The Interview

The Interview (exercise in lyric essay)

Q: “You said you were about fourteen when you discovered what you wanted to study?”

A: “Yes, that’s correct.”

Q: “And you were a sophomore?”

A: “Yes, at La Costa Canyon High School.”

Q: “What was your World History teacher’s name?”

A: “Mr. Heflin.  He was very strange.  He had weird blond hair parted down the middle and shifty eyes. He looked like the mammoth from the movie Ice Age. Seriously! We all thought that.  His hair looked like the mammoth’s hair.  But he was a wonderful teacher.”

Q: “So this project that you did, it was an assignment for the class?”

A: “Yes.  We needed to interview someone who participated in World War II, or who knew someone that did.  Then we had to write a paper about them.”

Q: “I see.  And who did you interview?”

A: “My Grandma Cantrell, my stepdad’s mother.  Grandpa Cantrell fought in the war but he had died six years earlier so I couldn’t talk to him.”

Q: “You interviewed your grandmother about her husband?”

A: “Well, yes.  I asked her about his experience in the war, but I also asked about her experience.  She worked in a factory during the war, building airplanes and such.  But she also told me a lot about what Grandpa did in the Navy.”

Q: “Did you do any other research for that paper other than the interview?”

A: “Oh yes.  I did a lot of research.  I went through all his memorabilia from the war.  There were pamphlets and letters, and lots of packets from the reunions of his Navy unit, many years after the war.  These packets had biographies of the men and other bits of history recorded.  I got to wear his dog tags.  That was my favorite.”

Q: “Did you learn anything new about the war from these items and the interview with your grandmother?”

A: “Absolutely.  I had never heard of the Battle of the Coral Sea before.  It took place soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor.  Grandpa was on the USS Lexington CV2 during that battle, and his ship got attacked.  It flipped over, and he and all the other sailors had to jump off.  There is this great picture of the Lexington turning over, with all these guys jumping into the ocean.  Jerry, my stepdad, said that Grandpa figured out where he was in the picture one time, and showed Jerry.  Jerry couldn’t remember where he was, so I don’t know either.  It’s a great picture though.  Oh, and all the sailors survived.  They were picked up by an American ship that was passing by.  Grandpa told Jerry once that it wasn’t a big deal.  But I think he was lucky.  He might have been at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 but instead he was out at sea on the Lexington.  If he had died at Pearl Harbor Jerry would have never known his dad.  Jerry was only a few months old when Hawaii was attacked.  At that time I also didn’t know that women went to work in the places of men during the war.  That was really interesting to me.”

Q: “What was it about this project that led you to want to study history?”

A: “All of it.  I loved doing the interview; I loved hearing what happened directly from someone who experienced it.  I loved going through the memorabilia.  I loved being able to touch history, to read things that had been written sixty-something years before, to hold something that was present during war, in the midst of a battle.  I also loved that these stories were real and true, and I knew the people that had experienced them.  I loved that I knew a lot more about my grandparents after this project was over.”

Q: “Will you pursue this passion in your later life? Perhaps in a career?”

A: “I truly hope so.  I would love more than anything to work with archives, museums, libraries, et cetera doing research and compiling histories, putting together people’s stories.  I’d also really like to work on putting them in written form.  I don’t know about that yet. I have a long way to go, ha ha.”
<3 Mel