Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 8, Issue 4, April 2004

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Hamilton eighth-graders

discover Wallingford's past

By JAMES BUSH

A group of eighth-graders at Hamilton Middle School are not only investigating their neighborhood's history, but also planning to share it with others.

An innovative collaboration between Jill Read's eighth-grade Washington state history class and the University District-based Jack Straw Productions will result in a "historical audio tour" of the surrounding neighborhood. Copies of the historical radio features narrated and produced by students will be available both on CD and in an online version which will be featured on both the school and Jack Straw Web sites.

Students visited Jack Straw's Roosevelt Way studios on March 12 to record their narrations and do some initial production. Oral history interviews with several longtime neighborhood residents were recorded at the school earlier in the week.

Read, who is her fourth year of teaching at Hamilton, says the students worked to develop radio features on six historic neighborhood sites: Hamilton Middle School, Lincoln High School, Interlake Elementary School (now the Wallingford Center), Tweedy & Popp Hardware Store, Ryther Child Center (now located in Wedgwood but founded on Stone Way), and the former Stapp family home at 4203 Woodlawn Ave. N, the one-time headquarters of the old North Central Outlook weekly newspaper.

The morning's work began with a briefing on studio recording from engineer/producer Scott Bartlett and a series of vocal exercises led by Laurel Anne White and Amy Broomhall, two theater artists who served as vocal coaches for the student narrators.

Broomhall advised students to keep their hands folded behind their backs while speaking to cut down on extraneous movement and noise, then invoked a mantra the students would hear many times that day: "There's no such thing as mistakes," she said. "You can go over and over."

Working in studio two with Liane Walters, who was narrating a piece on the history of Hamilton Middle School itself, Broomhall deleted a tongue-twisting phrase, then showed Walters how to emphasize the end of sentences to properly lead into a snippet of their oral history interviews.

Walters said that learning about Hamilton's history taught her to look at her school differently. For example, she learned from former students that the scars on the floors of some classrooms were caused by the former practice of bolting down desks. "They were always there," she said of the scars, "but we just didn't think about them."

Jacob Hamilton, the student producer of her segment, says what surprised him was how little of the two oral history interviews they completed will actually be included in the final product. "We asked about 20 questions to both of them," he said, "and we used about six seconds of it."

Broomhall and White each used different techniques to coax a good performance from their charges. Broomhall took her narrators through their entire presentation several times to get a superior complete version, while White took the presentation one line at a time to ensure exact readings of each line. After Solomon Simone took his first try on introducing an interview from a child who used to live at the Ryther Child Center, White advised him to try again, but put more interest in his voice. "Make it really interesting," she encouraged him. "Make it the most interesting story you've ever told."

Meanwhile, back in studio two, Bartlett was showing the student producers how to insert the interview excerpts into the Hamilton history narration. After inserting a few lines from a former student describing his Hamilton days, Bartlett noted that the cut wasn't quite smooth enough. "It kind of sounds like he's not done talking," he said. He debated two possible solutions with the student producer: either changing the quote used or inserting a fade into the audio track to smooth the transition.

The production will be finished at Jack Straw in late March, with CD copies of the student history vignettes expected by the end of April.

Joan Rabinowitz, Jack Straw executive director, says the Hamilton program was based on a professional piece Jack Straw did on University District Art and Architecture. The program was designed with the help of Hamilton coordinators Sue Ranney and Audra Rutherford and led by Jack Straw resident artists Don Fels and Gordon Black. "It's been a lot of work," said Rabinowitz. "The kids have really done a lot."