Hearing Voices from NPR®:
008 About Aging—
I Thought You’d Never Ask
Host— David Greenberger of Duplex Planet
Airdates— 2009-04-22 (Originally: 2008-04-23)
From StoryCorps comes a remembrance from Richard Craig of his days as a dance host on cruise ships.
In Sound Portraits “The Ground We Live On” journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc faces mortality in recordings she made during her father’s last months alive.
And host David Greenberger shares some stories told him over the years by the elderly, including “Growing Old in East LA“.
Here’s another entry in our What NPR Was category: In the late 70s & early 80s Keith Talbot produced several series for NPR; among them was The Radio Experience. One episode, “Death in Venice” by Larry Massett, was mainly interviews with Venice FL retirees.
The half-hour is like a swim in the ocean, soothing, stimulating, but watch for the rocks and rip tides — it pulls you in. The piece told us then what non-fiction creative radio could be. Almost thirty years later, it still does.
Larry Massett wrote the narration, produced, and played his original music; Joe Frank narrated. From June 1981, “Death in Venice” (29:01 mp3):
Larry sez:
“I had no idea what was doing. And so I didn’t have any questions for anybody. I just stood on the beach in Venice with a microphone. If anybody asked I just said I was recording.
All I knew was is it was a retirement area, and there were a lot of fossils on the beach. Certain people saw the mic and came up and started talking. It was only after I got home and started to paw thru the tape that I realized what they had chose to talk about was the love of their life.”
The piece will be in an upcoming HV hour on Memory. Another Massett/Talbot experience, “Ocean Hour,” is up at Third Coast (with an KeithT interview on the NPR days of yore).
Hearing Voices from NPR®: