Minisode: Reverse Q&A

In this minisode, Molly highlights a couple of listener answers to questions raised on the show. Most importantly, we finally find out what Dan Burros was watching on TV on November 10, 1962.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello Molly, here with a little minisode.
It's the end of the year and that's got me
thinking about trying to wrap up loose ends. Earlier this month,

(00:22):
I answered some of your questions, but I left out
something important. Sometimes you guys answer my questions. I get
so many fascinating little tidbits from you all, and I'm
not lying when I say I really do read all
of your emails. I read all of them, and I

(00:43):
appreciate every person of Greek ancestry who wrote in with
their own family stories about the nickname Yanaki, which is
just Greek for little Johnny. And I was very intrigued
to find out that Brian Serralt pronouncing his name Seralt
and not soah. Maybe more than just the American tradition
of mispronouncing anything foreign, because there is a particular linguistic

(01:08):
tendency to intentionally bastardize the pronunciation of anything French in
certain parts of New England because of local animosity towards Quebec.
And several of you wrote in to tell me that
Frank Smith setting his lawn on fire is apparently not
that weird, and burning dormant grass in the winter isn't
uncommon in rural areas. I mean, forgetting there was dynamite

(01:30):
hidden in the haybales. This is definitely not standard procedure,
but the fact that he intentionally set his yard on
fire wouldn't have been confusing to the fire department. And
I didn't know that. You guys all know so much,
and I love learning new things from you too, so
thank you to everyone who has written to share their

(01:52):
knowledge with me. I think I'll start keeping notes on
the fun facts I get so I don't have to
just rely on my memory, and maybe i'll add in
a row recurring segment or a quarterly round up of
the loose ends you guys have tied up for me.
Off the top of my head, though there are a
couple I wanted to tell you about. I'll keep your
names off the air because I forgot to ask you

(02:14):
how you felt about that, and I put this off
too long to have time to write you and ask you.
But I recently got an email from a court reporter
who had some information for me about what happens in
the transcript when someone misspeaks. In the October twenty eighth
minisoded about how often people accidentally mix up Norman Rockwell,

(02:34):
the artist and George Lincoln Rockwell, the Nazi. I told
you about the time I heard a lawyer make that
mistake in court. It was a memorable moment. I mean,
it wasn't consequential to the case, but I remember it
so clearly because I burst out laughing and was briefly
a little bit grateful for the global pandemic, because that's

(02:57):
why I was listening to the trial on my headphones
at home and not in the court room, where that
kind of outburst would have gotten me in trouble. But
when I went back to look at the transcript while
I was writing about it, it wasn't there. I mean,
I couldn't believe it. I thought transcripts were these infallible
records of everything that was said in the courtroom. Now

(03:19):
this might earn me more emails from court reporters, because
I'm sure court rules and local bets practices vary. But
the court reporter who wrote in said that where they work,
the rule is that you don't put into the transcript
words that were spoken by mistake if they are immediately
verbally corrected. So the transcript wouldn't say George Norman Rockwell.

(03:42):
I'm sorry, George Lincoln Rockwell, it would just admit the
mistake entirely. And if you're just reading the transcript, all
you would see are the words that they meant to say.
That makes sense, but it has been a tremendously unsettling
realization for me. And now I'm never going to stop
wondering what tiny little pieces are missing from the transcripts

(04:06):
I read. It sounds so minor, right, it sounds totally meaningless.
But when a case is appealed, there's not usually an
audio recording. The appellate case is just a transcript, so
there's no true, faithful record of what the jury heard

(04:27):
in the courtroom. There is no objective truth or reality
when you're looking at the past. I don't know. It
really shook me. And now this is just a mini
so I'll just tell you one more. One of you
emailed me to tell me what Dan Burrows was watching

(04:49):
on TV on Saturday, November tenth, nineteen sixty two. This
was from the first episode about John Patler, The Death
of a Demagogue, Part one from September e eighteenth of
this year, and toward the end of that episode, I
was talking about the few months John Patler spent in
New York City in late nineteen sixty two early nineteen
sixty three, during one of his spats with George Lincoln Rockwell.

(05:13):
Remember before he ultimately murdered Rockwell in sixty seven. Pler
had a few rough spots in his friendship with Rockwell,
and in nineteen sixty two he had packed up and
moved to New York City with another member of the
American Nazi Party who was so mad at Rockwell that
he also quit, was a guy named Dan Burrows, and
they set up their own rival Nazi group, but never

(05:35):
really had very many members and it was struggling to
really even be a group at all, and this failure
was starting to put a strain on their friendship. And
the real nail in the coffin came on November tenth,
nineteen sixty two. John Patler was arrested that day for
putting on a one man protest outside Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral,

(05:57):
and Dan Burrows had refused to go with him day.
In a biography of Burroughs, it just said he stayed
home to watch sports on TV. I wanted to know
what game it was. The book didn't even say which sport.
I spent like an hour or two on this, which
is kind of embarrassing because it doesn't matter. I don't

(06:20):
know anything about sports today, let alone about sports in
the sixties. So I gave up the day the episode
came out, I think honestly, in the middle of the night.
Within hours a bit appearing on the podcast apps, I
got a text from my dear friend Gode. Now, if
you don't know God, you should check out his coverage

(06:40):
of Virginia state politics on Twitter, Blue Sky, and TikTok
at God Gatsby in case you didn't know. Maybe it's
tacky to plug my friend's stuff in the middle of
a story, but he's the only person in the world
who has both picked me up from jail and been
picked up from jail by me, and that's a special
kind of friend. But God texted me to answer my

(07:03):
first question. No, there weren't reruns of sports games on
TV in nineteen sixty two like there are today, So
whatever Dan Burrows was watching, it was a game that
would have been played that day. And God told me
that the only televised sport on a Saturday in November
of nineteen sixty two would have been college football, so

(07:26):
that definitely narrows it down, and I felt satisfied. But
then recently one of you took this over the finish line.
There were several college football games on November tenth, nineteen
sixty two, but CBS aired the Purdue at Michigan State game,
which Perdue won seventeen to nine. Now doesn't that matter, No,

(07:50):
not at all, but I feel so much better knowing it,
and maybe it does kind of drive home the point
that Dan Burroughs was completely checked out of whatever he
and John Patler were doing. There's no way he cared
about either of those teams. He didn't even go to college,
and he was from the Bronx. He never spent any

(08:12):
time in Indiana or Michigan, but that football game was
still more interesting to him than getting arrested with John
Patler and Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral. So now we know, and
I realized now that I was going about it all wrong.
I was trying to find old TV schedules and newspaper

(08:32):
archives instead of seeking out the online archives of sports
fanatics researches its own skill. Subject matter expertise can only
take you so far. You have to know how to
find what you don't know, so I am grateful to
all of you who write in to help me fill

(08:52):
in those gaps. Weird Little Guys is a prorection of
Poolzo Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by me,

(09:14):
Molly conger Our e secontive producers are Sophie Lichterman and
Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented
Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard.
You can email me at Weird Blue Guys Podcast at
gmail dot com. I will definitely read it. I probably
won't answer it, but I might talk about it on
the show. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show
with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just

(09:35):
don't post anything that's gonna make it of my Weird
Little Guys