Interview
Elizabeth Sullivan, another interviewee for the Wisconsin Agriculturalists Oral History Project, encouraged me [interviewer Dale Treleven] to contact Blochowiak, elected first president of the Dairy Council of Milwaukee after it was organized in December, 1944. After holding a luncheon discussion with Blochowiak, I was firmly convinced that the president of Milwaukee's last independent family-owned dairy company should be taped not only because of his clear and unique remembrances of the dairy's operation, but also because of the long relationship of that enterprise to Milwaukee-area dairy farmers during a period of immense change in the many steps extending from milking time to consuming milk and other dairy products.
I held two interview sessions with Bob Blochowiak in the board room of the Lincoln State Bank, situated on Lincoln Avenue in Milwaukee, although in the year between the sessions the board room's location shifted because of bank modernization. Before each session, we had lunch at “Alexander's,” where Blochowiak invariably introduced me to many of his friends in the professional and business communities on the south side. While the first session provided an overview of the dairy's operation over much of its sixty-seven year history, the second focused primarily on a series of photographs taken in the 1950's and assembled into packets so routemen better understood how milk was processed and dairy products made and could, with the aid of the packets, explain those processes to existing and prospective customers. The photograph numbers referred to in the abstract correspond to copies of the photographs which are preserved in the Visual Materials Archive of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Blochowiak's precise description of the function of the complex array of tasks, machines, pipelines, and gauges revealed in the photographs will be helpful to researchers who wish to know more about the operation of a small but modern dairy plant in the early 1950's. Rich too are Blochowiak's descriptions of applying scientific and technological improvements in the plant, of helping to improve sanitary standards on the farms of the dairy's milk suppliers, and arranging to convert on the farm milk storage and preservation methods and facilities from cans to bulk tanks.
Abstract to the Interview
The tapes for this interview have two tracks: a voice track containing the discussion, and a time track containing time announcements at intervals of approximately five seconds. The abstract lists, in order of discussion, the topics covered on each tape and indicates the time-marking at which point the beginning of the particular discussion appears.
Thus, the researcher, by using a tape recorder's fast-forward button, may find expeditiously and listen to discrete segments without listening to all of the taped discussion. For instance, the user who wishes to listen to the topic on “MECHANICS COURSE IN DAIRY SCHOOL” should locate the place on the second track of tape one, side one, where the voice announces the 06:15 time-marking (the voice says at this point, “six minutes, fifteen seconds”), and at this point switch to the first track to hear the discussion. The discussion on “MECHANICS COURSE IN DAIRY SCHOOL” continues until approximately 06:45, at which point discussion of the next topic (“IMPLEMENTS SHORT COURSE LESSONS AT BLOCHOWIAK DAIRY”) begins.
Notice that in most cases, sentences beneath each headline explain more about the contents of the topic. For example, the sentence underneath “MECHANICS COURSE IN DAIRY SCHOOL” gives further details on what appears on the tape between 06:15 and 06:45.
The abstract is designed to provide only a brief outline of the content of the tapes and cannot serve as a substitute for listening to them. However, the abstract when used with the index will help the researcher to locate easily distinct topics and discussion among the many minutes of commentary.
Index to the Interview
The index, which is keyed to the same time announcement track (second track) as the abstract, gives a single alphabetical listing of proper nouns (persons, places, groups, organizations, books, periodicals), distinct historical phenomena (Depression, Crash, World War II, McCarthyism), and concepts and activities (economy in government, ethnicity, organizing, collective bargaining) which appear on the tape/in the abstract. Each entry is followed by one or more citations specifying the location(s) where the entry appears. For instance, Advertising is followed by the citation 4:1, 20:25. This indicates that a reference to Advertising appears on Tape 4, Side 1, within the time-marking beginning at twenty minutes, twenty five seconds of the time announcement.
