Western Carolina University (20)
View all
- Canton Champion Fibre Company (2308)
- Cherokee Traditions (293)
- Civil War in Southern Appalachia (165)
- Craft Revival (1942)
- Great Smoky Mountains - A Park for America (2683)
- Highlights from Western Carolina University (430)
- Horace Kephart (941)
- Journeys Through Jackson (154)
- LGBTQIA+ Archive of Jackson County (7)
- Oral Histories of Western North Carolina (314)
- Picturing Appalachia (6679)
- Stories of Mountain Folk (413)
- Travel Western North Carolina (160)
- Western Carolina University Fine Art Museum Vitreograph Collection (129)
- Western Carolina University Herbarium (92)
- Western Carolina University: Making Memories (708)
- Western Carolina University Publications (2283)
- Western Carolina University Restricted Electronic Theses and Dissertations (146)
- Western North Carolina Regional Maps (71)
- World War II in Southern Appalachia (131)
University of North Carolina Asheville (6)
View all
- Appalachian Region, Southern (15)
- Asheville (N.C.) (11)
- Avery County (N.C.) (1)
- Buncombe County (N.C.) (55)
- Cherokee County (N.C.) (17)
- Clay County (N.C.) (2)
- Graham County (N.C.) (15)
- Great Smoky Mountains National Park (N.C. and Tenn.) (1)
- Haywood County (N.C.) (40)
- Henderson County (N.C.) (5)
- Jackson County (N.C.) (131)
- Knox County (Tenn.) (1)
- Macon County (N.C.) (17)
- Madison County (N.C.) (4)
- McDowell County (N.C.) (1)
- Mitchell County (N.C.) (5)
- Polk County (N.C.) (3)
- Qualla Boundary (6)
- Rutherford County (N.C.) (1)
- Swain County (N.C.) (30)
- Watauga County (N.C.) (2)
- Waynesville (N.C.) (1)
- Yancey County (N.C.) (3)
- Blount County (Tenn.) (0)
- Knoxville (Tenn.) (0)
- Lake Santeetlah (N.C.) (0)
- Transylvania County (N.C.) (0)
- Interviews (314)
- Manuscripts (documents) (3)
- Personal Narratives (7)
- Photographs (4)
- Sound Recordings (308)
- Transcripts (216)
- Aerial Photographs (0)
- Aerial Views (0)
- Albums (books) (0)
- Articles (0)
- Artifacts (object Genre) (0)
- Biography (general Genre) (0)
- Cards (information Artifacts) (0)
- Clippings (information Artifacts) (0)
- Crafts (art Genres) (0)
- Depictions (visual Works) (0)
- Design Drawings (0)
- Drawings (visual Works) (0)
- Envelopes (0)
- Facsimiles (reproductions) (0)
- Fiction (general Genre) (0)
- Financial Records (0)
- Fliers (printed Matter) (0)
- Glass Plate Negatives (0)
- Guidebooks (0)
- Internegatives (0)
- Land Surveys (0)
- Letters (correspondence) (0)
- Maps (documents) (0)
- Memorandums (0)
- Minutes (administrative Records) (0)
- Negatives (photographs) (0)
- Newsletters (0)
- Newspapers (0)
- Occupation Currency (0)
- Paintings (visual Works) (0)
- Pen And Ink Drawings (0)
- Periodicals (0)
- Poetry (0)
- Portraits (0)
- Postcards (0)
- Programs (documents) (0)
- Publications (documents) (0)
- Questionnaires (0)
- Scrapbooks (0)
- Sheet Music (0)
- Slides (photographs) (0)
- Specimens (0)
- Speeches (documents) (0)
- Text Messages (0)
- Tintypes (photographs) (0)
- Video Recordings (physical Artifacts) (0)
- Vitreographs (0)
- WCU Mountain Heritage Center Oral Histories (25)
- WCU Oral History Collection - Mountain People, Mountain Lives (71)
- Western North Carolina Tomorrow Black Oral History Project (69)
- A.L. Ensley Collection (0)
- Appalachian Industrial School Records (0)
- Appalachian National Park Association Records (0)
- Axley-Meroney Collection (0)
- Bayard Wootten Photograph Collection (0)
- Bethel Rural Community Organization Collection (0)
- Blumer Collection (0)
- C.W. Slagle Collection (0)
- Canton Area Historical Museum (0)
- Carlos C. Campbell Collection (0)
- Cataloochee History Project (0)
- Cherokee Studies Collection (0)
- Daisy Dame Photograph Album (0)
- Daniel Boone VI Collection (0)
- Doris Ulmann Photograph Collection (0)
- Elizabeth H. Lasley Collection (0)
- Elizabeth Woolworth Szold Fleharty Collection (0)
- Frank Fry Collection (0)
- George Masa Collection (0)
- Gideon Laney Collection (0)
- Hazel Scarborough Collection (0)
- Hiram C. Wilburn Papers (0)
- Historic Photographs Collection (0)
- Horace Kephart Collection (0)
- Humbard Collection (0)
- Hunter and Weaver Families Collection (0)
- I. D. Blumenthal Collection (0)
- Isadora Williams Collection (0)
- Jesse Bryson Stalcup Collection (0)
- Jim Thompson Collection (0)
- John B. Battle Collection (0)
- John C. Campbell Folk School Records (0)
- John Parris Collection (0)
- Judaculla Rock project (0)
- Kelly Bennett Collection (0)
- Love Family Papers (0)
- Major Wiley Parris Civil War Letters (0)
- Map Collection (0)
- McFee-Misemer Civil War Letters (0)
- Mountain Heritage Center Collection (0)
- Norburn - Robertson - Thomson Families Collection (0)
- Pauline Hood Collection (0)
- Pre-Guild Collection (0)
- Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual Collection (0)
- R.A. Romanes Collection (0)
- Rosser H. Taylor Collection (0)
- Samuel Robert Owens Collection (0)
- Sara Madison Collection (0)
- Sherrill Studio Photo Collection (0)
- Smoky Mountains Hiking Club Collection (0)
- Stories of Mountain Folk - Radio Programs (0)
- The Reporter, Western Carolina University (0)
- Venoy and Elizabeth Reed Collection (0)
- WCU Gender and Sexuality Oral History Project (0)
- WCU Students Newspapers Collection (0)
- William Williams Stringfield Collection (0)
- Zebulon Weaver Collection (0)
- African Americans (97)
- Artisans (5)
- Cherokee pottery (1)
- Cherokee women (1)
- College student newspapers and periodicals (4)
- Education (3)
- Floods (13)
- Folk music (3)
- Great Smoky Mountains National Park (N.C. and Tenn.) (1)
- Hunting (1)
- Mines and mineral resources (2)
- Rural electrification -- North Carolina, Western (2)
- School integration -- Southern States (2)
- Segregation -- North Carolina, Western (5)
- Slavery (5)
- Sports (2)
- Storytelling (3)
- World War, 1939-1945 (3)
- Appalachian Trail (0)
- Cherokee art (0)
- Cherokee artists -- North Carolina (0)
- Cherokee language (0)
- Church buildings (0)
- Civilian Conservation Corps (U.S.) (0)
- Dams (0)
- Dance (0)
- Forced removal, 1813-1903 (0)
- Forest conservation (0)
- Forests and forestry (0)
- Gender nonconformity (0)
- Landscape photography (0)
- Logging (0)
- Maps (0)
- North Carolina -- Maps (0)
- Paper industry (0)
- Postcards (0)
- Pottery (0)
- Railroad trains (0)
- Waterfalls -- Great Smoky Mountains (N.C. and Tenn.) (0)
- Weaving -- Appalachian Region, Southern (0)
- Wood-carving -- Appalachian Region, Southern (0)
Interview with George Frizzell, transcript
Item
Item’s are ‘child’ level descriptions to ‘parent’ objects, (e.g. one page of a whole book).
-
-
George Frizzell 1 George Frizzell Interview Interviewer: Jacob Nicholson Interviewee: George Frizzell Interview Location: Western Carolina University Interview Date: May 28, 2019 Interview Length: 41:21 Jacob Nicholson: I'm Jacob Nicholson. I am here with George Frizzell. I am from Appalachian Oral History. Do I have your consent to record you during this interview? George Frizzell: Yes. JN: I want to thank you for taking time out of your day to come and do this interview. Thank you very much. GF: I appreciate that. JN: If you could, give me your name, birthplace, and where you grew up, please. GF: I am George Frizzell. I was born in Sylva but actually grew up in the Little Savannah Community, which is a few miles away from the actual town of Sylva. A very rural area. I've always lived there, in a valley where my family has been for several generations. JN: Little Savannah, ain't that going towards Franklin? GF: Ah, you can get to Franklin going that way. You go across Gribble Gap, you know, what they call the airport road now, and as you go down into the valley, you're in what technically what is Little Savannah, and that runs all the way out into Webster. Then from there, you can cut over to Franklin. JN: That's pretty cool. What was it like growing up around here? GF: A little different from today. When I was growing up, of course, my road was a dirt road, a gravel road. Actually, the closest paved highway was over two miles away, even coming toward Cullowhee. Sylva was, this was the days before any of the roads were four-laned through here, so Sylva was probably a good twenty-five, thirty-minute ride from where I lived. Just to give, well when I say Sylva, into the old downtown area, not the Walmart stretch, but the area down and around the old courthouse and that stretch of buildings. JN: What was your family like? How big of a family did you have? GF: I am an only child, but my father came from a family of, there were fifteen. Most of those lived to adulthood. I think about twelve actually lived to adulthood. My mother came from a family of five. She had two brothers and two sisters, so I had lots of Aunts and Uncles, lots of cousins, and in my immediate area, there were, once again, a host of great uncles and great aunts and various relatives. JN: It's always good to have a pretty big family. GF: It was a big family, yes, my grandparents were literally just a few hundred yards away up the hillside above us, and the other set of grandparents were once again about a twenty, thirty minute drive, not George Frizzell 2 that far of a distance today but in the sixties, it would have taken them twenty-five, thirty minutes to get to their place. JN: What sort of stuff would you do for fun, what would you go out and do exactly? Were you one of them kids that would just go out in the woods and build you a fort and play in the mud, just real nice? GF: Well, before I developed allergies to it, we used to go up to the barn and build forts out of hay bales. And then, at some point in my early teens, I developed a severe reaction to dry grass, so that stopped. But we did roam around the hillsides quite a bit, mainly because my grandfather had cows and there would be cattle tracks that you could follow up and down around the mountainsides. At a certain point in the teens, my cousins and I had bicycles, and we would ride around the communities, just on our bicycles. No big deal. And then at some point in time, I developed an intense passion for reading, so I started reading a lot, quite frankly. JN: Sometimes, your preferences just change. you go from liking one thing to liking the complete opposite. GF: Yup, I developed a great passion for books and started reading and found out there were books on just about any topic you could imagine and sort of went from there. JN: Did that sort of build you up to be in charge of records here at WCU? GF: I guess to some degree. Like I said, I had an intense love of books for the knowledge they contain but also just the intrinsic nature of them and the fact that there were different editions, there were different versions of them. That you could go into the library and find annotated versions you could find one that was illustrated. You could find just a host of different books, and when I started working here, it was one of those things where I was able to start putting that into help collecting in particular areas. JN: How did you like being in charge of special records here? Some people don't like their jobs, but did you like it, or did you like other? GF: Oh no, I really enjoy what I was doing because of what we were collecting were historical materials that chronicled the development of the area, the changes of both the cultural and environmental landscape. It included things like manuscripts be it correspondence, financial records, written materials along those lines, photographs, and books as well. The books were just one component of a much larger collecting policy, and the great fun of it was that you never knew what you were going to find or locate. You could read the history of the book, but when you locate, when somebody donated an original letter, something that helped document that history, that was the exciting part of it. I would be going through these large collections. for instance, we got in one collection from a clothes textile company in the area that operated in the 1920s, and to my surprise, there was a letter signed by Helen Keller, which just took me off guard. She was advocating workers safety, and I was just going through these stacks of letters, looking at them, and of course, a lot of it was just the everyday operations of the plant, the business dealings, and then all of a sudden, there was this letter about safety, and I thought well this is different, and I looked at the signature, and it said, Helen Keller. I checked on the Helen Keller signature later, and it was signed the way she did it, it was perfectly handwritten, and it matched up. This is not something I was expecting while going through these. JN: This is one of the amazing things, you just walk around and like, “Whoa, that's pretty cool.” George Frizzell 3 GF: It was, it's interesting that something unexpected like that would just suddenly crop up, and you can use that to put collections in a wider context. Here you have a company based out of Waynesville, and at the same time you got Hellen Keller, who has national fame, this is an original signature, writing to urge a matter that was very dear to her. It brings a certain personal level to the collections that I don't think people always realize, and that's the fun part of it. You just never knew what people would suddenly find in their family papers and want to share, and that was the other fun part of it was getting to know family stories, family histories. They would bring in these letters from different time periods, and we would help put them into context and then in most cases people would decide to donate them so that they would be available for other people to research and enjoy. JN: What were some of your jobs and duties in the special records? Would you, like as you said you'd get certain things people would donate and you would look over them and tell people about them and stuff like that? GF: Well, when you get a new collection in, regardless of the size, the first thing you need to do is go through and analyze it and see what the components are and then you have to write up some kind of finding guide. You have to do something that will make it accessible for researchers. That might be chronological or alphabetical, depending on the nature of the materials involved, but you have to have some way to access particular items and to let people know that this collection concerns be it the records of a store, something that concerns WWI or the Civil War or any of the number of local topics be it businesses or family matters. You've got to be able to write up a collection description that will help people, you and the researcher locate it, and then when people come in because you already had first-hand experience handling the materials you can help point them in the right direction. One thing I always try to avoid doing was putting myself in between the researcher and the material. I didn't try to lecture them about an interpretation of it. I would help them find the material and then find correlating items, something that would help give them a historical perspective. If they would ask me point-blank, I would help with historical context, but I try not to be the person that was dictating to them what their interpretation should be. That's something that they would have to . . . That's the whole part of doing historical research, you've got to come up with your own interpretation of the sources that are at hand. And you don't want to be the person that, where people can't access these materials without checking in with you, and you go, “Oh, I don't like that question. You can't do that.” you go, “Yes, I think I can help you find the answer to this” or “I can help you find relevant materials.” That's what I always try to do is help find those relevant materials and then add anything else that might be helpful like other manuscript collections. You'd be amazed the number of collections. This collection may have something that a researcher is interested in, and at the same time, there maybe three or four other collections, and you bring those out, and it gives a wider context, or there may be a primary or secondary source in the form of a book. There might be a history that was written that's a secondary source that would give them some additional information. That was one of the fun parts of the kind of work that I did was helping people find answers. Taking questions and helping them find the materials that would help them build upon their answers and give them the kind of research materials that they were seeking. JN: So instead of being more of a teacher and tell them what they wanted, what you thought would be biased, you would be like, well here's this, I think you'd like it. You're more of a guide. GF: Yeah, I would answer questions if it was something that I had done a lot of research in. I would give them some guidance, but I would tell them you've got to look at the resources and make up your own George Frizzell 4 decision. One thing that I always used to do, for instance, with a book, there were some history books that thoroughly enjoyed, some that I wasn't too pleased with their analysis, but I would tell people to check the footnotes. Sometimes people had fantastic footnotes, and I would try to get people to, if you don't agree with what the analysis was, at least check the footnotes. See what they referenced because there were some people that had incredible footnotes. I didn't always agree with the final analysis but I would tell people to check their sources and then make a determination, don't decide just based upon oh, I don't agree because it’s just not what I think. JN: So, be open-minded to the different sources? GF: I tried to get people to look at different sources. I would read books, and I'd get halfway through and go this just isn't what I was expecting but I'd still finish it. (laughs) And then there were some that I thought were just fantastic because they were well documented, they were well footnoted, they had obviously searched out primary and secondary sources, and of course the great thrill was if they used materials that we had collected. (laughs) And you'd be reading and go I know this letter. (laughs) JN: What did you see as your greatest responsibility as the head of the special collections? GF: That's a good question. I'm not sure. Part of the aim was to make sure it was something that would, the special collections existed before I arrived, and one of the main goals was to try to make sure it was something that would endure long after I was gone. That was one of my biggest desires is that once you collect it and organized it and been making it accessible the day will come when I'm gone and when your gone and everybody else, but with any luck, these materials will still be around in a couple generations and beyond for people to research and to make more use of. New research topics come up constantly. Everybody thinks that historians have mined everything that's possible, and that's just not true. New history's being made every day, and when you take the older materials and put in context with the newer stuff, you see the new options and new research avenues. That's always the fun part, but you got to make sure that these are preserved and organized and accessible and that they will be available years after you're no longer there to be a direct participant, and especially with online resources now it’s just amazing what you can get to online. That's been one of the fun things to watch. JN: Always go back and see just all the different history, I like to go back and see all of it, and it's amazing. GF: Oh, it is. It’s fun to see the different versions. I always enjoyed, for instance, looking at old newspapers because newspapers were, that issue of the newspaper, be it March 1917, whatever, they didn't know what next week was going to hold. So what they were writing about was the immediacy of their lives, and they may not know that a big event is going to happen the next week. And so that's the incredible part was to see what life was like up to that point when the event happens and how people react, because sometimes when you read a history book, you already know the outcome. If you read a book on a particular event that's been analyzed in-depth, you already know certain facts are going to be covered, but when you’re reading some of the original documentation, the people don't have that foresight. They just, all they can tell you is what's happening at that point, and they may not know that a major event is on the way. Like one I helped out with last year was about the 1940 flood in Jackson County, which was the major flood in this county in late August of 1940. And when you’re reading the newspapers, they know that it's raining a lot and they know that the water is getting high, but they don't know that in a few days' time that this incredible flood is about to hit a major section of the county and George Frizzell 5 then afterwards there's report on how they rally to overcome that and how they try to get across the rivers because all the bridges are washed out. They do things like build temporary footbridges, and even to get students to school, they would row them across the Tuckasegee river. JN: What is the most memorable moment throughout your whole career? GF: I'm not sure I can narrow it down. I mean it’s all been a lot of fun. I'm not sure if I have a singular most memorable moment. I've had times when I've got taken off guard. I was doing a program to a group of 8th graders, one time, and I had a picture to show you how old this was. It was a slide, not a PowerPoint. It was a slide with a photo I'd looked at several times, and one student said, “Who's that lady in the background?” I mean I was using it to illustrate a lady at a spinning wheel, and a student said, whose the person in the background and I glanced, and it took me a moment, and I thought they are right, there is somebody in the background, and I'd never noticed. I was kinda of startled by that. As far as a memorable moment, I think I've had quite a number of them, you know. People locating items that I didn't think would ever see the light of day, new collections, new materials, photographs. The most memorable moments that I think I've had were doing programs, outreach programs to talk to the community, where you'd get to share all these items. And that's another fun part of the position was to be able to put together a program or a talk on a particular topic, be it the history of Sylva or something about Dillsboro or I did one on hydroelectric developments in the area. And you get to go out, and you get to share it with people, and then they get to share their stories back with you, and you could learn a lot from the experiences that people had growing up. Like one person, I would do one on hydroelectric developments, and somebody would talk about, reminiscing about when their family first got electricity. That was a major deal. You could do one on the history of Sylva, and someone would put in a little aside about remembering when there used to be two-way traffic on main street. Or when a particular event would take place, so those were some of the memorable events, was being able to interact with folks in the community, and be able to get their perspectives. And you didn't have to be from here. Some of the best programs that I enjoyed were people that were new to the area, and they were very interested in the history of this region, and they had moved here and wanted to learn more about it. That was very enjoyable to see people get involved in local history. I do the same thing when I've traveled. I go to local museums, and there's an outdoor museum in south Georgia that I've stopped at several times to see what life was like in the late 1800s in south Georgia, even though I have no family from there. JN: Do you miss any aspects of the job? GF: I miss helping people. I miss answering questions, having particular resources immediately available at hand. I still do volunteer work, and I get to help with answering questions and finding resources but I don't have the immediate access since I'm not in the building. But part of that has been offset, like you said, with so much information being placed online. It's amazing for just materials housed here what you can get to now online, be it photographs, manuscripts, correspondence. That is something that has been one of the best parts of this is being able to go in and do a search and suddenly find an item that you remember and pull it up and see it. I do miss some of the interactions with a lot of researchers, but I still get to do that on a different level in my volunteer work. JN: How did you get interested in the local history? GF: I said this in another interview, years ago when I retired, but one of my first recollections, I went to an elementary school in Webster, you know the rock building in Webster. Okay that was the elementary George Frizzell 6 school. It used to be a high school before that, that my father attended, but I was in elementary school, and I remember that one day we took a walk around Webster and we heard people reminiscing about here's where the first courthouse in Jackson county stood and this is where the first jail was and here's where the Mountain View Hotel was. And I remember just being fascinated because I had never really heard this in detail before, people just discussing the history of the region. Especially after I got in college, I started to find out that our local history, as with any local history, was far more complex than a lot of people would give it credit for and people were making big decisions in their lives and we were wrapped up in the same kind of national events that there were, for instance just a few miles down the road from me there were clay mines, kaolin mines that were shipping out in the late 1890's massive amounts of a highly profitable resource. It wasn't gold, it wasn't silver, it wasn't the things people think of would make a fortune off of, but the clay mines were making some people very rich and I just thought this is fascinating that all this is happening in our area and that it all ties in nationally. The clay was going to potters in the midwest to make porcelain. We're not talking clay for bricks, we're talking very fine high quality. As I started doing research in college and then in graduate studies, I started concentrating on local events more and more, and fortunately got a position in the library here that let me utilize that, to help collect local history and make it available. JN: In your opinion, what makes this history, our local history so interesting? GF: Like I say that as with local history there is a complexity and you have to factor in, as with any other area, different circumstances. The mountains here made transportation a little different than other areas. Our experiences were similar to and yet different from those in let’s say the piedmont, or other areas depending on, you know. . . The rail lines did not arrive until the 1880's whereas they might have arrived a generation earlier somewhere else. It’s one of those things where you pick up on it and you try to find out what the trends are and how they fit in overall but then what's unique about it. For instance, here they were shipping off, in the 1840's and 50's even before rail lines got here, tons of ginseng. It’s just fascinating to find out there's a market for this and that they go to great lengths to gather it and get it to market, and when they ship all this off they also turn around and they buy commodities and bring back here things that aren't available. They bring back items that could be sold in stores here, so you find out where some people act as though western North Carolina was completely isolated, and you find out instead that we were connected to a wider region. You get to learn about not only the region you're living in but in some cases, you stumble upon your family. So, every now and then you get in a ledger book or something and you start looking through it and you go oh, there's some of my people. JN: Do you have any memorable stories from this area that has really got to you and it's like wow that's really fascinating, and interesting? GF: Well, like I said, there's some stories I just found riveting, the flood in 1940, like I say, was partly because I’d done programs about it that I would meet people that still remember the flood of 1940. And when we did a program last year, there were folks that got up and told family stories about it and you would get this immediate feedback that, to them, what I was reading were newspaper accounts of what I had heard from my family and people would get up and give you this immediate response as to what happened with their family, how they dealt with it, their experiences, things that did not get reported in newspapers or had been written down in letters that hadn't been donated yet. I'm sure there are letters out there where somebody has written in detail about the flood to someone else, but those haven't, while I was here, have not made it back. And people were getting up and telling these George Frizzell 7 events that I just found fascinating, because to me its history, but for some of them, they were just reading life events. Then they would repeat earlier floods that they heard from their grandparents. They would go back to something thirty, forty years earlier, and say, yes, my grandfather said the river did this. And sometimes items like that would be hard to document otherwise. I wish more people would write some of this down, actually, and I do wish people had taken the time to document some events or at least search them out and see if they had any family papers they would like to share that would shed more light on it. JN: What changes have you seen, to WCU, like over your time working here and after you retired? Like what changes have you noticed? GF: Well, certainly, the campus and the university have been growing quite a bit. My father was working here in the early 1960s, and at that time, I think, enrollment was in the 2,000 to 2,500 range. I believe it’s about 12,000 now, 11 ½ to 12,000. So definitely, the campus and enrollment have grown significantly. A lot more offerings in the way of courses, so it's a much larger institution, and as I said, when I was growing up, there were no four-lane roads. You literally went on the Old Cullowhee highway to get to Sylva. It was two-lane roads from here, even from campus, until you got close to Asheville. So there's been a noticeable change there as far as transportation goes, the ability to come and go, and a large growth in the population of the county. When I was born, the county was actually experiencing significant population loss. In the 1950s, the population was going down. Some studies attribute the growth to Western Carolina, to the college, and later the university, when it became a university in 1967. Its growth to helping reverse that population decline in Jackson county, so there was an upsurge in my teenage years and later, but then a significant increase, past twenty or thirty years, the county population is two and a half times what it was when I was younger. So, it has grown quite a bit, which is not bad necessarily. That's why we collect the materials that we do that we did when I was here, to document some of this and show the way life was and hopefully document fifty years from now when people want to find out what it was like to live through this time period. Fifty years from now, your folks may be wanting to find out what you lived through. JN: Can't lose that history. People’s got to know what we've been through and where they come from. GF: It helps. It gives people a sense of place, a sense of being. Sometimes it takes people a little longer. They are a little older before they suddenly take interest in what their grandparents or great grandparents experienced. Others get into it much earlier, but at some point in time, a lot of people suddenly develop an interest in the region where their family had a connection, and they want to know more about it. They want to find out what was the area like, what was life like, what did my grandparents or great grandparents experience? I had the good fortune of knowing all of my grandparents so I could kind of relate to it for people that didn't have that, that maybe wanted to know more about. They had just heard stories, or they just knew vaguely, and I can just understand why they would want to try to fill in the gaps and try to see what these family traditions meant. JN: Do you have anything that you would like to add, like any stories or anything? GF: Ah, no, other than I just hope that people can continue to be on the lookout for historical family materials and take an active interest in sharing those and consider letting other people know that these items exist. To me, I hate seeing things just stashed away in a dresser drawer somewhere, and people have no clue what they have. I prefer that they would share it or at least bring it out and let people see George Frizzell 8 it and enjoy it with them. So that's something that I would always urge people is that you've got to start collecting now for the future because, at some point in time, items are going to start disappearing. You may have the family papers now, but you don’t know if they're going to be around in fifty years, so let's share them while we can.
Object
Object’s are ‘parent’ level descriptions to ‘children’ items, (e.g. a book with pages).
-
George Frizzell is interviewed by a Smoky Mountain High School student as a part of Mountain People, Mountain Lives: A Student Led Oral History Project. Frizzell was born in Sylva and raised in the Little Savannah community where he has lived his entire life. He shares stories of growing up and his career as the head of Special Collections at Western Carolina University. He shares his thoughts on the importance of local history and some ways in which the history of western North Carolina is unique.
-