"I left Vietnam in 1972. I listen the radio when I was in high school. I still in Vietnam at that time. I left with US troops during the Vietnam War. I really love the song, you know, played by Glen Campbell, "Wichita Lineman." And all the song from the Bee Gee, from Beatle, Rolling Stone, I love.

When I was young I heard, you know, "California Dream." I thought, `Wow, San Francisco, everybody wearing their flower in their hair?' I make my wish: when I grow up, I like to come to United States. I like to live in San Francisco, see if I can get flower in my hair. That's a "California Dreaming," the song.

But when I come here in 1979--oh, it is hard. I have no relative. Just, like, a couple of friend. They help me. And I'm not able to be speaking very, very well. So every day when I am driving, I put a tape in my radio so I'm listening.
When you come to the country here, the easy way to be get in--get a job is to go to into the nail salon. That's why the population from Vietnam, they all do nail business."


French Manicure - The Long Shadow of Shirley Temple

Fugitive Waves:  The Making of the Homobile:  A Story of Transportation, Civil Rights & Glitter  ( and further stories of making...) / Produced by The Kitchen Sisters/ Mixed by Jim McKee

In this episode of Fugitive Waves, The Kitchen Sisters ride the nightshift with The Homobile.  Homobiles is a non-commercial, volunteer, 24/7 ride service created by Lynnee Breedlove for the "LGBTQRXT and transgender community and others around San Francisco who feel the need for safe, dependable rides, outside traditional services.  "Moes getting hoes where they needs to goes," is their motto.   Homobiles is for people who feel at risk because they don't conform to sexual or gender norms and have been targets of rudeness or shame or violence, says Lynne.  Homobiles is a network of independent drivers who pilot their own cars, a non-profit organization that caters to this underserved, and sometimes harassed community in the Bay Area.  This community car service operates on donations.  No one is turned away for lack of funds.  Homobiles has been called "Uber for Drag Queens," but with a mission that is social, not financial. 

The Making Of...the Homobile

Just about anytime we walk out of The Kitchen Sisters office in San Francisco we stop and stare in the windows of City Lights bookstore, soaking in the covers of the new arrivals.  Awhile back, we were stopped in our tracks by a book of photographs of Patti Smith – Patti staring down the camera, holding a movie camera herself.  It turns out Patti wasn't just the muse of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the Sixties, she was also muse and model for Judy Linn, an art student and budding photographer in New York.  

Paging through Patti Smith 1969-1976, we discovered Judy had that no only photographed Patti, she had made a little super-8 movies too, as the two young women created a world together. The movies were missing, but the soundtracks remained.  Lost and found sound, we thought.  Got to hear those recordings, got to meet that photographer.  And we did.  Fugitive Waves, Episode Number 7:  Just Girls: The Hidden World of Patti Smith and Judy Linn.


Just Girls: The Hidden World of Patti Smith & Judy Linn

Produced by The Kitchen Sisters in collaboration and translation with Raquel Bitton

She rose every day at dusk and rehearsed, performed, ate and drank until dawn.  Then slept all day, woke up and began to create and unravel again as the sun went down.  Nearly every song Edith Piaf sang came from a moment of her life on the streets of Paris.  She would tell her composer and musician lovers a story, or describe a feeling or show them a gesture and they would put music and words to her pain and passion, giving her back her own musical autobiography.  Charles Aznavour, Francis Lai, Georges Moustaki, Henri Contet, some of France's great musicians and writers recall their nights with Edith Piaf.   

Fugitive Waves is one of 10 podcasts in the Radiotopia Collective, some of the best story-driven podcasts on earth.  99% Invisible, The Truth, Love & Radio,Theory of Everything, Strangers, Radio Diaries, and us, The Kitchen Sisters. Come January you'll also be hearing Criminals, Mortified, The Illusionist and Heart.   Love Funding for this episode comes from Mothlight Creative and Audible.com.  Funding for Radiotopia comes from Mailchimp and The Knight Foundation and from all of you who backed the Kickstarter campaign that kicked some serious support.

12 - The Nights of Edith Piaf

Before Elvis walked through the door, before Sun Studios put Memphis on the map—Sam Phillips, a young man with a tape recorder, lived by the motto, "We Record Anything, Anywhere, Anytime." Weddings, funerals, marching bands, the Miss Memphis Pageant—Sam recorded them all—anything to keep his fledgling Memphis Recording Service open to record Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King, Little Junior, Ike Turner, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley. The raw and rocking, unrecorded music of the 1950s South.

13 - Sam Phillips and the Early Years of the Memphis Recording Service

In 2001, a quarter-century after boxing's celebrated "Thrilla in Manila," Ali and Frazier were once again poised to enter the ring. But this time it was the daughters of the legendary combatants scheduled to battle at the Turning Stone Casino on the Oneida Indian Nation in upstate New York. Laila Ali, 22-year-old daughter of Muhammad Ali; and Jacquelyn Frazier-Lyde, 39-year-old daughter of Joe Frazier.The 2001 bout, broadcast on pay-per-view TV, was billed as "Ali vs. Frazier IV" —a continuation of the blood feud that fueled their fathers' three title fights in the 1970s.  A behind the scenes glimpse of the "Daughters of Destiny", from the trash-talk of the press conferences to the sweat of the training camps.

Unfinished Business: Ali vs Frazier VI, Daughters of Destiny

After a debilitating accident, Eddie McCoy took his passion for local history and a scavenged cassette recorder from a trash can and began taping his town, from the oldest citizen on down—hidden stories of slavery times, sharecropping, the civil rights era and more in Oxford, North Carolina.

A Man Tapes his Town: The Unrelenting Oral Histories of Eddie McCoy

The birth of the Main Street of America—songwriter Bobby Troup  tells the story of his 1946 hit Get Your Kicks on Route 66; Gladys Cutberth, aka Mrs. 66 and members of the old "66 Association" talk about the early years of the road. Mickey Mantle explains "If it hadn't been for US 66 I wouldn't have been a Yankee." Stirling Silliphant, creator of the TV series "Route 66" talks about the program and its place in American folklore of the 60s. 

Route 66—The Mother Road, Part I

Willie Nelson and Dallas-born actress Robin Wright, along with some wild and extraordinary tellers, take us across Texas and share some of their hidden kitchen stories. Gas station tacos, ice houses, the birth of the Frito, the birth of 7-Eleven, the birth of the frozen margarita, and more.


Hidden Kitchens Texas with host Willie Nelson

Horses and dolphins and unicorns— creatures that possess the imagination of so many young girls—borderland creatures—gateway animals to other worlds. "They let us be cowgirls and oceanographers and mermaids and princesses, wizardessess."

Horses, Unicorns, Dolphins

The Braveheart Women's Society, a group of Yankton Sioux grandmothers, re-establish an almost forgotten coming of age ritual for young girls—a four day traditional Isnati ceremony on the banks of the Missouri River in South Dakota. 

27 - Braveheart Women's Society: Coming of Age in South Dakota

As construction commenced on the largest building project since the pyramids, questions and controversies swirled around Lower Manhattan. How tall? Why two? What's a slurry wall? A kangaroo crane? Where are the small businessmen going to go? What's a world trade center, and who needs it anyway? Guy Tozzoli, the Port Authority visionary behind the building of the Twin Towers, had an inspiration—"Construction Guides." Friendly co-eds in mini-skirt uniforms were posted at corner kiosks on the site to inform an inquiring public and put a pretty face on a controversial issue.

The Building Stewardesses: Construction Guides at the World Trade Center

When Sam Phillips sold Elvis’ contract in 1955 he used the money to start an all girl radio station in Memphis, TN. Set in a pink, plush studio in the nations’ third Holiday Inn, it was a novelty—but not for long. He hired models, beauty queens, actresses, telephone operators. Some were young mothers who just needed a job. WHER was the first radio station to feature women as more than novelties and sidekicks. The WHER girls were broadcasting pioneers. From 1955 into the mid-1970s they ruled the airwaves with style, wit and imagination. “WHER was the embryo of the egg,” said Sam Phillips. “We broke a barrier. There was nothing like it in the world.”

WHER: 1000 Beautiful Watts, Part 1

An all-girl radio station in Memphis—set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, the women's movement, Vietnam, and the death of Martin Luther King—the story of WHER continues following the women who pioneered in broadcasting as they head into one of the most dramatic and volatile times in the nation's history.

WHER: 1000 Beautiful Watts, Part 2

Nick Drake was a British singer songwriter from the early 1970s. His music has attracted a passionate, loyal following and influenced countless musicians. He’s often called a musician’s musician. But during his brief musical career he had little commercial success. Shy and private, Nick was never great on stage – but his guitar playing was brilliant and his songs were beautiful, melancholy, compelling. For years, he suffered from serious depression, and on November 25, 1974 he overdosed on anti-depressants. Thirty years after his death, Drake’s producer, Joe Boyd, gathered a group of musicians to pay tribute to Drake in a series of concerts and an accompanying record. In this episode of Fugitive Waves we go behind the scenes, into rehearsals, sound checks, and the making of Way to Blue: the Songs of Nick Drake.

Way To Blue: The Songs of Nick Drake

“Somewhere in the world there’s a Tupperware Party starting every 10 seconds.” And we’re going to one with The Kitchen Sisters.

Parties. Rallies. Sales sessions. More than a way of storing leftovers in covered plastic bowls, for many it’s a way of life. Earl Tupper took the plastics he developed for WWII into post-war American kitchens. The Tupperware Party is one of the ways women have come together to swap recipes and kitchen wisdom, get out of the house and support each other’s entrepreneurial efforts.

This story, which is used by instructors teaching audio classes around the country, was produced by The Kitchen Sisters in 1980, one of the first stories they created together. In this podcast the Sisters deconstruct the making of the piece and talk about the experiments and accidents  that led to the development of their production style.

Tupperware

Before the availability of the tape recorder and during the 1950s, when vinyl was scarce, ingenious Russians began recording banned bootlegged jazz, boogie woogie and rock 'n' roll on exposed X-ray film salvaged from hospital waste bins and archives.

"Usually it was the Western music they wanted to copy," says Sergei Khrushchev, son of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. "Before the tape recorders they used the X-ray film of bones and recorded music on the bones, bone music."

"They would cut the X-ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole," says author Anya von Bremzen. "You'd have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha's brain scan — forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens."

Produced by The Kitchen Sisters and Roman Mars' 99% Invisible

Bone Music: A Collaboration with 99% Invisible

Our show today is in honor of the beloved poet C. D. Wright who unexpectedly passed away recently. We interviewed C. D. in 2009 as part of a story we produced for our Hidden World of Girls series on NPR. And like all of our stories there are hours and hours of tape behind every minute of what you hear in the final piece. So today we’re going to play our original story—a story of family, crime and the power of art to grapple with the unimaginable. And then we’re gonna let it roll. To hear CD read from her work and talk about life, poetry and her longtime collaboration and friendship with Deborah Luster.

One Big Self: The Hidden World of Deborah Luster & C.D. Wright

Carmen Miranda—Brazil’s Ambassador of Samba, the highest paid woman entertainer in the world in the 1940s. When she died, hundreds of thousands of Brazilians lined the streets of Rio to pay homage to her. Over 50 years after her death she is still Brazil’s most famous celebrity. Her iconic turban, piled high with fruit, her moves, her rapid fire Portuguese lyrics, her wild lens of samba, rhumba, along with her epic dance numbers in 1930s Busby Berkeley musicals, captured the imagination of the world. The Kitchen Sisters travel to Rio to meet Carmen’s sister, her husband, her lover, her band leader, her driver, her composers, Cesar Romero. And we visit the Carmen Miranda Museum.

Carmen Miranda: The Life and Fate of the Brazilian Bombshell

C.B. “Stubb” Stubblefield, namesake of the legendary club in Austin, Texas, had a mission — to feed the world, especially the people who sang in it. When he started out in Lubbock, he generously fed and supported both black and white musicians, creating community and breaking barriers.

From 1968 to 1975 in Lubbock, Texas, C.B. "Stubb" Stubblefield ran a dilapidated barbecue joint and roadhouse that was the late-night gathering place for a group of local musicians who were below-the-radar and rising: Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Willie Nelson, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Muddy Waters, Johnny Cash, Tom T. Hall.

Born in Navasota, Texas in 1931, Christopher B. Stubblefield was the son of a Baptist preacher and a mother who worked raising 12 children. As a young boy he picked cotton and worked in local restaurants. After a stint in Korea, where he was in charge of food preparation for thousands of soldiers, he came back to Lubbock and started a small BBQ joint.

One day he picked up a hitchhiker, guitarist Jesse Taylor. And that was the start of it. Jesse asked if he could bring some friends by to play music at Stubb's and the place became a focal point for west Texas musicians and people traveling through.

A generous visionary who wanted to "feed the world," Stubbs was not a good businessman. But his friends helped through. Ultimately, he moved to Austin, started a new restaurant, created a BBQ sauce that is still on most grocery shelves across the nation, and spread love, music and good will throughout his life.

Stubb Stubblefield: The Archangel of BBQ

Each fall, the Ojibwe tribes of northern Minnesota harvest wild rice by hand. It's a long process that begins with families in canoes venturing into the tall grasses, where rice is poled and gently brushed with knockers into the bed of the canoe. We journey to White Earth Reservation, out onto Big Rice Lake in a canoe, to see how one tribe is supporting itself and changing the diet of its people through community kitchen projects. And we talk with the founder of White Earth Land Recovery Project, Winona LaDuke, about the land, her fight to save wild rice, GMOs, her family, philosophy, and her candidacy for vice president of the United States on the Green Party ticket with Ralph Nader.

Harvest on Big Rice Lake

Six generations of Mohawk Indian ironworkers, known for their ability to work high steel, have helped shape New York City’s skyline. Hundreds of Mohawks still commute to Manhattan each week from reservations in Canada to work on the city’s skyscrapers and bridges. In September 2001, a new generation returned to the World Trade Center site to dismantle what their elders had helped to build.

Walking High Steel: Mohawk Ironworkers at the World Trade Towers

“Nobody can soldier without coffee,” a Union calvary man wrote in 1865. Hidden Kitchens looks at three American wars through the lens of coffee: the Civil War, Vietnam and Afghanistan. And an interview with Anastacia Marx de Salcedo author of “Combat Ready Kitchen: How the U.S. Military Shapes the Way You Eat.”

War and Peace and Coffee

For five years Davia’s father, Lenny Nelson, asked her to go to Rattlesden, England, to visit the Air Force base where he was stationed during WWII and to find an old photograph hanging in the town pub honoring his 8th Air Force squadron. It was still there, over 50 years later, he told her. Finally, one fine Sunday, Davia headed out in search of the pub and a piece of her father’s past—the piece he was proudest of.

Lenny died on Christmas Eve last year. In his honor, we share the journey with you.

Samuel Shelton Robinson helped produce this story with The Kitchen Sisters. He’s from London. It seemed only right.

Rattlesden

Black cake, gingerbread, slant rhyme, secret loves, family scandals, poems composed on the back of a coconut cake recipe —we journey into the steamy, myth-laden, hidden world of poet Emily Dickinson through her kitchen. In her lifetime, Emily was probably better known as a baker than a poet.

Filled with mystery, intrigue and readings by Patti Smith, Thornton Wilder, Jean Harris and an array of passionate poets and experts.

Black Cake: Emily Dickinson's Hidden Kitchen

Recording sound pioneer Sam Phillips — the father of Sun Records, the man who discovered Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash…, the creator of WHER, The First All Girl Radio Station in the World — talks about his journey, his adventures and “the acoustics of life.” With stories from his son Knox Phillips, his wife Becky, his biographer Peter Guralnick, and one of his first artists, Ike Turner.

Hear recordings from the archive of interviews we did with Sam beginning in 1998—personal stories told by the man himself and his family and friends.

Interest in Sam Phillips is running high right now –not that it was ever running low. There’s a new TV series out and there’s Peter Guralnick’s epic biography “Sam Phillips The Man Who Invented Rock’n’Roll.” And there’s a film in the works based on the book — one of the producers is Mick Jagger and Leonardo DiCaprio is playing Sam. Sam has had a monumental impact on the world of music and sound. And he’s had a monumental impact on The Kitchen Sisters.

Sam Phillips, Sun Records and the Acoustics of Life

Stories from The Hidden World of Girls with host Tina Fey: Nigerian writer Chris Abani tells about his English-born mother enlisting him at age 8 to be her translator in Nigeria as she travels door to door through the villages teaching women the Billings Ovulation Method of birth control. Plus stories from singer/actress Janelle Monae, science fiction writer Pat Cadigan, Estonian activist Tiina Urm and her "Let's Do It Campaign" and more stories about girls and the women they become.

The Hidden World of Girls with Tina Fey

Cab drivers, children's jump rope rhymes, folk songs, dialects, controversial TV ads, interviews with blacklisted artists and writers during the McCarthy Era — Tony Schwartz was one of the great sound recordists and collectors of the 20th Century. An audio portrait of a man who spent his life exploring and influencing the world through recorded sound.

It was 1947 when Tony first stepped out of his apartment in midtown Manhattan with his microphone to capture the sound of his neighborhood. He was a pioneer recordist, experimenting with microphones and jury-rigging tape recorders to make them portable (some of these recordings were first published by Folkways Records). His work creating advertising and political TV and radio commercials is legendary.

The Kitchen Sisters visited Tony in his midtown basement studio in 1999. He had just finished teaching a media class at Harvard by telephone — Tony was agoraphobic and hardly ever ventured beyond his postal zone. He was there in his studio surrounded by reel to reel tape recorders, mixing consoles, framed photographs and awards — and row upon row of audio tapes in carefully labeled boxes.

Tony passed away in 2008. His collection now resides in the Library of congress — 90.5 linear feet, 230 boxes, 76,345 items — some 30,000 folk songs, poems, conversations, stories and dialects from his surrounding neighborhood and 46 countries around the world.

Tony Schwartz: 30,000 Recordings Later

Barbecue, burgoo, mopping the mutton, the fellowship of stirring. Hidden Kitchens stories of conflict, competition and resolution in the backyards and fire pits of our nation. From the all night communal roasting rituals in Owensboro, Kentucky, to the cotton fields, German meat markets, and chuckwagons of west Texas. We hear from men’s cooking teams, African American Trail Riders, Willie Nelson and his bass player Bee Spears, Stubb Stubblefield…And we contemplate David Klose’s BBQ pit on the moon.

What is it About Men and Meat and Midnight and a Pit?

Stories of creativity and invention— the making of a jar of jam, the making of a fashionable 3-D printed covering for an artificial limb, the making of Muttville – a foster care rescue center for senior dogs, a Karaoke Ice Cream Truck, the arrangements for a father’s funeral, the un-making of the Typewriter, and more stories from The Making Of…What People Make in the Bay Area and Why. Produced with KQED and AIR.

The Making Of a Karaoke Ice Cream Truck and More Stories

In 1967 thirty men left Trinidad with 97 steel drums to represent their country at the World's Fair in Montreal. None of them had ever been off their island before. They were members of the Esso Trinidad Tripoli Steel Band, all playing “pan,” the steel drums of Calypso, hammered from the leftover oil drums of World War II.

The band took Expo ’67 by storm. And their sound and performance caught the ear of one of the most popular entertainers of the day: Liberace. The glittery piano virtuoso hired the Trinidad Tripoli Steel Band to go on the road with him for the next two years — traveling to cities large and small around the world including towns in George Wallace’s segregated south. One flamboyant rhinestoned white piano player and 30 black steel drummers from Trinidad playing Flight of the Bumblebee.

We travel to Trinidad and trace the history of the steel drum and follow the Esso Trinidad Tripoli Steel Band from the streets of Port of Spain to the Ed Sullivan Show.

Steel pan was born on the island of Trinidad in the late 1930s. It began as an outlaw instrument, hammered from milk tins, biscuit boxes, brake drums, garbage cans — and later, the oil barrels that were scattered across the oil-rich island after World War II.

When the bands first started, anything metal that could be scavenged was "tuned" and played to make a sound, a note. Pan began as the music of the island's poor, before Trinidad’s independence from Britain. For the native Trinidadians under British rule, the beating of drums and marching in Carnival was often forbidden.

As the oil drums evolved, dozens of pan bands — some more than 100 members strong — sprang up in neighborhoods across the island. Casablanca, Destination Tokyo, Desperadoes, Tripoli... they named themselves after the American war movies and Westerns of the day. Come Carnival, the steel bands would battle one another for the championship, marching across Port of Spain waging musical war — a tradition that continues today.

When the island gained its independence in the 1960s, the foreign companies that controlled the oil resources of Trinidad worried about nationalization of their businesses. The island's prime minister declared steel pan music an important, vital expression of the Trinidadian people. British Petroleum, Esso and other oil companies looking to sway public opinion began sponsoring neighborhood oil drum orchestras, supplying instruments, uniforms and the money to tour outside Trinidad.

In 1967, the Esso Trinidad Tripoli Steel Band (named after the World War II movie Shores of Tripoli) was sent by the government and the Esso oil company to represent Trinidad and the nation's musical heritage at the Montreal Expo World’s Fair.

Liberace & the Trinidad Tripoli Steelband

Robert King Wilkerson was imprisoned at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for 31 years, twenty-nine of those years in solitary confinement. During that time he created a clandestine kitchen in his 6×9 cell where he made pralines. And Julia Kumari Drapkin director of ISeeChange, a community weather and climate journal project talks about creating water gardens, floating streets and living with water in New Orleans.

New Orleans Visions - King's Candy & Living with Water

The Great Galveston Hurricane arrived on a Saturday, September 8, 1900 — almost without warning. Galveston, the grand dame of Texas, a vibrant port city sitting haughtily on a sand bar facing the Gulf, was reduced to a splintered wasteland. Some 6,000 people perished on the island and at least 4000-6000 on the mainland. Survivors struggled to save themselves amid the towering waves, rocking debris, and floating wreckage of their city.

As part of our Lost & Found Sound series, producer John Burnett revisits the deadliest natural disaster in US history with recorded oral histories and memoirs from the children, the lovers – the survivors of the 1900 storm.

The Galveston Hurricane of 1900: No Tongue Can Tell

A walk through Oaxaca's Ethnobotanical Garden with chef and cookbook author Pati Jinich, host of the Emmy and James Beard nominated PBS series Pati's Mexican Table and resident chef at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington DC. Pati talks about her Jewish heritage, growing up in Mexico, immigration, life choices and how she found her way into the kitchen.

Pati's Mexican Jewish Table

Thad Vogler, creator of San Francisco’s Bar Agricole and Trou Normand, travels the world in search of hand made spirits — rum, scotch, cognac, mescal — and the hidden stories of the people and places behind these spirits. His bar is like a library, each bottle rich with story. “Any bottle of rum you take off of the shelf, you have to think about the Caribbean, about the African diaspora, the indigenous culture, the merchant cultures, the colonizing European country, the sugar plantations controlled by the French…”

Thad has just come out with a new book — By the Smoke & the Smell: My Search for the Rare & Sublime on the Spirits Trail. It’s a beautiful book —part travelogue, part memoir.  We talk with Thad about his life and philosophy, about the impact of prohibition, alcohol as agriculture, tracing ingredients to their source, and the bar as a kitchen.

We also talk to Russell Moore, chef and owner of Camino in Oakland. Russell worked for more  than 20 years at Chez Panisse and when he opened Camino he asked Thad Vogler to create a locally sourced, non-GMO bar that reflected his kitchen.

Thad Vogler: A Short History of Spirits

A string of sonic prayer flags — voices and sounds from New Orleans and Bayou Road, the oldest street in the city. Local visionaries, neighborhood entrepreneurs, artists, skateboarders, civil rights activists, musicians, teachers, and more. Listening to the sounds and moods of the City.

We’ve been recording in New Orleans lately for a project we’re doing as part of Prospect.4 – an exhibit of works by artists from around the world who’ve been invited to create events and artworks throughout the city. The first Prospect New Orleans was created in the aftermath of Katrina – exploring the role of art and artists in the rebuilding of the city. The theme of this fourth Prospect is “The Artist in Spite of the Swamp.”

Our project is called “Levee Stream” a five-hour live, street-corner pop-up Cadillac radio station installation on Bayou Road. We’re collaborating with the Houston based artists collective Otabenga Jones & Associates – Jamal Cyrus, Jabari Anderson – who have created a cut-in-half pink Cadillac, with giant speakers in the trunk, and a white plush leather upholstered back seat where guests can sit and converse and be interviewed live on the air. It’s a roving radio station that’s toured to neighborhoods in Houston and Brooklyn – and now New Orleans. The event will take place on Bayou Road and the stories, prayer flags, videos and images will be online at kitchensisters.org and prospectneworleans.org.

Sonic Prayer Flags - New Orleans

Today's Sonic Prayer flag waves for Fats Domino. Rest in Peace.

Listen to more Sonic Prayer Flags from New Orleans at kitchensisters.org/present

Sonic Prayer Flag - Fats Domino

November 14, 1960 — Four six-year-old girls, flanked by Federal Marshals, walked through screaming crowds and policemen on horseback as they approached their new schools for the first time. Leona Tate thought it must be Mardi Gras. Gail thought they were going to kill her.

Four years after the Supreme Court ruled to desegregate schools in Brown v Board of Education, schools in the south were dragging their feet. Finally, in 1960, the NAACP and a daring judge selected two schools in New Orleans to push forward with integration — McDonogh No.19 Elementary and William Frantz.

An application was put in the paper. From 135 families, four girls were selected. They were given psychological tests. Their families were prepared. Members of the Louisiana Legislature took out paid advertisements in the local paper encouraging parents to boycott the schools. There were threats of violence.

When the girls going to McDonogh No. 19 arrived in their classroom, the white children began to disappear. One by one their parents took them out of school. For a year and a half the girls were the only children in the school. Guarded night and day, they were not allowed to play outdoors. The windows were covered with brown paper.

The story of integrating the New Orleans Public schools in 1960 told by Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost Williams, and Gail Etienne Stripling, who integrated McDonogh No.19 Elementary School, and retired Deputy U.S. Marshals Herschel Garner, Al Butler, and Charlie Burks who assisted with the integration efforts at the schools.

First Day of School, 1960, New Orleans

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