Born in Chicago on October 4, 1926, Willa Baum was unconventionally educated in Germany, Switzerland, and New York in the 1930s and 1940s before settling in Ramona, California for high school. She was a star student at Whittier College. Her youthful interests and job experiences were diverse—skiing, folk dancing, playing piano and trombone, reading history, working as a social reporter on a local newspaper, and fruit picking. In 1947, before enrolling in the master’s program at Mills College, Willa hitchhiked across the country. The following year, she enrolled at Berkeley as a graduate student in U.S. history (one of only two women in the program at the time).
Baum was present at the founding of UC Berkeley's Oral History Center (at that time called the Regional Oral History Office, or ROHO) in 1954, the second university program in oral history in the country, and served as its director for forty-three years until her retirement in 2000. She was a pioneer in the development of oral history as research methodology and expert on oral history methods, processing, uses, and theoretical approaches.As a founding member and leader in the Oral History Association, she mentored countless community historians as well as Berkeley faculty and students. Her book,Oral History for the Local Historical Society, was first published in 1969 and is still recommended for beginners to the field. The procedures and practices she established at ROHO on matters from legal releases to nuances of transcribing and editing interviews to ethical treatment of interviewees have provided models for programs across the country.
The tangible scholarly impact Baum created is best exemplified by the oral history collection built at ROHO—more than 1,600 oral history interviews, in 800 repositories worldwide (many of them now accessible via Internet). She fostered ROHO's projects in a diversity of topics of central importance to the history of California and the West, often before they became established subject areas in academia: environmental history, women in politics, the disability rights movement as examples. Baum also worked with the Class of 1931 to establish an endowment fund for oral histories with distinguished alumni, entitled "The University of California: Source of Community Leaders." In recognition of her many contributions, Baum received the Berkeley citation, the University’s highest honor, and The Bancroft Library’s Hubert Howe Bancroft Award.
By Ann Lage, former Associate Director of ROHO
Read more:
The Personal and Professional Papers of Willa K. Baum
Remembering Willa Baum and Her Work as Director of ROHO