Julian picked up the violin in second grade. His father, who plays the guitar, encouraged him to play. Julian remembers, “When I started the violin, he told me not to quit because he knows that it’s really fun. And so do I. I said don’t worry, I’m not going to quit. I love playing the violin.” Now Julian and his father teach each other songs, and Julian has even started teaching his little sister to play the violin as well.

Julian’s love of the violin is abundantly clear. As he tells Miss Karl, “I don’t want to miss any single day I can. I don’t care if I’m on vacation or not, I just want to go to violin class. I remember this day I was really, really sick. I didn’t go to school, but I did go to violin class!”

Julian even brought his violin to the booth. Although he was willing to pose for some photos, I couldn’t convince him to give us a taste of his musical talents. Lucky for me, just a few days after Julian and Miss Karl came into the booth, Julian was to perform in a concert at Reno’s Pioneer Center, as a member of the Reno Philharmonic’s Youth Strings Symphonia. Eager to see Julian in action and hungry for some music, I attended. Below, a slide show with photos from Julian’s performance, and at the MobileBooth with his mother and his little sister.

While listening to the orchestral sounds, I remembered how Julian explained the feeling of playing his violin just a few days prior. “I feel so good,” he said. “Maybe when I’m upset with something, when I play the violin, I feel so much better. I feel like I’m listening to a radio station, but its actually me, playing the violin. So that’s fun. Or maybe if something sad happens, I play the violin. It makes me feel better.”

Well Julian, your music made me feel better too! Bravo!

Jim agreed. “New Orleans is a great place if you like art, architecture, history, food, or music.”

“And great people!” Patti chimed in. “It’s filled with great, interesting, wonderful, loving people. And that’s what life’s all about.”

The MobileBooth East staff couldn’t agree more.

StoryCorps last visited the great city of New Orleans in May of 2006, just 8 months after devastating Hurricane Katrina slammed the southern coast of the United States. Now, five years later, the MobileBooth has returned for 5 weeks of recording, hoping to collect 150 stories of all varieties. The MobileBooth is parked outside of the National World War II Museum until April 17th. We are happy to be partnering with WWNO, Common Ground, Los Isleños Heritage and Cultural Center, Mid-City Neighborhood Organization, Edible Schoolyard, Puentes New Orleans, and the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies, among many others.

One thing has already been made abundantly clear since we arrived: People love this city! Whether they are native New Orleanians, transplants, or visitors, no one can seem to get enough of all the city has to offer, including myself!

New Orleans is still in the process of rebuilding, and although far from finished, the love for NOLA remains and grows stronger by the day. As one participant remarked, “When you love a place, it’s pretty hard to leave it. Whether you were born here, or whether you just come here and love it. [...] I see there’s hope again. It’s starting to look like the old New Orleans and feel like the old New Orleans. It’ll never be the same, but it’s getting that life back that had been missing since the Hurricane.”

Simply put, she continued, “It’s the greatest place on earth.”

Tempted by the warmth of the Sunshine State and eager to get an inside look at what I’m up to everyday, my mom made the trip from our home in Guilford, Connecticut to the East MobileBooth in Pensacola, Florida. In preparing for our conversation, I soon understood why participants often come into the experience feeling nervous about how they will possibly be able to pack in all they want to talk about in just 40 minutes! There was so much I wanted to ask my mom – both to hear old stories retold, and to ask some questions I had never thought to propose in the past. She gladly rehashed the story of meeting Julia Child and humored me by singing the songs she and her siblings made up about their childhood pets. More than anything she said though, the entire experience reminded me of just how special my mom is. She is a jack-of-all trades – an avid knitter, an incredible cook and baker, and a talented artist, among many other things. More importantly, my mom is loving and unbelievably selfless. I think she sometimes gets down on herself for being a stay-at-home mom, but I am quick to remind her that what she did, and continues to do (raising my sister, brother, and myself) is work too -  not only hard work, but incredibly meaningful and important work as well. I tried to ask her how she got to be such a good mom, in hopes of discovering some secret formula I could use if and when I become a mom, but I think it just comes naturally to her.

Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps, StoryCorps’ new book, arrives in bookstores on April 15, 2010 – just in time for Mother’s Day! Help StoryCorps in celebrating American mothers from all walks of life and experiences. I know I’ll be celebrating mine!

We’re all only human, that’s for sure. But here in Yuma, Arizona, everybody is also Yuman. Or at least that’s what they call the people from this sunny town of just under 195,000 people. Yuma lies just five minutes from the border of California, and just 20 minutes from the border of Mexico. Recorded as the sunniest place on earth and the iceberg lettuce capital of the world, Yuma ain’t a bad place to be for the wintry month of January! Site Supervisor Anna Walters, brand-new Facilitator Jorge Rios, and I joined the rest of the snowbirds to soak up the sun and collect some stories — particularly those of Latinos, as part of StoryCorps Historias. While in Yuma, MobileBooth West partners with KAWC, Colorado Public Media, as well as the Yuma County Main Library, where the Booth is parked.

Lenore Stuart and her mother, Mary Redondo Lorona, were among the first participants to come in and share some of their family history and favorite stories. Mary’s father, Jose Maria Redondo, first came through Yuma from Altar, Mexico on his way to California during the Gold Rush. Taken by the beauty of Yuma, he swore he would come back one day. And 10 years later, that is exactly what he did. He even changed the name of the territory from Arizona City to Yuma, after the Yumans, who were the chief Indian inhabitants of the area.

Jose served many roles in the Yuma community, including mayor for some time. A lover of music, Jose ordered a Steinway Grand Piano in New York City to be shipped from France to Yuma so that any child who wanted to could learn to play. The Panama Canal, however, had not been constructed yet, so the piano was shipped all the way around Cape Horn and up the western coast until it arrived in Yuma, its keys jingling down Main Street.

The piano is still in tact today, although out of tune, and has been passed around various family homes for some time. Mary, herself, never truly learned to play, but she has many memories of the piano still. “I’m wherever that piano is,” Mary reflected. “It’s old, but it’s a great piano.” And at 95, Mary may be old, but she sure is a great storyteller.

After driving through snow and sleet, MobileBooth West pulled into downtown Colorado Springs, CO and set up shop in front of the Penrose Public Library. KRCC General Manager Delaney Utterback and Producer Noel Black greeted us warmly and looked on with excitement as we wedged the MobileBooth into its new home. And if a big shiny Airstream trailer wasn’t enough to announce our arrival in town, KRCC went to work producing a short web video providing the curious community with an inside peek as to what StoryCorps is all about.

Set at the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains and the base of the famous Pikes Peak, sprawling Colorado Springs is home to quite a number of institutions and attractions, including the United States Air Force Academy, NORAD, Fort Carson, Focus on the Family, Colorado College, the United States Olympic Training Center and Committee Headquarters, Seven Falls, and the Garden of the Gods National Park (to name a few!). Our partner organizations are just as vast and numerous, including PEAK Parent Association, PHAMALY Theatre, Partners in Housing, the Alzheimer’s Association of Colorado Springs, African Americans in Gerontology, Pikes Peak Community College, Future Self, and more. Given the wide range of various places, communities, and organizations,  MobileBooth West will soon be filled with an equally diverse array of participants, life experiences, and stories!

So far, so good, in Colorado Springs!

While every participant who came into the MobileBooth was different from the next, each with their own story and their own voice, there was one thing almost everyone seemed to agree upon. There is no place like Paonia. Part of the beautiful North Fork Valley, Paonia is home to an assortment of community-run businesses, the best peaches you’ve ever tasted, an exquisite landscape, the sweet sounds of bluegrass music, and of course, KVNF Public Radio – “the nucleus” of the community, explained one participant. As KVNF Manager Sally Kane remarked, the North Fork Valley is “pastoral, abundant, and enlightening. [...] and it attracts people with huge hearts.”

Paonia may be a small dot on the map, but as participant Liz Lilien remarked, “sometimes that dot seems to shine.” And indeed it does!

Thank You, Paonia. Colorado Springs, here we come!

When participants come into the StoryCorps Booth, they often tell the story of how they first met. It’s not everyday, however, that participants meet one another for the first time at the MobileBooth! That is exactly what happened in Paonia, Colorado, at StoryCorps’ MobileBooth West when Marjorie Johnson and Marylee Hauze came in to tell their story.

Almost four months ago to the day of their scheduled conversation, participant Marylee Hauze came upon a letter to the editor in the Delta County Independent written by an “M.E. Johnson” titled, “A Mother’s Day Tribute.” Marylee was so moved by the article, she wrote a letter to “M.E.” thanking her for her words. Since then, Marge and Marylee have been exchanging letters as pen pals. It was September 5 that they met for the first time. After sharing lunch in town, they came to StoryCorps to continue their conversation face-to-face. It didn’t take long to understand why Marylee was so eager to make the acquaintance of Marjorie E. Johnson.

What struck Marylee about Marge’s letter was how she spoke of her mother. Both Marge and Marylee came from large families, in which their mothers played a significant role in their upbringings. They instilled in Marge and Marylee similar words of advice – not to judge anyone, be kind, and to look for the good in people.

“She gave me one of the greatest pieces of advice ever,” Marge said of her mother. “If you know something good about someone, tell them so. And the reason she gave for doing this was that people go through their lives getting a lot of criticism and very little praise. And she said it would help if you kind of evened that out. And I didn’t truly realize until I was grown up the true beauty of that advice which was that it made me look for things to praise, and finding them made my world a better place.”

And for Marge, meeting Marylee was one of those things. “Just in the short acquaintance we’ve had,” she said, “I know you, and I know you’re special. I could tell that from the day I got your letter.”

Perhaps Marge is right. “There are no such things as choice encounters.”

Gustavus is a city of 429 people set on the shore of Icy Strait, 36 air miles from Juneau, Alaska’s capital city. Gustavus is a unique community of individuals with a wide array of lifestyle choices and accommodations, from one room cabins with no plumbing to five star homes. With geologic and geographic changes to Gustavus over the years have also come social and demographic changes. The gateway community to Glacier Bay National Park, Gustavus is unique in its landscape and in its people.

In the planning stages of Elise’s endeavor, she showed a picture of the StoryCorps MobileBooth to a friend who commented that the Gustavus Public Library didn’t feel quite as “hip,” so they set out to find and make their own Gustavus StoryCorps booth. “If Gustavus is rich in something, it seems we are rich in ex-lodge buses,” Pepple remarks. She quickly came across a 21-year-old resident named Elm, who had recently bought a bus to live in. Pepple explains, “He said we could borrow the bus if we could move out the 20,000 pounds of scrap metal that were living inside and get it started. A couple of hours later, the bus was sitting in front of the library.”

Elise reported that, for the most part, Gustavus locals had not heard of StoryCorps. The public radio station there airs StoryCorps clips at 4 AM! Elise explains, “It seemed like either the whole town might show up, or no one at all.” But by the end of StoryCorps’ stay in Gustavus, some 30 interviews were recordedófriends, couples, and family members shared the stories that shape their lives.

Elise describes her experience best, “Whether tacitly or explicitly understood, many of the stories told during StoryCorps Alaska in Gustavus oriented around the connections people here have to this place. While at times, I explicitly stated, ëyou do not need to make this about Gustavus,’ even in my own interview, I found myself speaking of the complex and beautiful pull the community of Gustavus has had on my life.”

She continues, “As the person recording these stories, I’m pretty sure I lucked out the most. I’d crouch behind the wood stove, mouth agape, as people I knew expressed what is both beautiful and harsh in life. Listening confirmed for me the mission of this project: everyone has a storyómoments that have been surprising, hysterical, and poignant in their lives. All you have to do is ask.”

“All told, there was laughter, tears, partial nudity, and the confirmation that people in Gustavus shape remarkable lives of independence and sincerity.”

Visit www.storycorpsalaska.net for more information on StoryCorps Alaska.