HOUR Story

To All Interested, 

The beauty of learning from the past is that it does not have to be our past. Lessons learned can come from an aunt, a documentary film project, a neighbor who lived in the Ukraine or the old guy at the coffee shop. My old guy was Carl Sagan. I was pregnant with my second child, pushing my first in a stroller and the coffee shop in our little village of Trumansburg was called the Store. Ernie was the barista although he would have preferred short-order cook. He was a local, a graduate of Cornell Hotel School, and the son of the original owner. The rumor was that Ernie taught English Lit classes at the small private college on the north end of Cayuga Lake when he wasn’t serving coffee and eggs. There also was a rumor that Carl taught classes at a large private university on the south end of Cayuga Lake but that too could have just been a rumor. I do know Carl spent many mornings at the counter at Ernies surrounded by farmers, graduate students, and the occasional B-List rocker. Conversations flowed, Carl could listen as well as pontificate. My young son, now out of his stroller, would be wide-eyed staring into the ice cream cooler, trying to decide between a Nutty Buddy or a red, white, and blue rocket pop. Daniel had learned from Carl a few weeks back that dessert was best with breakfast and a new habit had formed. 

It is the small stories in-between the much larger chapters that I love about oral histories. Knowing Carl Sagan’s ability to rub elbows with the counterculture in Upstate New York adds a dimension unseen from the New York Times and Scientific American headlines. My graduate project for my MFA was a documentary on Dr. Harvey Fletcher. If you study Britannica or go to the web, you will read that Dr. Fletcher is considered the Father of Modern Acoustics and the creator of Stereophonic Sound. If you go to the dozens of interviews I conducted, you will hear the priceless slices of in-between that make the world-wide greatness far more fascinating. 

“I used to order things through the mail order catalog. [] One of the things I ordered was a crystal set. It didn’t work too well because it did not have an antennae. My father helped me string a long antenna to the local telephone pole. It must have been about 100 feet long. Boy, that crystal set really boomed. So I could listen to that radio, it had no batteries, up in my room undisturbed by my brothers.”  Dr James Fletcher,  NASA Chief (2x) , University of Utah President (1964 -1971) 

The ability to picture Dr. H. Fletcher as a young father of a brood of children nurturing the scientific yearnings of his second son is endearing. The optics of imagining Dr. James Fletcher as an inquisitive teenager in 1930 New Jersey listening to his radio in his attic bedroom creates a more absorbing picture of his world. As an educator, a social worker, a filmmaker and a mother of four children I bring to any position a passion for activism and human rights. As a graduate student in the University of Utah Masters of Social Work and a Victim-Survivor Advocate at the U’s Center for Student Wellness I am deeply entrenched in gender, race and sexuality studies. All of the above, combined with my love of research, writing and education makes me a perfect candidate for any position. You can find a more detailed overview of my life through my resume, linkedIn and website.

Respectfully,

Maureen H Meyer