Sheldon Wesson oral history interview

1979-03-23

Wesson, Sheldon, 1922-1997; Mayo, Marlene J.

Oral history interview with Sheldon Wesson conducted by Marlene Mayo on March 23, 1979. Sheldon Wesson (1922 – January 1997) was born in Brooklyn, New York and attended the City College of New York, Syracuse University, and Columbia University, majoring in economics, political science, and journalism. Prior to the war, he worked as a journalist for the New York Journal of Commerce. At the outbreak of war, he joined the Army, becoming a Communications Officer. He then went to Japan during the Occupation as a civilian to work in the Textile Branch of the Economies and Scientific Section (ESS) of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), where he became Chief of Programs of the Liaison Branch, later the Plans and Requirements Unit. In ESS, Wesson oversaw the Japanese textile industry and wrote monthly reports on textile production, before he resigned in the middle of 1948. Back in the States, he worked for Fairchild Publications as a reporter for thirty years in New York and Japan, where he remained for ten years and went on to organize the Fairchild News Bureau. He went on to become the Director of Press Relations for the American Iron and Steel Institute for thirteen years before his retirement in 1992. Sheldon Wesson passed away five years later in 1997

University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)

Oral histories

Japan--History--Allied occupation, 1945-1952

Japan; District of Columbia

Postwar Japan

Special Collections and University Archives

English

Collection may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. To obtain permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the University of Maryland Libraries at http://www.lib.umd.edu/special/contact/home.

Recording: 01:35:00 (audiocassette; mp3); Transcript: 69 pages (PDF)

This oral history interview is part of the Marlene J. Mayo oral histories. A guide to the full collection of Marlene J. Mayo oral histories is available in our archival collections: http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/42478.
Accession 2009-209-GWP
An interview transcript is available.

Filename: prange-087597