Talk Is Cheap (and priceless)

My father was not taciturn in his speech but he did think that actions spoke louder than words. Among his most firmly held beliefs was his conviction that the material consequences of the work he accomplished – water well drilling and plumbing -- would speak to the memory of his existence. I know some of my father’s inventions. He crafted (invented) a well-drilling rig on a homemade oak and steel frame, for example, and short of both money and access to proper well drilling equipment he made many of his own heavy tools. Unfortunately, unlike the visible fruits of labor of sculptors or architects, my father’s work was inconspicuous except to the few who chanced to examine it at close range. Still, what one did rather than what one wrote or spoke, was what mattered most to him. He did not disdain the written and spoken word but neither did he think that either was as important as the useful knowledge of the craftsman. In his mind, “book learning” was not bad; it was just secondary to the invention that flowed from experience in material crafts. For my father, those who talked were worse than those who wrote. Almost every time after having had to listen to someone talk too much (and, on more than one occasion, that included his two sons and his daughter), he would mutter: “the empty wagon is the one that makes the most noise.”

I cherish the memory of accompanying my father to drill wells with his improvised machinery, and of watching him solve a knotty plumbing problem. But I also wish that I had some verbal or oral artifacts of his life to pass along to my sons and grandsons. I only have vague ideas about his life between his birth in 1896 and WWI. I know he briefly joined the “Wobblies” (IWW) (a “youthful mistake,” he later told me) while training as a steamfitter in Detroit, and I know that he was inducted into the U. S. Army late enough in the WWI to avoid being sent “over there.” His life in the 1920s and 1930s – those were all depression years where we came from -- and even much of the 1940s will always remain obscure to those few of us who still remember him. What my brother and sister and I recall of him are more the incomplete remembrances of children and adolescents than of keen observers.

Neither my brother nor my sister and I ever shared my father’s view on the limited value of books. We all read a fair amount (my brother read an enormous amount), and I entered a profession that required constant reading. For a long time, however, I probably shared some of my father’s prejudice about “talk.” Perhaps my ill-formed diminution of “talk” or oral sources was reinforced because I am an 18^th century historian, whose primary sources are manuscripts. I have always loved research that involved diaries, journals, letters, even commonplace books and almanacs, and I have always pitied those poor modern historians who had to use lesser materials like radio broadcasts and film and oral history evidence. Oral, spoken evidence was too light, too transient, too unreflective, and too “cheap” to for me to take seriously.

For the past year now, I have been conducting oral history interviews of persons who were engaged in the founding and early development of the university where I spent my career – The University of Lethbridge. Because it was not founded until 1967, many of its earliest members are still able to remember well their involvement in that university’s early years. Yet, my initial motives were more negative than positive in regard to recording these interviews. Instead of lauding the richness of oral history interviews, I too often have said (and still say), that the regrettable lack of written sources about this university’s first formative years makes the use of oral history sources necessary. No one has left rich diary and journal sources. No one’s correspondence remains extant, and since the rise of computers and email, it is certain that useful electronic source materials disappear in a nano-second as well. So, I sigh and lament that all I can do is record fifty or so oral history interviews (twenty-seven are completed as of this date). Because I have the time, I usually add with little enthusiasm, that I might as well finish this project on the first generation of the U of L out of duty. These interviews just have to be done, I suggest with the tone of voice of someone who must wash the evening dishes. Before I began the project, I also said to myself (and no one else) that these interviews would be like mining some low-grade ore field, looking for a few nuggets valuable enough to keep. I thought I was looking for a few meager answers to specific questions about the origins, policies, programs, governance, liberal education, and people of the first decade of the University’s existence.

I was wrong, of course, and after my first interviews, I slowly began to distance myself from my snobbery and weak prejudices. What I found were fascinating, highly varied, stories about childhoods and personal educational experiences. Arcs of personal narrative, of personal history, emerged in the earliest interviews and have continued ever since. The enormous achievements of my colleagues in their personal and professional lives made me much more humble about my own accomplishments, and made me respect the fullness of everyone’s life when put into an autobiographical context. I have put most of my pre-planned, specific questions aside. I now start each interview with no notes. I just try to encourage interviewees to describe their lives, and then we proceed largely on autopilot. I eventually “converse” too much with everyone I record, but what my interviewees say is so evocative of our shared past that I often cannot keep my mouth shut (my father was right, at least about me). I now find myself contemplating more openly the views of others about teaching or research or curricula or programs or liberal education that I once resisted openly and forcefully. With every new interview, my respect for oral history sources increases.

This is not to say that I am blind to the shortcomings of oral history. Remembrance of the past well after the occurrence of events is problematical at best. Autobiographies – which oral history interviews are in short form -- are one of the weakest forms of historical evidence. My personal narrative, biographic approach creates incomplete and false historical narratives. My role as an interviewer who converses with his subjects – and one who was a participant in or observer of most of the events discussed – further distorts any objective picture of the past. But, look at those written sources I used to admire above all others. Personal letters are carefully crafted to address a specific reader. Diaries and journals are biographical and generally written in a self-serving manner. It is true that if one puts together a large enough body of someone’s personal correspondence and self-reflective writing, a subtext of unintended truths seep out of this verbal self-justification. Yet, I have seen subtle, undeclared truths about the character or essential nature of my interviewees seep out of an hour and a half to a two-hour interview as well.

As a late convert to oral history, I cannot tell you how much I would now give to be able to turn on my digital recorder and talk to my father for two hours. Since I cannot, I urge the rest of you to sit down and record the stories of your family or friends. You do not have to wait until someone is old; interviews of young children also produce amazing results. While the most astute interviewer cannot get a subject to recreate the past accurately even the most novice interviewer can conduct an oral interview that will produce an astounding record of their interviewee’s experiences, ideas, and feelings.

I am just reading a memoir by Studs Terkel, the famous Chicago interviewer and raconteur, entitled Touch and Go. Terkel knew, and inevitably interviewed, an enormous range of the rich and famous. But, as he puts it, he is (was; he died last year) really someone who has “been celebrated for having celebrated the lives of the uncelebrated among us, for lending voice to the face in the crowd.” According to him, his epiphany in this regard came at a public housing project in Chicago where he recorded a young mother. Here is what Terkel says:

I don’t remember whether she was white or black. The place was mixed. She was pretty, skinny, with bad teeth. It was the first time she had encountered a tape recorder. Her little kids, about four of them, demanded a replay. They insisted on hearing mama’s voice. I pressed the button. They howled with delight. She put her hands to her mouth and gasped. “I never knew I felt that way.” She was astonished, sure, but no more than I was. Such astonishments have always been forthcoming from the etceteras of history. Ever since the Year One.