FAMILY STORIES ON FIRE
Fire 1)
Story Grandma Denise, 1906 Earthquake
My Grandma excitedly told me that she had something in the basement to show me. She unearthed a box of China plates that came from John’s store, and I asked her why they were so dirty. “It’s ash chicky!” my Grandmother said with enthusiasm, and she held the soot-tinged plate to my nose and instructed me to inhale the smell of the 1906 Fire. This story inspired me as a child about both history and the transformative effects of fire. It was significant as a family story.
Our lack of records for my ancestor John Dwyer, who immigrated from Ireland to the West Coast, was said to be because of the 1906 Earthquake and subsequent fire. My Grandmother always told me all our family records were burned with John’s store in San Francisco. This also reinforces for me the importance of oral traditions and stories in families. My Grandmother always shared family stories with me and I try to share these same stories with my younger cousins to carry on the tradition.
Fire 2)
Interview with Aunt Linnea
Linnea shared her recollections of September 11 2001 and what it was like to witness the World Trade Center attacks from her job in Manhattan and later near her home in Brooklyn.
“I was walking through Prospect Park and there was cinders, you know like paper, like scraps of burned paper that was floating through the air. That was really surreal. You know, like you were living in a movie. Like an extra in a movie.”
Linnea also talked about “how poorly US citizens and our government responded to the attack”. She describes the “era of atrocities” and how it felt to her to know that her country was committing these acts of great evil around the world. Linnea talked about protests at that time, that “Still, going out and saying that I disagree with this publicly, but it felt so...[ineffective].” We discussed our complicated feelings around 9/11, on one hand seeing the value in these firsthand accounts of major historical events, while on the other hand acknowledging how this event was used as a catalyst for decades of racist laws being enacted that violated basic privacy and constitutional rights and long and horrendous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Linnea says seriously that, “We are conveniently forgetting, our own history.”
The audio from this video was used in the videos Coven and Pledge Allegiance. Quotes included, “Everything, like the emergency vehicles, and the you-know. The sound of the towers going down was so...big...that you know it drowned out anything that I could hear in my immediate.” This interview did not directly support my thesis question but added to the sources about fire as a transformative element.