BLACKSBURG — Warm Hearth Retirement Village is nestled back in the woods of the Blue Ridge Mountains between Blacksburg and Christiansburg. It looks like a subdivision but it is a place for seniors to retire. It is with this backdrop that one of Radford University’s psychology professors helped some of the residents put their memories down on tape. Actually the memories are recorded digitally and include pictures.

Dr. Tom Pierce taught residents to use PowerPoint, a computer program used to create audiovisual presentations. With it, users were able to place pictures on a page and overlay sound. Two residents of Warm Hearth, Nickie DiSalvo and Jean Scott, built impressive memory libraries.

“The fact that I can hand down to my children my life story, and that they’ll have this when I’m no longer around is what really appeals to me,” Scott said.

Among those memories are photos from when the couple lived in Floyd County where they built a log cabin after Scott’s husband, Frank, retired.

Scott, a psychiatric nurse, draws on her work history for the oral part accompanying a photograph of the cabin. She describes how she wanted to cry because she didn’t want to be in Floyd, but since she always told her patients to make the best of circumstances, she did that.

Pierce has taught residents to create presentations for a little over a year.

“The idea came to me by being back at home, looking at pictures, not knowing who some of these people were, aunts and uncles. I’d ask, ‘Who are these people?’ They’d tell me, and tell me what was going on when the pictures were taken. All these great stories,” Pierce said. Guided biography has been going on for years. You meet for sessions and discuss various points of your life. Pierce took this idea, and decided to record it and then add pictures of people’s past.

“If we can record somebody while they talk about their old pictures and put them in a PowerPoint presentation, then you have a digital recording of who the people are, what they are doing, where they were, and anything the picture reminds them of,” he said.

Pierce says the hardest part was making sure everyone knew how to use the equipment. He had to get a scanner for Warm Hearth’s computer room, and learn how to use it. To help the residents while he wasn’t there, he made a detailed, step-by step list of instructions for them. Scott says she didn’t have that much trouble learning anything.

“Nothing hard, I didn’t have to do anything. Tom did all the work and I did all the talking. I never had
a problem talking, so nothing was hard for me!” she said.

Watching Scott’s presentation is like watching a documentary. She names each person in the picture, what their relationship is, and describes what they were doing when the picture was taken. She even tells what type of clothes people are wearing and what types of fashions were popular with bits of historical information.

DiSalvo did things a little differently. She learned to use the computer program, the scanner, and how
to save different file types. Using Pierce’s instructions, she learned to create the CD alone.

DiSalvo said she did not describe the pictures in as much detail as Scott did and wishes she had.

Scott has over 800 pictures and almost every one has a description. She and Pierce worked on it for almost the entire year. They would scan a couple of hundred pictures each time Pierce came to Warm Hearth, and record Scott’s voice as well.

“These albums can eventually become family legacies. The children can make one, grandchildren can make one, and eventually you have generations of memories,” he said.

Freelance writer Donald Graham is a Radford University graduate who also works in radio.

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