By: Leah Davis Witherow, Curator of History For the past several decades the museum has actively collected oral histories. Every year CSPM interviews a few dozen individuals who have stories to share about our community’s past and present. Sometimes the interviewees are leaders in the community with easily recognizable names, and sometimes they are not. However, each story is important and every interviewee’s perspective is an invaluable piece of our history. All told, CSPM’s Oral History Collection consists of several hundred interviews, which span thousands of hours and cover nearly every conceivable topic in our region’s history. One of CSPM’s most challenging tasks continues to be convincing members of our community that their story counts and is worth recording. They ask, “Why me?” We answer, “Why not?” Everyone’s history matters. Interviews in the CSPM collection are now “born digital;” meaning using digital audio recorders that easily transfer voice recordings to computers for access and file storage. However, interviews from the 1960s through the 1990s were done on analog tapes. This type of media becomes extremely unstable over time and must be migrated for permanent preservation. Thankfully, Stephanie Prochaska, Assistant Archivist, researched the technology to complete the migration on CSPM computers at minimum cost. As a result she has successfully migrated from analog tape to digital file the majority of our interviews from CSPM’s Voices and Visions project in the 1990s. This award-winning collection was originally funded through a generous grant from the Colorado Endowment for Humanities (now Colorado Humanities) with the goal of interviewing 100 women in 1992 to celebrate the centennial anniversary of Women’s Suffrage in Colorado. All told, 126 women were interviewed during the grant period resulting in a wide range of stories that serve as a remarkable connection to our past. For instance, the 1994 interview conducted with Norma Beghetto Dellacroce describes her family’s deep roots in our community. Her maternal grandfather Antionio Gheno came to Colorado Springs from Italy around 1910. He found work at the City Coal Mine and boarded with a family in Papeton, now known as Venetian Village. Ten years later, his wife and children joined him in Colorado. The family built a home on Pennsylvania Avenue in Papeton where Norma’s mother, Tranquillla, attended school in the neighborhood with the Venetucci and Pinello children. Norma’s mother remembered the dances held at the Papeton community hall and the warm, comfortable feeling in a working-class neighborhood filled with Polish, Italian, Czechoslovakian and Hispanic miners or farmers and their families. Norma’s father Raymond Beghetto was born in Tombolo Padua, Italy in 1896 and came to America at the age of sixteen with just $12 in his pocket. After working various jobs in Chicago and for the railroad in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Raymond came to Colorado Springs to do cement and construction work on the new South Junior High School in 1923-1924. Introduced to his future wife through friends in the tight-knit Italian community in Colorado Springs, Raymond took the streetcar to the end of the line on North Tejon Street to spend Sunday afternoons with Tranquilla and the Gheno Family. According to daughter Norma, Raymond would, “…fill his pockets full of rocks and he would walk from there to the Papeton area to visit my mother and the family. The rocks were to chase away the dogs because everybody had dogs and cats, and they would follow him.” MUSELETTER JANUARY 2018| PG 8
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