Portland State Magazine Fall 2014

FALL 2014 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE 11 A PSU archivist finds a treasure trove of old recordings and posts them for the world to hear. IT’S MARCH 1968 . American soldiers are in the midst of the bloodiest year of the Vietnam War. President Lyndon Johnson goes on national television to say he will not seek re-election. College protests sweep the country. Martin Luther King Jr. has less than a month to live. And Robert F. Kennedy, only 10 days into his campaign to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, comes to Portland State. He steps to the podium in the college’s packed gymnasium. Students give him a raucous welcome and for the next 50 min- utes or so they listen and applaud as he criticizes the Vietnam War and voices support for the growing radicalism of American college students. Kennedy is, in turns, witty, earnest, engaging, and completely relaxed in this over-crowded gym. When a student says she needs to leave for her 11 a.m. lecture, Kennedy decrees that everybody can skip school for the week. “Just remember when you’re deciding who to vote for, it was Kennedy who got you out of class,” he quips. A recording of this event is just one gem out of hundreds discovered in some battered cardboard boxes of reel-to-reel tapes by Cris Paschild, PSU archivist and head of the PSU Library Special Collections. She found them almost by accident as she was walking through an off-campus warehouse used to store overflow collections from the library. “I popped them open and saw that the labels had very specific dates and times, and in some cases, locations at PSU. So I realized these were original recordings made on campus, not copies of national speeches,” she says. “Right away I knew this was something special.” WR I T T E N B Y J OHN K I RK LAND P HOTOGRA P HY B Y CRA I G H I CKMAN ‘ 7 1 tapes