'My First Day' Podcast Launches Season 3

Speaker 1: 00:00 For those of us not born here in San Diego. The question is what brought you here? What keeps you here? The KPBS podcast, my first day has been telling the stories of the many San Diego ans who chose this place as their new hometown for its third season. My first day shares a range of stories from skateboarding to homelessness, military life to gay identity. Ultimately, my first day is about the nature of home in all its beauty and complexity. And joining me is the creator and host of my first day Andrew Bracken. And Andrew, welcome back. Thanks a lot. Great to be here. How do you choose the stories you tell? On my first day Speaker 2: 00:40 for this season, one point of emphasis we tried to make was um, connecting some of the stories to certain characteristics of San Diego or just, um, they kind of fit the heartbeat of what San Diego is. So some of these might be, um, we have a story about someone that came out here for a love of surfing and also became connected to basically, uh, helping to, uh, revolutionize skateboarding. Another stories of a military spouse. We tried to tell military stories since it's such a big part of the San Diego community. Um, but one story I haven't told was from the spouse, not from the service member. So, um, it, from that perspective of having kids and having to move every few years and it's several first days, it's a complicated life. That was one important story. Another was, um, homelessness. Homelessness is something we hear quite a bit about and it was really powerful to hear Ron Patterson story of how he came, um, to ocean beach actually, and basically lived on the streets in that area for about 25 years. And one interesting thing about his story to me was where his camps, where he lived right near my house. And just to hear his experiences and his viewpoint, you know, we have such a different experience yet we're basically right next door to each other. Speaker 1: 02:01 Here's a clip of Ron Patterson talking about how he landed in San Diego. Speaker 3: 02:07 Uh, the main deciding factor was I threw a dart at the dartboard and I really wanted to, I wanted to at that time get away from being in the middle of nowhere. And I basically, I'm a good shot, but darts is, like I said, I basically knew kind of the area I wanted to hit, but it could have been anywhere up and down the California coast at 20 feet know. But San Diego was, seemed to be perfect. Once I got hit, the dirt hit there, I decided that it was where I was going to go. And, Speaker 1: 02:42 and in fact that's the name of the episode dart at the dartboard. Why did you want to highlight that homeless experience on the podcast? I think it's something Speaker 2: 02:50 we all see in our community, in the city. Um, it's something we hear a lot about. We read a lot about, we see the numbers, um, and we may see it in our community. It's, it's not always common for us just to hear the story of what his life was like and how we slept, how he, what he did when it rained. These were all pretty illuminating to me. What have been some of the most memorable moments of the new season? One story that really, you know, caught, I think a lot of our attention in our community, we last year was the synagogue shooting in Poway. And so we really wanted to tell a story of, um, from the Jewish community and telling the story of Rose Schindler who, uh, was a Holocaust survivor and uh, actually, um, survived the Auschwitz concentration camps. Speaker 4: 03:36 It was an amazing life over there before the war. Really. It was an amazing life under the Czech government. The Jewish people had the same rights like everybody else. Okay. And most of the Jewish people were business people and a lot of the non Jewish people were farmers and be the friends. We went to school together, we played together till everything went to hell, Speaker 2: 04:03 you know, went through a measurable loss, lost the majority of her family during that experience, but ended up as a refugee meeting her future husband, also a Holocaust survivor and eventually settling in San Diego. So that was one particularly, um, important story that we wanted to tell this year. Speaker 1: 04:19 Is there anything that surprised you about the people you met this season? You also introduce us to a native new Yorker. I know about that. Who misses home? Here's Aaron Bianco. Speaker 5: 04:31 It's so strange to me because so many people move to a San Diego because of, you know, it's 75 all the time and sunny like I want to kill myself that it's 75 and sending every single day. Like, can I just get a drop of rain? Speaker 1: 04:48 Can I just get a drop of rain here? And Aaron is still getting used to the idea that San Diego moves at a much slower pace than New York. What led Bianco to San Diego? Speaker 2: 05:00 [inaudible] got a job here. His, his mother was sick and had moved out to orange County. So it kind of was a couple of factors there. But I mean that is another interesting piece is, is it's not just people coming to San Diego and becoming San Diego runs 100% right. We're all products of where we were from. Some of us, you know, let more of it go than others. But that was a story of, you know, I say this, the series is about home and the nature of home, you know, leaving it, trying to find new home, but ultimately where we're from plays a great role in that too. Speaker 1: 05:34 Is there anything that surprised you about the people you met this season? I mean, I think at the end of the day I think, I think Speaker 2: 05:40 what surprises me the longer I do these, I mean, these, these interviews are hard, you know, I mean the real people are really open and they're really intimate. Um, so I th I think I'm always surprised by just the generosity of people have to share their stories, but also that at the end of the day, you know, when you cut down to the bone, we have all these different experiences. We're from different countries, different socioeconomic backgrounds, all these differences. But at the end of the day, we're all trying to find the same things, you know, safe home for our family to raise our families. We're trying to find a home for ourselves. And our families. And so the more interviews I do, the more I talk to people, the more commonalities I see between the stories. Where can people find my first day? Well, season three is available, um, on any podcast app, uh, such as Spotify, Apple podcasts, as well as a kpbs.org/my first day season. Three of my first day drops today, and new episodes are available every other Wednesday. I've been speaking with the host and creator of my first day, Andrew Bracken. Andrew, thank you. Thank you.