A $86,000 grant will help archivists at E.S. Bird Library organize the personal papers of the late William Safire — a collection that includes scrapbooks and correspondence with politicians.

The grant from the Dana Foundation will allow Bird officials to pay an archivist to process the personal papers of Safire, who attended Syracuse University. He was also a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and senior speechwriter for former President Richard Nixon.

Bird recently acquired Safire’s personal papers, which range from materials connected to Safire’s ‘On Language’ column in the New York Times Magazine to correspondence with politicians, such as former President Bill Clinton, as well as lecture videos and scrapbooks, according to a Feb. 2 SU News release.

‘The archivists’ job is to create order from chaos, though Safire’s collection was well organized from the beginning,’ said Sean Quimby, director of the special collections research center at SU.

The Safire Room, located on the sixth floor of Bird, is already home to a collection of roughly 1,700 books, which Safire donated to SU from 1994-98, Quimby said. Books in the collection cannot be taken out of the library, but students will be able to use them as reference.

‘Getting this recent collection completes the picture in terms of papers that document his career,’ Quimby said.

Bird has most of Safire’s collection, but the Library of Congress is home to other Safire papers. Safire’s family still owns the papers, but they have entrusted Bird with preserving and keeping the collection in good condition for five years, Quimby said. At the end of the five years, Bird is hoping the family will give the papers to the library as a gift, Quimby said.

The Dana Foundation grant will allow SU to digitize approximately 500 of Safire’s items so they are available on the Web, Quimby said. Everyone will have access to Safire’s papers, manuscripts and books once they are processed into the system, he said.

Along with paying an archivist to sort through Safire’s paper, Bird will use the grant money to create a searchable index for the documents and place the materials in boxes and folders, Quimby said. This is not the first time the Dana Foundation has been supportive of a university project. The foundation also supported the construction of the Safire Room, he said.

Bird officials approached the Dana Foundation for the grant, said Barbara Rich, vice president of communications at the Dana Foundation. Rich said she believes the board of directors at the foundation awarded the grant in honor of Safire. Safire was the chairman of the Dana Foundation, a private philanthropic organization with particular interests in brain research, from 2000 up until his death. He died on Sept. 27, 2009, due to pancreatic cancer.

The foundation mourns Safire not only because he was the chairman, but because he was a good friend and devoted to his work, said foundation President Edward Rover on a memoriam for Safire on the foundation’s website.

‘During his tenure, Bill was our greatest champion, always working to enhance and build Dana’s mission and outreach,’ Rover said.

Safire attended SU in the 1940s. He dropped out after two years but returned a decade later to deliver the commencement address, according to the memoriam on the Dana Foundation website.

Safire’s professional career is extensive, ranging from being a U.S. Army correspondent to a New York Times columnist. In 1978, Safire was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. Safire also wrote numerous books on grammar, usage and etymology, which have left him as the most widely read writer on the English language, according to the memoriam on the Dana Foundation website.

About three years before Safire died, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.

‘Mr. Safire was a man who had much prominence as a well-known commentator in culture, language and politics,’ said Quimby of SU’s special collections research center. ‘We are thrilled to be home to a bulk of his papers.’

hmbehre@syr.edu

Published on February 8, 2011 at 12:00 pm