Ellen Hao

This week on SSW Radio, we spoke with a home baker, a library branch manager, and heard stories from Englewood Speaks

A PEARfect APPLEtunity” is the pie that won Rachel McCauley second place in the South Side Pie Challenge’s fruit category. In the second installment of our series on South Side Pie Challenge winner’s, McCauley made South Side Weekly’s Ellen Hao and Erisa Apantaku a chocolate cake complete with an edible wreath and pinecones!

Rod Sawyer
Blackstone library branch manager Anne Keough (Rod Sawyer)

Later in the hour, the Weekly’s Rod Sawyer interviewed Chicago Public Library’s Blackstone Branch manager Anne Keough about discoveries made during Blackstone’s recent renovations. Imagine changing the furniture around in your office and then discovering a two volume set of works by Shakespeare from the late 1800s. That’s what happened to Keough. She shared her comments on the finds, which included old Hyde Park Heralds and library policy manuals, and why she values the preservation of these relics.

To close out the show, we shared two stories from Englewood Speaks: Things I Learned While I Was Teaching. Englewood Speaks is a series of storytelling events held at Kusanya Cafe. Clarence Hogan (aka Sonny Speaks) hosts the series and explains its origin as a way to collect the narratives of people living in Englewood and the surrounding community today. Hogan hopes the storytelling events will create an archive, telling “a story of what it meant to live in Englewood at a certain time and a certain place.” Things I Learned While I Was Teaching was full of stories by educators, both in the traditional classroom sense and educators-at-large within the community. This week we shared one story about what Dr. Janice Tuck-Lively learned from a quiet, foreign student of hers one day outside an elevator.

SSW Radio is the Weekly’s radio hour, featuring stories and interviews from the people of the South Side of Chicago. SSW Radio airs Tuesday afternoons from 3pm-4pm on WHPK 88.5 FM.

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