Different Drum: Doing the best job possible to re-tell history
I wrote this on a weekday that falls between two September weekends where small town “cemetery tours” are featuring local history. These two annual tours, Union City’s “Riverside (Cemetery) Memories” and Athens’ “Tombstone Tours and Town Tales,” are set within community cemeteries and staged by the Society for Historic Preservation and the Athens Area Historical Society.
For the past decade, I have been involved with both cemetery tours, whether as an attendee, an actor, a publicist or a photographer. Which capacity matters naught to me because the histories at the heart of the individual portrayals and the story depictions are absolutely fascinating and educational. Whatever role I have leaves me steeped in local folklore and appreciation for those who have come before me. I’m not alone in feeling that. Many people who come to watch are impressed by the information that’s shared.
Admittedly, the retelling of local history isn’t for everyone. There are no car chases, elaborate sets or special effects. By the nature of their subjects and the earlier eras covered, they are overwhelmingly low-tech. But interestingly, the absence of modern technology in historical program delivery only adds to the timeless charm of re-enactments, especially juxtaposed to today’s increasingly complex and fast-paced world.
What wonderful respite on a warm, late summer or early fall day to head to an older, mostly shaded cemetery with neighbors, friends and family and get to listen to neighbors, friends and family share the stories of days past when dearly departed (although sometimes not so dear) neighbors, friends and family still roamed the earth. It’s much better than sitting in history class or reading a history book alone.
Of course, this is only my perspective on cemetery tours as an important source of local history. Other people view history differently, as evidenced by these radically different quotes about it:
“History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there,” said philosopher, poet, literary and cultural critic George Santayana, who hailed from Madrid and departed this world 70 years ago.
Yes, historical accounts of people and events are subjectivity-prone. There’s no getting around it. But to the extent possible, given an all-volunteer workforce, time constraints, lack of monetary resources and unavailability of public information on the events and lives of the subjects featured, the organizations staging cemetery tours do their best to provide accurate local history information, albeit slices of it versus the whole pie.
That said, local history researchers, Bobbie Mathis from Union City and Cle Bauer from Athens, do a terrific job of mining what they can from the sources at their disposal. In coming up with the scripts for the former Union City residents I’ve played, I try to weave their lives within the context of what was happening statewide, nationally and globally in their era.
For instance, I recently portrayed pianist and business owner Neal Radebaugh, whose musical career was launched in 1915 demonstrating sheet music for other pianists at Woolworth’s. I shared that during WWI, radio was in its infancy so people learned sheet music by hearing it played live.
“History is not the past but a map of the past, drawn from a particular point of view, to be useful to the modern traveler,” said Henry Glassie, professor emeritus of Indiana University in Bloomington who researches folklore and folklife.
Glassie’s conceptualization of history closely aligns with the content and context of local cemetery tours. As someone journeying through modern times, I appreciate how paying attention to the lessons of history can spare us the reinvention-of-the-wheel kind of unnecessary activity.
But unfortunately, as English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley, best known for his novel "Brave New World," summarized, modern travelers come up short on the learning curve. According to Huxley, “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”
The repetition of past mistakes is the generational curse our mother warned us about. It’s also what makes cemetery tour attendance infinitely important — to absorb the past lessons of innovation, hard work, risk-taking and perseverance necessary to help us extricate ourselves from the present pickles in which we find ourselves.
— Kristy Smith’s Different Drum humor columns are archived at her blog: diffdrum.wordpress.com.
This article originally appeared on Coldwater Daily Reporter: Different Drum: Doing the best job possible to re-tell history
