December 20, 2024 • 37 mins
Who's the artificial Christmas tree king? Meet Si Spiegel, a Jewish kid from New York with a remarkable, improbable Christmas story. Si's story was first brought to light by Laurie Gwen Shapiro in her 2021 New York Times feature, "He Bombed the Nazis, Outwitted the Soviets, and Modernized Christmas."
Laurie Gwen Shapiro kindly shared her extensive notes for this episode. Her next book, The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon, will be published by Viking in July 2025. Learn more at LaurieGwenShapiro.com.
ANOTHER VERY SPECIAL THANKS
Kevin C. Fitzpatrick is author of World War One New York and 7 other books tied to New York City history. Kevin's also a public historian and veteran of the United States Marine Corps. Learn more at FitzpatrickAuthor.com.
*
VERY SPECIAL CREDITS
Hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zaron Burnett, and Jason English
Written by Dave Roos
Produced by Josh Fisher
Editing and Sound Design by Jonathan Washington and Josh Fisher
Mixing and Mastering by Baheed Frazier
Original Music by Elise McCoy
Research and Fact Checking by Dave Roos and Austin Thompson
Show Logo by Lucy Quintanilla
Executive Producer is Jason English
Want to listen to other VSEs written by Dave Roos? Check out 'The Shot' (episode 16) and 'The Pledge' (episode 4). If you're enjoying the show and want to do something nice this holiday season, leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform. You can reach us at veryspecialepisodes@gmail.com.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Originals.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Welcome to Frankenmuth, Michigan, the charming Bavarian themed town in
central Michigan where the Christmas spirit is alive three hundred
and sixty five days a year. Frankenmuth is best known
as the home of Bronner's Christmas Wonderland, a Midwest Christmas
decoration mecca since nineteen forty five.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
So we're actually the world's largest Christmas store. We have
everything from trees, to lights, ornaments, glass, anything you can
probably think of, we have it.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
That's Noah Johnson, the fresh faced merchandising manager at Bronner's.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Wally Browner, the originator of the store, opened it in
nineteen forty five. So we have billboards signs all over
the United States for visitors to come in. We have
people actually from all over the world that also come
in to visit.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Every single year, the busy season at Broner's kicks in
a few weeks before thanks Giving. The Christmas superstore welcomes
as many as twenty five thousand customers a day.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
We're kind of famous for our Christmas cookies. We got
some really good sugar cookies that have been around since
I was a kid coming here.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Noah's worked at Bronar's for seventeen years. He started off
stocking shelves when he was in ninth grade. Now he
regularly flies to China to custom order Bronner's latest line
of artificial Christmas trees. Bronner sells one hundred different varieties
of artificial trees, from three foot minis to sixteen foot bohemoths.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Usually, the higher end trees tend to look a lot
more realistic, have a lot more lights on them, and
are a lot fuller as well.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Pre lick Christmas trees are all the rage gone, or
those hopelessly knotted strings of incandescent lights with one dead
bulb that's impossible to find. The new artificial Christmas trees
have built in LEDs that are fully programmable. Noah says
that some customers even keep their trees up all year.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
Long pretty much program the tree lights however you want
them to be. But we have a lot of customers
that come in that do a tree year round and
do themes, so they'll there a summer, spring, fall, Halloween,
and then of course Christmas.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Artificial Christmas trees have come a long way since those
silver metallic eye sores of the nineteen fifties. Today's high
end artificial trees are so lifelike they're almost impossible to
distinguish from the real thing. Even Noah gets fooled sometimes.
In twenty twenty four, three quarters of all American households
with a Christmas tree chose an artificial one, and it's
(02:41):
easy to see the appeal. There are no annoying needles
to sweep up, no dragging a dried out tree carcass
to the curb after the holidays. Just pack it up
and reuse it year after year. Artificial Christmas trees are
a multi billion dollar global industry, but few people know
the unlikely story of how it all started. The person
(03:02):
who pioneered the modern artificial Christmas tree wasn't some Christmas
crazy inventor from a place like franken Move. In fact,
he never even celebrated Christmas. Meet Cy Spiegel, a Jewish
kid from New York City with a remarkable, improbable Christmas story.
Welcome to Very Special Episodes and iHeart original podcast. I'm
(03:25):
your host, Zaren Burnett, and this is an artificial Christmas.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
Welcome back to Very Special Episodes. My name is Jason English.
Today's our first holiday episode. I don't know if podcasting
as a medium is old enough to have established classic
holiday episodes that people revisit year after year, the way
they do with Christmas episodes of TV shows or holiday movies.
(03:56):
Whether you decide this one is worth listening to in
subsequent years or not, I think it's a good one,
and especially if you're gonna be seeing older relatives this
holiday season, Here we go.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Lori Gwynn Shapiro is a journalist and documentary filmmaker who
lives in New York City. One day in November twenty nineteen,
Laurie was walking around Manhattan, enjoying her two favorite hobbies,
drinking coffee and eavesdropping on other people's conversations.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
I'm a terrible eavesdropper. All journalists are eavesdroppers.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
In Central Park, Laurie overheard an older gentleman talking about
his military service. The sharply dressed man looked like he
could be in his nineties. He reminded Laurie of her
own elderly father when he was in better health. Laurie
is Jewish and had a hunch that the old man
was Jewish too. She couldn't help herself. So she butt
into their conversation.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
I'm like a Buttinski and I said, are you possibly
talking about World War iiO, Are you a veteran? And
he said I am. I was in the war. And
I said, oh, well, were you involved with aviation and
he said yes, I know a lot about anti Semitism
during World War Two? And I've never heard of a
(05:14):
Jewish pilot. What were you during the war. I thought
he might be a mechanic and he said no, I
was a pilot. I was just floored.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Laurie's journalistic instincts kicked in. There was a story here.
How often do you run into a Jewish World War
two pilot in the middle of Central Park. So, in
classic Laurie styles, she convinced the old veteran to sit
down with her for an interview. If only Laurie knew
just how wild this story was going to get.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
So when I went and had a doorman apartment, as
I said, I had no idea where he'd gotten this
money from. It was a beautiful apartment with a nice
slice of Central Park in the view. And he just
sat down talking to me. And I did what you
do when you start a story, You start at the beginning,
I said, who are you?
Speaker 1 (06:02):
His name was Cy Spiegel and he was ninety five
years old. So I was born in nineteen twenty four,
the very first year of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade,
and also the first year you could use a kleenex.
SI grew up in Greenwich Village, an immigrant enclave of Jews, Germans,
(06:22):
Italians and more. SI's father ran a hand laundry on
West forty third Street, frequented by Broadway stars and occasional gangster.
After school, Si worked at the laundry and picked up
odd jobs at small machine shops in the neighborhood. SI
was always good with his hands. In the nineteen thirties,
SI's parents read disturbing reports in the local Yiddish papers
(06:43):
about Adolf Hitler's rise in Germany. They had no clue
of the horrors that would soon be unleashed on European Jews,
but they knew enough to worry. SI was just seventeen
when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and America entered World War Two.
He was a shy kid, small too, just five seven
maybe one hundred and fifty pounds. But the day SI
(07:04):
turned eighteen he enlisted in the army was going to
war with Hitler. He wanted to be in the fight.
Speaker 5 (07:12):
A lot of these men who were immigrants or the
sons of immigrants, wanted to prove how American they were.
They wanted to prove their metal, but they really wanted
to prove to their friends and family and everywhere else
around him how American they were.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
That's Kevin Fitzpatrick, an author and New York historian who
was introduced to Cy through Laurie.
Speaker 5 (07:33):
One of the things that Germany underestimated in World War
One and World War Two, because remember Germany sent the
most immigrants to the United States in the nineteenth and
early twentieth century. They thought all those people were going
to return to the Motherland and the Lady of the
Fatherland to fight, and they didn't. They put on American
uniforms because they're proud to be American now.
Speaker 6 (07:54):
And so that might have been in the back of
his mind, is you.
Speaker 5 (07:58):
Know, I'm a Jewish American, but I'm American too, and
I want to do this, and I want this.
Speaker 6 (08:03):
I don't want to miss out on this as well.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
So I enlisted at a outed Army recruitment office. Then
he was shipped off to Fort Dix in New Jersey
for basic training. When the Army learned about sized machine
shop experience, they assigned him to the Army Air Corps
as an airplane mechanic. So I didn't know a thing
about planes, So the Army sent him to various mechanic schools,
winding up at Roosevelt Field on Long Island. This was
(08:29):
September nineteen forty three, almost two years after Pearl Harbor Side.
Knew kids from the neighborhood who were already fighting in
the Pacific or training to jump from planes over Europe,
and here he was on Long Island reading engine manuals.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
So one of the things he told me is that
he was frustrated with his role in the military. He
just said to himself, I can't fight Hitler with a wrench,
and you have to remember, for Jewish men fighty Hitler
became a personal mission.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
One of the officers at the mechanic school told Sye
that if he was really itching for action, he could
apply to become a pot pilot. There was an Army
Air Corps recruitment office right up the road at Mitchell Field.
CI had never dreamt of flying an airplane, and he'd
certainly never heard of a Jewish pilot. But he had
to get out of mechanic school, so he put on
(09:21):
his uniform, stood tall, and marched into the Army Air
Corps recruitment office like he belonged there. The place was deserted,
unlike the mob scene at the recruitment office in Times Square,
there was only one other guy applying for pilot training,
and he was wearing a thick pair of glasses. With
his sharp uniform and perfect vision, Si was a shoe in.
(09:42):
If the recruitment officer recognized Spiegel as a Jewish name,
he didn't blink. He stamped the papers, shook size hand,
and shipped him off to California for pilot training. SI
didn't exactly take to the air like an eagle as
a trainee. They took Si up as a passenger and
put him through barrel rolls and loops. SI puked every time,
(10:03):
but he was a hard worker and definitely not a quitter.
It wasn't long before Si I was the one putting
trainees through barrel rolls and making them lose their lunch.
Zi earned his wings and shipped off for New Mexico
to train on the B seventeen, the iconic World War
Two bomber known as the Flying Fortress.
Speaker 5 (10:21):
I mean, the B seventeen is like the classic bomber.
When you're building scale model kits as a kid, it's
the B seventeen Flying Fortress you want.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
That's Kevin again. He gets a little excited when he
talks about size plane, the B seventeen.
Speaker 5 (10:34):
So first four engines, so you got to think about
the sound of being inside.
Speaker 6 (10:38):
Something like that with four engines to on either side
of you.
Speaker 5 (10:41):
The nose, it's two levels, has got this plexiglass canopy
so you can see all around you. So it's like
you're flying in a greenhouse and it's not pressurized. So
you're wearing you know, sheepskin jackets, you know, wooll lining
jackets and mittens, becuts below zero and you got to
do your job. And you're nineteen years old. It's crazy
(11:03):
to think about the youth that we sent into World
War Two and what they were doing with the technology
of that era eighty years ago.
Speaker 6 (11:10):
It's just mind blowing.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
So here's cy this nineteen year old Jewish kid, thousands
of miles from home in the middle of nowhere in
New Mexico. He's spending days in the cockpit of a
seventy five foot long bomber. On weekends, the other flyboys
go out to the local bars and brothels beside. Was
too shy and innocent for all that sort of Apparently,
(11:35):
there's also something irresistible about a man in uniform. When
Laurie interviewed Cy at his apartment, he brought out a
picture of himself at nineteen wearing his black leather bomber
jacket and a white silk aviator's scarf.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Then I saw pictures of him in his military outfits
and it was like, ooh, this is my World War
two boyfriend. I'm really hot. We all want to have
a pilot.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
That's how shy and innocent SI. When the heart of
Frankie Marie Smith, a stunning young beauty from Lovington, New Mexico,
Frankie's insisted they get married in an evangelical church. Afraid
to tell his parents, Cy kept his shiks a wife
a secret. He'd have plenty of time to explain everything
when he got home from the war. For now, it
(12:19):
was time for Lieutenant Spiegel B seventeen pilot, to say
a tearful goodbye to his young bride and fly off
to Oklahoma, where he would finally meet his crew and
then together fly on over to Europe to start dropping
bombs on Hitler. Cy Spiegel was not, as Laurie believed,
(12:48):
the only Jewish bomber pilot in World War Two. One
hundred and fifty thousand Jewish people served in the Army
Air Corps or similar in some capacity during the war.
In total, over five hundred thousand American Jews served in
World War II.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
But I can't tell you that anyone who is Jewish
that served in World War Two had a little H
on their dog tag for Hebrew, and Protestants had a
pee and Catholics had a see. And one of the
fears of many Jewish people serving in Europe was that
(13:23):
they were going to be taken and they would have
an H and then the Nazis would find them.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Jewish soldiers fought bravely in World War Two, but out
of a total force of more than twelve million Americans,
even if they were overrepresented, they were still a small minority,
and anti Semitism was rampant in the military as it
was in broader American society. PI was lucky that he
made it through pilot training without being singled out by
(13:49):
a bigoted officer as Jewish. Other Jewish trainees were intentionally
washed out before they got their wings, but Ci graduated
as a lieutenant and was finally ready to captain his
own plane and meet his crew.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
There were all black units like the Tuskegee Airmen, but
there was no Jewish unit, and so when they figured
out that he was Jewish, they kind of sent him
what he described a motley crew of leftovers.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Five Catholics, two Jews, a Mormon, and a Wasp. It
sounds like a setup to a bad joke, but that
was SI's crew. Danny Shapiro was the other Jewish guy
on the plane, and he and Si became close friends.
Catholics in those days weren't treated much better than Jews,
so the leftovers bonded quickly. Frank Sanchez was a radio
operator from Arizona. Sam Navara, the waistgunner, was an Italian
(14:38):
American from Chicago. Dale Tyler was a tailgunner from Utah
from a big Mormon family of thirteen. The only wasp
on board was Frank Stockton, the other tailgunner who got
into some trouble with the law in Chicago.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
I judge said to him, you have two choices. You
can go to jail while you could join the army.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
For SI, it didn't matter that they all came from
different worlds or that the army considered them second class soldiers.
SI talked about each member of his crew like they
were brothers.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
I will tell you that he seemed to time travel
every time he talked about his crew. He was not
just a member of the crew. This was his crew.
He was a pilot.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
When Kevin Fitzpatrick met with Cy, he asked to see
some of SI's photos from the war.
Speaker 5 (15:22):
He pulled out a group photo that you've probably seen.
I took a photo that too, of his crew. He
named every single man. He told me his hometown and
what position he had on the plane. So these are
photos taken, you know, eighty years ago, and he's rattling
off the names of all these guys.
Speaker 6 (15:43):
That was incredible, lucky for us.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Kevin recorded a snippet of that conversation. Here's Cy.
Speaker 7 (15:50):
This is Frank Finley, who was the other waistgunner who
didn't fly missions with us as Dale Tyler, the tale gunner.
It's me my copwhile Bill Hole, Patulski, and Shapiro. The Bambajean.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
And his men flew there B seventeen from Nebraska to Labrador,
then onto England, which served as home base for their
bombing missions over Germany. They were part of the US
eighth Air Force, the Mighty eighth and members of the
four hundred and ninetieth Bomb Group. SI flew over thirty
bombing missions over the course of nineteen forty four and
nineteen forty five, pummeling German cities and destroying Nazi munitions factories.
(16:32):
SI flew all of his missions in broad daylight. His
B seventeen was one of hundreds of planes flying in
huge formations through a sky exploding with German anti aircraft fire.
It was one of the most dangerous and deadly jobs
in World War Two.
Speaker 5 (16:48):
He was with the eighth Air Force, which got, you know,
just heavily, heavily involved in the conflict bombing Nazi Germany,
and for the B seventeen, you know, they had a
loss rate of like something like thirty seven to forty
percent the crews themselves.
Speaker 6 (17:02):
Only fifty percent of those guys came home.
Speaker 5 (17:04):
If front to be seventeen, it was one of the
most dangerous jobs you could have had.
Speaker 6 (17:09):
In World War Two.
Speaker 5 (17:10):
He was in one of the heaviest military campaigns and
definitely the biggest ever air campaign in history.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
That air campaign, what Kevin calls the biggest in history,
was the bombing of Berlin in nineteen forty five. On
a frigid February morning, wearing his heavy flak jacket and
winter gear, Cy boarded his B seventeen for his thirty
third mission. It was the mission that he would talk
about for the rest of his life. Ci and his
crew took off from England and joined an aerial formation
(17:41):
of more than fourteen hundred bombers and nine hundred and
forty fighter planes. Their destination was over five hundred miles
away Berlin. Early into the flight, size plane had an
engine malfunction, a common problem on the B seventeen. With
three of the four engines, they could still make it
to Berlin and back, but things quickly went from bad
(18:02):
to worse. On the approach to Berlin, size plane was
rocked by anti aircraft fires. The second engine was blown
out by flack.
Speaker 6 (18:09):
So what flack is?
Speaker 5 (18:11):
Those are the projectiles that are being fired from very
long munitions that are fed into the eighty eight millimeter cannons.
Speaker 6 (18:18):
They're being fired straight up at the sky.
Speaker 5 (18:20):
So when those fragment, they're going to create trapnel and
they're going to rape through those airframes, which are basically
like a beer can.
Speaker 6 (18:27):
And it says the flacks, the engines, it's all over
for the airplanes.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
With just two engines, they'd never get their heavy B
seventeen all the way back to England. They'd be lucky
if they didn't crash in German territory, a death sentence
for a Jewish pilot. SI had to make a split
second decision. His mind flashed to Poland. He'd heard that
Russians America's allies had taken Warsaw and were swiftly marching
toward Germany. If CI could get the badly damaged B
(18:53):
seventeen over the border into Poland, that might be their
best option, maybe their only option. CI ordered his navigator
Ray Potolski, to set a course for Warsaw. Meanwhile, the
crew had to ditch anything that wasn't bolted down.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
They threw out flack suits, extra ammunition, and anything of weight.
He was screaming, get rid of it, Get rid of it.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
By some miracle, the crippled plane made it to Warsaw,
but the city was completely destroyed. There were no airfields
in sight. A small Russian plane spotted the wounded B
seventeen and guided the Americans over some forested fields, losing
altitude by the second, Si saw an opening in the trees,
(19:36):
and he went in for a white knuckle wheels up
belly landing. The B seventeen skidded to a stop in
a muddy field. The bottom of the plane was nearly destroyed,
but no one was hurt. Size men whose lives he
cared about more than his own, were safe for now
at least. The problem was they were now at the
(19:56):
mercy of the Russians. The Russians were allies, but they
were busy planning an invasion, not babysitting Americans. At the
Russian base, Si met another American beasts seventeen pilot who
had also crash landed in the Berlin raid. His name
was George Ruckman. Altogether there were twenty Americans in Soviet
custody in Warsaw, but the Russians were in no rush
(20:19):
to get them home.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
It wasn't like these were the Germans or the Japanese.
But they just wanted to get out of there, and
nobody was letting them get out. I wouldn't call it
a prisoner of war, but they were trapped.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Meanwhile, the US Army had little idea that two bomber
crews had crashed behind German lines in Poland. Even worse,
size family and the families of the rest of the
crew all received telegrams from the Army informing them that
their soldier was listed as missing in action. Weeks went by,
then a month after. Every time Si asked their Russian
(20:54):
handlers when they could leave, he get the same answer
with Moscow says so.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
And it got to the point, after weeks and weeks
of when Moscow said so, that they had to do
something themselves.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Cy and Ruckman hatched a plan. Both of their B
seventeens were unflable, but between the two planes they had
four working engines. Their best hope of getting home was
to Frankenstein together that working parts of each plane and
make their escape.
Speaker 6 (21:22):
So you got to think about this.
Speaker 5 (21:23):
Anybody does any mechanics, You're rebuilding an airplane engine and
airplane parts with whatever tools.
Speaker 6 (21:30):
You have around. You're not in a garage.
Speaker 5 (21:32):
You're not in a hangar, You're basically in a potato field,
doing this all under the watchful guns of the Russians.
Speaker 6 (21:38):
So it's just it's crazier than a movie.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Bribes were exchanged, American watches, whiskey pistols. Enough Russian soldiers
agreed to look the other way that the Americans were
able to secretly piece together a functional B seventeen. CI
would never forget the look on the Russian officers' faces
as the Frankenstein B seventeen, loaded with twenty giddy Americans,
(22:04):
roared down the runway. Asked if the Russians chased after them,
SI joked, they were probably relieved that they didn't have
to feed us. On Saint Patrick's Day nineteen forty five,
six weeks after crash landing in Poland, the two American crews,
piloted by Cy Spiegel and George Ruckman, landed at an
(22:25):
American base in Italy. They were greeted as heroes. The
first thing SI did was send a telegram to his
anxious family, and I'll.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Tell you I wrote down what the telegram said, said,
AM safe and well.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Letters following SI didn't go home right away, though, he
had unfinished business. After recuperating in Italy, he flew back
to England and completed his final missions, because that's what
heroes do. In August nineteen forty five, CI finally sailed
home on the SS Queen Elizabeth. Over the course of
the war, he'd grown from an undersized teenager into a
(23:00):
battle tested man. The post war period was a time
of tremendous opportunity for American gi and their families, but sadly,
Cy was about to find out that those opportunities weren't
available to everyone. Laurie gwyn Shapiro interviewed CI a number
(23:26):
of times at his nice apartment overlooking Central Park. There
was always more to talk about, and Si enjoyed the conversations.
One day, he brought out a small dusty box to
show Laurie. Inside were ribbons and medals from the Army
that he'd received for his war service. Laurie wondered why
they weren't on display.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Yeah, so this is something that I talked to him
at length about the antisemitism that he faced despite a
being a hero, which was quite shocking to me. And
he did thirty six missions and he had multiple awards,
and he wanted me to have the army hear this
that he felt strongly that many Jewish soldiers for denied
(24:07):
a promotion and rank because of anti Semitism at that time.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Historian Kevin Fitzpatrick is a veteran himself, and it's hard
for him to hear how Si was treated. In the
nineteen forties.
Speaker 5 (24:18):
Our American military was a reflection of what American society
was like at the time, so racial discrimination, religious discrimination.
It wasn't similar to what we have in twenty twenty
four at all. But I definitely I believe what Sis saying.
He was denied promotion, who had denied advancements other men
who had less missions in him and did less than
(24:41):
he did. We're getting to advance. He certainly should have gotten.
Speaker 6 (24:45):
More valor and bravery awards than he was awarded.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Like millions of other gis Cy Spiegel was proud of
his service, but also ready to put the war behind
him and get on with his life. Remember Frankie Marie Smith,
SI's young bride in New Mexico. The couple moved to
Texas and tried to make it work. Si even got
a job as a radio announcer at a country West
his DJ name was Muddy Boots. But try as they might,
(25:11):
the spark just wasn't there anymore. Frankie and Ci split up,
but Si wasn't disheartened. He heard that airlines were looking
for pilots. All of his Army Air Corps buddies were
being hired by the commercial airline industry, which was just
taking off, so to speak. So Si moved back to
New York, hoping to finally cash in on his heroic
(25:32):
war record. He was in for a rude awakening.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
New York City was the center of the aviation world.
The big buildings like the PanAm Tower come later, but
you know, like the airlines were all based in midtown Manhattan.
There were jobs, and there were lots of jobs for
everyone except him.
Speaker 6 (25:52):
He's a well trained pilot and he can't get a job.
Speaker 5 (25:56):
And other men that he flew with were getting these nice,
cushy commercial airline jobs in the forties and fifties, and
he was denied because he was a Jew.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
This was a real low point inside life. The country
that he'd served so bravely and selflessly was turning its
back on him. Luckily, Si was still good with his hands,
so he was able to get jobs as a machinist,
he joined a union. In nineteen forty nine, Si attended
a politically progressive summer camp in upstate New York called
(26:25):
Camp Unity. Think of it like that resort in Dirty Dancing,
if it was full of Greenwich village types, poets, jazz musicians,
communist and at least one disgruntled Jewish bomber pilot. It
was at Camp Unity that Si met a young Japanese
American woman named Motoko Ikeda. Like Si, Motoko was struggling
(26:45):
to find her place in postwar America.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
When he met Motoko at Camp Unity, she told him
that she had a family of six that had been
forcibly sent from Los Angeles to in a Chairman camp
in Wyoming. This is someone who had been fighting the
Germans in the Japanese So think about how extraordinary this
conversation might have been. At fourteen, she was kept behind
(27:11):
barbed wire and watched by armed American guards at sentry posts,
and they were ready to shoot her or her family
if she escaped. When Motoko left the intermy camps, I
told me they gave her not a lot of money.
They have her twenty five dollars and a one way
ticket and you could choose where the ticket was two
(27:33):
and she chose New York. She wanted far away from
the West Coast.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Motoko and Side bonded instantly. Maybe it was their shared
war trauma, or their outsider status in their own country.
Whatever it was, they fell in love, got married, and
started a beautiful family together. The fact that they came
from different backgrounds and religions was never an issue. Side
joked that quote, Buttoko was better at making Jewish food
(27:59):
than my mother. She could cook in any language.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Buttko was the love of his life, and he told
me that often.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Now that Si had a wife and young family to support,
he needed to think about his career. Si was working
as a machinist for a dollar eighty an hour at
a brush factory. These weren't hair brushes. They were industrial brushes, wiry,
pointy things for scouring wood or finishing metal. As it happens,
there was a fad in the late nineteen fifties for
(28:26):
something called spray brushes, tinsel like metallic brushes that were
used as holiday decorations in storefront windows like Macy's and
Sacksmith Avenue. The company Si worked for the American Brush
Machinery Company fabricated and sold machines that made spray brushes
for twelve thousand dollars a machine, which was good money.
(28:48):
But just like that, the spray brush fad died out.
What was American Brush supposed to do with those expensive,
useless contraptions. One of the higher ups had the bright
idea of repurposing the spray brush machines to make artificial
Christmas trees. It wasn't too much of a stretch. After all,
a pine tree kind of looks like a bunch of
(29:09):
green plastic brushes glued together, So that's exactly what they did.
The initial results were less than inspiring.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
If you look at the artificial Christmas trees from this era,
they're horrifying. They don't, I mean, they're just really sad.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
American Brush was ready to cut its losses. In fact,
they sent Si Now, a senior machinist, to shut down
the whole Christmas tree operation. But where American Brush saw
a dead end, Si saw an opportunity to change the
Christmas tree game.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
And he had this idea that he could make them
look more realistic. You know, the more realistic they were,
the more people would buy them.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Cy brought in real trees, Scotch pines and Douglas firs
to study their branch spacing and pine needle patterns. He
spent months tweaking the industrial brush machines to new specifications
and finally convinced his boss is to give Christmas trees
a second chance. Now it was all up to sigh
if the artificial Christmas tree sold, SI would be a
(30:15):
hero if they sunk. So at his career, American Brush
spun off a new division called American Tree in Wreath,
and they made Sigh the President. Things got off to
a rough start. Size new plastic trees looked incredibly realistic,
but mid century America wasn't interested. If people were going
to buy a fake tree in the early nineteen sixties,
(30:38):
they wanted one of those funky space age aluminum ones.
Size division lost tens of thousands of dollars a year
as he struggled to find a market for his realistic
fake trees. The turning point came on December sixth, nineteen
sixty four, with the premiere of A little Thing called
a Charlie Brown Christmas.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
The story gets tree a little bit nuts, and I
think that anyone who's gen X like me or younger
will know that Charlie Brown Christmas Special. And if you remember,
if you've seen Charlie Brown Christmas, there's this real appeal
to come back to the meaning of Christmas. And during
this period of time, mid century, there were futuristic aluminum
(31:21):
trees with color wheels were dominating the market. And there's
a line in the Charlie Brown Special which is get
the most enormous aluminum tree you can find, Charlie Brown
and maybe painted pink, and that's Lucy van Pelt. That's
what Lucy told Charlie. And he chose a different kind
(31:42):
of tree. He chose a scraggly tree. And you know,
Americans tuned in and they took heart. They were like,
what is Christmas?
Speaker 3 (31:55):
You know?
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Why do we have this like futuristic aluminum tree representing
what we love? And that's when, if you're following along
with me here, the aluminum tree business took a nose dive. So,
of course, is now an opportunity for sy with his
(32:16):
scheme that he's been trying to push all along, which
is that artificial Christmas trees should look more like Christmas trees.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Whether the end of aluminum trees. Can truly be credited
to Charlie Brown is perhaps debatable, but it's fair to
say it accelerated a dying trend. Another factor was the
fake roots of polyvinyl chloride, which allowed trees to look
like well trees instead of large wire brushes, new technology,
(32:44):
new trends, kids cartoons. It all combines to make Size
Christmas Tree Division explode. After the Charlie Brown Christmas special
sales from Size Christmas Tree Division shot up. American Tree
and Wreath experienced sixty five percent annual growth. Soon they
were producing eight hundred thousand artificial trees a year. SI
(33:06):
and a worker decided to start their own company, Hudson
Valley Tree. With Size, hard work and expertise, they built
the business into a Christmas tree juggernaut. By the nineteen eighties,
SI was being called quote the Henry Ford of artificial
Christmas trees.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
So this is the person that was not allowed to
fly for the American Airlines, a Jewish man from Greenwich
Village who was now the Artificial Christmas tree King of
the United States. So I just said I wasn't Christian,
but even I knew that didn't looked like a Christmas tree.
Think of an artificial Christmas tree today. It's pretty. Sometimes
(33:43):
you have to double check to see if it's real
or if it's not real. That's all Size doing. That
was his vision that he had, that we can make
these trees better.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Sai devoted his life to his Christmas tree business, and
in nineteen ninety two he was finally ready to retire.
Si sold Hudson Valley Tree and walked away a multi millionaire.
It's the American Dream Christmas edition. Ci and Motoko were
married for fifty wonderful years, but Toko passed away on
(34:13):
Valentine's Day two thousand, suddenly alone in his big house
that Christmas trees built. Ci started thinking more about his
time as a bomber pilot in World War Two. He
began attending reunions of the four hundred and ninetieth Bomb
Group Historical Association and found great comfort and camaraderie among
his fellow veterans. By this point, Size Jewishness no longer
(34:35):
made him an outsider. He was embraced as an equal.
Speaker 6 (34:40):
And so for decades he went to the reunions, and
so he knew all these men from the Eighth Air
Force for years and years, and their spouses and then
their children, but then slowly they all started, you know,
passing away, and so he's like the last of the last.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
For him. He was very happy that he was able
to provide for his family. That was certainly not something
that he took lightly, but he said that it was
unequivocal in his mind that the most important part of
his life was serving the American people fighting fascism, fighting Hitler.
(35:17):
And I think also the fact that he was the
last one standing and that he was the person that
had to tell the story with.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Laurie Shapiro, bodinskied her way into size conversation that day
in Central Park. She didn't know she was about to
meet one of the last living World War two bomber
pilots or the artificial Christmas Tree King of America, and
she certainly didn't expect to be making a friend.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
I think what listeners will probably know is that Si
is no longer with us. I mean, that's part of
the story too, that you know he passed away. I
will say that I was able to see him about
a week or two before he passed away. He was
very thin, he was not going to the gym. He
had some health issues that he didn't have before, and
(36:08):
he was still clear of mind, and he just said
thank you, and I said thank you, and it was
a genuine friendship. And I think that that's something that
is also what I hope listeners can take away with
is that don't look at older people as invisible. Look
at them even if they weren't in World War Two,
(36:28):
as long as they're living and of a certain age,
they are history. Sit down and talk to people.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Twenty twenty four will be the first time in almost
twenty years that Christmas and the first night of Hanukkah
fall on the same day. It feels like an appropriate
time to salute the Jewish bomber pilot who changed the
way people celebrate Christmas. This one's for you, SI.
Speaker 4 (36:57):
Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.
This show is hosted by Danish Schwartz, Sarren Burnett, and
Jason English. Today's episode was written by Dave Rouse. Our
producer is Josh Fisher. Editing and sam designed by Jonathan
Washington and Josh Fisher. Fixing and mastering by Beheth Frasier.
(37:18):
Original music by Elise McCoy. Research impact checking by Dave
rus and Austin Thompson. Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla. Our
executive producer is Jason English. If you're looking to do
something nice for us this holiday season, Blenny, head over
to Apple or Spotify, give us a nice rating, click
those stars. You can always reach us at Very Special
(37:41):
Episodes at gmail dot com. We've got two more episodes
coming this month, including a special Monday episode to get
ahead of the Christmas on Wednesday. We'll see you back
here on Monday. Very Special Episodes is a production of
iHeart Podcasts.
Originals.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Welcome to Frankenmuth, Michigan, the charming Bavarian themed town in
central Michigan where the Christmas spirit is alive three hundred
and sixty five days a year. Frankenmuth is best known
as the home of Bronner's Christmas Wonderland, a Midwest Christmas
decoration mecca since nineteen forty five.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
So we're actually the world's largest Christmas store. We have
everything from trees, to lights, ornaments, glass, anything you can
probably think of, we have it.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
That's Noah Johnson, the fresh faced merchandising manager at Bronner's.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Wally Browner, the originator of the store, opened it in
nineteen forty five. So we have billboards signs all over
the United States for visitors to come in. We have
people actually from all over the world that also come
in to visit.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Every single year, the busy season at Broner's kicks in
a few weeks before thanks Giving. The Christmas superstore welcomes
as many as twenty five thousand customers a day.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
We're kind of famous for our Christmas cookies. We got
some really good sugar cookies that have been around since
I was a kid coming here.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Noah's worked at Bronar's for seventeen years. He started off
stocking shelves when he was in ninth grade. Now he
regularly flies to China to custom order Bronner's latest line
of artificial Christmas trees. Bronner sells one hundred different varieties
of artificial trees, from three foot minis to sixteen foot bohemoths.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Usually, the higher end trees tend to look a lot
more realistic, have a lot more lights on them, and
are a lot fuller as well.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Pre lick Christmas trees are all the rage gone, or
those hopelessly knotted strings of incandescent lights with one dead
bulb that's impossible to find. The new artificial Christmas trees
have built in LEDs that are fully programmable. Noah says
that some customers even keep their trees up all year.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
Long pretty much program the tree lights however you want
them to be. But we have a lot of customers
that come in that do a tree year round and
do themes, so they'll there a summer, spring, fall, Halloween,
and then of course Christmas.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Artificial Christmas trees have come a long way since those
silver metallic eye sores of the nineteen fifties. Today's high
end artificial trees are so lifelike they're almost impossible to
distinguish from the real thing. Even Noah gets fooled sometimes.
In twenty twenty four, three quarters of all American households
with a Christmas tree chose an artificial one, and it's
(02:41):
easy to see the appeal. There are no annoying needles
to sweep up, no dragging a dried out tree carcass
to the curb after the holidays. Just pack it up
and reuse it year after year. Artificial Christmas trees are
a multi billion dollar global industry, but few people know
the unlikely story of how it all started. The person
(03:02):
who pioneered the modern artificial Christmas tree wasn't some Christmas
crazy inventor from a place like franken Move. In fact,
he never even celebrated Christmas. Meet Cy Spiegel, a Jewish
kid from New York City with a remarkable, improbable Christmas story.
Welcome to Very Special Episodes and iHeart original podcast. I'm
(03:25):
your host, Zaren Burnett, and this is an artificial Christmas.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
Welcome back to Very Special Episodes. My name is Jason English.
Today's our first holiday episode. I don't know if podcasting
as a medium is old enough to have established classic
holiday episodes that people revisit year after year, the way
they do with Christmas episodes of TV shows or holiday movies.
(03:56):
Whether you decide this one is worth listening to in
subsequent years or not, I think it's a good one,
and especially if you're gonna be seeing older relatives this
holiday season, Here we go.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Lori Gwynn Shapiro is a journalist and documentary filmmaker who
lives in New York City. One day in November twenty nineteen,
Laurie was walking around Manhattan, enjoying her two favorite hobbies,
drinking coffee and eavesdropping on other people's conversations.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
I'm a terrible eavesdropper. All journalists are eavesdroppers.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
In Central Park, Laurie overheard an older gentleman talking about
his military service. The sharply dressed man looked like he
could be in his nineties. He reminded Laurie of her
own elderly father when he was in better health. Laurie
is Jewish and had a hunch that the old man
was Jewish too. She couldn't help herself. So she butt
into their conversation.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
I'm like a Buttinski and I said, are you possibly
talking about World War iiO, Are you a veteran? And
he said I am. I was in the war. And
I said, oh, well, were you involved with aviation and
he said yes, I know a lot about anti Semitism
during World War Two? And I've never heard of a
(05:14):
Jewish pilot. What were you during the war. I thought
he might be a mechanic and he said no, I
was a pilot. I was just floored.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Laurie's journalistic instincts kicked in. There was a story here.
How often do you run into a Jewish World War
two pilot in the middle of Central Park. So, in
classic Laurie styles, she convinced the old veteran to sit
down with her for an interview. If only Laurie knew
just how wild this story was going to get.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
So when I went and had a doorman apartment, as
I said, I had no idea where he'd gotten this
money from. It was a beautiful apartment with a nice
slice of Central Park in the view. And he just
sat down talking to me. And I did what you
do when you start a story, You start at the beginning,
I said, who are you?
Speaker 1 (06:02):
His name was Cy Spiegel and he was ninety five
years old. So I was born in nineteen twenty four,
the very first year of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade,
and also the first year you could use a kleenex.
SI grew up in Greenwich Village, an immigrant enclave of Jews, Germans,
(06:22):
Italians and more. SI's father ran a hand laundry on
West forty third Street, frequented by Broadway stars and occasional gangster.
After school, Si worked at the laundry and picked up
odd jobs at small machine shops in the neighborhood. SI
was always good with his hands. In the nineteen thirties,
SI's parents read disturbing reports in the local Yiddish papers
(06:43):
about Adolf Hitler's rise in Germany. They had no clue
of the horrors that would soon be unleashed on European Jews,
but they knew enough to worry. SI was just seventeen
when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and America entered World War Two.
He was a shy kid, small too, just five seven
maybe one hundred and fifty pounds. But the day SI
(07:04):
turned eighteen he enlisted in the army was going to
war with Hitler. He wanted to be in the fight.
Speaker 5 (07:12):
A lot of these men who were immigrants or the
sons of immigrants, wanted to prove how American they were.
They wanted to prove their metal, but they really wanted
to prove to their friends and family and everywhere else
around him how American they were.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
That's Kevin Fitzpatrick, an author and New York historian who
was introduced to Cy through Laurie.
Speaker 5 (07:33):
One of the things that Germany underestimated in World War
One and World War Two, because remember Germany sent the
most immigrants to the United States in the nineteenth and
early twentieth century. They thought all those people were going
to return to the Motherland and the Lady of the
Fatherland to fight, and they didn't. They put on American
uniforms because they're proud to be American now.
Speaker 6 (07:54):
And so that might have been in the back of
his mind, is you.
Speaker 5 (07:58):
Know, I'm a Jewish American, but I'm American too, and
I want to do this, and I want this.
Speaker 6 (08:03):
I don't want to miss out on this as well.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
So I enlisted at a outed Army recruitment office. Then
he was shipped off to Fort Dix in New Jersey
for basic training. When the Army learned about sized machine
shop experience, they assigned him to the Army Air Corps
as an airplane mechanic. So I didn't know a thing
about planes, So the Army sent him to various mechanic schools,
winding up at Roosevelt Field on Long Island. This was
(08:29):
September nineteen forty three, almost two years after Pearl Harbor Side.
Knew kids from the neighborhood who were already fighting in
the Pacific or training to jump from planes over Europe,
and here he was on Long Island reading engine manuals.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
So one of the things he told me is that
he was frustrated with his role in the military. He
just said to himself, I can't fight Hitler with a wrench,
and you have to remember, for Jewish men fighty Hitler
became a personal mission.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
One of the officers at the mechanic school told Sye
that if he was really itching for action, he could
apply to become a pot pilot. There was an Army
Air Corps recruitment office right up the road at Mitchell Field.
CI had never dreamt of flying an airplane, and he'd
certainly never heard of a Jewish pilot. But he had
to get out of mechanic school, so he put on
(09:21):
his uniform, stood tall, and marched into the Army Air
Corps recruitment office like he belonged there. The place was deserted,
unlike the mob scene at the recruitment office in Times Square,
there was only one other guy applying for pilot training,
and he was wearing a thick pair of glasses. With
his sharp uniform and perfect vision, Si was a shoe in.
(09:42):
If the recruitment officer recognized Spiegel as a Jewish name,
he didn't blink. He stamped the papers, shook size hand,
and shipped him off to California for pilot training. SI
didn't exactly take to the air like an eagle as
a trainee. They took Si up as a passenger and
put him through barrel rolls and loops. SI puked every time,
(10:03):
but he was a hard worker and definitely not a quitter.
It wasn't long before Si I was the one putting
trainees through barrel rolls and making them lose their lunch.
Zi earned his wings and shipped off for New Mexico
to train on the B seventeen, the iconic World War
Two bomber known as the Flying Fortress.
Speaker 5 (10:21):
I mean, the B seventeen is like the classic bomber.
When you're building scale model kits as a kid, it's
the B seventeen Flying Fortress you want.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
That's Kevin again. He gets a little excited when he
talks about size plane, the B seventeen.
Speaker 5 (10:34):
So first four engines, so you got to think about
the sound of being inside.
Speaker 6 (10:38):
Something like that with four engines to on either side
of you.
Speaker 5 (10:41):
The nose, it's two levels, has got this plexiglass canopy
so you can see all around you. So it's like
you're flying in a greenhouse and it's not pressurized. So
you're wearing you know, sheepskin jackets, you know, wooll lining
jackets and mittens, becuts below zero and you got to
do your job. And you're nineteen years old. It's crazy
(11:03):
to think about the youth that we sent into World
War Two and what they were doing with the technology
of that era eighty years ago.
Speaker 6 (11:10):
It's just mind blowing.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
So here's cy this nineteen year old Jewish kid, thousands
of miles from home in the middle of nowhere in
New Mexico. He's spending days in the cockpit of a
seventy five foot long bomber. On weekends, the other flyboys
go out to the local bars and brothels beside. Was
too shy and innocent for all that sort of Apparently,
(11:35):
there's also something irresistible about a man in uniform. When
Laurie interviewed Cy at his apartment, he brought out a
picture of himself at nineteen wearing his black leather bomber
jacket and a white silk aviator's scarf.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Then I saw pictures of him in his military outfits
and it was like, ooh, this is my World War
two boyfriend. I'm really hot. We all want to have
a pilot.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
That's how shy and innocent SI. When the heart of
Frankie Marie Smith, a stunning young beauty from Lovington, New Mexico,
Frankie's insisted they get married in an evangelical church. Afraid
to tell his parents, Cy kept his shiks a wife
a secret. He'd have plenty of time to explain everything
when he got home from the war. For now, it
(12:19):
was time for Lieutenant Spiegel B seventeen pilot, to say
a tearful goodbye to his young bride and fly off
to Oklahoma, where he would finally meet his crew and
then together fly on over to Europe to start dropping
bombs on Hitler. Cy Spiegel was not, as Laurie believed,
(12:48):
the only Jewish bomber pilot in World War Two. One
hundred and fifty thousand Jewish people served in the Army
Air Corps or similar in some capacity during the war.
In total, over five hundred thousand American Jews served in
World War II.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
But I can't tell you that anyone who is Jewish
that served in World War Two had a little H
on their dog tag for Hebrew, and Protestants had a
pee and Catholics had a see. And one of the
fears of many Jewish people serving in Europe was that
(13:23):
they were going to be taken and they would have
an H and then the Nazis would find them.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Jewish soldiers fought bravely in World War Two, but out
of a total force of more than twelve million Americans,
even if they were overrepresented, they were still a small minority,
and anti Semitism was rampant in the military as it
was in broader American society. PI was lucky that he
made it through pilot training without being singled out by
(13:49):
a bigoted officer as Jewish. Other Jewish trainees were intentionally
washed out before they got their wings, but Ci graduated
as a lieutenant and was finally ready to captain his
own plane and meet his crew.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
There were all black units like the Tuskegee Airmen, but
there was no Jewish unit, and so when they figured
out that he was Jewish, they kind of sent him
what he described a motley crew of leftovers.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Five Catholics, two Jews, a Mormon, and a Wasp. It
sounds like a setup to a bad joke, but that
was SI's crew. Danny Shapiro was the other Jewish guy
on the plane, and he and Si became close friends.
Catholics in those days weren't treated much better than Jews,
so the leftovers bonded quickly. Frank Sanchez was a radio
operator from Arizona. Sam Navara, the waistgunner, was an Italian
(14:38):
American from Chicago. Dale Tyler was a tailgunner from Utah
from a big Mormon family of thirteen. The only wasp
on board was Frank Stockton, the other tailgunner who got
into some trouble with the law in Chicago.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
I judge said to him, you have two choices. You
can go to jail while you could join the army.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
For SI, it didn't matter that they all came from
different worlds or that the army considered them second class soldiers.
SI talked about each member of his crew like they
were brothers.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
I will tell you that he seemed to time travel
every time he talked about his crew. He was not
just a member of the crew. This was his crew.
He was a pilot.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
When Kevin Fitzpatrick met with Cy, he asked to see
some of SI's photos from the war.
Speaker 5 (15:22):
He pulled out a group photo that you've probably seen.
I took a photo that too, of his crew. He
named every single man. He told me his hometown and
what position he had on the plane. So these are
photos taken, you know, eighty years ago, and he's rattling
off the names of all these guys.
Speaker 6 (15:43):
That was incredible, lucky for us.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Kevin recorded a snippet of that conversation. Here's Cy.
Speaker 7 (15:50):
This is Frank Finley, who was the other waistgunner who
didn't fly missions with us as Dale Tyler, the tale gunner.
It's me my copwhile Bill Hole, Patulski, and Shapiro. The Bambajean.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
And his men flew there B seventeen from Nebraska to Labrador,
then onto England, which served as home base for their
bombing missions over Germany. They were part of the US
eighth Air Force, the Mighty eighth and members of the
four hundred and ninetieth Bomb Group. SI flew over thirty
bombing missions over the course of nineteen forty four and
nineteen forty five, pummeling German cities and destroying Nazi munitions factories.
(16:32):
SI flew all of his missions in broad daylight. His
B seventeen was one of hundreds of planes flying in
huge formations through a sky exploding with German anti aircraft fire.
It was one of the most dangerous and deadly jobs
in World War Two.
Speaker 5 (16:48):
He was with the eighth Air Force, which got, you know,
just heavily, heavily involved in the conflict bombing Nazi Germany,
and for the B seventeen, you know, they had a
loss rate of like something like thirty seven to forty
percent the crews themselves.
Speaker 6 (17:02):
Only fifty percent of those guys came home.
Speaker 5 (17:04):
If front to be seventeen, it was one of the
most dangerous jobs you could have had.
Speaker 6 (17:09):
In World War Two.
Speaker 5 (17:10):
He was in one of the heaviest military campaigns and
definitely the biggest ever air campaign in history.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
That air campaign, what Kevin calls the biggest in history,
was the bombing of Berlin in nineteen forty five. On
a frigid February morning, wearing his heavy flak jacket and
winter gear, Cy boarded his B seventeen for his thirty
third mission. It was the mission that he would talk
about for the rest of his life. Ci and his
crew took off from England and joined an aerial formation
(17:41):
of more than fourteen hundred bombers and nine hundred and
forty fighter planes. Their destination was over five hundred miles
away Berlin. Early into the flight, size plane had an
engine malfunction, a common problem on the B seventeen. With
three of the four engines, they could still make it
to Berlin and back, but things quickly went from bad
(18:02):
to worse. On the approach to Berlin, size plane was
rocked by anti aircraft fires. The second engine was blown
out by flack.
Speaker 6 (18:09):
So what flack is?
Speaker 5 (18:11):
Those are the projectiles that are being fired from very
long munitions that are fed into the eighty eight millimeter cannons.
Speaker 6 (18:18):
They're being fired straight up at the sky.
Speaker 5 (18:20):
So when those fragment, they're going to create trapnel and
they're going to rape through those airframes, which are basically
like a beer can.
Speaker 6 (18:27):
And it says the flacks, the engines, it's all over
for the airplanes.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
With just two engines, they'd never get their heavy B
seventeen all the way back to England. They'd be lucky
if they didn't crash in German territory, a death sentence
for a Jewish pilot. SI had to make a split
second decision. His mind flashed to Poland. He'd heard that
Russians America's allies had taken Warsaw and were swiftly marching
toward Germany. If CI could get the badly damaged B
(18:53):
seventeen over the border into Poland, that might be their
best option, maybe their only option. CI ordered his navigator
Ray Potolski, to set a course for Warsaw. Meanwhile, the
crew had to ditch anything that wasn't bolted down.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
They threw out flack suits, extra ammunition, and anything of weight.
He was screaming, get rid of it, Get rid of it.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
By some miracle, the crippled plane made it to Warsaw,
but the city was completely destroyed. There were no airfields
in sight. A small Russian plane spotted the wounded B
seventeen and guided the Americans over some forested fields, losing
altitude by the second, Si saw an opening in the trees,
(19:36):
and he went in for a white knuckle wheels up
belly landing. The B seventeen skidded to a stop in
a muddy field. The bottom of the plane was nearly destroyed,
but no one was hurt. Size men whose lives he
cared about more than his own, were safe for now
at least. The problem was they were now at the
(19:56):
mercy of the Russians. The Russians were allies, but they
were busy planning an invasion, not babysitting Americans. At the
Russian base, Si met another American beasts seventeen pilot who
had also crash landed in the Berlin raid. His name
was George Ruckman. Altogether there were twenty Americans in Soviet
custody in Warsaw, but the Russians were in no rush
(20:19):
to get them home.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
It wasn't like these were the Germans or the Japanese.
But they just wanted to get out of there, and
nobody was letting them get out. I wouldn't call it
a prisoner of war, but they were trapped.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Meanwhile, the US Army had little idea that two bomber
crews had crashed behind German lines in Poland. Even worse,
size family and the families of the rest of the
crew all received telegrams from the Army informing them that
their soldier was listed as missing in action. Weeks went by,
then a month after. Every time Si asked their Russian
(20:54):
handlers when they could leave, he get the same answer
with Moscow says so.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
And it got to the point, after weeks and weeks
of when Moscow said so, that they had to do
something themselves.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Cy and Ruckman hatched a plan. Both of their B
seventeens were unflable, but between the two planes they had
four working engines. Their best hope of getting home was
to Frankenstein together that working parts of each plane and
make their escape.
Speaker 6 (21:22):
So you got to think about this.
Speaker 5 (21:23):
Anybody does any mechanics, You're rebuilding an airplane engine and
airplane parts with whatever tools.
Speaker 6 (21:30):
You have around. You're not in a garage.
Speaker 5 (21:32):
You're not in a hangar, You're basically in a potato field,
doing this all under the watchful guns of the Russians.
Speaker 6 (21:38):
So it's just it's crazier than a movie.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Bribes were exchanged, American watches, whiskey pistols. Enough Russian soldiers
agreed to look the other way that the Americans were
able to secretly piece together a functional B seventeen. CI
would never forget the look on the Russian officers' faces
as the Frankenstein B seventeen, loaded with twenty giddy Americans,
(22:04):
roared down the runway. Asked if the Russians chased after them,
SI joked, they were probably relieved that they didn't have
to feed us. On Saint Patrick's Day nineteen forty five,
six weeks after crash landing in Poland, the two American crews,
piloted by Cy Spiegel and George Ruckman, landed at an
(22:25):
American base in Italy. They were greeted as heroes. The
first thing SI did was send a telegram to his
anxious family, and I'll.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Tell you I wrote down what the telegram said, said,
AM safe and well.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Letters following SI didn't go home right away, though, he
had unfinished business. After recuperating in Italy, he flew back
to England and completed his final missions, because that's what
heroes do. In August nineteen forty five, CI finally sailed
home on the SS Queen Elizabeth. Over the course of
the war, he'd grown from an undersized teenager into a
(23:00):
battle tested man. The post war period was a time
of tremendous opportunity for American gi and their families, but sadly,
Cy was about to find out that those opportunities weren't
available to everyone. Laurie gwyn Shapiro interviewed CI a number
(23:26):
of times at his nice apartment overlooking Central Park. There
was always more to talk about, and Si enjoyed the conversations.
One day, he brought out a small dusty box to
show Laurie. Inside were ribbons and medals from the Army
that he'd received for his war service. Laurie wondered why
they weren't on display.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Yeah, so this is something that I talked to him
at length about the antisemitism that he faced despite a
being a hero, which was quite shocking to me. And
he did thirty six missions and he had multiple awards,
and he wanted me to have the army hear this
that he felt strongly that many Jewish soldiers for denied
(24:07):
a promotion and rank because of anti Semitism at that time.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Historian Kevin Fitzpatrick is a veteran himself, and it's hard
for him to hear how Si was treated. In the
nineteen forties.
Speaker 5 (24:18):
Our American military was a reflection of what American society
was like at the time, so racial discrimination, religious discrimination.
It wasn't similar to what we have in twenty twenty
four at all. But I definitely I believe what Sis saying.
He was denied promotion, who had denied advancements other men
who had less missions in him and did less than
(24:41):
he did. We're getting to advance. He certainly should have gotten.
Speaker 6 (24:45):
More valor and bravery awards than he was awarded.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Like millions of other gis Cy Spiegel was proud of
his service, but also ready to put the war behind
him and get on with his life. Remember Frankie Marie Smith,
SI's young bride in New Mexico. The couple moved to
Texas and tried to make it work. Si even got
a job as a radio announcer at a country West
his DJ name was Muddy Boots. But try as they might,
(25:11):
the spark just wasn't there anymore. Frankie and Ci split up,
but Si wasn't disheartened. He heard that airlines were looking
for pilots. All of his Army Air Corps buddies were
being hired by the commercial airline industry, which was just
taking off, so to speak. So Si moved back to
New York, hoping to finally cash in on his heroic
(25:32):
war record. He was in for a rude awakening.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
New York City was the center of the aviation world.
The big buildings like the PanAm Tower come later, but
you know, like the airlines were all based in midtown Manhattan.
There were jobs, and there were lots of jobs for
everyone except him.
Speaker 6 (25:52):
He's a well trained pilot and he can't get a job.
Speaker 5 (25:56):
And other men that he flew with were getting these nice,
cushy commercial airline jobs in the forties and fifties, and
he was denied because he was a Jew.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
This was a real low point inside life. The country
that he'd served so bravely and selflessly was turning its
back on him. Luckily, Si was still good with his hands,
so he was able to get jobs as a machinist,
he joined a union. In nineteen forty nine, Si attended
a politically progressive summer camp in upstate New York called
(26:25):
Camp Unity. Think of it like that resort in Dirty Dancing,
if it was full of Greenwich village types, poets, jazz musicians,
communist and at least one disgruntled Jewish bomber pilot. It
was at Camp Unity that Si met a young Japanese
American woman named Motoko Ikeda. Like Si, Motoko was struggling
(26:45):
to find her place in postwar America.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
When he met Motoko at Camp Unity, she told him
that she had a family of six that had been
forcibly sent from Los Angeles to in a Chairman camp
in Wyoming. This is someone who had been fighting the
Germans in the Japanese So think about how extraordinary this
conversation might have been. At fourteen, she was kept behind
(27:11):
barbed wire and watched by armed American guards at sentry posts,
and they were ready to shoot her or her family
if she escaped. When Motoko left the intermy camps, I
told me they gave her not a lot of money.
They have her twenty five dollars and a one way
ticket and you could choose where the ticket was two
(27:33):
and she chose New York. She wanted far away from
the West Coast.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Motoko and Side bonded instantly. Maybe it was their shared
war trauma, or their outsider status in their own country.
Whatever it was, they fell in love, got married, and
started a beautiful family together. The fact that they came
from different backgrounds and religions was never an issue. Side
joked that quote, Buttoko was better at making Jewish food
(27:59):
than my mother. She could cook in any language.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Buttko was the love of his life, and he told
me that often.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Now that Si had a wife and young family to support,
he needed to think about his career. Si was working
as a machinist for a dollar eighty an hour at
a brush factory. These weren't hair brushes. They were industrial brushes, wiry,
pointy things for scouring wood or finishing metal. As it happens,
there was a fad in the late nineteen fifties for
(28:26):
something called spray brushes, tinsel like metallic brushes that were
used as holiday decorations in storefront windows like Macy's and
Sacksmith Avenue. The company Si worked for the American Brush
Machinery Company fabricated and sold machines that made spray brushes
for twelve thousand dollars a machine, which was good money.
(28:48):
But just like that, the spray brush fad died out.
What was American Brush supposed to do with those expensive,
useless contraptions. One of the higher ups had the bright
idea of repurposing the spray brush machines to make artificial
Christmas trees. It wasn't too much of a stretch. After all,
a pine tree kind of looks like a bunch of
(29:09):
green plastic brushes glued together, So that's exactly what they did.
The initial results were less than inspiring.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
If you look at the artificial Christmas trees from this era,
they're horrifying. They don't, I mean, they're just really sad.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
American Brush was ready to cut its losses. In fact,
they sent Si Now, a senior machinist, to shut down
the whole Christmas tree operation. But where American Brush saw
a dead end, Si saw an opportunity to change the
Christmas tree game.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
And he had this idea that he could make them
look more realistic. You know, the more realistic they were,
the more people would buy them.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Cy brought in real trees, Scotch pines and Douglas firs
to study their branch spacing and pine needle patterns. He
spent months tweaking the industrial brush machines to new specifications
and finally convinced his boss is to give Christmas trees
a second chance. Now it was all up to sigh
if the artificial Christmas tree sold, SI would be a
(30:15):
hero if they sunk. So at his career, American Brush
spun off a new division called American Tree in Wreath,
and they made Sigh the President. Things got off to
a rough start. Size new plastic trees looked incredibly realistic,
but mid century America wasn't interested. If people were going
to buy a fake tree in the early nineteen sixties,
(30:38):
they wanted one of those funky space age aluminum ones.
Size division lost tens of thousands of dollars a year
as he struggled to find a market for his realistic
fake trees. The turning point came on December sixth, nineteen
sixty four, with the premiere of A little Thing called
a Charlie Brown Christmas.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
The story gets tree a little bit nuts, and I
think that anyone who's gen X like me or younger
will know that Charlie Brown Christmas Special. And if you remember,
if you've seen Charlie Brown Christmas, there's this real appeal
to come back to the meaning of Christmas. And during
this period of time, mid century, there were futuristic aluminum
(31:21):
trees with color wheels were dominating the market. And there's
a line in the Charlie Brown Special which is get
the most enormous aluminum tree you can find, Charlie Brown
and maybe painted pink, and that's Lucy van Pelt. That's
what Lucy told Charlie. And he chose a different kind
(31:42):
of tree. He chose a scraggly tree. And you know,
Americans tuned in and they took heart. They were like,
what is Christmas?
Speaker 3 (31:55):
You know?
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Why do we have this like futuristic aluminum tree representing
what we love? And that's when, if you're following along
with me here, the aluminum tree business took a nose dive. So,
of course, is now an opportunity for sy with his
(32:16):
scheme that he's been trying to push all along, which
is that artificial Christmas trees should look more like Christmas trees.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Whether the end of aluminum trees. Can truly be credited
to Charlie Brown is perhaps debatable, but it's fair to
say it accelerated a dying trend. Another factor was the
fake roots of polyvinyl chloride, which allowed trees to look
like well trees instead of large wire brushes, new technology,
(32:44):
new trends, kids cartoons. It all combines to make Size
Christmas Tree Division explode. After the Charlie Brown Christmas special
sales from Size Christmas Tree Division shot up. American Tree
and Wreath experienced sixty five percent annual growth. Soon they
were producing eight hundred thousand artificial trees a year. SI
(33:06):
and a worker decided to start their own company, Hudson
Valley Tree. With Size, hard work and expertise, they built
the business into a Christmas tree juggernaut. By the nineteen eighties,
SI was being called quote the Henry Ford of artificial
Christmas trees.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
So this is the person that was not allowed to
fly for the American Airlines, a Jewish man from Greenwich
Village who was now the Artificial Christmas tree King of
the United States. So I just said I wasn't Christian,
but even I knew that didn't looked like a Christmas tree.
Think of an artificial Christmas tree today. It's pretty. Sometimes
(33:43):
you have to double check to see if it's real
or if it's not real. That's all Size doing. That
was his vision that he had, that we can make
these trees better.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Sai devoted his life to his Christmas tree business, and
in nineteen ninety two he was finally ready to retire.
Si sold Hudson Valley Tree and walked away a multi millionaire.
It's the American Dream Christmas edition. Ci and Motoko were
married for fifty wonderful years, but Toko passed away on
(34:13):
Valentine's Day two thousand, suddenly alone in his big house
that Christmas trees built. Ci started thinking more about his
time as a bomber pilot in World War Two. He
began attending reunions of the four hundred and ninetieth Bomb
Group Historical Association and found great comfort and camaraderie among
his fellow veterans. By this point, Size Jewishness no longer
(34:35):
made him an outsider. He was embraced as an equal.
Speaker 6 (34:40):
And so for decades he went to the reunions, and
so he knew all these men from the Eighth Air
Force for years and years, and their spouses and then
their children, but then slowly they all started, you know,
passing away, and so he's like the last of the last.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
For him. He was very happy that he was able
to provide for his family. That was certainly not something
that he took lightly, but he said that it was
unequivocal in his mind that the most important part of
his life was serving the American people fighting fascism, fighting Hitler.
(35:17):
And I think also the fact that he was the
last one standing and that he was the person that
had to tell the story with.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Laurie Shapiro, bodinskied her way into size conversation that day
in Central Park. She didn't know she was about to
meet one of the last living World War two bomber
pilots or the artificial Christmas Tree King of America, and
she certainly didn't expect to be making a friend.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
I think what listeners will probably know is that Si
is no longer with us. I mean, that's part of
the story too, that you know he passed away. I
will say that I was able to see him about
a week or two before he passed away. He was
very thin, he was not going to the gym. He
had some health issues that he didn't have before, and
(36:08):
he was still clear of mind, and he just said
thank you, and I said thank you, and it was
a genuine friendship. And I think that that's something that
is also what I hope listeners can take away with
is that don't look at older people as invisible. Look
at them even if they weren't in World War Two,
(36:28):
as long as they're living and of a certain age,
they are history. Sit down and talk to people.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Twenty twenty four will be the first time in almost
twenty years that Christmas and the first night of Hanukkah
fall on the same day. It feels like an appropriate
time to salute the Jewish bomber pilot who changed the
way people celebrate Christmas. This one's for you, SI.
Speaker 4 (36:57):
Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.
This show is hosted by Danish Schwartz, Sarren Burnett, and
Jason English. Today's episode was written by Dave Rouse. Our
producer is Josh Fisher. Editing and sam designed by Jonathan
Washington and Josh Fisher. Fixing and mastering by Beheth Frasier.
(37:18):
Original music by Elise McCoy. Research impact checking by Dave
rus and Austin Thompson. Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla. Our
executive producer is Jason English. If you're looking to do
something nice for us this holiday season, Blenny, head over
to Apple or Spotify, give us a nice rating, click
those stars. You can always reach us at Very Special
(37:41):
Episodes at gmail dot com. We've got two more episodes
coming this month, including a special Monday episode to get
ahead of the Christmas on Wednesday. We'll see you back
here on Monday. Very Special Episodes is a production of
iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Zaron Burnett
Dana Schwartz
Jason English
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.