March 21, 2023 • 47 mins
Floyd Collins was a natural-born caver who met a terrible fate, becoming stuck underground where no one could get him loose. His unlucky, slowly unfolding plight also turned out to be one of the first national media sensations of the 20th century.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Dude, doo doo doo. I just told Josh's trumpet bit
announced that we are continuing our twenty twenty three tour
this spring by going to DC, the Boston area and Toronto,
Canada yep, in that same order, May fourth, fifth, and sixth,
and you can get tickets at Link Tree Slash sy
sk Live for all three shows. We'll see you guys soon.
(00:25):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, and that makes this Stuff you
should Know part of our continuing sad Kentucky tragic history
(00:46):
era that we seem to be in right now. Are
we going to point out where this is fifteen times? No,
this is this is in the Kentucky that you'd expect
it to be in. Okay, we had some funny Instagram
comments on that. I know what you're talking about about.
Half the people when the supper club fire thing went
to Instagram said where was this again? Jodsh No, I know,
(01:08):
I'm just kidding. Okay, I'm just kidding. I'm aware of
what goes on on Instagram. Who knows, I don't know
you're one of those lurkers. Yeah, totally, I totally am
so m speaking of lurking, Chuck Es, if you go
to Barron County, Kentucky, okay, one of the things that
you might do is a pastime is lurk in a cave. Hey,
(01:30):
look at that transition. It was okay. But the reason
why you might do that is because Barron County and
neighboring I think Edmonton or Edmondson County our home to
the largest cave system in the world, Mammoth Caves. Yeah,
we talked about Mammoth and I guess it had to
be our caving episode. Certainly, there's no way you can.
(01:51):
I mean again, it's enormous, Like, as far as we know,
I think something like four hundred miles have been mapped. Yeah,
and I was reading we have a lot. We have
an enslaved man back in the eighteen twenties up to
the forties to thank for a lot of that, because
he was the only one brave enough to crawl over
the bottomless pit and keep exploring. So that definitely extended it.
(02:13):
But they think also that there's another six hundred miles.
By the way, his name is Stephen Bishop. Sorry I
meant to say, but they think there's another six hundred
miles left to be mapped. So that's a giant old
cave system. Yeah, potentially a thousand miles of gave system stuff. Yes,
Now I have a desire to go in almost none
of it. Yeah, I know, you know, but I have
(02:34):
to say, like Ruby Falls is definitely worth the visit
for sure. Yeah. I mean my deal is I did
it once and it was really cool. I would go back,
but I'm not, you know, dying too. I'm kind of like,
you know, I know what it's like now, and that's
all I really wanted to know. Yes, I was looking
for a new hobby. The thing is, though, is if
you're into caves caving, even if you're not like a caver,
but you're, you know, into touring caves, you know that
(02:57):
you can stand up in and there's walkways in every
short Mammoth cave is an absolute must. It's just like
Geological Wonder. After Geological Wonder, it's pretty neat. Yeah, you
like your caves to have an energy drink fridge at
the bottom of it, that's right, and a moving side one.
It is a National park now since nineteen I think
forty one Mammoth is and it was a big like
(03:20):
and remains a big tourist attraction, but all the way
dating back to the Civil War, and as a result,
that whole area became cave central, not just because Mammoth Caves,
but there's so many other cave systems around there, and
it became like a legitimate sort of roadside not only stop,
but destination for people. And the people that you know
(03:43):
was like, Hey, i'll pay me a dollar or fifty
cents or whatever and I'll take you down in these caves.
They started battling each other more and more of these
locals trying to drum up business for caves they had
the rights to explore, and that was known as the
Kentucky Cave Wars. Yes, and it was basically just entrepreneurs
run amuck in Kentucky. They would burn one another's cars,
(04:07):
They would put bowlders on the road to keep tourists
from being able to make it to the other cave locations.
They would pose as tourists and talk about how terrible
one cave was. It was free yelped, so that was
their live, live yelping. And then another thing they would
do is tell the tourists that they were all the
same caves. They were just different entrances. So it's all
(04:27):
the same. Just come to mind, wow, which is sort
of true in a way kind of, but I think
not really. Yeah, I mean that doesn't mean they're all connected,
but oh they are. Well, what I mean is that
you can access It's like you can't get there from
here kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. And also I think
each entrance is like, this is for all intents and purposes,
it is a completely separate cave system. Right, This is
(04:49):
my whole which I told you that there's something I
thought you were using hole as an adjective now that
that was the weirdest thing about when I went caving,
and I'll just quickly say it again, is that I
expected some big cartoon like thing that you just walk
into and start exploring. I did not realize you could
(05:12):
literally walk by a cave entrance in the woods and
not notice it because it's a two by two foot
hole in the ground, and that makes caves exponentially scarier
more sure, you know. Oh yeah, when I saw that thing,
I was like, that's where we're going, because that means
the people coming to help you could walk right past
it too, and it's just I mean, it's just tampering
with the pits of Hell. I don't I don't agree
(05:33):
with that. So our story moves on now to one
of the great cavers of the region. There were a
lot of great cavers, but one was a gentleman named
Floyd Collins, who if you look him up, he looks
a bit like Crispin Glover and sort of the same
way that almost all rural white men in Kentucky in
their early nineteen hundreds look like Crispin Glover. Yeah, he
(05:55):
just sort of had that generic Kentucky guy look. Well,
the cut hairdo, the shemp he had definitely helps a
lot too. So he was born in eighteen eighty seven,
had a bunch of brothers and sisters from his mom
and then a previous marriage that his father had lee. Yeah,
and they were really close to the Mammoth Caves about
(06:16):
four years old. So from the time he was a
little kid, like six years old, he was out there
caving and doing his thing like you would when you're
six in nineteen o seven or whatever. Yeah, Plus there
was not a lot else to do, Like if you
were a farmer, you were eking out a really hard
living in this area. Apparently the soil wasn't very helpful
(06:37):
because again because astone cave system, right, so it's kind
of tough to grow things on bare limestone. And so
what Floyd Collins figured out very quickly is that there
were a lot of Native American indigenous artifacts, including remains,
in these caves, and that he could take these things
(06:57):
out of the caves and go to the Mammoth Cave Hotel,
this huge hotel that was built expressly for the tourists,
and sell them to those tourists. And he was so
profitable that he dropped out of school at age ten
to pursue his looting activities full time. Yeah, which, you know, um,
I'm not going to judge the guy from here in
twenty twenty three for being a ten year old trying
(07:20):
to make a living. Yeah neither. Yeah. Ye, surprising word, no,
of course, it's surprised to keep everybody on their toes um.
So fast forward a bit. It's nineteen seventeen now and
Floyd Collins is still doing his his caving. He's still
one of the foremost experts in the region, and he
found a new system or at least, no one had
(07:42):
discovered this system as far as he knew, and it
was really beautiful. It had these almost marble like walls,
is how Dave Ruce put it. Dave helped us with this,
and it was just one of the more gorgeous caves
on the inside, and so he named it the Great
Crystal Cave and told his he said, hey, we need
to scrape together what money we have so we can
(08:04):
lease this land, because this thing is going to be
our meal tickets. It's prettier than any of the other
caves around. Yeah. He went in halfers with his dad,
Lee and another man by the last name of Gerard,
and they basically developed this Great Crystal Cave, which was
a wonderful fine. He was incredibly lucky to have come
upon this cave and be able to get the rights
(08:25):
to it. There was a huge problem with it though,
it never became really financially successful because it was at
the other end of the cave system, so by that
you really had to know that it was there and
want to go there. If you were just a tourist
wandering around visiting caves, there was very little chance you're
going to end up there accidentally. And then what with
(08:46):
this being the Cave Wars and everybody who was a
competitor of his, but also we're probably neighbors and second cousins.
By the way, they were doing everything they could to
keep those tourists from making their way back to Great
Crystal Cave. So it's great a cave as it was,
it just wasn't viable. Yeah, the big city guy came
in and said, son, you'd never learned the first rule
(09:07):
of business, location, location, location, And Floyd went, why are
you saying location three times? Yeah, yeah, it's sad, but true.
That's a direct quote everybody, it really is. So now
they're in a situation where Floyd says, all right, that
this didn't quite work out, But now they're in a
situation where they're kind of even more desperate than before
(09:28):
to find some means of revenue. So he set out
to find another amazing cave and a better location, and
he found one that wasn't quite so amazing as far
as is aesthetics go, but it was on Cave City
Road before you even got to Mammoth. So that was like,
that's the location, location, location that he didn't understand that
(09:51):
he needed, but right got it. That's how that's how
important it was that you could have a so so cave.
But if the entrance was on the weight of the
bigger caves than you had, you had a gym mine
even if there were no gems in the cave, because
you could lie and say there are right, Say it's
the same entrance or the different entrance to the same thing. Right.
(10:11):
So yeah, he went into business with a different guy,
a man named B. Doyle Beasley Doyle and another man
named ed Estes, and Doyle and Stes went half on
their half, and they said that they would give Floyd
the other half if he would explore and develop this
cave so that they could start taking tourists down in it.
(10:34):
And so Floyd Collins is being I haven't seen it
expressly written out, but he spent so much time in
caves from such a young age, and he had been
at it for so long and had become such a
respected caver that I suspect this is the one. Like
when he woke up, the one thing he wanted to
(10:54):
do was go into caves, like he just loved what
he was doing. So this is probably like a dream
gig for him too. Yeah, But he started exploring this
cave and started to develop it. But he ran into
a problem very early. You mentioned that this cave was
not so great as far as caves go, right, Yeah,
and we didn't mention it was called sand cave. And
(11:14):
it was called sand cave for a reason because it
was not solid limestone like you know, most of the
rest of these caves, which made it, you know, pretty
tourist friendly to walk around, kind of like you would
have a ruby falls, let's say, the smooth limestone. Yeah,
the good stuff. This is actually loose rock and muddy sand.
(11:35):
So sand Cave is is an apt name. And Floyd
was like, I've got to make this work, though, Like
I'm even more desperate than I was before because now
signed onto this thing, and so I'm gonna, like, there's
good stuff down there that's deeper. I just have to
carve out a passageway that's safe enough to get tourists
in here. And so he did that for weeks and
(11:58):
weeks and weeks, working all our days clearing out and
it was you know, it was really cold at the time,
clearing out this mud and ice and water and rock
and trying to build what looked like a legitimate entrance way. Yeah,
which I mean I think his premise was that he
would if he if he dug enough of this stuff out,
he would reach those smooth limestone walls. Eventually. It was
(12:21):
just going to take some extra work, right, Yeah, And
he was down to work. He was dtw and you
keep making mention like he really needed this. Um. I
mean he was able to like make ends meet here
or there. I think he and his brother like chopped
timber for the railroad ties to the local lines that
were built. Like again, Mammoth Caves was such an enormous attraction.
There was a special railroad line that was established and
(12:44):
built just to take people to this, Right, so there
was some money to be made. But to say that
Floyd Collins and his eight siblings were poor as an understatement.
I saw a picture of the house that the siblings
all lived in with their parents, and the ticket booth
for Great Crystal Cave, and the ticket booth is slightly
bigger than the house, Like it is like they were
(13:08):
they were. Yeah, they live basically hand to mouth to
say the least. Yeah, so this needed to work. That's
why you put in all this work painstakingly digging this
passage and eventually on January thirty, nineteen twenty five, he said,
all right, I've got an opening here, and I believe
(13:28):
I can get down to the depths that I so desire.
And he did. He got down about fifty feet deep
and then came to a ten foot drop that's shaped
like a chimney, So it's a ten foot shoot that
he can go down. And at the bottom of this shoot,
it kind of makes not the hardest L, but it
(13:49):
would like a soft L shape to where it goes horizontal.
But that horizontal opening was not very big. It was
just enough for Floyd to like get down there on
his back, go in kind of feet first, with the
top of the the shoot like inches above his face. Yeah,
(14:10):
he was in this crack. So the chimney itself was
not like exactly like a drop. He had to kind
of shimmy down it, but with that crack was like
a whole other thing altogether. He couldn't take a full
breath in there. We shoko a warning a trigger warning
for people that suffer from claustrophobia, because yeah, I don't
even and a lot of this felt like I was
(14:31):
about to have a panic attack. Yeah, I have a
vague sense of claustrophobia. It takes a lot to trigger it,
Like just hearing about the stuff, I'm like, oh my gosh,
but I can handle it. But I'll bet there's people
out there who sure couldn't even hear this, So way
to go chalk. Yeah, So that CoA and another one,
which is when you're dealing with old stories like this,
we found that there are a lot of facts that
(14:51):
get mixed up depending on what sorts you're using. So yeah,
we're doing our best moving forward. Well, also, like we're
in the age where we've really just woken up to
the fact that back in the twenties, say, newspapers would
print whatever, and we've long been like, well it was
in the newspaper, so it's probably well researched, not true, necessarily,
(15:13):
not at all. So he's sliding through this crack and
you're probably getting pretty nervous, but hold on to that
because he makes it through the crack and on the
other side he finds a big I think like fifty
foot deep room, a big chamber, and this is what
he's been looking for. This is the kind of stuff
tourists want to see. And he starts exploring it. He's
repelling down and I think it's I don't even know
(15:36):
if he made it to the bottom or not, but
his lantern started flickering, and that is a sign if
you are exploring a cave for the first time, to
go to get out of the cave. So that's what
he did. He was a smart guy. He wasn't dumb.
He was he was very gutsy, but he didn't like
just you know, he wasn't. He didn't gamble with his
life for no reason. Yeah, he knew what he was doing. Yes,
(15:58):
So he crawled back up the rope, took his lamp
with him, and started to make his way back through
the crack. He was oriented the same way that he
was going in, so he went in feet first. This
time he went in head first. Yeah, and he made it.
I believe his head made it out when he kind
of kicked into the ground to kind of give himself
(16:20):
purchase to push himself the rest of the way through
the crack. When he did that, he moved some some dirt,
some sand, and I've seen up to a seven ton boulder,
came down from the ceiling and lodged his foot in
place firmly. It was not. He was not moving anymore,
and he was stuck in this crack hopelessly. Yeah, and
(16:41):
that's one great example. I saw seven ton, and then
everywhere else I saw twenty six pounds. Big. I mean,
could you really not like shimmy a twenty seven pound
Maybe not in a crack like that, I mean twenty
six pounds on a foot in a crack. And we
should mention too, that his lamp went out while he
(17:02):
was in there, and again I saw various things from that.
It finally flickered out to he accidentally kicked it out,
kicked it over and made it go out. So now
he is laying there with his arms by his side,
stuck in this crevice, in the complete blackness. And Dave
pointed out and I can verify, and if you've ever
(17:24):
been caving, it is a blackness like you've never understood
before in your life. I don't want to understand that.
It is the blackest of black. You literally cannot see
your hand in front of your face. So he's, you know,
literally laying there in pitch blackness, which he's sort of
used to because he's I'm sure he's been without a
(17:45):
light before in a cave and gotten out of it,
but he was in a bad way. He was, and
he wasn't panicking because he knew that he was right
almost at the base of that chimney and that if
he could get to the chimney, not only could he
relight his lamp, he could shimmy up the chimney easily.
So he was almost there. But the problem was again
that rock, whether it was twenty seven pounds or seven tons,
(18:07):
wasn't letting him go. And so Floyd Collins was alone
in the dark traps in a crack, and no one
knew he was down there. Yeah, and before we go
to break, because I know this where we're headed. The
final little cherry on top of danger danger cherry is
it's sixteen degrees. Very nice, Chuck, all right, we'll be
right back, so Chuck, before we get started again, I
(18:51):
want to shout out a source. There's an article from
nineteen seventy six in American Heritage magazine, a great history
source by Michael Leasy L. S Y. And he actually
was the guy who wrote or compiled Wisconsin Death Trip
a few years before he wrote that article, and it's
(19:12):
called Dark Carnival, and it is really worth a read.
But he got all of his sources directly from newspapers,
so basically every word he wrote had been reported in
the newspaper somehow or some way. So that is probably
why that's the only source for the seven ton. It
was probably misreported, but he's still a pretty good source
(19:33):
for facts. He's a professional historian, so he knew what
he was doing. But he was also really fascinating too.
All Right, so he's down there, no one knows he's
there for a while. He was known to disappear for
you know, many hours and days exploring these caves, so
it's not like the people got too concerned at first.
It would be twenty five hours before anyone even knew
(19:55):
anything was going on with him, and that was when
the Sun of Sts his name was Jewel, pretty cool name,
seventeen year old went to go check. He'd kind of
been hanging out with Floyd and caving with him, and
I think Floyd even said like, you know, I could
die in here to the guy the day or two before.
(20:16):
And he's the one who went down there called out
for Floyd and heard Floyd call back that he was
hung up and needed help. Right, So this is good,
I mean it's been a full day, but at least
now somebody knows he's down there. So juel Estes runs
back and starts getting help, and I think in very
short order, word got to his brother, Homer, who I
(20:38):
guess younger brother because I think Floyd was thirty at
the time, and I think Homer was twenty two or fourteen,
depending on where he can I hadn't seen fourteen, so Homer,
either way, he rushed. I get the impression that he
was a man by then, so I'm gonna say twenty two, okay.
But he rushed to the site and basically became the
first person who was willing to actually go in and
(21:01):
try to rescue Floyd. There are other people who had
given it a shot before Homer arrived, but they apparently
that chimney scared every single one of them off. They
were like, I'm sorry, I'm I like Floyd a lot,
but that's I'm not going through that chimney. Yeah. So
he shows up, says, Floyd's like, can I get some
food first and foremost, so his brother said, sure, here's
(21:25):
the worst thing possible you could eat when you're pinned
in a cave. Here's some sausage and coffee. Yeah, so
let's get that heart rate up ensure that you're gonna
have to urinate, and then just the sausage is just
a bonus, yeah, just to fill you up. Yeah, and
to make that really flow. But he had food. I'm
(21:46):
kind of kidding around here. This is what people ate
back then. So he just needed some some calories in
his body. And Homer was down there working hard, trying
everything he could do to get him loose. Every time
he dug rubble out, more rubble would fall down where
that rubble was. He brought a crowbar back to try
and dislodge some bigger stones. Nothing was working. He's exhausted
(22:11):
and cold. At this point, he's offering up like advice
is coming in from around the country by this point,
like word had gotten out of like how to do it.
He's offering to pay surgeons five hundred dollars to go
down there and cut his foot off. And I think
one surgeon was actually debating whether or not to do it. Yeah.
I think he was sent by the heiress to the
(22:32):
International Harvester Fortune. He got sent to the scene. She
paid for him to go there. It's nice, yeah, it was.
It was very nice. I mean, she was very concerned,
and apparently he was one of the best surgeons in
America and he ended up becoming one of the medical
advisors during this time. But he did not go down
and cut his foot off because he couldn't reach his
foot anyway, there's no way. But they were saying, well,
(22:52):
we could also put ropes around him and pull him
out and just cut his foot off like that. Yeah,
not a good idea, and they didn't actually do it,
but that was definitely on the table for a while. Yeah,
And they were also you know, this is a really
sort of sad part of this is there were people
that were volunteering to go down and bring him blankets
and food and stuff, and they would go down and
(23:14):
come back and say, his season, good spirits, he's got
the food and blankets. And then later when other people
would go down to check things out, they would find
that food and blankets to sort of cast aside and
stuffed and cracks, and that people were too scared to
go down there, and I guess too scared to admit it. Yeah,
so there you go. There's there's a couple of things
(23:35):
that we've just hit upon. I think bear pointing out
one is that people are taking blankets down and then
not actually doing it, so we don't actually have any
like professional rescuers right now. And then secondly, like his
brother is the first person who's willing to get down
there and give him some food. And if you take
a step back, you realize, like this is a it's
(23:55):
a big problem for Floyd Collins. But at this point,
and for a really shockingly long time, it was basically
a local problem. The people who were in charge of
rescuing Floyd were the same people who were um his
competitors in the cave tourism business. It was just locals
trying to figure out what to do. Yeah, and didn't
(24:15):
the I'm sorry, the son of one of the former
partners who was a good trusted friend he got involved
as well, right, Juel Estes was the son, not Jules
the Burnette. I didn't see him. Yeah, Johnny Burnette put
heat factored in pretty heavily as far as because he
(24:36):
was a trusted person to Floyd. So Floyd told him like,
you're the only person I like trust to get me
out of here. Oh okay, wow, so so um yeah.
So so there were people who were like really trying
to do this. They had the best intentions, they just
didn't necessarily know what to do. And the upshot of
(24:56):
it is there was a distinct lack of expertise. He's
in that kind of thing for a very long time,
for the first several days of Floyd's encounter, Right, and
I guess we should introduce Skeets Huh. Yes, Now this
is the first time somebody comes outside with no expertise
but has the guts to be like, this man needs
to get out of there, and I'm gonna do what
(25:17):
I can. Right, Yeah, this is Skeets Miller. This is
three days into this debacle. He was a young kid.
He was well, he was twenty young to me, that
was like sixty back then, I guess probably so. He
was a reporter came down to Cave City on assignment
from the Louisville Courier Journal to cover this story. He
(25:37):
was a little guy. The joke was that he'd looked
like a mosquito. He was five five, weighed barely over
one hundred and ten pounds. So he was a little guy,
like you said, that had a lot of guts and also,
which is key, small enough to get into some of
these places that some of the larger dudes could not
get into. But he was a reporter and he was
(25:58):
going after the story, at least as at first. So
when he first went down there, he was going down
there to interview Floyd. And the reason why he decided
to do that was because he had tried to interview Homer,
who said something like, if you want information, there's the
hole right over there. You can go down and find
out for yourself. And so Skeet said, I'll take that
as permission, and he went down and interviewed Floyd Collins himself,
(26:21):
and in very short order, over the course of the
time Floyd was in this hole or in this cave,
Skeet just kept writing more and more stories, interviewing him
multiple times, and ended up winning a Pulitzer for his reporting.
He became as much a star as Floyd Collins did
in this saga because of his writing and because he
was basically doing gonzo journalism with a trapped man in
(26:44):
a cave. Yeah, and he also was the one saying
like he's in bad shape down there, right, Like these
reports of him being in good spirits aren't super accurate
because he's he looks like a guy that's been trapped
in a cave for three days. Right, That's what I
wanted to say. Like he started out going after the story,
(27:05):
but once he encountered Floyd in real life, he became
an actual rescuer as well. Yeah, he wanted to get
him out of there. He did things like developed a
bucket brigade system to get stuff out of there. He
brought a light down, well, he lit a lot of
the cave just so they could see better, but he
brought a light down to Floyd to keep him warm,
(27:26):
like a lightbulb, like legit electricity, to help keep him
on a little bit. Because remember it's freezing cold down there. Man,
I can't imagine sixteen degrees. Yeah, and this it was
over now a couple of weeks, like seventeen days. Little
Skeets Miller is getting down in that cave and trying
to rescue along with Homer and along with some other people,
(27:48):
like really dedicated to getting him out of there. Right.
So the thing is is Skeets writing these dispatches for
the Louisville Courier Journal, and it's starting to get picked
up by the Associated Press and the Associated presses sending
these out to newspapers all over the country, and all
of a sudden, Floyd Collins went from, as Dave puts it,
(28:10):
like this poor schmuck who was like trapped in a
cave to a national interests or human interest story that
just gripped the nation. And one of the reasons why
it was able to grip the nation was not just
because of the ap picking up skeets writing, but also
because radio was becoming a thing at the time. Not
(28:31):
everybody had a radio this early on, but enough people
did that there were like radio broadcasts done from the
cave site that were reaching people's homes all over the country.
So between the newspapers and the radio, it was just
the whole nation was enthralled with Floyd collins plight. Yeah,
it became it became a not only a media sensation,
(28:54):
but a local sort of carnival atmosphere. Like there were
thousands of people there that came to through the town
at least to see what was going on. I think
there were at least two thousand people at the cave site.
There's this website, this guy that had pictures of, you know,
of the scene at the cave entrance of the grounds
(29:16):
of the people in the cars, of people selling hot
dogs and hamburgers and balloons that said sand cave. And
it's it's crazy to see these black, old, black and
white photos of just how like, um, how crowded it
got in rural Kentucky by this cave entrance. Yeah, by
by all estimates, tens of thousands of people ended up
(29:37):
showing up over the course of this these couple weeks
that Floyd Collins ended up being stuck in the in
the ground. I saw ten thousand, I saw sixty thousand.
There was just a ton of people, and they came
from all over at a time when it wasn't that
easy to travel, but they were coming from out of state.
And I say, Chuck, we take a little break and
(29:58):
come back to this carn well that's growing up around
Floyd's hapless situation. Let's do it all right. So Floyd
(30:29):
is still trapped, They're getting some food down to him.
He is not doing well. There's a carnival atmosphere, like
we mentioned, kind of all over the place. And eventually
they did make a little bit of progress in the
with his buge bucket brigade, and that they cleared out
enough for him to be able to to move a
(30:51):
little bit for the first time. It cleared his arms,
it cleared his legs because stuff had collapsed beyond just
that either twenty six pound or seven ton boulder that
was on his foot. So he was, you know, fully
trapped for a long time, and then finally he was
able to move around a little bit. They he said
that he was freed at one point like that his
(31:12):
foot was even I guess he was delirious or miscommunicating,
because that foot was definitely not free. And the last
guy to bring him food was a minor named Maddox,
who brought him food that he ate. And he was
Floyd's delirious at this point and said, Maddox, get me out.
Why don't you take me out? Kiss me goodbye. I'm
(31:34):
going And apparently Maddox kissed him goodbye, which was a
very empathetic, sweet thing to do. And you know, heat
from all this work had thawed this frozen mud that
basically was acting like a mortar, and he just he
got more entangled and trapped than he was before. And
Maddox came out saying like he's dying, like very very soon.
(31:58):
Imagine being Maddox waking up in the middle of the
night for the next fifty years to Floyd Collins's voice saying, Maddox,
why don't you get me out? Yeah, that's awful, man,
especially to somebody that empathetic too, you know, sure so
right so, um as as after Maddox makes it out,
(32:19):
I don't believe anybody was any anywhere near the inside
of Saint Cave with Floyd at the time. But the
cave finally just collapsed in the way to get to
Floyd was now cut off hopelessly, and they had no
idea what had happened to Floyd. Was he covered up
in the cave in was it just cutting off their
their you know, their passage between them and him. They
(32:43):
just didn't know. And now finally, this is about day
five of poor Floyd Collins, already being a national American
media sensation. Um, finally, the governor of Kentucky's like, maybe
we should do something. And now the experts start to
show up. But they show up like just hopelessly too late.
(33:05):
Despite that, despite him being in there for five days
and him being totally cut off now with no access
to food or water or anything, they decided that they
were still going to do everything they could to get
him out, and the idea that was put forth that
everybody agreed on was to construct a shaft directly down
(33:27):
to him, I think, to his feet, and to get
him out that way, to get the bowlder off of
his foot, and to pull him back through the crack
one way or another. But the problem was chucked. This
was solid limestone and they couldn't use dynamite, right, Yeah,
they couldn't use dynamite. Dave said they couldn't use heavy
machinery at all. But I saw something that said that
they brought in to steam shovels, like ten thousand dollars
(33:52):
steam shovels. And at one point someone said, I think,
in a not too happy way, it's going to cost
one hundred thousand dollars to dig out a dead body,
because I think the writing was on the wall at
that point. But at any rate, they did dig. A
team of seventy five experts this time, built a five
story shaft into the ground. And you know, these guys
(34:16):
weren't in great shape either doing this hard work, right,
But they eventually get down there and what they find
is a dead Voyd Collins. Yeah, sadly, this was I
think day fifteen, maybe when they finally reached him. I
think eighteen days later is what it says, okay, And
he had gotten caved in on day four or five.
(34:38):
So there was a lot of people out there who
were like, yes, he's he's already dead, but we should
get him anyway, and some people were like, there's a chance,
you know, but there there wasn't. Just there weren't high
hopes for reaching him, and those hopes were not fulfilled anyway.
When they found him the corner I believe said that
he had he had died just three days before they
(34:59):
reached him, but that esteemed doctor that the heiress to
the International Harvester Fortune sent calculated more like five based
on the condition of Floyd's body. Yeah, but they had
the same problem that they had before, even in death.
They couldn't get that boulder off of his leg, and
they apparently it was enough of a problem to get
(35:22):
him out that they all agreed that they should basically
leave him down there, that this shaft or this this
crevice that he was stuck in was now his grave.
We bury people in the ground anyway. This was the
ground burying him prematurely. Essentially, is I guess what the
Kentucky reasoning was so um they everybody basically left. The
(35:43):
media circus was over, the news reports kind of moved
on to some other stuff, and the world just kind
of they didn't forget about Floyd Collins, but they had
other things that suddenly grabbed their immediate interest. Yeah, and
you know, as a sort of a sidebar, before they
(36:04):
found his dead body, there were rumors that started to
circulate because again people were printing things that weren't quite accurate,
and rumors started to circulate that that why am I
saying circulate? Weird? That's so weird? Circulate I'll saying circulate.
I like it. That's a new way to say it.
I think you're just evolving the English language. Anyway, the
(36:27):
rumors were that this was all a stunt to get
people there to go to his cave. That Floyd was
not trapped at all was sort of the main rumor,
and that he was orchestrating a hoax to drive people
there to pay money to go into the caves. There
were other rumors that abounded that maybe people blocked access
(36:47):
to the tunnel to delay the rescue, to kill him
so that they could get that real estate for the
cave because these cave wars were still going on, and
this all culmanated and eventually a a court, a military
tribunal even convene to see if this was in fact
a hoax. And I think this is all going on
before they finished the rescue. Yeah, I think this was
(37:11):
happening while they were digging that limestone shaft by hand,
essentially so, and they had plenty of time to do
it and no new news. Right, there was nobody talking
to Floyd anymore. So the newspapers were just printing whatever
they could get their hands on that had anything to
do with it, whether it was factual or not, which
has made our efforts that much harder. Thank you, old
(37:33):
timing newspapers. Right. Yeah, So B Doyle, who was the
guy that he went into business with, put up a
roadside sign that said, you know, two hundred yards away
is the body of Floyd Collins, imprisoned in Sand Cave.
And he would charge people fifty cents just to go
down and stand at the mouth of the cave above
(37:53):
the tomb. And I guess either pay their respects or
just gaulk or whatever draw a picture of it. Whatever
you did back then, as a tourist, right, Homer, And
this was admirable and sad. He hit the road on
the vaudeville stage to tell this story. And before like,
when I first saw that, I was like, it didn't
sound like a Homer Collins move right, seems like that's
(38:15):
not the Homer I know. Yeah, he seems like a
stand up either fourteen or twenty two year old. And
he was doing it to raise money to get him
out of there. He was like, I don't think that
should be his final resting place, so I'm gonna do
whatever I can to make enough money to fund a dig. Yeah.
The way I thought was that he had vowed to
Floyd that he would get him out of there, and
even though Floyd died, that didn't that didn't release him
(38:38):
from that vow in his mind. So that is pretty neat,
you know, especially because I think that the public idea,
or the later idea of him was that he had
been doing it for just money and fame or whatever.
But it worked, right, it did work. A couple months later,
he was able to pay for his brother to be
removed from that crevice, and so, as people do, they
(39:00):
put Floyd back in the ground. But at this time,
they put Floyd back in the ground in a much
more appropriate place, the family cemetery, and they actually used
to stalag tight or Mike, I can't remember as a
headstone form, which is super neat and appropriate for a
Floyd Collins headstone. I couldn't figure that out because I
saw the headstone. Did they just crush it and make
(39:22):
it into a headstone? I don't think that's the original
headstone that you saw. If it was, if it was
a color photo, I think that was the one that
came later, Okay, But how would they make a headstone
out of a stalactite anyway? Hey, those Kentucky people are industrious.
They can do anything they put their minds to, except
for get Floyd Collins out of the ground. Oh boy.
(39:42):
So tourists kind of stopped coming around because a lot
of the reason was because of this story. They were
like this champion caver or died down there, Like, maybe
we shouldn't spend our spring break caving in Kentucky anymore.
And so they sold the Great His family sold the
Great Crystal Cave, that initial cave that was gorgeous to
(40:04):
a dentist named Harry Thomas, who said throwing an extra
ten grand and that's a that's a lot of money
back then, Yeah, especially if like you, Yeah, your ticket
booth is bigger than your house. Yeah, so just keep
that in mind before you prejudge the family for what
they agreed to. He said, for an extra ten grand,
if you'll let me exume his body and put it
(40:25):
on display in a glass coffin in that cave in
a you know, respectful way, then we got a deal.
And they needed the money and they said yes. Yeah.
So for more than sixty years Floyd Collins was in
a glass coffin in the Great Crystal Cave. Beneath I
(40:48):
believe that salagtite or slagmite headstone with the engraving greatest
cave explorer ever known. And for the first at least
fifteen year. I think if you're a tourist and you
went to the Mammoth Caves, you probably made an extra
trip to the Great Crystal Cave to go see Floyd
collins super embalmed corpse through the glass window in his
(41:14):
in his um casket right just playing there in the
in the I think a chamber of the Great Crystal
Cave and actually slight in show correction. The body did
not stay there for that long uninterrupted. Okay. In March
of nineteen twenty nine, his body was stolen by grave robbers.
(41:35):
Apparently their intent was to toss it in the East River,
or I'm sorry, the Green River. They're gonna drive to
New York, toss it in the East River. Yeah, they're
gonna hit Cramer swimming. But it got caught in some
underbrush and they couldn't get the body out. Doctor Thomas
recovered the body in a field. Sal's leg so the
leg that was trapped was no longer there and I
(41:57):
don't think anyone knows where that leg ended up. But
then he doctor Thomas reinterred it, this time in a
chain locked up casket back in the cave. Yeah, and
that's where he stayed for decades. The thing is, the
National Park Service came in and bought the place in
nineteen sixty one. So yeah, for about thirty years you
(42:18):
could go visit Floyd Collins body in the Great Crystal Cave.
But once the MPs took over, they honored the family's
wishes not by removing him from the cave, but by
closing off public access to the cave. So for all
intentsive purposes. He was no longer something for tourists to
gawk at, even though he was still down in this cave,
(42:39):
and the family didn't want him in there anymore. So
it wasn't until nineteen eighty nine that I believe a
court ordered his body to be removed and finally interred
once again in the ground top side, and that's where
he remains today. And I believe, Chuck that they put
him in the ground on March twenty fourth, nineteen eighty nine,
(43:02):
which is right around the anniversary of that internment, when
this episode's coming out, I think, and right after my
eighteenth birthday senior year of high school. Awesome, man, I'm
surprised I didn't hear the news. Oh yeah, your birthday
is coming up, isn't it IDEs of March it is.
(43:23):
I'll never forget Chuck. So that's the story they ended up.
Billy Wilder, famous film director and writer. I made a
film called Ace in the Whole that basically was an
indictment on the media surrounding this event, starring a youngish
Kirk Douglas as the as not skeeter as as a
(43:46):
bad newspaper reporter. Two things have you ever seen Witness
for the Prosecution, written by Billy Wilder. I think I have,
but it's been a long time. I just saw it
for the first time the other day. It's one of
the best movies I've ever seen. He's I mean, he's
one of the best. You ever seen The Apartment, I haven't.
I have seen Sunset Bolivard plenty of times. It's a
(44:06):
great movie. To the Apartment's amazing. And that was Scott
Ackerman's movie Crush Pick Oh, okay. And then the second thing, Chuck,
is that there was actually a musical that was made.
I think it first was put on in nineteen ninety six.
It's called Floyd Collins. I'm surprised to see that. I
have an impression it was in the same vein as
that musical that the um how the South Park creators
(44:30):
came up with about the cannibal in Colorado. Oh, the
Book of Mormon, No, this was a different one. It
was before Book of Mormon. I thought this was like
a respectful thing. I didn't know it was a communic
it was. It was, That's what I was gonna say.
It was much more respectful, but it was. There was
a lot of I think the basis of it was
a comedy musical. Oh interesting, what's funny about this? I
(44:52):
don't know. But the cool thing is is the guy
who wrote them, the words and lyrics, I think the
whole thing basically he got an hour in the cave.
It was. It was opened up for him specially, and
he did a lot of research and actually an analysis
of the play by Scott Miller informed some of this episode.
(45:14):
It was one of the sources we used. He did
that much research on it. I think they were the
ones that said his brother was fourteen. So I take
a show. Really, you know, I'm conflicted. Who knows? I mean?
But back then the difference between fourteen and twenty two is, well,
it's half your life. Actually, I guess you got anything else?
I got nothing else? R I p Floyd Collins. We're
(45:35):
sorry that that happened to you, Floyd. And since Chuck
says he's got nothing else, it means his time for
listener mail. I'm gonna call this great naming convention. Hey guys,
a longtime listener to the show. I'm finishing my masters
in a couple of months, and I want to say
thank you for keeping me entertained. Through a move to
a new state, long hours of tedious work in my
(45:57):
community campus. Every day. I had to stop listening in
the library because I laughed out loud every episode. I
really enjoyed your nap episode. My brother has been an
advocate for coffee naps for years and coined a term
that I think is pretty great. Did you see this?
You're ready for this? No, I haven't seen that one yet.
I'm not ready. No, the nappaccino, Oh that is good?
(46:19):
How great is that? Not a napper myself, but I
think everyone should use this term. That is from Madison Madison.
Whoever your brother is, need to name your brother, but
just tell him that that's pretty great. A pretty great
title it is. It definitely beats the two I was
working on, the flat nap yeah or the napata. Neither
(46:42):
one of those is nearly as good as nappuccino. I'll
tell you that the No. Number one. You know, what
would happened? What would happen, Chuck? If Alpaccino took a nappuccino,
you would say that was a great nap. Okay, If
you want to get in touch with us like who
(47:02):
Madison Madison did with some great information about your sibling.
We want to hear it. You can email to us
at stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should
Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my
heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(47:24):
you listen to your favorite shows.
Dude, doo doo doo. I just told Josh's trumpet bit
announced that we are continuing our twenty twenty three tour
this spring by going to DC, the Boston area and Toronto,
Canada yep, in that same order, May fourth, fifth, and sixth,
and you can get tickets at Link Tree Slash sy
sk Live for all three shows. We'll see you guys soon.
(00:25):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, and that makes this Stuff you
should Know part of our continuing sad Kentucky tragic history
(00:46):
era that we seem to be in right now. Are
we going to point out where this is fifteen times? No,
this is this is in the Kentucky that you'd expect
it to be in. Okay, we had some funny Instagram
comments on that. I know what you're talking about about.
Half the people when the supper club fire thing went
to Instagram said where was this again? Jodsh No, I know,
(01:08):
I'm just kidding. Okay, I'm just kidding. I'm aware of
what goes on on Instagram. Who knows, I don't know
you're one of those lurkers. Yeah, totally, I totally am
so m speaking of lurking, Chuck Es, if you go
to Barron County, Kentucky, okay, one of the things that
you might do is a pastime is lurk in a cave. Hey,
(01:30):
look at that transition. It was okay. But the reason
why you might do that is because Barron County and
neighboring I think Edmonton or Edmondson County our home to
the largest cave system in the world, Mammoth Caves. Yeah,
we talked about Mammoth and I guess it had to
be our caving episode. Certainly, there's no way you can.
(01:51):
I mean again, it's enormous, Like, as far as we know,
I think something like four hundred miles have been mapped. Yeah,
and I was reading we have a lot. We have
an enslaved man back in the eighteen twenties up to
the forties to thank for a lot of that, because
he was the only one brave enough to crawl over
the bottomless pit and keep exploring. So that definitely extended it.
(02:13):
But they think also that there's another six hundred miles.
By the way, his name is Stephen Bishop. Sorry I
meant to say, but they think there's another six hundred
miles left to be mapped. So that's a giant old
cave system. Yeah, potentially a thousand miles of gave system stuff. Yes,
Now I have a desire to go in almost none
of it. Yeah, I know, you know, but I have
(02:34):
to say, like Ruby Falls is definitely worth the visit
for sure. Yeah. I mean my deal is I did
it once and it was really cool. I would go back,
but I'm not, you know, dying too. I'm kind of like,
you know, I know what it's like now, and that's
all I really wanted to know. Yes, I was looking
for a new hobby. The thing is, though, is if
you're into caves caving, even if you're not like a caver,
but you're, you know, into touring caves, you know that
(02:57):
you can stand up in and there's walkways in every
short Mammoth cave is an absolute must. It's just like
Geological Wonder. After Geological Wonder, it's pretty neat. Yeah, you
like your caves to have an energy drink fridge at
the bottom of it, that's right, and a moving side one.
It is a National park now since nineteen I think
forty one Mammoth is and it was a big like
(03:20):
and remains a big tourist attraction, but all the way
dating back to the Civil War, and as a result,
that whole area became cave central, not just because Mammoth Caves,
but there's so many other cave systems around there, and
it became like a legitimate sort of roadside not only stop,
but destination for people. And the people that you know
(03:43):
was like, Hey, i'll pay me a dollar or fifty
cents or whatever and I'll take you down in these caves.
They started battling each other more and more of these
locals trying to drum up business for caves they had
the rights to explore, and that was known as the
Kentucky Cave Wars. Yes, and it was basically just entrepreneurs
run amuck in Kentucky. They would burn one another's cars,
(04:07):
They would put bowlders on the road to keep tourists
from being able to make it to the other cave locations.
They would pose as tourists and talk about how terrible
one cave was. It was free yelped, so that was
their live, live yelping. And then another thing they would
do is tell the tourists that they were all the
same caves. They were just different entrances. So it's all
(04:27):
the same. Just come to mind, wow, which is sort
of true in a way kind of, but I think
not really. Yeah, I mean that doesn't mean they're all connected,
but oh they are. Well, what I mean is that
you can access It's like you can't get there from
here kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. And also I think
each entrance is like, this is for all intents and purposes,
it is a completely separate cave system. Right, This is
(04:49):
my whole which I told you that there's something I
thought you were using hole as an adjective now that
that was the weirdest thing about when I went caving,
and I'll just quickly say it again, is that I
expected some big cartoon like thing that you just walk
into and start exploring. I did not realize you could
(05:12):
literally walk by a cave entrance in the woods and
not notice it because it's a two by two foot
hole in the ground, and that makes caves exponentially scarier
more sure, you know. Oh yeah, when I saw that thing,
I was like, that's where we're going, because that means
the people coming to help you could walk right past
it too, and it's just I mean, it's just tampering
with the pits of Hell. I don't I don't agree
(05:33):
with that. So our story moves on now to one
of the great cavers of the region. There were a
lot of great cavers, but one was a gentleman named
Floyd Collins, who if you look him up, he looks
a bit like Crispin Glover and sort of the same
way that almost all rural white men in Kentucky in
their early nineteen hundreds look like Crispin Glover. Yeah, he
(05:55):
just sort of had that generic Kentucky guy look. Well,
the cut hairdo, the shemp he had definitely helps a
lot too. So he was born in eighteen eighty seven,
had a bunch of brothers and sisters from his mom
and then a previous marriage that his father had lee. Yeah,
and they were really close to the Mammoth Caves about
(06:16):
four years old. So from the time he was a
little kid, like six years old, he was out there
caving and doing his thing like you would when you're
six in nineteen o seven or whatever. Yeah, Plus there
was not a lot else to do, Like if you
were a farmer, you were eking out a really hard
living in this area. Apparently the soil wasn't very helpful
(06:37):
because again because astone cave system, right, so it's kind
of tough to grow things on bare limestone. And so
what Floyd Collins figured out very quickly is that there
were a lot of Native American indigenous artifacts, including remains,
in these caves, and that he could take these things
(06:57):
out of the caves and go to the Mammoth Cave Hotel,
this huge hotel that was built expressly for the tourists,
and sell them to those tourists. And he was so
profitable that he dropped out of school at age ten
to pursue his looting activities full time. Yeah, which, you know, um,
I'm not going to judge the guy from here in
twenty twenty three for being a ten year old trying
(07:20):
to make a living. Yeah neither. Yeah. Ye, surprising word, no,
of course, it's surprised to keep everybody on their toes um.
So fast forward a bit. It's nineteen seventeen now and
Floyd Collins is still doing his his caving. He's still
one of the foremost experts in the region, and he
found a new system or at least, no one had
(07:42):
discovered this system as far as he knew, and it
was really beautiful. It had these almost marble like walls,
is how Dave Ruce put it. Dave helped us with this,
and it was just one of the more gorgeous caves
on the inside, and so he named it the Great
Crystal Cave and told his he said, hey, we need
to scrape together what money we have so we can
(08:04):
lease this land, because this thing is going to be
our meal tickets. It's prettier than any of the other
caves around. Yeah. He went in halfers with his dad,
Lee and another man by the last name of Gerard,
and they basically developed this Great Crystal Cave, which was
a wonderful fine. He was incredibly lucky to have come
upon this cave and be able to get the rights
(08:25):
to it. There was a huge problem with it though,
it never became really financially successful because it was at
the other end of the cave system, so by that
you really had to know that it was there and
want to go there. If you were just a tourist
wandering around visiting caves, there was very little chance you're
going to end up there accidentally. And then what with
(08:46):
this being the Cave Wars and everybody who was a
competitor of his, but also we're probably neighbors and second cousins.
By the way, they were doing everything they could to
keep those tourists from making their way back to Great
Crystal Cave. So it's great a cave as it was,
it just wasn't viable. Yeah, the big city guy came
in and said, son, you'd never learned the first rule
(09:07):
of business, location, location, location, And Floyd went, why are
you saying location three times? Yeah, yeah, it's sad, but true.
That's a direct quote everybody, it really is. So now
they're in a situation where Floyd says, all right, that
this didn't quite work out, But now they're in a
situation where they're kind of even more desperate than before
(09:28):
to find some means of revenue. So he set out
to find another amazing cave and a better location, and
he found one that wasn't quite so amazing as far
as is aesthetics go, but it was on Cave City
Road before you even got to Mammoth. So that was like,
that's the location, location, location that he didn't understand that
(09:51):
he needed, but right got it. That's how that's how
important it was that you could have a so so cave.
But if the entrance was on the weight of the
bigger caves than you had, you had a gym mine
even if there were no gems in the cave, because
you could lie and say there are right, Say it's
the same entrance or the different entrance to the same thing. Right.
(10:11):
So yeah, he went into business with a different guy,
a man named B. Doyle Beasley Doyle and another man
named ed Estes, and Doyle and Stes went half on
their half, and they said that they would give Floyd
the other half if he would explore and develop this
cave so that they could start taking tourists down in it.
(10:34):
And so Floyd Collins is being I haven't seen it
expressly written out, but he spent so much time in
caves from such a young age, and he had been
at it for so long and had become such a
respected caver that I suspect this is the one. Like
when he woke up, the one thing he wanted to
(10:54):
do was go into caves, like he just loved what
he was doing. So this is probably like a dream
gig for him too. Yeah, But he started exploring this
cave and started to develop it. But he ran into
a problem very early. You mentioned that this cave was
not so great as far as caves go, right, Yeah,
and we didn't mention it was called sand cave. And
(11:14):
it was called sand cave for a reason because it
was not solid limestone like you know, most of the
rest of these caves, which made it, you know, pretty
tourist friendly to walk around, kind of like you would
have a ruby falls, let's say, the smooth limestone. Yeah,
the good stuff. This is actually loose rock and muddy sand.
(11:35):
So sand Cave is is an apt name. And Floyd
was like, I've got to make this work, though, Like
I'm even more desperate than I was before because now
signed onto this thing, and so I'm gonna, like, there's
good stuff down there that's deeper. I just have to
carve out a passageway that's safe enough to get tourists
in here. And so he did that for weeks and
(11:58):
weeks and weeks, working all our days clearing out and
it was you know, it was really cold at the time,
clearing out this mud and ice and water and rock
and trying to build what looked like a legitimate entrance way. Yeah,
which I mean I think his premise was that he
would if he if he dug enough of this stuff out,
he would reach those smooth limestone walls. Eventually. It was
(12:21):
just going to take some extra work, right, Yeah, And
he was down to work. He was dtw and you
keep making mention like he really needed this. Um. I
mean he was able to like make ends meet here
or there. I think he and his brother like chopped
timber for the railroad ties to the local lines that
were built. Like again, Mammoth Caves was such an enormous attraction.
There was a special railroad line that was established and
(12:44):
built just to take people to this, Right, so there
was some money to be made. But to say that
Floyd Collins and his eight siblings were poor as an understatement.
I saw a picture of the house that the siblings
all lived in with their parents, and the ticket booth
for Great Crystal Cave, and the ticket booth is slightly
bigger than the house, Like it is like they were
(13:08):
they were. Yeah, they live basically hand to mouth to
say the least. Yeah, so this needed to work. That's
why you put in all this work painstakingly digging this
passage and eventually on January thirty, nineteen twenty five, he said,
all right, I've got an opening here, and I believe
(13:28):
I can get down to the depths that I so desire.
And he did. He got down about fifty feet deep
and then came to a ten foot drop that's shaped
like a chimney, So it's a ten foot shoot that
he can go down. And at the bottom of this shoot,
it kind of makes not the hardest L, but it
(13:49):
would like a soft L shape to where it goes horizontal.
But that horizontal opening was not very big. It was
just enough for Floyd to like get down there on
his back, go in kind of feet first, with the
top of the the shoot like inches above his face. Yeah,
(14:10):
he was in this crack. So the chimney itself was
not like exactly like a drop. He had to kind
of shimmy down it, but with that crack was like
a whole other thing altogether. He couldn't take a full
breath in there. We shoko a warning a trigger warning
for people that suffer from claustrophobia, because yeah, I don't
even and a lot of this felt like I was
(14:31):
about to have a panic attack. Yeah, I have a
vague sense of claustrophobia. It takes a lot to trigger it,
Like just hearing about the stuff, I'm like, oh my gosh,
but I can handle it. But I'll bet there's people
out there who sure couldn't even hear this, So way
to go chalk. Yeah, So that CoA and another one,
which is when you're dealing with old stories like this,
we found that there are a lot of facts that
(14:51):
get mixed up depending on what sorts you're using. So yeah,
we're doing our best moving forward. Well, also, like we're
in the age where we've really just woken up to
the fact that back in the twenties, say, newspapers would
print whatever, and we've long been like, well it was
in the newspaper, so it's probably well researched, not true, necessarily,
(15:13):
not at all. So he's sliding through this crack and
you're probably getting pretty nervous, but hold on to that
because he makes it through the crack and on the
other side he finds a big I think like fifty
foot deep room, a big chamber, and this is what
he's been looking for. This is the kind of stuff
tourists want to see. And he starts exploring it. He's
repelling down and I think it's I don't even know
(15:36):
if he made it to the bottom or not, but
his lantern started flickering, and that is a sign if
you are exploring a cave for the first time, to
go to get out of the cave. So that's what
he did. He was a smart guy. He wasn't dumb.
He was he was very gutsy, but he didn't like
just you know, he wasn't. He didn't gamble with his
life for no reason. Yeah, he knew what he was doing. Yes,
(15:58):
So he crawled back up the rope, took his lamp
with him, and started to make his way back through
the crack. He was oriented the same way that he
was going in, so he went in feet first. This
time he went in head first. Yeah, and he made it.
I believe his head made it out when he kind
of kicked into the ground to kind of give himself
(16:20):
purchase to push himself the rest of the way through
the crack. When he did that, he moved some some dirt,
some sand, and I've seen up to a seven ton boulder,
came down from the ceiling and lodged his foot in
place firmly. It was not. He was not moving anymore,
and he was stuck in this crack hopelessly. Yeah, and
(16:41):
that's one great example. I saw seven ton, and then
everywhere else I saw twenty six pounds. Big. I mean,
could you really not like shimmy a twenty seven pound
Maybe not in a crack like that, I mean twenty
six pounds on a foot in a crack. And we
should mention too, that his lamp went out while he
(17:02):
was in there, and again I saw various things from that.
It finally flickered out to he accidentally kicked it out,
kicked it over and made it go out. So now
he is laying there with his arms by his side,
stuck in this crevice, in the complete blackness. And Dave
pointed out and I can verify, and if you've ever
(17:24):
been caving, it is a blackness like you've never understood
before in your life. I don't want to understand that.
It is the blackest of black. You literally cannot see
your hand in front of your face. So he's, you know,
literally laying there in pitch blackness, which he's sort of
used to because he's I'm sure he's been without a
(17:45):
light before in a cave and gotten out of it,
but he was in a bad way. He was, and
he wasn't panicking because he knew that he was right
almost at the base of that chimney and that if
he could get to the chimney, not only could he
relight his lamp, he could shimmy up the chimney easily.
So he was almost there. But the problem was again
that rock, whether it was twenty seven pounds or seven tons,
(18:07):
wasn't letting him go. And so Floyd Collins was alone
in the dark traps in a crack, and no one
knew he was down there. Yeah, and before we go
to break, because I know this where we're headed. The
final little cherry on top of danger danger cherry is
it's sixteen degrees. Very nice, Chuck, all right, we'll be
right back, so Chuck, before we get started again, I
(18:51):
want to shout out a source. There's an article from
nineteen seventy six in American Heritage magazine, a great history
source by Michael Leasy L. S Y. And he actually
was the guy who wrote or compiled Wisconsin Death Trip
a few years before he wrote that article, and it's
(19:12):
called Dark Carnival, and it is really worth a read.
But he got all of his sources directly from newspapers,
so basically every word he wrote had been reported in
the newspaper somehow or some way. So that is probably
why that's the only source for the seven ton. It
was probably misreported, but he's still a pretty good source
(19:33):
for facts. He's a professional historian, so he knew what
he was doing. But he was also really fascinating too.
All Right, so he's down there, no one knows he's
there for a while. He was known to disappear for
you know, many hours and days exploring these caves, so
it's not like the people got too concerned at first.
It would be twenty five hours before anyone even knew
(19:55):
anything was going on with him, and that was when
the Sun of Sts his name was Jewel, pretty cool name,
seventeen year old went to go check. He'd kind of
been hanging out with Floyd and caving with him, and
I think Floyd even said like, you know, I could
die in here to the guy the day or two before.
(20:16):
And he's the one who went down there called out
for Floyd and heard Floyd call back that he was
hung up and needed help. Right, So this is good,
I mean it's been a full day, but at least
now somebody knows he's down there. So juel Estes runs
back and starts getting help, and I think in very
short order, word got to his brother, Homer, who I
(20:38):
guess younger brother because I think Floyd was thirty at
the time, and I think Homer was twenty two or fourteen,
depending on where he can I hadn't seen fourteen, so Homer,
either way, he rushed. I get the impression that he
was a man by then, so I'm gonna say twenty two, okay.
But he rushed to the site and basically became the
first person who was willing to actually go in and
(21:01):
try to rescue Floyd. There are other people who had
given it a shot before Homer arrived, but they apparently
that chimney scared every single one of them off. They
were like, I'm sorry, I'm I like Floyd a lot,
but that's I'm not going through that chimney. Yeah. So
he shows up, says, Floyd's like, can I get some
food first and foremost, so his brother said, sure, here's
(21:25):
the worst thing possible you could eat when you're pinned
in a cave. Here's some sausage and coffee. Yeah, so
let's get that heart rate up ensure that you're gonna
have to urinate, and then just the sausage is just
a bonus, yeah, just to fill you up. Yeah, and
to make that really flow. But he had food. I'm
(21:46):
kind of kidding around here. This is what people ate
back then. So he just needed some some calories in
his body. And Homer was down there working hard, trying
everything he could do to get him loose. Every time
he dug rubble out, more rubble would fall down where
that rubble was. He brought a crowbar back to try
and dislodge some bigger stones. Nothing was working. He's exhausted
(22:11):
and cold. At this point, he's offering up like advice
is coming in from around the country by this point,
like word had gotten out of like how to do it.
He's offering to pay surgeons five hundred dollars to go
down there and cut his foot off. And I think
one surgeon was actually debating whether or not to do it. Yeah.
I think he was sent by the heiress to the
(22:32):
International Harvester Fortune. He got sent to the scene. She
paid for him to go there. It's nice, yeah, it was.
It was very nice. I mean, she was very concerned,
and apparently he was one of the best surgeons in
America and he ended up becoming one of the medical
advisors during this time. But he did not go down
and cut his foot off because he couldn't reach his
foot anyway, there's no way. But they were saying, well,
(22:52):
we could also put ropes around him and pull him
out and just cut his foot off like that. Yeah,
not a good idea, and they didn't actually do it,
but that was definitely on the table for a while. Yeah,
And they were also you know, this is a really
sort of sad part of this is there were people
that were volunteering to go down and bring him blankets
and food and stuff, and they would go down and
(23:14):
come back and say, his season, good spirits, he's got
the food and blankets. And then later when other people
would go down to check things out, they would find
that food and blankets to sort of cast aside and
stuffed and cracks, and that people were too scared to
go down there, and I guess too scared to admit it. Yeah,
so there you go. There's there's a couple of things
(23:35):
that we've just hit upon. I think bear pointing out
one is that people are taking blankets down and then
not actually doing it, so we don't actually have any
like professional rescuers right now. And then secondly, like his
brother is the first person who's willing to get down
there and give him some food. And if you take
a step back, you realize, like this is a it's
(23:55):
a big problem for Floyd Collins. But at this point,
and for a really shockingly long time, it was basically
a local problem. The people who were in charge of
rescuing Floyd were the same people who were um his
competitors in the cave tourism business. It was just locals
trying to figure out what to do. Yeah, and didn't
(24:15):
the I'm sorry, the son of one of the former
partners who was a good trusted friend he got involved
as well, right, Juel Estes was the son, not Jules
the Burnette. I didn't see him. Yeah, Johnny Burnette put
heat factored in pretty heavily as far as because he
(24:36):
was a trusted person to Floyd. So Floyd told him like,
you're the only person I like trust to get me
out of here. Oh okay, wow, so so um yeah.
So so there were people who were like really trying
to do this. They had the best intentions, they just
didn't necessarily know what to do. And the upshot of
(24:56):
it is there was a distinct lack of expertise. He's
in that kind of thing for a very long time,
for the first several days of Floyd's encounter, Right, and
I guess we should introduce Skeets Huh. Yes, Now this
is the first time somebody comes outside with no expertise
but has the guts to be like, this man needs
to get out of there, and I'm gonna do what
(25:17):
I can. Right, Yeah, this is Skeets Miller. This is
three days into this debacle. He was a young kid.
He was well, he was twenty young to me, that
was like sixty back then, I guess probably so. He
was a reporter came down to Cave City on assignment
from the Louisville Courier Journal to cover this story. He
(25:37):
was a little guy. The joke was that he'd looked
like a mosquito. He was five five, weighed barely over
one hundred and ten pounds. So he was a little guy,
like you said, that had a lot of guts and also,
which is key, small enough to get into some of
these places that some of the larger dudes could not
get into. But he was a reporter and he was
(25:58):
going after the story, at least as at first. So
when he first went down there, he was going down
there to interview Floyd. And the reason why he decided
to do that was because he had tried to interview Homer,
who said something like, if you want information, there's the
hole right over there. You can go down and find
out for yourself. And so Skeet said, I'll take that
as permission, and he went down and interviewed Floyd Collins himself,
(26:21):
and in very short order, over the course of the
time Floyd was in this hole or in this cave,
Skeet just kept writing more and more stories, interviewing him
multiple times, and ended up winning a Pulitzer for his reporting.
He became as much a star as Floyd Collins did
in this saga because of his writing and because he
was basically doing gonzo journalism with a trapped man in
(26:44):
a cave. Yeah, and he also was the one saying
like he's in bad shape down there, right, Like these
reports of him being in good spirits aren't super accurate
because he's he looks like a guy that's been trapped
in a cave for three days. Right, That's what I
wanted to say. Like he started out going after the story,
(27:05):
but once he encountered Floyd in real life, he became
an actual rescuer as well. Yeah, he wanted to get
him out of there. He did things like developed a
bucket brigade system to get stuff out of there. He
brought a light down, well, he lit a lot of
the cave just so they could see better, but he
brought a light down to Floyd to keep him warm,
(27:26):
like a lightbulb, like legit electricity, to help keep him
on a little bit. Because remember it's freezing cold down there. Man,
I can't imagine sixteen degrees. Yeah, and this it was
over now a couple of weeks, like seventeen days. Little
Skeets Miller is getting down in that cave and trying
to rescue along with Homer and along with some other people,
(27:48):
like really dedicated to getting him out of there. Right.
So the thing is is Skeets writing these dispatches for
the Louisville Courier Journal, and it's starting to get picked
up by the Associated Press and the Associated presses sending
these out to newspapers all over the country, and all
of a sudden, Floyd Collins went from, as Dave puts it,
(28:10):
like this poor schmuck who was like trapped in a
cave to a national interests or human interest story that
just gripped the nation. And one of the reasons why
it was able to grip the nation was not just
because of the ap picking up skeets writing, but also
because radio was becoming a thing at the time. Not
(28:31):
everybody had a radio this early on, but enough people
did that there were like radio broadcasts done from the
cave site that were reaching people's homes all over the country.
So between the newspapers and the radio, it was just
the whole nation was enthralled with Floyd collins plight. Yeah,
it became it became a not only a media sensation,
(28:54):
but a local sort of carnival atmosphere. Like there were
thousands of people there that came to through the town
at least to see what was going on. I think
there were at least two thousand people at the cave site.
There's this website, this guy that had pictures of, you know,
of the scene at the cave entrance of the grounds
(29:16):
of the people in the cars, of people selling hot
dogs and hamburgers and balloons that said sand cave. And
it's it's crazy to see these black, old, black and
white photos of just how like, um, how crowded it
got in rural Kentucky by this cave entrance. Yeah, by
by all estimates, tens of thousands of people ended up
(29:37):
showing up over the course of this these couple weeks
that Floyd Collins ended up being stuck in the in
the ground. I saw ten thousand, I saw sixty thousand.
There was just a ton of people, and they came
from all over at a time when it wasn't that
easy to travel, but they were coming from out of state.
And I say, Chuck, we take a little break and
(29:58):
come back to this carn well that's growing up around
Floyd's hapless situation. Let's do it all right. So Floyd
(30:29):
is still trapped, They're getting some food down to him.
He is not doing well. There's a carnival atmosphere, like
we mentioned, kind of all over the place. And eventually
they did make a little bit of progress in the
with his buge bucket brigade, and that they cleared out
enough for him to be able to to move a
(30:51):
little bit for the first time. It cleared his arms,
it cleared his legs because stuff had collapsed beyond just
that either twenty six pound or seven ton boulder that
was on his foot. So he was, you know, fully
trapped for a long time, and then finally he was
able to move around a little bit. They he said
that he was freed at one point like that his
(31:12):
foot was even I guess he was delirious or miscommunicating,
because that foot was definitely not free. And the last
guy to bring him food was a minor named Maddox,
who brought him food that he ate. And he was
Floyd's delirious at this point and said, Maddox, get me out.
Why don't you take me out? Kiss me goodbye. I'm
(31:34):
going And apparently Maddox kissed him goodbye, which was a
very empathetic, sweet thing to do. And you know, heat
from all this work had thawed this frozen mud that
basically was acting like a mortar, and he just he
got more entangled and trapped than he was before. And
Maddox came out saying like he's dying, like very very soon.
(31:58):
Imagine being Maddox waking up in the middle of the
night for the next fifty years to Floyd Collins's voice saying, Maddox,
why don't you get me out? Yeah, that's awful, man,
especially to somebody that empathetic too, you know, sure so
right so, um as as after Maddox makes it out,
(32:19):
I don't believe anybody was any anywhere near the inside
of Saint Cave with Floyd at the time. But the
cave finally just collapsed in the way to get to
Floyd was now cut off hopelessly, and they had no
idea what had happened to Floyd. Was he covered up
in the cave in was it just cutting off their
their you know, their passage between them and him. They
(32:43):
just didn't know. And now finally, this is about day
five of poor Floyd Collins, already being a national American
media sensation. Um, finally, the governor of Kentucky's like, maybe
we should do something. And now the experts start to
show up. But they show up like just hopelessly too late.
(33:05):
Despite that, despite him being in there for five days
and him being totally cut off now with no access
to food or water or anything, they decided that they
were still going to do everything they could to get
him out, and the idea that was put forth that
everybody agreed on was to construct a shaft directly down
(33:27):
to him, I think, to his feet, and to get
him out that way, to get the bowlder off of
his foot, and to pull him back through the crack
one way or another. But the problem was chucked. This
was solid limestone and they couldn't use dynamite, right, Yeah,
they couldn't use dynamite. Dave said they couldn't use heavy
machinery at all. But I saw something that said that
they brought in to steam shovels, like ten thousand dollars
(33:52):
steam shovels. And at one point someone said, I think,
in a not too happy way, it's going to cost
one hundred thousand dollars to dig out a dead body,
because I think the writing was on the wall at
that point. But at any rate, they did dig. A
team of seventy five experts this time, built a five
story shaft into the ground. And you know, these guys
(34:16):
weren't in great shape either doing this hard work, right,
But they eventually get down there and what they find
is a dead Voyd Collins. Yeah, sadly, this was I
think day fifteen, maybe when they finally reached him. I
think eighteen days later is what it says, okay, And
he had gotten caved in on day four or five.
(34:38):
So there was a lot of people out there who
were like, yes, he's he's already dead, but we should
get him anyway, and some people were like, there's a chance,
you know, but there there wasn't. Just there weren't high
hopes for reaching him, and those hopes were not fulfilled anyway.
When they found him the corner I believe said that
he had he had died just three days before they
(34:59):
reached him, but that esteemed doctor that the heiress to
the International Harvester Fortune sent calculated more like five based
on the condition of Floyd's body. Yeah, but they had
the same problem that they had before, even in death.
They couldn't get that boulder off of his leg, and
they apparently it was enough of a problem to get
(35:22):
him out that they all agreed that they should basically
leave him down there, that this shaft or this this
crevice that he was stuck in was now his grave.
We bury people in the ground anyway. This was the
ground burying him prematurely. Essentially, is I guess what the
Kentucky reasoning was so um they everybody basically left. The
(35:43):
media circus was over, the news reports kind of moved
on to some other stuff, and the world just kind
of they didn't forget about Floyd Collins, but they had
other things that suddenly grabbed their immediate interest. Yeah, and
you know, as a sort of a sidebar, before they
(36:04):
found his dead body, there were rumors that started to
circulate because again people were printing things that weren't quite accurate,
and rumors started to circulate that that why am I
saying circulate? Weird? That's so weird? Circulate I'll saying circulate.
I like it. That's a new way to say it.
I think you're just evolving the English language. Anyway, the
(36:27):
rumors were that this was all a stunt to get
people there to go to his cave. That Floyd was
not trapped at all was sort of the main rumor,
and that he was orchestrating a hoax to drive people
there to pay money to go into the caves. There
were other rumors that abounded that maybe people blocked access
(36:47):
to the tunnel to delay the rescue, to kill him
so that they could get that real estate for the
cave because these cave wars were still going on, and
this all culmanated and eventually a a court, a military
tribunal even convene to see if this was in fact
a hoax. And I think this is all going on
before they finished the rescue. Yeah, I think this was
(37:11):
happening while they were digging that limestone shaft by hand,
essentially so, and they had plenty of time to do
it and no new news. Right, there was nobody talking
to Floyd anymore. So the newspapers were just printing whatever
they could get their hands on that had anything to
do with it, whether it was factual or not, which
has made our efforts that much harder. Thank you, old
(37:33):
timing newspapers. Right. Yeah, So B Doyle, who was the
guy that he went into business with, put up a
roadside sign that said, you know, two hundred yards away
is the body of Floyd Collins, imprisoned in Sand Cave.
And he would charge people fifty cents just to go
down and stand at the mouth of the cave above
(37:53):
the tomb. And I guess either pay their respects or
just gaulk or whatever draw a picture of it. Whatever
you did back then, as a tourist, right, Homer, And
this was admirable and sad. He hit the road on
the vaudeville stage to tell this story. And before like,
when I first saw that, I was like, it didn't
sound like a Homer Collins move right, seems like that's
(38:15):
not the Homer I know. Yeah, he seems like a
stand up either fourteen or twenty two year old. And
he was doing it to raise money to get him
out of there. He was like, I don't think that
should be his final resting place, so I'm gonna do
whatever I can to make enough money to fund a dig. Yeah.
The way I thought was that he had vowed to
Floyd that he would get him out of there, and
even though Floyd died, that didn't that didn't release him
(38:38):
from that vow in his mind. So that is pretty neat,
you know, especially because I think that the public idea,
or the later idea of him was that he had
been doing it for just money and fame or whatever.
But it worked, right, it did work. A couple months later,
he was able to pay for his brother to be
removed from that crevice, and so, as people do, they
(39:00):
put Floyd back in the ground. But at this time,
they put Floyd back in the ground in a much
more appropriate place, the family cemetery, and they actually used
to stalag tight or Mike, I can't remember as a
headstone form, which is super neat and appropriate for a
Floyd Collins headstone. I couldn't figure that out because I
saw the headstone. Did they just crush it and make
(39:22):
it into a headstone? I don't think that's the original
headstone that you saw. If it was, if it was
a color photo, I think that was the one that
came later, Okay, But how would they make a headstone
out of a stalactite anyway? Hey, those Kentucky people are industrious.
They can do anything they put their minds to, except
for get Floyd Collins out of the ground. Oh boy.
(39:42):
So tourists kind of stopped coming around because a lot
of the reason was because of this story. They were
like this champion caver or died down there, Like, maybe
we shouldn't spend our spring break caving in Kentucky anymore.
And so they sold the Great His family sold the
Great Crystal Cave, that initial cave that was gorgeous to
(40:04):
a dentist named Harry Thomas, who said throwing an extra
ten grand and that's a that's a lot of money
back then, Yeah, especially if like you, Yeah, your ticket
booth is bigger than your house. Yeah, so just keep
that in mind before you prejudge the family for what
they agreed to. He said, for an extra ten grand,
if you'll let me exume his body and put it
(40:25):
on display in a glass coffin in that cave in
a you know, respectful way, then we got a deal.
And they needed the money and they said yes. Yeah.
So for more than sixty years Floyd Collins was in
a glass coffin in the Great Crystal Cave. Beneath I
(40:48):
believe that salagtite or slagmite headstone with the engraving greatest
cave explorer ever known. And for the first at least
fifteen year. I think if you're a tourist and you
went to the Mammoth Caves, you probably made an extra
trip to the Great Crystal Cave to go see Floyd
collins super embalmed corpse through the glass window in his
(41:14):
in his um casket right just playing there in the
in the I think a chamber of the Great Crystal
Cave and actually slight in show correction. The body did
not stay there for that long uninterrupted. Okay. In March
of nineteen twenty nine, his body was stolen by grave robbers.
(41:35):
Apparently their intent was to toss it in the East River,
or I'm sorry, the Green River. They're gonna drive to
New York, toss it in the East River. Yeah, they're
gonna hit Cramer swimming. But it got caught in some
underbrush and they couldn't get the body out. Doctor Thomas
recovered the body in a field. Sal's leg so the
leg that was trapped was no longer there and I
(41:57):
don't think anyone knows where that leg ended up. But
then he doctor Thomas reinterred it, this time in a
chain locked up casket back in the cave. Yeah, and
that's where he stayed for decades. The thing is, the
National Park Service came in and bought the place in
nineteen sixty one. So yeah, for about thirty years you
(42:18):
could go visit Floyd Collins body in the Great Crystal Cave.
But once the MPs took over, they honored the family's
wishes not by removing him from the cave, but by
closing off public access to the cave. So for all
intentsive purposes. He was no longer something for tourists to
gawk at, even though he was still down in this cave,
(42:39):
and the family didn't want him in there anymore. So
it wasn't until nineteen eighty nine that I believe a
court ordered his body to be removed and finally interred
once again in the ground top side, and that's where
he remains today. And I believe, Chuck that they put
him in the ground on March twenty fourth, nineteen eighty nine,
(43:02):
which is right around the anniversary of that internment, when
this episode's coming out, I think, and right after my
eighteenth birthday senior year of high school. Awesome, man, I'm
surprised I didn't hear the news. Oh yeah, your birthday
is coming up, isn't it IDEs of March it is.
(43:23):
I'll never forget Chuck. So that's the story they ended up.
Billy Wilder, famous film director and writer. I made a
film called Ace in the Whole that basically was an
indictment on the media surrounding this event, starring a youngish
Kirk Douglas as the as not skeeter as as a
(43:46):
bad newspaper reporter. Two things have you ever seen Witness
for the Prosecution, written by Billy Wilder. I think I have,
but it's been a long time. I just saw it
for the first time the other day. It's one of
the best movies I've ever seen. He's I mean, he's
one of the best. You ever seen The Apartment, I haven't.
I have seen Sunset Bolivard plenty of times. It's a
(44:06):
great movie. To the Apartment's amazing. And that was Scott
Ackerman's movie Crush Pick Oh, okay. And then the second thing, Chuck,
is that there was actually a musical that was made.
I think it first was put on in nineteen ninety six.
It's called Floyd Collins. I'm surprised to see that. I
have an impression it was in the same vein as
that musical that the um how the South Park creators
(44:30):
came up with about the cannibal in Colorado. Oh, the
Book of Mormon, No, this was a different one. It
was before Book of Mormon. I thought this was like
a respectful thing. I didn't know it was a communic
it was. It was, That's what I was gonna say.
It was much more respectful, but it was. There was
a lot of I think the basis of it was
a comedy musical. Oh interesting, what's funny about this? I
(44:52):
don't know. But the cool thing is is the guy
who wrote them, the words and lyrics, I think the
whole thing basically he got an hour in the cave.
It was. It was opened up for him specially, and
he did a lot of research and actually an analysis
of the play by Scott Miller informed some of this episode.
(45:14):
It was one of the sources we used. He did
that much research on it. I think they were the
ones that said his brother was fourteen. So I take
a show. Really, you know, I'm conflicted. Who knows? I mean?
But back then the difference between fourteen and twenty two is, well,
it's half your life. Actually, I guess you got anything else?
I got nothing else? R I p Floyd Collins. We're
(45:35):
sorry that that happened to you, Floyd. And since Chuck
says he's got nothing else, it means his time for
listener mail. I'm gonna call this great naming convention. Hey guys,
a longtime listener to the show. I'm finishing my masters
in a couple of months, and I want to say
thank you for keeping me entertained. Through a move to
a new state, long hours of tedious work in my
(45:57):
community campus. Every day. I had to stop listening in
the library because I laughed out loud every episode. I
really enjoyed your nap episode. My brother has been an
advocate for coffee naps for years and coined a term
that I think is pretty great. Did you see this?
You're ready for this? No, I haven't seen that one yet.
I'm not ready. No, the nappaccino, Oh that is good?
(46:19):
How great is that? Not a napper myself, but I
think everyone should use this term. That is from Madison Madison.
Whoever your brother is, need to name your brother, but
just tell him that that's pretty great. A pretty great
title it is. It definitely beats the two I was
working on, the flat nap yeah or the napata. Neither
(46:42):
one of those is nearly as good as nappuccino. I'll
tell you that the No. Number one. You know, what
would happened? What would happen, Chuck? If Alpaccino took a nappuccino,
you would say that was a great nap. Okay, If
you want to get in touch with us like who
(47:02):
Madison Madison did with some great information about your sibling.
We want to hear it. You can email to us
at stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should
Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my
heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(47:24):
you listen to your favorite shows.
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Josh Clark
Chuck Bryant
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