Welcome to the digital exhibit of the Thomas Gregory Song Papers (TGS Papers). This exhibition displays all sorts of documents such as pictures, letters, essays, books, and oral interviews in Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean, which are part of the official collection in the Rare Books & Manuscripts Library at The Ohio State University. These papers, in addition to the sister collection, The Song Family Papers, offer a window into the life history of the collection’s namesake, Thomas Gregory Song (1929- 2014).
Who was Thomas Song?
Thomas Gregory Song was born in 1929 as the first child in an ethnically Korean family that had settled in Tokyo City. He grew up in the Japanese-occupied city of Dairen (present-day Dalian, China), then part of the Kwantung Leased Territory of the Empire of Japan. During his childhood in Dairen, he attended a local primary school and junior high school under the Japanese imperial curriculum; meanwhile, he was exposed to Western culture and thoughts as a member of a local Catholic Church. When the Empire of Japan surrendered to Allied Forces, the Song family fled to Seoul, South Korea under the U.S. occupation.
Confronting the reality that he was incapable of merging into Korean society, he eventually departed to Boston in 1948 and completed his high school education there. After graduating, Song earned an undergraduate degree in Mathematics at Dartmouth College and then became the recipient of a full scholarship to pursue a Master’s degree at the University of Michigan. During his stay in Ann Arbor, MI, he was suspected as a Communist sympathizer and imprisoned in Detroit. Following his release, Song enlisted in the U.S. Army and obtained U.S. citizenship as he completed his military services. Eventually, he returned to the University of Michigan and earned a Master’s degree in Philosophy and another Master’s degree in Library Science. He subsequently worked as a researcher, a lecturer, and a librarian.
Before retiring, Song worked as the Associate Director of Libraries at Bryn Mawr College from 1969-1987. Given his training as a mathematician, he was involved in the early years of computer automation in research and university libraries. In the early 1970s, he came out as gay, amicably separated from his wife of 14 years, and then more openly began what would ultimately be a 40-year gay relationship with his partner.
Song’s life was marked by imperialism, world war, transnational migration, and political persecution under McCarthyism. He struggled with his identity as an ethnic Korean, assimilated Japanese, naturalized American, and his sexual identity as a homosexual man. This exhibit presents different stages of Thomas Song’s life and highlights the contents of the Thomas Song Papers.
