Native American and African communities have certain respected members who use tales to remind their tribes of the past. Scandinavians chanted and sang stories and myths until they could eventually be written down for posterity. To some degree, every culture relies on storytellers to convey knowledge to its people so that the lessons of history are not forgotten. Even in our age of technology and fast-paced living, storytellers remind us of where we came from and what we value. Storytellers tell us who we are.

At 81, Frank Shivers Jr. is Baltimore's storyteller. "It's in my gene pool. I come from a family of diarists. I watched my father write in a diary and record what he saw and did every day, all his life."

Shivers has recorded the stats and stories of Bolton Hill (Bolton Hill: Baltimore Classic), Maryland literature (Maryland Wits and Baltimore Bards), and general points of interest in the city (Walking in Baltimore). He collaborated on The Architecture of Baltimore with Mary Ellen Hayward. And he knows so much about the history and development of the Bay that the Environmental Protection Agency asked him to contribute to a report on that subject, which, at Shivers' suggestion, later became the book Chesapeake Waters.

Surrounded in his parlor by history books and biographies, Shivers recalls how he developed this skill of recounting the past.

"I was born in New Jersey and went to Yale for undergraduate and graduate degrees in English. Then I went to Cincinnati to teach at the university and met my wife. We came to Baltimore so I could do more graduate work and teach at Johns Hopkins University. But we were outsiders. We had to work at getting the neighbors to know us and trust us."

Shivers and his wife, Lottchen, moved to Baltimore in 1951. In 1955 they settled into a house on Bolton Street where they raised their four children, and where they still live today.

"People asked us, ‘Who are you? Where did you come from? Who were your relatives?' I told them my father was born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in Somerset County on a farm near Princess Anne. That's about as far south as you can get in Maryland. My wife's uncle and aunt belonged to the Gibson Island Club. Once our well-established neighbors heard our connection to Maryland, then we were okay. But we were always considered Yankees."

A large Southern contingency resided in Bolton Hill in the 1950s. After the Civil War, people had moved up from the South looking for work and a place to live that hadn't been physically ruined. "There were many people living here who remembered the Civil War, the effect of that outcome. I just started listening to their stories. There were quite a few characters."

One woman in the neighborhood, a Southern sympathizer, refused to take a five-dollar bill in change. "She would insist on getting five ones, not a five. Why? Because Lincoln was on the five-dollar bill.

"There is always that little suspicion that a Yankee doesn't really quite get it. He may write all these books, but he really doesn't understand. But I have a perspective they don't have."

Gradually, Shivers' encounters with Baltimore residents helped him gain an understanding of the city's past. "People just want someone to listen to them. I was more than eager to do that." And in doing so, he uncovered stories that eloquently relate history's lessons.

He met a woman who remembered, as a child, the Baltimore fire of 1904. "Her family was packing up important belongings and loading up a wagon to get ready to leave the city. But then the wind shifted and the fire didn't spread north." The February fire destroyed much of the downtown business district, which then required rebuilding for the next few years. "I can't imagine watching that fire and wondering what might happen, if it was going to overtake the entire city."

Many neighbors also talked about the political activity at the Fifth Regiment Armory, located at 29th Division Street just below Bolton Hill. The 1912 Democratic Convention, when Woodrow Wilson secured the presidential nomination, was a big draw. "People sat on their porches and listened to the cheering over at the Armory when Wilson came to town," Shivers says. "And Kennedy and Ike came to the Armory. Many presidential candidates went through [Bolton Hill] to get to the Armory and people would gather to see the motorcade go by."

Some of Shivers' tales are just plain entertaining, like the ones about F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of Bolton Hill's most famous residents. "One of the people who took my class, Franklin Mason from the Baltimore Sun, told great stories of Fitzgerald. When Franklin was young, he had to deliver first-edition copies of Tender Is the Night to F. Scott Fitzgerald's house so that they could be signed," Shivers recalls. "Well, Fitzgerald fell asleep while signing the books. The housekeeper came by and told Franklin she would make sure the books got returned to the store," he says.

"Another story about that book always makes me laugh. Fitzgerald gave a signed copy of Tender Is the Night to a neighbor whose daughter went to school with his daughter, Scottie," Shivers remembers. "The neighbor threw it in the trash because she didn't want this book to harm or spoil the innocence of her daughter. She didn't want her daughter to even see it. A first-edition, signed copy of Tender Is the Night, right in the trash. Can you imagine that now?" he asks in disbelief.

Baltimore's stories are not always as pleasant. Early writers who spent time in the city developed a reality-based style of writing that reflected this truth. Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain were "hard-boiled" detective and mystery writers who used the city as a backdrop, even if it was not named as Baltimore on the pages. Upton Sinclair's work focused on the reality of living and working in the extreme conditions of abject poverty. "I see their work as precursors to David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets," he offers. "You can see how that style of writing has continued in the city."

Shivers collected these tales while doing one of the things that storytellers do best: teach. He was head of the English department at Friends School of Baltimore for twenty-five years, as well as a part-time professor at Johns Hopkins, the University of Baltimore, and Towson University.

Last year, Shivers retired from teaching at Johns Hopkins. In 1999, the alumni association honored Shivers with its annual Excellence in Teaching Award for his time at the School of Professional Studies in Business and Education. "I don't even want to say how long I was there, but I really enjoyed it."

Presently, Shivers is updating and expanding his Bolton Hill book, to be released this fall under the title Bolton Hill: Classic Baltimore Neighborhood. And he is looking into the story behind the subject of his most recent writing project, the four parks surrounding the Washington Monument in Mount Vernon. "I asked around, ‘Who designed these parks?' and nobody knew." He discovered that architect Robert Mills designed both the parks and the monument. Mills went on to design the Washington Monument in D.C., along with other government buildings. "The Baltimore monument was finished years before the D.C. monument. We honored George Washington here first. But this is the way we are sometimes. It's Baltimore. We don't call attention to ourselves."

Not every city is blessed with such a historian and advocate. Wayne Schaumburg, another local historian and a Green Mount Cemetery tour guide, puts it best: "Frank is a walking encyclopedia of Baltimore history. Whether it is in a book, a tour, or a lecture, his knowledge of the city and its past is second to none. We are lucky to have him."