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This week on Sound Effect, our theme is "What Are the Odds?" We'll meet the grandson of Holocaust survivors who calculated the very low probability that he would even be born. Then a typo may have saved Bob Hofferber's life, by keeping him off of a military plane bound for Tacoma in 1952. In another story of the twists of fate, group of nuns walking along a Washington beach are overtaken by a rogue wave, changing their lives and their relationship with God forever. We'll get to know a scientist

Arik Cohen’s grandparents survived the Holocaust, all four of them. The likelihood of that happening is astronomical -- and he has the calculations to prove it. A self-professed geek, Cohen began looking at the history of his family to figure out the statistical odds of each person surviving and contributing to a grandson: himself. Cohen’s crunching of the numbers also allowed him to look closer at four individual tales of survival against the odds. Arik Cohen is a member of the Holocaust Center

On 28 th November 1952, a chance occurrence – a clerical error – resulted in Bob Hofferber not catching his scheduled flight from Fort Ladd, Alaska to McChord Field in south Tacoma. It was an error that likely saved his life. The U.S. Air Force C-54G Skymaster crashed on its approach , resulting in the deaths of all but two of the people on board. Bob had spent most of the day checking out of Ladd Air Force Base, where he was coming to the end of an eighteen-month deployment in the Air National

The population of Concrete, Washington in 1938 was about 1,000 people. But one October evening that year, while a famous radio broadcast was frightening a good portion of the population across the country, things in Concrete got even stranger. When Orson Wells broadcast his famous War of the Worlds broadcast on October 30, 1938, if you didn’t tune in at the very beginning, you might not have realized it was a radio play, not actual terrifying news of Martians invading earth. But in Concrete, a

As part of Sound Effect’s " What Are the Odds?" e pisode, Dick Stein, 88.5’s man of chance and mystery, shares a few stories from his time spent at poker tables. “Poker players hate to get up from the table, God forbid they should miss that hand that will make them a huge score,” said Stein. “So, we do two things: one, cultivate super human bladder control, and two, when we’re hungry we’ll just order something and eat it at the table.” In these vignettes, Stein talks about some of the unusual

The population of Concrete, Washington is about 700 people, and back in 1938, it wasn’t much different…about 1,000 people lived there. But 79 years ago yesterday, while a famous radio broadcast was frightening a good portion of the population across the country, things went a step further in Concrete. When Orson Wells broadcast his famous War of the Worlds broadcast on October 30, 1938, if you didn’t tune in at the very beginning, you probably weren’t aware that this was a radio play, not actual

This week on Sound Effect, our theme is "ghosts." We open with host Gabriel Spitzer having his son taste-test a ghost pepper. Gabriel then heads out to learn about a forest of dead trees , and how that came to be. We then meet a woman who lost her husband to cancer , but contemplates his lingering presence.

Near the coast of Washington state, on the banks of the Copalis River, lies a ghost forest -- a stand of gray, dead trees in the middle of a healthy forest. How did it get there? Could the key lie in another mystery, a mysterious tsunami recorded by samurai in 18th-century Japan? Linking these seemingly unconnected phenomena became a goal for ambitious scientists using everything at their disposal, from computer models to chainsaws. But, most importantly, unlocking this mystery led to a

In the Fall of 2016, Greg Beckelhymer died after a year-long struggle with metastatic kidney cancer. He was 47 years old. In this story, his widow, Seattle-based writer Michelle Goodman and her sister, Naomi Goodman, talk about how acute grief is often accompanied by strong denial. “I had to remind myself that he wouldn’t be walking through the front door to make dinner with me and to take the dog to the nearby park afterward. I had to remind myself because grief is sneaky. It fools you into

Seattle Writer Rachel Kessler started this discussion by reading a passage from an essay she wrote that was recently anthologized in a book Ghosts of Seattle Past. “I ride down Yesler every day to get to the library where I research and write. At this point I decided to investigate my own family's history which it turns out is connected to Yesler way and 17th. ‘How far back do you know your family?’ The genealogy librarian opened up the ancestry search engine on the computer in front of us. I