Radio Diaries

A few years ago, we produced a story about the greatest underdog we'd ever met: Jimmy Weekley. Jimmy was the last remaining resident of Pigeonroost Hollow, West Virginia. Jimmy spent most of the last two decades fighting one of the largest coal companies in the country in an attempt to save his hometown. He said he was born in Pigeonroost Hollow, and he planned to die there. This year, he did. He was 74. Today on the Radio Diaries Podcast, we're remembering Jimmy Weekley, The Last Man on the Mountain.

The story of William Cimillo, a New York City bus driver who snapped one day in 1947, left his regular route in the Bronx, and drove his municipal bus down to Florida.

Jose William Huezo Soriano - aka Weasel - is a 26-year-old Los Angeles resident who gets deported to his parents' home country of El Salvador, which he has not seen since the age of five. In this episode, you'll hear Weasel's original audio diary, as well as an update from Weasel in which he talks about his life over the past 15 years.

For more than four decades, the area around Cortlandt Street in lower Manhattan was the largest collection of radio and electronics stores in the world. Then in 1966 the stores were bulldozed to make way for the new World Trade Center.

What happens when, instead of people crossing the border, the border crosses the people? In this episode of the Radio Diaries Podcast, two stories from the U.S.-Mexico border.

In the early 1970s, radio host and oral historian Studs Terkel went around the country, tape recorder in hand, interviewing people about their jobs. Studs collected more than 130 interviews, and the result was a book called "Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do." And - something unprecedented for an oral history collection - it became a bestseller. In this episode of The Radio Diaries Podcast, we bring you two of the lost interviews that never made it into the book: Helen Moog, a taxi driver and grandmother of five who happened to drive Studs to the Youngstown, OH airport; and Lovin' Al Pommier, a "car hiker."

The images coming out of Ferguson, MO this summer have reminded us of another upsetting image of race in America. It's a photograph that was taken just a few hours from Ferguson, but eight decades ago...and it inspired the Billie Holiday song, Strange Fruit. Listen to our story (and be advised that it is disturbing.)

This is the story of a song, "Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down," written by a 12-year-old boy on his deathbed. A boy who - instead of dying - went on to become a Pentecostal preacher. A boy who would later help inspire the birth of Rock & Roll. His name was Brother Claude Ely...and he was known as The Gospel Ranger.

When Jeff Rogers was 16 years old he started referring to himself as a “halfrican.” Jeff has a black father and a white mother. And like many teenagers, he was trying to figure out who he was. We met Jeff back in 1998, and gave him a tape recorder so he could document his life for our Teenage Diaries series. We started thinking about Jeff when we produced our Teenage Diaries Revisited series last year for NPR. On today’s show, Jeff’s original teenage diary, plus…a conversation we recently had with him, more than 15 years later.

Once there were thousands of seltzer men in New York City. Today, Walter Backerman is one of the last. Support our Kickstarter campaign! bit.ly/RDKickstarter

Check out our Kickstarter video. (Ira Glass has a cameo...) If we reach our goal, we'll put out the Radio Diaries Podcast twice as often. Biweekly!

Asa Carter was a speechwriter for Alabama Governor George Wallace. He penned one of the most infamous speeches of the era… Wallace’s Segregation Now, Segregation Forever address. Forrest Carter was a Cherokee writer who grew up in Tennessee. His autobiography, The Education of Little Tree, is a beloved classic that has sold millions of copies around the world. But these two men shared a secret.

The moment Nelson Mandela really became Nelson Mandela was on April 20th, 1964 - fifty years ago today. It happened when he stood up in a stuffy South African courtroom and gave a speech.

As a teenager, Frankie Lewchuck recorded an audio diary about his family in rural Alabama. 16 years later, he recorded a follow up story for the Teenage Diaries Revisited series: "I went from being on the front page for football, representing my itty-bitty school, to being on the front page as a thief and a meth head." A lot of life happens in 16 years.

On the night of May 7th, 1951, in the small town of Laurel, Mississippi, close to a thousand people gathered around the courthouse. They came to witness an execution. Willie McGee was a young black man who had been accused of raping a white woman... and sentenced to death. Six decades later, Bridgette McGee teamed up with Radio Diaries to find the truth about what happened to her grandfather.