Docena: Stories from Behind the Recorder

Published on November 14, 2018

https://www.samford.edu/departments/oral-history/projects/samwav/Docena-Stories-Behind-Recorder.mp3

"...and she was writing her mom’s information on the back, and I was, like, 'Oh my gosh! That’s Melba Kizzire!' And she was like, 'What?' I was like, 'No, this is, we have her interview from the seventies!' and so her mom was actually one of the people who, the interviewees that we have from the 1970s."

Chapters

Introduction: Cameron Teaney’s Trip to Docena

Cameron Teaney recalls her experiences finding interviewees for her internship project on Docena, Alabama.

Play Segment

Dr. Marlene Rikard’s Oral History Class

Cameron Teaney recounts her discovery of an amazing connection between her Docena interviews and Marlene Rikard’s 1979 oral history class on Docena, and Marlene Rikard explains the story behind her class.

Play Segment

Docena’s Oral History

Marlene Rikard explains the impact of her students’ interviews—on scholarship, on the interviewing students, and on the members of the Docena community.

Play Segment

Transcript

[HARWELL GOODWIN DAVIS: He stated that he had been appointed to suggest a
president for Howard College.

EUNICE ROGERS: And so there was a lot of industry in Bessemer when I grew up, a
lot of progressiveness. However, it was still a typical, small, Southern town.

OLIVER BARREAU: To be perfectly honest with you, um, I didn't know what Alabama
was until I set foot in Alabama.

ELIZABETH SLOAN RAGLAND: I was not greeted by hecklers. I was greeted by Martha
Ann Cox.]

CAMERON TEANEY: So, (chuckle) well, I'll just explain the whole, like, saga
of the trip to Docena, because it was all kinda crazy. Um, so, I had sent, I had
like tried cold-calling any, which, when I say, like, all of the businesses in
the area, there was really not that many. But just anything that had the same
zip code as, I don't know, Docena, or what I could find. Um, and either,
like, lines were dead, people just weren't responsive or were like,
"There's nothing there. Why are you doing this project?"€ (laughs)
Um, even the post office lady was--she was very friendly, but she was like,
"There's--this is, kind of--why?"€ (laughs). So I was
like, "Well, you know what? I'm not getting anywhere with these calls.
I'm just going to go out there."

CLAIRE DAVIS: Hi, welcome back to Sam.wav, we are your hosts, Claire Davis--

MICHELLE LITTLE: --and Michelle Little.

CLAIRE DAVIS: And today we are bringing you the story of the story of Docena,
Alabama. The process of collecting oral histories doesn't usually get much
air time, but the road to this project crossed decades and generations with
enough surprising turns that we think it merits its own story. This past spring,
intern Cameron Teaney collected oral histories from a tiny, unincorporated
community eight miles outside of Birmingham. She knew that the town had a
history with coal mining--it was named after the nearby Number 12 mines for
the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company, after all--but as far as
finding willing participants, she was running into some trouble.

CAMERON TEANEY: So I was just like, "Well, I'll just go to this
church, and, like, hopefully people will be there. Uh, if they're not there
now, then they probably won't be another time in the week." So I drove
out there, and kind of, like, I, I just walked in. And then, at the end of the
service, I was like, "Oh, I'll just kinda, like, you know, try to get
the pastor and ask him if he knows of anyone in the community that would be
willing to talk to me."€ But, I mean, there were only seven people in this
congregation, so it was pretty obvious that I was, you know, not a normal, like,
person who came. And so, um, they all, like, swarmed me and were super
interested in why I was there. And as soon as I told them, you know, about the
project and wanting to interview someone, so many people were like, "Oh!
Well, you know, I was a, like, my dad worked for the mines," or "I was
married to a miner."€ They all had connections to the mines, so it was just,
like, "Whoa. This is way more than I could have imagined."

MICHELE LITTLE: During that initial visit to Docena Baptist Church, Cameron met
Nancy Fouche, a regular attender of the church, who mentioned that her mother
might be willing to share some of her stories of growing up in Docena. The very
next day, Cameron packed a recorder and headed up to meet Nancy and her mother,
Faye Mason, for a joint interview.

CAMERON TEANEY: I think, I think it was just fun interviewing Faye and Nancy
â€˜cause they were, like, mother and daughter, so it was just so cute because
Faye would be telling a story and Nancy would be going, "Well, no, make
sure you tell her about this detail,"€ and she was like, "Oh, I'm
getting there."€ Or, like, this, so it was just really sweet to--
Cause I could tell they were very close, and their dynamic as I was
interviewing them, I think, was, like, different than if, you know, I had just
interviewed them individually. Um, because I think, you know, Nancy had heard
her mom tell these stories about her growing up, and then, um, Faye, in her
mind, she was like, "Oh, these are just stories,"€ so she would leave
out certain details, and Nancy would be like, "Well, don't forget
this!"€ And I, I thought it was cool how, you know, even the things that
Faye may not have considered, like, super important, like, really meant a lot to
her daughter, and then to me also.

NANCY FOUCHE: Did you tell her about, uh, back in the forties, I think, or
fifties, where they had the ice cream vendor would ride on the bicycle and sell
ice cream?

FAYE MASON: Oh yeah, yeah.

CAMERON TEANEY: Oh wait, yeah, tell me about that.

FAYE MASON: It was fun. Ice cream man is coming; the bell would ring and
we'd all go out and get ice cream and uh, also sold tamales, hot out of the--

CAMERON TEANEY: Oh, yum.

FAYE MASON: --out of the bicycle instead of a hot box, I mean cold box,
they'd have a hot box sitting on the front of the bicycle like that.

CAMERON TEANEY: Of tamales?

FAYE MASON: Uh-huh. That's so good.

CAMERON TEANEY: That's so funny.

NANCY FOUCHE: The milkman would deliver the milk.

FAYE MASON: Yeah, and the egg man would come and we also had a, we had a family,
I mean a community garden and in the war time we had victory gardens at school.
I can get you some pictures of that. Each, we had to raise something, you know,
at school. But we had a truck that came here later that delivered fresh produce.

CLAIRE DAVIS: Cameron isn't the first Samford student to travel to Docena
armed with a microphone and a list of questions. In 1979, a few history classes
recorded the stories of miners and town residents under the guidance of Dr.
Marlene Rikard. Rikard donated these interviews to Special Collection where they
remained on the original reels until recently. Thanks to our generous donors, in
2016, money was raised to digitize the decaying reels. Once finally digitized in
2017, Cameron used the interviews to familiarize herself with the town's
history in preparation for her own interviews.

CAMERON TEANEY: Well, and also that was another really cool thing about the
project, was that it wasn't just-- It was using a very tangible, not
evidence, but historical information that I could use to, you know, then learn
more about the precedent that had already been done, so it was cool to kinda,
like, build on what had been done in the same means, or medium, as, like, in the past.

MICHELLE LITTLE: As Cameron worked through the thirty-year-old interviews, she
encountered names of individuals and families that greatly aided her research
but didn't appear in the current Docena phone directories. However, her
search wasn't finished yet--a second trip to Docena Baptist yielded an
amazing connection.

CAMERON TEANEY: But we went back to the church with the whole STORI crew and
there, we met-- It was a lady that I had met before, but she said that her
mom had written a book about her growing up in Docena, and we were like,
"Ah, this would be great for, like, primary source, um, research and
whatnot."€ And so we went to her house to go pick it up, and she was writing
her mom's information on the back, and I was, like, "Oh my gosh!
That's Melba Kizzire!" And she was like, "What?"€ I was like,
"No, this is, we have her interview from the seventies!" and so her
mom was actually one of the people who, the interviewees that we have from the
1970s. And she was really jazzed about that, as was I.

CLAIRE DAVIS: Melba Kizzire was interviewed in 1979 by Samford student Joy
Richardson. The interview covered multiple reels as she described her experience
moving into Docena as a child and returning to raise a family. Kizzire mentions
writing a book about Docena.

JOY RICHARDSON: This is an interview with Mrs. Melba Kizzire for the Samford
University oral history program, and my name is Joy Richardson. We're in
Ms. Kizzre's home, and the date is March 12, 1979. Ms. Kizzire has written
a book on the history of Docena, and it was published in 1977. Is that right?
Um, Ms. Kizzire, I'd just like to ask you what is it about Docena that has
intrigued you and made you want to write the history.

MELBA KIZZIRE: The fact that it was and is a very good place to live and bring
up a family. People seldom leave: when the older people die out, their children
take over the homes. If somebody does move away, they usually move back as soon
as a house is available. They'll buy and move back. The Jackses was, were
one example, weren't they? You know, most of the people that do move away
are very unhappy, and, um, for one thing, this is where my relatives have been
for a long time, this is where I intend to be, to bring up my children, and my
grandchildren make my fourth generation.

CAMERON TEANEY: And it was interesting because none, I remembered Melba talking
about a book that she had written. It was just, it, I don't know, it was
really, I guess, like an oral history victory in a lot of ways. Um, but yeah,
that was, and that was probably my favorite part of the project was actually
going and meeting those people and making those connections.

MICHELE LITTLE: In addition to making the connection between Mrs. Kizzire and
her book, Cameron interviewed the instigator behind the original set of
interviews: retired Samford professor Dr. Marlene Rikard. Over coffee at the
library's bagel shop, Dr. Rikard discussed her first experiences with oral
history as a graduate student.

MARLENE RIKARD: I actually, um, took a class, I guess in oral history, when
Wayne Flynt was a professor here and I was doing my masters here at Samford at
that time. And I, I can't be sure because I took several classes from him
before he left for Auburn, but I think I took his oral history class. And then
we he, when I started teaching here, um, they needed someone to handle the oral
history classes, and so I took over the classes. And so I taught an, taught the
oral history classes. But, when I was working on my dissertation, I was having
trouble finding traditional records, written records. The topic had to do with
programs that US Steel had implemented and US Steel was very protective of their
records. They didn't want anybody to see any of their records. And so I kept
wondering, "How am I going to get into this topic if there are no records
for me to tap into?" And I decided that if I could identify people who had
been connected with the programs and interviews them, it was kind of a backdoor
way of getting into the topic. And... So, it dealt with welfare capitalism,
which was very paternalistic programs that TCI, which was a division of US Steel
put in for their workers. And there were several motivations. One was, it was
obviously anti-unionism. They didn't want their workers to unionize. But
there were other things as well. So I began to identify people who lived in the
villages, the company towns and people who had worked for the company and began
to compile a list of people to interview.

CLAIRE DAVIS: Over time, Dr. Rikard's practice in oral history extended
into her teaching, and she told Cameron her rationale behind choosing
communities and projects close to Birmingham.

MARLENE RIKARD: So then when, when I began teaching the oral history class, what
I liked was for the students to all work on a central theme so that they could
communicate with each other or they could share each other's research.

CAMERON TEANEY: It was less of an individual thing and more of a class...

MARLENE RIKARD: Right. And that at the end we would come out with something that
would be worthy of being put in Special Collection. So the natural thing was to
pull upon contacts and resources that I had. So I had done all these interviews
in these villages and everything and knew people there. So, I used Docena as one
of the projects for one class. Docena was a coal-mining village that was owned
by US Steel TCI. And I could put the students in touch with people that they
could interview, they could use some of what I had done in the past in research
as the basis so that they would have knowledge about the company town, the
programs, and that would help them develop their questions that they utilized in
their oral history interviews.

MICHELLE LITTLE: So what did a historian trained on books and physical records
find in oral history work that made it so essential to her classes?

MARLENE RIKARD: You know I'm kind of glad it worked out the way it did,
because later, I actually got into some US Steel records and that's,
that's a whole other story. And a lot of serendipity there. But because I
had done the oral histories first, I could then check the accuracy of the
memories against the written records that I finally got into. And if I had been
into the written records first, it might have skewed the way I did the interviews.

CAMERON TEANEY: That's interesting.

MARLENE RIKARD: But, it validated the oral history to me as a, as a method and
one of the things that I was focusing on was I didn't want to do elitist
interviews. A lot of oral history programs have focused on elites, on
presidents, um, people in high positions in government or high positions in the
military. But the class, the way we designed it here was to give voice to people
who wouldn't appear that much in the written record. And so, one of the
things that I found with the interviews that I did and with the interviews that
the students did was that these people were so appreciative that somebody wanted
to hear their story.

CAMERON TEANEY: Wow. That's awesome.

MARLENE RIKARD: And they, they just thought that well, at first they would say,
"Well, I don't have anything important to tell you." You know,
and then when you got across to them that you, you were looking for how they
lived their lives, what it was like in a company village, how they reacted to
the programs that the company put in, were they union members, uh, how did they
feel about the union versus the company programs, they began to open up. And
they were excited that somebody wanted to hear their story, their version.

CAMERON TEANEY: Yeah.

CLAIRE DAVIS: Beyond preserving the stories of the "everyday person,"
Dr. Rikard found increasing value in using oral history in the classroom. Just
as she had learned the value of oral history in Dr. Flynt's class as
graduate student, she hoped to instill the same respect for personal accounts in
her students.

CAMERON TEANEY: ...what was, um, I guess your main hope for them as they
were conducting these interviews? Or like main reason for like...

MARLENE RIKARD: Well, I guess there were several. I don't know if there was
a main hope. Obviously in an oral history class I wanted them to see the value
of oral history. And the readings were all directed to that. Some of the
readings that were assigned had to do with Birmingham history as an industrial
site, but some of the readings had to with oral history projects that had taken
place in other parts of the, of the country. So I wanted them as history majors
to learn that it's not always just the written record, that there are other
ways of getting into what happened at a particular time. But also, for most of
them, given the nature of Samford students, they had never been to a place like
Docena or Muscoda. And so it was also introducing them to another side of town,
another genre of people, another way of life, and they most of them made very
deep friendships with the people that they interviewed.

CAMERON TEANEY: That is so cool.

MARLENE RIKARD: Many of them went back later to visit with the people they interviewed.

CAMERON TEANEY: Wow, that's awesome.

MARLENE RIKARD: And so I think it added a dimension to their experience. I mean
you've probably heard Samford referred to as a bubble on occasion. Well this
definitely got them out of the bubble.

CAMERON TEANEY: Burst the bubble. (both laugh)

MICHELLE LITTLE: Ultimately, though, what Dr. Rikard most wanted to emphasize
was the importance and permanence of students' work to others in the
historical record, and, by extension, the importance of sharing that collected
knowledge to keep their stories alive.

CAMERON TEANEY: And, well I guess, kind of on that note like with what
we're trying to do with this project and bringing back these, the
interviews that were conducted in your class, do you have any sort of like hopes
for what, you know, or things you'd like us to emphasize?

MARLENE RIKARD: Mmmm, that's a good question. I guess to a certain extent
that students can produce things that are of lasting value. That those
interviews that they did weren't just to get a grade, weren't just for that
class. Those interviews that they did are now in special collection, that they
can be utilized by searchers on many levels. And we do, we've had a lot of
people come and research because we have got photographs of industrial history;
we've got all these interviews about industrial history. And so people who
are working on dissertations or family history or visual images have been coming
here and they have been using material that was done by Samford students. So I
guess in a way, you know, that as a student, you're not just, particularly
as a history major, you're not just working for a grade, you can be
producing something that's got value to people well outside the class and
well outside of Samford.

MICHELE LITTLE: So I know that I see the need for and the uses of oral history
everywhere I look (an occupational hazard, I guess), but to me, this story
exemplifies all of this perfectly. And not only the powerful, lasting effect of
doing oral history, but also now bringing it into the digital realm. I mean,
here we have a graduate student from over 40 years ago getting excited about
oral history methodology, deciding to use it in her classroom when she became a
history professor, running this project in the Docena community in the 1970s,
donating the reels to our library here at Samford, and the Samford library keeps
them safe and sound until they can be digitized recently, and now we have
current students learning from these older interviews and now conducting new
interviews. And now we're able to bring all these stories to you, our
audience, in a podcast. And we have another student, English major Emily Youree,
who is set to do another internship on these same Docena interviews this coming
fall. She's going to be indexing the transcripts and running a language
analysis on the corpus of the interviews and putting it all together on our
website. So this type of thing can really only happen with oral history. And I
guarantee you that if Dr. Rikard's students had just written research
papers about TCI mining towns we would not be having this conversation right now.

CLAIRE DAVIS: Definitely--I know from my own personal experience that
before this project even appeared on my radar, an acquaintance of mine who knew
I worked in the STORI office approached me and asked if we had a copy of his
interview that he had conducted as a Samford student years ago, and lo and
behold, it was actually one of the Docena interviews. It was amazing to see the
effect that one project had on this man--he could remember so many details
from the conversation and was clearly excited that a copy of it might still
exist in the world. There's no way he would have remembered a paper as
fondly or that a paper could have left such an impact on him. And now, we get to
share interviews like his so that they can continue to influence people 40 years
in the future.

CLAIRE DAVIS: As always, thanks for listening! Next time, we'll share more
from Docena and dive into what life in a Southern company town was like. Until then--

BOTH:--make waves!

CLAIRE DAVIS: Our theme music was made by Samford student Kerry Joiner.
Background music was composed by Kerry Joiner and Lucas Gonze, and Lobo Loco
from the Free Music Archive. Cameron Teaney conducted the interviews with Dr.
Marlene Rikard, Nancy Fouche, and Faye Mason. Joy Richardson conducted the
interview with Ms. Melba Kizzire. Claire Davis conducted the interview with
Cameron Teaney. This show was written and hosted by Claire Davis and Michelle
Little. This is a Samford Traditions and Oral History Recording Initiative
production. For more information on Samford University or our program, visit us
on our webpage on the Samford website or follow us on social media on Facebook
and Instagram at Samford_STORI and on Twitter at SU_STORI.

Audio Information
Attribute	Value
Repository	Samford University Oral History Collection
Accession	SUHist/STORI/010