I Just Wanted a Tuesday–Thursday Class Schedule; What I Got Changed My Life

Abstract

Having been a hippie dropout in the sixties, I'd gone back to school at the University of Maine thirteen years later to finish my BA in history. I was commuting an hour each way to campus. And I had a thirteen-year-old daughter who was too young to date but was nonetheless hanging out with the fourteen-yearold boy next door. He was six feet tall and his voice had changed and every time he called her I had a maternal anxiety attack. So I was looking for that holy grail of all students and teachers, a Tuesday-Thursday schedule, so I wouldn't be away from home so much. My advisor suggested that I check with Ives who taught oral history and folklore fieldwork on Tuesdays and Thursdays. What's oral history, I asked. Go talk with Sandy, I was told. So I wended my way into the bowels of South Stevens Hall to the basement office of folklore professor Edward D. Sandy Ives. And I fell in love. With Sandy-who is without question one of the most wonderful people I knowand, through his class, with oral history. The assignment for the class was to interview someone and write a biographical sketch based on the tapes. We not only learned the basics of oral history methodology but also discussed the biographer's craft and obligations to her subject and readers. I came from a background in journalism where getting the story is the primary obligation. stressed a kind of personal integrity manifested in (but by no means limited to) respect for our narrators and readers. Creating lasting relationships with his informants, acknowledging their authorship and