With Cressman at Catlow Cave, 1935 and 1937: A Personal Note

• Main Author: Fred W. Voget
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ubiquity Press 1998-11-01
• Series: Bulletin of the History of Archaeology
• Subjects: r Luther Cressman; Catlow Cave
• Online Access: http://www.archaeologybulletin.org/article/view/290
• ISSN: 1062-4740; 2047-6930

I transferred from Reed College to the University of Oregon in 1934 because of a growing interest in man's distant past. That interest had been awakened in a civics class in Washington Highschool (Portland) when I confronted a skeletal portrait of Neanderthal Man accompanied by a brief sketch of his cave life and association with cave bears. At Reed College I took a reading course in religious origins from the famous anthropologist, Alexander Goldenweiser; but a commitment to man's distant past and to anthropology as a discipline had to wait until a roman­tic attachment for the origins and history of the ancient Egyptians had run its course. In Eugene [Oregon] I was fortunate to obtain room-lodging for $1O.OO a month and a stipend of $30.00 furnished through the National Recovery Act. I owed this economic security to Dr. [Luther] Cressman, who selected me as his classroom assistant. I succeeded Howard Stafford, who, I believe, was the first to hold the position. Those were the days when one lunched on nickel hamburgers washed down with a ten cent milkshake.