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Lost & Found Sound NPR's Lost & Found Sound series explores newly discovered audio and music sessions, home audio, and listener submitted sounds and interviews. Subscribe to the RSS feed of never before played audio and sounds.

Lost & Found Sound

Lost and Found Sound Finale

Quest For Sound Curator Jay Allison brings down the curtain on our year-long series, Lost and Found Sound, by playing examples of some of the listener calls that came in this year answering our plea for hidden audio artifacts. He laments that we never heard the talking seal, but then plays a short example. Allison takes us on a walk through the various kinds of sounds we learned about: ancestors passing messages to their descendants, voices of youth returning on record in old age, and many more. And, we hear the sound that initiated the series: a mysterious record made to a World War Two solider by his lover or wife back home.

Lost and Found Sound Finale

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'Lost & Found Sound': Wartime Quest for Sound

In this week's Lost & Found Sound feature, "Quest for Sound" curator Jay Allison guides us through a collection of voices of American servicemen. They come from the 1,500 callers who contacted us all this year to tell us about tapes and discs they have at home. Many were made at Christmas or during wartime. We hear from a father in Vietnam corresponding by cassette with his family. We also hear a rare recording of the five Sullivan brothers of Waterloo, Iowa, who lost their lives on the USS Juneau -- along with 700 other men -- in November 1942. And, we hear the testimony by a former Korean War prisoner about the worms in the rice he was fed; a Gulf War conversation between brothers abroad and at home -- cut short by a Scud attack; and a veteran of the trenches of World War I telling about surviving five days in No Man's Land with two legs and an arm shot up.

'Lost & Found Sound': Wartime Quest for Sound

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LOST & FOUND SOUND: Vermont Folklore Recordings

Reporter Nina Keck of Vermont Public Radio tells us about the 35-year obsession of a woman named Helen Hartness Flanders to capture a vanishing breed of Vermonter on recorded media. She started in the 1930s with wax cylinder, then graduated to disk and tape. She sought out elderly residents, and had them sing and tell stories.

LOST & FOUND SOUND: Vermont Folklore Recordings

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LOST AND FOUND SOUND: Walkin' Talkin' Bill Hawkins

Lost and Found Sound presents the story of William Allen Taylor, a disk jockey and a bit of an actor, who went looking for the sound of the voice of his father. Taylor was born out of wedlock. It was only late in life that Taylor discovered his father was Walkin' Talkin' Bill Hawkins -- a former Pullman reporter who in 1948 became Cleveland's first black disk jockey. Hawkins broadcast live from the window of his record store, and was widely influential. But there are no known recordings of Hawkins' voice. So, by talking to those who knew Hawkins and listened to his program, William Allen Taylor attempts to bring his father's voice to life again through imitation.

LOST AND FOUND SOUND: Walkin' Talkin' Bill Hawkins

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LOST AND FOUND SOUND: West Virginia Steam Trains

The Lost and Found Sound series continues with a story from All Things Considered host Noah Adams. Noah travels to West Virginia in search of a lost sound - the sound of the steam train. Most trains in the United States switched from steam to diesel by the early 1950s, turning robust centers of activity into ghost towns. One such place is Thurmond, West Virginia, which now has only seven residents. Noah also visits Cass, a restored lumber town, to take a ride up Cheat Mountain on an authentic steam train. A veteran engineer explains how train whistles work, and we hear steam whistles far off in the valley, echoing through the hills.

LOST AND FOUND SOUND: West Virginia Steam Trains

Only Available in Archive Formats.

Lost and Found Sound: A Partridge Family Vacation

NPR's Marika Partridge rediscovers a family treasure: reels and reels of tape recordings from her family's 1968 journey across Eurasia and Africa. That year, her dad was leaving a military assignment in the Far East. He planned a journey through Thailand, Burma, India, Pakistan, Kenya, Uganda, Pakistan, Kashmir, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere by train, car and boat.

Lost and Found Sound: A Partridge Family Vacation

Only Available in Archive Formats.

LOST AND FOUND SOUND: Aimee Semple McPherson

NPR's Deborah George tells us the story of pioneering radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. She was among the first to take her preaching to the radio, bringing innovative ideas to the airwaves. In the first half of this century she was a celebrity of the first order, listened to by movie stars and common folk. She was a striking stage presence who used humor and song to make her message heard. In the first of these two segments, we hear from the movie actor Anthony Quinn who played saxophone at her rallies as a boy in East Los Angeles. He tells us he learned a lot of his stage presence from her -- using pauses and staring at the audience to get attention. We learn how scandal rocked her life. McPherson vanished at Venice Beach and turned up a month later in a Mexican border town with a strange story that few believed. There were rumors she had been seen in a love nest with a married man in California. This shadow over her Godliness was compounded during the stock market crash of 1929 by money woes and family arguments over money. She died in 1944 at age 54, long after her heyday ended.

LOST AND FOUND SOUND: Aimee Semple McPherson

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LOST & FOUND SOUND: That Was the Week That Was

Art Chimes had a single TV sound obsession: a satirical TV show on NBC from 1964-65 called "That Was The Week That Was" (TW3), which introduced David Frost to American viewers. The show's sharp wit caught Chimes' fancy as a teenager in New Jersey. The most striking thing about the show was the opening song sung by Nancy Ames, which contained all the week's news. Chimes says the show was a smart viewing choice in days of clownish variety shows.

LOST & FOUND SOUND: That Was the Week That Was

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LOST AND FOUND SOUND: Mental Hygiene Films

The years just after the Second World War saw the advent of a new genre of classroom films: "social guidance" or "attitude enhancement" films -- we'll call them "mental hygiene" films. Young people in schools across America saw films with titles like "Dating Dos and Don'ts," "Mind Your Manners," "Are You Popular?" and, "Narcotics: Pit of Despair." Topics included table manners, etiquette, fitting in, posture, dating, highway safety, substance abuse, and juvenile delinquency. They were tools of social engineering, made to shape the values and attitudes of an entire generation of American kids. More than three-thousand of these films were made over nearly three decades. Now, fewer than half of them survive. Ken Smith has written a new book called "Mental Hygiene: Classroom Films, 1945-1970". He'll be our tour guide through this Lost and Found Sound report on this funny, fascinating, and largely forgotten genre of American filmmaking.

LOST AND FOUND SOUND: Mental Hygiene Films

Only Available in Archive Formats.

LOST & FOUND SOUND: WHER - One Thousand Beautiful Watts

A story about radio station WHER in Memphis, billed as the first "All-Girl Radio Station" in the nation. It was started by Sam Phillips of Sun Studio fame in 1955 - just after he sold Elvis Presley's contract to Colonel Parker. Phillips gave women a chance to work both on the air, and in the sales department. It lasted 17-years. Independent producers Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson located 14 of the 40 women who worked at WHER.

LOST & FOUND SOUND: WHER - One Thousand Beautiful Watts

Only Available in Archive Formats.

LOST & FOUND SOUND: The Transistor on the Schoolbus

Our series Lost & Found Sound remembers the explosion of transistors radios for the first time in the early 1960s. Washington lawyer Jonathan Cuneo recalls how every kid had to have one when they first became small enough to carry around in a pocket. With portable radios, sports like the World Series could be listened to in school - and on the school bus ride home. Cuneo tells how the final game of the 1960 World Series was a highlight of his life -- thanks to his transistor and where he heard the game.

LOST & FOUND SOUND: The Transistor on the Schoolbus

Only Available in Archive Formats.

Lost & Found Sound: The Man Who Loves Sound

Eighty-five-year-old Don Hunter plays us a few of his acoustic "trophies" from a lifetime of recording the sounds of his Pacific Northwest. The Eugene, Oregon man has been making stereo recordings of his region since the late 1950s -- and has been interested in sound since he was a boy. We hear a "planer," fog horns and a Douglas Fir being cut down.

Lost & Found Sound: The Man Who Loves Sound

Only Available in Archive Formats.