I will never have a CD recording the story about the time my grandparents went to
a nightclub (speakeasy?) during Prohibition with my great-aunt and her husband,
and how my now very dignified but then only nineteen years old great aunt got so
drunk she literally slid under the table. My grandmother's story about working for
the Social Security administration in DC as part of a jobs program during the
Depression will never make it into the Smithsonian Folklife Center's archives, and
we probably never will get the full story about why my great-grandfather didn't
sail on the Titanic, as family legend says he'd planned to.
It's too
late for me. But it's not too late for other people, who can now take an older
friend or relative to the
href="http://www.npr.org/display_pages/features/feature_1475619.html">Storycorps
a> booth in Grand Central Station in New York and get those stories recorded --
one CD for yourself and one for the Smithsonian. There are even faciliators to
help elicit the stories. Rudder's still got all four grandparents, but I can't
figure out how to get them to New York. I hope the project expands, as they plan
to.
If not, we'll just keep encouraging them to talk. Did you know
that you can spook an enemy by dropping an empty bottle on him from an airplane?
Apparently they make a loud and eerie noise on the way down. I didn't know that
either, but that's what one of Rudder's grandfathers did in the South Pacific
during WWII. The other was a CO, with a completely different set of stories to
tell. They don't think too much of each other, or they didn't for a long time (I
think time has mellowed both), but I'm glad to be related to both if only by
marriage.
Maybe I can find an email address for one of my cousins.
Their grandmother, that same great aunt who ended up under the table is still
here, and she's a lot closer to NYC than Rudder's West Coast family.