Elizabeth Spedding Calciano: Founding Director of the Regional History Project, UCSC Library Interviewed by Cameron Vanderscoff Edited by Irene Reti Santa Cruz University of California, Santa Cruz University Library 2020 This oral history is covered by copyright agreement between Elizabeth Spedding Calciano and the Regents of the University of California. Under “fair use” standards, excerpts of up to six hundred words (per interview) may be quoted without the University Library’s permission as long as the materials are properly cited. Quotations of more than six hundred words require the written permission of the Head of Special Collections and Archives and a proper citation and may also require a fee. Under certain circumstances, not-for-profit users may be granted a waiver of the fee. For permission contact: Irene Reti [email protected] or Regional History Project, McHenry Library, UC Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064. Phone: 831-459-2847. CONTENTS Interview History 1 Early Life, Childhood, and Education 7 Family Life during World War II 20 Education 34 College Years 56 A Few More Childhood Memories 61 Radcliffe College 64 Graduate School at Stanford University 87 Moving to Santa Cruz and Opening a Medical Practice 95 Applying for the Position of Oral Historian at UC Santa Cruz 100 The Early University of California, Santa Cruz 105 The Early Years of the Regional History Project 116 The Changing 1960s 139 UC Santa Cruz Students 151 Editing and Publishing Oral Histories 153 “A Couple of Loose Ends” 165 Recording Technologies of the Early Regional History Project 166 Creating Archival Oral Histories for the Historical Record: Audience, Access and Technologies 170 The Library’s Original Location in the Central Services Building 185 Getting off the Hill: Regional History and Outreach to the Santa Cruz Community 188 Regional History’s Place in the UCSC Library 192 The Campus Guide 203 Relationship with Chancellor Dean McHenry 206 The Changing Scope of the Regional History Project 210 Changing Attitudes Towards Women in the Workplace 231 Teaching for University Extension 243 “The Changing Culture of Santa Cruz County” 249 Student Protests at UC Santa Cruz 262 Ansel Adams 273 Civic Activities in Santa Cruz 279 Editing Oh, That Reminds Me . 296 The Early Days of the Oral History Association 298 The Impact of Watergate & Interviewing Page Smith 326 The Decision to Leave the Regional History Project 334 Elizabeth Spedding Calciano: Founding Director of the Regional History Project 1 Interview History This set of interviews with Elizabeth Spedding Calciano make up the rare project that is not just a life history, but an oral history of and about oral history itself. While Calciano has thrived in multiple professions and jobs, including a forty- plus year career as a lawyer, this volume focuses on her years as the founding head of the Regional History Project at UC Santa Cruz from 1963 to 1974. While the weight of our running time was about her life and work, in places the tables turned and she interviewed me about interviewing. More than once, sessions diverted into lively sidebars about the changing methods, technologies, and values of our shared practice, and as a result, this volume is both a life narrative and a meta oral history, telling the story and perspective of someone who arrived to UC Santa Cruz and the oral history field at emergent historical moments. Beyond being a record of the origins of the Regional History Project, these are the memories of a participant and witness to beginnings. Our sessions start with her own beginnings, leading into an extensive discussion of her family history and early years growing up in Ames, Iowa. Calciano is the daughter of Ethel Anne MacFarlane Spedding, a teacher and homemaker, and Frank Spedding, a professor at Iowa State University whose work on uranium extraction played an important role in the Manhattan Project. In this environment, she recounts the assumption and expectation that she would go to school, following her studies through her undergraduate years at Radcliffe and her MA work at Stanford. The primary emphasis of our conversations comes into focus with her move to Santa Cruz, California in 1962, where her then-husband began a medical Elizabeth Spedding Calciano: Founding Director of the Regional History Project 2 practice in anticipation of the new University of California campus opening in 1965. Calciano recounts getting a job in oral history at the fledgling university; she was only the thirteenth employee brought aboard in 1963, starting when UCSC offices were still housed off-site at Cabrillo College. Working alongside campus founders such as Chancellor Dean McHenry and University Librarian Donald Clark, Calciano discusses her time as the founding head of the Regional History Project (RHP), where she began when she was only twenty- four. At this juncture, the mission of the Project was documenting local history as a community outreach venture. Donald Clark and Dean McHenry were inspired by the oral history programs at UCLA and UC Berkeley to create and fund this position of oral historian in the new library even before the library opened its doors. Calciano later expanded this purview into university history, inaugurating the two thematic traditions of RHP projects that continue to the present, as the Project divides its focus between the campus and the region and seeks to serve as a bridge between these sometimes alienated communities. In conducting oral histories with working- class narrators, Calciano was years ahead of much of the oral history profession of that time, which was primarily doing oral histories with elites and would not venture into the world of social history for another decade. Today, her community interviews comprise a remarkable life history collection that illumines a now long- gone period of California history and have been invaluable to local history researchers. Her interviewees, then in their eighties and nineties, relate their experiences in late 19th and early 20th century local industries and trades, such as lumbering, dairying, blacksmithing, and apple farming. One of her oldest narrators Elizabeth Spedding Calciano: Founding Director of the Regional History Project 3 was born in 1873, and another tells family stories dating back to the early days of Spanish California. For anyone who is struck by the behind-the-scenes stories Calciano recalls in these sessions, it’s well worth consulting her interviews directly online; they detail a complex and unvarnished social history of the area as well as economic lifeways. My sessions with Calciano track the growth of the Regional History Project and UCSC, covering her relationships with key figures in early campus history, her experiences as an interviewer and editor, and her recollections of the advent of the counterculture for both town and gown. From her days at Radcliffe through her time in Santa Cruz and beyond to her later law practice in Los Angeles, a recurring theme is gender bias and the different pressures and expectations placed on working women. As Calciano notes, “…post-World War II women had this envelope of expectations around us. So I’m proud that I was able to break through that.” Calciano is a detailed commentator on this dynamic in her life and work, and this volume constitutes a valuable account of professional and social life in Santa Cruz and on campus in the sixties and seventies. Calciano—who is also socially known as Elizabeth Georgeon—further reviews other responsibilities and involvements from this time, including guest lecturing in Ansel Adams’ class, her civic engagement in the city, and her role in the Oral History Association. She relates attending the first-ever Association conference in 1966, and her subsequent involvement in that organization as a presenter, conference organizer, and council member, including making a remark in a session that made the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Our sessions conclude with her relaying the events that led her to leave Santa Cruz in Elizabeth Spedding Calciano: Founding Director of the Regional History Project 4 the mid-70s and transition to a new career in law. In many ways, these interviews marked her return to her first vocational home of oral history. The idea for this project first arose in 2014, when current Regional History Project Director Irene Reti and I were discussing the value of documenting the history of the Project. As oral historians, we spend most of our time looking out at the lives of others, but our own life histories shape the work that we do, imbue the questions we ask, and determine what we think of as historically important. These forces and questions change across biographies and generations; in interviewing Calciano, we were hoping to not only learn about the unique perspective of a pioneer UCSC staff member as the campus was approaching the commemoration of its 50th anniversary, but to help ourselves and future users of the collection better understand the formation of the Project. For us, this initiative became an exercise in both inquiry and reflexivity. Interviewing an oral historian brings with it unique challenges. Working closely with Irene, I read Calciano’s corpus of interviews, sifted through her correspondence and other ephemera from Project archives, and dug up Oral History Association conference agendas from the late 1960s. All of this preparation proved to be essential; as an experienced and therefore self-aware practitioner, Calciano often would break the fourth wall of the interview, considering how a transcriber might render something she’d just said, or debating the merits of our varying interview styles, editing approaches, or how the evolving role of technology has changed oral history norms. At one point she directly addressed Irene, knowing she would ultimately listen to the audio: “…I have thought, I hope that Irene doesn’t Elizabeth Spedding Calciano: Founding Director of the Regional History Project 5 chastise him for not having control of the interviewee….