Center makes history turn personal

Notable Arkansans put life stories on tape for UA archive

Kris Katrosh, director of the Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History in Fayetteville, discusses plans to put the center in a renovated Bud Walton Hall.
Kris Katrosh, director of the Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History in Fayetteville, discusses plans to put the center in a renovated Bud Walton Hall.

— It didn’t take long for Jerry Maulden to ignore the video camera, large microphones, reflective panels and studio lights a few feet from his face.

A crew from the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History had spent two hours transforming the home of the former chief of Arkansas Power & Light Co. into animpromptu studio, carting in a truckload of equipment and rearranging furniture.

In a typical interview with the history project, Arkansas’ most notable people talk for six to eight hours, recording their life stories for an online archive.

The Pryor center staff blocks the windows, replacing the natural glow with artificial lights aimed at walls so video footage doesn’t reflect the sun setting behind the subject.

Maulden was in tearsless than a fourth of the way through his 2007 interview, talking about how rejection from the parents of wealthy childhood friends drove him to later prove his worth in the business world.

“And so, maybe I didn’t have the right clothes on, maybe I didn’t dress as well as that son or something else,” he told interviewer Scott Lunsford, associate director of the Pryor center. “And, I really believe it wasthat rejection that put in me the desire to succeed.”

The moment is one of the many poignant moments housed in the center’s enormous archive, located in the Special Collections unit of the University Libraries at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, director Kris Katrosh said.

The center, started in 1999 with a a contribution of $220,000 in unspent campaign funds from former U.S. Sen. David Pryor, has collected 50 terabytes of photos, video and audio recordings centered on the personal experiences of Arkansans.

Maulden’s interview is housed alongside those of former governors, executives of large companies and a man who taught the Tuskegee Airmen how to fly.

That archive likely will keep growing as increased emphasis on video interviews, new recording initiatives, a new facility and a growing list of recommended interviewees stretch the center’s capacity,Katrosh said.

“The list keeps growing, and it stays pretty far ahead of us,” he said.

Katrosh said he hopes to relocate the Pryor center to a new space in Bud Walton Hall, a former dormitory, after the first phase of a $5 million renovation, which should be completed in about 18 months, he said.

The expanded space will allow the center to store and edit 24,000 hours of donated news footage from KATV, Channel 7, in Little Rock. The footage, up to 50 years old, is currently housed in the station’s basement.

“We’ll fill that space up immediately,” Lunsford said.

Once online, users will be able to click their way through historic vignettes - governors being sworn into office, Johnny Cash singing at Cummins Prison in 1969 and Elvis Presley getting a haircut at Fort Chaffee after he was inducted into the Army in 1958.

The KATV archive joins other donated recordings, including the recently opened interviews President Bill Clinton’s friend Diane Blair completed with his campaignstaff after his 1992 campaign. The center estimates there are 75,000 additional hours of recorded material that could be collected and catalogued around the state.

After recording an original interview, the center’s staff transcribes it, edits the video and converts it into several formats, allowing it to be watched on computers or mobile phones. Audio, video and transcripts are posted to the center’s Web site.

Lunsford proudly displayed an interview on his iPhone on Thursday.

“We find that there’s a lot of personality that comes through when you can hear someone’s voice,” he said. “There’s a lot more personality that comes through when you can see someone speak.”

The center hopes one day to expand its reach by forming agreements with cable stations to broadcast interviewson television, Katrosh said.

“We’re not interested in hoarding this material,” he said. “We want people to use it.”

The center originally transcribed interviews from microcassette tapes. It now lends digital audio recordersand powerful microphones to Arkansans, providing a copy of their self-conducted interviews in exchange for the rights to house the stories in the center’s archive. Primary interviews, completed by the center’s staff, are almost entirely done on video.

Pryor’s initial financial gift was expanded with a $2 million pledge from poultry magnate Don Tyson’s family, but it will take additional private funding to complete future projects, Katrosh said.

It will take about $5 million to catalog the KATV archive, and the center continues to expand.

Center officials said they hope to create a “history mobile” that will travel around the state, allowing Arkansans to create video interviews on the spot, an expansion of the Pryor’s original mission in founding the center, Lunsford said.

“Arkansas is a rich mine of stories,” he said. “They felt it was time for the people here to tell their story instead of letting Hollywood and New York do it for them.”

Arkansas, Pages 15 on 03/21/2010

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