Kevin Leonard holds an eight-inch stack of yellowing file cards, the kind that haven’t been touched in over a decade and that probably won’t be seen again for another. In the bowels of Deering Library, the archives are part museum, part warehouse full of artifacts from the university’s 161-year history.
“Here it is, that one’s mine.” Leonard pulls a single card from the stack. Scrawled across the top in square blue letters are the words “Kevin Leonard 1976,” the first day Leonard came into the archives.
To Pat Quinn, the head archivist in 1976, that clear legible print was necessary in a time when there were no computers and everything needed to be written by hand; he offered Leonard a job. In class as an undergraduate history major, Leonard studied the past. In his work, he moved it in boxes.
When he graduated from Northwestern, his desire to teach was shot down by Chicago area schools. However, in 1980, Quinn gave Leonard a call about an opening at the archives and 31 years later, Leonard’s still there.
As the university archivist, he spends the majority of his time hunting down people with significant ties to the university and convincing them that their old documents are valuable.
“I try to save something that otherwise would end up in a landfill or burned or lost to history,” says Leonard. “We save evidence of lives.”
Leonard admits he hasn’t added much to the landfill in his lifetime.
“Oh yeah, I’m a total whack job when it comes to saving stuff. You know the show Hoarders? I’m not that bad but I have every letter I have ever received since the age of 6,” he says. For Leonard, saving things is a way to combat the passing of time, a way of stopping it from drifting away.
“Very few people have an opportunity to have their words live past them,” he says.
Leonard is in charge of saving those words. Shelf after shelf and box after box, he feels his way through the university’s past. Good handwriting brought Leonard to the archives; history made him stay.