December 10, 2024 • 34 mins
'Tis the season for knitwear! So we’re celebrating sweaters of all shapes and sizes. Did you know that the ugly Christmas sweater trend got its start over a hundred years ago? Or that American soldiers in WWI had beef with amateur knitters? We cover all that and more, including the most expensive sweater ever sold and delightful facts about sweater-loving celebrities like Mr. Rogers, Weezer, and… Sting? Look, if this episode doesn’t give you the warm fuzzies, we don’t know what will.
Show us your best, weirdest, and/or ugliest sweaters! Tag us on Instagram @parttimegenius.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're listening to part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Guess what Will? What's that Mango?
Speaker 1 (00:14):
So you've probably noticed that ugly Christmas sweaters have become
big business over the last decade, with some companies raking
in as much as five million dollars each year from
kitchy knitwear. But do you know that the sweaters also
have their very own holiday?
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Yeah? I think I think they call it a Christmas right.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Yeah, But a truly goer sweater deserves to be seen
more than at least one year, and that's why. Ever
since twenty eleven, the third Friday in December has been
set aside as National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day. The practice
started here in the US, but it's now celebrated by
the fashionably unfashionable all across the world. Some people mark
(00:55):
the day by running a charity race, throwing a party,
or organizing a pup. But you can really celebrate however
you want provide. Of course, you also do it while
wearing a chunky, cheerful sweater.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
You know when this whole thing started with the ugly
and ridiculous Christmas sweaters? I have to admit I didn't
see it having this kind of staying power that whole
like day glow sweaters with tensil and pom poms and
light up reindeer. It's just not something I fully expected
to stick around this long.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Yeah, So it actually turns out that ugly Christmas sweaters
are a much older concept than you might think. The
idea of wearing special festive sweaters for the holidays dates
back to at least the Victorian era, but back then
they were advertised simply as Christmas sweaters, and the designs
were farm were reserved. But things changed by the nineteen
(01:46):
thirties with the rival of so called jingle bell sweaters,
which featured both embroidered bells and real metal ones that
would jingle as you walked.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
So, as you think back to those earlier times, or
you think back to the nineteen thirties or whatever like,
were those sweaters ironic as well?
Speaker 1 (02:02):
No, they were still considered tasteful at that point, even
elegant in some cases, and by the fifties, sweaters started
incorporating things like Rudolph the Red Nose reindeer and Frosty
the Snowmen, especially on kids Christmas sweaters, and as the
decades progressed, adults continued to favor more subtle designs, things
like snowflake patterns or argyle made to look like wrapping paper.
(02:24):
But it isn't until the nineteen eighties that Christmas sweaters
became truly tacky. Designs of previous decades had mostly stuck
to one holiday icon per sweater, but designers of the
eighties adopted sort of a kitchen sink approach. Right. They
put on candy canes, and then they threw on Christmas
trees and skiing polar bears, and it all went onto
(02:46):
the same garments, all.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Right, So I have to guess by this point you're
finally seeing that this is like a joke, right, like
where they considered a joke at that point, I need
you to get to the point where they become a joke.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
So it it doesn't become a joke until ten years
later in the nineteen nineties, when American culture gets a
little more jaded and movies like Dumb and Dumbers start
making holiday sweater jokes. But from then on, ugly Christmas
sweaters became something to wear ironically, and people started competing
to find the most over the top patterns in fact,
(03:19):
the growing trend pretty much wiped out the supply at
thrift stores, and by the twenty first century, companies were
pumping out brand new, purposely TACKI designs to meet the demand.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Set Mango, this is like a roller coaster for me
because I'm now I'm going the opposite direction where he
doesn't feel tongue in cheek enough when people are buying
these things off the racket full price. So I don't know,
We're gonna have to talk through this. That is definitely true.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
But our ugly sweater history is just the first of
nine warm facts to usher in sweater season. So let's
get cozy and dive in.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm
Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good
friend mangesh Hot Ticketer and on the other side of
that soundproof glass. I have to be honest, I was
looking forward to this today because you never know what
this guy's going to be up to. He's a super
talented guy. As we've discussed many many times before. He's
(04:32):
knitting a sweater for everything. Today of course knit himself
a holiday sweater. He knitted ones for each of us,
which was very kind, and then he made a sweater
for the lamp in there, made a cozy frame for
the whiteboard in there. It's actually getting a little bit
out of hand, but that's our talented producer, Dylan Fagan
over there.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Yeah. I think he said he wasn't going to stop
until he'd yarnbombed the entire studio, and I don't know
exactly what that means, but he clearly has a vision.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
So oh, yes, well we're.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Talking sweaters today, a topic I know since the first
day we started the show all these years ago, you said, Mango,
we have got to do a show on sweaters, but
not yet.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Not yet, not yet. It wasn't ready.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
And then last week you were like, remember how I
wanted to do that show on sweaters all those years ago.
Now is the time. It's finally the time to do this.
What fact do you want to start with?
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Yeah, I was trying to get you in studio immediately
to do it. You weren't ready at that point, but
now we're both here. We're both ready. Dylan's ready. And
of course, in doing a whole episode on sweaters, the
first thing I looked up, which won't surprise you, was
the story behind the Sweater Song from Weezer.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Oh man, I know that song as Undone, and I
feel so old because that song came out like our
freshman year of high school.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Yeah, it's been it's been a minute, for sure. But
you know what's interesting is that the Sweater Song, which
was their first big breakout song, was also the first
Weezer song that frontman Rivers Cuomo ever wrote. I had
no idea. Yeah. I always thought Undone was this quirky
fun song, but it's actually more bleak than you might think. So,
as Cuomo told Billboard Magazine, people thought we were just
(06:10):
being sarcastic and ironic. But when I wrote the Sweater song,
to me, it was a very sad song about depression,
and people heard it and they thought it was hysterical.
That is so weird.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
I do not associate that with any sort of rough emotions.
It's just like a happy, fun song to me. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Apparently this goes back a few years before Weezer's first album.
The band was struggling to stand out in the LA
music scene, so Cuomo decided to enroll in community college
sort of as a backup plan, and then one day,
during a lecture on essay writing. He had an English
professor who was explaining the importance of a strong thesis statement,
and he likened it to the thread of a sweater.
(06:49):
He was explaining, a strong thesis statement gives kind of
shape to the entire essay, but a weak one is
like a loose thread. So if you pull on it,
the whole thing unravels. Is image sticks with Cuomo, and
so after class he goes home and he incorporates it
into a chorus. Three years later, the same song proved
to be the big break the band had been looking for.
(07:11):
I always love stories like this, like you never know
where the inspiration is going to come from. But while
the Sweater song might not be as funny as people think,
the band did have a sense of humor about it
by the time they came to shoot the music video,
as all four members made sure not to wear a
sweater for the filming. That's funny.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
So since we're talking sweaters, of course, I've got to
bring up my main man, Fred Rogers. Now, we did
a whole episode dedicated to mister Rogers way back in
twenty seventeen, which people should check out if they haven't,
and in it we mentioned one of the most well
known facts about him, which is that many of the
cardigans Fred wore on the show were actually knit for
(07:51):
him by his mother. But one thing we didn't cover
in that episode is what a hard time the production
team had trying to source new sweaters for Fred after
his mom passed away in nineteen eighty one. So the
stockpile of hand knit sweaters she left behind kept her
son Confiance screen for about another ten years. But by
the early nineteen nineties, after two dozen seasons and hundreds
(08:14):
of episodes, many of the garments were starting to look
their age right. They were starting to get a little threadbare,
and it was clear that a new crop of cardigans
was needed. But of course, this is public television we're
talking about, and the show didn't have this huge budget
commission a new han knit wardrobe or anything like that,
So instead the art department launched this desperate search for
(08:35):
lookalike sweaters. They poured through catalogs, they hunted the racks
at stores all over Pittsburgh, but nothing they found matched
the style of Fred's trademark cardigans, and, as the show's
producer explained to Smithsonian Quote, nobody wore those zippered sweaters.
They just weren't cool then, So what do they end
up doing? The show's art director, Kathy Borland found a
(08:58):
suitable stand in. Eventually, it wasn't from a store, though.
She actually spotted a postal worker on the street wearing
a zippered cardigan that kind of looked like Fred, so
she chases him down. She gets the name of the
manufacturer from his sweater's label, Like I imagine her just
sort of like pulling it and looking at the tag,
although I'm sure it was a lot nicer than that,
And she was able to buy a whole bunch of
(09:20):
white sweaters and then she dyed them different colors in
this giant soup pot.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
That's amazing. I know you said she probably was very
nice about it, and I'm sure she was, But I
also like to imagine her in a sense of panic
and just having to basically like rip this thing and
being like, I need it for mister Rogers. I get it,
I get it. I would happily dedicate a sweater to that,
But you know, I know that he wore different colored sweaters,
but honestly, when I picture mister Rogers, he's always wearing
(09:48):
a red one, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Yeah, I think most people actually remember the red ones
because that's the color he's usually wearing in all the
marketing materials. He also donated a red sweater to the
National Museum of American History if you years after his
mom died. It was one of the ones she had
knit for him, and he was always so proud that
something she had handmade was in the Smithsonian, which you know,
is super sweet.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
That is very sweet. It does make me curious, though,
and I know this is the type of thing that
our crew loves to dig into. Did he wear a
certain color more than the rest or was it pretty
evenly split?
Speaker 1 (10:21):
I actually had a similar question, and Gabe looked into
this and he found a data writer named Owen Phillips
who made this handy chart that tracks the color of
every sweater mister Rogers wore from nineteen seventy nine until
the show's finale in two thousand and one. And the
chart actually does reveal some fun surprises. For instance, Bred
(10:42):
wore a neon blue cardigan exactly one time in the
early nineteen eighties and then never again.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
That was a little too wild, I think. Also as the.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Years went by, mister Rogers gradually moved away from pastels
in favor of darker earth tones, and.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
In fact, it turns out that green was.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
The color he wore most frequently. He donned a green
sweater in seventy four episodes compared to just fifty four
in which he wore a red one. That said Fred
Rogers was also red green colorblind, so really it all
looked brown to him.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
And I also would like to see if there's data
on which one Eddie Murphy wore most often playing mister Robinson.
Of course, a spoof of mister Rogers on SNL. So, Gabe,
if you can look into that, that will be helpful
to the next very helpful. Yeah, you know. So, one
thing I didn't realize is that there was a time
where you could actually receive negative attention for wearing sweaters.
(11:40):
And this is a story about a woman named Francine Godfried,
and for a brief period in the late nineteen sixties,
she was better known to New Yorkers as Wall Street's
sweater Girl. Now, this goes back to a more prudish
era when in the mid twentieth century many people were
downright scandalized by the side of a woman in a
tight sweater. In fact, the derice termed sweater girl was
(12:01):
going to describe any woman who wore a tight, form
fitting sweater. This was a look that was popularized by
Hollywood actresses like Glanta Turner Jane Mansfield. But in nineteen
sixty eight, the most famous woman to sport it was
this twenty one year old clerical worker named Francine Gottfried.
She was a Brooklyn native. She lived with her parents
(12:21):
in Williamsburg, and she just started working in New York's
Financial District in May of that year. But by late August,
there was a small group of men who had taken
notice to the tight sweater she wore, and they began
timing her daily arrival at the Wall Street subway station.
This all sounds so weird, but it's actually true. So
over the next few weeks, those initial group of gawkers
(12:44):
told their creepy buddies, until finally, in mid September, there
were more than two thousand leering men just waiting to
catch a glimpse of her, some of whom reportedly climb
trees and lampposts to get a better view. I mean,
how strange is this mango that is so weird. Also,
can you I mention how scary that must have been,
Like You're just trying to go to work and suddenly
(13:05):
there's this mob of Wall Street guys lining up to
augle you at the subway. It sounds terrible and it's
obviously very strange, But the wildest part is that the
crowd of sweater girl watchers just kept growing. So in
the afternoon of September. I'm not kidding, like these numbers
are just bananas here. So on the afternoon of September nineteenth,
more than five thousand people, five thousand people left work
(13:28):
early to go watch fran Scene exit the subway. There
must not have been anything in the world interesting happening
at that point, and it was such a madhouse that
police had to close the streets and escort her through
the crowd. And this chaotic scene was reported by all
the papers later that day, with the New York Times
even publishing fran Scene's measurements, which is perhaps the most
(13:50):
upsetting part of all of this. It's like, you expect
certain people to just be dumb about certain things, but
when a paper like that joins in and is publishing
stuff like that, it's it's just ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
And I'm sure getting more press attention only slowed down
the crowds right right, people.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
Were over it by the end of the exactly right. Well. Unfortunately,
the following day the crowd doubled to ten thousand people.
I know, all this sounds like a joke and I'm
just going to keep making up bigger numbers, but this
is true now. That is no, You're exactly right. And
none of them got what they wanted that day, as
(14:28):
Francine stayed home, understandably for her own safety, but the
mob was unfazed. They came back the next day to
try again, and so The Times of course gets in
on the action. Reporting on it, they described the anticipation,
writing quote ticker tape floated down from the high buildings.
Newspapers as far away as Australia waited for pictures, and
(14:48):
for the second day, a cheering, good natured crowd of
more than ten thousand jammed Broad Street in front of
the New York Stock Exchange and nearby Wall Street from
wall to wall.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
That's so crazy, one that like international press was suddenly
coming in for this, but also like to call it
good nature. It feels so bizarre.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Yeah, that's what stood out to me.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
But what happened, like did Franccene start driving to work
or go incognito or what happens from here?
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Not exactly. I mean she did start getting off at
a different station and about a year later she reportedly
left her job on Wall Street. And I do want
to note that Francine was not the first or even
the last sweater girl to be leered at by big
crowds on Wall Street. But it is interesting to see
how the growing women's movement decided to push back. How
did they do that? So in nineteen seventy, the first
(15:39):
national oglein was held in Wall Street in which women
used these cat calls and harassed stockbrokers on their way
to work to make a statement both in real life
and depressed that they were tired of being pestered and
objectified when they were just trying to walk down the
street to work.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
That's interesting that that was the way they pushed back.
But why don't we move away from the upsetting side
of sweaters and back to the cozy side. And what
better way to do that than by telling you and
our audiences about the Australian Wildlife Clinic that distributes handmade
sweaters to penguins.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
You know what, coming into this, I knew I could
count on you for a good mister Rogers fact, and
I knew you'd find something good related to animals and
penguins just takes it to another level. So why do
they give out sweaters to penguins? You know? Well, I
thought you'd never ask. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
The program started in the late nineteen nineties after a
series of oil spills off Australia's Phillip Island threatened local wildlife,
including the island sizable population of little penguins. And to
be clear, I'm not trying to be cute here. The
species name is actually called quote little penguins. They're like
these pocket sized penguins also known as fairy penguins, and
(16:59):
most of them are about twelve inches tall.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Oh wow, yeah, that's pretty cute. So I have to
ask why do penguins need sweaters other than the fact
that obviously it sounds adorable.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Yeah, every tiny animal should own a winter wardrobe of sweat.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
But I forget I asked, Yeah, that's so.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Actually, oil spills are a problem for penguins of any
size because oil clumps their feathers together, and this can
expose their skin to freezing temperatures, but it can also
weigh them down as they swim and they hunt for food.
And the worst part is that when a penguin tries
to preen and clean off the oil with their beaks,
they actually wind up ingesting the oil, which of course
(17:39):
makes them sick. So these sweaters act as a barrier
to keep the penguins from picking out their oily feathers,
at least until the rescue staff can wash them and
clean them.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
It's a really smart idea and really sweet too, but
I mean, honestly, it is still sort of weird, but
that's I like that they came up with it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
So the practice was pioneered by the rehabilitation to at
Phillip Island's Penguin Foundation. They started a program called Knits
for Nature to collect as many tiny sweaters or jumpers
as they're called there from local volunteers. Then as word spread,
people began to knit and donate penguin sweaters from all
(18:16):
over the world, and they've collected well over two hundred
thousand sweaters over the last couple decades, although not all
of them are deemed suitable for actual penguins, like some
are too big or too small to fit correctly, and
others came embellished with like pomp pomps that would potentially
pose a choking hazard. But you don't have to worry
about it. Those sweaters still get used. All of the
(18:39):
tackier sweaters, like all the Christmas sweaters, etc. Are put
on plush penguin toys and then sold to raise funds
for the island's conservation efforts. And since twenty twelve, the
sale of the sweater penguin plushies has raised roughly four
hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
That is wild and pretty awesome. So are they still
accepting donation then yeah, but at this point.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
And it's for nature, has enough sweaters to meet demand
for many seasons to come. But they still accept sweaters
to sell on their plush penguins. So for any animal
loving knitters out there, you can find all the information
and the free jumper patterns at Penguin Foundation dot org.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
That's pretty cool, all right. Well to go in a
different direction though, I guess a little bit animal related.
Did you know that one famous musician wore a sweater
so distinctive that it actually inspired his lifelong stage name.
Please say it's Snoop Doggy Dog. I will not say that.
It is not Snoop Dogg. And it's not bad Bunny either.
It's actually Sting, the former frontman of the Police and
(19:40):
current Mega mentor on NBC's The Voice Mengo Mega Mentor.
That's how it's amazing. His birth name is Gordon Matthew Sumner,
which I actually did not know that. But he often
wore a black and yellow striped sweater as a teenager,
and his bandmates teased them for looking like a giant bee,
and so they started to call him that's really funny.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
For some reason, I always assumed it was like a
nod to the Lord of the Rings because Frodo has
that little glowing sword called Sting. But oh yeah, getting
a nickname from a funny looking sweater is way way better.
And I actually really love that he kept the nickname
all those years later.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Yeah, by the way, if anyone ever wondered whether we're nerds,
we give them one little fact like that every once
in a while that you thought maybe it came from
Lord of the Rings and remembered the name of the
sword that Frodo had it's pretty great. We need one
of those every episode. But you know, it doesn't sound
like he had much of a choice with this nickname.
His friends started calling him Sting even after he stopped
(20:38):
wearing the bee stripe sweater. Then, to make matters worse,
his mom started using it. In fact, in twenty eleven,
the singer told Time magazine, even my wife calls me Sting.
I was never called Gordon. You could shell Gordon in
the middle of the street and I would just move
out of your way.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
It is really amazing that something as arbitrary as a
sweater ends up sticking with him him for that long.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
It's nuts, it really is. It is worth noting that
while Sting has embraced his be based persona, he never
went so far as to legally adopt it. According to
a twenty sixteen interview with Howard Stern, Sting's passport still
says Gordon Sumner.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
So, after all your music facts, I'm starting to feel
left out here, so I'm gonna skip ahead and throw
one of my own in. This fact is about Nirvana
frontman Kurt Cobain, because as of twenty twenty four, his
sweater is the most expensive sweater ever sold at auction,
And I'm sure you know this what I'm talking about.
(21:36):
It's the olive green one. Yeah, that was on MTV's
on Plugg concert way back in nineteen ninety four. But
the show was taped just five months before Cobaine's passing,
which means that's really the last time a lot of fans,
including myself, saw him was wearing that sweater on TV.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
And was it something he had worn before? Was it
just part of the wardrobe for the taping.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
No, he definitely warned it before he He worn't on
tour for a few months by that point, and there
was not anything fancy or costume about it. According to
the Cardigan's label, it was made in the nineteen sixties
by a company called Manhattan Industries. The fabric is acrylic,
mohair and lycra and fashion historians think it retailed for
(22:18):
about sixteen dollars by at that point, but Cobain probably
paid less for it since he bought it at a
thrift store in Seattle in the early nineties.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
So how did it end up at auction?
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Well, this is an interesting story. After Kurtz's death, Courtney
Love gave the sweater to the family's nanny, who held
on to it as a keepsake for about twenty years,
but in twenty fifteen, she decides to bring it to
auction because she has cancer and she's trying to pay
for her cancer treatments. The sweater was expected to fetch
(22:48):
about fifty thousand dollars at auction, but it wound up
selling for one hundred and thirty seven thousand dollars instead.
It is obviously a hefty price tag, but the buyer
did get a little something extra with his purchase. When
he reached into one of the pockets, he found what
he described as quote, some kind of brown, crunchy something,
which he guesses was either chocolate or vomit.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
It feels like you should know the difference, but hold on.
So the nanny never washed the sweater.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
I guess not friendly. She left it exactly as she
had received it twenty years earlier, right down to the
crunchy treat in the pocket.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
But wow. The buyer in.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Twenty fifteen also declined to clean it, believing that the
sweater's musty smell, it's missing button, and all the cigarette burns,
which had multiple cigarette burns. All of this added to
the sweater's character and also its value. All of this
proves to be a wise decision for the buyer, because
when he put the sweater up for auction in twenty nineteen,
(23:49):
it sold for three hundred and thirty four thousand dollars,
more than twice would you pay for it?
Speaker 2 (23:55):
And so I would imagine that's the highest auction price
ever paid for a sweater.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
I mean, at least until the current owner decides to
part with, at which point it'll probably go for even more.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah, I would imagine. All right, Well, two more sweater
facts to go. But before we get to those, let's
take a quick break.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
You listen to Part Time Genius and we're counting down
nine thread pulling facts about sweaters. So, will are you
a sweater guy? Like I wear cardigans a lot, but
I don't really think of you as wearing sweaters a
whole bunch.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Yeah, it's a really personal question, Mango. But part of
the reason I had been pushing to do this episode
is I'm ready to go ahead and state it publicly
that I have become a sweater guy. For years, I
was not as a kid. I found them itchy. I
couldn't do sweaters. I refuse to wear them, but over
the last few years. Maybe it's a dad thing. I
(25:01):
don't know, but I am totally a sweater guy now, Mango.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
I love that you finally embraced this about yourself.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
We've been waiting for that moment. This was my safe
space to admit that thing.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
You know. It's funny because I was thinking about it
this week. And in elementary school, we had this project
where we had to figure out, like how we'd live
as adults, right, so we had to look up apartments
in the local paper to see where we'd rent a place.
We learned how to make a food budget and an
entertainment budget, all of which I've forgotten how to do.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
But as part of.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
That, I actually illustrated how I was.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
Going to dress.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
And while I don't live in Wilmington, Delaware, I don't
eat burritos four times a week. Like like my way
to say a food budget was like, oh, I just
buy like a bag of frozen fries and burritos and
I'll use the rest on entertainment.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
But I do dress exactly like a nine year old
me pictured myself. I wear low top soccer sneakers, I
wear collar shirts and cardigans. But what's really funny about
it is like, now, that's fairly common style, but when
I was in fourth or fifth grade, people were like,
what is this lazy grandparents style?
Speaker 2 (26:08):
You want to look like? Yep, that's amazing. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Maybe it was mister Rogers's influence, but something clearly struck
a chord with a style sense. So what do you
want to do with your last sweater fact?
Speaker 2 (26:22):
All right, Well, I felt like we both got some
things out there. This is great that we kind of
a sweater episode to work out some things. But I
liked your last penguin fact. So, speaking of sweaters for
a good cause, my next fact takes us back to
the First World War, when the American government promoted knitting
as a patriotic duty. And that may sound like a
strange thing, but even before US soldiers were deployed overseas,
(26:46):
organizations like the American Red Cross had encouraged the public
to knit and donate warm clothing as a way to
assist foreign soldiers. So it makes a lot of sense.
And once the US formally entered the war in nineteen seventeen,
these knitting campaigns and kicked into high gear. These people
were churning out roughly three hundred and sixty million knit
garments in the course of just two years. Three hundred
(27:10):
and sixty million garments. That is no joke.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
So who is it that is working the needles for
all this knitting charity?
Speaker 2 (27:16):
You know? That's the thing. These so called wool brigades
included everybody. You had, kids, adults, senior citizens. Even the
inmates that sing sing prison were said to have form
knitting circles and they'd be sitting out in the prison
yard knitting. It's actually pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
I mean, I liked the enthusiasm, and I liked that
they trusted them to do that.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Yeah, of course. And you know, while most of the
work was done by women, as you might expect given
the era, many men did their part as well, and
the ones who couldn't fight abroad were encouraged to knit
a work during their lunch hours. And the soldiers who
were wounded on the battlefield actually took the knitting and
their hospital beds gave him something to think about.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
That is insane, Like, I've never heard of this, So
what kind of things were all these people knitting?
Speaker 2 (28:00):
A good deal of the output was not surprisingly wool sweaters,
but patriotic knitters also produced mass quantities of mufflers, scarves,
you know, most importantly socks, which were in dire need
because of the brutal conditions of trench warfare. But despite
all the good intentions there there was a downside to
sourcing clothing from amateur knitters. Namely, they didn't always know
(28:22):
what they were doing, and so the knitwhere soldiers received
on the front lines weren't always up to snuff, and
at least one soldier offered some not so constructive feedback
in the form of a short poem. I know you
and I both love it when people expressed their thoughts
through poetry, and I found this from our friends over
at Atlas Obscura and it reads as follows. A pair
(28:44):
of socks. They are some fit. I used one for
a helmet and the other for a mit. Glad to
hear you're doing your bit, But who the blank said
you could knit pretty great? Huh.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
It almost feels like that old Cosby Show episode where
did you makes theo a shirt and he's complaining about
how big it is and just like just tucking in
and he's like Denise it's tucked into my socks.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Said it was going to pass as a as a
real Gordon Gartreel. I think I'm Greel did amazing the
kinds of things that stick in our brains.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
I do love the idea of how misshapens of the
nitwhere must have been. But speaking of getting into knitting,
my last fact actually starts back in twenty thirteen when
the Norwegian television network NRK broadcast a special event called
National Knitting Evening.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
I got it, mitmego, that sounds like a long evening,
you have no idea.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
The show actually lasted twelve full hours, including four hours
of knitting commentary followed by eight and a half hours
of what the network build is quote long quiet sequences
of knitting and spinning.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
So wow.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
Of course, this is all for the phenomenon we've discussed
before called slow TV's in this genre of things like
a seven and a half hour train journey. Or there
was actually a trilogy of shows devoted to firewood that
they did. The three episodes were National Firewood Morning, National
Firewood Evening, and National Firewood Night.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Wow. That sounds riveting and I'm glad they did three
different versions because I imagine they are just incredibly different.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Yeah, but you know, first off, this is supposed to
be an antidote to the addictive nature of smartphones and
this smartphone culture we're all part of now, right, But
also listen to nur Case synopsis because it is really
really fun. This is what it says about National Knitting
Evening quote twelve hours non stop knitting. We knit our
(30:45):
way into the night by dressing up a Harley Davidson
in knitting clothes, which obviously would appeal to Dylan, but
also you will get tips on how to knit, learn
about the history of knitting, and meet enthusiastic knitters. From
midnight on, we cap sure the back to back world
record from Australia, which means that we will have to
produce a sweater from sheep's back to humans back in
(31:08):
less than four hours, fifty one minutes and fourteen seconds, which,
oh they also ended by saying, Wisha's luck.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
You know, Mango, I feel like you buried the lead
about the back to back challenge. I mean a sweater
knit off one animal's back onto another, Like now, I
want to see this, I know I do.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
And apparently Norwegian's felt the same way because about one
point three million people, which is more than a fifth
of the total population tuned in for National Knitting Evening.
The average viewer actually stuck around for at least four hours.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
That is wild. You know, it's a difficult decision, Mango.
It's like, do I go home and hunt for an
hour of what to watch on Netflix and fall asleep
before I watch anything, or do I just go straight
to the knitting and then fall asleep. Yeah, I don't
think you can lose with other option. You're right. Well,
I know I was the one who's been pushing to
do this sweater episode. But between the penguin fact and
the one about Norway's must see TV, and of course
(32:09):
our hero mister Rogers, I think you've earned this week's trophy. Mango.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Oh I love it and I'm really grateful, But did
you please start a trophy with a tiny knitted cactus? Like?
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Where'd you get this? That Dylan is a machine so
he knit it for me Earlier this week I just
had this gut feeling you were going to win it.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Well, I'm guessing you knit a cactus because he loves
draw humor. I'm gonna place this proudly on my bookshelf
where I definitely won't water it, but that's gonna do it.
For today's Part Time Genius. If you like our show,
let us know by writing as a review on Apple
Podcasts or by hitting us up on our Insta. You
know the handle it's at. Part Time Genius and from Will, Mary, Gabe,
(32:54):
Dylan and myself, thank you so much for listening and
fundle up. It's chilli out there. Part Time Genius is
a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted
(33:16):
by Will Pearson and Me Mongas Chatikler and research by
our good pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered
and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from
Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by
Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry, with social media support from
Sasha Gay, Trustee Dara Potts and Viny Shorey. For more
(33:39):
podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
You're listening to part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Guess what Will? What's that Mango?
Speaker 1 (00:14):
So you've probably noticed that ugly Christmas sweaters have become
big business over the last decade, with some companies raking
in as much as five million dollars each year from
kitchy knitwear. But do you know that the sweaters also
have their very own holiday?
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Yeah? I think I think they call it a Christmas right.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Yeah, But a truly goer sweater deserves to be seen
more than at least one year, and that's why. Ever
since twenty eleven, the third Friday in December has been
set aside as National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day. The practice
started here in the US, but it's now celebrated by
the fashionably unfashionable all across the world. Some people mark
(00:55):
the day by running a charity race, throwing a party,
or organizing a pup. But you can really celebrate however
you want provide. Of course, you also do it while
wearing a chunky, cheerful sweater.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
You know when this whole thing started with the ugly
and ridiculous Christmas sweaters? I have to admit I didn't
see it having this kind of staying power that whole
like day glow sweaters with tensil and pom poms and
light up reindeer. It's just not something I fully expected
to stick around this long.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Yeah, So it actually turns out that ugly Christmas sweaters
are a much older concept than you might think. The
idea of wearing special festive sweaters for the holidays dates
back to at least the Victorian era, but back then
they were advertised simply as Christmas sweaters, and the designs
were farm were reserved. But things changed by the nineteen
(01:46):
thirties with the rival of so called jingle bell sweaters,
which featured both embroidered bells and real metal ones that
would jingle as you walked.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
So, as you think back to those earlier times, or
you think back to the nineteen thirties or whatever like,
were those sweaters ironic as well?
Speaker 1 (02:02):
No, they were still considered tasteful at that point, even
elegant in some cases, and by the fifties, sweaters started
incorporating things like Rudolph the Red Nose reindeer and Frosty
the Snowmen, especially on kids Christmas sweaters, and as the
decades progressed, adults continued to favor more subtle designs, things
like snowflake patterns or argyle made to look like wrapping paper.
(02:24):
But it isn't until the nineteen eighties that Christmas sweaters
became truly tacky. Designs of previous decades had mostly stuck
to one holiday icon per sweater, but designers of the
eighties adopted sort of a kitchen sink approach. Right. They
put on candy canes, and then they threw on Christmas
trees and skiing polar bears, and it all went onto
(02:46):
the same garments, all.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Right, So I have to guess by this point you're
finally seeing that this is like a joke, right, like
where they considered a joke at that point, I need
you to get to the point where they become a joke.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
So it it doesn't become a joke until ten years
later in the nineteen nineties, when American culture gets a
little more jaded and movies like Dumb and Dumbers start
making holiday sweater jokes. But from then on, ugly Christmas
sweaters became something to wear ironically, and people started competing
to find the most over the top patterns in fact,
(03:19):
the growing trend pretty much wiped out the supply at
thrift stores, and by the twenty first century, companies were
pumping out brand new, purposely TACKI designs to meet the demand.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Set Mango, this is like a roller coaster for me
because I'm now I'm going the opposite direction where he
doesn't feel tongue in cheek enough when people are buying
these things off the racket full price. So I don't know,
We're gonna have to talk through this. That is definitely true.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
But our ugly sweater history is just the first of
nine warm facts to usher in sweater season. So let's
get cozy and dive in.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm
Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good
friend mangesh Hot Ticketer and on the other side of
that soundproof glass. I have to be honest, I was
looking forward to this today because you never know what
this guy's going to be up to. He's a super
talented guy. As we've discussed many many times before. He's
(04:32):
knitting a sweater for everything. Today of course knit himself
a holiday sweater. He knitted ones for each of us,
which was very kind, and then he made a sweater
for the lamp in there, made a cozy frame for
the whiteboard in there. It's actually getting a little bit
out of hand, but that's our talented producer, Dylan Fagan
over there.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Yeah. I think he said he wasn't going to stop
until he'd yarnbombed the entire studio, and I don't know
exactly what that means, but he clearly has a vision.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
So oh, yes, well we're.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Talking sweaters today, a topic I know since the first
day we started the show all these years ago, you said, Mango,
we have got to do a show on sweaters, but
not yet.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Not yet, not yet. It wasn't ready.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
And then last week you were like, remember how I
wanted to do that show on sweaters all those years ago.
Now is the time. It's finally the time to do this.
What fact do you want to start with?
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Yeah, I was trying to get you in studio immediately
to do it. You weren't ready at that point, but
now we're both here. We're both ready. Dylan's ready. And
of course, in doing a whole episode on sweaters, the
first thing I looked up, which won't surprise you, was
the story behind the Sweater Song from Weezer.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Oh man, I know that song as Undone, and I
feel so old because that song came out like our
freshman year of high school.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Yeah, it's been it's been a minute, for sure. But
you know what's interesting is that the Sweater Song, which
was their first big breakout song, was also the first
Weezer song that frontman Rivers Cuomo ever wrote. I had
no idea. Yeah. I always thought Undone was this quirky
fun song, but it's actually more bleak than you might think. So,
as Cuomo told Billboard Magazine, people thought we were just
(06:10):
being sarcastic and ironic. But when I wrote the Sweater song,
to me, it was a very sad song about depression,
and people heard it and they thought it was hysterical.
That is so weird.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
I do not associate that with any sort of rough emotions.
It's just like a happy, fun song to me. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Apparently this goes back a few years before Weezer's first album.
The band was struggling to stand out in the LA
music scene, so Cuomo decided to enroll in community college
sort of as a backup plan, and then one day,
during a lecture on essay writing. He had an English
professor who was explaining the importance of a strong thesis statement,
and he likened it to the thread of a sweater.
(06:49):
He was explaining, a strong thesis statement gives kind of
shape to the entire essay, but a weak one is
like a loose thread. So if you pull on it,
the whole thing unravels. Is image sticks with Cuomo, and
so after class he goes home and he incorporates it
into a chorus. Three years later, the same song proved
to be the big break the band had been looking for.
(07:11):
I always love stories like this, like you never know
where the inspiration is going to come from. But while
the Sweater song might not be as funny as people think,
the band did have a sense of humor about it
by the time they came to shoot the music video,
as all four members made sure not to wear a
sweater for the filming. That's funny.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
So since we're talking sweaters, of course, I've got to
bring up my main man, Fred Rogers. Now, we did
a whole episode dedicated to mister Rogers way back in
twenty seventeen, which people should check out if they haven't,
and in it we mentioned one of the most well
known facts about him, which is that many of the
cardigans Fred wore on the show were actually knit for
(07:51):
him by his mother. But one thing we didn't cover
in that episode is what a hard time the production
team had trying to source new sweaters for Fred after
his mom passed away in nineteen eighty one. So the
stockpile of hand knit sweaters she left behind kept her
son Confiance screen for about another ten years. But by
the early nineteen nineties, after two dozen seasons and hundreds
(08:14):
of episodes, many of the garments were starting to look
their age right. They were starting to get a little threadbare,
and it was clear that a new crop of cardigans
was needed. But of course, this is public television we're
talking about, and the show didn't have this huge budget
commission a new han knit wardrobe or anything like that,
So instead the art department launched this desperate search for
(08:35):
lookalike sweaters. They poured through catalogs, they hunted the racks
at stores all over Pittsburgh, but nothing they found matched
the style of Fred's trademark cardigans, and, as the show's
producer explained to Smithsonian Quote, nobody wore those zippered sweaters.
They just weren't cool then, So what do they end
up doing? The show's art director, Kathy Borland found a
(08:58):
suitable stand in. Eventually, it wasn't from a store, though.
She actually spotted a postal worker on the street wearing
a zippered cardigan that kind of looked like Fred, so
she chases him down. She gets the name of the
manufacturer from his sweater's label, Like I imagine her just
sort of like pulling it and looking at the tag,
although I'm sure it was a lot nicer than that,
And she was able to buy a whole bunch of
(09:20):
white sweaters and then she dyed them different colors in
this giant soup pot.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
That's amazing. I know you said she probably was very
nice about it, and I'm sure she was, But I
also like to imagine her in a sense of panic
and just having to basically like rip this thing and
being like, I need it for mister Rogers. I get it,
I get it. I would happily dedicate a sweater to that,
But you know, I know that he wore different colored sweaters,
but honestly, when I picture mister Rogers, he's always wearing
(09:48):
a red one, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Yeah, I think most people actually remember the red ones
because that's the color he's usually wearing in all the
marketing materials. He also donated a red sweater to the
National Museum of American History if you years after his
mom died. It was one of the ones she had
knit for him, and he was always so proud that
something she had handmade was in the Smithsonian, which you know,
is super sweet.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
That is very sweet. It does make me curious, though,
and I know this is the type of thing that
our crew loves to dig into. Did he wear a
certain color more than the rest or was it pretty
evenly split?
Speaker 1 (10:21):
I actually had a similar question, and Gabe looked into
this and he found a data writer named Owen Phillips
who made this handy chart that tracks the color of
every sweater mister Rogers wore from nineteen seventy nine until
the show's finale in two thousand and one. And the
chart actually does reveal some fun surprises. For instance, Bred
(10:42):
wore a neon blue cardigan exactly one time in the
early nineteen eighties and then never again.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
That was a little too wild, I think. Also as the.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Years went by, mister Rogers gradually moved away from pastels
in favor of darker earth tones, and.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
In fact, it turns out that green was.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
The color he wore most frequently. He donned a green
sweater in seventy four episodes compared to just fifty four
in which he wore a red one. That said Fred
Rogers was also red green colorblind, so really it all
looked brown to him.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
And I also would like to see if there's data
on which one Eddie Murphy wore most often playing mister Robinson.
Of course, a spoof of mister Rogers on SNL. So, Gabe,
if you can look into that, that will be helpful
to the next very helpful. Yeah, you know. So, one
thing I didn't realize is that there was a time
where you could actually receive negative attention for wearing sweaters.
(11:40):
And this is a story about a woman named Francine Godfried,
and for a brief period in the late nineteen sixties,
she was better known to New Yorkers as Wall Street's
sweater Girl. Now, this goes back to a more prudish
era when in the mid twentieth century many people were
downright scandalized by the side of a woman in a
tight sweater. In fact, the derice termed sweater girl was
(12:01):
going to describe any woman who wore a tight, form
fitting sweater. This was a look that was popularized by
Hollywood actresses like Glanta Turner Jane Mansfield. But in nineteen
sixty eight, the most famous woman to sport it was
this twenty one year old clerical worker named Francine Gottfried.
She was a Brooklyn native. She lived with her parents
(12:21):
in Williamsburg, and she just started working in New York's
Financial District in May of that year. But by late August,
there was a small group of men who had taken
notice to the tight sweater she wore, and they began
timing her daily arrival at the Wall Street subway station.
This all sounds so weird, but it's actually true. So
over the next few weeks, those initial group of gawkers
(12:44):
told their creepy buddies, until finally, in mid September, there
were more than two thousand leering men just waiting to
catch a glimpse of her, some of whom reportedly climb
trees and lampposts to get a better view. I mean,
how strange is this mango that is so weird. Also,
can you I mention how scary that must have been,
Like You're just trying to go to work and suddenly
(13:05):
there's this mob of Wall Street guys lining up to
augle you at the subway. It sounds terrible and it's
obviously very strange, But the wildest part is that the
crowd of sweater girl watchers just kept growing. So in
the afternoon of September. I'm not kidding, like these numbers
are just bananas here. So on the afternoon of September nineteenth,
more than five thousand people, five thousand people left work
(13:28):
early to go watch fran Scene exit the subway. There
must not have been anything in the world interesting happening
at that point, and it was such a madhouse that
police had to close the streets and escort her through
the crowd. And this chaotic scene was reported by all
the papers later that day, with the New York Times
even publishing fran Scene's measurements, which is perhaps the most
(13:50):
upsetting part of all of this. It's like, you expect
certain people to just be dumb about certain things, but
when a paper like that joins in and is publishing
stuff like that, it's it's just ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
And I'm sure getting more press attention only slowed down
the crowds right right, people.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
Were over it by the end of the exactly right. Well. Unfortunately,
the following day the crowd doubled to ten thousand people.
I know, all this sounds like a joke and I'm
just going to keep making up bigger numbers, but this
is true now. That is no, You're exactly right. And
none of them got what they wanted that day, as
(14:28):
Francine stayed home, understandably for her own safety, but the
mob was unfazed. They came back the next day to
try again, and so The Times of course gets in
on the action. Reporting on it, they described the anticipation,
writing quote ticker tape floated down from the high buildings.
Newspapers as far away as Australia waited for pictures, and
(14:48):
for the second day, a cheering, good natured crowd of
more than ten thousand jammed Broad Street in front of
the New York Stock Exchange and nearby Wall Street from
wall to wall.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
That's so crazy, one that like international press was suddenly
coming in for this, but also like to call it
good nature. It feels so bizarre.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Yeah, that's what stood out to me.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
But what happened, like did Franccene start driving to work
or go incognito or what happens from here?
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Not exactly. I mean she did start getting off at
a different station and about a year later she reportedly
left her job on Wall Street. And I do want
to note that Francine was not the first or even
the last sweater girl to be leered at by big
crowds on Wall Street. But it is interesting to see
how the growing women's movement decided to push back. How
did they do that? So in nineteen seventy, the first
(15:39):
national oglein was held in Wall Street in which women
used these cat calls and harassed stockbrokers on their way
to work to make a statement both in real life
and depressed that they were tired of being pestered and
objectified when they were just trying to walk down the
street to work.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
That's interesting that that was the way they pushed back.
But why don't we move away from the upsetting side
of sweaters and back to the cozy side. And what
better way to do that than by telling you and
our audiences about the Australian Wildlife Clinic that distributes handmade
sweaters to penguins.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
You know what, coming into this, I knew I could
count on you for a good mister Rogers fact, and
I knew you'd find something good related to animals and
penguins just takes it to another level. So why do
they give out sweaters to penguins? You know? Well, I
thought you'd never ask. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
The program started in the late nineteen nineties after a
series of oil spills off Australia's Phillip Island threatened local wildlife,
including the island sizable population of little penguins. And to
be clear, I'm not trying to be cute here. The
species name is actually called quote little penguins. They're like
these pocket sized penguins also known as fairy penguins, and
(16:59):
most of them are about twelve inches tall.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Oh wow, yeah, that's pretty cute. So I have to
ask why do penguins need sweaters other than the fact
that obviously it sounds adorable.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Yeah, every tiny animal should own a winter wardrobe of sweat.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
But I forget I asked, Yeah, that's so.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Actually, oil spills are a problem for penguins of any
size because oil clumps their feathers together, and this can
expose their skin to freezing temperatures, but it can also
weigh them down as they swim and they hunt for food.
And the worst part is that when a penguin tries
to preen and clean off the oil with their beaks,
they actually wind up ingesting the oil, which of course
(17:39):
makes them sick. So these sweaters act as a barrier
to keep the penguins from picking out their oily feathers,
at least until the rescue staff can wash them and
clean them.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
It's a really smart idea and really sweet too, but
I mean, honestly, it is still sort of weird, but
that's I like that they came up with it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
So the practice was pioneered by the rehabilitation to at
Phillip Island's Penguin Foundation. They started a program called Knits
for Nature to collect as many tiny sweaters or jumpers
as they're called there from local volunteers. Then as word spread,
people began to knit and donate penguin sweaters from all
(18:16):
over the world, and they've collected well over two hundred
thousand sweaters over the last couple decades, although not all
of them are deemed suitable for actual penguins, like some
are too big or too small to fit correctly, and
others came embellished with like pomp pomps that would potentially
pose a choking hazard. But you don't have to worry
about it. Those sweaters still get used. All of the
(18:39):
tackier sweaters, like all the Christmas sweaters, etc. Are put
on plush penguin toys and then sold to raise funds
for the island's conservation efforts. And since twenty twelve, the
sale of the sweater penguin plushies has raised roughly four
hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
That is wild and pretty awesome. So are they still
accepting donation then yeah, but at this point.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
And it's for nature, has enough sweaters to meet demand
for many seasons to come. But they still accept sweaters
to sell on their plush penguins. So for any animal
loving knitters out there, you can find all the information
and the free jumper patterns at Penguin Foundation dot org.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
That's pretty cool, all right. Well to go in a
different direction though, I guess a little bit animal related.
Did you know that one famous musician wore a sweater
so distinctive that it actually inspired his lifelong stage name.
Please say it's Snoop Doggy Dog. I will not say that.
It is not Snoop Dogg. And it's not bad Bunny either.
It's actually Sting, the former frontman of the Police and
(19:40):
current Mega mentor on NBC's The Voice Mengo Mega Mentor.
That's how it's amazing. His birth name is Gordon Matthew Sumner,
which I actually did not know that. But he often
wore a black and yellow striped sweater as a teenager,
and his bandmates teased them for looking like a giant bee,
and so they started to call him that's really funny.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
For some reason, I always assumed it was like a
nod to the Lord of the Rings because Frodo has
that little glowing sword called Sting. But oh yeah, getting
a nickname from a funny looking sweater is way way better.
And I actually really love that he kept the nickname
all those years later.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Yeah, by the way, if anyone ever wondered whether we're nerds,
we give them one little fact like that every once
in a while that you thought maybe it came from
Lord of the Rings and remembered the name of the
sword that Frodo had it's pretty great. We need one
of those every episode. But you know, it doesn't sound
like he had much of a choice with this nickname.
His friends started calling him Sting even after he stopped
(20:38):
wearing the bee stripe sweater. Then, to make matters worse,
his mom started using it. In fact, in twenty eleven,
the singer told Time magazine, even my wife calls me Sting.
I was never called Gordon. You could shell Gordon in
the middle of the street and I would just move
out of your way.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
It is really amazing that something as arbitrary as a
sweater ends up sticking with him him for that long.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
It's nuts, it really is. It is worth noting that
while Sting has embraced his be based persona, he never
went so far as to legally adopt it. According to
a twenty sixteen interview with Howard Stern, Sting's passport still
says Gordon Sumner.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
So, after all your music facts, I'm starting to feel
left out here, so I'm gonna skip ahead and throw
one of my own in. This fact is about Nirvana
frontman Kurt Cobain, because as of twenty twenty four, his
sweater is the most expensive sweater ever sold at auction,
And I'm sure you know this what I'm talking about.
(21:36):
It's the olive green one. Yeah, that was on MTV's
on Plugg concert way back in nineteen ninety four. But
the show was taped just five months before Cobaine's passing,
which means that's really the last time a lot of fans,
including myself, saw him was wearing that sweater on TV.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
And was it something he had worn before? Was it
just part of the wardrobe for the taping.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
No, he definitely warned it before he He worn't on
tour for a few months by that point, and there
was not anything fancy or costume about it. According to
the Cardigan's label, it was made in the nineteen sixties
by a company called Manhattan Industries. The fabric is acrylic,
mohair and lycra and fashion historians think it retailed for
(22:18):
about sixteen dollars by at that point, but Cobain probably
paid less for it since he bought it at a
thrift store in Seattle in the early nineties.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
So how did it end up at auction?
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Well, this is an interesting story. After Kurtz's death, Courtney
Love gave the sweater to the family's nanny, who held
on to it as a keepsake for about twenty years,
but in twenty fifteen, she decides to bring it to
auction because she has cancer and she's trying to pay
for her cancer treatments. The sweater was expected to fetch
(22:48):
about fifty thousand dollars at auction, but it wound up
selling for one hundred and thirty seven thousand dollars instead.
It is obviously a hefty price tag, but the buyer
did get a little something extra with his purchase. When
he reached into one of the pockets, he found what
he described as quote, some kind of brown, crunchy something,
which he guesses was either chocolate or vomit.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
It feels like you should know the difference, but hold on.
So the nanny never washed the sweater.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
I guess not friendly. She left it exactly as she
had received it twenty years earlier, right down to the
crunchy treat in the pocket.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
But wow. The buyer in.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Twenty fifteen also declined to clean it, believing that the
sweater's musty smell, it's missing button, and all the cigarette burns,
which had multiple cigarette burns. All of this added to
the sweater's character and also its value. All of this
proves to be a wise decision for the buyer, because
when he put the sweater up for auction in twenty nineteen,
(23:49):
it sold for three hundred and thirty four thousand dollars,
more than twice would you pay for it?
Speaker 2 (23:55):
And so I would imagine that's the highest auction price
ever paid for a sweater.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
I mean, at least until the current owner decides to
part with, at which point it'll probably go for even more.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah, I would imagine. All right, Well, two more sweater
facts to go. But before we get to those, let's
take a quick break.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
You listen to Part Time Genius and we're counting down
nine thread pulling facts about sweaters. So, will are you
a sweater guy? Like I wear cardigans a lot, but
I don't really think of you as wearing sweaters a
whole bunch.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Yeah, it's a really personal question, Mango. But part of
the reason I had been pushing to do this episode
is I'm ready to go ahead and state it publicly
that I have become a sweater guy. For years, I
was not as a kid. I found them itchy. I
couldn't do sweaters. I refuse to wear them, but over
the last few years. Maybe it's a dad thing. I
(25:01):
don't know, but I am totally a sweater guy now, Mango.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
I love that you finally embraced this about yourself.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
We've been waiting for that moment. This was my safe
space to admit that thing.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
You know. It's funny because I was thinking about it
this week. And in elementary school, we had this project
where we had to figure out, like how we'd live
as adults, right, so we had to look up apartments
in the local paper to see where we'd rent a place.
We learned how to make a food budget and an
entertainment budget, all of which I've forgotten how to do.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
But as part of.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
That, I actually illustrated how I was.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
Going to dress.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
And while I don't live in Wilmington, Delaware, I don't
eat burritos four times a week. Like like my way
to say a food budget was like, oh, I just
buy like a bag of frozen fries and burritos and
I'll use the rest on entertainment.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
But I do dress exactly like a nine year old
me pictured myself. I wear low top soccer sneakers, I
wear collar shirts and cardigans. But what's really funny about
it is like, now, that's fairly common style, but when
I was in fourth or fifth grade, people were like,
what is this lazy grandparents style?
Speaker 2 (26:08):
You want to look like? Yep, that's amazing. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Maybe it was mister Rogers's influence, but something clearly struck
a chord with a style sense. So what do you
want to do with your last sweater fact?
Speaker 2 (26:22):
All right, Well, I felt like we both got some
things out there. This is great that we kind of
a sweater episode to work out some things. But I
liked your last penguin fact. So, speaking of sweaters for
a good cause, my next fact takes us back to
the First World War, when the American government promoted knitting
as a patriotic duty. And that may sound like a
strange thing, but even before US soldiers were deployed overseas,
(26:46):
organizations like the American Red Cross had encouraged the public
to knit and donate warm clothing as a way to
assist foreign soldiers. So it makes a lot of sense.
And once the US formally entered the war in nineteen seventeen,
these knitting campaigns and kicked into high gear. These people
were churning out roughly three hundred and sixty million knit
garments in the course of just two years. Three hundred
(27:10):
and sixty million garments. That is no joke.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
So who is it that is working the needles for
all this knitting charity?
Speaker 2 (27:16):
You know? That's the thing. These so called wool brigades
included everybody. You had, kids, adults, senior citizens. Even the
inmates that sing sing prison were said to have form
knitting circles and they'd be sitting out in the prison
yard knitting. It's actually pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
I mean, I liked the enthusiasm, and I liked that
they trusted them to do that.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Yeah, of course. And you know, while most of the
work was done by women, as you might expect given
the era, many men did their part as well, and
the ones who couldn't fight abroad were encouraged to knit
a work during their lunch hours. And the soldiers who
were wounded on the battlefield actually took the knitting and
their hospital beds gave him something to think about.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
That is insane, Like, I've never heard of this, So
what kind of things were all these people knitting?
Speaker 2 (28:00):
A good deal of the output was not surprisingly wool sweaters,
but patriotic knitters also produced mass quantities of mufflers, scarves,
you know, most importantly socks, which were in dire need
because of the brutal conditions of trench warfare. But despite
all the good intentions there there was a downside to
sourcing clothing from amateur knitters. Namely, they didn't always know
(28:22):
what they were doing, and so the knitwhere soldiers received
on the front lines weren't always up to snuff, and
at least one soldier offered some not so constructive feedback
in the form of a short poem. I know you
and I both love it when people expressed their thoughts
through poetry, and I found this from our friends over
at Atlas Obscura and it reads as follows. A pair
(28:44):
of socks. They are some fit. I used one for
a helmet and the other for a mit. Glad to
hear you're doing your bit, But who the blank said
you could knit pretty great? Huh.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
It almost feels like that old Cosby Show episode where
did you makes theo a shirt and he's complaining about
how big it is and just like just tucking in
and he's like Denise it's tucked into my socks.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Said it was going to pass as a as a
real Gordon Gartreel. I think I'm Greel did amazing the
kinds of things that stick in our brains.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
I do love the idea of how misshapens of the
nitwhere must have been. But speaking of getting into knitting,
my last fact actually starts back in twenty thirteen when
the Norwegian television network NRK broadcast a special event called
National Knitting Evening.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
I got it, mitmego, that sounds like a long evening,
you have no idea.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
The show actually lasted twelve full hours, including four hours
of knitting commentary followed by eight and a half hours
of what the network build is quote long quiet sequences
of knitting and spinning.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
So wow.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
Of course, this is all for the phenomenon we've discussed
before called slow TV's in this genre of things like
a seven and a half hour train journey. Or there
was actually a trilogy of shows devoted to firewood that
they did. The three episodes were National Firewood Morning, National
Firewood Evening, and National Firewood Night.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Wow. That sounds riveting and I'm glad they did three
different versions because I imagine they are just incredibly different.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Yeah, but you know, first off, this is supposed to
be an antidote to the addictive nature of smartphones and
this smartphone culture we're all part of now, right, But
also listen to nur Case synopsis because it is really
really fun. This is what it says about National Knitting
Evening quote twelve hours non stop knitting. We knit our
(30:45):
way into the night by dressing up a Harley Davidson
in knitting clothes, which obviously would appeal to Dylan, but
also you will get tips on how to knit, learn
about the history of knitting, and meet enthusiastic knitters. From
midnight on, we cap sure the back to back world
record from Australia, which means that we will have to
produce a sweater from sheep's back to humans back in
(31:08):
less than four hours, fifty one minutes and fourteen seconds, which,
oh they also ended by saying, Wisha's luck.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
You know, Mango, I feel like you buried the lead
about the back to back challenge. I mean a sweater
knit off one animal's back onto another, Like now, I
want to see this, I know I do.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
And apparently Norwegian's felt the same way because about one
point three million people, which is more than a fifth
of the total population tuned in for National Knitting Evening.
The average viewer actually stuck around for at least four hours.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
That is wild. You know, it's a difficult decision, Mango.
It's like, do I go home and hunt for an
hour of what to watch on Netflix and fall asleep
before I watch anything, or do I just go straight
to the knitting and then fall asleep. Yeah, I don't
think you can lose with other option. You're right. Well,
I know I was the one who's been pushing to
do this sweater episode. But between the penguin fact and
the one about Norway's must see TV, and of course
(32:09):
our hero mister Rogers, I think you've earned this week's trophy. Mango.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Oh I love it and I'm really grateful, But did
you please start a trophy with a tiny knitted cactus? Like?
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Where'd you get this? That Dylan is a machine so
he knit it for me Earlier this week I just
had this gut feeling you were going to win it.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Well, I'm guessing you knit a cactus because he loves
draw humor. I'm gonna place this proudly on my bookshelf
where I definitely won't water it, but that's gonna do it.
For today's Part Time Genius. If you like our show,
let us know by writing as a review on Apple
Podcasts or by hitting us up on our Insta. You
know the handle it's at. Part Time Genius and from Will, Mary, Gabe,
(32:54):
Dylan and myself, thank you so much for listening and
fundle up. It's chilli out there. Part Time Genius is
a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted
(33:16):
by Will Pearson and Me Mongas Chatikler and research by
our good pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered
and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from
Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by
Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry, with social media support from
Sasha Gay, Trustee Dara Potts and Viny Shorey. For more
(33:39):
podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Part-Time Genius News
Hosts And Creators
Will Pearson
Mangesh Hattikudur
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