IN THEIR OWN VOICES

Local immigrants, and their descendants, share oral histories with the rest of us

The Times, Mar 5, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Submitted photo / Times Newspapers

Gloria Rivera, who was born in the Philippines and emigrated to the United States in 1973, tells her story as she is interviewed for an oral history project at the Cedar Mill Community Library.

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The Cedar Mill Community Library, a member of the Washington County Cooperative Library Services, has announced that the first nine in a series of nearly 20 local oral histories have been collected from area residents.

The Cedar Mill library oral history effort is part of the local libraries participation in the statewide Oregon Reads project, a celebration of Oregon’s sesquicentennial.

Inspired by the work of a Sunset High School instructor, Mark Richardson, a young adult librarian with the Cedar Mill Community Library, came up with the idea to recruit the participation of students to help the library gather oral histories of local immigrants and their descendents.

Each year, Matt Hiefield, a Sunset High history teacher, leads his students in the collection of oral histories from World War II veterans. Richardson felt that this year the two projects could be complementary and provide a way to involve students in the libraries’ participation in the Oregon Reads project.

Richardson coordinated the project with Lynne Erlandson, head of adult services with the library. Erlandson was responsible for recruiting the local immigrants and their descendents from the surrounding community. The response has been very positive.

The stories being gathered will be available on the libraries website as podcasts, and will be added to the libraries permanent collection of local history. The first nine participants were interviewed in late February. The library anticipates a gradual roll-out, posting one oral history per week on the Web site over the next two months. The first in the series of interviews should be on the Web site by March 9.

Following is a brief biography on the first nine participants:

n Kathy Foldes – My parents both emigrated to the U.S. from Hungary to escape Hitler in 1939. My mother wrote a short story about how she and her family were able to get a tourist visa for her by pretending her family was wealthy. She was 15 when she came and never saw her parents again. My father came at age 18 with his mother. They were able to qualify under the Czech quota which was larger than the Hungarian quota because the town where my grandmother was born had been in that country at the time she was born there. My grandfather didn’t immigrate with them but he survived the war, which is also an interesting story. My parents both lived in New York City after they landed there and met the next year at a poetry reading at the Hungarian Club. My father was able to expedite getting his U.S. citizenship by enlisting in the Army. He married my mother and left to fight the next week and didn’t see her for 2½ years.

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