Tell Your Story

In 1991, when he was 80 years old, my father surprised us by buying and learning to use a personal computer. This was no small feat. Although he had been fond of electronic gadgetry all his life—he once built a color TV for the fun of it—I was impressed by the zeal with which he went about learning his way around unforgiving, recalcitrant DOS.

Within a few weeks he had mastered the rudiments of the personal computer, was logged on to Prodigy, and was doodling around with an extremely primitive graphics application called “Instant Artist.” It was through working with Instant Artist that I discovered my father’s abiding love of cheesy clip-art—a love wholly free of ironic implications. For the next few years I would regularly receive letters and birthday cards emblazoned with the most dreadful depictions imaginable of birthday cakes and party hats, cobbled together with a certain endearing artlessness. I would never have been able to convey to him the soulless cheapness of computer clip-art, and as this marked the first time I had ever received any sort of letter or birthday greeting from him, I didn’t press the issue.

My father’s love for Instant Artist didn’t wane, but I believe that after having conquered the realm of the visual arts, he hungered for expression in other avenues. It may also have been that he felt the need to justify the expense of the equipment—it was a 10-megabyte machine after all—to my mother, who had come to wonder whether so much money for a fancy birthday-card-and-holiday-banner-maker was justified. So a few months after purchasing the computer he obtained a copy of WordPerfect 4.0.

After learning the rudiments of the application, and sending short notes to everyone he knew, my father began to collect his memories of his childhood and youth. With time on his hands and the means to quickly set down his thoughts, he accumulated a large amount of reminiscence in a surprisingly short time. Toward the middle of his manuscript, as one recollection led in turn to another, he often found himself out of bed in the middle of the night, setting down some new anecdote in the blue light of the monitor. He produced about 80 pages and then, after correcting and printing those, quickly produced about 60 more of miscellaneous stories, facts and memories.

It is a remarkable document. My father wrote very much the way he spoke, and while not on the level of literature, it is a tremendously natural, witty, and enjoyable narrative detailing his early years up to the time he left Pomona College in 1933. It codifies a great deal of family history and provides a vital context within which familiar anecdotes can be better understood. But it is more than that. On the most basic level, it is a slender textual link to an otherwise unrecoverable past.

My father died quite suddenly in 1995, and his sister Jean, who was five years his senior, followed in 1997. Just as suddenly I found myself the repository of a great deal of family history and artifacts, many of which I had never known existed. There were so many questions, but with both of them dead there was no one left who could supply me with answers. My father’s brief memoir has been a window into that earlier time, and has provided a setting in which I can posit likely answers to my questions. The light it gives is not great, but it is sufficient to illuminate much that would otherwise be forever sealed in darkness. Moreover, it provides a vivid self-portrait that will hereafter differentiate him from the clip-art “ancestors” in the rest of the family tree, long after all of us who knew him are gone as well.

Although his writing has the most significance for his own family, I believe that anyone would find these recollections entertaining, not solely for his skill as a breezy raconteur but because they are steeped in such a strong essence of the early twentieth century. Much of my understanding and appreciation for Pasadena, Los Angeles and Claremont in that vanished time are a direct result of my father’s memoirs. Through his specific experience I can begin to understand what it was like to be alive then, and have a more genuine appreciation for the times, the people, and the choices they made.

Each of us stands by a window, a window on our lives that will be walled over for eternity upon our death unless we preserve it by recording as much of our experience and environment as we can. Each of us has a duty—to ourselves as much as for those we leave behind—to tell his or her story, however plain and unremarkable it may seem. Time grinds slowly on and the quotidian is rendered exotic by the distance.

To my mind this has always been the fundamental purpose of the Oak Leaf: a forum in which the past and the present meet and mingle under the aegis of common fraternal experience. This has long been a place where the “older generation” (and I recall when that used to mean those from the class of ‘21, although ‘51, ‘61 and—dare I say it—’82 now qualify as sufficiently elderly) brushed against Actives and recent alums, each gaining a better sense of the other’s outlook and experience. Some aspects of lives lived then have a long-ago-and-far-away quality that seems hopelessly removed from the present, but there are other aspects of fraternity life that ring continuously and repeatedly throughout the generations with the regularity of a well-oiled clock. We are all made richer for the exchange of these stories.

So my charge to those in the “older” generation is to find a way to set down your recollections of the people, places and events that made up your daily experience at Pomona and within the fraternity, and send it to us, whether “for publication” or not. Our growing archive already includes the collected works of Blackie Smith ‘25, in his nineties and still kicking, who took that charge to heart years ago and is determined that the world will not forget he lived. And for the rest of us—those of my “middle aged” generation (it’s still a shock to write that, although it is now technically true) and especially those fresh out of Pomona or still in school—we mustn’t wait until our retirement to start compiling the anecdotes, experiences, and friendships that made up our time in Nu Alpha Phi.

The sobering fact is that in 100 years time we will all be reduced to dust. By the contributions we make here in the Oak Leaf we can subvert the passage of time by keeping a window, however small and obscured, open onto the times in which we lived. It may not qualify as immortality, but there is a certain small comfort in knowing we may one day be gone, but not forgotten.

Chris Hall