'Fluffy surprise' joins CC special collections

For female students nearly nine decades ago at Colorado College, the dining hall offered opportunities for, um, distinctive tastes.

Newly recovered dining hall recipe cards show how to make large quantities of sumptuous treats such as ham balls and raw parsnip salad. The recipe for 50 servings of “Fluffy Surprise” calls for gelatin dessert powder, hot water, cold water, bananas and vanilla ice cream.

The recipe cards were found in August in the basement of Bemis Hall, a Colorado College all-female dorm, which had a dining hall until 2001. A scrapbook found with the cards contains breakfast, lunch and dinner menus for 1919 to 1920.

Now the artifacts are on file with the Tutt Library Special Collections department, permanent evidence of the kinds of food women students ate and how much diets have changed since.

“You’re not going to see pizza on these menus,” said Jessy Randall, special collections curator and archivist at the Tutt Library.

The recipe cards are among more than 500 additions made to the Colorado College Special Collections files this year. Hundreds more documents, artifacts and other historical treasures were added to special collections departments of other area libraries.

Some new acquisitions reflect news events and cultural shifts. In 2006, for example, the Colorado College department started a folder to keep track of gay, bisexual and transgender issues.

This year, the college started a folder titled “Colorado College Scandals and Embarrassing Incidents,” after a controversy in October over four students who wore blackface as they attempted to represent a TV show that has black characters.

Randall also collected photos this year that document “slack lining,” a tightrope-walk activity students often practice amid the grass and trees across from Tutt Library. Among the electronic snapshots students sent Randall showing their balancing skill, one shows a male student who removed his clothes for the occasion.

At the Pikes Peak Library District, the special collections department this year added tens of thousands of photographs that document the lifestyles of the rich and famous at The Broadmoor hotel and resort. The photographs were taken during 50-plus years by Bob McIntyre, a longtime photographer for The Broadmoor.

“They’re not just pictures of famous people, he really captured the personalities,” said Tim Blevins, the district’s special collections manager. “We don’t have anything else like it. For somebody who wants to do research on, for instance, how Colorado Springs was a magnate to the very wealthy and very well-known, it gives you kind of a pictorial representation of that over the years.”

Among the big shots captured in the images are Bob Hope around 1979, Henry Fonda in 1966 and Jimmy and Gloria Stewart in 1949.

Another addition at the library district were the papers of the Junior League of

Colorado Springs, a women’s organization that promotes volunteer work. The papers could be useful as researchers study the history of health care in the region in advance of a conference planned for next year.

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0187 or perry.swanson@gazette.com