Western Libraries offers local 1960s film archives online

The Western Libraries at Western Washington University is offering a varied and fascinating selection of 1960s films from Bellingham-based KVOS TV online via the libraries’ Digital Collections.

Films include footage of Western’s campus; a feature on “Girls, Glitter and Gracie” at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair; dramatic footage of the aftermath of the 1964 Alaska earthquake; a 1962 rally about nuclear weapons titled “If the Bomb Survives, Can We?”; a 1965 protest in Bellingham against the Vietnam War, and interviews with educators, politicians and Civil Rights leaders and activists, including James Farmer, Dick Gregory and Julian Bond (with Bond interviewed in 1967 while sitting on the Old Main lawn at Western).

The selection of 1960s films is now available online at Western Libraries and on the WWU YouTube site. Click on the URL image and then “Access this item” on the next frame. A complete list of more than 70 KVOS Channel 12 films archived and accessible at the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies also is available online.

The selections are from a collection of reel-to-reel films of KVOS television programs filmed and broadcast between 1961 and 1967. The collection includes copies of the Webster Reports (a monthly program focusing on human interest stories featuring Vancouver, B.C. newsman, Jack Webster) and Channel 12 Specials, which include interviews and documentaries about significant events and issues in Washington State and British Columbia during the 1960s.

Many of the Channel 12 Specials programs were broadcast live and were produced by Al Swift, former U.S. Congressman and former news director of KVOS TV, where his series of weekly public interest programs and documentaries earned Swift an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (Swift’s Congressional papers are also archived at the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies).

The film collection is housed at the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies at Western. For more information, please contact the Center at (360) 650-7747 or e-mail: cpnws@wwu.edu For more information about collections at the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, please visit here.