Gene Kendzior grew up in Marion County, West Virginia, where it was commonplace to work in the coal mines after high school. His father worked in the mines for over 30 years but tragically died in a mining accident in 1967. Here, Gene tells his daughter, Jennifer, about his father.

Dr. Pedro "Joe" Greer has spent much of his 25-year-career helping Miami's homeless and poor.  He founded the Camillus Health Concern in 1984, which currently gives care to thousands of people each year, and the St. John Bosco clinic, which treats low-income and immigrant patients in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood.

In this piece, Dr. "Joe" and his wife, Janus, sat down at StoryCorps in Miami, to talk about how he started working with Miami's homeless.

53-year-old Willie Jefferson has been working at Our Lady of the Assumption Catholic School in Atlanta as a custodian for 23 years.  Chloe Smith is a 13-year-old student at the school who has known and admired Jefferson since first grade.

When the two of them came in for an interview at StoryCorps in Atlanta, Chloe wanted to know about Willie Jefferson's life and his time working at the school.

When Dana Viviano (DAY-nuh vi-vee-ON-oh) was 22 years old, her mother, Judy Cruny, passed away from breast cancer. Almost two decades later, she recorded this interview.

Dana has worked as a nurse for the past 15 years, caring for cancer patients.

Here, Dana sat down at the Siteman Cancer Center in St. Louis, MO to answer some questions from her 11-year-old daughter, Sarafina (sarah-FEE-nah).

Sister Mary DeSalles spent over 50 years working at New York Foundling - one of the oldest adoption agencies in New York
City.

She found homes for hundreds of children, but one case stands out....

In some families, a specific talent seems to be passed down through the generations. That could be the case for Ledo Lucietto and his daughter Anne, who share a passion for mechanical engineering.

The Luciettos owned a tool and die shop in Illinois for 50 years. Ledo's father was a mechanical engineer who emigrated from Italy. Their shop was called the Byron-Lambert Co.; they made wire forms and metal stampings.

And as a little girl, Anne was a regular in that shop, asking her grandfather, Luigi, what he was doing as he made parts.

Talking about Anne's childhood recently, the pair recalled how Anne asked her father an important question when she was just 5 years old...

Andrew Vollo is a New York City cab driver who has made it his mission to interview as many other cabbies as he can, recording their memories for the StoryCorps oral history project. Recently, Vollo spoke with Oleg Roitman and Jerry Tierstein about their experiences driving passengers around New York.

In New York City, a taxi driver named Andrew Vollo has been interviewing other cabbies. Here, Vollo talks with long-time driver Hyman Bloom about his work that began over thirty years ago.

When he opened a restaurant nearly 30 years ago, Joe Spano Sr. used the cooking skills he had learned from his mother. The lessons he passed on to his own son have kept the restaurant in business.

Tom Domingue <doe-MING> was 8 when he contracted polio, which left him with braces on his back and legs. Domingue recently told his wife about how his mother coddled him then - and how his stepfather helped him get back on his feet.

Mark Sullivan grew up in Connecticut during the late 1950s. It was a time when the state produced huge amounts of shade leaf tobacco, used to make cigar wrappers. Sullivan recounts the summers of his childhood when he and other local teenagers went to the fields.

TV journalist Tim Russert made a name for himself with interviews of politicians and heads of state. But Russert, of Buffalo, N.Y., also embraced the stories of everyday Americans. In 2005, Russert interviewed James T. Molloy, a fellow Buffalo native living in Washington, as the StoryCorps oral history project launched its MobileBooths. Molloy was a second-generation firefighter before becoming the doorkeeper of the House of Representatives.

Darryl Downes talks about his passion for art, which he acquired while serving time in New York's Sing Sing prison. Darryl completed his studies at The Art Students League of New York in 1981. The public murals he has painted since then can be seen throughout New York.

Gustina Atlas or "Miss G" as she's known was Geraldine Nash's high school math teacher more than 30 years ago. Today, their roles have reversed, and their relationship has outgrown the classroom. Nash is now a master quilter, and Miss G has become her student. The two talk about how their unlikely friendship forged out of a mutual fervor for quilting. Gustina Atlas starts their conversation.

Something was amiss one December day when Ron Kroenke came to tune a piano at a nursing home near Omaha, Neb.

Dorothy Glinton worked at Ford Motor Company's Chicago Assembly Plant for 30 years. She was one of the first women to hold a management position at the company. Glinton came to StoryCorps, in Chicago, to tell her son, Sonari, how she came to work at Ford. She describes the working conditions at the plant as awful and decided that she would apply for a job in management. She was hired but soon faced discrimination from other male employees. In the mid-1990s, after working at Ford for 16 years, she was laid off while other workers at the plant with less seniority were transfered to other places. Glinton decided to file a lawsuit. After settling the suit, Glinton went back to work at the plant, and served on Ford's Diversity Council. She retired earlier this year. StoryCorps Griot is an initiative to record interviews between everyday African Americans across the United States. In West African tradition, the griot is a storyteller who preserves cultural identity and passes it on from generation to generation. The StoryCorps Griot booth is traveling from coast-to-coast collecting these interviews, which will be archived in the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Robbie Cronig's father and uncles opened Cronig's Market in 1917. Robbie Cronig started working at the store when he was just a boy. Decades later, he owned it. And many years later, he sold his family's business to Steve Bernier. Bernier says that shortly after he met Cronig, they discussed him buying the store. "You slapped the keys in my hand and you said, 'Someday you're going to own this place,'" Bernier recalls. The sale was finalized in 1986, "And from there on in we became the best of friends," Cronig recalls. After the sale, Cronig kept a set of keys to the market and continued to work there until about 10 years ago. Bernier says that if it weren't for his friend's health, he'd still be working there today.

Judge Joe Pigott [PIE-gut] served nearly two decades on the bench in Jackson, Miss. But he says no defendant confounded him more than the man nicknamed "Pip" -- otherwise known as the late Willie Earl Dow, whose exploits often landed him in Pigott's courtroom. Recalling those days with his wife, Lorraine, Pigott said that Dow had two bad habits: drinking, and stealing in order to support his drinking. "You didn't have to try him, he always pled guilty," Pigott said. "And he was a likable person." Pigott recalls seeing Dow at the time of his retirement, in a courtroom ceremony. Pigott remembers Dow saying, "I heard they were going to hang Judge Pigott at the courtroom, and so, I didn't want to miss that." "Sometimes you make friends in strange ways," Pigott says.

Before Lendall Hill was born, his father lost his leg in a farming accident. But that didn't stop the elder Hill from working at his saw mill -- or from bringing Lendall along on delivery jobs. As they unloaded the truck one day at a mine in West Virginia, Lendall's father, Vaunia, realized his artificial leg had gotten caught briefly on a piece of timber. The sound it made, he recalls, being like "a loud pop." The leg, made of varnished paper and made movable by a system of cables, was twisted at the ankle. "Oh darn, I think I broke my foot," said Vaunia (pronounced "Vaughn.") He sat on the truck's running-board, trying to twist the foot back into alignment with the rest of the leg. After wrenching it around a bit, he climbed back up on the truck and finished the job. Father and son thought little of the incident -- but the mine's timber checker who was working with them that day "turned white as cotton," Lendall recalls. The reason for that became obvious several years later, when they heard from Lendall Hill's uncle, Lon, who had run into the same timber checker. Realizing that he was talking to Vaunia Hill's brother, the man recalled the day he saw a man trying to pop his broken foot back into place. "I'll tell you one thing," the timber checker had said. "That's the toughest man I ever seen." Lon Hill never could bring himself to tell the man that his brother had an artificial leg.

In 1955, John L. Black Sr. started his job as a janitor for the Cincinnati school board. He regularly put in 16-hour days in the boiler room of Woodward High School, keeping the building's pipes from freezing. "Working all those hours," Samuel tells his wife, Edda Fields-Black, "he didn't have time to discuss things. You had to get it right that time and that time only." "He was a very stern disciplinarian," Samuel Black says. Often, all his father had to do was look at his sons, and the meaning was clear. That was the case one day when Samuel was 10. He and a friend went out looking for returnable pop bottles to bring to the local store, seeking the deposit money that they hoped would cover a root beer and some potato chips. Realizing he was 10 cents short, Samuel decided to take a shortcut and claim some of the store's bottles as his own. At almost the same instant, he looked out the store window, where his father was standing, watching him. The walk from the store, Samuel says, "seemed like the Long March." But it wasn't until years later -- after his father died in 2004 -- that Samuel Black realized how big a mistake he had made.

Rufus Burkhalter, 61, and his friend and co-worker Bobby Brown, 58, are water-pump operators at Pumping Station No. 6 along the 17th Street Canal in New Orleans. In the days after Katrina hit, Burkhalter and Brown risked their lives inside the station, continuing to work even after the levees broke. Pump Station 6, in Orleans Parish, is one of the world's largest pumping stations. Brown's home in the Lower Ninth Ward was submerged and destroyed, and everything inside Burkhalter's home was severely damaged by the rising water. The pair have worked together for more than 20 years.

In his 24-year career as a pediatrician, Dr. John Bancroft has treated thousands of children. But the story of one young girl, whom he treated more than 10 years ago, has stayed with him. The girl's condition was dire -- a sudden onset of liver failure -- and her family's hopes hinged on an organ transplant. But a donor for the girl could not be found before her condition had advanced too far for intervention. Upon her death, the girl's family asked that their daughter's organs -- her kidneys and pancreas -- be offered for donation so that others could have an improved chance at life. As Dr. John Bancroft told his own daughter, Carolyn, recently in New York, it was the gift of life, as much as his patient's death, that has stuck with him.

Rick Kincaid [kin-CADE] talks with his friend Danny Ray Terry [TERRee] about his 11 year career as a bounty hunter in Texas. "Some fellers would find out we were chasing them, they'd just go put themselves in jail," Kincaid remembers. After several fruitless tries to nab one man, it wasn't the $300 bond that motivated Kincaid to keep after him -- "it became a matter of principle," he said. But one of Kincaid's targets finally challenged that principle and made him stop chasing criminals. He told his wife, "that was about as close to death as I want to get." Rick Kincaid's interview was recorded in a StoryCorps Mobilebooth in Austin, Texas.

For Tom and Lauren Nelson, being married has been a thrill. But it has also presented challenges; only days after their July 2005 wedding, Tom's Army career led him far away and into danger in Afghanistan. Tom, 23, is an infantry officer in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division. And that has meant that the usual adjustment period for newlyweds also included a four-month deployment in Afghanistan, while Laurel stayed behind in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The Nelsons talk about the difficulties of maintaining a marraige over the phone and the worry on both sides when a spouse is deployed in a war zone. The experience has forced Lauren and Tom to adjust and change. As Tom says, "When people thank the military soldiers, they should also thank the wives, and the family."

Last week, Arthur Winston reached two milestones. He turned 100 years old, and he retired from the job he held for more than 70 years, maintaining buses at the LA Metropolitan Transit Authority. In that time, he missed just one day of work. His exceptional service led to a Los Angeles bus terminal being named after him. In an interview session with his great-grandnephew, Eric Anthony Givens, a few days before his retirement, Winston offered his views on everything from work to the current obsession with fighting age -- including Viagra. Despite the decades he has spent working, Winston says he has lived a full life, traveling across America and Europe: "You can't wait 'til 99 to do hardly anything," he said. Still, Winston says he pictures an active retirement. Among his plans: To do some volunteer work at centers for senior citizens.

Andy Linares, who runs Bug Off Pest Control, came to the StoryCorps booth at Grand Central Terminal to talk about his work as an exterminator. Linares, a classically trained musician with a master's degree in International Affairs, decided to take over the family business in 1987.

New York City Cab driver Jimmy Beatrice talks to his friend Andrew Vollo.

Angelo Bruno worked as a New York City sanitation worker for over 30 years. He spent the last decade of those years working with Eddie Nieves in Manhattan's West Village.

Here, the two men reflect on their time working together.

Majid Al-Bahadli came to the U.S. from Iraq after the first Gulf War. In this piece, Majid and his wife, Diana Klatte, remember how they first met.

Sister Vincent Cecire became a nun in 1934, working as an elementary school teacher in cities all over the country. While teaching, she developed a love for baseball.
 
Here, Sister Vincent tells her friend Sister Catherine Garry how she first got interested in the game.

19-year-old Noe Rueda grew up the eldest of four siblings on Chicago’s West Side.

Here he tells his high school economics teacher, Alex Fernandez, how he started his own business at the age of eight to help his single mother get by.

Author Walter Dean Myers grew up in Harlem, the son of a janitor. Myers began writing as a teenager, but always failed to impress his father with his writing.

Here, Myers talks about his father with his own son, Christopher.

From the 1940s through the 1960s, the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York were a popular summer escape from New York City. The resorts needed entertainment, and talent agents like Jack Segal made their living booking comedians, singers, and novelty acts there.

Here, Jack’s son, Mort Segal, and daughter, Joan Feldman, remember their dad.

Former NYPD lieutenant Bill Cosgrove remembers carrying Father Mychal Judge, the first official victim of September 11th, out of the World Trade Center.

When Earl Reynolds Jr. was 11 years old, he shined shoes at his father's barbershop in Roanoke, Va.  Here he tells his daughter, Ashley, about a valuable lesson he learned from a customer -- the late James Brown. 

Thomas Morris was a U.S. Postal Service worker for 28 years. He was working in Washington D.C. when anthrax laced letters targeting senators and major media outlets appeared in the mail. He was one of two postal workers who died in October 2001 as a result of these biochemical attacks. His widow, Mary Morris, came to StoryCorps to remember their life together–starting with the day they met at a family funeral.

88-year-old Frank Curre remembers serving on the U.S.S. Tennessee during the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.

Queen Jackson tells her case manager, Debra MacKillop, how she became homeless.

In 1990, Ayodeji Ogunniyi left Nigeria, along with his mother and brother, to come to the United States. They arrived in Chicago, joining Ayodeji’s father, Abimbola “Yinka” Ogunniyi, who’d arrived a few years earlier, and was working as a cab driver.

Abimbola always wanted Ayodeji to be a doctor.  But while Ayodeji was studying pre-med in college, his father was murdered on the job.

At StoryCorps, Ayodeji talked about how his father’s death changed the course of his life.

Iraq War veteran Richard Bennett talks with Craig Williams about how they became unlikely business partners.

Many veterans seek out the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Hospital in hopes of feeling better. Thanks to Anthony Bravo Esparza — known to his friends as “Dreamer” — those veterans often end up looking better, too.

Since the 1970s, Dreamer, a veteran himself, has been giving free haircuts to vets.

He can be found in a red, white, and blue painted trailer parked at the VA, where he averages about 200 haircuts a month.

Last year, Paul Crowley showed up looking for a trim. Today, he’s Dreamer’s assistant.

At StoryCorps, the pair sat down to speak about their friendship.

In 1992, Los Angeles police officers were charged — then acquitted — of assaulting Rodney King.

The news sparked riots in the city, and no neighborhood was hit harder than South Central LA.

KJLH was an urban R&B station located on Crenshaw Boulevard, at the heart of the riots.

Karen Slade, the general manager, Eric “Rico” Reed, a DJ, and Arthur “Sonny” Williams, KJLH’s driver, remember what happened during those days.

When Sean Guess brought his grandfather, Harrison Wright, to a mobile booth in Austin, he asked about Harrison’s service during World War II.

Harrison was drafted in early 1943 and soon after shipped out to Europe. He played the bugle in his unit, and, at the end of the war, he was called upon for a special assignment.

On a fall day in 1981, Ricardo Ramirez accepted an offer to become a bishop in San Antonio, Texas.

At StoryCorps, he remembered the dozens of phone calls he made that day.

One of the first was to his grandmother Panchita Espitia.

Mark Edens is a retired state trooper who worked for the Michigan State Police for 25 years.

During that time, he was often tasked with investigating fatal car accidents on Michigan’s highways.

At StoryCorps, he sat down with his daughter, Jessie, to talk about his work.