Oral History Project revived after four decades

November 20, 2012 12:10 am  •  By Amanda Brooks / Contributing Writer

Serendipity — that is how an oral history project started by the Lompoc Historical Society and the Lompoc Museum in the late 1970s has nearly come to fruition today.

As Patricia Sazani, who grew up in Lompoc, was completing her anthropology degree at Columbia University, she got the idea to call the Lompoc Historical Society to ask if they would be interested in having her start an oral history project.

It turned out that they didn’t need someone to start an oral history project, they needed someone to finish one.

In the archives of both the museum and the Historical Society were more than 90 hours of interviews with members of Lompoc’s founding families from an oral history project that ran from 1979 to about 1989.

“We had some envelopes with transcripts with no audio, some with only cassettes and some with both,” said Lompoc Museum Director Lisa Renken. “Audio cassettes have only a 10- to 20-year shelf-life, and it’s been 30 years. We knew they were disintegrating.”

So it really was a pleasant surprise when Sazani called wanting to do just the thing that needed to be done.

“I’ve been wanting to do oral history, so this is like a dream project where I have my hands in all aspects,” Sazani said.

Oral history seeks to record the memories of people who lived through a particular time. It differs from written history in how much more personal and subjective it is-though some might argue that all history is subjective.

“Oral history is good at capturing unheard stories,” said Sazani. “You can hear about some big legislation, but oral history shows how it plays out in individual people’s lives.”

“It makes history memorable,” said Renken.

Karen Paaske, president of the Lompoc Historical Society, gave an example of a memorable story from the transcript of an interview with Amelia Perozzi-Rhodes where she described watching the Lyndon school house float away toward Surf with its bell ringing in the flood of 1907.

With the aid of grants from the Santa Barbara Foundation, the Santa Barbara Arts Commission and Santa Barbara Bank and Trust, Sazani has already converted all of the audiocassettes to MP3 files. Now she is working on the arduous task of transcribing all of the interviews.

Because transcribing is such slow work, Sazani has enlisted volunteers and even gotten some college students — students studying sociology, history and/or anthropology at UCSB, Cal Poly and Westmont — to help via internships.

Because of this, Sazani also developed a guide for transcribers. Then, because one of the interns wanted to learn how to collect oral histories, Sazani also developed an oral history training program.

“Anyone can volunteer to record the oral history from someone they think would be good. We’ve written a whole guide,” Sazani said. “Then they can donate it to the Lompoc Historical Society and Lompoc Museum archives. It is all available online.”

In addition, Sazani has developed a two-day lesson plan for teachers who would like to explore oral history with their students. The lesson plan is customizable to work with students from 5th grade to 12th grade. This, too, can be found online by going to lompocoralhistory.tumblr.com and clicking “get involved.”

Little is known about the original project that ran from about 1979 to about 1989 other than that it was an all-volunteer project and that the group had an oral history manual.

“What was really cool was that they had an oral history instruction manual — it’s pretty famous and very accessible,” said Sazani.

Because so little is known about the original project — there were only a few notes jotted onto the minutes from a meeting — Renken and Paaske had to deduce that the original project was a joint venture of the museum and the Historical Society because of the duplicate files.

“Clearly it was a joint project from the beginning,” Renken said.

Though the original intent for the oral histories is unclear, Renken has big plans for them today.

“We hope to use the audio files in exhibits at the museum and at Artesia school,” Renken said, explaining that she envisioned patrons, using sound sticks, listening to excerpts from the interviews that coincide with displays.

“We’ve already come across Artesia in some of the interviews,” said Renken.

Paaske said the Historical Society would have CDs and transcripts in binders available for people doing research.