Boen Wang has a theory that a lot of the misery in his life can be traced to a single moment that happened years before he was born. So he makes a pilgrimage to see if he’s right. Prologue: Ira talks about what it’s like to go back to 1119 Bayard Street in Baltimore. (6 minutes) Part One: Boen visits Norman, Oklahoma, where he was born, to meet the man he thinks changed his parents’ lives—and his life, too. (31 minutes) Part Two: Boen’s friend, Andrew, and his parents take what he learned in Part One, throw it into a blender, and push puree. (20 minutes)
A quick warning.
There are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show.
If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website thisamericanlife.org My dad's ATM password was 1119 till the day he died.
1119 was also in the password for his home wi fi network.
1119 was shorthand for 1119 Bayard street which is where his grandfather, my great grandfather, owned a tiny grocery store on the ground floor of a house in downtown Baltimore in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s.
Picture a neighborhood bodega and you've got the general size of this thing.
The family lived upstairs, worked downstairs.
So much happened at 11:19 Bayard.
So many things about our family were set in motion there.
But my sisters and I only got little scraps of stories about the place.
This handful of family defining origin stories that got trotted out now and then.
Like for instance, there was the one about the chickens.
My dad and his brother Lenny both worked in the store from the time they were little kids and chickens were slaughtered at the store, which freaked them out, both of them to the point where decades later, as grown men, neither of them ate chicken.
And they'd explain this was the reason why.
Or there's the story about my great grandfather's bookkeeping skills.
I'm actually named for my great grandfather, Isadore Friedlander.
My parents chose Ira instead of Isadore because Isadore Glass is a parsable English sentence.
Isadore Glass.
My mom once told me that they picked Ira over the alternatives because it sounded less Jewish to them.
It just goes to show how completely, utterly Jewish their entire world was back then.