Miguel Algarin, Nuyorican Poet

Miguel Piñero and Miguel Algarín, co-founders of the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, had made a pact: Piñero would write a poem specifying in detail the arrangements to follow his death, and Algarín, when the time came, would faithfully carry out his friend’s instructions:

Just once before I die
I want to climb up on a
tenement sky
to dream my lungs out till
I cry
then scatter my ashes thru
the Lower East Side.

So begins Miguel Piñero’s last wishes and paean to Manhattan’s Lower East Side. After Miguel Piñero died on June 14, 1988, Algarín led a grand procession in which Piñero’s ashes were scattered across his beloved Lower East Side. This is the story of that procession.

Recorded in New York City. Premiered June 21, 1998, on Weekend Edition.

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.

My Last Mile

On October 1, 2007, an ex-convict named Billy McCune—one of the most important subjects in the history of documentary photography—died in a half-way house in Kansas City, Missouri. He was 79 years old.

McCune, who was mentally ill, was convicted of rape and sentenced to die in the electric chair in 1950. A song he wrote on death row caught the ear of the governor, who commuted his sentence to life in prison. It was there, four decades ago, that McCune met a young documentary photographer named Danny Lyon. Lyon had been granted unprecedented access to photograph inside the Texas prison system. He published his photos in the seminal 1971 book, Conversations With the Dead.

Over the course of the project, Danny Lyon got to know Billy McCune, who had also become an artist in the penitentiary. Lyon included so many of McCune’s drawings in Conversations With the Dead that he subtitled the book “Photographs of Prison Life With the Letters and Drawings of Billy McCune #12-20-54.”

While Lyon’s prison photos are today legendary, what’s not know is that he also made reel-to-reel audio recordings of his conversations with Billy McCune in prison. Never before heard, these tapes are an extraordinary artifact—providing a rare glimpse inside the Texas prisons of the 1960s, and documenting Lyon’s historic partnership with the late Billy McCune. Photographer Danny Lyon tells us the story.

Recorded in New York City. Premiered December 31, 1997, on All Things Considered.

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.

A Letter to Butchie

Jeannie Reilly was a heroin addict and prostitute who worked the streets of New York City’s Lower East Side. In 1994, she made a resolution: she would get off drugs, get off the streets, and pull her life together, so that one day she might reunite with the son she had abandoned as a baby.

Producer David Isay used to live and work on a block that Reilly frequented, and the two became friends. After Reilly was released from jail for the last time, she began recording a series of audio letters to her son. Reilly was HIV-positive at the time, and she started the project because she did not know if she’’d ever have the opportunity to speak to her son in person.

Jeannie died of pneumonia on September 11, 1997, having spent the last three years of her life clean. She never saw her son again before she died. This is her audio letter to him.

Recorded in New York City. Premiered December 31, 1997, on All Things Considered.

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.

Looking for Mary

Prompted by the enormous increase in sightings of the Virgin Mary in every region of the United States, Looking for Mary is reported by Beverly Donofrio, who, like many Catholics, regards Mary as a central figure in her spiritual life. But like many Americans, Donofrio has long been fascinated by — and skeptical of — people who claim they are speaking to Mary. So in February, 1997, she set off on a physical journey, visiting apparition sites across the United States, and a spiritual journey, trying to understand the role that Mary has played in her own life.

This documentary examines the phenomenon of men and women experiencing visions of the Virgin Mary from Donofrio’s intimate perspective. Producer David Isay, associate producer Stacy Abramson and writer Donofrio take listeners to apparition sites around the country — from New York and California to Georgia and Arizona — speaking to people who believe they are communicating with the Blessed Mother.

Recorded in New York City. Premiered December 6, 1997, 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.

Fountain Hughes, Former Slave

An interview with Fountain Hughes, a 101 year-old former slave, from the spoken-word collection at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.

Recorded in Baltimore, MD. Premiered August 24, 1997, on Weekend Edition Sunday.

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.

Museum of Jurassic Technology

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is a small nondescript storefront on Los Angeles’s Venice Boulevard. Inside, it is a museum like no other. Museum creator David Wilson, a man of prodigiously unusual imagination, has been mounting a series of unbelievable exhibits there for the last fifteen years. He has collected spore-inhaling ants, x-ray bats, human horns, peach-pit carvings, and novel theories of oblivion.

Lawrence Weschler investigated the natural and unnatural phenomenon Wilson has assembled at the museum in his book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 1995. In 1996 Weschler teamed up with producer David Isay to bring the Museum of Jurassic Technology to radio life.

Premiered December 6, 1996, on All Things Considered.

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.

Folksbiene Yiddish Theater

The Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre, the longest-running Yiddish theatre company in the world, was formed in 1915 as a response to the light, escapist fare then on offer to immigrant audiences, and its commitment to high-quality Yiddish-language theater continued through the decades. It was sustained by two of the company’s veteran members — Morris Adler, who joined the company in 1934, and Zypora Spaisman, who joined twenty years later. During their tenure, the Folksbiene became a bastion for Yiddish theater and culture.

Morris Adler stopped performing in 1985 to become President Emeritus of the company. He passed away on December 27, 2001, at the age of 107. Zypora Spaisman eventually became the artistic director and remained the company’s lead actress until 1999. She passed away on May 18, 2002. In this American Talker piece, Adler and Spaisman remember the roughly half century they each spent with the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater.

Recorded in New York City. Premiered December 1, 1996, 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.

Woody Guthrie

In March of 1940, a young Woody Guthrie sat with folklorist Alan Lomax at the U.S. Department of the Interior studios for a series of oral history interviews for the Library of Congress archives. They were the first-ever professional recordings of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, and while some of these recordings have been released on record, the original aluminum discs remain at the Library of Congress. Originally broadcast on the 29th anniversary of his death, the recordings offer a glimpse of Guthrie’s early music style and a frank account of his harrowing past.

Recorded in Washington, DC. Premiered October 20, 1996, on Weekend Edition Sunday.

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.

Harold Cotton, Hat Blocker

Harold Cotton speaks about his life as a shoe-shine man, hat-blocker, and owner of Bob’s Hat Shop in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Recorded in Greensboro, NC. Premiered August 18, 1996, on Weekend Edition Sunday.

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.

Reggie Jones, Lifeguard

Reggie Jones has been a lifeguard at 2-West on Jones Beach since 1944. In this American Talkers segment, Reggie tells of the grueling training and tryouts he went through to get his job. After lasting for over three unpaid weeks while competing with over 100 other beach-bound hunks, Reggie exults when he is picked from the crowd: “I thought I had won the Olympics. I said ‘Yes! Yes! There is a God.”

Recorded in New York City. Premiered July 7, 1996, on Weekend Edition Sunday.

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.