April 21, 2021 • 49 mins
On the episode of the Our American Stories podcast, we bring you Ronald Mason, a WWII pilot with a heck of a story; also, the story of Adam Davis and Adam John who have been using table-top games as a therapy tool; and finally, Bill Bryk makes the familiar fascinating and briefly recounts how New York City became the city it is today, as well as his love for its past.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From the small towns to the big cities, we bring
you the stories that matter. This is this is This
is the Our American Stories podcast. This is Lee Habib,
(00:27):
the host of the Our American Stories podcast. We can't
wait to bring you these fantastic stories from our team.
They work hard, day in and day out to bring
you stories from everyday life and from everyday Americans. We
tell the stories about this great country that may not
be perfect, but sure it is beautiful. If you'd like
to support us in all that we do here, visit
(00:48):
our American Stories dot com and go to the giving tab,
join our team and the work that they do, and
become a part of all that's going on here. We're
a nonprofit and we appreciate both one time gift and
monthly donations. It's for you and through you that we
tell the story. And now we have a story of
(01:12):
a group of guys that use dungeons and dragons as
a therapy tool. Also Bill Brake short history lesson of
New York City. But first, here's the story of an
Iowaman who went skydiving at one hundred years of age.
Ronald Nason was born in nineteen nineteen in Pennsylvania. At
(01:34):
the time I interviewed him, Ronald was a hundred and
two years old. He's in better shape than most people
at the retirement home he lives in, including those far
younger than him. They call him Superman. Exercising every day,
reading and helping those around him. Ronald still lives a
full life, and so I asked him, what's your secret. Well,
(01:58):
you have to drink the right kind of life. I've
had four ounces of eighty proof for about seventy five years.
Whether that has aided my old jevity, Hell, I don't know.
I don't much care. You know, I enjoy it and
(02:20):
and I'm not going to give up now because it's
to be honest to speak, a part of my life.
I don't look upon it as a morality thing like
a lot of people would. But I'm honest. I'm an alcoholic.
There's no It depends on how you defend define alcohol alcoholic.
(02:46):
All kidding aside, it's no wonder alcohol would be part
of Ronald's life. At the age of twenty one, he
got one of the deadliest jobs anyone could get, but
it paid well, which was important to him. At sixteen
years old, he left home in hitch Heights, through Canada, Washington, Mexico,
and California, seeking good paying jobs during the Great Depression
(03:09):
while working as a tree tremor. In attending community college
in California, an opportunity to make more money presented itself
to Ronald, an opportunity that came with tremendous risk. I
went back in junior college, back in Los Angeles, and
this is nineteen thirty eight, and it was obvious that
(03:36):
there was problems in Europe that could develop into a war.
Now I was pacifistic. I was not interested in no why.
I didn't want to fight anybody. But I was also
aware of the fact that if this should develop into
a war that the United States is getting involved in,
(04:00):
to go where the money is, and there wasn't much money.
Being a dog face, they paid thirty dollars a month
referring to those in the infantry during World War Two,
whereas if you were a commissioned officer flying in the
Army or the Naval Flying Service, you would not only
(04:21):
get your commission pay as an officer, but you would
get half again as much because of the extra hazardous
a duty of flying. Well, I said to myself, my God,
that's where I'm gonna go. So as the war came on,
(04:44):
that was in the back of my mind, I will
become a naval aviator and get money. The draft was
on and that's what prompted me to have to move
head to sign in or I would be drafted. So
I signed up and got admitted into naval aviation training. Now,
(05:07):
some of these experiences I had in training, I'll never forget,
and I can explain one of those. As time went on,
we were restricted to the base because of the war,
because of Pearl Harbor, but there were times when we
would have weekends and it was on one of these
(05:29):
weekends that I went into town and got myself polluted
and I came back. Now, there was a rule in
naval aviation training that if you didn't feel like flying,
you would report it and you wouldn't have to fly.
That was just a rule that existed. Well, I was
(05:50):
in one of the final stages of training, which was
training with two other planes, and what we would the
training exercise was to fly in formation, the three plane formation. Well,
I didn't feel like flying, and I told the other
two pilots. I said, look, I'm not I don't feel good.
(06:14):
I don't want to fly today. Well, we want to
get through with this program and we want to fly,
and we don't want you to slow us up. Well
I gave in. Now we go up and we do
our thing. And part of the training is that you
that you lift up and you slide over a plane
(06:38):
and you set it down again. So now you're a
three plane formation with a little different configuration. And we
did that and we landed out in a reserve field,
which is common, and we all had a cigarette. Now
we get back in the plane, we do or exercise
(07:02):
it again, and it's time to go back to the base.
Now Here I am flying this single engine by plane,
open cockpit, and I'm the only one in it, and
we've finished our three plane formation training and I'm on
(07:23):
my way back. Now. When you leave a three plane formation,
you would take the plane and you would put it
in a nose high attitude and you would swing it
off to the left or to the right, and you
would be going down at a rapid clip, very rapid clip.
(07:46):
And so this is what I did. I pulled a
stick back and I went up and I made the
turn to the right, and now I'm going down head first,
and I'm slipping out of the cockpit. My head goes up,
gets into the wind, and my goggles flow back, and
(08:09):
the upper part of my body is outside of the airplane,
and I'm in a hell of a position. You're own
straight down. Well, to make a long story short, I
grabbed the combing that's the ring around the cockpit, and
I took my right leg, my ankle, and I pulled
the stick back, which brought the plane into a level position.
(08:36):
And now, okay, I survived that crazy thing, Scared to death,
knees knocking, didn't know what was going to happen. And
I get back to the base. Thank god, I survived that.
I'm alive, and the plane keeps going to the right,
(08:59):
and I cry by using the left breaks and so on. Well,
I wound up in a loop, a ground loop. I
had forgotten to lock the tailwheel. And now I've really
learned something. Alcohol and flying doesn't mix. So and that
(09:24):
mantra stayed with me forever. Alcohol and aviators was a
very common, ordinary thing. But usually, and particularly in my case,
you learned the hard way if you survived it. And
(09:45):
I learned the hard way. I never drank and flew.
After that. I had been in Corpus Christi, Texas, training
and we flew the PBIS looking for German submarines. Now,
Pearl Harbor headn't hit. We were not in the war.
(10:08):
We didn't carry any depth chargers and we didn't carry
any ammunition. But we were just out there looking for
German submarines. Now it's kind of stupid and ridiculous when
you think about it. The war wasn't on. Why are
we looking, well, I don't know. The Navy wanted the intelligence,
(10:30):
I guess, to know if any submarines out there, and
they found out there was not many. And of course
it varied from time to time. Now Pearl Harbor hit
and all hell breaks loose. I was in my final
(10:51):
stages of training and it was December seventh, of course,
brought on the war Japan, and I thought to myself,
I made one a hell of a mistake. I'm going
to be nothing but a clay pigeon for somebody to
shoot at. I never expected to survive the war. Never
(11:14):
never expected. Even when I met my wife, I told her,
I said, look, you're gonna be a widow. There's no
question in my mind at all. So it's a decision
you have to make. I can't make it for you.
And I said, I'm willing to get married if if
(11:35):
you want to do that, Well, of course she should.
She did, so we were married and carried on. So
that that was my mental attitude that it existed during
the whole thing, and I wasn't far from wrong. But
Ronald was lucky. He mostly flew non combat missions, patrolling
(11:56):
the waters for enemy submarines, which was less dangerous the
missions of fighter pilots and bomber crews. But that didn't
mean he'd be out of the woods or should we
say water. Some of the most frightening moments didn't involve
the enemy and involved whether or involved mechanical failures of
(12:21):
the air plane itself. Now we're stationed at Zandriffield, Dutch Guiana,
and we're at the mouth of the Paramaribo River that
intersects the Amazon. The river goes to the coast and
(12:41):
meets the ocean. Now we're completely a night outfit. We're
looking for German submarines at night. And now I'm at
about two thousand feet and my instruments go crazy, absolutely crazy.
It shows that I'm going up two thousand feet a minute.
(13:04):
I make the correction, and I now I'm going down
two thousand feet a minute. And at two thousand feet
that didn't take very long. So to make a long
story short, I went up, I went down. I went up,
and I went down, and I got out volcanically. What
(13:25):
I got into was when the warm water came out
of the river and hit the cold water of the
Atlantic Ocean, there were up drafts and down drafts. In
other words, it was like a hurricane. There were up
drafts and down drafts in this area of storm. Now
(13:48):
that's only part of it. The water was coming through
the cracks and the airplane I was being sprayed with water,
and all the time I had we'll call it the stick,
actually was a yoke, all the way forward and all
(14:13):
the way back, and all the way forward again and
all the way back. Now, the gyation of the plane,
as you would look at it would be it was
nose down, nose up, nose down, nose up. At two
thousand feet, how close I came to the water, I'll
ever know. But I made the corrections and got out
(14:35):
of it. Now my knees are shocking, knocking again, and
I tell myself, the hell with this business. They'll court
Marshal me, but I'll get out of here and be
a Cervidian. Well, the Megabogue story short. This was a
tropical area and that morning broke and the sun came out,
(14:56):
and my attitude changed completely. There After the war, Ronald
spent a few more years in the Navy, started a
family and became a lawyer, which led to a long
and successful career, giving him many opportunities to work on
(15:16):
his bucket list. But in twenty nineteen, at the age
of one hundred, there was still one goal he wanted
to check off. This goes back to shortly after the war,
the Navy had a plan whereby a n aviator, if accepted,
could go to lake Hurst, New Jersey and make a
(15:36):
parachute jump. He was trained on how to pack the chute,
and he would pack his chute and he would go up,
and he didn't make the jump. Well, I applied for that,
but they turned me down. And I think they turned
me down because I was a station of the Coast
Guard at the time looking for these German subs that
were depth charging merchant ships right and left. So I
(15:58):
didn't get to make the jump. So as time went on,
I kept thinking, well, I'd like to make the jump.
And I decided, well, now it's a good time. I'm
a hundred years old and kind of a freak anyway,
so I'll become a little more freaky. And I thought, well,
I won't tell the kids about it, because something serious
(16:22):
could happen and they could feel guilty, and I don't
want them to be a field of guilty. So I
got ahold of the Methodist organization called Wheels. They have
cars that they employ people to take inmates from the
nursing home. So I called her and said, look, I
(16:43):
got something I don't want you to talk to anybody about.
It's just secret between the two of us. I said,
I'm planning to make a parachute jump. Well that could
have shopped her and whatever, but she agreed with me
that she wouldn't tell anybody. So I scheduled it for
(17:05):
the jump at Winterset, Iowa. And this is that Amoyt
skydivers It's an organization, is a very very active organization.
And the driver was a young lady and she didn't
know why I was going to the airport except her
(17:26):
job is just to take me there. Well, she took
me there and while I'm there, a large group of
young people that are doing the skydive thing. They have
a large they have a twin engine aircraft that takes
people up and do their thing. But she didn't know
that I was scheduled to make a jump, so this
(17:49):
came as a surprise to her too when she found
out what was happening. Ronald, along with twenty other skydivers,
boarded the plane for fifteen minutes of climbing. The plane
door opened at thirteen thousand feet. He and his Tannem
skydiver sat on the edge with their feet hanging out,
(18:10):
and they jumped, free falling for about a whole minute
and made a safe landing. Ronald had finally marched that
off his list, but his story doesn't end there. I
get all kinds of questions about what are you going
to do it again? And this summer or next summer
or whatever. But now I'm looking forward to this June
(18:36):
or July. I'm scheduled to participate in the air show
at Pensacola, Florida. This is an air show that apparently
they usually have about once the year. Normally they have
about forty thousand people that at ten and whatever, and
(18:57):
they have me a scheduled to fly with two other
naval World War two aviators information. We'll be flying the
old biplane open cockpit planes information, so I'm looking forward
to that now. I have been scheduled to do this
(19:22):
for three years. The first year was canceled because of
a hurricane. The second year was canceled because of the
covirus thing. But I'm looking now for the third years
being a successful year. So we'll just see what happens.
The good Lord willing and the river doesn't right, I'll
(19:43):
still be kicking, and I'm sure you'll still be kicking
in a special thanks to Ronald Mason for sharing his
story and his special thanks to Monty Button from des Moines,
a listener on who We're looking always for your stories,
send them to American story dot com and has always
a great job by Joey the story of Ronald Mason,
(20:04):
and my goodness, so many people who are still alive
who served in World War Two. We've done a lot
of World War Two stories on this show, and particularly
Frank Davita's story. He was the Higgins boat operator on
D Day and made any number of runs it's harrowing,
and it's heartbreaking, and it's bold and beautiful and his
voice swell. It's an important one to hear. Ronald Mason's
(20:28):
story an American patriot and an American daredevil. And if
you have a story to share, we want to hear it.
Send them to our American Stories dot com. That's our
American Stories dot com and click on the your stories tab.
We can't wait to hear from you. Up next, Adam
(20:50):
Johns and Adam Davis have figured out how to use
Dungeons and Dragons as a therapy tool. As we talk
to people kind of around the country, and especially people
who are not not in the gaming or or kind
of geek atmosphere or culture, oftentimes they assume Dungeons and
(21:14):
Dragons as a video game. So here's how I usually
describe it. There's one person who acts as the sort
of head storyteller and referee of the game, and they
know most of the rules and they can explain most
of the rules to the game. And that person isn't
usually referred to as the dungeon master or the game master,
(21:34):
and they sit at the head of the table and
they describe stuff that's happening in the world, and then
everybody else who's sitting at the table is just playing
a character in that world, a single character, and they
have a piece of paper that tells them things like
how strong their character is, or what kind of equipment
they have, or what kinds of abilities they have, And
this all takes place in a fantasy world, much like
(21:56):
Lord of the Rings, where there are swords and bow
and arrow and full suits of armor and of course
magical skulls, and the dungeon master might describe something like,
all of you have decided to venture into this dark
cave where you can see that there are there's mildew
(22:19):
growing on the walls, there's mold, and there is a
dripping coming from the stalactites in the ceiling. You're here
because you've heard of a tremendous treasure that apparently was
lost in these caves a long time ago, and you've
decided you're going to go after that treasure. Maybe even
you have a map to help guide you through. And
as you travel further down into the cave, it's very dark,
(22:41):
but you can see that the walls have been carved out,
like somebody has carved them with man made tools, and
you travel deeper and deeper into this cave system until
finally you open up into a large room. And in
this large room, you can see across the way is
a door on the other side of a large gap,
(23:01):
and the gap seems to stretch very far down into
the ground. But the thing that really catches your eye
is that hanging above the gap, clinging for dear life,
appears to be a small gnome man and he's hanging
from a rope, and he sees you as you walk in,
and he shouts to you, oh my gosh, thank you
(23:24):
so much for being here. I'm so happy somebody finally
showed up. Please help me. And at this point in time,
the dungeon master then says, what do you do? And
all of the players at the table get to decide
what their character does to sort of overcome this challenge
or this situation, so they might do all sorts of things.
(23:45):
A warrior character might leap across the pit and try
to grab the nome to save him from from falling
down into the pit. A ranger or an archer character
might shoot a bow with a rope tied to it
and tight rope walk across the pit and save the
Nome that way, or a wizard character who can cast
(24:05):
magic spells might use a magic spell that can pull
the rope and get it swinging, so the Nome might
be able to jump off. And no matter what they do,
they're going to do it together because all the players
at the table are all working on a team together.
They're not competing with each other. Instead, they are working
cooperatively towards a common goal. And in this case, the
(24:27):
common goal of the game is not the most points.
It's not even to achieve a particular goal. Even in
this case of the example I gave, you're not trying
to get treasure. You're trying to tell a story. And
that's one of the really brilliant things about games like
Dungeons and Dragons is that the point of the game
(24:48):
is to tell a story. And because that's really the
goal of the game, because that's really the place that
you're trying to get to, everybody at the table might
have a different idea for what that story looks like,
but they know they're all working towards that goal, and
that's what really turns it into a brilliant and amazing experience.
As the dungeon master continues to describe things in the world,
(25:09):
continues to describe whether or not the players attempts to
do those things are successful, and the players get to
roll dice to help add randomness and help determine the
outcomes of their action and get to really have the
most open ended gaming experience you can possibly have, where
they can decide and try anything that comes to their
(25:31):
minds in a very loose rule system that allows you
to be very flexible with the outcomes of it. A
lot of game masters, to my chagrin, I don't like
the fact that they often see themselves as adversaries of
the players. There's oftentimes an antagonistic relationship where the game
(25:53):
master sees themselves needing to challenge and there's like a Haha,
your characters are going to die today because my monsters
are going to be stronger than them, and we don't
do anything like that. Our goal as game masters is
very much to challenge the players, but also to keep
them engaged and keep them excited. So we do that
(26:15):
by challenging them the right amount, building on their ideas
while they build on our space on our ideas. Because
we are we're co creating and collaborating in this game
where that's oftentimes for many of our players the first
time an adult has said what do you care about?
What do you want to do? So then the players
(26:35):
now see an adult who is playing with them, really
playing with them in a way that is very healing
to a lot of a lot of participants, especially ours
who are identified at school as as oftentimes being an outcast.
People tell them what to do all the time, very
rarely say what do you care about? What is something
that you want out of life? And so this is
(26:57):
an opportunity where they can push boundaries and see what
happens when they take up space and then have an
adult be excited about the choices that they're making. He
started doing what we're doing right now using Dungeons and
Dragons and therapeutics social skills groups, largely by accident. Adam
and I both started playing Dungeons and Dragons when we
(27:19):
were pretty young. Got a lot of out of it.
We played games with our friends. We got to use
all the mechanics of the games and the storytelling of
the game to really get a lot of social outlet.
When we were kids, I Adam Davis, was studying drama
therapy because I had wanted to use the drama games
and experiences that I had had as a performer and
(27:41):
then as a drama teacher to help kids, help kids
become more into themselves and learn about themselves and then
how they could interact with the world better. And so
Adam and I met in grad school, and I started
picking up an after school program that was a Dungeons
and Dragons program for quirky kids who needed a little
a little guidance in social support. And I took the
(28:04):
game over and realized that Dungeons and Dragons is actually
a perfect modality for sit down drama therapy. So we
started using the game a little more intentionally and then
just barely scratching the surface. And then when my facilitator
at the time left to go pursue other interests, there
was an opening. And I knew Adam from grad school,
(28:25):
so we had kind of like done that thing where
we brought some things from our personal lives to sort
of get to know you activity in the very beginning
of the quarter, and both Adam and I brought dice.
We knew from across the room that we're both named Adam.
We both liked dice and games, and so we knew
we were kindred spirits. So we had that great moment
(28:45):
that sort of nerd nod from across the room. And
then after the class, Adam Davis came up to me
and he said, Hey, do you want to get paid
to come and play improv games and Dungeons and Dragons?
And I was like, yeah, that sound that sounds like
the best. And at the time the group was really
just a sort of drop in social group. And then
(29:08):
when we came in we started saying, there's a lot
we can do with this, and we were both in
a state of sort of master's program desire to want
to use all the amazing theories and all the amazing
stuff that we were learning, and we really had this
tremendous opportunity to start diving in saying, oh my gosh,
(29:30):
we're this is exactly what we can be using all
of these amazing theories, all these amazing things that we're learning,
and we can apply them right here. But through the
game of Dungeons and Dragons that we grew up playing,
we got our first group going. The parents saw the outcomes,
the parents started talking to other parents, inviting us to
(29:53):
speak at other engagements and then all of a sudden,
the ball started to roll and then before we knew it,
we have continued grow and we are now full time
therapeutic game masters and executive directors of the Game to Grow.
We have a sort of a theory at Game to
Grow where players play the characters that they need to play.
(30:14):
So we have a lot of players who, like I said,
are socially isolated, who don't have a lot of social aptitude,
and they don't really have a lot of experience being
charismatic or confident, but they pick characters who are aspirational.
A lot of players come in and they pick characters
who are military leaders who have on their character sheet
that they are very charismatic, that people believe in them,
(30:37):
and so we know right away that that's something that
these young people want to want to play with and
want to explore. We have players that come in choosing
to play characters that are very similar to themselves, lone
wolves who are very isolated in the game, and then
we can help that character grow and thus the player grow.
And that lone wolf character who wants to go off
(30:57):
and solve every problem by themselves, now we put them
in a situation in the game where their character needs
to rely on somebody else, because Dungeons and Dragons is
a fellowship game. It's a game where every character has
a unique and special ability that makes them special. And
that's a great life lesson is that you can't do
everything by yourself, and people are going to rely on you,
(31:21):
and you were going to rely on people. And here's
what that looks like to ask for help. And here's
how good it feels to be able to be the
person who can step up and help out the team.
In one particular instance where a player really made a
choice that I was not expecting, the characters had all
made their way through the stunt and they came up
(31:43):
into a room where there was in one corner of
the room a massive troll of Legend who had been
imprisoned there, and in the other corner of the room
was a series of three unlabeled switches, and across the
other side of the room was a metal door that
was closed, And it quickly was explained to the players
(32:05):
that one of the three unlabeled switches would open the
door on the other side of the room, allowing them
to progress further into their dungeon, and the other two switches,
when pulled together, would release the massive troll of Legend
upon the players, but also upon the world itself. And
usually how this works is that it's sort of an
interesting challenge where the players can talk to the troll.
(32:28):
They can figure out is the troll lyne to us
about which switch the switch, and it's sort of a
mix of a puzzle and a social challenge. In this case,
we had one player who had just joined the group,
and the player had described their character as being impulsive
and having a lot of hyperactivity, and it was an
appropriate character for that player to play because that player
(32:51):
also struggled with those exact same challenges. And that player said,
I run across the room and I pull all three
switches at once, and I've run that scenario several times.
That was the first time anybody had ever just decided
to pull all three switches. So all of a sudden
I had to decide, Okay, well, what's going to happen here,
(33:11):
and what are the consequences of effectively just running ahead?
And all the other players at the table had gotten
out like graph paper, and they were getting ready to
like solve the puzzle and they just stood and stared
slack jawed at their teammate, who who might have just
done them all in? And what I said was the
troll runs across the room and he picks up the
impulsive players character, getting ready to eat them whole and
(33:35):
all the other characters. I said, you're you're the players
at the table. I said, you can leave now. The
door is open. But if you leave, you'll be leaving
your teammate to be eaten by this, this massive troll
of legend, and you'll also be leaving the troll to
to recavoc upon the world. You need to decide what
your characters would do here. They are heroes in this world.
(33:56):
What would they do? And they turned and they debated
it with each other, and they eventually decided that they
would help their teammate, and so they entice the troll
back into the cage and reimprison the troll. And at
the end of that session, we always do a checkout
at the end of every session. At the end of
that session, there the players all checked out with each other,
(34:19):
and the impulsive players said, I'm really glad that you
guys helped me out there, because my character is really
impulsive and it's clear that they're going to have to
learn how to be less impulsive, and I'm hoping that
your characters will help teach them that. And one of
the other players at the table also said in the checkout,
I'm super glad that you did that, because we're all
(34:41):
here to basically learn how to navigate this space, how
to learn these skills and be better at this, and
your character doing that help make me feel like like
I really belong here. I struggled with some of the
same challenges and it helped me feel like I belong
And it was an amazing moment for them to realize
(35:01):
that they're all in a similar place, and they've all
struggled to make friends, to connect with people, and this
is a place where that doesn't matter, where they can
all get along and where they can maybe have missteps,
but they can feel a sense of acceptance here. Part
of our mission is to get more games into more
(35:24):
communities around the country and around the world. We have
traveled and we've done presentations and trainings for therapists who
want to get involved. So what we've seen is that
a lot of therapists don't have a lot of experience
with role playing games and then the big barrier to entry.
They hear the stories, they get excited, they want to
participate in this emerging intervention strategy, but they're under experienced
(35:48):
in gamelink Dungeons and dragons. So one of our missions
is to create a product that they can then take
and it'll help them get started much faster. This project
is called critic Core. It is a beginner box for
therapy to gamemasters to start helping their participants almost right
out of the box. So it's got a really simplified
rule set, it's got a facilitator's guide for how to
(36:12):
facilitate the game to be a positive, pro social environment
with all the improv and all the stuff that we
have added on as incorporating the play therapy and drama
therapy that we have into our game. But then also
it's got a very specific module design where the storylines
are directly related to a real world areas of social growth.
(36:33):
So we might have the room that fills up with
lava and that's a way to build frustration tolerance, or
the players have to go and get past a guard,
and that guard might have a slightly downturned mouth that
looks like a frown, and then we can work on
theory of mind skills and perspective taking, where now we
can talk about nonverbal social cues and the fact that
(36:54):
that guard being sad or upset has nothing to do
with you. You have no idea why he's making that
facial expression. But in order to get past the guard
into the next room in the dungeon or in the castle,
we have to be able to relate to him, understand him,
and communicate with him. So those three components going into
critical core, I think will really be how we can
(37:15):
get this project out there. We like Microsoft's vision of
a computer on every desk. We want a game in
every desk, a game in every school, a game in
every hospital, a game in every clinic and therapist's office.
That is our mission. So we don't want people to
just game more. We want people to game better, don't
just game game And what an interesting story. At first,
(37:39):
when I was reading about it, I thought why should
I care? But as so often happens here on this show,
you start to hear the story and you go, my goodness,
what an interesting way to do therapy therapeutic game masters
and it's just well, it makes sense. Certain people What
a great way to reach them. And we've been telling
Adam Johns and Adam Davis's story. Great job on this, Robbie.
(38:01):
Robbie just sort of bumped into it. These guys are
in Kirkland, Washington, and we love to tell stories from
all over this great country. Big ones, small ones again,
Adam Johns and Adam Davis Game to grow and I
love what they said, don't just game more, game better.
(38:22):
If you love what you're listening to and the stories
we bring you every week, please give us a five
star rating. It really helps us out on Apple Podcasts
and Spotify or whatever platform you listen to us on.
And finally, one of our regular contributors, Bill Bright, short
history lesson of New York City in a way you've
(38:42):
probably never heard. Manhattan Manahatta. The Algonquin's Island of Hills
is twelve and a half mile long and two and
a half miles wide at its broadest point. Every day,
(39:04):
one point five million people ride its buses and three
point five million its subways. Each ferry was two seventy
five when my wife and I left the city for
New Hampshire, but fifty nine thousand commuters now ride free
on the Staten Island ferry. Ben Sweeney, a Staten Island historian,
defines a ferry as a function, rather than a boat,
(39:27):
water borne transportation regularly crossing some body of navigable water
for the convenience of persons, vehicles, and animals. The first
Staten Island ferry of which we know started in seventeen
oh eight. It ran between William Street in Manhattan and
the watering place now Tompkinsville on the east shore of
(39:49):
Staten Island. Oarsman powered the first ferries. Later someone devised
a horse driven treadmill to propel the boats. In eighteen ten,
Cornelius Vanderbilt, a handsome, profane Staten Islander, borrowed one hundred
dollars from his mother to run a ferry from Stapleton,
another east shore town, and the foot of Whitehall Street.
(40:13):
Seven years later, he launched the first steam ferry, the Nautilus,
and charged an extortion at twenty five cent fair children
half price. By contrast, the nickel fair was sacre saying
for most of the twentieth century, rising to twenty five
cents and then fifty cents only under pressure of the
city's fiscal crises. Then on July fourth, nineteen ninety seven,
(40:35):
Mayor Giuliani decreed there would be no more fair, just
in time for that year's mayoral elections. For five years,
five mornings a week, I walked to the ferry terminal
in Saint George Staten Island to catch a ferryboat from
its bow. Manhattan's towers gleamed on the horizon, like the
(40:57):
fabled city of El Dorado, or like a vision of
the city of God. The boat rumbled from its slip
past the great bronze statue on Below's Island. My paternal
grandfather saw the same statue from an immigrant ship in
nineteen o six. He was then an eighteen year old
(41:18):
adventurer who had escaped constriction into the armies of the
Czar by crossing the border into Austrian Poland beneath the
load in a manure wagon. He had thence made his
way through Austria, Germany, in Belgium, where he quickly picked
up a sound idiomatic French, which he could speak well
into his ninth decade, and then to England, whence he
sailed from Southampton. Within a century of his arrival, His
(41:42):
experience of a long sea passage closing with the vision
of a mighty woman her lamp. The imprisoned lightning has
become uncommon, if not unknown. Men and women no longer
come here in steerage. They land from airplanes, something of
which my grandfather probably had no knowledge, In a practical
technology even now barely a century old, So too we
(42:07):
have changed how we carry freight across the seas. Now
the great container ships glide past Saint George to Elizabethport
and the Bay of Newark, where the containers stand stacked
for transfer to train and truck. Of the hundreds of
ships that once daily lined Manhattan's shores with a forest
of masts, only a few cruise liners now swing at
(42:28):
anchor at Whitehall in Lower Manhattan. Swift currents and contrary
winds bumped my boat into its slip. Nearby, a pile
driver alternated puffs of steam with hammer blows as it
drives a wooden pile into the harbor floor. It was
probably the last working steam powered machine in Manhattan, if
not the city. Nothing more surely measures progress than the
(42:53):
obsolescence of scheme, a driving force of the Industrial Revolution.
The city's last steam Locomo motives, the Brooklyn Eastern District
Terminal's oil burning switchers serving the waterfront north of the
Navy Yard dropped their fires in nineteen sixty two. The
last steam ferryboat, the Verizano, stopped all engines in nineteen
(43:14):
eighty one. New York is older than Philadelphia or Boston,
yet only a handful of pre revolutionary buildings have survived.
Saint Paul's Chapel on Lower Broadway is the only one
in Manhattan. Walking uptown, I often unfairly contrasted the city
(43:34):
with John D. Rockefeller's colonial Williamsburg. Manhattan's past exists side
by side with the present, and, though fragmented, often remains
oddly alive. Williamsburg was barely a ghost town when Rockefeller
began restoring what had been Virginia's colonial capital. Today the
hamlet is beautifully restored and maintained. It presents a careful,
(43:58):
corporate and ino fencive vision of colonial history. Downtown's tortuous,
irregular streets are those laid out by the Dutch and
the English, except Broadway, which was an Indian trail running
north from the battery before the white men came. Some
street names have changed, usually for political reasons. Crown Street
(44:21):
was renamed Liberty, but most remained the same. The Indispensable
AIA guide to New York City notes that Pearl Street
was once the edge of the island, where mother of
Pearl oyster shells littered the beach. Wall Street, the most famous,
was the site of the northern boundary of New Amsterdam,
where a wall was erected against the English and the Indians.
(44:45):
Of course, there have been no beavers on Beaver Street
for nearly three hundred years. In seventeen seventy one, the
Royal government erected a guilt bronze equestrian statue of King
George the Third and a black iron fence the ornamental crowns.
After the first reading of the Declaration of Independence on
July ninth, seventeen seventy six, up at the Commons just
(45:09):
south of today's City Hall, a mob of patriots came
downtown toppled the statue and broke off the crowns. The
statue was broken up and carried away and melted for shot.
A fountain has taken its place. The fence remains. Downtown's
tangled streets contrast with the grid of right angles and
(45:30):
straight lines imposed on most of Manhattan by a board
of street Commissioners in eighteen o seven. Their plan was
memorialized on the Randall Map, named after John Randall Junior,
the engineer and surveyor who created it and drew it
by hand. Nearly twenty five years ago, Harry Cliderman pulled
(45:51):
me into the Manhattanborough President's Topographical Bureau. Harry worked there.
He was tough, profane, and worldly, and I liked him
a lot. His romanticism escaped only in kindness to his friends,
love of history, and fidelity to the memory of Tammany Hall.
The Hall had gotten him his jobs. He had been
a pick and shovel man for the Borough Department of
(46:12):
Works now part of the Department of Transportation, a confidential
secretary to a municipal court justice, and then a clerk
in the Topographical Bureau. We gossiped about politics. Then Harry
asked whether I wanted to see the Randall Map. He
opened the cabinet with the reverence one might reserve for
(46:33):
the ark of the Covenant. The map had been made
in several parts and was mounted on rollers so cracks
wooden form along fold lines. Harry unrolled part of it.
Randall had drawn and named the streets with India ink
and watercolored the land forms. There was the collect Pond
and Minetta Brook and Kipp's Bay and the rolling hills
(46:55):
of Chelsea that would all soon vanish beneath the pavements
and landfill of the city. The map was perfect and exquisite.
The Topographical Bureau and its predecessors maintained it as if
it were the Holy of holies, because in a worldly
way it is. It's the root of all land use
in Manhattan. I lightly touched its edge for a moment.
(47:18):
It's made of a heavy parchment to endure for the ages.
The Randall map is one of the few objects I've
touched that is so rare and unusual as to be
literally priceless. Then Harry rolled it up again and closed
the drawer. And you've been listening to Bill Brake give
(47:44):
a short history lesson of New York, his own personal
history lesson of New York. And by the way, I
used to give my own personal tours in New York
City because I knew so much about the place and
basically walked most of the Five Burrows. Because back when
I as a kid, well, folks let you, your parents
let you, and so from Orchard Beach and the Bronx
(48:05):
all the way to Coney Island is I love to
swim in. I love the water, and boys, there are
a lot of water around New York City and the
Hudson River, which people started to swim in by the
nineteen nineties and by now people swim in it regularly.
And it is a city with many bridges, many tunnels,
and a whole lot of interesting dimensions beyond Manhattan. When
(48:27):
you go there, hit Orchard Beach, hit Coney Island. They're
two beautiful spots in a beautiful city. If you've missed
any of our previous podcasts, please go back and listen
to them. We have the story of the cloud juicing
entrepreneur who bottles rainwater, the story of Ford versus Ferrari
and the making of the Ford GT and also the
(48:47):
story of Cheyenna Rashid, the woman whose family was in
the KKK and who in the end married a Musliman,
plus many many more. Thanks for listening. I'm Li Habib
and this is the our American Stories podcast.
From the small towns to the big cities, we bring
you the stories that matter. This is this is This
is the Our American Stories podcast. This is Lee Habib,
(00:27):
the host of the Our American Stories podcast. We can't
wait to bring you these fantastic stories from our team.
They work hard, day in and day out to bring
you stories from everyday life and from everyday Americans. We
tell the stories about this great country that may not
be perfect, but sure it is beautiful. If you'd like
to support us in all that we do here, visit
(00:48):
our American Stories dot com and go to the giving tab,
join our team and the work that they do, and
become a part of all that's going on here. We're
a nonprofit and we appreciate both one time gift and
monthly donations. It's for you and through you that we
tell the story. And now we have a story of
(01:12):
a group of guys that use dungeons and dragons as
a therapy tool. Also Bill Brake short history lesson of
New York City. But first, here's the story of an
Iowaman who went skydiving at one hundred years of age.
Ronald Nason was born in nineteen nineteen in Pennsylvania. At
(01:34):
the time I interviewed him, Ronald was a hundred and
two years old. He's in better shape than most people
at the retirement home he lives in, including those far
younger than him. They call him Superman. Exercising every day,
reading and helping those around him. Ronald still lives a
full life, and so I asked him, what's your secret. Well,
(01:58):
you have to drink the right kind of life. I've
had four ounces of eighty proof for about seventy five years.
Whether that has aided my old jevity, Hell, I don't know.
I don't much care. You know, I enjoy it and
(02:20):
and I'm not going to give up now because it's
to be honest to speak, a part of my life.
I don't look upon it as a morality thing like
a lot of people would. But I'm honest. I'm an alcoholic.
There's no It depends on how you defend define alcohol alcoholic.
(02:46):
All kidding aside, it's no wonder alcohol would be part
of Ronald's life. At the age of twenty one, he
got one of the deadliest jobs anyone could get, but
it paid well, which was important to him. At sixteen
years old, he left home in hitch Heights, through Canada, Washington, Mexico,
and California, seeking good paying jobs during the Great Depression
(03:09):
while working as a tree tremor. In attending community college
in California, an opportunity to make more money presented itself
to Ronald, an opportunity that came with tremendous risk. I
went back in junior college, back in Los Angeles, and
this is nineteen thirty eight, and it was obvious that
(03:36):
there was problems in Europe that could develop into a war.
Now I was pacifistic. I was not interested in no why.
I didn't want to fight anybody. But I was also
aware of the fact that if this should develop into
a war that the United States is getting involved in,
(04:00):
to go where the money is, and there wasn't much money.
Being a dog face, they paid thirty dollars a month
referring to those in the infantry during World War Two,
whereas if you were a commissioned officer flying in the
Army or the Naval Flying Service, you would not only
(04:21):
get your commission pay as an officer, but you would
get half again as much because of the extra hazardous
a duty of flying. Well, I said to myself, my God,
that's where I'm gonna go. So as the war came on,
(04:44):
that was in the back of my mind, I will
become a naval aviator and get money. The draft was
on and that's what prompted me to have to move
head to sign in or I would be drafted. So
I signed up and got admitted into naval aviation training. Now,
(05:07):
some of these experiences I had in training, I'll never forget,
and I can explain one of those. As time went on,
we were restricted to the base because of the war,
because of Pearl Harbor, but there were times when we
would have weekends and it was on one of these
(05:29):
weekends that I went into town and got myself polluted
and I came back. Now, there was a rule in
naval aviation training that if you didn't feel like flying,
you would report it and you wouldn't have to fly.
That was just a rule that existed. Well, I was
(05:50):
in one of the final stages of training, which was
training with two other planes, and what we would the
training exercise was to fly in formation, the three plane formation. Well,
I didn't feel like flying, and I told the other
two pilots. I said, look, I'm not I don't feel good.
(06:14):
I don't want to fly today. Well, we want to
get through with this program and we want to fly,
and we don't want you to slow us up. Well
I gave in. Now we go up and we do
our thing. And part of the training is that you
that you lift up and you slide over a plane
(06:38):
and you set it down again. So now you're a
three plane formation with a little different configuration. And we
did that and we landed out in a reserve field,
which is common, and we all had a cigarette. Now
we get back in the plane, we do or exercise
(07:02):
it again, and it's time to go back to the base.
Now Here I am flying this single engine by plane,
open cockpit, and I'm the only one in it, and
we've finished our three plane formation training and I'm on
(07:23):
my way back. Now. When you leave a three plane formation,
you would take the plane and you would put it
in a nose high attitude and you would swing it
off to the left or to the right, and you
would be going down at a rapid clip, very rapid clip.
(07:46):
And so this is what I did. I pulled a
stick back and I went up and I made the
turn to the right, and now I'm going down head first,
and I'm slipping out of the cockpit. My head goes up,
gets into the wind, and my goggles flow back, and
(08:09):
the upper part of my body is outside of the airplane,
and I'm in a hell of a position. You're own
straight down. Well, to make a long story short, I
grabbed the combing that's the ring around the cockpit, and
I took my right leg, my ankle, and I pulled
the stick back, which brought the plane into a level position.
(08:36):
And now, okay, I survived that crazy thing, Scared to death,
knees knocking, didn't know what was going to happen. And
I get back to the base. Thank god, I survived that.
I'm alive, and the plane keeps going to the right,
(08:59):
and I cry by using the left breaks and so on. Well,
I wound up in a loop, a ground loop. I
had forgotten to lock the tailwheel. And now I've really
learned something. Alcohol and flying doesn't mix. So and that
(09:24):
mantra stayed with me forever. Alcohol and aviators was a
very common, ordinary thing. But usually, and particularly in my case,
you learned the hard way if you survived it. And
(09:45):
I learned the hard way. I never drank and flew.
After that. I had been in Corpus Christi, Texas, training
and we flew the PBIS looking for German submarines. Now,
Pearl Harbor headn't hit. We were not in the war.
(10:08):
We didn't carry any depth chargers and we didn't carry
any ammunition. But we were just out there looking for
German submarines. Now it's kind of stupid and ridiculous when
you think about it. The war wasn't on. Why are
we looking, well, I don't know. The Navy wanted the intelligence,
(10:30):
I guess, to know if any submarines out there, and
they found out there was not many. And of course
it varied from time to time. Now Pearl Harbor hit
and all hell breaks loose. I was in my final
(10:51):
stages of training and it was December seventh, of course,
brought on the war Japan, and I thought to myself,
I made one a hell of a mistake. I'm going
to be nothing but a clay pigeon for somebody to
shoot at. I never expected to survive the war. Never
(11:14):
never expected. Even when I met my wife, I told her,
I said, look, you're gonna be a widow. There's no
question in my mind at all. So it's a decision
you have to make. I can't make it for you.
And I said, I'm willing to get married if if
(11:35):
you want to do that, Well, of course she should.
She did, so we were married and carried on. So
that that was my mental attitude that it existed during
the whole thing, and I wasn't far from wrong. But
Ronald was lucky. He mostly flew non combat missions, patrolling
(11:56):
the waters for enemy submarines, which was less dangerous the
missions of fighter pilots and bomber crews. But that didn't
mean he'd be out of the woods or should we
say water. Some of the most frightening moments didn't involve
the enemy and involved whether or involved mechanical failures of
(12:21):
the air plane itself. Now we're stationed at Zandriffield, Dutch Guiana,
and we're at the mouth of the Paramaribo River that
intersects the Amazon. The river goes to the coast and
(12:41):
meets the ocean. Now we're completely a night outfit. We're
looking for German submarines at night. And now I'm at
about two thousand feet and my instruments go crazy, absolutely crazy.
It shows that I'm going up two thousand feet a minute.
(13:04):
I make the correction, and I now I'm going down
two thousand feet a minute. And at two thousand feet
that didn't take very long. So to make a long
story short, I went up, I went down. I went up,
and I went down, and I got out volcanically. What
(13:25):
I got into was when the warm water came out
of the river and hit the cold water of the
Atlantic Ocean, there were up drafts and down drafts. In
other words, it was like a hurricane. There were up
drafts and down drafts in this area of storm. Now
(13:48):
that's only part of it. The water was coming through
the cracks and the airplane I was being sprayed with water,
and all the time I had we'll call it the stick,
actually was a yoke, all the way forward and all
(14:13):
the way back, and all the way forward again and
all the way back. Now, the gyation of the plane,
as you would look at it would be it was
nose down, nose up, nose down, nose up. At two
thousand feet, how close I came to the water, I'll
ever know. But I made the corrections and got out
(14:35):
of it. Now my knees are shocking, knocking again, and
I tell myself, the hell with this business. They'll court
Marshal me, but I'll get out of here and be
a Cervidian. Well, the Megabogue story short. This was a
tropical area and that morning broke and the sun came out,
(14:56):
and my attitude changed completely. There After the war, Ronald
spent a few more years in the Navy, started a
family and became a lawyer, which led to a long
and successful career, giving him many opportunities to work on
(15:16):
his bucket list. But in twenty nineteen, at the age
of one hundred, there was still one goal he wanted
to check off. This goes back to shortly after the war,
the Navy had a plan whereby a n aviator, if accepted,
could go to lake Hurst, New Jersey and make a
(15:36):
parachute jump. He was trained on how to pack the chute,
and he would pack his chute and he would go up,
and he didn't make the jump. Well, I applied for that,
but they turned me down. And I think they turned
me down because I was a station of the Coast
Guard at the time looking for these German subs that
were depth charging merchant ships right and left. So I
(15:58):
didn't get to make the jump. So as time went on,
I kept thinking, well, I'd like to make the jump.
And I decided, well, now it's a good time. I'm
a hundred years old and kind of a freak anyway,
so I'll become a little more freaky. And I thought, well,
I won't tell the kids about it, because something serious
(16:22):
could happen and they could feel guilty, and I don't
want them to be a field of guilty. So I
got ahold of the Methodist organization called Wheels. They have
cars that they employ people to take inmates from the
nursing home. So I called her and said, look, I
(16:43):
got something I don't want you to talk to anybody about.
It's just secret between the two of us. I said,
I'm planning to make a parachute jump. Well that could
have shopped her and whatever, but she agreed with me
that she wouldn't tell anybody. So I scheduled it for
(17:05):
the jump at Winterset, Iowa. And this is that Amoyt
skydivers It's an organization, is a very very active organization.
And the driver was a young lady and she didn't
know why I was going to the airport except her
(17:26):
job is just to take me there. Well, she took
me there and while I'm there, a large group of
young people that are doing the skydive thing. They have
a large they have a twin engine aircraft that takes
people up and do their thing. But she didn't know
that I was scheduled to make a jump, so this
(17:49):
came as a surprise to her too when she found
out what was happening. Ronald, along with twenty other skydivers,
boarded the plane for fifteen minutes of climbing. The plane
door opened at thirteen thousand feet. He and his Tannem
skydiver sat on the edge with their feet hanging out,
(18:10):
and they jumped, free falling for about a whole minute
and made a safe landing. Ronald had finally marched that
off his list, but his story doesn't end there. I
get all kinds of questions about what are you going
to do it again? And this summer or next summer
or whatever. But now I'm looking forward to this June
(18:36):
or July. I'm scheduled to participate in the air show
at Pensacola, Florida. This is an air show that apparently
they usually have about once the year. Normally they have
about forty thousand people that at ten and whatever, and
(18:57):
they have me a scheduled to fly with two other
naval World War two aviators information. We'll be flying the
old biplane open cockpit planes information, so I'm looking forward
to that now. I have been scheduled to do this
(19:22):
for three years. The first year was canceled because of
a hurricane. The second year was canceled because of the
covirus thing. But I'm looking now for the third years
being a successful year. So we'll just see what happens.
The good Lord willing and the river doesn't right, I'll
(19:43):
still be kicking, and I'm sure you'll still be kicking
in a special thanks to Ronald Mason for sharing his
story and his special thanks to Monty Button from des Moines,
a listener on who We're looking always for your stories,
send them to American story dot com and has always
a great job by Joey the story of Ronald Mason,
(20:04):
and my goodness, so many people who are still alive
who served in World War Two. We've done a lot
of World War Two stories on this show, and particularly
Frank Davita's story. He was the Higgins boat operator on
D Day and made any number of runs it's harrowing,
and it's heartbreaking, and it's bold and beautiful and his
voice swell. It's an important one to hear. Ronald Mason's
(20:28):
story an American patriot and an American daredevil. And if
you have a story to share, we want to hear it.
Send them to our American Stories dot com. That's our
American Stories dot com and click on the your stories tab.
We can't wait to hear from you. Up next, Adam
(20:50):
Johns and Adam Davis have figured out how to use
Dungeons and Dragons as a therapy tool. As we talk
to people kind of around the country, and especially people
who are not not in the gaming or or kind
of geek atmosphere or culture, oftentimes they assume Dungeons and
(21:14):
Dragons as a video game. So here's how I usually
describe it. There's one person who acts as the sort
of head storyteller and referee of the game, and they
know most of the rules and they can explain most
of the rules to the game. And that person isn't
usually referred to as the dungeon master or the game master,
(21:34):
and they sit at the head of the table and
they describe stuff that's happening in the world, and then
everybody else who's sitting at the table is just playing
a character in that world, a single character, and they
have a piece of paper that tells them things like
how strong their character is, or what kind of equipment
they have, or what kinds of abilities they have, And
this all takes place in a fantasy world, much like
(21:56):
Lord of the Rings, where there are swords and bow
and arrow and full suits of armor and of course
magical skulls, and the dungeon master might describe something like,
all of you have decided to venture into this dark
cave where you can see that there are there's mildew
(22:19):
growing on the walls, there's mold, and there is a
dripping coming from the stalactites in the ceiling. You're here
because you've heard of a tremendous treasure that apparently was
lost in these caves a long time ago, and you've
decided you're going to go after that treasure. Maybe even
you have a map to help guide you through. And
as you travel further down into the cave, it's very dark,
(22:41):
but you can see that the walls have been carved out,
like somebody has carved them with man made tools, and
you travel deeper and deeper into this cave system until
finally you open up into a large room. And in
this large room, you can see across the way is
a door on the other side of a large gap,
(23:01):
and the gap seems to stretch very far down into
the ground. But the thing that really catches your eye
is that hanging above the gap, clinging for dear life,
appears to be a small gnome man and he's hanging
from a rope, and he sees you as you walk in,
and he shouts to you, oh my gosh, thank you
(23:24):
so much for being here. I'm so happy somebody finally
showed up. Please help me. And at this point in time,
the dungeon master then says, what do you do? And
all of the players at the table get to decide
what their character does to sort of overcome this challenge
or this situation, so they might do all sorts of things.
(23:45):
A warrior character might leap across the pit and try
to grab the nome to save him from from falling
down into the pit. A ranger or an archer character
might shoot a bow with a rope tied to it
and tight rope walk across the pit and save the
Nome that way, or a wizard character who can cast
(24:05):
magic spells might use a magic spell that can pull
the rope and get it swinging, so the Nome might
be able to jump off. And no matter what they do,
they're going to do it together because all the players
at the table are all working on a team together.
They're not competing with each other. Instead, they are working
cooperatively towards a common goal. And in this case, the
(24:27):
common goal of the game is not the most points.
It's not even to achieve a particular goal. Even in
this case of the example I gave, you're not trying
to get treasure. You're trying to tell a story. And
that's one of the really brilliant things about games like
Dungeons and Dragons is that the point of the game
(24:48):
is to tell a story. And because that's really the
goal of the game, because that's really the place that
you're trying to get to, everybody at the table might
have a different idea for what that story looks like,
but they know they're all working towards that goal, and
that's what really turns it into a brilliant and amazing experience.
As the dungeon master continues to describe things in the world,
(25:09):
continues to describe whether or not the players attempts to
do those things are successful, and the players get to
roll dice to help add randomness and help determine the
outcomes of their action and get to really have the
most open ended gaming experience you can possibly have, where
they can decide and try anything that comes to their
(25:31):
minds in a very loose rule system that allows you
to be very flexible with the outcomes of it. A
lot of game masters, to my chagrin, I don't like
the fact that they often see themselves as adversaries of
the players. There's oftentimes an antagonistic relationship where the game
(25:53):
master sees themselves needing to challenge and there's like a Haha,
your characters are going to die today because my monsters
are going to be stronger than them, and we don't
do anything like that. Our goal as game masters is
very much to challenge the players, but also to keep
them engaged and keep them excited. So we do that
(26:15):
by challenging them the right amount, building on their ideas
while they build on our space on our ideas. Because
we are we're co creating and collaborating in this game
where that's oftentimes for many of our players the first
time an adult has said what do you care about?
What do you want to do? So then the players
(26:35):
now see an adult who is playing with them, really
playing with them in a way that is very healing
to a lot of a lot of participants, especially ours
who are identified at school as as oftentimes being an outcast.
People tell them what to do all the time, very
rarely say what do you care about? What is something
that you want out of life? And so this is
(26:57):
an opportunity where they can push boundaries and see what
happens when they take up space and then have an
adult be excited about the choices that they're making. He
started doing what we're doing right now using Dungeons and
Dragons and therapeutics social skills groups, largely by accident. Adam
and I both started playing Dungeons and Dragons when we
(27:19):
were pretty young. Got a lot of out of it.
We played games with our friends. We got to use
all the mechanics of the games and the storytelling of
the game to really get a lot of social outlet.
When we were kids, I Adam Davis, was studying drama
therapy because I had wanted to use the drama games
and experiences that I had had as a performer and
(27:41):
then as a drama teacher to help kids, help kids
become more into themselves and learn about themselves and then
how they could interact with the world better. And so
Adam and I met in grad school, and I started
picking up an after school program that was a Dungeons
and Dragons program for quirky kids who needed a little
a little guidance in social support. And I took the
(28:04):
game over and realized that Dungeons and Dragons is actually
a perfect modality for sit down drama therapy. So we
started using the game a little more intentionally and then
just barely scratching the surface. And then when my facilitator
at the time left to go pursue other interests, there
was an opening. And I knew Adam from grad school,
(28:25):
so we had kind of like done that thing where
we brought some things from our personal lives to sort
of get to know you activity in the very beginning
of the quarter, and both Adam and I brought dice.
We knew from across the room that we're both named Adam.
We both liked dice and games, and so we knew
we were kindred spirits. So we had that great moment
(28:45):
that sort of nerd nod from across the room. And
then after the class, Adam Davis came up to me
and he said, Hey, do you want to get paid
to come and play improv games and Dungeons and Dragons?
And I was like, yeah, that sound that sounds like
the best. And at the time the group was really
just a sort of drop in social group. And then
(29:08):
when we came in we started saying, there's a lot
we can do with this, and we were both in
a state of sort of master's program desire to want
to use all the amazing theories and all the amazing
stuff that we were learning, and we really had this
tremendous opportunity to start diving in saying, oh my gosh,
(29:30):
we're this is exactly what we can be using all
of these amazing theories, all these amazing things that we're learning,
and we can apply them right here. But through the
game of Dungeons and Dragons that we grew up playing,
we got our first group going. The parents saw the outcomes,
the parents started talking to other parents, inviting us to
(29:53):
speak at other engagements and then all of a sudden,
the ball started to roll and then before we knew it,
we have continued grow and we are now full time
therapeutic game masters and executive directors of the Game to Grow.
We have a sort of a theory at Game to
Grow where players play the characters that they need to play.
(30:14):
So we have a lot of players who, like I said,
are socially isolated, who don't have a lot of social aptitude,
and they don't really have a lot of experience being
charismatic or confident, but they pick characters who are aspirational.
A lot of players come in and they pick characters
who are military leaders who have on their character sheet
that they are very charismatic, that people believe in them,
(30:37):
and so we know right away that that's something that
these young people want to want to play with and
want to explore. We have players that come in choosing
to play characters that are very similar to themselves, lone
wolves who are very isolated in the game, and then
we can help that character grow and thus the player grow.
And that lone wolf character who wants to go off
(30:57):
and solve every problem by themselves, now we put them
in a situation in the game where their character needs
to rely on somebody else, because Dungeons and Dragons is
a fellowship game. It's a game where every character has
a unique and special ability that makes them special. And
that's a great life lesson is that you can't do
everything by yourself, and people are going to rely on you,
(31:21):
and you were going to rely on people. And here's
what that looks like to ask for help. And here's
how good it feels to be able to be the
person who can step up and help out the team.
In one particular instance where a player really made a
choice that I was not expecting, the characters had all
made their way through the stunt and they came up
(31:43):
into a room where there was in one corner of
the room a massive troll of Legend who had been
imprisoned there, and in the other corner of the room
was a series of three unlabeled switches, and across the
other side of the room was a metal door that
was closed, And it quickly was explained to the players
(32:05):
that one of the three unlabeled switches would open the
door on the other side of the room, allowing them
to progress further into their dungeon, and the other two switches,
when pulled together, would release the massive troll of Legend
upon the players, but also upon the world itself. And
usually how this works is that it's sort of an
interesting challenge where the players can talk to the troll.
(32:28):
They can figure out is the troll lyne to us
about which switch the switch, and it's sort of a
mix of a puzzle and a social challenge. In this case,
we had one player who had just joined the group,
and the player had described their character as being impulsive
and having a lot of hyperactivity, and it was an
appropriate character for that player to play because that player
(32:51):
also struggled with those exact same challenges. And that player said,
I run across the room and I pull all three
switches at once, and I've run that scenario several times.
That was the first time anybody had ever just decided
to pull all three switches. So all of a sudden
I had to decide, Okay, well, what's going to happen here,
(33:11):
and what are the consequences of effectively just running ahead?
And all the other players at the table had gotten
out like graph paper, and they were getting ready to
like solve the puzzle and they just stood and stared
slack jawed at their teammate, who who might have just
done them all in? And what I said was the
troll runs across the room and he picks up the
impulsive players character, getting ready to eat them whole and
(33:35):
all the other characters. I said, you're you're the players
at the table. I said, you can leave now. The
door is open. But if you leave, you'll be leaving
your teammate to be eaten by this, this massive troll
of legend, and you'll also be leaving the troll to
to recavoc upon the world. You need to decide what
your characters would do here. They are heroes in this world.
(33:56):
What would they do? And they turned and they debated
it with each other, and they eventually decided that they
would help their teammate, and so they entice the troll
back into the cage and reimprison the troll. And at
the end of that session, we always do a checkout
at the end of every session. At the end of
that session, there the players all checked out with each other,
(34:19):
and the impulsive players said, I'm really glad that you
guys helped me out there, because my character is really
impulsive and it's clear that they're going to have to
learn how to be less impulsive, and I'm hoping that
your characters will help teach them that. And one of
the other players at the table also said in the checkout,
I'm super glad that you did that, because we're all
(34:41):
here to basically learn how to navigate this space, how
to learn these skills and be better at this, and
your character doing that help make me feel like like
I really belong here. I struggled with some of the
same challenges and it helped me feel like I belong
And it was an amazing moment for them to realize
(35:01):
that they're all in a similar place, and they've all
struggled to make friends, to connect with people, and this
is a place where that doesn't matter, where they can
all get along and where they can maybe have missteps,
but they can feel a sense of acceptance here. Part
of our mission is to get more games into more
(35:24):
communities around the country and around the world. We have
traveled and we've done presentations and trainings for therapists who
want to get involved. So what we've seen is that
a lot of therapists don't have a lot of experience
with role playing games and then the big barrier to entry.
They hear the stories, they get excited, they want to
participate in this emerging intervention strategy, but they're under experienced
(35:48):
in gamelink Dungeons and dragons. So one of our missions
is to create a product that they can then take
and it'll help them get started much faster. This project
is called critic Core. It is a beginner box for
therapy to gamemasters to start helping their participants almost right
out of the box. So it's got a really simplified
rule set, it's got a facilitator's guide for how to
(36:12):
facilitate the game to be a positive, pro social environment
with all the improv and all the stuff that we
have added on as incorporating the play therapy and drama
therapy that we have into our game. But then also
it's got a very specific module design where the storylines
are directly related to a real world areas of social growth.
(36:33):
So we might have the room that fills up with
lava and that's a way to build frustration tolerance, or
the players have to go and get past a guard,
and that guard might have a slightly downturned mouth that
looks like a frown, and then we can work on
theory of mind skills and perspective taking, where now we
can talk about nonverbal social cues and the fact that
(36:54):
that guard being sad or upset has nothing to do
with you. You have no idea why he's making that
facial expression. But in order to get past the guard
into the next room in the dungeon or in the castle,
we have to be able to relate to him, understand him,
and communicate with him. So those three components going into
critical core, I think will really be how we can
(37:15):
get this project out there. We like Microsoft's vision of
a computer on every desk. We want a game in
every desk, a game in every school, a game in
every hospital, a game in every clinic and therapist's office.
That is our mission. So we don't want people to
just game more. We want people to game better, don't
just game game And what an interesting story. At first,
(37:39):
when I was reading about it, I thought why should
I care? But as so often happens here on this show,
you start to hear the story and you go, my goodness,
what an interesting way to do therapy therapeutic game masters
and it's just well, it makes sense. Certain people What
a great way to reach them. And we've been telling
Adam Johns and Adam Davis's story. Great job on this, Robbie.
(38:01):
Robbie just sort of bumped into it. These guys are
in Kirkland, Washington, and we love to tell stories from
all over this great country. Big ones, small ones again,
Adam Johns and Adam Davis Game to grow and I
love what they said, don't just game more, game better.
(38:22):
If you love what you're listening to and the stories
we bring you every week, please give us a five
star rating. It really helps us out on Apple Podcasts
and Spotify or whatever platform you listen to us on.
And finally, one of our regular contributors, Bill Bright, short
history lesson of New York City in a way you've
(38:42):
probably never heard. Manhattan Manahatta. The Algonquin's Island of Hills
is twelve and a half mile long and two and
a half miles wide at its broadest point. Every day,
(39:04):
one point five million people ride its buses and three
point five million its subways. Each ferry was two seventy
five when my wife and I left the city for
New Hampshire, but fifty nine thousand commuters now ride free
on the Staten Island ferry. Ben Sweeney, a Staten Island historian,
defines a ferry as a function, rather than a boat,
(39:27):
water borne transportation regularly crossing some body of navigable water
for the convenience of persons, vehicles, and animals. The first
Staten Island ferry of which we know started in seventeen
oh eight. It ran between William Street in Manhattan and
the watering place now Tompkinsville on the east shore of
(39:49):
Staten Island. Oarsman powered the first ferries. Later someone devised
a horse driven treadmill to propel the boats. In eighteen ten,
Cornelius Vanderbilt, a handsome, profane Staten Islander, borrowed one hundred
dollars from his mother to run a ferry from Stapleton,
another east shore town, and the foot of Whitehall Street.
(40:13):
Seven years later, he launched the first steam ferry, the Nautilus,
and charged an extortion at twenty five cent fair children
half price. By contrast, the nickel fair was sacre saying
for most of the twentieth century, rising to twenty five
cents and then fifty cents only under pressure of the
city's fiscal crises. Then on July fourth, nineteen ninety seven,
(40:35):
Mayor Giuliani decreed there would be no more fair, just
in time for that year's mayoral elections. For five years,
five mornings a week, I walked to the ferry terminal
in Saint George Staten Island to catch a ferryboat from
its bow. Manhattan's towers gleamed on the horizon, like the
(40:57):
fabled city of El Dorado, or like a vision of
the city of God. The boat rumbled from its slip
past the great bronze statue on Below's Island. My paternal
grandfather saw the same statue from an immigrant ship in
nineteen o six. He was then an eighteen year old
(41:18):
adventurer who had escaped constriction into the armies of the
Czar by crossing the border into Austrian Poland beneath the
load in a manure wagon. He had thence made his
way through Austria, Germany, in Belgium, where he quickly picked
up a sound idiomatic French, which he could speak well
into his ninth decade, and then to England, whence he
sailed from Southampton. Within a century of his arrival, His
(41:42):
experience of a long sea passage closing with the vision
of a mighty woman her lamp. The imprisoned lightning has
become uncommon, if not unknown. Men and women no longer
come here in steerage. They land from airplanes, something of
which my grandfather probably had no knowledge, In a practical
technology even now barely a century old, So too we
(42:07):
have changed how we carry freight across the seas. Now
the great container ships glide past Saint George to Elizabethport
and the Bay of Newark, where the containers stand stacked
for transfer to train and truck. Of the hundreds of
ships that once daily lined Manhattan's shores with a forest
of masts, only a few cruise liners now swing at
(42:28):
anchor at Whitehall in Lower Manhattan. Swift currents and contrary
winds bumped my boat into its slip. Nearby, a pile
driver alternated puffs of steam with hammer blows as it
drives a wooden pile into the harbor floor. It was
probably the last working steam powered machine in Manhattan, if
not the city. Nothing more surely measures progress than the
(42:53):
obsolescence of scheme, a driving force of the Industrial Revolution.
The city's last steam Locomo motives, the Brooklyn Eastern District
Terminal's oil burning switchers serving the waterfront north of the
Navy Yard dropped their fires in nineteen sixty two. The
last steam ferryboat, the Verizano, stopped all engines in nineteen
(43:14):
eighty one. New York is older than Philadelphia or Boston,
yet only a handful of pre revolutionary buildings have survived.
Saint Paul's Chapel on Lower Broadway is the only one
in Manhattan. Walking uptown, I often unfairly contrasted the city
(43:34):
with John D. Rockefeller's colonial Williamsburg. Manhattan's past exists side
by side with the present, and, though fragmented, often remains
oddly alive. Williamsburg was barely a ghost town when Rockefeller
began restoring what had been Virginia's colonial capital. Today the
hamlet is beautifully restored and maintained. It presents a careful,
(43:58):
corporate and ino fencive vision of colonial history. Downtown's tortuous,
irregular streets are those laid out by the Dutch and
the English, except Broadway, which was an Indian trail running
north from the battery before the white men came. Some
street names have changed, usually for political reasons. Crown Street
(44:21):
was renamed Liberty, but most remained the same. The Indispensable
AIA guide to New York City notes that Pearl Street
was once the edge of the island, where mother of
Pearl oyster shells littered the beach. Wall Street, the most famous,
was the site of the northern boundary of New Amsterdam,
where a wall was erected against the English and the Indians.
(44:45):
Of course, there have been no beavers on Beaver Street
for nearly three hundred years. In seventeen seventy one, the
Royal government erected a guilt bronze equestrian statue of King
George the Third and a black iron fence the ornamental crowns.
After the first reading of the Declaration of Independence on
July ninth, seventeen seventy six, up at the Commons just
(45:09):
south of today's City Hall, a mob of patriots came
downtown toppled the statue and broke off the crowns. The
statue was broken up and carried away and melted for shot.
A fountain has taken its place. The fence remains. Downtown's
tangled streets contrast with the grid of right angles and
(45:30):
straight lines imposed on most of Manhattan by a board
of street Commissioners in eighteen o seven. Their plan was
memorialized on the Randall Map, named after John Randall Junior,
the engineer and surveyor who created it and drew it
by hand. Nearly twenty five years ago, Harry Cliderman pulled
(45:51):
me into the Manhattanborough President's Topographical Bureau. Harry worked there.
He was tough, profane, and worldly, and I liked him
a lot. His romanticism escaped only in kindness to his friends,
love of history, and fidelity to the memory of Tammany Hall.
The Hall had gotten him his jobs. He had been
a pick and shovel man for the Borough Department of
(46:12):
Works now part of the Department of Transportation, a confidential
secretary to a municipal court justice, and then a clerk
in the Topographical Bureau. We gossiped about politics. Then Harry
asked whether I wanted to see the Randall Map. He
opened the cabinet with the reverence one might reserve for
(46:33):
the ark of the Covenant. The map had been made
in several parts and was mounted on rollers so cracks
wooden form along fold lines. Harry unrolled part of it.
Randall had drawn and named the streets with India ink
and watercolored the land forms. There was the collect Pond
and Minetta Brook and Kipp's Bay and the rolling hills
(46:55):
of Chelsea that would all soon vanish beneath the pavements
and landfill of the city. The map was perfect and exquisite.
The Topographical Bureau and its predecessors maintained it as if
it were the Holy of holies, because in a worldly
way it is. It's the root of all land use
in Manhattan. I lightly touched its edge for a moment.
(47:18):
It's made of a heavy parchment to endure for the ages.
The Randall map is one of the few objects I've
touched that is so rare and unusual as to be
literally priceless. Then Harry rolled it up again and closed
the drawer. And you've been listening to Bill Brake give
(47:44):
a short history lesson of New York, his own personal
history lesson of New York. And by the way, I
used to give my own personal tours in New York
City because I knew so much about the place and
basically walked most of the Five Burrows. Because back when
I as a kid, well, folks let you, your parents
let you, and so from Orchard Beach and the Bronx
(48:05):
all the way to Coney Island is I love to
swim in. I love the water, and boys, there are
a lot of water around New York City and the
Hudson River, which people started to swim in by the
nineteen nineties and by now people swim in it regularly.
And it is a city with many bridges, many tunnels,
and a whole lot of interesting dimensions beyond Manhattan. When
(48:27):
you go there, hit Orchard Beach, hit Coney Island. They're
two beautiful spots in a beautiful city. If you've missed
any of our previous podcasts, please go back and listen
to them. We have the story of the cloud juicing
entrepreneur who bottles rainwater, the story of Ford versus Ferrari
and the making of the Ford GT and also the
(48:47):
story of Cheyenna Rashid, the woman whose family was in
the KKK and who in the end married a Musliman,
plus many many more. Thanks for listening. I'm Li Habib
and this is the our American Stories podcast.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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