Orality is why we are all pursuing the arts of storytelling. I never got to have a storyteller tell stories to my kindergarten and first grade classes. Or second, or third-grade class, or, come to think of it, any class at all. I realize that I first heard stories at home.
But almost all of us have grown up with family stories. I used to think of the stories as familial myths. The first stories in my life were from my father, about Prince Edward Island and Gloucester, Massachusetts, and my mother, about driving across the country in a ’39 coupe, with two children aged six and thirteen, in her fourth month carrying me; four souls to start a new life in San Francisco toward the end of WWII.
Our family storytelling faced strong headwinds with the advent of TV. San Francisco is where television was invented in 1927, but its growth was delayed by the war. By 1950 television sets began to become affordable for middle-class Americans. Six million homes at that time had TV sets. But radio was still the predominant form of mass entertainment and communication across the US since the content of television lacked variety and sophistication. On the radio I listened to 10-to-15-minute comedy sketches of Fibber McGee and Molly and the crime sleuth series, The Shadow. Dave McElhatton (KCBS radio) read the comics of the San Francisco Chronicle. The highlight for me was hearing the ongoing saga of Prince Valiant. However, I became a devotee (at five years old) of the very first animated children’s TV program (1950) called “Crusader Rabbit.” It consisted of 4-minute satirical stories, each with its own title, strung together to create a series.
I grew less fond of TV as it became ubiquitous. I couldn’t adequately articulate my dislike of TV. So, my father introduced me to “foreign” films and regional community theater when I was ten. Films like The Red Balloon, Mon Oncle (My Uncle), Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, Wee Geordie and Tight Little Island informed my puberty and in high school my first boyfriend introduced me to Japanese Cinema and Akira Kurosawa. To this day I love samurai/kung fu movies and popcorn when I just need to be mindless. Here is Yojimbo by Akira Kurosawa.
But it was in June of 1963, shortly after graduating from high school, that I first heard “Bert and I.” “Bert and I” is a collection of relatively short stories (4-20 minutes long) told by Marshall Dodge and Robert Bryan, both Yale graduates, that chronicled the dry humor and quirkiness of the traditional folk of “Down East” Maine, told in a Maine accent. Dodge, the “I”, and Bryan, the “Bert” (Bryan was pastor-pilot that flew to settlements in western Quebec to collect stories and preach the good word) did extensive cultural and story research for “Bert and I” which was syndicated and published and introduced the regionally distinct Maine accent to the world. I am still moved by the dry hilarity of down east humor.
It was the success of “Bert and I” that inspired Garrison Keillor to create the famous Lake Wobegon series that started on radio in 1974. The weekly stories from “Prairie Home Companion” became a national phenomenon of self-deprecating Minnesotans that overestimated their capacities and qualities. At first, I found it funny, but after a while I began to feel uncomfortable hearing the contrived humor and put-downs of ordinary folks that flowed from Keillor’s story writing.
In 1997 Berns and I moved to Bellingham, WA, 25 miles south of the Canadian border, and discovered we could receive CBC (Canadian Broadcast Corporation), Radio One, from Victoria, BC in addition to CBC TV via cable. Every morning we would listen weekdays to Julie Nusrallah (a Canadian mezzo-soprano) host her classical music show, “TEMPO” on CBC Radio One. Forgetting that it was a weekend, I tuned into CBC and heard a man named Stuart McClean telling a story about Dave and Morley and their two kids, on a program called “the Vinyl Café.” I laughed until my eyes teared up. It became a Sunday morning ritual for me and Berns to listen to Vinyl Café.
It was unlike any other radio or TV program I’d ever encountered. And it was the first time I began to understand that relatively short oral stories (and some lengthy ones) could bring warmth and laughter into hundreds of thousands of lives, via radio. Years later I discovered that McClean’s unique storytelling style resulted from his efforts at overcoming a severe stutter in his childhood.
In format, Vinyl Café was a musical variety show with performances that ranged from famous Canadian performers like the McGarrigle Sisters, Gordon Lightfoot and Buffy St. Marie to local performers of the towns and cities to which the Vinyl Café production team traveled. The team consisted of researchers that spent a week ahead of the production crew, interviewing local residents to glean stories about the town, its history and notable citizens. McClean took that research and created stories that became part of the performance with the live local audience often laughing the hardest and loudest when they heard Stuart McClean tell it to all of Canada (and northern US states that could receive the programs). Within the 21-year life of the Vinyl Café there are over 400 episodes (the first in the US was via KUOW of Seattle). One episode actually took place on board the dome observation car of the transcontinental passenger train, The Canadian, replete with a live audience. Sadly, Stuart McClean died in 2016 of melanoma. All of Canada mourned, flags lowered to half-staff for a week.
What McClean did was weave together the various stories of the extremely diverse cultures of Canada, (Quebecois, Athabascan, Iroquois, Inuit, Italian, Scottish, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Parsi, Buddhist…), and did so in ways that allowed people to laugh at their humanity. McClean said “I have no agenda to spark…I just think there should be a conversation. We have something to learn from each other – we’re very different.” Canada’s favorite fictional family– Dave, Morley their kids, friends and neighbors–became the template to break down cultural isolation and barriers in the long process of assimilation in whatever form that would take and celebrated the tapestry of Canadian life without pompousness or divisiveness. And this is why, I’m now realizing, I am in class learning to tell my stories, thanks to all of you! I leave you with a Christmas story.
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