835: Children of Dave

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2024

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Boen Wang has a theory that a lot of the misery in his life can be traced to a single moment that happened years before he was born. So he makes a pilgrimage to see if he’s right.

Prologue: Ira talks about what it’s like to go back to 1119 Bayard Street in Baltimore. (6 minutes)
Part One: Boen visits Norman, Oklahoma, where he was born, to meet the man he thinks changed his parents’ lives—and his life, too. (31 minutes)
Part Two: Boen’s friend, Andrew, and his parents take what he learned in Part One, throw it into a blender, and push puree. (20 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show.
0:05.4	If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, this American Life.
0:10.0	org.
0:11.9	My dad's a T.M. password was 1119 until the day he died.
0:16.0	1119 was also in the password for his home Wi-Fi network.
0:20.0	1119 was shorthand for 1119 Bayard Street, which is where his grandfather, my great-grandfather,
0:27.0	under a tiny grocery store on the ground floor of a house in downtown Baltimore in the 1920s,
0:31.8	30s, 40s,s 50s picture a neighborhood
0:34.6	Bogdaiga and you've got the general size of this thing the family lived upstairs
0:38.8	work downstairs so much happened at 119 Bayard So many things about our family were set in motion there.
0:46.4	But my sisters and I only got little scraps of stories about the place.
0:49.8	This handful of family defining origin stories
0:53.6	that I got trotted out now and then.
0:56.1	Like for instance there was the one about the chickens.
0:58.4	My dad and his brother Lenny
1:00.4	both worked in the store
1:01.6	from the time they were little kids.
1:03.0	And chickens were slaughtered at the store.
1:06.0	Retrieked them out, both of them.
1:08.0	To the point where decades later, as grown men,
1:12.0	neither of them ate chicken chicken and they'd explain this was the
1:15.6	reason why. Or there's the story about my great grandfather's bookkeeping
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from This American Life, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of This American Life and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.