ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ORANGE COUNTRY PIONEER COUNCIL INTERVIEWS
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About this Project
Title
Orange County Pioneer Council Oral History Project
Date(s)
1984 to present
Extent
91 original interviews and 45 pre-existing interviews
Repository
Center for Oral and Public History
California State University, Fullerton
Project Abstract
In 1981 Orange County’s centennial was approaching. A program at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana that acknowledged the role of many cultural groups in Orange County inspired Jack Ball and Bill Lowe to form a group to recognize the contributions of early Californians. Along with Donald Kennedy they organized the Orange County Pioneer Council.
Membership was extended to anyone whose family had lived in the county prior to 1914. Many pioneers attended the Council’s first gala party at the Santa Ana Country Club on January 26, 1983 and agreed to support an oral history project to record memories of family life in the early decades of the twentieth century. The Council would not only conduct interviews, but it would also provide the narrators from among the its membership. The initial interview was conducted on July 31, 1984 by Ann L. Spencer with Clare Sharpless Marks whose family came to Orange County in 1909.
Over the years responsibility for gathering interviews passed from Ann Spencer to Patty Bothamly to Bettie Webber and finally to Eileen DeCair. They worked with the volunteers who conducted the interviews––stalwarts like Annabell McFadden Rasmussen, Maureen Rischard, Barbara Oldewage, Karen Reese, and William Gulley––all of whom conducted at least four but as many as eleven interviews. The Council took the tapes to Cal State Fullerton’s Oral History Program (OHP) to be transcribed, edited, indexed, and bound. Photos and ephemeral material were included with bound transcripts whenever possible.
In addition, to reach further back in county history, the Council funded completion of existing interviews in the OPH archive that had been done earlier by well-know county historians like Esther Cramer, Jim Sleeper, and Stephen Gould. The project of origin for these earlier interviews is listed along with the Orange County Pioneer Council project. Of note is Cramer’s La Habra Valley project that was a series of thirty interviews conducted between 1963-1965 and 1970, before oral history techniques were taught at Cal State Fullerton. The interviews lay dormant until 1999 when the Pioneer Council provided funds to process them. They are collected in five volumes; the last was completed in 2005. Sleeper’s interviews were conducted while he was the historian for the Irvine Company during the 1960s and 1970s.
All of the interviews are available at six locations throughout the county: Chapman University; Old Courthouse Museum; Santa Ana Public Library; The First American Corporation; University of California, Irvine; and California State University, Fullerton.
Restrictions
None
Literary Rights and Quotations
The oral histories are made available for research purposes only. No part of the audio tape or the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Center for Oral and Public History, California State University, Fullerton.
Requests for permission to quote from these materials should be addressed to:
Center for Oral and Public History
California State University, Fullerton
P.O. Box 6846
Fullerton, CA 92834
The request should include identification of the specific passages and identification of the user.
We plan to add photos where available, if you have a photo to submit please contact us at COPH
Please click on a letter of the alphabet above to download abstracts of interviews in pdf format.
