The decline of oral story-telling

When I was a young boy, my dad used to take me with him to Scranton, about 2-1/2 miles east of our farm over the county line in Callahan County. In warm weather there were usually old men, telling stories while sitting on the porch of either Morgan’s Store or Gattis Brother’s Store. Morgan’s faced west, providing shade in the morning. The Gattis store was situated eastward, making it a cooler afternoon spot for conversation.

A lot of little towns had gathering places like this. In some communities in the South, the old men played dominoes. But in Scranton, these geezers did nothing but talk. And chew tobacco. And spit on the ground.

There were usually brothers Felix and Lee Boland (Uncle Drake, husband of my dad’s aunt Lena) and brothers Arthur Baily (husband of my dad’s great aunt Nancy Elvira) and Jim Bailey (husband of my mother’s aunt Grace – In those days, most people in Scranton were related either by blood or marriage). Add to the mix of regulars farmers with chores to do at home who would stay a while to join the gabfest.

As a four- or five-year-old kid, I didn’t appreciate this cultural act of connecting with the past. I was usually too busy looking through the pile of soda-pop bottle caps strewn on the ground where the Gattis Brothers dumped the bottle-top container from their iced-drinks box or standing next to my dad in the store, hoping he would buy me a Coke or an Eskimo Pie.

My generation didn’t learn the art of story-telling. Yes, we communicated with one another, but for our post World War II group by the 1950s, spinning yarns was competing with Top-40 music on the radio and TV. With social media, texting and streaming music, kids today don’t have time for story-telling, either.

The value of oral story-telling as a connection to the past really hit me several years ago when my wife and I were in Scranton for the annual Scranton Homecoming, a reunion launched back in the 1950s by former Scranton teacher Lillian Battle. Staying at the family farm that weekend was the principle speaker for the event, writer-playwright Larry L. King.

Larry, whose uncle was married to my Granddad Allen’s sister Grace – Remember, I said earlier most people in the community were related one way or the other – attended Scranton Schools through grade six before his family moved to nearby Putnam. I stood on the front porch for an hour and a half, enthralled by the rapid-fire stories coming from Larry, my dad’s cousin Bill Boland and Uncle Hugh Shrader. I wished my generation had learned to celebrate events in our lives in this way.