GLYNN WASHINGTON, HOST:
Welcome back to SNAP JUDGMENT, the Look Back Special. Now, there are just too many stories out there for us to squeeze them all into a single-hour episode. But we asked some of our producers what were their favorite moments of the past year. And this is what they said.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: So when I was a kid, I always wanted a pet monkey. Enter this story, where this guy actually ordered a monkey off the - well, not the Internet then, uh, back of a magazine. They get the monkey in the mail - comes in a little box. Boom. So they bust him out of the box. And a monkey had been in the mail for however long, not given the proper care, and it really had to go to the bathroom.
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TIM TATE: (Laughter) So sadly, now he's freaked out because a knife's been plunging at him. He's been shipped in a shoebox. So now as he screeches at the top of his lungs, bites us with needlelike teeth and runs in the living room, there's an arc of urine in front of him and a huge trail of defecation wherever he went around that living room. So now the women, hearing that there's something screeching outside, think, oh, my god, what happened? Run up the steps with their arms up going, oh, my god. What's going on? Oh, my god. In those years, women had huge beehives that were sprayed and sticky and horrible. And Pepe decides at this moment in time that the best defense is a very strong offense. And leaps on one of the women...
JULIA DEWITT, BYLINE: Florence Foster Jenkins was a famous opera singer in New York in the 1930s and '40s. She drew huge crowds. She even sold out Symphony Hall, but it was not because she was great. It was actually because - totally unbeknownst to her - she was terrible.
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FOSTER JENKINS: (Singing).
STEPHEN TEMPERLEY: Her voice, if you listened to it, it's a series of hoots and shrieks, and she'll see a high note and pretty much go (screams) (coughs)excuse me, I have to drink some water.
JENKINS: (Singing).
TEMPERLEY: She seemed to have a kind of boundless self-confidence. And I think there were a few times when it almost penetrated but she managed to tap that down.
JENKINS: (Singing).
NANCY LOPEZ, BYLINE: So this is a story about a guy named Joe. And he's a truck driver in Texas. He learns his son, Cole, has this life-threatening disease and needs a very costly operation. Joe tries to do all kinds of things to raise the money and finally decides that he's going to move meth in order to save his son's life. And then Joe, of course, gets busted.
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COMPUTER-GENERATED VOICE: This call is from a federal prison.
JOE JACKSON: I said, you know, when that boy right there was dying and we tried every way in the world asking all of you people for help, every federal agency there was, you wouldn't help us. And I don't figure you're going to help me now. And that's exactly what I told the judge in my statement at sentencing. I done knew what I was fixing to get and it was over. My only regret was that he couldn't give me a death sentence.
LOPEZ: As I'm asking him these questions, he asks me if I have any kids.
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JACKSON: Do you have kids Ms. Lopez?
LOPEZ: I don't. I don't.
JACKSON: You'll understand when you have them, believe me.
ANNA SUSSMAN, BYLINE: I chose a piece of tape from a journalist who was covering one of the wars in Liberia and who had hired a private security guard who was a mercenary. And this journalist and the mercenary got into a lot of situations where they had to choose between maybe doing the right thing and doing the thing that would save their life.
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JAMES BRABAZON: Working in conflict like that, it's like pig iron on your moral compass. It's very hard to steer true. Everything around you is violence and obscenity. What is it in you that keeps you pointing in the right direction? And that's where I was finding out how robust my compass was.
DAVEY KIM, BYLINE: So I talked to a Hungarian conductor Laszlo Marosi, and he told me about a song he loved as a kid. It's an infamous Hungarian breakup song called "Gloomy Sunday." Legend has it that those who listen to the song ended up taking their own lives, including the songwriter and the songwriter's ex-girlfriend. And here's what he told me at the end of the interview.
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LASZLO MAROSI: If I would have the chance to die, I would do that - commit suicide with this song, put it on. And I just haven't decided which day - not yet.
KIM: So Laszlo wasn't being serious, but what he says there really embodies how much he's into the song and the dark story behind it.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: The clip I'm setting up for you guys is a clip from a story that was killed. And the story was actually about a Nobel prize-winning scientist who discovered the cosmic background radiation, which was the smoking gun for the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. The overall story didn't work out, but he had this amazing story about his father when they were a family living as Jews in Nazi Germany.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: My father won the daily double one time at the racetrack - 100 to 1, 80 to 1. The horse that he bet on, which no one else did, was a horse called Inge (ph) Mouse, because Inge was my mother's nickname. And the next day, the newspapers put it down saying, Jew wins daily double. And then the day after that, there was an edict saying Jews no longer allowed to go to racetracks. But the point was everybody in Germany knew his name because he was the Jew who managed to rig a race. What happened was when my father left to get out of Germany, you know, he had his exit permit in his hand. He was trembling as you go out there, you know, 'cause at that point people knew what was happening to them. People aren't getting out. And the guy at the train said, OK, stop. My father froze. He says, look, I'm going to let you go. I've got your passport right here. You can go in a minute. But I want you to answer a question for me. My father was sweating. And he said, how did you fix that face?
WASHINGTON: Big thanks to all the producers that made 2014 special - the sound designers, the storytellers, the snappers out there who supported our Kickstarter. We could not have done this without you. That piece was produced by Julia DeWitt. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.