David Michael Miller
The University of Wisconsin library wants your old Onions. And your Octopuses (Octopi?). And whatever other campus-humor-related memorabilia you have stashed in the attic.
Long before The Onion made its debut in 1988, Madison had The Octopus, which first appeared in 1919, and before that, The Sphinx. The UW Library has some copies of those old humor mags, but the missing issues far outnumber those in the holdings. Sadly, early issues of The Onion are in danger of being similarly lost to history. David Null, director of University Archives, and Ben Strand, director of development for campus libraries for the University of Wisconsin Foundation, are trying to prevent that from happening.
To that end, they've partnered with the UW Parent Program to put together Our Funny University, a panel presentation featuring Scott Dikkers, a founding editor of The Onion; and Jim Mallon, who was elected president of the Wisconsin Student Association on the Pail and Shovel Party ticket. Pail and Shovel achieved notoriety in the late 1970s through such large-scale pranks as filling Bascom Hill with hundreds of plastic pink flamingos and placing a replica of the Statue of Liberty -- at least her torch hand and the upper half of her head -- on frozen Lake Mendota. Mallon went on to become one of the creators of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Our Funny University, part of the official Parents' Weekend agenda, takes place Sept. 19 at 6:30 p.m. at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
One purpose of the event is to put the call out to the university community and beyond to hand over historical bits of campus humor to the Archives. The other purpose is to encourage students to be brave, make connections with like-minded peers, and get involved in campus activities. You never know if that wacky project you start in your dorm room will be the next Onion.
The UW Library System's interest in campus humor got a big boost in 2008 when John Dobbertin, a former editor of the University of Michigan's humor magazine The Gargoyle, donated to UW what may be the biggest collection of college humor magazines in the country. Decades after first amassing a big pile of Gargoyles, Dobbertin decided to start collecting magazines from other campuses.
"The result," Dobbertin explains, "was a collection of more than 1,000 college humor magazines... and a wife asking when I would 'do something' with them."
That "something" turned out to be making them a gift to UW. Since most of Dobbertin's mags have nothing to do with Madison or UW, they reside in the UW Memorial Library Special Collections Department. Materials connected to the UW campus, such as Onion and Octopus issues, live in the UW Archives.
After the arrival of the Dobbertin collection, Strand started looking to see what else the university had in the way of college humor, especially from Madison. It turned out not to be all that much. So he and Null started reaching out to people they thought might be able to help locate what was out there before it's too late.
"Scott Dikkers has been great, helping us reconnect with a bunch of early Onion founders," Strand says. "But these were college kids, and they didn't tend to keep stuff."
Another Onion founder, Tim Keck, had a lot of Onion artifacts but lost the whole lot in a house fire years ago.
The Archives are looking for campus humor items of all sorts, not just magazines.
"We're interested in event posters, photographs of pranks, all sorts of artifacts," says Null. The challenge, he says, is that "a lot of that stuff is very ephemeral, so it doesn't tend to get saved."
Null worries that with The Onion closing in on 30 years, the clock is ticking on the survival of those missing early issues. That brings a sense of urgency to the project.
"Madison has a long, rich history of quirky humor," Strand notes. "We're looking for ways to preserve that story."
