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 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: We're gonna be talking about Harry Truman, Doris Day, and Red.
Speaker 2: China, Harry Truman, Doda de What do you know about
Harry Truman.
Speaker 1: Harry Truman was the thirty third President of the United States.
What you may not know is that he had only
been vice president for a couple of months before he
had to take over as president because Franklin Delano Roosevelt
suddenly died of a cerebral brain hemorrhage unexpectedly. The thing
that you may not know is that Harry Truman hadn't
got any information about what was going on with the
Soviets or the development of the atomic bomb. But four
months later he was going to have to make the
decision to drop the bomb on two different cities in Japan.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So he was born in eighteen forty four. He
was a farmer in Missouri. He served in World War One.
He's got a middle initial of S, and a lot
of people know, hey, the initials doesn't actually stand for anything,
it's just S. But as it turns out, it was
a way that he could be named after both of
his grandfathers. One of them had the middle name Ship,
the other one had the first name Solomon, and so
the S stood basically for both of their names. He
became vice president for the third term of FDR because
he had uncovered about fifteen million dollars worth of waste
that was going on during the war and had solved
that problem. We start this song with Billy Joel's birth
right nineteen forty nine. So when he was president in
forty nine, the Soviets blockaded the western part of Berlin,
weren't letting anything come in, and so it was Truman's
idea to go, Okay, you're not going to let us
drive the fo in, we will airlift it in. And
so that's what they did. He started airlifting supplies into
western Berlin and on May ninth, nineteen forty nine. Billy
Joel was born on May eleventh, nineteen forty nine. Just
two days later, the Soviets pulled back their blockade because
of what Harry S. Truman did. Wow, that's incredible. All right,
tell me what you know about Doris Day.
Speaker 2: Okay. Doris Day was born Doris Mary Ann Koppelhoff in
nineteen twenty two. Kopplehoff is not the greatest, right, So
here's the thing. She began her career as a singer.
She changed her name to Doris Day after singing the
song day after day, day after day. So she landed
her role in a movie called Romance at the High
Season nineteen forty eight, after impressing the writer and the
director Afting hearing her song Embraceable U. From there, she
started several musicals, including By the Light of the Silvery Moon,
which I know from Looney Tunes and so do you.
She also started in the movie Calamity Jane and the
Man Who Knew Too Much, the Alphad Hitchcock classic. Now. Then,
from that movie she sang her signature song k Sara Sarah,
but she hated that song when they came to her
and said, you're gonna sing that. She's like, fine, I'll
sing this one time and that's it. Well, it became
her signature song. She's sang in a billion times after that.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: She also starred in a movie I'll See You in
My Dreams. Go back to our Patreon episode where we
did on the Giant song and Pillow Talk with Rock
Hudson where she became a lifelong friends with Rock Hudson.
Most people don't know this. She turned down the role
of Missus Robinson in The Graduate how About that It's
Been Cool? She turned it down because she didn't like
the subject matter, and she was dubbed the world's oldest
vergeon because of her squeaky clean image. She hosted several
TV shows and became an animal and AIDS activist. Now then,
she's name checked in We Didn't Start to Fire by
Billy Joel, Obviously, Wake Me Up Before You Go Go
by Wham You Make, Wrap Her Up by Elton John
and dig It by the Beatles. She also did several
songs with Johnny Ray, who we're gonna be talking about tomorrow. Okay,
de what do you know about Red China?
Speaker 1: Okay? There is far too much history for me to
tell you the whole story about Red China, but I
will tell you this. It has been Red China for
about eighty years now. Before that, it was a dynasty
for about two thousand years, so that's pretty freaking impressive.
But in nineteen twelve the dynasty was broken up and
China kind of became the subject of various factions run
by war lords. And then Shang Kai Shek took over
and he started running everything as best he could, which
he made a lot of progress, but he was also
kind of an asshole, and so the Communists in nineteen
twenty seven started a war with Shang Kai Shek's Kuming
Teng government, and that civil war went on for a
long time. Nineteen thirty seven Japanese War starts as well.
But then by October first, nineteen forty nine, the Communists
win and the official proclamation of Communist China takes place.
Now they called themselves the People's Republic of China, but
over here in the US we called them Red China
because they were the Communists. Side note. Nineteen eighty nine,
when the came out, there were political reforms going on
in China, and that is when we had the Tenaman
Square protests and mask. That's it for today, folks. We
will catch you on our next episode.