When Earl Reynolds, Jr. visited the StoryCorps MobileBooth, he told his daughter Ashley about the day the James Brown Revue came to Roanoke, VA. A caravan of 15 buses and close to 200 people stopped in front the family barbershop where Reynolds was a bootblack, or shoeshine boy. After stopping at the neighboring record store to check up on his newest single, The King of Funk himself walked into the Reynolds’ barbershop.

After shaking hands all around, James Brown took a seat on the stand and asked Reynolds to give him a shine. Although he was immaculate from head to toe, Reynolds dutifully re-shined his shoes. When Mr. Brown stepped down from the stand, he told Reynolds that he himself had started out shining shoes. He assured Reynolds that it was an honorable profession, and good work, but encouraged him to think about what he might want to do next. On his way out of the barbershop, Mr. Brown handed Reynolds a five spot. “I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” Reynolds recalled.

Although he was too young at the time to go see James Brown do his thing, their brief interchange stuck with him. His father had hoped he would take over the barbershop, but Reynolds instead decided to attended Fairfield State Teacher’s College where he graduated at the top of his class. He still lives in Roanoke today, where he is a community activist.

“I’ve got those blue ridge mountain blues/and I’ll stand right here to say/my grip is packed to travel and I’m scratching gravel/for the blue ridge far away.”

-Earl Scruggs, “Blue Ridge Mountain Blues”

Roanoke, Virginia is the sort of place where folks stop to say hello as they pass you on the street, where people bring you eggs fresh from the farm, where you are likely to see a living Frida Kahlo painting in a storefront window, where swarms of starlings sing from the downtown trees each night. Roanoke is where you can say, “good morning,” to someone in the local coffee shop and and then see that person later in the day at the mobilebooth to share a story. It’s the type of place where a woman you a hardly know will make you apple pie, where folks invite you into their homes for dinner, or a pancake breakfast extravaganza, and even into their recording studios. But don’t be fooled by the small town charm, Roanoke, Virginia is also where journalists from across the Atlantic and big shots like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton come to find out what Americans, like you and me, think about our country and our future. Its where the MobileEast Booth was lucky to be for a whole month and its a place we are sad to leave.

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John relived the moment he heard about his mother’s diagnosis. “It was 1978. I was a sophomore in college at the University of Delaware. My dad had called my roommate who had to find me. He didn’t know where I was, and I remember getting on the phone and getting my dad on the phone and he said, ëYour mom has breast cancer but everything’s fine.’ And the operation had already happened because back in those days they didn’t have mammograms they went in, operated and then found out what happened. I didn’t even know she was going to the hospital because they didn’t want me to know about it, which was kind of disturbing, but it was her intent that I not leave and not be there, that I should just continue on with my life and then see her when I got back home.”

“I loved her humor,” says John. “I loved her passion for life. I loved her story telling. I loved the fact that she was witty and fun and just full of life.” It was that same sense of humor that John inherited from Ann. Her ability to laugh in the face of adversity was one of her best weapons against the disease and helped her combat the ignorance and insensitivity she encountered early on.

“This was back in the late Seventies, early Eighties when women’s rights or patient rights were not as strong as they are today,” recalls John. “One of the things that was really amazing about her as well as her friend [Caryl] who was going through cancer was that they stood up to these doctors and really demanded proper care. And I think that those kind of individual moments across the country with women like her, that were doing that, really changed not only treatment of breast cancer but doctor patient relations. I remember one time when she was frustrated with her oncologist or the surgeon, but she and her friend Caryl dressed up as clowns and went in to the doctor’s office and said, ‘If you’re not going to treat us seriously maybe you will if we’re dressed up as clowns.’ And that seemed to shake [the doctors] out of it, at least for that visit.”

Ann surprised her doctors, and perhaps even her family, when she exceeded the predictions of how long she would live, but after years of fighting she finally succumbed to the disease with her family at her side.

When asked how he would advise other men on how to support the women in their lives who have breast cancer John offered this simple advice; “I would say the first thing you need to do, if she’s nearby, is hold her and comfort her, tell her how much you love her and then I would listen.”

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Headed south on 220 towards Roanoke just as you crest the hill into town, there she is, the most perfect, 65 foot, bottomless neon pot of joe you’ll ever see. We had the pleasure of living beneath this Roanoke icon.

Our first evening, as we roamed downtown, every business in the city from the Thai restaurant to the bail bondsman, seemed to be lit up in neon. Even Mill Mountain, looking down upon the town, glowed red, white and blue from the Roanoke Star. The Roanoke neon effect was so striking with eyes, letters, scissors, coffee cups, violins, arrows, toothbrushes, glasses, musical notes flickering about town, that naturally, our first thought was, who is behind all this neon? The answer came to Jeremy and I one evening in the form of a small placard attached to a fence post near our front door. The placard dedicated the neon coffee cup to “Mark Jamison, the Neon Man.”

Sadly, Mark Jamison, Roanoke’s Neon Man died in 2004 while hanging a neon sign. Mark’s girlfriend, Lisa Thomas, Ann Jamison, Mark’s mother, and Slash Coleman, his best friend, each came to the mobilebooth to remember Mark.

Neon signs made by Mark Jamison and other artists as part of “In the Glow.”

Mark learned the neon craft in Johnson City, Tennessee. He first set up shop on his parent’s property in Boones Mill. He made signs for commerical businesses like Burger King and the food court at the Tanglewood Mall but his pet projects like the restoration of the Grandin Theatre Marquee, or a 10-foot leaping cat commissioned for someone’s home, are true works of art. He was an expert at crafting a perfect neon circle, one of the most difficult skills.

Aside from his neon work, Mark had an electric personality. “He looked like a fairy or an elf of some sorts,” said his girlfriend Lisa. He wore an fringe leather jacket around town that he adorned with squirrel tails that he caught and skinned himself.

He was wearing the jacket the first time that Lisa met him, “He was this beautiful character and I thought wow, who was that sitting across the table in this fringe leather jacket?”

Once, when visiting his best friend, Slash in Chicago, Mark wore the jacket with the fringe and the squirrel tails on the elevated train. John Cusack also happened to be riding the train, but all the passengers were staring at Mark instead of the celebrity. Cusack sidled up to Mark and said, “You’re not from around here are you?”

Mark’s death was a great tragedy in Roanoke. Newspaper articles were written, the entire town mourned. In a bittersweet twist of events his girlfriend, Lisa Thomas, found out that she was pregnant a few weeks after Mark passed.

Ann recalled the moment that Lisa told her the news,

“You didn’t know Wayne [Mark's father] and I. You came out to have dinner to tell us. And I had this stupid, big roast beef dinner. And I know you could hardly breathe. And you were eating your dinner and you said, ‘Well I have something to tell you.’ That was a momentous point. You could of so easily said, ‘I’m going to survive this thing within myself with my family.’ But you let us be a part of this baby. There’s is no way you’ll ever know how that was appreciated and how we loved that.”

“I don’t think I had a choice,” said Lisa.

“The first thing I did was buy a little white onsie and had it embroidered, ‘the neon baby,’” said Ann.

- Virgil Thomson

While the music scene in Roanoke may not be as visible as the scenes in other southern cities, like Athens, GA or Austin, TX, it is, for the inquisitive music lover, a rewarding discovery. One day, after checking out a matinee at the Grandin Theatre just outside of downtown Roanoke I found my guide sitting next to the popcorn machine. Peter Evans works at the theatre but he is also part of the Magic Twig Community, a homegrown arts collective that includes bands and side projects like Boys Lie, The Missionaries, Rootstone Jug Band, The Sad Cobras and Turbo P, and visual artists, Kelly Queener and Indianface. With the indie trifecta of the Plan 9 Records store, the Mystic Fortress rehearsal studio and the Water Heater art and performance venue, the Magic Twig Community might just put the Star City on the map as the next new music mecca.

Paige Hodges and Daniel Cundiff, best friends forever and multi-instrumentalist members of the collective came to the MobileBooth East to talk about their friendship, their compulsive list making, and the themes and narratives they explore in their music. Daniel, who is in SUNKING! with Peter and Sad Cobras with Paige, played a bit of the song Rabbit Hands with a little help from Paige. Other members of the Magic Twig Community who shared their stories were Sam Lunsford, Sean Poff and their friend Scott Baldwin all of whom are in the Rootstone Jug Band. The three talked about the band’s origins as an offshoot of the New Roanoke Jug Band which was itself inspired by the original Roanoke Jug Band which made its only known recording on October 18 , 1929. Not only did Sam, Sean and Scott play a bit for us in the booth but they also invited us to a rehearsal at the Mystic Fortress, where they played several songs in the roots music canon as well as an original, Do That Thing You Do.

Of course, you can’t talk about music in or around Roanoke without mentioning Arthur Conner. About a half hour outside of Roanoke, nestled within the Blue Ridge Mountains is Floyd County, Virginia. Floyd is Arthur Conner’s home, its where he was born and where he heard the mountain music that would one day inspire him to make fiddles. But not just any fiddles, Arthur’s fiddles are sought after by the likes of music legends like Ricky Skaggs, Gene Elders and Jeff Midkiff. Arthur came in to the booth with his good friend, musician Scott Perry to talk about his life, his craft and the Floyd County musical resurgence. He started the conversation off with an impromptu performance.

It didn’t take long for Whitney, Nina and me to set our sights on Floyd’s Friday Night Jamboree to check out some pickin’ and grinnin’ at the Floyd Country Store. Now, you don’t have to go to the Country Store to hear bluegrass and country, you can find them on every street corner and in every coffee house and restaurant in downtown Floyd, but if you want to see some serious flat footin’ then you’ll need to cough up the $2 entry fee to see what’s happening on the dance floor.

“Not one in a million Americans ever again will ride a scheduled mainline passenger train behind a live and breathing steam locomotive. That time is gone. “
- liner notes from The Fading Giant

It’s impossible to ignore the train in Roanoke, the nightly screech of freight trains edging through town, the whistles that pierce the city’s hum throughout the day. Each morning, Whitney and I run across a bridge and peer down on the train tracks below, hundreds of boxcars full of coal form a line clear to the horizon. There hasn’t been a single morning when one of us hasn’t commented on the sight.

Bill Arnold was born 50 feet from the tracks.

From left to right: Kim Parker, Bill Arnold, Ellen Arnold

“My dad was an employee of the Norfolk and Western Railway. I lived in an N&W company house for seven of my earlier years and lived and breathed railroading — I think I have cinders in my blood,” said Arnold, self-proclaimed railroad enthusiast.

“Ralph White, conductor, contemplates Engine 429 at a stop in Damascus to drop off freight cars.”
Property of the O. Winston Link Museum. Roanoke, VA

Arnold grew up Radford, Virginia, a small town not far from Roanoke. Radford was a true railroad hub. Instead of church bells or the gong of a clock tower, a steam whistle used to keep time. Every day at seven in the morning, at twelve noon and at six o’clock the whistle could be heard all over town. “I used to go up to the powerhouse after supper and talk to the foreman and ask him, if I could blow the six o’clock whistle.” said Arnold.

Arnold, first met the railroad photographer O. Winston Link in 1987 during the National Railway Historical Society Convention at the Hotel Roanoke. He came to the mobilebooth to talk about his relationship with Link.

“O. Winston Link and George Thom with night flash equipment, 1956.”
Property of the O. Winston Link Museum. Roanoke, VA

O. Winston Link, was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, but fell in love with trains while working in Mineola, Long Island near the Long Island Railroad in the 1940′s. His interest in the railroad became an obsession from 1955 through 1960 when he photographed the Norfolk & Western Railroad Company, the last line of steam powered engines in the United States.

“Hawksbill Creek Swimming Hole, Luray, Virginia, 1956.”
Property of the O. Winston Link Museum. Roanoke, VA

Link first visited Roanoke, headquarters of the N&W Railroad in 1946. He walked up to Jefferson Street, a main thoroughfare that crossed the railroad tracks, and stood there as one of the large freight locomotives came by and scared his one-year-old son to death. Soon after, he met with the president of the N&W Railroad and told him, “I want to photograph your steam engines. I don’t want any money. I just want free access.”

“Cows are herded in for milking on the Norvel Ryan farm in Shawsville, Virginia, as train No. 3 The Pocahontas passes in the distance, 1955.”
Property of the O. Winston Link Museum. Roanoke, VA

For five years Link rode the rails, surveying spots to photograph, and recording the sounds of steam engines in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina. “He was a persuasive person. He could make the train back up or slow down to make a shot just right,” said Arnold. Link made 2400 photos during that period. He captured life along the tracks including the passengers and people who worked the rails. He told Arnold, “I was making a preservation of something that would completely disappear.”

“Train 202 was scheduled to arrive at White Top northbound at 1:06pm but often arrived hours late. Whenever it did arrive, Charlie Dolinger, White Top’s mailman, was waiting with the day’s mail.”
Property of the O. Winston Link Museum. Roanoke, VA

After Link died in 2001, Bill and his wife Ellen were instrumental in the founding of the O. Winston Link Museum here in Roanoke, which opened in 2004. “Winston wanted the O Winston Link Museum in Roanoke because of his relationship here,” said Arnold. Bill and Ellen continue to work as volunteers at the Museum.

“Maude bows to the Virginia Creeper in Green Cove, Virginia, 1956″
Property of the O. Winston Link Museum. Roanoke, VA

The people known as the Somali Bantu have endured centuries of discrimination and violence, and during the recent war in Somalia, the Bantu were again the victims of violence in that country. Of the roughly 20,000 Somali Bantu refugees in Africa and Yemen, some 5,000 found refuge in Tanzania. In 1999, the United States Government offered the remaining 12,000 Somali Bantu refugees in Kenya the protection they had been seeking for over 10 years. The refugees are being settled in over 50 cities in 38 states. Many of those refugees have made their way to Roanoke, Virginia. MobileEast had the pleasure of recording conversations between Rahmo Isse and her mother Rukia Hussein, who are both Somali Bantu, and Saadiya Guhad and her sister Faduma who are Somali.

Rahmo conducted her interview with Rukia in the Maay (“Mai”) language. They talked about the war, Rukia’s memories of life in Somalia before the war and the journey to America. Saadiya and Faduma talked about meeting each other for the first time in Kenya. They talked about which of them takes after which parent. Faduma favors her father in her personality while Saadiya is more like her mother. The sisters also talked, in both English and Somali, about what it is like being Muslim in the United States and some of the stereotypes some Americans have about Africa. All of the participants came to us through the Refugee and Immigration Services of Virginia and were accompanied by Laura Boutwell who works with RIS and who, along with Faduma, coordinates Imani Nailah, a weekly after school program for middle and high school refugee youth.

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One of my favorite parts of working as a facilitator is learning about what other people do for a living. Janitors and teachers, lawyers and railway workers, preachers, salesmen, farmers, I have listened to the tales of just about every profession it seems, but I have never encountered quite the enthusiasm and passion that Leah Gardner, Volunteer & Education Coordinator for the O.Winston Link Museum expressed for her job. Leah and her co-worker and friend, Allison Hasson dropped by the booth recently to talk about their work within the community.

“Why do you do what you do?” asked Allison.

“I get that question often,” said Leah. “I grew up in New Jersey and when I was in elementary school we had one classroom mother who would come in once a month and teach us about art history. Once we were learning about the Sistine Chapel, looking at slides and pictures of the Sistine Chapel, and then we taped paper to the bottom of our desks, laid down and did little drawings on the bottom of our desks. That sticks in my memory and it made me love the Sistine Chapel. And it made a connection for me between art history and the making of art,” said Leah

A little over two years ago Leah started a pilot photography program with at-risk youth at the West End Center in Roanoke. “To me photography is really every person’s art form,” explains Leah. The premise was simple, “What would to happen if you put a digital camera in the hands of a 5-year-old or a teenager?” What happened was a success…

Courtesy of the O. Winston Link Museum. Roanoke, VA.
Photo from the West End Center for Youth (Summer 2007)

The project has expanded to include all age groups from kindergarten to adult students. Leah has even had her students experiment with “antiquated” film cameras.

Courtesy of the O. Winston Link Museum. Roanoke, VA.
Black and White Holga Image (cropped from a contact sheet) from Addison Community Learning Center at Lucy Addison Middle School (Fall 2007)

Courtesy of the O. Winston Link Museum. Roanoke, VA.
Digital image from Shutterbug Camp with the Science Museum of Western Virginia (Summer 2008)

“My favorite part is getting to know these kids and seeing what they think is important to take pictures of… I want to know that I’ve made a difference. I don’t expect that my students remember my name, but I do know that they remember me. Going back and seeing students that I’ve had before, or running into them downtown, they all gather round and say, “It’s the camera lady!”

Thanks Leah and Allie for coming and sharing your enthusiasm. For more information about arts education programming at the O. Winston Link Museum go to www.linkmuseum.org

On October 8, MobileBooth East completed our first Door-to-Door recording in Salem, Virginia at the Richfield Retirement Community. We learned very quickly about the hard work the Door-to-Door team does on a regular basis and realized the challenges and rewards of taking the StoryCorps experience to people’s doorsteps. We met wonderful folks and recorded stories that were funny, poignant, and heartwarming. We heard the story of Eileen Dunnavent, who worked in a factory to support her two children. We listened to Erna Isler recall her days as an artist in Mexico, and we relived a moment with Dora Leigh and Dwaine Russell when they had their first conversation on a friend’s front porch. The European travels of Nancy Mutter, a.k.a. “The Countess of Sower, Virginia” made for quite a few amusing tales, and Elinor Bradford’s account of how Mole Hill got turned into a mountain had Nina howling with laughter!

We’d like to thank the staff of Richfield Retirement Community for making us feel so welcome and for caring enough to preserve the memories of their residents.

Gainsboro, the historically African American neighborhood lies just across the tracks from the Virginia Museum of Transportation where the MobileBooth is parked. The Henry Street Bridge, located one block away from the MobileBooth, used to be the only way for anyone to cross the tracks from Gainsboro into downtown Roanoke. “We had to be back over the bridge at about six o’clock in the evening,” said participant Dr. Perneller Chubb-Wilson.

On February 20, 2008,? the Henry Street Bridge was renamed the Martin Luther King Memorial Bridge. Dr. Chubb-Wilson and Bishop Edward Mitchell, founding members of the Roanoke chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, came to StoryCorps to discuss their fight to rename the bridge and what that meant for Roanoke.

“I know that civil rights is not only in your heart, it’s in your blood. You breathe it… They call you the mother of the bridge,” said Bishop Mitchell.

“It was hard to get it here. After such a long fight in the city of Roanoke, when I got home one night, one Sunday night, I got down on my knees and I said, ‘Lord I can’t take this anymore.’ Then I went to sleep and around 4:30am, I woke up and turned back and forth.

“At 5:10 I sat up straight out of bed, ‘Name the bridge after Martin Luther King!’ So I started thinking about that bridge. The bridge was a bridge that we had to walk over back and forth. It reminded me of the bridge in Selma, Alabama. I said, ‘Lord are you trying to tell me to name that bridge?’ So I called Bill Carter. I said, ‘Bill, we are naming the Henry Street Bridge after Martin Luther King.’ I said, ‘God told me this morning to name that bridge after Martin Luther King.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll take it to council this morning and see what they say.’

“At 9:25 I got a call. [Bill] said, ‘Little darling are you laying down or standing up?’ He said, ‘Well I want you to know that it was voted unanimously that the bridge will be named after Martin Luther King,’” said Dr. Chubb-Wilson.

“It became the ideal place because he was a bridge that brought people together,” said Bishop Mitchell.

“I think this has brought all of us, white and black, together in the community.” said Dr. Chubb-Wilson.

The Martin Luther King Memorial Bridge is a modest footbridge. Flowers adorn each end, inspirational quotes are etched into the ground. “Dare to Dream,” the bridge says. A bronze statue of Dr. King stands on the Gainsboro side. Sit down on a nearby bench and you can listen to bits of his speeches piped into the air. According to Bishop Mitchell, this statue is a near perfect likeness.

p.s. – Thanks, JH.