Radio Diaries

In the spring of 1981, the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings met for a minor league baseball game of little importance. But over the course of 33 innings—8 hours and 25 minutes—the game made history. It was the longest professional baseball game ever played.

This story was produced in collaboration with ESPN's 30 for 30.

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In the 1990s, Arch Coal began mountaintop removal mining in a corner of West Virginia called Pigeonroost Hollow. There used to be dozens of houses in the area, but within a few years there was just one. It belonged to Jimmy Weekley.

This story originally aired on NPR in 2011.

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This week we're sharing a story from the audio magazine Signal Hill.

The story, "What's Inside the Moon," is about the poet Kenneth Koch and a group of elementary school students he taught to write poetry in the 1960s. Half a century later, producer Jess Shane tracked down the students to ask what poetry had meant for their lives.

You can find more stories from Signal Hill at SignalHill.fm.

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This week we're featuring an episode of Phonograph, a podcast that deconstructs the history and art of audio storytelling.

The hosts of Phonograph recently invited Radio Diaries' Joe Richman on their show to talk about "24 Hours at the Golden Apple," a classic episode of This American Life that he helped produce. The Golden Apple is a diner in Chicago, and back in 2000, a group of producers took shifts hanging out there over 24 hours and talking to as many people as they could. Joe's story focused on the friendship between two high school students, Danielle and Allison, who he met during his shift.

Here's an excerpt of Phonograph where Joe talks about making this story, and what it's like to listen back to it more than two decades after it first aired.

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A few years ago we did a story about Martha Lillard, a woman who had spent most of her life sleeping in a device called an iron lung. Martha had caught polio in the early 1950s, and, like many polio survivors, she had difficulty breathing on her own. Her iron lung was a big metal ventilator that fit her entire body inside and used bellows to suck air in and out, helping her to breathe. Martha was the last person in the U.S. to use one.

Martha Lillard died on June 26, 2026. As a remembrance, we're revisiting our story about her.

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Fifty years ago, a group of schoolchildren in South Africa changed history.

For decades, the whites-only government of South Africa had brutally enforced a policy of racial segregation known as apartheid—and had crushed any opposition just as ruthlessly. By the 1970s, an entire generation of anti-apartheid fighters had been silenced. May were imprisoned or killed.

But on June 16, 1976, students in Soweto township outside Johannesburg decided to hold a protest against a government policy mandating that all classes be taught in Afrikaans, the language of South Africa's rulers.

This is their story.

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This year marks 30 years since we first worked with teenagers to record stories about their lives.

Over the years, people have often asked us, whatever happened to them? What happened to Juan, Amanda, Melissa, Frankie, and Josh?

We’re going to find out.

In honor of three decades, we’re setting out to make a new series with our original teenage diarists. And we’re turning to you, our listeners, for help.

If you donate now you’ll get an exclusive look behind the scenes as we make these stories. And for the next two weeks we have a generous match, so every dollar you contribute will be doubled: www.radiodiaries.org/donate

This week on the show, we’re revisiting Juan’s teenage diary, and have a sneak peek of Joe’s recent trip to see him in Colorado.

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When it comes to the space race, we all know names like Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin. But in most moments in history, there are a few names that fall through the cracks. One of those names is Ed Dwight.

When Ed Dwight was selected to train to become an astronaut, many thought he would become the first Black man to go to space. But Ed faced some unexpected hurdles. Today on the show, we bring you his story.

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This episode includes topics and archival audio that some people will find disturbing.

Seventy-five years ago, on the night of May 7th, 1951, close to a thousand people gathered around the courthouse in the small town of Laurel, Mississippi. They came to witness an execution. Willie McGee was a young Black man who had been accused of raping a white woman and sentenced to death.

Six decades later, Bridgette McGee-Robinson teamed up with Radio Diaries to find the truth about what happened to her grandfather.

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From ancient myths of sea monsters lurking below to Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the ocean has long been both a source of fear and fascination. For Captain George Bond, a Navy medical officer in the 1960s, the deep sea was humanity's next frontier. Undersea agriculture, deep sea mining, and human colonies on the ocean floor made up his dream for the future.

Today we bring you the story of the U.S. Navy's little-known experiment building homes on the ocean floor. They called it, Sealab.

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This week we're bringing you a story from our friends at History This Week, a podcast from the History Channel.

April 3, 1951. A man who escaped slavery is grabbed off the streets of Boston and thrown into a carriage. He fights back, shouting to the crowd, but it doesn’t matter. Under a new federal law, even the North isn’t safe.

The Fugitive Slave Act has turned cities like Boston into hunting grounds. Freedom seekers are being captured, and ordinary citizens are being forced to help.

But across the North, resistance is growing. In Pennsylvania, a man named William Parker is building a network to fight back. When slave catchers come to his door, that resistance explodes into violence.

How did one law push the country dramatically closer to war? And what happens when the people targeted by this law refuse to surrender?

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Last week, Leqaa Kordia, young Palestinian woman from Paterson, New Jersey, walked out of an ICE detention center in Texas. Kordia had been held for more than a year.

Radio Diaries has been following her story and recorded Kordia while detention. Now, we bring you her first interview since her release.

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When the Hollywood classic, Casablanca, was released in 1943, moviegoers were thrilled by the love story. Humphrey Bogart stars as the cynical owner of Rick’s Cafe, a nightclub in Morocco. Ingrid Bergman is his old flame, Ilsa, now married to Victor Laszlo, a dashing resistance leader hunted by the Nazis.

Many of the characters at Rick's Café are European refugees trying to make their way to America. What most viewers didn't know is that those characters were played by actors who themselves had recently fled the Nazis. This casting choice lent the film an authenticity that helped deliver its message: that a war far from our borders was a war worth waging.

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This is the final episode of our series about Isaac Woodard, a Black soldier who was beaten and blinded by a white police officer in 1946. In the last episode, radio host Orson Welles, who was investigating the case, learned the officer's identity.

Isaac Woodard himself told a reporter, "Nothing they can do to the police officer will give me my eyes back, but if they punish him good and legal it may keep the same thing from happening to some more of our boys coming back home. I want him punished."

But demanding accountability and getting it were two different things—especially in the Jim Crow South. This week, the officer goes to trial, and the President of the United States takes notice.

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Last week, we shared the story of Isaac Woodard, a Black soldier who was brutally beaten by a white police officer in South Carolina. No one knew the name of the police officer. Or even the town where it happened. Not even Woodard himself.

By the summer of '46, the case was gaining national attention thanks to Orson Welles, who was investigating the crime, week-by-week, on his radio show.

Today, episode 2 of our series Orson Welles and the Blind Soldier, about an incident in a small, southern town that became a spark in the growing civil rights movement.

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Thanks to Richard Gergel for his book Unexampled Courage and Indiana University’s Lilly Library for archival audio. Music from Matthias Bossi and Duke Ellington.

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On February 12, 1946, a Black soldier was heading home from WWII when he was brutally beaten by a white police officer in South Carolina. No one knew the identity of the police officer. No one even knew the town where it happened.

When the famous radio host Orson Welles heard about the crime, he pledged to solve the mystery, week-by-week, on the air.

Today, episode 1 of our new series Orson Welles and the Blind Soldier, about an incident in a small, southern town that led to the desegregation of the U.S. military.

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Thanks to Richard Gergel for his book Unexampled Courage and Indiana University’s Lilly Library for archival audio. Music from Matthias Bossi and Bill Frisell for music.

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On February 12, 1946, an African American soldier heading home from WWII was attacked by a white police officer somewhere in South Carolina. The soldier's name was Isaac Woodard.

No one knew the identity of the officer who attacked Woodard. No one even knew which town it had happened in. So when the famous radio host Orson Welles heard about the case, he vowed to solve it on the air.

Radio Diaries and Radiotopia bring you a new series about a crime in a small southern town that led to the desegregation of the United States military.

The first episode drops February 12th on the Radio Diaries Podcast.

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A little over a decade ago, we went to interview a woman at her small one-bedroom apartment in a sprawling complex in the Bronx. She was living a quiet and somewhat anonymous life. But many years earlier, she had done something remarkable.

The woman’s name was Claudette Colvin. In 1955, she was a 15-year-old girl growing up in Montgomery, Alabama. On March 2nd of that year, Colvin refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a public bus, and was arrested. This was nine months before Rosa Parks would do the exact same thing. But while Rosa Parks became an icon of the Civil Rights movement, Colvin spent most of her life in obscurity.

Claudette Colvin passed away this week, at age 86. We’re remembering her by revisiting the story we did with her in 2015.

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Looking for love is an art, not a science. People have been trying to crack the code, with mixed success, for a long time.

This week we're going back to the 1960s, when a couple Harvard students had an idea.

Businesses had started using a new technology called the computer to process payroll or match a client with the right type of insurance. What if these same computers could be used to get a date?

This is the story of the very first computer dating service, Operation Match.

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Today on the show, we sit down with photographer Andrew Lichtenstein to discuss his new book, THIS SHORT LIFE, which combines photo essays with audio testimonies about 12 Americans, from a West Virginia coal miner to a Maine farmer, all united by how the struggles of their past have shaped their present. You'll hear audio testimony from some of the people in the book.

Buy THIS SHORT LIFE here.

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