On With Your Story

Every day precious stories are lost. You can save them by taking a few moments to listen.

November 27, 2008, was Thanksgiving of course, but November 28 was a special day as well. And I don’t mean the shopping orgy called Black Friday. November 28 was the National Day of Listening, designated by the Library of Congress and StoryCorps. If you listened to National Public Radio at all during Thanksgiving week, you heard about StoryCorps.

StoryCorps is on a mission to honor and celebrate the lives of Americans through listening. Dave Isay, the founder and president the non-profit StoryCorps, explains the organization this way: “By recording and listening to the stories of our lives with the people we care about, we can experience our history, hopes, and humanity. Since 2003, 40,000 people have interviewed family and friends through StoryCorps. This makes StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind creating a growing portrait of who we really are as Americans.”

As luck would have it, I spent the National Day of Listening sitting at a dining room table and listening to Irving, a 92-year old African American man. tell about the day Eleanor Roosevelt likely saved his life. The army had sent him, a Virginia farm boy, to Tuskegee air base in Alabama. When Eleanor Roosevelt visited the base in 1941 and asked a group of black soldiers how they were being treated. Irving spoke right up. He told her he had blood in his urine, but every time he went on sick call, he was given an aspirin and ordered back to duty. Two hours later, he found himself discharged from the army and on his way to a government hospital where his kidney infection was diagnosed and treated–thanks to Mrs. Roosevelt.

I also listened to his wife tell about saving with her mother to buy a house in 1935. Jane and her mother both worked as domestics in Staunton, Virginia. But Jane’s mother was aging, and it was clear that they would not be able to keep their living arrangements forever. So every week Jane and her mother each put five dollars of their six-dollar wage into an envelope. In a year they had enough for down payment on a house with no indoor plumbing. With family and friends, they fixed up the house and rented out the upstairs and downstairs, to cover the mortgage until they needed to move in themselves.

Listening to these people, who had survived difficult times, reminded me of the last dinner table gathering I had with my mother and grandmother in 2000. Mom had already been diagnosed with lung cancer, and I accompanied her to Kansas to visit her mother for the last time. One evening after dinner, my mom, her sister, and grandma looked through old photo albums and told me stories. Some of these stories I had never heard before. And as a result, I saw my grandfather, my grandmother, and my mother in a new light. These stories explained so much.

I knew my grandfather as a quiet, kindly, hardworking, tee-totaling, and frugal man, who gave us comic books, never yelled and rarely smiled. But there was another side to him I found out that night. In 1940, my grandfather moved his family to Rio Tinto, Nevada, where he worked in the copper mine there. He loved the male camaraderie of working at the mine by day and playing poker by night, sometimes coming home without his pay. For Grandmother, however, the place was too rough, especially for young girls. My mother remembered being friends with a wild 10-year old boy who was frequently truant and smoked cigarettes. Grandma finally had enough of the place when a naked man came hurtling out of the miner’s bathhouse onto the road as she walked by with my mother who was then 12. As grandma tells it, she delivered an ultimatum, she was leaving with the kids and grandpa could come with her or stay behind.

As they drove away from Rio Tinto, my mother recalled her father, my grandfather, weeping. My stoic, reticent grandfather, wept.

Today, Rio Tinto is a ghost town, but it is also a living family story for me. It is said that family stories disappear in just two generations, so I wrote down what I heard that evening for my children. But I never heard my grandfather’s telling of this story.

Later when my grandmother died, I received an old journal that my grandfather kept. In it is one page where he summed up his life–in the third person. As if dates and places can tell you very much, this is all he wrote of those hard times:

“Got a job Phillips Petroleum Co under Roosevelt’s NRA at $14 a week. Stayed with them until 1937 when he moved his family to Twin Falls, Idaho, where he ran a service station for St. Clair Oil Co, until he got a job with Anaconda Copper Co as a miner in 1940. Mined until 1942.”

What I would love to ask him now if I had the chance!

I missed recording my grandpa’s stories, and the 2008 National Day of Listening has passed, but we can make our own Listening Days. Do you have a tape or digital recorder? I urge you to grab that recorder, prepare a couple of interview questions, and listen to someone tell you his or her story. You can find some guidelines for doing this on the StoryCorps website.

Or you can reserve a time in a StoryCorps recording booth near you. Check the StoryCorps website for booth locations. You will get a CD for sharing, and the story will be preserved in the Library of Congress for generations to come.

This is the perfect time–what time could be better than now?–to listen to someone tell you his or her story. As Isay of StoryCorps reminds us: Everybody’s story matters. Every life counts. And listening is an act of love.

by Nancy Heifferon