Charlestown seniors pen essays for Grub Street Memoir Project

by Sandra Miller
Charlestown Bridge

Most publishers know that everyone has at least one good story in them. The Grub Street writers on Boylston Street know this, too. They gathered the stories of Boston seniors and are publishing them in their second volume of collected essays in “My Legacy is Simply This.”
It’s the first time that seniors from Charlestown, East Boston, Mattapan and Chinatown have been published, and certainly the first time they’ve participated in a book signing like last Thursday in the Borders Bookstore on School Street downtown.
The book contains dozens of stories from seniors young and young at heart, discussing a wide span of history -- about World War II to Vietnam, from the Depression to the turmoil of the 1960s, discussing white flight and the Japanese occupation of China. Many chose to focus on the happier parts of their lives, such as dating, making friends, and eating their parents’ food from the Old Country. They drop names about businesses and nightclubs long closed, beaches long gone, and loved ones long dead but not forgotten. Their essays are fresh, unforgettable, first-person history lessons of our communities.
“It’s nice to have some historical family photos to put in the book,” said Rizzuto. The author photos are of vibrant older residents. “They’re not just people from the past. They’re still involved in their communities.”
The Memoir Project recruited seniors through the Commission of Affairs of the Elderly, and was the brainchild of the Mayor’s Office and Grub Street director Chris Castellani. For Grub Street, it’s one of two community outreach groups, the other aimed at area youth. The memoir project began in 2006 with “Born Before Plastic,” which held stories from seniors from Roxbury, South Boston and the North End. The next volume will include Mission Hill and Jamaica Plain.
“The Elderly Commission wanted to offer something that was new and different, that offered enrichment for some of its elders,” said Rizzuto. “Grub wanted to do some outreach.” In turn, it not only enriched the participants, but also the instructors and anyone who reads the book.
In Charlestown, it attracted the literary talents of William Boyle, Margaret M. Spellman, Arnold Ross, Barbara McTigue, Eileen Locke, Marie Hubbard, Marion Wood, Peter Looney, Beverly Hayes, and Carol Waller.
For eight weeks, instructor and author Michele Seaton took the memoir and essay class lessons she usually delivers at Grub Street classrooms on Boylston Street, and brought them locally. The seniors were asked to write about their childhood, their neighborhood and family, and how they met their spouses. Seaton and other mentors didn’t write the pieces for them, they only acted as guides.
“If someone wrote shorter pieces, then we’d include two shorter pieces than one longer piece,” Rizzoto said. “A few have two and three pieces in the book.”
To Rizzuto’s knowledge, only one author had to discontinue the program, due to a hip replacement. Otherwise, there was a healthy interest that may have spurred a second career for several participants.
William Boyle, 64, of 230 A Main Street in Charlestown wrote about his 32 years as a firefighter, from May to Labor Day.
Retired, Boyle appreciated the time he could spend on the project, and being able to speak on a cable show about the project, as hosted by fellow author Peter Looney.
“There’s four or five of us from Charlestown went on Thursday,” he said. “We wanted to just go and thank them for all the time they spent with us. They worked hard on it. The program was great.”
“It was my first time that I actually done something legible,” he said. “I wasn’t much of a writer. My spelling’s atrocious, my sentences run together, I didn’t know what I was getting into.”
They coaxed him to add descriptions, to cut down on the run-on sentences, and were patient with him. He left out his awards and medals, and his family life, and about serving in Germany during the Vietnam years. “It was supposed to be about the job itself,” he explained. “I enjoyed being a firefighter.”
“I say the instructors of Grub Street are very good,” he said. “They go around and critique you, they show what you did and didn’t do, you fix it, and add on a piece every week. After about 10 weeks the story was just about done, and they took things out and added things in. They had patience unbelievable. We all said ‘Wow, writing is tougher than we thought.’ Writing is not the easiest things in the world.”
But when he gave out copies of his book to friends and family, everyone liked it, he said. Fire chaplain Dan Mahoney is also showing the around a few firehouses.
Fellow Townies Marie Hubbard and her sister, Marion Wood, contributed a few stories. “My sister asked if I could come along to the meetings,” she recalled. “ I like to write anyway, and the idea of writing about the past was very interesting.”
“They gave us subjects to write about and then they picked out which ones they thought would be readable,” recalled the lifelong Charlestown resident. “I thought a lot of it was very amateurish, but it was a lot of fun. It was really one of the funnest times I’ve had a in a long time, remembering the old history. We did it ourselves. For better or for worse it was our own stuff.”
As participants read their stories aloud, her fellow writers all chimed in with their own memories of growing up in Charlestown. “There was some people in the group who weren’t old townies,” she recalled. “They weren’t familiar with some of the things we were saying.”
For her, she traveled down sentimental lane. “I had the unfortunate instance of bursting out crying at one point,” she recalled. “I guess that means there were a lot of pleasant memories I had forgotten for a long time.”
She loved writing about the friend she’s had since she was little. “I am glad I had a chance to give her a little credit,” she said of her friend, “She loved it. We’re more like sisters than my sister. You’ll tell your friend something you won’t tell your sister. I’m going to see her next week I think. I just turned 80 and she just turned 80.”
Meanwhile, she and her sister had a little competition going. “I thought to myself, ‘I wish I had remembered to put this in. She wrote about the house we lived in on High Street for 10 years -- that’s where all the interesting things happened.”
She giggled when she pointed out that her son is a Harvard-trained writer, and she got published before she did. “He was impressed by his mother,” she said. “He said, ‘You’re published, mom!’ I felt good about that.”
“I hope they’ll do another class. I’d love to go again. It’s great for the history of the town. Charlestown is now nothing like it was when I was a child. My grandchildren, they just couldn’t get it how life was back then. It came as a surprise to them that people didn’t always had cars and televisions. It was a little history for them and that’s good. I think they looked up to us a little more. If they had a program I’d keep on writing. I write for myself, when something happens. I like to write so I can remember things – as you get older, you forget things. That’s what I should have been, a writer. All my children write pretty well, it seems to be a family thing.”
“Some of the seniors have told me they are still writing,” said Rizzuto. “One woman, from Roxbury, said she just kept going and wrote a whole memoir.”
That’s created a new project for Grub Street, to figure out how to keep the writing program going in local libraries.
“Probably the real high point of the project is when the seniors see themselves in print for the first time,” said Rizzuto. “They are so absolutely thrilled. It affirms that they are important, and people want to hear what they have to say. The teachers are very interested in their stories, but when they see themselves in print it’s a whole new ballgame.”