For more on Georgia Radio Reading Service, go to www.garrs.net.
Ken Traina jokes that he has a face for radio. He certainly has the voice. And the heart. In fact, it was his heart, or congestive heart failure more precisely, that turned the Tucker resident from the life of an addict to the life of a volunteer. One of Traina’s passions is reading a newspaper, magazine or book to people who can’t. At least once a week, he volunteers with Georgia Radio Reading Service, a 35-year-old nonprofit radio station that produces shows for people who are blind or sick or have been injured in war and can’t hold a book. The AJC caught up with Traina at 5 a.m. on a recent Tuesday at the Midtown radio station where he was just settling in to record the most recent issue of Popular Mechanics.
Q: So you were an addict?
A: I had spent two and a half decades as an alcoholic and drug addict. I got extremely sick and ended up in the hospital. It hurt so bad for wind to go into and out of my lungs. I was very lucky to survive. I still have dreams from time to time where I get high. I wake up and am relieved that it was only a dream.
Q: How do you decide what to read to your audience?
A: There is a slate of programming that volunteers read. There are publications that get read every day, like the AJC, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today. We also read things like the National Enquirer, Time, National Geographic, even the Kroger circular if it is the newspaper.
Q: Were you a big reader before you started doing this?
A: Books and certain magazines, yeah. Circulars, not so much.
Q: How do you make circulars interesting?
A: That is a very good question. When I read Popular Science or Popular Mechanics, I know there is a lot of innovation and new technology, some of it very relevant to the blind, like cars that drive themselves. I try to keep a “Holy Cow” feel to it. There are also stories, like in The Christian Science Monitor, that deal with some very tragic things. The volunteers try to give those stories the full weight of seriousness that they deserve. There are little ways to personalize the readings to make things interesting but you don’t do those kinds of things when you read the obituaries.
Q: You have different game faces?
A: When I read the newspaper, I am as straight-laced as they come. I channel my Brian Williams and off I go. When I read Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat and Other Stories,” I sound a little like Archie Bunker. Crane wrote phonetically and one of the stories deals with people living in the Bowery in New York City. We don’t usually try to do voices but we do need to try to convey what the author is trying to convey.
Q: Do you ever censor material for content?
A: No, no, no. The rule is, if it is on the page, you read it. Every time you finish a recording, you turn in a notation of the kind of warning that may need to be on it, like listening discretion strongly advised.
Q: What do you get out of doing this?
A: It is my belief that the reason we are on here on this planet is to help each other. When someone allows me to help, they are allowing me to fulfill my human destiny. And that is a pretty great gift — to me.
About the Author
