This week on Sound Effect, our theme is “The Past Is Still With Us.” First, we hear about how a man who died in Missouri in 1855 crossed the Oregon Trail in a whiskey barrel to be buried in Southwest Washington. Then, we hear how a Seattle rapper uses music to process his pain of the past. We travel to a Concrete to learn what happens when Hollywood takes over your small hometown. We meet a Bellevue teacher who uses typewriters to make art — and unlock students’ inner authors. Finally, we learn about an implicit bias test, and what it can teach us about how our environment shapes our attitudes.
PICKLED PIONEER
Willie Keil’s grave sits on a hilltop in the Willapa Valley. The marker is a bit hard to read — the weathered stone shows a date of death as May 19, 1855.
What’s unusual about Willie’s case isn’t when he died, but where: Willie succumbed to disease in Bethel, Missouri, 2,000 miles away, days before his family hit the road west, along the Oregon Trail.
So how did this 19-year-old wind up buried not in Missouri, but in Southwestern Washington? Listen to the story to find out.
PORTER RAY
Plenty of artists look to past struggles when they’re creating. It’s why there are so many songs about heartbreak and disappointment.
Seattle rapper Porter Ray Sullivan, who goes by Porter Ray on stage, has used music to cope with and process a whole string of setbacks in his life — and somehow emerge with hope. Listen to Porter Ray share his story.
CONCRETE HOLLYWOOD
Concrete, Washington, was struggling in the early 1990s. Timber jobs were scarce in the upper Skagit Valley. The big cement plant had closed decades before. And then, in 1992, in stepped an unexpected player: Hollywood.
This is the story of what happens when Hollywood comes to your small, isolated hometown, takes over everything, and then leaves.
TYPEWRITER TEACHER
Have you been in an elementary school classroom lately? In a lot of them, it’s all about technology: smart boards and laptops and tablets. But in Kelye Kneeland’s first-grade classroom at Spirit Ridge elementary, the most eye-catching bit of tech dates to the Civil War era.
Shelf after shelf is crammed with mechanical typewriters. We hear from Kneeland, who was bitten by a typewriter bug several years ago.
IMPLICIT BIAS TEST
There’s an online test — you may have heard of it, or maybe even taken it. It’s called the Implicit Association Test. It measures your split-second responses to words and images, then gives you a result that ranks your bias toward whatever is being measured.
The most famous version measures bias towards black or white people.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it in his 2005 book, “Blink.” He’s biracial, and when he took the test he discovered, to his own mortification, that he was “moderately biased toward white people.”
Obie Pressman of Seattle is a white man. He read “Blink,” and, as he told Sound Effect, he immediately decided to go take that test. Listen to his story.
