Column: A Salute to Jean P. Moore

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On my watch: A salute to Jean P. Moore for her work bringing us stories from the Oral History Project

A 2016 OHP Christmas party at Greenwich Library. Left rear, John Twomey, Harriet Feldman, OHP co-chair Robin Edelston, Jean P. Moore, the late Dick Blair, and Tara Stone. OHP office manager. Photo by Anne W. Semmes

Greenwich writer, Jean P. Moore, is an award-winning novelist of “Tilda’s Promise,” and “Water on the Moon,” and she’s penned a book of poetry, “Times Tyranny.” But she’s also managed through the years to serve as volunteer for the Greenwich Library Oral History Project (OHP). For the last nine years she has served as editor/writer of the OHP online blog featuring interviews from the Project’s vast collection. With news of her retiring that post, we reached out to her with a few questions.

So, why and when was she drawn to OHP? “I joined in 2003 when I learned the project was looking for volunteers. I have always had an interest in history, so I was drawn to the organization’s mission of recording and preserving Greenwich history through the words of its residents. In 2011, the project began a blog, posting news about recent interviews. I volunteered to take it over. I became very interested in the scope of the collection and, with recommendations, I began writing pieces usually dedicated to one or two interviews at a time. I found the interviews to be enchanting.”

And, when did students begin to volunteer? “In 2016, we began soliciting volunteers from the schools, knowing that our collection could be of great interest to students with a love of history and writing. Our first student blogger was Olivia Luntz, then graduating senior at Greenwich High School. Today our student blogger is Noor Rekhi, a junior at Greenwich Academy. Our OHP volunteer blogger is Joseph Campbell.”

Have any of those oral histories fed her own writings? (The plot of “Water on the Moon” begins with an airplane crash on a house in Greenwich!) “I must say,” she responds, “I have considered historical fiction after reading some of the more fascinating interviews in our collection, but I cannot say any of the interviews I admire have found a way into my own work. I’ve always said our collection provides fertile ground for writers, such fascinating material there. I only scratched the surface.”

So, what might be favorite blogs she wrote or oversaw in her writing/editing years? Following on are excerpts from three that especially intrigued. (Note that the Cos Cob Power Plant is now Cos Cob Park, and the Marks Brothers Stationery once did rule on Greenwich Avenue.)

The Heart of the Dynamo: Lewis Grant O’Donnell, Chief of the Cos Cob Power Plant In an Oral History Project interview conducted in 1989 long-time Cos Cob resident, Gertrude O’Donnell Riska, remembers this man, her father, Lewis Grant O’Donnell, who maintained overall responsibility for the plant from 1923 until his retirement in 1940.

When Ms. Riska quotes her father in her interview, she tends to get her reader’s attention:
“My father would scare me to death. At different times he’d say to me, ‘See that turbine over there? There’s a big wheel inside it. If that wheel ever broke loose—and it has in other power plants—it would cut a path of destruction for ten miles…’”

Because the plant was not a place for a little girl to be roaming free, Ms. Riska was well aware of her father’s boundaries. One day, to her surprise, he told her to climb up several stairs that had until then been off-limits. At the top was a little slot barely wide enough to fit a pair of eyes, even a little girl’s. Her father told her to look through the opening. There she saw a “fairyland,” an enchanted landscape of shimmering ice and snow crystals. In a place where the heat generated by the furnaces was maintained at 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, it was impossible to imagine ice!…Her father informed her then that she was looking at white heat and that the glass she was looking through was very special, inches thick, because, as he told her, “if you looked at it with your naked eye, it would burn your eyes right out of your head.”

Jennie Marks Levine 1974 interview on her family’s Marks Brothers Stationery Store Prepared by guest blogger and graduating Greenwich High School senior, Olivia Luntz.

Jennie Marks was born on August 4,1895, in Greenwich after her parents immigrated to America from the town of Goris, on the border of Germany and Russia. Remarkably, her parents and grandparents were able to travel from Hamburg to America in 1875 for the sum of only five dollars per ticket… Levine confesses that if her family had had to pay any more for their tickets, they probably would not have been able to come to America…

Around 1904 Levine’s father heard of a newspaper business in Greenwich that was for sale, and he decided to buy it…Levine stresses that running a newspaper route was far from easy work, especially due to the lack of modern conveniences at the start of the twentieth century. “I remember my father, on a Sunday morning, getting up at two o’clock in the morning, going to the station and getting the papers, bringing them up to the store—we all folded the papers—he delivered in a couple of cars, or a couple of wagons. They delivered papers in Greenwich and came home at twelve o’clock, changed horses, and went out to Round Hill to deliver some more papers, and way up on North Street. Worked from two o’clock in the morning until six o’clock the next night. And that’s the way people worked to make a few dollars. Just to make a living.”

Mother and Daughter Flyers

The two remarkable women are Molly Cummings Minot Cook, who was recently [2012] interviewed by the Oral History Project, and her mother, Marian Engle Cummings, born in 1891 and who died in 1984. Together with Molly’s brother, Wilbur (“Billy”) Love Cummings, Jr., also a pilot, the threesome won the nickname, “The Flying Family of Greenwich”…
Molly Cook, born in 1917, was also a flying marvel, earning her pilot’s license on her eighteenth birthday [1935]. Soon thereafter, she and her brother, Billy, bought a small plane, a Luscombe, and began competing in meets.

But it is when she [Molly}talks about flying that she is most clearly in her element: “I loved stunting. In the summer…I would be in my white flying suit and helmet and goggles—oh, I was just the big cheese—and get into my little Fleet plane. All these people on Sunday, that was the thing to do in those days, that people would drive up to Armonk to watch the planes, sort of a—what would you call it—a bullfight feeling. Is the matador going to make it or—I’d go up and do a spin or a loop and a something, and then come down. Then we’d sit, and then somebody said, ‘Well, I think I’ll go up and amuse them a little bit.’ It was fun on Sunday.” A wonderful way to spend an afternoon—and a life.

The Greenwich Library Oral History Project Blog is featured monthly in the Greenwich Sentinel.

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