May 13--The story begins innocuously enough, a familiar immigrant tale of sacrifice, hard work and dreams of prosperity.
A father with a college degree and a career as a bank manager moves his family from Nigeria to Chicago to give his kids greater opportunity, and ends up taking a job driving a taxi.
His son Ayodeji Ogunniyi, 3 years old when his family made the move, describes his dad putting his mom through nursing school, and his mom working 16-hour days in hopes of affording a home in the suburbs.
As for Ogunniyi and his brother, they were instructed to become doctors. If not doctors, then engineers. If not engineers, then lawyers.
Ogunniyi's story, chronicled in the new book "Callings" from the oral history project StoryCorps, then takes a horrifying turn that points him to his life's purpose.
"Callings," a collection of 53 interviews, gives readers a peek into what it feels like to find meaning in your work, drawing on the wisdom of people who have toiled in a hodgepodge of occupations that rarely get a spotlight.
There was the coal miner's son who was hellbent on becoming a dentist.
The kid who decided at 15 that he was destined to be an NBA referee.
The domestic abuse survivor who became a tattoo removal specialist to help fellow survivors erase the names their abusers had inked on their bodies.
StoryCorps founder David Isay, who will be speaking Sunday at the Chicago Humanities Festival, hopes the book serves as a reminder that the goal of work need not be to spend the fewest hours making the most money for an early retirement, but to follow the personal passion that gives meaning to each day.
"The lesson is that, inside of us, we know what it is that we're meant to do," Isay said in an interview. "And attention must be paid. You really need to listen to that voice. It takes enormous courage, but you never regret it."
StoryCorps, a nonprofit chronicler of regular people's lives, has recorded nearly 155,000 interviews since it launched in 2003, all of which are stored in the Library of Congress. A booth in the Chicago Cultural Center is one of three in the nation where people can record their stories. There is also a mobile app.
"Callings," StoryCorps' fifth book, includes four interviews with Chicagoans, including a father-son pair working as firefighters and a chef and restaurateur who is blind.
Former Chicago policewoman Pat Hays, who was 74 when she recorded her interview last year, begins her story bluntly: "When I was a kid, I was very, very shy. My dad used to come home and just hit me."
Hays, who subsequently left an abusive husband, took the police exam on a whim when she accompanied a friend. Assigned to kids, runaways and rape victims, she discovered a knack for offering compassion and comfort.
"I really enjoyed helping people," Hays said, according to the book. "I would have done it forever."
Ogunniyi's story is in the same chapter as Hays', which is titled "Healers."
He recounts that he was dutifully studying to be a doctor in college, but didn't love it, when he returned home for the holidays during his freshman year.
One night, police called to say his father had been murdered. He cried out, and his mother fell to the ground.
Two teens and their 22-year-old friend carjacked and shot his father while he was picking up a fare in Evergreen Park. Ogunniyi's anger was directed at wanting to know: "What happens to a person? Where do they get lost and become murderers?"
At the time, for extra money, Ogunniyi was tutoring kids at an after-school program. They came from a similar impoverished background as his dad's killers.
He recalls a 16-year-old with a bad attitude who broke down into tears one day and confessed he couldn't read. Ogunniyi got the boy into other programs, where he learned.
"I forgot the pain of the murder, and I wanted to continue to give more of what I had to these students," Ogunniyi said. So he became a high school teacher.
Isay calls Ogunniyi "an American hero."
"He is someone we should be thanking and talking to our kids about as someone they should be looking up to," he said.
Ogunniyi, now 29, teaches English and coordinates a group for at-risk boys at Thornton Township High School in Harvey.
Reached by phone this week, he said StoryCorps contacted him after reading about his experience in a 2010 article in the Tribune. He wanted to be involved in the project as a way to immortalize his father.
He hopes the stories help people who are searching for purpose in their lives.
"Sometimes I feel that we get so caught up in routine and going to work, sometimes we miss why we're doing what we're doing," Ogunniyi said. "Take a breath and see if what you're doing makes you happy, and if not, there's still time to make a change."
aelejalderuiz@tribpub.com
