I recently caught up with Travis Greenwood ’01, kitschy shirt connoisseur, to get the scoop on his efforts to collect and document Olde Reed t-shirts.
Please give us your vision for this project?
This project mixes personal and professional interests. I’ve always had collector tendencies, progressing from comic books to records and then, later, bicycles. These days, it’s all of the above, plus t-shirts, which is convenient because I write and edit a blog, “It Goes to 11,” for my employer. It’s focused (somewhat loosely) on t-shirts, t-shirts from the reel world, t-shirt trends, movie memes, the overlap there between and whatever else I stumble across on the web. Combine all of that with extremely fond memories of my Reed experience (I majored in history and managed KRRC) and here you have it, my contribution to the college’s collective history. Don’t say I never gave anything back to the community!
Seriously though, it dawned on me that the typical Reed experience was accompanied by several t-shirt traditions (experiential mile markers if you will), namely O-Week, Renn Fayre, and Beer Nation, but also encompassing several smaller events and tropes. Following from that, it seemed that someone–namely, me–should consolidate and archive material of this type online. If the Internet has room for LOL Cats, defamatory weekly newspapers (zinger!), and second-tier social networking sites, then certainly we can carve out a niche for our humble t-shirts, which when taken collectively, constitute an enormous and revealing trove of Reed minutia.
Does it have a catchy name?
I haven’t given much thought to the moniker, but a simple bit of brainstorming yields this bastardized gem:
“Atheism, Communism & Tee Love: A Pictorial History of Reed T-Shirts”
(groan…)
Continue reading Atheism, Communism & Tee Love: Reed T-Shirts Unite!
