Recorded Voices May Still Need to be Preserved

VINTON - Record the memories before they're gone. Historians have urged that for decades.

But, if you heeded that advice long ago, you may need to follow the lead of the Benton County Women's History Committee and upgrade what you've got.

In the early 1980s, interviewers recorded 36 hours of audiotapes from ten Benton County women at least 80 years old. By 1986 the tapes were edited and combined with pictures into the slideshow, "Her Own Story: Oral Histories of Ten Benton County Women." It traveled the state to stimulate similar projects.

My, how times have changed in a quarter of a century. And those ten subjects have all died.

"Last year I got to thinking," says project director Julie Zimmer (left) of Vinton, "These things are about to be lost. Nobody has tape players. Nobody uses audiocassettes. Nobody uses slide projectors."

Yes, the slides were turning yellow and brittle. The sound quality of tapes could deteriorate.

Using private funds, Mike Kelly, a Vinton videographer, transferred the 35-minute slide/tape show onto a DVD. That program was screened at Vinton's Palace Theater last year by 100 viewers.

"We heard from a lot of people who wanted to see it but couldn't," says Jane LaGrange (right), an original interviewer for the project.

As a result, the show has made the rounds this month, Women's History Month, at care centers and libraries. It will be shown free of charge at 2 p.m. March 25 at the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School in Vinton. That program includes a discussion about the importance of recording first-person interviews.

But, the Benton County group also hopes to preserve the original 36 hours of tape and to digitize more than 2,000 typewritten pages of transcripts. A $550 Iowa Humanities mini-grant this year helps, as does a local contribution from the Gilchrist Trust. Still, additional funds are needed.

"We'll have it put on the Internet," says Julie. "That way any school kid can push some buttons and access this."

"It's amazing," adds Jane. "Back when we were doing this, that was unheard of."

"You look at it in your own lifetime," Julie says. "What will be here for the people when I'm gone?"

That, of course, was the intent in the 1980s.

"I'm the same age these women were when we did this," says Jane, 81. "It just blows my mind."

From nominations, the ten selected were Jennie Koch Beck (left, at the time of the interview, and right, high school graduation in 1922) of Keystone and Belle Plaine, Bess Shurtliff Burrows of Belle Plaine, Nira Primmer Geiger of Vinton, Freida Brehm Geiken of Vinton, Ruth Congwar Mumford of Fremont Township, Dorothy Wiegand Salle of Mount Auburn, Alvena Selken Schroeder of rural Keystone, Allegra Grady Schueler of Van Horne, Gertrude Nellist Smith of rural Vinton and Esther Williams of Vinton.

"Most of them lived into their 90s and one lived to be 103," Jane says.

"We tried to balance it with demographics," Julie says. "Married and not married. With children and without children. Different walks of life. Different socio-economic backgrounds."

"One had only an eighth-grade education," Jane adds. "Others had college degrees."

But all told wonderful stories, whether that was preaching in church, cutting corn in a cannery, weathering the Great Depression or working a lifetime at a daily newspaper.

It is priceless to preserve and listen to these voices, the voices of everyday women recalling life in the 20th Century.