This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years, and now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint.
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Here's Terry Neal with her story beginning. With her childhood. Yeah. Their earliest memories of me like four or five I knew what trucks were. It was just...
Out in front of us. It wasn't hidden. You know, they were so wrapped up in their addiction, they just used kind of in front of us. I could remember us just being at different houses, like I would be with her aunts or our grandma, or just back and forth. There was fighting between both families.
When I was one, my mom did leave my dad and she met my stepdad about a week later and started using heroin with him.
So me and my sister were constantly back and forth between my mother and my father. My dad wasn't addicted to heroin, but he was an alcoholic and addicted to other like psychedelic drugs.
So we weren't cared for really well. My mom started getting arrested when I was almost two.
So she was in and out of jail a lot.
So when we were with her, me and my sister were with my grandmother, her mother. And my grandmother didn't just have us. She had my cousins and I and my sister. Out of my mother's family, there is five children and all of them were drug addicts.
So we weren't cared for as well as we were supposed to be because, you know, my grandma struggled having to take care of a lot of her grandchildren. At one point, there was like 10 of us in one home with my grandpa and her. We didn't get our own bed. A lot of us slept on the floor in the living room on the couch. It was, you know, the hard part about it was that, like, my grandma and my grandpa worked a lot.
Know to try and provide for us so we weren't cared for properly. You know, not that it's their fault. It was just, you know, too many kids.
So there were times where we didn't have food. Um, you know, we weren't taken care of properly. I was not in school very often. There were times where my sister and I missed like two years of school.
So, like, for me, I never went to the fourth or fifth grade. I went straight from third to sixth grade.
So, there was a lot of missed opportunities or learning in our family as well. Because my mom was in and out of jail and using drugs. And when she was out here, she really wasn't taking care of us. We kind of did everything, you know, what we wanted.
So, because my mom. didn't really care. Um We didn't really care. Like, I I didn't feel like I needed to go.
So it wasn't really like an important thing. I remember because even when she was Around, like, my grandmother would be the one, like, they need to go to school, she needs to go to school, you know, stuff like that. And then, So I remember like my mom would say, you need to pretend you're sick. Like she would even encourage uh so she didn't have to hear it from my grandma.
So it wasn't like it was just the norm. It wasn't an important thing. And I think the only reason my mom would make us go because But then Um when you get welfare, which my mom got for us. you have to get things signed showing that your kids were in school so I remember even when I got to junior high, Um my mom would just go like you need to go Like just to get that thing signed up so we could get money. Like it it was.
School just wasn't important. I started using drugs and drinking at 11. I had joined a gang at 12. I had been. you know, messing around and doing stuff that I wasn't supposed to do.
Um I started hanging around gang members like that's who we were partying with when we were younger. Um So like my girl cousins and They, you know, my girl cousin, and you know, some of us all hung out with the same gang members, and so we decided to join the gang. It was just accepted in our family. My mom was in a gang, my dad. Was in a gang.
My mom's brothers were in it. You know, they had it tattooed all over them. And when they were in out of prison, too.
So my stepdad was in it, too. He was all tattooed up.
So it's just the way we grow up. And that's kind of where, like, all the drug addiction, because when you're in a gang, you're doing drugs or being a part of this whole other world. And that's how my. parents got involved in that as well. At the age of 12, my grandmother, my dad's mother, actually, not my mother's mother who raised us, but she had talked to me about Jesus.
And it was really hard for me to come to faith in Jesus Christ because my mom got saved in prison. When she would talk about Jesus, she would say, like, Jesus saved me. I'm going to be sober. I'm going to die. But then she would backslide, you know.
And back then, when I was young, I would think, okay, whoever Jesus is, he don't work, you know?
So I got saved at 12, but because I went home to the same chaos nobody poured into me.
So, I believed in God, but I didn't know who really Jesus was.
So I had met a boy on parting, was on and off with him. My mom at the time had got arrested again, and back then you would get a lot of prison time for certain things if you continuously reoffended. And so that time she had to go away for quite a while. I believe it was almost three years that she went away. And in between that time, I started my freshman year high school, and I kind of just dropped out.
My stepdad at the time, who was my brother's father, he was taking care of us, but he struggled with his addiction and also sold drugs and things like that.
So we were kind of like the drug dealer house in the neighborhood.
So. I really didn't have to go to school because he didn't make me.
So at the age of 16, I had already been dropped out of school and I ended up pregnant at 16. I was scared. I didn't really believe that I was pregnant. I remember sitting, I mean, at the age of 16, sitting at the clinic. And thinking like it wasn't real, kind of.
And I remember once the lady said, Oh, you know, you're positive. I just started crying, like uncontrollably crying, because I think it just hit me. And mind you, I was still using drugs, I was still drinking and partying.
So. I remember her telling me, oh no, it's okay. You know, you have options. And she gave me pamphlets. And I kind of didn't even look at the pamphlets because I was so scared and just not really sure what was going on.
So I went home and I called my boyfriend and I said, Hey, you know, I'm pregnant and, um, And I remember his reaction, and I remember telling him, you know, oh, but we have options. And at the time, I had already read the pamphlets, and the pamphlets literally were just to abort my baby. They weren't any other option but that. Mm-hmm. I just said, hey, you know, this is the choice.
And he's like, no. We're not killing our baby. Like this is gonna be our my baby, you know?
Something kind of clicked in me. I don't know exactly, you know, now that I'm older, I believe it was the Lord, but something clicked in me, and I was like, okay, I gotta make a change in my life. Like I said, I had been dropped out of high school. I was drinking, doing drugs, and stuff like that.
So I was like, I can't do this anymore. There were times in my life that I remember like going over a friend's house when I was little and seeing their mom or seeing how they live in their family or they have a nice house or like I never felt right.
So there were times that I remember that I thought like Well, that's different, or that seems, you know, that must be normal or something.
So I remember when I got pregnant and I had my son, I thought, you know I don't want my kid to hurt. I don't want my son to see me go away. or beyond drugs, because It hurt to see my mom like that. It hurt to not have her there. You know, even though, like, I was still, you know, doing drugs or drinking and stuff like that.
You know, when you're a child, you always want your mother. Or, you know, your father, and we were so poor, like, we didn't get clothes to go to the next school year. You know, we were starting the The same old rundown clothes, only one pair of shoes. if it didn't have holes or anything you know Um which even sometimes because we didn't have we would go steal And it's funny because when you grow up like that, you don't Think. anything of it until you see other people with, you know, better But um I know that when I had my son, that really woke me up.
Because I want it better. And we've been listening to Terry Neal share her story with us. right up until the moment she got pregnant. And what a rough childhood she had, what a rough deck of cards she was dealt. Mom was an addict, dad was an alcoholic.
Soon she was just about raising herself. Found her way into gangs, was doing drugs by the age of 11. At 16, she was a high school dropout and pregnant, but she and her boyfriend decided to keep. There, boy. and, as she said, when I had my son, it woke me up I wanted better.
When we come back. More of Terry Neal's story, a great overcoming story here. on Our American Stories. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years.
And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q.
That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. Amazon Health AI presents painful thoughts. I am. I can't stop scratching my downtown. Mm-hmm.
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Mm-hmm. Hello, hello, this is Malcolm Glabel from Smart Talks with IBM. Today we're diving into a fascinating conversation with Stefano Pallard, head of fan development for Scuderia Ferrari HP. Your pronunciation is it's strongly American. It's more Scuderia Ferrari.
I'm still working on rolling my R's. But what I was able to learn from Stefano was the importance of engaging the tefosi. The Ferrari super fans in the digital age. Ferrari fans and Super fans want to be part of something, want to belong to something.
So they want to be part of a community and ultimately they want to be part of a winning team. You've got Ferrari, which is a long. History design history. And now you're interacting in a kind of digital space. And I'm curious how you balance those two.
Traditions. When it comes to fan engagement, it's really digital technology and digital channels are being able to create a deeper connection with our fans. To learn more about how Ferrari and IBM are using technology to build deeper connections with fans, visit ibm.com/slash Ferrari. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI.
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And we're back with our American Stories and with Terry Neal sharing her life story. After becoming pregnant at 16, while she was in a gang doing drugs and drinking, Terry's boyfriend told her not to give up. to give their baby a chance at life. This led to a change. in her life.
Let's return to Terry.
Something switched in me where I was like, okay, I know I need to get a high school diploma because I need to get a good job and I need to get out of this house. I was still living with my stepdad at the time and my little brother, but I just knew that I needed to go back to school. At the time, the district had a teen parent program.
So, my sister helped enroll me, and I began going back to school, and that kind of triggered like a. A b basically like a series of events that were were good. It was hard. My environment didn't change. My stepdad was still, you know, selling drugs and using heroin and stuff like that.
I made a conscious decision, you know, like every day to get up, go to school when I was pregnant. And then finally, at the age of 19, I did graduate high school. My son was almost three. when I received that diploma, but it w it it just kinda helped me. I managed to get a job.
My sister at the time got a house, so I moved out with her and my son for a while. And then I got pregnant again with our second child. During that time, I was still working odd jobs, and then I remember thinking once I got pregnant like There's no way I could continue doing this. I hadn't moved out of anybody's house or got my own place.
So I had my son, my younger son, and my older son, and I went back to college. Um, I ended up becoming a single mom. Me and their dad didn't stay together.
So I then became a single mom and had to raise my kids. And so at the age of 21, my younger son and my older son and I went back to college. And I was just going to get like a certificate of completion or something. Cause I remember saying when I, when I went to college to sign up for classes, I told the college counselor, I want to work in an office. Cause at the time I was doing manual labor, I was like detailing cars and stuff.
So I was like, I need a better job. And I just knew like an office, I thought like an office would pay well.
So when I did that, He kind of laughed at me, but he kept asking me, like, you know, what have you always wanted to do? You know, things like that. And I remember when I was younger. It's a funny story, but when I was younger, I used to go with my mom to go see her parole officer. And I remember thinking, I want to be that lady because she tells my mom what to do.
And so I was like, I know when I was younger, I wanted to be a parole officer or something in law enforcement. And so he's like, you could still do that. And so that kind of changed my direction and what I majored in.
So I ended up majoring in sociology. They super encouraged me to continue to go. And I was the first person in both sides of my family to get a master's degree.
So I have a master's degree in educational counseling. I didn't go into parole or probation. I ended up liking the education side because I had the counselors that really motivated me to go. When I'm almost 30 in my master's program, because it's a counseling program, I had to choose a change. And I remember I was like, oh, I'm going to become more spiritual.
You know, so that was like my goal. And I was like, um, one of my young aunts had. asked me to attend a Christian church here in our area. And so I went one day, and I just remember I felt good. That's all I remember.
So when I chose to change in my master's program, You know, and you have to record it and write about it. I was like, I'm going to become more spiritual.
So I'm going to attend church every Sunday, no matter what. And at the time, I wasn't using drugs or anything, but I was drinking and I drank a lot. I partied a lot with friends and going out to clubs and stuff. I was single and, you know. During that to when I didn't have my kids, I would go out.
But then, you know, because addiction runs in my family, it became almost, you know, alcoholism in a sense.
So I go start going to church, and I would literally still go when I was hungover. Like I'd be Sunday, I was that person Sunday morning hungover in church. Mind you, and I was only going every Sunday because I wanted to write a good paper for my master's program. But what ended up happening was The Lord just got a hold of me. And I remember.
our pastor saying He was giving an altar call, but he said, like, everybody's like, Oh, you haven't received Jesus. And I remember, I was like, Oh, I had Jesus when I was 12. I remember that. But then he said, Maybe you. gave yourself to Christ before, but you haven't surrendered your life.
And so I was like. That's me. But everything didn't change then. You know, I was trying to give my life to Christ. and really surrender, but I was still hanging around with the same friends, my party friends.
And um One day I I remember I was so You know, one foot in, one foot out. I was going to watch a Laker game because, you know, I love sports, and I was like, I'm going to go watch a Laker game. And I remember praying, God, please don't let me get drunk. Like I thought that was gonna work. And um So there I go, but I ended up getting so drunk that I woke up and I didn't even know where I was, and I was beat up.
Apparently, I had got jumped. And so I went home. And I was crying, and I just cried out to the Lord. And I just remember God saying, like, you're not bigger than your sin.
So I remember praying, God, I need new friends, I need new that, and I kid you not within a week. The Lord put a girl in my path who went to my church that I had never met. She said there's a women's retreat. Let's go. And I was like, I can't afford that.
Like, I, you know, I was raising two kids on one income. I didn't get any child support. And I was like, that's a lot of money for you, blah, blah. She's like, if you want to go, the Lord's going to provide this woman at so much faith. And I was like, okay.
And What ended up happening was I got a scholarship from our church. I went. And that Sunday, I was like, I'm done, God. I don't want to leave this mountain because it was up in our mountains here. I don't want to leave this mountain the same person.
So, literally, that day, I surrendered my life to Christ. I came back down and I never drank again. I stopped having sex outside of marriage. Everything. Galorgus.
Just took a hold of me because I said yes. Like it was just amazing. My faith in Christ has helped me through everything: prayers of family members throughout the years. Believers. It's made me a strong believer in praying for anybody that I meet.
Because I truly believe that we could literally be the only person praying for that person. And I know that prayer has got me through my life, and it's literally gotten me to where I'm at today. My first real job was working with at-risk youth, so pouring into kids that grew up just like me. There are kids who, same thing, I have drug-addicted parents. I really anybody.
assisting them. I started working in group homes, which are homes with kids that have um are not fit enough for foster care, but they're like in placement. currently now I'm working in a high school district and I work part-time for Our local police department for a youth grant.
So I go into the juvenile hall once a month with the group. just talk to those youth and pour into them and talk to them about like, you know, me being an ex-gang member. Me changing my life. For my local district, there's a teen, the same teen parent program, like I said, but it's now at the high schools that I went into.
So I've gathered a few of my teen friends from back in the day who are now grandmothers and older now with me. We've gifted young teen moms with Mother's Day gifts and things like that. to show them how much we love them and how they matter and how they can continue on. And it's so funny because when you go to school and you learn all the statistics and things like that, you're like, Oh my gosh, I should have been this way, but I'm this way. You know what I mean?
So it's crazy. By the grace of God, I'm able to be where I'm at right now, you know? Both my boys are doing wonderful. My older son ended up joining the Marine Corps after high school. He is currently on his second term.
My younger son ended up following in his brother's footsteps, and he's also a Marine.
So, both of my kids are Marines and For me, when I look back at my life, my struggles are what made me stronger. My struggles are what built character in me, resilience in me. Um, you know, and by the grace of God, my kids have Have been able to, you know, we've been able to stop the cycle of addiction and abuse and teen pregnancy as well because it's run in my family for so long. There was times where I was poor to the point of there was no food in our house. Because of my mom's drug addiction, we were even living out in the streets sometimes in a trailer, you know, ownless.
I've lived in some pretty horrible circumstances, but. Our family overcame that. File I look back and I tell my son like he saved me. I didn't care about my life. 'Cause nobody cared about me.
When you don't have parents to pour into you. I was only one. Yeah, and when she started using soap. I never had anybody tell me. You know, I'm beautiful.
I love you. You know, we could be somebody. You know, and um I know my life. Would it not have changed if I didn't get pregnant? I know I would.
not be where I'm at if it wasn't for that moment. And a beautiful job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own. Madison Derricott, and a special thanks to Terry Neal, twice pregnant. Putting herself through high school, then college. Majoring in sociology, the first person on both sides of her family to get a master's degree.
And she goes to that woman's retreat and prays for new friends. I don't want to leave this mountain, the same person.
So many of us have been on that mountain and prayed that prayer. And it was answered. She has two sons, both Marines. And as she said, I look at my son and tell him he saved me. and so did her god.
The story of Terry Neal here. on our American stories. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way.
The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q.
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