A Eugene couple recently unearthed a treasure deep in their crawl space. It wasn’t jewels or gold bars—but a trove of iconic magazines they’d nearly forgotten they saved.
In 1971, Gayle Giobbi went off to college. Her parents gave her a parting gift: a coveted subscription to Rolling Stone magazine.
Over the years, the monthly publications kept coming. Gayle married her sweetheart Mike Chisolm, they bought a house in Eugene and pondered what to do with their ever-growing magazine collection.
“We should keep all of them in there!,” Gayle exclaimed. “When we were young and healthy and could carry big heavy boxes into a crawl space. So we did that. And now we just retired and we’re like, ‘our kids are gonna think we’re nuts—they’re gonna have to find these in our crawl space.”
So they spent an entire day exhuming.
“Here’s the technique,” Gayle says from the crawl space. “I put on knee pads, a headlamp, then I wheeled this (little dolly) way into the corner. Then I put a giant box on there. And then I would put this rope around it. Then I would throw the rope to Mike- And he would pull pull pull pull pull.”
Mike chimes in, “How many boxes, Gayle?”
“15 boxes,” she says.
“And now here they are- four decades worth of perfectly preserved Rolling Stones- neatly stacked on a big sheet of plastic covering their living room floor. Faces from the covers peer up at us.”
(hear sound of plastic crunching)
“You know they really had their finger on the pulse of things,” Gayle says. “There are very few covers of artists that fizzled into nothing.”
Shuffling through the stacks, there’s Bob Dylan, here’s Bruce Springstein, yep, Madonna made the cover.
“It’s so wild they go from Quintin Tarentino to USHER to Prince…
Ooh Super Summer Double Issue,” Gayle croons.
Reporter: “The Cars- remember them?”
“I remember The Cars,” Gayle laughs.
“The magazines themselves have changed. In the beginning, they’re still news print,” says Mike. “And they went glossy in somewhere around ’91. They got smaller in what was this, 2009?”
Reporter: “Gayle, you said it was fun to flash back.”
“Yeah, when I look at the pictures of all my favorite bands and artists when they were young, I feel like I’m that age again. Like here’s a picture of Jerry when he was like in his 30’s –like ‘yeah, I’m in my 30’s I’m
remembering all that.”
“Yeah, it’s a lot of history,” says Gayle. “Music is a huge part of our lives. Going to concerts was our main form of entertainment, we love it. That’s what this represents. The sound track of our lives, in visual form.”
“We knew then why we kept them,” says Mike. “This is music, this is politics, this is us! The question now is really what are we gonna do with them?”
Their friends are full of suggestions: Sell them on EBay? Wallpaper the guest bathroom?
For right now, Gayle and Mike are content digging on the articles and reveling in 40 years of treasured memories- courtesy of the Rolling Stone.
Reporter’s note: Gayle Giobbi Chisholm retired from KLCC last year.
Copyright 2020 KLCC
