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Doing Oral History
Now I know this is a course that uses a lot of technology. Were your technology skills good going in?
I'm not technologically incompetent but I'm not very good with it. I'm not a very technologically inclined person. Even though we have a laptop program at Urban, I prefer to take notes in a notebook or in a binder, and I use my computer to type my essays and check my email, but that's pretty much it for me. We use them in our math classes and our science classes. Occasionally there's like specific programs we can use for directed or specific learning, but besides that it's pretty much... At a rudimentary level I can, but otherwise not so much.
Why did you specifically choose to take this course?
Yes. You can come into Urban as a eighth grader and shadow a class and sit in and see what you like about it and what you don't like about it. Then you can come in for the open houses and I came in for one of the open houses and Howard was leading one of the workshops and this program is his pride and joy and he always finds a way to fit it in to one of his little schpiels and so he was talking about this program and showing us this web site and it was brilliant and I really wanted to be a part of it. My grandfather fought in World War II and so that was an interesting personal connection that I had with it. It was personally relevant and germane for me. And I just wanted to know more.
I am a history teacher. One of the things that is so important to me is that history comes alive in whatever capacity for the student. How did history come alive in this course? Was it always in the interviewing or at other moments?
History has come alive for me at Urban in so many ways, that's just a hard question. I feel like at Urban history is really focused on the scrutiny of primary sources especially, that's a really big thing that we do here. And the analysis of fresh ideas. We sit in a circle with maybe twelve to fifteen of our peers and talk about what we think of a text. Those discussions were valuable for me in the oral history context, but mostly it was the interviewing. There was a lot of preparation that went into the interview beforehand and a lot of anticipation. But the actual interview is what made it valuable.
What did you do in the preparation in the first part of your class of 12 weeks to get ready for the interviews?
I transferred into the class a couple weeks late, I was thinking about taking a neurobiology class and then I decided this is kind of silly, I am much more of a humanities oriented person than a math and science person. So I transferred into the class kind of late so I don't know what they did during the first couple of weeks. When I came in one of my main assignment was to pick an interview that was already up on the web that had already been published by previous students in previous years and to study that interview. I went through and I read all of it and watched all of the little movie clips just to gain a sense of what the interview was supposed to be like, what kinds of questions you could ask, what kinds of responses those questions were going to generate. And in so doing, I got a little bit of a feel for what my interview was going to look like. That was the main assignment.
My other assignment was to pick out highlight clips from that interview and make a timeline of that interview. Those were additional things that could be put up on the web site in conjunction with that interview. I was building up the web site learning about the history of this person and picking up skills that I could use in my own interview.
I have a couple of questions that are going to go in a little bit of a constellation and then hopefully come around and jump in at any point. The person that you interviewed, was that person assigned to you, did you discover that person?
We got to choose whether we wanted to dabble in one of three areas. You could interview a Holocaust survivor, a Holocaust liberator or a Japanese internee. I decided I definitely wanted to interview either a survivor or a liberator, and then I was assigned to a liberator—Warren Dunn—who was my interviewee.
It sounds like discovery was a big part of this process and you mentioned the worksheets you did at your last school. Did you have any concerns about jumping into primary source material thinking it might be boring and so on, and what was part of that process of discovery?
Jumping into the primary sources was something we did automatically our freshman year. All freshman are required to take a Twentieth Century history class and that's when you really start to analyze all these primary sources. I didn't really know what it meant to analyze before I came to Urban. It's kind of a gradual immersion process, but they definitely get you thinking about that right away from the start.
Your curiosity was already there?
Yes, absolutely, and being in the Urban history program made me more passionate about history, but I think that was also there intrinsically from the beginning.
Now that you've been a part of making a primary document through this interview, what are your thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of oral history as a form of capturing the moment as compared to some of the other things you may have been analyzing since freshman year?
I think it's really amazing and I think that in the moment of interviewing you're just so—you have to be so engaged that there is no way you can't pick up something or learn something from the process of interviewing. If you're reading a text or analyzing a source you have the possibility of dozing off or not being focused, but when you're in the interview, you have to be there 100%, you have to be spontaneous and impulsive, and you have to be listening and captivated and in that way it's really...
If you don't mind me prodding this issue further, what about then those who down the line who might be using the interview you created, rather than just when you're in the moment—like when you said one of the first things you did in class was watch another interviewer. How was that different than reading someone's journal?
I think it's because you get to see the emotional reactions that are elicited from the questions in the interviewees face and body language and I think that's important to—I'm trying to think of specific moment—I studied an interview of Charles Newton who was also a liberator, and at the end they asked him to do a little bit of self-reflection and he said that he thought that "everyone in their life should write a book, plant a tree and have a child." When he said that there was this sort of expression on his face that was kind of like, "These are the three things that you absolutely have to do and this is what I'm encouraging you to do, this is what I've done and this is how it's served me in my life." It's really potent for a viewer to be able to see that.
I'm really curious about the steps involved with creating this interview. It's not like you can call a guy who is a Holocaust survivor and say, "Hey, do you mind if I have another two hours of your time?" What was the initial groundwork like? Why don't we start there, and then carry it out.
All of the students in our class before we went into the actual interview were required to do a pre-interview. We'd call up our interviewee, and get a basic timeline of their lives, so we knew what we were working with. In the case of my particular interviewee who was a liberator, he had written a book about all of his experiences. Both myself and my interview partner had to read that book before we went into the interview, so that we were prepared. Are you asking about the process of actually going into the interview?
Yes. You read a book, was it a memoir type thing?
Yeah. Yeah.
So you had a pretty good sense of who the guy was, and that probably helped you create your questions?
Yes, Yes.
Then let's just go to the day itself. Did you meet at his house, or here at school?
Actually the requirement was you had to participate in one interview, and observe at least one interview. So the day that I went—my interviewee lived in Monterey, which is pretty far away—I was observing an interview right before that. So I had sat through two hours of testimony before my actual interview. You can imagine I was pretty—it was pretty heavy material and I was pretty exhausted. The minute I walked into my interviewee's house I felt like there was an immediate change of pace, and he was so open to talking with us. The group that had interviewed before us was in charge of set-up for our interview, while we broke the ice with our interviewee. We talked to him about his family, and his travels, and stuff like that. Howard does preparation with us about that too, about what are you going to talk to them about during schmooze time? It's all very lined up. Then we start the actual interview by asking them to do a little bit of a summary of their life, just like you did right now with me like "where did you grow up?" and all that stuff. Some of them last just a minute—they just say, "I was born here, I went to this camp, and then I moved to the States," and then some of them go on for 30 minutes. My interview went on for about 30 minutes.
The schmooze interview?
After schmoozing, when you sit down for the first question. He gave a pretty thorough, pretty meticulous review of his life. So we got to dive right into the really interesting questions with him, which was great. Howard would—before I was talking about interview strategies, my interview partner and I—he was a sophomore boy, I'm a senior girl, so that was kind of an interesting dynamic in and of itself. We decided—we broke it up into chunks, and for each chunk there would be a primary interviewer and a follow-up interviewer, and that would switch with each chunk. So it's kind of an amalgamation of the two different philosophies that he was talking about before.
Do you feel like it was helpful to not have a lot of history with your co-interviewer, and that it benefited in the interview? Or, do you think it would have been better to have known someone really well?
I don't know. I didn't experience it the other way. The interview process didn't make me and my interview partner closer at all. It was really just—I felt like, he was there, and he was asking questions and we switched off with our sections, and we had fairly good chemistry, but for me it mostly about me and the interviewee.
I'm wondering how intimate this felt as compared to how—sort of rehearsed and professional? I imagine you had to keep track of a lot of details in your head?
Yes.
But were you able to enjoy the moment?
Oh yes, no definitely. I feel like I should tell you a little about this guy, he's so interesting. His name is Warren Dunn, and he was a liberator of Dachau. He was enrolled in the ROTC program at UCLA. He spent most of his formative years in Santa Barbara. He was inducted into the military in, I think, '43, and then shipped overseas in November of '44, and he landed in Marseilles. He was pretty much engaged in combat, whether in a defensive or offensive position, until 1945. His company commander was shot, and he had to become the company commander of his division, which was the 42nd Rainbow Division. Their claim to fame was that wherever they defeated Hitler or were victorious, they would paint a rainbow. So there's hundreds of rainbows in Germany right now. It was in that capacity of company commander that he went and liberated Dachau. He stayed in, I think, Austria for about a year after the war as a division information, and education officer. Then he came to the States, and now he's a rocket scientist, which is really cool. So we have these amazing people to interview.
Were you star struck?
Yes, I was so scared, I was so nervous. But he had such a welcoming, nurturing personality that it made it really easy for me to be affable with him.
There wasn't a sense of intimidation when you walked in? You said when you walked in the place that the pace changed. What did you mean by that?
He had water and juice out for us, and he was ready for us to come. He was so excited. His wife was there, and she really wanted to meet us, and he really wanted to introduce her to us. He knew that we had read his book, and he knew that we were kind of coming in prepared for the interview, but at the same time, he was the company commander of a division that liberated Dachau. It's like, "Whoah."
It's not like your average guy on the street.
Right. There's something really special about his story that you want to capture and extract. I guess it's kind of, in that sense, it's sort of a relief that you have someone there to do it with you, and that you have a history instructor there in case you miss something really important. I guess it was kind of a mix of feelings.
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