181: The Friendly Man
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You know how there are certain stories that in your family or your circle of friends become kind of infamous favorite stories that people tell? Well, for a generation of people working in public radio, especially documentary producers, the story of how Scott Kerry or Gott on the radio is one of those stories. Here's what happened. Scott was living in Salt Lake City and things weren't going so great. His marriage was coming apart. He had a job painting a semiconductor factory that was easy to walk away from. From time to time, when he was listening to an especially great story on the radio, on public radio, he would think to himself, "I could do that." And so one day, he got himself a tape recorder and walked to the highway and stuck at his thumb and headed east to the headquarters of NPR News in Washington, DC. And anybody who picked him up and gave him a ride, he interviewed. So after a couple weeks on the road, he arrives at NPR's old offices on M Street in Washington. With all these interviews in his backpack, it was a Sunday. The place was mostly deserted, only to staff a week at all things considered and some engineering staff were there in the building. But there's a telephone in the lobby of that building and Scott called in and the then host of weekend all things considered, Alex Chadwick, happened to be the one who picked up the phone. And Scott explained that he had just arrived, having hitchhiked across the country and now he had all these tapes and he would like it if somebody would show him how to turn the tapes into a radio story, which, incredibly, somebody did. Most people on the radio sound like each other, the same way that most people on TV sound like other people on TV and most writing in the newspaper is like all the other writing in the newspaper, Scott sounds only like himself. There's a feeling in his stories, it's not like anything anybody else does. So today we're going to do something different, we're going to be bringing you an entire hour of stories from one contributor from Scott Carrier. We wanted to try this and try it with Scott because there's just something in this set of stories where when you put them all together, somehow they seem to be telling one long story in a really nice way. From WBEZChicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International, I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, stories by one of the most interesting people working in radio, Scott Carrier. Our show today in four acts, including in act three, Scott Carrier heads out on a mission to discover whether amnesia, the kind that's in the movies where somebody gets bonked on the head and can't remember anything, you just find out whether that actually happens in real life. Our show today in four acts, stay with us. At Kwan, the test. Well a couple years back, Scott Carrier was hired to interview men and women in Utah who were diagnosed with schizophrenia. He got the job because the director of the research project heard some of his radio stories and thought that he was a good interviewer, somebody who knew how to listen. So they taught Scott to administer this test that measured mental health. It was a hundred questions, each of which was scored in a scale of one to seven. It took an hour to give the test. Scott was paid $30 for each test he gave. The people he gave the test to, Scott $5.
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