Six Impossible Episodes by Request

This installation of Six Impossible Episodes is a bit of a hodge podge, with several oft-requested topics. Included are Olive Yang, the Silent Parade of 1917, Glencoe Massacre, Marion Downs, Lena Himmelstein and the Great Windham Frog Fight of 1754.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. It is
time for six Impossible episodes. Our last few six Impossibles

(00:22):
have had a running theme. We had a set of
six stories that were about frontline heroism from soldiers and spies,
and before that we had six episodes that sound a
lot like episodes we had already done. Before that, there
were six stories that might have been apocryphal, maybe not.
And so today we once again have six short stories.

(00:44):
As these things go, but this time it's kind of
a hodgepodge. These are all frequent requests, several of them
very heavily requested, and we're going to talk about them
all in one go. Um, they don't have a lot
of thematic commonality among one another except the fact that
people have asked us to talk about them. And just

(01:04):
a quick note that a couple of these are quite violent,
and the first one includes a couple of brief mentions
of rape and sexual assault. So first up in July
of this year, which we are recording in, we got
a whole lot of requests via email and social media
to do a podcast about Olive Yang. Yang died on

(01:24):
July thirteenth at the age of ninety, and their obituary
got a lot of attention. Yang was born Yang Kin
sue In and what was then British Burma and is
now more commonly known as Myan mar This was in
the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, that's our region along
the border of jan Mart, Laos and Thailand, was a

(01:45):
major supplier in the global opium trade for a lot
of the twentieth century. Yang was descended from the royal
house of the Shan state of ko Lang, but the
family fled the region during Japanese invasions in World War Two.
Yang defied gender expectations and was described as a tomboy,
wearing boy's clothes and carrying guns, and having no desire

(02:07):
at all to marry or become a mother. In their
later years, Olive, whose native language has no gendered pronouns uh,
what asked to be called Uncle Yang. And all of
this together is why for this episode we are going
with the pronoun they when we reference Olive. In spite
of their protests, Yang was forced into an arranged marriage

(02:27):
with a younger cousin. Yang's mother died before the wedding
day and their father was in very ill health, But
the wedding went on as planned, and Yang then left
with this unwanted duty of providing an air refused to
do it, reportedly throwing a chamber pot at the groom
on their wedding night. Yang's son Jipou was ultimately conceived

(02:49):
through marital rape. Even before Gepoo was born, Yang had
already left the family and fallen in with bandits and
opium traders. With a reputation Asian for a fiery temper
and always being armed, they wound up being offered the
command of an army of three hundred men. On the
way in a take command, Yang's caravan encountered some drunken

(03:11):
officers trying to extort bribes, so Yang kidnapped the officers
and brought them along the rest of the way to
the outpost. This ruffled some feathers. Yeah, there's a lot
of I'm gonna do what I want, and then people
being like, okay, that was maybe maybe that that is
going to raise some eyebrows. After gp was born in

(03:33):
the one, Yang left him with a wet nurse he
went on to be raised by a series of uncles.
Yang then turned their attention to developing the trade routes
that would turn the region into the world's largest supplier
of opium for a time, commanding a fighting force of
up to a thousand men and developing a reputation for
being particularly fierce. During the Cold War, the United States

(03:56):
wanted to influence policy and military outcomes in parts of
the war world where it wasn't really supposed to be operating,
and this was especially true when it came to attempts
to stop or roll back the spread of communism. Without
the ability to publicly intervene, the United States instead turned
to a number of covert programs to try to achieve

(04:16):
the same end. One of these was codenamed Operation Paper,
in which the CIA funded and armed various militias, most
of them involved in opium trafficking. These forces included remnants
of the Chinese Nationalist Army Cooman Tang or KMT, which
had been defeated by Mao Zedong in nineteen forty nine.

(04:38):
Some of the KMT were under Yang's command. Yang's troops
were on the receiving end of these covert air drops
at least once. In nineteen fifty two, Yang's force crossed
the border into Thailand illegally to retrieve weapons that had
been dropped by an unmarked CIA owned aircraft. The government
of what was then Burma complained to the UN General Assembly.

(04:58):
Yang was later arrested sentenced to five years in prison.
A couple of years after being released, Yang took over
the former army of their elder brother, who had advocated
his role in the Shan government, and thus became the
region's de facto leader. In nineteen sixty three, Yang was
captured again and spent more than six years in prison,

(05:19):
much of it in solitary confinement. They later reported to
relatives that they were repeatedly tortured and sexually abused while
behind bars. After their second release from prison, Yang found
that one of their lieutenants, Losing Han, had essentially taken
over the opium trade that Yang had built. Losing Han
wound up being a far more notorious name in the

(05:40):
opium trade than Yang did, at least until more recently.
Following some news coverage, Yang described themselves as a lesbian,
and their relationships were often the fodder of gossip columns
and tabloids. Including a reported relationship with actress Wah Wah
Win Schui in ten Win Schwi did nine that really
lationship in spite of having lived in a house that

(06:02):
Yang owned and giving the interview in question in a
rebuilt house that sat on the same property. Not all
of Yang's life was so notorious or sensationalized. Though later
on their active time and the opium trade was essentially over,
but Yang still had really extensive connections within all of
these criminal organizations, which led to their being recruited to

(06:23):
try to negotiate peace agreements with those organizations on behalf
of the government. So obviously there is a lot going
on here. Al of Yang is a fascinating and complicated
character who was connected to the opium trade, international dispute,
and covert CIA programs. Me and mar has been in
the news a lot over the last few years, but

(06:45):
for a range of reasons, its history hasn't really been
covered on our show. So it's not surprising at all
that people asked for more. But here's the thing about
trying to make a whole episode about all of Yang.
In terms of what's available in English, pretty much all
of this information goes back to reporting done by Gabrielle Poluke,
which was picked up and redistributed by the World from

(07:06):
p r I. Other outlets that picked it up from
there either go back to Poluke's reporting or to Poluke
herself in interviews. So it's clear from all of this
reporting that other information about al of Yeng exists, but
most of that isn't really information that we can get
to as an English speaking podcast on the other side
of the world. And Poluke is reportedly working on a

(07:28):
book according to the Washington Post, about all of this,
and we would absolutely read that. We absolutely want that's
going to be a running theme in this show. There
are going to be several people who if there were
you know, uh and uh maybe not official, but if
there were a comprehensive biography on their life, then probably
we could do a complete episode. And they are all
biographies that I would jump on the opportunity to read.

(07:51):
Next up, we have another request that came in from
a lot of people thanks to the Internet, and that
was the nineteen seventeen Silent Parade, which was also the
subject of a Google Doodle, which is what led so
many people to ask about it. The Silent Parade, known
at the time as the Negro Silent Protest Parade was
a protest that took place on July seventeen on Fifth

(08:13):
Avenue in New York City. The n double a CP
organized this protest in response to Jim Crow Laws, ongoing
lynchings and a riot in East St. Louis in which
a white mob had killed more than one hundred black
residents and destroyed the homes of about six thousand more.
The riot had taken place over July one through the third,

(08:33):
and that had been sparked in part by striking white
workers resentment that black strikebreakers were replacing them at a
box site processing plants. So taken from the letter that
was distributed in advance of the march, sort of as
instructions quote, we marched because, by the grace of God
and the force of truth, the dangerous hampering walls of
prejudice and inhuman injustices must fall. We marched because we

(08:57):
want to make impossible a repetition of way go Memphis
and East St. Louis by rousing the conscience of the
country and bring the murderers of our brothers, sisters, and
innocent children to justice. We marched because we deem it
a crime to be silenced in the face of such
barbaric acts. So that goes on with all of the
reasons that they are marching, and they also gets into

(09:18):
procedures for the march. And then the letter ended quote
Yours in righteous indignation, Reverend Chaz Martin, Secretary. A list
of mottoes, first signs and banners was distributed in advance
of the march as well, including make America Safe for democracy, Mothers,
do lynchers go to Heaven, two hundred thousand black men

(09:39):
fought for your liberty in the Civil War, and Tracy's
favorite pray for the Lady Macbeth's of East St. Louis. Uh.
There have been a couple of different interpretations that have
been circulated for that last one, one being that it
referenced the white women of St. Louis who had egged
on the mob. So about ten thousand people, all of
them black, partici the pated in the silent March. The

(10:02):
organizers went first, and then children and then women who
were all dressed in white, followed by all the men
who were in dark suits. The protesters included W. E. B.
Du Bois and James Walton Johnson, James Weldon Johnson later
wrote about it and his autobiography, saying, quote, the streets
of New York have witnessed many strange sites, but I
judge never one stranger than this. Among the watchers were

(10:24):
those with tears in their eyes. This was certainly an
important event in civil rights history. It was one of
the first, if not the first, non violent mass protest
against racism and racist violence. And the fact that all
the marchers were black was also important. At this point,
most civil rights organizations and activities were integrated, in part

(10:45):
because the idea was so contentious that seeing white people
involved made it somewhat more palatable to other white people.
Having white people involved also offered at least some degree
of protection, Like there are so many stories about violence
during the civil rights movement, and this is a little
bit earlier than what a lot of people think of
as the movement. Um, So it wasn't a guarantee of safety,

(11:09):
but it was like a slight measure of safety sometimes.
So it's likely that there's enough information about this march,
and archives are special collections to make it into a
whole episode. But in terms of what's publicly available to
us right now, that's the overview and we're gonna have
some more stories, but first we're gonna pause for a
little sponsor break. Next up on our list. We have

(11:36):
gotten several requests for the Massacre of Glencoe, including from
Haga and Neil Ramona, ros Leia Megan, and almost certainly others,
and a lot of these came in around the time
of the Game of Thrones episode The Reigns of Castomir,
which also led to requests for another historical event known
as the Black Dinner. The Glencoe Massacre was one of

(11:58):
many bloody events in Scottish history that followed in the
wake of the Glorious Revolution. We talked more about the
Glorious Revolution in our podcast on the Jacobite Rising of
seventy five, and we will link to that in the
show notes, but very briefly, King James the seventh of
Scotland and second of England was Catholic, and when he
had a son, James Francis Edward Stewart, Protestants became concerned

(12:21):
about having another Catholic in the line of succession. So
Protestants in Scotland and elsewhere had hoped that James would
die without an heir and then be succeeded by a
Protestant monarch. With that no longer a possibility, some prominent
Protestants got in touch with William of Orange and basically
invited him and his army to come to England and
take over. So he did, and William and his wife

(12:42):
Mary became monarchs in sixteen eighty nine. Obviously, that's very
highly condensed. That's the speed round version. A number of
Scottish clans remained loyal to King James into the House
of Stewart for both political and religious reasons. This was
the basis for the Jacobite movement that we cover in
that previous episode and just f y I also makes

(13:03):
up the first chunk of the Outlander TV show and books.
The new monarchs, William and Mary, recognizing the threat that
that the Jacobites posed both to their reign and to
the overall stability of the kingdom, tried to secure the
Scottish clans loyalty. It took a very stick and carrot approach.
They offered an indemnity to the clans that agreed to
sign an oath of allegiance to them, while authorizing attacks

(13:26):
against the clans that didn't. As time went on, though
the focus got a lot more heavily on the stick
than on the carrot. This deadline for signing this oath
of allegiance was January one of six, and this presented
a number of logistical problems. Most clan chiefs needed to
travel somewhere to sign the oath in the presence of

(13:46):
a magistrate or sheriff, and winter in Scotland made that
rather difficult. Also, many of the clans had already sworn
an oath to James Stewart and they couldn't sign another
one until they were released from that first oath, and
that didn't happen until mid December. So a number of factors,
including travel, weather and the magistrate not actually being present

(14:08):
when they got there, Captain McDonald's of glen Coe from
meeting the January first deadline. Alistair McLean, chief of the clan,
arrived in time to do the signing, but he couldn't
actually do it until January six. Alistair McLean was not
the only chief in the area who missed the deadline,
but for whatever reason, he was the only one who
was not included in an indemnity that was issued for

(14:30):
everyone who had Instead. McLean and the McDonald's of glen
co were subject to punishment by the quote utmost extremity
of the law. It may have just been an oversight
or an intentional effort to make an example of the
McDonald's of glen Cove for having been publicly loyal to
the Stewarts, but the elements of that are still unclear. Regardless,

(14:53):
and early February, soldiers arrived at glen Coe seeking shelter.
They reported that they had been assigned to Fort will Um,
which was not too far away, only to find that
the fort was already past capacity. So the soldiers were
billeted in the McDonald's homes, and then on February thirteenth,
starting at about five in the morning, the soldiers, along
with others who joined them from Fort William, massacred members

(15:16):
of the McDonald plan there in their homes. Alistair McLaine
was the first to be killed, while he was rising
from his bed by soldiers who were his guests. About
thirty eight people were killed in the massacre on the thirteenth,
but since the soldiers also burned people's homes, many more
died of exposure. After the actual conflict was over three

(15:38):
years later, a Scottish Parliamentary Commission described it as quote
murder under trust. The Campbell clan has long taken the
blame for having orchestrated and executed this whole thing. There
was certainly a long standing feud between the Campbells and
the McDonald's, and the Campbells were heavily represented among the
military units that committed the massacre. But the Jacobite backdown

(16:00):
was really a much bigger issue than the Campbell McDonald feud.
The Campbells might have, and some would say definitely did,
taken the opportunity to exact some kind of justice after
years of skirmishes and cattle raids, but it was really
William and Mary who put such a sharp focus on
rooting out the Jacobites in the first place. We didn't

(16:20):
do a full episode about this one, largely because the
Game of Thrones episode that prompted so many requests came
out in at which point you couldn't turn around without
running into an article about the Glencoe massacre, so ours
kind of would have been redundant, And after that it
started to feel like the moment had really passed. That
was even more true after we did our show on

(16:41):
the Jacobite rising of since it covers so much of
the same territory. The Black Dinner, on the other hand,
which is the other thing that everyone asked us to
talk about in response to this Game of Thrones episode
that's often summed up as a paragraph, so we are
going to include it. This kind of a bonus seventh
Impossible episode. In four team forty, sixteen year old William,

(17:02):
Earl of Douglas and his younger brother David were invited
to visit King James the Second of Scotland, who was
then ten, at Edinburgh Castle. So yes, this is a
completely different King James and the one we were talking
about earlier in this segment. After being served the head
of a black bull, which was a symbol of death,
the two boys were taken out into the yard, given

(17:22):
a mock trial, convicted of treason, and beheaded. All of
this connects to an ongoing power struggle between the monarch
and the Douglas clan. At this point really more like
the monarch's advisors because the monarch himself was only ten
uh So basically the idea was that they were trying
to check the Douglas influence. But the whole story is
really full of said to have and may have been,

(17:45):
and it's really not clear who arranged this or what
their endgame was. Now to completely change gears, Oh yeah,
we're like so completely, so get ready because if you
may have a bump as we grind through the um.
Next up, Marian Downs, who is known as the mother
of pediatric audiology and requested most recently by Lee and Megan.

(18:09):
Unlike so many other doctors we've talked about on the show,
Downs didn't spend her whole life planning to go into medicine.
She dropped out of college in the nineteen thirties to
get married and have children, which was really common among
female undergraduates at the time. Once her children got a
little older, though, she decided she wanted to go back
to school. And this was right after the end of

(18:29):
World War Two, when colleges and universities were flooded with
returning soldiers pursuing an education under the g I Bill.
So when Downs went to register for classes at the
University of Denver, she picked a course of study by
finding the shortest line, and that line was for speech
pathology and audiology. Now didn't really know what that was

(18:49):
when she enrolled but she really excelled at it, and
she's known today for her pioneering work in infant hearing screenings.
I love when someone just sort of stumbles a degree
and exactly what happened has doubled into the short line
of greatness. Uh. In terms of the brain, a person's
language ability develops a lot in their first two years

(19:10):
of life, regardless of whether that language is verbal or
non verbal. And when Down started practicing, most children didn't
really get their hearing checked until they were three or
four years old, and even then that was usually because
the child's parent was concerned that perhaps their speech was delayed.
And Downs thought this was a huge disservice, that missing
out on those early years of language development was actually

(19:33):
setting people up for lifelong trouble with all aspects of communication,
including reading, and she was, of course right. So she
started testing children's hearing while they were still babies and
fitting them with hearing aids when they were as young
as a year old if they needed one. She encountered
a lot of resistance to this, in addition to everything

(19:53):
that comes along with being one of very few women
in a male dominated field. Other doctor insisted that a
child's brain wasn't ready to handle a hearing aid until
age three or four, and that her work was damaging.
From a neurology perspective, Downs was right. Her naysayers were
wrong that that just refusing to fit children with hearing

(20:16):
aids meant that the people who were hard of hearing
and with a little support could learn to, you know,
listen and speak, like just denying that brain development time
for a couple of years meant that the brain development
wasn't happening at all. In nineteen sixty three, Down started
the first systematic infant hearing screening program in Denver, Colorado. Today,

(20:38):
percent of children born at hospitals and birthing centers in
the United States have their hearing tested as soon as
they are born, maybe not literally the delivery room, but
before they leave the hospital or birthing center, they have
a screening. So these tests, of course, are very different
today than they were in the sixties. When Downs was
creating her testing protocol, she was using a device to

(20:59):
play specific sounds and then observing babies responses to them.
So some of the cues that she was looking for
could be really subtle, especially in newborns. There were things
like blinking or widening, their eyes are moving a little bit,
so you have to be really good at observation. Today,
the screening is usually use a device that plays a
tone into the ear and then measures basically the echo

(21:22):
from the inner ear. That's a bit of a simplification,
but it's an analogy. Another test which is often done
if that first one UH suggests that the child might
have hearing loss, that one measures like the actual brain
stem response to sounds using little sort of electrode attachments.
And today there's also some debate about what the best
strategy should be for deaf and heart of hearing babies,

(21:45):
But at this point there is a lot of evidence
backing up the fact that there needs to be some
kind of strategy. Children who don't begin to learn language
in their first months of life really miss out on
critical brain development and the effects of that missing space
are lifelong. Yeah, there's a whole a hole at this
point body of research about everything from you know, the

(22:06):
ability to comprehend language to be able to express themselves,
to children who don't begin to learn some sort of language,
either verbal or nonverbal, having trouble reading and not being
able to to read well. For basically the rest of
their life. So in addition to her work as a doctor,
Downs was also a teacher. She published nearly a hundred
books and articles on audiology during her career. Towards the

(22:30):
end of her life, she also wrote shut Up and
Live You know How, a ninety three year old skuide
to living to her rifled age. I kind of want
to read it now. Uh. Downs died on November at
the age of one hundred, having made a lot of
advances in the world of audiology while also surviving a
plane crash, traveling all over the world, playing tennis, skiing,

(22:52):
and narrowly avoiding being blown up by a grenade during
the Vietnam War. It is clear that she was both
a medical trailblazer and a character or and somebody that
chooses her life course based on the like for it.
But there's more medical than personal information available about her
at this point. So maybe someday someone will write her
biography and we would certainly read that book as well. Ye,

(23:15):
We're gonna take another quick sponsor break before we talk
about our last two impossible episodes. For our last two segments,
we're going to start with one that came in as
either a post or a comment on our Facebook page,
and I didn't immediately write down who said it, which
sadly means that's now lost forever. Facebook comments and posts

(23:39):
are the hardest things to try to track down later on.
So thank you whoever asked us to talk about Lena Himmelstein,
who was the founder of Lane Bryant. Himmelstein was born
in a stettle in Lithuania. Her parents died when she
was young, and she was raised by her grandparents. She
immigrated to the and In States when she was sixteen,

(24:01):
joining her older sister Anna, and the two of them
worked in a sweatshop. Haimilstein married a jeweler named David
Bryant in They had a son together, who they named Rafael,
but David died not long after Rafael's birth. Widowed and
without a source of income, Hamilstein returned to sewing, this
time opening a dress shop where she focused on making

(24:24):
expensive dresses and lingerie, which were euphemistically called bridal sets.
In seven a customer asked her to design a maternity dress,
and this was at the time a new concept in
American fashion. People generally wore their regular clothes during pregnancy,
letting out the seams or adding extra material to make

(24:44):
more room because they're belly swelled and they needed different
garments fits During very advanced pregnancy. When this was not practical,
people who could afford to typically just stayed at home.
But a lot of people couldn't afford to just stay
home while pregnant, and there was this huge unmet need
for a practical, modest, comfortable maternity garment that was appropriate

(25:06):
to be warned to work. So Haimilstein's first design was
a simple adjustable dress that used pleats and elastic to
expand as needed, and it was an immediate success. When
she realized how much demand there was for maturity clothing,
Haimilstein branched out into more designs, using elastic and flared
skirts and draw strings, sashes and ties to try to

(25:27):
fashion dresses that were comfortable, expandable, and often also concealing.
Many of them were designed to still be wearable, sometimes
with a little bit of alteration after the baby was born.
This concealment of pregnancy was actually a really big deal.
In the first decades of Himilstein's business, people who could
afford it replaced their regular coursets with maternity coursets which

(25:49):
were designed to both support the figure and conceal the
appearance of pregnancy, and you can actually buy these at
a number of retailers, including Lane Bryant. As I was
looking to see if I can find a picture of her,
or like a good historical picture of a of an
old storefront or something, I kept finding all of these
maternity corset ads and they were all on scans of

(26:11):
newspaper pages, and there would be three or four other
maternity corset ads right around there. So maternity course it's
hot item at the time. In two Himilstein remarried Lithuanian
American mechanical engineer Albert Malson. They eventually had three children together.
Milson started working on the financial and logistical side of
the business, helping it to expand, and the business incorporated

(26:35):
as Lane Bryant Incorporated in nineteen sixteen, when she had
opened her first bank account for the business. Back in
those earlier days of that first dress shop, her name
had been Lena Bryant, but the bank misspelled it as
Lane and the name just stuck. So was she going
by that name? Nope, Nope, I don't think she personally

(26:55):
was going by the name, but it was just the
business name. But yeah that when the bank misspelled it
on her her business account, that definitely stuck for the
business name Gotcha. Sales grew rapidly, from fifty thousand dollars
to five million dollars between nineteen o nine and ninety three.
In nineteen seventeen, she also branched out from Eternity, where

(27:18):
in two plus sized clothing, this time after having measured
thousands of women and found that they all generally fit
into one of three body types, so she made clothing
in larger sizes for each of those types. By nineteen
sixty nine, lane Bryant had more than a hundred stores,
and this was in spite of cultural taboos that had
prevented Hamilstein herself from being able to advertise in the

(27:41):
earliest years of the business. Most of her early advertising
was done through word of mouth, and most of her
sales came from mail order catalogs. Even so, for decades,
most of the women in lane Bryant's advertisements were very slender.
None of them were visibly pregnant. They were basically like
people like like women in little little dresses with little

(28:03):
tiny waists, being like yes, you can expand the stress
quite a lot. Well, and that's one of those things
that's even carried through into the modern era. Only in
the fairly recent era in plus sized catalogs have models
been anything over like a twelve. So it's changing now,
but slowly, but but happening. Yes. In addition to designing

(28:29):
and selling clothing for populations that were not really being
served by the fashion industry, Lena Hamilstein was also on
the forefront of labor rights for retail employees. During her
time at the company's helm, employees received reimbursements for medical care,
along with pensions, life insurance, disability coverage, and profit sharing.

(28:49):
She was also a philanthropist, donating to the Hebrew Immigrant
Aid Society and the New York Federation of Jewish Philanthropies,
among others. Hamilstein died on September nineteen fifty one, at
which point Lane Bryant was the largest plus sized clothing
retailer in the United States. And in today's running theme,
if someone wrote a full biography of Lena Haimilstein, I

(29:12):
would read that for sure. Uh, and now once again
another gear change. Uh. We're gonna go out on a
much later note. Courtesy of our listener Mike, and that
is the Great Wyndham Frog Fight of seventeen fifty four.
At least it's lighter if you're not especially uh soft
on frogs or really love okay, if you if you

(29:32):
like frogs a lot, or just animals in general. Not
so much of a lighter story. But it is really weird.
So things weren't going too well in Wyndham, Connecticut in
the summer of seventeen fifty four. The French and Indian
War has started that May, and the region had also
been beset by rout and then on one particularly muggy
night in June, I did not find anywhere that specified

(29:55):
what night in June specifically, residents were arra find out
of their beds by a horrible, inexplicable cacophony. People heard
all kinds of shouts among the clamor and they sounded
like calls for rum or gin, or the names of
the town's militia leaders, or the names of the people listening,

(30:17):
or war cries from an invading army, or the trumpets
on Judgment Day. Sometimes people call it the frog Fright
because it was so very frightening. There was just so
much noise. Some of the local militia did take up
arms and fire into the darkness, but that had little effect.
By morning, though the sound had died down. After dawn,

(30:38):
the residents of Wyndham left their homes to find hundreds
of bull frogs belly up all over the place, and
they eventually concluded that they had been fighting over the
last remnant of water in a nearly dry pond, and
that those frogs fighting had caused all of this noise.
We're also taking with a grain of salt how many

(30:59):
frog they're really were, because we only have the accounts
of people who were frightened out of their wits. Uh
So this became a weirdly popular story. In the eighteenth century.
The town put a frog on its official seal. There
were poems and ballads and even an operetta written about it.

(31:20):
The Windham Bank even issued money with a pair of frogs,
one living in one dead, with the living one kind
of like lording over the dead one in a position
of victory in the lower right corner. Today Wyndham is
known as Willomantic, and there's a bridge over the Willomantic
River has giant bronze frog sculptures on it. So that's

(31:43):
basically the whole story why that's why we're not doing
a whole episode on it. It's very weird, but there
there's just not not a lot more there. I like
how it's like the frog spooked us real bad and
now it's our town identity. Exactly what happened? Do you

(32:06):
have some listener mails? Sure you? Uh? And this is
from Kara and it goes back all the way back
to our Her Nana's Versus Texas episode which was earlier
this fall, and Kara says, Hi, Holly and Tracy, I
love the show. I listened on my way to work,
and I love finding out new and interesting things on
my commute. I had honestly thought I would never have

(32:28):
a reason to write in about an episode because I
thought that my life and experience did not particularly intersect
with history. But then I heard your episode on Her
Nanda's Versus Texas. I was delighted to hear a brief
reference to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. I'm a lawyer,
and after graduating from law school, I clerked for a
judge on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. A clerkship

(32:50):
is a one or two year position where a generally
newly graduated lawyer assists a judge by reviewing petitions, doing research,
advising the judge, and helping to draft a pit unions.
My time with this little known court was very interesting
and I'm so glad for the experience. I still fondly
remember eating my lunch on a bench outside the Texas
State Capital nearly every day when looking at the beautiful

(33:11):
flowers that are planted there. Here's a bit of legal trivia.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals is one of only
two high courts that exclusively here's criminal cases in Texas.
The Texas Supreme Court Here's only civil that is, non
criminal cases, while the Court of Criminal Appeals is at
the same level as the Texas Supreme Court, Here's only
criminal cases. This explains why Hernandez appealed directly from the

(33:35):
c c A to the U. S. Supreme Court and
did not go to the Texas Supreme Court. Uh. And
then it follows with a plug for an episode idea
and then kerasas thanks for all you do, Kara, Thank
you so much. Kara. I am so glad that uh
that we had got this email, because I was actually
curious about why the case had gone from the Texas

(33:58):
Court of Criminal Appeal, which just by its name suggests
that it is an appeals court that would probably be
like a rung below a Supreme court. Um why I
had gone directly from that to the U. S. Supreme Court.
So I was very glad to learn that reason, which
is one of those like details that I did not
look up at the time because it was not completely

(34:19):
pertinent to what we're talking about. So thank you so
much Kieff for writing in. Also feel free to write
in just to say hello. We love those emails too. Yes, indeed,
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast where History podcast at how stuff
works dot com. We're also on Facebook and uh, Twitter
and Pinterest and Instagram, all of those at Missed in

(34:42):
History is our name there, UH you can come to
our website, which is missed in History dot com and
you will find the show notes to all the episodes
that Holly and I have done together in a searchable
archive of all the episodes. Ever, so come and see
us at missed History dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit how stop works dot com.