Free Stuff — Julie's Story

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As an editor at the Daily News in Longview, I recall a brainstorming session to come up with names for a new soft feature we planned to write about people. Jaded journalists looked at me as though I were a naïve optimist when I offered the trite but true title: “Everyone’s special.” Although it fell flat as a title for the feature, my offering is a deeply held personal belief.

Have you ever sat at the foot of an older person—a grandparent, parent, neighbor or friend—and asked what life was like when they were young? Wise words flowed from their hearts and souls as they recalled adventures, foibles, trials and triumphs.

Florence Gibbs Hayes, a neighbor I adopted as a surrogate grandmother, shared her precious stories with me. I listened raptly as she recalled childhood days on a Montana ranch with nine siblings and a hired hand. She told about falling asleep after hiding under her bed, riding horse-drawn sleighs to skate on a frozen lake, life in nursing school where she developed her fondness for pie, literally bumping into a much older doctor as she rounded a corner at a hospital, and seeking solace and time to think at Timberline Lodge before agreeing to marry a man more than 20 years her senior. She shared stories of their daily life near a Longview lake and tales of trips to Europe, Polynesia and the Virgin Islands.

I’ll never forget Florence, who died in 1993. I visit her at the cemetery where she’s buried next to her husband, near the same church where they married 60 years before she died. I met Florence in the twilight of her life, long after she buried her husband, but the blessings of her life remain in my memory. How I wish I had recorded those wonderful stories she shared!

I won’t have similar regrets in the future. My mother-in-law, who died in 1987 four years before I married my husband, took the time to write in two spiral notebooks the tales of her early childhood and life as a young teacher in the 1920s. Now transcribed, edited and interwoven with photographs, Lucy’s memoirs grace our bookshelves, next to the life story of her husband, Almer Zander, who died in 2001 at the age of 99 years and two months. His book is appropriately titled Spanning a Century.

My own parents shared their stories on videotape and, later, my mother filled in gaps on audiocassettes. The story of their lives is captured within the pages of a beautiful hardcover book titled A Circle of Love.

These books and tapes are the only way my children will ever know three of their four grandparents. But they will know them intimately, hearing them tell their tales in their own voices, recounted in keepsake books that forever preserve these precious memories.

Our bookshelf soon will hold another volume—letters my husband sent to his family while serving in Vietnam in 1968. Perhaps we’ll tuck that one next to The Magic Kingdom, Disneyland, September 1997; or Traipsing Through Europe in 1993, which records the whirlwind month-long trip my mother and I took to Europe. I’m finishing our wedding photo scrapbook as well as a booklet I’ve tentatively called, Pregnant at 40: A Blessing in a Surprise.

These are just some of the many chapters of my life. I would be honored and humbled to put my interviewing, editing and writing skills to work for you. Please let me turn your tales into treasures.

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Learn more about how you can create your personal memoir, family memory book, oral history or spiritual legacy. See samples of our memoirs and memory books, learn more about Julie Zander, or contact us to begin your project today.

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