Interview
It became apparent to me [interviewer Dale Treleven], while conducting pre-interview research for a series of interviews with Percy S. Hardiman, former president of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation, that Isabel Baumann had been very active in the organization for decades. In the half-century between the 1920s and 1970s, I could think of few women who might rival Isabel Baumann's level of activity in a general farmers' organization. An earlier interviewee for the Wisconsin Agriculturalists Oral History Project, retired Wisconsin Farmers Union educational director Jean Long, is a possible exception; Mabel Douglas of Green County (WFBF) and Emma Ihde of Winnebago County (Grange), also farmers' organization activists, had died. Isabel Baumann and the others named above were among the women who blazed a path for others who would demand by the late 1960s that policy-making boards of farmers' organizations should be comprised of more women. By 1982, there were two women directors on the Wisconsin Farmers Union board; another organization, Wisconsin Women for Agriculture, was a most vigorous proponent of farmers' and rural interests.
After holding a pre-interview session with Isabel Baumann, at which she agreed to be taped, we held our discussions on three separate dates (April 1, 15, and 30, 1980). We taped each session in the living room of the modernized two-story farmhouse in the Town of Sun Prairie, invariably beginning at 9 a.m. with a cup of coffee and concluding just before noon. Mrs. Baumann had assembled a box of materials relating to Farm Bureau, Pierceville Mothers' Club, and We Say What We Think Club in anticipation of the series of interviews, and occasionally referred to one source or another. Researchers will find a good deal of information about the evolution of a modern dairy farm in the 1920s and 1930s, aspects of teaching in a one-room school during the 1920s, women's work on a farm during the 1920s and 1930s, the neighborhood social group which brought women together regularly, and many comments and observations about the Dane County and Wisconsin Farm Bureau organizations. Valuable too are Mrs. Baumann's remarks about that unique group of broadcasters, the We Say What We Think Club.
Before the formal interview sessions began but after my pre-interview visit with Mrs. Baumann, she agreed to participate with me in videotaping a segment of discussion for WMTV, Channel 15 in Madison. A Channel 15 news reporter and cameraman joined Mrs. Baumann and me in her living room on March 20, 1980, where we simulated a segment of an actual oral history interview for a Sunday news spot. In so doing, WMTV acquainted its viewers with the term “oral history” and, specifically, its and the Society's role in capturing remembrances about Wisconsin's agricultural history.
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 “BAUMANN'S EARLY BACKGROUND” should locate the place on the second track of tape one, side one, where the voice announces the 03:15 time-marking (the voice says at this point, “three minutes, fifteen seconds”), and at this point switch to the first track to hear the discussion. The discussion on “BAUMANN'S EARLY BACKGROUND” continues until approximately 04:55, at which point discussion of the next topic (“FAMILY CONSIDERS ITSELF NORWEGIAN”) begins.
Notice that in most cases, sentences beneath each headline explain more about the contents of the topic. For example, the sentences underneath “BAUMANN'S EARLY BACKGROUND” give further details on what appears on the tape between 03:15 and 04:55.
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, Barley is followed by the citation 1:1, 20:00. This indicates that a reference to Barley appears on Tape 1, Side 1, within the time-marking beginning at twenty minutes of the time announcement.
