Finding a Voice

The Internet is a great place for stuff. All kinds. A little digging on EBay can turn up just about anything your heart could desire. Everyone knows its also a great place to find information. Of course you sorta have to pick and choose among to find the "real" nuggets. There's a lot of disinformation or unverified information out there (here?).

The Internet turns out to be a nifty place for storing stuff too. Old newspaper articles, book reviews and the like. I found an NPR site for their "Lost and Found Sound" series, which ran occasionally from 1999 until 2004. Listeners sent in story ideas, along with recordings of just about anything--historical events, audio letters, Internet audio files. It's a kind of Americana oral history project.

The stories range from the odd: "Atencion, Seis Siete Tres Cero: The Shortwave Numbers Mystery" (did the CIA send spies around the world coded shortwave radio messages during the Cold War and after?); to the humorous and wistful: "Lindbergh, Collie, and Me" (Alexandra Kalman's 1982 recollection of Charles Lindberg's 1927 landing in Paris and her dragging her reluctant husband Collie to Le Bourget Field to watch the landing); to the poignant: "Her Father's Voice" (NPR's Susan Stamberg listening to a recording of her dead father's voice, which she hadn't heard in 30 years).

One of the most striking stories, the sort that make you pull over to the side of the road to finish hearing the story, was "The Vietnam Tapes of Lance Corporal Michael A. Baronowski." The tapes were Baronowski's audio letters home from the Vietnam War in 1966. Whatever you believe about the Iraq War, you listen to this one story, and you realize what people at home and at war sacrifice in their partings.

Susan Stamberg seems to reach the heart of what the series aimed for when she talks about how a personality's essence can live in the voice. The website has a short epigram from a story about Sam Phillips: "There's somethin' about your voice--comin' out of the night, out of the light, out of the sky, out of the ground--over the airwaves comes your voice on a little Atwater Kent Radio."