Quote:
Originally Posted by lumberjack
Lawrence Ritter said he had to keep his subjects focused. He had a woman friend who was helping, running the tape recorder or something, and he had to ban her from the interviews as she would go off subject and distract the old guys. He said he wasn't happy about it, but it was necessary. As I understand it, he hired someone to make transcripts of the interviews and they simply went on and on. Riter was, I guess, pretty good at editing the stories down.Henry Thomas can, perhaps, add to that.
lumberjack
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I would agree with most of this. Larry's girlfriend, Barbara, who was allowed to participate in several of the interviews, was everything you didn't want in a questioner: full of herself, asking inane questions, obsequiously flirting with the subjects, etc. You can hear all that in the Goose Goslin segment of the audio set, but the Goose just rolls over her, he's got his story to tell and he's going to tell it, and it turns out great. And yes, the freedom and time Ritter gave his subjects could also work against him, and some of the interviews ramble on without producing much of interest. Sometimes the interviewees themselves just weren't very good no matter how much editing was brought to bear, and those were an easy choice to leave off the set. It was Larry's son, Stevie, then in his mid-teens, who handled the tape recorder, incidentally.