Washington State University’s first official collegiate graduates finished school in 1897; on June 23, 1898 18 graduates of the school formed an alumni association. In 1905 the association began the first alumni publication, the PowWow (later replaced by Hilltopics and then Washington State Magazine). In 1947 the first “Golden Grad” celebration was held in honor of graduates’ 50th anniversaries. In the late 1960s the association was granted space in the CUB to operate out of, but in 1989 they received a permanent home, the Lewis Alumni Centre.
The collection consists of sheets of photographic slides either created or collected by Bob Smawley of the WSU Alumni Association, for use in outreach efforts aimed primarily at the schoool’s alumni. The slides document individuals, events, places, and activities associated with Washington State University. Though the slides themselves were created between 1959 and 2003 (with the bulk of them created in the 1980s and 1990s), maybe a third to a half of them are reproductions of earlier photographs and other documents, which can date back as far as the 1892 beginning of instruction at the university.
Materials in this collection are arranged in three alphabetical series (Athletics; Facilities; People), with the few folders that didn’t fall into those categories placed at the end as a ‘Miscellaneous’ series. Within each series, folders are organized by subject. Within each folder, items are retained in their original organization. While some of the sheets and/or individual slides are identified or dated, many lack both.
This collection is open and available for research use.
Copyright restrictions apply.
[Item Description] WSU Alumni Association Slides, 1959-2003 (PC 161)
Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA.
Materials in this collection were transferred to the Washington State University Libraries’ Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC) by Katie Fowler of the WSU Alumni Association in two parts, on November 5, 1915 and July 21, 1916. They were treated as one accession, UPC 2015-08. Prior to transfer, the materials had been in storage in the Lewis Alumni Centre.
The collection was processed in July of 2016 by University Archivist Mark O’English. Materials in this collection were brought to the archives in three-ring binders labeled by subject; in processing this material that organization and those subject headings were retained, although the binders were discarded and the slide sleeves foldered instead.
The original accession included approximately one linear foot of materials which had been created by editor Pat Caraher in publishing the Hilltopics alumni magazine; those materials were moved to the Hilltopics Photo Collection (PC 123). A small number of print documents were moved to the Alumni Association section of MASC’s WSU Publications collections (WSU 24).
This collection is indexed under the following headings in the online catalog. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons, or places should search the catalog using these headings.