The Baylor Line Foundation’s Oral Histories project has launched on YouTube as a way to capture – in their own voices – what members of the Baylor Family loved about the time here.
The first set of video interviews with retired history professor James Vardaman and former baseball coach Dutch Schroeder – both Baylor icons — have been posted on the BLF’s YouTube site (click here), with more scheduled to be published over the weeks to come.
“We think this will be a wonderful way to connect members of the Baylor family across generations and share their loved ones’ stories with others,” said BLF President Fred R. Norton Jr. ’80, JD ‘83. “As we developed our new mission statement this past summer, we thought it was critically important to focus on telling the stories of the Baylor family and finding ways to preserve the timeless values of Baylor’s founders. The Oral Histories project accomplishes both those goals. I loved watching the Vardaman and Schroeder videos and I look forward to watching the new ones as they are added.”
“This was and is a very personal project for me, because I would love to be able to go to a site like this and watch my dad – who passed away in 2003 – talking about what he loved about Syracuse, where both of us went,” says BLF Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Peter Osborne. “We shared so many hours watching games together – even when we were separated by hundreds of miles. But more important, I wish that my children – his grandchildren – had a chance to see a man who we lost before most of them had a chance to get to know him. That’s the value of this project.”
Osborne said the Oral Histories are “designed to be shared by the Baylor Family. Years from now, they’ll be able to do more than just reminisce about teachers like Dr. Vardaman and Dutch. They’ll be able to go to this site and watch them on tape.”
The BLF is scheduling interviews with other Baylor greats and plans to soon enable others to upload their own short videos of parents and grandparents to the site, using just their mobile device. It is also working on redesigning the YouTube page to make it easy to find specific interviews at a glance.
You can receive notifications when new Oral Histories interviews are added by clicking on the red Subscribe button on the Baylor Line Foundation’s YouTube pages. We’d also appreciate your thoughts on candidates for our longer video interviews in the Comments below.
