As Reg Golledge’s staff assistant for 10 years prior to his death, your editor was given the task of clearing out his office in 3616 Ellison Hall. It took 6 weeks, but over 8,000 pounds of materials were eventually sorted and, when possible, recycled (yes, I kept a record!). Reg was a pack rat and had materials dating back to the early 1960s stored in his office. Personal effects, of course, were given to his immediate family. Much of Reg’s computer hardware and software was too old to be of use (pre-1980 and requiring 8-inch floppy disks and magnetic tapes), but Dylan Parenti, our Computer Network Coordinator, salvaged what he could for departmental use, and most of Reg’s more recent adaptive technology equipment was gladly accepted by the Santa Barbara Braille Institute.
Apart from office furniture and shelving, the bulk of Reg’s materials consisted of paper in the form of everything from an impressive library (over 1,000 books, final reports, etc.) and a collection of over 30 journals to copies of every class lecture he ever gave and 3,708 filed articles (most of which have been kept by the department). But the bulk of the 3+ tons of recycled paper hauled out of his office was the result of Reg’s visual impairment. Unaided, Reg couldn’t read anything with a font size less than 36, but, with the aid of a telesensory chroma svga enlarger (a desktop video magnifier that enlarges print 5 – 45 times on a monitor), he could read even fine print (although only a few words would be visible on the magnifier’s screen at a time). However, this also meant that that all of his email had to be printed out, and that every draft (often over 20 versions) of everything he wrote had to be printed out (including his 16 books, 391 articles, 296 conference presentations, and on and on) for him to edit by hand. This was further complicated by his difficulty in dealing with staples and with pages printed on both sides, not to mention his insistence on keeping hard copies of everything, in order to be able to access and read it at will.
Apart from the materials mentioned above, Reg had a collection of hundreds of geographical articles recorded on tape cassettes and well over a thousand photographic slides. The latter consisted of a mix of personal photos and slides used for classroom presentations in the days before the advent of overheads and Power Point presentations. While the tape cassettes ended up in the electronic recycling bin, grad student Seth Peterson expressed an interest in the slide collection. It turns out that Seth is a serious amateur photographer as well as an avid collector of, shall we say, historical, high tech paraphernalia.
Seth’s interest in the Golledge slide collection was fortuitous. For one thing, he came across a box of personal slides of Reg’s first marriage to Margaret Mason in 1961 in Canberra, Australia, which was returned to the family. Of even more interest to Seth the photographer and geographer were Reg’s photos of his early travels: “He was a GREAT photographer and there are some neat images. Thus far, I’ve looked at a trip to Nuristan (a province in Afghanistan) in 1968 and a trip in New Zealand. Like many good photographers there aren’t many images of Reg, but the existing ones are really good.”
Seth scanned some of the slides for the Event Photos section on our web site gallery of pictures of Reg (see 2009, Golledge Memorial here), and he’s gone one step further by creating a blog of selected scans of Reg’s slides and accompanying text taken from an unfinished autobiography Reg began writing a few months before his death. Check out Seth’s terrific site at http://reggolledgeslidecollection.blogspot.com/. It’s an ongoing project: “There are about 200 slides I have to go through of his Afghanistan trip; those are going to be amazing. I didn’t really know Reg, but I know quality photography, and he had the eye.” As Reg would have said, “Good on ya, mate!”
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