Generally I’ve found Morning Edition’s StoryCorps project to be pretty hit or miss. The oral history project roams the country giving normal people a chance to tell their stories.
This morning’s segment was a definite hit.
In it, Ken Kobus tells the story of his steelworker father, who toiled in Pittsburgh’s J&L works. The part that really got me, though, was when Ken described his father, dying of cancer and on morphine, making odd motions in his bed.
The doctors where befuddled, but Ken figured it out right away. He told the doctors: “He’s makin’ steel. He was opening furnace doors and he was adjusting the gas on the furnace and traps. “I could see, I could see what he was doin’.”
Reading it really can’t do this justice. Go to the NPR page and listen to it. Amazing stuff.
