November 8, 2024 • 24 mins
Holly talks about the bias against Lyon in his bank robbing trial. Tracy talks about the way other podcasts that cover history are made, and the dynamics of the Manson family.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
We talked about Patrick Lyon in the first US bank
robbery this week. I did not know this story in
any way at all. I had never heard any aspect
of it. And when you told me this is what
you were working on, I was also like, oh, a
bank robbery. I cannot even think of when is the
last time we talked about a bank robbery on the podcast.
I know, and I will confess to you I was
(00:36):
actually researching another bank robber when a different bank robbery
was invoked as the first bank robbery in the US,
and I went and looked for that and I was like,
wait a minute, there's one way before this. And so
that's how I ended up down this particular rabbit hole,
which completely fascinated and engaged me. We did not mention
(01:00):
during the show, but Carpenter's Hall still exists. You can
even book it for events. I imagine it's pricey, but
I haven't looked into it, but that'd be a cool
place to do something. One of the things that I
didn't put in the outline, but is interesting to me
is that Patrick Lyon was laid to rest next to
his daughter Clementina, but not either of his wives. And
(01:25):
I wasn't sure why. People I don't know if they
ended up in their own family cemeteries or plots, and
Clementina was in one that they had started for the Lions.
I'm not sure what that is. But he's with her
and not either of his wives, which is just kind
of interesting. There is a full, I think it's what
(01:52):
one hundred and thirty ish pages publication of everything that
happened in that trial. Oh wow, which is a lot
of testimony, which is why I was saying, it becomes
so obvious after you keep reading it for a while
that it's like the bank just really didn't like him
and decided that that was who had done it, and
(02:13):
they just dug in and could not be convinced otherwise. Right,
And it's like testimony on testimony on testimony of like
he's the most suspicious, and because Cunningham had died, they
were able to kind of manipulate his what would have
been his side of the story to shore up their
(02:33):
own thing of like, oh, Cunningham would never ever have
done anything wrong with a key. And it's like the
guy that robbed the bank told you that was his
guy on the inside, right, but now you make him
like this paragon of virtue.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
It's so weird.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Yeah, that part of it reminded me of all kinds
of like wrongful conviction, wrongful accusation stuff. It still happens today,
where the rationale is like, oh, she didn't seem emotional
enough when she was telling us about her husband's death. Uh. Oh,
(03:11):
he seemed to be too focused on the detail of
what was happening when that guy was in his shop.
And I'm just like, so often all of that stuff
is just encompassed in the breadth of how we experience
and express ourselves as humans. Yeah, uh, and then becomes
like justification for an entire case against someone.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
It's so weird to me that they're like, how is
your memory so good? Well, maybe he just has like
a you know, nearly photographic memory people do well. And
none of what we read seemed all that detailed to
be right. It's like, well, the guys came over. It
would be weird enough if I had, if I were
in my little office that presumably did not have a
(03:59):
lot of foot traffic, and someone related to the business
I was doing came over with another friend that I
didn't know. He chatted for a minute, and then they left,
and then that unknown person showed back up again while
I was with another customer, just walked around by themselves
for a little while. I would remember that that's not
that's a memorable event for most people, right.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yeah, it's super duper weird. The minuteness.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
They keep talking about the minuteness.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Like that just doesn't seem that minute to me.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
At first, I was I thought I was reading like
paraphrases of one person's quote that kept bringing up, like
specifically the word minuteness and minute, and I was like, no,
it just shows up repeatedly. They just somewhere in their
whole thing, they were like, he was so minute, and
that's what they all started repeating. Yeah, bizarre. Yeah, one
(04:51):
of the funnier parts of the testimony. To me, again,
it's not funny that he was held wrongfully, but some
of the ways that people behave is comedic to me,
and especially in context of the world we live in today.
And one of the big fox sie of the whole
(05:13):
thing that kept coming up was whether or not Smith,
who was the cashier of the bank, ever swore or cursed, Okay,
like that being some sort of marker of whether or
not he was a gentleman. And his barber named Jay
(05:34):
initial j Riser was very forthright about like, yes, he
swears in my chair all the time, Like, yes, of
course he does. And it just was so funny to
me that there was a whole side argument going on
about whether this person ever used foul language or not,
and sitting in the year twenty twenty four, where there
(05:55):
is a whole lot of wild and wooly stuff going
on in the public and political stage, the idea of
a fixation on whether someone you know ever dropped the
word damn as a bomb in a sentence, like, Oh,
that's that's so quaint, right. It's kind of like when
(06:18):
we did our episode a while back on James Fair
and his affair, his extramarital affair got him drummed out
of Congress, and I'm like, how quaint It's.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Wild to me.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
The other fun part is that after painting Lyon's portrait,
Nagel's career really took off. Yeah, he kind of even
though that portrait was definitely a departure from the accepted
style and composition of the time. Like normally, if you
were going to get your portrait painted and you hired
someone to do it, you wanted to look like a
(07:05):
fancy pantsy unicorn. You wanted to be featured in your
absolute best thing, not looking sweaty in front of a
blacksmith forge. But everyone loved that portrait so much, and
it got so much attention because of its unique qualities
that like suddenly he was the it portraitist for a
lot of people in Philadelphia and beyond. Right, even though
(07:28):
most most people I think today would say this is
still like one of his very or two now of
his very best works, but it is quite interesting. I
love the pettiness of no put you put Walnut Street
Prison in that portrait with me?
Speaker 2 (07:41):
You do it.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
I'm I'm not letting anybody forget what those.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Weasels did to me.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
I love everything about that level of pettiness. Anyway, Anyway,
bank robberies will never know really where that key came from. Yeah,
somebody had one, we don't know. But since you know,
it seemed like Isaac Davis spent a lot of time
(08:10):
gawking at the keys while he was there. I mean
that here's what happens in my head and my fanciful
how did this potentially play out? The what if scenario is,
did he send that woman in to engage lying in
conversation and then he went in and diod time like
a really fast like wax imprint of a key.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
That's my theory. I'm reminded of some.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Book that I read when I was a child, so
I just I don't remember. Somebody in the audience may
remember and send us an email, but it was a
book that I read, like in elementary school years. I
think that involved a kid at a boarding school that
needed to break into a place and made an impression
of the teacher's key into a bar of soap and
(08:58):
then whittled it out of would And I'm like, that's
that's what I think happened here.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Something cool, something cool.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
But yeah, I'm I'm delighted that this was one that
took you my surprise a little bit, because yes, it's
a again not fun that he was wrongfully imprisoned, but
it is a fun story, yes, in terms of how
it all goes and how weird it is, and also
who robs a bank and then deposits the money in
the same bank.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
I thought about that a lot.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
I was like, what that would bless your heart moment.
I'm not saying I would ever rob a bank, but
if I robbed a bank, I would not be putting
the money in any bank, right, definitely not in the
same bank, not in the bank. Yes, and again I
(09:52):
did not rob any bank. Wild that a person would
take that course of action, It is really really kooky
to me. I wish, oh how I wish that we
could get the story of logic on that of like, yeah,
like what what was the decision making process there?
Speaker 2 (10:12):
I know what I'll do?
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Yeah, And Isaac Davis kind of blips out of the
whole thing. Apparently there was a moment it gets invoked
during the trial record that he had been back he
like left Philadelphia. He upoutied once they were like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
your pardon. Apparently he had been in Philadelphia at some
point early in the eighteen hundreds, and at that point
(10:38):
Patrick Lyon was like, does anybody want to question this guy?
Like do you want to get initial information? And nobody did.
But I saw in one thing and I wasn't able
to verify it. It may have been in the materials
I had, but there was a lot of them, so
I may have just missed it that he patrick Lyon
had actually gotten Davis to write a letter saying explicitly
(11:01):
patrick Lyon was in no way connected to that robbery.
He did not get involved at all. This is now
in writing, It's not just me talking to the bank dudes.
And yet everybody was like, yeah, but still we think
he did though, but are you sure, because we're pretty
sure he must have. He's just he's a mastermind, clearly right.
Another thing that plays out in the rich fantasy life
(11:22):
of my head, in the fictional version of this in
the petty Olympics, is that at one point, one of
those weasels houses burning down, and Patrick Lyon is like,
oh really you want a firetruck, just standing outside the
guy's house watching it burn while he sits with his
fire truck apparatus. That's not really how any of that
would have worked, but in my head, in the petty
(11:44):
comedy of my head, right, if you were writing this screenplay,
that would have been kind of fair, Like remember how
you held me for months in a root seller and
barely fed me enough to live and then told my
friends they couldn't see me anymore. I mean, I it
seems a little fair at that point, Yeah, it seems
(12:05):
a little fair. Those are really sad. There's one piece
of testimony from one of his friends. It was like
I visited him initially, but then they stopped letting me in,
and I had seen him looking worse, but then I
couldn't see him anymore. And it's just like, it's so
beyond wrongful imprisonment because at that point it's just weird
(12:25):
and cruel. It's like you haven't been charged with anything,
and yet you get essentially like isolation.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Yeah, that's the comical elements of this episode for me,
are are kind of counterbalanced by having, you know, read
the coverage of so many things about people who were
wrongfully convicted or wrongfully accused and in some cases like
substantial evidence that they did not commit the crime, and
(12:57):
we're then executed for it.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
And so it's like, well.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
This goes back all the way to the beginning of
the legal system in our country. I mean, this one
is nice because in the end, you know, he proves
the truth right, takes them for a ride legally, and
comes out victorious, So it's a little easier to stomach
(13:21):
because of all that. Right, if it had ended terribly
and he had not, as he feared, gotten out of jail, then.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
It would not be a fun episode at all.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Right, And he did apparently at one point have yellow
fever while he was imprisoned, but he survived it, which
is extraordinarily fortunate because a lot of people did not.
And he also kind of started to advocate in general
for people who were held whether they were one, he said,
there are a lot of innocent men in that jail,
(13:53):
and two they're not getting treatment, Like, they're not living
in hygienic conditions, even the ones that had a better
air quoting could because it clearly wasn't a better situation
than what he had, Like, he's like, they're still getting sick,
there's still a lot of infection, and nobody's being treated
or cared for. So I don't know that that really
(14:17):
had a direct impact on anything in terms of like
improving care. Clearly, you know, there were a lot of
people who still felt very comfortable talking trash about him
even after he had lived through that improven his innocence.
But right, right, humans, you disappoint me. But also when
you deposit, you're stolen money in the place you stole
(14:38):
it from, you delight and enchant me. It's a mixed bag,
but it's yeah, fundamentally, like I said, the underdog comes
out on top in the end, Right lives a great
and wealthy life, sticks it to everybody with his portrait.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
I love it.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
One of the things that we did this week was
talked to Toby Ball about the podcast Rip Current. I
wanted to talk to Toby for a couple of reasons. One,
this all started with Nomes Griffin, who's one of the
producers at iHeart who worked on this show, sending a
note to me say, Hey, what if Toby were on
your show? And I thought it would be an interesting
(15:28):
opportunity one to talk about some history that's a little
more recent than you and I totally cover, to talk
about what it's like to make a podcast that's so
very different from yours and mine, because what the two
of us do is we researched the episode, and we
write the episode and then we record.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
It right.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
And Rip Current involves a lot more going through archival
audio and interviewing a lot more people and all of
that kind of stuff, and I personally have not worked
on a show that involves that kind of production, but.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
You have, I sure have.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
I have not at all, But you take on a
lot more other projects at work than I do regarding
making other podcasts.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Yeah, so I.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Thought that might be an opportunity for our listeners to
sort of hear what the behind the scenes is like
on another type of podcast that is also talking about history.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Yeah, those are always tricky. There's a moment early on
where I usually when I'm dealing with something like that,
and it's always my own fault. I'm always like, here's
how we should do this, and then we actually get
all the stuff, and then I just want to start
crying because I'm like it's too much too dig through. Yes,
(16:51):
one of the things that we talked about in the
interview was like the process of getting all of the
information together. Holly has not heard the interview yet, so
I am telling Holly Toby's method for putting together his
thoughts and his information and his research involves index cards
of different colors and then putting those together. And I
(17:17):
got the impression when he said that that he that
we might think that was an odd thing to do,
But I was like, oh no, that was absolutely my
process for a long time until it became easier to
move things around with a mouse. Yet I still like handwritten, Yeah,
I do, whether it's index cards or I got really
(17:39):
into for a while, like just at home, I keep
a giant whiteboard, huh. And I had at one point,
like when we were doing drawn and I was trying
to figure out some of this stuff, I kind of
had like this weird numbering system where I would just
as we did an interview, I would number the interview
and be like, this is interview number one, two, this
(18:00):
is three, and then I would stack those numbers into
a grid by topic where it would be like that
one talked about you know, early Walt Disney studios. This
one talked about you know, termite terrace and those studios.
This one talked about bugs bunny. This one did not.
And that's how I did. So what a visual is
(18:21):
great for me? Right, I can parse it out a
little more easily that way. Yeah, there are things that
I do like writing by hand, making a little chart
or a list or whatever, But writing things out by
hand is so much more laborious for me than typing it. Yeah,
that if I can type something, that's usually what I'm
(18:42):
going to choose to do. We also had a moment
the two of us while I was listening to episodes
of Rip Current that I found funny, and I thought
we would sit here a little bit. And so, parents, teachers,
if you're listening to this with younger people, I'm just
gonna say, maybe skip ahead just a little couple of minutes,
or I'm not sure.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
I think this is the Friday episode, so.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Maybe even this is a place to just check out
of this behind the scenes, because we're gonna be talking
about some Manson family stuff. So I was listening to
Rip Current, listening to all of the episodes that had
come out so I could prepare for this interview, and
there was audio footage of one of the members of
the Manson family talking about how like their sexual relationships
(19:26):
with each other and said something like, we would have
sex with each other, and we would have sex with him,
We would have sex with each other with him, just
like a family. And I was not expecting the just
like a family. And I said what out loud, And
then when I relayed that experience to you, you were like,
did you not know that? And I was like, I
(19:50):
knew the first part, but it was just like a
family that really threw me. Ye, And that is when
we realized that, like our our familiarity with the Manson family,
very different experiences. Yeah, I mean I have a few, right.
I had mentioned that, like Manson was another one of
(20:12):
those things that got talked about in my house growing
up a lot, and that my mom and my two
sisters read Helter Skelter together. Yeah, and Helter Skelter would
not have been a book that was allowed to be
in our house, right. But to be clear, like my
sisters are much older than me. It wasn't like my
mom was like, hey, eleven year olds, would you like?
It was like they were late teenagers at that point. Okay, yeah,
(20:36):
probably junior and senior year of high school.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, I remember correctly, but so so.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
But then also, it's come up in various other points
in my life, like there was a play called Your
Children about Charles Manson that somebody I knew in college.
Did I think a staged reading of so? I was
just very familiar with that material, but in that way
(21:07):
that you think that your experience is universal. I was like, Tracy,
what are you talking about you've never heard this book, yeah,
And I was like, I've never I had never heard
that clip. I had never read that as a quote.
The first part of it about how they were all
like basically all having sexual relationships with each other and together.
That was not the surprising part. It was the then
(21:28):
equating that to like a family, as though that's all
how all families work, And I was like, what.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Ambling right now?
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Because I grew up in a household, I would say
I was pretty sheltered raised Methodist, which growing up Methodist
in North Carolina in the nineteen seventies and eighties, on
the spectrum of Protestant religions, I feel like kind of
in the middle in terms of how conservative, broadly speaking
(22:00):
we tended to be. But also Satanic panic happened, and
my mom was very concerned about anything that might lead
my brother or me into devil worship, So anything involving
Charles Manson was off the table for being appropriate to
(22:21):
read or talk about, right. I guess part of it
for me too, is like if my mom said that, I'd.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Be like aunt well.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
And I was also very much a rule follower in
contexts where the rules made sense to me, and I
thought they mattered, so like I did not. I did
not do homework that I thought was a waste of
my time, even though doing the homework was the rules.
But if my mom told me that I needed to
(22:56):
do a load laundry every day, then I was going
to do the load laundry every day. I mean, I
think it's safe to say I was a more rebellious
child than you.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Yeah, that's it seems correct.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
I didn't have a ton of respect for anybody. I
even remember telling my mom when I was like seven,
you don't get my respect just because you're older than me, yeah,
which I feel like you would never have said to
your parents.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
No, no, no.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Yeah, you can imagine how well that went over.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yeah I didn't.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
I didn't start being more rebellious until I was like
in my teens and started trying to do stuff like date.
But even then, like there were still there were still
a lot of rules, and if I broke the rules,
there were definitely consequences for having done that, and I
still tended to be like a rule follower in a
(23:48):
lot of other ways.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
So anyway, all exchange made me laugh.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
So yeah, yeah, I'm glad I have gotten to do
a couple of interviews lately. One of them will not
be out yet by the time this episode comes out,
so folks can look forward to having another interview suit
related to another podcast. So again, Happy Friday everyone, whatever's
happening on your weekend. I hope it's great, and I
(24:21):
hope that you come and join us tomorrow for a
Saturday classic and on Monday for something brand new. Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(24:41):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
We talked about Patrick Lyon in the first US bank
robbery this week. I did not know this story in
any way at all. I had never heard any aspect
of it. And when you told me this is what
you were working on, I was also like, oh, a
bank robbery. I cannot even think of when is the
last time we talked about a bank robbery on the podcast.
I know, and I will confess to you I was
(00:36):
actually researching another bank robber when a different bank robbery
was invoked as the first bank robbery in the US,
and I went and looked for that and I was like,
wait a minute, there's one way before this. And so
that's how I ended up down this particular rabbit hole,
which completely fascinated and engaged me. We did not mention
(01:00):
during the show, but Carpenter's Hall still exists. You can
even book it for events. I imagine it's pricey, but
I haven't looked into it, but that'd be a cool
place to do something. One of the things that I
didn't put in the outline, but is interesting to me
is that Patrick Lyon was laid to rest next to
his daughter Clementina, but not either of his wives. And
(01:25):
I wasn't sure why. People I don't know if they
ended up in their own family cemeteries or plots, and
Clementina was in one that they had started for the Lions.
I'm not sure what that is. But he's with her
and not either of his wives, which is just kind
of interesting. There is a full, I think it's what
(01:52):
one hundred and thirty ish pages publication of everything that
happened in that trial. Oh wow, which is a lot
of testimony, which is why I was saying, it becomes
so obvious after you keep reading it for a while
that it's like the bank just really didn't like him
and decided that that was who had done it, and
(02:13):
they just dug in and could not be convinced otherwise. Right,
And it's like testimony on testimony on testimony of like
he's the most suspicious, and because Cunningham had died, they
were able to kind of manipulate his what would have
been his side of the story to shore up their
(02:33):
own thing of like, oh, Cunningham would never ever have
done anything wrong with a key. And it's like the
guy that robbed the bank told you that was his
guy on the inside, right, but now you make him
like this paragon of virtue.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
It's so weird.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Yeah, that part of it reminded me of all kinds
of like wrongful conviction, wrongful accusation stuff. It still happens today,
where the rationale is like, oh, she didn't seem emotional
enough when she was telling us about her husband's death. Uh. Oh,
(03:11):
he seemed to be too focused on the detail of
what was happening when that guy was in his shop.
And I'm just like, so often all of that stuff
is just encompassed in the breadth of how we experience
and express ourselves as humans. Yeah, uh, and then becomes
like justification for an entire case against someone.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
It's so weird to me that they're like, how is
your memory so good? Well, maybe he just has like
a you know, nearly photographic memory people do well. And
none of what we read seemed all that detailed to
be right. It's like, well, the guys came over. It
would be weird enough if I had, if I were
in my little office that presumably did not have a
(03:59):
lot of foot traffic, and someone related to the business
I was doing came over with another friend that I
didn't know. He chatted for a minute, and then they left,
and then that unknown person showed back up again while
I was with another customer, just walked around by themselves
for a little while. I would remember that that's not
that's a memorable event for most people, right.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yeah, it's super duper weird. The minuteness.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
They keep talking about the minuteness.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Like that just doesn't seem that minute to me.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
At first, I was I thought I was reading like
paraphrases of one person's quote that kept bringing up, like
specifically the word minuteness and minute, and I was like, no,
it just shows up repeatedly. They just somewhere in their
whole thing, they were like, he was so minute, and
that's what they all started repeating. Yeah, bizarre. Yeah, one
(04:51):
of the funnier parts of the testimony. To me, again,
it's not funny that he was held wrongfully, but some
of the ways that people behave is comedic to me,
and especially in context of the world we live in today.
And one of the big fox sie of the whole
(05:13):
thing that kept coming up was whether or not Smith,
who was the cashier of the bank, ever swore or cursed, Okay,
like that being some sort of marker of whether or
not he was a gentleman. And his barber named Jay
(05:34):
initial j Riser was very forthright about like, yes, he
swears in my chair all the time, Like, yes, of
course he does. And it just was so funny to
me that there was a whole side argument going on
about whether this person ever used foul language or not,
and sitting in the year twenty twenty four, where there
(05:55):
is a whole lot of wild and wooly stuff going
on in the public and political stage, the idea of
a fixation on whether someone you know ever dropped the
word damn as a bomb in a sentence, like, Oh,
that's that's so quaint, right. It's kind of like when
(06:18):
we did our episode a while back on James Fair
and his affair, his extramarital affair got him drummed out
of Congress, and I'm like, how quaint It's.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Wild to me.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
The other fun part is that after painting Lyon's portrait,
Nagel's career really took off. Yeah, he kind of even
though that portrait was definitely a departure from the accepted
style and composition of the time. Like normally, if you
were going to get your portrait painted and you hired
someone to do it, you wanted to look like a
(07:05):
fancy pantsy unicorn. You wanted to be featured in your
absolute best thing, not looking sweaty in front of a
blacksmith forge. But everyone loved that portrait so much, and
it got so much attention because of its unique qualities
that like suddenly he was the it portraitist for a
lot of people in Philadelphia and beyond. Right, even though
(07:28):
most most people I think today would say this is
still like one of his very or two now of
his very best works, but it is quite interesting. I
love the pettiness of no put you put Walnut Street
Prison in that portrait with me?
Speaker 2 (07:41):
You do it.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
I'm I'm not letting anybody forget what those.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Weasels did to me.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
I love everything about that level of pettiness. Anyway, Anyway,
bank robberies will never know really where that key came from. Yeah,
somebody had one, we don't know. But since you know,
it seemed like Isaac Davis spent a lot of time
(08:10):
gawking at the keys while he was there. I mean
that here's what happens in my head and my fanciful
how did this potentially play out? The what if scenario is,
did he send that woman in to engage lying in
conversation and then he went in and diod time like
a really fast like wax imprint of a key.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
That's my theory. I'm reminded of some.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Book that I read when I was a child, so
I just I don't remember. Somebody in the audience may
remember and send us an email, but it was a
book that I read, like in elementary school years. I
think that involved a kid at a boarding school that
needed to break into a place and made an impression
of the teacher's key into a bar of soap and
(08:58):
then whittled it out of would And I'm like, that's
that's what I think happened here.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Something cool, something cool.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
But yeah, I'm I'm delighted that this was one that
took you my surprise a little bit, because yes, it's
a again not fun that he was wrongfully imprisoned, but
it is a fun story, yes, in terms of how
it all goes and how weird it is, and also
who robs a bank and then deposits the money in
the same bank.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
I thought about that a lot.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
I was like, what that would bless your heart moment.
I'm not saying I would ever rob a bank, but
if I robbed a bank, I would not be putting
the money in any bank, right, definitely not in the
same bank, not in the bank. Yes, and again I
(09:52):
did not rob any bank. Wild that a person would
take that course of action, It is really really kooky
to me. I wish, oh how I wish that we
could get the story of logic on that of like, yeah,
like what what was the decision making process there?
Speaker 2 (10:12):
I know what I'll do?
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Yeah, And Isaac Davis kind of blips out of the
whole thing. Apparently there was a moment it gets invoked
during the trial record that he had been back he
like left Philadelphia. He upoutied once they were like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
your pardon. Apparently he had been in Philadelphia at some
point early in the eighteen hundreds, and at that point
(10:38):
Patrick Lyon was like, does anybody want to question this guy?
Like do you want to get initial information? And nobody did.
But I saw in one thing and I wasn't able
to verify it. It may have been in the materials
I had, but there was a lot of them, so
I may have just missed it that he patrick Lyon
had actually gotten Davis to write a letter saying explicitly
(11:01):
patrick Lyon was in no way connected to that robbery.
He did not get involved at all. This is now
in writing, It's not just me talking to the bank dudes.
And yet everybody was like, yeah, but still we think
he did though, but are you sure, because we're pretty
sure he must have. He's just he's a mastermind, clearly right.
Another thing that plays out in the rich fantasy life
(11:22):
of my head, in the fictional version of this in
the petty Olympics, is that at one point, one of
those weasels houses burning down, and Patrick Lyon is like,
oh really you want a firetruck, just standing outside the
guy's house watching it burn while he sits with his
fire truck apparatus. That's not really how any of that
would have worked, but in my head, in the petty
(11:44):
comedy of my head, right, if you were writing this screenplay,
that would have been kind of fair, Like remember how
you held me for months in a root seller and
barely fed me enough to live and then told my
friends they couldn't see me anymore. I mean, I it
seems a little fair at that point, Yeah, it seems
(12:05):
a little fair. Those are really sad. There's one piece
of testimony from one of his friends. It was like
I visited him initially, but then they stopped letting me in,
and I had seen him looking worse, but then I
couldn't see him anymore. And it's just like, it's so
beyond wrongful imprisonment because at that point it's just weird
(12:25):
and cruel. It's like you haven't been charged with anything,
and yet you get essentially like isolation.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Yeah, that's the comical elements of this episode for me,
are are kind of counterbalanced by having, you know, read
the coverage of so many things about people who were
wrongfully convicted or wrongfully accused and in some cases like
substantial evidence that they did not commit the crime, and
(12:57):
we're then executed for it.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
And so it's like, well.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
This goes back all the way to the beginning of
the legal system in our country. I mean, this one
is nice because in the end, you know, he proves
the truth right, takes them for a ride legally, and
comes out victorious, So it's a little easier to stomach
(13:21):
because of all that. Right, if it had ended terribly
and he had not, as he feared, gotten out of jail, then.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
It would not be a fun episode at all.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Right, And he did apparently at one point have yellow
fever while he was imprisoned, but he survived it, which
is extraordinarily fortunate because a lot of people did not.
And he also kind of started to advocate in general
for people who were held whether they were one, he said,
there are a lot of innocent men in that jail,
(13:53):
and two they're not getting treatment, Like, they're not living
in hygienic conditions, even the ones that had a better
air quoting could because it clearly wasn't a better situation
than what he had, Like, he's like, they're still getting sick,
there's still a lot of infection, and nobody's being treated
or cared for. So I don't know that that really
(14:17):
had a direct impact on anything in terms of like
improving care. Clearly, you know, there were a lot of
people who still felt very comfortable talking trash about him
even after he had lived through that improven his innocence.
But right, right, humans, you disappoint me. But also when
you deposit, you're stolen money in the place you stole
(14:38):
it from, you delight and enchant me. It's a mixed bag,
but it's yeah, fundamentally, like I said, the underdog comes
out on top in the end, Right lives a great
and wealthy life, sticks it to everybody with his portrait.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
I love it.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
One of the things that we did this week was
talked to Toby Ball about the podcast Rip Current. I
wanted to talk to Toby for a couple of reasons. One,
this all started with Nomes Griffin, who's one of the
producers at iHeart who worked on this show, sending a
note to me say, Hey, what if Toby were on
your show? And I thought it would be an interesting
(15:28):
opportunity one to talk about some history that's a little
more recent than you and I totally cover, to talk
about what it's like to make a podcast that's so
very different from yours and mine, because what the two
of us do is we researched the episode, and we
write the episode and then we record.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
It right.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
And Rip Current involves a lot more going through archival
audio and interviewing a lot more people and all of
that kind of stuff, and I personally have not worked
on a show that involves that kind of production, but.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
You have, I sure have.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
I have not at all, But you take on a
lot more other projects at work than I do regarding
making other podcasts.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Yeah, so I.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Thought that might be an opportunity for our listeners to
sort of hear what the behind the scenes is like
on another type of podcast that is also talking about history.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Yeah, those are always tricky. There's a moment early on
where I usually when I'm dealing with something like that,
and it's always my own fault. I'm always like, here's
how we should do this, and then we actually get
all the stuff, and then I just want to start
crying because I'm like it's too much too dig through. Yes,
(16:51):
one of the things that we talked about in the
interview was like the process of getting all of the
information together. Holly has not heard the interview yet, so
I am telling Holly Toby's method for putting together his
thoughts and his information and his research involves index cards
of different colors and then putting those together. And I
(17:17):
got the impression when he said that that he that
we might think that was an odd thing to do,
But I was like, oh no, that was absolutely my
process for a long time until it became easier to
move things around with a mouse. Yet I still like handwritten, Yeah,
I do, whether it's index cards or I got really
(17:39):
into for a while, like just at home, I keep
a giant whiteboard, huh. And I had at one point,
like when we were doing drawn and I was trying
to figure out some of this stuff, I kind of
had like this weird numbering system where I would just
as we did an interview, I would number the interview
and be like, this is interview number one, two, this
(18:00):
is three, and then I would stack those numbers into
a grid by topic where it would be like that
one talked about you know, early Walt Disney studios. This
one talked about you know, termite terrace and those studios.
This one talked about bugs bunny. This one did not.
And that's how I did. So what a visual is
(18:21):
great for me? Right, I can parse it out a
little more easily that way. Yeah, there are things that
I do like writing by hand, making a little chart
or a list or whatever, But writing things out by
hand is so much more laborious for me than typing it. Yeah,
that if I can type something, that's usually what I'm
(18:42):
going to choose to do. We also had a moment
the two of us while I was listening to episodes
of Rip Current that I found funny, and I thought
we would sit here a little bit. And so, parents, teachers,
if you're listening to this with younger people, I'm just
gonna say, maybe skip ahead just a little couple of minutes,
or I'm not sure.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
I think this is the Friday episode, so.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Maybe even this is a place to just check out
of this behind the scenes, because we're gonna be talking
about some Manson family stuff. So I was listening to
Rip Current, listening to all of the episodes that had
come out so I could prepare for this interview, and
there was audio footage of one of the members of
the Manson family talking about how like their sexual relationships
(19:26):
with each other and said something like, we would have
sex with each other, and we would have sex with him,
We would have sex with each other with him, just
like a family. And I was not expecting the just
like a family. And I said what out loud, And
then when I relayed that experience to you, you were like,
did you not know that? And I was like, I
(19:50):
knew the first part, but it was just like a
family that really threw me. Ye, And that is when
we realized that, like our our familiarity with the Manson family,
very different experiences. Yeah, I mean I have a few, right.
I had mentioned that, like Manson was another one of
(20:12):
those things that got talked about in my house growing
up a lot, and that my mom and my two
sisters read Helter Skelter together. Yeah, and Helter Skelter would
not have been a book that was allowed to be
in our house, right. But to be clear, like my
sisters are much older than me. It wasn't like my
mom was like, hey, eleven year olds, would you like?
It was like they were late teenagers at that point. Okay, yeah,
(20:36):
probably junior and senior year of high school.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, I remember correctly, but so so.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
But then also, it's come up in various other points
in my life, like there was a play called Your
Children about Charles Manson that somebody I knew in college.
Did I think a staged reading of so? I was
just very familiar with that material, but in that way
(21:07):
that you think that your experience is universal. I was like, Tracy,
what are you talking about you've never heard this book, yeah,
And I was like, I've never I had never heard
that clip. I had never read that as a quote.
The first part of it about how they were all
like basically all having sexual relationships with each other and together.
That was not the surprising part. It was the then
(21:28):
equating that to like a family, as though that's all
how all families work, And I was like, what.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Ambling right now?
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Because I grew up in a household, I would say
I was pretty sheltered raised Methodist, which growing up Methodist
in North Carolina in the nineteen seventies and eighties, on
the spectrum of Protestant religions, I feel like kind of
in the middle in terms of how conservative, broadly speaking
(22:00):
we tended to be. But also Satanic panic happened, and
my mom was very concerned about anything that might lead
my brother or me into devil worship, So anything involving
Charles Manson was off the table for being appropriate to
(22:21):
read or talk about, right. I guess part of it
for me too, is like if my mom said that, I'd.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Be like aunt well.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
And I was also very much a rule follower in
contexts where the rules made sense to me, and I
thought they mattered, so like I did not. I did
not do homework that I thought was a waste of
my time, even though doing the homework was the rules.
But if my mom told me that I needed to
(22:56):
do a load laundry every day, then I was going
to do the load laundry every day. I mean, I
think it's safe to say I was a more rebellious
child than you.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
Yeah, that's it seems correct.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
I didn't have a ton of respect for anybody. I
even remember telling my mom when I was like seven,
you don't get my respect just because you're older than me, yeah,
which I feel like you would never have said to
your parents.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
No, no, no.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Yeah, you can imagine how well that went over.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yeah I didn't.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
I didn't start being more rebellious until I was like
in my teens and started trying to do stuff like date.
But even then, like there were still there were still
a lot of rules, and if I broke the rules,
there were definitely consequences for having done that, and I
still tended to be like a rule follower in a
(23:48):
lot of other ways.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
So anyway, all exchange made me laugh.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
So yeah, yeah, I'm glad I have gotten to do
a couple of interviews lately. One of them will not
be out yet by the time this episode comes out,
so folks can look forward to having another interview suit
related to another podcast. So again, Happy Friday everyone, whatever's
happening on your weekend. I hope it's great, and I
(24:21):
hope that you come and join us tomorrow for a
Saturday classic and on Monday for something brand new. Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(24:41):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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