I also pictured her trapped on a bus, her honey-colored hair so long she could sit on it, shirt neatly tucked into her jeans, being driven hours down a winter highway, to sit vigil next to her precious husband, the writer.
I went away for Christmas, and by the time we caught up, there was an obituary in my in-box for Joseph Victor “Jersey Joe” Hamburger.
The Hamburgers’ house was on an acre at the corner of two roads in farm country, a raised brick ranch with white pillars in front. The side yard held the two organic garden plots. In the back was the hot tub and the aboveground pool, fenced behind the chain links of a former dog run. A development of mansions was rising up across the road, but otherwise the country felt unspoiled. The university was ten minutes away, past bucolic scenes—long stretches of undulating land, a pond surrounded by native grasses, the vista of Mount Nitanny.
The cat boxes sat right inside the front door, accommodating five cats, mostly variations on Siamese. The air was humid with cats. There were cat signs on the coat closet (No outfit is complete without cat hair!), by the front door (Don’t let the cat out no matter what it tells you!), and in the kitchen (Spoiled rotten cats live here). The interior was a kaleidoscope of cats, cats rendered in oil, ceramic, iron, wood, real cats prowling the acid-green carpet of the living room, fake cats on the walls and bookshelves and tables and piano.
Back in Hamburger’s bedroom, the mattress rested on the floor, in readiness for new bedroom furniture and a new paint job. There were bags of stuffed animals to give away, along with several old chests of drawers, smeared with putty where Joe had begun to fix the gouges and scratches. “You wouldn’t believe what I’ve already taken out of this house,” Sue said. Joe was a compulsive shopper who haunted the thrift stores, originally to supplement his cool musician wardrobe with leather coats and funky shirts. He’d bring back clothes and other things, too, space toys and model cars, cat tchotchkes, books, and furniture. At some point his therapist suggested he start reselling the vintage clothes. The basement is stuffed with the remnants of that business, which Sue had stepped in and organized. “Joe wasn’t practical. He couldn’t find things, had no idea whether he was making any money, so I designed a tag that went on each garment as it came in, coded for what type of garment it was, like jacket or pants, and how much it cost, and sorted them into bins.”
On this chilly March day, three months after his death, Susan Hamburger was surrounded by stacks of her husband’s work. She was going to use her professional skills to decide what to preserve among the scrawled paper place mats, the copied flyers, the stories and poems and lyrics and letters and self-help articles that Joe wrote and she rescued. Her plan was to organize all of it, sort it into acid-free archival files and boxes, write catalog descriptions and develop finding aids, then donate the processed archives to his alma mater, Rutgers University. Sue had called a colleague there and told him of her intentions. His response? “Dead air on the line.” No matter. If Rutgers didn’t want it, she’d find someplace that would.
Sue and Joe had met when they were students at Monmouth College (now Monmouth University) in New Jersey when he tried to pick her up at the music store where she’d gone to buy a left-handed twelve-string guitar. “He was so smart. He knew so many things.” Within weeks they were living together; they married on Valentine’s Day 1968. Music was a bond, as was a shared resentment over their parents’ failures: Sue’s father had died when she was sixteen, leaving the family impoverished, and her mother drank, and Joe had been brought up by Communists, so preoccupied with politics and other people’s rights he felt abandoned. Joe and Sue agreed never to have children themselves. They got through school (Joe with a bachelor’s in psychology, and Sue with two master’s degrees, including a master’s in library science, and a doctorate in American history), and began moving around the country, following Sue’s employment. They almost divorced while living in Connecticut, where Joe couldn’t find work and began drinking. Instead, he sobered up, went into treatment, and earned a master’s in rehabilitation counseling, which he was able to practice off and on for years. Mainly, though, and especially after his health began to decline, he wrote and he played music.
Sue separated piles of his poetry from his music. “I can identify the poetry, and I know the songs: the poetry never rhymes and the songs always do. If I turn this collection over to somebody else, they wouldn’t know the difference, necessarily.
“He couldn’t handle the practical aspects of writing. Joe took rejection personally. He would find a science-fiction editor who encouraged him, then the publication would collapse or the editor would leave.
“In his lifetime, I was proofreading everything he did and, initially, with the poetry and the short stories, I paid a typist to make a clean copy. I had a folder of the master, then made copies to send out. I put them in the top of my closet so everything was organized—and then he got to them. And one time he decided he was going to revise the stories…. Trying to find the original copy, the master, is going to be fun. Normally with a literary person, they’ll have different drafts, an original, then they’ll edit that, retype or rewrite, or cut and paste—it’s a messy, messy process. The creative person isn’t thinking of organization.”
Sue kept the flyers and local newspaper announcements of appearances by “Jersey Joe,” which is what Joe called himself when he strapped on his guitar and covered Bruce Springsteen, or played original songs like “eBay Blues (Selling Memories),” and she also kept a handwritten list of performances they did together dating back to 1967. She showed me one of Joe’s claims to fame: the album cover of Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, which had a photograph on the back prominently featuring Joe’s handsome face in a crowd around the singer, and the academic paper he wrote about Springsteen, who had gone to the same high school he had and been bullied by the same crowd. Joe speculated about the psychology that drove him to embrace in his lyrics the greasers who used to torment him.
Sue tossed out the ephemera, the buttons and magazine clippings of bands Joe liked; she made copies of the essays he had published in newspapers, then threw out the originals. “Newspaper yellows and disintegrates, and what we care about with this collection is the content.” She pulled letters out of envelopes and, if the letters were dated and had a return address, she tossed the envelopes. She had already written a biographical note for the collection that included when and where Joe had lived; that would be useful for dating items with a return address. She ditched the rusty paper clips and pried out staples. She separated versions of manuscripts with legal-sized pieces of acid-free paper, so they could also function as bookmarks. “You leave one side open in the file, unless the paper has been deacidified. Paper still breathes. We used to encase the documents in Mylar, but that cooked them. Only use Mylar, now known as Melinex; other plastic, if you can smell it, it’s not good.”
The sorting seemed simple, until you actually started doing it. “Here are two different versions of the same story, one with a little intro that isn’t on the other copy. What the archivist has to do is figure out which came first. In some cases you might not know. Draft A, draft B, both undated. You leave that to the scholar studying the writer to figure out.
“You have to make a decision when you’re processing, How much effort do you go through to organize the collection item by item? How important is the person? Since it’s my husband, and it’s before I’m giving it to an archive, and I have plenty of time to deal with it, I’ll go through and reorganize these pages.”
There were only two rooms in Sue’s house off limits to the cats, and one was the office. Sue shooed them away, but when we squeezed through the door, a cat managed to streak past our legs and burrow among the wires behind one of the desks. Sue got on her hands and knees to drag the cat out while I looked around. We were standing in a museum of technology. “I have every computer I ever owned. Some work with the scanner and the camera, some don’t.” She had connectivity as ancient as some of the machines, a dial-u
p connection through the university.
“Joe took to the computer like a duck to water. It was so exciting, to write all this stuff and go back to make changes. That’s a difficult thing for an archivist, authors who don’t have multiple drafts to see. Of course with the computer, open a new file and you change the date; you don’t know when something was written, and so many of his files weren’t named. He’d hit ‘save,’ and the file name would be our address.
“I’ll go through these things and print out what I can find. That’s the best way to save them.” The floppies and CDs were time bombs, unreadable without computer forensics, except in a room like this, where you could insert them in the computer that created them.
We moved back to the open kitchen to sit at the round kitchen table, stacked with books and periodicals and the box containing Joe’s ashes. Sue made us herbal tea—no alcohol in this house. She fussed with the sound system in the living room, and put on Joe’s songs, and his rich baritone filled the room with a love song for Susie: deft folk guitar moves, nimble lyrics, and a warm, slightly slurry voice.
“Joe came to all the archival conferences with me. He joined one of the archival groups and got interested in oral histories. He was going to write about growing up as a ‘red-diaper baby,’ the child of Communists,” Sue said. “Gertrude Dubrovsky grew up in the same Jewish community he grew up in, and wrote a book and made a film about it: The Land Was Theirs: Jewish Farmers in the Garden State. She interviewed his parents, and us, too. Her research and notes are in the Farmingdale Collection at Rutgers.”
So Joe is already there in the Rutgers archives, and of all the stories he had to tell, maybe being the son of Jewish Communists raising chickens in New Jersey is the most compelling, and his papers belong with the papers of others who documented this subculture. But just in case his literary work or his rock-and-roll legacy is deemed of interest, Sue will be ready. She thought his work was worth saving, so it was saved. That’s the story of all archives. “I’ll say to Rutgers, ‘Here is an alum who has been published, he has interesting writings, he’s connected to their other holdings. Someone can get something out of this. Want it?’”
He spent his adult life looking for a home for his writing. Why would that stop just because he’s gone?
The Great Boxing Archive
Librarian David Smith put in an appearance at the ALA’s 2008 midwinter conference, but he left the meetings, panels, speeches, get-togethers, and exhibits to his wife. He hung out where the husbands of librarians hang: in a sports bar a block from the conference center, where most of the televisions in a bank behind the bar were tuned to a Colts–Chargers playoff game (though one featured guys playing pool). It was three in the afternoon. Smith had cornered a table, a prime viewing spot, covered with newspapers, anchored by a bottle of beer.
“Did anybody recognize you?” I asked. A few weeks earlier, not long after his holiday party for writers at the New York Public Library, the New York Times article about him had appeared. Sam Robert’s piece, which described him as “the Virgil of the stacks,” and “librarian to the stars,” had lit up the library blogs.
Smith grinned. “Yeah, a few. One guy said, ‘Go, reference!’”
Debbi Smith was chairing a committee meeting that afternoon—she is a force in collection development for academic libraries—and then she was dragging David to dinner with a database vendor. Smith got gloomy just thinking about it. “All these people talk about is libraries,” he said. Not books; that would have been fine; just libraries. Then he came to life, remembering something he’d wanted to share. “Hey, did you see Hank Kaplan’s obituary? The guy with the incredible boxing archives? I couldn’t tell you the story before, but now I can.”
Sometime in the mid-eighties, Smith started dreaming about a place where he could go to see the classic fights, read about the great boxers, hang out and talk about them. A cable channel devoted to classic fights soon debuted, and his dream lost its urgency. But Smith still nurtured the idea of a library, a club, a space devoted to boxing. Scholars of boxing were not being served. True fight fans, a shrinking but dedicated constituency, deserved more.
Meanwhile, in the course of his reference work, Smith got to know the authors of several boxing books, David Margolick, Ron Fried, Jeremy Schaap. One night, Margolick told him about these incredible archives. Hank Kaplan was a boxing fan whose suburban Miami house was stuffed with clippings, posters, and books about boxing. Half a million photographs. The history of the best fighters, but also the history of the others, including the worst fighter in the world, a guy aptly named Joe Grim who lost ninety-one fights and won only six. The story of women in boxing, bareknuckle fighting, animals in the ring. Sports Illustrated, ESPN, HBO, Showtime, all of them used Hank Kaplan’s phenomenal memory and his archives. Kaplan told a reporter in the nineties: “Even when I was 16 or 17, I said there’s got to be some way to remember them. If someone were to ask me why I keep the archives, I guess that’s what I’d say: Someone has to be charged with remembering them.”
In his eighties, Kaplan began thinking about selling his collection of fistic arcana. He put a price tag of $300,000 on it, “which was very reasonable,” Smith said. “We’re talking huge, irreplaceable.” (Smith had never actually seen the archives, but he was a librarian; he knew.) Smith floated the idea of buying it to someone in archives acquisitions at the New York Public Library, but the collection was too big, too specialized.
So when Smith read a newspaper article about Alan Dershowitz donating his papers to the Brooklyn College Library, and saw, buried deep in the piece, the detail that the archivist receiving those papers liked to box, he was dumbstruck. What do you know—a boxing archivist. Smith immediately shot an e-mail to the guy, Anthony Cucchiara, and began inviting him to readings by the boxing writers.
That’s what the boxing archives needed: a boxing archivist. That’s how the Kaplan archives would come to New York.
“How can you tell the archivists from the librarians?” a young librarian in Brooklyn was asked. “Different gang colors,” she joked. You can offend either profession by confusing or conflating them, but I couldn’t pick the archivist out of a police lineup of librarians. Except for the tattooed ones, all of them looked like people I’d known at Oberlin.
I might not be able to distinguish them, but I knew the difference. In spite of Smith’s efforts to save these archives, he was, like most librarians, a finder. Librarians were finders. Archivists were keepers. Smith could find anything. Tony Cucchiara would keep anything.
Cucchiara found his calling as a student intern in the archives of St. Francis College, a small men’s school in Brooklyn Heights. “The original town records of Brooklyn were being thrown out by the county clerk’s office back in the sixties. I would go with the archivists and Dumpster-dive to retrieve these things—that’s how I got into it. It’s almost like a fever.”
Not long after Cucchiara came to work at Brooklyn College, an English professor called his desk. Someone on her street had thrown out a steam trunk, “filled to the brim with the diaries, letters, mountain-climbing journals, and the photographs of Annie Peck, one of the first woman mountain climbers in 1905 and 1910.” Originally, it seemed, Peck had sent the trunk from her home in Rhode Island to a Brooklyn writer who planned to write her biography. He died before he got around to it. The people cleaning his house figured the papers for junk and left them on the curb…and now the Annie Peck papers live in the Brooklyn College archives.
Tony Cucchiara is in his late fifties, and fit, somewhere between a lightweight and a welterweight. The only clue to his age are the carved parentheses around his mouth. He spars three times a week at Gleason’s Gym. He has been the archivist at Brooklyn College for over twenty years, and only once did he pay for a collection, when he bought the papers of William Alfred, a playwright and alumnus who corresponded with a host of literary and stage figures, from Robert Lowell to Faye Dunaway. At a time when significant archives command big money, Cucch
iara simply asked Alan Dershowitz to donate his papers. If not for Brooklyn College, Dershowitz felt, he would have been a dry cleaner like his father instead of a lawyer; donating his papers was a great way to say thanks. The Times picked up the story; David Smith clipped it; and soon Cucchiara was sitting in Jimmy’s Corner, a Times Square bar run by Jimmy Glenn, a former boxer and cutman, conspiring with Smith’s gang to bring the Hank Kaplan archives to New York.
The Boxing Hall of Fame is in upstate New York, four and a half hours from the city, and most of the fights these days take place in Las Vegas. But for this group of boxing fans, the history of boxing and its multiethnic boxers was centered in New York City, and Kaplan himself started out in Brooklyn—they had lots of reasons his papers should end up there. And here they were—boxing writers, a librarian, and an archivist—all willing to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars and swear eternal guardianship of the collection. Its size would tax the space and labor resources of most archives, but Cucchiara’s library had recently been renovated, and he directed a program that trained students across the disciplines in archival studies. He had room to hold all those papers and interns to help process them.
This Book Is Overdue! Page 19