As an Orthodox Jew, Nancy had to be creative about observing her faith while she was on skiing or biking excursions.  “In 1994 she decided she was going to take a back roads trip out west, I think it was a 10 day bike tour, into southern Utah and northern Arizona.  But she had no problems,” says Harvey.  “One time she stayed in a tent over the entire Saturday and then ultimately caught up with the group subsequently on the Sunday.”

Harvey and Suri came to the Mobile Booth with a copy of  the book they published after Nancy’s death.  The book serves as a companion to the website Harvey and Suri created to honor their daughter.  Harvey read one of the passages written by one of Nancy’s fellow cyclists:  “Nancy always worked harder than everybody else because she was a kosher racer.  It’s hard to arrange bike racing around the Jewish Sabbath rules but Nancy always did it.”

“After 9/11 when we went back to her apartment to retrieve many of her belongings there was her racing bicycle and her skis,” recalls Harvey.   “I barely could get on a bicycle and get off without falling and also my skiing is not the greatest but I was determined to basically be able to ride her bike.  Getting on and off the bike and riding up and down Cenral Park or Prospect Park or up in the mountains gave me sense of how Nancy felt riding the bike.”

Retired firefighter Harriet Duren and New York City Fire Museum director, Linda Burke,  came to the StoryBooth in Lower Manhattan and talked about being in one of the first classes of female firefighters in New York City.

Born and raised in Harlem, Harriet talked about her family’s reaction to her decision to become a firefighter. “They laughed at me.  My father was impressed,  but he never would say anything.  My mother was adamant against it.  She did not want me to come into this job.  The idea of going into the fire department was something very strange.  They thought that maybe a police would be better - at least I’d have a gun. ”

She later describes what it’s like the first time she entered a burning building.”The one thing that really enc0mpasses you when you go in there, it can be very quiet. and You can hear the fire crackling, it’s like you, you’re in a sound proof booth, because all of the smoke and gasses are around and you have on your mask, and you’re searching, really searching….”

She also remembered her last fire in harrowing detail.

“It was on a Sunday  at 1 in the morning and by 1:05 I was on fire and out the window.We went in the top floor to search and it exploded and all of it came on me, and then I was on fire and I had to go out the  3rd floor window.

The fire truck couldn’t get the ladder over to us so they told us  to jump.  I saw my lieutenant go out the window and I saw my irons guy - and they never woke up.  So I thought I was going to be dead too.  I stopped to pray first, and when I did, firetrucks came, another firefighter ran up to the building, and when I got ready to jump he put his body in the way.  I jumped from the 3rd floor to cement and I didn’t break anything.  It saved my life.  I never forgot him.”

Harriet was part of one of the first engines to respond to the 1993 World Trade Center attacks - her engine received a medal for their work there.

After 15 years in the New York Fire Department, Harriet retired from active  duty, but is still fighting fires by teaching fire safety at the New York City Fire Museum.

As I made my way through the sea of people to the StoryCorps booth at the gay pride celebration, I kept thinking ‘If I didn’t understand what this celebration is about, I would be mighty confused right about now’.

I didn’t realize until later that I, in fact, had no idea what the celebration is actually about.

A little backround: in 1969, the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar on Christopher Street in Manhattan. In response to this seemingly unprovoked attack, protestors rioted for several days after. This is widely considered to be the event that unified and accelerated the gay rights movement. But like so many other celebrations, it is easy to miss the historical implications of the day and focus simply on the excesses of the moment.

But in looking beyond the bright colors, far-out get ups and cheap beer lies a very real, tangible energy that has nurtured hope and provided community to so many. The gay pride celebration is no longer simply a commemoration of a single past event, it is a reminder to everyone that the future has more struggles in store on the road to equality. And it couldn’t have been a better place for StoryCorps to have been. If there were ever voices that need to be heard, they are the thousands upon thousands of people who were crammed into downtown San Francisco to celebrate the causes of justice, social equality and freedom of expression.

StoryCorps was lucky to have been a part of the gay pride festivities. Thanks to our partnership with the Contemporary Jewish Museum, we were able to reach out to a host of people in the LGBTQ community who would have never heard of StoryCorps otherwise. A big thank you goes out to all who came out in support of such a worthy cause.

StoryCorps is working to launch a new initiative, StoryCorps OutLoud (storycorps.org/outloud), in order to capture even more stories from the LGBTQ community. Be sure to make a reservation at our San Francisco StoryBooth and come tell your story!

Santiago left Mexico and traveled to the United States, as he said, “para buscar una cosa diferente,” to find something different. While working on the farms of the Yakima Valley in Washington state, Santiago saved his money and brought his family to start a new life.

Many years later Ricardo asked his father how it felt to watch each of his eleven children graduate from high school and go onto too college.  Santiago responded, “Me emociono tanto ver como las cosas pueden mejorar con esfuerzo,” I am so excited to see how things can improve with effort. “Eso para mi era como un milagro, haberme yo con tan poquita escuela, tan poquita oportunidad. Me han negado mucho por la falta de la escuela, pero a mis hijos no.” That for me was like a miracle, having so little school, so little opportunity. I have been denied many things for my lack of education, but my children will not be.

Santiago strongly believes that, “La mejor herencia es la escuela.” The best inheritance is school.

The Blais have been sugaring — that is, making maple syrup — for three generations.  Muriel’s great uncle Lazarre Bisson started tapping sugar maple trees in the ’20s with his nephew Armand Bisson and the Bisson Sugar House was born.  That was back in the day of hand cranked drills and metal buckets.

Lucien and Muriel Blais when they first started making syrup

Sugaring season starts around March and April when the weather turns warm during the day but still freezes over night.  “Warm” in the north country is around 40 degrees.  On average, it takes 40 to 50 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of syrup.

Little at Bisson’s Sugar House has physically changed since Lazarre and Armand first started. There are still the same benches, same sign, same wood-burning stove, same smell of split birch logs and sap.  Sure, technology has advanced — Muriel and Lucien no longer collect sap in buckets, but use a system of plastic tubing to tap the trees — but for Berliners, Bisson’s remains a fixture in the community.

And the syrup, well, let’s just say that I have been eating a lot of pancakes lately.

On Thursday June, 4th, StoryCorps participated in the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s first ever Oy Vey Thursday event. Outside the museum, in Jessie Square, event-goers danced to the all-gal old-time stylings of the Stairwell Sisters before enjoying the aforementioned signature cocktail and joining StoryCorps Facilitators to listen to some of our favorite clips. No kvetching occurred and a fantastic time was had by all!

This week Liz Forrer interviewed her friend Marie Magnuson in Wenatchee to learn a little bit more about her friend, and her timing couldn’t have been better. It turns out that Marie’s Aunt Nora was the founder of Father’s Day! Marie’s father’s father, William Jackson Smart, and his wife lived in Eastern Washington with their 11 children. When his wife died suddenly, William was left to care for his children alone. Marie remembers him as a doting grandfather, who even gifted her a horse. Marie’s Aunt Nora was so grateful for her father who had raised her and her siblings so tirelessly, she thought that he deserved a day as much as mothers. And so she fought and advocated to honor all father’s with a day.

Poof is a resident historian here in Berlin, which is also know as “the town that trees built.” Berlin is a paper mill town.  During its heyday in the late 19th century and into the early 20th century, five mills ran full time churning out paper goods.  Each spring, according to Poof, men drove logs down the Androscoggin River to supply the mills with lumber.  These men wore spiked boots and worked the fallen trees down river, separating the logs to be delivered to each mill by use of a series of boom piers, or man made islands, which still dot the Androscoggin River.

Paul “Poof” Tardiff

After long, harsh winters in the woods,  loggers and river drivers flooded into the big city during log-driving season, transforming Berlin into a lively - and sometimes rowdy - place. Log drives ended in the 1960s and the last paper mill closed in 2006.

Today, Berlin is the throes of a new phase transitioning from a booming mill town into a smaller, quieter place.  What is next for the town that trees built?  We have three weeks to find out…

Marcia told her daughter, Sabrina, about her most memorable childhood home at the Fergus Falls State Hospital in Fergus Falls, MN. In 1954, when Marcia was 5 years old, her father was hired as the chief clinical psychologist and housing at the hospital was provided with the job.

Fergus Falls State Hospital (courtesy KirkbrideBuildings.com)

Playdates at the hospital were infrequent because Marcia’s friends’ parents “weren’t too keen on having their kids come up and play.” So instead of other children, Marcia made friends and played with patients who lived at the hospital.

Evelyn was one of Marcia’s best friends at the hospital. She was in her 20s and they played together almost everyday. Marcia remembered: “I asked my dad why [she was] there and he would talk to me like an adult. My dad told me Evelyn was a paranoid schizophrenic.”

Marcia’s father was Evelyn’s therapist, and he told Marcia that she “probably did more therapy with her than he did. We walked and we played. She was just Evelyn….I knew that they were patients at the hospital and they couldn’t take care of themselves somewhere else, but they were just people and that was a pretty profound experience to have.”

Marcia Page and her daughter, Sabrina Bender

Even though stigma surrounded these institutions, Marcia’s memories are positive. She said the patients who lived at the hospital “had pride in taking care of their hospital and their community….The really positive thing was that they were living their lives and being productive, while being cared for. ”

Marcia and Sabrina’s interview was recorded in partnership with the San Luis Obispo County SELPA.

Pictured above are the festivities just outside the MobileBooth, at the Wenatchee Performing Arts Center,  which Northwest Public Radio organized to greet StoryCorps to the city. The opening day shindig was complete with baskets of apples on every table. NWPR has also put together a slide-show with an audio clip from the first interview with Harriet Bullitt and Wilfred Woods. The Woods family shares a three-generation legacy of running the Wenatchee World, one of the few remaining family-owned newspapers in the country. Wilfred Woods’ father played an instrumental role in making Wenatchee the apple capital by advocating for the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam and the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project, which irrigates much of the region, as well as providing hydroelectric power.

Today Facilitator Carl Scott and I talked about StoryCorps with two other local radio stations, La Super Z, , and Apple FM. We are looking forward to hearing more stories from the folks that live and work in the Wenatchee Valley.