Though they had just met, they had some important things in common, including the fact that they are both homeless.

“How long have you been homeless?” Donald (L) asked Noblake (R).  Noblake answered that he began living on the streets in 2002, after being incarcerated for nine years. Many of the family members he was close to have passed away.

Donald’s story is a bit different. “I had to get some eye surgery. I continuously went to see doctors and couldn’t work.  I lost my job.” Donald also went through a divorce and left his house to his children and ex-wife, he said. “I’ve always told my ex-wife and my children that I would be homeless before I would allow them to suffer.”

“I respect you for stepping up like that,” Noblake told Donald.

At the end of the conversation, the men reflected on their futures.  “If you could do anything in your life right now, what would you do?”  Donald asked Noblake.  After a few moments of reflection, Noblake answered.  “I would study long, instead of study wrong.”  Noblake said his proudest moment in life was when he recently earned his GED.

“What words of wisdom do you have for me?” Noblake asked Donald.

Donald said, “If you do nothing, nothing will happen. You are the environment that you live in.  You change your mind, you change your life.”

“That has me pondering and wondering over here,” said Noblake.  “I appreciate that because I need to be reminded of it.”

When the men left the Booth, they said they were headed to the library to make a copy of their StoryCorps CD.

Snow described her journey to the U.S. 15 years ago. On the way, there was a flight delay in Taipei, Taiwan. A couple hundred of people that came with her on her flight slept in the waiting room at the airport. “Changing flights takes a lot of faith,” she said. “All you have to do is carry your ticket and they tell you where to go. Just the airplane journey prepared me a lot for being in a new country.”

Snow talked about the motivation of her brothers and her sister who came with her to the United States. “We’re here to succeed and we’re going to do whatever it takes to accomplish our goals.” They worked hard to buy a house. “We all have a separate room now. It’s a luxury for us. It comes from us. We worked hard for it. Back home, we shared a small room with 6 people.”

Snow now acts as an interpreter for other Montagnards in North Carolina. “As an interpreter,” Celia said to Snow, “You’re standing between two cultures.” Snow has helped people from her community navigate themselves through the health care system and find jobs. She has also been able to listen and empathize with their resettlement stories.

“It humbles me. I was there before them 15 years ago. We didn’t have an interpreter back then,” Snow said.

Juliette Gordon Low was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1860 and started Girl Scouts of America in 1912.  Currently, there are over 3.7 million young women all over the United States that are part of the program.

At MobileBooth East in Savannah, current Girl Scouts Victoria Ross and Ashley Sutton interviewed Allene George. Allene has been a Girl Scout since 1932 and is now a lifetime member. She remembered holding meetings in a log cabin on an Army base at Fort Screven on Tybee Island in Georgia.  “Back then we only had one type of  Girl Scout cookie and we didn’t sell them, we ate them,” Allene said.

From left: Ashley Sutton, Allene George and Victoria Ross

Victoria asked Allene about summer camp at Camp Low. They were surprised when they found out that there was no electricity at the camp. “What was your best experience sitting around a campfire?” Victoria asked. Allene remembered cooking and singing – many of the songs Ashley and Victoria also know.  “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other’s gold,” they all recited together.

As a closing question, Victoria and Ashley asked Allene what advice she would give to current Girl Scouts. “Enjoy your Girl Scout years and the friendships you make along the way.  Don’t ever be ashamed to wear your uniform.”

The MobileBooth is located right nearby the Telfair Museum of Art in Telfair Square – one of 25 squares in the city.  Everywhere you look there are green spaces with oak trees covered in Spanish moss.  Plenty of opportunities to sit in the shade and have a good conversation…

Eric Nauert of Georgia Public Radio treated us all to an excerpt from the Thornton Wilder play, “Our Town,” connecting it to the StoryCorps mission to preserve human history.  Read the quote as you enjoy the photographs from Opening Day in Savannah:

“[…]Even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then.

So I’m going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now’ll know a few simple facts about us […] more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight.

See what I mean?

So[…]people a thousand years from now […] this is the way we were (in the provinces north of New York) at the beginning of the twentieth century. […]This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.”

Larry’s uncle, Dick Bardon, came from St. Louis to Tulsa in 1904 driving a covered wagon that he won with gambling money. When gambling became illegal, he opened the doors to a pawn shop. Bardon was well known for his philanthropy, handing an $80,000 check to the struggling Board of Education and saying, “I have no intention of living in a town that can’t pay its teachers.”

Larry took over the pawn shop in 1967, leaving the cash registers from his Uncle Dick’s ownership on display.

A typical day at Dick Bardon Pawn Shop began with phone calls from people who had been robbed. Larry had a clever way of determining whether goods had been stolen. He imitates his strategy: “Gollee, this is a nice camera. Show me how you work with this.” He would stall the thief. And then the policeman would arrive with the person who reported the robbery. Busted.

At Dick Bardon’s, popular pawned items included TVs, record players, sewing machines and power saws. There were also the more long-term artifacts. “One thing I shy away from are sliding trombones,” Larry says, “We had one for darned near 20 years.”

Many customers would also use the pawnshop as storage space for seasonal items: Lawnmowers and fans. Larry puts emphasis on one of Dick Bardon’s multiple mottos: “We’ll loan on anything of value.”

“The taxi drivers liked us,” Larry says, ” ‘Cause we had an alley entrance. The gambler took a taxi and pawned his diamond or hat or suit. Sometimes his shoes. He’d hire a taxi driver to take him down to Bardon’s while he gambled.”

In 1980, there was a hold-up at the pawnshop. Larry remembers when two men walked in with pistols. Larry and his two employees came out of the situation unharmed, but the hold-up continued to affect him. He was awake into the early morning sometimes, worrying about vandalism and the potential for robbery. Tulsa was changing. “Could I shoot somebody?” Larry remembers asking himself. “Under the right circumstances I could. Did I want to? No I did not want to.” Larry closed his doors in 1986.

There was an auction on the evening of October 15, 1986. Over 100 dedicated Dick Bardon Pawn Shop customers attended. Guns, jewelry and tools were up for grabs. The original aluminum pawn shop balls from Dick Bardon’s downtown Tulsa location were also on the block. A brochure from the auction reads: “Cash only. No checks accepted. Established customers excluded.”

“I could call almost every customer in the store by name. It was a wonderful business and it killed me to have to sell it. But then I got to really and truly spend the rest of my time being a cowboy,” Larry says. Therapy Hill, his 20-acre farm east of Tulsa, was Larry’s retreat.

-National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)

Wear a seat belt. Wear a seat belt. Wear a seat belt. It is echoed again and again by schools, parents, public service announcements and new laws. It is often ignored or forgotten or considered redundant by teenage drivers. The simple act of putting on a seat belt does not just save your life. It saves the lives of the people you love.

The following three stories are personal and tragic reminders that go beyond the teenage driving statistics and into the lives of families who have lost someone in a car accident.

Bonnie, Randal and Stephen Arends

The day that Stephen and his twin brother Greg got into a car accident started out like any other day. It was yearbook picture day. Greg and Stephen wore their Future Farmers of America jackets as they ate breakfast. They left for school. Moments later the car was “wrapped around a pole” by the side of the road.

“We thought our lives were changing because you were seniors and the empty nest syndrome might happen,” Bonnie says to Stephen who sits with his legs up on the MobileBooth seat. “Looking at that car not knowing if either of you would survive. It was devastating. The doctor that delivered you and Greg was the same doctor that came up to us and said that Greg was gone.”

Randal remembers the differences between Greg and Stephen. “I remember Greg liked loud rock music and you liked your country music. Greg liked fast import cars and you likedÖ”

“Big Chevy trucks,” Steve says, finishing Randal’s sentence.

“You guys both had such a track record of taking risks,” Bonnie says.

Stephen lights up with memories of rebellion, teaming up with Greg in the pursuit of mischief. “We took huge waterguns – supersoakers – and filled them up with gasoline and made beautiful fountains of fire,” Stephen says.

Going from a 6-month coma to only being able to move a finger to now being able to speak, walk and raise beef cattle, 23 year-old Stephen has come a long way. Although his speech is still slow, he speaks with a confidence.

“As parents, when it came to driving, we were scared in the normal way parents of teenagers are scared. But we thought, you’re farm boys. You’ve been driving since you were young. You surely will be good drivers,” Bonnie says.

“We were invincibleÖor so we thought,” adds Stephen.

Stephen spreads the message of good driving in front of huge audiences. He sometimes speaks at his old high school. “I wanted – my whole life – to help others. And now I’m doing that through such tragedy.”

Penny Gold and Danny Bent

Penny Gold’s son Jeremy Gold Amor was killed in a car accident in 2004 when he was 18 years-old. Penny sits across from Danny Bent, Jeremy’s best friend since he was 4 years old.

Danny remembers the moment when he and Jeremy met. “He asked, ëDo you want to play?’ and we bolted off leaving you in the dust to go back to your house, because you guys had a playground and we didn’t,” He tells Penny. “It was perfection from there.”

“Our imaginations were so big,” Danny says remembering the basketball games he used to play with Jeremy. “We’d never play against each other, so we always played against imaginary people.”

Danny also remembers a more recent memory of a trip with Jeremy’s family to North Carolina. Jeremy pulled a rope out of the ocean triumphantly, thinking it was a squid. “He was fearless,” Danny says.

“If I was there, he would have worn his seat belt,” Danny says to Penny.

“So he did usually wear his seat belt?” Penny said. “He always wore one when he was with me, but I wasn’t sure if he wore one when he was with other people.”

“What do you miss most about him?” Penny asks.

“Every single thing,” Danny says. “I even miss fighting with him.”

“What did you and Jeremy teach each other?” I ask.

“He taught me how to be a good friend, regardless. Now I cherish every friend,” Danny says. “One thing I taught him is it’s not unmanly to show emotion towards a friend. I told him I loved him. I hugged him.”

Penny remembers a hug she had with Jeremy 4 days before his death. “Ever since he was little, I would hold his hand going across the street. But man, as soon as he was old enough to not have to hold my hand, he didn’t want to hold my hand anymore. A couple days before he died, I said “Jeremy, come and give me a hug. And he gave me a hug. I’m so grateful for that.”

The friendship between Penny and Danny has grown since Jeremy and Danny’s first childhood moment at the family playground. Danny introduces Penny as his “best friend” now. They share a bond as distinct as family. “It’s kind of like having another child, but not with the conflict, the angst or the worry,” Penny says.

Penny and Danny also keep Jeremy alive through their conversation. “We share memories all the time – the good, the bad, the wonderful, the funny, the ugly. It’s nice to have somebody else you can say anything to. It’s nice to have someone in my life that wants to talk about Jeremy too.”

Marianne Epstein and Elisabeth Epstein

Marianne Epstein and her daughter Elisabeth Epstein remember Jamie, Elisabeth’s sister and Marianne’s daughter who died in a car accident in her Freshman year of college.

The conversation between mother and daughter is a nostalgic chronology of Jamie’s life – her talents, her quirks and her kindness. “Jamie would only wear dresses until she was in the 2nd grade. You would only wear sweatpants,” Marianne says to Elisabeth.

Elisabeth laughs about Jamie’s nickname in softball. “They called her ëWheels’ because she was so slow.”

“You were always striving to outdo her,” says Marianne.

“I didn’t strive. I did.” Elisabeth says. They both laugh.

“One time, Jamie insisted on swimming across the lake at Tomahawk. I wouldn’t let her do it unless her father went with her in the rowboat. She still insisted and her father and the neighbor took the rowboat alongside her the entire way,” Marianne remembers.

Elisabeth and Marianne tell Jamie’s story all the way up to her Freshman year of college. This was the year that Jamie went to visit her Uncle Dave in New Jersey with a few of her friends.

“The girl who was driving reached for something and lost control of the car and it just spun around and flipped into the median. People don’t realize the physics when a car starts somersaulting. Jamie got thrown from the car and died instantly. The two girls in the front seat had their seat belts on and they walked away from it. That was it,” Marianne says.

“Can you remember where you were when you heard about the accident?” I ask.

“Elisabeth was at dinner, before a school dance. I was at the computer sorting out photographs that I had taken on my digital camera. The doorbell rang and there were two state police officers at the door,” Marianne says.

“You’ve got two choices when something like this happens to you. One is to stop living yourself. The other is to put one foot in front of the other and to take it sometimes minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, but your life has to go on,” Marianne says.

Since the accident, the Epstein family has started a scholarship fund in Jamie’s name. “It’s amazing the amount of people who still donate on a yearly basis to the fund,” Marianne says. “It’s also amazing the number of people who told me that they didn’t wear seat belts before Jamie’s accident, but since Jamie’s accident they always put their seat belt on and they always think of her when they do it.”

– Uncle Albert in Mary Poppins

I can hear laughter coming from across the parking lot at Metro Centre. It is Marlene Olson and her nanny Linda Blakey. Marlene has a flower in her hair and Linda wears a baseball cap.

“You’ve been the other half of me for a long time, caring for my kids when I couldn’t be there,” Marlene says to Linda.

Linda talks about the activities she spontaneously concocted in her daytime nanny duty at the Olson residence. “We used to dress up and play music on oatmeal boxes. We played Army and I would paint the kids’ faces green and they would slide down the stairs on their bellies.”

Linda also liked to make up songs on-the-spot. One such tune was “The Rainbow Song.” The three kids would stand in front of the refrigerator waiting for the light coming through the stained glass window to decorate their bodies with rainbows: “Got a rainbow on my shoulder, got a rainbow on my knee. Got a rainbow here for you and a rainbow here for me.”

“Didn’t you go to the moon or stars sometimes too?” Marlene asks.

“Oh yeah,” Linda remembers tilting her head up as if she can see the sky. “We used to lay in the grass at the park and make animals out of clouds and feel the breeze around us.”

Marlene and Linda met when Marlene was in search of a housekeeper. “It was hard for me to have that trust when I wasn’t there,” Marlene says. One day she was home sick and Linda was cleaning. “I knew the house sparkled, but I didn’t know how you did it. You Windexed and Pledged everything in sight. I knew you were a hard worker.”

Marlene soon decided to ask Linda if she could be the nanny to her children. Now, 25 years later, the children call her “grandma.” “They say it takes a village to raise a child,” Marlene says. “When I was in search of a village, I got you. Talk about an instant village.”

Linda chews gum while she laughs. She talks about the daytrips she took with the kids to every possible part of Peoria. “I showed them how to hop a train. We went into the woods and down into the gravel pit. I showed them the hill that I went down when I was seven in the wagon. We ran down it. We didn’t do too many naps. We just had a lot of fun.”

Linda and Marlene were role models for how to have a good time. “The kids liked that we made each other laugh,” Linda says. “They really got a kick out of it.”

“Laughter is the best medicine,” says Marlene.

“Well that’s pretty much all we did,” says Linda.

At Metro Centre in Peoria, pink flags wave on top of parking lot lights. October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but these flags stay up all year. Metro Centre used to be farmland, a place where Susan G. Komen, namesake of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, would go horseback riding. Now it is a community shopping center owned by Eric Brinker.

Eric came to the MobileBooth on one of the first crisp fall days to talk about how his family started Susan G. Komen Foundation. “Susan G. Komen was my aunt. She died of breast cancer at age 37,” Eric says. Susan had breast cancer in “the dark days” of the disease. “You didn’t talk about it. You called it the big C word. They weren’t providing treatment options that were anything more than barbaric. People thought it was contagious.”

Photo courtesy of Eric Brinker and Susan G. Komen for the Cure

Susan was treated with high magnitude radiation. She had third degree burns all over her body, down to her legs. On Susan’s deathbed she told her sister Nancy (Eric’s mother), “Nanny, we need to do everything that we can do to change the face of this disease. We need to raise awareness. We need to eradicate it.” Nancy Brinker promised her sister that she would do everything she could do to make sure this happened.

Nancy G. Brinker and Susan G. Komen

Photo courtesy of Eric Brinker and Susan G. Komen for the Cure

“My mom was driven in a way that she wasn’t going to fail,” Eric says of his mother’s motivation to follow her promise after Susan’s death. Nancy began with the people she knew, calling a “shoebox full of names.” She kept calling. Then she called businesses. Many doors slammed in her face on her business-to-business odyssey. One time, Nancy went to a bra company to pitch the idea of putting self-breast exam tags on the bras. “She must have had 20 doors of bra companies slammed in her face. They all said ëWe don’t want to be associated with negativity and bad news.’”

“Is there ever a moment when your mom was about to throw up her hands and say, this isn’t going to work?” I ask.

“The rejection was intense. There were slammed doors, rolled eyes, snickering and laughing. The attitude was so different back then and I felt it through my mom when she would come home from meetings where she thought she would have a breakthrough.” Eric continues, “But all the rejection in the world can’t stop the power of a promise that you make to a loved one.”

Nancy Brinker had the same form of breast cancer that Susan did, going through 16 reconstructive surgeries in the past 25 years. Eric remembers his childhood reaction to his mother’s disease. “It was scary for me seeing my mom with tubes hanging out of her and no hair.” Now he says, “I’m proud to say that I am a co-survivor with my aunt and my mother. Breast cancer is a family disease. When your mom has breast cancer, your whole family has breast cancer. Your family fights it together.”

“My mother went through a lot of determination, defiance and anger. She channeled that anger into something positive,” Eric says.

Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure started in Dallas, TX in 1983 with 800 people that Eric says were “mostly friends and relatives convinced to show up on a rainy day.” Three years later, Peoria Memorial was the second race to start. Now there are over 125 Race for the Cures with millions of participants every year.

Susan G. Komen Foundation has raised over $1.5 billion invested in the cause of breast cancer research and education. In the past 25 years, every single advancement in the science of breast cancer has been touched or funded by the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

Eric is now taking over Metro Centre, a project that his grandfather left him. He is preserving his grandfather’s office in the same way it was left – orange shag carpeting and suede wallpaper. He will continue to be an integral part in the movement that started with a promise between his mother and his sister. The power of the color pink is now a symbol for Breast Cancer Awareness in the parking lot of Metro Centre and around the world.

Phil Doubet wears a self-designed t-shirt with the quote above. These are the words of Willie York, a well-known homeless man in Peoria, Illinois, who Phil once talked to at a gas station on Monroe Street.

In 2005, Phil talked to 333 people. He honored them through self-publishing their stories word-for-word in a 600 page book entitled My Pryor Year: A 333 Soul Anthology. His inspiration was a book from his own childhood, called Pioneers of the Ozarks, written by his great uncle Lennis Broadfoot. Lennis lived in Dent County, Missouri and his life work was to compose character profiles of the Ozarks pioneers. He “would go to different villages and draw people in charcoal and then listen to their stories.”

Phil did not carry the charcoal that his great uncle carried decades before. He carried a tape recorder. “When I decided to go out and talk to people, I really didn’t have a plan in mind. I went out to restaurants. I went out to bookstores. I went out to people on the street. Random people at random times.”

Phil wanted his book to be “Central Illinois-centric.” He sought to define the area through other people’s words: Caterpillar Inc. employees, Michael Reagan, Richard Pryor, Jr., Arlo Guthrie, tamale salesman Willie Smith, and mortician Joe Hott, to name a few. “Whether they are famous or the average person on the street, or people who don’t even have a home, he found out what was important to them,” says Fitz Doubet of his father’s project.

When he approached a stranger, Phil told them that he was writing a book and then asked, ” ‘Can you have a conversation with me?’ And they would,” Phil says matter-of-factly. “One of the first guys I talked to was Harold Quinn. I was at a restaurant in Farmington and this guy dropped his pack of cigarettes, so I picked them up and we got to talking. I asked him if I could record our conversation. He told me a story about getting his hand mangled in a corn picker.”

“You know how some people won’t really tell people who are close to them certain things, but they’ll tell total strangers intimate details?”

Sometimes Phil asked specific questions, surprising people in their daily routines. He remembers a moment when he was standing in the entryway of Barnes & Noble. Just waiting. “This young girl walked in. I didn’t say anything to her except, ëWhat’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?’ She looked up in the sky and told me a story about going fishing with her father and watching the sunrise. And then I told her what I was doing.”

“What was your purpose in writing this book?” Fitz asks.

“I was looking for answers without really knowing what the question was. I was just having a rough time in my life then. I just wanted to learn more,” Phil says.

Learning about our own lives through the powerful act of listening… as a StoryCorps Facilitator, I seek to be as courageous as Phil Doubet by opening my ears to words of wisdom in every crevice of every conversation.

“Since then,” Burton says, “I have purchased many knot books. I have broadened my horizons by being able to tie knots. I have worked on trees. I have worked on steep barn roofs. I’ve hauled things with vehicles and tied things on top of cars. It all started with that first interest in knots.”

Luckily for us at MobileBooth West, Burton carries a rope in his pocket. He demonstrates many knots: slippery square, sheep shank, sheet bend ,and bow line. He finishes with a grand finale: the jar sling, which he uses to pick up a Gatorade bottle.

People often ask Burton for advice on knot-tying. A neighbor once asked, “I haven’t seen you lately, what have you been up to?” Burton answered, “I’ve just been reading this knot book.” The neighbor got a confused look on his face. “Knots? Like K-N-O-T-S?” He spelled. He then asked, “Is there a special type of knot you can tie a boat anchor with?”

Burton grimaces at the mention of the term “granny knot.” It is best to tie a reef knot in nearly all circumstances.?A granny knot can release unpredictably. Burton gets excited about the use of knots in problem solving. “Knots broaden my horizons. It’s nice to tie something I can depend on.”