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Transcription: [00:30:00]
{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennumm"}
-port and were found crawling all over the place, they'd gotten loose.
{SPEAKER name="Polly Stewart (interviewer)"}
[[laughs]]
{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennumm"}
And we were asked to please come and corral them all, sometime the sheep got loose, now when we were close to the Lincoln Memorial and we had to send a couple of cowboys with lassos up to corral them in the Lincoln Memorial I believe. Er,
[00:30:23]
and it's things of that sort of--
{SPEAKER name="Polly Stewart (interviewer)"}
Other duties as assigned [[laughs]]
{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennumm"}
Other duties as assigned, yeah.
[00:30:29]

{SPEAKER name="Polly Stewart (interviewer)"}
Well what is, has your title changed in your years?
{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennumm"}
Well I, erm I was hired as ethnomusicologist and then for a while became a senior ethnomusicologist, I don't think because of my advanced age because at that time y'know was younger, but I think I was the only ethnomusicologist really in the office, since then they have two or three more.
[00:30:50]
I suppose it means I've been around a long time.
{SPEAKER name="Polly Stewart (interviewer)"}
[[laughs]] Yeah that's right.
{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennumm"}
Er no, so that's pretty much where the, where the titles were made.
{SPEAKER name="Polly Stewart (interviewer)"}
But it really er doesn't do justice to the types of work that you do really because it's much more than ethnomusicology and er-
[00:31:06]

{SPEAKER name="Tom Vennumm"}
Well, I said one of the nice parts of working at the Smithsonian I think is that er, and working for this program is they, it seems to me that as long as you're productive they are very supportive about any direction you really would like to go in.
[00:31:21]
Um, my first book was specifically on the Ojibwa Dance Drum, which our authors published, that's was part of the series I was talking about. But since The Ojibwa, people are, the prime harvester is wild rice and I grew up in Minnesota and Wisconsin and a lot friends that go out ricing every year and I've.
[00:31:46]
There's been a book published in Germany based on some field work done at Net Lake Minnesota done in 1947, erm I know it's thought that the book should have been translated in to English and sat down one cold winters eve and began to--
[00:30:35]