Interview With My Great-Uncle, Essay Example

For this project, I sat down to talk with my great uncle Phil at his dining room table with great big mugs of hot coffee between us.  It was raining out and we watched the birds at the feeders off of his back porch and I started asking him about what things were like when he was a kid. I knew that he had grown up in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, during the height of the Depression (he was born in 1930), but I did not know that much about the details of his life. I found out a lot.

As we slowly worked our way through the mugs of coffee, he started telling me about Sand Springs. It was a very small town, about seven miles west of Tulsa, and was founded by a man named Charles Page; he had been a very wealthy man in Tulsa itself but then had married his sixteen-year-old housemaid and moved out west to found the town since his wife had not been accepted by Tulsa society, such as it was.  Uncle Phil remembers the widow and orphan colony that Page had founded just outside of town.

Uncle Phil was the middle child of five, and had three brothers and one sister (the youngest).  His father had been abusive and he and Uncle Phil’s mother divorced when Phil was still a little boy.  Phil told me that this was really shocking in the those days and that his mother, who was choir director at her local church, gave up the position after the divorce at the request of her minister since he did not want her to set a bad example for the children, being a divorcee. Uncle Phil, his siblings and his mother all moved into a three-bedroom house with his grandmother and his mother worked as a seamstress in a local sheet factory to support them all. Phil remembers that they ate a lot of beans for dinner and oatmeal for breakfast (both of which he loves to this day) and they had a vegetable garden, their own chickens, and even a milk cow: Uncle Phil remembers as a boy, a man would come down the back alley to collect all the cows, take them to pasture outside of town, then return them in the evening.  They were poor, but looking back on it, Uncle Phil realizes how lucky they were: they always had food in their bellies, a roof over their heads and a grandmother to take care of them.

Uncle Phil has a pretty remarkable life: he left Sand Springs and went to school on the G.I. bill, getting his bachelor’s degree in English from Northwestern in Talequah, Oklahoma, then his master’s degree from Vanderbilt. He taught English, humanities, and philosophy in London, Paris, Rome and Sardinia, taking his family with him all over Europe, finally returning to the United States in his fifties and retiring from teaching when he hit 65. He spends much of his time now watching and feeding the birds on his porch, writing, sketching, and playing with his terrier, Amanda and his five cats, all of whom are rescue animals.

I learned a lot about him when we sat down and talked like this and I thought it was pretty amazing, in days before scholarships and student loans, that a kid from a very poor family in the tiny little town in Oklahoma would be able to go to college and get a degree that would allow him to travel all over the world.  I laughed a lot when he talked about how he and his friends would pile into an old Studebaker and go out to a farm out of town to steal watermelons. I cried when he talked about how much it hurt when his grandmother died of cancer when Phil himself was in his early twenties.  It was really amazing to hear about the stuff that you read in history books—like the Great Depression or the end of World War II – and how older people remember those things – how they did not read about them, they actually livedthrough them.  It gave me a really different feel for history and how big events like wars have such profound effects on average, everyday people.  I am really glad I did this interview.