From "This American Life" radio show --

Kindness of Strangers - September 12, 1997 - Episode 75

Stories of the kindness of strangers, and where it leads. Also, the unkindness of strangers and where that can lead. All of today's stories take place in the city most people think of as the least kind city in America: New York.

Note: PT/FW does not infer that there was any sexual intent or encounter in the following situation; however, it is so VERY similar to many, many man-boy relationships of these days (that also may involve no "sex" because of laws, but still can involve deep love and caring).

Act Two. Runaway. Jack Geiger, at the age of fourteen, in 1940, left his middle class Jewish home and knocked on the door of a black actor named Canada Lee. He asked Lee if he could move in with him. Lee said yes, and in Lee's Harlem apartment, Geiger spent a year with many of the great figures of the Harlem renaissance: Langston Hughes, Billy Strayhorn, Richard Wright, Adam Clayton Powell. This is what Geiger ended up doing because of that experience.

A side note: it turns out there's a movie in which Canada Lee takes a white teenager under his wing and counsels him, as he did for Jack Geiger in real life. The film is called Lost Boundaries. And more: poet Maxine Kumin wrote a piece about Jack Geiger, New Year's Day 1959, which you can read online. (11 minutes)

Full broadcast audio is at: http://www.thislife.org/ra/75.ram

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