PSU Magazine Spring 1996

E ach morning, inhaling the fragrant summer air, Gordon Dodds, professor of history, crossed the sun dappled Park Blocks from Cramer Hall to the Branford Price Millar Library and burrowed into the microfilm repository for the day. Eager in his pursuit, the single-minded Dodds never chafed at spending Oregon's premier season in the fluore cent shadows of Millar's inmo t recesses. Instead, painstakingly winding reels of microfilm into the projectors and peering into the glare, he pored over the student newspaper starting with the November 15, 1946, issue of Vet's Extended (renamed the Vanguard a year later). His mission: mining the forgot– ten veins of PSU' past. "l thought by going through the Vanguards I would get omething on everything," says Dodds. "That every item of importance would be noted at lea t in brief." His operation yielded nugget after nugget which Dodds has crafted into a lustrous work-The College That Would Not Die-a history of PSU to be published later this year. PSU's past was an obvious choice for Dodds, and not solely because he is the Univer– sity's official historian. Since his days as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin 40 years ago, the history of the Northwest has sung to him a siren's song. He wrote his dissertation "The Salmon King of Oregon" on the founder of a Rogue River cannery, he has writ– ten six previou books on Northwest history, he teaches five cla es in Northwest history (including one on the history of PSU), and recently he agreed to update Oregon's history for Microsoft's Encarta CD-ROM encyclo– pedia. You could say he is Mr. Northwest History, and his office looks it. The ize of a modest bathroom, his campu retreat is a jungle. Shallow shelves along adjoining walls spew papers and books like lava. A desk and filing cabinets crouch the short length of another wa ll. A lone guest chair queeze beside the door to complete the perimeter. File cabinets squat in what shou ld be open floor space. And on every surface, twisting, turn– ing stacks of books reach Dr. Seuss-ian proportions. The available floor space is large enough for Dodds to pull his chair out from the desk so he can queeze in, no more. Visitors mu t sit halfway out the door. Perhaps it's no wonder he glad ly pent two summers staring into the microfilm projector's glare at old Vanguards, but Dodds explains it this way: "You get interested in some particular institution or event, and you begin to wonder how it came to be. I knew enough about the uniquenes SPRING 1996 P U MAGAZINE 7