Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

August 12, 2007 10:57 PM

Interviews with 100-year-olds:
(Short): Quick NPR interview with a guy who works on Wall Street.
(Medium): A series of small segments with the oldest graduate of Gilbert High School.
(Long): Part of WFMU's 365 day project. Restored tape from 1978, on which it appears a young student is interviewing an old lady from Kansas.
posted by Alex404 (8 comments total)

Also, there seems to be a few more of these on the NPR website. They're linked to in the link I provided.
posted by Alex404 at 11:02 PM on August 12, 2007

Thanks for these, the real audio files are a great treat!
posted by hadjiboy at 11:30 PM on August 12, 2007

Fair Warning: I just finished listening to the hour long tape. It's a bloody trip. I can't really even explain why.
posted by Alex404 at 11:44 PM on August 12, 2007

Centenarians just don't seem as old as they used to.
posted by psmealey at 1:27 AM on August 13, 2007

Can't listen to the 1978 one right now, but one interesting thing about some of the centenarian oral histories taken at that time or earlier is, some of those people remembered (in their youth in the 1870s) meeting people who were then really old and who were alive when George Washington was president. Which is pretty mindboggling.
posted by beagle at 7:08 AM on August 13, 2007

I work in the master control room of the university I attend, and a few weeks ago we had a job come in to dub some old cassettes to audio CD. The client was a university employee who had, back in the late 80s and early 90s, recorded a couple hours' worth of interviews with both of his parents. It was my job to babysit the dub and change the tape/CD when necessary, etc. This entailed that I listen to the entire thing. I expected it to be dull, but it turned out to be a really fascinating experience, heightened by the fact that my coworkers were busy with a video shoot that week and thus I was left alone in a darkened control room listening to these voices from the past.

I think we, as social beings, tend to enjoy listening to others talk about their lives, even if those lives are in fact quite "ordinary". I think things like this also remind us of how quickly the world changes, something we frequently forget as we are immersed in it.

This reminds me of an episode of This American Life a month or two ago that was almost entirely centered around audio tapes found in a thrift shop... they were "audio letters" from the family of a man away at medical school, and his father and mother would take turns recording them and sending them to him. It was almost like the audio version of an epistolary novel: you could listen to the people talk and learn as much about them and their family dynamics from how they said what they said (and also what they didn't say), as you could from the actual content.

A lot of what I've read on high tech storage tends to focus on its volatility and how our knowledge might not be preserved in the case of a civilization-ending catastrophe, and while acknowledging the validity of that concern, I can't help but be amazed at how much technology is continually enabling us, more and more, as a society, to collectively remember things that would otherwise be lost in the flow of time.
posted by Kosh at 11:38 AM on August 13, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

(The TAL episode in question for anyone who's interested. There are other stories in that episode too, but the one I detailed is the one that really stuck out to me, to the point that I misremembered the episode as being almost entirely centered around it.)
posted by Kosh at 12:02 PM on August 13, 2007

100 is the new 90.
posted by psmealey at 4:55 PM on August 13, 2007