In the spring of 1909, the Men’s glee club spent an entire month touring the Great Plains and Pacific Northwest. It was estimated that they travelled about 5,000 miles, through 11 states; performing 26 “secular” concerts, 6 “sacred” concerts, and a number of informal events at high schools and Y.M.C.A.s, to “an aggregate audience of some fifteen thousand people”—all at a grand cost of five thousand dollars.

To commemorate this momentous tour, members of the Glee club created a scrap book that recorded each day of the trip, along with pictures and commentary. A local printer published a small run of this work as The Western Trip: To the Coast and Back with the Iowa College Glee Club: A History of the Trip by James Normal Hall and David Wright Wilson (a copy of which is in special collections in Burling Library, for anyone who wants to read about their adventures).

 

One noteworthy feature of the book is that it represents the first publication of James Norman Hall (class of ’10), who would go on to become a prolific writer and novelist (most known for his Bounty trilogy that began with Mutiny on the Bounty in 1932). It is also interesting to see how the book ends, with a note to future readers who will encounter it’s yellowing pages in decades to come…