People
From the Oral Histories
Ultimately, I found no better way of unpacking lay peoples= past encounters with a neighborhood ecology, and the narratives by which they ordered these, than by sitting down and talking with them about it--oral histories. From early on, I concentrated my interviewing in three contrasting communities within each suburbanizing region: one that was a mass suburbs, another that was upper middle class, and another that harbored a large minority population. Overall, I conducted some 74 interviews for Crabgrass Crucible, with some 99 individuals. You can find the full list of interviews and interviewees here. Below I've culled excerpts from several of the interviews, especially those of people featured in the book. I am currently seeking to deposit the tapes and transcripts of my interviews in the Special Collections Department of Melville Library at Stony Brook University.
New York (Long Island)
Levittown
Julien and Muriel Kane moved into a Levittown house in 1952. For three years prior, once married, they had lived in an apartment in Queens. Both of them had grown up in the New York City area, as children of families of recent immigrants. He had studied geology at the graduate level and taught high school earth science; she had worked in the NYU adult education division, but then worked parttime in the Levittown schools as they raised their children. They would live in Levittown for twelve years, and Julien would become president of the Levittown Property Owners Association in the late fifties, and then an environmental activist.
I interviewed them at their home in Great Neck in April, 2005. My account of their experiences also drew upon their papers, now on deposit at the Special Collections department in Melville Library at Stony Brook University.
North Amityville
Eugene and Bernice Burnett first decided to buy a house on Long Island in 1950, not long after they were married. Both had grown up in Harlem, of West Indian heritage, but they didn't want to raise their children there. The first housing development they visited was Levittown, but they were barred from buying there because they were black. They then bought a house in Ronek Park in North Amityville, a bit further out from Manhattan. Eugene worked at first as a local policeman, while Bernice, a college graduate, held a job at Consolidated Edison until she became pregnant in 1953. Eugene would become a leader in the local NAACP chapter.
II conducted two interviews with them, one only with Eugene in March 1999 and another with the both of them in January 2004, both at their current home in Wyandanch. Documentation of Eugene's activity in the NAACP lies in the chapter files of the NAACP, available at the Schomburg Center in New York City. I wrote up a more extended account of their experience in "Race and Nature in Suburban Passage."
Old Field
Robert Cushman and Grace Barstow Murphy had grown children, and he was contemplating his retirement, when they moved into a house in Old Field in 1952. Murphy had grown up on the island. Prior to moving, the couple had recently given up what had been the Murphy family's longtime summer home, in nearby Crystal Brook, also the house where they had raised their kids, in Brownsville. Robert Murphy had been a longtime ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History, as well as sometime president of National Audubon Society. Grace Murphy was a well-known author in her own right. They would go on to spearhead such organizing as the Long Island chapter of the Nature Conservancy (1954) and the United Conservationists for Long Island (1956). RC Murphy also help lead a lawsuit of Long Island plaintiffs against a DDT spray campaign in the late fifties, and went on to write Fish-shape Paumonok (1964), an early environmental history of Long Island.
My account of their experiences is based on an extensive series of journals kept by Robert Cushman Murphy, which are filled with clippings and observations of Long Island itself. These, along with Grace Barstow Murphy's correspondence, are now in the collections of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. There is also a collection of Murphy papers in Stony Brook's special collections.
Los Angeles
Lakewood
Jackie, Bud, and Steve Rynerson owned a house in Lakewood starting in 1952. Jackie and Bud had married during the war, then shuffled between rentals in Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Centralia. Jackie’s family had only arrived in industrial San Pedro in the 1930's, after immigrating from Paris, France. Bud had come to the West coast still more recently, during wartime service, after growing up on a farm in Iowa. Their son Steve, second of their four children, had been born eighteen months before they moved to Lakewood. Jackie would become involved in Lakewood's local government, in charge of the parks and then serving as mayor. Steve would become the family's first member of the Sierra Club.
My initial interview with Bud and Jackie happened in their Lakewood home in June of 1999. I then interviewed Jackie once more after Bud had passed away, in October of 2006. For their story, I also relied on the trove of documents related to Lakewood's founding and early years at the Lakewood Public Library. My interview with their son Steve was conducted over the phone in February of 2009.
San Gabriel
Beatrice and Henry Alva came to own a house in the barrio area of San Gabriel, near the old Mission, in 1942. Bea had been born this barrio; Henry's parents had moved there when he was a child. When they acquired their San Gabriel house, they had been married for four years, and living in an apartment further downtown, near the lumber yard where Henry worked. Their experience over the postwar decades offers another perspective on suburbanizing: what it was like to live in a old core of a town that was attracting new industries like Whammo, and filling in. Henry was active in the lumber workers' union, and Bea helped organize and lead a San Gabriel-based movement for official recognition of the Gabrielino tribe of California Indians.y
I first interviewed Bea in May, 1999, and then corresponded with her seeking answers to further questions. My documentation of her story was aided by collections at the San Gabriel Historical Society as well as the archive of San Gabriel's La Casa.
Santa Monica foothills/Bel Air/Beverley Glen
Louise and Richard Lillard lived in a house tucked away in a canyon along Beverley Glen from the late 1940's until the mid-1960's. Richard had bought the house in 1947 when moving to the Los Angeles area with his first wife, to take a job as a young college instructor in UCLA's English Department. lIHis marriage soon unravelled, but then he met Louise, a French teacher at Beverley Hills High School, who then moved into his Beverley Glen home. He had grown up in California, though around Sacramento; her upbringing had been in Missouri. Richard helped revive the Beverley Glen homeowner association, and briefly served as president. Preferring to write an early version of environmental history, Richard went on write Eden in Jeopardy (1966), the premier environmentalist manifesto of the Los Angeles region.
My account of the Lillards' experience is based on an interview conducted with Louise Lillard in June 2003 in her North Hollywood home, also Richard Lillard's autobiographical My Urban Wilderness in the Hollywood Hills (1983), a collection of his papers at UCLA's Special Collections, and diaries written by him that are currently in the possession of his daughter, Monique Lillard.y