Transcript of National Archives History Office Oral History Interview
Interviewer(s): Brian Knowles
Interviewee(s): Edward J. McCarter

Brian Knowles: I am Brian Knowles. I am acting as an oral historian for the National Archives and Records Administration History Office. Today’s date is 11 April 2014. I am conducting an Oral History Interview with Mr. Edward J. McCarter, Chief of the Still Picture Branch, Special Media Archives Division at Archives II, College Park, Maryland. Good morning, sir. Would you please provide a brief overview of your career timeframe at the National Archives?

Edward J. McCarter: Sure. I began in 1975, I think it was. I think my career date is stated at ‘76 but I’m not sure that’s quite correct. In any event, I started in ‘75 as a student temp. I was in graduate school at the University of Maryland working on my Ph.D. and, and I saw this job posted over on the history board about working at the Archives. And then, and I said, oh, that sounds like an interesting job. So, I decided to go ahead and apply. And somehow, I can’t even remember about, sort of Byzantine process of getting into the Federal Government as an outsider. Somehow I winded my way through the process and ended up working at the old General Archives Division out in Suitland, Maryland. And that, that’s sort of the beginning of it. And I plan on retiring on May 31 of this year, 2014.

Brian Knowles: Excellent. How did your education influence your decision to work at the Archives?

Edward J. McCarter: Didn’t really. As I was saying before you turned on the recording, a lot of people who are my age who came to the Archives in the early seventies, mid-to-early seventies, probably backed into it. They were all basically history graduates, had little or no knowledge of what the National Archives did or was. And they were graduating, looking for a position, and then they found a position at the Archives. And, obviously it relates to history. So it’s sort of a decent fit in terms of your graduate work or your undergraduate work and the kind of work you would do here at the Archives. My undergraduate degree was actually in American Studies at Maryland, with my major concentration was actually film, not photography. So, it’s an interesting story how I ended up in the photo unit rather than the film unit. I guess you could say there is a relationship between the two. You know, you love history. I’ve always loved it from the time I was in grammar school. I used to read all these books on historical topics and subjects. And it continued through high school and college and graduate school.

Brian Knowles: All right. So, it was just school you were doing before you came to the National Archives or did you have other work experience?

Edward J. McCarter: No. Right before I came, I started graduate school, after I graduated from college in ‘67, ‘66, ‘67, I think. I taught for two years in an elementary school, seventh and eighth grade. And because I had a minor in theology, I also prepared the second graders for their first communion. I had more theology than the nuns on the staff at the school. So that was a very interesting experience. But teaching and seventh and eighth, I taught history. And after two years of teaching I realized I really wanted more of a challenge in terms of working with students. I wanted kids who were more interested in what I was interested in. I always felt like teaching in elementary school was half acting and half teaching. You know, because you need to figure out ways to keep the kids interested, but yet at the same time provide information about whatever topic you’re teaching. So you sort of kind of juggle those two roles when you’re teaching in, at an elementary school level. So I decided to go back to graduate school and applied to a whole bunch of places. And I decided to go to Maryland because I was interested in a program of American Studies. And at that time, the University of Maryland, every faculty member on the staff had a degree in American Studies which is far different from all the other places I applied to. Most of the places, it was a kind of cooperative program where somebody from the history department and the English department and film or whatever, would come together and sort of cobble together a program on American Studies. But everybody at Maryland had a degree in it. So I thought well, that makes sense, you know. Go someplace where the people who’ve had their graduate work in the same field I was interested in. So, after that two years of teaching, then I went to graduate school. And from there, probably about two years into it, that’s when I hit on the job at the Archives.

Brian Knowles: Alright. So did you finish the Master’s degree before—

Edward J. McCarter: I finished the Master’s degree. I was in a straight-through program so I didn’t have to do a Master’s thesis. But I didn’t actually finish my Ph.D. I got to the point where I had a dissertation topic and I had an advisor. And, and then a position opened up, a more permanent position opened up at the Archives, other than the student temporary position that I was in. And I talked it over with my advisor. And probably the best advice I’ve ever gotten from an advisor was you’re stupid if you don’t take the job. So, I took it. I never actually went back and finished the dissertation. I had, you know, I was getting kind of old at that point. So it was time to actually start working for a living.

Brian Knowles: So in that temporary student trainee position, what were your typical duties, responsibilities?

Edward J. McCarter: It was pretty wide ranging. At first accessions would come in and you’d just throw the new accessions up on the shelves. You know, this is again, at the General Archives Division. Huge stacks out in Suitland, as you’re probably familiar with. We would climb all the way up to the top and move things up onto the shelves. So we did that for a while and then a few months into it, and I clearly remember this, the Division Director, at the time was Dan Goggin, at the General Archives Division. And he called me into his office and he said, you know I was looking over your resume. He said, I can see you’ve got a Master’s degree here. He said, maybe we can find something more fitting for you to do. So he put me into the reference section. And I responded to a lot of reference letters from the general public. Mostly I was working with the Bureau of Land Management Records and the Patent Records at the time. Then I would work also in the research room. Sometimes I’d help researchers with various subjects that they were working on. Again, related pretty much to BLM and Patent Records. And I continued to put boxes on shelves and whatever else they had to do. I didn’t do any project work at all. It was, it was completely reference oriented when I was out at Suitland.

Brian Knowles: Great. Now at this time did you do any preparation for microfilming or reproduction? Did you do any of that work out there?

Edward J. McCarter: We did a little bit of that, and I got more involved in the microfilming when I moved from the student temp position to the archivist position on the OMGUS Project. There was a lot of, you know, microfilm and microform related work involved in that.

Brian Knowles: Now did you seek out that project, or was that something assigned to you?

Edward J. McCarter: No. I was there. And, again, Dan Goggin—that project was a cooperative project between the Bundesarchiv in Germany and the National Archives, actually funded by Volkswagen. That’s who paid the salary. I was in an excepted service position. And, you know, they needed somebody to fill the position. I was there. Because it was excepted service, you could pick a person without going through the whole civil service process. You know, posting a job and all that sort of thing. Because it was a temporary position. It was going to be lasting for about three to four years. So, you know, they had liked the work I had done in the reference section. And they thought with my background I could probably fit into this. And I happened to be there. That was the other part of it. I needed a job. So they hired me to work on that project, which is extremely interesting. I don’t know if you know anything about OMGUS records? These are the occupation records in Germany after World War II. And my job was basically to work with historians and archivists who came from various different parts of Germany, to the States, to review all of the records. And there was roughly, I think, 17-18,000 cubic feet total of all the OMGUS records. I might be a little shy on that. They came over in shipments. And there were 17 separate shipments. You know, each shipment dealt with a specific body of records. There were both the headquarters records that were in Berlin, as well as all of what they called the land records, sort of the regional records that were in the various different locations in the U.S. Zone of Occupation in World War II. So they would come over and they would review the records. And I had to go through the records, kind of screen them for privacy, get them ready, all sorts of things that you do to prepare things for researchers. And I’d work with them. I knew something about that post-World War II period. I took a couple of classes in graduate school. And I did a lot of reading on my own about the occupation, which is a very interesting period of time. But that was a whole area of historiography that the Germans had nothing, which is unusual for Germans. Because if nothing else, they document their history. But during that period, the U.S. Army was running the whole shebang. So, and all the records relating to that were here. So they would come over at, in various barrages, sometimes two or three at a time from Munich or Wardenburg Baden or Kassel from Berlin, you know, and they’d work here. And they would identify the records that they thought were of historical value for Germany. We would get the records prepared and take them to the microfilm office at NARA at WNRC. And they would microform, it was all done on microfiche. They would microfiche the records and then we would package it up and ship it to the Bundesarchiv who then would distribute it. You know, multiple copies were made for the Bundesarchiv and the other archival units that in different parts of Germany that were involved on the project. And it was very interesting because I got to meet some very interesting people, some very knowledgeable people. Their archival program is worlds away from our archival program. I went through a nine or ten month training program at the Archives. These guys don’t get into the archival program until they have their Ph.D. in hand. And then it’s about a two or three year process. So it’s a much different thing. So I learned quite a bit about what it was to be an archivist and what you do and what you don’t do, just talking to them. Fortunately, they all spoke English. You know, I didn’t have to learn German because, of course, the records were all in English. So I, they all had a very good command of English. It was very easy to talk to them. They were a very interesting group of people to work with, very nice. I have one funny story. I probably worked with 40 different people. There was one person, Klaus Oldenhage, who was the second in command at the Bundesarchiv, who was sort of shepherding this project from the German end. And he would come over for longer periods of time. And we got to be pretty good friends. But I remember all the people who came over, they were all pretty young. You know, most of them, obviously, post-World War II, born about the same time I was. But I remember one time, it was very funny. One of the guys who came over, and I can’t remember his last name, but his first name of Adolph. And every one of the other Germans who was there, at the time when he came, apologized to me that his name was Adolph. They just couldn’t understand how anyone after World War II would name their child Adolph. So, I thought it was kind of humorous. They were very funny people. You know, they were very formal in certain situations and then very familiar in other situations. We did a lot of things socially. I took them to baseball games which was hilarious. Because trying to explain baseball, even to some of them who had learned baseball during the occupation. Because some of these guys remembered the U.S. troops there during the occupation, the ones who were a little bit older. But taking them to a baseball game and trying to explain the rules of baseball. Say, well, this is the case here, but if this happens, then that’s the case. And, and they would scratch their head because, for them, the game that they knew was soccer and that’s pretty straight forward. Here’s a rule. That’s the rule. There’s no certain exceptions in certain cases. Whereas, baseball, you know, there are different exceptions depending on what’s going on. So, that was a lot of fun, in addition to being a real learning experience for me. And that went on for about two and a half years. And then, actually went over there and spent two weeks traveling around Germany. And went to a conference in, I’m not going to remember, Hamburg. There was a conference on the OMGUS project in Hamburg. And a lot of historians from Germany were there. And all of the guys who worked on the project were there. And so, that was kind of interesting. But the other part was when we would travel someplace, when we would go to a particular location, there was always somebody there that I knew. So we’d get off the train and we didn’t have to worry about where you were going to stay, what you were going see, what you were going to eat, anything like that. It was all laid out. That’s the way they are. You know, boom, boom, boom, boom. They had everything organized. And Klaus traveled with me the whole time I was there, the whole two weeks. So we travelled all over Germany. It was just interesting. The most interesting part was traveling through East Germany and into East Berlin. Because he said, you’ve got to take this trip, just to understand what’s going on. So we took a train, a West German train. And when we hit the border between East Germany and West Germany, everybody gets off. You got to get onto an East German train. So, it’s like going from a first class train into a cattle car. I mean, wooden seats, wooden cars. I mean, it was, I was worried the whole thing was going to fall apart. But anyway, so we get in the train. You know, we’re going through East Germany. And that was very interesting. There was barbed wire all along the thing. I asked Klaus, what’s all this barbed wire for? He said, oh, there’s mines there. So that people won’t try to jump over the barbed wire and get on the train. And so when we hit, just before we go into West Berlin, you stop on a siding and the East German police come on the train. And they’re looking at your passports. And they send the dogs underneath the train because they want to make sure there’s nobody hanging on underneath who’s going to sneak in from East Germany to West Berlin. And then we stayed in West Berlin. And went into East Berlin, saw what it was like there. And the difference, and this is back now, ‘77, ‘78, the difference between these two parts of the city was just unbelievable. I mean West Berlin was like going to New York City. East Berlin looked like the San Francisco earthquake. I mean, there was still a lot of damage left over from the war and we’re talking in the 1970s. Because they didn’t bother to repair things. You know, after the unification things changed. Then East Berlin became part of the whole German country. And I think things, I haven’t been there since then. But that was a very stark reality going into, into East Berlin and seeing what it was like over there as opposed to what, and just watching people walking around carrying submachine guns was sort of an experience. I mean, you don’t normally see that in American cities. At least you didn’t then. I’m not sure about now. But, at that point in time that was, that was, that was pretty, pretty strange.

Brian Knowles: Did you conduct any archival work in East Berlin or…?

Edward J. McCarter: No. It was, it was just basically went over for the conference and then, then we just kind of travelled around to kind—

Brian Knowles: [Interposing] Mm.

Edward J. McCarter: —of see Germany. See a lot of the places that I, you know, were in the records that I had worked with. So it was very interesting. I’m sorry if I’ve wandered off the topic here.

Brian Knowles: No. No. This is perfect.

Edward J. McCarter: But it was kind of an interesting thing. And then that, that project was coming to an end so, you know, I was back to Dan Goggin. Said, hey Dan, you got any full-time positions available? And he was able to bring me in for very short period of time as an archives technician. And then almost immediately I got switched into the CIDS program which back then was much more organized and structured and, and useful, a very useful program which unfortunately, I think, that was discontinued a number of years ago. And I think it was a huge mistake. Because what’s happened is, you don’t have, for lack of a better term, classes of new young archivists coming in who learn from the people who are already there. So there’s this huge gap in time frame between people like my generation who came in and the people who follow. And, you know, I think it’s really affected the way we get work done. Because I’m going to walk out the door on May 31st. There’s a lot of stuff that the two of the archivists who worked for me were extremely good. They just don’t know, you know. And that’s, kind of institutional knowledge too. I mean, that’s pretty important. But it, there’s huge gap there and you can’t impart that, you know. Because you’re working day-to-day and you’re trying to get things done. So, anyway, that’s quite an editorial comment about the CIDS program.

Brian Knowles: Yeah. It’s tough to transfer that knowledge. Yeah.

Edward J. McCarter: Well it, and as I said, you’re losing new blood coming into the building working in a professional capacity, which is what you need. And now it’s being done helter-skelter. You know, oh, well we got one position here. And we got one position there. And blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, and it’s, it’s just, to me, it’s pretty chaotic and I just don’t think it works very well. But anyway, so I was able to get in and I was in the CIDS project for a year when I was out in Suitland at the General Archives Division. I worked in a processing branch so I did a lot of arrangement, description projects, and worked with researchers. Everybody had to do a microfilm project at that point. That was part of the mandatory training. You know, we did rotations to other units, which was, it was very useful. You know, going into the appraisal unit. I actually, one of mine was the Motion Picture Unit, which was what I was pretty interested in. I did one to the Exhibits Office and a couple of other offices. I tried to stay away from Admin Offices. And just go to custodial and program unit offices. So that was very helpful in learning about all the different parts of the Archives. And how they all, all sort of fit together to deal with then entire life cycle of the records. I don’t know whether that same thing is happening today. I’m just, I’m not sure. It’s been a long time since we had an archivist trainee. So, they may very well be still going through rotations. If they’re not, they really should be. Because it’s an extremely valuable experience to see what other people do. And plus, you make a lot of good contacts that become very useful in your work.

Brian Knowles: Did you have a mentor when you first came in or somebody who you looked up to as a mentor?

Edward J. McCarter: Not really. You know, the people who supervised me, and this goes back a way, John Mendelsohn, John was German and a very good archivist. He was sort of the Assistant Projects Chief. And Ed Hill, who was Projects Chief out at Suitland, a really, extremely talented and knowledgeable archivist. For a long time, the only two supervisors that I ever had at the Archives were Ed Hill and Betty Hill. Betty was his wife. When I moved to Still Pictures, she was my supervisor for many years. So, I mean, I kind of looked to them for direction in, you know, in how to do things. And how to handle archival projects if I ran into an issue that I really wasn’t familiar with I could go to them. And then, at the time I was there, when I was a student, there were a lot of new archivists being hired at the time. So people like Bob Coran, Henry Mayer, who now works at the Holocaust Museum, Jack Saunders, John Vernon, all these, Patrice Brown, all these new archivists who came in. There was a period when they just hired a whole bunch of new people. So they were all going through the program and getting trained ahead of me because I was still a student. And then when I got into the General Archives Division, I kind of, you know, gravitated, Greg Bradsher is another one, kind of gravitated toward them, you know, for help. But having a specific mentor, that, that didn’t really happen until I got to Still Pictures. So…

Brian Knowles: So did that trainee position give you a good foundation for a career at NARA?

Edward J. McCarter: Yeah. I think it did. I mean, as I said, I think the rotations were among the most useful things. You know, learning about archival work. You know, basic things like, how do you identify a series? And, you know, how do you write a series description that makes sense and is useful to a researcher? Ed Hill actually wrote the NARA bulletin on preparation of preliminary inventories, I think it was. And in that, he also discussed series descriptions and how to create series titles. All the kinds of things that are really critically important when you’re writing a series description, so that when a researcher looks at something, particularly now online, they can say, yeah, I need to look at that. You know, there’s enough information there. And sometimes, my experience is it’s in the title. You know, the most important thing, the thing that hooks people and gets them to realize, ah, I need to take a look at that, is how you frame that title. Because sometimes that’s all they ever see. They look at that. And if it doesn’t seem interesting, they go onto the next thing, you know. You know, they delete that and go on to the next hit. So I’ve always felt and when I trained archivists that worked for me, I’ve always felt, particularly with photography, you really need to focus on that title. And, because it’s going to really tell a researcher right off the bat, whether that’s something they want to look at. You know, you don’t want to have titles like photographs relating to the Bureau of Land Management or something innocuous like that that nobody can really know what it’s about. You want to get some subject content if you can in that title. So they, oh, yeah. You know, that’s really going to be interesting. I really need to look at that. And then, of course, in the series descriptions.

Brian Knowles: Mm-hmm.

Edward J. McCarter: In Stills, we write much, much longer series descriptions, packed with a lot more information because that’s what researchers want. They want to be able to look at a series description and read through it and have it kind of identify the sort of general character of the records. But also some real specific examples of imagery that’s in there that they might be interested in. Things that are, you know, you wouldn’t think are there. You kind of pick them out and throw them in the description and say, you know, these kinds of images are located here. And, you know, research are based on the title or even the organization that created the records, the creating organization, you might not expect those kinds of subjects or topics to be located there. And so you can capture that in the series description. And now we’ve always done that. I mean that’s one of the things that we’ve done in the Special Media Division as whole that is pretty different from how textual works. You know, textual doesn’t work in the same way, very different groups. So, yeah. I’m sorry. I’m kind of rambling.

Brian Knowles: No, no, no. It’s perfect.

Edward J. McCarter: But, yeah. I think that was a really good foundation, even though it was only a year, working with Ed and John. You know, I learned a tremendous amount about how to be an archivist, what to do. You know, what’s important, what isn’t important. How to write things.

Brian Knowles: Well with that, the position from ‘77 to ‘80, as an archivist, the Freedom of Information Act was passed. Did that affect you at all or how do you feel about the Freedom of Information Act?

Edward J. McCarter: Well, I mean, I think it’s good in a lot of instances. I think it gets abused because a lot of researchers don’t understand that what the act was designed for was records that are restricted from use. Everything we have in Still Pictures is available. Yet we get a hundred FOIAs a year asking for photographs that are already available. So there’s no real need to use the FOIA. So it’s just a matter of education—

Brian Knowles: [Interposing] Mm.

Edward J. McCarter: —that between researchers not understanding what the intent of what the law was. And I believe it’s a very good one. As opposed to records that are already open. You know, we don’t have anything that’s restricted. You know, everything we have we make available. And that’s our goal. I mean, that’s what we do, is try to make the records available as much as possible. When we talk to agencies and I just got finished talking to DIA a couple of weeks ago. We’ve got like 1,100 paintings from the early eighties. And some of them are classified. I said you really need to get these things declassified before you transfer them. Because, first of all, the information should no longer be classified. I mean they’re photographs of jets and ships and bases and, okay, you know, maybe, maybe, you know, 25 years ago that was important and needed to be classified, but it doesn’t any more. So we try to get them, as much as possible, if they have any classified records of, to get them declassified so that when we brings things in we can make everything available.

Brian Knowles: What’s DIA?

Edward J. McCarter: Oh, I’m sorry. Defense Intelligent Agency.

Brian Knowles: Thank you.

Edward J. McCarter: They have a storage location over in Landover, which isn’t too far from here. So…

Brian Knowles: So how did you wind up in Stills?

Edward J. McCarter: Stills. Well that’s a winding, I knew from my graduate work at Maryland, I was a teaching assistant for the education, the head of the education office at the American Film Institute. So, through him, I met Bill Murphy who was the head of the Motion Picture Branch at the time. This is in the ‘77, ‘80, period. And, through meeting Bill and him knowing me and the work I did in graduate school, my interest in film. He came to me at one point and said there’s going to be a position available in Motion Pictures. Somebody’s going to be moving to a different unit. So I want you to make sure that you know it’s available and you make application. So, I thought, wow, I’m only here for two or three years and already I’m going to, you know, to pig heaven. This is where I really wanted to be, was in Motion Pictures. So that happened. The fellow moved. And they started the process of filling the position. And that’s when Ronald Reagan came into office. And good old Ron put the skids on a lot of things. And he kind of stopped government positions moving around, cut the budget dramatically.

Brian Knowles: Mm.

Edward J. McCarter: The fellow who was supposed to go to this other position had to move back to Motion, which means that position was no longer available for me. And on top of it, about a year later and after I got to, to Stills, I was there for about six or eight months, the RIFs came, the Reduction in Force came. And it came hard. Mostly, everyone who had been recently hired, archivists, were all going to be RIFed. They were going to lose their jobs.

Brian Knowles: Mm.

Edward J. McCarter: That’s the way it worked. Fortunately, I had a connection with somebody at the Air Force in the Photography Unit and I could get over and move into that position. But I would be going from like a GS-11 to a GS-5. So that agony went on for a number of months. You know, we were all prepared for what it was going to be like to get RIFed. We were given help in writing resumes, and things to find new positions in agencies that still had money. And that went on, I think, that was like four or five months. It was really an agonizing situation ‘cause I was just starting into the career. And I said, oh my God, this is the greatest place in the world after I realized what it was all about, you know. Like I said, when I came in as a student, I had no clue what the Archives was. But the longer I was here, the more I realized this is the neatest place in the world to work if you like history. I mean it’s just unbelievable. So, you know, I thought, oh my gosh. After all this, I’m going to be out on the street in like two or three months. So that whole agony went on. I don’t mean to prolong it, but I think this is an important thing to know. There were a lot of people who were caught up in that. You know, a lot of good people, Cindy Fox, for example, who was head of Reference, downtown, she got RIFed. She eventually came back.

Brian Knowles: Mm.

Edward J. McCarter: What, what, what ended up happening is, this is the honest to God truth, the Friday before I was going to be terminated, I get a notice from OPM that somehow I was not going to be terminated. Because of all the experience I had in my accepted service position and my student temporary position and the little bit of time I had on as a full-time regular federal employee, it pushed me to the very top of the list of all the people who were going to be RIFed. And only a couple of those people got saved.

Brian Knowles: Wow.

Edward J. McCarter: I happened to be one of them. So that weekend was just amazing. I thought, I just can’t believe this, you know. I’d been, for months, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to be doing. And then all of a sudden, like that, you’re told, oh, we’re switching gears. So anyways, that was great. So, then I continued on my career in Stills. And, you know, I worked at various positions there, just a basic archivist when I started there. And I started to develop a knowledge of photography. I still had interest in Motion Pictures. And I probably, early on, I would have jumped if I had the opportunity. But the more I worked in the Stills unit, and I took courses at the Corcoran in art history. I went to RIT for that, for that training class where I met Connie McCabe. First time I met Connie and Jim Reilly, Debbie Hess Norris. I started to really develop a real interest in this stuff. So I started to do a lot of heavy duty reading on photography. And as I said, I took, I two classes in the Corcoran, on two different, two classes on history of photography up through modern photography, very interesting, very useful.

Brian Knowles: And just, just to get a clear—so by the 11th hour saving of your employment, they placed you within Stills?

Edward J. McCarter: No. I had gotten to Stills at that point.

Brian Knowles: Okay.

Edward J. McCarter: There had been a position in Stills that I was able to get to.

Brian Knowles: Okay.

Edward J. McCarter: I guess I’m a little murky here on, on the sequence. But I remember specifically, that I was at Stills when the RIF came in. Bill Leary, who for many years was an archivist in Still Pictures, and if you go back through the records you’ll see his name scattered all over the place. And he went to various other positions at NARA and then went on, the last time I knew anything about Bill, he was working in the White House someplace, in records management. Anyway, he moved from the position he was in. And it opened up a position in Stills. And I was able to get into that position. By that time I had developed a relationship with some of the people who were at Stills and they knew of my work. And, yeah, you still had to go through the competition, you know. Names had to be forwarded, your resume to be forwarded, they interviewed you, and all that sort of stuff. And then I was fortunate to get selected. But I had a lot of background. So it helped quite a bit. You know, when I was applying, more background probably than anybody else did, who was applying for it. So at that point, shortly after that was when that all, the whole RIF thing came in. Because I started in Still Pictures in August of 1980. I remember that date, that month clearly, because that was the month I bought my first car, and I met my future wife, all in the same month. I think she decided to marry me because I had a new car. And a full-time position. Anyway, so Reagan came in ‘81. And then it was later in that year. So, probably we’re talking about ‘82 when I, all the stuff was behind me and then I could kind of focus on my work. And, and I started to develop a knowledge and a real interest in photography. And I did develop a little knowledge of photographic processes. Sara knows all about that. The classes I took at RIT, and I took several of these classes where you would spend, particularly at RIT, you spent a lot of time looking at images, trying to identify what they were. Is this an albumen print? Is it a salt paper print? Is it a platinum print? You know, is it a carbon print? Is it a modern gelatin print? You know, is it developing out as opposed to printing out, that sort of thing. And, and then I continued to work on that on my own after I came back. Just looking at everything in the holdings, trying to figure out, what is this? What is this? I became obsessed with, for about two years, I think. I was obsessed with trying to figure out everything I saw. I said- What is it? What is it, you know? Same thing with printing processes. But they were a little more difficult to identify. So I began to develop a knowledge of that and preservation. So I kind of got involved in the preservation of photography. And one of the things I did early on, was I went through the whole damn stack. And I looked at every series we had. And noted some of the issues that needed to be dealt with, preservation problems, you know. Were the prints curling? Were they stuck together? Were there too many in the box? Did the whole box need to be re-boxed, rehoused, new folders? Were the negatives acetate and deteriorating? Were they nitrate? You know, were they polyester? What were there? You know, kind of looking at each one. And kind of setting up a plan of what we would do about trying to attack these different problems. And then coupled with that, we were very fortunate at the time, there was this confluence of things that came together of a real interest at NARA in preservation, which might sound funny, but, you know, up to that time, the conservation lab was pretty skimpy. There was nobody on staff who was a photographic conservator. We had nobody to go to, if we any real issues or concerns. There were some chemists on the staff. Mr. Shahani, who eventually went over to the Library of Congress, he was there for a number of years. But I don’t remember, there were no contacts to really get help in terms of real problems with the holdings. But at the time then, it was kind of interesting, because around that time, Jim Moore, who had been my immediate, not my immediate, but my ultimate boss when I came to Stills, he was the head of what at that time was called the Audio Visual Archives Division. Jim Moore and his deputy was, Dick Meyer. Dick recently passed away about six or eight months ago. And, and then, and then Jim went from that position to, at the time was called NN, which was, I don’t even know how to describe it. Were you here when Michael Kurtz was here?

Brian Knowles: No.

Edward J. McCarter: No. It was basically, I guess the equivalent might be, Ann Cummings, our DDC.

Brian Knowles: Mm.

Edward J. McCarter: You know, in charge of all the Washington area custodial units, Jim Moore. Well Jim had a real interest coming from the AV world in preservation, in film preservation, and also in other non- textual record preservation. So there, as I said, there was this kind of confluence of things coming together that all of a sudden they became really interested in, hey, we need to preserve this stuff. Because we’ve got some really interesting things and really valuable things that are not in the greatest condition. And we need to do something about it. So there was this big push. And, at the time, we didn’t have a photo conservator. And I knew Jim from when I was in the Audio Visual Archives Division. And he asked me at one point, do you know anybody? We’re looking for somebody to do some conservation work here. One of the first people I identified was Kitty Nicholson. Because I knew her from her work at the Library of Congress and Connie McCabe. I knew her from her work at RIT with Jim Reilly, with the Image Permanence Institute. And Jim and Connie wrote a book together on 19th Century photography, The Care and Identification of 19th Century Photography, which was really instrumental and extremely helpful for custodial types. I mean, Sara knows this stuff backward and forward. But for those custodial types it was extremely useful book for helping us to identify the different kinds of photos we had in our holdings. So we were very lucky to, to, Kitty I think did come on board about that time. And not long after that, Connie came on board. And one of the first things we did was we wrote a contract to get an outside conservator. Because it always seemed like, if we generated this thing internally, upper management would say, “oh, yeah, okay.” But if you had somebody from the outside who had a rep and they generated it, then, oh, all of a sudden everybody sits up and they begin to allocate money to do things. So we wrote this contract. We wrote two contracts. One was for Jim Reilly to come in and look at our negatives, because Jim was very interested in preservation of original negatives at the time. And then the second contract for Debbie Hess Norris, she teaches at Winterthur, doesn’t she? You know, she’s the head of the photography program at Winterthur.

Mm-hmm. And, also was a private conservator. She worked on the side. And, yeah, one of the most well-known, as far as I knew at the time, people who knew about photography and preservation. So we were able to get Debbie to come in and spend a week with us. And we just walked around the stack and she looked at stuff. And then she wrote a report telling us what we needed to address. And interestingly enough, it was pretty much what we had done. But, with that report, we were able to start doing things. And one of the biggest things we did and accomplished at that point was to focus on the Mathew Brady original negatives, the Western Survey Negatives, probably the most valuable things we have in this building. And some of the corresponding albumen prints from the period. So we were able to get a project to, because when I first came here, believe this or not, they were still printing off the original plates. They went down to the lab. I almost freaked when I heard that. We had copy negatives. But, you know, they’re not that good. So, the researchers are looking for good quality images. So we were able to cobble together enough money, because preservation again, all of a sudden became an important thing, to really address what to do about the Brady negatives. They were sitting up in the 19th tier of Archives I, you know, near the top of the building. They were all in wooden cases. And I can show you an example of the wooden cases. We have one in the stack that when we moved from Archives I to Archives II, we used those somewhat, in moving things from Archives I to Archives II. Because the design was great. They were little boxes with little slats because the plates should be stored horizontally, not flat. Unfortunately, they were completely made of wood, which was probably among the worst things I guess they could have been in. The room itself had literally no temperature control or humidity control at all. And, like I said, it was pretty much top of the building. And it was impossible to work, because the ceilings, I had to bend over when I walked in there because the ceilings were so low and these damned pipes were all over the place. It was just crazy. So we were able to start addressing this problem. What to do with the most valuable things that we have? And, you know, Connie, through her knowledge, we were able to put together a, a duplication contract. And were able to get a guy named Doug Munson, who was head of the Chicago Albumen Works, which is located in Housatonic, Massachusetts. I think at one time, Doug was in Chicago. But he was at Chicago for a period of time and then moved. So Doug had developed this process of creating what they call, and you, Sara can address this better than I can. To make a duplicate negative from the original Brady plate, he would create an inner positive and what he called the shadow mask. Because the density range of those negatives was so long that modern film, if you just, you know, try to do a direct contact print, contact negative, you couldn’t get the full range of the image.

Brian Knowles: Mm.

Edward J. McCarter: So he created and I think it was based on an old idea. It wasn’t something that was, you know, he read through the literature and found that. You know, there were some hints about some of these things. And so he comes up with this idea. And so he would make the inner positive and the shadow mask. Those were made direct contact with the original negative. And then from that he would create a duplicate negative from that sandwich. And that duplicate negative then, we could use for printing. And it would provide pretty much the highest quality you’re going to get unless you’re printing off the original plate, which of course we wanted to stop doing. Because we didn’t want them to break, particularly when they would contact print them. That would drive me crazy. So, once we had those original negatives then, not only did we have a negative to print on modern paper but if somebody did want a print made on albumen paper and Doug made albumen prints, he could take the shadow mask and create another negative that was designed to print on albumen paper. So this thing was like really cool. So once we got all those negatives printed and that was all, there was about 6,000 Brady plates. And another, I don’t know, 2,600 Western Survey negatives, from the Four Great Western Surveys of the American West from about the late 1860s through the late 1870s. You got photographers like Jackson and O’Sullivan and Dell and the guy I always forget, the Powell survey. I don’t know why I always forget his name, but I always do. Anyway, some of the great photographers from the 19th Century. And, so, and those plates, so we got all those things copied and now we had something we could really provide to researchers that was just great. I mean, they loved it. So what’s the next step? We got to do something about the negatives. We can’t just leave them sit in these wooden boxes. So, am I rambling too much?

Brian Knowles: No. Perfect. Keeping going.

Edward J. McCarter: So we sat down and we looked the wooden cabinets and we said it’s a great design. It just sucks in terms of the physical materials that were used to make it. So we started drawing designs of what we wanted to do. And we got in touch with Interior Steel, which if you’ve ever played a sport or had gym class, they make every damn locker in the United States, I’m pretty sure. Because their name is on it, Interior Steel. Well it was very funny because at the time Interior Steel was starting to move into a different line of work. And they started thinking about making cabinets for other reasons. And so we contacted them and we got one of their reps down. And we told them what we wanted and they went back scratching their heads. Connie had all sorts of information about the gasketing and the paint and this and that, you know, that had to be done for preservation purposes. But also if we had a disastrous flood, to protect the plates because the cases would be pretty much tight, solid. And they scratched their heads and they put together something. And they made a demo and they sent the design and yeah, looks pretty good. You know, so just make sure they are to spec. So, they worked on that for some period of time and then they sent all the cabinets to us. And unfortunately there was a lot of off gassing. There was a lot of smell. First, they were in a warehouse, a GSA warehouse, that’s where they went originally. Connie walked in there, [sniff] she went like that and she said “Uh-oh. We got a problem.” So she contacted the people and they came back. They took all the cases back to Ohio, I think that’s where Interior Steel was. And they had to re-bake them. And that solved the problem. And then we had these wonderful cases which we have in our stack now, which you can go down and look at. And one of the cool things about it is we put windows in it. And why did we put windows in it? So we didn’t have to pull the negatives out when people wanted to look at them. We could just point at them say, that’s a Brady negative. You know, because we have all kinds of people contacting us and saying, gee, can we see the original negatives? Why, of course, now it’s very hard to get in the stack but when we were downtown it was a little different. So, even upper management would say—“oh, can we see those, you know?” And they’d bring their friends along. Plus there were a lot of important visitors that I dealt with—a lot of statusy people. Anyway, that’s why Connie put the windows in because normally you wouldn’t put windows in a cabinet like this. The other cases we have that we bought subsequent to it for storage of photographic materials have no windows at all. They’re just solid cases to protect the records. And they’re made of top quality material so there’s no interaction with the photography. But that’s why we put the windows in, so that we could just point to it. We didn’t have to open the door and pull one out. Because we live in deathly fear of dropping one when you’re handling them. Because they’re just irreplaceable. There are occasions where—I remember when the Archivist first, the new Archivist and practically every Archivist that I’ve dealt with. When he first came on board—he has a real interest in photography. And he was interested in Timothy O’Sullivan so I showed him some original prints that we have of O’Sullivan, some of the original negatives. And, I pulled out a Brady plate of Lincoln. Because that’s just, I mean that’s just, I mean, my God, it’s just unbelievable, you know. And you put it on a light table and you’re looking at Lincoln. And you feel like if I touch that it’s like touching a great man. I mean it’s just unbelievable to have these things. So anyway, we ended up being able to preserve those, those plates. And I think we did a pretty good job. And, you know, we rehoused every single plate too. That was the other thing Connie did. She wrote a contract for four flap enclosures so there was no glue anywhere. Went through every single plate, identified the plate, we made a grid of what it was, what the color is. Some of the plates in those periods, the collodion plates, are darker. Some of them are more gray and I’m not exactly sure why; I think it’s just in the processing that was used.

Yeah. That would change the color. So she was identifying the colors. If there were broken plates, they created these marvelous things, and Sara’s done this too, called sink mats. So we’d have a plate with maybe five or six pieces. They would create a matte that was sunk. It would have edges that were built up. And they’d put the plate in there. And then they’d cut out all these little pieces of archival board and place them in there so that the stuff wouldn’t jiggle around. And it was all stored flat. And we’ve got all of the broken plates, and there were a lot of broken plates, unfortunately. There were a lot of broken plates before they came to the Archives because they were used heavily by the War Department. They were printed a number of different times. And a lot of things get broken. So we, we were able to preserve those. The interesting thing is, Doug had to take everything out of the out of the sink matte, and put it on his printing table. And put it back together so he could make an image out of it. I mean the ones that were broken really badly, there wasn’t much you could do. Sometimes you’d only have two-thirds of a plate, you know, he was able to put back together. Because the rest of it, there were so many little pieces, it would be a nightmare to try to do them. But that was really an important thing. I think of all the things that I’ve been involved in at the Archives, to me that was the absolute most important thing was to do something about those plates. And without Connie and Jim Moore and support from the upper manager to get the money. One more thing—they also created a special room in Archives I. It was in 3E4. And it had very good environmental controls, temperature, and relative humidity. It was, I think, the only room in the whole building where they could control temperature and relative humidity. And, the conservation folks set all the parameters and then they got somebody in to build the air conditioning and heating or whatever equipment that would manage the room was actually sitting in, out in one of the stack areas just outside of the room itself. Because they sealed this part of the room off. And all of the plates were moved from that cruddy old room up there down to 3E4, in the cabinets, in the great environmental conditions. And there were a lot of other records, some of the treasures, that the Archives had were moved into that room because it had those tight controls. And then once we moved to Archives II, the lab again, working with the conservators that were on staff, they said, this is what the shelving has to be like. This is what the temperature and relative humidity has to be like. So those conditions that they developed when we moved from Archives I, it was like coming to heaven, you know. Everything was the way it was supposed to be. But that really was the coolest thing I was ever involved in. It was a lot of fun. It was very interesting. I learned a tremendous amount about the plates. Connie has gone on to become pretty well-known in terms of collodion wet plate photography. And she’s a conservator at the National Gallery of Art now. She left. So that, you know, that’s, that’s kind of where I was. And then, because of that, because of the knowledge I had developed, Betty, the old branch chief who was Joe Doan Thomas. Joe was here for many, many years. We often joked that they built the building around him. Joe was a great old guy and he knew a lot of stuff. And he retired. And then my immediate supervisor who was the Chief of Projects, she went over, she became the Branch Chief. And then I kind of took over the role of the project head. We had a Project Chief and a Reference Chief at the time. And Barbara Burger who retired, mm, six, seven years ago was the Reference Chief for many years. And, and so I worked in that capacity at Stills, pretty long, probably ‘82 or ‘84, like that, through the time of moving. Oh, I got a great story about moving too. When we moved to Archives II. This is hilarious.

Brian Knowles: Sure. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Edward J. McCarter: We had to design the shelving, how it had to be. Because we didn’t, everything wasn’t standard for us. You know, we have a lot of different sized boxes. So we didn’t want to waste a lot of room. So in some compartments we had 10 or 12 shelves. Because we had four by five shoe boxes like that so we wanted to maximize the space. Another series we had over-sized legal boxes so we needed enough space. So we had to kind of look at the stack, look at it series by series and where it was going to go. And what I did, was I’d draw these, I drew these goofy designs by hand. And what was going to go there, you know. In row one, compartments one through ten or one through three had to be ten shelves each. Because we got three compartments of shoe boxes we want to put in there. Well we did that for the whole stupid stack, this whole thing by hand. I mean today you would probably, there must be some computer program that does that sort of stuff. But, anyway, you know, it’s, it’s like this high, the stack of paper. It took me about nine months to a year to finish it.

Brian Knowles: Wow.

Edward J. McCarter: You know, I wasn’t working on it all the time because there was obviously other stuff going on. And we were trying to prepare the stuff to move. That was a massive role. Because the rule was nothing moved that was not in a container. So, and we had an awful lot of things that weren’t in roller drawers or in folders but sitting on a shelf. But, the folders were flip floppy, you know, who knows what would happen. So working with the conservation lab and I think, I’m trying to remember who, Sarah was down there, Sarah Wagner. And I, was Sarah involved? I guess Sarah was pretty much involved in the move. Connie and Sarah, I don’t know. Anyway—

Brian Knowles: [Interposing] Did you have to wait for the building to be fully completed before you started moving or as the various sections of the building were completed you were able to start—

Edward J. McCarter: [Interposing] Well, I think the building was pretty much done. I mean it was still a little rough. But we were among the first units to move out there, the special media.

Brian Knowles: Mm-hmm.

Edward J. McCarter: I think cartographic may have actually been one of the first or second. And, well, we had, there’s all sorts of messes about the move. But anyway, back to this little design that I created. You know, I thought it was a masterpiece. Anyway, so, I had it sitting on my desk. And I needed to do something. So I took it off and I set it on top of my garbage can. And, I went on working and then, you know, you are tugged away doing 20 different things. So, somebody had me and dragged me away. Come back to my desk. It’s gone. Where is it? Oh my God. It’s missing. You know, this was our plan for moving. It was also a plan of what was going at what point. Because we were trying to bring things together in the old building, we had part of series over here and the other part of it over there. So we wanted to make sure they all came together so everything was nice and neat. Plus, because we knew we had the moveable shelving and how active our records were, we didn’t want to put things in necessarily record group order. Because some record groups that were close together in number like 111 and 127, the Marine Corps and the Signal Corps, people are in and out of those things all the time. So we were trying to figure out a way to put the major groups at the beginning of each of the rows in the building here, the black, I forget what they call them. They have a term for them. So we wanted to put the Signal Corps in this one. We wanted to put the Navy over here. And then we wanted put USI over here. And then the Air Force over here because they were among the most active. And we didn’t want them all in the same range, that’s what they are. We didn’t want them all in the same range because then it makes it very difficult for people to go in and pull things as well as doing reference letters or whatever. So that was part of this whole thing that I had written. Anyway, so I’m looking in the garbage can saying, what the hell happened to this? I sat there for a few minutes and I think, oh my God. You know, the garbage person came by. It was sitting there, picked it up, and took it down in the trash. So, I immediately ran down to the loading dock at Archives I. And there’s this big huge bin of junk, trash that everything was fed into. But unfortunately the one I was looking at was empty. So I asked the guys on the loading dock. Say, did somebody come and just pick this thing up? Oh, yeah, came in about a half an hour ago and they took it off to the Navy, down in Southwest. I said “Where the hell in Southwest? Tell me.” So they gave the address of the place where it all went to. I grabbed a couple of people, got in my car, and we drove down to Southwest to this garbage pit basically trying to find this thing. We got in and we talked to some people and we said, we’re from the Archives and I think one of our big bins was just delivered by one of your semis. And, you know, went in the trash. And the guy said, oh, he said, “Gee whiz, it’s, it’s probably over here.” And he took us over to this bin. And there’s this massive bin full of garbage. And, believe it or not, when we were kind of far away. When we got up close, I said, there it is. It was sitting, it must have been the last damn thing that was thrown out. Because it was bound together and I had this cover on it that made it kind of distinctive. It was sitting right there. So I just walked up and I took it, got back in the car, and went back to the building. Otherwise, a year’s worth of work was just down the tubes, and we’d have to start all over again. And the move was coming, like a freight train. So that was kind of a funny story. I can’t even imagine what would have happened if I wouldn’t have got the thing back. Because it really was very useful in terms of getting the records moved in the right sequence. So we got out to Archives II and everything worked out fine. The move actually went very well. We had to kind of control the contractors, because they wanted to just pull things off of the shelf and get it out here. That’s all they were interested in. We were interested in making sure we didn’t have a God damned mess when we actually got out here and things weren’t just totally chaotic. So we had to control them pretty closely. And we, we talked back and forth from somebody supervising downtown. And I was out here making sure, okay, it’s time for 111-SC to come. Okay, it’s time for 19-NN to come or whatever. So that worked really well and it went very quickly. All of the Brady plates and all the survey plates made it out here and not any damage to any of the plates, because we went through every damn one of them to make sure. They actually hired a special mover, an art mover to do the plates. And they created specific kinds of cases with all sorts of padding in it to make sure that the plates were protected. The little cases they were on had pneumatic wheels instead of the hard wheels because you wanted the pneumatic wheels to reduce any of the shock. The trucks were specially designed so that they would eliminate hitting a rut and five plates gone forever. So it was amazing that everything got out here. It really was. I remember we started on March 17, it was St. Patrick’s Day in 1994. And within about two and a half to three months, I think we got everything out and here. And, it was just unbelievable. I was thinking- God, there’s going to be all kinds of a mess and damage. And it really wasn’t. We worked pretty hard in making sure that things were moved properly, so that we could keep integrity of the records together. And we had a cold vault. That was the really great thing. Now we had something to put our color materials, our camera original color materials in. So we had stored everything in a cold vault. That was designed again, by the conservation folks. And, so we moved all of camera originals over there. And then shortly after that, all of the flap about acetate and what to do with acetate. And, oh my God, acetate has to go in cold storage. Well we hadn’t really designed it to go there. We had about 2 1/2 million negatives that were acetate based. So that was the decision and it had to go down there. So we moved all our black and white acetate negatives that we had in the regular stack down into the cold vault so they’re going to be preserved. And we did another contract to kind of look at them and to see which of the groups of acetate negatives were deteriorating, even though they were in cold storage. Again, we had IPI, the Image Permanence Institute, Jim Reilly’s group, came out. And they did a survey through our cold vault using these things they called their little AD strips that give you information about what’s the acetate content in this group of negatives. So they went through the entire negative collection and they kind of identified for us that, even though these are in cold storage, we still think they need to be duplicated for preservation reasons. Because they have gone fairly long and away in terms of deterioration. So that’s been our Bible in terms of what we’re trying to duplicate. And for years we were duplicating on 70 millimeter film, roll film. And then the lab stopped doing analog duplication and we had to move to digitization. So that’s been a bit of a change for us. I guess I’m not really following your schedule.

Brian Knowles: Don’t, this, this is all good. It’s all good.

Edward J. McCarter: I’ll take a break here.

Brian Knowles: Going back to the ‘80, ‘85 time range, what other agencies or donors did you work with at that time?

Edward J. McCarter: Probably the biggest group, the organization that we worked with the most, turned out to be DOD. In ‘82 DOD decided to centralize its photography. And, well, their AV materials too, motion picture, sound, and video things. The idea was they wanted to get better control over all of the imagery that was created within the Defense Department. So it could be used by other components of DOD. And so, at that point, the Marine Corps had its photography in Quantico, the Army in the Pentagon, the Navy at the Navy Yard, the Air Force over on Fern Street in Alexandria. The stuff was all over the place. So they brought it all together in one place. Still kept it separately by the organizations, the Marine Corps records. And not long after they brought it together, we started discussions about the transfer of the World War II era material. Because we, at that point when we moved out here, all we had was World War I, while we were still downtown, all the we had was basically the World War I photography from the Army. We had bits and pieces of Marine Corps. We did have a good portion of Navy photography. And we had zippo for the Air Force, nothing. So we, once they brought it all together then it made it much easier for us to identify what was permanent and what needed to be moved. And at the time, DOD seemed very interested in cooperating with NARA in terms of transferring photography. So one of the things we did is we went over to the old Navy Yard, which is on Bolling Air Force Base down on Anacostia. You can see it when you’re going down 295.

Brian Knowles: Mm-hmm.

Edward J. McCarter: They created this organization called the Defense Audio Visual Agency where everything was centralized from these main groups. Now, keep in mind, there’s a boat load of photography that’s in a lot of other components throughout the Navy, ship yards, bases, ships at sea. So, the theory was, all of the organizations, components of DOD were supposed to transfer everything to this centralized repository. Some of them did, some of them didn’t. But by and large they had the right idea about what they needed to do. Particularly, an agency like DOD that is so huge and sprawling. NASA’s another one. It’s sometimes almost impossible to be able to identify the permanent records they have. So by bringing, centralizing it like that, that was a huge help. So all of the World War II Marine Corps photography, Army, Navy, Air Force, in that time period of ‘82 through ‘85, it’s probably ‘83 or ‘84, we brought in all of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps photography that related to the World War II period and Korea. I don’t even know how many we’re talking about, at least, close to a million and a half images. But the thing is we had to go there and we had to do it ourselves. All the stuff was in Lektrievers. The prints were at one place, the negatives were in another place. We had to kind of determine, “Where’s the cutoff?” Because most of these things were kept numerically. The negatives were all in numerical order. The prints were all in numerical order. Some of the prints were in albums by subject. So we had to try to find a numerical cutoff like, 1,260,000 was the number, whatever. That was kind of the end point for the Korean War, as best as we could, and we had to work with the services to identify that. So what we did is we just went into the Lektrievers and we pulled all the negatives. And then the prints that were in numerical order we’d just pull all the negatives up to that point. The albums that were arranged by subject, that was a little dicier. We had to make our best guess. Sometimes we took things that went a little bit longer. But, substantially the albums covered the World War II and Korea period. The real problem was the index. Because, of course, the index is in order by subject, not by number. So we had to go through every subject and look at the numbers. And pull out the ones that were below the numbers was the cutoff point. And then recreate that index when we brought it downtown. So it just related to what we pulled out. And then, of course, about five or six years later they said, “Oh, let’s transfer another chunk of it.” So we brought that in. So I’d say in that period in particular, the DOD was really the organization that we worked with quite a bit. We worked a lot with NASA too. But we never really got anywhere with NASA. A lot of talking, but not much was actually transferred. But in terms of really bulking up our holdings the DOD and the other organization that was really important was USIA, RG 306. We were able to bring in a lot of the more recent USIA photography. And that is just a gold mine of imagery on politics, art, culture, every aspect of American life. Because basically what USIA is, was a PR wing of the U.S. government overseas, you know. They would create exhibits in countries, Voice of America, be mean to the Communists to undercut the Soviet Union and the whole conglomerate of countries that were under Communist rule. And they would do exhibits there. So they would either create the photographs themselves or they would acquire them from commercial sources for a one-time use and create an exhibit, for example. Or they might make a publication. USIA did a lot of publications. So, those are probably two of the really important agencies that transferred material to us in that time frame that really sort of put kind of put us on the map in terms of research. Because prior to that, we had researchers when we were downtown. But once we got the Army, once we got the military photography through World War II and Korea, and once we got the USIA stuff, man, it just exploded. Because people were writing us asking for photographs of their ships, of the places they served at in, in Germany or England or wherever, you know. This is the tank I was on. I flew a B24 with the name of, you know, Misty Girl. Do you have a picture of that aircraft, you know? We did the best we could to go through and see if we could find these things, but it literally exploded. And the same thing with the USIA material. That became extremely active because of the content. And, of course, we had to tell the researchers, “Remember, some of these things are credited to commercial organizations.” So when that’s the case, and it says it right on the photo, you have to go back to the source to get clearance to make sure you’re not violating copyright. We’ll make a copy for you, but it’s up to you to go back and check with the organization, like Sports Illustrated or Life, or Time or UPI, AP, you know. All those things were in this file, in addition to agency creative photography. So, it’s very important to get the researcher to understand. And really important to getting NARA staff, particularly the exhibits people to understand there are some things that they really like to tap into because it’s great. But there’s a lot of stuff in there that was created commercially. So, you can’t just throw it up online or publish it or hang it up on a wall without talking to somebody about the rights situations. So, those two groups in that time period really built up our holdings and also really increased the number of requests we were getting, which just seemed to escalate every year, more reference requests, more people showing up in the research room. And then we moved out here, it just continued. We got additional accretions to the USIA and some additional accretions to the military. We now have the military photography up to 2007. A good portion of that is born digital photography, which all of its online. You know, we brought it in. That’s one of the things that we have done and been in the forefront of is, accessioning born digital photography from federal agencies, developed a way to process it using computers. We had to really work hard to get the IT people to understand what we wanted to do and what we needed to do it with. So we had to get special computers with more storage, more RAM, and all that sort of stuff to process, double screens to work with images and captions simultaneously. You know, programs that are not normally available in the NARAnet, to work with the images. And then the folks who work in the processing, Billy Wade and Nick Natanson, have really developed the procedures for processing born digital photography or scanned photography and getting it then, and putting it up online. We’ve got, oh, geez, I don’t know, 8, 900,000 images up online right now that are all from federal agencies. And some really interesting things. You know, the Mercury and the Gemini, onboard photography from early programs. We’re in the middle of bringing in a lot of NASA stuff from Apollo shuttle and post programs. So, we’re working real hard with the Apollo stuff. Because we’ve got the Apollo 11 photography. We also have the 13, the one that had the problem. And there’s lots of interior shots of them working on the little device that they needed to create so that they could get back to earth safely. So it, and again, I’m kind of wandering all over the place.

Brian Knowles: No. It’s quite all right. Well just, focusing back to the 1980 to ‘85 section. I’m to do this chronologically.

Edward J. McCarter: I’m sorry.

Brian Knowles: Keep it a little bit organized. What were some of the technological developments during that ‘80 to ‘85 time range?

Edward J. McCarter: Well I think it was probably around that time that we started looking at computers and how they could help us in our work. And one of the things that the Branch Chief at the time, Betty Hill, was very interested in trying to figure out how to use these things to our advantage. It was in that time frame that, we had all of our descriptive material on cards, indexed, you know, like five by seven index cards. You can go in our research room now and you can see the whole batch of them. But, of course, they were only available on the cards. We worked, I’m trying to remember what the organization was. Charles Dollar ran the organization. This was downtown. It was one of the first computer support offices. Actually, Charles Dollar, I’m sorry, he ran what we refer to as NUMI, the electronic records office, 25-30 years ago, downtown. But there was also an IT office downtown that would help us. And, two of the things that we were able to do is, one had to do with the move to Archives II. They gave us these little TRS-80, I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen them. They’re little like, they were like little laptops, basically, very, very, early. And one of the guys who was working in the IT shop, his name was Mike Getzy and Mike’s still around someplace. He might be in St. Louis, I don’t know. Anyway, he developed a program for us that was basically an electronic location register. And with these very, very early and very limited TRS computers, we could take them in the stack, they were battery operated. We’d take them in the stack and we could, you know, 111-SC is on this location or this location. So we were compiling all that information. This was also going to help us with the move. And then, when we got it all compiled we were able to print it out on, and I can show you the printouts. We’ve got them upstairs. We still have them. We used them for our move, on dot matrix printers. I don’t know all the technology that was involved. It was really early stuff now. These TRS-80 things are really hilarious if you look at them today in, you know, in comparison to what we have now. It’s like, but, you know, it was the first step. So that, the use of those laptops to create this automated location register was a huge, huge thing for us. And then, related to that, Betty, again, was very interested in looking at how we can use computers to help us in our work. So, she worked with that organization again and they found a program called Text Bank. It was a, a full text retrieval system. And it was very early. And this is got to be in the ‘80 to ‘85, maybe a little bit after ‘85, but kind of in that ball park. Text Bank was just a commercial piece of software that they were able to purchase and give to us. And it was stand alone. You couldn’t, it wasn’t a net, well, of course, we didn’t have a network downtown. All you already had was standalones. Anyway, to get the data into Text Bank, what we had to do was, we had to type in, what we did is we tried to scan, this is really early scanning too, all of the inventory cards. You know, and there’s some of these things that go back to like ‘45 and the fifties so the type is really strange. And we scanned as much as we could. But it ended up we only had about a 60% capture rate. So one of the technicians on the staff, happened to also be a super-duper typist, Sheila Mayo. She works down at the Carter Library now. She went through and corrected everything and added the rest of the text in electronic form. So then we had all of our cards in electronic form. We were able to put them into the Text Bank system. And we could type in, obviously whatever was in the card came out. If it wasn’t there it didn’t come out on the search. You could go in and type in, World War II. And you would get all of the series that we had that related to World War II. Well that was a huge thing. Because that’s what we had to do mentally when a researcher walked in the room. They’d say, I’m interested in this topic. And you got to kind of scan through your head and okay 111-SC, 19-NN, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know. And you’d come up with a list of series. And then we would take them over to the cards and they would read through the cards. And, there might be 15 or 20, or 50 or 60 for the Signal Corps, ‘cause there were so many separate series. That they would look at all of these cards and say, “Okay, I want to see that series, I want to see that series.” And then from the cards, they’d go to the finding aids that we created. Because generally we would create a box list for pretty much everything we had, when we could. Big files, like the Signal Corps and USIA, they had subject index cards. So, you didn’t have to create anything. You just pointed to there, and say, it’s over there. Just say, “Go look at the subjects.” But that was kind of the way it worked. You identify the series, then you get down to looking at the actual descriptions. Then you look at the finding aids, and then you put in a slip to get the boxes. That was kind of that process. But now having that computer, that could do that calculation, not calculation, but compilation for us, it made everything that much easier. And the researcher could do it by his or herself, which is a big deal. Because, if you work with researchers, they have a real skepticism about whether they’re getting to see everything we have—“Are you sure that’s all you have?” This way, they can do it themselves. They can go through the Text Bank system, do the search, and find out what series we have that might relate to their topic. And then sometimes we’d have to fill in the blanks because not every piece of information was on the card. There might be information that we knew in our heads from working with the records for 20 years. And by the way, you cannot replace people who’ve been working with the records for 20 years. That’s not possible. You know, we’d fill it in and by now we had kind of an automated way to help the researcher get closer to what they really wanted to look at. So we had that system of Text Bank and it was downtown. We had a couple of copies of it. It was on stand-alone computers and they were pretty early things. And then when we moved out here, all of the sudden, ta dah, we have a network. I mean downtown we were writing our descriptions, and this goes beyond the ‘82 through ‘85 up through probably, you know, the early nineties. We moved in ‘94. We only had one computer. So every time somebody wanted to write a series description, you had to vie for space on the one computer to type in the series description. And we were using the old format. And then, once we got it in electronic form though, then we could just insert it into Text Bank. We’d have to rebuild the Text Bank system. Every two or three months we’d take all of the new descriptions that were done electronically, and we’d rebuild Text Bank and, and incorporate the new, new series in there, so the researchers would have them. But when we got here, my God, you know, we had this network. And we had, I’m trying to remember what it was called. But basically, what it was, is the audio and visual archives locator. Because most everything that was in there was either from Motion Pictures, Sound, and Video or Still Pictures. Because we had stuff in electronic form. So they were able to take what we had created in Text Bank and import it into the system, it was the system before ARC actually. And the Archival Research Catalog goes way back. But right before that there was sort of this period where the rules, regulations, and stipulations that you have in ARC [Archival Research Catalog] were not quite in force. So they had incorporated all of our previous materials into the new system and then when that was switched to ARC, it went to ARC. And when it was switched to OPA [Online Public Access], it went to OPA. So, we have older descriptions in there that don’t meet the ARC standards. But, I mean you got to use them because they’ve got the information. So that once we were able to put that in there, that even made things even greater. And then the Internet, my God. People could tap into us from California. And they could look at the series descriptions. And they could send us letters based on that or they could start organizing their research so when they got here they could optimize it. Because, it’s expensive to come here and, and stay here and work here for a week. It’s not inexpensive. So that was a huge help I think for researchers. And, of course, they wanted more of that. You know, okay, now, are all your images online? Well we got 15 1/2 million, you know. We’re working on it. But the first projects we did was the EAP. Again, I think I’m, I’m moving around here.

Brian Knowles: Well, that’s fine. Go ahead, keep going.

Edward J. McCarter: Yeah. Okay. I’m sorry. The Electronic Access Project which the Archives got a special appropriation from Congress to put images online. Well, who do you think they came to first to populate it? Still Pictures. So we identified a bunch of different records that we thought would be useful to go up online. There ended up being about 160,000 photos. And they had a contractor who came into the building who scanned the material. And, of course, scanning the images is only, is the easy part of the job. The hard part of the job is all the caption information. So we had a bunch of students and staff and that’s what they did.

Brian Knowles: What was the time frame for that?

Edward J. McCarter: That was after we moved out here. So that was probably ‘95, ‘96, ‘97, some, somewhere in there. It wasn’t long after we got out here that, and we had the network and people started thinking, “Okay, now we got to really do something with this network.” And the upper management got additional funds from Congress to hire the contractor to do the work. And so, over a course of probably two and a half years, I think it was, it, it took us to get all the caption information. So we got all of this 165,000 up. Well, of course, that just feeds the beast. You know, oh my God, 165,000, but, what about this? What about that? So, you know, ever since it’s been a continuing push by the researchers to get more and more things online. You know, getting things scanned is one thing. It’s the caption information that takes such a long time and marrying those two things together so that when you pull up an image, you’ve also got all the metadata so you understand what you’re looking at. Or you can search it.

Brian Knowles: Well, in your estimation, how many images do you think are available online today?

Edward J. McCarter: Well if I add in the EAP and all of the things that we’ve accessioned from federal agencies, over a million.

Brian Knowles: Wow.

Edward J. McCarter: Which I think is pretty good for an organization that basically only has two people on the processing team. We have a lot of students and they’re very good. And they help us tremendously. We’ve used the students in much more of an archivist capacity than what I did when I was there pushing boxes around. I mean, they’re doing archival work.

Brian Knowles: Was there any technological flops that you’ve had?

Edward J. McCarter: Mm. Well we have, but I don’t know that I can say what it is, ERA. I don’t know that I would, well, I will be honest with you. The ERA is a total failure. The problem with that, and we kept trying to get them to pay attention to us, is that when ERA was designed, they really did not talk to us about what we knew was out at federal agencies. And what the volume was. And what the file sizes were. You know, they worked mostly with NUMI, which is RDE now. And they’re dealing with databases and things of that nature. So most of what they had was megabyte sizes, okay. We’re talking about agency images that are 75 megabytes a piece. And we’re accessioning 50,000 of them. And how are we going to send those through the pipeline to Rocket Center? It doesn’t work. The file sizes are too big and the numbers are too big. You can’t just push it. Every time we would push something of any size, it would get stuck. It just didn’t get there. So basically what we’ve had to do is, for very large bodies of images, we put them on a hard drive and we send them up to Rocket Center and they kick them in through the back door. I have no clue how they do it. But, the big problem is trying to move it from Archives II to there, because you’re FTPing it. And the pipe this stuff has to go through is like that, instead of being like that. Because it was designed that way. And, I always felt there was never enough discussion with the non-texts about what was out there. I mean, we had big file sizes. Ours are dwarfed by what motion picture will receive, dwarfed. I mean they have individual, electronic films that are two terabytes, one film. So, it’s like holy mackerel, you need to know that when you design this thing, so that it can manage and handle the movement of the records from here to there. So that really kind of backfired I think on everyone. And, they’ve understood that and I think they’re really working toward developing something new. How long that’s going to take, I don’t know. I mean, one of the things that is going to affect it is Mike Wash left. And Mike Wash, got it. He understood it. He really knew what we were talking about. He came from a Kodak background. So he understood photography. He understood what happens when you digitize an image or you create an image in a digital camera. And, it’s not 2 megabytes, but it’s 40 megabytes, because it’s a high resolution to file. So he was very instrumental in kind of rethinking how we were going to deal with the accession, not just digital photography, but all electronic records that come in whether it comes in to NUMI or in the regions or at the presidential libraries, wherever. So he was sort of helping us move in a different direction. And I worry about what’s going to happen now that he’s gone. Because he was pretty much a driving force, I felt, behind it. But we didn’t have any real major flops. I mean, you knew that, you use new technology and you make mistakes and you learn. But, like the old TRS-80’s. That’s all that was available. But they worked. They did what we had to do. They were cumbersome and you had to download information on it very frequently because they didn’t have much storage capacity. And then we would move on to the next technology and the next technology and so on. When we moved out to Archives II, one of the first things we wanted to do was to get access to NARAnet in the stack, because that was not available. And we proposed getting a big desktop, plopping it in there and running wires through the walls into the computer. Very early on, one of the guys who was in charge of the network. I’m trying to remember his name now, damn. Anyway, he said, “Oh, that’s, that’s a crappy idea.” He said, what you want to do, is you want to put a wireless connection in your stack so you can bring a laptop in there and connect directly to the NARA net through the wireless connection. So, he helped us get these little stations that were placed in strategic places in the stack. So we could take a laptop in and set it down, open it up, and we’d have a connection to the wireless connection, which would get us to the NARAnet. Then we could get to our location register. We could get to the series descriptions. All the stuff we needed to do, like when the staff is in the stack and they’re trying to find something. Oh, God, you can’t find it. Where the heck did it go? Go back to the location register, type it in—boom, it’s here. Oh, it’s not here. It got moved, t’s over there. So that’s an extremely useful tool in the stack. Unfortunately, they took it out. When they started redoing the wireless things in the building, I don’t know. Maybe it was old technology, so they thought they could do something better. But I hope they will put wireless access to NARAnet back into the stacks. Because it’s incredibly useful. Sorry. Wandering again. Will this thing ever make any sense to anybody?

Brian Knowles: It’s really good. It’s actually going really well. Now with, in ‘85 with NARA’s re- independence—

Edward J. McCarter: [Interposing] ‘84.

Brian Knowles: —was there, was there anything that affected your outlook for the agency or your day- to-day [crosstalk]?

Edward J. McCarter: Well, I mean, I think everybody who was on board and who was in the picture on front of the building downtown on Independence Day, was really looking forward to being independent of GSA and being able to do its work the way we thought it had to be done. Instead of having control from an organization—we just didn’t fit in with GSA. I mean you got Federal Supply Service and the Public Building Service, and had National Archives and Records Service. It’s like, what do we have to do with toilet paper and pencils and paper, you know? But, that’s where it was put. So once we got independence, I think everybody was really optimistic that, okay, our guys up on top here, they can develop the budget that we need to do the work we need to do, to get the people on board we need to get on board, to move in the direction of technology’s going so that we can use technology to do our jobs better. So I think there was a lot of optimism about what was going to happen, and where we were going to go. And, I think, by and large, it was a very good thing. But I can remember, thinking that, “Wow, this is going to be great.” And, of course, there’s always restrictions. Budgets are budgets, you know. They put together a budget which looks like it’s good and Congress looks at it or OMB looks at it and says, mm, no. Next thing, you got two-thirds of what you had. But, at least you have control over it yourself.

Brian Knowles: Yeah.

Edward J. McCarter: We had control. We could set the budget. We didn’t have to send something to GSA and have somebody up there who had no clue what we were doing saying, well, you can’t do this and you can’t do that. You didn’t have to argue with them or try to convince them that it was important to do this or to do that, that preservation was important and you needed money to do that. You needed new technology. I mean they were probably on board with the new technology thing because that’s the kind of thing that GSA does. But, with us, it’s just that you have control over your destiny, so to speak. And the people at the top of the organization, if they’re good, they can move you along. If they’re not so good, you kind of flounder until the next one shows up. It is what it is.

Brian Knowles: Now in ‘85 to ‘89, you were a senior archivist and preservation supervisor. How, how did you feel being a supervisor when you had to direct your staff? How was your leadership?

Edward J. McCarter: Well, that’s really interesting because, I think so many, I shouldn’t generalize. But I think so many people who gravitate toward working in a place like this, I won’t, I don’t want to call them introverts, but they’d rather work alone, if you know what I mean. Give me my project and go away and let me finish it. And I think that’s the way a lot of us are. Because we come from history backgrounds and that’s kind of the way history is in a way. Unless you’re a teacher, you’re interacting with students. But if you’re doing research all the time, it’s very solitary and you become very kind of comfortable with that. So moving into a supervisor, and at that time I wasn’t doing evaluations, I was just asking people to do this and to do that. It wasn’t too, too much of a switch for me. Because I kind of likened it, I hate to use sports analogies, but I can’t help it, because most of my life’s revolved around it. It’s kind of like a team. It is a team. You got a group of people who work together. It’s either a formalized thing or it’s informal. And they all have to pull their weight. And, somebody has to kind of do the coaching. And say this is what we’re going to do. To take it up to a more recent period, I wanted to get involved in electronic and digital photography. I could have not. I could have just let it go and default and maybe NUMI would have ended up with it, but I know they didn’t want any part of it. But more importantly, I wanted to get involved in it because I knew that the digital photographs that agencies were creating were simply extensions of the analog things they’d been creating for the past 50 years. So who’s better to work with those records than the people who know the past and can deal with the more recent ones? So that’s where I want to go. And then, you’ve got people around you who are really good. And you just kind of let them go. I mean, you have to kind of pay attention to what’s going on. But, you know, if you’ve got really good people, and in Stills on both reference and the processing side, we’ve always had very good people. They’ve stayed because they like the work. They like the records and the stuff they do. And, like in the processing end, working with digital photography, I mean, I don’t know that much about it. I would try to learn as much as I can. But Billy and Nick, you know, they just grabbed that thing and they ran like hell with it. And they created operating procedures and processes and designs and all this stuff on how we were going to bring the stuff in. How we were going to process it. And how we were going to make it available to the public by working with Gary Stern and the OPA staff. So that’s kind of what I did. And then even back in ‘84 and ‘85, I just said, “You know, well, here’s what we want to do.” We want to know what we have and we want to make sure that we can preserve it. So let’s go out and do that. And then we figured out how we were going to go about it and go out and do it. But, none of that works unless you’ve got good people. I mean, I don’t care if you’re Pat Riley or greatest coach in the world, if you’ve got a bunch of guys who can’t walk and chew gum, you’re not going anywhere. But, you know, I had been very fortunate, the whole time I’ve been in Still Pictures, there have always been very good people working there. Very dedicated, very interested in what they did. They liked what they were doing. And they were creative. And certainly more creative than I am. But I knew I could trust them. They weren’t going to go out and do something bizarro. When you’re working with people, some people, you know instinctually that this person I can trust because he’s really smart and he’s going to figure it out. And this person may have to keep a little bit tighter, reign on them. When you’ve always been working kind of in a solitary thing to all of a sudden, the next minute, you got all these people looking at you, like, “Well, what do we do now?” So, for reference, it’s not that big a deal because you’re getting letters and requests day in and day out. So it’s pretty straight forward. Processing’s a different thing altogether. You’ve got to think about what it is you want to do. Which records really are important? Which ones are we going to focus on first? Which ones are we going to set aside, we’ll get to them when we can? We’re going to get to them, but these records really need to be addressed first. So like, what we’re done now. We recognized that the digital stuff that’s coming in now has to be worked on pretty quick. You can’t leave it sit around. It’s not like 20 cubic feet of prints that you can basically put on a shelf and three years later go back there. And that 20 cubic feet is still going to be 20. And it’s still probably going to be pretty much in the same shape as it was the day you brought it in. Because you got environmental conditions in the stack. That’s not the case with the digital stuff. You’ve got to address it. Because there are problems that you get when you transfer things from agencies. You get different file formats, connecting the metadata with the, with the images. All that sort of stuff that really that has to be addressed. So, we’ve kind of pushed our analog to the side because we don’t have very many people. And the folks we have are focusing on the digital. We’ve got two million backlog images of digital photography.

Brian Knowles: Wow.

Edward J. McCarter: Over 70 terabytes of data. And it’s just going to get worse. And unless they do something about it, like get us some more people, it’s just going to grow, because the agencies, there is no agency out there that’s using a film-based camera, I can tell you that. They haven’t been using film- based cameras since probably 2005 or maybe even earlier. Everything is being shot in digital form. And the thing about it is, they are more than willing to transfer it. Because they can copy 5,000 images, 20 minutes or an hour, overnight. And so they’ll send you another copy of it. And you can accession it. So the accessioning time has gone from sometimes 10 or 15 years to one or two or three years. Right now, what we’re suggesting to agencies, if you’re creating digital photography, you should not hang on to it for any more than three years. And they’re okay with that because they can just copy the whole damn thing. And then send it to us. So, it’s going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. There’s a tidal wave out there that’s coming. And if the agency’s focus is on electronic records then, okay, folks, let’s put your money where your mouth is. And let’s build up the areas that are working directly with it. We don’t forget about the records we have. Because we’re still going to be accessioning analog records for a long time. But, you have to start thinking a little differently. You have to start thinking right now about how the allocation of resources is based on, pretty much, how many cubic feet of physical records you have sitting on the shelf. You’ve got to stop thinking that way. I mean it’s still a reality. But you’ve got to think about the other side of it too. You can’t just look at what’s right in front of you sitting on a shelf. You got to think about the electronic world, the digital photographs, my God, the AV material. It’s just, there is no possible way that NARA can accession AV material right now. There’s no place to put it. You can keep it on hard drives and on LTO tape and all that stuff. But that’s not managing it, that’s just putting it someplace and crossing your fingers and hoping something doesn’t go haywire. Our stuff that we’re getting in, we can still download it. We’ve got souped-up computers with eight terabytes of storage space. And faster processors and all that sort of stuff. We had to get that from the IT people so that we could do our job. So we can still do that now. We can still accession big files from agencies. But where are we going to put them? That’s the key. And that’s where the problem is. So we’re still using ERA, like I said, we’re still putting stuff on hard drives and literally mailing it. Have you heard of Bob Spangler?

Brian Knowles: Uh-uh.

Edward J. McCarter: Bob Spangler, he’s kind of the IT guru for RDDC. Bob will throw in the back of his car and drive up to Rocket Center and deliver it. So that’s how it’s getting there. And then they are literally putting it in. Because we can’t send it. As I said before, we can’t FTP it, because it just doesn’t work. It just doesn’t go. It gets stuck all the time. So that’s the key is, where are we going to put this stuff? Motion Pictures, they can’t even bring stuff in and begin to work with it, because they’ve got no place to put these massive files that they would be getting. You know, I think I wandered away again.

Brian Knowles: No. You’re all right. You’re all right. Well with that supervisory position, did you still have time for reference? Or how did you manage, how did you manage that transition to more of the administrator and less of the reference, I guess?

Edward J. McCarter: You know, when I first came in and worked with the organization, we had a reference chief and we had a processing chief. So, you know, even though I did a lot of reference work early on so I would know what the records were and I worked in the room, the research room for two years downtown, day in, day out. I got to learn the records. Where they were. What they were. When I went over to processing, I didn’t do so much reference any more. It was mostly just doing the processing work. But, inevitably you would get dragged back in to the reference situation, because you just got finished processing something and you knew more about it than anybody else did. So, because of this the reference team didn’t have the opportunity to get up to speed on it. So you’d get dragged back into it, which was fine. Because I liked working with researchers. They’re, by and large, most of them are pretty interesting people. And have got some interesting ideas and stories. So, I kind of strayed away from, from, from the reference part of it. But then when we moved out here, first the branch chief retired. And then the processing chief retired. So, the only person left holding the bag was yours truly. So, I had to get involved in everything. I was involved in processing. And I had to deal with reference. Because I was the only supervisor there. So, I get calls all the time. I got a call yesterday from Al Jazeera’s, we want to use these ten photographs that we found online. Are they copyrighted or are they in the public domain? You know, I get that stuff all the time. Then, of course, we get questions from federal agencies about transferring records. So I’m not sure I answered your question, but…

Brian Knowles: Oh, you are. You are.

Edward J. McCarter: But I, I’ve always liked to do reference. I think it is fun. And like I said, you do meet some incredibly interesting people. And I’ve been very fortunate to meet some pretty interesting people. You know, some relatively well-known people. I gave a tour to Barbra Streisand when she was here years ago. More importantly, I got to meet some really famous photographers like Yousuf Karsh, who’s a famous Canadian portrait photographer. He came to see the photographs that we had. We spent some time talking to him. And I got my story confirmed—have you ever seen the picture Karsh took of Churchill? He’s like that, with the cigar in his mouth. He didn’t have the cigar in his mouth, that’s the key to this story. He’s just sort of like that. I mean he looks like he’s about ready to bite your nose off. Well, the story that I’d always heard was that what Karsh did—what Karsh was able to do was to capture the essence of somebody in their face. I mean he was amazing in the way he could do that. Well he was working with Churchill trying, you know, this is during World War II, trying to get that bulldog tenacity type expression on his face. And he couldn’t get it. So the story I heard is, what he did is, he had an extension cord so he could press the shutter from walking around. And he walked up close to Churchill and he yanked the cigar out of his mouth. And that’s the expression that Churchill had. And he snapped the shutter right then. I’d always heard that story and I didn’t know whether it was true. So when he was here, I said, “Hey, I heard this story and can you confirm it?” And he said, “Yeah, that’s exactly what happened.” He said, “That’s how I got that picture.” I thought that was just incredible. Other photographers, I had this guy call me up on the phone one time, this is bizarre. Morris Engel calls me on the phone and said I was watching this movie. This is about seven or eight years ago, maybe longer. And he said, “I’m watching this movie,” what the hell was the name of it, oh, yeah, Saving Private Ryan. And he said, “You know what, I was on that beach. And I was a cameraman. And I worked for the Navy. Do you think you have any of my photographs there?” So we went back. And he told me the unit that he worked on, the Navy units had special designations and he was the person who worked in this one unit. Sure enough, I found a whole bunch of photographs by Morris Engel. And I got to talking to him on the phone, I mean just incredible stories. This guy is a very well-known photographer. He’s in that International Center for Photography book, he’s got a piece in there because he goes back to the thirties where he worked with a lot of the New York photographers that were very prominent at the time. And he was also movie camera guy. And so we got to talking and I said, “Well, geez, what was it like?” He said, well, you know, it was kind of interesting. He said the story was, the Private Ryan thing, was pretty close to the way it was. And he said, but I didn’t have a gun, all I had was a four by five speed graphic, which is this big clunky camera, plus he carried an Emo motion picture camera on his back. And that’s all he had. And he’s jumping out of one of these things and running into the beach well where the Germans are just going nuts, killing all these people. And he survived the whole thing. And it was just amazing to talk to him and hear his stories. And then we’ve had Vietnam photographers in and we’ve talked to them. We actually had a group in a couple years, I’m sorry, I’m, I, I do this all the time.

Brian Knowles: No. No. No. Keep going.

Edward J. McCarter: I’m wandering all over the place. We had this group of guys who came in. And I had worked with a guy who was in DC who was kind of organizing the group. And they were all photographers in the Army during Vietnam. So, he gave me information about them. And, we were able to find photographs for a lot of the guys. But what I did is, we just pulled out the whole series. It’s like 35,000 photos. And there were about 10 or 12 of these guys who were going to come in and look through them. And, and we just spent the day working with them so that they could go through this stuff. And, their names were on the back of all these photos. But what the cool thing was, one of the guys walks in the door. He’s walking over, and up on the wall we have this picture of a cameraman coming out of the swamp in Vietnam, with two cameras hanging around his neck. You’ve probably seen that. Anyway, he walks in and he turns and he looks at it and he said, “That’s me.” Sure enough. So, you know, we had the—

Brian Knowles: [Interposing] Wow.

Edward J. McCarter: His name was on the caption. And, he told us who he was. And to talk to them and to hear their stories and to hear the dedication these guys had. And some of the harrowing experiences some of them went through to capture this stuff and document what was going on. It’s just amazing to really talk to them. And then that goes on, you meet all kinds of other people. But, you know, I don’t know. I’m sorry. It’s just…

Brian Knowles: No, that’s great. Well that, that’s actually one of my questions I have for you—

Edward J. McCarter: [Interposing] I start thinking back about it and I said, why the hell am I leaving? I can tell you why I’m leaving, I don’t like the supervisor. No, I’ve had enough of that, believe me.

Brian Knowles: All right. Let’s see here.

Edward J. McCarter: Good God.

Brian Knowles: This, this is a good stopping point if we can continue the interview another time. Are you okay with that?

Edward J. McCarter: Up to you.

Brian Knowles: Okay. Alright. We’ll go ahead and stop.