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.

Before the famous Watson brothers began documenting the news in Los Angeles, they and their three sisters were child actors in scores of films. Fans remember Delmar for his role of Peter Goat Boy alongside Shirley Temple in “Heidi” and sharing scenes with Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” There were so many more.

Delmar understood the value of oral history interviews clear back in the early ’70s when he sat down with Uncle George and recorded hours upon hours of amazing stories.

Fortunately, Delmar was also willing to be at the other end of the microphone and camera in November of 2005 when he told oral historian Don Ray about his childhood, his career, his family and the harmless, but inventive, pranks he, his brothers and other photogs dreamed up and executed.

In this video, Delmar recounts a handful of such mischief back in the ’40 and ’50s.

Thanks to oral history interviews, future generations can laugh along with one of the most pleasant and humorous people anyone could wish to know. (Please forgive the incorrect year of death at the end of the video. Delmar lived to be 82 — not two years)

(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.

George entered the room but it was dark and he was unable to find the light switch. While feeling his way around the room he tripped and fell on the body. He remembers how his hair stood on end when he lit a match and saw the corpse.

“I said to myself, ‘If you’re going to be a news photographer you can’t get scared of a dead man.’ I thought, ‘What I have to do is touch this character ’cause he can’t hurt me — he’s dead.’ So I took a deep breath and I touched the guy. Then I was calm.”

In 1927 George covered nearly every angle of an even more horrendous crime. William Edward Hickman, an eighteen-year-old prospective ministry student, kidnapped twelve-year-old Marion Parker. Hickman sent a handwritten note to the girl’s father, a banker, and demanded a $1,500 ransom. Her father responded to the note, indicating he wanted to see his daughter alive before he would pay.

Hickman, who called himself “The Fox,” sent Mr. Parker detailed instructions. As planned, young Hickman drove past the girl’s father with Marion in the car. Mr. Parker released the ransom money when he recognized his daughter in the darkness. The kidnapper took the money, drove a few blocks and dropped off Marion’s body, dismembered and mutilated, wrapped in a blanket. Her lifeless eyes were wired open for the morbid rendezvous.

George Watson covered the murder case of William Edward Hickman from the autopsy of the victim to the execution of the killer.

George was one of many newsmen from all over the country who crowded into the coroner’s office at the time of Marion’s autopsy. The hard-nosed coroner demanded that all photographers and reporters leave the room before he would uncover the body. George acted quickly and, within minutes, convinced the sheriff’s department captain that pictures would be necessary at the trial. Newly appointed Deputy Sheriff George R. Watson took the only pictures of the Parker girl. He was later subpoenaed to testify at the Hickman trial.

The police arrested Hickman after cashing some of the marked ransom bills in Oregon. He became very friendly with George. After a jury convicted Hickman of first-degree murder and the judge sentenced him to die, the young man kiddingly gave George a rubber cigar. Later in an old warehouse near San Quentin, George witnessed the eighteen-year-old’s execution. He recalls how the boy looked up at the thirteen steps leading to the gallows. George watched, silently remembering the invitation the young man had given him to “attend my necktie party.”

Watson was on the scene countless times to get exclusive shots that would “scoop the world.” He gives much of the credit to the teamwork of the newspaper staff. One example of such teamwork occurred on March 13, 1928, shortly after midnight when a phone call from the Times switchboard operator awakened him. She had been trying to reach her correspondents in Fillmore and Piru, California, but the telephone lines were apparently down.

She told George she thought the St. Francis Dam had collapsed. He rushed up there on her tip. The St. Francis Dam had been filled to capacity for the first time since its completion two years earlier and had, indeed, collapsed. It killed more than 450 people. A wall of water, sometimes 200 feet high, destroyed all or part of all the cities along the Santa Clara River.

George arrived on the scene before dawn and captured 0n film Southern California’s worst disaster. The water was still pouring down from San Francisquito Canyon where the wall of water had washed away 400 homes. When George wasn’t taking pictures he was assisting in the massive rescue operation. He watched William Mulholland, head of the Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works and Supply, nearly collapse from agony when he surveyed the damage cause by the dam he had built.

George followed the army of workers who searched the rubble between  Saugus and Ventura for survivors. The teamwork of the newspaper staff had enabled George to record the aftermath of the disaster.

A breakdown in teamwork, though, sometimes cost a newsman a world-wide exclusive. George was working for Acme News Picture Service, the forerunner of United Press International wire service, when Los Angeles hosted the 1932 Olympic Games. He and his comrades had a chance to get the first shots of the opening-day ceremonies.

Teamwork was necessary to get the pictures developed and delivered to the single telephone photowire before any other newsmen. The rule was “whoever gets there first holds the wire until he runs out of pictures to send.”

The word was out that some other photographers had rigged an ambulance with developing tanks in which they would develop their shots while speeding to the telephoto wire. George’s crew quickly came up with a counter plan. An off0duty motorcycle policeman would be ready at Tunnel No. 8 to escort George’s car to the wire. Three developing tanks were ready in his car.

He reminded the policeman to be there on time, “’cause the biggest race of these Olympics isn’t going to be on the field. It’ll be on the streets!”

When the pictures were taken and the race for the wire began, the motorcyclist was not at Tunnel No. 8. George lost out to the ambulance. Their rivals had scooped the world.

“When I found the policeman later that night, I explained to him exactly what the situation was. I said, ‘This job requires timing. It’s all timing. Now you be there tomorrow!’” The following day George had his car running. His partner ran alongside and handed him the exposed film. Then the motorcycle officer turned on his red lights and siren and led the car, through signals and traffic, toward the wire. George and his comrades monopolized the photowire for the rest of the Olympic Games.

In remembering the incident more than forty years later, George shook his head and chuckled, “An ambulance just couldn’t drive on the sidewalks.”

When an earthquake hit Southern California in 1933, George called all of his Los Angeles County correspondents in hopes of finding the hardest-hit area of town. When he got through to every city except Long Beach, he assumed that the quake’s epicenter must have been there. He sent one of his best photographers, Paul Strite, out to get the first pictures. However, the roads were all blocked to the public. Paul saw a young motorcyclist dressed in a Western Union uniform get through the lines.

No one knows where the photographer got them, but, within minutes, Paul rode a motorcycle into Long Beach wearing a Western Union outfit. In the meantime,” recalls Watson, “I found out that’s where the main quake was and I thought we’d get some good pictures. But I wanted to hold the telephoto wire, so I went back to the newspaper’s morgue and got some old negatives of the  San Jacinto earthquake. I soaked them up in developer to get them good and soppy and slimy and all. I marked out any automobile license numbers and went to the telephoto office and filed ten pictures.

“They had a new operator on — now this was a dirty trick. I filed these pictures and began to say, ‘That’s pretty light. I don’t think thiss’ll transmit. We’d better make it over a little bit darker.’ I kept stalling. Pretty soon I was sweating. I was wondering when my photographer would come in with some actual pictures.

“In the meantime, a couple of photographers from the New York Times Wide World come and and had some pretty good shots. Then an Associate Press photog cam in with some dandies. When they saw me they wondered how I’d gotten there so quickly. Finally Paul Strite came in with some graphic shots of a ruined four-story building with sheets tied and hung together and cars covered with bricks.

“I grabbed Paul’s pictures and said to the operator. ‘Hey, wait a minute! This is a better picture,’ and went down the line as the other fellows looked at me kind of funny. I got all the pictures transmitted and scooped the world.” In all of his stalling, George believes one of the old San Jacinto quake pictures may have been transmitted over the wires.

Watson became well known  for his ability to get pictures where cameras weren’t allowed. He developed a camera small enough to fit in his cap and would shoot it from his lap. Judges were tormented when scenes from their courtrooms were graphically captured in pictures.

Even after people became aware of his little cap, with a trapdoor large enough for the camera lens, he still managed to slip past security men by outsmarting them.

When Rudolph Valentino died at age thirty-one, many photographers showed up at the funeral. They were all banned from taking cameras in the chapel. Knowing that he, in particular, was being watched, George overtly leaned his large camera and the tripod against an outside wall. The security men probably sighed in relief as he entered the building without it. The next morning, George’s exclusive interior shots were seen in print by millions.

Although he was best known as a clever and inventive news photographer, he was also respected as a humanitarian. This trait earn him the friendship of the world’s greatest all-around athlete, Jim Thorpe. Years after “Indian Jim” had been stripped of his six Olympic gold medals for having been involved in semiprofessional baseball, George Watson received a phone tip that Jim Thorpe was seen digging a ditch in the Los Angeles area.

George followed the lead and came upon a man resembling Thorpe. He first shot a picture of the ditch digger and then asked him if her were in fact Jim Thorpe.

The ashamed native American denied his true identity. George tried to assure Jim that he was a photographer for the wire service and could possibly help him. George backed up his assurances by giving Thorpe nationwide publicity — publicity that resulted in numerous requests for personal appearances, job offers and parts in movies. The friendship between the two never ended.

At age eighty-four, George still appreciates good photography. Aside from his family collection of photographs, he has saved hundreds of pictures that other photographers made long after Watson retired. With his nephew, Delmar Watson, he compiled and published a book of selected Watson photographs, “Quick, Watson, the Camera”: Seventy-five Years of News Photography. Although the faces and events differ from those of today, the basics and stratagems of news photography have changed little over the years.

“A photographer has to have a lot of guts,” explains Watson, “and he has to know how to use a camera properly. A camera to a photographer is like an easel to an artist or a typewriter to a writer. It’s just a means of expression. An news photographer must have an instinct for news and then must develop that instinct. It can’t be learned in a book.”

(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.

1. Tell me about your grandparents. This one could provide you with a firsthand recollection of someone born back in the 18th Century.
2. Tell me the reason you or your family moved to Southern California (or whatever area they now live). Odds are you’re going to hear about health, religion, military assignments or prosperity — or maybe about Gramps runnin’ from the law.
3. Tell me about the image you had about Southern California (or wherever they migrated to).  Here’s where you’ll hear about images of blue ocean waves lapping up against an orange grove with the snocapped mountains in the distance.
4. Tell me about the origin of that impression of the area. This is how you find out what an industrious chamber of commerce Los Angeles had. “When they say the read about California in the Los Angeles Times, they’re not lying.
5. Tell me what you know about the impact on your family of the flu epidemic of 1917. Depending upon where they were, it could have been 1918 or later. But if they were alive then, they’ve got a story to tell.
6. Tell me about your aspirations when you were growing up. Here’s your chance to see your grandparents in the proper historical context and in their own family setting.
7. Tell me about the way children have changed through the years. You’ve probably heard this answer before. “When I was your age .  .  .” But this time you can be ready for it.
8. Tell me about the greatest technological advance you’ve witnessed. Odd are your guess will be wrong. And be sure to ask the reason they believe it was the greatest technological advance.
9. Based upon your lifetime and experiences, tell me your opinion of this time period. Find out how good or bad you really have it today.
10. If you were starting out as a young person today, tell me about the things you would do differently. If he or she says, “Nothing,” keep probing. Remind him or her of some of the tales you’ve heard about the things your mom or dad did. That should get them on the right track.

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.

I was astounded.

I’ve always known that people are much more open to people outside the family that they are to those within. The immediate family members are usually the last to know the juiciest of the details. If I had any doubt about this concept, it had vanished when I sat, watched and listened. What a miracle to be able to see her smile emerge and hear the voice that brought me into this world.

My fantasy has always been to use my journalism and teaching skills to change the world in some way. Looking back, I have to smile when I think about how the oral history of my mother may be the most lasting jewel that I will leave behind when I move from the living to something, I hope, beyond.

There are no great-grandchildren yet for my mother, but it won’t be long before my nephews father the next generation. And while nobody is paying attention, there will be another generation and yet another. Imagine young children in the 22nd Century being able to watch a smile emerge from their great-great-great-great grandmother and hear the gentle love in her voice.

I have to admit that I’ve never made a better investment in my life. One day setting up and shooting the interview and a week or so of off-and-on editing, transferring old movies and scanning photographs created a gift that will outlive everyone on earth and probably outlive the houses we all occupy today.

If only I could listen to the calming voice of Dr. Levi Tidrick or of Dr. G.M. Rutledge when they were pioneer physicians in the little town of Winterset, Madison County, Iowa, back in the years following the Civil War. They were neighbors — they lived on separate streets, but shared a back fence — and would become in-laws when Dr. Tidrick’s son, Lee Bell, married Dr. Rutledge’s daughter, Sarah Alice.

My grandfather, Clarence Lee Tidrick (left) was the grandson of Dr. Levi Tidrick and the son of Lee Bell Tidrick. He died in 1959 when I was 10. I would give everything I have to be able to listen to him describe what life was like as a medic in France and Belgium during WWI.

I was four or five when my great-grandfather, Lee Bell Tidrick, was in his 90s. I can remember his voice, his beard and his shaky hands that would reach in his pocket for candy whenver my sister and I ran to greet him. I wish I could have asked him about his father, the doctor, or his grandparents back in Ohio.

Genealogists pore through documents, books and newspapers to recreate a mere glimpse of the common folks who comprise most branches on the family tree. The strange irony is that genealogists of the future will have a more difficult time learning about us. Technology is the culprit. The e-mail message, blogs, digital photos and websites of today are not likely to survive a fraction of the time that our own grandparents’ family portraits, letters, journals and newspaper clippings have survived.

The only hope is that some child, grandchild, niece or nephew will have had the foresight to set aside a couple of days to capture the expressions, voices and stories of their family members and then preserve those moving images and sounds for generations to come.

This little website with a big name can help you find the reason, the motivation and the methods you’ll need to create a priceless gift for your yet-unborn descendants.

By now, I hope you’re thinking about that important person in your life who could be sharing stories, recollections and wisdom with your own great-grandchildren and maybe even theirs as well.

Only you can prevent library fires.

Please call on me if you need more encouragement, more tips and more advice. Oh, and would you please be kind enough to leave a comment on this blog.

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.He was unable to open the door. When the shaking finally stopped, Lee and his son went outside—where they saw the damage done by a major earthquake that was centered 20 miles away in Long Beach. Moments later his wife ran outside and said to the, “Boy! That’s some stove!”

That’s how Lee Clark, now 96, told the story of the Long Beach earthquake to his grandson, David L. Clark. The younger Clark, a Los Angeles historian and author, uses recollections like those of his grandfather to piece together the history of common people—a history that would otherwise vanish with each passing generation. The process is rapidly finding its place alongside conventional historical methods.

“History is generally written for, by and about winners,” says Clark. “Seldom is there a different perspective. But oral histories shift interest to non-elite groups.” In his book Los Angeles: A City Apart, he uses information obtained from dozens of oral-history projects his students at UCLA have done over the past eight years. The result is a rare glimpse at the lifestyles, goals and crises of the people who assembled in what would one day become a leading metropolis.

Oral histories, of course, are as old a method of record keeping as history itself. But it wasn’t until the late 1940s that they became a part of academia—first at Columbia University and later at Berkeley. Today there are oral-history programs of some sort at most colleges and universities.

But after more than 50 years of consistent use, there are still a few historians who criticize the whole concept. Why? The main argument concerns the reliability of the human memory. The critics say you just can’t trust the information.

“That’s balderdash,” says Clark, who is quick to point out that traditional written documents are just as likely to be flawed as the verbal account. He’s currently going through written mountains of personal correspondence, minutes of meetings and other documents relating to the early history of UCLA—and says he’s finding a number of cases of intentional misinformation. “People,” in short, “were lying,” he says.

Those in the oral-history field agree that spoken accounts compiled with conventional methods provide a complete and accurate history. Dr. Lawrence de Graas, director of the oral-history program at Cal State Fullerton, points out that although modern technology has provided us with the tape recorder to preserve the spoken word, it has also done its part in eliminating much of the written word. “The average person doesn’t keep the sort of written records that historians have traditionally used—be they diaries, estate papers or minutes,” he says. “You just don’t find Joe Dokes neatly keeping those as a general rule. Either you don’t write that man’s history at all or you have to go to the oral interview.”

Years ago, personal experiences were recorded in longhand and sent to friends and relative. Today, the telephone delivers the stories so efficiently that personal letter writing is becoming a lost art. Modern transportation has also had a effect: Travelers of the past had the time to write lengthy trail journals—diaries that would paint a vivid picture of a lengthy westward movement or an Atlantic crossing. Today’s travelers have time only to jot a few notes on the back of their airline tickets.

For those reasons, academic historians began systematically interviewing members of previous generations. At UCLA, a team of professional interviewers has since 1959 been involving in recording biographies of prominent scholars, artists, politicians, moviemakers and the people who were involved with bringing water to Los Angeles. The UCLA Special Collections Library houses more than 200 interviews ranging in length from 12 to 70 hours; the tapes are all transcribed and edited for accuracy before being indexed and bound.

“It’s probably used the most frequently of any one collection in the department,’ says Jim Mink, who heads the special collections. “We figure that over the past three years, for example, every day that we’ve been open somebody had been here to consult one or more of those interviews.”

The oral-history program at Cal State Fullerton serves another purpose. Rather than simply gather and store material, it uses oral histories as an instructional tool. Students are trained in oral-history techniques and are then sent out to interview selected people for projects focusing on such subjects as Indian urbanization, the uranium industry, Japanese relocation during World War II, acquaintances of Richard Nixon and community histories.

At Cal State Long Beach, a similar program is offered. Sherna Gluck runs that campus’ Oral History Resource Center, which provides assistance to students, faculty members and any member of the community interested in undertaking an oral-history project. And she’s involved in an ambitious project herself: With the help of two other interviewers she has conducted interviews with 43 women who worked in war plants during World War II. The project, “Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women and the World War II Work Experience,” has given her insight into how the industrialized roles of women affected their homes, husbands and careers.

Even though they may not have done identical jobs during the war, they were in a setting where they could compare themselves in terms of skill and mastery,” Gluck says. “And that had a tremendous impact on a lot of the women, even women who were used to working, who’d been in the work force.

“That’s not something you can measure with most traditional data. You’re dealing with the subjective reality of the person—and you can only get that from oral history,”

Gluck has encouraged a variety of people to undertake oral-history projects. Kay Brieg is one of the hundreds who have taken Gluck’s class in oral-history methods at Cal State Long Beach; now Brieg is working on a history of oil drilling in the Long beach area. “I was your basic, unemployed Ph.D., teaching part-time, one place or another,” she says. “I grew up in Long Beach and thought this would be an interesting thing to do.”

But she really became sold on the oral approach to history when she was showing a traditional history film to a class. “It was the same old eastern-Establishment film. And I said, ‘Gosh! I live in this backward, undeveloped place called California, and it’s hard for me to find myself in that film, because it’s all the history of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and slaves and textile factories and all that stuff that’s eastern oriented.’” She says she realized that oral history brings the past home to people. “It shows them that the people right in their own neighborhood are important.”

Lakewood High School’s Dan Ryan took Gluck’s class, too, and before long his history students were putting together a collection of interviews of local, long-time residents. “They found that this was a whole lot better than reading a dry text-book,” says Ryan.

One of Ryan’s students, Stephen Rima, interviewed a man whose family had run a paper-and-dry-goods store in downtown Long Beach since 907. The proprietor, George Marmion, took the teen-ager on a descriptive trip back to the days of the Long Beach Pike, the Pacific Electric red cars and both world wars. Rima says, “When you read how bad things were during the Depression, that’s one thing. But when you talk to someone who really lived through it and who tells you how bad it really was, it puts a whole different light on the subject.”

The use of oral histories ahs even spread into the corporate world. Atlantic Richfield, for example, has contracted with an author to conduct oral histories with employees and officials of the five corporations that merged to become ARCO. And the Directors Guild of America has been compiling hundreds of hours of interviews with aging motion-picture and, more recently, television directors. Various cities, churches, historical societies and other associations are jumping on the oral-history bandwagon, as well.

One of the more intriguing projects is being undertaken by Wrather Entertainment International—the corporation in charge of running the Queen Mary Hotel—in preparing Howard Hughes’ famous flying boat, the Spruce Goose, for public showing. Wrather has hired a staff of historians to research the airplane and its designer, Hughes, and the firm has employed a full-time oral historian named Ronald Larson. He’s interviewed more than 30 of of the late recluse’s closest aides and coworkers in an attempt to find out more about the legendary billionaire. And though Larson says he’s still a long way from really understanding the man, he has been able to shoot some holes in some of the many Howard Hughes myths.

One such myth portrayed Hughes as being extremely hard of hearing, yet an anecdote that surfaces during an oral-history interview gave Larson a different view. According to a technician who had flown many times with him, Hughes would always bring a bottle of milk in a a paper bag and some chocolate-chip cookies on test flights. During one noisy flight, a technician at the back of the plane saw Hughes eating cookies as he sat at the controls. The worker put his mouth right up to the ear of the technician sitting next to him and said, “Why doesn’t that son of a bitch give us one?” According to one of the two men, Hughes looked around at his gauges, then turned around and walked back to where they were, held out the bag of cookies and said, “Here you go, you son of a bitch!”

Larson says he’s learned that Hughes’ behavior varied depending on where he was and whom he was with. He was comfortable around his engineers, but with other business associates he could be very frustrating. “Was sort of a jerk in a lot of ways,” says Larson, “but I’ve found that almost every person really respected him—at least in the field of aviation.”

Larson’s pursuit of Hughes’ real character is turning out to be as difficult as the fictional search for Charles Foster Kane’s Rosebud. “It’s still a myster. We still can’t put our finger on who this man was. We’re getting some of the small parts—but I think without oral history we wouldn’t have gotten that.”

For people in search of their own Rosebuds, there are places to turn to learn about oral-history resources, such as national and local oral-history associations. Shirley Stephenson, vice president of the Southwest Oral History association, says her group has more than 100 members who share information and techniques. The group sponsors workshops, puts out a newsletter and a directory of ongoing projects and conducts an annual conference.

For the average citizen interested in conducting oral histories of family members, the project can be expensive and time consuming. Taped interviews are of limited value if they’re not transcribed, edited and bound. The expense of typing, editing and retyping can bring the cost of the project to more than $200 per hour for each taped interview.

Gary Shumway, the founder of the oral-history program at Cal State Fullerton, has spent nearly two years trying to lower the cost of processing the information and upgrading the appearance of the finished product. He now operates a service out of his home using three word0processing computers. By streamlining the transcription process and finding less expensive ways to print and bind, he says he’s been able to bring the price down to about $115 per interview hour. But he says there’s still a lot of physical work involved in the entire process. “If I didn’t love it so much—if I didn’t need something to put my scholarly interest into—it would not be worth it.”

You may or may not be able to afford the cost of transcribing and binding a family history, but the value of sitting down and interviewing a loved one is surely priceless for both interviewer and subject. Karen Burch conducted interview with her grandmother and neighbors in the Dayton Heights area of Los Angeles. She learned that her grandmother’s family was one of the only black families in a predominately Japanese neighborhood. She learned about the government’s removal of those Japanese-Americans when World War II broke out. And she learned about her grandparents’ refusal to get caught up in the anti-Japanese hysteria. Her family looked after the property and personal belongings of dozens of their friends who were in internment camps throughout the Midwest.

Her interview project enabled Burch to get a better understanding of her family. “It just opened up new vistas back into my family history and my roots, as well as opening an even closer relationship with my grandmother. I think I saw her as a whole person.”

Sonja Manasian interviewed her mother, Ruby Avoian Manasian, and learned the details of the Armenian family’s escape from the Turks in 1918. Her mother’s account gives almost a historian’s documentation of starvation, corruption and senseless death. Sonja’s mother and grandmother nearly died trying to reach Ruby’s father in California—a father she had never seen. When they finally reached a friend’s house, Ruby looked up at several men. “And everybody asked me, ‘Which one is your father?’ My heart ran to him.”

“You knew?” Sonja asked her mother during the interview. “Yes. I knew, but I wouldn’t dare to say it because I was afraid I might claim some other man and they would laugh at my dad and my mom. So I just stood there and didn’t say anything, and then my dad said, ‘Hey what are you trying to do, confuse my baby?’ Then I knew it was my father.”

Everybody has recollections and memories that are of value to future generations, but it’s easy to put off collecting them. As David Clark explains it to his students; “In oral history, you’re working in a library that’s burning down. You have to work fast, because when these people go, the memories go with them.”

Aside from surviving the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, Clark’s grandfather had ridden on a horse with Buffalo Bill and had traded oil wells for used-car lots, says the younger Clark. But when you ask him if he’s taken the time to sit down with a tape recorder and get the whole story, he responds, “No. I haven’t done that yet—which I obviously should do. Everybody says that—because everybody always assumes that people will live forever.”

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