If you’ve been identified as the one in your family, neighborhood or group of colleagues who writes, you may find yourself called upon to create writing for projects you hadn’t imagined setting out to do. One such request could be to put together an oral history. This week, novelist and writer Kit Bakke shares her account of doing an oral history for the first time.

The Story of a Century in the Pacific Northwest
By Kit Bakke

“I was born February 22, 1906. I liked that because I never had to go to school on my birthday.” Gramma Hilda paused, waiting for me to get it. She’s not my gramma, but what else could I call this 102 year old Skagit County resident who lives on her own in a small cinderblock house down a dirt road on a beach crunchy with oyster shells, and who still cooks, bakes, gardens, tells funny stories and every year gives away dozens of wreaths she makes from seeds, nuts and pine cones that she’s collected over the decades?

My first venture into oral history-taking began last spring when Gramma Hilda’s granddaughter, a friend of mine, called with a request. My friend was about to retire from a job she’d held for many years, and her boss wanted to give her something special. Since my friend’s officemates had been enjoying stories about Gramma Hilda’s life for years, the boss thought up the splendidly generous idea of having someone write them down. Since my book (Miss Alcott’s E-Mail) had recently come out, suddenly I was a writer, so I was called in to the job.

After agreeing to this wonderful project, I realized I didn’t know anything about oral histories. I trolled the internet: a Google search turned up hundreds of thousands of hits on “oral history tips.” I talked to friends who had taken Lorraine McConaghy’s Nearby History course at Seattle’s Museum of History & Industry (www.seattlehistory.org), and then took her day-long, information-packed oral history class, although by then I was halfway through the project.

Oral histories are a growth industry. They are fun to do, rewarding for both interviewer and interviewee and usually have a built-in audience among friends and family members of the interviewee. They are more social than a memoir project, usually involve less research than serious non-fiction and are easier (for me, anyway) than making up a coherent plot and peopling it with believable characters.

“Just the facts, m’am,” is not the way to approach an oral history. The idea is to collect memories and stories, the fun stuff, not the dates and accuracies that you find in library archives. Oral histories gather information that can’t be found anyplace else. Oral histories answer questions like: What did your Mom feed you when you were sick? What were your Christmas Eve traditions? What was the funniest thing that ever happened on a family vacation? What was the scariest thing you ever did? What was your first job? What pets did your family have?

When you are writing up the life of someone who has lived for most of the 20^th century, it helps to know the general history of the times in the location(s) where the person lived. This background of facts allows you to prompt your narrator (a friendlier word than “interviewee”) about things like the great influenza epidemic of 1918, the depression, the world wars, earthquakes or big storms, the introduction of cars, telephones, radio, television, airplane travel, frozen food, etc.

Talking with women, it is very rewarding to get a recipe or two; stories about family eating habits and favorite foods usually come pretty easily. Most oral history tips include advice to use “memory aids” such as photographs or physical objects such as trophies, ribbons, yearbooks, newspaper articles, etc. Gramma Hilda’s 1924 high school yearbook was a treasure. I was quite impressed at how quickly she was able to put her hands on whatever snapshot she was looking for (it made me ashamed to think of the state of my own family photos!) as we pawed through boxes of photographs from fishing expeditions and berry picking trips and one picture of three fifty-pound turkeys she and her husband had raised. She had to cut them in half to cook them in her oven.

All the advice says to tape-record your interview-conversations, and I have to admit that I did not tape-record my twelve approximately two-hour interviews with Gramma Hilda. I did try. I bought a cheap tape recorder and found it distracted me more than it did Hilda. She turned out to be a cadenced speaker who was very invested in the project, so between her cooperation and my furiously fast writing, we made it work. I typed my notes immediately after the interviews, and three times during the five month process I gave her drafts of the growing narrative and we went over questions about name spellings and factual misunderstandings.

Early in the project I made a decision to write in an “as told to” first person style. It made Gramma Hilda’s strong personality and character even more direct and fresh on the page. It made the note-taking easier too, because I just transcribed her words. The only thing I contributed was to organize the stories and memories, partly along chronological lines and partly by topic.

The finished manuscript was about 11,000 words, and we picked out 36 photos to include. The choice for publication was www.lulu.com. This web-based, on-demand publishing company was not hard to work with, and the completed book is quite respectable and inexpensively priced ($5.59 for the fifty-page paperback with a coated, two-color bound cover that even has the title on the spine). You can see it at http://www.lulu.com/content/1428561.

Why would anyone other than the family be interested in Gramma Hilda’s stories? It didn’t take me long to understand that her century of living mirrors the sociology and history of her Pacific Northwest. Her story is really the region’s story—she was born in a log cabin on the Pilchuck River where her parents settled after coming out from West Virginia. Her father was a logger and was often away from home. With Hilda’s help (“I was always the strong one”), her mother ran the farm. Hilda grew up loving the land and its produce: she has grown berries, fruits and vegetables, as well as ornamental bushes, flowers and trees wherever she’s lived. After high school she worked in fruit-packing plants, cooked for a logging camp and worked in an Everett sawmill. She went to community dances, played in a Seattle poker group for decades, hiked the Cascades and fished regularly both in Puget Sound and in eastern Washington’s freshwater lakes. She married, raised daughters, was active in the Rebekahs (the women’s auxiliary of the Odd Fellows) and was enormously hospitable, routinely hosting sixty friends for summer weekend picnics.

Need another reason to read about Hilda? We included two of her recipes—one for crab salad and one for “Boat Cookies,” so named because she always made them for family fishing expeditions. I can personally attest to their tastiness.

****

Kit Bakke mentions that the Internet is full of references for doing oral history projects. DoHistory.org is one such site. It offers comprehensive step-by-step advice that will help you imagine yourself doing such a project as well as speed you along your way once you begin one.

Kit Bakke can be reached through her website, www.kitbakke.com. Her book, MISS ALCOTT’S E-MAIL, (Godine, 2006) has been reprinted in paperback, so the publisher must be happy. Her second book, a novel titled IT’S NOT ABOUT ONE, is currently busy collecting rejections.