“As a 16 year old, being a teenage father, and not having any real concept of what a father looked like, or not knowing what he sounded like, I guess I was really nervous and scared,” Colbert answered.

Colbert now raises Nathan as a single father. As a kid, Colbert remembers that he and his friends had a common bond—most were growing up with single mothers, without fathers in the picture.

“I am so proud of you because you have allowed me to be a father. I am proud of you for allowing my voice to still have meaning in a time and place when our fathers’ voices are becoming echoes. You could have used ‘growing up without a mom’ as a crutch and you have not allowed that to happen. I am also proud of you for allowing me to bring other kids that have been in really rough situations into our home,” Colbert told Nathan.

Colbert has made himself a father-figure to more boys than just Nathan. After working in an emergency shelter for years, Colbert decided he could provide a loving supportive home for others, and welcomed some of the adolescent boys he worked with into his home.

At age 29, Colbert finally searched for and found his own father. Colbert told Nathan, “I wanted you to have a grandfather and at the same time I found myself longing for a father. I had to heal the boy inside of me and at the same time teach the boy in you.” Last Thanksgiving, Colbert and Nathan met their new-found family for the first time. Nathan said, “We went from a small family to a huge one.”

Naturally, Brian the archaeologist was intrigued. They made a date to continue excavating Michael’s factory, and then they expanded the search to dig through the catacombs in downtown Akron for hidden  treasure. They succeeded in finding four little clay marbles. But when a parking deck downtown was removed years later, they found the ground littered with marbles and old penny toys. They also found the oldest penny toy in their now large collection, a small Santa figurine.

The other part of this story begins 100 hundred years earlier, in the 1880’s, when a man named Samuel Dyke started the production of penny toys in Akron. Before this time, toys were handmade and very expensive, a luxury afforded only by the rich. With Dyke’s mass production of toys, though, a new toy-buying demographic was created. Kids with a penny or two in their pocket now had something other than sweets to purchase. Samuel Dyke’s business boomed until he was making over a million marbles per day and shipping them around the country.

The business became so successful that other local entrepreneurs opened up their own marble factories. At one time there were at least 150 toy companies in Akron.

The last marble company left Akron in the 1950’s. “In the 1950’s they started asphalting over the playgrounds because they didn’t want the little boys and little girls to get dirty knees,” said Brian. “All the great old games — top throwing, jacks and hopscotch — these were games that originated because of dirt…These games are in danger of extinction,” said Michael.

The two stories came together when Michael and Brian founded the Akron Toy & Marble Museum in the 1990s. Now, they are both toymakers. Michael came into the booth with clay under his nails from making reproductions of the prized blue Santa they found in one of their digs. Brian has become a glassblower and makes fine marbles. They have both became masters of arcane ceramic, glass, and stone marble making methods. “When I step into my glass shop and I make marbles the same way that they were made 100 years ago, it is as close as I am going to get to a time machine,” Brian said.

Alas, StoryCorps is leaving Akron, but we are leaving with the feeling that we have found something special here: a world of curiosity and play. Maybe you could even say we have found our marbles.

Luckily, Rose seemed to have a pretty good time remembering her many bartending years with her grandson Joshua during their interview. After divorcing her husband in the 1950s, Rose moved to Akron with her three kids and took over the Zanzabar, a tavern in a working-class African American neighborhood where most of the patrons were employed by Akron’s rubber industry. Rose, a white Jewish woman from Cleveland, stood out for more reasons than one. Open 21 hours a day, the bar was filled at 5:00 a.m. with men from the rubber-factory night-shift, singing and dancing and breakfasting at the bar.

After trying to get her barmaids to unionize on their own, Rose organized profit-sharing with her employees. She saved all the year’s pennies to rent a summer cottage for Zanzabar employees and their families. Rose was even known for locking up her patron’s paychecks so they couldn’t drink their salary away.

Rose, her grandson Joshua, and his wife and daughter have lived together for the past 10 years. “I believe that grandparents and great-grandparents are supposed to be close to us, to be part of our lives… I am so glad my daughter Amelia Rose has this time with her great-grandmother,” says Josh. As a filmmaker, Josh has been filming “Bubba” (the Yiddish term for grandma), and has put together a documentary about Rose’s life story called the  “Bubba Briefs.”

Santiago left Mexico and traveled to the United States, as he said, “para buscar una cosa diferente,” to find something different. While working on the farms of the Yakima Valley in Washington state, Santiago saved his money and brought his family to start a new life.

Many years later Ricardo asked his father how it felt to watch each of his eleven children graduate from high school and go onto too college.  Santiago responded, “Me emociono tanto ver como las cosas pueden mejorar con esfuerzo,” I am so excited to see how things can improve with effort. “Eso para mi era como un milagro, haberme yo con tan poquita escuela, tan poquita oportunidad. Me han negado mucho por la falta de la escuela, pero a mis hijos no.” That for me was like a miracle, having so little school, so little opportunity. I have been denied many things for my lack of education, but my children will not be.

Santiago strongly believes that, “La mejor herencia es la escuela.” The best inheritance is school.

Pictured above are the festivities just outside the MobileBooth, at the Wenatchee Performing Arts Center,  which Northwest Public Radio organized to greet StoryCorps to the city. The opening day shindig was complete with baskets of apples on every table. NWPR has also put together a slide-show with an audio clip from the first interview with Harriet Bullitt and Wilfred Woods. The Woods family shares a three-generation legacy of running the Wenatchee World, one of the few remaining family-owned newspapers in the country. Wilfred Woods’ father played an instrumental role in making Wenatchee the apple capital by advocating for the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam and the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project, which irrigates much of the region, as well as providing hydroelectric power.

Today Facilitator Carl Scott and I talked about StoryCorps with two other local radio stations, La Super Z, , and Apple FM. We are looking forward to hearing more stories from the folks that live and work in the Wenatchee Valley.

After a trip back to New York, Paul proposed that they start a circus of their own in New York City. The circus is now about to celebrate its 32nd year. Michael, or Mr. Stubs, played for many years the hobo clown down on his luck. Michael, up until this last year, was the circus’ director and ringmaster. Their families grew up in the circus. Paul’s kids did all of their schooling on the road in the One Ring School House. Twenty-two years ago, the pair started  Clown Care, a program that integrates circus entertainers into childrens hospitals all over the country. They have seen the transformative impact the circus has on people. After the first act, “people are shimmering,” said Michael.

“At the circus, the audience leaves behind the woes of society, at least for a moment.” said Paul.

“We followed our heart. We followed our own joy. It [the circus] was challenging but not once did we look at each other and say let’s throw in the clown towel… Still after all these years there is that same sense of delight and wonder,” said Michael.

Since our arrival last week, we have heard love stories in Central Park, long gone delis of the neighborhood, the first days of Lincoln Center, the busker beginnings of a circus, and the rise of the Upper West Side skyline. We have heard from dancers, opera singers, student scientists, accountants, lawyers, writers, composers, teachers, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, computer programmers, unemployed people, nurses, doctors, therapists, trekkies, and many more to come to come.

“How did we become friends?,” Katherine asked her friend Beatriz in Spanish during their recent interview in Asheville, NC. “We are very different.”  Indeed, they are different.  Katherine is almost twice Beatrice’s age.  Katherine is single, Beatrice is raising a family. But perhaps their most glaring difference is language. Katherine is a native English speaker, while Beatrice’s mother tongue is Spanish. For Katherine, learning Spanish is a hobby, whereas for Beatriz, she must learn a new language to survive in this country.

Cuando Beatriz se mudó a Asheville de México, ella empezó poco a poco a aprender Ingles con Katherine. Enseñando una a la otra, han aprendido no solamente el idioma de la otra, sino también las distintas culturas. “Lo que me interesa es la diferencia, tengo muchas amigas de mi misma edad y cultura,” dice Katherine. “Creo que nuestra amistad ha mejorado porque tenemos la misma experiencia de aprender el idioma.”

When Beatriz moved to Asheville from Mexico, she began to learn English with Katherine as her tutor. However throughout the course of their studies together Katherine started asking Beatrice more and more questions about Spanish.  Soon they were switching between English and Spanish. Katherine would give Beatrice a lesson in English and then Beatrice would reciprocate with a lesson in Spanish. “I believe that our friendship has improved because we have the same experience of learning the language. “We have a lot of patience for the other because we share the same frustrations learning the language, ” said Katherine.

“¿Por qué querría aprender español? ¿Para conversar conmigo?” le preguntó Beatriz a Katherine. “Si” respondió Katherine, “pero también me di cuenta que el mundo habia cambiado, ahora el mundo pertenece a los bilingües o trilingües,” Katherine dijo. Además, la mama de ella la inspiró a aprender un nuevo idioma. “Cuando ella tenia 90 años, ella todavía estaba repasando su vocabulario en Español.”

“Why would you want to learn Spanish? To talk to me?” Beatriz asked Katherine.

“Yes,” Katherine replied, “but I also realized that the world has changed, now the world belongs to those that are bilingual or trilingual.” Moreover, Katherine’s mother inspired her to learn a new language. “When [her mother] was 90 years old, she was still reviewing her Spanish vocabulary.”

As a kid Max remembers playing with his father’s toolbox. Although his dad tried locking it shut to keep him out, he still found a way to undo the hinges and get to the tools. When Max was 15 his father passed away.   The day he died, Max remembers sitting with the toolbox. It was the place where Max felt closest to his father.  After high school, Max saved $850 to buy his own tools and started his chair making business, which he has been doing ever since.

After all these years Max still looks forward to going to work and still loves his customers, in fact, he says, “you don’t have buy anything to visit us, the latch string is on the outside, that’s a mountain term for making people welcome in your abode.” I was welcomed one afternoon at Max’s shop in Marion, North Carolina. I tried out the rocking chairs and heard many more of Max’s stories and words of wisdom.

Ricky Boone, magician extraordinaire who was born with a rare bone disease in which his skeletal structure went haywire.  Ricky said, “comedy was a way of getting out of the real world, the real world where people see me as someone disabled, and someone to pity. If I can make that person laugh their butts off, they have no time to feel sorry for me.”

Ricky remembers first learning magic from a teacher at school. “He pulled up on a Harley, wearing a black leather jacket and proceeded to show us card tricks. I was hooked.” When the teacher later became the school principal, he would call Ricky into his office over the intercom to where they would exchange magic and card tricks. “I had a pretty good reputation around school because everyone thought I was always in trouble,” Ricky said.

After working at an office for several years, he followed his dream to open a magic shop and dedicate more time to performing. With the economy struggling as it is, owning a magic shop is not easy, but Ricky still walks into his shop some mornings and says, “wow, this is mine.” On a cold spring day in Asheville, North Carolina, my fellow Mobile East team members, Nina Porzucki, Sara Esrick, and I visited Ricky’s shop, Magic Central where he welcomed us and showed a few of his tricks.