Griffin Celebrates Centennial with Stories

As you may know from a previous story on United Way's website, Griffin Hospital is celebrating its 100th anniversary as the Valley's community hospital. That's quite an achievement, and Griffin is looking to celebrate with a variety of activities including the amazing food drive that they conducted last month.

Yesterday Bill Purcell (President of the Greater Valley Chamber of Commerce and a United Way board member) and I had the unique experience of participating in another very special project that Griffin is bringing to the Valley in hopes of capturing the rich history that has surrounded Griffin's "century". They have brought the nationally acclaimed oral history project StoryCorps to the Valley. StoryCorps' mission is "...to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening." They do that by traveling to communities throughout America where they record conversations among ordinary Americans. The participants are given a copy of the recording to share with family and friends, and another recording is preserved at the Library of Congress in Washington. Since 2003, over 50,000 people have shared life stories and yesterday Bill & I joined the ranks!

I think we were both a bit apprehensive going in as there was no pre-arranged script and the tape would be rolling for 40 minutes. Surprisingly, the 40 minutes was over in a flash, and Bill and I had shared stories of our families, careers and our involvement with the community. I guess our Irish gift of gab got the better of us as we ran out of time long before we ran out of things to talk about. In the course of the conversation, we touched on quite a bit of history in the Valley over the last 100 years and some of the great leaders who made things happen here. Ironically, Bill made a special point of talking about Joel Smilow and his contributions to the Boys & Girls Club, and it was amazing how similar his perceptions were to those that I had expressed in an earlier blog posting.

Griffin will be wrapping up the StoryCorps project today, but they are giving people plenty of opportunities to contribute their own memories of the last 100 years. "Griffin Tales" is their project for inviting people to share their memories of life in the Valley and involvement with Griffin. Their tag line tells it all - "Griffin Tales: Your Stories, Our History. Since 1909." If you want to share your memories, you can e-mail them to Development@griffinhealth.org. Stories should be no more than one page in length. Include your name, address, phone number and e-mail, but you can request anonymity.

On behalf of Bill and myself, I want to thank Griffin and Connie Evans for giving us the opportunity to share in this wonderful project and also to congratulate Griffin on 100 years of making this a healthier place to live!