Joan Hall

Transcription

I learned about DARE when I was in graduate school at Emory University in, I think it was 1968 – And I thought Wow I’d like to work on that project. At the time I was working on a dialect survey of rural Georgia – And it was similar to the fieldwork that was going on here but it was on a much smaller scale. So I thought, Gee that would be great. But it was going on, and I was in Georgia, the fieldwork was emanating from Madison and so I just kind of put it aside. But when I was finishing my dissertation in 1975, my adviser from Emory, who was a friend of Fred Cassidy said "Fred Cassidy's looking for an editor" – I thought, ooh, that sounds great. So I applied then and got the job. Sometimes, people would say "well I don’t have time to do the whole thing." The whole thing done by one person could take up to a week. So they'd say "I don’t know about fishing and hunting" but talk to mr. jones down the road. I’ll do the questions about foods and farms and weather and time and things like that. So Sometimes there were several people who contributed to a single community's questionnaire but in eace case we knew the details of age, sex, race, amount of education and the community type so that when we plotted these responses on our map,we could also look at social distributions. It's very exciting. We've been working towards this for a long time and for the last decade or so of his life, Fred Cassidy’s motto was "on to z!" But we realized that z would not be the end because for one thing we've promised from the very beginning a volume of supplementary materials that will be wonderfully useful. As I look back I realize that we have had a simply amazing collaboration among federal agencies – NEH in particular and NSF and the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, other foundations, many hundreds of private individuals who simply want to see us get done and of course the University of Wisconsin. The graduate school in particular has been very supportive of us and they have housed us here since before 1965, because Fred Cassidy was a faculty member, and have been very supportive of us through the years. It’s very fun. I think we all like to think of it as our baby so we put the volume in our arms and cradle or rock it because it’s such a huge part of our lives.