I’d just finished a stint in the Army and caught on as a reporter for the daily newspaper in Portsmouth, N.H., The Herald. The guy who ran the newsroom was a gruff old-school managing editor named Ray Brighton and he’d trained a lot of rookies like me in the basics of news gathering and writing.
After a couple of weeks on the job he called me to his desk and assigned me to do a story on some local personage. It didn’t sound to me like there was much of a story there, and Brighton immediately sensed my wariness.
“Look, kid,” he growled, “every person walking down the street has a story. You gotta go get it out of ’em.”
These days I think often of Ray Brighton’s words of a half century ago as I sit down with a little high-tech recording device and interview folks around Plainfield who were living here in the second half of the 20th century and have deep roots in and solid memories of the life and times of the community.
The Plainfield Historical Society has breathed new life into an oral history project begun back in 1974 when it recorded some 45 people telling their life stories and reflecting on how people in the town worked and played back in the day.
All of those narrators have now passed away, but their stories live on in electronic form and have been transcribed onto paper. Some were memories that traced way back to the 1890s and others began at the turn of the 20th century and rolled on through the World War I years.
Sadly, nobody picked up the ball and caught the generation that lived through the Great Depression and World War II before their ranks thinned down to just a handful of people. We are trying to make sure we have these survivors’ stories recorded, but most of the recollections we’re capturing begin around 1950.
It gets us to the question of how long someone needs to have lived in Plainfield to be considered a real old-timer, but the reality is: You came here around 1980, you’ve got four decades to tell about; 1970, half a century; before that, all the better.
A lot has happened and a lot has changed in Plainfield in any of those time spans.
Start off with a couple of innocuous questions — talk about your childhood and your family and how you came to be part of the Plainfield population — and the words start to flow. In a score of interviews so far I haven’t met anyone who was reluctant to talk.
In fact, it has often been like a dam breaking with recollections pouring out. Lives of hard work, the raising of families and the events and changes in the community are themes that recur throughout these sessions, which usually last about an hour or so.
I’ve lived in Plainfield more than 75 of my 79 years and was sure I knew most of the town’s accumulated history in that span, but to sit with men who came home from the Korean and Vietnam wars, a couple who taught in local schools for half a century, a guy who built a multimillion-dollar local business out of nothing or a woman who saved her son from drowning in an iced-over pond is to add a vast new dimension to my knowledge and understanding of the town.
There are other themes that run through many of these narratives. There’s pride in community accomplishments, like building a central school, modernizing public services such as snow removal and land-use regulation, and nurturing a live-and-let-live environment where people can be whatever they want to be yet can still count on neighbors’ help whenever misfortune strikes.
But there’s also a measure of sadness about some things, particularly the decline of social interaction as the town has become essentially a bedroom-commuter community. Some lament how the coming of television destroyed local dramatic productions and diminished other traditions. And a few still grieve over how 1960s-era reconstruction of Route 12A took away shade trees and picket fences in Plainfield Plain, costing the place a big piece of its small village atmosphere.
As my old newspaper boss said, everybody’s got a story to tell, and it’s amazing how many are worth hearing — and being preserved.
Steve Taylor lives and farms in Meriden.
