Modern Spellbinder

Jay O'Callahan has revived the ancient art of storytelling

Once upon a time there was a small and shy boy named Jay who lived in a huge house. Its 32 rooms were filled with tapestries and wood carvings. In an enormous library with shelves from floor to ceiling, he could curl up and read Dickens and Stevenson and Tom Swift. Best of all, tucked in a corner of the garden was a little cave where Jay used to sit for hours and imagine that it had once belonged to King Arthur. In the evening, he and his family discussed literature, and sometimes Jay made up stories for them.

A tale from the good old days? In a way. The boy, Jay O'Callahan, is now 39 and makes his living in a fashion that surely would have stumped the panelists of What's My Line? He is a spellbinding spinner of stories of his own devising, the practitioner of a craft older than Homer, as old as mankind, that has largely been lost in modern times. Whether he tells about two fatuous bears who are forever pinning medals made of leaves on each other or about the voyages of Magellan, his stories captivate young and old alike. In the past twelve months, he has told his repertoire of 40 tales to 50,000 people from Maine to California, in barn lofts, in museums and, most often, in schools. O'Callahan's base is as story-teller-in-residence for public schools in Quincy, Framingham and Brookline, Mass. Although next fall he will start a radio program called The Spider's Web, O'Callahan prefers live audiences. "People are hungry for storytelling because we live in an age preoccupied with technology and science."

Becoming a bard in 20th century America was not easy. O'Callahan started out as dean of a Boston secretarial school founded by his father. Eight years ago, a group of children at a camp asked him to tell them a story. He wove a druidic spell for 35 minutes, making up the story as he went along. It was about a creature in Russia that set upon other animals. "The impact was tremendous," he recalls. "Then and there I decided to give up my job and write novels." He and his wife Linda moved to rural Marshfield, Mass., to operate the local Y.W.C.A. so that he could write. Two unpublished novels and five years later, O'Callahan found that his prime talent was for telling stories aloud. He found it in a manner any parent might envy: entertaining his own children, Teddy and Laura.

Bespectacled and bearded, O'Callahan uses no scenery, no costumes, no props. But he gestures his way through each story, giving his voice dramatic colors, using body language to suggest character and attitude. As a blacksmith, his voice is deep and strong. As a little old lady, he totters and quavers through his lines. Most of his tales are studded with songs, and they run to once-upon-a-time plot lines as simple--and profound--as fairy tales. One story, "Raspberries," is about a kind, honest baker named Simon who is hurt and ridiculed, runs away from his home town in Kansas, grows raspberries for a living, finds himself, and finally returns to home and trade.

When O'Callahan told this story to a group of seventh-graders in a tough Boston school, three unruly boys kept roaming around the room. O'Callahan thought he had failed to capture his audience. But a week later he got a call from the school's principal. One of the roamers kept singing over and over the song from "Raspberries." When he was asked to retell the story to students who had been absent, the boy went on for about 45 minutes, scarcely missing a detail.

In the nature of the telling, no story is ever retold in exactly the same way, but O'Callahan makes no concession to the age of the audience. "If children don't understand a word," he says, "they will search it out. That's how their language will grow." In schools he visits regularly, students often ask to skip lunch or gym to attend a storytelling, a high compliment in these days of wall-to-wall TV. Teachers find O'Callahan not only stirs total attention, but inspires students to read. As Newton P.T.A. Officer Jessica Davis puts it, "It is extraordinary to see a storyteller with the tools of an art centuries old captivate a group of children who thought they'd seen everything."

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