There are a lot of reasons to love working in Special C.,
not the least of which is digging up old photos of your professors and sharing
them with your friends (Nice hair, 1990s Tim Francis!). I thought that over the
course of three and a half years here, I had dug up and poured over every piece
of information about my beloved theatre department that the university had
retained here. Imagine my surprise when I learned that we have been housing a
collection of papers from Paul Baker
(Wow, right?!). Okay, maybe you don’t know who Paul Baker is, so my surprise is
difficult for you to imagine.
Some context: Paul Baker was a theatre teacher, who came to
Trinity from Baylor in 1963 after the Baptist university closed his production
of Long Day’s Journey into Night. His
move was more of a return, since he graduated from Trinity’s Waxahachie campus
in 1932. What little I already knew about him was colored by the vague sense of
reverence with which members of the current faculty occasionally mention “the
Baker years,” but I knew that he had essentially established the theatre
department at Trinity by bringing along all eleven members of his Baylor staff
and that he had designed Trinity’s Theatre One, which preceded the Stieren Theatre
that we all know and love. This collection was big news for me, promising an
insight I’d never had. If I’d been making a little “Ancestry.com” hobby of the
archives’ theatre records, this was one big green leaf.
Having forced Megan to stop everything and take me to the
boxes, I selected one at random and opened it. The first photo inside was a
picture of Paul Baker huddled over a script with Charles Laughton (Google him).
My nerdy heart exploded.
Most of the materials need some TLC if they're going to last.
Much better! (And safer!)
So here we are a few months later, and I’m up to my elbows
in Paul Baker. Though there are numerous press releases dated from his time at
Trinity and some information about the architecture of his theatre here, the
bulk of the collection dates earlier, detailing the development of his theatre
program at Baylor and at the Dallas Theatre Center, where he served as founding
artistic director.
I’m looking forward to many surprises. The cursory glance I
took at the papers was not enough to get a real idea of the exciting
things I know are there. The first real delight was a “Campus Sketchbook”—kind
of like a tiny yearbook--from Waxahachie in 1931! Who knows how many of those
are still floating around in the world? Then I must admit I was a little moved.
See, that’s the other thing to love about working in Special C. There is
something especially personal—even intimate—about searching through and caring
for people’s papers and photographs. I can’t wait to get to know Paul Baker
better over the course of the semester, and I’m hoping that when everything’s
processed, the rest of our campus community can get to know him better too.
Paul Baker's Papers should be processed and ready for visitors by the end of the Spring 2015 semester.
--Kate Cuellar, Class of 2015
