Ruth Felt
The Making of a Modern Impresario: San Francisco Performances and Nonprofit Organizations from 1960s to Today
Interviewer: Martin Meeker

In the summer of 2004, the Regional Oral History Office was commissioned by Camilla Smith to conduct a life history interview with Ruth A. Felt. The occasion for the interview was to commemorate the then upcoming 25th anniversary season of San Francisco Performances, the nonprofit performing arts presenting organization founded by Felt in 1979. In the intervening quarter century, San Francisco Performances under the leadership of Felt established itself as one of the premiere fine arts presenting organizations in the United States. Moreover, San Francisco Performances has charted new territory by commissioning innovative musical and dance compositions, by developing an educational program for high school students, and by reaching out to diverse audiences around the San Francisco Bay Area.

The interviews were conducted from September through November 2004 during four separate interview sessions. Each session lasted roughly two hours. All interviews were conducted in the home of Ruth Felt in the Ashbury Heights section of San Francisco. Along with research into the history of San Francisco Performances, nonprofit arts organizations, and arts management, exploratory unrecorded interviews were conducted with Camilla Smith (San Francisco Performances board member), Marian Kohlstedt (Director of Public Relations and Publishing at San Francisco Performances), Melanie Smith (Director of Education at San Francisco Performances), as well as with Ruth Felt. As a side note, this interview only briefly covers Felts years working at the San Francisco Opera under the leadership of Kurt Herbert Adler; for more on her years with the opera, see the interview with Felt for the Adler series at ROHO.

For more on the arts and artists in the San Francisco Bay Area, see the numerous interviews in ROHO's arts series, in particular the interviews with James Schwabacher, Kurt Herbert Adler, and Betty Connors.

McCracklin, Jimmy (b. 1921), Oral History Transcript in Progress
Born in rural Arkansas, Jimmy McCracklin migrated first to St. Louis, then Los Angeles, and in the late 1940s, to Richmond, California. Like thousands of African Americans who relocated to northern cities during and after World War II, McCracklin brought with him the musical culture and styles of the South. His story is profoundly sad in terms of the overt racism, music piracy, illness and loss he has encountered, but equally joyous in the gift of music he possesses and the hundreds of songs he has written.

Caroline Crawford is currently directing a documentary film, Jimmy Sings The Blues, focusing on the powerful themes of McCracklin's life and music. Two short clips from the work-in-progress film can be previewed to the left.

Nin-Culmell, Joaquin
Growing Up with Anaïs Nin, Studying with De Falla, Composing in the Spanish Tradition. 2006.

Joaquin Nin-Culmell and his sister Anaïs in 1927
Photo courtesy of Joaquin Nin-Culmell

Oliveros, Pauline
Improvisation, Deep Listening and Flummoxing The Hierarchy. 2006.

Pauline Oliveros in her faculty office at Mills College, 2002
Photo by Caroline Crawford

Rose Rinder (1894-1987)
Music, Prayer, and Religious Leadership: Temple Emanu-El, 1913-1969. 1971, 224 pp.

Sandor Salgo (b. 1909)
Teaching Music at Stanford University, 1949-1974, Directing the Carmel Bach Festival and the Marin Symphony, 1956-1991, 190 pp.

Schwabacher, James H. (b. 1920)
Renaissance Man of Bay Area Music: Tenor, Teacher, Administration, Impressario, 2001, 197 pp.

Video Excerpts:

Carl Rakosi Links:

Carl Rakosi (1903-2004)
A Century in the Poetic Eye: Carl Rakosi on Poetry, Psychology, and World Affairs in the Twentieth Century.
Interviewer: Kimberly Bird

Carl Rakosi is best known as a member of the “Objectivist” group of poets, who were first linked together in a special issue of Poetry Magazine published in 1931. Poetry editor Harriet Monroe chose Louis Zukofsky as guest editor and charged him with the task of handpicking the finest young U.S. poets and to present them as a new movement. However arbitrary their initial association, this grouping that included Zukofsky, Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and George Oppen endured and developed from that “Objectivist” issue of Poetry to occupy an important position in the history of poetry. During the 1930s, Rakosi was one of the more politically engaged of the group; yet, by the end of that red decade, he found it increasingly difficult to place his work. He did not write the kind of Marxist poetry being published by the journals popular with the left. His desire to support his family led him away from poetry and into a career as a social worker and then as a psychotherapist. He did not return to poetry until 25 years later, and then it was as if he never left.

The interview, which began in July 2002, is a record of Rakosi’s extraordinary memory looking back at his 99 years as a son, husband, father, grandfather, poet, social worker, psychologist, and citizen of the world. Among many other topics, Rakosi goes into depth on the Objectivists as individuals and as a group, the role of poetry in U.S. society, the evolution of social work and the field of psychology, the experience of Jewish peoples in Eastern Europe and as immigrants to the U.S., the history of anti-Semitism in the U.S., the 2001 World Trade Center catastrophe, and his assessment of George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon as statesmen.

Rakosi’s epigrammatic prose style, his aphorisms, and his short poems evidence his love of the concise. It is no surprise then that the stories he tells in this interview lack neither depth nor meaning, but neither are they sewn up neatly for the reader. Throughout, Rakosi demonstrates his unique ability to place the final punctuation mark, in the form of a smile and shoulder shrug, of a particular story exactly at the point where others might begin to explain or interpret the story for the listener. As in his poetry, Rakosi’s oral history demands that we slow down, think, and draw our own conclusions and connections.

Inside 500 Capp Street Video