Friday, October 27, 2006

MIA: Charles Gidley

Once upon a time there was a residence on the Sam Houston State University campus that was named for a man named Charles Gidley.

Time passed.

That's about all there is to it, aside from the fact the structure was torn down a few years ago. Of all the people who have had buildings named in their honor, Gidley stands out like a sore thumb. Our research a decade ago turned up nothing of any merit and now SHSU archivist Barbara Kievit-Mason is putting forth an effort to finally identify this mysterious individual.

"I can find no record of him here in the archives and all the folks I have talked to know nothing of him. I have listened to various theories that he was a librarian, music professor, etc., but none of these have panned out," she says in Today@Sam. Mason tells us she has exhausted all the usual sources - cemetery listings and census records – and interviewed numerous people and surfed the Internet, all to discover who Gidley was and his association with the university.

Anyone with information may contact Kievit-Mason at 936-294-3699, or by e-mail at lib_bak@shsu.edu.

1 comment:

buildingshsu said...

He's been found. Barbara writes today that Gidley was hired as assistant librarian for Fall of 1956 but was gone from Huntsville before 1961.