Author: ddunham

Jennifer Colliau: A Bartender’s Perspective on West Coast Cocktail Culture

Jennifer Colliau is a small business owner, Beverage Director, and veteran bartender. She was born and raised in Oakland, California. She graduated from Oakland Tech High School before attending the University of Southern California for Theater. She got her start bartending in Los Angeles, California at the Irish Times, a pub, while pursuing a career in acting. She ultimately decided to forgo that career path and moved back to the Bay Area to attend trade school and California College of the Arts for woodworking. She began working at Bucci’s in Emeryville, California, where she began her career in the bar industry. She discusses her early childhood and education, time in Los Angeles, return to the Bay Area, developing a passion for cocktails and the bar industry, furniture making, the Bay Area bar community, working with Thad Vogler and Erik Adkins at the Slanted Door, the rise of contemporary cocktail culture, starting Small Hand Foods, being a women in the bar industry, and what sets the Bay Area apart from other places.

This West Coast Cocktail Project oral history transcript is now available online.

Jörg Rupf: A Distiller’s Perspective on Contemporary Cocktail Culture

Jörg Rupf is an Alsatian-born distiller who founded St. George Spirits in 1982. Rupf was raised in Freiburg and Lake Constance, Germany. After earning a PhD in law, he became a court system judge and later, worked for both the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Ministry of Culture. He moved to Berkeley, CA in the mid-1970s to pursue post-doctoral research on legal studies and the arts at the University of California, Berkeley. He left the legal field and began distilling eau de vie in the early 1980s (though he had been doing this already for most of his life). He became America?s first artisanal distiller when he opened St. George Spirits in 1982, paving the way for future generations like Lance Winters. In this interview, Rupf discusses his early life in Germany, his love for music and the violin, experience working in the legal field, decision to leave law and start distilling, agriculture in the Bay Area, early days of sourcing, production, distribution, and marketing, legal challenges, bringing on new staff, learning from others, the role the wine industry played in the 1980s and 90s, expanding operations, receiving accolades and recognition by the spirits industry, interest in agave-based spirits, handing over St. George Spirits to Lance Winters in 2010, and life after retirement.

This oral history is part of our West Coast Cocktails Oral History Project.

Justice Cruz Reynoso: California Supreme Court Justice, Professor of Law, Vice-Chair United States Commission on Human Rights, and 2000 Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient

Cruz Reynoso was born in Brea, California. He attended Fullerton College and Pamona College, and served two years (1953-1955) in the United States Army. In 1958 he received his Bachelor of Law degree from UC Berkeley. He has been a professor of law at the University of New Mexico, UCLA, and UC Davis. From 1981 to 1986, he served on the California Supreme Court, and from 1993 to 2004 he was vice-chairman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. In 2000, Justice Reynoso was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

This interview was undertaken in partnership and under the auspices of the California State Archives, State Government Oral History Program. It is posted here courtesy of the California State Archives, and no part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the California State Archivist. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The California State Archives, 1020 O Street, Sacramento, California, 95814.

Robert Gibson: A Pioneering Career in Pharmacy at UCSF, 1950s-2000s

Robert Gibson was born in Tacoma, Washington. He served in the US Army during World War II. In 1958 he was the first African American to receive a Pharm.D. from the University of California, San Francisco. He then joined the faculty at UCSF where over the next 50 years he served in many capacities, including Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, Associate Dean for Professional Affairs in the School of Pharmacy, and as Director of the Pharmaceutical Technology Laboratory. In 2000 he was elected president of the American Pharmaceutical Association, and in 2006 he received the Remington Honor Medal.

Read the full transcript of Stan Dempsey’s oral history.

Stanley Dempsey is a geologist, lawyer, executive, and entrepreneur whose interest in the environment and outdoor pastimes led him to spearhead collaborations between the mining industry and activists, which anticipated the environmental legislation of the 1970s. Dempsey was at the forefront of developing the mining industry?s legal and policy responses to environmental regulation during this early period, and became Director of Environmental Affairs for AMAX, Inc., the first position of its kind in the industry. He was responsible for acquiring land positions and for construction contracts for the Climax and Henderson mines in Colorado. He directed the AMAX part of a multinational joint venture in iron-ore mining in Western Australia. In the early 1980s, he served as Vice President for the worldwide operations of AMAX. After a brief stint at a law firm, Dempsey co-founded a merchant bank called the Denver Mining Finance Company. In later years, he founded one of the first and most successful mineral royalty firms, Royal Gold, Inc. Dempsey continues to serve as a consultant, and is a longtime supporter and leader in many mining associations, including the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America and the National Mining Hall of Fame.

Global Mining and Materials Research Project

For over twenty years, the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) produced in-depth oral histories of members of the mining community, under a project called “Western Mining in the Twentieth Century,” which was overseen by ROHO interviewer Eleanor Swent. The 104 interviews in the project covered the history of mining in the American Southwest, Mexico, South America, and Australia from the 1940s until the 1990s.

ROHO has recently changed its name to the Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library, and with that change we proudly announce a new project entitled “Global Mining and Materials Research,” which will focus on key transitions in technology, policy, and geopolitics that have brought mining to its current state worldwide.

Much has changed in mining industries in the years since the Western Mining project was in full production, including the increased globalization of mining operations, the decreasing concentration of mineable minerals in ore, increasingly complicated regulatory environments, new systems of environmental remediation, new technology for exploration, extraction, and processing, and new stories of political conflict and resolution. In addition to collecting interviews about mining engineering, metallurgy, and administration, we also hope to explore the history of information technology and data analysis with respect to mining, as well as the legal, regulatory, and policy history of the industries.

This interview was funded with support from the American Institute of Mining Engineers, Metallurgists, and Petroleum Engineers (AIME), the Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration (SME), the Association for Iron & Steel Technology (AIST), the Minerals, Metals, & Materials Society (TMS), and the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE). We are also collaborating with the IEEE to host these oral histories on the Engineering and Technology History Website.

Thanks also to former Western Mining Project Lead Eleanor Swent, Dr. Douglas Fuerstenau, and Noel Kirschenbaum for their advice and support while the Global Mining Project was being established. Finally, we are most grateful to Stanley Dempsey for taking time out of a busy schedule to speak to us about the evolution of the mining industry over the past forty years.

Paul Burnett, Oral History Center

With the death of Sylvia McLaughlin on January 19 at age 99, the Bay Area environmental movement has lost one of its preeminent founding figures. At the Oral History Center, we knew Sylvia as a generous narrator in two oral histories and a donor to the Bancroft Library of her extensive personal papers; taken together, these documents tell the story of a half-century of pioneering activism to protect the San Francisco Bay. We also remember her with gratitude as a supporter and advisor for myriad oral history projects on environmental and water resources history as well as the history of the western mining industry.

In 1961, Sylvia, wife of UC Regent and mining executive Donald McLaughlin, joined with two other prominent UC-connected women, Catherine Kerr, the wife of UC President Clark Kerr, and Esther Gulick, wife of a Berkeley economics professor, to do something about the deplorable state of the San Francisco Bay: “We could see the dump trucks going down and filling the bay constantly. . . . It was a dump,” recalled Sylvia in her 2007 oral history. The three women formed Save San Francisco Bay Association and began a campaign not only to halt further degradation of the bay but also to return privately owned shoreline lands to public ownership and to restore them for public use as parklands and wetlands. They proved to be amazingly effective, drawing on university experts, energizing a broad swath of public opinion, organizing citizen caravans to lobby in Sacramento, and eventually getting a groundbreaking regulatory body, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan. In his book on the development of the Bay Area’s environmental consciousness, Berkeley geography professor Richard Walker credits the three women: “Nothing was more essential to the foundation of the Bay Area’s green culture. It all goes through Save the Bay.” [Richard A. Walker, The Country in the City: the Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area, University of Washington Press, 2007].

Sylvia joined the organization’s co-founders in 1985 for an oral history conducted by Malca Chall looking back at their first twenty-five years working together, in Save San Francisco Bay Association, 1961-1986. In 2007, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Sylvia for an eight-session biographical oral history. This time she reflected on her family and formative years in Denver, Colorado, and more than forty-five years of activism in the Bay Area and beyond. She discussed the incredible network of local, national, and international environmental organizations that she had helped to found, served on the boards of, acted as trusted spokesperson and advisor for, and attracted new activists to. In Citizen Activist for the Environment: Saving San Francisco Bay, Promoting Shoreline Parks and Natural Values in Urban and Campus Planning, she sums up her keys to successful advocacy: “These things take time, but persistence as well. . . . Determination. Never give up. And then it’s always helpful to have good leadership along the way.”

We will all miss Sylvia McLaughlin’s eternal vigilance and determination, as well as her vision, quiet persuasiveness, willingness to listen to opposing views, and genuine concern for both people and the environment. A memorial service will be held at 4 p.m. Feb. 2 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way in Berkeley. Memories and condolences may also be left at www.saveSFbay.org/rememberingSylvia.

Ann Lage
Interviewer Emeritus
Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley

The Oral History Center will be holding our 2nd annual spring workshop on Friday March 11, 2016 on the UC Berkeley campus. This workshop is designed for people who are interested in an introduction to the basic practice of oral history and serves as a companion to our more in ­depth Advanced Oral History Institute held in August.

This workshop will focus on the “nuts­ and­ bolts” of oral history including methodology, ethics, practice, and recording. It will be taught by our seasoned team of oral historians and include hands­-on practice exercises. Although space is strictly limited, everyone is welcome to attend the workshop, including community-­based historians, teachers, genealogists, public historians, and students in college or graduate school. The cost is $125, which includes lunch.

Registration is open now here!

Please contact Shanna Farrell at sfarrell@library.berkeley.edu with any questions.

Shanna Farrell
Historian/Interviewer
Oral History Center
The Bancroft Library

Applications now open for OHC 2016 Summer Institute

The Oral History Center is offering a one-week advanced institute on the methodology, theory, and practice of oral history. This will take place on the UC Berkeley campus in the newly-opened MLK Jr Student Center from August 14-19, 2016.

The institute is designed for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, university faculty, independent scholars, and museum and community-based historians who are engaged in oral history work. The goal of the institute is to strengthen the ability of its participants to conduct research-focused interviews and to consider special characteristics of interviews as historical evidence in a rigorous academic environment.

We will devote particular attention to how oral history interviews can broaden and deepen historical interpretation situated within contemporary discussions of history, subjectivity, memory, and memoir.

Registration is open now here!

William J. Rutter: Co-Founder and Chairman, Chiron Corporation

This series of interviews documents William J. Rutter’s view of his years, 1981-1999, as cofounder and chairman of Chiron Corporation, a San Francisco Bay Area biotechnology company specializing in vaccines and blood-screening technologies. These interviews explore the theme of commercializing basic science, introduced by the earlier oral history with Dr. Rutter on his career at the University of California, San Francisco. We also have a short oral history with Dr. Rutter on the social, political, and ethical dimensions of stem cell research.

Read related bioscience and biotechnology oral histories here.

Randy Wayne Schekman: Cell Biologist and UC Berkeley Nobel Laureate Oral History Transcript

This oral history with Randy Schekman is one in a series documenting bioscience and biotechnology in Northern California. Schekman’s research investigates fundamental cellular processes at the molecular, biochemical, and genetic levels. In the interviews, he describes the work which illuminates the mechanism and control of the complex intracellular pathways by which proteins are transported within the living cell. It was this body of research which led to the highest honors in biology, the Lasker Award in Basic Medical Research in 2002 and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013. Interviews conducted by Sally Smith Hughes in 2014.