EP45: The Sparks Family, Harold Nelson and Walt Whitman
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 9 August 2021
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, Sparky tells the story of his mother, Mary Sparks, and how faith, infidelity, and forgiveness grew his family not once, but twice; Rishi Sharma brings us the story of Harold Nelson and his role in WWII, Kelly Scott Franklin tells the tale of Walt Whitman's role in the Union and Confederate army and his literary accounts of the Civil War.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we bring you stories about, well, just about everything. |
| 0:27.6 | From the arts to sports, from business to history, and everything in between, including your stories. |
| 0:32.5 | Send them to our Americannetwork.org. |
| 0:34.9 | That's our Americannetwork.org. |
| 0:37.7 | And now we bring you our Women of True Grit series. |
| 0:40.3 | Our friend Edie Hand has come across many women |
| 0:43.8 | whose stories of hardship, character, and perseverance |
| 0:47.1 | caused her to write a book called Women of True Grit. |
| 0:51.0 | Now, Edie is bringing some of those women along with many others to our airwaves. |
| 0:55.7 | Today, Edy brings us the story of Mary Sparks, a tale of faith and family as told by her son's |
| 1:02.7 | Sparky. Here's Edie. |
| 1:08.0 | Mary Sparks exhibited strength of conviction throughout her life. |
| 1:16.6 | But oddly enough, it all started with an affair, a stolen baby, and her Catholic faith. |
| 1:23.6 | Here's your son Sparky to recount his mother's tale. |
| 1:28.3 | I guess the time to start this story is in 1943. |
| 1:34.3 | My mother fell in love with a married man who was about to ship off to the war. |
| 1:40.3 | Mary couldn't bear the idea of losing her love, so she attempted to join the Women's Army Corps, |
| 1:47.0 | a wax for short. |
| 1:49.0 | And when she joined the wax, she took her physical and found out she was pregnant. |
| 1:55.0 | My grandfather, great Polish gentleman, he shipped her to Chicago to a home for unwed |
| 2:06.1 | mothers where she worked like a dog for several months and then had my sister. |
| 2:18.3 | My sister who always made fun of me growing up and told me I was adopted. |
... |
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