If there’s one thing I’ve witnessed time and time again while working at StoryCorps, it’s the power of storytelling and sharing to bring families, friends, and communities together. Stories also create the histories of the spaces we inhabit together, especially the neighborhoods and cities in which we live. I was reminded of this when StoryCorps San Francisco returned to Oakland’s Peralta Hacienda Historical Park to record interviews at this unique museum and community cultural center located in the city’s Fruitvale District.

Originally a prominent, Spanish colonial hacienda of 1800’s California, Peralta House is now a fully restored and preserved historical site. The center is, in a sense, a “living museum.” Through interactive  multimedia exhibits and an array of community programs, the center brings to life the site’s past and celebrates the stories of the Fruitvale District today. In a city already known for its diversity, residents of the neighborhood trace their roots to all corners of the country and the globe, including recent immigrants from Latin America and Southeast Asia, as well as African-American, Latino, and Caucasian families that go back several generations. Their stories are the center of the museum’s exhibits and certainly celebrated in their motto, “Every human being makes history at Peralta Hacienda Historical Park.”

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StoryCorps San Francisco kicked off National Teachers Initiative interviews this fall with a unique and innovative Bay Area high school, Downtown College Preparatory. DCP is a public charter school in San Jose, California whose educators work closely with students and their families to promote academic excellence and to develop the self-confidence and community support they’ll need to succeed in college and beyond. The school prepares students — most of whom are first-generation Americans and will be first-generation college students — to thrive at four-year universities. They do this through a singular goal set for each student: DCP students must gain admittance to a four-year academic institution before graduating from high school.

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This fall, San Francisco’s St. Anthony Foundation celebrated 60 years of providing food, shelter, clothing, and health services to much of the city’s homeless population. The day kicked off with a Hope Rally on the steps of City Hall and finished with a BBQ Block Party in the heart of the city’s Tenderloin District. StoryCorps San Francisco was there to share some of the many stories we’ve recorded with St. Anthony’s community for the past three years.

St. Anthony's celebrates 60 years!

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A standout highlight for the San Francisco StoryBooth recording team this summer was our two-day recording trip to the Pinoleville Pomo Nation, the reservation of the Pinoleville Pomo people indigenous to the Ukiah, CA, area. Invited by the tribe’s Environmental Director, David Edmunds, Site Supervisor Natalia Fidelholtz and I took the trip about two hours north of San Francisco. Like most StoryCorps interviews, each conversation touched on a range of themes, though the thread that ran throughout was the importance of documenting stories of Pomo tribal history in the area, particularly those of community elders and leaders like Violet Carpello Renick (interviewed by David Edmunds) and Tribal Chairwoman Leona Williams (shown with her daughters Lenora Dawn Brown-Steele and Angela James).

 
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The moment I walked into the San Francisco LGBTQ Community Center I could see it really lives up to its name. “The Center,” as it’s called by patrons and staff alike, is an inviting multi-level, brightly colored building that’s a hub for events and services to support the city’s diverse Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer community.

On any given day at the Center, patrons can find an impressively vast range of direct services and classes, advocacy organizations, and arts events going on. There’s the Transgender Economic Empowerment Initiative; Aguilas, a supportive, culturally sensitive group for gay/bisexual Latinos; Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits, which offers culturally relevant activities for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex Native Americans; and the acclaimed San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, just to name a few groups that call the Center home. Their services are an especially critical support to members of the community who, as the Center’s mission states, often experience additional, intersecting forms of discrimination – people of color, transgender, lesbian, and bisexual women, differently-abled people, youth, elders, immigrants, and low-income individuals.
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This July Tadashi Yoshii celebrated his 90^th birthday. Joining him in for the festivities were his wife of 63 years, Lily, their three children, the children’s spouses, and their five grandchildren, now all adults too.  To honor the milestone their grandfather’s birthday and learn more about Tad and Lily’s lives, two of the Yoshii granddaughters, Sachi Yoshii, 28, and Michi Yoshii, 26, decided to bring their grandparents into the StoryCorps booth in San Francisco for a couple of interviews.

Tadashi Yoshii, with his granddaughter, Michi Yoshii

Tadashi shared many of his favorite family memories with Michi and Sachi, including the birth of his first son, Kenny, and meeting his wife and their grandmother, Lily, at their church in Richmond, CA. Tadashi’s conversation with his granddaughters focused mostly on his experiences during World War II, a painful topic, and one about which neither he nor Lily had shared much with the family’s younger generations. Tadashi, or “Tad”, as his family calls him, was originally from Oakland, CA, where the Yoshiis were part of a large and vibrant Japanese American community. Growing up, he said, his parents tirelessly worked around the clock to run their family’s restaurant. The start of World War II changed everything. Tadashi was 20 years old when their family, along with thousands of other Japanese American families, was forced to leave their business and almost all of their possessions behind to be interned away from the West Coast, labeled as potential “domestic threats” in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attacks. In all, over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast were forced to leave their homes during that time.
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Today the big marriage issue captivating the country is the debate around same-sex unions. But, not long ago, it was inter-racial and inter-cultural marriages that sparked intense political and legal debate across the 50 states. It wasn’t until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court officially legalized interracial marriages on a national level. The case was Loving vs. the State of Virginia, named fittingly after the newlywed couple who brought the case before the court, Mildred Jeter Loving and Richard Loving. Mildred was African American and Richard was white, and though they lived in Virginia, they married in Washington DC, where interracial marriage was legal. Upon their return to Virignia, they were arrested. With the help of the ACLU, their case eventually reached the Supreme Court, and with the court’s decision, all interracial couples in the U.S. were legally free to marry.

This landmark court decision is now commemorated as Loving Day, celebrated with events and festivities across the country on June 12^th, the day of its passing. To honor this year’s 44^th Anniversary of Loving Day , StoryCorps San Francisco teamed up with the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Loving Day national organization, LovingDay.org, to host a special community recording and art-making day for multiracial, multiethnic and mixed heritage individuals, couples, and families. We also set up  listening stations with some of our favorite Loving Day-related broadcast stories.
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San Francisco has been the historic port of entry for immigrants from Asia. North of Market Street and next to Chinatown was a community that came to be known as Manilatown, and it was made up mostly of single men often working as migrant laborers and residing in low cost hotels. Urban renewal in the 1950’s and 60’s moved these residents, many of them WWII veterans, to the South of Market area, or SOMA. Manilatown was devastated: Ten full blocks of low-cost housing, restaurants, barber shops, markets, clubs and other businesses that benefited a Filipino community that numbered around 10,000 people were destroyed.

More recent development, including the Moscone Convention Complex and Yerba Buena Center in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, once again displaced these older Filipinos as well as younger immigrant families. Even so, there is still a considerable Filipino presence in SOMA. Murals depicting Philippine history and community decorate the SOMA neighborhood walls. Also, nearby streets are named after Filipino heroes – including a street I have walked by many times, called Lapu Lapu, named after a Pilipino warrior that killed Portuguese colonialist Ferdinand Magellan in 1521.

A few blocks away from StoryCorps’ home in San Francisco’s South of Market Neighborhood is the Bayanihan Community Center. Bayanihan is a valued element in Filipino culture that means mutual assistance and mutual caring. The Center exists to strengthen the social, physical, and economic well being of the Filipino American community and the South of Market community with special attention to the underserved segments of the community.
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The San Francisco StoryBooth has been at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) for the past two and a half years. I began as a volunteer soon after the opening of the booth – a StoryCorps greeter, but without the orange vest.  Four months later, I was offered the opportunity to become a StoryCorps facilitator.

I have particularly enjoyed the fact that our booth is located here at the CJM. It’s the first time a StoryBooth has been housed in a museum, and because of it, we have many benefits not available to other locations: we are sheltered from inclement weather, restrooms are nearby and the building that houses the CJM is remarkable architecturally. But by far, one of the greatest benefits is the variety of people coming to our booth and to the CJM. They reflect the great diversity of San Francisco and the Bay Area, and through them I encounter a cross section of our society that I otherwise would never have a chance to meet.

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I love jump roping. It’s one of those things that can, in a heartbeat, take me back to childhood and make me burst with pure joy – like jumping on the bed or eating a giant ice cream sundae. That’s why I mostly think of jump roping as a recreational activity, at most a way to get a little exercise or train for other sports. Until I met Ho Ting Lam, that is.  He came to the San Francisco StoryBooth with his teacher at San Francisco International High School, Elizabeth de Rham, aka “Ms. Elizabeth.” Read the rest of this entry »