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Ira Glass (0:17)
Ira here to announce that I am helping kick off the Tribeca Festival with a live event in New York City on June 10th. That's Tuesday night, June 10th. I'm gonna be on stage with Ira Madison III, the host of the podcast. Keep It. What we're gonna do is we're gonna take a little eras tour through 30 years of this American life. Visit different periods of the show with clips and stories. Tickets are on sale now@tribecafilm.com this American Life Again, that is Tribecafilm.com this americanlive if you're in New York, I hope you can come out. I think it's going to be fun.
Unknown (0:55)
A quick warning. There are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org.
Ira Glass (1:06)
My dad's ATM password was 1119 till the day he died. 1119 was also in the password for his home wi fi network. 1119 was shorthand for 1119 Bayard street which is where his grandfather, my great grandfather, owned a tiny grocery store on the ground floor of a house in downtown Baltimore in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s. Picture a neighborhood bodega and you've got the general size of this thing. The family lived upstairs, worked downstairs. So much happened at 11:19 Bayard. So many things about our family were set in motion there. But my sisters and I only got little scraps of stories about the place. This handful of family defining origin stories that get trotted out now and then. Like for instance, there was the one about the chickens. My dad and his brother Lenny both worked in the store from the time they were little kids and chickens were slaughtered at the store which freaked them out, both of them to the point where decades later, as grown men, neither of them ate chicken and they'd explain this was the reason why. Or there's the story about my great grandfather's bookkeeping skills. I'm actually named for my great grandfather, Isador Friedlander. My parents chose Ira instead of Isadore because Isadore Glass is a parsable English sentence. Isadore Glass. My mom once told me that they picked Aira over the alternatives because it sounded less Jewish to them. It just goes to show how Completely, utterly Jewish their entire world was back then. I've heard all my life what a kind hearted man Isadore was and a soft touch. Which brings me to this next story we would hear now and then. During the Depression when everybody in the neighborhood was broke and buying on credit, Isadore set up a system where every customer would have a little book like this flimsy paper thing where he would write down what they owed. But the thing about the system was the customer kept the book. Maybe you see the problem with this. All the time customers would show up at the store and say I lost my book and is it over? Say that in math it's okay, what do you think you owe? And then they'd say some not very high number and he'd write it down and hand them a new book to take home. Years later my dad became a certified public accountant. And this became one of those the day Peter Parker got bit by the radioactive spider sort of origin stories. What bad bookkeeping he saw his grandfather do at 11:19 Bayard and how he was going to do better. I'm sure some good things happened at 1119 Bayard. But those stories didn't get passed down. We heard painful things. My dad was miserable working there. So was his brother, his mom, my grandma Frida got out of the store, went to college, taught Latin in junior high school but then got dragged back into the family business against her will like Michael Corleone when her dad Isadore got sick. I visited 1119 Bayard. I don't know, maybe half a dozen times in my life. A dozen times. Usually it would happen when my uncle Lenny came to town. He and my dad would drive us all downtown. We'd stand outside 1119 Bayard and the two of them would marvel at the place, at the fact of it, I think at the distance they'd come from there. My dad with his accounting firm out in the suburbs. My uncle who became a surgeon and moved to San Diego. Their kids raised in the kind of middle class comfort that we ate all the chicken we could ever want. I always found those trips disappointing. We take a picture, hang around there on the sidewalk. It's not a store anymore, just somebody's house. Doesn't look like anything. A row house in a block of row houses. Somebody, a few years ago somebody painted a cheerful Christian mural on one side of the building. The quote from the Book of Mark. Every time I've gone to 1119 Bayard and stood on the sidewalk, I tried to picture it. My family there long ago. Frida in her 30s, at the cash register against her will. My dad is a little boy opening boxes and putting stuff on shelves. I'm not great at that kind of thing. It's like trying to summon ghosts with a Ouija board. The little pointer refuses to budge. We've all got these spots from our family's past. We go to them. They're like Civil War battlefields that have been washed of blood long ago. We pause there, look at the trees and the grassy fields, and we want what? Some connection to something. I am who I am partly because of this place. But now it's mute. So we take a selfie and try to tune into the past, like a distant radio station whose signal we can just barely make out. Today on our program, we have a story of somebody else who heads out to a place like that from his family's history looking for answers. And he gets so much more out of it than I ever did at 11:19 Bayard about who he is. From WBEZ Chicago, at CIS American Life, I'm Aaron Glass. Stay with us. Support for this American Life and the following message come from Audible. Listen to the new Audible original the Big Fix, a Jack Bergen mystery inspired by a real life battle in Los Angeles. Conspiracy abounds as a Mexican American community is pushed out in order to build Dodgers stadium. Fellow Private Jack Bergen, played by Jon Hamm, as he investigates this latest case of murder and mayhem. Go to audible.com thebigfix and listen now.