Helen Hayes | Author, Risk-Taker, and Bay Area Original | Sound Legacy Podcast #19

Helen Hayes | Author, Risk-Taker, and Bay Area Original | Sound Legacy Podcast #19

Some people carry a heavy life and become bitter. Helen Hayes carried one of the heaviest lives you will ever hear about and became someone you want to sit next to at breakfast. Helen is the author of Secrets, Shame and Silence, a memoir that begins with grinding poverty in the Pacific Northwest and does not let up from there. Murder, suicide, foster care, loss, and a few continents in between. And yet the woman who shows up in this episode is funny, radiant, and completely uninterested in playing the victim. In this conversation, we cover a lot of ground. Helen's childhood. The five years in foster care that she calls heaven. A career speaking for Pacific Bell in the early 1950s, where she predicted wristwatch telephones to auditoriums full of people who had no idea what she was talking about. A marriage. A tragedy. A one-suitcase move to San Francisco. Three years in Spain. A chance encounter at a Denny's counter that changed everything. And Al-Anon, which helped her finally name the thread that ran through her whole life. Helen is 91.5 years old. She still speaks for ACA, Adult Children of Alcoholics, and she has no plans to slow down. Read the book! "Secrets, Shame, and Silence" - Available now on Amazon [https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Shame-Silence-Helen-Hayes-ebook/dp/B0H7T9P2QK/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1YEGBYUQUW48V&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.nk-3n5FdIH-Uw4X4Y7_g0oP-hLKhKeyEug3xPcHYE0E.e3BvVLajqUvSZNWAoYN8xJXgVnSEHViLIcfVrfecSzg&dib_tag=se&keywords=secrets+shame+and+silence+helen+hayes&qid=1783689611&sprefix=secrets+shame+and+silence+helen+haye%2Caps%2C166&sr=8-2]

Episode 18: David Knepler on Kindness, Winding Roads, and Why Love Is the Answer

David Knepler has lived a life that refuses to travel in a straight line. Raised in Connecticut by a professor-hypnotistfather and a glazier's daughter, he studied acting in 1975 Greenwich Village, got arrested protesting nuclear power, picked oranges for room and board, helped pioneer the Bay Area natural foods movement, and eventually found his calling as a gerontologist. He recently retired from LITA (Love Is the Answer), a Marin County nonprofit that has been matching volunteers with isolated older adults for over 50 years, always at no charge. Now in his early 70s, David finds himself becoming the veryperson he spent decades caring for. He talks about what that feels like, why admitting you're wrong is one of life's great teachers, where evil really comes from, and the one thing he'd tell his younger self. Get involved with LITA: 415-472-LITA https://litamarin.org/ [https://litamarin.org/] Produced by Sound Legacy, a legacy film andaudio studio in San Rafael, CA. Learn more at MySoundLegacy.com.

EP. 17 | Michele Hughes: Longevity Evangelist on Aging, Ambition, and Asking Better Questions

Michele Hughes has spent her life doing things most people only dream about: building a luxury real estate empire across Aspen, Kauai, and San Francisco, and now hosting Ageless and Timeless, a leading podcast on longevity and wellness. In this conversation, Michele sits down with us to talk about what it means to reinvent yourself, why the stories we tell about aging matter, and what she's learned from hundreds of conversations with the world's top health and wellness experts. This one is warm, wide-ranging, and full of wisdom.Ageless and Timeless Podcast: agelessandtimeless.comSound Legacy is a Bay Area show about meeting our elders, listening to great storytellers, and celebrating the people doing good work in our communities.www.MySoundLegacy.com

John Roosevelt Boettiger | A Grandson's View from the White House | Sound Legacy #16

Our guest today is John Roosevelt Boettiger, psychologist, author, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. He is also one of the very few living people who spent his childhood inside the Roosevelt White House, where his grandfather Franklin was busy running the free world, and his grandmother Eleanor was traveling it.While John is the grandson of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, he’s also the son of Anna Roosevelt and John Boettiger, a Chicago Tribune reporter who fell in love with the president's daughter on the campaign train in 1932. His book, "A Love in Shadow," tells the story of their marriage, and of his own long journey to understand a father changed by war and lost far too soon.In this conversation, John shares witty, warm, and deeply personal stories from his years inside the wartime White House, including memories of Churchill, of Eleanor, and of the man he simply called Papa. We talk about his father's moral injury, his mother's quiet courage, and the complicated grace of growing up a Roosevelt. We also talk about John's years as a civil rights activist, his time in Selma, and what it means to carry that history forward into a political moment like this one. It is a remarkable life. We are lucky he wrote it down, and luckier still that he came in on a Sunday to share it. Find John's book "Love and Shadow" here [https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/love-shadow-story-anna/author/boettiger-john/].

Cece O'Connor | Life Stages, End of Life, and Everything Between | Sound Legacy Podcast #15

Cece O'Connor grew up wanting to be Barbra Streisand. She ended up spending decades at the bedsides of the dying. In between: theater on the docks of Nova Scotia, oncology wards in Toronto, and years inside the psychiatric emergency system in San Francisco.Today, she works as an end-of-life consultant and death doula in the San Francisco Bay Area, helping people and families navigate what most of us spend our whole lives avoiding.This is a conversation about listening, presence, and what it looks like to show up for someone at the very end.Learn more at www.cecechats.com [www.cecechats.com]