William Feehan, Fire Chief

To the firefighters he led, William Feehan was legendary. The son of a firefighter and the father of another, it was said that he knew the location of every fire hydrant in New York City. Feehan joined the city’s fire department in 1959 as a member of Ladder Company 3. In his 42 years with the department, Feehan steadily made his way through the ranks. When he was named acting commissioner in 1991, he become the first person in history to have held every possible position in the department.

Feehan died in the line of duty on September 11, 2001, when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed on his command station. He was 71. This oral history was recorded in 1992 by Feehan’s son Billy and photographer Harvey Wang. It is dedicated to the members of the New York City Fire Department and to all of the men and women who have risked — and lost — their lives to save the lives of others.

Recorded in New York City. Premiered September 15, 2001, on Weekend Edition Saturday.

This documentary comes from Sound Portraits Productions, a mission-driven independent production company that was created by Dave Isay in 1994. Sound Portraits was the predecessor to StoryCorps and was dedicated to telling stories that brought neglected American voices to a national audience.

Under the Roller Coaster

In Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall, the house under the roller coaster was a sight gag. For Mae Timpano, it was home. In 1946, while working as a waitress on Coney Island, Mae met Fred Moran, the owner and operator of the Thunderbolt roller coaster. They soon fell in love, and for forty years they lived together in Fred’s house — right under the Thunderbolt’s first turnaround.

Fred died in 1982, and the Thunderbolt carried its last thrill-seeker soon after. In 1988, Mae moved out, and the house was sold to a developer who dreamed of building a new amusement park on the famed island. But the coaster was silent for twelve years, and in November 2000, with no warning, the city of New York bulldozed away one of its great urban treasures. Here, Mae tells the story of her years living in the house that the Thunderbolt rattled.

First aired on NPR’s Morning Edition September 4, 2001.

Execution Tapes

Since this country’s last public execution in 1936, all U.S. executions have been carried out solely in front of state-selected witnesses. Alongside the controversy over the morality of capital punishment has raged a parallel debate: Should the state’s ultimate act against an individual be enacted in secret? Many in the media have tried to bring their cameras and tape recorders into the execution chamber, but courts have consistently ruled that, although the media do have a place in witnessing executions, they have no right to record the scene.

In 1998, however, audio tapes of 22 Georgia executions — tapes recorded by members of the state’s Department of Corrections for their own records — entered the court record when criminal defense lawyer Mike Mears subpoenaed the tapes in a lawsuit he brought challenging the state’s use of the electric chair. Sound Portraits acquired the recordings, and, in conjunction with WNYC, produced The Execution Tapes.

The Execution Tapes is an hour-long public radio special hosted by Ray Suarez featuring excerpts of recordings made in Georgia’s death house during state electrocutions. This broadcast is the first time a national audience is able to hear what takes place during a state-sponsored execution.

In addition to audio of the 1984 execution of Ivon Ray Stanley, the program features audio of an execution that had to be “reinitiated” — that is, an execution in which the inmate is still alive after being electrocuted for two minutes, requiring that he be electrocuted again. There is also a selection of inmates’ final statements, recorded immediately before their execution.

Excerpts of the tapes are followed by two roundtable discussions about the implications of the tapes’ broadcast. Participants include 60 Minutes co-editor Mike Wallace, First-Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus, former Georgia Attorney General Michael Bowers, professor of psychiatry and psychology Robert Jay Lifton, and Diane Clements, president of the victims’ rights organization Justice for All.

Recorded in Jackson, Georgia. Premiered January 1, 2001.

The Day after Pearl Harbor

The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. After two tense years spent watching the war overseas, “the day that will live in infamy” thrust the United States into World War II overnight.

The day after the attack, the Library of Congress sent archivists around the country to record the thoughts and fears of a citizenry newly at war. Stored at the Library of Congress for nearly sixty years, these interviews — conducted on 9th and 13th Streets in Washington, D.C. — captured the voices of ordinary Americans at one of the most cataclysmic times in the nations history.

Recorded in Washington, D.C. Premiered December 10, 2000, on Weekend Edition Sunday.

Witness to an Execution

Witness to an Execution tells the stories of the men and women involved with the execution of death row inmates at the Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas. Narrated by Warden Jim Willett, who oversees all Texas executions, Witness to an Execution documents, in minute-by-minute detail, the process of carrying out an execution by lethal injection. Most of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice employees interviewed have witnessed over one hundred inmates be put to death. One-third of all executions in the US have taken place in Texas, since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977.

The voices in Witness to an Execution tell a rare story. Major Kenneth Dean, a member of the “tie-down” team, describes the act of walking an inmate from his cell to the death chamber. Jim Brazzil, a death house chaplain who has witnessed 114 executions, remembers inmates’ last words to him. Former corrections officer Fred Allen discusses his own mental breakdown, caused, he says, by participating in one too many executions.

Witness to an Execution won a Peabody Award in 2000.

Recorded in Huntsville, TX. Premiered October 20, 2000, on All Things Considered.

Weegee

He captured tenement infernos, car crashes, and gangland executions. He found washed-up lounge singers and teenage murder suspects in paddy wagons and photographed them at their most vulnerable — or, as he put it, their most human. He caught couples kissing on their beach blankets on Coney Island and the late-night voyeurs on lifeguard stands watching them. And everywhere he went, he snatched images of people sleeping: drunks on park benches, whole families on Lower East Side fire escapes, men and women snoring in movie theaters. He was the supreme chronicler of the city at night.

Born Usher Fellig in what is now the Ukraine, Weegee moved to New York’s Lower East Side in 1910 at the age of eleven. By fifteen he had left home, supporting himself through odd jobs and sleeping wherever he could find a place: the benches of Penn Station and Bryant Park (to which he would later return, camera in hand), or the Bowery’s flophouses. He became a street photographer’s assistant and later a roaming photographer himself, snapping pictures of children to sell to their poor but proud parents. During the 1920s he worked and often lived in the darkrooms of the New York Times and Acme Newspictures, and soon he was filling in for photographers when they couldn’t make their late shift. By the thirties, his intimate chronicles of disasters both natural and man-made were being featured in PM, Life, Popular Photography, and all of the New York dailies. He went on to become one of the most prolific and famous news photographers of the century. His first book, Naked City, which helped established his fame and is still in print today, was published in 1945.

Today Weegee is credited with ushering in the age of tabloid culture, while at the same time being revered for elevating the sordid side of human life to that of high art. Here is a rare interview with Weegee, recently discovered at the Recorded Sound division at the Library of Congress. It was conducted in July, 1945, by nationally-syndicated talk show host Mary Margaret McBride on WEAF in New York, soon after the publication of Naked City.

Recorded in New York City. Premiered June 11, 2000, on Weekend Edition Sunday.

Marine Valentines

In 1945, as the last months of fighting in the South Pacific drew to a close, the radio section of the Division of Public Relations of the United States Marine Corps recorded a group of tired GIs as they sat in their bunks about 7,000 miles off the coast of sunny California. February 14 was just around the corner, and the fighting men of the First Marine division from Milwaukee, Wisconsin were given the chance to send valentines and love poems to their mothers, wives, and sweethearts back home. Their loving words, often stammering and always from the heart, were pressed into records and sent back to the States as rare audio messages. A copy was also preserved at the Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress. Marine Valentines is the result.

Recorded in the South Pacific. Premiered February 13, 2000, on Weekend Edition Sunday.

The Jewish Giant

Photographer Jenny Carchman was eight years old in 1979 when her mother first showed her Diane Arbus’ collection of photos (diane arbus, 1971, Aperture). There were pages of “freaks” — midgets, transvestites, dwarves, hermaphrodites, naked people and the like. She remembers her mother pausing in the middle of the book on a photo of a very large man, towering above an older couple. The caption read, “Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, NY, 1970.” Her mother told her that the giant in the photo was named Eddie Carmel. He was her cousin. Eddie had died two years after the photo was taken, a year after Jenny was born. This was the first she had heard of him.

As a child, Jenny couldn’t get Eddie out of her mind: the freakish son in the dark Bronx living room, his parents looking up at him with wonder and sorrow. She had nightmares for weeks. She felt that if she touched that photo, she too would turn into a giant. Her fears were magnified by the silence surrounding her cousin. For years, whenever she’d try to talk about Eddie, her family refused to discuss him.

The Jewish Giant began with Jenny’s search to uncover a story that has remained a secret for 25 years. Eddie was normal sized until he became a teenager, when he began to grow uncontrollably (he suffered from acromegaly, a then-incurable condition resulting from a tumor that had developed on his pituitary gland). According to The Guiness Book of World Records, Eddie grew to be 8’9″. As an adult, the only work he could find involved exploiting his freakishness. He starred in B-grade monster movies (The Brain that Wouldn’t Die), made two 45 records (“The Happy Giant” and “The Good Monster”) and was billed in the Ringling Brothers Circus at Madison Square Garden as “The Tallest Man on Earth.” Eddie died in 1972 at the age of 36 in Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. His coffin was custom made.

The Jewish Giant is a story of suffering, of not fitting in, of the body betraying itself, and of the bizarre life-twists that can subsume a family. It’s a story about what it’s like to be a regular person looking at the world from inside a not-so-regular body.

Recorded in New York City. Premiered October 6, 1999, on All Things Considered.

“Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, NY, 1970,” Diane Arbus

Charlie’s Story

Charlie Geter had been living in the Palace Hotel, a flophouse on New York City’s Bowery, for over twenty-five years when producers David Isay and Stacy Abramson met him while working on their documentary The Sunshine Hotel. Impressed by his heart and drive, they gave Charlie a tape recorder and asked him to interview other residents of the Palace Hotel and to tell his life story.

Charlie worked on the project for nearly two years, recording late into the night and struggling to get interviews from the other hotel residents. Charlie now lives — in his own apartment — in Manhattan.

Recorded in New York City. Premiered December 30, 1998, on All Things Considered.

The Sunshine Hotel

This is an audio portrait of one of the final vestiges of the Bowery, New York’s notorious skid row. In the first half of the century, the mile-long Bowery’s bars, missions and cheap hotels (or flophouses) were home to an estimated 35,000 down-and-out men each night. Today, only a handful of flophouses, virtually unchanged for half a century, are all that remain of this once teeming world.

For several months in 1998, David Isay and Stacy Abramson had unprecedented 24-hour access to the Sunshine Hotel, one of the last of the no-frills establishments. “It was like stepping into King Tut’s Tomb,” Isay says. “The Sunshine is this fascinating, self-contained society full of unbelievable characters. While it’s a profoundly sad place, it is, at the same time, home to men with powerful and poetic stories.”

The Sunshine Hotel was awarded the Prix Italia, Europe’s oldest and most prestigious broadcasting award, in 1999.

Recorded in New York City. Premiered September 18, 1998, on All Things Considered.

Update on The Sunshine Hotel

Nathan Smith, manager of the Sunshine Hotel, wrote the following update on March 13, 2001:

Naturally things have changed since the broadcast of The Sunshine Hotel in 1998. The Bowery has changed, the Sunshine among the final six of the remaining flophouses on the Bowery. Renovation is the name of the game in SoHo. The mayor envisions a huge apartment complex and sports plaza from Confucius Plaza to 6th Street. The pending invisible memory of the Sunshine, located some two thirds of the way between the two streets along Third Avenue, the trolley and el gone with everything else of yesterday’s memories.

The hotel has changed as to its population: Vinny and his birds are gone. L.A.’s gone. The guy on the tape who says he doesn’t want to die in the hotel was found sitting up in bed, dead, looking straight ahead through sightless eyes. Here you witness the ignominy of death — Vinny dropped dead in the street that morning; L.A., grotesque in the dim light, a look of shock on his face; Anthony, all 425 pounds of him, died from diabetes in Beth Israel Hospital.

Yeah, they’re all gone. But there are some success stories, like a former porter becoming a social worker and car owner. Another of our car owners had his stolen three weeks after he bought it. It wasn’t new anyway, even if it was a Cadillac. Prince Street is becoming very trendy. The wise guys are gone but in keeping up the flavor of the former neighborhood, they shot and killed the manager of Connecticut Muffin. You’re hard pressed to see winos anymore, but you will see a smattering of the emotionally distressed, like “One Can” Kerry raving in the street harmlessly, closing in of the day somebody will beat him up. But he proves the adage that God protects drunks and babies, though sometimes that seems little more than a charming statement.

Yes, the Bowery and the hotel have changed. Fast coming are the days when all of this will be no more than a chapter in someone’s book of memories of days gone by.

Nathan Smith