I've been unearthing some unusual Stanford artifacts lately.
The first, strangely, was a personal memory, originating with what probably was my first contact with Stanford. It came cascading back to me 30 years later while I watched Stanford's basketball team playing in the NCAA tournament and my son entertained himself by tossing a foam ball into a plastic hoop hanging from our wall at home.
I was 12 when Stanford played in the 1971 Rose Bowl and I remember virtually nothing about the game, but I know I watched it. I'm confident saying that because for a while I adopted wide receiver Randy Vataha, '71, as my favorite guy to imitate in our basement midwinter Nerf ball games. Like most of the players in our "league," he (I) made spectacular, diving-behind-the-couch catches for imaginary game-winning touchdowns, time after time drawing the adulation of legions of make-believe fans, occasionally punctuated by shouts from the one fan who was not make-believe, my mom, worried about the furniture.
Why, after all these years, do I remember pretending to be Randy Vataha? Well, who knows. But watching Griffin shooting baskets in a pretend gym with a pretend basketball dragged this once dormant and fragmented recollection to the surface, pristine. A mint-condition mental souvenir made all the more interesting by the fact that I now work at the place where the memory began.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled across another piece of Stanfordiana while sifting through a stack of postcards in a Half Moon Bay antique shop. I was really just killing time while my wife and son searched for a bathroom, but my interest deepened when among the "Greetings from Yosemite" and faded pictures of Atlantic City appeared a postcard of the Laurence Frost Memorial Amphitheater, circa 1940. The painting was printed on woven linen stock, a beautiful thing. It depicted a large crowd at what seemed to have been a commencement ceremony or some other annual event. But the text on the back revealed that the sea of people seated on the hillside were there for a vespers service, held weekly by the University chaplain. I bought the card for $4.
I'm sure the postcard isn't rare, perhaps not even unusual. But it was an unexpected discovery--a found object imbued with significance by my association to it. I walk past Frost Amphitheater every day; I see its boundary of trees from my office window. Are they the same trees in the postcard? Could be. There is some sinewy connective tissue there, and it prompted introspection about an earlier time. Rather like remembering the basement exploits of a 12-year-old Randy Vataha wannabe.
Which brings me to Eadweard Muybridge and Our Little Secret.
Muybridge didn't attend Stanford, never taught a class here and didn't drop a dime in the University bucket. His relationship with the University actually predates the University itself. But, like Frost and Vataha, he occupies a corner in Stanford's history. One afternoon in 1878, the eccentric photographer, collaborating with Leland Stanford, set in motion the motion picture industry. (To learn more than that, you'll have to read Mitch Leslie's story beginning on page 68.)
When a colleague told me about Muybridge during a conversation early in my editorship last fall, I was fascinated. And then came the really good part--for more than two years, she explained, Stanford had been running Muybridge's "movie" in its pages, a subliminal wink at history that nobody (as far as we know) has yet figured out.
Here's your chance to finally "watch" it.
Turn to page 30, keep one finger there, and turn to page 36. See the image of the horse in the upper left-hand corner? Keep your eyes on the horse and quickly flip the pages backward.
Notice anything unusual? If you did it right, the horse "ran"--albeit in reverse.
I wouldn't have expected anybody to excavate such a detail from a series of page illustrations, but if you did, congratulations. It's an inside joke, which is part of the fun, but it's more than that, too. The Muybridge horses offer one more mnemonic for any of us who have studied or worked at Stanford. If only via our homage, the Muybridge icons are ours to own.
And they didn't even cost four bucks.
You can reach Kevin at jkcool@stanford.edu.
