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: The Catcher in the Rye, Eisenhower, and vaccine.
Speaker 2: And okay, what can you tell me about the Catcher
in the Rye?
Speaker 1: Okay? So The Catcher in the Rye was initially supposed
to be an adult book, but it found favor with
a bunch of kids. It became a humongous success. Now,
the author of the book, JD. Salinger, didn't like the
attention that he was getting, and so he went into hiding,
tried to avoid all publicity. But the book, it is
a lasting book that just never dies. Because the Holden
call Field character in the book, his angst and frustration
with the world around him is something that is universally
shared over decades of time. What's interesting is it is
a book that, for some reason the sixties started to
get on the list to be banned from high schools
and libraries. But what's an interesting fact about it is
it's associated not only with this angst, but with several
assassination attempts that are very famous, including Robert John Brando's
murder of Rebecca Schaeffer, John Hinckley Junior's assassination attempt on
Ronald Reagan, and after he shot John Lennon. Mark David
Chapman was arrested with a copy of the book that
he had purchased that day, and the note in the
book was to Holden call Field from Holden call Field.
This is my statement. As I mentioned, he kept himself
out of the limelight, and according to Kevin Knielan on
Saturday Night Live News, it was to tell everyone it's
actually pronounced Sallinger. All right, Jason, what can you tell
me about Eisenhower? Okay?
Speaker 2: David Dwight Eisenhower served as the American President from nineteen
fifty three to nineteen sixty one. That's our thirty fourth president.
He was born in Dennison, Texas, raised in Abilene, Kansas.
Graduated from West Point in nineteen fifteen. He went on
to become the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force
in World War Two, but he never saw active combat
in his thirty five years in the military.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: So he's in charge of what we call the Invasion
of Normandy or D Day. He ran for president. His
primary goal was containing communism and reducing the deficit. Thank god,
we got that under control. In nineteen fifty three, he
actually considered using nuclear weapons to end the Korean War.
He ended McCarthyism by openly invoking executive privilege. He signed
civil rights active nineteen fifty seven, integrading schools in Little Rock,
which we'll talk about very soon. He also led the
American response to Sputnik to help create NASA, which launched
the space race. Died of a heart attack in nineteen
sixty nine. That's Dwight Eisenhower. All right, d what can
you tell me about vaccine?
Speaker 1: Okay, So the vaccine that we've got to be talking
about here is the vaccine for polio. Polio virus had
been around for decades. By the time the fifties rolled around,
and it was epidemic. In nineteen fifty two, a guy
named Jonas Salk came up with a vaccine that was passed.
He is widely regarded as the guy who cured polio.
And just to tell you how bad it was that year.
Normally there were twenty five thousand cases a year. That
year there were about fifty eight thousand cases. So it
was extremely important to people that, I mean, some of
the kids' biggest fear was getting polio. So they engage
on the biggest medical experiment that has ever been done.
Started off with four thousand kids in high school and
ultimately encompassed about one point eight million people. Now what's
sad is only about four hundred thousand of those folks
actually got the vaccine. About two hundred thousand of them
got a placebo, and the other one point two million
were just the control group. They didn't get anything at all.
They announced the results of the field test on April twelfth,
nineteen fifty five. You'll remember that's the tenth anniversary of
the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who probably was paralyzed
as a result of polio symptoms, but the vaccine had
been sixty to seventy percent effective from the poliovirus type one,
ninety percent effective for the poliovirus types two and three,
and ninety four percent effective against the development of bulber polio.
By nineteen fifty seven, the cases were reduced fifty six
hundred in the US. By nineteen sixty one there was
only one hundred and six, and eventually throughout the world
countries would become what they called polio free. The most
recent one twenty fourteen, India was declared polio free. Side
note a quote I remember from a Dunesbury book that
I read back in the eighties from cher Yeah, she said,
I believed I was an angel sent from heaven to
cure the polio vaccine, and when Jonah Sulk did it,
it really pissed me off. Okay, guys, that does it
for today's episode. Join us next time for five minutes
of fire.