As a college counselor and earlier as a counselor for the California Department of Rehabilitation I listened to many interesting stories that were interrupted by the learning agreement or career plan that was the purpose for our meeting. Becoming an oral historian seemed to be a way to engage in more in-depth, uninterrupted interviews and listen to and record stories in their entirety.  To learn more about this interesting alternative form of interviewing I joined the Association of Personal Historians and later the national Oral History Association and sought out informational interviews with oral historians at conferences. 

 

I learned that oral historians are not journalists.  They do not fact check their interviews which are recorded “as told to” the interviewer. Ideally, they want to post them with a public institution on as permanent a basis as is possible, in contrast to journalists who post their fact-checked stories for a daily or weekly news cycle.  

 

I was inspired by David Isay, who recorded audio interviews with obscure but interesting characters in New York City and posted them on his website, SoundPortraits.  After receiving a MacArthur genius grant, he started www.storycorps.net, recording audio interviews between two people conducted in story booths he placed in Grand Central Terminal, at the World Trade Center Memorial site and in mobile booths that traveled around the country. In 1995 I flew to Henderson Nevada to be interviewed in a StoryCorps mobile story booth. I envisioned doing something similar, with video interviews, on the west coast, something that still lingers on my to-do list.

 

I was also inspired early on by fellow APH member, oral historian and author of Living Legacies, Ellie Kahn, who has produced an impressive collection of interviews with holocaust survivors and a curriculum, Tell Me Your Stories, that enables schools to offer teachers a way to have students interview family elders as part of their writing curriculum.  

 

In 1999 I began recording audio interviews with my parents, an aunt and several friends and colleagues. In 2006, when I retired after 26 years as a community college counselor I started a personal history services business, storylabwest.com and hired several former students to help me produce Martha’s Story and Bob’s Story from interviews I did with my aunt and father. After recording many interviews and producing tribute videos and mini-documentaries I posted them on my youtube channel.  

 

In 2008 I hired three former students to record interviews at a reunion of students, parents, teachers and administrators who attended or taught at the child-centered elementary school in Claremont CA that my 3 children attended during the 1970s.  The clips on my YouTube channel were edited from over 45 interviews with former elementary school students, teachers, principals and parents who were at the 2008 reunion and were asked to reflect on the impact that attending Sycamore school and experiencing the progressive innovations practiced there in the 1970s had on them at the time. 

 

In 2017 I learned that my wife had a terminal illness and needed my full support.  I stopped interviewing and discontinued my website. I am now re-building it and exploring new directions in oral history (group projects) and new technology (the Oral History Metadata Synthesizer-OHMS) for syncing the transcript to the interview videos, then indexing them with OHMS using Library of Congress Subject Headings, rendering them searchable to a world-wide community of researchers.

 

Once the Sycamore-in-the-70s interviews are archived with OHMS, they will give current and would-be teachers vivid examples of the educational benefits students experience when they have the “aha” experiences of discovery, when instead of being given the answers to their questions they are challenged to discover the answers with resources and research strategies. The videos show how shy students are inspired by being given a role in a school play, or how students from single parent homes felt when they gained the approval of an adult who listened and cared. 

 

Creating a searchable database of the 45 Sycamore interviews indexed with OHMS will enable researchers and teachers with an interest in progressive education to learn how a group of dedicated teachers inspired students to become active learners and independent thinkers and had a positive impact on their self-esteem. 

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At the moment, new and ongoing projects leave little time for the OHMS archiving project. The project is in need of volunteer assistance with an outreach program to contact the reunion participants and provide further assistance with the OHMS indexing process. Contact Ken McPherson at (909) 908-6922 if you are interested in contributing to making the Sycamore-in-the-70s archiving project a more valuable historical resource for Claremont and for a world-wide demographic of progressive education researchers. Acquiring the ability to index with OHMS and search the Library of Congress for keywords and subject headings could prove valuable for those inclined toward data management.

 

-Ken McPherson