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Joe Franklin? I'm ready. It's Ira Glass here. Oh, you're the emcee on the show, Ira. I am the emcee on the show. Yes. Oh great. Ira? I-R-A, Ira? Ira, I-R-A. Oh, great. Now hold on one second, Ira. Don't go away. Hello? [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. Call me after 3 o'clock. I have great news for you. Ira. Yes. So listen, Tony. If the phone rings, take it in the back. And then come out and tell me who it is. Just say, Joe's being with a camera crew. Just for about 10 minutes. We'll do about five minutes, 10 minutes, right, Ira? That's right. Well, one great thing about starting a new show is utter anonymity. Nobody really knows what to expect from you. This interviewee did not know us from Adam. OK, we're what? About a minute. We're one minute five into the new show. Right now, it is stretching in front of us, a perfect future yet to be fulfilled. An uncharted little world. A little baby coming into the world, no little scars on it or anything. Nobody hearing my words right now is thinking, "Oh, man, remember that show, back when it used to be good? That show, I never missed that show back in the old days, back in the first couple years before it got so-called popular. Back when it was still good." No, actually, I think that force, that human desire to say that is so strong, to say that "I was there back when that show was good," that force is so strong, it is so basic to who we are as people that I know-- OK, what are we? We are two minutes into the program-- I know that somewhere out there, one or two of you are saying, "Oh, sure. I used to listen to that show back in the first 30 seconds, back when it used to be really good. Remember back when they used to do all that crazy stuff? When they had that guy on the phone? Remember back then?" Well, from WBEZ, in the glorious city of Chicago, Illinois. The name of this show is Your Radio Playhouse. I'm your emcee. I'm your emcee, Ira Glass. OK, the idea of this show, this new little show, is stories, some by journalists and documentary producers, like myself, some just regular people telling their own little stories, some by artists, and writers, and performers of all different kinds. And the idea is we're going to bring you stuff you're not going to find anywhere else. And there is also going to be music. And tonight's show, we thought that we would have a theme. Tonight's show is going to be New Beginnings. And to kick things off, I called the man who's had, as best as anybody can tell, the longest running program in the history of television. His name is Joe Franklin, and his program ran for 43 years on local television in New York. And he claims that he invented the talk show format. And I called him to get some advice on how to create a long-running, healthy program. I've been called in many times to give a sort of a Dean, the elder statesman, even though I'm still a young kid. But I've been called in to give this kind of advice to new kids on the block. Conan O'Brien had me on his first show. And people like that. There's no guidance. It's a matter of paying attention. Your voice, I've heard so much about the sparkle, about the energy in your voice. The voice, on radio especially, is everything. And when the guest is sitting with you, you've got to look into his eyes. Many times, you get an author on there who's begrudgingly sitting there. He'd rather be home in his ivory tower. And above all, get the plug fast. Otherwise, he's worried you're not going to make the plug for the book. And I created a line, Ira, that's been picked up by George Burns. I always said, the main ingredient for longevity in the talk show field, where the mortality rate is so staggering, the main ingredient is sincerity. And once you learn to fake that, then you got it made. I made that up. And I just played it by ear. I was a natural born talker, I guess. So let me just summarize what I'm getting from you. You're saying you should just pay attention, look people in the eye, be sincere when I'm on the air, get in the plug early. That's the key. And don't look in their nose or their belly button. Look right in the eye. Eye contact is everything. And as I say, it's a lot of fun. And I never called anybody in my life to come on to my show. And I'm sure that they'll be coming to you too. I heard about you, and I called you and wanted to wish you good look, Ira. Imagine the thrill of John F. Kennedy walking into my studio. Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan, five times. And Bing Crosby. And I've got a major book out right now, by the way, Ira, called Up Late with Joe Franklin from Simon & Schuster. And if you find a copy in the store-- You see now, I guess I've sort of messed that one up, because I didn't let you get in your plug early. See, that is my fault. I got it in toward the bitter end. It's like Duke Ellington. He always used to have his dessert at the beginning of the meal. Duke Ellington said, because he would never have no room for it at the end. So he had his dessert at the beginning. Who is it? Well, no, good news, 6 o'clock. Well, Joe Franklin, thank you very much for being with us on our premier show. Ira, I'm going to be a listener and a fan. And let's always be in touch. All right, Your Radio Playhouse. All right. I'm making eye contact with you right-- wait, how does Joe put it? Wait a second. Look right in the eye. Eye contact is everything. I am making eye contact with you right now. That is just how much I have already learned. OK, so the thing about new beginnings is that there are the ones that we actually undertake and then there are the ones that we just wish for. And the ones that we wish for pretty much outnumber the ones that we really undertake. Well, Kevin Kelly spent most of his twenties wandering around Asia. He was basically wandering around as a freelance photographer. And he found himself photographing a lot of religious ceremonies and drawn to religious ceremonies of all sorts. And he says that he was really confused about what he believed. And he was the kind of person who had always dreamt about a new beginning, where he wouldn't struggle with these questions. I would get twisted and caught up. And these things were in the background, consuming me. And actually, I found that I could think about little else for many, many months, that behind all that I was doing, there was always this unresolved question of was God real. And if he was real, then how could we ignore him? And if we were trying to not ignore him, what would we do? And if he was real, then what about these other things that people said about God? We will not attempt to answer these questions, by the way, in this hour. I just want to just give you a sense of scope here, just modest scope. But what we want to talk about is what happened to Kevin Kelly. What happened is that at the age of 27, all of this changed when he came into Jerusalem on the eve of Easter and Passover. It was the same weekend. And flocks of people are coming into the city. So I entered Jerusalem on Easter with a simple expectation that I was going to photograph another religious ceremony, another religious festival. And then, for various reasons, I got locked out of my hostel room. They had a curfew. And I didn't make it back in time. And I was in quite a fix because I was a stranger in this very strange town. When it happened, I didn't have enough money to stay elsewhere, nor did I even have knowledge of where to go. So I wandered the Old Town of Jerusalem at night, which had been shuttered up and was like a time machine. It was as if I had been transported back to the 15th century, because all the souvenir vendors were gone, and what was left were the labyrinthian paths of cobbled passageways. And I wandered around for a number of hours, and it was getting colder. Eventually, I found myself at the one place that was still open, which was some of the churches. And particularly, after wandering around until about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, I finally settled into the Church of the Holy Scepter, which is called and viewed as the church built over the mound where Jesus Christ was crucified. And I was getting very tired. And there weren't many people around. And so eventually, I laid myself out on about the only flat area that was left, which was this marble slab underneath some pendants that had incense on them. And this was presumably the slab that commemorated the exact positioning of the crosses. So I slept there. I slept on the crucifixion spot on that night because it was the only place-- they had no place in the inn. I slept there until early morning, when the activity started to increase, and people started coming in. And I went out and followed the crowd where it was going when they were going out to the tombs area in Jerusalem. And I went out. And there were some folding chairs set up in front of this tomb area. And as the sun was coming up on that Easter morning, I was staring at empty tombs. And for a reason that I can not comprehend, as I sat on that chair contemplating this view of the early sun morning coming into the empty tombs, all that I had been wrestling with for the past many, many years in thinking about religion sort of became resolved in my mind. And at that very moment, I believed that Jesus Christ had, indeed, risen from those tombs. In an instant, the tension of trying to figure things out was resolved, because now, suddenly, everything was figured out. It was as if you had been working on a problem for a long time and suddenly the answer was there. And it was very clear that was the answer. And although there were many things that were still not clear to you, you were very certain that you were on the right path. Having that realization that I believe that Jesus Christ had actually risen from those tombs did not settle 1,001 other things about what one was supposed to do with that, what I was supposed to do with that. Did that mean I was supposed to be a monk? Did that mean I was supposed to be an evangelist? Did that mean that I had to immediately renounce all that I had, and get into sackcloths and ashes, and march out into the desert? All that was left unopened. And that is, in fact, what occupied my mind as I went back to my hostel to lay down and think about. Because I had no clue what it really meant to me ultimately, and that's what I was pondering when I was laying there napping. And I wouldn't say it was a voice, but there was an idea that came into my mind that just would not go away, and that was that I should live as if I would die in six months, that I should really, truly live. And that I could not tell for certain whether I would really die, but that either way, I should live as if I was going to die. And so that was the assignment. I'm a pretty rational person. I'm pretty logical. And after thinking the thought that I should live as if I was going to die in six months, the first thought that comes to my head was, "Well, that's pretty silly. I have no evidence whatsoever. I could live like I'm going to die in six months and not die at all. It would just be an interesting exercise." But at the same time, it was equally probable that I might die in six months. It happened all the time. There was no guarantee that I wouldn't die. And so fairly quickly, I decided that I could not settle that issue of whether I would really die or not, or just think that I was going to die in six months, and that, in either case, the important thing was to live as if I really believed that I was going to die in six months, which is what I set out to do. The next couple days, I had the joyous experience of saying to myself, "OK, what do I do for six months if I have only six months to live?" And the answers to that surprised me as much as the assignment, because after thinking that through and contemplating it, the conclusion that I came to was that what I wanted to do for six months was to go home and be ordinary, to go back to my parents, to help them take out the trash, and trim the hedges, and move furniture around, and to be with them. And I was really shocked by that, because I thought that with six months to live, I would climb Mount Everest, or I would go scuba diving to the depths of the ocean, or get in a speedboat and see how fast I could go. But instead, I wanted to go back home and be with my family for that time. I, of course, did not tell anybody my crazy idea. This is, in fact, the first time I'm really talking about it publicly. Because it's a very scary and alarming idea. And I never told anybody why I was coming home. I got back to where my parents live in New Jersey, and things were unbelievably ordinary. And yet, I found myself relishing the ordinariness and finding it in some ways as exotic as anything that I had traveled to see. I helped around the house. I dug up shrubs. I worked on a deck. I moved furniture, washed dishes. And I was intending to spend my last remaining six months at home getting to know my parents better and myself, hopefully. But about three months into that, my travel urges, I guess, got the better of me. And what I was most concerned about was I wanted to see my brothers and sisters. I had four brothers and sisters. And they were scattered all across the country. And so I felt very strongly that I wanted to see them before I died. And I got the idea that the way to see them was to ride my bicycle across the country and visit them on bicycle. But before I did that, I made up a will to dispose of the little things that I had. And I had some money left over. And one of the things I did with that money was I went to the bank and got some cashier's checks for $500 and $1,000. And I mailed the money to various people anonymously as gifts. And I think giving away those thousands of dollars was the first true act of charity I had ever done. Because there was absolutely no way for any kind of gratitude or elevated feelings to come back to me, because the people had no idea who had sent them that money. It was really remarkable to see the consequences of getting an anonymous gift like that. Because when you get a check for $1,000 in the mail, you immediately become suspicious of all your friends of having given that to you. And so there's this suspicion of charity, suspicion of goodness that starts to infect the people that are around you. And you look at someone, you think, "Hm, I wonder if he gave me that $1,000?" Does that make sense? You look at them, and you think, "I wonder if he gave me that $1,000?" And then you act really nice to him. And then the next person you see, the next of your friends, you think, "Could this be the person?" And then you act really nice to them. I almost want to begin a little speech here about let us all now take up this practice. All of us. Everyone within the sound of my voice. If we all could just do this right now, then I would believe that our little radio show, just 19 minutes into the program, had contributed in some way. I had enough money left over to basically pay for food and whatnot on my bicycle journey across America. And the path that I had to visit all my brothers and sisters was not a direct route, going from San Francisco to New York. I actually had to go up to Idaho, and back down to Texas, and then back up through Indiana. So it was a 5,000 mile trip. The day which, coincidentally, was exactly six months from when I had this assignment, was October 31. It was Halloween. And so the plan would be that I would ride back home, so that I would come back to die on the day after Halloween. I think there are a lot of people who have trouble staying in the present. There are some people who like to slip into the past as a means to perhaps fantasize or escape. And they find that the past is the place that they retreat to. And I often retreat to the future. I was not a person who planned or had a career staged out, or who had a particular woman he wanted to marry some day, or some vision of a house. The future that I found so hard to give up was a much more insidious type. It was that of I'd like to buy this record because, in the future, I want to hear this song again and again. Or I will read this book, and there are some cool ideas in it because someday I may write an article about this. And it's good to know that. There was a sense in which my entire life was shifted to the future. And the thought of doing something now for the enjoyment, or the pleasures, or the principle of the function of just right now, without any sense at all that it would ever be used again or that it could ever be brought forward, was extremely difficult and disconcerting. And I fought it day by day and tooth by tooth. One of the ways I dealt with this was that I was actually able, by the last weeks, to not think about my life beyond Halloween. There was a way which I had just-- each time a thought came up about something that was beyond this horizon, I just said, "Nope, can't think about it. It doesn't work. We have to dwell in the present." And at the same time I was doing that, and I was able to do that, I also decided that it was an entirely unnatural and inhumane way to live. And that having a future is part of what being human is about. And that when you take away the future for humans, you take away a lot of their humanness. And that it's not actually a very good thing to live entirely in the present. That one needs to have a past, and one needs to have a future to be fully human. It was a journey that began at the tomb of Jesus. And as I set off to my own presumed death, I did, indeed, think about Jesus Christ who, according to the Gospels, surrendered his own life in a very knowing way. So we have the history in the Gospels of Jesus's torment in his soul, as he approached what he knew of his anointed time to die. So it was, again, that very harsh information of knowing when you're going to die. And Jesus's soul was in great turmoil and pain because of knowing that. And I think I did experience some of that, not because I had the same weight. It was just my own life. But Jesus prayed that this burden be lifted, and there were days when I did pray that, that if I didn't have to die, I really would rather not. By late fall, I was pedaling through the Appalachians, and it was getting colder and colder. And my hands were freezing on the bicycles, and there was ice on my tents in the morning when I got up. And as each day went on, I was coming closer and closer to terrain that I was familiar with and that felt like home. And I was riding into New Jersey, and I was elated. I was elated that I had accomplished this long journey. And I was elated that I was home to see my parents. And I came in to their house on Halloween day. And I was so filled with ideas, and things, and emotions, that I didn't really say very much. And again, I couldn't say very much. I think we had a wonderful dinner. They were, of course, glad to see me because they hadn't seen me in a long time. They knew I was coming back, and we had a wonderful dinner. We had baskets of candy, which I gave out to the kids. And we had a discussion that night which was about nothing in particular. It was not about the future. It was just about, I think, talking about our family and my brothers and sisters. And I was telling them all that I had learned about them. And so it was a very together and, again, not a very dramatic evening, but just a pleasant one, one that you might have a memory about as you were dying, which was not a special evening, but just an ordinary evening. And I went to bed that night, which was a very difficult thing to do because I was fully prepared at that point never to wake up again. I had been praying. I had gotten everything arranged. I had fully gone through in my own mind, in my own soul, all the things that I might have regretted. And I had righted as many of those as I thought I could through letters. And I was prepared, as much as anybody could be prepared to die. And so I went to bed while the kids were still ringing doorbells. And I went to sleep, because I was very tired after that long trip. And I didn't know what was going to happen the next day. I thought I had done all that I could. And the next morning, I woke up. And the next morning, I woke up, and it was as if-- The next morning I woke up, and it was as if I had the entire-- my entire life again. The next morning, I woke up, and I had my entire life again. I had my future again. There was nothing special about the day. It was another ordinary day. I was reborn into ordinariness. But what more could one ask for? Well, Kevin Kelly is 43 now. That happened when he was 27. In his latest rebirth, he is the executive editor of Wired magazine, a glossy magazine about the future and the present. He told us that he wasn't even sure he has ever even told his parents this story, even this many years later. Anyway, he spoke with me and Paul Tough from the studios of KQED in San Francisco. This is Your Radio Playhouse on WBEZ Chicago. Good morning. Glass, Jacobson & Associates. Hey, is Barry there? Pardon me? Is Barry there? Yes, he is. He's on another call. Do you wish to hold, or I could take a message, or you can leave one on his voicemail? It's his son. Uh-huh. Isn't this starting to sound like-- this little dialogue-- isn't it starting to sound like an episode of Dr. Katz? You know that TV show? "This is his son." "Uh-huh. Yeah." Anyway, so I thought I would call my parents in Baltimore and ask for advice on this, our first evening of our brand new radio show, Your Radio Playhouse. Can I leave a message with you? Or is it better to use his voicemail? It doesn't matter. I'll put it right on his voicemail. OK, let's do. OK, hold on, please. This is the story of my childhood right there. Dad is a little too busy to talk. But there's the recording of Frank Sinatra when needed. Hello? Hey, Mom. Oh, hi, Ira. How you doing? Fine. Can you hold on a second? Sure. This is what it's like with my parents. They're so busy. Call them. Put on hold. [SINGING] Baby, what's your hurry? When I call my little sister, she works at Disney, and so there's Disney music playing on the hold system. But there's a lot of Disney music. And there's a lot of it that peo-- Hi. Hi, Mom. Yeah. It's me. Yeah. Listen, can I record a quick conversation with you about something? What about? Well, you know the new show goes on the air this week. And as part of the show, we were thinking about having me call around to different people and get advice from them. And I wanted to know if you would have any advice. Hm. Do I have any advice? Well, can I ask another question? Sure. Who is your target audience? You are such a pro. I'm saying that you're in danger of appealing to a narrow range of listeners if it becomes a little too-- I don't know what word to use. Artsy. Artsy, yeah. Are you and Dad still worried about me making a living in public radio? I know just for years, you were urging me to just get out and get, basically, any job in TV that I possibly could. But now that I've got my own show, are you guys still worried? Or do you feel like things are going OK? Do you want me to get into television still? Now that Hugh Grant is such a big star, and everybody who sees you or sees your picture thinks how much you look like Hugh Grant, that fires up that TV thing again in me. All right. I'm stopping the tape. This is me live. That was the tape. Only my mother could possibly believe this. Only a mother could pretty much believe this. Other adults see me, and the thought that goes through their head is not Hugh Grant. The thought that goes through their head is tall Jew. Well, gosh, wouldn't they want this wonderful humanistic, intelligent reporter who looks like Hugh Grant? All right. Yeah, let's move on. What's the theme for this week? The theme for this week is new beginnings. And we have several stories, people telling about various ways in which their life began anew at some point. That's very interesting, because I just did an interview this morning with a newspaper reporter about roman-- I'm just going to stop the tape again. This is my whole life. I call my mom for an interview, and it's not even her first interview of the day. I was lucky to get a booking. She's a therapist, and sometimes she gets called by the papers and stuff. --mance, romantic love. And people's expectations about relationships. And one of the things I believe is that there are a lot of people who are good at beginnings, but they're not good at middles. Which means what? It means that they like the beginning, where there's all this idealization and romantic projections. And the other person can be who they think they should be, rather than who they are. And when they get to the middle phase-- All right. I'm just going to stop the tape. Listen, all of you in the audience right now, let's just agree right now, it's the very beginning of our relationship. It's the very beginning of our radio relationship right now. This is our little first little radio date, and I just don't want any idealizing on either side. OK? Let's just make eye contact right now. Remember what Joe Franklin said about the eye contact. No idealizing. --where there's more of a reality-based relationship, they run away from it because it's not as exciting. It's interesting that you say that because, actually, as we've approached the first show, I've realized that I am much more comfortable with the notion of every day, work-a-day radio work, and being on every week, and having pieces on the air. But the notion of saying in a really big way, "OK, this is the beginning. It's the beginning, and we're going to have a big beginning, and we're going to make an epic statement," I feel very uncomfortable with. So you are good at middles. I'm better, I think, at middles than at beginnings. That's good. That's good because practically all of life is the middle. We have gotten so deep here. I never expected that it was going to get so deep. I'm just very pleased at how deep this has gotten. Now you're sitting there, you're thinking, "Is he making fun of me? What's happening now? Where are you?" No, I'm not. I'm not, actually. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. You have nothing to worry about. Are we going to get a tape of this since we're outside the Chicago listening area? Depending on how you sound, yeah. Well, that's my mom, Shirley Glass, speaking to us from Baltimore. I don't think she's going to get a tape. I do not think she's going to get a tape. Well, next on our little playhouse stage, we have Mr. Lawrence Steger. Now those of you who have been listening carefully to our program and taking notes, and I know there are many of you out there, you know what I'm supposed to do at this point. You know because you were listening carefully to Joe Franklin at the very beginning of our program. Above all, get the plug fast. That's right. Well, thank you, Joe Franklin. Lawrence Steger is a filmmaker and a performance artist, just back from performing in Glasgow, Scotland. He's going back there in January to collaborate with the performance artist, Ron Athey, who lives here in Chicago. And basically, we contacted Lawrence, and we told him the story that you heard over the course of the last half-hour, Kevin Kelly's story, this guy who believes he only has six months to live, goes on this cross-country road trip. And as it turned out, when Lawrence Steger found out, the day that he found out that he was HIV positive, this was five years ago, on that day, it was the exact day that he and a friend left on a cross-country car trip. So we commissioned him to do a little piece about his experience. And here it is. Title. Road. Treatment. It's shot entirely on video, mostly handheld. Shaky, out of focus, bad color. Overblown color actually. Sort of the way colors are separated on an old television console, yet still has all the outlines of the images repeated. The outlines of the images, the silhouettes, repeated over and over, ad nauseam, and fading into each other. Can I get this microphone adjusted a little, so I don't have to lean over so much? Yeah, sure. Just pull that. Check one, two, three. Sound better? Yeah. Sorry. Thanks. Synopsis. The story concerns Luke, gay, white, Midwestern, late twenties. Follows Luke on the day that he is informed of his HIV positive status. Luke cops a stance of cold, brittle, not unlike the Harrison Ford narration on Blade Runner, but there's a hint of vulnerability to Luke. Have we got the Harrison Ford or the Rutger Hauer voice? Yeah. Great. Roll it. Enhance 5719. Track 45 left. Great. Take it under me. That's great. Story follows Luke. He's accompanied by his college buddy, Bill, and both are packed for a road trip across the country to San Francisco. This isn't the right section of Blade Runner. Can you just kill the Blade Runner? Locations. Car interior. Gas station exterior. HIV clinic parking lot. HIV clinic interior. Highway. Music. Strauss's four last songs, particularly "Ruhe, meine Seele!" sung by Dame Janet Baker. Can you take it under me? Hold. Follows Luke and his friend Bill to the gas station and to the clinic, the last stop before getting on the highway. OK. Take it out. Take out the Janet Baker. Bill loads one hits of pot while driving on the way to the gas station and to the clinic. Can we nix that Strauss music? It's too mournful. There's really no music on the soundtrack. It's stark, crisp. Maybe some songs coming from the radio at the clinic's desk? Great. And definitely from the car radio mixed with surfing on an AM radio. No music. The drama is constantly being undermined through the cool, collective quality of Luke's demeanor. He seems detached, quote, "I am not sure how I feel. I feel a little sad, sort of mad. I guess blank. But I'm OK. I'm sure I'll get a handle on it," end quote. Luke thinks he's sounding like a short story assignment in a creative writing class or, worse, trapped inside an artsy novel. Luke imagines himself in a television dramatization of himself. Camera pulls back from behind Luke's head, sort of on a mini-crane. Camera floats, hovers over the back of Luke's head. "The ceiling of the car must be incredibly high," he thinks to himself. Bill pulls into the closest parking spot in the clinic, blows out the last of the one-hit, and, as he's knocking the brass pipe into the ashtray, turns to Luke with that slightly watery look in his eyes from too much intake. Luke takes it as one of those Care Bear looks that he's experienced before from Bill. A little clumsy since Bill has to force his face into a sympathetic posture. Quick close-up on the corner of Bill's mouth. There's a moment of anger flashing in Luke when he registers Bill's look. When Bill asks him, "What are you thinking about?" Luke responds, "Who's thinking? Nothing." "I hate thinking I'm in a novel," he thinks to himself. Cut to interior of the clinic, the reception area. Can we change this sound bed here? Great. Take it down just a-- Great. In the scene that we talked about on the phone, the clinic waiting room scene, that scene flips back and forth between various security black-and-white cameras mounted at the ceilings. The nurse assigned to Luke's anonymous number is a black drag queen named Stephanie, who wears a full nurse's outfit complete with a little paper hat that sits atop of her freshly coiffed hairdo. She's the only one in the clinic who wears a real uniform. Stephanie has the longest fingernails that Luke has ever seen on anyone. Luke thinks briefly about how the fingernails keep on growing even after a person dies, but he pushes that thought away with this fingers to his forehead, wonders why he is thinking about that. It's that novel thing again. Stephanie, the drag queen nurse, walks Luke back to the small cubicles that the tests are administered in and then used to relay the results. Luke's narrator imagines how many people have been in these cubicles and what they would look like if they were all piled on top of one another. Piles of tested bodies. Cut to Stephanie closing the hollow core door, makes that hollow core door sound. Do we have that on cart? Perfect. Maybe a shot from a security camera that shows all of the cubicles in the clinic. Luke imagines himself in a George Tooker painting that was reproduced in his sixth grade reader. He wonders what his sixth grade teacher would think of Stephanie. He wonders if his sixth grade teacher was ever tested. He imagines her body in the pileup of bodies who have come to the clinic. Stephanie has been saying something, and Luke has to blink his eyes again to refocus. He explains to Stephanie that he has been expecting this result, that he's experienced a large share of AIDS, cared for, and, likewise, buried lots of his friends. But it doesn't seem to come as a surprise. Stephanie says, "You can cry or hold my hand. I just want you to sit for a moment and let it sink in." Luke thinks, "Whatever." Cut to Bill in waiting room, flipping through People's The Year in Pictures. Cut back to close-up of Luke, forehead wrinkled. He thinks his narrator wants him to get out of the cubicle. He waits for Stephanie to finish her spiel, thanks her, and shakes her hand, getting a slight scrape from one of the fingernails. Close-up on Luke's hand, no scratch. The walls seem to pulsate as Luke walks down the hallway to the reception area. He tries to be as blank as possible to Bill. I'm not sure about this final section. I know that we talked about it ending on the highway with the car being surrounded by bikers on their way to the Sturgis bikers' rally. But now I like the idea of it ending on the highway entrance ramp. Cut to interior of car pulling out of parking lot. Luke keeps looking straight ahead, as he murmurs, "I'm positive." Long, slow pan from the back of Luke's head to the back of Bill's. There's no reaction in either of their faces or, better, the profiles of their faces. This is the longest shot. They don't look at each other. Perhaps this scene would be shot in blue screen with the camera in the backseat and the sky surrounding the two heads of Bill and Luke having that old, scratchy, 16 millimeter time lapse exposure, so the clouds seem to be moving at a rapid pace. Flickers, flips back and forth between real sky and blue screen backdrop. Voice comes up on a car radio. "Trying not to think of the future. Just live in the present moment." Something like that. You got that? It comes onto the radio. I also decided that it was an entirely unnatural and inhumane way to live, and that having a future is part of what being human is about, and that when you take away the future for humans, you take away a lot of the humanness, and that it's not actually a very good thing to live entirely in the present, that one needs to have a past. Luke comments to Bill, "Live entirely in the present, huh?" Bill drives and looks out the corner of his right eye to see what position Luke is holding his head in. Luke looks outside passenger window and, every once in a while, turns to glance at Bill. Long pause. There's dead air. Cut to Luke's point of view. Car is pulling onto entrance ramp of highway. Luke sees hitchhiker with a sign that he stands for any remote meaning to the narrative. Luke sees himself outside of his own story. He can't read the hitchhiker's sign. He knows that he's on a long silent journey. He leans over to turn off the radio. Cut to black. Well, Lawrence Steger is a Chicago performance artist and filmmaker. This is Your Radio Playhouse. I'm Ira Glass. OK, what am I doing right now? What am I doing right now? That's right. That's right. Eye contact. Look right in the eye. Eye contact is everything. That's right. Advice from the master. OK. Let's review our program so far. Let's just review. Let's just get things straight right now. Our stories so far have been about people whose futures were taken from them and were thrown into the present in one way or another. I guess when any big emotional moment happens, you are thrown in the present in a really aggressive, aggressive way, whether you choose to or not. You have this hyper sense of reality. Well, the next story is about someone whose future was taken from him when he was wrongly imprisoned for 20 years. And his sentence was commuted two years ago. And he found himself reborn into everyday life. It was like I just-- I don't know. It seemed like the oxygen was even different. You know what I mean? The air seemed to be thinner. I'll tell you what's been a real kick for me, getting up, cooking breakfast. Making pancakes, and eggs, and bacon, and stuff like that. It sounds drab maybe to the common-- everybody would think of that as, "That's really drab." But for me, that's really exciting. And that's one of the things I always dreamed of doing. I also dreamt of finding a very lovely lady, and I have. Inside, I'm happy. Inside. This is Ed Ryder. He was in prison for murder and was doing time in Graterford Prison in Pennsylvania. And a few years ago, a key witness who had testified against him admitted to lying while under oath, and other evidence came forward. He was made a free man. Back when he was in Graterford Prison, he played trumpet, and he sang with a jazz band. And that whole time, he dreamed of this new life, a new life that he would have outside as a professional musician. And that's what he's working on. That's what he's working on right now. And he's playing. He doesn't have a CD yet, but he's playing gigs in the real world. The first time I played, when I got out of prison, I didn't feel compelled to be so exact like I did when I was at Graterford. Inmates are the worst, critical people in the world. They criticize anything you do. In prison, you have a lot of musicians. After all, musicians, they don't make no money, so I guess the first place you find them at is in prison. But you have a lot of guys who are musicians. And even though they might not be actively playing anymore, they'll be quick to criticize you, whether the chord is not right, or whether you didn't flatten the ninth, whether you didn't raise this fifth, or you guys didn't play the changes right. Although it might not have took away from the structure of the music, it's just that, I guess you can say that prisoners have a tendency to think like classical musicians would. Everything has to be perfect and exact the way it's heard. And everything has to be like that. There's no going against the grain. And here, in the world, people are a little different. They don't concern themselves so much with that, as much as how are you entertaining us? How are you helping us to feel better about ourselves? How are you making us feel better? At Graterford, there is nothing you can do to make them feel better, except to release them. So if you can play for a Graterford audience, you don't even look for an applause. Just as long as they don't boo you, you're all right. If they can't find nothing wrong with the music, they'll tell you, "You just didn't turn right. When you had the horn up, you didn't hold it on a 45 degree angle. It didn't look right." So they'll find something. Now you know how we heard people earlier in the program talk about the importance of living in the present. But when we interviewed Ed Ryder, he pointed out that, in prison, the most important thing is to keep your eye on the future, on the day that you're going to get out. And that the guys who just live in the present do really badly, because, of course, the present is so terrible. I think when I was in prison, I dreamed more about the future in my head. I just had a lot of plans, a lot of things that I just dreamed about, I just dreamed of doing and dreamed of accomplishing. You're forced almost to. You know what I mean? You have nothing else to look forward to but tomorrow. You're constantly hoping and hoping. You're trying to plan something for the future. We asked him if he is still playing the same music now that his future is here and he's out. And we thought that maybe the songs that he used to play would just bring back these hard memories of prison that he'd rather just as soon avoid. But he said, no, he plays the same numbers now that he used to, though sometimes they mean something different to him today. When I was in Graterford, I always listened to it. I had a tape of "God Bless the Child That's Got His Own" by Billie Holiday. And what it meant to me when I was at Graterford-- and it has the same meaning now, but it's different. In the sense that, when I was at Graterford, when she said, "Them that's got shall get, Them that's not shall lose. So the Bible says, and it still is news. Mama may have, Papa may have, But God bless the child that has his own." Well, in my mind, at Graterford, I thought that, yes, I was the child that had his own, because I was out here on my own. I had no help at the time. There was no hope. I seen no way. I was like a child. I was like a child because I had no one I can turn to. My parents had passed. I had no one I could turn to. And I felt like every time I would listen to that, I felt as though she was talking directly to me. And for me, that meant that I was on my own in this prison situation. And I was going to have to make it the best way that I could. And I was going to have to muster all the energy that I could possibly muster. Now when I was released and I heard the same song again, it still had that meaning, but now it's a different-- I'm on my own differently because I'm not in prison anymore. That's not the struggle no more. It's me. But I'm on my own now because I've got things that I have to do. I have responsibilities now that I have to take care of. I have bills that I have to pay. I have job responsibility. I have a lot of other things that I have to do, and I have to do these things on my own now. I don't have no prison guards waking me up in the morning, telling me, "Hey, it's time to get up," or "It's time to go eat, " or "It's time where you guys can go to a shower." I don't have that anymore. I'm on my own. So all this now is dependent upon me and my own initiative. [SINGING] Them that's got shall get, them that's not will lose. So the Bible said, and it still is news. Mama may have, Papa may have, but God bless the child that's got his own, that's got his own. You know the strong get more, while the weak ones fade. Empty pockets don't, they don't make the grade. Mama may have, Papa may have, but God bless the child that's got his own, that's got his own. Money, you've got lots of friends. They all keep hanging around your door. But when money's gone and all of the spendings end, they don't come around, they won't come around no more. Rich relations give a crust of bread and such. Go on and help yourself, but you better not take too much. Mama may have, Papa may have, but God bless the child that's got his own. God bless the child that's got his own. That's basically some of it. Ed Ryder joining us in the playhouse from the studios of WHYY in Philadelphia, speaking with me and associate producer Nancy Updike. Ed Ryder's a big Billie Holiday fanatic. That was the word he used, "fanatic," when we asked him about it. So when we asked him to play a number with his horn, with his trumpet, he played "Lover Man." That's pretty much all the time we have for this evening. This show was produced by Dolores Wilber, Peter Clowney, Nancy Updike, Alix Spiegel, and myself. Contributing editors Paul Tough and Jack Hitt on the west coast, Margy Rochlin on the east coast. I've got that backwards. Paul Tough and Jack Hitt on the east coast. Margy Rochlin on the west. You see, you get so confused when you have two pieces of music running at the same time. Torey Malatia has supported this show from the start. We'll be back next week, same time, we hope. From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Ira Glass.
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There's what we wish for and there's what we get. For Susan Bergman, the story went like this. Her father led a double life. On the one hand, he proudly described himself as a family man, a church organist, in a denomination that was so strict the women covered their heads, wore no make-up, no dancing, no smoking, no drinking, no going to theaters, no swimming with members of the opposite sex, even. Her father stage-managed things so they appeared to be the perfect blond-haired, blue-eyed, American family. But secretly, he was having sex with men. By all accounts, it was lots of men. Sometimes he would even fly off to New York, go to gay clubs there. In 1983, he was one of the first victims of AIDS. They had barely named the disease. The symptoms weren't familiar. And he died before his children got the chance to ask him about who he really was and talk to him about how they should reconcile who he had pretended to be all those years, with who he was. What was real of their childhood? Susan Bergman wrote a book about her family's experience. And on her book tour, a very particular thing started to happen. Gay men, who were still married or who had been married, started to contact her. They wanted to explain her father's double life to her. They wanted to explain their own double lives to her. And they wanted to offer her the conversation that she never got to have with her father. Well, from WBEZ in Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Back once again for another hour documenting life in these United States. Today's program in four acts. Act One, gay men. I talk to Susan Bergman about her father. Act Two, a gay man talks to me in a parked car in an undisclosed location about why he thinks that his children don't need to know that he's gay and why he stays married. Act Three, we take all the heavy, very heavy themes about lying and families from the first two acts and rework them as comedy, if you can believe that. And finally, Act Four, the sins of the fathers pass on to the sons. Stay with us. Act One, The Book Tour. Susan Bergman came to our studios, loaded down with evidence. OK, now you've brought in some tapes of yourself being interviewed on talk radio shows that I've got here. So this first one, do we need to explain it at all before we play it? I think this was a caller that was, in some ways, typical of the response that I got on talk radio. Here we go. I have a particularly close connection to this sort of thing. I'm a gay father, divorced now. So I'm very close to this. In particular, I can understand your father's secretiveness and his pain. There's always the resentment that you had to go through the pain, that you had to hide, that you had to lie. And you live with that resentment. It really never quite goes away, even in my case, after you've come completely out and divorced and the whole bit. And the resentment lives on, that I had to do live that lie, that I had to lie to my wife, that I had to lie to my children, that I had to life to my family. And never be happy. Never, never, never know happiness. Hey, Susan? Uh-huh. Can I just ask you, what was your reaction to-- when he was saying this, had it occurred to you before that your father would actually be resentful of the family for the secret that he was keeping from you? He was angry at us a lot. But it seemed like it was more-- I mean I interpreted that as we were bothering Dad, or Mom was asking too many questions. Yeah. It's not one that had occurred to me. And I would have to contest that assumption that one has to lie or one is put in a situation where lying is the only appropriate gesture or response. Let's go back to this tape. And I hope that-- I don't know. Is there anything that I can help you. Any questions that I could answer. Because I'm still alive and I've been through it. That's great. Boy, I hope I can do this without just kind of gushing all over you, because it's so great of you to call in and offer that. It's beautiful. I didn't get that chance with my father. I guess I would ask you-- I'm just stopping the tape here. I'm just going to stop the tape here, because as you're listening, you're making the gagging signal at your own reaction. Oh, I think that's so great. Oh, I think that's so wonderful. I was not in touch with the full range of the reaction until after I hung up the telephone and stopped the radio interview. And clearly, that man was hurting in a lot of ways. And the last thing I needed to do was have a fight with him on the air about being a liar, or whatever. Whatever anger I would have had towards my father didn't seem to me to apply to him. He was just some innocent bystander. So I just tried to be nice. And it was kind-- oh yeah. There's the thing that you wish for and there's the thing that you get. And if what you really need is a long talk with your father, the kind of talk where you get mad and argue, and maybe he gets mad, and maybe people admit mistakes, and maybe things get resolved or maybe they don't get resolved, and you learn that they won't get resolved. But if that conversation is what you need, then no stranger on a radio call-in show, however well meaning, is going to give that to you. It's a mockery of what you need. But there you are. There you are. You're talking to this man, this stranger. And you find yourself asking a version of the question that you would most like to ask your own father. And you get an answer that is totally useless, because really it has nothing to do with you. You said, you didn't want to share your quote, "real life," maybe. But why do you feel that you were forced to lie about that? How could your family have shared your life? You see the problem is that once you get trapped into doing the thing you think you're supposed to do at a young age-- I married at 23 because I thought it was-- I knew I was gay then already. Hm. So did my wife, for that matter. She put it aside. Gay men sent Susan Bergman photos of themselves. One happy couple stands there in one of the photos in matching sweaters, raising glasses, smiling. The letter said that if her father had lived and divorced her mother, this is the kind of happiness he could have had. The letters that Susan Bergman got from the children and spouses of gay fathers, she said, seemed to be written in a completely different language than the letters she got from the gay fathers. It was like two different cultures, two different perspectives. There are lots of books about men coming out, gay men coming out, gay women coming out. But nobody seemed to be able to remember a book that had been told from the point of view of the children and the wives that these gay men had left behind. And families who are in that situation felt this shock of we are not alone. And they contacted her. You brought examples of letters? Yeah. The most poignant letter that I got, this woman says she read the book. "Our lives are so similar, Susan, that it was eerie for me to read." She talks about their background. They were all so fundamentalist. Our family wasn't quite fundamentalist. But this woman says, "Bible believing churches that started in their living room. We had six well-behaved, talented, athletic children in our prosperous and highly visible family." "When my dad was diagnosed in 1988," she writes, "my mom kicked him out of the house and would have nothing else to do with him. Three of us moved him out of town, encouraged him to change his name, and lied about his mysterious disease and our parent's sudden separation. Now, they are both gone. And we are left to deal with the fraud that was our life." They had just buried their mother-- when she wrote me this letter-- who had died of AIDS because the father didn't protect the mother at all. She says, "I'm writing to you now, not to pour out my heart, but to ask if my sisters and I can come take you out for lunch soon there in Chicago? There are not many like us who have suffered such circumstances. And I know in my heart that I should be able to hold my head high and talk about my mother's needless death without shame. But as of now, I can't." That's the end of that letter. And I talked to this family at length, on several different occasions. They did come to Chicago. They did? Yeah. Two of the daughters came. Some of the sons were not willing to even acknowledge that the parents had died of AIDS yet, one of them being a physician. One of the sons being a physician? Yeah. But the interesting story that they have, as her father was dying, they spent hours and hours interviewing their father on tape about his sexual contacts. They got the names of all of the married men that he had been with in this three-city area and the addresses and the phone numbers, which he had. And they began calling those men's wives on the telephone, because they wanted to save lives, because they knew their mother was dying. And so they would call up these women and say, you don't know me but-- Yup. --my father has had sex with your husband. Yes. I mean can you imagine that? I mean, of course they debated this among themselves. They thought this is none of our business. But when their mother got AIDS, they knew that this list of 100 married men were not taking any precautions with their own wives. And they started calling. And I said, "Well, what was the reaction?" I asked them to go on. And they said a lot of women hung up the phone them. And some would say, "Oh, thank you very much for calling." And as you say that, the thing that occurs to me is it's such a complicated act, because partly it's an act of compassion for somebody. And then partly it's such an act of vengeance against somebody else, and calling-- I know but-- --out that man. I mean if you lose your mother to AIDS, I can see why. I never had to do that. Yeah. But I'll tell you, in the town I live in, outside Chicago, there is a family, at least one, where the same thing is going on. The father is very promiscuous, a prominent man in town, has four young children. His wife has no idea he's a practicing homosexual. They have unprotected sex. And people in the community come to me and say, "What should we do? We've asked him to tell her. We're thinking about telling her. We want to protect her so that her kids have one parent." And when I talk to-- And what do you tell them? I say that's their decision. They're going to have to really think about that, because I don't know the people. I can't go into their lives just because I wrote some book on some related subject. If they're involved in the family system in some way, they have to make that decision. I have no idea. But when I talk to gay men about this book, who have read it and want to have a conversation, almost everyone has said to me, "Oh yeah, my main partners are married men." I said, "Well, you have to think about your own responsibility to the family then, I imagine." All these different fathers who contacted you, did any of them say, I'm sorry, I did something that hurt people and I'm sorry? Well, no. Because there's a lot of talk trying to defend the position that's just newly being articulated in their lives. And I understand that they're building their ramparts or whatever. That position being, I was right to at least clear up this lie. Finally, I did the one right thing. I left my family and became a true homosexual. That's the right thing, that's being defended in almost all of the letters. This is a very interesting letter signed, anonymously yours. He says, "At the risk of intrusion, which is not my intention, I'm compelled to write you and express some gentle viewpoints based on experiences similar to those in your book, but admittedly little real knowledge of your life." I appreciated that acknowledgement very much. "Based on your writing, however, I strongly feel that your father's life with you and your family was not the sham it may superficially appear. I see the story from a different perspective, as that of a tragic, often unconscious struggle by your father to love his family and not end up as one of nature's mistakes, which of course he wasn't. Were there no kisses of bruised knees, soothing of tears and hurt feelings, umpteen occasions of personal denial, dreams of success and happiness for you and the others? Would it be unreasonable to consider yourself doubly-loved, by a fractured psyche fighting desperately against the nature he was given? In retrospect, are not his intents as important as his failures?" It's a beautiful letter in some ways. And in other ways, there are these irritants in these approaches. I shouldn't be so critical I suppose, but then to say to me, were there no kisses of bruised knees? Yes, of course. Yeah, I had a great Daddy in many regards. Yes, he was a split person. And I don't think that he enjoyed being split, and neither does this gentleman. But that doesn't make him a better father. And that's almost the thing that this letter is driving towards, like couldn't you be doubly loved, being loved by a homosexual father? No. I think I was well-loved by my father. I think my father was a split person, and that that destroyed him and it worked towards the destruction of his family. By coming to understand that your family was structured around a lie, that who you were told you were and that the family was, has nothing to do with what you really are or were, that's very complicated. Susan Bergman. Her book is called Anonymity. Coming up, a gay father explains why he chooses not to tell his children of his double life. Act Two, Dad in the Closet. This next story isn't intended to answer whatever questions Susan Bergman might have about her father. It's intended to answer our questions about these gay men who stay in their marriages, leading double lives. The man we found to interview for this has been married for 26 years, heads a support group, called Review, for men in similar circumstances. He was willing to be interviewed, but he didn't want me coming to his home and he didn't want to come to our studios either. On the phone, I understood this to mean that he didn't feel comfortable appearing in public like this. Later, he told me that I had misunderstood, that he just didn't want to drive that far. In any case, we met in a parking lot on Damen Avenue and drove to a quiet street, where I conducted the interview, in his car. My name is Jerry Walters. Now let me just ask you, is it OK for us to use your name on the radio? Jerry Walters isn't my real name. It's a name that when I used to work on a hotline, they said pick out a name that you're comfortable with and use that. And so that's what I've been using. Plus, it separates business from my club activities. So Jerry Walters is fine. This man is in his fifties, was a teenager during the Eisenhower years. He looked like any suburban dad. He was neatly dressed, in gray wool slacks, a sweater, and what appeared to be a clip-on necktie. He says he was always a good boy. He says he doesn't really get at angry people, doesn't know how to yell at people. Back in high school, he says, he was the kind of boy who'd go out with girls, but never make passes at them. I graduated. I would date occasionally. And I did find somebody that seemed like a very nice person, that we had a lot in common. And we went out on a date. But that afternoon, after I met her in the morning, and that afternoon I had my first gay experience. And so, it was really kind of a red-letter day. I went bowling with her in the evening. And I was out with another man that afternoon. So I thought well, the situation with the other man was scary and disappointing and painful, to say the least. And so I thought, well, fine. That's out of my system. I don't want any more of that. He went on to marry the girl, who he's still married to nearly three decades later. But soon after their wedding, he became increasingly obsessed with men. He found himself driving out to the forest preserves, where gay men were known to hang out. Men would walk over to his car. Men would try to talk to him. And I would drive out of the forest preserve areas like a bat out of hell, to be perfectly honest. And thinking that, fine, I didn't do anything. So there's no reason for me to feel guilty. But I would end up with headaches that were so severe that I couldn't work. I would come home four or five days a week, and just be incapacitated with the pain. But then I was taking aspirins and Tylenol, and everything else. I got hooked on tranquilizers. And it's a scary thing. When this obsession first takes hold, where first you are thinking about it, and before you know it, you are completely consumed by the thought of doing something with another male. You're not even sure of what you want to do. You're not sure who you want to do it with or where these people are, but you are totally consumed with that quest. Well suddenly, my wife became the person that was stopping me from pursuing what I absolutely, positively had to do to survive. And your thinking gets distorted, would be an understatement. Why what happens? What do you start to think about? Maybe I shouldn't say this and maybe it's unique in my situation, but you think, gee, if she had an accident or something-- yes, I knew-- it sounds bizarre. But you're almost ready to plot to kill somebody. And I've told her this. And it's something that we-- here's a very mild mannered person, almost plotting somebody's demise, because they're stopping you. And they don't even know what's going on at this point. Do you think that at that time, before you told your wife, do think that in a day-to-day way, you had a lot of resentment that you would act out on, you would snap at her, that you would just be short with her? Because what you are describing is being so resentful. No, I didn't. I held it inside. You see, this was your wife. You can't do this. I'm one of these people that holds the door open for women and very courteous with people. So I held it inside. And you think the top of your head is going to blow off instead. Finally, after two years of marriage, he got up the courage to tell his wife he wanted to have sex with men. She says, "Oh, is that all?" And I said, "You don't understand. I've got these feelings for men and I don't know how to deal with them." And she says, "Well, I married all of you. I didn't marry part of you. We'll just figure out how to deal with it." And so from there, we just set the guidelines that would work for us. I asked her what she needed to be comfortable? She wanted, number one, to know where I would be. And that's fine. I would sooner leave a phone number underneath the telephone, that if I don't show up by 10 o'clock or 12 o'clock, she calls. She wanted me to be home when the kids got home, or when the kids woke up in the morning, which is fine. The term, "are you sleeping with somebody," I think, is kind of stupid. If I'm going someplace to sleep, I'll sleep at home. I'm going out for sex, not for sleeping. So that was never a problem. That's really the only things. And she said, "I want to be the most important person in your life." And she always has been and she always will be. He says, of course, he uses condoms. So he doesn't being home any infections or AIDS. His children and the people he works with don't know he's gay, though after his father died, he told his mother. Why stay married? Because I love her and she loves me. And we're probably the best thing that happened to each other, ever. See, I don't like-- there's a difference between gay feelings and living the gay lifestyle, a dramatic difference. And I know a lot of people will disagree with this and maybe take offense at this. There is an arrested adolescence in the gay community. There is an acceptance of lying because it was needed to survive. And honesty is something that I really put a high price on and I really value it. I suggest to him that he's the one who lies, by staying in a straight marriage, and not telling his own children he's gay. He says he's not really lying to his children. As he explains it, there's no easy time to sit your kids down and tell them that you're gay. When they're 5 or 10, it'll make no sense. When they hit adolescence, it could be confusing, a kind of burden, as they sort through their own sexual identities. If his children ask him directly he says, then he'll tell the truth. And he says, they'll ask when they're ready to hear the answer. If you want to know something, you will ask the question. If you don't ask the question, either you know the answer or you don't want to deal with the answer. Am I right? How old are your children? They're in their 20's. They're girls. Hm. Well, what is your assessment of what's going on? Do you think that they know, but they choose not to ask consciously? Yes. And it's a conscious choice? Yes. I think it's very much a conscious choice. I think that they accept me for who I am. And I don't think they want to know a whole lot more about it. But you're saying they accept you for who you are, but they don't actually know entirely who you are, because you keep a certain part from them. I am who my children see. The only thing different about me is that I have sex with men. That is the only difference. If that makes me a different person in their eyes, what value is that? How is that going to enhance me as a father if suddenly this is in the equation too? I'm a good father. I'm a good husband. I take care of them. I was there when they needed things, and with school and growing up and advice and everything. And I don't think that what a person does in their bedroom, or someone else's bedroom, really is your children's concern. Later in our conversation, Jerry says that he'd like to tell his daughters the truth, but his wife doesn't want him to. She doesn't want anybody to know. He feels he has to respect her wishes. I ask him if his wife is simply ashamed that other people will know her husband looks for sex outside of the marriage? No, says Jerry. She knows the marriage works for them and simply doesn't want to have to put up with the opinions of people who won't understand. And they do have a sex life, Jerry says, of a sort. Are you as sexually attracted to women as you are to men? No. We don't depend on each other for our sexual satisfaction. I don't know if I should go into that or not. Probably not. Masturbation is something that is part of what we do for sexual satisfaction. And however you do it, it's satisfying. Does she see other men? No. She says that's not what I'm about. We talked for two hours. It started to get cold in the car. Over time, as we talked, it became clear that this man stayed in his marriage, partly because he couldn't imagine any other life for himself. To Jerry, being an adult means having a wife, a house in the burbs, a couple kids, dinner parties, and mortgage payments, and mowing the lawn. That was the only way that people lived. I mean anything else wasn't even considered. And so how could I be anything other than what I am? And that was to be a married man. Do you think that you could have a kind of relationship like you have with your wife, with another man? No. I tell him that these kind of long-term, marriage-like relationships are commonplace among the gay men I know. In the suburbs, it's not commonplace. Let's face it. In the city it's accepted. There are areas in the city where men can hold hands, where men can show affection outwardly. You won't find that in the suburbs. But I find there's a part of you which doesn't even believe that it exists. It doesn't, where I live. For a while, I told him about Susan Bergman's book, about how difficult it was for her when she realized that her father wasn't what he seemed. I suggested to Jerry that his own daughters might feel betrayed, might find it hard to trust him if someday they find out he's been less than candid about his sexuality. He didn't agree. Shall we take the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus in that context too, that your parents told you that this man is Santa Claus? Do you hate your parents or distrust your parents' judgment from that point on? When you were a child, you were given just enough information to live your life. They didn't tell you that the landlord's going to throw you out of the house. They didn't tell you that your father's going to lose his job. They didn't tell you a lot of the things that could hurt you, because they were your parents. Their job was to protect you. Her situation is that her father was, on the surface anyway, presented the image of being a family man, a very religious man-- Right. --was a musician in their church. And so there was this constant lie, because-- Where is the lie? Was he not all of those things? Wasn't he all of those things, plus one other thing? We are complicated individuals. We can be a lot of things. You said he was a musician. He was a family man. He was a minister. He was a lot of things. And he was just this one more thing, that he didn't choose to share with her. And I think that was his privilege. How much do you need to know a person to love them, to live with them? Jerry says he talks to about 260 men a year in the support group he leads for gay and bisexual married men. He says he urges men to think very seriously about what they'll be giving up if they choose to quit their marriages, if they choose to be honest with their families, if they choose to end their double lives. Coming up, lies that every parent tells, including a secret that my mom has kept from her kids. And yes, it involves sex. Yes. In a minute, when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and artists to take a whack at that theme with monologues, documentaries, short fiction, short radio plays, anything we can think of. Today's program, Double Lives. Act Three, Lighten Up. Up until now, we've been hearing about pretty serious lies, told between parents and children. But there are lots of trivial lies that parents tell. In fact, you can reasonably argue that it is impossible to raise children without lying to them, which brings us to the Neo-Futurists. The Neo-Futurists are a Chicago group who perform 30 plays in 60 minutes every Friday and Saturday night. And they prepared this play, they call it a play. I think non-Neo-Futurists would call it a sketch. They prepared this play on our theme today. It's by Greg Allen, a recent father himself. Twenty-one lies I will tell my children. Go. Number one. If you don't get down, you're going to break your neck. Two. Santa's coming. Three. Mommy was just, um, singing. Go back to bed. Four. I will never forget this for as long as I live. Five. I'm sure he didn't mean to hurt you. Six. I said shucks. Oh, shucks. Seven. Sure. I like your music. It's just different. Eight. One more time and you're going to get out and walk. Nine. Just because your friends do it, doesn't mean you have to do it. Ten. Oh now, you don't really mean that. Eleven. Sure. I like your haircut. It's just different. Twelve. I never said that. Thirteen. No one is going to notice a little pimple. Fourteen. Sex is the expression of love and devotion. Fifteen. It doesn't matter about the new car. All that matters is that you're OK. Sixteen. I'm going to kill you. Seventeen. Sure. I like your boyfriend. He's just different. Eighteen. I was just closing my eyes for a minute. Nineteen. You were the best baby in the world. Twenty. Everything is going to be all right. Twenty-one. Daddy will always be here to take care of you. Curtain. Greg Allen, Diana Slickman, Dave Awl, Heather Riordan, David Kodeski, Anita Loomis, and Stephanie Shaw, of the Neo-Futurists. Our parents can surprise us with what they don't tell us, with what they don't talk about, especially when it comes to sex. Recently, I had this experience. An ex-girlfriend was in the gym, looking through a copy of a Marie Claire magazine, a woman's magazine. And there was an article in it on women's fantasies, their sexual fantasies, "What Do Your Man's Dirty Daydreams Reveal About What He Wants from You?" In the article, six sexperts-- that was the word they used, sexperts-- reveal the six most common male sex fantasy scenarios. So my ex-girlfriend is reading. And there, in the third paragraph, one of the sexperts turns out to be my mother. Hello. Hey, Mom. Yeah. It's Ira. Yeah. So I'd like to do a little interview. OK. So Mom, can I read to you a quote from an article? Of course. OK. Here it is. "Your man wants a woman who excites him through her own excitement. You could stimulate yourself while he watches or let him participate by moving his hand to where you want it." Yeah. That's you being quoted in Marie Claire. [LAUGHTER] You're kidding. What issue? All I know is that Anaheed was at the gym. And she opens up Marie Claire to an article called, "Men's Sexual Fantasies." And it says at the top here, "Sexperts reveal the six most common scenarios, unlock the secret longings and psyches of the modern men who fantasize." And you, basically, are one of this sexperts. Yeah. Yeah, I am. I didn't really know you were a sexpert? What did you think I was? [LAUGHTER]. Just another Jewish mom and psychologist. Uh-huh. So it wasn't like you were a sexpert and you were keeping it from your family? Um. You're talking about my family, meaning my children, not my husband? Yeah. Because he knows that I'm a sexpert. And you can call him to verify that. I think I'm just going to let that go. But my children always seem embarrassed if I discuss anything sexual. So therefore, I tend not to around them. When would you try to discuss something sexual with us? I might make a joke or say something that had a sexual connotation, and I'd get this disapproval. I don't think that that's true. No? Yeah. I mean it doesn't affect me in any way to think that you and Dad would be sexual with each other. In fact, I even remember as a teenager understanding that and being kind of reassured by it. Uh-huh. Does that make any sense? It makes a little bit of sense. But it really doesn't cover all the situations, if I'm just telling a joke or talking about somebody else. And I think it has to do with boundaries. And I think it has to do with that children, even adult children, do not like to regard their parents' sexuality. Hm. You know something, you're actually convincing me. [LAUGHTER] Well, let's do a little scientific test. Can you think of a sexual joke? You just tell one, right now. And I'll tell you my reaction. I can't think of one. [LAUGHTER] You know what I'm feeling right now? I'm feeling a profound-- Oh, actually I heard a wonderful-- Wait a minute, no-- I heard a wonderful joke, but I don't even know if it's a joke or story. Because this is like something that might be true. Uh-huh. That when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and he said, one giant step for man and one-- what is it? One giant step for mankind or whatever-- One small step for a man, one giant step for mankind. Right. Right. That's it. Right. One small step for man, one giant step for mankind. And then, he also said, "Good luck, Mr. Gorki." And for years people have been asking him what that meant? And he would never tell them. And then this year, someone brought it up again, what did you mean when you said, "Good luck, Mr. Gorki? And he said, well, I can tell now, because Mr. Gorki died this year. When I was a little boy, Mr. Gorki was our next door neighbor. And I was playing outside one day. And their bedroom window was open. And I heard Mrs. Gorki say, "Oral sex? You want me to give you oral sex? You'll get oral sex from me the day that boy next door walks on the moon." [LAUGHTER] Well, now I'm examining my own feelings. And I have to say, I did get very nervous there, in a way that does not correspond, perhaps, with shrugging my shoulders at the notion of you having some sexual life and sexual thoughts. Yeah. So let me read you some of your other quotes here. All right. In the fantasy of man dominates woman, you're quoted as saying-- says Dr. Glass, quote, "In a caring relationship, it's certainly not abusive or unhealthy if the fantasy is played out in a light, teasing way." You're also quoted extensively in fantasy number five, spontaneous encounter with a beautiful stranger. The key quote is this one, as far as I'm concerned, "Go to a restaurant, and at first pretend you don't know each other," suggests Dr. Glass. Which when I read that, it actually explained some dinners I've had with you and Dad,-- --I thought. Well, you didn't talk very much between the two of you. No. No. That's just the opposite. Have you done this? Have you gone to a restaurant with Dad and pretended you didn't know each other? No. No. No. No. But if you did, you're saying that-- We've gone to restaurants with you and pretended we didn't know you. [LAUGHTER] What do you mean by that? Well, when you were younger and-- --let's say that your manner of dressing didn't exactly conform to the style-- All right, all right, all right. I think everybody-- yeah. --that the people in the restaurant. Daddy would look at you. And he would start popping Gelusil, before we'd go out to eat. And I'd say, now Barry, people are going to look at him and they're going to look at us, and they're going to know that we did not pick out his clothes. So now that I know that you're this big sexpert, do you have any sex advice for me? Find a nice girl and get married. That's not sex advice. We always end up this way, don't we? With that particular advice, yeah. That's the lady I know. I could ask you any question and that would be the advice. Well, that was the first rule of journalism you taught me. Is what? No matter what they ask you, be sure to get your point in. You mean when you were first being interviewed by people, this is what I told you to say. Right. Right. Well, I'm glad we got to that then. My mom. Dr. Shirley Glass, in Baltimore. Act Four, Sins of the Fathers. What does it do to children if parents tell a big lie for years? Part of Susan Bergman's book, Anonymity, is her trying to understand the two parts of her father, strict, religious, family man; promiscuous, gay, night clubber. His personality was split in half, she writes, into two irreconcilable halves. But part of her book is about her discovery that growing up in his home, she became somebody who was also split in half, somebody able to carry on a life with two irreconcilable parts. She found herself as an adult, leading a double life. To end our program, we asked her to read from her book. I pretend I am a faithful wife. My husband is married to that faithful woman. The woman looks like me. She moves around in my body. This is what I mean. You can't tell by looking. He makes love to her. He has asked her a question once or twice, and she has heard herself reply with an avoidance, "Is there anything you haven't told me? I want to know more of you, Susan." They spent last evening on opposite ends of the house, keeping things going, changing the music, refreshing people's drinks and trays of food. "What makes you ask that tonight after such a great party? All our friends here, scrumptious food. Didn't you enjoy yourself?" She unfastens her gold-beaded bracelet and folds it carefully into its silk-lined box, replacing the lid. "I saw the way Tom looked at you." "There's absolutely nothing for you to worry about between me and anyone here tonight. Most definitely nothing's up with Tom." She concentrates on slowing down, as she hangs up her belt and tosses her stockings in a basket of hand washing. "You're doing this jealous thing again. What kind of look?" "Do you have any secrets from me?" "A few." She'll keep it light. "This is not my natural hair color, quite. But the rest is real." You must understand that lying is a temporal invisibility. It's the leaves you wrap yourself in when the voice in the garden calls. I was learning to deflect any doubt or question about my faithfulness, back onto the questioner, so that I didn't have to perpetuate the lie. I had for years, part lied, but mostly told the truth. Two and more irreconcilable parts, which let me understand my father, or made me into him. Here was my father's ailment again, his dread of being known. There's a family with children on the line. I force my family to serve as the same kind of false front I was raised to be from my father. Our presence testified to his normality. We failed, no matter how we strove for blessing, to discover the root of our calamity. I can't shake his choice alone, I tell myself. So we slipped and fell, which is human. And he died, stuck. And this gluey lie I keep perpetuating, sticks to me like a curse, revisited on the next generation. My father is in the window when I glance up, and in the hurried tone of my voice, in the shape of my ribs. What if, lights on, as is, he had asked us to love him? I opened the book I had slipped into my jacket pocket and read, "Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? Who shall dwell on thy holy hill? He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity; nor sworn deceitfully." If her hands are clean and her heart pure, I had been forgiven. But I had yet to go to the man I had wronged, and whom I desperately wanted to love me, to cancel my ongoing lie, my maintaining the family pattern of dishonesty. My husband couldn't bear ever to look at me again. Hadn't my family put him through enough already? Wasn't I a hard pill he had to swallow and swallow? He would remarry within the year, a woman of fidelity and beauty and a way with children, my children. What kinds of stories would they be told about me? All that we had made together-- I took inventory-- did not add up to the ultimate banishment of the untruthful from the presence of God. If you give me the opportunity Lord, one more time, whatever the consequence, I prayed, I will tell the truth. Judson put the question simply, the same one as before. That morning, I had sat in the sun, and read, and drunk my coffee, uninterrupted. Maybe it was a morning unlike any my father had ever been given. When Judson came home later that morning, is when he asked, "Is there something you'd like to tell me?" There was a reason my husband was unable to retire his doubts. I had made an offer of honesty, yes, but hadn't thought the test would come so soon. Walking out on the plank of my own promise, I peered down at the water. First, you leave your father's house, and then your own. There was a deep gulf below me I could not see into. This was the last of my life, as I knew it. "Whatever the consequence," I said inside my head to remind myself, breathing once. He could tell in the stillness of the pause between his question and my looking back up at him, that his life was changing too. Today's program was produced by Alix Spiegel and myself, with Dolores Wilber, Peter Clowney, and Nancy Upkike. Contributing editors Margy Rochlin, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, and Sarah Vowell. Musical help today by John Connors, Steve Cushing, and the mysterious and elusive Rumpety Rattles. To buy a tape of this or any of our This American Life programs, they're only $10, call us at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380, 312-832-3380. Our email address, [email protected] WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, whose mother never says things like-- Oral sex? You want me to give you oral sex? You'll get oral sex from me the day that boy next door walks on the moon. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week, with more stories of This American Life.
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From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And let me do something that I've never done before. Let me just reach out and retune your radio for you. You're on the air at WPLP. Good evening, Bob. I'm going to write more than one letter. I'm going to write the station. I'm going to write the chamber of commerce. --basketball team. I always wanted to go to Miami High-- You ever flip through the dial, past the stations that you listen to all the time, just skim up the dial, slowly, from station to station, waiting for something? You don't even know what. Something. Anything. Something like this, a radio signal whose source is impossible to figure out and the intimacy of one voice. What could be more personal, even in another language? [SPEAKING INUIT] Hello to you, Barney and Rosie. Hello to you, Rose. I'm happy to you-- OK, I'm singing to you Ayatollah Khomeini [SPEAKING INUIT] [BEGINS SINGING] This recording off the radio is one of those things that got recorded and then was passed from person to person to person. Finally, it ended up on a compilation tape of radio moments put together by radio station WFMU in New Jersey. And that's how we got it. By anybody's best guess, it's a radio station in northern Canada. The speaker is Inuit. And here's where it gets a little hazier. Because they're talking about a strike over and over on this tape, it's possible that this is a situation where the regular radio staff is on strike, and these are the replacement workers. Or it's possible that these are the regular workers who are about to go on strike, fed up, at the end of their rope. Or maybe that's not the story at all. That's actually one of the things that I like about this. Like a lot of good radio, part of what is so appealing about it is what it leaves you wondering and thinking about when it's over. Can you imagine tuning your radio and stumbling upon this? You know, just stumbling on this? It's so ephemeral, this moment just happening and passing and about to actually evaporate into nothing forever. And that's part of what makes radio different from other media, I think, that quality where it can seem so small and so fleeting. Ian Brown used to host the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation show Sunday Morning, and he was very great to listen to. He was smart and unpretentious and this great interviewer and writer. And when the show was revamped and he was taken off the air as host, he read this little radio essay on his last day about the intimacy of radio-- the false intimacy of radio, that feeling that we get together every week, you and me. I mean, literally, that's what it feels like. It feels like you and me. You and me, even though we don't know each other at all. Anyway, months passed after he ended that job, and we wanted to get him on our show-- on This American Life And I called him up, and he was not brusk but businesslike, very proper, formal. And it sounds ridiculous to say-- I feel sort of silly saying it-- but it was hard not to feel a little strange about it. It was hard not to feel a little bit like here is this friend who went suddenly cold. And I would not feel that way about Ted Koppel or Peter Jennings or anybody else who I've ever seen on television. I can tell you that. There is just something about radio. There's just something about radio. It's more personal. Well, this is our hundredth episode of This American Life. Each week on our program, we choose a theme, and for our hundredth show, we bring you an hour of stories about the medium in which we work . A program on radio-- what makes it great when it's great, what makes it terrible when it's terrible, which it often is. Act One of our program today, Brigadoon. Searching for an illegal radio station in Miami that keeps appearing and disappearing and appearing again in the mist. Act Two, The Invisible Leading the Blind. Jack Hitt stumbles on a radio station that seems to completely ignore the last six decades of broadcasting style and convention. Act Three, Radio Most People Listen To, an act in which we spend some time with the radio programmers who think that it's better to play the same exact songs over and over all day long, the consultants who make every radio station sound the same. In short, the thinking that makes most radio in America today so boring, and we defend those guys. Act Four, Noble Calling. A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who says that when peace comes to his country of East Timor, he has just one wish. He wants to do a radio show like Howard Stern's. Stay with us. The following program is furnished by. Are you married or are you living in sin? A little of each. You blast me, boy. You blast me. Act One, Brigadoon. We're devoting this first half of our program to the ephemeral thrill of stumbling onto some radio station, some radio moment, that you don't know where it came from, and you don't know what it is, but you just cannot stop listening. We have this first story from Iggy Scam in Miami. My friend [? Sinclair ?] was the one who first found the Northside black power pirate radio station way down the left of the FM dial. You could only tune it in up on the Northside, so we'd listen to it while we drove down 79th Street whenever I went to his house. You could tell it was pirate radio because of the number of times the DJs would say [BLEEP] in every sentence. They'd play all this poorly-recorded local rap, like this one song, "Too Many Suckers and Not Enough Stretchers" where the guy raps, "Living in the M, the I, the A-M-I. Sometimes, I've got to ask myself why." And then they'd play Tupac and then, every couple of beats, the DJs would just cut in over it and just scream, howl, or go "Uh!" And then the music would cut out completely. Most of the time, there'd be four or five DJs all in the room with the mic, all just talking and yelling and telling jokes over the music. It was totally loud and chaotic and fun. They even took phone calls somehow. They'd play a beat over the radio, and then people would call up to rap over it over the phone. Talk about DIY. Actually, they were never really that overtly political at all, really. We only called it the "black power station" because of one time when they were taking calls, and this dude called up and said, check it out, man. Southern Bell van's been parked in front of my house for three days. There ain't nothing wrong with the goddamn phone. It's the white man spying on us and trying to keep us down. Like I said, it was a great station. Besides being really great radio, the station was exciting. Who were these guys? Where did they broadcast from? And how did everyone in the city know their number to call in when they never gave it out over the air? When the DJs talked, I'd listen to see if there was even some discernible code that they used. I couldn't catch one. I never found out anything about it, really, and eventually, I just moved away from Miami. But after all my plans fell apart one by one last year, I found myself back in Miami trying to sort it all out. I ended up living back up on the Northside, off 79th Street. Good old 79th Street, home to the "Welcome To Miami" water tower and the INS building. Six lanes of road from beach to swamp, full of rusty, old, American cars blasting bass. The home of the urban trailer park and the indoor flea market, the $0.99 quart of malt liquor. I always thought 79th Street, and not the beaches or hotels, is probably the true heart of Miami. You could look at everything and think, this was all once somebody's idea of a good idea. Right away, I started trying to tune in to the station, but I couldn't seem to find it. I didn't know if my radio had bad reception or if they'd just gone off the air. I wasn't even sure of the exact frequency, really. I became sort of obsessed with finding out what happened to those guys, but there was no way to find out. Meanwhile, I kept busy taking long bike rides to explore the Northside, an almost touching daily tour of the very architecture of defeat. Often, I rode by sad, old Bobby Maduro Stadium, which is named for a Cuban baseball star who had never made the majors. Originally, it had been built in the '50s by a Cuban financier who was trying to lure Major League Baseball into Miami. And even then, he built it way too small for the major leagues. The financier lost all his money eventually, backing Castro, and then later backing anti-Castro revolutionaries. By the 1980s, the stadium was only used as a shelter and processing center for Nicaraguan refugees. And now, it was a host to a weekend flea market in its parking lot. Eventually, I pretty much fell in love with the Northside for its own sake, and I gave up the search for the station. But then one time, on my daily ride past the unused warehouses and huge fenced-off lots full of weed and rubble and the boarded-up housing projects, I found what could've been an important clue about the station. Down at the end of a dead-end street where almost certainly no one would see it, someone had spray painted "Tape Radio, 61.5 WEED." Now, 61.5 would seem to be a radio frequency. WEED would seem to be a station's call letters. Was this some kind of ad? How could it be a station, though, if the FM band doesn't even go down that low? Even if there could be a station at 61.5, no one would have a radio that could tune it in. 61.5 would almost certainly be dead air-- static. I decided to even try it as a phone number--615-WEED. Not in service. I figured that since there's never really any people walking around down there on that dead-end street, if 61.5 was somehow a station, they were probably broadcasting from a warehouse on that very street and that the broadcasters themselves must have painted it. Later that same day, I found the exact same spray painted message in the same exact writing in black paint 30 blocks north in Little Haiti. I never did find out what it meant. But that night, it was hot as hell outside-- the beginning of the Miami summer-- and I was just laying around feeling sweaty and miserable when I checked the radio for first time in weeks. And I couldn't believe it. The station was back on the air. DJ Funky One was on, playing music and taking calls. He'd play a little instrumental beat part, and then suddenly cut in completely over the music, put the caller on the air and yell, what's up? Caller would say, I want to say it two times for Little Haiti. DJ Funky One would say, all right, baby. Little Haiti's in the house. What's up? Next caller wanted to say one time for the Larchmont clique. All right, what's up? One time for Arena Towers, one time for the 6-8, one time for Edison, two times for the 7-4 boys, and a shout out to Shadow Man. It went on all night, music and calls. Outside my window, the station's signal was flying strong over the dark, rosy streets and avenues, past the open windows and open apartment doors and front porches, and the whole sad city out there sweating in the night. I drank some tall cans from the 79th and Biscayne gas station beer special and listened, and it felt like every radio in the Northside must be tuned in. Finally, after a while, I heard the phone number actually given out on the air. So one afternoon, when only music was on and they weren't taking calls, I called up anyway. I couldn't believe it when DJ Funky One himself actually answered the phone. I said, "Uh, what are you guys called?" He said, "We're the Space Station." "Well, where do you guys broadcast from?" "Carol City." I said, "Do you, like, have a license or anything?" And DJ Funky One started laughing really hard, and he said, "Yeah, yeah. We got all that [BLEEP], man." And then he hung up on me. Carol City was at the very north end of the county. It had originally been a white, suburban subdivision, but eventually, it was where city planners tried to get the rising black population of the '60s to move to when the city needed new slum land as far away from downtown as possible. These days, it's a seedy, menacing residential sprawl of little homes and gang graffiti known widely as a place where kids from white, suburban subdivisions go to buy drugs. I rode up there, but I found no more graffiti clues to the station's whereabouts. Later, with a car radio, I found that you couldn't even get the station that well north of 125th Street, which is about 60 blocks south of Carol City. So I think that DJ Funky One was probably lying about Carol City. So I started keeping my eyes open for any new clues on my ride home from the more wealthy southern parts of town, where I was working. It was a long ride home but always interesting. When you left downtown for the Northside, it was like crossing over into the flip side of the postcard. You rode out of the pink and blue neon glare of air-conditioned malls and chain stores and gated condos and hotels and skyscrapers into a dark, narrow maze of funky old wood houses, hand-painted signs, and corner stores. The suburbs have the police protection, but the Northside has voodoo. Well finally, one day I got a huge clue when the station was apparently having an on-air live promo party. DJ Funky One said, come on down. We've got all this great food down here at Mama's Kitchen. We've got the fried chicken plate for five bucks and Mama's conch dinner for seven bucks. Could it be? DJ Funky One and a pirate radio transmitter live in a restaurant? The address they gave out was only a couple blocks away in the heart of Little Haiti. But when I got there, there was no restaurant at all, just two black dudes on a couch in front of this tiny house cut up into four efficiencies. There was no music anywhere. There was no sign of a transmitter. I said, "Uh, are you guys with the radio station?" They looked at me like I was crazy and nodded. "This is Mama's Kitchen?" I could smell chicken. They said it was. I said, "But where's DJ Funky One? Where's the station?" They broke up laughing, and then one guy said, "Everyone wants to know that." So Mama's Kitchen was really just some guy's mom's kitchen. I ended up passing on the conch dinner, and I just bought a frozen cup of Cherry Kool-Aid for a quarter. I took it to my favorite spot by the tracks and sat there with it, laughing in the summer heat. Now that I'd met two people from the station-- or had I?-- the whole thing was even more mysterious. Well, I guess I don't mind not knowing, and now I'll probably never find out more about the station because now it was time to move away from the Northside. But I had one last Saturday night with the station, one last night of the station sending out the Miami-style bass to be packaged and delivered to the suburbs via 79th Street in a great, rusted 1971 Oldsmobile. One last ride through the ruins and failing streets and bad ideas that talk to you late at night, like radio. Iggy Scam's story first appeared in his handwritten, self-published zine Scam. Some music during this story was by the Mission Burrito Project in San Francisco, which delivers free, organic, vegan burritos to the homeless one night a week. --at the Centers for Disease-- Music from Wayne Shorter, Greg Osby, and-- Well, assistant city manager Virginia Dolloff resigned on Friday after two weeks of negotiations over severance issues. City manager Brian Martin disclosed that. Martin had asked -- Act Two, The Invisible Leading the Blind. So much radio listening happens in the car. This radio signal is one that our contributing editor Jack Hitt chanced upon on a long drive. It was my decision. I don't want to get into it. You hire and fire until you get one that works. Last month, I was cruising the backwoods of Massachusetts on assignment in a rental car. For the longest time, radio wasn't much help in relieving the boredom of interstate travel. After three hours, my finger was numb from jamming the Seek button when the radio suddenly snagged this station. And it was two elderly gentleman reading. It was unlike anything I'd heard all morning, or for that matter, for the last 30 years. Well, a good Monday morning to you, and welcome to the March 2 edition of The News, as being read to you by us volunteers, us being Mike-- That's me. --and yours truly, Gordon, Monday morning hosts here. And we read for the reading disabled or anyone else who would like to listen. And in the background, you're listening to a usually-swinging band playing Beatles music, Ted Heath from London, England. And we'll hear more of Ted on the way out at 12 o'clock. And then, at 11:00, we'll be playing Engelbert Humperdinck. Nice fellow. Of course, music is not our game here. No, it isn't. We just put it in to relieve or give ourselves a break and get us in the mood to read to you, because for the next two hours, we will be reading. You're listening to the Lowell Association for the Blind Talking Information Radio Reading Service coming to you-- The service is provided for the reading impaired. Mike and Gordon read items right out of the Lowell Sun, the Nashua Telegram, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune. They happily lack all the mannered, practiced intonation and attitude of commercial radio. Their keen story selection favors Homeric battles among sewer commissioners and landfill managers or pronouncements from local cranky professors. I knew right away that I had found my escape from Gordon Liddy and Chumbawamba. We really stick to local news if we can-- Merrimack Valley news, southern New Hampshire, northern Massachusetts, anywhere within our listening audience. But it's always local news because we feel-- and I think, Mike, you'll agree with me-- they can hear the national and the international news on their regular radios or televisions. Yes, I agree. And we're going to get under way with Mike reading from the Nashua Telegraph, today's edition, by the way. Yes, good morning. And from the University of New Hampshire, the headline here says, "Domestic Assault Researcher Backs Unorthodox Views." Murray Strauss defends his theory that wives assault husbands as often as the reverse. That's Mike, who seems to have naturally married the vocal charms of Lawrence Welk and Howard Cosell. Gordon's the other one, who tends toward a quieter style. In this story, Mike reveals that the official statistics on domestic abuse are flawed because men simply don't report their beatings to police. And Mike explains why. Although both men and women are likely to be ashamed of being hit by a partner, many men are even more ashamed because they feel it shows them to be a wimp, he said. Every story ends with a touch of banter from the two hosts. You know, Mike, that's never happened to me. Oh, me neither. Well, you're married. I'm not. No wife would ever hit me because it would have to be somebody else's wife, and I don't make friends with other people's wives. I can't remember if I've been hit by somebody else. Oh, you can. Come on. That was a very serious story-- Yes, it was. --but we sort of made a little light of it at the end. And we're sort of informal here on our little radio station, and we hope you don't mind it. "Informal" is not quite the right word. The right word is "surreal." Even though the readings are as ordinary as anything found in a newspaper-- Dear Abby, the horoscopes-- their intensity makes the listener feel not so much like he's hearing a radio station as living in this place where Mike and Gordon dwell. Even the obits are absorbing. Eugene R. Goyette of Alfred, Maine. Committal prayers and services will be conducted at 11:00 AM tomorrow in the chapel at Saint Joseph's cemetery in Chelmsford. Mrs. Anna E. [? Leckis-- ?] or Leekis-- [? Kunzler ?] of Lowell, wife of Charles E. [? Kunzler Sr. ?] Calling hours are at the-- no, this is another one. I'm sorry. She's evidently already been buried, Mrs. [? Kunzler. I could not turn the stories off, whether it was assistant city manager Virginia Dolloff getting fired because she hadn't done enough to stimulate growth along one part of lower Middlesex Street, or sewer commissioner Tom Moran who, now a candidate for selectman, was worried that his sewer experience might peg him as a one-issue politician, or the account of Representative [? Millnozzle ?] breaking his leg. But the story that had me spellbound for 10 minutes was a long and treacherous account of the annual meeting of the Dracut Water Supply District. It was rich in character and subterfuge, a mini Shakespearean drama. Essentially, three board members who faced pay cuts had packed the meeting with relatives. And in the end, they GOT raises. Graham's relatives at the meeting included his wife and about 10 brothers, sisters-in-laws, cousins, and nephews. Also present were about 15 Graham friends, neighbors, and business associates. Blatus had about 10 relatives at the meeting-- three sons, a sister, a brother, a cousin, and in-laws. [? Annis's ?] wife, daughter, son, and son-in-law were there, as were several of his neighbors. In all, counting relatives and friends of the commissioners, Blatus and [? Gardette ?], totalled close to 100. But wait, there's more. 26 from the school department, six firefighters, three police officers, and two from the sewer department. The disputed raise, by the way, was a mere $2,000. But the ferocity of the battle was apparent, and even the political tactics were strangely familiar. Like Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich, the raise plotters pretended to be astonished that anyone would question their motives for going to the meeting. So they shrouded themselves in patriotism. "It's just one of those things that happens," said district clerk Michael Blatus. "Everybody can go to a meeting. Shame on the people who don't-- By the end of the piece, my heart went out to Maureen [? Cares, ?] who had arrived innocently ready to defend smaller Jeffersonian government. But she was easily crushed. "I'm disappointed," said Maureen [? Cares, ?] who attended with her husband. "This was my first water district meeting, and it strikes me as though the other side-- and I hate to use that tern-- it appears that there were some efforts to bring out a particular constituency." Mike? I think that should have been subtitled "All in the Family." And now, I'd like to introduce Lowell's weather wizard, Steve Roberts. The core audience of this program is maybe 200 blind people in New England who actually hear the broadcast on special radios configured to receive its non-AM/FM signal. Occasionally, they air the show on the local college channel, which is how I heard it. But for the most part, Mike and Gordon's universe shares in our air space but is not of it. It's what Lake Wobegon would be if real people lived there, and then broadcast their own show without Garrison Keillor. In this alternate universe, the men are not always strong. Rather, they are savagely beaten by their wives. And the children are not at all above average. From Tyngsboro, sophomores at three area technical high schools scored poorly last year on a nationwide test of English, math, and other key subjects. Greater Lowell sophomores scored in the 27th percentile, meaning 73% of the school systems nationwide scored higher. Not that there isn't a good deal of Keillor's sweetness on the air. Mike and Gordon discuss a pledge drive that will occur between now and the-- I'm not making this up-- Acme Club picnic. Later, there's a discussion of the election of the town hog reeve. That's the guy charged with rounding up the village's pigs if they bust out of the pens. When you hear this program, you realize just how homogenized everything else on radio is. This is banter that hasn't been focus grouped or copied from another show with better ratings. Finding Mike and Gordon was like discovering radio as it might have been 65 years ago, a kind of ur-radio, beautifully preserved in amber. By the way, I have a little funny I want to make. Is El Nino related to that old movie star Sal Mineo? No, I don't think so. I had to say that. I just had to say that. Well, that's all right. I'll ask Dutch. He's an aficionado of these things. Sal Mineo, eh? OK, Steve, thanks a lot. You're welcome. Back to the news, we are. Jack Hitt listens to the radio from his home in New Haven, Connecticut. Coming up in the second half of our program, we move from the radio we love to the radio that actually exists on most radio stations, plus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who wants to host a radio show like Howard Stern's. And which Nobel Peace recipient is it? Nelson Mandela? Henry Kissinger? Yasser Arafat? The Dalai Lama? Real answers in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Radio. What makes it so great? What makes it so terrible? And we have arrived at Act Three, The Radio Most People Listen To. He can't even get it out. We start June 26. Free tickets? Myra, please. Well, I just thought I'd ask. Not for you. This is a recording of V103, WVAZ in Chicago. A few years back, V103 was in fourth or fifth place. But radio is not an art, my friend. No, no no. It's a science. And by applying scientific principles, consultant Tony Gray and program director Max Myrick transformed V103 until it tied for number one in the Chicago market, year after year, with adults age 25 to 54. This, of course, means lots more ad revenue, much bigger profits. Twice as many adults listen to them as listen to Chicago's public radio station. The story of how Max and Tony did this, made their station number one, is the story of how radio works-- pretty much every commercial station on the dial. This is the science of modern radio. And it begins here, 15 blocks away from the radio station. These are the offices of a company that V103 hires called Strategic Media Research. Every day, young women in 10 windowless rooms get on the phone in the late afternoon and early evening and call radio listeners. It's targeted research. For V103, they only call the listeners that V103 wants more than any others. These are 35- to 44-year-old African-American women. They go for women rather than for men for a very simple reason, Tony Gray tells me. Women are more likely to actually fill out the Arbitron diaries, which ratings are based on. In most cases across the country, the stations target females because you know you can rely on the women to fill out the diaries. So they get these women on the phone, and they hook them up to a computer which plays them brief clips of 30 different songs over the phone. It takes about 15 minutes. For each song, the women press numbers on the phone's keypad to indicate if they're familiar with the song, how much they like the song, and if they're getting bored of the song, which Max says is the most important thing. Once you get a record on the air, you have to know when to take it off, because there's nothing that'll drive a person away from a station than a song that they're just tired of. Every week, a printout of the audience scores arrives on Max's desk. And he marks it up, dividing the songs into A songs, B songs, C songs. A songs will be played on V103 every three and a half hours. B songs will be played every five hours. Cs will be played twice a day. These 30 songs are the only new songs that V103 plays They make up 40% of the music on the station. The other 60% is what radio programmers call "golds," proven songs that always test well with the target audience. For V103, that means Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing," anything by Anita Baker. On last week's list, Max crossed off six songs that just did not test well enough to stay on the station, one of them a sentimental favorite for Max by his favorite artist, an artist that he does not want me to name on the radio. So I'll just say that he's a crossover black artist who married Lisa Marie Presley. The reason this song is in brackets is because we've been playing it for several weeks. So it's saying it'll never be a hit. The research is saying it's not going to happen. Now, you like this song. I love this song. I love the artist. But you cannot let those feelings interfere. No, it's not about me. It's about listeners. It's about playing what they want. You have your own radio station here. You can play whatever you want. That's my job. You said the most important thing. I have my own radio station at home. And I play all the stuff I want to play as often as I want to play it. I make tapes. But when I come here, it's about business-- big business. Millions of dollars are affected by the decisions we make. So that's the real bottom line. V103 has four competitors who are going after the same demographic group that they are. The average person, says Max, jumps around between two and three radio stations all the time. If at any moment V103 has a song that scores lower with the audience and one of its competitors has a song that scores higher, V103 loses. Some programming tidbits I picked up during my visit to V103-- if you play rap music, you pretty much say goodbye to any adult audience. So even stations that target African-Americans usually don't play much rap. V103 plays none. Sampling is another matter. One of the reasons that sampling bits of old songs so popular now in pop music has to do with the way that radio stations operate, with the science of modern radio. Picture-- if you were a songwriter and you put some famous old clip from a pop song into your song, when radio stations do those telephone surveys of listeners, way more listeners, especially older listeners, are likely to say that they recognize and like your song. And radio stations will add your song to the playlist. One of the songs that Max is adding is a song called "Too Close," which has a sample in it. Oh, here it is. This is another song we were looking at. Normally, we would not go on a song like this because it tends to be a little young. But the bed for the song is from a familiar adult song. What's the sample that they steal-- use? What is that song? You'd have to put it in. Oh, here you go. It was a rap song back in-- oh, "Christmas Rappin'" by Kurtis Blow. Kurtis Blow. Right. Remember that? The '80s, sure. This is a very familiar sound. If you're in the adult demo, it's not going to make you mad to hear this song because it's just so familiar. You know this song? What is this song? When they came to V103, Max and Tony made some changes in personnel, they tinkered with the station's slogans and promotions. They paid a marketing firm to call 200,000 women on the phone telling them to listen for a contest on V103. But the main thing, Tony says, the single most important thing that moved them from number five to tied for first place was picking their music more carefully, letting in nothing that did not test well with the target demographic. A higher degree of discipline. And what, again, my experience has been, a short playlist always seems to fix the problem a lot quicker than, let's say, a more liberal playlist. When I went to visit V103, I had not been in a commercial radio station for 20 years. And I was curious about what it was going to be like, Chicago's number one station. Turns out it looks exactly like Chicago's public radio station-- same carpet, same fixtures, same office equipment, same phone system. It looked exactly the same, except everyone at V103 had much nicer clothes. And the stereo speakers in Max's office are nicer than the ones in the studio that I speak to you from right now. Tony and Max and I are the same age-- 39 and 40. All three of us started in radio as teenagers Ask them what they love about radio, and they talk about finding unknown songs, putting them on the air, watching them become hits. They talk about the satisfaction of watching the science of radio marketing actually work. And their lives are organized around one moment that happens every month-- the moment they get their numbers. It happens every month. I can't sleep the night before the book comes out. I can't do it. I can't sleep. I can't do it. And when I pull them up, I always have my head down. I don't even want to see them. And luckily, we've been at the top of the page. But man-- Running a station the scientific way means, of course, that most radio stations sound the same. It's why most radio is so boring, why we hear the same songs repeated over and over, everywhere on the dial, from city to city, why V103 can't even play Otis Redding. I should note that public radio does not stand above all this. Research has been driving it for years. The jazz played on Chicago's public radio station is audience tested. The classical musical on most stations is audience tested. The most any of us can hope for in this environment is pockets of individuality. And one of the interesting things about V103 is that their format does include pockets of individuality, most notably, the morning show. Tom Joyner, who's syndicated around the country, who does one of the most idiosyncratic, funny, truly interesting radio shows I have ever heard. It jumps quickly from This Day in Black History to the three-minute radio soap opera It's Your World. From serious and semi-serious to straight-out comedy, it is surprising and just great by any measure. So we kind of made a little noise, huh, Mr. Novak? Indeed you did. You've got some power, I would say. No. No, no, the people, not me. The people, OK. It's not me. A few weeks ago, Joyner and his morning crew took on conservative columnist Robert Novak. This is while President Clinton was in Africa apologizing for slavery. Novak, at the time, said something on television about how African-Americans would not be in the United States if not for slavery. Joyner's show started a barrage of mail to the Chicago newspaper that publishes Novak's syndicated column. And very, very quickly, Novak came onto Joyner's show to try to clarify his position for Joyner's audience. Some of our really fine citizens are African-Americans-- in government, in business, athletics and show business. You know how they got here? They were all slaves, weren't they? So it's kind of a problem. We wouldn't have this enrichment of our society if it wasn't for slavery. I never said slavery was a good thing. I said it was an unusual thing. Mr. Novak, let me jump in right quick, if I may. When you say it's kind of a problem, the "it's" in that sentence presumably stands for slavery. So if slavery is kind of a problem-- No, I didn't mean that. OK, what did you mean by that? I meant it's a logical problem that we wouldn't have-- One more thing about the scientific way of making radio-- it is weirdly democratic. Every song is chosen by polling. Here's this multimillion dollar business, all these well-groomed men and women and their expensive clothes spending every hour of every day thinking about how to please middle-aged, inner-city black women. How many other civic institutions are doing that? And let me just say one thing, that I'm not in the business of offending people. And I am genuinely sorry if anybody was offended by the remarks I made before or even the remarks I made this morning. OK. We appreciate it. Thank you, Mr. Novak. All right. You've got it. CNN, Washington bureau. Well, of course, the science of radio-- the machine of modern radio-- takes as well as it gives. It breaks hearts. Lots of people and ideas get knocked off the air as programmers try things they think will more predictably and scientifically attract listeners. Ida Hakkila had a job as a DJ on two big New York rock stations, and she got pushed out for more predictable programming. She began at a station called Z-Rock. I was the voice of Z-Rock. And what they'd have me do was-- I was kind of younger. I don't think I'd do it now. But I was the only female voice on the station. So I had to be really, really angry, which isn't the way that I am, personally. So it'd be like, AM 1480 Z-Rock! you know, like I was going to hurt somebody. So sometimes-- And were those instructions to you? Did they actually sit with you in the studio and they're like, "No, angrier. Make it sound angrier"? No. Actually, I did all the production. I just did everything. It was funny. And I think I got paid, like, $5 an hour. And then, at the end of the day, there was a boss that would hear everything. And he'd say, "Could you sound more, I don't know, like a dominatrix?" And at some point, you became a DJ-- a regular DJ on the station, right? Right. Well, what happened was, they started out this butt rock rock station. It was called Q104.3. What are you calling it? Butt rock. Butt rock? And I mean that in the most endearing way. I really love the music. It was AC/DC and Ozzy. And for some reason, the best way to describe it would be to call it butt rock. And the way commercial radio is, there's these very slight parameters. But this guy, as program director, knew that the best thing to do with me was to let me go. The very first shifts that I did were Saturday nights. He'd let me play some of my own records, which was an amazing amount of freedom. I know it doesn't sound like very much, but it was enough space to be a human and to have a lot of fun with the listeners. So what happened? So how come you're not there? Oh, because in 1996, I guess Viacom could own more than one station, and they decided that they wanted to have a station that appealed to males age 25 to 54. So they changed the format from pure rock, which is what they called it, to classic rock. These distinctions you're making-- pure rock versus classic rock versus new rock-- it's so Talmudic. It's just so fine. Classic rock, oh, it was like Aqualung again, and, like, Jimmy Buffett and stuff that just-- I was literally praying to get fired when I kind of saw the writing on the wall. I walked into the promotions closet, and I saw these Jimmy Buffett t-shirts. And I said, OK, I don't want to work here anymore. I hope they fire me. That's the sign that the Antichrist has arrived-- the Jimmy Buffett t-shirts. That's exactly it. Ida turned in her resignation. Then she looked for other jobs, including one at her first radio stations-- Z-Rock and K-Rock. But she decided she couldn't work there when she saw what those jobs would be. And I just kind of knew what was going to happen to me was that they'd want me to become somebody that said what they wanted me to say. You know those-- they're called liners in commercial radio, where DJs say stuff like, keep your button set on us. Wow. I didn't know there was a name for that. Yeah, that's called a liner, where they say, like, 20 songs in a row or your money back. Stuff like that. So really, like, middle of the road-- and these were people who were actually-- maybe 10 years before, they were the most vital and vibrant DJs, and they had just been beaten. They were people who were just absolutely beaten. They were reduced to having to say-- I just remember that button one, like, keep your button locked on us. And every day is a no-repeat day. And, we play 20 songs or someone wins $20,000. And, Ida, literally, what would be in front of you as you were on the air? Would there be a list of, you're going to play this song, you'll play this song, you'll play this song, you'll play this song? Yeah, it's basically a list. It's a list that says exactly what song comes at what time. So then, what's the pleasure of being a DJ? What is the thing that you're doing yourself? Somebody else has chosen the songs and all of that. I don't know why people become DJs. But I don't think that they look at the room like a really big phone or something really vital or exciting or alive, but more like they look at it like a room. You look at the radio station like a really big telephone? Yeah. Yeah, I thought of it as a really big phone. And it was a magic room. It was just the most vital room. And I really, really liked the listeners. All my phones lit up the whole show, and I just basically talked to people. And I'd talk about what people were doing at work. I'd talk about what they were eating at lunch. People would send me pictures of what they did. And it was this community. And if it was hot and people were working on roofs, I'd have them call up and talk about how hot they were and who's the hottest. And I shouted out songs. I know it sounds really hokey or stupid or whatever, but you were just making somebody's day. And I can't tell you how much I loved that. That's what, I think, breaks my heart the most is I miss that like you wouldn't believe. It's so weird. It's like you were betrayed by radio itself. I just so don't want to sound like a bitter person. And there aren't very many people, if anybody, that understands what I've gone through, which is, I was saying, it's just like an open wound. Or I am just so heartbroken. This is something that I love so much. And I just don't think that it exists. It's like being in love with somebody that you've never met. It's like some kind of strange situation where I just love this thing, and I don't see it anywhere. So what are you doing now? Now? Oh, god. Well, actually, I've been doing a lot of cool things, like being in a band. And I've been writing a lot. But the real reality of it is that I ran out of money. So I'm answering phones, and I waitressed for a while. And do you listen to the radio on your job? I actually tuned into some internet stations. There was a station that I really liked in Calgary that was-- they didn't even play good music, but the people just seemed real. Wait, you got onto the internet, and you had to search on the internet for a radio station in Calgary? I actually went all over every single thing that they put on Yahoo. And I listened to every single station that existed. Until you found one that you could stand? Like, there was nothing in the metropolitan or tri-state area on the actual radio? You literally had to pull in a station from another country. Participating with sister stations KEX Portland, WKRC Cincinnati, and-- Let's address the issues on the ground that affect the daily lives of the people, people who are being killed or kidnapped or tortured. All of these problems-- Act Four, Noble Calling. This is Jose Ramos-Horta on an international news program called Worldview that's broadcast on Chicago's public radio station. Horta is an exile from his homeland in East Timor, has spent two decades as the leading international figure denouncing the invasion of his country by Indonesia, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 for his efforts to hinder the oppression of a small people. But before his appearance on this radio program, Worldview, he confided in producer Edie Rubinowitz that someday, if peace comes to his country, he has another dream. He would like to do a radio program himself, one like Howard Stern's. He's seen Stern's movie, Private Parts, on an airplane. We reached Horta at the United Nations offices in Geneva. That's the kind of radio program I would do in Timor one day. I probably wouldn't copy off the hair, but his approach is really hilarious, and I enjoy listening to him when I can. So you've heard his radio show? Oh, yes. Yes. I heard before-- long before the film came in-- when I was in New York. A few times, I heard it on a taxi, like when you take a taxi somewhere. At first, I didn't know what the hell this is, but I noticed the taxi driver would crack up, would laugh. And then I would join in, so after that, of course, I heard it many times whenever I could, yes. Let me play you a little clip from the Howard Stern Show, OK? Yeah. All right, here we go. This is a clip, he's talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger. So I said, Fred, let's go chase Arnold into the bathroom and tell him how great we think it is that he's doing Conan The Barbarian. We went in there and he's like, "What?" [FART NOISES] "Hey, boys." [FART NOISES] "Hey, boys, please. Thank you so much for nice compliment, but please." [FART NOISES] "Sorry to bother you, Arnold." "That's OK, boys." Yeah. Something tells me he gets a little thing on the side going with some girls. Oh, here we go. I'm tellling you. "Meet me in my trailer." "Jamie Lee, that was a good strip." "That was very nice. Now, let's go practice in private. Come here, Rosanne." So can you imagine that your own radio program in East Timor would go in this kind of direction? Well, I don't know whether I can afford to be exactly like that. Well, they would get me off the air right away. But it is entertaining. When you imagine what you'd like to do on your radio show, what would you like to do? The kind of program, the kind of show that would not take people too seriously, like government leaders, politicians. When you describe it that way, it makes it sound like you'd have mostly a political show. You saw in Howard Stern's movie, Private Parts, he has, like, naked ladies in the studio. Would you do that? In our society, in our country, no, I couldn't do that. I don't think you'd find too many women in the Third World that would do that. You have to take into consideration that in certain countries, there are certain things that people are not yet prepared to listen. For instance, if I were to talk about sex the same way Howard Stern Show talks, the bishop would excommunicate me right away. Yes, and I should say, you won the Nobel Peace Prize-- it was a co-award, you and an archbishop. Yeah. Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo is an outstanding, courageous individual. And I don't think he would appreciate very much if I were to have a radio program exactly similar to Howard Stern when it comes to discussing sex. And let me ask you to explain, what's so appealing to you about Howard Stern? Well, he challenges all the hypocrisy, the snobism, the double standards. He says things, he does things that most people would want to do and to say but that they don't dare. You know, when you describe his program the way you do, it sounds that, in a way, it's almost a diplomat's dream. A diplomat can't usually say exactly what's on their mind, and here, you have a radio personality who gets to say exactly what he wants. Exactly. Many diplomats feel like I do. You get frustrated with all this posturing at the United Nations. And sometimes, I lose my temper and I tell some people what I actually think of them. And if I were not constrained by the delicate work I do, if I were to have my own radio program, I tell you, I would be almost exactly like Howard Stern. We don't believe you. Flat out don't-- I don't really care what you believe. I don't believe it. I think that Mark has a radar in his pants for money. Yep. Do you think there are many members of the diplomatic corps who listen to Howard Stern and are fans? Oh, yes, yes. People have fun. They enjoy it. Most of them feel, well, that's exactly what I would like to say myself. And if only I could have a job where I were able to speak honestly like this. Exactly. Yes, yes. Now, over the last few weeks, knowing that we were going to do this interview, we've been trying to arrange to get you onto The Howard Stern Show so you could take a look firsthand at your potential new career. And we haven't been successful so far. And I understand that at one point, you were in contact with them. You called them up. Yeah. Can you tell me what happened? Well, first, the lady had no idea what I was talking about. I told her East Timor. She said, East what? She probably thought I was calling from the East Side in New York. After, I tried to explain-- she even didn't know what the Nobel Peace Prize is all about. She had never heard of the Nobel Peace Prize? No. and then she pass on to the editors or the producer, whoever. And they say they don't know what you're talking about. Yeah. I'm going to play you one more clip. This is also from The Howard Stern Show. Morning, Howard. Right. I'm interested in the porno cruise contest. All right, listen. This is the ultimate prize. It's a porno cruise. It's like 70 hot chicks who are going to be naked the entire time, filming porno. They're going to be poolside. It's a cruise, a legitimate cruise, and we've got two tickets to give away. In other words, they're having a cruise, and it's going to be all porno actresses. And they're giving away tickets to it. But that again, is a joke, no? No, I think it's real. It's real? I think it's real. Well, OK, if it's a joke to joke people, I would. Many, many years ago, when I was a journalist back in Timor, on April Fools Day, I ran a story saying that a Swedish cruise vessel had ran aground not far from the capital, and there were many blond, nice, Swedish women around. And I tell you, everybody, including some very respectable men, they all rushed there. And all there was when they got there, there I was, waiting for them. There was no boat, no Swedish women. You were ahead of your time. Thank you. In a certain way-- you're trying to get freedom for your homeland-- do you view this kind of speech, which, I have to say, Howard Stern is often criticized here in the States for the things he says and the way he is. Do you view this as being, in a certain way, what freedom is all about? Yes, obviously, that is freedom. It is irreverent, but it is freedom. It is honesty. And that's why it is so popular and many people hate him because of that. But he should, in fact, receive a medal of freedom for what he's doing. Jose Ramos-Horta in Geneva. Well, our hundredth addition of This American Life was produced by Julie Snyder and myself with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike, senior editor Paul Tough, contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and Consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Laura Doggett and [? Sahini ?] Davenport. To buy a cassette of this or any of our 100 shows, call us at WBEZ here in Chicago. 312-832-3380. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who has issued new orders for how I'm supposed to do the show from now on. "Could you sound more, I don't know, like a dominatrix?" I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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In the 1830s, the area around Niagara Falls was still mostly wilderness. Railroads were just coming in, and already people were complaining about how commercialization was ruining Niagara Falls. Already there were cheesy attempts to make money off tourism. In 1827, promoters sent a ship full of animals over the falls. They had advertised that it would be ferocious animals of the forest-- panthers, wildcats, wolves. Instead, the cargo included a buffalo, two foxes, a raccoon, a dog, and 15 geese. It didn't matter. Everybody made money. The town of Niagara Falls had barely been settled for two decades. This kind of exploitation of the falls has continued for nearly two centuries since then. And what's surprising about it really is how unsuccessful it's been. Power plants fell into the river. Bridges collapsed. Deals were struck that benefited no one. If the classic story of America is the story of people who started with nothing, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, made something of themselves, the story of Niagara Falls is the opposite story. Here, they started with something, something big, something huge, but didn't build anything lasting from it. The modern history of Niagara Falls can be divided roughly into three phases-- the schemers who came in trying to exploit the falls for tourism, how their dreams rose and fell. But that's not the story we're here to tell today. Then there were the schemers who came in trying to exploit the falls for industry. By the twentieth century, they built hydroelectric power plants and factories that used that power, that cheap power, moved in. But then those factories left, decimated by the same economic forces that ravaged the industries in most of the Rust Belt states, forces so powerful they can destroy a town, even a town with one of the world's natural wonders in it. But that's not the story we're here to tell today either. We're here to tell the story of the third phase of Niagara's life-- the people who live in the aftermath of those dreams that have been dreamt and lost, who live in present day Niagara Falls, a city like many cities around the country, blessed at some point with natural advantages and resources that somehow fell from grace, fell apart, a town full of people trying to make sense of what's happened, living in the aftermath of what's happened, some who've made their peace with what Niagara is, some who haven't. During the next half hour, we're going to bring you two sets of stories interlaced, half of them from documentary producer Alix Spiegel, who went to the falls and interviewed people living there, half from David Kodeski, who grew up in the town of Niagara Falls. It's This American Life, from WBEZ Chicago, Public Radio International, I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. All the stories this hour will be from Alix and David. We'll start with this one from Alix. There's a painting of Niagara above the couch in Paul's living room and another on the opposite wall over a chair. These pictures have a romantic, epic feel, like the two Niagara pictures he's hung on the wall near the front door. Then there are the four aerial photographs of the falls above the greenhouse window and the etchings of the falls in his office and the small, delicate portrait of the falls in the kitchen over the sink. There is in fact a picture of Niagara on almost every wall of every room in Paul's house. I visit Paul, and we sit together on the couch in his living room under the biggest picture of blue water rushing the brink. He's wearing his Niagara baseball cap. Walking towards the falls you can notice the crescendo building up, the change. Then you can hear this mmmmmm, and that sound of the falls as you're getting closer and closer and closer. And finally you're there. It's like the "1812 Overture," when the symbols go, boom! Dum-da-da-dum! I get goosebumps when I hear that every time I hear it. Honest to God. If you've ever heard the "1812 Overture," I'm sure. Well, that's the same feeling. That's what people should get when they go to Niagara-- goosebumps. Paul was a schoolteacher but retired early so he could study and write about Niagara full time. He's written five books, a folder of poems and gives lectures to local high schools and environmental groups. Nothing about the falls is too small for Paul to study. He is, for example, the only person ever to compile a comprehensive history of suicides at the falls. He did this by combing through a century's worth of newspapers at the local library, picking out all the articles and references to suicide, and collecting this information in a series of graphs, colored bar charts on poster board, which break the suicides down by age, sex, and so on. Monday, blue Monday, I guess is the most popular day. Wednesday is the least popular. Over the hump. People always feel good. Over the hump. Weekend's coming, so who wants to do away with themselves? We got the weekend coming. And then what time of the day are suicides? 4 o'clock in the afternoon. So tired of work. Can't stand it. Can't decide to go home or whatever. And then what month of the year? September is the most. And believe it or not, the next month is the least, October. Paul reads me a poem he wrote called "Sensing the Wonders of Niagara." He tells me that the American Falls and the area around the American Falls is supposed to be a natural reserve according to a hundred years of New York state law. But, he says, the city of Niagara doesn't care. He says there are too many skyscrapers, too much honky-tonk, too many factories, and tourist helicopters buzzing low all day long. On the Canadian side of the falls, there's casino gambling and wax museums and sushi. Then Paul starts asking me questions, not the kind I'm supposed to answer. The kind that answer themselves. Who are we, the residents on either side of this wonder, to think that it is ours to do with as we wish? Why do we insist on introducing more and more buildings and distractions around the falls? Why must we turn the falls into a commodity? How come so many people are so unhappy today? Why are people angry when they drive? Isn't this because there are no places of natural beauty where people can escape modern life? How would it look if you stood in line at the Louvre in Paris to see the Mona Lisa, as I did in 1979, how would it be if when you finally got to see it there were neon lights all around it, flashing. Buy this. Buy that. Buy this. Could you really enjoy the painting? No. If you went to hear Mozart-- oh, my favorite composer, Mozart. If you wanted to hear Mozart and went to a concert, and you've waited for months to hear this concert and then, right next to the stage was a rock band playing at the same time, could you enjoy the Mozart? I'm afraid not. So when you come to see Niagara Falls, you should see something natural. When you come to hear Niagara Falls, you should hear something natural. Paul writes letters to the Niagara Gazette and the Buffalo News, and speaks out at town meetings about limiting commercialization of the area around the falls. His opinions are unpopular. He's seen as an outsider, an extremist. He's been called a complainer and anti-industry. One city councilman told one of his friends that he'd like to see Paul disappear. In 1983, Paul was testifying against a landfill that he thought might threaten the Niagara River. And that night he was woken up at three in the morning by the sound of a truck in his driveway. A truck pulled up in my driveway and put a large metal sawhorse against my overhead garage door. And my dog was barking. I got up, and I just got to see the truck leaving my driveway. And there were two men on the back of the pickup truck and a man driving. And there were two blinking amber lights on the sawhorse. I put my coat on, went outside, and I took a look at it. I said, my god, why is this here? So I called the police. And the sheriff came to my house. And he said Mr. Gromosiak, you've been warned. I said, by whom? He said, I don't know, but that's how they warn people. I said, oh, really? As a kid, Paul would visit Niagara three or four times a week. He would sit on his favorite stump, watch the water, and fantasize about what his life would be like. But now Paul doesn't visit Niagara at all. He lives less than three miles from the falls, studies and writes about the falls every day, covers his walls with pictures of the falls, but he can't bring himself to go. For relaxation, I can't anymore. I just can't. I get upset now. I could cry. I feel like I'm walking on the ruins of a wonder. So I go other places to walk. When you think about your life in the future, do you ever think that you will be able to-- No. No. No, I can't. I don't think I will. I will only go there when I have to, to do a favor for someone or to take people there to see it. But I will remind them about what it was. Paul tells me that he sometimes thinks that fighting for the falls is his destiny. He never married and lives alone, so he has plenty of time to really pursue it. And ultimately, he believes he will see a natural Niagara Falls-- one day-- when he gets to heaven. Could you imagine being in that place forever, how it used to be with the bald eagle soaring above, hundreds of them, with that ground shaking, with the trees bending over the gorge, growing larger than most other places in North America, all kinds of food to eat? Just cup your hands together and put them in the water and drink it while you're looking at the falls. I can deal with that forever. I can deal with that forever. There are really only two kinds of jobs at Niagara-- heavy industry and tourism. I got a job in tourism. Early in the spring of 1986, I was hired by Gray Line Tours, Incorporated, licensed by the state of New York and the province of Ontario. I had to pass a couple of simple tests. The Canadian, or Horseshoe Falls, are 158 feet high. The American Falls are 184 feet high and have a crest line of 1,060 feet. 30,000 cubic feet of water pass over both falls every minute during the daylight hours in the summer months. The water at the base of the falls is as deep as the falls are high. I became Niagara Parks commission tour guide number 674. All that spring, summer, and fall, I drove van loads of tourists to all points of interest in the region. Every tour a three-hour tour, three times a day, 21 times a week. Did you go on the boat, I'm often asked. Yes, I went on the boat three times a day, 21 times a week. Today, I know that in family photo albums in India and Japan there are pictures of me pointing out a geologic feature, telling a tale of daredevilry, posed with the rest of the tour group, the natural wonder in the background providing the perfect backdrop. When I was a kid we visited the falls often, nearly every weekend, usually just before Sunday supper at grandma and grandpa's. Yet I never really got over my terror of the falls. Despite the fact that I led tours at Niagara Falls three times a day every day for a single summer, I never got over my terror of them. The water there is so swift, the drop so sudden. You can't stand there at the brink-- watching the water roll over, changing yet always the same-- you can't stand there without the thought crossing your mind. It would be so easy, so peaceful, to just jump. And it does happen. Often. Everyone who lives here has a story of someone they've seen, of someone they've heard about, of someone they've known who was killed in the falls. Sometimes people will plan for a long time for a trip to the falls. They stand there watching the water for a while. Usually they'll remove their shoes, place their belongings, their personal effects inside their shoes, climb up over the railing and jump. I've seen it happen once. It was terrible. A young woman. I was at Table Rock guiding a tour. There was commotion as the would-be be rescuers ran past us. There were people on the observation deck calling out to the people on the Maid of the Mist boat trip who were taking photos of the majestic cataract, waving to the people 158 feet above, people who had seen her jump and were now trying to get the tourists aboard the boat to help the woman who was now being tossed about in the swirling waters. Her body was sucked behind the curtain of water. Disappeared. I don't know if they ever found her body. Sometimes they don't. They pay people to go down to the lower river and retrieve the bodies they do find. $100 a body. I think it started back in my grandfather's day. He did a lot of hunting and a lot of fishing. Them days they used to hunt below the falls. And being he was around the river all the time, any time they had someone jump over the falls, commit suicide or someone drowned accidentally, or someone would fall over the cliff, they'd get my grandfather to go down and recover the bodies or if the person was injured to find them and get the help to bring them up. Well, then from there, it went to my dad. Now, when I was eight or nine years old, I used to go down with my dad when he pulled bodies out. I'd just stand back and watch. He did the same to all my brothers. And I got three boys and a daughter. And all my boys used to go down with me to retrieve the bodies too, help us carry them up and everything. Wes Hill collects the dead bodies of people who go over the falls. A warning-- some of his descriptions may be a little graphic for some listeners. After you see one or two or three, you get used to it. It's just like looking at a dead animal really, because 90% of these people committed suicide. And it wasn't accidental. They wanted to be there, so why feel sorry for them? And it gets so after you've taken out a hundred or so, then it's just like somebody repairing a car. It's the same thing over and over again. And I've taken around 400 bodies out of the river. One time, it was in the afternoon. I was going to collect my paycheck. And it was too early to get my paycheck. I had to wait a couple hours. My wife was with me, so I said, let's drive down to the Maid of the Mist, and I'll go look around the driftwood, see what's floating in there. Because I got all kinds of fish and tackle and boat parts and everything out of the driftwood years ago. So as I parked car in the parking lot of the Maid of the Mist, I could see something pink going around the point just below the Maid of the Mist docks. There's a point of a rock that sticks out. I told my wife, that looked like someone's back or something. So I walked in behind one of the docks, and I got a pike pole. It's a logger's pole they have the pull out driftwood. I got that, and I walked around the bay and went in behind this big rock. And here's an old woman laying there in the water. So I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her up on shore. Her body was still warm and everything, but her back was all smashed. She was dead. Apparently somebody in Montreal went to visit his mother and father. And he went in the house. And there's a suicide note on the table saying that one didn't want to live without the other. And being they're up in their 70s, they figure, one could die any time. So they said they're going over Niagara Falls and jump together. And they did. We got her body that day, and I got the man's body about a week later. I got a 18-year-old girl out of the river. She got pregnant, and her boyfriend said he'd marry her. And then he didn't, and she accidentally caught him with another girl. And she jumped over the falls. And of course, with the pressure on the body, when I went to pull her body out, the baby was halfway out. That is sickening. Back in 1950, my brother, Red, decided he was going to try to go over the falls in a barrel. And he figured he needed something light, that if it hit any rocks, it would bounce so he wouldn't get hurt. So he got these big truck inner tubes, and he had them all put together with nylon webbing and everything, and a large net over the whole thing. The ends were closed with smaller inner tubes. And he figured if he went over in this thing made with inner tubes-- and he called it the Thing-- that he'd come out all right. So I told him, I'm not going to help you. And he said, why? I said, mainly because you weigh more than the barrel you're going over in. And I said, those inner tubes, when you go over the falls, it's going to hit the water and stop dead. And I said, you're going to shoot right through it, right out of it. No, no, he says, I'll be all right. I seen him that morning when he left my house. I was with my mother. And I went down to the Maid of the Mist landing with my brothers and my mother, because they figured he'd come out all right and they wanted to be there to greet him. And I was standing on the dock of the Maid of the Mist when I seen this jumble of tubes come out. And I turned to my mother and said, Bill's dead. She said, how do you know? I said, look at the tubes. They're all smashed up. And the small boat from the Maid of the Mist pulled the tubes in. He wasn't in it. They got his body the next morning. My mother had been fighting my father and us boys for years. Every time we'd go down to the whirlpool, take a body out or rescue somebody, she'd say, you're going to get in trouble. Stay home. She'd worry about us all the time we were gone. She always did that. When my brother said he was going over the falls, two of the neighbors said, why don't you try to stop him? She says, ain't no sense in talking to my family. She says, see? I can't talk him out of it. She tried, but we're all bullheaded. Did she hate the falls or did she-- She hated it. She really hated it. My other brother Norman, he worked on the Maid of the Mist for years, and when they started the hydro project, he went to work in the hydro. And he was down working in the tunnels, and a rock came down one of the shafts and hit him on the head and killed him. So actually, he was killed working along the river too. There's a legend for retelling by tour guides. I would retell this legend at the base of the Bridal Veil Falls during the Cave of the Winds trip part of my tour. This is a legend. Every year the Indians who lived at the falls would, in the autumn, choose a maid to be sacrificed at Niagara to appease the angry god who lived in the waterfall, to ensure safe passage through long, cold, dark winter months. Now, it happened one year that the kind chief's only lovely daughter was selected as the maid of sacrifice. The chief loved his daughter very much. And though it broke his heart, he went through with the preparations. When the fateful day arrived, the canoe, beautifully painted and laden with garlands of flowers and cornucopias of nature's bounty was carried to the village with his lovely only daughter inside. It was set into the river, and she drifted away, silently, nobly to her destiny. When she hit the first rapids above the falls, she let out a small cry of terror, and her father, overcome by heartwrenching grief, jumped into his own canoe in hopes of rescuing her. As her canoe tossed and turned in the rapids, she called out again and again. The chief paddled faster, but alas, he was too late. With a final cry, she passed over the brink and was lost. Her father paddled with speed to the edge, and he too disappeared. It is said that the roar that you hear at the falls is the father crying out in anger, and the mist you feel raining down are her tears. I would retell this legend three times a day every day to Australian and German tourists, to visitors from Tokyo and Bombay, to smiling blond-haired, straight-toothed families from Nebraska. They would smile and nod. Smile and nod. And then, simply because I could not help myself, I would tell them that the whole thing was a fabrication. Not true at all. The visitors, whether from Missouri or Melbourne, would lower their cameras, squinting at me, slack-jawed, like they were woken from a dream. I'd tell them that the aboriginal people who lived here never, ever engaged in human sacrifice of any kind, that really, what was in a way amazing about this story was that it survived for so long from the time of the very earliest tour guides in the area, from the 1820s when Niagara was only just starting up. What I didn't tell them was that I would, as a kid, attend the Maid of the Mist parade every summer. It came right down main street in Niagara Falls. And at the end of the parade every year, after the Shriners, the Knights of Columbus, high school bands and waving dignitaries, the most elaborate float would appear-- a re-creation of the Maid of the Mist legend, usually with a pretty young woman from the reservation nearby. There she'd be in her chicken wire and crepe paper canoe, poised on the very brink of the paper mache cataract, smiling, waving, throwing wooden nickels. I met a man in a bar who told me a story about the city of Niagara Falls, which is the story I think of whenever I'm trying to explain Niagara to myself. He told me that the mayor of the city gets two things-- a $30,000 salary and a license plate for his car. The license plate reads NF number one-- Niagara Falls number one. A couple years ago, there was a mayor in Niagara who got voted out of office, but was so mad about being ousted that he refused to give the license plate to the new mayor. They argued back and forth and back and forth, the new mayor insisting the old mayor give the plate up, the old mayor refusing. Finally, said the man in the a bar, the new mayor came up with a plan. He hired some men to steal the plate off the car of the old mayor. This, I should say, is unlikely. The new mayor was a policeman for 31 years, and he absolutely denied taking the plate. But the man in the bar said that he and many of his friends didn't believe the mayor. He said, this is the kind of town Niagara is. It's the kind of town where the new mayor steals the license plate off the old mayor's car. Don Glynn is a newspaper man who's worked at the Niagara Gazette for 37 years, not including his time as a paper boy. He takes me on a tour of the city. We drive through downtown Niagara. There's not much driving to do. It's mostly a grid of empty lots. So we circle the same streets over and over, past the convention center, past the old Niagara Hotel, past the Wintergarden and the Rainbow Mall, past the convention center, past the old Niagara Hotel. You see this big building here, the flashcube, we call it. That's the Occidental Chemical center. There's very little occupancy in there anymore because, well, Occidental has moved out for the most part. And the largest tenant in that nine story building-- this says something about the city of Niagara Falls-- the largest tenant is the Small Business Disaster Assistance office. All these places on both sides of the street for two or three blocks are just bars. And a lot of them are in Chapter 11. In fact, I often thought it would be neat to open a bar and just call it Chapter 11. It'd probably be packed with all the people that can't pay their bills. Niagara was an industrial boomtown from the '20s through the early '50s, but in the late '50s and '60s, the electrochemical companies which lined the river found cheap power, nonunion labor, and lower taxes in other states. They left, and people left with them. Then in the late '60s and early '70s, things got so bad that Niagara elected a flamboyant mayor with a plan. The mayor was E. Dent Lackey, and the plan was urban renewal. It was a simple plan which had three parts. Part one, the city would buy up all the property on the 82 acres of land which constituted Niagara's downtown area. Part two, the city would tear down all the property on the 82 acres of land which it had bought. And part three, developers from across America would flock to buy the empty lots, and they would build a new city. This plan is part of the reason it doesn't take very long to go on a driving tour of Niagara Falls. They only made it through parts one and two. Everything was just kind of like leveled, and they thought that all these developers would come in and rebuild. And that didn't happen, because the developers weren't standing in line like this mayor thought they would be. They just didn't want to come here, and they didn't want to invest. So it was this one administration that just kind of leveled the city. I thought he had a lot to do with it, Mayor E. Dent Lackey, for whom the plaza is named, by the way. You tear down a city and they name a plaza for you. Don turns a corner and drives us past the Lackey Plaza, a large concrete square with a shallow white wall around it in front of Niagara's convention center. He points to the corner of the wall, where there's a smooth bronze plate. See that marker there on the end there? See that little plate there? It looks like just an empty space. Uh-huh. Somebody stole the plaque. That's the Lackey Plaza, and that was the only proof that that was the Lackey Plaza, and someone stole it. It's been gone for like half a dozen years, the Lackey Plaza plaque. Does that tell you something about the city? Isn't that pathetic? I mean somebody felt that strongly about it that they removed the plaque. But that tells you something. We drive up the street a ways, past two enormous parking complexes a couple of blocks from the falls. They are pristine structures, four-story garages which take up two entire city blocks and dwarf everything around them. We've got these ramp garages, and they've never really been filled. They've never been used, and they're free. You notice that? Yeah, because it was foolish to try to charge. Finally they put a fee on this one here, but that's only because they're trying to take advantage of the people that work in the office building across the street. But the one closest to the falls is free. You can walk in there, and all the levels are free. It doesn't cost anything. And yet all the booths are in place there and the electronic system and the cars. They spent a lot of money on just setting up the mechanisms, and they don't use it. You got to remember that this is probably the capital of pipe dreams. I don't know why that is. You could go over to Navy Island, which is close by. It's around five miles away. That was one of the sites suggested once for the home of the United Nations. I mean, that's big thinking and big planning, right? Of course it never happened because the Rockefellers donated the land in New York. But they actually thought they could get the United Nations here. More than half of Niagara's population has left since the '50s. With industry gone, Don tells me about 2/3 of the population of Niagara Falls is on some form of public aid, and almost 60% of its population is elderly. Young people do not stay here. They move out. So in another, let's say, 20 years, you're going to have an entire city full of 80-year-olds. This is going to be like a huge retirement village or senior citizen's village. Absolutely. No question. I think you're right. Young people just don't come in here and don't stay here. And then, 25 years from now, it's going to be a ghost town, isn't it? Well, it has all the makings of that, yeah. Coming up, two weddings and a funeral, plus tape recordings made by someone inside a barrel as he went over the falls. Guess which Bon Jovi song he was listening to as he went over the brink. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of stories on that theme. Today's program, Niagara. Stories from documentary producer Alix Spiegel, who visited the falls, and from David Kodeski, who grew up there. In one sense, the story of Niagara Falls is the story of how we as Americans relate to nature. We revere it and romanticize it on the one hand, and we try to exploit on the other. It's no accident that one of our country's most famous ecological disasters, Love Canal, where so many toxic chemicals were dumped that residents had to be evacuated, is just a few minutes' drive from the falls. Those chemicals were there because so many factories grew up near the falls, near the cheap hydroelectric power provided by the falls. And that's where our story continues. Cheap, plentiful hydroelectric power lured the electrochemical industries of the world to Niagara. My father worked 40 years or so for DuPont in the sodium facility there. My uncle Ray worked for Carborundum, my cousin Paul for Union Carbide, my cousin Carl for Goodyear Tire and Rubber, my uncle Matt for Occidental Chemical and Petroleum, formerly known as Hooker Chemical. The factories line the Niagara River not far from the falls themselves. When I was driving tours that summer, we were instructed to direct the attention of our guests toward the river to point out the wideness of the river, to point out the relative calmness of the water. We were instructed to keep the attention toward the river and away from the chemical factories belching yellow and white smoke. None of this would appear in the official tour guide training manuals, of course, but the veteran guides who trained us reminded us that we were working for tips. And who would tip a tour guide who pointed out a ravaged and polluted landscape? Someone whose attention had drifted to the east might ask, what are those factories? And we were then instructed to explain how during the war effort these plants had supplied the armed services to aid in beating the Axis powers and those nylons GIs were plying Euro cuties with were made right here in Niagara Falls. The summer I turned 17, there was a great deal of family talk about which plant I should work for, just for the summer, see if I like it. The money's good. The money is very good. But I did not want to work in any one of the factories under any circumstances. They seemed deadly. I knew that my grandfather retired early because of his failing health. He died of pancreatic cancer in 1966. My grandfather was a chemical operator. He ran what they called caustic, caustic and chlorine. They make drain cleaner out of it, detergents, soap too. They use it to purify water. My relatives say dioxin was in the air there. They say that when they made caustic, the vapor would go up and it would turn into caustic dust. They say it was everywhere, even in the place where they ate. They say you could write your name in the dust on the table. You'd leave your coffee cup on the table, and there'd be a mark. I spent a lot of time sitting on the front porch of my parents' house staring at the factories on the horizon-- towers, ironworks, smokestacks. You could also see the mist of the falls from there, but you couldn't be sure if it was the mist you were seeing or the smoke from the factories. Near my parents' house, kids would play on the sites of abandoned factories and dump sites. They called them the whites because everything there was thick with white ash. It's hard to say what this did to people. If you look at the studies, Niagara's cancer rate is higher than other areas, but just a little. He went in and out of the hospital for months. One night when Tom was home from the hospital, we were all watching a movie on television, Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror, the one where she gets chased around her apartment by that little Zuni fetish doll. And Tom had to go to the bathroom. And we helped him down the hall and into the bathroom, and he had a seizure. He went limp. He passed out on the bathroom floor, and his eyes rolled back into his head. We all started to cry. That summer, Tom was given radiation therapy, cobalt treatments. We had to watch him. We had to take care of him. Sharon was taking care of him one afternoon, and they were playing with some toy soldiers in the yard. Sharon believes that Tom knew that he was dying. He was killing the already fallen soldiers, shooting them over and over. And Sharon said, why are you killing them like that? Well, he said, well, they won't suffer like that. Death and love-- that's what Niagara represents-- the nexus of death and love. Suicides on the one hand, honeymoons on the other. When I told a friend I was going to Niagara Falls, he asked me if I was getting married. Four different people asked me that question. I told them all I had no immediate plans. Then I called 1-800-785-L-O-V-E, the Niagara wedding chapel at the Radisson Hotel in Niagara Falls, New York. The Niagara wedding chapel offers what they call a full-service wedding, which means that in addition to a ceremony with flowers, preacher, complimentary bottle of champagne, license, and wedding video, I'm entitled to a day of beauty at the hair salon next door and a discount on a room for my wedding night at the Radisson. Niagara, I was told, is the honeymoon capital of the world. The Niagara wedding chapel performs over 2,000 weddings annually. At the end of our conversation, the man on the phone, who identified himself as the owner's brother, suggested that he and I get married. He told me he was single and I had a nice voice. I actually have his proposal in my notes of our conversation. There it is. Right under the information about the 24-hour waiting period, I wrote with a blue ballpoint pen, "Will marry me." It's Catherine and A.J.'s first time, which is a little unusual for the Niagara wedding chapel. Most of their market is second marriages. Catherine and A.J. have driven to Niagara from Pittsburgh with 30 of their friends and family, and are now waiting together with their maid of honor in the welcome area outside the chapel. They all look happy and nervous. They're laughing and joking, talking about the kinds of things you talk about right before you get married. A.J., you still have time to back out. No. He's calmer than me. I know. He's so calm. That's cool. I should have gone to the bathroom. Chris, the owner and manager of the Niagara chapel, comes in to tell Catherine and A.J. that even though two of their guests haven't arrived, the wedding must start. He's got a 4:30. He can't wait anymore. Everyone hurries to their places while Chris makes a brief announcement to their guests. They're allowed to take pictures, but everyone must remain in their seats until the end of the ceremony. I barely have time to wonder why this last instruction is necessary before-- Catherine starts crying as soon as she enters the chapel. She cries her way to the altar, cries as she takes her beside A.J., cries as the justice reads through the opening of the ceremony, cries more when the justice asks her if she'll love her husband through sickness and through health. The bareness of her emotion infects everyone in the room. I see three people in the front row hunch their shoulders and bring their hands to their faces, then the man in the second row next to the wall, then the woman sitting next to him. It jumps the 12-year-old boy sitting next to her and moves to the third row, then the fourth. Now I am crying. We are all in the room crying. Everyone happy and flushed and sure that everything, everywhere is going to be OK after all. And then, six minutes and 47 seconds after it begins, it's finished. A.J. and Catherine are now husband and wife. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure to introduce to you Mr. and Mrs. [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. In another 10 minutes they're gone. All evidence of the couple is removed, and the only sound in the chapel is the hum of fluorescent lights. Chris pops in a new video for the next couple and resets the video machine. He sets out a new bouquet and checks to see if the bride's dressing room is clean. Then his 4:30 arrives, Rod and Lori, just the two of them. No friends. No family. Lori goes to the bride's dressing room to check her makeup, and I try to talk to Rod. This is not an easy thing to do. Where are you coming from? New Jersey. Oh, all the way up from New Jersey? Right. What brought you up here? Well, Lori. She wanted to come to the falls? Right. Had you heard about it? Yeah, I think. You know. He's very quiet. He is. Lori comes out, and she and Rod are introduced to the minister. There are handshakes and some uncomfortable laughter. Then-- No one cries at this wedding. The two of them walk alone to the altar. The chapel is empty, just rows and rows of chairs. Rod and Lori stand stiffly as the preacher reads on and on. Rod seems perpetually awkward, not visibly happy at all. Lori isn't visibly happy either. As I've said, there's no one in the room, just a bunch of chairs and some video cameras. And it's hard not to wonder why they've chosen to engage in this exercise at all. It just seems so sad. I look around the little stage that serves as a wedding altar, where all day long it's a series of these dramas in 30-minute intervals, one couple after another, some happy, some not. Then eight minutes after it began, it's over. Rod and Lori are husband and wife. No one's there to applaud. Niagara, home of the two-tank honeymoon-- one tank up, one tank back. That's what Chris tells me. He hands me a card which says, Niagara, honeymoon capital of the world. But Niagara isn't the honeymoon capital of the world. It hasn't been for a long, long time. It held this title between the 1840s and the 1940s when the railroads made Niagara a cheap and easy weekend getaway for newlyweds in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, all up and down the east coast. But the railroad was discontinued decades ago, and affordable air travel makes destinations like Hawaii much more popular with newlyweds today. But the idea of Niagara as honeymoon capital remains in a hundred old movies and songs. And those movies and songs are a powerful force. Chris tells me he gets calls from Florence Italy, London England, from Japan. In the office in the back of the chapel, there's an entire wall of pictures of happy couples who have been married by Chris. I look at the pictures. Chris gets ready for his 5 o'clock. Here's another story we would tell as tour guides. This one happens to be true. Annie Edson Taylor was a 73-year-old school teacher from Bay City, Michigan. She arrived in Niagara sometime in the summer of 1903. She was alone, some say an old maid. She was penniless. She was desperate. She'd made up her mind that she would be the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and live. She designed and had built a special barrel. She hired a manager, one Frank M. "Tussy" Russell. Russell announced to the world that the 73-year-old Taylor was a widow, 42. Taylor met the press saying, I might as well be dead as remain in my present condition. It will be fame and fortune or instant death. At half past 1:00 on October 24, 1903, Annie Edson Taylor squeezed into her barrel. Cold water inside the barrel sloshed around her ankles. Annie could feel the pull of the river, the swiftness of the rapids. Her barrel banged and scraped against the rocks above the falls. Annie, deafened by the roar of the river, prayed aloud. The barrel neared the crest of the mighty Horseshoe and hung there at the lip, seemingly stuck, hanging over the boiling chasm. The crowd gasped, held its breath, and then she dropped into the cataclysm, into the chasm, into the roiling tempest below. She was pulled out of the barrel below the falls, dazed, bleeding, but very much alive. A cheer went up from the assembled crowd. The woman is alive! While Annie recuperated in a Canadian hotel, Frank M. "Tussy" Russell disappeared with Annie's barrel. He made his fortune with it and a beautiful young woman posing as Annie, queen of the falls. Annie had another barrel built, posed for photos with it, told and retold her story to tourists for pennies. She wrote her autobiography. She aged on the streets of Niagara, told tourists she was a widow, 52. She became scary, died alone, a lady of good breeding and refinement. This is a story of my hometown. The prevailing symbol of the town used to be the beautiful Indian Maid of the Mist, when really it ought to have been bad luck, down at the heels Annie Edson Taylor, a lady of good breeding and refinement who never got an even break. You have to become one. I remember when the guys were working on my barrel, I used to stand back, stand aside and just psych into it. I used to do a lot of work on it myself. And that's the only thing keeping you from death. You become one. You actually acquire quite a relationship with a barrel, a piece of metal, that one will not understand unless they're there. That is saving their life. So you can imagine the psyching in and the unity that you have with this vessel. Peter DeBernardi lives half a mile from the falls, so close that his windows sometimes rattle from the roar. One night in 1987, Peter was lying in bed listening to the falls, and it hit him. He would make history by going over the falls in a barrel built for two men, the first time ever two people would go over together. He found a partner, a guy named Jeff, and together with a crew of men they built a 3,000 pound deluxe steel barrel with inner tubes inside to cushion their fall, two windows of bulletproof glass so they could see out as they went over, and a stereo system so they could listen to tunes. They also installed a recording system so they could document the whole experience on tape. It took them 19 months to build. And then, as Peter will tell you, there was the mental preparation. As far as psyching in, I used to sit out here on the front porch sometimes up to 3:00 in the morning, 4:00 in the morning, because it's just me and the falls. It's rumbling. Like I said, I'm only a half mile away. And it was so quiet. Now sometimes if the wind is right, the breeze is right, it carries the mist all the way down the gorge. You can see it's like a white wall that goes down the gorge. OK? I'm sitting there. And all of a sudden, there was this little finger of mist that left the mainstream of the mist, came over, and it hovered over the small [UNINTELLIGIBLE] across the street here. And it looked like two little fingers. And it was pointing-- believe it or not-- pointing right at me sitting there. It stayed there for about 10 minutes. Then it finally, like a finger, as if you're just bending your finger back to the palm of your hand, it joined the rest of the mist. And that was it. Talk about getting in deep with this. It was trying to send me messages. And oh, god, what I went through mentally on this. The night before, I came home. I was out doing a normal job during the day, and then I came home, had something to eat, went to bed, fell asleep, and woke up the next morning. I didn't wake up, nothing like that. I guess I was so mentally prepared, psychologically prepared, that it didn't bother me. As a matter of fact, around my bed, I used to have pictures of Niagara Falls. I used to stare into them to fall asleep. I never had any bad nightmares or nothing like that. But next morning I got up, and Jeff was down. So we got everything together, the whole crew together. And the vessel was up at the crew chief's house. It was a great big state truck. And the barrel was on a special crib system on the truck. And I remember we climbed into it. And I will never forget the sound. And to this day, that sound remains in my mind. Them pounding those metal dog lathes. It was like being sealed into a metal coffin. And that was like, yeah, this could be it. This is your coffin. That's good. So here we are. We're going down the road. That was the shortest two-mile trip ever in my life. We could hear each gear shift, each stop, each turn. I knew exactly where we were turning. And they went down Murray Hill and along River Road. Feels like we're going down Murray Hill. Uh-oh. OK. She's straight now man. OK, good. Guess what? What? We're [BLEEP] on River Road, I think now. No kidding. 55. Yeah, there we go. And the truck pulled in, backed up. And they released the barrel, and they pushed it. And that's when it crashed into the water. Uh-oh, Peter, we're there. We're there. When you hit that water, this barrel weighing that much-- a ton and a half, when we hit that river bed-- it was about five feet of water-- it slammed into the floor of it so hard that it, like, jolted the mind. It was benumbing to the mind. And I thought, oh, my god, we didn't even go over yet. We just hit the river. Then I'm looking out of the glass. And here's a bunch of seagulls floating over. And I'm looking out through the bulletproof glass. And what's in my mind immediately is that, oh, no. No, no, no. This barrel is freshly painted. There's people here with cameras and stuff. Please don't crap all over this barrel. That was in my mind. Meanwhile we're on a 25-second second countdown-- 25, 24-- Sounds in the barrel were of course the two-way communication we had with our crew. Our crew chief had the radio, and he was telling us how many feet away we were from the brink. He was giving us a description of everything that was happening. And we had a stereo. That's a story itself. I'll tell you later on the story of how these fellows programmed the music. Well, I can say it. My barrel partner, Jeff, he says, guy, we got to have tunes in there, you know? And he's just quite a fellow. He said, you got to have tunes in there. And the tunes were, believe it or not-- the guys did a good job programming the tape. They should be music directors, I swear, at a radio station. As soon as I hit the river, the first song was "Riverboat Fantasy." Then the next song was "Dead or Alive" by Bon Jovi. You know, after we go over. I mean, these guys, what a warped sense of humor. We're going down, Peter. We're going down. Now, prior to doing the falls, I always thought it'd be something like a fast elevator ride, super fast. You know that feeling you get inside, real queasy, like, whoo. No, not at all. Not at all. And we did a 360 back flip, and I didn't believe what I was looking at because it felt like you lied down on the couch and went to bed, lying perfectly horizontal. And it was peaceful. It was so peaceful. The serenity, even with the music-- for three and a half seconds. After three and a half seconds, though, we hit, yes, that rock that was the size of a house. Hit the side of that. Water blew in at the same time. Then we went under the surface, hit two more times. And I can remember it shifted the barrel. It twisted it like a 180 in a circle. I remember we hit two more times. Everything went kind of translucent, white, darkest color. Then of course we hit two more times, then it surfaced. And then it was all over. I remember Jeff yelling out, we did it. We did it. There were a few profanities here and there, which I won't say right now. Whoo-hoo! Whoo! We're OK! [BLEEP] right we're OK! Peter, what a [BLEEP] buzz, eh? We [BLEEP] made it, man. Put her there bud! But when we came out of the barrel, I can tell you, we were able to climb out of that thing right at the base of the falls, right at the bottom of Table Rock, the lower observation deck. And I tell you, because you're so sealed in that thing, when those hatches were opened up, that was a nice vision seeing the crew chief's face sticking in the hatch and it was opened up. And what a feeling when you climb out of that thing. And of course people are applauding all around, and the crew's got big smiles on their face. And you're literally looking straight up-- we were that close to the base-- at what you had just done and went over that magnificent beauty. After the stunt, I had never went down there. Six years, seven years. I live no more than a half a mile from it too. That's ironic about this, that it's hard for me to believe that I've done that, bottom line. It seems like a dream, like that wasn't me that went over. It was somebody else. You know, to this day, though, I don't try to act like a smart ass, like, yeah, we did the falls. Yeah, wow, super stunt men here. No. Not at all. I have the admiration that, thank you for letting it happen because it let us through. Whatever forces there were, whatever happened, I was allowed to do that. And she let me do it. Well, the program was produced today by Alix Spiegel and myself, with Nancy Updike and Julie Snyder, senior editor Paul Tough, contributing editors Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Laura Doggett. Original music by Carrie Biolo and Jen Paulson. David Kodeski's stories were adapted from his one-man autobiographical show, Niagara. He's now working on a play called, I Can't Explain the Beauty. If you'd like to buy a cassette of this or any of our shows, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or if you don't want to write down the phone number, just visit our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can order a tape or you can listen to our programs there for absolutely free. That's right, free. Again that's www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. This American Life comes to you from the city of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, Mayor. Funding for our program comes from the listeners of WBEZ Chicago. WBEZ management oversight by Torey Malatia, who describes what it was like to listen to today's program this way. It was like being sealed into a metal coffin. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life. PRI. Public Radio International.
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"From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And for t(...TRUNCATED)
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