Interview
I [interviewer James Cavanaugh] interviewed Watson for three hours on September 26, 1978, in my motel room in Los Angeles during the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union convention. As a retiree, Watson attended the convention as an honored guest; but his serious devotion to the Union kept him glued to the proceedings of every session of the convention, save the one during which we held the interview.
Watson, of course, was selected as an interviewee for the TWUA Oral History Project because of his Canadian perspective. As a spokesman for the Canadian division of the TWUA, Watson served his function quite well. He was fairly articulate and thoughtful and was able to provide a perspective no other potential interviewee could have supplied. While the interview concentrated on the textile industry and textile unionism in Canada, Watson also offered some insights into broader TWUA topics - particularly the 1950-52 internal fight and the structural changes in the Union in the early 1970s. On Canada, he was particularly helpful in describing the problems TWUA experienced with staffing, the French-Canadian separatist movement, and the nationalist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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 “TWUA Came to Canada in 1946” should locate the place on the second track of side one, tape one, where the voice announces the 03:55 time-marking (the voice says at this point, “Three minutes, fifty-five seconds”), and at this point switch to the first track to hear the discussion. The discussion on “TWUA Came to Canada in 1946” continues until approximately 08:05 at which point discussion of the next topic (“The Canadian Textile Industry in 1946”) begins.
Notice that in most cases sentences beneath each headline explain more about the contents of the topic. For example, the sentences underneath “TWUA Came to Canada in 1946” give further details on what appears on the tape between 03:55 and 08:05.
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.
