| To say that James Danky is a unique individual is probably an understatement. Anybody who knows him would probably say that he is a character with a good soul and a quick wit. They would also probably say that he is very good at what he does -- or did because he retired from the Wisconsin State Historical Society last June -- the curating of alternative and ethnic print media for the Society's voluminous archives. Since the early 1970s, Danky, a downtown Los Angeles transplant who has lived in rural Wisconsin as a gentleman farmer since he came to Madison to earn his Master's degree, has helped the Society amass the world's largest collection of alternative and ethnic print media. On some levels, it is Danky's enthusiasm for small and sometimes obscure print media that has saved this media from a dusty life in obscurity on some of the shelves and dank basements of America's libraries. What began as a class assignment to create a bibliography of "those crazy newspapers you keep telling me about" -- Danky's professor's reference to "Takeover" and other underground newspapers of the 1960s and 1970s -- turned into the publication of Danky's first book, "Undergrounds: A Union List of Alternative Periodicals in Libraries of the U.S. and Canada." "A union list means that it isn't just the materials in this library here, but those across the country," Danky said in his newspaper-cluttered office in the Society's building at the end of State Street during an interview with The Capital City Hues. Danky eventually turned this class project into an academic pursuit that lasted almost 35 years. "I got drawn in by the alternative, progressive newspapers because I was always reading those things," Danky said. "What I had done was turn my personal interest in underground, small newspapers and the like into an academic pursuit. What I do is try to bring the same high quality, scholarly attention to materials that usually don't receive it. And so that if you had one of those proverbial 'because they don't exist level playing fields in a library that if you want to find out about The New York Times or Herald Tribune, those are easily found and described in standard sources. But if you want to know about underground newspapers or African American newspapers, that isn't the case. A significant portion of my career has been devoted to making those other materials available in exactly the same way that mainstream materials are. So if you want to ask about all of the Black newspapers in Milwaukee, that's just as easily an answered question as if you wanted to ask about all of the White newspapers in Milwaukee. And that wasn't true before. It was the same thing for Native American newspapers or other kinds of things I have done work on. I have created bibliographic quality archiving of the alternative press." While Danky has accomplished much for the sake of the posterity of the written word during his 35-year career, he quickly stated that he was just contributing to a longstanding stellar effort of the Society to collect small newspapers and periodicals. "I helped collect an awful lot of titles," Danky observed. "But even more importantly, it's something we have done since the 19th century. We spent $1 to acquire our 18 issues -- which was a lot of money in the 1870s -- of Freedom's Journal, the first Black-owned and operated newspaper in the U.S. We couldn't subscribe since the Historical Society didn't exist when Freedom's Journal began publication. But approximately 50 years later, some dealer must have had these 18 issues together and so we bought them and it brought our collection to 100." "The interest in that title today is so wholly unrelated to the little regard that the title was held by for a long time," Danky continued. "I think I looked once and there was a massive, wonderful bibliography of American newspapers done in the 1930s. And it shows for Freedom's Journal on the union list that it was held by maybe a half dozen libraries. It's a title that specialists might know of, but probably few people would have seen because libraries didn't collect it. That's an early title on a nice rag paper published in a major city. And if that didn't get collected very well -- and it didn't -- it was the case where libraries didn't collect that kind of material. That kind as in newspapers produced by African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and others. I don't think there was a complete set of Freedom's Journal until the public library in Schaumberg put all of the issues together and filmed them during the past few decades." In many ways, Danky followed in the footsteps of the Society's founder, Lyman Draper. Draper was a New York transplant who settled in the "Wild West" of Wisconsin back in the 1840s when Wisconsin was the westernmost point of the United States. "Lyman Draper believed thatyou needed to have all of the information out there in order for him to tell the story," Danky said about Draper's dream of writing a history of the west at that time. "I don't want to paint him as an unnaturally early liberal. But he felt it was important to hear what women said -- we have women's diaries from early periods. It's not that other people didn't collect those things. It's just that he went after those things with his usual manic vigor. He didn't discount materials offered by African Americans and others. If he though that what they had to say would illuminate whatever it was he was interested in -- he had this never really consummated vision of creating a whole book about the western movement as defined as moving from New England to the west as defined as Wisconsin -- he collected." In his own way, Draper also established and increased the Society's influence on other periodicals throughout the Midwest. "There were wonderful letters that he would write to Indian reservations in Oklahoma territory saying 'Maybe you have some information on this particular chief whom I am looking for who might have been part of a battle,'" Danky said. "He would always say 'I know this because I have enclosed an article on the Lost Dauphin up in Green Bay who believed he was the heir to the throne in France.' And then this little, teeny newsletter produced in Indian Territory would contain that article. He was an indefatigable person. One of our catch phrases is 'WWLD,' What Would Lyman Do. What is it that we need to collect today that we are going to wish we had in the future?" Danky has done what Lyman would have done: collect every newspaper and periodical that he became aware of. "When I took the collection over, it had 3,000 current titles and today, it has 9,000 different periodicals and newspapers," Danky said."Because the titles can have a short shelf life like the Kerry for President newsletter, there's a huge turnover. We're adding 20-40 new titles a month and eliminating around the same number, titles that just cease publication for one reason or another." According to Danky, the Society became so well-known for its collection of periodicals and newspapers that it was listed as a newspaper publishing member on various membership lists as if it were a newspaper. That's quite an honor for a historical society. Next issue: Trends in ethnic and mainstream print publications |
| James Danky retires from State Historical Society of Wisconsin Keeper of the written word By Jonathan Gramling Part 1 of 2 |
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