Carl and Hallie Foster talk about the good and the bad of Newburgh, Indiana. Having been a welder for most of his life, Carl Foster, reflects on the time he got sick while on the job. He had gotten cancer and had to be fed intravenously for six months. While he was out sick, the company did not compensate him. When asked about his hobby of growing banana trees, a true calm and passion takes over his personality, as noticed by Studs Terkel.
Susan Nussbaum, founder of Access Living and Michael Pachovas founder of Disabled Prisoners Program discuss the upcoming Disabled Americans Freedom Rally in the backdrop of the International Year of the Disabled Persons and President Reagan's budget cuts. Society needs to understand that expenditures are required to secure the rights of disabled people to live active, productive lives. They need to be able to get out of their apartment buildings or homes, travel on sidewalks and ride buses. That may require access ramps, working elevators, cut curbs, and hydraulic buses to lower steps.
The Newberry Consort is the resident early music ensemble of the Newberry Library specializing in the music of the late Middle Ages.
Terkel comments and presents a musical performance of Ladino songs
Author Susan Brownmiller discusses and reads from her book “Waverly Place”, a fictional story heavily inspired by the Lisa Steinberg child abuse case of 1987. Brownmiller discusses the details of the case and how domestic abuse, law enforcement, and the judicial system affected the outcome of this case. Studs plays "She Sits on the Table" - Tom Paxton (1980).
Noted Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl discusses his most recent book "The Tigris Expedition: In Search of Our Beginnings" in which Heyerdahl and a crew of 10 men built a reed boat in Iraq and sailed it through the Persian Gulf, around the Horn of Africa, to Pakistan and eventually the Red Sea. Their goal was to prove that the ancient peoples of Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley could have been in contact through marine trade and migration.