LCV Spring 2013 - (Page 79)

conducted an oral history interview with another legendary basketball coach, Carrice Russell Baker, she noted the irony that girls who grew up so close to the land with physical chores to do hardly needed such “accommodation.” Tarbutton coached Baskin High School, amassing an amazing 218 straight wins and several state championships until losing to Baker’s Winnsboro team in 1953. Both coaches had enviable overall records when they retired. It’s no coincidence that Louisiana Tech in nearby Ruston is a national women’s basketball powerhouse. In that area, high school athletics is part of the culture. A vivid recollection by Rebecca Guice in the Franklin Sun in 1976 jumps from Tarbutton’s scrapbook, viewed online: “We were at Natchitoches for the state finals. Picture the scene, if you will; a crowded gymnasium filled with noisy obstreperous ballplayers from all over the state—a churning mass of loud, not too polite, school kids. Into this bedlam walked a team, single file, dressed exactly alike, moving with quiet dignity to their appointed seats; and the whispered words began to filter through the crowd: NORTHEAST LOUISIANA HISTORIC IMAGES COLLECTION, ULM one’s hand. For his book The Kings of Casino Park: Black Baseball in the Lost Season of 1932, for example, Thomas Aiello dug through the ULM’s special collections for material about the Monroe Monarchs and their appearance in the Negro League World Series. Those of us with a narrative to research often need the help of a skilled professional archivist to plumb the depths and come up with elements that make the story authentic, vivid and worth the time to read or watch. A regents grant has provided funding for some key ULM collections to be scanned disseminated online. The grant, awarded in 2008, allowed Robertson to buy scanning equipment that facilitated an educational outreach program with a web of parish librarians whom she helped train and now works with to collect samples of history throughout the surrounding parishes. The idea is to scan relevant manuscripts, scrapbooks, notebooks, records and images, capturing these ephemeral materials before they are lost, damaged or discarded, and the owners can hold on to the tangible keepsakes for themselves. Robertson approached the cataloging in accordance with the Louisiana Library Network database, dubbed LOUIS, shared by the system of forward-thinking Louisiana libraries. Scanning sessions were scheduled at libraries in several parishes: Ouachita, Tensas, Concordia, Jackson, Lincoln, Madison, East Carroll, West Carroll, Richland, Morehouse, Union, Caldwell and Franklin. Conceptually, this is the beginning of a shared virtual archive. Allowing the people to keep their source material if they prefer seems a responsible answer to limited resources meeting a profound need to collect history in an area where the tangible record is as folkloric as it is recorded. The approach begs the question of whether gleanings of history may be respected even when only virtual. That question is becoming more relevant as important documents are increasingly shared only electronically. What will that look like in the archives of the future? How are they collected now? As you write your own history, do you make printouts, CDs and DVDs of what you think is important to leave for posterity? Or will the record in 1,000 years be as obscure as those at Poverty Point? For Robertson, her shared online collections from ULM include the Griffin 1932 Flood Collection, the Northeast Louisiana Historic Images Collection and the Edna “Tiny” Tarbutton Collection, the reason I visited. Want to study trends in fashion, and especially hats, at the turn of the 20th Century? There is a vivid lineup of a Morehouse Parish family dressed for a special occasion. Or if you wanted to study the adaptability of folks in flood times, maybe even if you were looking for ideas and clues about the Poverty Point culture and how those early residents of the region might have coped with flooding, you’d check the photos of James Everett Griffin. There can be found the ad hoc bridges erected during the Ouachita River flood in Monroe in 1932 and the imperiled earthen levees bolstered by sandbagging. The 5-foot, 11-inch “Tiny” Tarbutton, meanwhile, is part of the women’s basketball story of winning streaks, team play and lifedefining values centered in northeast Louisiana. The legendary coach epitomized excellence in the era of six-on-six women’s basketball, when each team’s three guards and three forwards were restricted to separate ends of the court, rules aimed to accommodate the “delicate” female athlete. Years ago, when I Hatted in their Sunday best, the Austin Brown and Rachel Morgan Travis family received the photo award in a contest for the family with the most natural children at the Morehouse Parish Fair in 1911. ‘That’s Baskin! That’s Baskin!’ Unless you had been there you could not believe the quiet that descended upon the entire gymnasium as all eyes turned to follow those girls to their seats. “I wondered then and I wonder now just what it was that reached out and brought the gymnasium full of kids to silence. It was not just Baskin’s reputation as a powerful basketball team: other teams were there with reputations of their own. It was something else, I like to believe. Those Baskin girls exhibited a quality which marked many of our Franklin Parish girls’ teams during those great days of basketball. Call it class if you will. Whatever it was, to me they wore an unmistakable look of ‘champion’ that even the thoughtless kids in the gymnasium sensed and respected.” The ULM library is open Monday through Friday. Special Collections can be found at http://www.ulm.edu/library/archives/. _________________________________________________________________ Documentary film producer Kevin McCaffrey is a James Beard Award finalist, as well as a publisher, writer, editor, oral historian, reviewer and creative-industry consultant. His film No One Ever Went Hungry: Acadian Food Traditions Then and Now was awarded the honor of the 2012 Documentary Film of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Spring 2013 • LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 79  http://www.ulm.edu/library/archives/

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