Imagine the Past

Though the novel for adults that I am currently writing is inspired by a real (no longer extant) Philadelphia institution, I have been frustrated by the lack of verifiable documentation. Innuendo swirls. Rumor. Whispered references to a dark past. But aside from a spate of newspaper stories from a single brief era, some remarkable photography, a few ambitious blogs, a township planning report, a slim chapter in a slim book, a few generic paragraphs, and an elderly gentleman who agreed to speak with me by phone, I had been coming up short.

It doesn't matter, my friends kept saying. This is a novel. You are free to imagine.

Yes, of course. I am writing a novel. But there are some things that one really must know, and besides, my degree is in the history and sociology of science. I crave the past like runners crave water.

A few weeks ago, though, I noticed a 1959 report listed at the University of Pennsylvania Van Pelt library, set aside in storage. It took a while for the book to make its way to me, and yesterday afternoon I sat with it for the first time. I hadn't much hope. It was, after all, a typewritten, yellow-paged report—full of Roman numerals and bullet points with chapter titles that stated, without romance or flutter, their purpose: "Ergotherapy Department (Hospital Industry) Activities in the Rehabilitation Service," for example, or "The Function of Occupational Therapy in the Rehabilitation Service." Marked as a "First Interim Report," the book had been donated to the library by its author—"with compliments—" and in a neat blue script throughout (the author's own) corrected or amplified with notations.

Who would then have thought that this book would turn out to be the gem that it is? Here, at long last, are many of the elusive facts—matter-of-factly called out, unmanipulated, and unpretty. It's all here, scientifically stated and bullet-ized, and I suspect that I am the first who has ever gone off in search of it; the book shows no signs of having been read. I can't help now but imagine this author, precisely 50 years ago, carrying his volume to the Van Pelt front desk and saying, "It is yours." Did he imagine that a novelist would someday wander in and find his recorded past for the taking?