OHR Editors’ Note: In April, we put out a call for oral history bloggers. We originally planned to run submissions starting this summer. However, we were so excited by the response that we decided to kick things off a bit early. Enjoy the first of many volunteer posts to come!
By Shanna Farrell
The cocktail is an American invention and was defined in 1806 as “a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters.” Cocktail culture took root on the West Coast around the Gold Rush; access to a specific set of spirits and ingredients dictated by trade roots, geography, and agriculture helped shape the West Coast cocktail in particular. We in UC Berkeley’s Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) are beginning a new oral history project about the legacy of the West Coast cocktail, which will explore the cultivation of the West Coast cocktail’s identity and how it has contributed to the return of bartending as a respectable profession. We consider documenting bar culture important, especially because of the current explosion of cocktail bars around the country. However, due to the nature of the topic, this project won’t qualify for academic or grant funding. ROHO has instead had to look for non-traditional funding opportunities, which has presented us with a set of complications that we had yet to experience.
The people involved in the bar and spirit industry have a unique perspective on the ways in which American life has unfolded and intersected around cocktails. When I first began developing this project I reached out to famed bartender Dale DeGroff, cocktail historian and journalist David Wondrich, and PUNCH co-founders Talia Baiocchi and Leslie Pariseau for their insight in identifying interview themes and potential narrators. They are all now serving as our project advisors. We conducted pilot interviews with three Bay Area-based female bartenders and recorded four hours with Wondrich himself. Even early on, themes of community, labor, gender, ethnicity, geography, culinary influence, storytelling and myth making, the dissemination of information, state laws and regulations, bartender/customer relationships, and popular culture have emerged. We hope to interview at least thirty people, including bar owners, bartenders, craft spirit distillers, and cocktail historians, to further unpack these topics.
As the project lead, I’ve encountered various issues planning and rolling out the project, especially because of funding. In an attempt to involve the cocktail community, garner interest in the project, and draw people into ROHO’s archives, we decided to raise money through crowdfunding. We’ve been working for several months to get administrative approval, build out partnerships and out network, choose engaging content from our pilot interviews, and build a project website. This has taken a lot of time and though we are optimistic about the success of the campaign, using this funding mechanism is a risk. We are up against a hard deadline to deliver a large amount of content at campaign’s launch on 3 June 2014 and during its following five-week run.
Crowdfunding campaigns usually have a short video (two to three minutes) explaining the concept of the project, the need for financial support, and establishing its legitimacy. We also need to deliver regular updates throughout the five weeks of the campaign to keep our audience interested in the project. This requires pulling clips from interviews that illustrate the project’s exciting topics and themes. For example, we have one story about how Wondrich discovered that pre-Prohibition cocktail recipes called for Holland gin, which is essentially flavored whiskey not readily available in the United States until the past few years, instead of London dry gin, which is flavored vodka and has dominated the domestic gin market for the past twenty years. This proved to be a revelation for Wondrich while writing the hugely influential book Imbibe!: From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to “Professor” Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar (Perigee Trade, 2007).
Once the campaign is over we will need to share completed interviews with the public as soon as we can to demonstrate that we are using contributions for the intended purpose; this is critical for the project’s reputation if we plan to use this fundraising method in the future. Content will have to be continuously created and sent to narrators for quick approval, which can be difficult due to schedules, file compatibility, and familiarity with technological mediums. Getting clips to narrators in a timely fashion has necessitated our use of free cloud-based technology, such as SoundCloud and Vimeo. Thus far, we have created private tracks on SoundCloud and private channels on Vimeo to share the files in a fast and easily accessible way.
This project will serve as a test for ROHO in many ways: will we be able to produce content, get it to our narrators for approval, and share it publically on a timeline that keeps our audience engaged? Will long-term use of various media outlets like SoundCloud and Vimeo prove successful? Will funders feel satisfied with the level of accessibility of the interviews? Time will tell how the project and its various set of challenges will unfold, but we hope to use digital age techniques to work around the challenges which crowdfunding has presented.
Shanna Farrell is an oral historian in UC Berkeley’s Regional Oral History Office. She holds an MA in Oral History from Columbia University, an Interdisciplinary MA in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University, and a BA in Music from Northeastern University. Aside from her current project on the legacy of the West Coast cocktail, her studies have focused on environmental justice issues in communities impacted by water pollution. Her work includes a community history of the Hudson River, a documentary audio piece entitled “Hydraulic Fracturing: An Oral History” that explored the complexity of issues involved in drilling for natural gas, a study that examined the local politics of “Superfunding” the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, New York, and a landscape study of a changing neighborhood in South Brooklyn.
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are that of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OHR editors.
The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, add them to your circles on Google Plus, follow them on Tumblr, listen to them on Soundcloud, or follow their latest OUPblog posts via email or RSS to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.
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Image credit: a midori sour on ledge over looking Coronado bay and San Diego. © AndrewHelwich via iStockphoto.
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By Alex McGinn, Publicity Intern
It’s no secret that East Coasters are skeptical of the West Coast. Southern California seems particularly peculiar to most inhabitants of the northeastern seaboard; perhaps its picturesque landscape, balmy weather, and laid back lifestyle seem out of touch with the realities of fast-paced East Coast cities. But what some of these West Coast cynics may not know is that SoCal’s most influential “boosters” were refugees of the northeast.
Thinking about this, I turned to The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America by Lawrence Culver. Here are a few important Yankees who escaped their overworked and seemingly miserable East Coast fates to become the earliest developers of some of Southern California’s most iconic getaways.
Charles Lummis known as a booster of Los Angeles and Palm Springs was born in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1859. The son of a Methodist minister, Lummis attended Harvard, but devoted less time to his studies than to romantic pursuits. He enjoyed his summers hiking, mountain climbing, and writing poetry while employed at a relative’s resort hotel in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. After failing out of school, Lummis married Dorothea Rhodes, a medical student he had met while at Harvard. After fleeing New England for Ohio, the two’s marriage faltered as did Lummis’s career as a newspaper editor. To make matters worse, Lummis had contracted malaria. He decided that he needed a fresh start and found it in Los Angeles. Chronic overwork, too little sleep, too much alcohol, and continuing marital problems resulted in a stroke that paralyzed his left side at the age of 29. After his recovery in Iseleta Pueblo, New Mexico, Lummis published several books that glorified the Southwest. This glorification tremendously aided the city of Los Angeles and granted it its allure.
Charles Frederick Holder known as a founding booster of Catalina Island began his career as a scientist and author. Interestingly enough, Holder was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, the same birthplace of Charles Lummis, in 1851. He attended the prestigious United States Naval Academy, but left before graduating. He served for several years as the assistant curator of zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and authored a number of books. He came to Southern California to recuperate from a lung infection aggravated by overwork. Like Lummis, Holder published several books about Southern California focusing on Catalina Island, which he believed encapsulated the region’s healthfulness and distinctive flora and fauna. Holder’s accounts of swimming, hunting and other recreational activities attracted tourists to the Southern Californian getaway.
John C. Van Dyke known as the first booster of Coachella Valley was the art critic for Century Magazine and one of the best-known and widely read public intellectuals in the nation. While he frequented Charles Lummis’s salon at El Alisal, he remained firmly entrenched on the East Coast, where he was librarian at New Brunswick Theological Seminary and the first professor of art history at Rutgers University. However, the deserts of California, to his eyes, contained the most delicate palette of colors imaginable. Van Dyke narrated his book <
I’ve been writing quite a bit about futures lately and with good reason. My sister and I had big plans beginning next April. We’d wanted to implement them this past October and couldn’t. As everyone knows, the best laid plans are subject to change without notice.
And so it has been. This past Saturday during lunch, however, we began talking about those plans for April. That’s when the shift took place. We’ve wondered if we are pawns in someone’s cosmic chess game for a while now. I think we’ve gotten our answer to that question once and for all.
She and I discussed whether we could get everything ready to take off on our road trip before Dec. 1. I know. Any significant road trip takes a lot of planning and strategy. This one was worth months of both.
Anyone listening in would have thought we’d lost our minds. Give up a perfectly good apartment, stuff all of our belongings into long-term storage and hit the road? It’s a joke. Right? Well, no, it’s no joke. We were going to do this in April anyway. We’d wanted to go in October. What’s so bad about December.
Let’s see. It could have something to do with the fact that we live in Montana and have umpteen mountain passes to travel just to get anywhere out of the state. Heck, we have passes to go through just to get out of our valley. Ski season approaches on the back of a hare in a race with a 
tortoise. The jockey on that hare is INCOMING SNOW STORMS!
You see the immediate problem.
Okay, so we’ll crawl out of the valley, through the pass south of here toward I-90. Then what?
We’re going south for the first part of our country tour. That would mean Wyoming–got stranded there in a blizzard a year ago. Don’t want a repeat. Or there’s always Highway 93 South. That goes through many more passes, part of snow-covered Idaho and into snow-covered northern Nevada. Once we hit Vegas we could get to Arizona’s snowy north and go down to I-
10 from there.
Nope, too many possible travel headaches. That leaves I-90 West toward the coast. Only two passes in that direction–both really long ones, but well maintained and careful driving will keep us safe. First hurdle planned for and conquered. Get chains.
So we get to the coast and then move south on the I-5. We won’t be making many stops if the weather is crummy. We need to get away from the northern coastline and winter storms rolling in with irrepressible, ever-changing La Nina, who threatens to bring the worst winter in 50 years.
We’ll be in good shape once we hit LA and San Diego.
I know that most won’t understand why all the rush is critical to us. Let me clue you in. We’re tenting our way around the U.S. for the next year+. That means everything we will be using will be crammed into a small car: tent, bags, year’s worth of clothing, cooler, cooking needs, computer, photography gear, everything.
Now you see the rush. We’re not fond of winter camping, though we’ve done it. If we can avoid it, so much the better.
There you have it. Once we’re on that southern road, we’ll be able to get online once/twice a week, update blogs and website, do email, send out our articles and such, and generally work our way through the country gathering material for our book.
Sounds like a fun time, huh? It will be. We’ve been looking forward to this for several months now. Not bad for a couple of senior ladies
Here’s wishing ya’ll the best of luck in the world on gettin out of Montana and God’s Blessing on you both.
Love
Cuzn Poppy