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Speaker 1: I'm Jason Colvin, I'm D. Graves.

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Speaker 2: Give us five minutes and we will give you the fire.

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Speaker 1: Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Surely You Can't

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Be Serious Podcast Special Edition five Minutes of Fire. We

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are here talking about the lyrics of We Didn't Start

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the Fire by Billy Joel. We're covering only five minutes

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at a time, which is about to link with the song,

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so it works out kind of nicely. So please join

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us as we dive into some new lyrics today.

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Speaker 2: All right, guys, So here are the topics that we're

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going to be covering today.

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Speaker 1: The Catcher in the Rye, Eisenhower, and vaccine.

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Speaker 2: And okay, what can you tell me about the Catcher

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in the Rye?

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Speaker 1: Okay? So The Catcher in the Rye was initially supposed

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to be an adult book, but it found favor with

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a bunch of kids. It became a humongous success. Now,

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the author of the book, JD. Salinger, didn't like the

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attention that he was getting, and so he went into hiding,

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tried to avoid all publicity. But the book, it is

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a lasting book that just never dies. Because the Holden

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call Field character in the book, his angst and frustration

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with the world around him is something that is universally

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shared over decades of time. What's interesting is it is

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a book that, for some reason the sixties started to

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get on the list to be banned from high schools

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and libraries. But what's an interesting fact about it is

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it's associated not only with this angst, but with several

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assassination attempts that are very famous, including Robert John Brando's

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murder of Rebecca Schaeffer, John Hinckley Junior's assassination attempt on

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Ronald Reagan, and after he shot John Lennon. Mark David

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Chapman was arrested with a copy of the book that

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he had purchased that day, and the note in the

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book was to Holden call Field from Holden call Field.

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This is my statement. As I mentioned, he kept himself

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out of the limelight, and according to Kevin Knielan on

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Saturday Night Live News, it was to tell everyone it's

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actually pronounced Sallinger. All right, Jason, what can you tell

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me about Eisenhower? Okay?

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Speaker 2: David Dwight Eisenhower served as the American President from nineteen

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fifty three to nineteen sixty one. That's our thirty fourth president.

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He was born in Dennison, Texas, raised in Abilene, Kansas.

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Graduated from West Point in nineteen fifteen. He went on

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to become the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force

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in World War Two, but he never saw active combat

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in his thirty five years in the military.

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Speaker 1: Wow.

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Speaker 2: So he's in charge of what we call the Invasion

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of Normandy or D Day. He ran for president. His

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primary goal was containing communism and reducing the deficit. Thank god,

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we got that under control. In nineteen fifty three, he

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actually considered using nuclear weapons to end the Korean War.

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He ended McCarthyism by openly invoking executive privilege. He signed

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civil rights active nineteen fifty seven, integrading schools in Little Rock,

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which we'll talk about very soon. He also led the

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American response to Sputnik to help create NASA, which launched

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the space race. Died of a heart attack in nineteen

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sixty nine. That's Dwight Eisenhower. All right, d what can

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you tell me about vaccine?

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Speaker 1: Okay, So the vaccine that we've got to be talking

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about here is the vaccine for polio. Polio virus had

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been around for decades. By the time the fifties rolled around,

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and it was epidemic. In nineteen fifty two, a guy

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named Jonas Salk came up with a vaccine that was passed.

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He is widely regarded as the guy who cured polio.

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And just to tell you how bad it was that year.

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Normally there were twenty five thousand cases a year. That

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year there were about fifty eight thousand cases. So it

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was extremely important to people that, I mean, some of

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the kids' biggest fear was getting polio. So they engage

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on the biggest medical experiment that has ever been done.

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Started off with four thousand kids in high school and

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ultimately encompassed about one point eight million people. Now what's

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sad is only about four hundred thousand of those folks

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actually got the vaccine. About two hundred thousand of them

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got a placebo, and the other one point two million

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were just the control group. They didn't get anything at all.

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They announced the results of the field test on April twelfth,

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nineteen fifty five. You'll remember that's the tenth anniversary of

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the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who probably was paralyzed

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as a result of polio symptoms, but the vaccine had

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been sixty to seventy percent effective from the poliovirus type one,

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ninety percent effective for the poliovirus types two and three,

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and ninety four percent effective against the development of bulber polio.

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By nineteen fifty seven, the cases were reduced fifty six

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hundred in the US. By nineteen sixty one there was

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only one hundred and six, and eventually throughout the world

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countries would become what they called polio free. The most

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recent one twenty fourteen, India was declared polio free. Side

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note a quote I remember from a Dunesbury book that

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I read back in the eighties from cher Yeah, she said,

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I believed I was an angel sent from heaven to

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cure the polio vaccine, and when Jonah Sulk did it,

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it really pissed me off. Okay, guys, that does it

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for today's episode. Join us next time for five minutes

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of fire.