On our last morning in Atlanta, facilitator Nadja Middleton bids a heartfelt farewell to the East Mobile booth after 2 months on the road recording peoples’ stories.

Driving down Auburn Avenue as we left the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, a StoryCorps listener wishes us safe travels as she enthusiastically listens to StoryCorps on NPR.

Facilitators Nadja Middleton, Jonah Engle and Veronica Ordaz (right) enjoy a hearty Southern breakfast at the Thumbs Up Diner before their last weekend of interviews in Atlanta. Veronica and Jonah will be heading on to North Carolina with StoryCorps’ mobile booth, while Nadja heads back to New York.
Being in Atlanta and recording interviews at the MLK Jr. National Historic Site has been a moving experience.

Since her arrival in Atlanta, facilitator Nadja Middleton has gotten into the habit of bringing flowers to the booth. Last week, orange carnations to match the StoryCorps color scheme. This week, tulips to confirm that despite the gloomy weather, spring is here!

Rabbi Alvin Sugarman participated in the struggle for Civil Rights, was a senior rabbi at the Temple –Atlanta’s oldest synagogue- and he starred as the Temple’s rabbi in the Oscar winning “Driving Miss Daisy”. He appears rather media savy but his granddaughter, Amanda Hirsch, had prepared questions he probably wasn’t used to answering in front of a microphone. Amanda asked him about his school days, favorite games, best childhood friends and his faith. At the end of the interview she told her grandfather how much she loved spending time with him and listening to his stories.

From Otis Redding to Outkast, from Ray Charles to REM
Georgia has long been a musical hotbed.

At Fat Matt’s, patrons come for BBQ ribs and nightly blues shows.
Here “The Crosstown Allstars” perform in front of a Mt Rushmore of Blues giants.

Wayne Tention is President of the Parkview Nursing Home Resident’s council. The Nursing home sits directly beside the Martin Luther King National Historic Site where the StoryCorps Mobile booth is located. Wayne talked about his fiancé who gave him a reason to live after years of drug addiction. Asked to describe her, Wayne answered “How do you describe an angel”?

On one of their first nights in Atlanta, facilitators Jonah Engle and Nadja Middleton were treated to a guided tour of the city and diner by Spelman and Morehouse (and StoryCorps) graduates Kay and Eric Hill. Like a number of graduates form those historic Black colleges, Kay and Eric decided to settle in a city that has been dubbed the country’s Black Mecca.

The second week, Rene Lindsay and Wanda Jackson of WABE brought bags full of Southern cookin’ to the booth: fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, black-eyed peas, cornbread, corn, and apple pie. Thank you for your hospitality WABE!

Michael Black is a research scientist with a passion for marine biology, a passion he shared recently with Jonah and Nadja. He gave them a guided tour of the new Georgia Aquarium and shared a number of interesting facts like: clown fish change sex on occasion, Japanese spider crabs can grow to the size of a car, and the aquarium’s biggest tank holds 6.2 million gallons of water!

After a StoryCorps interview, participants receive a designer CD copy of their conversation. In addition, most participants agree to have the interview archived at the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center. Some interviews are also excerpted for National Public Radio broadcast or for our website. On the Mobile Booth Tour, our local station partners get to extract their own clips from StoryCorps interviews.

Here in Atlanta, NPR affiliate WABE is our partner. In the picture above, the station’s Content Producer, Dave Barasoain admires a StoryCorps CD facilitator Jonah Engle has just handed him. During StoryCorps’ visit to Atlanta, public radio listeners in the area are treated to more than the weekly StoryCorps clips aired on NPR’s Morning Edition: Indeed, WABE listeners get an earful of poignant stories told by fellow Georgians!

God seems to be at the forefront of many participants’ minds in a way that He doesn’t seem to be in New York where Jonah Engle and Nadja Middleton facilitated before joining the Mobile Tour. A couple of people have prayed before the start of their recording. Some have preached to their interviewer. Others have shared how faith has saved them. Many simply express gratitude towards God.

Joyce Averils told her brother Kenneth Averils about surrendering her life to God just as she was about to “check out”. No longer able to cope with her problems, Joyce decided swallowing pills was the best solution. That is until a long neglected Bible caught her eye. She picked it up, read from it and ended up choosing surrender over suicide.

Janet Lutz is a hospital chaplain who came to reflect on her years of service, shortly before her retirement. Janet feels privileged to have been in a position to witness what she calls “holy moments” and to bless the hands of hospital workers. Another fond memory: learning from operating room technicians that, unbeknownst to the public and their colleagues, most of them would pray for patients while preparing surgical instruments. Towards the end of the interview, Lutz concluded: “I think stories are what make us human and in telling those stories, we can find out who we are and we can connect to the larger story, which is the story of God in our lives

Sisters Evelyn Sacks (left) and Annette Marcus (right) of Atlanta surprised their mother Charlene by bringing her to the StoryCorps booth. Charlene was visiting Atlanta from Indianapolis to celebrate Annette’s birthday that day.

The picture above was taken from the King Center. The Center, currently under the family’s stewardship, was originally founded in 1968 by Coretta Scott King shortly after her husband’s assasination. The late Reverand Martin Luther King Jr now lies in a tomb surrounded by a reflecting pool. The red brick building closest to King’s tombstone, is the Ebenezer Baptist Church where Reverands King Sr and Jr preached. Today, the building mainly houses Ebenezer’s administration while church goers from all over the city congregate in the new sanctuary accross Auburn Avenue. Below, Sunday church goers are seen leaving the new building of Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Coretta Scott King, who passed away earlier this year, now lies in a tomb close to her husband’s. Many come to pay their respects and snap pictures of loved ones sitting by Mrs King’s resting place. In the picture above (right), one can also see the Martin Luther King Historic Site visitor’s center. It too is situated accross Auburn Avenue, adjacent, in fact, to the new Ebenezer Church. Accross the Site’s visitor’s center, stands the StoryCorps Airstream trailer! (In the picture above it is just above the head of a man dressed in black, standing on the side walk with a camera he is about to use to capture images of Coretta Scott King’s tombstone).

Martin Luther King Jr was born one block away from where he first preached with his father and from where he now lies in a tomb. The picture above was taken from the front porch of his birth home. King grew up in a neighborhood where Blacks had been forced to retreat after White mobs massacred members of the community in 1906. Black institutions and businesses that emerged after Emancipation were able to thrive despite the setback. In fact, during the interwar period, early civil rights leader and Atlanta resident, John Wesley Dobbs, used to say that Auburn Avenue was the richest Black street in the country and consequently dubbed it “Sweet Auburn”.

With integration however, came disinvestment and the neighborhood’s “sweetness” wore off. Since the 1990s there has been an effort to revitalize “Sweet Auburn”. One example of that is the restauration of the late 19th century houses seen above.

CECILE: I’m John Cecile Daniels. I go by Cecile. I’m 75 years of age and today’s date is March the 5th 2006. We’re in Atlanta. We’ll be talking with my wife of 53 years, on our life basically.

ELSIE: My name is Elsie Todd Daniels. I’m 73. I’ll soon be 74. […]

CECILE: Elsie, of course we’ve been married 53 years. We know each other quite well but for this, I’d like for you to go into somewhat detail of circumstances around your birth.

ELSIE: I was born on a beautiful spring day in April. Apple trees blooming in the little valley, a very isolated valley in the North Georgia Mountains… Beautiful stream… Catch fish… All that there. I was the 4th child. My mother had 6 children in 8 years. The log cabin had no electricity. We had no car. We had a family truck that we used on the farm quite a bit, but we did a lot of walking […].

CECILE: I was born on the other end of the state, the southern end of the state. Actually, it was a border county to Florida. You was in a border county to North Crolina. […]. I was born at hime which was not unusual in those days. You were in a remote area, no town…

ELSIE: …[for] 25 miles…

CECILE: …and I lived on the edge of a small town in South Georgia.

The couple met on the telephone while he was serving time for rape, robbery and kidnapping. “How did I seem to you?” Clarence asks, sitting across from Yvonne in our Storybooth. “Well your mouth was filthy! Profanity, oh my God!” she recalls. Then, she explains, God showed her there was a purpose to their meeting: She was to save his soul. Clarence pushed her away at first, angry and bitter at having been convicted for crimes he did not commit. During 7 years of letter writing and candid conversations, Clarence and Yvonne gradually fell in love. Shortly after Clarence Harrison was finally exonerated and freed, Yvonne became Mrs. Harrison. On their wedding day, she felt like “Cinderella at a ball”.

StoryCorps’ East Mobile Booth just opened its doors to people living in the Atlanta area. Today, facilitator Jonah Engle helped Calah Singleton interview her mother Camara Phyllis Jones. Along with co-facilitator Nadja Middleton, he will be welcoming participants here until the end of March. The trailer is parked opposite the entrance to the visitor’s center of the Martin Luther King Jr National Historic Site. Apparently, people from all walks of life and of all ages visit this site. Following a tour of the MLK site, some students and teachers from the Casa Montesori added to their afternoon program a surprise tour of the StoryBooth. The kids were particularly excited about choosing a few StoryCorps pins to take as souvenirs!