December 27, 2018 • 8 mins
Connections are often an invisible thing, but they bind us together in unique ways. Today's journey through the Cabinet will reveal a few of the more surprising ones.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. The Old West a
(00:28):
time of change and growth, of outlaws and renegades, gunfights
in the streets, and swift justice without all the red tape.
Disagreements were settled when they happened, and often the only
form of mediation required was a bullet. If the movies,
television shows, and video games we all experience are true,
the Old West was a time when laws meant less
(00:50):
than one's personal code of honor. If someone thought you
did them wrong, you made it right, or you died trying.
One man thought Robert had done them wrong during a
poker game in eighteen fifty eight. It had been in
San Francisco, just eight years after California joined the country
as a full fledged state. The city was growing out
(01:10):
from under the thumb of Mexico's rule and planting the
seeds of the San Francisco we know today. Originally nothing
more than a trading post for the West, San Francisco's
dirt roads had been paved over, and it's hills leveled
for new homes and businesses. One of those new businesses
happened to be a saloon. You'd recognize the scene immediately,
(01:31):
a dusty wooden floor, men in heavy jackets and tall hats,
all sitting around a table, drinking whiskey, and in one
dark corner, a game of cards with the stakes higher
than they'd ever been. Lose a hand, lose a shirt,
or maybe more. Robert Fallon had been playing for a
while with a group of men who nursed their beers
(01:52):
and down shots in between their hands. Some want a little,
some lost a little. But Robert had something about him,
a kind of aura that had skipped over the other players,
a kind of luck. But they didn't see it that way,
and they didn't take kindly to cheaters either. Actually, they
didn't take kindly to anyone winning who wasn't them. Robert
(02:12):
had amassed a small fortune at his seat, about six
hundred dollars, and his companions thought something was amiss. Tired
of losing every hand, one man stood up and called
him out for cheating. Robert, surprised by the allegation, tried
to explain he had done nothing wrong, but no one
wanted to hear it more excuses from a line cheat,
(02:34):
they figured, so they shot him before he'd had a
chance to prove his innocence. His opponents, not wanting to
stop a game for something as inconsequential as a dead cheater,
looked for someone else to take his place at the table.
The new player hunkered down in the dead man's seat,
and the table gifted him with the six hundred dollars
his predecessor had already won hand after hand, This new
(02:57):
young man seemed to display a similar break and of
luck as Roberts. He turned that six hundred dollars into
in no time, and just like before, his opponents weren't
very happy. But before anyone could pull a revolver from
their holster, the police burst into the saloon. Word had
traveled fast, and they were on the hunt for the
(03:18):
late Fallon's killer. They surveyed the scene and asked a
few questions before telling the players that that six hundred
dollars that Robert had won should go to his next
of kin and not this new card player. The players
looked around, unsure of how to find Robert's family. They
didn't know anything about him, where he'd come from where
he was headed. All of it was a mystery. The
(03:42):
new player, however, this young man who had almost quadrupled
Robert's winnings that night, wanted to see whose money it
was that he'd taken. He looked down at the body
and got one good look at the face, and then
new the money had been his all along. Robert Fallon
had been killed that night, only to have his estranged
(04:04):
son take his place. The two hadn't spoken in seven years.
And that right there is what some might call the
luck of the draw. We're rarely in the right place
(04:30):
at the right time when it counts. On the eve
of a lottery drawing, we buy a ticket and hope
for the best, But it's always someone three states away
who bought their ticket before us, who wins the jackpots.
And there we are in the wrong place at the
wrong time. In the case of Michael Dick, carpenter and
father from Suffolk, England, he'd been right where he needed
to be at just the right time. He'd lost track
(04:54):
of his daughter. In the late nineties, he and his
wife had divorced, and after the papers had been signed,
she and their Lisa moved to Sudbury. They hadn't gone far,
maybe a handful of miles, but Michael somehow lost touch
with both of them. Ten years passed and Michael found
himself part of a new family with a new wife
and two daughters, but he never forgot about Lisa. She
(05:16):
crossed his mind every day. What was she learning in school?
What kind of food did she like? Was she happy?
Did she remember him? In the summer of two thousand seven,
Michael had had enough. He couldn't be content knowing his
daughter was out there somewhere without him. All he had
to go on was a general location and a father's
determination to make his family hole again. He and his
(05:40):
two daughters went door to door in search of Lisa,
but the effort proved too great for the three of them.
His next thought was to scour the local election records
for her name and information. Nothing. She was a ghost,
and Michael was at the end of his rope. And
then he got an idea, A long shot, really, but
it was the only hard left for him to play.
(06:01):
He contacted a local reporter at the newspaper in Sudbury
and asked them to run a story about his efforts
in finding his daughter. Instead of them running all over
town looking for her. They'd let her come to them.
The reporter agreed and snapped a photo of Michael and
his two girls to run alongside the story. All he
had to do now is wait. The article ran the
(06:23):
next day, but neither Michael nor the reporter got a response.
Another day passed still nothing, and then days later the
phone rang. Lisa had found the story, well, her friends
had found it, and they showed it to her. She
read through the piece and just knew she had to
get in touch. Lisa and her father met up that
(06:45):
evening to catch up on a decade's worth of lost time,
exchanging hugs and stories and share pictures of their lives
that had played out separately up to that point. But
amidst the tales of her upbringing and the photos of
her children, his instant grandchildren, as he'd like to call them,
was one other story, a story Michael wouldn't have believed
(07:06):
if he hadn't seen the proof for himself. When her
friends showed her the article in the Sudbury newspaper, something
immediately stood out to her about the photograph they printed
above it. There was her father, older and with less
hair than she remembered, with his arms around her half sisters.
Lisa didn't know them, but she did know one other
(07:26):
person in the photo. She hadn't expected to see herself.
When the reporter had snapped the picture, they had also
caught Lisa in the background, pushing one of her children
along in a stroller, yards away from her father and
half sisters. What's more, she had moved out of Sudbury
a long time ago and had only been there in
(07:47):
the city for a single day to visit her mother.
That picture of Lisa and her father was a one
in a million shot. Michael may not have won the
lottery that day, but both he and his daughter had
been in just the right place at just the right time,
and because of that, they want something a whole lot better. Family.
(08:13):
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
with How Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,
(08:36):
and you can learn all about it over at the
World of lore dot com, and until next time, stay curious.
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. The Old West a
(00:28):
time of change and growth, of outlaws and renegades, gunfights
in the streets, and swift justice without all the red tape.
Disagreements were settled when they happened, and often the only
form of mediation required was a bullet. If the movies,
television shows, and video games we all experience are true,
the Old West was a time when laws meant less
(00:50):
than one's personal code of honor. If someone thought you
did them wrong, you made it right, or you died trying.
One man thought Robert had done them wrong during a
poker game in eighteen fifty eight. It had been in
San Francisco, just eight years after California joined the country
as a full fledged state. The city was growing out
(01:10):
from under the thumb of Mexico's rule and planting the
seeds of the San Francisco we know today. Originally nothing
more than a trading post for the West, San Francisco's
dirt roads had been paved over, and it's hills leveled
for new homes and businesses. One of those new businesses
happened to be a saloon. You'd recognize the scene immediately,
(01:31):
a dusty wooden floor, men in heavy jackets and tall hats,
all sitting around a table, drinking whiskey, and in one
dark corner, a game of cards with the stakes higher
than they'd ever been. Lose a hand, lose a shirt,
or maybe more. Robert Fallon had been playing for a
while with a group of men who nursed their beers
(01:52):
and down shots in between their hands. Some want a little,
some lost a little. But Robert had something about him,
a kind of aura that had skipped over the other players,
a kind of luck. But they didn't see it that way,
and they didn't take kindly to cheaters either. Actually, they
didn't take kindly to anyone winning who wasn't them. Robert
(02:12):
had amassed a small fortune at his seat, about six
hundred dollars, and his companions thought something was amiss. Tired
of losing every hand, one man stood up and called
him out for cheating. Robert, surprised by the allegation, tried
to explain he had done nothing wrong, but no one
wanted to hear it more excuses from a line cheat,
(02:34):
they figured, so they shot him before he'd had a
chance to prove his innocence. His opponents, not wanting to
stop a game for something as inconsequential as a dead cheater,
looked for someone else to take his place at the table.
The new player hunkered down in the dead man's seat,
and the table gifted him with the six hundred dollars
his predecessor had already won hand after hand, This new
(02:57):
young man seemed to display a similar break and of
luck as Roberts. He turned that six hundred dollars into
in no time, and just like before, his opponents weren't
very happy. But before anyone could pull a revolver from
their holster, the police burst into the saloon. Word had
traveled fast, and they were on the hunt for the
(03:18):
late Fallon's killer. They surveyed the scene and asked a
few questions before telling the players that that six hundred
dollars that Robert had won should go to his next
of kin and not this new card player. The players
looked around, unsure of how to find Robert's family. They
didn't know anything about him, where he'd come from where
he was headed. All of it was a mystery. The
(03:42):
new player, however, this young man who had almost quadrupled
Robert's winnings that night, wanted to see whose money it
was that he'd taken. He looked down at the body
and got one good look at the face, and then
new the money had been his all along. Robert Fallon
had been killed that night, only to have his estranged
(04:04):
son take his place. The two hadn't spoken in seven years.
And that right there is what some might call the
luck of the draw. We're rarely in the right place
(04:30):
at the right time when it counts. On the eve
of a lottery drawing, we buy a ticket and hope
for the best, But it's always someone three states away
who bought their ticket before us, who wins the jackpots.
And there we are in the wrong place at the
wrong time. In the case of Michael Dick, carpenter and
father from Suffolk, England, he'd been right where he needed
to be at just the right time. He'd lost track
(04:54):
of his daughter. In the late nineties, he and his
wife had divorced, and after the papers had been signed,
she and their Lisa moved to Sudbury. They hadn't gone far,
maybe a handful of miles, but Michael somehow lost touch
with both of them. Ten years passed and Michael found
himself part of a new family with a new wife
and two daughters, but he never forgot about Lisa. She
(05:16):
crossed his mind every day. What was she learning in school?
What kind of food did she like? Was she happy?
Did she remember him? In the summer of two thousand seven,
Michael had had enough. He couldn't be content knowing his
daughter was out there somewhere without him. All he had
to go on was a general location and a father's
determination to make his family hole again. He and his
(05:40):
two daughters went door to door in search of Lisa,
but the effort proved too great for the three of them.
His next thought was to scour the local election records
for her name and information. Nothing. She was a ghost,
and Michael was at the end of his rope. And
then he got an idea, A long shot, really, but
it was the only hard left for him to play.
(06:01):
He contacted a local reporter at the newspaper in Sudbury
and asked them to run a story about his efforts
in finding his daughter. Instead of them running all over
town looking for her. They'd let her come to them.
The reporter agreed and snapped a photo of Michael and
his two girls to run alongside the story. All he
had to do now is wait. The article ran the
(06:23):
next day, but neither Michael nor the reporter got a response.
Another day passed still nothing, and then days later the
phone rang. Lisa had found the story, well, her friends
had found it, and they showed it to her. She
read through the piece and just knew she had to
get in touch. Lisa and her father met up that
(06:45):
evening to catch up on a decade's worth of lost time,
exchanging hugs and stories and share pictures of their lives
that had played out separately up to that point. But
amidst the tales of her upbringing and the photos of
her children, his instant grandchildren, as he'd like to call them,
was one other story, a story Michael wouldn't have believed
(07:06):
if he hadn't seen the proof for himself. When her
friends showed her the article in the Sudbury newspaper, something
immediately stood out to her about the photograph they printed
above it. There was her father, older and with less
hair than she remembered, with his arms around her half sisters.
Lisa didn't know them, but she did know one other
(07:26):
person in the photo. She hadn't expected to see herself.
When the reporter had snapped the picture, they had also
caught Lisa in the background, pushing one of her children
along in a stroller, yards away from her father and
half sisters. What's more, she had moved out of Sudbury
a long time ago and had only been there in
(07:47):
the city for a single day to visit her mother.
That picture of Lisa and her father was a one
in a million shot. Michael may not have won the
lottery that day, but both he and his daughter had
been in just the right place at just the right time,
and because of that, they want something a whole lot better. Family.
(08:13):
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
with How Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,
(08:36):
and you can learn all about it over at the
World of lore dot com, and until next time, stay curious.
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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