October 16, 2020 • 15 mins
Tracy and Holly share stories of their own moments of poor judgement, and the Tracy discusses her interview with Alvin Hall and Janée Woods Weber, creators of the podcast Driving the Green Book.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class. A production
of I Heart Radio, Happy Friday, Everybody. I'm Tracy V. Wilson,
and I'm Holly Fry. One of the topics that we
talked about this week on the show was the demon
Core and other criticality accidents. And I said in that
(00:22):
episode that I might tell a story on myself about
a time that I've done an incredibly foolish thing knowing
it was foolish but also did not involve handling nuclear material.
Please do, I'll tell one as well, and you'll be like, oh,
I'm not as stupid as Holly. So I was living
in my very first apartment and the building had been
(00:45):
sold to another owner, and I was very very nervous
about whether I was gonna, like my rent get raised
or whether I was going to get evicted. Like I
did not want to cause any problems. And I had
this stacked washer dryer unit in my kitchen and it
had stopped working very well, and I realized it was
(01:05):
because the place where like you cleaned the dryer event
like that was all plugged up with dryer land. So
I was removing the dryer lent from that part of
my dryer with a fork. Did you unplugged the dryer? Yes,
the dryer was unplugged. I was that smart. But as
(01:27):
I was doing this, I thought to myself self, You're
gonna drop that fork, and then you're gonna have to
explain to your landlord, who you're already concerned about with
your housing. You're gonna have to explain to your landlord
how you dropped a fork into the interior of your dryer.
And then I dropped the fork, um, and I was
(01:51):
able to get the fork out of the dryer. I
think what I wound up having to do was like
detaching the like dryer hose from the wall and going
in that way. Uh. It was not my finest moment.
I in my defense, I was like twenty two years old,
(02:11):
living on my own for the first time, and as
I said, very concerned about whether I was about to
be evicted because the building had been sold. See. I
have so many of those moments. I feel like, there's
here's one thing that I will say up front. It
never fails that right before I injured myself terribly in
some stupid way, I go, this is stupid, and then
(02:33):
I do it anyway, and there we go. I will
tell the story of um not electricity, but many moons ago.
I used to make a lot of giant costumes, like
we would wear them to dragon con and stuff. And
once I was working on one and I was using
(02:53):
an exact oblade to cut I think it was like
not PVC. It was like a heavy garden hose that
was part of a thing, and I just kind of
like had it in my lap, wedged in a weird way,
and I remember thinking like I'm being so stupid, but God,
I gotta get this thing done. And then suddenly I
(03:14):
don't even know quite what happened. I just know that
I was looking at my hand and there was a
an exact O knife all the way through it, and
I just had it standing there on my hand kind
of like almost in AWE was like, that's interesting, That's
not how that's supposed to. Like my body just like
took my brain out of the equation in terms of
any sort of horror. And not for the fact that
(03:37):
one of my friends, who is very squeamish was there
and was like, good, knife out of your hand, I
don't know how long I would have just like sat
there in a weird shock stupor going gosh, I'm so stupid.
Look there's a knife sticking out of my hand. Um,
but that happened. Yeah. Since this is an audio podcast,
(03:58):
people cannot see like the progressive look of horror that
my face transformed through during that story. I mean, I
try not to be that stupid. That's a classic case
of a like procrastinated project that ends up with sleep
deprivation on a deadline that means you have to do
something to get this done and you become a dump
(04:20):
dumb don't be like me, kids. Yeah. Yeah, like I said, like,
I can totally be like I can see being like
this is this is a foolish thing to do, but
I'm doing it. But again not with nuclear materials. UM,
and I did. Really there was this moment where I
was like I had done all of my research. I
(04:41):
had a long list of criticality accidents that were just
so similar that I was like, why am I doing this?
I need some kind of resolution to this because otherwise
it's like here's a bunch of incidents that happened, they
were bad, and then like what then it? Um. There
(05:01):
was one that I debated about whether to include and
did not include, and it was Actually one of the
reasons that I didn't include it was because it was
actually a reactor meltdown, not nearly as massive as something
like the Chernobyl disaster, but it was this reactor called
the the s L one. It was being brought back
online after having been shut down for the holidays at
(05:23):
the like the winter holidays, and what seems to have
happened is there was a control rod that needed to
be gradually and slowly removed, but it was sticky, and
they knew it was sticky, and the people managing the
facility knew it was sticky, and they had kind of
just cobbled together some procedures for how to deal with
the sticky control rod. And what it seems like happened
(05:46):
is the worker who was trying to pull it out
yanked it and pulled it too far too fast, and
the entire assembly went critical and it exploded and all
three of them were killed. And it was like it
had some similarities in terms of, like they're the safety
stuff was was not being done, but it was also
way more of a like a systemic thing of like
(06:10):
number one one control rod was enough to make this
whole thing go critical. Number two like the people who
were managing these three workers like knew about the stickiness
problem and they hadn't found a good way to deal
with it. And then yeah, one one of the outcomes
from that is that it they then started designing reactors
so that you could not cause the whole thing to
(06:30):
go supercritical by removing one control rod. My question that
I mentioned having during the episode that I would save
till now is like, and this is a stupid question.
It's not a real question, why would anyone do these jobs? Yeah?
I I had this question of like, what what knowledge
(06:51):
were you gaining from these criticality experiments that was so
so important that you were willing to do criticality experiments?
I holding radioactive materials with your hands basically, I mean
not really, they weren't holding the core, but they were
like building stuff around the core with their hands and
sometimes sticking a screwdriver in it. Yeah, that's just like
(07:12):
what And so like I read some accounts from other
nuclear physicists who were like, this was critical research that
needed to be done and there wasn't a remote facility
to do it yet, so we did it. And I'm
still like that seems so bad though, It's like such
a bad idea. So anyway, there's a lot about this
episode that I feel like it's just unresolved. But um also,
(07:35):
I don't know, it just it's felt like sort of
a maccob kind of horrifying thing that that made a
kind of atypical but also interesting October entry. Oh yeah,
I mean right, if it were not for the unfortunate
mortality rate involved in all of these stories, any one
of them would make a very interesting scary creature invention
(08:00):
in story or you know how a superhero gets their
power stories. But unfortunately those are fiction, and this is
the reality that it's a very dangerous thing to work with. Yeah,
I'm glad that the industry, I mean, I have very
various wish lists. I wish that nuclear weapons just didn't exist,
(08:24):
that that just had never happened. Uh, But since they do,
I'm glad that the industry involved with dealing with these
materials got better at safety. Yeah, happy Halloween question. One
of our episodes this week was an interview that I
feel so privileged to have done with Alvin Hall and
(08:47):
Janee Wood's Webber about the podcast that they have created
called Driving the Green Book. This is one of those
podcasts that is a team effort. Alvin was the host
and Janey was the so see a producer, and the
two of them went on the road trip together. But
then they're also like editors and a composer and all
these other people whose work went into that show. Um,
(09:08):
it is really lovely. I cannot stress that enough. Um.
We we got an email from somebody on our marketing
team who had gotten an email from another team asking
if we were interested in this, and both of us
were like, yes, definitely instantly. Yeah. I didn't want to
get into this and too much detail during the interview
(09:29):
because I really wanted to keep the interview focused on
them as much as possible and on their work and
not have me having like extended background of our show
in the middle of it. But I first heard about
the Negro Motorist screen book. At this point, it's been
several years ago, and I started trying to work on
an episode on it back and probably twenty or fourteen.
(09:53):
It was a while back, and at that point there
was way less information available than there is now. Um,
the New York Public Library I mentioned in the interview,
they've digitized something like twenty three years worth of green
books that hadn't happened yet. So I had like a
partial scan of one copy and a couple of really
(10:16):
brief articles, and I was like, I just I don't
have enough to make an episode out of this. And
then as more as more stuff became available in like
the New York Public Library did all those digitizations, and
like there was more stuff, then it was more like
I just couldn't figure out a great approach to it,
(10:37):
because a lot of times when we're talking about historic publications,
we read selections from them and talk about them, and
that just didn't feel as meaningful when big parts of
those publications are sort of like lists of businesses, um,
lists of hotels that you could stay at, lists of
places to get food. Um. So the fact that they
(11:00):
had this idea of going on a road trip and
visiting all these people, visiting the places that still are
in business, but in some cases just talking to people
about the things that they remember, Like, that's that's not
something that our show could really support in terms of
the way our budget and our timelines and stuff like
that work. Um. And it's also just the way, way,
(11:21):
way way richer experience than Tracy and Holly read Passages
from the Green Book. Yeah, books of lists are fascinating
to pour over, not always so fascinating to listen to. Yeah,
And I mean there are longer pieces of text in there,
you know, there are introductions that give a lot of
context about what was happening in the world at that
(11:43):
particular year, and longer descriptions of tourist attractions and things
like that. But it's still like the driving the Green
Book is a much more meaningful encounter with the Green
Book than Passages read than we would have been able
to put together. Yeah, for sure, Yeah, for sure. Were
there any um moments within that interview that took you
(12:05):
by surprise? Yeah? So I had listened to the episodes
that were out before going into the interview, and so
you know, I knew at least what those first four
episodes were about, and I had a sense of questions
that I wanted to ask, and I had written all
of those down. Um, when we were talking about this
(12:25):
is actually a question that I learned when I took
a workshop on interviewing at a thing called max Fun Con,
which is the Maximum Fun Podcast Networks annual thing that
they used to have, and I took this interview workshop
with Jesse Thorne, and he was like, I'm gonna tell
(12:46):
you a question that could be really great, And the
question was like, what did you think this was going
to be? Like? How did it turn out? And how
did that compare? UM? And that can be a way
to really get people thinking about things in an interesting way,
and so that has become a question that I asked
pretty often. And when I asked it, both Alvin and
Janet had totally different responses to it. As you know
(13:10):
if you've listened to the episode UM. Janet's was was
more like she didn't know as much what to expect
because she had not done this before. Alvin had done
lots of road trips before. So Alvin's response was very
much about the planning and the coordination and making sure
they stayed on schedule and that kind of stuff. And
I interpreted that in my head as Alvin having a
(13:30):
sense going into it of what it was going to
be like. And so when I asked the follow up
of like how did those two things compare? I focused
on Janet. Janet was thinking about it, Alvin said I'm
going to say something, and then it turned out Alvin
did it came out totally differently from how Alvin was expecting. So,
like everyone who was listening to the episode, like you
(13:51):
heard that exchange play out. Um, I had totally misinterpreted
Alvin's description of the lanning process as um as meaning
that it's like it went according to his mental plan
and that was not not actually the case. I UM,
Like I said, I'm so glad that we got a
(14:11):
chance to have them, uh, and that that you know,
sometimes one email will lead to great things. So I
was really really pleased that conversation started. I think while
you were out yes, and then I was like yes
from me, and I imagined from Tracy, but let's wait
just just in case, um, And of course you were
like yes, yes. So it was at that point where
(14:33):
you were out. It was just to make everything a
little confusing. Yeah, we were having kind of a relay
race of podcast at that point where I was out
and then you were out and handing the things off
to each other. So again, I cannot think Alvin and
Janette enough. They were so gracious and so generous and
such a pleasure to talk to you. Those are always
(14:53):
the most fun interviews when the people that you're talking
to are generous, with their time and make wonderful conversation too. Um.
I hope folks enjoyed the interview again if you if
you have been listening, like oh man, I wish they
would say the name of that show again. It is
Driving the Green Book. It's available in all the major
podcasts things. Give it a listen if you want to
(15:16):
write to us. We're a history podcast that I heart
radio dot com and you can subscribe to our show
on Apple podcast and I heart radio app and anywhere
else you get podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
(15:37):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class. A production
of I Heart Radio, Happy Friday, Everybody. I'm Tracy V. Wilson,
and I'm Holly Fry. One of the topics that we
talked about this week on the show was the demon
Core and other criticality accidents. And I said in that
(00:22):
episode that I might tell a story on myself about
a time that I've done an incredibly foolish thing knowing
it was foolish but also did not involve handling nuclear material.
Please do, I'll tell one as well, and you'll be like, oh,
I'm not as stupid as Holly. So I was living
in my very first apartment and the building had been
(00:45):
sold to another owner, and I was very very nervous
about whether I was gonna, like my rent get raised
or whether I was going to get evicted. Like I
did not want to cause any problems. And I had
this stacked washer dryer unit in my kitchen and it
had stopped working very well, and I realized it was
(01:05):
because the place where like you cleaned the dryer event
like that was all plugged up with dryer land. So
I was removing the dryer lent from that part of
my dryer with a fork. Did you unplugged the dryer? Yes,
the dryer was unplugged. I was that smart. But as
(01:27):
I was doing this, I thought to myself self, You're
gonna drop that fork, and then you're gonna have to
explain to your landlord, who you're already concerned about with
your housing. You're gonna have to explain to your landlord
how you dropped a fork into the interior of your dryer.
And then I dropped the fork, um, and I was
(01:51):
able to get the fork out of the dryer. I
think what I wound up having to do was like
detaching the like dryer hose from the wall and going
in that way. Uh. It was not my finest moment.
I in my defense, I was like twenty two years old,
(02:11):
living on my own for the first time, and as
I said, very concerned about whether I was about to
be evicted because the building had been sold. See. I
have so many of those moments. I feel like, there's
here's one thing that I will say up front. It
never fails that right before I injured myself terribly in
some stupid way, I go, this is stupid, and then
(02:33):
I do it anyway, and there we go. I will
tell the story of um not electricity, but many moons ago.
I used to make a lot of giant costumes, like
we would wear them to dragon con and stuff. And
once I was working on one and I was using
(02:53):
an exact oblade to cut I think it was like
not PVC. It was like a heavy garden hose that
was part of a thing, and I just kind of
like had it in my lap, wedged in a weird way,
and I remember thinking like I'm being so stupid, but God,
I gotta get this thing done. And then suddenly I
(03:14):
don't even know quite what happened. I just know that
I was looking at my hand and there was a
an exact O knife all the way through it, and
I just had it standing there on my hand kind
of like almost in AWE was like, that's interesting, That's
not how that's supposed to. Like my body just like
took my brain out of the equation in terms of
any sort of horror. And not for the fact that
(03:37):
one of my friends, who is very squeamish was there
and was like, good, knife out of your hand, I
don't know how long I would have just like sat
there in a weird shock stupor going gosh, I'm so stupid.
Look there's a knife sticking out of my hand. Um,
but that happened. Yeah. Since this is an audio podcast,
(03:58):
people cannot see like the progressive look of horror that
my face transformed through during that story. I mean, I
try not to be that stupid. That's a classic case
of a like procrastinated project that ends up with sleep
deprivation on a deadline that means you have to do
something to get this done and you become a dump
(04:20):
dumb don't be like me, kids. Yeah. Yeah, like I said, like,
I can totally be like I can see being like
this is this is a foolish thing to do, but
I'm doing it. But again not with nuclear materials. UM,
and I did. Really there was this moment where I
was like I had done all of my research. I
(04:41):
had a long list of criticality accidents that were just
so similar that I was like, why am I doing this?
I need some kind of resolution to this because otherwise
it's like here's a bunch of incidents that happened, they
were bad, and then like what then it? Um. There
(05:01):
was one that I debated about whether to include and
did not include, and it was Actually one of the
reasons that I didn't include it was because it was
actually a reactor meltdown, not nearly as massive as something
like the Chernobyl disaster, but it was this reactor called
the the s L one. It was being brought back
online after having been shut down for the holidays at
(05:23):
the like the winter holidays, and what seems to have
happened is there was a control rod that needed to
be gradually and slowly removed, but it was sticky, and
they knew it was sticky, and the people managing the
facility knew it was sticky, and they had kind of
just cobbled together some procedures for how to deal with
the sticky control rod. And what it seems like happened
(05:46):
is the worker who was trying to pull it out
yanked it and pulled it too far too fast, and
the entire assembly went critical and it exploded and all
three of them were killed. And it was like it
had some similarities in terms of, like they're the safety
stuff was was not being done, but it was also
way more of a like a systemic thing of like
(06:10):
number one one control rod was enough to make this
whole thing go critical. Number two like the people who
were managing these three workers like knew about the stickiness
problem and they hadn't found a good way to deal
with it. And then yeah, one one of the outcomes
from that is that it they then started designing reactors
so that you could not cause the whole thing to
(06:30):
go supercritical by removing one control rod. My question that
I mentioned having during the episode that I would save
till now is like, and this is a stupid question.
It's not a real question, why would anyone do these jobs? Yeah?
I I had this question of like, what what knowledge
(06:51):
were you gaining from these criticality experiments that was so
so important that you were willing to do criticality experiments?
I holding radioactive materials with your hands basically, I mean
not really, they weren't holding the core, but they were
like building stuff around the core with their hands and
sometimes sticking a screwdriver in it. Yeah, that's just like
(07:12):
what And so like I read some accounts from other
nuclear physicists who were like, this was critical research that
needed to be done and there wasn't a remote facility
to do it yet, so we did it. And I'm
still like that seems so bad though, It's like such
a bad idea. So anyway, there's a lot about this
episode that I feel like it's just unresolved. But um also,
(07:35):
I don't know, it just it's felt like sort of
a maccob kind of horrifying thing that that made a
kind of atypical but also interesting October entry. Oh yeah,
I mean right, if it were not for the unfortunate
mortality rate involved in all of these stories, any one
of them would make a very interesting scary creature invention
(08:00):
in story or you know how a superhero gets their
power stories. But unfortunately those are fiction, and this is
the reality that it's a very dangerous thing to work with. Yeah,
I'm glad that the industry, I mean, I have very
various wish lists. I wish that nuclear weapons just didn't exist,
(08:24):
that that just had never happened. Uh, But since they do,
I'm glad that the industry involved with dealing with these
materials got better at safety. Yeah, happy Halloween question. One
of our episodes this week was an interview that I
feel so privileged to have done with Alvin Hall and
(08:47):
Janee Wood's Webber about the podcast that they have created
called Driving the Green Book. This is one of those
podcasts that is a team effort. Alvin was the host
and Janey was the so see a producer, and the
two of them went on the road trip together. But
then they're also like editors and a composer and all
these other people whose work went into that show. Um,
(09:08):
it is really lovely. I cannot stress that enough. Um.
We we got an email from somebody on our marketing
team who had gotten an email from another team asking
if we were interested in this, and both of us
were like, yes, definitely instantly. Yeah. I didn't want to
get into this and too much detail during the interview
(09:29):
because I really wanted to keep the interview focused on
them as much as possible and on their work and
not have me having like extended background of our show
in the middle of it. But I first heard about
the Negro Motorist screen book. At this point, it's been
several years ago, and I started trying to work on
an episode on it back and probably twenty or fourteen.
(09:53):
It was a while back, and at that point there
was way less information available than there is now. Um,
the New York Public Library I mentioned in the interview,
they've digitized something like twenty three years worth of green
books that hadn't happened yet. So I had like a
partial scan of one copy and a couple of really
(10:16):
brief articles, and I was like, I just I don't
have enough to make an episode out of this. And
then as more as more stuff became available in like
the New York Public Library did all those digitizations, and
like there was more stuff, then it was more like
I just couldn't figure out a great approach to it,
(10:37):
because a lot of times when we're talking about historic publications,
we read selections from them and talk about them, and
that just didn't feel as meaningful when big parts of
those publications are sort of like lists of businesses, um,
lists of hotels that you could stay at, lists of
places to get food. Um. So the fact that they
(11:00):
had this idea of going on a road trip and
visiting all these people, visiting the places that still are
in business, but in some cases just talking to people
about the things that they remember, Like, that's that's not
something that our show could really support in terms of
the way our budget and our timelines and stuff like
that work. Um. And it's also just the way, way,
(11:21):
way way richer experience than Tracy and Holly read Passages
from the Green Book. Yeah, books of lists are fascinating
to pour over, not always so fascinating to listen to. Yeah,
And I mean there are longer pieces of text in there,
you know, there are introductions that give a lot of
context about what was happening in the world at that
(11:43):
particular year, and longer descriptions of tourist attractions and things
like that. But it's still like the driving the Green
Book is a much more meaningful encounter with the Green
Book than Passages read than we would have been able
to put together. Yeah, for sure, Yeah, for sure. Were
there any um moments within that interview that took you
(12:05):
by surprise? Yeah? So I had listened to the episodes
that were out before going into the interview, and so
you know, I knew at least what those first four
episodes were about, and I had a sense of questions
that I wanted to ask, and I had written all
of those down. Um, when we were talking about this
(12:25):
is actually a question that I learned when I took
a workshop on interviewing at a thing called max Fun Con,
which is the Maximum Fun Podcast Networks annual thing that
they used to have, and I took this interview workshop
with Jesse Thorne, and he was like, I'm gonna tell
(12:46):
you a question that could be really great, And the
question was like, what did you think this was going
to be? Like? How did it turn out? And how
did that compare? UM? And that can be a way
to really get people thinking about things in an interesting way,
and so that has become a question that I asked
pretty often. And when I asked it, both Alvin and
Janet had totally different responses to it. As you know
(13:10):
if you've listened to the episode UM. Janet's was was
more like she didn't know as much what to expect
because she had not done this before. Alvin had done
lots of road trips before. So Alvin's response was very
much about the planning and the coordination and making sure
they stayed on schedule and that kind of stuff. And
I interpreted that in my head as Alvin having a
(13:30):
sense going into it of what it was going to
be like. And so when I asked the follow up
of like how did those two things compare? I focused
on Janet. Janet was thinking about it, Alvin said I'm
going to say something, and then it turned out Alvin
did it came out totally differently from how Alvin was expecting. So,
like everyone who was listening to the episode, like you
(13:51):
heard that exchange play out. Um, I had totally misinterpreted
Alvin's description of the lanning process as um as meaning
that it's like it went according to his mental plan
and that was not not actually the case. I UM,
Like I said, I'm so glad that we got a
(14:11):
chance to have them, uh, and that that you know,
sometimes one email will lead to great things. So I
was really really pleased that conversation started. I think while
you were out yes, and then I was like yes
from me, and I imagined from Tracy, but let's wait
just just in case, um, And of course you were
like yes, yes. So it was at that point where
(14:33):
you were out. It was just to make everything a
little confusing. Yeah, we were having kind of a relay
race of podcast at that point where I was out
and then you were out and handing the things off
to each other. So again, I cannot think Alvin and
Janette enough. They were so gracious and so generous and
such a pleasure to talk to you. Those are always
(14:53):
the most fun interviews when the people that you're talking
to are generous, with their time and make wonderful conversation too. Um.
I hope folks enjoyed the interview again if you if
you have been listening, like oh man, I wish they
would say the name of that show again. It is
Driving the Green Book. It's available in all the major
podcasts things. Give it a listen if you want to
(15:16):
write to us. We're a history podcast that I heart
radio dot com and you can subscribe to our show
on Apple podcast and I heart radio app and anywhere
else you get podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
(15:37):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.