Derry Hill
Home Of The H.C. Auletta Clan
Conversations With My Mother
Stories About The Cabin, Long Island, and Elsewhere
Recorded February through May, 2008
Marjorie Jane (Auletta) (Yarotzkey) (York) Zinkand, age 83, and great-granddaughter Tayelor Hofschulte, age 7 months, Aug 27, 2007 in New York. Photo provided by Jessica.
In February of 2008, I had the idea to start this family website, centered around the Cabin. As I began to write the introduction, I realized that I had forgotten a lot of the basic information, like what year it was bought, how much grandpa paid for it, etc. So I called up my mom to find out all that stuff, as well as any other background info I could gather. Well, thinking about those questions opened the floodgates for her, and she started telling me stories about the early days that brought back memory after memory for both of us. When I hung up, I decided I had to record those stories, now …, it couldn't wait. And I decided it was so cool hearing them in her own voice, that I should post the recordings on the web as part of the family site, so that everyone could listen. The very next morning I drove over to Circuit City and explained what I wanted to do: Record someone over the phone, AND be able to easily transfer it to a computer to post to the internet. I preferred to skip the process of digitizing tape to digital, so wanted a device that could record in either WAV, AIFF, or MP3 format directly. Well, they didn't have anything, but the salesperson recommended I try Radio Shack. Which I did. I went through the whole rigmarole again, explaining what I wanted to do, waving my arms in the air as I spoke, and getting way too excited about the whole thing. Now only one of two things could happen in a situation like that, either he would think I was some amped up nut and slowly back away, or catch the energy and get just as excited. Fortunately for me, it was the latter. He started waving his arms in the air and getting way too excited too, because he had just done a similar thing. So he was like, “Man, I know just what you need, here – use this,” as he grabbed a small digital audio recorder off the shelf, “and then you need this reverse microphone thing that you wear as an earpiece to record both sides of a conversation on a phone,” as he preceded to run up and down the aisles looking for it. Which he couldn't find anywhere in the store. It seems this wasn't his normal store, as he usually worked up in Corvallis and was just covering for someone that day, and wasn't familiar with where they kept everything. “Hold on, let me make some calls,” he said, and preceded to call up his home store in Corvallis, and a few other people from the store we were in, re-explaining every time what it was he was trying to find. Finally, someone told him where it was, and he trots off into the back room and comes out a few minutes later holding his prize over his head, “I got it!”. So after a brief, but detailed explanation of how I should set the whole thing up, and making sure I had some extra batteries, we tallied up the cost, I paid, and I left. I went home and set everything up, tested it out, and called my mom. I wound up talking to her for hours and hours, on about five or six different occasions, and getting a wealth of stories to share. I'm still not done recording them. I have a few from a couple of weeks ago that I still need to edit, and a few more I plan on calling her about. As I get this site together, I hope to get at least one story from everyone on “tape”, including Aunt Dot and Aunt Nicky, and any of our kids who want to share. I think it is so cool just to hear people’s voices.
I consider these stories our family oral history - most of these stories we all grew up hearing - or experiencing - or telling - or all three. But the coolest ones are the stories I never heard before. It gives insight into where our parents came from (in the psychological sense of the word) and hopefully, will give our kids a sense of who we are. If nothing else, they dredge up some old memories from another time, another place.
And one last thing - the audio quality is not great. These were all done over the phone. They have great sound quality for being phone conversations. But they are still phone conversations. Click on the buttons to go to the audio files.