The Paul Baker Experience: Embarking

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