Listen to this interview here.

Jim McFarland was born in New York City in 1944. But his family was originally from the South, where his grandmother grew up.

From the age of 4 to when he turned 11, McFarland’s grandmother took him and his brother on a train trip to see their relatives in the South. It was a summer ritual.

In those days, the trip presented drastic changes that let McFarland know he was far from New York.

The switch began, he said recently, when their train reached Washington.

“When we got to D.C.,” McFarland recalled, “we would get out of an integrated car and we’d go into an all-colored car.

“I thought this was the greatest thing that could ever happen,” McFarland says. “Because now I’m in a car with all my people. They’ve got the brown paper bags with the greasy chicken, and the sandwiches. We’re having a good time.”

But on the following stops, McFarland often had trouble with the divided bathrooms. He was too young to read “White” and “Colored” well.

“Use the one with the ‘C’ on it,” his grandmother would tell him.

Going to the movies was another departure.

In New York, McFarland was forbidden from sitting in the theater balconies, which were reserved for smokers, and strictly for adults.

“I always wanted to sit in the balcony,” McFarland says.

But in the South, he was required to sit there.

When he got back to New York, McFarland’s friends would ask him, “What was the South about?”

“Them brothers got it going on in the South,” he would answer. “We got our own bathroom. We got our own water fountain.”

McFarland’s grandmother never let on to the details of the situation. She didn’t talk about why she left the South. And she’d shush him whenever McFarland tried to talk about it.

But he found out on his own about segregation, and the feelings behind it.

That was when he was 11 — and when McFarland told his grandmother, “I don’t want to go to the South any more.”

Eventually, Jim McFarland did return to the South — but not for 20 years. He now lives in Atlanta.

Produced for ‘Morning Edition’ by Selly Thiam. The senior producer for StoryCorps is Sarah Kramer.

Listen to this interview here.

Grady Hospital in Atlanta was segregated until the mid-1960s. But there were times when blacks and whites found themselves sharing the same space.

In this week’s feature from the StoryCorps Griot Initiative, Murray Brown — a nursing student at Grady in the ’50s — recounts some of her experiences at the Storycorps Griot Booth in Atlanta. Brown is now retired from her 42-year nursing career.

Listen to this interview here.

Thurman Weaver worked as a janitor and a chauffeur. But his greatest life’s work may have been his family. Recently, Thurman’s son, Dr. William Weaver, spoke of his father in Atlanta, Ga.

Now 57, Weaver is the chairman of surgery at Atlanta’s Morehouse School of Medicine. But he still measures himself against his father.

“My father was everything to me,” William Weaver told his daughter, Kimberly. Before Thurman Weaver died, William recalled, “every decision I made, I’d always call him, and he would never tell what to do.

“But he would always listen and say, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ And he made me feel that I could do anything I wanted to do.”

That spirit was evident when Weaver was in high school, and struggling to learn algebra. Sitting at the family’s kitchen table, the frustration built, and Weaver gave up. His father offered to help, but Weaver answered, “They didn’t even have algebra in your day.”

William Weaver went off to bed, and his father turned to the algebra books on the table. And at 4 a.m., he shook his son awake, and sat him back down at the table.

“What he had done,” Weaver recalls, “was sit up all night and read the algebra book. And then he explained the problems to me so I could do them, and understand them.”

“To this day,” Weaver said, “I live my life trying to be half the man my father was, just half the man. And I would be a success, if my children loved me half as much as I loved my father.”

Listen to this interview here.

When Roberta Keys-Torn and her sisters were born in 1915, it came as a surprise. Her parents, after all, were expecting one child — not four girls who together weighed 16 pounds.

Roberta, Mona, Mary and Leota were born in their parents’ bedroom in Hollis, Okla. Their parents, Alma and Flake Keys, had only one birth certificate, on which they entered the names on one line, along with a note: “All Girls.”

After that day, the girls became a sensation in their own right.

Every year from the time they were 9 months old to when they were in the third grade, the girls were put on display at the Oklahoma State Fair, Roberta Keys-Torn recently told her daughter, Susan Torn Young.

And when the girls were recognized later in life, Keys-Torn says, “Some people would say, ‘Ooh, we paid 25 cents to see you when you were little, at the fair.'” The sisters’ response was often “Do you want your money back?”

Their notoriety as quadruplets even earned them college educations — Baylor University offered to teach them at no charge. And to make money, the sisters went on stage singing and playing saxophones — an instrument they had long played, as Keys-Torn recalls. They were, after all, a natural quartet.

Asked how she would like to be remembered, Keys-Torn, now at 91 the only member of the quadruplets still living, says, “As somebody who gave back.”

“Your kids and your grandkids will remember you,” Susan Torn Young says, “as a person who had character, as well as a person who was a character.”

Produced for Morning Edition by Katie Simon. The senior producer for StoryCorps is Sarah Kramer.

Listen to this interview here.

Sisters Evelyn Palmour and Doreene McCoy were just children when the Depression hit their Nebraska community. Recently, the sisters remembered how their family packed up, took to the road, and started a new life.

The economic upheaval led the girls’ family to flee Norfolk, Neb., for the safety of their grandfather’s farm in Oklahoma.

But first, the family store — Nelson’s “A Good Place to Trade” — had to be sold, and long-running debts had to be collected.

The store, recalls Doreene, “did a credit business, they let people charge groceries. And the Crash came about that time, and the people were out of work. They were honest people, but they just didn’t have money to pay their bills.”

Their father sold the store, and their mother made a tour of the town, says Evelyn, “and told all the people that owed us money, ‘We are moving to Oklahoma, and we’re not coming back, and in lieu of money, we’ll take personal property.'”

Their customers took them up on the offer.

“Mom and dad drove that Model T truck loaded to the hilt with stuff,” recalls Doreene, who was 11 at the time.

The girls followed with their uncle, who was pulling a trailer behind his car.

Some 535 miles after leaving with a car and a truck teetering with belongings, the Nelson family arrived in Chelsea, Okla., on March 5, 1935.

“When we got to Oklahoma and unpacked the truck,” says Evelyn, who was 13 at the time of the move, “I was amazed at all the stuff. Some of it, I had never seen before.

“But it was what the people had forfeited for their grocery bill that they owed our parents.”

Produced for Morning Edition by Michael Garofalo. The senior producer for StoryCorps is Sarah Kramer.

Listen to this interview here.

Robert Crum, 83, worked as a Methodist minister for nearly four decades. Some time ago, Crum was sent to work in downtown Des Moines, Iowa. He turned a deserted building into a shelter for people in need — and saw things he’s never forgotten.

The shelter was called The House of Refuge, a place for troubled youth, battered women and people struggling to make their way in the world. Crum still calls the experience “an eye-opener.”

Around 5 p.m. one day, a young man stopped by Crum’s office, with a woman and two children in tow. He was there to talk, he said, before going down the street to rob a gas station for money to support his family.

But instead, Crum took the man in, gave him and his family food and a place to stay — and helped him find work.

About a month later, Crum recalls, the man was back. This time, he was asking for another favor.

He said, “I’ve lived with this woman for six years, and these are my two children. I’d like to honor them with marriage,” Crum recalls. “Would you be willing to perform the ceremony?”

“Sure,” Crum answered.

The last Crum heard of them, the man and his family were still together. He was working and making a living. “It was the most beautiful time,” he says.

Of those days, Crum says, “I quit preaching the gospel, and began living it.”

Produced for Morning Edition by Katie Simon. The senior producer for StoryCorps is Sarah Kramer.