History in the Making

“In the past six years, Gus Jensen, 57, has made 300 trips in a towed rowboat, prepared to rescue any children who fall overboard,” The Brooklyn Citizen, August 2, 1946.

One consequence of being an organization more than a century-and-a-half old is a large accumulation of records and documents—including archival photos and letters from dignitaries like Ronald Reagan and Hillary Clinton—with a responsibility to preserve and maintain them.

Many have taken on the task, only to be pulled away by more urgent concerns. Barbara LaPlaca, vice president of communications, was drawn to The Floating Hospital not only by its mission, but its rich history. In order to preserve the materials and increase their accessibility, she began scanning some of the archive’s contents, including photos.

When Charles Crofton joined her team as a designer, she said his research skills and ability to sense the stories behind the old photographs led her to put him in charge of them and our archival Instagram feed. For him, the research on the archive has become a full avocation and, possibly, even an obsession.

When he began the Instagram account, he realized the images often lacked interest and meaning without any background about their subject matter. “I started to do a bit of research, trying to figure out what was what.” He signed up for a newspapers.com account and “that was the first big breakthrough, because if we had an image from 1910, I could go and find that image in a 1910 newspaper.” It also helped with accurate dating and identification of the subjects in the photos.

Margaret MacDonald visited the ship, photographer in tow, July 30, 1941. She played the title role in “Kate Hopkins, Angel of Mercy,” a CBS radio soap opera broadcast weekday afternoons 1940 until 1942.

As he looked deeper, he started to unravel some of the mysteries the photos contained. He discovered the name of a CBS radio star of the day, Margaret MacDonald, who visited the ship in 1941. “Likewise, we have an image of a sailor in a row boat looking up at the ship (see top image). The title we had for the image, ‘Captain looking at The Lloyd from rowboat_1940s,’ seemed off to me because a captain is very unlikely to be in a row boat while on duty.” His research discovered the photo in the The Brooklyn Citizen, August 2, 1946 and the sailor was Gus Jensen, one of the ship’s crew assigned to ride in the rowboat tethered to it in case any of the children fell overboard. (Fortunately, that rarely happened.) “I love it when we learn the names of those guys,” Crofton said.

Toyohiko Takami as head of the kitchen staff while a college student. Photo from our 1896 annual report.

He recently traced the history of Dr. Toyohiko Campbell Takami, the first Japanese person to earn a medical license in the United States after graduating from Cornell Medical School in 1906. While a student, he worked as a cook aboard The Floating Hospital for seven summers. The practice he started in Brooklyn treated poor workers and Japanese residents, and he was the founder of what became the Japanese American Association of New York. A New York Times article that mentioned him by name, was a major clue to help discover a wealth of information online. We shared it on our Instagram archive account that April, but most of what we now know came from the doctor’s hard to find autobiography, which Crofton finally found online after a long search. Thanks to the Instagram channel, he has also been in communication with Dr. Takami’s grandson and great grandson.

Historical newspapers have been a font of information. “The newspapers were especially good at covering The Floating Hospital because we were invariably the ‘feel-good’ story. We always pop up in them around about July 4, which is when the season opened, and then throughout July and August, into the beginning of September. So you go through the newspapers looking for clues or interesting stories.” Often the articles are illustrated with images that ended up in our archive, but many are completely new to us.

“Supplied with milk and sandwiches, mothers and children eat under the sun on the deck of the Floating Hospital. Besides enjoying the fresh breezes of the harbor, the one day tourists were treated to an entertainment program headed by Ireene Wicker*, the “Singing Lady” of radio.” The Pittsburgh Press, July 23, 1939.

One photograph taken on the ship in 1939 has a movie camera in the background. Crofton found footage on YouTube from that year taken by British Pathé, a newsreel producer. “About 60 seconds in, you see where the camera would have been filming. It never made it into a finished newsreel, because the very next month, Britain declared war on Germany, and a film like that just wasn’t relevant anymore.”

He’s not the only one intrigued by our past and the material it has produced. Fionn Quigley, who joined us last September, has also become intrigued by our history and the papers and objects it has left behind. He has been organizing boxes of material, when time allows, and has become enthralled with the contents and what potential treasures lie within.

Both say it’s no accident they are intrigued by the archive and all that it represents. “The thing we have in common is we’re both from Ireland,” Crofton said. “And the Irish have a really big love for history,” As a child, he lived in England, where history was English-centric and “very pedestrian, lame really.” When he moved to Ireland, he was 15 and he found the Irish “very much in tune with history and open to what happens around the greater world,” including news and current events. “When you start digging, you read why things are the way they are, and everything starts to make sense.”

Although we value these remnants of our past, we’ve never been able to dedicate someone solely to the archive. Various staff members have worked with it, including Crofton, but something more urgent always takes precedence. Since Quigley started, he has been trying to get the 60 or so boxes of materials catalogued in some fashion. “They're just filled with things, but there's not really any organization to it,” he said.

A recent graduate, Quigley wrote his dissertation “on a pretty niche topic, the history of public toilets in Dublin. I was doing completely primary research, the first person to look at a lot of documents. It was pretty hard to find stuff, but it was fun and very rewarding,” he said.

As for the archive, “I don’t know what’s all in there, but that kind of excites me.” The challenge is figuring out how to put it in order, along with finding time to do it in an already crammed schedule. “When I get a chance, the main thing I’m doing is taking out a box, looking through it, organizing it vaguely, and putting a label on it describing what’s in there.” Once he’s explored every box in that fashion, more fine tuning can begin.

So far, he has primarily seen photos, “really gorgeous” negatives, the letter from Reagan when he was president (which offers its own questions yet to be answered) as well as the thank-you note from Clinton, when she was a U.S. senator, to the hospital president.

“I’ve worked with a lot of primary sources, and a lot of it is very mundane and doesn't really matter,” Quigley said. “But every so often, someone comes along and wants to look at this stuff, and you never know how useful it will be.”

*She added the second 'e' in her first name on the advice of an astrologer.