Interview with John Larson for the Oriental Institute Oral History Project

[0:04] Okay. Welcome to the inaugural interview of the Oriental Institute Oral History Project. Today is Tuesday, December 20th, 2016 and we are in Saieh Hall at the University of Chicago. I'm Anne Flannery, the incoming Museum Archivist at the Oriental Institute and I'm here with my co-host Foy Scalf, the Head of Research Archives at the Oriental Institute. And we are here with our first guest John Larson, the Head Archivist of the Oriental Institute since December 1980, for the past 36 years and we are lucky to be interviewing John before he retires on December 30th. John is published widely in both Egyptology and archival studies and for almost four decades he has been essential to the Institute and holds a vast amount of institutional knowledge, some of which we hope to access today so thank you for being here John and welcome. Thank you. Could you discuss some of your background, just your origin where you grew up. Well, I was born in Birmingham, Alabama. My mother was from

[1:08] there my father went to visit his parents who had transferred to Birmingham during the war. During World War two my grandfather worked for DuPont and he was an accountant there. My father was in the Philippines during the Second World War and but only in the last year of the war during the the the rescue of the Philippines and he went to work for Price Waterhouse in San Francisco for about a year and then he came to visit his parents in Birmingham and he went to work for Frigidaire Corporation which was a branch of General Motors at that time and he met my mother who was working

[2:11] at that time for Frigidaire as well and they got married eventually and along came me and and my sister and then my brother we moved to a suburb of Atlanta in Georgia in 1956 and I went to first grade there in Decatur and then the next year we were were transferred again and we moved to New Orleans where we lived for eight years and for two years in Memphis and then we moved to Portland, Oregon which was quite a change for me and I only had one year of high school in Beaverton which was a suburb of Portland. Then after my senior year of high school I decided I wanted to be close to where my parents lived I had

[3:16] been accepted at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California and decided not to go there. I went to Willamette University in Salem Oregon which is in the Willamette Valley of Oregon and because I had been to three different high schools in in my young life I talked to my parents about the possibility of staying all four years at one school and they agreed and so I was at Willamette until I graduated in 1972 my degree was a Bachelor of Arts in modern history primarily French and British my minors were in art history which is which is really the the pathway to the Oriental Institute for me and also in

[4:19] in music there was a college of music at Willamette in those days and I had a heavy concentration in in choral music yeah we were discussing before how Egyptologists often have sort of an origin story of how they come to the field we were wondering if if you have one of those as well well I I do but I didn't realize that I did until shortly after my mother died which was in 1993 and we were clearing out her house and as is often the case with with children of parents there was a lot of my stuff in the house as well as my brothers and sisters and I found a box of books that that had been squirreled away in the basement for probably 20 years and one

[5:20] of the titles was a was a book that I had been given as a Christmas present by my grandparents from the Random House Series all about and there were all about science all about archaeology and the book on archaeology was by Ann Terry White it came out in 1959 so that kind of dates around the time that the gift was given to me by my grandparents and in the the book on archaeology there was a chapter on Howard Carter and the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, King Tut and I really kind of think that that was the the origin story for me. At Willamette I my freshman year of college I went to register for a course in art history and all the the lower

[6:27] division is that for freshmen and sophomores were were filled up and only an upper division course in ancient art history was available and the the professor who was responsible at a small school for doing his own registration in those days questioned me closely about my background and whether I had any experience and I'm told him well at at Beaverton I had had a class in humanities which I thought was very good and I hoped that he would take me in the in the ancient art history class. Well he did. Professor Cameron Paulin was a character. He was a he was a curmudgeon he was about 60 years old at that time and he taught by the Socratic method which involved asking questions of the the students in the class in order to

[7:34] see how much the students knew and I did very well in that course and I took a couple of other classes with him in in later years but when I got ready to go to graduate school I thought gee I I think I would like to go into Egyptology so he wrote what I believed to be the letter of recommendation that got me that got me in many years later. I discovered that he graduated with a with a PhD in Far Eastern Art History from the University of Chicago and that he attended the same convocation the same grant graduates ceremony that Helene Cantor had appeared in and because they were the only two students in the

[8:36] department who got degrees that year, I feel strongly that they were probably sitting next to one another. Professor Cantor was was the the great art history professor of my generation of students and both she and Cameron Paulin were intern students of Henry Frankfurt who taught here at the University from the middle years of World War II up until about nineteen forty-eight forty-nine when he went to the Warburg Institute at the University of London to be their director. So in a way through two rounds I'm a student the the other story that's that's strange but true is that the view from

[9:38] my college dormitory, Belknap Hall, was of the what would have been the dome of the Oregon State Capitol Building in Salem. The the Capitol Building sat on property which had been ceded to the state by the by the Lamet University and instead of a dome on the Capitol Building the Capitol has a huge drum that goes up look at like to support a dome but on top of it is a statue of the Oregon Pioneer. That statue of the Oregon Pioneer is an enormous thing which is gilded and you can't miss it for for blocks around. It was sculpted by the American sculptor Ulric Ellerhusen who also did the

[10:39] tympanum of the Oriental Institute Building outside our front entrance. So in a bizarre kind of way I've got those two connection is that that go back to my college years. Did Professor Paulin encourage you to go to graduate school or how did you come up that idea? Um, It was an idea I had on my own and I asked him if he would write my letter of recommendation and he agreed I also had you know my senior advisor write a letter of recommendation but I I really feel because of his university connections and that he went back to the Oriental Institute in the days around World War II and shortly after that the building housed both Near Eastern and for what became Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations. So it was it was kind of interesting. Was Chicago the the only

[11:44] game in town at that point or did you look at other places or did you even consider other fields? I I didn't, um, strangely enough and why I thought I would get into the University of Chicago is beyond me. I have no idea why, you know, what I was accepted or or with the other people who were here, but I got in. But it must have been very strong academically, right? I mean you were coming out of being number one in your class in high school even with all the moving, which is pretty impressive. So you must have had a fairly strong academic background coming out of your undergrad, I I assume. I did and then it was it was kind of buried I in in a way I afforded my my senior advisors in the history department because by the time I had finished my sophomore year, I fulfilled the

[12:48] graduation requirements for the history department and so I spent the last two years doing choral music and music history and music theory and art history and the things that I wanted to do rather than the the things that I was required to do and I guess it was the kind of broad general background the that attracted the the faculty members here to me as a student so. Sure, and What's it, when you got here, what was it like in those times?

[13:28] Were you really looking forward to working with anybody in particular or did you sort of get signed an adviser? What was the other students like? I didn't know anything about the faculty here at that time. The first time I stepped foot in the Oriental Institute was the summer before September October. When I started in 1972 so sometime in August, I turned up on a Sunday from from Arlington Heights to to have a look around to see where I was going to go to school and it was probably the hottest day of the year and there was no air conditioning in the Oriental Institute at that time, so it was you know just dripping with perspiration and I went through the galleries and they were the the the galleries that had been installed to a degree by James Henry

[14:29] Breasted himself with some additions and some changes by Pierre de Lucas and Helene Cantor as faculty curators and the what is now the Mesopotamian Hall was the Egyptian Gallery and the Tut statue was in was in that gallery along with the Lamassu the the the Khorsabad Winged Bull Man who was put into the end of the gallery simply because they knew when the building was under construction that he was going to come to Chicago and they had to leave room and it was the only space available so they they put in a temporary wall and then he was let in after having rested in his crate under the band stands at Stagg Field for which

[15:35] is which is now the location of Regenstein Library. So when you came in obviously, well, pretty overwhelming but you sort of had your generation sort of had a direct connection to some of the very early days of Oriental Institute, right? We sort of had maybe one or two generations in between... I mean Nims was still around, Hughes. My principle educators at the Oriental Institute were Klaus Baer and Ed Wente and as she was coming up and finishing her degree, I was in the first class that Janet Johnson who taught in probably 1973 I would guess, which was demotic. And by-and-by there was some some readjusting of

[16:37] faculty members and Wente was out of Chicago House for a while and George Hughes stepped in from his retirement and and I had one year of Coptic from him, from George. George was a wonderful storyteller and all we had to do was to get him off line telling stories and the class would be over. We didn't learn a lot of Coptic I fear. Well we learned a lot about the history of the Oriental Institute; about the history of Egyptology and George was a dear man. He was it was it was very kind and very nice and Charlie Nims, who was finishing up as Field Director of the Epigraphic Survey at Chicago House in Luxor, Egypt was

[17:37] added to the mix about 1974 and we sensed as graduate students that he was sort of between things and and didn't know what to do with himself, so we got together and persuaded him to teach a graduate level course in the history of the Theban area, which he had done an article on places of around thieves places about thieves and so we got to know him and and we we were benefiting from his stories. I I wish to this day that somehow or other we'd had an oral history project like this one that we could have interviewed George and Charlie. I mean they started in in graduate school at the Oriental Institute about 1933-34 and Breasted was still alive and active

[18:47] in those days he died in nineteen, in the December of 1935. So they may have gotten to know him. I'm really not sure when I came to the Oriental Institute as a graduate student there were the two classrooms that were outside the the office space areas of the Oriental Institute. Um, they 2 210 and 212.. no 208 and 210, um, and then there was the library which had gone to Regenstein. It sure seventy-two it hadn't reopened yet. And beyond that I don't know if there's traces of it still but the double doors that separate the the offices on the second floor from the classroom space and the library had portieres hung over

[19:51] them there there there used to be hooks that you could see there were the remnants of the portieres and the the reason I bring this up is that that beyond the classroom space was sanctuarythey were the offices of the faculty members and then at the far end of the hall beyond beyond a right turn was the Director's study and the legend in those days that was that that Breasted office was bigger than the office of the president of the University and that he was terribly jealous that that Preston had a bigger office and a bigger desk and and so on and so I get the sense that there was a discreet separation between the faculty and the student body. The faculty only came out of their

[20:53] offices to use the library and and it was a couple of years before we had really a working library. The the history of that is is as follows. The departmental libraries of the University of Chicago were outgrowing their spaces all over campus and so it was decided to build Joseph Regenstein Library in order to accommodate the the collections as they were and the growth of the collections and almost every library, including ours, the Oriental Institute Library, had off-site storage and in in order to get certain books into the library they had to send someone from the library staff to the off-site stores to retrieve the book and bring it back. I mean it was like paging a book at Regenstein, except that it was off-site and and I don't know where her off-site

[21:57] storage was but it was it was a serious situation and especially in the winter-time faculty members got really tired of going two blocks in the trudging through the snow to check a footnote or you know to to just do minimal routine sorts of things. Not to check out a book but to just simply look up something that they that they were puzzled about and then, you know, return to their their work and it would take an hour out of their time to go to Regenstein well by 1974 the Oriental Institute had inherited several libraries: William Edgerton's library, Keith Seeley's library and the core of the Reconstituted Director's library or Research Archives as it came to be known were Egyptology because of the Egyptologists who had given their

[23:03] libraries to the Institute and that was how the library came to be and most of our interaction with faculty members outside the classroom was was in the library. Certainly, could you just described a little bit of how you went from graduate student into your position as archivist and the circumstances surrounding that? Well I worked part-time for Chuck Van Sicklen who was the first new librarian in the Oriental Institute and I believe Dick Settler was was the other graduate student who was working in the library. So a lot of the early pamphlets and things like that are labeled in our hand writings. And then I finished my coursework after four years, so in 1976, and it it

[24:09] came time for me to pay back my graduate school tuition loans, which were enormous and not as big as they are now but but substantial. And so I got a job first of all working in the Cashier's Office at the University Hospital in Billings Hospital as it was in those days and and then after about a year of working part-time in the Cashier's Office I went full-time and was offered a job in the Oral Surgery Department as a clinic coordinator which was essentially the person who makes appointments and calls up medical records for appointments and things like that and I worked from 1977 until 1980 in the university hospital

[25:18] system paying off my loans. Then in 1980 the the first ever Oriental Institute archivist, Ronnie Burbank, got a small federal grant from the National Science Foundation for the archives to to do some some routine things with with copying film that had gone bad and so I applied for that job in in the sense of getting me back into the Oriental Institute and unbeknownst to me Ronnie was pregnant at the time and she gets she had her baby in December and took her medical leave. Well I was hired first as acting archivist and then then

[26:20] as regular archivists so my time as archivist goes back to December of 1980 and Ronnie's husband was Canadian and when he finished his degree I think in the Math Department they went back to Toronto and she's been working at the Royal Ontario Museum ever since so that's that's how I came how I came to be archivist. For six months I was acting archivist and then then I was appointed regular full-time. In picturing the past you sort of you wrote about the the history of the archive. I was wondering if you could give us a sense of what kind of archive you walked into going back as far as you can about your understanding of of the Oriental Institute Archive and how it evolved.

[27:19] Well, first and foremost in those days the the principal purpose of the archivist was to provide access to outside scholars and to people working in the Oriental Institute to the archive archival records and principally to the photographic records and when when Ronnie took her maternity leave there were 300 outstanding requests for photographic materials and permissions, which had not even been looked at. So the first thing I had to do was straighten out that mess and you know as sometimes happens you know when when you get back on track it's too late for the for the book to appear and and so some of the some of the requests were just simply you know when I responded to

[28:24] it it was too late, but many of them that were still time so so we we got back on track and in those days we were working with film and darkroom and developer and and all of that sort of business. So, I worked very closely with our photographer, Jane Grant on fulfilling the the requests for photography and on my own I did permissions and things like that. The archives at that point were in various places throughout the building. The negative collection was stored in my office, which is now occupied by Museum Education and I had the annex to that office which is their meeting room and

[29:26] the docent library where lantern slides were stored and a few other things. The photographic collections were stored there. And sometimes I had access to the office adjacent, which is now Nadine Moeller's office because it had a door that that gave into to my office and I had four desks set up in my office and I early on started taking on volunteers to assist me and there were times when I had as many as four volunteers and I stood up so to speak. Then there were certain things that were stored in the basement level.

[30:15] There were a good deal of material stored on the balcony overlooking the reading room of the Research Archives because that space had not yet been turned over to the library for its purposes. It was a few years later that that I gave up that space and had to look for other things the Director's Office Correspondence which is now one of the the principal research things in the Oriental Institute Archives were were stored in in cardboard boxes that were stacked about six deep in a closet at the top of the third floor stairs and the the weight of the upper boxes was crushing the lower boxes so I had to do something about that and I initially got file cabinets and then later we got

[31:19] another system. And then gradually over time I took on the collected papers of Edgerton,which were stored actually in your office, Foy, and a little bit of Keith Seeley and Harold Nelson's papers and Breasted's papers were still in the library underneath the stairs that go up to the balcony. So so gradually I took I took those over and took those those in and as it happens the early collected papers were principally Egyptologists and because my professional training was in Egyptology, I I was kind of a natural in those days.

[32:16] In the years since I suppose the I'm one of the few Egyptologists that has had as much exposure as I've had to Mesopotamian studies and Ac. Eminent Persian and so on. And so I I do have now a background which I've learned from doing in the archives all the other countries that the Oriental Institute specializes in with the exception of Afghanistan, which is a rather late addition to the gang. Ya, recent. So the archive has grown significantly over the last 36 years. It has and we've we've taken in you know large portions of things. Most recently the card catalog of the CAD, the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary and that takes up five times nine times four [5 x 9 x 4]

[33:27] shelves in the in the archive storage room. Now originally, the archive storage room was on the table as a dream or a hope when the new building was was added to the Oriental Institute around 1995. So it's almost twenty years old. And the space was designed with with no windows, so that we wouldn't have any leaky windows. It was on the second floor so that it wouldn't be under the roof to have roof leak problems. The the only thing is that there is a water sprinkler system when and if it ever comes on we're in deep trouble.

[34:21] But the height of the ceiling in that space was geared to be even with the with the ceiling of the museum galleries, which is about 16, 18 feet and it wasn't very long after we moved in there, probably by about 2000, that we began to outgrow that archive space and I shared the first floor of the new wing with Organic Object Storage so it it has about one third of the space and the archives has about two thirds of the space. We got a a University of Chicago grant to install compact storage system in there and so we got as much space as we could from the storage we we thought at one time that we would hang a

[35:25] mezzanine in that space and that the mezzanine would be all archives and would go across Organic Object Storage space I now think that that probably won't happen, but it's anybody's guess what will happen in the future. The problem with hanging a mezzanine is that we would have to have two sets of lights and two sets of sprinkler system and it it just doesn't seem feasible. The current configuration of the compact storage is that we added an additional cap onto the the the usual height of the shelves. That's about three feet additional and so that would have to be removed in order to put a mezzanine in there as well and we would have to have off-site storage because we fill the

[36:31] every space that we have in the building with objects and with with archives so it could happen. It we might have an another new wing built, but it would it would have to be an addition I think rather than than the mezzanine as once as one solution. So as a space changed I imagine your job changed as well so you said it was photographic-based and then with all of these new collections coming in. Well, gradually over time the the museum secretary's role came to be partly my assistant and the museum secretary would do the paperwork that I would sign for permissions to photo to to use photographs and publications and that that sort of thing and gradually that has shifted to a photo archives

[37:37] assistant who does all the paperwork who who does the the initial research through the collections through the IDB, the Integrated Database, so that before I really am involved in the process a lot of the work has already been done and I'm only the the backup who provides images or scans for things that have not been scanned before and I spend a great deal more of my time assisting visiting scholars with their research and handling research requests that come via the internet and that sort of thing. But in your scholarly work has also though influenced projects that you took on the archives: transcription projects, James Henry Breasted. We've done a large number of things through volunteers who

[38:38] have who have transcribed batches of papers in the archives who have proof read and beyond the the transcription phase of preparing something for publication. You've got the handwritten letter. You've got the transcription, entering the data into a word processing program but then you've got the proofreading and the proofreading is essential because you know nobody's perfect and nobody nobody does an ideal version of the the transcription and you learn a lot along the way you learn a lot about things that should be footnoted and expanded upon and that sort of thing so I leave a legacy through my volunteers of a large number of manuscripts that can be finalized for publication we did one digital publication through the Oriental

[39:45] Institute Publications Office on the the Breasted letters home to his family written in 1919 and 1920 on the the inaugural trip that that established the Oriental Institute in the Middle East but there there's a great deal more than the Breasted Honeymoon letters there there there's the the Breasted 1905 to 1907 trip up the Nile, which could be Illustrated from negatives that are in the collection there there's a lot of stuff there's the the Megiddo Field Diaries of Gordon Loud from 1935 to 1939 which which contain some you know routine, day-to-day things like it rained for two weeks solid we couldn't do any work or you know the piano needs tuning or something like that, to

[40:48] honest-to-goodness archaeology records that more and more people are going back to and using for for analyses of the excavations at Megiddo. So there's there's that and there there are several other batches of things. Khorsabad for example, is another one where we've scanned all the field negatives of Khorsabad but now we need to to sort of put them together with the textual record to see what we we might have and because the Oriental Institute in its final publications of earlier projects like Khorsabad, for example. It produced two volumes in the Oriental Institute Publications Series but there's there's a lot more that can be brought to bear, like Gordon Loud's Diaries like letters from the field directors to the Director of the

[41:52] Oriental Institute and that sort of thing. Some of which contain a great deal of archaeology archaeological interest. So they they really need to be massaged into into a form that can be that can be accessed more readily. Just since you bring it up I'm just very curious about the publication series. I mean you've obviously put a lot of stuff out on the internet and you've put a lot of stuff out in print but this OIDA series, the Oriental institute Digital Archives, and we have a lot of stuff I want to talk about in the short amount of time but um, how much was that conceived from the beginning? What was just sort of your idea behind that sort of going forward into the future? What did you really want to do with that was it going to be sort of primarily Breasted letters or did you want do a lot of these other things that you're talking about. Um, a little of both really I because I tried to tailor projects to the skills of my volunteers who were mostly mature adult ladies who

[42:59] had retired from from whatever jobs they had had before. So they were you know 65 to 70 when they started to working for me I tried to try to to tailor these projects to their interests and to their skills if if one lady was interested in in Megiddo then I you know ran with Megiddo. If another was interested in Khorsabad we went with Khorsabad. So that's that's how that happened. The Breasted papers as a whole are integral to the origins of the Oriental Institute and it's early decades so that material also is very interesting to us and you know insofar as we could get that going it would be pretty interesting to get that in in line to what's what's also interesting to me is the difference

[44:02] between.. Well these are issues that that you two are wrestling with now. Born-digital is is something that we live with as American and an internet international world society and we are going to have to constantly upgrade the programming and the applications and the storage systems and so on in order to have the archives of the future the archives of the past is essentially a paper record and that paper record will will last as long as the paper lasts and we we've done what we can to see to it that that paper is in climate controlled conditions and and stored properly and so on. But the the digital age and translating that into the future is going to be an

[45:08] interesting problem. I mean for example Gil Stein has been director almost as long as Breasted served and most of his Director's Office Correspondence consists of email and so that belongs to the Oriental Institute. It belongs to the archives, but it's still in his hands and it's still it's still presumably in a form that we can we can access it and do research but we need to make sure that it stays that way and all of the other faculty members, their projects and their their research, and their their files, and their manuscripts and so on.. they're largely all verging into a digital age and they need to be maintained and and

[46:11] serviced so to speak. So your role will be transitional because you will still be working with with research involving the early years of the Oriental Institute but more and more you will undoubtedly be shifting into into the the realities of the digital age. You're talking about the future of the archives, what needs to be done one thing that we're all facing librarians, archivists, scholars, humanities, people in general is a lot of challenges that's on the horizon for us. Funding, space, popular popular opinion etc. So we were just kind of wondering with your experience what do you think are maybe some of the most important actions that the current generation of librarians, archivists, scholars, faculty, students that they can take to ensure that our fields have a bright future and stay relevant. Well I think laying the

[47:13] groundwork for the transfer of digital files to the to the archives and by archives at that level. I mean the servers that are located either in our building or outside of our building and we really need to have off-site storage as well as as in-house storage for that sort of thing. We need to have ready access to to materials that are that are born digital, but we also need to have a safe place where the the servers are located that you know will be safe for the for the conceivable future. Now I don't know in terms of time what the future will be. I mean when we started the discussions with the people and the

[48:16] Special Collections Department at Regenstein about archiving things for the future they they were they were telling me things like, oh well the future is five years or perpetuity is ten years or fifteen or twenty. Well that's not good enough. What's what's good enough is you know is forever or until such time as we're no longer here, under what circumstances we could never know, but we need to to lay the groundwork to lay the the the parameters and the the policies and the procedures for allowing faculty members and staff members to archive their material in such a way is that it will continue to be actively upgraded in terms of hardware

[49:22] and software from time to time and you know in a way the the development of digitalization and it acts against us because there's there's there's a new version of Microsoft Word that comes out every three years. There's a new version of this that comes out every five years. There's a new version of that that comes out every ten years and on the one hand that's good because it's good for the economy. It's good for all kinds of things and it's also good because it it reduces the amount of storage space necessary and and expands what you can do but it makes it harder to for any one person to to maintain a control over the

[50:24] the umbrella that that is coming along. I mean you almost have to have a retention schedule that enables you to say oh they're about to come out with a new version of this and the following things will be obsolete what can we do now to to upgrade the situation so that we don't lose fonts. So that we said we that we we don't have fonts go wonky on us in in various ways. We need to get everything converted to a standard that will be recognized by the world of digitalization the other thing is that that we need to to press our elected officials and the people who make the decisions at the

[51:27] departmental level and at the university level to fund all of these upgrades and necessary adjustments along the way. It's not free. It comes with a price and it may be easy right now to say oh well we need such-and-such to soar the papers of James Henry Breasted and to scan the negatives of Breasted and his his followers, but we also need to to be funding the the gradual development of whatever happens in the digital world and we need to make sure that our federal funding agencies and our state funding agencies and the the University of Chicago and the Oriental Institute recognize that need to fund the the future of the archives or there won't be a future. Yep yep. Well John, thank you so

[52:34] much for taking this time and we'll definitely have to do it again. There's so much more to tap into and to talk about. o really thanks a lot we appreciate it.