University Place History Sandwiched In Troy Reeves, "Oral History in Wisconsin" 10/19/2010  UP 505   cc >> Erin Hoag: Welcome to the Wisconsin Historical Museum and the History Sandwiched In program. I want to talk a little bit about today's speaker because I'm super excited to introduce him. Since 2007, Troy Reeves has been in charge of the University of Wisconsin-Madison oral history program and before that he directed oral history projects in Idaho for the state of Idaho historical society. In his current position, he's trying to open up the world of oral history to folks all over Wisconsin, including students, and on a personal note, I was a student of Troy's and I hold the record for working for Troy twice and firing myself both times. Today he's going to talk about oral history in general and then he's going to touch on some of the oral history activities that are going on in Wisconsin. (applause)  >> Troy Reeves: Thank you, Erin. Thank you for the applause in advance. This isn't like fast food, though, I hope I actually get some applause afterwards as well. Let's see, am I okay? Sweet. All right. 

The first time I ever gave an oral history presentation was the fall of 1999, so about 11 years ago. As Erin said, I led the oral history program for the Idaho State Historical Society. The first presentation I gave, a professor at the University of Idaho, which is in northern Idaho, not to be mistaken for Boise State University and their rugged football team with their blue turf. It's a football joke, I guess we wait for football jokes till Saturday? (laughter) I'll make a note of that. My first presentation, I drove up to Moscow, Idaho. I got to the history department. They had a round table where all the history graduate students were lined up. This was a history graduate seminar class. The professor introduced me, said, "This is Troy Reeves." I start speaking. This is pre-PowerPoint for me, so I have everything I need to know, or think I need to know, on a piece of paper. 

I start talking about oral history. The first time I look up at the piece of paper across the round table, there's a young man with his hand up. I say "young man," at the time he was probably, like, two years younger than me. He had his hand up and I'm thinking to myself, "Wow, 30 seconds into my first oral history presentation ever, I have engaged someone to a point where they've raised their hand and want to ask a question." So all this is going through my head quickly as I look over and say, "Yeah, you have a question?" And he puts his hand down and says, "Yeah, who are you and what are you doing here?" (laughter) So even with that great introduction by Erin, I'd like to spend a couple minutes answering, "Who am I? And why am I here?" (laughter) Again, my name is Troy Reeves. I currently head the oral history program for the UW-Madison. Since the Wisconsin Historical Society, the great institution it is, does not have a full-time oral historian, so because of that and what we have on campus with the Wisconsin Idea, I've sort of anointed myself the oral historian for the state of Wisconsin. You would think anointing myself that, there would be a commensurate raise in pay, but... (laughter) I haven't seen it yet. Before I started doing oral history here in Wisconsin, I was the oral historian for the state of Idaho for seven years. Before that, I was a student at Idaho State University. 

I was taking the second half of US history. At Idaho State they cleaved US history into pre-Civil War and post-Civil War. I was taking the post-Civil War class. About halfway through, the professor, who has since become my mentor and one of my great friends, about halfway through the class, he hands out a piece of paper to everyone, all the students assembled that day. Pick up that piece of paper. On the top it says, "You do not have to take the next test." I'm thinking, "Cool. I do not have to take the next test." Comma. "If you find someone who made it through the Great Depression and interview them about their experience." Not as cool as not having to take a test, but I'm thinking, I can do this. I can find somebody. As a matter of fact, I know of two somebodies who have been through the Great Depression, my two grandmothers, who lived nearby where I was going to school, about 90 miles away. 

So I got in the car one Saturday, drove to Arco, Idaho, sat down, interviewed one grandma at her house, and the other grandma at her house. They lived on opposite sides of Arco. Arco, Idaho has about 800 people, so even though they lived on opposite sides, I could get to them in, oh, about a minute and a half. (laughter) What happened that day is that my grandmothers became people to me. Before that, I called them my cookie receptacle devices. They were the folks that I would run in through the front door or the back door, hard target search on the cookie jar, open up cookie jar, take out contents, put the lid back on because I was raised somewhat properly, say, "Thank you, Grandma!" Wherever she was, I figured if I just yelled it, she would hear it, and run out whatever door I came in. What I found out after the hour or so that I interviewed my Grandma Faller and the hour that I interviewed my Grandma Reeves is that these were people who had made it through hard times. Both were raised rural, one in Colorado, one in Idaho. At the time of the Depression they were married to their husbands, my grandfathers, both of whom were not alive at the time of the interviews, so I also got to learn an aspect of my grandfathers' lives through this interview. And at that point, I was hooked. 

Oral history was my crack cocaine. Any project I could do that was a 20th century project, that not only I could review primary source materials like photos, documents, maps, I also tried to find people who could answer questions for me about that event. Eventually, as I said, I got the job at the Idaho State Historical Society after getting my master's degree at Utah State. I was perfectly happy in my job in Idaho, although I had moved out of oral history activities. The job came open here at UW-Madison and I went through the whole process thinking that there was no way that I would end up in Madison, but as I like to say, it took a perfect storm to get me here and they godfathered me. They gave me an offer that I couldn't refuse, except without the horse head in my bed. (laughter) Yeah, there was no horse head in the bed, that's for sure. So I now head oral history here at UW-Madison. Again, sort of the de facto head of oral history activities here in the state and I'll get to the "why am I here?" as we blow through some of these slides talking a little bit about UW-Madison. The oral history program is part of the university archives, which is part of the UW-Madison Library. 

This picture might be familiar to some of you. Right down at the end of State Street is Memorial Library. Memorial Library is where UW-Madison Libraries is housed. The UW archives is not housed in Memorial Library. We're in Steenbock Library, in what is called the CALS campus, or the agriculture campus. Not as much going on in the agricultural campus as on the Memorial mall, but it's still a great place to be housed. The UW-Madison Archives. In longer presentations I'd go over this a little bit more to talk a little bit about what archives do, but basically you preserve university records. You also provide records management and serve as an educational resource. I primarily put this slide up because I love to show a picture of the bed race. 

(laughter) When I went to college, at least when or where I went to college, we didn't get to push beds down the street, so I'm glad to see that there's somewhere in this world where bed races occurred. To get a little bit about who am I and why I'm here, I need to talk a little bit about what an oral history program does. This is a very pixelated picture of Elroy "Crazy Legs" Hirsch, one of the people that we've interviewed in the past. His oral history number is 440. This picture is actually online at the digital collections center, which is digicoll.library.wisc.edu. Oral history programs should gather oral history, so we should be conducting oral history with people. At UW-Madison we do that primarily with faculty and administration, but we also are looking to interview folks on specific topics. We are currently interviewing some long-time members of the campus and Madison LGBT community, and we're also conducting interviews with folks who have memories of the Sterling Hall bombing and the campus protest movement that was a part of it. We preserve those. Preserving interviews in this day and age means digital, and we'll talk a little bit about digital recording as we talk a little bit more about the practice of oral history later on in this presentation. 

It used to mean that we preserved them on cassette tape or open reel tape. In this day and age, we preserve them on a digital file and hopefully on several digital files that are hanging out in several spots on campus. Or in an individual's case, it might be digital files on your computer or a portable hard drive or a CD. Gather and preserve. The third thing we try to do is provide access. This is where I click off the slideshow briefly. This is our website. archives.library.wisc.edu. A Sterling Hall bombing picture. The oral history program, you can click through here to get to the oral history program information. 

Providing access in the 21st century means trying to provide some type of web-based access. So for our oral history program, we provide essential information on our website, and then through projects like the Sterling Hall bombing, we try to provide access to full audio and transcripts through that digital collection center that I mentioned earlier.  Of course. All right. We also, I hope it's obvious to folks, that we still provide access by coming to the archives as well. Our archives again is in Steenbock Library on the 4th floor. Educate. Firm believers in the adage that if you give someone a fish, they'll eat for a day; if you teach them how to fish, they'll eat forever. The 21st century corollary to that is, if you teach your parents how to use eBay, they sell all your stuff on eBay. (laughter) There's a Reeves family in Gideon, Idaho that are selling Fischer-Price toys and Star Wars toys as we speak. 

Financing their retirement through my childhood memories. For three years now my therapist has said, if you talk about this out in public it makes you feel better. (laughter) I think you can realize since I've been talking about it for three years, I haven't felt much better. (laughter) Seriously, educate is what we try to do in a situation like this, in a 30 minute or 40 minute presentation. We also give mini two-hour workshops or half-day workshops or full-day workshops. We also have and will, when able, teach classes on oral history, longer length than a workshop. We firmly believe that oral history is done well if the folks who are doing it have the tools to do it well and we will try to get wherever we need to go to do that. Again, we have the Wisconsin Idea on campus, which is that the bounds of campus are the bounds of the state. As long as they don't stop me, I will be traveling wherever I need to go, or wherever people want me to go to train them on how to do oral history interviews. The fifth piece here is collaborate. 

Again, I mentioned earlier the Wisconsin Historical Society doesn't have a full-time oral history program. They have been very great to work with, though, in terms of either having collaborative projects or having me give oral history workshops as part of their annual meetings. Also try to collaborate with the universities on campus, local historical societies, and also collaborate with individuals. Anyone who has an idea about an oral history project or an oral history interview, again, we want to try to get out of our program as much as we can to make sure that interview or project gets done and it gets done as well as it can. Pictures of some of our narrators in our collection. This is E.B. Fred. I apologize to any relatives of E.B. Fred, I cut off the top of his head. Again, with all due respect to E.B. Fred's relatives, he's just as bald on the top part of his head as he is on the forehead, so you're not really missing much. E.B. Fred was interviewed back in, I believe, the '70s. He was on our campus for 45 years. 

We did ten hours of interview with him. Margaret H'Doubler, and I know that I just butchered the French on that, but it's as close as I can come. At UW, basically, from 1906 to 1954. We only have two recorded hours with her. Probably part of that reason is, by the time we interviewed her, she might have been willing, but not able. Part of oral history is trying to get at folks while they are both willing to tell you stories and also able to get at the stories they have in their mind. That's a picture of her in the classroom, and that is indeed a skeleton beside her. She taught dance, not anatomy, but I believe that skeleton was instructive in some way. Well, I'm sure it was instructive in some way. Howard Temin, one of our campus Nobel Prize winners. 

We did three and a half hours of interview with him. We were able to interview him before he passed away with cancer in 1994. That's part of the reason why there's only three and a half hours and not, perhaps, a little bit more. Again, I talked about how we try to interview folks on topics, not just on campus life history. Dick Wagner may be known to some of you. A UW graduate student, Dane County elected official, Wisconsin state employee. He was at UW from 1965 to 1971, so we double-dipped him, so to speak. We interviewed him about LGBT activities on campus and in the community over time, and also about campus energy, student protests, Sterling Hall bombing and then this is a picture, one of the more famous pictures of student protest movement. This was the Dow protest seen from the inside of the building through a broken window.  Oops. 

 This is Bill Cronon. I'm guessing some of you, if not most of you, know who Bill Cronon is. Most recently he was one of the prominent talking heads in Ken Burns' National Park miniseries, documentary that was on public television last fall, I believe. We've done a couple of different interviews with Bill Cronon over time, for ten hours. This is our first clip. One of the things I like to ask folks is whose shoulders they stood on. Who were their mentors? I also like to ask them if they then paid that forward and have mentored other folks. So this is a clip where I asked Bill Cronon about who, growing up or in college, were his mentors?  >> Bill Cronon: In my undergraduate career, on my father's advice, another one of these occasions where I went to my dad and said, "What should I take?" I often asked him this. "What are some good courses? Who are some faculty members to take a course from?" And I don't know why he recommended this, but he said he had heard good things about a guy teaching in the English department and the Scandinavian Studies department named Richard Ringler, Dick Ringler. And maybe I should take a course with him. 

I don't think my father knew Ringler, certainly didn't know him well. Dick had begun to develop, and I think I was one of the first people to take it, I think he probably taught it once or twice, an honors English seminar, an honors course, English 360, called "The Anglo-Saxons," which was, still, in my mind, I took it the second semester of my freshman year on my father's advice, a transformative moment. It was one of the most brilliant classroom performances I have ever seen, if not the most brilliant classroom performance I have ever seen. Although he was an English professor, I think of him and I think of what he taught as profoundly cultural, intellectual history, in the richest possible sense of those phrases. By which I mean, there was nothing that wasn't fair game for Dick Ringler's mill. Over the years, explaining what was so powerful for me about that course, I think of it as a microcosm, macrocosm thing. My best metaphor for it is a kaleidoscope. What he does is take a fragment of the world, a little piece of the kaleidoscope, and weaves around that fragment the skein of patterns that finally form that unbelievably complicated, intricate set of patterns, which are the rotating set of geometries that happen when you turn the kaleidoscope. And what's brilliant about the way he does it, is that no matter which of the fragments you pick, you can show the underlying patterns if you are clever enough to connect enough stuff outward from that central point. So that, for instance, we might develop one lecture to 17 lines of a fragment of a poem that exists in only one copy in an ancient, 12th-century medieval manuscript from Anglo-Saxon England. 

And then the next week, the next lecture, we might look at the vellum on which those lines were written and he would talk about how vellum was manufactured in the monasteries at that time, by killing the sheep, scraping the inner side of the internal part, removing the hair from one side, the wool from one side of the skin, and the innards from the other side. Which is why, I still remember this, why writing on vellum, the two sides of a sheet of vellum, is different. Because in one case you're writing on the outside of the animal, where all the hair was, and on the other side you're writing on the inside of the animal and your pen works differently. Ringler's class was full of that kind of stuff. Very, very evocative for me. >> That clip was about 3:04, which reminds me of the Billy Joel song "The Entertainer." "If you want to have a hit, you've got to make it fit, so I cut it down to 3:05." I cut that one down to 3:04, it was actually about a 4.5, 5-minute clip and that's one of the nice things about technology. You can kind of close out the ums and the ahs and maybe some other stuff. The reason why I mentioned the length on that is, usually you ask a good question, you get about a 3 to 5-minute answer. I did ask someone to describe their Korean War experience once, and my voice didn't appear on the recording again for another 43 minutes.  So sometimes you get longer. 

Sometimes, of course, you get a "yep" or "nope" answer that takes three seconds, if that. Some of you may have noted. This History Sandwiched In was titled "Oral History in Wisconsin." My initial title, what I wanted, was in brackets, in search of a pithy title, "Oral History in Wisconsin," and some of you may have noticed on the first slide, I mentioned "An Oral History of Our Time," is how I titled this presentation. I get that from this book, "Joe Gould's Secret," which is actually two articles that Joseph Mitchell wrote for the New Yorker, one in 1942, the other in 1964. There's also a really great movie, "Joe Gould's Secret," that was produced by Stanley Tucci, stars Stanley Tucci. Joe Gould is played by Ian Holm. Susan Sarandon and Steve Martin co-star. Joe Gould's claim to fame in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s when Joseph first found out about him and interviewed him and wrote his first piece, was that he had written an "oral history of our time." A book that he claimed was written as he was listening to comments, listening to stories, basically eavesdropping on New Yorkers to tell the oral history of our time through the shirtsleeved multitudes and not the captains of industry. Joe Gould claimed, when Joseph Mitchell first interviewed him, that the oral history of our time was 9 million words long. Those of you who can't wrap your mind around 9 million words, it's 11 times larger than the Bible. 

He claimed during the 1940s that it was being hidden out in a New York farm, because he didn't want, if the Germans bombed New York, he didn't want his oral history of our time to be destroyed. The secret, of course, is that Mitchell found out that Joe Gould had never written an oral history of our time. He had made it up, in a lot of ways to sort of be his calling card to try to help make ends meet. He was primarily a homeless person throughout his life in the '20s, '30s, and '40s. So, why do I spend a few minutes talking about a person who wrote a book that didn't exist? I think in the 21st century with technology that we can start to achieve an oral history of our time, and I also think that the idea of interviewing the shirtsleeved multitudes always makes for a better overall history of anything, not that captains of industry or heads of state aren't important and shouldn't be interviewed, but I find, and I've found, that interviewing the shirtsleeved multitudes is great fun and you learn a lot more, at least I have in my time. Again, no kickbacks for plugging "Joe Gould's Secret" or the book. I'm doing this all on my own. (laughter) All right. I'm going to make another football comment, but not a joke. I'm sorry we're not close enough to the weekend for you all. 

Peter King, who writes on football for Sports Illustrated, at the end of each issue during the football season, he has the "3 things he thinks he thinks." I have "5 things I think I know." So I've gone him two better, and I know these things. I just don't think I think them. Or at least I know I think them. Or I think I know them. Anyway. I think I'm better than Peter King, is what I'm trying to say. So the first thing. Know what oral history is and what it's not. The first Oral History Association annual meeting, Oral History Association is the national group overseeing oral history in the country. They have a really easy website, oralhistory.org. 

Their first annual meeting was actually called a colloquium, which I think is Latin for "small meeting." It was in a northern California hotel resort. A large hotel convention center, lots of people there. At that time in the 1960s, there was about 40, almost 50 folks who considered themselves enough of an oral historian to attend this first meeting. During the day, they talked about what oral history was, they started to get some definitions. They started to get some general practices, some best principles. They talked about projects they were working on, "networking," before that term came into vogue, obviously. After the end of a day of this, one of the oral historians decided that he needed to go to the lounge for a drink. Again, this is a huge hotel convention center. Sits down at the lounge, has a drink. I mentioned earlier that I was the oral historian for the state of Idaho. 

I gave this presentation a lot for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormons, who don't drink. So this would be the part of the show where I have to explain to them what a lounge is, what a drink is, why it's important sometimes for people to have one at the end of a long day. (laughter) One of the beautiful things about being in this state is, I don't have to ever do that again. (laughter) I think your laughter allows me not to explain why. So he sits down at the bar next to another gentleman who is there for a completely different reason. And as people are wont to do as they're sitting at a bar next to each other, they start to chat. And as people are wont to do when you start to chat with someone you don't know, you eventually ask them, "What do you do for a living?" So the gentleman asks the oral historian, "What do you do for a living?" The oral historian said, "I'm an oral historian. I practice oral history." The other gentleman gets a big smile on his face. The oral historian starts thinking, "This guy must get it. I don't have to spend the next 10, 20, 30 minutes explaining what this is. 

The reason why I'm sitting beside him and not another oral historian is, I'm tired of doing that today." All this is going through his head. The other man starts to speak and he says, "I am so glad you're doing that. The history of dentistry is sadly neglected here on the West Coast." (laughter) If I had one of those cool writing boards I would give you a little math problem. I would do, "oral history not equals dentistry." If you want to interview dentists here in Wisconsin, I'd be happy to help in any way except for actually doing the interviews. And now that I've offended the dental profession on video, I will move on.  So what is oral history? Well, I think most of you who came in came in soon enough, and some of you may not have, I think I only have one more of these left. There's a sheet I gave on front and back, and I can actually give this last one. There's an extra. Anyway, on the top of it, it's a front and back. The first page is "some thoughts on oral history," and the Oral History Association, we put their definition of oral history on that front section there. 

Basically what it is, oral history is a method of gathering and preserving firsthand accounts through recorded interviews with participants in past events and ways of life. So oral history is gathering, preserving. Remember I mentioned in the oral history program, to gather and preserve. Oral history is gathering and preserving firsthand accounts. Oral tradition is great. I think there's nothing better than hearing the story about how grandma and grandpa got together or how great-grandma and grandpa got together, even though the person telling it may not have been actually there when it happened, and probably wasn't. And that's what oral tradition is, a story passed on from generation to generation. Oral history is trying to get at firsthand accounts. I want to interview you about your memories of Sterling Hall. Or I want to interview you as a member of the campus LGBT community. 

Or I want to interview you about your life history. If you want to talk about oral tradition, we will probably get at that and we will gather that, but primarily oral history is trying to get at firsthand accounts.  The number two thing I think I know. Oral history has its own interesting history, including here in Wisconsin. Lyman Draper, who some have called at least the American father of oral history, Lyman Draper was the first, I believe, executive director, probably was his title, at the Wisconsin Historical Society, the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, I believe they were called at the time. He sent out letters to try to get people to write down their memories and send them back to him. Created a large manuscript collection. Hubert Howe Bancroft at University of California was doing somewhat similar, although he was actually asking people to tell their stories and taking down notes stenographically as best as possible. So even in the US in the late 19th century, we are collecting oral history, trying to get people to tell their stories, either orally and we would write them down, or send things to them and have them write down their story. What happened in the 20th century and on to today is technology has allowed us to be able to capture not only the story, but the voice of the person telling it. 

To give you some sort of idea of how far we've come in terms of technology, in the 1930s and '40s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of his alphabet soup projects or programs was called the Works Progress or Works Project Administration. A subcategory under that was the Federal Writers Project. FDR would be chiding me right now, except for that, actually spelling these things out instead of using the acronym, but I'm trying to avoid acronym-izing as much as possible this year. Anyway, the Federal Writers Project was a way for unemployed historians, writers, folklorists, other humanists to be able to earn a living by going out and gathering stories and gathering songs, primarily in the US south and primarily with former slaves. What happened with some of these folks is, they figured out fairly quickly that it's great to get the lyrics for the song, but wouldn't it be great to actually get the song itself? So some of the folklorists for the Federal Writers Project were able to get a recording machine and then go and be able to record the voice as well as the lyrics, or as well as the story, have the voice to go along with it. In the book "Adventures of a Ballad Hunter," John Lomax, he and Alan Lomax were two of these folklorists, he talks about the recording machine they had in the 1930s. "Later, as a crown to all this comfort we also carried a 350-pound recording machine." (laughter) "A cumbersome pile of wire and iron and steel, built into the rear of the Ford." I'm not going to get much into oral history tips, but one of the tips is to try to build rapport with folks. And I got to think it's tough to build rapport if we start chatting, and I say, "Oh, you have some great stories to tell. Do you mind if I back up the Ford so I can record these?" (laughter) "You don't have any underground sprinklers or anything, do you? We should be fine?" "Two batteries weighing 75 pounds each." So I think 150 pounds of this 350-pound machine are batteries. "A microphone, a complicated machine of delicate adjustments, coils of wire, numerous gadgets, besides scores of blank aluminum and celluloid disks." Those big disks is what they were recording on. 

"And finally a multitude of extra parts the purpose and place for which neither Alan nor I have the faintest glimmer of an idea." Again, that's "Adventures of a Ballad Hunter," page 111. This is when, I didn't remember this until I was already on the bus headed here. This is when I would click on and actually show you this recorder. This is the Marantz 661. That is about, what would that be, six inches by three inches. It weighs maybe a half a pound. So between the microphone which might weigh half a pound, maybe more, depending on what kind of microphone, and some type of plug-in or batteries, you're basically at about a pound. So we have come a long way from a 350-pound recording machine, 150 pounds of batteries, to something like this that you can carry around. There are folks that use digital recorders even smaller than that. Somebody may even have digital recorders smaller than that that fit easily in your pocket. 

Again, thanks to technology, it can be practiced anywhere, and thanks to technology, I firmly believe we're able to at least try to do what Joe Gould was claiming to do, and that's create an oral history of our time. I want to just quickly get off the slide show again for a second, just to talk a little bit more about the present of oral history. Here's some current and recent oral history done in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Veterans Museum here on the Square, they have a veterans oral history project. They've done great interviews, both staff and volunteers, probably over the last decade if not longer. A recent project, "The March on Milwaukee: Civil Rights History Project." University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and others have brought together documents including audio onto a website to talk about Milwaukee's civil rights movement. Wisconsin Historical Society has a great Holocaust survivors project, where they digitized both transcripts and audio from interviews they did back in the '70s and '80s and put on their website. This is our project that I showed earlier before we turned on, actually started the official presentation. UW-Madison Campus Voices. We have two projects where we have recaptured and presented material on the TAA strike of 1970 and the Sterling Hall bombing, which happened on August 24, 1970. 

Black Thursday Oral History Project at Oshkosh. There's a couple more here. DC Everest, a school near Wausau, has done some great oral history over the last decade, which has culminated in several books on local history topics. And the US Forest Products Lab. They hired us when I first got here to conduct interviews to help commemorate their centennial, which they are finishing commemoration of this year. Their centennial was in 1910.  I have an Idaho public school education. Notice I said Idaho, not Wisconsin. Wisconsin Public Television, thank you. In the future, I talk a little bit about the past, present, and future again. 

The hope is, and this doesn't have to be led out of our office and actually I hope it's not, that we look at statewide projects in oral history, whether it's on environmental topics, conservation topics, political topics, labor topics. Where folks around the state can not only gather new oral history, but perhaps recapture the old oral history. The great old oral history was done back in the '70s and '80s, that needs to be digitized before there are no more cassette tape players and no more parts to repair for said tape players. Number four, oral history is common sense but not common practice, meaning there are things that need to go in the front of folks' minds when we talk about oral history. Again, I tell this in the longer workshops, but oral history isn't just finding a said, and I put this in air quotes, although I hate air quotes, "old timer." Finding an "old timer," finding some type of recording device and putting it in front of said old timer and saying, "All right, Pops. Tell me about your life." You can do that. General questions are going to get you very general answers. You can get general answers from anywhere. The idea is to be well-trained, well-prepared, ask questions specific to that person, or specific to the topic that you want to talk to that person about, and get their specific stories and memories. Whether they're firsthand accounts or oral tradition, you want their stories and to do that you need to ask them specific questions. 

Other things, again, the handout, the first side of the "some thoughts on oral history" handout, have ideas like conducting background research, meeting the person in advance, obviously recording it, using some type of good microphone, whether it's inside the recorder or outside the recorder to get good sound. Doing some type of summary. Also working with a repository. If you think this interview is going to have worth to somebody besides yourself or your family, immediately start talking with the state historical society or a local historical society or a county library or whatever, and start to talk to them about whether they'd be interested in getting a copy of that and if so, what they may need from you and what they may be able to help you with in terms of collaboration or reciprocity to try to make that oral history end up, again, to be done as good as possible. Oral history's power can best be shown by the voices, not the typed-out words of its narrators. Early on in the history of oral history programs, and your first oral history programs popped up on campuses like Columbia, UCLA, UC Berkeley, UT Austin. What they would do is, they would conduct interview on reel-to-reel. I just always think of MASH when I think of reel-to-reel tapes, Charles Emerson Winchester telling stories back to his sister and he's speaking into the reel-to-reel player. They would bang out a transcript, they would have a narrator edit it to make it more like a memoir, and then they would record over the open reel with the next interview, so they would lose the sound. Fortunately, that process, and thanks to the creation of the Oral History Association and other nascent groups, sort of got people to stop thinking of the transcript as the sole primary source, but of the transcript as a joint primary source to go along with the audio. 

Most oral history programs, fairly early on after that, would keep the audio as well as a transcript. The reason I say that is, in my mind, the best way to show oral history's power is to show it by listening, whether it's a video oral history so you can see and listen, or an audio oral history, but you listen to the narrator tell the story. We have a couple minutes, so I usually play this when we have a couple minutes. This is in honor of hunting season, although this event did not happen during Wisconsin hunting season. This happened back in my old home state of Idaho. This is a woman who was not only a teacher for 40 or 50 years in northern Idaho, but also led hunting trips in the back country, one of the first women in the state to do so. This is a story of one of her hunting trips that she led. Again, it's about three minutes long, so you'll have to have your listening ears on, but I think it's worth it.  Whoops, that's Bill Cronon talking about hunting. Obviously I imported the wrong clip, but that's why... 

 >> (inaudible)  They were very poor hunters, and they didn't know the terrain. So one morning I said to the man I was guiding, "Why don't you rest a day and cure up the blisters on your feet? And I'll go with these fellas and get them a shot." He said, "Well, I believe that'd just be fine with me, I'm awful tired." He said, "You just dragged me through this brush until I'm all in." And I took, I think, five, the other five. I said, "I know where I can place you on a stand and if you do what I tell you, you'll get a shot. And if you don't do what I tell you, you won't get anything, but it'll be the same as getting an elk as far as I'm concerned. If I show you elk and you miss them." So we tramped about three or four hours and I put 'em on a stand where they could see the mountains adjacent and a big basin. I said, "I'm going through that basin. Don't you shoot at me when I'm going through the basin. If there's any elk in there, they'll run up this trail and cross the ridge." I pointed --. I said, "He'll cross about there if there's any in here." And they were real agreeable and oh my. I said, "There's only one thing. 

You must promise me that you'll not move until I return because you can get lost in here and it's a long ways back and it'd sure camoodle my plans, and yours, too." And, oh, they would do everything. I said, "They'll come up this trail if there's any here, 'cause I won't shoot at them where I am. All I'm doing is flushing them by you." And oh, they were just delighted. They had seen elk, but they'd been too slow. So it took me, oh, two hours to go down and through the basin and I spooked the elk. Oh, there were a lot of them in there and I spooked them out. I beat the brush and spooked them out. And then I was tired and I sat down to listen for the shooting, because they went exactly where I said they would. And I didn't hear any shooting. And I thought, that's funny, because I knew they went exactly where I said. 

I know they had plenty of time for a shot as they went up this grade and crossed the ridge. So after another two hours I worked my way back, and there's one thing those fellas did that was right. They stayed where they were. I found them sitting right exactly where I'd left them. I said to them, "My goodness, why didn't you shoot, didn't you see them?" "Oh, yes, there was 15 head!" "Well," I said, "Weren't there any bulls in them?" "Oh yeah, five or six good bulls." Well, I said, "My goodness, why didn't you shoot? It wasn't too long a shot, maybe 200 yards." They said, "You know, Gertrude, they didn't stop." (laughter)  >> Reeves: For those of you who don't hunt, sometimes the animals don't do what you want them to do. (laughter) Is the moral of that story. In Idaho, the Idaho State Historical Society, there is a transcript to that. I'm never quite sure how we got the spelling of the word "camoodle" correctly. But nothing beats hearing, obviously, that's a story she had told and re-told throughout her life, but there's nothing in my mind that beats hearing a storyteller tell a story like that. That's all I have today. 

One thing I like to say in any presentation, regardless of length, is that this is not only a brief introduction to oral history, but an introduction to me, as well. My contact information is on the bottom of the "some thoughts on oral history" side of that flipsheet. I'm happy to take questions now, but if you'd rather wait and email or call or stop in and ask your question, I'd be happy to answer it that way. Just to let you know, on the flip side, those of you who may be interested in conducting any sort of family history interview, or even just talking to your family about their history, on the flip side it's about 45, maybe almost 50 sort of memory triggers. General events that may have happened to your family or a member of your family at various points in his or her life that might help spark their memory and be able to tell good stories. I want to thank you all for your time today. It's just shy of 1:00, I got done right when I thought I was going to. (applause)