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Title
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McKiernan Interviews
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Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br />
<h3>The McKiernan 22</h3>
<div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li>
</ul>
Creator
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Stephen McKiernan
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Binghamton University Libraries
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English
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In copyright.
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Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Roz B. (Roz Berkman) Payne, 1940-
Date of Interview
2010-10-05
Interviewer
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Stephen McKiernan
Language
English
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Binghamton University Libraries
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audio/mp4
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144:28
Biographical Text
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Roz Payne is an educator, activist, and founding member of an antiwar filmmakers group called Newsreel. She released a 12-hour DVD set titled What We Want, What We Believe on the Black Panthers. She has a Bachelor's degree from UCLA."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":13311,"3":{"1":1},"4":[null,2,4884200],"5":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"6":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"7":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"8":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"9":0,"10":2,"11":4,"12":0,"15":"Arial","16":10}">Roz Payne is an educator, activist, and founding member of an antiwar filmmakers group called Newsreel. She released a 12-hour DVD set titled <em>What We Want, What We Believe</em> on the Black Panthers. She has a Bachelor's degree from UCLA.</span>
Keywords
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Baby boom generation; Black Panthers; Nineteen sixties; Activism; Student Protests; Burning of Bank of America (1970)."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":513,"3":{"1":0},"12":0}">Baby boom generation; Black Panthers; Nineteen sixties; Activism; Student Protests; Burning of Bank of America (1970).</span>
Subject LCSH
Newsreel (Firm); Political activists--United States; Payne, Roz B. (Roz Berkman), 1940--Interviews
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McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Roz Payne
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 5 October 2010
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)
SM: Alrighty.
RP: So, what do you actually teach? What class is it?
SM: Actually, I retired.
RP: Oh, okay.
SM: I left the university a year ago in March to work on this book because I could never really... I was too busy. I was the director of student programming co-curricular programs, and I was at the university six days a week, and I just had no time. I have been working out–
RP: [inaudible] At the same university?
SM: I was at the Westchester University for 22 years. Then I was at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia for four. I worked at Ohio University for four years, and then I was out in San Francisco, the Bay Area for six years. I actually was hired at Berkeley, and they froze me out after I was hired. Really frustrated me. So I ended up starting my own entertainment business out there and working all different kinds of jobs. But I had an entertainment business until I was able to come back into higher education.
RP: Entertainment.
SM: Huh?
RP: What kind of entertainment?
SM: Oh, it was basically San Francisco [inaudible].
SM: Ask my first question.
RP: Yep, go for it.
SM: Yep. Could you talk about your early experiences in your background, your growing up years, where you grew up, the influence of your parents and teachers, or any role models who inspire you to become who you are?
RP: Okay. That is a big story. So you might also, let me just say one thing. You should go to my website. Did I send it?
SM: I have read it.
RP: Because there is in the family section, some photographs from that period of time. And some of them, one of them is specifically my mother getting arrested, which describes my childhood.
SM: I saw that. I saw that.
RP: So anyway, I grew up with ... I was born in Patterson, New Jersey. Allen Ginsburg lived a block from us and our parents are friends. And he used to occasionally watch me if my mother ran to the store or something. He was a little older than I was. I do not have any memory of it. I just remember my mother talking about it. But later on when we met, he stayed at my house one night and we went through that whole history. It was really interesting. So my parents were radicals. My father, my mother came from Poland, and she began working in the textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts. And she was very active in unions, and she was one of the leaders. What happened is a lot of textile unions in New Jersey, in Lawrence, and usually one would go out and strike, then everybody would go to another mill and get a job because they needed money and they never could have a general strike. Well, she helped organize a very large general strike with some other people. And I have pictures of her getting arrested from that, which are also my website, which I found in old newspapers and stuff. And my father also was a radical. He and his friend Nick San Tangelo, my father was Italian. My mother was Polish Jewish. And my father's whole family, parents came from Italy in the mountains, close to maybe two hours from Naples. I went and visited there once. And there's a church at the top of the hill in the village that says, "In honor of General Lismo Christiano." Christiano was my maiden name who helped Napoleon. And that is why everybody there has blue eyes.
SM: Oh, wow.
RP: So, my father was a radical in New Jersey. My mother was a radical, in Lawrence, Mass. And my mother spent about two years in jail from getting arrested. And they held her for deportation because she was born in Poland and had never gotten her citizenship papers. So, they tried to return her to Poland, but it did not work out because the borders changed in those days. Where she came from was not exactly in the right place or something like that. And then eventually my mother moved when she got out. She went to a hiking nature club overnight place in New Jersey where she met my father. It was called The Nature Friends. And the Nature Friends came out of Germany, and it was a place for people, workers mainly, not rich people that had country homes. But workers could go and they would have big lodges and communal kitchens, and it would be a place for workers to be able to enjoy nature. And they met there, and there was a pond there. I have pictures of myself when I was a little kid in the pond in the buildings. I actually went back and visited, and it still exists, by the way. When I went up to the Matterhorn a number of years ago, they have a sign with the N and the F, the F coming out of the back part of the N. And they have clubhouses all over the world. But I kept up my membership all these years so you can go. And Hitler put them on the undesirable list and was going to kill everybody because they were socialists basically.
SM: Wow.
RP: So that is what I grew up with. I grew up and my parents moved at some point. Well, we were in Patterson and all my father's family still remained in New Jersey. He was the only, he was the rebel and he left. My mother's family was in LA, so when I was four, they went across country and they went to live in LA. And I went to LA High School, I went to grammar school there. I went to LA High School, I went to UCLA. I went a year before UCLA to Santa Barbara. I did not exactly like it, particularly. I liked UCLA. And I graduated from UCLA in (19)62. And I was going to be an art teacher. I wanted to do art. And let us see what happened? Oh, my high school boyfriend remained to be my college boyfriend. And right after I graduated, we got married. His name was Arnold Payne. And he was a year ahead of me and he was going to Columbia University for graduate school. And so we got married and I moved. I went out to New York to live in New York with him. And let us see. My early days of political activity, by the way, since my mother was ... All those years that I grew up, my mother was held for deportation. And they had a big problem in trying to deport her after that. She was held in jail for that long time in Lawrence. They tried to deport her, but somehow the borders got changed between Poland and other countries and the papers were not ... They could not do it. There's some technological reason, and I cannot remember now what that reason was. And so she was held while I was growing up for deportation. So during my entire growing up, probably every three or four months, the FBI would come to my door and knock on the door. My mother had instructed me, just call her, close the door and do not let them in and call her. And then she would go outside and talk to them. And so, we were... Go outside and talk to them. And so, we were always going to these radical parties growing up, of the Hollywood Ten people and-and a lot of radical lawyers. People would bring my parents new political newspapers in brown paper bags. And I went to special schools at times or camps where with a lot of the Hollywood Ten kids. So, it was like people that I did not have to hide anything. The kids that I went to, like LA High school and stuff, I never talked about my political part, of that part of my life with them. And I learned not to cross picket lines. There was a group that sold, it was called Pep Boys, Manny, Moe and Jack was the name of this place that sold car repair material.
SM: They are all over the country today.
RP: Yeah. It was a big chain. There was a strike there and we were never allowed to go into that store. I remember things like that that happened. And my parents were not religious. My father grew up Italian Catholic. My mother grew up Jewish Polish. And so we would go to my mother's family for the Jewish holidays and eat and celebrate them. And then we always had a Christmas tree. We always had a lot of parties and lots of people in the house, in and out. And I used to take off for Jewish holidays. I would go to school the first day and then take off a second day to hang out with my friends or something. Right. It was like we were never religious, but I made use of the holidays so I did not have to go to school.
SM:
Was that experience of growing up in the (19)50s there and you saw what was going on with the Hollywood Ten, you saw what happened in Germany. Was there anything of those experiences growing up as a kid that got you interested in civil rights? One of the things that I have asked many people in the interview process, many of them were red diaper babies and they said their parents were communists because of the fact that the Communist party was the only one that showed any kind of empathy toward people of color, particularly African American.
RP: Might be true. But also my mother especially was very strong about people of color. And for example, when Emmett Till got killed, I was 13 at the time, I believe, and there was a memorial service in downtown Los Angeles. My mother took me to it. We were the only white people. It was in a very old building with a lot of balconies. I remember going up, we were sitting in the very top part and we were the only white people in the entire building that I remember. My mother had black friends and I had black friends and I had Japanese friends. I had a Japanese friend in grammar school who had been sent away to one of those internment camps where they put all the Japanese in the desert. She was there for a while.
SM: Internment camps, yeah.
RP: Yeah. Linda Fukuyama. And also, by the way, I just read a book summer, my Italian relatives have a house in Acapulco for the winter they use. And I went down there and somebody had left this book about Italian internment camps. Did you ever hear that?
SM: No.
RP: Oh my God, you should see how many there were. When you went down to the wharf in San Francisco, the first people they picked up were the fishermen who had the boats in San Francisco. They picked them up first and then they picked up a lot of these truck farmers, Italians. What an incredible story about these guys.
SM:
What year was that?
RP: It was the same time, it was the Japanese were being picked up and the Italians were being picked up.
SM: Oh my gosh.
RP: My cousin gave me ... My cousins that are there, they're not political at all, but so many thought they would enjoy reading the book because it was Italian and neither of them really read it. My cousin's wife read it a little bit, so I could not believe it when I read it.
SM: That had to do with Mussolini probably and the fascism and all that other stuff going on.
RP: Yeah, definitely. Yeah.
SM: How did you become interested in civil rights even before you could [inaudible].
RP: I got brainwashed into it.
SM: Connection with a-
RP: My parent, all my life I heard about the Scottsboro boys. For example, there's a left wing, I do not know if it's communist, I do not know what kind of magazine it was that my mother had a copy of, that had a story about the Scottsboro boys. And it all had a story about when she got arrested. And it's the same time. So, my mother also had black friends. I mean, LA is a pretty integrated neighborhood. We lived in a white neighborhood, but my mother had a few black friends and my high school had black students in it because LA High School, if you went to the south, it was very interesting. From the high school, if you went south, it was a Mexican and black neighborhood. You went east, it was a Japanese neighborhood. If you went north they're gigantic white mansions. And there was one black person that lived there, Nat King Cole. There were private streets with guards at houses at different streets, so you could not go in there, gigantic mansions. I had some friends that lived there. And then if you went west, it was mixed up, a lot of Jewish neighborhoods and white and working class and more until it got further west, then it got to be fancier again. Where I happened to live was a very integrated school. And so I just grew up having black friends and Japanese friends. It's how the neighborhood was.
SM: When you look at those early, late (19)50s and early (19)60s, even before the Black Panthers or even a thought, I just want to list these things and whether you personally or your parents or your family were linked to any of these. Let me list them first and then you can comment.
RP: Okay.
SM: And of course, the civil rights movement that was real strong in the (19)50s, Dr. King's Montgomery bus boycott, the I Have a Dream speech in Washington. We all know what happened with the lunch counters and down south, Freedom Summer of (19)64 when so many of the students-
RP: Do I need to interrupt you or let you go through all of those?
SM: Yeah, I am going to go through them and then the Chaney, Schwerner, Goodman situation, the church bombing of the little girls, Emmett Till, James Meredith's march. And of course, groups like SNCC, NAACP, CORE, the Urban League and the race riots that were all like Watson (19)64. Any thoughts on any of those?
RP: Oh, I have a lot of thoughts because I know all ... It's a mixed bag because I grew up knowing about all of that because my parents got radical newspapers and magazines, you got to understand they were often brought in in shopping bags. But for example, when the Scottsboro boys got arrested, in the same issue of this communist magazine, I cannot think of the name, maybe it was not communist, but it was definitely a left-wing magazine, was an article my mother being in jail, being held for her strike activities in Lawrence. And the Scottsboro boys were also in that issue. So for me, that was part of my history. You named so many. I was going to tell you specific stories that happened around some of them, and I cannot remember.
SM: Well, why do not I just, the first one, Dr. King and the Montgomery bus boycott.
RP: Okay. I just thought of what the one I was going to tell you. So, 1962, I got married, I think it was (19)62. And after my wedding, a bunch of people, and in fact, one of my bridesmaids was going on one of the freedom rides, and she actually went to North Carolina, I think it was. And this guy, Joe Gerbracht, who's now a lawyer in California, went to see, he was not going, he was not that radical, but he got really drunk at my wedding and he went to say goodbye to a bunch of people on the bus. And he went on the bus and passed out and woke up, he was on his way to Mississippi.
SM: Oh my gosh.
RP: So that happened. Both of those two things happened. And just recently, my friend Carol, who kept a scrapbook of everything that happened when she went, she actually went to North Carolina or South Carolina, I cannot remember, one of them, during those Freedom Rides. And she's now very ill. But I visited her in the hospital and with her husband there about four or five months ago, and he gave me her whole scrapbook of that period of time. It included all of her photographs and leaflets and things about do not go out at night or you will be hung, posters that were put up and all this stuff. So, I grew up with, that was part of my day-to-day normal stuff somehow. And of course, it was very moving, the whole civil rights period, and I did not do it. Why did not I do it? I almost did it. I almost got on that bus, but I went to see Mrs. Clark, my stupid, I am not saying stupid, my counselor at LA High School. It was my last year, and I told her I was thinking of doing it and I wanted her advice. And she said, "Well, if you do, you may never be able to teach."
SM: Oh, it was a threat then, early.
RP: Yeah.
SM: Oh my God. Because as we get later into the interview, we talk about the importance of Newsreel and what you did there, but how did the media's coverage of these things that I just mentioned, all these events in the late (19)50s. How did the-
RP: How did they cover?
SM: How did the media-
RP: You got to understand that I had beyond the media we got delivered to the house, the LA Times, and we got the local paper, the Pico Post, and the small little for community stuff. But my parents had, because my mother's was held for deportation, she was always scared they're going to kick her out of the US, that her friends would come to her house with brown grocery bags and inside would be the People's Work World, which was the communist newspaper. We had all that reading material in our house, but it was brought in, not by my parents, but by her friends who had visited in brown paper bags. My parents died, they had the most incredible intensive bookshelves filled with books, radical, every book you can imagine from that period of time, radical.
SM: Do you have those in archives now?
RP: I definitely still have them.
SM: Good.
RP: They're in my bookshelves now. I do not read them, but they're there.
SM: Yeah. Well, what was your thoughts on looking at television back in the (19)50s, that black and white TV and early (19)60s when President Kennedy came in (19)61, what was your thought on the media's coverage of these early events in the Civil Rights movement? They would list them on the evening news and you would see them in the paper. But was that in any way inspiring you to do something more, something more daring, more educational, more revealing?
RP: Well, I was always thought that I was doing daring things. We did support things. We did not have big demonstrations in LA around civil rights that I can remember. But I watched it with in great interest, let me say that. Whatever TV had on, I watched TV all the time. My parents always had the news on, always had the news. 6:00 news it would be on. And then I cannot remember, we ate dinner before 6:00, so we would have to be done by 6:00, or we ate after the news. But I grew up with that. And not only that, but I grew up with all of my parents' radical friends, because my parents are great entertainers. Coming to the house for eating big dinners and arguing you could not imagine and discussing. I did not pay too much attention at times about all the political things happening. When the Rosenbergs were being executed, what year was that? Do you know?
SM: That was in 19 ... Was that (19)54?
RP: I do not know, but I am not-
SM: Think it was around that time at the McCarthy hearings, it was in that timeframe.
RP: Oh, it was? Well, I would rush home from school and watch the McCarthy hearings. My Uncle Norman bought us our first TV very early, and my mother would be there watching. And as soon as I got home, I would be watching the McCarthy hearings. And because some of my friends' fathers who were in the Hollywood movie industry would be testifying sometimes. And I remember Bill Jericho's father was one of them. And so we watched the news. My parents did news all the time, and I watched the hearings and there was one more thing I was going to tell you before I thought of the TV ... I lost my train of thought.
SM: Magazines, or...
RP: Well, we had all the radical magazines in the house. We did not have any garden magazines or anything like that. I do not know why, we did not have that kind of magazine.
SM: Better Home and Gardens, that kind of stuff.
RP: No, none of that was in there. But we did have the LA Times on Sunday. My parents had the commie newspaper People's World. There were ... what other magazines were there?
SM: Well, there was Nation that was very popular.
RP: Oh, we did not have Nation. And big arguments, my parents and their friends on all sorts of political things, which I never paid attention to the arguments. Maybe they were just discussions, I do not know. But that did not interest me in my younger years.
SM: A quote that really stood out in some of the literature I read on you was that you have been quoted as saying that you used to look out when you lived in New York City near the [inaudible]
RP: Out the window?
SM: Out the window.
RP: Watch the sun setting over in New York and wish I was there?
SM: Yeah, that fire. And then the fire from the [inaudible].
RP: What it was, I was living in the New Jersey... This is later I got married. My husband was at Columbia University getting a PhD and he was working at the New York Times in the morgue. The morgue, you know what the morgue is, the newspaper?
SM: You mean the obituary columns?
RP: No, the morgue in newspaper is where they clip all the newspapers. They get all the stories and they file them. So, they have a back load of everything that is ever been written.
SM: Oh, okay.
RP: And that is called the morgue. So we lived in New Jersey. It was about the bus stopped on the corner of our street, and it was about a 15-minute ride to get into 40s, where the bus terminal was, in 42nd Street. And we had found that place because somebody else was a group of four or five little cottages going down on the Palisades overlooking the Hudson River. And it was gorgeous. And as the sunset to my east to the back of me, it would hit all the windows of all the buildings in New York, and it would turn them red on a sunset night. And so that is what I was looking at. And I would look at them and wish that I was there. Is that what I said?
SM: You said, well then you said it was the inspiration that ignited you because you said-
RP: Invited me to go to New York to get involved.
SM: No, you said the GI Zippo lighter on the-
RP: Oh, on the TV, I saw that.
SM: Yeah. And it helped-
RP: Oh yeah, I remember what that was. Okay. That is not nothing about the New York thing. This what really got me totally upset was this GI was in a little village in Vietnam, and the people were in these little straw houses. And first one guy goes and takes this knife and starts cutting open their bags of rice and dumping it on the ground. That was the first thing. That was really upsetting to me. And then this other guy who takes out his Zippo and he lights one of their huts on fire. And that was real. That really incensed me. And it did that somebody would, these poor people had nothing. And there were these just mainly women holding these naked kids in their arms and everybody's crying and screaming, and these guys are doing it. And that is what really ignited me to get really involved in the peace movement, antiwar movement.
SM: When you were a kid at a young adult, did you take pictures and film things when you were real young, before you even knew about Newsreel? Were there-
RP: No. Well, when Newsreel started, I went to the first Newsreel meeting. That happened in 1967 in New York. Well, I had my brownie camera. I took pictures when I went to camp of my friends or a deer or a tree or something, what normal kids would take pictures of. But my father, I will tell you about my father. My father and I never realized this at the time, had a darkroom in our house. We had this small room that had a single bed in it that a guest would sometimes stay there. And this is not my first house, this is towards the end. We lived in a few different places, but it was a little room. And it had the person who used to have that house turned it into a darkroom also. And it had a sink there. And my father had a lot of dark darkroom equipment and he used to take photos and he would develop them there. So that is what happened. And his photos, I have a scrapbook of a lot of his stuff, but they're just like family pictures, what you take of your family kind of, and mountains and stuff like that. But in my bathroom, I have got a beautiful, very large picture he took of a yucca. Do you know what yucca is?
SM: A yucca.
RP: A plant. There's a big white flower on top.
SM: That is the one out in Arizona, or...
RP: Oh, it could be any place. They grow in a lot of places. And he developed and it is just a gorgeous, gorgeous, and he had not colored some of the prints.
SM: And who knows, maybe subconsciously, that is how you really got interested in photography.
RP: My parents always had, I always had cameras. I always had the cheap little brownie type cameras. And wherever we went, if we went to Yosemite, my parents were into nature. We always went camping overnight. There were certain beaches not far from where we lived that you could put up your tent. My parents liked camping. So we put up our tent at the beach with other people, other families, and my father would take pictures. I have pictures of all this stuff. Then we would go to Yosemite and we would camp. Every year we would go to Yosemite and my father would take pictures. And by the way, I had some pine cones. But the main thing is my father belonged to this, I told you earlier, this group called The Nature Friends, that was on the Nazi list as being a socialist. Hitler hated these people and arrested and killed a lot of them. The group started out of Germany, but it spread to Switzerland and Austria and United States. And that is where my parents met, hiking at the one in Midvale, New Jersey. And I still go, by the way, I kept my membership up all these years. I pay my dues every year.
SM: You do not even understand that if you know anything about Hitler, was not he really into staying fit, and the perfect male, or whatever it was there?
RP: That is what all these guys look like in the pictures. They're wearing those little shorts, like Switzerland. But there's a place that is in San Jacinto, the mountain right above next to Palm Springs. My father helped build that cabin there. And as you go through it, a park, a national forest park, and there's a place where you can park your car and then you hike up about, you have to bring all your stuff. You hike up about, well, I do not know, probably a seven-minute walk. And on the top, they built this unbelievable, gorgeous cabin that looks like something out of the German or Swiss Alps. It's all stone on the bottom and then wood on the top and a big sleeping room inside and sleeping porch. Those Germans are so bright. Two miles away, there's water. This is big mountains. The pine cones are two feet big. And they piped in water two miles away, going up and down hills and by gravity fed somehow. And then they built this metal three layer box of frame with burlap over it and with a hose on the top of it. And the water then sprinkles out the top by the pressure coming down. And what's the burlap? And it drips down and the box is made out of mesh wire so animals cannot get into it to eat your food. And it keeps it cool. You're can have cold beer there. And so, they did all this stuff. I have a few films, I did not make them, but I found them in my discovery of trying to do research on this group, and I found films of them building this place. So, I have been around film stuff. We were extras in movies. I cannot even remember what movies. But when they needed audience, somebody sit in the audience or something. Growing up, that Hollywood thing was kind of important to me, living close to it.
SM: Oh, you were not audience for Howdy Doody, were you?
RP: No, but I was in the audience for, there was an Abbott and Costello show.
SM: Oh yeah. And that Art Linkletter had his show too.
RP: Do not know that. But I knew Abbott and Costello. Do you remember those names?
SM: Oh yeah, I remember them well.
RP: Yeah. Well, Abbott and Costello, one of them was born in Patterson, New Jersey, where I am from.
SM: Oh, my golly.
RP: So that was my connection to that.
SM: At your school, what kids or what people did you know that were from Hollywood?
RP: From Hollywood?
SM: Yeah.
RP: Well, it was not really from my school because my school was not in the Hollywood area, but I knew my parents from being radicals. We knew all the commie writers that got blacklisted, like Bill Jericho's kids. And I knew, I am trying to think of the name.
SM: I know there was a movie out on one of them. I forget his name now, the producer. There's a movie out on them a year ago, I remember. And for Zero Mostel was in that group as well.
RP: I will tell you, my parents were not in that group particularly. But we had friends that were in it. And we had individual friends because my parents were, first of all, my parents were workers. And that group was more, but my parents were intellectuals. Got to understand. We had lots of books and did all this stuff. They were still working class. That group was upper middle class or upper class, but from the industry. And they did not mingle that much with working class. Plus, my mother was Jewish and my father was Italian, and most of them were Jewish, I think.
SM: Can you explain how Newsreel began, where and when and-
RP: Exactly. Here is what happened.
SM: Explain how the Boomer generation involvement, why did it start and who were the early people?
RP: So '19, my husband and I broke up. I had friends in New York and I went to look for an apartment in New York, I wanted to move to New York. And I just looked at this apartment on 15th Street, fifth floor walkup. And I looked at it, and when I walked in, the guy says, "I am leaving right now. I am going to France. I got to catch a plane in two hours." And the apartment was filled with stuff, all over the place. And he says, "Here's the keys. If you want to take it, it's not my apartment. The guy whose actually apartment is-is already there. We're going to go work on a film with" ... Do not remember now, but some famous Italian filmmaker. And that is it. "I got to leave, I got a plane to catch." So I looked around and there was a Leica camera lying on the bed or a dresser, and there's a lot of money in change in someplace else. And he was gone. So I took the camera, put it on my shoulder. I decided I did not want that apartment. Fifth floor walkup, forget it, it was too much to walk up. And I walked out and I am walking down the street and I bumped into this guy, Marvin, who I am still friends with, and actually lives here. And Marvin says, "Oh, I am on my way to this film meeting, it's the first meeting of a group of people. And it's down on ..." We were walking down Second Avenue and 14th Street by this time. And do you know New York?
SM: Yes, I do.
RP: Okay. So I was at 15th near Second. Between First and Second, no, between Second and ... Anyway, it does not make a difference. It was a one block over. And I was walking down with Marvin. And all of a sudden this wild guy comes running up with us to us. And he said, "Oh my God, I am so glad to bump into you." And he sees my camera. He says, "Oh, good. You're a photographer. Well, I got to tell you, this is the first meeting right now that is happening. Immediately you have got to go to, of all these radical filmmakers. It's happening in this loft." And he told us, he says, "I am going there right now. Just follow me and da da da da da." It was Melvin Margolis, who is in our film group. He's in a lot of our films. And he was a great organizer. And he filmed some of the great shots in the Columbia University takeover film. When the black students kicked all the whites ... Do you know that film at all?
SM: No, I do not know the film, but I know all about it because I had friends that went there.
RP: Okay. Well, the black students took over the president's office and then kicked all the white students out at some point. And we filmed it, by the way. And Melvin, this guy that who ran up to me in the street, that said, "You got to go to this meeting, the blacks kicked all the whites out of that building." And he convinced them that is the most important thing that they were doing that has ever happened, and he has got to stay to film it. And they let him stay. He was the only white person that was allowed to stay in that building. So he filmed them soaping, putting liquid soap on all the stairs. Because there's a tunnel the cops are going to make come through the basement and come up the stairs, so they would slip on the soapy stairs. And he filmed all the notes on the blackboard about so-and-so's mother called and blah, blah. He was great. He was a really great wild man. He's dead now. He died of cancer some years ago. But anyway, so he led us to this meeting, his first meeting. And that was the first gathering of, I walked into this room. It was a basement, and it could have been either Bill Jersey or ... It was somebody else's loft. I cannot think of his name. Maybe it was not even a loft. It was in the basement. Very dark. And I looked around and they were all these really interesting people. And I said, "Oh my God, this looks like my gang of people that I want or hang out with." And I sat down and that was the first Newsroom meeting So that is how it happened. And then I kept going to the other meetings, and I finally found an apartment to rent on 15th Street. And I had friends, this old couple who lived on the second floor, and mine was on the fourth floor, I think. It was a one bedroom, a living room, a kitchen kind of dining area. And then there was a little alcove that you could put another bed in. So at times, somebody in Newsreel always needed a place to stay. So I would let them stay there. And it was a great building. I wish I did not give it up. We won it in a rent strike against the guy who owned it, and I would have owned it now.
SM: How did you finance all this? In the very early-
RP: I immediately, we rented a newsreel, rented an office on Seventh Avenue in the Garment District, and they needed somebody to run the office. And somebody, I think maybe Robert Kramer, somebody asked if I wanted to work in the office, because I was not working. In New Jersey I was teaching school, public school, by the way, and I began hating it. It was elementary school and I hated it. And there miniskirts were getting fashionable. I came to school in a miniskirt, and the principal sent me home one day and I said, "That is it. I am out of here." So I quit teaching and that is when I moved to New York to look for this place. I needed a job, and so they hired me at $65 a week to open. I went and there was another woman that got hired, the two of us. We would go in the morning, we would go at, I do not know, 8:00, 9:00 or whatever time, and unlock, walk up the two flights of stairs, or maybe we were on the second floor, Seventh Avenue and 18th Street, I think it was. Or 27th Street or something. It was in the garment area. That is all I can remember. Because people were pushing those things of clothing. And we would open it up and we would open the mail and then Newsroom people would start coming in. People are making films. Somebody would start bringing equipment in a movie and start editing something or somebody. We began just making films, immediately. Just people who had had equipment began sharing their equipment, and people who had money began paying the rent and paying for labs. And it was a very diverse group of people.
SM: When you did that first one, the Columbia protests, how would you find out about it and how would you get access to-
RP: Oh, that was really simple. So here we are. I come from New Jersey with my little red Volkswagen that I had when I taught school. And my husband and I had broken up and I kept the car. So, I am living on 17th Street, the place I just described to you. So, I am there and all of a sudden, the same guy that I told you when I was walking down the street with Marvin and this guy walked up to us and said, "Hey, there is this first Newsreel meeting happening," he told Marvin and I. Marvin calls me up, he says, "Roz, Columbia's just been taken over. I just heard about it. Get your car down here and pick me up and the cameras and we will go up there."
SM: Wow.
RP: So, I drove down, he loaded up cameras and film and stuff, and we drove up and parked the car there, and I never left during the protests. It was so much fun. It was one of the most fun things I have ever done.
SM: Were you a little fearful though, that you were getting involved in a situation that-
RP: I am never fearful like that.
SM: Did they force you out too, along with the students when they took over, or the police or whatever?
RP: Well, okay. Did you see the film?
SM: I have not seen the film, no. But I know.
RP: You should look at some of the film, will tell you so much. We will talk about that later. But what happened was, first one building was taken, then another, and then before you know it, the math building was taken in, all the math teachers were on strike. And then Margaret Meade at the anthropology building, and it was thousands. We were the majority, I never get scared of things like that. Things like that never bothered me. And I also always felt that I was safe because I was not one of them. I was documenting it. I was a filmmaker... documenting it. I was a filmmaker, so my camera kept me safe. I always felt that way. That is not necessarily true, but that is what I felt.
SM:
Did you film the... Again, I have not seen it, but I know the scene, the historic scene of the students in the President's office.
RP: No, I did not film that, but you know who filmed it? Melvin.
SM: Oh my God.
RP: This is what happened. The Black students... Everybody took over the place, and Melvin was there, and he was filming it. And there were a few other, maybe another neutral person, and they opened up his cognac or his wine. And they began going through all of his files and his girly magazines. But finally, they asked all the white... The Blacks asked all the whites to leave and go take over other buildings. Everybody left except Melvin, who convinced them he had to film what they were doing because it's the most important thing. So, they allowed Melvin to stay in that building. And he filmed them soaping the stairs, this liquid soap stuff they had, and they put it down... There was a tunnel that led from another building, underground, into that building. So they thought the cops are going to come through this tunnel, so then the steps would be all slippery and slimy from the liquid soap. And we have all that on film, in our Columbia film. It is all there.
SM: Of course, I am going to just briefly mention some of your other films here. But the Chicago (19)68, you were there and you covered that as well with photography and with film. I would say that must have been a scary situation too.
RP: I was scared once in a while there. I will tell you, it is not like I am not ever not scared. I feel pretty good, actually, with a camera. I always feel like it's protection, but I have been hitting the head with a tear gas grenade in Washington, D.C. at a demonstration once. And that was really scary. And I immediately ran... It did not hit me hard. It came across the side of my head, but Robert Kramer had already left. He ran fast. As soon as he saw them, he got out of there and left me and this other guy there. And the other guy and I ran around for a while, and we have some great shots from that. And then we left.
SM: What stands out from that experience?
RP: Which one?
SM: Chicago (19)68. Is there any scenes? Or just [inaudible]-
RP: If you saw the films that I made, my photographs... Well, the first thing was, I went there with a group of people. Newsreel had three different groups that were making three different films on Chicago. My group was going to find some young, innocent people who get involved and then all of a sudden the cops are going to be... There's going to be all this stuff. They get disillusioned, and they're going to get beaten up and stuff. Well, we found our couple... And the next day, we lost them in the crowd. We never could find them again. And then we were on our own, and we just began filming. And I hung out a lot in Lincoln Park, which was one of the staging grounds for stuff. And that is where a lot of these Chicago young bikers hung out. I think they were called the head hunters. And there's this one kid, I think his jacket said banana on it. And we did some long interviews with them. And it was interesting to talk to alternative types of people that were in Chicago that were not the political, not the Rennie Davises, not the FBS. I hung out at night a lot in the movement center, the FBS Movement Center. And that is where everybody got together and talked about strategy, and we filmed all this, by the way. This is in our film. You got to look. You got to look at some of our films. Do you have a video machine?
SM: Yes, I do.
RP: Okay. Because it is hard to explain all this stuff because it is so intense. But it was really scary... Sometimes it was really scary, and sometimes it was just absolutely fun. Because I had my gang of people. I had two gangs. I had Newsreel... There were a lot of Newsreel people. My best friend Jane is too scared. She does not like to be out when there's cops and all that fighting, but she was very important. She stayed near a phone in somebody's apartment, and she manned the phones. So, whatever anybody needed, or if somebody got in trouble, or somebody got busted or something, she was there to take down all the information, and make the contacts, and everything. And at the end... I never get arrested, by the way. My mother always told me, "Do not get arrested." Because my mother got arrested and spent time in jail for her union organizing. She said, "It's a waste of time. It drains you. It is a waste of time." She says, "Just escape. Try to escape." And I always followed her advice, and I always got out of there really fast if I thought I was going to be busted. My friend Jane, who is still by the way, my best friend. I speak to her every day. She lives up here, not far from me. She did not go out the streets at all. She was at the phones in case somebody had trouble. And going home from Chicago, the cops stopped her car. And why? Because she had Tom Hayden and some other people in her car.
SM: Oh, no.
RP: Because Tom is a really good friend of ours. And so, the cops were probably looking at him and watching him. Saw him get in the car, stopped the car... And inside her car, somebody had hidden under the seat these little balls that had nails in them that you stick under the tires of the cops as they move forward, which she did not do. She never would do anything like that. She's very proper, wealthy girl who would not do anything like that. So, she got arrested. I do not know. You just never know.
SM: The other one that really fascinates me is the 1967 protest at the Pentagon.
RP: Oh, yeah. See, that was the scariest one. I was so frightened at that one.
SM: Yeah, because there was a march all the way across the bridge, I believe. And then they walked up to the Pentagon? Is that what-
RP: Well, what happened was we were at the... Where were we? At the Reflecting Pool? Or someplace... Where Dave Dellinger and the usual gave the speeches, and then there was a march. We filmed all this, by the way. And then we marched... Maybe we went across a little bridge. I remember a bridge, but I cannot remember that. But then I remember, somebody cut through some field. And we went up this hill, and it led us right to the Pentagon.
SM: Oh, wow.
RP: And that was scary. That was really scary. See, I never sit down in demonstrations. I am taking pictures. I am not going to be one that sits there and let us cops come and hit me on the head. That is scary for me. So people sat down. And the marshals, not even the cops, it's the marshals that were just violent. The marshals went after people and people would not get up. They had their arms locked, and they would just bang them with these long wooden police sticks that they had. And there was tear gas, and a lot of people had bloodied heads.
SM: I think there were 100,000 people at that.
RP: Yeah, they were little old ladies and all sorts of stuff. I have got thousands of photographs.
SM: That is the one where that picture of the guy with the flower in his gun... I think that came from there.
RP: Yeah, it did. Exactly.
SM: That one of your pictures, or?
RP: You know what? I do not know which ones you're talking about exactly. I remember a picture with... The kid had put a flower in the end of the gun.
SM: When I look at all these, you were... Boy, it's amazing the things that you covered, beginning with Chicago. I saw the entire list, but up against the Wall, the Miss America. You did-
RP: That was great. That was really my most fun thing. We got on a bus in New York, and there was this great Black woman, one of the very first Black women lawyers who's now dead, but she got on our bus with us. And I was always a fan of hers. She's very radical. And we went down to, where was it? Asbury Park, or? I am trying to think where it happened.
SM: Atlantic City?
RP: Where?
SM: Was it Atlantic City?
RP: Yeah, Atlantic City. And it was a group of women... I went as a photographer. You got to understand, I was not the organizer of this event. But Beverly Grant, who worked in the office with me in Newsreel, she is a member of Newsreel, was also part of the group that organized this. So her part of this was to go inside. They got tickets and a certain time. They had stink bombs, whatever that means. It's something that you... There's ammonia, and it smells like ammonia, and they were going to let them go inside where the pageant was being held. And the person with Beverly got arrested immediately for some reason. Maybe they saw her doing it. And Beverly did take some photographs, and I was outside the entire time. And I, basically, was taking photographs outside. And they brought a sheep, and they began comparing Miss America to the sheep. And we made a short little... Maybe 15-minute film about that event.
SM: The other one that I really have to see is Bess Myerson speaking at the Women's-
RP: Another Mother for Peace.
SM: When I saw the that on the list, I went immediately to-
RP: That was not a Newsreel film. That was a film that we found, somebody gave us. And I just kept a copy. I made Bess Myerson a copy for it. She found out about it. I made her a print of it.
SM: My golly. Well, I got to definitely see that, because I would have never thought that-
RP: But all she did was... It was the Beverly Hills Women's Group, Another Mother for Peace, a luncheon in a fancy hotel. She gave this great speech.
SM: Well, you covered all these major things. You were up at Harvard dealing with the ROTC. You were-
RP: It was not all me. It was my group.
SM: Yeah, it was your group, but-
RP: So, I did not... The group, various people did various things. I am not going to take credit for doing all those things.
SM: The Earth Belongs to the People was another one.
RP: First ecology film, that was the very first ecology film ever made.
SM: 79 Springs of Ho Chi Minh.
RP: That, by the way, was made by Santiago Álvarez, a great Cuban filmmaker. We distributed it.
SM: Troublemakers was one. Yippie, you did a short one-
RP: Oh, Yippie has a lot of footage... It's a spoof on the Chicago convention, and it is hilarious. Daley got scared that the Yippies were going to put LSD in the Lake, park. And so Abbey Hoffman and a few other people worked on that film. I did a little work on it with this guy, Bill Jersey, in his studio. Was not a Newsreel film, but it should have been because it's one of our more popular films. And that shows them in a... Keystone cops, 1930s car. And they're all dressed up like cops. And they have their big billy clubs out, and they're hitting the water to try to get rid of the LSD in it.
SM: My gosh.
RP: It is hilarious.
SM: Yeah. And another thing too is, this is an area which I have not been able to get a whole lot of information on, is the Young Lord's film and the Puerto Rican-
RP: That was my favorite group.
SM: And the Puerto Ricans-
RP: In Newsreel, we had different groups that you hung out with. I am still friends with these Young Lords, by the way. Do you ever watch Amy Goodman on PBS?
SM: Yes, I have.
RP: On Democracy Now! It's Amy Goodman and Juan González.
SM: Yes.
RP: He was one of the leaders, he was actually my boyfriend at that time, of the Young Lords.
SM: Well, that is the one area that I have not been able to get anybody to talk about. I emailed a couple scholars, and they did not respond.
RP: The Young Lords?
SM: Somebody who teaches at different universities, to talk about the Puerto Rican movement, the Young Lords, that actually followed the Black Panthers in many respects.
RP: That is right. And they took their berets, the Black Berets. And they were very much like the Panthers. And we made this great film because they did a takeover of a church in the Puerto Rican community in New York that was never used. Only on Sundays was it used, and the people had already moved out of that community because they went to nicer communities. Because that community was... Gotten really trashed and was really poor. And it's on the edge of Harlem. And so, they demanded that the church be able to be used for a free breakfast program. And the minister would not let them do that, so they ended up taking over the church.
SM: If you have any contacts from the Young Lords, I would love to talk to them because I would like to-
RP: Juan González.
SM: Would he ever speak to me though?
RP: Why would not he?
SM: Well, he is a TV personality.
RP: Oh, I do not know. I have got another guy who is really good. His name is Mickey Melendez.
SM: N-I-K-K-I?
RP: Friend. He and I are... Well, Juan was my boyfriend actually at one point. So, I do not know. Maybe he would speak to you, maybe he would not. What do I know? Because I am not really good friends. He is very quiet and shy, and I do not see him very much. But Mickey Melendez was very important in that takeover. And he lives in... I have his phone number. I will give you his phone number. And you can use my name if you want. If you want me to, [inaudible]-
SM: Can you email that to me?
RP: Let me just give it to you right now.
SM: Okay, let me-
RP: You have a pen?
SM: Yep.
RP: Give me a minute. I am just going to pull it up. I am pulling it up on my cell phone. Mickey... Mickey, come on. M-I-C-K... Why do not I have it here? Oh, here it is. It's is easier for me to do this, like this, right now. Because if you ask me to do something later, I may not do it. Are you ready?
SM: Yep.
RP: 646-251-7745. So tell him what you're doing. You're writing this book. Is that what you're doing?
SM: Yes.
RP: And just who you are, and that I gave you his phone number.
SM: And his name is Mickey Melendez?
RP: Melendez. And he is very important in the Young Lords. He plays a big part in the takeover of the church. The other thing the Young Lords did was they... We had a bunch of radical doctors, who I actually just saw them, one of them, this guy Michael. And Lincoln Hospital, which is in the Bronx, where all the Puerto Ricans and Blacks would be sent... Mickey worked with doing a lot of medical stuff with Puerto Ricans, and making use of that hospital, and training people to be first aid stuff and things. And one of the great things they did is the Young Lords stole a New York City Health van, and brought it down into Spanish Harlem and did lead poisoning of the kids, testing for it.
SM: Oh.
RP: Because those vans used to just sit there. They did really great actions like that.
SM: How do you spell his first name?
RP: M-I-C-K-E-Y, Mickey.
SM: Oh, just like Mickey Mantle.
RP: Miguel.
SM: Just like Mickey Mantle.
RP: Yeah, or Miguel is his real name, but I call him Mickey.
SM: How did you become linked to the Black Panther Party? In other words, how did you develop their trust as a white person?
RP: Okay, now I know. I had to think a minute. So, I always cared about Black people, and I loved the Black Panther Party when they came out.
SM: Let me switch my tape here. Hold on one second.
RP: ...another book, number one. Number two, she has got six relatives-
SM: Oh.
RP: That she is taking care of, somebody in her house. She has got a lot of problems. She has got kids that she has got to deal with. She's got grandkids. She has got a full plate, plus she teacher. And I am pretty good friends with her, actually.
SM: She said not to contact her until she finished her book, and she said it was going to be done by October.
RP: I do not know. October, this coming October?
SM: Yeah, right now. How did you become linked again to the Black Panthers?
RP: All right, this is what happened. I am in radical Newsreel, the film group, and I began filming every time a group of... Every time the Panthers did anything... They were our counterpart. Newsreel, we were all radicals. We had a lot of film, so I started going up to the...I was asked by one of the leaders of the Black Panther Party in New York, if I would come up and show Newsreel films to educate the new recruits of the Panthers in their office. So once a week, every Monday night I think it was, I would leave the office. I would carry this very heavy, turquoise blue projector. I cannot tell you how heavy it was. And I would take one or two films under my arm and my purse, and I would take the subway up to 127th Street. Get out, and I would walk down to...I cannot remember if it was Seventh Avenue, the street that the Panthers' headquarters were on. And this guy, he was in charge of the headquarters and the building space, exactly, and who also was in helping with the new, young recruits, the new, young high school kids, and people who came in. And he would help set me up, and I would show... How I am talking to you about the films, I would talk to these kids about what the films were about. And we would show a film, and we would have a political discussion. And I did that once a week. It would be dark by that time, so then he would walk me back. His name was Zayd Shakur. You heard of Afeni Shakur?
SM: Oh, yes.
RP: Assata Shakur?
SM: Yeah, the [inaudible]-
RP: [inaudible] Shakur? Zayd's grandfather also has the name Shakur. Their family name is Shakur. And I love Zayd. He was the kindest, softest, nicest young guy that you could ever imagine. And Afeni Shakur, Tupac Shakur-
SM: Yes.
RP: They are all part of the same family.
SM: Oh, wow.
RP: And they took that name. Some of them were born into it, but they took the name. And when they would have reunions and parties, I always got invited. And even from Vermont, years later when I left, I would get invited. And I went to the cake company here in Burlington. And I had a cake that said... Made a big sheet cake to bring down for the party that was being held in Connecticut that said, "All power to the people." So I said to the woman who is the baker, I said, "Do you know what that means?" She says, "Does it have something to do with electric company?" And that was the end of that. I tried to explain. So, I always was close to the Black Panthers. I loved the Black Panther people that I met. And to this day, they're still really kind to me, gentle to me. And Zayd Shakur got killed on a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike. And he was really a neat young man, but he worked with the new young students who came into the party. And after I would show the film, and talk about the film, and what was happening in the country, he would walk me back to the subway to make sure I would get on the subway safely. And that was my relationship with him.
SM: I think it's important because there's a lot of misperceptions out there on the part of people who have read history or maybe do not know or do not want to know. Please explain the Panther links to white people and the partnerships they have with Asian Americans, and Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans. Because I do not think a lot of people... I think they isolate them into this one group, and they do not really see the relationships that they had with other people. Could you talk a little bit about that?
RP: Well, I just told you one story about me going down there. And still to this day, when they have reunions, I go to the reunions. And there's that time... I have done a lot of work around other things. You got to understand that this is not all I have done. Because I became friends with a lawyer by the name Elizabeth Fink. Do you know that name?
SM: Yes.
RP: So, Elizabeth Fink worked a lot on Dhoruba Bin Wahad's case. He was a Black Panther member. And I was in her law office, that she shared with a bunch of other people, when they had requested a whole bunch of documents on this whole case and on the Panthers to come. And I was there when they arrived, and there was something like 500,000 documents, big boxes, and boxes, and boxes of stuff. And then they went through the stuff... I never saw that much stuff. And it included all the counterintelligence documents, all the dirty tricks the FBI did that you have only heard about, but it's written down there in black and white. And I said, "Oh, this is incredible." So then, they did an appeal, and a lot of things are blacked out. So the lawyers in the office, Bob Boyle, Elizabeth Fink, and Bob Bloom, they did an appeal. And they asked that all the blacked out materials be un-blackened so we could read and see what it says. Sometimes there would be a whole page blacked out, so you did not know exactly what... So they did this, and they won. And I had this brilliant idea... I always get these brilliant ideas that then cost me years, that I would go through and... Because they were not in any order, anything. They're just how the FBI put it together as things went on. But you would be reading something about some incident, and then maybe 300 pages later, it would go on about that incident, what happened. So, I organized the project here at the University of Vermont. I brought it up for my students and other people in the community. I had a big meeting. I gave them instructions. Each person got one FBI book of documents that covered a certain period of time, maybe let us say 100 or 200 pages of documents. And I gave them a coding form. I worked with a coding form with the computer department. You would say, what was the volume it was from? What page was it? What's the number? The FBI has code numbers on each thing that they do. What is it about? Is it about starting problems between different groups? Is it about schools? Is it about education? Is it about workers? Is there something about race in it? It had about maybe 70 different things that you could mark, the time, the dates, the city that it happened in... And so, I did this. And after a number of years, we collected all this material. And then, we got the computer department at the University of Vermont to enter all the data. And it printed out everything in this order, so we could tell exactly what different things the FBI had done, going through all these 100,000 pages-
SM: Wow.
RP: Documents.
SM: And it was pretty bad, was not it?
RP: Yeah, it was really bad. And the thing is that when we got these documents, so much of the stuff was not marked out. It was not blacked out because... Some of the documents were blacked out. And then Liz Fink, and Bob Boyle, and the attorneys would go to court and demand that certain things be not blacked out. And then, the FBI would have to release things that showed, really, what happened.
SM: Wow.
RP: And so, we would get then better documents that showed us more and told this us more. And then sometimes, you would be reading a document and you did not know what really happened. And then you would read maybe five books later... Let us say, it's 300 pages, 400 pages later. You would come across something else that would fill in the information to tell the story completely. And so, that was a really big project that I did. I got totally obsessed around that because I could not believe that the FBI actually wrote all that stuff out. And not only did they write it out, but then they allowed the lawyers and the clients to see all that. It's just shocking to me. And I got totally turned onto the FBI. And there was one agent who was the biggest sexist... And great writer, brilliant writer, but he is very racist, very sexist. He liked to make jokes about Black people and everything when he made all his comments and his initials. See, we never knew the names of the FBI agents, but the FBI agents on each page, or when they did the reports, would put their initials. And his initials were WAC. So, we called him Agent WAC.
SM: Wow.
RP: And years later, I am reading through some other files, and I see that... Oh, I know what happened. I had gotten some files from the FBI in San Francisco. And when they were duplicating the files for me, or for the lawyers actually, for Liz Fink, they included... I found a page as I was reading it that had all the present-day... Somebody else must have gone to the Xerox machine and said, "Oh, I need a list of everybody who's working in the office right now." And they made a copy of all the FBI agents, with their names and present phone numbers.
SM: Oh my gosh.
RP: So, I got that document, and there's my Agent WAC. And I get his name for the first time. I only knew his initials were W-A-C. His name was William A. Cohendet, D-E-T at the end of his name, Cohendet, but it's Cohendet. And so, I get really excited. And I finally figure out, I am going to call the FBI office and see if I could talk to this guy. But then I do not have my nerve. And then I have this friend who is working for Mike Wallace at CBS. She went through a lot of my stories with me. She said, "Well, let me try... Give me that information. Let me see if I can do it, because maybe CBS will do a story on him." So, she calls me back a week later. And she says, "Well, you know what? That list was a list of the present-day FBI agents." This is years later. This is 20 years later. And that is his son who is also an FBI agent. And his son works there, and he's retired. But she gave me the son's home phone number, so I called up the son. No. She called up the son's home-home number, said it was from CBS. And she spoke to his wife. And his wife said, "Oh, that is his father who worked in those days. I will give you the phone number." So, we got the phone number of Agent WAC. By the time I pulled together a camera team, I pulled together somebody who was Steven Spielberg's cameraman and did all the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. And it was one of the same camera... He had a lot of camera people, but this was one that did them in France, I believe, that survived. I got him, and I got a friend of mine who's a very good sound person, and I called up the number. And I told him we would like to do an interview with him, and he got thrilled. We showed up, it was his 89th birthday. And he was so happy that he got to tell his story and be a star.
SM: Oh my God.
RP: So, we were there all day long, from morning until it started to get dark, and I interviewed him. Part of that interview is on my DVD. You should get the DVD. The story's there.
SM: Yeah, I am definitely going to get it, definitely.
RP: So, I have the interview with him on the DVD, part of it. Edited it, obviously. And then I also have another interview with another FBI agent that I fell in love with... Love meaning just through the paperwork. It's this other guy, Wesley Swearingen, who turned against the FBI at some point. And he got very interested... He was trying to figure out a lot of things. Because he came out to help Geronimo and some other people, and then he thought the FBI was maybe going to kill him. And he had retired already. He got really scared. And he had been in Hawaii, and he lived on a boat for many years. He now lives in Southern California. But anyways, I got him... I wanted to interview him, so I got the University of Vermont to pay him money and bring him to the university to talk about his being an FBI agent, which they did.
SM: Wow.
RP: And I got him a hotel, took him out for dinner with my friends, and we hit it off really well. And the following year, he called me up. And he said, "Roz, I am visiting my in-laws who live in the southern part of the state. And can we come and visit you?" I never have any of my documents. I never saved anything. And this FBI agent is this guy who I think maybe I messed up two of the stories, combined them a little. But this FBI, this is Agent WAC who I am talking about now. And his in-laws, he said, "Oh, my in-laws live in Pittsford." I said, "Oh, I know Pittsford." Because as a joke, some years earlier...I live in this little town, and we have a constable in our town that is elected position. And nobody was running that year. And as a joke, 32 of my friends did not tell me, but they wrote my name in. And I got the most votes so I became Constable in the town.
SM: Oh my gosh.
RP: And then they sent me for a week at the Police Academy to study all the laws of police laws and everything, which is in Pittsford, Pittsfield. And that is where the Police Academy was. So, I said to the guy, "Well, I have been there because I was elected constable, and I went there to study for a week." He says, "Well, meet my wife and all my family and we will take you out to the Radisson for dinner." So I did meet him, and we had dinner. And the first thing his wife says to me is, "You appreciate him more than his own children." And then, we became these immediate friends. I got what I call my costume. I got all dressed up. I changed how I normally look a little, and made myself very proper. And so, it was... a little and myself very proper. And so, that is how I got to know these two agents. And through them, I got a lot of information. And they're both on my DVD. I did two interviews with both of them. This DVD, besides having just some newsreel films, the extras is the main thing. It's nothing that you sit and watch all the way through because there's like maybe a PDF file at the very end. You turn off the DVD player and you look at it. There's a way of having to look at a PDF file on a DVD. And there's probably like, I do not know, 500 items on it, which includes all the Panther position papers and FBI documents that they wrote about them and all sorts of stuff.
SM: Did not you have even yourself have an FBI record of over a thousand pages?
RP: I have FBI [inaudible]. It's kind of boring. It's basically that I was seen at this event or seen at that event.
SM: Oh, okay.
RP: I never really did anything. I mean, I am not brave like a lot of people. I never got in trouble. I never got arrested. I was there as a camera person or as a demonstrator. My mother told me, "Do not get arrested. Escape if you can." And that is what I always followed, her words. Because being arrested is not fun.
SM: One of the things I wanted to ask is why did the Black Panther party begin? No, you already talked about that. Why do a lot of people believe that they were a violent group like the Weathermen? I have talked to a lot of different people, and I cannot pick on any specific person, but when they talk about how the anti-war movement and civil rights and how the movements all went negative toward the end of the (19)60s and early (19)70s, they bring up the Weathermen, they bring up the American Indian movement, which went violent at Wounded Knee, and they bring up the Black Panthers. Now-
RP: All right, let me speak to that.
SM: Yeah.
RP: I mean, I know your question, but let me do Wounded Knee first [inaudible]. Wounded Knee, these Native people were on their own land at Wounded Knee. And who was surrounding them? Who had a blockade that kept food from coming in? Do you know?
SM: Well, I would think it would be the police.
RP: Yes. So, that was Native land. I mean, in this country, you have a right to defend yourself.
SM: Right.
RP: All right. So, I am not even going to get into that. You can go online and read what Bill Cussler, their attorneys, and various other people have written about that and what they have written about it themselves. That was their land. And there's no reason at all that the US government should have been there. My opinion. All right. The second thing about the Panthers. The Panthers and Black people have been killed for years. They have been lynched, they have been hung, they have been beaten, they have been horribly treated, and they have a right to defend themselves and not allow themselves to be lynched and hung and beaten like that. And in this country, you have a right to carry a gun. You have a right to self-defense. And none of those Panthers ever shot, to my knowledge, at anybody unless the cops were shooting at them. Actually, there's a film out right now, and we're showing it at our film festival. It's the son of one of the Black Panthers that was involved in the LA shootout of the Black Panther headquarters. He's a young man. He studied film editing at USC, and his father and his father's friend, one of them had gotten shot when the police came and just did not like the Panthers, so they're going to shoot up their headquarters. They went to South Central LA and shot up. The father's a minister, and his friend still walks with a limp from being shot in the leg. He was on the roof, and there were no guns there at all. White people carry guns. You're allowed to go hunting, you're allowed to protect yourself. There's gun control that Blacks cannot have guns, and only whites can have guns. Only police can have guns. There were some Panthers that did bad drugs, and some of them maybe did things that were not too cool. I am not going to mention names or anything, but there were Panthers that were violent. But then you have to take each case and each thing by itself and you cannot link a whole group of people like all men or all white women or whatever it is, or all Weather people did this because it was not all. Sometimes there's somebody who does something that is not a good thing. And so, I think what happened is the Panthers, as soon as the media... And I blame the media for some of this, got a hold of the Panthers when they had guns to protect themselves. You know how many Black people were killed before Panthers had guns? They felt like they have a right in this country, have a right to have a gun. I mean, people in my town, I live in Vermont, there was a girl that lived here, and we used to walk around with a... What are they called? Around your waist. You have a holster. Is that what they're called?
SM: Mm-hmm.
RP: There was a gun in it. And during the hunting time, there's guns. Everybody has guns in their racks of their cars. But if they were Black people, I bet you it would be another story.
SM: And they forget the fine things that they did do, which is certainly the lunch program for poor kids, the sickle cell anemia drives to raise funds for that. There's a lot of issues that were very positive. Do not you somewhat blame the media though here? Because the media... I am just throwing a question out here. The media has a tendency to show the sensational every time. It's the sensational, the black berets, the intimidation, the guns, which is part of it. And two specific instances stand to mind. One was when the Black Panthers in California surrounded the Alameda County courthouse.
RP: I was there, by the way.
SM: Oh, were you?
RP: Yeah. And it's one of our films, on my DVD about... My big box set on the Black Panthers, it has that film in it.
SM: Well, it was that scene and then the one we all know at Cornell in 1969, which was the students coming out of the union there with guns.
RP: Do you have a picture of that? We cannot find these picture... And I remember seeing one picture, but I-
SM: I have the magazine front cover of, I think it's Newsweek, that I will send you.
RP: I would love to see it because I am trying to figure out... Because it was the anniversary of that, and I was trying to figure out where... There was a film made about it, but I cannot even find that anymore.
SM: I know Harry Edwards was the graduate student there who was kind of the advisor of that group. Of course, Harry went on to be a sociology professor at Berkeley and wrote Black Students, which is a great book. He's retired now. But those are the two scenes. You see students at Cornell and you see the Black Panthers at Alameda County courthouse. And what-
RP: Alameda County courthouse, I have a whole film. It's on that DVD. But there were no guns at that. There were no guns at all. There was marching around the courthouse.
SM: Okay. Well, the picture was seen all over the place.
RP: I might have to change phones. This phone is starting to go dead, the battery.
SM: Is that your cell phone?
RP: I got find my other telephone because this one's starting to go dead, I think.
SM: All right.
RP: Oh, here. Maybe this one will work better.
SM: Okay. You're still coming through pretty strong.
RP: No, but I hear it be starting to beep. It's warning me. Hold on a minute.
SM: Okay.
RP: Can you hear me?
SM: Yup.
RP: Okay, let me try this phone. I have got four phones downstairs on the same line.
SM: All right.
RP: The one I was talking to you starts beeping, so it gives me a warning that it might go dead.
SM: Could you, in your own words, talk about the fine things that the Black Panthers did do? I know I listed them. But it's my understanding too, because I have read about President Johnson, did not he take the food program and try to incorporate that into a program within the federal government? There's something there that they-
RP: [01:51:34] sounds familiar about it. But they did start the breakfast program. There had never been a breakfast program. Because kids were hungry going to school in the morning. You cannot think if you do not have a good breakfast. And they would have grits and eggs and blah, blah. That is why the Young Lords had that fight over taking over the church because they wanted to also have the breakfast program there.
SM: Right. When you look at the unique personalities of the leaders of the Black Panthers, Black Panthers are never looked upon, in my understanding, as a... They did not have weekly meetings.
RP: They did.
SM: Did they have weekly meetings?
RP: Oh, yeah.
SM: Did they have membership drives?
RP: Well, I do not know that they had a membership drive, but they were always having new recruits coming in.
SM: Yeah, well-
RP: Because I actually did a PR class with new recruits one time. I showed them the old Panther film, and there was somebody else... In fact, that is what I was going up to Harlem with the projectors, to show the film to new recruits. I did it weekly.
SM: There's about seven or eight personalities that were nationally known that were leaders of the party. The ones that seem to have the positive image, I will mention them first. Kathleen Cleaver seemed to have a more positive image in the minds of many people, as did Eldridge Cleaver, because he was also a writer. And even David Horowitz will say that he was a very good writer, when Soul On Ice was written. And actually, he said he did not have as much of problem with Eldridge as he did with everybody else.
RP: David said that?
SM: Well, David, I interviewed him over a year ago, so I am trying to think of... But it seemed like the only one-
RP: Only one you cannot imagine. David and I debated each other, by the way, at an academic conference on popular culture. And he's just horrible around the Panthers. And I will tell you why I think he's horrible. This woman, Kay... Kay Spender, maybe. Kay something. She was white, and he brought her over to do bookkeeping for the Panthers. He brought her over to Oakland. There's a bar there that the Panthers used to hang out. It was very close to where Huey's penthouse apartment was. He would sometimes get take-out food sent up to his place. I know a lot of this from the FBI files, reading them, by the way. And Kay Spender one day disappeared. She was at the bar, she left to go home and she was never seen again. No body, nothing. And David was the one that brought her over to the Panthers. David Horowitz, that is. And got her set up to be their bookkeeper. And he blamed, this is my opinion, he blamed himself for her disappearance and her probably death. And what happened to her? Who knows? Because there was never any sign of anything about what happened. It could have been that she was drunk walking home and passed out or some guy grabbed her or she drowned in the water. I mean, who knows? I do not know anything. I cannot imagine why Panthers would do anything because she used to do their bookkeeping, unless she knew something that she should not have known. I do not know.
SM: Well, I know that... Was not her name Mary Van Petton? Patton?
RP: I do not know, maybe.
SM: I think it was a different name. But he became a conservative as a result of this experience.
RP: Well, he hates the Panthers. He probably hates them as much as he hates me, because I did so well in that... I have debated him a few times and people love what I say, and they tell him to shut up.
SM: Yeah. We had him on our campus a couple times. But looking at these individuals, you have got to admit that Huey Newton does not have a good reputation, from all the-
RP: Huey Newton is not somebody that I loved. He's a high-liver. And he used Panther money. He had a penthouse apartment, he used designer drugs like coke and various other things. A lot of white people did that too, a lot of movie stars did that too, but they did not get harassed by the police. And he was a very good speaker at times, from what I hear. I have heard him speak a few times just on tape, but I do not really know him and I am not into bad-mouthing him or protecting him, because I do not really know. He was West Coast. I only really knew the East Coast-
SM: The other one that has a really bad name is H. Rap Brown, who's actually in jail for the rest of his life, I think.
RP: Yeah. Well, I am not going to get into him, but I do not know him at all.
SM: But Stokely Carmichael seemed to have a lot of respect-
RP: Yeah, he was.
SM: ... because of the fact he had been involved with SNCC.
RP: He was in SNCC. I only heard him speak a few times, and he was very bright, I thought.
SM: And then Kathleen Cleaver seems to have a lot of respect.
RP: Very respectful of people too.
SM: And Eldridge is a sad story in its own right.
RP: Yeah. Well, Eldridge became later a Moonie. You know that?
SM: Yes.
RP: I saw him, he came to the University of Vermont. The Moonies brought him here. And so, I went out in the parking lot waiting for him to come because I wanted him to sign this book I had. And he looked at the book, it was one of the old Panther books. He says, "I ain't signing that shit." He was really pissed. And he got into crack cocaine. I mean, he became a really bad drug addict. And anybody who's a really bad drug addict at some point, you cannot take them [inaudible].
SM: The killing of Fred Hampton was a sad thing too, in Chicago.
RP: Yeah.
SM: Because they said he was [inaudible].
RP: Plus, the cops did that. Right?
SM: Yeah.
RP: And he was a very bright young man.
SM: In the materials I have here, you were at all these events.
RP: I was not at the killing of Fred Hampton.
SM: No, no, no, no. But the Free Huey... There were Free Huey-
RP: Free Huey, off the pigs.
SM: Yeah. And then also Free Bobby at New Haven. And then-
RP: I was there.
SM: And then Free the 21 in New York City.
RP: I was there.
SM: So those are all major trials.
RP: Yeah. Well, I loved the Panthers, number one, and so did all my friends. That is the other thing. It was a big social thing for us. And I loved Afeni Shakur, I still love Afeni Shakur. I remember Tupac Shakur when he was a little baby. And I remember the grandfather. In fact, grandfather, who was his old man, a very dignified man. My politics, my (19)60s politics, I grew up with them. They were there from the beginning of my politics. So it was like I matured with them and I knew them from places and from events. The East Coast Panthers. Then at times, I went out because we started up a San Francisco newsreel. They said, "Hey, you got to come out here and make a film." We said, "You better make your own films. We're going to send some people out and you're going to find some filmmakers, and you're going to learn how to use cameras because we cannot be every place."
SM (01:59:34):
You talked about COINTELPRO. My interview this morning, we talked about it as well. I had another person I interviewed this morning from California. Explain in your own words what was COINTELPRO and what did it do to activists that... In one of the articles that I read on you, [inaudible] talked about Jean Seberg the actress. Then the experience you had with Dr. Curtis Powell, that you had to walk with him into his apartment. What they tried to do to Bobby Seal and Kathleen Cleaver and the Yippies and SNCC and Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
RP: I do not know anything about SCLC or SNCC, really. The counterintelligence program, you should... Have you ever interviewed any FBI agents that-
SM: No, I cannot. I know if anybody would ever speak to me.
RP: Yeah, I know somebody that will.
SM: Oh.
RP: He is a very important guy.
SM: Okay.
RP: You got to get my DVD. I have two FBI agents on my DVD. You will not get better talks than that. You can use any material you want from that.
SM: All right.
RP: The DVD, I have one of the most important FBI agents, and he's written a book exposing the FBI. And the other one is the one that is dead now, that opened up the case in San Francisco on the Panthers, because he was in the San Francisco office and he was assigned it. And he just sat there and he wrote up what happened every day. It was very boring to him. The informers would come in and he would get all these notes and he would just put it in a report. The thing was that he was a great writer. And he told funny jokes and he made fun of people, and he was sexist and he was racist. He wrote all these reports to send to his fellow FBI agent that he knew from the academy when he went to the academy. And he told me right in my DVD, he said, "I was writing the reports for them." They said, "Keep them coming. They're hilarious." He's dead now. I give you permission to use whatever you want from any of my DVD. If you want an FBI agent who wants to talk about it.
SM: Because you see, the book is about the boomer generation and the young people that grew up, but they all experienced all this. They all saw these things. They became influenced by it. And the people that are going to read these oral histories, they're going to be... Well, they may not be reading history books. So, if you could, in just a few words, talk about what COINTELPRO or what they did to the actress Jean Seberg-
RP: Okay. Well-
SM: And-
RP: What COINTELPRO did was it tried to destroy people's lives. It tried to make people look bad. It tried to embarrass people. It told lies and set up situations so that people sometimes could not face the media getting hold of these things. It was, the main thing, was the counterintelligence program to destroy, in this case, the Black Panther party. I mean, they have a counterintelligence program to destroy, let us say, the Young Lord's party or to destroy the Weathermen. The counterintelligence [02:03:26] used dirty tricks to destroy people and the FBI was pretty good at it. And in some cases, they were not very good. But with the Black Panthers, they would send out letters to people saying, "Beware. So-and-so just reported you to the police." Or "Beware. Jean Seberg is carrying a Black baby." When it was born, somebody saw the fetus and it was Black. " And we're going to feed her to the Hollywood gossip columnist..." What was her name? Jean Haber? No. Jean somebody. And some people think that that was one of the reasons that she may have killed herself, if she did kill herself, because she was embarrassed about all that, Jean Seberg.
SM: Was it a Black fetus?
RP: I do not know. I was not there.
SM: Oh, I read it was a white fetus. She went around with it or something like that.
RP: Jean Seberg went around with the fetus?
SM: Yes, she did.
RP: Where did you get that?
SM: I read it in one of the... I will have to email that to you too. It was in one of the articles.
RP: Well, you cannot believe everything you... I mean, I am not-
SM: Yeah.
RP: But what they did is they tried to make people look bad and embarrass people. That is the main thing about it. And sometimes, people could not take it and destroyed their lives and sometimes they killed themselves. Or sometimes they dropped out of being political people because they could not take their families knowing about [inaudible].
SM: What always amazes me is that we do live in a democracy where liberty is always protected. And of course, liberty is divine, is freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion. But here we have this COINTELPRO group that survived through '75. And then we have the FBI and the CIA, that have been infiltrating groups for years, and they destroyed many lives. In a quote that you put down here is that, "Democracy is based on openness and the existence of a secret policy, secret lists of dissident citizens, violates the spirit of democracy." That was a quote from you.
RP: I cannot remember half the things I say or wrote.
SM: Well, I was looking-
RP: I have been looking forward to getting your book. Is it a book you're doing or what?
SM: Yeah. You have time for a couple more questions?
RP: Yeah, sure.
SM: Yeah. You have been teaching, co-teaching, a course at the (19)60s at Burlington College for a while?
RP: Yeah.
SM: How-
RP: Not a co-teacher, I was teaching it alone.
SM: Yeah. How do the students react to courses like this, and how does the administration at the university respond to anything of the (19)60s? Because my experience has been that universities are afraid of the term "activism" due to the memories and the lessons from the (19)60s.
RP: Where do you teach?
SM: Oh, I used to be at Westchester University, not anymore.
RP: Okay. Well, let me tell you, where I teach... Well, I am off right now. But I had been teaching at Burlington College in Vermont. You know who our dean is?
SM: No, I do not.
RP: Do you know who Bernie Sanders-
SM: Oh, I know Bernie. Yes. Former congressman.
RP: Well, his wife was our dean.
SM: Oh, okay. That speaks for itself.
RP: But I was teaching there before she became the dean, and she actually has been very rude to me.
SM: Oh, no.
RP: And she actually is one of the reasons I am not teaching there now. But do not say anything about that.
SM: Oh, no, I will not.
RP: But it's a big long story. But I think I was ready to retire anyway.
SM: Yeah. What did the student protest movement teach universities in the (19)60s? What do you feel the universities learned from it, and maybe what have they forgotten?
RP: This is how I do my class. I give a little talk in the beginning, whatever the subject matter is, and then I show them one of the newsreel films. Because the pictures and seeing the real thing, there's nothing can beat that from that time. So, they see a film every time, and we have a discussion before the film, and we have a discussion after the film, and then they have to write impressions and write papers. That is about how all my classes are. And luckily, I have the whole collection of newsreel films. And the reason that newsreel films are so good is they're not slick Hollywood films. They're like real life. They're a little jumpy, they're running in the street with a camera. Cops are chasing us or whatever it is. And they cannot believe some of the stuff. They love it. They love those films because it's like real life.
SM: Well, the students love them, but do the universities love them?
RP: Yeah, but I am telling you where I teach, I teach at [inaudible] College. The other thing is, the universities love our films because who's the person that buys 90 percent of the films that I sell? The universities.
SM: Yes.
RP: Cornell, Harvard, Syracuse, Princeton, NYU, UCLA, Santa Barbara, SF State. I mean, all these schools have collections of our films because nobody else has done (19)60s like we have done them. We have done the burning of... One of the most radical events that ever happened in Santa Barbara, my first year of college, I went to Santa Barbara. And of course, I was not there when the burning of the Bank of America happened, that was one of the first radical things in Santa Barbara, was all these blonde crew cut boys and little blonde flipped girls burned down the Bank of America in Santa Barbara. Never happened before on our campus.
SM: Why would they do that?
RP: You know story?
SM: Well, I know that it happened, but I cannot remember why.
RP: Because there was a professor, they were going to fire a professor that they liked. And he was a political person. That started it. I mean, there were other issues, I am sure.
SM: Are there any myths about the boomer generation that you would like to comment on from your point of view? Any myth?
RP: Like what?
SM: Oh, that is why I am asking. Are there any myths?
RP: Tell me what you mean by a myth.
SM: A myth is a story that is-
RP: I know, that is not true. But give me an example of something [inaudible].
SM: A hundred percent of the students were activists. That is a myth. It only about 10 percent.
RP: That is not even a truth.
SM: Right.
RP: I do not know about myths, I guess.
SM: Are there any truths about the boomer generation and their times that are still being used to mislead the American public about the times when boomers were young, through today? And that might be linked to the criticisms that the era that the boomers grew up in is often attacked as the era where all our problems started. Because of drugs, sex, rock and roll.
RP: Rock and roll.
SM: Long hair, lack of respect for authority. Challenging your point of view, the welfare state, the isms and all the other stuff.
RP: What's the question around those again?
SM: The question is, are there any truths about the boomer generation, their times, that are still being used to mislead?
RP: Oh, I do not know about still being used because I am not really... I do not hang out with people that think like that, so I do not hear that so much. And I do not hear it on TV. I watch a lot of TV. And when I travel, I am talking... For example, three months ago, I got a grant to go to Mississippi to study Mississippi and Tennessee, but mainly Mississippi, to study the Civil Rights period. They're community college teachers, I am with like 40 community college teachers. And when you're teaching community college, you're taking for granted that these students are probably not as wealthy as regular university students, maybe. Or maybe they're not as smart. I mean, I do not know what people would think myth-wise. But the teachers there were some of the most brilliant teachers I have ever met. They talked in a language that the students could understand. And it was really interesting. I spent one week with them living, sleeping, getting up in the morning, eating, traveling. We got on a bus and we went out to the delta and we went and parked in front of the store where Emmett Till went... Where supposedly the girl was there that he whistled at. We hung out there. We went to Fannie Lou Hamer's house. We did all this stuff. And all those people there were community college teachers. I mean, they knew as much, or if not more, politics than I did, some of them. And they were brilliant. They had none of those myths that you would even think about. I never heard anything come out of any of their mouths. And they were from Texas, they were from Florida. Just community colleges. They were just like normal students who got their degree and went to teach in a community college.
SM: When did the (19)60s begin and end, in your opinion? And what was the watershed moment?
RP: Oh, God. Well, I do not know. I am a little confusing around that issue because you got to realize that I grew up political. All my life, I was a political person because I got it from... My parents were political. I knew nothing. I sometimes say I was brainwashed into it because that is what I knew. And that is how they acted and the way that they dealt with Black people or workers or anybody was always like this wonderful way. Did they drink? My mother did not, but my father sometimes would have a beer at night when he got home. He was a working man. I grew up in a working-class family and so, for me, I never had any pretensions of anything except a certain type of life. And you told the truth and you worked hard and you tried to help other people. So, I do not know. I mean, I do not know in my world that I ever actually encountered that. What I did encounter at some point, one of the first things that made me rebel... I do not know. It's hard to say. I do not know. I mean, I grew up in LA and Hollywood. I mean, it's very different than growing up in a normal place.
SM: That is okay for your answer. Some people give a specific event or period or whatever for the beginning and the end of the (19)60s, in their opinion.
RP: Well, I mean, miniskirts was not like the (19)60s - Miniskirts was not like the (19)60s, was it?
SM: Yeah, that was the (19)60s.
RP: What year was that?
SM: It was around (19)63, (19)64.
RP: Okay. Well, one of the things that happened to me, I always liked clothes, was when I was teaching school in New Jersey and the teacher sent me home from school because my skirt was too short. The teacher told me to go home and change. What's that?
SM: That is okay. And that was a watershed moment.
RP: That was a big watershed moment. And that is when I quit teaching.
SM: Another thing...
RP: That is when I decided to move to New York and I looked for that apartment. I told you that story, and then I...
SM: Yes.
RP: But that was a personal attack upon me. The other thing that that school did, here's another thing, the war in Vietnam, now I am thinking about it, the war in Vietnam was going on, and this is in New Jersey. This was in North Bergen, New Jersey, which is the town that I was living in at the time. And the Jersey Journal, I think was the name of the newspaper, but I am not sure. But some local newspaper sent out to all the schools these petitions that say we support our boys in Vietnam. And we were supposed to get all of our students to sign it. Well, first of all, I left it there. I said, if anybody wants to sign it, you can sign it. But then later that afternoon, when they were supposed to turn them in to the office, later that afternoon, I was walking through the office and nobody was there. I grabbed all the petitions and threw them away. So that was pretty intense for me. I knew I was quitting. I think that was probably the day I was quitting, I think. I did not care.
SM: Well, one of the things that you discussed when Newsreel did their films, is revolution is a term that was used by the new left, and the Panthers used it all the time, too. Do you feel though, in the eyes of many, that that term "revolution" hurts the legitimacy in the eyes of critics?
RP: Oh, I never worry about things like that, because what does the word revolution mean? How would you define it?
SM: Like the American Revolution.
RP: Right. That is a positive thing, is not it?
SM: Yes, it is.
RP: I did not understand what you said about critics, then.
SM: Well, for example, when we did the... In 1976 with the bicentennial, there was a group that we brought to campus that was under the leadership of Jeremy Rifkin, and it was the People's Bicentennial Commission. And the basic premise was that the founding fathers were revolutionaries. Well, that really upset people in Ohio, because we had a program with William Pells, one of the professors who came in to talk about the revolutionaries. And we had the Daughters from the American Revolution there saying, how dare you say that these were radicals? And it was a Midwest, and they were very upset with the use of the term "revolution" and "radical". So that was just an example.
RP: Well, I do not know. I do not really know because I am never really fussy about certain things. I am more of an activist. I just do my thing and I have my friends and we do it together. And I am not trying to get any place or be any place, or whatever happened to me was basically not necessarily planned.
SM: We took a group of students to Washington in and to talk about the year 1968, and we met with Senator Muskie, and we thought he was going to talk about the convention of (19)68. And the question was this, that the students asked him, and I will give you his response after I get yours, the question was, due to the divisions that were so intense in the Boomer generation during the (19)60s and (19)70s, do you feel that this generation of 74 million will go to its grave, like the Civil War generation, with bitterness and dislike and hatred toward opponents, similar to what happened during the Civil War in the areas of Black versus white, male versus female, gay versus straight, pro-war, anti-war, pro-troops, anti-troops. And that was a question we asked, and we waited for his response.
RP: What would he say?
SM: I want to hear your response first. Do you think we have a problem? Even within the Black Panthers, is there any healing or is not healing necessary?
RP: They have had healing, yes. Panthers have actually had a lot of healing stuff. And I think you have to have some type of healing stuff go on, somewhat. But you cannot have healing stuff for people who are dangerous and can kill people or kill other people. So, I do not know. I do not really know, because I have never had very many enemies to tell you the truth. For example, I did not like, at the end of Eldridge Cleaver's life, he came to UVM and he was working... The Moonies were paying his salary. I thought that was disgusting. And he said things that were disgusting things, and I would never go to see him again after that. And then he was found in an alleyway doing crack. He ruined his life. He ruined everything that he originally stood for. The people would put out bottles in Berkeley while he was being a crackhead and stuff. And people have picked them up and turned the money and the money went into the free clinic. And he would send out his guys to pick up earlier in the morning to take the bottles so they could keep the money. So there's things like that. I would just ignore the guy. That is the most I could say. He was important at his time when things were happening in the beginning, and then the drugs took over and it made him a bad person, I guess.
SM: There's a couple of quotes here that I want to put in the record. These are your quotes. This is from you: "We produce various films that these groups could use to tell their stories and to use in organizing their own communities and workplaces, hopefully serving as a catalyst for social change." Another very important quote from you, and again, this is for the record: " The only news we saw was on TV and we knew who owned the stations. We decided to make films that would show another side of the news. It was clear that the established forms of media were not going to approach those subjects which threatened their very existence." And then the last one here was...
RP: Where did you get that quote from?
SM: I got that quote from... I would have to send that, too.
RP: No, the reason I am asking, I agree with that statement, by the way it is not that I do not disagree with it. What I think is the language of that-
SM: Hold on one second because my tape is running out here. Hold on, one second. Okay. Let me get my... Bear with me.
RP: Okay, I am not rushing.
SM: Okay.
RP: I am doing my taxes, believe it or not.
SM: Taxes?
RP: Yeah. I screwed up.
SM: Oh, my goodness.
RP: And my whole living room floor has about 30 piles.
SM: Oh no.
RP: I am not doing it right now while I am talking to you, but I have been doing it for three days. I thought I only had to do it around certain business stuff or something else. But now my accountant told me I only have to do it around my film business.
SM: Oh.
RP: So, I have been working for four days on all this stuff because I save every piece of paper, but I do not file it right, organize it. It is all in one thing. So, I have been filing, I have been redoing things. So, I am looking at my living room. It is just unreal. But I think that quote that you just read to me, should I go on?
SM: Yes.
RP: I know that I said that we knew who owns whatever it was. I cannot remember exactly what you said.
SM: Yeah, "I know who owns the stations."
RP: Yes. I am wondering where specifically you got that. When did I say that? Because I am wondering, it sounds like ... I believe it totally. I could have said it, but you know what? So, could a lot of other people in Newsreel said it.
SM: Yeah.
RP: I could have picked it up from something that somebody else said.
SM: Yeah. I actually have all the notes here. Hold on one second. I might be able to find that. Oh, here it is. I think this is it. No, that is it. I might have to email you that too. I will email you.
RP: Yeah. Well, you know what? Because that sounds like to me in the old days, I would say, "Right on." It was a right on quote. But it's sounds a little sophisticated for how I talk. But then maybe sometimes I talk like that.
SM: Well, the last quote here is another one, and that is that, "Newsreel worked to expand the awareness of events and situations relevant to shaping the movement. Our films try to analyze, not just cover. They explore the realities of the media as part of the system always ignores."
RP: It is part that the system always ignores. I could have said that though. I do not know. It is definitely what we think about Newsreel. But it also could have been ... Because I could have been sitting around with a group of my friends who were in Newsreel and that could have been something from one of our leaflets that we wrote or something. I do not know.
SM: I am almost done here. But what happens at Panther reunions? How many come to those, number one? And do you keep track of any of the Panthers who died when they were young and how many continued to fight as they got older?
RP: Okay. Well, I have gone to lots of reunions. I have gone to Washington DC, I have gone to San Francisco, I have gone to New York. I have gone to smaller reunions that have to do with specific chapters. When I go, by the way, I like to hang out with Kathleen Cleaver because I really love her. She is a great talker, very bright. And I have got a few other people, this guy Billy Jennings ... Are you really interested in Panthers?
SM: Oh yeah. I have very interested in Panthers. I got all of Bobby Seale's books. I got –
RP: All right. Let me tell you a website to go to.
SM: Oh, okay.
RP: This guy is the most brilliant, smartest. He is the Panther archivist.
SM: Now, where is my pen? I got too much stuff here.
RP: It is okay. I went and got a pencil. I do not even have it anymore. And I have [inaudible].
SM: Okay, I got it. I got a pen.
RP: All right. His name is Billy Jennings is his name.
SM: Billy...
RP: Jennings. J-E-N-N-I-N-G-S. He is out of San Francisco. No, he is out of Sacramento. But his website is, write this down exactly how I tell you. I-T-S.
SM: I-T-S.
RP: It is about, A-B-O-U-T, time, T-I-M-E, B-P-P.
SM: B?
RP: B as in Black Panther Party.
SM: Right.
RP: P-P. His website is, it is About Time B-P-P, I believe.
SM: All right.
RP: His name is Billy Jennings. And he is the smartest, he's the best archivist of the Black Panther Party.
SM: And how old is he?
RP: He is younger than me. But he is married to a woman now who opened the one of the Black Panther free clinics. She's a doctor. And she is white. And I think they both had separate families at some point. They have been married for a really a long time. And he is basically, for the last 20 years, one of the main organizers of pulling the Panther reunions together. And they are brilliant. And he is brilliant. He is very smart. He knows the history better than anybody.
SM: Does he go out and speak on college campuses?
RP: Yeah, he does a lot of stuff. He is fabulous.
SM: Oh, wow.
RP: He is smart. He is interesting. He knows everything, does trips. And he is not a poor guy, I do not know what he is, but I know that he travels quite a bit. He knows everybody. And if you do not get the website, you would have to email me and I will have to look up, maybe I said it wrong, the site. But you could find out everybody who died, how they died. You can find out about all the programs. You can find out each chapter, the New Orleans chapter, the Sacramento chapter, the whatever. You can find out how many people. My friend Michael Singer who was in Newsreel, and he is writing a book about his, I do not know what he is writing about, maybe his life. But he wanted ask some questions about Panthers. He wanted to know how many Panthers have been killed. So, I sent him to Billy. If anybody asks me a Panther question that I do not know, which are probably 90 percent of them, I send them to Billy. He knows it all, and he is the main organizer of all the reunions. Pulls it together. Very good.
SM: Before I ask my very last question, that is that historic picture of Stokely Carmichael with Dr. King, where he's telling Dr. King that his time has passed, that the new Black power is now taking over for non-violent protest, which was with Dr. King and Dr. Abernathy and Bayard Rustin were into. But what what's interesting is when you look at that particular scene from a Black Panther, who was a major person in SNCC, which Stokely was first. It's almost like Dr. King saying to Thurgood Marshall after the Brown versus Board of Education decision was passed in 1954, that your gradualist approach to getting this passed was ... Well, congratulations, but pass the wand because that gradualist approach is no longer going to work because we want our freedom now. And that is what Dr. King said to nonviolent protests and then later on, Dr. King and Bayard Rustin and the group were linked with Stokely Carmichael. And he said, "Your time has passed." And that was before they were even 40 years old. But there's a lot of history there, an awful lot of history. And of course, Malcolm challenged Bayard Ruston in a debate before he died in 1965 too, about the change in Black power. My last question is, when you look at this, do you have any thoughts as a person on the generation that was born between '46 and (19)64, and that means Black, white, male, female, gay, straight, this generation that grew up after World War II, are there any thoughts you have on this generation overall?
RP: Well, that is not my generation.
SM: Well, I know that is not your generation, but you lived and worked with them.
RP: Yeah. That all seem very different than me. I feel like my friends, most of my friends are probably born after '46, and they just seem like one of ours, us.
SM: Maybe it's because the spirit. Your spirit and their spirit are united in so many different causes.
RP: Yeah. Well, that is how most of my friends ... People who are my friends, that is how it is. I played poker with a group of women, and we did not know each other until we all came to Vermont. And we're all involved in a million different diverse things, but we all have this politic that is really a good, clear politic. And it did not make any difference when we were born or anything.
SM: And your activism goes way beyond the Black Panthers according to what I heard.
RP: The Panthers is only a small thing in there.
SM: Yeah. Just list a couple of activist causes you're involved in before we close.
RP: In Bethlehem?
SM: Yes.
RP: Middle East?
SM: Mm-hmm.
RP: Israel and Palestinian, I am in a sister city group in Burlington. We started it with the first sister city that took a Palestinian city, Bethlehem, the Jewish city of Arad with Burlington. And we have a three-way relationship with the three cities. And that was the first that happened. There's something called Sister City International, which hundreds of American cities take cities all over the world to be their sister city. And we knew we would never get a pass in the city council if we had a Palestinian city. So we took a Jewish city and a Palestinian city, and it passed in Burlington City Council. So that is one that I just went to a meeting last night. I cannot stand. It's a losing of that thing. It's very difficult because we cannot even bring exchange students from Bethlehem. They cannot go to the Tel Aviv airport to come here.
SM: Geez.
RP: We cannot bring doctors or medicine to send there. We can bring our things to Arad, which is the near the Dead Sea, the city. But they do not need that stuff so much. So it's really horrible. So that is one thing that I work with in Burlington. And what was your question again?
SM: It's the other areas of activism you have been involved in.
RP: Activism. Well, then for a while, I am not now anymore, but after the sixties or coming out of part of the sixties was the woman's movement somewhat. And what else would I do? Who do I give my money? Legalization of marijuana. I do not smoke now, but I am for legalization of it.
SM: It's a big issue in California.
RP: Yeah. Well, it's a big issue every place.
SM: Right.
RP: Every place. It makes our kids be criminals. That is what I cannot stand about it. And what else do they give money to? Or I still give money to ... Giving money is different than getting involved. I am not involved in the legalization of marijuana, but I send money to when they send me one of their letters. I do not know. I cannot think.
SM: But you have been a lifelong activist though in many things.
RP: Well, race is the key thing. But I live in white Vermont. That is the problem. There's a lot of racist stuff that goes on here. And in Burlington, we have now become one of ... They have a lot of people from African countries that the US is set up what's called Resettlement Cities and Burlington's one of them. So, we have Bosnians, we have Africans, we have people from Iraq. We have got, oh, people from ... We had a few Cubans and people, but they cannot take the weather here. It's too cold for them. And so, they got transferred to warmer places. Impossible. But I am not working with it. I know some of them, the people, they're in my classes and stuff, but I am not really working it. They get a lot of help from resettlement programs around here. I work with film stuff. Right now, we have an International Film Festival that is happening starting next week, so next week I get to ... And what I do is I care about poor people a lot. For example, I get food from places for the Food Shelf. I go to the apple orchard a friend of mine owns, and I picked a lot of apples that he gave me and I brought it to the Food Shelf for poor people. Just things that I do not do it all the time, it's just something moves me about certain things.
SM: Yeah. You...
RP: Vermont's a really poor place. A lot of us have money and stuff, but there's a lot of poor white people here. And it's really pitiful. A lot of old people that are starving to death and freezing to death in their houses.
SM: That is sad.
RP: I am not doing anything about it, to tell you the truth. I donate something, but I am not really...
SM: Are these people who did not plan for the future?
RP: Are what?
SM: Are these people that did not plan for the future?
RP: No. Vermont is one of the poorest states in the country, number one. It looks so pretty on Christmas cards with skiing and stuff, but it's a very poor place. And for people who, there's no jobs, there's no factories here. There's no big cities. There's food stamps. There's not even stamps anymore. You now get it something that looks like a credit card. So, it does not embarrass you when you go with your kids. It looks like you're paying for it with a credit card. But you have money on a card that looks like a credit card.
SM: You said, and this is it, you said the camera is a weapon. Define what you mean by that.
RP: Well, you use a weapon to be able to have things ... If you take a picture of something that is horrible of a GI ... Well, for example, whoever took that picture of that GI burning down that Vietnamese woman who was holding her child tightly in her arms, burns down her hot by lighting it with a Zippo lighter, that destroyed an image of what the US soldiers were doing in Vietnam for thousands of people when they saw that. That one image on TV, that was a very important image.
SM: I think that was Morley Safer.
RP: Is that who it was?
SM: I think it was Morley Safer, 60 Minutes, I think.
RP: Yeah, it could have been that. See, I do not remember those type of things. You got a good memory for that. I remember the image. I could see him right now. I can see every movement he is doing. And I can see the woman there in her shed crying ... Not in her shed outside of her draw little house or maybe her depot where she kept her rice. I read into it, whatever I read into it.
SM: You also lived in a commune for a while. What was that communal experience?
RP: There's my best friend still to this day.
SM: Huh.
RP: I am serious. That was great. I loved it. You know what? I got up in the morning and guess what? Jimmy Nelsey, who taught economics of the University of Vermont, was cooking us breakfast. And there was this other guy whose name I cannot remember, would take the garbage down to the end of the driveway for his garbage time. And I love living with people. I love having people in my house. I like sharing stuff. And I was an only kid, so I did not have any sisters and brothers.
SM: And that commune, how many years were you in the commune?
RP: Oh, well, I was seen in Putney for maybe, let us say six months. And then, oh, I do not know, years. Let us see. Rain was born and Rain went to grammar school, junior high. I do not know how long. It was a long time. But it changed. It turned out at the end, there were four of us only at the end.
SM: With your kids. Was there any generation gap at all?
RP: I have one daughter and well, she's old now. She's in her thirties. And Rain is in her thirties. What do you mean generation gap?
SM: The generation gap in the sixties, in the seventies, was differences over politics and over the war and counter culture and all that other stuff between [inaudible].
RP: Oh no, they both have good politics. It might be a choice over music. Grateful Dead was big time for both of them.
SM: That is a good choice.
RP: That is a best choice. I love them myself. But my daughter got so into it that she wanted to go off on the road and follow them around, and then would get in trouble and I would have to bail her out of trouble and da, da, da. It was not so much fun for me. But she's fine. I have a granddaughter now. But the sixties, I never got arrested in my life. As I told you, my mother said, "Do not get arrested, escape." And I took that to mean that for real.
SM: It's interesting because Dr. King used to always say that if you really want to stand up for something, you cannot be afraid to be arrested and go to jail for it. And –
RP: My mother says, "You get in jail and you waste around and you're not doing what you should be doing."
SM: Right. Different philosophy. This is it. And that is, what do you think the lasting legacy will be of the generation that grew up after World War II, the boomers, that were sewn down the sixties and seventies. Many of them are Black Panthers and people from all walks life. What do you think when the best history books or historians or sociologists write about this period after the 74 million have passed on? What do you think they might be saying about the generation?
RP: I do not know. You could probably answer that better than me, you're a writer. I do not know. It depends on how the stories are told. Because for example, there's this TV film that was made, it's called The Hippies. Did you see it?
SM: No, I have not. And I am going to check it out.
RP: Well, they interview me. They come to my house. They made me look really good. They had a really good camera guy who knew how to put the right type of plastic on the window. So, the light came in beautifully. They did good makeup job. They did. They really knew what they were doing. They had no politics really on some level. They did not know about anything, but they let me talk. And then I decided to talk about some things I wanted to talk about that were not really necessarily true. And one of them had to do with LSD. We were talking at U UCLA that there was a program at UCLA while I was at UCLA that one of my friends, Lenny Leck, who's no longer, he's died, but he was a psychology professor there. And I was in the class. He was our teaching assistant, and he used to do a lot of LSD at UCLA because they had a program run by the psych department and maybe the army to see what it actually did to people. It was under lab conditions. It was a legalized program, which I never did. But I wanted to talk about how it was legal in those days and about this program and stuff, and the importance of it. So, I knew they would not put it on the camera unless I said I did. And I did not. I lied about it for the camera. And it really got me in trouble because that is the thing that everybody in my town remembered. Everybody loved the program, but I should not have lied about it. I cannot remember what your question was.
SM: Just the lasting legacy. What –
RP: Oh, the legacy. So sometimes, like I said something, I do not know what the last lasting legacy is for that group. We tried to have a better life. We wanted a better life for everyone. We wanted to have all the best for our kids, for every nationality, every race. We wanted there to be equality. We wanted there to be an end of war. We wanted there to be peace and justice and all those things that we wanted from the sixties, from that period of time and a lot of us worked for it and tried to live it, and some of us still do.
SM: Well, that is a perfect answer. And I want to thank you. Somehow in some way, I have got to get two pictures of you, because I have to have pictures.
RP: What about from my website? Can you go to my website?
SM: Yeah, I can go to your website.
RP: Take a look. I do not know what's on there. I do not know.
SM: Well, I will check it out. I know there's a good ... Anyways –
RP: Have you been –
SM: I do not need it right now, but I do need two pictures between now and Christmas.
RP: Well look at my website first and see if you can take anything from that.
SM: Okay.
RP: And if they're not good, there's a whole section there of photographs.
SM: All right.
RP: That start with, oh dear, I have not looked at them.
SM: I know there's a picture of you at an airport. I know that.
RP: At an airport?
SM: Yeah. You're sleeping on luggage.
RP: No, that was not at an airport. You think that was at an airport?
SM: I thought either an airport or a bus station. I do not know.
RP: That is interesting. I wonder what it is.
SM: You were with your girlfriend. There's a girlfriend there. Anyways...
RP: A girlfriend? I am going to my website right now. I think I was sleeping, because I used to fall asleep all the time. I was so tired and if I got some place where I could sleep, I would sleep.
SM: Yep. Well, that is a picture of you sleeping. And then there's a picture of you awake, just two pictures of you with two different females. And you're in looks like a bus station or airport.
RP: Well, I am going to go to that site and try to ... If I can even get my computer to work right.
SM: Back then or now?
RP: No, no. Maybe two years, three years ago.
SM: Oh, geez.
RP: And they said these commi something. I cannot remember what it was. It was on a bunch of really right-wing websites. I am trying to go to my website. I cannot get to my website on my computer.
SM: All right. Well, I guess that is it.
RP: All right. But that picture, that was at the alternative media conference. And we have just gotten driven for two days or something to get to Ann Arbor, and I was falling asleep there.
SM: Huh.
RP: I have been known to fall asleep in very important places. I am tired.
SM: All right.
RP: I just fell right out.
SM: Well, Roz, thank you very much for spending this time, we went over...
(End of Interview)
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2 Microcassettes
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Interview with Roz Payne
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Payne, Roz B. (Roz Berkman), 1940- ; McKiernan, Stephen
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Newsreel (Firm); Political activists--United States; Payne, Roz B. (Roz Berkman), 1940--Interviews
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Roz Payne is an educator, activist, and founding member of an antiwar filmmakers group called Newsreel. She released a 12-hour DVD set titled <em>What We Want, What We Believe</em> on the Black Panthers. She has a Bachelor's degree from UCLA.
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Binghamton University Libraries
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2010-10-05
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eng
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McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.157a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.157b
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2018-03-29
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McKiernan Interviews
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144:08
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https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/ce25ac87ab7465e34e83ec5c69301352.MP3
4473112a544a72a8e57fea58b0faf9da
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Middle Eastern Oral History
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This collection includes interviews of Middle Eastern immigrants who settled in the Binghamton area. Since the rise of nationalism and the repression of minorities during the last phase of the Ottoman Empire, the ethnic groups in the Middle East have faced physical pressure and violence, cultural assimilation, and ethnic cleansing in the nation-states they lived in, which made them to leave their homeland behind and settle throughout the United States. This project looks at the details about the impact of diaspora.
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In copyright.
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<p>Aynur de Rouen, Ph.D.</p>
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<a href="https://www.binghamton.edu/libraries/about/collections/oral-histories/index.html#sustainablecommunities">Sustainable Communities Oral History Collection</a>
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Date of Interview
October 15, 2019
Interviewer
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Joseph Seif
Interviewee
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Ruby
Language
English
Digital Publisher
Binghamton University
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Audio
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44:32 minutes
Biographical Text
Ruby was born in Jordan's Capital city of Amman. She moved a lot throughout Jordan since her father held a high ranking position in the Jordanian military. She came to the U.S. to work on her Ph.D. in computer science and converted from Islam to Christianity
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Religion, Amman, Jordan, Binghamton University, Israel/Palestine, Jordanian military, Christianity, Islam
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Interview with Ruby
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Oral Histories
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Oral Histories from 1960s Binghamton Alumni
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In 2019, Binghamton University Libraries completed a mission to collect oral interviews from 1960s alumni as a means to preserve memories of campus life. The resulting 47 tales are a retrospective of social, professional and personal experiences with the commonality of Harpur College. Some stories tell of humble beginnings, others discuss the formation of friendships; each provides insight into a moment in our community's rich history.
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Irene Gashurov
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Binghamton University Libraries
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2017-2018
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<a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/browse?collection=18">McKiernan Interviews : 60's collection of Oral Histories</a>
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Date of Interview
2018-05-18
Interviewer
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Irene Gashurov
Interviewee
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Dr. Ruth Silverman
Year of Graduation
1964
Biographical Text
Ruth Silverman, PhD, is a sociology professor at Nassau Community College, where she created the Women’s Studies Program. She is the sister of Dr. Amy Weintraub.
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Video or Audio
Audio
Keywords
Harpur College – Sixties alumni; Harpur College – Alumni in higher education; Harpur College – Alumni in Women's’ Studies; Harpur College – Alumni from New York City; Harpur College – Alumni at Nassau Community College; Harpur College – Alumni in the New York City area
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Subject LCSH
Harpur College – Sixties alumni; Harpur College – Alumni in higher education; Harpur College – Alumni in Womens’ Studies; Harpur College – Alumni from New York City; Harpur College – Alumni at Nassau Community College; Harpur College – Alumni in the New York City area
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Alumni Interviews
Interview with: Ruth M. Silverman
Interviewed by: Irene Gashurov
Transcriber: Oral History Lab
Date of interview: 15 May 2018
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)
IG: 00:01
Testing, testing, 1,2,3, it is working. Okay. So, we are here with Ruth Silverman. Ruth,
RS: 00:08
My name is Ruth Silverman. I graduated in 1964 with a BA in sociology. I am being interviewed today, May 18, 2018 in my sister's apartment, who also graduated in 1964, my birth date is 11/24/(19)42.
IG: 00:31
Perfect. Okay, so wh- where did you grow up?
RS: 00:40
Do not worry about your back.
IG: 00:42
Okay, all right, and I am going to actually move this up closer, if you do not mind, sorry, because I am hard of hearing, right. So, Amy, where did you grow up?
IG: 00:56
Albany, New York.
IG: 00:58
And tell me a little bit about your parents, what they did and-
RS: 01:06
Well, my father had a PhD in sociology from Columbia University, and he headed up the Bureau of Statistics, the Department of Mental Hygiene in Albany. And my mother, my father retired and got a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. My mother became his assistant, his office assistant, under grant.
IG: 01:35
Okay, so you are the only two siblings in your family. You are the two daughters. Were there other siblings?
RS: 01:42
We have an older sister?
IG: 01:44
Yes, so were the- were the expectations of for you similar? Do you think that all girls were expected to go on with their higher education?
RS: 02:00
It was definitely an expectation. It was a- my mother came from a family. We were six children, and my grandparents, of course, were immigrants, and all six children went to college. I mean, that was just an expectation. And my mother's family and of course, my father was, well, let me put it this way, his brother did not go to college. My father went all the way through, but there was an expectation that you were going to go to college, of course.
IG: 02:33
One thing that we did not say, I think that, you know, at the beginning we say, what you what you currently do what your profession is.
RS: 02:43
I have been teaching at Nassau Community College since 1986 in sociology department. My appointments in the sociology department, but I have also taught courses in it was the Women's Studies project. There was no Women's Studies Department. Some people come from other departments. So, I was active in creating the Women's Studies program courses, the intro course, the first course. My doctoral work was in sociology of health, especially women's health. So, um-
IG: 03:19
And where did you do your doctorate?
RS: 03:22
I did my master's work University Wisconsin, Madison, and the PhD work at NYU.
IG: 03:30
So, you know to backtrack, we will touch upon this a little bit later, but tell us a little bit about your growing up, what was that like, and where did you go to high school? What you know, what the preparation for Harpur College, what you know, predisposed you to-
RS: 03:53
Albany was very small when we were growing up there. It has changed considerably. The State University of New York in Albany was originally State Teachers College at Albany, and it was a local teacher’s college. There were no dormitories. But of course, the State University has expanded tremendously. The State Government has expanded. I mean, it has got this downtown campus called the mall, and they traded the Avril Harriman campus out by the university. So, you know, it was, um, it was a different city. It was much, much smaller and more what insular, less cosmopolitan, I guess you would say, when we were growing up, but we did not go to the public school. My parents sent us to the middle school, which was the training school for the teacher. We were right next door to the Teacher's College.
IG: 04:51
I see, I see.
RS: 04:52
And so, we were- our teachers kept moving. As you know, we worked in semesters. And they had to do their student teaching, but the supervisors were the same.
IG: 05:05
I see. So, do you think that you got over? Did you get your grounding for your future studies at the high school?
RS: 05:17
I think we got a very good grounding. Because we were neither completely public. Of course, the state, the college was a public institution, but and we were already completely private. [laughs] We were- so it was a funny coming so we did not have to take, we want to- we did not take regents. They only recommended that for applying to colleges, you should take a few regions so they could have some basis to compare you with students in the in the public school system. And the preparation must have been very good, because we did very well. I did very well in the ones in the regent’s exam said I chose to take so they could see that that the middle school was teaching at a level to take the New York State Regents.
IG: 06:17
So, I take it that you got the regents scholarship for college.
RS: 06:24
No, and I do not know why we did not get it.
IG: 06:32
Many-many-many people did get a regent scholarship, you know, but nonetheless, um, so-so, why did you decide on Harpur College? Did you apply to other schools? And what kind of-
RS: 06:49
We applied to other schools, but Harpur, Harpur was just beginning then, and if I remember correctly, it was um Dr. House, the guidance counselor who recommended to my parents that it would be a good place for us to go. And four of us- we went. It was a small school. I think that there were 60 people in the graduating class. It was not and four of us applied to Harpur and got in. Yeah, four of us in the middle school applied to Harpur and got and we all got in so we were not competing against each other. So, the middle school must have had a good reputation.
IG: 07:30
Right. And what you know, what- why did you decide on Harpur rather than, you know, buffalo, or any other school in the SUNY system, or anywhere else. Why?
RS: 07:46
I guess my parents thought that that is they put us in instead of tending us to the big high school in Albany. I guess they figured that a smaller school would be good for us. And they were right. They were absolutely right. I think Amy and I both. I mean, we just blossomed.
IG: 08:04
Well, so tell me about this experience. You know what- how when you arrived, you know what were, just tell us a little bit about that arc of what you were like when you first arrived at Harpur College and how you blossomed? Can you-
RS: 08:25
I think I blossomed intellectually, definitely. I blossomed in the way I felt about myself being a competent person, one of our professors, or we both had the favorite, our favorite professor, Dr. Peter Dodge, who we had just because the fact that when we were freshmen, and we had to take World History two semesters of it, and we both ended up in his class. And we-we just connected. And actually, he was Amy's honors advisor, but he also mentioned the fact that to us how, and I think it is a tribute to the kind of school Harpur was that you could have a relationship with a professor for four years, and he could say to you at the end, how he saw us grow from when he had us as freshman in the history course to when we graduated.
IG: 09:28
But any sense of the girl that you were when you first arrived in Binghamton and well, you mentioned that you became more self-possessed and more sure of yourself, but you know what-what-what were some of the big world view changes or internal changes?
RS: 09:52
Oh, because Harpur was small and it took students from all over New York State, but there definitely was a cultural difference between the students who came from New York City and those who came from upstate. And I have a call. I am going to get a glass of water so I can hear my voice beginning to-
IG: 10:25
Okay, we are back on so we continue with Ruth Silverman.
RS: 10:33
There was a cultural difference between the students who came from New York City and political cultural and political difference between those who came from New York City and those who came from upstate. And it was the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, the protest against the war in Vietnam and most of the people who were politically active. And it was also the beginning of a student the student uprising against in loco parentis. And the students who were leading the movement were all the students from New York City.
IG: 11:14
So, and how did you look upon these rebelling-
RS: 11:19
Well, the big rebellions had not started when I got, when I got to the University of Wisconsin, you know, there it is, but the beginning of, you know, it was beginning- was beginning at Harpur, and it was my introduction to politics. I would have to say. Yeah.
IG: 11:44
Because you had not thought of the world before in terms of politics.
RS: 11:50
I do not think that if the student, if Harpur, had not attracted such a large contingent of students, I do not know whether or not the campus would have been the same, and I would have been the same because I teach at a local community college, and you do not, you do not get what at my at the local community college. What you got, and at Harpur, these were bright students. Sophisticated, used to traveling the subways, you know, traveling subways and busses by themselves. When they were younger, they just bought a different vibration, a different view of the world, a different politics as they had a different culture.
IG: 12:38
And you found that exciting.
RS: 12:40
Yes, yeah, the ones, the ones from upstate New York, were more laid back, placid, I guess, looking back upon it now, I would say they were more conservative. They were certainly not [inaudible] and forth on the moon. In fact, I remember there being some kind of a friction between a young woman, I think she was in our dormitory, who was Republican or something.
Amy 13:09
Oh yes. And I had never been a Republican in my life.
RS: 13:14
And there was some friction there between her and the ones who were beginning to leave, leave the upcoming movement [inaudible] are from upstate. [laughs]
IG: 13:25
So, did you get involved in any of the student protests? Yourself?
RS: 13:33
No, we were there because of the fact it was just beginning. Then, I mean, people were talking. And because you were in the sociology department, you know, issues were being discussed. But I think because by the time one year later, two years later, when I was at Wisconsin, I mean, that was the really beginning. You know, the free speech movement. The Free Speech Movement began at the University of California, Berkeley, during the time that I graduated Harpur and was at Wisconsin. And the free speech movement at that point, then just moved out, I-I assumed it also began. It went to Harpur, but it certainly went to University of Wisconsin. And interesting enough, one of the faculty members in the sociology department, William Sewell, circulated a letter around faculty at the University of Wisconsin supporting the free rights, free the free speech movement at Berkeley. So, things were just beginning to happen. I think if I had graduated in (19)66 I would have seen a bit more, but we were just on the cusp of it. I mean, you knew, you could tell it was coming.
IG: 14:56
Right. So-so tell us you know, for those give us. A very quick history lesson. What was the free speech movement? Was it? And see, sort of, you know, the beginnings of it in at Harpur College.
RS: 15:17
The free speech movement emerged as a protest against the war in Vietnam, and the students were, if I remember correctly, the students at Berkeley, Mario [Mario Savio], something about if I remember correctly, was the leader of the free speech movement at Berkeley, and he-he generated the students to come together and openly, you know, in protest-protest on campus, the war in Vietnam. And of course, at that point, college administrators were not we were not used to students protesting like that. In fact, I have a colleague who went to the College of William and Mary in Virginia right at the same time that I was going to Harpur, and she was editor of the newspaper, and she said that even a conservative-conservative-conservative place like the College of William and Mary, protest was beginning to start, even at a place like that, and she was editor of the newspaper, and somebody wanted to come to campus. Was it Aptheker [Herbert Aptheker], the historian, who was also a communist, and the students the college president would not let him come? And the college newspaper got involved, and they were writing articles in the newspaper, you know, free speech. So that was the issue. But you certainly did not have it in the (19)40s and the (19)50s, students organizing on campus, publicly coming out and protesting. And that is where the free speech, free speech movie goes. It is new. It is ever right to the same, you know, free speech that is in the bill of rights as students.
IG: 17:04
Right. I mean, it must have been a very heavy time. Did it spill over into the way, into the dynamics of the classroom? Was there more, you know, challenging intellectually of the positions of your professors, although-
RS: 17:26
Well, we had one professor in sociology.
IG: 17:29
In Harpur or Wisconsin?
RS: 17:31
Well, I will get to Wisconsin later, but now we are talking about Harpur.
IG: 17:34
Yes-yes.
RS: 17:35
Richard Hamilton, who seemed to attract a lot of those students, intellectually and politically. Oh, yes, a new club was formed in I think my junior year, the International Relations Club. And I think Ronald Bayer is one of the founders of the International and they managed to get Eleanor Roosevelt to come and speak, and that was what launched the International Relations Club.
IG: 18:15
I remember speaking about Eleanor Roosevelt's visit.
Amy 18:20
She visited the campus.
Amy 18:21
Yes, it was a fantastic visit. The whole the whole campus, was filled with excitement that Eleanor Roosevelt was coming.
IG: 18:29
Amy, just for the purpose of this interview, just tell us who you are.
AW: 18:35
I am Amy Weintraub. I am Ruth Silverman's twin sister.
IG: 18:38
Very good.
AW: 18:39
Who also went to Harpur?
IG: 18:40
Thank you.
AW: 18:41
Yes, who also went to Harpur?
RS: 18:44
So, yeah, Harpur, it was just beginning to Harpur, but I remember our professor, Dr. Dodge, we were listening there was talk show. So, they were talk shows back then, and I do not remember what the issue was, but it was just like today. And I do not know how I was listening to the radio, to this particular station and to this particular show, but somebody in the community was calling in and complaining about that socialist professor at Harpur College, you know, named Peter Dodge, and I remember being floored. And I remember going over to his office and saying, I just heard somebody on the radio call you a socialist professor.
IG: 19:36
What did you think about that label at the time? Did you think it was ridiculous? Do you want to protect him? What-what-
RS: 19:43
Absolutely it was absolutely ridiculous. Took, you know, to confuse sociology socialists. But he must have been interviewed somewhere, yeah, you know, and he must have said something. And he must have said he was a social- artfully, a sociology professor, and she heard that he was saying and she heard it a socialist. So, you know, it was just beginning at Wisconsin. I mean, at Harpur, two years later, at Wisconsin, I was taking a course on social change, and social change was happening on the campus and the course, I think that is the only time I dropped a course. But this course had no it was so up here, and it had no relation to what was happening outside on the campus. By the time I left, they were teachings all the time. And I was going through the teachings. I was learning so much at those teachings.
IG: 20:46
Tell us about that.
RS: 20:47
I think if I had, if I had entered Harpur two years later, it would have been the same thing. Okay, I do not because, in fact, it was the times, so it had nothing to do, I think, with Harpur versus Wisconsin, just the fact that I was at Wisconsin who graduated just on the cusp of the movie and the change. And one of the things, the changes that were being asked of the college at that time to do away with, it was not just, you know, the war and civil rights was the whole notion of in loco parentis, and we had to be in the dorm at 10 o'clock at night on weekdays, 12 o'clock on weekends. And there was a dorm mother who would lock the doors, and if you came in late, you have to ring the doorbell and explain where you were. But the big thing was, when you got to be a senior, you could stay out, but remember, there was no place to go. Anyhow, we were on the Harpur campus. Where were you going to go if you stayed out at night? The library closed right? Everything, everything closed down, right? So, the movement was to do away with this whole notion that you had to be in by a certain time and co-ed doors. Why were men and women separated.
IG: 22:11
You know, clearly, you know, the movement reached a crescendo at Wisconsin. And you know, just if you could tell us about the teachings, because a lot of these institutions are, maybe have been absorbed by, you know, the culture, but we really do not know what they were at their very beginning. So, what are teachings?
RS: 22:37
What is a teaching?
IG: 22:38
Yes.
RS: 22:38
A teaching is when you announce a public space and that you get some experts, like not-not-not necessarily people from your own university, but people who you have contacted, who are experts, and they come -and it can last for a whole day, and you can choose which one of those talks you want to go to, and it is like rolling, you know. And so, you are learning so much that is not part of a set curriculum. So, I remember, you know, learning so much about the history of Vietnam. And why? You know, why worry in Vietnam. They had never taken any history courses on that part of the world. But by (19)65, (19)66 we were really involved in Vietnam. And so, for that reason, there was more protest that was also, Wisconsin is a larger school, generate more people involved. It was a graduate and, you know, it was a graduate training school. But as I say, it was because you could feel it in the air. You could feel it in the air at Harpur.
IG: 23:56
I am just trying to really see what a teaching is, is it, is it an auditorium filled up with experts, as you know, expounding on their subject?
RS: 24:10
There was a certain sub, there was a certain topic that is going to be discussed, and it is going to be announced. The lectures are announced at a certain time, and who the speaker is, and these teaching because last the whole day. And you just decided which one it is that you wanted to go to. It was not like one little classroom where somebody was coming was a huge arena, and students were going to the teachings, rather than to their classes, as I did. I mean, I learned nothing about social change in the classroom, but boy, did I see social change occurring right before my very eyes, those two years at Wisconsin and-and the point is the fact that was students who were generating it. This was the whole notion of student. I mean, once before that time, administrators said one thing and everybody. The administrators were not used to students saying no.
IG: 25:06
I can see that that is, that is-
RS: 25:08
And at Harpur, we began to see students saying no. And I assume that after we left, that the young, the people who were one year, two years, three years behind us, moved into those positions, and, you know, because they saw what was happening. So, I assumed that after we left, it must have been like not, maybe not, because University of Wisconsin was such a large place, such a major university. But it must have been the same way at Harpur, because it was already beginning when we were there.
IG: 25:42
So-so, for example, you said, you know, saying no to your administrators was one of the, one of the type of, you know, social, social changes that took place during those during those years, (19)64, (19)65 what were some other social changes that you were witness to, you know, during your college and early graduate years? What were some other social changes that were student-student initiative-
RS: 26:18
Between our sophomore year and I am Junior here that summer, Amy and I were counselors at a camp in North Carolina, and we traveled down there by bus to a place called Hendersonville, North Carolina. I mean, train to Hendersonville, North Carolina, right? And it was the beginning of the student, students being involved in the Civil Rights Movement and going down in summertimes. And the last thing my father said to us before we left, he says, "Do not get involved in it."
AW: 26:58
I am going to tell that story.
RS: 27:00
What?
AW: 27:01
I was going to tell that story.
RS: 27:02
Do not get involved. You were going down there for the summer. I do not know what he thought we was doing. We were going to do. We were going to go. So, we take the train from New York to Washington, DC. This is, this is a fascinating story. We take the train and at Washington, DC, we have had to switch to another train. So, we walk into the first car, and it is really an old, old train, an old car, and it is completely black-black. So, Amy and I walk we made no what to do, so we walk out into the next car. It is the same thing. What we realized later on was that further up there were the nice, white coaches. We looked at each other, and when you are twins, you do not have to speak. But we knew being nice Jewish girls, that we could not move. We could not we would have to go in. And so, we traveled from Washington to Hendersonville
AW: 28:13
In a black car.
RS: 28:14
Completely black.
AW: 28:15
Only whites in the car.
RS: 28:17
And it was not years later until my husband could not take his class one day, and he said, I am showing a film called Eyes on the Prize, a very famous film about the Civil Rights Movement. And this particular one that I was showing was how interstate commerce, how Robert Kennedy had declared that anything that was going between states had to be desegregated, and it had recently been issued okay, that you had to- we did not know that. We just sat on the car, on the train, on the car, because we felt that we could not turn our backs people on the car, that particular car. Must have thought that Amy and I were two civil rights workers, and my father's words came back to me as I am sitting in this class, watching Eyes on the Prize and saying to myself, "Oh my gosh, my father's last words." And here we were. It had just been promulgated, and we were sitting on this train, the only two whites, what else could they think of us? That we were two young civil rights workers, right? Not that we were going to a Jewish camp to be councils for the summer. We were civil rights workers Testing, testing the new law.
AW: 29:37
We got to know we got the house to go. They still had the black and white bathrooms. This was 1964.
RS: 29:46
So now we go after in (19)64 This was (19)62, so of course, it would still be,
AW: 29:51
You were right, we did not go in (19)64 we went in (19)62 years between [crosstalk] at a junior camp north and [crosstalk] [inaudible] to North Carolina.
RS: 30:04
[crosstalk] When I went to Wisconsin and met my husband. [AW is offering tea: milk and the sugar and tea} and met my husband see between (19)64 he was two years ahead of me, so he arrived. When I arrived in (19)64, he arrived in (19)62 and between in January, I think between (19)63 and (19)64 He and three other white friends rented a car and drove down to the south. And they went to the trial, the Medgar Evers trial, and again, had just been the court said rumors had just been desegregated. But of course, they go to the trial, and there are these four white kids sitting in the with the blacks, even though it was desegregated, and I did not think anything of it when he first told me a story, but years later, I said, you drove down to the south with a car, four of you white with a Wisconsin license plate, and then you drop in on the trial, and you sit in that part of the courtroom that had been reserved for the Blacks. I said, "Where was your head?" But, of course, I did not purposely integrate the train, but in our own naive way.
IG: 31:39
Yeah. But it is, it is, it is a wonderful story and a wonderful act, because we are too, either polite or-or-
RS: 31:50
-to living. Yeah, Jewish-Jewish liberal.
IG: 31:58
That you did not leave and you did. You know, it is, it is a wonderful thing. It is, you know-
RS: 32:06
But anybody, could have come and looked at us and thought we were civil rights workers. Never told the story to my father. But of course, it was years like not that was not that long after, maybe, what 10 years later, when I saw that film and learned that they had just integrated the interstate, the trains and the busses going interstate. I mean, they had just done it like it was not a year before.
IG: 32:39
But I am just interested, what were the feelings that sort of, you know, compelled you that no, we were going to stay here? Was it because of your liberality, of your, you know, ethics, of your politeness, or a combination?
RS: 32:58
You know, it was both, because the year later, we broke that was the first time. Then we split up. Amy went back to the camp, and I was working at what was called the major camp, the head camp, and it was part of a new movement called Young Judea. And at the end of the summer, there will be a national meeting of everybody at the camp. Okay? So, Amy came up, and then there was this march on Washington. It was August 1963 and we had a debate whether or not young Judea, a delegation from Barryville, New York and [inaudible], would go to the March on Washington under the Young Judea banner. And there was pro and con. It was one of the most it was an epiphany for me, and we voted the vote Benjamin that we were going to send a group down and marching with a Young Judea banner. But what won the day was when people were talking about the prophetic tradition, that we must live that prophetic tradition as Jews of Isaiah, Amos, and that we had to go, and that was the first time in my life I had ever really seen religion used to justify, maybe not justify. So not a good word, but to use, just talk about,
IG: 34:43
-to legitimize or-
RS: 34:46
-maybe legitimize, also to back up a moral movement.
IG: 34:51
Yeah, that is tremendous. It is tremendous.
RS: 34:55
And, yeah. So, there was a lot happening. And Harpur being in Binghamton and being a small college, it was even happening there. But of course, it takes a while. I you know I was going to say earlier that this is the 50th anniversary of the sit ins at Columbia University.
IG: 35:24
That is right.
RS: 35:24
So, when we graduated in 19, when we were graduated in 1964 it was about two, three or four years before the-the real movement started.
IG: 35:41
The only thing, the only you know, comparable thing that I could think of, was the when a religious movement actually legitimized a political one. Remember liberation theology in Latin America?
IG: 35:57
Oh, yeah, yes, [inaudible]
RS: 36:00
Yes, yeah. And we had, we belonged to a conservative synagogue. In addition to going to the middle school, we went to Hebrew high school three nights a week, from six to eight. But we had never really learned about talked about that prophetic tradition. That was the first time in my life, anybody brought up that prophetic tradition, but in Judaism, now, that whole profession, prophetic tradition is the thing that is behind what we call Tikkun Olam.
AW: 36:29
Yes, it is called tikkun olam letak, a means to fix so the Reform Movement is very dominant. In the Reform Movement Tikkun Olam to fix the world, which means no to better the world.
RS: 36:43
Actually, it comes from the Cesar Terek book. David has more of a mystical meaning, but it has taken over to have a social justice meeting that when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, something was broken, and the sparks went out in-
AW: 37:03
The Kabbalah.
RS: 37:05
What?
AW: 37:05
Kabbalah.
RS: 37:05
Kabbalah, yeah, Kabbalah. Madonna said, the Kabbalah. But so, it had a mystical thing to bring together, those-those sparks as one. But then it became tied to, not mysticism, black social action.
IG: 37:20
And there is a magazine Tikkun [crosstalk]
RS: 37:27
So, Lerner, what is his name? Michael Lerner.
IG: 37:33
So that, do you think that this prophetic movement was kind of a, not a driving force, but an accompaniment-accompaniment.
RS: 37:44
It was a driving force for me because of the fact that I was not into Marxism. That was the time, basically, when Marxism came to college campuses. And a lot of the students from New York were into but they were political science majors, history majors, sociology majors, and they were into reading Marx.
RS: 37:46
So, and you decided against that.
RS: 37:46
Yeah, it did not. It did not speak to me. But when I discovered that I could be active and stand for certain things, and I could find it in my own tradition, I could find and I felt more I felt more comfortable coming to it from that tradition.
IG: 37:46
So, tell us about sort of the formation of Ruth Silverman, the scholar, the-
RS: 37:46
Yeah, and a lot of that was due to-to Dr. Peter Dodge, as I said, when we graduated, he said to us that we had grown so and when he first met us as freshman in his history class, and actually he became Amy's honors thesis advisor. And as a matter of fact, it was Amy, this is how close we were when we were sophomores. She said to me, “You know what?" When we are a senior, we are going to do an honors thesis, and we are going to graduate with honors." And I said, "Okay, sounds good to me," but she was determined to do it, and Dr. Dodge, which he could not, he could not be both of our thesis advisors, so Amy-Amy took him and I took somebody else. But Dr. Dodge was much more supportive of her, much more interested in what she was doing than the one that the one that I chose, what was exhilarating when at the end there was an honors thesis presentation, and all the faculty who had honor students and maybe some who did not, were invited to hear our presentations, and I had to get up in front of all of these professors and talk about my honors thesis, that changes you a lot.
IG: 37:46
Susan, what did you talk about?
RS: 37:46
What was my thesis in sociology? We had in sociology religion; we have read this book called Oligarchy. Well, the original book was by the Italian sociologist [Robert Michels] The iron law of oligarchy, and which he says, "Whoever says democracy", I think the famous quote was, "Whoever says democracy, it is actually me in the end, it is oligarchy." And he- Michelle's and he was, he had studied how the labor unions in Italy started out as being democratic, and then eventually they become less and less democratic as a small group of people tend to take over and run it. Okay? And so, a lot of people started taking that idea and applying it to other kinds of organizations. So, it was applied to the American Baptist. I know what you call the American Baptist Convention, or something like that. Somebody had written a book how they were supposed to be very lay oriented and very democratic. And he said, even in there, you tended towards this oligarchy. And then Seymour Martin Lipset did a study of the book was called Union Democracy. And he said, it is very interesting that when you have some people on top who form the organization or the union or whatever you want to call it, it is not going to be democratic. It tends to be more democratic when the groups exist already and then they coalesce together and forming a national organization. And then you tend to get more democracy, because they were autonomous to begin with. They were not so. So, I started the conservative movement in Judaism, which had three, three parts. There was the rabbinical training school. There was the organization for graduates of the rabbinical school. And then there was the organ, the organizational arm, which was called-
AW: 37:46
Not son of America. United Synagogue of-
RS: 37:46
United synagogue of America. And so, I did, you know, I went to conventions, I went did a lot of interviewing, and it was obvious that the one arm of the seminary had the- was, you know, the major controlling element, and that the congregational arm of it was not also autonomous, you know. And so that was my that was my honors thesis, and I had to get up and did not talk about my thesis. The fact that I still remember it.
IG: 37:46
I was about to say, it is remarkable, but it really must have been a formative experience writing this.
RS: 37:46
I see I see this today. I am on the board of the Long Island Progressive Coalition, which is the Long Island chapter of citizen action of New York. There are there is another called Metro Rochester, something like that. Both of us existed before citizen action of New York existed, but with they formed chapters in many places there were top down. It is actually top down because every chapter other than Rochester and Long Island were formed through Albany. So, because that we existed, we existed because we existed. You know, it is nice to have a statewide affiliation, but because of the fact that we existed before they existed, we have much. We have made it clear to them and certain issues, we are part of you, but we existed before you. But I can see that Seymour Martin Lipset was correct. It depends upon how the union was formed, or the organization was formed. And if you had [crosstalk] if you had individual chapters that people, come together, saying the strength in numbers, it is less likely to get oligarchy.
IG: 37:46
D-o you think that that was a work that determined the future of your, you know, interests or, I mean, this is it must, you know. I mean, it must have propelled you on to-
RS: 37:46
It must have, in some way. I mean-
IG: 37:46
In some way, in some way.
RS: 37:46
-because of the fact that I know every time there is some kind of a little friction between says an action in New York and us, I always say "I have said it before, I am going to say it again," that this is, this is what we learn in sociology, okay? And it is our history. That makes for that friction, because we existed before they did.
IG: 45:24
By the time you got to your PhD studies-
RS: 45:28
I was- I had changed my area. Well, when I got to Wisconsin, I became interested in sociology of health and illness, because that was my father's area.
IG: 45:38
The sociology, excuse me, of-
RS: 45:39
Health and illness.
AW: 45:40
There is a thing here for you. Keep it.
RS: 45:43
Became interested in sociology of health and illness, and my husband had done a master's thesis in that area, so actually, I built upon his master's thesis, and then when I went back to graduate school, there was a space between my masters and my doctoral work.
IG: 46:03
How many years would you say I went back in (19)76 Yeah. So, what happened? You mentioned a husband. So where did you meet?
RS: 46:19
At Wisconsin.
IG: 46:20
At Wisconsin.
RS: 46:21
Two years he was there, two years before me. So, there was, there was no sociology of health program major or anything like that. I am soon there is now. But being a small college, the course offerings were courses that you had to take if you were a sociology major, but Wisconsin, that was one of the major areas. My husband had a fellowship in national from the National Institute of Mental Health. So, but when I went back to NYU, I had given birth to my first child, and I became interested in studying the history of childbirth in the United States. And that got me-
IG: 47:13
That is fascinating.
RS: 47:14
What?
IG: 47:14
Fascinating.
RS: 47:15
And that got me involved. When I went back to NYU, I majored in women's health in the sociology department.
IG: 47:24
Why did you decide to come to New York City rather than is that-
RS: 47:28
Amy, I stayed in Madison the summer between my first and second years. Amy had a fellowship to New York City, and she stayed in New York City with three friends of ours. They rented the apartment of the wife of Hal Holbrook. Hal Holbrook, the actor Hal Holbrook, he would call up every once in a while, to find out how they were doing after his one of his performances as Abraham Lee, that is Mark Twain. He invited them to come.
AW: 48:01
It was, um, it was a classroom, naturally.
RS: 48:05
He, no, he was playing Tom Sawyer, not Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain, Mark Twain. He was the famous performer of Mark Twain.
IG: 48:12
I have seen him on television, yeah.
RS: 48:14
So, he, they met him afterwards, right? And I had spent the summer, and Madison had a job with one of the State Departments doing something, and I came to New York before going back from my second year. And I said, "I have to, when I get my masters, I have to take a break between Albany Binghamton and Madison." I said, "I need to go to New York," right? I have had enough, you know what, these little places. So, it was fascinating that actually my husband came from Philadelphia during that semester, the Winter Break in (19)65 or going on (19)66. We met in New York, and we had a great time together. And then we get back to Madison, and the first Saturday back, he says to me, he proposes. And I remember saying to him, I will never forget it. Of course, I will never forget anything. Well, I want to tell you something. "My sister and I have both decided that after we get our masters, we want to go in. We want to live in New York." I said, "So if you want to join me in New York. [laughs]
IG: 49:33
You must have, he must have been very much in love with you.
RS: 49:41
So, it was not the yes, it was not the No, it was a kind of a strange proposal. And it was not until, like two weeks later, that we finally came to realize that that was a proposal. [laughs]
IG: 49:55
That is very sweet.
RS: 49:56
So, I just wanted to be able to be in New York. And of course, the minute we moved to New York was it, I cannot say it was the very minute, but by the time (19)68 rolled around, we involved. We got involved in the McCarthy the whole "Stay Clean for Gene." We got involved in the McCarthy campaign.
IG: 50:22
So, tell us about that.
RS: 50:28
57th Street. Amy saw a notice somewhere that there was an office, and Amy can open the door if you are hot--your apartment, as usual, it is hot.
AW: 50:44
Huh that the Parker's village. When you leave, before you leave. No, I have all my flowers. We bought those chairs. So, my husband managed to assemble all those four chairs, and I think he did a great job. But the bathroom looks so pretty with the new chairs and my flowers. So, I thought we could sit out there today. But given the weather, we cannot do that.
IG: 51:21
I think another time, but it is a lovely view.
AW: 51:24
It is.
RS: 51:26
So, Amy went and someone said to me, if you were from the Bronx, you do not want to work out of here. So, they sent me to a place in the Bronx on 161st Street. And I told them where I lived, and they said, oh, there is a lovely reform Democratic Club up right where you live. That is organizing for McCarthy, Gene McCarthy. So, it was right near me. And not only did I work for Gene McCarthy, um I became- my husband, and I became members of the club, it drew in a lot of young people, even up in the Bronx, because he was teaching at Fordham, they were young people who were protesting the war in Vietnam. And this little reformed Democratic Club attracted lots of young people who revitalized it. And I stayed with the fact. As a matter of fact, I ran for state office from my assembly district, and I won. I was taken the democratic state committee woman from the 83rd assembly district for several years.
IG: 52:38
You have a very storied career.
RS: 52:43
And the funny story is, the second they did not expect me to win the machine Democrats. So, the second time I ran, they put the assemblyman's mother ran against me, because this was a inter Democratic Party, intra Democratic Party primary, general election. So, I would go, you talk about how I changed. I went as a quiet little girl entering Harpur and a few years later, in 1968 in the morning, time I am doing subway stops, handing out my literature. And then I said, you know, I can do a lot, get to a lot more people. I cannot keep running up and down the platform. You know, a lot of people coming in on this end, and I cannot get to the people coming in on this end. So, I recruited Amy. I took one end of the platform, [laughter] I took my literature, and then about eight o'clock, it starts thinning out, because at eight o'clock I am going to work, and I see Amy heading towards somebody at the other end of the subway, and I look, oh my gosh, it is my assemblyman. She was heading over to him with my piece of literature, asking I made a [inaudible] something. [laughs] I got there just as she got [inaudible] [laughs]
IG: 54:17
And does Amy realize what-what=
RS: 54:21
She did not know who he was. I said, you know he was- I said, "Good morning, Assemblyman, taking the subway, the subway station." [laughter]
IG: 54:22
It is a good story. So, you are in your work as a politician, what do you think are your main achievements? What did you aspire to do? What did you accomplish?
RS: 54:52
I think, I think you know who started it, the position of a committee woman. Eleanor Roosevelt, she insisted that there be a position for women. So, from each district, each assembly district, there was a female committee woman and a male committee woman, and it started with her. So, I was not running against a male. I was running against I was running against a female. Um, so what-wat was the question?
IG: 55:31
Accomplishments?
RS: 55:32
Accomplishments. Oh, yeah. So, you know the reform Democrats wanted to reform the way elections and politics are in. They wanted to move away from the back room, okay, where people decided who was, who the candidates were going to be. So, there would be the statewide conventions, and if you got enough votes at the statewide convention, you did not have to go the petition, right? Which, when I learned that, I thought, well, this is not much of a reform. There should not be a convention at all. Why are we having a convention? Anybody who wants to run you get enough signatures and you get on the ballot to run. Why should it be that some people get, you know, the blessing that the convention and they get more than 25 percent and somebody else has to go to the petition route. So, my proudest moment was when Hugh Carey ran for governor. Oh, that year I got so many phone calls from people who wanted me to give them the vote at the state convention in Buffalo, and he calls me, and he asked him for my vote. And I said, well, the time that she placed it, I really do not like this convention system. I said, I would rather there would not be any convention at all, they say. So, I think when I get up to Buffalo, I am just going to pass. I am not going to vote for anybody. And he says, "Ruth Silverman, you could sound just like my kind of person." [laughs] And then the other thing was my Bronx-
IG: 57:27
How old were you at the time?
RS: 57:33
That was not the [inaudible] Well, I was 21 when I graduated in November, (19)64 and this was like (19)74 maybe by now 31 it takes, it takes growing up, but my growing up and becoming who I am started, started at Harpur and my parents were absolutely correct to realize that we needed a small college in order to grow we- I just, you know, I cannot, I cannot, I cannot sing the praises of small colleges enough. I even, I, no matter how large national is, we do not have large lecture classes. I mean, you have a large load of, you know, 4, 3, 5, classes to teach with. each class is top well, in sociology, it is 34 so students Nassau Community College do not sit in a large lecture hall. Well, nobody cares about you and who you are and what your name is.
IG: 58:32
No, I have heard said a number of people I have interviewed from Harpur College, the Harpur College at the time, was equal to an excellent, you know, elite-
RS: 58:48
You know what they call-
IG: 58:50
Private college.
RS: 58:53
You know what
AW: 58:54
[crosstalk] Brown University. And I worked harder at Harpur College, and I did at Brown University.
RS: 58:58
And, you know, they used to call Harpur when we were there, we were called the Swarthmore of the state university system. I do not know whether or not what it is like now. So-so much larger, whether or not students who go there
IG: 59:10
Have the same experience. I do not think so. I do not think so. It is a very different-
AW: 59:15
How many students are there now?
IG: 59:18
At Harpur College?
AW: 59:20
For college?
IG: 59:20
I do not know. I do not know. I mean, it is, it is, I am sure that it is,
RS: 59:25
it was, it was a special place. It was very special. And I felt when I went to University of Wisconsin that I was totally prepared. As a matter of fact, my theory course at Wisconsin was a- what was the exact same course I had to take social science majors. Had to take up what was it called at the end of the there is a word for it, to take-
AW: 59:49
Colloquium.
RS: 59:51
Yeah, it was, and it was based upon the philosopher Nagel. So, I had to go through the if then stuff about theory. I-I cannot tell Wisconsin, it is the same course I have already taken it at Harpur.
IG: 1:00:06
Must have given you a great deal of confidence, right? You know and well, and it is probably an easy pass into a difficult graduate course. What was NYU like? What you know, you-you did a very interesting dissertation. And was kind of, what was, sort of, you know, the climate, what was then, what like in New York City-
RS: 1:00:33
In NYU, I did part time-
IG: 1:00:36
In intellectual circles-
RS: 1:00:38
I did NYU part time, taking two courses in the fall and one course. You would not go to NYU for the high quality of the teaching.
IG: 1:01:03
Really?
RS: 1:01:04
I had Elliot Friedson was one of the top experts in this field of sociology of medicine, sociology and healthcare, whatever you-you know, whatever you want to call it, right? And then he moved from there. He became very much involved in studying professions, not just the medical profession. So, I take a seminar with him. Meets one day a week for an hour and 40 minutes. So you go to NYU, you take a course with one of the leading experts. He was writing a new book. He would come in, start reading us from where he had left off, and at an hour and 40 minutes, he put the book and correct there. And then the next time we would he would read from where he had left off, reading and chewing gum at the same time.
IG: 1:01:59
Did not any of the students complain or about his manner of teaching?
RS: 1:02:08
Not him in particular, but what the students did at one point, they wanted to have a student rep on one of the faculty committees. I do not remember how I got it, but I was the student rep, and by this time, you know, I knew my own mind, and I remember the students, well, it was not formal, but I remembered that some informally, the students were taking one stand, and I was supposed to be the representative, and I sitting in on this meeting, and I am listening and I am listening, and I think it was maybe by hiring somebody. I do not remember what it was, but I decided that their position was not the right one. So, I voted the way I felt the vote should go. And I do not remember what the issue was, whether or not it was courses, the hiring of somebody, I do not remember what it was. They were not faced with me, the students, I said, but I have to, you know, I am sitting there, I am listening to the arguments, and you know, you did not, you know, I was not sent here just to do what you [inaudible]. I was sent here to listen and to, you know, do the best I can, you know, but to raise my hand and to vote on something that you know based upon what every argument that I am hearing. And it just so happened that there was an argument that was, you know, different than I thought, better than yours.
IG: 1:03:44
So-so, you know-
RS: 1:03:46
But all this happened, I have to say this will happen, yeah, from going to Harpur. I do not know whether any of this would have come through if we had gone to a larger, a larger school, but it was the atmosphere of excellence, academic excellence, but also interaction between students and professors, beginning to feel that the times were changing.
IG: 1:04:13
They were changing, but also your own upbringing, because your father was an academic. I think that-
RS: 1:04:21
he was not, um, he was a state employee. He headed up the Department of Statistics. We did not teach, but
AW: 1:04:27
He headed up the department was called epidemiology. I remember statistics or epidemiology; it was one of those.
RS: 1:04:36
It was interesting that my father had done a study through the data from the Department of Mental Hygiene on violence committed by people who were mentally ill, and he did it with at that point, the Commissioner of the Department of Mental Hygiene and. Somebody wrote an article in The New Yorker, which I had never heard of at that point, in which they mentioned the study done by Benjamin Malzberg and Hoke. I think hope was the depart was head of department at that point, and Dr. Dodge got the New Yorker, and he was reading this article, and Malzberg is not a very common name. [laughs] So after class one day, he comes up to us, and he says, "Would you happen to have a father, Benjamin Malzberg, who is a sociologist. So, do you relate to him? " and we said, "Oh, that is our father."
IG: 1:05:36
A proud moment.
RS: 1:05:42
Very proud, very proud. Also in history, American history, when we got to the point about the nativist movement, the nativist movement of the early 1900s and a lot of my farmer, [crosstalk], that led to the passage of the immigration law in 1926 and he had done a lot of work using his data from the department, but that was his dissertation. As a matter of fact, using statistics to show that any tendency to immigrants having more mental illness was due if you control for variables like age, etc., you know,
AW: 1:06:21
Or acculturation.
RS: 1:06:22
You know, was, it was a culturation.
AW: 1:06:23
The second generation, the mental illness among Jews had definitely dropped.
RS: 1:06:27
So, any anyhow, um-
IG: 1:06:29
From the first?
AW: 1:06:30
From the first generation,
RS: 1:06:32
Anyhow, that was-
AW: 1:06:33
On the first generation more mental illness because they were getting, they were culturing a totally different culture. It was, you know, being-
IG: 1:06:40
I have heard that said that they carried kind of the burden of-
AW: 1:06:45
Exactly.
IG: 1:06:45
-of, you know, scrambling, both [crosstalk]
RS: 1:06:50
Alcoholism, anything that it was a matter of migration, and especially-
IG: 1:06:54
That is so fascinating.
RS: 1:06:55
So, and especially a lot of young men being here by themselves. They did not have any-any families with them?
IG: 1:07:01
What are you calling first generation? Though, is it? Is it? You know people first gen born?
RS: 1:07:07
I know people get confused on that. First generation is with those who are first born in this country.
IG: 1:07:12
Yes, rather than their parents.
RS: 1:07:14
Their parents are not first generation. First generation means those who were young. Yeah. So anyway, he-he asked us whether or not we were related to Benjamin Malzberg.
AW: 1:07:27
The history professor, Oscar Hamlin had written a book.
RS: 1:07:30
Oh, yes, so we got something, yeah, to the section on him when we had this book at that time. I do not know maybe that is the lead from colleges, but was every topic had a pro and a con. I mean two people, you know. I mean not-not opinion pieces, but from the academic literature. And so, the piece that was in there from the academic side. And there, in the body of one of the articles, a name pops up. And of course, the history professor also got it. [crosstalk] But that would not have happened had we gone to a larger university.
IG: 1:07:31
Of course, of course.
RS: 1:07:31
So, you know, our preparation for graduate school was top notch. And I am so happy that we got into Harpur, because while I was fourth in the class and Amy was fifth, math was not our [inaudible]. So, we got through algebra, and we got through geometry, and we decided not to take any more math, which was, I do not know how they allowed us to do that, because these days, in order, they did not call it the advanced Regents diploma, but you really need the third that third math class and that they took. They took the two of us anyway, and they took one other student who did not take the third math class, and the three of us, when we got to Harpur our first semester, had to take a course to make up for it in probability. There I am- we are without my father, the statistician I recently was talking to a friend who was an electrical engineer, and I told him that I had to take probability my first year because I did not take trigonometry in high school. He said, "Ruth, you should have taken trigonometry. It is much easier than probability." So, we made Harpur anyway.
IG: 1:07:35
Yeah, you made Harpur anyway.
RS: 1:07:35
And as a matter of fact, I do not know whether or not I even remember who Kathy Henderson and Stuart Lewis from Harpur also went and the admissions officer at one point. I guess, he, I do not know how my parents knew this, but the admissions over asked Dr. House, who was the guidance counselor at Milton, whether or not there were any more students and more [inaudible] and more students on the level of the four of us.
RS: 1:07:35
Well, but that is, that is, you know, certainly a great, great accolade to Harpur College and the education that you all have gone.
RS: 1:07:36
But I am curious, because people who were at Harpur, this is the (19)60s, yeah, so people who were at Harpur in (19)68 was there ferment there?
IG: 1:10:43
Yes.
RS: 1:10:44
Eventually?
IG: 1:10:45
Eventually-eventually, I think that they were more certainly politically involved. But Ron Bayer, for example, is quite a graduate of (19)64-
RS: 1:10:57
(19)64 and I think he was active in students for democratic [crosstalk]
IG: 1:11:00
He was extremely-extremely active-
RS: 1:11:02
When I think, when I think of the students coming from New York and how politically active they were, the name that always comes to mind is Ronald Bayer.
IG: 1:11:12
I mean, he is tremendous. And so, in my mind, he sorts of, you know, epitomizes the most [crosstalk]
RS: 1:11:19
He is the one who started the International Relations question, I am positive of it, and he must have been the one who contacted Eleanor Roosevelt.
IG: 1:11:27
Right. So-so, yeah, you know, and I have heard from, you know, the majority, I would say, the vast majority, of individuals I interviewed what you know, superlative-superlative education, and they, they got at Harpur and individualized attention and all that. So, you know, just your career trajectory, you graduated from NYU. What-what did you do?
RS: 1:12:01
I teach at Nassau.
IG: 1:12:02
No, I know is that your, was that the job that you got after getting your PhD, and did you just stay there? Or did you, kind of-
RS: 1:12:14
I had a teaching assistantship at NYU.
RS: 1:12:16
I also had a research assistantship one year, and then when I graduated and was trying to work on the dissertation as well, but I had, you know, children, I had to go somewhere. So, I had to pay for-for Ari, and that when I had the second child to go, to go to daycare, so I taught a course at Nassau Community. And then, you know, I eventually just stayed there and I got two National Endowment for the Humanities awards, [inaudible]
IG: 1:12:16
I see.
IG: 1:12:54
In what?
RS: 1:12:55
The first one because my area, that was a fascinating seminar. I spent the summer, spent eight weeks at Cornell. It was called humanities and medicine, but it was, really was a sociology, in many ways, a sociology, of course, but it was interdisciplinary. And was Sandra Gillen was an interdisciplinary and he ran the seminar. We read lots of literature to see the connection between medicine and how people illness is defined and how it is reflected in the humanities and in the literature, etc. It was a fascinating seminar and-
RS: 1:13:37
And what was that?
RS: 1:13:38
My essay to get in-
IG: 1:13:40
Excuse me, what-what year was-
RS: 1:13:44
1986. And then 10 years later, I think it was, I was asked to teach a course on the history of Israel in the history department, because, actually, my husband was approached by the chairperson because of the fact that they had it on the books and it had not been taught in years and years and years, the chairperson happened to know my husband, and my husband said, my wife can teach it. She has got an acknowledge. You have an excellent background. But in her graduate work at NYU, one of the first papers she wrote was a history of the labor movement in Israel. And so, she knows something. So, I taught the course. And then one summer, Michael Stanislavski was one of the leading experts in the history of Zionism, was giving a seminar. The first seminar at Cornell was open to people from community colleges and four-year colleges. No, that was the community college one, the one at the one at-
AW: 1:14:51
Columbia.
RS: 1:14:51
-Columbia. Now I do not remember which one, one of them was only four. For community college people. So, I was only competing against people from community colleges, but the other one was open to anybody, from anyone and yet, I was able to I was able to get in a community college competing against people from four-year colleges, and the college is very proud, because college likes to publicize the people who get these national awards-
IG: 1:15:23
Of course.
RS: 1:15:24
-and I brought two of them.
IG: 1:15:26
So, humanities of medicine and?
RS: 1:15:28
The humanities, it was so interdisciplinary. We were reading Roth [Philip Roth], The Anatomy Lesson and using that as a parttime to understand something about modern medicine. People were doing. There were people there who were art specialists. There were people there who came with a drama background and all bringing a different perspective on-on medicine and illness from their, from their disciplines. They, I mean the famous, but the famous painting, I do not remember. It is in the universe. It is in Philadelphia, at the Philadelphia Art Museum, the famous one, when the-the operation and shows the doctor. [crosstalk]
IG: 1:16:19
I can see it. I can see it. I do not know. I can see it the very it is a surgery. It is an autopsy.
RS: 1:16:29
Autopsy or something.
IG: 1:16:31
I think it is an autopsy. And it is very stark, and so same colors black-
RS: 1:16:35
It was brilliant, and they were the way he-he wove us back and forth between different disciplines and the understanding of-
IG: 1:16:44
That is more commonplace now. You know, places like Columbia, for example, have narrative and medicine program that was started by a doctor who also has a PhD in literature in the early 2000s I forget her name, but it is sort of, you know, but when, when you were looking back at (19)86 I think it was really you were in the vanguard of such a movement.
RS: 1:17:09
Oh, yeah. I remember somebody did a slide presentation on Da Vinci of his drawings. And he had one picture of himself in which he drew himself with a wound. I was taken aback. I raised my hand and I say, you know, psychology, psychiatry, has so much to say about penis envy. He said, "Look at this picture." I said, "Why has anybody ever written up womb envy?"
AW: 1:17:46
Written up what?
RS: 1:17:49
Womb envy, W, O, M, B, and it was actually directed towards Sondra Gilman, silence. But to me, that was an obvious. He was depicted in this drawing, having a womb. That tells us a lot about something.
IG: 1:18:14
So, you got this- you had two awards, and that allowed you to do what?
RS: 1:18:21
Well, when you get into the seminars, first of all, it is, it is prestigious for a community college to have somebody come in and get to get to and then you have to write a paper as part of this. You have to do some research.
IG: 1:18:35
Right. Do they give you money to-
RS: 1:18:37
Oh, yes, you get a stipend, of course. And actually, the one that I took, the one at Columbia, that was, that was the summer that my mother had her first heart attack, so I was going up and back to war on a lot. So, I did not do the best piece of research I possibly could, but I did something I was interested in. What since Freud did not consider himself Jewish in the traditional sense, I was always curious about, well, how did he feel about Zionism so? But then they were nine of us. All seminars are 12 people, three women. I was one of them. One of them was a Palestinian woman. It was very-very interesting. So, she was not, you know- Two years later, my colleague in the English department, Sharon leader, who was both a developer of the Jewish Studies project at the college and the Women's Studies project, called me up and said, "Ruth, you know, the National Women's, National Women's Association, the women of studies, whatever it was, she said, you know, has been very cool to having panels, having anything to do with Jewish women." And she says, "I finally worked on them, and they have agreed to have some panels this summer at Skidmore, which where they met. He said, “Would you give a talk on women in Israel?" And I said, "Well, I am not an expert on Israel." I said, "I am not an expert on women in Israel." But as for talking, I said, "What, you know, Sharon, I think I want to do a paper on women and Zionism. And I said, you know, of all the papers in that seminar on Zionism, not a single one of them was about a woman."
AW: 1:20:36
And there is a book. Arthur Hertzberg.
RS: 1:20:37
I am going to get there. I am going to get here. So, they made your book in the field, Arthur Hertzberg, Zionist Idea, came in 1959 published. It was a hit, and it was reissued and reissued and reissued and reissued. There is not a single woman in that compendium, right about of a woman I said, you know, I think I need to do a paper and do some research called Women Written out of History. So, I gave the paper, and I revised the paper so many times, and gave the paper at various places, and I was on to something.
IG: 1:21:20
You were so forward looking.
RS: 1:21:22
I was so for- because did you see this month-
IG: 1:21:28
And when was this? This is-
RS: 1:21:29
1990s.
IG: 1:21:30
That is, that is tremendous. You know-
RS: 1:21:32
-had awesome magazine, which my mother made us like [crosstalk] maintenance life, members of this organization had, also has an article this month. It just came the other day. [crosstalk] let me finish yet. I will get it. You can take a look at okay, go, get go, get it. Has been reissued, not reissued. A new a timely, new book, new people in it. And guess what? This volume now includes women. [inaudible] magazine [inaudible] to do about it that, finally, that women are coming back into the history.
IG: 1:22:14
Well, exactly, [crosstalk]
RS: 1:22:17
Zion is invented now, putting women back in the picture. I- boy, was I on to something?
IG: 1:22:26
Just recently, the New York Times started doing an obituary column of the women were forgotten. [crosstalk]
AW: 1:22:39
Yeah, right. I read some of those. It was absolutely fascinating.
IG: 1:22:45
This was very recent.
RS: 1:22:51
"Female and Zionist then and now, reclaiming the voices of the women who helped shape the Jewish liberation movement." Now, what is really fascinating is, okay. This is the article.
IG: 1:23:02
Yes.
RS: 1:23:04
Yesterday I get the Jewish week, and the Jewish Week has an interview with Gil Troy, the new the one who put he is fighting it. He is quite a scholar.
AW: 1:23:16
if you want to take a look at that.
RS: 1:23:17
Could not believe, I could not believe it was the same book, the person who was interviewing him does not mention there is not one mention that what is new about the new is that, not only that, it has got some new men in it that were not in the original one. Not one mention in this conversation, going back and forth, that the new book now includes women for the first time.
IG: 1:23:43
Right.
AW: 1:23:45
Here it is.
IG: 1:23:47
It is, it is a tremendous-
AW: 1:23:50
Jewish Week, Gil Troy, the most recent one.
RS: 1:23:55
[crosstalk] And I got this earlier in the week, and then this came yesterday, and talking about the new addition, there is only one, there is only one mention of women in this conversation, right? And it is a criticism that Anne Roiphe was included in it, but does not mention any other woman that is included, and there is no addition. 63 women were mentioned. I am glad that it mentions, you know, it has been re-re edited, and includes women. I am not very happy that a major paper that goes out to hundreds, 1000s and 1000s of Jewish people in, you know, in the New York City area has this- is unhappy with the fact that, but Roiphe does not know diaspora Jewish or Zionist history or religion or philosophy, it is hard to place Roiphe seriously in a serious volume on Zionist ideas. Other than that, there is no mention in this-
AW: 1:24:56
This whole review.
RS: 1:24:58
-about all the other women who have been included, but having a problem with Anne Roiphe. [laughter]
IG: 1:25:06
Right-right. So-
RS: 1:25:09
Write that to the answer room. I think it is time to write a letter.
IG: 1:25:11
Yes-yes-yes. So-so you are still kind of charging ahead and-and, you know, challenging the status quo, and you are sort of, you know, true to your value, to your roots, and as a young person, you know-
RS: 1:25:32
Actually, in many ways, we are following me through on my father, not just, but not just the fact that we are sociologists, but he was one of the first immigrant boys, okay, Jewish boys, to go to City College, and then he went. He got a- he went, he got his masters at Columbia. Then he got a friend's fellowship to go to Europe. He was going to study with Emile Durkheim, but by the time he got there, and it was the war of an on Emile Durkheim had died, but he studied with, you know, I think, Amy Durkheim, son in law, who was also an expert in the field. And he went to the London School of Economics. Then he goes back to Columbia and finish up his PhD. And the reason why he did his dissertation on immigrants is it is because of that that when he you think, you think academia has left us today, back then, academia was leading the nativist you look at the literature on nativism is all coming from academia and especially from sociologists. And he is sitting in all of these courses, whether it is at Columbia City College-
IG: 1:26:42
Oh, I remember, I remember-
RS: 1:26:44
English, England, and they are all talking about, you know, these immigrants-
IG: 1:26:50
Right.
RS: 1:26:55
-whose genetics are lesser, and that, you know, what will happen if we cream them into the country. It was not coming from, you know, the- it was coming from academia. I took a seminar once at the American Museum of Natural History with Professor associate of biology, actually from Stony Brook, who became interested in these racist biological ideas. And he pointed out we were sitting in the Museum of Natural History that in the 1930s the guy named Mueller, who was head of the Museum of Natural History here in New York, was one of those nativist racists, and that Hitler thought in many ways that the United States would join the war on his side, because we had all of these academics and the Institute out in Long Island, the scientific Institute.
IG: 1:27:46
Oh, that is [crosstalk] springs-springs. That is where [crosstalk] the people-
RS: 1:28:05
That is what eugenics records were kept.
IG: 1:28:05
Cold springs.
RS: 1:28:06
Cold Spring, that is where the oceanic records were kept. So he is, so here is a young Jewish [crosstalk]. Here is a young Jewish boy, and he is sitting at all these classes, and he is hearing people lecture and talk about immigrants. And so, when he got the job up in Albany, he had a wonderful mentor. He first got the job as the assistant director, and the person who, Dr. Pollock, who was the director, was his mentor and helped him do his dissertation using the statistics from the Department of Mental Hygiene. And from there, he just, he has mentioned in the introduction to Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma [Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944)]. His work is mentioned. So anyway, one of the things I am involved in when I moved to the island is I am on the board of the Central American refugee center. And when people, when people ask me why I joined the Central American refugee center? Well, I joined it for two reasons. I said, I follow this. I am following through on my father's work. I said, he did it academically. I said, I give you I joined the board to do it in a different in a different fashion.
IG: 1:29:19
That is beautiful. I think that you know we are going to, you know, think of wrapping up [crosstalk]
RS: 1:29:29
When I think this, all began, shy, a shy little girl, I have a story to tell we all had to take on our freshman year at Harpur, this broad-based social science course that it was neither sociology political science, okay? And we read books like gold race all of a sudden,
IG: 1:29:51
Not kingdoms of nations.
RS: 1:29:54
No.
IG: 1:29:55
Something of nations.
RS: 1:29:57
No. We were reading. We were reading those books, right? Um, broad, general books, Pirenne. We did not read that in history, Pirenne], [Henri Pirenne], Medieval Cities [Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade], right? I think we read that in that social so, I mean, we were reading really high-level stuff, and the professor, one day, who was not Jewish, decided that he was going to devote the class discussion to the {inaudible] trial.
AW: 1:30:22
I am not going to say that.
IG: 1:30:24
To the what?
AW: 1:30:24
[inaudible] trial.
RS: 1:30:26
[inaudible] Franklin [crosstalk] was on trial. So, you know, instead of discussing this high level, okay, Richard Sawyer, I even remember his name, so he starts talking about it. And one of the first comments that come out, Paul [inaudible], I even remember the kid's name, Jewish from New York. Says, "Oh, well, why are we discussing that now, that was a while ago," and the teacher was not Jewish, literally, the mouth fell down. And from my community, where I grew up, in old New York, nobody, but nobody would ever say that. And what did I do?
RS: 1:31:09
What did you do?
RS: 1:31:10
I kept quiet. I had not yet found my voice, and in many ways, I was too shocked.
IG: 1:31:21
Wonderful example, that is, that is, that is what I was searching for, I think, in the beginning, because that that shows you that huge road [crosstalk]
RS: 1:31:30
In front of him was a small class, but nevertheless, in front of all these people, I was open my mouth. I had never heard a Jew speak like that.
IG: 1:31:43
No.
RS: 1:31:44
-not where I came from.
IG: 1:31:45
No.
RS: 1:31:45
-you would not. You would never say a thing like that.
IG: 1:31:47
But-but you are saying this that you had not found your voice, that you-you were to, you know, we are taking a back. I was embarrassed for him.
RS: 1:31:59
And I tell you, actually, I think the first time I ever found my voice, I used to go to services in Albany. We would go to service Saturday morning Binghamton. So, at Wisconsin, I went to the hill. Now, I went to services every Saturday. And one February, cold February day I walk in, it is quiet, it was so cold, and I walk into the sanctuary. There is eight men. They look at me and the look of disappointment on their face, but you cannot walk [crosstalk]. So, I sit down, and then somebody says, "Well, you know, we only need one other man, because then we can take the Torah out and count the Torah as a male."
AW: 1:32:50
And the Torah is a female word.
RS: 1:32:53
Well, this is the second time in my life I have got this total I had never known this. Heard anybody say that, and I had no control of what came out of my mouth. I was thinking this, and as it was in my head, I hear it coming out of my mouth. I do not believe this. I said, "I am sitting here a living, breathing human being, and you are not going to count me, but you are going to take the Torah out. And not only you and count the Torah, you are going to count the Torah as a male, [inaudible] this." Absolute silence. Nobody said anything, and we never did [inaudible] They got the Torah. It must have been my second year. I must have been engaged already, because the fact when I left to come to New York and get married, the rabbi called my apartment and spoke to my roommates. He-he had been sitting on it my comment for months and months, and he wanted to call and let me know that he wanted me to participate in the high holiday services in the fall. The only problem was, I was gone. [laughs]
IG: 1:34:14
[inaudible] what?
RS: 1:34:14
I was gone.
IG: 1:34:15
You were gone.
RS: 1:34:16
He waited until August, and I had never told him that he knew my husband, but I had never told him that Arnie and I were leaving and that we- I was too busy, you know, finishing up looking for a job, looking for a place where we were going to live, you know, preparing a wedding from Wisconsin that never thought on me to go tell him I should have. I really feel badly. I did. I so he waited until I am gone-
IG: 1:34:43
Yeah, but-but you changed his mind.
RS: 1:34:47
To-to think about it, and to say yes, he wanted me to, and I would have loved to have been there to participate, but I cannot be in two different places at the same time.
IG: 1:34:56
That is a great That is a great story. That is a great story. Let us, let us, if you were, you know, since, since students are going to be listening to these interviews, I always ask my interviewees toward the conclusion, what advice would you give a beginning student about a beginning you know person, either you know about to graduate or how they how they should think about the rest of their career. You know, what are the most important lessons that you have learned from-from your you know, studies and from your life that you would like to impart to these young people.
RS: 1:35:42
As important as the academic part is, one of the things that you should be open to is getting involved in groups and issues that are not tied completely to what you are there should be a connection, but there should be some kind of cause, or some kind of a group, because of the fact that often it is for these kinds of connections that you make, not completely in the academic world, but that can lead you into very, very interesting places. Now, if somebody wants to get a PhD in neuroscience, of course, my advice was, stick closely to your academic career and find yourself a professor who will be a mentor you would give academia but I still think that it is important to try and move outside of academia and try and, you know, there are groups out there that, even with your interest in getting a PhD in neuroscience, that would be love to have you come and join them, and, you know, be on some kind of, let us say, advisory board, and that can lead you often to all kinds of interesting, interesting places, people that you never would have met.
IG: 1:37:15
That is very good advice.
RS: 1:37:22
So it was, it was, you know, moving beyond-beyond, moving into McCarthy campaign. And then, you know, they are being so involved in running for a political office. And then when I moved to Long Island, I felt, I felt like, I need to, I need to join something. I need to become involved. take how to take my time. But it is all these groups that are now involved in that, you know, they make an- in fact, I become the expert on immigration and what is happening in Long Island, in my department, because my involvement with the immigration issue. Fact, in fact, actually, I wrote up a paper. I presented a paper at a Hofstra conference. They have a suburban study of suburbia center, or something like that. And they were having a conference, and they were talking about the changing nature of Long Island. And I actually, I know, because my involvement there, I actually went and did a research paper. We went to the census. I did, you know, I did a number of things, and I present [crosstalk] as a matter of fact-
IG: 1:38:32
So-so about what-what-what- you know, in a nutshell-
RS: 1:38:37
Why-why, why was, why was there so much conflict all of a sudden around immigration on Long Island? And I thought of this because Andrew Beveridge, one of the leading sociologists of immigration at Queens College, I attended a session of his sociological national meeting in New York City, and he said he is talking about the fact that, you know, there were no immigrants on Long Island. That is the guy ever driven around the place. You go to certain communities on Long Island, well, the South doors are, I mean, you are not going to see them. In memory where I live. You go to Hempstead. Yeah, you will see them. You go up to Glen Cove. Glen Cove had such a bitter- they tried to, they tried to pass that that they could not stand out. And you know, I said, so yes, I give him. And I said, the proper the problem is that, in terms of the general numbers, they might be like, but you take a place like Glen Cove and all of a sudden, for some reason or other, you see the numbers of immigrants increasing. And then I did a similar community out on Suffolk County Farmingdale. And he said, it is not so much whether the numbers are 70 percent the point is the fact that if you census after census, you see the numbers increasing. That is the important point, not whether you have a map of the census and you see that, you know, in a large census district that you look at within the census district, and that is why there was conflict on Long Island, because they were moving into suburbia, where they never been. We associate immigrants with New York City, right? But they were moving into suburbia, and maybe your census figures did not pick it up. But you cannot always go by the Census figure, and you got to break it down into smaller units, and that is why we had so much conflict. They were moving. It was the new movement, and there was a woman who came to Carson for a while, got a BA at Harvard. She got her law degree at Harvard. She came involved in a Spanish organization in western so when she came to New York, she started something the clinical the workplace project, because Carson deals with the legal issues. She was dealing with what was happening in Long Island, and she wrote a book called suburban sweatshops. How immigrants are moving to the Long Island, and maybe they are not working in a factory. But one other sweat shops, lawn care. Kitchen, restaurant kitchens, you know, you go through the issues, calling them suburban sweatshops.
IG: 1:41:23
Right. That is very interesting.
RS: 1:41:27
And but you know, if I had not looked out of the confines of academia and become involved with community organizations, would I know this. And as a matter of fact, then, matter of fact. Deborah, not, no, Jennifer-Jennifer, something, she kind of, she got a MacArthur reward for her work in setting up a workplace project and her book.
IG: 1:41:50
Jennifer who?
RS: 1:41:50
Jennifer Gordon, I think. She got it. She got she became a MacArthur scholar. But how would I know about this if I had just, if I had not gotten out of academia and looked around and said, “What else can I do?”
IG: 1:42:04
Yeah, well, you know, there is, there is a tradition, I think in Italy, of that was sort of personified by Umberto Echo where, you know, intellectuals were public, public intellectuals, so they have both the role in their larger community-
RS: 1:42:24
Europe has [crosstalk], the public of the public until at the public intellectual right?
IG: 1:42:28
This has been a tremendous pleasure.
RS: 1:42:32
Well, it was really lots of fun going back and thinking about Harpur and the-
(End of Interview)
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Title
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Interview with Ruth M. Silverman
Subject
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Harpur College – Sixties alumni; Harpur College – Alumni in higher education; Harpur College – Alumni in Womens’ Studies; Harpur College – Alumni from New York City; Harpur College – Alumni at Nassau Community College; Harpur College – Alumni in the New York City area
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Silverman, Ruth ; Gashurov, Irene
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audio/mp3
Description
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Ruth Silverman, PhD, is a sociology professor at Nassau Community College, where she created the Women’s Studies Program. She is the sister of Dr. Amy Weintraub.
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Binghamton University Libraries
Date
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2018-05-18
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In Copyright
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eng
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Ruth Silverman.mp3
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2018-05-18
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Oral Histories from 60's Binghamton Alumni
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102:37 minutes
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/01da9eff8930c9b35ea8053292b0dbfc.mp3
27b4df8dc8622bb257252e1faaf86e18
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Armenian Oral History
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<p>Aynur de Rouen, Ph.D.</p>
Description
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<span>This collection includes interviews in English with informants of all ages and a variety of backgrounds from various parts of Armenia. The interviews provide deeper insight into the history of the Armenian culture through personal accounts, narratives, testimonies, and memories of their early lives in their adoptive country and back in Armenia. </span>
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In copyright.
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<a href="https://www.binghamton.edu/libraries/about/collections/oral-histories/index.html#sustainablecommunities">Sustainable Communities Oral History Collection</a>
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English
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Date of Interview
3/29/2016
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Gregory Smaldone
Interviewee
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Ruthann Turekian Drewitz
Duration
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24:07
Language
English
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Binghamton University
Interview Format
Video or Audio
Audio
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Biographical Text
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Ruthann is an active member of church; she has been a member of her Church Choir for over four decades and has earned her position as choir director. She has a Masters of Music from the Manhattan School of Music and Voice and was an opera singer by profession. Ruthann is a mother of two children; one son and one daughter."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":15105,"3":{"1":0},"11":4,"12":0,"14":[null,2,0],"15":"Calibri","16":11}">Ruthann is an active member of church; she has been a member of her Church Choir for over four decades and has earned her position as choir director. She has a Masters of Music from the Manhattan School of Music and Voice and was an opera singer by profession. Ruthann is a mother of two children; one son and one daughter.</span>
Keywords
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Turkey; Armenia; genocide; church; parish council; choir; traditions; food; language; Sunday school; ACYOA; AGBU; gender roles"}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":15105,"3":{"1":0},"11":4,"12":0,"14":[null,2,0],"15":"Calibri","16":11}">Turkey; Armenia; genocide; church; parish council; choir; traditions; food; language; Sunday school; ACYOA; AGBU; gender roles</span>
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium
Armenian Oral History Project
Interview with: Ruthann Turekian Drewitz
Interviewed by: Gregory Smaldone
Transcriber: Cordelia Jannetty
Date of interview: 29 March 2016
Interview Settings: Phone interview
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)
0:02
GS: Okay, here we go. This is Gregory Smaldone with the Binghamton University Special Collection’s library, working on the Armenian Oral History Project. Can you please state your name for the record?
0:17
RD: I am Ruthann Turekian Drewitz.
0:26
GS: Okay, when and where were you born?
0:30
RD: I was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1956.
0:35
GS: Can you tell us a little bit about your parents?
0:39
RD: My father was born in Urfa, Turkey; historic Armenia. He came here. Well, he was born in 1917 and he– the details on his trip over is little fuzzy but his family had escaped and came through actually Cuba, and to this country. He had– let us see, one, two, three, three brothers and three sisters. So it was a large family, and his mother was the one that brought them over. His father had stayed to wrap up business and unfortunately he stayed too long and he was killed. But his mother actually was able to get all of the children out of the country and to the United States.
1:37
GS: Okay, and what about your mother?
1:38
RD: My mother was born in Hoboken, New Jersey but her mother, her father had actually come to this country before the genocide started. Her mother came from a town right outside of Arapgir. My grandfather was born in Kharput, but he came here. My grandmother was born in a little town outside of Arapgir, she was called, it was [inaudible] she was [inaudible]. She came from a fairly well-to-do family. I had gotten a story from her she told me. She grew up her family owned orchards and they had a nice house and then when the, the trouble started she told me she was taken into a Turkish household, a neighbor I think to help hide her. And she was a servant in their house. For I think about five years. And then, there was a decree that had come down that anybody harboring Armenians would also be killed. So she had to leave and she told me stories about how she was on the rooftop since she was looking down into the village square, she saw the, I guess the head Gendarme or something. So she was like running over rooftops to escape. Somehow, she and her brother had made it down to Aleppo, Syria. The details on the trip you know from where she was you know to down Aleppo I did not get. I do not know, I mean I could only imagine but she made it to Aleppo. She and her sister were also there together and they met a woman who turned out to eventually be their mother-in-law because she had her two sons here in America and she wanted to match up the two sisters with her two sons. So, they somehow arranged for them to, they got a boat to Marseilles and then from Marseilles they came on a ship and came to Ellis Island. And the two sisters married the two brothers that were here. Those, my grandmother and my grandfather, my mother’s parents and my great aunt and uncle and that is briefly the story that I have been told you know by my grandmother when she was alive she passed it down to me.
4:37
GS: Okay, did both of your parents speak Armenian?
4:41
RD: My father certainly spoke Armenian, my mother before she went to kindergarten only spoke Armenian but then when she went to school, you know they spoke English that she had assimilated. She spoke Armenian but not very well. It was not like ̶ She mostly spoke English. And our Armenian I have to say because my grandmother was spent those years in a Turkish household and was forced to speak Turkish. The Armenian that we were brought up with was a mixture of Armenian, Turkish and English. Like, I have a funny story like my grandmother you know I asked her sometime certain words in Armenian like grandma how do you say this and that and one day I said grandma how do you say like cheap like cheap person, she says she thought about she goes: a stingy, [laughs] and I am like grandma–How I am going to learn Armenian but that is the way it was and then they came here and they had to learn English. And they wanted to fit in so, but my mother did know Armenian.
5:52
GS: Did you learn Armenian as a child or that like Turkish-Armenian-English mix you just mentioned?
5:58
RD: I did start out going to Armenian school but I did not finish. I only went for a couple of years. I understand most when people speak in my presence. I understand it but I do not have the ability to always come up with the vocabulary to answer them but I do have an understanding. And if I have to make myself understood I can.
6:23
GS: Okay, do you have any siblings?
6:25
RD: I have a brother who is a year older than me.
6:28
GS: Did he speak more or less or about the same Armenian as you do?
6:33
RD: Less.
6:34
GS: Less? Okay, and did you say he is a year older than you?
6:38
RD: Yes.
6:38
GS: Why do you think it is ended up spoke a little more Armenian than him?
6:43
RD: I am more active at the church, I have been a member of the Church Choir for four over forty years. I am currently Choir Director. I am also a singer who sung many pieces in the Armenian you know song repertoire. So I have a familiarity more with the language, and I have been surrounded by it more.
7:09
GS: Okay, can you tell us a little bit about your childhood. Let us start with the household, what were the roles that each of your parents played as you were growing up?
7:22
RD: Well my father was very, very involved with the church. He was on Parish Council for most of the decade of the sixties. So he, many nights he was not home, he was at the church at meetings but um we and my grandmother actually after my grandfather past away in 1965 she moved in with us. So we had her presence there in the household which is another reason why you know I was able to get her story and really find out you know all these things about her at her experiences, um we had big family get-togethers, you know the big Armenian family. What else would you like to know?
8:16
GS: Who would you say was your main kinship group growing up? Would you say that you mostly hang out with Armenians, with non-Armenians?
8:25
RD: Both, I mean it was equal. I was involved with the youth group at church at the ACYOA and but I also had a lot of my as we say Odas friends, in fact, your parents and I all went to college together and I would have parties and I would have the Armenians and the Odas. And you know, the Armenians would be one floor of my house and the Odas will be at the other floor of the house. But I was had equal kinship with both sets of friends.
9:00
GS: But they were separate groups of friends, they did not tend to intermix–for those parties correct?
9:05
RD: Correct.
9:06
GS: Okay, where would you say growing up was the main social space of your Armenian community?
9:14
RD: Oh, for sure the church.
9:17
GS: For sure the church? Can you tell us a little bit about your experience going to church growing up?
9:21
RD: Oh, well again, because my father was so involved from a very young age we would be like the first people at church in the morning. We would get there early because he was one of the Parish Council people who had to get everything set up. So my brother and I would– had the task of getting the mass all already and put in the bags for that Sunday. Then we go to Sunday school. We were there every Sunday and then I went through Sunday school and graduated Sunday school and then I assistant taught Sunday school, the year after I graduated and the I decided no, I, the choir is going to be for me instead of teaching in the Sunday school. The choir was where I felt I was best suited. So again, I was there for forty years and I have been involved right from, you know, early childhood, right up until present day.
10:21
GS: Okay, what were some Armenian traditions that your parents tried to maintain in the household?
10:30
RD: I remember, my grandmother she always had her incense she burnt her home. she had a specific ritual that she would do with that every week, you know, with the burning the incense and saying her prayers and it was a weekly event. We had the same with a little bit of various holidays. You know, we have gathered the family together, of course as any Armenian household, the food plays, you know, a very important role of you know, I mean well we all have our traditional foods and ̶
11:11
GS: Can you describe some of those please?
11:13
RD: The food?
11:14
GS: Yeah,
11:15
RD: Oh, well, let us see; yalancı dolma, börek, çörek, şiş kebab, pilav for sure. Pilav is like you have to know how to make pilaf if you are Armenian, and in fact my daughter now is at the University of Buffalo. I gave her a pot and I gave her rice and the noodles and I gave her the Pilaf recipe because she wants to make pilav up there. And she cooked pilaf for her dorm-mates a few times [laughs] so, but there is a lot of love that goes to the preparation involve the Armenian food.
11:51
GS: Okay, what was the Armenian community as a whole like for you growing up? Are there any stories that you think representative for how the community stuck together?
12:03
RD: Well, I mean we all have this shared history. I mean in our church there are people from many different backgrounds, we are all Armenian but we do not all have the same background and but we have this shared history that brings us together. Our church services as our Christian home it also serves as our cultural center where we have been, you know, we have learnt about our heritage. So, it does not you know there are people who are born in America, who people who have come from Lebanon, there are people who have come from Istanbul. We all come from different places and different circumstances but we all have that in common and we all get together at the church and share that commonality.
13:01
GS: So, outside of the church would you say that there was a separation between American born Armenians and recently emigrated Armenians?
13:12
RD: See, I have never really experienced that. There are certainly, you know, some have that thinking of you know, that is them this is us, you know, to me we are all one and I feel that how we should you know, we are short-changing ourselves if we think that way. We need to realize that, we need to all stick together and be one and be united.
13:52
GS: Okay, thank you. Moving on to a little bit of your– well first of all, when you left home, what was the highest level of education you achieved and what was your main occupation as an adult?
14:04
RD: Okay, I have a Master’s of Music from Manhattan’s School of Music and Voice.
14:10
GS: Okay, and what was your main occupation?
14:13
RD: I was an opera singer.
14:15
GS: You were an opera singer, okay. Do you have children and did you marry?
14:20
RD: Yes, I have been married; this year will be thirty years. I have two children. I have a son who is going to be twenty two on Sunday and my daughter is going to be twenty in June.
14:32
GS: Is your husband Armenian?
14:34
RD: No, he is not.
14:36
GS: Was it important to you to marry an Armenian when you were growing up?
14:39
RD: You know, my mother was not one of these parents who you know like said, oh, you have to marry–first of all I lost my father when I was fourteen. So, my mother kind of raised us, my brother was fifteen, I was fourteen when my father passed away. So, we were mostly raised by my mother from that time on. She was not a stickler you know for us marrying Armenian; you know it was more important that the person be a good person. So, you know I went to all the different social events and dances and what not but it never really worked out that way and it was not something that was really stressed in my household.
15:22
GS: What about for you personally? Was it something that you aspired to but it was not a deal-breaker or was it–?
15:29
RD: No, it was not a deal-breaker at all. Obviously I married somebody who was not Armenian. I mean obviously if I had met the right person that is an extra level of you know of something extra that can join you together but more important to me that it be somebody who is a good person, a compatible person, um, you know, the fact that they were Armenian, not Armenian to me was not, it was not a deal-breaker.
16:09
GS: Okay, going back to your children, when you were raising them, was it important to you that they spoke or learned Armenian?
16:16
RD: They do not speak Armenian but I did have them raised in the Armenian Church and they did both graduate from Sunday school in the Armenian Church. So they did learn about our church and about our heritage.
16:34
GS: Okay, and where did you raise your children?
16:37
RD: I live, we live out at East Northport in New York.
16:40
GS: Okay, and so they ̶ which church did they attend?
16:44
RD: Armenian Church of the Holy Martyrs.
16:47
GS: In Bayside, Queens?
16:48
RD: Yes.
16:48
GS: Okay, and they all attended for the full twelve years at the Sunday school?
16:53
RD: Yes.
16:53
GS: Okay, what other types of Armenian traditions did you try and pass on to your children and maintain in your household?
17:02
RD: Well, they of course enjoy the Armenian food, and when they come back from college, it is the first thing they want [laughs], and they ̶ well they have certainly been exposed to Armenian Music from time to time whether it is me singing it or listening to something. They do not speak Armenian and now years later, now my daughter is telling me oh, you should’ve taken me to Armenian school. So ̶
17:43
GS: What do your children identify as?
17:47
RD: I think they identify more with their Armenian half. There other half is German, but they seem to identify more with their Armenian half because that was how they were raised. They were raised in the Armenian community.
18:03
GS: What would you identify yourself as?
18:10
RD: I am an Armenian-American I guess. I am American first.
18:12
GS: You are an American first?
18:14
RD: It is an Armenian heritage.
18:15
GS: Would you say that that was typical in your community growing up that people would identify as an Americans first and Armenians in the second?
18:24
RD: The ones that are born here, yes.
18:27
GS: The ones that are born here ̶ but you think it is not so much the case for the recently emigrated Armenians?
18:34
RD: Yeah. I mean I would think because if they are not born here and they are not American, they are not going to ̶ I do not think they would probably think of themselves you know first as Armenian and from wherever where they have come from.
18:51
GS: Okay.
18:51
RD: But it is the Armenian that holds us together.
18:54
GS: What are your thoughts on the Armenian diaspora in America? Do you think that it a temporary entity or something that is here to stay? Do you think it is an unfortunate accident of history or something that you know, what are your thoughts on it?
19:08
RD: Well I mean it was unavoidable that, I mean, we got scattered you to all four corners. I have cousins in Aleppo, Syria and in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Perth, Australia because you know they were escaping the killings of…they ended up you know all different places around the world. It is important ̶ I find that I feel like we are losing some of our Armenian youth as each generation goes, we are losing them to, you know, assimilating into just American culture and not being as involved in the Armenian Church or the Armenian activities. I do not know what the answer to that is. It is ̶ I see it now as Choir director at Holy Martyr’s. We have a choir that is very advanced in age and we need to get some young people in there. When I say I am one of the youngest that is not a good thing [laughs]. We have a couple of young people that come every so often, but it is difficult because a lot of them when they graduate Sunday school they go away to college and when they go away, a lot of times they do not come back. So we are losing them that way ̶
20:52
GS: What role do you see Armenian organizations are playing in maintaining the cohesiveness of the American diaspora?
21:05
RD: You mean like organizations like AGBU and Armenian Students Associations, ACYOA and thing like that?
21:19
GS: Yes, exactly those organizations.
21:25
RD: Well, certainly you know there are events and activities and ongoing cultural events, lectures, educational events whether the youth partake in it, I do not know, I do not know, you know, how many do. There are certainly offerings out there–
21:52
GS: Okay, you said that growing up your father died when you were fairly young, so you and your brother raised mostly by your mother, how do you think this affected your relationship to the traditional gender roles in society?
22:19
RD: Just clarify it again what do you mean by that.
22:21
GS: What would you say your– how do you view traditional gender roles in society today and how do you–?
22:28
RD: Well, I mean my mother– I witnessed a woman who showed incredible strength. She hadn’t worked all those years and about six months prior to my father passing away, and it was a sudden death. He was not ill; it was a massive heart attack, so it was not expected. She had just gone back to work part-time. Like I said, I was fourteen, my brother was fifteen and then he passed away and this woman who you know, she did not drive a car. She had to learn how to drive a car. She had to learn how to run a household. She had to go out and get a full-time job. I mean it showed me what a strong woman can do when she has to do it. And I mean I had unbelievable respect for what she did and I have seen other you know women in similar circumstances. So, I mean– it– I certainly think that she did everything for us and gave us everything that you know, had we had a two-parent-household, you know I did not feel like I was lacking, I mean obviously I was missing my father but she picked up the rains and was able to you know–
23:59
GS: –Keep going. Okay, well thank you very much for your time, very much appreciate it.
24:04
RD: Well, happy to help you and good luck with your project.
(End of Interview)
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Interview with Ruthann Turekian Drewitz
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Kurdish Oral History
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Aynur de Rouen, Ph.D.
Description
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<p>In 2011, Binghamton University Libraries received the donation of the Vera Beaudin Saeedpour Kurdish Library and Museum Collection. The acquisition opened a dialog with the local Kurdish community in Binghamton, N.Y., which led to the creation of the Kurdish Oral History Project.</p>
<p>These interviews provide deeper insight into the history of the Kurdish culture through personal accounts, narratives, testimonies, and memories of their early lives in their adoptive country and back in Kurdistan. This growing collection holds interviews in English and/or Kurdish with informants of all ages and a variety of backgrounds from various parts of Kurdistan. The interviewees share remarkable stories of their migration, their persecution in Kurdistan, the resilience of their Kurdish identity in assimilating into the host culture, and the ties they maintain with their homeland in diaspora.<a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/sustain"></a></p>
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<a href="https://www.binghamton.edu/libraries/about/collections/oral-histories/index.html#sustainablecommunities">Sustainable Communities Oral History Collection</a><br /><br /><a href="https://archivesspace.binghamton.edu/public/repositories/2/resources/76">Vera Beaudin Saeedpour Kurdish Library & Museum Collection Finding Aid</a>
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Date of Interview
- 21 March 2015
- 7 September 2015
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Marwan Tawfiq
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Salar Hama
Language
Kurdish
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Binghamton University
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Audio
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Interview with Salar Hama
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Audio interviews
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McKiernan Interviews
Description
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Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br />
<h3>The McKiernan 22</h3>
<div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li>
</ul>
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Stephen McKiernan
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Binghamton University Libraries
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English
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Date of Interview
2010-03-02
Interviewer
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Stephen McKiernan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Sam Brown, 1943-
Language
English
Biographical Text
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Sam Brown is a politician and political activist. Brown was the head of ACTION under President Jimmy Carter, and ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He has a Bachelor's degree from the University of Redlands, and a Master's degree from Rutgers University. He also completed his graduate studies at Harvard University Divinity School."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":7043,"3":{"1":0},"4":[null,2,5099745],"10":2,"11":4,"12":0,"14":[null,2,0],"15":"Arial"}">Sam Brown is a politician and political activist. Brown was the head of ACTION under President Jimmy Carter and ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He has a Bachelor's degree from the University of Redlands and a Master's degree from Rutgers University. He also completed his graduate studies at Harvard University Divinity School.</span>
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Binghamton University Libraries
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audio/mp4
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2 Microcassettes
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Keywords
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"The Army-McCarthy hearing; Generational Gap; National Student Association; C.I.A.; Communist Propaganda; Young Americans for Freedom; Leadership; Non-violence; Lafayette Square; Kent State; Student for a Democratic Society; Black Panthers; Peace Corps."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":3,"3":{"1":0},"4":{"1":2,"2":14281427}}">The Army-McCarthy hearing; Generational Gap; National Student Association; C.I.A.; Communist Propaganda; Young Americans for Freedom; Leadership; Non-violence; Lafayette Square; Kent State; Student for a Democratic Society; Black Panthers; Peace Corps</span>
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119:03
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Politicians--United States--20th century; Political activists--United States; Brown, Sam, 1943--Interviews
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Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
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McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Sam Brown
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 2 March 2010
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)
SM (00:04:39):
Testing, one, two. This will carry very well. Done pretty good. I noticed something when I was reading your background. It was a quote. And I would like you to explain it a little further. "It never occurred to me that America could be wrong." You are quoted as saying that when you were younger.
SB (00:05:01):
Well, I grew up in Council Bluffs, Iowa in an egalitarian, Republican, religious family. And part of the religion of America is that America's always right. We are the good guys, we saved Europe from itself twice. We ... You know. So as a young man, I thought that almost quasi-religious sense of America's role and mission. And it never occurred to me until, oh probably like a lot of other people I guess, probably about freshman year in college, that maybe all that history that I thought I knew, I did not know as well as I thought I knew it. And that there was another side to America that was ... That we were, in fact, just human. I should have thought ... I should have known that actually from just religious teachings. I mean if we were all fallen, then how would we create a perfect state?
SM (00:06:18):
Right.
SB (00:06:19):
So ... But in any case, you know I was a kid. I believed that that is where a simple vision of America, always right, always on the side of the underdog.
SM (00:06:38):
You think this was ... Because I think a lot of Boomers ... A lot of people do not like the term Boomer so I am going to say those born after 19, about (19)46 and beyond. Certainly, the first 10 years, the frontline Boomers, who lived in the (19)50s and experienced everything from the get-go. I think a lot of Boomers had that feeling, what you are talking about because the parents were home, they had defeated two of the really worst dictatorships in the world. And things looked pretty good at home despite the Cold War and McCarthy telling people they were Communists. And-
SB (00:07:17):
Well, and there was an enormous growth in the economy. There was all this surge in education. People who had never thought they would get a college education, knew that their kids would. I was born in (19)43 so I was very much in that ... One of my very earliest memories actually is the Army-McCarthy hearings in, which would have been I guess, (19)50, (19)51.
SM (00:07:47):
(19)51, yeah.
SB (00:07:48):
Yeah. I remember coming home from school for lunch and seeing it on our-
SM (00:07:52):
Black and white-
SB (00:07:53):
... black and white television set, yeah.
SM (00:07:56):
It is amazing. See, I had a little boy. I was born at the end of 1946 and I can remember before going to the school ... Actually, I am a first-grader or kindergarten. But we had half days in kindergarten. I remember being home and being on the floor and hearing this man yell. He did not ... I did not like him. I did not like that. Did you have a generation gap with your parents?
SB (00:08:24):
Well, sure. I mean they really were on that World War I ... I mean, my parents were both born at the end of World War I and so their formative years were the depression and World War II. And America's enormous achievements during those years were really quite remarkable. And so, they saw in a different ... They saw the world through different eyes than somebody born in the grow and prosperity and opportunity that we were born into. So, in that sense, I did not always get along with my parents. I mean we had political differences that drove us apart for a number of years. But we were never apart as parent and child. We grew apart politically. Some things were just off the table, and I thought they were old fogies.
SM (00:09:26):
Yeah. You were a Republican when you were young. What changed you? Was there a specific event that changed you to become a Democrat?
SB (00:09:34):
Well, what changed me was not Republican to Democrat so much as the Civil Rights Movement. Remember this was the days when there was actually a reasonable Republican Party. And it was the era of Rockefeller. And the idea that the Republican Party could actually, particularly on civil rights early on, there were probably more Republicans willing to vote for bills than there were Democrats because the demographic of the Senate being so Southern, the Democrats being so Southern. So, I mean what changed me was not anything in the parties. It was that it was seeing a little more of the world and what actually happened in that world. Seeing, particularly, foreign workers in California. I was involved very early on with some efforts to ... In the unionization efforts of-
SM (00:10:39):
[inaudible].
SB (00:10:41):
... all of the farm workers. Not at any leadership. Just-
SM (00:10:43):
Right.
SB (00:10:44):
But you know, helping out, setting up tables, volunteering for things, that sort of stuff. In fact, that is what I was doing the day that Kennedy was ... John Kennedy was shot.
SM (00:10:58):
Mm-hmm.
SB (00:10:59):
And you saw that the world was not all this ... The same as this sort of white, red world in which I had grown up in Council Bluffs. And even Council Bluffs probably was not that way if I had had my eyes open all the time. But I had grown up in a middle class, relatively privileged family. And then you see what is happening to other people and you say, "Well, wait a minute. This is not working very well." And so that, I think, that and the Civil Rights Movement probably, were the things that eventually ...
SM (00:11:38):
When you were young, were you ... I know you were involved in a college but were you an involved student in high school? Did you just study and did well in classes and when was that first point where you said to yourself, "I want to make a difference in this world? I think I have it within me to"-
SB (00:11:56):
Freshman year in college, probably. High school, high school was high school in the late (19)50s. I was a whole lot more interested in cars and girls than I was in politics. And freshman year in college, Allard Lowenstein came to the campus. He was at Stanford then. He was Dean of Men at Stanford and came to give a speech. And he had just come back from Southwest Africa. And a small group of us, for one reason or another, met with him and got to talking to him. And it was really Allard who gave me the sense [inaudible]. You focus your attention and make an effort, you actually can make a difference in the world. So really, freshman year in college was very important for me. Very important for me. I mean, by the end of that year, I was just on campus stuff. The administration shut down the student newspaper because of an article that ... Either because of an article I had written in the paper or an article. I mean it was never quite clear but they were very angry, in any case. And so, we started an alternative newspaper and I mean ... So, by the end of my freshman year, I was pretty much involved. Then, only on campus and helping out.
SM (00:13:42):
That is interesting you had that experience. I saw that reference someplace in some of the information on you. And if you look later on in your life, in your young life, there's that time when you were with the National Student Association. And then as you got a more important role within that organization, you saw that the CIA had admitted to infiltrating. The organization of the International Scholars Program over in Europe, I guess. And that really upset you.
SB (00:14:16):
Yeah, I would not say infiltrating it, so much as that was the CIA had been funding a number of cultural institutions, the Congress for Cultural Freedom and other things in Encounter Magazine. And the National Student Association had turned out from sometime in the early 50s. And it really undermined the claim that we made because there were two sort of competing organizations of students. And the CIA knew what I believed to be true. That in developing countries particularly, the student leaders of today are likely to be the leaders of tomorrow because the very narrow elite. So, the student leaders tend to move into positions of authority. And certainly, the Russians and the Soviets knew that. And they were funding then an organization imported in Prague that was ... Pretended to be an organization of students who was really an organization of part of the Communist Propaganda Apparatus, basically. And the United States started funding an alternative organization of which the NSA was a leading player. And the agency was very smart. They knew that if ... That they probably could not fund it openly because of Congress. Because most of the people who were involved were people of moderate left persuasion because we were going to talk to European and African, Asian students. You could not go there. The right wing did not have much to talk to them about. So, from sometime in the early (19)50s until 1967, they had funded a variety, mostly of international activities for students, without telling many of the people that that is where the money was coming from. It theoretically came from a foundation in Upstate New York, Corning. That is the old Corning Glass money. So, the whole time we were pedaling along, we were saying, "Oh well, they are the bad guy, Communist Propaganda Apparatus. We are just the blossom of America's youth out to ... Because of ..." And many people did not know. I mean Gloria Steinem was on one of the first delegations to go. And there were a number of other people. I mean I have met other people through the years who were on that delegation of which Gloria was probably the most famous. But they did not know that it was CIA money. And it really was ... It just made a lie out of the whole thing because of it. I understand why it happened. I understand how it happened. But I disapproved then, I disapprove now. If it had been done directly through the State Department ... Maybe it could not have been done because of McCarthy and McCarthy [inaudible].
SM (00:17:54):
Yeah.
SB (00:17:55):
But if it had been done straight through the State Department, you just said, "Yeah, we got a grant from the State Department to go to this trip." Well, okay, that is fine. I mean nobody would have had any problem with that.
SM (00:18:06):
Upon reflection, after all of your experiences even beyond when you were in college and certainly the years you were organizing the Moratorium and the Anti-War Movement, it did not surprise you then that the CIA or the infiltrating organizations to-
SB (00:18:28):
It did surprise me.
SM (00:18:29):
Even during the (19)60s and the-
SB (00:18:32):
Yeah, it did surprise me. That was a great shock to me. It was a great shock to me. But it is now 40 years later. I can reflect back on it and say, "Well, it was this and that, I disapprove of it still." But I was shocked at the time. I mean I was in graduate school and was Chairman of the Board of NSA at the time and I had no idea. And then this allegation was made. There was a discussion at a board meeting about the allegation and everybody said, "No, it is not true. It is not true. It is not true. It is not true. It is not true. It is this crazy left rhetoric." And then three days later, I got the call saying, "Well, it was true." So the people that I had known for many years who were aware of it had been lying to me the whole time. So ...
SM (00:19:22):
Wow.
SB (00:19:23):
And they were sort of suborned into it. They signed an oath and they were, I think, basically threatened that they had to keep their mouths shut about it. I do not find that easy to forgive either. But ... You know, you get older, you understand.
SM (00:19:53):
There has been so many events in your life, so many experiences that really had an impact on you. But can you pinpoint one event, whether it was something you were involved in or something beyond you where you had no control, that really had the greatest impact on you as a human being? We are talking it could be a tragedy, a ...
SB (00:20:20):
Oh. I mean probably the event that changed me the most was that first meeting with Al Lowenstein because it really changed the direction of my life. Beyond that, I mean I had things that were weird. I started to say, I was on a Thursday night. I was studying and slogging my way through a manuscript in German. And Sunday morning, I was on Meet the Press. I mean that is a fairly rapid change of venue. And that was the CIA stuff. And I came ... I got on the plane right away and I was in Boston at the time. I came down here and held a couple of days of hearings and then went on Meet the Press with Joe Clark and I cannot remember who. There were a couple of other people on that program. Anyway, that had an enormous impact. But so did the early successes of the McCarthy Campaign changed what I could do subsequently because I got known and got known among other things among contributor circles so that when it came time for the Moratorium, I knew where to raise the money. So, it was ... Anyway.
SM (00:21:54):
You were involved in a lot of anti-war activities way before the Moratorium.
SB (00:21:59):
Yes.
SM (00:22:00):
In college years and-
SB (00:22:01):
Yes.
SM (00:22:01):
And I remember reading the Vietnam ... I think it was Vietnam Summer which was the (19)67.
SB (00:22:08):
Yeah.
SM (00:22:09):
Explain what that is because people are going to be reading this now, most of them are not going to have a whole lot of knowledge of that particular period, some of the specifics. Well, the Vietnam Summer.
SB (00:22:22):
The Vietnam Summer was an effort, as you say, in 1967, to get some of the people who had been organizing on their college campuses to actually go do it more broadly on a community-based level. And the theory was that you get however many people you could get to spend their summer talking to friends and neighbors and trying to find beyond the campus or beyond their campus at least, a way to talk to people about the war. It was really, as I recall it, sort of a successor to the teach-in movement from before that. That was broader. It was an effort, it was a broad educational effort, an outreach effort, that was before everything went to hell.
SM (00:23:14):
Yeah. I remember reading that there were 500 paid staffers and 26,000 volunteers in that anti-Vietnam project all over the country.
SB (00:23:24):
Yeah, that sounds a little inflated, frankly. I mean-
SM (00:23:28):
Yeah.
SB (00:23:28):
... 500 paid staffers. Not likely.
SM (00:23:31):
That might be misinformation [inaudible]-
SB (00:23:33):
Yeah. Somebody's inflated notion about how good it was. I mean it was-
SM (00:23:38):
But those experiences, did they help you in prepping you for McCarthy and being involved in the McCarthy-
SB (00:23:44):
Oh sure.
SM (00:23:44):
... experience?
SB (00:23:44):
Sure.
SM (00:23:45):
And how did you ever get that position? Because my golly, people would die to get a position like that at such a young age.
SB (00:23:52):
Hawk, with David Hawkins, another ... I mean we worked on a bunch of different things. We worked on a series of letters from student body presidents and student newspaper editors that we published in the New York Times because the administration, the Johnson Administration, was trying to say, "Well, it' is just a radical, crazy, lefty fringe that is against the war." And we wanted to say, "No, no, no. This is a mainstream, student leader, student’s newspaper editor. This is not your ... You cannot dismiss this as just a bunch of crazies." And through that, and through NSA itself, I probably knew people on ... I do not know, 3, 400 college campuses around the country. And that was in the days when it was not so easy because without email ... I mean now you can be in touch with 400 people with the touch of a button. Then, you either had to pick up the telephone and call them or you had to send them a letter. I mean there was no real, easy way to communicate. You could do a fax, but it is the same thing. You could not ... We did not have mass blast faxes at the time. So, it was just sort of ... And a lot of students would not have access to a fax machine anyway. The newspaper editors would and probably the student body presidents, too. But in any case, it was a lot of hard work. So, we spent months making phone calls and pulling together those ads. And through NSA, which had a big gathering every summer, you would get together with people from 3 or 400 different campuses. Well that is a big benefit when you are trying to organize something to actually know people face-to-face.
SM (00:25:56):
See one of the things that I do not think is talked about enough in the literature on the (19)60s is the National Student Association. I think it was formed in the late (19)40s or something like that. Hubert Humphrey was somewhat connected or-
SB (00:26:09):
Yeah.
SM (00:26:09):
... at the very beginning. Why has that organization ... Obviously, it still exists. But why is that organization not being pushed to the forefront when we are talking about the Anti-War Movement and all the groups. I do not ever hear the NSA discuss or even the Young Americans for Freedom which was a Conservative group. You hear about SDS. You hear about Vets Against the War, those kinds of groups.
SB (00:26:34):
It is all ... NSA also had this broad educational function and education reform function. It was not a single representative it had. And it was composed of a broad range of people. I mean I remember Danny Boggs from the Harvard delegation, every year wrapping the ... Using very clever parliamentary tactics to delay activity. I mean it was a broad-based organization and it represented a lot of different people. I knew a lot of the leadership of Young Americans for Freedom because they were also at NSA. So unlike SDS which had a conscious ideology, NSA was less ideological and certainly more modest in its moderating, I would say. Because it was broadly based. And the membership of it was student governments, not individuals. So, if the student government was headed by somebody conservative, then you get to the convention in the summer and it'd be very hard to get certain things done because you would have a resistance. Now eventually, by the summer of (19)64 as I recall, I think we got a resolution passed supporting Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that year. And lots of people who then became well-known were there at the time. And that includes everybody from Tom Hayden and some of the people, more ideological people, to people like Rodger Reaper who was the editor of the student newspaper at Illinois or ... I do not know. There's a whole bunch of people that we knew. Rik Hertzberg is now at the New Yorker and then the editor of the Crimson and ... There are probably 50 of those people that I could Google and they'd come up with a long list of stuff.
SM (00:28:54):
Yeah. It is interesting that I am trying to interview him as well because he's a friend of Charles Kaiser, the writer. So, I just sent an email to him to see if I can interview him.
SB (00:29:06):
Tom? Oh, Rik Hertzberg, Henrik Hertzberg?
SM (00:29:11):
Yeah.
SB (00:29:11):
Yeah.
SM (00:29:11):
Yep.
SB (00:29:11):
Yeah.
SM (00:29:12):
So, I am hoping ... And I did not use a speech writer for Jimmy Carter and ... One of the things-
SB (00:29:20):
We spent the summer together, Rik and I, in the summer of 19 ... Must have been (19)65, I guess. At what later turned out to be CI Summer Camp. And then he went on to work for the US Student Press Association for a year.
SM (00:29:37):
The links between McCarthy, you were a very important person in that position because when you think of Chicago (19)68, that is something that comes to everybody's mind, the-
SB (00:29:50):
Actually-
SM (00:29:51):
Go ahead.
SB (00:29:53):
[inaudible]. I have just realized that I sort of filibustered the answer to your question about how I got there. I did not intend to, but I started a ways back.
SM (00:30:02):
Right.
SB (00:30:03):
So, the-
SB (00:30:03):
It started a ways back.
SM (00:30:03):
Right.
SB (00:30:03):
So, the end of all of that story is that when it came time for them... Oh, and then there was one other big piece in there, which was the summer of 1967. There was a huge fight at NSA about who was going to be president of NSA for the succeeding year. And I lost by a few votes to a guy, the name of Ed Schwartz, who lives in Philadelphia now, and Ed was really the education reform. He said that is what we should be doing. And I was the candidate of anti-war that said what we should do is that an NSA should essentially devote its resources to ending the war in Vietnam. I did not, of course, know at the time that it was... No, maybe I did. Because by that time, the CIA funding had ended that spring. That was when it blew up. Anyway, I said, what it should be doing was anti-war stuff, and I lost. But we then went on to form an organization called the Alternative Candidate Task Force, which was to be the student effort to find the new candidate, an alternative to Johnson. And I became the head of that. So, in the fall the campaign, when we found the candidate, I had already been working for months on the process of finding that candidate. I knew the people who were involved in campuses all over the country. Allard Lowenstein was the kind of Pied Piper. He would go out and give the speeches, and then Curtis Gans would do the follow-up and actually make an organization out of Allard's enthusiasm. Harold Ickes was working in New York at the time, and I was traveling around to campuses. I was doing the campus side of that. I ran the campaign to the college Young Democrats to elect the slate of officers that was against the war and then looking for an alternative candidate. And we won that to the great chagrin of the White House. And anyway, long story short is I would spent years doing this stuff. So, when it came time for the campaign to do something, there was my smiling face.
SM (00:32:37):
What amazes is, well, it is obvious. It comes out over and over again. Organizer, organizer, organizer. That is such a skill. Because I know, I have been working with students for 30 some years, and most of them do not know the first thing about how to organize. They have a lot of friends and they can get their friends to come to things, and they go to all these student organization lectures and conferences, but they still do not know. And so, I think it is something that we need to do a better job of, especially with college students today. That is just my personal opinion. Because the question I am tired of hearing about over and over again is, I do not know what to do. And I believe in young people. So, it is just that they need to have confidence that they can do it. But one of the things here is 1968 was such an unbelievable event. You were in Chicago?
SB (00:33:32):
Yeah.
SM (00:33:33):
What was it like being there? Tom Gorman, I interviewed too, and he told me the experience he had with Senator McCarthy in Chicago in (19)68. But explain what it was like to be there. Secondly, to be the link between Senator McCarthy and the protestors.
SB (00:33:57):
Yeah. Well, most of them were friends of mine. I mean, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis particularly. But I knew a lot of the other people around too. Carl Oglesby was there. They were people I knew from the years past. So, it was a natural thing that I should be asked really on behalf of the campaign to go meet with them, talk to them, try and figure out if there was a way to minimize the damage on the campaign by their actions. We had no idea, of course, that the police would turn out, that there would be a riot, a police riot as the Ryan Commission later said. We could not predict that. What we could try to do was to help the demonstrations be peaceful, well-organized, not destroy any chance of getting a resolution through the convention opposing the war. It turned out we probably did not have a chance to get that anyway. It was a kind of symbolic effort to get a peace plank in the platform, which we lost. But anyway, my job was to try to minimize the damage, which was all really, I mean, there was no way it was going to be helpful. So how do you minimize the damage is really the question. And it was natural that I should be the person asked to do that. And I spent some time with them over the summer and then early on at the convention, and then did not spend much time actually with them during the convention itself. But I was outside the Hilton Hotel when the police attacked, I was actually sitting in the street with Carl Oglesby and he said, "Well, the police are going to attack." I said, "Carl, come on. The whole damn world is watching. There is television cameras up on the ledge of the Hilton Hotel. They are not going to do anything stupid." Well, how wrong was I?
SM (00:36:26):
Oh my gosh.
SB (00:36:27):
Two minutes later. Tear gas every place and we were trying to get out of Dodge.
SM (00:36:35):
Yeah, just to be there. I saw it on TV.
SB (00:36:41):
It scared the bejesus out of you, I will tell you. Because you get in a crowd like that, the crowd is as dangerous. Just the panic.
SM (00:36:52):
Who was at fault? I have read many books on this. Were the young people at fault or were the police at fault?
SB (00:37:02):
I think there is no question it was the police. I mean, they just lost it. And they lost it, I mean, I understand most of the people in the street were kids of privilege. They were college students. They were college graduates. They were people who could afford to come, who were not working the second week in August, could afford to be in Chicago. And the cops did not have any of that privilege. Probably not mostly college educated. Their jobs to maintain order. They are pissed off because these are raggedy-looking, yada-yada, yada. I mean, in some ways they were attacking their own kids or their own family, I think part of it, or whatever. I mean, nobody will ever be able to fully explain the psychology of it. But there is no question that they lost it. I mean just completely lost it. Nothing would have happened. Maybe a few windows would have gotten broken, but I am not even sure of that.
SM (00:38:07):
Well, there was disruption within inside the convention too. And of course, when Ribicoff spoke, they were swearing at him up there.
SB (00:38:14):
Yeah.
SM (00:38:16):
Senator Ribicoff. So, it was happening within it, because we all know what happened to Dan Rather. They roughed him up. So, a lot of things were happening.
SB (00:38:23):
Well, and Daley was the lead. He is the guy standing up saying fuck you. What do you think the police think?
SM (00:38:30):
What was Senator McCarthy thinking though?
SB (00:38:32):
I have no idea.
SM (00:38:33):
He was seeing this too. Two things come out of this. I guess you were a witness, too, at the Chicago Seven trial?
SB (00:38:41):
I was.
SM (00:38:41):
And of course, there were eight of them. Then of course Bobby, they took him away. But what was it like to be asked to be in that room? Did you feel a lot of pressure? I mean, a lot of them were your friends, but you had to be objective.
SB (00:38:58):
Well, yeah, I had to say what I saw and knew, which is pretty much what I just said to you. That they did not have any, I mean, there was no plan on behalf of the leadership of those demonstrations to end up in the circumstances in which they ended up. I was there enough to know that nobody was passing out clubs or wearing helmets. None of the things that would make you think, whoa, wait a minute, what is going on here? Were there 10 rabblerousers, or 50? Maybe. I do not know. But there was no plan. I mean, Dave Dillinger was not planning some revolutionary action in the street. I mean, it was a stupid [inaudible].
SM (00:39:50):
They picked those eight people. I mean.
SB (00:39:53):
Who knows?
SM (00:39:54):
Some of them were well known. But a couple of them, Lee Weiner was not well-known.
SB (00:40:01):
No.
SM (00:40:01):
There is another one that is well known. He is a professor in California. But anyway, so being in that trial, in that room with Judge Julius Hoffman, you experienced him firsthand then.
SB (00:40:14):
Yeah. It was not exactly an objective courtroom. I mean, the atmosphere was very hostile in the room. But I did not have so much to say. They wanted me because they wanted me as a defense witness to say I had observed the preparations. I knew that there were no plans for riot. I was there that night. I was in the campaign. I certainly was not with the demonstrators. And just they did not do it.
SM (00:40:48):
Did the prosecuting attorneys try to make you feel like you...
SB (00:40:54):
Oh yeah.
SM (00:40:56):
William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass were on the other side helping.
SB (00:41:00):
These are your friends. And of course, you are going to say what you say. No, I did not say it that way because they were my friends. I said it that way because that is the way it happened in short. But it was very brief as I recall. They wanted to get that piece on the record, and I got that piece on the record.
SM (00:41:22):
Yeah, I have read so much about it, and I have read so many different opinions and thoughts of it. And now quite a few of them have, well, several of them have passed on. Abbie and Jerry and have passed on, and Dave Delinger too.
SB (00:41:41):
Yeah. Well, Abbie and Jerry were always wild cards. I mean, I did not know them so well, unlike Tom and Rennie, Dave.
SM (00:41:50):
I interviewed Rennie. Rennie is smart as the dickens.
SB (00:41:55):
Yeah, he is.
SM (00:41:56):
But he does not like to talk about it anymore. He into a different sphere. Spirituality, that is his life now. And actually, his girlfriend, the person that was with him, it is the first time I have heard any of this. He does not even to talk about it anymore.
SB (00:42:07):
Is he living in Colorado?
SM (00:42:08):
He lives in Colorado. I guess he has done real well. Goes all over the country in a big expensive Winnebago with his, I am not sure if it is his girlfriend or his partner or whatever the story is. But she is also very well-educated and they talk about spirituality together. So, she is well-known too. But he is an unbelievable person. He gave me two hours of his time in a restaurant when he was in DC that is way beyond the call of duty, because he had to give two speeches that night. So, he was great. And I have interviewed David Harris, and I have interviewed a lot of good people.
SB (00:42:48):
Dave was a very good guy.
SM (00:42:49):
Dave was a great guy.
SB (00:42:52):
Yeah.
SM (00:42:52):
One of the things that really struck me when I interviewed Senator McCarthy. He did not really say anything to me. I asked Tom Gorman, I have asked other people, David Hawk, I asked people who worked on his campaign, what happened to him after Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Because you would have thought, with Humphrey and the other guy, you would have thought. He was sad, obviously, and he had his differences. But it's my understanding that that really did affect him, the assassination, even though he did not like him that well. Why did not he go gung-ho, pick up the reins and try to be the Democratic nominee?
SB (00:43:36):
Well, at the time, we were all very angry at him.
SM (00:43:39):
Let me switch. Here we go. Okay.
SB (00:43:48):
So, McCarthy in the summer of 1968, I think we were all very disappointed. Quite angry, in fact. About that time, there was that Paul Simon song, "Where have you have gone, Joe DiMaggio? The nation Turns its lonely eyes to you."
SM (00:44:04):
Yeah.
SB (00:44:05):
Well, that was a kind of theme song around the office, because everybody was saying, where have you gone, Gene? I mean, what the hell's going on? Now, I do not know that we'd ever would have gotten a completely straight answer to that question. But I think it was not so much being devastated by it as it was that he was a realistic guy, and he knew he was not going to get the nomination. Or that his view was that there was nothing he could do that would get him the nomination, and therefore it was just creating false expectations and hopes to be out. Maybe he was devastated by it. Maybe he was. But what happened, of course, is a lot of Kennedy people did not come over to McCarthy, but in fact went to McGovern. And McCarthy regarded that as only one more sign of the duplicitous nature of Kennedy's supporters and whatever. And remember with him, it goes also way back to 1956 in the Democratic convention.
SM (00:45:24):
Oh, that is right. When John Kennedy was going to run for vice president, and he did not have to. Yes, he had no shot. Stevenson was going to win.
SB (00:45:36):
But McCarthy nominated Stevenson at that convention. And so, the animus there was very deep and in some way’s kind of inexplicable. I mean, his vote against Teddy for the leadership position two years later. I mean, it was crazy stuff.
SM (00:45:59):
Yeah, I remember Tom Gorman. You know Tom?
SB (00:46:03):
Yeah.
SM (00:46:04):
He said he was up with McCarthy looking over the protest in their room. They had a little balcony. And so, they went out on the balcony and they could smell the tear gas and all the things going on. And he thought Senator McCarthy would get very upset with what was going on. But then he said it was listening to a professor talking about philosophy or something like that, no emotion. And he said he quit on the spot. He quit because he did not see the emotion of young people being beaten in and all the things. And this is America and he is running for president.
SB (00:46:43):
And he is a hundred feet from it straight above.
SM (00:46:45):
Yeah, and that is amazing, knowing the man. I have met him three times. That is not the man that I talked to, but maybe he is different personalities, multiples at times. One of the things too, you said something that is very important, I think this is important. I mean, I am trying to interview Brian Lamb at C-SPAN, and I know his philosophy, and this is comparable to what you just said. This is a quote from you: The worst thing that can happen to an organizer is to become identified as a leader. And that is Brian Lamb at C-SPAN. We took students to see him. He said, there is no superstars at C-SPAN. If you want to be a superstar, go to ABC. He does not allow any superstars to see it at C-SPAN. And he is very sensitive when he was thrust to the front. And I know it was at a time when all young people were questioning leaders, did not trust any of the leaders, but is that very important, a little bit about who you are as a human being?
SB (00:47:50):
Yeah. I mean, partly it was, as you say, at the time, it was do not trust leaders, watch the parking meters. It was partly that. It was partly, too, that if you are trying to organize something, what you want is as broadly as possible for everyone to think they are a leader, for everyone to be a part of it. And if you are either self-proclaimed or proclaimed by others to be the leader, you lose people at that point. I mean, when you become visible in that way, people take shots at you, or think you are gotten too big for your britches, or you are this or you are that or the other thing. So, I mean, it is both a real sentiment about that it is better that it be broadly shared. And it is a tactical thing as well, that the more people you can drag in and make them feel good and important, the broader base of activity. Now, that is not always true, but I think it was true then. At that time, in that circumstance, I think that was true.
SM (00:49:21):
What is interesting is when you look at the Boomer generation of perception out there is it is a generation that does not trust, and for very obvious reasons, because so many of the leaders lied to them, whether it be Lyndon Johnson or the Gulf of Tonkin. We all know about Watergate. And even as they progressed into older age, or even older, you could say, Iran Contra with Ronald Reagan. Nobody trusted Gerald Ford.
SB (00:49:50):
When he pardoned Nixon.
SM (00:49:53):
Pardoned Nixon. Because there has got to be some sort of a deal there. Jimmy Carter at times was attacked for the amnesty for people up in Canada. And then of course, you can even go back to Eisenhower where the U2 incident relayed on public television, on TV. And I remember seeing that as a little boy, him talking about Gary Powers and saying that we are not spying, Ike-like.
SB (00:50:18):
No kidding.
SM (00:50:19):
On national television. And then of course, as you read later on, John Kennedy, and he was involved with the coup in Vietnam. I do not think Kennedy wanted him killed, but I think he was upset. But he gave the okay for the overthrow. So here we got leader after leader after leader, after leader, not trusting. And college students at that time did not trust anybody with responsibility, whether they be the president of the university, or a minister, or a rabbi. They did not trust anybody in leadership. And I think you hit something very important here. Do you feel that your feeling was really [inaudible] amongst many of the Boomers?
SB (00:51:03):
I do not know. I mean, I cannot speak for other people. I just know that it was a sentiment. My sense of the people with whom I worked was that you wanted to be very careful, that claiming leadership is likely to lose you the ability to actually be a leader.
SM (00:51:31):
Once you were designated a leader though, when you became the head of Action, when you became the head of these other organizations later in life, you were a leader. You were assigned, you were picked just like you were picked by McCarthy. You were the Clean for Gene, which I want you to talk about there, but you were picked to be the leader of this. So, you might feel that, but you are showing a lot of sensitivity here that you are more about collaboration than you are about...
SB (00:52:03):
Yeah. Even when I was at Action, we brought in a series of consultants to work on something that the Congress then later countered me around for called Workplace Democracy. I thought that it was important to bring people into the governance process. Not always into the policy making process because that is really the Congress and the President set direction and my job was to carry out that direction. But to set the tone of the workplace and the way to get it done, I thought the way to do that was to bring as many people as possible into it. So, we had this sort of ongoing thing, and we hired.
SM (00:53:03):
I know you hired Dick Celeste. I am a big Dick Celeste person.
SB (00:53:06):
Yeah. Well, but we hired this consultant to come to do workplace democracy. Anyway. Oh, yeah. I was very fortunate because the president gave me a lot of room to succeed or fail, and I was able to get Dick to come to the Peace Corps and John Lewis to come to run the domestic programs. And John Podesta to be my chief of staff. I mean, I had a good crowd. Betty Curry, then Betty Mitchell, but later, Betty Curry, the president's secretary, Clinton's secretary was my secretary for four years. So, for a little tiny agency, we had a lot of very high-quality people. Tom Glenn, who was later Under Secretary of Labor, worked there. I do not know. We had a good crowd.
SM (00:54:09):
Good people then. And then the Moratorium is something, when you look at your history, I think me personally, I think of the Moratorium and I think of Action, and certainly all your involvement as a great organizer. These things really stand out. I know I have read about the Moratorium, but how did it come about? Before we go there. Clean for Gene.
SB (00:54:36):
Oh, Clean for Gene.
SM (00:54:37):
Clean for Gene, and then we will go right to the Moratorium.
SB (00:54:39):
Okay.
SM (00:54:40):
Because those are big decisions, both by you.
SB (00:54:44):
Clean for Jean was, I mean, I think probably Mary McGrory probably invented the phrase, but the idea was a simple one. We are going to a place that is essentially New England, conservative, small-town America. We are trying to talk to people about voting for our candidate. You want them to listen as open-mindedly as possible to the argument and not be put off by appearance. Therefore, you need to appear in such a way that people, when they see you standing on the doorstep are inclined to open the door and talk to you or offer you a cup of coffee, rather than slamming the door in your face. So, if you are not sorted around, that is if you are not dressed properly, if your hair is too long, if you look like you are not going to be able to have that open conversation with people by and large older, a generation older in many cases, who had expectations that were framed in the forties, not in the (19)60s, then you need to appear appropriately. I mean the rules were pretty clear. If you are going to get on a bus to come to New Hampshire, do not bother if we cannot use you. Now, sometimes when people got there, if their appearance was not appropriate, then we put them to work in the basement of the headquarters filing, keeping track of file cards. But we did not put them out on the street unless we thought they had a chance to actually influence people in a positive way.
SM (00:56:44):
That is the New York Yankee way too. The Yankees have this thing about appearances, remember? Because Johnny Damon had the... And that is what Bobby Cox does for the Atlantic Braves. You got to look at your part, look like a pro.
SB (00:56:56):
Yeah.
SM (00:56:57):
And they can still have a mustache.
SB (00:57:01):
Right-right.
SM (00:57:01):
Yeah.
SB (00:57:03):
So anyway, that then the press picked up on it and sort of loved it. So, there you go. But that was really, I was in charge of that organizing effort in New Hampshire, and so I made the rules.
SM (00:57:27):
How were you appointed to this very important role, again in McCarthy? McCarthy had to make the final decision. He picked you.
SB (00:57:37):
Well, they were not initially focused on New Hampshire. In fact, there was some discussion of not even contesting New Hampshire because it's a conservative state. We did not have that good an organization on the ground. Maybe we should focus first on Wisconsin, a more congenial place. But some of us in the campaign felt that we had a shot at New Hampshire in an important way. And one way to say that was to say, okay, well, I believe it so strongly, I am want to go there. And then it turned out I ended up. I mean, they were not going to make a 60-year-old in charge of the student volunteers coming in. So, I was at the right place at the right time. Just lucky.
SM (00:58:37):
Now, the Moratorium, that idea came from... Oh, I remember some name came out of nowhere. I never heard of the person, but you were one of the leaders of starting the Moratorium. But originally the idea of a strike, and I have done a lot of reading about-
SB (00:58:54):
That is Jerry Grossman.
SM (00:58:56):
Yeah. Now who is he?
SB (00:58:57):
Jerry was the president of Mass Envelope Company. He is an older business guy who was the head of Massachusetts Peace Action Council. He is actually still alive. His son is running for Congress, the Senate, I do not know.
SM (00:59:13):
Oh, wow.
SB (00:59:15):
And used to be the Democratic National Committee, the chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, his son. Jerry is now probably in his (19)80s, writes a blog. And he had this idea, Mass PAC actually had the idea. I mean, Jerry was the president, but the idea, I think grew up sort of organically through the organization, through Mass PAC to call a national strike. And Jerry went to see, I do not know, probably Marty [inaudible] to talk to him about money to do this thing. And Marty said, "No, go talk to Sam Brown." And I was teaching a course at the Kennedy School at the time.
SB (01:00:02):
... I was teaching a course at the Kennedy School at the time, and because I was not very good, I was young, I was kind of intimidated, most of the students were more or less my age. I was 25 and I had only graduate students and juniors and seniors, so it was ... Everybody in there was more or less my age. And I was fairly intimidated by that and not really very good at what I was doing. So, I threw out the standard way of doing it and said, "Look, since it is a seminar in contemporary American politics, what we are going to do here is we are going to talk about what you would do. We are going to learn about how politics works and what might work or might not work by taking a real issue, ending the war in Vietnam, and whether you agree with that or not, it does not matter. What we are going to talk about in this seminar is what might work." And at some point, in that seminar, we were talking about everything, demonstrations, letter writing campaigns, congressional campaigns, cutting off the budget, da-da, da-da. At some point, the idea of a strike came up, and Jerry had come to talk to me about it as I recall. And I said, "Nah, that can never work. It is too militant. It is too labor oriented. It does not sound like something that you can talk to people in the Midwest about. It sounds like the 1930s. It sounds like some lefty idea from the (19)30s. We cannot do that. But maybe we can find a way to think about that idea and not say we are going to have a strike and shut down American business, but to say instead, we are going to put aside a day to think about, to focus on this national issue and that they will put aside business as usual. Not shut down the factories, but put aside business as usual to contemplate what we are doing." And anyway, that grew over a period of time through that spring, in that seminar we refined that idea, and we needed ... Refined it to the place where we thought it was a pretty good idea. And then I raised some money to start the organization. And I had friends who I'd worked with in other things, David Hawk, David Mixner, Marge Sklencar, and a couple of students from my seminar, two or three students, in fact, from my seminar, who came to work in the office. And so, we started with a core staff of six or eight people, 10 or something like that. The core probably being the four of us, David and David and Marge and me as co-coordinators, term of art appropriate to the 1960s. Not leader and followers, but co-coordinators [inaudible].
SM (01:03:20):
Yeah, that was what SDS was supposed to be about, everybody's ...
SB (01:03:25):
Yeah, right.
SM (01:03:25):
Yeah. No leader, just...
SB (01:03:32):
Yeah. So, we just came down here in June after school was out and opened an office and announced we were going to end the war. Fairly audacious undertaking, but there you go. And because of the McCarthy campaign and the CIA thing, and one thing and another, I knew a lot of press people, so I knew we could get decent coverage for whatever we were going to do.
SM (01:04:01):
Boy, it was big. Because I can remember students from my college going to it, and it was big.
SB (01:04:11):
Yes.
SM (01:04:11):
And I know that we had students going to it from Binghamton, and of course that was ... It was in October, I think?
SB (01:04:20):
October 15th.
SM (01:04:22):
Yeah, October 15th was the actual across the country. And then November 15th was the actual event.
SB (01:04:25):
The [inaudible]".
SM (01:04:27):
Now, how many people were actually at the Washington Monument, because that is on Thomas Power's book, the front cover of his book?
SB (01:04:33):
Yeah.
SM (01:04:34):
That is the picture.
SB (01:04:35):
Yeah, that picture is actually hanging over there. My wife just gave it to me for Christmas this past year.
SM (01:04:41):
Oh my gosh.
SB (01:04:42):
Yeah. That was ... Who knows? I mean, everybody lies and nobody really knows. Estimates vary, but it was probably a half a million people, something like that. But I think you'd ... On any given day, depending on somebody's political instincts, they would say it was a hundred thousand or a million, 500,000. I mean, people ... But I think it was probably around 500,000.
SM (01:05:15):
It was a tremendous success. But from what I gathered, Nixon, as he always did, "Yeah, it was a big event, but it is not going to affect me at all on how I run things." Is that true? He was ...
SB (01:05:29):
No. Well, Dan Ellsberg tells me that it is not true, and Dan was still there, and he says that Nixon, that there was serious discussion about the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam, and that the moratorium ended that. Certainly, it forced them to rethink how they were going to conduct the war after that. And their first rethink was in the spring when they actually escalated the war, substantially in April when they ...
SM (01:06:07):
Oh, yeah.
SB (01:06:11):
And then that led to its own new round of demonstrations and opposition. But I think, I mean, Dan says he knows this with absolute certainty that from inside ...
SM (01:06:33):
That movie is out right now, The Most Dangerous Man in America is opening tonight in Philadelphia at the Ritz Theater. I am going tomorrow to see it.
SB (01:06:43):
Yeah. I saw it a few months ago.
SM (01:06:44):
I am heading off to the 40th remembrance at Kent State too. I have a question about that, but I have a question about who the speakers were at the moratorium in ...
SB (01:06:54):
Oh God.
SM (01:06:56):
... 1969. I know Benjamin Spock spoke ...
SB (01:06:58):
There was a struggle all the time because McGovern spoke, but the left did not want him to speak. I do not remember. David Hawk spoke there. I do not know. I just do not remember. I'd gotten arrested with Spock the night before. There was an effort to do something to say this was going to be non-violent. So, we were going to show the way by a demonstration at Lafayette Square, where a bunch of us got arrested. But I do not remember who ... I mean, I remember the fights about who should not speak.
SM (01:07:49):
Right. You had musicians there too that performed?
SB (01:07:53):
Yeah, I think Peter, Paul and Mary performed then. I am not sure who else. I just do not know.
SM (01:07:57):
I think Teddy Kennedy came and spoke too, did not he? I think.
SB (01:07:59):
I do not ...
SM (01:08:01):
I have some literature here ...
SB (01:08:02):
Maybe.
SM (01:08:03):
... that says that he came out and said a few things.
SB (01:08:04):
Okay.
SM (01:08:07):
Kent State, obviously after the moratorium in (19)69, and the reaction that I thought that Nixon gave to that particular event, then the peace activities were going on, so people looked at him more as the peace candidate, so it kind of died. So, the protest movement kind of ended there until the Kent State killings?
SB (01:08:30):
Well, it was not clear what he was doing at that point. And what happened really, in my recollection is, in October and November, we spent so much energy that when it came time for December, everybody ... Students were home. They were not on their campuses. It was hard to organize. You could not reach people. We had become sort of sclerotic. We had offices all over the country at that point. We were spending a lot of money to keep alive, not much real activity, so we decided ... I mean, we just sat down with our staff and said, "This is crazy." So, we closed. And then in the spring, of course, with the bombing, the Cambodia bombing over there, yeah, it just sort of blossomed from that. I mean, that was the ...
SM (01:09:37):
Now that was ... I asked quite a few of my interviewees where they were when two or three of these tragedies happened. Where were you when you heard about Kent State, number one, and where were you when you heard about John Kennedy's assassination?
SB (01:09:51):
Well, John Kennedy, I remember distinctly, I was at Redlands and I was working on a conference, a farm worker conference that weekend. And we were setting up tables and getting ready to do this conference when I heard about it. And then went to the cafeteria, and we were just sort of all in shock. And Kent State, I was here in Washington, but I do not recall precisely where, but it was so ... I mean, that two or three days around there, it was all kind of mushes together because it was such a blossoming, really, of anti-war activity. I think that spring ... I have this vague recollection that spring was the first Earth Day.
SM (01:11:06):
Yes. It was April 22.
SB (01:11:08):
And I had been working on Earth Day with Dennis Hayes and a bunch of people.
SM (01:11:12):
I have interviewed Dennis.
SB (01:11:12):
Yeah, he is a good guy.
SM (01:11:12):
He is.
SB (01:11:15):
He is a really good guy. So, I was around here because of that, and I had probably traveled someplace on the 22nd to speak, but I was living here and I do not remember exactly where I was.
SM (01:11:30):
You knew Senator Nelson too, when ... Because he was very involved in Earth Day.
SB (01:11:35):
Yeah, oh, sure.
SM (01:11:36):
The organizing of it.
SB (01:11:36):
Yeah.
SM (01:11:36):
One of the things that fascinate me about your background too, and I know you are probably very proud of this, was the book that you Wrote, which is called the Storefront Organizing.
SB (01:11:50):
Oh, Storefront Organizing.
SM (01:11:51):
And what really got me excited because it was dedicated to Jesse Unruh. I know him real well from living in California, and Senator McCarthy. But I love this quote, and I am not sure ... I get these quotes out of the ... But I think this is beautiful. You got to be proud of this.
SB (01:12:11):
Whatever.
SM (01:12:12):
"The bias is against the status quo rather than for it, because the few have always been well organized. The many have never been organized and never had a voice. Grassroots organizing is the way to change this." Now, that to me is beautiful. That is something that is about grassroots organizing. That says it all, but ...
SB (01:12:35):
Thank you.
SM (01:12:35):
But no, that is beautiful. But that booklet, you saw the need, just like I mentioned about students today ... I think, I do not know if this book is out of print. I think you ought to get this book back in print, I think, and put it on college campuses, because I think they are lost.
SB (01:12:51):
Well, it was just, it was largely a technical manual. It is sort of where you get office space and how you do various kinds of things. And of course, the times have changed so much that the techniques would have to have necessarily changed with it. There is actually another thing you may not have seen that I am, in some ways, even prouder of a piece wrote for the Washington Monthly called The Politics of the Peace.
SM (01:13:17):
When was that?
SB (01:13:19):
That would have been in late (19)69, early (19)70.
SM (01:13:26):
Can you get that, or?
SB (01:13:29):
It is probably archived, or it is certainly in a library, or ...
SM (01:13:33):
Okay.
SB (01:13:37):
I do not know. That is what I was looking for over there was to see if I might see a copy of it, but I do not know that I have a copy of it here. Anyway, but that it was a long piece that The New York Times then wrote a very laudatory editorial about, saying that they thought it was real smart, which is always a nice thing to have someone say.
SM (01:14:05):
Has that ever been put into a book as a ... Like essays of the (19)60s or the (19)70s or?
SB (01:14:10):
No, no. I think the only place it has been published was in the Washington Monthly. But Random House then came to me and offered me a contractor to write a book, and I went to write the book and discovered when I got to writing it that I really had about 12,000 words to say, and I would said them all. So, I returned the advance to Random House and got on with my life.
SM (01:14:39):
Wow. That is an interesting story. If I get a copy of that ... I am going to try to find it, but ... Not today, but down the road.
SB (01:14:46):
Yeah. I do not know whether you can find ... Maybe you can Google or maybe it is ... Or, whatever. Anyway, the Politics of Peace.
SM (01:14:56):
I have interviewed quite a few people from the Peace Corps in this project. Bill Jacobson ... Bill, he's great. We had a Peace Corps conference that I organized at our camp with Harris Swafford and [inaudible] ...
SB (01:15:08):
He is a really great guy.
SM (01:15:08):
Yeah, and we brought in five or six of the original people from the beginning, and ... Of course, Sergeant Shriver could not come because he is not well, and he has got Alzheimers, but they told him that this was happening. We have got it all on tape. But that must have made you feel really good, I mean, to be picked by President Carter to be the head of action and to oversee the Peace Corps and Volunteers in Service to America, which were ... When you were a boomer in the (19)60s, you knew about SDS, you knew about Black Panthers, you knew about certain things. But you knew about the Peace Corps, and you knew about VISTA and they were important. And just any thoughts you have about that experience of working for the Peace Corps, and maybe working with Sergeant Shriver, and knowing the people that were linked to ... And being a part of the continuity of its history?
SB (01:16:09):
Yeah. Well, again, I was lucky. I mean, I was the state treasurer in Colorado at the time, and I have gotten to know Carter during the course of the campaign. So of course, I was ... When he asked me, I did not hesitate. I probably could have been more gracious to the people who would help me get elected state treasurer by at least having a momentary pause before leaving the job to go to Washington. But, yeah, it was a terrific opportunity. And the Peace Corps is a very interesting institution because it has the theory that people will only be there five years, can only work there for five years, and then have to go out in order to renew. It has a funny opposite effect part of the time, which is that it tends to create the myth that it is ... It clings to its founding myths more strongly, I think, because of that than it might have if the same people had just stayed on. So, I am never sure about how that idea, which seems like a really smart idea, and I thought it was a smart idea, and it seemed like the right idea, but I am not quite sure that it actually works the way the founding fathers would have wanted it to work. And it also may be that just like any other institution, when it gets to a certain size, it becomes very difficult to move it in any very substantial way. I mean, it sort of has its own path and I was too young really probably to figure out that you could not go in and say, "Okay, now we're going to do this," and not have everybody say, "No, we are not going to do that." So, it was difficult for me. I mean, thank God for Dick Celeste, because action had been sort of forced together by the Nixon administration. There was a strong year irredentist movement in the Peace Corps that said it should be independent again. I thought it should be sort of policy independent ... Well, it cannot be policy independent. It's driven by the president. The Congress and the President give the policy. So, it cannot really be ... You know, you cannot go out and remake it into something that is not. But I thought there could be more ways of cooperating and training between Vista and Peace Corps. Peace Corps resisted that pretty systematically and consistently, because they were ... Okay. They would deny this, but I think it is true because they saw themselves as the sort of elite volunteers, VISTA volunteers. I thought being a VISTA volunteer was at least as hard as being a Peace Corps volunteer because you got to deal with your friends and neighbors.
SM (01:19:20):
When I was in high school, I knew kids that looked at them equally. I know a couple went into VISTA, before they went off to college, they wanted to do the VISTA thing.
SB (01:19:31):
Yeah. Well, it was a terrific opportunity and a wonderful four years for me, and I could not replace it, and I could not replace the people I had a chance to work with those years, for me.
SM (01:19:43):
You seem to be a little bit like the person who founded it though, because Sergeant Shriver believed in ... From reading his biography by Stossel, he had a whip in his office. I do not know if you have ever saw the whip?
SB (01:19:54):
No.
SM (01:19:54):
Yeah. In the early offices of the Peace Corps, and people asked him, "Why do you have a whip in your office," and being the guy he is, he said, "Well, it just means that I am a hard driving person. I work very hard and I work hour after hour," because he believed that this is the toughest job you will ever have. That was kind of the philosophy, but it is the greatest feeling because he ... Stories about he would sleep on the floor of an airplane when he flew. He did everything that the workers were doing. He was a great example. And one of the things says he believed in the think of hard work, and from what I am gathering and I read about you, you would be working 18-hour days. You had the same kind of philosophy, working all kinds of ... That was one of the qualities, when I read about your background, people admired you because you were a one heck of a worker.
SB (01:20:50):
Yeah. Well, who is it says, Woody Allen? "Success is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration." Right? Or whoever it was that said that. I think a lot of that is true. And the only thing that they left out is that there is also a good deal of luck involved, in my experience. Being there the right time, in the right place. Now, sometimes if you're working ...
Allison (01:21:14):
Hello.
SB (01:21:17):
Hi! If you are working additional hours in one thing than another, you're more likely to be in the right place. Because we are there all the time.
SM (01:21:27):
In the 2004 election with Senator Carey, you made some comments too, you know one of ...
SB (01:21:34):
My wife, Allison.
SM (01:21:35):
Oh, hi.
Allison (01:21:35):
Oh, do not ... That is okay. We [inaudible] ...
SM (01:21:39):
One of the things that happens is the Vietnam syndrome. Today, you cannot even bring up Vietnam, or ... At least in the university, and I have been the university for 30 years. Whenever you bring up the word Vietnam or quagmire, it sends all kinds of unbelievable waves amongst fellow boomers that run universities or students who either their parents have told some them about bad things about that particular era or whatever, or maybe not explained it properly. But when Senator Kerry was running for president, you were very upset over bringing ... About his service record, when they were not talking about ideas. It was more, they were making comments about whether everything that he said was true.
SB (01:22:24):
Oh, [inaudible] because they were lying about his service record.
SM (01:22:28):
Yeah, yeah. And this is another quote of yours, and I think it is very important because it is somewhat symbolic of what I have witnessed in universities for the past 30 years whenever we talk about Vietnam. And the quote here is that "36 years after the idealism that produced the McCarthy insurgency, I see nasty, mean spirited, politic politics on all sides." You compare it to the Chicago comity pits. I thought that was interesting. And I do not know if that is true, whether that is an exaggerated quote, but you bring up a good point, because in that election, to me, that was ridiculous to bring those things up.
SB (01:23:10):
Yeah, it was [inaudible] ...
SM (01:23:11):
Had nothing to do with ...
SB (01:23:12):
Nothing to do with it.
SM (01:23:13):
... what was going on. And to me, it is like the battle of Vietnam never stops.
SB (01:23:21):
Yeah. Well, the right has sort of demonized the (19)60s, and it was an era of loose morals and loose living and rejection of authority. And I mean, all kinds of things that the right says about it. And I just think that what they confuse, what gets conflated here is, there were really several things going on. One was a kind of cultural identity and revolution in politics, and Abby and Jerry and that crowd were into cultural revolution. Then there was the anti-war movement, which had to do ... Which was focused on political change. And sometimes those got ... They overlap, but frequently they were quite different. That is, the people who were working in the anti-war movement were not also spending their time promoting free love and free drugs and whatever other things that the right has said, "Oh yeah, well, the anti-war in the (19)60s. It is all the same." It was not all the same. There were distinct currents going on, and the anti-war current was, in fact, in some ways ... It certainly questioned authority, but it did not ... Most of us who were deeply involved did not intend to overthrow the cultural life of the world. I mean, we were more interested in ending the war and stopping the killing, and whatever we had to do to effectively do that. And we did not think that meant that the way to get that done was to go around breaking windows and making a fool of yourself. But the right has sort of stuck all that together and called it the (19)60s. And it's really quite different.
SM (01:25:30):
Because Newt Gingrich, when he came into power in (19)94, made some very strong comments about that particular period and blaming the breakdown of our society, the divorce rate, the second revolution, the drug culture, the isms, the welfare state, everything was blamed on that particular period.
SB (01:25:49):
Yeah. But I will tell you, you have been around interviewing people. David Hawk has been married for 30 years. I have been married for 30 years, and make a list of whoever you have gone to see. And by and large, I mean ... David Harris, I mean, was first divorced and then his wife tragically died.
SM (01:26:12):
Died, right.
SB (01:26:14):
But by and large, the people I know from that era have pretty stable personal lives, and family lives with a spouse or a partner or whatever. And frequently, the people throwing those rocks are the ones who themselves have personal lives that are a mess, and ...
SM (01:26:40):
Now George occasionally will take shots too.
SB (01:26:43):
Oh, yeah.
SM (01:26:46):
In his columns, in his books, he will have one or two little articles really attacking the (19)60s, but attacking the boomers, basically. And yeah, it is 78 million people is what we're talking about. One of the issues that I have tried to bring up with all of my interviewees is the issue of healing. I know we are getting toward the hour and a half here. We took a group of students to see Senator Musky about eight months before he passed away. It was a program we worked with Senator Nelson. I knew Senator Nelson real well. We would brought him twice to Westchester University, and we had organized nine trips. Okay.
SB (01:27:30):
It has been rescheduled. I am going to need to take it.
SM (01:27:31):
Right.
SB (01:27:33):
But they will call and let me know.
SM (01:27:34):
What was I ... I was starting to ask something here.
SB (01:27:39):
Senator Nelson, some trips?
SM (01:27:41):
OH, yeah. Yeah. It was about the issue of healing. The students actually came up with the question. The question was this, due to all the divisions that took place in America in the 1960s, particularly witnessing 1968, and since you were the vice presidential running mate at the Democratic Convention, I would like your response to this question that is, have we healed as a nation since those times or were those Black against white, male against female, gay against straight, those who supported the war, those who were against the war, those who supported the troops, those who did not, Vietnam veterans, against the anti-war people. The list goes on and on here. And the thought was that these young people who had not been born when all of these things were happening had heard that we were close to a second civil war in the United States? We were close to tearing this nation apart. Just your thoughts as-as Senator. And of course, he ... I would like your response to that first, and then I will tell you what Senator Musky said.
SB (01:28:46):
Yeah. No, I do not think, I mean, we were not close then. And I mean, in some ways I think we are closer now because the politics is deteriorated into ... There used to be adults in politics who could criticize each other, but still go out and have a drink. And I knew those people. I mean, I knew that time. And it seems like that time has now sort of passed. And the politics has been debased into essentially name calling and special interests trying to demonize everybody they are against. And the (19)60s make an easy target for that. But the idea that somehow or another in the (19)60s, we were close to civil war is preposterous. I mean, we were divided, but some things began to grow. I think, I mean, the moratorium was the first thing that a major trade union, the United Auto Workers, endorsed the moratorium, which we were very proud of because the unions at the time ...
SM (01:30:03):
...We were proud of because the unions at the time were widely regarded as sort of flag waving. Whatever America wants to do was okay with us. And we had the usual little lefty unions, 1199 and the Leather Workers and stuff. But when we got the union, when we got the UAW of endorsement, even that, there was always a kind of tension in the room. Here's a bunch of young lefties, and here is people who are more worried about what happens on the shop floor than they are about what happens in Vietnam. And you could still have that discussion. I am not sure now you can have the discussion with the teabags. I do not know if there is any basis there to talk about. Their vision of the world is so different. So, no, I think we were not even close, and I think we're more divided in many ways right now than we were then. We thought Senator Musk, his response is, we have not healed since the Civil War. And then he went on to talk about the loss of 430,000 to 440,000 men in the Civil War where South almost lost their entire generation. And because he had just seen the Ken Burn series and he says, "I am not going to talk about (19)68". He did not even mention it.
SB (01:31:36):
Yeah. Good for him.
SM (01:31:42):
And if you go to Gettysburg, I do not know if you have been to Gettysburg. It is amazing when you go there that you see the flags on the southern side, the Confederate side, you see nothing left on the northern side. And yet I will interview Phyllis Schlafly, who I interviewed about three weeks ago here, and she said, "Oh, the North has not gotten over it, but the South has." So, we cannot even agree on the Civil War because she says the South has healed and the North has not. And if you go to Gettysburg, you would think it is the other way around. But those are pretty good comments. The students were expecting of different responses.
SB (01:32:20):
Yeah.
SM (01:32:24):
I want your thoughts on the split between the white students and the black students in the (19)60s. They were together for a while against the Vietnam War, and then toward the latter part of the (19)60s, you could see it on college campuses, they were distancing themselves from the Anti-war Movement and more toward the Black Power Movement here in the United States with Black Panthers and everything. At Kent State, you can hardly find any African American students at the protest. Although I recently saw one of an African American students holding one of the students that was wounded, so there were a few there. But did you sense the split within the moratorium? Did you sense the split that African-American students or the Latina students, the-
SB (01:33:09):
African-American and Latinas were never deeply involved for the reasons that I am not quite clear about, but I do not think it was so much as a split as there was never a common ground. The African-American students that I knew and the movement people tended to be focused, as you say, on identity questions of black politics, of black power, of war on domestic issues of racism and poverty. And most of the people I knew in the Anti-war Movement took a nod in that direction. Many of us came out of the Civil Rights Movement, but were focused first and foremost on the war. I do not think it was so much a split as it was never really together.
SM (01:34:02):
Were you pretty cognizant and-
SB (01:34:04):
Except during Civil Rights era. And during civil rights era, it was very much together.
SM (01:34:10):
You obviously went to three different schools, I think you went to the Red lands, I think Rutgers, and then you went up to Harvard Divinity School. Did you have a knowledge and a sense that the free speech movement of (19)64 and (19)65 was very important for college students beyond Berkeley? Because of the fact that those students believed in freedom of speech. Most of them had experience, which we already talked about, of going the Freedom Summer in the South. Many of them came back like Mario Sabio and Bettina after, and Tom Hayden and Casey Hayden, I am interviewing her as well. And what I am getting at here is that ideas were more important than careers. Mario Sabio talked about that all the time, that when he grew up in the (19)50s and then in the early (19)60s, the difference between his parents and that generation and our generation is that we are different. We believe that a university's for ideas, not preparing people for careers. Did that have any sense within the movement south where you worked with David Mixner and David Hawk and the others, that they were really more into ideas and not into career?
SB (01:35:31):
The, it is a comment of privilege, frankly. We grew up in a new prosperity that our parents had not experienced. And they were, I think more driven by career because their life experience was that it is fragile and you do not know what's going to happen, and you need to focus on that. For us, at least in my experience, it was quite different than that. Jobs were readily available. You always knew you could do something. Money was not... None of us needed a lot of money to live. Our expectations were not, at least mine, of having any substantial amount of money. You're working for 30 bucks a week or 50 bucks a week and doing organizing stuff. Well, that was fulfilling and it was enough money. We had to share houses because nobody could afford to live on their own, so you end up renting a house with six other people or something, because that was the only way we could afford it. But that was in some ways a time of... That is a comment about privilege as much as it is about the times. My kids do not feel that. They know it is going to be really hard, jobs are tough. It is hard to figure out what you are going to do. You do not have the privilege of assuming, "Oh, well I will go do that for three or four years and then I will be able to land on my feet someplace else." And so, at least in the case of my career, it is serendipitous. It certainly was not planned. I could never have planned that. I did not think when I was a young man that I was going to be a US ambassador. that I was going to be right here now. That I was going to run an agency. That I would be an elected official, none of that. It was all just sort of one thing led into another and I was in the right place at the right time.
SM (01:37:33):
You talked earlier about the fact that you have poor violence, because it is only negative when you have violence and it hurts the image of a group. But do you think that the violence when students from Democratic Society, which was a really legitimately good group, went to become the Weathermen, and when the Black Power Movement with the Black Panthers and a bunch Chicano movement, when the Young Lords. And when the American Indian Movement from (19)69 to (19)73 became violent around wounded knee. All these groups tended to head towards some sense of violence. Is that a first?
SB (01:38:16):
Yeah, sure.
SM (01:38:16):
Does that permanent [inaudible]?
SB (01:38:19):
And it destroyed them. It effectively destroyed SDS when the Weatherman split off. Suddenly you had to either denounce them or be identified with them. And I just think it is a fruitless short term, stupid dead end. It is not as if you are going to change this country by violence. And we should have learned from Dr. King, that you can change the country, but not with violence. And so, all of those split offs ended up destroying the very movement that they thought they were being the cadre or the radical cutting edge or the leadership, whatever kind of crazy terms they applied.
SM (01:39:21):
Your thoughts on the Vietnam Veterans of America who kind of took over the Anti-war Movement of (19)71, because SDS basically went. And the other groups had their own problems, but they seemed to carry on the anti-war movement from 71 until almost the very end.
SB (01:39:38):
That is true.
SM (01:39:40):
Yeah. How important were they overall in the scheme of things?
SB (01:39:43):
Well, it was terribly important because the politics of it were important. The right did not have a singular monopoly on saying, "Well, we support the troops." If the troops are saying, "We do not like this war," then those people who are against it are actually supporting the troops. So, it changed the politics dramatically. They have that, it was a big deal. It was a big deal.
SM (01:40:12):
When you look at, after all your years as an activist, an organizer, a leader, or an ambassador, like you said, I have not even gone into some of the other things you have done in the last 30 years. Because we'd be here five hours if that was the case. What lessons can you pass on to young people today based on your experiences, especially if young people are willing to listen in the tough times that they are living through right now, where they are just trying to survive and struggle with?
SB (01:40:46):
Yeah, it is very tough.
SM (01:40:47):
And in oftentimes had no time at all to even be involved in the classroom activities.
SB (01:40:53):
That is right, because they are working.
SM (01:40:54):
Yeah.
SB (01:40:54):
I remember that was also at a time when the great public universities were still accessible to people of modest means, which is decreasingly true as time has gone on, and vanishingly true now. So, what would I say? Well, I would say, I guess what I say pretty much to my kids, which is, you need to care about these things, they matter. They will matter to your children. They will matter to you. Whether it is the war or healthcare. You need to care and you need to be informed. But you also need to find sort of your own muse in terms of what you do with a career. It's not for everybody to be actively involved on a daily basis. One of my kids is an actor. One of them in graduate school at Berkeley. One of them is in a PhD program at University of Virginia.
SM (01:42:02):
My nephew is going there next year.
SB (01:42:04):
Yeah. Well, they are doing other things, but they have, all of them, a great consciousness about the common good, about the public good, and about their obligation to pay attention to that. To be involved in campaigns. To be active voters. Everybody can do that. Everybody can do that. And if you do not do that, then I do not know what it means to be a good citizen. That is the core of what it means to be a good citizen, is to pay attention.
SM (01:42:44):
Good words. What do you think the legacy will be of the... Yeah, we are talking 78 million people here. Todd Gitlin said... I kept talking about Boomers. He had a problem with it from the get go. And I have had several people decide, I am going to talk about Boomers.
SB (01:42:57):
Yeah.
SM (01:42:57):
I am going to talk about the period, the times, the issues.
SB (01:42:57):
Well, I agree with Todd about that.
SM (01:43:04):
And people your age, a lot of the people were the graduate students that were leading the undergraduates in the (19)60s. And Abby and Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden, they were in the early and-
SB (01:43:16):
They are all a little older than me. Slightly older than I am. I think.
SM (01:43:19):
So, they call them pre-Boomers. And Richie Hayden, when I interviewed him, said, "I consider myself a boomer, Steve. I am a boomer. I was born in 1940, but I am a boomer."
SB (01:43:30):
I do not much like the term myself. But that post-war generation had a different life experience then. If the one before was the depression era, we lived through the prosperity era.
SM (01:43:44):
Yeah. What do you think the legacy will be when the best history books are written about the generation, particularly after on the 78 million have passed away?
SB (01:43:56):
I am hoping that the memory will be that we took our country seriously and we took seriously our obligations to try to set it right when we thought it had gone wrong. We were not always right, but I think it's changed and I think you see that now in, for instance, the openness toward gays. I think that is a legacy of that idea that all people should be acceptable for who they are. That is a direct derivative of the civil rights movement it seems to me. It took more years than it should have, but I think that openness of spirit is an important legacy. I would hope that would be seen. The (19)60s would be seen as the time when we began to take our country seriously enough and our fellow citizens seriously enough to really raise questions about the treatment of black people, for people. Hispanic people. Native American people, whatever. Gay people. It gets caricatured by the right as being so open-minded that our brains fell out. And I do not think that is the way it was. That is not my recollection of it. We thought hard and worried about the impact of our actions and took it seriously.
SM (01:45:46):
See, the no movements, you could say it, were a movement generation because a lot of these movements came about as a result of studying the Civil Rights movement and using it as an example, as a model. And certainly, the Anti-war Movement historically did that. Certainly, the Women's Movement and the separation. But if you study any of the movements, whether there's Chicano, Native American, even the Environmental Movement. Because I can remember, I have interviewed some people about how important it was with the Anti-war people making up with the Environmental people before Earth Day, and the consulting that went on between the two groups. To me that was collaboration, which should be a quality that we cannot forget. You have to collaborate to be successful.
SB (01:46:29):
Yeah.
SM (01:46:31):
And that to me, and I will get your thoughts on that, as a person who was involved in the Moratorium and the Anti-war that had the Environmental Movement student or young people consulting the Anti-war Movement, we're not going to step on what you're doing. Do you remember how important that was?
SB (01:46:47):
Oh yeah. That whole spring, the whole Earth Day, the first discussions were... I had been involved with this major event in the fall or events in the fall. So of course, they wanted to say, "Well, how would you do this? And what do you do about that? How do you get this done? Who do you talk to there?" So sure, there was a lot of that going on.
SM (01:47:11):
I only have three more questions and I will be done. I am not going to give you a name. I had this thing at the end where I give you names and terms, and what are your thought? I am not going to do that because you have given me already a lot of time. In your opinion, when did the (19)60s begin and when did it end?
SB (01:47:29):
Oh, it probably began in the mid (19)60s, actually, or the (19)60s, like (19)63, (19)64. And probably ended about (19)70, early (19)70s sometime. It did not start in 1960, at least in my recollection and experience, it did not start in 1960 before end in 1970. they certainly carried over through a year or two to get-
SM (01:47:56):
Stay Earth Day. In (19)73, a lot of people say went into (19)73, and you could even see on campuses the change in the fall of (19)73.
SB (01:48:03):
Really?
SM (01:48:04):
But the guy was there, and (19)72, (19)73, there were still things happening. And then on the fall, something streaking happened, and I knew it was over.
SB (01:48:14):
It was over.
SM (01:48:17):
Was there a specific event? (19)63 is the Kennedy assassination or the-
SB (01:48:22):
Well, the Kennedy assassination. The following year of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the Civil Rights Movement. Everything sort of came together to raise questions about the American narrative. And it was that questioning, which really led to many other things.
SM (01:48:42):
When you look at your fellow Boomers, I consider you a boomer. I consider pre-Boomers as Boomers, they are all one. When you consider the 15 percent that were categorized as activists, which is still a lot of people in 70 million, can you, from the people you know, because that is all you can really talk about, what were their strengths and what were their weaknesses? If you were to, from a person who worked with so many?
SB (01:49:15):
Well, the biggest weakness was probably clarity of analysis. There was a lot of bullshit in the rhetoric at the time. There was a great deal of inflammatory language and schismatic politics so that you would have the, not just SDS, but Socialist Workers, Progressive Labor, the Shack Mantes, the Trotskyite, the boot-boot, boot. everything was split up. And now partly that reflected the fact that people were thinking about ideas and so they were driven in various directions by what they thought about those ideas. But I think our biggest weakness was really probably a lack of consistency in the analysis. A lack of rigor about how people thought about their own actions. The greatest strength, I suppose, was simply the incredible energy. And aside from that intellectual piece, the brains, the attention to getting things done. That is a funny thing to say, that the weakness was analysis, but one of the strengths was it was a bunch of very smart people.
SM (01:50:55):
My last question is, and I asked this probably on about half of the people I have interviewed, because I have been doing this since (19)96. Now the last year I have been asking, this is important. That might be your call, right?
SB (01:51:01):
Yeah.
SM (01:51:01):
And then I going-
SB (01:51:20):
Hello? Yes. Hey, Steve, can I call you back in two minutes? I will call you right back. No, that is not the call I have to take.
SM (01:51:28):
All right. Well, this is the last question though. But in your eyes, I have asked each person who has experienced the 60 plus years that Boomers have been alive from (19)46 to 2010, just a couple sentences to describe the decades that these people lived. And I break it down from right after the war, (19)46 to (19)60. (19)60 to (19)70. (19)71 to (19)80. (19)81 to (19)90. (19)91 to 2000. 2001 to 2010. Just characteristics of the legacy.
SB (01:52:01):
Well, the (19)50s, my experience in the (19)50s was classically late 1950s. It could not have been more suburban, bland, ordinary. That was my experience of life is everybody's stereotype of it was the life I lived.
SM (01:52:24):
Right.
SB (01:52:27):
Bland food, bland politics, bland everything. The (19)60s was in my experience as you know on a time of this incredible intellectual engagement and in ideas. And so, I kept going to school. And when I was not going to school, I was writing something or reading something or whatever. And also, of enormous change. I would say most of my best friends are people in most cases that I have known since the (19)60s. There was a kind of bond forged there in common action that even when it turns out sometimes later in life, you do not even like them much, you still think of him as friends because you shared so much, such an experience together. The (19)70s, well, for me, it was the enormous hope of finally electing a president who seemed to have some vision for the country, and then the incredible loss that it turned out that he could not actually govern. The (19)70s are a sort of lost hope generation. It went from really thinking, "Wow, the war is over. We can begin to rebuild the country. We can do some exciting things." To Ronald Reagan. The (19)80s. The (19)80s for me are all Ronald, they're just Reagan. He was the dominant figure. It was the dominant politics. It was the change and it was rejection of the two previous decades in a fundamental way, which is really what he ran on. And just to fall back into some vague America hurrah kind of thoughtless politics. In the (19)90s, we are once again an era of some hope, but much more tempered than for me. My expectations, Clinton's a friend of mine for many years before he was elected president. I thought he was the political genius that he turns out to be. Now, there is a guy that Luke Gingrich could say was undisciplined. But sadly, because he is the political genius of our generation indisputably. There is nobody even like him. The next generation has Obama, but our generation, Bill Clinton. So, the (19)90s were a much more tempered hope. Economic recovery, for me, of course, the (19)80s and (19)90s were the time when my children were young. So, a lot of that time was spent with family not doing something else. And then the first 10 years of this decade lost again to war and to growing anger. I just find it depressing. I find right now, I have never been so discouraged about the country as I am right at this moment. We have got this fabulous president who offers a real opportunity, and yet we cannot get passed the... We cannot have a real discussion about healthcare because one party has decided we are not going to have that discussion, that it is in their interest. Well, I cannot imagine it is in the country's interest to not have a discussion, a real discussion about healthcare. It is in the country's issue to fix this problem not to just say no. Anyway.
SM (01:56:54):
And I am done. But I would like just your thoughts. What do you think about the Vietnam Memorial? What has it really done to the nation, and why did we lose the war? I am, I am actually going over there. I go over there every time I am here. What does it mean to you that wall? James Scrap said he wrote the book to heal a nation. He said it was not only about healing the families of those who served, but and also to be a non-political entity.
SB (01:57:25):
Yeah. I find it terribly. I think everyone, I find the symbolism of it moving and a visit to it because of the that incredible list of names. We have now been at war for eight years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we have lost 3,600,
SM (01:57:47):
Oh no. More than that.
SB (01:57:47):
5,000.
SM (01:57:51):
It is in the 4,600 right now. We are heading to five.
SB (01:57:53):
Yeah. But you walk down there and walk past the 55,000 names on that wall, it reminds you of... When we went to 125,000 troops in Afghanistan that was a huge deal. Remember, we had 550,000 troops in Vietnam.
SM (01:58:13):
And in your opinion as a person who fought to end that war, what was the main reason that Vietnam War ended?
SB (01:58:20):
Oh, exhaustion. Country just got tired of it, it just wore us out. And also, if you think about what it did to Vietnam, we would pretty... There was not much left to fight over by the time we got done there. We had so destroyed that country, and it has been so remarkable the way that it's been rebuilt since then. So disappointing in many ways and some of the things that the Vietnamese leadership did after the war. But anyway.
SM (01:58:59):
Very good. Well, thank you.
(End of Interview)
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Title
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Interview with Sam Brown
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Brown, Sam, 1943- ; McKiernan, Stephen
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audio/wav
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Politicians--United States--20th century; Political activists--United States; Brown, Sam, 1943--Interviews
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Sam Brown is a politician and political activist. Brown was the head of ACTION under President Jimmy Carter, and ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Redlands, and a Master of Arts from Rutgers University. He also completed his graduate studies at Harvard University Divinity School.
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Binghamton University Libraries
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2010-03-02
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eng
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McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.29a; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.29b
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2017-03-14
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McKiernan Interviews
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119:03
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https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/9abb07a21c62c5804aacb032fcaa972d.mp3
a0c7302483390102113fd5f96032833d
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Title
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Armenian Oral History
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<p>Aynur de Rouen, Ph.D.</p>
Description
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<span>This collection includes interviews in English with informants of all ages and a variety of backgrounds from various parts of Armenia. The interviews provide deeper insight into the history of the Armenian culture through personal accounts, narratives, testimonies, and memories of their early lives in their adoptive country and back in Armenia. </span>
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<a href="https://www.binghamton.edu/libraries/about/collections/oral-histories/index.html#sustainablecommunities">Sustainable Communities Oral History Collection</a>
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English
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Date of Interview
3/11/2019
Interviewer
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Jacqueline Kachadourian
Interviewee
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Sam Hagopian
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21:25
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English
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Binghamton University
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Video or Audio
Audio
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Biographical Text
Sam Hagopian was born and raised in Philadelphia. His father was the son of the son of immigrants who escaped the Armenian genocide. Sam learned about the Armenian culture from his grandmother and father. He still resides and works in Philadelphia.
Keywords
Armenians, Family, Genocide, Food, Traditions, Culture, Church, Sacrifices, Generations.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium
Armenian Oral History Project
Interview with: Sam Hagopian
Interviewed by: Jackie Kachadourian
Transcriber: Aynur de Rouen
Date of interview: 11 March 2019
Interview Setting: Phone interview
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)
00:02
JK: My name is Jackie Kachadourian. I am interviewing Sam Hagopian for Binghamton University's Armenian oral history project. Today is March 11, 2019. Can you please start with some basic biographical information, your name birthplace?
00:19
SH: Sure. My name is Samuel John Hagopian. I was born July 7, 1981. I have lived in the suburban Philadelphia region all my life.
00:31
JK: Great. And can you tell me a little bit about your parents’ your background? Were they both Armenian, your parents? What's their names?
00:41
SH: Sure. My father was Jack Hagopian. He obviously was Armenian. My mother, Eleanor Hagopian, was not. My father passed away in September of 2012.
00:58
JK: Okay, and I am ̶ So you said your father was Armenian? Was he 100 percent Armenian?
01:05
SH: Yes, he was. My grandmother and my grandfather obviously on my father's side were both Armenians. I believe my grandfather was born in America. However, my grandmother was born in [indistinct] in Turkey.
01:21
JK: Okay. And she was, I am assuming, was she born around or during the Armenian massacre?
01:29
SH: Yes. Yes, she was. She was a survivor.
01:32
JK: She was and do you recall any stories or the ̶ how she travelled from that region to America or wherever she ended up?
01:41
SH: Yeah, I mean, she was and I will be bluntly honest, she was put on mother's death marches. She was actually saved by a Turkish general. Who knew the family because my, my grandmother's family was ̶ he was a mayor. She, she stayed with them for a while she moved to Syria, spent some time in Versailles. Meanwhile, some OF the older ̶ she was the youngest one in her family and the older relatives or her brothers and sisters had come to America. And they kept in contact and eventually they brought her to New York.
02:24
JK: Okay, wow. So she traveled a lot. Yes, your journey did. Uh, did you have any siblings with her while she was in the death march besides her brothers who were in the States?
02:39
SH: The one or two one or two of her. One or two of them.
02:44
JK: So she ended up going by herself?
02:47
SH: Yes. Yeah.
02:48
JK: Okay. And on your grandfather's side, was there any others ̶ in a particular stories that you remember from that you can recall?
03:00
SH: Nothing really that I can recall. I actually never met my grandfather he died before I was born. And by the time I came along, we really ̶ the two sides, were not talking between my, my on my father's side.
03:21
JK: Okay. And growing up in the household, was it interesting having an Armenian
side versus a ̶ non-Armenian side and how did the culture influence each other?
03:37
SH: Um, that is actually a really good question. I mean, my ̶ I would say that my mother adapted to the Armenian culture very well. Um, you know, the food and the traditions. Um, you know, it was just it was, it was it was part of who we were. I mean, really, to me. No big deal and we were Armenian. And we were proud to be Armenian.
04:04
JK: And growing up in the Philadelphia area, I know there is a few Arme ̶ It is a popular Armenian spot to grow a family and attend church and stuff like that. Did you have any Armenian friends growing up or ̶
04:19
SH: No? Would they really where I grew up? There were not too many Armenian kids. Um, the schools I went to would have one or two Armenian families in it, but never, never many.
04:32
JK: Okay. And was there an Armenian Church around you when you were growing up or no?
04:39
SH: Yes. Yeah. There were two, there was, there was Holy Trinity in Cheltenham and St. Gregory.
04:47
JK: Okay. And did you ̶ Did you guys attend church regularly as a child?
04:53
SH: As a child? No. After my grandmother passed away, we did go to Holy Trinity some.
05:00
JK: Okay. And did you have any siblings growing up?
05:06
SH: Yes, I have one older sister,
05:08
JK: One older sister. Okay. And um, growing up do you guys ̶ I know you said prior that you are aware of that you are meaning that you are proud to be Armenian. But were there any specific things that you guys would do that connected your Armenian traditions in pass?
05:28
SH: You know, it is funny, I do not know how after you have gotten this answer, but I always remember the food. You know, it was always that was that was the main thing the food. You know, and, you know, as you got older, you know, I know I was ̶ I have managed to read Peter Balakian’s Black Dog of Fate, I believe it is. So, you know, there was always that, you know, and learning, you know, famous Armenians, you know, so I think that is the answer you are looking for there?
06:01
JK: Yeah. Do you recall ̶ did you ̶ did your father cook a lot or your grandmother when she was alive? Did she cook a lot? Like ̶
06:12
SH: Yeah, my grandmother always cooked a lot and she was an excellent cook. My father did cook a little bit he enjoyed cooking. I mean my mother in ̶ you know, shared responsibilities a lot. But yeah, my father liked to cook too, but my grandmother was the best book I ever, ever know.
06:34
JK: Yes. And did ̶ when you were around your grandmother and your father in that side. Did you guys speak Armenian when you were around them or did you guys speak English?
06:49
SH: I spoke English. My grandmother could speak Armenian. My father could speak some Armenian. I have never learned other than the occasional profanity.
07:02
JK: Oh, yes. And did you ̶ So growing up you never learned Armenian or learn how to write Armenian, correct?
07:06
SH: Yeah, I did not go ahead. My sister did take some lessons on on learning how to write learning ̶ how to write and speak Armenian.
07:16
JK: Okay and growing up, did you go to Armenian like Sunday school at all when after you started going to church or?
07:28
SH: I did I was in my late teens at that point.
07:29
JK: Yeah. Um, so do you ever ̶ do attend church regularly now?
07:40
SH: I do not, no.
07:41
JK: Okay. But you still ̶ do still believe that you have like a strong Armenian presence within you and you still want to spread that Armenian culture?
07:52
SH: Yes, yes, I do, yeah I mean, it is, it is you know I know ̶ It is you know, the funniest thing about Armenians is the last three letters of our names. And, you know, when you when you explain to someone, you know, how it breaks down, you know, the, the word, I am looking for the etymology of the word, you know the name, you know, and how it means and what it means and they learn live their life. So anytime I see an IAN an YAN, and I should ask if they know you, yeah, pretty much you know, but that is, you know, more just, you know, you know, I can it goes back to the food. I know, I am sorry. But, you know, you are teaching people Armenian food and those customs and you know, how people, you know, always take to it, and how much they love it.
08:46
JK: Mm hmm. Exactly. And It is really true. I am on your mom's side was ̶ what cultural background did she have?
09:01
SH: She was ̶ her, her father was Scots Irish. Her mother was Swedish.
09:06
JK: Okay. And did you guys which do you think mostly prevailed in the culture ̶ Did you mainly learn about mostly like Armenian stuff? Or also like the Irish Swedish side as well?
09:22
SH: I would say we learned about both equally. You know, we always ̶ you know, the traditions of the family you know, what they did growing up and, and that sort of thing.
09:36
JK: Yeah, exactly. And, and ̶ to you now is, let us see. Um, so, going back to, I am jumping around here going back ̶ Was there any memories that your grandmother shared of her living in Armenia, or the Ottoman Empire agent before the genocide occurred?
10:13
SH: Not really. And when it came to talk about that. I can only remember her ever doing that once. And it really took a lot convincing from my father to have her open up and talk about that. I do not think she really wanted to talk about that. Too much. It was, you know, I mean, she saw her mother and father killed right in front of her.
10:47
JK: Okay, so her grandparents, I mean, parents never made it to the United States.
10:55
SH: No.
10:57
JK: Okay. And do you know how her brothers ended up, u p in the United States.
11:02
SH: They ̶ not really I mean, they were managed to, to, to to ̶ I think some of them had come over already. And they had kept in touch. Okay.
11:20
JK: When your grandmother came over here, was it? Did you sense that it was important to her for to keep the Armenian traditions alive? And ̶
11:31
SH: Yes. I do not mean to interrupt you there, but yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. 110 percent. You know, it was not that she ̶ you know, was showing her path. She just did not want to talk about that.
11:44
JK: Mm hmm. Yeah, that's very understandable. And I am sure it was her very horrific. The circumstances that she went through ̶
11:55
SH: And I should also say ̶ she was only ̶ she was a very young girl. She was probably nine or ten years old.
12:03
JK: Oh, wow. That is crazy. Um, and so it must have been hard prior before the massacres occurred to really remember anything at all.
12:20
SH: Yeah, I mean, I know she had some memories. But yeah, I think it was more important. You know, coming to America.
12:28
JK: Yeah. And starting the new life and when she came over she settled in Philadelphia or ̶
12:40
SH: She actually settled in New York and then she moved. She, she married my grandfather and came down to the Philadelphia region.
12:49
JK: Okay. And um, what ̶ Growing up half Armenian 50 percent Armenian ̶ Did you guys ever celebrate ̶ like Armenian traditions? Like, I know we have our own Armenian Christmas? Or do you guys celebrate both?
13:09
SH: I mean, we mainly celebrated the main ̶ you know, Christmas, Christmas and Christmas and, you know, there was always, you know, phone call that day from my grandmother and you know, even now as we move on in our extended families you know, we kind of we always have like ̶ It seems like it works out for and when I say extended family meaning not blood, blood relatives ̶ Yes, just family, the people that you consider family, it always works for us to get together on our meaning Christmas ̶ to have a Christmas celebration. So in some ways it lives on.
13:54
JK: Yes, exactly. And going off of that have you ever traveled to Turkey or Armenia?
14:04
SH: I have not.
14:08
JK: And would you, would you have a desire to do that in the future?
14:12
SH: Yes. Yeah, I think I would. I would like I would like to go there.
14:15
JK: Okay. And like learn about the culture more.
14:19
SH: Yeah.
14:20
JK: Great. And, uh, what would you identify ̶ say you identify as your homeland? Like ̶
14:29
SH: America. You know, I do have Armenian roots, but I was born here in America.
14:36
JK: Yes. And so you would, and how would you identify yourself like Armenian American, American Armenian, or just American?
14:47
SH: I would probably be American Armenian.
14:53
SH: But I would also be an American, you know, Irish Americans. You know, I mean, you know, I would like that Am I selfish who I am and what I, what my past is as well?
15:03
JK: Yes. And now that you are older ̶ rather than looking now at today, do you see yourself holding on to those Armenian traditions? And if so, why and why is it important to you? If it is ̶
15:25
SH: I do hold on to a lot of them. You know, just you know, I keep coming back to the food I am sorry, Jacqueline. You know, it is, it is, you know, recreating those memories of growing up and then you know, having shish kebab and having, you know, all this great food and you know, talking with people ̶ It is, it is something that I always enjoyed, and I, I do not want to see that go away.
15:56
JK: Mm hmm, exactly. And did you ever learn how to cook these foods from your grandmother or your father?
16:02
SH: Um, not so much for my grandmother. You know, I watched her, I learned some from my, you know, through my sister, who, you know, my grandmother taught some things to. Learn a little bit from my father. Um, but you know, a lot of it is just been, you know, reading on Armenian culture online and watching you know, you know if there is a documentary, they always mentioned the food and, you know, just, just watching that and learning from there.
16:36
JK: Yes, exactly. And I am going back to the idea of the church. Do you think Christianity plays an important role in being Armenian? If so, why or why not?
16:55
SH: I do believe so. You know, when you had, you know, all these people coming to America It gave them an identity and something to, you know, for lack of a better term, you know, stay together and, you know, be surrounded by people, you know.
17:15
JK: Yeah, exactly. And what do you think is the most important part of being Armenian? Is it the language you talk to a lot about the food? The church, what do you think are the most important aspects of the Armenian culture?
17:39
SH: There is ̶ I cannot give you one answer. Jacqueline, I would have to almost say almost everything you mentioned. I mean, you know, the church being the first Christian nation. You know, when you tell someone that they, they, they almost are taken aback because so many people have never heard of Armenia, Armenians. The food because that is you know, that is how we always identified that it was, you know, our family would come down from New York and it would be, you know, this big party and there would be tons of food and, you know, everyone telling stories and laughing and joking. You know, the language I mean, there is, there is no language, like, the Armenian language in the Armenian alphabet that I know of. You know, you cannot, you know, it is it is, it is almost often ̶ It is like, own area. So I think there is, you know, you cannot just put one thing down us.
18:49
JK: Yes, yeah. As Armenian. Um, that is true. And as you grow older I forgot to mention, are you married at all?
19:02
SH: I am not, no.
19:04
JK: If growing up, was it ever pressured for you to like bury in Armenian or?
19:11
SH: No.
19:11
JK: So you could. Okay, that is, that is good to hear. And if very when you have children, if you do, do you want to teach them about the Armenian culture and keep that alive? Or do you think it's going to be more of an Americanized way of living?
19:33
SH: No, there will be Armenian culture and where they came from. I mean, they would they would have to know that ̶ to know who they are, and I am probably jumping around here but like to, you know, what my grandmother always taught me was, you know ̶ Let me let me rephrase this. To ̶ You know, every day, you know, when I think of I had a bad day or something went wrong, you know, I think of what she went through and the sacrifices she made to get to America. And if I did not ̶ If she did not make those sacrifices, I could not have the life I live now. You know, I own my own home, I work I have a successful job. You know, that is ̶ she made those sacrifices for me. So, you know, me having a child at some point of my life would be some extension of her dream. You know, to have, to have you know, grandkids and great grandkids. So, I know I am rambling here but that is essentially what I you know, why would teach them where they have been?
20:59
JK: Yeah I know, that is super important I completely agree. So I think that is it. Is there anything else you would like to add?
21:10
SH: No, thank you very much for contacting me. I think this is an amazing thing you are doing so important to who we are.
21:18
JK: Yeah, I completely agree. Really documenting the history.
21:22
SH: Yes.
21:23
JK: Yeah. All right. Well.
(End of Interview)
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Interview with Sam Hagopian
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/b0048b1386b03a6ba887f8276acdafc7.jpg
35308e55342ce25c71a1db0b34f18b1a
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McKiernan Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br />
<h3>The McKiernan 22</h3>
<div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li>
</ul>
Creator
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Stephen McKiernan
Publisher
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Binghamton University Libraries
Language
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English
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In copyright.
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Date of Interview
1997
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Stephen McKiernan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Sam Smith
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
55:18
Language
English
Digital Publisher
Binghamton University Libraries
Digital Format
audio/mp4
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Microcassette
Material Type
Sound
Interview Format
Video or Audio
Audio
Keywords
Baby Boomer; 1960s; Generation; Rights; Lyndon Johnson; Vietnam; Green Party; Vietnam War; Civil Rights Movement; 1970s; Race.
Biographical Text
Sam Smith is a writer, activist, and social critic who has been at the forefront of new ideas and new politics for more than four decades. The Harvard University graduate, class of 1959, has been editing alternative publications since 1964. He is an award-winning alternative journalist and currently is editor of Progressive Review. His activism helped organize the Association of State Green Parties-predecessor to the National Green Party and, in the 1970s, was a co-founder of the DC Statehood Party. He is the author of several books including his most recent titled Why Bother? Getting a Life in a Locked Down Land and a 1990's popular book titled His Shadows of Hope: A Free Thinker's Guide To Politics in the Time of Clinton. This native Washingtonian covered his first story in 1957 as a 19-year-old. He has served on the Board of the Fund For Constitutional Government; the DC United Black Fund; Project on Government Oversight and the DC NAACP Police & Justice Task Force.
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Interview with Sam Smith
-
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Audio interviews
Title
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McKiernan Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br />
<h3>The McKiernan 22</h3>
<div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li>
</ul>
Creator
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Stephen McKiernan
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Binghamton University Libraries
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English
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In copyright.
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Date of Interview
27 July 2010
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Stephen McKiernan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Sara Davidson
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
31:25
Language
English
Digital Publisher
Binghamton University Libraries
Digital Format
audio/mp4
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
MicroCassette
Material Type
Sound
Interview Format
Video or Audio
Audio
Keywords
1960s; Berkeley; Sorority; Loose Change; Protests; Sexual revolution; Boomer generation.
Biographical Text
Sara Davidson is a journalist, novelist, screenwriter, radio host, and the New York Times bestselling author. She is the author of eight books, and has written for the New York Times, Esquire, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and other magazines. Davidson created dramas for television and was co-executive producer of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Davidson graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and attended Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Rights Statement
Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly.
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Interview with Sara Davidson
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https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/d70193fa64eba7966d0f5bde51a60dd1.mp3
d6c758aaf2037b7083f54c97eac3da93
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Title
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Broome County Oral History Project
Subject
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Broome County -- History
Publisher
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Binghamton University Libraries
Description
An account of the resource
The Broome County Oral History Project was conceived and administered by the Senior Services Unit of the <a href="http://www.gobroomecounty.com/senior">Office for the Aging</a>. Funding for this project was provided by the Broome County Office of Employment and Training (C.E.T.A.), with additional funding from the Senior Service Unit of the National Council on Aging and Broome County government. The aim of this project was two-fold – to obtain historical information about life in Broome County, which would be useful for researchers and teachers, and to provide employment for older persons of a limited income. The oral history interviews were obtained between November 1977 and September 1978 and were conducted by five interviewers under the supervision of the Action for Older Persons Program. The collection contains 75 interviews and transcriptions, 77 cassette tapes, and a subject index containing names of individuals associated with specific subject terms. One transcribed interview does not have an accompanying audio recording. <br /><br />In 2005 Binghamton University Libraries’ Special Collections Department participated in the New York State Audiotape Project which undertook preservation reformatting of the audiotapes, and the creation of compact discs for patron use. Several interviews do not have release forms and cannot be reviewed.<br /><br />See the <a href="https://archivesspace.binghamton.edu/public/repositories/2/resources/44">finding aid </a>for additional information.<br /><br /><strong>Acknowledgment of sensitive content</strong><br />Binghamton University Libraries provide digital access to select materials held within the Special Collections department. <span>Oral histories provide a vibrant window into life in the community.</span> However, they also expose insensitive, and at times offensive, racial and gender terminology that, though once commonplace, are now acknowledged to cause harm. The Libraries have chosen to make these oral histories available as part of the historical record but the Libraries do not support or agree with the harmful narratives that can be found in these volumes. <a href="https://www.binghamton.edu/libraries/about/collections/digital/">Digital Collections</a> are created for educational and historical purposes only. It is our intention to present the content as it originally appeared.
Identifier
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2
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In copyright
Contributor
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Ben Coury, Digital Web Designer
Yvonne Deligato, Former University Archivist
Shandi Ezraseneh, Student Employee
Laura Evans, Former Metadata Librarian
Caitlin Holton, Digital Initiatives Assistant
Jamey McDermott, Student Employee
Erin Rushton, Head of Digital Initiatives
David Schuster, Senior Director for Library Technology and Digital Strategies
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1977-1978
Relation
A related resource
<a href="https://archivesspace.binghamton.edu/public/repositories/2/resources/44">Binghamton University Libraries Special Collections, Broome County Oral History project</a>
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Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Burbank, Sarah
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Dobandi, Susan
Date of Interview
1978-07-12
Collection
Broome County Oral History Project
Date of Digitization
2016-03-27
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
15:52 Minutes
Streaming Audio
Streaming URL
<a href="https://eternity.binghamton.edu/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE55874">Interview with Sarah Burbank</a>
Subject LCSH
Burbank, Sarah -- Interviews; Broome County (N.Y.) -- History; Home economics teachers -- Interviews; Binghamton (N.Y.); Drexel University; Radio programs; Radio stations; Cooking School
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Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium
<p><b>Broome County Oral History Project</b></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Interview with: Sarah Burbank</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Interviewed by: Susan Dobandi</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Date of interview: 12 July 1978</span></p>
<br />
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Susan: Mrs. Burbank, could we begin this interview by having you tell us something about your early beginnings? Where you were born? Something about your parents, what they did, and your early life in the community?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah: Well, let’s go back a little further to my mother. Ah, Mother was ah, one of twelve children, Welsh, all Welsh, and ah, she went to, ah, Bloominburgh to a school to be a teacher and ah, my grandfather and grandmother were very interested in the Church, Congregational Church, and they used to entertain the, ah, minister, you know. Well, one day they had him at the house for dinner and, ah, he said to my grandfather, he said, "Oh, Mr. Jones, you have a wonderful family,” and my grandfather said, "But you haven't seen our Gertie." That was my mother, and as soon as Gertie came home he married her—I mean, not as soon, but they—they fell in love and he married her.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Well, he was a Minister from Wales. He, ah, got his degree from Yale and ah, he got very sick. He died before I was born, and so mother of course went back to my grandmother's and, ah, she taught school and so my grandmother raised me. So that was the beginning, of course, of a spoil, because there were a lot of aunts and uncles and, ah, I loved my grandmother. I didn't like my mother much because she did discipline me. She wouldn't have me spoiled when she was home but grandma used to teach me things, and one thing—this table, which is a marble top table, she taught me how to dust it. I was dusting it, you know, just back and forth any old way and she said, "Oh look, you must go into those little holes there and dust it thoroughly,” that's one thing, and then she let me iron but I had to get the—the handkerchief straight and iron them straight, fold them perfectly straight, and I remember those things and I think they've stuck by me. Maybe made me a little prissy, I don't know, but I don't see the youngsters doing it nowadays, but ah, anyway mother married again and took me away from my grandmother, and at the time I didn't like it one bit but I can see now that it was better for me, and so ah, my father—I called him “Father”—stepfather was as good and better than some fathers I know. He was a wonderful man but, ah, Mother took out an insurance policy for me to go to school ’cause she had gone to school, and if I remember what she told me, it cost her $500 to go at her time. You're smiling. It doesn't seem possible, and then when I went she took out this policy for $1,000, which would come due when I was of age to go, and I went down to Drexel when I went to school.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Susan: Drexel.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah: Drexel, Philadelphia to take Home Economics. At that time, I went in ’18 and I think—1918—that was a new course, and it wasn't thought too much of right then, cooking and sewing, you know, you could learn that at home. Well anyway I went there, and ah, I don't know whether I got through, ah, for a thousand dollars or not, but I know I helped to wait on table, ah, to make a little more money, and in those days I made $4.00 a week but it seemed like a fortune to me and, ah, well, that was in 1919. I had two years and then I went to teach in Pennsylvania, and Cockinville was the name of the place, down there near Philadelphia, and ah, I went for $1,000 a year, that's what I was paid, nine months, and then I moved up to, ah, Brooklyn, Pennsylvania, which was another little small, but then I taught this Home Economics, that was three years, and then I came to Binghamton, and I taught one year here, but then I was married and our daughter was born and I stayed home.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Susan: What did Mr. Burbank do?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah: He was an insurance man for Prudential and ah, I, ah—I stayed home about five years, I think, until one day Mr. Maston, who was manager of WNBF here, the only radio station we had then, ah, called and asked me if I'd be interested in doing a cooking school of the air. I didn't know what it was all about, but you know youth, well I say, they're brash but they don't have any nerves and they're not afraid of anything. I wasn't then, but I said, "Well we'll try it," and we had to go through voice tests and reading tests and things like that, and finally we started.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I thought it would be for, oh, a few weeks, because they had cooking schools in the schools. I mean they would have a woman come—Home Economics, and she would do it for two or three days, I don't know if you knew that or not, but then ah, I started and went on for a year and, ah, then they decided to just have it radio, and so from then on, well, I think I was doing that for twenty-one years.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Susan: That long?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah: I thought it would be for about two years, but in the meantime of course my daughter was growing, but I was very fortunate to have a woman come in and take care of her when I was gone, you know, and I was able to do the work, ah, for the week. I mean, she would come clean through, you know, and if Rachel, my daughter, was sick, why, she would come over and stay with her while I was gone, but I wasn't gone too long doing radio, you know. Ah, well, the Cooking School of the Air finally went into television, and I didn't want to do that. I'd had—that's a lot of work. (Chuckle.) I don't want to do a lot of work, but you know—- Well, did you ever do any?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Susan: No.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah: Well, you know what you have to do. I did it because I wanted everything to come out right. I had a girl helping me on the cooking school, and she'd help me here. We'd make something what we were going to do that day. We'd do it, oh, quite a few weeks ahead, because ah, we made a recipe folder to give out and they had to be printed and I had to try them first, then ah, we'd go down there the morning of the school—go down to the store. It was in McLean's Silver Salon up on the fifth floor. I'll bet you don't remember that either?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Susan: No.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah: Well, they had their fashion shows and all sorts of things there, and then we'd do that in the morning again so the women could have it to taste, and then in the afternoon we'd do it in front of everybody, so it was too much work for the few of us who were doing it, you know, but of course we had sponsors, too, and we had to, well, we had to give them quite a bit of time. I think some days I'd have as many as seven or eight.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Susan: You did your own commercials?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah: Yes, yes, and they would send them to me, the material, and then I could do it whichever way I wanted to, and that went through all the time I was on radio, but ah, it was very interesting. I enjoyed it very much meeting the people, you know, and I had guests on the—on the air, I had them on the cooking school, too, but it was a lot of fun.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Susan: What was the name of your program?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah: </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Sarah Burbank Show</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Well, Mr. Maston thought that was best. I left it all up to them, I just did what they thought would be better, and that was, I can see now that was better, because we changed time, sometimes it would be fifteen minutes, and again they'd make it twenty minutes and change the format a little bit, but during that time my daughter, ah, grew up, graduated and from high school and from college. She went to St. Lawrence and then she married.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Susan: What did she study?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah: Well, she studied business—business administration, but, but never did work at it, she got married, ah, she graduated in June and was married the next February, and ah, has two children, and I enjoy them so much, the grandchildren, they’re wonderful. We've had a very full life, my husband and I—we, ah, didn't do extensive traveling, but we went to Florida after we both retired, out to California, Canada, and just have a cottage, and so it's been a very full life—very enjoyable, and it's been wonderful.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Susan: Are you active with any of the local clubs?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah: Not now, I was, ah—I was on the board of the YWCA for a while, and on the board of the Civic Club, too, and of course PTA when Rachel was in school, but ah, no others and not now, not too much now. Well, you know, you give over to the younger people and let them do the work now. It's only fair.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Susan: True.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah: Yes, I think so, and ah, I don't feel as though I could do very much, that is, to keep on, you know, like I used to for the different clubs.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Susan: Mrs. Burbank, it's been very nice chatting with you, and if you don't have anything more to add to this, why, I think we'll close the interview.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah: Fine.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Susan: Thank you very much.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah: Thank you for coming.</span></p>
Rights Statement
This audio file and digital image may only be used for educational purposes. Please cite as: Broome County Oral History Project, Special Collections, Binghamton University Libraries, Binghamton University, State University of New York. For usage beyond fair use please contact the Binghamton University Libraries Special Collections for more information.
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Sarah Burbank
Subject
The topic of the resource
Burbank, Sarah -- Interviews; Broome County (N.Y.) -- History; Home economics teachers -- Interviews; Binghamton (N.Y.); Drexel University; Radio programs; Radio stations; Cooking School
Description
An account of the resource
Sarah Burbank talks about her childhood and her fathers death prior to her birth, her education at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA, and her experience teaching home economics in Binghamton, NY. She discusses her project 'Cooking School of the Air' by Mr. Marston, the manager of WNBF radio station that lasted 21 years.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This audio file and digital image may only be used for educational purposes. Please cite as: Broome County Oral History Project, Special Collections, Binghamton University Libraries, Binghamton University, State University of New York. For usage beyond fair use please contact the Binghamton University Libraries Special Collections for more information.
Format
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audio/mp3
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
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Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Recording 9
Contributor
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Burbank, Sarah ; Dobandi, Susan
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1978-07-12
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2016-03-27
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
Broome County Oral History Project
Extent
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15:52 Minutes