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Payton Dean wanted more specialized weapons for his Lego minifigures. So he decided to make his own. Other people were intrigued and started telling Dean he should sell the weapons. With a little help from his grandfather, and $200 he had saved up, he decided to give it a try. Six years later, that decision has grown into a very successful business called X39 Brick Customs. It’s currently run out of his garage, and Dean says that the equipment alone is worth about $100,000. Various air-operated

Most of us don’t grow up dreaming of being a tiny gear in some big, impersonal mechanism. But for Rich Hawkins, destiny started coming into focus on the day when, as a kid, the first family television showed up. “The living room was dark and everybody was watching. And I’m peering over the shoulder of adults on the couch. And they were watching a war movie. And I must have gotten scared, because the next thing I remember is being in my bed with the covers over my head, thinking how unfair it was

Wolfe wanted children. But when he went to a sperm donor clinic, he didn’t expect that he’d end up with seventeen. After an extensive judging process, Wolfe wasn’t sure if he’d even be selected. “This was more like trying out for NASA,” Wolfe said. “They did extensive blood work. They looked at my family history going back multiple generations. They looked at any kind of genetic abnormalities. They had me on a treadmill jumping around.” After a few years, he went to see the director who handed

Kwesi Salih is serving more than 50 years in prison for the murder of a woman who was in a car that Salih and his friend tried to carjack. “I didn’t think how my actions could take another person’s life. You know, I live with that every day of my life now,” said Salih who spoke over the phone from Stafford Creek Correctional Center in Aberdeen, Washington. He says the crime he committed was almost inevitable. Growing up in the 1980s in Southern California, he was caught up in a great big machine

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

This story originally aired on June 17, 2017. Washington boasts the largest ferry system in the country. “Twenty-two ferries cross Puget Sound and its inland waterways, carrying more than 22 million passengers to 20 different ports of call,” according to the Washington State Department of Transportation’s website. Marsha Morse was one of the first women captains in Washington’s ferry system. She’s been navigating the waterways since 1975. In this episode of Sound Effect , we hop a ferry with

This story originally aired on June 17, 2017. The San Juans' last homesteaders first discovered the islands on a map. June and Farrar Burn were newlyweds. They met in 1919 at a party June threw in her log cabin in Virginia. June quickly fell for Farrar’s ruddy-cheeked smile, curly red hair, and his ability to make himself useful immediately: gathering firewood, serving drinks, hosting as if it were his own home. Farrar was drawn to June’s lively eyes and her unmistakable, fierce spirit. In a

This story originallyt aired on June 17, 2017. Affordable housing is certainly a big issue these days, especially if you are living in the greater Seattle area. But it is also a major issue on some of our islands. On San Juan Island, an overwhelming shortage of affordable housing is threatening the community and economy. But a non-profit in Friday Harbor is come up with a way to help that problem: by picking up old houses that are no long wanted in Victoria, British Columbia, putting them on a

Note: Some of the content in this story might be upsetting to some listeners. This story originally aired on June 17, 2017. McNeil Island in South Puget Sound is where the Special Commitment Center for sexually violent predators is located. There are about 250 permanent residents at the Special Commitment Center -that’s what they’re called — and there are only a few ways you can leave the facility: you die, you’re deemed to have successfully completed treatment, or you can challenge your

This story originally aired on June 17, 2017. In the summer of 1947, off the coast of Maury Island in South Puget Sound, a man named Harold Dahl was out on his boat with his son, Christopher, their dog and two workers. Harold collected logs floating in the Sound and resold them to lumber mills. According to Dahl, on June 21 at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, six unidentified flying objects appeared in the sky above his boat. One of the saucers then exploded and a metal substance started raining down