During the fall & winter semester of 1964/1965, undergraduate student Frank Patton received a grant from the SUI Business School for an academic project to record candid highlights from everyday campus scenes.
(M-0144) After hours of walking around campus with two tape recorders, one shotgun microphone, one regular microphone, two microphone stands, one set of headphones. and 100 feet of extension cord, Patton ended up with enough material to fill a two-sided LP (long-play) record album he called Echoes Of Old Gold.
Click here to read about how SUI arrived at our school colors of Black & Old Gold.
The LP is an eclectic collection of over 100 sound bites including recorded highlights of an Iowa football game, play-by-play of an Iowa basketball game on the radio, the Hawkeye Marching Band, the Scottish Highlanders, the billiards room at the Iowa Memorial Union, dozens of random student interviews, and excerpts from SUI lectures. Ranging from serious comments by SUI President Howard Bowen to a hilarious recording of a student phoning an order into Pizza Villa – during which the caller is told the restaurant does not carry cigarettes or beer – this album gives you a taste of life on campus in Iowa City in 1965.
So, below is our salute to Frank Patton and his Echoes Of Old Gold LP record album. Enjoy the album’s contents – divided into 15 different categories, along with some pics from Our Iowa Heritage collection and some insightful pages taken from The Daily Iowan – circa 1965…
“OLD GOLD” is a multitude of things to everyone who comes in contact with it. To me, it is a great University with faculty and students whose spirit in the search for truth and excellence guides their acquisition of knowledge. It is to this spirit and those who embrace it that I dedicate this record.
Frank Patton
(P-0161) Iowa Memorial Student Union – Read more here.
Read more about Dr. James Van Allen – Iowa’s Own Rocket Man.
Read more about SUI’s student newspaper – The Daily Iowan.
President Virgil M. Hancher was honored on campus with the original Hancher Auditorium (above left) in 1972, and after the devastating floods of 2008, the new Hancher Auditorium opened in 2016 (above right).
Sadly, we don’t know whatever happened to Frank Patton – the SUI undergraduate who recorded all these campus sound bites in 1964/1965, but we do want to say thank you for the memories. In the liner notes, Patton says this..
It is my hope that those who own this record will enjoy listening to it at the present time, but more important, will use it in recalling their life at the University of Iowa ten, twenty, thirty or more years from now. It is then that “Echoes of Old Gold” will be a most valuable possession.
Yup, Frank, you were right. Here in the 2020’s, it’s great to take a spin back into Iowa City and SUI of the 1960’s!
Kudos to the amazing resources below for the many quotes, photographs, etc. used on this page.
Dave’s Faves, Dave McCartney from Peace, Love, Hope, Kathryn Howe, Iowa Alumni Magazine, July 2016
The Daily Iowan Archive, 1965, University of Iowa Digital Library
Click here to go on to the next section…
Click here for a complete INDEX of Our Iowa Heritage stories…
Our Iowa Heritage 