At History's Knee

My interest in oral history-although I could not have called it by its proper name-dates back almost to my birth. For you see, one of my distinct blessings is to have begun life in a threeand indeed during my ve y earliest years four-generation household. Our big Iowa farmhouse was rife with relatives. Nearly any door or floor could yield up an elder, ready to play checkers or tell stories of by-gone years. In retrospect, the situation could scarcely have been better: my parents had automatic babysitters, my grandparents had an immediate audience, and I had an unassailable connection to the past. My Great-grandmother Gleason, born in 1868, who had always seemingly worn long, black dresses, and sat enthroned in her formidable high-backed wheelchair, told me of a time when the guns of the Civil War had only recently ceased their thunder, and when GAR veterans marched, some with sleeves empty, each Decoration Day to commemorate their role as saviors of the Union. She also told me of her role as surrogate mother to her twelve younger siblings, and how on sultry summer days when the chores could be declared complete, she would take her charges to a nearby copse. There, she and the older children would wrestle a young sapling double, hold it steady, and when a child's grip was firm enough, loose the tree to sway. My paternal grandfather, fatherless since age two, recalled life in the late 1890s. The humiliation of begging for the coins with which he would secure his first pair of new shoes still brought bitterness as he told of relatives who might have helped ease the pathway. He told me of my Great-uncle Harry, his older brother, who had answered the call to serve his nation

Art · Begging · Cousin · Developmental psychology · Grandparent · Humiliation · Literature · Oral history · Spanish Civil War · Tragedy (event · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Social Psychology