So I ordered “Hard Times” from the London interlibrary system after my last meeting with Dave. Studs Terkel seemed a good person to start my oral history research with.
But it didn’t arrive in time for this meeting and I had some vague questions about the different types of people who had gone to India and their reasons for doing so.
After rejecting my proposal “Beats, Buddhists, Freaks & Swamies” (‘I was too late for the Beats ….’ ) Dave patiently answered my incoherent queries; we ended up with five minutes of audio.
I would suggest to anyone interested in contemporary history that they read some Studs, or listen to one of his many audio recordings, a great communicator was he.
Five minute interview with Dave Tomory:
Friday 28th August 2009 – North London, UK – podcast feed HERE
Oral History:
“Hard Times”, by Studs Terkel, is an oral history of the Great (American) Depression, published in 1970. It is interesting to me that he wrote it 40 years after the Great Depression began in 1929. It seems that a generation space (30 to 40 years) is needed to achieve some distance from an oral history subject.
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