(October, November, and December)
for Jay Ruby's Oak Park Research Project
During this quarter
my responsibilities to the University took up most of my time.
I taught two graduate seminars and one undergraduate course and
spent many hours in tutorials with the ten Ph.D. students who
I advise. At times I began to feel as if I would never find the
time to work on the Oak Park research but I did. I continue transcribing
interviews - a process that will be a constant for the next year.
I am about to explore the potential of a new piece of software,
Annotape, to make complete transcriptions less necessary. As I
have over fifty left to transcribe I sincerely hope it works.
I finished cataloging about 400 photographs - some I have taken,
others were collected from the people whose life histories I videotaped,
and others came from a myriad of sources. I have started classifying
them into folders as to potential uses. I will organize them into
slides shows with some text as one preliminary way of ordering
things. I will continue to collect relevant images throughout
the study. I am sent Ebay notices about Oak Park images. The postcard
that heads this report was acquired in that manner.
I continued to read works designed to increase my understanding
of the African American community in Chicago and a general sense
of the Black Middleclass. I have continued to work on other materials
related to the Oak Park African American family that I filmed
and hope to produce the first work-in-progress about them by the
middle of next year. I watch the developments in the DVD area
and hope that things become more clarified by the time I must
decided what publication format to use.
On November , 2001 I was honored by my high school. Oak Park & River Forest High School awarded me their "Tradition of Excellence" award. I was truly touched by their recognition. I gave a brief acceptance speech that I revised and gave to the Wednesday Journal who published it as "Rediscovering His Hometown and Himself Through Anthropology" on December 5,2001. (Please note that I have started using Acrobat pdf files for attachments. You can download an Acrobat Reader free from Adobe.) I stayed in Oak Park for an extended weekend and use the time to do a bit more fieldwork and to scout out the possibilities for places to stay this summer. The time in Oak Park make we more aware of the dangers of doing fieldwork so close to home. Traditionally anthropologists has field sites a long way from where they lived. When they left the field, it was not likely that they would return soon. The information they collected was all they had. When they discovered sometime was missing, it was too bad. I can relatively easily return to Oak Park and I plan to at regular intervals. I know I will continue to find interesting new avenues of exploration each time. I did during this weekend. I cannot spend the rest of my life doing this project and will at some point have to stop looking.
On November, 2001, I
presented a paper at the American Anthropological Association
meetings in Washington, D.C. "Digital
Oak Park - an Experimental Ethnography" and discovered
other ethnographers trying to work out ways to "publish"
their work in a non-traditional way. It was an excellent way to
intorudce this work to an anthropological audience over 120 attended.
As I am still in the dark about which multi-media, hypertext program
to use and whether a DVD is the best delivery system, the conversations
were useful. We will form ourselvesi into a small working groups
in order to exchange ideas and insights. We hope to make a group
presentation at the World Congress of Anthropology in 2003 in
Florence. I will continue to work on the conceptual aspects of
this research, organizing the materials in a way that makes sense
to me and then worry about how to distribute it when I am ready
to do that.
Some Random Oak Park Moments
I have been collecting small items that have no immediate place in my work but are useful in characterizing Oak Park. Here are a few:
For the past five years Warner Brothers. Television has aired a situation comedy set in Oak Park. Their press release described it this way. "From commitment phobics to blissful newlyweds to wedlock veterans, For Your Love depicts love in all of its romantic, challenging and chaotically hilarious stages. Now in its fifth season, this sophisticated romantic comedy series was created and is executive produced by Yvette Lee Bowser, former executive producer and creator of Living Single.
Set in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Ill., For Your Love follows couples bound by friendship and family as they traverse the many phases of life and love in all their glorious complications..."
Two of the couples are African American and one is Euro-American. While not stated explicitly this show is also about how suburbanites of different ethnicities live together. Thus far I have not been able to discover why the producers choose Oak Park but my hunch is because of its national reputation as a place where residential integration is working.
Fremont Hestor was the
Oak Park chief of police in the 1960s. A number of people have
told me how important he was to the civil rights and fair housing
movement. He was a close friend of Elliot Gould, creator of the
Dick Tracy comic strip. Gould drew the cartoon above for Hestor's
retirement party. I recently discovered it at the Historical Society.
There is a rumor I have heard that Nestor was the inspiration
for the "Chief" in Dick Tracy. Nestor would make a marvelous
biographical subject. As it seems unlikely I will ever do it,
I hope someone else becomes interested in his life and actions.
I am looking forward
to the winter break when I will have the time to devote to this
research. Happy Holidays and the hope for a decent new year for
all of us. My next report will be at the end of March, 2002. I
will come to Oak Park for the summer. When I know when and where
I will be staying I will let people know. As always I welcome
your comments, criticisms, and suggestions. Email me at ruby@acsworld.net