Word: felsher
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WHEN TEENAGER ELAINE FELSHER left her East Texas home (Jacksonville, pop. 7,000) for New York City in 1946, she had dreams of singing as a mezzo-soprano at the Metropolitan Opera. To support herself while pursuing her aspirations, she found work as a "file analyst" trainee at TIME. Little did Felsher suspect that her trainee stint would blossom into "the most interesting job I could have ever hoped...
...from which Felsher retired last week after a 27-year career here, was overseeing the archives of Time Inc., the repository of this magazine's records as well as those of LIFE, FORTUNE and our other sister publications. The archives, which Felsher has managed for the past 15 years, are, in her words, "an attempt to make a story, and that story is the development and history of the company...
...Felsher collected the narrative thread so that others could weave the story (most notably the authors of Time Inc.'s three volumes of corporate history, published by Atheneum from 1968-86). At first she helped staff members cull their files to decide what should be consigned to the wastebasket and what saved. Anything of historical interest went to the fledgling archives: Henry Luce's 1922 plans for the launch of TIME; March of Time radio transcripts; files from waggish Fortune editor and publisher Eric Hodgins, author of the best seller Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House ("He didn't write...
Though Time Inc. continued to grow over the years, the flow of documents lessened--due to the advent of computers. Shortly after her appointment as archives manager, Felsher took action. "We were losing a lot of history," she says. She took a class in oral history at Columbia University, then began targeting people whose recollections she wanted to preserve on audiocassettes. Later, she conducted interviews with a video camera. "It takes a lot of nerve to interview a journalist," she says...
...Felsher sat in her office last Friday, preparing to celebrate with an evening of song at the Carlyle Hotel. Someone else would be singing, but that didn't matter. She gazed at a pair of landscapes on her wall--moody paintings of a squall blowing a shaft of rain across the desert--by Peter Hurd, a LIFE artist during World War II. The canvases "were just found in a closet, years and years ago," Felsher says. What would have happened had no one been there to protect them? Happily for us, Elaine...