By Tess Manjarrez ‘24

South Korea, 1963. Kim In Soon, dressed in a polka-dot dress and recently diagnosed with Hansen’s disease, or leprosy, hugs a young goat. In an era of harsh isolation tactics, Hansen’s was a cruel and lonely disease to catch. While Hansen’s is not a cause of death, it often causes permanent disfigurement and disabilities, which were treated globally as a cause for ostracism. Korean sufferers of the disease were moved from their communities and isolated on Sorok Island, a ‘leper colony’ for those whom society wished to forget. However, children in the early stages of Hansen’s were allowed to stay home on the condition that they were being treated and also not in contact with other children. Six-year-old Kim In Soon was one of these children, as photographed by Lois Dale Whitney.

Whitney, a self-taught photographer and Salem resident, was born in Chicago in 1923 and spent much of her life working in Europe, immortalizing events such as the aftermath of Hungary’s revolution, or the World Health Organization’s outreach in Italy. Whitney’s work in Europe even reached the UN, through the lenses of photo series from Turkey and Germany. In 1963, she took her photojournalism to Wedong Nyun, a village in Southern Korea being visited by a WHO-sponsored mobile leprosy team, and there met the young Kim In Soon, who had just started her first year of school. In a series of photos which capture the playfulness of the young girl as well as the isolation brought on by Hansen’s disease, Whitney’s work deeply humanizes a population made invisible by policy and social stigma.

Isolated as she was from other children, many pieces of Whitney’s photographs from this series feature In Soon engaging alone in otherwise communal activities –– we see her sitting, eating, and playing alone, even as the discolored spots characteristic of Hansen’s begin to appear on her legs and ankles. Whitney was even able to capture the moment in which Dr. Youn Keun Cha informed In Soon’s parents of her diagnosis.

Kim In Soon, isolated after her leprosy diagnosis, hugs a young goat.

A successful photographer with achievements in both media photography and international photojournalism, Whitney moved to Oregon in 1979, where she remained until her death from cancer in 2003. Her legacy is one rich with stories and kept alive by occasional displays in the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, The Portland Art Museum, Salem Public Library, and Salem Hospital, as well as on the World Health Organization’s own website. Many of her original photographs and associated typed or handwritten context are housed in Willamette University through the Pacific Northwest Artists Archives (PNAA).

While Whitney’s Korean series shows events such as WHO-backed doctors visiting villages or conducting treatments, the truly standout piece in this series is that of Kim In Soon with her goat. By Whitney’s own admittance, the black-and-white photograph is underexposed –– “A great shot”, she writes in her brief notes on the piece, found in the WU archives. “Photo was made inside a barn where we had taken shelter because of rain.” Perhaps the effect was mere happenstance, but its significance remains. The result of the underexposure is a totally black background, a stark contrast to In Soon’s bright dress and white goat. The goat itself seems to be smiling at the camera as In Soon cradles its head, a point of joy in an otherwise lonely future. Truly, with the dark background intent on swallowing them up, it seems in this photograph that Kim In Soon and her goat are alone in the world.

Such images beg the question: what, then, happened to Kim In Soon? Was she, like many victims of Hansen’s, sent to live on Sorok Island? Did she become permanently scarred, and ostracized as a result? Well, no. While Whitney did not add these details in her photograph description, the World Health Organization did indeed check in. Hansen’s disease is treatable, after all, as long as it is caught early. Kim In Soon needed only to continue taking her sulfone tablets regularly for more than a year. She recovered well and was able to continue her education, with the “arrested”, or inactive, lesions on her legs the only reminder of her illness.

Kim In Soon, eating alone.

The practice of sending those with Hansen’s disease to Sorok Island was officially abolished in 1963, the year Whitney met Kim In Soon, but of course, unofficial abandonment or isolation of ‘lepers’ continued. Indeed, it was not until 2007 that a bridge opened from Sorok Island to the mainland, finally connecting the historically isolated island and its residents to the rest of the country. Decades later, Lois Dale Whitney’s adventures, her notes, and the lives she captured on her 35mm negatives, remain immortalized and frozen in time — much like six-year-old Kim In Soon’s soft smile and the moment she shared with her young goat companion.

*Photograph 07 W.U., 1963, Subseries A, Box: 3, Folder: 7. Dale Whitney papers, WUA017. Willamette University Archives and Special Collections.

By Sanja Zelen, Willamette Student

Walking through downtown Salem along High Street, one will see a bright blue, 68-foot-tall mural portraying actors and actresses known for their groundbreaking performances in the 1920s and irreplaceable contributions to the world of theater. The mural, titled “Theatrical Heartscape,” was originally designed and painted by Jim Mattingly and was later renovated by Portland-based artist Dan Cohen. The mural, completed in 1984, serves as not only a striking piece of artwork for Salem to enjoy, but a community-inspired commemoration of Salem’s theatrical history as well.

Theatrical Heartscape mural on the back of the Elsinore Theatre.

James “Jim” Mattingly, the artist behind “Theatrical Heartscape,” was born in 1934. He was an art professor at the Oregon College of Education, known as Western Oregon University today, from 1968 to 1994. He was the head of the art department from 1977 to 1986, founding a printmaking program. His artwork has been displayed in the United States, Australia, and parts of South America, Asia, and Europe. In Salem, he was an active member of the arts community, increasing the Northwest Print Council’s recognition on both the national and international levels.

It was Jim Mattingly’s presence in the Salem arts community that ultimately led him to be selected by the Historic Elsinore Theater to commission a mural for the theater’s East exterior side facing Ferry Street. The goal of the project was to beautify the wall by creating a design representative of the Elsinore’s theatrical culture. Mattingly’s concept stood out from the other artists’ because it incorporated actors and actresses that rose to fame during the early years of the Elsinore, including Theda Bara, Marlene Dietrich, W.C. Fields, and Charlie Chaplin. The community board at Elsinore felt that Mattingly had picked “people of substance” that highlighted the Elsinore’s vaudeville origins. The chosen colors and shapes for the mural− white and black for the actors, red for the hearts, bold three-dimensional boxes that framed the characters, and a blue backdrop− encapsulated the drama, comedy, and excitement of theater.

Mattingly started the mural in 1982 with a $31,000 budget funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Oregon Arts Commission’s Art in Public Places, and the City of Salem’s transient occupancy tax. However, it was donations from Salem community members that guaranteed the project’s completion.

Mattingly’s process for creating the mural started out as an individual project and ended as a community effort. Mattingly was permitted to set up butcher paper on the floor of an elementary school gym to sketch out his concept. Artist Don Hoskisson assisted Mattingly in painting the mural. One group of citizens making up the Gorilla Wall Flare dressed up as gorillas to assist in fundraising efforts. Inmates were recruited by prison superintendent Hoyt Cupp to set up the scaffolding for the mural’s creation. A kickoff party in September 1984 celebrated the two-year long project’s completion. Jim Mattingly summarized his appreciation for the community’s involvement and support by saying, “I am really trying to do art for all the people”.

Portland artist Dan Cohen works on updating the mural in 2013.

The mural started to fade over time, but the community base that the original project had obtained came together once more to fundraise $20,000 for renovations of the mural in 2013, including power washing moss, repainting, and applying a protective layer to the wall. Dan Cohen, a Portland artist known for his murals displaying movie scenes, was selected as the painter to renovate the wall, filling in the missing parts and preserving Mattingly’s previous work. He painted with the goal of honoring the community just as Mattingly had, with the hope that restoration would “bring inspiration and colors into people’s lives” (Cohen as cited by Curtin).

Jim Mattingly’s mural was a success, portraying figures that were later shown on screen at film festivals at the Elsinore and creating an urban art piece to be enjoyed by pedestrians and drivers alike. Mattingly died in 2006, but his legacy lives on through Cohen’s and Salem community members’ 2013 renovations of “Theatrical Heartscape,” which stands as blue and bright today as it did in 1984.

By Susan Irwin, University Archivist smirwin@willamette.edu

It is that time of year when greeting cards celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year’s (and even the Winter Solstice) are sent to family and friends, near and far. Although ecard purchases are on the rise, Americans purchase and physically mail over one and a half billion holiday cards each year.

The origins of holiday cards date back to 19th century England. In 1843, Sir Henry Cole sent out the first known Christmas card.

The first Christmas card (Wikimedia Commons)

Considering the problem of how to send holiday greetings to his large social circle and associates, he commissioned the design of an illustration which he had printed on stiff cardboard with the sentiment, “A Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year To You.”

It took several decades before Christmas cards truly became a common part of holiday celebrations. In the United States, the cost of imported cards was prohibitive for most people, until Louis Prang of Boston started manufacturing Christmas cards in 1875. Prang hosted the first design competition for Christmas cards in 1880. A newspaper article in The New Northwest (Portland, OR) on July 1, 1880 noted that a Boston firm offered prizes for the four best original designs for Christmas cards. Out of the 600 entries, four received prizes. The winner received $1,000 (a little over $25,500 in today’s dollars!).

By the 1920s the format and style of Christmas cards had evolved and become big business. Early Christmas cards were similar to postcards – an image and sentiment on one side and space on the other to write a brief message. Folded cards of various sizes followed until, in 1915, the Hall Brothers company (now known as Hallmark) developed the standard format we use today.

Selection of American Cards

As Christmas cards evolved, art remained the central focus. Nativity scenes, angels, and robins were common on Victorian era cards. Flowers and nature scenes were the most common images in 19th American Christmas cards. Over time images expanded to include children, families, religious, Santa, humorous, and family homes and photos. It is not surprising then, that holiday cards can be found in the correspondence files of many of our artist collections.

Some examples:

As a child Edith Price Walford, a wood block artist, expressed interest in how her uncle made one of his linoleum block Christmas cards. Corresponding through the mail with him, she learned how to make her own. One of her wood blocks is seen here along with the card she made.

Rex Amos is known for his assemblage art – three-dimensional art assembled with everyday objects typically gathered by the artist.   His holiday greeting card seen here showcases his art, along with his sense of humor.

Through his work in the Pacific Northwest arts scene, Jack Eyerly maintained correspondence with hundreds of artists, but it is in his family Christmas cards that his own artwork is found. Here he personalized the card for his cat-loving mother.

Sources:

Ames, Kenneth L., Dover, Caitlin, and Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, Culture. American Christmas Cards, 1900-1960. New York, NY] : New Haven [Conn.]: Bard Graduate Center, Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture ; Distributed by Yale UP, 2011. Print.

Buday, György. The History of the Christmas Card. London: Spring, 1964. Print.

Edith Price Walford papers, Archives and Special Collections, Mark O. Hatfield Library, Willamette University. https://libmedia.willamette.edu/archives/as/repositories/2/resources/96 Accessed December 04, 2020.

Hane, John. The History of the Christmas Card, Smithsonian Magazine, December 9, 2015. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history-christmas-card-180957487/ Accessed December 04, 2020.

Jack Eyerly collection on Pacific Northwest Art, Archives and Special Collections, Mark O. Hatfield Library, Willamette University. https://libmedia.willamette.edu/archives/as/repositories/2/resources/130 Accessed December 04, 2020.

Rex Amos papers, Archives and Special Collections, Mark O. Hatfield Library, Willamette University. https://libmedia.willamette.edu/archives/as/repositories/2/resources/107 Accessed December 04, 2020.

By Susan Irwin, University Archivist smirwin@willamette.edu

We are living in an unprecedented moment in history. While we are experiencing the pandemic together, each of us is experiencing this pandemic in our own unique way. In line with our charge to collect, preserve and make available records of enduring value relating to Willamette University, the Archives and Special Collections invites you — Willamette students, staff and faculty — to submit original created works that capture your current experiences, thoughts, challenges and feelings.

Hatfield Library’s archivists and librarians will curate these submissions into a digital exhibition, “COVID: Experiences, Thoughts and Feelings.” This project is by and for our community. Eventually, the collection’s accessibility will broaden, so that decades from now, it can be used for exploration and scholarship into the impact of the pandemic on our lives.

Express yourself in a medium that best encapsulates your unique lived experience including sketches, audio recordings of music, videos of dance performances, photographs, poems, stories and essays. Full guidelines and the submission forms are available online.

If you’re not ready for your submission to be shared today, you may add it to a historical collection that won’t be released until 2025. Do not submit works you want to remain private. You retain the right to ask us to remove your submissions in the future.

If you’d like to make an anonymous submission, donate a physical item (e.g. written diary, sketch, etc.), or have other questions, please contact University Archivist Susan Irwin.

Thank you for helping us preserve this moment in history.

By Rosie Yanosko, Processing Archivist, ryanosko@willamette.edu

This spring, the Chuck Williams Collection will open for research. Charles Otis “Chuck” Williams was an environmental activist and professional photographer who was of Cascade Chinook descent and a member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. His collection, which primarily document his activism, careers, and writings, are held in the Willamette University Archives & Special Collections, while his photographs, which document a plethora of tribal communities, cultural celebrations, and landscapes in the Pacific Northwest, are held in the Oregon Multicultural Archives at the Oregon State University Special Collections & Archives Research Center. This LSTA grant-funded project seeks to preserve and make accessible his papers and photographs.

Born on July 20, 1943, in Portland, Oregon, Williams and his family moved to Petaluma, California several years later. Williams was interested in animals and nature from an early age, and his collection includes a charming childhood scrapbook titled “The Nature Part of the World”. After graduating high school, he took engineering classes at a community college and worked full time as a draftsman/technician, eventually landing a job at Johnson Controls and working on projects for NASA and Boeing. Despite his success, Williams realized he wasn’t cut out for this career path and went on to serve with the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic and AmeriCorps VISTA in El Paso, Texas. In 1973, he earned a BA in Art from Sonoma State University. Soon after, he began travelling the U.S. extensively, ultimately spending seven years touring the National Parks System (he managed to visit every park in the contiguous U.S.) in his camper van while honing his writing and photography skills. As he travelled, he sent notes to the environmental organization Friends of the Earth (FOE), informing them of issues he noticed while exploring the parks. This caught the attention of FOE’s founder, David Brower, who offered him a position as the organization’s National Parks Representative. While serving in this position, Williams lobbied for stronger protections for national parks and helped establish the Golden Gate and Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Areas. He also wrote articles for FOE’s’s journal, Not Man Apart. His papers from this period contain a manuscript for a book he was writing on the National Parks, as well as research files on the U.S. National Parks Service, and research gathered while writing his article “The Park Rebellion” for Not Man Apart. In the late 1970s, Williams moved back to his native Oregon to take care of his ailing father, and became involved with the fight to preserve the Columbia River Gorge.

In the early 1980s, Williams co-founded the Columbia Gorge Coalition, a grassroots environmental group that started the campaign for the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. In an article for Earthwatch Oregon in February 1979, Williams summed up the conflict in the Gorge: “Most conservationists agree that strong federal action will be needed to preserve the Gorge. Like Lake Tahoe, the Gorge is shared by two states that seldom see eye to eye, and nearly fifty local jurisdictions spread up and down both sides of the river have never been known to agree on anything. A national scenic area managed by the National Park Service is the most likely proposal.” While Williams and the Coalition wanted the Gorge to be protected from development and managed by the National Park Service, affluent activist groups in Portland favored fewer restrictions on development and thought the land should be managed by the U.S. Forest Service. To help bring attention to the cause, Williams wrote, photographed, and largely self-financed the publication of his book, Bridge of the Gods, Mountains of Fire: A Return to the Columbia River Gorge. After years of contention, the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act was passed in 1986. Williams did not think the National Scenic Area (NSA) provided necessary protections and considered the legislation a failure, but continued to fight for stronger protections. He worked with his family to preserve their land allotment in the Columbia Gorge, ultimately establishing the land as the Franz Lake National Wildlife Refuge.

Williams went on to serve as the Public Information Office Manager and Publications Editor for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fishing Alliance (CRITFC), an organization that coordinates management policy and provides fisheries technical services for the Yakama, Warm Springs, Umatilla, and Nez Perce tribes. Williams’ position at CRITFC led him to begin photographically documenting various tribal and cultural celebrations throughout the Pacific Northwest. In the mid-1990s, he co-founded and managed the Salmon Corps, an AmeriCorps program that worked with Native American youth to restore salmon habitats and riparian areas in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. After leaving the Salmon Corps, Williams was able to devote more time to his photography and writing. He continued to photograph cultural festivals and celebrations in the Pacific Northwest and exhibited them in the Columbia Gorge Gallery, which he operated out of his home in The Dalles. Proceeds from prints sold were shared with the subjects of his photographs–a testament to the depth of his care for his community. Williams also designed calendars commemorating Celilo Falls and offered slideshows and presentations on the histories of Native American Tribes in the Pacific Northwest. In 2013, Williams, along with David G. Lewis and Eirik Thorsgard, co-authored the chapter “Honoring our Tilixam: Chinookan People of Grand Ronde” in the book Chinookan Peoples of the Lower Columbia.

During his storied career, Chuck Williams was a tireless advocate for the protection of countless rivers, forests, parks, and animals, earning him the nickname “Wild and Scenic Chuck” (in Chinook Wawa, “chuck” means river). He consistently placed environmental causes before his own well being, and this took a toll on his health and finances. In 2015, Williams was diagnosed with lung cancer, and on April 24, 2016 he passed away. Williams was a diligent record keeper and his collection contains a wealth of materials pertaining to grassroots environmental activism, the histories of Native American Tribes in the Pacific Northwest, the U.S. National Parks Service, tribal fisheries, and other subject areas. His collection also provides a crucial counter-narrative to the prevalent discourse surrounding the creation, passage, and effects of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act. Willamette University Archives & Special Collections will open the Chuck Williams Collection for research in the coming months–please stay tuned for updates.