Sid Shroyer

Trying to figure things out has been an expression of my essential optimism, it seems to me, over the course of my lifetime. “Recognize problems, solve them, and make things better” makes sense to me, as easy to understand as picking up after myself.

I’m a child of the Enlightenment, I suppose, a believer in logic and evidence and reason, and like my parents and grandparents, progress, social progress, that will make the world a better place than it was for me for our children and our grandchildren.

“They moved the entire church brick by brick and only cracked one.” That’s what Lucinda Holderman told me Monday morning on the phone when I was making arrangements to attend the Somerset Lions Club meeting that evening after work. 

Dear Reunion Organizer:

I’m writing my new grandson a letter. 

Nobody’s getting rich working at WVPE. But, we have the satisfaction of knowing that our work matters.

Maybe we are victims of our own success. We are trying to not be noticed being noticed. We are trying to be noticed by not being noticed, “ motionless in time / As the moon climbs, ” like a good poem, according to Archibald Macleish. Zen and the art of radio station maintenance.

I became immersed in the study of the Holocaust because I took on the responsibility of teaching about the Holocaust to high school students in 2001. It’s a topic, I discovered, that we think we know everything about, and yet, as it turns out we know nothing about.

We are standing in a field on the Saturday before the election, somewhere between Highway 61 and the White Bear Yacht Club, 20 miles northeast of Minneapolis.

It’s just a coincidence, right?

One man’s good fortune and another man’s misfortune play out within minutes of one another in the same town, less than two miles apart, a 40 minute walk.

And it’s just a sad coincidence, no dots to connect here, right?

I woke up at 3:00 last Friday morning thinking about a scene in a movie we’d watched the night before. One of the main characters, a police detective, had been called to the local secondary school to fetch her son who’d run afoul, himself, of the law of the blackboard jungle. After the conference, she wormed her way through a packed hallway of students walking the other way toward an exit.

I miss my retired teacher friends. We meet once a month for breakfast to tell war stories, solve the problems of the world, and revel in our good fortune at having gotten out alive. We met last on March 6, right before the pandemic began to hit home.

Two months later, someone who looks like my wife, but with longer hair, flips channels between The Price is Right and the governor of New York. Andrew Cuomo seems like maybe he’d be a good teacher. Drew Carey, not so much.

I try to stay calm.

Maybe that’s a mistake.        

Passover began Wednesday night and millions of Jews across the country were figuring out how to celebrate the holiday while social distancing. 

Normally families get together and have a Passover Seder ceremony and meal on the first night of the holiday. This year many are having virtual Seder including Temple Beth-El in South Bend, and WVPE’s Sid Shroyer and his family. Both celebrated with a Seder over Zoom this year.

Listen for more on Passover and how one family held a Seder from homes across the country.

When I was 16 and people with whom I agreed burned the flag, and people with whom I disagreed used the flag as a weapon, my dad said to me, “It’s our flag, too.”

If I had a tattoo, that’s what it would say, “It’s our flag, too.”

When I turn the corner at the top of the stairs, there’s Kim, Kim Macon, the Development Director at WVPE, behind her desk and a computer screen, in her dimly lit office.
    

“Hi Kim.”
    

“Hey Sid.”
    

That begins my day at WVPE.
    

I’m not exactly sure what Kim does at the station. It’s my impression that she carries it around on her shoulders.

“Hi Kim.”

“Hey Sid.”

“Kim, I gotta ask ya, what is it, exactly, that you do here at WVPE?”

“I do a little bit of everything,” says Kim.

The story is well known. In 1988, Sister Maura started the Chapin Street Clinic in a vacant garage, to provide health care for people who are uninsured. She nurtured its growth into a modern building across the street in 1998, and then lent it her name in 2006. Thousands of patients, and hundreds of volunteers and employees have benefited from her vision.

Every time you turn around there’s another 50-year anniversary story that you’re gonna hear, the moon landing, Woodstock, and just ahead, the last Beatle recording: Abbey Road.

Abbey Road is one of only three records for which I remember exactly, the time and the place, where I heard it for the first time. 

“I couldn’t sleep,” Judy told me one morning last week. “I think it’s because I saw a headline that says insomnia can kill you.”

Wow. Pretty good. Put that on the Spirit of the Age brand t-shirts. The joke’s on us. Funny. Really funny.

(Maybe you just gave up trying to go back to sleep)  Again, she said,  “I couldn’t sleep because I saw a headline that says insomnia can kill you.”

From the group photo taken at the end of our tour, it’s hard to tell the Americans from the Germans, in the parking lot before we got on the bus and they went back to work.     

On a windy, wet Wednesday morning in the middle of March, Sara Stewart, the president and executive director of Unity Gardens, is out in the field, at the Main Garden, seven acres of urban farm land, between Prast Boulevard and Ardmore Trail near Honeywell and Beacon Heights, on the west side of
South Bend.