This exhibit explores the ways in which Oregon State students have cultivated and celebrated their campus community since 1868. 

Amongst Oregon State’s values is community engagement to build relationships between students, faculty, staff, and more broadly, the Beaver community. One way to foster these relationships is by invoking school spirit. Some of the ways the Oregon State community enacts its school pride include wearing school colors, participating in school traditions, and representing the university through sports, clubs, and activities. 

OAC athletes, Harriet’s Photograph Collection, 1868-1996, P HC

Beavers and the colors orange and black weren’t always a part of the Oregon State community. Some reports share that in 1896, students adopted orange as the primary school color in honor of Robert Reed Gailey, a Presbyterian missionary and popular former football player for Princeton University. At the time, he was visiting the Albany Collegiate Institute (now Lewis and Clark College), whose colors were orange and black. While visiting Oregon, students from Oregon State invited him to coach the football team for several days. In his honor, they chose orange as their school color. While black wasn’t officially adopted, it was used as a background color. Now, the Oregon State community proudly wears orange and black to show school spirit.

At the time of the university’s origin, mascots served a different role in academic communities. They were more akin to class pets, and were often real animals or even people. Early Oregon State mascots included “Jimmie” the Coyote and “Doc” Bell. Bell was a member of the Board of Regents, well-known for his tradition of marching to Marys River after each of Oregon State’s rivalry game wins and throwing his hat into the water to celebrate the victory. 

The beaver was eventually adopted as Oregon State’s official mascot after the school newspaper and yearbook used the name, “The Beaver”. Reports say that in 1951, graphic illustrator Arthur Evans (who famously designed a majority of the college mascots of the twentieth century) drew the first cartoon beaver mascot for Oregon State. In 1952, student Ken Austin showed up to a school rally dressed in a hand-made Beaver costume. These first renditions of “Benny the Beaver” are the origin of Oregon State’s modern mascot. 

Ken Austin with Benny, Beaver Yearbook Photographs, 1998-2005, P003:6500.

School spirit and tradition are closely related. Traditions are often used by students to portray a sense of pride in their institution by honoring those students who came before them. While traditions may play a role in school spirit, they are not an exclusive means of promoting school pride.

Historically, some traditions have been exclusionary, whether intentionally or not. For example, in the early-mid twentieth century, freshman students (known then as “rooks” and “rookesses”) were made to wear green on Wednesdays until the ritual “Burning of the Green” at the end of the academic year. This rule was enforced by sophomores and upperclassmen.

Burning of the Green, Graham & Wells Photograph Collection, 1919-1925, P021:026.

At sporting events during this time, there were also dress codes for student spectators. These students were also not allowed to “fuss”, meaning they could not sit or mingle with students of the opposite sex at sporting events. These days, campus has moved towards a more inclusive approach, allowing students of all levels to wear whatever they wish to classes and removing clothing and gendered restrictions for students attending sporting events. 

Other traditions are still practiced today. Among them are songs and cheers used at sporting events and academic celebrations, like convocation and commencement. The “Spirit and Sound of OSU”, Oregon State’s marching band, helps maintain these traditions and promote school spirit by performing at campus and sporting events. While playing music, they often form impressive shapes and scenes related to their performance.

Beaver songs, MSS MC Box-Folder 177.5.

Visual representations of school spirit are not the only means of building community at Oregon State, however. Many students participate in clubs and activities, pursuing hobbies or passions while at the same time representing the university at competitions and events. There, friends, family, and fans cheer them on. 

One of the most popular ways to show school spirit is to support Beaver athletics. Baseball is one of the most popular sporting events at Oregon State, with good reason. The Beaver baseball team won back-to-back NCAA championship titles in 2006 and 2007, and again in 2018. After each win, Oregon State students and community members gathered to celebrate the team after their homecoming.

Oregon State students have also competed internationally, to the excitement of the Beaver community. In 1964, Oregon State student Jean Saubert earned a silver medal in the giant slalom and a bronze medal in the slalom in the Winter Olympics. She also participated and placed in the World Championships in 1962, 1963, 1964, and 1966 as a member of the US Ski Team. Saubert graduated from Oregon State in 1966. Her accomplishments were celebrated in 1991, when she was inducted into the university’s Hall of Fame.

Jean Saubert, MSS MC 140.9.

Other clubs and organizations in which Oregon State students have participated or competed include Greek life, music groups and clubs, cultural groups, affinity groups, and more. 

Ultimately, there’s no one way to enact school spirit. Whether you wear orange and black to show your school pride, attend a volleyball game to support the student athletes on that team, compete in philanthropy events to fundraise for a good cause, or advocate for students’ rights, school spirit is about fostering and supporting the community around you here at Oregon State. 

~ Grace Knutsen

Grace Knutsen is the lead student archivist at Special Collections and Archives Research Center. She has HBAs in history, French, and German from OSU and is an MLIS student at Indiana University Indianapolis. 

The Taste of the ‘Chives is a celebration of recipes that have tantalized the OSU community. This year we’re highlighting the various ways that Beaver Nation have prepared and publicized cheese!  

SIGN UP TO MAKE A RECIPE HERE

Cheese research and production has a long history on campus that is reflected in many university theses, articles, publications, and faculty papers held by the OSU Libraries.

To inspire the preparation of cheese-centric dishes for the ‘Chives event, we’re sharing some recipes from these sources in the form of links and PDFs listed below:

• Cheese Tour ’08: A journey to four of Oregon’s farmstead creameries and into the world of artisan cheese. (Michelle Spatz, Honors College thesis, 2008)
• A Collection of OSU’s Favorite Recipes. [selected entries in PDF below] (Cookbook compiled by the OSU Foundation as a fundraiser for the 2021 OSU Food Drive)
• Potatoes for Successful Meals. (OSU Cooperative Extension Service circular, 1968)
• Oregon Cheese: 50 Recipes for its Use. [selected entries in PDF below] (School of Home Economics, 1927)
• Foods with an International Flavor: A 4-H Food Nutrition Member Guide (OSU Extension Service, 2008)
• Choosing and Using Western Vegetables. (OSU Extension Service, 1976)
• Recetas Pictoricas – Pictorial Recipes #2. (OSU Extension Service, 2000)
• Baking Connections: Coffee Club Memorial Cookbook (cookbook compiled to honor Dr. David L.G. Noakes and the Friday morning Coffee Club in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife he started)

Inspired by a recipe here? Share your creation with other and sample other cheesy delights on October 31 from 12-1pm in Willamette East (Valley Library room 3622)!

When I applied to work at SCARC, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I knew from the job description what my duties would be, but I wasn’t familiar with archives. I had a vague interest in history and record keeping, but I’d never even taken a college course on history before. I figured my best bet was just to show up, do what I was told, and see if I enjoyed it enough to stay. Little did I know it would be one of the most impactful experiences of my life. 

Most of my time at SCARC was spent on the more common duties – paging and shelving materials, digitizing them, aiding patrons. These were all interesting and satisfying in their own ways. My favorite part, though, was always preparing for classes. It was so interesting to see the materials requested for different topics, especially when it was an opportunity to see some of SCARC’s archival materials and artifacts. To be clear, digitization is an important way of both preserving materials and making them more available to the public, which are crucial roles of an archive. I’m proud of the digitization I’ve done to improve learning and accessibility and I don’t mean to undermine that. But there’s really nothing like holding a literal piece of human history. 

One of the first artifacts that really captured me was Romeyn Hough’s The American Woods, which was brought out for a class on horticulture in my first year. Hough developed a method of taking microscopically thin slices of woods in three directions, which he then mounted on pages. Seeing the slides was amazing. Hough worked in the 1880s onward, in a time when there were serious concerns about the future of American forests. To have a snapshot, a literal slice of time, is an amazing resource. As someone who majored in Environmental Sciences, one of the most important things we deal with is a shifting baseline – basically, people think that the environment they grew up with is “normal”. Over time, we culturally forget how big trees used to grow, how many insects there used to be, things like that. It makes it difficult to do retrospective studies when there just isn’t enough data on what the world was like. American Woods stands out as a tangible example of what the trees of that time were like – not just pictures or descriptions, but the wood itself. 

An ongoing project I’m glad to have worked on is the transcription of letters from the Oregon State Yank Collection. During WWII, recent OSU graduates Elaine Kollins Sewell and Kane Steagall decided to put out a newsletter for other OSU alumni in the military. The Yank Collection is comprised of more than a thousand letters written to Sewell with thanks, changes of address, and information. During my time working on this project, I’ve run the gamut of experiences. I’ve looked up authors, usually to confirm spelling for names, that had long, wonderful lives after the war. I’ve looked up authors only to find that they died before they could go home. I’ve read example of human resiliency, human callousness, and human prejudice. Above all, I’ve been surprised at how relatable they are. I intellectually knew that they were normal people, just the same as anyone else, but my own education in history has focused on the grand – wars, social movements, important dates. I’d never really sat down and read personal correspondence, and definitely not at this scale. Reading people apologizing for returning a letter so late (as I unfortunately find myself doing), or joking about being willing to live in California if they could only return from the war, or spelling out words like “pu-lenty” and “cutey” or even “bitchy” was a completely new experience for me, one that reminded me that I should never overlook humanity throughout time. 

If I had to choose one artifact, though, it would undoubtedly be one of the cuneiform tablets from the Early Written Word Collection, which I saw when they were brought out to be scanned for 3-D printing. It’s hard to understate the impact seeing it had on me. One of the things that I’ve always loved about history, the reason why I started working at SCARC despite not knowing what it would look like, is being able to see humanity shining through. The Yank was one poignant reminder, but there are overwhelming signs of people being people throughout time – fallible and flawed, but always striving to learn and to connect. It’s why Antigone is my favorite play to this day. Reading it and seeing the same questions and ideas that I have now written by someone who died thousands of years ago was proof of that concept. The cuneiform tablets are another. They’re tax records, not nearly as philosophical as a play or poem, but they’re physical evidence of people’s ingenuity, their ability to innovate to the point of creating something entirely new – writing. Being in the presence of something over four thousand years old, something that has been seen and touched and valued by countless people over the millennia, was incredibly meaningful for me. Writing has been developed individually in multiple places, but the alphabet that I’m using to write this down right now is part of that global heritage.  It’s something I will never forget. I don’t know what the equivalent for other people may be: seeing a religious relic, visiting the place where their grandparents grew up, reading their name in genealogical records. Whatever it is though, that appreciation for history and our connections to it was fully cemented when I saw those tablets.  

I’m not sure where I’ll go from here – work, grad school, whatever else may come. My skills from SCARC may not be directly applicable. Still, though, I do know that I’ll carry the knowledge and experiences from SCARC with me and be better for it. 

This post is contributed by Maxine Deibele. She was a student archivist at the Special Collections and Archives Research Center for nearly 3 years, including 1 year as Lead Student Archivist. She studied Environmental Sciences and Writing.

Join us for a month of activities. We will have presentations, Open Houses, and time to gather with crafts and food! Here’s what’s going on this month in SCARC:

Pride Center Grand Opening: OSU Queer Archives Display – POSTPONED! New Date TBD

• Friday, October 11th, 11am-2pm @ the Pride Center
• To celebrate the newly expanded Pride Center Grand Opening, the OSU Queer Archives (OSQA) collaborated with the Pride Center to curate a display of OSU queer history featuring materials from OSQA archival collections. 

Oregon River Maps Special Open House

• Wednesday, October 16th, 10:30am-1:30pm @ the SCARC Reading Room
• In collaboration with PRAx’s annual theme of watersheds, SCARC is highlighting hand drawn maps and figures from our “Plans and Profiles of Oregon Rivers” collection. Curated selections will include original images of the Klamath River from field data surveyed in 1923, just after the completion of the Copco dams but before the construction of Iron Gate. Months after the removal of these dams, these historic maps hold new interest.

Add Glitter to the Archives! A Crafternoon with the OSU Queer Archives

• Thursday, October 17th, 4-6pm @ Valley Library Main floor, Kow Lounge
• Join us in using (copies of) archival materials from the OSU Queer Archives (OSQA) for crafting projects! Participants will have the opportunity to donate their craft or a photograph of their creations to OSQA if they would like to do so. This event is a part of the OSU Libraries Crafternoon series and is hosted in celebration of Queer History Month.   

William Appleman Williams: A Retrospective

• Wednesday, October 23rd, 4:00-5:30pm @ the SCARC Reading Room
• This event will include reflections from three scholars on the life and work of William Appleman Williams (1921-1990), a major American historian and member of the History faculty at Oregon State University from 1968-1986. Regarded as a founder of the “revisionist school” of American diplomatic history, Williams’s The Contours of American History (1961) was named one of the 100 best non-fiction books written in English in the twentieth century.

Imag(in)ing structure: envisioning the atomic structure of crystals from x-ray diffraction

• Thursday, October 24th, 4-5:30pm @ the SCARC Reading Room
• For centuries, people have inferred that crystals have an ordered internal structure based on their external form. It was not until the 20^th century, with the development of x-ray diffraction, that the atomic structure of crystals was revealed. Melissa Santala will draw upon her experience as a materials scientist and the SCARC’s rich history of science collection to discuss the process of imaging – and imagining – the atomic structure of crystals from x-ray diffraction patterns.

Betty Lynd Thompson Special Open House

• Wednesday, October 30th, 10:30 am-1:30 pm @ the SCARC Reading Room
• Learn about the amazing legacy of art nurtured by OSU Dance Professor Betty Lynd Thompson in a curated display featuring items from the archival collection about her in SCARC.  

Taste of the ‘Chives Recipe Cookoff

• Thursday, October 31, 12-1p @ Willamette East (Valley Library room 3622)
• Celebrate OSU’s longtime connections to cheese in this food sampling showcase courtesy of SCARC! Enjoy flavors from past and present recipes featured in campus publications and learn about historic OSU ties to the production, promotion, and research of this tasty and delectable dairy product.