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Marketing Project Has Been'Life-Changing' |  |
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Lindsay Kastner (804) 649-6058 lkastner@timesdispatch.com January 4, 2005 Local ad agency produces unique learning tool: oral history of Va.'s war veterans Tom Kennedy is, basically, an advertiser. About five years ago, he started work on a project whose target audience would be children. It was not your typical marketing job. Kennedy and his partners at the Virginia War Memorial recently finished Volume 1 of "Virginians at War," a project that records -- on VHS and DVD the oral histories of Virginia war veterans. Many educators see oral history as a teaching tool that is hard to match. After completing the first leg of this project, Kennedy said he understands why. Kennedy & Green, the Richmond-based communications company of which Kennedy is vice president and creative director, has so far interviewed 750 veterans for the project, which comes with a teaching guide and is correlated to the state Standards of Learning. "Communications company is sort of a fancy word for ad agency," Kennedy said. The War Memorial project, he said, is "not the sort of thing you think you'll do, and it has been the most rewarding project." Kennedy conducted the interviews with most of the veterans for the project, which is divided into short chapters. Some cover wartime events such as Pearl Harbor and Iwo Jima. Others take on subjects such as prisoner-of-war experiences. "It has been a life-changing project," Kennedy said. He said he believes the spoken accounts of war will grip school children as much as they have gripped him. "If a kid's going to read a book, that's sort of level one," Kennedy said. "If he looks at The History Channel, that's sort of level two. And when he looks at one of our programs, they love it, because it's real people." Aside from a brief introduction that highlights the war theaters on a world map, the programs eschew narration in favor of the veterans' own stories, pasting together clips from multiple interviews along with vintage film footage and photographs. Professor Charles Perdue of the University of Virginia said oral history -- personal history from people who remember helps students learn a side of a subject that they might miss if they stick to textbooks. "The standard history books are about great men. . . . That leaves most of us out," said Perdue, who teaches English and folklore and is at work on a book about families who were uprooted from their land to make way for Shenandoah National Park. His own family lineage includes English royalty, which is easy to trace because that class of people was well-documented. But that's only a small part of his family line. "All my white-trash ancestry, they didn't have those kinds of records," Perdue said. Oral history can fill in gaps left by documented history, he said, and it can light a fire in kids who might be uninspired by dry texts. Perdue suggested that students embark on their own oral-history projects by interviewing family or community members. "Depending on the age of the kids," he said, "it's one way of getting them interested in things by looking at their own backgrounds. "You need to know where you're coming from." The Virginians at War project aims to give students a notion of their collective history, while keeping the individual stories of World War II veterans alive preserving the oral histories of a generation. "We'll never have this again. They're dying at a tremendous rate a day," said Anne Cabell Jordan, an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who worked for Kennedy & Green to correlate the project to the Virginia SOLs. "It will immortalize them, but also what they did." In the interviews, grandfatherly men dressed in sweaters and aloha shirts and garrison caps speak of ships burning in Pearl Harbor, of the steak dinner they were served just before D-Day and the confusion they faced as they landed behind German lines. "We didn't know where we were," said Lt. Col. Joseph DeGenaro as he described an airborne assault on Normandy. "We were briefed on where we were supposed to land, but nobody landed where they were supposed to land." They spoke of charging through water colored by the blood of their comrades. Capt. Harold D. Jefferson, a former prisoner of war, cried as he recalled watching "the swastika come down and the Stars and Stripes go up" over Moosberg, Germany, after being liberated from his prison camp by Gen. George Patton's 14th Armored Division. Another former POW, Staff Sgt. Lawrence W. "Bill" Hulcher, demonstrated an enduring sense of humor as he recounted some of his wartime memories. Hulcher recalled being led to a train station, hands wired behind his back, after his plane was shot down. "I saw one of the prettiest girls I think I ever saw in my life, a pretty blond German girl, and I winked at her 'cause she smiled at me," Hulcher said in his interview. "And a guard saw me wink at her, and I still suffer for where that man beat me." Hulcher laughed a little at the recollection. But Hulcher, who served as a B-17 gunner during World War II, could not laugh about all of his experiences. "You don't make too many friends in the military," he said, "'cause somebody is always dying." Peter Barringer, who teaches English and creative writing at Thomas Dale High School in Chesterfield County, has brought war veterans into his classroom to discuss experiences that relate to literature the students are studying. When his students read Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," a book about those who fought in Vietnam, they hear from a teacher who served there. "It's different than hearing me lecture, which they hear 183 days a year," said Barringer, who is too young to have served in Vietnam. Oral-history presentations allow students to get answers to questions on topics in which Barringer may not be an authority. "So often they look at me as, hey you're the teacher, you should know everything," Barringer said. "It gives them a different perspective." Because oral history portrays events as an individual remembers them, it's a teaching tool that can present history in a colored light. One person's experience may differ from another's or memories may simply shift over time. Steven Nigro, one of Barringer's colleagues at Thomas Dale, has also used firsthand accounts in his 10th-grade world history classes. An ironworker who was injured at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 discussed with Nigro's students "the difference in what the media is able to tell you and what the government is trying to hide." Nigro said teachers should explain the importance of perspective to their students. "Sometimes the explanation is given beforehand and sometimes it's given afterward, depending on what lesson you want them to take," he said. Perdue said few resources offer truly objective facts. "You always get an individual's perspective -- no matter who does the history," he said. Textbooks may not be truly objective and the same goes for historic documents. For instance, Perdue said, early census records were very much the product of the census taker's opinion. "You could be listed as black, mulatto or colored or any number of others, regardless of how you might perceive yourself," he said. Perdue said it can be helpful, when using oral histories, to gather several from multiple perspectives. Volume I of the Virginians at War project includes interviews from a multitude of veterans, though most are white men. Jon Hatfield, executive director of the Virginia War Memorial, said the response to the Virginians at War project has been enthusiastic. "Everyone we heard from was very supportive and said there was no other resource that helped them teach history like this one," Hatfield said. Teachers, he said, have told him the project fills a void. In response to their requests, Volume II, due out this year, will include segments on Korea, Vietnam and more World War II history. Hatfield said he thinks there are two reasons the programs are so successful. One: the immediacy of first-hand accounts. "This is someone who was there in the foxhole." Two: the medium. Young people bred on video and computer games respond better to something audio and visual "as opposed to just books," Hatfield said. Jeff Arco, an eighth-grade history teacher at Stonewall Jackson Middle School in Hanover County, had high praise for the project. "I've used bits of it, and the kids respond to it . . . and I know other teachers in the building are using it," he said. Some of Arco's students have also created oral-history projects of their own, recording interviews with veterans and using the footage to produce three documentaries. The first, completed several years ago, was a montage that included 17 veterans who served in wars from World War II to the Persian Gulf. The second focused on Pearl Harbor and used interviews from both veterans and people who were children living in the area at the time of the attack. The most recent film shows the interviews of five veterans who participated in the D-Day invasion. Arco said a former student who worked on the first film as an eighth-grader chose the experience as the subject of her entry for a Veterans of Foreign Wars essay contest that she entered last year, as a high school junior. "What these people had said to her obviously stuck with her," Arco said. "Books don't stick with you that way, at least textbooks usually don't." Nigro and Barringer have had their students embark on their own oral-history exercises as well. They said they would bring speakers into the classroom more often if they could. "It's tough getting any kind of outside help in the classroom because of the SOLs," Nigro said. "I think it's a shame that we have the constraints that we do because oral history is a resource that's not tapped often enough." Barringer said, despite state standards, he can be more flexible than his colleagues in the history department, whose lesson plans he said are "SOL-driven." The main thing holding him back from using more oral history in the classroom is "availability of speakers," Barringer said. "I can basically find a way to tailor any available speaker into my curriculum," he said. "They're just great teachable moments. It's someone who's been there, done that." Could students benefit from the inclusion of more oral history in the classroom? U.Va.'s Perdue said he is certain students could benefit from more, but he posed an alternate question as well. "Can there be too much?" asked the professor who teaches his students the value of gathering oral histories. Perdue said a Library of Congress project under way to gather interviews of all the living veterans of World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War would mean archiving 9 million interviews. "What are you going to do with tape recorded interviews of 9 million people?" Perdue asked. The Library has created an online database that lists contributors and information from the project that will be made available to researchers who visit the collection. "It's the American way that we've got to do it big and national, but that may not be the best way," he said. "I think the best way is to start with a class of kids." |