Local Luminary: Eileen McAdam

by Brian K. Mahoney and photographs by Amber S. Clark, January 27, 2009

“Radio is my fourth career,” Eileen McAdam says with a laugh when asked about how she got started with her tape recorder. McAdam is the director of the Sound and Story Project of the Hudson Valley, which she launched in 2007 to audio document the history and culture of the Hudson Valley, from Troy to the Battery in Manhattan. The evolving project seeks to capture the sense of place here in the region, and McAdam, along with Jim Metzner (whom many will know from his “Pulse of the Planet” series on NPR), has already recorded a good bit of oral history already. The sounds and stories are available via an interactive map on their website where visitors can click on a city or town and hear what the project has documented thus far in their community.

The project's website archive contains a wide array of audio, underscoring both the uniformity and diversity of the experience of living in the Hudson Valley, then and now. Some highlights from Sound and Story's website include: Department of Environmental Conservation naturalist Tom Lake catching eels in the Hunter''s Brook tributary of Wappingers Creek, the sound of the collected fish splashing in the net. The story of professional clown and juggler David Sharps, who transformed an abandoned boat into the Waterfront Museum and Showboat Barge in Brooklyn, and the rinkety-dinkety clank of his one-of-a-kind kinetic sculpture ball machine. The tale of Elsie May Warden’s blueberry picking and childbirth on a hill in Lomontville, as recounted by neighbor Jane McClure. Betty Carey of Beacon recalling the frigid night the Newburgh-Beacon ferry got stuck in the ice in the early 1950s. The trilling of a dawn chorus of toads in early spring along a roadside in Stone Ridge.

“Part of our mission is to highlight some of the really unheard-of stories in the Valley,” says McAdam.

“StoryScape,” a short radio program featuring stories from the project, narrated by Jim Metzner, can be heard on alternate Fridays (this month on February 13 and 27) at 10:35am on WAMC. The Sound and Story Project of the Hudson Valley is also soliciting stories and sounds of the region from the general public, looking to further their documentation project of the region. The project can be contacted through its website, www.soundandstory.org.