Long Haul: Public Radio Documentaries to Go!

A look at the workers building City Water Tunnel #3, a project to add to the New York City water supply. Produced in 1994.

A profile of Washington, D.C. bail bondsman Mardis Mitchell, and bounty hunter Robert Anderson. (Produced in 1995)

A conversation between barber "Red" Swarz and one of his customers at Red's Barber shop in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Produced in 1993.

Former door-to-door Bible salesman Jim "The Rabbit" Baker, featured in the classic 1969 Maysles Brothers film "Salesman," explains the secrets of his now extinct occupation. Produced in 2000.

Stanley Marshall, "supervisor of flavor" for Delta Pride Catfish, and how he decides just what catfish is good enough for Delta Pride. Produced in 1994.

Profile of people who work in family portrait studios during the holidays. Produced in 1992.

Vernon Short and Elwood Brannen, former coal miners in Southwest Virginia, talk about their work and recount mine explosions. Produced in 1993.

Prison guards working death row at Alabama's Holman Prison and Louisiana's Angola Prison talk about their work: what they do and how they feel about it. Produced in 1993.

A profile of Wes Bobo, who turns collected junk and found objects into art and mechanical inventions. Produced in 1994.

James Hudson, a National Park Service worker whose job included keeping the Lincoln Memorial clean, talks about what his job meant to him. This segment includes an epilogue and obituary for Hudson, who died from heat exhaustion after a Fourth of July clean-up on the Washington, D.C. mall.

A profile of a young gang member in Detroit's Mexicantown neighborhood, who with the help of an after-school program, uses her passion for rap music to express herself and revision her future. Funded by the Kellogg Foundation and used in a Kellogg Foundation annual report.

When the South Works steel mill shut down in the early 90's, it marked the end of "big steel" in the city of Chicago. A plant that had anchored the steel industry in Chicago, employing as many as 20,000 workers, was considered obsolete. This is an oral history of some of the men and women who worked at the mill during its heyday, marking where they went from South Works, and where they are today....

A look at the history of Chicago's meatpacking industry and the formation of the Packinghouse Workers Union. Produced in 1993. Winner: 1995 Edward R. Murrow Award (Radio-TV News Directors Association), 1994 National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB) Award, 1994 Association of Visual Communicators (Cindy) Award

Alva Maxey-Boyd defied race covenants, urban renewal bulldozers, and two Mayor Daleys, in a seven-decade battle to get and keep her gorgeous 19th-century mansion – only to be left as the last resident on her block of Chicago's South Prairie Avenue. Her epic story suggests, once again, that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Historical readings by Phil Ridarelli and John Hildreth;...

An urban fable that tells how a once-scruffy park in Chicago' s Logan Square neighborhood fostered a movement that took on an entrenched incumbent Alderman – and Chicago's legendary political machine. The result: one of the most surprising city elections in history. Produced in 2003.

In the early 2000s, the Chicago Recovery Alliance, a group that works on the street with intravenous drug users, distributed Naloxone – a drug that's been used for years by paramedics and in hospital emergency rooms to to reverse heroin overdoses and save lives. The Alliance trained users on injecting Naloxone whenever an overdose occurred – in a living room, in a car, in a park. In this story, pr...

Long before the expressways, travelers coming to Chicago from the north or northwest entered the city by way of Lincoln Avenue. Back then, Lincoln Avenue – also known as U.S. Highway 41 – was a major thoroughfare, dotted with bright motels sporting art deco signs and optimistic names like the "Tip-Top," the "Summit" and the "Diplomat." Most of these are now long gone, but towards the end, these lo...

The 1968 Washington, D.C. riots and the federal government's response altered the social and political climate of the nation's capitol. This portrait of Washington in 1988 draws from the perspectives of a variety of people whose lives were and are directly affected by those events. Produced in 1988.