Revisiting My Own Past – Working on Oral Histories and Accessibility
Currently in my DPH class, we’re looking at tools for making oral history interviews more accessible using OHMS. OHMS is an interesting website that allows the user to upload transcripts and metadata for oral histories, but it’s not the most user friendly (in fact it seems the application self-destructed for my classroom). But since this assignment required having an oral history interview, but was not subject specific, I decided to scour through the archives (my Google Drive), for an artifact of a long forgotten time (Spring 2020), and learn about a man that shaped the course of my family’s history (my father, because I couldn’t interview too many other people in person during lockdown).
For this assignment though, my interview needed a transcript. One that I don’t have so I sucked it up transcribed the first ten minutes as a sample for this assignment, but that already took over an hour, so I can’t justify transcribing it all for a minor assignment. It would be to my detriment and prevent me from working on my other coursework if I transcribed it all right now.
I’m not the biggest fan of oral histories, but I see where they can be useful. Here’s the transcript for the first 10 minutes of the interview though for your reading pleasure:
00:01:21 CW: Ok, this is Cecilia Ward interviewing William Ward for my oral history assignment for Historical Thinking. So, by what I understand of your life, sir, you studied in West Germany during high school. You mentioned that German was not your first choice of language, but why did you choose it?
00:22:93 WW: This is going to sound kind of weird. I- I’m a product of the Cold War. And during the Cold War, especially in the era that I was in high school, there was a lot of conversations about whether or not people wanted to survive when the bombs dropped. There was so much tension. We figured that between the Soviets and the Chinese and the Koreans and the Iranians with what they were doing and the United States, at some point or another, somebody was going to get crazy and there was going to be a bomb dropped. As soon as one dropped, they were all going to go off. So. So about the time that I started in high school, it was actually a few years after. So I can’t really use this as an excuse, but it’s indicative of what we’re talking about. Came a movie called Red Dawn. You ever seen the original Red Dawn? Because they made a sequel of it a couple of a years ago. The original had Patrick Swayze. The guy from Dirty Dancing? Red Dawn was about a hypothetical invasion of the United States. And one of the things that came out is that the invaders were Cubans, East Germans, Russians. Do you want me to look at the camera occasionally?
01:34:32 CW: You don’t have to.
01:37:53 WW: Okay. Cubans, East Germans or Russians. So the languages or occasionally North Koreans. And one of the standing jokes in it was, who do we have on our side? He was asking the kids that were in the movie – were asking Tyrone Power, I think it was- after he had been ejected from an aircraft that was down. A U.S. Aircraft. An he said “Well, who do we have on our side? Fighting on our side? Half a billion angry Chinese. But there are a billion Chinese. And that’s why they’re angry.” And so one of the things that mindset was going on – that actually was a lot of the mindset, especially growing in the area we did.
02:26:89 WW: I’m from Virginia Beach. I’m from Norfolk and Virginia Beach. And we used to sit around at the table in the cafeteria, and we would talk about, “Do you want to survive” It was like “yeah, I’d like to survive.” “No I want to get closer to the blast, so I’ll go over by the base or something,” and we would think about it. And if we were at school when it happened, we would be able to walk out and see eight or nine mushroom clouds all around us because there was Oceana. There was N.O.B. There was the Amphib. Base. There was Fort Eustice and Langley. There was the naval shipyard and all the little shipyards. But the only place we wouldn’t be able to look is over near Pungo except there’s Dam Neck in that direction as far as that’s concerned. And Oceana was generally in that direction.
03:17:38 WW: So, my first choice of language was actually Russian at the time. I figured that if we were going to conquer them or they were going to, or us in the Cold War, I need to darn well know it so I could tell them, “Hey! I’m no threat.” Or “Get down on the floor because you’re my prisoner.” One or the other. Russian was taught in the Virginia Beach school system at the time, but it was a non standard language, meaning that it was only guaranteed to be taught at two of the highschool. It could be taught at any high school if enough people were interested. But when I signed up for Russian, not enough people were interested.
03:56:70 WW: So my second choice was German for some of the same reason. Since East Germany. They were the big allies. They were the most important of the Warsaw Pact countries. Besides, Russia was East Germany. And so, besides which, it was interesting. You saw the war documentaries. You personally know me, so you know I’ve always been interested in the old World War II documentaries and things like that. I always said, “wonder what Adolf Hitler is actually saying when he’s getting all that, all that, and everybody goes ‘wow!’” And you’d always be wondering. And actually, as it turns out, he’s a very charismatic speaker, but none of the stuff he was actually saying was actually all that dynamic. It looks when it’s an unknown language, a lot more fearsome and scary than what he was actually saying. But he obviously had charisma, so German was my second choice. Not because I liked Hitler, but because I was interested in World War II history.
05:05:18 WW: They didn’t teach Japanese and I wouldn’t have been as interested in that anyway. The only ones they really taught were Spanish, French, German and. Spanish French, German, and Latin. So those were the four that could go at my high school, Kempsville Highschool in Virginia Beach. I could have theoretically transferred to a different high school to take Russian, but that wasn’t a big enough draw for me, so I took German and I enjoyed it. I actually found that when I started learning German, I became less interested in World War II history and more interested in World War I history.
05:48:09 WW: Mostly because of a friend of mine – I use the word friend because that’s the most appropriate word, but he was much older. He and his wife were much older, lived around the corner in a large yellow house. White and yellow house, when I was very young. He was a World War I vet, and he talked about World War I and what it was life over there. And I used to go over there and they would give me these thin lemon cookies. Personally, knowing me, you know what cookies I’m talking about, like the round lemon ones that we get.
06:21:65 CW: The sandwich cookies?
06:24:26 WW: Not the sandwich cookies, the flat cookies with no cream or anything.
06:27:51 CW: Ok.
06:27:66 WW: They’re kind of like a lemon shortbread.
06:30:48 CW: Ok.
06:30:78 WW: That’s what they would give me. They’d give me that and a glass of milk when I came over. And their family was all far away. They had only moved into the house in their own 70s or 80s. And so they were quite elderly when they bought the house. Now, of course, the house is 50 years old. But their family was all out in the Midwest, out in the Pacific Northwest. And so they rarely saw their grandkids. They kind of adopted me as a surrogate grandson. And he would occasionally talk about being a Doughboy in the First World War. And so I became more interested in that because then you start talking about thinks like the red Baron and things like that, or you could go back further in time and you could start talking about the Teutonic Knights and the Crusades and things like that. And all of that was interesting to me. I’ve always had an interest in history, and so German just seemed the one that was the most likely out of those and useful. I would love to have learned Latin, because I’ve always been interested in the Roman Empire. Your doctor knows that I’m your dad, right?
07:50:01 CW: Yeah.
07:50:69 WW: When I say that I instilled a love of history in you, at least maybe he gets where that comes from. Even though that’s not my chosen path, I did come close.
08:05:65: CW: Yeah, you almost became an archaeologist.
08:07:49 WW: I almost became an archaeologist. And if I had, I would be right up there with Dr. Kelso up at Jamestown and all the rest of it, and I would probably be his co-conspirator in crime up there because I knew where the James Fort was just as well as he did before he actually physically discovered it. I knew where it was, just like he did. And that was not common wisdom. Everybody else thought it was out in the river. I knew exactly where it had to be. And I’m right. I was right. He was right when he thought some of the same ideas 15 years earlier. I’d have been his protege more than his co-conspirator, but you know what I’m trying to say. So yes, I took the other road. But I came very close to being involved in history as a career, so I’ve always loved it and Roman history. Ancient history was especially good because I’ve always looked at it as a direct analog for what we’re going through. If you look at ancient history, we’re living close to or possibly in the time of what we would call the time of the Gracchis. They were pre- Julius Caesar, they were a very populist group, the Gracchi brothers. And their movement was a very populist group. This has nothing to do with German. It’s just showing where I’m coming from and why I chose it. And so we’re living in that time now. So if you look at ancient Roman history, you can see where that translates to our history. There’s a lot of direct analogues, there’s a lot different, but there’s a lot of direct analogues to events. The hard part is that most of the time when you look at old history and you see that it’s repeating itself, you don’t actually see the repetition in the cycle until it’s already there. You’re either already in-.
[End of Transcription of first 10 minutes.]
