Week 15: Elder Voices -- Kaija

Ticker Tape
By Gretchen Kaija
Woodstock Union High School, Grade 10

“Once, when my father was still in his tailoring business, he had the shop, you know, and on the other side was the pool room, you know, with a pool table. And in the corner of the pool room was something called a ticker tape --”

“What’s that?” I interrupted, guessing it was probably some incredibly ancient device from when my grandmother was just a child.

“It was an oval-shaped glass about two feet tall with a little machine inside, and every once in a while it would spit out little pieces of paper with numbers and all that jazz on it, telling about how the stock market was doing,” she described as she drew the shape of the machine in the air and moved her hand in lots of rolling hand motions, imitating a ticker tape. I nodded along.

“Anyways, my sister and I were playing in the pool room, you know, when the paper from the ticker tape just kept coming out! More and more; rolls and rolls of paper. And they were all connected, you know, so the paper just kept building up under the ticker tape in a big pile!”

“Why? Was it broken?”

“Well, we didn’t know at the time, but it was because the stock market had just crashed, you know! I lived during the Great Depression, and I didn’t even know I was watching the stock marked crash right before my eyes, pouring right out of the ticker tape! So, you know, it was so much that me and my sister decided have a little fun and take that paper and run it all around the house. We ran around our whole house twice, and it wasn’t a huge house, you know, but it sure wasn’t small either!”