Oral History

For anyone who has ever wandered onto a movie set -- or those who are just baffled by such terms as "gabo," "hair in the gate," "four-banger" or a "Mickey Rooney," let alone more standard lingo like "grips," "gaffers" and "best boy" -- Tony Bill has come to the rescue.

Get to know your neighbors in rural America. A new app created by the Museum on Main Street within the Smithsonian Institution Travel Exhibition Service builds a dialogue with interactive oral history. Name: Stories From Main Street Available for: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad What it does: Shares the voices and stories of small-town America. Cost: Free What's hot: Oral histories are underrated and a valuable tool for connecting generations.

Decades of Westwood Village history are recounted by the late Jimmy Hakes, founder of the Westwood Book Store, in an oral history volume on loan at the UCLA University Research Library's Department of Special Collections. The book is provided by UCLA's oral history program and can be read free of charge.

Dorothy Young was a 17-year-old New York City tourist in 1925 when she spotted an ad placed by master illusionist Harry Houdini seeking "girl dancer for Broadway show and tour of the United States. " She scurried to the tryouts and shyly hid in the back before being summoned to audition by Houdini and his manager. After breaking out in a Charleston, she was hired on the spot. When her mother and father, a minister, refused to allow her to join the traveling stage show, Houdini persuaded her parents that he and his wife "would look after me as their very own daughter, which they did," Young recalled in a 2000 oral history.

James Dodson considers himself an archeologist of ordinary memories. From recollections of some "old bums" who lived under a lettuce shed to memories of building a four-bedroom house for $75, Dodson's oral history library at Valley College is a catchall of commonplace life in the San Fernando Valley during the first four decades of this century.

Henry Ford said it all: "History is bunk!" And sometimes it is. Pages of names, dates and places; volumes of things to memorize, regurgitate and subsequently forget. But that old way of catching up with the past is, well, history--thanks to an innovative project at Cal State Fullerton. The Oral History program originally began as a project where students tape-recorded the experiences and life stories of Orange County's townships and people in their own communities.

Steve Barrios knows all about passing along stories. The kind of fleeting tales that zoom through cyberspace via MySpace and e-mail recounting the latest gossip on campus. But not until recently did the 16-year-old discover a new kind of storytelling, the ancient form of oral history.

Nancy Reagan wanted automobile license plates personalized with her initials, NDR. So Verne Orr set out to fulfill her wish. After all, he was director of the state Department of Motor Vehicles and she was the wife of his boss, the governor. But Michael Deaver, then a top aide to Gov. Ronald Reagan and later deputy chief of the White House staff, told Orr to drop the idea. Deaver was afraid the plates would make Mrs. Reagan's car easily identifiable to terrorists. A month later, Mrs.

For nearly 40 years, the nameless, faceless farmhands who labored in fields, protested against growers and demonstrated for fair wages and decent housing have remained in the shadow of Cesar Chavez, the symbol of the farm workers' struggle. Now, these men and women are emerging through first-person accounts of the formation and early days of a labor movement that began in 1962 on rural farms in the San Joaquin Valley and spilled over into other movements in urban corridors across America.

School officials have applied for a $150,000 state grant that would allow Huntington Beach High School students to participate along with senior citizens in an intergenerational oral history and computer tutorial program. The seniors would give students in 11th-grade American history classes an oral account of their lives and times.

If you owned a surfboard 20, 40 or even 60 years ago, and used it often, there's a group of people in San Clemente who would really like to hear from you. Maybe you surfed a stretch of coastline when the waves were taller than they are today — because a certain harbor and breakwater didn't exist back then. Maybe you surfed in a time and place where few others did. Like Dick Huffman, now 98, who would go out to the beaches of Corona del Mar in the 1920s with a bathing suit, some lumber and an ax, and make his own board before heading into the water.

The men are wearing neckties. The women are in hats, many of them holding babies. There are 187 people in the black-and-white photograph standing in front of a building, all of them Japanese except for three white people, a man toward the back with a long white beard and two partly obscured women. The photo was taken Nov. 24, 1923. "Commemorative photograph of the dedication ceremony for the farm cooperative hall at the Port of San Pedro, Calif., U.S.A." is the caption, written in Japanese.

Steve Barrios knows all about passing along stories. The kind of fleeting tales that zoom through cyberspace via MySpace and e-mail recounting the latest gossip on campus. But not until recently did the 16-year-old discover a new kind of storytelling, the ancient form of oral history.

For anyone who has ever wandered onto a movie set -- or those who are just baffled by such terms as "gabo," "hair in the gate," "four-banger" or a "Mickey Rooney," let alone more standard lingo like "grips," "gaffers" and "best boy" -- Tony Bill has come to the rescue.

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.

Columbia University and the Apollo Theater Foundation plan to create an oral history of the famed Harlem theater that launched the careers of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson and other music legends. The Apollo Theater Oral History Project will feature interviews with performers as well as cultural figures and politicians who helped make Harlem one of the nation's most vibrant communities. Planned as part of the landmark theater's 75th anniversary in 2009, the project is scheduled to be completed in 2010 and will include an online component.

Benis M. Frank, a Marine Corps chief historian who started the military branch's oral history program, died March 10 at Prince George's Hospital Center in Cheverly, Md. He was 82 and had congestive heart failure. Frank was a Marine Corps veteran of World War II and the Korean War and rose to the rank of captain in the Marine Corps Reserve. After a career in sales and teaching, he took a civilian job with the Marine Corps in 1961.

Five leading developers who helped create the Los Angeles of today reminisced about their activities in a discussion sponsored by the Los Angeles Regional Planning History Group and the Huntington Library, with the cooperation of the oral history department of UCLA. The objective was to record recollections of the building, planning, development and design of the Los Angeles region from the perspective of Ray Watt, Joseph Leggett, Walter H. Leimert Jr., Fred Marlow and John D. Lusk. Calvin S.

As children lofted soccer balls in MacArthur Park and ice cream vendors passed with bells ringing, a dozen Latino parents and the Real Madrid girls' soccer team crowded around an unfamiliar silver Airstream trailer earlier this week, full of questions. A Honduran immigrant, Miguel Velasquez, emerged and explained in Spanish to the group that the trailer is part of StoryCorps, a Brooklyn, N.Y.

As U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad and the statue of Saddam Hussein came down in April 2003, reporters on the ground quickly realized that they were not witnessing the unbridled joy on the part of Iraqis they had seen at the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Instead, the journalists encountered a mix of cheers and trepidation that turned out to be a harbinger of the future. An ophthalmologist standing beside Cox Newspapers' Larry Kaplow complained about the small American flags attached to the tank antennas.