The third floor of Beaman Library is home to the Lipscomb archives, including those of The Babbler, the university student print publication that ceased in 2009.
The third floor is also where Marie Byers, the Beaman Library archivist, volunteers her time, scanning in old stories and photographs to use in The BabblerExpress.
“I like to show off my stuff,” said Byers, motioning to the archive room in the corner behind her chair.
The BabblerExpress is a new Lipscomb paper, published by the Senior Alumni Council and mailed out to alumni ages 55 and older. Similar to the Nashville Retrospect, The Babbler Express pulls from old student publications to compose a bi-yearly newspaper for the senior alumni.
“The idea came from the Nashville Retrospect, which is the newspaper that’s published, I think monthly. It is a newspaper – only it’s bigger than the current Tennesseean, and it’s larger, like the old newspapers used to be, but it just re-prints articles from The Tennessean, the Nashville Banner and earlier Nashville newspapers from, say, the 19th century.”
Byers emphasized that although everyone reading the Nashville Retrospect doesn’t remember what happened fifty years ago, the people who lived at that time do and the stories are sentimental. The same is true of The BabblerExpress.
The committee makes it a priority to include a “little of this, little of that” in order to connect with all the alumni, many of whom enjoyed different interests, Byers said.
“We do have some guidelines,” Byers said. “We don’t have all sports. We don’t have all beauty queens, and we don’t have all Singarama. We try to show student activities. We try to have something about faculty.
“This was the campus newspaper for many years and it reflected [student] views of national events; as well as faculty interest, even administration interest. So, we try to go across the board and show a little bit of everything.”
Articles pulled from The Babbler and Pony Express are decided on by a committee of six, Byers being the head of that committee. After the committee has decided which stories and photographs to use, Byers scans them in before sending them off to be printed.
“The problem is everyone has so much fun looking at the old articles that it’s hard to get through,” Byers said, opening The BabblerExpress and pointing to its pages. “Everyday I work here I get memories. I’m always bumping into something I remember.
“Of course, those of us on the committee, we all want something in The BabblerExpress about our time at Lipscomb. But, we can’t do that. We have to focus on other years.”
Byers smiled as she reminisced about riding with other Lipscomb students to sing to patients at the tuberculosis hospital.
“For years, once a week, a group of students would get on this bus and drive out to [the] TB hospital and just sing for the patients,” Byers said. “People who had TB, before the 1980s, I guess, there was nothing they could do for them except put them in [a] hospital and let them live out their life in isolation. Well, so, we’d go out and sing to them.
“It was a great tradition and it was lots of fun. We’d sing on the bus all the way there and sing on the bus all the way back. We made some people smile.
“So, now what do people do? We have service projects,” Byers said. “We call it Service Day. This was a service project, we just didn’t call it that. So, Lipscomb students have always been involved in things like that.”
Byers expression changed to a smirk as she glanced out the library window and motioned toward Bison Square.
“Throughout the history of the school, there have been a number of pranks, for example, bubbles in the Bison Square,” Byers said. “That’s not the first prank. There have been pranks on this campus from day one, so occasionally we may publish an article about some of those.”
Not only do articles in The BabblerExpress pull heart strings, but just the name in itself causes nostalgia.
“The high school newspaper is called the Pony Express and the university’s newspaper was called The Babbler,” Byers said. “So, we decided to merge the titles and so it became The BabblerExpress. Anyone who was in high school or college would recognize that.”
Because The BabblerExpress is sent out to both high school and university alumni, it was important to include stories from both publications. Although most articles included are from The Babbler, there are at least two pages dedicated to the Pony Express.
The committee only pulls stories that the senior alumni will have recollection of, making the cut-off year 1980. In five years, Byers said the cut-off date will be 1985, which will give the committee another five years of material to work with.
“We project doing [this] for a while,” Byers said. “We have enough material to last us for a while.”
The archivist shifted in her seat, folding the paper on the table.
“I hope that there will be something out there in the future for people to fall back on and remember Lipscomb by,” Byers said. “This is our history and we feel like this is one way to keep it alive.”
The first issue of The BabblerExpress was published in the fall of 2012 by the Senior Alumni Council, a fairly new program in Lipscomb’s Office of Alumni Relations.
In 2011, Amy Hamar, Director of Senior Alumni Programs and Lifelong Learning, presented a proposal for starting a senior alumni program. The goal of the program would be to revive the interest of older alumni, specifically through monthly activities and Lipscomb-related events.
“My passion has always been older people. I just have a real heart for older people,” Hamar said. “I got to thinking, the things that we offer through the alumni office, [like] the events, are not geared towards older people.
“I proposed that we start a Senior Alumni program that would engage them on that level and try to reconnect with a lot of people we had lost touch with through the years.”
The BabblerExpress was just one more avenue for reconnecting with alumni.
“In the proposal, one of the things I said I thought would be great would be a senior newspaper,” said Hamar, a Lipscomb “lifer.” “Everything’s gone so electronic. That generation really likes a newspaper. So, I just thought that it would be cool if we could do a newspaper that would be directed specifically to that age group.”
The BabblerExpress is mailed to approximately 14,000 senior alumni, and each issue costs $4000 for print and postage. The Council eventually hopes to find underwriting for the publication so it can be printed more often. Hamar says they have talked about creating an online version to be emailed out in the summer, but right now the Council is just focused on a spring and fall issue.
“Our budget not only funds the paper, but it funds all of our senior alumni monthly events, so we have to pace ourselves and make sure it lasts the whole year,” Hamar said.
The first issue of The BabblerExpress was composed only of older articles from The Babbler and Pony Express. The second issue intertwined some contemporary pieces with the old to showcase Lipscomb now, as well as to communicate campus information, like Lipscomb’s Lifelong Learning program, senior alumni events and HerdComing.
The third installment of The BabblerExpress will be mailed out in early January. Hamar said the publication will be continually improving as the Council adjusts to give readers more of what they want.
“It just spurs so many memories in their mind and gets them thinking about Lipscomb again,” Hamar said. “Which is what we want to do.”
Hamar said the positive feedback and response from senior alumni has been overwhelming.
“We get letters. We get emails,” Hamar said. “It just really has done what we wanted it to do because it’s brought back a lot of memories.”