CHILDREN’S HOUR : Tell-Tale Club : A retired radio announcer regales kids--and helps fire young imaginations-- by spinning yarns.
It was a dark and stormy night. Really.
So begins the yarn that storyteller Jim Woodard is spinning for an audience of a dozen or so kids at the Boys & Girls Club of Ventura Bill LeFevre Center.
As the story unfolds, a young man named Bailey, who lives in the woods of South Carolina, is riding his horse over a seven-mile trail to his girlfriend’s house for a party that night.
“He knows a vicious storm is on the way,” Woodard tells his listeners, gathered around a table at the club. “There are flashes of light and thunder. Pow! Pow! Pow!”
Bailey finds shelter in a house, a haunted house, of course, where black cats have a strange affection for crawling into the fire and rolling around in the coals for fun.
And so goes another Friday afternoon session of Woodard’s at the club, where the 64-year-old former radio and television announcer has been entertaining kids 7 to 12 years old for the last year and a half.
Membership in the storytelling club is free, and Woodard donates his time each week.
“Some people like golf--I tell stories,” Woodard said after the 45-minute session recently. “It never gets old because of the enthusiasm of the kids.”
Woodard, whose voice is still deep and resonant from his announcing days, doesn’t just tell a story or two.
When he finishes with one, he asks the kids to recall specific details from the story to test their listening skills. They each rack up points for correct answers and the winners get little prizes at the end of the hour.
He also gives them a chance to test their creative skills. At the end of the story about Bailey and the strange cats, he asked them to come up with a different ending.
Aaron Cox, 11, offered a bloody, ghoulish version that involved a knife-wielding witch who throws Bailey’s decapitated body into the fire and watches as the body emerges from the coals as another black cat.
“Sometimes they come up with conclusions that are better than the originals,” Woodard said.
The club also provides an outlet for kids who have concocted their own stories and want to try them out on other kids.
Diana Miller, 9, offered one about a brother and sister swept overboard on a whale-watching trip. They’re rescued by a whale and emerge from the adventure determined to save the whales from slaughter.
The master storyteller of the group is Nik Dyer, 12, who related his tale, “Cove of Whales,” about a couple of oceanographers who meet in college and fall in love.
“I want to be a writer when I grow up,” Nik said after he finished.
Unlike those of his young audience, most of Woodard’s stories are not original.
He has a few he’s created, which are mostly about his own life. One of them is about a newspaper, “The Sit Down and Read Newspaper,” which he started when he was 11 years old.
Nonetheless, he has collected about 40 stories in his repertoire. He’s also a storyteller at schools and libraries throughout Ventura County and in the Los Angeles area.
His storytelling skills emerged when he was a counselor at Boys Town in Nebraska during the 1950s. One night when the boys were especially rowdy and wouldn’t settle down at bedtime, he told them a story. He was a hit and the stories became a regular feature.
After Boys Town, he got into radio and television, and eventually started his own public relations agency in Santa Barbara. With four children, he was always involved in youth activities.
He and his wife moved to Ventura six years ago where he writes a syndicated newspaper column about real estate and works as a free-lance writer. His children, the second oldest of whom is musician and free-lance writer Josef Woodard, are all grown and have children of their own.
Three years ago he felt the urge to get back into storytelling. He joined the National Assn. for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling, a 7,000-member group that has been gaining momentum since it organized in 1975.
He keeps files on all his stories, always practicing in the car. When he tells one, he doesn’t dart about the room with wild gestures.
But, he says, “I get a little expressive. I enjoy it. In any other setting I’m a quiet, shy guy, but when I tell a story, I get into a new skin.”
The kids seated around the table at the Boys and Girls Club listen intently to his stories, but the session is casual with kids drifting in and out, always keeping an eye on the chocolate-frosted cupcakes to be doled out at the end.
“Most of the kids here are great readers,” he said. Once they are hooked by the story, he has little trouble keeping their attention.
The stories they love the most are ghost stories, said Woodard, and a favorite is called “The Yellow Ribbon,” about a young woman whose head ultimately falls off.
He also throws out riddles to them and tells them anecdotal stories about famous people such as Walt Disney or Abraham Lincoln or “Peanuts” cartoonist Charles Schulz.
Woodard doesn’t confine his group, which ranges from eight to 20 kids on any Friday, to just a room at the Boys & Girls Club.
For the second year in a row, he took 12 of them on a whale-watching trip last week out near Anacapa Island. Island Packers took the kids on the excursion at no cost.
Woodard expects the trip to really pay off at the next storytelling session.
By then, the kids will have tapped into their creative juices and come up with some great stories about the trip.
* WHERE AND WHEN
Jim Woodard’s Storytelling Club for kids 7-12 years old meets at 3:30 p.m., Fridays, at the Boys & Girls Club Bill LeFevre Center, 1929 Johnson Drive, Ventura. There is no charge. For information, call the club at 642-5414.