On May 28, 2022 I celebrated my 70th birthday. I received some great birthday gifts from my family. The most unique gift came from my oldest son, Trey. Prior to receiving this gift, I only had one short video clip of my mother making a few comments a few months before her passing and no recordings of my Dad's voice. Click on the player below to hear the interview. Be sure to not miss the "Rest of the story" as Paul Harvey used to say in Trey's Background comments below.
Background
During my sophomore year at Churchill High School, my U.S. History teacher, Mr. Jennings, gave us the unique assignment of interviewing someone that lived through the Great Depression. I decided to interview my grandparents, C.A. and Edna Mae Gerfers (known to me as Pam-paw and Mam-maw). This interview, which took place at my house in North Central San Antonio in the spring of 1985, was originally recorded on a cassette tape. After I turned in my report on the interview (which is now lost to posterity), I tossed the tape into a drawer with a lot of other tapes and didn’t really think about it much. At some point I have a memory of rediscovering the tape several years later, only to find that I had taped music over it.
My recollection of the tape and the interview then faded away until January of 2022, when I was going through a bunch of old stuff that my mother had kept for me. She had created boxes with keepsakes for each of her three sons and among the many report cards, programs, photos, and letters, I came across this tape, labeled “Great Depression Interview with Mam-maw and Pam-paw April 1985” (!)
After a prolonged search, I finally located a cassette tape player and rushed home to see if the interview was still on the tape or if I had actually recorded over it, as I remembered. Of course, the tape promptly broke when I tried to play it. Not to be deterred, I found a company that restores cassette tapes and several weeks later a digitized file of the tape arrived in my mailbox on a thumb drive. Literally quaking with anticipation, I inserted the thumb drive into my computer and lay down on my couch to listen to it. Lo and behold, after almost 40 years of baking in my parents’ attic, the tape sent the voices of my grandparents out of the speakers and into the room, as if they were sitting there with me!
I immediately decided to make a surprise gift of this recording to my father for his 70th birthday and resolved not to tell anyone in the family about it until I had given it to Dad. The big day came this past Saturday, May 28, 2022. Now we’d like to share the recording with all of you, who love and miss Mam-maw and Pam-paw just as much as we do. Enjoy!
