Amanda Miller and Scott Greenberg met at the party of a mutual friend. Amanda had just returned from the Czech Republic and was not looking for a relationship, but Scott was not daunted, he wooed her until they became “official” three months later. The true test of the relationship came a few years later when the couple moved to Miami and had to manage job searches, law school, and living on a tight budget in an expensive city. “It was easy for the relationship between [Amanda] and me,” says Scott. “It was just the external circumstances that were difficult and we teamed up and made it through.” Amanda agreed, “That was the hardest point for me, but I think that it was the best time too because it was when I actually realized that when things did get hard we were going to be fine.” Amanda and Scott get hitched on April 10, 2010.

When Penny Steffens first met Melissa Featherstone she thought, “OOOOH! I can’t stand her!” Melissa thought Penny looked at the world through rose-colored glasses, but eventually, with the help of their mutual friend Pearl, the two got to know each other a little better and started going on sailing adventures and beach excursions. Now those rose-colored glasses are one of the things that Melissa loves about Penny the most. “We had no idea that we had a future together beyond friendship,” says Melissa. Penny and Melissa say “I do” on June 11, 2010.

After meeting at a photo shoot, disc jockey Dallas Peel and journalist Keri Holt had a very rocky start to their relationship. Dallas served as the model for the photo shoot and Keri wrote the article that accompanied the photos. She misspelled Dallas’s name in the article and when he discovered the error he told the listeners of his radio show that he would give a pair of  concert tickets to the first person who identified the mistake. Apparently there was more than one mistake, which led to heavy criticism of the article on the air. Keri fought back in a fiery response article, and the war was on. After a few weeks of battling over the air waves and via the printed word, Dallas offered an olive branch and asked Keri and her coworkers to a conciliatory dinner at an Italian restaurant. Keri’s coworkers bowed out at the last minute but Keri forged ahead. It was over dinner that Keri and Dallas buried the hatchet and on June 26, 2010 they’ll be tying the knot.

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!

Opening day was hosted by both First United Methodist Church and our friends at WUWF  88.1 FM and featured guest speakers Nancy Fetterman, a community activist and coordinator of the Public History program at the University of West Florida (UWF), and UWF Associate Professor of History, Dr. Patrick Moore. Both speakers shared their thoughts on the value of telling stories and the impact the practice has made on their lives and on the communities in which they have worked.

In one of the first interviews of the day, Lusharon Wiley talked with her friend, Reverend H.K. Matthews, about his life-long activism. Rev. Matthews began his contribution to Pensacola’s Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s as president of the Pensacola Council of Ministers. After staging protests for civil rights, Rev. Matthews was jailed as a political prisoner. Decades after those protests, in February of 2006, his struggles were acknowledged when a park was dedicated in his name to recognize the social changes that he helped to bring to Pensacola.

For the second story of the day, Charles Morgan III interviewed his mother, Camille W. Morgan, about the stand that she and her husband, Charles “Chuck” Morgan Jr., made in the South during the 1960s. Chuck, who passed away in January 2009, was a leading civil rights lawyer who won a landmark lawsuit that helped establish the so-called ‘one-person-one-vote’ rule, giving African Americans more equitable representation in legislative districts. Camille talked about how she and Chuck were threatened with violence by other white people in the South and how he never let those threats deter him from speaking out against discrimination and against the institutions that were complicit in the racist oppression of the time.

Tricia Jones came to the MobileBooth with her mother Gen Fields and talked about some of her favorite memories. “I will always remember us dancing because I can’t dance with anybody else the way I can dance with you,” said Tricia. “It was really special for me to get to, unscripted, unplanned, get to dance with you at my wedding party. It was a big party, but you know, it was awesome to have the opportunity to dance with you and get you to show your stuff and twirl me around the floor and make me look damn good!”

“You’re very good,” said Gen.

“Only because of you,” said Tricia.

Jeanna Houston came to the MobileBooth with her sister Connor Barnas to commemorate what Connor calls “the most stellar, fabulous, profound sister-sibling relationship that exists on the planet.”

Jeanna recalled her own wedding. “At [my] wedding we had the first dance together instead of husband and wife. It was the two of us and we danced to Steely Dan’s Babylon Sisters. It was special.”

“One of the things we’ve always said is that we’ve traveled through many lives together,” says Connor. “This is our karmic payoff. That we get a perfect relationship: one that is based so much in love and friendship and respect.”

Site Supervisor Whitney Henry-Lester, Facilitator Virginia Lora, and Miami-Dade Community College students

While in Miami, MobileBooth East is partnering with WDNA public radio to record the stories of Latino and Hispanic communities as part of StoryCorps Historias. And we were thrilled to welcome new Mobile Facilitator—and Miami local—Virginia Lora to the road.

Manuel and Mercedes Quiroga

For the first conversation of the day, Mercy and Manny Quiroga talked about family. Manny began the conversation by sharing memories of his father, Manuel Quiroga, who Manny remembers as a strong, determined man, “with great hands.” Manny particularly remembers the time that his father sawed through a ficus tree in their backyard in Havana, Cuba. Fifteen feet in diameter, the tree was so large that its roots were interfering with the house’s plumbing. Manny’s father only had access to a tiny pruning saw, so he spent every Saturday and Sunday for two years sawing, stroke by stroke, through the ficus’s huge trunk.

A few years ago, Manny decided to commission artists Haydée and Sahara Scull to create a portrait of his father in his typical plaid shorts, t-shirt, black socks, and loafers. After some thought, however, Manny realized that the portrait would really be incomplete without his mother. Yet he could hardly include his mother while omitting the rest of the family. Plans for the portrait eventually grew to include Manny’s entire family, their business, their car, and the street on which they lived in Havana. At this point, Manny’s wife Mercy pointed out that her family also lived on that block. Their mothers, after all, were old friends: the ones who introduced them.

Its evolution complete, the painting now hangs in the Quiroga home: an enormous, three-dimensional street scene of both families on their block in La Habana Vieja.

Quiroga Hermanos, Calle Muralla 458, through the artistry of the Scull sisters.

“He was happiest a couple of thousand feet off the ground” says Michael Berg.

“He started his business, which he called Prometheus Methods Tower Service Incorporated, because Prometheus was the god who brought fire.” says Michael. Nick was in the business of building and repairing radio towers. He traveled widely, and often offered his services to poor communities in developing countries like Uganda and Kenya, Michael remembered.

“He developed this little company from that to one that employed five people.” said Michael. “He was entrepreneurial, but he was not interested in money except as a means of furthering his charity. I’ve always said that the child was father of the man. I often looked to Nick because he just had it so all together and I just, I really wanted to be more like him.”

Michael Berg

It was during Nick’s second trip to war-torn Iraq, as an independent contractor helping to repair and build radio towers, that he was abducted. Nick was in Mosul, in the northern part of the country, when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal became public. “It so enraged the citizenry of Iraq,” said Michael. “It changed the whole texture of the war.”

Days before the scandal broke, Nick had been detained by military police and was finally released after being held for thirteen days.  He  began traveling from Mosul back to Baghdad, with the intent of returning to the United States. “He calls us on the phone and he tells us that everything is okay, that he’s going to get out as quickly as he can but that he’s not going to do anything rash and take a route that would be dangerous.”

“I remember telling him to ‘Stay low.’ That was one of the things he always said, ‘Stay low.’ I remember him telling me a lot of different routes he might take instead of the direct route which he ended up taking,” recalled Michael. “I didn’t want to get into, you know, saying ‘I love you.’ I didn’t want to say anything at this point because I felt like it’s like saying ‘I’m afraid I may never see you again.’ Maybe he felt the same way. I don’t know.”  That was the last time Michael spoke with Nick.

Michael was notified about Nick’s death by the U.S. State Department and he grappled with whether or not to share the details of Nick’s execution with his family. “When [my friend] heard the news about Nick I told him what I hadn’t told anyone yet about how Nick was killed and that I hadn’t told my wife and kids.” Michael’s friend encouraged him to tell his family and an hour after he told them, the video of Nick’s execution was broadcast on the Internet.

When I asked Michael what he would like to say to and about Nick, his reply was simple, “To Nick, I would like to say the ‘I love you’ that I didn’t say on April 9th when he called home. To know Nick was to know a unique individual, a real one-of-a-kind person who was a creative genius and wanted to harness that creative genius to help whoever was in need.”

Special thanks to Lilly Sullivan and Nina Porzucki.

Geographically speaking, Jacksonville is the largest city in the U.S., boasting miles of open beaches and waterways. We kicked off opening day in the heart of downtown. Jacksonville’s Hemming Plaza—originally a village green—was the first park in the city, and is now the oldest.

Frances Kinne inaugurated the booth with the first conversation of the day, but Frances has been the first of many things. She was the first woman to become president of a Florida University when she took the position at Jacksonville University. She later became chancellor, and then chancellor emeritus. Frances shared stories of living in China, Japan, and occupied Germany while married to her husband Colonel Kinne, during World War II.

Alton Yates joined his daughter Toni Yates in the StoryBooth soon after. At the age of nineteen, Mr. Yates left his hometown of Jacksonville to serve in the Air Force. While stationed in New Mexico, he joined a research division studying the effects of g-forces on the human body. He did this by becoming the division’s “human guinea pig,” literally placing himself inside rocket sleds for testing. Mr. Yates remembered coming home from the relative egalitarianism of the military to return to a Jim-Crow era Jacksonville. He still has a scar on his head from an injury he incurred at a Civil Rights demonstration. The demonstration took place in front of a Woolworth’s department store that still stands downtown, not far from where MobileBooth East sits today.

After helping Lisa remove her first tooth, Lenoir sat Lisa down and explained that the Tooth Fairy would be on her way to collect the tooth as Lisa slept, and that she would leave a quarter in its place. Lisa showed the tooth to her older sister Vicki before dutifully placing the tooth under her pillow, climbing into bed, and drifting off to sleep. The next morning Lisa woke up, reached under the her pillow and found that her tooth was still there. Lisa ran to her parents and held out her hand with the tooth in it.

“Mama started to say something and Daddy just threw his hand out and stopped me and said ‘Lisa, ‘Ray’ is at the end of the alphabet. The Tooth Fairy must have been really busy last night. You’ve got to go back to bed and you’ve got to go to sleep now!’”

Lisa ran back to bed and tried to force herself go to sleep until she actually started to doze off.

“I heard these heavy footsteps coming across the floor,” said Lisa. “I thought, don’t fairies fly?” She felt a large hand slide under her pillow and then heard the footsteps cross back to the door. “I just had to look. I saw the back of a bald head that looked just like my Dad’s.”

The door shut then Lisa reached under her pillow and found her quarter. Right at that moment Vicki came into the room.

“Vicki, I don’t think there is a Tooth Fairy,” said Lisa. “I think it’s Daddy.”

Lisa explained what she had seen and Vicki responded, “Well, that wasn’t Daddy, Lisa. That was the Gentle Giant. He helps the Tooth Fairy when she is busy!”

“When I was 11 years old,” Lee continued, “I used to take two big mules and turn ground all day long, out in the country. It weren’t easy.”

The oldest of eleven children, Lee worked 72 acres of cotton, corn, and tobacco on his family’s land in North Carolina. The job was year-round and left him with little time for school. “I got to school about two days a week, and I was the biggest kid in school. I got disgusted with school. My dad said, ‘you’re worth more to me at home than you are in school. You got to work on this farm. We got to live.’ And so it was hard,” Lee remembered. “And I still have a problem with not being able to read and write. But God sees me through.”

Lee brought his guitar to the booth. While growing up, he used to play clubs in Virginia and North Carolina. Today, Lee fills the booth with his bluesy renditions of “Tell Me Why” and “Amazing Grace.” You can listen to him sing by clicking on the links.

Nancy’s story was different. “I had a problem, years ago, with drugs and alcohol. If it weren’t for JCOC and their programs and guidance, I probably wouldn’t be here today.” Nancy has been sober over six years, and she now works as JCOC’s kitchen manager.

Nancy and Lee have known each other since 1995.

“He’s easy to talk to,” Nancy explained. “Kind-hearted, good Christian. Proud to say he’s your friend and you know him.”

Lee agrees. “Ever since I met Nancy, we’ve always been good friends, yes sir. I couldn’t ever say anything against this woman.”

Our friends at 89.5 FM not only set up a huge banner over Waterside Drive announcing our arrival, but they also provided music and food for guests at our opening day. Of course, the best part of any opening day is the stories we hear from our participants.

Brenda H. Andrews interviewed her friend Andrew I. Heidelberg about his experiences as one of the Norfolk 17,  the first group of  black students to attend previously white schools during desegregation in Virginia. One day, when 12 year-old Andrew was coming home for dinner, there were two women and a man from the NAACP at his family’s home. They wanted to recruit Andrew in their efforts to get African-American students into recently desegregated schools. Andrew agreed to participate but had no idea what to expect. Months later at age 13 was his first day at Norview High School. Despite the tremendous prejudice he faced on a daily basis from white students at Norview, he knew he would graduate. “I didn’t want to let them make me quit,” he said.

A tale of triumph over a different kind of adversity came from Ray Evans who spoke with his daughter Debra Matthews about what it was like to be a child evacuee in England during World War II. His separation from his family found him in foster home after foster home, some of them warm and loving and others awful and abusive. Ray also talked about the bittersweet moment when he had to leave his final foster home—a wonderful, caring place—to return to his family.

Mr. Heidelberg summed up the message of both stories when he said, “Quitters never win and winners never quit!”