Table of Contents
ALSO EDITED BY DAVE ISAY:
Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life
from the StoryCorps Project
This book is dedicated to all moms honored
through StoryCorpspast, present, and future.
INTRODUCTION TO STORYCORPS
StoryCorps launched on October 23, 2003, in Grand Central Terminal in New York City. It was admittedly something of a crazy idea: put a recording booth in the middle of one of the busiest train stations in the world, then invite pairs of people to come in and interview each other about the most important moments in their lives.
But the idea worked, the project caught on, and StoryCorps has since spread swiftly across the country. In just six years, StoryCorps has recorded nearly thirty thousand interviews with more than fifty thousand participants. Determined to collect the widest possible array of American voices, weve traveled to cities, towns, and hamlets across all fifty states. Along the way, weve drawn participants from every imaginable backgroundevery race and ethnicity, occupation, and age. Despite this amazing diversity of voices, however, the individual stories weve collected have taught us that as a nation there is so much more that we share than divides us.
Participating in StoryCorps could not be easier: You invite a loved onea parent, a sibling, a friend, a neighbor, anyone you chooseto one of our recording sites. There, youre met by a trained facilitator, who greets you and explains the interview process.Youre then brought into a quiet recording room and seated across from your interview partner, each of you in front of a microphone. The facilitator hits record on a pair of CD burners, and you have a forty-minute conversation. (Most people ask the sorts of questions youll find in the Favorite StoryCorps Questions list at the back of the book.) At the end of the session, two CDs have been recorded. You keep one copy, and the second goes to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. There, it will be preserved for generations to come, so that someday your great-great-great-grandchildren will be able to hear the voice and stories of your grandfather, your mother, your best friendwhomever you chose to honor with a StoryCorps interview.
Many participants see their session as a chance to leave a legacy. They use the time to talk about the most important people in their lives, to remember the best and worst moments theyve lived through, and to pass on wisdom theyve gleaned. Topics are broached that rarely get addressed in everyday conversation. It may come as no great surprise that memories of parents often feature prominently in StoryCorps recordings. Our facilitators, who have been present at each of the nearly thirty thousand interviews to date, tell us that even participants who are one hundred years oldor olderwill spend time remembering (and often crying about) their mothers and fathers. Indeed, many StoryCorps conversations start with reflections on our first and often most consequential bondwith Mom.
Across the country, thousands upon thousands of people have interviewed their mothers through StoryCorps. All types of mothers have shared their stories: single moms, working moms, moms with one child, moms with a dozen or more children, mothers who adopted children, mothers who lost children, and more. These stories remind us of the unflagging hard work and singular devotion required of moms, attributes that have too often been overlooked and underappreciated. In Mom, we hope to do our small part to rectify this wrong.
At its heart, StoryCorps is a project about the transmission of wisdom across generations, and the stories in this book are no exception. In the pages that follow, youll find not only wisdom, but also stories of connection and conflict, heartbreak and humor, strength and grace. I hope these extraordinary moms will inspire you with their heart, gumption, insight, and love.
Dads well save for another book, on another day. For now, its time to celebrate Mom.
AUTHORS NOTE
The following stories were edited from transcripts of StoryCorps interviews that usually run forty minutes. We aimed to distill these interviews without altering the tone or meaning of the original sessions. At times, tense and usage were changed and a word or two was added for clarity. We did not use ellipses to indicate omitted text; in the following pages, ellipses indicate speech trailing off or a significant pause in conversation.
Words and phrases that read well are not always the strongest spoken moments, and the reverse is also the case. As a result, a story may vary slightly from audio to print.
Participants gave permission for their interviews to be published in this book, and each story was fact-checked.
WISDOM
NANCY WRIGHT, 53 talks to her son, J. D. WRIGHT, 19
Nancy Wright: My mother, Frances Guy Ericksen, was born in Jacksonville, Florida. She was really defiant of authority. I remember a story of when she was growing up: She went into a classroom, and the screen door slammed shut behind her. The teacher thought she had slammed the door and made her go back and close it quietly a hundred times in a rowwhich struck her as highly unfair, since really it wasnt her problem that the door slammed. So she closed it quietly ninety-nine times, and then slammed the hell out of it the hundredth time! [laughs]
She got married to my dad, George Ericksen, who was probably not a very easy person to live with.They waited about five years to have me, because she wasnt sure the marriage was going to take. I remember her telling me that he proposed to her after he had fixed the toilet in the house. He came in, in his true romantic style, wiping his hands on a towel and saying, You know, if we got married, Id be here all the time to fix the toilet. [laughs] Whoo, makes you swoon! They were polar opposites. Dad was very introverted, and Mom was very extroverted. There were some rocky moments.
She had a real strong faith, and she put together prayer groups. In the early 1960s, she arranged for an interracial prayer group in Tampa, Florida. There were threats of crosses to be burnt on our yard.We were in a very conservative neighborhood, too. But that just made her even more determined to continue to do things like that.
My mom never met a stranger. She hugged people that she never met before. Her mission in life was to bring up the financial status of waiters and waitresses everywhereshe would leave a twenty-dollar tip sometimes for a five-dollar meal. And when it was pointed out to her that her tip might be a tad too high in terms of normal percentages, she was irate. There was no stopping her tipping. In fact, at the meal that we had right before her funeral we left a Frances Ericksen memorial tip for the waitress that was almost the price of fifteen of us eating there.
My mom and I were pretty compatible up to adolescence, but then we grated on each others nerves quite a bit, and our relationship really kind of went downhill from there. Even after I left the house, I felt like all of my conversations with her were very judgment-laden and critical, especially because I wasnt following the religious path that she wanted me to follow.
