This evening was my last late night on campus this semester. Students were producing a comedy show. The main character had a psychotic break of some sort. There was hypnosis, which didn’t work, and so they proceeded directly to lobotomy.
This is how the universe provides inspiration. The lobotomy bit was a simple go-home gag. Someone had a first aid kit, and produced some gauze.
I was sitting in another part of the studio typing away on this or that and I heard someone say “If only we had some blood, or a blood-like substance.”
Well. Earlier that same day, there had been an end-of-the-semester party in the commons. Wings for sports bros. Someone did a halfhearted job cleaning up afterward and there was a table loaded down with those ketchup packets. Someone went to grab a few of those, and suddenly there were special effects and makeup.
I hope someone added that to their LinkedIn.
Earlier this week I went into what I think is the one public space of our building I’ve never visited. I had a chance encounter with a delivery man. He had a shipment of paper. On the paperwork was a name no one recognized. Someone assumed this mysterious man might somehow work with the Board of Trustees. On the top floor of our building the Board of Trustees have a small set of offices. So I went up there to ask if anyone there knew the name.
They did not know the name. But they did have a few nice photos of the building. This is the laying of the cornerstone of Franklin Hall, originally the campus library, circa 1906.
The university’s archives say John William Cravens is at center wearing a bow tie and skimmer. Cravens founded a newspaper at 20 years old. He moved to Bloomington at 21, became a school superintendent, clerk of the circuit court, founded and ran for 13 years, a local paper, The Bloomington World, which is the ancestor of the current struggling rag. While he was doing some of these things he was also going to college, and was named university Registrar, as a student. (Different times, I tell ya.) He stayed on as Registrar for 41 years. In the background, hatless and wearing a white shirt is famed classical historian Harold Whetstone Johnston. Six years later, he killed himself on a train. William Lowe Bryan is standing at the right corner of the building wearing a skimmer.
Bryan is important. He finished his bachelor degree in 1884 and named an English instructor. A few months later, he joined the faculty of the Greek Department. The next year, he was named an associate professor. (Different times, I tell ya.) In the next few years, he became renowned for his work on the study of children, and was a charter member of the American Psychological Association. He became a VP of the university and then, in 1902, just 18 years after graduating, he was named president of IU. He was at the helm for 35 years, boom times, when he oversaw the beginning of the schools of medicine, education, nursing, business, music, and dentistry, many graduate programs and several satellite campuses, and, of course, this building, the library.
The Board’s office also has this print on the wall. This is just before the original construction was completed, so 1907. The archives hold this photo as a donation from the photograph albums of Floy Underwood, which I believe is a woman named Flora Underwood. I can’t find out much more about her, though.
If you follow the building into the background you can see the area where my office would eventually appear. If you want to see more Franklin Hall, here are the archives, which features some of those early days, a mid-century renovation, the fire in the 1960s, a few postcards and background shots. And then, just at that moment in history when cameras became ubiquitous and digital photography got cheap … the collection ends in 2003. Nothing about this, the third version of Franklin Hall’s life, which is wild. If you want, then, to see the promotional video we produced at the beginning of this incarnation of the building, go here.
I’ll be back there tomorrow, the last day of classes of the spring term. I’ll have two different productions running in two different studios. One of them will wrap up a multi-year project. The other will wrap IUSTV’s production run for the year. Big Friday.
