"I've been a folklorist at the university for over 25 years," Brady said. She's always wanted to do service learning in her classes, and she's always known that people in this state had fascinating stories to tell. "But for some reason I just couldn't figure out how to do it."

Over the past few years, one folklore project led to another, and finally Brady figured it out: How to involve students in recording the memories of average Utahns. The story of how the story project came about is a long story, as Brady tells it.

In 1999, Brady was just finishing a book about a pioneer woman who had lived in Orderville. Brady had interviewed all of the woman's granddaughters and had found a publisher for the history. But she needed to edit and check her footnotes, and she was dreading that part of writing the book.

Then one of her students came up with a way to make the editing fun. "I work at a bed and breakfast on an island in Ireland every summer," the student told Brady. "The place is used by artists and writers. If you came there you could finish your book."

Brady had always wanted to go to Ireland. She, herself, is three-quarters Irish, she explained. So she got a flight and as she worked on her book, she reveled in being around so many women who looked like she does. (Same coloring. Same eyes.)

By the time she'd finished her book about Orderville, Brady had found a new project. She'd met an 84-year-old woman who had lived all her life on an Irish island that is now inhabited by only five people. Brady interviewed her. Then she learned there were a number of Irish women living in solitude on small islands.

Listening to their stories, giving credence to their lives, changed her own life, Brady said. She desperately wanted to give her students the same chance to connect with an older generation.

At about this time, Irene Fisher, then director of the U.'s Lowell Bennion Center, asked university professors to suggest a service project their students might do on the west side of Salt Lake City. So Brady offered her students — as recorders of the life stories of senior citizens.

Then Brady applied for — and got — a major award, a university professorship, to help her carry out her idea. The "West Side Stories" professorship came with enough money for Brady to buy recording machines and pay for binding of the autobiographies. At the end of the semester, when the students presented the seniors with a book about their lives, they also gave them the CD recording of the interviews — and sent copies to the U.'s Marriott Library and the U.S. Library of Congress.