This week on Sound Effect, we hear stories of people who refused to give up. Billy Idolator Michael Henreichsen developed a fascination with a particular musician: Billy Idol. Michael saw him live a few times, including a show at Tulalip Casino just north of Everett. And something about that show left kind of a sour taste in his mouth . That launched a quixotic two-year quest to get Billy Idol to come to Seattle, and play a live show at his birthday party. Blind Sailor Mohamed Farid took a class

This story originally aired on September 9, 2017. When Meg Martin first moved to Olympia, Washington from Montana in 2007, she was recovering from a drug addiction and looking to start a new life. In Olympia, she threw herself into outreach work. She volunteered for a program that uses bicycles to deliver clean needles to people on the street who use injection drugs. Night after night, she’d encounter people who were homeless. Because these men and women were actively using drugs, they were not

This story originally aired on September 9, 2017. Tricia Arcaro Turton’s career started with a big fat “no.” She says she was never one to be discouraged just because someone tells her she can’t do something. And at a young age, she was told that she couldn’t be a boxer. She decided to write off the sport all together. But later in life she would undergo grueling training, and eventually became a professional boxer. This, of course, came after she played elite rugby on the United States national

The day that changed Michael Freeman’s life came about 22 years ago. “I was crushed by an eight-ton truck in a loading dock across the pelvis. They took me out to Madigan and did emergency surgery,” Freeman said. In the course of his treatment he was given a common blood-thinning medication, to which he turned out to be severely allergic. The complications would eventually cost him one of his legs. He was sent to Harborview in Seattle for two months to recover. “And I met this miracle person

Real estate. It’s a hot topic in the Northwest right now. A white-hot market like Seattle’s creates winners and losers, depending on which side of the transaction you happen to be on. These days, you’d probably rather be a seller than a buyer. But back in 1985, when Merlin Rainwater and her husband bought their place, the roles were reversed. They were able to score a little bungalow on the East slope of Capitol Hill for just $50,000. “There was this wave of young white liberal activist folks

Every Tuesday night, St. Paul’s Episcopal church in Seattle opens its doors and invites people living with mental illness and homelessness to come in and create. In the unique art space they can paint, knit, play music or find their own creative pursuits. The Karen Korn Project was founded by Pastor Kae Eaton and Patricia Swain, in honor of Swain’s daughter Karen. Karen died from suicide in November of 2014, after struggling with mental illness and homelessness herself. Swain says her daughter

Paula Becker grew up reading the "Mrs. Piggle Wiggle" children's books, and loved the whimsical stories of her uncanny ability to cure children of bad character traits. The author of the books, Betty MacDonald, lived in Washington. Many years later, when Becker moved to the Evergreen state, she asked her local librarian what had become of the best-selling author. It was then that she found out MacDonald had written much more than the fanciful "Piggle Wiggle" books. She was also the author of

If you have a band in Seattle, good luck finding an affordable practice space. There aren't many to begin with, and if a band can find a place that doesn't mind the noise, it is often small, old and outrageously expensive. Seattle music journalist and author Charles R. Cross says things were noticably different in the early and mid-'80s. "There were many, many empty spaces, that were just empty forever. So the capacity for a band member to rent a room for a hundred dollars in Belltown and live,

This week, stories of positive things coming from otherwise negative places. First, music journalist and author Charles R. Cross talks about how a bad economy helped produce the grunge music movement. Then, how the author of the light-hearted Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books actually had a pretty rough life. A mother finds a way to pay tribute to her artistic daughter who battled mental illness. We take a tour of a Seattle neighborhood that decades ago had intentionally been divided as a result of

When Sound Effect contributor Joel Shupack was just out of college, he was working a boring, tedious warehouse job in Bend, Oregon. “My job,” recalls Joel, “was to open boxes full of sunglasses, take them all out and put each pair into a separate box. They would be mailed out to all of the dupes who signed up for a sunglasses-of-the-month club.” It was one of those companies that would mail out leaflets advertising “FREE SUNGLASSES! $40 Value!”. An asterisk would direct you to the fact that you