Photos by Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

StoryCorps is in Roanoke recording stories from area residents who want to be part of a compilation of an oral history of America.

StoryCorps facilitator Jeremy Helton records participant information while Sheila Strauss laughs during an interview Thursday with her mother for the project, which will be taping conversations in Roanoke through Oct. 18.

As part of the StoryCorps project, Isabel Berney interviews her husband, Morton Nadler, on Thursday about his experiences as an American communist living abroad. StoryCorps, a nonprofit affiliated with National Public Radio, stopping in Roanoke.

From across Southwest Virginia, husbands and wives, mothers and sons, and brothers and sisters have come to this silver trailer to remember the good, the bad and the funny.

They've come in, plopped down in a booth with silver lining to just talk -- and record it for posterity.

The purpose of the occasion is emblazoned on the trailer in orange letters: StoryCorps. It's a nonprofit group that tours the country collecting people's stories to archive them at the Library of Congress as an oral history of America and to air some of them on National Public Radio.

In Roanoke, StoryCorps' people say, many of the tales have reflected on faith and devotion, segregation and Great Depression poverty in Southwest Virginia.

"There's this notion that [during the Great Depression] everyone in Roanoke was sort of helping each other," said Jeremy Helton, a StoryCorps facilitator. "A woman told a story that no one knew they were poor because everyone was poor."

The trailer -- which is parked outside the Virginia Museum of Transportation in downtown Roanoke through Oct. 18 -- can accommodate seven or eight 45-minute conversations per day. Many people have been invited by local organizations such as the Good Samaritan Hospice, and others have made appointments individually.

Since the project started in 1993, more than 20,000 conversations have been recorded, and about 1 percent of them have aired on NPR. But WVTF, which partnered with StoryCorps for the trailer's visit to Roanoke, will air locally some of the stories from Western Virginia.

Friday morning, the station aired the first one. Earl Reynolds is known in Roanoke as the director of housing and community development for Total Action Against Poverty, a former assistant city manager and the former city manager of Martinsville. But in his StoryCorps recording, he told of helping in his father's Roanoke barber shop during the 1960s -- and polishing the shoes of singer James Brown, the "Godfather of Soul."

Morton Nadler is a retired computer engineering professor who lives in Blacksburg. He recorded earlier this week the story that few people may know about him: being a communist expatriate. The Brooklyn, N.Y., native left the country in 1946 for Czechoslovakia and for more than 20 years tried to come back legally. It was only in 1995 that he regained his American citizenship.

Another woman told a story of emigrating from Germany in the 1960s and witnessing the contrast between racism in the United States and the treatment of Jews in Germany, and seeing separate drinking fountains for whites and blacks in Roanoke.

"These people could be living right next to you, and you'd never know they have a story like that," said Karen Dillon, a development associate with WVTF. "The booth is really magical because you get in there and things start coming out."