Internship Notes

Ai yi yi!! Allergies and altitude are not a good combination! Whatever is blowing in the wind (which at this point is just about everything since it's been so windy) has my head swimming. And being lightheaded and driving the twisty roads, that the engineers in this country seem to love, is also not a good combo. But I needed to go visit Katie again and I needed to go solo this time. So, with a death grip on the steering wheel and trying not to move my head, which made me even dizzier, I toodled down to Jerome.

I took some copies of her Hollywood pictures so that she could identify some of the people. She got to talking about them and had some great stories of those years. I also got some details to add to the metadata of the images. I asked her about her family and she talked about her son a little bit. That was a sore subject so I won't be including him in the display. I told her how I thought I wanted the cases laid out and she said that would be fine.

I brought back a couple more photo albums, her college yearbook, and some copies of correspondence and clippings from her files. One of the files was labeled "Rez Fowell," her name for Lake (Reservoir) Powell. Another file is labeled "Hot Letters to Stupid Twits" which contains letters she has written to various politicians advocating demolishing the dam. It seems so strange to go through someone else's files but it sure is interesting! One of the things I copied was a list of "Things to take on a River Trip (The Woman’s Side).” It listed things like what size toiletry bag to take and what to take in it, a bar of Ivory soap for laundry, and if you're in the Chicago area to pick up two bars of Dove because it works really well and that's the only place she has seen it available (remember, this is in the early 1950's!). She also lists what kind of make-up to take--no cake or powder kind as it will wash or sweat off when on the river. She also mentions that women need not be glamorous on the river. But on the other hand, they might want to look their best as there will be lots of photographs taken. I found this so interesting because Katie is tough as nails but at the same time she makes sure she looks good even while camping and running the river. And at 88 she is still a beautiful woman.

Monday and Tuesday, I worked on pulling some more images. Bee, who is curator of images, reviewed what I have so far and helped pull some slides that will work well for the 19 wall shots. We came up with about 13 that I gave to Jess, our digital expert, to look at. He seemed very pleased to be getting the images this soon. I also met with Peter this week to update him on what I had so far and go over the timeline.