By Vic Cox

	‘History is people, and it’s fun.’

In college, the undergraduate from Great Falls, Montana, wanted to become an expert on China and the complex relationship between America and the Asian giant. He ended up with a library career at UCSB, specializing in capturing the memories of interesting people.

As head of the campus Oral History Program, David Russell discovered that human memory could be almost as challenging as international relations. It takes time and skill to pin down the details. Once, while researching the history of the private Thatcher School in Ojai, Russell needed specifics from a key participant at a critical board meeting in the 1940s that decided to admit Jewish children to the exclusive boys’ boarding school. This was a hot topic in that era.

To help the participant refresh his memory before the interview about that long-ago meeting, Russell reviewed relevant meeting minutes, listed those present at the crucial vote, and extracted comments from the discussion. This document was shared with the participant.

“The idea was to take him beyond what was written (in the minutes),” Russell said. “That’s when you get to the kernel of what is oral history: It is the creation of a document that can be used by historians to write history. It is not synthesis, and it does not repeat verbally what has already been written.”

He has cast a wide net in producing more than 120 interviews in the oral history archives in Davidson Library’s Special Collections Department. Thirteen oral autobiographies and numerous journal articles with Russell’s by-line have emerged from these oral histories. But, he has noted, “a great deal of valuable testimony is lost in the process of editing.”

Eight permanent projects shape the collection, which currently includes UCSB Campus History; History of Science; California Ethnic Communities; Authors and Publishers; Humanistic Psychology; Performing Arts; Central Coast Communities; and Architecture and Urban Planning.

Russell has directed the program since 1983 when he left a post teaching history at a private college preparatory school in San Diego to join the UCSB library. His master’s degree is in architectural history, but he liked talking to architects and decided to venture beyond yellowing papers and dusty relics to seek the process of making history.

“History is people, and it’s fun,” Russell said. He recalled an architect he was interviewing in Los Angeles about the area’s skyscrapers telling Russell, “You don’t understand the process. It’s not ‘form follows function;’ it’s form follows fee.” The architect emphasized his point about money by gesturing out his window at different high-rises and telling Russell: “There’s a Chevrolet building; there’s a Ford; and there’s a Cadillac.”

“Most of my family was in science or engineering,” Russell said, so going into history was no foregone conclusion. His father was a structural engineer and his mother a newspaper reporter. He has maintained a link to science by interviewing campus scientists, and with a new oral history on UCSB science labs he plans to launch this fall.

His wife, Diane, is a supervisor at the Arts Library. They have two children.

From the eclectic content of his oral histories, Russell has created a vein of lives well lived for others to mine and analyze.