StoryCorps San Joaquin Unknown

And now to StoryCorps San Joaquin, a series based on our collaboration with the personal history project, StoryCorps. In this edited conversation from February's 2020 mobile tour in the Valley, 23-year-old Emalee Farley interviews 75-year-old El Daña about her life as a male impersonator entertaining in Fresno and beyond.

And now to StoryCorps San Joaquin, a series documenting the stories of Valley residents, based on our collaboration with the personal history project. In this conversation, Gabe Mora interviews his life partner, Don Simmons, a Fresno State professor and historic preservation enthusiast. They talk about building their life together in Fresno. For Don, he didn’t expect to grow to love this city, especially after a life-changing tragedy on 9/11. But his work in the community led him to find meaning in its history and its people. Don Simmons starts.

And now to StoryCorps San Joaquin, a series based on our collaboration with the personal history project, StoryCorps. In this edited conversation from February's 2020 mobile tour in Fresno, 64-year-old daughter Nadine Takeuchi asks her 88-year-old mother Harumi Sasaki about her experience as a Japanese-American teenager living through the Hiroshima bombing.

In this StoryCorps San Joaquin segment, 53-year-old Joan Yamate Taketa talks with her lifelong friend Celeste Johnston, 54, about what she has learned of her paternal family history. The two also talk about their decades-long close friendship. Joan calls Celeste the “repository of a lot of her memories” and shares a story about her father. When Joan’s father was a young boy in the United States, he travelled with his mother to Japan to retrieve his older sister, who had been going to school near Hiroshima. And then Pearl Harbor was bombed. Joan tells Celeste the rest of the story.

And now it’s time for StoryCorps San Joaquin, edited conversations from the mobile 2020 tour in Fresno and Bakersfield documenting the stories of Valley residents. Today Jeff Bowman tells StoryCorps facilitator Ava Ahmadbeigi about childhood summers spent with his pioneering grandmother, Billy Murphy. At age 46, she became the first woman to operate a fire lookout tower in California, 8,000 feet up in the San Bernardino National Forest. That was shortly after WWII and she did it for the next 23 years.

And now to StoryCorps San Joaquin, a series based on our collaboration with the personal history project Storycorps. In this edited conversation from February's 2020 mobile tour in Bakersfield, 15-year-old Emily Gorospe interviews her mother Valerie Gorospe about her grandmother, Teresa De Anda.