The national project that records and archives oral histories has released a new book detailing stories of gratitude and inspiration, including one story from Idaho you may remember.
StoryCorps is in its tenth year and its latest collection of stories is called “Ties That Bind: Stories of Love and Gratitude from the First Ten Years of StoryCorps.”
David Isay founded the StoryCorps project, and says this book is different from past books.
“For our tenth anniversary book, we were looking for a book that really spoke to the essence of StoryCorps,” says Isay. “Often people will bring that person who’s kind of been most important in their life, to honor that person or come to the booth to remember that person. So this is a book of those stories, a book of gratitude, of inspiration, a book about how we save each other. Mother Theresa used to say 'we’ve forgotten that we belong to each other' and this is a book that I hope helps us remember.”
One of the stories in the book comes from Idaho. Kathy Henrickson and Diane Hartman came to the mobile StoryCorps booth in Boise in 2008. They shared the story of their mom and the day she died in a house fire.
Q: This story must have made an impact at StoryCorps to have made it in the book?
A. Absolutely. We’ve done 50,000 interviews now, with about 100,000 people across the country. It’s the largest collection of human voices every gathered. Every interview is equally important to us. But some have this universal quality that make them appropriate to share with a larger audience and this is one of those. The ratio of stories that get broadcast to stories that actually get put in a book is something like 700- or 800-to-one.
We’re proud of all the stories in the book and honored to have anyone who has participated in StoryCorps to have come and recorded their interview with us and save their stories for new generations.
Q. What’s your favorite story from the new book?
A. This is, I think, probably the most poignant and powerful of all the books that we’ve done and there are a lot of stories in it that I love.
I do think of the story of Oshea Israel and Mary Johnson, which I think is pretty extraordinary and speaks to the surprising things that can happen in StoryCorps booth.
Oshea Israel, about 18 years ago, was in a gang and he murdered Mary Johnson’s son. About 12 years into his prison sentence, Mary Johnson wanted to meet the man who had killed her only son, went to the penitentiary and in subsequent years, went back and visited. When Oshea got out of prison, he ended up moving in next door to Mary and they have sort of a mother and son relationship now.
They came to StoryCorps soon after he was released to talk about the friendship they developed and getting through the grief and the guilt as best as possible after the tragic incident of the murder of Mary’s son.
Q. What’s the future of StoryCorps, five, 10, 15 years down the line?
A. When StoryCorps started 10 years ago, it was supposed to be a 10 year project, 10 years and out. So we would be right now, sweeping up the dust from the end of recording these interviews. But about a year into the project, I began to really see the power of this simple idea of two people coming to this booth and using 40 minutes to distil their lives and pass wisdom from one generation to the next. At that point, I decided to devote the rest of my life to StoryCorps. The dream is that someday this will be a sustaining national institution, that’s part of the fabric of this country. We’re going to our best to keep growing this thing. We’re just at the very beginning.
Copyright 2013 Boise State Public Radio
