September 19, 2024 • 48 mins
There's a good chance that if you don't live in San Antonio, Texas, you may not know who scientist/adventurer Tom Slick is. Today we tackle the story of the most interesting man you've never heard of.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and it's just us today and we know from
experience that that's just fine. And this is stuff you
should know. This guy had his finger in a lot
of different pies. That stuff you should know s ten
episodes on edition.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Yeah. I mean this is a interesting one because our
friend Chad, Chad did our TV show, and Chad is
doing a or has done a podcast, a highly fictionalized
scripted podcast. Yeah, for our company, for iHeart you know,
(00:52):
the company we own. Sure about Tom Slick. And when
he was telling me about this, Owen Wilson is voicing it,
and Sissy's is in it. I have a small part.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Uh oh really, I didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Yeah, yeah, I'll get to that.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
I also read that Carlton Fisk is in it.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Uh, I don't think so. The baseball player.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Yeah, no, it's Sissy's basics daughter.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah, Skyler Fisk.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Skyler Fisk guy always confused with Carlton Fisk, the old
white Sox player exposu.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
I have white Sox, I think, among others. Uh, okay,
but anyway, Chad was like, Dude, this guy, like he's
the most interesting man that you've never heard of. And
I found when I was online researching, like outside of
San Antonio and maybe Texas in a broader sense, like
there aren't a ton of people who don't think that
(01:42):
Tom Slick is just the name of a cartoon that
has nothing to do with this guy.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Yeah, did you ever watch Tom Slick when you were younger?
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Oh? The cartoon?
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Yeah? Sure, I never did. Yeah, I watched a lot
of Rocky and Bullwinkle, but I'd never heard of Tom
Slick until I started researching this cat.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Yeah, it was like a Georgia of the Jungle Partner
right show. But yeah, I just I mean it was
even I mean, it wasn't hard to find information online,
but it wasn't as easy as a lot of people.
And considering all the like kind of crazy extraordinary things
he did in his life.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
I ran into the exact same issue where like, there's
a lot of stuff, I don't even want to say
a lot, but there's a substantial enough amount of articles
and sources about him online, but they all contain just
basically like one off anecdotes. Yeah, and it's like, wait,
I don't quite understand, like how did this incident like
(02:35):
help form his outlook on life, Like there's not a
complete picture of that dude. It drives me crazy, Yeah,
because I like to understand the whole thing, you know.
I love how the parts kind of make up a whole,
and I feel like with this guy, largely just have parts,
even though you know, if I put him together, he's
like a jigsaw with a bunch of missing places. But
(02:59):
I still can kind of see the picture, and it's
that he was a pretty cool and interesting dude and
seems to have been a genuinely good dude too.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Yeah. Had Nicholas Cage pulled off the film adaptation of
his life, all your prayers may have been answered, my friend.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yeah, I heard that that one was canceled because he
was doing it so weird. Every time Tom Slick ran
into a problem or an issue and was upset, Nicholas
Cage would just go for like five minutes and it
took up. It added like a good forty five minutes
to the film. Oh and he refused to let them
(03:36):
cut a second of it.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
I remember one of the funniest parts of the when
Andy Sandberg was doing Nick Cage on SNL.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
One of the.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Lines really got me one week was he was on
the Weekend Update and they were talking about some movie
that came out that he was in, you know, and
he's in like fifteen movies a year, and it had
all the elements of the Nick Cage movie number one
it existed.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Also, Yeah, yeah, I like that guy a lot. Samberg,
Nick Catche Yeah, and Andy Samberg is great too. And
Tom Slick, Yeah, for sure. I like Andy Samberg, but
I hadn't seen I never really watched Brooklyn nine nine.
I saw the most work he did in That's My Boy,
(04:21):
which I actually loved. Like, I don't think there's a
Sandler movie out there that I don't at least.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Like I did not see that, And there are many
many Adam Sandler movies that have not seen.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
I know.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
It's the shame of the podcast.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah, but I did watch the first couple of seasons
of Brooklyn nine nine and it's great.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Okay, Well, Adam Sandler wasn't on that as far as
I know, so that doesn't.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Count, I don't think. So.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
So let's talk about Tom Slick.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Huh, Yeah, I mean one of the problems with Tom
Slick is separating fact from fiction because he's one of
these guys that lives sort of an extraordinary, curious, filled
adventurous life. And right off the bat, the fact that
he was born on either May six and I'll so
I saw May ninth. It just may have been the
way things were back then. This is in nineteen sixteen,
(05:06):
and he was a junior to Thomas Baker Slick Senior,
who was a guy that really rubbed off on his
son because he had the same sort of adventurous spirit
as an oil man.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, Tom Baker Slick Senior was king of the wildcatters,
and a wildcatter is somebody who goes around just drilling
oil wells in places where it's not at all clear
that there's going to be oil. They're just very hopeful prospectors, right, Yeah,
And that's how he spent like his early career and
then finally he just hit pay dirt. It was called
(05:39):
I think the Wheeler Won Well in Bristol, Oklahoma, and
it became one of the most productive wells in America
that was pumping out like over three hundred thousand barrels
a day.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
I got another stat for you at the time, what
would become Cushing oil Field was responsible for two thirds
of the oil production in the Western Hymn sphere Man.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
So, yes, I guess it goes without saying that Tom
Slick Senior made himself and his family rich beyond their
wildest dreams. And so Tom Slick Junior grew up a
rich kid, and that's a huge thing. That was a
huge like part of his formative upbringing. He was extraordinarily wealthy,
(06:26):
but he was a rare rich kid that took that
wealth and put it to good use and also used
it to just totally free himself from, you know, the
pursuit of making a profit or turning a dollar or whatever.
He did things because he was curious about stuff, and
because he wanted to help humanity.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Yeah, but you know, when you're working that much, obviously
you're not going to be around your family as much.
Tom had a couple of siblings, and you know, Dad
just wasn't around because they lived in Pennsylvania as a family. Obviously,
the oil is out west, so Pops was in Oklahoma
and Texas most of the time working these long hours,
and those long hours did him in when he died
(07:02):
at only forty six years old. Of a stroke, which
was a you know, a huge loss for young Tom
because he even though Dad wasn't around that much, I
get the feeling that he kind of idolized him and
really revered him.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Yeah, he definitely followed in his footsteps too in a
lot of ways.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Yeah, so he was fourteen years old at the time,
and you know, it was a huge loss.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
It was. I also saw that he'd become so revered
and respected in Oklahoma that when he passed away, the
oil derek's in the Oklahoma City field, which is one
of the biggest fields in the country, they went silent
for an hour. So every oil man in Oklahoma who
had a Derek in this field stopped making money for
(07:46):
an hour out of respect for Tom Senior. I think
that says an enormous amount about him. Or maybe they
were just hungry, could have been I guess sure.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
So after Dad dies, a mom did something that was
you know, pready common back then, or you know, not
more common than it feels like it is now, which
is marrying your dead spouse's brother or sister. Her brother
in law was Charles Erschall because he was married to
Tom's sister, Flow, who also died around the same time.
(08:19):
This is all just bad luck. Of course, nothing weird
went on, and they got together and got married.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Yeah, they had elaborate marriage, like we talked about in
the Widow's episode. So from what I can gather, Charles
Erschall was a good stepfather to Tom, and Tom was
happy to have him. I mean it was his uncle already, right,
so he was quite concerned. When he was seventeen, he
was home from Exeter, the boarding school for the summer
(08:46):
back at Oklahoma City. By this time, the whole family
had moved to Oklahoma City and was living in a mansion,
the slick Erschel family. And in July twenty second, nineteen
thirty three, while everybody's just kind of hanging out, machine
Gun Kelly came knocking on the door with a few
of his cronies and said, we are taking Charles Erschel
with us. Which one of you, two men is Charles
(09:09):
Erschael and Urschel's friend Walter Jarrett was did one of
the most stand up things a frank can do when
you're being kidnapped.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Yeah, he just stood silently and sort of nudged his
nose over towards Erschel.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
His eyes are going like way left over here.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
No one picked up on that, now I'm kidding. He
Neither one of them said anything. And you know, I
guess they were sort of together in this, and so
they took him both and that, you know, that's what happened.
They kidnapped both these guys. They would eventually find Jarrett's ID.
So they dumped him on the side of the road
and took Erschel to rural Texas, to a ranch and
(09:47):
demanded two hundred grand in ransom, which is close to
five million bucks today.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Yes, this was a hugely consequential event, right, so that
Tom Slick Junior tangentially involved in because when Charles Ershall
was being held, he really kept his head about him
and depending on who you ask e there, he noted
the time of day, the times of day that a
(10:14):
train passed by nearby, or that planes flew overhead to
try to get an idea of where he was. He
put his fingers on everything he could to leave fingerprints,
and he also counted the steps anywhere he went when
he was blindfolded. So when he was released, and thankfully
he was released unharmed for a two hundred thousand dollars ransom,
(10:37):
he was able to tell the FEDS like, hey, here's
everything you need to know about going and finding this
ranch where they took me, and they did. They found
it rather quickly.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Yeah, he was also timing how long the trains were
and if you know how many trains are passing in
a sort of general area, how big these trains are.
I think that allowed them to literally go to train
schedules in that part of Texas and figured this thing out.
So he was he was a very smart guy. And
there were you know, they arrested Machine Gun. Kelly fled,
(11:09):
but they arrested the other guys. They were able to
track down Kelly in Memphis and he went to Alcatraz
for the rest of his life.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Yeah, so not only did he go to Alcatraz, Machine
Gun Kelly did. But this is where we talked about
in the jaeg Or Hoover episode where G Men was
coined because they went to come get him and when
they busted in the door, he said, don't shoot g Men,
And that's where their nickname came from. Just like we
talked about in the Hoover episode, that happened from this.
So this is what I'm saying, Like Tom Slick, his
(11:38):
life really spreads out into a lot of different stuff
you should know episodes, and yet we'd still never ran
across him in our research, which is strange to me.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Yeah, he was a big backer of science. That's something
that you're gonna see that kind of pops up again
and again in his life right stemming from his just
natural curiosity. And he was a very very smart dude.
He went to Yale and was into genetics and was
really and this was a time when you know, in
the nineteen forties Repolice Believe it or Not magazine and
(12:09):
the idea of like cross breeding animals and cryptids and
all these things were just it was sort of big news,
or if not big news, something people were kind of
into at the time. And he supposedly kept a list
of like animals that he wanted to try and cross breed.
When he read about a hog goat that was a
(12:29):
hote that was living in Arkansas, he drove to Arkansas
and bought whatever it was. I don't even know if
it was like poor things or what he ended up with,
but whatever he brought home, he tried to breed it
on his own farm with no luck.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
It was definitely not a hog goat because it's physically
and genetically and biologically impossible for them to reproduce. So
I didn't see what it was either, just that that
didn't exist. But that didn't stop him from trying.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Did you really look that up?
Speaker 2 (12:58):
I mean, I was like, I got to see this
thing and there was nothing. Nothing hope, hog goat, hog
goat cross breeding, I know, but I thought like, surely
there's there's something that this way. I couldn't find any
reference to it. I also saw in some places that
he basically like went to go buy it and realized
(13:19):
that these people didn't even exist, and certainly the hope
didn't exist, but he went and tried it anyway because
he really liked the idea of it. And this was
when genetics was really new and cutting edge, and this
guy's into it while he's still at Yale, you know.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Yeah. So one of the things he successfully does cross
breed is cattle. He looked at the Scottish angus, which
is you know, prized for its excellent quality beef. They're very,
very fertile. And then he looked at the Brahmin cattle
from India and he was like, these things are great.
They're disease resistant, they're pest resistant, they are they do
(13:56):
well in drought, and they're very very maternal, much more
maternal than the angus. So let's get them together. Put
three aids Brahmin with five eighths angus. And this was
one of his big noted early successes. When he was
in his early twenties. He created the Brangus cattle breed
that is still around today and like highly sought after.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah, yeah, I saw that that. People still love that,
and it helped introduce the angus cattle into Texas where
they would not have done very well before.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yeah. But here's the thing though, Like this sounds cool
like and you think, oh, this guy's like a cattle guy.
Now he's a rich kid looking to make more money
on this cattle deal. He was doing it because he
wanted to introduce a breed of cattle that did better
in places where there was drought and there were pests
and disease. So one of his business partners was like,
he didn't care about making money on this. He just
(14:48):
he hoped it would help people in hot countries.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Not just he didn't care. He didn't give quote hoot
and hell about making money on brangus.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Well, I wasn't gonna say it.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
I say, we take a break and come back, and
you meant and he's into cryptids. Let's talk about that
in a second.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Okay, all right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
So I don't know if we said or not, but
Tom Slick got he developed a love of cryptids, with
that he shared with his father. His father passed on
like a love of stories about Locknus Monster, the Abominable Snowman,
all sorts of adventurous stuff like that, and like you said,
it really rubbed off on Tom Junior, and so at
a pretty early age I think. Yeah, he was still
(15:47):
at Yale and with some of his buddies, he packed
his red Buick onto a steamership and went to Europe
for a summer where they drove around Europe and one
of the top things on his list was to go
look for the Lochness Monster. And one of the things
you'll kind of notice about Tom Slick is that when
he's doing these things that today in retrospect seemed very
(16:09):
weird and flaky, at the time there was like a
lot of evidence that these things existed. This was nineteen
thirty seven. The next year, the Celacanth would be rediscovered.
Like it was just kind of in the air that
there were things out there that Sidnce hadn't identified yet,
and perhaps the Lockness monster was one of them.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Yeah, and the very very famous picture of supposed NeSSI
was just three years prior to that, so it was
all the rage at the time. Personally, he got married
pretty quickly after Yale and got divorced even quicker to
his first wife, Betty. I guess long enough to have
a son named William, but really took after his dad
(16:52):
more ways than one because he was a very busy guy.
He was a workaholic. He did spend more time around
his family get the idea that his father did. But
if you know, the YETI came calling, he would go
find the yetti or try to find the yetti, or
if he wanted to open up a new scientific research center,
(17:13):
of which he opened geez, how many like five of
him while he was alive. Yes, then he would spend
his time doing that because it was he thought it
was very worthwhile and it.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Was the call of the Yetti. By the way, is er.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Nicolas Cage he played the Yetti and dump slick and
the singer right Yeah, it would have been like adaptation.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Yep, exactly. So you said that he was a little
closer with his kids than his father. I think one
of the ways he did that was on a lot
of his adventures, he'd bring his kids along with him,
and I know, at least his son Charles Chuck, even
Chuck like has very fond memories of going on adventures
(17:57):
with his dad. So yeah, he was definitely closer to
his kids, at least experience wise, than he was with
his father.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Yeah. So one big foray into the scientific side of
his life was Science City. It was this dream project
that he had had for a long time. It's very
sort ofeen mid nineteen thirty's name, I guess. So he
opens up Science City, gets the ball rolling. By nineteen forty,
(18:25):
they had moved to San Antonio, which is where you'll
find Tom Slick Park and Tom Slick Everything basically, which
includes a little NeSSI statue which is kind of cool.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Yeah, but you can totally tell it's fake.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Yeah, yes, not the real thing. So he bought sixteen
hundred and two acres about eight miles west of San
Antonio that would eventually grow to about four thousand acres
for the S. Eessar Ranch, which is just a long
way of saying SR for scientific research. And he was
twenty four years old, and this is where all that
(18:59):
brang is stuff happen.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Yeah, and you said that he founded five research facilities
in his twenties. Three of them are still around. One
of the first ones he established was the Foundation for
Applied Research far Faar or Fayre, depending on how you
say it, and that is still around. That's now the
Texas Biomedical Research Institute. And as we'll see, these things
(19:24):
have had like significant contributions to science in the world
since they've been around.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Yeah, for sure. And we're all those in his twenties.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
From what I understand, this is all over like a
few year period.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Yeah, jeez, that's incredible. He tried to enlist in the
Navy after Pearl Harbor in nineteen forty one, but he
didn't have good eyesight, so they said, you are not
fit for wartime duty. So they commissioned him in nineteen
forty two as a lieutenant and right away said, all right,
you know what you're good at is running big operations.
(20:00):
Why don't you go work for the War Production Board
and kind of help this idea that we have of
changing over factories for making whatever they're making to helping
out with wartime production. From there, he went to DC
working for the Board of Economic Warfare, which was actually
in Santiago, Chile. And this is where things get a
(20:21):
little like who knows what happened because his letters and
diaries weren't around. The records from what he did in
Chile were destroyed, and we'll never know if or not
he was like a spy in South America, which a
lot of his family and other people said they thought
he was.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
I think we know one hundred percent that he was
a spy in Chile at the time. Oh really, just
from the circumstantial evidence.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Oh okay, yeah, I thought you meant you found something
better a man.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
You could write a book if you found that. But yes,
the family lore is that he was working in South
America as basically a Nazi catcher, helping local governments and
the US catch Nazis who'd escaped, which happened there. Yes,
that's the thing. It happened while he was there. That's
one of the operations that was going on in South America.
(21:17):
And he was just an American businessman, but he was
also in the Navy, and no one knows why he
was stationed there. He never talked about it or told anybody.
I would say that that's pretty much certain, because if
you combine that with another thing that he may have
been operative for or at least related to some operatives,
(21:38):
I think that it's pretty certain he was. That's my
two cents at least.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
All right, So he got married again, this time in
nineteen forty seven to a woman twelve years younger. She
was eighteen at the time, and they had three kids.
They also got divorced. You know, again, he's not around
a lot and probably not the most attentive husband when
he has all these things going on, and he had
(22:04):
he you know, he's somebody I'd look up to in
a lot of ways after sort of finding out how
he worked, certainly not as a husband, but how he
worked as a curious person. He seems like the kind
of guy that he would read and read and read
just about everything that he could and just soak up
as much knowledge as he could. And when he came
across something that piqued his interest in a particular way
(22:26):
or that he couldn't figure out, he had the resources
and the money and the time to you know, if
not solve it, try to solve it by just saying like,
all right, pick up the phone, let me call whoever
I know, or write a letter to whoever I know
who might be able to help out with this. And
then depending on what they say, I might hire some
people to go to work and try and figure this
stuff out. I might work on it myself and whatever
(22:49):
the outcome. He was just about trying. He wasn't afraid
of failing. He was just trying to find out stuff
and made his best efforts to even if it didn't
work out.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Yeah, just finding out that no one seemed to know
the answer that was enough for him. You know, of
course he wanted to find the answer to the question
he was looking for. But yeah, he said, I don't
believe in failure, only outcome, like he said, And that's
just what a great motto, you know. I mean that
just ye completely transforms your outlook on life.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Yeah, I mean, it's to be clear, it is a
motto that you can afford when you have that kind
of privilege, when you can just be like, hey, I'll fail,
Like what's the big rub? Sure, and he had that privilege,
but he you know, in his favor. He didn't use
that privilege to sit around on a beach and drink
coconut drinks like he was trying to better humankind.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Yeah, and I mean, like, yes, that's a great point,
but I also think that you can apply it to
all sorts of different things in life, you know, not
necessarily just your success or your wealth or anything like that.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
So there were a lot of things that he used
this technique for that came to fruition. Some things may
or may not exist, We're not one hundred percent sure.
But one thing that he definitely did in coinvent that
did have some consequence to it was what's called a
lift slab method of basically creating a concrete roof. Those
(24:09):
are very expensive to make. That's very difficult to create
them in place on the roof, and he basically figured
out a technique to make it on the ground and
then lift it into place. Sounds kind of basic and
low hanging, but apparently it saves a lot of cost
and it works. So that's a pretty good example of
him just kind of putting his mind to figuring a
better way out. It's boring, but it's still a good example.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
Yeah, I mean that wasn't just for roofs. It was
I mean feeble to ten story building. He would build
all ten floors on the ground and then hydraulic those
suckers up there.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
That's man, what can't you do with hydraulics?
Speaker 1 (24:48):
And we should also mention the lift slab. It was
simultaneously developed by another guy named Philip Utes. Tom Slick
got the patent and you know, gets all the glory
for that, but a lot of people still call it
the Ute's Slick method.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Beautiful.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
He developed a breed of mice. This was early in
chemotherapy treatments that were very useful in testing. We mentioned
that Brangus. I think my favorite is that he had
a thing against cowls in your hair, so he invented
a hair tonic that could supposedly reverse those calys.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Yeah, in particular Brangus Cowlyx give me her cal stinkless skunks. Apparently.
Did you see anything about this? I couldn't really find
anything on that.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
I found nothing on that.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
I don't know if it just went beyond the idea stage.
One thing that definitely happened was one of his institutes.
It might have been the Southwest Research Institute or the
Texas Biomedical Institute, had a huge role in producing some
of the first oral contraceptives. That's fairly world altering, sure.
And then another one that did not come to fruition
was called We're artificial pecans pecans however you want to
(25:56):
say it. He decided that the trees were way too
water intensive, especially from the perspective of Texas, and so
he wanted to find a way to create pecans that
did not need to grow on trees. And like I said,
it didn't get anywhere. I cannot, for the life and
me find what the heck he made the artificial pecans
out of. But he definitely gave it a try.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
So we've talked a lot about his, you know, work
as a funder of science and a believer in science
kind of maybe not weirdly, but he was also a
guy that really loved the unexplained and the mystical and
was not although he believed in science, he wasn't he
didn't necessarily think that those walls couldn't be explored beyond,
(26:42):
you know. So he went to India, as a lot
of people did in those days who were seeking enlightenment
in the fifties, saw people walking on hot coals, supposedly
saw Lamas and Tibetan monks levitating off the ground. This
is one of his claims.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
He basically went to a Tony Robbins convention.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Does he levitate lamas?
Speaker 2 (27:05):
He does all sorts of stuff like this that, yes,
he does pseudo scientific things like.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
This, or maybe a David Blaine performance.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Yeah, I tried to learn that method, but I did
it okay for a little while, but it wasn't great.
What levitating, well, the illusion that you're levitating, which is
what David Blaine did. It's a trick obviously, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Essentially you're basically standing on your toes.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
You're standing on one toe. You have people at a
certain angle where when you're raising all of your body
weight up on the one toe, you're blocking it in
with your other foot and like pant leg and so
it's all about the angle at which you see it.
So you can't see that that one toe is on
the ground, but it looks great if you can, if
you can do it well.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
So I don't understand why you call it levitating. I
think you could just get as much awe out of
people as saying like, I'm standing on one toe right now. Everybody,
how nuts is that?
Speaker 1 (28:03):
Yeah, I'm a a tow bodybuilder. I've got the strongest
tow right.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
So this is a really consequential time in Central Asia,
East Asia. In Tibet, the Dalai Lama had been oh,
I don't know the word, but basically found and identified
just several years before. This is the Dalai Lama as
we know him today. And around this time, he was
(28:29):
about twenty one, and China had invaded Tibet, and all
of a sudden, the Dali Lama found himself is like
the head of the Tibetan government. Everybody said, you're the guy,
what are you going to do about this? And there
was almost nothing he could do. There were Tibetan freedom fighters,
Tibetan resistance rebels, and they were just getting crushed left
(28:50):
and right by China. And Tibet was a place where
China had invaded. And so now anytime you saw an
American you can pretty much guess that if they were CIA,
they were backed by the CIA. They were giving information
to the CIA. The CIA had like a twenty year
program in Tibet, and one of the things they did
was help get the Dali Lama out when it became
(29:11):
clear that the Dalai Lama needed to get the heck
out and create a government for Tibet in exile, which
he still runs today. The CIA helped that happen, and
so did in some way, shape or form, Tom Slick
had some sort of hand in it.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
All right, maybe we should take a break and sounds
like a good little cliffhanger and come back and talk
about why he may have been over there in the
first place. Right after this, all right, So where we
(30:00):
left off was a little tease about Tom Sluck potentially
maybe helping to get the Dali Lama out of Tibet.
Why was he there? He had met him already, so
that was a you know, before the break, we were
talking about a trip that he took over there. Tossed
that one aside. He goes home, starts living his life,
feels a little bit more enlightened, he can meditate a
little bit. Sure, worthwhile trip, but he, just like his father,
(30:24):
was fascinated by the idea of the Yeti, the Abominable Snowman,
and the Himalayas, And like you mentioned earlier, like this
was a time when you know, it's kind of right
in the middle of all these yetti sidings, there were
new species being discovered. And so he was like, hey, listen,
I'm not some some wacko who just you know, believes
(30:46):
in these weird cryptis he cryptids? He said, I think
there's something out there that maybe like the link between
man and animal. And I think there are at least
two species. There are the big, tall eight footers with
black hair. There were smaller red haired guys. And I
think it's like a pre human man that's been basically
(31:07):
hidden for thousands of years in the Himalayas.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Yeah, and I mean Westerners have been trying to climb
the Himalayas for decades by this time, and as they
came back, they would bring stories from the locals about
the YETI, the abominable snowman, and so, like you said,
like it wasn't just totally like off the charts or
super fringe to mount an expedition for this, and he did,
and like he was looking for a missing link, remember
(31:33):
his fascination with hybridization. He felt like that that's what
those things were. They were a missing link out there.
They weren't some undiscovered animal. They were some human relative
that had somehow survived in the wilds of the Pacific
Northwest or the wilds of the Himalayas, and he wanted
to find one. I don't know if he wanted to
(31:54):
kill and stuff it because he was a hunter, but
he definitely wanted to at least or meet one, shake
his hand, buy him a steak dinner. I'm not sure,
buy him a Brangus steak dinner.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Pretty good. He actually did change the way that those
expeditions went down, because most of those had been kill
and catch or catch and kill expeditions for kind of
anything like that, and he changed it to more research
base and hey, let's see if we can get something alive.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
Good. I'm glad so he did. He mounted three different
expeditions I think the first one was in the winter
of nineteen fifty six, which you're gonna go to the
Himalayas in the winter seems like poor planning to me.
And while he was there, he found a footprint thirteen
inch long, bare footprint, and he made a plaster cast
(32:46):
of it and became one of his prize possessions. He
actually kept it on his dining room table and like
if somebody wouldn't bring it up when they were a
guest at his house. He would just kind of quietly
nudge it over toward them until it was like in
their face, on their plate even sometimes, and they'd be like, oh, okay,
what is this? If I may ask, and he'd say, oh, well,
(33:06):
funny you should ask. Let me tell you about this
abominable snowman footprint.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Yeah, he actually got a few footprints, and a couple
of them were very noteworthy. I mean, they weren't yetty,
but they were noteworthy, and that every other footprint had
been snowfootprints, and he got a couple out of the mud,
which was I guess sort of a bigger deal, and
also supposedly brought back some hair samples. Again not a
(33:31):
yetty because there's no YETI but he didn't know that
at the time. No, give the guy break. He's trying
to find what's true and what's not true, just like us.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
So two years after the first one he launched a
second expedition. This one was like fully kitted out. He
and a friend spent plunk down thirty grand in I
guess nineteen fifty eight money to fund this expedition. There
was a photographer, a documentary filmmaker. There were professional trackers.
They brought in a recons since plane. They had tranquilizer guns,
(34:02):
which supports your idea that this was not a catch
and kill. And then also he brought three blue tickhounds
tick bloodhounds, which are really well known as tracker dogs,
and he even put little snow boots on them to
help them through the snow, which I thought was very conscientious.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
Totally, he didn't go on this one. He just you know,
helped fund it because he had bailed on a bus
on the previous expedition that had lost its breaks and
pretty much tore up his knees permanently from that point.
So there are some great pictures of him with his
knees all bandaged up, but he's still, you know, smiling away,
(34:41):
looking like he stepped out of a Banana Republic ad.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Is he giving the thumbs up?
Speaker 1 (34:46):
There was no thumb when he had a cane in
his hand.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
Yeah. So that second expedition was there for nine months,
came home empty handed, obviously, or else we would all
know that there was such a thing as the Yetti.
And the third and last expedition, this is where the
CIA business kind of comes in. He funded two brothers,
Peter Burn and Brian Burn, and Peter was a well
(35:11):
known outdoorsman hunter and he'd been searching for the Yetti
for a couple of decades by this time. So Tom
Slick financed a third expedition with these two brothers. And
here we come to yet another stuff you should know
episode I guess, the one on the Yetti or the
Abominable Snowman, where we talked about this story where a
(35:32):
Yeti thumb that was being on being displayed at Pangbosh Temple,
the Buddhist monk temple, was stolen, and it turns out
it was Peter and Brian Byrn who stole it on
behalf of Tom Slick, who asked them to steal it
on behalf of doctor Osmond Hill, a primatologist from the UK.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Yeah, and this is this is probably the most famous
story about Tom Slick because of a certain coken sp
here that we're going to introduce. But he it was
actually a finger and a thumb. They gave these guys,
these brothers, like another finger to trade, or not trade,
but to swap out and hope no one would notice.
(36:15):
I guess and said here's you know, here's a thumb.
Take it over there, see if you can swap them out. Supposedly,
the Burn brothers talked about giving a big donation to
the temple. No one knows exactly what went down, but
they left with that yetti thumb and finger and what
they were told was a YETI scalp was another piece
(36:36):
of piece of YETI. I guess that they got. So.
I've seen this a couple of ways and stories. I've
seen that a certain Hollywood actor was in on this
from the beginning and it was all part of the plan.
And then I've also seen that after this happened, the
Burn brothers went to Calcutta and just had dinner with
(36:56):
Jimmy Stewart and his wife at the Grand Hotel and
were it from there got on board and just said,
and my best Jimmy Stewart, if you need help getting
the thumb across the border, I can. I can put
it in my wife's underwear bag.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
That was great. I was really hoping you're gonna do
something like that.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
It's okay. I used to do a decent one, but
it's been a while.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
It's good, especially for being rusty. I think the way
we told it was that he happened to be there
and offered I don't remember knowing that he was supposedly
part of the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
It doesn't really matter, honestly.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
No, he definitely smuggled what was thought to be a
Yetti thumb across the border out right out of India
and his wife's lingerie case back to the UK, where
he gave it to doctor Hill, and doctor Hill promptly
just stopped talking about it. I guess he probably did
some sort of examination and was like, yeah, this is
(37:52):
not a Yetti thumb and filed it away in the
archives of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, where
it was lost until I leave the twenty first century.
And then finally in twenty eleven, Edinburgh Zoo researchers did
a DNA test on it and they said this is
a human finger and thumb, and they made the little
finger gun for the photo that was published all over
(38:16):
the world.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Why do I get the feeling at the time if
they would have found that thing and thumb in the
wear bag at the airport, that she could have just
been like, stay out of that, that's my thumb, that's
my finger. Stay out of my underwear. They would have
just been like, oh my god, I'm so sorry, and
like just giving it back to her.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
I can't remember where I read it. It was years
and years ago. We may have talked about it. But
when there's when there's a personal massager found in luggage
that's being searched in front of the person, like, I
think the TSA is instructed to just pretend it doesn't exist,
like they didn't see it.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
I can't remember where we are, surely I definitely remember
us talking about that.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
That was a while ago, so yeah, I think back
in the late fifties you could have done the same
thing with a yetti finger, considering it was in her
underwork case.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Yeah. The other thing that they brought back was that
YETI scalp. Obviously not a YETI scalp. It was a
type of Himalayan goat. So they struck out on all fronts.
Too bad, But perhaps perhaps and I saw definite confirmation
that Peter Burn at the very least was helping the
(39:30):
CIA get people in and out of Tibet. There was
a guy named George Patterson that was doing work like
undercover work, and he helped get him in and out.
So the idea is that sort of kind of closing
the loop on the Dali Lama. Is that because of
Peter Burn's work with the CIA getting people in and
out that the New York Times even wrote a story
(39:51):
in April of fifty seven called Soviet Cy's espionage in
US snowman hunt this YETI I don't know if it
was a complete front. I think the are also looking
for the Yetti, but they were like, well, since they're
over here, we'll do a little bit the CIA work
for the guys right exactly?
Speaker 2 (40:06):
And I guess it's not definite. But I did see
in at least one source that Peter Burn had a
real hand in getting the Dolly lam out.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
I love that maybe he offered him his literal hand.
Speaker 2 (40:19):
He offered him a YETI thumb, come with me, big guy.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
So YETI eventually became a bigfoot as far as Tom
Slick's passions went, because a little closer to home he
could take take the kids on that trip, didn't have
to go to the Himalayas. So he became a serious
bigfoot hunter, including like hooking up with people who are
until very recently, we're still big and noteworthy big foot hunters.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
Yeah, one of them was Peter Burn. Peter Burn went
on to be one of the big well known big
foot hunters. When he went with Tom Slick, that's kind
of where he got the taste for it. And he's like, hey, Tom,
you go back home. I'm gonna to stay here. And
he even wrote a book called The Search for Bigfoot
Monster myth or Man. So I think that's a great
(41:09):
nineteen seventy six in particular title for a book on bigfoot.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Oh totally. So back to his private life, you know,
he got divorced that second time, and after that he
was like, you know what marriage is not for me,
but what is for me is being a millionaire playboy
and you know everything I saw said that he was
very upfront with the women that he coborted with and
(41:36):
was like, hey, I'm out to have a good time.
This is not going to get serious. It's kind of
a sort of a touchy way of saying. He had
a lot of girlfriends. At the same time, his niece
wrote a book about him and knew a lot about him,
and she said that at one point I found a
Christmas list from nineteen fifty eight and he would get
these lists together, like, hey, get these gifts for these
(41:58):
very specific women, send it to Nikit Neman Marcus and
like take care of him. So on the fifty eight
list he had Annette, Kathy, Cheryl, Cynthia, Irene, Jane, Jerry, Mary,
Nancy Nell, Sandra, Silvia, Tony, Topsy, and three Hellens, So
seventeen women scattered all over planet Earth. He was, you know,
(42:18):
he was having a good time.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
It sounds like it sounded just now like you were
halfway through a shell Silverstein poem, especially when Topsy makes
an appearance.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
You know, yeah, who's Topsy.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
There's one other thing we need to mention about him
is that he wrote not one, but two books arguing
and laying out plans for world peace, which you know,
not everybody's got those under their belt. So I read
at least one review of it from the fifties and
they were like, this is actually pretty good.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
Yeah, I mean again doing like the good work. Sadly,
that good work in that life was cut very short
in a tragic way when a night teen sixty two,
he was coming back in a little plane after a
peasant hunting in Calgary with some friends and their plane
basically disintegrated in mid air and bad weather over Montana.
(43:13):
And he died at the same age as his father,
at just forty six years old, and is buried at
Mission Burial Park there in San Antonio.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
Yeah, and like we said, those science foundations that he
created went on to do some pretty amazing things. In
addition to oral contraceptives, vaccines for hepatitis A through c HIV, AIDS,
ebola virus. They had a big role in the COVID vaccine.
And they also another one develops things for NASA electric cars,
(43:47):
the oil and gas industry. They're the kind who, like
they don't make the stuff, they help other people make
this stuff through their research.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
They make this stuff better.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
What company is that, BASF. That's exactly what it is,
thinking you.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
Yeah. Also again as another coda, he was a great
patron of the arts, one of the great art collections
of a private American citizen, most of which is at
the McNay Art Museum. And like we said, that movie
with Nick Cage didn't happen, But the podcast Tom Slick
(44:23):
colon Mystery Hunter is out now with Owen Wilson, Yeah,
playing Tom Slick and Skyler Fisk and Skyler Fisk and
her mom says he's basic, and Chad sent me a list.
I mean, it's just sort of a murderer's row of
great actors. And this was literally yesterday, and I was like, huh,
I would have loved to have done a voice. So he, yesterday,
(44:45):
like an hour after that, said he felt bad, and
I was like, oh man, I mean, don't feel bad.
I was just kidding, but I always want to do
dumb voices. And he about an hour later he said,
I got something for you. I was like, really. He
was like, can you do it today? He said you're
opposite Sissy Spacek and I was like, are we going
to zoom together? And he no, you just record your
lines and we marry them to hers. But technically I'll
(45:08):
be in a scene with Sissy Spacek playing seventy year
old former governor of Texas, Governor Nielsen, not a real person.
A lot of this is highly fictionalized. It's a you know,
it's a fun podcast. It's not like they stick to
the facts when they can, but it's it's an entertaining
kind of thing. So if you've never listened to a
(45:30):
scripted fictional show, give it a shot, because I listened
to a couple of episodes, and it's super cool. And
you can hear me doing my best kind of old
old school levon helm accent.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
Can we hear it?
Speaker 1 (45:42):
Yeah? I guess we could play a clip. Yeah, let's
do that, all right, here's a little clip of me,
you guys, finally, Governor Chlier. It's so lovely of you
to come to this little she big for dad.
Speaker 3 (45:58):
Little I heard there might be some reveals about the
mysterious Tom Slick. As a kid, I always thought your
father lived a double life. Oh yeah, Claire, remember when
we had those sleepovers at your house, Sure and your dad.
He'd tell us these wild tales about mysteries the world
and never known holy men who could levitate a tunnel
(46:21):
on the Amazon line with diamonds, the abominable snowman that
he said roam the.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
Roof of the world.
Speaker 3 (46:29):
He told those tales like he lived them, So I
guess I thought he always.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Had way to go.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Chuck, Thank you. He was an old Texas guy like that.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
Get off my claim, you varmit awesome? So where where
can you find this, Chuck? Where can you find this
podcast that you're starting in?
Speaker 1 (46:49):
I mean, anywhere you can get your podcast.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
I guess that's right, isn't that what they say? That's right,
it's called Tom Slick mystery Hunter. Right, yeah, awesome, Well
Duck I said, yeah, I was just mentioning a podcast
that he started in and we've fallen backwards into listener mail.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
All right.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
I'm gonna call this random fact because that's what Adam
called it when he wrote in in the subject line,
Hey guys on your Luddites episode, you mentioned some places
like Lancaster. Sure, that's the origin of the term sheriff.
Speaker 2 (47:24):
I love this or this email?
Speaker 1 (47:26):
Sure or Shire, I guess, just like in Lord of
the Rings County Reeve. So the county sheriff was originally
the shire reeve and was shortened to shere reef or sheriff.
All this info was bestowed upon me by a professor
of criminal justice at Atulmuss University in the early two thousands.
Go Rebels, I've been listening for several years. Look forward
(47:46):
every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Keep it cool, guys. That's
from Adam.
Speaker 2 (47:50):
All right, thanks a lot, Adam. That's a great one.
I'd never heard that before in my life, and now
I know. And if you want to be like Adam
and let us know something we never knew before in
our lives but would be happy to know. Please send
it to us via email. It's stuff podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
Speaker 3 (48:15):
The iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and it's just us today and we know from
experience that that's just fine. And this is stuff you
should know. This guy had his finger in a lot
of different pies. That stuff you should know s ten
episodes on edition.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Yeah. I mean this is a interesting one because our
friend Chad, Chad did our TV show, and Chad is
doing a or has done a podcast, a highly fictionalized
scripted podcast. Yeah, for our company, for iHeart you know,
(00:52):
the company we own. Sure about Tom Slick. And when
he was telling me about this, Owen Wilson is voicing it,
and Sissy's is in it. I have a small part.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Uh oh really, I didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Yeah, yeah, I'll get to that.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
I also read that Carlton Fisk is in it.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Uh, I don't think so. The baseball player.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Yeah, no, it's Sissy's basics daughter.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah, Skyler Fisk.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Skyler Fisk guy always confused with Carlton Fisk, the old
white Sox player exposu.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
I have white Sox, I think, among others. Uh, okay,
but anyway, Chad was like, Dude, this guy, like he's
the most interesting man that you've never heard of. And
I found when I was online researching, like outside of
San Antonio and maybe Texas in a broader sense, like
there aren't a ton of people who don't think that
(01:42):
Tom Slick is just the name of a cartoon that
has nothing to do with this guy.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Yeah, did you ever watch Tom Slick when you were younger?
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Oh? The cartoon?
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Yeah? Sure, I never did. Yeah, I watched a lot
of Rocky and Bullwinkle, but I'd never heard of Tom
Slick until I started researching this cat.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Yeah, it was like a Georgia of the Jungle Partner
right show. But yeah, I just I mean it was
even I mean, it wasn't hard to find information online,
but it wasn't as easy as a lot of people.
And considering all the like kind of crazy extraordinary things
he did in his life.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
I ran into the exact same issue where like, there's
a lot of stuff, I don't even want to say
a lot, but there's a substantial enough amount of articles
and sources about him online, but they all contain just
basically like one off anecdotes. Yeah, and it's like, wait,
I don't quite understand, like how did this incident like
(02:35):
help form his outlook on life, Like there's not a
complete picture of that dude. It drives me crazy, Yeah,
because I like to understand the whole thing, you know.
I love how the parts kind of make up a whole,
and I feel like with this guy, largely just have parts,
even though you know, if I put him together, he's
like a jigsaw with a bunch of missing places. But
(02:59):
I still can kind of see the picture, and it's
that he was a pretty cool and interesting dude and
seems to have been a genuinely good dude too.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Yeah. Had Nicholas Cage pulled off the film adaptation of
his life, all your prayers may have been answered, my friend.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yeah, I heard that that one was canceled because he
was doing it so weird. Every time Tom Slick ran
into a problem or an issue and was upset, Nicholas
Cage would just go for like five minutes and it
took up. It added like a good forty five minutes
to the film. Oh and he refused to let them
(03:36):
cut a second of it.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
I remember one of the funniest parts of the when
Andy Sandberg was doing Nick Cage on SNL.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
One of the.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Lines really got me one week was he was on
the Weekend Update and they were talking about some movie
that came out that he was in, you know, and
he's in like fifteen movies a year, and it had
all the elements of the Nick Cage movie number one
it existed.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Also, Yeah, yeah, I like that guy a lot. Samberg,
Nick Catche Yeah, and Andy Samberg is great too. And
Tom Slick, Yeah, for sure. I like Andy Samberg, but
I hadn't seen I never really watched Brooklyn nine nine.
I saw the most work he did in That's My Boy,
(04:21):
which I actually loved. Like, I don't think there's a
Sandler movie out there that I don't at least.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Like I did not see that, And there are many
many Adam Sandler movies that have not seen.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
I know.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
It's the shame of the podcast.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah, but I did watch the first couple of seasons
of Brooklyn nine nine and it's great.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Okay, Well, Adam Sandler wasn't on that as far as
I know, so that doesn't.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Count, I don't think. So.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
So let's talk about Tom Slick.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Huh, Yeah, I mean one of the problems with Tom
Slick is separating fact from fiction because he's one of
these guys that lives sort of an extraordinary, curious, filled
adventurous life. And right off the bat, the fact that
he was born on either May six and I'll so
I saw May ninth. It just may have been the
way things were back then. This is in nineteen sixteen,
(05:06):
and he was a junior to Thomas Baker Slick Senior,
who was a guy that really rubbed off on his
son because he had the same sort of adventurous spirit
as an oil man.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, Tom Baker Slick Senior was king of the wildcatters,
and a wildcatter is somebody who goes around just drilling
oil wells in places where it's not at all clear
that there's going to be oil. They're just very hopeful prospectors, right, Yeah,
And that's how he spent like his early career and
then finally he just hit pay dirt. It was called
(05:39):
I think the Wheeler Won Well in Bristol, Oklahoma, and
it became one of the most productive wells in America
that was pumping out like over three hundred thousand barrels
a day.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
I got another stat for you at the time, what
would become Cushing oil Field was responsible for two thirds
of the oil production in the Western Hymn sphere Man.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
So, yes, I guess it goes without saying that Tom
Slick Senior made himself and his family rich beyond their
wildest dreams. And so Tom Slick Junior grew up a
rich kid, and that's a huge thing. That was a
huge like part of his formative upbringing. He was extraordinarily wealthy,
(06:26):
but he was a rare rich kid that took that
wealth and put it to good use and also used
it to just totally free himself from, you know, the
pursuit of making a profit or turning a dollar or whatever.
He did things because he was curious about stuff, and
because he wanted to help humanity.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Yeah, but you know, when you're working that much, obviously
you're not going to be around your family as much.
Tom had a couple of siblings, and you know, Dad
just wasn't around because they lived in Pennsylvania as a family. Obviously,
the oil is out west, so Pops was in Oklahoma
and Texas most of the time working these long hours,
and those long hours did him in when he died
(07:02):
at only forty six years old. Of a stroke, which
was a you know, a huge loss for young Tom
because he even though Dad wasn't around that much, I
get the feeling that he kind of idolized him and
really revered him.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Yeah, he definitely followed in his footsteps too in a
lot of ways.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Yeah, so he was fourteen years old at the time,
and you know, it was a huge loss.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
It was. I also saw that he'd become so revered
and respected in Oklahoma that when he passed away, the
oil derek's in the Oklahoma City field, which is one
of the biggest fields in the country, they went silent
for an hour. So every oil man in Oklahoma who
had a Derek in this field stopped making money for
(07:46):
an hour out of respect for Tom Senior. I think
that says an enormous amount about him. Or maybe they
were just hungry, could have been I guess sure.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
So after Dad dies, a mom did something that was
you know, pready common back then, or you know, not
more common than it feels like it is now, which
is marrying your dead spouse's brother or sister. Her brother
in law was Charles Erschall because he was married to
Tom's sister, Flow, who also died around the same time.
(08:19):
This is all just bad luck. Of course, nothing weird
went on, and they got together and got married.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Yeah, they had elaborate marriage, like we talked about in
the Widow's episode. So from what I can gather, Charles
Erschall was a good stepfather to Tom, and Tom was
happy to have him. I mean it was his uncle already, right,
so he was quite concerned. When he was seventeen, he
was home from Exeter, the boarding school for the summer
(08:46):
back at Oklahoma City. By this time, the whole family
had moved to Oklahoma City and was living in a mansion,
the slick Erschel family. And in July twenty second, nineteen
thirty three, while everybody's just kind of hanging out, machine
Gun Kelly came knocking on the door with a few
of his cronies and said, we are taking Charles Erschel
with us. Which one of you, two men is Charles
(09:09):
Erschael and Urschel's friend Walter Jarrett was did one of
the most stand up things a frank can do when
you're being kidnapped.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Yeah, he just stood silently and sort of nudged his
nose over towards Erschel.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
His eyes are going like way left over here.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
No one picked up on that, now I'm kidding. He
Neither one of them said anything. And you know, I
guess they were sort of together in this, and so
they took him both and that, you know, that's what happened.
They kidnapped both these guys. They would eventually find Jarrett's ID.
So they dumped him on the side of the road
and took Erschel to rural Texas, to a ranch and
(09:47):
demanded two hundred grand in ransom, which is close to
five million bucks today.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Yes, this was a hugely consequential event, right, so that
Tom Slick Junior tangentially involved in because when Charles Ershall
was being held, he really kept his head about him
and depending on who you ask e there, he noted
the time of day, the times of day that a
(10:14):
train passed by nearby, or that planes flew overhead to
try to get an idea of where he was. He
put his fingers on everything he could to leave fingerprints,
and he also counted the steps anywhere he went when
he was blindfolded. So when he was released, and thankfully
he was released unharmed for a two hundred thousand dollars ransom,
(10:37):
he was able to tell the FEDS like, hey, here's
everything you need to know about going and finding this
ranch where they took me, and they did. They found
it rather quickly.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Yeah, he was also timing how long the trains were
and if you know how many trains are passing in
a sort of general area, how big these trains are.
I think that allowed them to literally go to train
schedules in that part of Texas and figured this thing out.
So he was he was a very smart guy. And
there were you know, they arrested Machine Gun. Kelly fled,
(11:09):
but they arrested the other guys. They were able to
track down Kelly in Memphis and he went to Alcatraz
for the rest of his life.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Yeah, so not only did he go to Alcatraz, Machine
Gun Kelly did. But this is where we talked about
in the jaeg Or Hoover episode where G Men was
coined because they went to come get him and when
they busted in the door, he said, don't shoot g Men,
And that's where their nickname came from. Just like we
talked about in the Hoover episode, that happened from this.
So this is what I'm saying, Like Tom Slick, his
(11:38):
life really spreads out into a lot of different stuff
you should know episodes, and yet we'd still never ran
across him in our research, which is strange to me.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Yeah, he was a big backer of science. That's something
that you're gonna see that kind of pops up again
and again in his life right stemming from his just
natural curiosity. And he was a very very smart dude.
He went to Yale and was into genetics and was
really and this was a time when you know, in
the nineteen forties Repolice Believe it or Not magazine and
(12:09):
the idea of like cross breeding animals and cryptids and
all these things were just it was sort of big news,
or if not big news, something people were kind of
into at the time. And he supposedly kept a list
of like animals that he wanted to try and cross breed.
When he read about a hog goat that was a
(12:29):
hote that was living in Arkansas, he drove to Arkansas
and bought whatever it was. I don't even know if
it was like poor things or what he ended up with,
but whatever he brought home, he tried to breed it
on his own farm with no luck.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
It was definitely not a hog goat because it's physically
and genetically and biologically impossible for them to reproduce. So
I didn't see what it was either, just that that
didn't exist. But that didn't stop him from trying.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Did you really look that up?
Speaker 2 (12:58):
I mean, I was like, I got to see this
thing and there was nothing. Nothing hope, hog goat, hog
goat cross breeding, I know, but I thought like, surely
there's there's something that this way. I couldn't find any
reference to it. I also saw in some places that
he basically like went to go buy it and realized
(13:19):
that these people didn't even exist, and certainly the hope
didn't exist, but he went and tried it anyway because
he really liked the idea of it. And this was
when genetics was really new and cutting edge, and this
guy's into it while he's still at Yale, you know.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Yeah. So one of the things he successfully does cross
breed is cattle. He looked at the Scottish angus, which
is you know, prized for its excellent quality beef. They're very,
very fertile. And then he looked at the Brahmin cattle
from India and he was like, these things are great.
They're disease resistant, they're pest resistant, they are they do
(13:56):
well in drought, and they're very very maternal, much more
maternal than the angus. So let's get them together. Put
three aids Brahmin with five eighths angus. And this was
one of his big noted early successes. When he was
in his early twenties. He created the Brangus cattle breed
that is still around today and like highly sought after.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah, yeah, I saw that that. People still love that,
and it helped introduce the angus cattle into Texas where
they would not have done very well before.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yeah. But here's the thing though, Like this sounds cool
like and you think, oh, this guy's like a cattle guy.
Now he's a rich kid looking to make more money
on this cattle deal. He was doing it because he
wanted to introduce a breed of cattle that did better
in places where there was drought and there were pests
and disease. So one of his business partners was like,
he didn't care about making money on this. He just
(14:48):
he hoped it would help people in hot countries.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Not just he didn't care. He didn't give quote hoot
and hell about making money on brangus.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Well, I wasn't gonna say it.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
I say, we take a break and come back, and
you meant and he's into cryptids. Let's talk about that
in a second.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Okay, all right, we'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
So I don't know if we said or not, but
Tom Slick got he developed a love of cryptids, with
that he shared with his father. His father passed on
like a love of stories about Locknus Monster, the Abominable Snowman,
all sorts of adventurous stuff like that, and like you said,
it really rubbed off on Tom Junior, and so at
a pretty early age I think. Yeah, he was still
(15:47):
at Yale and with some of his buddies, he packed
his red Buick onto a steamership and went to Europe
for a summer where they drove around Europe and one
of the top things on his list was to go
look for the Lochness Monster. And one of the things
you'll kind of notice about Tom Slick is that when
he's doing these things that today in retrospect seemed very
(16:09):
weird and flaky, at the time there was like a
lot of evidence that these things existed. This was nineteen
thirty seven. The next year, the Celacanth would be rediscovered.
Like it was just kind of in the air that
there were things out there that Sidnce hadn't identified yet,
and perhaps the Lockness monster was one of them.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Yeah, and the very very famous picture of supposed NeSSI
was just three years prior to that, so it was
all the rage at the time. Personally, he got married
pretty quickly after Yale and got divorced even quicker to
his first wife, Betty. I guess long enough to have
a son named William, but really took after his dad
(16:52):
more ways than one because he was a very busy guy.
He was a workaholic. He did spend more time around
his family get the idea that his father did. But
if you know, the YETI came calling, he would go
find the yetti or try to find the yetti, or
if he wanted to open up a new scientific research center,
(17:13):
of which he opened geez, how many like five of
him while he was alive. Yes, then he would spend
his time doing that because it was he thought it
was very worthwhile and it.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Was the call of the Yetti. By the way, is er.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Nicolas Cage he played the Yetti and dump slick and
the singer right Yeah, it would have been like adaptation.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Yep, exactly. So you said that he was a little
closer with his kids than his father. I think one
of the ways he did that was on a lot
of his adventures, he'd bring his kids along with him,
and I know, at least his son Charles Chuck, even
Chuck like has very fond memories of going on adventures
(17:57):
with his dad. So yeah, he was definitely closer to
his kids, at least experience wise, than he was with
his father.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Yeah. So one big foray into the scientific side of
his life was Science City. It was this dream project
that he had had for a long time. It's very
sort ofeen mid nineteen thirty's name, I guess. So he
opens up Science City, gets the ball rolling. By nineteen forty,
(18:25):
they had moved to San Antonio, which is where you'll
find Tom Slick Park and Tom Slick Everything basically, which
includes a little NeSSI statue which is kind of cool.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Yeah, but you can totally tell it's fake.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Yeah, yes, not the real thing. So he bought sixteen
hundred and two acres about eight miles west of San
Antonio that would eventually grow to about four thousand acres
for the S. Eessar Ranch, which is just a long
way of saying SR for scientific research. And he was
twenty four years old, and this is where all that
(18:59):
brang is stuff happen.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Yeah, and you said that he founded five research facilities
in his twenties. Three of them are still around. One
of the first ones he established was the Foundation for
Applied Research far Faar or Fayre, depending on how you
say it, and that is still around. That's now the
Texas Biomedical Research Institute. And as we'll see, these things
(19:24):
have had like significant contributions to science in the world
since they've been around.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Yeah, for sure. And we're all those in his twenties.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
From what I understand, this is all over like a
few year period.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Yeah, jeez, that's incredible. He tried to enlist in the
Navy after Pearl Harbor in nineteen forty one, but he
didn't have good eyesight, so they said, you are not
fit for wartime duty. So they commissioned him in nineteen
forty two as a lieutenant and right away said, all right,
you know what you're good at is running big operations.
(20:00):
Why don't you go work for the War Production Board
and kind of help this idea that we have of
changing over factories for making whatever they're making to helping
out with wartime production. From there, he went to DC
working for the Board of Economic Warfare, which was actually
in Santiago, Chile. And this is where things get a
(20:21):
little like who knows what happened because his letters and
diaries weren't around. The records from what he did in
Chile were destroyed, and we'll never know if or not
he was like a spy in South America, which a
lot of his family and other people said they thought
he was.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
I think we know one hundred percent that he was
a spy in Chile at the time. Oh really, just
from the circumstantial evidence.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Oh okay, yeah, I thought you meant you found something
better a man.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
You could write a book if you found that. But yes,
the family lore is that he was working in South
America as basically a Nazi catcher, helping local governments and
the US catch Nazis who'd escaped, which happened there. Yes,
that's the thing. It happened while he was there. That's
one of the operations that was going on in South America.
(21:17):
And he was just an American businessman, but he was
also in the Navy, and no one knows why he
was stationed there. He never talked about it or told anybody.
I would say that that's pretty much certain, because if
you combine that with another thing that he may have
been operative for or at least related to some operatives,
(21:38):
I think that it's pretty certain he was. That's my
two cents at least.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
All right, So he got married again, this time in
nineteen forty seven to a woman twelve years younger. She
was eighteen at the time, and they had three kids.
They also got divorced. You know, again, he's not around
a lot and probably not the most attentive husband when
he has all these things going on, and he had
(22:04):
he you know, he's somebody I'd look up to in
a lot of ways after sort of finding out how
he worked, certainly not as a husband, but how he
worked as a curious person. He seems like the kind
of guy that he would read and read and read
just about everything that he could and just soak up
as much knowledge as he could. And when he came
across something that piqued his interest in a particular way
(22:26):
or that he couldn't figure out, he had the resources
and the money and the time to you know, if
not solve it, try to solve it by just saying like,
all right, pick up the phone, let me call whoever
I know, or write a letter to whoever I know
who might be able to help out with this. And
then depending on what they say, I might hire some
people to go to work and try and figure this
stuff out. I might work on it myself and whatever
(22:49):
the outcome. He was just about trying. He wasn't afraid
of failing. He was just trying to find out stuff
and made his best efforts to even if it didn't
work out.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Yeah, just finding out that no one seemed to know
the answer that was enough for him. You know, of
course he wanted to find the answer to the question
he was looking for. But yeah, he said, I don't
believe in failure, only outcome, like he said, And that's
just what a great motto, you know. I mean that
just ye completely transforms your outlook on life.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Yeah, I mean, it's to be clear, it is a
motto that you can afford when you have that kind
of privilege, when you can just be like, hey, I'll fail,
Like what's the big rub? Sure, and he had that privilege,
but he you know, in his favor. He didn't use
that privilege to sit around on a beach and drink
coconut drinks like he was trying to better humankind.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Yeah, and I mean, like, yes, that's a great point,
but I also think that you can apply it to
all sorts of different things in life, you know, not
necessarily just your success or your wealth or anything like that.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
So there were a lot of things that he used
this technique for that came to fruition. Some things may
or may not exist, We're not one hundred percent sure.
But one thing that he definitely did in coinvent that
did have some consequence to it was what's called a
lift slab method of basically creating a concrete roof. Those
(24:09):
are very expensive to make. That's very difficult to create
them in place on the roof, and he basically figured
out a technique to make it on the ground and
then lift it into place. Sounds kind of basic and
low hanging, but apparently it saves a lot of cost
and it works. So that's a pretty good example of
him just kind of putting his mind to figuring a
better way out. It's boring, but it's still a good example.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
Yeah, I mean that wasn't just for roofs. It was
I mean feeble to ten story building. He would build
all ten floors on the ground and then hydraulic those
suckers up there.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
That's man, what can't you do with hydraulics?
Speaker 1 (24:48):
And we should also mention the lift slab. It was
simultaneously developed by another guy named Philip Utes. Tom Slick
got the patent and you know, gets all the glory
for that, but a lot of people still call it
the Ute's Slick method.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Beautiful.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
He developed a breed of mice. This was early in
chemotherapy treatments that were very useful in testing. We mentioned
that Brangus. I think my favorite is that he had
a thing against cowls in your hair, so he invented
a hair tonic that could supposedly reverse those calys.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Yeah, in particular Brangus Cowlyx give me her cal stinkless skunks. Apparently.
Did you see anything about this? I couldn't really find
anything on that.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
I found nothing on that.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
I don't know if it just went beyond the idea stage.
One thing that definitely happened was one of his institutes.
It might have been the Southwest Research Institute or the
Texas Biomedical Institute, had a huge role in producing some
of the first oral contraceptives. That's fairly world altering, sure.
And then another one that did not come to fruition
was called We're artificial pecans pecans however you want to
(25:56):
say it. He decided that the trees were way too
water intensive, especially from the perspective of Texas, and so
he wanted to find a way to create pecans that
did not need to grow on trees. And like I said,
it didn't get anywhere. I cannot, for the life and
me find what the heck he made the artificial pecans
out of. But he definitely gave it a try.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
So we've talked a lot about his, you know, work
as a funder of science and a believer in science
kind of maybe not weirdly, but he was also a
guy that really loved the unexplained and the mystical and
was not although he believed in science, he wasn't he
didn't necessarily think that those walls couldn't be explored beyond,
(26:42):
you know. So he went to India, as a lot
of people did in those days who were seeking enlightenment
in the fifties, saw people walking on hot coals, supposedly
saw Lamas and Tibetan monks levitating off the ground. This
is one of his claims.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
He basically went to a Tony Robbins convention.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Does he levitate lamas?
Speaker 2 (27:05):
He does all sorts of stuff like this that, yes,
he does pseudo scientific things like.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
This, or maybe a David Blaine performance.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Yeah, I tried to learn that method, but I did
it okay for a little while, but it wasn't great.
What levitating, well, the illusion that you're levitating, which is
what David Blaine did. It's a trick obviously, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Essentially you're basically standing on your toes.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
You're standing on one toe. You have people at a
certain angle where when you're raising all of your body
weight up on the one toe, you're blocking it in
with your other foot and like pant leg and so
it's all about the angle at which you see it.
So you can't see that that one toe is on
the ground, but it looks great if you can, if
you can do it well.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
So I don't understand why you call it levitating. I
think you could just get as much awe out of
people as saying like, I'm standing on one toe right now. Everybody,
how nuts is that?
Speaker 1 (28:03):
Yeah, I'm a a tow bodybuilder. I've got the strongest
tow right.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
So this is a really consequential time in Central Asia,
East Asia. In Tibet, the Dalai Lama had been oh,
I don't know the word, but basically found and identified
just several years before. This is the Dalai Lama as
we know him today. And around this time, he was
(28:29):
about twenty one, and China had invaded Tibet, and all
of a sudden, the Dali Lama found himself is like
the head of the Tibetan government. Everybody said, you're the guy,
what are you going to do about this? And there
was almost nothing he could do. There were Tibetan freedom fighters,
Tibetan resistance rebels, and they were just getting crushed left
(28:50):
and right by China. And Tibet was a place where
China had invaded. And so now anytime you saw an
American you can pretty much guess that if they were CIA,
they were backed by the CIA. They were giving information
to the CIA. The CIA had like a twenty year
program in Tibet, and one of the things they did
was help get the Dali Lama out when it became
(29:11):
clear that the Dalai Lama needed to get the heck
out and create a government for Tibet in exile, which
he still runs today. The CIA helped that happen, and
so did in some way, shape or form, Tom Slick
had some sort of hand in it.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
All right, maybe we should take a break and sounds
like a good little cliffhanger and come back and talk
about why he may have been over there in the
first place. Right after this, all right, So where we
(30:00):
left off was a little tease about Tom Sluck potentially
maybe helping to get the Dali Lama out of Tibet.
Why was he there? He had met him already, so
that was a you know, before the break, we were
talking about a trip that he took over there. Tossed
that one aside. He goes home, starts living his life,
feels a little bit more enlightened, he can meditate a
little bit. Sure, worthwhile trip, but he, just like his father,
(30:24):
was fascinated by the idea of the Yeti, the Abominable Snowman,
and the Himalayas, And like you mentioned earlier, like this
was a time when you know, it's kind of right
in the middle of all these yetti sidings, there were
new species being discovered. And so he was like, hey, listen,
I'm not some some wacko who just you know, believes
(30:46):
in these weird cryptis he cryptids? He said, I think
there's something out there that maybe like the link between
man and animal. And I think there are at least
two species. There are the big, tall eight footers with
black hair. There were smaller red haired guys. And I
think it's like a pre human man that's been basically
(31:07):
hidden for thousands of years in the Himalayas.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Yeah, and I mean Westerners have been trying to climb
the Himalayas for decades by this time, and as they
came back, they would bring stories from the locals about
the YETI, the abominable snowman, and so, like you said,
like it wasn't just totally like off the charts or
super fringe to mount an expedition for this, and he did,
and like he was looking for a missing link, remember
(31:33):
his fascination with hybridization. He felt like that that's what
those things were. They were a missing link out there.
They weren't some undiscovered animal. They were some human relative
that had somehow survived in the wilds of the Pacific
Northwest or the wilds of the Himalayas, and he wanted
to find one. I don't know if he wanted to
(31:54):
kill and stuff it because he was a hunter, but
he definitely wanted to at least or meet one, shake
his hand, buy him a steak dinner. I'm not sure,
buy him a Brangus steak dinner.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Pretty good. He actually did change the way that those
expeditions went down, because most of those had been kill
and catch or catch and kill expeditions for kind of
anything like that, and he changed it to more research
base and hey, let's see if we can get something alive.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
Good. I'm glad so he did. He mounted three different
expeditions I think the first one was in the winter
of nineteen fifty six, which you're gonna go to the
Himalayas in the winter seems like poor planning to me.
And while he was there, he found a footprint thirteen
inch long, bare footprint, and he made a plaster cast
(32:46):
of it and became one of his prize possessions. He
actually kept it on his dining room table and like
if somebody wouldn't bring it up when they were a
guest at his house. He would just kind of quietly
nudge it over toward them until it was like in
their face, on their plate even sometimes, and they'd be like, oh, okay,
what is this? If I may ask, and he'd say, oh, well,
(33:06):
funny you should ask. Let me tell you about this
abominable snowman footprint.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Yeah, he actually got a few footprints, and a couple
of them were very noteworthy. I mean, they weren't yetty,
but they were noteworthy, and that every other footprint had
been snowfootprints, and he got a couple out of the mud,
which was I guess sort of a bigger deal, and
also supposedly brought back some hair samples. Again not a
(33:31):
yetty because there's no YETI but he didn't know that
at the time. No, give the guy break. He's trying
to find what's true and what's not true, just like us.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
So two years after the first one he launched a
second expedition. This one was like fully kitted out. He
and a friend spent plunk down thirty grand in I
guess nineteen fifty eight money to fund this expedition. There
was a photographer, a documentary filmmaker. There were professional trackers.
They brought in a recons since plane. They had tranquilizer guns,
(34:02):
which supports your idea that this was not a catch
and kill. And then also he brought three blue tickhounds
tick bloodhounds, which are really well known as tracker dogs,
and he even put little snow boots on them to
help them through the snow, which I thought was very conscientious.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
Totally, he didn't go on this one. He just you know,
helped fund it because he had bailed on a bus
on the previous expedition that had lost its breaks and
pretty much tore up his knees permanently from that point.
So there are some great pictures of him with his
knees all bandaged up, but he's still, you know, smiling away,
(34:41):
looking like he stepped out of a Banana Republic ad.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Is he giving the thumbs up?
Speaker 1 (34:46):
There was no thumb when he had a cane in
his hand.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
Yeah. So that second expedition was there for nine months,
came home empty handed, obviously, or else we would all
know that there was such a thing as the Yetti.
And the third and last expedition, this is where the
CIA business kind of comes in. He funded two brothers,
Peter Burn and Brian Burn, and Peter was a well
(35:11):
known outdoorsman hunter and he'd been searching for the Yetti
for a couple of decades by this time. So Tom
Slick financed a third expedition with these two brothers. And
here we come to yet another stuff you should know
episode I guess, the one on the Yetti or the
Abominable Snowman, where we talked about this story where a
(35:32):
Yeti thumb that was being on being displayed at Pangbosh Temple,
the Buddhist monk temple, was stolen, and it turns out
it was Peter and Brian Byrn who stole it on
behalf of Tom Slick, who asked them to steal it
on behalf of doctor Osmond Hill, a primatologist from the UK.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Yeah, and this is this is probably the most famous
story about Tom Slick because of a certain coken sp
here that we're going to introduce. But he it was
actually a finger and a thumb. They gave these guys,
these brothers, like another finger to trade, or not trade,
but to swap out and hope no one would notice.
(36:15):
I guess and said here's you know, here's a thumb.
Take it over there, see if you can swap them out. Supposedly,
the Burn brothers talked about giving a big donation to
the temple. No one knows exactly what went down, but
they left with that yetti thumb and finger and what
they were told was a YETI scalp was another piece
(36:36):
of piece of YETI. I guess that they got. So.
I've seen this a couple of ways and stories. I've
seen that a certain Hollywood actor was in on this
from the beginning and it was all part of the plan.
And then I've also seen that after this happened, the
Burn brothers went to Calcutta and just had dinner with
(36:56):
Jimmy Stewart and his wife at the Grand Hotel and
were it from there got on board and just said,
and my best Jimmy Stewart, if you need help getting
the thumb across the border, I can. I can put
it in my wife's underwear bag.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
That was great. I was really hoping you're gonna do
something like that.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
It's okay. I used to do a decent one, but
it's been a while.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
It's good, especially for being rusty. I think the way
we told it was that he happened to be there
and offered I don't remember knowing that he was supposedly
part of the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
It doesn't really matter, honestly.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
No, he definitely smuggled what was thought to be a
Yetti thumb across the border out right out of India
and his wife's lingerie case back to the UK, where
he gave it to doctor Hill, and doctor Hill promptly
just stopped talking about it. I guess he probably did
some sort of examination and was like, yeah, this is
(37:52):
not a Yetti thumb and filed it away in the
archives of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, where
it was lost until I leave the twenty first century.
And then finally in twenty eleven, Edinburgh Zoo researchers did
a DNA test on it and they said this is
a human finger and thumb, and they made the little
finger gun for the photo that was published all over
(38:16):
the world.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Why do I get the feeling at the time if
they would have found that thing and thumb in the
wear bag at the airport, that she could have just
been like, stay out of that, that's my thumb, that's
my finger. Stay out of my underwear. They would have
just been like, oh my god, I'm so sorry, and
like just giving it back to her.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
I can't remember where I read it. It was years
and years ago. We may have talked about it. But
when there's when there's a personal massager found in luggage
that's being searched in front of the person, like, I
think the TSA is instructed to just pretend it doesn't exist,
like they didn't see it.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
I can't remember where we are, surely I definitely remember
us talking about that.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
That was a while ago, so yeah, I think back
in the late fifties you could have done the same
thing with a yetti finger, considering it was in her
underwork case.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Yeah. The other thing that they brought back was that
YETI scalp. Obviously not a YETI scalp. It was a
type of Himalayan goat. So they struck out on all fronts.
Too bad, But perhaps perhaps and I saw definite confirmation
that Peter Burn at the very least was helping the
(39:30):
CIA get people in and out of Tibet. There was
a guy named George Patterson that was doing work like
undercover work, and he helped get him in and out.
So the idea is that sort of kind of closing
the loop on the Dali Lama. Is that because of
Peter Burn's work with the CIA getting people in and
out that the New York Times even wrote a story
(39:51):
in April of fifty seven called Soviet Cy's espionage in
US snowman hunt this YETI I don't know if it
was a complete front. I think the are also looking
for the Yetti, but they were like, well, since they're
over here, we'll do a little bit the CIA work
for the guys right exactly?
Speaker 2 (40:06):
And I guess it's not definite. But I did see
in at least one source that Peter Burn had a
real hand in getting the Dolly lam out.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
I love that maybe he offered him his literal hand.
Speaker 2 (40:19):
He offered him a YETI thumb, come with me, big guy.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
So YETI eventually became a bigfoot as far as Tom
Slick's passions went, because a little closer to home he
could take take the kids on that trip, didn't have
to go to the Himalayas. So he became a serious
bigfoot hunter, including like hooking up with people who are
until very recently, we're still big and noteworthy big foot hunters.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
Yeah, one of them was Peter Burn. Peter Burn went
on to be one of the big well known big
foot hunters. When he went with Tom Slick, that's kind
of where he got the taste for it. And he's like, hey, Tom,
you go back home. I'm gonna to stay here. And
he even wrote a book called The Search for Bigfoot
Monster myth or Man. So I think that's a great
(41:09):
nineteen seventy six in particular title for a book on bigfoot.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Oh totally. So back to his private life, you know,
he got divorced that second time, and after that he
was like, you know what marriage is not for me,
but what is for me is being a millionaire playboy
and you know everything I saw said that he was
very upfront with the women that he coborted with and
(41:36):
was like, hey, I'm out to have a good time.
This is not going to get serious. It's kind of
a sort of a touchy way of saying. He had
a lot of girlfriends. At the same time, his niece
wrote a book about him and knew a lot about him,
and she said that at one point I found a
Christmas list from nineteen fifty eight and he would get
these lists together, like, hey, get these gifts for these
(41:58):
very specific women, send it to Nikit Neman Marcus and
like take care of him. So on the fifty eight
list he had Annette, Kathy, Cheryl, Cynthia, Irene, Jane, Jerry, Mary,
Nancy Nell, Sandra, Silvia, Tony, Topsy, and three Hellens, So
seventeen women scattered all over planet Earth. He was, you know,
(42:18):
he was having a good time.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
It sounds like it sounded just now like you were
halfway through a shell Silverstein poem, especially when Topsy makes
an appearance.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
You know, yeah, who's Topsy.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
There's one other thing we need to mention about him
is that he wrote not one, but two books arguing
and laying out plans for world peace, which you know,
not everybody's got those under their belt. So I read
at least one review of it from the fifties and
they were like, this is actually pretty good.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
Yeah, I mean again doing like the good work. Sadly,
that good work in that life was cut very short
in a tragic way when a night teen sixty two,
he was coming back in a little plane after a
peasant hunting in Calgary with some friends and their plane
basically disintegrated in mid air and bad weather over Montana.
(43:13):
And he died at the same age as his father,
at just forty six years old, and is buried at
Mission Burial Park there in San Antonio.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
Yeah, and like we said, those science foundations that he
created went on to do some pretty amazing things. In
addition to oral contraceptives, vaccines for hepatitis A through c HIV, AIDS,
ebola virus. They had a big role in the COVID vaccine.
And they also another one develops things for NASA electric cars,
(43:47):
the oil and gas industry. They're the kind who, like
they don't make the stuff, they help other people make
this stuff through their research.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
They make this stuff better.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
What company is that, BASF. That's exactly what it is,
thinking you.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
Yeah. Also again as another coda, he was a great
patron of the arts, one of the great art collections
of a private American citizen, most of which is at
the McNay Art Museum. And like we said, that movie
with Nick Cage didn't happen, But the podcast Tom Slick
(44:23):
colon Mystery Hunter is out now with Owen Wilson, Yeah,
playing Tom Slick and Skyler Fisk and Skyler Fisk and
her mom says he's basic, and Chad sent me a list.
I mean, it's just sort of a murderer's row of
great actors. And this was literally yesterday, and I was like, huh,
I would have loved to have done a voice. So he, yesterday,
(44:45):
like an hour after that, said he felt bad, and
I was like, oh man, I mean, don't feel bad.
I was just kidding, but I always want to do
dumb voices. And he about an hour later he said,
I got something for you. I was like, really. He
was like, can you do it today? He said you're
opposite Sissy Spacek and I was like, are we going
to zoom together? And he no, you just record your
lines and we marry them to hers. But technically I'll
(45:08):
be in a scene with Sissy Spacek playing seventy year
old former governor of Texas, Governor Nielsen, not a real person.
A lot of this is highly fictionalized. It's a you know,
it's a fun podcast. It's not like they stick to
the facts when they can, but it's it's an entertaining
kind of thing. So if you've never listened to a
(45:30):
scripted fictional show, give it a shot, because I listened
to a couple of episodes, and it's super cool. And
you can hear me doing my best kind of old
old school levon helm accent.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
Can we hear it?
Speaker 1 (45:42):
Yeah? I guess we could play a clip. Yeah, let's
do that, all right, here's a little clip of me,
you guys, finally, Governor Chlier. It's so lovely of you
to come to this little she big for dad.
Speaker 3 (45:58):
Little I heard there might be some reveals about the
mysterious Tom Slick. As a kid, I always thought your
father lived a double life. Oh yeah, Claire, remember when
we had those sleepovers at your house, Sure and your dad.
He'd tell us these wild tales about mysteries the world
and never known holy men who could levitate a tunnel
(46:21):
on the Amazon line with diamonds, the abominable snowman that
he said roam the.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
Roof of the world.
Speaker 3 (46:29):
He told those tales like he lived them, So I
guess I thought he always.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Had way to go.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Chuck, Thank you. He was an old Texas guy like that.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
Get off my claim, you varmit awesome? So where where
can you find this, Chuck? Where can you find this
podcast that you're starting in?
Speaker 1 (46:49):
I mean, anywhere you can get your podcast.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
I guess that's right, isn't that what they say? That's right,
it's called Tom Slick mystery Hunter. Right, yeah, awesome, Well
Duck I said, yeah, I was just mentioning a podcast
that he started in and we've fallen backwards into listener mail.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
All right.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
I'm gonna call this random fact because that's what Adam
called it when he wrote in in the subject line,
Hey guys on your Luddites episode, you mentioned some places
like Lancaster. Sure, that's the origin of the term sheriff.
Speaker 2 (47:24):
I love this or this email?
Speaker 1 (47:26):
Sure or Shire, I guess, just like in Lord of
the Rings County Reeve. So the county sheriff was originally
the shire reeve and was shortened to shere reef or sheriff.
All this info was bestowed upon me by a professor
of criminal justice at Atulmuss University in the early two thousands.
Go Rebels, I've been listening for several years. Look forward
(47:46):
every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Keep it cool, guys. That's
from Adam.
Speaker 2 (47:50):
All right, thanks a lot, Adam. That's a great one.
I'd never heard that before in my life, and now
I know. And if you want to be like Adam
and let us know something we never knew before in
our lives but would be happy to know. Please send
it to us via email. It's stuff podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
Speaker 3 (48:15):
The iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
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