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John E. Howell |
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Recordist At Library of Congress |
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John E. Howell, 66, who died of lung cancer Jan. 25 at Inova Mount Vernon |
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| Hospital, recorded poets Robert Frost and William Jay Smith, such classical virtuosos as the Budapest Quartet and the Juilliard String Quartet and blues musicians whose voices were full of pain. |
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He was so expert at coaxing faint sounds from early recordings that he was able to recover the sound of a door closing for a murder trial in Florida two years ago. |
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He recovered other sounds almost lost to history, including displaced survivors of the Holocaust and field recordings of ethnographers interviewing American Indians. |
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| John combined the good ears a sound engineer has to have with the sort of mechanical, tinkering proclivity of someone who deals with old machines, with completely obsolete media, said Sam Brylawski, former head of the recorded sound section at the Library of Congress. He had one foot in the 19th century and another in the 20th century. |
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| Mr. Howell's main work was as a recording engineer at the Library of Congress for 43 years, from 1960 to 2003. His work literally saved history. Brylawski and a 1999 Washington Post story described how Mr. Howell searched for years to find a device that could play recordings an Illinois professor made in 1946 of Holocaust survivors he found in European displaced person camps. Their voices were on reels of magnetized steel wire, stored in a box in the corner of the library. |
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| Nothing would play the reels -- until Mr. Howell tracked down two broken Peirce wire recorders, cannibalized their parts and rebuilt one. The interviews were rerecorded and saved on a more stable format. Mr. Howell said he'd like to see all the old formats saved, and, after years of arduous work, it would be nice if we had a couple of technical people we could put into storage, too, he joked. |
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| Mr. Howell also mastered the library's classic 15-record anthology, Folk Music in America, edited by Dick Spottswood. |
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| His life, however, was not solely focused on the past. He recorded live performances of musicians who played at the Library of Congress, often for radio broadcast. The music division in which he worked later became the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. |
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| Mr. Howell became supervisor of the special formats section. He worked closely with the library's American Folklife Center, copying early recordings of folk song collectors, including Alan Lomax. |
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| After retirement, he operated a home business copying from early media for families, universities and homicide trial attorneys. |
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| Mr. Howell, a native of Washington and graduate of Eastern High School, was raised on Capitol Hill except for about two years when he was in Oklahoma and Texas. He literally worked on the site of his boyhood home: His home on Carroll Street was torn down for a parking lot, before the Madison building, where his office was housed, was completed. |
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He served in the Air Force from 1956 to 1960 and was stationed in Hawaii, Guam and Greenland. He attended George Washington University while working part time. He was a member of the Audio Engineering Society, and in the 1960s he co-edited the organization's newsletter. |
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| Mr. Howell moved from the District to Springfield in 1986. He was a member of Burke Presbyterian Church. |
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| Survivors include his wife of 43 years, Peggy Howell of Springfield; two daughters, Kara Howell and Teri Howell, also of Springfield; and a sister, Janice Leopard of Waldorf. |
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