Dr. Eleanor Vale

Account

Eleanor Vale was born in 1935 in Bangor, Maine, and trained as a historian of institutions — hospitals, mutual societies, county archives, the sort of bodies that keep minutes for a century and are then dissolved in an afternoon. She worked for eighteen years as a university archivist, and her scholarly reputation, such as it was, rested on a single argument made repeatedly in unfashionable places: that the papers an institution keeps about its own conduct are a better guide to its character than anything it publishes.

She convened the first Thursday gathering in 1968 with Thomas Orrell, in a rented room above a shop. Her own account, given in the Founding Letter six years later, is that the gatherings were intended to last a winter.

Vale distrusted institutional authority, including her own, and said so in writing often enough that the phrase 'necessary danger' has passed into house use. Her objection was not to rules but to deference: she held that a body which cannot be corrected by the people inside it has already stopped being what it claims to be, whatever its rules say. Several of the Institute's least convenient arrangements — the refusal of any single leader, the requirement that disagreeing records both be kept, the standing rule that no practice may be defended by reference to a founder's wishes — exist because she insisted on them against the preference of the room.

She was rarely photographed. Two photographic likenesses are held; one, made about 1989 by a hand the Record does not name, is reproduced here. She declined a painted portrait commissioned the same year on the grounds that the Institute had more useful things to hang.

She died in October 1998, at sixty-three. She had asked that no memorial observance be held and that the ordinary Thursday go ahead that week. It did.

Materials recovered following the October fire were transferred to the Common Record in 1999.