Season 5, Episode 9- Fran Harris, The First Female Newscaster in Michigan

12/05/22 • 21 min

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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.

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Season 5, Episode 8- A Century of Mexicantown

A longstanding community called Mexicantown on Detroit's southwest side has persevered for around a century. The area of restaurants, shops, and bakeries anchors a key ethnic community in Detroit. For many, the journey here was prompted by a search for jobs. We explore the rise of the community, and the decline when Depression-era policies due to racism sent many Mexican-Americans packing for Mexico. We talk with Maria Elena Rodriguez and Elena Herrada and explore how this neighborhood came to be.

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Season 5 Finale- The Development of PCP and Ketamine

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.