Behind the Scenes Minis: Jane and the Clicker

Holly talks about nebulous passages in the writing of Jane Croly and her brother. Tracy and Holly talk about watching TV as children. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and Happy Friday. AM Holly Fry and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Jane Cunningham Croley
aka Jenny June this week. Yeah, and I can tell

(00:22):
listeners about the full on panic that I had getting
your email, because I I don't remember her being mentioned
in the paper Patterns episode. If she did, it was
not in my head anymore. But when I saw the
name Jenny June, what was in my head instantly was

(00:42):
someone we have talked about on the show before who
also knew used the name Jenny June. And that was
the person who wrote under the names Earl Lynde, Ralph
Werther and Jenny June. And one of the things we
mentioned in that episode, which I'd also forgotten that one detail,
was that he he said he did not know at

(01:04):
the time when he started using the name Jenny June,
that that name was already being used by someone else.
And so, like we mentioned, we mentioned Jane Cunningham Crowley
in this other episode, I had forgotten that one to tail.
So when I just I opened my email this morning
and I just saw a file name called Jenny June.
I was like, oh, no, did we accidentally repeat an

(01:26):
episode topic. No, it is in fact a different person. Yeah,
I am very, very fascinated by Jane Curley. Yeah, because
there are ways in which I'm like, I get you, babe,
I get and there are other ways and I'm like,
you are a snit. I will confess throughout all of
the research. In my head, everything she wrote as I

(01:48):
was reading it was read in the voice of Emelda Staunton. Joe, Okay, well,
we need to know. There was a phrase that I
read that her brother said a couple of different times.
I don't know what he means. This is one instance
of it. It may surprise even those who knew her

(02:09):
well to learn that her physical timidity was great and
at times painful. Now, I don't know if he's literally
saying she was shy and that was painful, or that
he is literally saying she has some physical ailment that
is painful. Like he and she both wrote in very

(02:29):
stilted language, where things like timidity might not mean what
you think it means. Yeah, when you've read it, I
interpreted it as painfully shy. But also, in addition to
both of them writing in kind of a stilted way,
like language use evolves over time. Yep. So if I
went and looked at like the Oxford English Dictionary or something,

(02:52):
would I find earlier connotations of any of that that
we don't really use as much of it now? Who knows? Yeah?
I mean I I squirreled around, and I never found
anything satisfactory. But again, also his writing style, yeah is not.
His writing style is exactly what you might anticipate of

(03:13):
someone who was a minister in the eighteen hundreds who
was used to writing sermons, do you know what I mean?
Not bad? Yeah, not an easy read either, yeah, right,
Like probably easier than some people. But because after all,
he was Unitarian, one of those untrustworthy Unitarians according to

(03:34):
their fellows, according to their English detractors that they live.
There are so many things in here that kind of
tickled me, and a lot of the stuff that I
ended up reading I really enjoyed, like especially the back
and forth in various newspapers. One of the things that
I thought was really interesting that I read was not
written by her but by another woman. That was like

(03:58):
a letter to the editor thing in response to something
the newspaper had written about Soorosis when it had first formed,
because apparently it had been a big thing of like,
what is the point, why are you even doing this?
What good are you doing? And this woman wrote this
very lengthy but very pointed response of like, do you

(04:20):
recognize that if a woman starts an enterprise, the first
thing that gets asked is who are you helping? How
is this of benefit to anybody else? What is the
point of this? But men can start a club and
you're like, cool, I guess they just want to smoke
cigars together, Like nobody asked them what their bigger purpose
and social benefit is. I was like, oh, bless you

(04:42):
eighteen sixty eight lady, who's real mad at this guy? Yeah?
I think we've talked about a couple of people on
the show who were members of Soorosis. Oh yeah, I
mean it was huge and particuarly in New York. A
lot of very well known people became members. Yeah. I
feel like one of them was maybe Emily Warren Roebling.

(05:04):
Probably not, would not be surprising at all. Right, I
didn't look up the full roster because I got very
bogged down and reading people argue in newspapers. It became fun.
It wasn't even sources at that point. It was just
like woo and then what she say? There was also
a moment in that very not cool passage. There are

(05:26):
several not cool passages when she's talking about like what
are you gonna do as a woman like teaching? You
don't know anything to teach it? And her point was that, like,
you are so young, you don't have the life experience
to be able to be a teacher. But knowing that
she as a young woman, her first job was a teacher,
I'm like, do you just remember feeling like you didn't

(05:49):
know what you were doing and that's what this is?
Or were you conceded enough to think that you were
the exception that was ready to be teaching. I don't know.
I don't know the answer. Yeah, I can't go back
and interrogate Jane Henning him Croley, ma'am, what is your
point here? Fascinated? Fascinated? You mentioned I don't know how
you put it that her writing is often very condescending,

(06:12):
and it is. Yeah, I found that passage in particular
about you know, don't be a teacher because you don't
know anything. I was like, well, what do you want
me to do? Man? And also, this is a little
patronizing the way you just wrote that. Yeah, I mean,
and that that is very much in the style of
her writing as Jenny June, where it is very like

(06:34):
I know better. It's like the advice columnist kind of thing.
And especially at that point she was an older woman
and she had really she was very well respected, but
she definitely took that to heart and was like, I'm
the expert on all the things. So mhmm, you are
clearly a ding dong my darling child, which is kind

(06:55):
of funny. Makes me laugh. No, thanks, like, oh honey, bunny. Yeah.
Her writing is also not an easy read, aside from
it being of the time. Sure, it's extra the phrasing
does not read naturally to me at all. Okay, but
it's still interesting. Yeah. I remember one of the things.

(07:17):
I don't remember which specific thing, but one of the
things that I was reading that was a quote in
the episode. I remember getting part way through and my
brain kind of like slipping between the gears. Yeah, having
to go back and be like, wait, what am I
saying right now? Jenny June? What do you get Matt? Yes,

(07:39):
Her books that cookery book. It literally would make you,
I rate because a lot of it is like, why
are you so stupid? Stupid? Be a smart be a
smart girl, learn how to cook, which is kind of
fascinating to me. Yeah, because she was clearly in many
ways at odds with her own ideology. But right didn't

(08:00):
recognize that, as is often the case, it's easy for
us to see it with the passage of time. But
you know, she was somehow thought, I mean, clearly, this
is a woman that had a lot of energy, right, Yeah,
you can raise four kids, keep a house. And like,
when I tell you about how she includes in that
book her schedule of housekeeping, I'm exhausted. It's like, and

(08:24):
then you have to iron the sheets and blankets, but
put them away carefully so that you know they won't
get wrinkled. And I'm like, mmmmm, no, ma'am, that's not
gonna happen here. And then that she was writing often
till the wee hours of the morning to keep up
with her schedule, and then you know, scheduling meetings with
other women to form this group and keep it running

(08:44):
and stuff. I was just like, I don't I'm just like,
it can feel really good to get into a bed
with a nice Chris sheet. But no one cares if
your sheets are ironed. No one, no one. I mean admittedly, right,
this is a time before everybody had washers and dryers,

(09:07):
so right, you know my thing is like pull your
sheets out of the dryer, fresh, fold them. Then they'll
be nice and crisp for you know, when you need them,
which was not the case then. But I can't even no, no, no,
I would not be ironing the sheets, blankets, table linens,
et cetera. Yeah, because Holly's lacey, Yeah in this way, Yeah,

(09:31):
she seems like a dynamo. Yeah. I might iron the
table linens if I was having a fancy party immediately
before the party. Yeah, but I don't think I actually
even own any table linens that could be ironed, So
this is moot. Yeah, I'm a steamer person in instances
such as that, I don't. I will use an iron

(09:54):
when I sew, but I don't really like it for
my clothes or my right and I don't steamer. Yeah,
I own an iron, and somewhere in our home there
is an ironing board. I feel sure, but I could
not tell you the last time I used them. I
actually think the last time our iron has been used.

(10:15):
My spouse has this battle vest that he wears that
when he works at conventions that has all these different
patches sewed on, and a lot of them are patches
that have an iron on component. But he also sews them. Yeah,
but he will sometimes position them and iron them first
to get them secured into that place rather than trying

(10:37):
to pin them where he wants them to go. I'm
pretty sure that is the most recent iron usage in
our house. See, I do have the good fortune when
it is kept clean, which it often isn't of having
a three foot by seven foot ironing surface in my
sewing room, Like that's my cutting table, which you may

(10:58):
or may not recall, is very big and it's covered
in like stuff that can handle thermal so I can
iron right on it, but I still don't ever want
to do it. I also never will iron on a
patch even if it has the iron on stuff, because
in my ding dong head, I'm always like, what if
I want to take that patch off one day and

(11:20):
put it on something else and I don't want the
adhesive to mess with the Now listen, when I make
patches like on my embroidery machine for other people. Do
I always put an iron on backing on it, Yes,
because I know not everyone else wants to hand soap
patches on stuff. Yeah, but I will always stitch it on.
I don't know, just one of my weird things. Yeah,

(11:43):
ever preserving. I bet that Jane Crowley would not approve
of iron on patches for some reason. Probably not. Probably not.
Shouldn't approve of a lot of things. But you know,
you better know how to cook, or you're going to jail.
Apparently I'm going to go to a restaurant and have

(12:04):
somebody else bring me food, because there's no greater joy
than sitting down and having someone bring me a delicious
beverage and a meal. I love my whole soul. Talked
about the invention of the television remote control this week. Yeah,

(12:28):
a thing that was slightly earlier than I thought based
on my own memory of my childhood. Yeah, and some
of that is because it was still a luxury item
when we were kids. Yeah. Yeah, my parents didn't have
My parents didn't even have a VCR until like well

(12:49):
after everybody else had one. Yeah. I remember when the
VCR was purchased for our household. Which was later I
was already in college. Yeah, I was not already in college. Yeah,
but I was at a point where, like most of
my classmates had a VCR already by the time we
got we were early adopters of some other stuff, like

(13:11):
when a lot of classmates had a Nintendo, we got
a computer. So that was sort of like a little
different track of technology in the house. But like I
remember the televisions with a dial that you had to
visitally crank crank it around. You get up on Saturday morning,

(13:34):
you want to go watch your cartoons. It's on the
wrong channel. You just grab it and fling it around,
and I like remember the ratcheting sound of that. I
have like a tactile memory of wrenching the TV dial around. Yeah.
I mean I was lucky because my favorite cartoons were
running in a block. Yeah, so it was like, you know,

(13:57):
you got your Smurfs and Snorks. Well, that's two hours
of your morning set up right there. Correct, Happy as
a clam the Barbarian. And then I've talked before about
how our household had a number of rules and we
were only allowed I think two hours of TV on
Saturday morning. It might have been longer than that, but
there was an hour a number of hours that was allowed.

(14:20):
And the reason I think it was two hours is
that I feel like we were watching four different cartoons
in that time, and Smurfs and Snorks was definitely a
block of that time. I feel like at some point
I should do an episode about Snorks and how they
are not a copy of Smurfs. I feel very strongly
about this issue. They came out around the same time

(14:41):
in Europe. I really thought you were about to say,
I think I should do an episode on all of
Tracy's weird rules from her children. No, I don't feel
nearly as strongly about that as I do Snorks and Smurfs. Listen, man,
give me Casey an all Star all day long, all day. Yeah.
I remember the first remote control that we ever got

(15:04):
that was pretty basic, with on and off and different
numbers for the different channels, and I also remember the
facing of it kind of delaminating from the body of
it over the time. Over time. Yes, my parents' house
now has so many remotes for different purposes, and my

(15:26):
mom's speech generating device has the ability to be the
remote control for the things that are related to the
team Ooh, that's cool. This is actually something I had
to write letters. I don't remember if it was letters
to my like congress people, or if it was commentary
on a proposed rule change, but there was a discussion

(15:49):
of how Medicare and Medicaid we're going to stop allowing
that technology on speech generating devices because it was seen
as like a luxury and they weren't even going to
allow people to like add that on out of pocket.
Oh weird. It was going to be like if you
added remote control technology, the entire thing was not going

(16:11):
to be covered. And it was like, okay, but this
is like one of the very limited ways that my
mother can have control over her own environment, and if
you take this away from her, she is reliant on
other people in a way that she would not have
been if she could just control the television herself. Viam Yeah, so,

(16:34):
and that was a change that did not happen if
I remember correctly. So anyway, that's a very sophisticated remote
control because it can control all of the television stuff
and then also communicate I'm gonna say, and also the weather.
Just to be funny, but wouldn't it be great if
we did just have remote controls to control the weather.

(16:55):
We don't need to fish do it? Okay? Anyway, it's
a Leelu and stitch. Oh yeah, pudge controls the weather.
There was a great quote that I read while I
was doing research for this. I have not read this
person's book. James Glake. I'm not sure pronunciation. It's g
l Eick wrote a book called Faster, The Acceleration of

(17:16):
just about Everything, and was quoted in one of the
articles I was looking at in terms of how the
remote control changed television programming okay, and the quote was,
now every television programmer works in the shadow of the
awareness that the audience is armed. And this was one

(17:40):
of those things. It was tied to a bigger discussion
in that article about how once people had remote controls
and they could control what they were watching from their
chairm a lot of TV writers, editors, et cetera. Executives
became keenly aware of the fact that they didn't keep everything.
If they didn't keep everything really snapped and engaging all

(18:01):
the time, people would turn away. Yes, So like when
you think about the short attention span that people have today,
often attributed to smartphones, YouTube TikTok et cetera. Like the
roots of it go go back to the fifties though,
so we can't only blame the modern stuff. You have
to recognize that, like these shifts were happening in in

(18:23):
ways way before we ever got there. Yeah, way before
we ever got to where we are today. So it
was just very very interesting the idea that that had
added a different type of choice agency to people's entertainment
and leisure time. Whereas before they might have been like, Eh,
just leave it on, I'm tired. Then now they don't
do that any You have the youngest person in the room,

(18:46):
it's their job to change channel. Yes, it then became
their job to go get the clicker. Yes. I will
also say too that the remote control as you mentioned
in your house right and everybody in the eighties, there
was a lot of discussion as it became really prolific
because the infrared remote controls also became entered the market

(19:11):
at a much more comfortable and achievable price point than
their predecessors. So suddenly a lot of people were getting
them very quickly, and there was so much discussion about
how it was going to ruin everyone's life and make
them sedentary. But like TV dinners have been around since
the forties, is that when the first one, maybe that's

(19:32):
one I'll look into. They've been around a long time, Like,
it's not only this one thing. Yeah, Almost any time
you want to discuss like a shift in cultural norms,
you have to recognize that there is rarely just one
thing that is responsible for any of them. And when
you oversimplify, you are creating a problem of understanding where

(19:54):
if you wanted to try to solve the situation, you
only address that one thing. You're not going to fix Jack,
It's just there's nothing it's important to remember. Yeah. Yeah. Also,
the amount of physical effort it takes to get up
and change the channel on the television is definitely not
going to counteract all four calories that you burn doing. Yeah,

(20:17):
if you're extra energetic about it. Yeah, it's a false,
false way to consider it. I was very fascinated by
this idea from the nineteen fifties that Eugene McDonald's, founder

(20:42):
of ZnI, had that if you muted commercials, they would
eventually go away because they were ineffective, right, And the
reason this struck me as hilarious was do you remember
in the nineteen eighties when MTV started muting their commercials.
When was this this in the nineteen eighties, I'm pretty

(21:04):
sure it had not been around very long. They just
played their commercials without sound. But what happened was they
actually got better viewer engagement on commercials because people would
get up go in their kitchen to get their beverage,
their popcorn, their snack, whatever, and when they heard no
sound coming out of the TV, they would run back
in thinking something was wrong, and so they actually pitched

(21:28):
it to advertisers. Is my understanding, as this is actually
a benefit because people are actually looking at your ad now,
whereas when we run them with sound, people just tune
the whole thing out. Yeah. I have no memory of this,
and I don't know. It could be because we were
also it took a while before there was cable at
our house. Oh, we didn't have cable forever. I watched

(21:49):
a friend's house. Yeah, in part because we'd lived in
the country and so there wasn't cable at all for
a while. And then once we did get cable, we
had a very base cable package that didn't include some
of that at first, at least, so I don't remember it.
I'm looking at a Reddit discussion right now where someone

(22:14):
had written in and said, I have a memory of
watching MTV when the network first launched. All of the
commercials were silent, that is, the sound cutout when it
broke away from music videos for commercials, And this person
is like, I've been asking other people and they said
that wasn't it. That didn't happen. But other people are like, oh, no,
I remember that, but I think I don't know how

(22:35):
long it lasted, which might be why the confusion arises
where people are like, that's not my experience. It's like, well,
my years were you watching. I think that was like
early in the launch of MTV when it was brand new,
and if you signed up for cable when it was
brand new, you would get the MTV button. Do you
remember that? No, oh, the coveted MTV listen. I was

(22:56):
not cool enough. My family was certainly not cool enough.
We were not signing up for cable, and I was
not getting the cool MTV button. But now I look
back and go, that was so important to like twelve
year old me, and now I'm just like, who cares.
I have a vague memory of like one friend having
MTV at their house and like barely having any experience

(23:20):
with it until it had been around for a while.
Oh no, the amount of sleepover skyrocketed as we all
wanted to go to the MTV houses and then like,
don't even get me started on one hundred and twenty
minutes because that was my bible as a teenager. Do
you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, on Sunday nights,
they would run one hundred and twenty minutes of kind

(23:42):
of alternative new wave stuff. Give me all of it,
Give me all of it. That's the first time I
ever heard of was Costello's strict Time, which is one
of my favorite songs of all time. Amazing, Oh my god,
all of yeahz Yeah, those are good times, like you.
This happened a little sooner than I would have entedid Yeah,
in terms of it going on nineteen fifty, yeah, I

(24:05):
would have put it in the seventies just because of
like when it was available at my house. Yeah, but
that was that was the need for you know, LEDs
to be developed in infrared to happen, and LEDs to
become inexpensive enough that they could be used for such things.
It's very fun looking at the diagrams on the patent

(24:26):
applications for these, because like the one for the space
command Listen. I've looked at a lot of patent applications,
and I will be the first to tell you that
when you get into electronic circuitry, my brain kind of
blips out of the situation. It's like, I don't know,

(24:46):
I don't know what any of this is. But that
one is one where I'm like, oh, I can actually
parse what this is, because, yeah, because it was a
little bit simpler, it was sort of ingeniously and elegantly
simple in its design, and it needed no batteries, which
I'm that's if you introduced a no battery remote today,
I think people would snap it right up right. Maybe, Yeah, Yeah.

(25:09):
We had very recently had an issue where the battery
died in the remote that we use for almost all
television applications at our house, and I turned on the
television and then it sent some sort of signal without
me pressing anything that put it onto some channel that

(25:31):
was coming over the cable, which is ninety nine percent
not what we used the TV for. And then the
batteries were dead, and so the TV was on. It
was on some random cable channel, and it took me
a minute to be like, why won't this work? Oh,
it is the batteries. Yeah, And unfortunately we had spare

(25:53):
batteries in the house. Otherwise I would have had to
fish around trying to find where the buttons are that
are invisible on there. That's very funny. Oh oh, TV.
What is the Homer Simpson line, teach your mother secret
lover television? Listen? I love it. TV is never turns

(26:15):
off at our house. Yeah, never turned off at my
house growing up. Keep it on all the time here
cats like to watch it at night. All good. We're
the opposite. Your TV's off all the time. It's off
most of the time. It turns on periodic. It usually

(26:38):
turns on. There are things that we watch together as
a couple. We turn it on to watch that. Often
as I am kind of winding down in the evening,
I will watch some kind of chill television show that
is not causing me any stress or anxiety. But otherwise
it's awful lot of the time. No on all the time,

(27:01):
muted most of the time, but it's on. We're playing
a game. If we're in a phase of some game
that is being played, on a console. TV is on
for that, but I rotate O, that's the downstairs TV.
That's okay. I was gonna say we only have one,
but we technically have to. But the second one I like,
I never interact with. It is in the upstairs attic

(27:22):
space where I rarely go one, two, three, four five.
We have five. Yeah, living room lounge, our little gym.
That one doesn't get used very much right now because
the plants are living in there. One in my sewing room,
and then I have another one that's not plugged in anywhere. Yeah,

(27:43):
I have an iPad emergency. I have an iPad that
serves the purpose of a TV that is on the
exercise bike. Yeah, on a little stand that I used
to watch a TV show while I try to exercise.
We used to always have the TV that was turned on.
This is this is more personal sad times to Cartoon

(28:04):
Network just all the time. Oh yeah, Cartoon Network is
no longer part of our cable package. It has now
moved to a premium cable package. And I have the sads,
but now it's just Golden Girls kind of constantly on
the channel which I've discovered runs Golden Girls at all
hours day and night. I didn't know it either is
or until very recently. Was also in one of the

(28:24):
streaming services, what do you mean, Golden Girls? Yeah, was on,
but I'm not streaming all the time. I'm I just
have TV on. Yeah, And I had to figure out
where the TV on all the time needed to be
tuned because cartoons, because it's not cartoon anymore. Yeah, it
was a cartooning sad. If this is your weekend coming

(28:48):
up and you want to veg out in front of
the television, rock on, I believe in you. Sometimes it's
the best listen. I'll put on a thing that's going
to run a million hours of ongoing content when I'm
trying to clean the house or do chores, and it's
the best I'll watch and or over and over seven
times a month. I don't care if you get to

(29:09):
watch TV and that is what delights you, wonderful. If
that's not interesting to you, I hope whatever it is
that you love is something you get to engage in
a whole bunch this weekend. If your weekend, in terms
of your time off, doesn't line up with the weekend calendar,
I hope that you still have the best possible couple
of days ahead, and that everyone is kind to you,
and that you eat delicious things and you feel joy,

(29:33):
and that the troubles of the world are not so
great that you cannot find delight in your every day.
We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic,
and then on Monday we'll have something brand new. Stuff
you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.

(29:53):
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