The story you’re about to hear is, at its heart, is a love story — between two artists, and a whole lot of dogs. It’s also the story of what it means to follow a dream — and the difficulties that can bring. Producers Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister have the story of Vermont artists Stephen and Gwen Huneck, and their life’s work: a place called D…

A young Marine comes home after his first tour of duty in Afghanistan. His parents tell his story.Oleh Long Haul Productions

The Ivory Billed Woodpecker was thought to be extinct – until recently, when a bird was allegedly spotted near the small town of Brinkley, Arkansas. The sightings were big news in a community depressed by recession and population loss. Our story weaves the locals' reaction with an original song written and performed by musician Sufjan Stevens. Winn…

For the past 60 years, people in northwest Tennessee have tuned each weekday at noon to a radio program on WENK/WTPR called The Swap Shop. For twenty minutes, listeners call or write offering to buy, sell or trade an item or a service in a radio version of the classified ads, things which range from a piece of used plywood, to a green cloth Berklin…

It's been 71 years since the "strike heard round the world" - when autoworkers in Flint, Michigan, occupied a General Motors plant and and jumpstarted the union movement in the United States. But in recent years, as the power of unions in the US has wained, sit-down strikes have been more common in Latin America, Europe, and even Canada.Things fina…

Since the 1930s, delighted throngs have gathered just outside Linesville, Pennsylvania, to toss bread to a writhing stew of carp and ducks at the Linesville Spillway. The carp are so thick that mallard ducks literally hop, skip and jump on the fishes' backs to compete for a slice of bread. Famous worldwide as the place “where ducks walk on the fish…

The small town of Baudette, Minnesota, sits on the U.S./Canadian border, about as far north in the contiguous U.S. as you can get. Famous for snowy winters and a giant concrete walleye that sits downtown, it's also home to a now-decommissioned Coast Guard navigational beacon, a LORAN tower built to guide people across and around the Great Lakes.The…

Faulkner County, Arkansas, has a whole lotta shakin' going on these days. Some of it is from the cash infusion brought on by the gold-rush like influx of natural gas fracking in the community, with over 3,000 new wells drilled in the area since the mid 2000s. But even more is due a mysterious wave of thousands of small earthquakes that have rattled…

Written and performed by Bonnie "Prince" Billy in 2011 for "The Natural State," a Long Haul Song+Story.Oleh Long Haul Productions

A week in the life of a woman trying to leave her physically-abusive husband. The documentary begins three days after Anna's estranged husband has threatened to kill her and their baby at gunpoint. Anna keeps an audio journal of her attempt to have her husband, who she says beat her repeatedly before they separated, arrested. She tells of her frust…

The story of two chronically mentally ill, homeless repeat offenders as they attempt to break the cycle that, for years, has spun them from jail to psychiatric hospitals to the streets and back to jail again. The documentary is a follow-up to "A Danger to Self or Others," which profiles the mental health division at Chicago's Cook County Jail. "Lif…

In November 1995, journalist Rebecca Perl was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. She learned had a tumor in her chest, six months after giving birth to a baby boy. Months of chemotherapy and radiation proved unsuccessful, leaving only one treatment possibility: a lethal dose of chemotherapy followed by a life-saving bone marrow transplant. This…

"A Danger to Self or Others" portrays everyday life inside Cook County Jail's Mental Health Division - the largest provider of mental health services in the United States. On any given day, there are 10,000 men and women held inside the Chicago jail, the largest of its kind in the United States. An estimated 10%, or 1,000, are suffering from some f…

"Learning to Live: James' Story" is the story of an ex-felon's transition from prison to the free world. James, who narrates, is 38 and has been in and out of prison all his adult life. After completing a seven-year prison term for burglary, James comes to live at St. Leonard's halfway house for ex-offenders on Chicago's west side. Over three month…

"When All Else Fails" is a first-person account of a man undergoing electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), formerly known as electroshock. Rob MacGruder tells of his lifelong battle with bipolar disorder and how ECT has repeatedly saved his life. The story follows MacGruder for almost a year as he falls into a severe depression, undergoes a series of ECT…

The House of Pain was the gang name for a ten-story high-rise at Stateway Gardens, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) development that once sat across from U.S. Cellular Field (a.k.a. Comiskey Park) on Chicago's South Side. The building was demolished as part of an ambitious initiative to replace Chicago's notorious public housing high rises with …

In the fall of 2002, Catherine Means was living on the tenth floor of what she describes as "hell" -- Chicago's Stateway Gardens high-rise housing project. In September, she finally got out from under the "bricks" at Stateway and into her first private-market apartment. Her move was one that thousands of public housing residents are making, as the …

Right now in Chicago, thousands of public housing residents are being forced to move as the Chicago Housing Authority systematically demolishes their notorious high-rise apartment buildings and plans to replace them with mixed-income developments. Since the redeveloped housing won't be available in most cases for several years, many families find t…

American schools teach students that with hard work, they can realize their dreams. But some kids do everything right, only to graduate from high school and find the American Dream isn’t for them.Sam was brought to the United States by his parents as a young child, but his family overstayed their visas. They’ve lived here now for fourteen years, an…

Over the course of eight months, Long Haul followed two hospice volunteers through their training and first assignments in patients' homes. Trained to provide "respite care," the volunteers set out to give family members a break from their caretaking responsibilities. And while one has a chance to reflect on her patient's life in a intimate setting…

Each year, more than 100,000 women use some form of doctor-assisted artificial insemination to try to get pregnant. Suzanne is one of these women. She's single, in her mid-40s, and has been trying for two years to get pregnant using a variety of methods. Team Long Haul follows Suzanne through her last in vitro fertilization attempt – her last chanc…

PART 1 of 4. Whether they are forced to, or whether they plan to, each year more and more seniors move into retirement homes. In 2000, Peg Collison was one of them. Peg left the town of San Mateo, California, where she'd been living for almost 35 years, and moved two hours away into a newly built retirement community in Davis, California. Peg's son…

PART 2 of 4.Whether they are forced to, or whether they plan to, each year more and more seniors move into retirement homes. In 2000, Peg Collison was one of them. Peg left the town of San Mateo, California, where she'd been living for almost 35 years, and moved two hours away into a newly built retirement community in Davis, California. Peg's son,…

PART 3 of 4.Whether they are forced to, or whether they plan to, each year more and more seniors move into retirement homes. In 2000, Peg Collison was one of them. Peg left the town of San Mateo, California, where she'd been living for almost 35 years, and moved two hours away into a newly built retirement community in Davis, California. Peg's son,…

PART 4 of 4.Whether they are forced to, or whether they plan to, each year more and more seniors move into retirement homes. In 2000, Peg Collison was one of them. Peg left the town of San Mateo, California, where she'd been living for almost 35 years, and moved two hours away into a newly built retirement community in Davis, California. Peg's son,…

Most autism experts generally agree that early intervention beginning immediately after diagnosis can help a child conquer some of the most debilitating aspects of the disorder. Yet, society's approach when it comes to helping these children is slipshod. Some parents are lucky enough to live in areas where their public school districts have top-not…

After waiting for Mr. Right – and after years of fertility treatments – Suzanne, a single woman in her forties, decided to adopt. She chose transracial adoption. We follow her through workshops designed to "teach white people to raise kids of color," baby-shopping trips with Mom at Target, a critical rendezvous with a young mother at a pancake hous…

At one time, it was believed there were as many as five billion passenger pigeons in eastern North America. By the mid nineteenth century, their numbers began to decline sharply – killed by sportsman, commercial hunters and by farmers angry as the birds began raiding farm fields as forests disappeared to logging. Jon Wuepper, a naturalist and histo…

Eastern Montana is a land of extremes. The mercury can swing from 50 degrees below zero in the winter to over 100 in the summer. A recent drought has made life even harder on people relying on water for their livelihood – and on people like Roger Muggli, who runs the Tongue and Yellowstone Irrigation District near Miles City, Montana. Muggli's job,…

The coqui is the national symbol of Puerto Rico: a tiny, but vociferous tree frog that's a beloved part of the Puerto Rican soundscape, lulling residents to sleep every night with the male's lusty “croak.” But it’s a different story on the Big Island of Hawaii. Coquis showed up on the island as stowaways a few years back, and because the frog has n…

Every year wild boar cause an estimated 1.8 billion dollars in damage to farms, lawns, and natural areas, primarily in the southern United States. Experts contend the roaming swine also carry a number of diseases that could infect commercial herds and seriously threaten pork producers.In recent years, rogue populations have sprung up in Michigan, w…

About twenty years ago, some locals got together with The Nature Conservancy to buy about 300 acres that was slated to become a subdivision near the town of Dixon, Illinois. Since then, Nachusa Grasslands has grown to some 3,500 acres, much of it former cornfields that have been restored with native plants and birds. Most of the restoration work is…

Every spring since 1989, bird lovers in Berrien County, Michigan (directly across the lake from Chicago), have taken part in a grueling competition to see which team can track down the largest number of species within a nineteen-hour time span. Teams kick off at midnight and go all out until 7 p.m.; they need only stay within the county limits. And…

Twenty years ago, academics Frank and Deborah Popper wrote what they thought would be a little-noticed, four page article subtitled "A Daring Proposal for Dealing with an Inevitable Disaster," which argued that current agricultural use of much of the Great Plains is simply not sustainable. They advocated for a "Buffalo Commons," a return of large t…

This is the story of a good fish gone bad … an immigrant brought here with good intentions … a tasty fillet with a bad rap. A victim of stereotypes. Of fish profiling. A fish that can fly! And, a fish that could – if we let it – just rock our culinary world! Long Haul tells the story of the Asian Carp invasion in this 2010 story.…

On March 11, 1998, 47-year-old Jerry Lee Hogue was put to death for the 1979 arson-murder of an Arlington, Texas, woman. Unlike the lethal injection earlier that year of Karla Faye Tucker (the first woman put to death in Texas in 130 years), which drew hundreds of national and international reporters and demonstrators, Hogue's execution -- like mos…

Team Long Haul follows the sentencing of a boy in Lansing, Michigan, who was 13 years old at the time of a murder in which he took part and for which he was convicted. The judge in the case had the option of sentencing Charles Lewis Jr. to life in prison without the possibility of parole. After the sentencing, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that life…

For the past several years, detainees at Chicago's Cook County Jail have been reading to their kids. These parents in prison meet in one of the jail's small libraries, pick out a children's book and record it onto a cassette tape. The tape and the book are then mailed to the child. For some, it's the only way to connect with their kids through pris…

The story of the worst homefront disaster of World War II -- an ammunition explosion that killed more than 300 men -- and what happened to the 50 African-American men who refused to go back to work loading ammunition after the explosion. On July 17, 1944, two Liberty ships anchored at the Port Chicago Munitions Case near San Francisco exploded, kil…

Texas has the largest prison system in America, with more than 150,000 prisoners behind bars. The headquarters of the state's Department of Criminal Justice is in Huntsville, a small, conservative town that's home to nine state prisons. In the center of Huntsville is the Walls Unit. The oldest prison in Texas, it has gained notoriety in recent year…

North Dakota's population is shrinking dramatically – so much so that many counties there now meet the U.S. Census' definition of frontier land, much as they did before homesteading began in earnest in the late 1800's. Kids are leaving; the rest are aging, dying. But in the Southwest part of the state, one man is fighting to save his hometown by bu…

Branson is home base for aging country and pop stars such as Mickey Gilley, Roy Clark, Wayne Newton, Tony Orlando, and Charlie Pride. With a population of 5,000, Branson boasts over 50,000 theater seats (more than on Broadway), four times more motel rooms than residents, and scores of restaurants. The "Branson Boom," as it is called, happened virtu…

Usually, the opening of a grocery store in a small North Dakota town wouldn’t get our attention. But in 2007, in New England, ND -- which had been without a grocery store for a year-and-a-half -- it was cause for major celebration. Long Haul has the story of the fall and rise of the ‘New England Community Grocery Store.’…

The River Valley High Mustangs, in the southwest Michigan town of Three Oaks, lost eighteen football games in a row from 2003-2005. But it's not just the number of consecutive games the Mustangs lost, it's how soundly they were beaten. During this stretch, River Valley was outscored by its opponents by a total of 949 to 38, or an average of 53 to t…

The presidential election of 2008 was particularly acrimonious in rural America. At Long Haul, we saw it first-hand in our own neighborhood when a neighbor, who'd had his sign stolen one too many times, encased his Obama for President sign in barbed wire. Thus, this story, produced in 2008.Oleh Long Haul Productions

Throughout America, a growing number of communities have selected their own poet laureate. Among the smallest is Three Oaks, Michigan – population 1,800 – located just across the lake from Chicago. Like countless other rural towns, Three Oaks' economy was decimated by farm consolidation and factory shutdowns, but an influx of artists and creative f…

"David Lynch goes into clean neighborhoods and finds the germs and bugs beneath; I go into dirty neighborhoods and find the life." That's how filmmaker Tony Buba describes his twelve documentaries about his hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Buba is the son of Italian immigrants, part of the wave of Europeans who came to America in the late ninete…

On January 4, 1988, 63-year-old Emma Gresham became the first black mayor -- the first mayor in a half century -- of Keysville, Georgia, winning the election over her white opponent by ten votes. In the town courthouse, a trailer mounted on cinderblocks, a banner reads "Justice Knows No Boundaries," a constant reminder of both the town's troubled h…

For more than 25 years, Frank Pease was the primary portrait photographer in LaPorte, Indiana - a town of about 20,000 just south of Lake Michigan. Starting in the mid-1940's, Pease took tens of thousands of black and white photos at his Muralcraft Studio: engagement photos, baby pictures, family portraits of the people of LaPorte. Pease kept thous…

The Roxy, a private nightclub on the main drag in Lockport, Illinois, may be the only one of its kind in the nation. The club's sole clientele are people with serious mental illness. There, customers can socialize, dance, or just hang out without feeling self-conscious. Occasionally the Roxy holds special events; Long Haul spent an evening at the b…