Search Results for: oral history
Rocked: An Oral History of the 1989 World Series Earthquake
Former players, broadcasters, fans and city officials look back on the Giants-A’s series and the devastating 6.9 quake that rocked Candlestick Park and the Bay Area:
"McGwire: We thought the whole place was burning up like in 1906.
"George Thurlow, fan, upper deck: The mood of the crowd was jubilant and excited and Wow, that was cool until the first radio announcements began. The first one that I have written down was, ‘The Bay Bridge is down.’
"Dolich: They didn’t say a piece collapsed. It was, ‘The Bay Bridge collapsed.’ You can only think, Oh my god, this is a horror movie coming true.
Keep the Things You Forgot: An Elliott Smith Oral History
Ten years after the singer-songwriter’s death, friends and bandmates tell the story of his life and career:
“I had a copy of the finished cassette on me all the time and I was listening to it all the time. I had a lot of friends at Sub Pop and Matador and Cavity Search and all these record labels, and I was hanging out with them because I was promoting [Heatmiser], and I needed these labels to put their bands on tour with my band, but I didn’t burst into Cavity Search Records like, ‘You have to play this! It’s the best thing you’ve ever heard and you need to release it right now.’ I was probably just like, ‘I’ve got this solo cassette by Elliott.’ ‘What? Elliott does solo stuff?’ I put it on and their jaws dropped. They released it without changing a thing. That’s Roman Candle.”
An Oral History of the March on Washington
Organizers, demonstrators, and speakers remember one of the most significant political rallies in U.S. history:
“Rachelle Horowitz
“A. Philip Randolph gave a speech that is just ignored too much. He gave the speech for jobs and economic rights, and he did it with incredible power. Then my heart was in my mouth for John Lewis, the then 23-year-old SNCC leader from Troy, Alabama. If you look at that speech today, it was still the most radical. And then of course Dr. King was the culmination. Mahalia Jackson sang, not to be believed. If you look at clips of the march, you see Bayard running around and talking, he never stopped. He’s organizing everything except when Mahalia sings.”
The Oral History of NY1
How Time Warner Cable’s NY1 became an iconic news channel in New York City:
Roma Torre: I would have been in the office at nine o’ clock because that’s when I arrive. But because it was a primary election day, and I was covering politics at the time, they told me to come in at two o’clock on September 11th. I was at home, and my daughter had just started kindergarten. My husband ran in and said, ‘Turn to CNN!’ I heard the woman who replaced me at the anchor desk speaking on CNN and that’s because CNN’s antenna was knocked out because they were on top of the World Trade Center. NY1’s was on top of the Empire State Building. For a while, we were the only game in town. CNN was putting us on their air because they had no means of transmission. I got dressed so fast and jumped in the car and started driving, which was kind of foolish because I didn’t have a game plan. Of course, from Jersey, all roads were closed getting into the city. I did a u-turn in Route 46 and decided to go North and went to Tarrytown and parked the car because I heard on the radio that Metro North was running. When I got to Grand Central Terminal, I miraculously found a cab and got one block until firefighters stopped the cab to ask if he could please let them in to take reinforcements to the tower. I was like, ‘Of course!’ So I walked to the west side. I really didn’t get into the office until about seven or eight o’ clock that night and I set out from my house at 10 a.m.
Good Will Hunting: An Oral History
Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Robin Williams and Gus Van Sant reflect on the film 15 years later:
“Damon: The very first day, I remember we started crying, because it was a scene between Robin and Stellan. And when Gus called action and we watched these guys—I mean accomplished actors—do our scene verbatim, we had waited so long for this to happen. I remember just sitting next to Ben and I had tears rolling down my cheeks because I was just so happy and relieved that it was really happening.
“Affleck: We did tear up a little bit. But why is Matt saying this shit? Like, he holds his fucking tongue for 15 years and now because it’s Boston magazine, he says he started crying? His career is not over, you know what I mean? He needs people to believe that he’s like Jason Bourne or whatever!”
2 Good 2 Be 4Gotten: An Oral History of Freaks and Geeks
An oral history of Freaks and Geeks, which received a huge cult following after its cancellation, and launched the careers of actors like Seth Rogen, Jason Segel and James Franco:
“PAUL FEIG: We did our infamous two weeks with the writers locking ourselves in a room and telling personal stories. I wrote a list of questions for everybody to answer: ‘What was the best thing that happened to you in high school? What was the worst thing that happened to you in high school? Who were you in love with and why?’
“JUDD APATOW: ‘What was your worst drug experience? Who was your first girlfriend? What’s the first sexual thing you ever did? What’s the most humiliating thing that ever happened to you during high school?’
“PAUL FEIG: That’s where most of our stories came from. Weirder stuff happens to people in real life than it does on TV. It was a personal show for me and I wanted it to be personal for everybody else.
“GABE SACHS (writer, ‘I’m with the Band,’ ‘The Garage Door’): We thought the questionnaires were a private thing between us and Judd and Paul, so we wrote really honest. And the next day at work we get them all bound together. We’re laughing with everyone but going, ‘Oh, man!'”
Chicago Tylenol Murders: An Oral History
Thirty years after seven people in Chicago died after taking cyanide-laced Tylenol, investigators, law enforcement officers, health and public officials, and friends and family members recount how it all unfolded. The perpetrator was never found, and the case was recently reopened:
“Nurse Jensen
The [Janus] family was all at Adam’s house, planning the funeral and mourning together. Adam’s younger brother, Stanley [Janus], had some chronic back pain. And he asked his wife—they had been married just a little while, and her name was also Theresa—to get him some Tylenol. And she came out and gave him two Tylenol, and then she took two Tylenol. And then he went down. And then she went down.
“Charles Kramer
Lieutenant with the Arlington Heights Fire Department [to the Daily Herald]
When I arrived at the house, there were cars and people everywhere. All eight of my men were working, four on one man and four on a woman. Everything that would happen to the man happened to the woman a few minutes later.
“Dr. Kim
As I was putting on my blue blazer to leave, around 5:30, a nurse told me that they were bringing the Janus family back. And I said, ‘Well, it’s probably the parents,’ because they were feeble and they might have been very upset. And the nurse said, ‘No, it’s his brother.’ I had been talking to this six-foot healthy guy. And I said, ‘Well, what happened? Did he faint?’ And she said, ‘They are doing CPR—and they are working on his wife too.’ That’s when I took my blazer off.”
The Dream Will Never Die: An Oral History of the Dream Team
Twenty years later, how Michael, Magic and the NBA’s best players sought to regain U.S. dominance in Olympic basketball:
Nathaniel Butler (official NBA photographer): We were sitting on the baseline. Magic is backing a guy down, and the guy on defense is yelling at his bench, “Now! Now!” And on the bench, one guy’s pulling a camera out of his sock and taking a photo of his teammate.
Hubbard: One time they were playing against Venezuela, and the guy who was guarding Magic kept on saying, “I need your shoes! I need your shoes!”During the game. And Magic goes, “Look, I need my shoes!”
Guantánamo: An Oral History
Ten years after the arrival of the first detainees, officials, lawyers, prisoners and soldiers speak out on how it all started—and how difficult it has been to close it:
“When I first got down to Guantánamo, I, along pretty much with everybody else in my group, thought that we were going to be dealing with the worst of the worst. That’s what we had been told.
“When I started to get a broader view, I realized that a large majority of the population just had no business being at Guantánamo. Maybe they had been picked up on the battlefield, and maybe they were involved in low-level insurgency. That would’ve been the worst of it with a large portion of these characters. The majority of the ones that I saw—really, we just didn’t have anything on them. So it was kind of a shock to the system on the level of the detainees.”
The Ultimate Oral History of ‘Wet Hot American Summer’
For this complete-ish oral history in celebration of Wet Hot’s 10th anniversary, we asked director and writer David Wain, his cowriter and creative partner, Michael Showalter, and stars including Janeane Garofalo, Paul Rudd, David Hyde Pierce, Elizabeth Banks, and Amy Poehler to reminisce about the shoot, the living conditions, the kids, the notoriously horrendous weather, and the hilarity (and debauchery) that took place off-camera. Throw another log on the soaking-wet campfire—theirs is an epic tale of camaraderie and survival in the heart of Pennsylvania darkness.
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