Our latest video release batch is now available – game and crowd footage for men’s basketball in the 1986-87 season!

• Everything is described here – http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/osuhistory-videos.html.
• Look for ‘1986-87 Season’ under the Basketball header.

This season is noteworthy in that it is Gary Payton’s freshman year at OSU, and the footage we are releasing is, as far as we know, the only Payton video in our collection we have the right to publish. These films were shot by News and Communications Services and include scenes of fans in the stands as well as game action.

And of course Benny, slapping some hands and dancing around the court.

Can you remember when a history lesson was this much fun?

Tracy Hensley and Tiah Edmunson-Morton hosted a booth at the PSU Archaeology Show to share a beer she made after some recipe inspiration provided by Edmunson-Morton.

This year’s theme is “dwellings,” so we thought it would be fun to enlist the help of a home brewer. A slightly meandering path led us to Tracy and a wonderful beer brewed up by the Green Dragon Brew Crew.

Read more about the recreation on the Brewstorian blog. 

Thanks to Special Collections and Archives Research Center Director Larry Landis for this lovely tribute to David Gilkey. 

Photographer David Gilkey, website photo without attribution.

I never met David Gilkey. But I shed a tear Sunday evening when I learned that the National Public Radio photographer/videographer was killed earlier that day in Afghanistan, along with his NPR translator, Zabihullah Tamanna. David attended OSU in the mid 1980s and went on to become an award-winning photographer with the Detroit Free Press and National Public Radio.

There were two degrees of separation between David and me. I know his father, Richard (Dick) Gilkey, who was an OSU alumnus (BS 1951 and MS 1953) and an excellent photographer in his own right. Dick was a student photographer here, taking photographs of campus events for the Barometer, Beaver yearbook, and the Oregon Stater. He was shooting cover images for the Stater as a sophomore and working as a stringer for the Oregon Journal newspaper in Portland. Clearly, photographic talent runs deep in the Gilkey family.

Richard Gilkey

Dick, long a friend of the OSU Libraries and Press, donated the photographs from his student days to SCARC in 2004 and 2005. The more than 1,000 images in the collection document student life, athletic events and facilities, drama productions. He created an iconic series of portraits of several Oregon State faculty, some of which were used as Stater cover images. One of my favorite Gilkey images is of students taking final exams in the MU ballroom. I used it as the opening image for chapter 5, “Academics at OSU,” in A School for the People: A Pictorial History of Oregon State University. The book also includes a wonderful portrait of Richard as a student photographer.

• See the guide to the Richard Gilkey Photographs. 
• Take a look at this “iconic” Richard Gilkey portrait. 

David and Dick are both a part of a long and rich photographic tradition and legacy at OSU, which dates back to 1891 when a local studio photographer named Emile Pernot was hired by Oregon Agricultural College to teach photography. There are few, if any, colleges or universities that can lay claim to offering photography as a for-credit course earlier than 1891. Others who have more recently been a part of OSU’s photo tradition include Chris Johns, editor in chief of National Geographic Magazine; Roger Werth, Pulitzer prize winning photographer for the Longview (Wash.) Daily News, who captured the May 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens; and Cheryl Hatch, who like Gilkey is an award winning photographer who has covered armed conflicts around the world.

Unfortunately, SCARC’s holdings don’t include an image of David Gilkey while a student at OSU. An image from the 1986 yearbook is captioned “Dave Gilkey has some 4-wheelin’ fun in the snow,” but the person behind the wheel of the pickup could be anyone. A few of his photos show up in the 1987 and 1988 yearbooks.

• Search the 1987 yearbook for David Gilkey. 
• Search the 1988 yearbook for David Gilkey. 

I’ve casually followed David’s career for the past few years, occasionally checking his NPR website for new work. Although best known for his images of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, he also covered the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, visited Cuba in 2014, and just last month was in India with NPR All Things Considered co-host Ari Shapiro, also a Portland area native.

• Read Monday’s OPB interview with Shapiro discussing his friendship with David Gilkey at http://www.opb.org/news/article/david-gilkey-npr-photojournalism/.

Dick sent me a note in late 2015 regarding the publication of A School for the People.  He added a note about David, saying that he had recently added an Edward R. Murrow Award to his list of honors.

Beaver Nation mourns the passing of David Gilkey, one of our own, and we send our heartfelt condolences to his family in Portland. But we can also celebrate the photographs David took, which in the words of NPR’s Ariel Zambelich, “brought us the world and made us all care.”

Larry Landis

To celebrate Pride Week 2016, OSQA hosted an event to share information on conducting oral history interviews. The event included an in-person interview with John Helding, an OSU alum who participated in a 1981 ASOSU vote to fund the Gay People’s Alliance. Helding shared his personal story, his experiences at OSU, and how 1981 ASOSU vote impacted and shaped this future, both personally and professionally.

Read more about John Helding on the OMA blog. 

What another super day with the Greenbelt Land Trust and local brewers. I think I could get used to doing this every Saturday! Unfortunately I’d never make it to the Corvallis Farmer’s Market if I did, which would be sad because it’s where I get honey and salsa I eat straight from the container.

Read the entire post on The Brewstorian. 

You may also want to read this lovely piece in the Gazette Times at “A taste of home: Corvallis brewers tour Owens Farm for inspiration”

Peter Pauling, 1954

With Winter break coming fast and Linus Pauling having apparently solved the structure of DNA, Jim Watson and Francis Crick extinguished any hope of modeling their own structure. Eager to take advantage of a few days off, their Cavendish office mate, Peter Pauling, headed for the continent in the company of a friend whom he described as “a mad Rhodes scholar” who had “wooed” him with his “insane plan” for exploring Europe.

On this trip, which was indeed ambitious, Peter visited Munich, Vienna, Linz, Brussels, Frankfurt, and Bavaria, hitchhiking his way from location to location. Crossing Germany, Peter saw neighborhoods still littered with the rubble of the Second World War, alongside industrious people struggling to rebuild. His mode of travel, he confessed to his mother in a letter, had seemed a better idea when its low cost was his only consideration. In person, however, spending several hours standing in or walking through the snow had a way of changing one’s priorities.

Want to read more? The full post is at “Peter Pauling and the Discovery of the Double Helix, 1952-1953.“

On May 14, 2016, the Oregon Black Pioneers hosted its second annual bus tour and the OMA was incredibly excited to attend! The OBP is an all volunteer nonprofit organization based in Salem, Oregon. It has an almost 25 year history of conducting research and educating Oregonians about African-Americans’ contributions to Oregon’s history. The purpose of the bus tour was to showcase the early settlement era and turn of the century places associated with Oregon’s African American history.

Read the whole post on the Oregon Multicultural Archives blog!

Join us on June 16 at 2:00 in the Valley Library’s Willamette Rooms for a wonderful talk by Artist and Independent Scholar Melody Owen.

Her talk “Poetic dendrochronology and human/tree portraiture in historical photographs from the Pacific Northwest” will be an exploration of human/tree portraiture in early 20th century photography culled from the Gerald W. Williams Collection. This genre includes photographs usually taken to emphasize the tree’s grand majesty, beauty, strangeness and/or size compared to the relative smallness of a person, as well as those that show off the human’s bravado and skills in cutting them down.

The title is in reference to the rings inside a tree’s trunk that indicate its age and also to the type of picture in which people hold hands and form a ring around a tree, sometimes to show its size and sometimes to protect it.

http://melodyowen.net