Delmar Watson’s stories live on.

When Delmar Watson died in October of last year, he left behind a collection of 20th century news photographs — mostly about people and events in Southern California. He and his five photojournalist brothers made most of the photos, but their uncle, pioneer news photographer George R. Watson contributed thousands of them (see “He Made the News Click” in an earlier posting). The collection grew even larger when other “photogs” donated or willed their collections.

“Bike saved my life!” An oral history story that will live on for generations.

When Doris Tidrick was nine, an infected blister on her foot led to a life-threatening case of osteomyelitis. In 1996 — a year before she died, Doris (Tidrick) Quinn told the details of her brush with death in an oral history her children arranged. They had heard the story before, but it took a stranger’s curiosity and professionalism to reel in the compelling details of how a loving father in the depths of the Great Depression used the promise of a brand new bicycle to infuse Doris with the desire to fight for her life.
Is there someone in your life with a library of wisdom and stories that could inspire the yet unborn children of the future?
Look for the resources on this blog — resources that may empower you to conduct or arrange for an oral history video of your loved one.

He made the news click

An oral history interview that became a magazine article

(First published in Westways, February, 1977)

By Don Ray

George Watson never anticipated  being regarded as a historian. Photography was his career, hobby and best friend. From 1910, when his first news photograph was published, until her retired during World War II, George’s only concern was that of capturing news.

George R. Watson when he shot for the Los Angeles Times.

Although his photographs lost their news value only days after he shot them, their historical value continues to appreciate with each passing generation. The colorful history of twentieth-century Southern California has been preserved in Watson’s collection of news photographs, numbering in the thousands, taken by him and his six nephews, all photojournalists.

Aside from being the dean of Southern California news photographers, the octogenarian’s credits included the invention of the first microfilm machine, the first aerial news photographs of Los Angeles, the first picture ever transmitted over telephone wires and the invention of a prototype of the Pako dryer, a print-drying machine used today in almost every photography lab.

He also founded and was the first president of the Los Angeles Press Photographers Association, an organization that continues to promote respect and dignity among “photogs.”

George Railton Watson befriended photography more than seventy-six years ago when his father, and amateur photographer, bought him a one-dollar Brownie camera for his eighth birthday. The boy developed and printed his first picture, a shot of the Colorado state capitol, and proudly displayed it to the proprietor of the local Eastman Kodak Company agency.

The dealer immediately placed the picture in his shop window above a sign that read, “If an eight-year-old boy can

George Watson shortly before he died in 1977.

take a picture like this, why can’t you?” When the family moved to Los Angeles a year later, the young lensman built his own darkroom out of a dry-goods box, using a coal oil lantern for a red light.

“It’s a wonder I didn’t asphyxiate myself,” George recalls. “I’d come out sweatin’ like the devil, but I’d have my prints.”

After spending most of his teens in the Pacific Northwest, George returned to Los Angeles in 1917. Experience gained taking pictures for the Portland Journals was all he needed to land a job with the Los Angeles Times as their second field photographer. In his twelve years with the Times, he witnessed and photographed nearly every major news story — every disaster, murder, visiting king, queen and president.

He rubbed elbows with the silent-screen stars, sports greats, explorers, adventurers and criminals who made the news.

George learned quickly that working for the press would not always be pleasant. The first time he was assigned to photograph a murder scene he had an experience that nearly sent him looking for another profession. The reporter with whom he worked asked him to get a few shots of a man who was slain by police after he killed his wife.

Cues to get them talking

Some sure-fire topics for your oral history interview

(As sidebar to “So I says to Howard Hughes…” in Los Angeles Magazine, October 1982.)

Okay. So you’re not an interviewer. That doesn’t mean you have to hide from Aunt Minnie. Here are 10 questions that some of Southern California’s sharpest oral historians provided. They swear that these questions will get Mama, Uncle Irv or Gramps talking so much that you’ll feel like Mike Wallace.

The library is on fire

Time doesn’t have to erase wisdom and memories.

By Don Ray

It’s a phrase I’ll never forget. It was in the first oral history class I took back in 1975 that the instructor, historian David L. Clark, urged us all to sit down with Grandma and Grandpa and record them telling the stories of their lives.

“It’s like a library that’s burning down,” he said. “You have to move fast.”

My own grandmother had died earlier that year — she was the last of my grandparents to die — so I understood the opportunity that I had missed. Indeed, the library was gone. Twenty-two years later, when my mother made the decision to spend her remaining time in home hospice, I made good on my vow to capture on videotape the stories that my sister and I had heard in bits and pieces over the years.

My mother always had a way of talking “baby talk” if I was in her presence when she talk to someone else about me, so

Doris (Tidrick) Quinn 1923-1997

I arranged a “head fake” when it came time to capture her recollections on videotape. One of my former students, David Ritchie, conducted the oral history interview — I operated the camera. Immediately before David began prompting her to talk, I put on big headphones and made it clear to my mother that I would be listening to my favorite Latin music.

“Don’t even bother talking to me,” I warned her. “I won’t be able to hear a thing.”

The plan worked. David listened to her for more than two hours there in the comfort of her apartment in Burbank, Calif. Only once was it clear that she was saying something about me. She gave me that smile as she looked my way. When I didn’t respond at all, she got the message and never looked my way again.

I decided to not watch the interview right away. Less than two years later, the emphysema squeezed the last of the breath out of her. It would be another year before I was ready to watch the video and listen, for the first time, to what she told David during the interview.

“So I says to Howard Hughes…”

The techno-rebirth of the ancient tradition of story telling.

By Don Ray

(Originally published in Los Angeles Magazine in October, 1982)

Pauline Clark had been waiting, alone and anxious, for this moment. Her new gas stove had just been installed. She reached down for the porcelain-covered handle and gave it a cautious turn to the right. First nothing happened. Then she heard a low rumble that grew louder and louder—as if a freight train were rounding the corner from the living room and heading straight for the kitchen. Things began to shake. Knickknacks and cooking utensils jumped from the wall and crashed down onto the counter. Pauline tried to run but couldn’t. The whole room was shifting back and forth.

It was March 10, 1933. Meanwhile, Pauline’s Husband was trapped in another room.