The Detroit History Podcast The Detroit History Podcast

The Blue Bird Inn was a cathedral of musical wonder in 1950s-era Detroit. This now-defunct west side club featured bebop jazz, featuring musicians such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Barry Harris, Thad Jones, and a longer list of jazz masters. The place was pretty much abandoned a few decades ago, but a local preservation group is taking up its cause, with some help from City Hall. We tell the story of a jazz club, including from the point of view of an archeologist who conducted a dig, yielding curious results.
Songs:
Wardell Gray- Blue Gray
Charles McPherson- Nostalgia
Charlie Parker- Blue Bird
Miles Davis- Rocker
Wardell Gray- A Sinner Kissed an Angel
Wardell Gray- Twisted
 
 

A group of soldiers from metro Detroit and Michigan boarded a trip ship bound for war-torn Europe during the closing months of World War I. Instead, they were diverted to Russia, just south of the Arctic Circle. They battled the Bolsheviks, who had just deposed Russia’s Czar. They fought in temperatures as low as 40-below zero, and continued fighting even after World War I came to an end in November 1918. Mike Grobbel, grandson of one of the members of the “Polar Bear Expedition,” tells their story. And George Baier recreates their mutiny. 

The Sheik (real name: Edward Farhat) was the most feared bad guy in Detroit wrestling during the 1960s and 1970s. He threw fire. He cut his opponent. He bit them, often winning with his “camel clutch.” His business model was simple: to behave in such a vile manner that people would pay money to watch him battle at air-conditioned Cobo Arena. We look at The Sheik’s impact on the world of wrestling, and how some of his innovations are being copied two decades after his death. And we have a bonus track: a poem by Mark James Andrews about The Sheik’s “good guy” nemesis, Bobo Brazil.

It's been 5 years since the Detroit History Podcast originally released their podcast on the 1957 NFL champion Detroit Lions. Much has changed with Lions brass in the past few years, and it has finally led to post-season success in the Motor City. The Detroit History Podcast revisits the improbable run the 1957 team made to the championship, a run that was led by a first year coach and a backup quarterback. Was grit always in the Lions DNA?  Managing editor Eric Kiska shares an updated essay on what has led to the Lions recent post-season success. 

Ketamine has found wide uses since the 1960s: As a painkiller, an anesthetic, a street drug consumed at raves, and -- now -- considered by many to be an exciting new treatment for depression. We explore how ketamine was developed here in Detroit, at the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company, with help from a Wayne State University chemistry professor, and later tested at the now-closed Lafayette Clinic facility in Detroit. Credit to: The BBC and The Tim Ferriss Show.

Broadcaster Fran Harris's life was a lifetime of firsts. She was the first woman newscaster in Detroit radio during World War II, persuading her bosses at WWJ to abandon its "guys only" tradition. And when television came along in Detroit on Channel 4 in 1946, she was on the air for that, too. When she retired from the station in 1974, some 200 women showed up at her goodbye party, grateful to Harris for the barriers she broke. We have a tape of a 1989 Harris interview, and talk with Michigan State University professor emerita Sue Carter. Former Channel 4 newswoman Betty Carrier Newman describes life in the newsroom when she arrived in 1969.