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Teens offer taste of living history JACKSONVILLE -- Once a week, Abby Horton travels across town and 88 years back in time. Horton shakes away her reality -- that of a 14-year-old Jacksonville girl in 1999 -- and assumes the the identity of a 14-year-old piano and etiquette student of Jacksonville's Carrie Beekman in 1911. Horton banters with tourists about young girls' realities in 1911, spinning historical facts and personal whims into a character that makes the history of Jacksonville come alive. And Horton revels in her role, right down to the black leather buckle-shoes and prissy mannerisms. "We all have the hearts of children in us," Horton says. "We like to play make-believe once in a while." Horton is one of 10 area teenagers breathing a teen's freshness into life in the Beekman House as part of the "living history" program in Jacksonville. For the past 16 summers, the historical society has conducted its Beekman Living History Program at the Beekman House on Old Stage Road in Jacksonville. While visitors tour the house, actors re-create the daily lives of the Beekman family. The girls act as students of Miss Carrie Beekman, the 45-year-old daughter of banker Cornelius Beekman, who taught music and etiquette to local children. As junior docents with the Southern Oregon Historical Society, the teens spend large chunks of their summer learning enough local history to play the prim and proper girls their great-grandmothers may have been way back when. They rely on six weeks of training and a confidence not regularly found in adolescent girls to give tourists a sense of the past. And it's not easy. While girls like Katy Meyers are frittering their summers away on mall binges and MTV, Katy Meyers is constantly studying and practicing her 1911 persona that she performs in weekly four-hour shifts without serious slip-ups. "It's hard not to use words you normally use in the '90s like `OK' and `like,"' Meyers says. "You have to say `nifty' and `peachy.' "And then," she says, "you got to remember not to say nifty and peachy at home." Their participation has brought some nifty side effects as well -- like learning local history, acting and music skills, and self-confidence. "I was so shy when I started, but not now," says Jennifer Turner, a 15-year-old Medford girl who has played the piano-student role the past three summers. "It really does help your self-confidence." Horton, Meyers and Turner keep their own names when they work in the living history tours, but they use what they've learned about life in old-time Jacksonville to immerse themselves in their characters. "We ask them to build a story in their mind about what their family might have done in 1911," said Darlene Turner, the historical society's marketing coordinator. For Meyers, that includes explaining away her braces. She uses a trick she pulled right from the living-history manual. "I say, `I got them in New York from a man studying under the prestigious Dr. Angle, an orthodontist. Such treatment would not be available locally,"' Meyers says. The living history players learn to keep up the act even when they have to chide visitors about touching fragile 90-year-old furniture. "They'll say something like `Oh, you know Mrs. Beekman is so fussy about that chair,"' says Turner. "They're very skilled at not breaking character." But it can be tough, depending upon who is on the tour. Grandmotherly visitors are the best, Jennifer Turner says, because they play right along. Others try to trick the living history actors into a mistake. "The people you know are the meanest -- especially if they know you're supposed to pretend you don't know them," says Jennifer Turner, Darlene Turner's daughter. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA