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History project opens students' eyes For new book, they learned from elders about Depression By VICKI GUARINO EAGLE POINT -- A school project that mixes regular old sophomore English with history and book publishing hits the streets today. The book, "Through Their Eyes -- Southern Oregon Elders Speak," rolls off the presses and into bookstores and history museums today. It's a milestone that makes the months of planning, interviewing, writing, editing and designing suddenly very real for the 22 Eagle Point High School 10th-graders responsible for the work. Young authors host reception Eagle Point High School's newly published 10th-grade authors are giving themselves and the community a reception tonight to celebrate publication of "Through Their Eyes -- Southern Oregon Elders Speak." The book records Depression-era recollections of local residents. Some 30-50 community elders are expected to attend the reception. Students are inviting the community to join them at 7 p.m. in the Eagle Point High School cafeteria, 203 Platt St., Eagle Point. The program will include readings from the book by students. The 150-page history will be available for $8. The book also will be sold in bookstores and history museums around the county. The project was funded by a grant. Proceeds from book sales will help finance future publishing efforts. "When they saw the cover, when they asked, `Is it is going to have a bar code?' -- yes, it will have a bar code -- then it seemed like a real book for them," says Eagle Point language arts teacher Cyndy Stribling. The 150-page book collects first-hand recollections of the Great Depression. Students focused on Eagle Point-area elders -- neighbors and family. Caleb Guillory turned to his neighbor, Arthur O'Keefe, and got a new perspective on the Depression. "I had a totally wrong impression," says Caleb. "It wasn't that bad." Caleb had seen the photographs in history books of bread lines and hungry children. In rural Jackson County, however, conditions for many were different. The O'Keefes, Caleb writes in "Through Their Eyes," had a large ranch near Eagle Point. The family lived simply and got by on what they raised. "We're dependent on money; they weren't," says Caleb. "I'm sure it was much worse in the cities because they were not self-sufficient." But for students, living simply and self-sufficiently was a life hard to imagine. Bryce Morgan recalls one man's description of his wardrobe: Once a year he would go to town and buy a new pair of overalls. "I'm like, `How could they do that?"' In Levi Schaffer's family, doing the laundry wasn't a casual chore but a grueling event. Not only did his grandparents have to haul water in buckets up a long hill and heat it over a wood fire, they had to make their own soap. For Rache'le Velasquez, the project presented a new view of her family. For the first time, she says, she saw photographs of her great-grandfather, James Owings. One of those pictures of Owings outside his Medford home is the cover art for "Through Their Eyes." His son, Cecil, born in 1929, is Rache'le's grandfather and her source for the project. His childhood was simple, she says, but not dire. The class focused on the Depression-era 1930s to bring to life some of their reading assignments. "I wanted them to have a connection to the literature we were studying, and we were studying John Steinbeck," Stribling says. "Rather than have them read it in the history books, I wanted them to write it." Students quickly learned that the project would require much more than setting words out on paper. "It was different than anything I've ever done," says Bryce. Bryce had to choke down the nervousness of meeting and interviewing someone, and then figure out how to describe his neighbor's recollections for the book. Mostly, he says, the work taxed his and his classmates' "people skills." "We had to work with each other," he says. The class had to coordinate the questions each student asked, obtain photographs, figure out the page format and even compare price quotes from printers. Stribling says she always assigns a major research project to her sophomores so they can learn how to plan and follow through on a major work. The finished project includes both written and oral reports. But this year, a volunteer from Rogue Community College, Linda Barnes, and a grant made book publishing possible. By the luck of the draw, Stribling gave her first-period class the book assignment. Other classes worked on Stribling's standard project. First-period student Nathan DeMartin initially thought he'd been had. "At first I thought, `Oh man, why can't we do a regular project?"' Then Nathan interviewed his grandfather. "It was weird. I started realizing we have a lot in common. We were like buddies." Excerpts In their own words: excerpts from "Through Their Eyes": "Well, there was 10 kids. Uh ... we had one radio, I remember that. And that was our sole entertainment as far as the family was concerned. We did a lot of singing. We had musical instruments. I played guitar and accordion, my sisters played guitar ... And the old timers used to come over and we had a big long bench outside of our house. Everybody would sit there and chat and the old men would have their pipes, smokin' out there, yeah ... Nobody could afford to go anyplace else ... they made their own wine, if they could afford it. "First job? Oh, I worked, first job, I worked on Saturdays and I scrubbed cement floors for 10 cents an hour ... And then I went to work in the hospital and I worked for the doctor who owned the hospital, and his daughter was takin' care of him ... he was pretty old ..." -- Theresa Hales, speaking to Joey Dowell. "Her eyes were emerald, a spark of life in a body condemned by death. I could all but see the stories held there, stories desperate to be told while the telling was good. Her eyes made me long to see what her life had been outside of this nursing home with its dingy walls and yellowed curtains. I never got to find out. "I knew only a bit about her, and what I did know only made me hunger for more. Her name was Helene, and, even at 86 years of age, she was beautiful. She was born in the winter of 1912 in a one bedroom house in Alabama, and her mother died giving birth to her. The Depression ruined her father, was responsible for her oldest brother's suicide, and put hard callouses on her hands that time never wore away." -- Stephanie Courtright, in the book's introduction. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA