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By Rick Lightburn, Class of 2008

The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.
The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.
                                                            – Steve Jobs

Once upon a time story-telling was greatly encouraged in docent training and perhaps it still is. Telling stories is really good advice: stories are memorable, vivid, and relatable, and we want our guests to remember us as compelling and relatable. People like hearing stories, and docents enjoy telling them. They’re always easier to latch on to than dry numbers: the great London fire happened (I think) in September of 1666, but I’ll never forget that the notable diarist Samuel Pepys buried a very large wheel of genuine Parmesan cheese in his garden to save it from the fire. To this day, the cheese has never been recovered. I barely know anything more about Samuel Pepys other than that interesting story about the great London fire.

A good story has a central character, a plot-line, a narrative arc with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

You might forget that the official height of Willis Tower is 1,491 feet, but you’ll never forget the story that its shape was inspired by a pack of cigarettes and that the building’s chief designer was a heavy smoker. One can imagine the architect Bruce Graham explaining the design of the building to the Sears client with a pack of Marlboros.

On CAC tours, tour manuals often have a collection of interesting stories to include when you’re interpreting buildings. So it’s easy and a good idea to have stories.

But…

Well, there’s a downside.

Stories may be fascinating to listen to and fun to tell. But they have a reputation of being lies. A common turn of phrase reflects that in the phrase “Oh that’s just a story.” Just because a narrative is coherent doesn’t mean it’s true.

One dangerous story is the story of POSH. According to this story, the word POSH was originally an acronym used to direct luggage from well-heeled steam ship passengers as they travelled from London (the capital of the British Empire) to India (the “jewel of the crown” of the British Empire). The best cabins on steam ships supposedly varied on which direction the ship was travelling, and so (supposedly) the best cabins would be on the Port side heading out, and Starboard heading home, so the acronym POSH was used on the tickets for the most well-heeled customers.

It’s a lovely, compelling, and vivid story full of rich imagery. But it isn’t true. The word POSH was in use well before the British Empire added India, and no one has ever found any luggage tags that say POSH.

Until sometime around 1970, the story of Chicago’s founding was attributed to white New Englanders such as John Kinzie, a fur trapper who moved here with his wife and child around 1802. Some time in the 1970s, people noted that the African American Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable actually lived here earlier with his wife and child. So there was a new story of Chicago’s founding.

Now we believe that Chicago was part of the ancestral homelands of the Ojibwa, Potawatomie, and Odawa, as well as the Miami, Menominee, and Ho-Chunk nations. Many native tribes used the area for trade, travel, gathering, and healing (and today that’s what happens in Chicago). So do you want to tell a story of brave, fur-trading descendants of the English, or of energetic and enterprising descendants of enslaved African, or of displaced Natives? Well, there are stories for each of these. Can all of these stories be true?

The “patron saint” of story telling was the Greek hero Odysseus. Nearly one-third of the epic poem telling of the ten years it took Odysseus to return from the war is him telling stories. His audience pays rapt attention to his stories. But a close reading of Homer suggests that what actually happened was fairly humdrum: he probably made a living trading with Egyptians.

So when you meet our guests, try to be vivid and engaging. Tell narratives with a central character or something one can hang imagery on.  As for The Sears Tower and cigarette story, well I can certainly believe that when Graham was selling his design to his client, he told that story; but was it really the inspiration for the design?

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