Six Impossible Episodes: Déjà Vu Edition

We often get requests for topics that are so similar to existing episodes that they would sound like repeats. Here are six that will probably sound very familiar to regular listeners.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. We
are due for another six impossible episodes. Always it delights. Yeah,

(00:24):
I'm glad people enjoy these because they are pretty fun
to pull together in a lot of ways. Today we
are going to to dive into six topics that listeners
have asked us for. But they're so so so similar
to other people and events that are already an archive
and relatively recent passed that if we did a whole
show on them, a lot of folks would probably be

(00:45):
listening like, wait, didn't I hear this one already? Didn't
you all do this before? Also, a couple of the
things that we are going to talk about are really
similar to some of the most tragic, violent, and deeply
upsetting episodes we have ever done. And I mean that
as both the heads up and why we're kind of

(01:06):
reluctant to dive into some of these in a at
a deeper level. I don't know about you, Holly, I
definitely don't shy away from difficult and sometimes painful topics.
But if I'm going to do that. I don't want
it to feel like a rerun, yeah, especially if they're
really really similar. Uh. Yeah, Like we we have done

(01:30):
plenty of episodes that have really made our hearts hurt,
But I don't want to do an episode that makes
everyone's heart hurt and sounds exactly like something's indistinguishable from
previous with just like names and dates changed. So uh,
today we have six of those that are very similar. Uh.

(01:52):
And the first one is the Donora smog So. Donora, Pennsylvania,
is located in a horseshoe shaped bend in the mononga
Halo River, in which some people, depending on where they live,
might say manonga HeLa. Uh. This bend in the river
is also framed by hills, creating a very fertile river valley.
People settling there during the late colonial period made their

(02:13):
living farming grain in its rich soil. By the turn
of the twentieth century, though, industry started to move into Donora.
Union Steel built a rod mill that would later become
the American Steel and Wire Works. The Carnegie Steel Company
also built a number of industrial furnaces furnaces, including open
hearth furnaces there. In nineteen o. Two More steel mills followed,

(02:37):
and a zinc works with open smelting furnaces opened there
in nineteen seventeen. By eight the heavily industrial town of
Donora had a population of about fourteen thousand people, and
some of them had begun to complain about the area's
extreme pollution. The river was reported to be too toxic
for fish to survive in it, and people described the

(02:59):
air as eating paint off their houses. Obvious contributors were
all of these smelting operations in their open furnaces, but
also contributing were the coal burning trains and steamboats that
carried people in supplies in and out of the area.
In late October, an incredibly dense fog settled over to Nora.

(03:21):
It was way heavier and thicker than the locals had
ever experienced before. People started uh, noting that the air
was burning their eyes and throats, but they mostly shrugged
it off at first, since the air in Denira was
typically quite bad. But this fog was way beyond what
was normal for De Noora, and it stayed for five days,
peaking on October thirty feet. In that span of time,

(03:46):
nineteen people died. Two of the victims had tuberculosis, and
the other seventeen all either had heart disease or asthma,
and all of them were over the age of fifty two.
In that same period, about five hundred people in Donora
reported symptoms of serious respiratory distress, and many many more
became ill. By some estimates, it was half of the

(04:07):
town that was sick. People started trying to evacuate, although
the dense fog made driving incredibly treacherous. The zinc works
closed down due to the emergency on the thirty one,
and then that evening rain started to clear the air.
This disaster brought immediate national attention to the problems residents
had already been complaining about. Local resident Lois Bainbridge, among others,

(04:31):
began writing to legislators trying to get Donora's industries to
either close up shop or just cut down on their pollution.
In a letter to the governor, she wrote quote, I
would not want men to lose their jobs, but your
life is more precious than your job. An investigation by
the Bureau of Industrial Hygiene found that the air was

(04:51):
contaminated with sulfur dioxide, soluble sulfur compounds and floorides and
The theory was that the hills surrounding the valley trapped
this incredibly dense pea soup fog, and the fog itself
kept all of these pollutants very near to the ground
where people were breathing them in. It's incredibly similar to
the Great London Smog of nineteen fifty two, even down

(05:13):
to some of the same pollutants. We talked about that
event on July two, and another similarity between the two
events is the response in Britain Parliament past the Clean
Air Act in nineteen fifty six. In ninety nine, Pennsylvania
established the Division of Air Pollution Control to examine the problem.

(05:33):
A Clean Streams law followed in nineteen sixty five, along
with clean air regulations in nineteen sixty six. Federal regulations,
including the Clean Air Act, followed the Donora disaster as well.
To move on to our next case of history kind
of repeating itself. On January sixteen, we talked about the

(05:53):
Honey War, which was a relatively absurd border dispute between
Missouri and Iowa that took place in the eighteen thirties.
The point of contention boiled down to a badly surveyed
boundary line, which created a narrow strip of land that
both Missouri and Iowa claimed was theirs. A similar conflict
played out between Ohio and Michigan in eighteen thirty five

(06:16):
and eighteen thirty six. Like the Honey Wars inaccurate boundary line,
the heart of this dispute was an inaccurate map that
long predated the actual conflict and only really became a
problem when a territory applied for statehood. Back when the
US government enacted the Northwest Ordinance in seventeen eighty seven,
it had used a map known as the Mitchell Map

(06:38):
to draw the boundaries of quote not less than three
nor more than five states. The Northwest Ordinance went on
to say, quote if Congress shall hereafter find it expedient,
they shall have authority to form one or two states
in that part of the said territory which lies north
of an east and west line drawn through the southerly

(07:01):
bend or extreme of Lake Michigan. Eventually, this line that
was drawn off the southerly bend or extreme of Lake
Michigan would be the border between Ohio to the south
and Michigan to the north. However, the southerly bend or
extreme of Lake Michigan, was in reality farther south than

(07:21):
shown on the Mitchell mamp which folks realized in eighteen
oh three, the same year that Ohio became a state.
When that happened, Ohio just adjusted the description of its
northern border. Instead of a straight east west line, the
line ran from the actual southern tip of Lake Michigan
northeast to Mommy Bay. Things were basically fine until Michigan

(07:43):
applied for statehood about thirty years later, and when it did,
Michigan kept the original Northwest Ordinance very version of its
boundary line, which ran directly east to west rather than
being at an angle. In addition to moving the Ohio
border south by five to eight miles, depending on where
you were along the line, that meant that that Ohio

(08:05):
would no longer have any access to Lake Michigan. This
led to a whole lot of political posturing, passing of
punitive laws, raising a militia, and various dust ups over
a piece of land that came to be known as
the Toledo Strip. Nobody cut down any be trees like
had happened in the disputed strip between Missouri and Iowa,

(08:26):
but there was an incident in which Major Benjamin Stickney
and his son's one Stickney and to Stickney, I'm just
gonna pause and let us sink in for a moment,
had an altercation with Michigan Sheriff Joseph would Wood was
attempting to arrest the mayor for voting in an Ohio election,
and one of the Stickney boys stabbed him with a

(08:47):
pocket knife. Congress finally had to get involved in this
whole dispute, which had come to be known as the
Toledo War, and in this case Michigan got a way
bigger concession than anybody did in the honeywoll Are. The
Honey War basically ended with okay, put the line back
where it was the end. In this case, Michigan did
have to give up its access to the Toledo Strip

(09:09):
so that Ohio kept its access to Lake Michigan. But
then in exchange, Michigan got the Upper Peninsula on the
total other side of Lake Michigan. This peninsula lies along
Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior, so it's access to lots
of bodies of water. And this is basically why there's
a piece of Michigan that looks like it should really
belong to its neighbor, Wisconsin. When you look on a map,

(09:34):
if you've ever wondered why that big chunk of land
that is adjacent to Wisconsin really belongs to Michigan, That's
why the two states continued to have boundary disputes until
the nineteen seventies. But today it's mostly just about their
football rivalry, and that I don't follow football, so I
know that's a rivalry that exists, and that is all
I know. We're in pretty much the same boat, except

(09:56):
you knew that was a rivalry that existed. Yep. Uh.
So that's a kind of lighthearted place to end. We
are going to take a brief break for a word
Front sponsor, and then we're going to dive into one
of the uncanny similarities of one of the most upsetting
episodes I have ever worked on on this show. Your

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(11:29):
The community of Rosewood was established in central Florida around
eight seventy. It started out as a logging town, harvesting
red cedar that would be delivered to pencil factories in
cedar Key on the Gulf Coast, which was about nine
miles away by railroad. But after a few decades that
supply of cedar trees for which Rosewood had been named

(11:49):
had basically been exhausted. The pencil factories closed, and many
of Rosewood's white families moved to the nearby town of Sumner,
which was home to a newly established sawmill. By around
nineteen hundred, Rosewood had become an independent, predominantly black community,
nicknamed the Black Mecca of Florida. Most of its black

(12:09):
population worked for small black owned farms and businesses located
in Rosewood. The black population numbered about three hundred. On Monday,
January one, Fanny Coleman Taylor, he was a twenty two
year old white woman who lived in Sumner, alleged that
a black man had attacked her in her home. Although

(12:30):
she couldn't give many details about what had happened, Some
of her neighbors said that they had seen a white
man leaving her home, and there were also some rumors
that she was having an affair while her husband was
away at work. But nevertheless, she wasn't really questioned more
deeply about it, and most people in Sumner took her
at her word. Soon rumors started to spread that a

(12:52):
black man had raped her. Fanny's husband went to Levy
County Sheriff Elias Walker, and they assembled a posse of
white men to go after the alleged perpetrator. The sheriff
brought in bloodhounds from a nearby prison camp. They had
decided on a man named Jesse Hunter, an escape ee
from a chain gang, as their suspect. The bloodhounds led

(13:15):
them to the empty home of Aaron Carrier. He was
actually at his mother's house at the time. The posse
found him there and they planned to lynch him, but
the sheriff took him into protective custody and sent him
to a jail in another county forty miles away to
try to keep him out of harm's way. However, at
this point that posse had grown beyond the Sheriff's ability

(13:35):
to manage it, and it effectively broke away from local
law enforcement to become a vigilante mob. Soon, the vigilantes
captured Sam Carter, a black man from Rosewood that they
suspected of harboring Hunter. They hanged him from a tree
before shooting and killing him, and then they repeatedly shot
his body on Thursday, So this original accused atation had

(14:00):
happened on Monday. Now we're on Thursday. A mob of
about thirty white men went to Rosewood because they had
heard that someone there was harboring Jesse Hunter. They had
also heard that Aaron Carrier's cousin, Sylvester, had been making
threatening statements. The New York Times had quoted Sylvester as
saying that the attack on Fanny Taylor was quote proof

(14:23):
of what negroes could do without interference, although it really
doesn't appear that anyone from the New York Times had
ever spoken to the man and said it seems like
this quote was another fabricated rumor that had spread among
the white community and then been reported to the newspaper
as fact. Carrier also had a reputation among the white
community for a quote not knowing his place among white people.

(14:46):
So with all this in mine, this mob converged on
the Carrier home. They shot and killed the Carrier's dog
before they broke in the door. Sylvester Carrier immediately shot
and killed two men as they tried to invade his home,
and this led to a lengthy standoff in which the
mob fired indiscriminately into the house, wounding several people who

(15:09):
were taking cover inside. Both Sylvester and his mother, Sarah,
were killed and four white men were wounded before the
mob ran out of ammunition, retreated and burned a church
and several houses on their way out of town. Sylvester
Carrier was almost certainly the only gunmen in that home,
but in spite of that, words started to spread that

(15:31):
Rosewood's black population was armed and aggressive. A mob of
about two hundred armed white men, including participants leaving a
Ku Klux Klan rally in Gainesville, Florida, and people from
out of state, soon descended on Rosewood. Over the next week,
this mob rampage through Rosewood, destroying several businesses in every

(15:53):
home in which a black person or family lived, as
well as shooting and killing resident Mingo Williams. Most of
Rosewood's black residents fled, either hiding in nearby swamps and
forests or by taking refuge with a few sympathetic white families,
knowing that any attempt to physically resist would be met
with even more violence at the hand of their at

(16:14):
the hands of their white attackers. Two white train conductors
John and William Bryce evacuated women and children to Gainesville.
By the end of the week, at least six black
residents of Rosewood had been murdered, although some sources site
numbers as high as forty. Local law enforcement was aware
of all this violence, and while apparently not actively participating

(16:38):
in it, after that first apprehension of Aaron Carrier, the
local police really did nothing to stop it. They instead
focused on protecting white families and protecting white owned businesses
where black people worked. And we're being threatened. The governor
offered to send in the National Guard on January five,
but the sheriff declined. Although a grand arey was convened

(17:00):
after it was all over, no arrests were ever made
and none of the white mob was ever brought to trial.
This event may remind listeners of our pretty recent episode
about the nineteen hundred Robert Charles riots in New Orleans,
and that event, a white mob terrorized New Orleans black
community after a series of confrontations between Charles and police

(17:23):
in which he wounded one officer and killed two others.
But both events involved a white mob violently retaliating against
a black community. The nineteen hundred riot also included a
lengthy standoff and shootout in which Robert Charles, who was
surrounded and trapped in an upstairs bedroom, fired upon law enforcement,
vigilantes and bystanderds alike. But the more direct comparison is

(17:47):
the destruction of the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, also
known as Black Wall Street. In our podcast on the
Tulsa Massacre and the Destruction of Black Wall Street came
out on July. The two massacres happened just a couple
of years apart, and aside from that, both of them
began after a rumor spread that a black man had

(18:09):
raped a white woman. In both events, a white mob
made its way through a black neighborhood, killing people and
setting fire to buildings, ultimately completely destroying two independent, prospering
black communities in two different states. Also in both Florida
and Oklahoma, there was news coverage at the time, but
it was followed by a willful effort among the white

(18:31):
population to erase these events from history. Both massacres were
left out or glossed over in history books and were
rarely discussed for decades after they happened. Survivors of Rosewood,
afraid of retribution if they discussed. It also kept the
incident a secret even among their children, grandchildren, and spouses

(18:51):
they later married. That started to change after sixty minutes
AIR to report on the massacre on December thirteenth of
ninety three. The big difference between Rosewood and Greenwood, aside
from obviously different locations and different specific people involved, is
that in four the state of Florida earmarked two point

(19:13):
one million dollars in reparations That included one point five
million dollars of direct reparations to be paid to survivors
who were still living, of which there were fewer than
fifteen at that point, as well as five hundred thousand
dollars to compensate people for lost property, and a one
hundred thousand dollars scholarship fund. The call for reparations for Greenwood, Oklahoma,

(19:33):
on the other hand, was unsuccessful. The report of the
officially convened Oklahoma Commission to study the Tulsa Race Riot
of strongly called for reparations. The state legislature opted to
set up scholarships of memorial in an economic development initiative
for Greenwood, but ultimately declined to pay direct reparations. This

(19:56):
successful reparations bill for Rosewood. I mean successful in that
repor rations were actually paid. There were a lot of
people who felt like that the amount of money was
quite small once it was divided up among people. Uh.
This this effort was spearheaded by Steve Hamlin and Martha Barnett,
who were doing a basically pro bono legal operation because
the statute of limitations had passed. Instead of taking them

(20:18):
outter to court, they instead had to convince the Florida
legislature to pass a claims bill. Governor Lawton Childs signed
the bill into law on May fourth, and there was
a movie about all of this made in Uh. We're
going to move on to some other incidents of history
repeating itself after we first pause, because I think we
could all use a quick break, uh, to talk about

(20:41):
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For whatever reason, very often when we talk about a
historical fire, we are then inundated with her us to
talk about other fires. Yeah, people love to set off
a chain reaction of fire requests. Well and I'm not

(22:07):
gonna lie. The fires tend to be really hard um.
In general, they tend to be quite similar, and in
this case there is just an uncanny amount of similarity.
On December twenty, eighteen eleven, a fire broke out in
Richmond Theater in Richmond, Virginia. The house was packed, and
because of the holiday season, many in attendance were families

(22:29):
with children. The cause of the fire was the stage lighting.
In this case, it was a chandelier one with candles,
which set fire to a backdrop at the start of
the third play, which was a melodrama called Raymond and
Agnes or the Bleeding Nun. This fire spread into the
rafters and soon burning debris was falling onto the stage
and the fire had spread into the house. The actor

(22:52):
playing Raymond stopped the show and announced the fire, and
at that point the crowd panicked. There were about six
hundred people in the theater and many were trampled on
the way to the theater three exits, all of which
opened inward rather than outward. Some made their escape by
leaping from windows. Seventy two people were killed, including Richmond's
mayor George W. Smith, who got out safely, but ran

(23:15):
back inside to try to save his daughter. A U.
S Senator named Abraham B. Venable was also killed, and
fifty four of the victims were women. With the fact
that it happened at Christmas time, the large number of
women killed, the fact that it was stage lighting that
had started the fire, and the panicked rushed to exits

(23:35):
that opened inward, it sounds so much like the December
Iroquois Theater fire, which we talked about on December eight.
The biggest difference in these two stories is that the
Richmond fire pre dates most fire safety regulations and building
codes that are intended to prevent loss of life in
the event of a fire. The Iroquois Theater, on the

(23:56):
other hand, had been built in willful disregard for those
laws and standards. I will say I mean in the
United States when I make that claim about about it
being in the other parts of the world had different standards.
So the other big difference is that uh more laws
and codes were passed after the Iroquois Theater fire with

(24:18):
the aim of making theaters safer for people, including the
standard that theater doors need to open outward from the
audience and have to be opened just by pushing like
you can't have a weird hard to figure out closure
for the door. After the Richmond fire, on the other hand,
there was not a big push to make theaters safer. Instead,

(24:38):
the biggest response was a lot of anti theater sentiment
and the conclusion that the fire had been God's punishment
against the people of Richmond. So to move on to
our next impossible episode. In eighteen o three, Denmark became
the first nation to ban the Transatlantic slave trade. However,
slavery itself still existed in Denmark's Caribbean colony, particularly Saint Croix,

(25:01):
and that continued for quite some time. In this regard,
it ended up being behind some other nations. Britain abolished
slavery in its Caribbean colonies in eighteen thirty three, although
that was not fully in effect until eighteen thirty eight,
and the delay between the announcement of abolition in eighteen
thirty three and people actually being freed in eighteen thirty

(25:21):
eight was the reason behind the Saint Kitts slave uprising
of eighteen thirty four, which we talked about. On May
eleventh of twenty fifteen, Denmark started discussing emancipating the people
that had enslaved in the Caribbean in eighteen forty four.
In eighteen forty seven, the nation decided on a gradual
abolition process. Children born after that point would be free

(25:44):
rather than enslaved at their birth, and the institution of
slavery would be entirely abolished in eighteen fifty nine, so
that slift left a twelve year window in which people
were still enslaved. Just as the enslaved people of St.
Kitts had not been satisfied with the idea that they
would be unpaid quote apprentices doing the exact same work
in the window between eighteen thirty three and eighteen thirty eight,

(26:06):
the enslaved people of St. Croix were also not satisfied
with the idea that they would need to wait twelve
years for their freedom. On July twelve, eighty eight, a
slave uprising started on St. Croix, with the protesting population
stopping their work, burning down plantations and besieging the city
of Frederick's did. One of the most prominent leaders was

(26:28):
an enslaved man named John Gottlieb, called General bud Ho.
In response, Governor General Peter von Scholten abolished slavery in St.
Croix immediately, even though he actually did not have the
authority to do this. He had been advocating for abolition
for some time, so some people speculated that he and

(26:48):
John Gottlieb had orchestrated the uprising and the abolition, although
there's there's no historical evidence that that's what actually happened. However,
this immediate abolition didn't actually age much for the enslaved
people of St. Croix. Their lives basically went on in
the exact same way as they had before, although now
they were at least on paper free. The Governor General

(27:11):
also faced an immediate backlash from the plantation owners, so
much so that he had a mental health crisis and
left the island of St. Croix. After being on paper freed,
St crois newly uh free labor force wound up being
subject to an increasing set of more and more restrictive

(27:32):
rules and penalties that were put in place on the plantations.
This was so much so that there was another labor
uprising in eighteen seventy eight. At that point, three of
its most vocal leaders were women who were known as
Queen Mary, Queen Agnes, and Queen Matilda. This second uprising
was a lot more destructive and deadly than the event

(27:52):
had been UH and then labor rights continued to be
an issue afterward. So in both of these uprisings on St.
Kittsin St. Croix, like there was, they were both motivated
by the same delay between uh an announced abolition and
the actual abolition, and they both just like things continued
to be basically the same afterward, except in the case

(28:13):
of St. Croix UH in theory they were freed but
still doing the same work for the same people in
terrible conditions. Cheery m. So we have one more impossible
episode to go. And we talked about women pilots during
World War Two in Tracy's fantastic two part interview with

(28:34):
Dr Catherine Sharp Landic on the Women Air Force Service
Pilots or WASP from March twenty one and March But
the WASP were not the only women pilots serving in
the war. In the U. S. Navy, there was another
set of women who saw wartime duties. The women accepted
for Voluntary Emergency Service or WAVES. This was a segregated program.

(28:58):
There were no black Waves until Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered
racial integration of the armed services. Like the WASP. The
WAVES program was established to recruit women to take on
tasks that would free up men for active combat duty.
Their work was initially meant to take place only in
non combat roles and only on the United States mainland,
although that did expand a little bit later on. A

(29:21):
lot of this involved clerical and administrative work, although there
were also a lot of women who, like the WASP,
served as pilots, including working as flight instructors. They did
other aviation work as well, including being mechanics and control
tower operators. Some of the Waves who had college educations
in math, engineering, and physics also worked in more scientific roles.

(29:44):
A total of more than one thousand women served with
the WAVES. While the WASP program was disbanded in nineteen
forty four as the trajectory of the war shifted, the
Waves were still in existence in ninety eight, and that's
when the Women's Are In Services Integration Act made them
a permanent part of the United States Navy. Although the
WAVES didn't initially serve overseas, the program was still in

(30:06):
existence all the way through the US involvement in the
Korean War, and several thousand WAVES did serve in Korea.
The WAVES program itself existed until ninety eight, with the
Navy stopped maintaining units exclusively for women and instead integrating
women and men into one unit. One of the most
famous women to serve with the Waves was Admiral Grace Hopper,

(30:28):
who is definitely on the list for an episode of
her very own. Uh. To be clear, there was also
a women's Auxiliary Corps in the U. S. Army, and
these three are all very distinct groups. Their overall stories
have a lot of the same elements of like a
lot of resistance to having women in the service and
a lot of suspicion that the women who were uh

(30:49):
serving were in some way disreputable. Like a lot of
the same themes of discrimination and sexism come up in
all of these stories. UH, So we're we're not trying
to leave out the Women's Auxiliary Corps. These are basically
three distinct groups which have a ton of overlap in
their stories, but also some distinct differences as well. So

(31:11):
that's six episodes that are so much like other episodes
who already have that they will probably never be a
free standing episode of their own unless some magical additional
piece of information is unearthed and then they'll probably be
an unearthed. Yeah, it's convenient to have unearthed to tackle
things like that that come up sometimes. It is also

(31:31):
almost the unearthed time of year it is. Do you
have some listener mail for us? I do. This listener
mail is from Akasha, and Akasha says greetings. I finally
caught up on some old episodes, such as the one
featuring the mongolf Ye Brothers, and also listen to the
most recent broadcast about the Orphans tsunami. Both of these
things rang bells to me for reasons completely unrelated to

(31:53):
each other or history class, and I thought you might
be amused by a couple of short stories. As soon
as I heard you ladies discuss earth quakes in the
Pacific Northwest, you had my attention even more so than usual.
I grew up in got out of and ultimately returned
to Port Angeles, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula, about two
hours west of Seattle. This past June, there was a

(32:13):
major multiple day earthquakes tsunami disaster prepared dis drill across
western Washington. It was referred to as Cascadia or Rising.
The National Guard ran exercises alongside many local emergency response
organizations and departments, and with all the bruhaha, for a while,
there was another uptick in conversations about disaster preparedness on

(32:34):
this side of the Cascade Mountain Range. Honestly, until listening
to the podcast, I didn't put together all the pieces
as to why they named the drill Cascadia Rising. My
public school education regarding Pacific Northwest history took place in
the late nineties and early auts. We talked about the earthquakes,
of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if one or
two of my middle school science teachers said something about

(32:56):
the Sevred event at some point. My reign probably ditched
the info as soon as I handed in the final test.
I'm simultaneously grateful now to be more informed and a
little embarrassed I made it so long without knowing Without
already knowing more about this. The other thing I wanted
to mention is much sillier, but I find it delightful.
In high school, I was somewhat obsessed with the electropop

(33:18):
synth pop artist Ronnie Martin, operating under the label Joy Electric.
In two thousand five, he released an EP titled Mongolfier
and the Romantic Balloons, a many concept album with the
title track October three, The Romantic Balloons. It was the
first time I ever heard of the Mongolfs, but being sixteen,
I didn't bother to research the lyrics any further, and

(33:39):
eventually I just forgot I hadn't thought about that particular
song in a long time. It was a delight to revisit,
inspired by our episode and with a more thorough perspective.
If you give it a listen, I hope you're half
as charmed as I was and still am. Thank you
for all your ladies do and the random circles like
these two instances that your work inadvertently helped so many

(34:00):
people close. Sincerely, Akasha, Thank you a Kasha. I'm gonna
put a link to that song in our show notes. UM.
We've had a number of people write to us about
disaster preparedness drills and other disaster preparedness things in the
Pacific Northwest since that episode came out. Somebody tweeted at
us a like, uh like a public service announcement style

(34:21):
comic about earthquakes and tsunami, and I read it and
I was kind of traumatized because some of the characters
in this comic are are three kayakers who are caught
up in this tsunami um and and they leave it
with one one of the kayakers not knowing where their
friends are. And so I got to the end and

(34:44):
I was like, but are they okay? Uh? I was
a little distressed by that. So I'll try to remember
to put a link to that in the show notes. Also,
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, where History podcasts at how stuff
works dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot
com slash miss in history, and they're on Twitter at

(35:05):
miss in History. Are tumbler is missing History dot tumbler
dot com. We're on pinterest pinterest dot com slash miss
in history. Our instagram is missing History. Basically everything except
for our email address is just missing history. Yeah, at
whatever the place is. You can come to our website,
which is missed in history dot com, and you can
find show notes for all of our episodes we've worked

(35:26):
on on archive of every episode that has ever existed.
Lots of cool stuff. You can also come to our
parent company's website, which is how stuff works dot com
to research anything your heart desires. So you can do
all that and a whole lot more at how stuff
works dot com. Or Missed in History dot com. More

(35:46):
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff works dot com