In January Regan Burke and I were on WGN Radio 720 touting the benefits of memoir-writing with Justin Kaufmann, host of The Download. Last month 81-year-old writer Bob Eisenberg shared some of his Chicago stories on The Download, and now it’s Audrey Mitchell’s turn.

Ttune in to WGN Radio 720 at 9 pm to hear Audrey Mitchell on WGN Radio 720.

Audrey is another writer whose stories intertwine with mine in my latest book, Writing Out Loud. The 500-word essays she reads aloud in class give us all a better understanding of the Great Migration — her parents came to Chicago from Edgefield County, South Carolina.

Before signing up for my class at the Chicago Cultural Center, Audrey had spent hours at her computer tracking down genealogical information about her family. After even more time at the South Carolina Archives, the Old Edgefield District Genealogical Society, the Great Lakes Regional Archives, and Chicago’s Newberry Library, Audrey ended up with pages of names, dates, and addresses.

But no stories.

All her family stories were oral. None of them were written. But Audrey has changed that. She has written down the stories her parents shared with her and has contacted — and visited — her relatives in South Carolina to get their stories down, too.

Once it was decided that Audrey would be one of the writers we’d feature in Writing Out Loud, I took her out for coffee, brought my digital recorder (I told her it was running!) and enjoyed a couple of magical hours listening to her answer some lingering questions about her life story. Here’s an excerpt from Writing Out Loud where I mention that coffee date: Chapter 68, Why Audrey Stays in Chicago.

Audrey can tell how intrigued I am by all her research. Over a cup of coffee at a local coffee shop, she tells me more of what she’s learned.

The 1870 Census was the first U.S. census to list all persons, including former slaves, as individuals. “I don’t have their slave records, but I do know my great-grandparents lived in Edgefield County in 1870,” she says, reasoning that they’d stayed there after the Emancipation Proclamation. “I have oral history and written data to back that up, but what I’m missing is the voice of my older relatives, what they were thinking, what they were feeling and like that. That’s why I keep taking your class. So my stories don’t get lost like theirs are.”

She then reveals that she’s pretty sure she’s figured out who owned her great-grandparents as slaves.

I’ve heard this genealogy stuff can get addictive, but does she really want to know who the slave owners are? Audrey doesn’t skip a beat. “Oh, yeah!” she says.

I drum up the courage to ask an even more awkward question: Why?

Her answer is obvious.

“Most people do want to know who the slave owners were,” she says. “In most cases, they’re an ancestor, too.”

Audrey’s essay “Why I Have Not Moved to South Carolina” is excerpted in Chapter 68, too, and on The Download this Wednesday she’ll be talking with Justin Kaufmann about her decision to start leading her own memoir-writing class at the Wrightwood-Ashburn Branch of the Chicago Public Library in her southwest side neighborhood of Chicago. Mark your calendars now and tune in to Wgn Radio on Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 9 pm.

1. Everyone leaves your Seeing Eye dog alone.
   

   Second Sense offers great services for the visually impaired.

2. Teacher knows material first-hand.
3. People listen to you.
4. When post-lunch fatigue sets in, you can lean back, close your eyes, put your feet up on the desk and still listen.
5. No dress code.
6. When the heat gets too high in the room, you can strip down to your underwear.
7. You hear conversations you’d never, ever hear anywhere else.

One of those wonderful conversations I heard on break this week at my Second Sense Intensive Screen Reader course was between two of the youngest women in class discussing some social network I’d never heard of. When I asked them what it was, the 21-year-old answered with a shrug. “It’s like Tinder for blind people.”

She told me a little about being raised by her grandparents on Chicago’s South Side and how much she’d hated her high school. “People there just didn’t get me.” She loves this social network app, though. “You just set up an account without any photos or images, pick an alias name, and then start recording messages or questions, then you just wait for people to listen and reply.” The app just records sound, she said, and now she’s talking with blind people from all over the world. “We’re pretty sure a couple of people on there can see, though,” she confided in a hushed voice. “You can just tell.”

I am wont these days to make declarations like “Music was better back then.”

But I doubt music is worse or better. I like plenty of new stuff I hear. I think what I’m really missing is the diverse, surreptitious exposure I got as a lad from, of all places, the likes of WLS and WCFL, the Chicago AM radio powerhouses of my youth.

We were experienced.

What I’m missing is the smorgasbord of music—Motown, psychedelic, schmaltzy, bubble gum, Osmonds, R & B, some really awful, some really great—you name it that, AM served up. Today, I can set my preferences on Pandora or other music services, and get what I know I like. But it seems harder than ever to bump into stuff I’d be surprised by if I just heard it.

When FM started taking off, I, like pretty much every music fan and audiophile, was happy. The tyranny of the three minute single and the low fidelity of monaural radio was replaced by the full, long versions of songs straight off an album, recorded and reproduced in stereo!

Today AM is populated by blowhard pundits and sports hate radio who fill time with repetitive droning. I still enjoy WXRT-FM, which was an evenings-only basement-studio based revelation in my teens. I still like it, but I guess somewhat ironically, it seems kind narrow in its own way—geared to people of a certain age, like, well, me.

To wit, my friend Patrick and I, during a serious barstool discussion, looked up the top singles from 1968. Check it out here, it’s incredible. And here’s a Pinterest collection of WLS “Silver Dollar Surveys” from several years. What my little transistor lacked in audio quality, it more than made up for with variety. Of course, there were the Beatles. And Monkees. But, also James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Johnny Rivers, Steppenwolf, Herb Alpert, Jimi Hendrix, Donovan, Cher, Etta James, The Doors, Smokey Robinson, Petula Clark, The Turtles, on and on.

Yep, I’d grimace when the 1910 Fruitgum Company came on, but the pain was worth the epiphany of falling in love with something new, that I didn’t know or would even guess I’d like.

Even after the AM hay day, when I was in college, I heard new stuff just by walking the halls of my dorm. There was no disc jockey, I’d just duck into a room and ask, “What’s playing?” Today, pretty much everyone is on ear buds. I’ve been told that the thing to do in the modern age is got to festivals—here in Chicago, that would be events like Pitchfork and Riotfest and, gulp, Lollapalooza.

But I’m tool lazy, not mention too cheap (though I happily still buy recorded music). For readers who are music fans, I’m open to ideas.

AM singles-oriented radio certainly had its problems. There was payola and the crazy, caricatured disk jockeys. But I not sure they weren’t better than today’s recommendation algorithms.

I have a love/hate relationship with my computer.

Don’t we all?!

I keep thinking I’d love my computer more if I was more efficient at using it. So with my memoir-writing classes on break now, I signed up for this weeklong course at Second Sense, a fantastic non-profit in Chicago for people who are blind or have visual impairments:

Our Intensive Screen Reader course is a great way to quickly update your computer skills in a fast paced one week class. You learn the new Windows 10 environment along with Microsoft Office 2016, (Word and Excel), Internet browsing and web-based email. This class is great for people who are working or those who cannot commit to our 16-week comprehensive course. If you are transitioning from Windows 7 to 10 or if it has been sometime since you last had some computer training, you might want to consider this course. Prerequisites include being able to type at a steady pace, having previous computers skills and familiarity with your screen reader. Classes meet Monday through Friday From 9:00 am to 4:00 pm April 2 to 6.

You read that right. Five days of computer training. Every weekday this week. 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Was I crazy to sign up for this? Too early to tell. One thing for sure, though: I’m already looking forward to 4 pm on April 6. Look for me at Friday happy hour.

The questions were fast and furious. Photo courtesy of retired teacher Maria LaPlaca Bohrer, who, with her husband Glenn, graciously fed and put us up for the night.

Mike, Whitney and I flew into La Guardia last Tuesday evening. The next day, New York City schools were closed due to snow. The next day, schools on Long Island were closed, too, so our Thursday visit to Rall Elementary School was cancelled.

Eyebrows up! Whitney and I finally outlasted Mother Nature on Friday. We spent that entire day at Harding Avenue Elementary School in Lindenhurst, and if you ask me, the questions the kids asked there made the wait worthwhile. Some examples:

• What happens when you have to go upstairs?
• How many dogs have you had?
• What inspired you to write books?
• How do you eat ice cream?
• How can you write books if you can’t see??
• What if your Seeing Eye dog bit you?
• How come you’ve had so many dogs?
• But what if the ice cream is in a cone?
• Can your dog have babies? Why not?
• When you go to shop, how do you pick out clothes?
• How can you drive?
• How come you have to change dogs so much?
• Is your dog with you all the time when you’re at home, too?
• How do you feel if you’re blind?
• You said all you can see is the color black, right, so I gotta wonder if, when your dog pulls you, does she keep you safe?

It took that little boy a while to get that last question out. I sure didn’t mind — it just gave me a chance to lean down and scratch Whitney’s ears while I listened. Bonus: the concern in the boy’s voice motivated me to lift the harness on Whitney’s back and demonstrate how a Seeing Eye dog works.

And so, for our grand finale, I commanded “Whitney, outside!” The kids watched in awe as my magnificent Seeing Eye dog led mea safely around chairs, bookshelves and children sitting criss-cross applesauce on the floor to the door out of the room.

This past Monday special education teacher Caitlin Farrell emailed me thank you notes from her class that I can hear. If you are looking for — or need — something to smile about, click the players below to hear their beautiful voices.