Tag: Alexander Dracobly

The UO Veterans Oral History Project

Presenter: Leonie Schulze

Co-Presenters: Jennifer Esparza

Faculty Mentor: Alexander Dracobly

Presentation Type: Poster 92

Primary Research Area: Social Science

Major: English, History

Funding Source: Tom and Carol Williams Fund for Undergraduate Education; Department of History; Kira Homo and James Fox at Special Collections; Kirstin Hierholzer and her staff at the Center for Media and Educational Technologies

Every person has a story to tell and everyone’s story deserves to be told. These stories can be recorded and stored in archives to be read and possibly used for research in the future. This is exactly what students of the UO Veterans Oral History Project have been doing for the past five years and will continue to do for however long there are veterans out there willing to tell their story. For students, the project is an opportunity to learn about how to prepare and successfully conduct interviews, as well as how to transcribe them in a way that lets the interviewee’s character shine through black letters on white paper. For the veterans who are interviewed, the project is an opportunity to reflect on their military past in a safe environment, to perhaps tell a story they have not told before and to know that their names will not be forgotten. For future researchers this project will hopefully be useful in various ways. During the past five years that this project has been pursued, UO students have collected enough material for researchers to ask a wide variety of questions. Why did people decide to join? How did one individual’s experiences in Iraq or Afghanistan differ from those of another soldier? What did the service mean for the members’ families? Our project will hopefully serve as a public record and as a tool for future researches and historians to find answers to their questions.

The World War II Correspondence of Billy and Bonnie Amend

Presenter(s): Will Curtis − History

Faculty Mentor(s): Alexander Dracobly, Julie Hessler

Poster 119

Research Area: History

For just short of three years, from June 1942 to August 1945, my great-grandparents, newlyweds Billy and Bonnie Amend, did not see each other or hear one another’s voice. Billy was a Major in the 190th Field Artillery, stationed in England until the Allied invasion of Western Europe on June 6, 1944. During the years he was gone, the Amends communicated exclusively through letters. They each wrote almost one a day for the duration of the war. My thesis examines just one year of this correspondence, 1944, during which Billy saw some of the most violent combat of the war, including the Battle of the Bulge. Meanwhile, Bonnie was left to struggle through daily life and care for my grandmother back home in Hugo, Oklahoma. Through examination and careful reading of just over one thousand pages of their original letters, my thesis evaluates how the Amends persisted through World War II and how the letters they exchanged helped them to do so. Primarily, the letters served to maintain the bond between Billy and Bonnie. While they spent ink discussing the war itself, the letters are largely dedicated to summaries of day-to-day life, and expressions of each other’s desire to finally be together again. However far apart they were and however much danger Bonnie imagined Billy to be in, the letters they wrote back and forth seemed to lessen their separation, and mitigate some of that danger. Though my thesis only examines the correspondence of Billy and Bonnie, their experience was one had by millions of Americans during the war. They provide a direct account of was on the minds of families separated by the deadliest war the world has ever known, and detail just how they were able to come out on the other side.