Irving Berlin, Part 1

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Irving Berlin
is really, to me amazing example of the kind of

(00:22):
story that the United States likes to tell about itself
as a nation. So the whole idea of being a
melting pot and a land of opportunity and a place
where immigrants can make a better life for themselves. And
also he's simultaneously an amazing example of just how complicated

(00:44):
and imperfect and incomplete that very idealized story can be,
because he was a Jewish immigrant from Russia who went
on to become a colossally famous songwriter and an enormous
contributor to what's own is the Great American Songbook. So
that's a loosely defined collection of jazz standards and popular

(01:06):
songs from the early twentieth century that have just had
a really enduring appeal and are still being sung decades later.
So just a few of Irving Berlin's contributions to the
Great American Songbook, or the songs White Christmas, God Bless America,
putting on the Ritz, Easter Parade and anything you can

(01:27):
Do I can do better from the Broadway musical any
Get Your Gun. I found working on this really challenging
because I kept stopping what I was doing to go
watch YouTube videos of people singing these songs, including watching
a video of Laura Austiness and Sentino Fontana singing anything

(01:48):
you Can Do, which I did in the middle literally
of writing this paragraph. And if you're like Tracy, why
why that version in particular one, I'd never seen it
before too. I miss Crazy Ex Girlfriend, which which Santino
Fontana was on. But in addition to all those things
that I just said, Irving Berlin also worked in an

(02:10):
industry that discriminated against people of color, while also drawing
inspiration from and even appropriating musical styles and traditions that
were developed by those same people, and also writing and
performing musical numbers that could be really offensive to them.
So while I originally envisioned this as a winter holiday

(02:34):
slash Christmas episode thanks to the song White Christmas and
the nineteen fifty film by the same name, this instead
turned into a two parter that's not really about Christmas
that much at all. It's more about the musical and
cultural context of Irving Berlin's work. So today we are
going to talk about his life and work through World
War One, and then in part two we will pick

(02:56):
up in the years between the two World Wars and
go through the rest of his career. Irving Berlin's family
immigrated to the U s. In eighte from Tolequin in
what's now Belarus, which at the time was part of
the Russian Empire. There are some variations in the spelling
and pronunciation of their name. It would have been written

(03:18):
using either the Hebrew alphabet or Cyrillic script, so English
speaking officials creating things like ship manifests and immigration records,
we're basically making their best guests at writing down the
name that they heard in English. When talking to journalists
and biographers. Berlin's descendants have also used two slightly different

(03:38):
pronunciations of the family's last name, Balin and Baleine. Yes,
they're very similar, but just different enough to go wait,
subble accents shift. Yeah, So we don't know much detail
about their lives before they immigrated. Irving Berlin was born
Israel Bilin, also known as Izzy, on May eleven, eight

(04:01):
and some accounts give his place of birth as a
stuttle in Siberia. He was the youngest of eight children
born to Leah and Moses Bullim. Moses was a canceler
and also worked as part of the kosher butchering process.
Sources contradict about exactly what his role was in that process,
whether he actually conducted the slaughtering or whether he was

(04:23):
inspecting and certifying that this process had been carried out
according to Jewish law. The family moved to the US
because they were trying to escape widespread programs and other
anti Semitic persecution. Czar Alexander the Second had been assassinated
in eight and although his assassin was not Jewish, rumors

(04:43):
had spread that Jews were responsible for it. Massive anti
Semitic violence followed, and the Bailin family left when it
was still at its peak. They arrived in New York
City aboard the s s Rhineland on September when Izzy five.
While the US would have been physically safer for a

(05:04):
Jewish family than the Russian Empire was at that point,
the nation was also in the middle of an economic crisis.
Multiple factors had fed into the Panic of eighteen ninety three,
which started months before the family's arrival and continued until
eight This economic depression affected virtually every industry and people

(05:25):
lost all their money as stock prices collapsed and banks failed.
So after arriving in the US, Izzie's father struggled to
find work, like literally any work. Eight members of the
family wound up living together in a window lists three
room tenement with no running water. That's not three bedrooms,

(05:46):
to be clear, that is three total rooms, and they
all tried to make ends meet however they could, including
renting out their beds to night shift workers so they
could sleep there during the day. By the age of eight,
is he was doing his part by selling newspapers. Beyond that,
we really don't know very much about his childhood. We

(06:06):
know that his first language was Yiddish and that he
didn't have a lot of formal education. As an adult,
he tended to tell the same very few stories about
his early years, including that he learned about Christmas from
Irish neighbors whose tiny, very scraggly Christmas tree seemed just
magical to him. A lot of articles described this as

(06:28):
like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. I think that's probably
what most of us envisioned. As you were saying, they're
already difficult. Financial situation actually got even worse in nineteen
o one, when Izzie's father died at the age of
fifty three. Izzie had just turned thirteen, and soon he
left home. Some accounts attribute this to his feeling that

(06:50):
as a growing teen, he had become a liability to
his family. He also described it as a challenge to
be the only boy in a home that was otherwise
over crowded with women and girls. Soon he was trying
to earn a living by busking, including singing in saloons,
and he was living mostly in low rent boarding houses.

(07:11):
As I got some musical experience, he started trying to
find work in tin Pan Alley, which was a place
and an umbrella term for the music that was broadly
popular in the US and the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, and a name for the composers and performers
and publishers and others who were all part of making
that music. The exact place shifted somewhat over the decades,

(07:34):
but it started out on West twenty Street. Today West
twenty between Broadway and sixth Avenue is known as tin
Pan Alley. The source of that name is also a
little bit vague. One popular theory is that it came
from the sheer cacophony of different songs being played simultaneously
on multiple upright pianos. Some were played by aspiring songwriters

(07:57):
hoping to find a publisher for their work, and some
by people employed as song pluggers, who were basically musical demonstrators,
playing songs to try to entice people to buy the
sheet music from them. I can imagine what this sounded
like in my head and why people might have equated
it to the sound of tin pans being banged around.

(08:19):
At this point, sheet music was really at the heart
of the economic model for the music business in the
United States. The phonograph had been invented in the nineteenth century,
and Thomas Edison had unveiled his version in eighteen seventy seven,
so by the early nineteen hundreds this was still a
really new and still developing technology. Phonographs themselves could be expensive,

(08:42):
and the wax cylinders they played can only hold a
couple of minutes of sound at first. The cylinders also
had to be recorded one at a time, so musicians
had to play the same thing over and over, and
that meant the finished product was also expensive. Even as
mass production techniques improved, they still just did not sound

(09:03):
very good. Meanwhile, pianos were seen as almost a requirement
for middle class families. They had become a marker of
both social status and respectability. Many boarding houses had a
piano in a common area, so did community gathering places
like churches, schools, and hotels. So a lot of people

(09:23):
bought sheet music so they could play and sing popular
music for themselves. Often that sheet music was printed with
a colorful, illustrated cover and a list of other music
available from the same publisher on the back, and from
a lot of publishers. It wasn't just the notes on
the page that you're buying. It was sort of this
nice thinges kind of so. Fourteen year old Izzy Bailen

(09:48):
got his start in this industry as a song plugger,
hired by songwriter and music publisher Harry von Tilzer in
nine two. This was a job that Izzy pursued for
himself in spite of the fact that he did not
know how to read music or play a piano. He sang.
He performed fon tills or songs to the public, and

(10:09):
two people in the music industry and for this he
was paid five dollars a week. A couple of years later,
he was hired as a singing waiter at Mike Salter's
Pelham Cafe in Chinatown. The venue in its proprietor both
had a nickname that included a racist slur, because while
Salter was of Russian Jewish descent, he also had dark skin.

(10:30):
At Pelham Cafe is he made seven dollars a week
plus tips. This was an overnight job. The cafe was
open from eight pm until six am, which seems to
have set the stage for Irving Berlin's lifelong habits as
a night owl and his chronic insomnia. Unsurprisingly, given this
establishments hours, the crowd tended to be on the courser side.

(10:53):
They were often inebriated and loud. The waiters were nicknamed
nickel kickers because those tips that they got came in
the form of throne coins, which the waiters had to
chase after as they rolled across the floor. Is He
had already figured out that he had a knack for
writing lyrics during his early years as a busker. He

(11:14):
had found ways to put his own twist on songs
that he was singing, and when he improvised. His lyrics
were usually clever or funny, and then that usually got
him bigger tips. And he also seemed to have an
instinct for picking out a good melody, one that was
simple and memorable and often already felt familiar to people,
so something that was grounded and established tunes and patterns,

(11:35):
but also which he managed to turn into something new.
So he started trying to write new songs of his own. Again,
he had no formal musical training. He probably would have
been exposed to music at home, but he had not
been formally taught anything. He didn't know how to read
or write music. He did not know how to play
the piano. He would hear a melody in his head

(11:58):
and then pick it out in the key of F
sharp major, which on a piano F sharp major scale
is played almost exclusively on the black keys of the piano.
This required a lot of trial and error and a
lot of craftsmanship and revision, and for the rest of
his professional life he would talk about working on songs
through the night to get them exactly right. On May seven,

(12:22):
a couple of days before his nineteenth birthday, is He
Bilin published his first song, Marie from sunny Italy. This
was certainly not his greatest work as a lyricist. Some
of his later work features delightfully clever phrasing that doesn't
quite rhyme, but in this song it's more like, please
come out tonight, my queen. Can't you hear my mandolin?

(12:46):
But just to say this started getting his name out there.
The name he was getting out there was not Israel
Bilin though. Instead the cover of this sheet music read
words by I Berlin, music by M. Nicholson. M Nicholson
was Mike Nicholson, pianist at Pelham Cafe. Some sources describe

(13:08):
I Berlin as a printer's error, and others as more
of a reflection of how people were pronouncing his last
name by that point. Still others, though, say that he
was looking for a name for himself that was less
recognizably Jewish, and that, in addition to the shift from
Berlin to Berlin, that he had been thinking about adopting

(13:30):
the name Irving for a while. Regardless of exactly how
the name change came about, soon is he Bylin was
professionally known as Irving Berlin. And we'll talk more about
that after we take a quick sponsor break. As Irving

(13:53):
Berlin published his first song, the entertainment industry in New
York City was growing and shifting. New York's first subway
line opened on October n four, and one of the
stations on that first line was at Times Square, by
the intersection of Broadway and Fort Street. Soon the surrounding

(14:14):
area was developing into a theater district. When Marie from
Sunny Italy was published, Berlin was still working at Pelham Cafe,
but he was fired from that job that year. Reportedly,
he fell asleep while he was supposed to be tending
the cash register and at the end of the night
was missing from the till Berlin got another job pretty quickly, though,

(14:36):
and it was a step up. It was at Jimmy
Kelly's Folly, where his wages were a little better the
clientele was a little more upscale. He earned enough money
that he was able to afford to rent a place
with his friend and colleague Max Winslow, rather than staying
in low rent boarding houses. He started meeting and making
more connections and friendships with other entertainers, including past podcast

(15:01):
subject Fanny Bryce, and he kept trying to publish songs,
often as the lyricist at that point with somebody else
writing the music. If you look up music from this era,
whether it's by Irving Berlin or by someone else, you're
going to find a lot of stuff that's offensive or
at the very least insensitive by today's standards. And there
were people who pointed out its offensiveness at the time.

(15:25):
For example, black face had become an established part of
popular entertainment, with white actors wearing exaggerated black makeup and
adopting a heavily stereotypical way of speaking and singing. Black
Face has multiple roots, including white performers appropriating the music
and dance styles of black communities and using them to

(15:46):
make money, while also largely excluding black performers from the
same industry. Black Face had become so widespread and popular
that there were also black actors who performed in black face,
although that of core added additional layers of nuance to
their performances. By the time Irving Berlin started writing songs,

(16:06):
people had been criticizing white performers use of black face
for decades. For example, Frederick Douglas was a vocal critic
as early as the eighteen forties, so like six decades
worth of criticism. Yeah, and this is something that was
always racist, but was incredibly normalized at this point. Some

(16:28):
of the music that came out of Tin pan Alley
was essentially audio blackface songs that were written and sung
by white performers that leaned really heavily into racist stereotypes
of how black people spoke and acted, and in a
lot of ways, Tin pan Alley took a very similar
approach to other racial and ethnic groups. Music and lyrics

(16:50):
and the accents that were adopted to sing them reflect
really stereotypical perceptions of immigrants from Italy and Ireland and particular,
as well as perceptions of Jewish immigrants from various parts
of Europe and of indigenous people in North America. Basically,
if there is a group you can stereotype, there was

(17:11):
music that played into those stereotypes. And feeding into all
of this was a broad fascination with anything that white
people thought of as exotic. Because entertainment was one of
the industries that was open to Jewish immigrants, many of
Tin Paney's songwriters and composers were Jewish immigrants themselves or

(17:32):
were the children of Jewish immigrants. They knew that they
could make money through these exotic sized depictions, whether they
were of their own community or someone else's and as
is the case today, another big money maker was sex,
or at least innuendo, which means a lot of these
songs could also lean into stereotypes around gender and relationships.

(17:55):
Irving Berlin's first really big money maker was My Wife's
Gone to the country hooray hooray, and which hooray is
spelled like hurrah in the sheet music, which I find
kind of delightful. He co wrote this with George Whiting
and Ted Snyder. Ted Snyder was a music publisher who
also published the sheet music for this song. As that

(18:16):
title suggests, this song is about a man whose wife
says she can't stand the heat anymore, so she's taking
the children out to the country. It's chorus goes, my
wife's gone to the country, hooray, hooray. She thought it
best I need a rest, That's why she went away.
She took the children with her. Hooray, hooray. I don't

(18:37):
care what becomes of me. My wife's gone away. This
man is so excited that his wife and kids are
gone that he puts an ad about it in the
paper announcing it and also looks up a pretty girl
he used to know named Molly if she listens to
a recording of this song. It's generally recorded in a
way that sounds exuberantly gleeful. Uh. And it was a

(19:01):
huge hit. Three hundred thousand copies of the sheet music
were sold, and Irving Berlin made a penny per copy
that added up to three thousand dollars, which was more
money than he had ever seen in his life. He
used some of the proceeds to move his mother and
one of his sisters out of their Lower East Side
tenement to a place in the Bronx where he lived

(19:22):
as well. He also bought his mother a rocking chair,
and he bought a transposing piano, one that used a
lever to change the key so he could keep picking
out the melodies enough sharp major while then hearing what
they sounded like in a different key. This is so
fascinating to me. Yeah. Uh. In Irving Berlin became both

(19:45):
a Freemason and a Shriner. The Shriners are connected to Freemasonry,
and while not all Freemasons become Shriners, a man has
to become a master Mason before becoming a Shriner. A
year later, Berlin published what's often cited as his first
international hit, Alexander's Ragtime Band. This definitely was not his

(20:07):
first song to sell internationally, but in the course of
a single year, more than two million copies of the
sheet music were sold, earning Berlin roughly forty dollars. We
mentioned earlier that Earling Berlin was a night owl, and
in particular, he often talked about working through the night
in just a grueling effort to finish a song, or

(20:29):
sometimes more struggling to write a song until the very
last minute, and then having to pack all that same
effort into a very short window to hit a deadline.
Alexander's Ragtime Band was an exception to that. It came
together for him really quickly. Berlin biographer James Kaplan describes
this song as quote a joyous tribute to African American

(20:52):
musical genius, the first great and lasting one in American
popular song from a Jewish American musical genius us. Kaplan
also calls the song a celebration of America itself. There
are some ironies involved in this song and its success.
It introduced a lot of people to the idea of ragtime,

(21:13):
like its musical successor, jazz, ragtime is a style of
music initially developed by black musicians and performers before becoming
popular among white performers and songwriters. The name ragtime comes
from the syncopated rhythms and ragged rhymes that are hallmarks
of the style. But even though Alexander's Ragtime Band included

(21:35):
the word ragtime in the title and celebrated ragtime and
in some ways introduced ragtime to a broader audience, it
is not really a rag This song is often described
really more as a march, and ragtime did have roots
in marches, but it's a little bit different. Uh. Before long,

(21:58):
rumors were also spreading that Berlin had stolen the work
of a black musician in writing this song. Some people
gave the credits to composer and songwriter Lukey Johnson, who
said he didn't have anything to do with it and
counter quote, I wish I had written that song. Decades later,
Lottie Stokes Joplin, the widow of Scott Joplin, who was

(22:20):
known as the King of Ragtime, said that Berlin had
stolen the tune from her late husband, But scholars who
have compared Alexander's Ragtime Band to various pieces of Joplin
surviving work, have not found a clear example of like
definite copying. Irving Berlin would face other accusations of plagiarism

(22:40):
during his career, including accusations of plagiarizing the work of
black performers. He vigorously denied these allegations, sometimes in a
way that could sound really dismissive toward the performers or
communities whose work he was allegedly copying. He absolutely drew
influence from things like folk songs and commonlities as well

(23:01):
as from other people's work, and some of his work
can definitely be seen as appropriating other cultures and musical traditions.
But there are not really clear cut examples of lifting
other people's entire songs note for note. Most of the
examples that have been brought up are sequences of four
or five notes that are part of a longer piece. Yeah,

(23:23):
I saw descriptions that were like, if people had heard
this song before, they might recognize these four notes as
the same as those four notes, which is not as
obvious as something like taking the entire baseline of under
pressure and using it to make ice ice baby, which
is like a thing that jumps out to me, is
like a clear example of musical copying. Well, that's considered

(23:46):
a sampling though, isn't it. Yeah, But it wasn't acknowledged
when it originally came out, I think, which was the problem, right,
I mean that was when like the concept of sampling
was still dead. Um. But like that's a more direct
obvious this thing turned into this thing than most of
the examples that people are like, what's It's more like, okay,
they're the sequence of four notes is the same as

(24:08):
this other sequence of four notes. In February of nineteen twelve,
Irving Berlin married Dorothy Gets, and their marriage was tragically short.
She died on July sevent of that same year. She
likely died as a result of typhoid, which she contracted
during their honeymoon in Cuba. Berlin wrote the ballad When

(24:29):
I Lost You after her death, and that is a
song that's often described as really the most personal one
that he ever wrote. It took a while for Berlin
to really start writing again after his wife's death, and
when he did, his next career move was writing for Broadway.
And we'll get into that after a sponsor break. As

(24:56):
we said earlier, Irving Berlin started working for Ted Snyder
in nineteen o nine. Into the nineteen teens, he became
more involved with that business, with Ted Snyder, Henry Watterson,
and Irving Berlin eventually coming together to become Waterson, Berlin
and Snyder, which became one of the most prominent sheet
music publishers in the US in the early twentieth century.

(25:19):
During these years, Berlin had also started working with his
first musical secretary, Cliff Hess, who the Snyder Company hired
in nineteen thirteen. Berlin and Hess worked together extensively over
the next five years, with Hess even moving into Berlin's
apartment to keep up with his work. Through the night
writing habits. Berlin routinely woke up at noon, ate breakfast,

(25:42):
and started working, going to bed at five o'clock the
next morning, which I will just say sounds like a
dream schedule, I think for him it was until life
intervenes to make it deeply inconvenient to be on that schedule.
Hess was the first of several musical secretaries and arrangers
who Berlin worked with during his career, which really helped

(26:04):
him compensate for the fact that he didn't know how
to read or write music, or really to play the piano.
These were skills that he only started to develop much later,
and even then most accounts say he was never really
proficient at them. Often Berlin would sing a melody or
pick it out on his transposing piano, and his musical
secretary would play it back, adding in the harmonies and

(26:27):
other musical elements. People described Berlin as being able to
point out spots where his secretary had used different notes
or chords than what Berlin had intended, because while he
could not read the notes on the page, he could
hear them in his mind. He also had a sharp
business sense, both for his own work and for the
industry in en. He was one of the co founders

(26:50):
of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers or
as CAP, along with other prominent composers and publishers. As
CAP has its own history that we are not going
to get into, but at its founding, the purpose was
to help members to copyright and license their music, making
it easier to protect their work and earn money from it.

(27:11):
Berlin's first full Broadway score was for Watch Your Step,
which opened at the New Amsterdam Theater in Berlin wrote
the music and the lyrics, and this was the first
time that a tin pan alley composer made the move
to Broadway. This drew a lot of influence from Ragtime,
and one of its best remembered songs is the overlapping

(27:33):
duet play, a simple melody which listeners of a certain
age may remember from when Jane Stapleton and Fozzy Bear
sang it on The Muppet Show. It is so charming,
It's a very delightful song. In the seven years that
had passed since his first song publication in seven Berlin
had published roughly one ninety other songs as either a

(27:55):
composer or a lyricist. While he had mostly been writing
the lyrics for his first songs, over time that had
shifted until he was almost always responsible for both of
those nineties songs published over seven years, he had written
both the music and lyrics to about two thirds of them.
This was a lot part of his creative process involved

(28:18):
just churning out a huge amount of material, knowing that
only some of it would be really great. In one story,
somebody complimented him at a party saying, no one has
written as many hits as you have. His response was,
I know there's no one who has written so many failures.
During these years, Berlin had honed his songwriting style and craft.

(28:40):
He was really focused on getting just the right melody,
often a very simple melody, and just the right lyrics,
which again were often really simple, but tucked in with
that simplicity returns of phrase and patterns and rhymes they
were very catchy and evocative. This work drew from a
lot of musical influences, including ragtime and blues in the

(29:02):
earliest years of jazz. As a musical style, his work
was sometimes described as jazz. He definitely incorporated some elements
that were really common in jazz, including the syncopated beats
that were also part of ragtime, but he didn't really
incorporate the more improvisational elements that are often found in jazz.

(29:22):
At the same time, as was the case with Alexander's
Ragtime Band, introducing the idea of ragtime to a white
audience without actually being a rag his jazz like work
became an entry point for a lot of white audiences
and in some cases even defined for those audiences what
jazz was all about. World War One started in nineteen fourteen,

(29:45):
following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and
his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenburg. In the face of
war and a growing sense of isolation and xenophobia in
the US, Berlin started the process of becoming US citizen
in nineteen seventeen. The United States became involved in World
War One. In early nineteen eighteen, Irving Berlin took his

(30:08):
oath of citizenship and he was also drafted at the
age of thirty. He was almost too old to be drafted.
The cutoff was thirty one, and he was really surprised
that he passed. As physical. In addition to the chronic
insomnia that we already talked about, he was also chronically
ill with what's usually described as nervous indigestion, and that

(30:29):
affected him for his whole life. There are some accounts
of all this that make it sort of sound like
he started his citizenship process in spite of the war,
thinking that he wouldn't be drafted because of his health.
But like the draft applied to people regardless of whether
they were citizens or not, like it applied to all
men living in the United States, so whether he was
a citizen or not was not part of whether he

(30:51):
was going to be drafted. In May of nineteen eighteen,
Berlin became a private in the U. S Army and
was stationed at Camp Upton in yap Hank, New York.
Work he was intensely patriotic, and he seems to have
really wanted to serve his adopted country, but he also
found life in the army very difficult. In particular, he
hated how early he had to get up, which really

(31:14):
is not surprising given his tendency to go to bed
at five in the morning and get up at noon.
He described himself as hating revelie so much that he
would lie awake at night thinking about it. I felt
this so much in my bones, in my bones. He
wrote a song about this, called Oh How I Hate
to get up in the morning, and that song started

(31:35):
to catch on around Camp Upton. Soon. Berlin proposed writing
a musical about army life to be used to raise
funds that would be sort of along the lines of
George Cohen's song Over There, which came out in nineteen seventeen,
as well as a musical review that the US Navy
had staged the previous spring. Exactly how this all came

(31:57):
about is a little bit fuzzy, but the result was
Yip Yip Yap Hank, which was a review with a
cast of army recruits. It was performed at Camp Upton
before moving to the Century Theater in New York City
and running for thirty two performances. This was a vaudeville
style review with music and dance and acrobatics, and a

(32:17):
black face number and a drag number. Berlin, who at
this point had been promoted to sergeant, performed Oh How
I Hate to Get up in the morning himself. After
the end of World War One, Berlin looked back at
his career and tried to figure out what his next
step should be. While his name was still part of Waterson,
Berlin and Snyder, he wasn't really working with that company anymore. Ultimately,

(32:41):
he established his own publishing house, Irving Berlin, Inc. So
he could control the copyrights and the royalties to his
own music. Two years later, he wrote fourteen musical numbers
for the Zigfield Follies. He went on to do various
work with the Follies in the years that followed. In
one he teamed up with Joseph M. Shank and Sam

(33:02):
Harris to establish his own Broadway theater, The Music Box.
This was a colossally expensive and difficult venture with technically
complicated stage equipment, including an elevator. His work and his
name recognition continued to grow in the early nineteen twenties,
and he also fell in love again. And that is

(33:24):
where we are going to pick up next time. Do
you have some yummi listener mail to tide us over
until our next episode? I do. This is from Angela
and Angela wrote after our recent episode on Charles Drew
and blood banking. Angela said, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I'm
sure you recorded the behind the scenes about blood banks

(33:45):
before this news came out, but I thought I would
put out the p s A that the deferral for
donating blood if you were in Europe during Mad Cow
has been lifted. Blood donation is very important to me
and has been a regular part of my life since
I turned eighteen. I won't say how old I am,
but I have recently gotten my six gallon pin and
that doesn't include the different places I donated when I

(34:07):
was younger. Since I have loved many people who have
benefited from blood donation. Anything that makes it so more
people can donate makes me happy. I'm glad the f
d A is constantly going back and reevaluating the policy
is to try to maximize the number of people who
can donate, but I do agree with you that it
seems like there are some in place for the wrong reasons.

(34:28):
Thank you, as always for your continued work to keep
listeners informed of the past and its impact today, Angela,
Thank you so much Angela for this update. So yeah,
the last time that I gave blood, before writing that
episode and doing the behind the scenes UM, the f
d A had actually issued new guidance UM, but the

(34:50):
Red Cross had not incorporated that new guidance into their
process yet. So when I gave blood at that point,
folks who had lived in Europe during the big Mad
Cow outbreak, we're still excluded from donating. UM. They actually changed.
They announced that they were changing the policy UM shortly
before we recorded this episode, and also shortly before the

(35:13):
next time I gave blood. But I'm pretty sure that
was still in the questionnaire that day. It's not in
the questionnaire anymore. UM. This directly affects people I know
who either like lived in the UK for a period
while they were in college or grad school, or folks
I know who moved from the UK to the United States.

(35:35):
So yeah, that that rule has changed from what was
in place for a very long time. So thank you
Angela for letting me know about that. A couple of
folks I know who this applies to also said something like,
within two or three days of getting this email that
we're like, hey, I can give blood again and we're
very excited about it. If you would like to send
us a note about this or any other podcast where

(35:56):
history podcast that I heart radio dot com and we're
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subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app
or wherever else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of I

(36:17):
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Tracy V. Wilson

Holly Frey

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