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Grandma's Been There
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
75 episodes
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 und...
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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 58...
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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!” at...
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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 Manhatta...
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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’...
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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 ...
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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 broug...
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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 co...
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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 y...
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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 fi...
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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 the...
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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 mus...
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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 wa...
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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 pl...
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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 ...
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