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Related Pieces
Piece Description
Back in 1919, Walter Backerman's grandfather delivered seltzer by horse and wagon on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Today, Walter continues to deliver seltzer around the streets of New York. Some customers, like Mildred Blitz, have been on the family route for more than 50 years. When Walter's grandfather drove his cart there were thousands of seltzer men in the city; today Walter is one of the last.
Transcript
Walter Backerman - SELTZER MAN
New York Works: Audio Portraits of a Vanishing City
Produced by: Emily Botein & Joe Richman The Next Big Thing (NPR) 1/19/2002
Dean Olsher, host: Hi, this is Dean Olsher. I?m going to take you around the city and introduce you to people who make up the radio series New York Works, seven people who are in professions that are slowly disappearing.
MUSIC
In 1919 Jacob Rosenblum took his horse-drawn wagon and began delivering bottles of seltzer-water to tenements on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In the late 1940s, his son also became a seltzer deliveryman and later his grandson took over the route. There used to be thousands of seltzer men in New York City and now Jacob Rosenblum?s grandson, Walter Backerman, is one of the handful left.
MUSIC FADES IN
HEAR TRUCK STARTING, RATTLING
Walter Backerman, seltzer man: The time now is 6:...
Read the full transcript
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David Schulman
Posted on July 12, 2004 at 03:05 PM | Permalink
Review of Walter Backerman, Seltzer Man
Eric Nuzum is right -- for a piece to be viable for stations via PRX, it needs to be easy to use, without extraneous material. So the Dean Olsher intro here should be cut, and the identical script provided for local station staff to read. But the piece itself is such thing of beauty -- a beautiful, beautiful piece of sound and storytelling. It's masterful: disarming, and funny , and then you get this amazing truer-than-life scene between Seltzerman and an old customer. For anyone who hasn't heard this piece before, I won't spoil it with more words. Listen!