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UNCLE LIONEL BATISTE
Don Marquis Collection
2013.0060
Jazz historian Donald M. Marquis conducted a painstaking amount of primary research to confirm or correct long-accepted notions about turn-of-the-century New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden. Published in 1978, In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz is still regarded as the seminal monograph on the legendary jazzman. Marquis was the first curator of the Louisiana State Museum’s jazz collections, the majority of which he obtained through his work with the New Orleans Jazz Club. The Don Marquis Collection at The Historic New
Orleans Collection consists of photographs, slides, and other ephemera pertaining to jazz history and the proliferation of New Orleans-style music throughout the world. The bulk of the material dates to the mid-20th century, but there are items from the early 1900s and photographs from post-Katrina New Orleans. Of particular interest are a number of slides from a landmark 1983 jazz exhibition at the Old US Mint, as well as several hundred Kodachrome stereo transparency slides that were given to Marquis by Myra Menville, founder of the New Orleans Jazz Club. These slides depict prominent jazz musicians such as A1 Hirt, Pete Fountain, Louis Armstrong, and many others. The oldest item, a police report from 1907, details alleged noise-ordinance violations in the area of town once known as Storyville. —MATT FARAH
Francis I. Cervantes Papers Addition
2073.0056
Sometimes one accession leads to another. In March 2013 Frank D. Cervantes donated personal effects and military medals that had belonged to his father,
Lt. Francis I. Cervantes, who was killed in action in World War II, just three weeks after Frank was born. The donation came in response to a previous acquisition—a collection of letters written by the elder Cervantes to his mother, Rachel Ramos Cervantes, while he was serving in the United States Army Air Force from 1942
to 1945. The original acquisition established the Francis I. Cervantes Papers (MSS 653, 2012.0202) and came to THNOC by fortuitous coincidences. After Rachel’s death in 1963, the letters remained in the possession of Francis’s sister Trinidad, and after her death in 2008 they were left behind in the attic of her New Orleans house. New owners began renovating the house and put any contents they found out on the curb, free for the taking. A neighbor, Owen Joyner, recognized that the letters had historical interest and brought them to the attention of another neighbor, THNOC Senior Curator / Historian John T. Magill, who helped make sure that the documents would be preserved.
While the first batch of Cervantes’s letters was being processed, THNOC cataloged discovered that his son—the child born just three weeks before Cervantes was killed—was living in San Antonio. THNOC’s late collections processor Bettie Pendley took a strong interest in connecting the surviving Cervantes to his father’s letters and prompted curators to contact the man. Through those efforts, Frank D. Cervantes was able not only to learn more about his war-hero father but also to donate other personal papers and effects that had been returned to the Cervantes family by the military. They make an excellent complement to the earlier acquisition and provide a further glimpse into one New Orleanian’s military service. —MICHAEL M. REDMANN
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Fall 2014	23