On July 18, 2008, just hours after taking their marriage vows at City Hall, Alexandra Budny and Steven Ketcham came to our Lower Manhattan StoryBooth to commemorate the day with a recording for future generations of their family.

The pair met for the first time, when Steve helped Ali’s mother move into the home his father had just moved out of. Ali’s mother had more foresight than anyone else. When she first met Steve, she told him, “My name is Nadia, I’m going to be your future mother-in-law.” A week later, Steve and Ali were dating. Six years and two months later—after supporting each other through both their parents’ deaths—they are living in the same home where they first met, and where they hope to grow gray together. “I would be very happy living there. That house is important,” said Ali.

“It’s how we met and it’s what binds us,” said Steve. “What I see is you completely gray, with wrinkles, but still looking beautiful, still having that charm. I’m going to be gray as well, with a big round belly and I probably will have shrunk a couple inches. And just sitting there chatting, looking out on our yard.”

As their forty minutes in the booth wound down, Ali commented, “We have a very interesting story and I hope that it continues to surprise us.”

Congratulations Steve and Ali!

Sisters Stafford and Tyla swept into our Foley Square StoryBooth Thursday evening to share breezy reminiscences of their Brooklyn childhood. Tyla, a staff person with New York City Community Partner Brooklyn College Student Center, was a veteran having previously brought in her husband for an interview and thus urged her sister to occupy the storyteller seat for a fun forty minutes.

Spirited doesn’t even begin to describe the tight twosome. When presented with an opportunity to remember their adolescent escapades, the two volleyed back and forth like Venus and Serena, never with more intensity than when recalling the antics of their bold mother Virginia. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York City StoryBooth is nestled in the heart of Lower Manhattan in historic Foley Square. This small island oasis is part greenspace part memorial on what used to be Collect Pond and the African American Burial Ground, it offers panoramic views of civic landmarks such as the New York County Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall Courthouse, the visual center-piece is artist Lorenzo Pace’s “Triumph of the Human Spirit” Memorial and now StoryCorps’ lone New York City StoryBooth.

Early morning residents of near by Chinatown practice Tai Chi on the park’s lawns. During business hours a steady flow of tourists pose and snap shots while the area’s nine-to-five inhabitants - business people, lawyers and civil servants bustle to and fro. A transient parks his overloaded trestle by a park bench and washes up muttering to sweet nothings to himself, children play in the cool water of memorial’s fountain. They all seem to lead disparate and disconnected lives. Later, two participants come to booth and spend forty minutes of quiet, uninterrupted time together. They come talk about anything, their history - family, friends, hopes, dreams, fears, loves of their life. In the end, they’ve shared a part of themselves, their stories, their lives, and leave having had an opportunity to make history. With their permission their conversation is archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

People come by the booth all the time to ask questions: “What is this?”, “Do you have a restroom?” (we don’t) or to proclaim “Now I gotta story to tell”. Many have returned to do just that.

And who says Lower Manhattan is dead after hours? When the sun sets, after the denizens of Lower Manhattan corporate life return home and the tourists migrate uptown, Foley Square becomes a destination some of the city’s more colorful characters, skateboarders practicing jumps, couples on late-night romantic walks, and those just looking for a place to rest their feet after a long day of touring the city. Each has a story to tell…

Mort and Meredith Young came to the StoryBooth  to document their love story as a gift to  their grandsons. They say it was love at first sight – almost. Actually, there were several occasions over eleven years when they should have met, but life stepped in and said, “not quite yet.”  After years of living  separate lives, a friend of Meredith’s  arranged  a blind date. Mort said, “When that door opened, and I saw you, I knew that you were the woman I wanted to marry.” And, 50 years later… well, the picture says it all.

Maureen Rosen at our Lower Manhattan StoryBooth

“Come on up love, we’ve got a nice cup of tea for you.” Those were the first words heard by Maureen after finding herself buried beneath the debris of her family’s fire-bombed home. Air raids occurred nightly, but on this day the family couldn’t make it to the bomb shelter in the living room so they found safety atop a mound of coal under the stairs. This was London in the time of WWII. Maureen’s father was fighting in the British navy while she, her mother, and baby brother were left to defend themselves and hopefully, live to tell. Maureen was little more than a toddler but old enough to know the warning sounds of an incoming bomb. These are her earliest memories - the taste and smell of air raids and coal dust. Naivety oftentimes escapes little girls unlucky enough to get caught in war, but not all realities reveal themselves so terribly. Most of the bombs aimed for her neighborhood missed and in their wake grew wild flowers. Back then Maureen wondered why the Germans dropped flower seeds with their bombs. Not knowing until later that there was a chemical in the explosion that also acted as a fertilizer, growing pretty little things amidst the chaos.

On Wednesday, May 14 StoryCorps staff and alumni bid farewell to our flagship StoryBooth in the Biltmore Ballroom in Grand Central Terminal. Founder Dave Isay spoke briefly about the history of the booth and what it has meant to the thousands of people who have shared their stories within its soundproof panels. He then handed the microphone over to VIP alumni Annie Perasa and Louisa Scioscia Stevens. In 2004, Annie recorded a love story so passionate that we dedicated the booth in honor of her and her late husband, Danny Perasa. Louisa Scioscia Stevens believed so strongly in the power of oral history and StoryCorps’ mission that she’s participated in 100 interviews at the Grand Central StoryBooth alone. Guests wrote farewell notes and recorded testimonials in the booth reminding us just how valuable the booth has been to their lives and families. Throughout we were moved to tears as we said, “Goodbye, you’ve served us well old friend.”

Enjoy the slide show. Click on a photo to get more information.

_{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.

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 »

StoryCorps was born in October of 2003 in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal. Since the inauguration of StoryCorps’ seminal StoryBooth, thousands of people have recorded conversations with their loved ones. For many the StoryBooth experience is love at first sight, or more aptly, love at first sensation. The experience is a series of unique sensations, from first reacting to the sight of an illuminated pod-like booth, to the distinct feeling of the outside world being vacuumed away with the closing “WHOOSH” of the giant sound proof door, to the final moments of an interview when you realize that 40 minutes really does pass a lot quicker then you thought. Perception of time tends to be lost as you surrender your senses to absorbing and sorting through memory. These sensations resonate with different people in very different ways, but whether the memories shared in the StoryBooth are pleasurable or painful, the experience is distinct. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, March 22, Monroe Mayer visited the Lower Manhattan StoryBooth with his son Livian Mayer and Livian’s girlfriend, Petrina Palazzo, to discuss his coming of age in New York during WWII. Monroe is one of those real native New Yorkers who can recall not only watching the Twin Towers go down but also watching the George Washington Bridge go up. By 13, he was an air raid messenger who would scurry messages from police officials to the air raid wardens positioned around the city. He remembers the imposed blackouts and the miles of ships in the Hudson River. Monroe is a great storyteller too. Petrina keeps prompting him on with, “ooh, and tell that one.” He could go on and on, from being drafted in 1946, to getting the German measels, to even having to guard the German physicist Wernher Von Braun once he, along with 500 of his top rocket scientists, surrendered to the Americans. At 80, Monroe Mayer is still a practicing attorney and the national commander of the Jewish War Veterans of the USA. Monroe is a charming and humble man. Sharing these stories remind us that his story unfolds our shared history.

StoryCorps supporters and Alumni Catharine Wall and Mark Smith recently visited the Lower Manhattan StoryBooth to talk about her large New York family, to remember her own childhood growing up in and around New York City and, to honor those who have passed on.

Catharine previously interviewed her aunt Mary Catharine at the Grand Central Terminal StoryBooth, then her uncle Jim at the West MobileBooth in Santa Monica, California. She first listened to her CD as she drove to the airport headed to Mary Catharine’s funeral. Her uncle Jim eulogized her own mother and talked about growing up with his sister in the city. She wanted to bring her uncle Tommy with the strong Queens accent, but did not get the opportunity. This time she came with her husband, Mark. They shared memories of first impressions of the city, her colorful family, and stories from their own twenty-four years of marriage. He asked her what it is about her experience in our booths that compels her, and she simply said, “There’s something nostalgic about it for me…A nostalgia that pre-dates my own experience. It harkens back to some earlier, easier time.”

So said Storycorps participant Jihad Qasim during his Storycorps conversation with facilitator Soo Na Pak on Wednesday. This Harlem resident and dedicated dance man touched on his favorite style: “mambo with a swing twist, or swing with a mambo twist, I can’t seem to keep them apart” and how when Jihad was young, NYC ballrooms like The Savoy, The Audubon, and The Renaissance were spots where young people learned to get along, according to Jihad, with a respect for each other that “dancing naturally created.”

Jihad remembers the signal that a dance party was underway in Harlem during the 1960s: if he saw flashing lights in an apartment window on a Friday or Saturday he knew that a good time could be found within. It’s a bittersweet memory: Jihad theorized that those window lights were the ancestor of the disco ball, the central symbol of the form of dance that crowded ballroom out of Harlem in the 1970s, a void which, according to Jihad, contributed to social problems in Harlem and other neighborhoods. But Jihad sees signs that a ballroom comeback is starting in New York, and we hope that’s the case. Take that, disco! (Just kidding, we secretly love you too…)

Veteran StoryCorps superstar Louisa Scioscia Stephens (who has participated in almost 100 interviews) came to the Grand Central StoryBooth today with her student and friend, Aude Lloydna Onanga Ndiaye. Ms. Onanga spoke about her mother, Marie-Stephanie Inquiessi, an extraordinary woman who lives in Libreville, Gabon. Her mother grew up in the small town of Mimongo, a name Ms. Stephens described as sounding like the beautiful sound of “wind blowing through the trees.” When Ms. Inquiessi’s father died, she and her many siblings were left homeless and in dire poverty…

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Patricia (Pat) Gillespie and her husband Harry (Bud) are both celebrating their 80th birthdays. As a present to them, their daughter made an appointment for them to tell their story in the Grand Central Terminal StoryBooth. All five of their children came to New York City from around the country to celebrate with them, and 18 members of their family watched outside of the both while their granddaughter, Anne Burmeister, represented for the family as the designated interviewer. Eighteen members of a family at once is a new record for StoryCorps. Thank you, Gillespie family, for choosing to spend your milestone birthday with us!