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UC Berkeley Press Release

Regional Oral History Office celebrates 50th

– What do biotechnology, Rosie the Riveter and the disability rights movement have in common? The stories of each help comprise the rich collection of the University of California, Berkeley's Regional Oral History Office (ROHO), which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.

A symposium tomorrow (Saturday, Oct. 23) at UC Berkeley will focus on these ROHO projects, as well as on its African American faculty and senior staff project.

Yet the office's accomplishments are vast and include an inventory of more than 2,000 oral histories cataloging California's evolution over the last half-century in such fields as politics and government, business and labor, the environment, technology, the arts and University of California history.

Interviewees range from Quaker suffragist Alice Paul to Nobel Laureate and UC Berkeley Emeritus Professor Charles Townes. Others who have been interviewed for ROHO projects include environmentalist David Brower, civil rights activist Frances Mary Albrier, and various bus drivers and concert musicians and shipyard welders who migrated to California from the Jim Crow South and the Dust Bowl.

The collection - in print, audio and video formats - follows a path set by historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, for whom the library housing it is named. In the 1860s, Bancroft set out to interview and create autobiographies of some of the West's pioneers to round out his already extensive collection of books, maps, journals and manuscripts.

"Oral history works because we all are participants in oral culture," said Richard Cándida Smith, ROHO's director and a UC Berkeley history professor. "Decisions are codified and rationalized in writing, but they are arrived at through a lengthy process of oral exchange."

An exhibit with a tantalizing sampling of the work of the second oldest oral history institute in the United States is on display at The Bancroft Library through November.

It features an often amusing oral history of writer Alice B. Toklas conducted with a large and clunky tape recorder in Paris at the behest of former Bancroft Director James Hart in 1952, two years before ROHO officially began. Also on exhibit are photos of Toklas and her partner, Gertrude Stein, along with diaries of Stein's mother, San Francisco matron Amelia Keyser Stein.

In a nearby exhibit case is a minidisk recorder, a device commonly used in oral histories today and a fraction of the size of the mechanism used to record eight reels of recollections by Toklas.

Space devoted to Paul's oral history reveals that getting history makers to sit down for an interview can be a challenge in itself; they are often too busy to reflect on the past. Interviewer Amelia Frey had to promise Paul that she would work on the campaign to pass the Equal Rights Amendment.

The Depression and World War II are highlighted in the exhibit with Dorothea Lange photos of the Dust Bowl poor who headed west in search of jobs in California's fields and orchards, and some of her photos of Japanese internment camps, many of which were impounded by the War Relocation Authority. ROHO has the oral histories of both Lange and her husband, the late UC Berkeley economist Paul Taylor.

The rest of the exhibit touches on the oral histories of such literary figures such as Wallace Stegner, artist David Ireland and chef Heidi Krahling, Life photographer Wayne Miller and jazz great Dave Brubeck. scientists who worked on the atom bomb, and contemporary biotechnologists and
entrepreneurs. An Internet station at the exhibit allows visitors to explore still more of ROHO's archived interviews and watch video histories on the Web at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/.

The free symposium will take place from 1-7 p.m. in the Morrison Library, inside Doe Library, with talks starting at 2 p.m. (biotech), 3 p.m. (Rosie the Riveter), and 4 p.m. (disability rights), and a reception to celebrate the AfricanAmerican faculty and senior staff oral history project from 5-7 p.m.. For more information, call (510) 642-7395.

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