The Mediocre Man

(is always at his best):
An Oral History
of

MICHAEL CECIL CONKIN

with

CHRIS HAIGHT


For Chris without whom...
MC²



For Michael without whom…
CH


INTERVIEW HISTORY



Interviewer:

Chris Haight
Freelance oral historian
B.A. (English), San Francisco State University,
Secondary Education Teaching Credential (English and History),
San Francisco, California

Circumstances of the Interviews:

Though I have worked for UC Berkeley Library for nine years, I only got to know Michael Conkin about a year ago. Though he has worked for the Library for twenty years and our tenures overlapped, we had worked on different floors of the Doe Library for much of that time and were never properly introduced until all the Technical Services people were moved to one big office on the second floor of Moffitt Library. At that point it just happened that our desks were about fifteen feet apart and I would see him often in the course of the day going about his business. One day, I don’t know what prompted it, we began talking and discovered we had a lot in common in the way of taste in music, humor, movies and the like. Soon we were swapping audio tapes, jokes over e-mail, and talking a little bit almost every day.

My interest in oral history developed around the time I was getting to know Michael, and after he began filling me in on his unusual childhood and on what I thought was his even more unusual response to his childhood, I began to be interested in hearing his life story in a more thorough and systematic way and it occurred to me that it would make an interesting oral history. So when I got the opportunity to take Professor Jacqueline Reinier’s oral history class I jumped at it, and when faced with the prospect of doing a class project I immediately thought of interviewing Michael Conkin.

As soon as I mentioned it to him Michael seemed not only willing but excited about the project. Though he is a reflective sort, he had never written anything of an autobiographical nature and had never really systematically reviewed his life, and he welcomed the opportunity. He was willing to do anything that I might require of him based on the demands of the class. The only thing he said to me on this score was that he really wanted me to get an A in the class, and anything that would help me do that was alright by him.
I had Michael fill out a biographical information sheet giving me names, dates and places in his life, but other than that I pretty much went by information I had already gleaned from our informal conversations. It was my intention to record his entire life story, though at that point I had little idea what that would mean in terms of the amount of work ahead and the number of hours of tape we would need to record to achieve that goal. But Michael did not flinch at anything I proposed, and we very soon began meeting at lunchtime for one-hour sessions.

We conducted all but one of our interview sessions out on the balcony of the Moffitt Library in a place where I ordinarily ate my lunch. Though this location had the potential to be loud--I had occasionally heard leaf-blowers and chippers running full throttle down below--it had the virtue of always being free, of being away from traffic, of being more or less private and unfrequented by students or by other library employees, and it allowed my interviewee to indulge freely in two of his favorite vices: drinking coffee and smoking cigars; and as these vices seemed to me to be conducive of spoken communication in those so afflicted, I decided that it was worth while fostering and encouraging them.

We taped the first of twenty-one hours of interview on September 18th, 1998, and wrapped up our last hour of tape on October 19th, a month later. During the course of our sessions my wife had a baby and I took paternity leave from work, so, though the first sessions were one-hour lunch break sessions, the balance were two-hour morning or afternoon sessions that I conducted on visits to work from home, and one session--the only one that took place in another venue--was a marathon four-hour session conducted at the house Michael shares with his wife, Tina, in Fruitvale. I found the entire process, harried as I was during most of this time with various family responsibilities, a real pleasure. I think I can say that the process of taking Michael’s oral history was fun and instructive for both of us. I know that we were both often surprised at the story that emerged from his narration. And when the last interview was finished I felt a strange sense of let-down, a sort of post-partum depression. I think the process of doing the interviews was so engaging that it became a primary focus for me during the weeks we were involved in their creation, and when it was over I immediately began to miss doing them. I only hope that I can capture in the transcript of the tapes the depth of the interviews themselves and a little of the pleasure I had in conducting them.



Chris Haight
October, 1998



Epilogue:

After completing the taping of the interviews I transcribed about three of the twenty-one hours of tape to turn in for my project. Oh, and by the way I did get the A that Michael was determined I ought to get, but thereafter I got busy again with various other writing projects and set aside the rest of the tapes to be transcribed later.

About seven years later, having gotten to a stopping place with the biggest project I’d been working on, I picked up the oral history again and resumed transcription. It was pleasurable and instructive to carry out this work, but it was also time-consuming and would have been much faster and easier if I’d only had maybe a half dozen secretaries slaving away over the tapes instead of just yours truly. Of course there was a certain advantage in doing it myself as I can vouch for the accuracy of the work. You hereby have my word that what was on the tapes is what is on the page to the utmost of my ability.

So for better or worse I’m responsible for the delay in getting this out to a waiting public. Thank you for your patience. Here it is at long last.



Chris Haight
July, 2006
Berkeley, California

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY


Michael Cecil Conkin was born in Kansas City, Missouri on June 12th 1946, part of the first wave of the post-war baby-boom. The family, which consisted of Michael’s father Clifford Patrick Conkin and his mother Laura Nell Conkin, nee Hobson, and two surviving older half-brothers, sons of Michael’s mother from her first marriage. Michael was the oldest of the children of his mother’s second marriage. Later there would be a younger sister and brother. His father was in the Navy off and on through Michael’s first six or eight years, and the family moved a few times before he was nine, first to Deming, New Mexico--where Michael’s earliest memories are set--and then to Olathe, Kansas, not far from Kansas City.

While the family was in Olathe Michael’s mother developed cancer, and in 1955 the family moved to Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, in order for her to be treated at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital. She died in 1956, and Michael’s father, after what seems to have been a nervous breakdown, soon got a job with NATO working on oil pipelines in Turkey, put the three children first into a Catholic home nearby and then into a Masonic home in St. Louis, Missouri and left the country for three or four years, making occasional brief visits during that time.

His father eventually returned from Turkey and settled down in Sunnyvale, California with his new Turkish wife and their young child, eventually sending for Michael and his siblings in the home in St. Louis. Michael had started high school in St. Louis. He resumed his schooling in Sunnyvale. But this new life engineered by his father soon fell apart too, and Michael and his siblings were packed off to the Masonic home in St. Louis again while his father returned with his new wife and their (now) two children to Turkey once again. Michael’s younger siblings were immediately readmitted to the home, but Michael had been declared persona non grata due to his previous behavior while at the home, and he had to be taken in at the last minute by his older half-brother Gene Scott and Gene’s wife, Tanya, who were living in Manhattan Beach in Southern California.

So Michael moved into his brother Gene’s garage, which had been made into a living space for him, and finished his secondary education at Mira Costa High School, Manhattan Beach, after which he stayed in the area doing odd jobs and eventually finding work in restaurants. A plan to have him live with his half-brother Bob and his wife in the San Fernando Valley and go to college fell through, and he found himself drafted into the United States Army.

He spent 1966 and 1967 in the Army. After basic training at Fort Lewis, Washington, he was trained as a clerk and sent to Germany. He eventually achieved the rank of Specialist 4th Class and was expert at filling out and deciphering particularly abstruse bureaucratic military forms.

After being discharged from the Army he returned to Southern California, worked as a candy maker and eventually got a job with the Redondo Beach Post Office, where he worked for a few years, developing during that time a network of close friends and intimates who were in some way connected with the Post Office, many of whom he is still in contact with. He also developed a romantic relationship with Kathy Stanis, one of the women at the Post Office, and when the job had run its course to his satisfaction (not theirs), he moved with her to Berkeley, California.

Through most of the seventies he managed to do, according to his own testimony, nothing, though he did get an AA degree in language arts from Merritt College in 1976 and did art work and design for print advertising for local businesses. He married Tina Gray, an artist and fellow student, in 1976 and moved into her house in Fruitvale, a neighborhood in Oakland. In the late seventies he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley’s Russian language and literature program and worked as a student employee in the campus libraries.

In 1978 he dropped out of the Russian language and literature program and took a full-time job in the library, where he has worked in various capacities and at various levels for the last twenty years. He has been involved in implementing the change-over from paper card catalog to electronic and has run the periodicals division in the Main Library and managed a branch library. For years he was in the cataloging department, and in 1998, a few weeks before we conducted our interviews, he was transferred to the Electronic Text Unit, where he is working to provide online access to library archives.



Oral History Outline

Michael Cecil Conkin:

June 12, 1946 in Kansas City, Missouri

1. BIRTH TO NINE

First memories
Parents
Siblings
Places lived
Mother’s death

2. NINE TO THIRTEEN

Father to Turkey
Institutional homes
Schools

3. HIGH SCHOOL

Clayton High School, St. Louis
Sunnyvale High School, Sunnyvale, California
Mira Costa High School, Manhattan Beach, California

4. COLLEGE OF HARD KNOCKS

Work in restaurants
Other employment

5. THE ARMY

Army Culture
Army bureaucracy

6. MORE HARD KNOCKS

Other jobs
The Post Office

7. COLLEGE, FOR REAL

Languages
Degree

8. DOING NOTHING (THE SEVENTIES)

9. LIBRARY WORK (THE EIGHTIES & NINETIES)