Bancroftiana, Number 120 Spring 2002: Linda Jordan/Engel Sluiter

Linda Jordan

It is with great sorrow that we inform our colleagues and friends of the death of Linda Jordan during the Winter break.

Linda, a lead archivist at Bancroft, was a much loved member of Bancroft Technical Services. She originally came to us as a student employee, her interest in libraries having been spurred by service as the driver of the bookmobile in Elko, Nevada, where her husband served as a forest ranger. After his death, she returned to school, taking a B.A. in art history at Cal and then her M.L.S. degree at San Jose State University.

Linda Jordan.

Linda came back to Bancroft full time in 1995 and worked on a variety of processing projects, among them the archives of Beat poets Ted Joans and Philip Whalen, the Gooch-Darby family papers, and the Paramount Theater archives. One of her colleagues called her "Bancroft's most versatile, energetic, and enthusiastic archivist. She attacked her work with the goal of getting it done quickly and properly, never losing sight of the goal of making it accessible for researchers. Her attention to detail did not stand in the way of the 'big picture'. She familiarized herself with the subject matter to such an extent that she also became a major resource person for any researcher working with a collection she processed."

Over and above her professional qualifications, Linda was a delight to be around. We shall sorely miss her.

Engel Sluiter (1906-2001)

Engel Sluiter, a longtime student of European overseas expansion, once predicted that curiosity would kill him, but he was mistaken: he died of a heart attack in Kensington, California on 28 May 2001, just over a month before he would have attained his 95th birthday.

Sluiter was born in a Dutch-speaking household on a ranch near New Holland, South Dakota. In significant ways his life was shaped by youthful enthusiasms. One was his inexhaustible passion for knowledge, reflected, for example, in his practice of regularly slipping through an open window of the closed local library in order to find materials that would satisfy his curiosity.

Sluiter obtained his B.A. in 1929 and in 1931 he returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to begin graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of the formidable Herbert E. Bolton. He earned his M.A. in 1933 and, following a year in the archives of Holland and Spain, his Ph.D. in 1937. He taught briefly at San Francisco State College before returning to Berkeley, where he would teach from 1940 until he reached mandatory retirement in 1973. Among his students were Roderick Barman, the late Fred Bowser, James Boyajian, James Guill, Henry Keith, Clifton B. Kroeber, Donald Rady, Herbert Raffeld, and Mario Rodrigues.

All of us became part of the Sluiter legacy. But there is also another, more durable part of that legacy and it consists of the Sluiter Collection now in The Bancroft Library. That collection represents six decades of far-flung multi-archival research in archives throughout Europe and Latin America. Sluiter undertook thirteen extended archival forays, each of which yielded thousands of frames of microfilmed documents in half a dozen languages that he meticulously transcribed in his office or in his study. His decades of toil produced a massive documentary collection of more than 160,000 pages organized chronologically and topically in fifty-six standard-sized file drawers. Each drawer is filled with complete transcriptions headed by a pithy summary.

Engel Sluiter was a unique scholar of exceptional drive and talent. He will be profoundly missed by all of us who were privileged to have worked with and learned from him.