought I would share some facts about the Pettit with everyone.

- The total building measures an impressive 200,000 square feet. 155,000 square feet of that is used as arena space, 97,000 square feet of that is used for ice!

- The total cost of construction was 13.3 million dollars.

- The formation of the Olympic oval took 100 truckloads of cement poured in one continuous effort that took two teams of 20 people 13.5 hours to pour! It took an additional seven hours to make sure that the oval was perfectly flat and seamless. This was done in order to keep the ice from cracking.

- The entire building was completed in only 10 ½ months.

- The arena space is large enough to house three 747 airplanes, with 22 feet to spare!

- The amount of ice inside the PNIC is enough to make 13 million one-inch ice cubes!

I don’t know where everyone else goes to work every day, but I think the building where I go to work is pretty cool. Check out the Pettit National Ice Center’s website to learn more about it: http://www.thepettit.com/

My sources for the information listed above were:

New Ice Age at Pettit National Ice Center. By: Sandra Hoseid. The Edge. May/June 1999

The Pettit National Ice Center – Dedication document (a document created in 1992 with specs and information about the newly constructed ice center)

Intern A has left the building

2011-08-12T14:56:00.000-07:00

Intern A has completed the last day of her internship. I am sad to see Amanda go, but thankful for all of the work she has done throughout her internship. She is starting school again this Fall and will be busy with classes as well as her position as a teaching assistant. I wish her the best of luck and know that she will be successful in her future endeavors! Thank you for all of your hard work Amanda!

I have already put out the call for another intern from the UW-Milwaukee Museum Studies Program, which is the graduate program that I completed as well. I am hoping to interview the candidates within the next few weeks and have the new intern start sometime in September or November.

There is still a lot of inventory to complete so having an intern to help me out has been so nice and I look forward to bringing in another helpful set of hands!

During the past week Amanda and I worked on processing and inventorying various event programs, protocol books, handbooks and meeting minute books. We now have five boxes full of programs from speed skating events around the world! Whew, those have been keeping us busy!

Trophies and photographs

2011-07-29T14:18:00.000-07:00

I'm a little behind on updating everyone on what we have been up to the past few weeks, but don't worry we have been busy!

The first thing I want to tell you about are the trophies. There are over 50 of them in the collection! We recently inventoried all of them. We assigned numbers to the trophies that didn't already have numbers, cataloged them, photographed them and re-housed them in archival boxes. The trophies that we too large for boxes were tagged and placed in large vented polypropelene bags. They were then placed on a top shelf in our storage room. We placed them in the bags to prevent them from collecting as much dust as they would had we left them uncovered. Eventually I would like to clean them all, but that will have to wait until after the intial inventory process is complete.

The other project we are working on (not yet completed) is another box of photographs. This box contains hundreds of 4x6 photographs that had not yet been processed. I antcipate that this box will take a few days to plow through. We are placing the photographs in archival envelopes and then into an archival photo storage box. I would say that we are about a quarter of the way through this box and must give Intern A much of the credit for this box. She has been working really hard on processing all of the photographs.

While she has been working hard on the photographs I took the opportunity to compile a list of the Hall of Fame members and am going to start working on updating the information we have on the members. I would eventually like to have a file for each member of the Hall of Fame and then be able to expand the biographies currently on the main website. I have a lot of ideas for this and will probably debut some of them here for feedback!

We are already half way through July!

2011-07-15T05:16:00.000-07:00

It's crazy when you think about it.....our short Milwaukee summer is flying by. July also makes me think about when this project started. I think I started the inventory around the beginning of March. July also makes me think that school is starting soon and Intern A won't be available as often or at all to come help out anymore. She is awesome and is going to be a TA this semester, so she will be busy. That being said, we are making wonderful progress on the inventory. Now when I go into the storage room I can point to pretty much half of the boxes and say we are all finished with those ones. That doesn't mean, however, that we are almost done. A lot of the boxes contain papers.....lots of papers. These need to be taken out of the non-archival materials, staples need to be removed and they need to be put into some kind of order, depending on what they are, and then re-housed in archival materials. This process takes time.....lots of time. A lot of people who see me working always ask "Aren't you done yet?" or "How long is this going to take?" I just smile and say, inventories take a long time and we are making great progress. When the boxes are sitting on the shelf they don't look big, but when we open them and deal with the contents we never know how long it will take to process just one box. For instance, when we worked on the photographs, one box took two weeks of our time and when we were processing ice skates we could make it through four or five boxes in a day. I guess it's all about volume of the boxes on the shelves.
This week we have been working on speed skating competition programs. The programs mostly have been from the surrounding area, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois. They are all from a single donor and range from the early 1950s through the 1980s. It is quite a collection. We have been sorting them by date and by state and putting them into archival folders into archival boxes. We've had to spread them out quite a bit to sort them and I am thankful that the nice people at the Pettit National Ice Center let us use the conference room to do our work. We usually spread out and use two or three long banquet size tables to do the work.
Well, I think that is all I have for the mid-July update. I feel like we are moving right along!

an update

2011-07-10T10:53:00.000-07:00

It's been a couple of weeks since our last post so I thought I would give everyone an update on what Intern A and I have been doing. We have been cataloging photographs, lots and lots of photographs. They have been pretty interesting and fun. We have been able to see images spanning from as early as 1924 to more modern images including a picture Christmas card from the 1988 USA Speedskating Team.

Intern B has finished his time at the Hall of Fame and has moved on to another opportunity. He was a tremendous help during his internship and we wish him well with the rest of his schooling and museum career!

This week we will open up some new boxes and are not sure what we will be working on next. That is one of my favorite parts about working in the museum field is that I get to do something different most days when I come into work. Sometimes a few weeks go by with many of the same tasks, but then something new comes in or happens and the day or week is something I never expected. I also get to meet many interesting people, from donors, to Hall of Fame inductees, to people just stopping in to see the Hall of Fame.

A little bit about "Intern A"

2011-06-23T17:33:00.000-07:00

This is a guest post by Amanda, also known as "Intern A." She is doing an awesome job here and I am so grateful and excited to have her on board and working hard!

My name is Amanda (Intern A). I am a Graduate Student at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, in the Public History program; I am in the Museum Studies track, working toward a Masters in History as well as a Museum Studies Certificate. I studied History and English Literature at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota. My specialization in history, beside my newly adopted passion for speed skating, has thus far been genocide studies. During my undergraduate work, I spent a month in Central Europe, touring various sites from the Holocaust. Ideally, I would like to work in a museum like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.

In the past, I have worked the Stearns History Museum in St. Cloud, Minnesota, where I am originally from (and yes, we all talk a little bit like the characters in Fargo). During my time there, I got to work with staff at all levels of the Museum, from the Director, the Exhibit Preparator, to the Curator. I even got to spend some time in the Archives, working with their extensive collection to write an article for their quarterly publication. Armed with this experience, as well as office and administrative experience from my (many) other jobs, I applied for the internship at the Speed Skating Hall of Fame this past spring.

During my interview, Rebecca told me that this summer would involve working from legacy museum records, developing new systems and creating a whole new organization. She was fairly upfront about the challenges that this task entailed. So far, her initial assessment has proved to be very true. And I’ve loved every minute. I believe that this unique, and yes, challenging experience will give me the skills necessary to become an outstanding museum professional.

The challenges we is facing now, starting from fragments of legacy museums, a modest budget and to its currently restricted space, are fairly common in the museum field. But we have one valuable element that is more valuable than anything else - a dedicated, involved and excited board. I am grateful for the chance to be involved at the ground level in a unique situation like this, where I am able to work directly with objects as well as to contribute my ideas and opinions. I look forward to a summer of learning more about speed skating and forming the foundation for a wonderful institution that reflects both the board as well as the world of speed skating.

Photographs!

2011-06-17T13:25:00.000-07:00

Today was all about photographs. Intern A and I worked on photographs from a donor who had at one time been a part of putting together the speedskating publication The Racing Blade. We have three binders that are chock full of photographs that were taken for the publication.
We worked on taking them out of the non-archival plastic sleeves and binders that they have been stored in and moved them into buffered photograph envelopes. While we are re-housing the photographs we are also recording them into the inventory. There are a lot of photographs and we only got through one binder today. There are two more to go. This project is pretty interesting because the photographs cover a wide range of time and events. I did come across some photographs from the late 80s and early 90s of some of the members of the board. Those were really fun to see. We currently are not equiped with a scanner so I won't be able to share any of them with you here, but maybe in the near future. These photographs should keep us busy next week as well.

Mold, Mildew and Bugs, Oh My!

2011-06-14T18:43:00.000-07:00

Back when this project started I encountered a room/storage space that was less than ideal, but it was what there was to work with. The collections are housed in an air handling room (I know, so less than ideal) and were in pretty bad shape at the beginning. The air handling system had a leak and there was standing water on the floor. The boxes were up on wood pallets for the most part, but cardboard likes to suck up moisture so it was still a problem. As we go through the collection we run across things that have mold and mildew on them from time to time. I do my best to properly handle and store these items so the mold doesn’t spread, but without a freezer or a budget to have these items conserved there is little I can do. Today was especially disheartening as we went through a box of clothing that had been removed from the storage space during the water incident, but hadn’t gotten much of my attention since. The clothes that were in the box are unfortunately in pretty bad shape. I don’t blame anyone for this but do feel terrible about it. Many of the items have visible mold and many of them also have holes in them. The holes are small and may or may not be from insect infestation at some point.

I wrote the paragraph above when we started working on the clothing collection. It was a rough day to say the least, but I think perhaps I am too hard on myself. I contemplated all week on whether or not to post what I had written and what people would think, but in the end have concluded that the purpose of writing this blog is to share my adventures as the curator here and there will be bad along with the good. That being said today was much better than last Friday. We still dealt with some clothing that contained mold and evidence of previous pest infestations. We have isolated those items and found other items in the collection that are fine. They aren’t moldy and there weren’t any visible signs of infestation. We are keeping these items far apart from one another, but finding some of the clothing items in good shape was like gold at the end of the rainbow! Here are some pictures of my and Intern A’s favorites. Intern B wasn’t working with us today so he will just have to look at our pictures and be jealous.

It's hard to tell in the photograph, but this is hand bedazzled. It is a fantastic skating uniform and has matching shorts.

This is part of an Olympic uniform. It is flannel lined and I bet it looked pretty sharp!

Also, if you win the lottery or have a few hundred thousand lying around that you would like to donate to our cause and the care of the clothing collection please let me know! We would be best friends and the clothing and textile collections would thank you.

Lots and lots of documents

2011-06-07T13:31:00.000-07:00

Today and last week we worked on processing a lot of correspondence and papers from a single donor. I think all together we may have removed about a pound and a half of staples, paperclips, and metal bindings. All of these items are terrible for paper over the long term. I actually hate staples, yes, hate them. Here is the bounty from today's work:

That being said, we actually got a lot of work done. We are taking the papers out of binders and non-archival folders and boxes and putting them into archivally sound folders and boxes. When we get through all of the papers we will then give them proper catalog numbers and enter them into the inventory. It's a lot of tedious work, but is really fun to see a lot of different types of documents and old letter head from different speed skating clubs.

Next week we are going to work on clothing and textile pieces in the collection. They are currently in non-archival cardboard boxes and we are going to transfer them to archival boxes while photographing and cataloging them. I am excited to see what we come across. More to come!

Photographing Artifacts

2011-05-26T14:17:00.000-07:00

We are photographing the artifacts while we go throught the inventory so that the data can later be plugged into museum software and so that in the future if we are planning exhibits we can look at the photographs of the artifacts to make initial artifacts selections instead of looking through the boxes. The photographing is adding some time to the inventory process, but will definetly save time in the long term.

I keep saying we, but as you know I am the only employee right now, but I do have two awesome interns. Amanda and Ben are interns from the Museum Studies program at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. They are helping with the inventory as well as eventually helping with exhibit planning. Since their names are Amanda and Ben, we jokingly refer to them as "Intern A" and "Intern B" and I will refer to them as such on the blog as well. No suprise, we have fun while we work.

Today we are working on photographing the artifacts that we have already entered in on the inventory spreadsheet. Intern B is taking the pictures and Intern A is recording the artifact number. We are storing the images on on external hard drive. Eventually the images can be imported into a museum collections management system. Until then they are a good way to help us document what is in the collection and to share the artifacts with the public.

From the artifacts we photographed today here are our favorites:

My favorite: Commemorative Plate from the St. Paul Winter Carnival - - St. Paul, MN. The carnival was founded in 1886, but we do not know the exact year of this particular plate.

Intern A's favorite: A champion speedskating medal from 1895.

Intern B couldn't decide on a favorite today, but will get back to us on his favorite later!

The First Blog Post; A Look Back to the Beginning

2011-05-24T16:39:00.000-07:00

I was hired in February of 2011 as the curator of collections for the National Speedskating Museum and Hall of Fame. My job consists of conducting an inventory of the entire collection, developing a mission statement and collections management policy, and developing small exhibits.

I started this blog to share my experiences with the project and to get input from other museum professionals. The situation at the Pettit National Ice Center is a unique one as it was not originally meant to be the home of a museum and hall of fame, but has found itself the home of one. The storage spaces are less than ideal and our budget is small so I have the task of finding appropriate storage solutions for a startup museum. The future plans include creating an actual museum, but for now there are three small display cases and the Speedskating Hall of Fame is located on the second floor of the Pettit center.

I plan to share interesting artifacts and experiences that I encounter while doing the inventory and at times will seek the advice of others to help me solve the challenges and unique situations that I encounter. However to start things from the beginning included below is a history of speed skating from the 2000-2001 Amateur Speedskating Union Handbook. It will be a good start about the history of speedskating and will give the reader some background to the project that is at hand.

History of Speedskating from ASU 2000-2001 Handbook:

Skating is one of the many sports (including running, horse racing, swimming, and cycling) in which people learned how to make a game out of their tools and techniques of transportation. Of the three forms of skating—speed skating, ice hockey, and figure skating—speed skating was the first to develop as a sport. This form of ice sport was already highly developed in Holland by the sixteenth century and, apart from improvements in style and equipment, speed skating does not differ much in its general aspects now from its early days. The word “skate” probably comes from the very Low German word “schaats”, Danish “Skoite”, English “scatch” and Scottish “sketcher.”

Nobody knows where man first started to skate. It is quite apparent that the ice skate had its origin and development through its predecessor, the ski. When a deep coat of snow covered the ground, the Vikings would use snow shoes (skis), and when the water froze on the rivers and lakes they would use ice skates. In all countries where Vikings have made their power felt, the archeologists have found numerous ice skates of Viking manufacture, not only in England, but in Germany, Switzerland, and other countries.

Early Scandinavian literature is full of allusions to skating on an iron skate as early as AD 1200. For many centuries before this, the people of the Northern countries—Sweden, Finland, Norway, Russia, Holland, Scotland—used skates made of polished animal bones for transportation over frozen lakes, rivers, canals and icy fields. During the fourteenth century, people began to make skates with runners of highly waxed wood instead of bones. As there was no sharp edge on bone or wood runners, a long pole was pushed against the ice to propel the skater across the surface.

About the year 1400 mention is made again of skates with metal runners secured in a wooden sole. This latest development of skating had its origin in Holland. A woodcut, printed in Holland in 1498, is the oldest known portrayal of skating. This earliest illustration shows women enjoying skating on iron-clad wooden skates, and an accident on the ice which actually happened to a fifteen-year old girl, Lidwina. Born in Schiedam in Holland in 1380, she fell and broke a rib while skating with some friends in the winter of 1395. Because of the many complications caused by the fracture, Lidwina became an invalid in constant pain. Having been deeply religious all her life, she began to pray more fervently, and she claimed to have divine visions. At first she was suspected of being a fake, but after she was tested by the church and acknowledged to be genuine, no one any longer doubted Lidwina’s nearness to God. Miracles began happening at her bedside except the greatest miracle of all—her own recovery. After thirty-eight years of agony she passed away on Easter Day on 1433 at fifty-three years of age. A shrine was built over her grave where the devout came to pray for centuries. In 1891 she was cononized by Pope Leo XII and became the patron saint of skating.

Here and there, European blacksmiths covered wooden skate runners with iron, but it was not until 1572 that a Scottish innovator made the first pair of all iron skates. With them, the formal story of skating as an organized sport has it’s start.

By the early part of the eighteenth century, when the first ice club in the world, the Skating Club of Edinburgh, was organized, speed skating was a popular sport in Scotland. The first recorded speed skating competition was on the Fens in England over a distance of fifteen miles on February 4, 1763.

Soon, skating clubs and tournaments spread all over Northern Europe. IN those pre-artificial ice centuries, skating was exclusively an outdoor winter sport. Wherever there was enough ice, races were organized. The participants were mostly laborers whose daily work in winter gave them practice in skating fast over the frozen canals. The aristocrats, who were more inclined toward artistic skating, served as judges and spectators for the speed skating competitions. Handsome cash prizes were awarded, and heavy betting and sweepstakes were common practices. In 1879 the National Skating Association of Great Britain was founded to protect speed skating from these dubious practices and to promote the sport in an orderly and uniform manner under the direction of an international council. Thirteen years later, in 1892, the International Skating Union was formed.

As skating spread throughout Europe, other countries held competitions; Norway in 1863; Sweden in 1882; Finland in 1883; Russia in 1884. By the middle of the nineteenth, speed skating dominated ice sports in Holland and was considered the national sport. Scottish settlers in the New World had made skating a popular sport in North American colonies. However, the first championship held on American soil was not until 1889. G. D. Phillips was the winner.

The first amateur speed skating championship of the world took place in Amsterdam in the winter of 1892-93. Four distances were skated: 500, 1500, 5,000, and 10,000 meters. It was necessary for a skater to win three out of the four races to be called Champion of the World. Jaap Eden of Holland was declared the first official Champion of the World when he won the first three races.

Skating Acquires “Wings” of Steel

The old iron skates were heavy, and the blades lost their sharp edges after a few hours of even casual skating. Then in 1850, E.W. Bushnell of Philadelphia started to make all-steel skates. They were light, strong, and maintained their sharp blade edges for months of hard use.

The new steel skates turned from a hardy Spartan sport to a popular craze. They were so light that another American, Jackson Haines, combined his professional talents as a ballet master and his enthusiasm as a skater to create the new diversion of figure skating. The new steel blades were also practical enough to turn speed skating into an organized international sport. Axel Paulson of Norway, in collaboration with Carl Warner, also constructed a racing skate of thin metal tubes and a blade 1/16 inch wide, attached to a boot. The modern hockey skate is the outcome of this speed skate.

The American Skating Congress was organized at Alleghany City, Pennsylvania in 1868, and skating competition gradually evolved in the United States from this post-Civil War era, primarily through individual skate clubs. Lack of uniform rules governing races eventually led to a call for a convention of all the clubs and organizations in the United States and Canada. The result was the formation of the first skating union organized in North America as the International Skating Union of America. It was organized February 3, 1907 at the Montreal Amateur Athletic Club, Montreal, Canada by delegates representing the then skating associations of North America.

Its purpose was set forth as “establishing a legislative body with power to make uniform laws, to regulate and control skating contests throughout the United States and Canada, and between the two countries.” The Union was composed of several associations having specific geographic areas for their activities. They included the Eastern Skating Association, New England Skating Association, Western Skating Association, Amateur Skating Association of Canada, and the Western Skating Association of Canada. Our present handbook contains many of the same phrases for rules and regulations evolved at this convention, and it appears that this group had an immense influence on the development of the sport and organized competition. This organization was the governing body of speed, figure, hockey and roller skating in the United States and Canada.

The International Skating Union of America functioned under that name until the winter of 1926-27 season when the Amateur Skating Association of Canada severed their affiliations with the United States skating associations and the International Skating Union of America was dissolved at Boston, Massachusetts, in November, 1927. It was succeeded by the Amateur Skating Union of the United States with new articles of alliance whereby the amateur skating associations of Canada were to conduct their own affairs and the Amateur Skating Union of the United States was to be the governing body over the skating sport in the United States, with a further understanding that sanctions for holding skating events involving North American championships were to be alternated between the two countries. Relationships with the Canadians have been revived from time to time with “Articles of Alliance” which define the regulations for conducting meets jointly such as the “North American Champions.”