One of his early assembly talks at the University of Oregon was on Jesse Applegate. It was announced as an illustrated lecture. But he had only one picture, a single stereopticon lantern slide, made to do recurrent duty in the course of the lecture.
It showed the great frontiersman with a shorn, elongated head—a cross between Rameses in the ancient histories and Boris Karloff in the motion pictures. He was jested a good deal about this, to which he responded with telescopic laughter. The students who loved him, were very much amused by his appreciation of Dr. Richard Burton's lecture on Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey. Dr. Burton's humor was too refined and subtle to make much of a hit with the Eugene students. But when the lecturer would lead up to one of his tepid cracks, Dr. Schafer, sitting up front, would again and again turn back to look at the audience with an expansive, contagious grin. This contagion did the work, if the original wit did not, and the students laughed uproariously.
Dr. Schafer's appealing human qualities, his enthusiasms, and the strongly motivating forces within him, have been described from long association by Eric W. Allen, dean of the school of journalism at the University of Oregon:
Joseph Schafer had the priceless gift of inspiring a definite liking in those who met him, and a warmth of affection in those who came to know him at all well. This was based on something deeper than "a pleasing personality," though he had that, too. The resonance of his rich voice, the quick responsiveness of his ready smile that recognized instantly any element of humor or whimsy in a conversation, and the heartiness of his big laugh made him a favorite in any group, but there was more than that.
Doctor Schafer was a generous soul, a sincere believer in the worth-whileness of other people. His life was gusto, a hundred little enthusiasms every day. He was no scorner of small things nor of other people's small-sized ideas. He would, seize with avidity even upon a remark intended as criticism, see the good in it, put it through his own peculiar process of magnification, and go on with it from there. Of course he was popular, and equally of course, he was a constructive force in every com munity in which he found himself.
A learned man himself, deeply versed and rigidly trained in his art and craft of history, he yet reserved the warmest place in his heart for the historical amateur. It became first his vision, and then his definite ambition, to create an Oregon which should be richly salted by the presence in each community of at least a few laymen who should make the study and recording of local history their serious hobby. Family by family, village by village, county by county, these devoted amateurs should
