David F. Winkler, Naval Historical Foundation Good Morning! Yesterday many of you heard an excellent presentation on how oral history can enliven your educational outreach programs. This morning I want to look at oral history as a tool that can enhance your development - fund raising efforts. I'm not saying that an oral history effort should equate to a gold digging effort but there can be financial benefits from such a program. I will be followed by Joe Smith and Michele Kelly who will discuss their collection efforts and how you can operate a program. Let me give an overview of where we are heading. First we will talk about how oral history can invigorate your institutional credibility. I'll talk a bit about the Naval Historical Foundation's effort. I then will use a case study which I'll call the Sea Service Oral History Challenge and how we were able to get that program funded. First a few words about the Naval Historical Foundation. We have been in the business of preserving and promoting our naval heritage since 1926. We are a non-profit organization committed to supporting the Naval Historical Center and Navy Museum. We raise funds through our historical services branch which does photo and cruise book reproduction and our Navy Museum Gift shop. For info on their offerings go to http://www.navyhistory.org. We offer publications, support symposiums, run speaker programs, and operated an extensive oral history collection effort. That oral history collection effort started in 1996 when the Foundation received a $20,000 grant from Ambassador H.G. Fitzgerald to hire yours truly part-time to support a Navy oral history collection effort. I did two things. I modeled a collection program after the State Department program that uses volunteers. I sent out a letter to our membership asking for interviewer volunteers, transcription volunteers, and potential interviewees. We also asked for contributions as we planned to provide a gratuity for our transcription volunteers--and we received some $7,000 in donations! These volunteers have become advocates for the foundation and help with our organizations external visibility. We keep in touch with these folks through our quarterly newsletter All Ears. So far we have collected over 200 interviews! Another thing we did is we sent out a survey and found over 60 programs that were doing Navy oral history. For example, the University of North Texas has one of the larger oral history collections on Pearl Harbor. The number of programs conducting oral histories has skyrocketed due to the Library of Congress Veteran's History Project which sought out partners in a grassroots collection effort. If you go to their database at http://www.loc.gov/index.html you will find over 2,500 interviews with Sailors. Type in your ship and you may find interviews of sailors you served on board. The Naval Historical Foundation signed on early as a partner and we do VIP interviews for the program. In this slide I am interviewing Senator Jeffords of Vermont who was a gunnery officer on a destroyer during the Lebanon crisis of 1958. We also network with other oral history collection efforts. For example, our underwater archeology branch at the Naval Historical Center wanted to conduct interviews with survivors of wrecks located off Normandy. Floyd Cox at the Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg and Michele Kelly came through for us by capturing recollections of folks in Texas and Massachusetts. We helped Michele out when she had an interview with Senator McCain and she needed a studio in DC to do the interview...we took care of that working with the Library of Congress. Now one of the challenges we had presented to us is that the Coast Guard, Marines, and Navy have thousands of reels and cassettes of recordings collected over the past four decades and these tapes are deteriorating. We were approached by the Marine Corps Historical Center about digitizing these collections. The key was purchasing digitization equipment. The Marines did their homework and found high-speed state-of-the-art equipment that would cost about $85,000 to acquire. At that time we received a letter from C. Douglas Dillon who had been interviewed by one of our volunteers. He said he enjoyed the experience and offered to support the program if help was needed. Immediately I sent a letter explaining our project. He deferred it to "The Dillon Fund" and we sent the fund a proposal and they funded the proposal with a $150,000 grant to buy the equipment, CDs, and labor needed to run the program. Shortly after that, I visited Texas Tech's Vietnam Center and explained to their Director, Dr. Jim Recknor about the digitization project. He was enthusiastic since most of the tapes were Vietnam era. We set up and arrangement where copies were sent to Texas Tech where they would be transcribed by students on work-study programs. When you tally some 6,000 reels x 50 pages per reel x $3 per page per transcription, (comes to $900,000) one can see this was a nice added payoff on the original investment. What is nice you can listen or read the interviews at the http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu website. One final story to illustrate how oral history can support fund raising. I did an interview with naval aviator Jack Taylor who flew off of Essex during WWII with ace David McCampbell. Good interview. After the war Taylor founded a car leasing company in St. Louis and called it Executive Car leasing. But he needed a new name when he wanted to expand and found there was a company with a similar name in Atlanta. So he decided to call it Essex Rent a Car. The idea panned--he then noted he had flew off the Enterprise---so now you know the rest of the story! Anyway he made a nice contribution to support our effort. However, when the National Naval Aviation Museum learned of his background he was approached and they secured a ten million dollar donation for a new education center! Thanks for your time...if you have further questions I can be reached at dwinkler@navyhistory.org !
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