Service Organizations, Social Groups, Senior Residences, Clubs, Associations, Libraries, Schools, etc . . .

Are you looking for a speaker?

Joe makes entertaining, informational, and inspirational presentations on the following subjects (more details below):

-"How to Write Your Own Life Stories
(or at least how to get started)"

"What's a Hundred Years (More or Less)?"

"The Good Old Day?!?"
(or the Good New Days?)

"Mercer County Memories"
(Readings from Lives of Quiet Inspiration)

"War Stories: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"
(Memories of Area Veterans)

Joe will adapt his talks to the time allotted and to the size, nature, and age of the audience.

To contact Joe for further information or to schedule a talk:

Call 724-347-1209
or e-mail joezentis@verizon.net

"How To Write Your Own Life Stories"
(or at least how to get started)

Writing, even for those who do it a lot, is an intimidating task. The most difficult thing is to get started. Joe introduces a way of putting ideas down on paper without getting hung in grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Writing, he says, isn't like building a house, where you start with a blueprint, lay the foundation, build the first floor, then the second, then the roof. It's more of an organic process like planting a garden. It's a simple process of planting a few seeds (ideas, images, memories) and seeing what grows.

"What's a Hundred Years (More or Less)?"
A look back to 1908

What were things like a hundred years ago? Well, most city streets were not paved. The Model T Ford was introduced 1908. The longest airplane flight was less than two hours in a plane that only held the pilot. Life expectancy was about 48 years (compared with about 78 today). Maybe that had something to do with the fact that 95% of doctors did not have a college degree. There was no such thing a penicillin, so while we worry today about getting infections in hospitals, people died back then from a sliver or nail scratch, or a sore throat. There were no vaccines for diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosus, tetanus, yellow fever, typhus, flu, polio. mumps, measles, rubella, chicken pox, pneumonia, meningitis, or hepatitis. There was no insulin to treat diabetes, and (although the first blood transfusion was accomplished in 1907) blood banks were still 30 years in the future.

"The Good Old Days?!?"
(Or the Good New Days?)

I'm just 67 years old, so when people younger than me talk about the "good old days," I usually asked when they were, because I apparently missed them. Sure, I had some good times when I was younger, but when I was a kid, our "thermostat" was the coal shovel we used to shovel fuel into the small stove in the dining room that had to heat a pretty large house. It didn't do a very good job, even when we got it hot enough to make the stove pipe Our cars were mobile junkpiles by the time they 80,000 or 90,000 miles. When we had to go somewhere on a winter morning, there was maybe a 60% or 70% chance that they would actually start. I'm a big fan of thermostats and indoor plumbing. Could it be that the "good old days" are a product of selective memory?

Mercer County Memories
Readings from "Lives of Quiet Inspiration"

During the past two and a half years, I have had the distinct privilege of talking with more than 60 individuals and couples over the age of 75 who have lived in this area for a significant part of their lives. They have told me their joys and sorrows, trials and tribulations, and I have written them up as "Life Stories" for the Sharon Herald. They tell about working in steel mills, clothing stores, offices, and homes. They are stories about those who went off to war, and those whom they left behind. They survived floods and tornadoes, blizzards and bombs, blast furnaces and layoffs. In spite of their struggles, none of them led what Henry David Thoreau called "lives of quiet desperation."

War Stories: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Memories of Area Veterans

During World War II, men and women from our area served in every theater of war and branch of service. They were infantrymen, pilots, seaman, radio operators, bomber navigators, nurses, paratroopers and parachute packers, even bakers. Some made significant contributions to victory without ever going overseas. Some were prisoners of war, some participated in the liberation of concentration camps. The story of World War II isn't contained in any one of them, but in all of them.