Ronald J. Grele: History, Politics, and Stories

It is no exaggeration to say that, for some five decades, Ronald J. Grele has been one of the most influential oral historians in the world. Among his best-known contributions to oral history are his distinct approach to questions of theory and ideology and his analysis of the dynamics of interviews, defined in his many publications and presentations. He is also renowned for guiding and participating in major oral history projects. Most notably, for eighteen years (1982-2000), he was, the director of the Oral History Research Office (OHRO) at Columbia University, one of the oldest and largest oral history programs in the world.¹ Before his tenure at OHRO, Ron was director of the UCLA Oral History Program (1981-1982), research director of the New Jersey Historical Commission and director of its oral history program (1977-1981), assistant director of the Ford Foundation Oral History Project (1971-1975), and archivist and interviewer at the John F. Kennedy Oral History Program (1965-1966). Beyond his work on major oral history projects, Ron has taught history and oral history domestically and internationally with great success, advised many archival and public history programs, including the City College of New York Oral History of Working Class New Yorkers, and mentored many budding oral historians, myself included.

Other articles in this issue will further examine Ron's accomplishments in the field of oral history, but to get a fuller sense of Ron as a historian, an oral historian, and a person, I want to discuss his life outside of this field.² What I want to suggest is that Ron early developed an enduring, deeply democratic outlook on life and a strong belief that intellectual work has to shape, and be shaped by, social justice work. These convictions have guided his later life and oral history work.

Ron was born during the Great Depression in the heavily industrialized and unionized town of Naugatuck, Connecticut. He often recalls the green, reeking river of his youth that ran through the town, with dark rubber factories lining its banks, carrying the toxic wastes of the brass factories upstream. His father, who was of German ancestry, worked his way up to an accounting job in a factory and died when Ron was just six months old; he never knew him. His mother, who was a Yankee with New England roots back to the Revolution, raised him and his older sister. For Ron, a family headed by a single mother was "nothing unusual"; the mixed European ethnic and white American working-class community of his youth was a "neighborhood of widows." Encountering women as heads of households, wage earners, and property owners was "totally unremarkable" to him. Beyond his immediate family, Ron grew up in the rich extended network of his German-American and New England relations. He worked from a young age at jobs like delivering newspapers and setting bowling pins. He became immersed in politics early, through the activist Republicanism of family members and the avid daily reading and discussion of the news during World War II. Consequently, he gravitated toward the study of the past and, by seventh grade, he knew he "was going to be a historian."

From 1952 to 1958, Ron attended the University of Connecticut (UConn), where he did indeed study history, receiving both bachelor's and master's degrees; he also studied broadly in the social sciences and literature. At UConn he "became political," joining the socially conscious Independent Students Organization (ISO), founded by antifascist World War II veterans who were incensed by, among other things, the racist, anti-Semitic policies of the fraternities. Running for office on ISO tickets, Ron became a student senator, then the student body president. Additionally, by the late fifties, the emerging Southern civil rights movement became an important inspiration to him and other student rebels. Oppositional politics had replaced his earlier Republican politics.

After finishing the master's program at UConn, Ron married, and he and his wife Gaile headed for the San Francisco Bay Area, attracted by the Beat movement and the region's alternative culture. They had the first of their...