As a student archivist, one of my primary projects is writing biographies for the more than one thousand individuals listed in the News and Communication Services Records. These individuals are primarily faculty and staff who were associated with Oregon State between 1940 and 2004. Oftentimes, the collection only holds an administrative document related to the individual. If I’m lucky, there might also be a CV or an article related to their professional work. While I do perform additional research to fill out a brief biography meant to communicate their birthdate, academic and professional history, and association with Oregon State, as well as to differentiate individuals with the same name, I’m still often left with only a snapshot of their life. I wish I could write detailed life stories for each individual in this collection, but alas, I am limited by time. 

Margaret Palen is an example of the many individuals I wish to learn more about. The News and Communication Services Records hold two newspaper clippings related to her suspension and eventual termination from Oregon State in the 1970s. Reading these, I wished to understand her life beyond these events as well as share her professional accomplishments. As much as this blog post is about Palen, it is also about the privilege of doing the research and filling in the historical record. 

Who was Margaret Krug Palen, and what more can we learn about her life? 

Margaret L. Palen (née Krug) was born on May 14, 1931, in Iowa. She attended Iowa State College (now Iowa State University), where she earned a bachelor’s degree in home economics in 1952. After graduating, Palen was a textile chemist for one year before becoming a home extension agent in Iowa from 1953 until 1955. That year, she joined the Oregon State staff as a county extension agent for 4-H. She resigned in 1957 after her marriage to become a homemaker, working temporarily from 1958 to 1959 to aid Marion County as an extension agent. According to Palen’s employment records, her supervisors found her work to be effective and of quality. Palen returned to Oregon State in 1966, becoming a home economics extension agent in Tillamook County. She also became a master’s student at Oregon State in the early 1970s.

Despite her tenured status, Palen was suspended, then terminated, from her job in 1972 due to ten charges filed by Lee Kolmer, head of the Cooperative Extension Service. From August-September 1972, a five-person committee conducted hearings to evaluate Kolmer’s complaints, although the members of that committee are unknown. 

During these hearings, several witnesses appeared before the committee. Among them were a number of Tillamook County residents who spoke in favor of Palen’s work in their community. Even so, the committee found four of the charges to be proven and just cause for dismissal. 

In October 1972, the faculty committee recommended that the matter would be best resolved by termination. Upon hearing this decision, OSU President Robert MacVicar fired Palen. This decision is included in the article, “Tenured Assistant Terminated” published by the Corvallis Gazette Times on December 21, 1972.

This is where the story ends in SCARC’s holdings. However, Oregon court records indicate that Palen did not succeed in protesting her suspension before the faculty hearing committee. In 1974, she appealed via the Oregon Court of Appeals, where the Board maintained that the university had just cause for dismissal. While we do not know the original seven charges, we do know these four because they were discussed in this case. They include that:

• Palen reportedly made unsupported claims of improper and sometimes criminal conduct on the part of University administrators 
• Palen reportedly was unwilling to cooperate with 4-H and Youth staff and leaders (that is to say, failing to adequately perform her responsibilities to the Tillamook County 4-H program)
• Palen reportedly was unwilling to live in Tillamook County, and while the Extension Service did not present evidence of a formal written policy regarding place of residence, “Mrs. Palen had been informed of the desirability and necessity of living near her place of employment”
• Palen reportedly refused to respond to direction from and provide a schedule of her activities to her County Chairman, claiming that she was on special assignment and not required to report to the Chairman

The Oregon Court of Appeals found the first and last charges and last “could properly conclude that petitioner’s conduct constituted cause for termination”. In the second, the Oregon Board of Education was found erred. In the third, the charge could not be sustained “because it was not proven to be one of the petitioner’s responsibilities to do so”. Therefore, the OSU president’s decision to fire Palen was upheld. 

While only listed as a staff member in Oregon State General Catalogs until the 1972-73 academic year, Palen’s name is listed in the 1974 Oregon State commencement program as a Master of Science in Education recipient (she likely graduated in Fall 1973, causing her to be listed in the 1974 program, because other documents in Oregon Digital list her graduating class as the Class of ‘73). That is to say, it appears that she still graduated from Oregon State after her termination. 

It’s difficult to trace the next decade of Palen’s life. She likely continued her career in community-oriented work outside of Oregon State. She also likely continued to raise and support her family. It’s possible that she spent some time traveling with her husband, Kenneth Palen, as his obituary states that the couple traveled to every continent and seventy-five countries of the world – an endeavor that would certainly take time to complete. 

A simple internet search of Palen’s name reveals that in the 1980s, she began her writing career. Inspired by her German family and her husband’s Scottish family’s immigration to Iowa, she authored Genealogical Research Guide to Germany in 1988, a guide for those individuals interested in tracing their ancestry. She would go on to write three related works: German Settlers of Iowa: Their Descendants and European Ancestors in 1994, Genealogical Guide to Tracing Ancestors in Germany in 1995, and Germany and Scotland Immigrants to Iowa in 2019. 

Searches in Oregon Digital reveal that Palen also continued her extension work as a volunteer executive with the International Executive Services Corporation. In 1996, she returned from a trip to Ghana, where she designed a clothing construction course for the African Women Entrepreneurial Training Centre. An image from this trip was even featured in the Oregon Stater in 1996. 

In 1999, she worked with the US Agency for International Development in Mozambique, featured in that year’s Oregon Stater. 

In both editions, Palen is referred to by her graduating class of 1973 and without reference to her prior employment with the university. She also continued international extension work to improve food production, textiles, and clothing, through travel to countries including Ghana, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Belarus, Bolivia, and Jamaica, described in her 2018 book A Different World: My Life and Making a Difference in the World.

When I first stumbled upon Palen’s name, I feared that she would only be remembered incompletely. Her story illustrates how important it is to paint full pictures of individuals in history, and how sometimes, preservation can be biased. Simply because the News and Communication Services Records only contains materials related to her termination, an individual utilizing these records might have a partial view of Palen. Further research shows that her dismissal from Oregon State did not stop her from continuing her career in extension work. Palen continued home economics work internationally for several decades, even earning recognition for this work from her alma mater and previous employer. It also shows other career-oriented pursuits, writing four books on the topic of genealogy and a fifth on her own life and work. 

~ Grace Knutsen

Grace Knutsen is a student archivist at Special Collections and Archives Research Center. She is an Oregon State alumna and Master of Library and Information Science student.

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.