Pauling’s two Nobel medals and a research notebook highlight items on display in a special recreation of his CalTech office, located adjacent to the main reading room in Special Collections.

Treasures of The Valley
Holdings within Special Collections and the OSU Archives help bring prestige to the university and delight researchers around the world.

By George P. Edmonston Jr.

It’s like seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time; the view of the mile-deep, multi-colored hole in the ground shocks the senses like a bolt of lightning. That’s often the way it is when you can’t prepare your mind beforehand for what you’re about to experience.

Which is precisely the feeling this writer got on a recent visit to The Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers on the fifth floor of OSU’s Valley Library. Housed in the department of Special Collections, this treasure of 500,000 items sits quietly in 1,800 boxes and measures 4,437 linear feet. Says Special Collections head Clifford Mead: “It’s the largest collection of its kind in the world. Even Einstein’s papers can’t compare.”

Nor does much of anything else compare to Pauling. Considered among the top five scientists produced by the 20th century and the only person in history to win two unshared Nobel prizes, Pauling, during his 70-year career, profoundly and fundamentally changed scientific understanding and inquiry in two critical disciplines: chemistry and biology. If this were not enough, and inspired by his wife’s involvement in promoting peace, the Oregon Agricultural College alumnus of the class of 1923 enjoyed a second career as a humanist and activist. Seen as a whole, the collection reflects both sides of his remarkable life and includes his personal, scientific and political papers, research materials, correspondence, photographs, awards and memorabilia.

Special Collections Head Cliff Mead (standing) and Chris Petersen

Specific highlights include the original manuscript of his seminal 1931 paper, “The Nature of the Chemical Bond,” which resulted in his first Nobel; research notebooks and other original manuscripts for all his most important works, especially General Chemistry, The Architecture of Molecules, No More War! and Vitamin C and the Common Cold; the original petition for nuclear disarmament prepared for and presented to the United Nations in 1958 — which contains, among the more than 9,000 scientists and Nobel laureates who signed it, the signatures of such notables as Albert Schweitzer, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein; and letters to and from many of the century’s greatest leaders, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., President John F. Kennedy, and James Watson and Francis Crick, discoverers of DNA.

Visitors also delight at seeing items of clothing worn by Pauling and his wife, Ava Helen, the love letters they exchanged, the things they kept from their student years at OAC, and even a lock from the beard Linus sported during the 1930s, the bright red hairs carefully tucked away in a plastic see-through bag. A voracious reader and collector of science fiction novels, Pauling’s personal library of the genre holds a special place of importance in the collection, along with thousands of other books he accumulated that are of a more academic nature.

Viewable from the main reading room is a rough recreation of Pauling’s office at CalTech, where he served as chair of the chemistry department for 20 of the 42 years he was there, and which features both his desk and a chalkboard on which has been carefully preserved (in his own handwriting) something he referred to as a “mystery molecule.” Sitting atop the desk, in plain sight, are Pauling’s two Nobel medals.

Turning down offers from the some of the most famous research universities and organizations in the country — including CalTech, Stanford, The American Philosophical Society, The American Chemical Society and The Smithsonian Institute — Pauling donated his papers and those of Ava Helen, to OSU in 1986. The reasons are simple. The Paulings were native Oregonians, each with an OAC undergraduate degree. They had met in an OAC chemistry class in which he was her instructor.

Pauling developed Oxypolyn as a pre-plasma injection for wounded soldiers waiting for medical treatment during World War II.

Not surprisingly, the two maintained strong connections to both home and alma mater throughout their lives, emotions that came into play when it was time to choose a permanent repository for their work. In addition, the Pauling bequest represented the culmination of efforts that had been going on since the early 1960s to secure the collection as soon as OSU’s most famous graduate was ready to turn things over.

Says Mead: “Professor Ken Hedberg of OSU’s chemistry department, and a former student of Pauling’s at CalTech, was the first person to come up with the idea, and he began pushing on the president of the university at that time, James H. Jensen, to begin the process of cultivation. Jensen passed the mantle off to Robert MacVicar, who in turn gave it to John Byrne in the mid ’80s. It was Byrne who finally succeeded.”

“About a third of the way through my tenure I wrote a letter to Dr. Pauling asking him to consider donating his papers and those of his wife to OSU,” said Byrne in a recent interview. “I think my predecessors had written similar letters, but apparently the time was right during my tenure for Linus to consider seriously where his papers would remain. He had returned to campus a number of times previously, and I think he felt comfortable here. Our students (at that time) loved him and celebrated his birthday every year.

Linus and Ava Helen, c. 1978

“The documents that most interest me reflect the striving of one Nobel laureate to enhance the prospect of world peace by putting an end to nuclear testing. Pauling built on his reputation as a scientist to rally other scientists to join his efforts to make the world a safer place. Ava Helen Pauling was clearly a stimulus and guide to his efforts, and although he was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize for peace, many people believe his wife should have been given equal recognition.”

Byrne added the collection today is of utmost historical significance. “It serves historians of science and peace from throughout the world for research that otherwise would not be possible.”

A specific example of this, Mead points out, was the discovery within the collection in the summer of 2003 of “photo 51,” an X-ray image by scientist Rosalind Franklin that played a crucial role in the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. “To the best of our knowledge,” Mead adds, “we have both Dr. Franklin’s original manuscript and what appears to be the original ‘photo 51,’ both of which were featured in a NOVA special in April of that year highlighting the importance of the photo in unraveling the structure of DNA.”

When the time came for Pauling to announce where he would place his life’s work, he made it crystal clear why his alma mater was his choice: “Several years ago I made the decision to place my personal papers, medals, and other materials, and my wife’s papers in the OSU libraries. I did so because I had confidence in OSU’s ability to preserve these materials and make them available to scholars around the world for generations to come.”

His confidence was and continues to be well placed. Indeed, he and Ava Helen would be most pleased if they were to visit their papers today. Climate-controlled rooms house and preserve the bulk of the collection, in areas that feature very limited or no access to the general public. A knowledgeable staff stands ready to assist in the retrieval of needed items, and visitors to the reading room are always welcome.

Researchers and students are given highest priority. This spirit of service is reflected in the numerous Web sites and links Mead’s staff has created in the last five years that provide both off-site electronic access to the collection and demonstrate the university’s ability to employ 21st century technology to do the important work of preserving fragile documents.

One site alone, simply titled “Research Notebooks: 1919-1994,” created by staff member and Beaver alumnus Chris Petersen, ’00, has now enjoyed more than 10 million hits. “Chris has helped establish OSU as a model institution for other libraries and organizations wanting to provide similar access to their holdings,” Mead says.

“The Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers is the elephant that drives about 80 percent of what we do,” said Mead, “but it also provides numerous additional benefits that reflect on the prestige of our university. Pauling’s gift clearly puts OSU and The Valley Library on the international map of libraries and allows us to be in very good company with other schools that have significant collections, such as CalTech, with its impressive history of science holdings, the William Welch papers at Johns Hopkins or the Bertrand Russell papers at McMaster University.

“The Pauling papers also sit at the cornerstone of OSU emergence as one of the leading schools in the country offering work in the history of science, helping to attract highly prestigious scholars to Corvallis as both visiting and permanent faculty. OSU Professor Mary Jo Nye is an example of someone who teaches here and is nationally renowned in the field of the history of 20th century science and technology.”

Linus and Ava Helen would also be pleased at the extent to which their donation has helped OSU attract other significant “treasures” to OSU Special Collections. Each, in its own way, has added to both the stature of Oregon State as “the research university of Oregon” and its goal of becoming one of the top 10 land-grant institutions in the nation.

These include the papers of Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, short story writer and former OSU English instructor (1949-1961) Bernard Malamud; papers relating to the work and career of historian William Appleman Williams, who served as a member of the faculty from 1968 and 1986 and was the founder of the “revisionist school” of American diplomatic history; the papers of chemist Milton Harris, who established OSU’s first endowed chair in 1984 (in chemistry) with earnings from his 35 patents in such technologies as polyester and shrink-wrap plastics; and the research notebooks, correspondence and awards of Paul Emmett, an OSU alumnus who served as chair of the chemical engineering department at Johns Hopkins and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

OSU Special Collections also houses “The Atomic Energy Collection,” a valuable resource for research on the development of nuclear technologies in the 20th century, with highlights that include the first published account of the discovery of radioactivity in 1896 by Nobel Prize winning physicist Henri Becquerel, writings on the Manhattan Project, and materials concerning the formerly classified congressional hearings of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Cultural aspects of the atomic age are also explored through fictional works, poetry, drama and music.

Two floors down from OSU Special Collections await treasures of a different kind.

Want to see an original diploma from OSU’s predecessor school, Corvallis College? A 1907 photo of William Jasper Kerr in his first year as president of Oregon Agricultural College? Photos of the campus during World War I or of Benton Hall when it was first constructed? These and thousands of other records, documents, films, videotapes and sound recordings are housed in OSU Archives, kept safe under the watchful eyes of University Archivist Larry Landis and his staff.

Spend five minutes with them and you’re immediately struck with how seriously they take their jobs. After all, they are charged with nothing less than the responsibility of preserving the history of the university. True, OSU is required by Oregon’s state records law to maintain an archives, but there’s a reason that goes beyond the law to something spiritual that says that it is OSU’s history that makes OSU, well, Oregon State University, and not Washington State, BYU, Cornell or Portland State.

Archives staff (from left) Erika Castano, Elizabeth Nielsen, Karl McCreary and Larry Landis

Prior to 1961, what is today housed in the OSU Archives was stored in numerous locations around campus, the result of colleges and departments maintaining their own records. In the process of planning activities for the university’s 1968 centennial celebration, a library committee headed by assistant university librarian Rod Waldron decided it would be of great benefit to OSU if an effort were made to centralize everything in one department.

The idea caught on and, in 1961, Harriet Moore, ’22, ’26, of the OSU library staff got the job as OSU’s first archivist. She set up a system to collect and preserve the university’s historical records and brought together a large number of photos. Known today as “Harriet’s Collection,” it helped launch the department as it is today and helped establish the spirit that guides it, from where the priorities should be in expanding the collection to that of education and public service.

Of the approximately 800 individuals who annually visit the archives, OSU undergraduates are the largest of the user groups, numbering about one-third of the total. Faculty, staff and graduate students make up another big chunk, as does the general public, which can be local or from anywhere in the country.

“We get inquiries that range from the simple, such as the tuition rate at OSU for a specific academic year, to the more complex as, for example, the historical development of OSU’s alcohol policy,” says Landis. “Another complex inquiry, but fun to research, happened recently when we helped an emeritus professor of horticulture look at early landscaping on the campus to determine when some of the more significant trees were planted.

“A local stream ecologist and OSU alumnus came to us with questions about Willamette River floods in the Corvallis area,” adds Landis. “The researcher was happy to find a whole complete series of aerial photographs of a major flood that occurred here in 1964.”

“Typically, we get anywhere from 40 to 80 on-site users a month, sometimes more,” he says. “We get another 40 to 60 reference inquiries a month via e-mail, phone or regular mail.” Landis says that common topics brought in by students often pertain to the history of campus buildings or the history of a sorority or fraternity or other student organization.

As a part of its public service mission, the OSU Archives periodically develops traveling photo exhibits for statewide tours, one of the most popular of which was “Fighters on the Farm Front” in 1993-1995. Stunning black and white images chronicled the story of Oregon’s emergency farm labor service during World War II, most of which were taken by OSU alumni or faculty.

In 1998, Landis and staff sent another collection of photos on tour, these from the historically significant Gifford Photograph Collection. Consisting of 600 glass negatives, 4,500 film negatives, 5,000 prints and 150 color transparencies, the collection is the work of four members of the Gifford family: Benjamin A. Gifford; his son, Ralph I. Gifford; Ralph’s wife, Wanda Muir Gifford, ’16; and their son, Ben L. Gifford, ’50.

According to Landis, the collection is important because it remains a valuable source of documentation of all of Oregon’s geographical areas, especially the Columbia River, Mt. Hood and the Cascades, the Oregon Coast and the Willamette Valley. Many of the images document Oregon’s traditional resource-based industries ... agriculture, fishing and forestry ... and many of Benjamin A. Gifford’s photos document the Native Americans of the Columbia Basin around the turn of the last century.

“Because of the variety of photographic formats represented in the collection and the fact that we have technical information from the Giffords pertaining to how many of the images were made,” Landis says, “the collection is very useful for studying the history of 20th century photography.”

Today, Landis and his staff are in the process of digitizing selected photographs and other selected material housed within the archives in order to expand accessibility to the collections by making them available online. Among the digitization projects to date are photographs of Braceros, World War II era guest workers from Mexico; a collection of images of the Willamette River Basin from the late 1930s and early 1940s; and a collection that includes a variety of OSU related images — buildings, student activities and organizations, faculty, and athletics.

“We are also in the process of developing procedures for capturing and maintaining records with historical value that are born digital, those that never make it to paper form,” Landis says.

The archives staff also collects the personal papers of prominent faculty members. “These collections form a major part of what we call our manuscript collections,” Landis said. “These materials often include professional correspondence, publications and presentations, research materials, teaching materials such as syllabi and lecture notes, and records pertaining to professional organizations.”

A good example of this type is the J. Kenneth Munford Collection. Munford was the first director of the OSU Press and a student, teacher, writer, editor and local historian. Munford’s research and writing about John Ledyard, a famous 18th century explorer, is a centerpiece to his collection. It includes research notes, correspondence, manuscripts, publicity and reviews for a 1937 article about Ledyard in the Sunday Oregonian; a 1939 book, John Ledyard: An American Marco Polo; and the 1963 publication, John Ledyard’s Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage.

“Our manuscript collections also include certain documents that are not directly related to OSU but instead pertain to interests traditional to the university’s research mission, especially agriculture and forestry,” Landis says.

A good example of this type of collection is the Hanson Leghorn Farm Records. Jess A. Hanson, owner of Hanson Farms, began a poultry breeding business in 1913 on a 30-acre farm just to the west of the OAC campus. In his lifetime, he became a pre-eminent breeder of chickens for egg production. In 1936, he received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Oregon State College and later established the Hanson Scholarship in poultry science at OSU. He was elected to the Oregon Poultry Hall of Fame in 1971.

In 2002, OSU was named the lead institution and received a grant of $350,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to coordinate a project to create an online catalog of information about archival collections at 13 different research institutions in Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington.

At present, an online database of more than 2,400 guides to primary source collections is available in such topics as arts and humanities; business, industry and labor; city and town life; colleges and universities; environment and national resources; ethnic groups; government and politics; Native Americans; home and family; pioneers; religion and missionaries; and sexuality. Architectural drawings, artifacts, letters, diaries, business, government and organization records, maps, moving images, oral histories, sound recordings and photographs are all available at the touch of a mouse. A second phase of the project began on July 1. Also funded by NEH, it is adding six new partner institutions and 1,600 new collection guides to its database.

Landis says this is an important project because it helps scholars, students, policy-makers and journalists have a better understanding and better access to documents critical to understanding the history and development of the Pacific Northwest. “It brings into one place all of the institutions’ catalogs of archival materials so researchers can see how different databases may relate to one another.”

As the Stater was going to press, it was learned that the family of Barney Keep, ’42, had donated a large collection of Ol’ Barn’s memorabilia to the University Archives. Keep served for more than three decades as the morning radio host on KEX in Portland. OSU

George P. Edmonston Jr. is editor of the Oregon Stater. Portland freelance writer Liz Nakazawa contributed to this story.