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With All-Star Week quickly approaching, the first half of the Major League Baseball season is almost finished. This week’s Throwback Thursday (TBT) features a photo from the 1957 Villanova University varsity baseball season. Did you know that Villanova first began playing varsity baseball in 1866? The program is one of the oldest collegiate programs in the country! “In a history that spans more than 150 years, Villanova has played more than 3,500 games and has had more than 1,500 student-athletes wear the uniform.”

Check out additional baseball photos in the Villanova University Digital Library. Looking for more information on the history of Villanova athletics? The exhibit, “Wildcats Past & Present: Moments from the History of Sports at Villanova,” features assorted and unique items representative of the varied sports played at Villanova. Prefer a podcast? Both episodes of the History of Athletics at Villanova can be played here.

For more baseball, explore the resources below! Catch a game this weekend: The Philadelphia Phillies begin a home series with the Washington Nationals tomorrow at 6:05 p.m. Congratulations to LSU men’s baseball! The team defeated Florida 18-4 in a winner-take-all Game 3 of the Men’s College World Series finals Monday, June 26, in Omaha, NE.

• Baseball: A History of America’s Game (Rader, 2018)
• Baseball (Burns, 2010) *Academic Video Online
• Baseball (Seymour, 1960)
• Baseball: The National Pastime in the National Archives
• Baseball: An Illustrated History (Ward, 1994)
• Baseball in America and America in Baseball (Kyle, 2008) *eBook
• Baseball and Philosophy: Thinking Outside the Batter’s Box (Bronson & Irwin, 2004)
• ESPN Feature: E60 “Risking It All” [Matthew Szczur] *Video

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Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Library. Her favorite baseball team is the Cleveland Guardians. 

 

 

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For this Throwback Thursday, we rewind to 1964 when legendary folk band Peter, Paul, and Mary visited Villanova to play for a crowd of 4,500. Alluded to in the Belle Air yearbook simply as “The Folk Singing Trio,” Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey, and Mary Travers, sang their newly recorded hits like “If I Had a Hammer” and “Puff, the Magic Dragon.”

Peter, Paul, and Mary were a combination of entertainment and activism and sang “If I Had a Hammer” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” at the Million Man March on Washington shortly before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke, according to Michael Scott Cain’s Folk Music and the New Left in the Sixties, part of Falvey’s collection.

Check out this memory (page 64) and many others, courtesy of our Digital Library.

 

Congratulations to the Class of 2023. In honor of this weekend’s commencement is a #TBT of commencement ceremonies of years past.

And did you know former U.S. President Grover Cleveland received an honorary degree at Villanova?

 

More commencement and student life photographs can be in found in the Distinctive Collections Digital Library.

 

For all the mothers and the mothers-at-heart, thank you for your care and kindness. Happy Mother’s Day!

Mother’s Day is an unlikely popular tradition of Villanova history. From the early 1900s, Mothers were invited on campus to celebrate Mother’s Day with their child. The day’s events would include tree-planting ceremony, corsage giving, mass, luncheon, games, and entertainment. Mother’s Day activities were incorporated into Junior Week festivities which began in 1935. By the 1950s, more than 400 Mothers and Grandmothers would visit marking it as one of the largest events each year. Parents Weekend overtime replaced Mother’s Day traditions. Though having Mothers partake in Junior celebrations bolstered the idea of Villanova’s community representing families of students too.

 

 

 

 

 

An especially long-standing tradition, that started long before it was incorporated with Mother’s Day activities, was the Junior tree-planting ceremony. The tree-planting ceremony was considered the class tree, a precursor to more elaborate class gifts. Typically, the event was held after Mass and students would walk in a parade to plant the tree. With time, the tradition evolved to include Mothers participating in the planting ceremony.

 

 

 

 

 

 

More about Mother’s Day and Junior Week can be found in Blazers and Class Rings digital exhibit and Digital Library.

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May 11 is National Twilight Zone Day! Honor Rod Serling’s television series by reading a dime novel from the Villanova University Digital Library. The “Czech ‘dime novel’ – roughly translated as ‘Adventure World’ – (pictured above) covers stories of science fiction and adventure. Starting in 1927 and running until 1938, this was a popular Czech title for adults and children.” Skim the Dime Novel and Popular Literature collection here.

Looking for more sci-fi adventures? You can stream The Twilight Zone on Paramount+ and Amazon Prime. If you’re looking for some recommendations, Entertainment Weekly ranked 30 of the “best” Twilight Zone episodes. You can also check out the Falvey Library resources below:

• The Twilight Zone (Grant, 2020) *eBook
• The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia (Rubin, 2018) *eBook
• The Twilight Zone FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About the Fifth Dimension and Beyond (Thompson, 2015) *eBook
• The Twilight Zone and Philosophy: A Dangerous Dimension to Visit (Rivera, 2019) *eBook
• Philosophy in The Twilight Zone (Carroll, N., & Hunt, L. H., 2009)
•  A Dimension of Sound: Music in the Twilight Zone (Wissner, 2013)
• “The Fast Draw: The Twilight Zone” (CBS, 2009) *Academic Video Online

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Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Library.

 

 

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Villanova University’s Digital Library presents and preserves digital collections of selected holdings from our University Archives and Special Collections, as well as partner materials including institutional partners as well as individual donors. A recently added title from my own family’s bookshelf, Along the Pathway from Fibre to Paper, shares a rare, illustrated history and step-by-step detail of the papermaking process in one of Philadelphia’s many paper mills at the turn of the twentieth century.

 

Riverside Paper Mills

The booklet was produced by W.C. Hamilton & Sons, owners of the Riverside Paper Mills, “where good paper has been made since 1853” – according to its title page.  The description opens with the history and long tradition of the papermaking industry in the Philadelphia region including the very first paper mill built in North America, established by William Rittenhouse in 1690.

The Riverside Paper Mills were located in Whitemarsh township, Montgomery County, situated on the Schuylkill River. The area, adjacent to Roxborough, Philadelphia and formerly known as Lafayette Station, is now known as Miquon.

An explanation of the company’s trademark image and the name “Miquon” is given. The trademark, appearing on nearly every page as well as the book’s endpapers, depicts the face of William Penn within a round circle over a feather quill pen, with the words – MIQUON – RIVERSIDE MILLS.

The origin of the name Miquon is said to derive from a meeting of Lenape people with William Penn. Penn’s interpreter, searching for a way to translate Penn’s name, pointed to a goose quill on the ground and said, “Onas, signifying a Quill or Pen. But his familiar name was Miquon” [8].

 

 

The Papermaking Process

The book then details the many steps and processes of turning wood fiber to paper, with large photographic plates of the machinery and workers to illustrate each step. The second half of the book incudes samples of the final products, including Hamilton’s Fine Writing paper, buff colored paper, and envelope papers.

 

 

 

My favorite part of the whole publication is, of course, that it belonged to my great-great-grandfather. A dedication bookplate on the front fly leaf reads, “Harry West, associated with W.C. Hamilton & Sons / Riverside Paper Mills / Lafayette / Montgomery County / Pennsylvania / for twenty-seven years / is the owner of this descriptive-history of the institution he has helped to build.” Signed by Freas B. Snyder, President. [Dated] 7/1/21. being no. 19 of 350 copies.” The italicized words are hand-written in the intentional blank spaces left in the printed text. I love that there is a blank space for he (and therefore, also presumably for she) indicating that copies were likely given to both men and women who worked in or were associated with the mills.

Unfortunately, Harry West died at the mill in 1925. His death certificate indicates that he was working as “Head Drainer” and cause of death listed as “crushed skull, cervical vertebrae, and left shoulder by belt driven pulley at W/C Hamilton & Sons White Marsh Township, Monty Co., Pa.”

In 1999, the former mill buildings were preserved and redeveloped into an office complex (named River Park I and River Park II). Since 2012, River Park II has been home to the campus of AIM Academy, an independent school for grades 1-12.

For more on Paper and Papermaking in Greater Philadelphia see also: https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/paper-and-papermaking/

If you have a unique or interesting item you would like to see digitized, please reach out to us at digitallibrary@villanova.edu.

 

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Rebecca Oviedo is Distinctive Collections Archivist at Falvey Memorial Library.

 

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“Halfway home is this putt by Ron Zurinskas. Bob Byrwa attends the pin, while Dave Doyle patiently awaits his turn” (1959 Belle Air, p. 208).

The Masters Tournament, the first of the four major championships in professional golf, aired this past Sunday. This week’s Throwback Thursday (#TBT) features the 1958 varsity golf team (three of the members are pictured above.) The team “turned in the school’s fifth consecutive winning season by triumphing in six of ten matches” (p. 208).

The 2022-2023 Villanova Men’s Golf Team won the Wildcat Spring Invitational for the second straight year at the LuLu Country Club in Glenside, Pa. on April 11, 2023. Best of luck to the Men’s Golf Team this spring!

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Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication & Marketing Specialist at Falvey Library. She enjoys golfing…but only in scrambles. 

 

 

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beautiful blooms and morning dew 

Celebrates the work 

Of our favorite poets –  

Frost, Dickinson, Shakespeare, 

Whitman, Cummings, Hughes, 

Many, many more 

Even our poet, McGarrity 

acknowledges 

All the forms, emotions, and hues 

That poetry brings to our hearts 

April, month of 

 

 

My case in the exhibit, “Poetic License: Seven Curators’ Poetry Selections from Distinctive Collections,” showcases examples of weird and fantastical poetry from Falvey Library’s holdings. Here, the term “weird” is used not colloquially, but rather in reference to the genre of weird fiction, which emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Owing much to Gothic horror, weird fiction reinvented the creatures and themes of Gothic horror and other forms of speculative fiction, as portrayed by writers such as Edgar Allan Poe. In fact, H. P. Lovecraft, the most widely known practitioner of weird fiction, considered Poe’s writings the origin of the genre. While writers like Lovecraft are now remembered largely for their contributions to prose, my exhibit case highlights their lesser known, but equally interesting, poetic works. Examples are drawn from Weird Tales, arguably the most popular periodical to ever publish weird fiction and poetry. These poems explore themes that are central to the genre, including the supernatural, the passage of time, and the futility of human pursuits in an indifferent cosmos. Formally, the poems tend to implement consistent rhyme and meter, which amplify the haunting quality of these works.

Some poems in the case are quite literally fantastical, like Lovecraft’s “Night Gaunts,” which describes the dreadful flying creatures that first appeared in the author’s posthumously published novella, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kaddath (1943). Other poems adopt a more grounded approach, such as Sudie Stuart Hager’s “Inheritance,” which examines how folklore can pass fantastical notions from one generation to the next. Meanwhile, Leah Bodine Drake’s “The Steps in the Field” uses fantastical motifs to develop a resonant metaphor about the afterlife, but also emphasizes the idea that some knowledge is dangerous and best left undiscovered—a popular theme in weird fiction and poetry. Together, these and other poems in the case paint a vivid picture of weird and fantastical poetry, its primary thematic concerns, and its formal techniques in the first half of the twentieth century.

The case also displays four covers of Weird Tales issues, illustrated by Margeret Brundage, Matt Fox, and Virgil Finlay. These expressive, colorful images, which depict eerie and otherworldly scenes, nicely complement the similarly evocative poetic works that accompany them.

Lastly, the case includes two works by authors who influenced the poetry in Weird Tales. First and foremost, Poe’s 1845 narrative poem “The Raven,” with its exploration of a depressed man’s desperate attempt to derive meaning from a bird’s repetitive sounds, lays the groundwork for numerous character arcs in weird fiction and poetry. The edition of this poem that is displayed in my case has been digitized and made available on the Villanova Digital Library, and may be read in full here. Furthermore, the case includes the Anglo-Irish author Lord Dunsany’s “A Walk in the Wastes of Time,” a metaphorical poem about communal memory, which was published in The Smart Set in 1917. This title has also been digitized and is available here. (A couple of years after this poem’s publication, Lovecraft would attend a talk by Dunsany in Boston; Dunsany’s influence on Lovecraft’s writings during this period is evident in many of Lovecraft’s works. Comic-book writer Alan Moore portrays the Boston talk in his Lovecraftian series Providence, which serves as both sequel and prequel to Moore’s Neonomicon.)

For more content related to weird fiction and poetry, read our digitized copy of Lovecraft’s personal journal of astronomical observations from 1909 to 1915, as well as this blog article that explains the significance of this rare manuscript. The Digital Library also includes other nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts that explore the occult, including several issues of The Paragon Monthly, a handbook on spiritualism, and other examples.

Please join us on Thursday, April 20, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. in Speakers’ Corner, Falvey Library, for the official launch and introduction of “Poetic License: Seven Curators’ Poetry Selections from Distinctive Collections,” followed by an open-mic poetry reading. This ACS-approved event is free and open to the public. In the meantime, make sure to view the full exhibit on the first floor of Falvey, and check the library’s blog for additional articles on individual curators’ cases!