Ransom Center Magazine

Research + Teaching

The Knickerbocker Theatre Collapse

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by HANNAH NEUHAUSER

In the 1980s, the Harry Ransom Center received a scrapbook from John and Vera Hills along with an extraordinary unpublished account of their survival of the Knickerbocker Theatre roof collapse in Washington, D.C. on January 28, 1922. The scrapbook and testimony are available for research in the Ransom Center’s Reading and Viewing Room. Graduate assistant Hannah Neuhauser offers these insights on the material.

We started out for an hour’s walk that was to last seven months and almost an eternity…
—FROM JOHN HILLS’S TESTIMONY

Vera Kreger Hills did not wish to go out on the evening of January 28, 1922. It was cold, brutally cold, and a whirring blizzard encased Washington D.C in over two feet of snow.

The weather did not deter her husband, Captain John Huntington Hills, however. He thought it “would be fun to take a stroll through the heavy snow.” After a few blocks, they passed by the Knickerbocker Theatre on 18th Street and Columbia Road. That night the theater was featuring a silent comedy, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, that heralded good reviews.

Vera Kreger Hills preferred to finish their walk rather than go to the theatre, but consented to her husband’s idea. They had not been in the theatre for over a year. They bought their tickets for 25 cents and took their familiar seats under the balcony in the second row. Unbeknownst to the couple at the time, their seating arrangement would save their lives.

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ABOUT HANNAH NEUHAUSER

Hannah Neuhauser is a PhD musicology student at the Butler School of Music at The University of Texas at Austin. She is a Pathways Fellow serving as a Curatorial Assistant at the Harry Ransom Center in the 2022-2023 term.

A Greek fragment is the first-known New Testament papyrus written on the front side of a scroll

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by GEOFFREY S. SMITH

A Fragment Makes History

A few months ago, I received a much-anticipated email that read, “The courier is scheduled to deliver the Willoughby Papyrus to the Ransom Center tomorrow.” The next morning, I anxiously watched as members of the Center’s conservation staff carefully removed from the oversized shipping package a small black archival box, no more than 8 inches square. They slid off its sleeve, opened the protective cover, and placed the object on the table in front of me for inspection. Mounted between two plates of glass was an ancient papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John, no larger than a credit card.

The manuscript was fragmentary, and some of the Greek letters were not easy to make out, but it had not suffered any damage since I had last seen it in person, nearly seven years earlier. I could finally breathe a sigh of relief. The “Willoughby Papyrus,” as it is known, had made it to The University of Texas safe and sound.

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ABOUT GEOFFREY S. SMITH

Geoffrey S. Smith is Associate Professor, Fellow of the Louise Farmer Boyer Chair in Biblical Studies, and Director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins (ISAC) in the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

Interpreting “Fringe” in the Mel Gordon Papers

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Mel Gordon’s Notes on Expressionism with 1917 clipping, Mel Gordon Collection, Box 12, Harry Ransom Center.

by MACAELLA GRAY

In 2018, The New York Times lauded historian, curator, and writer Mel Gordon as a “drama scholar of the fringe.”

At first glance, the so-called “fringe” certainly seems to find a home in the Mel Gordon Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, with materials ranging from anthologies on erotic dance to German and French adult magazines.

Mel Gordon earned his PhD at New York University in performance studies and taught popular classes on theater at UC Berkeley throughout the 1990s. Focusing on histories of 20th-century sex and eroticism, mysticism, horror, and spectacle, Gordon wrote Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin and Horizontal Collaboration: The Erotic World of Paris, 1920-1946—earning him a reputation as a “provocative, risqué storyteller.”

Based on his book titles alone, one can see how Gordon’s language tends to sensationalize 1920s Berlin and Paris—epochs often mythologized with tales of crazed sex and loose morals. However, at the heart of Gordon’s scholarship lies a contradiction: he challenges historical mythologies as much as he contributes to them. Gordon often questions the perceived marginality of the communities and figures he writes about, including the German silent film actress, dancer, and poet Anita Berber.

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ABOUT MACAELLA GRAY

Macaella Gray received her B.A in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin and is the Visual Materials Intern at the Harry Ransom Center. Her research lies primarily in the modern and contemporary arts, with a focus on early queer histories, post-war print media, and experimental film cultures. She is also the recipient of the Ronald Schuchard Undergraduate Archival Research Prize and the John F. Newnam Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Art and Art History.

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