Taking it to the vault

Cortez radio station KSJD helps preserve the spoken word

by Paul Ferrell

Three years ago, Cortez community radio station KSJD converted the historic Montezuma Valley National Bank into its new home. The 100-plus-year-old building, made from sandstone from a nearby quarry, has been transformed into offices, a broadcasting studio and a community meeting space, among other uses. Even the bank’s old vault has been utilized, now serving as a sound-proof, state-of-the-art recording booth.

And while the vault may no longer secure the riches it did in the past, it is being used to secure something equally valuable: oral history. Recently, the radio station launched "StoryVault," a program whereby anyone can go into the vault and sit down to interview each other, tell stories and offer a lasting testament of themselves and the history of the area. “For any two people who go into that small space with the intention to share stories – that’s something magical,” says DJ Liz Bohm, a volunteer at the station who serves as program coordinator for the project. “Something magical happens – the magic of storytelling.”

Tom Yoder, former volunteer DJ and now program director for KSJD radio, stands in an old bank vault converted into the “StoryVault” recording studio. The vault contains two chairs, two microphones and two sets of headphones. Interviews and conversations can be recorded directly to a CD or to a flash drive or memory card./Photo by Paul Ferrell

Modeled, more or less, on StoryCorps, Bohm and KSJD’s Program Director Tom Yoder envision StoryVault as a place where anyone can record a conversation with a relative, friend or even a total stranger. “It’s an opportunity that people don’t get very often,” says Yoder. “We tell stories around campfires, and we tell stories around the kitchen table, but to be intentionally going in and saying ‘I want this to be recorded for perpetuity’ is a different way of approaching your story.”

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that each story is going to be aired on the radio, says Bohm. Participants in StoryVault can have their recorded conversations archived at KSJD for possible future broadcast or they can be kept as personal property. “(The recording) can be private, it can be for on-air use, and maybe there’s some future program – something really creative and beautiful can be done with these stories that we haven’t even got to yet.”

Bohm says she encourages people to explore the space, experiment with it and have fun with it, and "discover the value for themselves.”

The StoryCorps program started 10 years ago when radio producer Dave Isay placed a recording booth in New York’s Grand Central Station for anyone to walk in and record an interview. Since then, mobile NPR recording booths have visited 174 American cities collecting more that 50,000 interviews. The recordings are archived at the Library of Congress with segments of interviews broadcast weekly on "Morning Edition."

In an interview with Mother Jones magazine, Isay said, “People know that their great-great-great-great-grandkids are going to get to hear their voice someday, and this will be maybe the only thing they leave behind. There’ll be pictures and other things, but the soul is contained in the voice.”

Bohm and Yoder were the first to bare their souls inside KSJD’s newly functional recording booth. “Liz and I were the first two people to sit in there and use it as a StoryVault in that way,” said Yoder. “It was kind of off the cuff; it really wasn’t anything planned. I said, ‘We’ve been talking about the StoryVault, why don’t we go and sit in there and talk for a few minutes and see what happens?’ We ended up in there for 45 minutes. It was pretty interesting to hear some of the things about our lives that we didn’t know about each other. It became pretty transformative pretty quickly.”

Bohm was equally impressed. “That experience was a true testament to the power of intentional storytelling,”  she says, adding, “it was a really nice meeting of minds.”

Bohm sees StoryVault as a way for people to become closer to one another. “I think it will strengthen bonds between people. It will strengthen bonds between family members or loved ones and also inter-generational bonds as well. There is a great quote which is: ‘The shortest distance between two people is a story.’”

Ted Ullman and Yoder are the only other two people to use the StoryVault. Ullman, a volunteer DJ at KSJD, described his experience as less of a conversation and more of an interview. “I rambled,” he said.  “I talked about my experience with the media.”

Ullman used the opportunity to talk about the influence of early television and his interest in radio. “In high school, I got interested in jazz and listened to the public radio jazz station in Cleveland.”

He says the 45-minute interview “just flew by" and that he may return to the vault. “I’d like to go back and talk a little about my personal history, things I did growing up and career, for posterity, for my kids and people that know me.”

Ullman would also like to interview others. “There’re so many fascinating people around here,” he says. “I’d like to do some of the old folks in the rest home.”

Yoder has plans to accommodate residents of rest homes and others who cannot make it into the radio studio. “Another aspect to the StoryVault is also empowering people to go out and get those stories,” he says. “Maybe they can’t bring them into KSJD and into the StoryVault, but maybe they can learn how to go out and capture a story.”

Yoder plans to capitalize on the upcoming National Day of Listening, a new national holiday started by StoryCorps, on Nov. 29. The day after Thanksgiving, the goal is to set aside a day to record conversations with friends and loved ones. According to Bohm, any recording method is fair game, from computers and smart phones to tape recorders or KSJD’s StoryVault.

 "Get the tools, learn how to do this,” Yoder says. “If you’re sitting around Thanksgiving dinner or the next day, ask grandpa about that story he’s told the family a hundred times.”

Yoder and Bohm hope to see KSJD’s collection of stories grow and eventually be put to good use. Yoder says,  possibly, maybe a few times a month the station would play a segment of a story that someone has told, with their permission of course. "A story that ... somebody has come in and told that has a particularly powerful impact that people can relate to. Or maybe it’s about a figure in the community, or an institution in the community, that people can relate to and may not know about."

Jeffrey Pope, KSJD’s executive director, sees StoryVault as a way to bring people together and more sharply define community identity. “People who have invested in KSDJ have made it possible for us to build a place that’s intentional for local histories, because the stories of our community, the history, hold us together,” he says.

Yoder notes that although community members will ultimately be the ones to benefit, they are also the ones responsible for making it work. “We’re asking for people to support this effort both through any kind of donations that they can give or coming in and getting involved with it,” says Yoder. “If they want to do a project of their own, some sort of oral history with their own family or something like that, we can probably accommodate that as well.”

To learn more about KSJD's StoryVault, call Tom Yoder at (970) 564-9727 or email him at tom@ksjd.org. 
To learn how to record your own stories go to KSJD.org