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David Schumer felt like the country was falling apart. Nixon had resigned, Carter was hapless and disco was everywhere he turned. “We thought the only sane thing to do would be to move to a rural area, buy 30 acres of land, build a house and grow our own food,” he remembers. He moved from the Detroit suburbs to rural Arkansas, deep in the Ozark Mountains, to the community of Chimes. David tells Sound Effect about one of his favorite nights of his life, sitting on a porch watching fireflies. He

In 2003, a group of four friends from various points of the country hit the trail for a bachelor party backpacking trip in the North Cascades. George Wing was the man who was getting married. They brought all of the usual necessities for such an outing: tents, food, a first-aid kit. But George’s longtime childhood friend and master prankster, Kermit, decided to shake things up. “We set up our first camp and I hear music and there’s this female leg protruding from Kermit’s tent, dancing in the

This week on Sound Effect, stories about the view from above. The Best View In The City Space Needle elevator operator B.J. Listman gets to see one of the best views in the world every single day for his job. And for B.J., the view from the top never gets old. High-Altitude Exploration UW Earth and space sciences faculty member Robert Winglee has designed a drone that can fly at an altitude of about 80,000 feet. It has solar panels in the wings and batteries for energy storage, meaning this

B.J. Listman is one of the elevator operators at the Space Needle. The Space Needle and the Smith Tower, according to B.J, are the only places left in Seattle where there are actually elevator operators. This iconic Seattle landmark has enchanted B.J. since he was a child. “It's kind of funny actually. I have one of those three-foot tall paper Space Needle models, and the model kit had you glued the elevators in place, but I never did because I like to make them go up and down the Space Needle,"

A group of students from the University of Washington is working on a way to create satellites that could stay up indefinitely and fly in a circle over a particular patch of the earth. The results could mean cell phone and internet coverage in disaster areas, along with super-high-resolution images of remote places on the planet. Right now, they’re testing their ideas, which have taken the shape of a 12-pound glider with a 20-foot wingspan attached to a small propulsion system that’s powered by

Jesse Hayes’ love of flying began as a kid growing up in Texas. His family had a car but they also had an airplane, which Jesse’s father adored. Jesse says that as an African-American family, that meant that they could literally fly over racism when they went on trips to visit family. The airplane made it possible for Jesse’s family to avoid the things that made traveling difficult for so many people of color in the American South at that time — such as being denied accommodations or the ability

Traveling on a commercial flight these days can be rough. Perks such as free meals and pillows are long gone. Today, airlines charge for everything from where you sit on the plane to how much legroom you’re allotted. It’s easy to forget there was a time, not too long ago, when passengers dressed up to get on an airplane. 79-year-old Gloria Sferra remembers very well what flying used to be like. She was a stewardess for Pan American Airlines from 1962 to 1964 — a golden era of commercial air

There’s a letter on Yulina Bilombele’s dining room table that she cannot read. “Defendant failed to pay the rent and has further failed to vacate and surrender the premises.” Bilombele is a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo. She’s 80 years old. She does not speak English. She is too frail to work and she does not have the money to pay rent. So, she turns to the man many Congolese refugees in Seattle call: Floribert Mubalama. “They want us to help them,” he says. “They have to go to

Michael McAndrews has had a lifelong love affair with birds. It all started with an article he read as a kid in National Geographic. It profiled homing pigeons used in wartime to communicate messages between troops. Michael was captivated by the story of a bird named Cher Ami that saved almost 200 American soldiers in France during World War I. So he started buying his own birds and training them. In fact, his classmates called him “birdbrain,” not as an insult, but because birds were the only

This week on Sound Effect, we share stories that take place underwater. A Meal Fit For An Otter At the Seattle Aquarium, sea otters get a diet that would make any seafood junkie jealous. Not only do they dine on restaurant grade salmon, crab, shrimp and other seafood, but they get fed up to nine times per day. Remarkable Rescue The MS Prinsendam was a Holland America cruise ship that left the Northwest in the fall of 1980. There were 324 passengers aboard, and 200 crew members. And they were on