WORLD Radio replay - Sweeping streets and making pies

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, August 11th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Paul Butler.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: interesting places! As we continue to celebrate 40 years of WORLD Newsgroup and 10 years of the podcast, we’re taking some time to listen back.

BUTLER: We asked our reporters and staff to nominate some of their favorite stories from the last decade. So during each program this week we’re playing highlights from a few of those memorable moments.

REICHARD: Our first story is from five years ago when I visited the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago. It’s full of many interesting displays and medical artifacts. It was also the first time that I met Paul Butler.

BUTLER: That’s right! WORLD sent me along as your audio technician to help you gather the sound while you interviewed the curator.

REICHARD: If I recall, you were a little green around the gills at times.

BUTLER: What really did me in was the Civil War amputations exhibit. We won’t play that part of the interview today. Instead, in this excerpt we join you about halfway through the tour, just after handling the bone saws.

MARY REICHARD, REPORTER: Another room filled with artifacts. Here’s a large, vertical, wooden box with a step on one side and two optical tubes on top.

JUSTINA: So here we have our x-ray exhibit. Another really popular exhibit. So I’ll just talk about the shoe fitting x-ray machine in the middle of the room here. So this was very popular - it was in shoe stores across America. Kids loved putting their foot in the back of the machine, there’s a hole in the back, then their parents and a shoe salesman could look in the top of the machine and see a live action x-ray of the child’s foot wiggling around in the shoe. This was before they knew the negative effects of radiation, of course. So once they found that out, these were pulled from shoe stores across America, but I still do get people who come in and remember using these as kids.

I can’t think of a clearer example of good intentions with unintended consequences.

Next, a medical development near and dear to all of us who’ve suffered.

JUSTINA: So we can go through to the left here to the pain exhibit. It’s one of my favorites. The pain and pain management exhibit. Right through here.

The science of pain management had a bumpy roll out.

JUSTINA: Heroin was actually developed at the same time as aspirin. They liked it better than aspirin because it was stronger. It was sold through the Sears catalog, so anyone could get their hands on it.

Once it became known that heroin was terribly addictive, legal sales of it ended in 1913.

AUDIO: VINTAGE ELEVATOR NOISE

We took the vintage elevator back to the ground floor. I thought of what I’d seen: I had a renewed feeling of gratitude that I live in a day of anesthesia, decent prosthetic devices, antibiotics, and trained doctors.

And yet, the medical frontier remains unconquered. Who knows what future discoveries will fill future rooms in museums?

Reporting from Chicago for WORLD Radio, I’m Mary Reichard.

BUTLER: Our next interesting place is the nation’s capital.

REICHARD: When I think of Washington, D.C., I imagine the Lincoln Memorial, Capitol Building, and of course, the Supreme Court. But in our next story highlight from 2019, WORLD Correspondent Jenny Rough brings us to the streets of a Washington D.C. neighborhood. Brian Bakke lives there and serves his neighbors in a very practical way—by sweeping their streets and sidewalks.

JENNY ROUGH, CORRESPONDENT: Not all of his friends understand why Bakke does what he does. They worry he’ll be attacked, but he never has been.

Bakke is 6 feet 6 inches tall with pale white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. He’s not exactly inconspicuous.

BAKKE: When I first moved to the neighborhood, I asked God, “All right, Lord, how does a white man that looks like me enter an all-black neighborhood?” And the Lord said, “Buy a broom and use it.” “Use it in silence.” Meaning, don’t say a thing until someone else talks to you.

Drug dealers were convinced he was an FBI agent. Others asked if he was performing community service, especially the days he wore an orange t-shirt. One morning, a woman stuck her head out the window and shouted questions at him: “What are you doing? Why are you cleaning?” He told her he was trying to be a neighbor. Stunned, she thanked him—and shut the window.

Bakke and Myra are friends now. She brought the village to him.

BAKKE: By the end of that week, every single person on my block was waving, smiling, calling me by name.

His actions have influenced others. Take one neighbor who is a chain-smoker. He used to casually flick his cigarette butts on the ground. Pet owners couldn’t walk their dogs along that stretch of polluted sidewalk because the dogs liked to eat the butts and would get sick.

BAKKE: So I went to this guy, and I said, “What if I put a little jar out here or this beautiful little ceramic vase, would you just drop your butts in there?” He said, “Absolutely.”

Drug dealers were convinced he was an FBI agent. Others asked if he was performing community service, especially the days he wore an orange t-shirt. One morning, a woman stuck her head out the window and shouted questions at him: “What are you doing? Why are you cleaning?” He told her he was trying to be a neighbor. Stunned, she thanked him—and shut the window.

Bakke and Myra are friends now. She brought the village to him.

BAKKE: By the end of that week, every single person on my block was waving, smiling, calling me by name.

During the crack wars, the city cut most of the trees down so the helicopters flying overhead could see better. Bakke and his wife decided to purchase new trees to plant. Soon, other residents chipped in to cover the costs and help plant them.

The block is now considered a safe zone.

Bakke says being “The Street Sweeper” is his calling.

BAKKE: Not everyone has this calling. So maybe it’s not a broom for you. Like think about all the different people in your world that are completely, solely, original to you. Who in it has God just broken your heart for?

Whatever else others do, come tomorrow, Bakke will be on the streets. A quiet, peaceful neighbor. The only sound, the sweeping of his broom.

AUDIO: SWEEPING BROOM

For WORLD Radio, I’m Jenny Rough reporting from Washington, D.C.

REICHARD: Our last story highlight for today comes from early last year. WORLD’s Myrna Brown stopped by a Georgia nursing home. And that’s where she met Robin Dill who uses a family apple pie recipe as therapy for patients with dementia.

AUDIO: OPENING CAR DOOR

ROBIN PRAYS: Well, Lord, I just pray over all of this stuff.

Packed tightly in the backseat of her black Volkswagen Beetle, 40 pounds of apples, more than a dozen pie pans, canisters of spices and that huge bowl of chilled pie dough from the day before.

ROBIN: Here we are!

With the Johnny Appleseed song in her heart, she makes her way to the center’s kitchen.

ROBIN SINGING: For giving me the things I need…

In a matter of minutes she unloads the pie dough, apples, aprons and the hair nets. Denise, a grandmother, is instantly enraptured.

DENISE: I’ve turned into Aunt Lorraine. She always had one of these on her head.

ROBIN: Hey Steve I’m glad to see you this morning.

Steve has gray hair with dark, thick eyebrows. He’s initially reserved and silent, that is until Dill puts a rolling pin in his hands.

ROBIN AND STEVE: Press. Good. Have you done this before? Did your dad bake pies? Grandma? [SIGH] They died. Oh, I’m sorry.

Then she puts Denise in charge of the apples: coring, peeling and slicing.

ROBIN: Ok, you crank. Perfect. Keep going. Look at you.

DENISE: I love it!

ROBIN: Isn’t that cool?

DENISE: Yeah!

Rod, burly and at times impatient, mixes the apples and the spices.

ROD: Can I go ahead and put my top on?

ROBIN: Not yet. We’ve got to have apples in there. He’s so funny. Even people whose brains are failing them, they still want to be purposeful.

After about two hours of apple peeling, dough rolling and crust pinching, Dill jubilantly displays 13 unbaked apple pies across a white table cloth. Denise, Rod and Steve will get to share the fruits of their labor with their caregivers, another benefit of apple pie making.

DENISE: Ahhh, mmm, this is so good. So good.

ROBIN: My tummy says it’s happy, what does your tummy say?

STEVE: GROWL

For WORLD Radio, I’m Myrna Brown reporting from Duluth, Georgia.

BUTLER: If you’d like to hear the full stories we included today, the links to those are in today’s transcript. You can find that at wng.org. Tomorrow, three more stories from the past as we celebrate 10 years of The World and Everything in It.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.