Sally Edwards and Lue Hutchinson

Kentucky residents Sally Edwards (left) and Lue Hutchinson (right) both had sons serving in the Gulf War. Sally’s son, Jack, was a Marine captain. Lue’s son, Tom Butts, was an Army staff sergeant. The two men, both killed in February of 1991, never knew each other, but today, their mothers are best friends.

Sally learned about Lue’s son while reading the newspaper and wanted to offer support to someone in a similar position as herself, so she wrote to her, “If you need help and you want to talk, I’m here.”

At StoryCorps, they discuss their friendship and share what they have meant to each other’s lives over the years.

Originally aired May 24, 2013, on NPR’s Morning Edition.

Top: Jack Edwards, a Marine captain in the Gulf War, killed in February 1991. Photo courtesy of Sally Edwards.

Below: Tom Butts on top of a Black Hawk helicopter. Photo courtesy of Lue Hutchinson.

Betty Jenkins

As a young woman, Betty Jenkins received a gift from her mother, an inflatable bra with a straw-like tube that was used to inflate the pads in the cups and enhance its wearer’s figure.

As Betty tells it, “I was very skinny, and I didn’t have any curves. I guess my mother got kind of worried, because she didn’t think I had enough boyfriends…I was real excited, so I blew and blew to about [size] 32.”

During a plane trip in South America, while the plane was flying near the Andes Mountains, she began to feel pressure and sensed a problem. It turned out the cabin was not pressurized, and the bra, whose pads could be inflated up to size 48, was expanding.

Once is passed size 48, one of the cups burst, making a noise so loud that the co-pilot came out of the cockpit with a gun wondering what had happened. The plane ended up making an emergency landing, and Betty was handed over to the police who ordered her to strip as they looked for what they assumed was a bomb.

Betty’s mother, who passed away in 1967, enjoyed the story so much that she kept the broken bra. While the bra has been lost to time, Jenkins, 94, says that that the attention she received wasn’t the kind she was hoping for.

Originally aired June 27, 2008, on NPR’s Morning Edition.