News Priceless Stories at Hoover Library March 4: Benton County Women Featured

A video montage of Benton County women’s lives in the early part of the last century is scheduled to air at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum Sunday, March 4.

Also, the Newhall Public Library is showing the montage Saturday, March 24, 10 a.m.

The recently-digitized montage is a 35-minute condensation of 36 hours of ten Benton County women’s oral histories, recorded 25 years ago by members of a Vinton branch of the American Association of University Women. The project was revived by an ad hoc committee seeking funds to digitize stories originally recorded on cassette tapes in 1984. Type-written transcripts of the tapes are being digitized by the Iowa Women’s Archives to increase their availability to the public.

“The montage shares first-person stories and photos woven together to give a rich picture of the lives of rural Iowa women from about 1900 to 1984,” according to Benton County project chair Julie Zimmer. “They talk about growing up in Iowa or emigrating from abroad, about their education and recreation, about their marriages or single lives, families, and jobs or work in the home, all in the context of two world wars, influenza epidemics, the advent of the automobile, women’s suffrage, the Depression and other historical events. These stories are engaging and priceless, partly because they are so relevant, the same wonderful stories our own grandmothers could have told. ”

The 2:00 p.m. showing at the Hoover Library in West Branch is one of several presentations in March, culminating with a special event at the Iowa Braille School in Vinton, moderated by Iowa Women’s Archives Curator Kӓren Mason, encouraging Iowans to share and preserve their own family histories.

The following free montage presentations, during the month of March (Women’s History Month) have been partially funded by a grant from Humanities Iowa and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

March TBA – various Benton County Libraries; Vinton-Shellsburg TAG program

March 1 - Vinton-Shellsburg home school group

March 4 – Hoover Library, West Branch 2:00

March 8 – Rockridge Care Center, Shellsburg

March 12 – Benton Community Schools MS/HS

March 15 – Windsor Manor, Vinton

March 19 – Lutheran Home, Vinton

March 19 – Blairstown Public Library (a.m & p.m.)

March 21 – Vinton Lions Club

March 21 – Virginia Gay Hospital Longterm Care

March 25 – Iowa Braille School Auditorium, 2:00 including remarks by Humanities scholar Karen Mason, footage from Vinton Sesquicentennial and tips on recording your own family histories.

Copies of the montage will be available for purchase. Proceeds will fund further digitization of the women’s voices from cassette to CD or flash drive.

Care centers wishing to schedule the montage may contact Virginia Holsten of the Vinton Public Library, or Julie Zimmer, 319-472-4660.

The ten women who told their stories on tape include:

Jennie Koch Beck, Keystone/Belle Plaine Bess Shurtleff Burrows, Belle Plaine Ruth Gongwer Mumford, Atkins/Fremont Township Alvena Selken Schroeder, rural Keystone Dorothy Wiegand (Pollock) Salle, Mt. Auburn, Allegra Grady Schueler, Van Horne Nira Primmer (Narber, Knapp) Geiger, Vinton Frieda Brehm Geiken, Vinton Gertrude Smith, (Cayton, England) rural Urbana/Vinton Esther Williams, Vinton