Speaker 1: The Thinking Atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
an idea.
Speaker 2: The population of atheists this country is going through the.
Speaker 1: Rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If I
tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth, not
because I put my hand on a book and made
a wish and working together for a more rational world.
Speaker 2: Take the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness, Truth, fusion,
wisdom will come to you that way.
Speaker 1: Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
Speaker 2: If I can beg your indulgence, today's show is going
to allow me to take a little bit of a
holiday vacation and spend some more time with my family.
So rather than go in and prepare all the new material,
I have gone back and grab some older material. This
is actually from my true Stories channel, and I've just
hand selected some fascinating short form stories. They run between
I don't know five and eight minutes long, a lot
of history and very often a twist ending. So if
you've already heard these but forgotten them, it'll be like
a new thing, right And if you are familiar, you
can just skip forward five, six, seven minutes and the
next one should be fresh for you. And if you
haven't subscribed, it's True Stories with Seth Andrews on all
major podcasts apps We've got. I think I'm coming up
on three hundred and sixty shows so far, and I
have learned a lot. You know, there are some celebrity shows,
and there're some interesting trivia, dumb criminals and that kind
of thing, But I think some of the ones that
really resonate with me are the ones where I'm learning
something about history that I never knew and it sounds
lame when I say it like that it's a history lesson,
but you're like, did that really happen? Is this the
origin of that thing? Why did I not know this?
Why did my teachers never teach this? And you're going
to hear a few of those on the broadcast, just
one after the other. Eleven total stories. Thank you so
much for allowing me to assemble these for you so
that I might have a little extra time to spend
the holiday with my family. So grank it up, buckle up,
and here we go. I'm not a drinker, not a
big fan of drunk people, but I do have to
sit back in awe of those who can just knock
back the alcohol like it's candy. Now, most of us
have been to a wild party where the booze was
really flowing, and most of us have stories that go
along with those parties. Well, I want to tell you
the story of one particular kegger that became one for
the books. It's a Friday night. The place is called
City Tavern, and a group of guys got together no
fewer than fifty five men plus nine musicians and seven
weight staff. This was quite a party, I mean, and
even the waiters got in on the bender. They were
drinking as well. It was supposed to be a work night.
These men were all co workers, But how much work
could you actually get done pouring through boxes of paperwork
while you are running up the following bar tab specifically,
fifty six bottles of Madeira wine, sixty bottles of claret,
twenty two bottles of porter, twelve bottles of beer, nine
bottles of cider, and seven large bowls of alcoholic punch.
Holy cow, that is a lot to imbibe, and it
doesn't include the musicians and the waiters. They ran up
their own separate liquor bill. They had an additional twenty
one bottles of wine. It was such a wild, intoxicated
binge drinking bash that somebody actually kept the receipt, the
itemized bill from City Tavern. They did the math adjusting
for today's dollars. Just for the men supposed to be
working that Friday night, more than forty five gallons of
booze were served, which would today be a barred tab
of over seventeen thousand dollars. Now, not everybody got drunk.
They may have had a few SIPs here or there,
but they kept their dignity and sobriety. But this party
was so epic that the receipt is preserved even today,
over two centuries after it happened, discovered first in a
box of documents by a professor, a guy named Gordon
Lloyd of Pepperdine University. He found it and he posted
it publicly in digital form. You could actually see the
receipt for the party on the internet today. Okay, why
should we care so much about a two hundred and
fifty year old drinking party. Maybe it has something to
do with the attendees, Those fifty five guys at City
Tavern in Pennsylvania, some of those men with names like Washington,
Jefferson Franklin, America's founding fathers, working after hours on a
Friday night at a restaurant pub in seventeen eighty seven,
and the job they were working on was no kidding
the United States Constitution. Dave Carroll was angry at the airline,
and he had a good reason. This was back in
March of two thousand and eight. Dave was traveling with
his folk rock band called the Sons of Maxwell. He
had just arrived in Chicago from Canada on his way
to Nebraska for a tour. It was the last leg
of the journey it would be on United Airlines. So
Dave was at the gate in Chicago, standing there with
the other passengers, watching with increasing alarm and concern through
the window as the baggage handlers were loading the plane.
The baggage vehicle rolled up, Employees grabbed passenger luggage and
then carelessly with abandon just chucked every piece onto the
conveyor belt. And of course one of those bags belonged
to Dave Carroll. It was his guitar case. Well, everybody
finally boarded that United flight landed at its destination, and
big surprise that guitar was damaged. As you can expect,
Dave was pretty upset and he took his complaint to
the airline. Hey, your people broke my twelve hundred dollars
tailored guitar. You need to do the right thing here
and compensate me. Now. I know that airline workers do
a difficult job, and I know that a lot of
airline employees are at the mercy of the higher ups.
But having said that, we have all found ourselves frustrated
when the airlines complicate our lives. Many of us know
what it's like to stand there at customer service and
feel helpless, like we are at the world's worst DMV,
like nobody really cares. We're never going to get our
problems solved, and Dave Carroll got passed around the system.
United Airlines bounced him from one agent to the next agent,
to the next agent, and finally they instructed him to
bring the broken guitar back to Chicago for inspection. Yeah,
after David jumped through all of the hoops, the airline
ultimately denied his claim. Well, this musician was so frustrated
that he wrote a letter to United and he told
them that he was going to write and release a
song about the whole debacle. And he was true to
his word, and he posted his song with a video
that is viewable even today on the Sons of Maxwell
YouTube page. The song title United Breaks Guitars and I
know you aren't just dying to hear a clip from
that tune, so I will oblige.
Speaker 3: Unite you wron unite who you are.
Speaker 2: You've broken you should fix it.
Speaker 3: Your libel just admitted I should have phoned with someone
else for gone by car because un race guitars.
Speaker 2: Now here's the funny part. Dave's complaint song went viral,
Like immediately went viral. This was not good publicity for
United Airlines, and within just a few days they reached
out to Dave to offer compensation. Dave responded, keep your money,
give it to charity or something. Now these days, Dave
Carol is no longer angry. He was actually interviewed by
the Guardian just one year after the incident. He said
the song was fun to record. He expressed gratitude that
you United Airlines had inadvertently given him an outlet where
he could sing his frustration and bring weary travelers from
all over the world together to enjoy a moment of
levity after that moment of calamity. It's amazing what happens
when people get creative to solve their problems. Your voice
might feel lost in the cacophony of the system, but
when you sing the song and strike the nerve, you
might be more powerful than you think. Are you a
movie buff or at least a frequent movie goer, or
do you watch a lot of television. Well, the next
time you are viewing, I want you to keep your
sonar up and be listening, because there is a sound
that you may have heard hundreds of times and never
actually noticed. It is this stock sound effect. You and
I already know that much of film and television sound
is added in post production, and there are sound effects
libraries that have thousands and thousands of options whatever you need.
Crowd noise, card tires, squealing, gunshots, birds chirping in the trees,
even shoes walking on grass. And throughout cinema history, sound
designers have always been on the hunt for a really
good scream. And so we traveled back in time to
nineteen fifty one. There's a movie Western called Distant Drums,
and in that film is a tense scene. Soldiers are
on the run from seminole Indians. They're wading through swamp
in the Everglades and the water is up to their
chest and suddenly one of the soldiers gets dragged under
the water by an alligator, and when the gator bites him,
the soldier screams, and the voice that was dubbed in
for that scream was said to come from an actor
named SHEB Woolley. And for that yell, shev didn't even
get a film credit. Well, Warner Brothers needed sounds for
their own stock library. Producing sounds from scratch was much
more expensive than just going and grabbing something that was
already on file. And this brings us to nineteen fifty
three and another big screen Western, a movie called The
Charge at Feather River, and there's a character his name
is Private Wilhelm. Private Wilhelm gets shot in the thigh
with an arrow and for that, once again the producers
needed a really good scream, and so they browsed through
the Warner Brothers library and there it was, and it
was perfect. It was at this point that somebody actually
gave this sound the name. They named it the Wilhelm
Scream after that character in the movie Private Wilhelm. Such
a distinct yell and useful and cheap. Warner Brothers used
it twice the following year, in A Star Is Born
and the horror film Them. Then in nineteen fifty five
it was used in Land of the Pharaohs and The
Sea Chase. The scream remained popular into the nineteen sixties
with The Wild Bunch and the Green Berets. But oh no,
Hollywood was not done with Private Wilhelm yet. Listen carefully
to Star Wars Episode four, the film that started the
entire franchise, and there's a scene where a storm trooper
falls and there is the Wilhelm scream. Two years after that,
it was included in the American Graffiti sequel. Into the eighties, nineties,
two thousands, everything from Willow, Grimlins, Die Hard with a Vengeance,
Beauty and the Beast, Poltergeist, Lethal Weapon four, the Fifth Element,
all of the Indiana Jones movies, and I'm not even
close to being done. Private Wilhelm continues to scream in
toy story, Pirates of the Caribbean, Avatar, Kung Fu Panda,
Deadpool two, Lord of the Rings, and the entire Marvel
cinematic universe, and I haven't even gotten into TV yet
because it has been included in hundreds of shows from
the Boys to The s Umsons to Breaking Bad. The
Wilhelm scream has become part of a collection of original
sound effects which was donated to the USC School of
Cinematic Arts. It is a legitimate and celebrated piece of
American film history, that sound, that yell from a nineteen
fifty one movie extra who was denied so much as
a name in small print on the movie credits. Now,
I said that the man behind the Wilhelm scream has
never been totally verified, but film historians have done a
lot of digging and they say that it is likely
that this bit part player, this voice actor in post production.
The man chev Woolley does deserve the credits, and this
guy had done some acting mostly though it was just
voice acting. He did pick up lines when her movie
studios needed something specific in post not even a film actor.
He was a voice dubbed in for another voice, which
makes sense, I suppose since back in the nineteen fifties, SEB.
Woolley was known for his voice, but not as an actor.
He was known as a singer he's the guy who
sang the nineteen fifty eight novelty classic Purple People Eater.
Right now, parents are singing the song in their heads
while their kids are scratching their heads. Come on, go
listen to the song, the one eyed, one horned Flying
Purple People Eater. And then next time you're at the movies,
keep your ears wide open. You just might hear the
famous Wilhelm scream. And that's a true story. Did you
ever hear that story about the guy who tied a
bunch of helium balloons to a lawn chair and then
he just went for a ride, like he's floating in
the atmosphere. I always thought that was a myth, right,
that's an old legend. It's a funny story that we
tell that never happened. Oh No, In my research, I
found out about this guy and I did a story
on him. And we're going to hear about lawn chair
Larry after the break, continuing my sort of holiday show,
a smattering of short form true stories to entertain you
this Christmas season. There are no surprises at the end
of this one. I think the story itself should be plenty.
This is the wild, weird tale of Larry Walters, the
man who took a ride into the sky. That is
almost impossible to believe. Now, Larry had always wanted to
be a pilot. He tried to join the Air Force
back in the seventies. He was rejected because of his eyesight.
He just couldn't see very well, but he would not
give up on his dream of flights. In fact, back
when he was a teenager, he used to fantasize about
this specific scenario, an alternative way to surf the skies.
And then finally, when Larry was thirty three, he decided
it was time to take that childhood fantasy and make
it reality. And here's what he did. The year was
nineteen eighty two. Larry and his then girlfriend started construction
on a homemade aircraft. No fuselage, no wings, no engine.
Larry's aircraft was a lawn chair. But how do you
get a lawn chair to fly? He needed lift, and
so he purchased forty five weather balloons that he would
then tether to the chair. Now this was going to
look suspicious. Who walks into his store and says, hey,
I would like forty five weather balloons. Someone's going to
take notice. And so Larry lied. His employer was a film,
TV and media production studio called film Flare, and he
grabbed a blank requisition form and he forged some important details,
and then he went in to a balloon and helium
cellar and said, hey, we need props for an upcoming
television commercial and it's for my company, film Flare. And
they bought this lie and they sold him everything he needed,
which meant lawn Chair Larry could set his way into
the heavens with the balloons and the tethers and the
helium and a parachute. He also carried a camera, a
Cbee radio, a sandwich, some beer, and a pellet gun. Yes,
a pellet gun, you see. Helium would make the ascent
no problem, but I mean at some point he was
going to have to stop going up, especially given the
conditions way up there, lack of oxygen, the temperatures are
sub freezing. Who knows what else could happen at high altitude.
So when he reached a certain threshold, the plan was
to pull out the pellet gun and start popping the
weather balloons to level him off and then allow him
to drift. Okay. Launch day the second of July nineteen
eighty two. Larry Walters at his home at sixteen forty
four West seventh Street in San Pedro, Los Angeles. There
he was, and he took the chair and he tethered
on the unfilled balloons, and then he tethered that chair.
He roped it to his jeep to make sure he
wouldn't fly away prematurely, and because he wanted time to
contact the authorities. Like the whole plan was to tell
air traffic control, Hey, I am launching. You might want
to tell aircraft flying around where I am and what's
going on, because you know, nobody wants to become a
kind of roadkill in the sky. I mean, beyond accidental
impact with another plane. Imagine if the military activated fighter
jets and shot him down with a missile or something.
So he did want to be upfront about all this,
and so they filled the helium balloons. But before they
could do the final checks, that rope to his jeep snapped,
and prematurely, Larry's homemade chair craft rose up and up
like a phoenix. At the moment of that unexpected premature launch,
the jolt knocked Larry's eyeglasses off of his face. They
just fell down to the ground. Larry's girlfriend, Carol was
talking to him on the CB. She panicked saw him
rise up into the clouds. She wanted to abort. Check
out this actual audio from their radio conversation. Come down,
you gotta come down. If you can't see coming down,
I've got my other classes. I can see perfectly.
Speaker 1: Don't worry you copy yourr I copy.
Speaker 2: Are you sure you okay to see there? You came here?
Speaker 3: Are you okay?
Speaker 1: I may okay. I'm going through a sinful lay.
Speaker 2: Or my Autoito's one thousand, five hundred marie le right
now he do that? Oh my god, you're going hercutionary
Get down now, you come down. Everyone watch down now.
And here he was Larry in a floating chair in
Federal airspace, rising up a thousand feet five thousand feet
ten thousand feet, up and up and higher and higher
until finally, at a freezing sixteen thousand feet after forty
five minutes of flight or float, I guess he was floating.
Larry pulled out his trusty pellet gun and he started
strategically taking out the balloons. He leveled off, began to
lose altitude, and then Larry accidentally dropped his pellet gun,
so he's it's totally out of control, as you would
expect in this scenario. It's not like the craft can
be steered. But this backyard balloon daredevil went down and
down and down toward the earth into Long Beach, California,
crashing into a power line. The line snapped it dumped
him onto the ground. He was unharmed. The whole neighborhood
lost power for about a half an hour. Now, when
Larry stood up, unscathed from his amazing and historic flights,
was he greeted with cameras and smiles and high fives
for his great accomplishment. He was not waiting on the
ground was the Long Beach Police Department, And the problem was, ultimately,
nobody knew how to charge him, Like what specific law
had he broken. There wasn't anything on the books that
covered this. He wasn't even a pilot, so it's not
like they could revoke his pilot's Ultimately, he got off
with a kind of slap on the wrist. He paid
a reduced fine of about fifteen hundred dollars for operating
an air craft without permission. I think fifteen hundred bucks
is a small price to pay to become a legends,
and Larry did get his fifteen minutes of fame. A
few days after his stunt, he was a guest on
the David Letterman show. Time x Watches featured his story
on one of their print advertisements. He even did a
short stint on the circuit as a motivational speaker. The
Darwin Awards gave him an award. Now I know he survived,
but they gave him a special award called at Risk Survivor.
And yet, unfortunately, I must tell you that Larry's personal
story would end tragically more than a decade after his flight.
The literal heights that he had achieved in his life
sadly could not heal the personal lows in his heart.
Larry took his own life on the sixth of October
nineteen ninety three, at the age of forty four, eleven
years after he had taken that balloon ride to the sky.
But Larry's story lives on, and the chair itself has
become a piece of flight history. It was ultimately donated
to the Smithsonian and it sits on display right now
at the Stephen f Udvar Hazy Center in Virginia. And
of course, every legendary aircraft needs a name. This particular
vehicle has been dubbed Inspiration one. And perhaps we can
all take inspiration from this man who refused to be grounded.
A man who embarked on one of the strangest journeys
of the twentieth century. A man who took a chair,
a cbe, a pellet gun, a sand which, and some
beer up into the heavens, leisurely drifting in the winds,
gazing down at the coastline, and writing his name into
the history books from his lawn chair three miles high
in the sky. John Donahue went to Vietnam, and he
wasn't supposed to be there. In fact, the United States
military didn't even know he was there. Here is what happened.
John was better known to his friends by a nickname.
They called him Chicky, and Chicky Donahue had served in
the Marine Corps from nineteen fifty eight to nineteen sixty four.
He became a merchant seaman and one day he was
just hanging out that one of his favorite New York
City bars, and he was sitting there talking to the bartender.
The bartender himself was a former gi He called himself
Colonel Lynch. He hadn't actually been a colonel, but that's
what people called him, Colonel Lynch, and he was angry.
Remember this is nineteen sixty seven. The Vietnam War well underway,
and soldiers and support personnel were getting drafted and wounded
and killed on the battlefield. And then Colonel Lynch would
look out his New York City windows and there would
be those Vietnam War protesters. The whole thing just made
his blood boil. His own friends and neighbors were across
the ocean bleeding and dying, and yet these demonstrators had
the gall to our chin protest. Here Colonel Lynch stood
behind the bar, cursing the whole thing, and he looked
at Chicky and he said, you know, I'd like to
go over there, just go to Vietnam and track down
those boys from my neighborhood and buy them all a beer.
And Chicky looked back and he said, all right, I
can do that. I'm sorry. Chicky was going to travel
more than eight thousand miles from New York to Vietnam
on a beer run. Yes, And here began one of
the most bizarre journeys of the twentieth century. John Chicky Donahue.
He just decided he was going to go to Vietnam
to hand out beer to four specific men. Now he
wasn't actively serving in the military, but he did know
the system, he knew the lingo, he knew how the
military he worked, and so he sported an important looking mustache.
Remember that the military didn't allow facial hair, so apparently
people saw him and just assumed he was some kind
of higher up, and even when he was pressed about
who he was, he would just respond, I'm a merchant mariner.
And nobody questioned him after that, possibly because they had
no idea what a merchant mariner actually was. John got
himself a job in the engine room of an ammunition
ship that was heading to Vietnam. This was a month
long journey, and Chikey had bought himself a duffel bag
full of beer cans. Now, the problem was that's a
long journey, thirty days, and Chicky liked beer. He would
later admit that he himself on that trip had drank
over sixty cans of beer and by the time the
ship docked, his duffel was looking kind of saggy. But
never fear, Chickie found some enlisted men's clubs, and he
requisitioned more, and then he embarked on his impossible journey,
a personal journey. Sometimes John found himself running for his life,
escaping enemy ambushes, sleeping in foxholes. The war was becoming
a close up experience. He was realizing just how dumb
and dangerous his stunt really was. And as he was
there dodging the bullets while soldiers all around him did not,
John's perspective on the war began to change. She'd arrived
with blind duty to country, but John would leave distrustful
and angry about the lies, the waste, the politics masquerading
as a fight for freedom. He arrived pro war, he
left antie. But of course he was there in Vietnam,
and he was a man on a mission, and he
was very, very clever. He managed to work his way
around the country through the system looking for these four guys,
and he would smooth talk his way onto a military plane.
He would slide himself onto road convoys, riding on the trucks,
and believe it or not, against all of the odds,
Chicky found and delivered beer from his duffel bag to
all four of Colonel Lynch's neighbor friends the soldiers Tommy Collins,
Bobby Pappis, Rick Duggan, and Kevin mcloon. I mean, just
imagine it. Chickie Donahue walks up and says, hey, your friend,
Colonel Lynch wanted me to bring you some beer. Can
you even imagine? And then, of course, after that the
mission was done. As the guns blasted and the bombs fell,
Chicky managed to get himself back out of Vietnam. He
left uninjured, but he did leave a changed man. Now
what in the world would motivate somebody to enter a
faraway war zone with a duffel bag of beer. Chicky
did a reunion interview with CBS News. He actually sat
next to the other four men reunited after decades, and
he said this before the cameras. He said, quote, I
did the right thing. I was letting these kids die
without me helping them, and that's what I wanted to do.
This story was actually made into a feature film in
twenty twenty two. The movie was not well reviewed. It
was not well received, but the real life story has
passed the test of time. The real accounts of John
Chicky Dona Hugh, the man who braved possible death to
bring some cold brew, desperately needed goodwill, and just a
little taste of home. The due date for the baby
was in late October of nineteen sixty seven. This was Smyrna, Georgia,
the suburb of Atlanta. The parents were poor. They could
not afford the hospital bill, but that bill would be
paid by none other than civil rights activists Coretta Scott
King and Martin Luther King Junior. And here is the
story of how these legendary figures would come to do
such a wonderful thing. The new parents were Walter and
Betty Lou and they were theater people, I mean the
starving artist actors turned playwrights. They'd actually met touring in
the theater for the US Armed Forces, and then they
would go on to co found the Atlanta Actors and
Writers Workshop and run a children's theater school. But talk
about struggling artists, I mean people in the theater world
will tell you all the stories about sleeping on the
floor and the unpaid bills and the broken down cars,
and the stretching of every grocery dollar, the sacrifices made
for their art. But when you love something, as actors,
love acting and directors love directing. As Walter and Betty
Lou loved the theater, money and status often become secondary considerations,
and Betty Lou was becoming more and more pregnant throughout
those months. In mid nineteen sixty seven, they faced this
looming financial challenge, how will we pay for the delivery
of this child? Now, this is where some might say
that fate stepped in the stars aligned, so to speak. Remember,
they had this children's theater program. Coreta King had called
Betty Lou at the school and she said, my young
children are having a hard time finding a place that
will have them. Remember this was the late nineteen sixties,
with racial tensions and legal fights and segregation laws and
riots in the streets suffocating the United States and a
haze of bigotry in the fight for human rights, and
the King family at the front of it all, and
their children were looking for a place to go to school. Well,
Betty Lou said, Hey, fine, I'm glad you called welcome. Yes,
bring the girls. They are more than welcome to attend.
And Walter himself served as acting coach for the young
Yolanda King in the only racially integrated theater troope in
the entire city of Atlanta. And it was a beautiful
and necessary thing. It was a moment of humanity with
a white couple and black family working together as teachers
and allies and friends. And then came that delivery date,
October twenty eighth, nineteen sixty seven. This financially strapped young
couple would rush to the hospital and see the birth
of this beautiful baby girl. And then they would receive
the beautiful gift of Coretta and Martin Luther King, who
stepped in and paid that hospital bill entirely. Now, I'm
sorry to say that this is not a fairy tale,
this is real life. Walter and Betty Lou would divorce
only four years later, and that acting school, the Theater
School for Children, would one day close its doors for
lack of funding. But Yolanda King would grow up to
be an actress and activist. She would do an interview
in two thousand and one with CN and she would
reflect and reminisce about those days that the children's theater,
about the teaching and the training, and the support and
love and goodness she received there, And she would remember
the young baby born in late October of nineteen sixty seven,
a baby named Julia, a baby born to perform, trained
by her own parents, beginning her long acting journey in
nineteen eighty seven, becoming a household name in nineteen ninety.
That Julia, whose delivery into this world was paid for
by civil rights icons Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther
King Junior, was none other than the pretty woman Darby Shaw,
the Runaway Bride, Aaron Brockovich, Heidi Bergmann, and so many
other big screen icons played by the actress Julia Roberts.
The term for it is moral panic, and moral panics
have been with humankind in some form throughout history. Moral
panic happens when people get hyper focused on a certain threat,
usually one that isn't really a big deal until the
media gets a hold of it, and then there's a
surge of hysteria before things cooled down, at least until
the next moral panic. In the twentieth century, alone prohibition
called alcohol a harmful vice. Elvis's gyrating legs were selling
sex to teenagers. Communists were infiltrating the government offices of
Free America. Rock music was of the devil, and today
we have all kinds of supposed devils that are coming
for polite society, from video games to vaccines to the
deep state. Probably the most famous moral panic in our
history books were the Salem witch trials back in sixteen
ninety two. But there was a fascinating fear that was
scaring whole cultures of people in the early eighteen hundreds
throughout Western Europe, Great Britain, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, even
in patches of the very young United States. There was
an addictive drug spreading like wildfire in cities, communities, private
homes not previously available to the commoners, those on lower incomes.
Only the wealthy classes were rich enough to indulge, and
they were the elites. But the commoners, nah, they couldn't
manage this drug, They couldn't understand how to use it.
They would not be able to control it, exposing the
everyman and every woman and their children to this narcotic
well that could crash polite society to the ground. And
it wasn't just rich people looking down and lamenting the
decline of civilization. Middle class parents were terrified about exposure
to their children. This inexpensive addiction could very likely rot
their brains and destroy their futures. Rumors abounded that this
drug was responsible for violent crime like murders, assaults, even
riots in the streets. Mom and dads read reports of
children who were getting lost in deluded hazes and taking
their own lives. One example from that time period was
the story printed in the New York Herald on the
fifth of July eighteen seventy five, a story about a
teenage serial killer named Jesse Pomeroy. Pomeroy had targeted and
murdered young children, but at his trial it was alleged
that his brain had been damaged and the culprit was
this drug, a substance and scourge that was ravaging not
just his brain but all the land. Oh yes, it
was moral panic. Clergy called it poison. Letters to newspaper
editors implored young people don't do it. It was kind
of a just say no campaign for the eighteen twenties.
And then, of course, those higher ups, the wealthy elites,
the power players, were looking down from their high balconies
as this drug, once expensive and exclusive and used only
in gilded mansions, was being sold for five cents on
everyday streets to the most common of citizens. And yet
this dangerous stimulant wasn't a pill, It was not a tonic.
It was nothing you would sniff or inject. The addictive
substance that so many were desperate to cloister for themselves.
The thing they feared might ignite the streets' infect brains
and turn the lower class against the ruling class was
the reading of books. Something formerly very expensive was suddenly not.
Books had previously been made in a hand assembled matrix,
coated with special ink, and pressed as pages one by
one before they were bound together. But here, centuries after
Gutenberg printed his first Bible, printing press technology had made
things faster and much cheaper. By eighteen sixty, books were
being printed on inexpensive wood pulp paper. The literary snobs
of that time insulted bad paper novels by calling them
pulp fiction, and yes, that's where the term came from.
A whole genre of cheaply made Gothic books were sold
for one cens and those were known as penny dreadfuls.
Some books were called yellowbacks because they were printed not
on paper but on pressed straw. No longer was the
written word sequestered from every day on. No longer could
the throne rooms and locked chambers restrain and control the
words and ideas pressed, printed and bound. Throughout our history,
the printed word has remained one of the most intoxicating,
brain expanding and dedictive drugs around. It frees the mind,
it fills the heart, it motivates the body, and just
a few hundred years ago, it was the book that
sent societies worldwide into moral panic, in no small way
because the few wanted to think for the many. As
the famous activist and journalist Margaret Fuller once said, today,
a reader tomorrow, a leader still to come, I've got
some deep thoughts for you. We're going to talk about
Big Bird going to space and a World War One
story that's all about love. We continue next. Thank you
so much for listening, and thanks for your support on Patreon, patreon,
dot com, slash Seth Andrews. I hope the holidays have
been good to you so far. As we head toward
the big December twenty fifth day, whatever your plans may be,
just be safe, be well, do it on your own terms.
And we are doing a holiday thing, a compilation of
true stories. Cliches often exist for a reason. These things
have become well known enough to become cliche. There used
to be a popular feature on Saturday Night Live. It
was called Deep Thoughts Jack Handy, and there were witty
observations like at my funeral, I'd like there to be
a pinata so people can be happy, but fill it
with bees so they're not too happy. Beyond the punchlines,
we've all heard the classic wonderings about the world we
live in, you know, the rusty old staples that we've
heard a thousand times. Why do we drive on parkways
and park on driveways? Why do you come akzi pilots
wear helmets? That kind of thing. Well, today we're not
really doing true stories, but I want to share some
stuff that speaks to the true things that we do
every day, we say, every day, we think every day,
without necessarily being aware of the irony. These observations and
questions will hopefully give you a smile and just maybe
make you think. Have you ever noticed that fat chance
and slim chance mean the exact same thing? If poison
goes past its expiration date? Does it become more poisonous
or less? I can't do this, but perhaps you can.
Are you able to say the words quickly? Irish wristwatch?
And I know you're trying it right now, Irish wrist watch,
you have to really work at it. I wonder if
twins ever stop to consider the fact that one of
them was actually unplanned. Take a look at the word swims. Swims.
Now write it down and flip it. Look at the
word upside down. Have you ever noticed that it still
says the word swims. Here's an interesting observation. Most of
those doctors who informed Stephen Hawking he would only live
for two years, most of them actually died before he did.
Why is it that things go off when they're actually starting.
Have you ever wondered if animals actually need glasses but
they haven't evolved the ability to invent them. I've often
wondered about that the near sighted or far sighted animal.
Check this one out. If you say this sentence, the
quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, you just
used every letter in the English alphabet. It's a common
saying that something is the best thing since sliced bread.
I wonder what the best thing was before the invention
of sliced bread. Is there a synonym for the word synonym?
When we clap our hands in applause, we're actually high
fiving ourselves for something that somebody else has done. I
never thought of it this way before, But if you
rip a hole in a net, there will actually be
fewer holes than there were before. If you try to
fail at something, and then you succeed at failing, have
you actually succeeded or failed? Drinking from a straw is
the opposite of snorkeling. The youngest picture of you is
also the oldest picture of you. Do you ever wonder
if cats break our stuff on purpose? So then we'll
go and order new stuff and they can play in
the empty boxes. If you find the perfect hiding spot,
is it still the perfect hiding spot? You can give
both an approval and a rejection by saying the word pass.
When you and I wear name brand clothing. We just
paid that company to be their billboard. I wonder because
of its color? Is carrot juice also orange juice? Why
is it that we say that we bite down on
something when we can only move our lower jaw? Aren't
we actually biting up? Here's something interesting. You and I
have probably seen more of the surface of the moon
than we have of the Earth. If you and I
can't see air, does that mean that fish can't see water?
Mirrors don't actually break, they simply multiply. If you turn
your socks inside out, does that mean that the entire
universe is wearing your socks? And you are not? No one,
not one person, not ever, No one has ever been
inside an empty room. Why do we talk about a
lot of hair with the word hair, but when we
only have a few strands of them, we say the
plural hair. Have you ever noticed this one? When you
eat at a restaurant, it's weird for you and your
partner to eat the exact same thing, But when you
have dinner at home, then it becomes weird for you
to eat something different. You do not know what you
have forgotten. And here's a deep one to finish today.
Have you ever stopped to wonder which places that you've
already visited for the last time? Just some fun stuff
to ponder, observations and questions as we explore just a
few of our deep thoughts, curiosities, and true stories. Okay,
grown ups, if you would like to shield your young
sesame street watching children from talk about the nuts and
bolts and players behind the fuzzy fur and feathers, you
might want to wait until the kids are playing in
the other room before you listen to this one. I
am here to tell stories. I am not here to
ruin childhoods all right, you've had time to hit the
pause button, so here we go. Carol Spinney lived an
ironic life. On one hand, he was loved by the
entire world. On the other hand, nobody knew who he was.
He was a hidden figure, hidden behind a character. Since
the launch of the legendary children's television show Sesame Street
in nineteen sixty nine, Carol the Man had been Carol
the Puppeteer, living and walking and talking underneath the feathery
skin of Big Bird. He really was a renaissance man.
He had done so much in his life. He illustrated
a comic strip for the military. He animated cartoons, He
had done puppeteering for several children's shows in the fifties
and sixties. He wrote several books. He was a painter,
And finally, one day he met Jim Henson, who was
impressed with his puppeteering, and Carol Spinney joined the Sesame
Street family to become Big Bird for a full forty
nine years. There's a wonderful documentary about this man. It
released in twenty fourteen. It's called I Am Big Bird,
and it will just fill up your heart anyway. Years ago,
Carol Spinney, the puppeteer was invited to become Carol Spinney
the scientist. NASA wanted to get more kids interested in
space involved in science, and they approached Carol Spinney to
talk about getting Big Bird in the space program as
in actual space flight. Big Bird really going into space.
What an amazing idea. And so the puppeteer and the
engineers started talking about logistics. How might we make this happen.
Let's get the next generation excited about space. And yet
space would be the problem, not outer space, but the
space inside the spacecraft. NASA astronaut requirements don't allow anyone
to exceed six feet three inches in height. The Big
Bird costume is a eight feet two inches. Carol Spinney's
journey as the Big Yellow Bird was grounded before it
could even begin. Somebody else was chosen to launch a
space in his place. And it's here that our story
takes a somber turn. Sesame Street actually stopped filming on
launch day. Everyone took a break and gathered around the TV.
Carol Spinney right there with his fellow actors and puppeteers,
and we can only wonder what he might have been
thinking on that day as he watched the mission that
once might have included him. He watched instead the other
educator and inspirer who joined the astronauts, a woman, a
teacher named Christa mcculloff, the woman who would perish with
six others on the morning of January twenty eighth, nineteen
eighty six. The Space Shuttle launch that Carol Spinney had
missed was the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Mary
Ann Smith was a knocker upper and people paid her
for this service. Now, hang on, hang on, this is
not what you might think. It is knocker uppers. This
was a thing back in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
The Industrial Revolution had been well underway and people were
working long hours and factories or underground and mines. They
needed the services of a knocker upper. Now picture this
profession in the United Kingdom in the nineteen thirties, a
profession usually populated by older people, and they would walk
the streets early in the mornings or at the midday
hours through dusk into the late night. Mary Smith had
become a known face around London's East End, and her
price was sixpence a week, that is half a shilling,
which comes to about six pennies a week in those days.
Mary the knocker upper was an alarm clock. Now, mechanical
alarm clocks did exist back then, but they were not
reliable and frankly they were really expended if most people
could not afford one, and so the alternative was to
hire a knocker upper, someone like Mary Smith, someone who
would show up at a designated time to get them
out of bed. And Mary's method was a simple one.
She got herself up around three in the morning, she
got dressed, ate a small breakfast, and then she would
grab her pea shooter, a straw and an arsenal of
peas that she would shoot through it like you would
shoot a blow dart gun. And every day she would
go out and take to the dark streets and she
would find your house and stand at the window or
door and she would fire projectile peas upon it until
you got up. And don't even think about ignoring this sound.
That diligent Mary would not leave until she was sure
that you were wide awake. And she was good. There's
actually a children's book written about this woman, and it
depicts her walking London, waking up everyone from common fishermen
to the mayor. And of course people haven't changed. They
were then like we are today. Some woke up cheery
and grateful, and others woke up grumpy and gripy. But
Mary Smith would be there sometimes, as the story goes,
shouting a good morning up toward the house and even
offering you a cup of hot tea. This was a
somewhat popular profession. Mary's direct competition was an old man
three miles away, and he was also a knocker upper.
His method was to bang on windows and doors with
a long fishing rod, irritating but effective. Of course, today
we have all kinds of annoying ways to get ourselves
out of bed. Any of these things are novelty alarm
clocks that we can buy online. In fact, you can
purchase right now a flying alarm clock. It's got an
actual rotor blade, like a helicopter blade, and it launches
and flies and bangs around your room. You can buy
a clocky. This is a mobile alarm with wheels. It
drives around and smashes into the furniture and the walls
until you get up to shut it off. There's a
target shooting clock. You actually keep a laser gun by
your bed. The clock itself has a bull's eye on
the other side of the room. You have to get
up and aim your gun and hit the bullseye to
shut the alarm off. There are police siren alarms, fire
station bell alarms, symbol alarms, glowing pillow alarms. Your pillow
turns into a white lights as you've got your head
buried within it. And there are hideous contraptions that come
without a snooze button. Wait a minute, no snooze. That
is simply unthinkable, And perhaps my favorite modern contraption is
the most insidious. It is called the Snooze and lose
smart alarm clock, and it does have a snooze button,
But every time you press it, it taps your bank
account and it donates money to an organization that you hate.
You've set it all up in advance. Every time you snooze,
money goes out of your account into the account of
someone you detest. Oh, it makes you appreciate the old
time knocker uppers people like Mary Smith, that lovely woman
who visits your home with kind words, hot tea and
her tiny little pea shooter. Given the alternatives, it doesn't
sound at all like a bad way to start the day, Okay,
And let's finish with one that ties directly into the
Christmas holiday season. Except this story isn't resented. This is
about a Christmas that happened over one hundred years ago
in the muddy trenches on the Western Front. It was
the First World War and it was hell for the holidays.
Nineteen fourteen saw the beginning of that four year conflict.
In five months after the first shots were fired, both
the opposing British and German forces found themselves at war.
On Christmas Eve, the soldiers, already so exhausted and weary
and sometimes bored and trying to pass the time, would
be so close to the trenches of the enemy that
many who could bridge the language barrier would engage in
conversation from one trench to another. A German might ask
someone in the British army about English football, or the
weather in London, or somebody's sweetheart back home, and vice versa.
Many British soldiers would engage in conversation with the enemy
in German conversations before and between the bullets and bombs.
It was so strange to see. Christmas nineteen fourteen, roughly
one hundred thousand British and German troops sat within their
trenches during a short informal cease fire. British machine gunner
Bruce Bairn's father was there. He was shivering in the mock,
jammed into a trench probably eight feet deep by six
feet wide, weary of all the sleepless nights and the
stale food and the wet cigarettes. But something magical would
happen on that Christmas Eve. It was around ten o'clock
at night that Bruce heard a sound. He was hearing
voices from the enemy trenches across the field. So Bruce
and a few buddies gathered around to listen, and they
realized what they were hearing was the sound of singing.
The German troops were singing Christmas carols, and it wasn't
long before British soldiers were singing right back to them.
And the songs continued for a while until finally a
German soldier shouted out in English, come over here. A
British sergeant responded, you come halfway. I will come halfway.
And what happened next would come to be described as
a Christmas miracle. The sworn enemies of both sides slowly
climbed out of their trenches, and they stood upright and
walked forward into this empty middle zone that they called
no man's land. And the soldiers smiled at each other
and shook hands and exchanged names. They traded cigarettes and
chocolate and bottles of liquor. The killers of two world
powers were meeting in peace for a holiday party that
would last into the night and ring in the first
hours of Christmas Day. Gunner Bruce Bairn's father would one
day write these words about that magical moment. He said,
there was not an atom of hate on either side.
Another British soldier, a guy named John Ferguson, would document
the day. He said, quote, here we were laughing and
chatting to men whom only a few hours before we
were trying to kill. This strange phenomenon was also happening
on battlefields elsewhere. Small pockets of French, German, Belgian and
British troops were holding their own festive seaspires. Across the
Western and parts of the Eastern Front. There was a
British fighter. His name was Ernie Williams, and he would
report hundreds of soldiers representing both the British and German armies.
They were playing a large scale version of soccer, and
beyond the handshakes and the laughter, and the music and
the wine, both enemy camps respectfully allowed the other camps
to collect their dead for a proper burial. The generals
in the field were horrified by all of this. British
generals Sir Horace Smith Dorian would go on to lament
the apathy of his men who were punished for fraternizing
with the enemy. There was a government notice published calling
this interaction treason and sadly, once the singing, then soccer,
and drinks and dancing had waned, the British and the Germans,
under orders from their superiors, were once again forced to
declare war upon the men they had befriended only moments before.
If you travel to the National Memorial Arboretum in England,
you can see there is a statue there commemorating the
nineteen fourteen Christmas Truths. There's a bronze statue of two
hands shaking just like those shaking hands from the Christmas
Eve battlefields of World War One, marking those few brief
moments when warriors welcomed each other in peace, not rivals,
not killers, not victims, not even nations, but men brothers
on this earth, human beings standing side by side and
face to face in Christmas goodwill on a small patch
of land that, just for a few precious moments, belonged
to them all. Rudyard Kipling once wrote these words. He said,
if history were taught in the form of stories, it
would never be forgotten. And I agree. If you want
to get and keep someone's attention, if you want to
interest them, amuse them, distract them, shock them, move and
motivate them, or maybe just join them. As we appreciate
our connection to the elements of our world, few things
are as powerful as the elements of a story. There
was a whole lot going on in the world that
disturbs and distracts us. There is so much to worry
about and grieve. There is work to do, But I
think it is important we never lose the moments of story,
the ability to take the journey, the realization that we
can expand and even liberate minds through stories. What kind
of stories lie ahead for you and me? What will
real world circumstances and fantastic fictions bring us who really knows,
but let us tell them together to each other and
for each other. I think perhaps the author Richard Denny
was right when he said authors do not choose a
story to write. The story chooses us. Thank you so
much for listening, and have a wonderful holiday.
Speaker 3: The Cotta