Everyone asks Rani Shankar the same question: do she and Nick Yulman sleep in their big, silver StoryCorps trailer, recently parked for two weeks on the lawn of the Field Museum? Yulman answers: “These seats do fold out–I mean, we could sleep here if we had to. But thankfully our hosts are putting us up at a hotel.” The two have worked together for the last few years at the StoryCorps home base in New York, but they’d never labored in such close proximity until mid-May, when this project took to the road, its first stop Washington, D.C. After Chicago they’ll spend several more weeks together, traveling to Saint Louis and Tuscaloosa. “The first two weeks are sort of like a really long first date,” Shankar says. “But then you get over it. Now it’s more like summer camp.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This oral-history venture, sponsored in part by NPR, is modeled in spirit and scope on the Works Progress Administration projects of the 1930s. Shankar and Yulman have been working six days a week, ten hours a day, engineering and logging 40-minute recordings of interviews by everyday citizens who believe they know someone with a story to tell–or at least someone whose experience merits space in a library. “Mostly it’s people who are related,” says Shankar. “Sometimes it’s a coworker, or an elder, a mentor.” The recorded stories are then turned over to StoryCorps, which prepares them for the Library of Congress archives. In Chicago, they’ve also been culled for broadcast on WBEZ, which is hosting Shankar and Yulman’s visit here.
After two weeks here, Shankar and Yulman were able to identify the Chicago narratives’ dominant theme. “Gentrification,” said Yulman. “Loosely, gentrification. A lot of the older people talk about how much all the neighborhoods have been redeveloped and changed. People have also talked a lot about Chicago as a destination. And racism.” Shankar added with a laugh, “We’ve heard quite a few stories about couples that met jitterbugging at the Aragon Ballroom. Oh! And Fluky’s! Families from all over the city were built up from dates to Fluky’s.”
