Oral History

For a relatively young country, American has rich tradition of passing history down from generation to generation. The advantage of a young, dynamic country like ours is that  history can span a relatively short period of time but include many epochal events.

My wife's aunt was born in the 1880s and lived over 100 years. In that period of time she saw New York City grow into a world-class metropolis (She actually remembered seeing sheep graze in what is now Central Park's Sheep Meadow). She saw gas lamps replace candles and electric lamps replace the gas. She lived to see the birth of the automobile and the death of the buggy. The rise and fall of railroading and the popularity of jet air travel. And finally, one hot July night, men on the moon.

My own grandmother told the story of arriving in America as an 11-year old immigrant. She remembered being at the train station in Buffalo, New York the day President McKinley was assassinated in 1901. "A great man had been shot," she said, although she didn't know who he was at the time. Her perspective was that of a frightened 11-year old in a strange land as soldiers brandished their rifles, trying to lock down the train station as she was arriving from New York.

On a business trip I once visited an elderly aunt who soon would be overtaken by dementia, but at that point still remembered being a little girl who accompanied my grandmother in 1919 to bring dinner to an old soldiers home. The soldiers were World War I veterans and many were victims of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. Her life would eventually encompass sending a husband off to fight in World War II, losing a brother in that same war, protesting the Vietnam War, even as two nephews fought in it, and watching the bombs drop on Baghdad in the First Gulf War.

Fay Vincent, the former commissioner of Major League Baseball, reminisced recently in a Wall Street Journal piece about sitting in a meeting in the 1970s and speaking with an attorney who had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Mr. Vincent, a student of history, asked whether Justice Holmes had ever spoken about his Civil War experiences. Justice Holmes had been wounded three times in that war.

The attorney, according to Vincent, told how Justice Holmes once took his clerks to Arlington National Cemetery. This was the late 1920s when the barbarism of the First World War was still fresh in the minds of Americans. Justice Holmes spoke about the current generation of Americans and the recent war's brutality. "They should have been with me at Antietam," he quietly told his clerks.

So here you have Justice Holmes, born in 1840 when he certainly would have seen veterans of the Revolutionary War, speaking about his experiences in the American Civil War to clerks who had just come through the First World War--all of which was recounted by a man who had lived to see both World Wars, Korea and Vietnam to a man who has witnessed countless global conflicts since then.

As Mr. Vincent writes, oral tradition is at the heart of our history. At this holiday season don't lose a chance to ask an older relative or family friend to share a story or two. Once our elders die a rich oral heritage dies with them unless we save it to hand down to the next generation.

Just thought you might like to know.