Interview
Enthusiastic and animated, Benet was a joy to interview. He was selected as an interviewee for the TWUA Oral History Project because of his long association with the AFHW, his vital role in the Federation's merger with the TWUA, and also because of his long service in the South. The interview, two and a half hours long, was conducted on September 27, 1978, in Los Angeles where Benet was attending the first convention of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union as an honored guest.
The Benet interview is most useful for studying the history of the AFHW, the decline of the full-fashioned hosiery industry, the Federation's concomitant decline, and the Federation's eventual merger with the TWUA. He was also effusive on the difficulties and possibilities of organizing hosiery and textile workers in the South. Benet came well prepared for the interview and included in it many facts and statistics as well as interpretations.
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 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 “Education” should locate the place on the second track of side one, tape one, where the voice announces the 02:05 time-marking (the voice says at this point, “Two minutes, five seconds”), and at this point switch to the first track to hear the discussion. The discussion on “Education” continues until approximately 04:30 at which point discussion of the next topic (“In 1926, Benet Became a Boy Topper in a Hosiery Mill”) begins.
Notice that in most cases sentences beneath each headline explain more about the contents of the topic. For example, the sentences underneath “Education” give further details on what appears on the tape between 02:05 and 04:30.
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, 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.
