(LATIN AMERICA.) Papers of United States Army officer and castanet master LeRoy Glodell, stationed in Bolivia, Panama and elsewhere. At least 2,000 items including correspondence (most with original envelopes), photographs, printed ephemera, and more in 2 boxes (2 linear feet); condition generally strong, almost entirely unprocessed. Various places, bulk circa 1941-1977 And now for something completely different. Connecticut native Leroy Marcus Glodell (1902-1984) traveled widely before the World War Two, including a tour of Mexico in the 1920s as a dancer. He became known as an artisanal castanet maker. In 1938 he settled in East Providence, RI where he worked as an electrician. By March 1941, before Pearl Harbor, he was already in army service in Florida. He became a captain, stationed mostly stateside in Washington, Miami, Leavenworth, KS, and elsewhere. After the war, given his fluency in Spanish, he remained in the army as an attaché in South America, and as chief of intelligence in the Panama Canal Zone, reaching the rank of colonel.
About half of this collection consists of a long correspondence between Glodell and his sweetheart Florence Grace Knapton Consolves (1910-1997) of Providence, RI. This collection includes several hundred letters between the two, mostly from 1941 through their marriage in 1947 in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
Several binders of photographs and reports relate to Glodell's military work in Latin America, and to his interest in local history there: an analysis of Fort Lorenzo de Chagres in Panama; photos of the Escuela de Transmisiones in Bolivia; several scrapbook pages of Glodell's expedition down Bolivia's Espirito Santo River; a typescript 1925 Department of State analysis of Mexican-American relations, 1910-1920; and much more. Hundreds of photographs document his military, personal, and musical lives.
Also included are correspondence and printed matter regarding flamenco dancing and his side business as a castanet manufacturer through 1977. His obituary in the January 1984 issue of Jaleo, a flamenco newsletter, described him as "one of the finest castanet makers in the world . . . one of the great masters of his craft."