For the past few weeks, MobileBooth West has been in beautiful Sacramento, California, in partnership with Capital Public Radio. We are parked outside the Sacramento Public Library, just blocks from the State Capital Building. While we remain on the lookout for Governor Schwarzenegger, we’ve been hearing stories more extraordinary than any Hollywood thriller.

Last week, Riki Friedman (R) came to the booth with her good friend Dorothy Finkbeiner. Riki met Dorothy the day she moved into Eskaton Senior Residences, a year and a half ago. Dorothy welcomed Riki by inviting her to her apartment for tea, and the two women talked for hours. This immediate connection was a surprise to both of them: Dorothy is from Germany, and Riki is a Jew from Brooklyn. Riki’s late husband, Israel, had been in the first American military outfit to liberate Buchenwald concentration camp, and had written vivid letters to Riki describing the horrors he witnessed. “If I had met you right after the war,” Riki told Dorothy, “I wouldn’t have given you the time of day.”

At their first meeting, Riki and Dorothy discovered their shared love for gardening, exchanged stories about their sons, and talked about what their lives were like during World War II, in which Dorothy lost two brothers. During that conversation, Riki admitted to Dorothy that she was her first German acquaintance since the war ended, and asked her, “What did you know?”

Dorothy answered, “Way too little. I didn’t even hear the word Auschwitz until the war was over.” Through their friendship, both women have realized that individuals should not be blamed for the terrible actions of countries, and that war is never the answer.

Riki and Dorothy are now the best of friends. “We see through the same eyes,” Dorothy said. “I wish the whole world could meet this way.”

Abilene, Texas is “the big city” in this region of West Texas and StoryCorps Mobilebooth West was told by many that we hadn’t really come to Texas till we came to Abilene. After spending more than a month in San Antonio, StoryCorps came to park outside the First Financial Bank on Pine Street in Abilene, a community whose economy flourished in the latter half of the twentieth century on oil, agriculture and the military. In recent years Abilene’s population has grown to more than 100,000 people. No longer merely a “cattle-shipping prairie town” Abilene can be characterized as a “metropolis on the plains.” Nevertheless, Abilene still maintains a deep sense of quiet and history in its wide-avenue streets and industrial-style buildings.

Here are some photos of this West Central Texas community.

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_{Lloyd “Tyke” Riddick (R) and interview partner Angela Bray (L).}

Lloyd Riddick is the kind of person who could tell you stories all day. From his beginnings in “Harlem, USA”; to joining the Air Force as a radio intercept operator; to becoming a top salesman at IBM. Mr. Riddick has done it all and then some, but he has one story for the history books. One night during the Cold War, while stationed in Germany as a radio intercept operator, Mr. Riddick discovered a signal he had never heard before. He passed off his transcription of the dots and dashes coming over his headset, and the next day learned that he was the first person west of the Iron Curtain to capture the signal coming from Sputnik, the Russian satellite. However, it was more than 40 years later, long after the Space Race had ended, that he was honored for his contribution, and able to publicly share his story.

Opening Day in Georgetown, Delaware was a squeeze–we welcomed to the East MobileBooth an entire Delaware Tech and Community College ESL class, and we just might have set a MobileBooth occupancy record in the process! While it was their first time in a booth, StoryCorps isn’t new to these students: Del Tech English professor Susan Schranck and staff member Amy Russell use StoryCorps stories like these in their classes to as part of their English language curriculum. Great idea, no? Some students have already come in for StoryCorps interviews, and we’re looking forward to many more as we kick off StoryCorps’ first visit to the First State. More on an action-packed opening day to come…

On April 16, 2008 StoryCorps facilitators Mike Rauch and Brianna Hyneman visited Clove Lakes Health & Rehabilitation Center, a short and long term nursing and rehabilitation center in Staten Island, New York.

Clove Lakes Social Service Secretary, Meaghan McKeon hosted us for the day as residents added their stories to the archive of New York oral history. Many of the participants that we listened to were raised in the Staten Island area during the depression. They talked about the solidarity of their communities, the families they raised and, their work from eighty years of crochet beading in the garment district to being a gunner in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II. Clove Lakes honors their residents’ stories and preserves some of the community they all share. On the day we visited, Staten Island’s and Clove Lakes’ oldest resident, Winifred Flynn, celebrated her 104th birthday with a large reception in the grand entrance.

Enjoy the slideshow. Click an image for more information.

…an interdisciplinary college preparatory boarding school located on 1,200 acres of Wisconsin woodland boasting 22 miles of trails and eight lakes. Founded by James R. Lowenstine, The Conserve School in Land O’ Lakes, Wisconsin offers its students an integrated educational program that explores the wonders of nature using the sciences, literature and the arts.

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Kemba Bloodworth and Jenna Weiss-Berman finished their ten week North Carolina tour in the lovely Outer Banks with some recordings for the StoryCorps’ Memory Loss Initiative. The recordings took place at the Gem Center in Nags Head, North Carolina, a wonderful day program for people in various stages of memory loss. Above, StoryCorps Memory Loss Initiative Coordinator Mitra Bonshahi (L front) and facilitator Kemba Bloodworth (R front) eat lunch with the program’s participants.

Among the interview participants were Jerry and Jane Smallwood, who met in high school but didn’t marry until many years later. In fact, after Jerry left for the Navy, they both married other people. But through the years they couldn’t stop thinking of one another, and they were finally reunited. Jerry was injured many years ago when the plane he was piloting crashed, which was most likely the cause of his memory loss and Aphasia, but he hasn’t let his ailments stop him from taking walks on the beautiful beaches of the Outer Banks with the love of his life, Jane.

93-year-old Lucy Hofmann and her sister 91-year-old Alice Lowry came to share their stories when StoryCorps visited The Haven Assisted Living Residence in San Antonio, TX. Lucy and Alice shared about their family and a unique slice of American history.

Lucy talked about how Emperor Dom Pedro Segundo of Brazil encouraged southerners following the Civil War to come to Brazil and become Brazilian citizens. He wanted agriculture and cotton to be developed in Brazil. William Hutchinson Norris, one of the first original Confederados known to arrive in Brazil was Alice and Lucy’s great grandfather. Many of William’s sons had fought in the Civil War for the South, and one of these sons, who joined William in Brazil, was Robert Norris, their grandfather.

Lucy said that their grandparents picked their land by choosing a spot that reminded them of the fertile land they left behind in Alabama. The town that formed around this land where Alice was born, Villa Americana, is now the city Americana in Brazil.
Lucy and Alice attended a Methodist boarding school called Colegio Peracicabano that they remembered fondly as well as the picnics held every four months by the descendants of the southerners who came to Brazil. These gatherings always had two things: southern dancing and good southern food. Alice remembered the tables piled high with fried chicken, stewed corn, lemon pies, and of course, biscuits and cornbread.

After traveling much of the world throughout their lives with their husbands, Lucy and Alice are settled back in Texas. Lucy is pictured here listening closely to her interview on the laptop in The Haven Parlor.

Jenna and Kemba are now in New Bern, North Carolina and it is HOT! 80 degrees today, to be precise. New Bern is the home of novelist Nicholas Sparks, as well as the inspiration for his romantic classic The Notebook. And I (Jenna) am staying in a home (above) on the Neuse River, with local New Bernian Zelma Peter, that bears an uncanny resemblance to the home that Noah built for Allie in the movie version of The Notebook (one of my personal favorites).

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On the morning of April 3, StoryCorps staff, our supporters and partners, and press came out to Foley Square in downtown Manhattan to celebrate our newly relocated and reopened Lower Manhattan StoryBooth. Now the flagship booth in New York, our Foley Square location puts us in the heart of one of the most historic neighborhoods in New York City. Read the rest of this entry »