August 29, 2026 • 50 mins
The 1920s were just absolutely nuts. People got into weird fads really intensely and one of the strangest of all was flagpole sitting. It’s just what it sounds like – sitting on top of a flagpole for as long as you can. One man sat above them all. Learn all about him and many of these wild fads in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. It's July 14th, 2020. And we're all rolling
through COVID pretty well by this point. We're all pretty
drunk most of the time and gaining weight. But that's okay.
We're going to let each other up because it's a
global pandemic. This episode is called Flagpole Sitting, colon, a
(00:20):
real fad. And it was. People would sit at the
top of flagpoles for as long as they could. And
it was a part of a weird time in American history.
So check out this episode, not on Harvey Danger, the
band who sang the song Flagpole Sitta, as did my
cover band, but Flagpole Sitting for real. Check it out
right now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production
(00:47):
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant right over there. Jerry's out
there somewhere, and this is Stuff You Should Know. You know, Chuck,
I have to say, every once in a while, the
amazing theme song from our short-lived television show comes into
my head. And it's just a complete earworm.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Because I just hear the end of it over and
over and over again. And it's actually pretty pleasant. It
doesn't bother me.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
I love it. I haven't heard that song in a while.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Well, you need to go listen. That was the Henry
Clay people, right?
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Yeah, our buddies Joey and Andy Sierra, California boys, Southern
California boys, men.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Didn't they go to like Harvard or something crazy like that?
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Joey ended up going to Harvard, and then I think
Andy went to AFI, and then Joey, I think, went
back to film school, and they're both writing, you know, screenwriting.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Man, that's great.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Andy's got a— he wrote this Andy Samberg movie that's coming
out soon.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Really? Which one? What's it called?
Speaker 1 (02:01):
It is called Palm Springs, I think.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Wow, and he wrote it? Yeah, dude. That's fantastic. Congratulations.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
And he wrote on the TV show Lodge 49. Yeah,
Palm Springs.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
I haven't seen that. But that guy, Kurt Russell and
Goldie Hawn's son— I love that guy.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
I think he's one of the coolest people walking around
on the planet today.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah. I haven't seen Lodge 49. It's supposed to be awesome.
And Andy was a writer's assistant and then ended up
on the staff. And they're both doing great.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Man, that's great. Congratulations to both of you guys.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
He's got a little baby now. They're both married.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Nice, man. That's nice.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
And that's an update on the Sierra Club, as.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
I call them. Yeah. Let's see. What else? I guess
that was it.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
How did that come into your head, though, the song? Like,
what made you think of that?
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Nothing. I was just out back, like, mowing the lawn
with my big old lawnmower, and it just popped in
my head. I was probably thinking of something I had
to do that had to do with Stuff You Should Know,
and I thought Stuff You Should Know, and when I
thought it, I thought it as Stuff You Should Know,
didn't it? And then it just played on a loop.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
This is the second time you mention the size of
your lawnmower.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
And now you just got to send me a picture.
Is this one of these things that you stand?
Speaker 2 (03:20):
No.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
And it wheels you around like some weird land speeder?
Speaker 2 (03:24):
You mean like a skag or something? No. This is
just a good old-fashioned Toro that is, because it's gas-powered,
I got it like on super discount because everybody's making
like really good electric lawnmowers.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
But this one was, you know, it was on discount,
and I like the look of it.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Yeah, it's a good-looking mower, huh?
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Yeah. I was like, I like your style. Come on
with me.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Is it red?
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Yeah, it's red Toros.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
It's nice.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Takes you back to days of paper routes and stuff
like that, doesn't it?
Speaker 1 (03:56):
I thought you were mentioning the song because you were
thinking of the song Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
No, I wasn't at all.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
But that's a great segue, Chuck, because it just so happens—
And you may be aware of this. We're talking about
flagpole sitting today in this episode.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
That's right. And I've been singing that song in my
head all day.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Now, I don't know that song.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
You know it. It was a, well, maybe not. It
was a top 40 hit in the 90s, kind of
during the grunge era. It was a power pop hit
that kind of. Oh. From Hardy Danger.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
No. Wait. Is that it?
Speaker 1 (04:44):
That's not it.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
No.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
My band actually covers Flagpole City. It's a fun song. Okay.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
That's great. I'm going to have to go listen to
it because I feel like I'm missing out. But is
that song about Flagpole City? Is it about Shipwreck Kelly
in particular?
Speaker 1 (04:59):
No, it's not. But it does have one line that says,
Run it up the flagpole and see. And that's the
only time it references flagpoles at all.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Sees what?
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Uh, who salutes, but no one ever does. I think
is the next line. Hmm.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
That rings a bell.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
I was looking into the mirror. A little bit clearer.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes, but
no one ever does.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Yeah. I'm not sick, but I'm not well. Who is that?
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Harvey danger.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
That's a great song. I love it.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Yeah. Who fellow podcasting friend, John Roderick actually, uh, Sean
Nelson was a friend of his in Seattle, and he
played bass for a little while in Harvey Danger.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Oh, very. Wow, man. This is all coming for so good.
I got one more for you. What you got? I
used to have that song, and I don't know where
I downloaded it from. This would have been probably back
in the Napster days or something.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Whoa.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
And it was mislabeled as Brian Jonestown Massacre. And I
was always like, this does not sound like Brian Jonestown Massacre.
Now I know it most definitely wasn't Brian Jonestown Massacre.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Wow. All right. We haven't even talked about flagpole sitting yet.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
No, we haven't, which is a crime because it's actually
one of the more interesting weirdo fads that's ever come
this way in America. And it was in the 20s.
It started— we actually— we know who Patient Zero was of flagpole sitting.
And it's easy to tell because it is such a
bizarre thing to do.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
That if you can find the person who did it first,
who claims to have done it first, they're probably correct.
And in this case, you can trace it back to
sometime around January of 1924, supposedly, potentially, in Hollywood, California,
part of Los Angeles, and there was a man named
Alvin Shipwreck Kelly who supposedly climbed up on a flagpole
(07:02):
as part of a promotion for a movie and sat
there for a full 13 hours and 13 minutes. to
help draw a crowd, and boy did he ever.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Yeah, which, you know, it sounds like a long time
to sit on a flagpole, but that is kid stuff.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Compared to where this is headed.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
That's an aperitif.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
But it's a good first attempt, you know?
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Yeah, and so, you know, it sounds strange because when
you think of a flagpole, you're like, what are they
sitting on? It's a modified flagpole that basically, there are
different kinds, but Um, usually it's sort of like a
bar stool at the top of a flagpole and it's
that lo-fi and you climb up there and you sit
and that's all you do.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
That's it. I mean, whatever else you want to do.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Well, sure. You do other stuff.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Use yourself or whatever. Yeah. That's up to you. But
as far as being considered a flagpole sitter, that's it.
You sit on top of a flagpole for as long
as you can.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
All right. So let's talk about this guy because Shipwreck
Kelly was a pretty interesting character.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
And I have to say there's a Memory Palace episode
about him that I specifically didn't listen to beforehand because
I didn't want to unconsciously rip it off.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
But go listen to that.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Yeah, or old buddy Nate. I'm going to check that
out for sure. So Alvin Kelly, he was born Aloysius
Anthony Kelly in New York City in Hell's Kitchen in
a tenement in 1893 and had a very sad start
to his life in that his father had already passed
before he was born. His mother passed in childbirth, and
(08:35):
that basically meant he was shuttled around to relatives and
orphanages from, you know, the minute he took his first breath.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yeah. And apparently from a pretty early age, he would
do things like climb flagpoles and other tall stuff. And
like working at heights became a kind of a recurring
theme in his life. supposedly by age seven he was
climbing flagpoles. Within a few years after that, he was
starting to scale the facades of some of the buildings
(09:06):
in his neighborhood. And by the time he was 13,
and bear in mind if this guy's biography seems a
little thin, he just came out of nowhere in 1924
for sitting on a flagpole. So all of the info
about him came from him to reporters who were reporting
in the 1920s. So just fabrications are flying around left
(09:26):
and right. Sure. But supposedly he ran away at age
13 and ran off to join the crew of a
cargo ship and start his life sailing the seas.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Yeah, and he did a lot of kind of odd jobs,
or maybe not odd jobs, but just jobs that didn't
have anything to do with one another over the next
couple of decades. He was in the movies as a
stand-in and a double. He was a stunt person, a
stunt pilot, a high diver, a boxer. This part I love.
There's actually a name for people that repair church steeples
(10:00):
What is that?
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Steeplejack.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
He was a steeplejack.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
That is definitely a band name for sure.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Steeplejack? Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
It sounds like maybe an industrial band, but like on
the light side, like the Like they're technically too melodic
to actually be considered industrial, but they still call themselves industrial.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
That's become my favorite part of this whole band name thing.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Is it?
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Is you describing what kind of band it is.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Oh, okay.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Well, thanks, man. That makes me feel warm and pleasant.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
So World War I comes along, and he was in
the Naval Auxiliary Reserve as an ensign and served on
the USS Edgar F. Luckenbach during that war.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yep. So he did have some sort of, well, I
should say, I don't know if anybody's corroborated that. But
we'll just take all that at face value because it
doesn't really matter at this point. But he eventually picked
up the nickname Shipwreck. And there's a lot of different
explanations for this. And he's given or he gave multiple
(11:06):
different explanations depending on what reporter he was talking to.
But one of the numbers that gets bandied about pretty
frequently is, is that Shipwreck Kelly was so named because
he survived 32 different shipwrecks at sea, which is where
shipwrecks tend to happen.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Those were the good old days. Yeah. You just make
up stories about yourself.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Do you remember when we talked about– we did an
episode on the world's either luckiest or unluckiest people?
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
And do you remember that one guy who was like,
I survived– car that fell off a cliff and I
survived a train wreck and all that. He was doing
his jam in like 2005, remember?
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Oh, was he?
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Yeah. He was pretty, pretty recent if I remember correctly.
You remember his son came out and was like, everybody,
this is not true. Right. Like none of what you're
talking about is true.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Well, we don't.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
My dad just fooled you all.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
We don't know if Shipwreck Kelly actually survived the Titanic
like he claimed, but we do know that he was
not on the roster on the Titanic. So I am
going to venture to say that he made that one up.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
And there were three Kellys on board who were survivors,
but all three of them were women. So, yeah, he
probably wasn't on the Titanic. Maybe he did survive from shipwrecks.
He was at sea, most likely. But the point is,
is they called him Shipwreck Kelly. And I guess somebody
went to the trouble of digging up that some reporters
(12:30):
who covered his boxing career are probably the likeliest source
for where he got his nickname Shipwreck, right?
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Yeah, which I love. Because I guess he wasn't a
great boxer because they said that he was often adrift
and ready to sink.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Isn't that great?
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Shipwreck Kelly.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
It's a great nickname and an even better origin story
than surviving 32 shipwrecks, if you ask me.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
Yeah, and the other thing we don't know for sure
is even if that Hollywood movie premiere story is correct
in his first major outing as a flagpole sitter because
yet another story says, no, this is actually in Philadelphia–
at a department store and he just did it on
a dare. And the department store got a lot of
business because people were standing around looking and then doing
(13:14):
some shopping. So they were like, hey, stay up there
and I'll give you some extra dough. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
So either way, it's pretty widely held that Shipwreck Kelly
was the guy who started the flagpole sitting craze.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
And it was a craze because This is a time
where you could go sit on a flagpole for 13
hours and 13 minutes and newspapers around the country would
pick up the story and write about it. And you
would suddenly become famous overnight. And that's exactly what happened
to Shipwreck Kelly. So that's prong one toward this becoming
(13:51):
a fad in the 1920s. The other criteria is that
people have to want to topple that record. And that
was very widespread at the time too because the 1920s
were actually really big into fads. Like people would take
up weird fads and just go nuts over them for
basically the whole decade.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Yeah, you know, people had time and they had fewer distractions.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah, no TV.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
So like someone doing a dance-a-thon for 28 hours or
sitting on a flagpole for a day, You know, it's
an interesting story back then. It's sad that that was interesting,
but it was.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Right. So we'll talk about dance marathons, and then we'll
take a break, okay? Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Okay. Oh, wait.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
I got that backwards, Chuck, I just realized. Hopefully Jerry
figured it out and there was an ad in there somewhere.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
I think we should just leave it just like that, though.
That'll be fun. Okay.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
So... We're going to talk about dance marathons now, after
the ad break, despite what I said before. And dance
marathons are a super 20s example of a crazy fad
that kind of came along and got everybody by the hackles.
And people across the country started entering basically dance marathon competitions.
(15:44):
All because of one person, one woman, a dance instructor
named Alma Cummings.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
That's right. 32 years old. She danced for 27 hours.
at the Audubon Ballroom in New York in 1923 with
six different dance partners. And it was a weird time
because it wasn't just dancing. It was endurance challenges as
a whole were just all the rage and punishing your
(16:11):
bodies and all these weird random ways from yo-yoing to
hula hooping to rocking in a rocking chair or skipping rope.
to dancing. Dancing was the big one. That's where you,
you know, if you see these videos of these marathon
dance competitions, it's just, it looks like hell on earth.
(16:32):
It looks awful.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Yeah. Oh yeah. They didn't seem very fun at all,
but Alma Cummings just kicked the whole thing off. And again,
just like Shipwreck Kelly, who would follow, I guess, a
year later, or even, yeah, about a year later, she
got a lot of publicity. There's like a famous photo
of her Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
For celebrity, however you can get it. And that seemed
to really drive people who wanted to be like, well,
if this lady got this much attention for dancing 27
straight hours, maybe I can get even more attention for
dancing 30 straight hours. And so within just, I think,
three weeks of Alma Cummings setting this record for dancing,
(17:30):
it had been broken nine times, at least, from people
trying to seek the same kind of publicity she got.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Yeah, and, you know, it's funny. It really, like, we
talk about these days how everyone wants their 10 minutes
or they want to be reality show famous or whatever.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Has it been whittled down to 10 now? I thought
it was, like, 15.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Well, like, that's something new, and it's really not. Like,
this is sort of the version of that back then
was I want to be famous, I want my names
in the papers, but I'm not particularly skilled enough to
do anything to do that, so I'll rock in a
rocking chair for three days. Yeah. You know?
Speaker 2 (18:07):
And hopefully they will come. If I rock, they will come.
That was a pity laugh at best, but I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Well, it was a bad joke.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Admittedly.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
But it would, and we should shout out a bunch
of great websites here because this next bit came from
Atlas Obscura, one of our favorite sites, and also our
dearest of old sites that we always have loved, Mental Floss, Ripley's.
History Daily, J. Mark Powell, and Historic Pelham, which is great.
(18:41):
But Atlas Obscura talks about in the 30s, and this
is really kind of depressing, during the Depression.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
It's very appropriate.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Is that sometimes people would enter these dance marathons because
it would be somewhere they could sleep and eat for
a week at a time when they didn't necessarily have
a home or food.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Yeah, it is extremely depressing. Or just the prize money
that was offered in the depression might be enough to
keep your house from being foreclosed on. So, yeah, the
thing is, you know, you can blame promoters for continuing
this long beyond the fad, but the promoters wouldn't have
been putting these on and offering this prize money were
(19:26):
it not for all the crowds that would show up
every day to watch these people get increasingly closer to,
you know, catastrophic exhaustion from, from dance marathons because like
there were, there were rules where, you know, probably early
on in the dance marathon, um, you could sleep or
rest for 15 minutes of every hour. Yeah. And then
(19:48):
after like a week, a week of this dance marathon
going on, the promoter might be like, oh, okay, well,
you know, we need to step things up a little bit.
And you will now have three minutes per hour of
every 24-hour period in a day to where you can rest.
And then toward the end, they'd be like, no rest.
(20:09):
I think I read about one where the last 57
hours of a multi-week dance marathon was like had no rest.
So these people dance for more than two straight days constantly.
You had to constantly be in motion and your knees
couldn't touch the ground or else you'd be disqualified. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
And if you look at footage of this stuff, I mean,
it's charitable to recall what they're doing is dancing toward
the end. It's just hanging. It looks like two corpses
hanging on each other, sort of swaying back and forth.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
I don't get, I mean, any of these things, even
the modern day versions of like these contests where you
have to keep your hand on a car or whatever.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
And on hard body.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Oh, man. Or sit in the car. I knew a
guy that did one of those where he tried to
win a Volkswagen Beetle by sitting in it with four
other people in a mall. I'm just like. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
You told us that story before. Did he win or not?
Speaker 1 (21:04):
I think he did. But there's just no way. Kill me.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Yeah, it would be really awful for sure. Because let's say.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
For one of those contests, let's say you don't win.
Then you've just sat in a car with three strangers
for a week and you didn't even get the car.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
But even if you did get the car, imagine yourself
five years on and that car is like there's tears
in the seats or something like that, you know, like
the glove compartment won't close. It's, you know. I mean,
I guess you've got a story to tell at cocktail parties,
but even that would wear thin after a while.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
But Chuck, we need people to do stuff like that
because there's something about contests like this. There's something about
fads like flagpole sitting that keep humanity from becoming too cerebral.
You know what I mean? From just becoming like. Computers, basically.
(22:04):
We need people that do stuff like this because it
brings out some juvenile something in us that makes us
want to find out about it or learn about it
or talk about it. And I think that's good. I
think that's healthy for our species. All right. It's my take.
It's genuinely off the cuff. I'm actually just surprised at
(22:24):
myself that I just said that out loud.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
You're just riffing.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
So Shipwreck Kelly, back to flagpole sitting. That initial 13-hour,
13-minute sit, like you said, inspired so many others to
break it. And it was getting broken in pretty short order,
kind of like the dance-a-thons. There was a woman named
Bobby Mack from L.A. who did it, a guy named
Joe Holdom Powers who did this in Chicago for 16 days,
(22:55):
another guy for 51 days named Bill Penfield.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Yeah, so let's point this out. Take a second here.
Shipwreck Kelly did 13 hours and kicked off a national fad.
These people are now into weeks at a time. 51
days is more than seven weeks up there. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
It's pretty impressive. That's a long time.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
I'm impressed at least.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Are you bucking the cerebral?
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Yes, right now. Can you tell?
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Let me see here. In the 20s, there was a
15-year-old boy who set the kid record. For 10 days,
10 hours, 10 minutes, and 10 seconds. I think that
was planned.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Yeah, if not, then. But see, there you go, Chuck.
We're thinking about that. It's making us think. This little
kid is making us think. We've got to avoid that.
It needs to be random combinations of numbers so we
don't start thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
We should also point out that not everyone was like, oh,
this is the best thing ever. In Cosmopolitan magazine, Cosmo
called it competitive imbecility. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
This is fine. We need that, too. I have to say,
I want to say something here. It's a little PSA.
This might not even ever make it in the final edit.
So I'll just say it to you. How about that?
I would say the last, like, few weeks of episodes,
there's been, like, some good ones here or there. But overall,
I find that they've been less good because I am
(24:22):
so sick of myself. Because we've been so... entrenched in
the book right now. So it's like living, breathing S-Y-S-K,
which is us, and having to confront and like myself
and my own personality and sense of humor and whether
that's actually funny and just constantly thinking about this on
(24:44):
top of doing the podcast on top of the other
stuff we're trying to do now too and I am
so sick of myself I can barely tolerate listening to
myself talk so if anyone's picked up on the last
few episodes like in the last few weeks just being
a little ho-hum that's why and I apologize maybe we'll
(25:04):
go back and redo them one day wow.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
News to me. I think you've been great.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Hey, thanks a lot, man. That's ultimately what I was
fishing for.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
All right. Well, if you want to cut that part out,
let me pick this up by saying, and I'm sure
you've made a great point, Josh.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
So, so back to Kelly, right? You've got all these,
what I'm sure Shipwreck Kelly deemed slack-jawed yokels, ho-hums, that
kind of thing. Um, Who were out there trying to
topple his record.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
And they did.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Some of them did topple his record. But nobody had
turned this into a business like Shipwreck Kelly had. He
was a one-man money-making machine who made his money just
by sitting on top of a flagpole.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Good money.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Because he was really good at self-promoting. Like there wasn't
a reporter whose ear he wouldn't bend if he got
the chance. And in these reports or these articles, he
would say things like, yeah, I'm in town for this,
but if anybody has any other offers, I'm wide open
and I'm staying at, you know, the Cambridge Arms itinerant
hotel for the next few days if somebody wants to
(26:14):
get in touch with me there with a job offer.
Like he was really good at attracting job offers specifically
for flagpole sitting.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Yeah, and he made good dough. I mean, this is
good money any time. if he made $ 100 an hour
like he claimed to, other people said, no, it really
wasn't that much. It was probably closer to anywhere between
$ 100 and $ 500 a day. Still a lot of money.
And like you said, it was like, he was almost
(26:43):
like a celebrity version of a sign spinner. Like if
you could pay George Clooney to sign spin in front
of your mobile phone store, that was sort of what
Shipwreck Kelly was.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
That's a great one. I got one too. It's almost
like if there was a cult of personality built up
around like the flapping dancing wind sock guy that they
put out in front of like mattress stores in like 2005. Yeah.
I love those dudes. Okay.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Those are fun.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
I think both of those are high quality analogies.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Well, we'll see which one Jerry uses in the edit.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Okay. Let me see here. Here are some of his
longer sits. He did 146 hours at the Old West
Gate Hotel in Kansas City. Not bad. 312 hours in Newark,
New Jersey atop the St. Francis Hotel. That's pretty good. Sure.
(27:43):
I don't know what that is in days, but... 312 hours?
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Let's see. If you divided that by 24, as you should...
You would come up with something along the lines of
13 days on the nose.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Hmm. All right. Well, how about 22 days? And this
was in conjunction with the dance marathon at none other
than Madison Square Garden.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Yeah, because I don't know if we said it or not,
but there was a dance marathon at Madison Square Gardens
that was actually shut down by the health department because
they decided it had gone on too long, 10 days,
and that it deemed a threat to the health of
the participants. That wasn't the one that he sat in,
but there was one the following year where for, what
(28:27):
was it, 22 days?
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
That means that the dance marathon went on for 22 days.
But imagine that. So you've got these two endurance fads
just interweaved in this way that the universe almost like
collapses in on itself because they're put together too close together,
you know?
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Yeah, and here's how he would do it. He would
sit on that bar stool-like thing And it was padded
and he would, um, you know, eat and smoke cigarettes
and shave apparently. And they would send this stuff, stuff
up in like a, with a bucket and a rope
and tell him how he would sleep. Cause this is
(29:08):
what I really kind of wanted to know.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
So, so you said his, his seat was like a
bar stool around bar stool basically. Right. And, um, It
was on a pole, a flagpole appropriately. And then in
the flagpole, you'd have two holes drilled just beneath the seat.
And now that I'm doing it, I'm like, that's really
hard to reach. So now I'm questioning whether this is
true or not.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
He might have long arms.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Maybe so.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Long thumbs.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
So he would plug his thumbs into those holes. drilled
into each side of the flagpole so that when he
started to lean forward, the pressure from the flagpole on
his thumbs would kind of cut into his skin and
wake him up just enough that he would adjust himself.
And apparently he got so good at this that he
would adjust himself to sit back up so he wouldn't
(29:58):
fall over off of the flagpole while he was still sleeping.
Like he wouldn't wake up. He could just adjust himself
in his sleep.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
That's right. And he'd have his little, I don't know
if they're little, but he would have his ankles locked
around the pole and apparently would tether a leg to
keep him from catastrophe. But I think it's very dubious
that that was a solid life-saving rig.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
And I mean, like some of these flagpoles, he's sitting
on 30 feet, 50 feet. One of them, I guess
the impression I had, the one that you mentioned on
Kansas City's Westgate Hotel, that that flagpole was on the
top roof of the hotel. So, I mean, he was
up there for sure. And if something had gone wrong,
he would have, yeah, that tether probably would not have
(30:46):
done terribly much. Or it would have done a lot
to keep his leg hanging up there, but the rest
of them would have kept going to the ground, you know?
Speaker 1 (30:54):
How did he pee-pee and poo-poo?
Speaker 2 (30:57):
He had a little contraption for that with the tube
that went down. Okay. But here's the thing. So you're
a traveling flagpole sitter. You're relying on the help of
other people on the ground. You need food. When you
pee and poop into that contraption that leads to a
tube that goes down to the ground— You don't want
that just leaking out for the spectators to see and
(31:19):
smell and experience. You need it to go into a
bucket that somebody is going to go take away and dump.
So you're relying on this kind of group of assistants
and hands that probably the promoter maybe helped hire for you.
Maybe you make a friend along the way who just
kind of travels from town to town with you for
a little while.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
That's what I think. Shipwreck Kelly had an assistant.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
He had a boy.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
That was the worst job in show business.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
Right. He had a lad who would help him.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Yeah. So, but it would be a pretty bad job.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
But anyway, so he had to, I mean, he had
to eat and he didn't eat much. He would apparently
just kind of almost do a broth fast, augmented with
cigarettes and coffee. He would stay up for four days
at a time because like living on a flagpole is
not exactly like the most comfortable place you can exist for.
(32:14):
you know, 22 days or 13 days or however long. No.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
And it eventually turned against him in that the money
dried up after he did this sort of big Atlantic
City stunt that we talked about. And it was the
Great Depression. And eventually people were kind of like, I
don't really care so much about this dumb stunt because
I'm starving and I'm broke and I'm homeless.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Right.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
And the kind of tide of public opinion turned such
that In 1935, he went to do this in the Bronx,
and he was actually arrested for public nuisance.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
And I'm sure he was like, but I'm Shipwreck Kelly. Right.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
But, I mean, think about it. That's like everybody's sick
of you now, Kelly, and your schtick. We're all just
depressed in the Depression, so maybe we'll do a dance marathon,
but we're not going to watch you sit around in
a flagpole anymore. And there was a contemporary article that
was written at the time that said that he– attributed
the decline of flagpole sitting directly to the stock market crash.
(33:16):
And he said that people didn't want to see anything
higher than their securities, stock securities at the time, which
were not very high.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
And everyone went, that's just not even a joke in
good taste. And he punches human familiar in the mouth
and say, you told me to tell that joke.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
Man, that was gangbusters, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Do you watch that show?
Speaker 2 (33:40):
You got me.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
What we do in the shadows?
Speaker 2 (33:44):
I've seen some episodes of it. You know, we were
talking about it, and one of the PAs, I think,
wrote in to say that they were just blown away
that we were giving such big ups to their show.
I think I remember that. If you talk to Matt Berry,
tell him he's a comedy genius. I never heard anything back. Oh,
have you seen An Evening with Beverly Loughlin?
Speaker 1 (34:08):
No. How do I know that name?
Speaker 2 (34:10):
So it's a Craig.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Robinson?
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Yes. From The Office, right?
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
He plays a guy named Beverly Loughlin. And Aubrey Meadows?
Speaker 1 (34:24):
Aubrey Plaza?
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Aubrey Meadows. Plaza. That's right. Man, I'm really screwing this up.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
You're great with first names, though.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
And then.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Okay. So she's the main character. Jemaine Clement. I know him.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
You got that.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
He plays... Well, you just have to see it.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
Well, he was in What We Do in the Shadows,
the movie.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Right, right. So I think he co-created it too. This
is what all ties into this. He and Matt Berry
are also in this too. Matt Berry is in the
TV version of What We Do in the Shadows.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
I mean, Clement helped create it. But it's definitely worth watching.
It's purposefully very bizarre, which can get really annoying really easily.
But this movie pulls it off very well, like purposeful
bizarreness for humor. And it's a good movie. It's worth watching. Okay,
it's worth watching. I'll leave it to you to decide
(35:16):
whether it's a good movie or not.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Well, I love everybody in it. That's a great cast.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah, I mean, it's worth watching. How about that?
Speaker 1 (35:23):
All right. Should we take our second break here? Can
you believe we haven't?
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Yes, I can.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
All right. Let's do our other break, and then we're
going to talk about, we're going to wind up this
flagpole sitting thing right after this. Okay, so Kelly, when
(36:09):
we left off, the public turns on him. They don't
care about him anymore. He's probably drunk in some hotel
room somewhere with his human familiar, talking about the good
old days at this point.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
Yeah, yeah, it is kind of sad. I get the
impression that the Memory Palace episode really focuses on the
sad decline of Shipwreck Kelly because, I mean, he was
a celebrity, a national, probably international celebrity for like a decade.
a decade for sitting on flagpoles. And then all of
a sudden he's just done. Like society drops him like
(36:45):
a hot potato and he's penniless and on public assistance basically.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Yeah. And he died a very sad death. He did.
And I think his final flagpole sit was all the
way in the 1950s in Orange, Texas in 1952. He
was almost 60 years old at this point. And he had,
during the publicity run-up to this, had two heart attacks. Well,
(37:14):
was he sitting on his pole for publicity or was
this part of the pole sitting when he had the
heart attacks?
Speaker 2 (37:22):
He had the heart attacks on the pole during the publicity.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Oh, so the actual sit was another publicity stunt for
some place.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Right, yeah. I don't know what business it was for.
I didn't see that. But I did see that the
promoters were like, come down right now. We don't think
you're going to survive a third heart attack, so stop.
Which is crazy. I mean, there was only 59 at
the time.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
Yeah, but 59 in the 1950s.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
I guess so. When your name was shipwrecked. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
But he did die of that third heart attack like
a week after that, right?
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Yeah, he was walking around New York on 51st Street.
And he dropped dead on the sidewalk from a heart attack.
And he was found holding a scrapbook of all, like,
clippings of newspaper articles about him during his heyday.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Oh, man.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Isn't that sad?
Speaker 1 (38:19):
That's like a movie.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Yeah, I can't believe this is a movie. He's, I mean,
he's a gold mine just waiting to be, well, mined.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Wait, wait, wait.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
There's one other thing about him before we move on.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
What do you got?
Speaker 2 (38:36):
After he was done with his flagpole sitting career, the
heyday of it, one of the jobs he had was
as a gigolo, a male escort who would dance with
whoever wanted him to dance at the Roseland Ballroom near
Times Square.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
He was a private dancer.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
A dancer for money.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
I've been to Roseland. Seen some good shows there.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Yeah, well. You were where Shipwreck Kelly danced for a
dime a dance. Because he was a gigolo.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
I would have paid for that dance. Sure. Tell him
to sit on my head.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Hey, he'll do what you want him to do. Oh, boy.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
So we looked, or rather you looked, because you put
this one together, and you found one death from flagpole sitting.
Isn't that right?
Speaker 2 (39:26):
That's all I could turn up. Surely, surely there were more,
but I could really only find one. And this guy
was wonderful in every way.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Dick Blandy?
Speaker 2 (39:36):
Dixie Blandy. Richard Dixie. D-I-X-I-E. Blandy.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
Dick Dixie Blandy.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Sure. So, Dixie Blandy. He was a flagpole sitter who
was contemporaneous to Shipwreck Kelly.
Speaker 1 (39:52):
A little bit.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
Like during, surely he was directly inspired by Shipwreck Kelly.
He came along and started in 1929, which is almost
the worst year you could join the flagpole sitting movement
because just the next year, Shipwreck Kelly had his triumphant
sit aboard like a, or above a two, what?
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Triumphant sit. It's just great. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Yeah, well, it was triumphant for a couple of reasons. One,
it was his longest sit, I believe, 22 days, 23 days,
something like that. And secondly, it was above a top,
a 200-foot flagpole. For weeks, he sat up there. That's triumphant,
if you ask me. But he did his in 1930,
(40:37):
and everybody dropped him right after. Dixie Blandy just started
in 1929. But even though people said flagpole sitting is
so out, we're not going to bother even looking up
when we see somebody on a flagpole. Dixie Blandy said,
you know what, I'm not giving up on this. And
he continued to make a career out of it wherever
he could.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
Yes, until he died from flagpole sitting at the age
of 71. In 1974, he fell off of his flagpole.
It was a 50-foot pole. And where was this? In Harvey? Harvey.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
Yeah, I get the impression in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
Harvey, Pennsylvania?
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Yeah, because the article that reported on it as if
it were something of a nearby event was called the
Reading Eagle. And Reading is in Pennsylvania, right?
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Yeah. Is it Reading?
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Whatever. I can't tell you how many times I've been
told that since I was a child playing Monopoly. And
it's just never stuck for some reason.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Oh, is that the titular railroad? Mm-hmm. Oh, okay. The
Reading Railroad. We said Reading.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
Yeah. That's right. That's what I said too, but apparently
it's Reading.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
I didn't know. I didn't know it was the same thing.
But either way, this is where Harvey, and of course
it's always like the grand opening of a shopping center
or something. Yeah. And that's what was going on here.
It's a four-day promotion, and he basically said, I think
this pole is attached to a trailer, and the trailer moved.
(42:09):
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Well, he asked a security guard to move the trailer
so they could make room for what I took to
be a cherry picker that could go up and get them.
This is hours before the end of his four-day sit.
And when the security guard, I guess who had never
tried this before, moved the trailer, a guy wire that
was stabilizing the pole became taut and actually pulled the pole,
(42:33):
snapped the pole in two with Dixie still on top
of this 50-foot pole, and he landed safely. Skull first,
from what I can tell, onto the asphalt below. That
is not what you want to open your grocery store with.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
No, or to close your flagpole sit with.
Speaker 2 (42:51):
No, either way, it's a bad jam.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
If you're going to fall, fall early.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
This was not his only accident, too. This was the
one that got him, but he had fractured his skull
before when he was thrown off a pole in a
storm in 1955. And then there was... This is heartwarming.
In 1961... he was doing a pole sit for a
promotion dressed as Santa Claus. And he was shouting, Merry Christmas.
(43:15):
That was his job. Sit on the top of the
flagpole and shout Merry Christmas. And apparently it got to
the point where he finally yelled down that he was
getting numb and he had to be taken to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
Which is, this is what I'm talking about, man. Just
no thought. It doesn't take thought to just think about
flagpole sitting. And I love that about it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Merry Christmas.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
Merry Christmas. I think, I think there's something wrong up here.
I got to go to the hospital cause I'm sitting
on top of a flagpole dressed as Santa Claus shouting
Merry Christmas for three days. And it's December in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
In Reading. It's reading. Uh, this was, you know, these
were definitely the waning days. This was in the 1970s.
There were some other stunts throughout the years here and there.
A couple got married atop a flagpole. Um, Let me
see here. A 17-year-old in 1963 named Peggy Townsend spent
(44:12):
217 days on a pole for a contest for a
radio station. And then the granddaddy of them all, this
guy Kenneth Gidge, Ken Gidge, 248 days in 1971. This
guy would later on be a state rep for New Hampshire.
And he, I mean, reading his account... He was basically like,
(44:37):
it was terrible.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
Right.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
And I hated it every.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
Second of it. He had a parakeet. He had his
parakeet with him named Nixon. And he said that his
parakeet came to hate him, like despise him. He said
he didn't think any animals ever hated somebody more than
that parakeet hated him. probably because he made them stay
up there in this little tiny house on top of
a fiberglass pole that would sway back and forth. He
(45:03):
couldn't lay down straight in it because of the pole,
so he had to lay wrapped around the pole. It
sounds really horrible and terrible. And he did it to
get publicity because he was an out-of-work actor, I guess.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
At the time. Yeah, like I said, to call the
thing a house is generous. It's this little, I mean,
you can see a picture of it, but it was
some sort of shelter, at least. He wasn't just sitting
like on a bar stool, like Shipwreck Kelly for 248 days.
Speaker 2 (45:29):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
But it was bad. And it's just funny reading these
quotes from him. He did not have a good time.
And he just basically kind of talked about how awful
it was.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
Yeah, they said that he lost 15 pounds, three inches
from his waist and 13 days of sleep just within
the first three months. And that when people would come out,
like when the weather was nice, people would come out
and shout questions up to him and he talked to him.
And he said, the men usually asked, if he sleeps
and how he goes to the bathroom. And then women
(45:58):
asked if he was lonely, which I find very sweet.
But I mean, remember, we started out here at 13
hours is what kicked this off. And this guy, Kenneth Gidge,
has brought it up to 248 days. But Chuck, that
does not seem to be the record any longer. In fact,
the record may never be broken ever. What do you think?
Speaker 1 (46:22):
Yeah, H. David Werder. Of Weeki Wachee, Florida. Man, this
is unbelievable. Sat for 439 days, 11 hours, 6 minutes. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
His sit went from 1982 to 1984. That's amazing. Yeah,
and it was outside of an appliance center in Clearwater.
And he didn't do this as like a publicity stunt
for that appliance center. He did it to protest gas
prices at the time.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
Yeah. That's how you see these days sometimes is protests.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
Sure. But gas at the time was 99 cents a gallon.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
That's cute.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
So his protest didn't work at all. But he spent
439 days of his life on a flagpole because he
was mad about the price of gas.
Speaker 1 (47:11):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (47:12):
No thought whatsoever to a zen-like beautiful state is what
this man achieved.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
Is that the overarching theme?
Speaker 2 (47:21):
Yep, I think so, man.
Speaker 1 (47:22):
All righty.
Speaker 2 (47:23):
You got anything else?
Speaker 1 (47:25):
Yeah, I mean, we should mention David Blaine. He very
famously did this standing in 2002. Remember that?
Speaker 2 (47:34):
For how long? No, I don't remember that at all.
Speaker 1 (47:36):
He stood atop a 90-foot pole for 35 hours in
Bryant Park in New York.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
And this is when he was doing those. I love
the guy as a street magician and give me a
little levitation trick, but when he was like, I'm going
to hold my breath or I'm going to be encased
in ice or stand on this thing. That's when I
lost interest.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I like street magic, too. It's pretty
great stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
But, yeah, he stood. It's tough to stand. I mean,
sitting is hard, but standing is a whole different deal.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
Yeah, for sure. I wouldn't want to do it.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
Nope.
Speaker 2 (48:12):
So you got anything else about flagpole sitting?
Speaker 1 (48:16):
I don't.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Well, then, Chuck, that means, of course, it's time for.
Listener mail.
Speaker 1 (48:24):
This is, oh, this is just funny. Remember in Bruxism,
I talked about my Dr. Tuggle. This comes from Joe
in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He said, hey guys, thanks for the
entertainment knowledge. Your discussion of doctor names at the end
of the Bruxism podcast reminded me of two anecdotes. My
ex-wife had a dentist in San Francisco named Dr. Drilling.
Speaker 2 (48:48):
No.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
Pretty good, huh? Sure. And this is even better. He said, second,
this one never gets appreciated as much by others for
some reason. It must just hit me the right way,
but I'm with you, Joe. It hits me too. She
worked in medical administration, and her boss at one point
was named Dr. Wachter. W-A-C-H-T-E-R, pronounced Wachter. And he said,
(49:15):
I could just imagine her submitting daily reports using BabyTalk going, here, Dr. Wachter,
here are your reports for the day.
Speaker 2 (49:25):
Man, this guy is our new mascot here on the show.
I think we need to actually get him on here.
What's his name?
Speaker 1 (49:31):
Joe in Gettysburg. I love it.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
Yeah, Joe, way to go. This is one of the
best listener mails I think I've ever heard, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Dr.
Speaker 2 (49:38):
Wachter. Well, if you want to be like Joe and
try to topple his record as the greatest email listener
mail writer of all time, take your best shot. You
can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, run
it up the flagpole and see who salutes it at
Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com.
Speaker 1 (50:02):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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Hey, everybody. It's July 14th, 2020. And we're all rolling
through COVID pretty well by this point. We're all pretty
drunk most of the time and gaining weight. But that's okay.
We're going to let each other up because it's a
global pandemic. This episode is called Flagpole Sitting, colon, a
(00:20):
real fad. And it was. People would sit at the
top of flagpoles for as long as they could. And
it was a part of a weird time in American history.
So check out this episode, not on Harvey Danger, the
band who sang the song Flagpole Sitta, as did my
cover band, but Flagpole Sitting for real. Check it out
right now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production
(00:47):
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant right over there. Jerry's out
there somewhere, and this is Stuff You Should Know. You know, Chuck,
I have to say, every once in a while, the
amazing theme song from our short-lived television show comes into
my head. And it's just a complete earworm.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Because I just hear the end of it over and
over and over again. And it's actually pretty pleasant. It
doesn't bother me.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
I love it. I haven't heard that song in a while.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Well, you need to go listen. That was the Henry
Clay people, right?
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Yeah, our buddies Joey and Andy Sierra, California boys, Southern
California boys, men.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Didn't they go to like Harvard or something crazy like that?
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Joey ended up going to Harvard, and then I think
Andy went to AFI, and then Joey, I think, went
back to film school, and they're both writing, you know, screenwriting.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Man, that's great.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Andy's got a— he wrote this Andy Samberg movie that's coming
out soon.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Really? Which one? What's it called?
Speaker 1 (02:01):
It is called Palm Springs, I think.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Wow, and he wrote it? Yeah, dude. That's fantastic. Congratulations.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
And he wrote on the TV show Lodge 49. Yeah,
Palm Springs.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
I haven't seen that. But that guy, Kurt Russell and
Goldie Hawn's son— I love that guy.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
I think he's one of the coolest people walking around
on the planet today.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah. I haven't seen Lodge 49. It's supposed to be awesome.
And Andy was a writer's assistant and then ended up
on the staff. And they're both doing great.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Man, that's great. Congratulations to both of you guys.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
He's got a little baby now. They're both married.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Nice, man. That's nice.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
And that's an update on the Sierra Club, as.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
I call them. Yeah. Let's see. What else? I guess
that was it.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
How did that come into your head, though, the song? Like,
what made you think of that?
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Nothing. I was just out back, like, mowing the lawn
with my big old lawnmower, and it just popped in
my head. I was probably thinking of something I had
to do that had to do with Stuff You Should Know,
and I thought Stuff You Should Know, and when I
thought it, I thought it as Stuff You Should Know,
didn't it? And then it just played on a loop.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
This is the second time you mention the size of
your lawnmower.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
And now you just got to send me a picture.
Is this one of these things that you stand?
Speaker 2 (03:20):
No.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
And it wheels you around like some weird land speeder?
Speaker 2 (03:24):
You mean like a skag or something? No. This is
just a good old-fashioned Toro that is, because it's gas-powered,
I got it like on super discount because everybody's making
like really good electric lawnmowers.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
But this one was, you know, it was on discount,
and I like the look of it.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Yeah, it's a good-looking mower, huh?
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Yeah. I was like, I like your style. Come on
with me.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Is it red?
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Yeah, it's red Toros.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
It's nice.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Takes you back to days of paper routes and stuff
like that, doesn't it?
Speaker 1 (03:56):
I thought you were mentioning the song because you were
thinking of the song Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
No, I wasn't at all.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
But that's a great segue, Chuck, because it just so happens—
And you may be aware of this. We're talking about
flagpole sitting today in this episode.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
That's right. And I've been singing that song in my
head all day.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Now, I don't know that song.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
You know it. It was a, well, maybe not. It
was a top 40 hit in the 90s, kind of
during the grunge era. It was a power pop hit
that kind of. Oh. From Hardy Danger.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Speaker 1 (04:44):
That's not it.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
No.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
My band actually covers Flagpole City. It's a fun song. Okay.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
That's great. I'm going to have to go listen to
it because I feel like I'm missing out. But is
that song about Flagpole City? Is it about Shipwreck Kelly
in particular?
Speaker 1 (04:59):
No, it's not. But it does have one line that says,
Run it up the flagpole and see. And that's the
only time it references flagpoles at all.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Sees what?
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Uh, who salutes, but no one ever does. I think
is the next line. Hmm.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
That rings a bell.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
I was looking into the mirror. A little bit clearer.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes, but
no one ever does.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Yeah. I'm not sick, but I'm not well. Who is that?
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Harvey danger.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
That's a great song. I love it.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Yeah. Who fellow podcasting friend, John Roderick actually, uh, Sean
Nelson was a friend of his in Seattle, and he
played bass for a little while in Harvey Danger.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Oh, very. Wow, man. This is all coming for so good.
I got one more for you. What you got? I
used to have that song, and I don't know where
I downloaded it from. This would have been probably back
in the Napster days or something.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Whoa.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
And it was mislabeled as Brian Jonestown Massacre. And I
was always like, this does not sound like Brian Jonestown Massacre.
Now I know it most definitely wasn't Brian Jonestown Massacre.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Wow. All right. We haven't even talked about flagpole sitting yet.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
No, we haven't, which is a crime because it's actually
one of the more interesting weirdo fads that's ever come
this way in America. And it was in the 20s.
It started— we actually— we know who Patient Zero was of flagpole sitting.
And it's easy to tell because it is such a
bizarre thing to do.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
That if you can find the person who did it first,
who claims to have done it first, they're probably correct.
And in this case, you can trace it back to
sometime around January of 1924, supposedly, potentially, in Hollywood, California,
part of Los Angeles, and there was a man named
Alvin Shipwreck Kelly who supposedly climbed up on a flagpole
(07:02):
as part of a promotion for a movie and sat
there for a full 13 hours and 13 minutes. to
help draw a crowd, and boy did he ever.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Yeah, which, you know, it sounds like a long time
to sit on a flagpole, but that is kid stuff.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Compared to where this is headed.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
That's an aperitif.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
But it's a good first attempt, you know?
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Yeah, and so, you know, it sounds strange because when
you think of a flagpole, you're like, what are they
sitting on? It's a modified flagpole that basically, there are
different kinds, but Um, usually it's sort of like a
bar stool at the top of a flagpole and it's
that lo-fi and you climb up there and you sit
and that's all you do.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
That's it. I mean, whatever else you want to do.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Well, sure. You do other stuff.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Use yourself or whatever. Yeah. That's up to you. But
as far as being considered a flagpole sitter, that's it.
You sit on top of a flagpole for as long
as you can.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
All right. So let's talk about this guy because Shipwreck
Kelly was a pretty interesting character.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
And I have to say there's a Memory Palace episode
about him that I specifically didn't listen to beforehand because
I didn't want to unconsciously rip it off.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
But go listen to that.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Yeah, or old buddy Nate. I'm going to check that
out for sure. So Alvin Kelly, he was born Aloysius
Anthony Kelly in New York City in Hell's Kitchen in
a tenement in 1893 and had a very sad start
to his life in that his father had already passed
before he was born. His mother passed in childbirth, and
(08:35):
that basically meant he was shuttled around to relatives and
orphanages from, you know, the minute he took his first breath.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yeah. And apparently from a pretty early age, he would
do things like climb flagpoles and other tall stuff. And
like working at heights became a kind of a recurring
theme in his life. supposedly by age seven he was
climbing flagpoles. Within a few years after that, he was
starting to scale the facades of some of the buildings
(09:06):
in his neighborhood. And by the time he was 13,
and bear in mind if this guy's biography seems a
little thin, he just came out of nowhere in 1924
for sitting on a flagpole. So all of the info
about him came from him to reporters who were reporting
in the 1920s. So just fabrications are flying around left
(09:26):
and right. Sure. But supposedly he ran away at age
13 and ran off to join the crew of a
cargo ship and start his life sailing the seas.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Yeah, and he did a lot of kind of odd jobs,
or maybe not odd jobs, but just jobs that didn't
have anything to do with one another over the next
couple of decades. He was in the movies as a
stand-in and a double. He was a stunt person, a
stunt pilot, a high diver, a boxer. This part I love.
There's actually a name for people that repair church steeples
(10:00):
What is that?
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Steeplejack.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
He was a steeplejack.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
That is definitely a band name for sure.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Steeplejack? Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
It sounds like maybe an industrial band, but like on
the light side, like the Like they're technically too melodic
to actually be considered industrial, but they still call themselves industrial.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
That's become my favorite part of this whole band name thing.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Is it?
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Is you describing what kind of band it is.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Oh, okay.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Well, thanks, man. That makes me feel warm and pleasant.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
So World War I comes along, and he was in
the Naval Auxiliary Reserve as an ensign and served on
the USS Edgar F. Luckenbach during that war.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yep. So he did have some sort of, well, I
should say, I don't know if anybody's corroborated that. But
we'll just take all that at face value because it
doesn't really matter at this point. But he eventually picked
up the nickname Shipwreck. And there's a lot of different
explanations for this. And he's given or he gave multiple
(11:06):
different explanations depending on what reporter he was talking to.
But one of the numbers that gets bandied about pretty
frequently is, is that Shipwreck Kelly was so named because
he survived 32 different shipwrecks at sea, which is where
shipwrecks tend to happen.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Those were the good old days. Yeah. You just make
up stories about yourself.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Do you remember when we talked about– we did an
episode on the world's either luckiest or unluckiest people?
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
And do you remember that one guy who was like,
I survived– car that fell off a cliff and I
survived a train wreck and all that. He was doing
his jam in like 2005, remember?
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Oh, was he?
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Yeah. He was pretty, pretty recent if I remember correctly.
You remember his son came out and was like, everybody,
this is not true. Right. Like none of what you're
talking about is true.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Well, we don't.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
My dad just fooled you all.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
We don't know if Shipwreck Kelly actually survived the Titanic
like he claimed, but we do know that he was
not on the roster on the Titanic. So I am
going to venture to say that he made that one up.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
And there were three Kellys on board who were survivors,
but all three of them were women. So, yeah, he
probably wasn't on the Titanic. Maybe he did survive from shipwrecks.
He was at sea, most likely. But the point is,
is they called him Shipwreck Kelly. And I guess somebody
went to the trouble of digging up that some reporters
(12:30):
who covered his boxing career are probably the likeliest source
for where he got his nickname Shipwreck, right?
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Yeah, which I love. Because I guess he wasn't a
great boxer because they said that he was often adrift
and ready to sink.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Isn't that great?
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Shipwreck Kelly.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
It's a great nickname and an even better origin story
than surviving 32 shipwrecks, if you ask me.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
Yeah, and the other thing we don't know for sure
is even if that Hollywood movie premiere story is correct
in his first major outing as a flagpole sitter because
yet another story says, no, this is actually in Philadelphia–
at a department store and he just did it on
a dare. And the department store got a lot of
business because people were standing around looking and then doing
(13:14):
some shopping. So they were like, hey, stay up there
and I'll give you some extra dough. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
So either way, it's pretty widely held that Shipwreck Kelly
was the guy who started the flagpole sitting craze.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
And it was a craze because This is a time
where you could go sit on a flagpole for 13
hours and 13 minutes and newspapers around the country would
pick up the story and write about it. And you
would suddenly become famous overnight. And that's exactly what happened
to Shipwreck Kelly. So that's prong one toward this becoming
(13:51):
a fad in the 1920s. The other criteria is that
people have to want to topple that record. And that
was very widespread at the time too because the 1920s
were actually really big into fads. Like people would take
up weird fads and just go nuts over them for
basically the whole decade.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Yeah, you know, people had time and they had fewer distractions.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah, no TV.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
So like someone doing a dance-a-thon for 28 hours or
sitting on a flagpole for a day, You know, it's
an interesting story back then. It's sad that that was interesting,
but it was.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Right. So we'll talk about dance marathons, and then we'll
take a break, okay? Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Okay. Oh, wait.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
I got that backwards, Chuck, I just realized. Hopefully Jerry
figured it out and there was an ad in there somewhere.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
I think we should just leave it just like that, though.
That'll be fun. Okay.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
So... We're going to talk about dance marathons now, after
the ad break, despite what I said before. And dance
marathons are a super 20s example of a crazy fad
that kind of came along and got everybody by the hackles.
And people across the country started entering basically dance marathon competitions.
(15:44):
All because of one person, one woman, a dance instructor
named Alma Cummings.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
That's right. 32 years old. She danced for 27 hours.
at the Audubon Ballroom in New York in 1923 with
six different dance partners. And it was a weird time
because it wasn't just dancing. It was endurance challenges as
a whole were just all the rage and punishing your
(16:11):
bodies and all these weird random ways from yo-yoing to
hula hooping to rocking in a rocking chair or skipping rope.
to dancing. Dancing was the big one. That's where you,
you know, if you see these videos of these marathon
dance competitions, it's just, it looks like hell on earth.
(16:32):
It looks awful.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Yeah. Oh yeah. They didn't seem very fun at all,
but Alma Cummings just kicked the whole thing off. And again,
just like Shipwreck Kelly, who would follow, I guess, a
year later, or even, yeah, about a year later, she
got a lot of publicity. There's like a famous photo
of her Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
For celebrity, however you can get it. And that seemed
to really drive people who wanted to be like, well,
if this lady got this much attention for dancing 27
straight hours, maybe I can get even more attention for
dancing 30 straight hours. And so within just, I think,
three weeks of Alma Cummings setting this record for dancing,
(17:30):
it had been broken nine times, at least, from people
trying to seek the same kind of publicity she got.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Yeah, and, you know, it's funny. It really, like, we
talk about these days how everyone wants their 10 minutes
or they want to be reality show famous or whatever.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Has it been whittled down to 10 now? I thought
it was, like, 15.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Well, like, that's something new, and it's really not. Like,
this is sort of the version of that back then
was I want to be famous, I want my names
in the papers, but I'm not particularly skilled enough to
do anything to do that, so I'll rock in a
rocking chair for three days. Yeah. You know?
Speaker 2 (18:07):
And hopefully they will come. If I rock, they will come.
That was a pity laugh at best, but I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Well, it was a bad joke.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Admittedly.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
But it would, and we should shout out a bunch
of great websites here because this next bit came from
Atlas Obscura, one of our favorite sites, and also our
dearest of old sites that we always have loved, Mental Floss, Ripley's.
History Daily, J. Mark Powell, and Historic Pelham, which is great.
(18:41):
But Atlas Obscura talks about in the 30s, and this
is really kind of depressing, during the Depression.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
It's very appropriate.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Is that sometimes people would enter these dance marathons because
it would be somewhere they could sleep and eat for
a week at a time when they didn't necessarily have
a home or food.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Yeah, it is extremely depressing. Or just the prize money
that was offered in the depression might be enough to
keep your house from being foreclosed on. So, yeah, the
thing is, you know, you can blame promoters for continuing
this long beyond the fad, but the promoters wouldn't have
been putting these on and offering this prize money were
(19:26):
it not for all the crowds that would show up
every day to watch these people get increasingly closer to,
you know, catastrophic exhaustion from, from dance marathons because like
there were, there were rules where, you know, probably early
on in the dance marathon, um, you could sleep or
rest for 15 minutes of every hour. Yeah. And then
(19:48):
after like a week, a week of this dance marathon
going on, the promoter might be like, oh, okay, well,
you know, we need to step things up a little bit.
And you will now have three minutes per hour of
every 24-hour period in a day to where you can rest.
And then toward the end, they'd be like, no rest.
(20:09):
I think I read about one where the last 57
hours of a multi-week dance marathon was like had no rest.
So these people dance for more than two straight days constantly.
You had to constantly be in motion and your knees
couldn't touch the ground or else you'd be disqualified. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
And if you look at footage of this stuff, I mean,
it's charitable to recall what they're doing is dancing toward
the end. It's just hanging. It looks like two corpses
hanging on each other, sort of swaying back and forth.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
I don't get, I mean, any of these things, even
the modern day versions of like these contests where you
have to keep your hand on a car or whatever.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
And on hard body.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Oh, man. Or sit in the car. I knew a
guy that did one of those where he tried to
win a Volkswagen Beetle by sitting in it with four
other people in a mall. I'm just like. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
You told us that story before. Did he win or not?
Speaker 1 (21:04):
I think he did. But there's just no way. Kill me.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Yeah, it would be really awful for sure. Because let's say.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
For one of those contests, let's say you don't win.
Then you've just sat in a car with three strangers
for a week and you didn't even get the car.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
But even if you did get the car, imagine yourself
five years on and that car is like there's tears
in the seats or something like that, you know, like
the glove compartment won't close. It's, you know. I mean,
I guess you've got a story to tell at cocktail parties,
but even that would wear thin after a while.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
But Chuck, we need people to do stuff like that
because there's something about contests like this. There's something about
fads like flagpole sitting that keep humanity from becoming too cerebral.
You know what I mean? From just becoming like. Computers, basically.
(22:04):
We need people that do stuff like this because it
brings out some juvenile something in us that makes us
want to find out about it or learn about it
or talk about it. And I think that's good. I
think that's healthy for our species. All right. It's my take.
It's genuinely off the cuff. I'm actually just surprised at
(22:24):
myself that I just said that out loud.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
You're just riffing.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
So Shipwreck Kelly, back to flagpole sitting. That initial 13-hour,
13-minute sit, like you said, inspired so many others to
break it. And it was getting broken in pretty short order,
kind of like the dance-a-thons. There was a woman named
Bobby Mack from L.A. who did it, a guy named
Joe Holdom Powers who did this in Chicago for 16 days,
(22:55):
another guy for 51 days named Bill Penfield.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Yeah, so let's point this out. Take a second here.
Shipwreck Kelly did 13 hours and kicked off a national fad.
These people are now into weeks at a time. 51
days is more than seven weeks up there. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
It's pretty impressive. That's a long time.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
I'm impressed at least.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Are you bucking the cerebral?
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Yes, right now. Can you tell?
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Let me see here. In the 20s, there was a
15-year-old boy who set the kid record. For 10 days,
10 hours, 10 minutes, and 10 seconds. I think that
was planned.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Yeah, if not, then. But see, there you go, Chuck.
We're thinking about that. It's making us think. This little
kid is making us think. We've got to avoid that.
It needs to be random combinations of numbers so we
don't start thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
We should also point out that not everyone was like, oh,
this is the best thing ever. In Cosmopolitan magazine, Cosmo
called it competitive imbecility. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
This is fine. We need that, too. I have to say,
I want to say something here. It's a little PSA.
This might not even ever make it in the final edit.
So I'll just say it to you. How about that?
I would say the last, like, few weeks of episodes,
there's been, like, some good ones here or there. But overall,
I find that they've been less good because I am
(24:22):
so sick of myself. Because we've been so... entrenched in
the book right now. So it's like living, breathing S-Y-S-K,
which is us, and having to confront and like myself
and my own personality and sense of humor and whether
that's actually funny and just constantly thinking about this on
(24:44):
top of doing the podcast on top of the other
stuff we're trying to do now too and I am
so sick of myself I can barely tolerate listening to
myself talk so if anyone's picked up on the last
few episodes like in the last few weeks just being
a little ho-hum that's why and I apologize maybe we'll
(25:04):
go back and redo them one day wow.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
News to me. I think you've been great.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Hey, thanks a lot, man. That's ultimately what I was
fishing for.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
All right. Well, if you want to cut that part out,
let me pick this up by saying, and I'm sure
you've made a great point, Josh.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
So, so back to Kelly, right? You've got all these,
what I'm sure Shipwreck Kelly deemed slack-jawed yokels, ho-hums, that
kind of thing. Um, Who were out there trying to
topple his record.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
And they did.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Some of them did topple his record. But nobody had
turned this into a business like Shipwreck Kelly had. He
was a one-man money-making machine who made his money just
by sitting on top of a flagpole.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Good money.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Because he was really good at self-promoting. Like there wasn't
a reporter whose ear he wouldn't bend if he got
the chance. And in these reports or these articles, he
would say things like, yeah, I'm in town for this,
but if anybody has any other offers, I'm wide open
and I'm staying at, you know, the Cambridge Arms itinerant
hotel for the next few days if somebody wants to
(26:14):
get in touch with me there with a job offer.
Like he was really good at attracting job offers specifically
for flagpole sitting.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Yeah, and he made good dough. I mean, this is
good money any time. if he made $ 100 an hour
like he claimed to, other people said, no, it really
wasn't that much. It was probably closer to anywhere between
$ 100 and $ 500 a day. Still a lot of money.
And like you said, it was like, he was almost
(26:43):
like a celebrity version of a sign spinner. Like if
you could pay George Clooney to sign spin in front
of your mobile phone store, that was sort of what
Shipwreck Kelly was.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
That's a great one. I got one too. It's almost
like if there was a cult of personality built up
around like the flapping dancing wind sock guy that they
put out in front of like mattress stores in like 2005. Yeah.
I love those dudes. Okay.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Those are fun.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
I think both of those are high quality analogies.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Well, we'll see which one Jerry uses in the edit.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Okay. Let me see here. Here are some of his
longer sits. He did 146 hours at the Old West
Gate Hotel in Kansas City. Not bad. 312 hours in Newark,
New Jersey atop the St. Francis Hotel. That's pretty good. Sure.
(27:43):
I don't know what that is in days, but... 312 hours?
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Let's see. If you divided that by 24, as you should...
You would come up with something along the lines of
13 days on the nose.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Hmm. All right. Well, how about 22 days? And this
was in conjunction with the dance marathon at none other
than Madison Square Garden.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Yeah, because I don't know if we said it or not,
but there was a dance marathon at Madison Square Gardens
that was actually shut down by the health department because
they decided it had gone on too long, 10 days,
and that it deemed a threat to the health of
the participants. That wasn't the one that he sat in,
but there was one the following year where for, what
(28:27):
was it, 22 days?
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
That means that the dance marathon went on for 22 days.
But imagine that. So you've got these two endurance fads
just interweaved in this way that the universe almost like
collapses in on itself because they're put together too close together,
you know?
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Yeah, and here's how he would do it. He would
sit on that bar stool-like thing And it was padded
and he would, um, you know, eat and smoke cigarettes
and shave apparently. And they would send this stuff, stuff
up in like a, with a bucket and a rope
and tell him how he would sleep. Cause this is
(29:08):
what I really kind of wanted to know.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
So, so you said his, his seat was like a
bar stool around bar stool basically. Right. And, um, It
was on a pole, a flagpole appropriately. And then in
the flagpole, you'd have two holes drilled just beneath the seat.
And now that I'm doing it, I'm like, that's really
hard to reach. So now I'm questioning whether this is
true or not.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
He might have long arms.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Maybe so.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
Long thumbs.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
So he would plug his thumbs into those holes. drilled
into each side of the flagpole so that when he
started to lean forward, the pressure from the flagpole on
his thumbs would kind of cut into his skin and
wake him up just enough that he would adjust himself.
And apparently he got so good at this that he
would adjust himself to sit back up so he wouldn't
(29:58):
fall over off of the flagpole while he was still sleeping.
Like he wouldn't wake up. He could just adjust himself
in his sleep.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
That's right. And he'd have his little, I don't know
if they're little, but he would have his ankles locked
around the pole and apparently would tether a leg to
keep him from catastrophe. But I think it's very dubious
that that was a solid life-saving rig.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
And I mean, like some of these flagpoles, he's sitting
on 30 feet, 50 feet. One of them, I guess
the impression I had, the one that you mentioned on
Kansas City's Westgate Hotel, that that flagpole was on the
top roof of the hotel. So, I mean, he was
up there for sure. And if something had gone wrong,
he would have, yeah, that tether probably would not have
(30:46):
done terribly much. Or it would have done a lot
to keep his leg hanging up there, but the rest
of them would have kept going to the ground, you know?
Speaker 1 (30:54):
How did he pee-pee and poo-poo?
Speaker 2 (30:57):
He had a little contraption for that with the tube
that went down. Okay. But here's the thing. So you're
a traveling flagpole sitter. You're relying on the help of
other people on the ground. You need food. When you
pee and poop into that contraption that leads to a
tube that goes down to the ground— You don't want
that just leaking out for the spectators to see and
(31:19):
smell and experience. You need it to go into a
bucket that somebody is going to go take away and dump.
So you're relying on this kind of group of assistants
and hands that probably the promoter maybe helped hire for you.
Maybe you make a friend along the way who just
kind of travels from town to town with you for
a little while.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
That's what I think. Shipwreck Kelly had an assistant.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
He had a boy.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
That was the worst job in show business.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
Right. He had a lad who would help him.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Yeah. So, but it would be a pretty bad job.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
But anyway, so he had to, I mean, he had
to eat and he didn't eat much. He would apparently
just kind of almost do a broth fast, augmented with
cigarettes and coffee. He would stay up for four days
at a time because like living on a flagpole is
not exactly like the most comfortable place you can exist for.
(32:14):
you know, 22 days or 13 days or however long. No.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
And it eventually turned against him in that the money
dried up after he did this sort of big Atlantic
City stunt that we talked about. And it was the
Great Depression. And eventually people were kind of like, I
don't really care so much about this dumb stunt because
I'm starving and I'm broke and I'm homeless.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Right.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
And the kind of tide of public opinion turned such
that In 1935, he went to do this in the Bronx,
and he was actually arrested for public nuisance.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
And I'm sure he was like, but I'm Shipwreck Kelly. Right.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
But, I mean, think about it. That's like everybody's sick
of you now, Kelly, and your schtick. We're all just
depressed in the Depression, so maybe we'll do a dance marathon,
but we're not going to watch you sit around in
a flagpole anymore. And there was a contemporary article that
was written at the time that said that he– attributed
the decline of flagpole sitting directly to the stock market crash.
(33:16):
And he said that people didn't want to see anything
higher than their securities, stock securities at the time, which
were not very high.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
And everyone went, that's just not even a joke in
good taste. And he punches human familiar in the mouth
and say, you told me to tell that joke.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
Man, that was gangbusters, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Do you watch that show?
Speaker 2 (33:40):
You got me.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
What we do in the shadows?
Speaker 2 (33:44):
I've seen some episodes of it. You know, we were
talking about it, and one of the PAs, I think,
wrote in to say that they were just blown away
that we were giving such big ups to their show.
I think I remember that. If you talk to Matt Berry,
tell him he's a comedy genius. I never heard anything back. Oh,
have you seen An Evening with Beverly Loughlin?
Speaker 1 (34:08):
No. How do I know that name?
Speaker 2 (34:10):
So it's a Craig.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Robinson?
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Yes. From The Office, right?
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
He plays a guy named Beverly Loughlin. And Aubrey Meadows?
Speaker 1 (34:24):
Aubrey Plaza?
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Aubrey Meadows. Plaza. That's right. Man, I'm really screwing this up.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
You're great with first names, though.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
And then.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Okay. So she's the main character. Jemaine Clement. I know him.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
You got that.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
He plays... Well, you just have to see it.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
Well, he was in What We Do in the Shadows,
the movie.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Right, right. So I think he co-created it too. This
is what all ties into this. He and Matt Berry
are also in this too. Matt Berry is in the
TV version of What We Do in the Shadows.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
I mean, Clement helped create it. But it's definitely worth watching.
It's purposefully very bizarre, which can get really annoying really easily.
But this movie pulls it off very well, like purposeful
bizarreness for humor. And it's a good movie. It's worth watching. Okay,
it's worth watching. I'll leave it to you to decide
(35:16):
whether it's a good movie or not.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Well, I love everybody in it. That's a great cast.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah, I mean, it's worth watching. How about that?
Speaker 1 (35:23):
All right. Should we take our second break here? Can
you believe we haven't?
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Yes, I can.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
All right. Let's do our other break, and then we're
going to talk about, we're going to wind up this
flagpole sitting thing right after this. Okay, so Kelly, when
(36:09):
we left off, the public turns on him. They don't
care about him anymore. He's probably drunk in some hotel
room somewhere with his human familiar, talking about the good
old days at this point.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
Yeah, yeah, it is kind of sad. I get the
impression that the Memory Palace episode really focuses on the
sad decline of Shipwreck Kelly because, I mean, he was
a celebrity, a national, probably international celebrity for like a decade.
a decade for sitting on flagpoles. And then all of
a sudden he's just done. Like society drops him like
(36:45):
a hot potato and he's penniless and on public assistance basically.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Yeah. And he died a very sad death. He did.
And I think his final flagpole sit was all the
way in the 1950s in Orange, Texas in 1952. He
was almost 60 years old at this point. And he had,
during the publicity run-up to this, had two heart attacks. Well,
(37:14):
was he sitting on his pole for publicity or was
this part of the pole sitting when he had the
heart attacks?
Speaker 2 (37:22):
He had the heart attacks on the pole during the publicity.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Oh, so the actual sit was another publicity stunt for
some place.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Right, yeah. I don't know what business it was for.
I didn't see that. But I did see that the
promoters were like, come down right now. We don't think
you're going to survive a third heart attack, so stop.
Which is crazy. I mean, there was only 59 at
the time.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
Yeah, but 59 in the 1950s.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
I guess so. When your name was shipwrecked. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
But he did die of that third heart attack like
a week after that, right?
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Yeah, he was walking around New York on 51st Street.
And he dropped dead on the sidewalk from a heart attack.
And he was found holding a scrapbook of all, like,
clippings of newspaper articles about him during his heyday.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Oh, man.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Isn't that sad?
Speaker 1 (38:19):
That's like a movie.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Yeah, I can't believe this is a movie. He's, I mean,
he's a gold mine just waiting to be, well, mined.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Wait, wait, wait.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
There's one other thing about him before we move on.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
What do you got?
Speaker 2 (38:36):
After he was done with his flagpole sitting career, the
heyday of it, one of the jobs he had was
as a gigolo, a male escort who would dance with
whoever wanted him to dance at the Roseland Ballroom near
Times Square.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
He was a private dancer.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
A dancer for money.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
I've been to Roseland. Seen some good shows there.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Yeah, well. You were where Shipwreck Kelly danced for a
dime a dance. Because he was a gigolo.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
I would have paid for that dance. Sure. Tell him
to sit on my head.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Hey, he'll do what you want him to do. Oh, boy.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
So we looked, or rather you looked, because you put
this one together, and you found one death from flagpole sitting.
Isn't that right?
Speaker 2 (39:26):
That's all I could turn up. Surely, surely there were more,
but I could really only find one. And this guy
was wonderful in every way.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Dick Blandy?
Speaker 2 (39:36):
Dixie Blandy. Richard Dixie. D-I-X-I-E. Blandy.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
Dick Dixie Blandy.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Sure. So, Dixie Blandy. He was a flagpole sitter who
was contemporaneous to Shipwreck Kelly.
Speaker 1 (39:52):
A little bit.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
Like during, surely he was directly inspired by Shipwreck Kelly.
He came along and started in 1929, which is almost
the worst year you could join the flagpole sitting movement
because just the next year, Shipwreck Kelly had his triumphant
sit aboard like a, or above a two, what?
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Triumphant sit. It's just great. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Yeah, well, it was triumphant for a couple of reasons. One,
it was his longest sit, I believe, 22 days, 23 days,
something like that. And secondly, it was above a top,
a 200-foot flagpole. For weeks, he sat up there. That's triumphant,
if you ask me. But he did his in 1930,
(40:37):
and everybody dropped him right after. Dixie Blandy just started
in 1929. But even though people said flagpole sitting is
so out, we're not going to bother even looking up
when we see somebody on a flagpole. Dixie Blandy said,
you know what, I'm not giving up on this. And
he continued to make a career out of it wherever
he could.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
Yes, until he died from flagpole sitting at the age
of 71. In 1974, he fell off of his flagpole.
It was a 50-foot pole. And where was this? In Harvey? Harvey.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
Yeah, I get the impression in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
Harvey, Pennsylvania?
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Yeah, because the article that reported on it as if
it were something of a nearby event was called the
Reading Eagle. And Reading is in Pennsylvania, right?
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Yeah. Is it Reading?
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Whatever. I can't tell you how many times I've been
told that since I was a child playing Monopoly. And
it's just never stuck for some reason.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Oh, is that the titular railroad? Mm-hmm. Oh, okay. The
Reading Railroad. We said Reading.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
Yeah. That's right. That's what I said too, but apparently
it's Reading.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
I didn't know. I didn't know it was the same thing.
But either way, this is where Harvey, and of course
it's always like the grand opening of a shopping center
or something. Yeah. And that's what was going on here.
It's a four-day promotion, and he basically said, I think
this pole is attached to a trailer, and the trailer moved.
(42:09):
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Well, he asked a security guard to move the trailer
so they could make room for what I took to
be a cherry picker that could go up and get them.
This is hours before the end of his four-day sit.
And when the security guard, I guess who had never
tried this before, moved the trailer, a guy wire that
was stabilizing the pole became taut and actually pulled the pole,
(42:33):
snapped the pole in two with Dixie still on top
of this 50-foot pole, and he landed safely. Skull first,
from what I can tell, onto the asphalt below. That
is not what you want to open your grocery store with.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
No, or to close your flagpole sit with.
Speaker 2 (42:51):
No, either way, it's a bad jam.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
If you're going to fall, fall early.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
This was not his only accident, too. This was the
one that got him, but he had fractured his skull
before when he was thrown off a pole in a
storm in 1955. And then there was... This is heartwarming.
In 1961... he was doing a pole sit for a
promotion dressed as Santa Claus. And he was shouting, Merry Christmas.
(43:15):
That was his job. Sit on the top of the
flagpole and shout Merry Christmas. And apparently it got to
the point where he finally yelled down that he was
getting numb and he had to be taken to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
Which is, this is what I'm talking about, man. Just
no thought. It doesn't take thought to just think about
flagpole sitting. And I love that about it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Merry Christmas.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
Merry Christmas. I think, I think there's something wrong up here.
I got to go to the hospital cause I'm sitting
on top of a flagpole dressed as Santa Claus shouting
Merry Christmas for three days. And it's December in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
In Reading. It's reading. Uh, this was, you know, these
were definitely the waning days. This was in the 1970s.
There were some other stunts throughout the years here and there.
A couple got married atop a flagpole. Um, Let me
see here. A 17-year-old in 1963 named Peggy Townsend spent
(44:12):
217 days on a pole for a contest for a
radio station. And then the granddaddy of them all, this
guy Kenneth Gidge, Ken Gidge, 248 days in 1971. This
guy would later on be a state rep for New Hampshire.
And he, I mean, reading his account... He was basically like,
(44:37):
it was terrible.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
Right.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
And I hated it every.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
Second of it. He had a parakeet. He had his
parakeet with him named Nixon. And he said that his
parakeet came to hate him, like despise him. He said
he didn't think any animals ever hated somebody more than
that parakeet hated him. probably because he made them stay
up there in this little tiny house on top of
a fiberglass pole that would sway back and forth. He
(45:03):
couldn't lay down straight in it because of the pole,
so he had to lay wrapped around the pole. It
sounds really horrible and terrible. And he did it to
get publicity because he was an out-of-work actor, I guess.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
At the time. Yeah, like I said, to call the
thing a house is generous. It's this little, I mean,
you can see a picture of it, but it was
some sort of shelter, at least. He wasn't just sitting
like on a bar stool, like Shipwreck Kelly for 248 days.
Speaker 2 (45:29):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
But it was bad. And it's just funny reading these
quotes from him. He did not have a good time.
And he just basically kind of talked about how awful
it was.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
Yeah, they said that he lost 15 pounds, three inches
from his waist and 13 days of sleep just within
the first three months. And that when people would come out,
like when the weather was nice, people would come out
and shout questions up to him and he talked to him.
And he said, the men usually asked, if he sleeps
and how he goes to the bathroom. And then women
(45:58):
asked if he was lonely, which I find very sweet.
But I mean, remember, we started out here at 13
hours is what kicked this off. And this guy, Kenneth Gidge,
has brought it up to 248 days. But Chuck, that
does not seem to be the record any longer. In fact,
the record may never be broken ever. What do you think?
Speaker 1 (46:22):
Yeah, H. David Werder. Of Weeki Wachee, Florida. Man, this
is unbelievable. Sat for 439 days, 11 hours, 6 minutes. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
His sit went from 1982 to 1984. That's amazing. Yeah,
and it was outside of an appliance center in Clearwater.
And he didn't do this as like a publicity stunt
for that appliance center. He did it to protest gas
prices at the time.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
Yeah. That's how you see these days sometimes is protests.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
Sure. But gas at the time was 99 cents a gallon.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
That's cute.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
So his protest didn't work at all. But he spent
439 days of his life on a flagpole because he
was mad about the price of gas.
Speaker 1 (47:11):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (47:12):
No thought whatsoever to a zen-like beautiful state is what
this man achieved.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
Is that the overarching theme?
Speaker 2 (47:21):
Yep, I think so, man.
Speaker 1 (47:22):
All righty.
Speaker 2 (47:23):
You got anything else?
Speaker 1 (47:25):
Yeah, I mean, we should mention David Blaine. He very
famously did this standing in 2002. Remember that?
Speaker 2 (47:34):
For how long? No, I don't remember that at all.
Speaker 1 (47:36):
He stood atop a 90-foot pole for 35 hours in
Bryant Park in New York.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
And this is when he was doing those. I love
the guy as a street magician and give me a
little levitation trick, but when he was like, I'm going
to hold my breath or I'm going to be encased
in ice or stand on this thing. That's when I
lost interest.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I like street magic, too. It's pretty
great stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
But, yeah, he stood. It's tough to stand. I mean,
sitting is hard, but standing is a whole different deal.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
Yeah, for sure. I wouldn't want to do it.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
Nope.
Speaker 2 (48:12):
So you got anything else about flagpole sitting?
Speaker 1 (48:16):
I don't.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Well, then, Chuck, that means, of course, it's time for.
Listener mail.
Speaker 1 (48:24):
This is, oh, this is just funny. Remember in Bruxism,
I talked about my Dr. Tuggle. This comes from Joe
in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He said, hey guys, thanks for the
entertainment knowledge. Your discussion of doctor names at the end
of the Bruxism podcast reminded me of two anecdotes. My
ex-wife had a dentist in San Francisco named Dr. Drilling.
Speaker 2 (48:48):
No.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
Pretty good, huh? Sure. And this is even better. He said, second,
this one never gets appreciated as much by others for
some reason. It must just hit me the right way,
but I'm with you, Joe. It hits me too. She
worked in medical administration, and her boss at one point
was named Dr. Wachter. W-A-C-H-T-E-R, pronounced Wachter. And he said,
(49:15):
I could just imagine her submitting daily reports using BabyTalk going, here, Dr. Wachter,
here are your reports for the day.
Speaker 2 (49:25):
Man, this guy is our new mascot here on the show.
I think we need to actually get him on here.
What's his name?
Speaker 1 (49:31):
Joe in Gettysburg. I love it.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
Yeah, Joe, way to go. This is one of the
best listener mails I think I've ever heard, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Dr.
Speaker 2 (49:38):
Wachter. Well, if you want to be like Joe and
try to topple his record as the greatest email listener
mail writer of all time, take your best shot. You
can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, run
it up the flagpole and see who salutes it at
Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com.
Speaker 1 (50:02):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by Audiochuck Media Company.
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.