OHA Conference

“When you're strange
Faces come out of the rain
When you're strange
No one remembers your name.”

The Doors, “People Are Strange”

When I was in college, a professor used a book dealing with the theology of Charles M. Schultz’s cartoon characters.  On WXRT Lin Bremer quoted Charlie Brown from Schultz’s “Peanuts” column saying, “I love mankind . . . it’s people I can’t stand.”  Then he played the Doors number “People Are Strange” from the album “Strange Days.” Jim Morrison evidently came up with the lyrics while battling depression and viewing a sunset from Laurel Canyon with Doors guitarist Robby Krieger.  The song had only two verses repeated several times.  The final lines go:

People are strange when you're a stranger
Faces look ugly when you're alone
Women seem wicked when you're unwanted
Streets are uneven when you're down

Attending my first Oral History Conference 30 years ago, I knew virtually nobody and felt strange and out of place at the opening reception.  By the final day, I was more comfortable since people were generally friendly. Now, at ease attending such gatherings I try to talk to those who look to be feeling what I did back then.

I was delighted when Anne Balay asked me to participate in a session at the 52nd annual Oral History Association (OHA) conference in Montreal, titled “Oral History in our Challenging Times,” about motivating and guiding undergraduates doing oral history projects. My main contribution toward its planning was getting longtime friend from University of Maryland days Don Ritchie, author of “Doing Oral History,” to be its chair.  Once a regular attendee, I hadn’t gone to an OHA conference since 1999 in Anchorage: my main memories are touring a gold mining camp, going on a glacier cruise, and watching Red Sox shortstop Normar Garciaparra at a sports bar starring in a losing cause against the Yankees in the AL championship.  I had begun to switch loyalties to Labor History conferences because of the dearth of such sessions at the OHA but continued to attend IOHA meetings in such locales as Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, and Pietermaritzberg, South Africa.

Even though my nonstop flight from Chicago to Montreal on American Airlines went smoothly, getting through customs was a royal hassle both at O’Hare and Trudeau International Airport.  The Hotel Europa was only a six-block walk to the conference site, Concordia University, and had a cool bistro bar, Addie’s, where I watched an Eagles victory over the hated New York Giants. I talked with three Canadian fishermen from Nova Scotia about the disappearance of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald,which sank in Lake Superior during a 1975 storm with 29 crew members aboard. I bragged about seeing Canadian Gordon Lightfoot live on three occasions.  Addie, the owner, told me after they departed that the guy next to me owned a large fish and lobster business. The weather was cold and rainy for 4 of the 5 days, so I didn’t do much touring, not that I had planned to after learning from a travel guide that the main attractions were museums and cathedrals.

Searching for Registration, I ran into David Caruso, editor of Oral History Review (OHR), who was delighted to learn that I had received the latest issue just two days before.  It contained Alessandro Portelli’s “Living Voices” that begins with dialogue from Arthur Penn’s “Little Big Man” (1979) between an anthropologist and an old frontiersman, Mr. Crabb, supposedly the sole white survivor of Custer’s Last Stand, talking past each other. Portelli’s purpose: to demonstrate a botched inter/view.  When Mr. Crabb is told to talk about tribal lifestyles, not tall tales, this exchange ensues:

  Mr. Crabb: Tall tales?  Are you calling me a liar?

  Interviewer: No, It’s just that I’m interested  in the life of the Indian rather than shall we say – adventures.

  Mr. Crabbe: You think the Battle of Little Bighorn was an adventure?

  Interviewer: Little Bighorn was not representative of encounters between white and Indian, Mr. Crabb.

I started to tell Caruso about souring on the OHA after a folk music proposal I put together that got rejected despite having two acclaimed historians, including Ron Cohen, as speakers.  What I didn’t get to tell Caruso was that I had recruited, after much persuasion, OHA founder Martha Ross and her husband to recite from an oral history about Broadsideeditors Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen. The planning committee probable had never heard of Martha Ross.  Martha’s husband, Don Ritchie later told me, is still alive.  Phyllis Smock took a course with Martha and told me about the OHA. “You do oral history, you should join,” she urged.  That October the Queen Maryin Long Beach provided the setting for my maiden conference.

Middle Tennessee State professor Kristine McCusker, in charge of Registration, noticed I was from IU Northwest and identified herself as an IU grad who had studied under John Bodnar.  I told her how influential Bodnar’s “The Transplanted” had been on my way of viewing immigrant history.  I knew of Bodnar’s prize-winning work on American monuments but not about his recent interest in American pop culture.  “I teach about Elvis in my American survey courses because of his influence,”Kristina said.  Ron later emailed me: “Kristine is afriend of mine from the International Country Music conferences I often attend in Nashville.”

A Kanien’Keha:ka elder, accompanied by drummers and the Medicine Bear singers, delivered the opening innovation and welcome, a practice handled for years by storyteller Brother Blue.  I hugged 92-year-old Ruth Hill, Brother Blue’s widow, who still works 20 hours a week at Radcliffe College, now affiliated with Harvard.  Toni, granddaughter Alissa (then a pre-schooler), and I spent a lovely morning in Santa Fe, New Mexico touring a Native American museum with them. I chatted with Paul Thompson, who 30 years ago hosted my first overseas conference in Oxford, England.  Back then, I was feeling strange and out of place until he greeted me warmly.      

                            
Nearby was Linda Shopes, formerly historian at the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, who had persuaded me to write an article on industrial heritage museums for the prestigious Journal of American History.  After it was published, I was invited to be a consultant for a museum housing first-generation supercomputers in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.  I agreed on the condition that they also hire Steve McShane. Retired Williams College archivist Paul Anderson asked me to give Steve McShane, whom he knew from MAC (Midwest Archives Conferende), his regards.  I told him about Steve and my road trip to Chippewa Falls, where we toured Leinenkugel Brewery and sampled 3-ounce, fruit flavored shots of beer.

above, Maria; below, Sasha

Perusing Wednesday’s conference agenda, I was amazed to discover that Maria McGrath,  daughter of close high school friend Susan Floyd, was chairing and speaking at an 8:30 session titled, “Queer Stories, Queer Lives.”  I knew that Maria taught at Bucks County Community College and that she was a food historian but had no idea that she came to OHA conferences (in fact, this was her first). Her recently completed book contains a chapter on Bloodroot Restaurant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, founded by lesbians Noel Furie and Selma Miriam, formerly married with children, almost a half-century ago as a collective and still in existence. Virtually a who’s-who of second wave feminist leaders spoke at Bloodroot’s Wednesday evening rap sessions.  Maria discussed concepts the founders tried to live by, such as “right livelihood,” “relational commerce,”and “nature idealism.”  Asked if the food was good, Maria was noncommittal, except noting that the menu is vegan. One assertion that left me intrigued was the Selma and Noel, as typical of hippies, sought downward mobility.  Maria was composed and confident.  At one point after stressing Selma’s self-image as a radical feminist, Maria said, “Let me modify that.  Selma wished to be known, above all, as a chef.”

Two of the four presenters were absent, a fortuitous development that left more time for discussion of Maria’s paper and one by Sasha Goldberg, titled “Tending the Bulldagger Archive: Identificatory Practices, Negotiations and Iterations of Lesbian Masculinities in a Post-Trans Temporality.”  Despite the obscure title, it was not bogged down in theory or jargon, and Sasha’s demeanor and delivery were self-confident and quite fetching. Just as I recognized Maria immediately due to the striking resemblance to her mother, Sasha was easily identifiable with old-fashioned butch haircut and tattooed, muscular arms.  Both gave brilliant papers and were very approachable once the session ended.  Maria was delighted to meet me (“my parents won’t believe it,”she exclaimed).  Sasha was an IU grad student whose grandparents live in Miller Beach and whose aunt, lo and behold, was IUN’s former CFO Marianne Milich, a friend and onetime star History student. Small world. During the lively Q and A I learned that “lesbian” was out of fashion compared to “queer” and a new word, terf, standing for trans exclusive radical feminists and usually intended as an insult.  Transvestites are now referred to as cds, for cross-dressers.  Cd sex workers plied the outskirts of IUN’s campus after dark until Chancellor Peggy Elliott cracked down on them. After books on LGBT steelworkers and long-haul truckers, Anne Balay’s next effort will be on sex workers.

 Nisa Remigio

At the next scheduled session, “An Empty Chair Is Not Really Empty,” only two people were in the large room, a Concordia University volunteer and Ruth Hill aka Lady Blue.  Unbeknownst to us, the program had been cancelled. As we chatted, a Concordia grad student, Nisa Remigio, wandered in and then stayed for an hour of intense conversation.  From the Azores, Nisa had come from a session where objects were on display and attendees asked to select one they could identify with and talk about it.  Nisa chose a piece of blue paper like her Portuguese grandmother used to wrap white hand-woven garments dear to her that otherwise would have turned yellow due to the island climate.  Several are still in Nisa’s possession, triggering otherwise forgotten memories.   

 Stephen High on right holding son

At a noon reception hosted by Concordia’s Center for Oral History, director Stephen High spoke passionately about his work.  Obviously popular with both students and faculty, High emphasized the Center’s collaborative projects dealing with various Montreal changing neighborhoods. University of Akron professor Greg Wilson, who teaches public history and published an oral history of the 1970 Kent State massacre, introduced himself.  He knew of former IUN chancellor Peggy Elliott’s brief unhappy tenure at Akron but had not been there then. At the “Oral History Jukebox Workshop” session one track featured a Stephen High interview showed to his students to point out how he had interrupted the narrator too much.  I did a similar self-criticism in Steve McShane’s Indiana History class with a videotaped interview with bridge player Joe Chin.

Having conversed the day before with affable Juan Coronado (above), head of Michigan State’s Oral History of Latinos Project, I attended his session dealing with Mexican-American farm workers in Michigan, Latino legislators in New Mexico, and female United Farm Worker leaders in California.  In Michigan, beginning in the nineteenth century, seasonal workers from Mexico harvested sugar beets, cherries, and blueberries. Coronado identified three stages of Latino permanent settlement, which he labeled Settling Out, Settling Down, and Settling In (joining unions, churches, and organizations such as the GI Forum).   Afterwards, Juan thanked me for asking about the current relationship between year-round residents and farm workers and describing  Abe Morales’ volunteer work with Region farm workers in teaching English and American citizenship preparation.  I promised to send Coronado a copy of “Maria’s Journey,” by Ramon and Trisha Arredondo, which I edited and obtained an Introduction by John Bodnar.

 Alphine Jefferson

The Presidential reception took place in Concordia’s Grey Nuns Building, named for a Sisters of Charity order that wore grey habits, worked at the college, and managed Montreal’s Catholic hospital. As I was talking to Alphine Jefferson of Randolph-Macon College, Anne Balay and Don Ritchie greeted me almost simultaneously.  To my disappointment there was no sign of Maria McGrath or Sasha Goldberg.  I told Stephen High how impressed I was with his student guides, and when I mentioned having chatted with grad student Nisa Remigio, he and two Concordia grad students with him agreed that she was quite remarkable.

Anne Balay and Haverford student Phil Reid had joined me for Juan Coronado’s session, and while Anne went off to a lunch meeting, Phil and I found a Chinese joint at a food court in the tunnel connecting the J.W. McConnell and John Molson buildings.  Phil’s independent study project involved interviewing passersby in a Philadelphia neighborhood containing numerous graffiti works of art.  He’d heard I’d helped Anne get into oral interviewing of gay and lesbian steelworkers.  I frequently teared up describing how her department chair held that against her. He had wanted her to stick to producing largely unread children’s lit articles.  I urged her to go slow, but, as Anne says, that’s not how her genes are programmed.  Because of my staunch defense of her, IUN’s A and S Dean informed me that the university was disassociation itself from the magazine that I had edited for over 40 years. Comforting me when I teared up, he said, “You’re the conscience of the university.”  As Anne would say, WTF?

Jimbo and Maria McGrath; photo by Anne Balay

At Friday’s Diversity reception I introduced Anne and Phil to Alphine Jefferson, who like Anne had studied at the University of Chicago and roomed in the same building. He was with a woman who headed up a Puerto Rican studies program. U.S. Steel’s Gary Works recruited Puerto Ricans beginning in 1948 and initially housed them in Pullman Palace cars.  I told her I bowled with daughter-in-law Delia’s Puerto Rican uncles Phil Vera, Larry Ramirez, Eddie Lopez, and Pete Caudio.  To my surprise, Maria McGrath joined us. We all got along famously and, after Alphine left, continued the conversation for another 90 minutes, well after the reception ended.  Maria and Anne were both meeting people later at the same function, what Anne called a lesbian dinner.  “I didn’t know that,” Maria said, adding that she wasn’t gay (22-year-old Phil went, too). Dick Clark’s name came up, and I bragged about attending a Willow Grove Amusement Park record hop featuring the “American Bandstand” host and dancing with 50s “one hit wonder” (“Love Could Be Like This”) Mary Swan until someone cut in on me 20 seconds later.   I mentioned the huge 1974 parade in Philadelphia after the Flyers won their first Stanley Cup.  “I was at it with my dad,” Maria declared. Hope to get to know her better.

Fred Burrill

Stephen High’s Saturday session on deindustrialization featured community organizer Fred Burrill speaking about violent protests over the rapid gentrifying of Montreal’s St.-Henri neighborhood, whose new high rise condos blocked the sun and overpriced shops and restaurants held little appeal for longtime residents. Bearded Burrill referred to workers bouncing from job to job with no security nor benefits as “global benchwarmers.”  Presenter Lachlan MacKinnon castigated short-sighted Chamber of Commerce types on the Cape Breton Island city of Sydney in Nova Scotia for quashing efforts to convert an abandoned steel plant into an industrial heritage museum.  The “Solid Citizens” (as Sinclair Lewis labeled those types a century before) deemed it too distant from the tourist area, opting instead for a lame display and commemorative rock labeled “good-bye to all of that.”  MacKinnon characterized the decision as “working-class erasure.”  Maddening.  I told a representative from the impressive Lehigh Valley Industrial Museum that Anne Balay has brought Haverford students there with a retired steelworker conducting the tour.

 Paul Thompson

Paul Thompson’s talk on “Oral History in its World Context” noted the expansion of oral history’s parameters since a half-century ago and reiterated that its central purpose should be to unearth hidden voices, in other words, record the unrepresented.  The planners should have made the distinguished Thompson a plenary speaker rather than put him with an otherwise undistinguished panel. Thompson held up the first and recently published seventh edition of his classic oral history anthology “The Voice of the Past,” which dwarfed the original. It brought to mind that volume 1 of Steel Shavingswas just 40 pages, compared to volume 47’s 320. I introduced myself to Daniel Garcia, a scholar from Georgia who studied under recently deceased labor historian Cliff Kuhn and promised to send him my latest Shavings,which eulogizes Kuhn. Garcia’s business card identified him as “the alternative history”but listed no university affiliation – ominous and tragic if the job market is that tight. 

PNW Dean Elaine Carey

The plenary session on “Remembering 1968: The Year that Shook the World” was disappointing save for Purdue Northwest Dean Elaine Carey’s talk, titled ‘Plaza of Sacrifices” (the title of her 2005 book) on the Mexico City student riots that broke out around the time of the Olympic games.  Unlike Carey’s paper, the others – on Vietnam Vets, the Black Panthers, and the Poor People’s Campaign – gave no evidence of benefitting from oral testimony. I told her she did Northwest Indiana proud.  She knew about me from PNW colleague Kenny Kincaid and vowed to visit the Archives. I told she should meet Heather Augustyn, a lecturer at her school who has written several books about Jamaican ska music, including “SKA: An Oral History.”

Last stop Saturday: an IOHA reception at McKibben’s Irish pub whose sumptuous buffet included fried calamari, corned beef sandwiches, yummy guacamole, and free lager on draft.  We found seats at a small table inhabited by a Texas middle school teacher who used Don Ritchie’s “Doing Oral History.” I told Anne and Phil, an English major, about favorite novelist Richard Russo’s best friend’s decision to undergo a sex transference into a woman.  Russo initially thought it selfish, as the person had a wife and children and buddies who liked to hang with him.  The operation almost proved fatal due to infection, but Russo and the wife remained by his side.

Scheduled for Sunday at 9 a.m., our session, “Talking to Strangers: Teaching Ethical Oral History Methods to Undergraduates,” drew a standing room only crowd of over 50, much to our surprise.  Nisa Remigio positioned herself in the first row, notebook in hand. The night before, inspired by Sasha Goldberg’s candor, I spruced up my prepared remarks with ribald anecdotes about bowling banquets and steelworker tales, drawing laughs.  So did this paragraph:

  In Jyväskylä, Finland, for the 2018 IOHA conference, I was conversing with scholars from Australia, Ireland, and South Africa who had interviewed victims of molestation and Rwandan genocide survivors.  “What are you working on?” one asked.  Senior bowlers and duplicate bridge players, I replied with just a hint of hesitation.   In my defense, there is considerable scholarly interest in the decline since World War II of volunteer associations as well as in the contemporary lifestyle of aging Baby Boomers. Students learned that romances, not surprisingly, have blossomed at the lane and card tables, both straight and gay, platonic and sexual (although students didn’t want to hear details about the latter). Virtually no college students play bridge nowadays, but since many subjects were retired teachers and gave lessons to their interviewers.  On my advice, students visited bridge games, where they were warmly welcomed.  Several lasting inter-generational friendships resulted. 

One motive for having my students meet active seniors is to counteract misconceptions and stereotypes about the elderly. Afterwards, an audience member applauded that goal, adding that young people often know just one or two seniors and generalize based on that small sample.

The other panelists, in addition to Anne Balay and Phil Reid, were Amanda Littauer and Christina Abreu from Northern Illinois University.  Christina’s parents live in Highland.  All of us, I thought, did well and stuck to our allotted time.  Phil announced he’d be reading his remarks since he was nervous and delivered them with breakneck speed but got a big round of applause.  Amanda and Christina examined privacy issues and worried about students coping with traumatic testimony by LGBT narrators and undocumented workers.  Christina noted that, despite advice against it due to poor quality, students often opt to use iPhones as recording devices. Don Ritchie was the consummate chair, as I knew he’d be, introducing me as a longtime friend, archives do-director, and Steel Shavingseditor, and handling the 30-minute audience participation flawlessly. My only regret was blowing an opportunity to draw the session to a close by repeating the translated title of Don Ritchie’s primer and saying, “Everybody should do oral history.” Bidding farewell to Nisa, I told her to keep a daily journal and she gave me a hug.

Homeward bound.  When I complimented American Eagle flight attendant on her ability to add ice cubes to drinks she’d poured, she smiled appreciatively and said that diet pop comes out half foam if she places the ice in the cup first.  Recalling the long lines passing through customs returning to O’Hare from Finland, I was delighted to find myself directed to baggage claim and then free to exit the terminal.  Limo driver Ron had me home within the hour.  He’d had experience as a record producer, so I told him and Vivian Carter and Vee-Jay Records.  As he pulled into our condo court, he said he’d be googling Vivian Carter and Vee-Jay as soon as he got home.