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Tales from the Hill
Jay O'Callahan brings home stories told 'round the world to celebrate 20 years at Olmsted.
by Ed Symkus
Reprinted from The Brookline Tab
There was a time, long ago, when Jay O'Callahan would venture out into his boyhood backyard, inventing all kinds of adventures around the Frederick Law Olmsted - designed landscaping out there. The house was at 112 High Street., smack in the middle of the "Pill Hill" area of Brookline, so named for the unusually large preponderance of doctors living in the neighborhood. When he wasn't letting his imagination run wild on his own, O'Callahan was hanging out with his Boy Scout pals, usually at Pill Hill's First Parish Church on Walnut Street.
Times have changed, but not that much. O'Callahan, now 63, has been living in Marshfield for many years. But as a professional storyteller, he still shares tales of his days growing up in Pill Hill. He comes back to Brookline, to that same church, on Sept. 30, to once again tell the Pill Hill stories, this time in conjunction with the 20th anniversary celebration of the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic site.
"The Pill Hill stories came out of the neighborhood," says O'Callahan. "When I decided to become a storyteller, I was telling a lot of stories for school-age people. And then I wanted to make stories about my own growing up, and Pill Hill was filled with interesting people, a lot of eccentrics and wonderful rhythms. All of the doctors and all of the kids, and the dramas and the tragedies. And you were aware of them all because it was a real neighborhood. Everybody knew everybody.
"I do a lot of characters," he adds. "And I use my body and the voice. There might be 20 or 25 characters in the stories. And I try to become a few central characters. I try to have you meet some of these people. There were a lot of currents going on - political and social - that I could feel but wasn't aware of. It was very electric and fascinating for a youngster."
But it wasn't just the people that fascinated him. It was the house he grew up in that had a lot to do with the shaping of O'Callahan's career. He vividly recalls the huge place with 32 rooms "if you count the small ones." His parents moved there from Cambridge when O"Callahan was 7.
"It was perfect for my parents," he says. "Mother and father were very dramatic. Mother's still alive. And the Hill was very dramatic; people loved to gather and sing. The people who lived there before us put on plays there, there's a huge room and they used to put on Shakespearian things. And daddy and mother would do the same thing. There were huge parties and there was singing and then there'd be plays.
"I grew up with the singing parties," he recalls. "Gilbert & Sullivan was very important to all of those adults. They had all gone through the war, so there was a lot of emotion in their singing. But the storytelling was all very private; it's something I never thought about. I would tell stories on the side privately to children when I was around 14. At any party I would look for any children - the neighborhood kids would come till 10 or 11 to these parties and then go home. And I'd tell them stories from the palms of their hands. The palm has so many things that suggest an image - a pond or a mountain or a stream. It was natural. I didn't think about it but found it fun. And as an adult, I never considered that you could do this as a way of life."
That's where the stories started, but the Olmsted back yard is most likely where O'Callahan's imagination was sparked.
"It was interesting because whoever had designed it - it was Mr. Olmsted - had done some wonderful things from my point of view as a boy. He built a cave there and the cave was just fascinating. Some of the rocks were huge. It's collapsed now, but was maybe 6 feet deep. You would step in there, and as a boy I was sure that if you touched one of the rocks it would slide open and you could go in and find King Arthur's sword. I never did, but I figured I never touched the right spot.
"We didn't have much property, but he turned it into something magical and beautiful," he adds. "The paths were curving, and the trees he chose, and the bushes, made it very mysterious. You would go in and almost get lost in some of these curves. So for a little boy, this was magical."
O'Callahan went through a few careers before turning to storytelling. He did a stint in the Navy, came back to Brookline and worked for ABCD, the anti-poverty program in Boston, then started working at and getting ready to take over the private school his parents had founded.
"But I just had to leave to write. And writing led right back to what I had done as a boy," he says of his storytelling capabilities. And when he first started professionally, his audiences were again all kids.
"I was living down in Marshfield and my sister mentioned to one of the teachers in the Brookline schools that I just had started doing this," he says. "A man named Norm Colb was in charge of English for the Brookline schools. He saw a bit of my performance and said, 'that's it. You're gonna be telling to all of the kids in the Brookline schools, three times a year, grades 4 to 8. because I want these kids to write and I want them to loosen up with their writing.' So I would tell and then we would talk about how the story came about. That was three years of a tremendous amount of work. Now most of my work is with adults."
And though O'Callahan tells all kinds of stories to his audiences, the ones about Pill Hill have received raves from around the world.
"I've told the Pill Hill stories at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin," he says. "I've told them in London at the Fine Arts Complex. I've told them in New Zealand. I guess that's the furthest."
"The reactions are generally all the same," he adds with a little laugh. "But there are specifics. There's a story called 'Chickie.' Some of the kids at the bottom of the Hill lived at a place called The Farm. They were triple-deckers and cold-water flats. And those kids were a lot tougher than we were on Pill Hill. They were not the doctors'' kids. They were very different. And daddy insisted when we were little kids that we go to St. Mary's to get a taste of a different life. So I met all these kids. And one of them, a man now named Flood, when he smiled his teeth looked like Chiclets. People always laughed at that, but when I did it in London, they were silent. I guess they didn't have Chiclets there. They didn't know what I was talking about."
September 27, 2001
Reprined with permission