Ed’s Collection

Meet Ed Nolan, a trim, white-haired, fourth-generation Washingtonian. Ed favors khakis and button-down shirts in muted tones, giving him the unspecific appearance of the guy who either owns the company or mops the floors.

Ed does neither. He’s a professional packrat. His huge stash sits in an ornate building on the western rim of Stadium Bowl. It consists of the more than fifty thousand posters, tickets, catalogs, menus and other printed pieces that make up the ephemera collection of the Washington State Historical Society.

Lucky for us. And maybe even luckier still for our kids, grandkids and great-greats that will follow.

Ephemera, Ed will tell you, are printed materials meant to be used for a short time, then tossed. Here’s an example: Ed’s collection — no, it’s not his personally, but it feels so much that way we might as well call it that — includes an 1837 recruiting advertisement meant to lure young Londoners to come to the Northwest and work for the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Ed’s collection extends all the way up to present-day pieces, including Nirvana posters, Mariners ticket stubs and even a few broadsides by guerrilla artists Beautiful Angle.

Just whisper the name Hudson’s Bay Company and history buffs get all dewy-eyed. But move a few file cabinets to the left and Ed will show you a stack of beautifully maintained 1970s-era Rainier Beer posters. The Running of the Wild Rainiers and all that.

So what makes the cut? Who determines what is historically significant and worth saving? Don’t ask Ed. Connoisseurship doesn’t concern him. That’s not his job, he’ll tell you. “Some future generation will have to judge if I made the right choices.” To cover himself, Ed saves all the good stuff he can get.

Redmond Barnett, head of exhibits for the Washington State History Museum, an exhibiting arm of the society, agrees with Ed’s approach. “It’s good to ask those questions, but the answers change from generation to generation. A few decades ago, no one was interested in women’s suffrage, but now we have an exhibit on it. So it’s a good thing that someone way back then saved that stuff.”

Why Do People Save This Stuff?

Ed started collecting and cataloging for the Society in 1990. When he came onboard, there was already quite a bit of material. But, as Barnett says, “For a long period, we didn’t know what we had.” That’s pretty well handled now. Ed and his people have a good idea of what they’ve got. And they’ve made it usable.

Those are the two sides of Ed’s job: collecting all sorts of cast-off printed material, then cataloging it in such a way that someone can actually use it.

Who uses it?

Museums, for one. You can see a good sampling of ephemera right now in the Washington State History Museum’s exhibit The West the Railroads Made, which runs through January 2009. Other typical users are researchers, college students and those trying to accurately convey a past era or attitudes.

Tacoma architectural historian Michael Sullivan has applied plenty of the collection’s pieces in his firm’s historic buildings documentation work, because ephemera do such an effective job of instantly placing the viewer in a specific time and location. “Why do people save this stuff?” asks Sullivan. “We collect it because it’s graphic. We collect it because it’s informational. We collect it because it documents.”

“Several of the pieces in the collection represent the height of poster art,” says Tacoma poster artist Lance Kagey, who views the collection as a required history lesson for local artists. “The craftsmanship and artistry that went into the creation of some of the circus posters and propaganda pieces is jaw-dropping.”

Graphic designer Jay Hember, who recently partook of a by-appointment tour of the collection, sees it this way: “There is some strange connection to humanity past, to the person who used it and wrote on it. It’s just so real.”

The Wonderful Sickness

How does Ed get all this stuff? “I do a lot of hustling. I haunt thrift stores. I work with a national network of folks. I’ve got a long list of search terms I try out on eBay on a regular basis.”

The Society inherits collections, too. Ed says there’s nothing that excites him more than meeting someone who has what he calls “the wonderful sickness,” referring to the inability to throw anything away.

One of those people was Sally Sloan, who died in 1937. Sally lived in Long Branch and ran the Searchlight chain of moving picture theatres in Seattle, Tacoma and Spokane. Whenever she came to Tacoma, she’d pick up as much printed material as she could. She collected from 1890 to 1930, saving auction catalogs, Alaska-Yukon exhibition posters and handbills advertising the movies she showed. That’s all in Ed’s care now, carefully preserved inside Mylar sleeves.

Another compulsive collector was Helen Espy. Her family settled in Osterville in the 1850s. Helen’s husband, H. A. Espy, was a state senator from 1911 to 1913, and her son, Willard Espy, became a well-known author. Helen’s collection tends to be far more personal than most, consisting mainly of the paper scraps of her family’s daily existence. She kept what everyone else typically throws away — catalogs, bills, receipts and a vast collection of junk mail. She kept so much of it, in good condition, that the result is an incredibly clear snapshot of early-twentieth-century life in Washington, on a day-by-day, dollar-by-dollar basis.

It’s that daily show that ephemera reveal to us. Spend a few hours in Ed’s files and you’ll get past the presidents and governors you learn about in textbooks and come face-to-face with the butchers, bakers and stump-speechmakers that filled towns like ours.

You’ll see that life in Tacoma once consisted of plenty of ugly prejudices that most of us would rather forget altogether. One anti-Chinese poster from the 1880s says, in the most straightforward (and randomly capitalized) language, “The Chinese Must Go! Mayor Weisbach Has called a MASS MEETING for this (Saturday) evening at 7:30 o’clock AT ALPHA OPERA HOUSE.”

The Society has an extensive collection of these anti-Chinese pieces, collected mostly by Edward Fuller, back when he was secretary of the Society. At the time these posters were made, they were throwaway advertisements. Now they paint a vivid picture of the complexities of our culture. “And we’re the only ones who have them,” says Ed passionately. “Nobody else in the world kept these.”

I Love Trains

Nolan collects anything, with the point of view that the more you get, the clearer picture you have of society. “I’ll take it all,” he says. “Pro-choice, pro-life, pro-war, anti-war.” This tolerant approach means the collection spans nearly every possible subject, from bikini models pitching beer to women fighting for the right to vote and from peace rally flyers to recruiting posters.

“But if I have one bias,” he says, “it’s that I love trains.” He quickly explains that this love — and the vast collection of train memorabilia that grew from it — is based in his belief that the railroads did more than anything else to shape the way the rest of the world perceived our little corner of the earth.

Samples of Ed’s favorite section of ephemera can be seen in the current railroad exhibit at the History Museum. It’s his view that the railroads created the most accepted image of the West, through the sheer volume of their marketing material. They advertised to East Coast and Midwest tourists, encouraging them to check out our natural wonders, like Rainier and Yellowstone, or to take part in emblematic experiences like dude ranches and horseback tours. They pitched real estate to eastern homesteaders, describing land as so fertile that crops nearly grew themselves.

They often advertised settlement opportunities overseas as well, encouraging northern European farmers to move their families to the American West. They were so successful at it, Ed says, that some entire villages relocated here from Sweden and Norway.

Redmond Barnett, who organized the exhibits for the show, believes this is another example of how ephemera reveal our history of racism. “The catalogs and advertisements were targeted specifically at white Anglo-Saxons,” he notes. “Mostly Protestants. Only a few Catholics. The people who ran the railroads were pretty skittish about eastern Europeans and southern Europeans. They wanted people like themselves.”

If you have any doubts, visit the exhibit and look closely for a small item known as an Indian ticket. Printed in the 1880s, this ticket allowed a Native American to ride on the outside platform between two railcars. The railroad companies didn’t allow Indians inside.

“A paper ticket tells that story in a way an official document never could,” says Barnett. “There’s nothing ceremonial about it. It is simple and real and everyday.”

Here’s Your Receipt. And Here’s Your Change

If a collection of tickets, junk mail and posters offers a view of our history, it also provides a printed record of how our attitudes change.

In Ed’s collection you can see rosy-pictured real estate ads from boom times, followed by going-out-of-business posters from the bust times. You can see early Tacoma posters dripping with insecurity, everything overstated and oversold. Then you can make comparison to a 1980s-era poster promoting the SafeStreets program. It admits to the gang violence prevalent in Tacoma at that time and its honesty almost feels confident by comparison.

The collection has heartbreaking gaps as well. Century-old attitudes are well represented in racist advertisements for minstrel shows. But there’s little from the 1960s civil-rights era. So it feels as though we’re only hearing one side of a very long conversation. Perhaps a corrective response lies in the huge collection of contemporary Sonics, Seahawks and Mariners posters, illustrating how African American athletes have risen from victims of racial discrimination to superstar status.

There are no simple answers here. This is real life, Ed points out. No whitewashing allowed.

One of the best views of changing attitudes can be seen in the stack of recruiting posters. In the World War I era, a benevolent Uncle Sam reminds a young man, “I Want You.” During World War II, the focus moves to the enemy, where Germans and Japanese can be seen lurking in the shadows as inhuman foes. Compare these to the latest army recruiting poster you’ve seen: it’s simply benefits-driven advertising now. Join the military and you’ll reap adventure, travel and college tuition.

Of course, Ed’s collection contains an amazing history of commercial printing — when etchings and linocuts gave way to halftone photo plates and when letterpress was overrun by offset printing.

Sometimes history even repeats itself: Train travel posters from the 1920s use art deco–style illustrations and fonts. This style reappears again in the 1970s in Northwest Airlines posters. Then art deco comes around once more on a 2005 Maritime Fest piece, depicting angular steamships and ’20s-era fonts.

Ed’s not surprised. He’s saving them all.