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PODCAST

Grandma"s Been There

Host and creator Siobhan Barry takes listeners back to the 1950s and 1960s. Her stories, sometimes funny and sometimes serious, are time traveling trips through the days of penny candies, neighborhood ice cream parlors, fifty-cent movie tickets, air raid drills, summers without air conditioning, street games, homemade toys, football weddings, transistor radios, Beatlemania, and a cultural revolution.

society & culture personal journals

All Episodes

20:58

I Know Something You Don't Know

Grandma"s Been There ·

2026/04/24

When I was a kid, there was one sure way to get under another kid’s skin. All you had to do was look at them and taunt, “I know something you don’t know.” It never failed. At first, they tried to pretend they didn’t care, but they couldn’t keep it up for long. In two minutes or less, they’d spin around and snap, “So whadda you know??” As somebody born in the 1950s, I know things plenty of younger people don’t. Do you wanna know what they are?

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18:38

Well, Hello Mister Soul

Grandma"s Been There ·

2026/04/17

On Christmas morning in 1967, I was kinda disappointed when the record I got wasn’t the one I had asked for. I didn’t think I wanted that album. Fortunately for me, my mother knew better.

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25:11

The Fox Hunter

Grandma"s Been There ·

2026/04/10

In 1961, when someone from my school newspaper asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer turned a few heads. I was seven and it was the height of the baby boom. The world was bursting with opportunities.

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13:44

A Bench For All Seasons: Spring

Grandma"s Been There ·

2026/04/03

One of my favorite ways to recharge is to just sit outside and watch the seasons do what they do best. Each season has a unique personality, but there is one thing they all have in common. They don’t wait around for us to appreciate them. They come and go pretty fast, especially the spring.

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18:11

Xanadu's Landlord

Grandma"s Been There ·

2026/03/27

When you watch the same movie at various stages of your life, you see the story from very different perspectives. I recently watched “Citizen Kane” again for the first time since I was seventeen. It brought back a lot of memories. It also brought up some questions that would never have entered my mind when I was a teenager.

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20:20

The One True Church

Grandma"s Been There ·

2026/03/20

The road to heaven was paved with suffering. Getting slapped by the bishop during our Confirmation ceremony was a reminder of just how hard it was to be a Christian. Only the baptized could go to heaven, and if communist soldiers invaded our country and demanded that we give up our religion or die, God wanted us to choose death. As young children in the early 1960s, we learned that being a member of the one true church wasn’t for the faint-hearted.

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16:07

Baby, You're A Rich Man

Grandma"s Been There ·

2026/03/13

New books, new records, the latest clothes and shoes, new movies… Guess what city they all hit first? New York, of which Brooklyn is a part. Thanks to your location, you’re more worldly and savvy than any small town kid. There’s nothing you can’t get here and you never have to worry about having someone to play with because you know kids in just about every apartment building on your block. Your country cousins would give anything to trade places with you. Forget about chasing rainbows....

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21:15

School Days Part 2

Grandma"s Been There ·

2026/03/06

By the time I became a fourth grader, I knew my way around the culture and the campus of my school. I wasn’t “new” anymore. My condolences went to the latest class of first graders. I’d survived, and with a little luck, so would they.

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21:28

School Days Part 1

Grandma"s Been There ·

2026/02/27

The mornings always felt two times longer than the afternoons, and Mondays always felt twice as long as Fridays. But lunchtime recess? Well, that flew by faster than we could rip open a candy bar wrapper. That was how our school days went.

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20:18

Going Viral

Grandma"s Been There ·

2026/02/20

In the 1950s and early ‘60s, there was a laundry list of what were referred to as “childhood illnesses” that every single one of us were going to get at some point. Viruses that all came with pink rashes, red rashes, blisters or lesions. The first nine years of my life are one big blotchy, itchy blur.

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17:36

Hey Mom, Can The Beatles Stay Here Tonight?

Grandma"s Been There ·

2026/02/13

As pre-teen rock and roll fans in the mid 1960s, we were passionate followers and defenders of our musical idols. Laugh if you want, but we were totally sincere. With the kind of joy these young musicians and their music brought us, we owed them our allegiance and we were glad to give it.

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14:10

Rock and Roll

Grandma"s Been There ·

2026/02/06

Since we just passed the 67th anniversary of the date that's come to be known as "the day the music died," I thought I'd spend a few minutes talking about my earliest memories of rock and roll and my first exposure to Buddy Holly's timeless music.

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18:44

The Media Push

Grandma"s Been There ·

2026/01/30

The television shows made during the 1950s and '60s helped shape the way we felt about Brooklyn. Those shows presented an image of family life in American towns that were totally unrecognizable to city kids like me.

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17:24

A Bench For All Seasons: Winter

Grandma"s Been There ·

2026/01/23

Winter is a season of multiple personalities. When we were kids, we loved some of its personalities, but hated others. Its long cold days were depressing. Just the length of the season tried our patience. But when it gave us snow, the winter was our best friend and it could stay as long as it liked.

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25:07

Where's Your Tie??

Grandma"s Been There ·

2026/01/16

Today, I'm going to tell you all about my school uniforms. They were outdated, impractical and humiliating. I hated them.

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20:03

Goin' Up The Country

Grandma"s Been There ·

2026/01/09

This week, I think we need a vacation. And where do Brooklyn people go to get away from the congested dirty city? To the Catskill Mountains, of course. We're goin' up the country!

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16:12

The Brooklyn Botanic Gardens

Grandma"s Been There ·

2026/01/02

As I've said many a time, life in Brooklyn sometimes left a bit to be desired. On the other hand, it had some very special and unique places that plenty of other cities didn't have. This week, I want to take you with me to visit one of those places.

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21:40

Local Calls

Grandma"s Been There ·

2025/12/26

Since "Grandma's Been There" is turning one year old in about another month, I thought I'd make the last episode of 2025 about the podcast itself.

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22:40

A Flatbush Christmas

Grandma"s Been There ·

2025/12/19

Now the seasons pass with the speed of shooting stars, but at a time when a year represented one tenth of my entire life, it always felt as if holidays would never come. And out of all the holidays, Christmas was by far the hardest one to wait for.

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32:28

Anatomy of a Shooting Star

Grandma"s Been There ·

2025/12/12

Sometimes shooting stars appear to us in human forms. They get caught in our gravitational fields and produce streaks of light across the heavens of our lives. The imprints they leave remain with us forever.

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70 results

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