While working on this project, it looks like I will be doing a lot of what I do best: editing and proofreading. Those aren't very glamorous parts of the work of getting a cause off the ground, but I do believe that they are important. Truly professional-grade documents (advertisements, press releases, etc.) should be easy to read and appear legitimate and trustworthy to the public. In my experience, a proofread document gets very different reactions from readers than a casually thrown-together one. We may "just" be students, but that's no reason not to approach this as a job and commit to doing absolutely all we can to get professional results.
That's why I'm taking AMST-680 in the first place, after all: to build skills I need for my career. Specifically, I want to learn to interview people and collect their oral histories. I study English, and my thesis focus is on the texts produced by fan composers (the sort of work that The Organization for Transformative Works does). While not directly connected to that, this course is at its core about speaking to and working with members of a community to document their histories and understand their goals, and that's exactly what I need.
The history of the Fairfield/Bethlehem shipyards back during World War II might be a good place for me to start.
(Picture via Wikipedia)
My paternal grandparents were Polish immigrants who came to live and work in a New York steel town before the War. They spent their whole remaining lives there, and my father also worked in the mill for a few years before he moved down here, so I feel something of a personal connection to the stories of the place. (Cursory Googling coupled with fuzzy memories indicates it might even have been Lackawanna, a Bethlehem affiliate, but I'm not certain at this time.) I'm also curious: what was the wartime industry like? Did many women take jobs, Rosie the Riveter-style, back then while the men shipped out? And if so, what happened to them when the war ended? The changing role of women in the 1940s and 1950s is just fascinating, and it would be amazing to be able to hear from and preserve the stories of women who lived it. Time is, after all, running out for us to do so.
Furthermore, what are community members' feelings regarding the industry's effects on the local environment? It's a complex issue, with many stakeholders involved. Entire communities rose and fell with the dual influences of available work and devastating pollution. As William Cronon observed in his essay "The Trouble With Wilderness," the position of wanting to get back to a "pure, unspoiled" form of nature is an inherently privileged on, held by people who can afford to be tourists of wilderness. Cronon argues that we need not only protect these sublime vistas, but also to find ways to integrate nature into the fabric of our own, human environments. The Filbert Street Garden is an example of this concept, a little oasis of plants in the middle of BayBrook's vast industrial development, and I wonder whether I can find out more about similar efforts in the area's past; Dr. King mentioned that the vanished steelworkers' community of Fairfield had a well-known garden. How have the people in these places modified them to suit their own needs, and how are they still doing it today?
More questions than answers, perhaps, but that's a good thing at the very beginning of research.
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