Archives West Finding Aid

In 1994, Washington State University Press published a biography of U.S. Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) entitled Fighting the Odds: The Life of Senator Frank Church, by LeRoy Ashby and Rod Gramer. Ashby, a professor of history at Washington State University, and Gramer, an Idaho journalist, began their research independently: Gramer in the 1970s, Ashby in the 1980s; each with the intention of writing their own book. They later combined forces to produce the jointly-written biography, which in 1995 won Utah State University’s David W. and Beatrice C. Evans Award as the most significant biography from the West published in 1994.

Both authors made extensive use of the Frank Church papers at Boise State University and conducted many interviews with Church’s family, friends, staff, and political colleagues, as well as Senator Church himself. The research files include notes, photocopies of key documents from the Frank Church collection, and copies of both primary and secondary materials obtained elsewhere. The interviews were recorded on tape cassettes; some are accompanied by either partial or complete transcripts made by or for Rod Gramer and LeRoy Ashby.

Like the Fred Hutchison collection (MSS 124), the Ashby-Gramer collection serves as a distillation of the much larger Church collection, presenting a selection of papers and documents the two researchers considered important to their research. Their files, maintained separately, are arranged alphabetically by topic, from Abortion to Wilderness. The earliest material in the files is census data from 1850 regarding the Church family. The collection also contains an edited typescript of the book and photocopies of source documents footnoted in the book, arranged by chapter.