As we tumble toward autocracy, we still don’t know exactly what’s in store, yet it has become clear what we should fear, and that we need to muster a movement that will stand up to everything hurtling toward us. But on today’s Locus Focus, I want to go back in time and tell the stories of the earlier days of my generation, when we had much less to worry about but didn't realize that then.
On this episode of Locus Focus we will hear Radio Tales for the Road, a series of stories I wrote and recorded twenty years ago, that go as far back in time as 1967, and kindle an alternative vision for how we can live and thrive, despite the challenging times we are experiencing.
HIDDEN WATERS explores the ghosts of once abundant salmon fisheries that were formerly waterfalls and rapids, now inundated behind the dams on the Columbia River, and then a culverted river in the producer’s hometown on the day of her father’s funeral.
STREETS BENEATH MY FEET
Stop the Draft Week, December 1967 in New York City. Producer Barbara Bernstein as a college freshman, has her first encounter with the New York City Tactical Police Force as she and 1,000s of other protesters are chased for five miles, from the Draft Induction Center in lower Manhattan to Times Square.
THE FESTIVAL EXPRESS
In the summer of 1970 producer Barbara Bernstein, then a 21-year-old hippie, traveled across Canada following the Festival Express, a series of rock festivals in Toronto, Winnepeg and Calgary. While the performers – which included some of the greatest musicians of the time: Janis Joplin, the Band, Buddy Guy, Ian and Sylvia, Delaney and Bonnie and Barbara’s schoolmates Sha Na Na – traveled and partied in a special train that carried them from festival to festival, Barbara, her friends, and thousands of other young adventurers followed along the Trans Canadian Highway in an improvised caravan of Volkswagon buses, old school buses and panel trucks and other recycled vehicles. In search of nature and rock and roll, Barbara found herself on the road to discovering the meaning of life.
- KBOO