Details of a very different daily life in the 1950s

FALLS VILLAGE — Working with hours and hours of recorded conversations and pages and pages of transcripts, Abigail Adam came up with an 18-minute podcast on what it was like to be a teenager in the Region One School District in the 1950s.

The podcast was previewed at Housatonic Valley Regional High School (HVRHS) on Tuesday, June 12. The regional high school serves the towns of North Canaan, Falls Village, Sharon, Salisbury, Kent and Cornwall.

The raw material for the project was interviews conducted by social studies teacher Peter Vermilyea’s students.

Those interviews, with area natives such as Ed Kirby, Pat Mechare and John Perotti, were wide-ranging and lengthy.

Vermilyea said this was deliberate — that historical society archives tend to be very strong on primary source material from the 19th century and earlier, but “struggle” with 20th-century history.

“People don’t view their lifetimes as history, and they don’t save things” such as letters and diaries.

Adam, with an internship from the Housatonic Heritage Oral History Center (at Berkshire Community College in Pittsfield, Mass.), had the job of sorting through the mass of material and producing a manageable podcast.

She said she stuck to the questions about entertainment and agriculture.

“I thought entertainment would be interesting.”

And it was. In the 1950s, the place to be was Johnny’s Restaurant in North Canaan, where Jim’s Garage is today.

North Canaan was a bustling place, according to the interviewees. Or “bubbling,” as one put it.

The other topic was agriculture. Adam and Emily Abbott, also of North Canaan and one of the interviewers, both noted that the subject came up naturally during the interviews, with little or no prompting from the questioners.

Several people recalled getting up very early in the morning — as in 4 a.m. — to milk cows and do other chores.

Adam handled the production work as well, adding a loop of background noise that makes it sound as if her voice-over narration is recorded in the high school cafeteria, where the interviews were conducted.

Adam will attend Gettysburg College in the fall.

The following entities are all part of the oral history project: HVRHS Social Studies Department, HVRHS Career Experience Program, the Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area and Housatonic Heritage Oral History Center at Berkshire Community College.