New Life Story Minute: In Between Edinboro and Aberdeen

Life Story Minute: In Between Edinboro and Aberdeen: Scott and his brother were born in the United States, but they grew up in Dundee, Scotland. Listen above or at the Internet Archive...

New Podcast: Audio Snapshots of Your Life Story

New from our friend Ian Kath at Create Your Life Story:

Episode 67 : Audio Snapshots of Your Life Story
Listen to the podcast here.

Enhance your skill & confidence while recording your LifeStory

Getting started is often the hardest part of recording a life story and getting started isn’t all the preparation. It’s starting to record audio. Your Audio!

A good place to get some motivation is with the free Quick Start Mini-Guide PDF.

Record on Phone to AudioBoo & SoundCloud

This useful information will help your overview but if you want more, you can get the complete Quick Start Guide which will get you started today while helping keep Create Your Life Story producing all this valuable content.

But what about the actual audio?

Click here to read Ian's new post on his website, Create Your Life Story.com

Be sure to check out Ian Kath mentioned on BBC (February 21, 2012, around 18:50 min).

New Life Story Minute: The Good in People

Life Story Minute: The Good in People

For better or worse, we teach our children well. They actually pay close attention to what we do and say--especially when it comes t...

Your Story: Electric One Man Band

New from our friend Ian Kath at Your Story: Audio Stories of Interesting Lives

Episode 66 : Rainer. Electronic One Man Band on an Acoustic Guitar

One Guitar for a DJ Mix Party

Robin Sukroso

At a recent Betahaus event in Berlin, the Awesome Foundationawarded 1000€ to innovative musician Robin Sukroso, aka. Rainer, to help further the development of his one man band guitar modification. 

Taking the idea of percussive and traditional guitar playing, using the instrument as an input for a midi device, means that virtually any synthesized instrument can be played, looped and feed back into the mix all while performing in the best of the techno clubs here in Berlin.

Click here to read and hear Robin's story.

Check out Ian Kath's other site, Create Your Life Story--the world's best online guide for getting your own life stories recorded.

TSVP eNewsletter February 2012

To read your pdf copy with clickable links, click here.

New Life Story Minute: Paul's Harmonica

Life Story Minute: Paul's Harmonica

As a young boy during the Depression, Paul taught himself how to play the harmonica by listening to the radio. That was seventy-three ...

Love Stories from StoryCorps

We absolutely love StoryCorps, and we owe a debt of gratitutde to Dave Isay for his pioneering efforts in showingi us how to preserve, share, and celebrate our life stories.  He and StoryCorps have inspired us throughout our humble beginings. --Kevin Farkas, founder and director of The Social Voice Project.


From NPR:
  

February 11, 2012

Dave Isay begins his new book with a quote from co-worker Lillie Love, whose name resonates deeply with his latest project. Shortly before she died in 2010, Love said, "Love is all there is ... When you take your last breath, you remember the people you love, how much love you inspired and how much love you gave."

Love worked with Isay at the Atlanta office of his StoryCorps project. In the organization's new book, All There Is: Love Stories From StoryCorps, everyday people narrate their personal experiences with love.

"One theme that keeps coming up is that no one should ever, ever give up hope on love," say tells NPR's Scott Simon. "It seems like it's not in the cards for people, and then it just sneaks up behind you and there it is."

Paul Wilson and his daughter Marty Smith visited StoryCorps in Wichita, Kan. Listen To The Full Story Of How Wilson Met The Love Of His Life

In one interview, 93-year-old Paul Wilson tells his daughter, Marty Smith, how he met her mother. "One day I was waiting in the lobby for the elevator, the door slid aside, and there she stood: the prettiest girl I had ever seen," Wilson recalls.

To read more and listen to the NPR interview with Dave Isay, click here.

Audio Notes From Berlin

This is what Ian saw in Berlin
just a few hours ago.

OK, you have to put this into perspective.  Not too long ago--in my lifetime, in fact--this was not possible.  The Internet did not exist, neither did the iPhone.  So, the audio "report" you can hear below from Ian Kath's adventures in Berlin is actually quite remarkable.  Instant global communication...the likes we've never seen before in the history of human kind. 

The point is that Ian's experiences in Europe can easily be conveyed through the wondrous technology of the Internet.  He's using a service called Audioboo to record his thoughts into his iPhone, and then he can broadcast his recording to...well, just about anyone in the world with an Internet connection.   

I get Ian's audio vignettes through Facebook.  Others might get it through his Twitter feed.  Wherever--and whenever--Ian wants to make a personal audio broadcast he simply talks into his iPhone using Audioboo and his voice is instantly available on the web.  Pretty cool, don't you think?   

Take a listen...and really think about how this powerful technology can be used to narrate and broadcast your own thoughts, experiences--your life stories.  Remember, it's never been easier for us to record, preserve, and share our stories with others.  Well, not just "others"--but the world!

PS: The last time I tried to send a message from Euorpe I was standing in the pouring rain at a public telephone booth and feeding handfulls of coins into a metallic static contraption.       

NOTE: Be sure to check out Ian Kath's incredible life story resources at CreateYourLifeStory.com--the world's leading life story guide on the web. 

listen to ‘Aussie lifestyle appreciation. ’ on Audioboo

Main Street's Social Voices

The Main Street Oral History Project

“Look up,” is Susan Foley’s advice for appreciating the architecture of the historic buildings on Main Street in downtown Louisville. “At street level you are looking at store fronts or the fronts of offices,” she says, “so you really do not see the original architecture of the buildings. It is best to look up and then down the street to get the full effect of wonderful architectural details.”

The long time history teacher, occasional downtown tour guide, and coordinator for the Main Street Oral History Project has a passion for the buildings in this particular part of the city and the stories and lives they have housed inside their walls.

From 2004 to 2008 she conducted seventy-one interviews with people who have intimate knowledge of the historic buildings downtown. Her journey to the homes of the grandchildren of Main Street business owners, to executive offices and occasionally to the buildings themselves to gather these stories, not only captured an inordinate amount of history about the architecture of the city, but wove an oral tapestry of the social history that illustrates more than just iron facades and cornice stones.

The Main Street Oral History Project was started by the Main Street Association in 2004 at the National Historic Preservation Conference. During the convention volunteers, including Foley, recorded 23 thirty-minute interviews with people associated with Main Street’s history. The results were very engaging, but it was clear that the well of information ran much deeper than what could be covered in a mere thirty minutes. The board green-lighted a more in-depth project and Foley was hired on as a contract employee to conduct the full-length interviews.

To read the whole article at The Paper, click here.

Seniors Tell Their Own Stories

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

From NBC News.

Retirement home bands together to bring WWII stories to life


By Brian Williams and Victor Limjoco

HANOVER — More than 70 years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, many residents of a retirement community in picturesque Hanover, N.H., still remember exactly where they were. They’ll sit down with you, and if you have a minute to spare, they’ll even show you their black and white pictures.

Some were in college; some heard about Pearl Harbor from co-workers. And while the memories are still crisp, they know that their generation, and their generation’s stories, is slowly disappearing.

“If these things are not put down on paper very shortly they are not going to get down on paper,” said Hanover native Mary Jenkins, who lived on an army base in Kansas with her husband during WWII. “All of us are in our 80s and 90s.”

After being inspired by other retirement communities that published memoirs, the residents of Kendal at Hanover compiled a total of 56 stories from fellow residents. The only requirement, Jenkins said, was that they needed to live at Kendal at Hanover.

But with that one requirement, came remarkable diversity. The book “World War II Remembered,” displays a cross-section of American perspectives, and NBC News was able to capture four of them: a soldier who survived D-Day; a former military wife on an Air Force base; a Japanese-American man who had been sent to an internment camp; and a soldier still recovering from the emotional toll of war.

"World War II Remembered" is currently available on Amazon and through the publisher's website.

Clockwise from top: Robert Christie, Mary Jenkins, Clint Gardner, Kesaya Noda

CLINT GARDNER

Clint Gardner, 89, was a First Lt. for four years during World War II. His story ties together three of his wartime experiences into one coherent narrative he titled, “Three Unlikely Wounds.”

He was there on D-Day, June 6, 1944. “The beach was strewn with hundreds of bodies,” Gardner wrote. “I soon realized that our Dog Green sector of Omaha Beach was turning into a disaster. Nothing was going as planned. You couldn’t have made a movie out of this; nobody would believe it.”

He continued, “Suddenly I heard a sharp explosion just in front of me. My head snapped back as if hit by a sledgehammer, and a curtain of warm blood poured over my forehead, closing my eyes.” Gardner was hit by fragments of a mortar shell. His helmet, almost split in two, covered the messy remains of the top of his skull. “I came very close to death,” he recalled. “If I had my head just a half an inch higher, my skull would have been fractured, and almost certainly I would have died shortly.”

A few months later, Gardner was stationed in Malmedy, Belgium, when a “terrific explosion flattened the house to the ground.” The bomb overhead had killed many of his friends, but Gardner miraculously survived.

But his deepest scars come from the liberation of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
When he first got to the site, he was startled by the scene in front of him. “Clustering around the gate, like young animals testing their ability to leave their place of birth, were hundreds of humanlike apparitions,” he wrote. “Scraps of dirty clothing failed to conceal the condition of their bodies.”

Those images still haunt him today.

“So far as I can tell, I have suffered no shell shock from my two unlikely wounds on Omaha Beach and at Malmedy,” Gardner wrote, “But now I suspect that I may never recover from the equally unlikely wound that Buchenwald has given me. Nor do I really want to recover from it.”

MARY JENKINS

Mary Mecklin Jenkins was in college during the Pearl Harbor attack. Two months later, she married her husband, John, and found herself in the flats of Kansas. “I was a little New England girl who had never best west of Ohio,” Jenkins said.

Life on the base was a transition for Jenkins, an onrush of residents made the base overcrowded, and Jenkins and her husband considered themselves lucky to find a small apartment. “Well, to be honest, a room,” she wrote. “It had once been a sleeping porch, a long narrow room with windows along one side … We liked our windows, but the near-constant Kansas wind rattled and shook them so we rarely had a quiet night.”

The airmen of the base flew one of the first sets of B-29 planes, and Jenkins said that the true seriousness of her new life became apparent when she saw the first crashed B-29 at the end of the runway of the base. “The 29’s had been rushed out of manufacture, out of the assembly line because they were needed for long range bombing,” she recalled. “The airmen did not like the 29’s. They didn’t trust it. It crashed often.”

The young couple later moved to Louisiana and had their first child. She distinctly remembers being with her daughter, Patty, when she heard on the radio the announcement of President Roosevelt’s death: “In a flash the world changed … People were crying on the streets,” she said.

For Jenkins, the perspective at home was a revolutionary time of change and growth. War matured her generation early. “It had to give us a realization of the world as a whole,” she said. “It taught us geography – places in the world where we would never had heard of suddenly because familiar words, familiar places.”

KESAYA NODA


A resident at Kendal at Hanover, Lafayette Noda turns 96 this month. His daughter, Kesaya Noda, helped him to document his story through the war. Sitting in very low stool next to him, she documented his unique experience being held in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans.

Born in California, Lafayette Noda was working in a lab at UCLA when word spread of the Japanese bombing at Pearl Harbor. While there was long-running racism against Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor, he said, “Things changed fast after that. The identification of the Japanese intensified.”

After President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the internment of all West Coast Japanese, he was sent off to the Santa Anita racetrack. “I was put with a group of bachelors who were treated as one unit. We were given one horse stall … with horse manure on the walls. It smelled."

His daughter, pained by her parents’ shared internment experiences, said: “If I were my father, I would’ve given up. If I were my mother, I would’ve given up. My parents came through that without bitterness.”

After the war, Lafayette Noda earned a doctorate in biochemistry from Stanford University and retired as a longtime professor at Dartmouth Medical School, becoming the first Asian-American department chair for the school.

“I would hope that people would feel my father’s hope and remember that image,” Kesaya Noda said.


ROBERT CHRISTIE, M.D.

Robert Christie’s contribution to the book was that of several poems. One is titled “Hunter.” 
A decorated veteran with a Bronze Star and three Battle Stars, Christie became a doctor after the war. But the experiences he had in wartime still haunt him to this day.

About 10 years ago, Christie was walking his dog when he had this sudden thought: “You’re not a doctor; you’re a killer.” Even though Christie didn’t have a background in literature, he felt the need to immediately put his feelings into a poem.

He wrote:

I am not a hunter.

I am a killer.

Once you have killed

you are a killer,

not a hunter.

He continued:

Then they gave me the 76mm cannon

and three machine guns

attached to ‘Fate’s Finger’:

Medium tank, an M4A3

I hunted people with it.

Some I never saw.

Shot them with HEs,

high explosive shells, in houses in bleak wrecked towns

two thousand yards away.

Looking back on it now, Christie identifies it as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. And while he hasn’t had a formal diagnosis, he says that 60 years after he left the service he still feels the effects of PTSD.

Christie said that he never enjoyed war – but he was doing his duty. In the end, he said the experience matured him. “My experience from the time I went into the service until the time I got out, changed me from a boy to a man.” He went on to say, “When I got out of the service, I really felt I was ready to take on the world. And in my own style, I did.”

FINAL THOUGHTS

While we weren’t able to interview all 56 participants involved in this project,, we salute them in sharing their stories in “World War II Remembered.” My colleague Tom Brokaw calls them the “Greatest Generation,” and they are disappearing. World War II veterans are dying at an estimated rate of 740 a day, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. It was an honor to share their stories.

A Love Story Becomes a Life Story

Kristin Anderson was dying of cancer.  He knew that after his death his wife Rachel would carry on without him.  Those who remain must carry on.  But Kristin wanted to leave behind a special memory before the inevitable time came, something that would truly express how much his wife meant to him--and always would. 

This is Kristin's love story and birthday gift to Rachel, recorded and presented to her while he still had time.  Kristin passed away on January 2, 2012. 

This powerful video, which includes appearances by the New Zealand prime minister and actor Hugh Jackman, is an example of how we can record a life story as a final testiment to what matters most in our lives.  If we do not tell our stories now--to speak from our hearts, like Kristin did--we may never again have the chance.    

We can help.  Please contact us to learn more about recording your own life (and love) story. 

Veteran Voices of Pittsburgh Oral History Project

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

NEW ORAL HISTORY PROJECT GIVES PITTSBURGH AREA VETERANS

A CHANCE TO TELL THEIR STORIES 



Tom Wiley of Pittsburgh pauses during an interview to
reflect upon his days as a young B17 pilot during some of the
heaviest action of WW II.

PITTSBURGH, PA – February 3, 2012 – Veteran Voices of Pittsburgh^® is a nonprofit, multimedia oral history project jointly created by The Social Voice Project, The Veterans Breakfast Club, and StartPoint Media, Inc.  The project is dedicated to capturing, preserving, and sharing the experiences of Pittsburgh area veterans of all branches of service and eras, including peace and war-time service.   

“We want to honor and thank Pittsburgh area veterans for their service by giving them a chance to tell their stories, on their own terms, and in their own way,” says Kevin Farkas, audiographer, Navy veteran, and director of The Social Voice Project.  “All veterans have remarkable stories of patriotism, sacrifice, and bravery.  They also have fascinating stories of fear and loneliness, confusion, boredom, mundane duties, life-long friendships, humor, and exotic travel.  To fully understand and appreciate veterans' experiences, we need to hear these stories as well.” 

Capturing the voices of “The Greatest Generation” is a priority.  “We are losing so many of our aging WW II era veterans,” says Todd DePastino, historian, author, and executive director of The Veterans Breakfast Club. “Unfortunately, most WW II veterans will pass on before their stories can be preserved. Too often family members take their parents’ stories for granted; they’ve heard the old ‘war stories’ many times, but very few are ever recorded.  Once a veteran dies we’ve lost an important eye witness to history.  The families of our oldest veterans must ensure that these stories are preserved for their children, grandchildren, and all future generations.”  

The Veteran Voices of Pittsburgh project uses high definition technology, formatting, and techniques to enhance oral histories. “We want to enrich the oral history experience, inspire the imagination, and warm the heart. High quality design, direction, and multimedia are essential for us,” says Chris Rolinson, award winning videographer, US Army veteran, and owner of StartPoint Media. “Unlike most oral history projects, our interviews are presented in dedicated audiographic, videographic, and written media.  Each genre yields a different experience, and the different media make the interviews accessible through a variety of platforms, including websites, social media, mobile devices, and print.  We want these veterans’ stories to be widely accessible, not hidden away in an obscure archive.” 

This is a lasting way to thank all veterans for their service.  To donate or become a corporate/individual sponsor of The Veteran Voices of Pittsburgh oral history project, please contact The Social Voice Project.  Volunteers are also needed to help preserve and share these stories as part of our American heritage.  Your generous support is tax deductible as allowed by law. 

For more information, please contact Kevin Farkas. 

The Social Voice Project^®

http://TheSocialVoiceProject.blogspot.com

TheSocialVoiceProject@gmail.com

The Veterans Breakfast Club^®

http://TheVeteransBreakfastClub.com

Todd@TheVeteransBreakfastClub.com

StartPoint Media, Inc.

http://www.startpointmedia.com

crolinson@gmail.com

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