Society & CulturePersonal JournalsHistoryComedy

Grandma's Been There

Siobhan Barry

Host and creator Siobhan Barry takes listeners back to the 1950s and 1960s. Her stories, sometimes funny and sometimes serious, are time traveling trips through the days of penny candies, neighborhood ice cream parlors, fifty-cent movie tickets, air raid drills, summers without air conditioning, street games, homemade toys, football weddings, transistor radios, Beatlemania, and a cultural revolution.

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20 episodes
weekly
Avg 19 min
English

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S2 · E95
Friday · 20 min
Closed On Sundays
Nowadays, when most businesses are open on Sundays and we can shop on line twenty-four hours a day, it must be impossible for younger people to understand what it was like for nearly every single business in the neighborhood to be closed for an entire day. But kids of my generation couldn’t imagine Sunday any other way.
S2 · E94
October 16 · 24 min
Cold Brew And A Croissant
How’d you like to visit your childhood home only to find out your old address no longer exists?
S2 · E93
October 9 · 21 min
What Are We Having For Supper?
Lots of things have changed since I was a kid, but there’s one question American kids have been asking every day since the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. “What are we having for supper?”
S2 · E92
October 2 · 19 min
A Few Of My Favorite Things
I became a podcaster because I love podcasts. They’re entertaining, educational and sometimes even inspirational. This week, I’d like to tell you about a handful of my favorites in case you’re looking for something new to listen to.
S2 · E91
September 25 · 16 min
I Do So Declare
By the time we were sixth graders, we were used to our teachers’ theatrics. The antiquated flowery language, trite worn out proverbs and dumb expressions meant to showcase their superior intelligence while illustrating our stupidity. They had a million of them. Is this what our parents were paying tuition for?
S2 · E90
September 18 · 22 min
Future Shock
In the mid-1960s, our teachers warned us we would someday suffer from something called “future shock.” Our world would change so drastically and so rapidly that we wouldn’t be able to keep up with it all. It would cause distress, anxiety, even disorientation and confusion. Maybe for the older generation, but not for us. We kids couldn’t wait to be bombarded by the future. We were ready. Bring it on.
S2 · E89
September 11 · 17 min
Back To School
The first few weeks of a new school year were always a rather frenetic period of readjustment and settling in. Get used to a new teacher. Get the right notebooks. Cover all those textbooks. For me personally, the hardest thing to adjust to every September was being back in school while the weather was still summer-like. It felt wrong, unnatural—like we’d been kidnapped.
S2 · E88
September 4 · 22 min
The Psychedelic Shop
In the late 1960s, you didn’t have to be fully aligned with the counterculture to enjoy a visit to a psychedelic shop. You just had to be open to new ideas and have a willingness to recapture some of that childhood sense of wonder, whether you were an adult or a kid.
S2 · E87
August 28 · 18 min
The New Look
Mary Quant, the fashion designer whose creations defined the 1960s “mod” era said she spent her thirteenth birthday crying because in her words, “old age had struck.” All she had to look forward to now were below the knee-length dresses, high heeled shoes, corsets, nylons and garter belts, stiff beehive hairdos, artificial nails… I totally understood. Before I became a teenager, I had been dreading being sentenced to a lifetime of that as well.
S2 · E86
August 21 · 18 min
The Candy Store
When we were little kids, just about everything was chosen for us, but the candy store was a place where we got to pick what we wanted.
S2 · E85
August 14 · 20 min
Submitted For Your Approval
Everything I need to know about life, I learned from Rod Serling. Well, maybe not everything, but lots of important stuff. By the time I was thirteen, I’d seen every single “Twilight Zone” episode more than once.
S2 · E84
August 7 · 17 min
Yoga
A richer, fuller more joyful life? Relaxation, discipline and more will power? Increased physical, mental and spiritual control? Who wouldn’t want all that?
S2 · E83
July 31 · 17 min
Our Summer Reading List
Nowadays, they call it “me time.” A time to shut out work, world and worries and just concentrate on wellbeing and recharging the physical and spiritual batteries. When I was a kid, we called it summer. Just like the old rhyme said, “No more pencils, no more books. No more teachers’ dirty looks.” I heard that! Except that chant should have been modified to say, “no more textbooks.”
S2 · E82
July 24 · 21 min
The Summer of Love
The summer of 1967, so frivolously referred to as the summer of love was a turning point, an ending and a beginning. Somewhere around the middle of July, the counterculture gained a number. I jumped in head first, and never looked back. It was the moment I’d been waiting for for thirteen years.
S2 · E81
July 17 · 20 min
Where Are We Going Today?
Summer days were long, lazy and dreamy. We were content to spend most of our school vacation outside eating ice cream, drinking sodas and playing with friends on the avenue, going no further than the corner store or the playground on the next block. But on a Saturday or Sunday, or during those two short weeks our fathers were on vacation from their jobs in July or August, we stepped out. All we wanted to know when we got up in the morning was, “Where are we going today?”
S2 · E80
July 10 · 23 min
From Unknown Faces
In January 1968, my favorite band, The Byrds released an album called The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Life-long fans like me referred to it as “the Notorious album.” One of the tracks on the album was “Draft Morning,” a song about a young man, a draftee who was in no hurry to be shipped off to Viet Nam and commanded to kill people, a command that came from faces unknown to him.
S2 · E79
July 3 · 18 min
Half Gaelic, Half Garlic
When we were kids, it was common for us to ask each other, “What are you?” What we were actually asking was, “What nationality are you? Where’s your family from?”
S2 · E78
June 26 · 17 min
A Bench For All Seasons: Summer
Even as a child, I was in love with the seasons, their unique personalities and the different things they did to get our attention. But if you asked me what my favorite season was, I didn’t even have to think about it. “Summer!” I said, just like every other kid I knew. Why would you even have to ask?
S2 · E77
June 19 · 18 min
The Eternal Kid: A Father's Day Story
The reason I have so many stories about my father from my own childhood and from the stories he told me about his years as a kid is because of my exceptional memory—the one I’m always bragging about in these episodes, the one I inherited from him.
S2 · E76
June 12 · 18 min
It's My Birthday!
I’m a June baby, one of Cancer’s moon children born right after the longest day of the year. In other words, I’m lucky enough to be able to celebrate my birthday right as the summer begins.

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