Soul to Soul

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The following is special programming sponsored by Public Radio KUNV 91.5. The content of Soul2Soul does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz & More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

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Soul to Soul, universal ideas for a brighter tomorrow. This show is a free for all of positive energy that includes book discussions, music, politics, books, food, COVID-19, oral interviews, books, and Las Vegas history. So today the show is about oral history and I am going to be talking to you about oral history with two experts in the field. Barbara Tabak, Stephanie Evans. So how are you today? Very good. Thank you. How are you? I'm wonderful. I am well, too. Thank you. Thank you so much. So these two women work in the Oral History Research Center at UNLV. The Oral History Research Center is located in Special Collections. So we're just going to jump right into the topic. Ladies, answer at your leisure. But how did you get involved in oral history? And tell me what it is to you, your definition. So who would like to get started first? This is Barbara, and I'll start out, I guess. How did I get involved in oral history, I think is the first part of your question. And it was accidental. I didn't even understand what an oral historian was, but that was over 15 years ago or better. And I was working as a personal historian, working with individuals and helping them map out their personal memoirs, and happened to create a small oral history project when the Frontier Hotel in 2007, was given notice that they were going to be closing in 60 days. And I thought, well, here's all these people, must have lots of stories. And something just, I guess, sparked in my mind. And I went down, and I actually embedded myself for most of that period of time and interviewed dozens of individuals who had worked at the Frontier. I have to say, because I really hadn't understood that part of Las Vegas living, that the experience of collecting those stories helped me understand the economics and the breadth of people who make this city, the vibrant city that it is for tourists, and that they have their own community. And that's one of the things that oral history, and when people what it is, it's a way of finding out about a place or a time or a group of people through their stories collectively to map out that history and understand and connect to it better. Fantastic. Stephanie, so how did you get involved? What is oral history to you? same order that Barbara did. I too came about it accidentally, but not. I was doing a paper in my one of my PhD courses in history. And the paper was going to be the seed for my So he suggested that I talk to you. And the difference between oral history and the interviews that I conducted for the course centered on consent and on storing the interviews so that they could be publicly accessed. So I retroactively had to go before the the institutional review board to get permission to conduct more interviews for when I was doing them for the thesis. definition, what you think oral history is? I think it's, it is finding out from the people on the ground, what their lives are like, due to within the parameters of the project. So, so Barbara interviewed people that were and were in the midst of labor negotiations, correct? No, no, these are people who are leaving their jobs. They were fired because the place was already fine. Okay. Strike was way over by then. But they so you had a set of requirements for what I was looking at. They were people who either lived or had formerly lived in a particular neighborhood. So after all this time working in this field, tell me about an interview that has changed you in some way. Barbara, I'm going to skip back over to you. Okay. There's so many whenever I'm asked that question. It's really, usually I defer to one of my more recent interviews, but basically, I'll give a category that within the Oral History Research Center, the projects that I've worked on, working on the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project, interviewing Holocaust survivors and getting their back story as well as their story about why they came to Las Vegas was very impactful in my life. But the most significant was how I became curious about oral history and that was through trying to interview my father who was becoming more and more memory challenged with his Alzheimer's and finally getting him to sit down and let me record him and practice some questions that I've been drafting for a book that I was putting together and finding, you know, that memories are elusive and that we all need to remember to capture them while we're crystal clear. And so that experience with my dad was just really special and I cherish it to this day. Wonderful. So Stephanie, anything special, any one special interview or special project? In the guise of the most recent interviews being the ones most impactful. One recent interview that we did for the Asian American Pacific Islander project that we're currently doing, a woman describes the scene in the airport when she was six years old, leaving Korea. And she talks about how her grandmother came and brought a big Asian pear for everyone that was leaving. And she said, and I'm quoting, it's really the last time you see your family. My mom will never see her mother again. And right after she said that, her voice just broke and she was silent for several seconds. And it just struck me. The power of that was that they're never going to see these relatives again. And that that is such a meta theme of migration. And so many of our families have migrated from either one state to another or one country to another and people do it all the time. But that doesn't lessen the impact. That's right. So as we do these projects, and we meet all of these people, what is the dream interview? What is that ideal interview that that person or that project that you'd like to work on. So we can go in the same order. Barbara, what is that dream project for you? Okay, so a dream project or an interview. Okay, a dream project which I have thought about because it illustrates how Las Vegas is constantly reinventing itself. As Stephanie said, it's a migration destination for many groups of people. But sports, sports is the current topic that kind of resonates in my mind that, you know, during the first professional sports team happens after the tragic shooting on 1 October, and hockey becomes tragic shooting on one October and hockey becomes our focus and brings joy. And they also supported the community and have ever since. And then we see other sports during the pandemic, you know, the Raiders coming to town and illustrating what how they can immerse themselves into our community right away. And along with that would probably come lots of interesting folks and perspectives. When you think about this, a lot of people think that when we go out to interview someone, that we conduct an interview, we transcribe it maybe, and we make it available. They don't know what happens in an oral history research center. So I'd like for you to talk about, you can share this as you talk back and forth, but inform the public about what we do when you start a project. What happens? Well, I know that for me, having started quite a few projects over the past decade, or been on the ground floor of formulating them, is to read and research whatever is available out there. Perhaps there were oral histories done in a history class in the history department here at UNLV. So immersing myself in that material that's available and understanding because they're not my personal stories. I don't pretend to know what it must be like to be somebody else in a particular group. And once we do that, then it's be to take our standard questions and interview questions and formulate those to be more specific to prompting stories, you know, in a storytelling in an oral history interview. So those are the kind of things that we try to get going. So Stephanie, do you want to add to that what else we do and what people should know happens when they are going to be asked to be interviewed? So one of the things that I think is a really valuable step that we do is to gain the trust of the narrator and to honor that trust. So when we interview someone, and we get the draft manuscript or the draft transcript back from the transcriber, we give that transcript to the narrator so that they can look through it and say, oh, my goodness. I said I did that in third grade. I meant to say I did it in fifth grade. They can make factual corrections like that. Or there's misspellings because the transcriber couldn't quite hear what they said or because there are five ways to spell this last name. So the factual corrections, they can also line out a sentence or two that maybe they kind of wish they hadn't said, or they can add a few sentences. Maybe they wish they had talked more about a specific topic. So this is their story. We're honoring their story by giving them control over it. And I think that's one of the most crucial things we do. Wonderful. I like that as well. And then we as an editor, once we receive that back from them, we write a preface and a table of contents, we send it off to a bindery someplace, and And it comes back in this beautiful hardbound cover. And they get a copy. And we retain a copy in special collections in Lee Library. So that's the entire process and it takes months. So don't expect this to happen in two or three weeks because it doesn't. But it is a wonderful way to capture the history of this city. And just to add nuggets to it all the time. So that's how it works and that's what we do. So right now, if you knew people who wanted to get into this field, this wonderful field that we are in, what kind of advice would you have for them? What would you tell them? I would tell them to listen. It's not a conversation. The topic is not about what the interviewer brings to it. It's all about the narrator and the narrator's story. So be engaged. Listen actively. Write notes so that you can follow up the questions, but it's not a conversation. So our opinions don't matter. Exactly. Any other advice, Barbara? Well, listening is first and foremost. A lot of people think, well, I'm a great conversationalist, as Stephanie alluded to there. It's like, no, this is not about you at all. It really is about you listening. And my advice on top of that would be is that, be sure you're a curious person, because your curiosity and interest, genuine interest, actively listening, as Stephanie said, shows, when you're working with someone in trust is how that

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evolves.

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Exactly. And I tell people that I listen with my entire being, my heart, my brain, my experience, my, as a black woman, I am listening with everything I have, so that those follow up questions can be the best they can possibly be. So, as we as we talk more about this, about listening, so Barbara, how long have you been in this field? How when you got started, I have been listening to people for as, in some capacity, personal historian or oral historian, probably for 15 years or more. I've worked with you in the Oral History Research Center, in some capacity or another, it'll be 11 years next month. And the reason I went back to Barbara with this is because Barbara has written two books. Barbara, tell us about that. Well, before I became an oral historian, I really focused a lot on the kind of questions and prompts that we use. And I've worked with different organizations, professional and just community organizations on how to use those prompts to interview others in their family or to write their memoirs. They also work for that. And another book I called Life Catching and that was when I had was filtering through. I had a opportunity to work in a consulting company that client were funeral homes and realized that people when didn't know their family member oftentimes very well. And when they were asked about it, when they were deceased, it was too late. And so that was tragic. So I wrote a book called Life Catching to try to get people stimulated to be more active in trying to get their family histories together. And I know that that's how I got to meet you, Stephanie, was because of your expertise in genealogy, which kind of goes hand in hand with a lot of other things that we do. And then it kind of goes hand in hand with a lot of what we, our foundation. So, Stephanie, as a person who has used this methodology in writing a lot, what is the value. So everyday people live their lives. But those lives are shaped by international events, they're shaped by national policy. And all those policies and laws are interpreted in the moment at the at a place. You know, the other day we had a border patrolman using the reins on his horse to move people around. In that moment, he was doing what he thought he should do to enact a national policy that he was interpreting on the ground in a really tragic and horrific way. The people that were there have stories to tell. Each one of their stories is going to be different because maybe they were further from the action and observed it, or maybe they felt it. But each one of those stories would be different. And it's the stories of people on the ground in the moment whose lives are being shaped by these bigger events. And that's how we get at what these events mean. That is an excellent example. So when we conduct an oral history project, we interview 80, 100, 135 people, and sometimes those people are asked the same questions. Different answers, different perspectives. So a researcher then has a rich array of primary source materials to use for research. We don't make a decision. We listen. We capture what the person has to say. Now we'll interrupt every once in a while if it's just something that's blatantly wrong. But when I say that I mean some facts are just blatantly wrong. If you say I came to Las Vegas in 1960 and I And I would go to Caesar's Palace. Well, Caesar's Palace wasn't built until 1966. So that kind of information, yes, we can correct right on the ground. But the rest of it, this is what the historian do then. They take that material, they look at newspapers, they look at other primary source materials, and they write. They write using all of that. So we are a very, very important part of all of that. And that's why we do the projects. So ladies, tell me about any other aspect of oral history that, as you are talking about it now and you're thinking more and more about it, we want to talk about that. And as you are thinking about that question, I am going to tell you one of my most impactful histories that I gathered. And I do this in this way for a reason. The very first interview that we captured when the Oral History Research Center got started 18 years ago was with a person named Darryl Luce. Mr. Luce told me wonderful, amazing stories that just hooked me in that first interview. He came to Las Vegas at five years of age, and he would go back and forth over the Hoover Dam, 1931, 1932, with his father, who owned a small hardware store was downtown Las Vegas. So he decided to start a small one in Boulder City. That's why they were driving back and forth every week, pick up the monies, drop off more equipment that was needed for selling, more materials, more merchandise that people in Boulder City needed. needed, irons, portable radios, toasters, small things like that. And so he was fascinated by the construction of the Hoover Dam as a young boy. So he told me all about that. And then he tells me how he grows up here, where he goes to high school, and then ends up in the military. And when he was sent back here as a military person, he then was put in one of the trenches at the Nevada test site. So those trenches, as you can remember, as you might know, wherever the blast was scheduled to be, they dug trenches a mile away, a mile and a half away, whatever distance. And then they would put military people in those trenches with a tag on and that would test the radiation. And Darryl Luce was one of those men that was tested that way. Very fortunate, never got cancer, but we know that a lot of others did. So those are the kinds of stories that just stay with you forever. So share a story with me. Tell me a story. I think you're onto something. I do take some of the stories to heart that I listened to and then it it pulls away at my own memories and I find a way to to relate to the narrator without talking about it. And then afterwards, you know, it will give me pause and reason to maybe journal about it or something. But I think learning about Las Vegas history through the amazing different careers of people, you know, from pawnshop owners, I really keep going back to Henry Cronenberg died just recently at 101 years of age going on 102, survived the Holocaust, found a lost sister that he never thought he would ever find again, found her living in Las Vegas and that was reason enough to come visit. He never left and he bought a pawn shop and became a very successful and philanthropic individual and so contributing member to Las Vegas's bigger community. Any stories, Stephanie, just a story that you'd like to tell? Yes, and this is at the very beginning of the Building Las Vegas project. We had talked to the woman who's in charge of the AIA branch here in Las Vegas, the American Institute of Architects. And she said, before you interview anyone, you must interview Joel Bergman. Thank you. Blanking on his last name. So I called him. He's an iconic architect. He was very excited, but he said he was going to have back surgery. And could he postpone it? Of course. Well, he kept calling. He really wanted to do this interview. So we did it after his surgery, went to his house, did the interview, and three weeks later, he passed away. So getting his interview, getting his story, especially because he was so Getting his story was such an overwhelming experience because he was so determined to tell it and then he passed so quickly afterwards. And you could read that story in our archives at the Oral History Research Center Special So ladies, thank you so much.

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This has been such a wonderful discussion.

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And this is Soul to Soul, universal ideas for a brighter tomorrow. It airs on the fourth Sunday morning at 830. So once a month, please tune in to hear this show that is a free-for-all of positive energy that includes book discussions, music, politics, books, food, COVID-19, oral history, books, and Las Vegas history.

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You've been listening to special programming sponsored by Public Radio KUNV 91.5. The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz and More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

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I'm not a good liar, I'm not a good liar I'm not a good liar, I'm not a good liar I'm not a good liar, I'm not a good liar I'm not a good liar, I'm going to be doing a lot of work on this. I'm not a good liar, I'm going to be doing a lot of work on this. Bye.

Transcribed with Cockatoo