Winsor McCay, Part 1

McCay is credited as a pioneer in early animation. But before he made drawings come to life, he worked as a billboard artist, an artist-journalist, and then a comics creator for newspapers. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody. Tracy here with news about some live appearances
we have coming up. Saturday July seven, I will be
at History Camp Boston where I will be part of
the History Podcaster panel. And then the next day, Sunday,
July eight, at two pm, Holly and I both will
be doing a live podcast at Adams National Historical Park

(00:20):
in Quincy, Massachusetts, where our show will be John Quincy
and Luisa Catherine Adams Abroad. This is an outdoor show
and it will happen rain or shine, and we're coming
back to Convention Days in Seneca Falls, New York. Our
show is at four pm on Saturday, July twenty one
in the historic Wesleyan Chapel. You can get more information

(00:41):
about all of these shows with links to buy tickets
where applicable at missed in History dot Com. Click on
live shows in the menu. Welcome to steph you missed
in History class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello,

(01:07):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson, and today we're starting a two parter,
so heads up this one. We'll take two episodes. We're
going to talk about a person who has been on
my list for almost exact amount of time that Tracy
and I have been on the show. He got on
my list almost immediately, uh, and I just never got
around to impartially because I knew he was going to

(01:29):
take a couple episodes for me to feel like we've
covered enough of his life, even so, I think we
could have done more. But lately he has been on
my mind a lot because of the work I have
been doing on our other podcast, Drawn, which is about animation,
because he influenced so much of the media that we
consume in the century, including work by people like Maury

(01:53):
Sendec and Walt Disney. And as I was doing interviews
for Drawn, that show is very interview heavy. Every time
name windsor McKay's name came up, the people that I
was speaking with universally lauded his incredible skill and drive
within the animation industry. He's really regarded as not just
an icon, but almost in um you know, like saintly guys.

(02:15):
He's really really admired. Uh. And whether you have heard
of him before or not, if you have watched any
animation made in the US after nineteen or frankly, if
you have ever read a comic strip you have benefited
to some degree from his influence. McKay was born Zenus
Windsor Mackay on September twenty six, although the year and
the place of his birth are not consistently reported. Depending

(02:39):
on where you look, you might see his place of
birth reported as Ontario, Canada or Spring Like Michigan. His
parents married in West Zora, Ontario, in eighteen sixty six,
and they moved to Michigan not long after that. So
the year that comes up in connection to Canada is
eighteen sixty seven, and for Michigan it's eighteen seventy or

(02:59):
seven anyone. And there are no records that have been
found to support any of this. Yeah, the records in
Spring Like Michigan, their records office had a fire, so
there's not much there, and there was never anything found
in Ontario. And even though they were living in Michigan already,
there has been speculation that his mother may have wanted

(03:22):
to travel home to be with her family when she
had her baby. So we just don't know. His age
is going to come up again later. The legend of
Windsor start as an artist is actually tied to a
little bit of a family tragedy. Allegedly, one night, the
mackay family home burned to the ground and Windsor, once
he was safely settled at a neighbor's house, used a

(03:44):
nail that he had found to etch an image of
the house on fire on a frosted window pane, and
that was the beginning of his drawing obsession, something which
McKay would later say he did exclusively to please himself
rather than anyone else who might look at his work.
While he may have only wanted to make himself happy
with his drawings, he was also never really attached to

(04:05):
any of them. That's probably served him really well later
on as a cartoonist and an animator. He once wrote quote,
I never saved my drawings. I would give them away
if anybody wanted them, or would throw them away. I
do want fences, blackboards in school, old scraps of paper, slates,
sides of barns. I just couldn't stop. He later said
that his drawing was only about fifteen percent talent and

(04:29):
about eighty five hard work. Yeah, if you subscribe to
the practice makes perfect ideology. He was constantly practicing, so
from the time he was really really young. So it
is a little bit hard to discern what was his
just natural talent versus what was his constant flexing of
those muscles. And even from a very young age, Mackay

(04:52):
was aware of the importance of observation for an artist.
He made a point to really look at the world
around him and try to remember as much detail as
he could so that he could easily recall realistic images
when he was drawing, and this method served him incredibly well.
Even as a young child. People noted how accurate his
drawings were in terms of perspective and proportion. He just

(05:16):
almost always got it exactly right, and he was just
doing so from memory, without a subject or a model
in front of him. In his father didn't see a
future for winds Or in art, and he later expressed
some regret for not having sent him to art school. Instead.
His parents sent him to business college, but business school
did not really hold his interest. Instead, he would take

(05:38):
a train from Ipsilante, where the school was, to Detroit
and he would draw pictures for money in a curiosity
museum called Wonderland. It's one of those museums full of
wax figures and taxidermy and a cyclorama and a menagerie.
He drew pictures of museum visitors and sold them for
a quarter, and then he split his take with the
museum fifty fifty. He never finished business school, but his

(06:02):
classmates were impressed with his steady flow of cash and
it's exciting life that he seemed to be living, traveling
as an artist while also skipping school. Yeah he uh.
At one point said this really fun thing about how
the best way to sell a drawing of someone was
to make it really flattering. So, especially when women or

(06:23):
girls were in the museum and wanted to have their
picture drawn, he would draw them looking like themselves, but
like a prettier version of themselves, and those ones always solved, which,
of course I mean flattery of the subject has been
working for artists for a long time. But while he
was in Ipsilanti, McKay did get a bit of an
art education, though certainly not through the business school and

(06:45):
not quite in a formal way. Instead, an art professor
at Michigan State Normal named John Goodison offered to give
the young artist private lessons. It was becoming really apparent
that while Windsor McKay's parents might not have wanted their
fun to pursue a career in art. A career in
art really seemed like a foregone conclusion. McKay had a

(07:07):
reputation enough that he attracted the interest of a professor
from a local college to offer to educate him. So
like this, this was not something that he was going
to walk away from, and he was really eager to
learn anything and everything that Goodison taught him, from art
history to technique in his own work, and his art
teacher was convinced that Windsor had a great career ahead

(07:29):
of him. The lessons in perspective and composition that Goodison
taught the young artist informed his work for the rest
of his life. And it was also during this time
with Goodison that McKay started doing really fast sketch work
from memory on blackboards and that skill. Keep it in mind,
because it eventually proved very lucrative. But in the more

(07:50):
immediate sense, McKay's work with Goodison made one thing really clear.
He could not bear the thought of a business career.
Art was the only path that he was willing to walk,
So with Goodison's encouragement, he left Ipsilante and moved to
Chicago to study at the Art Institute but this is
one of those areas of his life, and there are
a number of them where the actual events that took

(08:13):
place are real fuzzy. McKay never actually enrolled in school,
though what exactly stopped him is a little bit unclear. Instead,
he started working at National Printing and Engraving Company, which
made commercial advertising posters and pamphlets, and at that point
he lived in a boarding house with another young artist,
Jules Garrion, and the two of them sort of traded knowledge.

(08:36):
They both excelled in different areas of art, and they
really shared their knowledge with one another. Those two also
became freemasons together during this time, and McKay stayed a
freemason for the rest of his life. McKay didn't stay
in Chicago for long though, After two years he moved
on to Cincinnati, but it's not clear why. So when
he talked about himself, he liked to make it interesting,

(08:58):
and as friends also tended to embellish things a lot
when they talked about him. So a lot of McKay's
life is clouded by these different versions of the story,
and a lot of times not a lot of records
to back that up, so it can be hard to
unravel truth and half truth when trying to get to
the details of his life. Yeah, particularly this early part
before he was kind of a household name. McKay might

(09:21):
have followed a job offered to Cincinnati. Uh, he was
smart enough to know that he really kind of needed
a little bit of a plan going into a new thing.
But there is also a fun apocryphal story that in
fact he was working for a traveling circus as a
signmaker and that that's how he ended up in Cincinnati.
We don't know if there's any truth to that either,

(09:43):
but in any case, he ended up at another dime
museum similar to the Wonderland that he had worked at
in Detroit, most likely hired based on the growing reputation
of his work. He wasn't making sketches for patrons this
time around, but he was making posters and signs for
the museum itself as a regular employee. And it was
while he was working in the dime Museum that mckayson

(10:04):
edison Vitoscope moving picture for the first time. In addition
to his museum work, McKay also took jobs painting billboards
and large street advertisements. This also became his first performance work.
As an artist. One of the incredible skills that he
possessed was the ability to draw a figure in its
entirety in one single stroke. So as you can imagine,

(10:27):
a man drawing figures eight to ten feet tall out
in public in this incredible way would draw a crowd.
People were awed by his skill, and stories of the
man who painted these huge, lifelike drawings with no reference
out on the streets of Cincinnati started to spread. Yeah,
he would do this big sketch initially and then he
would paint it in And he was also a small

(10:50):
of stature person, so it really lent this extra drama
to the situation. Like a guy who was only five
feet drawing someone eight to ten ft in one single
long line was just astonishing. And so it kind of
got to the point where if he went out with
his supplies to start on a billboard or assign a
crowd would just gather to watch. Uh. And coming up,

(11:12):
we're going to talk about some unique artistic endeavors that
McKay was part of in Cincinnati. But first we're gonna
pause for a little sponsor break. So McKay also, in
addition to kind of becoming an accidental street performer. While
he was painting, participated in a couple of more planned

(11:34):
performance art pieces in Cincinnati that were conceptualized by his
employer on his billboard work, Philip Morton. For one of these,
they staged a battle from the Spanish American War on
barges out in the river, but onlooker started stoning the
barge representing the Spanish on which both McKay and Morton
were serving as actors, and both of the men were injured.

(11:55):
There are stories of them getting back to shore with
like cuts on their faces and arms from having rocks
and garbage thrown at them. A tugboat eventually had to
be signaled to pull the barge that McKay was on
off of a collision course with the bridge. Like the
whole performance art piece really went south. But while he

(12:15):
was certainly becoming a well known figure and a producer
of art in Cincinnati, perhaps the most important thing that
happens to McKay while living there was meeting maud Lenore
dufour after just seeing her walk into the museum with
her older sister Josephine one day while he was working,
McKay is said to have rushed up to his office
to change out of his painter's garb and into a

(12:37):
nice suit so that he could go up to this
young woman who had captivated him from the first time
that he saw her licking his absolute best. Yeah, he
was a snappy dresser, So he had his suit upstairs
and had changed into something a little grubbier to do
work with his paint and art supplies, and so he
wanted to go back to his fancy ensomb before he

(13:00):
met this young lady. And Windsor and Maud hit it off,
and they began dating immediately, And it was really quite
shortly after their courtship began that they rode to Covington,
Kentucky to get married before a Justice of the peace
in an elopement. This gets a little weird here because
Maud was a full decade younger than Windsor. She was
only fourteen at the time and he was twenty four.

(13:23):
So while it initially sounds very romantic sounding by today's standards,
it's kind of scandalous and even a little bit icky
to think about. But to further compound confusion over the
age gap, it appears that Windsor Mackay, who was already
known to lie about his age, had lost track of
his real date of birth entirely. Uh, he may not
have realized just how far apart they were in years,

(13:44):
or another theory is that he fudged it even more
to make the difference in their ages a little less scandalous. Yeah,
people did get married a little younger on average then,
but still in the eighteen nineties, the the median age
for women was more like twenty two. Not yeah, I mean,
I certainly like I look back on some old family

(14:06):
records and there are certainly people that got married at
at fifteen and sixteen, but it was not that was
still really young. So while McKay had seemed really eager
to marry Maud, he did have some ambivalence about actually
being a husband. So as a young man, he had
spent his young adult years doing whatever he wanted and
pursuing his art above everything else, so being a responsible

(14:30):
family man felt confining, especially because Maud's mother also lived
with them at the same time. Though the couple stayed
together and maybe to hang on to a sense of freedom,
McKay moved the family from home to home, and the
first twelve years of their marriage, the McKay's had ten
different addresses. Yeah, there's a lot of uh theorization and

(14:54):
discussion when you look at biographies of him that he
was a little bit unhappy with this arrangement just in
terms of being married, and it wasn't always smooth sailing.
But at the same time, any of the letters or
notes that he wrote to his wife and his family
were very loving, and he was generally believed to have

(15:14):
been really quite dedicated, but he still had that part
of him that just yearned to be out on his
own and able to do whatever he wanted. Maud and
Windsor welcome his son Robert on June one. The McKay's
had been married for five years at that point, and
their surprise, they got pregnant again almost immediately. They had

(15:35):
a daughter, Mary and Elizabeth on August. And throughout all
of this the artist continued in his jobs at the
museum and the billboard company. Eventually McKay got into newspaperwork,
largely because the papers that sold ads for the Dime
Museum didn't have any artists on hand who were willing

(15:56):
to draw the bizarre artwork that was needed for these ads,
so McKay was asked to do the art himself. He
learned an entirely new skill set to do so. While
he was talented and accomplished as an artist, the tools
of the trade and the parameters of work were a
lot different when a piece of art was going to
be printed in a paper versus being printed as a poster.

(16:18):
So he had to learn how to draw his art
for a larger size to be reduced for the paper,
and to pay really careful attention so that his lines
and the image wouldn't just be a mess when they
were reduced down for the paper. Yeah, there were also
just different supplies involved that he had to get used
to using. But McKay, always a quick and eager learner,
impressed the leadership of the Commercial Tribune, which was the

(16:41):
paper that had asked him to do this, so much
so that they offered him a full time job. And
at that point, he had been at the Dime Museum
for eight years and he was kind of reluctant to leave.
He felt the loyalty to them, But thankfully, when he
discussed it with his boss, his boss encouraged him to
take that new job, but no hard feeling in the
mix because it was going to be a move up

(17:01):
and he had a family to look after, and the
Tribune wanted McKay to work as an artist reporter, illustrating
stories and drawing cartoons. If you look at McKay's work
from this time as an illustrator, it's really astonishing. He
was able to capture moments for these stories with almost
the same level of detail that you would see in
a photograph. In crowd scenes like capturing parades, the details

(17:25):
on all the buildings are very carefully rendered, and the
people in the crowd are drawn in a lot of detail,
right to the point that it would be impossible to
put any more detail into the images. Receding perspective. Yeah,
there's one in particular where there's a crowd of people
watching a parade, and he even draws all of the

(17:46):
hats on the people until it's just like the point
where they would be thoughts, Like, everything is really really detailed,
and his sense of perspective that he had learned under
Goodison was serving him so beautifully because they looked peccable
in terms of how they were laid out. And McKay
also started working as a freelancer for the humorist magazine
Life during this time. As we go on, you will

(18:08):
hear over and over that he almost always had multiple jobs.
Life was a satirical magazine with spectacular art, and McKay
was actually a fan of many of their regular artists.
Heads up, just in case this peaks anyone's interest and
you want to go looking for work from this magazine.
There is a lot of racist humor in it, including
some of McKay's work. Many of McKay's cartoons during this

(18:31):
time focused on the relationship between the US and the Philippines,
which the US had gained control over with the signing
of the Treaty of Paris. In a larger paycheck lured
mackay away from the Commercial Tribune to the Cincinnati Enquirer
in nineteen hundred, and he quickly rose to be head
of the art department. He drew hundreds of cartoons for

(18:53):
the paper and the three years that he worked there.
Among the most significant were his illustrations for a series
called A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle
On that byline is part of the title. The series
depicts animals deciding to change their physicalities to try to
outwit three impish children of the jungle who are taunting them.

(19:13):
For example, and one of them the imps, tickle a
giraffe's nose until the giraffe sneezes, So then the giraffe
has a group of skilled monkeys make him a longer neck,
so when the imps approached him, he picks one up
by the hair shakes it flings him around to teach
him a lesson. The Jungle Imps series ran for most
of the three calendar year and was immensely popular. Yeah,

(19:37):
these were based on ratings by someone else, but they
basically explain evolution in a really bizarre way, where animals
consciously make the decisions to evolve so that they could
stop being teased by these children. But by the time
the last of that series was publishing, McKay had actually
already moved on to another job. In h three, McKay

(19:58):
started working at the New York Herald as a cartoonist,
so similar to his previous job move, he turned to
his boss for advice when the Herald had made him
this offer, and his editor at the Cincinnati Inquirer told
him that to take the position if the Harold would
agree to pay for his move to New York, which
it did. So this move was something of a shock

(20:18):
for the family. They had had this lovely house in Cincinnati,
but then when they moved to New York, they first
had to stay in a hotel, but they wanted a
house like they had had before. And eventually, after feeling
overwhelmed by the options in the city, particularly Maud, she
did not really love their options for living in Manhattan,
they moved into a home in Sheep's Head Bay, Brooklyn.

(20:41):
Starting in November of three, McKay started churning out illustrations
for the New York Harold and the Evening Telegram, which
was also owned by The Heralds publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr.
His work ranged from the political to social commentary to
unique illustrations depicting like a horse show that he covered
as a journalist. Instead of just making straight drawings of

(21:03):
these horses, he drew them from unusual angles, so he
created a really stylized look to the story. The idea
of the comic strip was just getting legs in the
US at this point, influenced in part by previous podcast
subject Rodolph top Fur, and McKay was quick to start
experimenting with it. He wanted, like many artists of the

(21:24):
time to secure a regular syndicated strip, and he wanted
the income and notoriety that would come with it. This
is kind of a time when being a popular cartoonist
was kind of like being a famous actor today. The
newspaper industry had been in steep competition to lure readers
with comics, and McKay stepped into the New York scene

(21:45):
just as this was starting to hit its fever pitch.
For the first half of nineteen o four, When's They're
tried out a number of comics, including Mr Goodenough, who
was about a wealthy gent who decided to be more
energetic and lively in his life, but his efforts to
do it always end in disaster. Another was Furious Finish
of Foolish Philip's Funny Frolics. All those fs are really phs.

(22:10):
They featured two clowns and a show girl, harkening back
to the Museum and the circus art that he had
done earlier in his career, and Windsor McKay was just
about to hit his stride as a cartoonist. But before
we get into the details of his early successes in
that medium, we're gonna pause for a little sponsor break,

(22:35):
so while McKay had started trying some things, but they
didn't quite catch on. Starting in mid nineteen o four,
he created two comic strips for the paper that became
very successful. The first was Little Sammy Sneeze Starting, a
little boy who, over the course of five frames in
each installment, had a sneeze build up in a situation
where sneezing would be inconvenient or inappropriate. The six panel

(22:59):
would always feature the unfortunate aftermath of the sneeze that
Sammy just couldn't suppress. The title of the comic was
framed on either side every week with the phrases he
just simply couldn't stop it, and he never knew it
was coming. Sammy and his Sneezing Problem debuted on July.
Sammy's Adventures evidenced a certain level of darkness in McKay's

(23:23):
comedic sensibilities, and one strip, Sammy is visiting the country
and watching a farmhand milk a cow as the sneeze
starts building up. When it finally lets loose, the cow bolts,
kicking the man that's milking her, and then the man
kicks Sammy in the rump. I feel like this goes
back to some of Rudolph toppers. Yes, spankings, Yes, like

(23:47):
the cycle of violence that just continues from one character
to another. Yeah, and another of them. Sammy is riding
in a crowded trolley with his mother, and as the
sneeze builds up, the passengers or gossiping and reading their papers,
his sneeze sends the whole car into complete chaos, with
hats flying off of people a dog escaping from its owner.
The last panel is simply as mother leading Sammy away

(24:09):
and saying I shall never take you with me again.
Yeah it's uh. It struck me as really somber and sad. Uh.
The second strip that McKay created in nineteen o four
was Dream of the rare Bit Fiend. So rare Bit,
also some sometimes called Welsh Rabbit, is a dish that
in fact contains no rabbit at all, but it is

(24:31):
a rich cheese based sauce that served over toast. It's
sometimes a little bit spicy, it's always very very rich.
And because it has long been a popular wives tale
that rich food causes strange dreams, the entire concept of
this comic was that it depicted the dreams of someone
who absolutely loved the dish and ate it before bedtime.

(24:53):
So in one strip, a man dreams that he begins
to grow antlers, and he is initially dismayed and his
concern grows. His wife and baby and even pets also
start to grow antlers. But just as he starts to
become comfortable with the idea, there's a moment where he's
looking at nature and he's like, no, nature is beautiful,
antlers are great. Uh. He is awakened from this nap,

(25:15):
And in another the main character is dreaming that he's
a sketched fashion model, but that the artist keeps smudging
the drawing and leaving ink blurs on him. And as
he continues to complain about the pen and ink artist
creating him, he becomes slowly engulfed by smears and blotches
of ink, and the character becomes convinced that he will
be torn up and thrown on a fire. And the

(25:36):
final panel is the dreamer awakening and swearing that he
will never eat rere bit again. I will tell you
this if you ever watched a lot of Looney Tunes.
This makes me wonder if this was not a direct
inspiration for UH that cartoon Duck a muck where Daffy
Duck is yelling at the animator and he gets drawn
into all kinds of crazy situations because it it vibes

(25:57):
very similarly, McKay actually had to sign a different name
to these rarebit strips. He could use his own name,
because his editor wanted to keep this child oriented art
of sneezing Sammy separate from the Rabbit comedy, which was
aimed at an adult audience. McKay was really irritated by
this requirement, so he started to sign the name Silas

(26:18):
on the rabbit strips, which was the name of the
trash collector and Harold Square, where the newspaper offices were.
They also asked readers to send in their own dreams
in the paper for inclusion into the strip. Yeah, it
was definitely ah. I like that. He was like, fine,
I'll use the garbage man's name. It wasn't like he
wanted to honor the garbage man. He just wanted to

(26:40):
kind of stick it to his editor in a weird way.
But he used the name Silas as his secondary moniker
forever after that, and even as McKay was producing Sammy
Sneeze in the rare bit fiend on a regular schedule.
He was also still fulfuit fulfilling his other duties at
the paper as an illustrator. He also continued to test

(27:01):
out new strips. He started one called The Story of
Hungry Henrietta in January nineteen o five, and it featured
a little girl that began as a three month old
infant and then showed her growing up over the strips
six month run. It provided a commentary on parenting, as
Henrietta's parents always gave her food instead of affection when

(27:21):
she appeared upset, and the main character, Henrietta, became a
compulsive eater, and all that work started to grind on him.
He was making sixty dollars a week and he loved
working at the Herald, but McKay also knew that he
deserved more. In nineteen o five, he wrote a very
direct letter to his boss outlining the breakdown of his
work each week and the quality of that work, and

(27:43):
pointing out that the artists at other publications were giving
were given much longer lead times for their work, and
they were assigned fewer things, and they were making twice
what he made. The letter came back with the letters
okay in the top right and a silly drawing which
would annoy me. But mackay got his race. He was

(28:04):
bumped up with seventy five dollars a week, and later
on he would negotiate more than double that when his
contract was renewed based on the ongoing success of uh
strip we're talking about next time called Little Nemo. Yeah,
he really was just like banging stuff out at a
shocking rate, partially because he was so fast, but even
then he was like, my quality suffers because I am

(28:27):
turning out like ten pieces of content for you every
week when normal artists are getting to assigned to them.
And part of it he brought in himself though, because
he was always doing two or three jobs at least
at a time, so it was an interesting time for him.
He created another adult audience strip for the Evening Telegram

(28:49):
under the pseudonym Silas, and that was called A Pilgrim's
Progress by Mr Bunyan. Again, that byline is part of
the title, and this was a comic strip interpretation of
John Bunyan's spelled a different way by the way Christian
allegory of the same name, although of course that does
not have the Bye, Mr. Bunyan Byeline uh that was
published in six Considering McKay's fascination with dreams that we

(29:13):
already saw in rere bit Fiend and that will fuel
other work in the future, it is probably no surprise
that he drew inspiration from a book that was written
entirely as a dream. The next year, Windsor McKay would
create his most popular comic strip, and we are going
to talk about that and his work in animation in
our next episode. Yeah, we're about to get to some

(29:35):
really fun stuff and the person that get me probably
choked up. It is really fun to go back and
look through his early comics because they hold up. They
are still very funny and very weird and surreal. And
his artwork is beautiful, Like the style of it is
so elegant and unique. Even when he's drawing like Sammy

(29:58):
Sneeze is kind of drawn to look like kind of
a UM. He is not an appealing looking child. I
will put it away, but the artwork itself is still
really lovely. Okay, So I have a little bit of
listener mail. I'm doing a choosy on this one, um,
because we have multiple fabulous little postcards and we haven't

(30:19):
done a postcard catchup in a bit. But I also
want to start with an email that we got from
our listener Lisa, and that is about our episode on Ephesis,
and Lisa writes, hello, y'all. I just listened to the
Ephesis episode and Holly mentioned that going to the Amphitheater
was on her bucket list. A few years ago, I
got the chance to go on a college trip through
the Mediterranean. The college choir paired with a class on

(30:41):
early Christianity, and one of the stops was in Ephesis.
The ruins were really cool. I kept trying to read
the ancient inscriptions with my very limited ancient Greek. It
did not work. But per the subject line of her letter,
because this was in part a music trip, when we
got to the Amphitheater, we sang a few pieces. Apparently
amphitheaters at the time were constructed in such a way

(31:03):
that if you stood just in the right spot, everyone
in the audience could hear you without the need to yell,
even from way in the back of the twenty thousand
seat Amphitheater. According to the religions professor that was on
the trip, that construction still holds up several thousand years later.
It was a really amazing experience, even though the Turkish
officials staffing the site came and told us off for singing.

(31:25):
Thank you so much for your great podcast. What an
amazing experience that must have been. I can't imagine what
that would be like, one because I can't sing to
begin with, but two because that had to be a
little bit surreal. Uh. It probably felt a little like
you're singing through time at that point. Uh. The other
mail that I wanted to acknowledge and I have trouble
reading it, but I will explain why. It is from

(31:47):
our listener Grace, who sent us an absolutely beautiful postcard
from Tokyo Disney, and the reason that it is hard
to read. Her writing is spectacular. However, it looks like
she mailed it from the Tokyo Disney resort and they
put a big, fat like stamp on it. Perhab scars
almost all of the writing because it's dark blue, and

(32:10):
so it's hard to read. But um, she is. It's
a really lovely thirty fifth anniversary card and it is
spectacularly beautiful and very colorful, so it seems like a
good one to read On today's episode since uh you know,
animation is is largely in debt to Windsor McKay, which
we will talk about more as we said on the

(32:30):
next episode. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at house to
works dot com. You can find us across the spectrum
of social media as missed in History, where it missed
in History dot com, where you will find every single
episode of the podcast that has ever existed before Tracy
and I were ever here, and then show notes for
the ones that Tracy and I have worked on. So

(32:51):
come and visit us and missed in History dot com
and we can all explore history together. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, visit hawstaff works dot com.