Passing It On

Caffeinated, hyphen-ated and pixellated

I am soooo wired! I’ve been working hard this week to finish a couple of family history projects before taking off tomorrow for the annual conference of the Association of Personal Historians in Nashville.

Today I’m loading up my new iPod with great old music, stocking up on fresh batteries for my new digital camera, recharging my (relatively) new cell phone and readying my laptop for its first road trip.

To top it off, my good friend Sherry Borzo of dsmBuzz fame just posted a podcast interview with me where we talk about entrepreneurship, my family history business and my book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens.

I’m feeling like an uber Digital Daddy as I prepare for my first APH conference after three years of membership. If all this electronic stuff works right, I plan to blog from the conference.

Just for fun. For 30 years or so, I had a mustache. After all that time, I shaved it off and nobody noticed. Now, it turns out, mustaches are blogworthy. Check this out.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family stores. To learn more, check out his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of Kaija.

People lie (or at least stretch the truth a bit)

I learned early on in my career as a newspaper reporter that the truth can be elusive.

“People lie,” is the mantra of Dr. Gregory House, the wildly popular fictional TV character. “People embellish,” is my decidedly more benign take on the matter as it pertains to family stories.

This became abundantly clear when I was researching my book, “The Day the Music Died: The last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens.”

In the nearly half-century since the fatal plane crash that killed the singers, dozens have claimed to have avoided fate by either passing up a seat on that four-seater plane at the last minute or skipping that tour altogether.

In one of my interviews, I was told by someone (I think it was Waylon Jennings or J.I. Allison, one of the Crickets) that “if everyone was on that plane that said they were supposed to be on that plane, they’d have needed a 747.”

It wasn’t just celebrities that exaggerated their roles in the tragedy, either.

Time and again I was referred to people who had had contact with the singers around the time of the crash and had told hair-raising versions of “the real story.” Time and again when these people realized they were being interviewed on the record for a book, they backed off their versions and told a much tamer, less remarkable tale.

Embellished family stories are common. Sometimes we know they’re not true, but pass them on anyway. Sometimes we enjoy the different versions of the same story that are floating about. Sometimes we simply don’t know where the truth lies.

Each family deals with this differently. Here is how storyteller Ann Hagman Cardinal dealt with the shock of discovering the truth behind some of her favorite family stories. Joe McKeever describes the role that embellished family stories plays in his family’s reunions.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. If you’d like to know more, visit his web site or e-mail him.

Flickr photo of Hugh Laurie as Dr. Gregory House courtesy of  improv_7.

Happy birthday, Buddy Holly!

Buddy Holly would have been 71 years old this Friday, September 7.

To celebrate his life and music, Rudy Sheptock at WILW-FM (94.3) in Wildwood, N.J., will be offering a tribute show during his 7 p.m. to midnight oldies show on Friday night.

I'm honored to be among Rudy's guests. I'll be discussing Buddy's last tour, the subject of my 5-star Amazon-rated book, "The Day the Music Died," from 8:30 to 9 p.m., Central Daylight Time. I'll be followed by Peggy Sue Gerron (yes, that Peggy Sue).

Be there or be square!

Flickr photo of Buddy Holly statue in Lubbock, Texas, courtesy of tentonbricks.