Exterior view of Neville Hall when it was a new dormitory. Purchased February 17, 1986. Photographer: Edgar C. Loevenhart. b / w, 5.5 inches by 6.5 inches.

The latest episode of Saving Stories on WUKY is in celebration of University of Kentucky’s Founders Day.  Alan Lytle and Doug Boyd feature a clip of a 1975 interview with former student T.R. Bryant who talks in great detail about UK’s campus in 1902.  Thomas R. “T.R.” Bryant first came to the University of Kentucky in 1902 after winning a scholarship through a competitive examination held by the county superintendent. Bryant graduated in four years and obtained his first staff job at the university in 1908 as an assistant in animal science. Throughout this interview, Bryant discusses life on campus both as a student and staff member.  Also being discussed in this episode of Saving Stories, we discuss the kickoff of UK’s sesquicentennial celebration:    Listen to the episode

In this episode, Blair discusses the origins of the idea, their motivation behind the protest, as well as the aftermath of the sit-in.

Listen to the Episode

To hear the entire oral history interview, go to SPOKE, the Nunn Center’s online catalog of oral histories.

The Haiti Memory Project is the brainchild of Claire Antone Payton, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History and Institute of French Studies at NYU, where she focuses on Haitian history. Beginning in 2011, Payton partnered with our center (the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries), to house, preserve,digitize and make available to the public this important historical collection of narratives.  The Haiti Memory Project explores life in the Caribbean country before and after the earthquake. The project’s interviews offer Haitians the opportunity to tell their own story of what has happened to their homeland. While almost all of the interviews reference the earthquake, many of the accounts focus on life after the event, including life in refugee camps. Interviews range from 30 minutes to approximately two hours and reflect such topics as politics, culture, medicine, religion and attitudes toward foreigners. Payton collected the interviews between June and December 2010.

The Nunn Center intends for the oral history project to be accessible to researchers around the world via the Internet and provide Haitians access to this pivotal moment in their history. Our hope is to present these interviews online using the Nunn Center’s OHMS system for search and discovery.  To browse the Haiti Memory project collection in SPOKE, the Nunn Center’s online catalog of interview, go to http://www.kentuckyoralhistory.org.

To learn more about this amazing project take a look at a recent news story: http://www.kyforward.com/?p=7748

An interview with Morgan French, July 25, 1985

The searchable catalog contains the records for over 8,000 interviews and nearly 300 oral history projects.  SPOKE allows users to quickly browse the collections and projects based on subjects or names, or conduct a robust search of the collections, projects, and interviews.  Users can follow links from the catalog record to interviews or projects that are available online, or users can request to use interviews that are not yet online by using a convenient online form.

We are excited about providing web access to our rich collection and would welcome any feedback on SPOKE.  Again the collection catalog is located at the following link:http://www.kentuckyoralhistory.org

Doug and Sara Price taught a pre-conference workshop for 40 participants about digital preservation of oral history and they both served on the panel From Combat to Kentucky: Student Veteran Oral History Project. Sara Price also chaired the panel Community, Conquest, and Childlessness: The Role of Oral History in Gambia’s Past and Present and served on the conference program committee as well. Click here to see the conference program.

A conference highlight was the Nunn Center’s documentary Quest for the Perfect Bourbon: Voices of Buffalo Trace Distillery, directed by filmmaker and oral historian Joanna Hay, won honorable mention for the association’s non-print award.  The documentary, which you can view online, was based on the Nunn Center’s Buffalo Trace Distillery Oral History Project.  On Wednesday night, the film was shown in its entirety followed by a bourbon tasting hosted by the Buffalo Trace Distillery.

Overall, it was an excellent week for the Nunn Center at the Oral History Association’s annual meeting and we are already preparing for Cleveland’s meeting in 2012.

To listen to the entire interview:

 
The following article about the interview was featured in the Lexington Herald Leader , May 21, 1994:

KENTUCKIAN’S MEMORIES UK RESEARCHER FELT AT EASE DURING INTERVIEW

Lexington Herald-Leader (KY) - Saturday, May 21, 1994

Author/Byline: DOTTIE BEAN, HERALD-LEADER EDUCATION WRITER

On the afternoon of May 13, 1981, University of Kentucky researcher Terry L. Birdwhistell left the Algonquin Hotel in New York for an appointment with history.His assignment was one that many journalists, historians and biographers would envy: An interview with the elusive Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.As he sat in the library of Mrs. Onassis’ apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, his nerves were on edge.”She was often described as aloof and cold, but she walked into that room and immediately put me at ease.”The interview focused on the friendship between the Kennedys and the late Sen. John Sherman Cooper, a Kentucky statesman. The edited contents were circulated in 1990, in a scholarly journal published by the University of
Kentucky. Copies of the tape Birdwhistell made during the interview have been available to scholars, historians and others who have researched Cooper and the Kennedys.But over the years, Birdswhistell, director of UK’s Oral History Program, has been discreet about his encounter with the woman America first came to know as its stylish young first lady, then as a bereaved widow and finally as Jackie O.The few people who knew about the interview were excited, but wanted to know more about what Mrs. Onassis wore than her recollections, Birdwhistell said.He agreed to talk about the interview yesterday after Mrs. Onassis’ death, but still withheld some details — such as what she wore for the interview.Mrs. Onassis, who in 1981 was working as a senior editor at Doubleday & Co., granted the time so Birdwhistell could record some of her memories of Cooper and his wife, Lorraine.”I thought we owed her an obligation to treat it in the same spirit in which she gave it.

“And our goal is not publicity; our goal is history.”

Birdwhistell used a straightforward approach: He wrote her a letter on April 14, 1981, explaining the oral history project and asking her to talk about Cooper.

“I started doing oral history in my early 20s,” said Birdwhistell , 43. “My philosophy has always been that they can’t turn you down if you don’t ask.”

He received a call on April 23 from Mrs. Onassis’ representative, Nancy Tuckerman of Doubleday & Co., agreeing to the interview.

When he arrived at Mrs. Onassis’ apartment, he was surprised at how easily he obtained entry. He was directed to an elevator, allowed to ride alone to Mrs. Onassis’ floor, where he was met by a doorman and taken to the library.

They were served a tray of sandwiches and iced tea, he said.

No, he doesn’t remember what kind of sandwiches. “I was too nervous to eat.”

IN JACKIE’S WORDS
In 1990, Terry Birdwhistell ’s interview with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis appeared in The Kentucky Review, a journal published by the University of
Kentucky Library Associates.

Here are some selected comments made by Onassis during the 1981 interview:

On Sen. John Sherman Cooper: My first impression of Senator Cooper is the same as my present impression — his wisdom, his humor, such a fine, fine man.

On the Kennedys’ friendship with Cooper and his wife, Lorraine: To show you what good friends we were — I think I’m right in this — the first dinner party we went to after we were in the White House was at the Coopers’.

On whether the Coopers enjoyed Washington social life: I never like to say “enjoy the social life,” because I think that sounds trivial and frivolous. If this is being done for history, as if the social life is an important. . . . I don’t know, everybody rushes in. Who’s in? Who’s out? You know, he’s (Cooper’s) too profound for that silly treadmill I have no esteem for.

On the Warren Commission: Somehow I had this feeling of, what did it matter what they found out? They could never bring back the person who was gone. Obviously, I knew it had to be done.

On her recollections of White House life: So many people, you know, hit the White House with their dictaphone running. I never even kept a journal. I thought, “I want to live my life, not record it.”

And I’m still glad I did that. But I think there’s so many things that I’ve forgotten.

Listen to the latest episode of Saving Stories on WUKY where we talk about the publication of Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community by Nunn Center Director Douglas A. Boyd.  The book was published by University Press of Kentucky.

Listen to the epidsode

Here is the Description of the book:

A small neighborhood in northern Frankfort, Kentucky, Crawfish Bottom was located on fifty acres of swampy land along the Kentucky River. “Craw’s” reputation for vice, violence, moral corruption, and unsanitary conditions made it a target for urban renewal projects that replaced the neighborhood with the city’s Capital Plaza in the mid-1960s.

Douglas A. Boyd’s Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community traces the evolution of the controversial community that ultimately saw four-hundred families displaced. Using oral histories and firsthand memories, Boyd not only provides a record of a vanished neighborhood and its culture but also demonstrates how this type of study enhances the historical record. A former Frankfort police officer describes Craw’s residents as a “rough class of people, who didn’t mind killing or being killed.” In Crawfish Bottom, the former residents of Craw acknowledge the popular misconceptions about their community but offer a richer and more balanced view of the past.

Book signing at Morris Book Shop, Lexington, KY August 6, 2011.  For more information go to www.crawfishbottom.com