Abstract
This interview was conducted as part of Cleveland State University's 50th Anniversary Commemoration effort. William Barrow is currently the Special Collections librarian at Cleveland State University. Barrow was born in University Circle and grew up in Cleveland's eastern suburb of Mentor. After high school he went on to attend Bowling Green State University where he was active in the school's chapter of Students For a Democratic Society. Barrow left BGSU before graduating to work construction and ended up becoming an animal warden, working in Bowling Green, Arizona, and Kentucky. He enrolled at CSU where he completed his degree and earned a MA in history. During the same time he pursued a MLS at Kent State and following the completion of that degree he was hired on as the Special Collections librarian at CSU. While at CSU Barrow has worked extensively with the Cleveland Union Terminal Collection, The Cleveland Press Collection, and has been instrumental in the awarding-winning Cleveland Memory Project. Of Particular interest in this interview are Barrow's accounts of his involvement in the SDS, his description of his coursework at CSU, and the process of making Cleveland Memory a viable online resource.
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Interviewee
Barrow, William (interviewee)
Interviewer
Wickens, Joseph (interviewer)
Project
CSU at 50
Date
10-22-2014
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
54 minutes
Recommended Citation
"William C. Barrow interview, 22 October 2014" (2014). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 500049.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/707
Transcript
Joe Wickens [00:00:01] My name is Joseph Wickens. I am here with the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University. I’m conducting this interview as part of Cleveland State’s 50th anniversary commemoration effort. You want to state your name and spell your last, please?
William Barrow [00:00:14] William Barrow. B-A-R-R-O-W.
Joe Wickens [00:00:18] And then today’s date is October 22, 2014. Alright, why don’t we start from the beginning? Where are you originally from? Where’d you grow up?
William Barrow [00:00:29] I am from Cleveland. I was born on University Circle as part of the first wave of the Baby Boom in 1946, and lived downtown and moved out to Mentor as a child and grew up in Lake County.
Joe Wickens [00:00:43] So what did you do? What were some of your interests then? I mean, obviously later on we can get into what you did.
William Barrow [00:00:50] Cops and robbers, football, playing, building model airplanes. So you don’t mean quite that early?
Joe Wickens [00:00:57] Oh, no, that’s fine.
William Barrow [00:00:59] Oh, I don’t know that I had any particular interest then. It was only when I went off to college at Bowling Green in the ’60s and got involved in things there, and then moved to Tucson and ran Humane Societies for a decade. And then in the ’80s, started selling real estate. And at that point I got interested in the history of land subdivision, how public lands became homesteaded and otherwise turned into private holdings, and then how those were subsequently subdivided into the ultimate use as often residential subdivisions. So that kind of got me back into the history interest that I had when I was at Bowling Green, but now, particular land subdivision surveying and patterns on the ground type of stuff.
Joe Wickens [00:01:48] You mentioned Bowling Green. What other schools were you considering when that time in your life came, late high school, when you started thinking about-
William Barrow [00:01:56] I wasn’t considering any other one. I had no clue. I mean, I just knew I was going to college someplace. The girl I was dating at the time was a couple months older than me, so therefore a year ahead of me. And she went to Bowling Green and majored in chemistry. So I thought, okay, I’ll go to Bowling Green and major in chemistry. So I did.
Joe Wickens [00:02:11] What did you major in then?
William Barrow [00:02:12] Well, chemistry at first and, you know, being in the ’60s, you know, kind of got gradually more interested in more current things. More, not more current things by any means, but more idealistic things, more activist things. But actually, that’s not reflected in my interest because my interest tended towards ancient history and anthropology. Again, trying to make sense out of society. You know, just part of the awakening that happens, hopefully, when you go to college and you realize life’s a little more complicated than you thought it was.
Joe Wickens [00:02:45] So did you end up immersing yourself in that contemporary sort of culture?
William Barrow [00:02:50] I was in SDS and all that kind of stuff, sure.
Joe Wickens [00:02:55] Well, tell me about that experience within the SDS at Bowling Green? What was, I guess the overall-
William Barrow [00:03:02] Well, I had gone to Bowling Green following that girlfriend who I mentioned, and we were both Barry Goldwater supporters in ’64. First round of idealism coming out of suburbs and Boy Scouts and all that kind of good stuff. And so we were Barry’s boys, or she was a Barry’s girl, I guess. And so I went off, and right away he got defeated, of course so I wasn’t there very long in that. And then I was apathetic for a while. And then somewhere in a few years later, I just wandered into an interview with Arnold Toynbee in Playboy, which was rumored to have articles, you know, wasn’t just the pictures. So it just kind of changed my perspective about what Vietnam was all about, and it just explained it further. I just became more involved in the New Left, and there was an SDS chapter about to start. I became a national member and was one of the people who formed the new chapter. And we were just trying to express our dissatisfaction with the way life was going at that time. You know, the war, student rights issues, and emerging civil rights well, civil rights wasn’t emerging, but gender issues and whatnot, so.
Joe Wickens [00:04:18] Any particular ways in which you acted that out?
William Barrow [00:04:26] Well, I didn’t burn anything down. No. No bomb throwing. I didn’t wear a bra, so I didn’t burn that. I didn’t actually burn my draft card, which I did have. No, actually, curiously enough, it wasn’t so much a particular thing other than campus issues in general, but it was more just widespread New Left kinds of issues you know, the war on campus being the predominant ones. We did run the governor of, we did run the president of the university for governor as kind of a prank. And we put a thing in the papers locally saying that we were going to have the National SDS convention in Bowling Green, and we were looking for local people to open their hearts and homes to delegates coming to the convention. Now you got to keep in mind the last convention had just happened and the Weathermen emerged, and it was all over the newspapers as being a big, violent bunch of crazies. So we thought, yeah, that’s great for Bowling Green. We’ll bring them here. You know, I mean, we weren’t really planning to. It was just, again, another spoof. So just that kind of general stuff, you know, had a Phil Ochs concert. I don’t know.
Joe Wickens [00:05:38] You crashed a Richard Nixon press conference?
William Barrow [00:05:41] Oh, yeah, you read that? Yeah, yeah. A friend of mine and I crashed a press conference. I posed as a photographer, and he brought a big old tape deck. And, you know, so I got to meet Richard. I got to meet Tricky Dicky and shake his hand. And then that evening, we crashed the talk that he was giving to area Republicans and at some point, I stepped out from behind the drapes to take a picture of him over his shoulder, and I was about three feet behind him, which probably was the closest you could get to, you know, thereafter, nobody was going to get close to Richard Nixon after he started running again. But I got chewed out by one of his campaign people because they were taping it for some national event, but I really didn’t care.
Joe Wickens [00:06:23] Well, one of the things that’s interesting about Bowling Green that also occurred at Cleveland State was following the Kent State shootings, neither university’s campus closed. What was-
William Barrow [00:06:34] Bowling Green’s didn’t. We stayed open. But we had a big torchlight procession, candlelight procession, I mean. Torchlight sounds like we’re going after the Frankenstein monster, but no. Nixon not being available, we didn’t- Or Governor Rhodes not being available, I guess, is the right one for this cause. So it was a wide swath of people that left the Founders, yeah, Founders dormitory went all the way downtown, up a block, and all the way back. And we’re talking, I don’t know, 10 blocks anyway, I would think. And the front of the line was just reaching the campus again. We could look up, block down, and the line was still leaving down there. So it was quite a lot of people, and it was very peaceful. No bullhorns, no agitators. You know, just people holding candles and reflecting on the sadness of the Kent State shootings. But close to campus, when we were coming by the Wood County Courthouse, the sheriff had all of his deputies out there in riot gear and stuff, you know, like, who was going to charge the courthouse? I mean, you know, and it was really, almost incited a problem right there. People were really upset about that show of force, you know, and what was basically a peaceful, commemorative kind of thing. But, you know, cooler heads prevailed, and nobody broke ranks. We just walked by resenting that he would intrude upon our commemoration with a show of force like that.
Joe Wickens [00:08:05] Well, I understand that another one of the big sort of events of that era was Woodstock. And you didn’t go.
William Barrow [00:08:11] I didn’t go to Woodstock.
Joe Wickens [00:08:12] Were you planning on going?
William Barrow [00:08:14] Well, first of all, it wasn’t that necessarily seen as that big a deal. It was a concert, you know. Gonna go to the concert? Yeah, it sounds like it’s gonna be fun, you know, but it wasn’t, you know, everybody’s gonna wish they’d been at Woodstock, you know, 50 years from now. And I’m not that big on concerts anyway and I was watching the house. My wife was being operated on, so, you know, I had a ride. I could have, could have gone, but I would have had to have made arrangements for the house. Frankly, I’m still not sure I really, am not just as happy not to have been out there, you know, in the mud and whatever. I’d rather listen to things on a record player than go to a concert anyway.
Joe Wickens [00:08:52] She wasn’t a chemistry student?
William Barrow [00:08:54] No, no, no. She was long gone. She just graduated. She just retired as a full professor at an east coast university, by the way. She stayed with chemistry. I didn’t.
Joe Wickens [00:09:05] So how did you meet then? At Bowling Green, I assume?
William Barrow [00:09:09] No, actually, I was the lifeguard at an apartment complex in Mentor, and her dad had been brought in by Turner Construction to be the project superintendent on the Erieview Tower. So that’s where he happened to put his family was in that building. And so I met the daughter, you know, at the poolside, and, you know, we ended up getting married. So, he ended up being chairman and chief executive officer of Turner before he retired. So, you know.
Joe Wickens [00:09:39] Well, you ended up working for him then?
William Barrow [00:09:43] Well, I was working for Turner, Yeah. Yeah.
Joe Wickens [00:09:47] In Bowling Green?
William Barrow [00:09:48] So Toledo. Yeah, it was. Well, I was living in Bowling Green.
Joe Wickens [00:09:53] How long did you, did you hold that one down?
William Barrow [00:09:56] It’s about a year and a half. We started working, I started working at the tail end of what they called the Owens Corning Fiberglass Tower. And then I moved across the street after that finished to the newly started Toledo Edison headquarters building and stayed on that until they opened it. And then I got moved out to Perrysburg to work on a Toledo Edison line truck garage, a big concrete structure for the trucks, and stayed on that till that was over. But, you know, basically, once all those jobs were done, there wasn’t any other current project, so I stopped doing that.
Joe Wickens [00:10:32] And then you started doing-
William Barrow [00:10:34] Well, my former ROTC commandant - I had been in ROTC for two years - he and I had developed kind of a friendship while I was in SDS. So we’d sit on the campus, me in my bell bottoms and, you know, long hair and beads, and he in his lieutenant colonel’s uniform, and we’d sit on the steps and chat about the war and stuff. He retired and became the new safety service director, city of Bowling Green, like the city manager, which he was later, and later the mayor. And so, he and the new mayor decided they needed an animal warden of their own for the city. And my idealism had taken me to saving turtles out of pet shops. So I joined the Humane Society, and so I was looking for a job, and I said, hey, how about having the Humane Society member as your animal warden? He said, okay. So I did that for a year until I got that program set up and running and then moved out to Tucson.
Joe Wickens [00:11:28] How did, did someone approach you about Tucson?
William Barrow [00:11:31] No, I had a buddy. I had a buddy from Bowling Green. He had moved out there and said, come on out and visit. So I went out and visited and decided, hey, I’m gonna stay. So I did.
Joe Wickens [00:11:40] And you stayed for-
William Barrow [00:11:41] 17. 17 years. Yeah. So I ran Humane, I ran the SPCA of Arizona, which is a smaller group and then I ran the- I was executive director of the Humane Society of Tucson, which is the bigger group with the shelter in the spay clinic. And then I worked on a startup magazine, the national trade magazine in animal control. Oh in there somewhere I also went to Louisville, Kentucky, for a year and ran the Kentucky Humane Society. So that’s what I did in the ’70s, basically, was humane work.
Joe Wickens [00:12:09] The weather’s so nice in Arizona, from what I hear. What made you go back to the area?
William Barrow [00:12:11] Well, it’s a little warm sometimes, you know, but I liked it. I was a lifeguard, you know, and I liked outdoors, and I like tortoises, you know, and I like cactuses. It was pretty nice, actually.
Joe Wickens [00:12:23] So you came back, though?
William Barrow [00:12:24] Yeah, I came back. I just, I hadn’t finished my degree when I was out in Bowling Green. For all the years I was in Bowling Green. I never actually, and I had 200 hours of credit in 17 departments and, you know, but never actually finished. So I came back to where I had a job and a place to live, and my wife and I broke up, so, working in the Hanna Building for a family travel agency and decided better go back to school in the ’90s and finish that degree.
Joe Wickens [00:12:53] So why Cleveland State then?
William Barrow [00:12:55] It’s right across the street from the Hanna Building. So I came back and finished a degree in history and specialized in real estate history because of my interests, and then stayed and was a graduate assistant and started working on a master’s degree and then finished the coursework in ’93, still had a thesis to do, applied for, and got a job here in this room working on the Cleveland Press Collection as a graduate assistant. But then after I finished the coursework, they hired me back to process the Cleveland Union Terminal Collection, which we had. So I worked on that for several years part time and the other part time I worked for the Western Reserve Historical Society processing their historic map collection. So I spent the middle of the ’90s, ostensibly working on the thesis, but not very hard, doing those two part-time jobs and sort of a self-imposed condition of getting the Cleveland Union Terminal job here in CSU library. I said I’d go to library school and get a library degree. So I was also doing that at the same time down at Kent state. So by ’97 and ’98, I finished a Kent program and finished a master’s degree and the library hired me full time in ’99.
Joe Wickens [00:14:16] So was this setting what you had in mind when you came to Cleveland State?
William Barrow [00:14:23] I liked being at a library. I liked being on campus. Yeah, I always- Something I missed in the ’70s and ’80s while I was away from Bowling Green. So I did like the- So I always liked the campus environment. So coming back to finish the degrees, I was just interested in staying here and the library seemed like the best fit for me. So was a way to do that, and this seemed to be the path.
Joe Wickens [00:15:02] So who was the person that you, how did you gravitate to this area then? How were you introduced? How did you find yourself here then? I know you enjoyed, you mentioned you-
William Barrow [00:15:12] Well, I was working for Bill Becker, the University Archivist, and as the grad student in the press collection. He was running the Press Collection in those days. So when I finished that, then, as I said, they hired me back to be a project archivist. So I kind of got more involved in the library and its personnel. But I was also, I did my internship for library school at the map collection at Cleveland Public Library. And of course, as I say, I’d worked part time at the Western Reserve Historical Society and I volunteered at the County Archives. I was very much a believer in networking, volunteering, doing internships, just kind of getting out and seeing who’s out there and what they’re doing, whether I’d want to work there, you know, whether they’d want to hire me and wherever I ended up having a network, professional network to fall back on for, you know, for help and brotherhood. You know, whatever, you know. So that was my goal. I always was very collaboratively minded.
Joe Wickens [00:16:12] Well, how would you describe your relationship with the Cleveland Press Collection then?
William Barrow [00:16:17] Well, that’s the collection, of course, I worked on as a graduate student I would just say it’s always been for the last 20 some years, 25 years almost, you know, very much a part of my day to day existence. It’s a great collection. Until the Plain Dealer became available online, it was about the only way you could really get at local newspaper sources. There was microfilm, but that really is hard to do unless you have a specific date. So, because this is subject sorted, it was much easier to work with and find things that way. But it’s a paper collection and it’s not online. So it had its limitations both as a paper collection and now of course, compared to the Plain Dealer, it’s not as strong, but it still has other uses. I mean, there’s still a counterpoint to the Plain Dealer available in the Press. There were different newspapers and they covered things differently. So there’s still a value to the clippings and of course the photograph collection. That part of the Press Collection is still one of the four major photography collections in Cleveland. And that’s important.
Joe Wickens [00:17:29] Well, how often is the, I guess the people accessing, who do you see accessing and when was it? When and who over those 25 years?
William Barrow [00:17:44] Well, yeah, up until fairly recently, just about everybody did. We would have students coming in, we would have off campus researchers, people working on books and family genealogy and we had media. I often knew what was happening with local personalities or even sometimes national news just from the fact that somebody would show up and start looking for pictures of somebody or another and I know somebody or another just died and sure enough, later that evening, you know, we’d find out it was before the Internet, so, you know, we didn’t have the benefit of having it on Yahoo News, you know, before even the media got here.
Joe Wickens [00:18:26] You had the scoop.
William Barrow [00:18:27] Yeah, right, right. Well, we knew something was up, right.
Joe Wickens [00:18:31] A person talking about brotherhood and sort of these collaborative, making these connections. The person that I was interested in hearing more about would be Walter C. Leedy.
William Barrow [00:18:40] Ah, yes, Walter.
Joe Wickens [00:18:41] What can you tell me about him?
William Barrow [00:18:42] Well, Walter was a great resource. He was professor of history, particular interest in architectural history. He’d been in town- He’s from University of Michigan and his background was in fan vault architectural element. But he came here in the early ’70s, taught art courses and taught Cleveland history courses and was just a very good scholar. He just really was very curious about things, knew how to go investigate them and whatnot, and he shared stuff. He was always accessible. So if you had a question, you could call him and not only would he know the historical stuff very well, but he would also often have the personal backstory behind it. He was an incurable gossip. So, you know, it wasn’t enough just to know the facts. He also had to know the why, wherefores, and, you know, behind it. So he was a good person that way. And, you know, he and I were both early users of eBay, and as a consequence, we were both always swimming back upstream to see who these people were who were bidding on Cleveland things. And in those days, you could talk to other bidders directly. So I still am in contact with a number of people who I met through bidding competitions for items on eBay. And same with Walter. He amassed a very large postcard collection, which we now have. And in the course of doing that, he met a lot of people. So it was kind of sad when he died. Leukemia. And a lot of people missed him, but, you know, other people will step up. I have a couple people in mind that I hope to see that way.
Joe Wickens [00:20:25] Well, he worked extensively with the Cleveland Union Terminal Collection, if I’m not mistaken.
William Barrow [00:20:30] Well, yeah, that was one of his interests. He was very interested in the Van Sweringens and Shaker Heights because of the architectural issues in both that and the Terminal Tower. But he, in fact, the Cleveland Union Terminal Collection came to us because of Walter. A fellow named Jerry Adams had a friend who was working as the last employee of the Cleveland Union Terminal down in the Tower City for anybody who doesn’t know what I’m talking about. And that friend said that they were going to be throwing out all the stored archives from the construction days 50 years earlier, 60, maybe even [Jerry] ran down there to try and acquire it. And they said, well, these are company records. We can’t give you company records. He said, well, what about the file cabinets? What are you going to do with those? I don’t know. Can I buy those? Yeah. Alright. So he bought the file cabinets and just hauled the Cleveland Union Terminal Collection off as waste paper in the file cabinets. That’s his story. I don’t know. It sounds good. So, anyway, he was trying to shop it around to see who would want it, and he tried the usual suspects, nationally and locally, and somebody told Walter about him, and Walter got a hold of him and talked him into donating it to us. So then I got to be friendly with Jerry, and he’s long gone now, but through him, several other people that he had known. So, very colorful character.
Joe Wickens [00:21:52] You mentioned that the Press Collection was organized by subject. How was the Terminal collection organized?
William Barrow [00:22:00] The Terminal Tower collection is the construction archive. So as they opened up new departments, Chief engineer, assistant chief engineer, design engineer. All these different people who were in charge of different aspects of the construction, they generated records, and those records, as their phases closed down, got boxed up and put in the basement. So the principal organization of the collection is by the generating office. There’s a chief engineer series and an assistant engineer and so forth. And then within that, it’s. I’m trying to remember if it’s strictly chronological. I think it’s still by subjects within that to some degree rather than strictly chronological. Correspondence and reports of some kind.
Joe Wickens [00:22:52] Now, during this time where you were working and sort of transitioning into a position, you were doing project work, where was all of this taking place at? Where were you going when you were working on your MLS at Kent State, you were still here studying. Where was all of this going down at I guess?
William Barrow [00:23:11] Well, the Cleveland Press Collection work in ’93 was taking place in this room in what’s now Special Collections, before we expanded it out into the outer area. This is now a work room, but it used to be where the press collection was. And the mapping was on the second floor, the Western Reserve Historical Society Library over in University Circle. And other things were just wherever they were. County archives building on Franklin. I did a stint at the Chicago Title title plant downtown as an intern for one of my courses. And again, back to my interest in land title history. I could have lived there. I mean, that was just wonderful.
Joe Wickens [00:24:01] Yeah, the Euclid Heights allotment. The palimpsest.
William Barrow [00:24:04] The palimpsest, yeah. [Euclid Heights Allotment: a Palimpsest of the Nineteenth Century Search for Real Estate Value in Cleveland's East End].
Joe Wickens [00:24:10] Yes.
William Barrow [00:24:10] Well, that comes again, goes back to the interest in land subdivision history. I had approached Walter about doing an independent studies program project. And he suggested - I was wondering about Shaker Heights - and he said, well, that’s kind of a big topic. Why don’t you do Euclid Heights? That was a predecessor to Shaker Heights and then if you do a thesis, you could do it on Shaker Heights. So I did the independent studies project and wasn’t satisfied that I’d really gotten deep enough into it. So I said, why don’t I just do the thesis on Euclid Heights and do it better rather than do another gloss over of Shaker Heights? He said, fine. So he was the chair of my committee, and the others were Jim Borchert and Tom Campbell. And then later, Alan Peskin replaced Tom Campbell because Tom retired before I got around to finishing it. So what I was trying to do was talk about what happened up there on the plateau at the top of what’s now Cedar Glen. over time. And at first, the committee was saying, well, you know, you’re about Euclid Heights, so don’t go too much into the past. And I said, well, I’m not really about Euclid Heights. I’m about the site. And the site is a timeline of different land uses and relationships to University Circle, Doan’s Corner, and onto Cleveland downtown. So I want to show how each of the different land uses, reflected to some degree in the land subdivision at that time, reflects the history of the area. And to whatever degree, some of the earlier remnants still exist, like Edward Street. I want all that to be part of the tableau. And I was trying to think of how to make that work when I came across the idea of a palimpsest, which is a document, usually on parchment, that shows where earlier works had been erased and overwritten in a time when before paper, cheap paper. And I kind of like that. I like that idea of earlier works being erased, but still somehow retrievable. And by looking at the land, you can. And the records about it, you can kind of see what the history is reflected as a series of layers, almost like a GIS in some way, too. Geographic Information System. So that’s where the palimpsest, the palimpsest idea brought together what I wanted to do and sold the committee on that approach.
Joe Wickens [00:26:40] That’s quite a committee. They bought it then?
William Barrow [00:26:42] Yeah, they bought it. Yeah, they bought it. And, you know, come on, Bill, you got to finish your stupid thesis. Alright, we’ll buy this. Just get it done.
Joe Wickens [00:26:50] I’ve heard a lot about some of the gentlemen that you were mentioning on your committee, and that’s pretty interesting that you got, that was who you work with on your thesis.
William Barrow [00:27:01] Yeah, it’s interesting that I had lunch with Alan Peskin on Monday, and I’m having lunch with Jim Borchert on Friday, so- And I’d love to be able to have lunch with Walter Leedy, but unfortunately, neither he nor Tom Campbell are still around. That’s the problem with this job sometimes, is that you tend to meet people late in life as they’re settling up their affairs or they’re already gone and their estate is settling up affairs. And so an awful lot of the interesting people who I’ve met over the 20 years are gone. You know, they’re departed. I had a head full of great people that I can’t talk to anymore.
Joe Wickens [00:27:36] Well, following that, you started working here, and at least I’m assuming-
William Barrow [00:27:43] Well, I Was hired originally after my part-time jobs were kind of running out of steam, the university could only hire me so long on a part-time basis before they had to do something. So I got my library, I was just getting my library degree so they hired me as a GIS, what was it? GIS. GIS Specialist. Oh, data GIS Specialist, that was the title. And the reason was I was one of the few people at the time on staff who could spell GIS. I kept talking about geographic information systems all the time. So there was some thought that maybe the university library ought to be doing something about data and GIS. So they said okay, go explore it. So I did for a year and by then I had my degree and they were ready to set up Special Collections and then I got hired for that. Oh no, it was the other job. When I got hired for the Cleveland Union Terminal job, this is jumping back to ’94, I was tied for somebody else and rumor has it, nobody will tell me for sure, but that one of the reasons I was selected over the other person was that I had worked a high-rise construction job, for Turner construction, and therefore might be more familiar with the concepts and language and whatnot of high-rise construction. Reasonable. Reasonable, yeah. Anyhow, so I got hired.
Joe Wickens [00:29:03] Skills coming back around later in life.
William Barrow [00:29:06] Well, you see, there’s another piece to this too, and the other piece is that over the ’90s, the other big thing that happened of course was the Internet turning into the World Wide web. And in ’96 I was concerned that the Cleveland Union Terminal Collection would be so big and esoteric that I’d be under a lot of pressure to get rid of a lot of it because it really wouldn’t be attracting a big enough user base to justify the space. So I thought, well, the only way I’m going to get over the low density of interest around here would be to try and expand its projected outward to a wider audience. And so I was looking at the Internet and you know, they had FTP, intelnet and you know, all those Internet only character driven kind of technologies. And then somebody said, hey, have you looked at this new thing, this World Wide Web thing? And I said no. So I looked at it. Son of a gun, that looked really good. You could put pictures in there and all sorts of cool stuff, you know. So I got a guy up on IS&T University Information Systems department to teach me HTML. So I sat at his elbow for two hours and he showed me how to code in HTML. And then he gave me, more importantly I think, a 10 megabyte hunk of the University’s web server that I could password access and put stuff up and then go and look, see what it looked like publicly, you know. And so I real quickly started building websites for the Cleveland Union Terminal and the Press Collection and stuff. So eventually they got moved back to the library. There had been some question of why is this not on the library server? And I said, well, because I’ve got direct access to this server, the university’s. Whereas if I were to try and put it on the library server, I’d have to submit it to a committee, and they’d look at it for weeks and decide where the logo was going to go and what the colors should be. And, you know, I didn’t have the patience for that. I wanted to be able to be more dynamic and immediate about the whole thing. So that was eventually given to me. You know, we moved it over. But as a consequence, the Cleveland Union Terminal Collection, the Press Collection, Bill Becker, the University Archivist, started Yesterday’s Lakewood Collection. That’s still part- Still up. And I also created something called the Cleveland Digital Library, which is a listing almost like a bookmarks page about local history resources in digital format that could be directly accessed whether we had them up or somebody else did, and that’s still up somewhere. So anyway, that was a lead into the new millennium, you know, and the web. So it came time to hire somebody as a special collections librarian. Meanwhile I had already worked in the press collection, I’d already processed the Cleveland Union Terminal Collection. I’d already built a website for local history, and those were all seen as skills. So really, my resume looked like the job description at that point.
Joe Wickens [00:32:04] Well, then, Cleveland Memory.
William Barrow [00:32:07] Cleveland Memory. Well, so-
Joe Wickens [00:32:08] Do you remember how Cleveland Memory-
William Barrow [00:32:10] Sure. So a couple years go by and Walter Leedy and I were talking about all of this, and he wanted us to start putting his postcard collection up. I wanted it too, of course. So we got talking about it and decided the only real good way to do this would be to have a database of some kind so that we weren’t building static web pages and parking them up there with all the awkwardness that produces. But rather, we needed a searchable database. So Walter approached the library and said, I’ll let you use my postcard collection, but we need a database. So Bruce Jepson, who was the systems administrator for the library at the time, went out and found one called Content DM that was being run out of the Pacific Northwest. It’s now run by OCLC here in Ohio, but seemed to do the job. And the stuff we put in it would be transferable if it wasn’t, it was probably about the cheapest of the group. So we decided, let’s start with that. So we put together a team. Bruce and, I was on it, of course, and Donna Stewart, who was then working for Bruce as a web designer. And oh, boy, I’m going to forget some of our- Joanne Cornelius, of course, who was working next door in digital, in systems. No, technical services. And Henry York, her boss. And I know I’m forgetting somebody. So anyway, so a gang of us, anyway, started putting things up and we, of course, picked not- We didn’t go aardvarks to zygotes, you know, just doing the collection systematically, but rather by what we knew to be things that people were really interested in. Downtown shopping, Christmastime, Euclid Beach, Eliot Ness, you know, East Ohio Gas Company explosion, all that kind of stuff. You know, the greatest hits of Cleveland history. So we started putting that stuff up. And then we started getting offers of ebooks from people like John Stark Bellamy and Jeff Morris, who had physical books out there, that wanted to have us put things up as ebooks. And we got videos up and, you know, just kind of gradually started growing from there and still is, you know, we got about 58,000 plus items up. And we also decided that rather than just do it in house, that we’d throw it open to a wider population of partners around the region. Some institutions pretty much only put their own stuff up. And, you know, we decided that rather than the idea of a Halle’s Christmas Window, where, you know, we’d cover it over and build a Christmas window and then tear the paper away and everybody could press their noses up against the glass and see what the wonderful people at Cleveland State did this time. That instead we’d be like a stage, and we’d build a stage and the lighting and the sound and all that kind of stuff and provide the technical support and then kind of let the community come in and help define what local history is going to be. So that’s why we have partners from East Liverpool to Mansfield to Sandusky involved in putting things into Cleveland Memory. And it’s been one of our characteristic attributes or aspects of Cleveland Memory is that it built more of a crowdsourced kind of thing, not strictly a crowd source, but with a lot of collaborative partners around the region.
Joe Wickens [00:35:29] You said the build has been gradual. What was the early months and years?
William Barrow [00:35:35] Well, we got it real early on in the mid-’90s. We had a lot of fun looking at the monthly web reports. My God, that page got, you know, 75 hits last month, you know, son of a gun. You know, and then next month, you know, it was 150, you know, and the next month it was 400. And, you know, when’s this going to stop? It’s crazy. You know, so we had a lot of interactions. It was a very fluid, make it up as you go along kind of thing. I’ve had a comparison to two ways of doing this. One was. Yeah, okay, thank you.
Joe Wickens [00:36:15] We were. You were talking about how-
William Barrow [00:36:18] Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. Thank you.
Joe Wickens [00:36:19] Following the hits on the, on every month on the website.
William Barrow [00:36:22] Right. Well, there’s been a couple models in my mind. I mean, I make this stuff up, but I got a couple views of how these kinds of digital, large digital projects happen. What I consider to be the usual way is the kind of responsible, grownup way where you kind of plan everything in advance and get the budgets and personnel requirements and go out and find funding and get the funding and buy the equipment and, you know, just plan the whole thing from soup to nuts. And then when you get to the right point, you start doing the work. I call that the Spanish Armada approach. You know, where you’re going to build a fleet and go do something with it. You know, we not having the patience to do that, opted for another model, which was just kind of start doing it and make it up and learn, make mistakes and change, and as you go along and just hope that nobody’s fleet sails out of the harbor and swamps you before you kind of get where you want to be. And I call that the Dunkirk model.
Joe Wickens [00:37:21] Or like the militia model?
William Barrow [00:37:23] Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m thinking of Dunkirk, you know, going over everybody in the, you know, find something that floats and take off and start doing something, you know, rather than, you know, wait for later. Now, the Dunkirk, you remember Dunkirk, succeeded and the Spanish Armada didn’t. So I don’t know. I don’t know how far we can take that idea, that parallel. But, you know, so.
Joe Wickens [00:37:42] So when did you, was there, like, I guess a defining moment where you thought with the Cleveland Memory Project, this is something that’s going to stick, or this is something that, something that sort of drove the point home where we’ve really got something that’s going?
William Barrow [00:37:56] Yeah. I don’t know what sticks. You know, I mean, I could retire tomorrow and come back in five years and find out that some provost decided to pull the plug on the whole thing, or the new library director wanted to use the resources for something else. It’s just up there, but nobody’s paying any attention to it internally anymore because, you know, everybody’s doing other things. That’s just the nature of projects. You know, sometimes the new pharaoh comes along and steals the bricks from the old pharaoh’s tomb, you know, so we’ll see. But once we committed to the software and put a lot of money into buying it, and we committed to the training and putting together the committee and everything to support it, if we can kind of finish getting out of this startup mode, as long as all the early people were there, you know, that we had, we’ve had a certain style of doing things which is very fluid and kind of, hey, let’s do this today. Sure, that sounds good, you know, but those people have retired one by one and a key one, Joanne’s retiring next month, and I think I’ll be the only one left from the original group still here. And so, you know, the transition’s going to have to be not a whole bunch of people who had fun putting it together and it’s their baby, but it’s going to be other people for whom it’s one of the tasks that they do. And if it’s not seen as a task that needs to be done anymore, then it won’t be, you know, it might be mothballed and still be out there probably. I mean, I don’t see any reason why anybody would take it down. But whether it grows and is added to, or whether outside partners are allowed to continue to add stuff, who knows, you know?
Joe Wickens [00:39:32] Well, those outside partners, Kent State, where you got the MLS, that relationship. I know at one point you actually received a friend of the year [award].
William Barrow [00:39:43] Yeah, that was because I had been a practicum student. I chose to be, to do a practicum when I was in library school that I, part of that model I was talking about doing internships and getting out and meeting people that I sponsored practicums here afterwards. And we probably had, oh, 70 practicums over the 15 years. That sounds like too many somehow. But I think it is a big number like that. People who have come up in- We’ve given them a project to do. There’s been a few volunteers in there too, people who did their practicum already but still wanted to add this to their résumé. So, you know, they’d come up and I’d give them a project topic and then they’d go investigate it. And if it looked like there was enough resources to justify it, and usually there were because they had an idea that would be. They would select, they’d study up the issue a little bit and select the resources and get permissions and digitize them and catalog them and, you know, be able to do the whole thing rather than just come in, you know, and start in some huge project at item number 1275, and work their way to, you know, 1352 and then leave and not have anything, really that, you know, they just worked on the widget assembly line, you know, so we wanted them to be actually doing more curatorial kinds of activities on a small scale, but get to see the whole thing and then have their name on it and be able to point to people, I did that, but that’s been one of the models. And some of those projects that the practicum students did were, in fact, working with communities or businesses or others outside of us. So when I talk about our collaborations in the community, some of those were lubricated by having a practicum student who could do some of the work.
Joe Wickens [00:41:36] Well, you said that people volunteer or come in or do practicums so that they can add to a resume, and I think that Cleveland memory has accumulated quite a resume. One of the things in particular that I’m sure you’re pretty proud of is the Herrick Memorial Award.
William Barrow [00:41:55] Yeah, that was-
Joe Wickens [00:42:00] What did that mean, I guess? Or how did you feel when you were approached and told by the-
William Barrow [00:42:06] I got a letter one day from the Early Settlers Association of the Western Reserve saying, hey, you know, you’ve been selected to be the Clay Herrick Memorial Award winner this year. And what had happened was they had spotted a profile that Grant Siegel had done on me in January of that year. Let’s see, what is this? ’14, ’15, ’14, ’13, ’12. I guess it would have been January ’12. Grant Siegel did one of his profiles he does on people around town, and they thought, oh, there’s somebody. Let’s consider him. So I went down to Public Square and part of this city’s birthday on July 22 and received the award and decided, hey, this is cool. I want to be more a part of this. I’m now vice president of the Early Settlers Association, and in charge of the birthday. So that’s the problem with opening your mouth and expressing an interest in something. You may find yourself put in charge of it real fast, you know.
Joe Wickens [00:43:05] So did you go back and look at the Clay Herrick Collection, then, a little bit?
William Barrow [00:43:08] Just out of the previous award winners, you mean?
Joe Wickens [00:43:11] No. You and having the collection. I guess the collection here.
William Barrow [00:43:16] I don’t really have any special Clay Herrick stuff or Early Settler stuff here. Most of the Early Settlers collection is out at the Western Reserve Historical Society because it is a very old organization, and that’s the kind of thing that Western Reserve would specialize in. Some’s at Tri-C Metro, too, but yeah, I mean, obviously I paid a little more attention to Clay Herrick and Early Settlers, but not..
Joe Wickens [00:43:41] The slide collection, I think, what is-
William Barrow [00:43:42] Oh, yeah, I’m sorry. Sure. Of course. Yeah. The Clay Herrick Slide Collection. Yeah, Clay, before Clay died, he donated his collection of slide. My goodness. I’m sorry. Clay. You know, slides that he had taken as part of his architectural investigations. So he donated that to us, and we put a fair amount of that up on the web.
Joe Wickens [00:44:05] I just thought that was interesting that I guess the entity that’s responsible for Clay Herrick’s slide collection received his-
William Barrow [00:44:12] Yeah, I never made that connection in that context. I knew we had Clay Herrick’s light collection, but nobody ever once mentioned that there was any connection there. So, I have to assume that.
Joe Wickens [00:44:23] Well, part of the reason, aside from just being noticed by the Early Settlers for a profile that was done on you, the New York Times have taken note, too.
William Barrow [00:44:33] Yeah. There was a little mention of Cleveland Memory in somebody’s tech column one day, just talking about how different places approach doing projects like this. And there’s been a couple other things. The Ohio Historic Records Advisory Board gave us their first award that they, well, we shared it with Dayton, I think it was. So the first year they gave an award, they gave one to us and one to Dayton, and the Society of Ohio Archivists gave us an award and Scene Magazine did the other day. So, you know, and there’s been some earlier ones that, that were more of a techie nature that we see. So it’s nice to occasionally have somebody, yeah, acknowledge what we’re doing or that they were just sufficiently desperate for somebody to give it to that we seemed like a good idea. I don’t know. How do these things work, you know?
Joe Wickens [00:45:28] Well, I think that’s the way it’s going, though, in terms of archiving.
William Barrow [00:45:36] Well, it’s in bursts. It’s in bursts, you know, I mean, some years there’ll seem to be a lot of recognition and a lot of activity and cool things happen. And some years seem to coast a little bit. And, you know, you wonder, is it coming back? You know, some years I’ll do a whole lot of presentations, specific groups, and then it kind of dies off, you know, everybody’s heard me, so they’re tired for a while, you know.
Joe Wickens [00:46:01] Well, it’s the Cleveland Memory Project that assumes that there’s, I guess a goal in mind. Is there an end in mind? Will a project like this ever be completed?
William Barrow [00:46:11] No, but we are engaged in another activity. You can see our staff of cheerful student workers here who can all wave hello. They’re all busy working on projects and the chief project at the moment is retiring the Press Collection. The Cleveland Press photo collection has been open to the public for the 30 years we’ve had it. Well, most of the 30 years we’ve had it. And then last year we decided, you know, enough’s enough, you know, we just can’t keep bringing our only archival copy of a print out and just handing it to people to, you know, even with gloves on to handle and then maybe misfile it or jam it in wrong and beat it up and especially on some of the more popular topics, they’ve been handled a fair amount. So because the rising curve of need and the falling curve of cost and impossibility have reached a point where maybe it’s feasible, we are now digitizing our way through the Cleveland Press Collection and making that the means of accessing the images through Cleveland Memory. Obviously not going to be a tomorrow kind of project and you know, there’s 500,000 photos over there so we’re going to have to make this kind of a long-term sort of process. But I think that’s ultimately the way we have to go. We still have an in-between method that we use for getting photos for people today that need to see what we’ve got. But the main wave is just to get it all moved into Cleveland Memory. So I think that’ll be, you know, Cleveland Memory’s always had. I’ve considered three levels to it. One level was the greatest hits of Cleveland history. You know, the name implies it’s the Cleveland memories, you know, Mr. Jingeling and all that kind of stuff, you know, which means more to the Baby Boomers than it does to these students right here. Probably because I grew up with it, they didn’t. And the Press stopped publishing in ’82. So there isn’t the kind of stuff that they would be looking at in the collection. But anyway, that’s the greatest hits kind of stuff for the more casual memory induced searches. Below that, the next level is the search and research or the research level where we have a lot more stuff on a subject and some of it might be fairly esoteric and not all that glamorous, but still important if you’re trying to find out what the windows on a building look like for some historic renovation purpose. And then the third level is more for our use. And that’s just locating stuff, managing the collection. We would have a folder, we would have many folders full of things like pictures of numbered streets or pictures of things starting with K. You know. And they were all very miscellaneous, and we never knew what was in them. We had to keep opening up the folder to see what was there.
Unknown speaker [00:49:09] [inaudible question]
Joe Wickens [00:49:15] So we’re talking about the three different layers-
William Barrow [00:49:18] Yeah. And the third one was our own internal things. So when we have small collections, kind of hard to remember things, it’s just as easy to put them in Cleveland Memory. And then they’re there. You know, somebody gave me nine pictures of the KW Ignition Company in the ’20s or ’30s. You know, I mean, I know we would have records that we had that collection, but it was just as easy to put the nine pictures in Cleveland Memory. And then I would have a way of sharing them. For one, it was pretty easy to do, and two, I could keep track of them a little better that way. So those are the three goals I’ve had for using Cleveland Memory as a, both a public outreach and sharing thing and as an internal collection management vehicle.
Joe Wickens [00:50:02] Well, we’ve got to talk about development of Cleveland Memory. We’ve talked about your, I guess, personal development.
William Barrow [00:50:08] Yeah.
Joe Wickens [00:50:09] Is there anything that you thought that we would mention or we would talk about that we didn’t get to? Or is there anything that-
William Barrow [00:50:15] Well, there’s always the issue of campus relationships. You know, there are various professors on campus teaching courses, either on Cleveland history or in which Cleveland history could play a role. The obvious ones would be like, you know, Mark Souther and Mark Tebeau and Regennia Williams in history. But there’s people in urban studies. There’s some interest in business. I’ve had classes come in talking about the history of civil engineering and older bridges because of the Watson bridge book collection that we have, We’ve had English professors assign writing assignments around people’s own homes, neighborhoods, family kind of stuff. So, you know, write about your neighborhood’s history, you know, and that caused the students to, well, okay, I don’t know much about my neighborhood’s history so they’d come in to get material, that kind of thing. So we’ve always stood ready to support those kind of class activities. And then, of course, the students come in individually and. And do research. And some of them just come in out of left field. You know, we didn’t know that they were even doing a project on something, but here they are, you know. So our goal, obviously, first and foremost, is to promote the success of the student population here that’s helping pay our way and our reason for being here in the first place. And we view all of these outreach things to the general public against that background because we’re employing the wider community to help us gather stuff that we don’t even have to own and buy necessarily, that would still be available to our students and, of course, everybody else. So, you know, that’s really the main mission.
Joe Wickens [00:52:05] Have you been pulling stuff for people over the 50th, the 50th anniversary?
William Barrow [00:52:10] I haven’t been so much. Bill Becker, the University Archivist, is the one that maintains the records of the Cleveland State University and its predecessor, Fenn College and Y Tech and all that. So Bill’s the one that’s been up to his eyeballs in Cleveland history, 50th stuff, for months now. Yeah, you ought to talk to him. But, I mean, he’s been here 40 years now, and if anybody knows Cleveland State, it’s gotta be Bill, because not only has he been here as long as anybody, but he’d been working the whole time with the records of the university, so.
Joe Wickens [00:52:46] Absolutely. Actually, I did get a chance to sit down and talk with him last week.
William Barrow [00:52:50] Oh, did you?
Joe Wickens [00:52:51] Yeah.
Joe Wickens [00:52:52] So. Well, then I’ll give you a chance, sort of, if you want to sum anything up, if you, you know, your lasting thoughts of Cleveland State here at the 50th.
William Barrow [00:53:02] Well, it’s just been a great place to be. It’s been a great- I’ve enjoyed working here. I’ve had several opportunities to apply for jobs of this nature elsewhere. Cleveland Public Library and Case have both had several, and Western Reserve Historical Society have all had attractive openings come up, and I’ve never applied for one because I’ve always felt that this was just a really great place to work in terms of the, not only the people, you know, which everybody always says, you know, the people I work with are great. Well, that’s true. People are great. But this system itself, the management structure here, has always enabled us to do these kinds of things. And when I see how my friends at other universities and other institutions, what their working conditions are in this regard, it’s always much more regimented and much narrower and harder for them to really express the kinds of things that we’re freely able to do. So it just, no reason why I would want not to stay and be a part of this, just because anywhere else I’d probably be less happy with this, you know, the situation. So.
Joe Wickens [00:54:12] Thank you.
William Barrow [00:54:13] Sure. Thank you.
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