Why It Matters

Bob Zeller, the Community Building’s ardent historian, carries a passion for archiving and a small mountain of photographs to prove it.

By Jamie Borgan

Bob Zeller and camera

On a sunny late winter morning, as we’re sitting near the deli counter in the Main Market Co-op on Main Avenue, it’s obvious that Bob Zeller’s as interested in the device that’s recording our conversation as he is in the substance of what we’re talking about.  He leans over and examines it carefully, making note of the brand. A couple weeks later when we visit again, he notices immediately that I’ve brought a different digital recorder.

As a consummate archivist, it’s not surprising that his interest in recording technology at least equals his passion for conversation. Zeller has long been a fixture around Spokane’s Community Building, seeming to come and go with a rhythm that corresponds to the ebb and flow of the intensity of the work of the Community Building tenants.

As a consummate archivist, it’s not surprising that his interest in recording technology at least equals his passion for conversation.

Pony-tailed, bespectacled and camera-toting, Zeller inhabits the building like a distant relative at a family reunion,

never forcing the action to happen, but always ready to gather people for a picture when it does.  And then, with the same level of avuncular pride, he prints, laminates and hangs his photos for public display, often with explanatory captions of the date, event, and people involved.

Among other things, he has become the self-selected volunteer archivist for the Community Building, having been on the scene to take photographs of the project since the old Birkebeiner Brewery was gutted from the space that would later become the Community Building, a hub for social justice and environmental organizations in Spokane.

It’s hard not to notice how completely Bob and his work are enmeshed in the fabric of the Community Building. As we visit at the market, our conversation is interrupted by passers by, colleagues and friends who’ve known him through the years, who are eager to say hello or make a date for lunch at a buffet in the near future.

“We gotta do our ribs,” he announces to one Community Building regular, “we’re the ribs club.”

The two take a moment to discuss various buffet joints in town, and then Bob turns back to me and affirms the importance of food gatherings to the culture of the Community Building, including barbecues on the roof and potlucks in the lobby.

On this particular morning, Zeller carries what he refers to as the “big jumbo three ring binder” of photos, showing the complete remodel of the buildings that began in the late 90′s and culminated in the opening of the Community Building in 2000.

Thumbing intently through the overstuffed volume, he describes its contents in vivid detail, the facts present to him, as if he had just assembled the binder this morning.

On this particular morning, Zeller carries what he refers to as the “big jumbo three ring binder” of photos, showing the complete remodel of the buildings that began in the late 90′s and culminated in the opening of the Community Building in 2000.

“And it has all of the pictures from the very start when it was gutted out through every step of the remodeling,” he narrates, “five or six major steps.”

When I ask him how many pictures he’s taken in his lifetime, Zeller pauses and estimates conservatively that he’s taken fifty thousand. Then he quickly adds, almost conspiratorially, in his low, rich, slightly graveled voice, “well, probably more than that.”

A portion of those photos has made its way onto the walls of the Community Building, the presence of which has the effect of transforming the building interior walls into an ever-changing scrapbook that includes a unique montage of public figures as its extended family: Mayor Mary Verner, punk rocker cum political activist Jello Biafra, U.N. weapons inspector, Scott Ritter.

Given how prolific his photo-taking has been, it’s more than a little surprising that the question that keeps resurfacing is the one that Zeller continues to ask himself: “but, who would care?”

And, yet, he quickly answers the question by his own presence and with his own reasons.

In part, Zeller says, he’s taken by the visual. He refers to Spokane as a city with “blind spots,” one of those being the visual.

“Most of the radical, cutting edge subcultures we deal with are very heavily visually-oriented with all kinds of posters,” he explains.

Sharing a story in the Community Building lobby.

He points out that the Northwest Fair Housing Alliance, a non-profit working on eliminating housing discrimination, has one of the strongest visual presences in the building in terms of posters and information.  Zeller distinguishes between the role of aesthetics and the power of specific messages.

“The buildings are beautiful” he says, but adds that the visual media is integral to creating story and selling a movement.

“Go over to the Flour Mill,” he says, referring to the archival photos displayed in the historic building on the Spokane River’s north bank. “People are riveted, they’re riveted.”

Zeller’s interest in the type of work going on at the Community Building is not nascent. Long before a family connection brought him to the Inland Northwest in the 80s, Zeller had been involved in the peace movement of the 1960s.

Involved might be an understatement. In fact, Zeller palled around with some of the most well known fixtures of the movement.  Sharing Minnesotan roots with that “other” Bob Z, aka Bob Dylan, nee Zimmerman (though Zeller wryly asserts that Zeller’s the “nice one”), Bob describes himself as a “player” in the burgeoning youth counter culture movement of the 60s.

“One of my friends went on to RCA television school in New York and he’s worked for 18 years at NBC television network in Rockefeller Center,” Zeller says. “I asked him, how would you describe who we were in the counter culture? And he says ‘we were players in the counter culture’–somewhere between major players and players, everyone was to some extent a player in the counter-culture, but we had more visibility than many or most regular hippies.”

Describing the fullness of the scene, Zeller points out that there was much more to it than “rock stars, movies stars, and a few people arrested in Chicago.”

Bob on the other side of the camera, at his traditional pose position in front of the Community Building.

Describing the fullness of the scene, Zeller points out that there was much more to it than “rock stars, movies stars, and a few people arrested in Chicago.”

Zeller had been a faculty member at Augsburg College, a small Lutheran school in Minneapolis, Minnesota, teaching film appreciation and coaching debate, when he chose to “drop out,” as he says, of his academic milieu and “drop in” to the peace movement of the ’60s, whose Beat roots he found compelling.

Zeller brought the Auggie’s notion of “education for service” (as opposed to “an education to be served” Bob deadpans referring to a more elitist liberal arts school) to his zeal for the counter culture movement.

“Pretty much, I’m a product of the service orientation of Augsburg College,” he says.   “What you see here, what I’ve done for the Community Building and so forth, these things are derivative from my Augsburg experience, and the counter culture and the spirit of giving, not that I’m going to give up all my possessions and go into the wilderness.”

His rasping laugh, bending towards a giggle follows this statement, along with an admission that this is too long an answer, and I’ll have to edit it down later.

The location of Augsburg in Minnesota is not an incidental detail.  Zeller attributes much of his sense of history to his roots in Minnesota, land of plentiful historical societies.

But more so even than the presence of history, he asserts, “Minnesota has a real sense of dedication to social justice…there really is a sense there, from the neighborhood block clubs and stuff all the way up that what I am doing and what we are doing locally, and then as you go on up the steps to the national, worldwide, they have this sense of life mission. This is really inbred into us that we are important and that what we are doing is important. This is really in sharp contrast to Spokane,” he pauses, and jokes, “I don’t know about Post Falls.”

Launching himself with enthusiasm into the tide of the 60s counter culture, Zeller’s exploits were diverse and colorful. He co-managed a band with Bob Dylan’s brother; he helped found a record label by the name of Hevy Gunz. But most importantly, he was present, and through it all, he brought his encyclopedic mind and a sense of historical importance.

Bob Zeller in action, taking photos

Talking to Bob Zeller about his life in the sixties feels like reading a Howard Zinn pamphlet. Not only is he eloquent and articulate without being heavy-handed–casually dropping terms like “the anomie of the youth”–but his recollection of events is detailed, wry, and voluminous as it informs his current push to archive and document the goings on of the counter culture.

As the youth fervor of the 60s waned, Zeller’s interest in media led him to more formalized work in the regulation of Minnesota’s cable system, not cable in the hyper-exposed, 24 hours a day voyeuristic nature of commercial cable, but rather Public Access television, a public First Amendment forum, created in the late sixties.

The term “Public Access television” doesn’t exactly sparkle with glitz, but discussing it with Zeller, it becomes the stuff of high glamour, as he talks with fluidity and passion about the importance of public information forums, the “gut conscious,” as he describes it, of the cable system.

His tone bends upward and slows as he describes the beauty of a public forum in which one is allowed to speak without prior restraint.

“Public Access was really a First Amendment forum,” he muses, “somebody could libel, slander or do copyright infringement, rights infringement, and get sued later, but you couldn’t stop them beforehand.”

A family connection brought Zeller to Spokane in the 1980s, a time in which Spokane was going through its own cable franchise renewal.  Zeller quickly inserted himself into the scene, becoming involved in non-profit groups working on cable access issues.  By the time renovation of the Community Building began in the late nineties, Zeller was already connected enough in the non-profit world to hear rumors of goings-on down on East Main.

The binder full of pictures is testimony to his presence on the scene.  At a time before digital photography made taking mountains of pictures easy and commonplace, Zeller’s burgeoning binder of stills is noteworthy.  Also noteworthy is the fact that Zeller has since digitized the entire binder of pictures, along with thousands of others in his collection.

Given the sheer volume of media in his life, it’s no surprise that Zeller interrupts our conversation on more than one occasion to describe his filing systems, waxing slightly nostalgic about 35mm slides and their capacity to allow an archivist to write directly on the paper frame of the slide.

He stops the flow of our conversation at one point, stepping out of story-telling mode to look at me and say, “I’ve gotta say some things which are really mechanical and extremely critical. I am one of the historians of the Community Building but I have saved a lot of documents and also photographs, photographs of virtually everything we did up to a certain point.”

He describes his computer filing system, as well as the physical copies of documents, photos, and information he’s saved, including his labeling and naming techniques for cataloging his work.

The above gallery is a sampling of Bob’s work over the years as the volunteer archivist of the Community Building.

Zeller recognizes the tendency of the stuff that interests him to be seen as detritus; the pamphlets, pictures, and fliers that commemorate our passage and presence through time seem at once more and less important when we view them through the lens of years having passed.

His forward looking view has pushed him to accumulate interviews, photos, documents, and audio files of the history of the Progressive movement, locally and beyond in an impressively large-scale project, which has come to be called the Green Progressive Archive.

Even in its nascent stages, Zeller describes its potential historical importance.

“The Green Progressive Archive, as it may develop, is a great one stop–not that they would only stop, at the Green Progressive Archive–for someone doing a master’s thesis or a doctoral dissertation from Washington State University or the Organizational Leadership Doctorate at Gonzaga University,” Zeller explains. “Whitworth University has a master’s program, and as we know [about] the Community Building complex, this is a major clustering of green, progressive, social justice organizations.”

Zeller also has a long view on the pessimistic outlook that many social critics and historians have about America and the world in the early 21st century.

“It is said, and of course we’re all hoping that it’s not true, that we are on the cusp of perhaps, we cross our fingers, of environmental, financial and cultural collapse, or at least severe problems in the world being able to sustain itself,” he says. “Historians looking back fifty to a hundred years from now, if there is a major collapse, will look back and say ‘what were they talking about?’ ”

Zeller views much of his work as an answer to that question.  He laments the tendency of the families of activists to relegate their accumulated treasures to the dumpster within a week of their family member’s death and makes eye contact with me at this point, emphasizing gravely that “you people have to swoop in” after he passes and defend his life’s work, which to some might appear like just an accumulation of interesting tidbits.

Bob checking out a voice recorder.

This is really inbred into us that we are important and that what we are doing is important. This is really in sharp contrast to Spokane,” he pauses, and jokes, “I don’t know about Post Falls.”

But there’s also hopefulness and excitement in his voice, when he describes future generations stumbling on some obscure artifact that he’s saved all these years and exclaiming with incredulity, “you have that!?”

Zeller’s memory and photographic collection are loaded with these kinds of moments; he describes, for example, the dedication of the Harold Balazs fountain in Riverfront Park by then scandal-embroiled mayor, Jim West. After West gave his presentation, no one clapped, but Zeller asserts, “I applauded until they all did,” clapping loudly for me and asserting, “which they should.”

Here’s part of the why of what makes Zeller’s motivations for historical preservation so fascinating.  Fundamentally, Zeller is trying to assert that who we are and what we do matter.

But there’s also hopefulness and excitement in his voice, when he describes future generations stumbling on some obscure artifact that he’s saved all these years and exclaiming with incredulity, “you have that!?”

“It’s trite to say that history will repeat itself,” Zeller asserts, and in talking to him, one gains the sense that there’s nothing didactic about his aims in preserving historical memory.

Rather, his indefatigable quest to archive stems from his own sense of social responsibility and his own conviction of the import of our lives, not to mention a rather Puckish delight in examining the foibles and triumphs of the human spirit.  And though Zeller’s passion for preservation may seem extreme, he views it as a task that we all could be undertaking.

“You see,” he says, pausing for slight effect, “what I’m doing is unique, and it really shouldn’t be.”