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Lost & Found Sound

Center of the World

NPR's year-long Friday collaboration with independent producers Jay Allison and the Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva) -- a series called LOST AND FOUND SOUND. Today we present an item from our QUEST FOR SOUND, in which listeners call 202-408-0300 and tell us about recordings they have - or have stumbled upon. Reverend Dwight Frizzell of Kansas City, Missouri found a recording of the late President Harry S. Truman from 1957 -- five years after Truman left office. The tape is of Truman dedicating a shopping center to be built on the site of his boyhood home. With music Frizzell and a friend added, this remarkable speech winds up being a powerful, and unintended elegy to a passing era.

Center of the World

Only Available in Archive Formats.

Lost & Found Sound

Eyewitness at Gettysburg

Quest for Sound curator Jay Allison has unearthed a unique recording: the voice of William V. Rathvon, who as a nine-year-old boy, watched and listened to Abraham Lincoln deliver his address at Gettysburg in November 1863. The story was told in 1938 and recorded on a 78 r.p.m. record. We will air a 5-6 minute excerpt. This item came to us as a result of our QUEST HOTLINE 202-408-0300. A family in Pallatine, Illinois had this recording to share with us. Rathvon was a distant relative. No other Gettysburg eyewitness is known to have recorded their memories on record.

Eyewitness at Gettysburg

Only Available in Archive Formats.