Every one of us, especially those of advanced experience, have something to say. So please, before it’s your time to go, take the opportunity to tell us because we’re all walking, talking history machines. That’s what makes us human.”

Sen. James Seveney

Prompts help you tell a story

Every year Atria Aquidneck Place gives its residents a gift, and its most recent was a box full of cards with story prompts printed on them.

“We have these boxes with about 300 different questions that we encourage families to share around the dining room table. We do it with our residents and staff,” said Ivan Cole, executive director of Atria Aquidneck Place.

The box, called Atria StoryWise, is being used by not only the local Atria facility, but in all of its 200 locations.

The game is also available on an iPhone app. Atria will donate $1 to the American Library Association — the keeper of all stories — for every story shared on the app between Jan. 11 and Jan. 31, 2018, up to Atria's maximum donation of $10,000.

The cards come in handy when coming up with an idea for a story to share, or simply jump-starting a conversation.

Here’s a small sampling of the story prompts:

• Concert you attended

• Times when the power went out

• Movie you loved watching with your family

• How you learned how to ride a bike

• A time you were the new kid

• A recipe that should never be made again

• A time you lost big

• A song you like to sing along to

• A summer job you had

• Best date you ever had

• How you got through a particularly rough time in your life

• A teacher who influenced you the most

PORTSMOUTH — They came to hear a story, and residents of Atria Aquidneck Place heard a whopper when John Vitkevich took the floor.

It was all part of the assisted living facility’s “Better Together” program that launched a national storytelling program — Atria StoryWise — designed to get its elderly residents to share their own personal history. According to Caitlin Teves, Atria Aquidneck’s engage life director, the program is meant to “spark memories, tap into personal experiences and help people everywhere connect more deeply through the power of storytelling.”

Several members of the community came out to the event to share their own stories after selecting a prompt card from Atria’s StoryWise box (see related story). 

Mr. Vitkevich drew a card that read, “A true tale that’s hard to believe,” and his story certainly fit the bill.

It started in 2003, while he was grabbing a bite at a Middletown Burger King. He met a girl from Slovakia who was being interviewed by the restaurant’s manager.

“He was a little rude to her and I don’t have a lot of tolerance for rude people. I gave her my card and she called me a few days later,” Mr. Vitkevich said.

He helped her get a job at another local restaurant and ended up sponsoring other young ladies from Slovakia who were coming to the area looking for work, he said.

In July 2004, one of the girls had to fly into John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, N.Y. Mr. Vitkevich, who was from New York, agreed to pick her up by taking the ferry from New London, Conn. to Long Island. During the trip, however, his wallet popped out of his pocket and went overboard.

“We’re about 45 minutes outside of New London when I realized this,” he said, adding that he spoke to his mother, who asked him if he had said a prayer. “Mom, my wallet is in Long Island Sound. St. Anthony doesn’t know Nemo,” her son replied.

Mr. Vitkevich figured he’d never see the wallet again, but nearly four months later he heard from a stranger.

“On Oct. 20, 2004 — 117 days later — my home phone rang and it was a woman by the name of Annie Nutt,” he said. “Annie’s a teacher at the American School for the Deaf in West Hartford, Conn. She’s been teaching deaf students for about 20 years. She had taken a course that previous summer in Mystic on profiling — stuff that they find underwater and they bring up like an artifact from a ship.”

When Ms. Nutt told him his wallet had been found, he figured it had washed up on the beach. But the truth was even more incredible.

“Students from the American School for the Deaf Middle School — ages 13, 14 — were on a Project (Oceanology) boat sponsored by the University of Connecticut,” Vitkevich said. “They went out for 45 minutes, they dropped a four-foot net 100 feet in the water, and they dragged it for 20 minutes.”

His wallet came up in the net.

“Of course, the kids thought that since my wallet was there, I must be down there,” Mr. Vitkevich said.

Long odds

The teacher happened to know a nuclear physicist from Yale University who called Mr. Vitkevich and gathered some information from him. 

“Then he called me back and said, ‘Do you want to know what the odds of your wallet coming out of Long Island Sound are? You could play 18 games of golf, each game consisting of 18 holes, and you would hit a hole-in-one on all 324 holes. That would happen before your wallet comes back,’” Mr. Vitkevich recalled.

Ms. Nutt then asked Mr. Vitkevich for permission to profile him. He said sure, on one condition: He would come for a visit and the kids would present their profile of him in person. A week later he walked into a big auditorium in Connecticut, where his wallet was sitting on a table. It had contained $48 in cash, “but half of it gotten eaten up,” he said.

Besides the incredible odds of finding his wallet, Mr. Vitkevich insisted there was a real lesson behind the tale. His original good deed — helping the young ladies from Slovakia find jobs in the states — paid dividends in the end, said Mr. Vitkevich, who likened the story to the movie, “Pay it Forward.”

“Because I did that, St. Anthony said, ‘Push his wallet into that net.’ All of this happened because everybody did the right thing,” he said.

Time for a song

After hearing from guests, Ivan Colon, executive director of Atria Aquidneck Place, went around the room to coax some stories out of the residents. He pulled one card that read, “A song that always cheers you up,” and asked Atria resident Judy Willey for her answer. 

She not only identified the song — “Anyone Can Whistle,” by Stephen Sondheim — Mrs. Willey showed off her beautiful singing voice as well: “Anyone can whistle, that's what they say — easy/Anyone can whistle, any old day — easy/It's all so simple/Relax, let go, let fly/So someone tell me, why can't I?”

As a bonus, Ms. Willey even yodeled a few bars to the delight of everyone present.

‘What makes us human’

The Atria residents also heard from Sen. James Seveney, who said the concept of storytelling was very dear to his heart. Just recently he lost his Uncle Paul, who was 85 and the last member of his father’s family. 

“This was a Greatest Generation family, a family of eight — six boys and two girls. They all went into the service starting the beginning of World War II with the oldest — my Uncle Harry, who was born in 1922,” Sen. Seveney said.

Harry died two years ago at the age of 93 and for many years the family never knew about his experiences in the war, he said, despite the fact that he was in Europe only four days after D-Day and stayed with Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army through the Battle of the Bulge. 

“For years and years we bugged him to tell us some of his experiences, and he never would. He wouldn’t even tell it to his own kids. He never spoke a word for decades,” said Sen. Seveney.

But about a decade ago, there was a nationwide effort to collect the oral histories of the Greatest Generation, “the World War II veterans who are disappearing very quickly,” he said.

“We finally got someone to speak to him and go on the TV and record his story on what he went through in his service in Northern Europe during World War II,” Sen. Seveney said. “If that hadn’t happened, he would have gone to his grave without any of his family knowing how he felt, how he met his wife.”

Photo in the foxhole

That’s a story in itself. 

“He was in a foxhole with a guy who showed him a picture of his sister, and he liked the picture and asked the guy if it would be OK if he could write to his sister. So he wrote for like two years and when he came home, he went with the guy to Texas, met the sister, and married her. Sixty years later, they were still married,” he said. “We could have missed all of that. Even my cousins didn’t know how their parents came together.”

Sen. Seveney then urged the residents of Atria to share their own stories. 

“Every one of us, especially those of advanced experience, have something to say,” he said. “So please, before it’s your time to go, take the opportunity to tell us because we’re all walking, talking history machines. That’s what makes us human.”