This is a treat. Back in 2012, I wrote about the eight-part oral history of Dick Huemer that Joe Adamson conducted in 1968 and 1969 as part of a UCLA project. Revisiting my post just now, I discovered that the link to the transcript no longer worked. I’ve replaced it with one to an Internet Archive copy that’s likely to remain operative indefinitely. While I was hunting that down, I discovered that UCLA has put up the audio of Joe’s 10 hours of Huemer interviews. (Note: They didn’t play on my iPad or on Safari on my Mac—I had to use Chrome.)
I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard Huemer’s voice before. Now I can feast on it, in a conversation with Joe that lasted, on and off, for more than a year. One of the reasons it’s so pleasant to hear him speak is that it reminds me of what it was like to talk with his son, Dr. Richard Huemer, whom I miss.
Joe and Dick’s discussion covers Scrappy and other Mintzana, but also the rest of Dick’s long career, both before and after the period covered on this website. It’s an essential piece of animation history, and we should be grateful to Joe for instigating it almost 60 years ago and to UCLA for making it available today.
With time, I hope more vintage audio of interviews with signficant figures from the golden age will become accessible. I deeply regret not saving the tapes of interviews I did for Animato in the 1980s and early 1990s, and have more recently become meticulous about preserving recordings of interviews I conduct. Sadly, almost none of them have anything to do with cartoons. And the opportunity to talk to people like Dick is gone, which is why I’m so glad we can listen in on what Joe heard when he got the opportunity.
My 2012 post still links to a scan of the original typed transcript of the oral history. UCLA has also made a modern, more legible PDF transcript available. Here it is.