Wellesley High School juniors (going on seniors) Chris Ulian and Ben Griswold have created a website called Wellesley Memories, a community service project they completed as part of a leadership training course they were selected for at the school along with other students.
“After briefly considering rather sub-par ideas such as ‘teach young children how to run,’ we decided to compile memories of Wellesley, which we felt would be beneficial to the community as a whole,” Ulian writes.
Wellesley Memories consists of narratives distilled from interviews the students conducted with seven Wellesley senior citizens. In doing the interviews, the students learned that even their elders took part in rascally behavior (driving cars in the woods near Longfellow Pond), spray painting the goal posts at Needham High before the big football, etc. They also learned about how townspeople coped during war time, including the Cold War. And they got a view into a very different Wellesley, one in which cows roamed neighborhoods near Cliff Road, record hops took place at the Unitarian Church, forced busing was used to integrate schools, and elementary schools squared off in sports competitions vs. each other.
The Wellesley Memories project nicely complements Josh Dorin’s Wellesley History blog as a record of times gone by in town.
Would love to see more. Who was interviewed? Where can we read the full report?
This feels very much like the youngsters in a family interviewing the oldsters: recognizing both a kinship with other Wellesley-ites and finding value in the reminiscences. Good for all the members of this committee.
Thanks for the shout-out! And I’m happy to see Wellesley residents — young and old — embracing the town’s history.