Hearing Voices

Hearing Voices

21 November 2022

13:00-14:00 PT
Season 10, Episode 10

Re-Imagined Radio partners with the Clark County Historical Museum and samples from their Oral History Collection to share stories about living and working in Southwest Washington. Museum director Bradley Richardson says, "This collection is deep and rich with stories, each told in the voices of those who lived the experiences their stories describe. They are true stories. The dialogue is unscripted, unpolished, and absolutely compelling."

Oral histories provide chances to hear voices from the past. We feature three in this episode: "Living with Chief Joseph," "Working the SPS Railroad," and "The Russians Arrive." Listening to these experiences told in the voices of those who lived them, we listeners gain a sense of presence and immediacy. We are there. In the scene. At the moment when the event happened. Enjoy "Hearing Voices."

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Optimized for radio broadcast.

Credits

Written, Produced, and Hosted by John F. Barber
Sound Design, Music, and Post Production by Marc Rose of Fuse Audio Design
Promotional Graphics by Kathy Klaus

Background

"Hearing Voices" is not an episode about hallucinations. About hearing voices no one else acknowledges.

Instead, the voices we will hear are sampled from the Oral History Collection in the Clark County Historical Museum, Vancouver, Washington.

Oral histories are stories about significant events told by people who experienced those events first hand. We've picked three very interesting oral histories for this episode.

The first, "Living with Chief Joseph," is told by Erskin Wood. In 1893, at the age of 13, he lived with Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce people in the Nespelem Valley, just north of present day Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state. Wood recounts his interesting connection to Chief Joseph, everyday life in his teepee, and his job wrangling the Chief's herd of horses. He tells about the games the young people played, and about the community singing and dancing in which he participated.

The second, "Working the SPS Railroad," is an account by Harry W. Hendricks of his experiences working for the Seattle-Portland-Spokane Railroad, 1950s-1994, during the transition from steam to diesel technologies. Hendricks, a retired conductor, recounts working on the railroad for more than fourty years. He talks about the pleasure of traveling through the Columbia River Gorge several times a week. From his enthusiastic storytelling it's obvious that Hendricks enjoyed every minute of his career with the SPS railroad.

In our third story, "The Russians Arrive," Leverett Richards, a reporter for the Clark County Sun newspaper recalls the surprise landing of a single-engine airplane at Vancouver's Pearson Airfield piloted by three Russian airmen, 20 June 1937. Two days earlier, June 18, the plane took off from an airport outside Moscow, Russia, headed for Oakland, California. The Soviet airplane and its crew, Valery Chkalov, pilot, Georgi Baidukov, relief pilot, and Alexander Belyakov, navigator and radio operator flew non-stop from Moscow, over the North Pole. After 63 hours of flying, and nearly 6,000 miles, low fuel forced them to land in Vancouver, Washington. Their landing marked the first non-stop flight from Moscow, Russia, to the United States by a single engine plane over the North Pole.

We sample from these recorded oral histories to explore radio storytelling in a new form. By focusing on historical insights into Southwest Washington, by the people who lived these experiences, we present a compelling documentary form of radio storytelling.

Promotion

Graphics

Hearing Voices web poster by Kathy Klaus (240 x 356)

Hearing Voices landscape poster by Kathy Klaus (820 x 356)

Hearing Voices trailer poster by Kathy Klaus (1920 x 1080)

Hearing Voices square poster by Kathy Klaus (2000 x 2000)

Hearing Voices full poster by Kathy Klaus (2000 x 3000)