By Victor Greto
DOVER – He looks way too comfortable.
Wearing black jeans, a ribbed white sweater, loafers — and a haircut he’s had almost continuously since the 1970s — Russ McCabe, Delaware’s bearded, home-grown state archivist, is dressing down today.
Even his large but sparely furnished office in the recently-built public archive building seems way too relaxed.
Although McCabe’s desk invariably holds a computer, the only thing hanging on the white walls above and around it is a framed copy of the document by which Delaware ratified the U.S. Constitution and made it the first state in the union.
The real document, on display a floor below McCabe’s office, was signed in a tavern just a few stone-throws from where it now sits, splayed and ink-faded in a clear case, washed by dim lights and controlled humidity.
“A case can be made that the original ratification document is the most valuable in our collection,” McCabe, 49, says of the hundreds of thousands of documents in Delaware’s ever-growing repository, which holds nearly four centuries’ worth of official state history, from deeds and legislative bills to vital records, and includes nearly 100,000 photographs and negatives.
Most of the documents are housed in acid-free folders and boxes within the archive’s three 60-degree, humidity-controlled vaults — a total of 95,000 cubic feet. The documents include both the arcane and influential, the stuff that records everyday events and the greatest moments in the state’s history.
“I tell people their lives are here,” McCabe says. “School grades, speeding tickets, licenses, birth and wedding and death records.”
So is his life.
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A Milton resident and native of Sussex County, McCabe’s family has lived in and around the southern Delaware region for nearly 400 years. And he has worked at the public archives for 27 years.
Records of his own ancestors are sprinkled throughout the building.
One of his favorite documents records the Revolutionary War career of his great-great-great-great-great grandfather, John McCabe, a private in the Delaware regiment.
On one of the rolls or lists of soldiers, his ancestor scrawled out his own name.
“I see that muster roll in our vault and it makes me feel damn good and proud and reinforces why I love my job and am interested in the future of Sussex County,” McCabe drawls in a casually deep voice.
It’s a voice that often has a hard time stopping, say his friends, acquaintances, and wife, Michele.
“When you get him on the phone, it’s hard to get him off,” she says. “People ask me to ask him something because they don’t have the hour to take to get the information.”
McCabe can’t help it; he’s full of time, and there’s so much to tell.
Along with the baby boomer lines now fighting for room on his face, and a family history folded deftly within his genes, his mind ebbs and flows with an oral history of colonial Sussex County, of shipbuilders and farmers, families merging, neighbors living and dying.
And now, his brain tackles technological change that, in the space of his half-century, has transformed his business from dusty records sitting unused on town courthouse shelves, to centralized records that people insist on getting with the click of a mouse.
“I come from a long line of storytellers, and you wonder if I’ll ever shut up,” he admits. “Oral history is where my interest in history came from.”
McCabe also is part of “One Sussex,” a diverse group of Sussex residents, officials, developers and environmentalists who regularly meet to discuss how to encourage “smart growth” in the expanding county.
“Its mission is to create a place for dialog,” says Mike DiPaolo, director of the Lewes Historical Society.
“We had several high-profile developers sitting next to staunch conservationists,” he says of the group, which first met as a “Your Town” workshop, and decided to incorporate itself.
“Russ has very deep convictions about helping to preserve the county but also providing opportunities for folks to stay here and find jobs that pay meaningful salaries,” DiPaolo says.
It’s part of the whole ball of wax, the past, present and future, McCabe says.
Call it the desire to continue a family tradition into another century.
“I want my kids” — he and his wife Michele have two boys — “to be able to live in Sussex County, too,” he says.
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McCabe always was surrounded by a sense of the past, and his incessant storytelling derives from a father, now 80, and his relatives, for whom dead air is intolerable.
Raised in Georgetown, he was a small boy when his ache for the past grew as inevitably as the ache in his growing pre-teen bones.
Visiting his mother’s parents in Milton, he’d walk across the street to the Goshen cemetery, reach up to open the iron gate to get in, and explore and wonder at the worn names of sea captains and ship builders carved in stone. Many of his mother’s family, several of whom were ship builders, are buried there.
“Each tombstone represented a person with a story,” he says. The cemetery became a playground, where he could begin to graze the surface of the world of his great-grandfather, Joseph Donaway, a farmer born in 1873. McCabe heard stories from Donaway until his death, when McCabe turned 14.
Many of McCabe’s ancestors came up to settle in Delaware via the Delmarva peninsula by the middle of the 17th century. The first progenitor probably was an Irish indentured servant.
It’s his extensive native past that newcomers who become interested in local history continue to tap into.
“He’s always been welcoming to new people,” says Ann Yarborough, executive director of Milton Historical Society and part of the One Sussex group.
Residing in Milton only two years after living in Washington, D.C., for 35 years, Yarborough says she often goes to McCabe for “perspective. He sees everything in the broader sense, and he also has the history,” she says. “We who are new have to work to acquire that.”
The issue of growth in Sussex County is not whether but how to develop, says Joanie Brown, co-owner with her husband of a Milton bookstore, who attends town council meetings and who has seen McCabe at those meetings.
“Part of the human creative spirit and energy lends itself to developing in a way that doesn’t radiate elitism and separatism,” she says of the potential cooperation among developers, residents and environmentalists in the “One Sussex” group. “The conceptual framework is community-based.”
“The growth is at our front doors,” McCabe says, “so a lot of people in Sussex are taking notice.”
They’ve been noticing for several years now.
According to the Census Bureau, the population of Sussex County has grown 10 percent from 2000 to 2004, from 157,473 to 172,216, faster than either Kent or New Castle counties. According to the 2000 Census, only 45 percent of the population was born in the state.
“It’s so completely changing the dynamic on who has an interest,” McCabe says. “It’s suddenly us [natives], who had once looked the other way and assumed it didn’t affect us directly, who are finally thinking about it.”
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It took McCabe 26 years, but last April he finally made it to the top position at the archives, when he was appointed director by Secretary of State Harriet Smith Windsor. It’s McCabe’s job for as long as he wants it.
“He’s one of the most knowledgeable people in the state, a historian’s historian,” Windsor says. “Historians go to him for sources. He just loves to tell the stories that we have so richly embedded in our history of the state of Delaware.”
It came at just the right time, McCabe says, as he teeters on the precipice of 50.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to do it 10 or 15 years earlier,” he says. “My children are now in their mid- to late-teens. Then, I was coaching baseball.”
But the job many say he was born to do was a happy accident.
After attending Sussex Central High School, he graduated from Radford University in Virginia with a degree in history and geography. It was a youthful foray outside of the sway of Delaware.
“I felt I had to experience a different environment,” he says.
He returned to his parents’ home in Georgetown and contemplated becoming an urban planner, and thought of applying to the University of Maryland.
But his mother, a public health nurse, noticed a job posting for an archivist/records examiner – one of only two on the staff at the time — and McCabe applied. He started working during the summer of 1978, still planning on going to graduate school.
But he became hooked after his boss allowed him several days of rooting through records that had not been touched for decades, some for centuries.
“We had this huge collection of unprocessed and disorganized records,” he says.
McCabe would literally have to cut open the government red tape that tied the records together. “It became a great way to become educated in all things historical,” he says.
There was no guide to the collections of documents, but an incomplete card file and a 3-ring binder.
Later a consultant suggested that McCabe and his fellow archivist not be allowed to travel together, for fear that if something happened to both of them, no one would know where anything was.
He eventually coordinated the processing of historical records, and helped draft the state’s 1988 comprehensive public records law. For more than a decade, he ran the state’s historical markers and monuments program.
He also did a four-year stint as Sussex County recorder, from 1987-1991 – the only time he cut his hair above his ears. It seemed more official. Asked to run again, he refused, but not for the hair, he says.
“It was about the time that my second son was born,” he says.
It was during his duties with the monument and marker program that he met Victoria Owen, of the Pencader Historic Association in Newark, in the late 1990s.
“He’s every mother’s wish for a son,” says Owen, 70, who would be happy to adopt him if he was available.
The proliferation of markers throughout the state during McCabe’s tenure — 230 out of nearly 500 – saved and recognized dozens of sites either ignored or under threat of development, Owen said.
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If behind every subject lies a story for McCabe, so behind every object in his spare office lies an emotion, desire, or secret regret.
Also there, a framed picture of Frank Sinatra leans by a long table behind his desk. Sinatra looks as archaically 1950s cool as McCabe looks archaically 1970s cool.
“I love him,” McCabe says of Sinatra’s music, and immediately spins a tale about one of the “great regrets” of his life.
“I had a chance to see him in 1993,” he says of the Chairman of the Board. “But the wife wouldn’t go.”
That same wife, to whom he’s been married for nearly 22 years, and with whom he’s had two boys, Josiah, 19, and Coulter, 15.
That same wife, Michele, who fell in love with him 25 years ago when she began working at the public archives, two years after McCabe had been hired as just another employee with a fascination with history.
It was during one of her first days working in the basement when McCabe came down and was speaking to a friend about a wedding he had just attended. “He was telling him it was not too late to change his mind,” Michele McCabe says. “I didn’t think that was the appropriate time to say this.”
Her disapproval, however, became tempered by biology.
“Even then, I was quite taken with him,” she says. “He was cute and older than me,” two criteria that placed Michele, now 43, on a course to marry him in August 1984, after she stopped working at the state archives.
“He wasn’t hard to nail down,” she says. After living together for six months, he proposed on one knee. “He’s very traditional.”
Call it a turn-of-the-21st-century sort of tradition, where the new mixes easily with the old, where centuries-old stories mingle with virtual reality, where the rituals of marriage brush up slyly against modern love.
Although his lips purse in regret now at the thought of not seeing an aging vocalist croak the echo of a tune, McCabe’s eyes are smiling.
He’s thinking of Michele, Sinatra and the centuries of history swimming haphazardly through his mind.
He’s never been happier.