Long Haul: Public Radio Documentaries to Go!

American schools teach students that with hard work, they can realize their dreams. But some kids do everything right, only to graduate from high school and find the American Dream isn’t for them. Sam was brought to the United States by his parents as a young child, but his family overstayed their visas. They’ve lived here now for fourteen years, and in that time Sam grew from a small boy to a you...

Over the course of eight months, Long Haul followed two hospice volunteers through their training and first assignments in patients' homes. Trained to provide "respite care," the volunteers set out to give family members a break from their caretaking responsibilities. And while one has a chance to reflect on her patient's life in a intimate setting, another gets to explore death in a rather unexpe...

Each year, more than 100,000 women use some form of doctor-assisted artificial insemination to try to get pregnant. Suzanne is one of these women. She's single, in her mid-40s, and has been trying for two years to get pregnant using a variety of methods. Team Long Haul follows Suzanne through her last in vitro fertilization attempt – her last chance to have her own biological child – and documents...

PART 1 of 4. Whether they are forced to, or whether they plan to, each year more and more seniors move into retirement homes. In 2000, Peg Collison was one of them. Peg left the town of San Mateo, California, where she'd been living for almost 35 years, and moved two hours away into a newly built retirement community in Davis, California. Peg's son, Dan, gave his mom a tape recorder and asked her...

PART 2 of 4. Whether they are forced to, or whether they plan to, each year more and more seniors move into retirement homes. In 2000, Peg Collison was one of them. Peg left the town of San Mateo, California, where she'd been living for almost 35 years, and moved two hours away into a newly built retirement community in Davis, California. Peg's son, Dan, gave his mom a tape recorder and asked her...

PART 3 of 4. Whether they are forced to, or whether they plan to, each year more and more seniors move into retirement homes. In 2000, Peg Collison was one of them. Peg left the town of San Mateo, California, where she'd been living for almost 35 years, and moved two hours away into a newly built retirement community in Davis, California. Peg's son, Dan, gave his mom a tape recorder and asked her...

PART 4 of 4. Whether they are forced to, or whether they plan to, each year more and more seniors move into retirement homes. In 2000, Peg Collison was one of them. Peg left the town of San Mateo, California, where she'd been living for almost 35 years, and moved two hours away into a newly built retirement community in Davis, California. Peg's son, Dan, gave his mom a tape recorder and asked her...

Most autism experts generally agree that early intervention beginning immediately after diagnosis can help a child conquer some of the most debilitating aspects of the disorder. Yet, society's approach when it comes to helping these children is slipshod. Some parents are lucky enough to live in areas where their public school districts have top-notch programs for autistic toddlers. Others have the...

After waiting for Mr. Right – and after years of fertility treatments – Suzanne, a single woman in her forties, decided to adopt. She chose transracial adoption. We follow her through workshops designed to "teach white people to raise kids of color," baby-shopping trips with Mom at Target, a critical rendezvous with a young mother at a pancake house, and, finally, a magical night at a suburban res...

At one time, it was believed there were as many as five billion passenger pigeons in eastern North America. By the mid nineteenth century, their numbers began to decline sharply – killed by sportsman, commercial hunters and by farmers angry as the birds began raiding farm fields as forests disappeared to logging. Jon Wuepper, a naturalist and historian, documented the decline of the pigeon in sout...

Eastern Montana is a land of extremes. The mercury can swing from 50 degrees below zero in the winter to over 100 in the summer. A recent drought has made life even harder on people relying on water for their livelihood – and on people like Roger Muggli, who runs the Tongue and Yellowstone Irrigation District near Miles City, Montana. Muggli's job, in part, is to determine how much water will be d...

The coqui is the national symbol of Puerto Rico: a tiny, but vociferous tree frog that's a beloved part of the Puerto Rican soundscape, lulling residents to sleep every night with the male's lusty “croak.” But it’s a different story on the Big Island of Hawaii. Coquis showed up on the island as stowaways a few years back, and because the frog has no natural predator there, they’re proliferating li...

Every year wild boar cause an estimated 1.8 billion dollars in damage to farms, lawns, and natural areas, primarily in the southern United States. Experts contend the roaming swine also carry a number of diseases that could infect commercial herds and seriously threaten pork producers. In recent years, rogue populations have sprung up in Michigan, where boar were brought in for commercial hunting....

About twenty years ago, some locals got together with The Nature Conservancy to buy about 300 acres that was slated to become a subdivision near the town of Dixon, Illinois. Since then, Nachusa Grasslands has grown to some 3,500 acres, much of it former cornfields that have been restored with native plants and birds. Most of the restoration work is being done by a spirited group of volunteer stewa...

Every spring since 1989, bird lovers in Berrien County, Michigan (directly across the lake from Chicago), have taken part in a grueling competition to see which team can track down the largest number of species within a nineteen-hour time span. Teams kick off at midnight and go all out until 7 p.m.; they need only stay within the county limits. And because the event is held at the height of spring...

Twenty years ago, academics Frank and Deborah Popper wrote what they thought would be a little-noticed, four page article subtitled "A Daring Proposal for Dealing with an Inevitable Disaster," which argued that current agricultural use of much of the Great Plains is simply not sustainable. They advocated for a "Buffalo Commons," a return of large tracts of land back to native species, including bu...

This is the story of a good fish gone bad … an immigrant brought here with good intentions … a tasty fillet with a bad rap. A victim of stereotypes. Of fish profiling. A fish that can fly! And, a fish that could – if we let it – just rock our culinary world! Long Haul tells the story of the Asian Carp invasion in this 2010 story.

On March 11, 1998, 47-year-old Jerry Lee Hogue was put to death for the 1979 arson-murder of an Arlington, Texas, woman. Unlike the lethal injection earlier that year of Karla Faye Tucker (the first woman put to death in Texas in 130 years), which drew hundreds of national and international reporters and demonstrators, Hogue's execution -- like most in Huntsville -- went largely unnoticed. Long Ha...

Team Long Haul follows the sentencing of a boy in Lansing, Michigan, who was 13 years old at the time of a murder in which he took part and for which he was convicted. The judge in the case had the option of sentencing Charles Lewis Jr. to life in prison without the possibility of parole. After the sentencing, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that life without parole for juveniles is unconstitutional....

For the past several years, detainees at Chicago's Cook County Jail have been reading to their kids. These parents in prison meet in one of the jail's small libraries, pick out a children's book and record it onto a cassette tape. The tape and the book are then mailed to the child. For some, it's the only way to connect with their kids through prison walls. Produced in 2002.

The story of the worst homefront disaster of World War II -- an ammunition explosion that killed more than 300 men -- and what happened to the 50 African-American men who refused to go back to work loading ammunition after the explosion. On July 17, 1944, two Liberty ships anchored at the Port Chicago Munitions Case near San Francisco exploded, killing 320 men and injuring 390. It was the worst ho...

Texas has the largest prison system in America, with more than 150,000 prisoners behind bars. The headquarters of the state's Department of Criminal Justice is in Huntsville, a small, conservative town that's home to nine state prisons. In the center of Huntsville is the Walls Unit. The oldest prison in Texas, it has gained notoriety in recent years as the location of Texas' famously-frequent exec...

North Dakota's population is shrinking dramatically – so much so that many counties there now meet the U.S. Census' definition of frontier land, much as they did before homesteading began in earnest in the late 1800's. Kids are leaving; the rest are aging, dying. But in the Southwest part of the state, one man is fighting to save his hometown by building giant metal sculptures along a lonely strip...

Branson is home base for aging country and pop stars such as Mickey Gilley, Roy Clark, Wayne Newton, Tony Orlando, and Charlie Pride. With a population of 5,000, Branson boasts over 50,000 theater seats (more than on Broadway), four times more motel rooms than residents, and scores of restaurants. The "Branson Boom," as it is called, happened virtually overnight. "Branson Postcards" explores how a...

Usually, the opening of a grocery store in a small North Dakota town wouldn’t get our attention. But in 2007, in New England, ND -- which had been without a grocery store for a year-and-a-half -- it was cause for major celebration. Long Haul has the story of the fall and rise of the ‘New England Community Grocery Store.’