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--> --> Elderly man spends life recording sounds By GILLIAN FLACCUS Associated Press Writer EUGENE - Don Hunter's passion for sounds began with the night trains, huge steam locomotives that whistled past his house as he lay tucked into bed. The trains would roll into the depot and send off four deep whistle blasts, a signal to the brakeman to walk behind the train to watch for engines that could hit it from behind. Eighty-five years later, Hunter remembers the sounds of those trains with loving precision: the deep, lonely bellow of the whistle reverberating in the forest, the "chuffing" of the turning wheels and the sharp bleat of a locomotive about to start. Those train sounds are still Hunter's favorite among an eclectic list of noises that have all but vanished from the American auditory landscape - but he diligently searches for them all. He has spent much of his life traveling the world in search of what he calls "dying sounds," sounds that are disappearing as a quieter technology takes center stage. When he finds them, he records them. "I've always been interested in sounds because sounds are like fragrances - they bring back memories," he said. "I could see sounds disappearing from the scene and I wanted to preserve them." Patiently, methodically, the soft-spoken Hunter has compiled a soundtrack of life in the 20th century, from summer crickets to university choirs to long-lost machinery. His painstaking work has attracted interest from the Oregon Historical Society and the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., but Hunter hasn't promised anything yet. Thousands of cassettes, reel-to-reel tapes and fragile acetate records line the walls of his three-room basement studio, stretching back 69 years. Each is neatly labeled: "Horses Plowing, summer 1977," "Steam Logging Donkey, Mineral, Wash., 16 Feb. 1966," "Yakima Streetcar, 1975." He can't listen to some of his oldest recordings - including a Eugene High School student playing the euphonium in 1932 - because no one makes needles for the dated, pre-grooved records anymore. He's hurrying to transfer his best work onto digital MiniDiscs before the original recordings disintegrate. Hunter, who founded the University of Oregon's audiovisual department in 1946 and worked there until his retirement in 1977, has dedicated almost every spare moment to his passion. He has traveled to countries that still use steam engines regularly - China, Argentina and Paraguay - to capture the machines' nostalgic rhythm. He has crept into strangers' backyards in the middle of the night to record crickets and driven nearly 2,000 miles in three days to hear a "Big Boy" locomotive carry grain on its last run. After decades immersed in sound, one of his favorite recordings is still a tape he made on Jan. 1, 1959, of a single-cylinder woodsaw. Email your... Technical questions & comments to: WebMaster Daily Tidings editorial comments & questions to: Editor Visit our other Oregon Newspapers... | Albany Democrat-Herald | Ashland Daily Tidings | Corvallis Gazette-Times | | Lebanon Express | Newport News-Times | Springfield News | Cottage Grove Sentinel | Ashland Daily Tidings 1661 Siskiyou Blvd. Ashland, OR 97520 Telephone 541-482-3456 © Copyright 2001 Lee Northwest Publishing