Matt Skryja never thought he'd hear his grandfather's voice again.
But thanks to digital preservations who were able to piece together shattered records, he was not only able to listen to how young his Grandpa's voice sounded like in 1944. He also got to hear stories from when his grandfather was a lieutenant during WWII.
Skryja, who used to be a former television reporter in Fresno, has always loved history. And he was especially interested in the history of his grandfather - Ray Skryja - who died when Matt Skryja, was just 8 years old.
So when he found two 70-year-old 78 rpm records - cracked and broken into pieces - that contained an old interview with his grandfather with an Omaha, Nebraska radio station about the war, he was both elated and frustrated."There is a radial crack through both of them," Skryja said, staring at the light shining through one of the cracks. "They are both unplayable."
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Or, at least, that's what he first thought.
But, the San Francisco resident who now works for AAA of Northern California, did some research and discovered there might be a way to fix the broken pieces of plastic, discovered by accident in his grandmother's house as the family was preparing for a move.
He had already immersed himself in historical research about the war, interviewing his grandfather's colleagues about the battles in the European Theater. But since his grandfather was dead, he was missing one crucial element.
"The voice of my grandfather," Skryja said. "I never had it for those stories that I told."
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So, in August, he shipped the records to the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Massachusetts, where preservation specialists use technology from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to repair damaged records and discs.
The technology is called IRENE, and it creates a digital map of the surface of old audio recordings. That map then translates the image into the sound a hypothetical needle would have created had one been able to travel across the record. Over the past decade, IRENE has been used to recover audio from some of the oldest sound recordings in the world. That includes bringing to life other WWII interviews from New York radio stations, which had been preserved on discs stored at the New York City Municipal Archives. One of the repaired discs - which had broken into five pieces - came from radio broadcast on Christmas Eve 1943, dedicated to the U.S. soldiers at war around the world — an NBC production that was likely broadcast on WNYC as well.
Knowing all this, Skryja was overcome with nervous excitement as he waited for his grandfather's broken records to hopefully play again.
When the LPs were returned weeks later, he invited his father to come over to listen.
"I think I'm going to have to hold my breath," Skryja said just before he heard his grandfather's voice for the first time. "It's going to be emotional."
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And then he heard the crackling speech of a young man - Lt. Ray Skryja who had just returned from serving in the European Theater of World War II - as he was interviewed by his hometown radio station. He spoke of being a bombardier and navigator aboard a B-24 "Liberator," who had completed 50 bombing missions over southern Europe before returning home. There were pops and static, and Ray Skryja was careful not to divulge too much sensitive material to the radio interviewer.
But all that didn't really matter, because to him, the sound of his grandfather's voice was crystal clear. A voice he can now listen to over and over again.
"This is precious," Skryja said. "It's finally nice to be able to hear it, and pass it on."
