Banker Harold Fincher believes it’s a rare person who learns from someone else’s life lessons, but that didn’t keep the Waldo resident from recording his memories of the Great Depression at the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies’ new interview studio.
Fincher, whose family founded the Peoples Bank in southwest Arkansas in 1910, was one of the latest participants in a string of interviews the center has recorded since last month in partnership with KUARFM, 89.1 as a National Day of Listening tribute.
“When you’re winging it, there’s a lot that you skip,” the 81-year-old said after Columbia County librarian Laura Cleveland interviewed him in the center’s closet-sized studio.
“We were all poor and didn’t know it,” he said, repeating what he told Cleveland.
In the 1930s, there was a sense of needing to pull together to survive, he said.
“I would say we were poor, but we were proud.”
Cleveland believes the histories and personalities of southwest Arkansas residents are underrepresented in the state’s history books, so she made the trek with Fincher to Little Rock recently to take advantage of the oral-history project.
“We haven’t been talking into microphones as often as we need to,” she said in an interview a day before the recording. “We want to do this before we lose the voices from 100 years ago.”
What is spoken into the microphone will eventually wind up on the Internet. Sara Thompson, an audio-visual archivist for the Butler Center, is workingon putting the interviews online.
The Butler Center, part of the Central Arkansas Library System, launched a digital database online in 2008 to share the speeches and interviews it had in its archives.
Many of the 100-plus interviews delve into Arkansas race relations or into Arkansas veterans’ experiences in the Korean War, both products of special oral-history projects the center undertook in recent years.
The recent recordings in the studio are a continuation of that oral-history work.
“We’re not going to do it if we just put it in a box and say, ‘This is nice,’” said David Stricklin, the Butler Center’s director.
Thompson said the interview nook is a great tool to gather a collection of stories “people are more willing to tell a family member than a stranger.”
The interviews will continue next year.
The Butler Center will open up the studio, through appointment, on the first Friday of each month for interviews.
Participants will walk away with their own copies of the recording.
Starting in January, students at the Clinton School of Public Service will also start using the studio to record in-depth interviews with the guest speakers who fly in.
The school, which shares space with the Butler Center in the Arkansas Studies Institute building, paid for the recording equipment and studio.
Some of the school’s interviews may end up on its Web site of lecture series or in its Frank magazine articles, said Ben Beaumont, a Clinton School spokesman.
The school also wants to use the equipment to create an internal record of its own history, Beaumont said.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 11 on 12/26/2009