Just as Tony Schwartz recorded the sounds of his New York City neighborhood and Sam Phillips and RA Coleman captured Memphis in the 1950s, Don Hunter made a sonic scrapbook of the Pacific northwest.
His love affair with sound began in 1935, when Don Hunter was in college. He began recording in stereo in 1955 - train whistles through the mountains, foghorns on the Great Lakes, and fir trees as they fell to the ground. Along the way he founded and directed the University of Oregon's Audio-Visual Media Center. He retired as professor emeritus in 1977.
The 85-year-old Hunter still works out of his basement studio in Eugene, Oregon, where he keeps his disks and tapes as trophies. In this edition of Lost and Found Sound, he shares some of those prize recordings with us.
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