Interview
My [interviewer David Tambo] first contact with Irene Gibbon occurred via a telephone conversation on July 25, 1978. Prior to this time, the Field Services Staff of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin had met her daughter, Mrs. Zager, who had suggested that her mother's experiences in VISTA might provide useful material for an interview. The purpose of my call was to set up a time to meet with Irene Gibbon. On July 31, 1978, I went to Dodgeville and talked with her. After looking at a photograph album and discussing VISTA in a generalized manner, I was convinced that it would be important to record the perceptions of a person of her age and experience, in regard to the day-to-day administering of a unique federal program (VISTA). On August 29, 1978, I returned to interview Irene Gibbon in the living room of her apartment in Dodgeville. Aside from changing tapes and one brief break for coffee, the tape recorder ran continuously throughout the course of the interview. In order to refresh her memory, Gibbon glanced occasionally at a scrapbook that she had compiled during her VISTA days, which contained newspaper clippings, notes, and other miscellaneous memorabilia.
The purpose of this interview was to capture a grass-roots view of the functioning of a major federal program in the late-1960s. To achieve this goal, a number of topics were discussed, which included the motivation of the interviewee; training procedures and their adequacy; reactions of the host community to the interviewee personally, and to the kinds of aims that VISTA was trying to accomplish; interaction among host community officials, the interviewee, and the VISTA bureaucracy; and the perception of the informant as to what actually was accomplished in the final analysis. Information on these subjects augments a number of similar collections loosely grouped in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin's Social Action Collection.
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 below 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 “APPLICATION PROCEDURES” should locate the place on the second track of tape one, side one, where the voice announces the 05:30 time-marking (the voice says at this point, “five minutes, thirty seconds”), and at this point switch to the first track to hear the discussion. The discussion on “APPLICATION PROCEDURES” continues until approximately 09:30 at which point discussion of the next topic “VISTA TRAINING PROGRAM” begins.
Notice that in most cases sentences beneath each headline explain more about the contents of the topic. For example the sentences underneath “APPLICATION PROCEDURES” give further details on what appears between 05:30 and 09:30.
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 it will help the researcher easily locate distinct topics and discussions among the many minutes of commentary.
