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Help create a time capsule of American stories featuring you.
Connect 250 is a new project from StoryCorps and Morning Edition celebrating America's 250th birthday.
Get matched with a stranger from a different part of the country for a virtual interview that will be archived at the Library of Congress.
Sign up for this experiment in human connection at connect250.org.
America, get ready to meet America.
This 4th of July, we're celebrating a major milestone as our country turns 250 years old.
And acknowledging we're not exactly in the brightest moment in our country's history right now, from where we sit here at StoryCorps.
There's still a lot to celebrate.
See, when you sit and listen to our archive the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered American voices you hear people just being themselves, speaking from the heart.
And you get a sense of what we, as Americans, really care about.
I remember when the doctor pulled you out.
That was the most proud moment of my life.
Don't tell your brothers, because it's three of y'all.
I always wanted to go with Grandpa.
And he would get a pastrami sandwich the size of my head and he would buy me a hot dog and he would say
Don't you tell anybody.
We just go for a good walk, right?
You want another hot dog?
I remember, I think I was in the sixth grade, when they asked me to say my favorite poem.
And I said, The Star-Spangled Banner.
My father said, look, everybody knows I'm a dairy farmer.
This is who I am.
And he looked me square in the eye.
And then he said, now how about you?
These voices come from more than 20 years of crossing the country recording everyday Americans.
And in this episode we're taking you on the road with us, city to city, state to state, tundra to desert sea, to shining sea, because to understand America you've got to meet America.
It's the StoryCorps podcast from NPR.
I'm Michael Garofalo.
Our first stop is a trailer park in the middle of Michigan.
This is Midwestern America where, like most places on the Fourth of July, you can't go anywhere without seeing the American flag.
Now we've all heard of Betsy Ross and the first flag, but our current 50-star version was designed in 1958 by a high school junior named Bob Heft.
The only problem was, at the time, there were only 48 states.
But Bob had a hunch that that would soon change.
In American history class, we had to do an outside-of-class project.
We could make or do whatever we wanted.
Like a science fair or something like that, you bring the project in.
The Betsy Ross story intrigued me.
And my mom and dad.
They had a 48-star flag they received as a wedding present, which of course meant a lot to them.
Well, I took a scissors and cut it up.
I had never sewn in my life.
I watched my mom sew, but I'd never sewn.
And since making the flag of her country, I've never sewn again.
So anyhow, we get to class.
I had my flag on the teacher's desk.
And the teacher said, what's this thing on my desk?
So I got up and I approached the desk and I'm shaking like a leaf.
And he said, why you got too many stars?
You don't even know how many states we have.
And he gave me the grade of a B minus.
Now, a B minus isn't that bad of a grade.
However, a friend of mine, Jim, he picked up five leaves off the ground.
He's taping these leaves down to the notebook and labeling Elm, Hickory, Maple.
And the teacher gave him the grade of an A.
I was really, I was upset.
The teacher said if you don't like the grade, get it accepted in Washington.
Then come back and sue me.
I might consider changing the grade.
Two years later, I'd written 21 letters to the White House, made 18 phone calls.
Now, you can imagine when my mom got the phone bill.
What's this number?
I said, well, mom, that's the White House.
So anyhow, I got this call and it said now the president of the United States is calling you later on today.
Well, at that time Eisenhower was president and he comes on the phone and he says is this Robert G Heft?
And I said, yes, sir, but you can just call me Bob.
And he says I want to know the possibility of you coming to Washington DC on July 4th for the official adoption of the new flag.
And so I have the grade book.
It's encased in plastic.
It's kept in a bank.
My teacher and he said I guess if it's good enough for Washington, it's good enough for me.
I hereby change the grade to an A, That's Bob Heft in Saginaw, Michigan.
He died in 2009.
Next, we head due west to the Black Hills of South Dakota and Mount Rushmore.
That's the national park with the giant faces of four presidents Washington Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt carved into the mountainside.
Donald Hart and Blaine Cordemeyer were park rangers there, and in 2005 they were charged with doing something no one had ever attempted before to go over the edge of the cliff and give the president's faces a little scrub.
What was it, 70 years or so of just... dirt.
Yeah.
I think we used about 800 feet of fire hose to get the water up there.
And a couple of times the hose broke.
Critters would... Chipmunks were terrible.
Chipmunks would gnaw on the fire hose.
We went through a lot of fire hose.
None of us had any rope experience, and all of us went over the faces the first time.
Scary.
Very scary.
In fact, I was the first one over the edge out of the group, and I was eye to eye with Lincoln.
When you go over Lincoln, once you are down below about midway in the hairline, you're hanging free.
Your feet aren't touching the granite of the face until you're swinging.
And you don't want to do any damage up there.
You need to use the same strategy as if you're playing chess.
You need to think ahead two or three moves to make sure that it all stays somewhat safe.
There was still handwritten directions on on the underside of the eyebrows of some of the presidents.
That's grease pencil up in the eyes.
Yep.
Directing the workers how to do the finished carving on the eyes.
There's also a quarter.
We found on top of Lincoln one day.
We didn't know when the quarter showed up.
Nobody gets to go over the face other than us.
So we decided to put it in Jefferson's left eye.
And I'm sure it's still there today.
I enjoyed Jefferson the most.
It sounds weird, but I gave him a kiss on his lip.
I was assigned to Lincoln.
We have become very well acquainted over the years.
It's definitely a special bond.
So today, as people move and some, like myself, advance in age, it gets harder to do this job.
Out of the original seven, we have three left.
We have all aged a little bit, and this is a very demanding job.
The time that I've been here, I've been blessed to help clean an icon of our country.
It's not something that can be taken lightly.
National Park Rangers Donald Hart and Blaine Cordemeyer at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.
Since this recording, Don has retired, but Blaine still works at the monument.
He's been there now for more than 25 years.
As we head further west to rural Wyoming, we'll hear from someone who lived through one of the darker chapters of US history.
Shortly after the Japanese attack on the US military base at Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the forced relocation and incarceration of more than 100000 Americans of Japanese descent.
Shig Yabu was one of them.
He was 10 years old when he was taken with his family from San Francisco to Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming.
Decades later, when Shig was 87, he came to StoryCorps to tell his grandson what it was like to be a kid in a detention camp.
At the very beginning, we were not allowed to go beyond the barbed wire fence.
But it didn't take long for the guards to figure out if we were to escape.
Where are we going to go?
So we spread the barbed wire and we would all take turns crawling through.
We found a little pond area.
That became our private swimming pool.
And we became slingshot shooters.
One day one of the boys said I bet no one could hit that magpie nest which is very high up on the willow tree.
But eventually, we hit the nest.
It hit the ground, rolled and stopped.
And when I peeked in, this little baby bird was begging for food.
And I decided to adopt that magpie, which I called Maggie.
My stepfather made a cage, and every time I left or returned, I would say, Hello, Maggie.
And she repeated, Hello, Maggie.
And if somebody laughed, she could imitate the exact laughter, which meant kids seniors teenagers, you name it.
All came to see her.
That magpie loved people.
I don't think she realized she was a bird.
During the summer, we allowed Maggie to go out and roam between the barracks.
And she was like a social worker.
She was so compassionate with the attorneys.
August the 14th, 1945, the sirens went off.
So we knew that the war was going to end.
But our family did not leave.
Not till the next to the last train.
Each week, we would go to the train track and wave goodbye and good luck to those leaving.
So...
Heart Mountain became a ghost town.
It was the saddest feeling because there was nobody to play with.
But I was fortunate.
Maggie and I would talk for hours.
Well, two weeks before we left, Maggie was on the bottom of the cage with just her eyes flickering.
And early in the morning, Maggie, she died.
So I dug a hole, placed her favorite toys, put my old T-shirt on Maggie and buried her, made a dirt mound, made a cross.
Even to this day, her legacy still stands.
That little bird kept the spirits up for all the eternity.
And when she was no longer needed, she went to heaven.
Shig Yabu remembering his friend Maggie the magpie.
He spoke with his grandson Evan in San Francisco.
Coming up after a short break.
When did you first learn that you weren't a citizen?
Oh my goodness.
We were going to celebrate our 50th anniversary and I went to try and get a passport, and that's when I found out.
Stay with us.
This message comes from Subaru.
In June, as part of the Subaru loves to care initiative, Subaru and its retailers partner with Blood Cancer United and their local hospital or cancer treatment center to give warm blankets, patient care kits and messages of hope to cancer patients.
Subaru and its retailers will have supported over 550,000 patients by the end of this year.
Subaru is proud to be Blood Cancer United's largest automotive donor.
Learn more at Subaru.com.
Hey folks, this is Max Young-Rice from the StoryCorps podcast.
Just want to remind you that you can tell us your stories by calling our voicemail at 702-706-TALK.
This week.
What would you want someone who lives in a very different part of the US to know about where you live?
That's 702-706-TALK.
Welcome back.
The next stop on our tour of American stories takes us to New York City in the 1960s and inside a Manhattan apartment building where we'll meet Nicholas Petron's grandfather, who was an immigrant from Italy.
My maternal grandfather, Rocco Galasso, was a superintendent in an apartment building for probably 18 years of his life.
And at some point, he bought the building.
And so we grew up there.
He would say to me, we're going for a walk.
And I always wanted to go with Grandpa.
And he would get a pastrami sandwich the size of my head.
And he would buy me a hot dog.
And he would say, don't you tell anybody.
We just go for a good walk, right?
You want another hot dog?
And in this building...
Every apartment was filled with an aunt or an uncle.
And every Sunday, Rocco cooked.
So all of his family would show up for dinner, all 30, 40 of us.
And one Sunday at dinner, Rocco made it clear to us that we were going to all have to move.
That the city has condemned all of these buildings. to build these brand new apartments.
And so we had, I think, eight months to a year to relocate.
And then one day my mom and dad and my brother Michael and I went to Rocco's apartment for the Sunday meal.
Now, we no longer lived on the first floor.
Everybody else was gone.
It was abandoned, except for that one apartment.
We had our meal and at some point Rocco said to me and my brother let's go down the stairs and put some coal in the burner.
And we got down to the coal pile.
And instead of grabbing the shovel, he said pick up as much coal as you can and put it in your pocket.
So we stuffed our overcoat with coal in our jean pockets with coal.
And we went to the backyard.
And there's one light on, and all the other apartments are dark.
And he takes a piece of coal out of his pocket, and he throws it through one of the windows.
And tears are streaming down his face.
And he says...
Come on, you break the windows with me.
So my brother and I just started throwing... We thought it was fun at the time.
And we're smashing windows.
And my mom and Aunt Lucy stick their heads out and go, What are you doing, Pop?
Stop it, stop it.
But we didn't stop until all the windows were broken.
Except for his apartment.
At first, my reaction was they took his building away.
That's what I thought it was about.
But I realized much later it was about the destruction of the family, which I think he knew.
A month later, he had to leave.
And never again were we ever together on a Sunday in that way.
That's Nicholas Petron in New York City, remembering his grandfather, Rocco Galasso.
¶¶
Now let's head south to Bradenton, Florida.
Sherry Johnson and her cousin James Ransom spent their childhoods visiting their grandparents there.
And they would attend Sunday school at the local Methodist church.
That's where they were taught by a Sunday school teacher named Miss Divine.
Let's talk about Miss Divine.
Miss Lizzy Divine.
Ms.
Devine was a wiry lady.
She wore summer dresses.
She had a bandana and a straw hat.
And she was the only person I knew that had more power than my grandmother.
She wasn't a mean person.
She was stern.
Stern, yes.
Very stern.
You know, when she said something, she meant exactly what she said.
Right.
In fact, she was our Sunday school teacher.
The only thing that would keep you from going to Sunday school.
You had to have one foot on a banana peel and the other in the grave.
Absolutely.
That's the only thing.
There's no excuse.
You had to go.
You had to go.
One of the things that you prayed for when you were in Mrs Devine's class was Lord, please let me get old enough to get out of this class.
She did the Catholicism.
Who made you?
God.
Where is God?
Everywhere.
She went through and said, Oh, Lord, have mercy, please.
This Miss Divine would come in on Sunday mornings to take us to Sunday school.
And when I saw her come Sherry, I thought the leaves would be blowing out the trees and the sky would go black and the clouds would come in.
And she'd come in the house one morning and say, good morning, children.
And everybody, my mother on down, said, good morning, Ms.
Devine.
And she says, it's time to go to Sunday school this morning, children.
I said, Ms.
Devine, I can't go to Sunday school today.
She said, no.
I said, no, ma'am.
She says, why not?
She said because I said my mother didn't bring enough clothes for me to go to Sunday school this morning.
She said, oh, no.
I said, no, ma'am.
She said, what do you have?
What kind of clothes do you have?
I said, all I have, Mr. Vine, are my pajamas and my tennis shoes.
She said, well, that's OK, honey.
Put your tennis shoes on.
We go to Sunday school.
I looked at my mother and she looked away, Sherry.
Mr. Vine made me walk two blocks in my pajamas and my tennis shoes.
I had to sit in church with my friends.
Doing Sunday school in my pajamas and my tennis shoes.
I'm going to tell you, I'll never lie to get it.
The divine was always there to take care of us.
Right.
But when the divine braided your hair, your eyes went up like this.
You had to sleep on soft pillows because, I mean, boy, she had it tight.
And Miss Divine had mango trees all over her yard.
But Miss Divine never brought you a mango until it was rotten.
Yeah.
It would smell like liquor.
That's when she brought you mangoes.
But you know what?
That's the kind of stuff that we got growing up.
And I'll never forget that.
James Ransom with his cousin Sherry Johnson remembering their Sunday school teacher, Miss Devine, in Bradenton Florida.
Sherry died in 2017. we'll end our tour back on the West Coast in Los Angeles.
That's where 85-year-old Stella Beltran sat down with her son and granddaughter to remember moving to the US from Mexico as a small child.
We arrived in Texas in 1928.
We lived on Leroy Street.
It was close to the railroad tracks.
When the cars went by, they were loaded with carrots, potatoes, beets.
During those years, the men sitting up there would throw things to the people.
We would line up and we took a bag and we'd pick up what they throw.
Under the bridge of the track was the hobo.
And they had a big kettle of water and everyone that passed by there was to contribute something so they could have something to eat also.
So we used to clean the pieces of carrot or whatever we got and put it in that kettle for them.
My father always said that we were to share what we had, because he had brought us to this country and this country was going to be very kind to everyone, not just the rich, not just the ones of importance, but everyone.
Has this country been kind to you?
I really, truly believe that this country has been wonderful to me.
I remember, I think I was in the sixth grade, when they asked me to say my favorite poem.
And I said, the Star-Spangled Banner.
I love being here.
I love what I thought being a citizen was.
What is being a citizen to you?
To me, being a citizen is being accountable to what I was raised to believe in in human beings, in the poor, in the ones that are afraid and the ones that need help.
Are you a citizen?
No, I am not.
When did you first learn that you weren't a citizen?
Oh, my goodness.
We were going to celebrate our 50th anniversary and I went to try and get a passport, and that's when I found out.
How did you feel?
I felt like maybe people feel when they... are doused with flame or something.
I didn't know what to do.
I'm in the country my father chose for us.
I belong here and I'm going to stay here and I'm going to do the best that I can and I'm going to represent my father and my mother and myself in the best way possible.
That conversation was recorded back in 2010.
15 years later Stella and her family sat down for this update.
Did you finally get your citizenship?
Oh, yes.
It was big, big, big thing for me.
It meant the world.
You're about to be 101.
Yes, ma'am.
I'm looking forward to it because I sit outside and enjoy watching the world go by.
I...
I love being here and I love being me.
Stella Beltran with her son Stephen and granddaughter Mary in Los Angeles, California.
Stella turns 102 the week this podcast comes out, just in time for the 4th of July.
We'd love to hear from you.
Our voicemail line is always open.
This week.
We're wondering what would you want someone who lives in a very different part of the country to know about the place where you live?
Leave us your answer in a voicemail at 702-706-TALK.
That's 702-706-TALK.
The stories in this episode were produced by This podcast is produced by Max Youngreis.
Our senior producer is Judd Esty Kendall.
Amy Drozdowska is our executive producer.
Our technical director is Jarrett Floyd.
And our intern is Zoe Meyer.
Welcome, Zoe.
I'm Michael Garofalo.
Thanks for listening.
Support for this podcast comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.
