Enid Hart Douglass, who was largely responsible for developing the oral history program at Claremont Graduate University and led it for more than three decades, has died. She was 81.
Douglass, a former mayor of Claremont, died Oct. 17 at a care facility in Sunnyvale, Calif., from complications stemming from Alzheimer's disease, her family said.
As a graduate student at the school in the 1950s, she studied the letters of people who founded the nation and became interested in how history is preserved.
Oral history was still a fairly new academic pursuit -- the field was founded at Columbia University in 1948 -- when Douglass joined Claremont's program a year after it was launched in 1962. She was the program's director from 1971 until she retired in 2003.
In explaining the importance of preserving spoken history, Douglass told The Times in 1986, "You're as close to the event or incident as you can be with a primary source; there's nothing closer."
In 1969, the program embarked on its first major project, interviewing missionaries who had been in China before World War II. The goal was to study how Western values had influenced China.
In the 1980s, she started recording the voices of California's recent political heritage, a project fueled by the discovery "that people weren't keeping records anymore," she said in the 1986 Times article. "We have no feeling for what went into the decision-making."
She interviewed politicians including Jerry Voorhis, who served five terms representing California in Congress before losing his seat to Richard Nixon in 1946, and Walter Stiern, dean of the state Senate when he retired in 1986.
Fearing that institutional knowledge was dying out, the president of Atlantic Richfield Co. sent Douglass to Alaska in the 1970s to interview employees. He wanted a written history that might make Arco "more human and real," according to the 2003 book "Doing Oral History."
Her interest in the founding of America led her to believe that she could bring about grass-roots change, said Paul Douglass, one of her two sons.
She was appointed to Claremont's Planning Commission and in 1978 was elected to the first of two terms on the Claremont City Council. From 1982 to 1986, Douglass served as the city's mayor.
In 1979, she helped found Claremont Heritage, an organization devoted to preserving the area's history. It was one of her many civic causes.
