For the third consecutive year, students from Haddonfield Memorial High School joined seniors at the Mabel Kay Senior Center to present memoir projects by the students that captured the seniors’ stories.
This year, about 20 participating senior citizens worked with English teacher Holly Maiese’s ninth grade class. In October, the students met with their seniors three times for hour-long interview sessions. From there, they teamed up to write memoirs that capture the life stories and covered subjects like family, school, career and other achievements.
Sheri Siegel, coordinator of the Mabel Kay Senior Center, explained how the memoir project has evolved. When it began three years ago, students were paired one to one with 48 senior participants. Now, they work in groups of two or three to interview the seniors, allowing the project to be more sustainable and to help distribute the work among students.
This year’s memoir subjects included seniors from Haddonfield and neighboring areas, including former Mayor Letitia Colombi. Caryl Wallace, a longtime Haddonfield resident who met her late husband in high school noted that the memoir project “made her feel young again.”
“I think it’s a great idea, for them (students) and for somebody older, and the fact that they learn to write also, they learn a lot of stuff,” Wallace observed. “They learned to interview, they wrote it up, and then they got it back with a couple of mistakes and they worked together. They gave us a rough copy for facts, and you could tell when it changed, which kids wrote which, and I enjoyed that.”
Students shared their favorite parts of the project, including speaking with the older generation, understanding more about the past and how it relates to today and how things were different but also the same.
“I feel like as a young person myself, I don’t really talk to the older generation in Haddonfield as much as I do the younger population,” acknowledged Everett Maeyer, a ninth grader who interviewed Wallace and expressed gratitude for the opportunity.
Each memoir helps to capture a moment of history. Once completed, the seniors are presented with a copy of their memoirs. In the project’s first year, two seniors passed away before the memoir handoff, so it was a bittersweet moment for their families to have a keepsake of them.
While she originally thought the end product would be the most valued, Siegel learned that the process was just as meaningful for seniors.
“I’ve learned that people just want to be able to talk to people and be a part of something bigger, and feel purposeful,” she noted, “and it’s created this atmosphere where the seniors feel valued, appreciated and heard.”
The Mabel Kay Senior Center expects to continue the project with Maiese’s class next year.
