March 14, 2025 • 25 mins
Tracy notes the wild array of incorrect information that circulates about Lillian Exum Clement. Then she and Holly talk about childhood reading habits.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This week we talked about
Lillian exem Clement Stafford, who I find so interesting and
so cool in so many ways, except for the United
Daughters of the Confederacy and the eugenics part. Not a
(00:34):
fan of either of those. Yeah, So to my knowledge,
there has been no like biography of her written, which
means that a lot of the research, like the initial
research for the episode included a lot of things which,
as we said in the episode, had come from local
(00:57):
newspaper and magazine article goals from western North Carolina specifically,
or from the state of North Carolina, not things that
have source lists or footnotes or anything like that. So
some of the things that they would reference, I was like,
where are you getting this? Where did this traffic light
thing come from? Like I could not find anything in
(01:19):
either of the legislative session records from like the session
that she was in in January through March and then
the extra session that started in December. Like I just
couldn't find anything about traffic signals in any of that
at all. Similarly, like where are you getting this about
(01:39):
her introducing eugenics legislation?
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Like I did not.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Read line by line all eight or nine hundred total
pages of these documents, right, I was keyword searching for
all of the relevant words that could have been used
in this kind of legislation and just finding nothing. So
it's like, I don't I don't know where that came from.
But also there were just so many mistakes in so
(02:06):
many of these articles. There was the birth year confusion,
which is absolutely understandable. It told like, when there are
that many different years in the written records of a person,
and your job is to write a brief newspaper feature
on somebody, you're probably it's like, it's less likely that
(02:28):
you're going to stumble onto the fact that there's none
of these ages line up right. The things about the
birth order totally makes sense that like there would be
questions and misinformation based on the weird birth years. But
like the idea, there are a lot of articles that
say that an all male electorate voted for her in
(02:52):
the general election, and that's just an easy one to
see is not the case, but it is in so
many places. One of the articles that I read about
her said that she had died of pneumonia during the
Spanish flu. Spanish flu we've done episodes about before that
happened from nineteen eighteen to nineteen nineteen. Sort of trailed
(03:15):
off after that, definitely not having something we call the
Spanish flu in nineteen twenty five, and I mean, she no, Tracy,
it was a weird Dorman strain, Like she's reported as
having died of pneumonia that may have been flu related,
but like the Spanish flu was not what was happening
(03:37):
right at that point. So I just, I just I
got a little frustrated.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
With that.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
And then when I realized that some of those things
go all the way back to her obituaries, I was like,
she she died, like she died five years after the
nineteenth Amendment was dratified, Like that's not a big amount
of time to have passed. So anyway, I got frustrated
(04:05):
about all of that. My little note of what to
talk about in behind the scenes has just sort of
a keyboard smash in my expression of my frustration about
this something that I had put in here in the
episode that I wound up taking out because it just
it felt like in aside that was kind of interrupting.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
The narrative. Is that on March.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Twenty second, nineteen twenty one, so after the main legislative
session was over, fellow Representative BG Crisp of Manio wrote
her a letter. And I found this letter. I was like,
this person I think would be a reply guy today.
(04:51):
So BG Crisp had been very staunchly and vocally against
the ratification of the nineteenth Amendment, and he.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Wrote her this let there's a quote from it. Quote.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
I merely wish to express in writing the high admiration
that I, with all other fellow members of the General
Assembly of nineteen twenty one have for you, as a
most intelligent and worthy representative who has made lasting impression
upon all who observed you in that capacity. Your course
was such as to challenge the highest admiration of all
(05:24):
who observed it, and I happen to know some who,
like myself were bitterly opposed to the ratification of the
nineteenth Amendment, were most interested observers. It's like he wanted
to basically make sure that she knew that it wasn't
that he had been opposed to women having the right
(05:47):
to vote, but that he thought that it should have
been left up to the states and not a constitutional amendment.
This was just kind of a weird letter. I was like,
I feel like you felt the need to write to
her and justify yourself.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Yeah. The legislation, the legislative session was over. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Also, in just a throwback to a recent episode, as
I was just trying to confirm things about her life
that I had not been able to really track down,
I was looking at the newspaper reporting of her time
in the legislature. One day, the giant front page headline
was about investigation into pelagra. Just the whole title, the
(06:29):
whole entire front page, whole headline space, covering the entire
width of it. I have a question. Tell me what
your question is. Why were they calling her brother, Clement.
I think they were just calling her brother because they
called each other brother, and so she was now part
of their governing body, and so they also called her brother.
I mean, I guess it's like on Star Trek when
(06:51):
they call all the women captain sir. Oh.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Sure, yeah, But I don't know.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
It just struck me as the oddest thing, And I
don't know why I kept getting really I kept thinking
about it while we were talking, and I'm like, why
was that a good thing?
Speaker 2 (07:06):
I didn't.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Yeah, Well, in like, that's sort of my conclusion of
what was happening, sort of like the fact that they
had never really thought about what would happen if somebody
changed their last name, right, because they'd never had to
think about it. Yeah, it had always only been men
before that, and so they had never really had to
think about what they would need to call a fellow
(07:27):
legislator or a fellow attorney if that attorney or legislator
was not a man, right. I mean, I actually feel
like that too, is one of those things that persists
a little bit.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Right.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
There are women that I know in careers where they're like, well,
I got married and I took my husband's name socially,
but professionally I'm still this, oh yeah. And I don't
know if that's because it's a complicated thing there's no
one there, but yeah, I don't know how much of
(08:01):
that is weighted by, you know, the fact that it
would just be harder to rebuild the recognition that they've
achieved in their field, or if some of it is
like I don't want to confuse anybody, and I mean
a lot of people now don't even do the name change,
which is also perfectly fine. Ye you did not change
your name, No I did. I had one of the
(08:24):
most boring common names on Earth. I was ready to like,
my name is my maiden name was so common that
when I told people it, they said, you are a liar,
and I would have to whip out my ID and
be like, nope, that's really my name. Well, there were
multiple Tracy Wilson's at my high school, and so when
(08:46):
somebody was called to come to the office, they would
have to put a middle initial in there. And the
fact that Tracy Wilson is such a common name as
why I have always used my middle initial professionally. And
then I got married at the age of four, at
which point I had, you know, two decades of professional
working experience under the last name Wilson, and so that
(09:09):
just seemed like a lot of effort, right, so try
to change stuff around. Now I'm thankful, like it. It's
a lot of work to change your name. And now
it's like wow, now, since people are introducing legislation requiring
names to match birth certificates, the fact that my name
(09:30):
still does is like an extra convenience to me.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
I'll just vanish into the night.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Legislation requiring your ID to match your birth certificate in
order to vote is bad. I will just put out
my feeling on that. Yeah, it is bad for a
lot of people. Yeah, if you're gonna write me an
email saying but there'll be a form to fill out,
I don't care. Overwhelmingly, men won't have to fill out
that for right. Anyway, I'm hoping to visit Ashville in
(10:04):
the near future. I will almost certainly drive by that
historical marker at some point.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
I am sure I have driven before it.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Now. I have been to Ashville since when it was
put up, so I don't think I ever noticed it
prior to learning about this, learning that she existed from
a different podcast. I one of her out her suits
is on display at one of the museums there. Oh nice,
trying to remember which one. It's quite a smart suit,
(10:36):
I quite like.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yeah, she looks lovely in every picture of her that
I've seen. She's very smartly dressed and very very like
neatly styled hair. So yeah, I wish there were a
full length biography of her that would answer some questions
(10:59):
that I have.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Some of the things that I'm like, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
It's totally possible that there is documentation of it somewhere
that's you know, not digitized, not generally available to the public,
or that it is, and I just didn't find that
in all of my research. I this morning, before we
came in here to record, I did a second pass
just to like try again to see Number one, is
(11:23):
there anything I can find about her family in relation
to the nineteen sixteen flood. Number two, is there anything
I can find about her or her family in relation
to the Spanish flu because she was actually alive when
that happened. And my second past, first thing this morning
found nothing about either of them. So we talked at
(11:53):
the top of the episode about Gertrude Chandler Warner. Huh
that you didn't read the box card stare They don't
think I did. So I had this experience where I
picked them up when I was still living in the
Pacific Northwest and just mainline them. I was obsessed with
them and I had found them in my school library.
(12:15):
And then when I was nine, we moved to the
Gulf Coast, and I remember thinking like, Okay, I will
look for them in the library there, and they didn't
know what I was talking about. None of those kids
had ever heard of it. It sounded like some weird,
far off thing that like I had made up and
now and then when you were like, I never read them,
I'm like, was this not popular in the South.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
It might have just been me if I like, I
started reading pretty early and I read a lot, Like
I was one of those kids that would get in
trouble reading oh same in class instead of doing or
reading ahead when we were reading aloud.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Oh I got yelled at. Yeah. I had a lot
of problems with that.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
But I think because I had started reading so early,
I a lot of times would read books that I
felt like were more grown up.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
I could be really resistant to books that I felt like,
we're gonna be babyish. And I think I might have
had that impression about the box Car Children. Well, I
started reading them when I was seven. Yeah, like I die,
I'm not like, I've definitely heard of these books, right,
I know what they are, but I don't think I
(13:34):
ever read any of them. Yeah, I'm tickled because I
definitely had a mix of I did the fashion thing
of mixture high and low to get personal style. Because,
since we've talked about before, I read Druma Capponi's in
Cold Blood when I was way too young to be reading.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Yeah, I tried to read like a totally like not
a not an adaptation for younger readers, but the full
on book Jane Eyre when I was in like fifth grade.
And then when I read Jane Eyre again in college,
I was like.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Wow, sure missed a lot of this. Sure didn't really
realize what was going on in this book. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
My book like that was Neuromancer because I found it
when I was twelve. Yeah, and I read it and
I really enjoyed it. But then when I went back
and read it as an adult, I was like, what
was I doing with this book in my hand? I
have so many things it just tickles me. I will
say this. I want to be very careful because I
don't like to criticize other people's creative work. Right. I
(14:34):
listened to audiobooks all the time.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
I love them.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
My husband doesn't love them because he doesn't like hearing
other people read things because it's not usually the way
he would read it if he were reading aloud, and
he finds that jarring totally fine, But because I knew,
I wasn't. I was trying to multitask a bunch of things,
and I was like, I'll listen to the audiobook version
of the first book, by which I mean the nineteen
(14:58):
forty two version to catch up. Because it's only a
couple hours long. I can do it while I'm running
around the house doing you know, prep work, taking care
of animals, et cetera. And the narrator who does the
one that I read, does the voices of the children.
I did not enjoy that at all. Yeah, I kind
(15:22):
of got used to it, but it was a little rough.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
It was a little rough.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
But I will say there are in many cases if
you experience something like this, dear listener. In some cases,
particularly very popular books like this or Dracula, which I
have mentioned listening to a lot of lately, there are
often multiple versions of audiobooks, so you can see if
you have another option that doesn't that doesn't quite great
(15:46):
on you.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
I did not do that. I was like, I already
have it in the thing, I'm just gonna gun it.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Most of my audiobook listening is like on road trips,
on some kind of travel where I'm going to be
sitting in a place wanting a way to like occupy
my mind. Yeah, because or you know, if there was
something I was really into, I would listen while walking
around or doing stuff around the house. But that's also
(16:12):
when I listened to the podcasts that I listened to.
So audiobooks are just not as big of a thing
for me. Time out of them, more likely going to
like read a book. No, I'll go right to sleep,
I think, because we read so much for this job.
That's true too, Yeah, that I'm like reading for leisure
doesn't feel quite the same as it used to you
(16:32):
to me, and my brain just goes, no, thank you,
I don't why why don't we stare in the middle
distance for a minute. There are some very cute stories
of Gertrude Chandler Warner and her siblings growing up, and
like I said, their youth seems almost idyllic. But one
of the things that I thought was very cute and
(16:54):
really quite ingenious is that they were trying to figure
out distances from their house to other places in town,
and they measured the circumference of the wagon wheels on
their family's wagon and then they tied a rag to
(17:14):
one of the spokes of it, and they would count
how many rotations it made from their house to their destination,
and then they would multiply that by the circumference of
the wagon wheel and be like, that is two point
six miles away from our house. That's amazing one point
And I'm like, this is the most ingenious thing.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
I've ever heard heard.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
For like three little kids to come up with this,
I don't know how little they were at the time,
but I just thought that was very, very charming. Yeah,
here's a thing that was wild to me. The way
(17:56):
she wrote her books. And when I read it at first,
I was like, are you saying this is how she
did it when she was a kid? Nope, pretty much
the whole time, until presumably her eyesight started to fail.
She had a typewriter, but she didn't love it, and
she usually did four passes on any of her books,
(18:16):
like to do her own editing and get the manuscript
to a point she liked. But her first pass she
would get a notebook and write in it with a pencil,
and she would write only on the right hand facing pages,
and when she got to the end of the notebook.
She would flip it over and then continue on what
(18:39):
was then the empty right hand facing pages.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
The other way. That's wild. That was exactly what I said.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
And also it made my hand crampy because that's a
lot of handwriting. I know people used to handwrite that much. Yeah,
but O hand crampy.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
We've talked about.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
How I find writing with a pen laborious, and I
mean I don't. That's actually how I prefer to keep
a lot of my lists and stuff. There's just something
about the tactile nature of it that I really love.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
M m. But I can't.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Imagine writing a paragraph let alone, like I'm talking bullet lists.
I can't like a manuscript sounds really really intense and unfun.
But that idea of like half a notebook one way,
half the other way.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
M hmm.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
I'm like, that's the way that like suspicious people write manifestos.
What are you doing, Gertrude, Gertrude, what is going on?
But it worked for her apparently, Okay, I just thought
that was nutty. She also had this one piece of
advice that I stumbled across for writers that I really
liked because she recognized that, you know, because she did
(19:48):
her own editing a lot before she ever handed off
a book. She too had the same thing that all
of us have when we write, which is like, you
look at something you wrote and you're like, dear credo,
I'm terrible at this. But her thing was don't ever
throw anything away because you might want it later. And
I'm like, that's actually a really good policy. It's hard.
(20:08):
You sometimes want to destroy the evidence of mediocrity, but
she's like, don't do it, don't do it. One thing
we didn't talk about that will come up a little
on our upcoming episode about Children's Morality Code was that,
And I will tell you why we didn't talk about
it was the sort of inherent Christian morality of a
(20:30):
lot of her work, because she isn't heavy handed about it.
There are not mentions of any kind of religion or
you know, God or anything. But she did publish a
book that I couldn't find much information about other than
just a mention in one of those pretty simple biographies
(20:51):
I read, which is that she published a book in
collaboration with a missionary named Leyla Anderson. And this person
apparently had a parakeet named Peter Piper that traveled the
world with her on these missionary trips and talked and
they wrote a book about the bird. I really would
(21:12):
like to find that book, like a good copy of that,
but I have a feeling it was a very small
run and they're probably in antique shops I haven't uncovered yet.
But yeah, Peter Piper the parakeet. Yeah, writing manifestos anyway,
I will say this, this is a thing. I didn't
(21:34):
do this on purpose, but I have recognized that I am,
in our troubled times revisiting a lot of the things
that gave me joy as a kid, and it's very comforting.
So I do encourage people if you had a book
that you loved as a child, or a game that
you loved, just anything that you associate with fun times
(21:55):
in childhood and delight. It's very soothing to go back
and readincare own it for the most part. Obviously you're
going to find things and go yo, that's racist or
oh sure this is a problem, but overall pretty delightful.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Revisiting the Box Car Children honestly made me so happy.
I had quite forgotten about their dog Watch and his
whole little sub story, yeah, which is really cute, just
that they find this poor dog wandering in the woods
with a big thorn in its paw, and Jess carefully
takes the thorn out, and the dog becomes like attached
(22:32):
to her at the hip going forward and takes care
of the children and warns them when there's trouble, and
it's just very I forgot about Watch the Dog anyway.
I love the Box Card Children. I have not read
any of the modern versions. Some of them have been rewritten.
They're essentially the same story she wrote, but they're rewritten
with modern scenarios, modern characters, etc. And I haven't revisited
(22:55):
any of those, so I cannot speak to their value
or quality.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Okay, but I love.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
The originals, even though we don't know why Grandpa hated
that Mom. I kept thinking about. This is kind of
not entirely related, but like Grave of the Fireflies, which
is a very incredibly sad film, but most Americans seeing
(23:25):
this film interpret it as an anti war film because
of the horrific things that the children go through in it,
while the filmmakers explicitly said that no, it's about how
children should behave themselves and respect their elders because they
were in the care of an ant and they leave
(23:48):
to try to make their way on their own. And
that's what I kept thinking about with these children having
a grandfather who was an adult there for them, but
instead they went to live in a box car totally
different setup, not at all like the same tone in
any way, But I kept thinking about that. Yeah, it's
(24:09):
a yeah, and he's like the richest man in town.
Everyone knows who he is, which is very funny. So
like the kids do a lot of like hiding of
their names, right, there's an event where they're actually like
with Henry's with a lot of townspeople, and he lies.
He only uses his first and middle name and doesn't
say his last name because he knows people are looking
for him. But he doesn't recognize his grandfather because they
(24:31):
never really knew him. So it's a it's it's again,
why did he not like their mom? With that? Listen,
if you have time off coming up in the next
couple days, I hope you get to revisit something that
brings you joy, whether it's from your childhood or not.
Just find the stuff that makes you happy or offers
you an escape, because the real world is going to
(24:53):
be there when you go back to it, and it
is good to take care of yourself with joy. There's
no shame in that game. I also hope that everyone
you encounter is kind to you. If you have to work,
that goes doubly so I hope nobody's a jerk to
you while you are just trying to make a living.
I hope everybody treats each other as kindly as they
(25:13):
possibly can. Again, it's a high tension life we were
living right now. But we will be right back here
tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday we
will bring you something brand new. Stuff you missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
(25:33):
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This week we talked about
Lillian exem Clement Stafford, who I find so interesting and
so cool in so many ways, except for the United
Daughters of the Confederacy and the eugenics part. Not a
(00:34):
fan of either of those. Yeah, So to my knowledge,
there has been no like biography of her written, which
means that a lot of the research, like the initial
research for the episode included a lot of things which,
as we said in the episode, had come from local
(00:57):
newspaper and magazine article goals from western North Carolina specifically,
or from the state of North Carolina, not things that
have source lists or footnotes or anything like that. So
some of the things that they would reference, I was like,
where are you getting this? Where did this traffic light
thing come from? Like I could not find anything in
(01:19):
either of the legislative session records from like the session
that she was in in January through March and then
the extra session that started in December. Like I just
couldn't find anything about traffic signals in any of that
at all. Similarly, like where are you getting this about
(01:39):
her introducing eugenics legislation?
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Like I did not.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Read line by line all eight or nine hundred total
pages of these documents, right, I was keyword searching for
all of the relevant words that could have been used
in this kind of legislation and just finding nothing. So
it's like, I don't I don't know where that came from.
But also there were just so many mistakes in so
(02:06):
many of these articles. There was the birth year confusion,
which is absolutely understandable. It told like, when there are
that many different years in the written records of a person,
and your job is to write a brief newspaper feature
on somebody, you're probably it's like, it's less likely that
(02:28):
you're going to stumble onto the fact that there's none
of these ages line up right. The things about the
birth order totally makes sense that like there would be
questions and misinformation based on the weird birth years. But
like the idea, there are a lot of articles that
say that an all male electorate voted for her in
(02:52):
the general election, and that's just an easy one to
see is not the case, but it is in so
many places. One of the articles that I read about
her said that she had died of pneumonia during the
Spanish flu. Spanish flu we've done episodes about before that
happened from nineteen eighteen to nineteen nineteen. Sort of trailed
(03:15):
off after that, definitely not having something we call the
Spanish flu in nineteen twenty five, and I mean, she no, Tracy,
it was a weird Dorman strain, Like she's reported as
having died of pneumonia that may have been flu related,
but like the Spanish flu was not what was happening
(03:37):
right at that point. So I just, I just I
got a little frustrated.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
With that.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
And then when I realized that some of those things
go all the way back to her obituaries, I was like,
she she died, like she died five years after the
nineteenth Amendment was dratified, Like that's not a big amount
of time to have passed. So anyway, I got frustrated
(04:05):
about all of that. My little note of what to
talk about in behind the scenes has just sort of
a keyboard smash in my expression of my frustration about
this something that I had put in here in the
episode that I wound up taking out because it just
it felt like in aside that was kind of interrupting.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
The narrative. Is that on March.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Twenty second, nineteen twenty one, so after the main legislative
session was over, fellow Representative BG Crisp of Manio wrote
her a letter. And I found this letter. I was like,
this person I think would be a reply guy today.
(04:51):
So BG Crisp had been very staunchly and vocally against
the ratification of the nineteenth Amendment, and he.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Wrote her this let there's a quote from it. Quote.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
I merely wish to express in writing the high admiration
that I, with all other fellow members of the General
Assembly of nineteen twenty one have for you, as a
most intelligent and worthy representative who has made lasting impression
upon all who observed you in that capacity. Your course
was such as to challenge the highest admiration of all
(05:24):
who observed it, and I happen to know some who,
like myself were bitterly opposed to the ratification of the
nineteenth Amendment, were most interested observers. It's like he wanted
to basically make sure that she knew that it wasn't
that he had been opposed to women having the right
(05:47):
to vote, but that he thought that it should have
been left up to the states and not a constitutional amendment.
This was just kind of a weird letter. I was like,
I feel like you felt the need to write to
her and justify yourself.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Yeah. The legislation, the legislative session was over. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Also, in just a throwback to a recent episode, as
I was just trying to confirm things about her life
that I had not been able to really track down,
I was looking at the newspaper reporting of her time
in the legislature. One day, the giant front page headline
was about investigation into pelagra. Just the whole title, the
(06:29):
whole entire front page, whole headline space, covering the entire
width of it. I have a question. Tell me what
your question is. Why were they calling her brother, Clement.
I think they were just calling her brother because they
called each other brother, and so she was now part
of their governing body, and so they also called her brother.
I mean, I guess it's like on Star Trek when
(06:51):
they call all the women captain sir. Oh.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Sure, yeah, But I don't know.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
It just struck me as the oddest thing, And I
don't know why I kept getting really I kept thinking
about it while we were talking, and I'm like, why
was that a good thing?
Speaker 2 (07:06):
I didn't.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Yeah, Well, in like, that's sort of my conclusion of
what was happening, sort of like the fact that they
had never really thought about what would happen if somebody
changed their last name, right, because they'd never had to
think about it. Yeah, it had always only been men
before that, and so they had never really had to
think about what they would need to call a fellow
(07:27):
legislator or a fellow attorney if that attorney or legislator
was not a man, right. I mean, I actually feel
like that too, is one of those things that persists
a little bit.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Right.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
There are women that I know in careers where they're like, well,
I got married and I took my husband's name socially,
but professionally I'm still this, oh yeah. And I don't
know if that's because it's a complicated thing there's no
one there, but yeah, I don't know how much of
(08:01):
that is weighted by, you know, the fact that it
would just be harder to rebuild the recognition that they've
achieved in their field, or if some of it is
like I don't want to confuse anybody, and I mean
a lot of people now don't even do the name change,
which is also perfectly fine. Ye you did not change
your name, No I did. I had one of the
(08:24):
most boring common names on Earth. I was ready to like,
my name is my maiden name was so common that
when I told people it, they said, you are a liar,
and I would have to whip out my ID and
be like, nope, that's really my name. Well, there were
multiple Tracy Wilson's at my high school, and so when
(08:46):
somebody was called to come to the office, they would
have to put a middle initial in there. And the
fact that Tracy Wilson is such a common name as
why I have always used my middle initial professionally. And
then I got married at the age of four, at
which point I had, you know, two decades of professional
working experience under the last name Wilson, and so that
(09:09):
just seemed like a lot of effort, right, so try
to change stuff around. Now I'm thankful, like it. It's
a lot of work to change your name. And now
it's like wow, now, since people are introducing legislation requiring
names to match birth certificates, the fact that my name
(09:30):
still does is like an extra convenience to me.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
I'll just vanish into the night.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Legislation requiring your ID to match your birth certificate in
order to vote is bad. I will just put out
my feeling on that. Yeah, it is bad for a
lot of people. Yeah, if you're gonna write me an
email saying but there'll be a form to fill out,
I don't care. Overwhelmingly, men won't have to fill out
that for right. Anyway, I'm hoping to visit Ashville in
(10:04):
the near future. I will almost certainly drive by that
historical marker at some point.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
I am sure I have driven before it.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Now. I have been to Ashville since when it was
put up, so I don't think I ever noticed it
prior to learning about this, learning that she existed from
a different podcast. I one of her out her suits
is on display at one of the museums there. Oh nice,
trying to remember which one. It's quite a smart suit,
(10:36):
I quite like.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yeah, she looks lovely in every picture of her that
I've seen. She's very smartly dressed and very very like
neatly styled hair. So yeah, I wish there were a
full length biography of her that would answer some questions
(10:59):
that I have.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Some of the things that I'm like, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
It's totally possible that there is documentation of it somewhere
that's you know, not digitized, not generally available to the public,
or that it is, and I just didn't find that
in all of my research. I this morning, before we
came in here to record, I did a second pass
just to like try again to see Number one, is
(11:23):
there anything I can find about her family in relation
to the nineteen sixteen flood. Number two, is there anything
I can find about her or her family in relation
to the Spanish flu because she was actually alive when
that happened. And my second past, first thing this morning
found nothing about either of them. So we talked at
(11:53):
the top of the episode about Gertrude Chandler Warner. Huh
that you didn't read the box card stare They don't
think I did. So I had this experience where I
picked them up when I was still living in the
Pacific Northwest and just mainline them. I was obsessed with
them and I had found them in my school library.
(12:15):
And then when I was nine, we moved to the
Gulf Coast, and I remember thinking like, Okay, I will
look for them in the library there, and they didn't
know what I was talking about. None of those kids
had ever heard of it. It sounded like some weird,
far off thing that like I had made up and
now and then when you were like, I never read them,
I'm like, was this not popular in the South.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
It might have just been me if I like, I
started reading pretty early and I read a lot, Like
I was one of those kids that would get in
trouble reading oh same in class instead of doing or
reading ahead when we were reading aloud.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Oh I got yelled at. Yeah. I had a lot
of problems with that.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
But I think because I had started reading so early,
I a lot of times would read books that I
felt like were more grown up.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
I could be really resistant to books that I felt like,
we're gonna be babyish. And I think I might have
had that impression about the box Car Children. Well, I
started reading them when I was seven. Yeah, like I die,
I'm not like, I've definitely heard of these books, right,
I know what they are, but I don't think I
(13:34):
ever read any of them. Yeah, I'm tickled because I
definitely had a mix of I did the fashion thing
of mixture high and low to get personal style. Because,
since we've talked about before, I read Druma Capponi's in
Cold Blood when I was way too young to be reading.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Yeah, I tried to read like a totally like not
a not an adaptation for younger readers, but the full
on book Jane Eyre when I was in like fifth grade.
And then when I read Jane Eyre again in college,
I was like.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Wow, sure missed a lot of this. Sure didn't really
realize what was going on in this book. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
My book like that was Neuromancer because I found it
when I was twelve. Yeah, and I read it and
I really enjoyed it. But then when I went back
and read it as an adult, I was like, what
was I doing with this book in my hand? I
have so many things it just tickles me. I will
say this. I want to be very careful because I
don't like to criticize other people's creative work. Right. I
(14:34):
listened to audiobooks all the time.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
I love them.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
My husband doesn't love them because he doesn't like hearing
other people read things because it's not usually the way
he would read it if he were reading aloud, and
he finds that jarring totally fine, But because I knew,
I wasn't. I was trying to multitask a bunch of things,
and I was like, I'll listen to the audiobook version
of the first book, by which I mean the nineteen
(14:58):
forty two version to catch up. Because it's only a
couple hours long. I can do it while I'm running
around the house doing you know, prep work, taking care
of animals, et cetera. And the narrator who does the
one that I read, does the voices of the children.
I did not enjoy that at all. Yeah, I kind
(15:22):
of got used to it, but it was a little rough.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
It was a little rough.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
But I will say there are in many cases if
you experience something like this, dear listener. In some cases,
particularly very popular books like this or Dracula, which I
have mentioned listening to a lot of lately, there are
often multiple versions of audiobooks, so you can see if
you have another option that doesn't that doesn't quite great
(15:46):
on you.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
I did not do that. I was like, I already
have it in the thing, I'm just gonna gun it.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Most of my audiobook listening is like on road trips,
on some kind of travel where I'm going to be
sitting in a place wanting a way to like occupy
my mind. Yeah, because or you know, if there was
something I was really into, I would listen while walking
around or doing stuff around the house. But that's also
(16:12):
when I listened to the podcasts that I listened to.
So audiobooks are just not as big of a thing
for me. Time out of them, more likely going to
like read a book. No, I'll go right to sleep,
I think, because we read so much for this job.
That's true too, Yeah, that I'm like reading for leisure
doesn't feel quite the same as it used to you
(16:32):
to me, and my brain just goes, no, thank you,
I don't why why don't we stare in the middle
distance for a minute. There are some very cute stories
of Gertrude Chandler Warner and her siblings growing up, and
like I said, their youth seems almost idyllic. But one
of the things that I thought was very cute and
(16:54):
really quite ingenious is that they were trying to figure
out distances from their house to other places in town,
and they measured the circumference of the wagon wheels on
their family's wagon and then they tied a rag to
(17:14):
one of the spokes of it, and they would count
how many rotations it made from their house to their destination,
and then they would multiply that by the circumference of
the wagon wheel and be like, that is two point
six miles away from our house. That's amazing one point
And I'm like, this is the most ingenious thing.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
I've ever heard heard.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
For like three little kids to come up with this,
I don't know how little they were at the time,
but I just thought that was very, very charming. Yeah,
here's a thing that was wild to me. The way
(17:56):
she wrote her books. And when I read it at first,
I was like, are you saying this is how she
did it when she was a kid? Nope, pretty much
the whole time, until presumably her eyesight started to fail.
She had a typewriter, but she didn't love it, and
she usually did four passes on any of her books,
(18:16):
like to do her own editing and get the manuscript
to a point she liked. But her first pass she
would get a notebook and write in it with a pencil,
and she would write only on the right hand facing pages,
and when she got to the end of the notebook.
She would flip it over and then continue on what
(18:39):
was then the empty right hand facing pages.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
The other way. That's wild. That was exactly what I said.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
And also it made my hand crampy because that's a
lot of handwriting. I know people used to handwrite that much. Yeah,
but O hand crampy.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
We've talked about.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
How I find writing with a pen laborious, and I
mean I don't. That's actually how I prefer to keep
a lot of my lists and stuff. There's just something
about the tactile nature of it that I really love.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
M m. But I can't.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Imagine writing a paragraph let alone, like I'm talking bullet lists.
I can't like a manuscript sounds really really intense and unfun.
But that idea of like half a notebook one way,
half the other way.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
M hmm.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
I'm like, that's the way that like suspicious people write manifestos.
What are you doing, Gertrude, Gertrude, what is going on?
But it worked for her apparently, Okay, I just thought
that was nutty. She also had this one piece of
advice that I stumbled across for writers that I really
liked because she recognized that, you know, because she did
(19:48):
her own editing a lot before she ever handed off
a book. She too had the same thing that all
of us have when we write, which is like, you
look at something you wrote and you're like, dear credo,
I'm terrible at this. But her thing was don't ever
throw anything away because you might want it later. And
I'm like, that's actually a really good policy. It's hard.
(20:08):
You sometimes want to destroy the evidence of mediocrity, but
she's like, don't do it, don't do it. One thing
we didn't talk about that will come up a little
on our upcoming episode about Children's Morality Code was that,
And I will tell you why we didn't talk about
it was the sort of inherent Christian morality of a
(20:30):
lot of her work, because she isn't heavy handed about it.
There are not mentions of any kind of religion or
you know, God or anything. But she did publish a
book that I couldn't find much information about other than
just a mention in one of those pretty simple biographies
(20:51):
I read, which is that she published a book in
collaboration with a missionary named Leyla Anderson. And this person
apparently had a parakeet named Peter Piper that traveled the
world with her on these missionary trips and talked and
they wrote a book about the bird. I really would
(21:12):
like to find that book, like a good copy of that,
but I have a feeling it was a very small
run and they're probably in antique shops I haven't uncovered yet.
But yeah, Peter Piper the parakeet. Yeah, writing manifestos anyway,
I will say this, this is a thing. I didn't
(21:34):
do this on purpose, but I have recognized that I am,
in our troubled times revisiting a lot of the things
that gave me joy as a kid, and it's very comforting.
So I do encourage people if you had a book
that you loved as a child, or a game that
you loved, just anything that you associate with fun times
(21:55):
in childhood and delight. It's very soothing to go back
and readincare own it for the most part. Obviously you're
going to find things and go yo, that's racist or
oh sure this is a problem, but overall pretty delightful.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Revisiting the Box Car Children honestly made me so happy.
I had quite forgotten about their dog Watch and his
whole little sub story, yeah, which is really cute, just
that they find this poor dog wandering in the woods
with a big thorn in its paw, and Jess carefully
takes the thorn out, and the dog becomes like attached
(22:32):
to her at the hip going forward and takes care
of the children and warns them when there's trouble, and
it's just very I forgot about Watch the Dog anyway.
I love the Box Card Children. I have not read
any of the modern versions. Some of them have been rewritten.
They're essentially the same story she wrote, but they're rewritten
with modern scenarios, modern characters, etc. And I haven't revisited
(22:55):
any of those, so I cannot speak to their value
or quality.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Okay, but I love.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
The originals, even though we don't know why Grandpa hated
that Mom. I kept thinking about. This is kind of
not entirely related, but like Grave of the Fireflies, which
is a very incredibly sad film, but most Americans seeing
(23:25):
this film interpret it as an anti war film because
of the horrific things that the children go through in it,
while the filmmakers explicitly said that no, it's about how
children should behave themselves and respect their elders because they
were in the care of an ant and they leave
(23:48):
to try to make their way on their own. And
that's what I kept thinking about with these children having
a grandfather who was an adult there for them, but
instead they went to live in a box car totally
different setup, not at all like the same tone in
any way, But I kept thinking about that. Yeah, it's
(24:09):
a yeah, and he's like the richest man in town.
Everyone knows who he is, which is very funny. So
like the kids do a lot of like hiding of
their names, right, there's an event where they're actually like
with Henry's with a lot of townspeople, and he lies.
He only uses his first and middle name and doesn't
say his last name because he knows people are looking
for him. But he doesn't recognize his grandfather because they
(24:31):
never really knew him. So it's a it's it's again,
why did he not like their mom? With that? Listen,
if you have time off coming up in the next
couple days, I hope you get to revisit something that
brings you joy, whether it's from your childhood or not.
Just find the stuff that makes you happy or offers
you an escape, because the real world is going to
(24:53):
be there when you go back to it, and it
is good to take care of yourself with joy. There's
no shame in that game. I also hope that everyone
you encounter is kind to you. If you have to work,
that goes doubly so I hope nobody's a jerk to
you while you are just trying to make a living.
I hope everybody treats each other as kindly as they
(25:13):
possibly can. Again, it's a high tension life we were
living right now. But we will be right back here
tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday we
will bring you something brand new. Stuff you missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
(25:33):
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