Speaker 1: I'm Jason Colvin, I'm d Graves.
Speaker 2: Give us five minutes and we will give you the fire.
Speaker 1: Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Surely You Can't
Be Serious Podcast Special Edition five Minutes of Fire. We
are here talking about the lyrics of We Didn't Start
the Fire by Billy Joel. We're covering only five minutes
at a time, which is about to link with the song,
so it works out kind of nicely. So please join
us as we dive into some new lyrics today.
Speaker 2: All right, guys, so here are the topics that we're
going to be covering today.
Speaker 1: Little Rock Kasternak, Nicky Mantle, Jason, what can you tell
me about Little Rock, Arkansas?
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm stealing this one from you, that's
all right. This is about the Little Rock Nine, which
were a group of black students that enrolled at Little
Rock Central High School in nineteen fifty seven. On May seventeen,
nineteen fifty four, the US Supreme Court issued a historic
Brown versus Board of Education that declared all laws established
segregated schools as unconstitutional. So by nineteen fifty seven, there
were nine black students that have been selected by the
NAACP to enroll at Central High School in Little Rock,
Governor Orville Babas called out the National Guard to prevent
these students from enrolling. Babas claimed that the white supremacists
were on their way and he was just watching out
for their safety. Well, that caused Dwight Eisenhower to get
involved and said, you guys, get out of the way,
because these students can enroll. And so that began the
integration of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. Okay, tell me
about Pastornak.
Speaker 1: Okay, So Pastornak refers to Boris Pastornak, who was a
poet in the Soviet Union. His family was from Russia.
His father was actually a great painter illustrator for Leo
Tolstoy novels. They were high society, hung out with Rachmaninoff
and other kind of elites of the day. But ultimately
the revolution happened and he at the time thought it
would be a good idea. But his family soon realized
that the elites were not well regarded their in the
Soviet Union anymore, and his mother and sisters went to
Germany for some medical procedure and decided not to return.
He and his brother, who was an architect, however, stayed.
But as you may or may not know, it was
tough to be an intellectual and elite and a literary
person in the Soviet Union back in those days. And
so this novel that he had been working on for
probably forty years at the time, called Doctor Javago, which
he believed was completely in line with what happened during
the Russian Revolution, was not well regarded by the literary
elite that the Soviets had working for them, and they
refused to publish it. Well, and he gets a knock
at the door and the Italian Communists Society says, hey,
we'd love to publish your novel, and Italian and brilliant
Pastornak says, well, that's perfect, because if you publish it,
then the Soviets will see how great it is and
they will welcome me with open arms. It could not
have been more wrong. The novel gets published, the Soviet
Union does everything it can to stop it from getting published,
but it still ultimately comes out it is not in
line with what their version of history is, and so
that upsets them. But ultimately he wins the Nobel Prize
for it. He's asked to come out to Germany to
accept his Nobel Prize, and the powers in the Soviet
Union say if you go, you better buy a one
way ticket, so he does not go. So then a
cartoonist creates a cartoon that has two Siberian prisoners and
one of them says, I won the Nobel Prize. What
are you in prison for it? He wins the Pulitzer
Prize for that cartoon the next year.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So Pasternak has a friend who is a writer
who is arrested for his views. He turns into apostle
Peter and says, I don't know this guy. I don't
know this guy. Please, I don't know this guy. Please.
He's terrified and he makes such a fuss about it
that Stalin actually calls him on the phone and says,
what are you freaking out about? And he's like, please,
don't do anything to me about it. He's like, dude, man,
stand up for your friend, and hangs up the phone
on him. Wow. He is reported to have been on
a death list, but Stalin thought he was just such
an imbecile that he took him off the list because
he thought he was an idiot. So ultimately the book
becomes a movie in the United States, a very famous
movie starring Omar Shariff and the CIA and MI six
order thousands of copies to be distributed as a way
of propaganda. Wow, what have you got for me? On
Mickey Mantle?
Speaker 2: Can you see how these lined up for me?
Speaker 1: Here? Pretty tricky? How you did that? I wonder how
we got out of order earlier?
Speaker 2: So Mickey Mantle big number seven for the New York
Yankees baseball player. I'm gonna get that out of the way. Yeah,
aka the Mick or the Commerce Comet. Played his entire
career with the New York Yankees from nineteen fifty one
to nineteen sixty eight. This was my dad's favorite baseball player.
I was almost named Mickey in honor of him.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Widely considered to be the best of the hitters and
fielders and overall athletes of the time. Warn in Spavnaugh, Oklahoma,
his dad trained him every day to switch hit and
would get mad at him if they were playing like
a pickup game. If he saw his son and the
guy he was facing was pitching right handed and he
didn't switch hit, and his dad caught him big trouble.
He hit for power and average from both sides of
the plate. Was a sixteen time All Star, seven time
World Series Champ, three times al MVP. He won the
Triple Crown in nineteen fifty six. And that's a major thing.
Best average, most home runs and most RBIs for the
entire season. Also known for the nineteen sixty one home
run chase. If you saw that movie by Billy Crystal
called sixty one, where Roger Marris actually bested in by
hitting sixty one homers in nineteen sixty one, man All
finished with only fifty two. Known for his winning personality,
fast living, hard drinking, and infidelities, died of liver failure
due to alcoholism in nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 1: I always feel a little bit awkward about that when
I'm having a beer at Mickey Mantle's here in Oklahoma City. Okay, guys,
that does it for today's episode. Join us next time
for five minutes of fire.