ESSAY

When The Record Complicates Memory:  

A Father’s Memory, a 1955 Broadcast, and the Limits of the Archive

April 10, 2026

During a phone conversation with me on a cold January evening, my father remembered the summer afternoon clearly. 

On Tuesday, July 19, 1955, from 3–4 pm Central Time, he and his first-grade classmates from Phoebe Hearst Elementary School appeared in-studio with their teacher, Maud C. Stubbings on Chicago’s WGN-TV Channel 9.  Together, they would demonstrate the phonics methods she had developed and used with her students.

Stubbings was a visionary Chicago educator whose “learning by doing” philosophy transformed early literacy from rote memorization into a tactile, multisensory experience. As both a classroom teacher and published author, she developed methods that bridged the gap between home and school through interactive phonetic play.

The WGN-TV broadcast was a significant public endorsement of her techniques, showcasing her students at Hearst Elementary School to demonstrate the effectiveness of her Phonovisual approach to a citywide audience.

* * *

He remembers introducing the principal. 

He remembers his mother being there, seated somewhere off camera with other family members and neighbors from the LeClaire Courts community. 

He remembers the feeling and weight of it, and because he was so certain of the memory, he was equally as certain that somewhere, there must be video footage to prove it.  

He didn’t say this, but I’ll say it:  Stepping up to a live microphone to introduce the principal as a seven-year-old Black boy from LeClaire Courts—especially in the high-pressure environment of a 1950s television studio—is a testament to both his confidence and the trust Maud Stubbings placed in her students.

So I began digging.

* * *

When I found the Chicago Tribune article for that day on Newspapers.com, I felt the small satisfaction of confirmation. The program had indeed aired. The date and time matched his account. But the article included a black and white photograph of Stubbings with a white student named Babs Brown — a single image standing in for the entire classroom. 

The live broadcast of someone like Stubbings, standing alongside a racially integrated group of students on a major platform like WGN-TV would have presented a complex visual for a Chicago audience. The Chicago Tribune article recorded the event, but framed it differently—reducing a lived reality already unfolding in my father’s community of LeClaire Courts, even as surrounding southwest Chicago neighborhoods like Sleepy Hollow and Archer Heights resisted it.

* * *

And in that framing, memory and documentation began to part ways.  On the surface, it felt like the evidence I found offered a measure of clarity and certainty.  Yet as I examined the digitized version of the 1955 clipping and considered the article’s editorial framing, I realized that what I had “discovered” was far more complicated than the apparent ease of digital access. 

The Chicago Tribune article documented the event but also flattened my father’s memory. One image became emblematic of who was present, while other participants — including my father — were absent from the framing. The article preserved my father’s recollection, yet obscured his presence.  

As I sat with this, I was sad.

Disappointed that the archive could not return what my father had asked me to find.

Frustrated, too, by the realization that I had approached a 1955 broadcast with 21st-century expectations of access, unaware of the limitations of early television and the archival practices that shaped what survived.

* * *

As I work on the manuscript for Black Men of Measure, I intend to revisit the task of locating footage from the 1955 broadcast, but I understand that it will be a challenge because it predates the use of videotape. It could mean that the segment likely vanished the moment it aired unless a rare and costly kinescope film was made. Furthermore, because early television was viewed as ephemeral, local educational segments were rarely archived by stations.

* * *

After locating the article, I contacted both the Chicago History Museum and WGN-TV’s archival department to inquire about surviving footage. WGN responded that no record of the broadcast exists. I never heard back from the museum.

This is the tension at the heart of archival work: corroboration is never neutral. Searching for evidence feels straightforward in the digital age, but the record reflects decades of decisions about what was worth preserving and how. On its face, institutional archives appear to be seamless, yet it contains artifacts that underscore absences, biases, and omissions that require careful reading to uncover.

* * *

In tracing my father’s story through newspapers and photographs, I am reminded that memory and public record are different instruments. One is lived, embodied, immediate, while the other is curated, mediated, and partial. The exercise of verification, as simple as it seems online, reveals not only what happened but also the complex scaffolding of institutional attention, editorial choice, and preservation that shapes what the past leaves for us to find.

The past may be a click away, but finding it — fully, faithfully, in all its dimensions — still requires attention to what the record chooses to show and what it quietly leaves out.