Weird things happen in research. Sometimes I notch it up to the Universe trying to speak to me; which is actually a phrase I detest. If the Universe is speaking to me, it's much too unclear for this early in the morning. It's 8 a.m. on a Friday morning before I have even finished my coffee.
In any case, sometimes when you do research, weird things happen. This morning I was looking to see if there were any news articles out there about the first female sports team at the College where I work. I tried poking around the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Even though my college is clearly on Long Island, situated right on the boarder of Nassau and Suffolk County, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle picked up news from all over the Island, City, state, nation, and world. If you had anyone living in the City of New York you should check the Brooklyn Daily for a mention of them. It's free: https://bklyn.newspapers.com/paper/the-brooklyn-daily-eagle/1890/
So I did a "hail Mary" kind of search. I just put in some keywords; Farmingdale, agriculture, and basketball; and limited to the year 1925.
The first page that came up was page 24 of the November 27, 1925 edition. On that page there was nothing about our College's women's basketball team but there was the picture below of Miss Kathrine Boller.
The word basketball appears in the article about Kathrine and the other words appear scattered on the page in other articles but the weird thing is that, I know Kathrine Boller (September 17, 1908 - March 15, 1995). Well, I never met her in-person but I researched the hell out of her and her family. She is the daughter of Claude Villette Boller (March 1869 - August 2, 1951) of Freeport, New York. Katherine's second husband was Norman Holland Foote (December 12, 1909 - March 2, 1999).
Now why did I research her?
Good question. Glad you asked.
Because here at Farmingdale State College we own the scrapbook of Katherine's father. I research that scrapbook for over a year and developed an online exhibit about its creator and its contents: https://bollerscrapbook.omeka.net/exhibits
Our only known connection to Mr. Boller would be through his son-in-law,
Mr. Foote. Mr. Foote was a professor and the Head of the Agricultural Engineering
Department at what is now Farmingdale State College from 1948 until his
retirement in 1967. His career at Farmingdale began in 1933 when our
institution was known as the State Institute Of Applied Agriculture. We assume that the College Archives must have acquired Mr.
Boller's Scrapbook from Mr. Foote before he retired in 1967.
It is a fascinating resource about the life of a noteworthy tailor from about 1883 - 1907. Mr. Boller established the men's wear department of the noteworthy Montgomery Ward & Co. in Chicago, Illinois. He began working for the famous catalog mail order company, Montgomery Ward, on September 29, 1896 and left on January 1, 1906 amidst the turbulent Chicago Teamsters' Strike. The Chicago Teamsters' Strike of 1905, which is noted as one of the bloodiest labor strikes in U.S. history, actually began in the Montgomery Ward & Co. cutting room where Mr. Boller was the manager
In any case, serendipity happens. Just thought I'd share. I guess the Universe is telling me to get back to work.
