The following article is presented by my good friend, Tom Fiske:
Last July 2nd, the Fullerton (California) College Community Band put on its annual patriotic music performance. It was a large group that performed on the College quad surrounded by a huge crowd of listeners. The listeners brought their own dinners and tried to find spots in the grass in which to sit where the sun was not so beastly hot. Then a cool breeze came up and the music began.
The College puts on a good show, attracting many older folks. They are most often the ones who still believe in patriotism, flag waving and love of country. Many of them also served in the military. We were approaching the 4th of July, an important part of our history. No date was more important to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams than July 4th. They both refused to die until they had seen the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. To some of us, it still is an important date.
As I looked around the quad area I wondered why these folks were really there. I went to be with friends, to listen to the music, to share stories about the past, and to reinforce the ties I had with the past. But there was another gentle attraction few of us recognized. It was the shared act of sitting around the campfire and telling stories that every generation has taken part in as far back as there have been campfires and groups of people to share them.
On July 2nd I noticed small groups of people, probably families, who ate together. Then there were those who recognized each other as members of the same community. And finally, there was the entire group that shared the common experience of Americanism. They enjoyed the music and the remembered hardships of war and military duty. Stories were passed on from one person to another and we learned, just as we had done a thousand generations before.
How many other ways do we meet like this? I wondered. There are church, mosque or synagogue meetings on various days of the week. Back in the 1930’s and 1940’s there were meetings among different families in which people huddled around radio sets to get the latest news and sports. There were and still are gardening clubs and ham radio groups and Boy and Girl Scout meetings.
Before the advent of radio, when people were not reading books, lecturers provided entertainment and a center of focus for groups who wanted to explore the world outside themselves (and maybe satisfy the urge to sit around the old campfire just one more time).
Larger ships of the 1900’s era provided speakers to entertain those bored passengers who traveled from one country to another. In my archives is a 1912 letter written by a U.S. ambassador to Turkey, who told about two such speakers. One was an old duffer who had been involved in the “Charge of the Light Brigade,” one of the bravest military actions ever taken (and one of the dumbest at the same time). It occurred about 68 years previously and the ambassador recalled:
“(I) met an older man named Sir John Blunt who was one of the very few survivors of the “Charge of the Light Brigade” at Balaclava in the Crimean War about 1854. He had been an aide-de-camp of Lord Napier, who led the charge and who was one of the early casualties. Sir John told the story of the Charge in such detail and poignancy that (the letter writer) said he thought he was there.”
“The Charge” inspired poems, stories and books before it was made into a movie. Its action had an iron grip on most who heard the story.
The letter writer told of another of the speakers he heard and came to know who was retired British Surgeon General May:
“May was on the hurried march across the desert to save General “Chinese” Gordon and his men in Khartoum around 1885. It was a terrible march for the 1,200 men who raced across the burning sands. Not all made it. May’s part of this large group consisted of 140 officers and men. Of them, 40 arrived. May was the only officer left in the group. Thirteen other officers had dropped out. May recalled, “Instead of rescuing Gordon and his comrades, we saw instead their heads stuck on pikes ornamenting the walls of the city.” They were two days too late.”
Not only were the passengers fascinated with stories told by people who were actual witnesses, but they also got to hear these stories with personal touches that publishers and editors did not have room for. Genuine history was passed on to other generations.
Don’t forget how we first learned about our ancestors. We were little kids once, in groups where family matters were discussed and people were described. The important things in their lives were brought out and their foibles were laughed at. Later, some of us researched the facts and stumbled into events no one told us about and soon we had an almost complete story. One cousin or another, looking at the same facts, would come up with a different story about the same person. That is when genealogy gets really interesting.
I maintain that it all goes back thousands of generations, when our ancestors sat around their campfires in the evening and entertained each other with their tales of the past. It was a survival mechanism such that those who followed the practice lived longer than those who wandered off by themselves under the watchful eyes of tigers or wolves.
Homer told and retold “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” many times. Others followed him for many generations with recitations before those two stories were written down. Perhaps the tellers saved many lives. In time, the urge to gather together in the evening around a large fire (to keep predators away) and the urge to share epic tales became inseparable.
Some of those stories are important to know by heart because they keep our nation together. How else are we going to reinforce our ties with each other and with the past? How are important times such as Independence Day to be remembered? I personally believe the resurgence of interest in genealogy will do its part.
Genealogists tell stories with the “personal touch,” which adds authenticity to their family histories. They often mention the important stories about how “Great-uncle Willie” was a personal guard to General Washington or some such person. When they repeat such stories, they reintroduce George Washington and his great military and managerial skills. (No kidding, I found a bronze highway marker which contained just such a story about an ancestor. Would a highway sign lie?) By telling our ancestors’ stories, we are telling the nation’s stories. So we need to keep up our good work.
We may be the last links to the past, or perhaps simply those who like to sit in front of a bonfire at night. However, there are many who prefer television sets, whose programs often seem to be designed to dull the mind, allowing the watchers to forget that Bengal tigers may be sneaking up on them.