Northern Ohio history, remembered out loud.
Real Stories Podcast turns Wyandotte County history and hometown lives into conversational narrative. Graham and Brian move from Colonel William Crawford and Caty Sage to local athletes, civic figures, archives, folklore, and the people who keep small-place memory alive.
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Real Stories Podcast treats local history as something close enough to touch. Graham and Brian work from Northern Ohio outward, using Upper Sandusky, Wyandotte County, old trails, churches, cemeteries, newspapers, and family memory as their map. The show is conversational, but the curiosity is serious. Episodes often begin with a question, a local legend, or a name that deserves more attention. Colonel William Crawford’s story becomes a way to talk about frontier Pennsylvania, Ohio, Washington, the Sandusky campaign, and a violent death in 1782. Caty Sage’s story is handled as both a kidnapping account and a complicated life story, one that resists a neat return-home ending. The show cares about that complication. It also cares about where stories are kept. In episodes about archives and historical connections, the conversation turns to primary accounts, missionary writings, journals, folklore projects, museums, heritage rooms, and the local historians who followed one clue to the next. That archival attention gives the loose talk a firm base. Real Stories Podcast is not only about the distant past, though. It also records community biography while the subjects are still able to tell it. Brett Montgomery’s episode follows youth golf, high school basketball, tournament success, COVID-era disruption, and the practical question of how a young athlete chases a dream. Scott Washburn’s episode uses a former mayor of Upper Sandusky as a lens on school years, college, politics, marriage, parenthood, friendship, humor, and small-town public life. Ethan Collins brings the show into the admissions process and first shock of West Point. The result is part historical narrative, part oral-history project, and part hometown conversation. It has tangents, corrections, laughs, and the occasional rough edge of two people remembering out loud. That looseness is part of the appeal. The show is best when it finds a buried local story and follows it until the larger history starts to show through.
Made for: For listeners drawn to local history, oral history, frontier narratives, and community biography. It especially suits people who like informal conversations anchored in real places, archives, and lived memory.
What sets it apart: Real Stories Podcast stays unusually local without feeling narrow, connecting Wyandotte County names and landmarks to frontier history, civic life, athletics, and family memory. Its strength is the mix of casual rapport and source-conscious curiosity.
Real People, Real Stories, Real History. Brian and Graham dive into some of their favorite historical tales and interview some people with their own Real Stories from the Heart of it All.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Real Stories Podcast connects Upper Sandusky's documented past with detailed life stories from the people who carried its local memory.
Graham and Brian turn the history around Upper Sandusky into a conversation between local records and remembered lives. Their subjects range from the 1842 treaty with the Wyandots and Colonel William Crawford to a longtime doctor's career, a family drugstore, and Sue Baker's…
A drugstore date ends with pizza on the counter; you get the floor-mopping details.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A frontier death tale that treats geography as part of the story.
Real Stories Podcast follows Colonel William Crawford from his retirement and life with his wife Hannah into the grim end of his story, opening with the claim that he was burned at the stake in 1782 just outside Upper Sandusky, Ohio.
A kidnapped child becomes a woman who chooses the life she made over the home she lost.
Real Stories Podcast follows Katie Sage from her childhood kidnapping in 1792 Virginia to the Wyandot community where she made a life so rooted that returning home no longer felt like the obvious ending.
A modest opening that uses local memory to frame history without much polish.
Graham and Brian begin with a plainspoken introduction to themselves and their region, then settle into a simple idea: stories collected over a lifetime can still carry useful lessons.
A small-town farewell built from work, memory, and a drugstore with a long history.
Real Stories Podcast follows Brenda Kaler, born Brenda Vonstein, through the life that grew around Kaler Drug in downtown Winford. The episode moves from Nevada farm work to the drugstore, then into seven-day weeks, holidays and Sundays, late-night mopping of the red and black…
A treaty-and-territory history of the Wyandots around Upper Sandusky.
This episode follows the Wyandots in Upper Sandusky from around 1630 to 1843, and it keeps that history tied to migration from around Toronto to Michigan and down the Sandusky Valley.
A doctor's life story that moves through comedy, road travel, and decades of medical change.
Real Stories turns to a doctor from Upper Sandusky who practiced for more than 50 years, and that span gives the episode its pull. His working life opens onto medicine, comedy, family history, and road-trip memory, while the show moves through his years in medicine and his life…
A family story about food science, hard work, and Hot Pockets.
Real Stories centers Sue Baker and the family background that shaped her, from a mother who returned to school to a father on swing shift, with a home life marked by oatmeal and written instructions.
Antique travel, court wit, and historical narration.
Phoebe Judge narrates true crime history and interviews the authors who uncovered it.
Dramatized deep dives into American history, from the Galveston hurricane to Harper Lee's Mockingbird.
Dana Schwartz narrates the violent lives of monarchs, warlords, and queens.
Brenda Kaler traces Kaler Drug back to Ray Kaler's 1936 start as Bergen Kaler, with paint, books, and a soda fountain all part of the business.
Real Stories Podcast's "The Treaty with the Wyandots, 1842" traces the Wyandotte people from the 1615 French encounter with Champlain and the 1639 pox outbreak to the 1842 removal from Wyandotte County.
Real Stories with Graham and Brian follows Dr.
Real Stories Podcast's "Sue the Baker" follows Sue Baker, Graham, and Brian from upper Sandusky to Ohio State, with Sue saying the episode turned into "way more about" careers than expected.
In this first installment on Colonel William Crawford, Real Stories Podcast hosts Graham and Brian trace Crawford's life from his 1722 birth in Westmoreland County, Virginia, through his decades-long friendship and military service alongside George Washington, to his 1781 retirement at age 58 or 59.
Hosts Graham and Brian of Real Stories Podcast tell the story of Katie Sage, kidnapped at age five in 1792 from her family's frontier cabin on Elk Creek, Virginia, by a horse thief who sold her to a group of Cherokee.
Hosts Graham and Brian introduce their podcast focused on real stories from Northern Ohio, discussing local history including Wyandotte Indian heritage, historical figures like Colonel Crawford, and quirky aspects of small-town life like drive-thrus.