StoryCorps celebrates more voices and a book

Record Your Story

Recording sessions are available by appointment only and can be made through StoryCorps website or by calling StoryCorps at 800-850-4406.

Booth hours are 1 pm to 6 pm Tuesday and 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. Saturday.

(Participants do not need to buy an admission ticket to the museum if they are recording a StoryCorps interview.)

Atlanta History Center

McElreath Hall

130 West Paces Ferry Road NW

Atlanta.

To hear more StoryCorps stories, go to www.storycorps.org

Dr. W. Lynn Weaver steps inside a sound-proof booth to tell stories about his beloved father, Ted Weaver.

During the 2007 recording at the Martin Luther King Jr., Center in Atlanta, Weaver, former chair of the department of surgery at the Morehouse School of Medicine, tells his daughter, Kimberly, how his father made him feel safe during the difficult days of Jim Crow. Weaver also talks about learning algebra from his father, who worked as a chauffeur and a janitor in Knoxville, Tennessee.

I got frustrated, saying, ‘I just can’t figure this out.’ My father said, ‘What’s the problem? Let me look at it.’ I said, ‘Dad, they didn’t have algebra in your day!’ and I went to bed. At around 4 o’clock in the morning, he woke me up, and sat me [down] at the kitchen table and taught me algebra. What he had done was sit up all night and read the algebra book, and then he explained the problems to me so I could do them and understand them. My father was everything to me. He was the greatest person I’ve ever known, the light of my life and the heart of my heart.

Weaver’s story is one of 42 recordings featured in the new book, “Ties that Bind: Stories of Love & Gratitude from the First Ten Years of Story Corps,” by Dave Isay, founder of StoryCorps. The book includes four recordings in Georgia.

“When people say these stories make them cry, and that there’s something about the story makes them more joyous, it’s that these stories remind us what is important in life, and how lucky we are to be alive. And when you think about the craziness in Washington, this tells a very different American story and reminds us that we really share more in common than what divides us,” said Isay, who will be at the Atlanta History Center on Oct. 24.

A decade ago, StoryCorps grew out a simple idea: ask an important person in your life to go into a sound-proof booth.As Isay puts it, “If I had 40 minutes left to live, what would I ask this person who means so much to me?”

At the end of the session, participants walk away with a CD copy of the interview, and StoryCorps sends another copy to the Library of Congress, where it becomes a part of America’s history.

What started with a booth in Grand Central Terminal has grown into one of the largest oral history projects of its kind with recordings in all 50 states. A permanent StoryCorps recording studio was set up at the Atlanta History Center recently. With about 2,500 interviews conducted locally, Atlanta ranks in the top three spots for recordings.

Now 50,000 interviews-strong (with almost 100,000 participants), StoryCorps speaks to the power of the bonds between families, friends, neighbors. Hundreds of the conversations are broadcast on NPR stations around the globe.

This new book fills pages with one deeply personal, poignant story after another. From life lessons to moments when lives are forever changed, these short stories also pack a lot of love into a few hundred words.

In a March 2011 conversation recorded in Macon, Steven Wells tells his daughter Jennifer how much he loves her — and how he wanted to be a different father than the one he had.

You were always kind of my buddy. Even though I am your father and I tried to be an authority figure, I also tried to be the father to you that my father was never to me. When I was about 10 years old, I was asking my dad to play baseball with me, and he didn't want to. My mother started bugging him: Come on Bill. Go out and play ball with the boy. And I'll never forget my dad say, 'Jesus Christ, Kay! I am the boy's father. If he wants to play with somebody, he can go up the street and play with one of the other kids!" I heard that, and I just said, 'OK, well I'm not going be that kind of father." (Steven Wells died unexpectedly six months after the recording.)

Isay said in one interview, a daughter who had stopped chemotherapy decided to resume treatments while talking to her mother.

“After the interview, the daughter decided she had a lot more to live for,” said Isay. “People sometimes forget how much they matter.”

In a 2010 interview recorded in Morrow, Georgia, Theresa Nguyen talks to her daughter Stephanie about the fall of Saigon in 1975 and escaping on the 12th attempt in a tattered wooden boat. She was lucky to get to shore alive.

But as Theresa talks to her daughter in a room with walls covered with a thick, soundproof lining, the conversation deals on the relationship between mother and daughter — about love, and some regret.

We were taken into the refugee camp. About a year later, when I was 17, I was allowed to come to the United States.

So that’s why your dad and I worked so hard — and why we pushed our children so hard. You want your children to have a better life than you do. But many times when I look back at your upbringing, if I had to do it again, a couple of things I would have changed.

Stephanie asks her mother, “What would you do differently?”

Her mother responds, “I would be a little bit softer, a little bit more compromising.”

During the interview, Theresa tells her daughter that she is proud of her.

When Stephanie acts surprised to hear the words, her mother, moved to tears, tells her daughter, “I know many times I’m very proud of you but I don’t say it.”