Dallas Voice makes donation to UNT LGBT Archives

Morgan Gierenger, university archivist and head of special collections at University of North Texas, was in Dallas today (Monday, July 1) from the far-away land of Denton to pack up items from the Dallas City Hall LGBT Pride Month history exhibit. So Dallas Voice used the opportunity to make a donation.

Among the items donated were a stack of T-shirts from events like the 1991 March on Austin, along with Dallas Voice editor Dennis Vercher’s typewriter and the office Mapsco.

Since Dennis was first hired in 1985, his typewriter has been on someone’s desk at Dallas Voice. He served as editor from 1985-2006 when he died from complication of AIDS. Tammye Nash took his position and his office. The typewriter and Mapsco remained in place.

When Tammye left in 2012, the editor changed and the typewriter moved to my desk, where it’s held a place of honor for the past seven years.

I actually used the typewriter once. We had a power blackout in our office, so while everyone else used that as an excuse to not work, I pulled out the typewriter and pounded out a piece as everyone else watched in amazement. They laughed, watching the keys hit the paper in the roller. They asked what I was doing each time I hit the carriage return. I got questions from some of our younger staff about how we did things in the olden days, and I resisted slapping them.

Then one of them asked a good question about the story I just typed on a piece of paper and now held in my hand: “How are you going to get that into the computer so we can use it?” he said.

Smartass.

“Well, I guess I’m going to retype it into the computer,” I said, then came up with a good, face-saving reason to have used the typewriter: “But at least it got written.”

Oh, and a Mapsco. That’s like a spiral bound Google Map on paper, except to get one, you had to go to the Mapsco store, which was on Maple Avenue in the building that’s now an El Rio Grande supermarket (the Mapsco sign on the side of the building is still visible).

To find your map, just look up the street alphabetically and the building by number range in the front section of the book. That directed you to a page and letter in the back half of the book. Each page was divided into small, lettered sectors. If your route took you off one page, a legend at the top, bottom and sides told you what page to turn to.

Easy, huh? No distracted driving using one of these babies in your hands.

For years, Dallas drivers relied on Mapsco books — relied on them so heavily that a store that sold one thing only — a spiral-bound book of maps — required a store the size of a supermarket.

UNT wants your donations, too, as they continue to build one of the largest LGBT history collections in the U.S.

The Dallas Way is an organization created to gather, organize, store and present the complete LGBTQ history of Dallas. Donations to The Dallas Way are stored and preserved at the archives at UNT. Much of the collection is available to view at TexasHistory.unt.edu, including issues of Dallas Voice dating back to the first issue printed in 1984, The Dallas Voice collection is complete through March 2018.

Along with other donation of items, Dallas Voice today sent pdfs of the last 15 months of the newspaper, Out North Texas and the last 11 years of the Alan Ross Texas Freedom Parade guide. Those will be turned into searchable pdfs and become available online on the archive.

To make a donation to the UNT LGBT Archives, contact The Dallas Way at TheDallasWay.org/contact.

And now I just have one more thing I have to do. I need to figure out what I’m going to do with all that extra space on my desk and at home in my T-shirt drawer.

— David Taffet