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Mandela: An Audio History
A five-part radio series to mark the 10th anniversary of South Africa's first democratic election.
Web Special:
Learn more about the stories, the people, and the history of the struggle against apartheid at our new Mandela website.
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Audio Portraits of a Vanishing City
94-year old Selma Koch runs one of New York's last old-style bra fitting shops. Walter Backerman still delivers seltzer along the same route worked by his father and grandfather. Frank Sabatino is one of two commercial fisherman left in Jamaica Bay. Charlie Zimmerman builds the rooftop water tanks that dot Manhattan's skyline. New York Works tells the stories of those who keep the city's past alive.
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Five inmates, four correctional officers and a judge are given tape recorders. For six months, the diarists kept audio journals and record the sounds and scenes of everyday life behind bars: shakedowns, new inmate arrivals, roll call, monthly family visits, meals at the chow hall, and quiet moments late at night inside a cell.
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Since 1996, the Teenage Diaries series has been giving tape recorders to young people around the country to report on their own lives. They conduct interviews, keep an audio journal and record the sounds of daily life—usually collecting more than 40 hours of raw tape over the course of a year.
We work with each diarist to edit all the material into documentaries for National Public Radio's All Things Considered.
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My So-Called Lungs
21-year old Laura Rothenberg has always tried to live a normal life, with lungs that often betray her, and the sober awareness that she may not live to see her 30th birthday. For the last two years, Laura has been keeping an audio diary of her battle with cystic fibrosis.
In the early 1940s, the US Airforce faced a dilemma. Thousands of new airplanes were coming off assembly lines and needed to be delivered to military bases nationwide, yet most of America's pilots were overseas fighting the war. To solve the problem, the government launched an experimental program to train women pilots. They were known as the WASPs, the Women Airforce Service Pilots.
Radio Row
When City Radio opened on Cortlandt St. in 1921, radio was a novelty. Over the next few decades, hundreds of stores popped up. The six-square-block area around Cortlandt Street in lower Manhattan was a bazaar of radio tubes, knobs, and antenna kits. Metro Radio, Leotone Radio, Cantor the Cabinet King. For more than four decades it was the largest collection of radio and electronics stores in the world. Then in 1966 the stores were condemned and bulldozed, to make way for the new World Trade Center.
A man gives up the keys to his Cadillac Deville. A woman shares her secret concoction to relieve arthritis pain. Down the hall, two octagenarians meet, court and decide to get married. A group of residents of The Presbyterian Home in Evanston, Illinois use tape recorders to document their lives in retirement.
"To invent, you need a good imagination... and a pile of junk..."
—Thomas Edison
Many important industries were born in a garage: Henry Ford's first
automobile, Walt Disney's early cartoons, the first Apple Computer. And
then there's Frank Conrad's garage, where some people say the modern broadcasting
industry began.
Seven decades ago, Daisy Anderson and Alberta Martin were brand new brides. Both women got married in their early twenties, to men who were near 80. And as it happens, their husbands served on opposite sides of the Civil War.
Deported: Weazel's Diary
A 26-year-old Los Angeles resident gets deported to his parents' home country of El Salvador, which he has not seen since age five. He has no memories of the country, no immediate family there, and little ability to speak Spanish.
The NBA, now a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry, looked very different a half century ago. When the league began in 1946, teams included the Providence Steamrollers, the Chicago Stags and the St. Louis Bombers. The New York Knickerbockers were also around back then, but today, few could name the first Knicks starting lineup: Kaplowitz, Schectman, Weber, Militzok, and Hertzberg.
At one time Gibsonton, Florida was considered the oddest town in America. The fire chief was Al Tomaini the giant. The second deputy of police was a dwarf. The sideshow fat man was also the town's auto mechanic. And Gibsonton still boasts the only post office in the country with a special counter for midgets. "Gibtown" has long been the off-season home for carnival sideshow performers. But these days it is more of a retirement village.
Radio Diaries, Inc. // 169 Avenue A, Suite
13 // New York, NY 10009 // info@radiodiaries.org
Radio Diaries is a not-for-profit production company
Radio Diaries is a not-for-profit production company