Read My Diary and I'll Have to Kill You!

In that box of heirlooms, forgotten letters, award certificates, teenage diaries, and theater programs, you may have some real bomb shells. Or, at the very least, some mortifying expressions of love and angst. If you are looking for fodder for a personal history, or just want to declutter, you may face a real dilemma: What to save? What to recycle? And what to absolutely destroy—burn, bury, obliterate for all time!

A long-time friend of mine posed this very dilemma to me recently. What do people do with their old journals, especially if some of them contain embarrassing information? As a personal historian, I am loathe to advise anyone to purge without taking the time to evaluate things. As embarrassing as something might be to us at the time, some accounts could have lasting value for those who come after us.

As I told my friend, we can imagine someone from past generations destroying all evidence of an unintended pregnancy and a child offered for adoption. To avoid scandal and to salvage relationships, things like that may have been carefully guarded family secrets. But what about that child, or the child’s children who seek to find their roots, who want to know their true biological and genetic heritage? We also know that times change, and we can  imagine the ache of never knowing the truth and the decisions that played into it.

Sometimes painful incidents that we may not want to revisit or reveal could humanize us and create inter-generational connections. In an old family photo album, there is a snapshot of my grandmother at about age 18. The sad and lonely expression on her youthful face is heartbreaking. In real life, I can’t remember ever seeing her look so plaintive. When I asked why she looked that way, her answer was coy, “Oh, someone I liked went away.” And then she changed the subject. I wanted to know more, but I was too shy—or polite—to press her. To this day, I wish I knew who that someone was. A boyfriend? Fiancé? Close friend? Some unrequited love? If only there were a journal or diary in which my grandmother had laid out her soul. Knowing the tale, however innocuous, would only add a new human dimension to the woman I knew only as an elder.

Amid the boring drivel in my old journals—and there are a crate full—there is plenty of pretty silly and slightly embarrassing stuff: like the letter I wrote to Michael Landon in hopes of winning a contest to be his date, the vow to my steady that nothing would ever separate us, my description of the first time I kissed a man with a beard. In fact, some people’s childhood writings make good comedy. If you think you have embarrassing stuff tucked away, check

out Mortified, a live forum where adults read the hilarious things they committed to paper as children and teens! Podcasts from the live show are available, as well as a movie on Netflix. So before you toss that embarrassing tale, it just may be your 15-minutes of fame, if you can bear to “share the shame.”

 

Bottom line: there are two steps to the question of what to do with old journals.
First, decide what is worth keeping. Is there positive value in the writings? Do they add something important to your legacy? Do they illuminate for future generations the time in which you lived or something about you as a person? Do you need the writing to understand and remember something that happened? Do they tell a good story that others would enjoy reading or could learn from? Yes? Then keep them. On the other hand, are there entries that would be hurtful to others? Do they contain vitriol from a breakup or loss that serves no purpose and that you have moved beyond? Do they lack any positive value, historic or otherwise? Then let them go. Remember, you can always decided to keep only part of a diary—the most interesting, funniest, helpful, enlightening parts—and throw away the rest.

The second step is to decide how you want to preserve the journals you decide to keep. Archivists agree that things we want to save should be preserved in multiple ways and in multiple places. Actual journals and diaries written in bound books or notebooks should be stored in acid-free archival boxes in a cool, dry place such as an interior closet. You can digitize the contents by scanning pages and combining into pdf files. Alternatively, you can hire a transcriptionist to input the writing into an electronic document. Digital files should be stored on multiple devices, your computer hard drive, an external storage device, or on a cloud service. Sorting and storing your journals by chronologically, and adding an index of significant events would be helpful. Your descendants will thank you. 

For more information on preserving your things, see Preservation Week, a project of the American Library Association.

Not Quite Home published!

I am pleased to announce the completion of a very special personal history book: one for my parents, Paul and Ann Long. The book was published in August 2012 on Blurb.com, and concerns the eight years when my folks were starting out on their own in the Corn Belt of central Illinois. My dad had just graduated from veterinary school at Oklahoma State University and was off to practice his profession with my mother, my two brothers, and me in tow! It was an idyllic beginning for us kids, but certainly not the easiest of times for my parents.

Creating this book was a true joy and my family will treasure the memories.
You, too, can record family memories in book form. Many resources are available on the web, and Evermore Legacies stands ready to assist you with writing, editing, and book design.
Contact me at laura@evermorelegacies.com

Not Quite Home Starting Out in the Corn Belt by Paul and Ann Long ~A Personal History~ 1956-1965 | Make Your Own Book

Pooh Bear

For Christmas of 1955, when I was three-years-old, Santa Claus brought me a teddy bear that was as almost as big as I was tall. I was amazed at my good fortune, and smiled with pride when anyone would remark: “My goodness! That bear is about as big as you are!”

But that’s all I remember about “the bear that is big as me” because it was lost when we moved from Oklahoma to Illinois that next June.

When my dad graduated from Oklahoma State’s veterinary school in 1956, he landed a job working for another veterinarian in Pontiac, Illinois. That summer, my family of five set out for new adventures.

We had one car and not much money, so my parents packed up all our belongings in the car and a small trailer. The plan was that my dad would drive the car to Illinois and my mom, my two brothers, and I would follow on the train.

Somewhere en route, my dad had a car accident on Route 66 and was thrown from the car. He was not badly hurt, but the car was wrecked. Dad took all our stuff out of the car before it was hauled off to the junkyard—or so he thought. But when I asked about my bear, it was nowhere to be found. I had placed it in the back seat of the car, and all anyone could imagine was that the impact of the accident had pushed it under the seat out of sight. I couldn’t understand how a “bear that is big as me” could be lost, but there you have it.

I wailed, I cried, I thrust out my lip in a heart-broken pout, and I refused to be consoled—until my older brother, Curt intervened.

“Here, Laura, you can have Pooh,” he said, and handed me the little golden-colored teddy bear that he had received when he was about my age. The A.A. Milne tales of Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin were favorites of Curt’s in his early years, and he had aptly named his teddy for the lovable “silly old bear” in the stories.

Maybe Curt thought that a seven-year-old boy was too grown up to have a teddy bear any longer, or maybe he just wanted to coax a wailing sister into quieting down. But whatever the reason, his generosity shocked me into grateful silence.

Pooh became my treasured companion. Thereafter, I slept with Pooh bear every night, and when I occasionally would awake, trembling, with a nightmare and creep into my parents’ bed, Pooh would come along. In the morning, I often would discover that Pooh’s little black nose had fallen out from his snout, and my mother and I would search through the bed sheets and blankets until we found it. No amount of gluing ever seemed to permanently secure Pooh’s nose in place.

Today, Pooh has an honored spot on the bed in our guestroom. He has been to camps and to college; he  has lived in dorms, apartments, and houses in fourteen cities or towns in eight states. 


After more than fifty years, Pooh surely has paid witness to many things, but the sweetest would still be a big brother’s generosity.

Fact Checking Your Personal History/Memoir

Memories and facts are not the same thing, but both are important in your personal history. 


Facts can be checked and verified in some objective source, such as reference materials or people who were on the scene at the time or know about the places and events. 


Memories, on the other hand, encompass all the shades of meaning, the lens of experience, the emotional connections that color and shape a place and experiences. Your personal history can't be "true" without both facts and memory. Together, facts and memory combine detail, emotion, and meaning into a good story. 

RMS Titantic, courtesy Wikipedia

A good reporter knows this. The RMS Titantic sinks, and you can get "just the facts, ma'am":

• On her maiden voyage, the ship scrapes an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. April 14, 1912;
• Five compartments fill with water in ship built to stay afloat with water in four;
• The ship's 20 lifeboats can accommodate only 1,178 persons; more than 2,200 were on board;
• At 2:20 a.m. April 15, 1912, the Titantic sinks;
• 1,514 people are killed. 

Now that's a tragic and compelling story, but don't we want to know more? Don't we want to know who these people were, the heroes and villians, the compassionate and the self-absorbed? And even when the facts are invented (think Rose and Jack in James Cameron's 1997 movie, Titantic), the story has its own truth.

With personal histories, many facts can be verified and checked to bolster your story and to add details for the reader. The Internet, of course, is a treasure trove of information. (I found a picture of the "Jumbo" that I used in my March 12, 2012 post on the Roanoke, Illinois Web site--thank you, Cheryl Wolfe--as well as a Centennial History of the town that I purchased on E-Bay.) And Google Maps lets you zero right in on streets and buildings in places far away, refreshing your memory in a way that's almost as good as time travel. 

Too, if never hurts to check your memory with family members, friends, colleagues, or others who shared your experiences or lived in the same time and place. Their information may adjust your memory or just add to the story.

On a recent trip to see my folks in Oklahoma, my dad and mom "adjusted" my story about the night when my pals, Jim and Chuck, came calling after dark and got the wrong bedroom window (See "Night Visitors," March 20, 2012, below). 

When she was awakened to a flashlight shining into their bedroom window, Mom said her first thought was "carnies!" The carnival that was in town employed a group of rather seedy looking characters whom she thought might easily be capable of mischief, especially in semi-isolated house outside of town. 

She recollected not only screaming, but calling out, "Get the gun!" a demand meant to scare the culprits, because the only gun my dad owned was a shotgun for hunting birds, which was kept--unloaded, of course--in its case way, way back in his closet behind some heavy garment bags. But just the word "gun" surely lit a fire under Jim and Chuck as they made a hasty retreat through the cornfield. 

Although I thought my dad had figured out who the visitors were on his own, he had a slightly different memory. He told me, "When I went into town the next day, the story was already all over town. Jim and Chuck had been bragging about it. Somebody, I don't remember who, asked me about it. So when I saw Jim, I let him know that I knew what they'd been up to."

A-ha! So it wasn't Jim and Chuck's reputations that gave them away. It was just their big mouths! 

Still, I imagine they would have their very own versions of the truth.

Night Visitors

Photo by Kate Ter Haar

Even at 11 o’clock at night, the August air was as thick and sticky as the cotton candy that my best friend Debbie and I had devoured at Roanoke’s weekend carnival. The community fundraiser was set up on village’s south side, in the American Legion park, past the railroad tracks.

Giddy with excitement—and too many sweets—we lounged on my bed, sweating in the moonlight that streamed through my open bedroom window. Not even the slightest breeze stirred the curtains as we whispered about the evening’s fun and waited for our expected midnight rendezvous.

We had met our school friends, Chuck and Jim, at the carnival that Friday evening, where we were allowed some pre-teen independence in the waning summer days before we would start seventh grade. With our allowances stuffed into our shorts’ pockets, we careened around the midway, throwing down dimes and quarters on games of chance, sideshows, and snacks. And, of course there were the rides.

We screamed on the Wild Mouse, squished unnaturally close together on the Scrambler, and cuddled at the top of the Ferris wheel, with all of Woodford County laid out below us. Or at least Chuck and Debbie cuddled, as Chuck clearly had a gleam in his eye these days when he looked at perky, button-nosed, brown-eyed Debbie.

To me, Jim and Chuck were just friends. We had gone to school and the Methodist Church together since kindergarten, playing softball in the school fields, riding bikes to the creeks, climbing the Jumbo. The two of them were lots of fun and full of mischief, but the familiarity crowded out any notion of romance for me.

That night at the carnival, the four of us quickly discovered an intriguing symmetry—Debbie was spending the night at my house, and the boys were camping out in a tent in Chuck’s backyard.

A plan was hatched.

A little before midnight, when parents would surely be asleep, the boys would sneak due north through the cornfields to my house, which was just a half-mile out of town, and rendezvous with us. We girls agreed to leave a lawn chair under my bedroom window so the boys could recognize where to find us.

As the minutes ticked past midnight and on towards 1 a.m., all was quiet in the house. We had heard my parents go to bed an hour ago in the bedroom next door. We yawned and stretched out, trying to find a cool place on the sheets. Clearly, the boys weren’t coming. Maybe Chuck’s parents had caught them, maybe they’d gotten lost in the corn and turned back, or maybe they’d just changed their minds. We yearned for sleep, which seemed impossible in my stifling bedroom.

Photo by Watt Publishing

Even as a wind was starting to kick up, Debbie and I gathering up our pillows and sheets, and headed for the basement playroom, a comfortably cool retreat on a night like this.

Some of what happened next is still in dispute as everyone had a little bit of the story. But this much is pretty clear:

Sometime after 1 a.m., two figures, flashlights in hand, emerged from the cornfield on the south side of our lawn. The house windows were all dark.

Suddenly, my mom awoke to a light panning across her bed. Seeing a face at the open window, she uttered a dry-mouthed scream, and my dad leaped from bed toward the window.

“Hey! hey!” he yelled, spying two figures scrambling off, lickety-split, into the corn.

“Who was it?!” my mother asked, her heart still racing.

“Just kids,” Dad said. “I think I can guess who.”

At the breakfast table the next morning, my mom casually asked, “Did you two have a plan for Chuck and Jim to come by the house in the middle of the night?”

Debbie and I passed surprised glances, and then, feigned our most innocent expressions as Mom told us about the fright she’d received. As quickly as possible, and saying little, we high-tailed it to the bedroom to giggle about the boys’ mistake:

• "Can you believe they got your parents' bedroom?"
• "Why would they DO that when we told them that the window was the closest to the porch, and that's where the chair was?"
• "I can just seem them running off into the field! Probably tromped down a couple rows!"
• "It's a good thing Dad doesn't keep a gun!"

Later that afternoon, my dad stopped by Jim’s house to return a cake pan to Jim’s mother that she had left at the Boy Scouts’ bake sale at the carnival. As he was leaving, he spotted Jim in the yard, and remarked with a chuckle:

“I see you made it out of the cornfield last night, Jim. I figure Chuck did, too.”

Never ones to believe their reputations might precede them, Jim and Chuck were  convinced that we had ratted them out—an argument that raged for years, and chances are, could still be resurrected with renewed vigor.

How Topography Intersects Personal History

A child of the flatlands, I have always loved the wide-open spaces—unrestricted vistas from east to west where it is possible to see the sun appear on the horizon at daybreak, ascend to the zenith, and sink below the edge of the earth in the evening, one day, whole and complete.

I have lived in places with trees or buildings or cliffs, where open sightlines are not possible. Such places wear on me and begin to feel confining. But if I can get out, away, on higher ground and see the arc of the earth against the sky—ah, that’s freedom, and my soul soars.

Topography must influence our personal histories in some way, certainly in the experiences we encounter, and perhaps also in our very outlooks on life. Can a person who born on the savannah see life the same as someone who grew up beside a great river? Wouldn’t folks living at 8,000 feet have different experiences from those on the coasts?

Few places are flatter than central Illinois. The rolling fields, mostly corn or soybeans, go on and on, unbroken until there is a creek or a river. But a “mountain”—the Jumbo—also defined our town, Roanoke, and still does, I suspect.

Roanoke's Jumbo, courtesy Cheryl Wolfe, www.roanokeil.org

Rising from the prairie at the southeastern corner of town, the Jumbo is the tailings of the Roanoke Coal Mine, sunk in 1881, the second shaft in Woodford County. Although only a couple hundred feet high, the Jumbo stands out for miles around, it’s odd gray and red color contrasting with the rich, black top soil. The Jumbo is Roanoke’s distinctive symbol of place.

Against the Jumbo's weathered backbone, the annual Independence Day fireworks show was mounted, as families gathered in the park at its base. At Christmastime, a lighted star was displayed from the Jumbo's summit, and today there waves an American flag. 

For us kids in the 1960s, the Jumbo was a place for adventures. We would pack a lunch, a canteen of water, and ride our bikes to the park below the Jumbo and hike to the top. The old railbed, along which rail cars had hauled and dumped the dirt and slag, provided the easiest climb. But some kids liked to try the steeper side. The mound, an uneven pile full of gullies, steep faces, and coarse soil full of sharp gravel, and bits of coal could be slippery. Fall down, and you were likely to sustain a nasty scraped knee or thigh.

Kids liked to tell tales about the Jumbo:

• a cave-in had trapped miners inside and their bodies were never found; 
• the place was haunted by the ghosts of dead miners; 
• Boy Scouts had seen eerie figures sitting on timbers where the tipple had been;
• some kids knew a secret entrance to the shaft; 
• and the mine had once blown its top off.

Not much of that was completely true, of course. Here’s a few facts from the Roanoke Centennial History:

• The longest shaft ran two miles east and a little north of town, on a downward slope.
• Originally, mules were used to pull the coal cars through the tunnels, and a room was carved out at the bottom of the shaft where the animals were stabled during the mining season, September through April.
• In 1890, the mine produced 42,000 tons of coal, selling at $2 per ton.
•  At its peak, the mine employed 300 men and hoisted 500 tons a day.
• For two weeks in late summer, the mine was opened so that farmers could purchase coal to fuel the thrashing machines that traveled through the countryside during harvest time.
•  Two men were killed in separate cave-ins in the mine in 1905, prompting extensive repairs to improve safety and efficiency.
• Clay brick and tiles were manufactured after the turn of the century adjacent to the mine, utilizing coal-fired kilns.

But the most dramatic events were these:

• On June 29, 1906, quicksand shot into the mine shaft 70 feet below ground, tearing a scaffolding from the walls, and plunging four men 400 feet to their deaths. The Roanoke Call published a special edition the next day, recounting the tragedy. The four victims—Andrew Mitchell, August Mueser, Camille Faucon, and Joseph Dewasme—all under forty, first-generation immigrants from Scotland, German, Belgium, and France, respectively. Each had married Roanoke women less than ten years before their deaths, and each left young children.

• On April 14, 1941, several years after the mine and brick factory had closed, the mine tipple collapsed with a roar into the shaft, creating a crater 60 feet deep and wide, and shaking the earth for miles. The Centennial History reports, “The hole filled the next day with the bluest water anyone in Roanoke had ever seen.” The dramatic event marked the end of the mine. The state ordered the crater filled and sealed. The equipment was sold. Only the Jumbo remains of Roanoke’s mining days.

Topography holds ambience, history of time and place, and particular experiences for those whose lives it intersects. How has topography affected your personal history? 

for those who stand and wait ...

That day’s blizzard was not the first snowfall of the winter of ’62–’63, but it came with a singular speedy intensity. By afternoon, the decision was made to close school an hour or so early and send everyone home before the roads got any worse. The drifts on the country roads were already too much for the school buses, and parents were phoned to make other arrangements to get their children home.

Microsoft File Art

Schoolchildren in Roanoke, Illinois, population 1,800, belonged to one of two groups—the town kids or the country kids. Town kids walked to school (rarely did anyone’s parents drive children to school); country kids rode the school buses. Inclement weather sometimes kept the school buses from running, giving the country kids a day off until the plows could clear the roads. I started kindergarten as a town kid, and I often envied the country kids’ extra “snow days.”

But this winter, my fifth-grade year, was the first my family spent in our newly built house located just a quarter mile north of town on a corner plot my dad bought from a farmer. A country kid now, I rode the school bus to town, and extra snow days were a distinct possibility. But I hadn’t figured on getting stranded at school.

When we students learned school was letting out early, some parents—country and town alike—were already waiting outside in cars. Townies who lived near by bundled up and headed out to walk home.

My teacher, Mr. Castro, passed the message from my mom: “Stay at school and wait for your dad. He’s out on a call, but will come and get you when he’s done.”

My heart sunk. My dad was a veterinarian, and his “calls” could take him to far-flung farms across the Illinois River valley, and the duration of his visits were unpredictable.

Happy to get home early, all my friends skedaddled out of class in a blur, leaving me—the last kid. As the minutes ticked by, the custodian seemed to be the only soul in the building as I waited and waited at the school door, a lump growing in my throat. Did Dad get detained? Had he slid into a snowy ditch? There was no way to know and nothing to do but wait.

Unless . . .

Microsoft File Art

The school was on the northern edge of town, its athletic fields backing up to a cornfield. And beyond that field, at the intersection of the section line road and the gravel extension of Main Street, was our house. In the summertime, I often took my bike down the gravel road into town. Or, to avoid the dusty road, we kids would simply take off through the cornfield, following the straight rows until they ended at “civilization.”

Now, with the field empty save for the snow, I could easily see the gravel road from the school, and I knew that at the field’s highest place, I would be able to see the roof of our house. There was no way to get lost.

And so, taking charge of my own fate, I headed out the door. Rounding the school building, I slammed into an icy wind blowing with ferocity off the flat, expansive prairie. I caught my breath, and for an instant, hesitated. Then, pumping up stubborn determination, I thought, “I can do this. It’s not far.”

On I trudged, into the field, snow swirling and blowing around me, heading due north to home.

The going was easier at first, snow just to my boot tops. But the farther I went, the deeper the snow became. Soon I was up to my knees, and it was a slow slog. Clearly, the trek was going to take longer than I figured, so I determined to angle off toward the road, hop the fence, and take the road home.

Reaching the rise, the older snow was packed hard from the dry wind. I could walk on top of it as I turned toward the road.

Then, whoosh! The snow bank gave way and I went down into a gully. I was over my head in snow. Flat on my back, staring up at the steely sky, I was spent. This was a dumb idea, and I was going to have to eat crow, if I was ever again warm enough to chew. No matter—dry clothes and a warm house was all I wanted.

As I struggled to get free, the snow felt like quicksand around me. Recalling the extraction technique demonstrated in some old movie, I rolled over and over on my belly until I was back up on hard snow.

Straight ahead of me, not a hundred yards away, stood the last house on Main Street where my friend Beverly and her family lived. They would take me in! I lumbered forward, snow packed in my sleeves, my boots, my cap, and falling down my back.

I must have looked quite a sight when Bev’s mother opened the back door to my knock.

Microsoft File Art

“What in the world...”

“Mrs. France, can I stay here until my dad comes to pick me up?” I asked.

“What happened to you?”

The Frances graciously took me in, warmed me up, gave me dry clothes, and fed me the most delicious potato soup I’ve ever had.