Story Tellers Channel

Sharing The Stories That Matter

Gayle Turner

Coming Together

By

This Friday evening, June 12, and Saturday morning, June 13, the Virginia Storytelling Alliance will hold its Annual Virginia Storytelling Gathering online for the first time. This is a significant event. Not just because we’ll be celebrating the timeless art of storytelling on a 21st century technological platform, but because we will also be celebrating the Alliance’s 20th anniversary.

Friday evening from 6:00-6:30 we’ll conduct our annual members meeting and then from 6:30-7:00 we’ll gather to spend time with old friends and meet some new ones. Then from 7:00-7:50 we’ll here from three celebrated tellers: Anthony Burcher, Beth Ohlsson and Glen Holliday.

Then we’re encouraging people to check out the Rappahannock Story Swap hosted by VASA member Annette Stjernhja.

The following morning internationally celebrated storyteller Sheila Arnold and I will conduct a workshop entitled “Finding Storytelling Business in a Brave New World” from 9:30-11:00 and from 11:30 to 12:30 Ruth Walkup, Les Schaffer and Louise Tucciarrone will offer coaching.

Visit VirginiaStorytellingAlliance.org for more info and to register.

I have served as the President of the VASA Board of Directors for several years and will be rotating off the Board at the end of June. It has truly been an honor.

I hope you’ll join us.

A Moment of Light

By

Another Loss

For those of you who read this newsletter, you know I regularly write about my family. I did not publish last Tuesday because the previous Tuesday my daughter’s longtime companion and love, Durant “Scooter” Davis, III died. 
Sorry to be so abrupt, but his loss has devastated her as well as those of us who love her and loved Scooter. He had just turned 40 the Tuesday before. My daughter is essentially a widow at 36. 
The details of his death are still unknown. The Richmond City Police Major Crimes Division is investigating. He was a kind, caring, and compassionate man. 
He is and will be missed.

Between the pandemic, the misbehavior of people in power, and the reactions said misbehavior has engendered we as a nation are being challenged to live into our better selves. 

In ancient Rome, the highest compliment that could be paid was to say someone was a Citizen. And the worst slur was to call someone an Idiot. An Idiot is someone who puts their personal interest ahead of the welfare of the community.

I believe we live into the stories we tell ourselves.

One of the stories I tell myself is that whenever anyone is deprived of their freedom, we are all diminished. 

My dad used to say, “Beware when they suppress the blue-eyed people, because they’re coming after us next.” 

I feel compelled to find something positive to write about.

So, on a brighter note, I spent yesterday morning watching a Henrico County Public Access TV crew video a puppet show. Chris Hudert of Applause Unlimited presented three of my favorite Aesop Fables: The Grasshopper and the Ant; The City Mouse and the Country Mouse, and The Tortoise and the Hare. Chris and I went to college together and when he retired as the Boss Clown for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus he came home to Richmond. He joined the late Terry Snyder at Applause Unlimited. The pandemic has put a stop to his touring performances and he and I have been talking about how to capture the energy of his shows for the 2nd, 3rd and 4th screens.

Are you familiar with that concept? Movie screens are the first screen, TVs the second, Computer Monitors the third and Smart Phones the fourth. I guess tablets are v3.5. 

I subscribe to Frank Lloyd Wright’s mentor Louis Sullivan’s premise that “Form Follows Function.” As such, we frequently see the notice before a movie on TV warning us the film has been edited or reformatted from its original form to fit the screen and time restraints.

For the TV/Video producer/director this presents significant challenges. How do we shoot and edit so our audiences can enjoy our product on all these mediums without our having to reproduce the shows to fit the specific demands of each medium?

That’s one of our major challenges here at storytellerschannel.com as we get closer to figuring out how The Storytellers Channel as we plan for our studio. Bigger screens have room to show more, smaller screens require tighter focus showing less at any one time. But if we shoot for the 4th screen we wind up with suboptimal content for the second screen. However, with the new 4K format and the expensive editing software and computer capacity necessary to take advantage of its capabilities we can capture footage that will work for both although we’re still stuck with having to re-edit. I promised a brighter note. 

First, spend some time with Aesop’s Fables from the Library of Congress. Their timeless wisdom is comforting.

Second, Check out Applause Unlimited ’s show pages. The pictures of their whimsical puppets will bring a smile to your face. We hope to be recording some of their magic soon.

Third, we hope you’ll be happy for us here at storytellerschannel.com as we get closer to figuring out how to bring the stories currently only available on our site to 2nd and 4th Screen viewers.

DOWNLOAD
Tales of Deadly Matrimony 
by 
Edgar Allan Poe
Audio Book                            E-Book

I Want to Hear from You

Remember, be a good citizen. Don’t be an idiot!
1. Wash your hands. 
2. Keep your distance. 
3. Stay home if you’re sick. 
4. Wear a mask in public. 

I’d love to hear your stories.

Share with me stories that matter to you and I’ll share them with our readers.
Tell me about the people who have shaped you.
Or share stories of people living into their better selves.
We need encouragement.
Send them to gayle@storytellerschannel.com

Til next time, 

Gayle Turner
Executive Producer.

In Memorium

By

In Memorium

Today is the 28th anniversary of my dad’s passing. We southerners use a lot of euphemisms. We seldom use words like died. We speak of going on to your reward, passing over to the other side or the smart mouth version, kicking the bucket. I write about my daddy a lot. He remains my primary role model.

Central Virginia is gradually reopening. Slow and safe are the by words. We’re following the advice of the PBS News Hour. 
1. Wash your hands. 
2. Keep your distance. 
3. Stay home if you’re sick. 
4. Wear a mask in public. 

The doctor who gave this advice said none of these are 100% effective by themselves, but collectively they are powerful. He also said, if 60% of us do our part and abide by these guidelines, we should stop the virus’ spread.
Ben Franklin wrote, “The good men do separately, is small compared with what they may do collectively.”

None of us wants to get sick. And I can’t imagine any of us wants to be the cause of someone else becoming ill or heaven forbid dying. 

In ancient Rome the highest compliment was to call someone a “Citizen”. And the worst insult was to call someone an “Idiot”. An Idiot was someone who put their personal interests above the needs of the community.

So, let me encourage you to play well with others during this trying period. After all we can all insist upon our individual right to run with scissors, later.

In Memorium

I’m one of those damned fools who has always had to touch the stove. I’m one of the ones who has rushed in where angels feared to tread. For decades, I seldom hesitated to metaphorically “hang ten”.

Consequently, my body, mind and soul bear the scars of having been rode hard and put away wet, way too many times. 

This began to change May 19, 1992. Around 3:00 AM that night, my mom called to say she had called the ambulance. I knew the drill. I got up, got dressed and minutes later I had driven the five blocks to their house. The ambulance was there and they were already loading daddy. 

I said, “We’ll meet you there.” And then I was told we were going to Retreat Hospital, St. Mary’s ER was full. Daddy had been at St. Mary’s that previous evening. They had sent him home.

We sat in the waiting room and at 7:30 they came out. I expected to be told we could go back and see him. This was his 8th heart attack since 1974.

We’d been through this before. Daddy would come in for a tune-up, they’d balance his electrolytes and after two weeks of his entertaining the staff, he’d come home.

Not so this time. The doctor said he was dead. I don’t remember much after that. My mom said I became hysterical. She thought they were going to have to sedate me. I remember calling my oldest cousin, Billy, and explaining that daddy was gone. I asked him would he notify everyone, as I didn’t have it in me.

By that afternoon, I was fine. I took Momma to Bliley’s and we arranged the funeral service. Daddy had decided he wanted to be cremated, but Momma wanted a traditional viewing, so we rented a coffin. I remember walking into the parlor at the funeral home. Daddy had suffered from congestive heart failure the last 7 or 8 years of his life. As a result, he retained a lot of fluid. He had blown up from a 44” chest weighing 198 pounds to a 56” chest weighing 260 pounds. I had never suffered claustrophobia before that moment, but seeing Daddy shoehorned into that coffin still haunts me.

I sat Momma down on a chesterfield where she could see the coffin and I positioned myself in the hallway, where she could see me, and I could greet the mourners, but mercifully I could not see Daddy.

The funeral was lovely. Holy Comforter was packed with those showing their respects and I was quite comfortable greeting and thanking everyone for coming. A friend later told me he was confused that day. I looked so happy. 

I have no idea what I was feeling that day. I was on autopilot. I was doing what was expected of an only son. I was handling details and looking out for my momma as my daddy would have expected me to do.

What I realize now, is that was the day I began to seriously think before I leapt. That was the day I realized I no longer had a safety net.

Prior to Daddy’s passing, if I jumped a fence and drove a spike through my foot, Daddy was there to pick me up and take me the hospital. If my car broke down in the back of beyond, Daddy would somehow come find me when I didn’t show up when I was supposed to and when a business venture failed Daddy was there to talk it through and help me brainstorm how to find a stake and get back into the game.

Now, there was just me. I hadn’t built a support network. I hadn’t needed one. I’d always told myself I was the independent, rugged individualist of American mythology. It dawned on me I’d been kidding myself. I’d been a part of a team. A team of two, but a team.

As time went on, I realized I was also kidding myself that I hadn’t had a support network. Family and friends rallied around me and this was when I began to grow up. 

I’d begun practicing Servant Leadership a few years earlier as result of my participation in Leadership Metro Richmond. Now, I began to recognize my dad’s legacy. I stopped “playing the role” and began to live into the role he had modeled for me.

I am now 5 years older than daddy was when he died. For 28 years I’ve been asking myself, “What would Daddy do?’ I’m in virgin territory these days. Dealing with things he never had to deal with. I’ve learned to listen before I speak. I’ve learned to look before I leap. I’ve learned to put other’s well being ahead of my own.

Frankly, the territory might not be as unknown as I think. Daddy was born, lived and died. He came into this world alone and unfortunately left it that way, but in between he lived life well. He enjoyed going to work every day and he enjoyed coming home every night. Of equal importance everyone was happy to see him show up wherever he went.

So, on this anniversary I honor his memory. I thank God for the time he lived among us. And I continue to try to fill his shoes.

In Memorium
Warren Gayle “Buddy” Turner, Sr.
July 29, 1929 – May 19, 1992

DOWNLOAD
Tales of Deadly Matrimony 
by 
Edgar Allan Poe
Audio Book                            E-Book

I Want to Hear from You

Remember, be a good citizen. Don’t be an idiot!
1. Wash your hands. 
2. Keep your distance. 
3. Stay home if you’re sick. 
4. Wear a mask in public. 

I’d love to hear your stories.

Share with me stories that matter to you and I’ll share them with our readers.
Tell me about the people who have shaped you.
Send them to gayle@storytellerschannel.com

Til next time, 

Gayle Turner
Executive Producer.

The Power of Story

By

I hope everyone had a Happy Mother’s Day. My daughter, Jennifer, joined Marie and me at Momma’s and we Zoomed my sister, Rowena, in from sunny southern California. Momma said she couldn’t remember when she’d last had bacon and eggs and so I fixed brunch and then we chowed down on the Russell Stover candy I brought her.

I’m always talking about people living into the stories they tell themselves. Currently, I’m reading Narrative Economics: How stories go viral and drive major economic events by Robert J. Shiller. So far the book is echoing my sentiments on the subject.

I started thinking about some of the outrageous things I’ve done in my life and how they were driven by my emulating characters in stories. Today’s story illuminates a few of my childhood misadventures. In the ‘90s I got all upset when Tipper Gore wanted to put ratings on music lyrics. Now, I think maybe there should have been warnings for the funny papers and the TV series of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Frankly, everything I watched and read until I was 30 should have had a warning label. Not for me, because I wouldn’t have paid any attention, but for all the folks around me to warn them or at least to have given them a heads up that I was about to do something reckless, again.

The Power of Story

There were close to 60 children on the city block where I grew up. While I wasn’t supposed to leave the block occasionally I crossed the street, but generally someone’s mom had their eye on us, so it was hard for us to get into too much mischief.

Now, I love to read, always have, and at 10 I consumed as many books as I did comic books. Plus there was the Sunday funnies, Saturday morning cartoons and reruns of old movie serials like Hopalong Cassidy, The Cisco Kid and Zorro. Not to mention Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone and my favorite Texas John Slaughter on TV at night. I love TV as much as I love reading, so I had constant flow of stories.

We played soldiers, a la the TV show Combat, but I was always a Marine, because my Dad had been a Marine before he joined the Navy. Ours was a war like version of hide and go seek called Sniper. One team would be sent off to hide and the other team would go “on patrol” to find them. When the sniper saw someone he would whisper, “You’re dead. Lie down and shut up.” I was not only fast, but I could climb as well and so, I would leap down from wherever I had hidden and run around behind the “enemy”, climb into another perch and hit them from behind. Periodically flower gardens and rose bushes suffered for these military maneuvers.

One collection of rose bushes belonged to Dr. Thelma Biddle, a professor at Richmond Professional Institute (later Virginia Commonwealth University). Thelma’s answer to this was to make me Sherriff of her garden. My job was to keep other marauders from damaging her rose bushes. I must have done a satisfactory job because years later after I had failed out of college for the third time, Thelma vouched for me and VCU let me back in, again. This time I managed a 3.95 GPA, so apparently, her trust was well placed. The neighbor who lived between Dr. Biddle and us was Mrs. Payne. Our relationship wasn’t as cordial. Probably, because I kept raiding her flower garden to take flowers to my mom. I’m pretty sure I got the idea from Dennis the Menace.

There was the time my buddy, Freddy, and I tied the girl next door, Cindy, to a tree (across the street in the woods where they later built the Post Office) and tried to set the pine tags on fire. It worked on Davy Crockett. Or the time I used a bullwhip to drive a kid from down the street home. I think I did a better job than Mingo on Daniel Boone. I never touched him once, but the snap sounded like a thunder clap.

It was years before I read O. Henry’s The Ransom of Red Chief. I didn’t recognize myself at the time, but in retrospect it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s how the neighbors saw me.

The biggest disaster came about when we found an abandoned cardboard box that a refrigerator had come in. I made a cape like Mandrake the Magician. We put Freddy’s little brother, Tommy, in the box and using my WWI bayonet as a sword, we repeated a trick we’d seen in the Sunday Funnies. Relax, nobody died, but I will tell you this; it’s amazing how much the most superficial head wound bleeds.

I am sorry to say this wasn’t the last of my adventures spawned from literature, history, TV, the movies and every now and then a teacher’s lecture. (Blowing out the windows in the junior high chemistry class was a successful experiment from my point of view) But since 40, I’m a lot more circumspect about the stories I try to live in to.

They say you don’t have a complete frontal cortex until you’re 25. I guess I’ve just been a late bloomer.

At least that’s the story I tell myself.

Be safe. And if you see me with my nose in a book, you might ask, “What are you reading?” It could give you a clue when to give Lakeside a wide berth.

DOWNLOAD
Tales of Deadly Matrimony 
by 
Edgar Allan Poe
Audio Book                            E-Book

I Want to Hear from You

I’d love to hear your stories.

Share with me stories that matter to you.
Send them to gayle@storytellerschannel.com

Til next time, 

Gayle Turner
Executive Producer.

Guest Storyteller

By

Rusty Gross and I were chatting at a mutual friend’s annual Mardi Gras celebration.
He said the newsletter brought back a flood of memories  of his growing up in Richmond. Then he went, “Oops, correction, I have never grown up and hope to be one of Richmond’s oldest teenagers to the end.”

He commented on how much of our lives were so parallel growing up in the same time and circumstances and how our parents, teachers and so many others in our youth became so much smarter as we got older.

His ultimate goal in life is to write a what not to do book rather than a how to do book from doing things his way with sometimes dire results. The lesson learned from his many broken bones and scars is, “Stupid Hurts”.
I suggested he send me one of his stories and here for your enjoyment is The Quickest Job I Never Had. 

*****************************

Remember: You Matter. Your Stories Matter. Tell Them Well!
Gayle Turner
The Storytellers Channel

The Quickest Job I Never Had

by Rusty Gross

As kids growing up we all fantasized becoming and maybe became Doctors, Lawyers, Nurses, Teachers, Fireman, Police officers, Cowboys and so many other things.

For me, I was overwhelmed with motorcycles and the sound of power and freedom they projected as they passed down the streets of Richmond. 

From then on at five years old it became an obsession that would consume my life. 

Fast forward after many motorbikes, scooters and very worn out motorcycles that were challenges to either get running and most important keep running, I was on my life’s quest. 

Being a poor student in school with nothing on my mind but motorcycles and the people / lifestyle, for whatever reason I just happened to look at the classified ads in the Richmond Times-Dispatch and like karma there was an ad for Hod Carriers @ $1.65 per hour. 

For those of you that never heard the term Hod Carrier it is a Vee shaped box with a pole to carry bricks stacked to the max to deliver to the brick masons for laying in place. I am guessing easily 40- 60 plus pounds. 

Eureka, I’d found my destiny in life to quit school and work at this great paying job until having saved enough to buy a 1957 Triumph 650cc motorcycle and head out to sunny California and live the good life. 

The next morning I jumped on my 165cc Harley and rode to where South Side Plaza was still in the building stages and saw this trailer with a “help wanted- apply inside” sign leaning there.

Without even looking at the free standing building facing Hull Street Road I went straight into the office to apply for the position. The foreman immediately asked how old I was and without hesitation I replied “19 Sir”, even though a few years had been thrown into that answer hopefully to get hired. 

He began to tell me that work started promptly at 7am and to wear my oldest clothes since “you’ll for sure be covered in brick dust from start to finish every day.” 

He mostly dwelled on the fact of how demanding the job was, in both strength and perseverance to be able to adapt. Since many people on day one were so overwhelmed and worn out they never came back from lunch break or quit in short order. 

Being focused on the $1.65 per hour and the Triumph it was California here I come. 

As I walked out of the trailer with the foreman he pointed up at the building and said ” be here before 7am and meet whatever his name was up there and he would provide me with a hard hat , gloves and whatever else was needed for safety and to expect to be pushed to the limits by the brick layers to hurry, hurry, hurry since they were paid on performance and speed of the job. 

When I did see the building under construction, it was to become the Miller & Rhoades Department Store, all kinds of workers were scurrying around on I-beams that looked to maybe be 12 plus inches wide . 

That was maybe my first epiphany of realizing that even to this day I take up more room just walking on sidewalks, there was no way could I ever walk on those bloody I-beams. 

Needless to say, I said, “No thanks sir.” I stayed the course in school. 
And yes, I do have a ’57 Triumph to this day in my collection.

DOWNLOAD
Tales of Deadly Matrimony 
by 
Edgar Allan Poe
Audio Book                            E-Book

I Want to Hear from You

I’d love to hear your stories.

Share with me stories that matter to you.
Send them to gayle@storytellerschannel.com

Til next time, 

Gayle Turner
Executive Producer.