AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE ORAL HISTORY

by Ben Greenman

Originally written in 2004

Bill DeLisle: The idea came about when I was talking to an old man on a bus. To say he was garrulous is an understatement. I mean, blah, blah. He had so many stories. Some were even interesting. I mentioned it to a friend of mine, Alan Lomax, who had just finished up a project with Woody Guthrie. "Someone should take down all these things that are being said." I said. "So many people, so many stories." He looked at me like it was something he had already thought of.

Ruth Kaminsky: In the building there was little Louie Terkel. He was, you see, supposed to help with things around the place, but he spent all his time out in Bughouse Square listening to crazies. Once the stove went on the fritz and I asked up Louie. He said people were calling him Studs. "Well now Mr. Studs," I say, "fix my stove." He did but not well. It broke the next day and I needed to call a real fix-it man.

Fred Jenkins, cab driver: I was in the war, the Big One, and then I came back to New York and I started to drive.  In 1948—I remember because it was the year the Indians beat Spahn and Sain—I had a guy in my cab what was a famous historian. Albert Nevins, I think. I was talking about my ex-wife and how she sued me for half the medallion. He took an interest. "I have written about great men," he said, "but maybe this is the true American story." I dropped him off near Columbia. Not sure if he ever did anything with the idea. Decent tipper.

Albert Nevins: I live near Columbia but I'm not a historian. I'm in fruit importing, so I guess you could say I'm a historian of that. The Romans brought in oranges but after the empire fell no one in Western Europe thought about them for almost a thousand years. There’s a more famous guy with my same name who works at the university. Is it him you want?

Louis Camras: My uncle was the famous electrical engineer Marvin Camras, who pioneered the wire tape recorder. He had a joke: "The name is Camras, the game is recorders." That's because our name sounds like "cameras." He was an electrical engineer, not a comedian. The government used his inventions--they recorded battle noise and put it near where the Normandy invasion was going to happen to confuse the enemy. Oh, right, oral history. A guy he worked with at his college used his recorder to take down stories of Holocaust survivors. I think his name was David Boder. My uncle never said much about the guy.

Martin Perez, tailor: Oscar Lewis used to come in to the store. Very nice man, 42 long. He wanted me to tell him about my family in Mexico. I didn't say much because I'm Puerto Rican.

Rebecca So: I studied Alex Haley in graduate school, especially the controversy over whether he took Roots from his own family history or from Harold Courlander’s "The African.” That’s not oral history exactly, but it’s history, and it raises some of the same questions. Can memory be collective? What does it mean to objectively represent events? Who owns history? Who should profit? I now work as an entertainment attorney, and these issues still pertain. That's about all I'm willing to say without a better standing of where this will appear, and who will control its future usage.

Sean Robbins: I'm seven. I don't know what any of this is. Why did you bring me to this room? Where's my mom?

Elaine Bunton: I always thought oral history was designed to help us recover vital parts of our nation’s past that would otherwise have been lost to obscurity. Makes sense, right? But the other day I was looking around and I saw oral histories of Chipotle, Extreme’s “More Than Words,” and The Facts of Life. Some things are better left undocumented.

Mark Simonson, editor of this piece: I suggested this article, at least the title, in an email I sent to the writer on a Thursday night during a football game. Usually he turns things around really fast but this took him almost a week. The morning he turned it in, I had a strawberry smoothie that tasted a little like banana, as if they had neglected to properly clean the blender...Wait. What? This isn't "An Oral History of 'The Oral History: An Oral History'"?  Never mind.