Indiana Jones he`s not, contends Bob Shuster. But, as Jones did, Shuster sees history as an adventure, a thrilling escape into other people`s lives.
Take, for instance, vicariously accompanying a woman on a trek through the Gobi Desert during the Sino-Japanese War.
Or going on safari with David Livingston.
Or sharing the trepidation Corrie Ten Boom felt while hiding a Jewish family from the Nazis in the Netherlands during World War II.
Shuster has experienced these events, and more, through the letters, diaries, records, tapes and oral histories he pores over as director of the award-winning archives collection at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton.
The award came last year from the Society of American Archivists, which saw fit to bestow upon him its highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award. Thus the small archives at the Billy Graham Center enters the realm of other distinguished recipients of the award such as the New York State Archives, University of Michigan and Tennessee State Archives. Only one other small archives, the American Institute of Physics, has won the award before, and this is a first for a religious organization, though there are scads of prominent mainline religious archives, including those of the Franciscans, Maryknoll Archdiocese, Methodists and Presbyterians.
”He is the envy of others,” said Patricia Swindle, news coordinator for Wheaton College.
But why Shuster, and why the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College?
Probably first and foremost, it goes back to the Indiana Jones thing. Shuster promotes his archives as a wealth of adventure, mystery and excitement. Even in a promotional brochure, the staff takes a lighthearted look at letting people know what an archives is and what it does.
”What is an archives?” begins the pamphlet. ”No, it`s not a chain of islands in the South Pacific. It`s not a case of painful itching. And archivists are not people who plot rebellion and bloody insurrection.”
Instead, archivists collect things such as the letters, diaries, tapes and films of prominent people or events in history. In the case of the archives at the Billy Graham Center, collections focus on the work of non-denominational mission efforts to spread the gospel.
The core of the collection is Billy Graham, but other leaders such as Kathryn Kuhlman, Billy Sunday, Paul Rader and Charles Colson are represented, as well as organizations such as Christianity Today magazine, International Christian Broadcasters, Prison Fellowship, World Evangelical Fellowship and Youth for Christ.
Every day in the archives holds the promise of adventure, said Shuster. Take the day a truck pulled up to the back loading dock with an unexpected 16 tons of film from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Or the 13 letters handwritten by evangelist Dwight L. Moody discovered while processing an unassuming box of unrelated materials.
Shuster`s goal is to spread that excitement to the community.
”A lot of archives have been deficient in this,” said Archie Motley, curator of archives and manuscripts at the Chicago Historical Society. But Shuster, said Motley, spends a lot of time putting out promotional material to let people know what`s in his archives so that they can come and use the materials.
”At some places, it`s not easy to use the materials,” Motley said,
”but at Billy Graham, it is easy to use them.”
In fact, when a visitor enters the Reading Room on the third level of the Billy Graham Center, the place to access the items in the archives, the visitor might find the quiet, unassuming 40-year-old Shuster, who sports a beard and favors tweed in his jackets, taking his turn doing the clerical job of helping people find materials. He and his staff rotate the position.
Shuster wants to promote use of the archives out of the realm of professors and graduate students and into the world of the general public. So he has invited local groups of students to learn to use the facility, including history students of David Oliphant, a teacher at Wheaton North High School.
”The idea at first was just to let the kids see an archives and the techniques they use,” said Oliphant. ”The first year it was just a tour. After that, we thought, `Wow, these kids could learn to do primary research here.”`
Carefully choosing topics that would not promote religious themes at a public school, Oliphant assigned topics the students could research in the archives by reading the documents of people who were present during the Boer War in Africa, or during the conversion of Persia to Iran, or China during the time of the warlords.
”It was a lot of work for the students, but as they read, they developed relationships with these people who lived in the 1800s, and that`s magic,”
said Oliphant. ”As we`d talk about them in class, the kids started calling these people by their first names. Some of the kids took the initiative and found out some of these people were still alive and went and interviewed some of them.”
Even home-schooled children as young as 9 years old have toured the archives and found it exciting, said Paul Ericksen, associate director.
”They weren`t intimidated by using the documents,” he said.
Some people, though, say reading material in an archives is like going through somebody else`s mail.
”Just this morning, a student came in who was doing biographies on missionaries,” said Shuster. ”She was reading a diary of a woman who died in 1940 in Africa. The student said she felt embarrassed, asking if it was all right to read the diaries. They are very intimate, expressing frustrations and sorrows as well as joy.”
Shuster came to Wheaton College fresh out of graduate school in the late 1970s to head up the archives project the Billy Graham Center was launching.
”The archives were always a high priority at the Billy Graham Center. They wanted to do it right,” said Shuster.
And so they set aside 2,800 square feet of space sprawling across the top of the fourth floor of the center for storage of the collections.
”We`re blessed. Many organizations don`t even know they have archives. They are stuck in a basement somewhere,” says Shuster as he spins the wheel to open the heavy vault-like door that leads to the thermostatically controlled rooms containing more than a mile of shelving for storing fragile papers, tapes and films. To get to a tape of one of Kathryn Kuhlman`s broadcasts, he slides back one of the massive gliding shelves to reveal rows and rows of shelves stacked with reels of films.
”It`s an excellent facility, built to Bob`s specifications,” said Swindle, the Wheaton College news coordinator.
In fact, as a small facility, the award citation notes, the archives at the Billy Graham Center sets an example for larger archives, particularly in reaching out to the public.
”The thing they do that`s different than a lot of archives is outreach,” said Elisabeth Wittman, director of archives at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. ”Even though they are a small repository, they`ve done exemplary service to their own organization, to the community and archive professions. They do all their archival work up to professional standards while still being a small staff.”
Anne Diffendal, executive director of the Society of American Archivists, agrees:
”He`s done a wonderful job in developing an awareness of the usefulness of the records he holds. Typically, many collections are thought of as being used just by the faculty, but he does a lot to show students, undergraduates and instructors how to use materials. He`s also been able to show that a small organization can do outstanding work, that it doesn`t have to be a large institution in order to do quality work.”
Part of Shuster`s success also comes from his zeal in seeking to constantly expand the collection. He contacts more than 100 people and organizations every year to ask them to contribute their materials.
In fact, Shuster is tireless in soliciting people and organizations to donate their records, said Motley: ”He is a very quiet, unassuming guy. He never toots his own horn but is very capable professionally. He really cares about the work, about the subject matter.”
His care about the work extends to the people he works with, said Janyce Nasgowitz, who began working for Shuster 10 years ago as a secretary and moved up to reference archivist.
”He has so much knowledge and a phenomenal memory, and he likes to encourage people to work at their very top capability,” said Nasgowitz. ”He gives you opportunities to try new things and lets you go as far as you can. Any time that you have someone who encourages you like this, it gives you a feeling of wanting to excel, to learn more, to try to do the best you can. It can`t help but reflect in the kind of work you do.”
Shuster repeatedly stresses that the success of the center is a staff effort. Because of that emphasis, it is difficult to get bachelor Shuster to talk about himself. He will say that he grew up just outside Philadelphia in a little town called Hatboro, where his parents still live. Both of his brothers attended Wheaton College, and Shuster followed them there to earn a bachelor`s degree, later finishing up at University of Wisconsin at Madison with a master`s degree.
The Billy Graham Center plucked him straight out of school in 1975 to set up the new archives.
”They wanted someone who knew something about archives and was an evangelical, and I guess I fit the bill,” said Shuster in his typically low- key manner.
Though Shuster pushes aside talk about himself, he actually is quite an outgoing person, said Ken Gill, associate director at the library at Wheaton College and who has known Shuster for seven years.
”He likes to entertain, likes to have people over to his house,” said Gill. ”In fact, he was one of the first people to invite my wife, Judy, and me over when we first arrived at the college.
”He enjoys doing things for other people, like when he had a staff party, he had special, unique gifts for each person. He likes to do personal things for people. For instance, he knew my wife and I were football fans, so he became a Bears fan for a year, just so he could interact with us.”
He also likes things out of the ordinary, said Gill. For instance, Shuster took an adventure trip to New Zealand and Australia, hiking all over the place, traveling to places that most people wouldn`t see. ”That sort of thing doesn`t put him off at all,” said Gill.
Gill has noted, too, how Shuster hesitates to emphasize his own personal accomplishments at the archives.
”We`ve tried to spotlight his role sometimes. We put his name in a prominent space, and he always gets a little embarrassed and wants to change the subject or not talk about it, or accept full credit,” said Gill. ”On the other hand, he`s very proud of the job he`s done at the archives, but he sees it mostly as a group effort.”
Indeed, the staff at the archives is noted for its professionalism, said William Martin, a professor of sociology at Rice University in Texas who did research there for his new book ”A Prophet With Honor: The Billy Graham Story,” published by William Morrow.
”The staff is extremely helpful and they also know the material extremely well,” said Martin. ”I discovered people at other archives, such as the National Archives and Records Service in Washington, D.C., who know of Bob Shuster, that he is a very fine archivist.
”The people at the Billy Graham Center want to share what they know and have excellent research guides available, so I was able to find precisely what was in the materials and to go to it very quickly. I wish, frankly, that they were closer to me. If they were, I could turn out numerous scholarly articles from now until the time I retire.”
”Brave visitors find the archives an exciting place to be, where documents come alive,” said Shuster. ”It is not dusty, gloomy or scary. It is exciting. You never know when an old box of material arrives and you open it what you`re going to find, what kind of stories are inside. It`s like making a connection to past and future generations.”
This connection is the exciting part of the collection, not just saving yellowing scraps of paper, or diaries or films. It`s getting to know the people behind the letters, diaries and snapshots and telling their stories, said Shuster. It`s the personal part. The history-comes-alive part. The Indiana Jones part.
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The Archives at the Billy Graham Center, 500 E. College Ave., Wheaton, is open to the public 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday. 708-752-5910. To subscribe to the archives` new newsletter ”Witness,” write to the above address, or call for information.
