Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse

Remorse explores the death of Eric Morse, a five-year-old thrown from the fourteenth floor window of a Chicago housing project by two other boys, ten and eleven years old, in October, 1994. The documentary was reported by LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman — both residents of the Ida B. Wells housing development, where the crime took place, and both sixteen years old.

Remorse marks the return of Jones and Newman to NPR’s airwaves. In March of 1993, at age fourteen, they collaborated with producer David Isay for the radio documentary Ghetto Life 101, an audio diary of young people growing up on Chicago’s South Side.

When Eric Morse fell to his death in 1994, LeAlan and Lloyd felt compelled to pick up their tape recorders once again. They spent a year reporting the case and interviewed everyone from Eric’s mother, Toni Morse, in the only interview she’s granted to the press, to Vince Lane, chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority, to the father of one of the assailants. They set out to learn about the story from the inside, to see how a tragedy like this can touch a community, and to bring to light the scars it left behind.
Remorse won the Grand Prize Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and a Peabody Award in 1995.

Recorded in Chicago, Illinois. Premiered March 21, 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.

All the Way Broken

All The Way Broken is the audio diary of Iolene Catalano, a former heroin addict and prostitute. She was born on May 10, 1948, in a carnival trailer in Pennsylvania. Her mother was an exotic dancer and her father ran a crooked carnival concession. She spent her childhood in orphanages, reform schools, and mental institutions. By age twenty, she was living on the streets of New York City as a prostitute, thief, and some-time rock-and-roll singer. Iolene was diagnosed with HIV one month after she shot heroin for the last time.

Together Catalano and producer David Isay recorded more than thirty hours of interviews. In April 1994, Iolene had a breakdown. She was admitted to Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, and the project was suspended. Throughout her illness, Catalano kept a tape recorder by her bed-side. At night, she’d have a nurse tape a microphone to her chest so that she could record her thoughts before she fell asleep.

Iolene died at Roosevelt Hospital on June 3, 1994. She was clean for the last eight years of her life. All The Way Broken won a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in 1996.

Premiered September 9, 1995, on Weekend All Things Considered.

The Gods of Times Square

There is no place in the world like Times Square. Located in midtown Manhattan, it teems with people — hardened New Yorkers and wide-eyed tourists, commuters and shoppers, theater-goers and merchants, prostitutes and policemen. Shining down are shimmering lights, flashing signs, towering billboards, and epileptic neon. And amid the throngs, illuminated by the fluorescence of consumerisms most triumphant block, walk the countless religious zealots who consider Times Square their concrete pulpit.

In 1992, photographer Richard Sandler began a video documentary to capture these street prophets in their unnatural habitat. He was guided by the question of why people would come to Times Square to inquire into the nature of god, to argue, to pray, and to convert. In 1994, after shooting more than 100 hours of videotape, he realized that there was not enough money to complete the film. Sandler shifted his focus from Times Squares sights to its sounds, collaborating with producer David Isay to create this radio documentary from his video footage. In 1999 Sandler finished his video, The Gods of Times Square, which has since won numerous film festivals.

Recorded in Times Square, New York City. Premiered December 23, 1994, on All Things Considered.

Jim Bishop, Castle Builder

Jim Bishop has been hard at work on an elaborate medieval castle on a remote mountain in the Colorado Rockies for the past quarter century. Bishop Castle is, in Bishop’s words, “The world’s biggest — with the help of God — one-man physical project, always open free to the public. A place of liberty, freedom, and justice. The poor man’s Disneyland.”

Bishop Castle has (or will have) waterfalls, wishing wells, fountains, wrought-iron gates, a wrought-iron-and-glass scenic elevator, a gravity-belt escalator, a fire-breathing dragon — and more. It was inspired by Bishops awe of the Colorado Rockies. After putting $450 on the piece of property at the age of fifteen, Bishop began working . . . and working . . . and working. The project continues to this day.

Recorded in Rye, Colorado. Premiered February 24, 1994, on All Things Considered.

World’s Longest Diary

For twenty years, Robert Shields of Dayton, Ohio, has kept a written record of absolutely everything that has happened to him, day and night. For no less than four hours each day, Shields holes himself up in the small office in his home, turns on his stereo, and types. His diary, at 35 million words, is believed to be the world’s longest.

Recorded in Dayton, Washington. Premiered January 27, 1994, on Morning Edition.

A page from Shields’ diary.

Woolworth’s Lunch-Counter Waitress

Geneva Tisdale was working that day, in 1960, when four young black men sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, NC, and asked to be served. The management refused, and protests ensued. Six months of negotiations and sit-ins later, the Woolworth’s management changed its policy and chose Geneva Tisdale and two of her co-workers to be the first African-Americans to eat at the lunch counter at which they worked. Thirty years later, Geneva Tisdale was still behind the counter. David Isay interviewed her the day it closed.

Recorded in Greensboro, NC. Premiered October 23, 1993, on All Things Considered.

Hula Ville

Along California’s Highway 15, about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles, stands an enormous weather-beaten billboard of a girl in a hula skirt. The sign says, “You’ve reached Hulaville,” a desert park built and operated for almost forty years by poet and artist Miles Mahan.

Recorded in Victorville, CA. Premiered July 7, 1993, on All Things Considered.

Dinosaur Gardens

“I Thought I Saw a Dinosaur” reads the welcome sign to Moscow, Texas, an unincorporated hamlet ninety miles north of Houston. There isn’t much more to this place. Indeed, the number of dinosaurs residing in Moscow rivals the town’s population, all thanks to a retired carpenter named Donald Bean.

Bean came up with the idea for the theme park in the late 1950s when he happened upon a similar roadside attraction in Oregon. “Soon as I saw that, I said ‘That’s what I want to do!’ So I did it.” It took Bean twenty years of planning and saving before he was finally ready to build his own park, which opened in 1981. The park cost the Beans nearly $100,000 to build, and when Dinosaur Gardens opened it was met with just about the level of enthusiasm one might anticipate for a dinosaur theme park in the heart of Moscow, Texas. The masses did not seem to share Bean’s fervor for creatures prehistoric. There were no lines at the ticket office. “It kind of disappointed me,” Bean says, wiping a spider web from Struthiomimus’s mouth. “I don’t know how many people I thought would come, but I thought there’d be quite a few.”

There is a downside to this slow business, to be sure. Bean’s wife of forty-three years had to come out of retirement and take a job at a nearby convenience store in order to help support her husband’s dinosaur habit. But there’s an upside, too. With visitors scarce, Donald Bean can spend as much time as he wants alone in his theme park pondering his dinosaurs.

Recorded in Moscow, Texas. Premiered May 27, 1993, on Morning Edition.

Jack Hitt’s audio essay on the evolution of dinosaur exhibits, from This American Life (Act 2).

Simulated worlds, Civil war reenactments, wax museums, simulated coal mines, fake ethnic restaurants, an ersatz Medieval castle and other re-created worlds that thrive all across America.

Act One. National Tour. Host Ira Glass uses Italian author Umberto Eco’s essay Travels in Hyperreality as a guidebook to American simulated worlds. Eco says that the urge to create these miniature simulated worlds is a very American impulse–a significant American aesthetic–and one that’s not often discussed. Ira visits the Wax Museum at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, plays clips from Jessica Yu’s documentary on Civil War reenactors (called Men of Reenaction and available from the Independent Television Service at 800/343-4727), stops by a fake coal mine under Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, and discusses “the poor man’s Hearst Castle”–a California hotel called the Madonna Inn. (17 minutes)

Act Two. Dinosaur Exhibit. Writer Jack Hitt discovers that the world of dinosaurs is a man-made creation, a simulated world that may or may not accurately reflect what happened on earth 100 million years ago. Talking with dinosaur experts like Jack Horner (the dinosaur expert whose work was the basis of much of the film Jurassic Park) Hitt finds that most of what you think you know about dinosaurs is probably wrong, and that Americans’ ideas about dinosaurs go through fashions–fashions that reflect the national mood. We believed dinosaurs were more aggressive when we were on the brink of World Wars One and Two. And these days we focus on their family values. (13 minutes)

Act Three. Medieval Times. Ira takes a Medieval scholar from the University of Chicago, Michael Camille, to Medieval Times a chain of fake castles where visitors eat Medieval food and drink Medieval Pepsi and watch a supposed recreation of a Medieval jousting tournament. The scholar finds that there are many historical inaccuracies, but that Medieval Times does capture something essential and interesting about the spirit of the Middle Ages. (19 minutes) (Postscript: Sadly, Michael Camille, the wonderful scholar in this story, passed away in 2002. You can read about Camille at the University of Chicago website, or on the UK’s Guardian Unlimited website. Michael’s books are still in print, though aimed at an academic audience. The one that touches most directly on the things he talks about on our show is Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Essays in Art and Culture).

Act Four. Simulating Reality on Morning Edition. Ira Glass worked for NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered for 17 years, and shares a few thoughts on the devices he and his colleagues used to simulate the real world on those shows. (2 minutes)

Ghetto Life 101

In 1992, LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman, both thirteen years old, collaborated with public radio producer David Isay to create the radio documentary Ghetto Life 101, their audio diaries of life in Chicago’s South Side. They taped for ten days, and their documentary brought listeners an audio portrait of children’s daily life in one of the country’s most dangerous and disadvantaged housing projects, with sounds of machine guns at night and the effects of a thriving drug world on a community.

Ghetto Life 101 became one of the most acclaimed programs in public radio history, winning almost all major awards in American broadcasting. It was translated into a dozen languages and was broadcast worldwide. The team went on to collaborate on a second radio documentary, Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse, about the murder of 5-year-old Eric Morse, who was dropped from a 14-story building in Ida B. Wells by two other boys, and the book Our America.

May 2001 Notes from Lloyd and LeAlan

Lloyd Newman writes:

I know a lot of people have been wondering what’s been going on with me over the past few years. Is he living up to his words or is he still living that Ghetto Life? Well, I’d have to say both. Since the documentaries and the book came out, I have attended three different colleges, searching for the one that fits me best. I’m not living a Ghetto Life but I’m still living in the ghetto (when I’m not at school), which doesn’t bother me at all, even though there are rats and roaches still crawl the wall. My father has been doing the same. Some people might think, “Oh he’s a terrible father,” but a father who loves his kids as much as mine does is the best father you can have. My sisters are still doing great, raising great kids, even thought they still don’t have jobs. Lately I’ve been thinking of a million things that I want to do, but I’ve had a hard time putting it all together. Yes, I have been blessed with success in journalism, but I was a kid then and had a lot of help. Now that I’m in college, I see you have to work hard to get to where you want to be. All I can say is: I got ideas. Don’t think that this will be the last time you will hear from me because I will put those ideas to work.

LeAlan Jones writes:

I am now a junior at Barat College in Lake Forest, Illinois, were I am taking up Interdisciplinary Studies with a minor in Poli-Sci. I will be graduating from Barat in the spring of 2002 with a Bachelors Degree in the above fields. I have been continuing to speak at all levels of academia, from grade schools to graduate and law schools around the United States. I firmly committed to changing the intolerable conditions of urban America. I still live in the same community and have immersed myself in attempts to affect the social climate of poverty. A change will come when we as a people embrace difference and respect all capacities of life. Whether it be a ghetto or an isolated rural community, we have to begin working towards One America. This is my goal, my life, and my mission.

December 2022 Update on Lloyd and LeAlan

Lloyd moved to DeKalb, Illinois, and spent the last few years working at the DeKalb Public Library, where he recently told us, ”It didn’t feel like a job, but something to be a part of…a service that needed to be provided to the community.”

Lloyd passed away in December 2022 from complications from sickle cell anemia. He was 43 years old.

LeAlan is a father and husband and trains student-athletes in Chicago.

Rest in Peace, Lloyd Newman. March 3, 1979-December 8, 2022.

Photos of the Ida B. Wells housing projects (1997), by John Brooks

Archival photos of the Ida B. Wells housing projects from the Library of Congress

A class in radio for youngsters at Ida B. Wells Housing Project, 1942. Photo by Jack Delano. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USW3- 000319-D.

Ida B. Wells Housing Project, 1942. Photo by Jack Delano. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USW3-004871-D.

A childrens’ rhythm band in a music class, Ida B. Wells Housing Project, 1942. Photo by Jack Delano. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USW3-000294-D.

Children playing a game in a music class, Ida B. Wells Housing Project, 1942. Photo by Jack Delano. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USW3-000270-D.

A meeting of the Cub Scouts in the community center, Ida B. Wells Housing Project, 1942. Photo by Jack Delano. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USW3-000290-D.

An apartment in the Ida B. Wells Housing Project, 1942. Photo by Jack Delano. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-038652-D.

The Carr family in their living room, Ida B. Wells Housing Project, 1942. Photo by Jack Delano. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USW3-000086-D.

In the kitchen of the Carr home, Ida B. Wells Housing Project, 1942. Photo by Jack Delano. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USW3-000085-D.

Jelna Carr and her father listen to the 6:45 news broadcast, Ida B. Wells Housing Project, 1942. Photo by Jack Delano. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USW3-000075-D.

Jelna and her sister Grace both play the piano, Ida B. Wells Housing Project, 1942. Photo by Jack Delano. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USW3-000078-D.

Ralph and Grace Carr, Jelna’s brother and sister.. Photo by Jack Delano. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USW3-000068-D.

Jelna likes sciences, is going to be a doctor. For Christmas her parents bought her this chemistry set. Ida B. Wells Housing Project, 1942.. Photo by Jack Delano. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USW3-000076-D.

Mrs. Ella Patterson, the oldest resident at the Ida B. Wells Housing Project, Chicago, Illinois, and her grandson, 1942.. Photo by Jack Delano. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USW3-000105-D.

A study guide, for teachers who want to share Ghetto Life 101 with their class [PDF file, 416 KB]

Kipperman’s Pawnshop

Kipperman’s Pawn Shop in Houston, Texas, is the only pawn shop/wedding chapel on the planet, according to its owner. The chapel is located behind a church facade inside the shop. It opened during the tough economic times of the early 1980s, when customers routinely hocked their wedding rings. Because Kipperman was reluctant to melt down “all those memories,” his collection of rings grew and grew. Kipperman says that In 1984, while he was considering what to do with the rings, God spoke to him and told him that a wedding chapel would be a good thing to build in the store.

Recorded in Houston, Texas. Premiered February 12, 1993, on All Things Considered.