Jasmyn Morris (JM): It’s 2005… at a public radio conference… Everyone in the industry is there. StoryCorps founder Dave Isay is the keynote speaker… and he has a big announcement to make. 

 

Michael Garofalo (MG): Dave gets on stage and tells the audience that StoryCorps is going national. We’re partnering with public radio stations around the country to send mobile recording booths out to do interviews.

 

JM: Then Dave adds another announcement for good measure… He says… moving forward StoryCorps will be on the radio every Friday on NPR’s Morning Edition. Everyone in the audience began applauding enthusiastically… …except for one person… the person who was running that show.

 

Ellen McDonnell (EM): There were no words; I was just like, “What?” 

 

MG: That’s Ellen McDonnell, who was the head of Morning Edition for many years… 

 

Dave had been pushing for a spot on the show for a while. And Ellen’s feedback was always the same… Morning Edition is a national news program… StoryCorps is just too New York. 

 

JM: Yeah, so she told him, let me know when StoryCorps starts recording nationally and then we’ll discuss it…

 

EM: I went up to him later and said, “Dave, could we have talked about this?” He said, “Oh no…no…no, we did. We definitely talked about it. We definitely…” 

 

You know, he may have had conversations in his head with me, but we never had the conversation where I said “Yes, we will do this weekly.” That’s a big, big commitment to say you’re going to give a very coveted weekly slot on Morning Edition, so I certainly could have pulled it back. I could have said, “Forget it; I don’t care. We’re not doing it.” But, you know, 20 years later, I’m thrilled we did it. Fridays are special because of StoryCorps. With the terrible news surrounding us every day, we need that human connection. And in many ways it’s the rainbow we all need; it’s a special moment. 

 

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MG: The launch of the mobile tour is a very special moment in StoryCorps’s 20 year history…

 

JM: It’s when StoryCorps began to grow exponentially… reaching into every corner of America.

 

MG: To date, our mobile booths have recorded in more than 270 different cities and towns, collecting more than 27,000 interviews. 

 

JM: But in this episode we’re focusing on that first year of the tour… you’ll hear some of those stories. 

 

MG: And about life on the road – from the StoryCorps staff who went along for the ride.

 

NY: So Dave Isay came out to visit us when we were in St Louis. It was about a month in. And I remember he took us out to dinner and, like, right away turned to us and said, “So you’re out on the road and you’re recording all these stories. You’re doing this thing that no one’s ever done before. So I just wanna know, what have you learned about humanity? (laughs) 

 

MG: No pressure or anything… I’m Michael Garofalo… 

 

JM: And I’m Jasmyn Morris.

 

MG: From NPR…this is StoryCorps Then and Now, celebrating 20 years of StoryCorps…

 

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JM: Now when StoryCorps hit the road… we did it in style.

 

MG: That’s right. We took two airstream trailers – these iconic, gleaming aluminum campers – gutted them, and built recording studios inside. 

 

JM: We launched the tour in front of the Library of Congress in May 2005. After that, one booth went west… the other east. 

 

MG: One of the early stops was Sarasota, Florida… where cousins Cherie Johnson and James Ransom stepped into the trailer for a conversation. 

 

JM: They shared memories of growing up in Bradenton, Florida… and specifically… of their larger than life sunday school teacher…

 

James Ransom (JR): Let’s talk about Miss Divine.

 

Cherie Johnson (CJ): Miss Lizzy Divine.

 

JR: Miss Divine was a wiry lady. She wore summer dresses; she had a bandana and a straw hat, and she was the only person I knew that had more power than my grandmother.

 

CJ: She wasn’t a mean person; she was stern —

 

JR: Stern, yes, very stern.

 

CJ: — and you knew when she said something she meant exactly what she said. In fact, she was our Sunday school teacher. The only thing that would keep you from going to Sunday school, you had to have one foot on the banana peel and the other in the grave.

 

JR: Absolutely.

 

CJ: That’s the only thing.

 

JR: There’s no excuse.

 

CJ: You had to go.

 

JR: Had to go.

 

CJ: One of the things that you prayed for when you were in Miss Divine’s class was, ’Lord, please let me get old enough to get out of this class.’ She did the catechism: ’Who made you? God. Where is God? Everywhere.’ She went through and, Lord have mercy please.

 

JR: This Miss Divine would come in on Sunday mornings to take us to Sunday School. And when I saw her come, Cherie, I thought the leaves would be blowing off the trees, and the sky would go black and the clouds would come in and she come in the house one morning and say, ’Children, good morning, children.’ And everybody from my mother on down said, ’Good morning, Miss Divine.’ And she says, ’It’s time to go to Sunday school this morning, children.’ I said, ’Miss Divine, I can’t go to Sunday school today.’ She said, ’No?’ I said, ’No, ma’am.’ She said, ’Why not?’ I said, ’My mother didn’t bring enough clothes for me to go to Sunday school this morning.’ She said, ’Oh, no?’ I said, ’No, ma’am.’ She said, ’Well, what do you have, what kind of clothes do you have?’ I said, ’All I have, Miss Divine, are my pajamas and my tennis shoes.’ She said, ’Well, that’s OK, honey, put your tennis shoes on; we’ll go to Sunday school.’ I looked at my mother and she looked away, Cherie. Miss Divine made me walk two blocks in my pajamas and my tennis shoes. I had to sit in church with my friends during Sunday School in my pajamas and my tennis shoes. I’m gonna tell you, Cherie, I never lied again.

 

CJ: Miss Divine was always there to take care of us. But when Miss Divine braided your hair you eyes went up like this. You had to sleep on soft pillows because I mean, boy she had it tight. And Miss Divine had mango trees all over her yard but Miss Divine never brought you a mango until it was rotten. It would smell like liquor. That’s when she brought you the mango.

 

JR: But you know what? That’s the kind of stuff that we got growing up and I’ll never forget that.

 

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JM: That’s James Ransom and Cherie Johnson in Sarasota, Florida. Cherie died in 2017. And James is now a StoryCorps board member … he recently gave the toast at our 20th anniversary gala.

 

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MG: In preparing for this episode, we realized one of the stories that doesn’t really get told… Is what it’s like to be out on the road collecting these interviews.

 

JM: Yeah, you’ve heard us refer to StoryCorps facilitators – but unless you’ve done a StoryCorps interview yourself – you might not understand what that job is. These are the people who welcome participants into the booth, engineer all the recordings, make sure everything sounds good, and also…listen. They are there to jump in and ask questions, basically be the ear of future generations who may listen back to this.

 

MG: I always call it the best job in the world, especially the mobile tour facilitators. They go out in pairs for months at a time to record stories in the airstreams… spending weeks in each community they visit… just absorbing the wisdom of all the people they meet. 

 

NY: People often assumed we slept in the recording booth because, you know, it’s an airstream trailer that people do use as campers.

 

JM: That’s Nick Yulman… one of the very first mobile facilitators. And no, they don’t sleep in the booth.

 

NY: It’s really, kind of, one of the best ways to travel that I can imagine. That you not only go to a place and obviously get to see what’s there and learn about it’s history, but, like, to actually directly hear about people’s lives there. And it’s kind of the thing that I often would like to be able to do, like to go up to a stranger and just, like, ask somebody any kind of question you want. 

 

MG: Nick spent four months on tour that first year… and we recently asked him what that was like…

 

NY: It was a beautiful routine. You’d wake up and you’d go to the booth and you’d get the airstream ready to greet people and record. And then there’d be six interviews a day and so every hour a new group of people would come. 

 

JM: Nick’s first stop was Chicago… where the booth was parked outside the Field Museum. 

 

NY: I think we worked six days and then had a day off and then five days and then two days off. It was certainly all consuming, so I was tired. But part of what was so exciting about doing this work was not just like, we’re making these recordings and we’ll produce radio from it and people will hear it now, but also what the impact will be 100 years from now if someone can find this recording and hear those voices.

 

MG: On the way out of town to their next stop… Nick and two other facilitators… Kayvon Bahramian and Rani Shankar… did something that’s only happened once…. They took the booth to someone’s house… and not just anyone… someone with a special connection to StoryCorps…

 

NY: As we were leaving Chicago, we made a special stop at Studs Terkel’s house. For how large he loomed in our imaginations, he was not a large man physically and, you know, he was walking with a cane. You know, we kind of helped him up into the booth and got him situated. 

 

Studs Terkel (ST): How’s my voice sound to you? 

Facilitators: Sounds good. 

 

ST: Sounds strange? 

 

Facilitators: No. 

 

ST: I can’t tell. 

 

Facilitator Kayvon: It sounds seasoned.

 

ST: My hearing aid’s on the blink, eyesight is blurry. Aside from that, pretty good. 

 

Facilitator Rani: You look good.

 

ST: So here we are. You go ahead, name your poison…

 

NY: He’d recently had heart surgery but, as soon as we started recording, he just became incredibly animated, just this light in his eyes and technically you could say we interviewed him, but I think we only got in maybe two or three questions… 

 

Studs Terkel (ST): What has happened to the human voice? Vox humana. Hollering, shouting, quiet, talking, buzz. I was leaving the airport, this is in Atlanta. You know you leave the gate, you take a train that took you to the concourse of your choice. And I get into this train — dead silence. A few people seated or standing. Up above, you hear a voice, that once was a human voice, but no longer, now it talks like a machine. Concourse one: Fort Worth, Dallas, Lubbock — that kind of voice. Just then the doors are about to close, pneumatic doors, one young couple rush in and push open the doors and get in. Without missing a beat, that voice above says, ’Because of late entry we’re delayed 30 seconds.’ The people looked at that couple as though the couple had committed mass murder you know. And the couple was shrinking like this, you know. Now I’m known for my talking — I’m gabby — so I say, ’George Orwell, your time has come and gone.’ I expect a laugh… dead silence. And now they look at me, and I’m with the couple, the three of us, are at the Hill of Calvary on Good Friday. And then I say, ’My god, where is the human voice?’ And just then there’s a little baby… maybe the baby’s about a year old or something. And I say ’Sir or Madame,’ to the baby, ’what is your opinion of the human species?’ Well what does the baby do? The baby starts giggling. I say, ’Thank god, the sound of a human voice.’

 

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NY: Because StoryCorps is a non-profit, we also ask people if they’d be interested in making a donation to support the project. I remember at the end of the interview, he said something like, “So can I give you some money? Is this where I can give you a donation?” And I think we sort of begged it off. We said, “Oh no Studs. This is such an honor to meet you and get to record you. But then what he wound up doing was giving us a five dollar bill which he also autographed as his donation for StoryCorps. You know I did get a sense he felt somewhat honored that this was a whole project that in some ways was building on what he had done. And to be able to go to his house and record him was an incredible honor.

 

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JM: After that interview, Nick, and his co-facilitator Rani, and the booth headed south.

 

MG: We’ll go with them… after the break. Stay with us.

 

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[BREAK]

 

JM: Welcome back. A big part of the facilitator’s job is to bear witness … and sometimes that means they find themselves sitting a few feet from people who lived through history. 

 

MG: It’s one of the incredible things about the archive we’ve built… all the first-hand accounts of things you usually only read about in books. Here’s Nick…

 

NY: One of the stops I was in was Memphis, Tennessee and we were parked just a few blocks away from the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was killed. And one of the interviews that I got to facilitate was with Bessie and Taylor Rogers, who came in to talk about their recollection of Martin Luther King’s final speech…

 

Taylor Rogers (TR): I mean it was wall to wall with people.

 

Bessie Rogers (BR): And it was stormin’ and rainin’. He preached and he said that, uh…

 

TR: ‘I’ve been to the mountaintop.’

 

BR: Oh, yeah.

 

[Archival tape] Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK): Because I’ve been to the 

mountaintop…

 

TR: ‘And I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the promised land.’

 

MLK: And I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the promised land…

 

TR: ‘I might not get there with you.’

 

MLK: I may not get there with you…

 

TR: ‘But we will get there.’

 

MLK: But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the 

promised land…

 

BR: And he was crying. Tears was rollin’ down his cheeks.

 

TR: Preachers were cryin’, people were cryin’, and everybody was cryin’ and…

 

BR: He really talked that night. I mean he really, really talked.

 

TR: You could tell by the expression on his face and the feeling and the sound of his voice that he knew something was going to happen. He said, cause, uh, ‘I’m not fearing any man.’

 

MLK: I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of 

the Lord.

 

BR: Next day he was killed.

 

TR: You know, it’s kinda like you lost a part of your family. You just really can’t describe it. He stopped everything, put everything aside to come to Memphis to see about the people on the bottom of the ladder, the sanitation workers. 

 

After his death, we marched. You couldn’t hear a sound. You couldn’t hear nothin’ but leather against pavement. It was just some terrible days back then. But, uh, with God’s help, we came through. And it means something to know that you was a part of this.

 

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NY: It is humbling to sit with somebody who has been, you know, a witness to history like that. And also, like, Bessie and Taylor Rogers are not famous civil rights leaders in the sense that you’re not going to read about them in every history book about that struggle. But, like, this is such a central and key moment in their lives and to be able to have a chance to remember and record that is very important. 

 

JM: And it wasn’t just stories from 40 or 50 years ago… they were documenting key moments that were happening in real time. 

 

MG: Yeah, this was 2005. And of course, that’s the year that Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Not long after the storm, StoryCorps took the booth down to Gulfport, Mississippi.

 

NY: And that last stop was actually something that was not planned initially, but we wound up finding a way to kind of add it on because Hurricane Katrina happened, like, shortly after I started on the Mobile tour. And it was, sort of, our first opportunity to bring the booth to a community that had been affected by it. 

 

And this was just a few months after the hurricane, so there was still so much destruction. And people were coming in and talking about really harrowing experiences, and we were staying at, like, a casino hotel that was right on the water there. You know, and the casinos there are these offshore barges. The strip that we were on, some of the barges had blown inland and crushed buildings, so it was this, kind of, apocalyptic setting and to get there we had to go through a national guard checkpoint and then get up in the morning and go to the booth and record stories. 

 

Douglas P. deSilvey: My name is Douglas P. deSilvey, I’m a native of the Gulf Coast. The story I want to tell today is about my family, the three women in my family, have steered my life for the past 59 years, to the man that I am today and I hope and think that I am a pretty good fella.

 

NY: When Douglas deSilvey came in, you know, he came alone. So in that case, the facilitator would serve as the interviewer. And so I knew I was going to interview him. And he was very soft-spoken. And it became clear why he was coming in alone. And that’s because, I don’t know that he had somebody who he could sit down and talk to about this or he could do this interview with.

 

DPS: Every time we had a hurricane we would go over to Nadine’s home. We considered this just another storm, since ’77 when she built this house, we been through every storm in it.

 

Not knowing what we were in for, we were sitting on the bed and we could hear glass breaking, and I walked to the back of her bedroom ,which was facing the bay, just to measure the water and see how high it was. And in the back the water came up so fast, it was unbelievable. As I turned and told them to hold hands, that we was gonna have to get in the water, the roof came down on all of us…and my lungs started to fill up with water, and I kept asking Jesus, ”Please don’t let me go like this,” I had to get my family out. I got out and they didn’t. I’m a big guy, I’m 268 pounds, I exercise and stay healthy and I just, I could not do a thing. It was just their time to go is the only way I can understand this.

 

Losing a family is, I don’t think there’s any words for it. It kinda makes you wonder what life’s all about… many, many questions I have not received answers for yet. I just don’t know I feel these days. I wake up and go to the office and do my job and come home, I’ve got the house full of their belongings that I don’t know what to do about. You know, as a father, and a dad and a husband and everything, you always plan for the future of everybody, and it’s just the opposite now. I have nobody to plan for, or work on retirement for or save for buying a house…it’s just me.

 

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NY: You know, being able to sit down and ask questions and hold space and know that it’s going to be an incredibly emotional interview–I think there were moments during that recording when we both were crying and just had to pause a moment and, just kind of, take a deep breath before we continued on. Definitely those interviews in Gulfport have stuck with me and I think about a lot of those people still.  

 

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NY: There’s two facilitators who would work on the Mobile Tour at a time. It was incredible to be out on the road with just one other person and, you’re having this experience, so to kind of have somebody go through that with you, to, like, process the things we’d heard. And like, some nights we would tell each other we had this incredible moment in the booth where two people were holding hands and crying. But also there were some nights where you’d just be so emotionally drained that talking was hard. You felt like you’d already spent all the resources you had to communicate or to actively listen to somebody because it was just an intense day. 

 

MG: We’ve talked before about how StoryCorps connects people – well, this is another way that happens… between facilitators who have shared the experience of being on tour together. 

 

JM: At the end of a facilitator’s time on the road, they often do their own interview together. Here’s a little bit of Nick’s conversation with his co-facilitator Rani… 

 

NY: I really wanna… I wanna thank you Rani. I was just so blessed to, like, have you as a partner on the tour, just like the level of curiosity that you bring to everything, and, just like, the empathy you exude for just anybody you’re interacting with is just… I learned a lot from being on the road with you, and just knowing you too. And it’s been really wonderful. 

 

Rani Shankar (RS): Thank you Nick. I feel the same way. I think I told you on the road how much I’ve learned from you just by watching you in action. I’m really gonna miss working with you, and I feel so blessed to have become part of your everyday interaction.

 

NY: (Laughs)

 

RS: Like, I spend more time with you than anyone else really. 

 

NY: Yeah. 

 

RS: I was thinking, like, we had every meal together for like 10 weeks. 

 

NY: (Laughs) I know.

 

RS: And I’ve never had that experience with any other person ever, and thank you so much. 

 

NY: Yeah.

 

<MUSIC>

 

MG: We’ll leave you now with some closing thoughts from Nick about life on tour… and what it meant to him.

 

NY: By the end of four months, you know, I was very tired. We worked hard but it was unforgettable. There’s still things I think about from that time, the people we met and the places we went to, and I just think of it as one of the best times of my life. I think it kind of reset my mind in a lot of ways too, just a different way of seeing the world, a different way of interacting with people. 

 

I think one of the key takeaways for me is, like, you never know what somebody is gonna talk about. So  when you’re walking down the street, and it’s easy to get into the mode of making quick assessments of people, but nothing dissolves that feeling faster than having this experience day in and day out of having somebody walk into the booth and having your mind blown about what their life was or what they’re talking about or the relationship they have with the person sitting across from them. 

 

One of the clearest and I think most genuine ways you can show love to somebody is to be curious about who they are; what they care about; what they’ve done. And being able to sit and witness so many people doing this for family members, and what it meant for them, like, it’s an incredible  example in my own life and my own personal relationships. 

That’s something that I try to bring to being a parent too, letting your kids know that you genuinely want to know what they’re doing, how they feel about it. And, like, make sure that you’re having these deeper conversations.

 

JM: Next week… how a listener’s comment led one man home again…

 

WLW: Is that West? No? 

 

GPS: Take the next right and then arrive at your destination on the right…

 

WLW: Oh my gracious… this is West High School. This is extremely different… Look, look there’s black students walking, coming to school. Amazing… [Laughs]

JM: This episode was produced by Jud Esty-Kendall with Max Jungreis. Our technical director is Jarrett Floyd. 

MG: Liz McCarty created the art for this episode. Special thanks to Ellen McDonnell, Nick Yulman, all of the facilitators who have been on the road over the years, producer Katie Simon, and facilitator Nelson Simon.

 

JM: Find out how to record your own conversation at StoryCorps – dot – org… You can go to one of our storybooths, visit one of our mobile booths when they’re in your area, use our app, or record remotely. I’m Jasmyn Morris.

 

MG: And I’m Michael Garofalo… 

 

We’ll be back next week. Thanks for listening.

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