Ten Cent Trouble

On today's trip through the Cabinet, we'll meet a rowdy crowd and a solo visionary.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. 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.

(00:36):
Let's be honest for a moment. Sports fans are not
necessarily known for their good behavior. It's not unheard of
for riots to break out if a beloved team loses
or even wins. Fans take it on themselves to defend
the honor of their team and clash with fans from
the opposing club. Whether it's the football hooligans of the
UK or baseball fans in the US, these upheavals rarely

(00:59):
end well. In Ohio, there is one such episode from
the nineteen seventies that remains the most infamous in professional
sports history, and it all happened in June of nineteen
seventy four. First, the Cleveland Indians were coming off of
a loss in Texas to the Rangers. It was a
bitter defeat that included an on field brawl between some

(01:19):
of the players not a good example for the fans. Second,
the Indians returned home and prepared to face off against
the Rangers, only now on their own turf. The stadium
management prepared a promotion a ten cent beer night to
draw fans to the game, and the Cleveland Indians hadn't
been performing well, it must be said, so the attendance
was down. They typically drew only about twelve thousand fans

(01:42):
per game. And Third, a local shock jock named Peter
Franklin spent the weeks leading up to the game urging
people to attend, saying that this would be their chance
to take revenge on the Rangers for the brawl in Texas.
All of this leads to a virtual powder keg on
the night of the games is double what it normally
is due to the promotion. There are about twenty four

(02:04):
thousand fans at the stadium, and beyond that, they're consuming
lots and lots of beer. Now it's only three percent alcohol,
but if the beers are only ten cents a piece, well,
the sky's the limit. As one fan said, I had
two dollars. You do the math. Management supposedly limited fans
to six beers each, which is already too many, but
their ability to enforce that limits is questionable. Down on

(02:27):
the field, the game is close. As the night progresses,
fans get more and more restless. Things start to get
wild when a female fan makes her way onto the field.
She crawls on top of the dugout, removes her top,
and starts dancing. She eventually wandered over and tried to
kiss the umpire before finally leaving. Bizarrely, the nudity parade
was only just getting started. Next a man stripped down

(02:49):
and ran across the field in just his socks. You know,
you've got to keep your feet safe after all. Now
it must be said that streakers were actually common at
this time. There had just been one on live TV
at the Academy Awards that previous April. People in the
seventies just really seemed to think it was funny to
get naked in public, and in the case of this
Cleveland Indians game. Next up was a father and son duo,

(03:12):
you know, just to make things even weirder, who walked
out on the field together and mooned everyone. Clearly, the
beers were taking their toll. Soon enough, fans were hurling
cups and hot dogs onto the field management removed the
player's wives from the bleachers, sensing that things were going
to get worse from there. And then suddenly, Rangers player
Jeff Burrows was swarmed with multiple drunk Indian fans who

(03:36):
taunted him, trying to take his hat, and Indians players
came to his defense, tackling the most aggressive fan, and
then all hell broke loose. Hundreds of fans swarmed the field,
running a muck, taking swings at each other and at
the players. Security couldn't handle so many people. The best
they could do was get the players off the field.

(03:57):
The riot raged on for forty five minutes. Police arrived,
but in all the chaos they only managed to arrest
nine people. After that, the umpire you know, the one
who had narrowly escaped being kissed by a streaker earlier,
ruled that the game was a forfeit in favor of
the Rangers. The Cleveland Indians fans had lost their team
the game. Now, curiously, this was not the last ten

(04:20):
cent beer Knight at the stadium. The promoters argue that
it had actually been successful. They had doubled attendance, never
mind the fact that they had gotten everyone so drunk
that they started a riot. Subsequent beer knights went more
smoothly after that, as the Cleveland locals wanted to prove
that they could behate themselves. They were earning their city
quite the negative reputation. However, over the years, the legend

(04:43):
of ten cent beer knights only grew to where it
became something of a badge of honor if you were
actually there. Fans loved to talk tough about how they
drank twenty beers, or took a punch to the jaw,
or stole one of the bases, literally stole one of
the bases. Nowadays, baseball team are very careful to avoid
another of these incidents, limiting guests to two beers and

(05:05):
upping the security at the stadium. But I have to
say that it's curious this did not occur to them
so much sooner. The ancient Greeks told the story of

(05:27):
a boy named Icarus, who was the son of the
world's greatest inventor. When the pair were imprisoned in a tower,
the inventor created mechanical wings out of feathers, beeswax, and
thread so that they could escape together, but Icarus was
intoxicated by the thrill of flight, and forgot his father's
warning to stay low. He flew too close to the sun,

(05:47):
the wax melted, and he plummeted to his death. It is,
of course a story about Hubris, but on a literal level,
it was also a reminder that humans were never really
meant to fly. To the Greeks and many other ancient peoples,
the skies belonged to the gods. Mortals could dream about visiting,
but would never belong there. And for roughly three hundred
thousand years that was true. Then on a blustery December

(06:11):
day in nineteen oh three, it ceased to be true.
Two bicycle mechanic brothers named Orville and Wilbur Wright became
the first humans to achieve powered flight. Their journey lasted
twelve seconds and one hundred and twenty feet, but a
changed history in an instant. Within hours, the right brother's
flight was making headlines. The news of their accomplishment spread
across the globe, igniting imaginations and inspiring a generation of

(06:35):
aviation enthusiasts. Among them was a seven year old boy
from Worcester, Massachusetts named Jean. Jean had always been a
small boy, and his classmates never let him forget that
their teasing left him feeling isolated, and so he found
solace in his daydreams. He spent a lot of time
staring out the window, wishing that he could leave the
world and his bullies behind. So when Jean heard about

(06:58):
the Right brother's flight, came obsessed. Boys had dreamed of
flying for centuries, but now it was possible, and Jane
was determined to be part of it. Over the next decade,
he devoured every book and magazine on aviation he could find,
and by the time he reached adulthood, the American aviation
industry was just beginning to take off. No pun intended.

(07:19):
He graduated from high school the very same year the
first commercial passenger flight was conducted. The plane was still
light years from the jumbo jet days of today. Of course,
air travel was a rickety, open cockpit experience, loud, unsteady,
and far from reliable. Most people at the time saw
flying as more of a dare devil's stunt than a
way to travel, But to Jean, it was the future.

(07:42):
He threw himself into the world of flight, taking every
opportunity he could to get in a cockpit. Within a
few years of graduating high school, he earned a reputation
as one of the best pilots in the country at
a time when that was a very small group. When
he wasn't in the cockpit, Jane was analyzing flights in
the classroom. He attended Clark University and studied physics with

(08:03):
Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry. That education and
personal connection became a launching pad for Jane's career. Pretty
soon he was rubbing elbows with aviation legends. He met
Orville Wright, Howard Hughes, and Charles Lindberg. He was even
an early passenger on the Hindenburg, and, as the story goes,
predicted that it would go up in flames. By the

(08:25):
time World War One broke out, Jane was no longer
just a dreamer. He flew for the US Army in Europe,
engaging in dogfights that were more like duels, where pilots
circled each other in fragile, wooden biplanes, firing rudimentary machine
guns from the cockpit. And two decades later, when World
War II erupted, Jean returned to the skies, this time

(08:46):
in a sleek, metal, closed cockpit modelplane that barely resembled
the primitive aircraft of his youth, Aviation was evolving at
lightning pace, and Jane adapted with it. By the war's end,
he was working on experimental aircraft for the US Air Force,
pushing the boundaries of human flight. Gene served until nineteen
fifty six, when he retired at the rank of colonel.

(09:08):
He stayed active in the advancing field and later became
a consultant for NASA. In July of nineteen sixty nine,
the seventy three year old was watching history unfold yet again.
Jane had already witnessed aviation's evolution from fragile biplanes to
supersonic jets, but this was something else entirely, a rocket
carrying three men beyond Earth's atmosphere. As the lunar module

(09:32):
touched down, Jane held his breath, and when the grainy
black and white image flickered onto the screen, he saw
the impossible become real, a man stepping onto the Moon's surface.
For Gene, though this was more than just history in
the making, it was also deeply personal because one of
those lunar astronauts was his very own sun Eugene Aldrin Junior,

(09:55):
better known to us as buzz 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 Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works.

(10:18):
I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can
learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com.
And until next time, stay curious.