December 31, 2020 • 10 mins
The decisions we make in life have a way of carving out a path for us. But two such individuals made the sorts of choices that made them perfect additions to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
I Heart Radio and Grim 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
(00:27):
of Curiosities. Aristotle once said that envy is paying at
the good fortune of others. Seeing someone with something we
want doesn't instill good feelings within us. It breeds resentment
and anger, and it can make us act out in
(00:48):
unbecoming ways. Roland Roly Fingers didn't know that he was
jealous when he caught a glimpse of Reggie Jackson walking
onto the field in two fingers in. Jackson played for
the Oakland Athletics baseball team as pitcher and outfielder, respectively.
Jackson had arrived at spring training that year sporting a
brand new mustache, a blatant act of rebellion against the
(01:10):
unwritten policy that forbade players from growing facial hair. When
it became clear that Jackson wanted to only stand out
apart from the rest of the crowd, Fingers and a
few other players thought that they'd play a little prank
on him. He and his teammates, like Jim Catfish Hunter,
grew their own mustaches too. Now, what they expected was
that the A's manager, Dick Williams would tell everyone to
(01:32):
shave them off, including Jackson. Williams was a conservative man who,
along with other managers, believed that players should be clean
shaven at all times. Instead, team owner Charlie Finley got
wind of what Fingers was doing. He thought the small
rebellion would be a great way to draw crowds out
to the stadium to see all those mustachioed men playing ball.
(01:53):
Finley even offered a three incentive for any player sporting
a mustache or beard by opening day, which happily paid
after Fingers ran to the mound wearing what would become
his trademark look, an epic handlebar mustache, and just like that,
the picture had become a member of the Oakland A's
infamous mustache Gang. What Finley hadn't counted on was Fingers
(02:14):
actually liking his facial hair. Raleigh, like many athletes, was
a superstitious fellow. From the first pitch that season, the
A's started winning games, so there was no way the
mustache was coming off, and as long as they were winning,
Williams and Finley didn't care whether their players wore a
pencil mustache, a goatee, or a big white beard like
Santa Claus Heck. Finley even grew one himself. Fingers played
(02:39):
for the A's for another four years, winning three World
Series championships and earning an m v P Award. Then
he signed with the San Diego Padres, playing from nineteen
seventy seven to nineteen eighty before moving to the Milwaukee Brewers. Sadly,
a series of injuries and health setbacks kept Fingers out
of his nineteen eighty three season with the Brewers, and
he needed back surgery to remove a hernie aided disc
(03:00):
the year after that, but he did eventually return to
the pitcher's mound almost as good as new. The Brewers
released him in nineteen eighty five, when he was thirty
nine years old. Now, for most players, that would have
been the end of their professional careers, but Fingers still
had some fight left in him. Cincinnati Red's manager Pete
Rose saw that fight and tried to get him to
sign on with him. There was just one catch, a
(03:23):
rule that had come from the team's owner, Marge Shot,
which every player was forced to obey. Shots beloved St.
Bernard SHOTSI was the only living thing allowed on the
field to have hair anywhere but the top of its head.
Any player working for her was required to shave their
facial hair if they wanted to put on a Red's uniform.
Raleigh Fingers didn't much care for shots rule. By two
(03:47):
he'd become the first pitcher to reach three hundred saves,
and he was just over six years away from being
inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Yet, despite his
impressive career, many fans today remember him for just one
decision that changed his entire life. Fingers was all set
to join the Reds in six but the blanket policy
about no facial hair just didn't sit well with him.
(04:09):
He got on the phone with the general manager to
work out a deal, but unfortunately Shot wouldn't budge, and
if Fingers hoped to play ball, he had to follow
the rule. The mustache had to go. Given no other option,
Fingers put his foot down for good. He chose his
mustache over his career, officially retiring from professional baseball in
(04:44):
just one family was responsible for all nineties. Seven lighthouses
built along the coast of Scotland between seventeen ninety and ninety.
Today those Scottish lighthouses are automated. The weather beaten lighthouse
keepers were replaced with computers, Tungsten bulbs were swapped out
for l ed's. It was the process of change that
comes for everything from the past as new minds experiment
(05:05):
with past achievements. But it's still a story worth telling,
in part because, like many ambitious and important projects, it
all started with a tragedy. That's when Robert was just
a boy and his father and uncle had died. They
were merchants from Glasgow and they made their living shipping
goods across the Atlantic on a trip to the island
of St Kitts, though the two men got sick when
(05:27):
they died. They left Robert and his mother at home
in Scotland to make do. Life was hard, but Robert
eventually met the man who would marry his mother and
light his way forward. He was a tinsmith, a skilled
mechanic and crucially a lampmaker, and he had just been
selected as the engineer for the new Northern Lighthouse Board.
So young Robert became engineer's assistant. That meant he had
(05:50):
a lot of learning to do, but he took to
the rocky crags of the Scottish coast and the calculations
of stone and light like no one had expected. He
was an excellent assistant, and in just a few short
years he was on the job supervising the construction of
lighthouses that his stepfather was designing. Engineering became his trade too.
(06:10):
Maybe Robert thought about the death of his father when
he stood on a cliff's edge and looked out over
the ocean. The rocks and reefs off Scotland's coast had
taken thousands of lives. In one spot east of Dundee,
about six ships were wrecked every winter on an underwater
shelf of sandstone. It was known as Bell Rock, probably
because in the hundreds a warning bell had been built,
(06:32):
but it didn't last, and Robert knew that nothing protected
ships in that spot. Now people were losing their lives
and their livelihoods there every year. Generations of children were
being orphaned by the sandstone hazards. So he got to
work building his most ambitious project. In fact, the project
was so difficult and so expensive that at first the
(06:52):
Northern Lighthouse Board thought it was impossible, but when the
sixty four gun warship HMS Yorke went down on that
spot and all four members of the crew were lost
in the raging breakers that put the project into motion.
They brought on one of the most esteemed engineers of
the day, John Renny, to help with a design, while
Roberts and his building crew tackled the construction work. And
(07:15):
it was a heroic challenge, not least because they could
only work for a few hours each day at low
tide before the waters swept in and reminded them that
they were building their tower on a watery graveyard. But
after four years the work was done. It's an incredible
feat and it still stands today, the oldest sea washed
tower in existence, built down into the partially submerged reef.
(07:38):
It was a kind of wonder of the modern world.
It wasn't just lighthouses that Robert engineered, though over time
he came to design and build bridges, roads and railways too,
But it was his inventions of new kinds of lights
for lighthouses that earned him the most respect. He even
got a medal from the King of the Netherlands for that,
and that set the tone for the family. Robert's three
(08:00):
us followed in his footsteps. They became a whole family
of engineers, and in the years that followed, from seventeen
ninety all the way up to nineteen forty eight, members
of the family became engineers, experimented with new technologies, and
built the nineties seven lighthouses that still like the North
Sea and the Northern Atlantic. There are a few interesting
(08:20):
things about that, though, not least that the family saw
their work first and foremost as a duty to the nation.
Rather than taking on patents on their inventions, they offered
them to the world, without expecting anything in return, without
trying to turn their most helpful contributions into a new
tide of wealth crashing into their personal coffers. But not
everyone in the family was equally ready for the family business.
(08:43):
One man who was named after that original Robert, found
that it was the adventure on the high seas and
the drama of life and death on the open ocean
that set him a light. And in fact, in the
years that his family trained him to be an engineer,
he learned something altogether different. What I gleaned I am
sure I do not know, he said, but he had
(09:03):
already determined to be something else. He loved the art
of words, and he said that everything he learned from
hardened sailors and genius technicians interested me only as properties
for some possible romance, or as words to add to
my vocabulary. We can be grateful for all of that learning, though,
the stormy seas and craggy rocks of the Scottish coast
(09:25):
became the setting for some of Scottish literature's most beloved stories.
When that Robert put his pen to paper, he set
tales on scotland stormy coasts and engineered plots that would
light the way for the coming generations of adventure seekers
with a monumental achievement that rings down through the years,
like the lighthouse on Bell Rock. It was the second
(09:45):
Roberts who put the family name in lights when he
invented a crew of Wily Brigands in the wake of
his father's journey to the Caribbean, and Robert Lewis Stevenson
became known as the author of the most famous story
of piracy and adventure in the English language, Jem Treasure Island.
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
(10:07):
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 and you can learn all about it over at
(10:28):
the World of Lore dot com. And until next time,
stay curious. Yeah,
Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
I Heart Radio and Grim 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
(00:27):
of Curiosities. Aristotle once said that envy is paying at
the good fortune of others. Seeing someone with something we
want doesn't instill good feelings within us. It breeds resentment
and anger, and it can make us act out in
(00:48):
unbecoming ways. Roland Roly Fingers didn't know that he was
jealous when he caught a glimpse of Reggie Jackson walking
onto the field in two fingers in. Jackson played for
the Oakland Athletics baseball team as pitcher and outfielder, respectively.
Jackson had arrived at spring training that year sporting a
brand new mustache, a blatant act of rebellion against the
(01:10):
unwritten policy that forbade players from growing facial hair. When
it became clear that Jackson wanted to only stand out
apart from the rest of the crowd, Fingers and a
few other players thought that they'd play a little prank
on him. He and his teammates, like Jim Catfish Hunter,
grew their own mustaches too. Now, what they expected was
that the A's manager, Dick Williams would tell everyone to
(01:32):
shave them off, including Jackson. Williams was a conservative man who,
along with other managers, believed that players should be clean
shaven at all times. Instead, team owner Charlie Finley got
wind of what Fingers was doing. He thought the small
rebellion would be a great way to draw crowds out
to the stadium to see all those mustachioed men playing ball.
(01:53):
Finley even offered a three incentive for any player sporting
a mustache or beard by opening day, which happily paid
after Fingers ran to the mound wearing what would become
his trademark look, an epic handlebar mustache, and just like that,
the picture had become a member of the Oakland A's
infamous mustache Gang. What Finley hadn't counted on was Fingers
(02:14):
actually liking his facial hair. Raleigh, like many athletes, was
a superstitious fellow. From the first pitch that season, the
A's started winning games, so there was no way the
mustache was coming off, and as long as they were winning,
Williams and Finley didn't care whether their players wore a
pencil mustache, a goatee, or a big white beard like
Santa Claus Heck. Finley even grew one himself. Fingers played
(02:39):
for the A's for another four years, winning three World
Series championships and earning an m v P Award. Then
he signed with the San Diego Padres, playing from nineteen
seventy seven to nineteen eighty before moving to the Milwaukee Brewers. Sadly,
a series of injuries and health setbacks kept Fingers out
of his nineteen eighty three season with the Brewers, and
he needed back surgery to remove a hernie aided disc
(03:00):
the year after that, but he did eventually return to
the pitcher's mound almost as good as new. The Brewers
released him in nineteen eighty five, when he was thirty
nine years old. Now, for most players, that would have
been the end of their professional careers, but Fingers still
had some fight left in him. Cincinnati Red's manager Pete
Rose saw that fight and tried to get him to
sign on with him. There was just one catch, a
(03:23):
rule that had come from the team's owner, Marge Shot,
which every player was forced to obey. Shots beloved St.
Bernard SHOTSI was the only living thing allowed on the
field to have hair anywhere but the top of its head.
Any player working for her was required to shave their
facial hair if they wanted to put on a Red's uniform.
Raleigh Fingers didn't much care for shots rule. By two
(03:47):
he'd become the first pitcher to reach three hundred saves,
and he was just over six years away from being
inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Yet, despite his
impressive career, many fans today remember him for just one
decision that changed his entire life. Fingers was all set
to join the Reds in six but the blanket policy
about no facial hair just didn't sit well with him.
(04:09):
He got on the phone with the general manager to
work out a deal, but unfortunately Shot wouldn't budge, and
if Fingers hoped to play ball, he had to follow
the rule. The mustache had to go. Given no other option,
Fingers put his foot down for good. He chose his
mustache over his career, officially retiring from professional baseball in
(04:44):
just one family was responsible for all nineties. Seven lighthouses
built along the coast of Scotland between seventeen ninety and ninety.
Today those Scottish lighthouses are automated. The weather beaten lighthouse
keepers were replaced with computers, Tungsten bulbs were swapped out
for l ed's. It was the process of change that
comes for everything from the past as new minds experiment
(05:05):
with past achievements. But it's still a story worth telling,
in part because, like many ambitious and important projects, it
all started with a tragedy. That's when Robert was just
a boy and his father and uncle had died. They
were merchants from Glasgow and they made their living shipping
goods across the Atlantic on a trip to the island
of St Kitts, though the two men got sick when
(05:27):
they died. They left Robert and his mother at home
in Scotland to make do. Life was hard, but Robert
eventually met the man who would marry his mother and
light his way forward. He was a tinsmith, a skilled
mechanic and crucially a lampmaker, and he had just been
selected as the engineer for the new Northern Lighthouse Board.
So young Robert became engineer's assistant. That meant he had
(05:50):
a lot of learning to do, but he took to
the rocky crags of the Scottish coast and the calculations
of stone and light like no one had expected. He
was an excellent assistant, and in just a few short
years he was on the job supervising the construction of
lighthouses that his stepfather was designing. Engineering became his trade too.
(06:10):
Maybe Robert thought about the death of his father when
he stood on a cliff's edge and looked out over
the ocean. The rocks and reefs off Scotland's coast had
taken thousands of lives. In one spot east of Dundee,
about six ships were wrecked every winter on an underwater
shelf of sandstone. It was known as Bell Rock, probably
because in the hundreds a warning bell had been built,
(06:32):
but it didn't last, and Robert knew that nothing protected
ships in that spot. Now people were losing their lives
and their livelihoods there every year. Generations of children were
being orphaned by the sandstone hazards. So he got to
work building his most ambitious project. In fact, the project
was so difficult and so expensive that at first the
(06:52):
Northern Lighthouse Board thought it was impossible, but when the
sixty four gun warship HMS Yorke went down on that
spot and all four members of the crew were lost
in the raging breakers that put the project into motion.
They brought on one of the most esteemed engineers of
the day, John Renny, to help with a design, while
Roberts and his building crew tackled the construction work. And
(07:15):
it was a heroic challenge, not least because they could
only work for a few hours each day at low
tide before the waters swept in and reminded them that
they were building their tower on a watery graveyard. But
after four years the work was done. It's an incredible
feat and it still stands today, the oldest sea washed
tower in existence, built down into the partially submerged reef.
(07:38):
It was a kind of wonder of the modern world.
It wasn't just lighthouses that Robert engineered, though over time
he came to design and build bridges, roads and railways too,
But it was his inventions of new kinds of lights
for lighthouses that earned him the most respect. He even
got a medal from the King of the Netherlands for that,
and that set the tone for the family. Robert's three
(08:00):
us followed in his footsteps. They became a whole family
of engineers, and in the years that followed, from seventeen
ninety all the way up to nineteen forty eight, members
of the family became engineers, experimented with new technologies, and
built the nineties seven lighthouses that still like the North
Sea and the Northern Atlantic. There are a few interesting
(08:20):
things about that, though, not least that the family saw
their work first and foremost as a duty to the nation.
Rather than taking on patents on their inventions, they offered
them to the world, without expecting anything in return, without
trying to turn their most helpful contributions into a new
tide of wealth crashing into their personal coffers. But not
everyone in the family was equally ready for the family business.
(08:43):
One man who was named after that original Robert, found
that it was the adventure on the high seas and
the drama of life and death on the open ocean
that set him a light. And in fact, in the
years that his family trained him to be an engineer,
he learned something altogether different. What I gleaned I am
sure I do not know, he said, but he had
(09:03):
already determined to be something else. He loved the art
of words, and he said that everything he learned from
hardened sailors and genius technicians interested me only as properties
for some possible romance, or as words to add to
my vocabulary. We can be grateful for all of that learning, though,
the stormy seas and craggy rocks of the Scottish coast
(09:25):
became the setting for some of Scottish literature's most beloved stories.
When that Robert put his pen to paper, he set
tales on scotland stormy coasts and engineered plots that would
light the way for the coming generations of adventure seekers
with a monumental achievement that rings down through the years,
like the lighthouse on Bell Rock. It was the second
(09:45):
Roberts who put the family name in lights when he
invented a crew of Wily Brigands in the wake of
his father's journey to the Caribbean, and Robert Lewis Stevenson
became known as the author of the most famous story
of piracy and adventure in the English language, Jem Treasure Island.
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
(10:07):
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 and you can learn all about it over at
(10:28):
the World of Lore dot com. And until next time,
stay curious. Yeah,
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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