Commenter George Osborne correctly answered last week’s LSU Trivia question. The three teams into which Coach Paul Deitzel split the Tigers were the White team for best all around athletes, the Go team for offensive specialists and the Chinese Bandits for defensive specialists!

Congratulations go out to this year’s Tiger football team for their National Championship!

Research and background information for LSU Trivia is provided by Barry Cowan, University Archives. Keep an eye out for more questions next week.

In the final stretch of the football season, with the Tigers heading into the National Championship game, it seems a good time to remember LSU’s first National Championship in 1958.

Coach Paul Deitzel led the team to a 10-0 regular season, culminating with a seven to zero win over the Clemson Tigers in a Sugar Bowl worthy of a battle of the big cats.

Going into the 1958 season Coach Deitzel had to figure out how to structure a team with few experienced players. He did so by dividing the team into three groups, explaining himself this way:

“We need reserve strength and we do not have two teams of equal strength both on offense and defense. I have placed the best athletes on [one team] and they play both ways. Consequently, they spend equal time working on both offense and defense. The rest of our top prospects have been divided into teams which feature the particular phase of the game at which they are most proficient. Therefore the best offensive players are members of [another team]. They spend the greater parts of our workouts on offensive specialty. [The third team], our best defenders of this group, spend more time of each workout on defense.”

By focusing on the strengths of the players and being able to switch out teams Deitzel was able to keep his players fresh and use the Tigers’ speed to their advantage. Obviously the strategy paid off!

Come in to Hill Memorial Library and take a look at some of the LSU football resources in our collection like Peter Finney’s The Fighting Tigers 1893-1993: One Hundred Years of LSU Football and No. 1 in the Nation! L.S.U. Tigers 1958’s National Champions, published in Baton Rouge by TIGER FANS.

LSU Trivia:
In the first of our regular LSU trivia question posts, we put this question before you: What are the names of the three teams into which Deitzel separated the 1958 Tigers? Post your answers in the comments, then come back next week to see if you were right!

The photos and quote used in this post were taken from the aforementioned No. 1 in the Nation.

Maida Owens (Director, Louisiana Folklife Program), Jennifer Abraham (Director, T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History), Joel Gardner (Guest Speaker), and Elaine Smyth (Head, LSU Libraries’ Special Collections), visit during the reception following Gardner’s talk.

Joel Gardner, oral historian, spoke at Hill Memorial Library on November 30. Discussing the two strands of oral history — the folklore documentary strand, which regards oral histories as “performances”; and the academic approach, which seeks to document historical facts through personal experiences of those who are interviewed – Gardner pointed out that Louisiana had an important role in the early development of both. John and Alan Lomax pioneered the use of oral history to document the lives and performances of Louisiana musicians such as Leadbelly and Jelly Roll Morton. LSU professor T. Harry Williams used oral history in his Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography of Huey Long, thus legitimizing the use of the technique for academic historians. Gardner noted that the Williams Center has been extremely successful, compiling a remarkable 3,000 hours of oral histories in just 15 years.

After the talk guests toured the exhibition “Have You Heard? The Past in First Person from the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History.”

In conjunction with the opening of the LSU Libraries’ Special Collections exhibition, “Have You Heard? The Past in First Person from the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History,”oral historian Joel Gardner will speak on Friday, Nov. 30, at 6 p.m. in Hill Memorial Library’s lecture hall. A reception will follow the talk. The exhibition and talk are free and open to the public.

Gardner has directed several oral history projects and programs in Louisiana, served as copy editor of Louisiana Folklife A Guide to the State, and was actively involved in the founding of the Williams Center. He is the author of Oral History for Louisiana (1981), Looking Back: A Guide to Genealogical Research in Louisiana (1983), and Built in Louisiana: A Social History of Louisiana Carpenters (1985). He has interviewed dozens of people in all walks of life on topics ranging from television production to sports to publishing. In 1987, he founded Gardner Associates to conduct oral history research for corporations and institutions in the Delaware Valley.

An outspoken advocate of oral history, Gardner will speak on its importance as a tool to preserve and document culture and history, especially in Louisiana, with its strong tradition of story telling and folklore. He will discuss the work of pioneering oral historians, such as John and Alan Lomax (interviewer of legendary folk musicians, including Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, and Jelly Roll Morton), as well as T. Harry Williams, who used oral history in his Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Huey Long.

The exhibition “Have You Heard” showcases a diverse selection of oral history interviews collected by the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, covering topics such as LSU history, World War II, the Houma Indians, Hurricanes Betsy and Katrina, the Flood of 1927, folklife in the Atchafalaya and Louisiana politics.

LSU Libraries’ Special Collections will open a new exhibition, titled “Have You Heard? The Past in First Person from the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History,” which will be on display from Nov. 12 through March 8 at Hill Memorial Library on LSU’s campus.

In addition, oral historian Joel Gardner will lecture about the exhibition on Friday, Nov. 30, at 6 p.m. at Hill Memorial Library’s lecture hall. A reception will follow the talk. The exhibition and talk are free and open to the public.

“Have You Heard” showcases a diverse selection of oral history interviews covering topics such as LSU history, World War II, the Houma Indians, Hurricanes Betsy and Katrina, the Flood of 1927, folklife in the Atchafalaya and Louisiana politics.

Visitors will learn about student Grover Rees’ two-day journey on four trains and a ferry to get from Breaux Bridge to LSU in 1908; Huey P. Long’s attempt to convince LSU football star Abe Mickal to run for the Louisiana Senate; World War II nurse Ida Turcan’s experience in North Africa and in Europe during the Battle of the Bulge, where she experienced living with a daily allotment of one helmet full of water to take care of hygienic and personal laundry needs; and veteran Millard Brewer’s participation in the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp.

Coupled with related images, manuscript collections, and published materials from Special Collections, the words and voices of the interviewees bring history to life. Listening stations will showcase audio interviews about the Civil Rights movement in Baton Rouge, Vietnamese refugees relocating in Louisiana, the history of women’s education at LSU and more. Visitors can listen to various showcased excerpts through portable listening devices, which will be loaned to visitors by request.

The library is open 9 a.m. – 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, and 9 a.m. – 1 p.m. on Saturdays. When classes are in session, the library is also open Tuesday evenings until 8 p.m. More information is available at www.lib.lsu.edu/special or by calling 225-578-6544.

For the related lecture, Gardner will speak on oral history in Louisiana, the founding of the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, and the importance of documenting Louisiana culture and history. Gardner has directed several oral history projects and programs in Louisiana, served as copy editor of “Louisiana Folklife A Guide to the State,” and was actively involved in the founding of the Williams Center. Gardner is the author of Oral History for Louisiana (1981), Looking Back: A Guide to Genealogical Research in Louisiana (1983), and Built in Louisiana: A Social History of Louisiana Carpenters (1985). He has interviewed dozens of people in all walks of life on topics ranging from television production to sports to publishing. In 1987, he founded Gardner Associates to conduct oral history research for corporations and institutions in the Delaware Valley.

The T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, or THWCOH, collects and preserves, through the use of recorded interviews, unique and valuable information about Louisiana history and culture.

Image: from Mississippi River Flood of 1927 Album, Photograph by Jasper Ewing

Contact

Leah W. Jewett

LSU Libraries

225-578-6558

lwood@lsu.edu

This Saturday, November 3, is the annual Louisiana Book Festival at the State Capitol and surrounding areas. Several of this year’s authors researched their works here at Hill Memorial Library. Among them are the following:

Irene S. Di Maio, professor of German at Louisiana State University. She will be speaking on her book Gerstäcker’s Louisiana: Fiction and Travel Sketches from Antebellum Times through Reconstruction from 10:00 to 10:45 AM in the John J. Hainkel, Jr. Room with a book signing to follow.

Gary D. Joiner, assistant professor of history at Louisiana State University in Shreveport and the director of the Red River Regional Studies Center at LSUS. He will be speaking on his book Little to Eat and Thin Mud to Drink: Letters, Diaries, and Memoirs from the Red River Campaigns, 1863–1864 from 2:15 to 3:00 PM in Senate Committee Room F with a book signing to follow.

Mary Ann Sternberg, Baton Rouge resident and nonfiction writer. She will be speaking on her book Winding Through Time: The Forgotten History and Present-Day Peril of Bayou Manchac from noon to 12:45 PM in House Committee Room 6 with a book signing to follow. Ms. Sternberg will also participate in the panel discussion Forgotten bu not Forsaken from 3:00 to 4:00 PM in Senate Committee Room A.

Carolyn E. Ware, assistant professor of folklore and English at Louisiana State University. She will be speaking on her book Cajun Women and Mardi Gras: Reading the Rules Backward from 3:00 to 3:45 PM in the John J. Hainkel Jr. Room with a book signing to follow.

In between meeting with the authors make sure you stop and visit LSU Libraries in Booth #1! Special Collections will be giving away bookmarks and postcards and there will be a raffle with such prizes as a stuffed tiger, an LSU Press book and a framed Andrew D. Lytle Photo (pictured below).

The Louisiana Book Festival runs from 10 AM to 5PM on November 3, 2007 at the State Capitol and surrounding areas in Baton Rouge, LA. We look forward to seeing you there.

Our thanks go out to the authors listed above for their permission to feature them on our blog.

A mini-exhibition featuring Sturm’s recent work is on display in the lecture hall through October 20.

The talk, titled “James Sturm’s America: Cartooning on the Frontier,” was sponsored by the LSU Libraries, Department of English, the School of Art, and the College of Arts and Sciences. Special Collections would like to thank Professor Brannon Costello, Department of English, for arranging the lecture.

The Bowlus Collection includes more than 7,000 comic books and related materials, many from the silver age of comic books published during the late 1950s through the 1960s. Bowlus, an LSU alumnus, began collecting comics in grade school and continued until his untimely death in his late 20s, due to Marfan syndrome. The collection was donated to the LSU Libraries by his mother, Martha Bowlus, to honor his memory and preserve a collection he loved. The Bowlus Collection offers a wealth of graphic art and storytelling from a formative period in American cultural history.

The exhibit demonstrates that comic books are a rich popular culture resource. As with all forms of literary and artistic expression, comic books both reflect and influence to a degree the culture out of which they are created. Comics tackle contemporary issues and classic tales, and storylines are fleshed out in a universe with plots and characters ranging from the stereotypical to the fantastic.

Many of the materials that will be on display reflect comics produced from 1960 to 1985, with an emphasis on superhero titles. Loaned materials published in more recent years also supplement the collection. Topics of analysis include censorship, democracy and patriotism, race, gender and alternative and web comics. The exhibition will also include an industry history, with a focus on Marvel Comics, EC Comics and DC Comics.