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BN: And then you said you did some teaching after you graduated. But where was that?

SH: This is in San Fernando Valley, which at the time, by the way, was a very middle-class white neighborhood. The only concentration of non-white people were in the Pacoima and San Fernando proper. And I used to hate to go to those schools. I walked in one day and I couldn't stop the planes from flying. And this one Black guy was giving me a lot of . . . . I said, "Richard, get your ass back in that chair," and everybody started to laugh. It was really quite crazy.

BN: This is in the L.A. Unified system?

SH: Well, I taught there for four years, yes. And then the whole time that I was a grad student, I was a substitute teacher -- during which I went to every junior and senior high school in San Fernando Valley -- every one. And, you know, it's really strange because before I went to grad school, I was one of two finalists for a job. Was it Taft? I can't remember -- a school in the valley. And my chairman and I were the finalists, and, of course, the job went to him. And then I went to Europe and I interviewed for these jobs to teach in the American School. And again, a guy came out and interviewed me at UCLA and then he said, "I'm sorry, we thought about you, but we hired somebody with a little bit more experience. Because I only had a year or so. And because none of that panned out, I ended up going to grad school. And at that point, I only intended to get a master's degree so I could go teach in a junior college. (It was then called a junior college.) And I interviewed for some of those positions in Orange County. (But then one night) I went out with a guy to dinner. We went to a cafeteria on campus and we started going through his biblio and I thought, "Well, I could pass these exams in two fields now. What am I doing in the MA program?" But it took me a long time to decide that I was going to go for it. And then when I told my mom, she said, "Well, when are you getting married?"

BN: The MA, what was the MA program in?

SH: The program?

BN: What field? What field were you -- was the master's program...

SH: Oh, in grad school?

BN: Yeah.

SH: I was in history.

BN: Okay.

SH: But you know, I was never all that interested in history proper; I was really interested in what is now called cultural history.

BN: Okay. What was the particular area of interest? Was there a specific topic?

SH: Well, you know, you didn't have much choice. Back then at UCLA, you had to have four fields for your orals. And most people did two fields, early modern and late modern Europe, and then early American and modern American. And I thought, oh, you know, this sounds like a drag. So what I did was--I went to the English department and I got someone to sponsor me so I only had one field in American history and the other field was in American lit. But then, after I passed my orals -- well, as I was preparing for my orals -- I had to come up with a dissertation topic. And here there was a big socialist movement in L.A. in the early 20th century, and I was beginning to explore that. And then I went farther afield and I thought, you know, I stumbled into the movies because they began you know, on the East Coast but came to the West Coast. And I just got -- I just went into film. And at that point, it meant jumping disciplinary boundary lines, and it was many years before I could figure out how to marry two disciplines that in some ways had very antithetical assumptions because one's highly theoretical, the other one is, you know, more data-based. But I finally evolved a way of working those two fields, but it took me several years to figure it out.

BN: What was your dissertation? What did your dissertation topic end up being?

SH: Well, it was about the silent movie heroine. And to do that, I had to go to the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art, and especially George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.