Kim McIntyre grew up exploring the alcoves and bays of Long Beach’s famous Bembridge House, a Queen Anne Victorian-style mansion near Drake Park. McIntyre’s mother, who drove a library bookmobile around Long Beach, knew the house’s owner, Dorothy Bembridge. The two would play piano and sing downstairs, while a young McIntyre navigated the attic. “I knew all the secret passageways,” she said.
Later, as a cheerleader at Poly High School, McIntyre cheered the football team to frequent wins before studying to become a nurse. She was recruited to the Long Beach VA Hospital; there, she received eight marriage proposals. “I think all the guys want a nurse to take care of them forever,” she said. “I said no to every one.”
Now, age 77 and retired, McIntyre is part of a local effort to record stories like hers. The Long Beach Gray Panthers, part of a national organization championing the needs of older adults, has partnered with interns at Cal State Long Beach to interview Long Beach seniors.
Karen Reside, president of the Long Beach Gray Panthers, is conducting the project for StoryCorps, a national nonprofit collecting and archiving Americans’ oral histories in the Library of Congress. Reside is focusing on Long Beach residents who, through their many years of life, have seen the city evolve. “We don’t want to lose their knowledge,” she said. “We want them to understand that their knowledge has value.”
Ray Hetzel, 83, attended a Gray Panthers taping session after moving to Long Beach in October. He grew up in Rockaway, New York, and, in his “ill-spent youth,” became an undercover police officer, he said. He quickly dispelled illusions of glamor: “I was not a James Bond,” he said. “When I went undercover, I was a janitor.”
To keep his mother calm, he gave up the badge, he said, and went on to have a career as an artist, taking photos of models and actors in Texas, developing his skill as a painter, curating art museums and spending a stint as architect Philip Johnson’s go-for (“Go for this, go for that,” Hetzel explained).
Eventually, the Texas heat became too oppressive: “I was basically a prisoner in my studio,” he said, showing photo evidence that his thermometer clocked the pavement at a scorching 149 degrees. A business partner-turned friend had moved to Long Beach, and Hetzel, ready for a coastal breeze, followed.
Now, he said he has more freedom and fewer age restrictions. “Here, I don’t feel like people refer to me as an old man,” he said. “In Texas, they do.”
The interviewers who elicited these colorful stories are CSULB students studying political science, psychology and public health. Shirene McKinney, working toward her master’s in public health and focusing on gerontology, wanted to intern with the Gray Panthers because of their mission to foster interaction between generations. “It’s so important to share our lives, share our experiences,” she said. “We grow so well from being in community with others.”
One goal of the project is to help young people understand how their community develops by interviewing those who shaped the city across decades, said Reside. Another goal is to help young people understand how much they have in common with seniors: “Students are having trouble finding housing. So are older adults,” Reside said. Both groups face discrimination in the workplace, caregiving challenges and financial instability, she said, naming some of the issues the Gray Panthers focus on.
Reside understands that common ground can begin with a conversation. “On family holidays, I would always go talk to the older people because their stories fascinated me,” she said, referring to herself as “the keeper of the family history.” She hopes to give others the opportunity to share their experiences, even if they don’t have self-appointed family historians.
On the third Saturday of each month from 10 a.m. to noon, Long Beach seniors are invited to the Billie Jean King Library to be interviewed. No need to sign up, Reside said. The next session will take place on April 18.