In addition to responding to the "DARE" questionnaire, informants were invited to make audiotape recordings in which they both read a set passage and conversed informally about any topic of their choice. The use of the reading passage, a contrived story called "Arthur the Rat" that was designed to elicit all significant pronunciation variants in American English, allows comparison of sounds in the same context from places all across the country. The use of free conversation elicited the introduction of topics not covered in the questionnaire, resulting in a corpus of informal speech that can be contrasted to the formal style of the reading passage. It also provides an extremely valuable oral history of mid-20th-century America.