Lorene in Her Own Voice: 52 Ancestors 2024 Prompt “Storyteller”

 

Lorene Smith Jandy’s Memoir Showcases Her Storytelling Talent

Lorene Edith Smith Jandy: 1903-1994 (Maternal Grandmother)

 

When I first met “Gram Jandy”, it was late in her life. She had become legally blind and was living in an assisted care placement. But she was still a very active woman and was intensely interested in the world and people around her. She had an amazing talent for chatting up anyone she met and learning an amazing amount about their lives, which she could then recount later. She was a natural born storyteller—not in the “tall tales” or fictional type of story, but in an oral history sort of storytelling. Her children and grandchildren (including my husband) tended to roll their eyes when she’d launch into a story about someone they’d never met and would never, ever meet. However, she also had amazing stories about her family. 

Lorene before she lost her vision

Luckily for her descendants, she dictated a memoir of sorts about her life and family that is a delightful source of information now that she is gone. Perhaps the most charming thing about the memoir is that it sounds like Lorene—it captures her quick topic changes, her way of expressing things, and her non-linear storytelling.  

Here is a small sample from her memoir:

“Albert Elias was Willis Smith's second son. He was educated at the University of Kentucky, where he was a sprinter, and at Chicago Theological Seminary. He married Otilda (Tillie) Herrin

and they lived and worked all their lives in the east Kentucky mountains, where they reared a family of four children--Frances, Willis, Harvey, and Albert. My brother Albert was a minister and Tillie an economics teacher. Until Albert's death, they gave their entire lives to the mountain

people. Just after we visited them in 1930, when Laurel was four, Albert was fatally burned while cleaning a chicken shed with gasoline. He panicked, shouted for Tillie, and ran down the hill,

fanning the flames. He died that night with his lungs seared and full of fluid.

 

“Foolishly, all through the mountains, people built their chicken sheds and outhouses up above the main house, where they could contaminate the wells. Albert lived lower down the mountain by a creek, which would overflow and flood the house. Many outhouses (one- or two

holers) didn't even have doors, just a curtain. Toilet paper as we know it was an unheard-of luxury to the mountain people. You wiped with corncobs or shucks or used the pages of outdated Sears

Roebuck catalogues, from which you could get colored print on your seat. The used paper was stored in a can and then burned. In Fredonia and other towns, the outhouses were painted to match the houses—high style!”

This really shows her style of talking—one minute she’d be talking about a specific person, and then she’d move on to society in general, and then back to the person, or even on to an anecdote about a totally different individual. It was very entertaining. Not exactly easy to follow, but fun all the same. I love the details about outhouses, especially the tidbit about getting colored ink on your bottom from using catalogs as toilet paper.

 

Lorene in college

In glancing back through her memoir, I realize how much information I have yet to mine from it about her extended family. While I have names and dates, I don’t have the lovely details, like this little gem:

“When Nannie broke her hip as an old lady, she refused medical treatment because of her Christian Science beliefs, and lay in bed some six months for the bones to mend, after which she got up and went about her life again.”

Dates and documents would never be able to paint that picture of a determined woman of strong beliefs and high pain tolerance!

 

Lorene with oldest daughter, Laurel. Around 1928.

I wish I’d had the chance to chat with Lorene more. I would have loved to hear more stories about her family and her life in rural Kentucky, as a young married woman in Detroit, and during her travels with her husband in Ethiopia later in life. She was an amazing, gregarious, and kind-hearted woman.