A Structural Analysis of Personal Experience Narratives, the Federal Writers‘ Project to Storycorps

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AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE NARRATIVES, THE FEDERAL WRITERS‘ PROJECT TO STORYCORPS

by Megan M. Dickson

B.A. May 2007, Utah State University

A Thesis submitted to

The Faculty of Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

May 16, 2010

Thesis directed by John Michael Vlach Professor of American Studies and of Anthropology

Dedication

This thesis is dedicated to the experiences we each have and share every day— in the park, over the phone, and sometimes even to a government employee (circa 1937), or with a loved one in a cozy StoryCorps sound booth in New York City. To my husband—

Perry Dickson—without you, your love and strength, your championing and cheerleading this story would never have been possible. To my parents—Mona and Ken Farnsworth, and Robin Dickson—thank you for your unending love, support, encouragement, and belief. To my son Parker, whose story has only just begun, your vigor and verve for life already bring constant adventure and joy beyond measure.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge and thank the faculty and staff of the American Studies department at The George Washington University. A special thanks to Maureen

Kentoff—the most fabulous muse in American Studies Executive Assistant history for helping to navigate the sometime frightful waters of university protocol, and sharing ways to succeed as a non-traditional student; John Michael Vlach—my faithful advisor;

Melanie McAlister—Director of Graduate Studies who administered my comprehensive examination; Phyllis Palmer—a woman whose enthusiasm and intellectual spark lit up an otherwise apathetic paper proposal; and Thomas Guglielmo, Chad Heap, Terry Murphy, and Elizabeth Anker—for their teaching prowess and academic acumen.

Abstract of Thesis

American Existence: A Structural Analysis of Personal Experience Narratives, The Federal Writers‘ Project to StoryCorps

This paper argues that the personal experience narrative contains and maintains structural integrity in the form of carefully formulated narrative functions. These functions of narrative structure, manifest over time, underscore the traditional nature of personal experience narratives. The analysis conducted is based on a selection of narratives from the Federal Writers‘ Project life histories and from StoryCorps project interviews, and modeled after the seminal study of Labov and Waletsky‘s ―Narrative

Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience‖ (1967). In a sample of ten narratives, the functions—orientation, complication, evaluation, resolution, and coda—are extracted from the narrative clauses in order to obtain analytical referents to examine not only the structure of the individual narratives themselves, but to substantiate the claim that the narrative structure is a traditional underpinning of personal experiences. The traditional nature of American personal experience narratives is thus displayed over a span of seventy years.

I begin by placing these two recording initiatives in context of their historical cultural atmosphere to indicate the climate out of which the narratives came. Such findings also suggest an American experience rooted in cultural constructs, which manifest themselves in themes of individuality, responsibility, happiness, change and choice. This study concludes by arguing that the narratives also constitute representative examples of the American experience through the themes they employ, which may someday serve as a basis for a narrative theory of American personal experience narratives.

Table of Contents

Dedication …………………………………………………………………………iii

Acknowledgements .….…..………………………………………………………..iv

Abstract of Thesis ………………………………………………………………….v

Table of Contents ………………………………………………………………….vi

List of Tables ………………………………………………………………………vii

Chapter 1: Introduction ……………………………………………………………. 1

Chapter 2: Historical Context ……………………………………………………… 7

Chapter 3: Narrative Analysis …………………………………………………….. 22

Chapter 4: Conclusion …………………………………………………………….. 54

Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………… 66

List of Tables

Table 1 …Richard Dorson‘s Personal Experience ………………………………. 32

Table 2 …Orientation ……………………………………………………………. 36

Table 3…Complication …………………………………………………………... 40

Table 4 …Evaluation ……………………………………………………………... 43

Table 5 …Resolution ……………………………………………………………… 47

Table 6 …Coda ……………………………………………………………………. 51

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Chapter 1: Introduction

Here the profound lesson of reception, neither preference or denial; The black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseas‘d, the illiterate person, are not denied; The birth, hasting after the physician, the beggar‘s tramp, the drunkard‘s stagger, the laughing party of mechanics, The escaped youth, the rich person‘s carriage, the fop, the eloping couple, The early market-man, the hearse, the moving furniture into the town, the return back from the town, They pass—I also pass—anything passes—none can be interdicted; None but are accepted—none but are dear to me. -Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

My introduction to StoryCorps came in what I would now describe as a fairly common personal experience in terms of these narratives. Friday morning, my husband and I rush from our home for another harried commute into D.C. We jump into the car; I turn over the engine. Seat belts fastened, we turn up the volume on NPR‘s Morning

Edition. We reverse out of the driveway as the familiar voice of Rene Montaigne introduces, ―Time now for StoryCorps. This project is traveling the country collecting interviews. Many people have been telling their stories about loved ones. Today we‘ll hear from a family in Virginia‖:

My name is Gregg Korbon. There‘s a Little League baseball field in Charlottesville called Brian Calvin Korbon field, and I would like to tell the story of how it got its name. When Brian was getting ready for his ninth birthday he said that he would never make it to double digits meaning ten-years-old. We didn‘t understand that because he was healthy, but he did not want to celebrate his birthday.

Well over the next several months he said that he wanted to have a belated birthday party. There were several things he did that we didn‘t know about till later, but he wrote letters to his friends. And he put a sign on the door that said, ―Brian‘s on a trip, don‘t worry about me.‖ Then the next morning was his party. The kids came for the party. He didn‘t want any gifts. But his little girl friend gave him a kiss, and his boy friend wrote a song for him. And then it was time for Brian to play little league.

Now he always was afraid of the ball, he was the littlest kid on the team. But when Brian got there he was fearless. He was charging after the ground balls and just having the best time. It was his first time up at bat and he got walked to first base. The next little boy hit a triple. Brian ran around the bases, crossed home plate, he was the happiest little boy you ever saw. He gave me a high five and went into

the dugout and he collapsed. The coach brought him out. And I‘m an anesthesiologist, that‘s what I do is resuscitate people, but something inside told me he wasn‘t coming back.

After he died, I went to the ball field to get my car, and it was the most beautiful spring day I have ever seen. There was another Little League game playing when I went back. And I was looking at the other kids playing, and all of a sudden everything got very clear. And I had the sense that if I could bring Brian back it would be for me, not for him—that he had finished. Any unfinished business was just mine.

Rene concludes, ―Gregg Korban with his wife Kathryn, at StoryCorps. Their entry will be archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. See pictures of Brian and his parents at npr.org.‖1 The broadcast ends and I find myself crossing Memorial Bridge wiping tears from my face. My husband‘s eyes glisten; the emotional impact was palpable. Why?

What is it about personal experience narratives that capture an audience so expertly? Aside from the masterful editing job of NPR‘s morning edition team, is it the repeated revelation of a shared humanity, or our ever-present need for stories ―to tame the chaos of the world, to give meaning‖ as Barbara Myerhoff suggests?2 Is it the insight into individual veins of personal belief, lessons or proverbs that may be passed on generationally, the idea that these stories can almost resurrect specific moments or memories again and again making time seem less linear and more organic, or a combination of all these? Or could it be that this type of personal experience narrative has become so inculcated into patterns of conversational discourse that it has taken on a power long associated with other narrative forms of folk speech, the facet of tradition?

1 Gregg and Kathryn Korban. interview at StoryCorps, NPR’s Morning Edition, 88.5WAMU FM, November 20, 2009. 2 Barbara Myherhoff, Number Our Days, (New York: Dutton, 1978), 33.

Answers to these questions reach to a larger national treasury of everyday

American life captured and preserved by two definitive recording movements—the

Federal Writers‘ Project of the New Deal era and the contemporary non-profit organization StoryCorps. The archival record of both crusades is housed in the Library of Congress, captured on a variety of media—from old wax cylinders and type-written pages, to records, tapes, CDs, and DVDs. Now even digital facsimiles of these personal experience narratives are accessible through the Library‘s web server.3 These recordings chronicle an epic search to define America, an ongoing quest to sift through individual experiences and seize perhaps a more universal and shared essence of what it means to be

American.

Personal experience narratives are stories told in everyday talk about our individual experiences—whether we are sharing the mundane happenings of an ordinary day or extraordinary events that mark our existence. Perhaps our fascination with PENs as Americans comes from the fact that the telling of these personal experience narratives is centered explicitly on the individual, and that attention to the individual is what shapes these stories into a truly American catalog of conversation. Livia Polanyi advocates, the

―American Story‖ is centered on one person relating one experience, thereby placing the individual as the pivotal actor in personal experience narratives. 4 American personal experience narratives would then represent a recurring resolve to rediscover what a nation founded by the people, for the people, of the people imagines of itself.

3 ―American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers‘ Project, 1936-1940,‖ American Memory Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, 25 February 2009, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahom. 4 Livia Polanyi, Telling the American Story: A Structural and Cultural Analysis of Storytelling. (Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishers Corporation, 1985), 133.

The purpose of this study is to examine the intersection of these two monumental

American recording initiatives from the perspective of the personal experience narrative and locate them within a structural analysis of storytelling. I will use the analytical referents obtained to show the permanence of the structural form of the personal experience narrative over time—or at least over the last seventy years—which serves to emphasize the traditional structural nature of these stories beyond their individual idiosyncratic content. It is not within the scope of this paper to make claims as to the traditional function of the personal experience narrative. It is, however, my aim to touch on how these narratives function as explicitly American stories—how they manifest the beliefs, values, conditions, attitudes of American cultural constructs.

The StoryCorps project is a not-for-profit enterprise founded by radio broadcaster

Dave Isay in 2003 to record the lives and stories of everyday Americans, and in turn, to encourage Americans to listen to one another. StoryCorps is an ongoing project, which continues to collect narratives from across the nation. The Works Progress

Administration life histories were collected by the Folklore Unit of the Federal Writer‘s

Project from roughly 1936-1941.5 As a means of investigating these bodies of narrative,

I have chosen to focus my research on interviews taken from two specific texts which serve as representative transcripts from each respective recording movement—Listening is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project and First

Person America. Listening is an Act of Love, as the title alludes, contains transcripts of

StoryCorps interviews from around the country during the first three years of the project.

5 ―American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers‘ Project, 1936-1940,‖ American Memory Library of Congress Manuscripts Division ,25 February 2009, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahom.

First Person America, edited by Ann Banks and published in 1980, was the first project ever to transcribe, edit, and publish a selected collection of the life histories gathered by the Folklore Unit of the Federal Writers‘ Project since B.A. Botkin‘s Treasury of

American Folklore in 1945. After spending over a year reading through the entire archival offering at offsite storage for the American Folklife Center and Manuscripts

Division of the Library of Congress, Banks selected interviews she felt were representative of the collection as a whole.

This study is divided into four chapters. To begin, I take a comprehensive approach in Chapter 2 as I discuss the historical cultural contexts of these stories. This chapter offers a clearer understanding of the internal functions of the FWP and

StoryCorps, which affords a fuller understanding of why, how, and by whom these narratives were collected in the first place. My questions are these: How do the

StoryCorps recordings compare to the collection of the FWP folklore interviews from over half a century ago? What are the similarities and differences of these two collections? What might they teach us about the prevailing existence of a national character or ―American Story‖ from the perspective of the hearts, minds, lives and therefore stories from common citizens? 6

Then I offer a selection of ten narratives, five from each project which fall under accepted definitions of the personal experience narrative or PENs as they are sometimes referred to (I will use these terms interchangeably throughout the paper), to further exploit salient facets of personal experience narratives which foreground a solidified narrative structure. I contend that it is this narrative structure which composes the

6 Polanyi, Telling the American Story, 133.

traditional element within the body of personal experience narratives as discussed in

Chapter 3. Chapter 3 is a concentrated analysis of the selected narratives to determine if the narratives meet the structural criteria based on the work of William Labov and Joshua

Waletzky, ―Narrative Analysis: Oral Version of Personal Experience‖.7

Labov and Waletzky identify five integral facets of personal experience narratives: orientation, complication, evaluation, resolution, and coda. I chose to analyze the narratives in this way to show that the FWP and StoryCorps interviews contain these five structural components, and that they manifest these key narrative structures over time. I conclude that these narratives are significant precisely because their structural form is maintained over time, which strengthens and supports claims as to the traditional nature of this narrative genre. In my conclusion, Chapter 4, I briefly explore these stories as a representative body of American personal experiences, leaving the door open for further research and examination of these PENs as American texts as well as the functional layers of tradition they manifest.

7 William Labov and Joshua Waletzky, ―Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience,‖ in Essays on the Visual and Verbal Arts, ed. June Helm (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), 12-44.

Chapter 2: Historical Context

America meets America: Folklore and the FWP

―By the end of the 1930s, the celebration of the marginal, which had emerged out of disenchantment with America, had become the basis for a new style of patriotism celebrating America. The folk became figured not as failures or malcontents but as embodiments of America‘s strength through diversity. Many people within the official culture began to treat folk forms as part of a resilient cultural core that, they hoped, would see the country through the depths of the depression and the perils of war.‖ –Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music We know the history book basics of the Great Depression; one can summarize them almost reflexively from eighth grade: frothy bubbles of overinvestment and credit excesses tanked overnight. Aghast, investors scrambled to sell off their stock as prices of shares plummeted; joblessness soared as the American economy drowned in the backwater of bad bank loans and bogus securities, all resulting in mass poverty and lengthening breadlines. We might even picture the physical devastation. In the East— bankers, falling like wing-clipped birds, threw themselves from Wall Street building windows. In the West—parched farmers‘ families were sent reeling by the Dust Bowl.

Harrowing stories, yes, but real enough to the individuals who experienced these tragic circumstances and told powerfully enough as personal experience narratives that they were repeated again and again around the dinner table for decades, to this day even8, by individuals like Ann Banks‘ grandmother Blanche.9 In short—a depth of national economic crisis Americans had never experienced before or since.10 Subsequent pages of that same standard history text talk of the nation-saving policies and programs of the

Roosevelt administration: the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), the Civilian

8 ―Virginia Hill Fairbrother, interviewed by her daughter Laurel Kaae, Bismark, North Dakota, July 14, 2005,‖ in Listening is an Act of Love, ed. Dave Isay (New York: Penguin, 2007), 165. 9Ann Banks, ―The Power of Storytelling,‖ Ann Banks’ Blog, Tuesday, March 17, 2009.http://anbanks.blogspot.com/ (accessed March 30, 2009). Ann writes, ―If my grandmother Blanche were around to read the headlines today, I know just what story she would tell…‖ Banks proceeds to tell her version of her grandmother‘s personal experience narrative of the depression. 10 David Pendery, ―Three Top Economists Agree 2009 Worst Financial Crisis Since Great Depression; Risks Increase if Right Steps are Not Taken,‖ Reuters, February 27, 2009, as quoted in Business Wire, 2009. http://www.reuters.com/article/idus193520.

Conservation Corps (CCC), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and numerous other ―alphabet soup‖ agencies—all of which would eventually be lumped together under the banner of New Deal legislation. 11

Behind the ruins of acronymic New Deal work projects rest the stories of countless Americans—men and women whose lives, memories, and histories entwined at this specific moment in time not simply because they shared hardship through economic crisis, but also because they shared employment or outreach, and in some cases both, from these agencies. Concentrating on the history of the Federal Writers‘ Project, one is first likely to encounter personalities like John Lomax, Sterling Brown, B.A. Botkin,

Katherine Kellock, and Henry Alsberg, all of whom served as directors within the project at some point.12 Even the public lives of these WPA project heads and editors seem little known and of relatively little consequence to today‘s general public. Their stories are remembered mostly by enthusiastic amateur historians and seasoned academics, and read like an ancestral tree from an Ivy League alumni newsletter—Harvard, Harvard,

Columbia, Harvard.13

Be that as it may, these men and women not only stood as power-house intellectuals and scholars in their time, they also shared the important and revolutionary belief (at the time) that America did have a distinct folk culture separate from that of the

Old World, a culture removed from chasing down Childs‘ ballads or cataloging Jack

11 Jim Couch, ―Works Progress Administration,‖ EH.Net Encyclopedia, http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/couch.works.progress.administration. 12 Jerold Hirsch, Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 4. 13 Christine Bold, The WPA Guides: Mapping America, (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1999), 20. ―The Federal Writers‘ Project was centrally managed by a small group of East Coast intellectuals who attempted to stamp their version of cultural nationalism on a divers and geographically dispersed body of workers.‖

Tales. Jerold Hirsch dubed this cadre of Arts‘ Project Administrators as ―romantic nationalists‖ and ―cultural pluralists‖ who each ―gave an affirmative answer to the question of whether the United States had distinct, indigenous folklore and art traditions that had grown out of the American experience.‖14 Hirsch also notes that Lomax and

Botkin especially believed that ―[American Folklore] was the creative response of diverse

American groups to their New World experience.‖15

Collecting folklore was not simply a government-mandated relief effort or an incidental pastime for the likes of Lomax, Alsberg, Brown, and Botkin; it was a critical step in detailing the depth and breadth of America‘s vital cultural dynamism. They believed that this living cultural force was embodied in ―the people‖ themselves,

American citizens who had, theretofore, been marginalized, underrepresented, and passed over time and again in the Nation‘s historical, political, and social chronicles. It was this belief that spurred the Washington wing of the FWP to seek out the folk, to celebrate regional idiosyncrasies in food, dialect, story, and song, to work overtime to gather these precious songs, tales, sagas, and life stories from the folk, with the hope that their work might serve ―to introduce America to Americans‖.16 This group of highly motivated scholar-stewards mobilized tens-of-thousands of relief workers—employees who were themselves on the Federal relief rolls—to find and collect the offerings of these peripheral peoples on a massive scale never before undertaken in the United States.

These same intelligentsia then lobbied tirelessly to see that these collections were preserved in archival safe-houses like the Library of Congress; creating an American

14 Hirsch, Portrait of America, 29. 15 Hirsch, Portrait of America, 29. 16 Ibid., 84.

precedence for collections of American folklore, American folklife, and American folk song in an institutional setting.17

However, FWP officials had much more in mind than safely depositing their findings in tomblike archives. Their more expansive task involved utilizing FWP publications to craft a vision of America from the perspective of the status quo rather than the elite. Perhaps even more instructive to an examination of the social climate of the FWP would be to delve beyond the actions of WPA officials and project heads, and instead bring the lives of individual FWP workers into sharp relief. For some employees, working for the WPA‘s units like the Federal Art Project, Federal Music Project, or

Federal Writers‘ Project was a stepping-stone on the road to fame and fortune, or at least a small stake in future name recognition. Others, like Zora Nealle Hurston, had already begun careers as writers and folklorists. Her association with the WPA exemplifies the more liberal social and political leanings of its hierarchy. WPA employee rolls also boast the likes of novelist and expatriate Richard Wright, novelist and intellectual Ralph

Ellison, poet May Swenson, radio personality Studs Terkel, and the list goes on, all of whom actively collected narratives for the Writers‘ Project.

These writers—whether anthropologists, sociologists, teachers, poets, novelists, or journalists by trade—took this moment of unprecedented Government arts funding to advance a vision of America that was populist as well as patriotic, and functionalist as well as folk-based.18 The group of artists employed by the Federal Writers‘ Project,

Federal Music Project, and the Resettlement Administration found within their job

17 Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 134-135. 18 Filene, Romancing the Folk, 137.

descriptions an opportunity to sing, paint, photograph, write, and record America both as they saw it and as they hoped it to become.

The Federal Writers were responsible for recording somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,900 interviews in 24 states across the nation. The thousands of interviews collected by the Folklore Project of the FWP were originally slated to be cast as part of the larger FWP undertaking—a series of guidebooks for every state in the U.S.

While the guides offered insight and interpretation of regional life and even blurbs about folk cultural, the series became packaged more as glorified visitor information brochures pocked with ―points of interest‖ and marketed to purveyors of the burgeoning tourism industry than they ever served to highlight marginalized or underrepresented groups. 19

Therefore, almost none of these narratives—folk tales, tall tales, legends, and personal narratives—ever made it into the American Guide Series. What of the lore the individual

Federal Writers‘ uncovered—the legends they scared up, the songs they mustered from railroad workers and Appalachian backwoodspersons, the thousands of personal narratives they recorded? Much to my delight, and the joy of researchers across the academic spectrum with WPA interest, the Manuscripts Division of the Library of

Congress has digitized all of the FWP Life Histories they possess as recently as 1999.

Yet the most critical and compelling facet of examining personal experience narratives collected by the FWP is found in the stories and experiences recorded in the narratives themselves—ordinary American lives, which garnered little or no name recognition during the lifetime of the interviewee and who, for the most part, remain

19 Bold, The WPA Guides, 25. At first it might seem antithetical to imagine that an era of depression would help spawn an age of travel and tourism, but one unforeseen consequence of these massive works projects was the vast system of highways, freeways, and state roads which were busily opening the U.S. to more automobile traffic and travel than ever before.

relatively anonymous to this day. Names like Captain Antonio, Nelson Walton, Ellen

O‘Connor, and more, fill the pages of Ann Banks‘ First Person America, the first-ever textual rendering of these FWP interviews. But their lives were not necessarily as simple, ordinary, or ―common‖ as one might imagine. Indeed, in reading the transcripts of these interviews—whether from Banks‘ text, the American Memory website, or the original typewritten pages themselves in the Folklife Reading Room—one is bound to conclude that the lives of those who were somehow destined to become part of one of the most sweeping democratic oral history initiatives in the United States, while not famed or fortuned, were truly exceptional.

Now to say that the stories these people left continue to shape perceptions of

America and what contemporary Americans might believe it means to be ―an American‖ would be a stretch at best. While many may know about WPA activities in the ‗30‘s, and even more specifically about the functions of the FWP, these interviews have only recently had a wider audience than the inside of archival storage boxes. But one importance of these interviews from the 1930‘s forward is precisely the fact that they do not represent a slice of well-documented American elite biographies or a sampling from the tell-all of a Depression-era American tycoon. Power in these interviews comes through the preservation of average, ordinary Americans pausing for a moment to share experiences from their personal day-to-day: work, play, home, and history, whether it was balancing on the razor‘s edge of mortality seeing many of his co-workers maimed, disabled, often killed as Nelson Walton described to Sam Ross in his first-hand account of work-life in a Chicago steel mill, or detailing living and working conditions in the

Chicago stockyards right on the cusp of unionization of the industry by the CIO as

Victoria Kramer, or Irving Fajans who spoke to May Swensen about life as a department store employee.

It is also true that Banks‘ selections of personal experience narratives were most likely chosen for their scintillating and perhaps more printable nature. One stunning example is an interview recorded by Nelson Algren with Ellen O‘Connor, a prostitute on

Chicago‘s South Side. O‘Connor spoke openly with Algren about everything from the social stigma of prostitution, to the hazards and even bodily harm she faced in her line of work. Ellen knew that many people viewed her occupation with disdain and even horror, and, consequently, her narrative contains a bit of bite toward those who may have found themselves in more socially acceptable professional circumstances. Yet her bite turns toward resignation as she describes the predicament of an entire class of poor, uneducated, female women across Chicago, and she concludes, ―The smartest just take it lying down. You last longer that way.‖ 20

Everyone Has a Story: StoryCorps

―Today we shall begin celebrating the lives of the uncelebrated! We‘re in Grand Central Station. We know there was an architect, but who hung the iron? Who were the brick masons? Who swept the floors? These are the noncelebrated people of our country. In this booth the noncelebrated will speak of their lives. It might be a grandmother speaking to a grandchild. It might be a kid talking to his uncle. It might be a neighbor talking to a neighbor. And suddenly they will realize that they are the ones who have built this country!‖ -Studs Terkel, StoryCorps launch, Grand Central Terminal, New York City, October 23, 2003 One of the first, most striking facts about the archive of StoryCorps interviews at the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress is its sheer size. To date

StoryCorps has recorded more than 50,000 interviews with people across the United

States. From Nome, Alaska, to Portland, Maine; Sarasota, Florida to Medford, Oregon;

19 ―Ellen O‘Connor, interviewed by Nelson Algren, Chicago, 1939,‖ in First Person America, ed. Ann Banks (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 177.

Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Wichita, Kansas—20,000 of these interviews have been archived in the Library of Congress with more arriving every week.21 It doesn‘t take a folklorist to note that this is a phenomenal number of narratives! No other oral history project to date can boast numbers like these, and many of the interviews are also archived at their place of origin in locations nation-wide where historical societies and museums have sponsored StoryCorps‘ traveling MobileBooth or semi-permanent StoryBooths.

StoryCorps is based on the premise that everyone has a story to tell. Therefore,

StoryCorps‘ recording structure and schedule are meant to aid in collecting as many interviews as possible from as many locations around the nation as possible. The first

StoryBooth, a small sound booth equipped with professional grade recording equipment, was opened in Grand Central Terminal in October of 2003. The first mobile StoryBooth, an airstream trailer, also fully outfitted with the highest quality sound equipment, left

Washington, D.C. in May of 2005. Permanent booths are currently stationed in New

York City, NY; Atlanta, GA; and San Francisco, CA. Mobile booths are set to visit

Yuma, AZ; Miami, FL; New Orleans, LA; Reno, NV; and Dayton, OH (among other locations) in 2010, which gives some idea of the expansive nature of this project. And if you can‘t come to a StoryCorps booth, StoryCorps may come to you through either a door-to-door visit from a StoryCorps facilitator, or a StoryKit which is a package of professional recording equipment sent to your home outfitted for two to three StoryCorps interviews.

21 Marcia Segal, (Library of Congress librarian) personal interview, American Folklife Center, February 19, 2009.

StoryCorps interviews are generally designed to be between close friends or relatives who visit a StoryCorps site and record a forty-minute interview together.

Participants are encouraged to create a question list before the interview session and think about what experiences they might want to share in advance. StoryCorps also reaches out nationally through broadcasting interviews on NPR‘s Morning Edition every Friday morning, the forum where I and many others were introduced to StoryCorps. In an effort to further the projects‘ national notoriety and share a more detailed selection of

StoryCorps interviews with the public, StoryCorps founder Dave Isay edited a collection of StoryCorps interviews for publication in 2007.

The afterward to the book Listening is an Act of Love, stands as Isay‘s personal experience narrative orienting readers toward an understanding of events that lead to the creation of StoryCorps. Isay details a few of his most beatae memoriae StoryCorps—the memory of a long-lost tape-recording of his grandparents and two great aunts recorded when he was a boy on holiday in Connecticut; a freelance recording project he did as a med-student to generate interest and financial support for Angel and Carmen Perez, a

New York couple struggling with HIV; and a recording project he engineered for two young boys, Lloyd Newman and LeAlan Jones, on Chicago‘s South Side to record a week in their lives. Isay does not hide the fact that part of his inspiration for the

StoryCorps project came straight from the WPA FWP collection at the American Folklife

Center. ―I learned of a series of interviews from the 1930s and ‗40s housed at the

American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Most of these were conducted by the Works Projects Administration‘s Federal Writers‘ Project by a small cadre of historians and folklorists. I wondered why nothing along the lines of these WPA

interviews had been undertaken since—top-quality recordings of the voices of everyday

Americans across the nation.‖22

Isay emphasizes time and again his hope to encourage Americans to learn to listen—that through listening we will come to know the nature of our nation. He explains, ―These interviews remind us that, contrary to what we might infer from the media, we are not just a nation of celebrity worship and consumption but, rather, a people defined by our character, courage, and heart. These stories are a reminder that if we spent a little less time listening to the racket of divisive radio and TV talk shows and a little more time listening to each other, we would be a better, more thoughtful, and more compassionate nation.‖ With this quietly ambitious, slightly avant-garde revision of the sweeping populist vision of the Federal Writers‘ Project recordings, StoryCorps has quickly catapulted into a modern day recording phenomenon.

Though the projects—StoryCorps and the Federal Writers‘ Project—are separated by a gulf of nearly 70 years, the personal experience narratives they evoke(d) are strikingly similar. From the interviews I read and researched, respondents from both ventures in narrative collecting really are and were encouraged to share experiences from daily life. Jerold Hirsch points to this with respect to the FWP in his text Portrait of

America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project, ―Everyone was considered a potential authority on some aspect of American life. The FWP‘s interest in talking with ordinary people about their local communities and their own lives testified to that. The

FWP encouraged ordinary Americans to participate in the rediscovery of America, to become partners with the Federal Writers in creating the guides: ‗Will you join with us in

22 Listening is an Act of Love, ed. Dave Isay, (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 253-254.

this effort to build up the distinctive atmosphere and background of your community?‘‖23

The same inclusive narrative gathering concept can be applied to StoryCorps. From

Isay‘s lips, ―By listening closely to one another, we can help illuminate the true character of this nation by reminding us all just how precious each day can be and how truly great it is to be alive.‖ This is not surprising as it is obvious that StoryCorps interviews follow the interview formula adopted by the FWP Folklore Unit which encouraged writers to allow the interviewees to speak freely, ―following the natural association of ideas and memories‖.24

The interviews are also very similar in their structure. Subsequently, the project recordings from both projects manifest very similar returns, which fill Labov and

Waletzky‘s structural rubric (discussed in the second section of this paper). Both projects are also concerned with perpetuity, preserving a legacy of American experiences as told by common Americans themselves. Both the Federal Writers‘ Project and StoryCorps were and are vitally concerned in seeing that a record of those interviews and conversations are kept for future generations to be able to connect more directly almost in-person with voices from the past, and, therefore, with the America of the particular present represented. ―By preserving a written record of personal stories, Federal Writers offered men and women the hope that their voices might be heard by an audience beyond their immediate circle of family and friends, and that their lives would touch people they had never met.‖25 StoryCorps aspires to that same end.

23 Henry Alsberg, press release, November 27, 1935, box 83 DIFWPA, in Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project, by Jerold Hirsch. 24 First Person America, ed. Ann Banks, (New York: Alfred Knopff, 1981), xv. 25 First Person America, ed. Banks, xxv.

One glaring misconception of StoryCorps is the idea that it is an outgrowth of difficult economic circumstances brought on by the current recession. It might also appear, from a present economic perspective, that StoryCorps is a direct resurrection of the Federal Writers‘ Project life histories initiative. This assumption, however, would be a mistake. It is true that the financial challenges faced by modern Americans circa 2007- present are being called the worst since the Great Depression by even the most respected economists.26 Yet one distinguishing factor alerted me to the fact that StoryCorps was first conceived in a very different economic climate from the FWP life histories. The fact is that Federal Writers‘ Project interviewees almost never mentioned the depression as part of their life stories because the depression was commencing simultaneous to these interviews. These people had not yet fully realized or experienced the future they would meet on the other side of the Great Depression. In contrast the Great Depression has been the centerpiece of StoryCorps interviews, like Virginia Hill Fairbrother‘s PEN, because it is now a ―lived‖ and integral narrative in the lives of many older Americans specifically because it is a past experience rather than a present event unfolding.

Certainly many aspects of the StoryCorps project smack of the bygone FWP enterprise as already noted: the emphasis on 1) personal narrative, 2) the focus on common rather than acclaimed individuals, 3) the fact that both archives are housed at the

American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, 4) and both initiatives span economically tangled historical time frames, 5) as well as Dave Isay‘s open admission that the WPA‘s FWP interviews were one of the catalysts in the conception of

26 Pendery, ―Three Top Economists Agree 2009 Worst Financial Crisis Since Great Depression; Risks Increase if Right Steps are Not Taken,‖ Reuters, February 27, 2009, as quoted in Business Wire, 2009. http://www.reuters.com/article/idus193520.

StoryCorps. That said, it is important to recognize that the FWP was a temporary program to assuage joblessness, while StoryCorps is designed as a lasting endeavor.

Rather than being a government response to joblessness for those caught in the dregs of the Great Depression, StoryCorps is spurred by a current reaction to popular culture‘s seemingly insatiable desire for stories of the ―stars‖, the growing trend of media organizations from print to television to promulgate narratives about the lives of the politically powerful, the money-fisting mogul, the screen sirens, and the ―reality‖ TV show attention mongers. So while both oral history crusades tirelessly approached personal experiences narratives from a bottom-up historical bent with a belief that defining America lies in gathering stories from the lives of common individuals,

StoryCorps began more as an upshot from David Isay‘s personal experiences both in broadcasting, interviewing.

Continuing to contrast difference between the two projects, more emphasis was placed on collecting full and fleshed out life histories by the FWP than by StoryCorps.

Many FWP employees visited their informants on numerous occasions. By their reports they were able to establish very deep rapport with many of the people they interviewed.

For example, in her field report titled ―Tramp Poet‖, Federal Writer May Swenson described spending the morning with Harry Kemp in his Washington Square apartment in

New York City as he talked and made tea, and her experience is certainly not singular. 27

StoryCorps interviews are set at forty minutes long. But what they may lack in length, they make up for in visceral exchange. This is due, in part, to the way that

27 May Swenson, ―Tramp Poet,‖ in ―American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers‘ Project, 1936-1940,‖ American Memory, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahom, (accessed March 18, 2009).

StoryCorps has cast its sound booths as an opportunity for a ―transformative‖ or

―transcendent‖ experience. StoryCorps interviewers are encouraged to ask probing questions like ―What are you most proud of?‖; ―What was the happiest moment of your life?‖; ―What is the saddest thing you have experienced?‖; or ―How would you like to be remembered?‖ These questions lead to perhaps more soul searching and poignant responses than those drawn out by the Federal Writers—responses that may also appear more popularly palatable in terms of the emotional depth and drama they elicit. This would also explain the celebrated nature of StoryCorps on NPR in an era of heart-string reporting techniques where even broadcast journalism has taken slice-of-life stories as its main exchange.28

Juxtaposing Federal Writers‘ Project personal histories alongside StoryCorps interviews one may note that StoryCorps engages interviewees in more ―emotional questions‖29 as opposed to questions geared more toward prosaic responses about an interviewee‘s day at the shipyard or weeks spent at the meat packing plant. FWP employees had the additional initial hurtle of needing to build a relationship of trust with their subject before an informant might feel comfortable enough to offer more direct personal experiences. The FWP narratives are much more likely to surround subjects of physical and material circumstance including living situation and occupation.

Consequently, StoryCorps interviewees may be more inclined to offer personal experience narratives, which implicitly express personal beliefs or values than the more

28 Frank Russell, ―Folklore in a Hurry: The Community Experience Narrative in Newspaper Coverage of the Loma Prieta Earthquake,‖ Journal of American Folklore 116(460): 160. 29 Listening is an Act of Love, ed. Isay, 280. ―Ask emotional questions such as ―How did this make you feel?‖

event-driven conversations in FWP interviews. In contrast to the FWP‘s encouragement to conduct lengthy interviews, which sometimes stretched over days and even weeks.

Part of this more emotionally based interview repertoire also owes to the fact that participants in StoryCorps are encouraged and most commonly interviewed by family members, loved ones, and close friends, which solves the initial getting-to-know-you graces of interview exchange. As might be expected, the interview takes on new levels of familiarity and comfortability simply because the interviewee is sitting across from an interviewer they already know and in most cases trust. For purposes of narrative structural analysis, it would appear that the close relationship shared by interviewer and informant in StoryCorps interviews may serve to strengthen the candid conversational nature of the interview, hence, coming even closer to eliciting more viable examples of conversational storytelling versus predatory collections solicited by government employees.

Chapter 3: Narrative Analysis

―Embedded in the lives of the ordinary, the marginalized, and the muted, personal narrative responds to the disintegration of master narratives as people make sense of experience, claim identities, and ‗get a life‘ by telling and writing their stories.‖ Kristin Langellier, “Personal Narratives: Perspectives on Theory and Research.” In Text and Performance Quarterly

The structural analysis this paper offers follows in the footsteps of Russell Frank as he applied the paradigm established for personal experience narratives by William

Labov and Joshua Waletzky in their seminal sociolinguistic work, ―Narrative Analysis:

Oral Versions of Personal Experience.‖ Whereas Frank applies Labov and Waletzky‘s analysis to uphold third person (newspaper journalists‘) usage of personal experience narratives to create a community meta-narrative, here I would like to offer a folklorist‘s rendering of PENs to show that these narratives maintain structural integrity over time and space which posits them more firmly within the realm of a traditional narrative genre.

This analysis becomes increasingly salient in modern America as older genres of narrative such as legend, saga, folktale, and even fairytale become more removed from the ―communicative repertoire‖ of many communities.30

The critical nature of this analysis comes from recognizing the sometime overlooked importance of personal experience narratives in modern approaches to folklore. Though this paper does not seek to argue that the personal experience narrative is in any way a new or modern genre of narrative—as Sandra K. Dolby points out it has been part of oral tradition for a long time—this genre, in the realms of folklore scholarship, has experienced a relatively short lifespan.31 It is my aim to show that

30 Frank, ―Folklore in a Hurry: The Community Experience Narrative in Newspaper Coverage of the Loma Prieta Earthquake,‖ 161. 31 Sandra K.D. Stahl, ―Personal Experience Stories,‖ in Handbook of American Folklore, ed. Richard M. Dorson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 269. See also Dolby‘s text Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative (reprint 2007).

personal experience narratives are identifiably structurally codified and therefore, in a sense, able to be collected, analyzed, and cataloged as a traditional form of folk speech.

Despite the fact that the content of the stories is as diverse as the tellers themselves and the content information as idiosyncratic as the contexts from which they were taken,

PENs do manifest a structure which can be extracted. Labov and Waletzky proved that

―by examining the actual narratives of large numbers of unsophisticated speakers, it will be possible to relate the formal properties of narrative to their functions.‖32 My hope is to confirm this premise as well as support Livia Polanyi‘s position that ―a story told in a conversation reveals itself to be as formally constructed as any carefully worked out acknowledged piece of literary verbal art.‖33 I suggest that because personal experience narratives do contain and maintain formal structure over time, the practice of telling personal experience narratives and the continuance of such has inculcated these narratives into a traditional form of narrative expression.

While folklorists have certainly not ignored the importance of the personal experience narrative, the field has engaged in a rather reticent theoretical debate about the nature and classification of this type of narrative for decades. Detailing problems of defining, classifying, and analyzing the personal experience narrative within a narrative schema may be traced back to similar studies regarding definitional deficiencies in narrative genres like the memorate (considered by some scholars like Sandra K. Dolby to be a type of PEN). Juha Pentikainen, in his paper ―Belief, Memorate, Legend‖, leads a protracted discussion specifically focused on the memorate-legend terminological boundary. Though he is not directly concerned with personal experience narratives as

32 Labov and Waletzky, ―Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience,‖ 14. 33 Polanyi, Telling the American Story, 12.

defined by this paper, his discussion highlights some of the conflicting discussion that some narrative terminology has created in the scholarly field (obviously his study points to memorate as an ambiguously employed term). The same appraisal Pentikainen applies to memorates may also be applied to the personal experience narrative. His critique also points out that the term ―personal experience‖ may prove a complicated genre to define in that personal experiences are a part of many folk narrative genres.34

Linda Degh and Andrew Vazsonyi further question the intersection between the term memorate and personal experience in their work ―The Memorate and the Proto- memorate‖. Degh and Vazsonyi argue that the memorate cannot stand alone as a narrative genre, and in doing so they question the very nature of personal experience narratives. They ask if personal experiences are able to be told as ―personal experiences‖ beyond the original teller. They characterize the problem this way:

―Personal experience‖ is an important ingredient of the memorate. This can be

interpreted only one way: the story in question could be transmitted to another

only by the person who had the experience. If the second person told the story to

a third, he would not tell it as his own experience but as that of the first person,

who had the original experience and first reported it. The classical definition,

therefore, would mean in its strict interpretation that a memorate can be known

only by that single person and respectively by as many people as heard it from

34 Juha PentiKainen, ―Belief, Memorate, Legend,‖ Folklore Forum 6 (1973): 218.

him. This presupposes either that the second person does not retell the memorate

or that, if he does retell it, the narrative can no longer be called a memorate.‖35

By applying this same argument to personal experience narratives, one might conclude that the classical definition of personal experience narratives would be impaired by the same retelling constraints Degh and Vazsonyi delineate, as only the teller could offer the story to the receiver after which, were the receiver to retell the story, it could no longer be told as a ―personal‖ experience. However, modern modes of communication and recording may now allow the transmission of such stories to larger audiences than ever before possible. Today Greg Korban can tell his personal experience of naming a ball field in Charlottesville, Virginia, after his son who passed away there, and that story can literally be heard by millions. While the simple act of reaching millions of listeners does not induct personal experience narratives into the realm of traditional folk speech, and a retelling by me to my friend of Greg Korban‘s story may not fall under the term personal experience narrative either, the fact is the structure of Greg Korban‘s story defines it as a personal experience narrative rather than either the content or the context in which it is told as will be discussed further below.

There appears to be a similarly uncertain treatment of PENs in terms of previously accepted storytelling definitions, as well. Traditionalists, on the one side, maintain that personal narratives fall outside the realm of folklore because the content of these stories does not fall into a narrow traditional window, lacking traditional staples such as traditional plots or motifs. Dolby points out, ―From a conservative perspective on

35 Linda Degh and Andrew Vasonyi, ―The Memorate and the Proto-Memorate,‖ Journal of American Folklore 87 (1974): 226.

―What is folklore?‖ the stories themselves would not be folklore so long as their plots were idiosyncratic. A narrative based on a teller‘s personal experience is not a narrative taken from oral tradition and retold by the storyteller, nor is it a folklore item whose plot or major motif can be corroborated by a folklorist, no matter how alert and patient.‖36

Conservatives would then argue that personal experience narratives are generally filled with anomalous, individual content, and that the context both of where such are told and the location where the stories themselves take place in the ―storyworld‖ manifest variety and unpredictability antithetical to most other folk narrative genres.

Other scholars explain that the muddled treatment of personal experience narratives evolved in part because this type of narrative is positioned on the margins of so many traditional forms of narrative. Kristin Langellier believes that PENs function at the boundaries of established forms of discourse: ―between literary and social discourse, between written and oral models of communication, between public and private spheres of interaction, between ritual performance and incidental conversation, between fact and fiction.‖37 Langellier believes that the ubiquity and democracy of personal experience narratives creates this marginal threshold between the doorstep of academia and the on- rush of everyday existence.

One example of scholarly conversation that directly underscores the ambiguous academic treatment of PENs surrounds the Federal Writer‘s Project collection of life histories and the reception, or lack thereof, which greeted Benjamin Botkin‘s Treasury of

American Folklore. Richard Dorson, lauded director of the Folklore Institute at Indiana

36 Sandra K. Dolby, Literary Foloristics and the Personal Narrative, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 16. 37 Kristin M. Langellier, ―Personal Narratives: Perspectives On Theory and Research,‖ Text and Performance Quarterly 9 (1989): 244.

University, gave Botkin‘s Treasury a scathing rebuke, in part because of Paul Bunyan, a topic which this paper does not seek to broach, and in part because it contained a large number of PENs gathered by the FWP. Dorson claimed that the personal experience narrative was one type narrative which constituted ―fakelore‖—―a synthetic product claiming to be authentic oral tradition but actually tailored for mass edification‖38.

Dorson‘s irascible response to Botkin‘s methods of defining, collecting, editing, and publishing folklore is far from forgotten within the discipline. His denunciation had a deleterious effect on PENs, perhaps causing the sometime tepid scholarly treatment of personal experience narratives by folklorists ever since.

Another set of scholars believe that personal experience narratives constitute cold hard folklore. Sandra K. Dolby, for one, explains that a personal experience narrative is, by definition, a creation of its teller and therefore not traditional. However, she persists that personal experience narratives can capture material at the root of how individuals interpret traditional belief systems and attitudes. Therefore, the personal experience narrative holds its own as a folklore genre that is not traditional in content, but is traditional in style, structure, and function as will be shown.39 Now here‘s where the argument gets interesting. One of the examples that Dolby uses to display a personal experience narrative in her text is a narrative she collected directly from Richard M.

Dorson. Yes, none other than the FWP Botkin-discreditor offers his very own personal experience narrative as support for Dolby‘s hypothesis. The significance of Dorson‘s contribution to Dolby‘s work cannot be overlooked as it in some fashion evidences his

38 Richard Dorson, Folklore and Fakelore: Essays toward a Discipline of Folk Studies, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). 39 Stahl, ―Personal Experience Stories,‖ 270.

shifting views toward the personal experience narrative as a viable folk narrative genre.

The important note here is that the personal experience narrative has become recognized as a genre in its own right where folklore scholarship is concerned, meaning that both the

WPA life histories and the StoryCorps interviews may be deemed vital research resources.

Illustrative Analysis

In Dolby‘s construction of personal experience narrative genres she places

Dorson‘s PEN under the heading of ―The Self-Oriented Narrative‖. This is due in large measure to scholarly discussion of the intersection of personal experience narratives and other folk narrative genres such as memorates (as discussed above). Dolby explains that this particular narrative was not new to herself or anyone in the conversational group present, which included her husband Mark and Dorson‘s wife on this particular occasion.

Dolby foregrounds Dorson‘s narrative with an explanation of the introductory material

Dorson usually used to set the scene for his story: (1) the fact that he was failing ―Pop‖

Whitman‘s American History class, (2) that he worked to boost his grade to a B+, and (3) that through this experience Dorson had learned ―how to study‖40. The portions of

Dorson‘s narrative which Dolby uses fall neatly into the rubric of this analysis as the story contains all five major functions—orientation, complication, evaluation, resolution, and coda. Richard Dorson‘s experience serves as a brilliant illustrative analysis of these traditional formal properties:

[P1]Then one day Pop announced a prize competition annually given by the Daughters of the Society of Cincinnatus to the best student essay on the cause of the American Revolution.

40 Stahl, ―Personal Experience Stories,‖ 272.

So—I was thinking, I had been at Exeter four years and a summer session and I‘d never won any academic honor—and this is my one chance. So I stayed in my room that weekend. I got all of the books on the American Revolution out of the library. I put them all around me— took something out of this, something out of that—combined it into an essay. I cut the Saturday night movie. This was the top occasion at Exeter. You waited all week long for this Saturday night movie to begin—a Laurel and Hardy film. And I didn‘t go to that. I cut Sunday morning church; I had somebody sign in for me—that was compulsory. And I wrote this thirty-five page paper on the causes of the American Revolution, and I handed it in to Pop.

[P2] And now the scene shifts to the very last ritual occasion of my Exeter career—Prize Night, in the assembly hall where we had our chapel services. And seven hundred Exeter boys are seated there. They now have girls, but at that time—it was completely, uh, monastic institution. So I‘m sitting at the back of the hall, as a senior. And Doc Perry, our principal— a very benign, benevolent figure—is up front announcing the prizes and all the faculty are seated behind him. And he‘s reading off the list of winners. And one prize after another goes to John Aloysius O‘Keefe. He won the Bandler Latin Prize, the Healed Debating Prize, the Stilton Mathematics Prize—it is incredible how many prizes are going to this one individual. And he‘s mounting up this big pile of books and medals and certificates. But I wasn‘t paying much attention because I wasn‘t involved in any of these competitions—but just the one that I was waiting to hear about. And finally we reached that point. And Doc Perry says, ―And now it is my pleasure to announce the winner of the prize given annually by the Daughters of the Society of Cincinnatus for the best essay on the cause of the American Revolution. The winner is—John Aloysius O‘Keefe! Honorable mention: Richard M. Dorson.‖ So I sat there—crushed, despondent. I later learned that John Aloysius O‘Keefe had written a sixty- three-page paper on the causes of the American Revolution.

[P3] So I‘m feeling very, very blue, grim. Four years and a summer session at Exeter and nothing to show in the way of any academic achievement. In fact, I was very lucky just to graduate because I had to get a tutor to get a D in physics. So, I‘m sitting there with my head in my hands not paying any attention to what‘s going on because that‘s the only prize I had a chance for—that I entered the competition for. And then—suddenly I heard my name called. And, and, I looked up, and there‘s Doc Perry waiting for me to come up, and I had to walk the whole length of the assembly up to the front. Seven hundred boys all applauding, and Doctor Perry smiling, and he has a big handful of books there—six books from the Biographies of the Great Americans, with my name inscribed in Latin: Ricardo Mercienis Dorsonibu. And so I‘m loaded down with these books, and Doc Perry announces, ―I am pleased to award to you the prize annually given to the Exeter student who has made the greatest improvement in American History.‖ [Laughter.] ―So I didn‘t quite know how to respond to that, but anyway—I had won a prize, the kind of prize you can‘t really enter into the competition for.‖And so, I am now able to say that I came away with one academic distinction [laughter]—a rather curious kind of distinction.

In this example, the opening paragraph (P1) of Dorson‘s narrative could almost be analyzed as a narrative in and of itself, a stand-alone story cycle. The first sentence

serves as an adequate orientation clause in that it immediately centers the listener in the storyworld as to the person(s)—in this case Richard Dorson and Professor Whitman, his history teacher, ―one day Pop announced,‖ ―I was thinking‖; place—Phillips Exeter

School for Boys; time—nearing graduation, ―I had been at Exeter four years‖; behavioral situation—Dorson intends to win the prize for the Daughters of the Society of

Cincinnatus essay contest, ―I‘d never won any academic honor—and this is my one chance‖ (emphasis added). At this point in the story, the narrator has only shared two sentences and the listener (reader) is already much advanced in an understanding of the situation into which both the teller and receiver are entering through the orienting clauses noted above.

Dorson continues, almost immediately to complicate the story in the second paragraph. Transitioning to ―Prize Night‖ he introduces John Aloysius O‘Keefe and begins to detail Keefe‘s mounting stack of academic honors. The scene culminates in this revelation: ―And now it is my pleasure to announce the winner of the prize given annually by the Daughters of the Society of Cincinnatus for the best essay on the cause of the American Revolution. The winner is—John Aloysius O‘Keefe! Honorable mention:

Richard M. Dorson.‖ Keefe has won the prize Richard Dorson so painstakingly sought to garner.

The narrative‘s complication generally leads directly into what is known as an evaluation. From Labov and Waletzsky we learn that the importance of the complicating action or scene actually hinges, not in the complication itself, but in the evaluative clause as the narrator must offer if this narration is to be considered a full and fleshed out PEN.

Dorson actually offers several evaluative clauses within his experience. First, he

evaluates the feelings he experiences as a direct cause of being named Honorable

Mention in the essay contest, ―So I sat there crushed—despondent… So I‘m feeling very, very blue, grim. Four years and a summer session at Exeter and nothing to show in the way of any academic achievement.‖ However, these evaluative statements might also be seen as additional complications to the story, or what I like to refer to as cycles of complication. Therefore, the depression Dorson experienced by being chosen second place could be seen as an evaluation or it could be characterized as another layer of complication in the PEN. In my estimation, the real evaluation comes more toward the end of Dorson‘s tale as he relays the fact that he is then chosen as ―Most Improved‖

American History student, and he says, ―So I didn‘t quite know how to respond to that, but anyway—I had won a prize, the kind of prize you can‘t really enter into the competition for.‖

Interestingly, this final evaluation is actually placed after the resolution of the story. Dorson explains, ―Doc Perry announces, ‗I am pleased to award to you the prize annually given to the Exeter student who has made the greatest improvement in

American History.‘‖ It turns out that Dorson has won an award. Not the prize he had looked, hoped, and worked for, but a prize he achieved in pursuing his goal to win the

Daughter‘s of the Society of the Cincinnatus essay contest. And finally, Dorson ends his

PEN by bringing both the teller (Dorson) and the audience (Dolby, her husband, and

Dorson‘s wife) out of the storyworld with a comment in present tense. ―And so, I am now able to say that I came away with one academic distinction [laughter]—a rather curious kind of distinction.‖ Through Dorson‘s PEN it is easy to distinguish the formal

structural properties of personal experience narratives (See Table 1). I apply this same approach to the following selected PENs.

Table 1. Richard Dorson – Personal Experience Narrative

Narrative Function Clause Placement

Orientation ―Then one day Pop announced a prize competition annually given by the Daughters of the Society of the Cincinnatus to the best student essay on the cause of the American Revolution.‖ P1

Complication ―And now it is my pleasure to announce the winner of the prize given annually by the Daughters of the Society of Cincinnatus for the best essay on the cause of the American Revolution. The winner is—John Aloysius O‘Keefe! Honorable mention: Richard M. Dorson.‖ P2

Evaluation ―So I didn‘t quite know how to respond to that, but anyway—I had won a prize, the kind of prize you can‘t really enter into the competition for.‖ P3

Resolution ―Doc Perry announces, ‗I am pleased to award to you the prize annually given to the Exeter student who has made the greatest improvement in American History.‘‖ P3

Coda ―And so, I am now able to say that I came away with one academic distinction —a rather curious kind of distinction.‖ P3

Selected Personal Experience Narrative Analysis

Personal experience narrativists suggest that while personal narratives may not ever find their way into the indexed annals of legends, ballads, or tale-types, they must be recognized and studied in light of their importance in current conversational and storytelling narrative genres. Indeed, not only in terms of their narratological impact on the field of folklore, but also the ramifications they possess for capturing some of the most painful and passionate societal events of our existence.41 Russell Frank urges:

41 Frank, ―Folklore in a Hurry: The Community Experience Narrative in Newspaper Coverage of the Loma Prieta Earthquake,‖ 173.

The message here for folklorists is not to wrest the personal experience

narrative from the amateurs so that it will be treated with the respect it

deserves, but simply to have the courage of their convictions and do more

projects [like Bendix‘s impromptu earthquake storytelling session] in the

aftermath of disaster. The journalists rush in and skim off the first

narratives they can find, just as they did in the days and weeks following

the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11,

2001. It remains for the folklorists to follow close behind making the in-

depth record of the terrible and heroic moments of our time.

So it is with the personal experience narratives NOT contained in this paper, or edited into a book, or aired on NPR. A veritable gold mine of personal experience narratives still rests untapped in both the FWP and StoryCorps archives. Frank even goes so far as to christen these narratives ―the dominant form of American folklore‖.42

Together with this definition of personal experience narratives and the groundbreaking study of Labov and Waletzky, I have set about analyzing the structural components of the ten personal experience narratives as selected from the FWP and StoryCorps collections.

This research has yielded the direct correlation between the personal experience narratives within these two collections by identifying the same five structural components in each of the ten narratives and showing that these structures are maintained over time by comparing narratives told seven decades apart.

42 Frank, ―Folklore in a Hurry: The Community Experience Narrative in Newspaper Coverage of the Loma Prieta Earthquake,‖ 160.

I begin with Ellen O‘Connor‘s personal experience and continue by examining two other personal experience narratives from the FWP. In all I have chosen to focus on six narratives, three from each project. Furthermore, I paired the narratives in terms of content, juxtaposing an FWP narrative with a StoryCorps narrative of similar content, simply to aid in highlighting the striking similarities in narrative structure across time that are clearly apparent (the content of the narratives themselves does not fall under scrutiny until Chapter 3 of this paper). For example, the first narrative pair is Ellen O‘Connor, the

Chicago prostitute, paired with Dr. Monica Mayer, a doctor on the New Town Indian

Reservation. I grouped this pair of stories under the heading ―Women Working‖. 43 The other pairs of stories fall under the self-explanatory headings ―Steel Workers‖, ―By the

Work of Your Hands‖, ―Tales of the Depression‖, and ―Immigrants‖. Together with their

StoryCorps counterparts, we will apply Labov and Waletzky‘s five narrative functions— orientation, complication, evaluation, resolution, and coda—to each narrative giving us the framework to determine if these narratives do indeed build a traditional bridge of narrative structure through time and space.

The only changes I have made to the original text are the addition of the sub- headings of brief biographical information, the name of the interviewer, place and date where the interview was conducted, and paragraph numbers for ease of reference between the individual narratives and subsequent analysis:

Orientation

Women Working

Ellen O‘Connor interviewed Nelson Algren in Chicago, 1939

43‖Ellen O‘Connor, interviewed by Nelson Algren,‖ in First Person America, 177.

[P1] ―I went into a house on Eighteenth and Indiana, that was in Prohibition years. Then over into the big one on Twenty-second and Wabash—that used to be Four Deuces, then over to Nineteenth and Dearborn. After that I got transferred to the Paris Hotel on South State, and then around the corner to the Best. I was in the Best when I got sick. I been on the bum ever since; I got no money to go to a real hospital, and I know what they do to you in the County. They give you the black bottle [a sedative].

[P2] All at once I owed everybody and I couldn‘t figure out why. They charge you four times over for everything. You got to pay for the towels, for the music, for the Lifebuoy, for the guys who stay overtime, for guys who lose money somewhere else and think they lost it in your outfit, for the high-school kids who come up with two dollars even and carfare and then forget and put a nickel in the slot machine. Then you got to give them carfare, you got to pay off the doc who finds out you‘re sick, a sawbuck just to let you off, a fin to the bondsman when the house is pinched—and still you aren‘t really sure you want to get out. Even when some duke tells you about some job in a big office, you don‘t try for it. You got no heart for it.

[P3] We all know what kinds of jobs girls like us get anyhow. Twelve hours a day for six dollars a week at Goldblatt‘s [a Chicago department store] maybe. I can make that in six minutes, sick as I am, and I don‘t feel I‘m making a fool of myself any more one why than another. I‘ll have a house of my own someday, managing one that is, keeping an eye on things, seeing that the girls stay sober and the drunks don‘t cause much trouble, being able to think faster than cops and doctors and such.

[P5]… It ain‘t women like me ends up on the street, no siree. It‘s the department store dames who put in twenty years and then get the gate that end up that way, not us girls who been outsmartin doctors and coppers since we was maybe fourteen, fifteen years old.

[P6]I don‘t mean it‘s no bed of roses. It‘s bad alright, but it ain‘t no worse, take it all in all, nor no better neither, than the next racket that girls without folks or schoolin can get into… The smartest just take it lying down. You last longer that way.

[P7] This Nineteenth and Dearborn territory has been my territory for years, even before I got on the bum. I know every window, every alley, every bust-out lamp, every car-line, every newsboy, every cigar store, every cop, every Chinaman. I even notice where somebody tossed out a cigarette against a wall and the next day the wind has blew the snips into the middle of the street. I‘ve walked this corner at four a.m. and four p.m., summer and winter, sick and well, blind drunk and stone sober, sometimes so hungry I‘d have to walk slow so as not to fold up the pavement and get pulled in, and once with a month‘s rent paid in advance and thirty dollars in a purse under my arm.

[P8] There‘s only one kind of man I ever met and that‘s the bad kind. You‘d think fellas would be the one to remember a girl, wouldn‘t you? I mean the fellas being the ones who‘s having all the fun, and her just seein one right after another all night long, it seems like he‘d remember what she looked like better than she‘d remember him. It ain‘t that way though, it‘s the other way around. You think I forget one single fella? Say, I could recognize them from six years back and the guy who was up here last night wouldn‘t know me from Hedy Lamarr right now, I bet. I‘ll tell you why that is; I figured it out. You can‘t forget one of them because you

have to get the best of him as soon as he come in the room and takes off his cap. And nobody don‘t forget anybody that they got the best of.

Dr. Monica Mayer, 45, interviewed by her cousin and patient, Spencer Wilkinson Jr., 39, New Town, North Dakota, July 29, 2005

[P1] My father was full-blood German, and my mother was full-blood Indian, and it was pretty tough in the sixties growing up half-breed, so to speak. My father didn‘t have any sons, so he raised us like little boys. And I must have been in about seventh grade, and I wasn‘t doing well in school. In fact, I was maybe getting Cs, and I‘m the oldest of three girls. So my dad packed us up in his pickup truck and took us out to his old homestead land, which is about eighteen miles north of New Town, in the middle of nowhere. Well, New Town‘s kind of in the middle of nowhere, but, I mean, this is really in the middle of nowhere. And he packed us some lunches and some water. He dropped us off out there at seven or eight in the morning and said he wanted all the rocks picked up and put in the northwest corner in one big pile and that he‘d come back that night to pick us up, and it had better be done.

[P2] So there we were, working hard all day, and then he comes back. And we‘re dirty, stinky, sweaty, sore muscles, crying. My dad pulls up, and he gets out of the pickup. And we must have been a sight to see. I looked at him and I said, since I was the oldest—my two younger sisters are hiding behind me—―Dad we don‘t think this is fair we have to work this hard.‖ And I remember him saying, ―Is that right? Well, do you think I like working hard like this every day?‖ ―No.‖ He said, ―You know your mother said you girls don‘t like school and you‘re not doing very well. So I talked to Momma, and we decided that you‘re going to come out here and work like this so your hind ends will get used to how your life‘s going to be when you get older.‖ So I said, ―Well, if we got good grades, do we have to come out here and work this hard?‖ And he said, ―No. That‘s the deal.‖

Table 2. Orientation

Narrative Orientation Clauses/Placement

Ellen O‘Connor (FWP) ―I went to a house on Eighteenth and Indiana…‖ 4; P1

Dr. Monica Mayer (SC) ―My father was full-blood German,‖ 10; P1

Nelson Walton (FWP) ―The last fatal accident we had was on the mold yard crane‖ 16; P2-4

Ken Kobus (SC) ―I‘d choose my dad‘s job. He was in charge of a furnace.‖ 11; P1, P2

Michael Donegal (FWP) ―I learned the stonecutting trade in Scotland when I was in my teens.‖ P1

Ronald Ruiz (SC) ―I love my passengers.‖ P1

Irving Fajans (FWP) ―The whistles were blown in every Grand store in New York at eleven-thirty a.m. on March 14th.‖ P1

Virginia Hill Fairbrother (SC) ―I was born in 1924, so I started school in 1930.‖ P1

Captain Antonio (FWP) ―Me and Garcia used to run in good loads—Scotch, rye, gin, rum‖ 12; P1

Blanca Alvarez (SC) ―We were walking and walking.‖ 12; P1

Monica Mayer, continued from page 36: [P3] Well, he didn‘t have to bust my head twice up against the brick wall. My two younger sisters and I were laughing about that, because they remember that particular day exactly the way I remembered it. One day of hard labor changed everything.

According to Labov and Waletzky, the orientation section of a narrative functions like a compass locating the reader in the storyworld44 with respect to four points: person, place, time, and behavioral situation. Labov‘s findings also indicate that this section is almost always situated at the beginning of the narrative for obvious reasons. Without exception the names of the individual storytellers are known because of the biographical information contained in the supporting texts. However many of the narrators give the names of others who were part of the story besides themselves. Monica Mayer begins by telling a short lineage of both her father and mother, ―My father was full-blood German, my mother was full-blood Indian‖ orienting the listener not only to their racial and cultural history, but hers, as well. It is clear from the narrative of Ken Kobus that the experience he is detailing is not only his own but his father‘s as well, perhaps even more

Kobus‘ experience of his father‘s experience as a steel worker than his own experience as a steel worker. He states in the first line of the first paragraph, ―Oh, I‘d choose my dad‘s job‖, immediately orienting the reader toward his father as a main character in the narrative.

Indeed six of the six narratives contain inferences to persons other than the teller.

With close examination orienting statements may actually be found throughout the entire story, though they do tend to be concentrated at the beginning, as the teller continues to offer additional references to place, time, and situational orientation as the story unfolds.

44 Polanyi, Telling the American Story, 19.

Such sequences of orientation, however, may not appear to be critical to main events in the story. Polyani describes these types of propositions as durative-descriptive in that they are not punctual events on the main time line but instead describe ―characters, settings, motivations, including habitual, iterative, and noninstantaneous actions‖45. They function to orient the story toward further scenes of complication, evaluation, and resolution, and it is clear that this type of proposition, which orients the listener to person, place, time, or behavior in the storyworld, may command considerable use as shown in the number of narrative clauses some stories contain before a complication sequence occurs (see Table 1).

The analysis shows that the orientation of a narrative is weighted heavily toward the beginning of a personal experience as nearly all of the stories exhibit orienting sections in paragraphs one and two. This follows an understanding that the teller must draw the listener into a ―world‖ of their telling. As Polanyi explains, ―in narrative discourse of all sorts, a time line is established, demarcated by discrete moments at which instantaneous occurrences take place in the world created through the telling.‖46 I would add that narrative markers supporting this storyworld time line and its characters are those of orientation. I also chose to include the number of orienting clauses in the narrative before a complication was entered into the narrative to further support Labov and Waletzky, and Polianyi‘s belief that personal experience narratives often contain a number of ―free‖ orienting clauses before any actual complication takes place.

Complication

Steel Workers

45 Polanyi, Telling the American Story, 12. 46 Ibid., 10.

Nelson Walton, interviewed by Sam Ross, Chicago, 1939

[P1] ―I don‘t know how true this story is. I have been hearing it for years. A guy fell or was pushed off one of the bridges into a ladle. He goes pouff [sic.] into nothing. Then the company buried the guy with the steel until the family got over the accident, or until they moved away. After that the company dug up the metal and used it in making steel.

[P2] The last fatal accident we had was on the mold yard crane runway. There were three cranes on the runway: two slag cranes and a mold crane. Some molds were needed in a hurry and the foreman sent the mold-crane operator down to get the craneman from one of the slag cranes to relieve him on the mold crane because he was faster. The guy thought he‘d ride on the center crane instead of walking. Before the crane stopped he jumped off. It was pretty dark in the place and as he jumped he was crushed to death between the crane and the columns that support the roof of the building. Next day the company issued orders that no craneman can get on or off moving cranes.

[P3] The ladles in the pits are big—175 tons. They are hooked up into the cranes by hookers in the pits. We had an old fellow, pretty well along in years and not as husky as he used to be. The hook got away from him and swung back from the ladle and hit him in the chest. That didn‘t kill him right away, but a few days later he died. The company doctors went over to examine him. They said the man had died from heart trouble.

[P4] For years steel has been made with soft ore, raw lime, scrap steel, and a small amount of scrap iron. That made up about forty percent of the total charge. The hot metal added made up about sixty percent of the charge. A week or so ago the bosses got a brainstorm and decided that ore was more expensive to use than ―cinder,‖ which was nothing but old slag they had thrown away and which they dragged out of the lake. Now this cinder is porous; it‘s fine when the weather is dry, but holds a lot of moisture in damp weather. The bosses overlooked that. They started a charge with cinder in dry weather and it worked fine. But yesterday was the second of two damp days and the cinder they charged yesterday absorbed a great deal of moisture. So when the metal was poured on top of the partial melt in the furnace it trickled down to the cinders. It created a tremendous force of steam, and two furnaces were blown up. What a noise!

Ken Kobus, interviewed by friend Ron Baraff, 42, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 20, 2006

Ron Baraff: If you could choose any job in the steel mill, what would it be?

[P1] Ken: Oh, I‘d choose my dad‘s job. He was a first helper, in charge of an open-hearth furnace. To face a furnace is just— It‘s hard to describe because when you open a door of the furnace, it‘s over 3,000 degrees, and your whole body‘s standing in front of a door opened to hell. It has effects on your body; it stretches your skin. And you watch cold steel, scrap metal, being put into there, and you just watch it become more and more red and red and red, and then it just sort of like disappears and falls apart. You see huge, huge boiling steel—it‘s not water, it‘s steel. And you see these bubbles and these balls flopping out and it‘s just like a volcano. You‘re looking in a volcano.

[P2] I know it stuck with my father for all his life. I mean, when he was dying, he couldn‘t talk. He had throat cancer, and so they took his voice box out—and he was in a lot of pain. I was in the hospice, and I was watching him in the bed once and the doctor came in. He saw that I was

looking at my dad, and my dad was lying on his back and he had his hands up in the air, and he was turning and manipulating. The doctor says, ―I wonder what the heck he‘s doing.‖ Because, you know, he did it all the time. He would by lying on his back, and he would be doing this stuff, and they had no clued as to what he was doing. I said, ―He‘s making steel.‖ I could see what he was doing. He was opening funace doors, and he was adjusting the gas on the furnace and the draft. I could see. The doctor was amazed. To the day he died that‘s what he lived: steelmaking. And that‘s quite an impression. And it‘s made an impression on me , too. I could always recommend to somebody to watch steel being born. It‘s fantastic. It‘s a spectacle that is unreal.

[P3] I‘ve been working for forty years, and it‘s just long, hard work. A lot of times I can‘t imagine how the men bear up against it. The guys knew how to work and could face up to the job and just were so strong. I was proud to be around many guys that could do that, that wanted to do that, and had pride in doing that. They took pride in what they did. And they knew that people looked at them with honor. They made steel.

Table 3. Complication

Narrative Complication Placement Ellen O‘ Connor (FWP) ―I was in the Best when I got sick. I‘ve been on the bum ever since;‖ ―All at once I owed everybody and I couldn‘t figure out why.‖ P1, P2

Dr. Monica Mayer (SC) Her father, ―You know your mother said you girls don‘t like school, and you‘re not doing very well. So I talked to Momma, and we decided that you‘re going to come out here and work like this so your hind ends will get used to how your life‘s going to be‖ P2

Nelson Walton (FWP) ―It was pretty dark in the place and as he jumped he was crushed to death between the crane and the columns that support the roof of the building.‖P2

Ken Kobus (SC) ―I mean when he was dying, he couldn‘t talk. He had throat cancer.‖ ―I was looking at my dad, and my dad was lying on his back and he had his hands up in the air, and he was turning and manipulating.‖ P2

Michael Donegal (FWP) ―The people here blamed us all for what the bad ones did.‖ P2

Ronald Ruiz (SC) ―I could see she was confused.‖ P1

Irving Fajans (FWP) ―Nobody left the store for eleven days…‖ P4

Virginia Hill Fairbrother (SC) ―That‘s the year that I consider my odoriferous year.‖ P2

Captain Antonio (FWP) ―Sometimes the customs pushed us so close we had to drop the load overboard.‖ P2

Blanca Alvarez (SC) ―Oh my God, I could see big crawling ants, and I was so scared.‖ P2

Complication is, in general, a very straightforward, fairly manageable feature of a narrative to assess. Through many other narrative genres we have been trained to hone in on the problem, the glitch, the crux, or the climax of a story—the point at which the action seems to reach its height in the storyworld. Labov and Waletzky define complication simply as: ―a series of events which may be termed the complicating action.‖47 It is important to note that, according to Labov and Waletzky, a narrative may contain a string of simple narratives each punctuated by complications sections. For example, one could extrapolate many cycles of simple narrative peaked by complicating actions from both Ken Kobus‘ and Nelson Walton‘s narratives. Ken complicates his narrative very quickly in P1 by noting the adverse mental and physical effects the extreme heat of the furnace inflict upon the human body: ―your whole body‘s standing in front of a door opened to hell.‖, and ―It stretches your skin.‖

Because Nelson Walton‘s narrative appears to be a string of four similar narratives spliced together, one may observe four related, yet distinct complicating actions: ―A guy fell or was pushed off one of the bridges into a ladle.‖, ―as he jumped he was crushed to death between the crane and the columns that support the roof of the building.‖, ―The hook got away from him and swung back from the ladle and hit him in the chest.‖, and ―metal was poured on top of the partial melt in the furnace it trickled down to the cinders.‖ From comparing these two narratives we can see how very similar, not in terms of content but in terms of placement, the structure of complicating actions is between the two narratives despite the seventy year gulf in real-time.

Evaluation

47 Labov and Waletzky, ―Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience,‖ 20.

The Work of your Hands

Michael Donegal, interviewed by Roaldus Richmond, Barre, Vermont, no date (probably 1939)

[P1] I learned the stonecutting trade in Scotland when I was in my teens. But Mary and I was both of a mind to get away to a new country and from America came letters telling of this great country with all its jobs. They said a carver like myself would make a fortune in no time over here. Well, whether I believed it or not, over we came.

[P2] Barre was swarming with stonecutters from Italy, Spain, Scotland, and Ireland. It was a wild, unsettled time, and many rough men came to work on the granite. Some sent back home for their families and settled down here, steady and good. Others had no thought of settling down, but came only for the big money, the drinking, the good times. The people born here blamed us all for what the bad ones did. But we had our trade to work at, our steady money coming in, our own countrymen and friends. So we did not mind it so much. And it changed as time went on. People mingled more and became friends.

[P3] I was a fair enough carver, so they say. But I was never with the best of them. The best ones came from Italy. No better workmen maybe, but with more of the artist in them, more of the inspiration. Like the old-time sculptors, they were. One of the finest, a slim fair Italian, a statue cutter—he died at thirty, or younger. He had beauty in himself; he could put it into the stone. All of the best ones are gone now. The last real one, the best one left, had to stop working a time ago. They do everything by machines now. It still needs workmen of skill, but not the artists. They are gone, once and for all.

[P4[ It‘s the way things change, that is all. Everything changes the same way. Machines take the place of men, and men go without work, and hungry. That is the course of the world today— the machines, and everywhere men out of work. That makes for unhappiness and misery and trouble. Take away a man‘s job and you kill the man. Maybe the dust killed them, but being without work kills them inside—a worse way.

Ronald Ruiz, interviewed by Brett Myers, New York City, New York, July 28, 2004

[P1]I love my passengers. I remember one woman in particular—a senior who had gotten on my bus. She seemed very lost. She said she was going to a restaurant on City Island Avenue. I could see she was confused. There was just something about her. She looked so elegant, but with a fur coat on a hot summer day, so I said, ―Are you okay?‖ She said, ―I‘m fine, but I don‘t know what restaurant I‘m meeting my friends at.‖ I said, ―Get on. Sit in the front.‖ I asked a gentleman to get up so she could sit near me, and I said, ―I‘ll run in, and I‘ll check each restaurant for you.‖

[P2] So I checked the restaurants, and no luck, but at the very, very last restaurant on the left, I said, ―It‘s got to be this one. Let me swing the bus around,‖ and I swung it around. I said, ―Don‘t move. Let me make sure this is the place before you get out.‖ It was a hot day, and she‘s got a fur on. She could pass out. So I said, ―Stay here, sweetie. It‘s nice and cool in here.‖ I went in and I said, ―There‘s a lady in the bus, and she‘s not sure of the restaurant,‖ and I saw a whole bunch of seniors there, and they said, ―Oh, that‘s her!‖

[P3] I ran back to the bus and I said, ―Sweetie, your restaurant is right here.‖ I said, ―Let me kneel the bus.‖ Kneeling the bus means I bring it closer to the ground so she gets off easier. And I said, ―Don‘t move.‖ I remember my right hand grabbed her right hand. I wanted to make her feel special, like it was a limousine. It was a bus, but I wanted to make her feel like it was a limousine. And she said, ―I‘ve been diagnosed with cancer—but today is the best day of my life.‖

[P4] And I never forgot that woman. (Weeping.) She‘s diagnosed with cancer, and just because I helped her off the bus, she said she felt like Cinderella. Can‘t get better than that. And doing your job and getting paid to do a job where you can do something special like that? It‘s pretty awesome.

Table 4. Evaluation

Narrative Evaluation Placement

Ellen O‘Connor (FWP) ―We all know what kind of jobs girls like us get anyhow. Twelve hours a day for six dollars a week at Goldblatt‘s maybe. I can make that in six minutes, sick as I am…‖ P3

Dr. Monica Mayer (SC) ―One day of hard labor changed everything.‖ P3

Nelson Walton (FWP) Comments at the end every paragraph about the way the company handled injury and death. Nelson‘s evaluation is implied: the company was guilty of misconduct time and again in cases such as those he details. For example, (P4) ―What a noise!‖ Implied throughout

Ken Kobus (SC) ―I could always recommend to somebody to watch steel being made-- it‘s fantastic. It‘s a spectacle that‘s unreal. ‖ P2 Michael Donegal (FWP) ―It‘s the way things change, that is all.‖ P4

Ronald Ruiz (SC) ―I wanted to make her feel special, like it was a limousine.‖ P3

Irving Fajans (FWP) ―The girls held out just as well as the fellows…‖ ―Luckily, no one in our store got sick during the strike.‖ P4

Virginia Hill Fairbrother (SC) ―I have no idea what I smelled like.‖ P5

Captain Antonio (FWP) ―A good friend of mine drowned tryin to save a few extra bottles.‖ P2

Blanca Alvarez (SC) ―We went through a lot of things.‖ P5

The point of the story is the lay term for the evaluation clause. In fact, Labov and

Waletzky contend that without delineating or emphasizing the juncture where the complication reaches the greatest climax, or ―the break between the complication and the

result‖ a narrative is not complete48. Evaluation is most easily identified or marked by the statements of the sentiment of the narrator toward the story. Polanyi explains this phenomenon: ―In storytelling, the burden of making the relevance of the telling clear falls on the narrator. Insofar as they share a common world view, the narrator and intended story recipients have similar basic understandings of people, objects, and occurrences—the material world, in short, and the intricate complex of values and beliefs which are used to assign meaning to the goings-on in that world and to make sense of experience.‖49

Michael Donegal‘s narrative is chalk-full of resolution clauses as he shares his views on everything from the state of Barre during the height of stonecutting, his own skills as a stonecutter, to the ―death‖ both literally and figuratively of the artist in modern stone work, and the terminal state of Man and his work in a ever-changing, evolving industrial world. With narrative power, he asserts:

―I was a fair enough carver.‖

―One of the finest, a slim fair Italian, a statue cutter—he died at thirty, or

younger.‖

―All of the best of them are gone now.‖

Even the clauses that might be considered the ―coda‖ of Donegal‘s personal experience narrative, as they are outside the main time-line of the story sequence and are comments

48 Labov and Waletzky, ―Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience,‖ 33. 49 Polanyi, Telling the American Story, 13.

which draw the listener back into the present moment, are offered in very evaluative terms:

―That is the curse of the world today—the machines, and everywhere men out of work.‖

―Take away a man‘s job and you kill the man.‖

―Maybe the dust killed them, but being without work kills them inside—a worse way.‖

―They are gone, once and for all.‖

Therefore, when Ellen O‘Connor gives her evaluation of the limited employment options that uneducated females, like herself, face on Chicago‘s South Side as a justification for choosing to work in prostitution saying, ―We all know what kind of jobs girls like us get anyhow. Twelve hours a day for six dollars a week at Goldblatt‘s maybe.

I can make that in six minutes, sick as I am…‖, we, the story recipients, draw on our common understanding of her circumstances to interpret her message as to her of job choice, and here, whether we agree or disagree with her evaluation is not nearly as important as our shared understanding of her message. Ellen O‘Connor‘s evaluation jives with her contemporary parallel, Dr. Monica Mayer. Mayer‘s evaluation is more explicit: ―One day of hard labor changed everything.‖ But one is under the impression that if Ellen O‘Connor were to hear Mayer‘s story repeated, she too would understand the evaluation Mayer makes.

Resolution

Tales of the Depression

Irving Fajans, interviewed by May Swenson, New York City, New York, 1939

[P1] The management had refused to negotiate with our committee, and the workers voted for a sit-in to demand shorter hours and better working conditions. The whistles were blown in every Grand store in New York at eleven-thirty a.m. on March 14th. The workers finished their sales and folded their arms, refusing to wait on any more customers. Practically a hundred percent of the workers joined us, and most of the stores immediately closed their doors. We were prepared to stay a month if necessary.

[P2] We had cots brought in and blankets, electric burners for coffee, and plenty of eats. There was food and other things we might have used in the store, but non of our people touched any sort of merchandise during the strike. It was pretty cold, being early spring, so we had to huddle together at night. There were some canary cages in the store, and we kept the birds fed; they‘d wake us up every morning. We had games like checkers and cards, and we had a radio and danced to the music.

[P3] Two engagements were announced during the time we sat in. We even held a marriage ceremony for a couple who decided to get married during the strike: the girls dressed up the brined; we sent for a priest and he married them. The strike held out over Easter week and since some of our people were Italians and Irish Catholics, we held Easter services for them in the store.

[P4] Nobody left the store for eleven days except the committee to contact the management. The girls held out just as well as the fellows, and everyone tried to be gay and have as good a time as possible. Luckily, no one in our store got sick during the strike. The management finally heard our committee and met our demands—largely as a result of the publicity our sit-down had gotten all over the country.

[P5] During the Ohrbach‘s strike a couple of years ago, two salesgirls pulled a neat stunt. Mr. Ohrbach, who is supposed to be a big philanthropist, spoke at a dinner held at the Hotel Astor. While he was spouting about some of these public charity funds, two girls who had crashed the dinner in borrowed evening gowns climbed up on the balcony and chained themselves to the railing. Nobody noticed them, and suddenly they began shouting in the middle of Ohrbach‘s speech: ―Charity beings at home! Give your employees shorter house and better pay!‖ Of course, there was a big hubbub, and the girls were arrested. But the papers carried a big story, and the boss had to grant our demands to appease public opinion.

Virginia Hill Fairbrother, interviewed by her daughter Laruel Kaae, Bismark, North Dakota, July 14, 2005

[P1] I was born in 1924, so I started school in 1930. The Depression was not evident the first couple years. By the time I was in third grade, it was. We had a brother and sister in school who only had one pair of overshoes, and that was a nasty winter. One of the kids came to school wearing the overshoes one day and got the work. The next day the next kid came and did the same thing. They only got half as much school as they should have, but they passed.

[P2] My big memory was in 1936, which was our coldest year. It was 60 degrees below in Parshall, North Dakota, that winter. That‘s the year that I consider my odoriferous year. I know if there‘s a word like odoriferous, but it sure fits the year. I was in sixth grade. Everybody came in with their mittens. I don‘t know if anyone now realizes how mittens smell when they‘re wet

with snow, but we‘d all come in and put our mittens on the radiators to dry—and you already had a very different odor.

[P3] The teacher kept us in alphabetical order, so the fellow ahead of me was Billy Bernt. Billy Bernt‘s father was a First World War veteran. He had been wounded. He didn‘t have any money. They were a nice family—very clean. But Billy only had two sets of clothes. At night in the wintertime he ran a trap line, and every so often he got skunks. He didn‘t need to tell us the next day that he‘d gotten a skunk. We knew it. He sat ahead of me.

[P4] On either side of me there were a brother and sister who were farmer‘s children. They walked a mile to school in the weather. They again didn‘t have any money. Their mother made bread, and she put lard on the bread, and either wild garlic or wild onion. When they came, they had their lunch pails. You weren‘t aware of it then, but about an hour after they had eaten it, you knew somebody had eaten garlic or onions.

[P5] In the kitty-corner in back of me was a girl who got up at five o‘clock every morning and went to our doctor‘s office with her mother and washed everything with disinfectant. You could smell that. I have no idea what I smelled like.

[P6] A lot of people at that time still didn‘t have bathrooms inside, so they didn‘t wash as much as they should have or could have. All of the little girls in those days, if you had a birthday, you got a bottle of Blue Waltz perfume, which had kind of a vanilla odor. You got four ounces for ten cents. So every girl used perfume. The little boys used cough drops with a licorice odor. All of those things together made an odor that I still think of every so often. Once in a while I smell some of that stuff, and I go back to sixth grade.

[P7] We had a wonderful teacher who never said a word about the smell. We had to spend five minutes of the recess time outside, and then we could come in because it was so cold. While we were out, she raised all of the windows, and when we got in, it was colder than you could believe, but there was no odor for a little while. She must have been an angel.

Table 5. Resolution

Narrative Resolution Placement

Ellen O‘ Connor (FWP) She‘s working again: ―This nineteenth and Dearborn territory… For years, even before I got on the bum. I know every window…‖ P7

Dr. Monica Mayer (SC) ―So I said, ‗Well, if we got good grades, do we have to come out here and work this hard?‘ And he said, ‗No. That‘s the deal.‘‖ P2

Nelson Walton (FWP) None, the only resolution might be implied through Mr. Walton‘s membership in a union. One could only assume this from Ann Banks‘ sub-heading, not Nelson‘s narrative. none

Ken Kobus (SC) ―To the day he died that‘s what he lived: steelmaking.‖ P2

Michael Donegal (FWP) ―Machines take the place of men, and men go without work and hungry.‖ P4

Table 5, Resolution (Continued from previous page)

Narrative Resolution Placement

Ronald Ruiz (SC) ―She said, ‗I‘ve been diagnosed with cancer—but today is the best day of my life.‖ P3

Irving Fajans (FWP) ―The management finally heard our committee and met our demands.‖ P4

Virginia Hill Fairbrother (SC) ―We had a wonderful teacher who never said a word about the smell.‖ P7

Captain Antonio (FWP) ―The customs marshal got me to slip the whole load in his garage.‖ P4

Blanca Alvarez (SC) ―There was a telephone booth, and I called a taxi to get to your aunt‘s house.‖ P4

Resolution is reached in the narrative in that ―sequence which follows the evaluation.‖50 Another seemingly cut-and-dried answer from Labov and Waletzky; however, I found the analysis of the resolution of the story to be the most difficult in some cases. At times it appeared as though several of the narratives contained multiple resolutions, which would make sense if, as Labov and Waletzky suggest, narratives may contain multiple complications. It would seem to follow that for each complication posed there might be a resolution. This is not the case. Though Nelson Walton‘s narrative is the least developed or sophisticated of the six, the text contains no resolution whatsoever.

The only clue to resolution of this narrative comes from the sub-heading in Banks‘ text where she describes Walton as ―a crane operator and a militant CIO officer.‖51 Perhaps resolution is more difficult to extract because it is so often implied. For example, in Ellen

O‘Connor‘s narrative there is no overarching comment of resolution. She simply states that she is working again in her old neighborhood of Nineteenth and Dearborn. The listener is left to understand that even though O‘Connor has been ―on the bum‖, she will come out fighting and on top in the end: resolution.

50 Labov and Waletzky, ―Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience,‖ 37. 51 First Person America, ed. Banks, 76.

Russell Frank gives a more concrete definition of resolution when he states, ―the resolution is the upshot of the story, how events played out.‖52 This can be seen in the deal that Monica Mayer makes with her father so that she and her sisters can return to school: ―So I said, ‗Well, if we got good grades, do we have to come out here and work this hard?‘ And he said, ‗No. That‘s the deal.‖ Resolution is also obvious in Captain

Antonio‘s narrative, though we don‘t know the terminal results from his comments, we do know that he was able to wrest his bootlegged moonshine from the ―pelicans‖ and that he continued running liquor between Key West and Cuba: ―The customs marshal got me to slip the whole load in his garage.‖ Standard paragraph position for the resolution of personal experience narratives shows that resolution most commonly enters at the conclusion of the narrative.

Fajans‘ narrative is an excellent study not only of a succinct resolution, ―The management finally heard our committee and met our demands,‖ his narrative also underscores the complication-evaluation-resolution relationship. Fajans complicates his narratives about the workers‘ strike and sit-in at Grand‘s department store in one paragraph. He begins: (complication) ―Nobody left the store for eleven days except the committee to contact the management.‖ He continues: (evaluation) ―The girls held out just as well as the fellows, and everyone tried to be gay and have as good a time as possible. Luckily, no one in our store got sick during the strike.‖ He concludes:

(resolution) ―The management finally heard our committee and met our demands— largely as a result of the publicity our sit-down had gotten all over the country.‖

52 Frank, ―Folklore in a Hurry: The Community Experience Narrative in Newspaper Coverage of the Loma Prieta Earthquake,‖ 171.

Coda

Immigrants

Captain Antionio, interviewed by Stetson Kennedy, Key West, Florida, 1938

[P1] ―Me and Garcia used to run in good loads—Scotch, rye, gin, rum, champagne, wine. Key West was one of the few towns in the country where you could get stuff that wasn‘t watered.

[P2] Me and Garcia had a good reputation—could practically guarantee delivery. That gave us good business. We always went around and got up orders and collected in advance before we made a trip. It ain‘t but eighty miles over to Cuba, but that Gulf Stream gets mighty rough for small boats. I‘ve crossed the channel in a storm with only a coupla [sic.] inches freeboard. We moved at night. Sometimes the customs pushed us so close we had to drop the load overboard. Then all they could hold us for was running without lights. When they would get on our trail we‘d make a run for shallow water where we could lose em, or at least drop the load and pick it up later on. Used to hate to have to throw stuff over in deep water. A good friend of mine drowned tryin to save a few extra bottles.

[P3] The damned pelicans—hijackers—bothered us more than customs. Them pelicans knew the water good as we did. We never knew they was watchin us hide a load under water. That‘s why we call em pelicans—they‘d wait till we was gone, and then they‘d dive down and bring up the load.

[P4] One time me and Garcia unloaded out at Cow Key because there was a customs boat in Key West. We hid the stuff in the grass, and fishing place, and the next day a coupla strange fishermen landed to cool lunch. I give em a few kegs of wine to keep quiet. They hadn‘t been gone long when the customs boat swung out of Key West and headed straight for me. I didn‘t have no boat, so I just waited for em to land. You know what happened? The customs marshal got me to slip the whole load in his garage.

Blanca Alvarez, interviewed by her daughter, Connie Alvarez, Santa Monica, California, January 9, 2006

Connie: When I was little and I heard pieces of the story of how you crossed from Mexico, I used to hear you guys talk about a coyote, and I didn‘t understand that that‘s what you call the people who crossed you. For the longest time when I was growing up I thought you were with real coyotes in the desert, and they somehow were able to bring you over and carry me safely into the United States. So I thought that I had a special connection with coyotes. But now I know what a coyote means. What was the journey like?

[P1] Blanca: We were walking and walking for me it was an eternity. I don‘t know how long. I didn‘t have a watch with me or anything. He told us to take our shoes off. He said, ―I don‘t want no noise because the dogs are very, very good to detect every noise.‖ And he said, ―I‘m going to whistle when the border patrol change shifts.‖ He told us two different kind of whistles that he was going to make. He said, ―When I whistle like this, you‘re going to duck, and when I whistle like this, you‘re going to run.‖

[P2] He whistled, so we went on our stomachs and we stayed there. Oh my God, I could see big ants crawling, and I was so scared. Because I was very scared and I wanted to go back, cousin told me, ―Don‘t worry. It‘s not going to take us that long.‖ So when he whistled again, we stood up and we ran. He told us, ―Run right now! Run!‖ I remember it was torture on those rocks without shoes. So we ran as fast as we could and then he said, ―Put your shoes on right here.‖

[P3] We were at kind of like a bridge, and he said, ―You‘re going to walk over that bridge. I‘m going to walk behind you, and you‘re going to put your hand behind and give me the money there. There‘s a post office, and if you have money, buy stamps. And then from there you‘re on your own.‖

Connie: Why do you think he wanted you to buy stamps?

[P4] Blanca: I don‘t know. Probably because he didn‘t want them to think we were crossing the border. I don‘t know. There was a telephone booth, and I called a taxi to get to your aunt‘s house. I wasn‘t sure if I had enough money to pay for the taxi, but my cousin did. And, besides, I couldn‘t walk anymore because of the rocks.

[P5] We went through a lot of things—like, for example not eating. For six months your father lost his job, and we never told you that. I guess because we never want to worry you.

Table 6. Coda

Narrative Coda Placement

Ellen O‘Connor (FWP) ―There‘s only one kind of man I ever met and that‘s the bad kind.‖ P8

Dr. Monica Mayer (SC) ―My two younger sisters and I were laughing about that, because they remember that particular day exactly the way I remember it.‖ P3

Nelson Walton (FWP) ―I don‘t know if the story is true. I‘ve heard about it for years.‖ P1

Ken Kobus (SC) ―I‘ve been working here for forty years, and it‘s just long, hard work.‖P3

Michael Donegal (FWP) ―That is the curse of the world today—the machines, and everywhere men out of work.‖ P4

Ronald Ruiz (SC) ―Doing your job and getting paid to do a job where you can do something special like that? It‘s pretty awesome.‖ P4

Irving Fajans (FWP) ―During Orbach‘s strike a couple years ago…‖ P5

Virginia Hill Fairbrother (SC) ―Once and a while I smell that stuff, and I go back to sixth grade.‖ P6

Captain Antonio (FWP) ―I never did like to fool with aliens.‖ P1

Blanca Alvarez (SC) ―For six months your father lost his job, and we never told you that. I guess because we never wanted you to worry.‖ P5

Each narrative analyzed exemplified a very strong final marker of Labov and

Waletzky‘s structural makeup which is the coda. Coda, in a narrative, is set apart from the rest of the narrative by ―returning the verbal perspective to the present moment.‖53

So, for example, Blanca Alvarez suspends her narrative about illegally crossing the border between Mexico and the United States to mention to her daughter, Connie, that her husband was jobless for some time: ―For six months your father lost his job, and we never told you that. I guess because we never wanted you to worry.‖ Blanca‘s statement returns the conversation to the present moment where the two women are sitting in a mobile StoryBooth in Santa Monica rather than reliving a midnight border crossing.

A Final Note on Analysis

Through extracting clauses which form the structural underpinnings of these story sets I have shown that these personal experience narratives do indeed adhere to Labov and Waletzky‘s theory of narrative structure. With an eye toward analyzing the traditionality of this narrative structure, the story subjects were selected from two collections seventy years apart. The appearance of the same narrative structural forms— orientation, complication, evaluation, resolution, and coda—shows that personal experience narrative structure functions as a traditional element of these stories. This is an important development within narrative scholarship as it opens up a discussion of tradition as a staple of story structure, not simply of story content or story function. As

Sandra Dolby points out, ―Unlike fairy tales or legends or tall tales or jokes, personal narratives are not usually perpetuated in tradition much past the lifetime of the stories‘ main character.‖54 This study does not undermine that statement, but instead shows that

53 Labov and Waletzky, ―Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience,‖ 37. 54 Dolby, Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narraive, prologue to the 2007 reprint, xxxii

tradition in structural elements of personal experience narratives may prove to keep these stories viable, transferable (if good records are kept), and culturally coherent long after the original tellers are gone.

Chapter 4: Conclusion

Ubi panis ibi patria (my homeland is where my bread is), is the motto of all emigrants. What then is the American, this new man?‖ -John Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer Having established, through analysis, that the selected personal experience narratives do indeed reveal a structural narrative integrity both on the individual narrative level and over time, supporting the premise of their traditional structural configuration, I close with some ideas as to how these narratives may represent a body of American conversation. There is no singular ―American experience‖. Instead these PENs represent a synthesis or a confluence of stories which, when shared, become individual narratives intermingled with the cultural signifier ―American‖. When broaching the idea of

American personal experience narratives with academic colleagues, friends, and family alike, almost all affirmed the existence of an American experience. Therefore, to say that an American culture exists is no stretch. Polanyi concurs, ―I‘m not alone in this belief that American culture exists. It is a commonsense widely accepted belief. We can read about it, hear about it on television, talk about it to one another, discuss whether so-and- so is typically American and feel ourselves to be incredibly typical Americans when we go abroad as we find out that the world is inhabited by people who are really much more different from ourselves than we are from each other.‖55

It is also important to point out that I do consider myself an American. This fact may either be used to strengthen my research standpoint or undermine my subjective credibility, or both. But either way, it stands that I was born and raised in the United

States and that I consider myself to be a rather typical American. Obviously other scholars have encountered a similar double bind. In her text Telling the American Story,

55 Polanyi, Telling the American Story, 147.

Livia Polanyi also uses the simple fact that she is an American to reinforce the eminence of her research perspectives, rather than undermine her credibility. Polanyi sees it as her academic right as an American to investigate the cultural constructs of Americanism through narrative. She explains:

In expanding the propositions in the stories themselves (which were, with

one exception told in undirected conversations among American born,

English speaking, white, middle class friends) I have used myself, a

reasonably acculturated native-born American, as an informant. In doing

so, I was operating within the tradition of transformational grammarians

who have long used their own ―native speaker intuitions‖ as a source of

insight into the syntactic acceptability of sentences in their own languages.

My ordinary judgments are correct insofar as the resulting text seems a

string of clichés to my compatriots. Insofar as another cultural American

finds himself surprised by an observation, I have failed to capture the

―unintentionally obvious.‖ These self-evident ―everyone knows this‖

truths differ tremendously from culture to culture.56

Like Polanyi, I have chosen to embrace my American-ness as a mid-western girl, born in the heart of South Dakota, a descendant of Norwegian immigrants on my mother‘s side and a mixture of backgrounds from my father‘s blood including English,

German, and Scottish. I was raised and educated in the Rocky Mountains, spent seven summers in Alaska, and set my sights on graduate school in eastern America. However, culture is not an axiom, and has never been able to be defined, described, designated, or

56 Polanyi, Telling the American Story, 3.

defended as such. Instead, I stand before a myriad of dynamic cultural forces hoping to tease out some of the more American strains in these PENs.

One of the more constructive ways to view culture is as a tool-kit, a theory Jerome

Brunner and many others have expanded upon, Brunner writes:

Principles and procedures [of culture] learned in one domain do not

automatically transfer to other domains. If the acquisition of knowledge

and of mental powers is indeed domain specific and not automatically

transferable, this surely implies that a domain, so called, is a set of

principles and procedures, rather like a prosthetic device, that permits

intelligence to be used in certain ways, but not in others. Each particular

way of using intelligence develops an integrity of its own—a kind of

knowledge-plus-skill-plus-tool integrity—that fits it to a particular range

of applicability. It is a little ―reality‖ of its own that is constituted by the

principles and procedures that we use within it.

These domains, looked at in another way, constitute something like a

culture‘s treasury of tool kits. Few people ever master the whole range of

tool kits: we grow clever in certain spheres and remain incompetent in

other in which, as it were, we do not become ―hitched‖ to the relevant tool

kit….57‖

In fact, the cultural facet of narrative is precisely what Jerome Bruner seeks to unpack, he continues:

57 Jerome Brunner, ―The Narrative Construction of Reality,‖ Critical Inquiry 18, no. 1 (1991): 2.

It is with just this domain [narrative] that I want now to concern myself.

Like the domains of logical-scientific reality construction, it is well

buttressed by principles and procedures. It has an available cultural tool

kit or tradition on which its procedures are modeled, and its distributional

reach is wide and as active as gossip itself. Its form is so familiar and

ubiquitous that it is likely to be overlooked, in much the same way as we

suppose that the fish will be the last to discover water. We organize our

experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of

narrative—stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so

on. Narrative is a conventional form, transmitted culturally and

constrained by each individual‘s level of mastery and by his conglomerate

of prosthetic devices, colleagues, and mentors. Unlike the constructions

generated by logical and scientific procedures that can be weeded out by

falsification, narrative constructions can only achieve ―verisimilitude.‖

Narratives, then are a version of reality whose acceptability is governed by

convention and ―narrative necessity‖ rather than by empirical verification

and logical requiredness, although ironically we have no compunction

about calling stories true or false.‖58

Grounded in Brunner‘s concept of narrative as one ―domain‖ of culture, it is natural to acknowledge that the analysis upon which this paper is built can only really constitute a glimpse at the traditional structure of PENs, and gives nowhere near a fully nuanced, encompassing read on further texture and other traditional elements contained

58 Brunner, ―The Narrative Construction of Reality,‖ 4.

in these types of performances. So while the structure of these narratives may constitute one traditional ―tool‖ as a way to express an American cultural narrative, a medium for tellers and listeners to identify this particular narrative form from other folk narrative genres, my comments will come nowhere near to completing an entire narrative cultural tool- kit.

In fact, without a cultural variant—a narrative from Spain, or France, or Guam, or a narrative containing vastly different structural components—it is hard to prove that the narrative structure alone acts as a cultural signifier. Perhaps however, we can assemble a thematic ―tool-kit‖ whereby we might decipher these narratives on the American level.

As a solution, I have opted to look back at the narratives I selected for the structural analysis. I have chosen as my guiding text Livia Polanyi‘s research into a grammar of

American stories, Telling the American Story: A Structural and Cultural Analysis of

Storytelling. A few of the most distinctive tropes which surfaced are individualism, responsibility, happiness, change, and choice. My basis for extracting these tropes comes from Polanyi‘s premise that ―without the ability to model interests and world-knowledge of others, human beings would have no idea of what to tell a story about.‖59 To further exemplify the interests of Americans, she offers ―An American Story‖ which goes something like this:

ADULTS are INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE WHO KNOW HOW to DO what

they MUST DO; CAN DO what they MUST DO; and DO it. They have

CHOICE and they HAVE the KNOWLEDGE and they CHANGE and DO

59 Polanyi, Telling the American Story, 77.

to SATISFY their NEEDS. They HAVE the RESPONSIBILITY for

Doing and the RIGHT to CHOOSE what and how they should live their

lives, manage their affairs, and SATISFY their NEEDS. Their NEEDS

SATISFIED, they FEEL GOOD about themselves and HAVE EARNED

the RIGHT to PLEASURE and HAPPINESS.

There are still those who CANNOT INSIST, CANNOT DEMAND, are

not ABLE TO KNOW, or DO. They remain CHILDREN—without

RIGHTS, without CHOICE, without FREEDOM, inhibited from pursuing

HAPPINESS as they might wish to. Since they DO NOT KNOW, they

CANNOT DO and they NEED to be CARED FOR… without the

ABILITY TO DECIDE, they CANNOT DECIDE and therefore SHOULD

NOT DECIDE.

Their FUTURE is in the hands of those who DO KNOW, who CAN

DECIDE, who TAKE CARE of them. The question remains as painful, as

perplexing as ever: EXACTLY which INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE are

ENTITLED to LIVE LIFE FREELY PURSUING HAPPINESS as

EQUALS of other MEN?

This compelling ―story‖ condenses the most common tropes that Polanyi recorded in a much larger group of narratives. Polanyi bends her analysis to creating what she calls, ―a grammar of possible stories,‖ in other words a grammar of cultural American constructs individuals may draw from to create PENs buttressed by American values, beliefs, and motifs. To do this she concentrates the narratives into what she calls

―Adequate Paraphrases‖ which she creates from a combination of themes the narrator

emphasized during the storytelling performance. Further distilling the Adequate

Paraphrase, Polanyi makes lists of words she sees being employed as possible cultural derivatives, or the most important or frequently mentioned values within the story experience. In this vein, I have selected a few of the cultural derivates I found most prevalent in my selection of PENs.

Individualism, Responsibility, Happiness, Change, and Choice

When first reflecting on the American attributes these PENs might expose, I began to notice that one underlying refrain of these stories was a very exacting individualism. While the stories themselves sometimes referred not only to the individual narrating the story but included experiences of parents or family members, these family-based stories still incorporated the narrator as a direct participant, visa vie genealogical ascendancy. Ken Kobus, Monica Mayer, Greg Korbon all shared PENs whose main characters or participants included themselves as well as their close relatives—fathers, mothers, sons. Still, these stories continually place the individual as the main actor within the overall motif, thereby raising the status of the individual from simple character to principal performer. Ken‘s father was a hero in his eyes for working with steel so long and with such commitment that his dad ―made steel‖ even in his sick bed up until the day he died.60 Monica Mayer‘s father had ingrained the importance of education in his daughters by sending them out for a day of hard physical labor in a rock pile in North Dakota; and Greg Korbon‘s son Brian had exemplified a child‘s uncanny understanding of departure and death in a way that impacted Greg to the very moment of

60 ―Ken Kobus, interviewed by Ron Baraff, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 20, 2006,‖ in Listening is an Act of Love, 63.

the telling of his PEN. These stories all contain a raw image of individualism—the character of one person against the odds of backbreaking work, crushing poverty, and imminent death. Many of the other PENs emphasize the cultural hallmark of individualism, from Captain Antonio‘s Cuban bootlegging escapades to Richard

Dorson‘s academic honors.

Responsibility – Closely aligned with ideas of individualism are concepts of responsibility. At times these tropes are closely combined to bring about themes of self- reliance as in the case of Monica Mayer. Mayer‘s PEN focuses on the individual, but another part of her experience is the realization that she is responsible for taking command of her education, and by extension, responsible for her future life and career.

Mayer‘s story alluded that her father‘s lack of education had placed him at the mercy of hard-labor. Mayer says, ―And I remember him saying, ‗Is that right? Well, do you think

I like working hard like this every day?‘‖ 61

Happiness – You can almost hear the happiness in Ronald Ruiz‘s voice as he tells about helping a woman find her correct bus stop. Obviously suffering from dementia,

Ruiz‘s passenger told him that she was scheduled to meet friends at a restaurant, but was unable to remember the name of the eatery. Ruiz explains, ―I never forgot that woman.

She‘s diagnosed with cancer, and just because I helped her off the bus, she said she felt like Cinderella. Can‘t get better than that. And doing your job and getting paid to do a job where you can do something special like that? It‘s pretty awesome.‖62 Ruiz finds his joy in the day to day, perhaps to some, the mundane, but it is clear that he loves his job

61 ―Monica Mayer, interviewed by her cousin Spencer Wilkinson Jr., New Town, North Dakota, July 29, 2005,‖ in Listening is an Act of Love, 57. 62 ―Ronald Ruiz, interviewed by facilitator Brett Myers, New York City, July 28, 2004,‖ in Listening is an Act of Love, 87.

and that he receives real personal satisfaction from discharging the duties of a bus driver honorably.

Change – Of the PENs selected, the story of Irving Fajans and his comrades eleven-day strike staged at Grand‘s department store in New York City is definitely one associated with principles of change. Change in Fajans‘ PEN was sought by ordinary people—in this case over-worked department store cashiers and clerks, who were fed up with low wages and extremely long work shifts—not by powerful political figures or wealthy entrepreneurs. Fajans recalls, ―Of course, there was a big hubbub… But the papers carried a big story, and the boss had to grant our demands to appease public opinion.‖63 The democratic notion that power to set demands and change opinions is vested in the people as a political body is not a widely accepted belief, and certainly not a ubiquitous worldview of most nation states. Fajans‘ narrative reveals the power to organize for change.

Change may not always be viewed as a positive force in America. For Michael

Donegal, change is symptomatic of the technological replacement of man. His PEN reaches the denouement, in resignation he says, ―It‘s the way things change, that is all.

Everything changes the same way. Machines take the place of men, and men go without work, and hungry. That is the course of the world today—the machines, and everywhere men out of work. That makes for unhappiness and misery and trouble. Take away a

63 ―Irving Fajans, interviewed by May Swenson, New York City, 1939,‖ in First Person America, 126.

man‘s job and you kill the man. Maybe the dust killed them, but being without work kills them inside—a worse way.‖64

Choice – A large part of the American story has also become those who chose to come to the United States as immigrants, legally or otherwise. Several of these PENs feature this theme of choice—choosing America as home for the promise of jobs, land, or other forms of refuge. Take Blanca Alvarez, for example, whose daughter Connie asked her to talk more about her journey in her StoryCorps interview. Blanca tells of how she came to America with the help of a coyote, a person usually hired to help illegal immigrants cross the border undetected. But her story is punctuated with hardship. She says, ―We went through a lot of things—like, for example not eating…‖65 Michael

Donegal also immigrated to the United States. Donegal, a stonecutter, and his wife came from Ireland. ―Mary and I was both of a mind to get away to a new country and from

America came letters telling of this great country with all its jobs. They said a carver like myself would make a fortune in no time over here.‖66 It is through stories like Alvarez‘s and Donegal‘s we learn that making the choice to come to America may be more difficult and fraught with pain than some of us imagine.

Final Coda

Another Friday, another commute. My husband Perry balances his work bag on one arm and our one-year-old son Parker in the other; I grab the diaper bag and the keys.

64―Michael Donegal interviewed by Roaldus Richmond, Barre, Vermont, about 1939,‖ in First Person America, 103. 65 ―Blanca Alverez, interviewed by Her Daughter Connie Alvarez, Santa Monica, California, January 9, 2006," in Listening is an Act of Love, 111. 66 ―Michael Donegal interviewed by Roaldus Richmond, Barre, Vermont, about 1939,‖ in First Person America, 103.

Another Friday, another two minute StoryCorps spot on NPR. As we head out on to

Route 1 again, I shush the baby and Perry turns up the radio volume. ―Here Theresa

Burroughs remembers trying to register to vote in Tuscaloosa, Alabama at the Hale

County Courthouse in 1955‖:

I went there for two years with a minister named Reverend J.J. Simmons. The white

men, they would not allow us to register to vote. They would sit there, and they had tables playin‘

dominoes. I didn‘t even know how to play dominoes, but I learned to play by watchin‘ them.

They would ask you silly questions like this man—I never will forget his name—Mr. Cox. He

was chair of the Board of Registrars, and he would ask you silly questions like, ―How many black

jelly beans in this jar? How many red ones?‖ I said, ―You don‘t know how many jelly beans

there are in there.‖ He told me, ―You shut your black mouth. Shut up!‖

Well, the next Monday I told Reverend Simmons that I was not going back. I said, ―I‘m

not going to be embarrassed like that anymore.‖ He said, ―You want to vote don‘t you.‖ I said,

―Yes.‖ He said, ―We‘re going to go until the building falls down. We‘re going to be there every

time they open that door. Now in the morning, I‘ll be by to pick you up. You‘re going.‖ And that

is the day Mr. Cox asked me to recite part of the preamble to the Constitution. I don‘t really think

he knew it. He said, ―You‘re going to pass today because we are tired of looking at your black

faces.‖ Then he gave me my slip showing I was a registered voter. We did vote in the next

election.‖67

Today fellow Americans may not be returning to the courthouse every day in civil display of our desire and right to vote in the face of racism and bigotry, but you can bet that quiet battles for freedom continue to be waged daily across America and continue to be part of the American story. In this study I have shown that personal experience narratives have a traditional structure. It is this traditional structure that brings an

67 Theresa Burroughs, interviewed by Toni Love at StoryCorps, NPR’s Morning Edition, 88.5WAMU FM, January 12, 2007.

important element of power and cultural traction to PENs which solidifies their place as an inscrutable folk narrative genre.

This paper has served to emphasize two very important attributes of PENs. First, as already mentioned, the personal experience narrative does represent a traditional narrative genre. Traditionality is maintained in the formal structural properties of this narrative rather than in the distinctive plots or motifs these narratives employ. Second, these narratives also possess a cultural thumbprint, or to borrow Jerome Brunner‘s analogy once again, they are one cultural tool in the tool-kit of the culturally salient individual—a way of validating personal experiences by creating narratives that are culturally viable. Coming to better understand the traditional nature of personal experience narratives also allows us to examine some of the cultural construction of

Americanism including tendencies toward individualism, personal responsibility, perpetual pursuit for happiness, and a deep-seated emphasis on choice. In an ever- changing cultural fabric, these are some of the themes that continue to perpetuate

American culture as a whole.

I believe that academic interest in the personal experience narrative is due for a revival. How else are we to tap into the most reflexive and ubiquitous genre of shared narrative? In her most recent blog post Ann Banks wrote, ―These days, we are in the midst of an economic meltdown. Now that hard times have returned, I believe storytelling is due for a revival. We need again to imagine a future that is meaningful in the face of difficult circumstances. Listening to each other's stories may grant us a sense

of common purpose that money can't buy.‖68 The depth and breadth of each of these personal narratives add functional layers to the word ―American‖, and contemporary layers to our understanding of narrative traditions. Personal experience narratives are an unprecedented way of exploring the visceral core of the individuals that make up our nation.

68 Ann Banks, ―The Power of Storytelling,‖ blog, http://annabanks.blogspot.com, (accessed March 30, 2009).

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