Stories from the Miami Valley


he story of our community is made up of the experiences of the many different people who live in our region’s rural areas, small towns and cities. Here, we share some first-hand accounts of life in the Miami Valley.

In The Happiest Part of My Life is Just Helping, 102-year-old Adelaide Hand looks back over a century, sharing her life as a social worker and neighborhood activist.

In A Year ’Round Job: Raising Tobacco in Jefferson Township, Woodrow Wolf describes the backbreaking work of cultivating tobacco, which was one of Montgomery County’s important cash crops. By listening to their stories, we catch a glimpse of their everyday lives, their challenges and their triumphs.

In the Keller Family Correspondance, a set of letters describes life in Mississippi during an 1855 Yellow Fever epidemic and the American Civil War. The letters were written to residents of Miamisburg, Ohio.

The NCR Retired Employees Association is carrying out a nation-wide oral history program at the Historical Society, capturing on tape the stories of those who worked at the company in years past. The project will preserve the history of the people, significant events, or just the every day activities that took place through the years at NCR. It is a wonderful way of gathering information that will enhance our understanding of the NCR Archive, and we greatly appreciate all their hard work and dedication to the project. Leo McGrath and Carol Spencer are coordinating the project, and are interesting in finding more NCR alumni to interview. If you are interested or know someone who may want to be interviewed, please contact NCR Archivist, Jeff Opt, at 228-6271 (ext. 116).

In the first NCR oral history to be posted, Dr. Tom Sherby discusses his time at NCR, and the computer projects that the company was working on during the 1960s and 1970s.

Betty Robarts served in the U.S. Navy as a WAVE (Women Appointed for Voluntary Emergency Service) during World War II. She talks here about her experiences working at NCR on the top-secret Bombe project.