Lillian Bloodworth, now 92, says when she first started to give blood, other donors would read her name tag and ask if that was really her name or if it was a gimmick for the blood bank.
Ruth Owens worked for four decades as a nurse in Tennessee, inspiring family to go into the profession. "I love people, and I love to help them — physically, mentally, spiritually," Owens said.
Olivia Hooker advocated for the military to open its doors to women of color. But even after policies started to change, "nobody seemed to be joining," she said. So she decided to join herself.
At StoryCorps, Eddie Chang tells his daughter Tria how he finds comfort in the pain surrounding her mother's death: "When you stop grieving is when you start losing contact with the person."
Six-year old Jerry Morrison is obsessed with space — a love that intensifies when talking to his uncle, a NASA engineer. "I learned from you a lot," Morrison told him. "More than I could imagine."
As a teenager growing up in Alabama, Lewis wrote a letter to Martin Luther King Jr. during a budding civil rights movement. In a letter back, King invited the 18-year-old to join the cause.
When Dena Kohleriter was 36, she decided to start a family on her own. At StoryCorps with her daughter, Jori, Dena describes how her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, responded to the news.
After a Somali American woman was attacked for speaking Swahili, the attacker's sister reached out to see if she was OK. The two women recently returned to StoryCorps to talk about their bond.
Drew Lanham grew up captivated by birds on his family's South Carolina farm. At StoryCorps, he says a return to the land inspired him to pursue his childhood dream of becoming an ornithologist.