Labor folklorist Archie Green, 91, dies

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_12022488

By Elaine Woo

Los Angeles Times
Posted: 03/28/2009 10:56:08 PM PDT

Archie Green liked to tell people he had two educations — one on San Francisco's waterfront, the other in the university. But the former shipwright and carpenter didn't just trade his blue collar for a white one. He merged the two identities and created a new field of study.

Green, who was 91 when he died of renal and heart failure March 22 at his San Francisco home, was a pioneering folklorist who studied the language, music, art and customs of working men and women. It was a unique pursuit that required a name, which he coined: He called it "laborlore."

In his hands, laborlore meant scholarly explorations of hillbilly music, the etymology of the shipyard term "Dutchman,"and the origins of the metal figures tinsmiths fashioned for their shop signs. He so strongly believed that these were important cultural expressions — as worthy of preservation as a symphony by Hector Berlioz or a landscape by Winslow Homer — that he spent seven years lobbying Congress to create the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Established in 1976, it houses more than 4,000 collections documenting the lives of ordinary Americans.

"Archie said, 'Working men aren't dummies.' I heard him say that many times," recalled Robert Cantwell, a University of North Carolina folklorist who knew Green for 40 years. "That struck me as the essence of his thinking. He didn't like to be patronized and he didn't like patronizing social philosophies. He invested a lot of his beliefs in the capacity of the working man to be a conscious carrier of his labor culture."

Green was born June 29, 1917, in Winnipeg, Canada, and moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was 5. After graduating from Roosevelt High School, Green entered the University of California-Los Angeles, later transferring to the University of California-Berkeley, where he earned a degree in political science in 1939.

Green joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, working on the Klamath River building roads and fighting fires. After a year, he moved to San Francisco and worked in the shipyards until World War II intruded. He served as a Navy Seabee in the Pacific during the war.

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