By Sharon Abercrombie
Staff writer

Residents at Mercy Retirement and Care Center might not realize it, but they are now in the company of such well-known personalities as 18th century political pamphleteer Thomas Paine. A writing and story telling project at the senior residence in Oakland has put them there.

Paine, author of the famous political “Common Sense,” pamphlet, bypassed established printing houses of the day, preferring to self-publish as a way to circulate his revolutionary political ideas. If Paine lived today, his pamphlets would be known as “zines” (short for magazines).

Zines are created by ordinary citizens and have become a mode of expression apart from the computer. Some focus on social issues and others lean towards story telling, personal journaling and poetry.

Mercy’s first zine is a treasury of residents’ memories from the past: their favorite foods and movies, school capers, church recollections, and eccentric town characters. It came about after Elisa Reutinger, community relations coordinator, discovered the zine genre at an Oakland bookstore. She thought the idea would be a great way for retirees to record their histories.

So earlier this year, Reutinger invited members of her Friday reading group to jump onto the memory train. She enlisted her two teenaged daughters, Anna and Eva, and a couple of their friends at Albany High School to serve as “living history’ stenographers to take down the elders’ thoughts.

Reutinger went to work designing the zine. The finished project is a photo-copied, child-sized booklet with an inside folder pocket. The pocket holds a tea bag “just for fun,” says Reutinger, and a post-card sized reproduction of a still-life painting by resident Lucille Lacey. The 92-year-old’s art is often used for Mercy party invitations.

The zine cover is a full-color reproduction of the retirement home’s weekly activities in February 2009. Each inside page brims with personality. Doreen writes about running away from home when she was a little kid, even though she had a very happy childhood.

“My father would help me pack my dolly suitcase . . . and he’d say, ‘Well, we want to be sure you take your toothbrush and some toothpaste and an extra pair of panties.’ . . . I’d get as far as the corner, which was a pretty long block and I’d see the porch light on. I could look out thinking he couldn’t see me, but he was watching me the whole way.” Doreen’s page includes a photo of some vintage dolls.

Another writer recalls a memorable Sunday dinner, “when the whole family was sitting down to eat and all of a sudden, the ceiling tiles fell down onto the table and into the soup. My mom sprang up yelling, ‘Save the soup! Save the soup!’ She made us strain the ceiling bits out of the soup so we could still have some dinner.”

There are smiling photos of Mercy residents, a crossword puzzle geared to senior interests, and magazine cutouts of favorite movie stars, including Audrey Hepburn and Gene Kelly.

So what does one do with a zine? Are they sold or given away? Both. Each designer/writer decides how to distribute their work. Reutinger decided to sell Mercy’s for $4 each at the recent Zine Fest in San Francisco.

“They were quite the big hit. We sold 25 of them.” Reutinger said she had artists coming up to the table requesting the senior zines, adding that people loved them. Reutinger will use the proceeds to purchase books for her Friday reading group.

The book group also earned money from the sale of some “wise owls” they’ve been sewing. The owls have words of wisdom from residents tacked on back.

Is there another edition of the Mercy zine coming out anytime soon? Reutinger hopes so. Although her older daughter, Anna, is now off to UCLA, she hopes younger daughter, Eva, will help create another one.

home