Tilford Studley

The plot thickens! There is a labor union on campus called UPI, and today Catherine and I were informed that all of the UPI members, which I understand includes a large number of the faculty, have been notified about and encouraged to attend Sunday's presentation about Tilford Dudley and his work with labor unions. Hmmmmm, it's cool that there is all of this interest in the program, but the million dollar question is: where are we going to put everyone, and how is Norma Winkelblack, the president of the Coles County Historical Society, going to make enough cookies and punch for all of these people? The Dudley House really is not very big. We were joking today that we could close down 7th Street and hold a street meeting outside with megaphones :-) The only thing we have going for us is that there is a Chicago Bears game on Sunday afternoon, and people here get pretty fanatical about their Bears, so hopefully a lot of them will stay home to watch the game. I mean, it would be cool to have a lot of people there, but too many would be a little hard to manage.

Today I've been trying to hammer everything into place for my part of the presentation, then tomorrow night Catherine and I are going to put all of our stuff together and have a practice run. Everything is coming together really well--it's just that there is sooooooo much information to sift through, and the hard part is putting it together in a way that makes sense to people who don't already have a lot of background information about these topics. (Especially since I don't have a lot of background information about these topics!!) But, everything seems to be coming together. In fact, I think it's going to be such a good presentation that everyone will start calling him Tilford Studley! Family issues aside, Tilford really did do a lot of work for people during the New Deal years. Catherine and I are a little nervous because this is the final Dudley lecture, and our topic covers the fruition of all of T-Dud's work. We are basically giving the culminating lecture that is supposed to get at the "meat" of his work and explain the significance of his life. No pressure there! It's okay though--because I have been learning a lot and the previous experience I've had with presenting at conferences has been coming in handy. Most of the other students haven't ever done anything like this before, so I've been able to offer some good advice based on what I've learned in the past.

Today after class, I went to the Charleston Public Library to the genealogy room to look up some stuff about Charleston during the Great Depression. There were three ladies working there in the genealogy room, and they were just tickled to pieces to have a student come in there. They were really funny and nice, and they told me all of their stories about living through the Great Depression and surviving the dust storms in Kansas. It was all very interesting. Tonight we students are going to go hear Dr. Small give a presentation about Nathaniel Hawthorne's use of architecture in The Scarlet Letter, and then we have to meet to work on a Museum Exhibits project--it never ends!