¶1 Dave That's fine, I've just turned on a sound recorder because usually the things we talk about are things we want some form of AI to take a look at for spawn [unclear]. I'm not thinking that clearly this weekend myself because I've just been goofing off, but I'm thinking well enough to turn on a sound recorder and have somebody else that's smarter than me process things.
¶1 Bob The other two things that I wanted to discuss too are also good to get recorded, but I was reading through this and I was kind of wondering who the audience was.
¶2 Bob Maybe it said up front or something, I missed it, but then I found out it was the board and that was really interesting because I thought there's a lot of detail in here that doesn't seem to be too necessary for most readers, but if it's the group, if it's the board, then yeah, the details are important so they can see step-by-step how these changes have been made and what the policy is and how it's evolving. Then the boxes where it was like well, I could just write in whatever I wanted. I thought well, I'm not sure what works best.
¶3 Bob So if I was talking to you and were being recorded on each of the three boxes, assuming you're still going with this format, then that'd be the best way to do it. It'd be better than me trying to write something just off the top of my head that I hoped would fit in. The other potential candidate in my mind, well actually there were several for possible readers, would be if we found someone else that had another archive of things that we were interested in merging or including in the library, then having them see how the process went for the last group would be useful for them to think about how could we do that in the future.
¶4 Bob The next candidate would be the way in which we're operating this library is quite a bit different than the way traditional libraries are operated. So anybody that was thinking about being a librarian or a state representative for ASTL on the library, they might want to see how did this work. So those were the likely readers, I thought.
¶5 Dave Yeah, that sounds good, and I agree. I was thinking that one, this would be a lot of detail for a general reader, but having specific audiences like that, it's perfect.
¶5 Bob† And I get to resume my role as a guinea pig. Let's see, have you changed anything substantively on the outline or the details on this at all since you sent it to me in the first place?
¶5 Dave No, I think the last piece of actual productive work that I did that had anything to do with either the library or School Trust Lands was what I sent to you.
¶6–13 Omitted. Eight paragraphs of discussion of pending litigation and a named attorney's working habits were removed under Library publication rules.
¶14 Dave Well, let's see. Should we start to go through this?
¶14 Bob Sure.
¶14 Dave Let's see.
¶15 Dave† I think it's the first one, what I was trying to build. And then I think that's asking why I was doing Soap Creek Valley.
¶15 Bob The interesting thing is my major professor, which I've connected with on this, and he is really happy with it.
¶16 Bob I haven't had any direct contact with him in 15 years or so. And a local historian from Newport area was a good friend of Royal Jackson. [a sentence about a third party omitted]
¶17 Bob But he sent back a really good note on that that I was surprising about. But he was my major professor.
¶17 Dave Oh, just in the last week or two?
¶17 Bob Yeah, yeah.
¶18 Dave Oh, OK. That's fine.
¶18 Bob Just in the last week.
¶19 Bob And he's an expert on this stuff. He was the one that got me going on oral histories, and he's one of the co-authors of, well, you can see that, 1975 or 79. And then Karen Thomas was one of his students.
¶20 Bob And then I became a student. He owned land in Eddyville and just had a real mutual respect type of relationship. So he's my major professor, and he was in oral history.
¶21 Bob And because of that, I got employed as a student employee to do oral histories on Soap Creek Valley. So that was the academic green light, and I was paid to do it. Not very much, student wages, I think $7 an hour or something, which is what I used to pay my crew.
¶22 Bob But my reason for doing that was very simple. One, the oral histories, like we talked before, were invented in 1948, and they had three basic formats. One was autobiographical.
¶23 Bob One was an event that happened, a carnival or asteroid hit or something, and then they'd talk to all the people. The third one was, I can't remember, maybe a biography or something, but they didn't have geography. And so Soap Creek Valley is something I've been working with as a reforestation contractor.
¶24 Bob We're dealing with sub-basins. We're not dealing with legal description so much as where the water flows and the fire goes and so on. So Soap Creek Valley, at the time, the beef ranch was being managed by the OSU Research Forests, so I was hired by them through Bill Atkinson to do it.
¶25 Bob And the idea was, and remains, that the actual experts on the land aren't agency representatives or academics at the university. It's the people that lived there and had been there for a while and involved in the history. So that was the undertaking, was to develop a new type of oral history on OSU property land and to use the experts and the emerging field at that time still of oral histories to demonstrate how that can be done and to what degree.
¶26 Bob And that was the reason that I was so careful with all the indexing. At that time, it was a lot more expensive. I think oral histories might be a thing of the past with AI.
¶27 Bob We might just do videotaped interviews now and have those transcribed almost immediately and turned into whatever products we're interested in making. But tape recorders and a methodology, a specific methodology made oral histories possible. And so when I was doing it, we had reel-to-reel tape recorders.
¶28 Bob That's what Royal used. I used a cassette recorder. We were able to get other student workers to do transcripts.
¶29 Bob Then we'd audit the transcripts and share them with the owners or the interviewees and for any corrections or any concerns and then send them back to the transcriptionist to index them, to index based on the topics that were covered and so on. So it was a time-consuming process. It was expensive and it had lots of errors because it had lots of humans.
¶30 Bob So the result was a series of 15 oral histories. I think I did about a dozen of them. I typically had a student assistant to do the recording while I did the interviewing, but not always.
¶31 Bob And so the idea then was, okay, we've got all these done. They're not accessible. They're really hard to reference, two or three of them.
¶32 Bob They tried to use computer indexing and got the pagination wrong, and then they were in print. A couple of them we reprinted to correct those types of errors, but a couple of them, that didn't happen. And the next step was to do just what we've been discussing, is to compile them into a three-volume set with a common index for everything so that they would be citable references, so that the errors would be removed.
¶33 Bob And there was interest in doing it, but there was no funding and no time. And so that was the, what we're trying to build is a demonstration project to show a methodology for capturing and sharing landscape history on a sub-basin scale, because it's not taught in our schools, and most people are so mobile now that these generational memories and knowledge has largely disappeared from much of the landscape, where when people were farmers and they had to rely on walking or horses for transportation, they became intimately familiar with the environment, so there was no reason to teach it in our schools.
¶33 Dave Yeah.
¶34 Dave† And at that time, they were closer to the original donation land claim process, so they actually understood the history back as far as history would go. I mean, there really isn't any history before what they knew, because the Indians didn't record things in ways that allows you to really have, I mean, the word history implies a written part component to it, really. Unless you tag the word oral on it, in which case then the mythologies and stories of the smart fox and all of the rest could be brought into some form of history perhaps.
¶35 Dave But aside from that, you really don't have an Indian history. Whereas at Soap Creek, at the time that you were recording, you could go back probably almost to the original beginnings of history for that area.
¶35 Bob Yep.
¶36 Bob There's two types of history, and I bring that out in my thesis. One type is the record of people on the landscape, so rock carvings, buried patches and so on, indications of what people were doing in the past, archaeological resources is one type of history. And the other one is just what you just said, documentation, photographs, written words, eyewitness accounts.
¶37 Bob And you're right. This group was able to take it back at that time, basically to the original donation land claims were pretty close to that. They knew the history of the land and development, maybe not all of the characters, but they knew some of them.
¶38 Dave† Greenberry Smith and a few others, I think.
¶38 Bob But yeah, I think Charlie was born in 1890, and he had memories going back to about 1900. And the newest ones we did was about 1992, maybe.
Library note, September 14, 2026. The collection's People page gives Charlie Olson's birth year as 1898. On September 14, Bob clarified that he recalls probably 1898, based on his memory of the 1890s; this is a qualified recollection, not an independent verification. His original words remain above. The collection's session records run later than 1992: the last Soap Creek Valley interviews were made in 1995.
¶39 Bob And so those memories went back to World War II. And that was significant for that valley, the World War II history as well as the Indian history. [passage about a third party omitted]
¶40–42 Omitted. Three paragraphs of characterization of a named living scholar were removed under Library publication rules.
¶43 Bob [opening sentence about a third party omitted] So that's the reason, is that there is a huge difference, and oral histories were invented specifically to get the transcription so there would be documentation. And that was the reason that I was so specific on indexing and having the people review the transcripts after I had to make sure they were correct.
¶44 Bob So with what we've got going with AI now, that whole process is in the rear view mirror. It's just like buggy whips, I think. We can just do videos and feed it to AI and have immediate results and are better quality than what we were doing 30 and 40 years ago.
¶45 Dave Or do what we're doing now, which is just turn on a sound recorder and then run it through a transcription program.
¶45 Bob Say again?
¶45 Dave Or do what we're doing now, which is to turn on a sound recorder and then run it through a transcription program.
¶45 Bob Yep, yep.
¶46 Bob But the idea for video instead of transcription, but we're building from the history that's there, that going forward, having people's facial expressions, I know a lot of times, and you've probably experienced the same thing, I know I have, you put something in print and you've got a little humor to it or something like that, and it doesn't go through. People read it and they think instead of friendly teasing, they're looking at it as weird criticism or who knows what. But having the ability to see a person's gestures and expressions and hear the sound in their voice, of course you can do that on a recording, but it just adds detail.
¶47 Dave Yeah. I think we covered the first box there more than enough. Okay, moving on.
¶48 Dave Let's see, the second one, what surprised me, what you did not expect, good or bad, from the first build in August.
¶48 Bob Oh, we've discussed this, but we did put it in writing. I was shocked at how quick and high quality the results were and the ability to work directly with what I had written rather than hallucinating and following specific guidelines and coming up with such a quality result, a final draft result, just a little bit of touch-up or formatting or something like that.
¶49 Bob It shocked me at how well AI can follow verbal instructions.
¶49 Dave Yeah, the difference between August of 2025 and August of 2026 is night and day, isn't it? In the last year, things have just gone from hallucinating and potentially helpful at wording things to being actually trustworthy.
¶49 Bob Yeah, it's like the difference going from a hand-push mower to a riding mower or hiring somebody else to do it.
¶50 Dave Yeah, right, yeah.
¶50 Bob That's why I did not expect the significant increase in quality and capability because when we worked with it before, a year or two ago, I could see value and I put it to work as far as making summaries of work and summarizing statements and that, but it was pretty clunky and at the same time, it needed to be reworked. The auditing on it was a problem, and this just took care of 90% of that.
¶51 Bob And so that much improvement in capability and quality was entirely unexpected.
¶51 Dave So I have a story I want to interject here, if it's okay, and tell me if I'm repeating myself because I do that a lot and I have no reason to do that now. I haven't talked to you about how I've used the Fable 5 to help with my grandson, Eli, on creating a stocking survey for the Redwoods we planted, have I?
¶51 Bob Yep, you did tell me that.
¶52 Dave And that included the software that we developed?
¶52 Bob I'm not sure. I think probably the main thing was I didn't know you developed software on it. I knew you were using software and that too.
¶53 Bob So you're saying that the stocking survey that you did, somebody could use the software for other similar types of projects.
¶53 Dave Yeah, all right. So I've already talked about that.
¶54 Dave Yeah, the new ways in which you can go about using this, it's just fun because you run up against different tasks that you've not used it for before and then just give a description. Well, can you do this? And boop, it's done. Yeah, so that's just entertaining.
¶55 Dave What caught me off guard the most in that was that it was smart enough to be able to tap into the middle of my phone and pull up GPS data and compare where the plot was supposed to be with where I was standing and say, move seven feet northwest, you'll be at the right spot.
¶55 Bob Wow.
¶55 Dave Yeah.
¶56 Bob I think coordination between the video drones and AI would be a wonderful forest management tool. And roads and trails, that's what we're promoting several years ago, but without the AI capability to analyze and summarize the information that was coming in.
¶56 Dave Yeah, I think for timber cruises, right, an Optimus robot and a drone and an AI could do remarkably accurate timber cruises for free, basically.
¶57 Bob Well, except the cost of all the equipment and then maintaining it and operating it and transporting it. But it would greatly reduce costs and greatly increase quality.
¶57 Dave Yeah.
¶58 Bob In fact, when you call, I'm working on an email regarding road and trail maintenance on the forest service, which is becoming a big issue again with fire season and everything. And that's something that I've been trying to get people to understand for six or seven years is, like, these inventories and things, with the video drone that can be programmed and just send it out once a week, look for illegal campers or whatever, or do stocking surveys or whatever, blow down assessments would really reduce costs a whole lot and would justify people in the office instead of what they're doing now with NEPA regulation and building pods and just a bunch of busy work. It would be a really solid record that readily analyzed and a whole lot less manpower and a whole lot better resolved.
¶59 Bob All right, sorry about the distraction. Are we moving on to box three?
¶59 Dave Yep. So let's see here.
¶60 Bob Yep.
¶60 Dave What I want a reader to do with it. What you hope somebody finds here in 50 years.
¶61 Bob Oh, okay. And we talked about this before, too. That was my whole reason in putting it together.
¶62 Bob I was hoping and still hope that the methodology would be made more generally available. And that was one of the other things I wanted to talk about. You were talking about putting together a brief methodology piece, whether a booklet or an essay or whatever.
¶63 Bob But, yeah, that was what I'd hoped would immediately come, is here is a way to get expertise on local landscapes and to make materials that can be taught in the schools so that people moving into an area or younger people could readily follow interest with the index and replicate this. We talked about that maybe now going back and covering the previous 35 years since this was done or 30 years with people that have been living there the last 30 years, a new set of people, and continue the history of Soap Creek Valley in that method. So that was one thing I'd hoped for immediate use that now AI might have eclipsed.
¶64 Bob But just the approach of detailed oral histories or detailed landscape histories with the experts, the local experts that know the roads and trails and land and neighbors and so on, I'd like to see that become part of our curricula in our public schools. The other thing, the long-term 50 years, is exactly what we talked about before. This isn't a New York Times bestseller thing.
¶65 Bob This is an academic approach to basically covering today's mobility and giving people important insights as to not only the history of their land but management options going forward, what can be done, what should be done, what was a mistake, what was a proven success, and how those can be replicated. So the practical value on that level. But then 50 years and 75 years, it would be descendants, students, local historians, or it could be botanists, people that are tracking invasive species, weeds, or looking for evidence of rare and endangered species such as mentioned by some of the folks that were interviewed.
¶66 Bob So short-term would be the methodology and replication and educational applications, which haven't happened yet. And the long-term is people like you and me that are looking back and finding, it's like when I'm looking at survey notes from the 1850s, the person who made them hasn't been around for more than 50 years. Their information is just really of significant interest to me and the valuable research data as far as forest history or forest management or wildlife habitat or any of those things that people have not been accurate.
¶67 Bob I'll just put it that way. We've been dealing with a lot of assumptions and a lot of computer modeling and a lot of printouts and a lot of statements that are just not factual, but they're easy to do. Ben Stout used to say that the reason people thought, what do you call it when you go from one type of plant to another to another, there's a word and they teach it, like you go from grasses to shrubs to hardwoods to conifers and there's this evolution of species in the environment that they might still be teaching as the way a forest regenerates.
¶68 Dave For a succession process?
¶68 Bob Yes, that was a succession. That was the word I was looking for. Ben Stout and one of his professors at Harvard, I think it was, disproved that in the 1970s, 1960s, maybe even a little earlier.
¶69 Bob So Ben gave me those works and it just verified exactly what I've been observing for 20 years, digging a hole in the ground every 10 feet through all kinds of terrain, that succession is not something that happens. I think that even age stands for a reason, that the alder comes in and then it's alder. A landslide happens and it might be alder.
¶70 Bob If the fir comes in, then it's fir. Following fires, if there's some seed available and there's bare soil, then you get an even age stand of lodgepole or Douglas fir or spruce.
¶70 Dave But the forest succession model is so intuitive that the fact that it isn't real doesn't really matter.
¶71 Dave It's an urban myth that just pops up and grows all on its own.
¶71 Bob And it's indoctrinated into the students. My question with him is, why are they teaching this? And he said, because it's easy.
¶72 Dave Yeah, right. And it's just intuitive. It just makes sense.
¶73 Dave† Somebody explains it and you go, oh, wow, that's really interesting.
¶73 Bob† So I'm looking at the hardwood phase and then pretty soon there's going to be an isolated conifer coming in. And it's just bullshit.
¶74 Bob It's like, what? Hitting that, after working in the woods for 20 years, I was lecturing at the university and high schools and grade schools and writing about it, the reforestation of the Tillamook burn. I wrote about it in 1980. And then being inundated with that kind of teaching at the highest level, graduate school level, and being taught things like, well, Franklin's phrase that Tom, I think it's his last name right now, starts with an S. But we had to memorize that the ideal forest system was a non-declining, even flow, naturally functioning ecosystem.
¶75 Bob And wrote memorization of that. And in class, I made myself unpopular with the guy and started canceling myself by saying, that is a really interesting concept, and you can almost do it in a terrarium, but I've never heard of any place on earth where that is taking place. And so that made me unpopular.
¶76 Bob But it was ridiculous. I mean, humans are pathogens. Dead and dying trees are signs of a healthy forest.
¶77 Bob Well, why are they dead and dying then? It doesn't make any sense. And so we've been dealing with that ever since. And you and I have discussed it.
¶78 Bob I thought, well, once these guys get some photographs and some inside information from the actual experts, the people living on the landscape, the loggers and the people building the roads, they will wise up and change direction because they're off on a weird tangent here. And I thought that would take two or three years, and here we are 30 years later whining about the same thing. It's like, wow.
¶79 Bob They've indoctrinated two generations of people with pure crap fantasy at the highest level of education. That goes right into the agencies. The agencies are the ones that hire the local businesses.
¶80 Bob The students, the children of the businesses and the agencies are being taught this in school. And now we've had 40 years of brainwashed people with just weird propaganda in which we are pathogens in the forest rather than an important component as we've done for thousands of years or had been.
¶80 Dave Well, we're not going to solve that.
¶81 Dave But I think we've managed to get through the first three boxes.
¶81 Bob Yep.
¶81 Dave There was like several topics you wanted us to work through.
¶82 Dave And so have we done the first set of stuff?
¶82 Bob I think so. I think now I can do whatever you want to do with it. That integrates best with what's there already, whether it's 50-word summaries or whatever the heck it is.
¶83 Bob We covered the topics well. And I'm comfortable with any kind of that's going back to the first one or second one. That's what's surprising.
¶84 Dave So a different question that's similar. Was there anything that it put together in your Zybach Collection or descriptions or your comments that you thought was inaccurate or needs to be revised or pulled or otherwise dealt with?
¶84 Bob I think I mentioned one thing earlier on one of them, but not really. That's been the shocking thing.
¶85 Bob Even the summaries before with the one I reprinted, [unclear], where it summarized my paper or report, I think on PMAT on these very issues, a 100-page report. And it gave a pretty good summary. It missed a key point, but it didn't hallucinate anything.
¶86 Bob And it was a good summary. I was expecting a step up from that, not 10 steps up from that. But, yeah, not really.
¶87 Bob I've been pretty satisfied with that. Now, on the Letitia Carson and Smith things, those need to go through. I need to edit those or audit them and do one more step probably.
¶88 Bob But they were pretty darn close from the get-go. I've been really impressed with the quality that's being done with this work.
¶88 Dave Well, that's important because the AI programs are gatekeepers that don't like to publish stuff without prior approval, which I find annoying because they basically say, we can't write anything or do anything until you already get the author of this to say okay, and yet the author can't say okay because you haven't done anything to look at.
¶89 Dave And so that becomes a catch-22. And then they're so cautious in what they do that they're not willing to develop without a lot of encouragement, not willing to develop prototypes that people can actually look at to understand what might be done. And that's tricky.
¶90 Dave So getting your post, I mean, because I basically had to twist its arm pretty hard to say, go off and do this even though you don't have his approval. And so now at least you've looked at it and you have sort of endorsed that what it did reluctantly was actually more or less on target.
¶90 Bob Yeah, yeah.
¶91 Bob And that's what I noticed too. But I got something from Larry Landis, and that was one of the topics I wanted to briefly cover. But I got a note from him about 2017 or 2018.
¶92 Bob That's when they got all of my material in from OSU Research Forests. And one of the reports was the Human Use Report. It was a cultural resource inventory of the OSU Research Forests.
¶93 Bob And that grew out of this project as well. And he said they would have to put that, because of mentions of Native American locations, they would have to put that in a restricted list. They couldn't publicly release it.
¶94 Bob So he was saying the same thing that I was saying. And that's something that not through these methods, not through this project, but something that I've been trying to challenge for quite a while, is that the reason we're losing these artifacts and these resources and these burial sites is because just an elite few people seem to think that they're privileged to have the information. And if they don't keep it secret from the rest of us, that looters will go in there and steal it.
¶95 Bob And we had artifacts, my great-grandmother had them, that her husband dug up from Indian burial sites in Portland, Washington. And that happened in the early 1900s. But also I had an ancestor buried on the Oregon Trail, and they had to, in 1851, they had to do several things to the grave site so the Indians wouldn't dig it up.
¶96 Bob So grave robbing is still going on for medical students and so on. But I think they should be treated like a Catholic cemetery. Everybody knows where it is.
¶97 Bob If you degrade the thing, then you get serious consequences. But they should be openly known sites that people visit and celebrate, rather than just a special few know where they are and with the ultimate result that they get destroyed.
¶97 Dave Inadvertently.
¶98 Dave So it's a question of whether you allow them to be inadvertently destroyed because nobody's paying attention to what's there and doesn't know to protect it versus vandalism of intentional design. And that's a tricky balance to have. And I can see why the experts would always call it that they're allowed to know and nobody else is.
¶99 Dave I mean, that's what you find with every fire department in terms of how to deal with a wildfire, for example. We're the only experts in the world that could help with putting out a fire so people that just have backhoes and farm equipment need to flee the area and not pay attention to any of their belongings so that we can, understaffed and not paying much attention, be the ones that are responsible. The way I've said that, obviously, there's a bias here towards anti-government, overly zealous oversight, but it's not just the fire departments and the police departments in the world that know how to keep people safe and how to protect things.
¶100 Dave And I think that by analogy, the topic that you're talking about with respect to preserving ancient artifacts has a similar analogy. Does that make sense?
¶100 Bob Yep. When anybody does the minor thing, least important thing on a forest, and they've got to follow NEPA, and so it takes two or three years for the value of the trees are lost, and then people litigate it based on that.
¶101 Bob It's a really slow-going, costly, counterproductive process because only a few experts and then people in the public that can do acronyms and hectares and all that kind of stuff that even have the time to deal with that. And then we have wildfires, and we have people from Florida or Mexico, whole crews that don't speak English or claim not to speak English, people from Alaska come down, and they can make decisions to burn up 10,000 acres in a backfire without NEPA, without local knowledge, without any expertise so far as local fuels or access roads or any of that, and they've been doing it with impunity over millions of acres, and that really only started about 1990 or something. The Indian thing started in probably about 1960s or 70s when they started putting in these restrictions and that.
¶102 Bob But yeah, it's passed backwards. Local people control fires. They used to stop people on the highway, local residents, and have the legal right to have them go out and fight fires in the 1920s and 30s.
¶103 Dave Well, that's entertaining. So if you were just driving down the highway, you could be deputized without your concurrence to help fight a local fire, and that actually makes some sense. It's like the opposite of or the logical extension of good Samaritan laws.
¶104 Bob Yeah, and then they have local crews. That's why I'm doing the East Evans print and trying to get it through ORWW through a case-by-case thing. But they had a local crew on that fire, and they sent them over to eastern Oregon and replaced them with a crew from Florida because of regulations.
¶105 Bob So I've been interviewing those folks and figuring out how to get this information out there because we've got all of these rules and regulations that are creating the situation, and then we've got no rules or regulations when the experts come in, and they don't even give them names, so there's no accountability there. ICs. So if you've got an IC on the job who is giving out the orders, and it used to be that it was the local forest ranger, and it used to be that the local forest ranger was quite often a third generation from that community, so they knew the land.
¶106 Bob They knew the road. They knew the people. They knew where the equipment was, and we didn't have fires.
¶107 Bob I just keep repeating that because it's such an obvious disclaimer. A lot of these beneficial fire proponents, just when you have local people take care of fires, which they did for 10,000 years and longer, yeah, they start more fires. The roadless people, oh, they'll have more people setting more fires out on the road, yeah, and you'll have more people able to put them out, so they don't get big.
¶108 Bob It's just whether it's a campfire or a careless smoker or an arsonist, without the fuel and with access, you don't have this problem, and we've demonstrated that for generations. So these self-inflicted problems are quite often because the experts, the agency people, we've got all these ologists out there. It requires a college degree, but it doesn't require any local knowledge, and so those people are then given authority by law to make decisions that are killing our wildlife and destroying our forests and ruining our rural communities.
¶109 Bob I guess it's tangent, but it's related. It's exactly the same thing.
¶109 Dave Okay, well, we're not going to solve all those problems today.
¶110 Dave What's the next thing that we should work on?
¶110 Bob Well, let's see. I've got three quick things here. One, Larry Landis with Chris quit, and he put it to Karl, [characterization of a named third party omitted]
¶111 Bob [characterization of named third parties omitted] So I was thinking to contact Larry again. I copied Larry. He's retired.
¶112 Bob I dealt with Larry in the 1990s when he was first starting out as an archivist at Oregon State, and I think he retired about 2020 or something like that, [passage about a third party's motives omitted] and what I'm just going to run by you briefly is, like, I think I should contact Larry, copy you, and send him the products. I actually sent Chris a map because Larry used to be president of the National Digital Archivist Organization and try to get some connection from him and what we were approaching Chris about, which is enlarging the library to a more national audience. So I just wanted to run that, and then Larry may be a person that would be interested in this process here because he's the one that actually was Larry or right before him, when we were doing Soap Creek, Royal Jackson said we have to have signed statements from people, and Jennifer Lee, his wife, [a personal detail omitted] she was working at the Benton County Library and they transferred all their stuff over to the, and that's when they were in Philomath.
¶113 Bob No, they were in an office on the highway between Philomath and Corvallis, and at that time she was keeping track of the oral histories. They were starting the process of having signed releases from people. I was schooled to be sure and get it on tape, that it was okay with the person being recorded, and then those things in my thesis, the six or seven statements that I put in there as samples, we developed, and at about the same time, 93 or 94, Oregon State Archives started requiring them and developing them on their own, but we were kind of the trendsetter on that.
¶114 Bob So that part with AI coming in and saying that we need all these permissions and approvals and they need to be formats, those were kind of imposed after the fact because everything we did was to the highest quality standards at that time with the approval of the people that these materials would be used, would be published, likely published. They got copies of them. Everybody that I interviewed or that was interviewed could tell me how many copies they wanted, and we published that many copies for that family, some of them 20 and 30 copies, most of them three or four or five.
¶115 Bob So they all knew about it, they all agreed to it, and then to have AI saying, now we have to do all of these technical additional steps, I was glad to see that you left that off.
¶115 Dave Well, the reason why things got left off is that I was getting so many roadblocks from Fable 5 that I basically said, look, you're not letting us do anything because you're worried about the possible implications of having done something. Stop it.
¶116 Dave Stop it. Stop it. Go, go, go, and actually get something done so that we can have something to look at.
¶117 Dave And then at that point it said, oh, I never thought of it like that. It's like these programs are trained so thoroughly into being correct about how they do things that they don't, and they've never been taught that to actually get something done, like to mow a lawn, you actually have to cut off the tops of pieces of grass, and that's a destructive act, and they're not supposed to destroy anything, so you can't mow any lawns. I mean, the logic here of dealing with them when you're dealing with archival work is so tortured that they really honestly have no clue about the importance of actually moving forward and doing things.
¶118 Bob They're using 2026 standards and perceptions, and they're dealing with mostly dead people, work that was done over 30 years ago that exceeded standards at that time.
¶118 Dave Right, and they're waiting with bated breath for those people to crawl up out of the grave and come after us for having used their words in ways that they never intended, which why in the hell did they sit down and do the recordings to start with?
¶118 Bob And review it, and ask for printed copies, and hand them out to their relatives. My God, all the actions in it, and get recorded, and signed statements.
¶119 Bob The one question, we might not have signed statements for everybody because the records were transferred from OSU Research Forest, and that's who I was working for. And the two earlier ones, Karen Thomas and Royal, I think those were at the county library where Jennifer was working, I think. But they might not be recoverable.
¶120 Bob They could have been lost in the shuffle because it was pre-digital. But the fact that they were done, all the evidence is clear.
¶120 Dave Yeah, right.
¶121 Dave This is not a matter of moving forward against stern opposition and wise counsel about being cautious. It's a matter of everybody wants this to happen, and AIs are saying, you didn't spend enough time on the paperwork in the 1970s. It's just dopey.
¶122 Bob Yeah, but at least it got taken care of. But anyhow, the short question, I guess, is do you think that Larry should be contacted again? I'd like to contact him and send him the stuff that we sent Chris before he got transferred and that Karl is dealing with. But I'd like to do that independently and ask about the National Digital Archives and also ask if his name was removed because he didn't want to be dealing with additional work in his retirement, if he just didn't want to be pestered on it.
¶123 Bob And he's been a friend. So I was going to do that, and I just wanted to run it by you first to see if you had any reservations about that.
¶123 Dave No, I have no reservations whatsoever.
¶124 Dave I think this is an excellent idea, and if you'd like, we could insert a little note at this point to have the AI that's going to review this tape create a draft for you to forward, a draft for you to read, edit, and forward. So that could be done, or you could just do it on your own.
¶124 Bob I was thinking of doing it with the material that we sent Chris and with the same questions and then a little cover note on it so that wasn't too onerous, too much information for him, but where he could see the basic products and links and get feedback on that.
¶125 Bob All right. Hopefully some recommendations as to who to contact next or what process needs to be followed.
¶125 Dave You seem to have a very clear understanding of what you want to do, and so why don't you go ahead and do that.
¶126 Bob† Okay. I just want to have you get another thing in the e-mail that was somebody you didn't know that you weren't familiar with.
¶126 Dave Well, my first thought would be if we can find anyone that's interested in working with this School Trust Library and we can recruit them as a deputy or an assistant librarian or a state chief of this or that, that we don't want to turn down anyone that we can recruit or volunteer.
¶127 Dave So that's my general thought. It's consistent with my earlier comments about just trying to get the AIs to be willing to start. We're starting off.
¶128 Dave It is far, far easier to realize that you've gone down the wrong path and that you want to correct things than it is to never do anything. If you've never done anything, then getting started is almost impossible. But if you're trying a lot of different things and some of them don't work and you just drop the ones that didn't work, that's no work at all.
¶129 Dave Making a correction is just almost always easier than not having done anything and then realizing, well, I never did anything with my life. I wish I had.
¶129 Bob I think with Larry it's more of a matter of approaching him as a knowledgeable advisor or consultant and then leaving the recruiting part of it as hopefully a volunteer and then whatever title he wants.
¶130 Bob If he wants to become formally involved with it, I think that would be a second or third step or maybe he'd step forward on it. So that was the idea on approaching him.
¶130 Dave Okay.
¶131 Bob So then two more. One, you talked about doing a methodology and summarizing that. I think that would be great.
¶132 Bob In line with what we were talking about just a little bit earlier, I think it should be local, maybe even landscape, but local history research methods and the focus on teachers and historical groups as far as here's how you systematically can gather and document the local landscape history and there's three facets to it. The one is documentary just in general, just newspapers, photographs, typical books, typical type approaches. The second one is roads and trails and the third one is oral histories.
¶133 Bob Each one of those oral histories and roads and trails are technically documentary, but they're not traditional. So what I'd like to do is, and we were mentioning it right first, what were you hoping to have done with this work? It's a demonstration project. It's like a guidebook for teachers and local historians and maybe even a little bit of a paragraph or two with an editorial.
¶134 Bob This needs to be taught in our schools. It's an important part of our knowledge and ability to survive as a species, for one, at some point. But to have roads and trails, which are largely aerial photograph and map focused, so specific types of documentation with a specific type of desired outcome that isn't typical for a lot of research.
¶135 Bob And then, of course, the oral histories, which is what we're doing right now and the ability to really improve on the process with AI, but some kind of product along those lines.
¶135 Dave Okay. Is that something that would be a down the line or kind of a priority because AI could do it in 10 minutes probably and that could be added into a final product fairly quickly? Or is that something down the line because there's really no existing audience at this point for that type of product? I don't plan on doing anything right this instant, but I do have two other things that I am curious about that are related or may be related.
¶136 Dave The first is both you and I believe that a lot of Elliott history was lost in the transfer from ODF to DSL. And they're never going to have an incentive to document what happened and what there used to be and what there is now. And I believe that someone like you should do interviews to find out from Katie at the College of Forestry and whoever the people are at DSL and ODF to find out what currently exists, what used to exist, and how it got lost, if anything got lost, that that is a type of oral history that I think is almost guaranteed to never happen voluntarily by the folks that are in charge of the Elliott State Research Forest but is an essential part.
¶137 Dave You can't set up a billion-dollar research forest and honorably throw away the majority of the information about that forest and then also not even acknowledge how it happened and who did it. When you put all of those things together, you have a huge problem. And what you've done is you've documented a number of things with histories from Phillips and Gould and elsewhere about the forest, but we don't have that critical linchpin, which in my mind is what was it that ODF was maintaining and kept and then how important was that and what portion of it got lost and how did it get lost in the whole transfer process.
¶138 Dave Is that worth following up on? It seems related in my mind to the whole idea of creating oral histories and then the meta-information about how do you go about creating oral histories.
¶138 Bob I think that's not an oral history problem so much as all the oral histories that help on it, but when they put all those things in the boxes and hauled them from ODF to DSL, Jim Paul was in charge of that. He's actually a forester and I had a really good meeting with him and the idea was that, as you're saying, I'm the most qualified person to go through those records and what I was really interested in was the 1950s and what Jerry Phillips did.
¶139 Bob They did surveys, detailed inventories of all the landscape on the Elliott in the early 50s and Jerry was involved in that and they had records of it and it was at the office when he retired in 88 or 89 and he didn't think those records had been destroyed and when I talked to Jim Paul, he said he thought they were all, I think it was like 38 boxes or something and this was about 2018 or 2019 or something like that and I said I'd be really interested in doing that. I would need funding because it would be time consuming but it would be producing a product that would be really valuable and he was very interested in that. He had a person attend the meeting that I never explained who that person was and I've got a feeling in retrospect that it might have been part of their legal team or something but they were applying for funding which they got.
¶140 Bob He said it's going to be five or six months and then we'll have funding and then let's talk and then in that period of time, he transferred to another job [characterization of a named agency's staff member omitted]. I made a couple other valid efforts to say I think those records are still in existence but they should at least be checked out. Somebody needs to go through those boxes and they didn't have anybody there that knew anything about Elliott history and of course I'd been interviewing Jerry and read his book and knew the lab and blah, blah, blah so it was bothersome to me when Oregon State came on and started hiring a lot of people to do increment boring and reports that weren't even doing literature review much less tracking down those records.
¶141 Bob So that's kind of more documentary than oral history but oral history would be a good way with Jim Paul or somebody like that if they'd be willing to discuss that part of the history [passage omitted]. So I think that's important and it'd be good to reactivate that, revisit it because it's still quite possible that those records have never been actually destroyed but they may still exist but nobody knows and nobody seems to really want to look at them and I think that's because nobody has the capability to understand what they're looking at.
¶142 Dave Yeah, I forgot what the second thing I was interested in was but it was the same sort of character in terms of importance in my mind at the time. It may pop back in. So given that I can't remember that and the idea of trying to document what happened to Elliott records isn't something that we're going to be able to solve right now, what next should we talk about?
¶142 Bob I have one other thing and I just talked with Wayne Knauf.
Library note, September 14, 2026. Bob confirmed the names Wayne Knauf and Eldon “Tope” Knauf on September 14. Knopp was a transcription error. Eldon is supplied here as identification, not added to the spoken words.
¶143 Bob He's a 92, Berkeley educated forester, Colville tribal member. His brother Tope is 94. Wayne went on to become vice president of Georgia Pacific at one point and while I was doing contracting for Georgia Pacific and he was a troubleshooter as a vice president for field operations and we had a really good working relationship with a GP with a local office and Wayne figures that's why we never met.
¶144 Bob We never posed a problem that he had to resolve or address [personal details about two living people omitted] and I was just talking with Wayne the other day and he said he'd like to pay me to do an article on their family history and I wouldn't want to accept a pay from them but what I suggested to him was what we're talking about right now, these oral histories. It's like Wayne, if I can learn how to record over a phone you and Tope and we can have two or three discussions that are recorded, we can feed that into AI and then we've got really good oral history transcripts and AI can turn it into any kind of article or editorial or biography that you want and so I'd like to do that. I've got to still learn a few more things on how to go about doing it but that was something that because it would impose on your time and not be a Soap Creek Valley project, kind of a side issue but something that I'd like to get done, that was the last thing on my list.
¶145 Bob Does that sound like something doable or something that can be maybe addressed in a few weeks or is it just something that could be readily undertaken fairly quickly because it's so basic at this point?
¶145 Dave Well, I'm more than happy to do the kind of work that I've been doing with you with other people to capture and organize up information. Is that the answer you wanted?
¶145 Bob That would be great.
¶145–147, in part Omitted. A passage about a current dispute on the Colville reservation, naming a living official, and about a recent fire there, was omitted under Library publication rules. Bob gives it as the reason the Knauf oral history is timely.
¶147 Bob […] so there's a current relevance to an oral history at this point. Their opinions and their background on the Colville and as foresters, Tope basically was a sawmill. He traveled all around the northwest going to different sawmills and determining efficiency on how much lumber could be cut out of a log with whatever techniques and how that affected the harvesting and so on.
¶148 Bob So they're both really well-versed and well-experienced both in tribal history and in modern forestry and with current issues and so what I'd have to learn to do is and Wayne when I told him that he was just really happy with that result if it can be done. What I'd have to learn how to do is I've never made a recording on a phone. I've always used a cassette recorder for these types of interviews and so trying to get something recorded and then you're the person that's doing AI.
¶149 Bob I'd have to go through you probably at that point with some basic background and then we'd have it ready to develop into other products that hopefully I'm learning how to do.
¶149 Dave Yeah, well, so I think that it'd be pretty easy for us to come up with a simple plan for how you could make a phone call and have it be recorded on your computer and then you could just send me the wave file or whatever the appropriate output would be. Your computer is a Mac and I haven't used Macs for a while.
¶150 Dave I used to use Macs and so we asked an AI what it recommends doing to be able to take a phone call and record it. The other approach would be use like Google Meet or Zoom and both of those allow the call to be recorded and so you could learn to initiate a phone call through Google Meet or Zoom and record it and then once you've got the recording, if you just stick it out on the Google Drive that we've been sharing things and give me a pointer, then I can have it be analyzed and summarized and sliced and diced in whatever way you wish and sent back to you and or posted somewhere out on the net. That would be ideal.
¶151 Bob I don't know if Wayne or Tope have the ability to do Zoom, but I've been thinking for probably the last several weeks anyhow, but maybe a few months that I need to learn how to do Zoom because it's like you say, I've been attending meetings that are on Zoom, they're being recorded, and then we get the notes right back. I don't know what AI it's using, but they're usually pretty clunky, but they're really solid and easy to review and edit, but to get the notes back and then I think transcripts are just like an obvious related step as we've been doing with these recordings. On the WAVE files, that was one thing that Chris said.
¶152 Bob He said those should be downloaded. Is WAVE actually better than MP3 for some reason because it uses a lot more memory?
¶152 Dave I don't know anything about WAVE versus MP3. Their history, how accurate they are, which is archival, which is more likely to be used whether it's proprietary or not.
¶153 Dave There's a whole bunch of knowledge that one could have, and I have alluded to it a bit in the last sentence, and I know none of it.
¶153 Bob Well, then that brings a full circle. That would be the type of thing that Larry Landis would know.
¶154 Dave Or he could ask any AI. Any AI would know it as well.
¶154 Bob That's true.
¶155 Bob But anyhow, we should download the files. I can do that on ORWW or I didn't know what works best.
¶155 Dave One way or the other, we should get possession of those files, and then when we're indexing or linking to them, then a stable location, whether ORWW or OASTL or the library, would be an obvious thing.
¶156 Bob But an MP3 would be taking up a whole lot less memory, would be the main thing. But it might not meet archival standards. When I started scanning, at first they were saying, and I've scanned about 300 DPI, and that's good enough for magazines or newspapers.
¶157 Bob But archival standards in the 90s or early 2000s, they wanted 1,200 DPI, and they wanted it in a format that just uses a massive amount of memory. I can't remember which format it is now. I think it still exists.
¶158 Bob But the requirements were so strict for correspondence, that reasonably 100 DPI can keep written records pretty darn good. They're not meant for display or publishing or anything, but the requirements were so stringent and so costly that a lot of stuff wasn't getting done at that time, and that would be my concern a little bit with WAVE. It's like it really uses up a lot of memory, and MP3 compresses that.
¶159 Bob But it seems to be just as good a quality. It's like 300 DPI versus 1,200 DPI. An expert can probably maybe tell the difference, but it's pretty easy to fool.
¶160 Dave I just asked Google to tell me a little bit about WAVE versus MP3 and MP4 and how oral history should be made. It basically says that the standard for oral history is uncompressed WAVE. As your preservation master, export to MP3 for distribution.
¶161 Dave Use MP4 only when the physical expression or visual artifacts demand video. So that's the brief overview of stuff. Did that help?
¶161 Bob Kind of, and I want to get verification from Larry, because if WAVE is required, it's the same thing as the Indian burial sites.
Library note, September 14, 2026. The Library has since checked the standard Dave read out — an uncompressed WAV file as the preservation master, MP3 copies for listening — against the Library of Congress's recommended-formats statement and the University of Pittsburgh's oral-history toolkit, and both agree with it.
¶162 Bob It's like, why?
¶162 Dave Well, it doesn't really matter. It says it's 30 to 50 megabits per minute, and the storage volume is not something to worry about today. I mean, the gigabytes store a lot, and terabytes are nearly free, and they store a thousand times more than a gigabyte.
¶163 Dave So if there is a standard, we should just follow it and not question it, as far as I'm concerned, because it's no longer relevant.
¶163 Bob Hard drive with less than one terabyte information transferred over to a one terabyte computer. I've got to take it in the shop again on Monday.
¶164 Bob I had to take it out so that I could do the round table with Monique, and that turned out real well, as it turned out. So that part was good. But should then these files be downloaded to the library? It seems to me that that would be the right place, and then when they're linked according to the index, then it's stable, and you don't have to worry about that, because I think you were linking them to the box that he was sending them in, and he was saying that that's going to disappear or likely disappear.
¶165 Dave Yeah, it does seem like we should avoid linking to any OSU box that we ought to have our own copies, and that they should be stored somewhere in the library storage that gets pushed up to GitHub, and once it gets pushed up to GitHub, then it's in a spot that's forever and basically free. GitHub is a remarkable repository of information about not just computer programs, which is what it started with, but all of the ancillary things like WAV files and videos, and it's basically a free resource, and so all of the America's School Trust Library stuff that gets distributed via Cloudflare, which is the process of distributing things when people ask for webpages, is basically maintained by GitHub, and there's no limit there and no fee. This is weird, but it's all driven.
¶166 Dave I believe Microsoft bought it, and the goal here was to try and make the developer community be friendly with what they were doing, and the easiest way of making the developer community be friendly is to promise that you'll store stuff forever for free and to make it real easy, and that's what they've done.
¶166 Bob Well, then I think, because the memory problem isn't a problem for Microsoft Cloud, but it is a problem as far as hard drives and that again. It's a limitation there, but so is that something that you can just tell AI to do, is download the WAV files and to link to those in the index?
¶166 Dave Yes, I believe that's what we should do and that what you and I just did in the last two sentences is adequate as instructions for that to happen, and that if it has problems with doing that, it should come back to me and say, wait a minute, you told me to do this in the extended prompt of what you talked with Bob, and I don't understand it, or you and Bob were wrong in one way or another, so here's why I want more guidance.
Library note, September 14, 2026. Dave's account of GitHub at ¶165–166 turned out to be wrong. GitHub refuses any single file over 100 megabytes, and an hour of uncompressed sound is several times that. The recordings went instead to the Library's own storage: all 117 files OSU had placed in Box — 86 for Soap Creek Valley and 31 for the Elliott — were copied there on September 13 and 14, 2026, each checked against a checksum, and are held privately until the rights questions on the Soap Creek series are settled.
¶167 Bob Well, and that goes back to box number one, it's like what, or two, what shocked you most? Is it just the fact that we can have this conversation and tell AI what to do and then it will do it or ask additional questions or direction? To me, I never saw that day coming.
¶167 Dave Yeah, right. Both you and I, what has happened in 2026 is just remarkable and it goes beyond and it's faster than what, I knew in 2025 that this sort of stuff was going to happen, but I didn't think it was going to happen as thoroughly and easily as it has in just six months later, or eight months, well, we're in the ninth month of the year, but this year has been transformational in what AI can do reliably for this kind of work.
¶168 Bob Yeah, and even if you could project it or predict it, having it there to use is an entirely different atom [unclear].
¶168 Dave Yeah, right. You should be able to do something, and now we're actually doing it, and it's like, oh, wait, this is doable, and now there's all these other options that open up for opportunities, and that's what we're exercising right now.
¶169 Bob That's the part that's incredible to me.
¶169 Dave Well, on that note, are we actually near the end of this conversation?
¶169 Bob Unless you… and AI has got a recording to document it.
¶169 Dave Right, so this actually ought to almost be an oral recording that would be similar to the other recordings, except this one is a recording about the process of setting up a collection within the America's School Trust Library.
¶170 Bob Yep.
¶170 Dave Okay.
¶170 Bob† And also with the monkeys in the library [unclear].
¶171 Bob† Conducting research or educational aspects, learning new things, and doing it really efficiently and really well, and we'll have MP4s and they can see the images.
¶171 Dave As long as we're doing this, for the record, what I'm currently doing is I am talking on my Pixel 10 cell phone, and I've set a Pixel 10 cell phone on top of the keyboard of my Dell laptop, which is running Windows, probably Windows 11, would be my best guess, and I turned on the default sound recorder inside of Windows 11, and I can see its WAV file being generated as it goes.
¶171 Bob Wow.
¶172 Dave And we've been talking for an hour and 24 minutes, and then I'll save that WAV file and push it through Turbo AI, and Turbo AI is a subscription-based transcriber that has three settings. One is a dolphin, one is like a minnow, and then there's a whale, and the whale takes longer, but given that you've got a subscription, it doesn't cost anymore, and does a pretty damn good quality transcription, and then that's what I tend to feed into Fable 5 at the current moment, although there are times that I feed it into the ChatGPT newest thing, which is called Astro 6, something like that. The names keep changing nearly every few weeks as they keep coming out with new stuff.
¶173 Dave I mean, the stuff they're coming out with is happening almost on a weekly basis as opposed to not very long ago, it was every three months, and then not long before that, it was once every six months. The speed at which things are changing is just breathtaking.
¶173 Bob I don't even try to learn the names, but if you could ask AI, or I guess I'm doing it right now, to send me instructions on how I can use my iPhone to record onto my iMac what the most efficient steps for achieving that are, that would be really helpful.
¶174 Bob I can almost get started that way.
¶174 Dave Yeah, and you're interested really in carrying on more of the oral history kind of work, so you'd like it to be done in a way that is sort of semi-approved or archival. [aside omitted]
¶175 Dave I want to be doing this in a quality way so that future generations can know what we were thinking and doing at this point in time.
¶175 Bob† And using oral history methodology, develop methodology.
¶175 Bob So yeah, I'd like to do that with Wayne and with Tope, and it'd probably be two or three phone calls, and they'd probably be about this length, hour, hour and a half, maybe two hours, but two or three of them on each of them because they're old and they've got a lot of history, and they both know a lot.
¶176 Bob So yeah, if they could send me those instructions, I could get started on this, and probably be about a week before I can actually do anything practical because I need to get my new computer first, but that would definitely be helpful and revolutionary.
¶176 Dave So you probably have an Apple iPhone 17 or something like that?
¶176 Bob I think it's a 16.
¶176 Dave Okay.
¶177 Bob Yeah, but somewhere around there.
¶177 Dave Because I suspect that an iPhone 16 already has built-in apps that will do what we want if you know how to be able to ask it, and so that may be the answer that they were asking for it to validate and look up.
¶177 Bob And tell me how to do it because the iPhone is like my Chevy Trax.
¶178 Bob It's got all of these icons that I avoid, because I don't know what they are, and when it tells me what they are, it's an acronym or some function, or rather that I have no idea what it is, so I just avoid them. I'm a one-trick pony on these things. So if AI tells me how I can make a recording on my iPhone or coordinate my iPhone to make a recording on my computer, they're directly hooked up and connected by iCloud, which I'm starting to finally learn a little bit about and get more comfortable with.
¶179 Bob But that would be great.
¶179 Dave It would be handy to have a one-page description that included having Bob phone Dave as a test and then a two-minute phone call that then ends up creating a two-minute WAV file that we then validate that we've got the whole process down. The last thing you want to do is to phone up Larry or whoever it is and spend two hours talking and then find out that it didn't work the way you wanted it to.
¶180 Bob We did. I had somebody helping. They turned the tape over instead of putting in a fresh tape and recorded over 30 minutes of discussion with a guy that's dead that is an expert on Indian lore.
¶181 Bob [a name, unclear on the tape], we were working, I think, ORWW at the time 15, 16 years ago, and I still recall that. It was like, oh, no, all the preparation, all the discussion. Because when people go through it a second time, we're all human.
¶182 Bob We just say, well, we already talked about that, like earlier with the Redwood. It's like, okay, you got the basics. And they don't go into the detail, and they're not explaining it.
¶183 Bob And you're not asking them because then you've got the insights. So, yeah, that sounds like a really good step to run a test between the two of us to see, make sure it works, and then go to Wayne and Tope.
¶183 Dave The example in my life that is similar to what you just described was my father was the news editor for the Statesman Journal.
¶184 Dave So he got me a job working in the photo department downstairs. And the primary job that I had was whatever photos were going to be in the paper the next day, I put them on an engraving machine, and it would make the engravings that would then get, with double-sided tape, put actually on the presses that picked up the ink and transferred it to the paper, right? But in addition to making those engravings, I was responsible for changing the chemicals in the darkroom, and I resized photographs by taking a photograph that was the wrong size and then taking a picture of it and whatnot. So I was using the darkroom quite a bit, the same darkroom that the staff photographers used.
¶185 Dave And so I remember that one day I was mixing chemicals and then took a break that was no more than like 60 seconds to go off to put on an engraving, and I came back, and rather than knocking on the door and checking to open it, I opened the door without knocking. And there was a staff photographer winding his negatives that he'd spent the day taking around a spool so that he could get them into the developer. And so I had just committed the cardinal sin of opening up the darkroom door without checking to see that someone was actively doing things inside the darkroom.
¶186 Dave And so I explained that I didn't believe that anyone had had the chance to get in there between all of this, and that didn't cut it in terms of an explanation. The actual saving grace was everyone gets one pass on this. You do it twice, your job's gone.
¶187 Dave But my one pass was up. And here it is. It's probably 60 years later.
¶188 Dave I still remember that.
¶188 Bob Yep, yep. In 15 years since [the assistant's name, unclear on the tape] did that, she probably still remembers it.
¶189 Bob And it's the same thing. It's involving another person and just a dumb mistake.
¶189 Dave Yeah, right.
¶190 Dave And having an immediate ruinous result.
¶190 Bob Yep, yep. We didn't discover it until we got home.
¶191 Bob It's like, hey, wait a minute. Where was the part where he was describing such and such? Oh, shit. Oh, my God.
¶192 Bob All right. Yours was more instantaneous, but same thing.
¶192 Dave Well, on that note of long-remembered failures and not repeated for probably that reason.
¶193 Bob Yeah.
¶193 Dave All right. I'll talk to you later.
¶194 Bob Thanks for everything.
¶194 Dave Bye, then.
¶194 Bob Yeah, bye.
End of recording.
