Archival Mystique, or What I Found Today

What passed through my hands today:

• A 16mm print of Olive Trees of Justice, a 1962 feature film by University of Oregon alum James Blue, who was the first American to win the Critics’ Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
• A reel of Kodachrome from the 1930s and 1940s showing campus hijinks around homecoming. Parades, picnics, football, legendary track coach Bill Hayward, coeds in bathing suits log rolling on the Millrace.

Bill Hayward. Courtesy University of Oregon Libraries Special Collections & University Archives.

• U.S. Senator Wayne Morse speaking at the Heathman Hotel in Portland, Oregon c1960s, but the film is silent.
• A three-reel home movie of UO geology professor William D. Smith’s research trip to South America in 1930. He sailed from San Pedro, California, on the S.S. Rakuyo Maru, a cargo-passenger freighter built in 1921 by the Mitsubishi Shipbuilding Co. to serve the Toyo Kisen Kaisha’s South American line. In WWII, the Rakuyo Maru was used as a transport ship for Australian and British POWs, and en route from Singapore in Sept. 1944 it was torpedoed and sunk by the USS Sealion. Nearly all of the 1300 soldiers on board were killed.