Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2005 - 69

the end, and by 1986 the vicissitudes of fortune found Doug happily settled at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UM-KC) where he doubled as a professor for the theatre department and as
technical director for Missouri Repertory Theatre. Fortuitously, Doug's job circumstances at UM-KC
were beginning to evolve, and the Institute's needs had found an interested party at a propitious
moment in time.
I conducted the interview that follows in early August 2000, shortly before Doug's retirement
from UM-KC. I had gone up to Kansas City to spend a final eight days researching in the archive that
Doug had so diligently collected before it was to be packed up and shipped to the USITT offices in
Syracuse, New York. It was a nostalgic time for us both. Doug was thinking about his approaching
retirement and reflecting on the significant events in his fruitful career. For my part, I had driven to Kansas City via Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in doing so had taken the opportunity to retrace the route that I had
driven twenty years earlier in order to attend my first USITT conference in 1980. As we sat down to talk,
with the abundant artifacts of the USITT archive around us, the sense of Institute history and how it
had flavored our lives was pervasive. But this is Doug's story; let's listen as he tells his tale...
Interviewer: What started you thinking about a USITT archive?
Doug Taylor: What started me thinking about the archives was when my job at UM-KC got split
three ways, and it became clear that I was no longer going to be the technical director for
the Rep. I thought...
Interviewer: Around 1986?
DT: Yes, that period of time. I thought that I needed an academic project-something more professorial. After all, I was a full professor. I always had an interest in the history of technology
and the Institute. This was a period when the New York office was very small and cramped.
They were throwing stuff out, because they had no place to keep it or idea what to do with it.
So when I heard about David Hale Hand's plan, I wrote a proposal back to him saying that I
would be willing to become the archivist for the Institute. This proposal included the paper
archive, a second section to create a library of theatre technology, and a third part that
would eventually become a museum of theatre technology. Unfortunately, the Institute subsequently decided to forego the last two parts. Anyway, Dave bought the original proposal, and
I was given some money to attend a two-week archives conference here in Kansas City during
my vacation. There I learned the rudiments of how to be an archivist. One of the important
things, incidentally, is how to throw stuff out. You sort through...invoices, for instance, have
very little long-term value. Membership receipts to a large extent have very little value. That
sort of thing. So as stuff would come in, I would work through it and generally reduce it
down to the essence of what was important for the history. That is what has survived until
today. There were many, many boxes. There were times when my smaller office was literally
four feet deep in records.
Interviewer: But what gave you the idea? What was the impetus-not just the academic pressure?
DT: At this point in time, I saw a need that I didn't think the Institute was addressing. I thought I
had the skills and interest to handle it.
Interviewer: The Institute was about 25 years old. We had moved from a couple different locations. Had you visited the New York offices?
DT: No, not at that time. But I did subsequently. In the interim I put out feelers and what have you.
We solicited our own membership far and wide. We investigated file drawers in the attic of
the old ANTA Theater [now the Virginia Theatre, ed.] in New York City where the Institute
had its first office. But the contents proved to hold only WPA records. Even with all of our
efforts and the contributions of our members, there are some significant holes in the collections. My intention was that everyone would send me stuff. And many people did. All was
carefully sorted and organized into boxes or drawers. One of the interesting things we had
were the files of the conference chairs from various conferences, which revealed a lot about
how conferences happened in the days before there was a National Conference Committee.
Ultimately I had a problem with getting everything organized to the degree that I would
have liked. This had to do mostly with all the ongoing changes with my job at UM-KC. The
number of courses per semester increased substantially. The opera program, for which I
served as TD, became much more elaborate. And, as a result, my time to work on the
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2005