The History Project News Letter

Bonackers Gather In Florida

On March 3rd, for the 8th consecutive year, residents of East Hampton who now reside in Florida attended the "Bonaker Reunion" at Pete's Restaurante in Boca, Raton, Florida.

John Hiscock, formerly of East Hampton and now living in Loxahatchee, Florida, drove to the reunion in "Old No. 5," a 1935 Ford Seagrave fire engine, which originally went into service in 1935 for the East Hampton Fire Department and served the town for 20 years. During the reunion, Bucket Daniels of Boynton Beach, Florida recalled his years on "Old No. 5's" crew. Hiscock, a master set builder at the South Florida Fairgrounds, has lovingly restored the vehicle and has taken it all over the country for the past 20 years, for ceremonial and charitable purposes. In 1992, the truck ferried relief supplies to Florida residents durning the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew.

Durning the luncheon, tribute was paid to Mary Venegas, who died alst fall at age 97. Mary had never missed a reunion. Martha Kalser of The History Project, read from excerpts of a March, 2000 interview with Mary, whose husband worked for Mackay Radio in East Hampton and was a life-long ham radio operator.

History Project Collection Continues to Grow

In February, an additional 12 completed interviews and an updated index were deposited with the Pennypacker Long Island Collection of the East Hampton Library. This brings to 92 the number of transcribed and indexed interviews in The Collection along with 744 accompanying photographs and other printed material donated by our subjects.

Since we have done 180 interviews, this means we still have 88 interviews to go! A good two years work ahead of us.

Recollections...

The recently released film POLLOCK, contains a scene where Jackson Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, arrive at their house in Springs for the very first time on a dark and rainy night. Her is Mary Louise Dodge's (age 85) recollection of that night.

"Jackson Pollock, yes. Yes I remember him coming to the door, ten o'clock one night, right after there'd been saboteurs in Amagansett. I didn't know who he was from a hole in the ground and nobody ever knocked on the door and he wanted Justice Edwards (Mary Louise's father). Well upon that, my father came into the room and we were going to bed at ten o'clock. We had all the shades pulled because of the blackout. And my father recognized him. Well, Pollock had lost his key so he couldn't get...and he was just arriving with his old beat up truck with furniture on it, to go to his house they'd bought. It had no heat in it. I guess it had electricity, but no heat in it then. And wanted the key to get in the house. And my father found a key and then Jackson dropped the key outside and crawled on the ground looking for it. And I thought "What kind of kook is he here?" And my father invited them in. I didn't think he was ever going to leave. He fell...had too much wine, I think. He fell asleep in that chair. So I was not super impressed at the time."

We Welcome a New Volunteer

Maryam Bakht-Rofheart has volunteered to transcribe interviews. Ms. Bakht-Rofheart was brought up in Wainscott and currently lives in Amagansett with her husband Evan Rofheart. She graduated from East Hampton High School in 1992 and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Linguistics at New York University, where she is a MacCraken Fellow. Her academic interests are sociolinguistics and dialects of English. She is interested in researching the "Bonac" accent, still spoken by some of the older members of the East Hampton community.

Why We Love What We Do!

At Christmas time we received this note from Olga Collins:

"I received the folder you sent (containing the transcript of our interview with John and Olga Collins). My two girls are enjoying it ever so much and are learning some history of their birthplace that they know so little about. They both have a greater love and respect for their father and their grandparents after reading this. Again, thanks ever so much!"

Tony's Column

From a March 10th article in The New York Times, we were pleased to see that we are in synch with what others around the world are aiming for in oral history. From the start, we have felt that East Hampton was a microcosm of America in the 20th Century and that the voice of its people tells a more complex story than a compilation of facts would illicit. The article by Alexander Stille, has some interesting things to say on that subject.

His first reference is to an Italian oral history done in the 1970's by one Allesandro Portelli among the population of a small working class city in that country. When talking about a man who had been killed by the police during a demonstration, all those interviewed mistakenly said that the event had happened in 1953. In reality, the man had been killed in 1949. The motivation behind this disconnect seemed to be that demonstrations over mass firings at local factories in 1953 had more meaning and importance to the interviewees than did demonstrations about joining NATO in 1949. According to Stille, Mr. Portelli was one of the first to place imphasis on that part of oral history which is subjective. Before him, the value of technique was primarily judged by how well a person could accurately remember certain key events and facts.

Luisa Passerini, a professor at European University in Florence, interviewed workers about the FAscist period from '22 to '43. In a paper she delivered at an oral history conference in Britain in 1979, she examined, "silences, the discrepancies, irrelevancies and inconsistencies that cropped up in her interviews." Citing the hesitancy of the subjects to talk about the Fascist era, Passerini says that though these irrelevancies and discrepancies must not be denied, they will never be understood if we take oral sources merely as factual statements. Instead, she says, "they should be taken as forms of culture and testimonies of the changes of these forms over time."

While subjectivity can be seen as a peril of oral history, those very discrepancies can be useful sources of information. In fact, most historians today believe that taped interviews are an important source of both factual and subjective information. The key it seems to me, is that the researcher be willing to look for applications and interpretations, for the information. Every environment, whether it be a country, a culture, or the life of a small community, has both external and internal forces that affect the way people communicate, the way they perceive things, and the way they mythologize.

Tony Prohaska
Project Director