Tag: Rebecca McGinness

Categories
Arts

Shared history: A portal to the past runs through West Main Street

As Charlottesville development races ahead, the documentary West Main Street gives us a reason to pause and evaluate how we define progress. Friday’s screening will be followed by a brief Q&A with filmmakers Reid Oechslin and Chris Farina (pictured during the making of the film in the ’90s). Courtesy subject

From 1988 to 1992, two recent UVA graduates, Chris Farina and Reid Oechslin, set out with a camera, 16mm film, little money and no lighting equipment, to interview residents of Charlottesville’s West Main Street. They wanted to learn more about their newly adopted hometown by inquiring into the lives and histories of the people tethered to this stretch of land.

Under the production company name Roadside Films they had already made one film together, Route 40, about the residents of Pulaski Highway in Baltimore, near Farina’s childhood home. Back then, UVA didn’t have filmmaking classes, so Farina and Oechslin took film criticism and fell in love with the medium. Farina says, “We were basically self-taught and [Oechslin] was the one who had the capacity to learn how to use the camera and editing table.”

In West Main Street, “The people, themselves, they tell the story,” says Farina. The film—which premiered in 1995 at Vinegar Hill Theatre, where Oechslin was the manager—features Jefferson School teacher Rebecca McGinness, funeral director and civil rights activist George Ferguson, teacher Sonny Sampson, Greek immigrant and entrepreneur Pete Stratos, Barrett Early Learning Center Director Cindy Stratton and barber Milton Via, among others.

West Main Street
Vinegar Hill Theatre
April 27, 7pm

At the time, “A bunch were older residents, so in a way it was capturing the 20th century through their perspectives,” says Farina. McGinness was born in 1892 and was about 98 when they interviewed her. Ferguson was born in 1911 and grew up on Main Street. And Stratos, the owner of the Chili Shoppe restaurant, “was almost the classic immigrant story,” Farina says.

Barber Milton Via is one of the fixtures of West Main Street featured in the film. Courtesy photo

While their intent was to represent the everyday lives of their subjects, it was impossible to tell the story of West Main Street without talking about the destruction of the historically black neighborhood Vinegar Hill. “The beauty of it was, it wasn’t our agenda going in,” says Farina. “Our agenda was to listen to these people who had lived here for a long time who really contributed to the community.”

As a result, the film documents both the shared humanity of the black and white residents and the prejudices that directly affected black residents. Ferguson, the funeral director, was the head of the local chapter of the NAACP when the public schools were desegregated, and his daughter was a member of the first integrated class. In the film, he speaks not only of his identity as a black man, but as a funeral director, too. “We talked to him about his perspective on death and he spoke from his real sense of faith,” Farina says.

Similarly, McGinness—who taught at the Jefferson School from 1915 to 1960—“one of the matriarchs of the black community,” Farina says, “talks about why she got into teaching…expressing the importance of a teacher to a community.” Teacher Sampson recounts the devastation of Vinegar Hill, where his uncle owned a business, and also reminisces about growing up in Fifeville, where he picked and sold peaches for his grandmother.

Farina doesn’t want the film to be politicized for its documentation of some painful aspects of Charlottesville’s past. “In many ways I feel like our films were kind of anthropological,” he says. “Here’s a community that people drive by and walk by. Stop and think about it.”

More than two decades later, Farina has digitized the film and will screen it again at Vinegar Hill Theatre on Friday. The original impetus for his desire to share it with a new audience was the commercial and residential development that has drastically changed the cityscape. “I just feel we’re racing ahead and not looking back,” he says, adding that we’re more concerned with who’s coming than with who lives here. “Mrs. McGinness remembers when the streets were dirt and you had to close the windows ’cause of the dust,” says Farina. “So you can say that change has always been part of things. I just don’t feel like the people who live here get as much respect as the money that’s being made.”

The events of August 11 and 12 gave him even more reason to digitize and share the film. He remembers the integrated audience at the premiere in 1995. Now, he says, Charlottesville is segregated. “That’s one of our problems in this town.” But the film doesn’t preach, he says. “I genuinely have a real affection for the subjects in the film,” says Farina. “If the affection I feel is shared with the audience, then it’s going to be successful and that’s kind of the real purpose.”

Categories
Arts

Elizabeth Meade Howard’s collection offers aging insights

Elizabeth Meade Howard will read from her book, Aging Famously: Follow Those You Admire to Living Lone and Well, at New Dominion Bookshop on September 15, and at the Senior Center on September 22.

When Elizabeth Meade Howard’s father died at age 90, she found herself adrift without a beacon. Not only had she lost her parent, she’d lost her model for aging well. An award-winning journalist, she began to interview friends, neighbors and professionals she admired—some of them famous—inquiring what aging successfully meant to them. Her quest became the book Aging Famously: Follow Those You Admire to Living Long and Well, due out on September 10. The thesis of the book, she says, “is to look to your own mentors. See how they’re living their later years, and if there’s something good in it, take from that.”

Each chapter distills a single subject’s life into just a few pages, a task that Howard says was most difficult for those she knew well. The self-described “semi-native” encountered some of her subjects in Charlottesville—such as artist Hartwell Priest and Jefferson School teacher Rebecca McGinness, for example. Others she sought out, and some she met through circumstance and persistence, such as the Reverend Jesse Jackson during his visit last month to Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church-Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville.

While all of the interview subjects are over 60 and many have since died, Aging Famously is not only about aging well, but about living well at any age. Local resident Mary Lee Settle, who quit her job as an editor at Harper’s Bazaar to become a writer, told Howard, “It’s a risk not listening to your soul. …Your job is to take the next step and the next step is always into the dark.” Poet laureate Stanley Kunitz agreed with such persistence but also acknowledged those steps in the dark don’t have to be alone. “It’s very important to feel one’s self as part of the world you live in, and to care about others as well as your own being,” he said.

Walter Cronkite credited his energy to a boundless curiosity, a characteristic, he told Howard, that compelled him to observe his own appendectomy reflected in a mirror. Gordon Parks, the first African-American photographer to work for Life and the first African-American to write and direct a Hollywood film, recognized the necessity of work. He told Howard, “Survival came from working hard. Whatever you want in the world somehow or another comes to you through hard work.” But balance, too, is necessary. Civil rights activist Rosa Parks wrote Howard that to maintain a long life one must “Learn how to rest.”

A theme that arises among the diverging narratives is the importance of creativity. “Aging well requires some imagination,” Howard says, in order to find workable solutions for obstacles such as being unable to drive. All of her subjects, she says, were “mentally flexible and looked at life in a variety of ways.” Their creativity endured despite the effects of health problems, too. “They were not dancing into old age,” Howard says. “But they had enough drive that they plowed through it. And they were gifted in that they had that sense of purpose and curiosity. I think that overrides a lot of pain and loss.”

They also had in common “a certain willingness to take a risk or to be rejected,” she says, such as one subject who revived her acting career in her mid-70s. Howard ponders what might prevent some people from taking such risks, and perfectionism comes to mind. “I’d like to be Joan Didion, but I’m not,” she says. “You have to do it as well as you can do it.”

In interviewing people at this advanced stage of life, Howard found herself bearing witness to her subjects’ love, loss and all that they had survived. Kunitz was in his 90s when she visited, and his wife had recently died. “He was pretty compromised…and sad,” Howard recalls. Afterward, she stood in the hallway and cried “because I thought, ‘This is really an exceptional experience, a sweet time, and it’s not going to happen again.’ I’m not a religious person but it was close to something spiritual.”