Listen now, before it's too late

I bought a camcorder in 1997. It was a crappy oversized VHS-C job that always got wobbly on sound after the midpoint of each cassette and set me back about $500. I bought it for one reason: I was heading down to Florida to see a Space Shuttle launch and I wanted to get it on video. This was to be a night launch, so it promised to be even more spectacular.

It worked out well. I got the launch, which was an amazing thing to see, and hear, and smell. I was lucky with that, because the two other times I went to see a launch, I believe one was postponed by a day, and the other by a week or more. So I only got to see one other launch, and that was a daytime launch - which, while spectacular, is less spectacular than a night launch.

So there I was with a camcorder whose purpose had been served. What to do with it now? I turned it on other things: my pets, my family, my friends. The audio issue was pretty annoying, and effectively limited me to about 15 minutes worth of good audio and video per VHS-C cassette.

I got lots of video of my dog Kitty. She died in the Summer of 1997.

My grandmother - who was in her late eighties and had had at least one stroke - had a fall at her nursing home later that year. As with all accidents, it was the result of either an unsafe act, an unsafe condition, or both. In this case she had been left unattended in a shower on a shower chair. She fell and bruised her arm and her face, and looked like she had been mugged.

I took my camcorder with me when I went to see her that weekend. I had had an idea brewing, but now it was cast aside. I wanted to get evidence. I was furious.

"You look like they beat you and left you for dead!" I said as I set up my gear. I wanted to get a video of her, showing close-ups of the damage, and record in her own words what had happened.

Finally I was ready. I switched on the camera and said to her, "Tell me what happened. How did you get that black eye?"

"They beat me and left me for dead," she responded.

I had to turn the camera off, 'cause I was laughing so hard.

* * * * * * * *

My idea was one that I had kicked around for years. The memories of the elderly provide a largely untapped storehouse of oral history - stories, songs, poems, and memories that have never been written down anywhere. They have been passed on to children, grandchildren, friends, strangers - but how many people really bother to listen to these stories when they are told? Eventually there comes a time when these stories are gone, and the person who knows them is no longer able to tell them, due to death, encroaching memory loss, or the loss of the ability to communicate.

So my idea was to set up a project to capture these stories. Videotaped interviews would probably be the best way to go. Videocameras were everywhere back then. It seemed like it would be no big deal to have thousands of people with thousands of camcorders go out and capture the memories of tens or hundreds of thousands of old people, before those stories were gone forever.

I got a few from my grandmother. Her stroke and her Alzheimer's progression had limited what she could say, though. I remember other stories, and other songs, and I'm doing my best to preserve those. She died in December 1998.

Many if not most of the members of her generation are gone now. People who were children during the Great War, who entered their twenties during the Great Depression, who started families of their own just before the outbreak of a second World War. Perhaps someone has captured some of their stories, some of their memories. But so many more stories and memories have been taken to the grave to feed the worms.

Now another generation is in its late 80's and early 90's. Their memories are different: they were born in the aftermath of the Great War, grew up in the Great Depression, and were just the right age to be shipped off to fight in the Second World War. And after them are the children who grew up during that war, members of my parents' generation. And then those who were born in the hopeful but terrifying years following WWII, born to McCarthyism and the Cold War.

Everybody has their own unique experiences. Everybody has a story to tell. So many of these stories are going unheard.

There are efforts to capture these oral histories. StoryCorps is one such effort. Their mission, as stated on their website:

Our mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening.

Since 2003, almost 30,000 everyday people have shared life stories with family and friends in our StoryBooths. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to share, and is preserved at the Library of Congress. Millions listen to our broadcasts on public radio and the web. StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind.

Everybody’s story matters. Every life counts. Help us reach out to record our history, hopes, and common humanity—and illuminate the true character of this nation.

StoryCorps isn't just aimed at the old, but at everyone. I've heard some of the stories on NPR's Morning Edition. They range from the mundane and trivial to the profound and touching - often all at the same time.

I'm thinking I'd like to do something like that locally. Capture the stories of the old folks of Nanticoke, their memories of what things were like seventy or eighty years ago. I would say "Maybe someday", but with each passing day more and more of these voices are silenced forever.

* * * * * * * *

Last summer I dropped by my house one sunny Sunday afternoon to ladle buckets of water out of my rain barrels onto my blueberries and cherry trees. My next-door neighbor, who was ancient in my grandmother's time but was probably really ten years her junior, was out in his yard. We got to talking, not like two people separated by a gulf of fifty years, but like two old neighbors in a Rockwellian vision of America. And he started telling me stories of the Nanticoke he had grown up in, of riding sleds from the highest hills to the creek that once ran parallel to Main Street, of having his own personal coal mine and coal shanty where he sold coal to passers-by, in competition with his brother, who was doing exactly the same thing. Stories of a time long gone, in a place right under our feet.

How much longer does he have to tell those stories? How much longer does his wife have to tell hers? And has anyone been listening?


REM: Try Not to Breathe

...I have seen things you will never see.
I want you to remember...