Pacific Biological Laboratory, Cannery Row, Oral History City of Monterey Project Manager: Clinton Blount Date: 1998 - 2001 In association with Cultural Resource Management Services, Albion recently completed an intensive oral history program with the Pacific Biological Laboratory group in Monterey. This group owned and continues to use the lab, which was formerly operated by Edward F. (Doc) Ricketts, the “Doc” of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday and the model for many of the powerful and reflective characters in Steinbeck’s other novels. Ed Ricketts's laboratory, located at what is now 800 Cannery Row, was arguably one of the most important gathering places for avant-garde thinkers and artists in the 1930s and 1940s. Joseph Campbell, John Cage, Edward Weston, and Steinbeck were regular attendees of these informal gatherings, and all were influenced by Ricketts’s intellect and diligent inquiry. The city of Monterey commissioned this oral history focusing on the period after Rickett's death (1948 to the present). Albion and CRMS interviewed twelve of the group members, compiled a substantial archive of relevant papers and photographs, and amassed more than 500 pages of documentary material on the history of the Pacific Biological Laboratory. Albion has just begun a second phase of work on this project, preparing a video-based program that will focus of the Ricketts-Steinbeck era and on the last 50 years at the lab. Return to "Oral Histories."
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