re: #1 Charles Johnson

Not all stories have happy endings.

I can’t think of a single StoryCorps story that ends happily. NPR, for all its faults, is the only thing I can stand to listen to on the radio, and every Friday morning when that damned acoustic guitar intro comes on, I know I’m in for a round of gut-wrenching misery and despair.

It’s always people who fell in love and never followed up on it, only to have the object of their affection die in some awful way that could have prevented by the person telling the story, or 90 year-old WWII veterans tearfully recounting the nightmares they’ve had for the past 70 years about killing a young German soldier in the forest or watching his shipmates burn to death at Pearl Harbor.