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Mark Cave
Senior Curator/Oral Historian, Hired 1993
One of mv first friends at The Collection was Libby Nevinger. We started the same day. Libby worked in our photography department, and I worked in the old manuscripts reading room. On the one-year anniversary of our employment, the staff threw Libby and me, along with Marie Louise Martin, who had started a few weeks earlier, a party to celebrate being at The Collection for an entire year. We had cake and ice cream and were congratulated by just about everyone on staff. Then we were each handed a balloon. 1 remember standing there with my balloon, thinking, “This is a really strange but wonderful place.” The institution was so familial back then, like going to Sunday dinner at grandma’s house. We are much larger and more professional today, engaged in really important and fulfilling work. Libby is, sadly, gone. But The Collection has given me many wonderful friendships, and I’m still here—eating cake.
Libby Nevinger and Mark Cave, 1994
Mary M. Garsaud
Exhibitions Editor, Hired 1998
I’ve worn a variety of hats in the publications and marketing departments during my tenure at The Collection—publications assistant, Quarterly editor, marketing manager, exhibitions editor—and many projects, events, and people have shaped both my professional and personal lives throughout my career. One of my favorite writing assignments for the Quarterly was covering the archeological dig at 535-37 Conti Street (now the WRC Annex) in spring 2005. Stories of everyday life from the past have enticed me since I was
young. Reporting the excavation’s discoveries—rouge pots and liquor bottles from a hotel known as the Rising Sun; shards of French ceramics from the early colonial period; and prehistoric, shell-tempered pottery—awoke in me that early excitement about history all over again.
Items found in Conti Street archaeological dig, 2005
Mary M. Garsaud, 1998


New Orleans Quarterly 2016 Spring (15)
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