In 1907, three Philadelphia natives opened Camp Kennebec, a summer camp for boys that reflected the robust masculinity and rugged independence of the Teddy Roosevelt era. Situated on Salmon Lake in North Belgrade, Maine, Camp Kennebec provided a means of recreation in the natural environment juxtaposed with the campers’ urban life in Northeastern and Mid-Western cities. Kennebec, opened during the pioneer days of organized camping, was dedicated to keeping the camping experience as natural and primitive as possible and promoting healthy competition through athletics and wilderness activities.

By the 1930s, Camp Kennebec had instituted camping trips to various outposts throughout the Maine wilderness. A mainstay of the Kennebec experience, these expeditions gave campers the opportunity to explore the landscape and test their skills. Among the campers of the 1938 camp season was Edward Block, described camera fiend and resident photographer. While at Kennebec, Block used photography to document his experiences and record activities including the annual trip to Mt. Katahdin, the highest mountain in Maine and the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. Over the course of the nine day expedition, Edward Block recorded the progress of their ascent to the summit and captured the natural beauty of Maine’s pristine environment.

A collection documenting Philadelphia campers’ time at the camp is now available for research in the Philadelphia Jewish Archives collections of the Special Collections Research Center.  Start by reviewing the finding aid at http://library.temple.edu/collections/scrc/camp-kennebec-alumni.

Frances W. Kratzok recently donated a 1935 diary written by her father, Stanton W. Kratzok to the Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center.

Stanton Kratzok was a Philadelphia native and alumnus of Temple’s School of Law. He composed the diary in the summer of 1935 during his travels abroad through Europe and the Soviet Union. That summer, Kratzok, an undergraduate at Wharton, enrolled in a program hosted by Moscow State University and organized by the Institute of International Education in New York and Intourist, the official state travel agency of the Soviet Union. It was during his journey to Moscow that he recorded his thoughts and experiences with the aid of a portable Remington typewriter.

Upon arriving in Leningrad, Kratzok and the caravan of American and English students travelling with him were informed the People’s Commissariat for Education had cancelled the summer program, purporting the professors assigned to instruct the courses had been commandeered by the government for “shock work.” Accommodations were made for Kratzok and his fellow travelers to tour the Soviet Union in lieu of their planned studies. Nearly half of the diary’s contents are dedicated to his exploration of Moscow, the seaside towns in Georgia, and the cities of Yalta and Kiev in the Ukraine. Within the 82 pages of the diary, Kratzok provides colorful commentary about his fellow travelers, the sites he visited, social conditions, and government politics with special attention paid to the legal system in the Soviet Union and daily life for Russian Jews.

The finding aid for Stanton W. Kratzok’s diary is accessible online. 

–Jessica Lydon, Project Archivist

Franklin Littell grew up to be a prolific writer of religious history, but he may have gotten his start writing science fiction.  When he was just 11 years old (circa 1928), he wrote “A Trip to Mars.”  In this story, a young student of astronomy named Jim journeys to Mars with his professor.  They travel in a ship invented and built by the professor that went “one hundred thousand miles an hour, forward, and one hundred thousand five hundred miles an hour, perpendicularly…” In the story, Littell describes a ship that was “run by five engines, of eight thousand horsepower each….  It had one pair of wings…,” was equipped with “fifty large oxygen tanks…,” and ran on “a new kind of gasoline that will make the plane go one thousand miles per gallon.”

Littell describes their arrival on Mars as experienced by his character Jim: “…under the plane some of the boldest men of mars, were preparing to fight…”.  Jim and the professor landed the ship and disembarked when “suddenly the chief [Martian] yelled and started for the man [the professor].  They [Jim and the professor] put up a desperate fight, but were outnumbered.  It was their [the Martians’] custom to poke their spears into their victims before they burned them…” .  Page 6 of the manuscript tells us what happens next.

Read a transcript of this story page.

Littell’s short story is creative and fun and a definite foreshadow to his future life as a writer, but it also unexpectedly links the Littell papers to another collection acquired by the Special Collections Research Center in 2010, the manuscript and illustrations for Peter Caledon Cameron’s Nodnol (circa 1900).  Part of Temple’s Science Fiction and Fantasy collection, this manuscript takes the reader on an expedition to the Antarctic, where among other things, a new race of people are discovered.  The people found inhabiting the South Pole prove to be far less aggressive than those encountered on Mars by Littell’s Jim and the professor, but both stories speak to the early 20^th century’s fascination with discovery and encountering new worlds.  By the time Littell wrote, the race to the South Pole was over and space was beginning to take shape as the newest, unexplored frontier.

“Nodnol. The narrative of a Voyage for scientific investigation into the Antarctic Regions, the discovery of Astrogee, a Second Satellite or New World, resting on the South Pole of Our Earth, its exploration, its strange fauna and flora, its marvellous [sic] natural phenomena, its wonderful nations of civilized Quadrumana and its glorious population of perfect Humanity.” 279 pages, annotated and edited by the author, with a separate portfolio of seventeen signed illustrations in pen and ink.

Purchased in May 2010 for the  SCRC’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection, the Nodnol manuscript was written and illustrated by the English-American water-colorist Peter Caledon Cameron (active in the U.S., coming from England, 1880s-1930s?; Philadelphia/New Jersey area) and is typical of 19th and early 20th century fantasy and science fiction writing and illustrating.

–Courtney Smerz, Project Archivist

Temple Libraries currently have running, through 6/27/08, a trial to Cambridge Histories Online. This sub-collection of the larger Cambridge Collections Online, which also includes the already available Cambridge Companions titles, includes digital access to over 250 volumes of the vaunted “Cambridge Histories” series published since 1960. Find more information about Cambridge Histories Online here.

For the second year in a row the History Department has representatives in both the winner and honorable mention categories of the Library Prize competition. Congratulations to Maureen Whitsett (winner) and her faculty sponsors Liz Varon and Petra Goedde, and to Brian Chambers (honorable mention) and his faculty sponsors Liz Varon, Petra Goedde, and Art Schmidt. For more information, including (eventually) photos and downloadable PDFs of the students’ projects, see the Winners page on the Library Prize website.

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