Audio Academy

Navy veteran Ron Ekika Riveira Jr. says that when you first see him and all his tattoos, you might see a “big bad scary-looking Hell’s Angels guy.” But if you look closer, you'll see that the ink tells a different, much more surprising story.

This piece originally aired in 2016.

Bill Milestone says you can tell when a pigeon is happy. They get frisky with energy. They squabble with each other. They get, he says, a sparkle in their eye.

Milestone is training his flock of forty for an upcoming race. They live in a small white house on stilts in the backyard of his San Francisco home, cooing over each other. 

In February of 2016, new express lanes opened on Interstate 580 near Pleasanton. These express lanes are just like carpool lanes – in most ways. They’re free for buses, motorcycles, and cars with more than one rider. But in an express lane a single driver can get in too, for a price.

On Sunday mornings in the Castro neighborhood, there’s a place where rhythm reigns. Dancers pull out their leg warmers, spandex, and fluorescent headbands for Sunday Skool — and with the right accessories and a lot of attitude, their dreams of being a backup dancer for a day come true. 

“Lasting Letters: Leaving a legacy behind” reports on legacy letters and how they are helping people prepare for death, say goodbye, and grieve loved ones after they are gone.  

It’s not only football players protesting during the national anthem. Members of the Oakland Unified School District Honors Band also discussed ways to take part.

This story originally aired in November of 2016.

On September 10, 2016 football players from Mission High School in San Francisco were headed to a game in Redwood City. They were led by San Francisco Chronicle 2015 football player of the year Niamey Harris, a 17-year-old senior quarterback from Bayview.

Eric Cetnarski works as a sound healer in Oakland. Sound healing can be many things: from listening to our favorite songs to using our voices. 

In May 2017, two men were convicted of a hate crime for attacking Richmond resident Maan Singh Khalsa the previous September. Before they attacked Khalsa, they threatened to cut off his hair. As a follower of the Sikh faith, Khalsa doesn’t cut his hair, and like many Sikhs, he ties a turban.

On any given day across the country, there are over 600,000 openings for technology-related jobs. Over the past few years, training programs called coding boot camps have sprung up to help fill these gaps, but bootcamps are often quick, intensive and expensive.

This auditory guessing game is part of Audiograph, a crowd-sourced collaborative radio project mapping the Bay Area’s sonic signature.

I’m with emergency responders Nicolas Kinney and Chris Channell in a green and white Paramedics Plus ambulance racing to a 911 call in Fremont. We bump over train tracks and swerve through mid-afternoon traffic.

It was 1854 when the first patent for a breast pump was issued to an inventor in New York State. Since then, the device Lea Hardy is about to use to pump breast milk hasn’t changed much.

Forty-plus seniors both in and out of wheelchairs socialize in groups of twos and fours in the lobby of AgeSong University. Friday afternoons are happy hour time at the Portola eldercare facility, and the scene is complete with a caterer, and a singer performing lite rock hits. 

If you walk down San Bruno Avenue in the Portola neighborhood, you’ll notice an orange building sitting in the shadow of the Avenue Theater. Right now it’s a Round Table Pizza. However, more than 60 years ago, this building was the Melita Furniture Store. 

A lot of San Francisco neighborhoods have iconic visual identities-- like the Mission district with its colorful murals, or the Fillmore with sidewalk plaques commemorating the “Harlem of the West”. So then what do we see when we  walk down San Bruno Avenue in the Portola district – just down the hill from KALW on the Southeast side of the city?

You’ve probably seen them: groups of men looking for work, standing in front of Home Depot or waiting on corners of busy thoroughfares. These men are day laborers, looking for short-term work ranging from gardening to painting. On any given day there are almost 120,000 of them looking for work in the United States; about 40 percent are here in California.

Many people with physical disabilities have been told that they can’t do things like hike, camp, rock climb, or bowl. Lori Gray says they can. She runs an outdoor adventure group for Bay Area Outreach and Recreation Program, or BORP. It’s an organization with a mission to get people with disabilities involved in sports and recreation.

Instead of working just one job for a single employer, more and more people are becoming gig workers: folks who consult, freelance, contract, temp, and do jobs on-call—often through smartphone apps. But there’s one kind of gig worker that’s been around for centuries: musicians. Reporter Shereen Adel finds out how they make it work. 

Demonstrators spoke out in cities around the Bay Area today, on behalf of immigrant workers.

We all know we’re supposed to prepare for earthquakes, but how many of us really have a plan?

One of the first things you hear when you enter the East Bay Vivarium is lots of scratching. It's coming from inside a large cage -- its a giant lizard that’s nearly as long as I am tall. “His name is Elmo, he’s a good guy. People love him,” says Owen Maerks, one of the co-owners here at the Vivarium.

If you live in the Bay Area, chances are you know about Golden Gate Park. But you might not have heard about San Francisco’s second largest park: McLaren.

Most reviews on Yelp are of restaurants. But there’s one that’s a little bit different. It begins like this.

Imagine walking into the Avenue Theater and settling in to watch Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dance, Humphrey Bogart search for the Maltese Falcon, and Judy Garland and her dog journey from black and white Kansas to technicolor Oz.  

All week long, we've been playing this sound and asking you to guess what exactly it is and where exactly in the Bay Area we recorded it.

It was business as usual Saturday morning, at the Downtown Berkeley Farmers' Market. Romanesco is in season. Troubadour Mark Ray played his guitar for tips. Then, just a few steps away, at around one o’clock, hundreds of Trump supporters and Trump protesters gathered.

At his press conference today, President Trump reiterated his motivation for strictly enforcing and enhancing U.S. immigration policy.

You’ve just given birth to the most perfect little human. You name him after your father, and his father before him. On the birth certificate, you spell it just like it’s always been spelled, with an accent mark over the i. Then Gisela Sanchez comes along.

Right now, in such a divided country, how we connect with others is on many people’s minds. Maybe you go to church every Sunday, maybe you’re in a book club, or a hiking group, or have a favorite yoga class. Or maybe you spend your weekends dueling friends at a small shop in San Francisco’s Portola district.