Interviews
The interviewees were chosen because of their experience at the Bloomsburg Fair. They were selected from a list provided by the Bloomsburg Fair Association. Once these individuals agreed to be interviewed, arrangements were made for a meeting and a tape-recording session. My interviews were informal, open-ended sessions that allowed those being interviewed to recollect their experiences in as much detail as possible. Once the interviews were on tape, transcriptions were made of these recordings. The next stage was to condense the actual transcribed text into a readable document. To turn these into oral narratives that are readable required considerable editing, disfluencies (e.g. “uh” and “um”) and filler words (e.g. “like” and “you know?”) in the interviews have been deleted. In addition, tangents (i.e. phrases or sections of dialogue deemed of little importance to the integrity of the data collected) have been removed. Grammar has also been corrected when necessary. Throughout the book, interview questions appear in italicized print. The responses to questions appear in regular text.