The Voices of Cranbrook: History Speaks for Itself

Join the Center’s Head Archivist Leslie Edwards for an evening of insight, surprise, and laughter. Through a presentation of audio clips, paired with archival images—carefully curated from the Archives’ collection of oral histories that includes more than 200 interviews recorded on a variety of media formats—the evening offers an opportunity to hear the voices of some of the people who helped shape Cranbrook, especially during the second half of the twentieth century.

While we do not have interviews with key founding figures like George Booth and Eliel Saarinen, interviewees including Booth cousin Edmund Pratt and the Academy of Art’s second president Zoltan Sepeshy will help shed light on their personalities. Others, like Brookside School’s dietitian Flora Leslie and the Cranbrook Foundation’s landscaper and trusted employee Dominick Vettraino, will provide glimpses of daily life on campus seldom told and often overlooked. The program will touch on all aspects of the Cranbrook community including art, education, religion, and science.

Edwards will also address the work that she and the archivists at Cranbrook Archives are doing to preserve and make accessible these fragile histories, the first-person accounts of our history.