Posts Tagged ‘Oregon Historical Society’

Soccer Exhibition at Oregon Historical Society

Monday, April 18th, 2011

Timbers fever has been sweeping Portland lately. Now fans can see an oral history-based exhibit on Portland’s soccer history at the Oregon Historical Society. The exhibit opened April 15 and will run through September 4, 2011. Click here for more information about the OHS and details about this exhibition.

The exhibit curators, Morgen Young and Michael Orr, have collected uniforms, photographs, and other memorabilia from players and fans.

Young was kind enough to write the following article for the NOHA newsletter:

Soccer History: Chronicling the Portland Timbers

I am the historian for FC Media, a Portland based company created to document and preserve soccer club history. Our initial focus is the Portland Timbers and I am overseeing a large oral history project relating to the history of the team. We have interviewed eighteen people for the project so far, with more interviews scheduled. We have interviewed former players, staff, management, players’ families, media personalities and fans. There is a lack of scholarship on the history of the Timbers, so as a company we chose to first emphasize the early roots of the team. The Timbers were formed in 1975, as the twentieth team of the North American Soccer League. Many players stayed in Portland following their respective tenures with the club and went on to shape the soccer culture in the city, through youth academies, collegiate programs and professional iterations of the Timbers. We hope to make the transcripts of our oral histories, as well as audio files of the interviews themselves, available to the public in the future through either a Timbers-specific archive or donation to an existing repository. These oral histories formed the foundation of our research for an upcoming exhibit at the Oregon Historical Society, “Soccer City USA: The Portland Timbers and the NASL Years, 1975-1982,” opening April 15th and running through the end of the summer.

For more information about Morgen’s work, click here.