Sharing the Love of Stories - Oral to Written

Dad, Lawrence L Weeks Sr., has always loved a good story, and once he had your attention he didn't really want to stop.  As he got older his stories tended to ramble a bit more, but he never stopped entertaining.  My daughter, Jessica and I spent a great deal of time trying to convince him to write them down.  He had recognized the importance of preserving stories back when I first started working on genealogy with him in the 1960's.  He made quite a few audio tapes of his conversations with his mother, Bertha Weeks.  But, he was worried about his spelling and the mechanics of writing and wasn't very interested in filling notebooks.  

While my children were away at college, I completed my master's program at USM and some of my classes introduced me to the joy of writing. I started writing some of my own memories and sharing them. After my mom, Evelyn Hodgdon Weeks, passed away in 1992 and Jess went to Denver CO to complete her master's program, she and Gramp began to correspond with each other and share their memories and thoughts.  As time went on, we all started writing and sharing stories, poems - anything that struck our fancy.  Each of us had a different style,  and Dad couldn't be called traditional. He had always loved technology and finally purchased a computer and his interest started to grow.  I had been  asking him to write an autobiography for a  long time, but he just kept putting me off.  Then, Jess started in on him and "no problem",  I went in one day and he handed me a finished story. It was nothing like I expected, but it was clearly written by my father with his quirky sense of humor. He wrote it as if he were "intra utero," and it was hilarious. From then on, he was hooked and wrote poems, stories, letters along with all the wonderful diaries he had kept for years.  He even wrote a couple of presentations for school children - one for his great grandson, Tanner's class when they studied the history of the now abandoned Kezar Falls Woolen Mill.

I  believe that it is my responsibility to help share his views on life and sense of humor with the rest of our family.