Episode 1. Introduction: The Envelope.

...in which our narrator tries to face death and things take a strange turn...

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This episode kicks everything off by exploring the relationship between a psychiatrist at the end of his life and his grandson trying to find his way as a young adulthood... and the grandson discovers the dying man's long-forgotten study of suicide. 

Sound and music by Wilson Vediner and Courtney Sheedy.

Episode notes:

I can’t verify his stock of pickled eggplant was the largest in Central Connecticut. I made up the room number B26 because I couldn’t find the real number. Though my grandfather remembered being mentioned by Mae West on Edgar Bergen’s variety show, I could find no independent verification after what seemed a reasonable amount of time pursuing it, and I could find no trace of a paper he’d written on female drivers; honestly, I might have imagined the whole thing. “Dinapoli” is the name I’ve given the family who owned the pond.

I later found out The New Britain Herald was an afternoon daily during this period, and home delivery most likely was suspended during the war due to gas rationing, according to the best guesses of a former Herald reporter and a recent Herald staffer as conveyed to me by Pat Watson, who runs the Local History Room of the New Britain Public Library and without whom this project would be impossible, though any errors, whether of fact, interpretation or judgment, are, god knows, solely my own.