Above: The description for this 1936 photograph reads, "Federal Residence School, sponsored by Idaho National Youth Administration, located at Weiser, Idaho. 'Come on in - the snow's fine' --Girls of the NYA Federal Residence School take time out for a sun bath and to have their pictures taken." At NYA residence centers across the country, young men and women received job training and could live, socialize, and network with their peers. The NYA was a great opportunity during the challenging times of the 1930s. Photo courtesy of the FDR Presidential Library and Museum.
Above: A WPA-built toboggan slide in Portland, Maine, ca. 1935-1943. Photo courtesy of the National Archives.
Above: "Rosaleen Jackman and her snow elephant," created on a WPA recreation project in Spokane, Washington, 1937. This young girl may be responsible for one of the largest music archives in the world (see below). Photo courtesy of the National Archives.
Rosaleen Jackman and the Moldenhauer Archives
Sometimes, when I see a person's name on a New Deal photo, I do a quick Internet search to see if I can find out what became of him/her. In this case, the girl you see above appears to be the same Rosaleen Jackman who married Hans Moldenhauer in 1943. A 1985 newspaper article reported that Hans had fled Germany in 1938 because of the Nazis, taught music, and then "married his former pupil and protege, 17-year-old Spokane native Rosaleen Jackman" ("Deposit boxes contain some musical treasure," The Paris News (Paris, Texas), June 5, 1985, emphasis added). The name, age, and location seems to match the photo above (she would be about 11-years-old in 1937).
Hans (1906-1987) and Rosaleen (1926-1982) became prominent musicians, and today Hans's piano is displayed in the Washington State Capitol Building and Rosaleen is honored with a memorial publication at the Library of Congress, a sort of companion guide to the Hans Moldenhauer Archive - an archive of "more than 3,500 musical manuscripts, correspondence and other music-related material... assembled by Moldenhauer over the course of nearly 40 years... the contents of which span Western music history from the 12th century to modern times... the largest composite gift of documents related to music scholarship ever made to the Library [and] regarded as one of the greatest collections of primary source material in music ever assembled" (The Rosaleen Moldenhauer Memorial, Library of Congress, 2001).
Hans credited Rosaleen as the driving force behind the archives (see, e.g., "Extensive Collection Is Musical Treasure," Rocky Mount Telegram (Rocky Mount, North Carolina), March 11, 1985), and today, according to the Wikipedia entry for the archives, it has "grown to many thousands of items that are now housed in nine institutions around the world: in the United States, at the Library of Congress, Harvard University, Northwestern University, Washington State University, and Whitworth College; in Basel, Switzerland, at the Paul Sacher Foundation; in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Zentralbibliothek; in Munich, Germany, at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek; and in Vienna, Austria, at the Stadtarchiv und Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek."
No comments:
Post a Comment