Harriet Miller & Monica Wehrle, Fort Wayne, IN

While StoryCorps’ new team of Facilitators and Site Supervisors were training in our Brooklyn Office, our two Mobile Booths were preparing for their next stops in Fort Wayne, IN (East Booth) and La Crosse, WI (West Booth). Working with the Mobile East Team in Fort Wayne during their first week of recordings, I facilitated a conversation between business and life partners Harriet Miller and Monica Wehrle who talked about organizing an exhibition game with the former players of the Fort Wayne Daisies in their efforts to promote equality for women through the Fort Wayne Women’s Bureau.

A week later I joined our West Booth Team, new Site Supervisor Eloise Mezler and new Facilitator Jackie Sojico, for Opening Day in La Crosse, where we are partnering with WLSU Wisconsin Public Radio and the La Crosse Public Library in downtown.

Participants come up to the booth on Opening Day in La Crosse, WI.

Dolly Vanderlip & Susan Colliton, La Crosse, WI.

One of our first participants during that week of recordings was Susan Colliton, who came in to interview her friend and co-worker Dolly Vanderlip. Dolly, it turns out, was a Fort Wayne Daisy.

“Lippy,” as she was known by her teammates when she joined the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, grew up in Charlotte, NC, and signed her contract with the Fort Wayne Daisies when she was 14.

During her interview, she remembered their uniforms: Miniskirts, socks to your knees, and spikes, shoulder-length hair, and make-up. “They wanted feminine women playing baseball,” she said with a grin, though according to her, by the time she signed up the League had relaxed some of their rules and the women no longer had to attend charm school-like classes, as the older players had done.

"Lippy"

“We didn’t have to go, because we were already charming,” she’d tease some of her older teammates  at later reunions. “When we see each other we always give each other a hard time,” she told Susan.

It’s this sense of camaraderie, and the opportunity to meet different people, living and working together as they traveled around the U.S. that became one of her favorite things about playing in the League. “I liked the team thing.”

In addition to pitching for the Fort Wayne Daisies, Dolly also played for the South Bend Blue Sox and has had the chance to reunite with former teammates on various occasions.

We look forward to hearing many more stories like Dolly’s while in La Crosse and are thrilled to be working with many local community organizations. Our Mobile West team will be doing recording here through August 7th, 2010.

During the month of August, my co-facilitator Naomi Greene and I visited the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) in Tampa, FL. MOSI won the National Medal Award, awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to the ten best libraries and museums around the country.

MOSI’s core ideology is to make a difference in people’s lives by making science real for people of all ages and backgrounds. During our visit to MOSI, we recorded interviews with people that share their love and passion for science with all the museum’s visitors.

Julie Fooshee & Hadley Andersen

Julie Fooshee (L) and Hadley Andersen (R) took time out of their very busy day to sit down and discuss their research and work at MOSI. They have pretty amazing jobs. Known throughout the MOSI organization as “interactors.” Julie and Hadley spend a lot of their time in and around the museum’s 450 exhibits. Julie describes an interactor as “…a little bit of everything. They play, they teach…they are tour guides. Everything.” Interactors are the people that make the exhibits and the information come alive for the patrons.

Jason Allgair & John Satterwhite

Jason Allgair (L) and John Satterwhite (R) are two of MOSI’s guest services representatives. John is living with cerebral palsy and has welcomed, helped, and guided visitors of the museum for the last 13 years. During the conversation, John shared some of his favorite memories about working at MOSI and helping visitors of the museum: “It’s scary at times, but I keep in mind that I am a teacher and they will learn to talk to people with disabilities.”

Everyday, Julie, Hadley, Jason, John, and a team of enthusiastic staff, bring science to life for thousands of people of all ages and backgrounds. We thank them for sharing their stories (and their exhibits!) with StoryCorps.

In May, StoryCorps traveled to the offices of the Dolores Huerta Foundation in Bakersfield, CA, to facilitate a conversation with Dolores Huerta and two of her daughters, Camila Chavez and Lori de Leon.

80 years young

Huerta is the co-founder of the United Farm Workers Union. She now heads her own foundation. In 1965 she and the late UFW president Cesar Chavez directed the great grape boycott, bringing the plight of the farm workers in California to the attention of the consumer. It was so successful that in its final days, it brought the California grape industry to its knees and grape growers signed a collective bargaining agreement with the UFW in 1970.

During the conversation with StoryCorps, this courageous labor leader recounted stories over her 80-year life. She remembered leaving the relative security of Salinas to organize in Delano and the  shift in the mindset of her children when she did that.

Leaving to organize

Dolores spoke of how it felt leaving her kids to organize in the fields. “I left my youngest, an infant, and another young daughter with my two first-cousins” and she took the rest of the kids with her to Delano. Her daughter Camila tells her, “We had to grow up quickly. It was either sink or swim. So we swam.”

Dolores said she was criticized at home by her “compadres” (relatives/close friends) for doing this and on the other hand, ostracized by the farm worker women when she went to the Central Valley because she was divorced and didn’t play the traditional role.

“It was hard to take,” she said, “I didn’t get a lot of invitations to other people’s gatherings. So I would pack the kids up and drive to Corcoran.” Dolores went to this town in Central Valley to be with the one family that was close to her: Cesar Chávez and his wife Helen. “He had seven kids and then with my 11 we were a houseful!” remembered Dolores.

One of hardest times

From all her years of organizing and pushing for the rights of farm workers, one incident particularly stands out in her mind: when she was trying to get unemployment insurance passed for farm workers. When it didn’t pass, she recounts that she “started sobbing. I was crying so hard that the grower lobbyists were bringing me kleenex. I was in front of the committee and just crying. The committee was so embarrassed that they amended the bill to approve disability insurance for farm workers and that was in 1961. To this day California and Hawaii are the only two states that have disability insurance for farm workers.”

Attack

Dolores recalls one time growers tried to break into her home, breaking the window into shards that narrowly missed her son, Emilio. She remembers the pet dog squealing after being kicked by the intruders so it would stop barking. “I put my son through a small window to go get help,” which came and the intruders were scared off.

Throughout all her years this strong and amazing woman has accomplished great things, but perhaps no greater than the love and respect of her 11 children. Said Camila, “You never forced us to do what you did. You gave us the liberty and supported us 100 percent.”

Last year the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) bestowed the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal (CMC) with the National Medal Award. It is one of 10 institutions to receive the honor in 2009 and the prize included three StoryCorps recording days. My co-Facilitator Matt Herman and I visited Cincinnati, OH, from July 14-16 to record stories from the CMC’s donors, patrons, staff, founders, community and board members.

All of the days’ participants glowed with praise for CMC’s programs, historical institutions, and OMNIMAX Theater. They were also particularly proud of the Museum’s ongoing, costly, and crucial preservation of Cincinnati’s Union Terminal, an Art Deco train station built in 1931.

The building is crucial to the city’s identity; it carries an impressive aura of historical grandeur. Its significance is exemplified in photographs of legions of World War II servicemen filtering through its front doors, welcomed home by crowds of loved ones, draping its portico and filling its rotunda. Each participant shared an important memory minted in the building. This is where several generations of greater-Cincinnatians have consistently reunited.

Read about a pair of our participants at CMC in Matt Herman’s post, “I never grew out of the phase of knowing all the dinosaur names.”

Brenda Hunda is an invertebrate paleontologist at the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History and Science. She grew up in Saskatchewan, Canada, where there are a lot of dinosaur fossils. During her StoryCorps interview, Brenda told her friend and museum volunteer, Bob Bergstein, that she knew what she wanted to be from a young age.

My mother would tell you that I wanted to be a paleontologist since I was three, even though at the age of three I didn’t know what it was called, but I certainly knew what dinosaurs were. I never grew out of the phase of knowing all the dinosaur names and having all the dinosaur books.

After studying at the University of Alberta, Brenda came to the United States to work on her Ph.D. at the University of California – Riverside. While at UC Riverside, Brenda started coming to Cincinnati over the summers to do research. After finishing her Ph.D., Brenda moved to Cincinnati and got a job at the museum.

Because her work focuses on invertebrates, Brenda works with fossils that are hundreds of millions of years old. She talked about what it’s like to touch something that old.

The first thing I think about is the awe of holding something that no one has ever seen before. Every specimen has so much potential to shed light on something we didn’t know before or solve part of a mystery. We’re like detectives that go back in Earth’s time and try to uncover the mysteries of life. It’s like a time machine every time we go out and that still gets me.

Brenda loves the hands-on work and told Bob that she worries that “we’re forgetting to see and touch things. So much of the science that we do now is genetic. You don’t have to see an actual organism to work with DNA.” Because of this, Brenda said that the Geier Collections and Research Center at the Cincinnati Museum Center is important, especially to get young people interested in natural sciences.

Reflecting on her passion for paleontology, Brenda told Bob, “My job is not work. I get paid and I get to travel around the world to play in mud and look at the history of life. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the absolute best job in the world.”

Brenda and Bob’s interview was recorded in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Cincinnati Museum Center.

Marisol and Luis Natividad

At the end of July, members of Los Bilingual Writers and of MANA de San Diego stopped by Logan Heights Library in San Diego, CA to share their story. Among them were Luis Natividad and his daughter Marisol. They arrived towards the end of the day and immediately it was obvious that they were more than parent and child. The suspicion was cleared when Marisol and Luis sat in the recording room and Luis wondered out loud “What could I tell you about me that you don’t know yet?” and Marisol answered with “I know everything.”

But as it turned out, there were still things that Luis and Marisol hadn’t talked about and they spent the next forty minutes talking about his parents and about his feelings as a son, a father – and a grandfather. Marisol is the mother to two little girls that Luis calls his “reason for living,” and he gladly described to his daughter how he rocked her children to sleep the night before, with Marisol sporting a slight smile. He spoke of the mistakes his own father made and about the ones he tried to avoid.

Marisol countered by telling Luis that she felt lucky that Luis served not only as a great father to her and her sisters, but to her friends as well. “I don’t know how many of my friends have said that they think of you as a father,” she said, before laughing and piping up with, “Remember the limo service? You bought that limo and it was the only car we had – so we drove to school in a limo, bought our groceries in a limo, ran all errands with that limo,”

“I still get calls about that limo!” Luis answered, smiling, and the both of them were smiling still when their conversation ended.

“I guess there’s always something new to find out,” Marisol said to me on her way out while pointing at her father, “Specially with this one.”

Ilana Brito recently brought her mom, Iris Lupu to the Lower Manhattan StoryBooth to share memories of Ilana’s saba and safta, which is Hebrew for grandfather and grandmother – Nathan and Berta.  Saba and safta managed to escape Eastern Europe during WWII and made it to a kibbutz in Israel.  Safta’s beloved cousin moved to the U.S in 1959 and when he returned to visit Israel, he said “Berta, America is for you.”

After 18 years in Israel and now with two children, saba and safta moved to New York City.  Iris says of her mother, “She had no education, she had no money, but she had perseverance, she had energy and she had chutzpah…and she actually got an empire going.”

Once in New York City, through advertising in local German newspapers, saba and safta found jobs in a sweater factory, where they worked for many years until their retirement.  Saba fixed machinery and safta sewed sweaters.  After retirement, saba brought leftover schmattas, which is Yiddish for rags, home from the factory. Safta began sewing sweaters in the basement. This is how it started.

“She’d be sitting there, in this mass of sweaters with lint in the air.  It was so thick.”  remembered Iris of her parents’ basement.

Ilana remembers going to see safta in what she and her brother would playfully refer to as “safta’s sweatshop.” “At the end of the hallway there were two rooms – the room on the right was just ridiculous. It was just filled with scraps all the way to the ceiling.”

“The other room is where safta worked…She would sit at her desk with her little machine…” Safta would work in a room covered in sweaters, schmattas and lint, sitting at a small table with a little black and white TV in the corner, listening to game shows.   Iris remembers always hearing her mother’s magic number,  “I have ten thousand sweaters lined up on the wall.”

Saba and safta began selling the sweaters at flea markets.  According to Iris, “The first sweater was hard to sell. You waited till that first customer would buy the sweater and afterward, it was like magic.” Ilana recalls saba’s sale’s pitch, “It’s only $6 dollars.  If you don’t like the sweater, you can wash the car with it.”

They traveled the tri-state flea market circuit and they got customers.  Lots of them. Ilana and Iris remember the markets, vendors, friends, and those many customers. They sold sweaters even in summer. “It always felt like found money” says Ilana and as they laugh, think back and smile, remembering saba and safta in their second life, after retiring, selling sweaters.

Iris looked at Ilana and laughing, with her hands in the air, told her daughter “Best money ever and it didn’t matter how much we made.”

StoryCorps visited Sandy Ground Historical Society for 2 days of interviews to recognize and record the stories of the men, women and descendants of those who worked at Staten Island’s Seaview Hospital from 1913 -1960. During that time, the hospital served as one of the premier sanatoria for the treatment of tuberculosis in the United States; it also provided rare work opportunities for African American nurses.  The nurses, referred to as Black Angels, were recruited and courageously volunteered to work in an environment where daily exposure to the deadly airborne pathogen was part of the job.

Participants Zonese Porter and Leah Bennett remember their aunt and mother.

“Seaview was a sea of darkness the only thing white at Seaview were the nurses uniforms.  The supervisors were all black.  Everybody was black. ” describes participant  Zonese Porter.  Her aunt, Annie Bostick, worked as an RN in what they called “up the track” in the pediatric unit.  Her aunt came from Tuskeegee Institute, one of the Historically Black Colleges from which the hospital would recruit.  Many of the nurses were not married.   “I was like everybody’s baby, and spent a lot of  time at the hospital.” Porter explains. “I’d  see the children afflicted with TB who had been left at the hospital to await their fate, some without family support.” Porter recalls one of her classmates who contracted TB and wasn’t able to attend her graduation.  Although Porter wanted to visit her friend , she couldn’t because of the stigma  and dangers attached to the disease. She left disappointed but inspired.  “It was the beginning of my being a social worker.  I just wanted to go there.”

In 1957 Leah Bennett’s mother, Curlene Jennings Bennett, arrived at Seaview as the only black nurse to graduate from Bellevue Nursing School in 1957. She bravely requested to go to Seaview.   Better pay was part of the incentive  as  well as the opportunity to ply her skills and earn a living.  That year Curlene Bennett earned $3,500 a year, but because she worked with communicable diseases she earned an extra $240.  With a surgical mask as her only protection, Bennett’s mother described conditions at the hospital as “walking through a petri dish.”  Leah Bennett recalls scarier moments.  “My mom did find a legion on her lung but thank God it didn’t become full blown TB.” Years later,  Curlene Bennett’s bravery and dedication to the health of others continued in Liberia where she set up baby clinics and taught nutrition.

Both participants were pleased that Sandy Ground Historical Society provided time for excavating this moment of heroism in Black History and were happy to share their stories with each other.  As Leah Bennett reflects, “I’m glad that these Black Angels are being recognized it’s brought me and my mom closer.”

After our last stop in Chicago, StoryCorps’ East MobileBooth arrived in Fort Wayne, Indiana. We set up shop right next to the Allen County Public Library in downtown Fort Wayne, where we will record nearly one hundred stories. We have been fortunate to work with our host Northeast Indiana Public Radio and with over ten local organizations to bring in participants from all over Northeast Indiana. As always, the stories recorded have been incredibly diverse, from giving birth to twins in a field to finding love at an old age, and to leaving and returning to the Midwest.

Fort Wayne residents visit the MobileBooth on Opening Day

One of the stories I have personally had the pleasure of facilitating is that of Don Derrow, who came in with his son Stuart to share his experience in the military. Mr. Derrow served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1951 to 1954. Unlike many of his peers, Mr. Derrow was not deployed to Korea. Instead, Mr. Derrow was sent to Europe, and after a three-month stay there, he was given a far more unique assignment: he was among the Marines who participated in Operation Tumbler-Snapper, an atomic bomb test that took place in the Nevada Proving Grounds in the Spring of 1952.

Don and Stuart Derrow

According to Mr. Derrow, he and his fellow Marines were stationed about 4.5 miles from the blast site (though he later heard they were actually a mere three miles), making them the human beings to be closest to an atomic explosion aside from the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They wore no special protective equipment aside from their uniforms. They were told to begin walking towards the blast site, a fake village built out of plywood and populated with dummies, as soon as they saw the light from the blast go off. Since light travels faster than sound, the sound waves hit them just as they left their foxhole. According to Mr. Derrow, “just like waves in the water, you could see the sound waves coming toward you.” Once at the blast site, the Marines observed the effects on the fake village and returned to be debriefed—and to be tested for radiation with a Geiger counter. Fortunately, he never tested positive.

The atomic blast aside, Mr. Derrow’s time at the Nevada Proving Grounds was rather uneventful. In fact, he had good reason to want to go home: he’d been married just ten days before being sent to Nevada. What did the other Marines and he do to pass the time? Played checkers while lying on the desert sand, though one of his more adventurous friends did go hunting for rattlesnakes.

Still, Mr. Derrow considers himself lucky to have been in Nevada instead of Korea. He believes that, out of sixty men in his unit deployed to the Korean War, only twelve came back.

StoryCorps’ East MobileBooth is thrilled to be in Fort Wayne through July 31^st. Next, it will head to Central Pennsylvania. Visit our website for a complete list of StoryCorps booth locations.

Last month, StoryCorps Door-to-Door once again visited our nation’s capital. This time, Facilitator Susan Lee and I had the privilege of recording stories at the American Library Association’s annual conference. JoAnn Jonas (L) and Lisa Von Drasek (R) were two lovely ladies who shared with us why they love their jobs as librarians.

Lisa inspired Jo Ann to become a librarian, and she used the StoryCorps interview to ask her mentor, Lisa, about what had inspired her to become a librarian. Lisa remembers meeting the Coordinator of Children’s Work at the Brooklyn Public Library. After speaking with Lisa about her love of children’s books, she suggested Lisa explore becoming a children’s librarian.  Within one month of that conversation, Lisa quit her job at a prestigious publishing company, landed a job as a librarian trainee and began her graduate work at Pratt Institute in library sciences.  Of her first week working in the library, Lisa says, “I remember feeling comfortable immediately. I remember thinking that ‘this is what I was meant to do.’”

So, why do Lisa and Jo Ann love their jobs? As Lisa says, “A kid who is looking to build a model rocket and the kid who is looking for information about spiders…to be the person there for them at that moment and to know that that individual is growing and changing. The ability to be in that position, that’s why I love my job. Every minute is different. Every minute is changing. It’s always a surprise. By the end of the day, I could never have predicted what happened.”

Thank you Lisa, JoAnn and the thousands of librarians around the country who help us all learn and grow!