This is a slightly unorthodox post. I enjoyed reading a lot of Letting Go? and have comments and questions on many of the short pieces. I love the amount of education theory that continuously creeps up and the possibilities for using technology to find balance in who has authority and power in the telling of our shared past. Throughout the first ninety or so pages of Letting Go? I highlighted and took notes about learning theories, technological influences, and community involvement in museums. Then I hit “Moving Pictures: Minnesota’s Most Rewarding Film Competition” and I lost my composure at the bottom of the first page. I will preface the rest of my response with this: My grandmother passed away last week and my grandfather, her husband, passed away this past August.
As I read this piece, the history of the film competition and the stories of Grandma Lucy and Grandpa Bill, the raw emotion it evoked caught me off guard. I am sad and I miss them both dearly, but I am also angry with myself for never taking the time to do what these filmmakers “had always meant to do” and finally did. I spent plenty of time with both Nona and Papa, but I never asked the questions I wanted to ask. What was the Navy like during the War? Where did you serve? Will you teach me to play backgammon? What was life like growing up with a mother who only spoke Italian? What did you do as a teenager, before you married Papa? How do you make that salad dressing that makes every vegetable taste like heaven? While I am personally more upset about those stupid little questions, as a historian, I am angry that I failed to preserve their story in a meaningful manner. I failed in my “obligation to future generations” by not capturing their story using all of the technology available today, to make it as vivid and as genuine as possible.
Like that of Grandma Lucy, my grandparents’ stories are not remarkable or fantastic, but ordinary. I know bits and pieces from my father and my aunt; and I believe as Drube does that “the defining characteristic of the greatest generation was not the circumstances that they endured, but rather the hope they had for a better tomorrow” (p 105). I believe this because I saw and felt it when I was with my Nona while she cooked for her family and when I was with my Papa when he taught me to play cribbage. I know it is not too late to capture their stories the way Grandma Lucy’s was captured by Drube and his daughter and to make them part of the conversation of our past.
Katrina, I was also surprised at the emotional reaction I had reading the pieces about the film festival. It added a sense of urgency to my past thoughts of recording oral history with my grandparents, even going as far as buying a recorder and always thinking “I’ll have more time to sit and talk with them on my next trip.” I definitely want to do this before it is too late. It was great that the Drubes’ project still paid homage to Lucy’s life even when it was “too late.” I also appreciated his perspective on the universal aspects of interpersonal connections and family ties that the festival highlighted for him, as it reflects a less theory-driven aspect of what makes public history possible and necessary – that anyone can do it, and has a story to tell.
I think one of the most powerful aspects of history is that it belongs to all of us and everyone can be a historian. I love that public history has started to give amateur historians and filmmakers the opportunity to tell their family’s stories. And there is a sense of immediacy too; get these stories before they disappear (i.e. the huge push to collect Holocaust survivor stories in the 90’s). As public history makes this practice a priority, I think it important that they also begin public campaigns to bring people (of all races, creeds, genders and socioeconomic status) into their museums to get their stories. Few people have the equipment or the know-how to create their own movie (or even write it down eloquently). Public historians will need to go out there and GET it!