Willa Klug Baum, 79; Oral Historian Focused on Notable Californians

Willa Klug Baum, 79, an oral historian who for more than 46 years interviewed the people who made history in California, died May 18 of complications from back surgery.

“She virtually created oral history as an academic discipline in the United States,” Charles Faulhaber, director of UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

For many years, Baum was the director of the library’s Regional Oral History Office and amassed more than 1,600 oral histories. They are available at hundreds of libraries worldwide.

Among her projects were interviews about forestry and water resources before they were studied as environmental history, interviews on women’s topics before colleges had women’s studies departments, and early documentation of the disability rights movement.

Born in 1926 in Chicago, Baum moved to Ramona, Calif., as a teenager. At Whittier College, she found it galling when a teacher told her she was his second-best student, after Richard Nixon. She earned a master’s in history from Mills College in Oakland and began working at the Berkeley library in 1954.