StoryCorps

It takes all kinds of people to help support those with HIV. Friends and co-workers Adrienne Elias and Eric Sutter come from very different backgrounds, but they both feel passionate about their work at Shanti, a San Francisco non-profit dedicated to enhancing the lives of people with HIV and other life threatening illnesses.

Patricia Chin was born in San Francisco’s Chinatown.  She had never left the neighborhood when she auditioned to be a chorus girl. It was quite a leap for a young Asian-American girl, born in 1935, but Chin loved the adventure, and saw it as a way to bring home extra money. Her group, the Chinese Vanities, performed in nightclubs up and down the West Coast.

From time to time, the StoryCorps team goes mobile, and collects interviews at different sites around the Bay Area. One of the places they visited was Highland Hospital in East Oakland. The public hospital has been around since 1927, and has since served thousands of patients from all walks of life.

After serving time in the Air Force, Nathan Baxter, an African American man from Pennsylvania, ended up in the South in the 1960s. Baxter learned a lot of lessons during and after his service – one of which was how difficult it could be to be a black man in the South at that time. He stopped by mobile Storycorps booth in Oakland to share some never-told experiences with his descendants.