ORAL HISTORY: PRESERVING A PERISHABLE COMMODITY

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By CHARLES T. MORRISSEY

Oral history--spoken recollections of past experiences--are recorded interviews that preserve historically significant memories for future use. These reminiscences can be important in numerous ways: They document the history of families, communities and institutions and aid professional caregivers committed to improving services for their clients. Across America today there are hundreds of oral historians who can work beneficially with professionals in aging.

Oral historians come from diverse backgrounds. Some are folklorists, anthropologists, mainstream historians or librarians. Others may be doctors, lawyers, educators or retired people who believe in the importance of preserving knowledge of past experience. They realize that memory is a perishable commodity and, if neglected, will not survive the ravages of time.

MAJOR PROGRAMS

Many prominent univisities have major oral history programs. Columbia University, New York City, holds the largest collection of interviews; in 1948, Allan Nevins, a member of its faculty, started the first organized oral history project in modern America. Institutions such as Duke University in Durham, N.C., and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, have focused on race relations in the American South, and the both the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses of the University of California have documented topics in their state ranging from viticulture to filmmaking. In Austin, Texas, the Lyndon B. Johnson Library houses transcripts of about 1,500 interviews; in Boston, Mass., the John F. Kennedy Library holds about 1,000.

My own work as an oral-history consultant mainly entails archive-building with high-profile institutions in the nonprofit sector. Currently I am documenting how the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, Md.--one of the world's largest philanthropies--funds biomedical research, and how the Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia, Pa., practice broad-based grantsmanship.

I also teach oral-history workshops each summer at Portland State University in Portland, Ore., and at Vermont College in Montpelier, Vt. The projects below are among the many initiated by my former students. I have included these descriptions to convey a greater sense of oral history as a multifaceted activity:

* Linda Tamura, a professor of education at Willamette University, Salem, Ore., interviewed her grandparents and other elders in her home town of Hood River, Ore., who had come from Japan to farm; during World War II, all were forced into relocation camps. The result of Tamura's interviews is her 1993 book The Hood River Issei: An Oral History of Japanese Settlers in Oregon's Hood River Valley (Chicago: University of Illinois Press).

* W. Bruce Fye, a physician at the Marshfield Clinic in Marshfield, Wis., recorded oral history interviews for his 1996 book on the history of cardiology. The book received the Welch Medal for excellence from the American Association for the History of Medicine.

* Rosemary F. Crockett of Washington, D.C., who retired last summer from her post as a U.S. foreign service officer, is interviewing the wives of the Tuskeegee Airmen, African American fighter pilots of World War II.

Also, last January I taught a three-day workshop at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, for 12 oral historians who plan to record how Bill Clinton made the upward climb from his boyhood in Arkansas through state politics to two terms in the U.S. presidency.

Through spontaneous in-class interviews these workshops emphasize question-asking techniques so that participants learn how to phrase open-ended queries; handle sensitive topics; deal with balky narrators; and treat problems, such as evasiveness, garrulity, forgetfulness and factual inaccuracies. I also discuss ethical and legal aspects of oral history interviewing.

Workshop participants are urged to collect any letters, diaries, photographs and other "paper-trail" evidence from their informants to complement the spoken memories. It also is important for oral historians to include in their documentation socially marginalized people who have often been excluded from historical consideration, especially women, low-income people and people of color. Oral history can restore to knowledge the life stories of individuals who have been neglected by historians who tend to presume that only elites are important.

An attractive feature of oral history is how quickly and easily a life story can be recounted verbally. For instance, a woman asked me to interview her father, a retired physician, who lived about 225 miles away. I traveled to his home, and recorded two hours before noon on the first day and another two hours before supper, then repeated this routine the next day. Between sessions he had time to enjoy lunch, putter with chores and rest his voice. I returned a few weeks later to present him with a 148-page, double-c[aced transcript for him to edit. Out of only four two-hour sessions recorded over two days, we produced a modest book of recollections.

The man was able to verbalize to me his memories of brutal warfare in the Pacific Theater during World War II, because to him I was a stranger with a cordial but clinical interest in his biography. Never to his children had he been able to talk about his travail as a navy doctor, and they were eager to learn about this chapter of his life. What was previously unspeakable had become a permanent part of this family's history.

My dream is that someday, every locale in the nation will be equipped to preserve the spoken memories of its elders through oral history. I hope retirement communities, Veterans Administration hospitals and other places where elders are served are staffed with trained oral-history professionals. The 20th century was the most turbulent era in human history; those who lived this history deserve to be heard, their memories saved as a resource for the future.

Charles T. Morrissey, a former president of the Oral History Association, is an oral-history consultant in the chancellor's office at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas.

RESOURCES

Two excellent books for learning about oral history are Valerie R. Yow's Recording Oral History: A Practical Guide for Social Scientists (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1994), and Donald A. Ritchie's Doing Oral History (New York City: Twayne, 1995).

The Oral History Association (OHA) is headquartered at Dickinson College, P.O. Box 1773, Carlisle, PA 17013; website: www.dickinson.edu /organizations/oha. Information on the group's electronic discussion list, H-Oralhist, can be found online at www.h-net.msu.edu/~oralhist. Questions can be directed to H-Oralhist editor Jeff Charnley at charnle2@pilot.msu.edu.

In addition, various regional oral history groups serve New England, the Middle Atlantic States, the Southeast, the Southwest (including California) and the Northwest. State groups exist in Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Texas, and Kentucky operates a legislatively funded Oral History Commission through the Kentucky Historical Society. The Bay Area Oral Historians group meets for picnics and other occasions around the San Francisco area.

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