Any of you that know me know that I have a huge passion for history. But I didn’t always. Before college, history was a collection of random of dates about people who died long before my memory.
It took an assignment from my college US History professor to get me hooked. The assignment? Go talk to a family member about WWII, the Great Depression, or Korea and write a paper about it.
If I’m honest, I wasn’t thrilled about this assignment. At the time, I was a Chemistry major (yes, Chemistry and that’s a story for another time), but I loved my grandparents and gladly took the opportunity to visit Grandma and Bobpa (our nickname for my grandpa) to talk about their lives.
Over glasses of lemonade, I found out how my grandmother went to college (with a fur coat no less) and graduated. They told me about the decision they made that my grandfather sign up before he was drafted into WWII so he could stave off being shipped over. He eventually became a liaison pilot, of whom 7 out of 10 didn’t come home. Overseas, he dragged around a piano box with a hole in it to use as a portable outhouse. And a host of other recollections I now have logged in my memory.
Every story they told showed me a different part of who they were, who I am. Stories tell me what life was like, the mistakes, hopes, and dreams of another generation.
In a very real way, my grandparent’s stories gave birth to my love of story.
As I grew older and studied, I began to realize that my passion for stories was actually based in science. The tremendous power of story is that it gives us a relatively safe place to figure out relationships and life’s questions.
But it all started with my grandparent’s war stories.