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[Ed. note: This transcript has been extensively edited by the narrator]

JG: You've had a very full research life given the work you've done in oral history at Fullerton, but you've mentioned about having to defer your own research agenda in part. So I'm wondering, what is it that you've been working on over the years, or what are you working on now?

AH: Well, of the first two things I published, one was an article that dealt with the famous Bloomsbury group of intellectuals in England: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and still others, mostly writers and artists. It was really a pretty good piece, and I should have tried to get it published in the American Historical Review. Instead I had it published in a campus-based interdisciplinary journal. And one of my History Department colleagues said, "What in the hell did you do that for?" Well, probably it involved fear. It's hard to imagine yourself, somebody from a lower-middle-class family, being an intellectual, to imagine yourself having a Ph.D., and having an academic career. I used to love the title of the movie, My Brilliant Career. "What's so damned brilliant about it?" "Is it even a career?"

Anyway, the first article I wrote was about Bloomsbury and the next article I wrote, also published in the same campus-based interdisciplinary journal, was about the artists, writers, and bohemians of New York's Greenwich Village: John Reed, Max and Crystal Eastman, Floyd Dell, Mabel Dodge, Walter Lippmann, John and Dolly Sloan, Randolph Bourne, and others. And both articles dealt with the period around World War I. I was very interested in cultural radicalism. That was my focus in terms of the Anglo-American world. And so that's why I was attracted to doing these interviews with social scientists like those connected with the UC Berkeley-based Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study during World War II. As for oral history, I was at least as interested in the theoretical aspects of oral history as I was in the practice of it. I mean, I would go to oral history conference sessions dealing with such matters as "What is an oral history interview?" What constitutes it?" If it's a story, what kind of story?" And I would have liked to have had a career where I wrote books and was a bigger player in scholarship than I was. Not writing a lot of books so much, but writing ones that went through the rigorous kind of refereeing that goes into being published by academic presses. Somehow or other I skirted that sort of thing. So while I have had a lot of articles published along those lines, when it comes to books, I have had a thin career. So I think that would be my regret, I guess, though not a deep regret. I've now been retired for two years and I basically spend probably six to eight hours per day just working on my research and writing. I pretty much work on it all the time. I golf once a week, and I do take walks, go to lunch occasionally with friends, and do some historical consulting and volunteer work, but essentially my retirement life consists mainly of reading, researching, and writing. I mean, that's it. That's what I like, that's what I care about.

I have three book projects that I'm working on right now. The first is editing this memoir written by James Omura. When I inherited the manuscript from the family of Omura, after his death in 1994, it was in very rough shape. It had a lot of problems. I've spent so much time and so much money preparing it for publication. Hopefully, Stanford University Press will publish it within the next year or so. That's the first thing. And the second book project is this two-part publication I was telling you about. It's tentatively titled "Barbed Voices: Oral History, Resistance, and the Japanese American World War II Experience." And that manuscript is pretty much in good order. But right now I have to devote my primary attention to the Omura manuscript, which is now titled "Nisei Naysayer: The Memoir of Miltant Japanese American Journalist Jimmie Omura." And then the third book I'm doing -- I've always been interested in sports, and I've always been interested in cultural history, and I've always loved southern California -- is that I'm writing a history of the transformation of southern California in the early Cold War period, but I'm doing it through the lens of a particular high school football game that was played in 1956 at the Los Angeles Coliseum. It was a California Interscholastic Federation, CIF, championship game, and it drew some 41,000 fans, the largest crowd ever to view a high school football game in California. The game was between Anaheim High School and Downey High School. It was a tie game and the two star players were named the co-CIF players of the year. They had great Disneyland-like names, Mickey Flynn, of Anaheim, and Randy Meadows, of Downey. But the manuscript, "The Golden Kingdom: Prep Football and Early Cold War Society and Culture in Southern California," really gets into everything about the transformation of southern California during that era. And this was the period where southern Californian people, and many people elsewhere, thought that the area was the wave of the future, the golden age, that the good life was right here. Of course, the good life was white. One side of the coin was just being racist, the other side was being politically conservative. But the car culture, the music, and all kinds of other things in southern California were viewed as the cutting edge of the country. So I've been collating all of this stuff. It's kind of an American Studies type of project, but it's centered on southern California, and I've done a lot of interviewing with this project because I've interviewed the people from the two high schools who were on the teams, as well as those who weren't on the teams, and am trying to get a fix on the situation. It's an important book to me because it again involves another thing that I left out of my life for a long time, which was sports. Somehow or other, sports was something I came to be ashamed of a little bit, feeling that somehow you are not an intellectual if you're too involved with sports; and yet I never would have been a historian if it wasn't for sports. The first thing I was doing history on was really sports. When I was about six years old I knew virtually every baseball player in the major leagues. I mean, I was a walking encyclopedia of sports, and a lot of kids were then and still are today. You talk to them, and they know all these things about sports. But you give those things up as you age, because you think that somehow or other, "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, and when I became an adult, I put away childish things." So sports became a childish thing to put away. But now the last thing I read before I go to bed every night is some book or other to do with sports. Right now I' m reading about the Philippine professional basketball league, Pacific Rims, written by a twenty-five-year old writer, Rafe Bartholomew. It's fascinating. But I read books about a mother's perspective of her son's experience as a high school football player. I've also read books about women's basketball teams and women's basketball coaches. I read all these kinds of things because I'm really trying to understand how sports books are approached by authors. What I want to write is not a sports book per se, and I don't want to write a history book. What I want to write is a society-in-sports/sports-in-society kind of history. So many sports writers have moved in that direction in recent years, and the quality of sports writing is so much better than I had realized. I thought I could come in and really write some gangbusters kind of study, but no. I'm fighting for air, I really am. It's tough. It's tough. I mean, they're really good writers in this field, but I'm enjoying myself working on this project. So that keeps me going. But the last thing at night I always do is to read sports books.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.