400: Stories Pitched by Our Parents

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass.

[RINGTONE]

Ira Glass

About a year ago, this thing happened to me when I took the train down to visit my dad in Baltimore. And when this thing happened, he said to me, you know, this could be a story on your show.

So this week, I called him up to have him and my stepmom tell the story.

Ira Glass

I said, well, apparently you can go to Amtrak and they'll retrieve your luggage at the train's next stop and throw it onto the next Amtrak that's headed back to you.

But the problem was my dad had tickets to the Baltimore Symphony that night, and train that was hopefully going to arrive with my suit, that is, if everything went perfectly, perfectly, perfectly, that train would arrive--

Ira Glass

So of course, this was very, very worrisome.

And before I go any further in this story, I should say, this is the 400th episode one of our radio show. There are eight of us who make the show, working together really closely, finding stories and shaping them. And for years, as we made those 399 other episodes, all those years, family members have approached us at weddings, holidays, with all kinds of ideas for the show. Most of them never made it onto the air, because-- i'll be frank-- they were not so great.

And this week we thought, OK. It's our 400th show. We should do something we've never done before. Something so difficult we've never dared do it before. And we thought, you know, after tackling all the subjects we have over the years-- productions of Peter Pan gone awry, and investigations into Guantanamo, and trying to make the history of mortgage-backed securities into entertaining radio-- what would be the greatest challenge? What would be the greatest challenge that we could possibly attempt for our 400th show?

And the answer? Obviously, let's do all of those stories pitched to us by our parents. Stories where it's not even clear whether it's humanly possible to make them into listenable stories on the radio.

So hence this story with the suit. OK, you remember where we are? OK. We're worried about the train and the suit.

Ira Glass

And it was at lunch that my stepmom, Sandy, got an idea. Let's buy a cheap suit at Marshalls just in case the train doesn't come in.

Ira Glass

We didn't have much time, so we hustled over to Marshalls, where we learned that Marshalls actually doesn't sell many suits. They literally have two suits in the store. Miraculously, one fits.

But another obstacle. The pants. The pants need hemming. Though if we hem them, of course, we wouldn't be able to return to suit. What to do? What do we do?

Ira Glass

It went off like a great bank heist. Like The Sting. Like Ocean's 11. I got the suit at Marshalls. The train came in. It had my real suit. I change into the real suit at the back of the train station. We go to the Baltimore Symphony, which was, by the way, fantastic. They got this new conductor. We went home, removed the scotch tape from the suit, and returned it on Monday.

Ira Glass

Well, at least he could tell.

Today, for our 400th show, each of us who work on the radio show went to our parents, got them to pitch the story-- or repitched one that they had pitched in the past-- and then the idea was, we each had to make the story they pitched.

But there is more. Musical transition, please?

So we're gathered here, not in our studio, which actually isn't big enough for all of us to fit, but in our office, in the room where we have our weekly story meetings. So it's nine of us sitting here with microphones and looking around the room. It's Robyn Semien--

Lisa Pollak

It's funny what your parents forget to tell you until you're recording them for national broadcast. Here's what my mom said when I asked her for a story idea.

Lisa Pollak

She explained that she and my dad had recently bought their cemetery plots. Apparently all their friends were making plans for eternity, and they got they should jump on the bandwagon, too. I wasn't really sure why she was laughing, but she seemed convinced there was a funny idea in here, somewhere.

Lisa Pollak

So this is the idea. Find funny stories about funerals. Stories kind of like my mom's, only actually explaining the funny parts.

I started looking, and the first thing I found was a New York Times story from January 1902. Clearly I wasn't the first reporter whose mother had this idea. The headline read, "Humors of Funerals: The Funny Side of a Gruesome Subject As Seen by Clergymen." Or, as I like to imagine a clergyman would say it in 1902--

Lisa Pollak

The story was a collection of anonymous anecdotes, gets like this one.

Lisa Pollak

OK. So the setup's a little dark. But then, to the clergyman's surprise, a whole crowd of mourners show up. They bring food--

Lisa Pollak

OK, that didn't work.

So I turned to a more contemporary source, a book called The Funny Side of Death, published in 2008. The author is a retired funeral home owner who says his sense of humor helped him cope with the job. On page 97, for example, he explains how dead people's hip replacements, which are metal and stay intact after cremation, can be, quote, "shined up and presented to friends as letter openers."

At this point, I started making phone calls, first to the National Funeral Director's Association. I told them what I was looking for, and they said they had the perfect person to help me. And next thing I knew, I was on hold, waiting to talk to a funeral director in Decatur, Illinois named Randy Earl.

You know, nothing puts me in the mood for a humorous anecdote like the stuff they play when on hold at the funeral home.

Lisa Pollak

Randy said he'd been expecting my call, and that he had a great story. It was about a man who came in one day to make prearrangements for his funeral. The man had his kids with him, and one of the things they all talked about was what music to play at the man's service.

Lisa Pollak

As fate would have it, the man died in July. And at the church where the service was supposed to be, the whole "Silent Night" idea wasn't going over so well.

Lisa Pollak

It turns out that in the funeral business, humor can be a touchy subject. As Ron Hast, publisher of Mortuary Management Magazine, told me--

Lisa Pollak

Ron spent so much time warning me about the pitfalls of this story idea-- how funny things don't really happen that often in his business, how outsiders like me tend to exaggerate and embellish, that when he actually gave me exactly what I was looking for, I was afraid to react. Instead of laughing, I asked a dumb question that killed his whole punchline.

Lisa Pollak

At this point, I gave on funeral directors and called a Lutheran minister I know. His name is Duke Fries. Pastor Fries told me a story about the time he finished doing a funeral service and made this dignified exit in front of a room full of people, only to realize--

Lisa Pollak

Finally, I was getting somewhere. I kept at it, and before long, I had more stories than I knew what to do with. There was the overzealous mourner who fell into the grave during the funeral, a woman who wanted to be buried topless to show off her breast job, and a funeral home worker who lifted a woman out of her bed only realize that her husband, in the next bed over, was the dead one.

But I wasn't so sure any of these were what my mom was looking for. None of them were like that funeral she went to, where--

Lisa Pollak

I was just about to give up looking when our intern, Brian Reed, told me I had to call his friend Rob. So I did. And after that, I made one last call.

[RINGTONE]

Lisa Pollak

So she didn't bust a gut. But maybe for my mom, that only happens at funerals.

Ira Glass

All right. Well, our next story is from Nancy Updike, who recorded this story, but couldn't be here with us.

Nancy Updike

I talked to my dad. He pitched me this idea a year ago, actually. Kind of caught me off-guard with this one. The Erie Canal.

Nancy Updike

And before I answer that question, I just want to quickly remind our listeners of everything they, of course, already know about the Canal. Longest canal in the U.S., when it was built. 363 miles. Linking Lake Erie and the rest of the Great Lakes to the Atlantic via the Hudson River, dug by hand, with shovels and pre-industrial tools, before our country was even 50 years old. And it was our first big success in physically uniting the United States by connecting the built-up east coast with the midwest.

This is Craig Williams, curator at the New York State Museum.

Nancy Updike

So I did find out what became of the canal, and some things you just cannot express in words alone. The canal is too big, so I wrote a song with my friend, Dave Hill.

Ira Glass

Well everybody, what do you think? Nancy Updike, with Dave Hill, by the way.

Ira Glass

All right. Well, our next story is from Alex Blumberg.

Alex Blumberg

His other idea, at least initially, seemed equally as unpromising.

Alex Blumberg

He'd been thinking about the idea of corporate personhood for years, but it was especially on his mind during the conversation I had with him, which took place just a couple of days after that Supreme Court decision overturning large parts of campaign finance law. That decision, the Citizens United case, basically said there is no distinction between a corporation spending a lot of money on a campaign and a regular person doing it. In the eyes of the law, the corporation can buy as many ads as it wants. To my dad, that seems crazy and dangerous.

I'm not going to lie. This didn't go well. I called Exxon, spoke to a media relations person there, told her about how my dad and I had this conversation, and I wanted to find out who Exxon thought it was. The lady was very nice, but she said she didn't see any reason Exxon would ever want to talk to me about this. In this way, Exxon is just like a lot of people. If they don't want to talk to the media, you can't really make them.

I called around to other multinational corporations. Same answer. Then I tried the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the trade group for most of American business. The guy there was a little bit more receptive, and he called me back with the name-- Eugene Volokh. He's the guy you should talk to. Although when I reached Eugene Volokh, he couldn't explain why the Chamber of Commerce sent me to him.

Alex Blumberg

So Eugene Volokh turns out not to be a spokesman for corporate America in any way. He's a charming libertarian-leaning law professor at UCLA. He runs a popular blog called the Volokh Conspiracy, though he's written a lot about constitutional issues in the Citizens United case.

And the more we talked, the more I had to let go of my Michael Moore dreams-- asking stunty questions designed to expose the fallacy of corporate personhood, such as, what's Exxon's favorite color? Or what does Exxon want for Christmas? Or who's Exxon's favorite Beatle? That line of questioning, Eugene Volokh told me in so many words, is stupid.

Alex Blumberg

Others being, for example, people who want to hear what the corporation has to say.

All right. I'm just going to stop here and say, by the time I got to this point in my conversation with Eugene Volokh, I already knew that the story my dad wanted me to do was in trouble. So Dad, if you don't mind, I took up a different question. The question I took up is this. How worried should he be about the Citizens United case?

OK. A little background on the idea of corporations as people. When it comes to property rights, corporations are basically the same as you and I. The government can't take away their property without due process. That's protected under the fourteenth amendment. But when it comes to something the fifth amendment, which says, you can't be forced to incriminate yourself in a court of law, corporations are not covered. All those TV dramas and congressional hearings where people plead the fifth? Exxon can't do that.

So corporations are legally like people in some respects, and unlike them in others. And it's in this context that the issue of corporate spending on campaigns comes up. The Supreme Court has dealt with this issue a handful of times over the last century--

Ira Glass

OK. Stop the tape. Stop the tape. OK. I'm just going to point out what's going on here. Paul, our engineer, with all due respect, briefly fell asleep. Alex, meanwhile, had to leave to go to a meeting for his other-- he works on Planet Money, and they had a big meeting, so he's not even here to defend himself.

Ira Glass

All right. So it's looking very, very bad for Alex in our competition. Coming up-- more stories pitched by our parents, who by the way, we all love very, very, very much. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life from Ira Glass. It is our 400th episode, and if you're just tuning in, we're doing something very different. After all these years of family members pitching us stories for the show, this week we actually go out and make the stories that our family members pitched. The staff of the radio show and I are sitting here in our office meeting room-- hi everybody, again. We're listening to each of the stories, and at the end of the hour, we're going to decide which story was best, which parent pitched the best story. Whoever it is will get a prize. We're also asking you to vote online at thisamericanlife.org. Our next story up is from producer Robyn Semien.

Robyn Semien

When I asked my dad to think of an idea he'd like to pitch, he took it to mean one thing. A clear opportunity to tell his favorite story.

This story usually takes him a little over an hour to tell. it's about how he souped up a car when he was 20. But before he tells you about that car, he always tells you about another car, his starter car, a 1953 Oldsmobile.

When he was growing up in Richmond, California, which is near Oakland, there was a fad among teens to take some chrome off a car and paint primer where the chrome used to be. My dad took the trend a step further. He took the door handles off his car-- that's right, the door handles-- and painted circles of gray primer where the handles used to be.

Robyn Semien

You'd open the door, or my dad would open the door, by pressing the button he'd hidden in the chrome trim of the car. It was an electric button that triggered a solenoid which released the door latch. My dad was obsessed with electronics, and wondered what else in the car he could trick out. The radio, the lights.

Robyn Semien

After a while, my dad bought about another car-- a used '56 Lincoln Premiere convertible. And the attraction was that everything in the car was electric. Power seats, power windows, the convertible top. It was a perfect laboratory for my dad.

His job at the time was at a place where they were manufacturing parts for CB radios, and these particular CB radios had rotary dials on them, like on a telephone, connected to a switch inside. And it was at work one day, inspecting those rotary dials, when it hit him. He had his Thomas Edison moment.

Robyn Semien

For the next eight months, my dad locked himself in his room. His plan was this. He'd attach all of the car's power circuits to a metal box using hundreds of relays, all controlled by a rotary dial from an old Princess phone, the kind which had a little light behind it. This was the star of the show, and needed a prime location-- the center of the steering wheel.

Robyn Semien

That's my sister Shaun and me laughing in the background. My dad really thinks we don't know that story.

Robyn Semien

I've heard the story at least as many times as my sister. My uncle Rocky, who was 16 when my dad built the Lincoln, probably heard it the most.

Robyn Semien

My friends Ellen and Anya have both heard it, separately. My boyfriend Damien.

Robyn Semien

In fact, the night my dad pitched me the car story, my niece Alexis, who is 15, was listening. Alexis also had a story idea, but we never got to it, because when my dad started on the car story, she couldn't outlast him.

Robyn Semien

My nephew Jamison, who's 11, also heard that story that same night. My dad says Jamison's the lucky grandchild who will inherit the box and dial. Jamison's take on the story?

Robyn Semien

When we were young, there was a lesson attached to this story-- that when you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything. But when I asked my dad today why this is the story he tells over and over, what's the point of the story, he says he's just proud that he had an idea that nobody else did. I point out to my dad that his invention was completely impractical. It's way harder to dial a secret code than to just push the button that opens the window. He says that's not the point. It was cool. It made him stand out. And if anyone wanted the window down, or the radio on, they had to go through him.

Ira Glass

OK. So this is a good place to say that two of our producers put together stories that didn't work out so well. Alissa Shipp, one of our producers, called her mom, and got into this pretty heavy conversation. And the most air-able part of it was this one moment that they got talking about this moment with her grandmother in the hospital. And it's 16 seconds long.

Sarah Koenig

I figured maybe there was some cognitive reason for Ava's confusion, like that at her age, she simply could not compute the contradiction that somebody Jewish would do something not Jewish.

So I talked to a couple of child psychologists, and they told me I was right. That this question is taxing Ava's prefrontal cortex. That's the part of the brain where we store information about rule-governed behavior, like how we're supposed to act. And they said it might take a couple of years for Ava's prefrontal cortex to get it.

This is Karen Bierman. She's written books about child development.

Sarah Koenig

Anyhow, none of this felt very, um, gripping.

So to sum up, I wrote a little ditty about Ava's situation with her grandmother, who she calls Yaya. The tune is borrowed, by the way.

Sarah Koenig

[SINGING] Ask why--

Sarah Koenig

Ask why--

Sarah Koenig

Don't you eat that Christmas stew. You're a Jew. You're a Jew--

Sarah Koenig

You're a Jew--

Sarah Koenig

Me too--

Sarah Koenig

That's it.

More songs! I like it.

Ira Glass

All right. Well, our last story today comes from Jane Feltes.

Jane Feltes

I called my dad, and obviously he was super stoked to help me with this project.

Jane Feltes

That was my dad's attempt at modesty. Turns out he's kind of a pitching machine. The stuff I could do stories about range from, Can you believe GM is bringing 800 jobs to Michigan, rather than moving them out? Or, why you guys follow up on that story you did a few years ago about some vigilante border patrol guys down on the Mexican border?

Jane Feltes

Then somehow we got on the topic of how to make solar energy efficient, which led to the wave particle duality of photons, and not led to--

Jane Feltes

Right. And then naturally--

Jane Feltes

And then finally--

Jane Feltes

At first I was like, who? But then I remembered that Harry Brakeman was the pastor at my Grandma Ruth's Methodist church a while back. Now he's retired, and he and his wife live in eastern Michigan, out in the country.

Jane Feltes

I kind of doubted this story from the jump. Like, maybe he had a church there, and it's possible that they taught a Sunday School, but then someone was talking to somebody, and it turned into a game of telephone, and in the end, everyone in Michigan thinks Harry Brakeman's like running the Harvard of the Caribbean.

Jane Feltes

OK. So that phone call, that was a week before the earthquake in Haiti. So when the earthquake happened, then I found myself worried about this school that I didn't even know if it existed.

Jane Feltes

Ladies and gentlemen, Harry Brakeman, 87 years old, in his home in Clyde, Michigan. And Harry says it's true. There is a school.

Back in the '70s, a missionary visits Harry's church, and he's talking about some work he's doing in Haiti, and would Harry want to join and help. So in 1976, the Brakemans fly into Port-au-Prince for the first time.

Jane Feltes

Now, I've heard Harry's sermons, and to tell you the truth, they sound pretty much like this conversation. He's not all filled with the spirit or anything. So you can see how special this was. He toured around the island and saw how people live.

Jane Feltes

His missionary work took him to a small town called Petit Goave, or Ti Goave, about 40 miles west of Port-au-Prince on a two lane highway. It's a fishing town on the coast. Kind of a commercial center for all the tiny villages in the mountains that surround it. They were building churches, and Harry had the idea to build a school.

The work was hard, hauling construction supplies from Port-au-Prince and working crazy hours to avoid the midday sun.

What wasn't as difficult was finding volunteers. When Michigan construction jobs dried up every winter, Harry said they found plenty of people happy to spend a few months warming up in Haiti.

Jane Feltes

As the students grew, the classes grew, and so on and so forth, until they had 650 students and 42 teachers, all of them Haitian. They taught preschool through junior college, and then two years ago added university level courses. They were affiliated with a medical campus in Port-au-Prince. At least, that was the case up until a month ago.

Jane Feltes

Three weeks after the earthquake, I asked a newspaper reporter from New Jersey, Meredith Mandell, who was traveling to Haiti to do her own story, if she would go, or at least try to go, to Petit Goave, and find the school, and if she found it, was it standing?

Meredith said that these helicopters were flying really low overhead the whole time she was there. Eventually, she found the school.

Jane Feltes

The guy she's talking to is Luc Lespenasse whom Harry put me in touch with. Luc's known the Brakemans for years. He met them when he was a teen, back when they first visited Petit Goave. In the '80s, he came to live with them in Michigan for a few years, and they put him through college. They call them their Haitian son.

The original classrooms were solidly constructed with rebar support, and all finished nicely. Kind of looks like it could be a high school in southern California And those buildings, they're still standing, though they do have that empty, frozen in time feeling. Like the date of the quake, January 12, is still written on one of the chalkboards in teacher's handwriting.

But a few recent additions to the school were thrown up with cinderblocks, and they've come down. The new computer lab is just piles of rubble. But overall, the school fared pretty well compared to the rest of Petit Goave, which was essentially leveled. Not only was it hit in the first quake, but that 5.9 magnitude aftershock that happened a week later? The epicenter was right beneath Petit Goave. So the school is kind of the last thing on anyone's mind.

I had a long talk with Luc on the phone, but without thinking, I made the mistake of starting with the standard non-emergency disasters on small talk.

Jane Feltes

For years, Luc's run an ad hoc orphanage out of his house, which is now uninhabitable. Altogether, since he started, he's taken in 172 kids. Right now he has 15 boys, seven of them he's legally adopted.

Jane Feltes

He said his boys were keeping themselves busy, playing dominoes, basketball. Help has been slow to arrive to Petit Goave. Medical teams didn't get here until a week after the quake. Stores are down, and even if they weren't, Luc can't access his money because the banks were destroyed. More kids show up every day asking for help. He says everyone is just waiting, but they're not even sure what they're waiting for.

Jane Feltes

Many people there count Harry as a Haitian, Luc says.

Jane Feltes

Luc said it's a thousand. The official count, according to the mayor, is more like 1,100 so far. And that's in a town of roughly 12,000 people.

Ira Glass

OK. So it's time to vote. We've heard all the stories. Just to review on what those stories were one more time. It was my dad's story the suit on the train, Lisa's story about the funny funeral, Nancy's story about the Erie Canal, Alex's story about corporations as people, Robyn's story about her dad's rotary phone-controlled car, Alissa's story about her bubbe's deathbed boredom, Sarah's story about Christmas and her daughter and her mom, and Jane's story about the college in Haiti.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself with the greatest documentary production staff in radio-- Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semian, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder Our intern, who is already making our stories better, is Brian Reed. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon is our office manager. Music consultant, Jessica Hopper. Audio engineering for today's shows by Paul Ruest.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Special thanks today to our parents, especially the ones who we interviewed who didn't make it into the show. Don't forget to go to our website and vote. We really are curious what the audience favorite is for today's show. We went your vote. The web address is www.thisamericanlife.org.

At our website, you can also listen to Alex Blumberg's complete story, the one that we cut off in the middle.

If you happen to be an iPhone user, there's also a link at that site to a new iPhone app that gives you all 400 of our episodes at your fingertips which is three bucks. The app also has amazing extras, like David Sedaris's first few radio stories, or I also interview Terry Gross and she interviews me, and there's a free behind-the-scenes video of our show, there's an amazing cartoon slide story done by Chris Ware.

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our 400 episodes by our partner in all this, Mr. Torey Malatia, who does not understand why Lisa Pollak's funny funeral stories should win number one.