One thing you learn from doing local journalism for any amount of time is that everyone — regardless of who they are and where they come from — truly does have a story to tell that is worth hearing.

Two Riverside friends are taking that concept to heart, and going a step further, as they’ve launched a video podcast series called “Good Morning Riverside”, which strips away all the noise from modern content creation and gets right down to the soul of it — putting a microphone in front of real, local people, and letting them talk.

“There are so many people who had these crazy lives and have all these wonderful stories, and they don’t really have anyone to tell them to anymore,” said Tony Ottone, Jr., who co-hosts the show with his friend and fellow Riverside resident, Bill Hurley. “You can see the joy in people when they’re telling it. Just to have someone listening to it. That’s all they want.”

Ottone and Hurley had previously kicked around a concept of doing some kind of show together before Covid put the plans on hold. Still, during the doldrum days of the pandemic when everyone was relegated indoors, they earned a small fandom on Facebook with their back-and-forth quips and comedic posts.

Then, in May of 2024, Hurley opened McShortagee’s Market — a new deli, marketplace and hot wieners spot where the beloved Schroder’s Deli had been located for decades, on Willett Avenue in Riverside. Hurley said that within the first few days and weeks he experienced a large volume of former Schroder’s customers coming in to see what had taken its place.

“When I opened it up, seniors would come in and ask, ‘Are you going to have the ham salad and the ambrosia?’” he laughed. “So many people came in to tell me their stories about Schroder’s, or they’d tell me they used to work at Crescent Park in the summers. The stories just started rolling in.”

Eventually, Hurley decided it would be compelling to share the kinds of stories he was hearing with a wider, local audience, and he started the podcast — hosted right within a booth at the deli.

So far the pair have had on a series of interesting guests, such as U.S. Army veteran, Thomas J. Dailey. Dailey grew up during the Great Depression, was orphaned as a young child, and lived in a Buick when he was a teenager. He would go on to fight in the significant Battle of Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War.

They’ve spoken to former Oldham Elementary School principal and Friends of Pomham Rocks founder, David Kelleher, as well as August Wesley, a Barrington resident and wrestler at the Olympic level. Local businesses, like Stevie D’s Tavern, get a chance to come on and promote their spots, and local musicians also get a share of the spotlight.

“Some other things that we'd like to do is more of a roundtable type discussion, where we could bring in teachers from different generations or police officers and firefighters from different eras,” Hurley said. “The best part is just opening the floor up to them.”

A recording (and collection) of local history
While Hurley and Ottone are acting as archivists of sorts when it comes to the spoken word, they’ve also turned McShortagees into a bit of an East Providence museum with the sheer amount of stuff they’ve accumulated; all donated by local Townies.

All throughout the shop, you can find treasured local artifacts. Jerseys from high school championship teams of decades’ past; ticket stubs from Crescent Park carnival rides (along with what might be the only remaining original set of “knock em’ down” pins from a carnival game that was destroyed following the park’s closure); photos and land deeds of Townies throughout the centuries; and just about everything in between you can imagine.

“It started with one case from the Gilbert Stuart movie theater from 1921,” Hurley said. “And it just snowballed to people saying like, hey, I got my championship football jacket from 1973. So now I have five state championship jackets.”

“People in Rhode Island have a hard time letting go,” added Ottone. “But if they bring in something where it’s not in a drawer, and can be appreciated, it’s the same thing as the stories. They bring in the stories so they can be passed on.”

Ottone and Hurley have also amassed a vast collection of East Providence High School yearbooks, going all the way back to over 100 years ago. They get a kick out of seeing people flip through them, finding old classmates or even a son looking up his mother and discovering (apparently for the first time) what a maiden name is.

“There were two women probably in their late 60s, early 70s sitting here. They had finished eating and they're looking through the yearbooks,” Ottone said. “One of them is like, "Oh, I found Oz." And they literally went from like 65, 70 years old to 16. ‘Remember Jimmy? He was so cute. Oh my god. And then I dated so and so.’ It was so cool to see them just get totally transferred back into high school mode.”

You can check out “Good Morning Riverside” here, with all episodes available for listening. They said they eventually want to improve the recording quality and expand to other streaming services.

For now, they are happy being proven right over and over again about the aforementioned mantra.

“Everybody has a story,” said Hurley.