782: Family Dig
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbearped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, ThisAmericanLife.org. From WBECChicago, it's This American Life From Our Glass. So Nancy Updike has been a producer making stories here at This American Life, starting with our very first episode back in the 1990s. And when Nancy takes on a big story, it is very exciting for me and the other producers here because nobody writes or reports a story the way that Nancy does. She just throws you in there with the people that she's writing about, and you're in so deep so quickly, and there's just intimacy to it, and so that's such a feeling to it. And she has a new podcast. It is called We Were Three, she made it with her co-workers who make cereal. And today, on the show, I'm going to play you the first episode of her podcast, and you'll hear what I'm talking about for yourself. That's going to be the first big chunk of today's show. And then after that, we have another story for you of somebody who is digging around in their family's past, like the woman who's at the center of Nancy's story. And let's just get to it. I think actually saying more about Nancy's story will not add to the listening experience of it. So here's Nancy Updike. Rachel McKibbons and her dad, Pete Camacho, stopped talking and resumed talking many times over the course of her life. He could be generous. He could be mean and drunk. She learned how to be mean. She left California, moved across the country. She loved him when she could, and she never wrote him off. She made sure her kids knew the good version of him. When COVID started, Rachel and her father were in a barely talking phase. But a few months in, he emailed her. Trying to find the email where he reached out. So I think the word was infusion. Infusion meant he was sending money. Yep. Here we go. Infusion. That was right. She opened the email. And it said, "Just want to be sure that my New York family is safe and all of this. Please, if there's anything you need, let me know we are family after all." And I was like, "Okay, here's an olive branch." He sent $1,000 to her bank account. And infusion, it saved the day. Rachel and her partner at the time, Jacob, ran a bar and restaurant in Rochester, New York. It was closed, COVID. They were strapped. They had three kids at home, out of five. A year or so later, conversations with her father were very different. Her father was insisting that Rachel not vaccinate his grandkids, her children.
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