The Kitchen Sisters

The Kitchen Sisters hit the links at the legendary Bing Crosby Pro Am at Pebble Beach.

Meet Itumeleng “Itu” Banda — a young, South African activist, award-winning radio host, and undeniable role model. A boundary-breaker and a storyteller. We met Itu at the 2019 International Congress of Youth Voices in Puerto Rico and recorded her stories. Motivated by a deep sense of responsibility for her community, and by personal experience with gun violence, Itu is committed to forging a future that is safer for people like and unlike herself. In her radio work, Itu is blazing a trail as a voice for young people, and making a point to open up space for female speakers and listeners. Here’s Itu. This story was produced by Teddy Alexander with The Kitchen Sisters. Hear more stories from the International Congress of Youth Voices on our podcast, The Kitchen Sisters Present...

The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted routines in every corner of the globe. Photographers have been quick to document how the world looks different: public squares, streets, and airport terminals devoid of people. But one composer wants to capture what that shift sounds like. Pete Stollery is an electro-acoustic composer living in Scotland and he sees this as a rare moment to listen to the noises the world makes in lockdown and to create a living archive of the moment we're in. Produced by Nina Sparling. Explore the map and submit your sounds here: https://sound-scotland.co.uk/news/covid-19-sound-map

#KeeperoftheDay – Latino Public Radio Consortium, an affiliate of the Library of Congress Radio Preservation Task Force. Here is a clip with astronaut Jose Hernandez from the Historias de Si Se Puede series: “sixty-second radio stories about immigrants and second generation Latinos, who through persistent struggle have found success in music, the professions, politics, community involvement, and are now an inspiration to countless others.” https://latinopublicradioconsortium.org/

#KeeperoftheDay – Pacifica Radio Archives an affiliate of the Library of Congress Radio Preservation Task Force. “Chronicling the political, cultural and artistic movements of the second half of the 20th century.” Here’s a gem from the archive. A 1956 interview with Rosa Parks. https://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/recording/bb0566 Episode Title: Commentary of a Black Southern busrider / Rosa Parks Series Title: Commentary by Sidney Roger PRA Archive #: BB0566 Description: Discussion of Rosa Park’s refusal to give up her seat to a white man and the resulting bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. The interview was conducted by Sidney Rogers with Rosa Parks in 1956. Station: KPFA Date Recorded on: April 1956. Date Broadcast on: KPFA, 20 Dec. 1962. Item duration: 1 reel (16 min.) : 7 1/2 ips, mono.|16:30 Keywords: These terms will not bring up a complete list of all items in our catalog associated with this subject. Click here to search our entire catalog. Roger, Sidney. Blacks — Civil rights. Protests, demonstrations, vigils, etc. — Montgomery (Ala.). African Americans–Civil rights–History Roger, Sydney Parks, Rosa, 1913-2005 Contributor: Sidney Roger Role: Host Distributor: Los Angeles : Pacifica Radio Archive, 1962.

Josh Shepperd, Director of the Radio Preservation Task Force at the Library of Congress called The Keeper Hotline to tell us about this incredible undertaking. "Radio history is pretty endangered and it turns out to be one of the largest and unexplored and unpreserved archives in the United States..." Learn more: https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-recording-preservation-plan/about-this-program/radio-preservation-task-force/

Earlier this week, the San Francisco Public Works’s Bureau of Urban Forestry honored poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti with their annual signature tree. Lawrence, who turns 100 on March 24, is being feted all over town. We were delighted to be there for the tree-planting ceremony and to sprinkle some fresh soil (with a gold-plated shovel) onto the luscious olive tree’s root. The tree is just across the street from Via Ferlinghetti in North Beach. On the sunny side of the street, of course. Pay it a visit when you’re next in town. Listen to the speech from Carla Short, Superintendent of the Bureau of Urban Forestry, at the ceremony.

A call from The Keepers Hotline. "Hi guys, my name is Steve Gainer. I am a cinematographer and curator of the American Society of Cinematographers Camera Museum in Los Angeles. Our collection is probably the most complete camera collection in the United States having to do with cinematographers. We don't just collect cameras because they're old and rare. We collect them because they have something to do with our previous members or current members..." Do you have a keeper you want to nominate? Call The Keeper Hotline and leave a message: 415-496-9049.

Listener RJ Ramey called The Keepers Hotline to tell us about Monroe Work (1866-1945), who was hired by Book Washington as Director of Research and Records at Tuskegee Institute and worked to document every known lynching in the United States. Ramey created a website, monroeworktoday.org, to share Work's story.

#KeeperoftheDay - Le Musée de f.p.c. "We just started collecting slowly, not intentionally and we wake up 30 years later and we have this beautiful collection…” Listen to Beverly McKenna, who co-founded McKenna Museums with her husband Dr. Dwight McKenna, talk about Le Musée de f.p.c., the historic house museum honoring the legacy of New Orleans' free people of color. https://www.lemuseedefpc.com/

#KeeperoftheDay for Valentine's Day - The Kay Johnson Public Library in Valentine, Texas. Listen to this story produced by Andrea Gutierrez for the Transom Traveling Workshop in Marfa, Texas about Valentine librarian Lety Navarrete. "I’m a writer and former educator turned radio producer in Los Angeles. In summer 2018, I headed to Marfa, TX for the weeklong Transom Traveling Workshop, where radio maestro Rob Rosenthal showed a pack of us audio newbies how to tell a story with sound. After my original interview fell apart the last minute (the guest ghosted me), I drove 30 miles west to the town of Valentine, where I remembered seeing a tiny library when I passed through on the way to Marfa. It was my luck that librarian Lety Navarrete was there and, after some hesitation, willing to chat with me." -Andrea Gutierrez

#KeeperoftheDay - Mrs. Conti’s Florist Shop Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero talks about his childhood library in North Beverly, Massachusetts, located in the neighborhood florist shop. Do you have an idea for Keeper of the Day? Call our Keeper Hotline: 415-496-9049, or send us a note on Twitter or Instagram: @kitchensisters or on our website: http://www.kitchensisters.org/keepers/

#KeeperoftheDay - Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives at Oregon State University Tiah Edmunson-Morton called The Keeper Hotline to tell us about the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives, the first of its kind in the nation. She collects records of hops and brewing in the Northwest, highlights the experiences of women working in brewing, and has done 108 oral histories to date of people working in hops and brewing. The oral history collection has "become a really important record of the industry over the last five years,” says Tiah. This piece was produced by our intern Lauren Schechter.

"My favorite person, my hero, is a clerk in the State Department named Stephen Pleasonton. Who, the night before the British burned the town and the Capitol in the War of 1812, realized that the charters were at risk. He rolled them up, stuffed them into linen sacks, commandeered a wagon on the street and took them into the hills of Virginia. The only reason that the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights have survived is because of Stephen Pleasonton.” -David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States

"FDR I’m convinced was a closet archivist himself. He called the Archives his baby. He designed a box to house his papers which is the prototype of the boxes we use now at the National Archives. From the very beginning the intent was that the American people needed to be able to access the records in order to hold the government accountable for its actions. And that’s what 'keeping' means.” Listen to David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, talk about FDR and the beginnings of the US National Archives. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. https://www.sessions.blue/

DJ Spooky aka Paul D. Miller aka That Subliminal Kid is a composer, a multimedia artist, a writer, a keeper, an “exchanger” who takes on big environmental and social issues in his work. We are huge fans of his music and his way of thinking. He came by our studio this week to talk about his new multimedia concert experience, Quantopia: The Evolution of the Internet, an homage to the 50th anniversary of the Internet and “a tribute to the depth and high stakes of free speech and creative expression involved in our daily use of media.” Quantopia was commissioned by the Internet Archive with funding from a Hewlett 50 Arts Commission. And is a big collaboration with Greg Niemeyer, Classical Revolution, the San Francisco Girls Chorus, MEDIUM Labs, Sozo Artists and more. The world premiere is tonight, January 25, at YBCA in San Francisco. Tickets: https://tickets.ybca.org/24699

We talked with Valérie Sainte-Agathe, Artistic Director of the San Francisco Girls Chorus about the group’s upcoming performance of DJ Spooky’s Quantopia: The Evolution of the Internet, a multimedia hip hop concert experience about the history and exponential growth of the Internet. Commissioned by the Internet Archive. Catch the world premiere at YBCA Friday, January 25 in San Francisco. Get tickets: https://tickets.ybca.org/24699/24700

We interviewed writer Eliza McGraw for The Keepers podcast episode, the Pack Horse Librarians of Eastern Kentucky. She told us about other keepers in her life, including her Uncle Bill who "compulsively does dairy histories.” He and Eliza’s mother-in-law opened a dairy museum in Maryland which they call the MOOseum. Take a listen.

Zora Neale Hurston January 7, 1891 - January 28, 1960 Keeper of Culture, Zora Neale Hurston, was an anthropologist and the author four novels, including Their Eyes were Watching God (1937) and more than 50 published short stories, plays and essays. In 1939 during the depths of the Depression, she the went to work for the Florida Writers Project and worked with folklorist Stetson Kennedy and others to chronicle and preserve the songs and culturally rich traditions of Southern Florida. In this clip Zora Neale Hurston sings and describes an African American railroad track-line chant she learned at a railroad camp in North Florida in 1935, Library of Congress Collection, https://www.loc.gov/collections/zora-neale-hurston-plays/about-this-collection/ “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” Zora Neale Hurston

“Every story matters. The challenge is getting that story to the historical record. Simply putting it into the archive is maybe not enough.” -Doug Boyd, Director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries. Listen to this story about the power of oral history to make connections across continents and across history.

#KeeperoftheDay No. 36 "Hi Kitchen Sisters. My name is Lindsay Smith Zrull and I'm a curator of astronomical photographs here at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. We have over 500,000 glass plate photographs of the night sky that were taken between 1885 and 1992...But the thing that's the most amazing at least in my opinion is that during the late 1800s and early 1900s we had a team of women who studied these stars that were preserved on the glass and they made revolutionary discoveries in the field of astronomy. This team collectively was known as the Harvard Women Computers..."

While recording stories for The Keepers we had the honor and pleasure of interviewing French director Agnès Varda. We sought her out for our story Archive Fever: Henri Langlois and The Cinémathèque Française because she knew Langlois back in the day. We went to her home/production office in Paris—the apartment was filled with the scent of red peppers roasting. A bouquet of roses Martin Scorcese had given her upon receiving her Honorary Academy Award graced the table. Agnès talked about the Cinémathèque, but the interview veered off in other directions and became a kind of meditation on keeping, on cinema, on life. As her films have across the decades, she gave us much. “Agnès Varda: Keep Faith in Art” was produced by Selene Ross & The Kitchen Sisters. Mixed by Jim McKee.

Aaron Swartz Day co-founder Lisa Rein talks about about her work with the annual hackathon. Founded in 2013 after the death of activist and programming wunderkind Aaron Swartz, the event draws attention to Aaron’s story in hopes of protecting others from similar circumstances and offers a yearly showcase of the many projects initiated by Aaron as well as new projects inspired directly by him and his work. Lisa also talks about her background as archivist for Chelsea Manning: “When I learned more about Chelsea, without getting into whether you agree with what she did or what she didn’t do, she definitely followed her heart and wanted to improve the world and that's an Aaron Swartz Day thing.” Produced by Michal Wisniowski and The Kitchen Sisters

#KeeperoftheDay No. 18: Radio Haiti Archive. Laura Wagner from the Radio Haiti Archive at Duke University called The Keeper Hotline to tell us about this "trilingual digital archive of Haiti's first independent radio station, Radio Haiti Inter." The project is "salvaging and preserving the original tape—more than 5300 programs—and digitizing the entire archive and describing every recording in English, Haitian Creole, and French." Explore this amazing collection at https://repository.duke.edu/dc/radiohaiti

#KeeperoftheDay No. 15: Our Children’s Trust / #youthvgov Beatrice Bowles called The Keeper Hotline to nominate Our Children’s Trust for Keeper of the Day. “I am so impressed with the young people who have brought a case to court—to the Supreme Court—defending their right to stand up for the environment.” Learn more about these keepers of the environment at http://ourchildrenstrust.org

#KeeperoftheDay No. 13 - Emma Goldman Papers Project. Emma Goldman was a woman ahead of her time, an anarchist, a Jewish immigrant to America. Born in the Russian Empire, her time in the United States was mostly between1885 and 1919. Goldman was a fierce and eloquent public presence, a speaker and organizer about the issues of injustice, poverty, women’s independence and freedom, about birth control, labor rights, and education. Her vision was one of egality, harmony, beauty and individual action. Goldman was deported from America in 1919 for speaking out against involuntary registration into the draft for WWI but even more so because she was an immigrant and a radical. What began decades ago as a passion for justice and a need to know more about this revolutionary woman who spoke fiercely for human rights and beauty became the Emma Goldman Papers Project, now 38 years old, founded and directed by Candace Falk and housed at UC Berkeley. Candace and her team have spent decades documenting Goldman’s life, including her correspondence with Chinese anarchists, Mexican anarchists, and her circle of comrades and friends including novelists Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, HG Wells, Henry Miller, Aldous Huxley, Agnes Smedley, and figures as varied as Albert Einstein, Lady Astor, Eugene Debs, Peter Kropotkin, Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Carlo Tresca. Candace tells us, “We have been collecting organizing and editing the papers, letters, surveillance materials, trial transcripts, newspaper clippings, unpublished writings and published writings of Emma Goldman and have some 22,000 documents related to her life in this amazing archive preserving the history of a woman whose voice is really needed now.” In this clip, Goldman speaks to a reporter on her return to the United States after an exile of 15 years.

We talk with Nicholas Meriwether, the first curator of the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz, about the band’s incredible collection of fan art. “I’ve come to realize that the art movement that accompanied the rise of the Dead is as much a part of what we became in the public eye as the songs and our playing of them.” – Robert Hunter, Lyricist, 2003 “If you want to know how the Dead was built, this is where you would go…the archive tells the whole story.” – Mickey Hart, Rolling Stone Magazine, April 1, 2010

#KeeperoftheDay No. 8 Hilary Swett, an archivist and librarian at the Writers Guild Foundation called The Keepers Hotline to tell us about her collection. “As an archivist I think of myself as keeping the stories of America's storytellers, movie and TV writers…. My collection speaks to the history of entertainment industry, of course, but they also correlate to the history of labor and capitalism in twentieth-century United States, not to mention the McCarthyism of the 50s that struck screenwriters particularly hard, like the Hollywood Ten who were jailed during that period were screenwriters. Screenwriters have always had a little bit of an activist bent and been very politically minded and kind of a catalyst for change."

Home Movie Day, a global preservation celebration of people and their home movie collections, began in 2003. October 20, is the 16th Annual Home Movie Day and there are screenings,events and preservation parties around the world. Here’s an oldie but goodie, a story The Kitchen Sisters produced the year Home Movie Day launched. We hope you pick up a camera or camera-like object and film your people today. #keeperoftheday

#KeeperoftheDay #2. A message from The Keeper Hotline: "Hi, my name is Dr. Derek Fox. I'm a veterinary orthopedic surgeon calling from Columbia, Missouri. The details of a story are certainly not mine, and I'm no expert on this individual or even the field that she represented. It just seemed to me that her story would be one that you guys would be interested in pursuing for your Keeper series. Elizabeth Hawley who was an American born in 1923 and died in January of 2018, so just this year at age 94. "What makes her truly remarkable is that at the time when she really started what would become her career it was essentially unheard of for women to be adventuring the way she did. She grew up in America, got her Master's and became a researcher for Fortune Magazine, but became quite bored and started traveling as a result of some intense wanderlust that she had. After several years of traveling around the world and going on many adventures as a single young woman, she landed in Kathmandu and and settled in Nepal around 1957. "Quickly she became fascinated with Mount Everest, even though she did not like hiking and didn't really particularly like trekking or have any interest in climbing the mountain herself. What she was fascinated by was chronicling the expeditions that were climbing Mount Everest and in very short order she became in charge of and the main keeper and chronicler of all the records and the data for all expeditions going up Mount Everest. This chronicle, this overall collection of her records became the Himalayan database and in very short order the world leading mountaineers and alpinists started to come to her because she had collected so much data and information and records on the mountain that if you wanted to climb an eight thousand meter peak, you probably needed to go to Elizabeth Hawley."

Today, The Keepers continues with the launch of "Keeper of the Day," our new daily, year-long social media series featuring keepers from around the world. {Kind of like baseball cards}. #KeeperoftheDay will arrive in an array of modes—radio, podcasts, photographs, graphics, videos, quotes….  Along with more stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians, we’ll be featuring keepers of all kinds—river keepers, seed keepers, climate keepers, peacekeepers—stewards of culture, civil liberties, the land, the free flow of information and ideas—people who take it upon themselves to preserve and protect. Keeper of the Day (#keeperoftheday) will appear on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, kitchensisters.org, emails, and beyond. We’ll be telling in a medley of mediums. Daily for a year. A keeper a day. We begin this wing of the series at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. Twas there we met him.  Keeper #1: The Free-Range Archivist: Jason Scott, the public facing mouth of the Internet Archive. Listen and you’ll see why. This story was produced by one of our mighty interns, Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo, in collaboration with The Kitchen Sisters. This is Juliet’s first story. She took the reins and we were knocked out by what she did. Jim McKee mixed.

"My archival calling was, I believe, part of my spiritual calling." -Brenda Billups Square Last week, we shared a story from New Orleans. The story of Leona Tate, who as a six-year-old was one of the first African American children to integrate an all-white school in New Orleans. Today we share a moment from a story about Brenda Billups Square, co-pastor of Beecher Memorial Congregational United Church of Christ and an archivist documenting New Orleans. In 2018, we will be spending many hours with people like Brenda, as we embark on a new series for NPR called The Keepers — stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, collectors, curators and historians — keepers of the culture and the culture and collections they keep. We are asking for your support to help create this rich, surprising, timely series about the people and stories behind collecting and protecting our history and culture.

November 14, 1960 — Four six-year-old girls, flanked by Federal Marshals, walked through screaming crowds and policemen on horseback as they approached their new schools for the first time. Leona thought it must be Mardi Gras. Gail Etienne thought they were going to kill her. Listen to the entire story at kitchensisters.org/present

Thad Vogler, that pioneering spirits visionary, has written a beautiful new book — By the Smoke and the Smell: My Search for the Rare & Sublime on the Spirits Trail. We interviewed him years back because he’s so wise and mesmerizing. Here’s a taste.

In 1983 Prince hired LA sound technician, Susan Rogers, one of the few women in the industry, to move to Minneapolis and help upgrade his home recording studio as he began work on the album and the movie Purple Rain. Susan, a trained recording technician with no sound engineering experience became the engineer of Purple Rain, Parade, Sign o' the Times, and all that Prince recorded for the next four years. For those four years, and almost every year after, Prince recorded at least a song a day and they worked together for 24 hours, 36 hours, 96 hours at a stretch, layering and perfecting his music and his hot funky sound. Yesterday we interviewed Susan, who is now a Professor at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, for our upcoming NPR series, The Keepers — about activist archivists, rogue librarians, collectors, curators and historians. It was Susan who started Prince’s massive archive during her time with the legendary artist who died a year today. Here is small smattering of the stories she told that will be heard on The Keepers and our podcast. We thank you Susan. We thank you Prince.

"Humanity will be cured and saved by an orchard" -Fyodor Dostoyevsky Awhile back we were at Leila’s Shop in the East End of London, interviewing Leila McAlister, neighborhood kitchen activist, cook and grocer about her efforts to build community through food, when a beautiful Russian woman suddenly appeared balancing a high stack of beautifully illustrated candy boxes from a town called Kolomna, some 70 miles east of Moscow. Leila lit up, put down the prosuitto and began to tell us the remarkable history of Kolomna Pastila a nearly lost tradition of apple sweets, a tradition dating back to the time and orchards of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, now being revived by a group of Russian women, Natalia Nikitizna, Elena Dmitrieva and Elena Shampanova. They call the project the Kolomna Museum of Forgotten Taste. The revival of the candy factory of Kolomna has not only brought pastila to world at large, but has helped revive the once thriving town of Kolomna and is now taking the women on The Apple Road - in search of rare apples and lost orchards around the world to collaborate on reviving heritage breeds of apples and lost cultural traditions. An international project that brings people together from around the world in their love of apples, orchards and stories. We had yet to make a story about this encounter, but this summer, Kitchen Sisters intern, David Fuchs from Middlebury, heard this orphan tape, and crafted this story — The Apple Road: A Hidden Russian Kitchen as part of our series, Hidden Kitchens: War and Peace and Food. Thank you, David.

This season of Hidden Kitchens was inspired by an issue of the magazine, Public Diplomacy centered on the concept of “gastrodiplomacy,” the idea of sharing a country’s cultural heritage through food, food as a medium of cultural engagement, the use of food as a diplomatic tool to help resolve conflicts and foster connections between nations. Korea it turns out, is one of the nations most involved in branding itself through its food, in using food as a part of it’s “soft power.” The philosophy of the Korean government is to help spread its influence through supporting Korean people to go and open Korean restaurants throughout the world and helping to export and by helping to export and popularize that most ubiquitous of foods—kimchi.

Nicole Choi on Korean Cornbread by The Kitchen Sisters

You've heard of the San Francisco gold rush. But that rush spurred another, lesser-known event: the egg rush. The legions of miners who swept into the region in the 1850s hoping to strike gold all had to be fed. And they needed protein to stay strong. But when food shortages hit, wily entrepreneurs looked for eggs in an unlikely source: the Farallon Islands.

Sylvan on the influence of World War II and poverty on Japanese cuisine by The Kitchen Sisters

In Japan, nearly every interest has a manga dedicated to it, whether it's sports, music or shooting pool. So it's no wonder that food, which has always been tied to Japan's cultural identity, has skyrocketed as a genre of manga, which represents about 40 percent of all books published in that country.

Lisbon is a city of plazas, parks, overlooks and gardens. For more than a century, these beautiful public spaces were graced by Art Noveau and Moorish-style kiosks — small, ornate structures that provided chairs and shade and served traditional Portuguese snacks and drinks. These quiosques de refrescos (refreshment kiosks) were the heart of public life in the city. But, under the long dictatorship of Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar, which started in the 1930s, laws actually discouraged public gathering and conversation. Many restaurants closed down and the kiosks ­­fell into disrepair and all but disappeared. That was, until Catarina Portas, a native of Lisbon, former journalist and entrepreneur stepped in.

War and Peace and Coffee by The Kitchen Sisters

Operation Hummus by The Kitchen Sisters

Tony Ramy talks about his Lebanese restaurants and hummus by The Kitchen Sisters

Ra’anan Alexandrowicz discusses hummus of his childhood by The Kitchen Sisters

Hummus Day by The Kitchen Sisters

James Fox has been going in and out of San Quentin Prison for 13 years, teaching yoga and mindfulness to prisoners.

"Often buildings speak to you.” -Leslie E. Robertson, structural engineer responsible for building the original World Trade Center, from the Sonic Memorial Project featured this week on our podcast Fugitive Waves. http://kitchensisters.org/fugitivewaves

In honor of actor Martin Milner, who recently passed on, here’s an excerpt from our story about Route 66 featuring Milner, George Maharis and show creator Sterling Silliphant talking about the show's cult following and the social impact it had in 1960s. Listen to the entire two-part story of Route 66 on our podcast, Fugitive Waves: http://kitchensisters.org/fugitivewaves