Extending Our Lives Backward through Older Folks

John Hallwas

            I recently re-read Studs Terkel’s “Division Street: America” (1967), a popular volume of oral memoirs by Chicago residents, reflecting on their experience in the city. It is a penetrating look not just at past times in a particular place but at deeply felt attitudes, and it reminds me of my own oral history and interview work in our region, which started in the 1970s and became indispensable to my writing of books and articles. But I focused more intently on elderly folks.          

            Of course, they know the most local history. But also, by listening to older people, especially when they recount their own life experiences, we naturally identify with them, and we comprehend the past in personal terms. We extend our own life backwards, fostering a sense of connection between what we experience today and what people once went through as they grew up, developed friends, struggled to make a living, raised children, achieved some purposes, coped with deaths, dealt with aging, and hopefully, deepened their lives.

            One of many older Macomb friends who shared his local knowledge and his personal past with me was retired judge Keith Scott, who died in 1991. He was elected as a circuit court judge in 1959 and served until retiring in 1975, which is about when I met him. He took a special interest in our county’s legal tradition and even wrote an article-length history of “The McDonough County Bar” (1977). He knew a great deal about fascinating local law cases.

            Keith had researched the careers of such remarkable figures as William H. Neece, the most renowned nineteenth-century criminal lawyer in our county; L. Y. Sherman, who was a county judge, state legislator, and U. S. Senator; and Damon G. Tunnicliff, a local judge who also served on the Illinois Supreme Court. But he had also known personally such talented 20^th-century figures as the colorful William A. Compton, the talented T. Mac Downing, the storytelling Wallace Walker, and the crusading state’s attorney Bill Harris. I loved to hear him talk about the character and interests of such men---whom he felt connected with.

            Keith had clearly extended his own life back into the heritage of our county by learning from, and socializing with, older men in the field that he loved and knew so much about. He referred to his sense of connection to them all as a matter of “fellowship and appreciation,” for he realized that their efforts had impacted his own life, in both professional and personal ways.

            Another of my much-older friends was Lora Lemmer, an unmarried lifelong resident who died in 1993 at the age of 99. She and I became acquainted in the early 1980s when I was writing an article on the Gooseneck Ghost, and someone told me that an elderly woman who resided at Everly House had actually seen the ghost---as a child, back in 1908.

            She wrote a brief memoir about that experience, in fact, and I quoted from it in my article, which was later included in “McDonough County Heritage” (1984). Lora was also helpful when I was writing the history of Macomb, for although she was not a community leader, she had a remarkable memory for the everyday experiences of local folks---attending shows at the opera house, participating in Memorial Day ceremonies, and the like.

            In fact, of the many local elders that I have interviewed and gotten to know, she had the most extensive and vivid memory of early childhood experiences. Fortunately, I realized that listening to her recollections was a kind of precious sharing of the otherwise vanished past, and I often dropped by to see how she was doing, tell her what I was writing about, and learn more about the way it was, and the way people felt about things, generations ago.

           Clearly, she was rooted in a different world, of horse-drawn wagons and buggies, one-room schools in the countryside, family-focused Chatauqua programs, aging Civil War soldiers, rampant childhood diseases, and close relationships with grandparents who had been pioneers. And the more I listened, the more I felt connected with it all, and with her.

           But Lora was not the oldest person I ever spoke with and learned from. I once knew older folks in several nearby counties---and many especially in Hancock County, where I eventually did research for books on early Nauvoo. When I met Ernestine Berger in 1980, she was 105. (As she once quipped, “When you’re 105 there’s no disguising your age. It’s public knowledge.”)

           Born in a log cabin near the Mississippi River, in 1875, she recalled a village life of hard manual labor and close relationships, and she remembered some aging pioneers who were still around in the 1880s. She was so deeply connected with early Nauvoo that she felt a bit alienated in the later 20^th century.  But listening to her memories—of steamboats on the river, hard times in the 1890s, early cars on the dirt roads, and so on---was a remarkable experience.

            If listening to and learning from older folks has taught me anything, it is this: You can outlive your own lifetime, not by going forward, of course, but by extending backward into the roots of your tradition, developing a feel for the culture that led to you. When the past becomes a kind of shared awareness, through the agency of those elders who recall it and identify with it, you-the-listener can achieve a real sense of longevity, of deep belonging within the slow march of years as one era fades into another---regardless of whether you live to be 105.