April 29, 2025 • 16 mins
What would you do if you stumbled upon a piece of history worth $75,000? Join Bama Brown and his co-hostst, the Big Puma, as they dive into fascinating stories of historical discoveries and personal anecdotes that will leave you in awe. Together, they explore a range of topics from the depths of WWII to the hidden gems of Civil War memorabilia.
Tune in now to uncover the hidden histories that shape our world.
- WWII Dive Discoveries: Bama shares an incredible story about divers exploring the wreck of the USS Yorktown, revealing a 1941 Ford Woody believed to be the Admiral's car.
- Personal WWII Connections: Big Puma recounts his childhood memories of hearing war stories from veterans, including a claustrophobic gunner on a bomber and a tail gunner who survived a fall without a parachute.
- Civil War Memorabilia: Bama narrates the tale of a rare Civil War sniper jacket found at an estate sale, worth a staggering $75,000, and the intriguing story of Eli Whitney's cotton gin prototype.
- Historical Figures: The episode touches on notable figures like a Spitfire pilot with artificial limbs and a PT-109 crew member who survived with JFK.
Tune in now to uncover the hidden histories that shape our world.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hey, folks man around here in the Man Around Experience,
I Hard podcast network along with the Big Puma Big Cat.
He has a sports team out of San Antonio and
talking baseball, talking sports. He actually played college basketball, so
he didn't just talk it.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
He walks it. What is it you talk to talk?
You walk the walk and you something like that.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Yeah, although I think the walk I had in college
basketball was more like a couple of steps down the
trail and not a full hike.
Speaker 4 (00:32):
But hey, I'll still take it. I'll still take it.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
You wore the uniform and you shot at the You
shot at the basketball goal side. As far as I'm concerned,
that's that's you might as well have been in the
final four as far.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
As exactly Yeah, it was exactly the same McMurray compared
to the final four we had here in San Antonio
last month. But no, any if you need your sports
fix anywhere you get your podcast, just search for the
sports Cave with the Biggest Puma.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Of course you can get a die hard on any
of them. But we appreciate you'all listening to the Bam
Around Experience. Thousands of you are. We're as shocked as
anybody I got several managers who are like, are.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
You sure you sure Bama's shows full of man okay,
but asking me to double check the numbers. Yeah, something's
not right.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
I saw some awesome, awesome picture too from the Yorktown.
They some guys were diving on the Yorktown with some equipment.
They're not down three miles down there in midway. If
you don't know anything in the story about the Yorktown,
it was it was we sunk I think what four
of their carriers or three of their carriers, and they
sunk one of ours. But it was a huge turning
(01:39):
point in World War two with Japan. It's when it
stopped the expansion and turned them around because they lost three.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Of their damn carriers.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
But they were had the equipment down on the Yorktown
and taking pictures. And there was a forty one Woody
that they think was the Admiral's car are and it
was in inside the hangar and it was they could
kind of you know, it rot it, of course, but
they could tell that that's what it was with forty
one and Ford Woody that they were. You know, they'd
(02:10):
still some planes down around there, you know, and the
water has really because so deep it's kept them pretty
good shape. But the cost of you know, they still
find those planes and they raise them up. A guy
I knew with the commember therefore, he was talking about
the ones in Indo, China.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
That still have the pilots in them.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
They're hanging in the trees and the zeros raining trees
in the and the skeletons of them are still there
and you can't get in there and get them because
they want so much money. You know, the government's like, hey,
you want to come in here, man, you got to pay,
you know. So there's those planes on little islands all
over over in still to this day, and is.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
It I mean, I know, when you think about that
and actually try to think about what that was like,
it feels like that was three lifetimes ago. It was
still I mean, that's eighty years, you know, less than
less than one hundred years ago. But we I mean,
it's just so hard I think to imagine wrapping your
(03:10):
head around the entire world at war like that when
now we're so interconnected. I mean, now we're fighting over
trade and economics instead of territory and boundaries or whatnot.
It's just sometimes, you know, sometimes when I go too
far down a history YouTube wormhole, I just start to
kind of it starts to seep into my mind, like
(03:31):
this really wasn't that long ago.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
Oh that's a scheme of our timeline.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
The war had only been over fourteen years when I
was born. You know, I'm born in fifty eight forty five,
so I mean, you.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Think about it. I knew a lot of World War
Two guys. A lot of.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Kids I went to school with their granddads were, you know,
and both both uncles won.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
You're one in over in And it was funny.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
My uncle Jack was he was at Guadalcanal and all that,
and somebody was taking some books in the libraries of
World War two history books and they stopped by to
say hi to him, and then and they were showing
him the book and he started thumbing through it and
he found his picture on a page. They were lined
up to eat, and they were in Guadalcanal, and he.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
Was like, and he goes, oh, I know this guy.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
The guy he started I recognized these and you know,
he was an older guy, and he started recognizing these kids.
And sure enough, there he was in line, you know,
waiting to waiting to eat just just crazy, you know.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
That growing up, you know, in my small town, I
didn't realize until I was much older. How you know,
at our church, one of the older elders, one of
the deacons, was a guy that had he was one
of the gunners on the bottom side of the of
the bombers.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Oh that's kind to be scary.
Speaker 4 (04:48):
Man, right exactly.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
And he was and he was so open and he
wasn't you know, really he was willing to talk about
a lot of it. And so as a kid, it
you know, hearing him tell the stories. I was only
maybe six, seven, eight years old. And then by the
time I was in high school and actually learning the
the you know, day by day, month by month history
(05:12):
of what he actually went through, that was when it
all kind of started connecting in my head, like, oh,
my god, Like that guy has seen life. That guy
has seen a part of life that I will never
come close to experiencing.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Yeah, there's always interesting.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
There was a guy was in the tail of ABE
seventeen and got shot out of it. It like blew
it apart, and he fell out of the back without
his parachute because were you crawled back there for the
tailgun there's no room for parachute. Well, and he fell
and fell into a snowbank, broke a few limbs, but
the Germans sent him home.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
They didn't. They said, you know it.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
He made he survived, that he must we get to
go home. There was there's a great story about a
guy named Vader who flew a spitfire and he had
actually he had had both legs from the knee down amputated.
But they needed every pilot they could get, so he
flew a spitfire with artificial limbs on his on his legs,
and he was pretty good.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
He was a pretty famous pilot.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
I mean he shot down and he got shot down,
and they put him in a pow camp.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
But he didn't he lost his legs. And it's not
a joke, it's totally true.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
And they convinced the Red Cross to fly over the
pow camp and drop him two legs because it was taken.
Everybody was having to move him around the guard or
having to deal with him because you know, he had
to be carried everywhere. If we could drop two legs in,
let this plane fly over drop him in, then he
can have some legs.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
And he they did. He got his legs and he escaped.
He used his legs.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
What a patriot, baby, hear it.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
The only other story I thought it was really interesting
was where my granddad, my grandmother lived in Alabama.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
I spent a lot of time on there on their
farm with him.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
And there was a guy, an old guy lived across
the street and down but he was it was out,
you know, had a farm, so really their closest neighbor.
And he passed away and my mother went to Uh.
Nobody knew this, but my mother went over to help,
and she knew him kind of as she grew up there,
and she helped, uh. And when he passed away, she
helped her kind of go through and get all their stuff,
(07:22):
and he there was an invitation to the White House
for Kennedy's inauguration.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
He was on pt.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
One on nine with Kennedy and was did the whole
you know, swam to the island and the whole ill
I mean, and they had no idea, you know. And
when I was a little kid, they brought Kennedy's rocking
chair and the coconut.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
You remember that. He If you don't know the story.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
He was on an island, him and his guys, they
got hit by a destroyer and broke their pete boat
and half.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
They swam to an island.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Kennedy took uh it, took a coconut, scrabbled a message
in it, and gave it to a native and that's
how they got rescued. And so I got to see
the coconut as a little kid, and I to see
the rock and chair and all. This was shortly after
he was assassinated, but it was, uh, yeah, that's the
kind of that's real history there that I that I
remember even as a little kid.
Speaker 4 (08:09):
You know. Yeah, that's where those are the you know,
those are.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
The stories that are starting to slowly uh leave us
as that generation, you know, as they are no longer
with us to tell those stories or share it. But
I guess in that sense though, all of the stuff
that they're leaving behind is now being found by family members,
right yeah, people that are buying it, you know, in
(08:35):
a state cells and it turns out to be something
that's deeply connected to our history as a country.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
It was a guy and I saw this on I
don't remember where I saw it, but this guy collected
Civil War memorabilia.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
He was a Civil War guy.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
And there was one they had a if you were
a Union sniper, you there was an elite squad that
had a green shirt with green.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Lighter green piping. I mean, it was like a special shirt.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
That you got, you earned when you became a sniper
with this Union Army, with the Union Sniper Crew. And
he said, there was probably the most rarest thing in
Civil War member, but you just would never find one.
And he was in California, I think, and so he
saw the state sale. He goes to the estate sell
and it was literally six blocks from his house. I mean,
(09:27):
this is how the story is crazy. So he goes
in there and they got, you know, all this stuff.
They're having a little auction, and he said, there's a
box there with a World War two uniform and then
a World War One uniform. And he said, he flipped
up the World War One uniform and there was one
of these jackets. I mean, he knew instantly. The one
person in the world that would know what this was,
(09:49):
he knew what it was. So he set it down
and he goes and he sits down and they start bidding. Well,
this other guy and him are bidding against it. He
gets two hundred dollars, and he said, I go this
guy and go, what do you what are you trying
to get? The guy goes, I'm a World War two guy.
I do World War two stuff. He said, well, I'll
tell you what. Let's going together. Let's give him the
(10:09):
two hundred bucks. I'll do one hundred. You do one hundred.
You take the World War two and World War One.
I'll take the green jacket. And the guy said, yeah,
that's cool. You know, because the guy had no idea
the jacket at that time, that story has got to
be twenty years old. At that time, that jacket was
worth seventy five grand.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
And that's what I was about to say. I think
that guy might have gotten the short end.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Yeah, he got a short end of the view.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
But he had a mannequin and they showed it was
a beautiful jacket. I really it really was as an overcoat,
I guess I'm calling a jacket. But it was dark
green with light green piping. You can google it look
at it, but it was. He had it on a
mannequt lotter.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Really cool.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
But it was he had all this Civil War stuff,
you know, and it was it was pretty pretty, pretty
neat I've seen a lot of stuff like that. Well,
I had a friend, you know, the Lamb's Goodyear Lamb's
Goodyear stores. Mister Lamb John Lemna was a friend of
mine and he collected Civil War memorabilia and he had Alex.
(11:07):
My daughter was studying the Civil War, her class was,
and so I called him and I said, hey, could
I borrow a sword to take to show the kids?
Speaker 2 (11:17):
And he said yeah. Man.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
He said, well when is it? And I said, well,
they're doing it, you know, Wednesday or whatever. So he said, well,
let me, I'll bring a few with me. And he
showed up at the school and he had he laid out,
they set up tables.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
He had guns.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
He had a drum that had been in five different wars,
the Revolutionary War, I mean, were the same regiment. He
had all these guns that had a huge amount of
Confederate guns which are really hard to find. And he
had all this stuff and he talked to the kids,
you know, my daughter's class, and explained the differences and
what they went through, and he was fascinating. At the
(11:52):
principal was like, oh my god, man. And so she
went and got all the other classes, you know, So
they had turned into a big you know, like a
lot of forum got.
Speaker 4 (12:00):
A like now museum day.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Yeah, she goes, she said, I had no idea. I said,
WELLHY didn't either. He's going to do all that.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
So then he calls me about you know, once again,
this goes back twenty twenty five years. So he calls
me because I was doing the ads for Lambs back then,
you know, for the for the Goodyear.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
He calls me and he says, hey, come over, I
got something in my office. I want to show you.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
And he was at one They were one eighty three
and uh in six twenty and then so I go
in there and I go up the stairs in his
office and there's this big wooden thing sitting there. It's
like a big wooden table box looking deal. And I said,
what is that? And he said, that's Eli Whitney's cotton gin.
And I said what he said? He goes, that's the
actual Eli Whitney cotton gin, the prototype. He said, I
(12:45):
went to an auction in Atlanta, and this is what's
really a coincidence. He said, I went to a museum
auction in Atlanta and this was in it. And I said,
when I was six or seven, years old. I went
to that museum and I saw this thing. So here
it is now. You know, I'm sixty seven years old,
so back then i've been probably fifty, you know, maybe
(13:07):
forty eight something like that. And there I was seeing
this thing I'd seen as a little kid. I also
remember they had a Japanese zero they had outside that
they had captured at the museum in Atlanta. But anyway,
the museum went out of business and they were selling
everything off.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
And he said, I'm standing there.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
There's Eli Whitney's cotton gin and he said, I'm buying
the Southern Confederate stuff. And he said, I meet this
man who's center here by me, and he said, well,
you know, he was from England. And he goes, well,
what are you doing here? And he said, I'm here
to buy Eli Whitney's cotting gen. Eli Whitney was English,
and we feel like that's an English invention, and he goes, really,
so he said, I got thinking about it.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
I got pissed off. That's an American invention. And he
said I got.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Into a bidding war with this asshole from England and
he said he I said, well, he goes. I ended
up spending two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to buy.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
On Eli went in. I mean it was all it was.
They had pictures and it was fully documented. It was
a real deal.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Uh. He had it in the Smithsonian for a while,
and then it was in the gerald Ford Museum for
a while. They asked us put it in there, and
then he got it back and I haven't talked to
him in years, so I don't know what happened to it,
but it's in a museum, I'm assuming.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
But it was crazy.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
Yeah, we talked about this before of you know, what
would you what would you actually if you got like
giant fu money, totally rich overnight, what would you actually buy?
And I think on record, I think the first thing
I said was a sports team. Yeah, yeah, it's the thing, Like,
I would love to be so rich that I could
(14:39):
just buy a piece of history like that that then
I would loan out to museums because that would be
awesome to know. I mean, you're buying it for everybody else. Basically,
you're buying it to end up putting it in the Smithsonian.
To have to have something that you technically own be
on display in the Smithsonian and then it'd be something
(15:01):
as uh, you know, historically important as the cotton gin.
Speaker 4 (15:05):
I mean that just seemed that that's a that's a
level of wealth. I can't wrap my head around.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Well, he said that kaya was only that guy was
limited to however much he screwed up and told him
how much it was, you know, that he was allowed
to spend because it was government money, you know, it
was British money.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
He would spend his own money, you know. Uh.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
But I guess the tire business had been good to
John and he ended up there was when I was
a kid.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
Brits will claim anything as British too, by the way.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
I mean, they feel like that, you know.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
Yeah, it was according to them.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
It was all theirs for it was ours, and then
we took it away from him. So that's the way
most everything's done.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
The when I was a kid, we were in Athens, Georgia.
We lived in Athens for a year and it was
a junk yard not too far from our house. You know,
we were poor, but there.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Was we would climb the fence.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
There was an army tank, an old army tank in
the in the junkyard, and we'd go in there and
play in it, you know, and it's in the Smithsonian now.
It was one of three World War One tanks that
had survived one. How I got in Athens, Georgie, I
don't know, but it ended up in the Smithsonian. And
I remember when they came and got it, you know,
and my mom said, they said, was some kids have
(16:18):
been playing. It was in the newspaper. The kids were
playing on it. So we're having to fit you know,
fix the fence and all that. Do we get it
out of here.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
And I was like, hey, that's us.
Speaker 4 (16:26):
I made the paper. Mom.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
I started, you know, we're not tearing up your tank,
you know, as it were kids and oh it's a tank.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (16:34):
Like what's a group of ten year olds going to
do to a tank?
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah exactly. But that was pretty That was You can
google that as well. Google the the Army tank in
the Smithsonian.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
That was a pretty neat deal.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Well that's a lot of memory down. I wrote a
lot of war stuff, but this is all fun. Thank
you for listening to the Bama Brown Experience on the
iHeart podcast Network.
Hey, folks man around here in the Man Around Experience,
I Hard podcast network along with the Big Puma Big Cat.
He has a sports team out of San Antonio and
talking baseball, talking sports. He actually played college basketball, so
he didn't just talk it.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
He walks it. What is it you talk to talk?
You walk the walk and you something like that.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Yeah, although I think the walk I had in college
basketball was more like a couple of steps down the
trail and not a full hike.
Speaker 4 (00:32):
But hey, I'll still take it. I'll still take it.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
You wore the uniform and you shot at the You
shot at the basketball goal side. As far as I'm concerned,
that's that's you might as well have been in the
final four as far.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
As exactly Yeah, it was exactly the same McMurray compared
to the final four we had here in San Antonio
last month. But no, any if you need your sports
fix anywhere you get your podcast, just search for the
sports Cave with the Biggest Puma.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Of course you can get a die hard on any
of them. But we appreciate you'all listening to the Bam
Around Experience. Thousands of you are. We're as shocked as
anybody I got several managers who are like, are.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
You sure you sure Bama's shows full of man okay,
but asking me to double check the numbers. Yeah, something's
not right.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
I saw some awesome, awesome picture too from the Yorktown.
They some guys were diving on the Yorktown with some equipment.
They're not down three miles down there in midway. If
you don't know anything in the story about the Yorktown,
it was it was we sunk I think what four
of their carriers or three of their carriers, and they
sunk one of ours. But it was a huge turning
(01:39):
point in World War two with Japan. It's when it
stopped the expansion and turned them around because they lost three.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Of their damn carriers.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
But they were had the equipment down on the Yorktown
and taking pictures. And there was a forty one Woody
that they think was the Admiral's car are and it
was in inside the hangar and it was they could
kind of you know, it rot it, of course, but
they could tell that that's what it was with forty
one and Ford Woody that they were. You know, they'd
(02:10):
still some planes down around there, you know, and the
water has really because so deep it's kept them pretty
good shape. But the cost of you know, they still
find those planes and they raise them up. A guy
I knew with the commember therefore, he was talking about
the ones in Indo, China.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
That still have the pilots in them.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
They're hanging in the trees and the zeros raining trees
in the and the skeletons of them are still there
and you can't get in there and get them because
they want so much money. You know, the government's like, hey,
you want to come in here, man, you got to pay,
you know. So there's those planes on little islands all
over over in still to this day, and is.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
It I mean, I know, when you think about that
and actually try to think about what that was like,
it feels like that was three lifetimes ago. It was
still I mean, that's eighty years, you know, less than
less than one hundred years ago. But we I mean,
it's just so hard I think to imagine wrapping your
(03:10):
head around the entire world at war like that when
now we're so interconnected. I mean, now we're fighting over
trade and economics instead of territory and boundaries or whatnot.
It's just sometimes, you know, sometimes when I go too
far down a history YouTube wormhole, I just start to
kind of it starts to seep into my mind, like
(03:31):
this really wasn't that long ago.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
Oh that's a scheme of our timeline.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
The war had only been over fourteen years when I
was born. You know, I'm born in fifty eight forty five,
so I mean, you.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Think about it. I knew a lot of World War
Two guys. A lot of.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Kids I went to school with their granddads were, you know,
and both both uncles won.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
You're one in over in And it was funny.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
My uncle Jack was he was at Guadalcanal and all that,
and somebody was taking some books in the libraries of
World War two history books and they stopped by to
say hi to him, and then and they were showing
him the book and he started thumbing through it and
he found his picture on a page. They were lined
up to eat, and they were in Guadalcanal, and he.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
Was like, and he goes, oh, I know this guy.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
The guy he started I recognized these and you know,
he was an older guy, and he started recognizing these kids.
And sure enough, there he was in line, you know,
waiting to waiting to eat just just crazy, you know.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
That growing up, you know, in my small town, I
didn't realize until I was much older. How you know,
at our church, one of the older elders, one of
the deacons, was a guy that had he was one
of the gunners on the bottom side of the of
the bombers.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Oh that's kind to be scary.
Speaker 4 (04:48):
Man, right exactly.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
And he was and he was so open and he
wasn't you know, really he was willing to talk about
a lot of it. And so as a kid, it
you know, hearing him tell the stories. I was only
maybe six, seven, eight years old. And then by the
time I was in high school and actually learning the
the you know, day by day, month by month history
(05:12):
of what he actually went through, that was when it
all kind of started connecting in my head, like, oh,
my god, Like that guy has seen life. That guy
has seen a part of life that I will never
come close to experiencing.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Yeah, there's always interesting.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
There was a guy was in the tail of ABE
seventeen and got shot out of it. It like blew
it apart, and he fell out of the back without
his parachute because were you crawled back there for the
tailgun there's no room for parachute. Well, and he fell
and fell into a snowbank, broke a few limbs, but
the Germans sent him home.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
They didn't. They said, you know it.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
He made he survived, that he must we get to
go home. There was there's a great story about a
guy named Vader who flew a spitfire and he had
actually he had had both legs from the knee down amputated.
But they needed every pilot they could get, so he
flew a spitfire with artificial limbs on his on his legs,
and he was pretty good.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
He was a pretty famous pilot.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
I mean he shot down and he got shot down,
and they put him in a pow camp.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
But he didn't he lost his legs. And it's not
a joke, it's totally true.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
And they convinced the Red Cross to fly over the
pow camp and drop him two legs because it was taken.
Everybody was having to move him around the guard or
having to deal with him because you know, he had
to be carried everywhere. If we could drop two legs in,
let this plane fly over drop him in, then he
can have some legs.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
And he they did. He got his legs and he escaped.
He used his legs.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
What a patriot, baby, hear it.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
The only other story I thought it was really interesting
was where my granddad, my grandmother lived in Alabama.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
I spent a lot of time on there on their
farm with him.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
And there was a guy, an old guy lived across
the street and down but he was it was out,
you know, had a farm, so really their closest neighbor.
And he passed away and my mother went to Uh.
Nobody knew this, but my mother went over to help,
and she knew him kind of as she grew up there,
and she helped, uh. And when he passed away, she
helped her kind of go through and get all their stuff,
(07:22):
and he there was an invitation to the White House
for Kennedy's inauguration.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
He was on pt.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
One on nine with Kennedy and was did the whole
you know, swam to the island and the whole ill
I mean, and they had no idea, you know. And
when I was a little kid, they brought Kennedy's rocking
chair and the coconut.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
You remember that. He If you don't know the story.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
He was on an island, him and his guys, they
got hit by a destroyer and broke their pete boat
and half.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
They swam to an island.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Kennedy took uh it, took a coconut, scrabbled a message
in it, and gave it to a native and that's
how they got rescued. And so I got to see
the coconut as a little kid, and I to see
the rock and chair and all. This was shortly after
he was assassinated, but it was, uh, yeah, that's the
kind of that's real history there that I that I
remember even as a little kid.
Speaker 4 (08:09):
You know. Yeah, that's where those are the you know,
those are.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
The stories that are starting to slowly uh leave us
as that generation, you know, as they are no longer
with us to tell those stories or share it. But
I guess in that sense though, all of the stuff
that they're leaving behind is now being found by family members,
right yeah, people that are buying it, you know, in
(08:35):
a state cells and it turns out to be something
that's deeply connected to our history as a country.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
It was a guy and I saw this on I
don't remember where I saw it, but this guy collected
Civil War memorabilia.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
He was a Civil War guy.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
And there was one they had a if you were
a Union sniper, you there was an elite squad that
had a green shirt with green.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Lighter green piping. I mean, it was like a special shirt.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
That you got, you earned when you became a sniper
with this Union Army, with the Union Sniper Crew. And
he said, there was probably the most rarest thing in
Civil War member, but you just would never find one.
And he was in California, I think, and so he
saw the state sale. He goes to the estate sell
and it was literally six blocks from his house. I mean,
(09:27):
this is how the story is crazy. So he goes
in there and they got, you know, all this stuff.
They're having a little auction, and he said, there's a
box there with a World War two uniform and then
a World War One uniform. And he said, he flipped
up the World War One uniform and there was one
of these jackets. I mean, he knew instantly. The one
person in the world that would know what this was,
(09:49):
he knew what it was. So he set it down
and he goes and he sits down and they start bidding. Well,
this other guy and him are bidding against it. He
gets two hundred dollars, and he said, I go this
guy and go, what do you what are you trying
to get? The guy goes, I'm a World War two guy.
I do World War two stuff. He said, well, I'll
tell you what. Let's going together. Let's give him the
(10:09):
two hundred bucks. I'll do one hundred. You do one hundred.
You take the World War two and World War One.
I'll take the green jacket. And the guy said, yeah,
that's cool. You know, because the guy had no idea
the jacket at that time, that story has got to
be twenty years old. At that time, that jacket was
worth seventy five grand.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
And that's what I was about to say. I think
that guy might have gotten the short end.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Yeah, he got a short end of the view.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
But he had a mannequin and they showed it was
a beautiful jacket. I really it really was as an overcoat,
I guess I'm calling a jacket. But it was dark
green with light green piping. You can google it look
at it, but it was. He had it on a
mannequt lotter.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Really cool.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
But it was he had all this Civil War stuff,
you know, and it was it was pretty pretty, pretty
neat I've seen a lot of stuff like that. Well,
I had a friend, you know, the Lamb's Goodyear Lamb's
Goodyear stores. Mister Lamb John Lemna was a friend of
mine and he collected Civil War memorabilia and he had Alex.
(11:07):
My daughter was studying the Civil War, her class was,
and so I called him and I said, hey, could
I borrow a sword to take to show the kids?
Speaker 2 (11:17):
And he said yeah. Man.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
He said, well when is it? And I said, well,
they're doing it, you know, Wednesday or whatever. So he said, well,
let me, I'll bring a few with me. And he
showed up at the school and he had he laid out,
they set up tables.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
He had guns.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
He had a drum that had been in five different wars,
the Revolutionary War, I mean, were the same regiment. He
had all these guns that had a huge amount of
Confederate guns which are really hard to find. And he
had all this stuff and he talked to the kids,
you know, my daughter's class, and explained the differences and
what they went through, and he was fascinating. At the
(11:52):
principal was like, oh my god, man. And so she
went and got all the other classes, you know, So
they had turned into a big you know, like a
lot of forum got.
Speaker 4 (12:00):
A like now museum day.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Yeah, she goes, she said, I had no idea. I said,
WELLHY didn't either. He's going to do all that.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
So then he calls me about you know, once again,
this goes back twenty twenty five years. So he calls
me because I was doing the ads for Lambs back then,
you know, for the for the Goodyear.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
He calls me and he says, hey, come over, I
got something in my office. I want to show you.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
And he was at one They were one eighty three
and uh in six twenty and then so I go
in there and I go up the stairs in his
office and there's this big wooden thing sitting there. It's
like a big wooden table box looking deal. And I said,
what is that? And he said, that's Eli Whitney's cotton gin.
And I said what he said? He goes, that's the
actual Eli Whitney cotton gin, the prototype. He said, I
(12:45):
went to an auction in Atlanta, and this is what's
really a coincidence. He said, I went to a museum
auction in Atlanta and this was in it. And I said,
when I was six or seven, years old. I went
to that museum and I saw this thing. So here
it is now. You know, I'm sixty seven years old,
so back then i've been probably fifty, you know, maybe
(13:07):
forty eight something like that. And there I was seeing
this thing I'd seen as a little kid. I also
remember they had a Japanese zero they had outside that
they had captured at the museum in Atlanta. But anyway,
the museum went out of business and they were selling
everything off.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
And he said, I'm standing there.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
There's Eli Whitney's cotton gin and he said, I'm buying
the Southern Confederate stuff. And he said, I meet this
man who's center here by me, and he said, well,
you know, he was from England. And he goes, well,
what are you doing here? And he said, I'm here
to buy Eli Whitney's cotting gen. Eli Whitney was English,
and we feel like that's an English invention, and he goes, really,
so he said, I got thinking about it.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
I got pissed off. That's an American invention. And he
said I got.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Into a bidding war with this asshole from England and
he said he I said, well, he goes. I ended
up spending two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to buy.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
On Eli went in. I mean it was all it was.
They had pictures and it was fully documented. It was
a real deal.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Uh. He had it in the Smithsonian for a while,
and then it was in the gerald Ford Museum for
a while. They asked us put it in there, and
then he got it back and I haven't talked to
him in years, so I don't know what happened to it,
but it's in a museum, I'm assuming.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
But it was crazy.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
Yeah, we talked about this before of you know, what
would you what would you actually if you got like
giant fu money, totally rich overnight, what would you actually buy?
And I think on record, I think the first thing
I said was a sports team. Yeah, yeah, it's the thing, Like,
I would love to be so rich that I could
(14:39):
just buy a piece of history like that that then
I would loan out to museums because that would be
awesome to know. I mean, you're buying it for everybody else. Basically,
you're buying it to end up putting it in the Smithsonian.
To have to have something that you technically own be
on display in the Smithsonian and then it'd be something
(15:01):
as uh, you know, historically important as the cotton gin.
Speaker 4 (15:05):
I mean that just seemed that that's a that's a
level of wealth. I can't wrap my head around.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Well, he said that kaya was only that guy was
limited to however much he screwed up and told him
how much it was, you know, that he was allowed
to spend because it was government money, you know, it
was British money.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
He would spend his own money, you know. Uh.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
But I guess the tire business had been good to
John and he ended up there was when I was
a kid.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
Brits will claim anything as British too, by the way.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
I mean, they feel like that, you know.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
Yeah, it was according to them.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
It was all theirs for it was ours, and then
we took it away from him. So that's the way
most everything's done.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
The when I was a kid, we were in Athens, Georgia.
We lived in Athens for a year and it was
a junk yard not too far from our house. You know,
we were poor, but there.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Was we would climb the fence.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
There was an army tank, an old army tank in
the in the junkyard, and we'd go in there and
play in it, you know, and it's in the Smithsonian now.
It was one of three World War One tanks that
had survived one. How I got in Athens, Georgie, I
don't know, but it ended up in the Smithsonian. And
I remember when they came and got it, you know,
and my mom said, they said, was some kids have
(16:18):
been playing. It was in the newspaper. The kids were
playing on it. So we're having to fit you know,
fix the fence and all that. Do we get it
out of here.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
And I was like, hey, that's us.
Speaker 4 (16:26):
I made the paper. Mom.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
I started, you know, we're not tearing up your tank,
you know, as it were kids and oh it's a tank.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (16:34):
Like what's a group of ten year olds going to
do to a tank?
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah exactly. But that was pretty That was You can
google that as well. Google the the Army tank in
the Smithsonian.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
That was a pretty neat deal.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Well that's a lot of memory down. I wrote a
lot of war stuff, but this is all fun. Thank
you for listening to the Bama Brown Experience on the
iHeart podcast Network.
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