So to begin, to introduce Rodney--
Rodney Phillips recently moved to Tucson from New York
where he retired very early from his position
as the director of the Humanities and Social Science
Library, the main library that's there
in midtown, the one with an entrance flanked
by lions, the famous, the famous New York library.
Before taking the position of director of the library,
Rodney held the position of curator of the Berg Literary
Collection, one of the greatest collections
of literary manuscripts and other rare materials pertaining
to literature and other related areas in the world.
Rodney was in charge of acquiring
new items for the collection, such as the last letters
of Dylan Thomas to his wife, and Thomas Wolfe's notebooks
containing draft texts of Look Homeward, Angel.
Rodney was also a chief curator of exhibits using a collection
in the library's halls.
Such exhibits featured luminaries
such as Nabokov and Yeats.
Yeats?
Yeats.
It's always confusing.
Anyway, so Yeats-- along with more contemporary parts
and such less canonical topics such as mimeographed literary
magazines.
Rodney was once interviewed for a PBS special
about New York where he talked about some of the items
under his care kept in the mysterious underground
stacks such as Melville's trunk, containing
some of the manuscript of Typee, and one of the four
handwritten copies of the Declaration of Independence,
soon to be featured in a major motion picture,
if you haven't been watching previews.
Because on the back of the Declaration of Independence,
there is a map to the treasure.
[LAUGHTER]
Coming in the fall.
Rodney also once carried the scroll typewritten manuscript
of On The Road by Jack Kerouac from New York
to Minneapolis to Los Angeles in a very special satchel custom
made just for that continuous roll of paper.
Rodney was born in Valley City, North Dakota,
which is also the birthplace of Penny Lee and Lawrence Welk.
He then grew up in Tucson and attended Rincon High School
with Linda Ronstadt, although he never
met her, before venturing northwards
to the University of Oregon.
It is nice to have him in Tucson.
Tucson just got much better, and the first concrete evidence
of that is the exhibit here that Rodney curated.
To discuss it with you, here he is.