High school students across the country are making oral history this week by recording interviews with their elders to stockpile wisdom for the ages.
The Great Thanksgiving Listen was conceived by the nonprofit oral history project StoryCorps. The effort encouraged kids to send audio recordings to a Library of Congress archive using a free smartphone app available at StoryCorps.me.
StoryCorps president and founder Dave Isay said he hoped to double in one weekend the 65,000 audio recordings StoryCorps has collected since 2003.
Students and their interview subjects talked this week about their StoryCorps interviews. Here are their stories:
MY RELIGION IS NONVIOLENCE: Sal Monteiro, an ex-con who was part of a deadly carjacking in 1992, made an impression on Karl Lauture three years ago, when he visited Karl’s class at Moses Brown School in Providence, R.I.
When Karl’s eighth-grade teacher assigned a StoryCorps interview this fall, Karl decided to talk to Monteiro, now a training coordinator at the Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence. In their interview, Monteiro expressed regret about dropping out of high school and being with a friend who fatally shot a man during the carjacking. Both men went to prison.
Karl said their conversation gave him new perspectives on family and religion. Monteiro talked about the preciousness of family reunions, something Karl hadn’t considered.
“I get to see some family members about, like, every other year, and I don’t really take in those moments,” Karl said. “I think next time I get to see them, I’ll really value it.”
Monteiro, 43, also told Karl he doesn’t believe he needs God or organized religion.
“If anything, my religion would be nonviolence,” he said.
Listen: bit.ly/1LCcRfS
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CHOPPING COTTON, BUSING TABLES PART OF STRUGGLES: Long before Bennie Stuart led a small church in Chicago, he chopped cotton for $3 a day, cleared restaurant tables for $45 a week and did social work. But his most interesting job might have been his work as a boy in Arkansas. Stuart was paid in eggs.
He cleaned yards for older neighbors and was allowed to take eggs from the coop in return. But that was no easy task, since snakes and the occasional fox were his competition. He sold the eggs he could get at a local store.
“I needed the money,” the 78-year-old minister said with a laugh in an interview in Bolingbrook, about 30 miles from Chicago.
Stuart told his granddaughter Vanyce Grant about his struggles in hopes of convincing her to get a good education.
“She has been blessed with great opportunities that I didn’t hardly even dream of having,” he said.
Grant, 15, who aspires to be an architect, said she interviewed her grandfather for the StoryCorps project because he often has something interesting to say.
Listen: bit.ly/1MGfvoG
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LET’S CHAT BEFORE YOU LEAVE FOR THE MARINES: Seventeen-year-old Yuliza Ruiz has an older brother who recently signed up for the Marines and will leave in Chicago, where both have been frustrated by crime. Ruiz also wants to go into the military someday, so sitting down to talk with her brother, Emilio, over Thanksgiving is critical.
“I want to ask him his goals. I want to hear his perspective,” she said.
Both siblings say they want to work in law enforcement, in part because the children of immigrants want to curb the gang and violence problems in their neighborhood.
Emilio Ruiz, 19, said his friends have been shooting victims, and he wants to be an example of how to grow up in the neighborhood and succeed.
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A DEEPER RELATIONSHIP WITH GRANDDAUGHTER: Lauren Bonner’s StoryCorps conversation with her grandparents deepened their understanding of each other. She learned about the last time her grandfather Claude Gange saw his mother alive in Brooklyn, N.Y., two days before she was killed by a car.
Lauren, a 13-year-old eighth-grader in Providence, R.I., also listened to her grandmother Camille Gange’s memories of growing up surrounded by her extended family in an eight-unit tenement in 1940s Brooklyn. They had no car or air conditioning but lots of love, Camille Gange said.
“I had all these aunts, uncles, grandparents doting over me constantly, and I felt like I was the queen of the May,” she said.
Claude Gange, a 78-year-old retired school administrator, said the interview with Lauren was a highlight of his year.
“That interview really helped in opening up her to us. I think we may be more likely now to have conversations,” he said.
Listen: bit.ly/1XtRxjz
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HOW IN TOUCH WITH GOD ARE YOU? Rhiannon Leonard said she was curious about her boss Gary Himes’ religious beliefs. She knew that he was active in the service club Ruritan and that his chapter held an pancake breakfast at her church, the Brownsville Church of the Brethren in Maryland.
“I always knew that he believed in God, but I wasn’t sure how in touch with God he is,” Rhiannon, 17, said. “I’ve never really figured out his denomination.”
Himes, 69, paused before answering the question Friday. The kitchen is attached to the general store his family has run for more than a century. He said he was raised in the same church as Rhiannon but now follows personal, nondenominational convictions.
“I believe in God,” Himes said. “I think he’s got a hand on this Earth. I don’t think he controls the Earth. If you follow Christian teachings, you’ll be a good person.”
Himes said he enjoyed the fellowship of the church as boy, even though his parents didn’t attend.
“Everything wasn’t right in the church, but you had to be smart enough to pick out the good from the bad,” he said.
