Where we have been: Notes on the history of the family of Alan and Erika Sawyer
This is really just a beginning, some disorganized notes about places in Dana's childhood, probably mostly of interest to family members. But some day it might become a book!
Alan R. Sawyer, Dana's father, began his teaching
career at Texas State College for Women (TSCW) around 1949 in the
Department of Fine Arts. Dana was two years old. TSCW is
also still around, but is now Texas
Woman's University
(TWU). While the TWU web site can be a bit confusing to navigate,
it has a lot of interesting information. The best way to find
stuff is to use the "TWU Quick Links" at the top of the page, which are
organized alphabetically. For example, under "A" you will find
"Arts, School of the", which has a picture of the same Fine Arts
building where Alan taught. Or if you can't find it in A to Z,
you can use the Search window in the upper right, which will get you to
the archives, among
other places. From there, under Faculty Publications, you can
download all or part of an electronic copy of Marking
a Trail: A History of the Texas Woman's University
by Joyce Thompson. Rather than downloading the whole thing at
once
(159 megabytes!), you may want to download individual sections of the
book. Chapter 8 covers the 1940s (plus a section of color
illustrations of the campus as it looks today), and Chapter 9 most of
the 1950s.
Mary Macomber Leu has written a memoir
about her experiences in Denton:
she and her husband moved from Massachusetts to Denton in 1952 when he
accepted a teaching position at TSCW -- about the same time the Sawyer
family was moving to Illinois. The Denton part of her story
begins in Chapter 21, and in Chapter 22 we find some familiar names
including Ruth Steidinger and Fanny Vanderkooi, together with the
beginnings of a Unitarian Fellowship.
The Park Forest Public Library
barely existed in our day, but their web site is an excellent place to
begin. One of the most interesting things I've found is the
oral history project, part of which is in the Illinois
Digital Archives.
See especially their interview with architect Richard Bennett. The archives also contain many interesting photographs and scanned
documents.
More about the architects of Park Forest, especially
Richard Bennett, can be found at the Chicago
Architects Oral History Project.
Books about Park Forest avalable from Amazon and other
booksellers:
America's
Original GI Town: Park Forest, Illinois (Creating the North American
Landscape) by Gregory C. Randall. Permalink: http://amzn.com/0801877520 | |
Park
Forest: Dreams and Challenges (IL) (Images of America) by Jerry
Shnay. Permalink: http://amzn.com/0738519502 | |
The Organization
Man by William Hollingsworth Whyte. Permalink: http://amzn.com/0812218191 |