Last week I picked up for our collection the diary of Northwest historian W. D. Lyman. The first volume opens with this: “The year 1884 dawns chill and dark upon the world.” In the last two entries, from 1920, Lyman records that has become professor emeritus, that his pension is in place, and that he feels rotten. Lastly, he writes: “This period of my history marks another stage of my life. It may have some fine opportunities.” He died two days later.
The future of his history is now in our archives, waiting for a new kind of life (although not of the sort He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named got through his fifty-year-old diary).
