StoryCorps

LoAnne and Dale Barnes told their love story in the StoryCorps booth in May. The two met by chance in St. George after retiring.

LoAnne: So when I got ready to retire, I thought, well- I should look into Southern Utah. I was a high school librarian in Seattle, Washington and I used to come back to Southern Utah every spring vacation.

I retired in 1997. I'm LoAnne Barnes, I'm 76.

Dale: When I was a Boy Scout, we came down to St. George on an outing. It was cold in Wyoming, it was juts after Memorial day, and we got down to St. George and it was just perfect weather. It hadn't gotten real hot and I thought, 'Wow, this is paradise. I'd really like to live here.'

I'm Dale Barnes, I'll be 80 in December.

So after I retired from Questar, I came down and looked all around the area, and found a lot out in Leeds.

Robust and healthy in appearance, 94-year-old Rockville, Utah resident Wilma Angius talked with her daughter Kate Starling, about growing up in rural Missouri during the depression. Wilma revealed an unexpected personal experience she had during World War 2.

Wilma grew up on a farm just across the Missouri river from Glasgow, Missouri. She said the town had about 2,000 people, and is where her family would go for supplies.

Stored in the Fife Folklore Archives on the Utah State University campus are seven boxes containing information and oral history recordings from 39 members of Cache Community Connections.  Among those recordings are comments from long time Utah Public Radio friend and member Jack Keller who spoke about his years volunteering with the Northern Utah religious and civic community organization.

Francis Battista (68) talks with his friend and colleague Cyrus Mejía (66) about founding the animal sanctuary Best Friends Animal Society.  He talks about the beginnings of the shelter, the ethics it was founded upon, and events that have put Best Friends in the national spotlight as a model for animal rescue work.

MEJIA: At some point, we started getting a whole lot more animals, because we took on animal control.

BATTISTA: The way it happened was this: We arrived and amongst the group of us, we had about 200 animals with us. One of our dogs wandered off, this was shortly after we got there. One of our colleagues went looking for his dog which had been lost, and he went to the local pound, which was basically a tin-roof shed, in a field, in the back of the airport.

Priscilla and Marlyne Hammon are sisters, who married the brothers who talked last week on StoryCorps. They two now discuss how laws against polygamists have affected their lives and how they became activists for plural marriage.

PRISCILLA: Marlyne and I consider ourselves full sisters, but there's something interesting about us because while we share the same father, we both have different mothers, so we grew up having five mothers in our home, which was a very positive experience for us, unlike so much negativity that you hear about polygamy. Our experience was totally different.

Alma Hammond interviewed his brother Arthur about growing up in a polygamous family in the mid 1900s. Arthur was born in 1948 at his uncle's house while his mother was in hiding.

"My mother was in hiding because she was a plural wife, and plural marriage is against the law. That was part of our childhood. Our parents lived under the threat of arrest, which made it imperative to protect our parents. If you went to school, you couldn't say who your father was," Arthur said. "I went to school at a place where others of my siblings went, but because they were siblings from a different mother, you couldn't acknowledge them as such."

In the spring of 1953, the Hammonds moved to Highland Drive, where Arthur said the neighbors were closer and keeping the polygamy a secret was imperative, and more difficult.

Most people who come into the StoryCorps recording booth bring a partner  with whom to have a conversation.  46-year-old Greg Peck's interview partner had a family emergency just prior to their appointment and had to cancel. Greg reluctantly agreed to come into the Booth anyway and StoryCorps Facilitator, Olivia Cueva interviewed Greg in St. George in May 2013 about his lifelong love affair with baseball.

"The year that I turned eight years old was the year that Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's home run record. As an eight year old, my older brother, he took me to see the Padres play the Atlanta Braves and Hank Aaron hit two home runs in that game. It was just maybe a month or two after he had broken that record. That was my first experience of seeing a real ballgame being played in a big stadium and to see Hank Aaron hit two home runs for the first time, that's something that's stayed with me for all these years. With that kind of a beginning of baseball, how could anyone not love the game?"

Chelsea Bundy was a 3-year-old girl from St. George when she met Thomas Taylor. Taylor worked at Dixie Regional medical Center. He came to the StoryCorps booth in St. George to tell her story.

Chelsea was at a family outing when she was hit by one of her cousins driving an ATV- crushed between a fire hydrant and the ATV. She was rushed to the hospital, where she was in critical condition.

"She arrived at the hospital, she was unconscious, very pale. Her tummy was starting to swell because there was some internal bleeding," Taylor said. "The ER doctor said she probably was not going to survive."

Terri Kane, CEO of Dixie Regional Medical Center interviewed Ron Metcalf, chairman of the Center's board,  about the history of the Dixie Regional Medical Center- and the years before it was known as such. Metcalf's family moved to St. George in the '60s, and his family has been involved with the hospital since.

St. George was a dry and desolate area, in the eyes of young Metcalf. His father owned a mortuary in town, and since the town didn't have an ambulance, his father was asked to provide one.

"They asked the mortuaries to provide the ambulance service simply because the mortuaries had the vehicles, they had the equipment and had stretchers they would use  in their profession. This lent itself to being able to help people when the need arose in an emergency," Metcalf said.

Jeremy Larsen interviewed his friend and  fellow band member Robert Keller about living with a mental illness in the StoryCorps booth in St. George. They talk about how Larsen learned how to manage his  illness thanks to the help of his friends like Jeremy, and Southwest Behavioral Health Center.

They also talk about their band, which is a day program based at a mental health facility. and the challenges they face as a group that could make them excel.

Robert Verhelst ran the St. George Ironman in May. He runs many full and half Ironmans in full firefighter gear, which weighs 50 pounds,  as a token of remembrance for Sept. 11, 2001.

In 2001 Rob did 8 days of search and recovery under the wreckage of the Twin Towers. He said he still remembers what it was like.

Jordan Rapp and Paul Jewkes talked in the StoryCorps booth while attending the Ironman 70.3 in St. George in early May. Jewkes was participating for the first time, but Rapp  said he was taking part in what was "probably my 15th, maybe 20th half ironman,"  as a full-time as a professional.

Jewkes said he has been following Rapp's career, and asked him about how he got involved.

Sonya Gelter is a single mom of five children, and she was the recipient of a zero-percent loan for a Habitat for Humanity home. She was interviewed by Lil Barron, a Habitat for Humanity employee, in the booth at StoryCorps.

"I was just getting divorced. I had five children, and we were on our way to losing a home," Sonya said of her life just prior to her Habitat for Humanity experience. "I didn't know what to do, or where to go. I had these five kids, my youngest, the twins, were a year and a half old."

Daniel and Bunny McArthur tell the story of their experiences in childbirth. Then, after the youngest of 6 children was in kindergarten, Bunny decided to finish college- at the same time as 3 of her children.

"All the rest of our children were miracle babies. Jeff was 3 weeks early, we didn't know anything wrong," Daniel said.

Mike Empey speaks with his friend Glenn Rogers about what he has learned as a member of the Shivwits Band of Paiutes. Rogers remembers spending his early years getting an education in a small community where he was a minority. He continues to work with Paiute Indians to help educate and improve the quality of life on the reservation.

Greer Chesher and Barb Graves talk about their time as Park Rangers in Zion National Park.

Barb and Greer first met as park rangers in 1981. Barb Graves came from being a fire fighter from the forest service. She was one of the first female fire fighters to be hired and trained.

The children of Hilda and Leo Bringhurst share stories of growing up in Toquerville, Utah between 1930 and the 1950’s.  Luzon, Wayne, and Antone Bringhurst remember working on the family farm and reading with their mother.

Carl and Shari Berger have been married almost 55 years, and it's been a good run.

What Carl calls "one of the most exciting and most stressful and most interesting years, was that one year in 1997."

While returning from a trip to New Orleans, Carl started pacing in the airport. What started as a need to walk soon turned into something very different.

Alisha Weigle was born into a family of 46 children, with three mothers, and a father, in the Colorado City polygamous compound in Arizona.

"I was one of the few that went away and went to college in Cedar City," Alisha said. "I got a degree in education, but I also got my eyes opened in a big way as to what the real world was."