What’s in a memory?
For most, a memory is a vivid recollection of scenery, people and – of course – collections of love, loss, trials and triumph.
For one former Poplar Bluff family, one grandmother’s 1930s diaries painted such a vivid picture, that a podcast was born earlier this year.
Mark McKinney — who currently resides in Charleston, South Carolina — and his podcast partner Liz Duren launched the platform and accommodating website dedicated to his grandmother, Elisabeth Hartsell.
Hartsell was a mere 51 years of age at the time of her passing in 1969. But her diaries contained a tale of many lives in the documented narratives from 1931-42.
For Hartsell, the thesis was simple yet resonated like a holiday church bell.
So, how did the project come to fruition?
“Liz and I were sitting in my living room one day, and these diaries were sitting on my shelves,” said McKinney. “The writing was super, super small. Nobody had really been able to read them. These diaries are like the size of your hand, so Liz said, ‘Give them to me for a couple days.’”
Day after day, Duren — a theatre actor in Charleston — was thumbing her way through, page after page.
“The story that unfolded about my grandmother is just amazing. None of her family knew pretty much 99% of what is in these diaries,” McKinney said.
The friendship between McKinney and Duren has eclipsed 30 years now. In the initial podcast airing on April 30, 2023, Duren hosted the show and McKinney served as video editor.
“We started by just wanting a social media account,” recalls Duren. “But we found the story to be so compelling and interesting, that we wanted to go back to the beginning. Elisabeth starts the diary as a prosperous young lady, and within one year, she was living in a tent in Arkansas picking strawberries and eventually cotton. Her family is destitute. The toll the Great Depression took on his family...Mark makes a brilliant point: What happened to his grandmother happened to millions of people. She just wrote it down.”
For McKinney, the diaries, and now the podcast, serve as a daily reminder of the character and perseverance his grandmother and her parents exhibited, as the years eventually went from adverse situations to brighter days.
Family, health and happiness
For Hartsell, while the years were as tough as a country ox, finding the positives and focusing on family, health and happiness were precursors to the aforementioned better days that lay ahead.
“The thing she had that was the most important was her family,” said Duren. “As long as her family was all together, then they knew everything would be OK.”
Decades later, family descendants would come to know the palpable struggles Hartsell and her family endured.
“Now, they have a real idea of how her father struggled to find jobs. How the entire family had to pitch in and help. How they would go a night without eating. It was an incredible story of perseverance. And then successfully pulling themselves out of the Great Depression in Marble Hill and Poplar Bluff,” said Duren.
McKinney was born in 1970, so like many, he never met his grandmother. But he owns her diaries, chock full of thoughts, hopes and dreams.
One of which was her desire, come to find out, of being a professional writer.
“She was a prolific reader and writer. This has given me a really good idea into my grandmother, who I never really was interested in,” said McKinney.
The trials and tribulations are unbeknownst to many.
Duren added: “They didn’t know that she lived in a tent for nearly a year and a half. They didn’t know how boy crazy she was, and to read these diaries and to see her in the midst of having to bathe in a well because they didn’t have a bathroom or latrine, and then posing herself under a tree to catch the boys’ eyes as they drive by and being flirty and going to dances, this is not the mother they knew at all.”
Her oldest daughters are 84 now, also living in Charleston, as they sit around and listen to diary entries — painting a vivid picture of their mother.
They mostly lived in Missouri for the bulk of their younger years, McKinney said.
“It has brought her back to life a little bit,” Duren said of the diaries.
Character and perseverance
Reading the entries to producing the podcast and editing video, McKinney has learned much about his family, as their character and mental toughness is second-to-none.
“At 13 years old, at the beginning of the Great Depression, she started writing these diaries. So, the time period is so important. She writes for 10 and a half years, not missing one day,” said McKinney. “They mostly were in Bollinger County and Cape. She died in a duplex in Cape.”
Hartsell’s husband’s name is being withheld as the podcast continues to push toward the engagement, but for those whose family resided in Marble Hill in the ‘50s, he served as mayor.
What would Hartsell think of the podcast?
With time comes change, and the digital world — as foreign as it may be to that generation — is something which Hartsell would appreciate.
“I think she would be absolutely thrilled,” McKinney said of his grandmother. “We both [McKinney and Duren] think that she literally wanted these read; she left instructions in the diaries. They would break out these diaries and read them aloud in the 1930s as she was writing them. So, she was actually a writer. She would send things in, so I think she wanted to be a writer.”
McKinney’s family is in full support of the podcast, he said.
“We all think that she would be absolutely thrilled,” said McKinney.
Faith, happiness and love continue to serve as pillars of the family, which is evidenced by their support of McKinney’s project.
“Mark is part of the most supportive family on the planet,” said Duren. “This is a lesson that Elisabeth instilled in her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Family is the most important thing.”
A lasting impression
“I had no clue as to the details of the Great Depression,” said McKinney. “The thing that I am learning that really sticks out is my great-grandfather, they were pushed out of destitution by the WPA [Works Progress Administration]. He got a job on the railroad, these jobs that FDR created under the New Deal. Looking back, we know those federal programs stepped in and gave him jobs when he desperately needed them.”
To learn more about Hartsell and the podcast project, please visit mygrandmasdiaries.com.
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