On this show, we are by no means strangers. Too long forgotten tales
of men and women eating almost anything and everything they can lay their hands on.
We've had stories of the man who ate King Louis dried up old heart,
a craze of people eating live goldfish, and even the story of Nicholas
Wood, the man who in the sixteen hundreds once ate eighty four rabbits in
one sitting. But what all these have in common is that all of those
things could at least kind of be classified as actual food, although you do
need to kind of do some squinting to try to make the dried up heart
meet the criteria, but at one stage it would have been somewhat meat like.
For today's story, however, we will be diving into the life of
a truly extraordinary man named William V. McKenna, and while he fits the
category of people who eat random things, those things that he ate can't really
be classified as food. But let's go all the way back to the beginning
and see just how this man, William McKenna, first discover his talented digestive
system. These are the bizarre but true stories from history and in some way
involved food. I'm Nick Charlie Key, and this is the fantastic history of
food. Now. Very little is known about the birth and childhood of William
V. McKenna. As best as we can determine, he was born sometime
in the late eighteen sixties and grew up in the suburb of Long Island.
As was the custom of the day, young men were sent out to work
and earn a living for their families as soon as they were physically able.
Young William was no different, and as soon as he became a teenage he
was sent to work in the local Myer's glass making factory in Brooklyn. Every
day it was the same. He'd get up, go to work, perform
his duties, break for lunch, work some more, and then head home
to rest just enough to wake up the next day and do it all over
again. Now, it's fair to assume that factory work wasn't particularly lucrative in
the eighteen eighties, and being by this point a young fourteen year old boy
living in New York City, was sure that William spent a lot of his
time day dreaming about making it big and making a name for himself in the
city that Never sleeps. William was a particularly scrawny young man, all bones
and sharp edges, but he still had a healthy appetite and looked forward each
day to his lunch break, where he could kick back, dream his big
dreams, and stuff his face with whatever he had brought along with him that
day. But on one fateful day in the eighteen eighties, his life was
about to take a distinct turn. But I'll leave it to you to decide
if it was for the better or for the worse. He arrived at work
that morning, clocked in, and began working just like he always did.
The hours ticked by slowly, and he occasionally would glance up at the clock
in the factory to try and work out how much longer he had until he
could take his lunch break. Finally, the factory whistle blue, and men
and boys everywhere downed their tools, collected their lunch packets, and went to
find somewhere to sit quietly and eat in peace. William was starving, and
as soon as the whistle blew, he unwrapped his lunch and took a bite.
Suddenly he felt the call of nature, and so left his unwrapped lunch
on his workspace and trundled off to the bathroom to relieve himself. Once he
was finished, he returned, collected his food, and took an outside to
eat in the sunshine. He seated himself on a bench near some coworkers and
began tucking in to the remainder of his packed lunch. The first bite was
fine, as he daydreamed about something or other, but on the second bite,
he realized that something didn't feel quite right in his mouth. What had
originally been a fairly soft sandwich now felt rather crunchy. He took another bite,
trying to work out what could be happening, and realized that whatever it
was, he rather enjoyed this new texture. He lifted his sandwich up to
the sun, and there, covering his lunch was a coating of tiny glass
shods that had obviously settled on his unwrapped lunch while he was in the bathroom.
Oblivious to the dangers this posed, and rather enamored by this interesting new
turn of events, he heartily tucked into or was left of his sandwich,
while commenting to his co workers that he was eating a glass sandwich. They
were taken aback at this news and told him to prove it. He showed
them the sparkling flecks on his sandwich, but they were dubious. Someone at
the back told him that he would need to eat a bigger piece of glass
to prove that he wasn't lying. William accepted the challenge. He took the
larger glass shard in his hand and crunched a piece off with his teeth.
He chewed it up somewhat carefully, but went on to swallow it, apparently
without any discomfort whatsoever. Now this is where most people would have stopped.
You've made your point. Your older co workers were suitably impressed, and you
had somehow managed to achieve this feat without shredding your throat or intestines. But
William suddenly understood that, for whatever reason, he was built different. He
popped the rest of the glass in his mouth and chewed that up as well,
to the utter astonishment of those around him. The whistle blew once more,
and the men, still shaking their heads, slowly returned to their posts,
talking loudly amongst themselves about what they had just witnessed. At lunch time
the next day, the men dared William to eat some more glass, even
betting him small amounts of money as to whether or not he'd be able to
successfully consume whatever weird item or glass shard they produced. This became a fairly
lucrative side hustle for William, and soon he was eating so much glass on
his lunch breaks that the management of the factory began to notice that their stocks
of glass were inexplicably disappearing. It all became clear sometime in the following week
when one of the owners was walking around the factory and heard cheering coming from
outside. He followed the noise and came upon a crowd mesmerized by the sight
of William devouring an entire glass wine bottle. At first, he was stunned
his eyes couldn't truly be seeing what he thought they were seeing, but slowly
adorned in him what was happening, and he finally managed to put two and
two together. The owner, somewhat shortsightedly, managed to get over the initial
shock of the fact that one of his factory workers could seemingly ingest glass unharmed,
and went straight to the capitalist nightmare scenario that this man was in fact
embezzling company glass inside his stomach each day. Needless to say, William was
summarily fired from his job. Initially, he was upset at the loss of
income, but soon realized that if his coworkers had been willing to pay to
see him perform what he was now considering a type of circus style act,
well, then surely there would be many more people who would pay for that
privilege as well. So the next day he approached the owner of a local
dime museum that displayed interesting artifacts and curious attractions, where he believed he would
fit right in. He performed his act for the owner, who watched on
in amazement and signed him right up on the spot. As the words spread,
more and more people paid to come and see him perform. He realized
that he would need to broaden his repertoire if he was to keep them coming
back again and again. He even approached a local reporter to follow him for
a day and to do a full story of a day in the life of
what he was now calling himself the human Ostrich. The reporter agreed and excitedly
met up with him early in the morning, just after William arose for the
day. He watched as William devoured a large plate of eggs and sausage before
heading to the museum to perform his act. The reporter watched aghast as William
mckennas started off his act by performing his classic glass eating routine. From there,
he moved on to eating a live bull frog, a handful of carpet
tacks, two fistfuls of paper, and for dessert, finished off the show
with his favorite, a whole glass whiskey tumbler. What made this all the
more impressive was that McKenna was a small statured man, standing just five foot
six inches tall and weighing in at just one hundred and thirty eight pounds up
sixty two kilograms. The reporter then followed him to lunch, where once again
he ate a full and hearty meal before his afternoon performances began that night.
Thinking William would surely be too stuffed to eat anything more, the reporter noted
with amazement that the human ostrich finished his day by yet again devouring another fool
sized dinner. The reporter wrote up his article and published it the next day
with the following headline, the human Ostrich a living, breathing man ordinary in
all things save one. It went on to read his stomach, which is
like that of an ostrich can with the utmost safety eat anything from a cambric
needle to a five inch spike, a boiler plate, or a railway sleeper.
We'll needless to say this stirred up a flurry of interest in William's act,
and soon he was performing nine times a day just to service all of
the people who were queuing up to see this modern marvel perform. From his
factory days, where he was earning between five and eight dollars a week,
he was now raking in around eighty dollars a week, ten times what he
was previously making. He knew the value of good press coverage and so performed
stunts out in the streets to drum up business. One of his favorites,
which would often land him in trouble with the law, was to shimmy up
a nearby lamp post and eat the glass right out of the lamptop itself.
As his popularity grew, he began to take his show on the road,
leaving New York and traveling to nearby cities and states to impress and mesmerize his
patrons there too. As his performance changed, he switched the live bull frog
portion of his act to be his grand finale, he would make a big
show of letting the bull frog hop around on the table before carefully swallowing it
whole. To top it all off, he would invite the audience to come
on stage and feel the poor frog, still kicking wildly inside his stomach.
We could only hope that William, like other curious eaters of his time,
who also did live frog swallowing, would simply bring it back up again directly
after the show. Not. Despite him having turned this talent into a somewhat
luctive career, it soon became evident that the lifestyle was taking a toll on
him. As one paper wrote about him a few years later, mister mc
kenna was not calculated to impress the ordinary observer very favorably. His collar had
been divorced from the band of his shirt and rode ungracefully up under his ears,
and the bottom of his vest showed a disposition to keep the waistband of
his trousers at a distance. The odor of many cigarettes, blended with the
perfume of macerated garlic, enveloped him like a nebulous halo, and his unkempt
hair stood on end like the wool of an end man's wig. It seems
that maybe it did all become a bit too much for him, as just
ten years after discovering his talent, William mc kenna suddenly disappears from the history
books and is never heard from again. My hope is that he'd made enough
money to pack it all up and move somewhere quiet to live out the rest
of his life, but I suspect he probably went the same way as another
act who, having seen the money that could be made by William, had
begun copying his act. This poor man, named Joseph Kennedy from Saint Louis,
Missouri, had also been making a living from eating tacks, nails,
screws, and other assorted bits of hardware. His body quickly began to shut
down, and when it became clear that he was near the end, medical
examiners offered to pay his family five thousand dollars to examine his body. They
quickly agreed, and the findings were both curious and shocking. They found that
the walls and lining of the man's stomach were entirely normal, but he had
failed to pass through any of the items he ingested. This meant that his
insides were literally packed to the brim with broken glass, nails, screws,
and so much more. But even so, not one piece of evidence showing
any tearing or perforation of the stomach at all. Now, for this episode,
I'll leave you with a somewhat incredible flier describing the human Ostrich himself,
William mc kenna, a pampered, well fed, volant and veracious epicure,
a greater feaster than Helioglabus, and an odder human than the voluptuous Apecius.
He swallows living kicking frogs with an astonishing crassitude. He will empty a paper
of carpet tacks down his ponderous throat. He will eat a pound of green
glass and let it crash zigzagging down his gullet. He will eat tenpenny nails
and make one think they are tempting and tasty morsels. He will eat the
blades off your pocket knife and then daintily swallow the handle. To him.
A junk shop is loaded with delicacies to tickle his terrible palets. This show
is made entirely by me, Nick Charlie Key, with our theme music having
been made by the Enigma that is, the mysterious Breakmaster cylinder. If you'd
like to support the show, the simplest way to do that is over on
our Patreon account. There's just one option. For just two bucks a month,
you'll help me keep producing this show, and in return, you'll get
your name forever etched onto our supporters Wall of Fame over on our website and
then maybe listen out for your name in an upcoming episode. So until next
time, bona petito. Wow. Yeah