Our wandering child ... returns

@SWEETBABYJESUSOFMSMC is home from London and reappeared in the flesh (well, plaster) in a cloud of pink bubble wrap with a very nice apology. All is forgiven. The welcome home picture is over at Instagram, http://instagram.com/p/VHbOP5CX8Y/.

Maya Angelou on the mission

From Mount
Magazine, Summer '86.

SOMETIMES THE MOST SNOOZE-INDUCING stuff will suddenly make you sit up and take notice. Okay, not very often. But it happens.

A heavy, comb-bound monster called "Statement of Overriding Considerations" was produced in 1994 in response to the Environmental Impact Report (EIR, another tome) for the proposed Learning Resource Center. Amid all the charts, graphs and stiff prose is the justification for new construction.

But included on the title page where no one will miss it is this moving quote by poet and frequent Mount speaker Maya Angelou.

When these old buildings were new, they were home to the rich, the powerful and the privileged, just as our colleges, universities and businesses were, and still are.

Students usually excluded from college because of ethnicity, poverty or lack of basic skills can succeed. Mount St. Mary's College has opened the door to a new and different kind of student with wonderful results. Won't you open your own doors?

The City Planning Commission evidently took to heart Angelou's tributes -- and those of scores of others included in the document -- and approved the building, which was dedicated as the Sister Magadalen Coughlin Learning Complex in 1998.

It's good to be reminded now and then of why we're all here, trying to contribute in whatever way we can to the MSMC mission. For the College Archives, that means preserving things with compelling titles like "Los Angeles City EIR 94-0170 / State Clearinghouse No. 95-071092 / ZA 94-0182 (ZV) / CPC 94-0181." Because you never know what little treasure someone will find someday.

Holy moly!

We started this blog a couple years ago as a way to keep track of fun and interesting stuff that comes through the Mount Archives. Since it was envisioned as more of a reference tool than anything else, we truly had no expectation that anyone would read it. 

Imagine our surprise and delight when we noticed that we're closing in on 14,000 page views!

A big thank you to anyone and everyone who has taken the time to read a post. If you'd like to see more of something or less of something else, please leave a comment. 

We are blessed to work in this wonderful small-but-mighty archives, and we want to share. Thanks for helping us do that.  Bless you.

- Posted from our non-archival iPad

Our wandering child

Come back, Baby Jesus!

THE CHALON LIBRARY CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS went up on December 3, and no sooner was the Creche scene complete than Baby Jesus disappeared.  In the spot where the manger had been were his heartbroken parents and an empty patch of straw.

A couple days later, our colleague Cheryl Ocampo pointed out that Baby Jesus was making the rounds of the Chalon Campus, and you could follow him on Instagram, the smartphone social media app, with the handle @sweetbabyjesusofmsmc.

Hello from London.

If you want to find somebody in social media, you have to be there yourself, obviously. So we signed up for Instagram (@MSMCArchives) just in time to see the Christ Child take off for London on Christmas Day (captioned, of course, "Happy Birthday to me").

Well, two can play this game. Hoping eventually to reunite the ceramic Holy Family in the library Creche, we started posting some pleas on Instagram from the Virgin Mary for her Baby to come home.  A week ago, we finally heard from @sweetbabyjesusofmsmc: "Relaaaax....I'm having fun. and I will be back."

At this point we're starting to think that Baby Jesus is channeling his inner teenager.

Getting closer... down the hill.

Classes resumed today and Baby Jesus is indeed back... somewhere.  Instagram has SweetBabyJesusOfMSMC posing in the O of Joseph on the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet sign down the hill.  But he hasn't made his reappearance in the library. As of an hour ago, Mary and Joseph were still waiting for their wandering child.

In archives terminology, by the way, this is called "replevin," which means getting your stuff back that was taken wrongly or illegally. Call this "social replevin." We can't wait to hear about the London trip.