Storytellers

My father and his father were storytellers. This is a part of a long tradition that likely stretches back hundreds or thousands of years. It's not that they told stories outside of friends and family. It is just a tradition that existed before radios and TV and especially in people that lived out in the country away from theaters or churches where live performers or ministers or politicians performed their own unique types of storytelling.

The types of stories my grandfather told mostly were either experiences hunting in the backcountry of the western states from about the 1890s until his passing in 1970. Since he was born in the early 1880s I believe his stories were very unique for someone born like me in 1948. My father's stories were about his childhood growing up but he also brought in animals talking in anthropomorphic ways like my grandfather. Women especially out in the country sought out men with good humor who could tell stories especially before radio and television.

So:In addition to Marconi, two of his contemporaries Nikola Tesla and Nathan Stufflefield took out patents for wireless radio transmitters. Nikola Tesla is now credited with being the first person to patent radio technology; the Supreme Court overturned Marconi's patent in 1943 in favor of Tesla.  So even though Marconi sent the first radio signal, Nicola Tesla had the first radio patent.

So, it wasn't until the early 1900s that radios started to become more normal in the U.S. And this was limited to people who had electricity except for those who had early radio crystal sets. You don't even need a battery with a radio crystal set:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio

So before the radio if you were going to live way out in the country you either would need to be able to read and have access to books or you would greatly love to live with or be near to a good story teller. Or you would likely get pretty bored unless you just liked to walk around outside and look at sunsets, rivers and wild animals and the weather a lot.

I found out by age 9 that I too had the gift of storytelling when my 4th grade teacher honored a story I had written by reading it in front of the class. Though I was very shy at the time and turned red with embarrassment I never forgot all the attention I got when my teacher read my story. I began then to write journals with sketches and poems and stories about what I found interesting. When I got excommunicated from my childhood religion I wrote to stay alive and not to commit suicide from 21 to 23 years of age. Around this time I found I could communicate with those who had passed away including Jesus, Saint Germain and other saints and angels so I wrote a lot of this down as well. However, my mother even though she was an intuitive as well as I had a lot of trouble with some of this because I was channelling my uncle  who she was in love with before my Dad before my uncle died in a plane crash( supposedly). So eventually she threw all these hundreds of pages away. I was very upset. Just like I was upset when she threw away all my comic book collection. It would likely be worth 50,000 to 100,000 dollars today. So, that was upsetting but she didn't understand and couldn't cope with the idea of my channelling or having a comic book collection. But you know just how funny parents can be.

So, being able to be a storyteller to myself and to others has been a very fulfilling thing to do in my life. It helped keep me alive so I could get married and have kids and travel the world. Writing and storytelling can be very healing and keep you alive too. It can be very self therapeutic and in some ways better than visiting a minister or counselor to talk things out because you can write things you could never say to a minister or counselor because you don't necessarily have to show what you write to anyone other than yourself. So, in this sense it is like a diary.

So, anyway, the tradition of storytelling leads to friends and mates along the way. It is a gateway to humor, friendship and love and culture. So, for me at least the tradition of storytelling has helped me stay alive and be happy even now when I'm 62 almost 63.