Lizbeth Colocho, 9 (left), and Kierra Palmer, 9 (right), both love helping their mothers cook for the holidays. Lizbeth’s family tradition is making tamales for la Navidad. They remind her of her grandmother who lives in El Salvador. Kierra helps her mother make crawfish dressing every Thanksgiving. Kierra has helped her mother make crawfish dressing forever — that is, since she was seven years old. It takes a really, really, really long time to make–Kierra was emphatic. More than a hour!

Sergio Morales, 9 (left), and Ashley Pineda, 10 (right)

Sergio’s favorite holiday dish is pozole. “It’s sort of like chicken soup,” he explains. His mother makes it every Thanksgiving just for him. She makes the best pozole in the world, full of pork, chicken, corn, vegetables, and chiles and — Sergio has written out her list of ingredients which is more than a page long. However, Sergio likes to eat his pozole without any vegetables. Ashley’s favorite Christmas tradition is helping her grandmother fry up a batch of buñuelos – fritters covered in cinammon and sugar. Ashley likes to eat her buñuelos with fruit on top. She wants to be a chef when she grows up, or a doctor, or maybe both.

Sergio, Kierra, Ashley and Lizbeth are all part of a local program run by the Recipe for Success Foundation (RFS) where they are learning how to garden and cook the veggies that they grow. They are all winners of RFS’s 4th grade Holiday Storywriting Competition.

So what is your favorite holiday food?  What were you munching this Thanksgiving?  From Mobile West, we wish y’all a happy and healthy holiday season. May the food be plentiful and the conversations memorable!

That was how our radio partner KMUW welcomed us as we pulled into Wichita, Kansas for our stop in the Wheat State. And the stories have been plentiful. Wichita, we learned, is the originator of many things: Pizza Hut, the electric guitar, Cessna airplanes, and yes, folks, the original White Castle.  Pizza, and airplanes, and little, tiny, burgers, oh my!

Our first week of recording, Randy Cabral came in with his friend and colleague Heidi Johnson to talk about the first fully-tactile Braille American flag. Randy created the flag to honor his father, a World War II veteran who became blind later in life. The American flag was a big deal in the Cabral family. Every day his father insisted that it be raised and lowered in front of their house. As his father’s sight grew dim, Randy decided to dedicate himself to learning Braille and subsequently started the Kansas Braille Transcription Institute.

One evening Randy’s mother told him that his father, who was now completely blind, had confused their American flag with her scarf. That same evening Randy drafted the first-ever tactile American flag. Randy has toured the country with his flag, commemorating it at places such as Arlington National Cemetery, as well as giving a copy to President Obama. Some of his most prized memories, however, have been when he has witnessed blind Americans ’see’ their flag for the very first time.

The Blais have been sugaring — that is, making maple syrup — for three generations.  Muriel’s great uncle Lazarre Bisson started tapping sugar maple trees in the ’20s with his nephew Armand Bisson and the Bisson Sugar House was born.  That was back in the day of hand cranked drills and metal buckets.

Lucien and Muriel Blais when they first started making syrup

Sugaring season starts around March and April when the weather turns warm during the day but still freezes over night.  “Warm” in the north country is around 40 degrees.  On average, it takes 40 to 50 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of syrup.

Little at Bisson’s Sugar House has physically changed since Lazarre and Armand first started. There are still the same benches, same sign, same wood-burning stove, same smell of split birch logs and sap.  Sure, technology has advanced — Muriel and Lucien no longer collect sap in buckets, but use a system of plastic tubing to tap the trees — but for Berliners, Bisson’s remains a fixture in the community.

And the syrup, well, let’s just say that I have been eating a lot of pancakes lately.

Poof is a resident historian here in Berlin, which is also know as “the town that trees built.” Berlin is a paper mill town.  During its heyday in the late 19th century and into the early 20th century, five mills ran full time churning out paper goods.  Each spring, according to Poof, men drove logs down the Androscoggin River to supply the mills with lumber.  These men wore spiked boots and worked the fallen trees down river, separating the logs to be delivered to each mill by use of a series of boom piers, or man made islands, which still dot the Androscoggin River.

Paul “Poof” Tardiff

After long, harsh winters in the woods,  loggers and river drivers flooded into the big city during log-driving season, transforming Berlin into a lively – and sometimes rowdy – place. Log drives ended in the 1960s and the last paper mill closed in 2006.

Today, Berlin is the throes of a new phase transitioning from a booming mill town into a smaller, quieter place.  What is next for the town that trees built?  We have three weeks to find out…

Stories are rich in Western North Carolina and it seems that nearly everyone has come in to the share a bit of themselves with us. It has been a privilege and an honor to hear tales of tobacco farming, mountaineering, snipe hunts, immigrating from Moldova, love at first sight, the beginnings of All Things Considered, the Blue Ridge Parkway, hiking the Appalachian Trail, losing a daughter, adopting sons, getting older, fighting in World War II, going to Klezmer Kamp, weaving, throwing clay, joining a sorority... the list goes on and on. We have only scratched the surface. Keep on recording your stories, and stay tuned to WCQS to hear what Western North Carolina sounds like.

Enjoy some shots from our time in Asheville…

Lawrence Anthony and his son, Carroll

What started out years ago, with Lawrence and Drexel’s sheriff whiling the time away with their guitars, has turned into a scene.  Each Saturday, anywhere from five to well over 30 musicians will gather to jam in the back of the barber shop, in, as Lawrence likes to call it, “the pickin’ room.”  People have come from all over the county and even as far as England to listen.

David Shirley and his son, Philip

Driving into downtown Drexel, you can’t help but notice empty storefronts.  Both the Drexel Furniture Factory and the hosiery mill have closed, and so have most of the stores that line Main Street. The barbershop is a bright spot for the community, a place where folks can gather and the music’s free of charge.

Bryce was in a coma for 28 days. Doctors said he never wake up. But Bryce did wake up.  To see him walk and talk today you would never know how close he came to dying. Yet he suffers from what he calls “the invisible injury,” brain injury trauma. His short term memory is faulty, and sequential thinking and timing are hard for him. “Since my car wreck, I’m not quick enough to be a salesman,” he told his friend and advocate Karen Harrington during his StoryCorps interview.  Bryce was gracious enough to share his story along with other survivors of brain injury trauma who live in the Asheville area.

Post accident, Bryce has become what he calls, “a student of patience.”

“Every time I approach a decision to make, I have before-car-wreck-adrenaline-junkie-Bryce and then I have the more reasonable, let’s-figure-it-out-Bryce. And every time I make a decision I have to have a committee hearing. My favorite analogy is: I’m out at a swimming hole and and I ask myself, ‘What do you want to do, pre-car-wreck-Bryce?’

“‘Well I want to go to the top of that waterfall and dive from the top of that rock.’

“‘What do you wanna do post-car-wreck Bryce?’

“‘I’m happy sunbathing on the beach.’

“And I have to mediate between the two sides of myself, so I go halfway up the rock and jump in feet first. It’s not that this isn’t something that everyone goes through. It just seems that much more dramatic to me.  On top of the patience that I have with myself, I accrue the debt of patience or lack of patience from society.”

Today, Bryce no longer sells cars but makes art. He has sketch books full of sculptures and paintings that he intends to create.  His dream is to open an art space for people with disabilities.  “It’s the first decision that I have made in my life that has come from my heart and not from the desire to make money.”

Rose Clark and her son, Gary Clark

Rose met her husband at a revival at the Baptist church.   Shortly after they married Rose moved with her husband to a logging camp where she cooked for the loggers near the Qualla Boundary. “I didn’t do nothing but cook for those men.  All work and no play.”

She has been caring for people her entire life.  She kept a garden for her family.  “Hoed it and canned it myself.”  Milked her own cows, churned her own butter, gathered her eggs, baked her biscuits and then she would go to her parents homestead and do the same for them.  At one point she was tending three gardens — helping out her brother’s family, working her own kitchen garden, and still caring for her mother and father, while raising two of her grandchildren.

The secret to a long life according to Rose, is hard work.  “Hard work never killed nobody, if it did, then I’d be dead a long time ago,” she said.   But I think the secret is her giggle.  A sweet little laugh punctuates the end of her sentences.  She is all smiles.  And her son is quick to point out, “those are all of her own teeth.”

Teofil Schintee and his friend, Jordan Sugar

The year was 1979. The place was Romania. Teofil Schintee made a decision to leave. He did not tell his parents. He did not tell his friends from the University. He did not tell a soul. Secretly he began to practice swimming. After work, on the weekends, any spare moment he had, Teofil would swim in the Danube near his childhood home in Caransebes. Late one evening, Teofil watched from the river bank as the Romanian border patrol boat chugged upstream and out of sight. He dove into the Danube. “As a child I would swim in the Danube and I would always look at the other side and I was curious to see what was on that other side.” More than three hours later Teofil crawled ashore to the former Yugoslavia. He had nothing but the clothes on his back, all of his savings in a plastic bag, and a Bible.

Jordan Sugar, a close friend of the Schintee family, brought Teofil into the WestBooth to record the story of his escape. After many months, and many close calls with the authorities in Yugoslavia, Teofil was able to come to the United States as a refugee. He credits his journey to the grace of God. During the months spent in refugee camps and in those cold moments paddling across the Danube in the dark he never stopped believing. He never lost faith.

Last week MobileWest pulled into sunny southern California and parked at the East Los Angeles Public Library. The trailer sits in an idyllic spot next to a pond where Angelenos fish, toddlers waddle after ducks, high school students turn up the radio, and one can always find a cart selling elote (corn-on-the-cob) or shaved ice.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina, along with the great folks from our partner station KPCC, welcomed the booth to this historically diverse neighborhood. East L.A. is home to the largest Chicano and Latino communities in the United States.

We look forward to hearing mas historias del barrio and sampling some of the best tamales and tacos in California or dare I say, the United States.