We’re not just going to find meaningful work, we have to work to make work meaningful.
Dydia DeLyser
Cultural-historical geographer, writer, researcher
Professor of geography, California State University Fullerton
Most university professors, we all have similarly structured jobs. We often work long hours, it’s really typical that my work week is 60 to 70 hours and I usually work 7 days a week. But that’s fairly common especially among professors that are considered “research active” which just means that in addition to your teaching, you’re actively doing new research and publishing about it, to share that work and to contribute to and hopefully in some way advance or elevate scholarship in your field. We balance the research work that we do with the teaching work that we do and with what’s called “service.” Service is usually the smallest component, and for some people it only includes serving on a hiring committee in their department or doing something for the collective good of their university department, or it could be a university committee. For other people, like myself, we do what’s called public and engaged scholarship, or participatory research. Our service is often to and with communities and it overlaps with or is completely intertwined and embedded with our research and possibly also our teaching.
In my case, I consider myself a participatory historical geographer. My research is about how the past is made meaningful in the present. I work with communities of the past and of the present to find ways to understand our past and carry what we want forward, on behalf of the future. That’s participatory because I work with communities, I serve on five or six nonprofit boards currently, I’m secretary I think of four. It’s also embedded in my research. I’ve been on the board of the Museum of Women Pilots, and I’m a pilot and I’ve published about that and made films about that. I’m on the board of an aviation museum. I’m on the board of the Museum of Neon Art and I’ve been on the board of the American Sign Museum — my current research is about neon signs. I serve as president of a nonprofit bord that raises money for Bodie State Historic Park, this ghost town where I spent 30 years working and doing research. To me, I already have a salary, so I can invest in my community. My community gives an enormous amount to me. I would not have been able to do my research for my dissertation or for my master’s thesis had people not been generous to me and had I not been embedded in the communities that I worked with. I’ve always wanted to give back and I started doing that by volunteering and then by working to forward and elevate the agendas of those communities.
What I have termed “participatory historical geography,” it’s about the past and sometimes working with communities of the past. Well, this is a little bit difficult, because how do you work with people who are dead? My research really started in the late 1980s and I finished my PhD in 1997. In some sense, my formal career starts in 1998, but the research that launched that career goes back to my undergraduate days. My first undergraduate term paper in my first quarter as an undergraduate became my first book — my thesis and then my first book. And I’m still doing research on that topic now.
As a woman pilot, I started flying gliders in the late 1980s and later in the late 1990s, I started flying powered aircraft. I just really started to notice the way that — and this was way before the MeToo movement or anything like that — and I just could not help but notice that the way people were treating me was different from the way that they were treating men that were at equal skill levels to me. I was constantly confronted by it. I wasn’t angry about it or something; I just went, “Isn’t that interesting,” and kept thinking about it. I started reading autobiographers of early women pilots in the 1920s and realized that from the start in the 1920s when aviation was really catching on, women had the same issues that I was having. I was doing research at the Museum of Women Pilots in Oklahoma City and started to volunteer with them and become more involved. The museum is run by an organization called The Ninety-Nines. The Ninety-Nines are the organization for women pilots. It was founded in the late 1920s by the then 99 licensed women pilots, hence The Ninety-Nines. I found early recordings of their speeches and I had these transcribed and made available to the public; I saw ways how I was directly taking the baton in a relay race, literally from their hand into mine, even though they died long before I was born. I felt like they left it very clear what their issues were, and what they were forwarding and what they were pushing. It was almost as if I had been handed those things with utter transparency. In doing that work, I developed this name “participatory historical geography” to be participating with communities potentially of the past, in the case of the early women pilots, but also in continuity with the present — because The Ninety-Nines, I just renewed my membership, it’s still a vibrant organization and an important organization for women pilots today. So the participatory focus of my research has become the main thrust of my work in what’s called public and engaged scholarship.
From the very beginning, my work was very personal to me and very interwoven with my own life, and with my relationship with my boyfriend and later husband Paul Greenstein. Research was always something that we talked about together and we would go to places because of my research and do things because of my research and interests that we shared. In realizing that all research is part of a community, I started to want to be able to give back. Over three decades, I’ve moved my research to be more and more and more committed to community to the point where now it’s all the work that I do. There isn’t any aspect of my research that doesn’t have a community component anymore. That’s what makes me happy.
One of the branches of my research has been to study tourists and tourism. Tourists are often studied by our numbers, and I say “our” because most of us are tourists at some time, even in our own city. We’re most often studied by arrivals and departures and how many hotel rooms. I was interested in what places meant to people, and how they meant those things. That’s very difficult when the tourists are dead, when it’s historic tourists going to tourist attractions that are no longer in existence, they’re extinct tourist attractions and the tourists are long gone.
That first undergraduate term paper that I mentioned — that really lit me on fire with how much I loved doing research. That first term paper was about a 19th century novel called Ramona. The novel was written to draw attention to the plight of the California Mission Indians, and native people in the U.S. in general: all the broken treaties, all the stolen lands, all the horrors that were being perpetrated against them at that time, in the 1880s. It wasn’t about the past, it was about what then was the present. It’s woven into a romance that people just loved, and the novel took off. A year after it was published, it was published in 1884; in 1885 the author, Helen Hunt Jackson, died of cancer. She was a very famous writer, she was very skilled, very talented and very well-known, very well paid and very motivated by her cause: to right the wrongs done to Native people. But when you’re dead, you can’t be motivated anymore. She was no longer able to mobilize the popularity of her book to do something in the world. Her book had a life in the world, entirely of its own (books always do), but without the ability of the author to intervene or do anything. This one really went off on its own. It was so beloved, tourists began to read it before travelling to southern California because it was the first novel about southern California.
If you think about the 1880s and ’90s, into the 19-teens — there’s no internet, there’s no television, there’s no movies, there’s no radio. They didn’t have the things that we so totally rely on, to tell stories and understand the world around them. One way that people have always learned about the places they wanted to go was to read fiction and historical fiction about those places. The author, Helen Hunt Jackson, had travelled all throughout California and was a really, really excellent ethnographer and reporter. She had a sharp eye for detail. When she wrote the book, she put in all this exact detail about places in southern California, and she told them beautifully and evocatively and she made you want to go there. People read the book, and then they looked and went, “Hey, that’s that place right over there, and this scene is over here. Ramona grows up over here.” Pretty soon, there were tourist attractions all over southern California: Ramona’s home, Ramona’s marriage place, they were everywhere. They’re gone now; the buildings are still there, but they’re not called after Ramona anymore because people don’t read the book. It’s still in print, never been out of print. But people don’t really read it now like they did when it was a huge best seller.
When eBay started happening in the late 1990s, that’s how I began to find tourist souvenirs that I could buy affordably myself. That really changed my research because if you’re studying tourists, one of the problems is… let’s say you’re studying tourists at the Grand Canyon or Yosemite. I can stand here and talk to you when you first get to the park and stand there with my clipboard and you can do my survey (or not) or whatever. But once you’re gone, you’re gone maybe forever. You may never come back to that place. Typically, something like a tourist souvenir, we all buy them when we travel. You can’t find the souvenirs in the place where they originated, you have to find them scattered to the winds. It’s a different way of doing research that, in my case, brings me very close to the work that I’m doing.
There were all these early accounts of the Ramona tourism phenomenon, which became known as the “Ramona myth” because Ramona was a fictional character, there were all these accounts of how many tourist souvenirs there were. I couldn’t find any of the souvenirs though, and nobody had found any. There had just been these early accounts that they existed. I was like, “Wow, how could I find these?” I started being able to find them on eBay. That’s all those spoons on the wall over there; there’s like 65 of them or something and they’re all different, they’re all souvenirs of Ramona’s marriage place and the home of Ramona. Some of them have initials engraved and dates of a visit, but they’re all different. It’s a sterling silver spoon; sterling silver’s expensive, it is now and it was then. To make a spoon like that, you have to make some sort of a mold, you’re not only going to make one. You’re going to make a thousand. If there’s that many that are different, that many people or companies that believed that they were going to sell a thousand or more, this is starting to say that, wow, that’s quite a big tourist phenomenon.
But then how do you know what a spoon means, except that somebody had their initials engraved? What do these Ramona places mean? Why do people go there?
I started collecting postcards and I started being able to find them with writing on the back — or on the front, depending on the time period — where people wrote on the postcard about having visited a Ramona site. “Read the novel and went to this place yesterday. It’s being restored now, I’m sure you’ve heard about this.” That made me realize there was this whole conversation going on across the country with people who went there and people who didn’t. It was not just a thing that was happening here, it was geographically much more dispersed. Then I started being able to find scrapbooks and photo albums that show here’s three women, Bertie, Marion, and Gert, in the mid-1930s. I think they went from Chicago and they drive in a loop across the country and around. They go to Yellowstone and they eventually go to the Grand Canyon, they go to San Francisco. They go to all these places in this loop — what’s on the loop? Ramona’s marriage place. By collecting a whole series of these photo albums and scrapbooks, I was able to show that for tourists, from about 1905 to about 1960 or so, Ramona’s marriage place as a tourist attraction was an integral part of seeing America, just like seeing Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. It was a place that they stopped.
So, I could show that it was important, I could show that it was big — with all the spoons — I could show that it was ranking up with the Grand Canyon because lots of people were doing it, I could show that they were talking about it because of what was on the postcards. Then I began to be able to show what it meant by looking in more fine-grained detail. For example, there’s one honeymoon album that I have that’s super fabulous. Ruby Faye and Loran Dennis. They’re married in the ’40s and Ruby Faye makes their honeymoon album; they travelled from Texas to California by car, I think it was in a ’37 Chevy, or maybe it was a Dodge. Anyway, it’s written in the album. She is one of these people who, it’s her honeymoon album, so she’s saving everything. She buys postcards, she puts those in. They take snapshots of themselves, she pastes those into the album. She buys little souvenirs and she pastes those in. There’s a napkin from a cocktail lounge and it says the name of the cocktail lounge and she writes on it, “The crooner sang yours,” which is just so dear. This is meaningful for them, they’re in love. They go to the Grand Canyon, they go to the Hollywood Bowl, they go to Grauman’s Chinese, and they go to Ramona’s marriage place. At Ramona’s marriage place, she pastes in a postcard of this view, here’s her husband standing at that spot. Here’s a postcard of this other view, here’s her standing at that spot. Here’s a postcard of the wishing well — not in the novel, there was no wishing well in the novel, that was just for tourists — she writes underneath the postcard about how there were many nickels, dimes, and quarters, “I made a wish, too, but I won’t tell.” Oh my. Well, just guess what she’s wishing for, right? I think we’re going to get pretty close.
What she was doing, and I was able to find other similar stories, what people were doing, they were linking their experiences in their travels with the experiences of the characters in the novel. She’s going on her honeymoon to the place where the character was married. Now, what’s interesting is that the character, Ramona, in the novel she’s half Indian and half white, that’s how she’s described. She’s like Cinderella, she has an evil stepmother that she’s raised by and against her evil stepmother’s wishes, she elopes with Alessandro who’s the son of a Native chief. And then horrible things befall them. They’re happy, they’re having a wonderful life together, but because of the invading Americans stealing Native land and burning native villages, horrible things are happening until eventually Alessandro is murdered in front of Ramona’s eyes. The marriage doesn’t work out so well. They never stop loving each other, but it turns out pretty rough. That was Jackson’s point, to raise awareness of the issue. What’s interesting is people were connecting themselves to the life of Ramona and the characters in the story… without wanting to go all the way there. Ruby Faye wasn’t hoping that someday she was going to have to witness Loran’s murder, nobody does that. Half of the story was really, really romantic and people were connecting with that part, and then half of the story is a lot of violence against Native people and they weren’t so much relating to that part. They were relating to the personal parts and the parts that were really autobiographical to the author, and they could see their own lives reflected in the mirror. When they saw that, they felt value in that and they connected to it. Then they bought the postcards and then they bought the spoons. Ruby Faye even pasted into her album the little paper baggie from Ramona’s marriage place that she put a souvenir in. The souvenir was a redwood toothpick holder, she wrote it on the bag. She couldn’t past a three-dimensional object into her album, so she wrote about it on the souvenir bag. Totally great!
It is in part through my life and through living with these things that I’ve been able to understand the lives of the people like Ruby Faye Dennis. For example, when I was working on that first undergraduate term paper, I was a student at UCLA so I’m doing research in the rare books and photographs and manuscripts library and I’m digging deep into this and getting really into it. I realized all these things that I’m looking at, there’s actually these places and I want to start visiting the places. I think it was on our second or third date, something like that, Paul and I drove up to the home of Ramona, Rancho Camulos, and we had the same experience that many tourists had in the later years: we got thrown out. Tourists were no longer welcome! There had been such an influx of tourists who wanted to come see the home of Ramona and bounce on Ramona’s bed — I got to do that in later years when I got to know the family. Then we went to Ramona’s birthplace, which had been identified in like the 1890s as being at Mission San Gabriel. I was like, “Let’s go see if there’s anything left of it.” We drive out there, and that was where we had our first kiss. So sweet, right? My early budding relationship with the man I later married, it’s been like 37 years now, it started in some of the same ways that visiting these same tourist attractions had been for people a hundred or a hundred and thirty years before.
This is what we call autoethnography, ethnography of the self and through the self. It’s not the same as autobiography or memoir. Autobiography is my story of my life. Autoethnography is an approach that uses my experiences, past and present, as a lens through which to understand what I’m looking at. Autoethnography, it’s not about the person, it’s from the person, and from that personal perspective and that immersion deep inside of something and you use the tools of a scholar to understand something that you are immersed in the middle of. That was what I was doing about 15 years later with historic women pilots. As a pilot, I was having the same flying experiences, or similar analogous flying experiences, so that was in part autoethnographic work. The work that I started doing for my Ph.D. dissertation in the ghost town called Bodie, 350 miles north of here, Bodie State Historic Park… that was a slightly later date with Paul. We drove 350 miles, it was our first road trip ever, our first big overnight outing. We were camping, now we’re stuck in this car for a few days together, so this is elevating the game. That was my first ever trip to Bodie and I just fell in love with it right away. That place, too, has been absolutely part of my personal life. I worked there as a maintenance staff member for 10 summers and I’ve been a volunteer ever since and then started serving on the nonprofit board about a dozen years ago or 15 years ago or something. Now I’m the president of the nonprofit board. I’m still a volunteer and I still do the same work that I used to do, which is swinging a hammer, stabilizing buildings, and cleaning toilets. I still do the same work, I just don’t get paid for it!
Those are some examples of the ways that my personal life and my own experiences and potential for insight have woven their way through my research over three decades as part of my life and career. All these projects never stop, they continue to follow me. I talk to my students about that and I say, “When you pick a topic for your research, pick something that you care about, pick something that matters to you, pick something that you like to think with, because you may be thinking with it for 35 or 40 years and it may be following you for a very long time. So pick something that inspires you to think.”
In the case of my current research about how neon signs transformed the American landscape and how they shape American communities, I began that research because of conversations with Paul because he makes neon signs and restores neon signs and has been doing that for like 45 years, since well before I met him. We started by talking about the history and eventually at some point in the 2000s I was like, “Maybe I should write something about that.” I wanted to do some background reading and I was like, “Oh, I’ll buy the Big Fat Book About Neon’s History, because I’m sure it’s out there, some historian will have written it.” I go to the library, no, there’s nothing; I look in the Library of Congress, nothing; I look on Amazon, there’s nothing. Wait a minute. There’s nothing! Open door! Whoa. I thought, “Ok, how do I really want to do this? I don’t want to do this as an outsider. I want this work to be valuable to the people in this industry and in this community.” As I was starting to do the historical and archival research, I did interviews with people all around the country in the industry and joined the boards of the Museum of Neon Art and the American Sign Museum and helped them with their collections. The book that Paul and I wrote, Neon: A Light History, which came out in 2021, it was a pandemic project to help raise money for the Museum of Neon Art, which like every museum, was closed in the pandemic.
It was for me also really significantly a way to share, long before my scholarly Big Fat Book on Neon’s History comes out, I wanted to share that knowledge. The stories of neon’s history were so hidden and so completely wrongly told and so much misinformation had poisoned the community for so long that I really felt that I wanted to try to right some of those wrongs. There was one very well financed company and they bought the very expensive patent rights to a couple of key patents. They became the big gorilla. But there were dozens of smaller companies innovating in their own ways; this technology was really new and everyone was figuring out lots of ways to do the same thing. Well, the big gorilla came out and said, “Bam! I’m going to punch you out and I can afford to pay my lawyer,” so a lot of people had to back down. They had to give up and close their shops. Ok, that’s one way of doing business. But what was revealed in these court transcripts was that same big gorilla was sending moles, sending secret agents, basically, into other people’s neon shops. “Are you hiring? I’m a highly skilled neon bender. It would be great for you to hire me.” “Sure, we need someone right now, you can start tomorrow.” And then they steal all the secrets and boom, nail them for patent infringement. They were planting spies in other people’s businesses. A hundred years later, people in neon shops are very reluctant about hiring outsiders. When you talk to them, they don’t know this story. That’s been hidden in the archives for a hundred years. But when I’ve interviewed them, they say, “Well, we’ll train other family members and maybe people we know really well. But we don’t take apprentices because that guy could just come and open a shop across the street and become our competition.” And of course that’s real. But where it starts is from having spies planted in your business and then having your business crushed. That poisoned the well. They didn’t know where the poison came from. So, “We never train anybody, we keep it a secret, we keep it close to the vest. We won’t tell anybody. You can’t see our shop. No, you can’t be our apprentice.” Now, it’s really starting to change, which is great. There’s a young generation of people who really want to learn the trade. It takes years to learn to get good at it, so it takes a major commitment. But the industry is up off the bottom after being nearly crushed by LEDs.
There are neon signs that are almost a hundred years old now, in this city, that are still working outdoors at night, with their original tubes. The original gas is still in there, being electrified, even in the rain. It can work and be electrified indefinitely. There are no examples yet, that I have ever heard of, of a sign that has exhausted its livelihood. Without breaking. If it springs a leak, that’s different. But as long as it remains sealed, there’s no evidence that it will ever not work. Whereas with LEDs, I don’t think there’s a single one that has lasted even 20 years, let alone 95. But there are 95-year-old signs all over Los Angeles.
To sum up a little bit about work and what work means to me, I have been very, very fortunate that I have both found and made work that satisfy my heart and soul, as well as my financial needs. If I look at my grandfather on my mother’s side, he was a river barge captain. He sailed the inland waterways of Europe, like the Rhine River, all those big rivers, and he and his wife raised their children on the barge. They had 10 children, in tiny living quarters. Both of my grandparents, both of their parents, had been barge families, and their parents and grandparents, as far back as we know, they had been river barge people on both sides. My grandfather’s four surviving sons all became river barge captains. None of the girls went into it, but typically you were supposed to marry a river barge captain and raise your kids on another boat somewhere. If I think about my grandfather and his surviving sons, my grandfather was never offered an opportunity to do anything but what his father did. My grandmother was born on a barge and then she lived on another barge and then she married a guy from a barge and all her children were born with midwives on the barge. That was it, the barge was your life and you didn’t have a choice. Their four sons, they were also not offered other options. They were going to do this.
It is incredibly recent in human history that we now, as children, in the developed world, in a wealthy country like the U.S. — and it’s still not true for everyone, but for the semi-privileged — you can be working class in the United Sates and still believe in the American Dream or still understand this country as being the “Land of Opportunity,” or realize that you don’t have to do what your parents did. You don’t have to be wealthy in this country to have the thought that you can take action that will guide you into a different direction. Many young people who we see are very overwhelmed by the breadth of their opportunities, by the different choices of college majors. I work a lot with my students helping them to change majors and discover what their passion is and what they love the most and what inspires them. Because it’s hard! My grandfather and my uncles never got to think about what inspired them and what their passion was. Maybe their family was what they loved, or maybe they developed a hobby outside of working 24 hours a day on the river barge. They had to do this job, and didn’t think about their work as a source of inspiration and passion and satisfaction for their soul and their heart.
In my case, my parents had limited access to those choices, they were able to make those choices, they fought very hard to be able to make those choices. Of my four uncles, none of them wanted to go to college, they were all actually content, more or less, to become river barge captains… or sufficiently bullied into it that they did it and didn’t see an alternative. My mother wanted to fight for an alternative, begged to be able to go to college. She wanted to go to medical school. My grandfather said, “If anyone in this family is going to college, it’s going to be one of the boys.” So she went to nursing school and became a nurse, immigrated to this country with my father, and made a career for herself outside of nursing and made some really bold choices for her life that led her on an entirely different path, far far far far away from the river barge. She was really the first generation. My father also departed from what his father and all his ancestors had done. I’m only the second generation that’s been able to make these decisions. That’s not a lot of experience.
Thinking about that… work has been work, has been labor, has been what we had to do, for like all eternity. We have to feed ourselves, we have to feed our families, we have to put a roof over our head. We hafta, hafta, hafta. It’s really recent, I think, that ordinary folks are starting to think about work as something that should be satisfying in more ways than just meeting those bare minimum needs. When we do that, we may be putting too much pressure on most kinds of work. What I see in my life is that I’m very fortunate and very privileged to have worked my way through college and graduate school and seized these opportunities and built something. I’ve also really worked hard to embed all that work in my life to make sure that my research and my teaching and my community engagement and leadership is meaningful. I could equally still be a professor and still enjoy my teaching and be happy about it, do enough research to get by, but not be emotionally inspired by it. That was a choice. We’re not just going to find meaningful work, we have to work to make work meaningful. We have to build that into it. But that meaning doesn’t come automatically. You can work at the Department of Motor Vehicles and have that be meaningful because every time someone passes their divers test, you helped them pass their drivers test and you just changed their life. You just did something really meaningful for someone else. That’s awesome. That’s a meaningful job. We don’t necessarily think of working at the DMV as meaningful — you have to make it that way. I think that’s the thread that draws all my work together: investing everything I do with so much of myself, my heart and soul, so that it can be my joy and my passion and my inspiration. Then it becomes the infinite cycle. Then it’s more than a paycheck.
Find Dydia's books at:
Comments