NOTE: This article was originally the lesson plan for the TellOurLifeStories.com and NewspaperARCHIVE.com co-sponsored teleconference on using archival newspapers to enhance and inform your life story.
To begin, there is an inspiring piece in Natalie Goldberg's book, Old Friend from Far Away, that is in the chapter titled "Ordinary."
She says:
I've said this in subtle ways, but yesterday after a book reading, an old student sidled up, not looking at me and said, 'My childhood wasn't so bad. I mean, well, I was brought up in Illinois.'
You mean, what if I had an uneventful, ordinary life, can I still write a memoir? Natalie cut in.
The student nodded shyly.
You know the answer. What did Mies van der Rohe say? God hides in the details. Slow down and give them to us. We need to read about regular childhoods, otherwise, we won't know what they are..."
A tremendous relief flushed across the student's face.
We need you, the ones who had a cough and your mother or grandfather was there to administer the syrup. Even if you had only one year when you were three when you tasted peace, let us know about that. The experience probably gave your fragile life a foundation. Share that ground with us.
The important thing is to go below the clichés to touch the texture of your experience. Your mind is hungry to be alive.
I enjoy Natalie Goldberg's book and find it thought provoking and helpful in memoir writing.
For me, when I am reading through a story, and I meet a detail that tells me that the main character brewed a cup of Earl Gray tea and she and her best friend settled in front of the picture window in the kitchen facing the apple tree whose leaves had just begun to turn color in the fall, I am there. I can smell the tea. I can feel the chill of fall in the air and sense the sunlight coming in through that picture window.
It is the details that bring a story to life.
I remember one book that I read, can't think of the name of it, but it took place in the 1800's and as the story moved along, they never talked about what people ate or what their daily lives were like. They didn't talk about the ordinary things. The plot raced along and the characters developed over time, but I remember wondering if they ever took a bath.
This lesson is about searching for more details using archival newspapers to spark your memory and to enliven your storytelling.
You can search through these newspapers and discover many tidbits that will rattle your memory cells bringing to life details and thoughts that were long forgotten. Or use them to add context to your story.
Here is an example of what I found when I searched for information about the day I was born.
I was born on a Sunday in December in 1951. As I look at the events of that day, combing through archival newspapers for a glance at what was happening, I see that there was still war, the Korean War had begun, and illness, polio was crippling children at that time.
But, there were other headlines too. And it seems to me that in some ways, things were a lot simpler then.
There was a story in the Billings Montana Gazette about two sets of twin boys, born 11 months apart to a family in Wisconsin. This was a big story on the front page of the paper. The father is holding the older twins and looking befuddled in his suit and tie while mom sat beside him with the other two on her lap wearing her June Cleaver dress.
And there was news of new books coming to the Parmly Billings Memorial Library on Monday.
An ad promotes semi-annual auto insurance for $7.65. Imagine that. And another ad shows a mom, a dad and a daughter seated around a console radio, an advertisement for the Magnavox Belvedere, complete with a 3-speed record changer. In the ad, mom and daughter both wear dresses and daughter has on saddle shoes.
I remember being a youngster and looking out the window at the teenagers returning home from school. The girls were wearing saddle shoes and carrying their books, talking and laughing and I thought they were ever so sophisticated and I couldn't wait to be grown up like them.
And in San Francisco, the Ada Oklahoma Evening News reported that, on the eve of my birthday, "driving winds closed the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time in its 14-year history. The order to close the mammoth bridge, the world's largest single span structure, was given by James E. Rickets, general manager of the bridge. 'We figured it was too rough out there for passenger cars and other vehicles,' said Sgt, Everett Jennings, in charge of toll collections. He told the Associated Press wind velocity h a d reached 60 miles per hour and was rising..
Little did I know in my early years that I would someday be living in the San Francisco Bay Area and commuting past the Golden Gate Bridge every day. The bridge is a main highway link between San Francisco and the rest of coastal Northern California. In the morning the Bay is often blanketed in foggy down and by evening the sun is shining over the Pacific beyond the Golden Gate.
Also on my birthday, in Lowell, Massachusetts, a specially painted Santa mailbox was installed in front of the City Hall. There was a picture of a little girl mailing her letter that day. I wonder if she got what she asked for?
In other news, the Korean War was going on and the Lowell Sunday Sun from Lowell Massachusetts reported that, "Communist jets shot down four Allied warplanes Saturday in one of the first Red victories of the Korean air war."
Shocking to me, the talk of "Red victories."
The Ada Oklahoma Evening News reported that United States officials pledged $600 million in direct aid and defense spending for France before the first of July, 1952.
It was the rebuilding of Europe after World War II.
Skipping ahead a few years as thoughts of events occurred to me, I cruised more newspapers for the headlines.
On my fifth birthday, marshall law was declared in Iraq by King Faisal. In Hungary, according to the Cedar Rapids, Iowa Gazette, "The Soviet garrison at Budapest called for reinforcements Saturday night as handwritten leaflets proclaiming "armed resistance" to the Russians were distributed in the capital and other Hungarian cities."
The Gazette also reported that Dr. William Menninger of Topeka, Kansas said "everybody has a mental health problem at one time or another." And in other news, a live baby pig very much wanted by a 6-year-old in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin was on its way to him.
The Big Spring Daily Herald had an ad for a Ford 4-door sedan for $595.
It seems strange to me to think that what are considered historical events occurred during my lifetime and as I was cruising through the old newspapers, more ideas came to me.
For example, I read an editorial in the Albuquerque Journal, from August 22, 1969, about Woodstock in which the writer said, "the hearts of most parents went out to those miserable overage moppets who suffered and .sickened and died in the drenching rain and almost incredible traffic jam that made of the festival a chaotic quagmire. The inclination was to get on the long-distance phone and tell Sonny or Sister to come on home, have a good meal and slip between clean, cool sheets for 12 hours of shuteye. They struggled through the mud, slept outside in the downpour and didn't get enough to eat. Hot dog prices soared to $1, soft drinks cost 50 cents and beer 75 cents."
And then there were the Beatles. I was a big Beatles fan. I especially liked Paul. I took my transistor radio into my bedroom and put it under my pillow, hoping that they would play the song "Nowhere Man."
Here is something about Beatlemania also from the editorial pages of the Albuquerque Journal, dated August 2, 1964. "They were poor, came from the wrong side of the tracks in Liverpool. They're down-to-earth. They put on no airs. They're good-natured and polite. Audiences establish an immediate rapport with them. They're successful because they're good. It's as simple as that. Whatever the explanation, be warned, Beatlemania is on its way."