Alexander (Sandy) Hobbs is a significant donor and friend of GCU Archive Centre. In July this year, he received the Linda Dégh Lifetime Achievement Award for Legend Scholarship by the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. His research in this area is part of the Sandy Hobbs papers. Congratulations to Sandy from the Archive Centre team.
My long association with “Urban Legends” starts in my childhood in Aberdeen, when my grandmother told me a story generally called “Downie’s Slaughter”. At the time it was just something my granny talked about, but later I came to see it as an example of what I came to realise people mean by the name “Urban Legend”.
Let us put the story aside and move on to 1954 when, at the age of 17, I entered Aberdeen University, planning to study Psychology. My choice of this subject was based on a quite inadequate understanding of what Psychology was as an academic discipline. It became clear to me that there was a strong movement, particularly in the United States, to make Psychology an experimental science. Teaching on the course included taking part in demonstration experiments. One which particularly interested me was called Serial Reproduction.
