Eponymous Drinks

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I don't think it's
any surprise that the eponymous food series has become one
of my favorite things to do. We get a lot

(00:24):
of emails from listeners who also have found it to
be a favorite. It's super fun. Who doesn't want to
talk about food, delicious or otherwise. But last time we
did an all chocolate addition. This time I thought it
might be fun if we only talk about beverages, which,
just to set it up, we're doing kind of an assortment.

(00:45):
So one is a mocktail, technically one is a cocktail,
and one is a brand person's name attached to it.
So we're getting a little bit of a spread of options.
And there are some surprises in here for me personally. Yeah,
And it just made me very, very nostalgic about various

(01:07):
things I have consumed and enjoyed over the years, So
hopefully it will do the same for you. And then
I feel like this is we're setting up for a
very lively Friday conversation. Yeah, I think so. We'll start
with an absolute classic and one of the earliest mocktails,
and that's the Shirley Temple. So probably not a surprise
who it's named for. Child star Shirley Temple. And if

(01:31):
you don't know who that is, Shirley Temple was a
leading child star in the nineteen thirties and in the
US as the country was completely engulfed in the Great
Depression that followed the nineteen twenty nine stock market crash,
she really became kind of an antidote for the failing
morale of the country. Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, quote,

(01:53):
as long as our country has Shirley Temple, we'll be
all right. Because she was adoor. She was a very
good performer from the time she was just tiny. She
charmed people on screen so much charm. Shirley was born
on April twenty third, nineteen twenty eight to George and
Gertrude Temple. She was their third child and their only daughter.

(02:16):
At the age of three, she was enrolled in a
dance school. Sometimes you'll see that reported as like two
and a half, and that is where she was spotted
by a casting director for educational pictures and her film
career began. We're not going to get into all of
that film career here. That is its own whole thing,
but I will say if you go back and watch
some of Temple's earliest films, there's some pretty cringey stuff

(02:37):
in there. There was often a trend in films and
particularly educational pictures, to show children playing adults as sort
of a spoof, which can be funny in theory, but
often these were kind of weird situations to put children in.
For example, in her first movie, War Babies, she played
a dancer who entertained soldiers. There's some some sexual overtones

(03:01):
to it. That's pretty weird. There's a romance storyline. This
is reported as when she received her first kiss, So
it's like there's it's icky. Some people don't find it icky.
A lot of people do. There are others like this film.
They were all under an umbrella of baby burlesques, and
per Temple's own autobiography, the kids were treated very poorly

(03:23):
and exploited in addition to whatever issues you may or
may not have with the subject matter, But to the
film going audience, this was all kind of cute and
wholesome at the time, and Temple's image and success were
based entirely around that idea of innocent sweetness that was
used to market them. There are three different places that

(03:43):
have been the alleged originators of the drink that was
named for this child actor. The most frequently cited is
Chasin's in Hollywood. That's an eatery that opened in nineteen
thirty six. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Awaho has also
touted the drink as its own invention over the years,
and yet another version of the story states that it

(04:05):
was created at the Hollywood Brown Derby, which has been
the focus on the show other Food. Despite the variety
of locations that this may have happened in, the basic
origin story for the drink is almost always the same. Sureley,
who at this point was a successful actor, was out
with her parents. Both of them were drinking old fashions.

(04:26):
Surely wanted one because of the cherry garnish. Here we'll
have a sidebar on the pronunciation of Maraschino, which is
how we say it in the US, versus Maraschino, which
is how it really is said in Italy. Here is
a distinguisher. I have heard people use, I don't know
if this is universal. They tend to use Maraschino for

(04:48):
the hyper sweet, kind of bright translucent ones that go
into things like Shirley Temple's Here Now, and Maraschino for
the darker, deeper flavored ones that go into actual cocktails.
I don't know if that's a convention a lot of
people use. I have heard it in a few different places, though,
But anyway, Sureley wanted a drink because of this cute garnish,
but of course she could not have an old fashioned,

(05:10):
so someone on the staff made up an alcohol free
drink that she could have and garnished it with a
Maraschino cherry. Voila, the Shirley Temple is born. And after that,
restaurants in Hollywood started offering this as a beverage for
younger diners to enjoy, and it's spread very quickly from there,
and adults who didn't drink alcohol also started to order

(05:31):
it because it's delicious. The actual ingredients are kind of variable, though,
depending on what recipe you look at or where you
order it. There's usually grenadine and then either a lemon
lime soda or ginger ale on top. Some versions combine
those sodas, also orange juice, maybe a little lime juice,

(05:52):
but there's always that Maraschino cherry to garnish it. But Shirley,
who became Shirley Temple Black when she married her second
husban in nineteen fifty, appears to have not been a
huge fan of the drink, especially as time war on.
In nineteen eighty eight, a company called Soda Pop Kids
in Encino, California, brought a bottled version of the Shirley

(06:13):
Temple to market under the brand name Shirley t with
the tagline the Shirley Temple Soft Drink. But Temple Black
fought it aggressively through legal channels, saying that it diluted
her name's commercial value and invaded her privacy. In a
quote given to press in autumn of nineteen eighty eight,
she said, quote, I will fight it like a tigris.

(06:36):
All a celebrity has is their name. She noted in
another interview, quote, I have always been very cautious all
of my life to make sure any items are licensed.
My lawyer will go after anyone who is using my
name on a product without my permission. And she also
stated that she thought most Shirley Temple drinks were just
too sweet and she didn't even really like it, and

(06:58):
she felt like, even though so this drink contained no alcohol,
it still kind of felt like marketing a cocktail to children,
and she never liked that about it either. The legal
battle over bottled Shirley Temple soda hinged on whether the
name had become a generic term or not. Bradley Wideman,
the owner of Soda Pop Kids, and his counsel, argued

(07:19):
that people had been able to walk into restaurants and
order a Shirley Temple for fifty years at that point,
so obviously it was a generic term. But Temple Black's attorney,
Joseph M. Malcolm, made the case that it did not
matter how long people had been ordering Shirley Temples and restaurants.
In nineteen seventy one, a law had been passed in
California making it illegal to use a person's likeness or

(07:42):
name for commercial purposes without their consent. Malcolm said in
an interview with the Los Angeles Times, quote, it's one
thing to go into a bar and order a Shirley
Temple drink, or go into a restaurant and get a
Clint Eastwood sandwich. It's another thing to sell a soft
drink as the Shirley Temple Soft drink or a sandwich
as the Clint Eastwood Sandwich. In late October of nineteen

(08:06):
eighty eight, Temple Black was able to stop the use
of her name associated with the sale of Shirley Tea temporarily.
The court order stated that the company could sell existing
inventory of the product, but it had to be relabeled
to exclude her name. It appears that the company never
got back to making it after the lawsuit. Today, you
can occasionally find empty bottles with the Shirley Tea label

(08:29):
on them on eBay with the Shirley Temple Soft Drink tag.
Temple Black died in twenty fourteen, and today you can
easily purchase drinks with the Shirley Temple name on them
in both mocktail and alcoholic varieties. Okay, so it's time
for one that I actually wanted to do for a
long time as its own episode, and I kept backing

(08:50):
away from it. But this seems like the right place
to do it. Holy cow, everyone has been talking about
negronies in the last year, yes, particularly after how Dragon's
actor Emma Darcy said the Negronie spalliado was their drink
of choice in a viral TikTok from HBO's account with
fellow House of Dragon star Olivia Cook. Okay, everybody knows

(09:10):
this by now, but I'm just going to go over it.
And the Gronie Spiriato has prosecco in it instead of gin,
and spalliato means mistake in Italian, so it's literally a
mistake in the gronie. Also just the delivery, Oh yes,
although it has led I know to people ordering it

(09:32):
in a weird way. I'm not criticizing anyway. Whatever you do,
it's fine. But if you say to a bartender, I
want a Negronie balliado, you don't have to say with prosecco.
When they say that. In that TikTok, they're explaining what
it is, not saying it's this, and you add this additionally,
with prosecco, you know that it's vaded prosecco. Yeah. So

(09:54):
where did the original cocktail, which usually consists of equal
parts come Parise Vermuth and gin get its name. Before
we talk about the person it's named for, we have
to talk about its predecessor drink, the Americano. We do
not mean a Cafe Americano. That is a different thing.
This is a drink that incorporates on a morrow that's

(10:15):
a bitter herb liqueur, specifically campari. For the Americano, it's
combined with sweet vermouth, which is a fortified wine that
also has herbs, spices and bark flavoring, and then that's
topped off with club soda. It's a pretty light drink
in terms of alcohol by volume. Yeah, the club soda
makes it pretty refreshing. But the Americano was based on

(10:37):
a drink called the Milano Tourno. Maybe Milano is a
reference to Milan, the origin city of Campari, and Torino
is a reference to Turin, where vermut Titurini comes from.
This drink was invented by Gaspar Campari in the eighteen
sixties at Cafe Camparino in Milan, and it was, according
to legend, popular with American tourists that they preferred it

(11:01):
diluted with a bit of club soda, thus the name Americano.
But there's debate, however, about whether or not Italians also
already drank it on occasion with a soda topper. According
to author and drink's historian David Wondrich, who knows all
of the things about the history of drinks, the Americano
and Milano Torino are better described as kind of existing

(11:22):
in tandem, that the Americano being a generic version, in
the Milano Torino being a variation. An Americano, according to
his information, is not named for the version with the
diluted club soda, but for the use of bidders with vermouth,
which was considered an American practice. So what we can
say with certainty is that in the nineteen teens the

(11:43):
Americano was a very popular drink in Italy, both with
people who lived in Italy and people who visit it.
Now we get to Negroni, the man, or more accurately Negronese,
because there are two different origin stories. We're going to
talk about both of those after a sponsor break. Okay,

(12:12):
before the break, we said we would talk about the
two men who are both discussed as possibly being the
man for whom the Negroni is named. So first, Camillo
Luigi Manfredro Maria Negroni was born on May twenty fifth,
eighteen sixty eight, in Florence, Italy. His father was Count
Enrico Negroni, and his mother was Ada Savage Landor. His

(12:35):
father died when he was ten years old, and when
he was sixteen, Camillo went to a military academy. He also,
during this time subtly changed the spelling of his name.
Instead of two ms in Camillo, he changed it to one.
We do not have a clear reason why his mother,
though remarried and Camillo did not get along with the
second husband at all, and it is that conflict which

(12:58):
is said to have inspired him to leave home and travel,
and he headed to the United States. For a long time,
the only real account of Camillo Negroni came from a
wonderful and somewhat fanciful tale that appeared in North American
newspapers in nineteen twenty eight. This is the biography slash Travelog,

(13:20):
written by a journalist named Bob Davis who worked for
the New York Sun. Have a number of questions about it.
There may or may not be answers, but it's pretty fun. So.
Davis said that he encountered Negroni after he had such
a hard time communicating with his cab driver while visiting
Italy that he had just kind of gestured to the
man to simply drive and hope that he would figure

(13:42):
out where to go or that he would see something
of interest. And when he saw a man on a
horse with a Mexican saddle and looking entirely like a
wild West cowboy, he had the driver stop and he
asked if demand spoke English, and he got the reply,
your tutin' I do ombre, although allegedly with an Italian act,
which I dared not try because I will sound like

(14:03):
a bad video game. I don't I that just this
is part of my questions. That just seems like an
impossible sentence to say with an Italian accent. Like I said,
I dare not. But the two men, according to this story,
began talking and the Gronie told Davis, quote, you are
the first stranger in these parts who ever tumbled to

(14:25):
my outfit. He also told the American tourists that he
could tell the driver to follow him over a ridge
that he was pointing to, and that once they got there,
he could show him where to get something to eat
and drink. So over these refreshments, according to what Davis wrote,
the count told his life story quote, I went out
to the Rockies in the late eighties and fell in
love with the country. I learned enough about stud Qino

(14:49):
and Pharaoh to get broke and stay that way. Punching
horses suited me to death, and I went adventuring over
the ranges. And the Gronie talked about how he the road,
heard around North America, spent time in Alberta, Canada, and
even taught a horse to stick around without hitching. He
also shared a story about when he was delivering beef

(15:11):
from one ranch to another and met a cowboy along
the way who bad mouthed the man who was supposed
to receive the order. That man's name was Walter Gordon Cumming.
The two of them got drunk together, and it turned
out the cowboy talking trash about coming was actually Walter
Gordon Coming. And then after this whole joke was exposed,

(15:32):
Coming and Negrony became very good friends. Coming gifted the
count with the Mexican saddle that Davis had noticed from
the taxi while he was lost. It also turned out
that as Nigroni told Davis about his gambling exploits, Davis
started to recognize some of the stories and realized that
he had actually heard of Nigrony before, and had even

(15:55):
gone to a party that Nigrony had thrown when the
Count was flushed with winnings when he was in North America.
By the way, he eventually lost all of that money
again according to the story. For a long time, this
very fanciful write up was really consistent of the only
pieces of information that we in North America had about
this Count ne Groni's personality up to when the cocktail emerges,

(16:18):
and it establishes that this person does seem to exist.
This doesn't mention the cocktail at all, although the whole
thing is rather fantastical. This and so many aspects of
this reading to me like something that the writer made up. Yes,
So in recent years, as more books about Negroney history
have been published, we've gotten more detail about this cowboy count.

(16:42):
He got married on his thirtieth birthday to a woman
named Antoinette's worka from Prague. He found out he had
a son from a romance. In his youth. He designed
gardens probably, and he lived a lot of life and
died at the age of sixty six. And now we're
gonna step sideway and talk about the other Negroni who
maybe the reason the cocktail got its name. This is

(17:04):
a briefer story, probably because it involves less fanciful things.
The second Negroni namesake is General Pascal Olivier, Count de Negroni.
He was born on April fourth, eighteen twenty nine, in
San Colombano a l'ambro in Italy's Lombardi region. This Count
Negroni was a member of the French army who served

(17:25):
starting when he was eighteen and ending forty four years
later at the age of sixty two. During this time,
this Negroni led a pivotal charge in the Franco Prussian
War of eighteen seventy and earned the Officer's Cross of
the Imperial Legion of Honor. He was captured just weeks
later and spent six months as a prisoner of war,
but after that he continued his rise through the ranks

(17:48):
and became a general and a commander of the Legion
of Honor. But Negroni, the general, died in nineteen thirteen
at the age of eighty four, and this causes a
little problem with the ti timeline of the invention of
the eponymous cocktail, because it's usually noted as having been
created in nineteen nineteen, so the Cowboy count is said

(18:10):
to have returned to Italy as calls for prohibition were
gaining favor in the United States, and he frequented a
place called Cafe Cassoni in Florence. This was not strictly
a bar, not strictly a cafe. It also sold groceries
and perfumes, kind of like a corner store with a
cocktail bar in it, which that sounds like a handy

(18:31):
thing to have in a neighborhood. It still exists, though
it's now known as Cafe Jacosa, and Camillo d'groni is
said to have stopped in there one day, as he
often did, and asked for an Americano but popi robusto
or a little bit more robust. Camila n'groni is said
to have picked up a taste for gin while living

(18:53):
in the United States, so bartender Fosco Scarceli omitted the
club soda and replaced it with gin, and then topped
that with an orange garnish. There are also historians that
say the gin was simply added without omitting the soda.
But whichever way the Negroni was born, maybe Scarceli remained

(19:15):
known for creating the Negroni for the rest of his life,
and according to various accounts, people started ordering it by saying,
I want the same drink as Negroni. But there are
still some problems with the story. For one, members of
the Negroni family have stated that they have scoured their
family tree back to the eleventh century. They found no

(19:36):
Count Camillo, although there was a reproduction of his birth
certificate that has since appeared in print. Now to support
the general Pascal Negroni story, we found several mentions of
an article titled new evidence that Neigroni was invented in
Africa Sorry Italy that was said to appear in a
publication called Drinking Cup in twenty twelve. I sure couldn't

(20:00):
find this, but Tracy did. It's a now defunct site
which featured a photo of a letter that Pascal Olivier
Negroni sent to his brother that suggested that he created
this drink in eighteen fifty seven to celebrate his wedding,
and he then introduced it to officers while he was
stationed in Senegal in eighteen seventy. This is also tricky though,

(20:24):
because in eighteen fifty seven Campari didn't exist yet, and
most bartenders will tell you if there's no Campari, it's
not a Negroni. But in twenty fifteen, author Luca Peake
published his story of the Negroni and sides with the
Camilla Nigroni version, but also includes a story of litigation

(20:45):
in this book which echoes the one we talked about
with the Shirley Temple, although in the opposite way. In
the late nineteen fifties, a company called Treviso, which was
owned by a member of the Nigroni family, put a
pre mixed negro on the market, sold in bottles, but
it was, according to the barman and liqueur manufacturers of

(21:06):
the time, bad bad enough that Campari and several other
Liqueur companies sued over it and the case. A lot
of people testified to the Florence origin of the cocktail
at Cafe Cassoni, including bartender Fosco Sarcelli. The bottled old

(21:26):
Nigrony cocktail was taken off the market, so it seems
like pretty much all of the actual evidence supports the
Count Negroni, who was a cowboy and perhaps a very
flamboyant character. But wherever it started, it seems like its
intense flavor is matched only by the intense scrutiny its
origins have gotten and the intense disagreements about who it's

(21:47):
really named for. The Campari Company, by the way, sticks
with that nineteen nineteen Florence origin. Our next beverage is
a soft drink. We will talk about whether or not
it really qualifies as an eponymous food him after we
hear from the sponsors that keep stuffymus in history class,
going alrighty, we have had a mocktail and a cocktail,

(22:16):
and this next one is a soft drink. Have you
ever wondered why doctor Pepper is called? That? Is there
Doctor Pepper? Like the Negroni, there are competing stories. We
definitely do know who invented this one though, and a
lot about the early years of doctor Pepper, but the
doctor himself that it may or may not be known for.
That's a little more mysterious. And this story starts in Waco, Texas,

(22:39):
but it has roots in Virginia. The inventor of this
soft drink was Charles Alderton. Alderton was born in Brooklyn,
New York, on June twenty first, eighteen fifty seven. After
finishing a bachelor's degree in England. He went to the
University of Texas to study medicine and used his education
to become a pharmacist a job in a drug store

(23:01):
in Waco, Texas called Morrison's Old Corner drug Store. This
was an old school drug store with a soda fountain.
I kind of missed these. There maybe are still some somewhere.
I know definitely of one in New York, but there
are more than that, I'm sure, but they're few and
far between now. Yeah, there was one in Like the

(23:24):
pharmacy that we went to when I was growing up
had a soda fountain, and that is where my brother's
after school job was in high school. So, according to
the Doctor Pepper Museum, which is in the original building
where the now defunct Morrison's drug Store operated, Alderton loved
the way the store smelled because of all of the
fruit syrups from the soda fountain. So when he wasn't

(23:46):
busy compounding medicines, he would get behind the soda fountain
counter and help serve customers, and he started to think
about how he might combine a number of syrups to
make a carbonated drink that tasted the way the store smelled.
He started experimenting with this idea in eighteen eighty five
and kept notes on what combinations and proportions he had used.

(24:08):
He kept tweaking the mix until he felt like he
had it just right, so the next step was a
taste test with the boss, Wade Morrison. Morrison also liked it,
and they started offering it to customers, who also liked
it a lot. They patented this beverage on December first,
eighteen eighty five. At that point it was just called

(24:29):
a Waco and it became so popular that other drug
stores started buying the mix from Morrison so they too
could sell wacos. The burden of distributing that much product
out of a drug store got to be too much,
especially because according to legend, it has had twenty three
ingredients Since the beginning, Alderton and Morrison could not keep

(24:51):
up as demand grew, enter Richard S. Lazenbee, who was
a beverage chemist. Lazinbie owned a ginger ale company and
he approached Morrison and Alderton and suggested that he could help,
and at this point Morrison went into business with Lazinbe.
It seems that Alderton loved the creativity of creating this
drink and working out the formula, but he wasn't really

(25:12):
interested in the logistics of large scale beverage manufacture. So
Lazinbe and Morrison went into business together and they formed
the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company. In eighteen ninety one.
Lazinbee's son in law, JB. O'Hara, also joined the company
and it changed names to the Doctor Pepper Company. I
swear we're going to come back to the name, but

(25:33):
for now, just know it changed names for the next
decade and change. The drink remained kind of a local
specialty in Texas, but in nineteen oh four, Doctor Pepper
made its global debut at the World's Fair exposition in
Saint Louis. It's estimated that Lazinbe and O'Hare served the
drink to twenty million people over the course of the expo,

(25:56):
but they had prepared for that. The company had built
a new bottling plan in Saint Louis ahead of the
fair and started advertising in Missouri as early as nineteen
oh one, and when the expo opened, Doctor Pepper was
sold at concession stands throughout the complex. Was a huge
moment for the company, which continued to expand rapidly. Headquarters

(26:17):
moved from Waco to Dallas in nineteen twenty three as
part of the expansion. Okay, but who is doctor Pepper?
There are several stories and theories. One is simply that
the name was concocted to suggest the idea of it
giving the consumer a bit of pep or energy. That
was something that was a big concept in the late

(26:38):
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. You've heard us talk about
it on other episodes where we talk about people who
I don't want to say study nutrition because sometimes they
weren't quite on it. But it was a popular concept
like we need more pep, and that the addition of
doctor on the label was intended to give it some
sort of gravitaz, right, like a doctor pick me up.

(27:00):
Pep may have also been short for pepsin, which is
a digestive enzyme. The most popular story, though, is what
puts this in an eponymous Foods episode. This one involves
a bit of backward time travel. Not long after the
US Civil War, a drug store opened in the town
of Rural Retreat, Virginia by a man named Charles T. Pepper.

(27:24):
Pepper was born in New River Valley in eighteen thirty
and attended the University of Virginia Medical School. He got
his medical degree in eighteen fifty five. Served in the
Civil War as a surgeon for the Confederate Army. He
had first started a private practice in Tennessee when the
war ended, but then moved to Rural Retreat and established

(27:45):
a combination drug store in doctor's office according to the law.
In eighteen seventy four, he hired a young Wade Morrison
to work as a pharmacist, and it was Morrison's first job.
Wade only stayed in Rural Retreat for a few year
years before moving to Texas, although he moved around the
state of Texas for a bit before settling in Waco.

(28:06):
So there is this story that he had fallen in
love with Charles Pepper's daughter and wanted to marry her.
That information does not hold up to scrutiny. Pepper's daughter
would have been a little kid when Wade moved to Texas.
Ruth Pepper did get married much later, in nineteen oh
one to a man named Barnes Gillespie, but this story

(28:27):
of this romance element has persisted. That Morrison had named
this popular soda after his first boss as part of
his involvement with the family. There is an interesting element
in this, which is how very invested rural retreat Virginia
has been in maintaining the importance of doctor Charles Pepper's

(28:48):
role in this chain of events that led to the
soda and its name. Sometimes the story of the daughter
and Wade being in love is repeated. It's combined with
a romantic melodrama element, suggesting that Morrison created the soda
beverage to try to impress Charles Pepper but failed, and
that he left Virginia in embarrassment and heartbreak. Another version

(29:11):
of the story that sometimes told is that Charles Pepper
actually invented the formula and that Wade Morrison took it.
There's even a brief mention in a nineteen ninety two
write up about the beverage that Charles Pepper left behind
some notes that some believe to have been part of
the formula. These notes mentioned swamproot, quinine, spices, raisins, and soda.

(29:34):
Yet another version suggests that Wade may have taken the
formula from Charles's son, Lewis. There's even a variation suggesting
that Lewis ran away to join the circus and got
it from someone. There so many fanciful stories, but there
is yet another twist in all of this. Because researchers

(29:55):
at the Doctor Pepper Museum looked into Morrison's years in Virginia,
there is there's no evidence he ever worked for Charles T. Pepper.
He lived about forty miles away in Christiansburg, Virginia, But
when they looked at census records for that town during
the time Wade Morrison lived there, they did find another
Doctor Pepper, doctor William Alexander Reed Pepper. This doctor Pepper

(30:18):
lived near Morrison, They were in the same neighborhood, and
he had a daughter just one year younger than Wade.
Could he be the real doctor that the drink is
named for, and maybe that's where this love interest story
got its start listen. If so, we're probably never going
to know for certain, because there is not much information
on that doctor Pepper or Wade's possible relationship with him

(30:40):
or his daughter. What we do know is that Doctor
Pepper has continued to be one of the largest soda
brands globally. A secret recipe of twenty three ingredients has
been theorized and mythologized for more than one hundred years.
The company has also gone through a lot of shifts
and changes over the years. Today it is part of
Kurig Doctor Pepper. There are more things about Doctor Pepper's history.

(31:03):
For example, now just FYI any style guide people, there's
no period in it. Okay, we'll talk about that and
other stuff behind the scenes on Friday. I feel like
my head is full of odd Doctor Pepper facts that
weren't really germane to this part of the story. There's
a lot of litigation that I became very fascinated by.

(31:24):
But now I will do a little bit of listener mail,
which feels a little bit like a solidarity listener mail
because it is somebody who felt the same way as
I did about their plush toy growing up and Scarlet Fever.
This is from our listener Elise, who titled their email
Don't burn My Teddy Bear. Alise writes, Hi, Holly and Tracy,

(31:45):
I'm catching up on the last few weeks of episodes
and just listen to the behind the scenes episode on
Scarlet Fever, and I had to write you after listening
to you ladies discuss the Velveteen Rabbit, and admittedly tearing up,
I had to share I have a teddy bear that
I've loved dearly my whole life. It's lived with me
in every house an apartment I've ever had, and still does.
As a kid, after reading The Velveteen Rabbit, I was

(32:07):
so fearful of scarlet fever and the consequences that any
time I had the slightest throat tickle or any signs
of illness, I would hide my bear in the back
of my closet. I remember being so afraid the adults
would come and burn my things, including the bear, and
I could not allow that. But if he wasn't near
me when I was sick, he wouldn't need to be burned. Right,

(32:27):
nightmares ensued. I'm certainly no advocate of banning books, but
this one should maybe be labeled as YA fiction. I
think that's actually kind of smart. On another note, I
cannot thank the two of you enough for all your
hard work sourcing materials, for your episodes, working tirelessly to
use respectful and updated language, and for the care with
which you handle delicate and potentially triggering topics. I also

(32:49):
love the laughter you share and find myself smiling and
chuckling along with you, especially when I can predict one
of your reactions to something. I've been a listener to
Stuffy Miss in history class for a long time, but
over the last years, I worked my way through every
single episode earning my second PhD. The first is in
cellular and molecular biology. It allows me to teach biology
at a local university. During the last few years, your

(33:11):
voices have become such a source of comfort and familiarity
that I will save up episodes to listen to you
after a hard day. I'm so honored by that My
two doggoes, Greta and Finn actually allow me to move
around the house without constantly trailing behind when your voices
are playing from my pocket. Thanks, by the way, for
not using lots of background sound effects doors creaking or
knocking in the background of some of my other favorite podcasts.

(33:34):
Sends the dogs off into the deep end. Dog photos attached.
Obviously this is so sweet. Okay, first of all, I
don't know which dog is which one of these dogs.
This is like a supermodel glamour shot. The dog is gorgeous.
First of all, it's the one with the white chest area.
Sitting in the grass just in the yard, but one

(33:54):
ear is flopped over with this like insussient devil may
care expression that's like a The other dog is absolutely
adorable and they both look like very good babies. I
kind of want to hug and kisch your dogs. Thank
you so much to a Lease. I'm glad I'm not
the only person who had contingency plans for my toys
and how they had to be kept safe at all costs.

(34:16):
It was very reasuring. If you would like to write
to us, you could do so at History Podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on social
media as missed in History pretty much everywhere. And if
you would like to subscribe to the show and haven't
done so yet, maybe you, like Alise, want to get
your PhD and stuff you missed the History class. You
can do that on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you
listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History

(34:44):
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.

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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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