Our Episodes
Special Edition- The Polio Outbreak
With a terrible virus sweeping the nation, the word “vaccine” dominated headlines for months. Not COVID-19, but polio. Not now, but the 1950s. Elder generations remember it well. But...
Season 3 Finale: The Deindustrialization of Detroit
Some look at Detroit today and wonder how the abandoned buildings got here. What happened between The Arsenal of Democracy and now? How did a city of nearly 2...
Season 3 – Episode 09: Lottie The Body, The Burlesque Queen of Detroit
Burlesque legend Lottie Graves-Claiborne wowed ’em on several continents, sharing the stage with numerous worldwide stars. But throughout her celebrated 90 years, Lottie insisted on highlighting the art of the tease. This...
Season 3 – Episode 08: Birds of a Feather- Bowling, Belgians, Beer, Pigeons, and the Cadieux Cafe
A historic cafe has morphed its way through generations of change, and still … still … there is the feather bowling. Feather bowling? Yes, feather bowling. One man, born in...
Season 3 – Episode 07: The Politics of Fear
In 1952, famed historian David Maraniss’s father, Elliott Maraniss, was fired by the Detroit Times, the city’s Hearst daily newspaper. This happened on the very day congressional witch hunters...
Season 03 – Episode 06: The Evangelista Occult Murders
Benny Evangelista found Detroit’s near East Side fertile territory for dispensing pay-as-you-go insights into the lives of his working-class clientele. He was known in the neighborhood as a “divine...
Season 3 – Episode 05: Far from New Orleans, Long Before Motown, Jazz Became Detroit’s Pulse
The magnet of good-paying factory jobs and the nurturing influence of an excellent public school music program helped make Detroit a hotbed of jazz and the hometown of many...
Season 3 – Episode 04: They Sat Down and Rocked The Boat: Walter Reuther’s Blue-Collar Revolution
He came to Detroit as a high-school dropout raised in hardscrabble West Virginia. The career arc that followed — from diemaker at Henry Ford’s Ford Rouge Plant to confidant...
Season 3 – Episode 03: From Midnight to Windsor, Detroit’s Underground Railroad
From Dr. King’s march on Woodward to Cobo Hall where he delivered an early version of his “I Have a Dream” speech, to Coleman Young’s election in 1973, to...
Season 3 – Episode 02: How WABX Radio and Plum Street Put the Counter in Counter-Culture
In the late 60s, a thunderously enduring upheaval occurred in the musical and cultural landscape. Young Americans, knowingly or not, were overdue for something other than Top 40 music...
Season 3 – Episode 01: How the Spotlight Found Coleman Young
If anybody was taking bets in the early 1960s, Coleman A. Young would have been a true longshot for getting himself elected to just about anything. He held any...
Special Release: Detroit’s Response to the 1918 Spanish Flu
When COVID-19 began to ravage the world, many health experts compared it to the 1918 Spanish Flu. What are the similarities? Nearly 100 years ago, the United States was...
