For the Love of Listening
The Harry Smith Glaze, Jr. Collection & Fund for the Performing Arts
Cathy Glaze remembers waiting in the car with her mother outside the Record Exchange in San Francisco while her father carefully combed through stacks of old opera records. At home, music played every night, LPs and 78s echoing through the house as Cathy drifted to sleep.
The late Harry Smith Glaze, Jr. was a chemical engineer with a passion for opera. Over a lifetime, he assembled a collection of more than 2,000 early recordings, including Enrico Caruso cylinders and the only known Leo Slezak Edison cylinder. In memory of her father, who passed away in 2021 at age 88, Cathy donated the collection to UC Santa Barbara. Here, it will enrich the UCSB Library’s Performing Arts Collection and preserve the sounds that shaped her father’s life.
UC Santa Barbara’s Performing Arts Collection contains over 400,000 historical sound recordings and over 250 archival collections containing manuscripts, letters, photographs, scrapbooks, artwork, and other primary source documents that document and support research in the performing arts, including music, theater, dance, radio, and the circus. Cathy felt the UCSB Library was the right home for her father’s collection because of its commitment to accessibility.
“I like that it’s all being digitized so other people have the opportunity to listen to it. I think my dad would have loved knowing that others can listen to those scratchy old records all evening, just like he did, and maybe even have their kids fall asleep to them,” said Cathy.
Harry met his wife, Lynn Ferguson, at Stanford. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and returned with his family to earn his MBA. The family moved to the east coast, where Harry served on the boards of Opera Delaware and Girls, Inc. Avid travelers, Lynn and Harry visited 120+ countries together.
Cathy was set on returning to Stanford, where she received her bachelor’s degree and J.D. She practiced law for several years before entering higher education, and retired after several years as Stanford’s Title IX coordinator. Now, Cathy lives in Tucson, where she’s a patron of the local arts.
In addition to donating her father’s collection, Cathy created an endowed fund: the Harry Smith Glaze, Jr. Fund for the Performing Arts. Collection endowments are vital in supporting the Library’s role as a steward of history. An endowment ensures long-term financial stability for the acquisition and preservation of a collection while also increasing its accessibility and opportunity for scholarship.
“Having worked at a university for a long time, I understand how important it is to provide financial support to maintain physical collections. Supporting this collection, and others like it, felt like the right thing to do. In the end, you need funding to make the work possible, and I’m lucky to be in a position to give that support,” said Cathy. She has chosen to also name the endowment fund as a beneficiary in her estate plan, so there will be additional funding available to provide enhanced support in the future.
“Donors like Cathy are key to sustaining programs like the Library’s world-renowned Performing Arts Collection. The collection was founded in the 1970s as a repository of rare opera recordings, and Cathy’s donation of her father’s collection contains significant rarities that may be the only copies in a public archive. Collections like this enhance and enrich the collections and the impact the Library has on its users. Her commitment to a legacy gift to help support the collection will help it grow and sustain it for the next generation of students and scholars. We are deeply grateful for her support,” said David Seubert, curator of the UCSB Library’s Performing Arts Collection.
“Donating my father’s collection was an easy choice,” said Cathy.
“UC Santa Barbara is the best place in the world to donate a collection like this, where people will truly appreciate it and do something meaningful with it.”
Published November 2025
I think my dad would have loved knowing that others can listen to those scratchy old records all evening, just like he did, and maybe even have their kids fall asleep to them.
Cathy Glaze