Portland State Magazine Fall 2014

12 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE FALL 2014 The boxes included recorded speeches given on campus during the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s by luminaries such as Allen Ginsberg, George McGovern, Dave Brubeck, Margaret Mead and many more. The tapes were part of the PSU library collection for years, and students could listen to them on library tape players. But as technology changed they were packed away in boxes and shipped off to the warehouse to make room for newer library collections. Now they’re available again. Paschild had all 257 hours of the tapes converted to digital format and posted them online under the name Oregon Public Speakers Collection. Visitors to the site at pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/orspeakers can listen to hours of complete, professionally recorded speeches from history makers, activists, scientists and cultural icons. The collection also includes recordings of many local academic and political figures, as well student speeches made during the October 1969 National Moratorium on Vietnam. CONVERTING THE OLD TAPES to digital format was a dicey undertaking. Paschild and library technician Carolee Harrison thought the tapes would be so fragile from age that a single listen might cause them to break or the recording sur- face to flake off. So, before putting them on a tape machine, they hired a consultant to oversee the process. As the consultant threaded the tape machine and was about to press “play,” Paschild says, “I was so nervous I wasn’t sure I could be in the same room.” The first tape they listened to was of Branford Millar, presi- dent of Portland State College in the 1960s and the namesake for PSU’s main library. “As soon as we heard his voice, we teared up—for two reasons: one, because the tape worked, and two, because we heard his voice. We never knew what he sounded like until then,” she says. Paschild obtained a $10,000 grant through the Library Services and Technology Act to pay for an audio technician, Marti Clemmons, to transfer the tape recordings to digital format. To support the project, the library also acquired a quality reel-to-reel tape deck—a challenging purchase given its outdated technology. Paschild found a good one on eBay from an audio equipment dealer in Pennsylvania. The transfer process took a year, and was completed in May 2014. A few of the tapes were unplayable because they were stuck together, and one (of Malcolm X) had been vandalized. But the bulk of them are nearly flawless and sound as clear as the day they were recorded. They provide glimpses into the past outside the realm of standard sound bites of the day: • Oregon Sen. Wayne Morse, one of only two U.S. senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that led to a dramatic escalation of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, says to a PSU crowd in 1965, “I say with all solemnity that … if we follow our present course of action in South- east Asia, then 12 months from today there will be several hundred thousand American troops in Asia and there will be thousands of them coming back in coffins.” • In 1968, more than a decade before he began hosting the TV series Cosmos , astronomer Carl Sagan, was looking ahead to the Apollo 11 mission the following year. “Shortly, there will be human beings on the moon,” he says. “They will go up for long walks and examine another world. There’s no telling what’s there. The sense of adventure involved in this is absolutely compelling.” Poetry recorded from counterculture poet Allen Ginsberg (left) is in the 1967 and 1969 PSU Oregon Public Speakers Collection. Eugene McCarthy (middle) , who ran for the presidential Democratic nomination in 1968, spoke at Portland State in 1968 and 1971. There are four speeches by Oregon Sen. Wayne Morse (right) in the collection for 1965, 1968, 1969, and 1972.