Voices of the Past : . . . While Private Thoughts Do the Same for Loved Ones

When Dorothy Klipp and her first husband bought 17 acres of land on an old stagecoach trail six miles inland from Solana Beach, the year was 1941. The land was $100 an acre.

“But that took every penny we had,” said Klipp, who recalls moving into the tar-papered center section of their unfinished house in December with their 3-year-old daughter and 8-month-old son. They had no electricity, no heat, no hot water. Their nearest neighbor was a dairy several miles away.

“One night the temperature dropped to 18 degrees,” she said. “My hands were so cold I was scared to change the baby. So I ran down the long, isolated road flapping my hands up and down to get the circulation going.”

Forty-five years later, when the “long, isolated road” had turned into Camino Real, all built up with luxury homes, Klipp’s son and daughter each handed her a book.

“They were books in which you were supposed to record the details of your life,” said Klipp, who traveled across China in her teens. “They had spaces with headings like ‘I Was Born On . . .’ But, somehow, I just couldn’t summon up the interest to get started.”

Saw Notice of Class

Then in May, as she was browsing through a brochure on adult education from San Dieguito High School, Klipp noticed a life-story writing class. It was described as a class to preserve memories of the “good old days” to pass on to grandchildren.

“I was so excited by the first one I took,” she said, “that the minute I got home I sat down and began writing.”

Betty Springer, who teaches the life-story class Klipp discovered, as well as two others in Clairemont and Solana Beach, said people often rush home to write after listening to the memories of others.

“They hear stories about buying gas at 8 cents a gallon, or dancing the Charleston, or watching a father--who had just come in from milking the cows--eat three huge plates of pancakes covered in hot, liquid bacon fat, and it awakens all kinds of memories of their own past,” she explained.

“Our format is to write an incident, or a description, at home and bring in a rough draft.”

A rough draft, Springer emphasized, is all that is needed.

“Because it’s while people are sharing their stories that the best parts tend to come out,” she said. “Then they go back and rewrite and polish. The aim is an interesting book for their descendants to treasure.”

Springer, a tall, cheerful woman in her 50s, her skin smoothly tanned after a week in the Caribbean, was speaking in her Encinitas class at the Family Service Senior Center. Around her, on folding chairs, fanned a circle of men and women whose birth dates ranged from 1894 to 1937.

“Well . . . shall we start with Bill today?” she asked, leaning forward to smile at a distinguished looking man with a neatly pointed white beard.

Bill--also known as Folk Artist of the West William G. Wicknick--has been in the class since December. By writing for four or five hours a day, he has managed to complete his life story. Considering that he is 93 and left home at 15 to be a cowboy, a homesteader, a railroad construction worker, a logger and a Marine before he became a successful artist, a book encompassing his life seems a major accomplishment.

His great-granddaughter, he said, does his typing. “But I’m still writing things between the lines. I keep finding things I omitted the first time. Soon, I’m going to have more writing between the lines than I have on the original manuscript.”

As Wicknick finished speaking, Mac Hartley, a retired college professor in his 60s, drew several folded pages from the pocket of his red shorts.

Hartley had reached the part of his life story where he and his wife, Sut, were newlyweds, and moving, because of the postwar housing shortage of 1947, into the only home they could find; a crumbling duplex with a 4-by-6-foot hole in the kitchen floor.

Renovation Required

They could stay, the landlord informed them, only if they renovated the place.

As Hartley, who had never tackled any kind of home improvements before, described struggling to wallpaper a ceiling with a wife who was a foot shorter than himself--”About the closest we ever came to a divorce”--the class dissolved into laughter.

“Mac, you mentioned rent control. Do you think that your grandchildren, reading this story now, 40 years later, will know what rent control meant?” Springer asked. “Remember, you want your stories to be clear to them.”

Making their life stories clear--as well as entertaining--is one of the reasons, Springer said, that she urges people to include photographs, maps, family trees and letters. Wicknick plans to illustrate his book with his own sketches of the American West.

“Ummm . . . I’m not sure my story is going to be very interesting,” a hazel-eyed woman named Henriette Lane, who was born in Germany in 1922, murmured. She glanced dubiously at several handwritten pages in her lap.

“Most of us feel that way. But they’re always better than we think,” Springer said.

Lane, new to the class, had been working on her earliest memories. The earliest memories, Springer explained, are often the easiest to start writing about because, for most people, they are not stressful ones.

“You just let your mind roll back,” she said.

Students Laughed

Lane had certainly done that. The class listened, first smiling, then dissolving into laughter again as she described her life as a 3-year-old.

She, her Russian mother and German father--”They met when my father was a soldier in Russia”--and 12 cats and a German shepherd lived in a small apartment over a butcher’s shop in Hamburg.

“One day a neighbor who was a steward on a ship brought us a present. A monkey!” Lane read, launching into an account of a day when the monkey escaped, and her mother bribed it back into its cage with wine and cigarettes.

An assortment of stories followed Lane’s.

Stories of four- and six-hole outhouses; of pulp magazines printed on rough, off-white paper, and the perilous gasoline stove that had a gasoline tank only a few inches from the burners. (Jim Phillips wrote of that stove “Pump too hard and the gas would spew out and flame half way to the ceiling. Mom had permanently singed hair and eyebrows.”)

“Try to dredge up as many feelings as you can,” Springer urged the class. “Don’t worry about trying to write an intellectual piece. We all have, stored away in our memories, the smells . . . the colors we saw . . . the emotions we felt with each experience.

“It’s remembering these that will help you to develop your style of writing.”

As the group dispersed for a break, Springer commented, “People really get to know each other in a class like this. Deep friendships form. And, sometimes, if a part of a life story is painful, there are tears.

“You have to be able to feel trust for the people you are with to read aloud a part of your life that was painful.”

In the parking lot of the Senior Service Center, a slight aroma of the lunchtime pot roast still lingered. People were milling about on their way to various classes. Springer leaned against an iron railing, clutching a cup of mint tea.

“I’ve always been intrigued by how life was lived in earlier days,” she said.

Twenty months ago, when she and her contractor husband, Herb, moved from the San Fernando Valley to Cardiff, Springer covered the walls of their new home with five generations of family pictures. Color photographs of her own eight children and nine grandchildren mingle with sepia images of her stiffly dressed grandparents.

Directed Seniors Center

Her method of teaching life-story writing evolved--”After a few false starts and experiments”--during the 10 years she was director of a Center for Senior Citizens for Los Angeles.

“Clients kept telling me wonderful stories. I felt that these memories should be treasured and preserved.”

As the class began to reassemble, Evelyn McLerd, a retired teacher whose thick white hair was drawn back into a gleaming knot, remarked that she knew from experience how enjoyable it is to have the thoughts and experiences of a parent written down.

McLerd’s mother, Emma Swenson, who was born in Sweden in 1886, described her life in a series of letters written from Huntington Park, in 1954, to a newspaper in Sweden.

“She described being sent out to work at the age of 5. And how it felt to sail to America in steerage at 21. She had a way of making the absolute best of any situation,” McLerd said of her mother. “Her relatives in Nebraska expected her to work as an unpaid farmhand, but she ran away and found a wonderful job as a cook for the president of Burlington Railroad.”

“Howard--where are you in your story today?” Springer asked Howard Greene, who was born in New York in 1921.

“Still in Tokyo, in 1949,” Greene said cheerfully. A cluster of handwritten papers rustled in his hands as he read an account of living in a picturesque apartment with paper-paneled sliding doors, plumbing problems, and a maid whose salary was $12.50 a month.

Grace Butler, after holding up a typed page covered in scribbled afterthoughts--”That’s the way I want you to do it,” Springer assured her--read a story taken from her childhood in the early 1920s, during a yearlong stay in West Virginia with her grandparents. Her grandfather, wounded during the Civil War, had a silver plate installed in his head by an Army surgeon.

Lived Until He Was 90 Despite Plate in Head

“He insisted that he blacked out if he did any heavy work,” Butler said, adding that some of the relatives were a little suspicious about that. “He lived to be 90.”

The members of her classes, Springer said, tend to be a lively, fun-loving group. Most of them are saving their favorite pieces for a paperback book she is organizing. They also keep their eyes open for ideas for the weekly column she writes on senior living for the Citizen newspaper.

Recently, she was asked whether she would take several people who remembered the Depression over to San Dieguito High School, to talk to Marilyn Puddy’s consumer education class. She took along four.

“Their ages ranged from the late 70s to the late 80s,” she said. “The kids loved them.”

At first, Springer said, the high school students had a lot of general questions about the Depression. Questions such as “Did you know it was coming?” (No, all four seniors said, they didn’t.)

“But then they got into comparing life’s basics. Dating, music, getting jobs.

“We take for granted the everyday things of our own life. But in another culture, and another time, they’re fascinating.”