The Family Tree

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 26 July 2021

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A listener’s voicemail sent us searching for the story of a very special -- and giant -- oak tree Peoria, Illinois, and the family of arborists who cared for it.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, Dylan.
0:09.0	Hi, Manolo.
0:11.0	How are you?
0:12.0	I'm good.
0:13.0	I'm good.
0:14.0	Everything's fine.
0:15.0	So I'm back again.
0:17.0	And this time I have a voice memo for you to listen to.
0:20.0	Great.
0:21.0	I'm excited to hear it.
0:23.0	Yeah.
0:24.0	So this voice memo is from Alex Katz.
0:27.0	And they have this vivid memory of this giant oak tree in Peoria, Illinois, where they grew up.
0:33.0	And the tree is surrounded by so much history.
0:36.0	And this is what they had to say.
0:39.0	Hi, Atlas Obscura.
0:41.0	My name is Alex Katz, and I use they-them pronouns.
0:44.0	I grew up in Peoria, Illinois.
0:46.0	And one of my most powerful and surreal childhood memories was going to Giant Oak Park once in elementary middle school.
0:54.0	I remember being overwhelmed by the scale of it all, the density and bright greenness of the leaves.
1:01.0	The, yeah, the age the tree was supposed to be at least 500 years.
1:06.0	And the feeling that somewhere in among those packed leaves was something wonderful or terrifying up in or next to the trunk.
	...

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