StoryCorps

Lamar Van Dyke, Paula Lewis and Traci Lewis have a special bond. Lamar gave birth to Traci when she was 18 years old. Unprepared to have a baby, she gave Traci up for adoption. Paula Lewis adopted her. Traci sat down with her biological mom, Lamar, and her adopted mom, Paula, at the StoryCorps booth at the San Francisco Public Library to talk about their family.

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This interview was facilitated by Geraldine Ah-Sue, and produced for KALW by Chris Hambrick. It originally aired in May of 2015. 

Tracy Grubbs grew up fascinated, curious and also afraid of death. Her curiosity, plus her interest in Buddhism led her to volunteer at the Zen Hospice Project, a San Francisco center for the dying supported by the Buddhist community. Grubbs spoke with her colleague Lisa Messano.

Here at Crosscurrents, one of the first assignments we give the fellows in our Audio Academy is to listen to a 40-minute conversation between two loved ones provided by our partners at StoryCorps — then pick out the best bits, and edit and craft it together into a short audio documentary.

Maritza Hurtado Torres has been cooking for as long as she can remember.

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.

In 1996, when San Francisco's Presidio was decommissioned as an army base and turned into a national park, a man named Eric Blind came to work there as an AmeriCorps volunteer. Blind recalls at the time that the dilapidated Presidio was like a “ghost town.” 

Football players from Mission High School in San Francisco made headlines across the country when the team, as a unit, refused to stand for the national anthem, in protest against the oppression of people of color in the U.S.

We all remember quirky family recipes, but we don’t always appreciate that home-cooking until we’ve actually left home. Joyce Lin-Conrad sat down with friend and co-worker Geoff Palla to talk about how her heritage influenced her interest in food, which eventually led them both to teach at the Edible Schoolyard.

It’s not always easy to pass down family traditions, especially when they don’t match mainstream American culture. But that’s what Maria Sanchez and Roberto Vargas are trying to do. For both, Danza Azteca traditions have been important for honoring their Mexican and Nicaraguan cultural heritage. The couple sat down with their children, ages 12 and 14, for a talk about ethnic identity and why Danza is so important to them.

Music is a powerful way to connect people who come from different experiences, but there's a special kind of magic when music amplifies the diversity, heart, and history within one culture. Journalist Belva Davis and KKSF jazz show host Miranda Wilson tease out how the roots of Jazz and hymns are significant to African-American culture, starting with revisiting how Wilson started as an MC on a Bay Area jazz show.

Today we’re sharing a StoryCorps about a young man with Down syndrome. His name is Tim Harris, and there’s a restaurant in Albuquerque named after him: it’s called "Tim’s Place." Harris calls it “the world’s friendliest restaurant.” He works there six days a week and greets each customer at the door. Tim sat down with his father, Keith, who helped him start the business in 2010.

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Elizabeth Beltran-Larios struggled with her identity for much of her childhood. Beltran-Larios was born in Oakland, but she was raised in a small town south of Jalisco, Mexico. Growing up, she felt alienated from the Catholic church because of her sexual orientation. Her exposure to Buddhism in college helped her come to terms with who she is and what she believes. She sat down in the StoryCorps booth to share her story of this transformation.

When someone is dying, sometimes the best medicine is not medicine at all. And sometimes what needs to be healed, is not the body, but the mind. That is the kind of caretaking that Paul Kelley takes pride in doing. When Kelley began his career as a hospice worker in 1983, he knew instantly that he had found his calling.

"I can't fix my toilet at home, I can't fix the car, I can't do bookkeeping, I can't do computers. But I can be with someone who is dying, for some reason."

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For as long as she could remember, Suzanne Thompson wanted to be a mom, but she was running out of time. She thought of her friend Christopher Noessel and his partner Benjamin Remington, who always wanted to be dads, and then she had an idea that could maybe give them all the chance to be parents...together. To make sure their future child wasn’t confused, they sat down with StoryCorps and made this tape for their son, Miles, while he was still in utero. 

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.

Shortly after World War II in Eastern Europe, Slobodan Dan Paich was just a boy – and he says life felt void of color. He remembers the moment light came back in – it was all thanks to a certain musical tale about a dark-haired beauty named Tosca.

Before Laurie Brookner adopted Kate, she knew her as only as a blown-up, photocopied photograph. On the photograph was a Chinese name: Yu Mingren. Anxiously, Laurie traveled all the way to Jiangsu in China to adopt her. Soon Mingren became Kate. As Laurie held Kate in her arms, she was filled with utmost joy—mixed with a dash of sadness that her daughter would never know her Chinese birth mother. Fifteen years later, Kate and Laurie came to the StoryCorps booth at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Kate wanted to ask her mom what it was like when she saw her for the first time.

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.

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.

Shortly after World War II in Eastern Europe, Slobodan Dan Paich was just a boy, and he says life felt void of color. But he remembers the moment light came back in – it was all thanks to a certain musical tale about a dark-haired beauty named Tosca. 

Olin Thomas is a retired army veteran. He says it wasn’t until after he joined the military that he realized he was gay. Despite his fears about coming out, he found support in unexpected places. Thomas sat down in the StoryCorps booth at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco with his friend, Hugo Salinas, to tell his story.

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This story originally aired on April 7, 2011.

From time to time, the StoryCorps team goes mobile, and collects interviews at specific sites around the Bay Area. This piece is part of a series of interviews that took place at Highland Hospital in East Oakland.

Last week marked the 80th birthday of one of San Francisco’s grandest landmarks: Coit Tower. Inside the iconic structure are several colorful murals depicting themes of labor and life in California during the Great Depression. A group of master artists went to work on these murals in 1934 as part of the Public Works of Art Project. The program was part of the federal government’s effort to put people back to work, a precursor to the creation of the Works Progress Administration. 

The year 1934 also marked the controversial West Coast Waterfront Strike, which helped usher in the national organized labor movement. Violence broke out during the strike, and controversy over the radical content in some of the murals ensued. Some of the most contentious scenes were painted over. Bernard Zakheim was one of the Coit Tower muralists, and his daughter Ruth Gottstein remembers the strike in this interview with San Francisco StoryCorps. 

Sitawa Natambu Jamaa has been incarcerated for 33 years at the Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City; 23 of them in the Security Housing Unit, also known as the SHU. He spends most of his time—up to 22 hours a day—in a small, windowless cell. His charge is murder, though his sister Marie Levin says he did not commit the crime.

StoryCorps founder Dave Isay joined KALW’s Hana Baba live by phone to revisit some memories recorded in San Francisco.