Author: pburnett
From the OHC Director: December 2020
From the Oral History Center Director, December 2020
Resilience is one of those words that the Transcendentalists would Capitalize — and I’m good with that. Oxford Languages (which publishes the multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary) offers two main definitions of Resilience:
- the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness and
- the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.
Strength and flexibility. Google analytics has an interesting tool that proposes to show the prevalence of word use over the centuries. For “Resilience” it finds notable upsurges in the Great Depression, in the wake of 9/11, and the 2008 financial crisis. It’s a word we turn to with aspiration in difficult times. I’ll bet that we’ll see a marked increase in 2020, this difficult year of years, with a global pandemic, unrest in the streets, and a nation starkly divided.
While the word is often used in an aspirational way, to motivate and inspire, when I use it here, it is a fair and accurate description for the perspective and work of the remarkable staff and student employees of the Oral History Center in 2020. The year began with optimism but also challenges — we knew we had our work cut out for us with a large docket of projects to complete alongside the ever-present pressure of being a self-funding research program. Then, by late January, ominous clouds appeared on the horizon and we soon learned that vigorous hand-washing wasn’t going to stop the approaching storm. Not knowing if we’d return to the office in two weeks or … two years … we moved our operations online and became familiar with Zoom — as did most of the world. I’ll admit that those first weeks were difficult, rife with uncertainty and worry, so our virtual staff meetings focused on simply checking in with one another. And I remain thankful for having a group of smart, concerned, and level-headed colleagues to converse with in those early days of isolation. They made that time bearable and helped give me direction as head of the office. Notably, I recognized their Resilience and their readiness to continue to do the work that they are so passionate about.
When it became clear that we weren’t returning to the office anytime soon but that we weren’t quite ready to conduct oral histories virtually (something we always advised against “if at all possible” when we teach best practices), we turned our attention to other important tasks. Shanna Farrell, Amanda Tewes, and Roger Eardley-Pryor each contributed to our ad hoc podcast season, “Coronavirus Relief,” which was less about documenting the virus than about ways in which we were seeking relief from the emotional toll of it. Amanda and Roger, working with stellar Berkeley undergrad Miranda Jiang, completed a project begun pre-pandemic and released the excellent podcast/performance piece, “Rice All the Time.”
The Oral History Center is perhaps a more complex operation than might be apparent from the outside. A massive amount of work goes into the creation of the oral history interviews that you read and/or view on our website. There is of course project development, research, and videography, but there is also managing the complex process of creating, editing, and preparing transcripts that often run several hundred pages and can include forewords, photographs, and multiple appendices. In essence, we’re a small press publishing house that produces all original content. Two years ago we began the process of redesigning and then documenting this back-end operation and that process not only continued but accelerated during the course of this work-from-home year. Communications Manager Jill Schlessinger, with an eye for detail and keen awareness of what needs to be done, helped build this structure, drew up its plans, and then made it work by implementing a new online project management software solution. Likewise, Office Manager David Dunham contributed documentation of the technical side of our work (creating new transcript templates, digitizing analog recordings, writing metadata, etc.) during this time; moreover, he innovated by finding work-arounds for tasks usually done in person that now had to be done remotely. This behind the scenes work is plainly evident in this newsletter, with its abundance of newly released oral histories, completed with the necessary aid of this process during the pandemic.
As it became clear that in-person meetings would largely be prohibited for the foreseeable future, we adopted the spirit of flexibility and resolved to bring the operation fully online and conduct interviews remotely. Paul Burnett and Roger spent many hours studying and testing various options and came up with a workable solution — Paul even hosted an online tutorial which was attended by hundreds and is now available online. We began conducting remote interviews in August and have conducted close to 200 hours of recordings already! If that doesn’t indicate Resilience, I don’t know what does. As one of those interviewers who has benefited from Paul’s research, I can attest that it works; while remote interviewing isn’t the same as in-person interviews, I’ve learned it is still possible to gain a similar sense of familiarity and intimacy as in person. Even more important: all of these essential stories are getting preserved, the importance of this is glaring in the face of the fact that well more than 300,000 Americans will have died of this dreaded virus by year’s end.
The above is clear evidence of the Resilience of the remarkable staff and student employees of the Oral History Center but it doesn’t end there, not by a long shot. Rather than let their student employees go unemployed, David and Jill have devoted many hours to keeping them busy doing important tasks and allowing them to maintain their income. Todd Holmes, returning to the office in July after caring for his wife who sadly passed away, has finished up a number of outstanding projects, including the oral history of Chicano/a Studies and a set interviews with and about esteemed Yale scholar James C. Scott. Shanna was determined to forge ahead with our annual Advanced Oral History Summer Institute, changed by its virtuality but also by the fact that we had a record number of applicants and attendees. Amanda launched the new Women in Politics Oral History Project with a well-attended online panel discussion that featured Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, former SF City Attorney Louise Renne, and Pittsburgh City Councilmember Shanelle Scales-Preston. Paul with Jill’s considerable assistance launched our new educational resources pages (a space you’ll want to watch for exciting developments in 2021). Jill kept our communications program running and robust and thus helped spread word of this great work far and wide. We submitted three major grant applications (fingers crossed!). And, last but not least, Shanna kept this newsletter going with several content-packed releases.
When we look back at 2020 and see that almost predictable upsurge in the frequency of “Resilience,” I’ll know that this word is not only an apt descriptor — toughness and flexibility — for people’s aspirations during difficult times but also an accurate description of how we persevered and rose above to achieve something of real value. Finally, I want to offer my profuse gratitude to our many friends, sponsors, and partners and to Amanda, David, Jill, Paul, Roger, Shanna, and Todd, for making 2020 truly a story of Resilience.
Martin Meeker, Charles B. Faulhaber Director of the Oral History Center
Read more about what we’ve been doing, listen to our podcasts, and sign up for our newsletter.
Oral History Center Staff’s Top Moments of 2020
Podcast Season: Coronavirus Relief
Remote Interviewing Tips and Tutorial
Women in Politics Panel Discussion
Educational Resources: AIDS and Epidemics Curriculum
The Price of Place: Oral Histories of George S. Tolley and Howard R. Tolley

This interview with University of Chicago economist George S. Tolley is the latest in our series of interviews with Chicago economists as part of the Economist Life Stories project. However, along with this twenty-hour interview, we are also releasing online for the first time the oral history with his father, Howard R. Tolley, first head of UC Berkeley’s Giannini Foundation, and chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (USDA) during the New Deal and World War II. This interview, conducted by Dean Albertson in the early 1950s, comes to us from the archives of the Columbia Oral History Project, which graciously granted permission for us to publish these interviews together.

Photo courtesy of https://www.wikiwand.com/en/M._L._Wilson
These interviews will be of enormous importance to historians who are interested in the social and political contexts of the social sciences. Economists at the University of Chicago have been deeply involved in policy advocacy and policymaking since the beginning of World War II. Growing up in Washington during the Great Depression, with a father who was responsible for analyzing and providing solutions to Depression-era farming, George S. Tolley felt that economics was the calling of his generation: to figure out how to prevent such a calamity from ever happening again.
George completed his PhD at the University of Chicago with Theodore Schultz and D. Gale Johnson in the 1950s, and returned as faculty in the 1960s. Schultz was the impresario for the department during this period, bringing his ethic of service to the nation, along with many important contacts. G.S. Tolley was part of Schultz’s agriculture group at Chicago, in which many prominent economists researched problems of agricultural modernization, whether in the rural US or around the world. True to this spirit of service, Tolley became the Director of the Economic Development Division of the Economic Research Service of the US Department of Agriculture in 1964-65, and in 1974–75, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Office of Tax Analysis of the US Department of the Treasury.
As an outgrowth of his research on resource use and farm labor migration, G.S. Tolley was in on the ground floor of two new research areas, urban economics and environmental economics, neither of which could be more topical today. He also consulted widely for federal, state, and municipal agencies on urban and environmental problems from the 1960s until the present day, both as an academic and in his capacity as CEO of his firm RCF Consulting, Inc. As agricultural economics became central to policymaking in developing countries, so too did urban economics, as megacities mushroomed across the globe, echoing the influence of the agriculture group in this domain. In the late 1980s and 90s, George also produced a seminal work on health economics, which moved the field to a broader view of the economics of wellness.
Social sciences emerged to identify, define, and address the social problems and challenges of the age of which they were a part. If we think of the ideal of science as a belief in the possibility of making knowledge that stands independently of the biases, instrumentation, and idiosyncrasies of observation and experiment, we can understand what the social scientist is up against. Notwithstanding the commitments of many social scientists to such an ideal, it’s impossible for them to escape the social context in which they operate. Both of these oral histories chronicle policy controversies and challenges, and the emergence and evolution of sub-disciplines to tackle particular social problems (low farm income, labor migration, housing inequality and urban sprawl, management of natural resources, or the management of an insurance-based health care system). And both economists focused on the economics of human geography, the price of proximity to markets, opportunities, amenities, and resources. But the larger pattern in both life histories is this: the higher the political stakes of an area of research, the greater the social scientist’s commitment to an ideal of value-free science, often out of sheer necessity. George S. Tolley’s basic approach in his career was humility before the complexity of economic and social phenomena. But that approach becomes a policy orientation in itself: careful analysis of blanket prescriptions or proscriptions, and an understanding of the unintended consequences of well-intentioned plans, an orientation he passed on to his many accomplished graduate students.
From the OHC Director: October 2020
While we are in the midst of a year without precedent, I am lucky enough to be able to draw upon any number of well worn cliches to describe the current state of the Oral History Center: we’re running on all cylinders, chugging along, moving full steam ahead, and, happily, derailed no more. In this month’s newsletter you’ll see very clear evidence of the work that was accomplished during the months of shelter-in-place: the completion of many long-in-progress oral histories, our first remotely conducted Advanced Oral History Institute, and several other productive initiatives.

We have also moved well beyond the “wrapping up old projects” phase of 2020 and have forged ahead boldly by resuming our core activity of conducting new oral history interviews. Since I last wrote a newsletter column, the OHC team of interviewers has conducted oral histories for our projects with the Getty Trust, East Bay Regional Park District, Sierra Club, and San Francisco Opera—and we’ve done new interviews for our Chicano/a Studies and Women in Politics projects. History cannot wait and we’ve resolved to make progress in spite of the obvious limitations of this strange historical context. As always, we welcome ideas, feedback, and support.
Martin Meeker, Charles B. Faulhaber Director, Oral History Center
New oral history – John Prausnitz: Chemical Engineering at UC Berkeley, 1955–2020

When I asked John Prausnitz about his interest in science growing up, he said “I really recognized that chemistry is life. Chemistry is how we live, and the body, what we eat, and what we inhale. Chemistry is it.” This is one key to understanding John Prausnitz’s approach to science and to life. He doesn’t separate them. His intellectual pursuits are not narrow. Although less and less so, engineering can still be understood as “mere” applied science, a question of fitting the fundamental principles long ago worked out by pioneering scientists to industrial or commercial processes. If this supposition was ever true, it really began to come apart around the time that Dr. Prausnitz entered the field of chemical engineering in the 1950s. And while he faced a brief moment when a possibility of a career in the private sector was presented to him, he quickly chose instead to devote his entire career and the rest of his life to UC Berkeley.
The mind of Dr. Prausnitz works on at least two tracks. First, he considers the challenges beyond the confines of the academy; but he also ranges widely over scientific and humanities literatures for tools to help him to interpret and solve these problems. He was a key mover in the foundation of the field of molecular thermodynamics: using the principles of molecular behavior worked out in physical chemistry to predict properties and behavior of mixtures of substances in various states. The scope of this revolution in engineering is hard to grasp until one considers the fact that many large-scale chemical processing factories were designed, constructed, and operated without careful consideration of chemical behavior at the molecular level. Some of his models that simplified the interactions of types of molecules were adopted by entire industries and would dramatically improve their efficiency and efficacy over the decades.
By immersing himself in the literatures of different scientific disciplines, Prausnitz attacked problems with a much broader perspective than if he had stayed in his field, respecting the boundaries of disciplines. Over the decades, Dr. Prausnitz has also been a witness to the expansion of the field of chemical engineering, from petroleum production processes to electro-chemical engineering to bioengineering. Prausnitz was not merely a champion on the sidelines of these new subfields; he immersed himself, quite late in his career, in molecular biology in order to collaborate on contributions to bioengineering, drawing especially on work with the Department of Energy in its sponsorship of biofuels research. Again, Prausnitz brought to bear his expertise in molecular thermodynamics to help place the research on a stronger footing.
Always, however, Dr. Prausnitz was thinking about the larger context and meaning of the work, and as an academic, this meaning had a lot to do with teaching and students. Like all great mentors, he took an active role in the progress and wellbeing of students and collaborators. As an enthusiast of the history of science, he understands that science is above all a human endeavor and a social process.
– Paul Burnett
From the OHC Director: July 2020
Every year as the semester comes to a close, the Oral History Center hosts a very special event. We call the event our annual Commencement celebrating the Oral History Class of that year. We invite campus friends, project partners, and everyone (and their families and friends) whose oral history we completed in the previous year. Every year this has been a joyous and often moving event. Every normal year, I should say, as we were unable to gather our community together this year. So, like almost every other social gathering, we’ve decided to host our commencement virtually by devoting and dedicating this newsletter to the Oral History Class of 2020. In articles within, you’ll be treated to thoughtful reviews by our interviewers on the past year’s oral histories. We’re also including a feature on a podcast produced by undergraduate Miranda Jiang, which was originally planned to be a live performance at the event. And we’re announcing Ricky Noel as the first winner for the Carmel and Howard Friesen Prize in Undergraduate Oral History Research, which we had hoped to award at the commencement.

This year I’ve also decided to hand over the honor — and the duty — of the commencement address to my very able colleagues at the Oral History Center. Several of the Center’s interviewers have written about their interviews from the previous year, offering well-considered thoughts on what they learned and on what valuable lessons might be drawn from those voices now preserved in our archive. These four “commencement addresses” are worth reading on their own, but taken together they offer a compelling answer to the question: why is oral history unique, or perhaps better, what can oral history uniquely teach me?
Amanda Tewes focuses on her several interviews for the Getty Trust Oral History Project and reveals that conducting interviews — and setting the framework for conducting successful ones — has taught her a great deal about humility, and how humility takes work and planning. Roger Eardley-Pryor contributed a thoughtful piece showing how oral histories uniquely show how expertise is rarely a solitary achievement but one that is possible because of mentorship, collaboration, and even rivalry. Shanna Farrell centers her many interviews for the East Bay Regional Park District project and highlights the many diverse people who need to work together to make something that we too often take for granted — in this case, open space and parklands. Finally, Paul Burnett reflects on the moments in interviews when narrators revealed a failing — personally or institutionally — and struggled with how to respond and how to accept responsibility. I think each of these “commencement addresses” demonstrate not only the breadth and depth of OHC’s collections but also, and equally importantly, that contained within these interviews are innumerable lessons learned and now shared over the narrators’ collective hundreds (or thousands) of years of experience. They show that we are capable of making mistakes but also correcting them, that we change as we grow and often strive to do better. I am thankful for these contributions by my amazing colleagues, as well as for a culture of open dialog that allows people to acknowledge past difficulties without sanction as they themselves pursue a better path forward.
Martin Meeker, Charles B. Faulhaber Oral History Center
The Meaning of Taking Responsibility
These times pose great challenges for us as individuals and as a nation. We are being called upon to look beyond our own narrow interests and to make changes in our behavior to keep ourselves and others safe. In reflecting on my interviews over the past year, most of which are not yet publicly available, I see people who have identified problems and engaged with them directly. I see people having hard conversations, which includes taking some degree of responsibility, either personally or institutionally, for something that has gone wrong, or that has been going wrong for quite some time. I see people who act in accordance with their values.
In the San Francisco Opera project, I see Dramaturg Emeritus Kip Cranna and former General Director David Gockley having difficult conversations about budgets and staffing during periods of crisis, which, in the arts, is always a relative term. I see former UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau spending a lifetime advocating for the excluded and disadvantaged, and taking criticism after making difficult administrative decisions. I see Susan Graham—one of the first professors of computer science at UC Berkeley—participating in the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology that was established during the Obama Administration, which recently warned the federal government of the urgent need to replenish the national stockpile of personal protective equipment that had nearly been depleted after the H1N1 pandemic. And although I did not conduct the interview with nurse administrator Cliff Morrison, I felt close to his story, as it features prominently in the podcast I worked on about the early years of the AIDS epidemic. After spending a career caring for people living with AIDS, Morrison is currently participating in a study of the long-term effects of COVID-19, having contracted the disease while performing similar acts of service in this latest pandemic. In Cliff’s story, he took the step—audacious for the early 1980s—of asking patients what they needed and providing it for them, overriding an established hierarchy in the hospital by doing so. Although he was not the first to suggest patient-centered care, his act of courage was an important catalyst for the development of the “San Francisco Model” of nursing care that has since become a standard around the world.
But one of the interviews that really stays with me is with Bob Kendrick, who had a 60-year career in the mining industry. He tells a story of a mine accident that happened while he was the superintendent. What he relays in the story—and the fact of his telling it—is an example of taking responsibility that I take to heart.
And finally, there’s the oral history of George Leitmann, an engineering science professor at UC Berkeley who returned to Europe and risked his life to fight the Nazis and to make the world a better place.
In recent months, we have all been reminded, again, of the call to respect one another and to act to reduce harm to others, whether this involves simple acts of observing public health recommendations or speaking out and acting against organized discrimination, implicit bias in our own work, and systemic problems with police brutality against African Americans. Many of the oral histories listed below are examples of people who have spent their lives serving some idea of the greater good. I am grateful to all of my narrators this past year for reinforcing the importance of stepping up and taking responsibility for the world we live in, and the world we want to live in.
This year, we celebrate the completion or near-completion of the following interviews:
Bob Kendrick – Global Mining and Materials Research
George Leitmann – University History
John Prausnitz – University History
Bruce Ames – University History
Robert Birgeneau – University History
Susan Graham – University History
David Gockley – San Francisco Opera
Kip Cranna – San Francisco Opera
George Tolley – Economist Life Stories
Winner of the Friesen Prize in Oral History Research
Announcing the Winner of the First Annual Friesen Prize in Oral History Research
The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library is pleased to announce that the winner of the first Carmel and Howard Friesen Prize in Oral History Research is Ricky Noel, for his paper, “Corporate Imperialist Medicine: Aramco’s Health Care Initiatives in Saudi Arabia 1945–1965.” Mr. Noel is a Berkeley undergraduate majoring in history.
The selection committee read the several submissions for the following criteria: How well oral histories are integrated within and essential to the overall essay; how creatively oral histories are used in the essay; and the overall quality and persuasiveness of the essay. Noel’s essay excelled in all three areas. Particularly notable is the fact that his paper demonstrates how oral history interviews can be a crucial, even transformative, source from which new and enlightening historical interpretations can be drawn. Noel drew upon the interviews of the ARAMCO project, which consists of twenty-one oral histories covering the history of the US-Saudi oil operation founded in the 1930s and then sold to the Saudis in 1980.
We applaud Mr. Noel for digging deep into the archives, reading through long and detailed oral histories, and, in the end, hitting pay dirt in terms of fascinating and consequential archival discoveries, such as the public health dimension to US investment in overseas industrial ventures, as is covered in this essay. In this time of remote research, we encourage all students to explore the 4,000 interviews in the Oral History Center online collection and, like Ricky Noel, produce meaningful original research.
Did Masks Work? — The 1918 Flu Pandemic and the Meaning of Layered Interventions
A large number of recent news items have reflected on our current crisis by looking to the past for comfort, commiseration, and even some answers. My own writing on this is no exception. However, we need to be very careful about how we use history to inform our current context.
“Were masks effective in the 1918 flu?”
I was recently asked this question for an article that just appeared in the Smithsonian Magazine. It’s a fascinating exploration of the politics of masks in California during the 1918 flu, and the fact that Mayor Davie of Oakland was jailed for not wearing a mask in Sacramento. However, my statement at the end of the article, applied historically, is not correct by itself. I’m quoted as saying the gauze masks of 1918, “may not have been much use to the user but did offer protection to those around them.” I had in mind the ultimate public health lessons learned from the 1918 flu way down the line, in a study concluded a little more than ten years ago.
But back in 1918, public health leaders who studied the problem thought that the mask laws and mask use by the public were minimally effective.

This is from a study published in 1919 by the California State Department of Health. The above graph showed very little difference in death rates between Stockton, which mandated the wearing of masks in public, and Boston, which did not. So, early on, authorities were skeptical of the effectiveness of masks, but they also felt that masks were not used properly.
Part of the disappointment was that medical authorities had advised using medical gauze, which had a tighter weave than what most people understood as “gauze.” Then as now, not everyone had access to the personal protective equipment solutions that were recommended. People were using cheese cloth for masks, with predictable outcomes. The problem was the user. A more pessimistic appraisal of masks came in a study published in 1921 by physician William T. Vaughan:
“One difficulty in the use of the face mask is the failure of cooperation on the part of the public. When, in pneumonia and influence wards, it has been nearly impossible to force the orderlies or even some of the physicians and nurses to wear their masks as prescribed, it is difficult to see how a general measure of this nature could be enforced in the community at large.”
William T. Vaughan, Influenza: An Epidemiologic Study, (Baltimore, MD: American Journal of Hygiene Monographic Series, No.1, 1921) 241.
Mask skepticism was officially sanctioned by the Surgeon General of the US Navy in a 1919 report:
“No evidence was presented which would justify compelling persons at large to wear masks during an epidemic. The mask is designed only to afford protection against a direct spray from the mouth of the carrier of pathogenic microorganisms … Masks of improper design, made of wide-mesh gauze, which rest against the mouth and nose, become wet with saliva, soiled with the fingers, and are changed infrequently, may lead to infection rather than prevent it, especially when worn by persons who have not even a rudimentary knowledge of the modes of transmission of the causative agents of communicable diseases.”
“Epidemiological and Statistical Data, US Navy, 1918,” Reprinted from the Annual Report of the Surgeon General, US Navy, (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919) 434.
Although the Surgeon General of the US Navy acknowledged that wearing masks by hospital staff was good practice, “the morbidity rate, nevertheless, was very high among those attending the sick,” and may only have prevented infection from a direct, close hit from a cough or sneeze of a patient. The protocols followed in the contagious annex of the US Naval Hospital in Annapolis, MD, were sufficient to prevent cross-contamination of “cerebro-spinal fever” (aka meningitis), diphtheria, measles, mumps, scarlet fever, and German measles. Not so with influenza. In fact, the infection rate of staff was as high in the high-protocol wards as in the improvised hospitals. In one improvised hospital at the Navy Training Station in Great Lakes, IL., the infection rate was higher among those corpsmen and volunteers who wore masks than those who did not!
But what did all of this mean? Again, a discussion of a specific piece of technology by itself is not enough. This was not simply a question of “mask or no mask,” but of design, construction, supply, and use. The wearer needed to use a well-designed mask properly, and change masks frequently. Therefore, most of the expert complaints about masks around the Spanish Flu pandemic in the US seemed to be about the users and reliable access to steady supplies of properly constructed masks, not the concept of wearing a mask.
Indeed, that’s what the research team led by Howard Markel found when the Pentagon asked them to study the Spanish Flu pandemic. In 2007, they published their report on non-pharmaceutical interventions during epidemics and found that there was a “layered” effect of protection by using multiple techniques together: school closure, bans on public gathering, isolation and quarantine of the infected, limited closure of businesses, transportation restrictions, public risk communications, hygiene education, and wearing of masks.
So the key historical question here is not whether or not masks were useless. The broader, more troubling historical pattern that Erika Mailman revealed in her article is clear: the problem of public trust in public health. Some Americans, then as now, do not like being told what to do.
They especially do not like being instructed by “experts.” Americans arguably had more respect for expert authority during the flu pandemic than they do now, but even then, some would wear masks in public to comply with the law, then remove them when they went indoors, in close quarters with others and with poor air circulation, when they needed protection the most. Mayor Davie’s casual rebellion aside, citizens might grudgingly comply with the letter of the law, but not its scientific spirit. I’m reminded of a recent TikTok video of a woman in Kentucky who entered a store wearing a mask with a long slit around the mouth because it “makes it a lot easier to breathe.” Another problem, then as now, was that the right equipment in a time of crisis was unavailable. So people made masks with what they had available. But a cheesecloth mask was probably worse than no cloth, especially if they touched it frequently and changed it rarely.
A public health technology such as a mask is not just a simple, inanimate object. It’s the care with which it is designed and constructed; it is the infrastructure that can assure a steady, sanitary supply; it’s the use of one technology and practice in conjunction with others, and it is especially the informed users who take responsibility for their own health and those of their fellow Americans. Going back to the graph near the beginning of this blog post, we see that the curve of the death rate was bent by this layering of multiple public health interventions. Masks were not used widely and well enough to make much of a difference, but public health authorities tended to believe in their effectiveness for front line workers exposed to the worst of the flu pandemic. If we invested more in public health research, primary health care, and public health education, we could improve even more the quality and quantity of these layered non-pharmaceutical interventions, which worked together in 1918-19 and which are working now. We can do better with building our communication and trust so that all of these measures can work together. But for them to work together, we have to work together.
From the Oral History Center Director — May 2020
From the OHC Director — May 2020

I’m not the only one who has noticed that days seem to have become indistinguishable from one another — that the everyday cycles of life have become something of a blur. Thankfully there are still reminders of change and growth. At my home in Sonoma County, where I’ve been doing my SIP, we had a peek at summer last week when temperatures jumped unto the upper 80s and where, in my garage, my very first brood of chicks is quickly becoming a gang of unruly teenagers. And while our campus remains closed, another school year is just about wrapped up and with it (remote) celebrations for our graduating seniors. In recent years, we’ve worked with an increasing number of undergrads as employees and as apprentices and this year we commend and congratulate these Golden Bears for their contributions to our campus and achievements in the classroom: Gurshaant Bassi, Emily Keats, Nidah Khalid, Emily Lempko, Devin Lizardi, JD Mireles, Kendall Stevens, and Calvin Tang.
Last month in the April newsletter, I wrote about how the Center’s staff was working to bring our usual face-to-face operations into the Zoom Age by exploring the viability of high-quality online interviewing. Our working group, consisting of Paul Burnett, David Dunham, and Roger Eardley-Pryor, has devoted many hours to considering the possibilities and testing the options. I’m very pleased to report that they have developed a menu of workable options that accommodate the varying technological capabilities of our diverse set of narrators, as well as should meet the high expectations of our partners. I’m also very happy to report that at least one of our partner organizations has agreed to sponsor an online life history interview with a key individual in their organization’s history. As the OHC working group tests and fine-tunes their methods, they are documenting the specific processes and writing instructions. Once we’re confident that we’ve found the best possible process (given our uncertain and changing circumstances) we will happily share this with the oral history community. More than anything, we want to continue to do the important work of documenting lives and recording stories so that vital first person accounts of these remarkable and trying times are not lost to history — and we want you to be able to continue this work too!
Speaking of retrofitting for the ‘new normal,’ we are bringing other initiatives online too. Our Summer Institute this year is going virtual, for one. Registration is now open and keep in touch for more information on how the 2020 Institute is going to be run. Moreover, the May newsletter is usually our opportunity to celebrate and express our gratitude for those we interviewed during the previous year. Every April for the past six years, we’ve hosted an “Oral History Commencement,” that brought these folks together for a joyous event on the Berkeley campus. Alas, we’ve had to cancel the event for 2020 but still want to pay due attention to our narrators from the Oral History Class of 2020! Please come back next month for our virtual celebration of those who contributed their time and stories to the ever-growing Oral History Center collection.
Martin Meeker, Charles B. Faulhaber Director
Dispatch from the OHC Director, April 2020
From the OHC Director, April 2020
I’ve been thinking a great deal of late about what it means to live a life connected or disconnected or perhaps something in between. I suspect I’m not alone in pondering these states of being — a kind of remote engagement that itself feels a little bit like connection.
Oral history is about many things: listening, documenting, questioning, recording, explaining. I think connection is always key to the work that we do as oral historians. But like many other operations, including basically all non-medical research projects that involve humans, our work conducting interviews is largely shut-down while we consider how best to forge ahead.

My colleagues and I have always valued the importance of the in-person, face-to-face interviewing experience. We regularly travel across the country at some considerable expense just so we can be in the same room with the person we are interviewing. We have found this time in close proximity with our narrators to be priceless. Not only does this allow us to shake hands, look eye-to-eye, and gauge body language just before and during the interview, but also these are practices that, until recently, have been second nature — we usually do them without thinking much about it. There really is an unconscious kind of dance that happens, especially when meeting someone for the first time, that in most instances results in a spontaneously choreographed fluidity that can carry the ensuring interview through fond memories and bad. Because of this, up to this point, only when it really was impossible to meet in person have we conducted an interview over the phone or online.
But times change. The current health crisis has profoundly rearranged social relationships, and likely for some time into the future. (Dr. Fauci even suggested that we rethink the practice of shaking hands, which, I’ll admit, makes me sad.) The Oral History Center staff have been scattered now for over a month. But we have endeavored to not lose touch with one another. Thanks to multifarious technological options, we have easily transitioned our weekly staff meetings online. We use either Google Hangouts or Zoom and, so far, everyone has used video, so we get to hear each other’s voices and see faces too. We sometimes have agenda items that require lengthy discussion, at other times we simply check in with each other about work but also about “how things are going.” We live in different settings so people have different challenges and we do our best to touch on those. I also chat every week with each of my colleagues individually and I’m very pleased to know that my colleagues have been meeting with each other, doing their best to push projects forward. The success of these virtual meetings, and, well, the zeitgeist, inspired me to set up virtual happy hours with friends and family. My family lives across the country and it’s been probably four years since we’ve been in the same room together but for the past two weeks we’ve all gathered online to check in, tell stories, have some laughs, get serious and, of course, get photobombed by various kids and dogs. We don’t escape the underlying gravity of the current situation, but this hasn’t stopped connection — in some real ways it has promoted it.
So, with this in mind, we are exploring the options for bringing our oral history back to life by bringing it online. We’re currently testing out various options for video and audio recording, paying close attention to everything from quality of recording to ease of use (considering that most people we interview don’t fit within the “digital native” demographic). We also are sensitive to the dimension of personal connection, rapport, and understanding, but given recent experiences “at” home and “in” the office, we have reason to be optimistic. The reasons for going online are not only about opportunity, they are much deeper and in some ways quite profound: every day, every month that passes, we lose an opportunity to interview someone who should have had the opportunity to tell their story. In fact, we just learned the very sad news that artist and advocate of Black artists, David Driskell, passed away due to complications from COVID-19. This was a man with a story to be told — and thankfully, with our partners at the Getty Trust, we conducted his oral history last year. We simply cannot wait out this epidemic and let it steal stories along with lives.
The second profound reason is related to something I’ve mentioned rather delicately here in the past: that the Oral History Center is a soft-money institution. What that means is we are basically a non-profit that earns its money (allowing us to do our work) by conducting interviews. The longer we are prevented from conducting oral histories, the more precarious our position becomes. We hope for but do not anticipate relief from the university, the state, or the federal government. All we want is to resume the good work of documenting our shared and individual experiences in times of growth and times of challenge — to continue the work that we’ve done for the past 66 years.
As we consider the path ahead, the Oral History Center staff continues to work vigorously albeit remotely. We’re finishing the production process on dozens of interviews that have been conducted already — that is, writing tables of contents, working with narrators on edits for accuracy and clarity, creating the final transcripts for bound volumes and open access on our websites. We continue to process original audio and video recordings so that they can be uploaded to our online oral history viewer. We’re writing blog posts about oral history and producing podcasts, including our newest and very topical season, Coronavirus Relief. Plus in addition to the regular work, we’re using this opportunity to focus on long desired projects: We’re creating curriculum for high schools; we’re writing abstracts for old interviews that never had them; and we’re using this time to think about new projects and write grant proposals so that when the time comes, we’ll be ready to go full steam ahead.
Check back here next month for more on our efforts to move oral history online. We’ll share our results publicly as many others are venturing into this domain too — and have themselves made important contributions to the conversation (I especially recommend checking out the free Baylor / OHA webinar on “Oral History at a Distance”). Until then, we sincerely hope that everyone this newsletter reaches stays safe, healthy, and able to remain connected to those who are important to you.
Martin Meeker, Charles B. Faulhaber Director, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library