Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California UNIVERSITY HISTORY Doris Maslach A LIFE HISTORY WITH DORIS MASLACH An interview conducted by Nadine Wilmot in 2004 Copyright © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ************************************ All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Doris Maslach, dated February 3, 2006. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley 94720-6000, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Doris Maslach, A Life History with Doris Maslach, an oral history conducted in 2004 by Nadine Wilmot, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2007. i Doris Maslach—Interview Description Doris Cuneo Maslach and I began working together to conduct her oral history in April of 2004. Ten interviews were conducted in all, over the course of four months, ending in July of that year. Each interview took place at the dining room table of her home in Berkeley. All interviews were recorded on minidisc and digital video. The interview was transcribed and audit edited by our office. Doris then reviewed it for accuracy of names and dates and lightly edited it with an eye for coherence and discretion. Eleanor Swent had interviewed Doris’s husband George J. Maslach in 1998 and 1999 to document his long involvement with the University of California—first as a student, then as a professor in the Engineering Department, and ultimately as a senior administrator who finished off his distinguished career at Berkeley as the Vice Chancellor for Research and Academic Affairs. His daughter, Christina Maslach, joined Berkeley’s faculty in the Department of Psychology and now serves as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. The history of the Maslach family for the past seventy years has been intertwined with the history of the Berkeley campus. This interview with Doris Maslach tells the story of the woman who anchored the Maslach family. Because of the times and the social context in which Doris Maslach came of age, her story, that of an educated woman who marries a successful man and raises a family, takes the form of a back story. She lived through and contributed to an important period in the history of the campus, but her name appears only in passing in the institutional record. Yet Doris’s thorough engagement with herself and her world, her commitment to examining her experience as a partner and mother, creates this story in a new mold. She reconfigures the “back story” so that it is the central story, one with its own important lessons about the history of the Berkeley campus and the city of Berkeley. Each interview took place at Doris’ home on Panoramic Hill above the Berkeley campus. After walking up the leafy stairway paths that run up and down that hill, I would cut through the Maslachs’ backyard, where I sometimes found George watering the garden. In the dining room, overlooking the Bay and surrounded by their son’s exquisite glasswork, Doris would have waiting tea and biscotti in beautiful old time tea cups. These were her engagement teacups, she explained to me; her mother’s friends had each given her a cup and saucer upon her engagement to George so that she had a collection of different and lovely cups and saucers, to start off their married life. And so begins our journey back to old San Francisco. Doris felt that an important piece of her history was that she came from a family of immigrants— her father was Italian and her mother was Danish and Scottish—who had come to San Francisco in the mid 19th century and stayed and thrived. She speaks of her Uncle Rinaldo, a well known California painter, and her aunt Minnie MacLean, who held a salon for artists, writers, and musicians at her Pacific Heights home, and her mother’s family homestead close to where Ghiradelli Square is now, which survived the 1906 earthquake and fire and sat directly on the ocean before there was fill to extend the footprint of the peninsula. Over the course of our work together, Doris was involved in an ongoing excavation of her basement which held many treasures from the past since she acts as “the heritage keeper” for her family. One day when I ii arrived for her interview, she had unearthed a beautiful portrait of Tina Modotti inscribed by the famous modernist photographer to Doris’s aunt. Another day she shared with me a book of photos by the San Francisco photographer Isaiah West Taber, explaining that her mother had been a close friend to Louise Taber, the daughter of Isaiah, and that she, Doris, had inherited these Taber materials and made a gift of them to the Bancroft Library. Her family had been centrally involved with the arts and cultural life of San Francisco in the early 20th century. Another thread of her discussion of her youth in San Francisco deals with class and ethnic stratification, the ways in which her family sorted and was sorted by others as a function of ethnicity, and the way she was perceived and located socially as an Italian American, and a woman, in high school and college. As a dual citizen of both the campus community and the city of Berkeley over several decades, Doris engaged with and has perspectives on some of the seminal events in Berkeley’s campus and civic history. In particular, as someone who was active in Democratic politics, she played a significant role in the desegregation of Berkeley’s public schools and was active in struggles around rent control in Berkeley. As a campus wife, she has perspectives on social change and campus activism--including the surveillance and censorship of the McCarthy era, the Free Speech Movement, Peoples’ Park, and the controversial development of Clark Kerr campus--and the impacts of these on her family and community. Finally, as an undergraduate at Berkeley, Doris lived in the Co-ops, and was one of the few women Math majors; her experiences illuminate social and academic life at Berkeley in the late 1930’s. This interview was conducted under the auspices of the Regional Oral History Office. The Regional Oral History Office was established in 1954 to augment through recorded oral memoirs the Library’s materials on the history of California and the West. Copies of all interviews are available for research use in the Bancroft Library and in the UCLA Department of Special Collections. The office is under the direction of Richard Cándida Smith, Director and the administrative direction of Charles B. Faulhaber, James D. Hart Director of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Nadine Wilmot, Interviewer Regional Oral History Office Berkeley, California May, 2006 1 Interview with Doris Maslach Interview #1: April 5, 2004 Begin Maslach 1 04-04.wav 1-00:00:25 Wilmot: Okay, Doris Maslach, interview one, April 5, 2004. Here with Nadine Wilmot of the Regional Oral History Office. So, well, we start with our first question which is usually where and when were you born? 1-00:00:46 Maslach: I happened to be born in New York City, in Greenwich Village on June 19, 1921. 1-00:00:59 Wilmot: I wanted to ask you, I think, just to kind of stay with this theme of talking about your family history, I wanted you ask you if you could tell me a little bit about, actually as far as you remember, your father’s history, as far as you know your father’s family history. 1-00:01:21 Maslach: My father’s family came to San Francisco right after the Gold Rush. I believe they were here in the early 1860s, and at that time I understand, also, that there weren’t that many Italians in San Francisco, there were only 500 families. I had gone to this lecture by a professor of Italian at UC who had given this talk on Italians in San Francisco, and he said the miners came to work the mines and the Italians came and worked the miners.