THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501270718
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Tony Stein
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
William Jennings Bryan was one of the most famous orators and political figures of turn-of-the-century America. I have not only read about his lusty trumpet of a voice; I have heard it on a recording in the collection of Dennis McCurdy of radio station WFOS-FM.
A recording like that is more than a curiosity. It is a historical treasure, a preservation of something that ought to be preserved. The everyday technology of the camera tells us what Bryan looked like. The everyday technology of the recording device tells me something of what he sounded like.
We blend the sights and sounds of the past into a stew called history and force-feed it in school. I think it needs to be force-fed. I think good citizenship means knowing something about our history. A famous philosopher once said, ``Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'' My version is less poetic: How in blazes can you know where you are if you don't know where you've been?
And while I'm in my mutter-and-growl mode, please spare me from stories about what high school students think they ought to be studying. Like the ones who say history isn't ``relevant.'' Sorry, kids, but asking teenagers to design their education is like asking 2-year-olds to design nutritious dinner menus.
OK, Stein, I hear you saying, get to the point. Or are you just burbling like a stuffed stomach after too much pepperoni pizza?
My point is that I think Chesapeake ought to have a public repository of tape-recorded interviews and meaningful photographs. I'm particularly hooked on the idea of recorded oral history - the people who were there telling us and tomorrow's listeners just how it was.
Some of the voices that should have been preserved are already silent. Like Charles B. Cross Jr., who died a few years back. He was one of the prime movers in the creation of the city of Chesapeake. His memories of the political maneuvering fully told in his own words would be a historical treasure trove.
And, as the Chesapeake Jubilee grows into a long-established tradition, I wish I could hear Marian Whitehurst, the former mayor who originated the Jubilee, tell about the fun and frustrations of the first one. Can't be done. Too late. Whitehurst died a couple of years ago.
But it's not too late to reap the history harvest from people like Dr. Hugo Owens. A wonderfully articulate man of quiet strength, Owens was one of two blacks who broke the color line on Chesapeake's City Council. He later became Chesapeake's first black vice mayor. His memories, his insights, ought not to be lost.
And there's Don Buckley, administrator of Chesapeake General Hospital. He's the combination mother hen and ramrod who has guided the hospital from the days when it was no more than a trailer office. Please, somebody, turn on the tape recorder and let him tell it.
Yes, make sure our taped history includes the big stuff, the pivotal events and institutions. Don't forget the fascinating fabric of daily life, though. I had the pleasure in 1986 of interviewing - and recording - Anne Wilson Old, who died a couple of months ago. She had lived in a house on Cedar Road since 1902. She told me about Great Bridge when Battlefield Boulevard was a dirt road; when she went to a one-room school; and when the doctor came by horse and buggy and mixed medicines himself.
Intertwined were fascinating bits of local lore, like how Cedar Road used to be called Poor House Road because the poor house was where the Civic Center is now. And how there was a blacksmith's shop at what is now Cedar Road and Battlefield Boulevard. The blacksmith's wife made satin linings for coffins and she gave Old and her playmates satin scraps for doll clothes.
Then there was the time in 1986 I interviewed Frank Livingston Portlock, who told me about growing up in South Norfolk in the early 1900s. How, for instance, the family had a surrey with the fringe on top. Portlock would get up early in the morning to feed the horses and sometimes milk the family cow. ``I could milk right well,'' he said. ``I had a good grip, a good squeeze.''
It's not exaggerating to call those kinds of memories treasures. But they are not renewable resources. Time dulls the memories and eventually stills the voices. Somebody, maybe the good folks at Tidewater Community College, ought to make a Chesapeake oral history project an ongoing reality. Even with Allen-nomics butchering college budgets, it ought to be possible.
However, I will admit to an occasional pitfall when interviewing the very elderly. None funnier than the time I, a young sprite of 65, was trying to talk with a 105-year-old lady. After a while, she had a question for me.
``Are you,'' she asked, ``older than I am or younger than I am?'' Is that a kick in the ego or what? by CNB