Wisconsin Public Television	University Place		Wisconsin Academy Fellow:	James P. Leary		4/27/14	UP5773  cc [APPLAUSE]  >> I was born in Rice Lake and grew up between two lakes, a woods, and a swamp, and in the '50s and '60s when I was growing up, the presence of people who had learned languages other than English, including indigenous people, Chippewa or Ojibwas, as well as many people from Europe was very much in evidence. My home community had French Canadians. It had Irish. It had many kinds of Germans. It had the full range of Scandinavians, especially Norwegians. There were Czechs and Poles. There were Italians. And I grew up with all of those people as well as their parents and grandparents and got a sense of their culture, their various traditions, and their lives. I also had the good fortune to do a lot of different kinds of work when I was a kid. I put up hay bales for a dollar an hour in the hay mound during haying season. 

In the early summer, with a buddy of mine who had a chainsaw, I peeled the poplar bolts for the Excelsior mill. I did newspaper stuffing and delivering in the back room of my dad's weekly newspaper. I worked in a bottling company warehouse loading and offloading trucks, and I also worked in a small iron foundry where we made the molds, we broke up old radiators and so forth and poured molten metal in hand ladles. And that was a very important part of my education. My parents were journalists with a great respect for and curiosity about the world around them and also a sense of obligation to understand and report on that world. And they valued education and travel, urging that on all of their seven children, but they also expressed the importance of being grounded, being rooted somewhere, of knowing where you are. A conviction that every place is in its way the center of the world and connected with every other place, no better but certainly no worse than any other place. I was very lucky to discover that there was folklore, such a field as folklore studies when I was an undergraduate. A way to go out and document the cultural traditions and the artistry of ordinary people. In 1973, when I got my master's degree in folklore, my dad gave me 50 bucks, and I spent half of it on beer. 

[LAUGHTER] But with the other half I bought a cheap tape recorder, some cassette tapes, and a microphone. The first persons I interviewed was a guy named George Russell, whose parents had come from Ireland in the 19th century. He was born in 1885. He lived down the road from me when I was growing up. He worked in the woods and on farms. And he told me stories, jokes actually, from the lumber camps. Jokes about the patent mike and jokes about Ole and Lena that went back to right around 1900. So this was amazing stuff. I was pretty much hooked. Since then I've recorded, interviewed, photographed hundreds and hundreds of people. 

In 1980, the fall of 1980, I was doing fieldwork in northern Wisconsin, and I heard about a Finnish accordion player, Bill Hendrickson. I went to his house and found out that he actually wasn't in his house, he was in the basement underneath his house which you could only get to from some of those old cellar doors. And he was down there kind of with canned goods and potatoes and cabbages hanging there. And it was all dusty, and he was playing the accordion with a crappy tape recorder trying to set down all the tunes that he knew. And because he was old and hard of hearing and arthritic, he didn't hit all the right notes all the time and he also had to play loud so he could be heard. So his wife couldn't stand him playing in the house. [LAUGHTER] That's why he was down in this potato hole. But when I came to find him, he said I've been waiting for you to come. [LAUGHTER] And I had never met the guy before, but the networks were around. He knew I was out there, and he was waiting for me. 

And I knew right away that I had a better tape recorder than he did and I knew a better archives than a potato hole. [LAUGHTER] So I was able to record a bit about his life, a lot of his tunes. We were able to put that into an archive. I was able to produce a recording that he was on. I wrote about him, and I also put some of his stuff on radio. Now, many are used to academicians publishing, but I'm one of a company of public folklorists because we do work with people in their home communities, with living people with their important cultural traditions. We have a responsibility and of course a desire to work with those people to create publicly accessible programs that involve them, that show their art to the world, and that also take care of that through making good quality recordings and records and putting them into archival collections. In the early 1980s, I was able to move to Wisconsin, and I've been doing that kind of work ever since. A lot of it with a lot of different people, including my wife and fellow folklorist Janet Gilmore. We worked on many, many projects. 

The Wisconsin Arts Board, Richard March and Anne Pryor, we worked with them, Wisconsin Humanities Council. The folklore program took me in as an academic staff member, but Scandinavian studies allowed me to become a faculty member at UW. And in early 2001 with Joe Salmons, a linguist we found at the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, which is dedicated to field research, development of archival collections, and public programs having to do with the languages and folklore of diverse peoples in Wisconsin. So I dedicate this honor to my fellow workers in this enterprise and to all the magnificent people that we've had the privilege of recording and encountering over the years. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]