Prehistoric podcast studio found
My co-host and I revive the Kassel Mission Chronicles
The last couple of weeks I’ve been working on reviving the Kassel Mission Chronicles podcast with an ear to resuming my original podcast, War As My Father’s Tank Battalion Knew it.
That said, I can only describe my podcast studio, aka my cluttered desk, as a mixture of something old and something new. The first new episode of the Kassel Mission Chronicles, which I recorded with co-host Linda Alice Dewey, consisted of a three-way call on a landline on loan from the Smithsonian, between me in Connecticut, Linda in Michigan, and veteran Jim Baynham in Texas, with the phone’s speaker activated and my new Zoom H4 Essential recorder placed right next to the speaker. Then it was on to my newly outdated Windows 10 computer to edit on my recently downloaded Sound Forge Audio Studio 17.
My friend Steve Parker, who has me as a guest on his radio show every so often, says you don’t need a lot of expensive equipment to produce a podcast. That’s not true. It probably would cost a lot of money to get one of these antique Panasonic landlines from the Smithsonian. The Sound Forge Audio Studio 17 costs $59, although I suspect I paid a little less than that. Sound Forge 7 Audio Studio was the editing software I first used longer ago than I care to remember, and a couple of years after that I splurged for the more robust Sound Forge 9 and then I upgraded to Sound Forge 11, but they’re both on my old Windows 7 computer; I can still use them but I can’t transfer them, besides which the Audio Studio does everything I did to do on those.
Then there’s the Zoom H4, which replaced my Zoom H2 which finally gave up the ghost. I got that in 2010 and it marked my transition from analog to digital recording, which reminds me I still have about 200 cassettes that need to be digitized, but I bought a $50 gadget that plugs into a usb port and digitizes a cassette as it plays.
Here’s a sample from the finished product. 101 year old Jim Baynham on learning to drive, speaking with Linda Alice Dewey of the Kassel Mission Historical Society.
Jim was a 20-year-old B-24 pilot on the ill-fated Kassel Mission of Sept. 27, 1944. His plane was shot down with four crew members killed, three of them murdered on the ground. The full episode is at the Kassel Mission Chronicles podcast on Spotify, Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts.
The second episode is a three-way call between me, Linda and Jim Miner, whose father, Reg Miner, was also a B-24 pilot on the Kassel Mission and a prisoner of war. Just last month, on Sept. 27, the, what, 81st anniversary of the fateful mission, a Memorial was dedicated at the site where Reg Miner’s B-24 crashed. Jim attended the ceremony with his niece Kiera and her son, so there were three generations of the pilot’s family on hand.
Here’s an excerpt not from the podcast but from my original interview with Reg Miner, who was actually the first Kassel Mission veteran I interviewed, in 1999, when I got in my car with a list of names and drove around the country. Reg was my first stop, in the Finger Lakes region of New York State.
Reg Miner on the Saarbrucken Mission:
Aaron: Which came first, the podcast or the dinosaur?
Barney: Glad you asteroid
Please support our sponsor: Joe’s Hot Pterodactyl. Home of the pterodactyl ptender
Ptoday’s special: Pthree pterodactyl ptenders for pten pdollars (while supplies last)