About the interviews

The Oral History Center regularly conducts longer life history interviews as well as shorter topical interviews with individuals who have made important contributions to the areas of commerce, industry, and labor. These oral histories may be with individuals who have founded and managed corporations, people who have contributed expertise and spurred innovation in business, or those who represented workers through unions or other organizations. The interviews listed here typically were not conducted as part of an ongoing project. Instead, the majority of these interviews document the singular contributions of individuals to the economic life of the United States and the larger global arena. Interviews are added to this subject category as they are completed. 

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Project resources

Additional oral history interview projects with substantive content on the history of commerce, industry, and labor include:

Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream  

Economists Life Stories

Global Mining

Kaiser Permanente Medical Care

Slaying the Dragon of Debt: U.S. Fiscal Politics and Policy

Venture Capitalists

Western Mining
 

The Port Chicago Oral History Collection rounds out the oral histories about Port Chicago that are already in the Oral History Center’s collection. This new collection of nine oral histories are told from the perspective of the survivors themselves. The Center’s existing collection talks about Port Chicago from a variety of voices, such as sailors on base, teenagers in town, and congressmen working to memorialize Port Chicago as a national park. These new oral histories were conducted by Robert Allen, activist, writer, and retired professor of African-American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the UC Berkeley. First published in 1993 and subsequently in 2006, Dr. Allen's book, The Port Chicago Mutiny: The Story of the Largest Mass Mutiny Trial in the US. Naval History, is the leading scholarly source on the events at Port Chicago. During the course of his research, Allen was able to interview many of the surviving sailors; all of his narrators are now deceased. These interviews are the some of the only surviving first-person accounts of the events. Preserving such important primary sources is critical in preserving the history of these events.

Oral Histories synced to audio

Martin Bordenave

Jack Crittenden

Freddie Meeks

Percy Robinson

Robert Routh

Cyril Sheppard

Joe Small Interview 1

Joe Small Interview 2

Joe Small Interview 4

Edward Waldrop

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the National Park Service for funding the preservation, digitization, and access to these oral history interviews, as well as to Dr. Allen's Port Chicago and Civil Rights collections in partnership with The Bancroft Library. 

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Project resources

Robert Allen Port Chicago Papers

Robert L. Allen Bancroft Library Papers

OHC Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front Oral Histories relating to Port Chicago

This project records the stories of Portuguese immigrants and their descendants in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond who represent various aspects of the history of this early immigrant group. Portuguese began arriving in California aboard American whaling ships—upon which many served—well before the Gold Rush. Although settling in urban areas as well, Portuguese have traditionally preferred to follow agricultural pursuits, where they have been especially active in the state’s dairy industry.

Immigration from Portugal (mainly from the Atlantic archipelagoes of the Azores and Madeira, as well as Cape Verde, now an independent nation) peaked in the first years of the past century and then again in a second wave in the 1960s and 1970s. It is the voices of these people and their descendants that have been the target of this oral history series, which began in the fall of 2002.

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Project resources

Video excerpts

Related resources

Center for Portuguese Studies

About the project

The OAB was recommended for closure by the Base Realignment and Closure Commission in 1995 and finally shut its doors in September 1999. Ownership of the base was transferred to the City of Oakland (City) and to the Port of Oakland (Port) in 2006. Parts of the OAB were determined eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) as a discontiguous historic district. Redevelopment of the OAB by the City and the Port would remove all resources contributing to the OAB Historic District rendering it no longer eligible for the NRHP. The loss of the OAB Historic District was determined a significant impact by the Oakland Army Base Area Redevelopment Plan Environmental Impact Report (EIR), which identified mitigation measures to partially compensate for the loss. The Oakland Army Base Oral History Project implements recommended cultural resources mitigation measures from the Final EIR. The City and the Port jointly fund this project.

This oral history project on the OAB is intended, first and foremost, to capture living memories of a now closed institution. Beyond the basic act of recovering memories, however, the project seeks to gain information about: the core functions of the base as part of the Port of Embarkation, as headquarters for the Military Traffic Management Command, Western Area, and as a key element of the Port of Oakland, one of the largest deep-water ports in the United States; the social, cultural, and military life on the base as it relates to a wide variety of issues including labor, housing, politics, public order, and the environment; and the relationship between the OAB and the surrounding world, from immediate community of West Oakland to the City and Port of Oakland to the rest of the world.

The OAB Oral History Project is designed to last three years. During the first two years of the project, approximately 45 interviews shall be conducted on the topics mentioned above with veterans, former base employees, community members, and policy makers. The interviews are transcribed, reviewed by the interviewees, and then posted on this website (the Regional Oral History Office is in compliance with the UC Berkeley Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects.) The final year of the project will be devoted to creating a book about the OAB based primarily upon the oral history interviews.

Project team (2007-2009)
Martin Meeker, Project Director and Interviewer
Vic Geraci, Associate Director of ROHO
Lisa Rubens, Interviewer
Ann Lage, Interviewer
Robin Li, Interviewer
Jess Rigelhaupt, Interviewer
Julie Allen, Production Coordinator
David Dunham, Web/Video Editor

Funding
The Oakland Army Base Oral history project is funded through a contract with the Port of Oakland and the City of Oakland for the duration of three years.

Statement of Scholarly Independence
Although funded by the Port of Oakland and the City of Oakland, this project was planned and is being executed as an independent scholarly research project; individual interviewees are covered by UC Berkeley Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects guidelines that provide for sealing portions of interview transcripts at the discretion of the interviewee. While the research design and interviewing are independent of the Port and the City, we have been assisted by staff at both institutions in identifying research themes and in selecting and locating potential interviewees.

Bibliography

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Project resources

Thematic focus

We propose to select interviewees and conduct interviews with an eye to addressing three overarching themes, each of which contain a number of research questions and subthemes:

1. Core Base Functions: By focusing on “core base functions” we intent to explore the raison d’etre of the OARB: its role as the point on embarkation for supplies, weapons, and troops. We propose to examine the following issues:
   1. Technology and labor: the sixty years from the beginning of the Second World War to the decommissioning of the OARB witnessed vast changes in the use of technology and labor for supplying the military. We will explore the nature of these changes and how they played out on the piers and in the warehouses of the base.
   2. Military objectives and tasks: Work on the base varied greatly from wartime to peacetime, and from one era to the next. We will explore the relationship between the context of worldwide and hemispheric military engagements and the kind of work accomplished on the base.
   3. Military and capital/trade: Presuming there is a close relationship between U.S. military action and the opening (or closing) of foreign markets to U.S. commerce, we will explore the role played by the OARB in the management of this relationship in both larger global matters but also developments closer to home, such as the military command of the Port in WWII and the gradual transfer of base land to the port in the 1990s.
   4. Transportation networks:  As a port of embarkation, the OARB served as a hub, linking two great transportation networks: road and rail on the land and ships at sea. Interviews will explore not only what (and who) traversed those networks, but will examine how those networks changed along with the ramifications of those changes, such as the emergence of intermodal transport.
2. City within a City: With a varying population that, at times, reached the tens of thousands, the OARB was a city within a city. We propose to explore the internal life of the army base by focusing on:
   1. Community and cultural life: For residents of and contractors working at the OARB, the base provided not only the necessities of life (food and shelter), but also made an effort to sustain community and culture. Interviews will explore all facets of cultural life, including: religion (individual and communal experiences), entertainment (movies, dances, concerts), athletics (baseball, bowling), sociability (clubs, bars, mess halls), and foodways (from MREs to the officer’s dining hall).
   2. Governance and Order: Like any city, the base required a local structure of governance to maintain working order (sewers, water, power), including policing apparatus to keep public order. We will examine the ‘local’ governance structure with an eye to explaining how the various arms of it accomplished their assigned tasks; interviews will examine how base life facilitated order but also incidents when it was undermined.
   3. Housing, health, and well-being: Public health and housing take on new meanings when the site under consideration is a military base, where the federal government is obliged to provide all the basic needs of its residents. Interviews will explore the military-model of housing and health provision. We will also examine the place of families, children, and schooling on the base.
   4. Military and social hierarchies: Hierarchical to its core, military order and function derives from and is integral to its structure. Interviews will explore the ways in which hierarchies of rank were mobilized to serve the mission of the OARB, but also instances in which rank hierarchies were questioned.  We also will examine historically variable hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality at the base across all project themes. 
3. Community Impact:  Being a city within a city, the OARB was compelled to interact with surrounding communities, cities, and regions as part of its mission. We propose to explore the impact of the OARB on the surrounding communities, and vice versa, by focusing on the following issues and questions:
   1. City of Oakland and Alameda County governance: Because of state and federal precedence, city bureaucrats and elected officials find the governing of municipalities difficult. This is compounded when a massive federal institution sits immediately adjacent to the city in question. Although many cities compete for new military bases, others lament the difficulties caused by those already present. Located in a large urban area, the OARB was an integral part of the patterns of everyday life and the eruptions of sensational events that make up the history of the San Francisco Bay Area since the beginning of World War II. Interviews will explore the ways in which local government dealt with the OARB and vice versa.
   2. Public order and policing:  One of the most important, and troubling, arenas of base - community interaction came with policing and public order. Interviews will explore how several difference policing forces (Oakland Police Department, Alameda County Sheriff, base MPs, Shore Patrol, Armed Forces Disciplinary Control Board) addressed issues related to soldier behavior (e.g. AWOLs, public drunkenness, rape), vice (prostitution, gambling, drugs), etc.
   3. Politics and protest:  As an outpost for both the military and federal government, the OARB was a lightening rod for community pride and protest. Interviews will examine instances in which the surrounding community looked to the base as a national pride (e.g. VJ day, Memorial Days) and as a source of national shame (i.e. during the Vietnam War and the anti-nuclear movement).
   4. Community outreach and crisis mitigation: Beyond the obvious times of stress during protests, the OARB and the surrounding community (particularly of West Oakland) had to maintain a stable working atmosphere. Interviews will explore the mechanisms, protocols, and organizations established to facilitate constant contact between the base and the surrounding communities.
   5. Environment:  Perhaps the most profound and longest-lasting impact the base has had (and will continue to have) on the surrounding communities comes in terms of its environmental impact. Interviews will explore how the OARB impacted the local environment from landfill programs to oil spills to cleanups following decommissioning.
   6. OARB and Port of Oakland relations: Sharing the same waterfront and engaging in the same larger project of producing wealth from the nation, the OARB and the Port of Oakland still were two very different entities who had to work together closely over the entire period of this study. We will explore the larger issues as well as the intricacies of this relationship.

Oakland Army Base book

To your reserve your copy of the Oakland Army Base book, please send your name, address, email, and phone number to Paul Burnett with ‘OAB Book’ in the subject line.

• Excerpt: CHAPTER 3: The Oakland Army Base and the American Dream
• Read Oakland Tribune Article on Oakland Army Base Oral History Project Book.
• Read UCB article: “Oral history weaves story of the Oakland Army Base and its profound region-wide impact.”

Related resources

Port of Oakland

City of Oakland

California State Military Museum

Oakland Museum of California

Brief history of the Surface Deployment and Distribution Command (formerly the Military Traffic Management Command)

Historical overview of the Oakland Army Base

Randy Wayne Schekman: Cell Biologist and UC Berkeley Nobel Laureate Oral History Transcript 

This oral history with Randy Schekman is one in a series documenting bioscience and biotechnology in Northern California. Schekman’s research investigates fundamental cellular processes at the molecular, biochemical, and genetic levels. In the interviews, he describes the work which illuminates the mechanism and control of the complex intracellular pathways by which proteins are transported within the living cell. It was this body of research which led to the highest honors in biology, the Lasker Award in Basic Medical Research in 2002 and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013. Interviews conducted by Sally Smith Hughes in 2014.

Related resources

Dr. Schekman’s 2012 oral history for the Daniel Koshland Retrospective.

Information about this project is coming soon.

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On the Waterfront: An Oral History of Richmond, California, is a collection of 18 oral history volumes based on interviews with 20 Bay Area residents. They include members of early Richmond families, black and white, World War II Kaiser Shipyard workers recruited from the South and Midwest, cannery workers, fishermen, and whalers. Interviews with longtime Richmond residents and new arrivals during the wartime boom document the transformation of this small working-class town during World War II. For related oral histories, please see Rosie the Riveter/World War II American Homefront Oral History Project.

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In collaboration with the National Park Service and the City of Richmond, the Oral History Center conducted over 250 interviews focusing on the World War II Home Front experience. Starting with over one hundred interviews focused on the home front experiences in the Bay Area, we focused on why people from different backgrounds came to the Bay Area, what they did when they arrived, and what they learned from the fluidity and flux of wartime life that affected decisions they made after the war ended. What did women learn about the relationships between work and family life? How did attitudes change toward education? How did war affect race relations and reshape civil rights struggles? Did new ideas about sexuality take root, and if so, why and where? What happened to entertainment? To what degree did religious organizations provide people with a new sense of community? Oral histories collected are used in the National Park Service’s Visitor Education Center at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Homefront National Historic Park and the Bancroft Library and available online below in transcript — and when possible — with videos synced to transcripts.

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Project resources

Video excerpts

Related themes

• Migration
• Discrimination
• Kaiser Shipyards

Related resources

Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park

Rosie the Riveter Trust

Rosie the Riveter Revisited, Cal State University, Long Beach

The Marion and Herbert Sandler oral history project documents the intertwined lives of the Sandlers through their shared pursuits in raising a family, serving as co-CEOs for the savings and loan Golden West Financial, and establishing a remarkably influential philanthropy in the Sandler Foundation. This project consists of eighteen unique oral history interviews, at the center of which is a 24-hour life history interview with Herb Sandler. All project interviews were conducted by Martin Meeker between January 2017 and July 2018.

Marion Osher Sandler was born October 17, 1930, in Biddeford, Maine, to Samuel and Leah Osher. She was the youngest of five children; all of her siblings were brothers and all went on to distinguished careers in medicine and business. She attended Wellesley as an undergraduate where she was elected into Phi Beta Kappa. She took a job on Wall Street, in the process becoming only the second woman on Wall Street to hold a non-clerical position. She started with Dominick & Dominick in its executive training program and then moved to Oppenheimer and Company where she worked as a highly respected analyst. While building an impressive career on Wall Street, she earned her MBA at New York University. Herbert Sandler is an American philanthropist and businessman. Sandler was born in New York City in 1931 and was raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side neighborhood. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1951 and from the Columbia School of Law in 1954. He worked as an attorney in private practice and for the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor. Sandler met Marion Osher in 1960 and they wed in 1961. Herb and Marion Sandler moved to California in 1962 in order to purchase a small savings and loan institution. The Sandlers both served as CEOs of the institution, which was named Golden West Financial Corporation. The operating subsidiary was named Golden West Savings and later renamed to World Savings. The Sandlers sold Golden West in 2006 as they had been devoting more of their time to philanthropy. Through the Sandler Foundation, the Sandlers invested heavily in many existing organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, and founded several others, including ProPublica and the Center for American Progress.

In these oral history interviews, the narrators discuss the following topics, among many others: Sandler and Osher family background and upbringing; education and law school; the life and work of Marion Osher Sander; the practice of law in New York City; the purchase, expansion, culture, business model, and governance of Golden West Financial; the Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980s; the financial crisis of the 2000s; and the establishment, administration, interests, and leadership of the Sandler Foundation; key receipients of support, including: American Civil Liberties Union, University of California San Francisco, ProPublica, Center for American Progress, Center for Responsible Lending, Human Rights Watch, and more.

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About the project

In 1970, shortly after the first Earth Day, a collaboration arose between the Sierra Club, one of the oldest and most influential environmental organizations in the United States, and the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library, one of the oldest organizations professionally recording and preserving oral history interviews. Over the past half-century, this ongoing collaboration has produced an unprecedented testimony of engagement in and on behalf of the environment as experienced by individual members and leaders of Sierra Club. 

Sierra Club volunteers helped conduct several interviews in the Sierra Club Oral History Project. But then, as now, extensive and deeply researched oral history interviews with legendary Sierra Club leaders—like photographer and former director Ansel Adams, longtime directors and former Club presidents like Dr. Edgar Wayburn, or former executive directors like David Brower—are conducted on a professional basis through the Oral History Center by oral historians with expertise in environmental history.

The Sierra Club Oral History Project has documented the leadership, programs, strategies, and ideals of both the national Sierra Club and the Club's grassroots at regional and chapter levels for much of the mid-twentieth through the early-twenty-first centuries. These interviews highlight the breadth, depth, and significance of the Sierra Club's eclectic environmental efforts—from education to litigation to legislative lobbying; from wilderness preservation to energy policy to environmental justice; from outdoor adventures to climate change activism to controlling chemicals; from California to the Carolinas to Alaska and beyond to international realms. The Sierra Club Oral History Project, together with the sizable archive of Sierra Club papers and photographs in The Bancroft Library, offers an extraordinary lens on the evolution of environmental issues and activism over the past century, as well as the motivations, conflicts, and triumphs of individuals who helped direct that evolution.

We are grateful and excited to conduct new oral histories with leaders of the Sierra Club, one of the most significant environmental organizations in history. And we deeply appreciate the narrators who share their meaningful memories of protecting the planet for all of us to explore and enjoy

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Project resources

The Sierra Club

The Sierra Club Foundation

Sierra Club Women Bibliography

William E. Colby Sierra Club Library

Project history

In May 1970, the Sierra Club board of directors established a standing Sierra Club History Committee, with Marshall Kuhn appointed its founding chairman. Kuhn and his committee turned to Willa Baum, director from 1958 to 1999 of The Bancroft Library's Regional Oral History Office (now the Oral History Center), for advice and training in the art of oral history interviewing. In 1971, trained Sierra Club volunteers from northern and southern California, along with oral history students at the University of California, Berkeley, initiated the Sierra Club Oral History Series by recording reminiscences of early Sierra Club members. In 1974, Ann Lage began coordinating the Sierra Club Oral History Series until her retirement from the Oral History Center in 2011. By the end of the 1970s, the Sierra Club Oral History Series included thirty-five volunteer-conducted interviews, and the Oral History Center had conducted or was completing five extensive oral history interviews with Sierra Club leaders. In 1980, with considerable support from the Oral History Center, the Sierra Club earned a sizeable grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to thoroughly document the Sierra Club of the 1960s and 1970s. Between 1980 and 1984, the NEH grant and matching funds from the Sierra Club Foundation made possible the completion of seventeen professionally conducted oral histories and forty-four volunteer-conducted interviews, totaling over 250 hours of recorded history. Between 1984 and 2019, trained Sierra Club volunteers contributed to The Bancroft Library eight new oral history interviews, resulting in two multi-volume collections published respectively in 1989 and 1996. Between 1992 and 1999, the Oral History Center conducted eight extensive Sierra Club interviews, three of which featured narrators previously interviewed. And between 1999 and 2018, the Oral History Center completed and published five new interviews for the Sierra Club Oral History Series.

In the Spring of 2018, a renewed collaboration between the Sierra Club and the Oral History Center restored life to the Sierra Club Oral History Series. Since the bulk of Sierra Club oral histories conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Sierra Club, the nature of environmentalism, and the natural environment itself all experienced significant changes. In an effort to address those changes while complementing prior Sierra Club oral histories, our renewed collaboration features long-form interviews with former presidents of the Sierra Club. Roger Eardley-Pryor, an interviewer with the Oral History Center with expertise in science and environmental activism, conducts these new interviews for the Sierra Club Oral History Series.