The founder of StoryCorps, the most ambitious oral history project ever, shares some of the more remarkable stories from an astonishing trove of memories and arranges them thematically into a beautiful mosaic of American life. An excerpt from “Listening Is an Act of Love.”

When I was a kid growing up in New Haven, Connecticut, in the early 1970s, my parents had a cassette recorder and microphone around the house. One night when I was eleven years old, my grandfather, grandmother, and two of her sisters came to our apartment for a holiday dinner.

My grandmother Rose Franzblau was a ­larger-­than-­life character. The oldest child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, she raised her four younger sisters after they were orphaned during the flu epidemic of 1918. She graduated from college, earned a Ph.D. in psychology, and after World War II went to work as an advice columnist at the New York Post for more than a quarter century. I knew her as a small whirlwind of a lady who filled up every room she walked into.

That afternoon in New Haven, I decided to set up the tape machine and record her. When we were done, I brought in my grandfather and then my ­great-­aunts. I remember I was a lousy interviewer — ­butting in incessantly with goofy ­comments — ­but I captured their voices nonetheless.

When I was thirteen years old, my grandmother passed away, and one by one over the next several years my two ­great-­aunts and my grandfather died as well. At some point I went looking for the cassette of the interviews ­I’d recorded. It was nowhere to be found. Still today, more than ­twenty-­five years later, when I go to my parents’ house I search for this tape. I know it’s gone, but just in case ...

In 1988 I stumbled into radio completely by chance as a ­twenty-­two-­year-­old headed to medical school. One afternoon, I was walking through New York City’s East Village and a storefront caught my eye. It was a tiny sliver of a shop with imaginatively decorated windows. I went inside and saw that the store was empty except for the couple who ran it. They were excited to have a visitor and wanted to show me around. It was a store for addicts in recovery, with all sorts of 12-step books and ­self-­help materials meticulously displayed. There was no mistaking the love and care that infused every inch of the cramped shop.

The couple, Angel Perez and his wife, Carmen, said they were recovering heroin addicts. They brought me to the back of the store and began telling me about their dream: to create a museum to addiction. Carmen had recently been diagnosed with HIV, and they were determined to see this museum rise before she passed away. They showed me scale models of the building, which ­they’d constructed out of tongue depressors and plywood. They had blueprints for every floor and intricate drawings of each exhibit.

They pulled out a ­loose-­leaf binder thick with rejection letters from wealthy New Yorkers to whom ­they’d written for help. While it was clear that these were form letters, the Perezes didn’t read them that way. Language as simple as “Congratulations on your idea” or “I wish you luck” gave them hope that the next request was going to lead to funding. All the while they were only weeks away from having to close their tiny storefront for lack of business.

I was moved by their courage and spirit, and I thought they deserved some attention. I went home, pulled out the Yellow Pages, and began calling all of the local TV stations to see if any of them might do a story. No interest. I flipped to the radio stations and called them as well. No interest whatsoever. At some point I dialed the number of a community station ­I’d never even heard of, WBAI. The news director at the time, Amy Goodman, took the call. She said it sounded like a great idea, but that they ­didn’t have any reporters to cover it, so why ­didn’t I do it myself? That afternoon I took a tape recorder and went back to see Angel and Carmen. I sat down beside them and began to record. From the moment they started speaking, I knew that I’d found what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Tape in hand, I went to WBAI and put the story together. It aired the next evening. Gary Covino, a producer from NPR in Washington, D.C., happened to be driving through New York City and heard the piece. He called the station and picked it up for NPR’s All Things Considered. I decided against medical school. My fate was sealed.

As a young radio producer I did piece after piece about ordinary Americans with extraordinary stories, focusing on underdogs in hidden corners of the country. I quickly learned about the power of radio, the capacity of people speaking from the heart to move listeners at the most visceral level; and I discovered how grateful subjects were to be heard and to have their stories told with dignity.

In 1993, I produced a radio documentary with two ­thirteen-year-­old boys, best friends growing up on the South Side of Chicago. Lloyd Newman lived in the Ida B. Wells housing projects; LeAlan Jones in a house right next door. I gave them tape recorders and asked them to record a week in their ­lives —­ what it’s like to grow up in one of the most dangerous and impoverished neighborhoods in the country. I spent a few hours training them to use the recording equipment, and then they were off.

LeAlan and Lloyd taped themselves at home and at school, getting into mischief around their neighborhood and taking bus adventures through downtown Chicago. They interviewed family, friends, and each other, and named their documentary “Ghetto Life 101.”

Sitting in my room in Chicago, listening to a recording of LeAlan climbing into bed with his grandmother and asking her about her life, was an epiphany. It was one of the most intimate and powerful moments ­I’d ever heard; the tape all but glowed with the love radiating from this conversation. The microphone had given LeAlan the license to ask questions he had never asked ­before —­ about the father he never knew, about his mother’s mental illness, about his grandmother’s childhood. The interview opened up lines of conversation between LeAlan and his grandmother that continued long after the taping ended. Years later, after LeAlan’s grandmother died, these tapes became some of his most treasured possessions. ­“They’re enough to sustain me for a lifetime,” he said.

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