Memoirs of the Elderly
DECEMBER 9, 2006 Listen to this Story
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The local writing community in Boston is working to preserve the memories of its residents. The elderly who live in the city are being asked to take a memoir writing class. And one neighborhood at a time, the stories are being collected in hopes that one day they can be published. Weekend America's Shannon Mullen sat in on some of the classes to see how the project is going so far.
Maddie Powell, 86, reads from a piece she wrote when the homework assignment was "Changes in your Community". She tells the tale of her days a teacher during court-ordered desegregation busing in Boston. Hear her read about her sadness at the disappearance of local mom and pop stores, and the subsequent rise of violence in her neighborhood (Real, 8:45).Mary Clark, 74, remembers watching her son Anthony leave home on Thanksgiving Day to go fight in the Vietnam War (Real, 4:49).Esther Williams, 88, reads her piece about the life-changing experience of catching one of the last buses from Boston to Washington for the 1963 Civil Rights March, where she heard Martin Luther King give his "I Have a Dream" Speech (Real, 2:59).Daisy Janey, 86, reads her story about relocating to the Boston area as a young child, from an island off the coast of South Carolina, and her first experience with cornflakes for breakfast after growing up on home-grown grits (Real, 1:20).Pat Beckles, 73, reads her "Family in the Good Ole' Days" (Real, 1:20).
Notes from Producer Shannon Mullen:
When I heard about Boston's Elderly Memoir Project, my first thought was, simply, this is an important thing to do--to get these stories on record before they're gone forever.
I thought about my grandfather's attempt to write his memoirs, and how much he would have benefited from taking a class like this. I know for a fact that he's lived an interesting life, full of fascinating twists and turns, but in his writing, he downplayed those, and spent pages and pages on things like all the different bosses he'd had as a young accountant.
So I was curious to see how the City of Boston and its community writing instructors from Grub Street were going pull out the gems from the memories of their students.
The ladies in the Roxbury class were surprised that someone as young as me (I'm 27) was interested in their stories. Some of them told me it's "like pulling teeth" to get their grandkids interested in their tales from "the olden days".
But from the moment I met them, I was fascinated. They came to Boston from all over the country, so their experiences were varied, but they had a lot memories in common. They spent a lot of time gabbing in class, and not all that much writing. We laughed a lot, and sometimes, they brought each other to tears.
I was moved by their stories about surviving racial persecution, and how economic hardship broke up many of their families. These are things I have only read about in history textbooks, so it was a privilege to hear first-hand accounts of what life was like during the depression, the Vietnam era, and the civil rights movement.
There was one moment in particular, when I was listening to a story and thinking, this is nice, but what is it about this memory that made it worth recounting on paper? Right about then, the author, Pat Beckles, revealed that the subject of her story was the famous civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois, who was the first black man to receive a diploma from Harvard University.
I also loved listening to the women wax nostalgic about the special treats their mothers made to take the edge off of Depression hardships. Several of them remembered their mothers using government-issued butter and sugar to make a sticky-sweet paste they'd spread on white bread for breakfast. One woman remembered her mother making ice cream from snow and maple syrup.
I loved something about every one of the ladies' stories, and I wanted to put snippets of them in my piece, but I just didn't have the room. So I've picked some of the best pieces, and posted them here for you to listen to. Enjoy.
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