Grating the Nutmeg

1. Bob Steele, the Voice of Connecticut Radio

For more than sixty years, Bob Steele was the voice of Southern New England, entertaining listeners of WTIC AM with his wit and humor. Connecticut author Paul Hensler has written the first-ever biography of Steele, chronicling his hardscrabble beginnings in the Midwest, his early career as a boxer, and his almost accidental hiring as an announcer at WTIC in the midst of the Great Depression. In this episode, recorded at the CT Historical Society with Natalie Belanger, Hensler provides a look into Steele's life and work.

Paul Hensler's book, Bob Steele on the Radio: The Life of Connecticut's Beloved Broadcaster, is published by McFarland. We wish to thank Natalie Belanger and author Paul Hensler. This episode was produced by Natalie Belanger and engineered by Patrick O'Sullivan. Be sure to join us for our next episode of Grating the Nutmeg.

CT Explored publisher Elizabeth Normen sits down with Dr. Benjamin Foster and Connecticut State Representative Bobby Gibson to talk about their efforts to pass legislation requiring teaching African American history in Connecticut, their vision for the curriculum, and why it matters. "When kids started to say math is for whites," Foster, a longtime educator says, "I knew we had to do something" to reconnect students with their rich history of contributions to this nation.

We wish to thank Dr. Benjamin Foster and Representative Bobby Gibson and Carmen Arace Middle School for hosting us. This episode was produced by Elizabeth Normen and engineered by Patrick O'Sullivan.

Anna Mae Duane has written an amazing new book about James McCune Smith and Henry Garnet, two African American boys who met as young students at the New York African Free School on Mulberry street.

Their intertwined, but very different lives of antebellum antislavery activism helped define the possibilities for blacks in American Society. State historian Walt Woodward interviews UCONN English professor Duane, who talks about Educated for Freedom, and the inspiring and informative example Smith and Garnet provided for their generation, and ours.

Episode recorded by Walt Woodward. Edited, mixed, and assembled by Matt Berky at Massive Productions

In the Winter 2019 issue of Connecticut Explored, Museum of Connecticut History curator Dave Corrigan tackles the obsolescence of everyday objects such as typewriters that were replaced by personal computers. With the advent of digital recording, CDs, and streaming music services, perhaps no industry has experienced more rapid change in the last 20 years than the music industry. But as historians, we know that some people value doing things in the traditional way.

In today's episode, Assistant Publisher Mary Donohue and podcast engineer Patrick O'Sullivan visit Connecticut's legendary Dirt Floor Recording and Production Studios to talk to musician and Dirt Floor producer Eric Lichter. Connecticut Public Radio's John Dankosky calls Dirt Floor "the Music Sanctuary of Connecticut". Hear more about how Lichter uses old fashioned, hands-on musical instruments and recording methods to produce some of Connecticut's most popular new musicians.

We wish to thank our guests Eric Michael Lichter and musician Angela Luna. To learn more about Dirt Floor Recording and Production Studios, go to dirtfloorrecordingstudio.com and for more about Angela Luna, go to her Facebook page at Luna & the Lost Souls. Our thanks to Luna & the Lost Souls for the music in the episode.

This episode was produced by Mary Donohue, Assistant Publisher of Connecticut Explored, and engineered by Patrick O'Sullivan.

In our first episode for 2020, state historian Walt Woodward interviews author and historian Tom Shachtman talks about his just released book, The Founding Fortunes: How America's Wealthy Paid for and Profited From America's Revolution. In this fascinating economic history covering the years from the Birth of the Republic to the end of the War of 1812, Shachtman asks an important question most historians don't consider: Who paid for the war for independence?

The answers come with some profound insights that still resonate in the present. Shachtman also helps us understand the national significance of a number of famous Revolutionary Connecticans, including Jeremiah Wadsworth, SIlas Deane, Eli Whitney, John Fitch, and Oliver Wolcott, Jr.

For your holiday enjoyment, State Historian Walt Woodward has gathered together three historic Connecticut Christmas stories, and a Christmas Song: Francis S. Parsons "The Christmas Party" (1923), Louise Chandler Moulton's "What Came to Olive Haygarth" (1867), Abby Allin's "Old Santa Claus (1850), and Walt Woodward's own "A Children's Christmas."

Happy Holidays From All the Grating the Nutmeg Team.

Maps tell stories. In this episode of Grating the Nutmeg, Natalie Belanger and Ben Gammell of the CT Historical Society uncover the little-known story of 18th-century cartographer Bernard Romans. A new exhibit of his maps at the museum pieces together the life story of a bold, talented, and adventurous immigrant to Connecticut who put his considerable skills to work for the American cause and may have paid the ultimate price for it.

"War, Maps, Mystery: Dutch Mapmaker Bernard Romans and the American Revolution" is on view at the Connecticut Historical Society until May 2, 2020. To learn more, visit chs.org. For more great stories on maps, order Connecticut Explored's back issue for Spring 2012 -entitled "Putting Connecticut on the Map"- at our website at ctexplored.org

This episode was produced by Mary Donohue, Asst. Publisher of Connecticut Explored, and engineered by Patrick O'Sullivan.

For more than a generation, Kendall F. Wiggin has been one of the most influential champions of history issues and institutions in Connecticut. At the end of 2019, Ken is retiring after 21 years as Connecticut's State Librarian. In a revealing interview, State Historian Walter Woodward sat down with Ken for a wide-ranging discussion about his agency's complex role in preserving the state's past, the effect of the Internet on historical research and libraries, the role of Connecticut history in public education, his successes and regrets, some advice for his successor, and more.

How did Mark Twain aka Samuel Clemons use scrapbooks to fight unscrupulous publishers who reprinted his work without paying him? Why did celebrities like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony keep scrapbooks? How did abolitionists, suffragettes, and African Americans use scrapbooks to tell their story? Before the era of google and Instagram, how did American use scrapbooks to curate printed stories that contained information they wanted to save for the future?

In this episode, our guest, Dr. Ellen Gruber Garvey explores how Americans from all walks of life created scrapbooks to document, store, critique, and participate in a rapidly changing world of information overload. This episode was recorded as a lecture at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. You'll have to use your imagination a little to picture some of the types of scrapbooks that Dr. Garvey refers to but you'll be fascinated by impact scrapbooks had on American history.

We wish to thank our guest Dr. Ellen Gruber Garvey, professor of English at the New Jersey City University and the host for the lecture, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. Read more in Dr. Garvey's book Writing with Scissors American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance published by Oxford University Press. This episode was produced by Mary Donohue, Assistant Publisher of Connecticut Explored, and engineered by Patrick O'Sullivan.

To hear more episodes of Grating the Nutmeg, subscribe on iTunes, IHeartRadio, GooglePlay, Spotify or at gratingthenutmeg.libsyn.com. Subscribe to Connecticut Explored and get the upcoming Winter issue with stories about events or inventions that disrupted history. Subscribe, buy back issues and collections—at ctexplored.org

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Say the name Wilbur Cross and most Connecticans think of a parkway. Wilbur Cross the man, however, was a Connectican of extraordinary accomplishment. Born in 1862 in the factory village of Gurleyville, he became a world-class scholar, author, educational reformer, founding Dean of the Yale Graduate school, and, starting at age 68, a popular four-term governor who guided Connecticut through the worst years of the Great Depression.

In this episode, state historian Walt Woodward sits down at the New Haven Museum with poet and publisher David Wilk, whose City Point Press recently reissued Cross's 1943 autobiography Connecticut Yankee: An Autobiography of Wilbur L. Cross, to discuss Cross's remarkable nineteenth and twentieth century life.

As a bonus, we include a reading by David Wilk of Wilbur Cross's 1936 Thanksgiving Proclamation, regarded then and now for its eloquent invitation to thankful reflection.