Start reading
Remove from Saved
Add to list
Download to app
Share
Memories of the Quaker Past: Stories of Thirty-Seven Senior Quakers
By Xlibris US
546 pages
17 hours
Included in your membership!
at no additional cost
Description
The book consists of excerpts from interviews of senior members
of State College Friends Meeting. The narrators who lived
through the Great Depression tell of their difficult childhoodand yet in
most cases one they regarded as happy. Some of the conscientious objectors
during WWII tell of life in CPS camps; others speak of using nonviolent
methods with mental patients, while still others relate the story of the human
guinea experiments some of them participated in.
Of those who did relief work after the war overseas, probably the
most exciting tales are told by the four who worked with the Friends
Ambulance Unit in China. They happened to be located close to where the
Nationalists and the Communists were fighting.
======
Buy on FJ Amazon Store
This volume of excerpted and transcribed interviews is another rich resource as well as a treasure of memories. As the author explains, the interviews were conducted by the Oral History Project of State College (Pa.) Meeting; all the subjects were meeting members, although they came from various places. The 37 senior Quakers in the book all reached adulthood in the mid-twentieth-century, when the Great Depression, World War II and its aftermath, and the Vietnam War made deep impressions on them, resulting in a great deal of personal dedication to resisting combat service, helping others, and working to take away the causes of war in the future.
The text is 341 pages (and generous with photos), followed by a bibliography and an 18-page index.
==
Introduction
In 1996, the State College Friends Meeting initiated the Oral His-
tory Project; the purpose of the project was to preserve by audio-
tape and in print the personal memories of its seniors (those who
were sixty years old or older). Shortly thereafter, Mae Smith Bixby
started a similar project at Foxdale Village. Subsequently, the two
projects were amalgamated. We have now conducted over two
hundred interviews; about a third of these were interviews of
Quakers. For this book, we have chosen thirty-seven interviews—
all of them interviews of Quakers.
We feel that these life histories may serve as a very valuable re-
search tool, especially considering the tumultuous epoch
spanned by these lives.
The narrators in our study were born be-
tween 1910 (they would have been 86 when we started our inter-
views in 1996) and 1940 (they would have been 66 when we con-
ducted our last interviews).
However, most of the narrators ex-
perienced the Great Depression in their childhood and came of
age at the time of the Second World War. Social scientists in-
creasingly appreciate the value of longitudinal studies—formal
and informal—for increasing our appreciation of human
==
development. In our oral histories, we have the added benefit of
focusing on women’s lives as well as men’s. President Martina
Horner of Radcliffe College, talking about the need for the Murray
Research Center, A Center for the Study of Lives, says, “Few studies
examined lives over many years and stages of development, and
those that did rarely used the same measurements.” She went on
to talk of the “disturbing truth that so few of the existing studies
included women participants, even when gender was an impor-
tant factor.”
It was not possible to include whole interviews because of
their lengths. Instead, excerpts from the interviews have been se-
lected. In this way, we have the narrators’ stories in their own
words. Because some details have been left out and also because
narrators do not always tell their life stories in sequence, a brief
biography of each narrator is provided before the excerpts from
his/her interview.
The choice of interviews to include was a difficult one. I made
the decision to include these particular thirty-seven interviews
more or less subjectively, i.e., I had no set criteria. It would have
been nice to include excerpts from more of the seventy-five Quak-
er interviews. But because of space limitations, it would not have
==
been possible to include enough excerpts from any one interview.
It was also difficult to decide in which order to place the
(abridged) interviews. If they had fallen neatly into three or four
categories, our task would have been easy. But they didn’t. Sev-
eral were in Civilian Public Service (CPS) camps during the Sec-
ond World War. Several did relief work overseas after the war, and
several were teachers or researchers. But there were a number of
narrators who were not included in any of these groups, and in
fact, they did not fall into natural groups. I have kept the inter-
views of husband and wife together when they have both been
interviewed. And I have tried to arrange the interviews so that
each interview has something in common with the one that fol-
lows it.
Two of the interviews in this collection are rather special. One
is an interview of my father, Lloyd Williams. He was interviewed
in 1968, and it was that interview which made me aware of the
importance of oral history. Subsequently, I suggested that we
start an oral history project in the meeting—which we did. The
other interview is one of Alice Hoffman. Alice, a long-time mem-
ber of State College Meeting, is a prominent oral historian. She
was very helpful in the launching of our project. She came to
==
State College to conduct a workshop for committee members.
Much of her interview deals with her time in State College.
I am responsible for writing the short biographies and choos-
ing the excerpts. For the latter task, I was given help—especially
by Lu Evans. Except for minor changes, the language is that of the
narrator. However, for the sake of clarity, I have sometimes bro-
ken a very long sentence into two, or even more, sentences, or
made other minor changes. Where words have been added, again
for the sake of clarity, they are enclosed in square brackets ([ ]).
A story is always made more vivid with the addition of pic-
tures. So we solicited pictures from the narrators; Lu Evans was
most helpful in doing this. Other pictures were obtained from
various sources, many of which are noted in the list of illus-
trations.
The original committee for the Oral History Project consisted
of Mae Smith Bixby, Bunny Moon, Christine Ayoub, Peg Doms,
Jane Jenks Small, Marjorie Smith and Reed Smith (I have not
mentioned two or three members who very soon left the com-
mittee). The first two—Mae and Bunny—made transcriptions of
the interviews; the rest were interviewers. We were most fortunate
in having two experienced individuals to do the transcriptions. It
==
is a difficult—and sometimes tedious—task which requires both
skill and patience. All but three of the interviews in this collection
were conducted by original members of the committee.
At the beginning of each interview, along with the name of the
narrator, is the name of the interviewer. In addition to the actual
interview, the interviewer has numerous other tasks to perform—
contacting the narrator, seeing to the equipment, having the inter-
view proofread, and seeing that the transcribed interview is
placed in the library, etc. I cannot speak too highly of the work of
all the committee members. They were a dedicated group who
did a painstaking job. Sadly, we have lost three of these mem-
bers. Mae died in 2000, leaving Bunny as the only person to do
the transcriptions. In 2006, Marjorie died, and in 2011 Reed died.
They are sorely missed.
Finally, I should like to express my thanks for all the financial
aid we have received. We received grants from the Publications
Grants Committee and from the Bequest Granting Committee of
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The former grant was responsible
for much of the funding of this publication. We also received a
grant from the Reynolds Fund of Baltimore Yearly Meeting. In
addition, we have received continuing financial support both
from State College Friends Meeting and from the Residents As-
sociation of Foxdale Village.
I have had much support and encouragement from members
of the meeting as well as from residents of Foxdale. Foremost
among these has been my husband, who has watched patiently
as I struggle with the computer and who bailed me out when I
cried for help.
===
