The birth of Storyhour and how Spencer Shaw connected a divided world using storytelling

Story Hour at Brooklyn’s libraries, museums, churches, temples, and mosques are mystical moments for children of all ages.? At libraries, they began in Brooklyn in 1903 when Englishwoman Marie Shedlock was invited to Pratt Institute’s children’s library, to read and tell stories.? The Pratt Institute offered classes on how to become a librarian, and the teachers there often tried out new ideas.? Marie Shedlock brought her new idea.? She showed Brooklyn’s librarians that by reading and telling stories to children about faraway lands and different cultures, students became interested in books and became interested in learning about how other people lived.? Marie’s Story Hour idea was so popular with children and librarians that for many years her birthday was celebrated at Pratt’s children’s library.

Story hour quickly spread across Brooklyn. Story Hour was read by librarians from the Brooklyn Public Library over the radio starting in 1924, a tradition that continued for the next thirty years. Also, in the 1920s, the Brooklyn Museum gave the Brooklyn Public Library interesting objects for children to look at during story hour.? The items matched with the stories being read. At Story Hour at the Brooklyn Museum in the 1920s, children dressed up in authentic French peasant costumes and heard French folk tales. This began a long tradition of storytelling and dress-up at the Brooklyn Museum. By the 1930s two Brooklyn librarians were telling folk tales using puppets to hundreds of school children.? In the 1950s and 1960s, the Brooklyn Public Library set up gold and green striped umbrellas at parks, churches, and beaches, all summer long. Librarians beneath the umbrellas read fascinating stories to crowds of children.

Librarian Spencer Shaw is by far Brooklyn’s most famous and influential Story Hour leader. When a boy or girl sat down at Spencer Shaw’s Story Hour, they were about to cross an imaginary bridge from an ordinary library room into a world of adventure.? To set the mood, Spencer would play some music, sort of a musical glimpse into the place he and the children would journey to.? As the children settled into their chairs, Spencer would talk quietly with the children about their day.? Their adventure together would be shaped partially by how the children were feeling that day: tired or excited, happy or sad. ?Spencer knew ways to light up the imagination in the minds of children based on what they experienced earlier in the day.?

To start Story Hour, Spencer would have the children help him light a candle.? Then he would begin to read or tell a story.? Spencer collected stories from around the world and many of the stories were hundreds of years old.? These tales transported the children to faraway lands and places long ago.? At first, these other cultures often seemed strange to children. Then as Spencer talked more about the villages and people who lived there, the villagers and places became wonderful and exciting. The stories Spencer read and told about made children understand and feel one with people from other lands. Soon these people did not seem so different after all.?

The folk tales told about the ways people overcame struggles and solved problems, situations that were very much like the challenges the children at Story Hour faced in their own lives.? The stories let the children decide right from wrong for themselves. Spencer’s stories never told children what to think.

Children discovered at Story Hour that an adult like Spencer could be someone other than a person who enforced the rules or kept things in order. An adult who told stories could be someone who helped them make discoveries about far away places and about themselves.? Even if they were not interested in books before Story Hour, children often became very interested in reading books about faraway places and having another adventure like the one they had just had with Spencer.? When Spencer Shaw saw children making discoveries like this, it made him happy, his Story Hour programs were carefully designed to free up the imagination and help children care about people from other lands and other times.? His programs ended with the children blowing out the Story Hour candle.? The children were not expecting to make important discoveries at Story Hour, but they often did.? Many remembered a Spencer Shaw Story Hour for the rest of their lives.

As a program specialist in Brooklyn starting in 1949, Spencer Shaw was given the opportunity to reach thousands of Brooklyn children each year at Story Hours he held at all of the branch libraries.? Articles about his Story Hour soon appeared in magazines and newspapers.? He was invited on radio and television programs to tell stories to children and speak to adults about the value of story telling to people of all ages. He reminded audiences that, “In primitive cultures the story teller was looked upon as the most learned member of the tribe. He not only entertained but helped his people to understand their cultural and religious history.”? For Spencer, Story Hour was really important for people of all ages and every culture.? He felt storytelling should break down some of the racism he experienced growing up. ?He said: “We are living in a pluralistic society. New populations arrive from the Far East and the Caribbean, and Muslims come from many parts of the world. None of them has come empty-handed. They all have a heritage, a culture, customs, moral codes of behavior and something to contribute to our cultural tapestry. Diversity should be recognized as a positive thing. We have to develop cultural understanding and acceptance of others. One channel to use to accomplish this is through storytelling.”? Spencer encouraged all adults to tell stories to children and to give children a chance to tell stories to adults.? He also wanted men to consider careers in schools and libraries.

When Spencer was at the Brooklyn Public Library in the 1950’s, Black History Month was Negro History Week. In his special programs that week he read the words of Black leaders, sang songs and read poems by Black writers and musical composers. He told stories about Black leaders in American history and asked Black people to join together to become a powerful force in America.? Spencer was one of the Black leaders in the 1950’s whose words would inspire Brooklyn’s civil rights leaders to begin the struggle for equal rights in Brooklyn in the 1960’s. ?

?After ten years at the Brooklyn Public Library, 1949-1959, Spencer Shaw was asked to share his stories and his beliefs about storytelling to the world.? For the next fifty years, he circled the globe teaching librarians how to lead Story Hour.? In whatever country he found himself, Spencer would collect new stories and then share them across the world.? In his later years, he taught college, teaching future librarians the basics of running a library.? He helped guide many Black librarians through their first years at library school and inspired them to tell stories at their first library job. When Spencer finally retired in his eighties, he returned to his hometown of Hartford Connecticut to find one of the students he once mentored, working there as head librarian.? She asked him if he would come to the library each week and lead Story Hour.? He kindly agreed.