Behind the Scenes Minis: Griffith and Crosse

Holly and Tracy talk about the fascination of the Griffith story and how contemporary journalists covered Griffith's crime, as well as how his story ties to Disney history. Tracy also discusses how delightful it was to pull together the research on Andrew Crosse.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. So, Tracy, we talked
about a lot of horrific things in the Griffith J.
Griffith episode. Did I was curious, what led you to

(00:25):
this specific story. He's been on my list for a
really long time. Yeah, and then it came up in
another project that's going on, just a fleeting mention of
his name, and I was like, oh, I should go
back to that. It's horrifying but fascinating to me, uh,
you know, because it is one of those instances where
there's part of me that finds the whole thing frustrating

(00:46):
because in the long game, he got exactly what he wanted, right.
His name is still famous, he's still like known and
considered a founder of of a lot of pieces of
L a U iconography in terms of their escape. He
got the Greek theater and in the observatory that he
wanted right, not in his lifetime, but he got him. Um.

(01:07):
But yeah, I I love a good villain story anyway.
I just think it's a really strange and interesting thing.
And the thing I really do love not about this, obviously,
I don't love what took place, but I really loved
combing through the original newspaper accounts of the whole thing

(01:28):
because clearly, especially because he was a prominent citizen at
that point, every journalist was just completely fascinated and focused
on it for a while. And I mean they really
would just like pages and pages of coverage from different
angles of the case, where you know, one is like
that one that we specifically talked about a lot that

(01:50):
was like the first story breaking where we didn't really
have Mrs Griffith's full account yet because she had just
spoken briefly to her sister in the hospital. You know,
it really breaks down like here's what the hotel looks like,
and they have the diagrams of like where she landed
on the roof below, and they're trying to puzzle out
the whole thing, and not to me is just really
interesting because I like seeing one what coverage was like

(02:14):
at any given time versus how like that story would
be covered today in terms of journalistic integrity and stuff.
Like I mentioned in the episode, that moment of the
reporter kind of asking him some really good, hard hitting questions,
but then at the end giving him the out by saying,
so is that all untrue? Yeah, yes, of course it's

(02:34):
all untrue, instead of just letting him like dangle for
a minute. But there's a good part that I wanted
to say for this as like the bomb to the
whole thing. And a lot of people will already know this.
I'm not dropping any knowledge that any Disney fan doesn't
already know. The Merry Go Round at Griffith Park was
installed in This is a significant feature in the park.

(02:56):
It's still there. It's when it's not a pandemic, you
can still write it. But it is also significant in
Disney history because Walt Disney used to take his daughters
there to ride the Merry Go Round, and it was
sitting on a bench watching his daughter's ride that carousel
that he got the idea for Disneyland. I don't think
I knew that. Yeah, I feel like we might have

(03:17):
said it in a prior episode and I forgot, uh maybe,
But so there there is a lot of really amazing
history just connected to Griffith Park, including, like you know,
things that were going on during the Civil Rights movement.
There have certainly been other crimes committed in the park,
some of which have been grizzly and also similarly fascinated

(03:40):
the press. The park itself has a really fascinating history,
and there's a lot of work has been done to
preserve the park's history and really like make a robust
archive of it. Um. I know the Observatory had a
an exhibit for a while. I don't know if it's
still up that was a history of the park. But yeah,
it's a you know, these places are all around us

(04:00):
and we don't always think about them having long stories
to tell, um, but they all do. I mean, we've
we've talked about, you know, Central Park in an entire
community that was there that most people have forgotten about.
It's it's like that any of these places have probably
stories that may or may not be very delightful, but
they're an important part of the record and of the

(04:22):
identity of that place. So Griffith, J. Griffith, I called
him a lot of very very unkind things while doing
this research and in your email when you emailed me
the ah it's a show that kids might listen to.
So I won't use any of the words I used,

(04:42):
but I don't have a favorable opinion of the One
of the things we talked about this week was Andrew Cross,
who did a lot of experiments with electricity. Yes he did,
um so three year uh. My spouse and I are

(05:03):
on a team for the m I T Mystery Hunts,
which is a puzzle hunt events um where people try
to find a coin that's hidden on the m I
T campus, which of course had to be handled very
differently this year because of the pandemic. It was a
virtual situation. But because I was going to take Friday
off to go with our Monday MLK holiday, the men

(05:28):
I need to get my work done early, and I
was like, what do I feel like I can handle?
Goofy scientist guy. I think I can get finished in
the amount of time that I have to get my
work done, And that was totally true. This is one
of those episodes that just sort of fell together neatly
as I was working on it, instead of being kind

(05:49):
of hammering things into place, which is how Olamptera Googe went.
Just Yeah, It's funny how those some just go smooth
as silk and others who are like, you're dragging a
sack of information to the finish line, Like please come on,
just tie up somehow narratively make a narrative please. Um.

(06:11):
His second wife's books were, of course a big source
of information for the episode. Um. They are online in
several places. You can read them for yourself and if
you are interested in more details about the experiment with
the mites, um, all the details are in there. Reading
through those was a whole lot of fun. I don't
have a great explanation for the mites beyond maybe some

(06:36):
mtes laid their eggs on there. Um, And it like
continues to not really have a definitive explanation, right. Only
two people had this result. A little vague about all
of it, you know. I think I feel like I
would blame the water for some reason. Yeah, I'd be like,
it's in there when they set up the experiments. That's

(06:58):
what it is. I'm basing that nothing. Various household mites
can also be pretty hearty. If you have ever tried
to like get rid of dust mites in your house
or whatever, it can take a whole lot to try
to do that. All of Number one, it's clear that
in his school years, like his boyhood's school years, he

(07:20):
sounds like he was a handful and then as an adult,
he just became kind of this eccentric I'm gonna do
experiments in my house, which, well, you know, a lot
of scientific work happening at that time was just people
who were enthusiastic and interested and had enough money to
support their science habit. That's true, Um, I promised you

(07:44):
a story about time, all right, right, since he and
his brother tried to split up time into ten hour
increments instead of the twelve and twelve to make twenty
four that we all live on, I as an ad alt.
Do you remember Swatch Internet time? No? Okay, So there

(08:08):
was a move in where Swatch tried to introduce this
idea that everyone globally should switch to one time Swatch
Internet time because they recognize that due to globalization, like
people would be communicating with each other, and rather than going, okay,
wait at six where I am, that means it's one

(08:30):
where you are, you could just say let's meet at
seven hundred and like the day was broken down into
beats what they called beats, which were one thousand beats
per rotation, so per day. I would have been in
my mid twenties at this time, and I wanted everyone

(08:50):
to adopt Swatch Internet. I thought it was brilliant. I
tried to live by it, much to the frustration of
everyone around me, because I would be like, oh, do
you mean you know? They would be like, oh, breakfast
is at eight thirty, and I would be like, oh,
do you mean you know three hundred and twelve or whatever.

(09:14):
But it was just never gonna work. I mean, I
did some doofy things in my twenties, so I don't
feel like I can judge you too much for this,
but I do have some questions. I mean, I just
thought it was like revolutionary and smart, but what are
your questions? My question is really like, one of the
things about having all these time zones is having a

(09:37):
sense of what time it is in another place and
whether the person you're talking to is likely to be awake. Right,
how did it account for that? Were people just gonna
be awake at we were all gonna well, it didn't
I mean, it wasn't like that. It was like you
would be able to say, no, I sleep from five
or whatever, but you didn't have to worry about daylight savings.

(10:01):
That was not part of the plan. It would stay
completely consistent, sure, and it would get everybody on the
same time, which I think the Crosses would have been
very into this if they had been living in I
thought of them. I thought of it immediately when I
read that, I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'd be
into this. I mean I always kind of like the

(10:23):
idea of playing with time and not living by the
twelve hour o'clock. You know. I'm also one of those
people who really really wanted to make polyphasic sleeping work,
and that was not functional for me. Um, It's like,
it works really well until it doesn't work and then,
which for anybody that doesn't know, that's when people there

(10:43):
was I'm sure there are still people doing it at
the time. I mean, this was some years back the
research I had been doing. The idea was that if
you broke your sleep down into smaller increments that were
on a very regimented schedule, you didn't have to sleep
like a full eight hours every night. You could get
by with actually like three, but it was like in

(11:04):
you know, twenty five minute increments or whatever, but you
had to do them at like regularly scheduled out intervals intervals,
and a lot of people did it. You can do
a search for it and you'll find lots of people's
accounts of trying to switch to this. I love it
because I have a love hate thing with sleep. I
wish I didn't have to sleep. I have stuff to do.
Them in a die one day, I wouldn't make a
lot of clothes before then. But um, for a lot

(11:26):
of people that make it work, what they find is
that it works great. And then if you're like in
a situation where you cannot get to your place two
doze off. Like one guy. I remember reading his account
and he was saying, like I was doing really, really great,
and then I was in a meeting at work that
ran along and my body was so used to just
like go to sleep at ten o one every morning

(11:49):
that I literally just slumped over and fell asleep on
the conference table, like and then once that happens, you're like,
once you get off of it, you have to start
all over, and it takes a long time to retrain
your body. It's probably more about me than you ever
wanted to know. But I sure wish I could make
that work. I'm thinking the crosses might have also been
into politic I do too. It's kind of like a

(12:11):
lot of people point to was it Einstein that would
know Edison would cat nap. He didn't like have bedtime
per se. He would just cat nap throughout the day.
Edison has his own problems, but that always sounded appealing
to me. But I've never been able to make it function. Yeah,
uh yeah. If you want to write to us about

(12:34):
this or any other podcasts or history podcasts at my
heart radio dot com. I hope everybody has a great
weekend whatever is on your plate. If you're working, I
hope people are not jerks to you, And if you
are not working, I hope it's as RESTful as it
can be. Stuff you missed in History Class is a

(12:56):
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