Claim OwnershipPaint the Sun: A Boy's Journey
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© Chris Kursel 2025
Description
When Chris was born, the youngest of seven sons, his father (Joel) was 64 years old. Joel was the child of immigrants and grew up poor in a cement factory town in western Pennsylvania. He was a bomber pilot in World War II. Then an ad man who went by another name. Then, when Chris was 16, Joel died of brain cancer.
Paint the Sun: A Boy's Journey tells the story of Chris's quest to discover who his father really was, reconstruct his life and reflect on his long lingering grief.
A blend of narrative nonfiction and memoir, each episode weaves together the past and present in a dance of voice-driven storytelling, music and sounds.
13 Episodes
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Twenty years after his father's death, Chris, a film editor in New York, reflects on the weight of his grief and how it has evolved since he was a teenager. Through fragmented recollections—his 17th birthday, a voice on an answering machine, and the quiet ache of his mother’s annual text—he explores how loss lingers, shaping both the present and the past. He soon realizes that in order to face his trauma once and for all, he must go deeper than ever before.
As the world teeters on the edge of lockdown in early 2020, Chris takes a deep dive into the digital traces of his father’s life — and his father's name, which mysteriously changed soon after he returned home from WWII. What starts as a routine online search leads to a trove of newspaper archives, ship manifests and historical documents that reveal a fractured picture of Joel's life. In piecing these together, Chris begins to understand the origins of his family, and the many questions that still yearn to be answered.
In this episode, we unravel a deeply personal and unsettling moment--one that begins with a plate of uneaten carrots. In late 1998, Joel's health takes a sudden turn. As a teenager, Chris struggles to make sense of his father’s apparent decline. Was it stress? A lingering ulcer? Or something far worse? Through medical records, faxes, frantic notes and fading memories, Chris follows the slow unraveling of a man who tried to outrun time.
As 2020 New York City reels from the crisis outside—empty parks, ambulance sirens, and protests shaking the streets—inside, a different kind of reckoning unfolds. Chris continues the excavation of his father’s life, guided by the scrapbooks Joel meticulously compiled over decades. Through late-night text exchanges with his mother, memories resurface, artifacts emerge, and a portrait of a man both intimately known and deeply mysterious becomes even more clear.
Drawing on the haunting nature of an old wedding photo, Chris excavates the lives of his immigrant grandparents, Joe and Linda. From their early days in Pennsylvania’s steel and limestone towns to their lasting impact on his father, he discovers a world of struggle, love and resilience in early 20th century America. And through birth certificates, old addresses and family lore, he wrestles with the question: how do we truly know where we come from?
At a pivotal Thanksgiving gathering, Joel's health reaches a critical point. Chris reflects on his complex relationship with his much older half-brothers, the drama of their shared language of basketball, and the unspoken tensions stemming from their family’s unusual history. Within this warm but foreboding family reunion, he grapples with the tension between his past and evolving sense of self.
In this episode, we step into the world of the Kursel family of Bessemer, Pennsylvania circa 1930. We see life through the eyes of Joe and Linda’s growing family as they navigate the grit of industrial America, from the booming cement industry to the stark realities of poverty. Despite scarcity, there was joy—games played under streetlights, homemade baseballs and Independence Day fireworks. And as Joel grows from boyhood into young adulthood, his glory on the basketball court ignites dreams of greatness beyond his small cement town.
Christmas 1999. Chris, now 17, faces the traumatic reality of his father's cancer diagnosis. After Joel undergoes brain surgery, weekly visits to the hospital test Chris's mental and emotional stamina. In between, there are fleeting moments of normalcy with new friends and the energy of high school life. But the hospital looms with its sterile smells, its quiet heartbreak, and a father who emerges from surgery irrevocably changed. Even in Chris's dreams, death lingers—not as absence, but as an unsettling, altered return.
In this episode, we follow Joel’s journey from the familiar streets of Bessemer, PA to the academic halls of Allegheny College in the late 1930's. As he grapples with homesickness and financial hardship, Joel finds himself at a crossroads—torn between the world he knew and the one he yearns for. Along the way, he experiences first love with the beautiful and enigmatic beauty queen Mary Jane Beeler, a campus wide celebrity. But as graduation nears, the looming specter of war threatens to upend everything.
Chris recalls a trip to the movies with his father that unlocked a deeper understanding of Joel's past as a WWII bomber pilot. While never hidden, Joel's stories of war existed fragments, woven into their home’s quiet displays of history. But when Chris uncovers a startling detail about his father's enlistment, he is forced to reconcile the legend he grew up with and the real man behind it.
In this episode, Chris looks back on being sixteen in the late ’90s as the reality of Joel’s illness unfolds. Music, friendships, teenage routines, and small acts of rebellion play out alongside hospital visits, radiation treatments and the disorienting collapse of his father’s life. As memory, grief and nostalgia blur together, he tries to make sense of a season defined by all that went unsaid.
This episode traces the making of Bill into a wartime pilot (and a wartime husband) from bases in rural America to the skies over Europe. Following the trail of artifacts his father left behind, Chris explores how war accelerates lives, compresses intimacy and reshapes identity. He reflects on inheritance—of faces, habits, silences and memories—and on the strange distance between the man he knew his father to be, and the man he must have been in combat.
This episode is anchored in Chris's increasingly frequent feelings of his father's presence during the eerie quiet of the COVID pandemic. It also introduces a series of consequential questions about Joel's war experience that take center stage in Chris's search for the truth about his dad's life and character.
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