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'Everybody has a story'
(by Tim Woodcock - April 28, 2008)
The city of Clayton is edging toward its 100th anniversary and is exploring ways to celebrate that milestone.
“We will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of incorporating in 2013,” said Judy Goodman, an alderman who has taken a special interest in city history. “It seems like a long time away, but we have a lot of work to do.
“We have a responsibility to be good stewards of history,” and the city is promoting a multi-faceted approach to preserving the past, Goodman said.
The projects that the city plans to make part of the 2013 celebration include:• publishing a coffee table-style book detailing the city’s first 100 years;• restoring and reopening the Hanley House, the oldest house in the city;• and collecting oral histories from people who have lived and worked in Clayton over the years. The city is currently soliciting people with a Clayton connection who want to record an oral history.
The oral-history project is being coordinated by OASIS, a Clayton-based organization that works with older adults by offering a blend of educational and volunteer opportunities. It already has experience in the area of gathering oral histories, but this is the first time it has worked so directly with a municipality.
As the oral histories are collected, excerpts will be posted on the website of the Clayton History Society, an organization that is starting up again after years of dormancy.
The march of time creates “a sense of urgency,” Goodman said. “There’s a previous generation that we are going to lose, and we’ve got to capture what they know about life in our community.”
Goodman said there are seven living former mayors of the city, and she would love to have their recollections included as part of the project. But that figure is already out of date: Since Goodman spoke to the Word in early April, James Lafflin, mayor of the city from 1971 to 1979, has died.
OASIS has been recording oral histories for individuals for about 10 years, said Hazel Mabrey, a 20-year veteran of the organization. OASIS has done special projects for historic houses and war veterans’ groups, but “this may be the biggest one we have been challenged to do,” she said.
Home base for the project will be Clayton on the Park, a hotel and apartment complex overlooking Shaw Park that is being converted into a senior-living center. On a recent Monday, about two dozen people gathered there to learn more about the project. Some were volunteers from OASIS who will make and catalogue the recordings, others were signing up in order to get the chance to tell his or her story to the camera.
A cascade of memories
Lifelong Clayton resident Jan Harrison, who has three children and seven grandchildren who also live in the city, was one of the first to sign up. She worked with OASIS volunteer Ethel Mariam to create a personal “memory jogger” sheet that will help structure a future interview.
For Harrison a cascade of memories was released, including:
• The days when Shady Oak cinema showed double features — some good, some bad — and there was a pool hall on Forsyth in downtown Clayton. The pool hall had such a seedy reputation that her parents instructed her to walk on the other side of the street when we she went by it.
• The 1944 World Series, also known as the Streetcar Series, in which the two St. Louis teams, the Cardinals and the Browns, played each other. Teachers warned school kids not to skip school, but they did anyway, Harrison said. “They couldn’t punish us all.”
• Tricks such as soaping uphill streetcar tracks. The result was streetcars grinding to a halt because they could not get purchase on the slippery tracks; the streetcar operators usually carried a bucket of sand with them to throw on the tracks to remedy the situation. But such mischief was generally kept in check because neighboring families knew each other better than today’s neighbors and it was more acceptable to discipline other people’s kids. “Even if I didn’t know them, they knew me,” she said.
• The custom of taking clothes “on approval” from Gutman’s, the city’s only department store. The clothes could be taken home to see how well they fit and to see if they met with parents’ approval. It required no paperwork and payment was put on a tab.
• The days when Clayton High School was at Forsyth and Jackson, and the site it is on now was totally empty. At this point in time, neither the Ladue nor Parkway school districts existed and kids were bused in from the west. Some wore overalls to school, and there was a feeling among some of the Clayton kids that those from West County were country bumpkins.
Harrison’s memories are not all so innocent. She notes that the day her family moved to Clayton in 1929 was also the last day there was a hanging in the county seat.
Harrison and Mariam debated over when one stopped hearing German-inflected English spoken on street corners and how one negotiated Clayton’s small but clearly demarcated African-American section.
Mariam has never lived in Clayton but worked for an accountancy firm in the city in the 1950s and ’60s, “before the tall buildings, when the buildings were only two stories high.”
Like unwinding a ball of wool, one memory unravels a succession of others, and it is up to the participants, with some help from the OASIS volunteers, to impose some form on this potential chaos.
“Mostly we get things structured before [the subject] comes in,” said Mabrey, who will be conducting some of the interviews. Mabrey said she sees her role not as an interrogator but as a collaborator who helps keep the stories moving forward.
‘Talking to your legacy’
Jerry Rothman, a videographer who estimates he has recorded between 40 and 50 oral histories for OASIS, said the key to a good interview is allowing a person to tell his own story in his own way at his own pace. He tells people, “It’s your story — you do it how you like.”
It’s about “talking to your legacy,” Rothman said — allowing future generations to get a sense of who you are and who you were.
He encourages people to bring objects to the interview that evoke memories and to have at least some notes that will help keep the story on track. Typical objects are photos, souvenirs, scrapbooks, ship manifests — records of when a family first came to the United States — and wartime medals.
Sometimes people get choked up and embarrassed, and may ask for the camera to be turned off. Rothman prefers not to go down that road.
“I like to let these emotions out,” he said. “I like it to be real.”
Impressions not facts
Lynnea Magnuson, a historian based at the Soldiers Memorial Museum downtown, is hoping some of the Clayton interviews will help build her collection of stories from local veterans. She said she is primarily interested in the “boots-on-the-ground experience” of wartime. “The presidents all have their memoirs, but the people who were in the war don’t,” she said.
Increasingly, the museum is relying on oral histories to tell the story of the objects in its collection, which is dominated by weapons and uniforms that are “just stuff unless we tell the stories behind them.” A ration book is not that interesting in and of itself, but when it is accompanied by a tale about how rations affected a family’s life, then it comes alive, she said. “Objects are markers of an experience,” Magnuson said.
Magnuson credits the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center for popularizing oral histories as a way of researching and explaining the past.
Magnuson said her advice to the OASIS volunteers would be to be scrupulous about getting names, dates and locations down correctly. Things that might be self-evident to the teller of a story may be less clear to the contemporary listener and utterly alien to a listener several generations down the line. Unless these pedestrian details are clearly written down now, they can be a major headache for curators of oral-history collections, she said.
The main criticism of oral-history projects is that they take a lot of information on trust and without independent verification. There should be at least some basic fact checking, Magnuson said. Sometimes personal memories simply don’t stand up against known facts, but that doesn’t mean the memory is flat-out wrong. Perhaps a place name or date has been mixed up, but the story is otherwise true. If that’s the case, using a phrase such as “Their memory of the event was this…” can be a good way to frame the discrepancy.
Bob Archibald, president of the Missouri History Museum, said he was trained as an academic historian at a time when history was conceived to be primarily about analyzing written records.
But 30 years have passed, and he has gradually been persuaded of the value of oral histories, a process he prefers to call “listening to stories.” These stories offer richness and nuance that written texts cannot.
This form of history will only become more important as fewer people keep diaries and write letters, and technology makes the recording and storing of oral histories easier, he said.
When you sit down to record an interview with someone, it empowers that person by telling him that that his life, no matter how quietly it was lived, really matters, Archibald said.
With oral histories, “It’s not names, dates and places. It’s impressions …. It’s really about stories, and everybody has got a story,” he said.
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