Seniors see a glimpse of their history in art Aldo Leopold student Emily Webb performs a skit based on oral histories collected from local senior citizens at the Aging Resource Center of Brown County. (photo by H. Marc Larson). Local students learn from seniors By Anna Krejci News-Chronicle Seniors relived their histories Monday as perceived through the eyes of children. As part of a history lesson that emphasized interviewing and researching, students at the Aldo Leopold Community School presented works of poetry and drama based on weekly meetings with seniors at the Aging Resource Center of Brown County. After students spent six months creating poems, photographs and dramas, seniors saw how their personal experiences became textbook material. At the Aging Resource Center of Brown County, 22 intermediate students collectively read a poem expressing unique aspects of historical events in a verbal collage of short phrases. Some referred to owning the first television on the block and even to using pages of the Sears catalog as toilet paper. The students composed poems commemorating an anecdote in the lives of their senior partners in the project. Seniors saw themselves portrayed while they gardened, played sports or sat outdoors watching a dragonfly circle them in the sky. Sandra Shackleford, documentary artist and Aldo Leopold staff member addressed the audience before the presentation began. "You have been the teachers of our students," she said to the seniors. One of those seniors was Jerome Krueger, who grew up in a small Illinois town. Everyone in his family bathed once a week and they heated five-gallon buckets on a gas stove to use as bath water. Krueger's bathing experience was highlighted in a poem. The retelling sparked chuckles from the audience as students enacted the successive baths taken by family members, with Krueger's character last in line because, as the poem read, he was always the dirtiest. After the presentation, seniors reflected on the poems. "I was so happy to get to high school and get showers," Krueger said, and acknowledged that he used to get into a lot of mud during his childhood. Margaret DeBroux was the subject of a poem written by Aldo Leopold student Zach Engels whose poem she says reflects her love of horses. "Safety of riding horses, loving pace of nature," Engels wrote in the opening lines. DeBroux loves horses because the rider feels a sense of freedom and shared power that exists between the rider and horse. "You feel a joining of that power. It makes you able to run with the wind which I couldn't do without a horse," she said. She used to race horses and showcase them in competition. She recalled one day she and a friend rode their horses across the Claude Allouez bridge, speeding up to beat a bus across. "Seniors like to tell their stories and I do too," DeBroux said. Young people believe seniors had a hard childhood just because it took place many years ago, but that is not always the case, she said. Her own childhood was filled with fun, it was just entertainment that was different than watching television. "It's a different life. I'm sure its as good for them as it was for me," she said. Cythera Moyer's said the interaction with children makes her feel more connected to society as it is now, and current times from which she does not want to be disconnected. "Any time seniors can get together with young people in any setting is wonderful," she said. In 1943 she married her husband before he left for the South Pacific to serve in the navy during World War II. At the time Moyer was a sophomore in college. Aldo Leopold student and poet, Andrew Jelinsky, wrote about his subject, "(she) wished to the stars that Jim would come home to the city safely." And her husband did come home, Moyer said. In September and October students took weekly trips to the Aging Resource Center. Teacher Hilarie Rath said the project was an outlet for expression. It's a voice for two groups that often don't have a a strong voice, and that would be the young and the old," Rath said. Shackleford, who instructed students on interviewing and how to develop the photographs they took, said, "I think your life is history." The act of telling one's story and hearing it expressed again from another person in an artistic way shows how one's history impacts others, she said. Students will perform "Weaving a Historical Tapestry: Voices of Youth and Age," at Heritage Hill State Park on at 2 p.m. Sunday.