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PEEKSKILL, N.Y. -- One is never too old to start writing.
That was the message writing coach Cindy Beer-Fouhy had for guests at a book reading she hosted Thursday at the Drum Hill senior living facility.
The men and women giving performances that evening were proof of that message. Twelve participating senior citizens met weekly for 90 minutes for 20 weeks to write and share their ideas.
"They've been encouraging each other to write about parts of their lives that they didn't really think were very important or very interesting to everybody else," Beer-Fouhy told the dozens of Drum Hill residents who turned out to enjoy the readings and refreshments, including wine and cheese. "And when you listen to the pieces that they picked out, these are pieces that they picked out to read from 95 pages of writing that they did over the 20 weeks."
The seniors who took part in the workshop had quite a bit of life experience to draw from, Beer-Fouhy said.
"Until they wrote them down, they didn't realize how their stories connected with other people to make them who they are," Beer-Fouhy said. "These are people who survived wars, illness, family crisis, the Depression and all the things that they survived they are able to bear witness now in their writing."
The writers included 90-year-old Lenny Harris, who read a piece about his time at the 1939-40 World's Fair.
"The most popular exhibit was the General Motors World of Tomorrow," Harris recalled. "Visitors rode in moving chairs and looked down upon future highways with streamlined cars moving on them. RCA demonstrated a room-to-room television set. General Electric showed a lot of appliances, and one I remember was a new method of cooking. A pretty young woman fried an egg on a frying pan in her lap. I assume that was an early version of a microwave but I always wondered if she was affected by the radiation."
The participating writers in the program were Martina Bole; Lenny Harris; Frances Manacher; Dorothy Margolies; Thomas McConnell, Marguerite Norgren, Bob Pierce, Margaret Pierce, Doris Pope, Edith Shapiro, Miriam Smith and Sara Weinstein.
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