Archive for January, 2011
Mary Bent Blanchard
Tuesday, January 25th, 2011This month marks the 120th anniversary of Mary Bent Blanchard’s death who died on January 11, 1890. While traveling to California to visit her daughter Sonora Caroline, Mary died at age seventy-one in East Las Vegas, New Mexico. A fuller account is given in Four Hazardous Journeys of the Reverend Jonathan Blanchard by Raymond P. [...]
Malcolm Muggeridge Papers…25 year anniversary
Friday, January 21st, 2011As 2010 finished out it marked the 25th anniversary of the acquisition of Malcolm Muggeridge’s Papers and the 15th anniversary of their dedication . Canon David Winter gave the dedicatory address entitled “Seeing Through The Eye: Muggeridge, the Prophet of the Media Age.” A commemorative booklet including the entire dedication program on November 18, 1995 [...]
“Where the Law of God is the Law of the Land…”
Wednesday, January 19th, 2011January 19 is the birthday of Jonathan Blanchard and 2011 marks the bicentennial of his birth. Blanchard had several careers of significance prior to his coming to the dreary open prairies of Wheaton Illinois in the late 1850s. He had taken great risks as one of “The Seventy” disciples of abolitionism. He was a very [...]
What a character…
Thursday, January 13th, 2011In 1953 William Akin, generous rare book donor to Wheaton College, recounted in a Union League Club publication that while working for the Chicago Daily News he found himself in San Antonio, Texas and had a chance meeting with, what he called, using as he described it, the radio-parlance of the day, “a character.” As [...]
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Monday, January 10th, 2011This recollection by Dr. Wendell White ’05 of Los Angeles was submitted to the Wheaton College Alumni Magazine (Feb. 1958) for a feature called “We Asked for Good Old Stories.” I had returned to Wheaton a week before the school semester commenced. I was downtown in the stores and a Western Union agent got the [...]
Epiphany and Judgment
Thursday, January 6th, 2011Over twenty years ago, Special Collections author Frederick Buechner penned the following words in the 1989 Advent — Epiphany issue of the Anglican Digest. Judgment We are all of us judged every day. We are judged by the face that looks back at us from the bathroom mirror. We are judged by the faces of [...]
We never have worked pleasantly together….
Tuesday, January 4th, 2011In late June 1871, the twenty-two year old Charles Blanchard wrote to his mother about his travels from Worcester, Massachusetts to Bailey Hollow, Pennsylvania. Following his graduation from Wheaton College in 1870 Charles lectured on behalf of the National Christian Association, a reform organization dedicated chiefly to opposing Freemasonry and other oath bound orders. By [...]