September 13, 2024 • 19 mins
Tracy shares some notes about people Jovita Idar was connected to that didn't fit into her episode. Holly discusses her thoughts on the nature of Carvalho Monteiro's décor choices.
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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 Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. One of our episodes this week
was on Koweita Edar. Yes, I have a couple of
(00:21):
things that I noted that I originally was trying to
work into the episode, and that was just not a
great place to put them. They're not specifically about her.
They are about people that she was connected to in
her life. One of them was Leonora Viegas de Magnon,
who was the person who founded La Cruz Blanca, who
(00:43):
went on that trek across the river to get into Mexico,
pretending to hold a gun on the driver when it
was really a whiskey bottle. So her memoir is called
La Rebelde or the Rebel, And I had just sort
of assumed that this was a nickname that she was
given because of her sort of spirit and personality and
(01:08):
a lot of work that she was doing during these
years doing social activism and you know, founding a counterpart
to the Red Cross to work during the Mexican No,
it was the nickname that she got as a newborn.
According to her to her memoir, So this turned out
to be a very fitting nickname for her. But the
(01:30):
story that she told in her memoir was that when
she was born in Nuevo Loedo in eighteen seventy six,
soldiers had come to their home looking for rebels and
she had just been born and her father like opened
the door to the room where you know, her mother
had just given birth to her and was like, here's
(01:50):
the only rebel I'm hiding in this house, and you know,
it's a tiny, screaming baby. I liked that story a lot.
The other is that we kind of mentioned that the
whole our family was like really politically active and aware
and doing stuff. We talked about her brother Eduardo being
one of the founders of LULAC. Another is her brother Clemente,
(02:13):
and Clemente did a lot of work as an activist
and also as a labor organizer, and he was the
first Mexican American organizer to be hired by the American
Federation of Labor. I feel like we have talked about
people being labor organizers a lot on the show. I
don't know if we've ever defined what that is, and
(02:33):
I don't know if I fully understood what that is
until being in a union. The organizers are the people
who are like talking to everybody, trying to get people
on board with joining union, forming a union, working toward
the goals that the union is collectively trying to achieve.
It is a really hard job. And so one of
the things that was going on at the time is
(02:56):
that people thought that the American Federation of Labor was
being biased toward Mexican workers. There weren't any people who
could speak directly to the needs of Mexican and Mexican
American workers or necessarily even spoke the same language. So
there was a labor organization for Mexicans called La Confederacial
(03:18):
and Regional Obrera MEHHANA, and that organization had basically accused
the AFL of bias, and then after that, Clemente Edar
was hired to work for them as a labor organizer. Reportedly,
much later in his life, President Franklin Roosevelt asked Clemente
(03:39):
Adar to serve as the Secretary of Labor, but he
had to say no because he was having trouble with
his health. He had developed diabetes as well, and he
died in nineteen thirty four and That's one of those
things where I don't know if there's official documentation of
this offer being made, but it was definitely something that
was talked about within the family. Such a busy group,
(04:02):
very very busy. Like whenever we talk about a situation
like this where it's like a family and they're all
very involved in activism, I can't help but in my
head wonder, what like their dinners are, like, yeah, like
are they talking about you know, mundane things like whether
or not they're flowers sprouted from the seeds they planted,
(04:24):
or are they like all right? We like is it all?
Is it all organizing meetings all the time? I mean,
I know it's got to be a mix. That's just
how life works. Yeah, I got the impression, I don't
remember if it was from an interview or an article
that quoted possibly her brother Equiano, who went by ike
(04:45):
that like Sunday dinners specifically were like a big time
to talk about what had happened that week, what was
going on politically, you know, what people were working on,
what the goals were, that kind of stuff. But yeah,
you do kind of wonder. It does feel like so
much of the family was like devoted to working for
(05:08):
equal rights for Mexicans and Mexican Americans like you do
kind of does was that like every moment of family
life that part I don't really know, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Or were they like, no, we need a space away
from that, Let's take a break. They just want to
be with my family and enjoyed the miss and enjoy
(05:28):
them as human beings, not as activists, even though obviously
that's a big part of them in their personalities. But
I just can't help but wonder we don't know. Yeah,
maybe someone will write a play about it, and they
will give us examples of possibilities. Yeah, there is someone
I forgot. I have forgotten the name of the person.
There is someone who I believe is working on a
(05:48):
biography of her and has talked about like it's challenging
because so much documentation just isn't there. And at this point,
like there may be nieces and nephews still living, but
like none of her siblings are still living anymore. I
don't think I was the youngest of the family and
(06:10):
had been born in nineteen oh four, so the like
it's possible maybe her siblings, children or grandchildren may have
you know, recollections or personal papers or that kind of thing.
But it's just really challenging. It's just sort of I've
had multiple episodes in a row that have turned out
(06:31):
to be challenging from a just availability of research kind
of situation, because this has followed not directly on the
heels of Dominica Guilme and the whole art scandal that
also had a lot of like maybe this information is
(06:51):
in French, in France somewhere, but I'm not sure that
has suddenly reminded me that we got a couple of
people asking on Facebook whether Dominica Gillolme's son got half
of her money when she died. I did not put
that into the episode because there was really only one
(07:14):
source that said anything about that. That one source didn't
say how much it was, but did say that he
got some kind of inheritance, and also that he was
of the belief that he was actually the biological child
of her husband. He did apparently have some kind of
(07:39):
family resemblance. I'm not sure if he is still living
he was as of like ten or twelve years ago,
but yeah, it does seem like he inherited something. How
much it was, I am not clear on so anyway,
it's a digression onto a totally different episode. It's okay,
it's just you know, house cleaning.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Yeah, yeah, we talked about Antonio Caravagio Montano this week.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
It might be more appropriate to say we struggled through
talking about it, right. I apologize it was my selection
because it's such a cool space, and we don't talk
about Portuguese things very often.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
As is.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Evidenced, the reason is that we are not great at
pronouncing Portuguese things. It's a very very hard language for
me anyway. I think this is probably the case with you. Also.
I often feel sort of caught between knowing that our
(08:52):
listeners would like to hear about history from a lot
of different places and times, and the things that make
languages that we're not familiar with, or periods in places
of history that we're not familiar with, like a lot
more difficult in the same finite amount of time that
(09:14):
we have to work on other episodes. So when it
comes to something like trying to say words in Portuguese,
which is not a language either of us are proficient
in any any way, having this sort of internal struggle
of the Portuguese episode versus being able to say it
in a way that's not upsetting to people. Right, It's
(09:38):
always super tricky, and it's like people always go, well,
you could just ask me, and it's like, well, one,
that's not that easy. Two Sometimes I mean, I've been
writing a lot of stuff while I'm traveling, so it's
not like I can just reach out to folks. And
the other thing is right, like, we're never ever going
to have the same ability to like see through some
(10:01):
of the things like propaganda and find the nuance sure
in a story of a culture that we are, Yeah,
that distanced from That's the one of the big tricky
parts for me.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Also in terms of pronunciations in particular, we can have
a pronunciation by a native speaker of a language that
we just can't form our mouths around, or as was
the case recording, this one just won't stick in our head.
Every single time, there was one particular thing I needed
(10:33):
to say. I had to ask you every time, like,
how do you say this? So Casey Pegrim is typically
the person who does the editing of our show, So
Casey will hopefully have made it sound like I don't
say hopefully, as though I have doubts. I know that
Casey will make it sound like we knew what we
were doing, like we're much more clueful than we but
(10:58):
that we did for shore or create a recording, that's
a lot more work for him to edit on today's episode,
as we struggled to do our best with how to
say words, yeah, and then it sort of bled into
words in English that then we also couldn't say it
because we were struggling. Yeah. It does tend to all
(11:21):
fall apart when you have one difficult part of it.
The rest gets real messy too, because your brain gets frazzled. Yeah.
Having said all that, I have so many thoughts about
this whole thing. Oh hooray. One is just a fun
detail that I read in an account of his death
and I wasn't able to verify it anywhere else, but
(11:45):
it's great, which is that he is said to have
when he died been wearing multiple necklaces or medallions, and
one of them had one of his favorite sayings. And
this saying is so good. I almost want a tattoo,
(12:05):
even though I don't tend to get wordy tattoos, which
is I slither but I do not stray. Ooh, and
I'm like I am in love with you. That's just
a fun little thing. The other thing that I wanted
to talk about a lot is the design of his
(12:27):
palace and areas of his grounds, and how it's been
interpreted as having knights, templar associations, some mystical associations. Once
the US got a hold of news of it, it
was all like it's haunted house, because we can't deal
with the concept of Gothic as an architectural style without
assuming there's a vampire somewhere in there. But the thing
(12:51):
is like, especially as I was looking at the UNESCO
World Heritage entry on the Cultural Landscape of CenTra, a
lot of the houses in that area have similar like
we make nods to Egyptian history, to you know, other
epic poems. The Luciads is not an uncommon thing to
(13:12):
be referenced because it is considered like the literature of
Portugal for many people. Apparently Caravagio Montano was kind of
obsessed with it. He learned how to he memorized it
and could say it without prompting. He could do the
whole thing if asked from a very young age. And
then there's this part of me that's like I have
(13:34):
my own perspective on it, because look, I have what
most people would affectionately call a kookie house. My house
decor is KOOKI we call it the costume that we
live in. Like there's nothing subtle about my choices. It's
a lot of colors intermixed with black, like we it's
(13:55):
a lot of Star Wars. It's just it's it's not
a grown up person's house.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Right.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
When I go into a home that's really like tastefully decorated,
I feel very uncomfortable because I feel like somebody's parents
are gonna bust in and be like, why is that
holly girl in here? Like I just I want a
more playful house. It makes me feel more comfortable. And
so we have none of the grown up stuff and
all of the kooky stuff, And so there is just
part of me that's like we have attributed over the
(14:21):
years all of this meaning and all of these things
that we think he might have been doing, when really,
for all we know, maybe he was just really into
the history of the Knights templars, and the same way
I have a Star Wars canteena in my house, he
had a Knight's templar underground. Well, like, I know, there's
part of me that's like, this could just be a
(14:42):
serious fanboy expression of someone with millions of dollars. Sure,
And I don't ever see that considered. Yeah, And I
will say from a tourism point of view, it's probably
not a popular way to look at it, because more
people they're going to come if they think it's mystical
(15:02):
in any way. Yeah, yeah, that's my Those are my
thinks on his beautiful palace, which his family may not
have loved, but I adore it. I love it. I
feel like he's not the first person recently who has
come up with And then they inherited the estate, which
they didn't like. M M. I can't remember who the
(15:24):
last most recent one was, but it was similarly like
here's this giant thing. They were like, no, I don't
want to live here, No, thank you. There was one
reference to it that called it a philosophical mansion okay,
and a scenic territory of mythical character, which is a
great turn of phrase. But I was like, or maybe
he just liked art, he was just into it. He
(15:45):
was like, more curly cues, please, Now, I will tell you,
as I often do Holly's stupid moment of the week. Okay,
So I was looking at lots of pictures of the
estate because I could look at them all day long,
They're so beautiful, and there was one particular picture of
(16:09):
a grotto. I will also preface this story by saying, look,
my eyesight has gotten noticeably worse in the last couple
of years. My eyes are aging. So I was looking
at this photograph and it was a grotto, and it
had what looked like along the bottom of it, like
installations of lights the way like we've seen it, you know, Versailles.
(16:32):
A lot of those fountains have like little lighting features
around it and stuff. And I started to go down
this little rabbit hole of like, oh, at what point
did like electricals get run to these grottos, because we
know they weren't happening like in the caves downstairs of
the inverted Tower until you know it got renovated in
the nineties, like at one point. And then I was
(16:54):
looking really hard at the picture and I realized those
aren't lights. They're ducks. They're just all ducks, but they're
all turned like away at an angle that like neither
their tail feathers nor their head shape on it. They
kind of just looked like rounded little like those clamshell
(17:15):
style lighting fixtures. Oh wow. And then I was like,
I am Queen of the ding Dongs as I'm like
madly doing internet searches for like Regaleira grotto illumination like
I'm drying, and I'm like, why am I getting no
search results because there's nothing to search for. It's ducks,
(17:39):
right quack.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
That's my ding dongerie of the week, as well as
I hope people build the kooky spaces that they want
to live in. Yeah, I definitely have that ideology. People
have asked us from the beginning of when we bought
the house we're in and we started immediately painting it
(18:02):
in a variety of some people would say crazy ways.
You always get the same question of like, but what
about resale value? And I'm like, I'm buying this house
to live in it, not to sell it. And I
also just think, like making a space your own is
vitally important to your mental health. Those are my thoughts
(18:23):
on the matter, and I think maybe that was what
he was doing here. It's unfortunate that they only got
to live there for like a decade before he passed.
But I hope he had the most fun and enjoyed
every corner of his massive estate. Yeah. I hope, Hell yeah.
I hope you enjoy every corner of the space that
(18:44):
you live in and that you're able to make it yours.
I know if you rent, there are some problems there.
I lived at that for many years. But in any case,
I hope wherever you live it feels safe and like
a haven and is a place that news and reinvigorate
your spirit and bring you your joy. We will be
(19:05):
right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then
on Monday we'll have 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, 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 Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. One of our episodes this week
was on Koweita Edar. Yes, I have a couple of
(00:21):
things that I noted that I originally was trying to
work into the episode, and that was just not a
great place to put them. They're not specifically about her.
They are about people that she was connected to in
her life. One of them was Leonora Viegas de Magnon,
who was the person who founded La Cruz Blanca, who
(00:43):
went on that trek across the river to get into Mexico,
pretending to hold a gun on the driver when it
was really a whiskey bottle. So her memoir is called
La Rebelde or the Rebel, And I had just sort
of assumed that this was a nickname that she was
given because of her sort of spirit and personality and
(01:08):
a lot of work that she was doing during these
years doing social activism and you know, founding a counterpart
to the Red Cross to work during the Mexican No,
it was the nickname that she got as a newborn.
According to her to her memoir, So this turned out
to be a very fitting nickname for her. But the
(01:30):
story that she told in her memoir was that when
she was born in Nuevo Loedo in eighteen seventy six,
soldiers had come to their home looking for rebels and
she had just been born and her father like opened
the door to the room where you know, her mother
had just given birth to her and was like, here's
(01:50):
the only rebel I'm hiding in this house, and you know,
it's a tiny, screaming baby. I liked that story a lot.
The other is that we kind of mentioned that the
whole our family was like really politically active and aware
and doing stuff. We talked about her brother Eduardo being
one of the founders of LULAC. Another is her brother Clemente,
(02:13):
and Clemente did a lot of work as an activist
and also as a labor organizer, and he was the
first Mexican American organizer to be hired by the American
Federation of Labor. I feel like we have talked about
people being labor organizers a lot on the show. I
don't know if we've ever defined what that is, and
(02:33):
I don't know if I fully understood what that is
until being in a union. The organizers are the people
who are like talking to everybody, trying to get people
on board with joining union, forming a union, working toward
the goals that the union is collectively trying to achieve.
It is a really hard job. And so one of
the things that was going on at the time is
(02:56):
that people thought that the American Federation of Labor was
being biased toward Mexican workers. There weren't any people who
could speak directly to the needs of Mexican and Mexican
American workers or necessarily even spoke the same language. So
there was a labor organization for Mexicans called La Confederacial
(03:18):
and Regional Obrera MEHHANA, and that organization had basically accused
the AFL of bias, and then after that, Clemente Edar
was hired to work for them as a labor organizer. Reportedly,
much later in his life, President Franklin Roosevelt asked Clemente
(03:39):
Adar to serve as the Secretary of Labor, but he
had to say no because he was having trouble with
his health. He had developed diabetes as well, and he
died in nineteen thirty four and That's one of those
things where I don't know if there's official documentation of
this offer being made, but it was definitely something that
was talked about within the family. Such a busy group,
(04:02):
very very busy. Like whenever we talk about a situation
like this where it's like a family and they're all
very involved in activism, I can't help but in my
head wonder, what like their dinners are, like, yeah, like
are they talking about you know, mundane things like whether
or not they're flowers sprouted from the seeds they planted,
(04:24):
or are they like all right? We like is it all?
Is it all organizing meetings all the time? I mean,
I know it's got to be a mix. That's just
how life works. Yeah, I got the impression, I don't
remember if it was from an interview or an article
that quoted possibly her brother Equiano, who went by ike
(04:45):
that like Sunday dinners specifically were like a big time
to talk about what had happened that week, what was
going on politically, you know, what people were working on,
what the goals were, that kind of stuff. But yeah,
you do kind of wonder. It does feel like so
much of the family was like devoted to working for
(05:08):
equal rights for Mexicans and Mexican Americans like you do
kind of does was that like every moment of family
life that part I don't really know, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Or were they like, no, we need a space away
from that, Let's take a break. They just want to
be with my family and enjoyed the miss and enjoy
(05:28):
them as human beings, not as activists, even though obviously
that's a big part of them in their personalities. But
I just can't help but wonder we don't know. Yeah,
maybe someone will write a play about it, and they
will give us examples of possibilities. Yeah, there is someone
I forgot. I have forgotten the name of the person.
There is someone who I believe is working on a
(05:48):
biography of her and has talked about like it's challenging
because so much documentation just isn't there. And at this point,
like there may be nieces and nephews still living, but
like none of her siblings are still living anymore. I
don't think I was the youngest of the family and
(06:10):
had been born in nineteen oh four, so the like
it's possible maybe her siblings, children or grandchildren may have
you know, recollections or personal papers or that kind of thing.
But it's just really challenging. It's just sort of I've
had multiple episodes in a row that have turned out
(06:31):
to be challenging from a just availability of research kind
of situation, because this has followed not directly on the
heels of Dominica Guilme and the whole art scandal that
also had a lot of like maybe this information is
(06:51):
in French, in France somewhere, but I'm not sure that
has suddenly reminded me that we got a couple of
people asking on Facebook whether Dominica Gillolme's son got half
of her money when she died. I did not put
that into the episode because there was really only one
(07:14):
source that said anything about that. That one source didn't
say how much it was, but did say that he
got some kind of inheritance, and also that he was
of the belief that he was actually the biological child
of her husband. He did apparently have some kind of
(07:39):
family resemblance. I'm not sure if he is still living
he was as of like ten or twelve years ago,
but yeah, it does seem like he inherited something. How
much it was, I am not clear on so anyway,
it's a digression onto a totally different episode. It's okay,
it's just you know, house cleaning.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Yeah, yeah, we talked about Antonio Caravagio Montano this week.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
It might be more appropriate to say we struggled through
talking about it, right. I apologize it was my selection
because it's such a cool space, and we don't talk
about Portuguese things very often.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
As is.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Evidenced, the reason is that we are not great at
pronouncing Portuguese things. It's a very very hard language for
me anyway. I think this is probably the case with you. Also.
I often feel sort of caught between knowing that our
(08:52):
listeners would like to hear about history from a lot
of different places and times, and the things that make
languages that we're not familiar with, or periods in places
of history that we're not familiar with, like a lot
more difficult in the same finite amount of time that
(09:14):
we have to work on other episodes. So when it
comes to something like trying to say words in Portuguese,
which is not a language either of us are proficient
in any any way, having this sort of internal struggle
of the Portuguese episode versus being able to say it
in a way that's not upsetting to people. Right, It's
(09:38):
always super tricky, and it's like people always go, well,
you could just ask me, and it's like, well, one,
that's not that easy. Two Sometimes I mean, I've been
writing a lot of stuff while I'm traveling, so it's
not like I can just reach out to folks. And
the other thing is right, like, we're never ever going
to have the same ability to like see through some
(10:01):
of the things like propaganda and find the nuance sure
in a story of a culture that we are, Yeah,
that distanced from That's the one of the big tricky
parts for me.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Also in terms of pronunciations in particular, we can have
a pronunciation by a native speaker of a language that
we just can't form our mouths around, or as was
the case recording, this one just won't stick in our head.
Every single time, there was one particular thing I needed
(10:33):
to say. I had to ask you every time, like,
how do you say this? So Casey Pegrim is typically
the person who does the editing of our show, So
Casey will hopefully have made it sound like I don't
say hopefully, as though I have doubts. I know that
Casey will make it sound like we knew what we
were doing, like we're much more clueful than we but
(10:58):
that we did for shore or create a recording, that's
a lot more work for him to edit on today's episode,
as we struggled to do our best with how to
say words, yeah, and then it sort of bled into
words in English that then we also couldn't say it
because we were struggling. Yeah. It does tend to all
(11:21):
fall apart when you have one difficult part of it.
The rest gets real messy too, because your brain gets frazzled. Yeah.
Having said all that, I have so many thoughts about
this whole thing. Oh hooray. One is just a fun
detail that I read in an account of his death
and I wasn't able to verify it anywhere else, but
(11:45):
it's great, which is that he is said to have
when he died been wearing multiple necklaces or medallions, and
one of them had one of his favorite sayings. And
this saying is so good. I almost want a tattoo,
(12:05):
even though I don't tend to get wordy tattoos, which
is I slither but I do not stray. Ooh, and
I'm like I am in love with you. That's just
a fun little thing. The other thing that I wanted
to talk about a lot is the design of his
(12:27):
palace and areas of his grounds, and how it's been
interpreted as having knights, templar associations, some mystical associations. Once
the US got a hold of news of it, it
was all like it's haunted house, because we can't deal
with the concept of Gothic as an architectural style without
assuming there's a vampire somewhere in there. But the thing
(12:51):
is like, especially as I was looking at the UNESCO
World Heritage entry on the Cultural Landscape of CenTra, a
lot of the houses in that area have similar like
we make nods to Egyptian history, to you know, other
epic poems. The Luciads is not an uncommon thing to
(13:12):
be referenced because it is considered like the literature of
Portugal for many people. Apparently Caravagio Montano was kind of
obsessed with it. He learned how to he memorized it
and could say it without prompting. He could do the
whole thing if asked from a very young age. And
then there's this part of me that's like I have
(13:34):
my own perspective on it, because look, I have what
most people would affectionately call a kookie house. My house
decor is KOOKI we call it the costume that we
live in. Like there's nothing subtle about my choices. It's
a lot of colors intermixed with black, like we it's
(13:55):
a lot of Star Wars. It's just it's it's not
a grown up person's house.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Right.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
When I go into a home that's really like tastefully decorated,
I feel very uncomfortable because I feel like somebody's parents
are gonna bust in and be like, why is that
holly girl in here? Like I just I want a
more playful house. It makes me feel more comfortable. And
so we have none of the grown up stuff and
all of the kooky stuff, And so there is just
part of me that's like we have attributed over the
(14:21):
years all of this meaning and all of these things
that we think he might have been doing, when really,
for all we know, maybe he was just really into
the history of the Knights templars, and the same way
I have a Star Wars canteena in my house, he
had a Knight's templar underground. Well, like, I know, there's
part of me that's like, this could just be a
(14:42):
serious fanboy expression of someone with millions of dollars. Sure,
And I don't ever see that considered. Yeah, And I
will say from a tourism point of view, it's probably
not a popular way to look at it, because more
people they're going to come if they think it's mystical
(15:02):
in any way. Yeah, yeah, that's my Those are my
thinks on his beautiful palace, which his family may not
have loved, but I adore it. I love it. I
feel like he's not the first person recently who has
come up with And then they inherited the estate, which
they didn't like. M M. I can't remember who the
(15:24):
last most recent one was, but it was similarly like
here's this giant thing. They were like, no, I don't
want to live here, No, thank you. There was one
reference to it that called it a philosophical mansion okay,
and a scenic territory of mythical character, which is a
great turn of phrase. But I was like, or maybe
he just liked art, he was just into it. He
(15:45):
was like, more curly cues, please, Now, I will tell you,
as I often do Holly's stupid moment of the week. Okay,
So I was looking at lots of pictures of the
estate because I could look at them all day long,
They're so beautiful, and there was one particular picture of
(16:09):
a grotto. I will also preface this story by saying, look,
my eyesight has gotten noticeably worse in the last couple
of years. My eyes are aging. So I was looking
at this photograph and it was a grotto, and it
had what looked like along the bottom of it, like
installations of lights the way like we've seen it, you know, Versailles.
(16:32):
A lot of those fountains have like little lighting features
around it and stuff. And I started to go down
this little rabbit hole of like, oh, at what point
did like electricals get run to these grottos, because we
know they weren't happening like in the caves downstairs of
the inverted Tower until you know it got renovated in
the nineties, like at one point. And then I was
(16:54):
looking really hard at the picture and I realized those
aren't lights. They're ducks. They're just all ducks, but they're
all turned like away at an angle that like neither
their tail feathers nor their head shape on it. They
kind of just looked like rounded little like those clamshell
(17:15):
style lighting fixtures. Oh wow. And then I was like,
I am Queen of the ding Dongs as I'm like
madly doing internet searches for like Regaleira grotto illumination like
I'm drying, and I'm like, why am I getting no
search results because there's nothing to search for. It's ducks,
(17:39):
right quack.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
That's my ding dongerie of the week, as well as
I hope people build the kooky spaces that they want
to live in. Yeah, I definitely have that ideology. People
have asked us from the beginning of when we bought
the house we're in and we started immediately painting it
(18:02):
in a variety of some people would say crazy ways.
You always get the same question of like, but what
about resale value? And I'm like, I'm buying this house
to live in it, not to sell it. And I
also just think, like making a space your own is
vitally important to your mental health. Those are my thoughts
(18:23):
on the matter, and I think maybe that was what
he was doing here. It's unfortunate that they only got
to live there for like a decade before he passed.
But I hope he had the most fun and enjoyed
every corner of his massive estate. Yeah. I hope, Hell yeah.
I hope you enjoy every corner of the space that
(18:44):
you live in and that you're able to make it yours.
I know if you rent, there are some problems there.
I lived at that for many years. But in any case,
I hope wherever you live it feels safe and like
a haven and is a place that news and reinvigorate
your spirit and bring you your joy. We will be
(19:05):
right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then
on Monday we'll have 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, or
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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