Fifty years ago “oral history” was a term of low esteem in the academy, akin to “folklore” and “populist.” And when UCLA started one of the first recorded oral-history programs in the country, it risked looking more lowbrow than high-minded. Today, however, recorded oral history, popularized by such chroniclers as writer Studs Terkel, Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation and tens of thousands of family amanuenses, has a solidly respectable name.

When UCLA founded its Oral History Program in 1959, it was only the third university in the country to have done so. Columbia University was the first; its program started in 1948, and for many years thereafter, few in academe took much notice. History, after all, had been established since the 19th century as a discipline based on the study of written documents. The advent of tape recording after World War II prodded the field to evolve faster than it might have liked. While technology offered a new way to preserve and study individuals’ accounts of events, many scholars were unconvinced of the value of this new approach.

James Mink ’46, M.A. ’49 was the assistant head of special collections in the UCLA Library in 1959. He recalls at the time that even the man appointed to chair UCLA’s new oral-history committee, John W. Caughey, was “extremely dubious” of this turn in historical scholarship. When Mink took the reins as director in 1964, he was determined to elevate its status. He convened the first national colloquium on oral history in 1966, which led to the founding of the Oral History Association. Two years later he sponsored the first nationwide training institute in oral history. More researchers began using oral history in their studies of underrepresented groups, and the discipline began moving toward the mainstream.

Though Mink gave the field a critical push forward, UCLA’s program could not have started in ’59 without a champion or champions. Clearly someone in the University of California system grasped the importance of oral history at a time when other universities were taking a wait-and-see approach; UC Berkeley started its program, the second in the country, in 1954. Five years later, the UC regents, urged ahead by historians, librarians and other members of the university’s community, funded UCLA’s program to ensure “equal treatment” of the northern and southern campuses, Mink says. The mission of UCLA’s program was, and still is, to focus on the people and history of Southern California.

Since its inception, UCLA’s interviewers have collected more than 800 histories, most of them multi-session interviews lasting six to 12 hours and sometimes longer. Famous subjects include former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley ’41, director George Cukor, “Popeye” animator Dave Fleischer, artists Robert Irwin and Ed Kienholz, architect and father of the California ranch house Cliff May, choreographer Bella Lewitzky, blacklisted Hollywood writers, many current and former UCLA faculty and, in keeping with oral history’s traditional focus on the unsung, hundreds of lesser-known individuals. Major series in the collection include the Central Avenue Sounds histories of local jazz musicians, and the Frank Lloyd Wright Design Heritage interviews with associates of the seminal Prairie Style architect.

Each interview requires days of research and preparation by one of the program’s six staff members. The interview takes place in multiple sessions spread over several weeks. The complete tape — the program still uses audiotape, although it is trying to obtain funding to upgrade to digital recorders — is stored in the climate-controlled Southern Regional Library Facility on the UCLA campus. Aside from occasional problems with “sticky shed,” the name given to the physical disintegration of a layer of tape, even the oldest interviews remain playable. Written transcripts and an audio copy of the interviews are available through the UCLA Library Department of Special Collections. A handful are available online through the California Digital Library, but for now, librarians say, there is not sufficient funding available to post the entire collection on the Web.

The program’s selection policy leads to some logical but surprising omissions. It does not collect oral histories from people who have written an autobiography, on the assumption that they will tend to repeat themselves. That construct has, for example, eliminated legendary Bruin basketball coach John Wooden from consideration.

Alex Cline has been collecting histories for the program for 16 years. Currently he is interviewing behind-the-scenes characters from Los Angeles’ vibrant music scene of the late ’60s to the early ’70s. The idea, says Cline, who is himself an acclaimed jazz percussionist, came to him during an interview with Todd Schiffman, who was the booking agent for The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and other famous acts, and whose business partner in those days was the young David Geffen.

It is a project that defines perfectly UCLA’s niche. There is no shortage of books about Jim, Janis and Jimi. But if not for the oral-history program, who would take the time to show what was really going on in the L.A. music scene? Cline is aware of oral history’s struggle to be taken seriously, but his own experience in the field leaves no room for scholarly quibbles.

“It’s important because, aside from filling a lot of the gaps in terms of what might be available in the historical record … it’s about us. It’s about people. It personalizes, humanizes and in that sense vitalizes history,” he says.

Cline also believes oral history has an edge in spontaneity that is lacking in memoirs and diaries. A person’s comments may be more valuable, Cline says, if they have less time to think about how to present themselves. Memoirs, especially those of the political variety, are famously plagued with self-justification and image-crafting.

The search for a spontaneous exchange accounts in part for the program’s reluctance to film its subjects during interviews. Though she has not ruled out using video in the future, Teresa Barnett M.A. ’00, the current director of UCLA’s Oral History Program, feels subjects tend to be less guarded off-camera.

Barnett has been with the program for 17 years, beginning as an interviewer straight out of college. She then went on to graduate studies in history at UCLA. In that sense, she says, she came to history through oral history. It did not take her long to realize that many historians still did not offer oral history due respect. She recalls the comment of an older professor during a conference in the early ’90s: “It’s OK for anecdotal, you know … you wanna add a little local color, sure, throw in some oral history.”

“That view has been very predominant,” says Barnett.

Two movements have helped to dislodge oral history’s amateurish reputation. Tired of their stepchild status, oral historians quit apologizing for the unavoidable shortcomings of their discipline — faulty memories, biased interviewees, technical problems — and began questioning written sources’ own validity.

“The memory issues are real, but they’re also real in any memoir someone writes,” Barnett points out. Other types of records have systematic inaccuracies, she adds.

“Anybody who’s been in any organization and seen the official rules, and then observed how things really get done — there may be a wide, wide discrepancy there,” Barnett says. “So if you’re a historian and you’re relying on the written rules … it’s an ideal. Whereas if you interview someone they might say, ‘Well, of course, the boss said that, but in fact, in order to do anything you have to [do this and this]. …’”

Also there was a vanguard of theoreticians in the late ’70s who started building a rigorous framework that moved oral history beyond the tired debates about literal accuracy. These researchers argued that even faulty memories of certain events have much to teach us about the way we construct history. While collecting oral histories in a small Italian town, University of Rome Professor Alessandro Portelli, for example, noticed that many of his subjects made the same factual error. They moved by four years the date when a young worker named Luigi Trastulli was killed in a clash with police during an anti-NATO demonstration in 1949. Instead, they recalled the event having occurred in 1953 during a period of massive layoffs that led to large demonstrations. Their recollections, Portelli noted, had shifted to a period that had a much more profound and lasting impact for the community.

“The discrepancy between fact and memory ultimately enhances the value of the oral sources as historical documents,” Portelli wrote in a now-famous paper. “It [the discrepancy] is not caused by faulty recollections … but actively and creatively generated by memory and imagination in an effort to make sense of crucial events and of history in general. Indeed, if oral sources had given us ‘accurate,’ ‘reliable,’ factual reconstructions of the death of Luigi Trastulli, we would know much less about it.

“Oral history sources tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing and what they now think they did,” Portelli has written.

Subjective experience is a historical phenomenon, says Barnett, citing for example the different views of one’s self and one’s community in oral histories from Western versus Eastern Europe. But, Barnett adds, the full analytical potential of oral history has yet to be unlocked. “Most historians are still using oral history in a kind of, ‘Just the facts, ma’am’ sort of way,” she says.

Of course, getting the facts and getting them right remains the priority in any oral-history interview. When hiring interviewers, Barnett looks for someone with strong knowledge in areas of interest to the program. In addition to Cline, who conducts most interviews relating to music, the program’s staff includes an independent filmmaker with a doctorate in film. Every new interviewer must pass the program’s own training workshop. After an interview is transcribed, the transcript goes back to the interviewee for fact checking.

Inevitably, some mistakes and biases get past the editing process. “Every source is biased in its own way and I think you just have to know that and you try to look at all the sources in connection with each other,” says Barnett. In as much as this caveat applies across all historical sources, it shows oral history may finally rank as an equal among its peers.

The First Oral Historian

The beginning of oral history as an academic movement is wrongly credited to Allan Nevins, who founded Columbia University’s oral-history office in 1948. Two years earlier, in 1946, a psychology professor from Chicago named David Boder lugged 60 pounds of primitive recording equipment, including 200 spools of carbon steel wire and an assortment of converters and transformers, to postwar Europe to interview displaced persons in France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany, many of whom were survivors of Nazi concentration camps.

It was the first methodical application of recording to oral history, and the idea was so new that Boder had no name for it. When he returned with 109 recorded interviews totaling 120 hours, he called his recordings “the world’s first spoken literature.” Sadly for Boder — who borrowed from his life insurance to finance the expedition and who suffered a serious heart attack the week his first book of interviews was published — the world did not take notice. The book quickly went out of print. Boder’s health deteriorated, and his doctor advised him to move to a warmer climate. In 1952, he retired from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and became a research associate in the psychology department at UCLA.

In welcoming Boder, UCLA shares with IIT the distinction of having been the first to support a recorded oral-history project. In many ways Boder’s project was the perfect application of oral history. There were at the time few written descriptions of daily life and events in the concentration camps. There were as yet few diaries from the survivors, who had been free for only a year and had spent much of that time recovering from starvation and disease. There was not even a name for what would later be called the Holocaust. Only Boder attempted to fill the postwar void. His interviews are the only extensive testimonials collected from survivors so soon after the war. As such, they are perhaps the most important historical sources about the Holocaust.

Boder’s interviews cover an enormous variety of wartime experience, not all of it from inside the camps. One of the most haunting stories concerns a family hiding from the Germans in the woods of Poland. The father, mother, adolescent daughter and 3-year-old son lived in constant fear of discovery. Eventually the father announced they would have to leave their son behind — he made too much noise and could give them all away. The mother refused, and the father left the family. Near starvation, the mother and daughter risked their lives by entering a Polish village to beg for food. When they returned to their hiding place, the boy had died. The mother died from grief a few days later. Only the daughter was left to tell Boder her family’s story.

Evalyn Segal was a student when she worked for David Boder in the summer of 1953. “He wanted to analyze the interviews’ ‘adjective-verb ratio,’ to see if that would provide an index to the speaker’s emotional state,” she recalls. “I was 21, just about to start graduate school in psychology in the fall.

“I must have read each of the transcribed interviews three or four times. I would sit at my desk, tears streaming down my face, trying to count adjectives and verbs. What I was learning was a revelation to me. When I told my parents about it, they were alarmed that their little girl was being put through such an emotional experience — as if it weren’t a crucial, and welcome, turning point in my life.”

Boder worked at UCLA from 1952 until his death in 1961. Of the 109 interviews, only eight had been published in his 1949 book, I Did Not Interview the Dead. Boder transcribed 70 interviews in all. The other 39 interviews have never been transcribed. His papers are in the collection of the UCLA Library’s Department of Special Collections. The original recordings are in the Library of Congress.

Tips for the Would-be Interviewer

For those who want to do their own family oral history, the UCLA Oral History Program can provide detailed suggestions on the types of questions to ask, equipment and recording guidelines, interview preparation and interviewing techniques, as well as the titles of manuals and how-to books on oral history. For more information or for referrals to training workshops, contact the UCLA Oral History Program. Here are a few tips to help you get started:

• An oral history is not about the interviewer. Your role is to ask questions and listen, not to share your experiences.

• A chronological organization is the best structure for an oral-history interview.

• Start a new topic with a broad question — “Tell me about” or “Can you describe” — that launches the interviewee into an in-depth description or reflection.

• You are collecting stories, not just facts or opinions. Try to get the specifics of an interviewee’s experience before you ask them to reflect on or assess that experience.

• Don’t interrupt.

• Have follow-up questions ready for when an interviewee finishes answering your initial question.

• Keep questions concise and focused.

• Avoid yes or no questions, except to clarify specific details.

• Don’t start the interview with highly personal or sensitive questions.

• Be ready to challenge the interviewee when there seems to be more to a story than you are being told.

Documenting Denial

Though Turkey for more than 85 years has rejected the claims of Armenians that 1.5 million of their people were slaughtered by the Ottoman Empire during World War I — the first example of genocide in the 20th century — Richard Hovannisian Ph.D. ’66 parries such denials with the voices of the victims.

Over the past 40 years, UCLA’s holder of the Armenian Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Armenian History and his students have collected close to 800 oral histories. Other Armenian groups have undertaken their own oral-history projects, but Hovannisian asserts that his is the largest. “We sort of started about the same time,” he says. “We all had a sense that the last generation of Armenians to be born in the Ottoman Empire was fast disappearing.”

As that generation died off, they were taking with them not only eyewitness accounts of wartime atrocities, but also the collective memory of the customs and ideals of a civilization 3,000 years old. “What was being lost was enormous,” says Hovannisian.

The focus of his collection, however, remains the murder, forced deportation and death by starvation of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and 1916. Hovannisian has amassed what he considers incontrovertible proof of the event, including evidence of premeditation in the similar accounts of Turkish actions by survivors from different regions. Hovannisian says the survivors describe a similar sequence of events: first, a government order to disarm and turn in any weapons; arrests of priests and community leaders; a relocation order, to be carried out within two or three days; before relocation, adult males are killed outright; women and children march for weeks, during which time more than half die; the survivors find they have been relocated to the open desert; a majority die there, though some are taken in by Bedouin tribes or find some other way to survive.

Despite widespread media coverage and an international outcry, the genocide was quickly forgotten — so quickly, that Hitler used it to convince his ministers that no one would remember the Nazis’ extermination campaign against European Jews. Hovannisian and his students are now focusing on the children of survivors. Almost all the interviews have been converted to digital form and stored on a hard drive. About a quarter to date have been transcribed into Armenian. Hovannisian hopes to obtain funding to finish the transcriptions and translate them into English.