Tucked away in a third-floor office surrounded by monitors and audio equipment you’ll find Luke Sprague, Wisconsin Veterans Museum Oral Historian, working to preserve the stories of our veterans in their own words. A veteran himself, Luke graduated with a BS in cartography from UW-Stevens Point as a commissioned second lieutenant in the United States Army. He served for four years on active duty in Korea, Japan, and Washington and was honorably discharged at the rank of captain. He later received his master’s in military history at Norwich University. He likens his service experiences to the work staff does at the museum saying, “It was an overall positive thing, but it’s a lot of learning on the fly. It’s like here, there are leadership
challenges, it’s how you deal with them, how you adjust, and how you work through them that influences an outcome.”

Sprague cares for the oral history collection at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum which is the fourth largest veteran oral history program in the nation, surpassed only by the Library of Congress, Witness to War, and the World War II Museum. Processing one oral history takes a minimum of 66 hours from start to finish. With the time involved one would think that Sprague would know minute details of the narrators in the collection. This is not the case.

As Sprague says, “We do not get a lot of time to imbibe, and simmer, and stew in the content. There isn’t as much time to get to know these people as we would like. A lot of the time we are just running and gunning. We hand it off to someone who gets to do that.” You will see the results of his team’s work in the archival collection, museum exhibits, on our blogs, and in publications.

Can Luke pick just one favorite narrator? He says, “Each person is kind of like a special cookie. They each have their own little flavors and each one is different. There are so many
that stand out and they are all for different reasons. They may be stories of survival, endurance, depression or repression, escape, just all kinds. So it’s really hard to pick one.”
What Sprague wants the public to know about his work is this, “There are incredible stories available, and they are available to them and if they are interested, they should
check it out.”