May 1, 2024 • 16 mins
This week, we present a smattering of stories you might have missed. If you've inhaled all these, email us — veryspecialepisodes@gmail.com — and we'll recommend something else worth your time.
Operation Lunar Eclipse
Apple • Spotify • iHeart
Boat Trip
Apple • Spotify • iHeart
The Pledge
Apple • Spotify • iHeart
Old Man on Campus
Apple • Spotify • iHeart
Seed Wars
Apple • Spotify • iHeart
We're back with a new episode on May 15th!
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Welcome to Very Special Episodes. I'm Jason English. We have
something a little different for you this week, and before
we get into it, I'm gonna add a little disclaimer
at the top. If you are someone who's been on
the Very Special Episodes bandwagon since our very first episode,
if you've tuned in every week, if you've made this
(00:42):
show part of your Wednesday routine, there's not a lot
new for you here in this episode. That's not fair.
So if you fall into that camp, I want you
to email the show. We set up an account just
for this It's Very Special Episodes at gmail dot com.
Episodes with an S. Tell us what kind of podcasts
you like. Tell us which of our episodes you've enjoyed.
(01:07):
We'll recommend something that'll fill the time between now and
our next new episode. And you know what, if you
haven't listened to all the episodes, you want to email
that account to that's cool. Very Special Episodes at gmail
dot com. Now, if you are newer to the show
and you have not exhausted the back catalog, I hope
(01:27):
you hear something in today's episode, which is more of
a clip show that sends you back into the archives.
We'll put all the links in the show notes and
hope you find something new.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
It's December nineteen seventy two. Canadian Jamie Matthews, age fourteen,
is sitting comfortably in his airplane seat. It's his first
trip away from home. Jamie's first love is astronomy, and
astronomy has earned him the trip of a lifetime. He's
(02:07):
been to the White House, to NASA's Mission control in Texas,
to the United Nations, and now he's returning home. But
there's a problem, and no it's not the airline food.
Someone is threatening to kidnap Jamie because he has a rock,
(02:28):
and not just any rock, a moonwalk one retrieved by
an astronaut two hundred and forty thousand miles from Earth.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
This is your captain speaking Jamie Matthews. Please come to
the front of the plane. Jamie Matthews, to the front
of the plane. Two scary men are here to pick
you up. I repeat, two very serious looking men are
here to take you away.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Jamie takes some tentative steps forward. He's just landed in Detroit.
Two adults in dark suits meet him on the tarmac.
Now these men are not the kidnappers. They're from the
United States Secret Service. They explain to Jamie what's happening.
His parents back in Canada received an alarming phone call
(03:21):
threatening his safety all because of this rock. They want
to escort him to the Canadian border, just to be safe.
Because the Moon rock isn't exactly a souvenir, it's one
of the most rare and valuable materials on Earth. It
could be worth millions. To Jamie, it's worth even more.
(03:46):
But what the kidnappers don't know is that Jamie doesn't
have it, not yet anyway, but he will. And the
men who called Jamie's parents, they're not the only ones
who want a piece of the moon.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
All right, sound of that episode? You want to go
listen to the full thing. It's called Operation Lunar Eclipse.
It was our second episode, and again all these lengths
will be in the show notes. Another early episode, this
was in fact our first, was called Boat Trip. We
drop in on the set of James Cameron's Titanic in
(04:27):
the mid nineties, and it's the night someone poisoned the
cast and crew with PCP. It's just one of the
craziest stories I've ever heard.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Everybody quiet off I heard.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
It's the night of August eighth, nineteen ninety six. A
crew in Halifax, Nova, Scotia is working hard on the
last day of filming at this location. After weeks of
working overtime and several grueling night shoots, everyone could use
a break. Around midnight, the crew breaks for a meal.
(05:07):
It's a welcome respite from setting up cameras, positioning lights,
and capturing tedious takes of the same scene. It's a
chance to relax with colleagues and friends, if only briefly.
But here's what the crew doesn't know. Within thirty minutes,
all hell will be unleashed on set. It's an incident
(05:32):
no one could have predicted because it had never happened before,
or since it's the night the crew of James Cameron's
Titanic was drugged. Every on set department was affected that night,
from the grips and electricians to the set decorators and
(05:53):
camera operators, from the assistant directors to the actors, and yes,
even future Oscar winner James Cameron. As the chaos ensued
that night, the mystery of who drugged the crew was ignited.
A multi year police investigation followed, and one question haunted
(06:16):
everyone impacted that fateful evening.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Why did you ever wonder who wrote the pledge of allegiance? No, well,
stick with me anyway. There's one accepted story about the origin,
a very specific story told the same way over many decades.
But in this episode we explore whether that story can
(06:41):
withstand the test of a curious researcher armed withthewspapers dot
com account. I give you the pledge.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
It's October twenty first, eighteen ninety two. Across the United States,
school kids are gathering for a once in a lifetime
celebration the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America.
Of course, Columbus never actually stepped foot on American soil,
(07:12):
and he went to his grave thinking he really landed
in India. But that's a topic for another podcast. Back
to eighteen ninety two. In celebration of this flawed and
historically inaccurate holiday, then President Benjamin Harrison issues a special proclamation.
(07:32):
He calls for America's new system of public schools to
fly the American flag high and proud. As parades of
Civil War veterans file into school yards across the country,
Students prepare to salute the flag. And not just that
they're about to recite a new patriotic oath. They've been
(07:55):
practicing it every day for a month, just for this
special occasion. It's only twenty two words long, but it's
still a mouthful for a bunch of school children for
a name, anyone really.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which
it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Sound familiar. Sure, it's missing a few words and phrases.
Those would come decades later. But that day, October twenty first,
eighteen ninety two, was the public debut of what we
all recognize now as the Pledge of Allegiance. The thing is,
back then, it wasn't called the Capital P Pledge of
(08:43):
Capital A Allegiance. It wasn't a thing yet in eighteen
ninety two, no one had an inkling that this short
patriotic oath, written for a one time event would ever
be uttered again. As we'll see, the story of the
Pledge of Allegiance is a story of a nation at
(09:04):
a crossroads, a nation still here from the collective trauma
of the Civil War, a nation experiencing one of the
largest influxes of immigrants in its history. It was a
time of tremendous anxiety over what it meant to be
an American, and the original Pledge, with its twenty two words,
(09:27):
was supposed to offer an answer. The crazy thing is
more than one hundred and thirty years later, after reciting
the pledge every morning in nearly every classroom in America,
we still have absolutely no idea who wrote it.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Now. We recorded this next one at the Super Bowl
in Las Vegas on Radio Row as part of our
iHeart NFL partnership Great Week. It may no longer be
football season, but Andy Stateon's story is good for all
sports seasons.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
It's twenty twelve and players at Culver Stockton College in Canton, Missouri,
are gearing up for football practice. Canton is a college town,
but not a big one. Nestled near the Mississippi River,
the population is less than three thousand. Their source of
athletic pride is the Culver Stockton Wildcats, but times have
(10:32):
been tough. During the previous season, they went just one
and ten. It wasn't so much sport as human sacrifice,
but there's a sense their fortunes can be turned around,
maybe with some new blood. At practice, a freshman named
Mike Davis looks around and spots an older man, a
(10:55):
very very big man, six foot five and two hundred
and ninety five pounds, and Mike starts to wonder if
maybe this giant has a son who's going to be
playing here, hopefully a kid who has the same oversized proportions.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
And I'm looking around the wave room, you know, just
like who's this guy's got a kit here? Like, whose
kid is this guy's?
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Mike's head coach looks at the guy, then back at Mike.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
And he goes, Oh, no, that's Andy. He's actually gonna
be playing for us. And at that point my mind
blew a little bit and I was like, well, that's
a grown man. I was like, you know, I asked him, like,
how old is he? Always thirty eight?
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Thirty eight is older than the coach, older than the trainers,
older than almost everyone in and around the team. That's
how Mike and every other player learns about Andy Stayton.
Andy is the newest nose tackle for the Wildcats and
a man who's about to get a second lease on
(12:01):
life by returning to a game he walked away from
almost twenty years prior. It's an opportunity to provide a
better life for himself and his kids and close a
chapter on a story he never quite finished. But as
a midlife crisis goes, this one is going to hurt
(12:23):
a lot.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Okay, one more to highlight. Someone one day might ask
you your favorite botany rivalry, and I want you to
have a good answer, So listen to seed Wars.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
In nineteen twenty nine, Joseph Stalin ordered the farmers of
the Soviet Union to start a utopia. Back then, the
USSR was a quilt of old school, frankly almost medieval
farming villages. Peasants lived simply. They grew their own food
(13:03):
and if they felt like it, sold the surplus. Stalin
saw that as a problem. The Soviet Union was industrializing.
People were flocking to cities, and many of them didn't
have garden plots to grow their own food. Meanwhile, the
country's stockpile of grain was shrinking by the day. The
(13:26):
situation was so bad that the USSR was importing wheat
and rye from the United States. As you can imagine,
Stalin hated this, so he cooked up a strategy to
fill every belly in the country with locally grown food.
(13:47):
The plan collectivization. The state would take over farms and
all those old school peasants would begin growing food for
everybody with the stroke of a pen. The government began
gobbling up farmland. It bought new state of the art machinery.
(14:09):
It introduced new breeds of high yield, disease resistant crops.
But there was one problem. Many of the farmers refused
to join the fight.
Speaker 4 (14:22):
There was sort of a systemic depression among farmers. Now
they were working for Stalin, not for themselves.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
That's Gary Paul Naban. He's an agricultural ecologist, conservationist, and
past winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant. He describes Stalin's
push for collectivization this way. Imagine you live on a
farm that's been in your family for generations. You know
the land inside and out.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
They have a pride in taking care of their land.
They have motivations for working hard to produce crops, both
for their own food and for others.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
And now suddenly the government is handing you seeds and
give you quotas, and you can't even keep the spoils.
Farmers didn't take the news well, especially the most powerful peasants,
a class of farmers called the Kulos. They simply ignored
Stalin's demands. When Stalin realized that the Kulaks were resisting,
(15:26):
he didn't respond with a sternly written letter. He responded
by promising, and I quote, to liquidate the Kulos as
a class. Police swooped onto Kulock farms. Around five million
would be arrested, deported sent to prison camps. Untold numbers
(15:50):
were killed. Turns out exterminating your most successful farmers is
a bad idea.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
That's all for today. Again, you want to email the
show for any reason, very special episodes at gmail dot com.
We'll work in ships. We'll try to apply to everyone.
Then your recommendations tease upcoming episodes. We're going to be back.
Our next episode is May fifteenth. It's a good one
that sits at the intersection of Dana's noble blood world
(16:26):
and Zarin's Ridiculous Crime Royal Ridiculous Crime. I'm Jason English.
Thank you for tuning in to our clip show. Hopefully
one of these intrigues you and go check out the
back catalog. Lots of other good stuff in there, and
we'll see you back here. On May fifteenth,
This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Welcome to Very Special Episodes. I'm Jason English. We have
something a little different for you this week, and before
we get into it, I'm gonna add a little disclaimer
at the top. If you are someone who's been on
the Very Special Episodes bandwagon since our very first episode,
if you've tuned in every week, if you've made this
(00:42):
show part of your Wednesday routine, there's not a lot
new for you here in this episode. That's not fair.
So if you fall into that camp, I want you
to email the show. We set up an account just
for this It's Very Special Episodes at gmail dot com.
Episodes with an S. Tell us what kind of podcasts
you like. Tell us which of our episodes you've enjoyed.
(01:07):
We'll recommend something that'll fill the time between now and
our next new episode. And you know what, if you
haven't listened to all the episodes, you want to email
that account to that's cool. Very Special Episodes at gmail
dot com. Now, if you are newer to the show
and you have not exhausted the back catalog, I hope
(01:27):
you hear something in today's episode, which is more of
a clip show that sends you back into the archives.
We'll put all the links in the show notes and
hope you find something new.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
It's December nineteen seventy two. Canadian Jamie Matthews, age fourteen,
is sitting comfortably in his airplane seat. It's his first
trip away from home. Jamie's first love is astronomy, and
astronomy has earned him the trip of a lifetime. He's
(02:07):
been to the White House, to NASA's Mission control in Texas,
to the United Nations, and now he's returning home. But
there's a problem, and no it's not the airline food.
Someone is threatening to kidnap Jamie because he has a rock,
(02:28):
and not just any rock, a moonwalk one retrieved by
an astronaut two hundred and forty thousand miles from Earth.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
This is your captain speaking Jamie Matthews. Please come to
the front of the plane. Jamie Matthews, to the front
of the plane. Two scary men are here to pick
you up. I repeat, two very serious looking men are
here to take you away.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Jamie takes some tentative steps forward. He's just landed in Detroit.
Two adults in dark suits meet him on the tarmac.
Now these men are not the kidnappers. They're from the
United States Secret Service. They explain to Jamie what's happening.
His parents back in Canada received an alarming phone call
(03:21):
threatening his safety all because of this rock. They want
to escort him to the Canadian border, just to be safe.
Because the Moon rock isn't exactly a souvenir, it's one
of the most rare and valuable materials on Earth. It
could be worth millions. To Jamie, it's worth even more.
(03:46):
But what the kidnappers don't know is that Jamie doesn't
have it, not yet anyway, but he will. And the
men who called Jamie's parents, they're not the only ones
who want a piece of the moon.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
All right, sound of that episode? You want to go
listen to the full thing. It's called Operation Lunar Eclipse.
It was our second episode, and again all these lengths
will be in the show notes. Another early episode, this
was in fact our first, was called Boat Trip. We
drop in on the set of James Cameron's Titanic in
(04:27):
the mid nineties, and it's the night someone poisoned the
cast and crew with PCP. It's just one of the
craziest stories I've ever heard.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Everybody quiet off I heard.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
It's the night of August eighth, nineteen ninety six. A
crew in Halifax, Nova, Scotia is working hard on the
last day of filming at this location. After weeks of
working overtime and several grueling night shoots, everyone could use
a break. Around midnight, the crew breaks for a meal.
(05:07):
It's a welcome respite from setting up cameras, positioning lights,
and capturing tedious takes of the same scene. It's a
chance to relax with colleagues and friends, if only briefly.
But here's what the crew doesn't know. Within thirty minutes,
all hell will be unleashed on set. It's an incident
(05:32):
no one could have predicted because it had never happened before,
or since it's the night the crew of James Cameron's
Titanic was drugged. Every on set department was affected that night,
from the grips and electricians to the set decorators and
(05:53):
camera operators, from the assistant directors to the actors, and yes,
even future Oscar winner James Cameron. As the chaos ensued
that night, the mystery of who drugged the crew was ignited.
A multi year police investigation followed, and one question haunted
(06:16):
everyone impacted that fateful evening.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Why did you ever wonder who wrote the pledge of allegiance? No, well,
stick with me anyway. There's one accepted story about the origin,
a very specific story told the same way over many decades.
But in this episode we explore whether that story can
(06:41):
withstand the test of a curious researcher armed withthewspapers dot
com account. I give you the pledge.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
It's October twenty first, eighteen ninety two. Across the United States,
school kids are gathering for a once in a lifetime
celebration the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America.
Of course, Columbus never actually stepped foot on American soil,
(07:12):
and he went to his grave thinking he really landed
in India. But that's a topic for another podcast. Back
to eighteen ninety two. In celebration of this flawed and
historically inaccurate holiday, then President Benjamin Harrison issues a special proclamation.
(07:32):
He calls for America's new system of public schools to
fly the American flag high and proud. As parades of
Civil War veterans file into school yards across the country,
Students prepare to salute the flag. And not just that
they're about to recite a new patriotic oath. They've been
(07:55):
practicing it every day for a month, just for this
special occasion. It's only twenty two words long, but it's
still a mouthful for a bunch of school children for
a name, anyone really.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which
it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Sound familiar. Sure, it's missing a few words and phrases.
Those would come decades later. But that day, October twenty first,
eighteen ninety two, was the public debut of what we
all recognize now as the Pledge of Allegiance. The thing is,
back then, it wasn't called the Capital P Pledge of
(08:43):
Capital A Allegiance. It wasn't a thing yet in eighteen
ninety two, no one had an inkling that this short
patriotic oath, written for a one time event would ever
be uttered again. As we'll see, the story of the
Pledge of Allegiance is a story of a nation at
(09:04):
a crossroads, a nation still here from the collective trauma
of the Civil War, a nation experiencing one of the
largest influxes of immigrants in its history. It was a
time of tremendous anxiety over what it meant to be
an American, and the original Pledge, with its twenty two words,
(09:27):
was supposed to offer an answer. The crazy thing is
more than one hundred and thirty years later, after reciting
the pledge every morning in nearly every classroom in America,
we still have absolutely no idea who wrote it.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Now. We recorded this next one at the Super Bowl
in Las Vegas on Radio Row as part of our
iHeart NFL partnership Great Week. It may no longer be
football season, but Andy Stateon's story is good for all
sports seasons.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
It's twenty twelve and players at Culver Stockton College in Canton, Missouri,
are gearing up for football practice. Canton is a college town,
but not a big one. Nestled near the Mississippi River,
the population is less than three thousand. Their source of
athletic pride is the Culver Stockton Wildcats, but times have
(10:32):
been tough. During the previous season, they went just one
and ten. It wasn't so much sport as human sacrifice,
but there's a sense their fortunes can be turned around,
maybe with some new blood. At practice, a freshman named
Mike Davis looks around and spots an older man, a
(10:55):
very very big man, six foot five and two hundred
and ninety five pounds, and Mike starts to wonder if
maybe this giant has a son who's going to be
playing here, hopefully a kid who has the same oversized proportions.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
And I'm looking around the wave room, you know, just
like who's this guy's got a kit here? Like, whose
kid is this guy's?
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Mike's head coach looks at the guy, then back at Mike.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
And he goes, Oh, no, that's Andy. He's actually gonna
be playing for us. And at that point my mind
blew a little bit and I was like, well, that's
a grown man. I was like, you know, I asked him, like,
how old is he? Always thirty eight?
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Thirty eight is older than the coach, older than the trainers,
older than almost everyone in and around the team. That's
how Mike and every other player learns about Andy Stayton.
Andy is the newest nose tackle for the Wildcats and
a man who's about to get a second lease on
(12:01):
life by returning to a game he walked away from
almost twenty years prior. It's an opportunity to provide a
better life for himself and his kids and close a
chapter on a story he never quite finished. But as
a midlife crisis goes, this one is going to hurt
(12:23):
a lot.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Okay, one more to highlight. Someone one day might ask
you your favorite botany rivalry, and I want you to
have a good answer, So listen to seed Wars.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
In nineteen twenty nine, Joseph Stalin ordered the farmers of
the Soviet Union to start a utopia. Back then, the
USSR was a quilt of old school, frankly almost medieval
farming villages. Peasants lived simply. They grew their own food
(13:03):
and if they felt like it, sold the surplus. Stalin
saw that as a problem. The Soviet Union was industrializing.
People were flocking to cities, and many of them didn't
have garden plots to grow their own food. Meanwhile, the
country's stockpile of grain was shrinking by the day. The
(13:26):
situation was so bad that the USSR was importing wheat
and rye from the United States. As you can imagine,
Stalin hated this, so he cooked up a strategy to
fill every belly in the country with locally grown food.
(13:47):
The plan collectivization. The state would take over farms and
all those old school peasants would begin growing food for
everybody with the stroke of a pen. The government began
gobbling up farmland. It bought new state of the art machinery.
(14:09):
It introduced new breeds of high yield, disease resistant crops.
But there was one problem. Many of the farmers refused
to join the fight.
Speaker 4 (14:22):
There was sort of a systemic depression among farmers. Now
they were working for Stalin, not for themselves.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
That's Gary Paul Naban. He's an agricultural ecologist, conservationist, and
past winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant. He describes Stalin's
push for collectivization this way. Imagine you live on a
farm that's been in your family for generations. You know
the land inside and out.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
They have a pride in taking care of their land.
They have motivations for working hard to produce crops, both
for their own food and for others.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
And now suddenly the government is handing you seeds and
give you quotas, and you can't even keep the spoils.
Farmers didn't take the news well, especially the most powerful peasants,
a class of farmers called the Kulos. They simply ignored
Stalin's demands. When Stalin realized that the Kulaks were resisting,
(15:26):
he didn't respond with a sternly written letter. He responded
by promising, and I quote, to liquidate the Kulos as
a class. Police swooped onto Kulock farms. Around five million
would be arrested, deported sent to prison camps. Untold numbers
(15:50):
were killed. Turns out exterminating your most successful farmers is
a bad idea.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
That's all for today. Again, you want to email the
show for any reason, very special episodes at gmail dot com.
We'll work in ships. We'll try to apply to everyone.
Then your recommendations tease upcoming episodes. We're going to be back.
Our next episode is May fifteenth. It's a good one
that sits at the intersection of Dana's noble blood world
(16:26):
and Zarin's Ridiculous Crime Royal Ridiculous Crime. I'm Jason English.
Thank you for tuning in to our clip show. Hopefully
one of these intrigues you and go check out the
back catalog. Lots of other good stuff in there, and
we'll see you back here. On May fifteenth,
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