My Story
September 27, 1971
3:30 pm
Hayward Field
Eugene, Oregon, US
I started running in Bill Bowerman's famous beginning running class at the University of Oregon.
Fewer than two hours earlier, I had bought my first pair of running shoes at The Athletic Department at 855 Olive Street.
How do I know?
I have the receipt!
While a student at the University from 1971-73 and 1974-75, I saved everything - and I mean everything - related to track and field.
I saved 28 pairs of shoes, including a pair handmade by Bowerman on the waffle iron, as well as two Nike prototypes handmade by Dennis Vixie in the workshop he shared with Bowerman.
I also saved over 270 pieces of memorabilia - receipts, posters, t-shirts, photographs, ephemera, programs, books, and magazines.
Here is the Cullen Collection. I hope you have a terrific time jogging through the ages and pages of the University of Oregon's Golden Age of Track and Field.
Interview with DyeStat's Doug Binder
DyeStat interview: https://bit.ly/3KWwzsZ
Above is a link to the interview DyeStat's Doug Binder did with me about the collection. In its first several days of posting on DyeStat, it received over 63,000 views!
In this interview, I discuss shoes and also go deep into the collection's 270 pieces of memorabilia, such as Nike's first trifold advertising brochures.
Hope you enjoy it!
*********************
Updating of original welcome post:
Greetings Track Fans and welcome to my new website.
The purpose of this website is to present a visual and written history of the shoes and memorabilia I collected while I attended the University of Oregon in the early 1970s - a total of over 300 items.
This is more accurately called an archive, as I have never intentionally added to what I saved then. However, individuals have graciously contributed several items over the years, including programs, newspapers, and shoes.
Thank you Kyle Jannson, Steve Niemi, Pat Tyson, and the late Jerry Cranmer.
(Recent additions to be catalogued come from Bob Coll, Mike Fanelli, and Ron Wayne.)
I have worked on this website for the last year-and-a-half, and have researched the items as deeply as possible, limited only by the availability of historic resources, as well as individual and collective memory.
There are 140 pages of text and over 35,000 words in the website.
The website is best utilized when you click on Read More, which will get you a closeup of the artifact, more detail, or both.
I welcome additional information and perspectives.
I especially hope that this website will have served as a resource for the 2022 World Championships, held in Eugene, Oregon, July 15-24, 2022.
I hope you will enjoy this website as much as I have enjoyed developing it. It is a true labor of love, and I hope it will become a lasting and trusted resource for this remarkable era of track and field.