Monday, January 25, 2010

First taping completed, second on deck for the weekend.

Howdy folks!

Sorry for the long delay in writing. The past couple of weeks at work have really kept me on my toes. Back to the GG files update. The first week of filming was really fantastic. My whole purpose was to just get her used to being on camera which is something she has never done before. I turned it on and just had a normal conversation with her until I felt like she had forgotten it was there which thankfully she did.

I really just wanted to get some basic facts from her so that I could go back and revist those stories later. She definitely told me a few things I never knew before like that 6 of her sisters were born in the house she lived in, one was born in a hospital and she was born in a house two blocks away. She doesn't know why she was born in that house, and there is no one alive to ask, but she thinks it was because it was her grandfather's house and they may have been remolding the one she lived in at the time. My grandfather was shipped off to WWII for three years. She told me how they met, through work, but that after they were married he had to be transfered because it was an actual law at the time that married people could not work together. She and her sisters used to love to go an see movie at the theater down the street. How they used to take the train everywhere and that she watched both the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate be built. How her family obtained their first car.


It was a lot of little things like that that give you a window inside a person and to how their particular life was formed.

This weekend I am hoping to film a couple of hours with her and really get deeper into her childhood. In the coming months I am going to be heading to Napa to visit her sister Murray and her husband who have so many photographs from the family and interview them as well to just add to the story.

So far this is turning out to be a really great project and should keep me quite busy this year.

Happy Monday!

2 comments:

  1. Here's my notes on the racehorse story. Grandpa Sullivan's father raised racehorses and a man named Lyle used one of his horses illegally as a stud. Great Grandpa went to court to keep the foal from this horse and was legally granted ownership. Lyle ambushed Gr. Grandpa on Spruce St in Berkeley and shot him dead. Investigation showed that the buckshot from Lyle's gun was wadded with wallpaper from Lyle's kitchen.

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  2. Lyle was sentenced to life in San Quentin and at an old age was paroled back to his home because he was dying from cancer. Lyles Cove in Belevedere is named after him. Check it out with Mom, see if she remembers.

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