PODCAST · society
Grandma's Been There
by Siobhan Barry
Host and creator Siobhan Barry takes listeners back to the 1950s and 1960s. Her stories, sometimes funny and sometimes serious, are time traveling trips through the days of penny candies, neighborhood ice cream parlors, fifty-cent movie tickets, air raid drills, summers without air conditioning, street games, homemade toys, football weddings, transistor radios, Beatlemania, and a cultural revolution.
Episodes
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Cold Brew And A Croissant
How’d you like to visit your childhood home only to find out your old address no longer exists?
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What Are We Having For Supper?
Lots of things have changed since I was a kid, but there’s one question American kids have been asking every day since the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. “What are we having for supper?”
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A Few Of My Favorite Things
I became a podcaster because I love podcasts. They’re entertaining, educational and sometimes even inspirational. This week, I’d like to tell you about a handful of my favorites in case you’re looking for something new to listen to.
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I Do So Declare
By the time we were sixth graders, we were used to our teachers’ theatrics. The antiquated flowery language, trite worn out proverbs and dumb expressions meant to showcase their superior intelligence while illustrating our stupidity. They had a million of them. Is this what our parents were…
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Future Shock
In the mid-1960s, our teachers warned us we would someday suffer from something called “future shock.” Our world would change so drastically and so rapidly that we wouldn’t be able to keep up with it all. It would cause distress, anxiety, even disorientation and confusion. Maybe for the older...
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Back To School
The first few weeks of a new school year were always a rather frenetic period of readjustment and settling in. Get used to a new teacher. Get the right notebooks. Cover all those textbooks. For me personally, the hardest thing to adjust to every September was being back in school while the…
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The Psychedelic Shop
In the late 1960s, you didn’t have to be fully aligned with the counterculture to enjoy a visit to a psychedelic shop. You just had to be open to new ideas and have a willingness to recapture some of that childhood sense of wonder, whether you were an adult or a kid.
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The New Look
Mary Quant, the fashion designer whose creations defined the 1960s “mod” era said she spent her thirteenth birthday crying because in her words, “old age had struck.” All she had to look forward to now were below the knee-length dresses, high heeled shoes, corsets, nylons and garter belts, stiff...
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The Candy Store
When we were little kids, just about everything was chosen for us, but the candy store was a place where we got to pick what we wanted.
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Submitted For Your Approval
Everything I need to know about life, I learned from Rod Serling. Well, maybe not everything, but lots of important stuff. By the time I was thirteen, I’d seen every single “Twilight Zone” episode more than once.
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Yoga
A richer, fuller more joyful life? Relaxation, discipline and more will power? Increased physical, mental and spiritual control? Who wouldn’t want all that?
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Our Summer Reading List
Nowadays, they call it “me time.” A time to shut out work, world and worries and just concentrate on wellbeing and recharging the physical and spiritual batteries. When I was a kid, we called it summer. Just like the old rhyme said, “No more pencils, no more books. No more teachers’ dirty looks.”…
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The Summer of Love
The summer of 1967, so frivolously referred to as the summer of love was a turning point, an ending and a beginning. Somewhere around the middle of July, the counterculture gained a number. I jumped in head first, and never looked back. It was the moment I’d been waiting for for thirteen years.
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Where Are We Going Today?
Summer days were long, lazy and dreamy. We were content to spend most of our school vacation outside eating ice cream, drinking sodas and playing with friends on the avenue, going no further than the corner store or the playground on the next block. But on a Saturday or Sunday, or during those…
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From Unknown Faces
In January 1968, my favorite band, The Byrds released an album called The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Life-long fans like me referred to it as “the Notorious album.” One of the tracks on the album was “Draft Morning,” a song about a young man, a draftee who was in no hurry to be shipped off to Viet...
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Half Gaelic, Half Garlic
When we were kids, it was common for us to ask each other, “What are you?” What we were actually asking was, “What nationality are you? Where’s your family from?”
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A Bench For All Seasons: Summer
Even as a child, I was in love with the seasons, their unique personalities and the different things they did to get our attention. But if you asked me what my favorite season was, I didn’t even have to think about it. “Summer!” I said, just like every other kid I knew. Why would you even have to...
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The Eternal Kid: A Father's Day Story
The reason I have so many stories about my father from my own childhood and from the stories he told me about his years as a kid is because of my exceptional memory—the one I’m always bragging about in these episodes, the one I inherited from him.
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It's My Birthday!
I’m a June baby, one of Cancer’s moon children born right after the longest day of the year. In other words, I’m lucky enough to be able to celebrate my birthday right as the summer begins.
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Banned
Before I even became a teenager, there were plenty of banned rock and roll records out there. Many of them were in my own record cabinet.
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I Cannot Tell A Lie
When we were kids, the adults in our lives wanted to be sure we understood that honesty was always the best policy. But how was that concept supposed to sink in when they were constantly lying to us?
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Hair
When I was a year old, I still hadn’t grown any hair. My mother Scotch taped a bow to the top of my bald head so I would look less like a little boy in girls’ clothing. As a teenager in high school, I loved my waist-length hair and couldn’t understand why my teachers hated it and wanted me to cut...
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All About Bill
In March of 1968, Bill Graham opened The Fillmore East. Though it only lasted three years, it would be hailed by both musicians and concert goers as the most unforgettable and greatest rock venue of all time. This month marks the 58th anniversary of the first of countless visits I made to The...
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How Did They Do It?
Brooklyn mothers like mine always found a way to make it all happen for their families. These women that grew up in the Great Depression and came of age during a world war were filled with resilience and ingenuity. The iconic “We can do it!” attitude of Rosie the Riveter endured in our mothers…
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The Coolest Place in the World
As a thirteen-year-old, I prayed for one Greenwich Village folksinger or one barefoot East Village poet to stray across the Manhattan Bridge and start an artistic community in my neighborhood. Everything worth seeing and hearing was in Manhattan. What was wrong with Brooklyn?
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I Know Something You Don't Know
When I was a kid, there was one sure way to get under another kid’s skin. All you had to do was look at them and taunt, “I know something you don’t know.” It never failed. At first, they tried to pretend they didn’t care, but they couldn’t keep it up for long. In two minutes or less, they’d spin...
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Well, Hello Mister Soul
On Christmas morning in 1967, I was kinda disappointed when the record I got wasn’t the one I had asked for. I didn’t think I wanted that album. Fortunately for me, my mother knew better.
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The Fox Hunter
In 1961, when someone from my school newspaper asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer turned a few heads. I was seven and it was the height of the baby boom. The world was bursting with opportunities.
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A Bench For All Seasons: Spring
One of my favorite ways to recharge is to just sit outside and watch the seasons do what they do best. Each season has a unique personality, but there is one thing they all have in common. They don’t wait around for us to appreciate them. They come and go pretty fast, especially the spring.
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Xanadu's Landlord
When you watch the same movie at various stages of your life, you see the story from very different perspectives. I recently watched “Citizen Kane” again for the first time since I was seventeen. It brought back a lot of memories. It also brought up some questions that would never have entered my...
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The One True Church
The road to heaven was paved with suffering. Getting slapped by the bishop during our Confirmation ceremony was a reminder of just how hard it was to be a Christian. Only the baptized could go to heaven, and if communist soldiers invaded our country and demanded that we give up our religion or…
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Baby, You're A Rich Man
New books, new records, the latest clothes and shoes, new movies… Guess what city they all hit first? New York, of which Brooklyn is a part. Thanks to your location, you’re more worldly and savvy than any small town kid. There’s nothing you can’t get here and you never have to worry about having...
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School Days Part 2
By the time I became a fourth grader, I knew my way around the culture and the campus of my school. I wasn’t “new” anymore. My condolences went to the latest class of first graders. I’d survived, and with a little luck, so would they.
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School Days Part 1
The mornings always felt two times longer than the afternoons, and Mondays always felt twice as long as Fridays. But lunchtime recess? Well, that flew by faster than we could rip open a candy bar wrapper. That was how our school days went.
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Going Viral
In the 1950s and early ‘60s, there was a laundry list of what were referred to as “childhood illnesses” that every single one of us were going to get at some point. Viruses that all came with pink rashes, red rashes, blisters or lesions. The first nine years of my life are one big blotchy, itchy...
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Hey Mom, Can The Beatles Stay Here Tonight?
As pre-teen rock and roll fans in the mid 1960s, we were passionate followers and defenders of our musical idols. Laugh if you want, but we were totally sincere. With the kind of joy these young musicians and their music brought us, we owed them our allegiance and we were glad to give it.
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Rock and Roll
Since we just passed the 67th anniversary of the date that's come to be known as "the day the music died," I thought I'd spend a few minutes talking about my earliest memories of rock and roll and my first exposure to Buddy Holly's timeless music.
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The Media Push
The television shows made during the 1950s and '60s helped shape the way we felt about Brooklyn. Those shows presented an image of family life in American towns that were totally unrecognizable to city kids like me.
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A Bench For All Seasons: Winter
Winter is a season of multiple personalities. When we were kids, we loved some of its personalities, but hated others. Its long cold days were depressing. Just the length of the season tried our patience. But when it gave us snow, the winter was our best friend and it could stay as long as it liked.
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Where's Your Tie??
Today, I'm going to tell you all about my school uniforms. They were outdated, impractical and humiliating. I hated them.
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Goin' Up The Country
This week, I think we need a vacation. And where do Brooklyn people go to get away from the congested dirty city? To the Catskill Mountains, of course. We're goin' up the country!
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The Brooklyn Botanic Gardens
As I've said many a time, life in Brooklyn sometimes left a bit to be desired. On the other hand, it had some very special and unique places that plenty of other cities didn't have. This week, I want to take you with me to visit one of those places.
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Local Calls
Since "Grandma's Been There" is turning one year old in about another month, I thought I'd make the last episode of 2025 about the podcast itself.
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A Flatbush Christmas
Now the seasons pass with the speed of shooting stars, but at a time when a year represented one tenth of my entire life, it always felt as if holidays would never come. And out of all the holidays, Christmas was by far the hardest one to wait for.
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Anatomy of a Shooting Star
Sometimes shooting stars appear to us in human forms. They get caught in our gravitational fields and produce streaks of light across the heavens of our lives. The imprints they leave remain with us forever.
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Unknown Legends
This week, as we tumble down the wormhole, we're going straight past the 1960s and 1950s and time traveling back to the early 1940s. Today's episode brings us to the Brooklyn Skating Rink on Empire Boulevard in December of 1942. The story is based on real places, actual events and real people.…
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Life in the Temperate Zone
A temperate zone is defined as an area that has a moderate climate and distinct seasons with relatively mild temperatures. "Mild?" That is a relative term. Even though I knew there were plenty of hotter, colder, wetter and drier places on this earth, the middle latitudes didn't always feel so...
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November 22nd
It's often said that anyone who's old enough to remember the day can tell you exactly where they were on November 22, 1963. As trite as it may sound, it's the truth. For me, the memory of that afternoon and the days that followed will never fade or disappear.
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Pictures of Joni
I was fourteen years old the first time I saw Joni Mitchell. She was simplicity and intricacy, and she was beautiful. She was like no other artist I'd ever seen or heard before. Let me share some of my pictures of Joni with you.
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Elementary School Political Science
John Kennedy entered the White House five months after I entered the first grade. When I saw that the new president was a young man with a daughter around my age, I knew things were looking up. But how much of what I saw was real and how much of it was an illusion?
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Host and creator Siobhan Barry takes listeners back to the 1950s and 1960s. Her stories, sometimes funny and sometimes serious, are time traveling trips through the days of penny candies, neighborhood ice cream parlors, fifty-cent movie tickets, air raid drills, summers without air conditioning, street games, homemade toys, football weddings, transistor radios, Beatlemania, and a cultural revolution.
HOSTED BY
Siobhan Barry
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Grandma's Been There have?
Grandma's Been There currently has 95 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Grandma's Been There about?
Host and creator Siobhan Barry takes listeners back to the 1950s and 1960s. Her stories, sometimes funny and sometimes serious, are time traveling trips through the days of penny candies, neighborhood ice cream parlors, fifty-cent movie tickets, air raid drills, summers without air conditioning,...
How often does Grandma's Been There release new episodes?
Grandma's Been There has 95 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Grandma's Been There?
You can listen to Grandma's Been There on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Grandma's Been There?
Grandma's Been There is created and hosted by Siobhan Barry.
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