Marty Wouldn’t Get Out of the Truck

Marty pulled into my driveway last month and didn’t get out of the truck. He rolled the window down and said, “Sit in here a minute.”

Then he hit play on the stereo. A man’s voice came through, telling a story about burying the family car in mud up to the door handles in 1961.

The man laughed at his own story. Marty laughed with him.

That was Marty’s father. He’s been dead six years.

I sat in that passenger seat for twenty minutes. When I got out, I went in the house and sat at the kitchen table a while.

I don’t have a single recording of my father’s voice. Not one. He’s been gone nineteen years, and I couldn’t tell you anymore what he sounded like.

It wasn’t complicated. That’s the part that got to me.

Back in 2018 his dad got a diagnosis with a number attached to it. Marty drove over with his phone and a legal pad and asked if he could ask him some questions.

They did it in four sittings at the kitchen table. Maybe three hours all together. His dad talked about his own father, the mill, meeting Marty’s mother at a dance, the year they nearly lost the house.

Marty says the first twenty minutes were awkward for both of them. Then his dad forgot the phone was sitting there.

No equipment. No professional. A phone propped on a stack of magazines and a man willing to ask.

I’ve got photographs of my father. Boxes of them. I’ve got his tools, his watch, and a folder full of his paperwork.

None of it sounds like him.

A photograph gives you a face. It doesn’t give you the pause before he answered a hard question, or the way he said your name when you’d let him down, or what he thought was funny.

There’s a whole institution built on that idea. A guy named Dave Isay opened the first StoryCorps recording booth in Grand Central Terminal in October 2003. Studs Terkel cut the ribbon.

More than 750,000 people have sat down and recorded a conversation since. StoryCorps calls it the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered, and with the participants’ permission the recordings go to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

Not transcripts. Voices.

Somebody worked out a long time ago that a voice carries something a document can’t.

Here’s where guys get stuck. You sit down, hit record, say “so tell me about your life,” and get nothing back.

StoryCorps publishes its question list for anybody to use, free. They’ve run hundreds of thousands of these conversations, so it isn’t guesswork. A handful of the questions are worth the whole exercise.

▸ “How would you like to be remembered?” Nobody gets asked this. Ever. Most men have an answer ready that they’ve never once said out loud.
▸ “Do you have any regrets?” It sounds like a rough thing to ask. It isn’t. That’s usually where the real conversation starts.
▸ “Is there anything you’ve never told me but want to tell me now?” Marty says this one turned the whole afternoon. Ask it late, not early.
▸ “What was your childhood like?” and “What was my mom like growing up?” Your easy openers. Start here, not with the heavy material.
▸ “Are you proud of me?” That’s on their list too, for parents and grandparents both. Ask it if you can get it out.

Read that last one again and ask yourself whether you’ve ever heard the answer.

Your phone is good enough. Voice memos on an iPhone, the recorder app on an Android. Stop shopping for gear.

What ruins these recordings isn’t the microphone. It’s the room. A running dishwasher, a ceiling fan, a TV going two rooms over — all of it lands on the recording louder than you’d expect, and you can’t take it back out later.

So kill the noise first. Put the phone between the two of you on something soft. Then record thirty seconds and listen to it before you go any further.

A few other things I’d do. Record in short sittings instead of one marathon. A standard StoryCorps session runs forty minutes, and that’s about the honest limit of anybody’s attention.

Ask one question and then shut up. The silence after a question is where the good material comes from, and most of us step all over it.

And say the date and both your names at the top of every file. Sounds fussy. In thirty years it’s the difference between a recording somebody keeps and a recording somebody deletes.

A recording that lives on one phone isn’t saved. It’s just waiting.

The Library of Congress puts out plain guidance on this for regular people, not archivists. Here’s what they tell you to do.

▸ Save it in an open format. Not something locked inside one app. Plain audio files anything can open.
▸ Make at least two copies, and more is better. One on the computer, others on a drive or in the cloud.
▸ Keep the copies physically far apart. A house fire shouldn’t be able to take all of them at once.
▸ Check them once a year. Open a file and make sure it still plays.
▸ Remake the copies every five years. Media dies quietly.

Two other places worth knowing about. StoryCorps has an app you can record into and a public archive, so the file lives somewhere besides your closet.

And if the man you’re recording served, the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress takes interviews recorded by anybody 15 or older. All branches, all ranks, going back to World War I, combat or not. They publish a field kit with the forms in it.

A recording made at your kitchen table can end up in the Library of Congress, same as the Gutenberg Bible. That still strikes me as remarkable.

I can’t record my father. That window closed in 2007 and I didn’t know it had ever been open.

So I did the only version of this still available to me. I called my daughter and asked her to interview me.

We’re doing it in October. She’s got the question list. I told her not to skip the uncomfortable ones.

I’ll be honest with you, I’m dreading it a little. Sitting there talking about yourself into a phone feels ridiculous.

Then I think about Marty in that truck, laughing at a joke his father told him eight years ago, and it stops feeling ridiculous.

Somebody’s going to sit in a driveway someday and hear me laugh. That’s worth an awkward afternoon.

— Walter