Interview
I [interviewer James Cavanaugh] interviewed Todd for three-and-a-half hours on September 28, 1978, in his room at the Los Angeles Hilton where he was attending the ACTWU convention as an honored guest. Todd was selected as an interviewee for several reasons - his ten years on the Executive Council, his Midwest perspective, his black perspective, and his organizer/local-level-leader perspective. Todd, in the interview, spoke from each of these perspectives and provided an additional dimension as a leader of many non-textile workers in a textile union.
The Todd interview is most useful for his description of the textile industry in Chicago and how it and some non-textile Chicago industries were organized into TWUA. Todd is also very good on race relations in TWUA and the labor movement in general. An enthusiastic interviewee, Todd was rather weak on dates and facts, but he was highly opinionated and fairly strong on concepts.
Abstract
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 fact-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 “Establishment of the Chicago Joint Board” should locate the place on the second track of side one, tape one, where the voice announces the 04:20 time-marking (the voice says at this point, “Four minutes, twenty seconds”), and at this point switch to the first track to hear the discussion. The discussion on “Establishment of the Chicago Joint Board” continues until approximately 05:05 at which point discussion of the next topic (“Biographical Information”) begins.
Notice that in most cases sentences beneath each headline explain more about the contents of the topic. For example, the sentences underneath “Establishment of the Chicago Joint Board” give further details on what appears on the tape between 04:20 and 05:05.
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 easily locate distinct topics and discussions among the many minutes of commentary.
Index
There is a master index for most of the TWUA Oral History Project interviews in the collection-level finding aid.
