Shalayne Smith Needham

Cousins Charlene Duncan and Kathleen Chegup, both in their early 60’s,grew up together on a Utah Cattle Ranch. The cousins got together at the Ute Education Center at Fort Duchesne, Utah and talked about their childhood and how they are still good friends today.

The spry 93 year-old Clara Price of Vernal recalls her elopement at the age of 16 to her husband, Dan Price.

The documentary, The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb, gives a history of one of the architects of the atomic bomb. The film will be screened in Southern Utah Friday, June 24, 2016. Many Utah residents were exposed to the radiation fallout of testing in Nevada. 

  A culinary chronicle about our distinctive approach to food, cooking and eating in the West.

Husband and wife, Ryan McKnab and Jessi Brunson, are competitive bike racers. During this Uintah Basin StoryCorps conversation they talk together about how their lives were changed forever because of a telephone call.

Telsa Mittlemeir tells us about her father who was an American born son of Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Belarus. He was born in 1921 and became the bridge to his older brothers families.

The Christensen family talks about loving Vernal and Logan as places that helped them become who they are today.

Listen to Debbie Cook's life changing experiences as a dental hygienist in Africa.  An inspiring story of how giving of herself brought so many good things into her own life.

Brothers Rich and Cory Etchberger discuss the mystery surrounding the death of their father, a national Vietnam War hero.

From astronauts and test pilots to Hollywood celebrities, retired dentist, 93 year-old Roy Nisson talks with his wife Janice about his brushes with the stars.

73 year-old Laura Stratten Friel talks with her husband Don Freil about the harsh realities of growing up on a farm and living off the land.

Laura: All my life I've had to live...been forced to live in two worlds at the same time. Sometimes its added a great deal to my life and also its frustrating. When I was a young person I was confronted early with the harsh realities of life. That was my upbringing. I drank milk from the cows that I actually milked. I ate meat from the chickens and cows and sheep and deer and pigs that I actually helped to kill. I knew what a toothache was when my parents couldn't afford a dentist. I work like a man in the fields and yet I'm a small woman. I saw my family suffer after a baby's death. I ate vegetables from our own garden. And if I wanted fruit I just climbed up into the cherry tree or the peach tree or the apple tree and eat the fruit while I was playing in the tree.

UPR's Kerry Bringhurst talks with her mom, Kathy Lyne Jones about being a dance ambassador for the city of Mesquite, Nevada.

Kathy: I belong to a senior dance team called The Mesquite-Toes. Our average age is 69 1/2. I have only danced with them for three years but they celebrated their 10th year anniversary this year. It started as an exercise class at the rec center. Out of the ten beginners five of them are still dancing. We took a trip this year to Palm Springs and to Knott's Berry Farm in California and then next year we are going to Alaska on another cruise. We do about 26 different dances. We have tap classes, jazz classes and clogging classes. I do like the clogging the best. I think it's the fact that you can take out all of your frustrations...stomping your feet that loud.

Kerry: Tell me about the groups favorite color.

Hal Cannon, former state folklorist and founder of The Western Folklife Center, visited the StoryCorps booth with his wife Teresa Jordan.  He recalls his experience working with the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers to preserve the material culture of Utah's pioneer past.  Cannon talks about an unexpected visit from Kate Carter, former director of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers. 

Retired Zion National Park Superintendent Jock Whitworth talks with Amnesty Kochanowski, National Park Service Safety Manager, about the role that our National Parks parks have played in his life and the life of his family.  After 36 years of federal service Jock Whitworth retired January 3, 2014.  He plans to pursue his interests in hiking, photography and volunteering for nonprofit organizations.

Marlyne Hammon and her sister Priscilla, polygamist wives from Centennial Park, Arizona, talk about the Short Creek raid of 1953 which, at the time, was described as the largest mass-arrest of men and women in modern American history.

Former Zion National Park Ranger Greer Chesher talks with Barb Graves. Chesher recalls her experience surviving a flash flood in the Zion Narrows.

We hiked from Russell Gulch down into the [Narrows]. There were about six of us park rangers, all women except one.

But we hiked in there- we had a lot of rapelling to do. The weather report was fine. We were on a rappel, I was the first one over, and it was maybe 20 feet or something like that.

And so I took off my pack and set it on the canyon floor. The canyon is only about 10 feet wide, you could touch wall to wall, but about 1,500 feet deep. Just these straight canyon walls, like you're in a room. A hallway, a really deep hallway.

So I was on this rappel, I get down, take off my pack and I look up the rope at the next person who's coming down and my eyes just kept coursing up along the canyon walls until I saw the sky, which was black as night.

I just went, 'RUN!' and I ran. I turned around and ran. I put my pack back on, and ran down the canyon, because I knew we had to find a place out of there, a way out.

Greer Chesher and Barb Graves talk about their time as Park Rangers in Zion National Park.

Barb and Greer first met as park rangers in 1981. Barb Graves came from being a fire fighter from the forest service. She was one of the first female fire fighters to be hired and trained.

Alisha Weigle was born into a family of 46 children, with three mothers, and a father, in the Colorado City polygamous compound in Arizona.

"I was one of the few that went away and went to college in Cedar City," Alisha said. "I got a degree in education, but I also got my eyes opened in a big way as to what the real world was."