March 19, 2020 • 28 mins
In fall 2017, we talked about a strange cultural phenomenon. For a brief window from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, people in the United States were watching train wrecks for fun.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everybody, here is an episode from our ten episode
playlist that we're calling Offbeat History. Yeah, we're adding this
to our our regular publishing schedule as one kind of
big drop all at the same time on March nineteen,
And that is so that you have maybe have a
little bit of extra entertainment options available to you, particularly
(00:23):
if you are self quarantined or sheltering in place. Welcome
to Stuff you missed in History Class A production of
I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tray c V Wilson. I'm Holly Frying. So how do
(00:46):
you know how sometimes when something terrible is happening that
we just can't look away from, we say it's like
watching a train wreck. Yes, yes, Although people do describe
actual catastrophes as train wrecks, a lot of the times
it's something a lot less tangible, with way less risk
(01:06):
of injury or death, like uh, bad speeches or product
launches that go really terribly or like really crane cringe
worthy TV shows, things that are not really ready, you know,
things that are not really going to cause somebody to
actually die. We describe as like watching a train wreck.
(01:27):
But I always thought that was kind of weird that
we would describe something, uh, like, you know, somebody's bad
talent show entry that's just awful that you just can't
stop staring at. Like why we would describe that as
like watching a train wreck. It turns out that for
a brief window from the late eighteen hundreds into the
(01:47):
early nineteen hundreds, people in the United States we're watching
train wrecks for fun. It's hard to come up with
the exact tally of how many of them there were,
because there were several different people who were arranging these
things in different venues. Over the span of about forty years,
there were definitely at least planned train wrecks to watch
(02:10):
for fun, mostly playing out in the southwestern and midwestern
United States, often at events like state fairs. So that's weird.
Here's what it reminds me of. So when my husband
and I got married and we merged our households, we
found that we had multiples of things, and somehow in
(02:32):
that deal we had three microwaves, two which were pretty
good in one which was really junkie. So we gave
the really good one away to somebody who needed one,
and then the junkie one we took out on the
back patio and we blew stuff up in it. So
I kind of understand this train wreck thing. Well. When
I was a kid, my elementary school had a Halloween
(02:55):
carnival every year, and one of the things that they
would do for this Halloween carnal carnival is that they
would go buy a really junkie used car and you
could pay a dollar to get to take a swing
at it with a baseball bat. Um. So, yeah, this
is it still seems weird though, so it's what we're
(03:15):
gonna talk about today. I also it's felt like we
needed a little bit of a lighter topic. We've had
some heavier things lately. Some lighter stuff too. I in particular, though,
had researched some really heavy stuff and so I was like,
let's just do something goofy. I will say this is
mostly goofy. It does have a little bit of tragedy,
but is overall weird and fun. Yes, the concept of
(03:36):
someone going, hey, let's stage some recks so we can
all talk at them. There is an inherent level of
comedy there. Yes, So we are going to start though
with the one that did actually have a few fatalities.
This is the most famous and most deadly of the
United States stage train rex and it was known as
(03:59):
the Crash Crush, which took place in September of eighteen
and this was the brainchild of William George Crush, passenger
agent at the Missouri Kansas Texas Railroad Company, also known
as the Katie, which was shortened down from its initials
m KT by five the year before this event took place.
(04:19):
The Katie had a hundred and thirty three locomotives and
a hundred and sixties three cars. William George Crush came
up with this idea to try to drum up some
publicity for the railroad and to sell tickets on the railroad.
The railroad wasn't really in financial danger in any way,
but the nation was just starting to come out of
(04:41):
the Panic of eight so the Katie was definitely interested
in protecting its bottom line. The railroad was also in
the process of replacing its thirty five ton locomotives with
sixty ton models, so Crushed proposed they take two of
those retired thirty five ton locomotives and smashed them together.
It really is just like my microwave. The venue that
(05:05):
he proposed for this stage train wreck would be a
pop up town named Crush, located about fifteen miles north
of Waco and about three miles south of the town
of West, conveniently close to the existing Waco Dallas track.
The designated spot was in a small valley with hills
on three sides, making a natural amphitheater with plenty of
(05:26):
viewing locations. They'd supplement this with things like a restaurant,
a grandstand in carnival attractions selling two dollar round trip
tickets on the Katie to get there and back. The
Katie had some concerns about the safety of this scheme,
namely that the boilers of one or both of the
(05:47):
locomotives might explode on impact, so they asked the opinions
of several of the railroad's engineers, all but one of
whom agreed that the risk of an explosion was low,
so William Crush was given the go ahead to proceed. First,
they laid track from the existing Waco Dallas line, terminating
at a two thousand one foot that's sixty depot platform,
(06:11):
complete with a sign telling passengers that they had arrived
at Crush. There was also a stretch of track for
the two trains to travel down and crash into each other,
which followed the natural slopes of the land, and this
gave the track a slight downward grade from each end
toward the middle, which would help the locomotives pick up
more speed. Locomotives and one thousand one were chosen for
(06:35):
the crash, with one painted green with red trim and
the other painted red with green trim. For their pop
up town, they drilled wells and installed spigots for fresh
water along the spectator area. William Crush, which was apparently
his fortuitous but actual real name, was friends with P. T. Barnum,
so he borrowed a circumstance from Barnum to house a restaurant.
(06:59):
They also construct lemonade stands to telegraph offices, a stand
for reporters, and a bandstand. They built a wooden jail,
which I found I found one source saying that that
was made out of a caboose. They hired two hundred
constables to patrol on the day, and they also made
plans for a huge carnival complete with games and medicine
(07:21):
shows and a variety of other diversions. Clearly they were
expecting this to be a party Yeah. William Crush and
The Katie advertised this spectacle heavily all through the summer
of eight, calling it the Monster Crash. The crash and
the preparations for it became regular news items all throughout
(07:41):
the Texas papers and outside the state as well. Organizers
fielded queries from all over the country, and in the
days leading up to the actual event, William Crush estimated
that there would be fifteen thousand to twenty thousand spectators.
William Crush had arranged for thirty three trains to provide
passenger service to Crush and the Katie started dropping passengers
(08:05):
off around dawn on September. By ten am, there there
were at least ten thousand people already on the scene.
They were picnicking and playing games and listening to political
speeches while they waited. More trains kept arriving all through
the morning and afternoon, some of them so crowded that
people were riding on the roofs of the cars. The
(08:27):
Monster Crash was supposed to start at four, but people
were still arriving as that hour drew near, so they
delayed the start until five pm, at which point there
were about forty people there double what William Crush had estimated. First,
the two locomotives came together very slowly on the track
and touched their cow catchers together. That's that little great
(08:49):
looking thing on the front of a locomotive. They touched
their cow catchers together, kind of like boxers touching their
gloves before a match. Then they were reversed a party
in and William Crush, on horseback, raised a white hat
into the air and whipped it down to give the
signal for the wreck to officially begin. The two locomotives,
(09:10):
pulling empty box cars that were festooned with advertisements and decorations,
then began moving toward each other and picking up speed.
Their engineers pulled their whistle cords and tied them down,
then jumped clear and ran away from the track. They
estimated that at the moment of impact, each locomotive was
traveling at about fifty miles per hour when they crashed
(09:33):
into each other. The collision was incredibly violent. The box
cars unsurprisingly shattered into splinters, but the locomotives didn't behave
as they expected. Organizers had thought that they would basically
push each other up into an inverted v and they
would expend most of that energy and the upward trajectory
of doing that. Instead, it was more like squeezing an
(09:56):
accordion or collapsing a telescope, and the two giant locomotive
was just folded into each other. And then, to the
surprise of everyone except perhaps that one dissenting engineer, both
their boilers exploded. Scalding water and flying debris from the locomotives,
including pieces of iron and steel of all shapes and sizes,
(10:17):
flew into the crowd, most of whom were along the
hills at least two hundred yards away. At least two
people were killed, although some accounts say there were three.
Ernest Darnell, who had been who had climbed up a
mesquite tree to watch, was hit with a ten pound
length of break chain and was killed instantly. A young
girl was hit with a chunk of iron that fractured
(10:38):
her skull, and although she was reported to be resting
comfortably afterwards, she died on the way home. There was
a third man, John Morrison, who survived the wreck itself,
but fell between train cars on the way home and
was run over by the train and died. I haven't
quite figured out if that is the third person, some
of the counts referred to as being and killed or
(11:01):
if that was a separate incident. There were also a
lot of injuries from the flying debris in boiling water,
and at least six of those were serious, and some
of them were sustained more than a mile away from
the actual crash. J. C. Dean, a photographer from Waco,
had been hired to take pictures of the event, and
he lost an eye when a bolt from the wreck
(11:22):
tore through it. His response was to get up and
keep working, telling his brothers, who were also photographers, how
to finish the shot that he had been framing. Even
in the midst of all this chaos and the tragedy
that was unfolding, souvenir seekers rushed in to try to
claim pieces of the wreck. Record trains hauled off the
(11:43):
biggest remaining pieces. After the event was over, people began
to leave the temporary town of Crush. As soon as
the event had finished, Workers struck the tent and the
other structures erected for the town, and the whole thing
was essentially gone by nightfall. Willie him Crush was fired immediately,
but then officials at the Katie realized they'd had an
(12:05):
incredibly profitable day in spite of the tragedy, so they
hired him back the next day, and he worked at
the railroad until his retirement. In his in nineteen forty,
The Katie began quickly and quietly settling lawsuits and paying
compensation to the people who had been injured and the
families of those who had been killed. Photographer J. C.
(12:26):
Dean was paid ten thousand dollars and given a lifetime
pass on the train. There wasn't nearly as much public
condemnation as he might expect from an event that killed
at least two spectators and injured many others, but the
news reporting at the time was actually relatively pragmatic about it.
A few weeks after the crash at Crush, composer and
(12:47):
pianist Scott Joplin published his Great Crush Collision March. Joplin
would go on to be known as the King of Ragtime,
whose other most famous pieces include Maple Leaf Rag and
The Entertainer, which would become the the music for the
nineteen seventies three films The Sting starring Paul Newman, Robert Redford,
and Robert Shaw. It's unclear whether Joplin was actually at
(13:08):
the crash, but the Great Crush Collision March was one
of his earliest published pieces of music and a relatively
early example of ragtime, which is a distinctly African American
form of music that was at the height of its
popularity from the mid eighteen nineties through the nineteen teens.
And we're going to link to that in the show
notes so people can listen to it. Scott Joplin is
(13:30):
the reason I took piano lessons as a child. Really, yes,
love uh. And the part of me that wants to
do an episode about him is at odds with the
part of me that that does not like the sad
aspect of story, which is his death at a very
early age from untreated syphilis. So the Katie went through
(13:50):
waves of financial success and difficulty after this point until
really starting to struggle along with the rest of the
industry in the nineteen fifties. It was ultimately bought by
the Missouri Pacific Railroad Company. In there's a historic plaque
commemorating the Crash at Crush in McLennan County, fifteen miles
north of Waco. Although the Crash at Crush is the
(14:13):
most famous of these stage drecks, that wasn't actually the
first one, and so we're going to talk about that
first one and some others after a quick sponsor break.
Really frequently. The crash at Crush is described as the
(14:33):
first staged train wreck in the United States, was something
that drew a big crowd, but which no other actual
railroad company tried again afterwards for obvious reasons. But that
September event was actually pre dated by one staged by
a man named A. L. Streeter Or. He was a
railway equipment salesman from Illinois. Street Or first tried to
(14:58):
stage a train wreck in Illinois, but wasn't able to
generate enough attention, so he turned his attention to Ohio,
where he got the okay to conduct a crash on July,
a couple of miles outside Canton. Here's how he described
it in one of the ads that he ran to
promote this event. Quote to monster, locomotives with full head
(15:19):
of steam starting a mile apart, will rush toward each
other at the rate of sixty or seventy miles an hour,
and allowed to come together with a crash that will
result in the most horrible head on collision ever seen
or heard of. Street Or made arrangements to buy a
couple of retired locomotives and decorated them. One was emblazoned
(15:39):
with free trade and the other with protection, symbolically pitting
the two economic theories against one another. The two engines
would pull flat cars loaded down with rocks, like the
crash a crash. Part of Streeter's plan involved selling train tickets.
A fifteen cent fair on the Cleveland, Canton and Southern
Railroad would get people to the actual location for the crash,
(16:03):
but once people got to that location, admission to the
crash itself was not free. He hoped to sell twenty
thousand tickets at seventy five cents apiece so that people
could then watch the crash from a designated viewing area. However,
the overwhelming majority of spectators had a different idea that
was to climb trees and together outside the official viewing
(16:23):
area and watch it for free, so he only sold
about two hundred tickets. In the end. Though these two
locomotives never wrecked, the whole event was canceled at the
last possible minute. Streeter claimed it was because spectators got
too close and refused to move, ruining it for everyone
else and forcing him to cancel for safety reasons, But
(16:46):
the railroad claimed that street Or owed them two thousand,
four hundred dollars for the retired locomotives, which he had
never paid, so the railroad exercise their right to take
them back. Spectators. Of course, we're out aged, and the
ones who had paid demanded a refund. People were also
upset that they had spent that fifteen dollar train fair
(17:06):
for something that didn't actually happen. Street Or was widely
criticized in the press for wasting people's time and money,
even as he claimed to have lost about eight hundred
dollars of his personal funds in the venture. Street Or
didn't give up, though. On Memorial Day he tried again,
this time in Buckeye Park in Marietta, Ohio, about twenty
(17:28):
five miles southeast of Columbus. The locomotives this time were
named the A. L. Streeter and the W. H. Fisher.
Fisher worked for the Columbus Hawking and Toledo Railroad, and
to add some more drama, street Or put mannequins aboard
so it would actually look like there were people in there.
This time, the wreck did indeed go as planned. Clarence
(17:50):
Metters wrote about the event in National Magazine, saying, quote,
twenty five thousand pairs of eyes were riveted upon one
engine or another as they rushed together, and so critical
was the moment that scarcely a word was spoken. On
and on sped the two iron monsters at the rate
of over forty miles an hour, and when the crash
(18:11):
came it was terrific, both trains being practically destroyed. Street
Or continued to organize more of these spectacles around the
country until the early twentieth century. But another man organized
so many of them that it became part of his
personal brand, and he was Joe Connolly, who was known
by the nickname head On Connolly, who staged at least
(18:32):
seventy three rex between eighteen ninety six and nineteen thirty
two and became the most famous organizer of planned train wrecks.
I found one account that said that he tried to
sue someone for staging a train wreck and using the
term head On when that was clearly his, But I
couldn't find any evidence that he had actually tried to
(18:53):
register that trademark, so not sure what the actual status
of that was regardless though. Head On Joe had worked
in theater in Des Moines for decades before putting his
hand to staging train wrecks, and he was scrupulous about safety.
He had a very specific set of safety rules that
had to be followed at any wreck he staged. He
(19:13):
also told reporters that he had a quote lifelong desire
to see such a disaster without danger to himself and
thought many other people harbored the same secret desire. He
was also a showman, and as his REX went on,
he did things to make them more and more dramatic.
He started laying small charges on the tracks that would
explode when the trains rolled over them, creating tiny explosions that,
(19:37):
in normal circumstances were used to warn other trains of
incoming traffic. He'd also doused the cars in fuel and
filled them with flammable materials so that they would burn
after impact. Commonly made a lot of money staging these
crashes over the years, and his last one took place
as the fad was really starting to wane. This one
(19:58):
was at the Iowa State Fair and thirty two. He
had staged Rex at the Iowa State Fair previously to
a lot of fanfare, but in nineteen thirty two, the
United States was facing the Great Depression. Even naming one
of the locomotives the Roosevelt and the other the Hoover
wasn't enough to make the events sit right with the crowd.
The explosion itself was reported to be a good one,
(20:20):
but the response from the audience was really lackluster. That
seemed like seeing two huge trains wrecked against each other
for sport was needlessly wasteful in a time when so
many people were hurting from money. This was doubly true
when words started to spread that Connolly had charged the
fair forty dollars to stage the wreck, and that the
(20:40):
fair had lost sixty five thousand dollars that year. People
who were already angry at the idea that the crash
had been wasteful or furious that it had cost so
much money, in addition to the wreckage of the locomotives themselves,
a le Streeter and head On Connolly weren't the only
people organizing these staged wrecks. As another example, in September,
(21:03):
approximately six thousand people paid to see two engines that
had been retired from the Salt Lake railroad crashed together
at an agricultural park near downtown Los Angeles. Organizers for
this one where James Morley and former promoted a football coach,
Walter Hempele. This particular wreck didn't go all that well.
The engineers tried to extort extra pay from the organizers.
(21:26):
In the middle of the event, they were doing a
prolonged run up to the actual crash, in which they'd
run the trains at one another and then stop them
before a collision. The engineers thought it would probably be
impossible to find replacements in the literal middle of the event,
so they asked for an extra three hundred and fifty dollars.
Organizers managed to find replacements with no problem, though in general,
(21:50):
engineers were pretty eager to volunteer, so the original engineers
were fired and then the event proceeded as planned. He
had the idea that you would get to just on
purpose run a locomotive that was normally where you had
to spend your working life into another locomotive and just
smash it to pieces. Like that apparently was attractive to
(22:10):
a number of engineers. Um and I really didn't find
any indication that any of them were seriously injured while
doing this, although I did find one that was an
engineer who fell while trying to jump free of the
locomotive and sprained his ankle. So uh. In this event
(22:30):
at the Agricultural Park near downtown Los Angeles, the locomotives
did run into each other whistles blaring, but the end
result was pretty anticlimactic because they just sort of shammed
into each other with a thud and then stopped and
nothing derailed and nothing caught on fire and nothing exploded,
and so people were not particularly impressed. And these are
just some examples. There were lots and lots of others,
(22:53):
and there's actually footage of several of them on YouTube.
We're gonna link to that footage in the show notes.
Next start going to talk about some ideas about why
maybe this caught on so well. So for roughly thirty
(23:16):
or forty years, staged train wrecks were a really big
deal in the midwestern and southwestern parts of the United States.
The biggest crowd reported at one of these events was
a hundred and sixty thousand people, and attendance was routinely
in the tens of thousands. The town of Crush had
about the same population of as Dallas or San Antonio
(23:38):
for the few hours that it existed. In nine twenty,
a staged wreck on opening day of the Minnesota State
Fair doubled the fairs first day attendants from the year before.
All of this happened at a time when getting somewhere
was a lot less comfortable and convenient than it can
be today. This has led some people to speculate as
(24:00):
to why this all caught on so well. One aspect
was certainly the marketing organizers promoted their events heavily, getting
lots of fanciful coverage and newspapers, and there was often
a political theme to the decorations on the trains themselves.
In addition to the ones that we talked about already
earlier in this show, a stage direck pitted locomotives dubbed
(24:21):
evolution and fundamentalism. After the Scopes trial in there was
also a showdown between the National Recovery Act, part of
the New Deal versus Old Man Depression at the Minnesota
State Fair in nineteen thirty three, and for some people
the attraction was related more to the general politics of
the day than any specific political issue. There was a
(24:44):
general idea that locomotives were symbols of big businesses and
industries that were taking advantage of people and ruining the landscape,
and so it was really fun to think about their
destroying one another. And then, of course there is this
fact that humanity has kind of a morbid fascination with destruction.
There's a complicated set of emotional and psychological responses that
(25:06):
feed into the general human trait of morbid curiosity. In
the decades after Stage train wrecks, there were demolition Derby's,
monster truck rallies, a whole slew of disaster films, true
crime shows, and on and on. These are all still
moneymakers in many cases. Yep. I mean, I think the
thing that strikes me as so weird about the train
(25:28):
part is that locomotives are just so big. They like,
that's a lot of metal smashing together and then doing
I don't know something to the scrap heap or whatever, uh,
which you know, may made it seem a little odder
to me than a demolition Derby or a monster truck
rally or whatever. But also, I mean, people do just do,
(25:50):
as we have shown in our some past episodes of
the show, people go on onto weird stuff. Sometimes. I
think that's also a factor. This is the kind of
episode that happens when you're looking for something a little
less heavy to write about and you google weird fads. Right,
(26:11):
I've done similar things. Uh, yeah, it is. It's a
I'm trying to think if there would ever be like
a modern day equivalent attempted, Like, would anybody ever go,
let's try to crash planes together. I don't know how
you would possibly orchestrate such a thing, but that sounds
(26:32):
very scary. Yes, well, and suddenly I just remembered when, um,
when I was also a kid. In addition to having
the elementary school Halloween carnivals where you could smash old
cars with a baseball bat, um, whenever the fire department
would be conducting training by burning down a derelict building
and extinguishing the fire, like, there would always be a
(26:55):
crowd to watch that. Oh, anytime there's a building demolished,
there's a crowd. We had one in Atlanta not long ago,
and everyone who lived in Atlanta had it all over
their social media because they got up at an ungodly
hour to go look at it. We're blowing stuff up.
I mean, I then feel very tame for like being
like what happens when you put a CD in a microwave.
(27:19):
By the way, it's very pretty. Thank you so much
for joining us today for this classic. If you have
heard any kind of email address or maybe a Facebook
you are l during the course of the episode, that
might be obsolete. It might be doubly obsolete because we
have changed our email address again. You can now reach
(27:40):
us at History podcast at i heart radio dot com,
and we're all over social media at missed in History,
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
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you listen to podcasts. Stuffy miss In History Class is
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
(28:02):
I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Hey, everybody, here is an episode from our ten episode
playlist that we're calling Offbeat History. Yeah, we're adding this
to our our regular publishing schedule as one kind of
big drop all at the same time on March nineteen,
And that is so that you have maybe have a
little bit of extra entertainment options available to you, particularly
(00:23):
if you are self quarantined or sheltering in place. Welcome
to Stuff you missed in History Class A production of
I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tray c V Wilson. I'm Holly Frying. So how do
(00:46):
you know how sometimes when something terrible is happening that
we just can't look away from, we say it's like
watching a train wreck. Yes, yes, Although people do describe
actual catastrophes as train wrecks, a lot of the times
it's something a lot less tangible, with way less risk
(01:06):
of injury or death, like uh, bad speeches or product
launches that go really terribly or like really crane cringe
worthy TV shows, things that are not really ready, you know,
things that are not really going to cause somebody to
actually die. We describe as like watching a train wreck.
(01:27):
But I always thought that was kind of weird that
we would describe something, uh, like, you know, somebody's bad
talent show entry that's just awful that you just can't
stop staring at. Like why we would describe that as
like watching a train wreck. It turns out that for
a brief window from the late eighteen hundreds into the
(01:47):
early nineteen hundreds, people in the United States we're watching
train wrecks for fun. It's hard to come up with
the exact tally of how many of them there were,
because there were several different people who were arranging these
things in different venues. Over the span of about forty years,
there were definitely at least planned train wrecks to watch
(02:10):
for fun, mostly playing out in the southwestern and midwestern
United States, often at events like state fairs. So that's weird.
Here's what it reminds me of. So when my husband
and I got married and we merged our households, we
found that we had multiples of things, and somehow in
(02:32):
that deal we had three microwaves, two which were pretty
good in one which was really junkie. So we gave
the really good one away to somebody who needed one,
and then the junkie one we took out on the
back patio and we blew stuff up in it. So
I kind of understand this train wreck thing. Well. When
I was a kid, my elementary school had a Halloween
(02:55):
carnival every year, and one of the things that they
would do for this Halloween carnal carnival is that they
would go buy a really junkie used car and you
could pay a dollar to get to take a swing
at it with a baseball bat. Um. So, yeah, this
is it still seems weird though, so it's what we're
(03:15):
gonna talk about today. I also it's felt like we
needed a little bit of a lighter topic. We've had
some heavier things lately. Some lighter stuff too. I in particular, though,
had researched some really heavy stuff and so I was like,
let's just do something goofy. I will say this is
mostly goofy. It does have a little bit of tragedy,
but is overall weird and fun. Yes, the concept of
(03:36):
someone going, hey, let's stage some recks so we can
all talk at them. There is an inherent level of
comedy there. Yes, So we are going to start though
with the one that did actually have a few fatalities.
This is the most famous and most deadly of the
United States stage train rex and it was known as
(03:59):
the Crash Crush, which took place in September of eighteen
and this was the brainchild of William George Crush, passenger
agent at the Missouri Kansas Texas Railroad Company, also known
as the Katie, which was shortened down from its initials
m KT by five the year before this event took place.
(04:19):
The Katie had a hundred and thirty three locomotives and
a hundred and sixties three cars. William George Crush came
up with this idea to try to drum up some
publicity for the railroad and to sell tickets on the railroad.
The railroad wasn't really in financial danger in any way,
but the nation was just starting to come out of
(04:41):
the Panic of eight so the Katie was definitely interested
in protecting its bottom line. The railroad was also in
the process of replacing its thirty five ton locomotives with
sixty ton models, so Crushed proposed they take two of
those retired thirty five ton locomotives and smashed them together.
It really is just like my microwave. The venue that
(05:05):
he proposed for this stage train wreck would be a
pop up town named Crush, located about fifteen miles north
of Waco and about three miles south of the town
of West, conveniently close to the existing Waco Dallas track.
The designated spot was in a small valley with hills
on three sides, making a natural amphitheater with plenty of
(05:26):
viewing locations. They'd supplement this with things like a restaurant,
a grandstand in carnival attractions selling two dollar round trip
tickets on the Katie to get there and back. The
Katie had some concerns about the safety of this scheme,
namely that the boilers of one or both of the
(05:47):
locomotives might explode on impact, so they asked the opinions
of several of the railroad's engineers, all but one of
whom agreed that the risk of an explosion was low,
so William Crush was given the go ahead to proceed. First,
they laid track from the existing Waco Dallas line, terminating
at a two thousand one foot that's sixty depot platform,
(06:11):
complete with a sign telling passengers that they had arrived
at Crush. There was also a stretch of track for
the two trains to travel down and crash into each other,
which followed the natural slopes of the land, and this
gave the track a slight downward grade from each end
toward the middle, which would help the locomotives pick up
more speed. Locomotives and one thousand one were chosen for
(06:35):
the crash, with one painted green with red trim and
the other painted red with green trim. For their pop
up town, they drilled wells and installed spigots for fresh
water along the spectator area. William Crush, which was apparently
his fortuitous but actual real name, was friends with P. T. Barnum,
so he borrowed a circumstance from Barnum to house a restaurant.
(06:59):
They also construct lemonade stands to telegraph offices, a stand
for reporters, and a bandstand. They built a wooden jail,
which I found I found one source saying that that
was made out of a caboose. They hired two hundred
constables to patrol on the day, and they also made
plans for a huge carnival complete with games and medicine
(07:21):
shows and a variety of other diversions. Clearly they were
expecting this to be a party Yeah. William Crush and
The Katie advertised this spectacle heavily all through the summer
of eight, calling it the Monster Crash. The crash and
the preparations for it became regular news items all throughout
(07:41):
the Texas papers and outside the state as well. Organizers
fielded queries from all over the country, and in the
days leading up to the actual event, William Crush estimated
that there would be fifteen thousand to twenty thousand spectators.
William Crush had arranged for thirty three trains to provide
passenger service to Crush and the Katie started dropping passengers
(08:05):
off around dawn on September. By ten am, there there
were at least ten thousand people already on the scene.
They were picnicking and playing games and listening to political
speeches while they waited. More trains kept arriving all through
the morning and afternoon, some of them so crowded that
people were riding on the roofs of the cars. The
(08:27):
Monster Crash was supposed to start at four, but people
were still arriving as that hour drew near, so they
delayed the start until five pm, at which point there
were about forty people there double what William Crush had estimated. First,
the two locomotives came together very slowly on the track
and touched their cow catchers together. That's that little great
(08:49):
looking thing on the front of a locomotive. They touched
their cow catchers together, kind of like boxers touching their
gloves before a match. Then they were reversed a party
in and William Crush, on horseback, raised a white hat
into the air and whipped it down to give the
signal for the wreck to officially begin. The two locomotives,
(09:10):
pulling empty box cars that were festooned with advertisements and decorations,
then began moving toward each other and picking up speed.
Their engineers pulled their whistle cords and tied them down,
then jumped clear and ran away from the track. They
estimated that at the moment of impact, each locomotive was
traveling at about fifty miles per hour when they crashed
(09:33):
into each other. The collision was incredibly violent. The box
cars unsurprisingly shattered into splinters, but the locomotives didn't behave
as they expected. Organizers had thought that they would basically
push each other up into an inverted v and they
would expend most of that energy and the upward trajectory
of doing that. Instead, it was more like squeezing an
(09:56):
accordion or collapsing a telescope, and the two giant locomotive
was just folded into each other. And then, to the
surprise of everyone except perhaps that one dissenting engineer, both
their boilers exploded. Scalding water and flying debris from the locomotives,
including pieces of iron and steel of all shapes and sizes,
(10:17):
flew into the crowd, most of whom were along the
hills at least two hundred yards away. At least two
people were killed, although some accounts say there were three.
Ernest Darnell, who had been who had climbed up a
mesquite tree to watch, was hit with a ten pound
length of break chain and was killed instantly. A young
girl was hit with a chunk of iron that fractured
(10:38):
her skull, and although she was reported to be resting
comfortably afterwards, she died on the way home. There was
a third man, John Morrison, who survived the wreck itself,
but fell between train cars on the way home and
was run over by the train and died. I haven't
quite figured out if that is the third person, some
of the counts referred to as being and killed or
(11:01):
if that was a separate incident. There were also a
lot of injuries from the flying debris in boiling water,
and at least six of those were serious, and some
of them were sustained more than a mile away from
the actual crash. J. C. Dean, a photographer from Waco,
had been hired to take pictures of the event, and
he lost an eye when a bolt from the wreck
(11:22):
tore through it. His response was to get up and
keep working, telling his brothers, who were also photographers, how
to finish the shot that he had been framing. Even
in the midst of all this chaos and the tragedy
that was unfolding, souvenir seekers rushed in to try to
claim pieces of the wreck. Record trains hauled off the
(11:43):
biggest remaining pieces. After the event was over, people began
to leave the temporary town of Crush. As soon as
the event had finished, Workers struck the tent and the
other structures erected for the town, and the whole thing
was essentially gone by nightfall. Willie him Crush was fired immediately,
but then officials at the Katie realized they'd had an
(12:05):
incredibly profitable day in spite of the tragedy, so they
hired him back the next day, and he worked at
the railroad until his retirement. In his in nineteen forty,
The Katie began quickly and quietly settling lawsuits and paying
compensation to the people who had been injured and the
families of those who had been killed. Photographer J. C.
(12:26):
Dean was paid ten thousand dollars and given a lifetime
pass on the train. There wasn't nearly as much public
condemnation as he might expect from an event that killed
at least two spectators and injured many others, but the
news reporting at the time was actually relatively pragmatic about it.
A few weeks after the crash at Crush, composer and
(12:47):
pianist Scott Joplin published his Great Crush Collision March. Joplin
would go on to be known as the King of Ragtime,
whose other most famous pieces include Maple Leaf Rag and
The Entertainer, which would become the the music for the
nineteen seventies three films The Sting starring Paul Newman, Robert Redford,
and Robert Shaw. It's unclear whether Joplin was actually at
(13:08):
the crash, but the Great Crush Collision March was one
of his earliest published pieces of music and a relatively
early example of ragtime, which is a distinctly African American
form of music that was at the height of its
popularity from the mid eighteen nineties through the nineteen teens.
And we're going to link to that in the show
notes so people can listen to it. Scott Joplin is
(13:30):
the reason I took piano lessons as a child. Really, yes,
love uh. And the part of me that wants to
do an episode about him is at odds with the
part of me that that does not like the sad
aspect of story, which is his death at a very
early age from untreated syphilis. So the Katie went through
(13:50):
waves of financial success and difficulty after this point until
really starting to struggle along with the rest of the
industry in the nineteen fifties. It was ultimately bought by
the Missouri Pacific Railroad Company. In there's a historic plaque
commemorating the Crash at Crush in McLennan County, fifteen miles
north of Waco. Although the Crash at Crush is the
(14:13):
most famous of these stage drecks, that wasn't actually the
first one, and so we're going to talk about that
first one and some others after a quick sponsor break.
Really frequently. The crash at Crush is described as the
(14:33):
first staged train wreck in the United States, was something
that drew a big crowd, but which no other actual
railroad company tried again afterwards for obvious reasons. But that
September event was actually pre dated by one staged by
a man named A. L. Streeter Or. He was a
railway equipment salesman from Illinois. Street Or first tried to
(14:58):
stage a train wreck in Illinois, but wasn't able to
generate enough attention, so he turned his attention to Ohio,
where he got the okay to conduct a crash on July,
a couple of miles outside Canton. Here's how he described
it in one of the ads that he ran to
promote this event. Quote to monster, locomotives with full head
(15:19):
of steam starting a mile apart, will rush toward each
other at the rate of sixty or seventy miles an hour,
and allowed to come together with a crash that will
result in the most horrible head on collision ever seen
or heard of. Street Or made arrangements to buy a
couple of retired locomotives and decorated them. One was emblazoned
(15:39):
with free trade and the other with protection, symbolically pitting
the two economic theories against one another. The two engines
would pull flat cars loaded down with rocks, like the
crash a crash. Part of Streeter's plan involved selling train tickets.
A fifteen cent fair on the Cleveland, Canton and Southern
Railroad would get people to the actual location for the crash,
(16:03):
but once people got to that location, admission to the
crash itself was not free. He hoped to sell twenty
thousand tickets at seventy five cents apiece so that people
could then watch the crash from a designated viewing area. However,
the overwhelming majority of spectators had a different idea that
was to climb trees and together outside the official viewing
(16:23):
area and watch it for free, so he only sold
about two hundred tickets. In the end. Though these two
locomotives never wrecked, the whole event was canceled at the
last possible minute. Streeter claimed it was because spectators got
too close and refused to move, ruining it for everyone
else and forcing him to cancel for safety reasons, But
(16:46):
the railroad claimed that street Or owed them two thousand,
four hundred dollars for the retired locomotives, which he had
never paid, so the railroad exercise their right to take
them back. Spectators. Of course, we're out aged, and the
ones who had paid demanded a refund. People were also
upset that they had spent that fifteen dollar train fair
(17:06):
for something that didn't actually happen. Street Or was widely
criticized in the press for wasting people's time and money,
even as he claimed to have lost about eight hundred
dollars of his personal funds in the venture. Street Or
didn't give up, though. On Memorial Day he tried again,
this time in Buckeye Park in Marietta, Ohio, about twenty
(17:28):
five miles southeast of Columbus. The locomotives this time were
named the A. L. Streeter and the W. H. Fisher.
Fisher worked for the Columbus Hawking and Toledo Railroad, and
to add some more drama, street Or put mannequins aboard
so it would actually look like there were people in there.
This time, the wreck did indeed go as planned. Clarence
(17:50):
Metters wrote about the event in National Magazine, saying, quote,
twenty five thousand pairs of eyes were riveted upon one
engine or another as they rushed together, and so critical
was the moment that scarcely a word was spoken. On
and on sped the two iron monsters at the rate
of over forty miles an hour, and when the crash
(18:11):
came it was terrific, both trains being practically destroyed. Street
Or continued to organize more of these spectacles around the
country until the early twentieth century. But another man organized
so many of them that it became part of his
personal brand, and he was Joe Connolly, who was known
by the nickname head On Connolly, who staged at least
(18:32):
seventy three rex between eighteen ninety six and nineteen thirty
two and became the most famous organizer of planned train wrecks.
I found one account that said that he tried to
sue someone for staging a train wreck and using the
term head On when that was clearly his, But I
couldn't find any evidence that he had actually tried to
(18:53):
register that trademark, so not sure what the actual status
of that was regardless though. Head On Joe had worked
in theater in Des Moines for decades before putting his
hand to staging train wrecks, and he was scrupulous about safety.
He had a very specific set of safety rules that
had to be followed at any wreck he staged. He
(19:13):
also told reporters that he had a quote lifelong desire
to see such a disaster without danger to himself and
thought many other people harbored the same secret desire. He
was also a showman, and as his REX went on,
he did things to make them more and more dramatic.
He started laying small charges on the tracks that would
explode when the trains rolled over them, creating tiny explosions that,
(19:37):
in normal circumstances were used to warn other trains of
incoming traffic. He'd also doused the cars in fuel and
filled them with flammable materials so that they would burn
after impact. Commonly made a lot of money staging these
crashes over the years, and his last one took place
as the fad was really starting to wane. This one
(19:58):
was at the Iowa State Fair and thirty two. He
had staged Rex at the Iowa State Fair previously to
a lot of fanfare, but in nineteen thirty two, the
United States was facing the Great Depression. Even naming one
of the locomotives the Roosevelt and the other the Hoover
wasn't enough to make the events sit right with the crowd.
The explosion itself was reported to be a good one,
(20:20):
but the response from the audience was really lackluster. That
seemed like seeing two huge trains wrecked against each other
for sport was needlessly wasteful in a time when so
many people were hurting from money. This was doubly true
when words started to spread that Connolly had charged the
fair forty dollars to stage the wreck, and that the
(20:40):
fair had lost sixty five thousand dollars that year. People
who were already angry at the idea that the crash
had been wasteful or furious that it had cost so
much money, in addition to the wreckage of the locomotives themselves,
a le Streeter and head On Connolly weren't the only
people organizing these staged wrecks. As another example, in September,
(21:03):
approximately six thousand people paid to see two engines that
had been retired from the Salt Lake railroad crashed together
at an agricultural park near downtown Los Angeles. Organizers for
this one where James Morley and former promoted a football coach,
Walter Hempele. This particular wreck didn't go all that well.
The engineers tried to extort extra pay from the organizers.
(21:26):
In the middle of the event, they were doing a
prolonged run up to the actual crash, in which they'd
run the trains at one another and then stop them
before a collision. The engineers thought it would probably be
impossible to find replacements in the literal middle of the event,
so they asked for an extra three hundred and fifty dollars.
Organizers managed to find replacements with no problem, though in general,
(21:50):
engineers were pretty eager to volunteer, so the original engineers
were fired and then the event proceeded as planned. He
had the idea that you would get to just on
purpose run a locomotive that was normally where you had
to spend your working life into another locomotive and just
smash it to pieces. Like that apparently was attractive to
(22:10):
a number of engineers. Um and I really didn't find
any indication that any of them were seriously injured while
doing this, although I did find one that was an
engineer who fell while trying to jump free of the
locomotive and sprained his ankle. So uh. In this event
(22:30):
at the Agricultural Park near downtown Los Angeles, the locomotives
did run into each other whistles blaring, but the end
result was pretty anticlimactic because they just sort of shammed
into each other with a thud and then stopped and
nothing derailed and nothing caught on fire and nothing exploded,
and so people were not particularly impressed. And these are
just some examples. There were lots and lots of others,
(22:53):
and there's actually footage of several of them on YouTube.
We're gonna link to that footage in the show notes.
Next start going to talk about some ideas about why
maybe this caught on so well. So for roughly thirty
(23:16):
or forty years, staged train wrecks were a really big
deal in the midwestern and southwestern parts of the United States.
The biggest crowd reported at one of these events was
a hundred and sixty thousand people, and attendance was routinely
in the tens of thousands. The town of Crush had
about the same population of as Dallas or San Antonio
(23:38):
for the few hours that it existed. In nine twenty,
a staged wreck on opening day of the Minnesota State
Fair doubled the fairs first day attendants from the year before.
All of this happened at a time when getting somewhere
was a lot less comfortable and convenient than it can
be today. This has led some people to speculate as
(24:00):
to why this all caught on so well. One aspect
was certainly the marketing organizers promoted their events heavily, getting
lots of fanciful coverage and newspapers, and there was often
a political theme to the decorations on the trains themselves.
In addition to the ones that we talked about already
earlier in this show, a stage direck pitted locomotives dubbed
(24:21):
evolution and fundamentalism. After the Scopes trial in there was
also a showdown between the National Recovery Act, part of
the New Deal versus Old Man Depression at the Minnesota
State Fair in nineteen thirty three, and for some people
the attraction was related more to the general politics of
the day than any specific political issue. There was a
(24:44):
general idea that locomotives were symbols of big businesses and
industries that were taking advantage of people and ruining the landscape,
and so it was really fun to think about their
destroying one another. And then, of course there is this
fact that humanity has kind of a morbid fascination with destruction.
There's a complicated set of emotional and psychological responses that
(25:06):
feed into the general human trait of morbid curiosity. In
the decades after Stage train wrecks, there were demolition Derby's,
monster truck rallies, a whole slew of disaster films, true
crime shows, and on and on. These are all still
moneymakers in many cases. Yep. I mean, I think the
thing that strikes me as so weird about the train
(25:28):
part is that locomotives are just so big. They like,
that's a lot of metal smashing together and then doing
I don't know something to the scrap heap or whatever, uh,
which you know, may made it seem a little odder
to me than a demolition Derby or a monster truck
rally or whatever. But also, I mean, people do just do,
(25:50):
as we have shown in our some past episodes of
the show, people go on onto weird stuff. Sometimes. I
think that's also a factor. This is the kind of
episode that happens when you're looking for something a little
less heavy to write about and you google weird fads. Right,
(26:11):
I've done similar things. Uh, yeah, it is. It's a
I'm trying to think if there would ever be like
a modern day equivalent attempted, Like, would anybody ever go,
let's try to crash planes together. I don't know how
you would possibly orchestrate such a thing, but that sounds
(26:32):
very scary. Yes, well, and suddenly I just remembered when, um,
when I was also a kid. In addition to having
the elementary school Halloween carnivals where you could smash old
cars with a baseball bat, um, whenever the fire department
would be conducting training by burning down a derelict building
and extinguishing the fire, like, there would always be a
(26:55):
crowd to watch that. Oh, anytime there's a building demolished,
there's a crowd. We had one in Atlanta not long ago,
and everyone who lived in Atlanta had it all over
their social media because they got up at an ungodly
hour to go look at it. We're blowing stuff up.
I mean, I then feel very tame for like being
like what happens when you put a CD in a microwave.
(27:19):
By the way, it's very pretty. Thank you so much
for joining us today for this classic. If you have
heard any kind of email address or maybe a Facebook
you are l during the course of the episode, that
might be obsolete. It might be doubly obsolete because we
have changed our email address again. You can now reach
(27:40):
us at History podcast at i heart radio dot com,
and we're all over social media at missed in History,
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
Google podcast the I heart Radio app, and wherever else
you listen to podcasts. Stuffy miss In History Class is
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
(28:02):
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