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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
89 episodes
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 ...
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 h...
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 m...
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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 ...
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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 b...
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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 d...
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 li...
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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 h...
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.
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 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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