201. The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir with Griffin Dunne
Release Date: 01/15/2025
216. Brewing Community: Labor, Alcohol, and Unrest in Industrial New Britain
Grating the Nutmeg
Immigrants from Lithuania who made their way to New Britain, Connecticut at the beginning of the twentieth century found work in the city’s factories turning out tools and hardware. Their weekly routine included work, church and socializing at neighborhood saloons. But major upheavals in American society were happening at the time that affected their lives including the rise of organized labor, the temperance movement, anti-immigrant sentiment, and labor strikes. In this episode, we have two new voices in public history, Central Connecticut State University students Jon Kozak and...
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215. Connecticut’s Wild Visionary: Children’s Author Maurice Sendak
Grating the Nutmeg
Artist and author Maurice Sendak was able to achieve significant and enduring success in art and children’s literature during his lifetime. But what secrets did he had to keep from his family, publishers, parents, librarians, and readers as a gay, Jewish man negotiating the field of children’s literature? Sendak wrote and illustrated books that nurtured children and adults alike. Winner of the 1964 Caldecott Medal for Where the Wild Things Are, in 1970 Sendak became the first American illustrator to receive the international Hans Christian Anderson Award, given in...
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214. Monstrous: The Business of Whaling
Grating the Nutmeg
Whaling was big business. Connecticut and her sister New England states built ships, forged cast iron tools, produced wooden storage casks and outfitted sailors. Stonington, Mystic, New London, and New Haven were part of New England’s predominance in successful whaling. We’re going to get into the nitty gritty of the trade in this episode and hear about some of the striking artifacts from Mystic Seaport’s whaling collection - tools, ship logs, harpoons, blubber hooks and scrimshaw - that are on view. They speak to the staggering risks and rewards of the whaling industry that lit...
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213. When the Continental Army Camped in Connecticut
Grating the Nutmeg
The Redding Encampment, Connecticut’s first State Archaeological Preserve, is located in Putnam Memorial State Park. Understanding of the Revolutionary War has emphasized the battles, maneuvers, and war meetings; but far more time was expended during the long periods of winter encampment. The winter months were a brutal test of individual fortitude, unifying command, and local support. In the journal Joseph Plumb Martin kept at the time, he wrote, “We arrived at Redding about Christmas or a little before and prepared to build huts for our winter quarters. And now came on the time...
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212. Ingredients for Revolution: Feminist Restaurants featuring Bloodroot Restaurant
Grating the Nutmeg
and our podcast, , have featured many of the heritage trails that mark the important histories and sites of Connecticut’s people. has undertaken a survey of LGBTQ+ heritage sites across the state. Now, Grating the Nutmeg and Preservation Connecticut have teamed up to bring you a three-episode podcast series that pairs new research on LGBTQ+ identity and activism with accounts of the Connecticut places where history was made. The episodes include a thriving vegetarian cafe-bookstore run by lesbian feminists in a working-class former factory town, a transgender medical researcher...
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211. Leviathan: New Englanders and the History of Whaling
Grating the Nutmeg
American whale oil lit the world. The Industrial Revolution couldn’t have happened without it. Connecticut was part of the whaling industry of the nineteenth century that sent thousands of American ships manned by tens of thousands of men to hunt whales across the world’s oceans. Stonington, Mystic, New London, and New Haven were part of New England’s predominance in successful whaling. In fact, New London, Connecticut is known today as the “Whaling City”. My guest Eric Jay Dolan is the author of sixteen award-winning books on maritime history. In...
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210. The Mattatuck Museum: Waterbury and Summer Leisure
Grating the Nutmeg
In this episode, host Mary Donohue visits the in Waterbury, a place that includes stellar architecture, art by some of the most renowned artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and an exhibition that tells the story of Waterbury’s rise as a manufacturing powerhouse. The Mattatuck Museum is an art and regional history museum on the Green in downtown Waterbury, that started out as a historical society in 1877. Our guest is Rebecca Lo Presti, Assistant Curator. She served as the curator for “ The Art of Leisure” an exhibit that is up now until June 15, 2025. From...
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209. Mary Hall and the Good Will Club
Grating the Nutmeg
In this episode, Natalie Belanger of the CT Museum of Culture and History tells the story of the Good Will Club, the forerunner of the youth club movement that got its start in Hartford. But the story of the club can't be separated from that of its founder, a woman who's an inductee of the CT Women's Hall of Fame for her barrier-breaking work in the legal field. There are lots of ways to learn more about the history of the Good Will Club and about Mary Hall. Here’s a partial list of sources consulted for this episode: Elizabeth Warren, CT Explored, Spring...
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208. Saving Connecticut’s Mid-Century Modern Homes
Grating the Nutmeg
We’re celebrating May, Historic Preservation Month, with an episode on the Modern houses of the 1950s and 1960s. Could you live in a glass house? New Canaan, Connecticut’s Mid-Century Modern homes designed after the Second War are world famous. In addition to Philip Johnson’s Glass House, now a museum, New Canaan has homes designed by Marcel Breuer, Eliot Noyes, Frank Lloyd Wright and Edward Durell Stone. Each one is a part of architectural history and is a masterwork of the era’s most talented architects. But by the 1990s, people began to demolish these relatively...
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207. Book and Dagger: Yale Professors Become Successful WWII Spies
Grating the Nutmeg
In her new book, Book and Dagger, How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of the World, Dr. Elyse Graham tells the story of academics, like Yale literature professor Joseph Curtis, who hunted down German spies and turned them into double agents, and Sherman Kent, a Yale history professor who rose to become the head of analysis for all of Europe and Africa. At the start of World War II, the United States found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today’s CIA, was quickly formed—and in an...
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In this episode, Host Mary Donohue talks to Griffin Dunne, actor, producer and director and now New York Times best-selling author about his family memoir The Friday Afternoon Club. His Hartford to Hollywood family includes generations of writers, movie producers, journalists, and actors including his father Dominick Dunne, uncle John Gregory Dunne, and aunt Joan Didion.
This prominent family dynasty has part of its roots in Irish-American Connecticut, coming from Ireland to Derby and Hartford. Irish Catholics, unwelcome in Protestant Connecticut from the jump in the 1820s, nevertheless made Connecticut home. In this episode, Dunne shares stories about family figures such as Hartford’s Dominick Burns, a self-made man who immigrated from Ireland at age 11 and became a business owner and bank president. And Dr. Edwin Dunne, a Harvard-trained surgeon, who was the grandson of an Irish immigrant and the son of a machinist at the Farrell Foundry and Machine Company in Ansonia. And we don’t forget the Hollywood part of the story either with Dunne’s vivid memories of his father’s life as a movie producer and crime journalist!
Our thanks again to Griffin Dunne for joining us for this episode. His book is available at your favorite bookstore or on Amazon.
The new Hartford Public Library Park Street at the Lyric Branch is located at 603 Park Street. The building that housed the Park Street Trust Company where Dominick Burns served as co-founder and president is located at 617 Park Street, on the southwest corner of Park and Broad Streets.
The grave monument company that is mentioned is Beij, Williams and Zito-still in business. John Zito, Jr. was a sculptor as well as a partner in the cemetery monument company.
Their website is here:
https://fineartstone.com/companyhistory/
If you want to learn more about Connecticut’s Irish-American history and landmarks, go to the website of the Connecticut Irish-American Historical Society here:
http://www.ctirishhistory.org/website/publish/about/index.php?About-Us-2
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