Indiana State University Newsroom

People attending this year's Indiana State University Homecoming football game Oct. 17 will have the opportunity to be part of the official history of the university's sesquicentennial era.

"We'll be doing what I call ‘fly by' oral histories," said Cinda May, chair of special collections with Cunningham Memorial Library. "We're going to ask people to stop, give us their name, the class they graduated or will graduate with and what their favorite memory is of ISU or Homecoming."

Faculty and staff at Indiana State are also invited to participate.

May and Cassidy Crawford, a junior from Greencastle majoring in history and English, will have a video camera at Tent City on the Memorial Stadium grounds to record the oral histories as part of an independent study project with the university's history department. They're hoping to be set up near the Alumni Association tent.

"We're also interested in identifying people who might want to have a more extended conversation about their experience and involvement with ISU," May said. "We're starting to collect oral histories for the overall sesquicentennial era, and all of them will go into university archives and be available in the future for people to use and listen to. I've always wanted to do this, and this is the first chance I've had to engage folks at Homecoming and get pieces of their story."

Homecoming weekend will usher in a five-year celebration of the 150th anniversary of the period marking the founding of the university in 1865 and the start of classes in 1870.

Media contact: Dave Taylor, media relations director, Office of Communications and Marketing, Indiana State University, 812-237-3743 or dave.taylor@indstate.edu