Patterson, Frederick D. (Frederick Douglass), 1901-1988 Search this
Patterson, Wilhelmina Bessie, 1888-1962 Search this
Extent:
6 Linear feet (9 boxes)
Type:
Collection descriptions
Archival materials
Photographs
Programs
Clippings
Correspondence
Ephemera
Postcards
Place:
Anacostia (Washington, D.C.)
Date:
1866 - 1990.
Summary:
The Dale-Patterson family papers, which date from 1866 to 2010 and measure 6 linear feet, document the personal and professional lives of the Dale-Patterson family who came to live in Hillsdale, Anacostia, area of Washington, D.C., in 1892.
Scope and Contents note:
The Dale-Patterson family papers, which date from 1866 to 1990 and measure 6 linear feet, document the personal and professional lives of the Dale-Patterson family who came to live in Hillsdale, Anacostia, area of Washington, D.C., in 1892. The collection is comprised of correspondence, photographs, clippings, and ephemera.
Arrangement note:
The collection is arranged in four series:
Series 1: Dale-Patterson Family papers
Series 2: Charles Qualls papers
Series 3: Community Organizations
Series 4: Subject Files
Biographical/Historical note:
The Dale family came to Washington, DC in 1886 when John Henry Dale, Sr., a gifted self-taught man, obtained a position as clerk in the newly contracted Pension Bureau building at 5th and G Streets, NW. First they lived near 13th Street and Florida Avenue, NW, then moved to Howard Road in Anacostia. Dale built a house at 2619 Nichols Avenue, now Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue, drawing the plans and supervising the construction. The Dales and only one other family lived in this solidly built house for 100 years before it was sold to a church group and demolished.
General Note:
Finding Aid Note: This finding aid is associated with a MARC collection-level record.361883
Provenance:
The Dale-Patterson Family collection was donated to the Anacostia Community Museum on April 07, 2013.
Restrictions:
Use of the materials requires an appointment. Please contact the archivist at acmarchives@si.edu.
Rights:
The Dale-Patterson Family collection is the physical property of the Anacostia Community Museum. Literary and copyright belong to the author/creator or their legal heirs and assigns. Rights to work produced during the normal course of Museum business resides with the Anacostia Community Museum. For further information, and to obtain permission to publish or reproduce, contact the Museum Archives.
Material is subject to Smithsonian Terms of Use. Should you wish to use NASM material in any medium, please submit an Application for Permission to Reproduce NASM Material, available at Permissions Requests.
Papers documenting inventor Earl S. Tupper, his inventions, Tupperware and the Tupper Company.
Scope and Contents:
The collection documents the life of inventor Earl S. Tupper through correspondence, notes, photographs, drawings and sound recordings.
Arrangement:
The collection is organized into five series.
Series 1: Personal Papers, 1910-1989
Series 2: Early Business Papers and Scientific Notes, 1930-1965
Series 3: Tupper Corporation/Tupperware Business, 1908-1983
Series 4: Neil Osterweill Oral Histories and Research Notes, 1926-1989
Subseries 4.1: Research Files, 1926-1989
Subseries 4.2: Original Masters, 1987-1989
Subseries 4.3:Research Copies, 1987-1989
Subseries 4.4:Research Copies, 1987-1989
Subseries 4.5: Preservation Copies, undated
Series 5: Center for Advertising History, Oral History Interviews, 1992
Subseries 5.1: Original Masters, 1992
Subseries 5.2: Research Copies, 1992
Subseries 5.3: Research Copies, 1992
Subseries 5.4: Preservation Copies, 1992
Subseries 5.5: Abstracts and Transcripts, 1992, 2003
Biographical / Historical:
Earl Silas Tupper was born in 1907, to a New Hampshire farming family of modest means. During his youth and boyhood in New England, his mother Lulu Clark Tupper, took in laundry and ran a boarding house, while his father, Earnest Leslie operated a small family farm. Earnest Tupper loved to tinker, developing labor-saving devices for the farm and family greenhouses; one of his devices, a frame to facilitate the cleaning of chickens, was granted a patent. It is from his father that Earl Tupper is said to have developed a love for invention. Even as a boy, Tupper showed an enterprising and entrepreneurial spirit. At the age of 10, Earl discovered he could move more of the family's produce by selling door-to-door, bringing the product directly to the customer.
After high school graduation in 1925, Tupper continued to work in the family greenhouses in Shirley Massachusetts for two years. Tupper was an ambitious young man, though, and he was determined to earn his first million by the time he was thirty. During the twenties, he set out on a number of different paths, including work as a mail clerk and on a railroad labor crew. In 1928, he took a course in tree surgery, with the idea of setting up his own tree surgery and landscaping business. He continued to help out with the family business, and got married in 1931. Through the early thirties, the landscaping and nursery business continued to grow and thrive, despite the Depression, enabling Tupper to pursue some of his ideas and inventions. His scientific notebooks for this period reflect the diversity of his interests. Even after Tupper Tree Doctors was forced into bankruptcy in 1936, Tupper remained optimistic about his ability to develop and manufacture some of his inventions.
In 1936, Tupper met Bernard Doyle, the inventor of Viscoloid, the plastics manufacturing division of DuPont, located in nearby Leominster, Mass. He went to work for DuPont in 1937, but stayed there only one year. Later, Tupper would say it was at Dupont "that my education really began." Tupper took the experience he had gained in plastics design and manufacturing at DuPont, and struck out on his own. In 1938, he formed the Earl S. Tupper Company, advertising the design and engineering of industrial plastics products in Leominster, Massachusetts. Much of the fledgling company's early work was performed under subcontract to DuPont. Business was good during the war, because despite the difficulty of acquiring the raw materials necessary for plastics production for the domestic market, Tupper Plastics was able to garner several defense contracts, molding parts for gas masks and Navy signal lamps.
After the war, Tupper turned his attention to developing plastics for the growing consumer market. Many of his earliest designs, which included plastic sandwich picks, cigarette cases, and an unbreakable tumbler for the bathroom, were offered as premiums with other products. For example, Tek toothbrushes offered the tumbler with purchase of a toothbrush, and cigarette companies and other businesses offered cigarette cases imprinted with their logo.
Plastics was still in its infancy in the forties, and the commercial market for plastics product was limited by plastic's reputation for being brittle, greasy, smelly and generally unreliable. Tupper's contributions were twofold. First, he developed a method for purifying black polyethylene slag, a waste product produced in oil refinement, into a substance that was flexible, tough, non-porous, non-greasy and translucent. Second, he developed the Tupper seal, an airtight, watertight lid modeled on the lid for paint containers. Together, these innovations laid the foundations for the future success of Tupperware. Nevertheless, marketing the new product presented a challenge. Tupper experimented with department store sales, but as Businessweek reported in 1954, "in retail stores it fell flat on its face." It seemed clear that the new lid required explanation or demonstration.
In the late 1940s, Thomas Damigella (in Massachusetts) and Brownie Wise (in Florida) were selling household products through Stanley Home Products. Purchasing through local plastics distributors, both began offering Tupperware as part of their product line, and were moving enough Tupperware to attract Earl Tupper's attention. In 1948, Tupper met with Damigella, Wise, and several other local distributors at a Sheraton in Worcester Massachusetts to discuss a new distribution plan. Modeled on the home party plan pioneered by Stanley Home Products and expanded and refined by Brownie Wise, the home party plan became and remains the exclusive outlet for Tupperware. Wise was named Vice President of the company (named Tupperware Home Parties) in 1951, a position she held until 1958, when Tupper sold the company to Rexall for $16 million.
Tupperware's success stems from the combined genius of Earl Tupper, the self-styled Yankee inventor and entrepreneur and Brownie Wise, the consummate saleswoman and motivator. If Tupper personified reverence for the product, Wise personified respect for the sales force. "If we build the people," she was fond of saying, "they'll build the business." Almost half a century later, their legacy remains an important part of Tupperware's continuing success.
Earl S. Tupper died on October 5, 1983.
Related Materials:
Materials in the Archives Center
Leo Baekeland Papers (AC0005)
DuPont Nylon Collection (AC0007)
J. Harry DuBois Collection on the History of Plastics (AC0008)
Celluloid Corporation Records (AC0009)
Albany Billiard Ball Company Records (AC#0011)
Brownie Wise Papers (AC0509)
Ann and Thomas Damigella Collection (AC0583)
Materials at the National Museum of American History
Tupperware related artifacts are located in the Division of Home and Community Life (now Division of Cultural and Community Life), the Division of Medicine and Science and the Division of Work and Industry. See accessions: 1983.0711; 1984.1098; 1985.3014; 1985.3015; 1987.0180; 1990.3055; 1992.0209; 1992.0605; 1993.0257; 1994.0118; 1994.0124; 1995.0109; 1998.0070; 1998.0220; 2012.0133; and 2014.3077.
Provenance:
The materials were donated to the Archives Center in 1992 by Glenn O. Tupper, Earl Tupper's son.
Restrictions:
Collection is open for research but master (preservation) tapes are stored off-site and special arrangements must be made to work with it. Contact the Archives Center for information at archivescenter@si.edu or 202-633-3270.
Rights:
Collection items available for reproduction, but the Archives Center makes no guarantees concerning copyright restrictions. Other intellectual property rights may apply. Archives Center cost-recovery and use fees may apply when requesting reproductions.
Smithsonian Institution. Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage Search this
Type:
Archival materials
Date:
September 27-30, 1979
Introduction:
In 1979, the Folklife Program inaugurated a new kind of exhibition, under the rubric Folklife in the Museum. It grew out of the Festival's long experience in the presentation of folklife traditions and was designed to complement Smithsonian museum collections. This new program had several components: indoor displays and demonstrations by tradition bearers making objects like those in the collections, presentations by scholars of the folklife traditions defined by the people and their objects, and films that portrayed living traditions in their natural settings. Together, these components were mobilized to create events designed to function within museum walls: living environments, symposia, and film and lecture programs.
Of course, in previous years folklife programs had been held in the museums during the Festival. However, this year's set of events marked the first time the indoor Folklife in the Museum Program was separated in time from the outdoor Festival of American Folklife. Smithsonian organizers came to realize that museum presentations had potentialities and problems different from those of a festival. They were deemed worthy of special attention in their own right rather than as components of a larger event, and the 1979 activities - focused on Folk Medicine - were considered as a pilot for future presentations of folklife traditions within Smithsonian Institution walls.
Activities were of three types: in the National Museum of History and Technology's Medical Sciences hall, traditional healers, curers, and herbalists discussed and demonstrated living traditions in American folk medicine for the three days of the program. A symposium, "Folk Medicine: Alternative Approaches to Health and Healing", was held in NMHT on September 29 and 30. Finally, a film festival presented documentary films about folk medicine in the Museum's Carmichael Auditorium.
Jack Santino served as Program Coordinator, assisted by Pamela Ow. Steve Zeitlin coordinated the film program, assisted by Barr Weissman.
Presenters:
C. Jason Dotson, Glenn Hinson, Barbara Reimensnyder
Consultants:
Brooks McNamara, Douglas Elliott, David J. Hufford
Symposium speakers:
Richard M. Dorson, Norman Farnsworth, Joe S. Graham, Wayland D. Hand, David J. Hufford, Barbara Reimensnyder, Robert T. Teske, Andrew Weil, Don Yoder, James Harvey Young
Participants:
Maude Bryant, 1894-, midwife, Moncure, North Carolina
Dora Darden, 1934-, practitioner of traditional home remedies, Indianapolis, Indiana
Marjorie Darden, 1957-, practitioner of traditional home remedies, Indianapolis, Indiana
Clyde Hollifield, 1944-, herbalist, Old Fort, North Carolina
Burlah C. Largen, 1893-1981, black gum toothbrush maker, Hillsville, Virginia
Hattie Mae Lee, 1914-2007, herbalist, Moncure, North Carolina
John Lee, 1910-2005, herbalist, Moncure, North Carolina
Hawk Littlejohn, 1941-2000, Native American traditional healer, Pittsboro, North Carolina
John H. Persing, 1941-, physician, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania
Donald A. Troutman, 1932-1999, pharmacist, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania
Barlow J. Wagman, 1931-, dentist, Riverdale, Maryland
Ernestine Weddle, 1932-1988, practitioner of traditional home remedies, Indianapolis, Indiana
Collection Restrictions:
Access to the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections is by appointment only. Visit our website for more information on scheduling a visit or making a digitization request. Researchers interested in accessing born-digital records or audiovisual recordings in this collection must use access copies.
Collection Rights:
Permission to publish materials from the collection must be requested from the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections. Please visit our website to learn more about submitting a request. The Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections make no guarantees concerning copyright or other intellectual property restrictions. Other usage conditions may apply; please see the Smithsonian's Terms of Use for more information.
Collection Citation:
Smithsonian Folklife Festival records: 1979 Festival of American Folklife, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Institution.
Access to the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections is by appointment only. Visit our website for more information on scheduling a visit or making a digitization request. Researchers interested in accessing born-digital records or audiovisual recordings in this collection must use access copies.
Collection Rights:
Permission to publish materials from the collection must be requested from the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections. Please visit our website to learn more about submitting a request. The Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections make no guarantees concerning copyright or other intellectual property restrictions. Other usage conditions may apply; please see the Smithsonian's Terms of Use for more information.
