Hey, humans. How's it going? Susan Ruth here. Thanks for listening to another episode of Hey, Human podcast. This is episode 420, and my guest is Ellie Khan. Ellie is a multi hyphenate human. She's a psychotherapist, producer, journalist, and historian, more specifically an oral historian, a collector of humanity's triumphs and sorrows.
She's the founder of Living Legacies Productions and helps create meaningful books for people and their families to preserve their history for generations to come. She also works with foundations to help collect stories of groups of people and and make sure that those stories are not forgotten. Really interesting woman, definitely a kindred spirit. And I so enjoyed talking with her. I met
her by habit stance. She was sitting behind me at lunch one day, and we got to talking and found that we had storytelling in common and and history of humans in common. So I'm looking forward to you hearing this episode. General Stuff, Hey Human Podcast is now on YouTube under official Susan Ruth. I'm on Patreon at susanruthism. That's s u s a n r u t h I s m. And this Saturday, 3 PM Pacific Standard Time, I'm gonna be hosting a Patreon, Zoom. So anybody can sign in and say
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Rate and review and subscribe to Hey Human podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, again, now on YouTube as well. And thank you for listening. Be well. Be kind. Be love. Here we go. Aly Khan, welcome to Hey Human. Thank you. Hi. Hi. It's so nice to see you. Nice to see you too. Your work, your life's work now, I don't know if it we're gonna find out if that's been your work the whole time, but it was very intriguing to me. It's right up my alley. So I'm excited to have
you on the show. Yeah. It's fun for me to talk about my work. So this is great. Yeah. Well, let's go back to the beginning. Where are you from? Where did you grow up? And how did your environment shape you? I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. I'm 75. And so it was a long time ago. I was really shaped by having wonderful grandparents and a father who was a storyteller. And I was very fortunate. My dad and I interviewed one of my grandfathers
when I was in high school. I wish I remembered how that came about, but it's amazing to hear my grandfather's voice all these years later. And we interviewed him about his parents and and what he knew about his family background and also his own life. So that was probably the beginning, but it didn't occur to me
to become an oral historian then. I went to Malvern Elementary School, then he went to Woodbury Junior High School, then he went to Shaker Heights High School, then I went to Lake Forest College, and then I graduated from occupational therapy school at Ohio State. It came about because I volunteered with children with disabilities, in high school. And then I heard about the fact that you could work with those kind of children as an occupational therapist, and I didn't end up doing that. It
was my goal. But when I the first job I got was in the psychiatric setting as an occupational therapist. What was that like? It was interesting. It was, truthfully, it was not really what I wanted to do. And I slipped into, I mean, deliberately doing art therapy instead of occupational therapy at the hospital for 10 years where I worked, Woodview Calabasas Hospital. It's no longer around, but I was there for 10 years from 73 to 83. I've actually been intrigued by art therapy for
a while now. I've been poking around and reading up on it. Can you talk a little bit about it? What I did at the hospital was offer patients a variety of art materials, whether that was clay or paints or colored pencils.
And I would give them a prompt such as in any way you want, use the materials that call out to you to show how you're feeling today or to represent, something, a memory of your childhood or something like that, which is interesting because those are the kind of questions I asked in my career now as an oral historian. The art therapy was really exciting because I also ran,
just a verbal therapy group with patients. And sometimes people who had a hard time talking in the verbal therapy group, when they had some image as a vehicle or a bridge to talk about what was going on with them, it was easier. I was very impressed with, also the people I studied with who were art therapists. It was it was really wonderful. And I did it myself also, you know, scribbling and seeing what image came out. That was, till 1983.
In the movies, we see art therapy being used generally, it's kids drawing pictures of, you know, their house is on fire, or daddy has big claws, or there's a monster in the closet. Does does that happen in real life? Do kids draw like that when there is trouble afoot? Well, I worked with adolescents and adults, not children.
But, yes, there there were all sorts of images that, you know, one one time a a woman drew a picture of herself as a tree strangling her father because she was feeling so powerless with him, and this was how she represented herself feeling more powerful. So those kind of images, yeah, it was those you you never you never knew what was gonna come out, whether it was kinda realistic or abstract. That's fascinating. I'm really, really intrigued by that work.
Tell me how you began the process of collecting stories of other people, which, of course, I love them. Yes. We know you do. Well, when I when I left the job in 83, I went to do you know about the book, What Color is Your Parachute? Have you heard of I have heard of it. That book, Richard Bowles, who wrote that book, was inspired by John Crystal, and he had a place in New York, the John Crystal Center, and I decided to go there for a week to a work life planning course.
And it was the kind of experience where you did a lot of exercises to discover who you were, what your skills were, what your interests were, what you know turned you on and it was a fluke but at the end of the course when they asked the question, if money was no object object, what would you like to be doing? I said, I'd love to be a photojournalist.
Now I guess I should back up and say I had taken a a photography class at the local junior college, and we had to find someone or several people to do a photo essay of their of them. So I I did 2 things. 1 was a woman having her baby. So I took pictures of her in her yoga class, and then I got to go to the delivery of her baby and take pictures and make, you know, make made a kind of a collage of the a photo essay
for the class. The, the second person was a man named Frank Perkins who lived in the park near my house in Woodland my apartment in Woodland Hills. He was a homeless man, and he and I got to talking. He looked like he was at a country club. He was tan. He was smoking a pipe. He had white hair. It looked very relaxed, and I followed him through his day and took pictures of him for a photo essay. So in the John Crystal course, they said to me, okay. You wanna be a photojournalist.
Here's your homework. Take those photos that you took of this homeless man to the local newspaper. And so when I got home, I got up my courage and went to the daily the daily news or the Valley news. I forget what it was called at that time in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles and showed them the pictures of Frank, and they said, you know, we would really like to use these. We'll send someone out to interview him. And very impulsively, I said, oh, could I interview him?
And that was the first article I ever wrote, which led to me becoming a freelance writer and journalist. And I've I still do some articles, but I I was full time freelance, you you know, writer for the LA Times, for travel and leisure, for Parents Magazine. It was it's a wonderful career as you know, because I could meet someone like a a a guy who is a ventriloquist on the street in Hollywood, and I could suggest that I write a story about
him to The Herald Examiner. I wrote a lot for the old Herald Examiner, and they let me write an article about him. And it was it was just fabulous. So I had a wonderful time as a as a journalist. And I was in the in New Hampshire in 1988 with my mother. I heard about this woman who was very popular and famous in her neighborhood. She drove a yellow Mustang, and she always dressed in purple. They called her the purple lady.
And I wrote an article about her for, a magazine that was for older people, 50 plus, I think it was called. And somehow, a friend said to me after she read that, do you know about the field of oral history? And I did not know anything about oral histories. But an oral history is something from ancient days when the elder of the tribe would tell a story about the tribe or about life or whatever.
So I found a mentor named Gary Shumway who taught at Cal State Fullerton where they have an oral history program, and he became my mentor. And in 1988, I started doing oral histories, and that's been my career for over 35 years. I still do some freelance writing, but I practiced first on my parents. I interviewed both of them, and then I created a book from the interviews I did with them. And then I just started
getting hired. In 1991, I was hired by the Jewish Historical Society to to create an oral history of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles, which had been a very large Eastern European Jewish community between World War 1 and World War 2. And I taught volunteers to interview people who had lived in that community. You know, how do how do you do interviews? You know, how do you listen to people? How do you ask questions? And so so that was part of what I was teaching these volunteers.
From that, I produced a documentary film called Meet Me at Brooklyn and So to that involved me interviewing about 50 people, including Xavier Slawski, who grew up in Boyle Heights and just wonderful, interesting stories and about getting to America and finding this community in Los Angeles where there were pickle barrels on the street and signs in in Yiddish and lots of political arguments, other communists and Trotskyites and whatever. And then I taught
students from that. I decided to teach students to interview their grandparents, and that was at Palms Middle School. And, one boy called his grandmother. It was actually to interview their grandparents or their parents if there weren't grandparents. So he interviewed his grandmother in Korea over the phone. And, I had also been contacted by Spielberg's Shoah Foundation to do interviews with Holocaust survivors since they knew I was already an oral historian.
I, didn't really need to be trained to do it, but they had a fabulous training, and I interviewed a number of people who were already my clients. It was very interesting. They were all, of course, very moving interviews because many of the people's parents and and families had all been killed during the Holocaust by the Nazis and Hitler. And so their stories were, really important to be shared.
And a lot of the ones who were my clients, they were hesitant to tell their children about their experiences because they didn't wanna upset their kids. Their kids didn't wanna ask their parents about their experiences because they didn't wanna upset their parents. So I ended up over the years, being kind of a bridge between them. And and most of my oral history interviews are end up being books.
So I I have it transcribed by people and then I edit that and organize it into a book with photos from the family and documents. And one of my clients had a party with his grandchildren and nieces and nephews. He autographed the books and gave one to each of them. So, I mean, you can imagine what a wonderful career it is. It's like, I meet the most fascinating people, and I feel good about the fact that so many people tell me this is
not what I feel good about. I feel very frustrated at how many people say we kept meaning to frustrated at how many people say we kept meaning to interview my parents or my grandparents, and we were just so busy. We just never got around to or we gave my grandmother a book to fill in, and she never got around to it. And there's just I I might not have interviewed my own parents had I not started doing this work. That makes me very sad when
I hear that. I've given a gift for to many friends as a birthday present, to interview them or their or their parents. And it's, you know, it's a joy. And Zoom has changed things, of course. I have clients in other states. I have clients in other countries. And it's like, you can do it on Zoom. And then I record it so that so that the family has the recording. And sometimes that's all they want, and sometimes they want to have a book made or, you know,
have edited videos over the years. And I did 2 other oral histories that were documentaries for Paramount Studios. I interviewed Cecil b DeMille's granddaughter, Cece DeMille Presley, about him. And, you know, she got to go to Egypt when he was producing the 10 Commandments. Then I interviewed a man at who was at Paramount for many years, and he wandered around the the lot, stopping people to tell them stories about the actors who'd come through Paramount. His name was AC Lyle.
And so those oral histories were edited into into into videos. So it's a mixture, but mostly, I make books, hundreds, you know, hundreds of clients I've have made the books for. And it's really fun to hand them to them, you know, when they're done. But mostly, you know, I get the gift of meeting all of these wonderful people. Absolutely. And, I mean, I've interviewed my parents for this show twice now. Oh, wonderful. You know, single singularly each, twice.
My grandparents are long deceased, which is unfortunate, and they died when I was quite young. But you discover, and I I mean the royal you, so much about your parents when you do that, when you when you interview them because they have a world unto themselves that they'll never show if you don't ask. And it really is. I mean, the stories they told were so wild.
I bet. We don't like to see our parents as human beings, I guess, and at some point that when you cross that when you cross over to understand that they are their own autonomous people that they have these lush lives. Yeah. I I'm so glad you did interview them. It's, it's very powerful experience.
You know, in terms of my interviews with people who've had traumatic experiences, I think being a licensed psychotherapist helps helps me be very, very comfortable if they are moved to tears or they can't talk, you know, because of something that and I'm you know, I say, are you sure you wanna talk about this or it's okay if you wanna stop? And one time, a family had me interview everyone in the family because their sister was dying of cancer, and she was at the
interview. So I interviewed her, and I interviewed her sons about her, and I interviewed her sisters and her mother, all telling favorite stories about this woman who was dying of cancer. And then I sat her and her mother and sisters down because they said they really hadn't talked about how they were feeling about the fact that she was gonna die soon. And I invited them to talk about it, and I was very moved. I, you know, I have to kinda steady myself when people are
talking about something very traumatic or moving. It's like I have to detach a bit, but still have compassion. Yeah. Things like that that are very powerful for me. I have recordings. So every time I visited my father, he was reminiscing. So I've got hours and hours and hours of of interviewing him or just listening, recording him. You know? So he influenced me a lot in terms of him. Both my parents knew about their family background, and and I, again, I knew all my grandparents.
1 2 of my grandparents when they came from Hungary moved to Omaha, Nebraska and opened a saloon, which apparently wasn't uncommon for Jewish people, Jewish immigrants. Apparently. And this is, you know, not a nice thing, but my grandmother was afraid of the Indians that were coming into the saloon. I mean, you know, coming from Hungary, she had never experienced. You're talking about indigenous peoples. Right? Indigenous people in in Omaha, Nebraska. Yes. Formerly called Indians and,
now called Native Americans. But in the story my dad told, it was, you know, he said Indians. And so they moved to Cleveland where there was family. And his joke was where there was a baseball team formerly known as the Cleveland Indians. An irony not last, of course. Yes. How has your taking in of all these stories from a pretty decent swath of humanity, how has taking in all these stories shaped you personally? Changed you even?
I think that I've become even more interested in hearing people share things about themselves. And I find myself meeting people wherever I go and talking to them. My ex husband said he had to stop me from picking up old people in the park, which, of course, now I am one of those. I think it's I've it's given me I've it's taught me patience, you know, to be able to wait and just listen. And I think that I'm so awed by how people have gotten through things in their lives.
And and that makes me very grateful for my life and and, you know, the things that I have in my in my life that are easy. I I volunteered for a program, in Brooklyn, the sharing network. It's a program for African American people in a housing development in Brooklyn, and I led reminiscence groups with them where I asked 5 or 6 people to talk about their family background.
And there's nothing like hearing about people having to warn their African American sons to be careful walking down the street or being with their friends to make me realize how I've never had to teach my son that at all. I've never had to be afraid of that. Their stories were very different than some of the other people I interview in terms of their recipes and their, you know, their grandparents,
and it was just a joy. It's a wonderful program because they still have lots of classes that are done all on Zoom. And but the people are on their telephones talking from their apartments in this development. It was a privilege to spend about 8 months, you know, getting to know people who had such different lives than I have. It's so important in my opinion to hear the stories of those who are having different experiences than ourselves. It makes the world smaller.
It it develops empathy, which, my god, do we need that more than ever. Yeah. It's really it's an honor too. It's an honor to bear witness to the stories that people have. I am not always as good at not crying. I have definitely gotten emotional on a few interviews over the last 8 years. But for the most part, I'm able to hold it together, but every once in a while, I get pretty choked up. Yeah. It's tough. But you're right. Being it is an honor. Absolutely. It's a privilege.
I worry that there are so many stories that will we can't get them all, obviously, but that there's a whole generation that keeps leaving and then the next that keep leaving, and they take with them such richness. Yeah. And then people forget. Yeah. That's right. That was one of the reasons that I taught, the kids to interview their grandparents because that really could be part of every school, you know, to to have kids in our it's, you know, it's an also, how often do kids spend a couple hours
talking to their grandparents? But you're right. There's so many people who aren't getting a chance to, you know, to reminisce and share and know that their stories will live on. You know? Yeah. I think it's very gratifying for a lot of people. Yeah. A little bit of immortality. I was hired by a man named Elliot
Sturman. He found out that he had a brain tumor and he was in his sixties, and he hired me to sit behind him while he lay on his one of his adult no longer living at home, but their son his son's bed reading his children's favorite childhood books, Cat in the Hat, Doctor Seuss, Calvin and Hobbes. And while he read, he was pointing out things in the book just like you would read to a child, but he was better than I had ever been reading to
my son. And what he said was that he will never know his grandchildren, and he wanted to be more than just a name to them or a picture on the wall. So this is this is what he left, you know, all of these recordings of him reading all these books, you know, for his kids to pass on someday. That's beautiful. What a great it's a great idea. Yeah. It was fabulous. And and that that one, I had a hard time not crying.
Yeah. He was talking about the fact that he would never know his grandchildren, and he died 6 months later. Yeah. I've interviewed a couple people who are either dying and or at the very end of life. And talk about humbling. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. I, I interviewed a woman who was in hospice, and I couldn't go in because she was so she was being kept in isolation, and we just talked on the phone. And yeah, I'm still visiting my 90 something year old
clients who've become friends. It's just yeah. It's a privilege and fun. And you can't capture all the stories at once. Like I said, I interviewed my parents twice now each, and they told different stories. I mean, tons of stories. So I got to hear all these different things that make them more, more human. More human is a I don't know. It's hard to explain how I feel about that, but you know, because you of
your work. But for those listening, I I could not recommend this more to interview the people around you because it's fascinating. Yeah. It is. What are you working on right now? Well, last year, I interviewed someone for 18 hours. He's in New Jersey, and it was by Zoom. And I've, been edit I edited it into a manuscript, which he's now reading through. Then I have 2 other people whose I interviewed for about 9 or 10 hours each, so I'm editing those right now.
I have a couple of clients in Israel who it's their project's been put on hold because their kids are in the army. And also I was hired by the world's oldest women's rowing club in Mission Bay, San Diego. And I got to go down there and interview people, and I got to go out rowing. And so now I'm doing still doing some Zoom interviews for that, organization, which is their their stories about their grandmother starting this rowing club in, you know, in the close of the late 1800,
going out rowing in a barge. So that's been a really, really fun fun project. Who's getting your story aside from me right now? But do you are you leaving your story as well? I started to take an autobiography class through Santa Monica College Emeritus. So I have been writing my stories and my memoir
things. And it's been really fun because some of them are about my mother and her dementia and, you know, what we went through together when she had dementia and about my father after he had a stroke and the fact that it was a time when he needed help, which he didn't want. So it's about the relationship that I've had with my parents. I'm also writing about some of the men in my life from starting at 6 years old when one of my little friends kissed me in his closet.
As somebody that does capture stories, when you are faced with something as tragic as dementia that robs people of their stories and their history, how do you how do you support that? Because, of course, many of us have family members or loved ones who are going through that.
Well, if I interview the person who in the who's in the early stages of dementia, which I've done quite often, They see that something's happening to them and they want or their family says, let's get this done while you can. And it's very moving because they're scared, of what's happening to them, the loss of control, and they don't know what's ahead. And so and they also feel what most people do, a relief to be able to share their stories and reminisce and and cry if they need to cry or,
laugh when something's funny. And with my mom, she got her dementia was gradual and she still knew me until the end. So there were some very funny moments with her dementia. She was living in a boarding care where there were just 6 people. It's like a house with just 6. I used to joke and say they were inmates, but 6 residents. So they're sitting at the dining room table, and this woman is reading the paper. This is years ago, of course. And the woman says,
oh, my oh, my goodness. The queen mother died. And my mother said, really? How old was she? She says, let me look. Oh, she was a 101. And my mother said, isn't that amazing? There's a pause. Woman says, wow, the queen mother died. And my mother said, really? How old was she? And the woman says, she was a 101. And my mother says, really? That's incredible.
So this went on about 3 times and I had to leave the room because I was laughing, but I called my sister and told her we had we had lots of conversations about my mom where I told her about the experience of, say, taking my mother to, the movies and having her loudly say, what did she say? And other things like that. If we didn't laugh we would just be crying about but she still knew me till the end. I will tell you one other funny thing
with her. She had a brother-in-law that she didn't like and I took her to his funeral and we're sitting in the front row and everyone's very quiet. My mother loudly says, who died? And I hissed at her, I've died and she kind of giggled. We get after the funeral we get to their house where you know they're having food and we're sitting there I gave my mom a sandwich we're sitting there and my mother said, where are we? And I said, we're at Carol and Bob's house. She said, oh, where's Bob?
I said, we just buried him. And she just burst out laughing. So I have written for my own memoirs about those kind of stories, actually, that was in that was also published as an article. So some of my stories about my parents and what they went through, I've, I've written as articles also. So that was that's fun. That's straight out of a British comedy. Have you had people do what one would call a deathbed confessions to you?
People frequently say things that their family didn't know before, but I don't know if there would be anything I would call a deathbed confession. I don't think there's been anything that is quite that dramatic, but there's a lot that people have said that their family never knew before and that they had been hesitant to tell their family.
I think it's interesting when you do what we do, that it really aside developing empathy and listening skills, I think it truly helps develop your nonjudgmental side as well. Because you can't be listening to someone's story and say, oh, how could you have done that? Or, oh my god. And to that point, when I interviewed my mom one of the times, I said, if you could do it all over again, would you have gotten married and had children? She had 3 children. And she said, absolutely not.
And I could have taken that 2 ways. I could just accept it for that's her the way she feels, and it has nothing to do with me. That's her life she's talking about. Or I could have gotten really pissed off. But I actually found it pretty funny because I already knew the answer, I think, and somewhere in the back of my mind. But it really does teach you along the way that everyone is really just doing the best they can with what they've got.
Yeah. That's beautifully said. Yeah. Absolutely. It's funny about your mom. I have just once or twice when I sent the interview, the recording to a client, they've said, please remove this part. I don't want my family to know that. That's happened so rarely out of, you know, 35 years of hundreds of interviews, maybe 2 times. And I it was like, I was surprised and sorry that they felt, you know, that they were so unhappy about having shared that. And, of course,
I kept it. It was everything's confidential. You know? Yeah. It's hard not to dance at the shame prom sometimes. The other thing I'm doing is, as a gift to a friend. I'm interviewing on Zoom his, older sister and her husband, but their 3 children are present, and her 2 siblings are present. And so it's a whole family thing. And, you know, like you were saying about interviewing of one's parents, everyone's asking questions. It's not just me asking
the questions. And, it's really been fun because they have memories that the peep the the stars of the show don't have and and and their version of things growing up. So it's been really fun. That's so cool. What a great idea. That's really been fun. Tell people how they might find you out there in the world. Well, I have a website, living legacies, plural, productions, plural.com, or they can email me, e like elephant, k like king, z like zebra, male, mail@gmail.com.
Perfect. I'll put links for people too. And are your books available on Amazon? No. These are just for the family. Oh, okay. Yes. And and, you know, I think in it for that reason, people feel very comfortable that this is private, that, you know, this is just for the family. So, there have been people who have given ordered books and given them to friends, you know, and other people, but no, we don't publish them on Amazon. Okay. But your own memoir will be? No. I'm doing that just for fun.
Oh, really? Okay. No. You know, that's interesting. In the autobiography class that I'm in, there have been published authors in that class who have written, you know, their memoirs and put them on Amazon. So, but, no, you make an interest I I'm gonna think about that. I'd read it. I think some of the stories that I've written for the class would be fun for people to read.
I mean, we learn and grow with each other, and your experiences will help shape other people who may end up going through the same thing or are going through the same thing now. I I cannot stress that enough as well that we are all just here to be mirrors to each other. You're so good at what you do, Susan. Thank you. I really I really enjoyed spending the time with you. Well, I take that as a huge compliment given what you do, so thank you. Yeah. Thank you for listening, everybody.
Bye. Bye bye, everyone. Rate, review, and subscribe to Hey Human wherever you find your podcasts. Thanks. Bye.