Radio Diaries

20 years ago, NPR’s All Things Considered began running our occasional series, Teenage Diaries… which then grew up to become Radio Diaries. Today on the podcast, we check in with our very first diarist, Amanda Brand.

In 1906, New York’s Bronx Zoo was the largest zoo in the world. That year, the zoo introduced a new exhibit that would quickly became its most popular attraction. In the monkey house, right next to an orangutan, there was a man…inside a cage.

Nine months before Rosa Parks, a 15-year-old girl refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, AL.

Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein were both born in New York City and adopted as infants. When they were 35 years old, they met and found they were “identical strangers.”

As a teenager, Frankie was a high school football star whose picture was in his hometown newspaper every week. Years after graduating, Frankie was back in the paper—as a criminal. In his new audio diary, Frankie is hoping for a second chance.

“In the seventh grade, I was real little, probably weighed 75 pounds. Everybody used to pick on me all the time. They picked on me and beat the crap out of me everyday…Then one day, my ninth grade year, I decided to play football. Now, at school, I can’t go out in the hall without somebody touching me and saying, ‘Hey Frankie, good luck tonight.’ I mean it’s just crazy. I can’t believe everybody likes me as much as they do. It’s like the old me is dead and then I was born again or something.” In this episode of the Radio Diaries Podcast, hear Frankie’s story from “Teenage Diaries.”

The 10th Mountain Division fought in World War II for only four months, but it had one of the highest casualty rates of the war. The division started out as an experiment to train skiers and climbers to fight in the mountains. The men of the 10th went on to lead a series of daring assaults against the German army in the mountains of Italy.

Four years after Nelson Mandela was released from prison, he became president of South Africa. And yet, those 4 years were among the bloodiest and most painful for all South Africans – black and white – as they struggled toward the transition to majority rule. On the Radio Diaries Podcast we’ve been revisiting chapters from our documentary series, Mandela: An Audio History. In this episode, we bring you “From Prison to President.” Plus, a bonus chapter about what might have been the most awkward lunch in history. We couldn’t make these stories without your help. Please consider making a donation to Radio Diaries at radiodiaries.org. Thank you!

When you spend so much of your life getting to the next stage, thinking about the next move, what is it like to find yourself at…the Last Place? On this episode of the Radio Diaries Podcast, we bring you audio diaries from a retirement home. If you enjoy this podcast, please help us reach our year-end fundraising goal! Every dollar will help us produce more stories. Donate at radiodiaries.org

November 23, 1936 was a good day for recorded music. Two men – an ocean apart – sat before a microphone and began to play. One was a cello prodigy who had performed for the Queen of Spain; the other played guitar and was a regular in the juke joints of the Mississippi Delta. But on this day, Pablo Casals and Robert Johnson both made recordings that would change music history.

How a ten minute operatic folk cantata managed to unite Democrats, Republicans and Communists.

Polk Youth Institution in Butner, North Carolina is a prison for young men between the ages of 19-25. For our series Prison Diaries, I gave tape recorders to a handful of inmates at Polk to tell the story of life behind bars. After visiting the prison for a few months, I realized I had been overlooking the stories of the guards. Pretty much every guard I talked to said they serve time too – in eight hour shifts. In this episode of the Radio Diaries Podcast, listen to the audio diaries of prison guards.

One of the best mission statements we’ve ever read is the original NPR mission, which was written in 1969 by Bill Siemering. Bill is an amazing guy who, at the age of 80, continues to help create radio stations and programs in developing countries around the world. The manifesto Bill wrote is no longer NPR’s official mission statement but it’s a lovely reminder of why we do this work. It’s truly worth reading. Here at Radio Diaries we like history – including our own. So with help from the good folks at Transom.org, we brought Bill into a studio because we were curious how he came to write that original mission statement, and why. We asked him to look back at the history of public media, and to imagine the future. We also asked him to read part of that original NPR mission statement. You can also read a transcript of our conversation at Transom.org, thanks to Jay Allison, Sydney Lewis and Samantha Broun. If you don’t know about Transom…go there as soon as you can. It’s like a master class in radio storytell

This month’s podcast is about what it takes to get people to change. We focus on a group of people that might be the hardest to change – or at least they’ve had the most money thrown at them in hopes of change: Criminals. Back in 2006, Richmond, CA was named the ninth most dangerous city in the country, with 42 murders for a population of about 100,000. Then they brought in a new police chief and started doing all kinds of things differently. And it worked. Homicides are now a third of what they were. Crime has dropped in a way that is dramatic and impressive. And police say that one of the things that helped is a program called the Office of Neighborhood Safety, or ONS. That’s a bland name for what is actually a very unusual program with one particular tactic that you do not hear about people trying very often: paying criminals to not commit crimes. Sounds crazy, but the even crazier part is…it works. This story originally aired on This American Life, in the episode, The Incredible Rarity of Changing Your

“Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck, for the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, for the sun to rot, for a tree to drop. Here is a strange and bitter crop.” -Abel Meeropol Poet and songwriter Abel Meeropol wrote that lament after seeing a photograph of two black teenagers hanging from a tree, after being lynched in Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 1930. Meeropol’s song, “Strange Fruit” was later made famous by Billie Holiday. A secret, missing from the photograph, is that a third black boy was supposed to die that fateful day. James Cameron is believed to be the only African American to have survived a lynching. Listen to our story (and be advised that it is disturbing.)

While Mandela and other political leaders languished in prison, the government cracked down. It seemed that resistance to apartheid had been crushed. But on June 16, 1976, a student uprising in Soweto sparked a new generation of activism. This is Chapter 3 of our documentary (and 2015 Audiobook of the Year) Mandela: An Audio History. Plus, the story behind the only known recording of Nelson Mandela during his 27 years in prison. More information about the project is available at mandelahistory.org

Big, happy announcement: The Memory Palace is the newest member of Radiotopia! To celebrate, we bring you an episode from The Memory Palace, by Nate DiMeo. It’s the story of Guglielmo Marconi, sometimes called the inventor of radio…and his dreams of a super-radio that would allow him to hear every sound ever made. We pair Marconi’s story with our sound portrait of Frank Schubert, the last civilian lighthouse keeper in the U.S.

We gave both Judge Jeremiah, a Rhode Island juvenile court judge, and Matthew, a 16-year-old repeat offender, tape recorders. Judge Jeremiah released Matthew early, for good behavior. Two weeks later, Matthew was arrested again for selling drugs. Through their diaries, Matthew and the judge tell the same story from two different sides of the bench.

The Education of Little Tree is an iconic best-selling book, with a message about living in harmony with nature, and compassion for people of all kinds. But there’s a very different story behind the book. It begins with the most infamous racist political speech in American History. This week on the Radio Diaries Podcast, the true story of the untrue story of The Education of Little Tree.

Bridgette McGee grew up knowing nothing about her grandfather, Willie McGee. Now she is on a quest to unearth everything she can about his life – and his death. In 1945, Willie McGee was accused of raping a white woman. The all-white jury took less than three minutes to find him guilty and McGee was sentenced to death. Over the next six years, the case went through three trials and sparked international protests and appeals from Albert Einstein, William Faulkner, Paul Robeson, and Josephine Baker. McGee was defended by a young Bella Abzug arguing her first major case. But in 1951, McGee was put to death in Mississippi’s traveling electric chair. His execution was broadcast live by a local radio station. Today, a newly discovered recording of that broadcast provides a chilling window into a lost episode of civil rights history. Narrated by Bridgette McGee, this documentary follows a granddaughter’s search for the truth about a case that has been called a real-life To Kill A Mockingbird.