June 12, 2019 • 31 mins
The P.S. General Slocum burned in the East River in New York on June 15, 1904. It had been chartered for a group outing that suddenly became a deadly maritime disaster.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Racy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying.
The ps General Slocum burned in the East River in
New York on June n o four, so a hundred
(00:22):
and fifteen years ago this month, and this disaster has
also been a really frequent listener request, including from Kell, Suzanne, Linda,
Jesse Tory, and Michael Um. It has some similarities to
the East Lynn disaster, which we talked about on the
show a couple of years ago. Both of these vessels
had been chartered for a group outing that turned into
(00:43):
just a deadly maritime disaster very suddenly. Both of these
were also topics that I knew from the start we're
going to be tragic, but then turned out to be
even worse than I imagined them. The paddle steamer General
Slocum was built in It was named after Henry Warner
Slocum of New York, who had served as a general
(01:03):
in the Union Army during the Civil War. The ship
was one of two steamers owned by the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company,
the other being the Grand Republic. It was a large
wooden sidewheel steamer with three decks. The General Slocum was
licensed to carry up to passengers, and when it was
first launched it was a modern, luxurious vessel, but by
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nineteen o four it was really starting to show its age,
although it had been regularly repainted over the years, including
shortly before the disaster, but it also passed an inspection
on May five of nineteen o four. The Slocum was
an excursion boat intended for making short trips around New
York's waterways from the spring through the fall. In the
early part of the season, people could charter the whole
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vessel for a flat fee. Starting around the beginning of July,
it operated as a ferry on the Rockaway Route, connecting Manhattan, Brooklyn,
and Rockaway on Long Island. For its June fifteenth, nineteen
o r trip, it had been chartered by St. Mark's
Evangelical Lutheran Church at a cost of three hundred fifty dollars.
The church was hosting its annual picnic to celebrate the
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end of the school year, and most of the people
who were attending were church members who lived in Manhattan's
Lower east side. They lived in a neighborhood known as
Klein deutsche Land or Little Germany, because of a very
large population of German immigrants and their descendants who lived there.
At the time, this was one of the largest German
American communities in the United States. About one thousand, three
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hundred fifty eight passengers were aboard the Slocum on the
day of the disaster. The exact number is actually an estimate,
since there were tickets for this excursion, but babies didn't
need one, and sometimes multiple children were brought aboard on
one ticket. Since the picnic was being held on a Wednesday,
most of the adult passengers were women. The men and
the families were more likely to be at work. Overall,
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more than half the people aboard were children, and only
between fifty and one fifty of the passengers were adult men.
These passengers were in high spirits, dressed in their Sunday
best and prepared for a two hour cruise along the
East River from the Third Street Recreation Pier to the
north shore of Long Island. Once they got there, they
would spend the day at a picnic ground called Locust Grove.
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They had food and a bar on the boat along
with entertainment provided by a band that was playing on
the promenade deck. Although they embarked generally as families, once
people were aboard, parents were totally comfortable letting their children
go off on their own and play together. They left
the dock between nine thirty and nine forty in the morning.
In command was the Captain William H. Van Shaik, with
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first pilot Edward van Wort and second pilot Edwin Weaver.
Van Shaike had been aboard the General Slocum since its
launch and had a reputation for being safe and careful,
but he was also in his sixties and the General
Slocum had been through a number of incidents and accidents
over the years, so some people thought that it was
maybe time for him to retire. Not long into this journey,
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of fires started in the forward compartment on the main deck.
It's not clear exactly how because there were just so
many possible sources. The forward compartment was being used as
both a storage room and a lamp room. Machine oil
for the mechanical systems was stored in the forward compartment
as well, along with two bags of charcoal and various rubbish.
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There were lots of other flammable materials in this wooden compartment,
including three open barrels of glassware that were packed in hay.
Those had been brought aboard for the excursion. This was
also where a member of the crew filled and maintained
the lamps using a makeshift table made of wooden planks
laid over a couple of trestles. In the course of
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this work, the floor of the compartment had been covered
in a thin layer of oil. There had also been
an open flame in this room at several points over
the course of the morning. The compartment itself had electric lighting,
as did other parts of the ship, but that morning
the porter who was responsible for filling the lamps had
found the room to be very dark, so he had
lit one of the lamps using a match. He later
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testified that he could extinguish the match, and he had
thrown it down on a bench. Someone else had been
working on part of the mechanical system in the room,
using an open torch as a light source. People also
lit matches and had other open flame in the room
for all kinds of reasons, something that was just inherently
dangerous given what was in there. Shortly after the fire started,
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the general slogan was approaching a narrow part of the
East River known as Hellgate. About that time, a boy
noticed smoke coming from near the forward cabin. He told
a member of the crew, who apparently thought that the
child was playing some kind of prank and told him
to mind his business. A few minutes after that, other
members of the crew saw smoke coming from the forward cabin,
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and they realized there was a fire and started trying
to put it out. The ship's firefighting equipment included a
standpipe and hoses. The standpipe and its valves were in
good working order, but the hoses were mostly old, cheap
linen hoses. Members of the crew attached a piece of
this old hose to the valve near the forward compartment
and asked the engineering room to send water through the standpipe,
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but as soon as the water hit that hose, it
shattered in multiple places. There were also a couple of
newer rubber hoses on the boat, and members of the
crew got one of those to try again, but they
couldn't get that new hose to connect to the standpipe.
When they couldn't figure out why, they gave up, and
an investigation later revealed that when the first hose shattered.
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It was blown off the coupling that was holding it
onto the standpipe, but the coupling itself was still there.
In their panic, the crew members didn't realize that the
old coupling was still connected, and if they had removed
the old coupling, the new pose would have connected with
no problem. This was really the last of the cruise
effort to try to fight the fire. There were fire
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buckets on board, but they were empty and they weren't
put into use. There are also reports that a hapless
crew member dumped a bucket of charcoal onto a fire
to try to smother it. That doesn't appear in the
Federal Commission's report about the disaster, and it's such a
far fetched idea that someone would do that that it
seems almost unbelievable. At the same time, the way the
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disaster progressed from here is almost unbelievable, and we're going
to talk more about it. After we first paused for
a little break. After the fire was discovered in the
forward compartment of the PS General Slocum, it doesn't appear
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that the Captain William H. Von Schaik personally assessed what
was happening with it or gave any kind of orders
to try to get it under control. Instead, he looked
at where they were on the river and decided to
beach the ship so that people might be able to
jump to safety. The nearest land was west of the
boat in the Bronx, but this area was full of
stored lumber and gas tanks. Apparently someone warned Von Shaike
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away from it for that reason, or he decided that
landing flaming vessel there would be more dangerous than trying
to find another location. The captain ordered the pilots to
aim north northeast toward North Brother Island. This required them
to travel at full steam ahead into deep water in
the middle of the East River. So the ps General
Slocum was made almost entirely out of wood. Its middle
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deck was a promenade deck with it was mostly open
to the air, with a smaller enclosed space in the middle.
The top deck was a hurricane deck that was similarly
open to the air, and hurricane decks just get their
name from how incredibly windy attempts to be up there.
So when the vessel started bearing down toward North Brother Island,
it was full steam ahead against the wind and the
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resulting air flow across its structure quickly spread the fire
from the forward compartment toward the back of the vessel.
When the fire started, the passengers were spread all around
the ship. There were more people on the promenade deck
than in other passenger areas because that's where the band was,
and because the fire heard it in the forward compartment,
most of the passengers were behind it. That meant that
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as the boat picked up speed, the wind was spreading
the fire directly toward them. Very quickly. People started to
panic as various family members had got off to play
or socialized. People had become separated from one another, so
parents didn't know where their children were, and children couldn't
find their parents. Also, most of the people aboard could
not swim. Swimming hadn't really taken off as a pastime
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in the United States at this point, and clothing suitable
for actually swimming was not considered decent for women to
wear at all. And, as we said earlier, because this
was a nice outing, the people aboard were in their
Sunday best so as the fire spread, people had a choice.
They could jump into deep water, weighed down by their clothing,
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knowing that they could not swim, or they could stay
where they were and risk burning to death. The general
Slocum did have life preservers aboard, unlike a lot of
the other Meretime disasters that we've covered on the show.
There was a life preserver for every passenger, but these
were old. Some of them probably dated back to when
the ship was newly built. Their covers were rotten, so
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when people got them down and tried to use them,
some of them just fell completely apart in their hands.
Others had intact covers, but the cork inside had rotted
into dust, so when people jumped into the water with
these on, they just soaked up the water and became
incredibly heavy, rather than helping people to stay afloat. At
the same time, though very few of Slocum's life preservers
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were put into use, Some passengers, as we said, grabbed
a life preserver only for it to fall apart in
their hands, and then they just gave up on trying
to find another one. Also, the crew did almost nothing
to help distribute them. One testified at the coroner's inquest
that he had put one life preserver onto a person,
and that was the one that he put on himself.
(10:52):
Only about fifty life preservers were definitely used during the disaster,
twenty of them on people who drowned while wearing them.
The Slocum also had lifeboats. The boats themselves were in
generally good condition, but they weren't put into use during
the disaster either. The crew had never been trained on
how to operate them, and the mechanisms to lower them
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had been painted over and were immovable. Some of the
lifeboats were even wired down. Even if the crew had
been able to move these boats with the ship operating
at full steam ahead, they just couldn't have been lowered
safely into the water. The timeline of the disaster was
pieced together from eyewitness testimony, and it took as long
as twenty minutes from the time the fire was discovered
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to the general Slocum being beached off North Brother Island.
During that time, the fire consumed more and more of
the boat, and passengers jumped into the water. Rather than
burning to death, most drowned and some were crushed in
the paddle wheels. Then, just as the boat was reaching
North Brother Island, the starboard side of the hurricane deck
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collapsed under the weight of hundreds of passengers. Dumping all
of them directly into deep water, but beating the vessel
off North Brother Island did not allow the rest of
the passengers to jump to safety the way that the
captain had hoped that it would. The vessel came to
rest at an angle with its bowl between ten and
twenty ft from the shore. That's between three and six ms,
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but that put the stern of the boat more like
forty to sixty ft from shore or twelve to eighteen meters.
The current there was very fast. The water was way
over people's heads, and because of the way the fire
had spread, almost all the passengers were towards the very
stern of the ship, where they had to jump into
this deep, fast moving water. It's estimated that between four
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hundred and six hundred people jumped into the water and
drowned after the boat had been beached. North Brother Island
was home to a quarantine hospital for people with contagious illnesses,
and members of its staff came to the shore to
try to assist. Two nearby tug boats, the John L.
Wade and Walter Tracy, also rendered aid and probably saved
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the lives of hundreds of people. Two men incarcerated at
nearby Rikers Island compelled a doctor who was working there
to take them to the site of the wreck in
a rowboat so that they could help with the rescue,
and there were people on other boats or boats who
rode out from shore who rescued people who had jumped
into the water along the way. But even with the
prompt assistance of all these people from outside the ship,
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almost everyone aboard was injured or killed. It was the
worst single day disaster in New York until the September eleventh,
two thousand one terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
Roughly a thousand passengers died, and that was more than
seventy of the passengers aboard. Only two passengers escaped without injury. Meanwhile,
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the crew, most of whom did not try to help
stop the fire or assist the passengers, was almost unscathed.
Twenty three of the thirty crew escaped without injury and
two were killed. For a while after being beached, the
general slocum stayed in place off North Brother Island. People
who came to help were mostly able to get it extinguished,
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and for a time the number of bodies pulled from
the water was relatively small, so a lot of people.
We're hopeful that there had been a miraculous recovery of
a lot of the folks. But the East River isn't
really a river. It's a tidal estu area that connects
New York Harbor to the Long Island Sound. Consequently, it
experiences regular tides, and as the tides rose, it lifted
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the wreck, which floated about a mile before coming to
rest again off Hunt's Point, which is north of Rikers Island.
The shifting tides and currents also meant that more and
more bodies started washing ashore all along the East River,
something that continued for days. By one am on the sixteenth,
seven hundred thirty nine bodies had been recovered and sent
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to a city morgue, as well as temporary morgues on
North Brother and Rikers Islands. This disaster was catastrophic for
New York City's German American community, and it was also
obvious that something had gone call silly, unacceptably wrong. We'll
get to the disaster's aftermath after another sponsor break. The
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disaster aboard the PS General Slocum was devastating, especially in
New York's German American community. At least six hundred families
lost someone, and some families only had one surviving member,
somebody who had been at work that day instead of
on the excursion, who basically came home and found that
their whole family had died. Many of the people who
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survived had serious burns, some of which were disabling. Many
had lifelong breathing problems because of smoke inhalation and burns
to their lungs. Post traumatic stress disorder wasn't recognized until
decades later, but survivors also had ongoing effects on their
mental and emotional health. The Little Germany neighborhood of the
Lower East Side had started to coalesce in the nineteenth
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century as people left Europe in the face of famine
and unrest. The neighborhood really grew from the eighteen thirties
to the eighteen fifties, and in eighteen fifty five it
was one of the largest German communities in the world.
By nineteen o four, this community had outgrown the Lower
East Side and was starting to expand into other parts
of New York. This included people who had been born
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to that first wave of German immigrants who wanted to
get out on their own, so some of the neighborhood's
population was already moving elsewhere before this disaster happened, but
afterward the neighborhood changed dramatically. People who had lost family
members found it too painful and moved away, either to
other parts of New York or other cities, or back
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to Germany. Even for people who weren't really close to
any of the families that had been aboard, the sudden
deaths of so many children changed the character of the
neighborhood enormously. People described it as unnaturally painfully quiet. Soon
the Manhattan neighborhood of Yorkville was more associated with the
city's German community than the Lower East Side was. Other
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communities in New York were affected by the tragedy as well,
including neighboring Italian and Jewish neighborhoods, but the Lower Reassigns
German Protestant community was by far the hardest hit. St.
Mark's Lutheran Church also lost much of its congregation. That
building still stands today, and it was converted into a
synagogue in ninety Naturally, people were outraged by this incredible
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loss of life. The captain was also hospitalized due to
injuries that he sustained in the disaster, and he was
arrested while he was still in the hospital. He also
received hundreds of threatening letters. People called for investigations into
the accident and the steamboat company and the excursion boat
industry in general. A coroner's inquest was held about two
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weeks after the incident and recommended that charges be brought
against the president and directors of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company,
the captain, the company's port captain, John A. P. S,
the ship's mate, and the government inspectors who had cleared
the boat. The coroner's jury also issued the opinion that
the system for inspecting vessels in New York's harbors was
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not sufficient. Federal commission was also convened to investigate, and
they issued a report on October eighth, nineteen o four.
By that point, the General Slocum's wreckage had been raised
from the river and towed to Rikers Island to be
pumped out, and the process, the bodies of eighteen more
people were found within the wreck, including one lodged in
the wheel. The Investigation Commission personally inspected this wreckage, which
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was later sold and converted into a barge. That barge
think in New Jersey in nineteen eleven, but that time
there was no loss of life. Nearby tugboat rescued the crew,
who were the only people on board. The Commission's report
was scathing and found numerous problems that were not at
all unique to the general Slocum. To start with, it
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had been built with minimal attention to fire safety. It
had a working standpipe in the event of a fire,
and it was built with the boilers that required distance
from the wooden surfaces. Beyond that, though, fire safety did
not seem like it had been a consideration at all.
The boat didn't have fireproof bulkheads or any other feature
that might slow down or stop the spread of a fire. Instead,
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it was almost entirely a flammable vessel, covered in layers
and layers of flammable paint and varnish. The same was
true of most excursion vessels that were in use at
the time. The crew also was not trained in fire
safety or in what to do in the event of
a fire. Crews were supposed to have regular fire drills,
but the Slocum's crew had not had one in more
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than a year. Compounding this lack of training was the
fact that most of The crew were seasonal workers who
had been hired for very low pay. They had very
little training or experience, and because they've been seasonally hired,
some of them had never experienced a fire drill of
any type on any ship. Ever, they were not familiar
with basic things like what the ship's fire alarms sounded like,
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or how to put on a life preserver. Another problem
was an overall lack of maintenance, with many life preservers
and fire hoses literally rotten with age. After the General
Slocum disaster, other companies started replacing their worn out, rotten
life preservers with new stock, but that uncovered another problem.
Compressed blocks of cork were commonly used to make life preservers.
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An employee at a life preserver factory in New York
discovered that at least one cork supplier was tampering with
the product. This employee had been handling a block of
cork that was sold to them by the Non Perell
Cork Works of Camden, New Jersey, and something just didn't
feel right about it. Breaking open, the block of cork
revealed a six inch long iron bar. It's about fifteen
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centimeters and it weighed about eight ounces or more than
two grams, so life preservers were supposed to contain six
pounds of cork, but instead of selling six pound cork blocks,
this corkworks was shorting the amount of cork and making
up the difference with iron. President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a
letter to the Secretary of Commerce and Labor that went
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along with the Federal Commission's report. In it, he described
this as an offense quote so heinous a character that
it is difficult to comment upon it with proper self restraint.
It appears that the National Legislature has never enacted a
law providing in set terms for the punishment of this
particular species of infamy, doubtless because it never entered the
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head of any man. That's so gross an infamy could
be perpetrated. Sometimes when you are reading articles on the
Internet about this disaster, it'll say that the life preservers
on the Slocum had iron bars in them. That does
not appear to be the case. This appears to be
like the newly made ones that people were using to
replace the ones that clearly needed to be replaced. The
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Commission's report was also scathing in terms of the captain
and the two pilots and how they had conducted themselves
during the fire. As we noted earlier, the master of
the vessel, William H. Vansteik, doesn't appear to have evaluated
what was happening with the fire, or given any orders
about fighting it, or issued any instructions about getting the
passengers to safety. He and the boat's pilots were all
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in the pilot house when they learned about the fire.
Van Shik ordered the pilots to proceed full speed ahead.
He left the pilot house for a moment, and then
he said, upon returning, that they should beach the boat
at North Brother Island. When the boat was beached, he
jumped overboard, breaking one of his legs in the process.
So Van Shayk had failed in multiple duties that were
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his responsibility both before and during the accident. He had
not ensured that the boat and its life saving and
firefighting equipment were up to safety standards. He had not
seen to the safety of the passengers. He had not
conducted a fire or lifeboat drill that season. He had
not fulfilled any of his duties in the actual emergency,
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which included delegating responsibilities to see to the passenger safety
and ensure that they did not panic. The commission also
found that Vansheike had multiple opportunities to safely beach the
vessel much earlier, but didn't take them, and if he
had done so, the fire would have had much less
time to spread before people could evacuate. These other possible
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beaching points included Little hell Gate and Sunken Meadows, and
getting to them would have required the boat to turn
sharply to the west. Then the wind would have been
blowing across the vessel rather than down its length, which
could have helped limit the spread of the fire. Van
Shake maintained that he had learned the fire too late
to beach the ship at any of these other points,
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and that North Brother Island was their only option. It
should also be noted that he stayed at his post
in the pilot house even as it burned around him,
and his clothes caught fire. The commission also found that
the lead pilot, Edward L. Van Work, was also at
fault for the way the vessel came to rest off
North Brother Island. It had come to rest at such
an angle that there was just no way for the
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passengers to escape safely, and in the Commission's opinion, this
was either poor judgment or a lack of skill. Compounding
all of this, the testimony of the aptain and the
pilots didn't match up with the timeline that was pieced
together from other witnesses. These three men all said the
same thing, that they beached the boat off North Brother
Island less than three minutes after being informed of the fire,
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and North Brother Island was their only option, But whitness
testimony from survivors and from witnesses on other vessels and
on shore suggested that the time between when the fire
started and the vessel was beached was as long as
twenty minutes. Either no one informed the captain of what
was happening for more than ten minutes, or the captain
and pilots were trying to protect themselves by saying they
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didn't know about the fire until later. And The investigation
also found a lot of other problems as well, including
that the ship's mate did not have the required license.
It was also noted that the nature of an excursion
crowd meant that the passengers themselves really were not equipped
to take over and handle things in a crisis. They
needed to be in the care of a competent, well
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trained crew who knew how to keep their safety. In
my mind, and to quote the report quote, a very
important conclusion from this set of facts is that the
law and regulations must recognize the fact that an excursion
party must be taken care of and cannot take care
of itself. Henry Lundbergh was one of the inspectors who
had passed the general slocum just before the incident. He
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was fired from his position, and both he and Inspector
John W. Fleming were indicted on charges of fraud, misconduct
and inattention to duty. The managing directors of the Knickerbocker
Steamboat Company were indicted as well, but the only person
ever convicted of a crime was Captain Van Shike, who
was convicted of criminal negligence on January seven, nineteen o six.
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He had also faced two charges of manslaughter, but the
jury was unable to reach a verdict, and those he
was sentenced to ten years, including hard labor, which was
the maximum sentence allowed. The judge said that he wanted
to make an example of him, in part because no
one else who clearly was culpable in this was facing
any actual trial. Yeah, it's like a carnival of complete
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in attention to duty. Yeah, like Van Stike clearly made
a lot of errors here, but he also was scapegoatd
for this whole thing. Like he the whole thing got
pinned on him when it was a systemic problem at
multiple levels. Yeah, there were a lot of balls dropped
along the way. Uh. Van Shike was incarcerated at Sing Sing,
but he was paroled after three and a half years.
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President William Howard Taft pardoned him in nineteen eleven. The
families of the victims also received no restitution or compensation.
The Knickerbocker Steamboat companies creditors filed suit, as did survivors
and families of the victims, and eventually the City of
New York. The company asked the court to limit its
liability to five thousand dollars, which was the value of
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the ship after the disaster, and the company also faced
enormous criticism for continuing to operate its other vessel, the
Grand Republic, especially when the Grand Republic was found to
have its life save and firefighting equipment in similarly poor repair.
The Grand Republic was involved in a series of crashes
with other vessels before being destroyed by fire while docked
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in nineteen twenty four, with the crew safely evacuated. The
Knickerbocker Steamboat Company eventually closed down. In nineteen o six,
a memorial fountain was unveiled in Tompkins Square Park. It
had been paid for by the Sympathy Society of German Ladies.
It's inscribed with the words they are the Earth's purest children,
young and fair. There's also a monument at All Faiths
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Cemetery in Queens, New York, where sixty one unidentified bodies
were buried. Adela Lebaneau, who had been six months old
at the time of the disaster, unveiled the statue while
she was still a toddler. She was the youngest survivor
of the incident, as well as the last living survivor.
She died in two thousand four at the age of
one hundred. By that time, she was Adela Lebaneau Weatherspoon.
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Two of her sisters also died in the disaster, one
of whose body was never found. Laws passed after the
disaster regulated the excursion boat industry more strictly, including requirements
for crew training and equipment maintenance. The disaster has also
been noted as one of the inspirations for more formalized
life saving programs in the United States and for children
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to be routinely taught how to swim. It's not totally
clear how direct this connection is, though, As the story goes,
Wilbert E. Longfellow of Rhode Island, known as Commodore, was
distressed about this disaster, and so he started working with
organizations to teach children how to swim. Longfellow was definitely
involved in this work, There's no doubt about that at all,
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but several of its milestones were still a few years off.
When the Slocum happened in nineteen fourteen, Longfellow started working
with the American Red Cross to develop water safety and
swimming programs. He worked with the y m c A
and the Boy Scouts in the nineteen teams as well,
but it was still some time before it was considered
appropriate for women and girls to wear swimsuits that you
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could actually swim in. That's something that we talked about
more in our episode on Annette Kellerman Tracy, what what
is the what is the listener mail situation? And is
it a little uplifting after all of this very very
sad material. My My listener mail is an update on
the shoes hidden in Walls question. Uh, if you have
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not been listening to all of the episodes recently, we
got a listener mail about the practice of hiding shoes
in walls to deter evil spirits and witches and such.
And Holly and I had a whole conversation in which
I was like, I feel like we talked about this
on the show, but I can't find evidence that we
did anywhere. And Holly also recalled having talked about it
(29:46):
on the show, and we put it out to listeners
to help us remember when this happened. So the first
person to tell us this was Stephanie. And Stephanie says, Tracy,
you remember the conversation you did have about him hidden mints.
You talked about it during the live show about John
Quincy Adams at Adams National Historical Park. However, your batteries
(30:08):
entered the Adams Triangle and did not record the live show.
I think during your re record you briefly mentioned the
conversation and Holly saving a spider. I forgot about that spider. Yeah,
that was a great, a great little moment where um
we we rescued a spider and one of the park
(30:29):
staff came and helped us out with that. Um yeah.
As soon as she posted that comment on our Facebook,
I remembered immediately that that was where it had happened,
and I think I replied something along the lines of yes,
with about fifteen says afterward and some exclamation points. And
then we also got a note from one of the
park staff that we worked with confirming that was the case,
(30:51):
not that not that I doubted what stuff that he
was saying at all. Um So we've heard from a
few folks who were there and remember that that is
where we talked about the shoes and walls. So thank
you everyone for uh filling that hole in my memory.
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, where at History Podcasts at how
stuff Works dot com, and then we're all over social
(31:11):
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and find the show notes to all the episodes Holly
and I have ever worked on and a surtable archive
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(31:38):
History Class is a production of I heart Radios How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Racy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying.
The ps General Slocum burned in the East River in
New York on June n o four, so a hundred
(00:22):
and fifteen years ago this month, and this disaster has
also been a really frequent listener request, including from Kell, Suzanne, Linda,
Jesse Tory, and Michael Um. It has some similarities to
the East Lynn disaster, which we talked about on the
show a couple of years ago. Both of these vessels
had been chartered for a group outing that turned into
(00:43):
just a deadly maritime disaster very suddenly. Both of these
were also topics that I knew from the start we're
going to be tragic, but then turned out to be
even worse than I imagined them. The paddle steamer General
Slocum was built in It was named after Henry Warner
Slocum of New York, who had served as a general
(01:03):
in the Union Army during the Civil War. The ship
was one of two steamers owned by the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company,
the other being the Grand Republic. It was a large
wooden sidewheel steamer with three decks. The General Slocum was
licensed to carry up to passengers, and when it was
first launched it was a modern, luxurious vessel, but by
(01:25):
nineteen o four it was really starting to show its age,
although it had been regularly repainted over the years, including
shortly before the disaster, but it also passed an inspection
on May five of nineteen o four. The Slocum was
an excursion boat intended for making short trips around New
York's waterways from the spring through the fall. In the
early part of the season, people could charter the whole
(01:47):
vessel for a flat fee. Starting around the beginning of July,
it operated as a ferry on the Rockaway Route, connecting Manhattan, Brooklyn,
and Rockaway on Long Island. For its June fifteenth, nineteen
o r trip, it had been chartered by St. Mark's
Evangelical Lutheran Church at a cost of three hundred fifty dollars.
The church was hosting its annual picnic to celebrate the
(02:09):
end of the school year, and most of the people
who were attending were church members who lived in Manhattan's
Lower east side. They lived in a neighborhood known as
Klein deutsche Land or Little Germany, because of a very
large population of German immigrants and their descendants who lived there.
At the time, this was one of the largest German
American communities in the United States. About one thousand, three
(02:31):
hundred fifty eight passengers were aboard the Slocum on the
day of the disaster. The exact number is actually an estimate,
since there were tickets for this excursion, but babies didn't
need one, and sometimes multiple children were brought aboard on
one ticket. Since the picnic was being held on a Wednesday,
most of the adult passengers were women. The men and
the families were more likely to be at work. Overall,
(02:54):
more than half the people aboard were children, and only
between fifty and one fifty of the passengers were adult men.
These passengers were in high spirits, dressed in their Sunday
best and prepared for a two hour cruise along the
East River from the Third Street Recreation Pier to the
north shore of Long Island. Once they got there, they
would spend the day at a picnic ground called Locust Grove.
(03:15):
They had food and a bar on the boat along
with entertainment provided by a band that was playing on
the promenade deck. Although they embarked generally as families, once
people were aboard, parents were totally comfortable letting their children
go off on their own and play together. They left
the dock between nine thirty and nine forty in the morning.
In command was the Captain William H. Van Shaik, with
(03:37):
first pilot Edward van Wort and second pilot Edwin Weaver.
Van Shaike had been aboard the General Slocum since its
launch and had a reputation for being safe and careful,
but he was also in his sixties and the General
Slocum had been through a number of incidents and accidents
over the years, so some people thought that it was
maybe time for him to retire. Not long into this journey,
(03:59):
of fires started in the forward compartment on the main deck.
It's not clear exactly how because there were just so
many possible sources. The forward compartment was being used as
both a storage room and a lamp room. Machine oil
for the mechanical systems was stored in the forward compartment
as well, along with two bags of charcoal and various rubbish.
(04:20):
There were lots of other flammable materials in this wooden compartment,
including three open barrels of glassware that were packed in hay.
Those had been brought aboard for the excursion. This was
also where a member of the crew filled and maintained
the lamps using a makeshift table made of wooden planks
laid over a couple of trestles. In the course of
(04:41):
this work, the floor of the compartment had been covered
in a thin layer of oil. There had also been
an open flame in this room at several points over
the course of the morning. The compartment itself had electric lighting,
as did other parts of the ship, but that morning
the porter who was responsible for filling the lamps had
found the room to be very dark, so he had
lit one of the lamps using a match. He later
(05:03):
testified that he could extinguish the match, and he had
thrown it down on a bench. Someone else had been
working on part of the mechanical system in the room,
using an open torch as a light source. People also
lit matches and had other open flame in the room
for all kinds of reasons, something that was just inherently
dangerous given what was in there. Shortly after the fire started,
(05:25):
the general slogan was approaching a narrow part of the
East River known as Hellgate. About that time, a boy
noticed smoke coming from near the forward cabin. He told
a member of the crew, who apparently thought that the
child was playing some kind of prank and told him
to mind his business. A few minutes after that, other
members of the crew saw smoke coming from the forward cabin,
(05:47):
and they realized there was a fire and started trying
to put it out. The ship's firefighting equipment included a
standpipe and hoses. The standpipe and its valves were in
good working order, but the hoses were mostly old, cheap
linen hoses. Members of the crew attached a piece of
this old hose to the valve near the forward compartment
and asked the engineering room to send water through the standpipe,
(06:10):
but as soon as the water hit that hose, it
shattered in multiple places. There were also a couple of
newer rubber hoses on the boat, and members of the
crew got one of those to try again, but they
couldn't get that new hose to connect to the standpipe.
When they couldn't figure out why, they gave up, and
an investigation later revealed that when the first hose shattered.
(06:30):
It was blown off the coupling that was holding it
onto the standpipe, but the coupling itself was still there.
In their panic, the crew members didn't realize that the
old coupling was still connected, and if they had removed
the old coupling, the new pose would have connected with
no problem. This was really the last of the cruise
effort to try to fight the fire. There were fire
(06:51):
buckets on board, but they were empty and they weren't
put into use. There are also reports that a hapless
crew member dumped a bucket of charcoal onto a fire
to try to smother it. That doesn't appear in the
Federal Commission's report about the disaster, and it's such a
far fetched idea that someone would do that that it
seems almost unbelievable. At the same time, the way the
(07:13):
disaster progressed from here is almost unbelievable, and we're going
to talk more about it. After we first paused for
a little break. After the fire was discovered in the
forward compartment of the PS General Slocum, it doesn't appear
(07:33):
that the Captain William H. Von Schaik personally assessed what
was happening with it or gave any kind of orders
to try to get it under control. Instead, he looked
at where they were on the river and decided to
beach the ship so that people might be able to
jump to safety. The nearest land was west of the
boat in the Bronx, but this area was full of
stored lumber and gas tanks. Apparently someone warned Von Shaike
(07:56):
away from it for that reason, or he decided that
landing flaming vessel there would be more dangerous than trying
to find another location. The captain ordered the pilots to
aim north northeast toward North Brother Island. This required them
to travel at full steam ahead into deep water in
the middle of the East River. So the ps General
Slocum was made almost entirely out of wood. Its middle
(08:20):
deck was a promenade deck with it was mostly open
to the air, with a smaller enclosed space in the middle.
The top deck was a hurricane deck that was similarly
open to the air, and hurricane decks just get their
name from how incredibly windy attempts to be up there.
So when the vessel started bearing down toward North Brother Island,
it was full steam ahead against the wind and the
(08:41):
resulting air flow across its structure quickly spread the fire
from the forward compartment toward the back of the vessel.
When the fire started, the passengers were spread all around
the ship. There were more people on the promenade deck
than in other passenger areas because that's where the band was,
and because the fire heard it in the forward compartment,
most of the passengers were behind it. That meant that
(09:04):
as the boat picked up speed, the wind was spreading
the fire directly toward them. Very quickly. People started to
panic as various family members had got off to play
or socialized. People had become separated from one another, so
parents didn't know where their children were, and children couldn't
find their parents. Also, most of the people aboard could
not swim. Swimming hadn't really taken off as a pastime
(09:27):
in the United States at this point, and clothing suitable
for actually swimming was not considered decent for women to
wear at all. And, as we said earlier, because this
was a nice outing, the people aboard were in their
Sunday best so as the fire spread, people had a choice.
They could jump into deep water, weighed down by their clothing,
(09:48):
knowing that they could not swim, or they could stay
where they were and risk burning to death. The general
Slocum did have life preservers aboard, unlike a lot of
the other Meretime disasters that we've covered on the show.
There was a life preserver for every passenger, but these
were old. Some of them probably dated back to when
the ship was newly built. Their covers were rotten, so
(10:09):
when people got them down and tried to use them,
some of them just fell completely apart in their hands.
Others had intact covers, but the cork inside had rotted
into dust, so when people jumped into the water with
these on, they just soaked up the water and became
incredibly heavy, rather than helping people to stay afloat. At
the same time, though very few of Slocum's life preservers
(10:30):
were put into use, Some passengers, as we said, grabbed
a life preserver only for it to fall apart in
their hands, and then they just gave up on trying
to find another one. Also, the crew did almost nothing
to help distribute them. One testified at the coroner's inquest
that he had put one life preserver onto a person,
and that was the one that he put on himself.
(10:52):
Only about fifty life preservers were definitely used during the disaster,
twenty of them on people who drowned while wearing them.
The Slocum also had lifeboats. The boats themselves were in
generally good condition, but they weren't put into use during
the disaster either. The crew had never been trained on
how to operate them, and the mechanisms to lower them
(11:13):
had been painted over and were immovable. Some of the
lifeboats were even wired down. Even if the crew had
been able to move these boats with the ship operating
at full steam ahead, they just couldn't have been lowered
safely into the water. The timeline of the disaster was
pieced together from eyewitness testimony, and it took as long
as twenty minutes from the time the fire was discovered
(11:35):
to the general Slocum being beached off North Brother Island.
During that time, the fire consumed more and more of
the boat, and passengers jumped into the water. Rather than
burning to death, most drowned and some were crushed in
the paddle wheels. Then, just as the boat was reaching
North Brother Island, the starboard side of the hurricane deck
(11:55):
collapsed under the weight of hundreds of passengers. Dumping all
of them directly into deep water, but beating the vessel
off North Brother Island did not allow the rest of
the passengers to jump to safety the way that the
captain had hoped that it would. The vessel came to
rest at an angle with its bowl between ten and
twenty ft from the shore. That's between three and six ms,
(12:16):
but that put the stern of the boat more like
forty to sixty ft from shore or twelve to eighteen meters.
The current there was very fast. The water was way
over people's heads, and because of the way the fire
had spread, almost all the passengers were towards the very
stern of the ship, where they had to jump into
this deep, fast moving water. It's estimated that between four
(12:37):
hundred and six hundred people jumped into the water and
drowned after the boat had been beached. North Brother Island
was home to a quarantine hospital for people with contagious illnesses,
and members of its staff came to the shore to
try to assist. Two nearby tug boats, the John L.
Wade and Walter Tracy, also rendered aid and probably saved
(12:58):
the lives of hundreds of people. Two men incarcerated at
nearby Rikers Island compelled a doctor who was working there
to take them to the site of the wreck in
a rowboat so that they could help with the rescue,
and there were people on other boats or boats who
rode out from shore who rescued people who had jumped
into the water along the way. But even with the
prompt assistance of all these people from outside the ship,
(13:21):
almost everyone aboard was injured or killed. It was the
worst single day disaster in New York until the September eleventh,
two thousand one terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
Roughly a thousand passengers died, and that was more than
seventy of the passengers aboard. Only two passengers escaped without injury. Meanwhile,
(13:43):
the crew, most of whom did not try to help
stop the fire or assist the passengers, was almost unscathed.
Twenty three of the thirty crew escaped without injury and
two were killed. For a while after being beached, the
general slocum stayed in place off North Brother Island. People
who came to help were mostly able to get it extinguished,
(14:03):
and for a time the number of bodies pulled from
the water was relatively small, so a lot of people.
We're hopeful that there had been a miraculous recovery of
a lot of the folks. But the East River isn't
really a river. It's a tidal estu area that connects
New York Harbor to the Long Island Sound. Consequently, it
experiences regular tides, and as the tides rose, it lifted
(14:26):
the wreck, which floated about a mile before coming to
rest again off Hunt's Point, which is north of Rikers Island.
The shifting tides and currents also meant that more and
more bodies started washing ashore all along the East River,
something that continued for days. By one am on the sixteenth,
seven hundred thirty nine bodies had been recovered and sent
(14:47):
to a city morgue, as well as temporary morgues on
North Brother and Rikers Islands. This disaster was catastrophic for
New York City's German American community, and it was also
obvious that something had gone call silly, unacceptably wrong. We'll
get to the disaster's aftermath after another sponsor break. The
(15:13):
disaster aboard the PS General Slocum was devastating, especially in
New York's German American community. At least six hundred families
lost someone, and some families only had one surviving member,
somebody who had been at work that day instead of
on the excursion, who basically came home and found that
their whole family had died. Many of the people who
(15:34):
survived had serious burns, some of which were disabling. Many
had lifelong breathing problems because of smoke inhalation and burns
to their lungs. Post traumatic stress disorder wasn't recognized until
decades later, but survivors also had ongoing effects on their
mental and emotional health. The Little Germany neighborhood of the
Lower East Side had started to coalesce in the nineteenth
(15:57):
century as people left Europe in the face of famine
and unrest. The neighborhood really grew from the eighteen thirties
to the eighteen fifties, and in eighteen fifty five it
was one of the largest German communities in the world.
By nineteen o four, this community had outgrown the Lower
East Side and was starting to expand into other parts
of New York. This included people who had been born
(16:18):
to that first wave of German immigrants who wanted to
get out on their own, so some of the neighborhood's
population was already moving elsewhere before this disaster happened, but
afterward the neighborhood changed dramatically. People who had lost family
members found it too painful and moved away, either to
other parts of New York or other cities, or back
(16:38):
to Germany. Even for people who weren't really close to
any of the families that had been aboard, the sudden
deaths of so many children changed the character of the
neighborhood enormously. People described it as unnaturally painfully quiet. Soon
the Manhattan neighborhood of Yorkville was more associated with the
city's German community than the Lower East Side was. Other
(17:00):
communities in New York were affected by the tragedy as well,
including neighboring Italian and Jewish neighborhoods, but the Lower Reassigns
German Protestant community was by far the hardest hit. St.
Mark's Lutheran Church also lost much of its congregation. That
building still stands today, and it was converted into a
synagogue in ninety Naturally, people were outraged by this incredible
(17:22):
loss of life. The captain was also hospitalized due to
injuries that he sustained in the disaster, and he was
arrested while he was still in the hospital. He also
received hundreds of threatening letters. People called for investigations into
the accident and the steamboat company and the excursion boat
industry in general. A coroner's inquest was held about two
(17:43):
weeks after the incident and recommended that charges be brought
against the president and directors of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company,
the captain, the company's port captain, John A. P. S,
the ship's mate, and the government inspectors who had cleared
the boat. The coroner's jury also issued the opinion that
the system for inspecting vessels in New York's harbors was
(18:04):
not sufficient. Federal commission was also convened to investigate, and
they issued a report on October eighth, nineteen o four.
By that point, the General Slocum's wreckage had been raised
from the river and towed to Rikers Island to be
pumped out, and the process, the bodies of eighteen more
people were found within the wreck, including one lodged in
the wheel. The Investigation Commission personally inspected this wreckage, which
(18:28):
was later sold and converted into a barge. That barge
think in New Jersey in nineteen eleven, but that time
there was no loss of life. Nearby tugboat rescued the crew,
who were the only people on board. The Commission's report
was scathing and found numerous problems that were not at
all unique to the general Slocum. To start with, it
(18:49):
had been built with minimal attention to fire safety. It
had a working standpipe in the event of a fire,
and it was built with the boilers that required distance
from the wooden surfaces. Beyond that, though, fire safety did
not seem like it had been a consideration at all.
The boat didn't have fireproof bulkheads or any other feature
that might slow down or stop the spread of a fire. Instead,
(19:11):
it was almost entirely a flammable vessel, covered in layers
and layers of flammable paint and varnish. The same was
true of most excursion vessels that were in use at
the time. The crew also was not trained in fire
safety or in what to do in the event of
a fire. Crews were supposed to have regular fire drills,
but the Slocum's crew had not had one in more
(19:32):
than a year. Compounding this lack of training was the
fact that most of The crew were seasonal workers who
had been hired for very low pay. They had very
little training or experience, and because they've been seasonally hired,
some of them had never experienced a fire drill of
any type on any ship. Ever, they were not familiar
with basic things like what the ship's fire alarms sounded like,
(19:54):
or how to put on a life preserver. Another problem
was an overall lack of maintenance, with many life preservers
and fire hoses literally rotten with age. After the General
Slocum disaster, other companies started replacing their worn out, rotten
life preservers with new stock, but that uncovered another problem.
Compressed blocks of cork were commonly used to make life preservers.
(20:17):
An employee at a life preserver factory in New York
discovered that at least one cork supplier was tampering with
the product. This employee had been handling a block of
cork that was sold to them by the Non Perell
Cork Works of Camden, New Jersey, and something just didn't
feel right about it. Breaking open, the block of cork
revealed a six inch long iron bar. It's about fifteen
(20:41):
centimeters and it weighed about eight ounces or more than
two grams, so life preservers were supposed to contain six
pounds of cork, but instead of selling six pound cork blocks,
this corkworks was shorting the amount of cork and making
up the difference with iron. President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a
letter to the Secretary of Commerce and Labor that went
(21:02):
along with the Federal Commission's report. In it, he described
this as an offense quote so heinous a character that
it is difficult to comment upon it with proper self restraint.
It appears that the National Legislature has never enacted a
law providing in set terms for the punishment of this
particular species of infamy, doubtless because it never entered the
(21:23):
head of any man. That's so gross an infamy could
be perpetrated. Sometimes when you are reading articles on the
Internet about this disaster, it'll say that the life preservers
on the Slocum had iron bars in them. That does
not appear to be the case. This appears to be
like the newly made ones that people were using to
replace the ones that clearly needed to be replaced. The
(21:45):
Commission's report was also scathing in terms of the captain
and the two pilots and how they had conducted themselves
during the fire. As we noted earlier, the master of
the vessel, William H. Vansteik, doesn't appear to have evaluated
what was happening with the fire, or given any orders
about fighting it, or issued any instructions about getting the
passengers to safety. He and the boat's pilots were all
(22:06):
in the pilot house when they learned about the fire.
Van Shik ordered the pilots to proceed full speed ahead.
He left the pilot house for a moment, and then
he said, upon returning, that they should beach the boat
at North Brother Island. When the boat was beached, he
jumped overboard, breaking one of his legs in the process.
So Van Shayk had failed in multiple duties that were
(22:27):
his responsibility both before and during the accident. He had
not ensured that the boat and its life saving and
firefighting equipment were up to safety standards. He had not
seen to the safety of the passengers. He had not
conducted a fire or lifeboat drill that season. He had
not fulfilled any of his duties in the actual emergency,
(22:48):
which included delegating responsibilities to see to the passenger safety
and ensure that they did not panic. The commission also
found that Vansheike had multiple opportunities to safely beach the
vessel much earlier, but didn't take them, and if he
had done so, the fire would have had much less
time to spread before people could evacuate. These other possible
(23:09):
beaching points included Little hell Gate and Sunken Meadows, and
getting to them would have required the boat to turn
sharply to the west. Then the wind would have been
blowing across the vessel rather than down its length, which
could have helped limit the spread of the fire. Van
Shake maintained that he had learned the fire too late
to beach the ship at any of these other points,
(23:29):
and that North Brother Island was their only option. It
should also be noted that he stayed at his post
in the pilot house even as it burned around him,
and his clothes caught fire. The commission also found that
the lead pilot, Edward L. Van Work, was also at
fault for the way the vessel came to rest off
North Brother Island. It had come to rest at such
an angle that there was just no way for the
(23:50):
passengers to escape safely, and in the Commission's opinion, this
was either poor judgment or a lack of skill. Compounding
all of this, the testimony of the aptain and the
pilots didn't match up with the timeline that was pieced
together from other witnesses. These three men all said the
same thing, that they beached the boat off North Brother
Island less than three minutes after being informed of the fire,
(24:13):
and North Brother Island was their only option, But whitness
testimony from survivors and from witnesses on other vessels and
on shore suggested that the time between when the fire
started and the vessel was beached was as long as
twenty minutes. Either no one informed the captain of what
was happening for more than ten minutes, or the captain
and pilots were trying to protect themselves by saying they
(24:35):
didn't know about the fire until later. And The investigation
also found a lot of other problems as well, including
that the ship's mate did not have the required license.
It was also noted that the nature of an excursion
crowd meant that the passengers themselves really were not equipped
to take over and handle things in a crisis. They
needed to be in the care of a competent, well
(24:56):
trained crew who knew how to keep their safety. In
my mind, and to quote the report quote, a very
important conclusion from this set of facts is that the
law and regulations must recognize the fact that an excursion
party must be taken care of and cannot take care
of itself. Henry Lundbergh was one of the inspectors who
had passed the general slocum just before the incident. He
(25:18):
was fired from his position, and both he and Inspector
John W. Fleming were indicted on charges of fraud, misconduct
and inattention to duty. The managing directors of the Knickerbocker
Steamboat Company were indicted as well, but the only person
ever convicted of a crime was Captain Van Shike, who
was convicted of criminal negligence on January seven, nineteen o six.
(25:40):
He had also faced two charges of manslaughter, but the
jury was unable to reach a verdict, and those he
was sentenced to ten years, including hard labor, which was
the maximum sentence allowed. The judge said that he wanted
to make an example of him, in part because no
one else who clearly was culpable in this was facing
any actual trial. Yeah, it's like a carnival of complete
(26:04):
in attention to duty. Yeah, like Van Stike clearly made
a lot of errors here, but he also was scapegoatd
for this whole thing. Like he the whole thing got
pinned on him when it was a systemic problem at
multiple levels. Yeah, there were a lot of balls dropped
along the way. Uh. Van Shike was incarcerated at Sing Sing,
but he was paroled after three and a half years.
(26:27):
President William Howard Taft pardoned him in nineteen eleven. The
families of the victims also received no restitution or compensation.
The Knickerbocker Steamboat companies creditors filed suit, as did survivors
and families of the victims, and eventually the City of
New York. The company asked the court to limit its
liability to five thousand dollars, which was the value of
(26:48):
the ship after the disaster, and the company also faced
enormous criticism for continuing to operate its other vessel, the
Grand Republic, especially when the Grand Republic was found to
have its life save and firefighting equipment in similarly poor repair.
The Grand Republic was involved in a series of crashes
with other vessels before being destroyed by fire while docked
(27:10):
in nineteen twenty four, with the crew safely evacuated. The
Knickerbocker Steamboat Company eventually closed down. In nineteen o six,
a memorial fountain was unveiled in Tompkins Square Park. It
had been paid for by the Sympathy Society of German Ladies.
It's inscribed with the words they are the Earth's purest children,
young and fair. There's also a monument at All Faiths
(27:32):
Cemetery in Queens, New York, where sixty one unidentified bodies
were buried. Adela Lebaneau, who had been six months old
at the time of the disaster, unveiled the statue while
she was still a toddler. She was the youngest survivor
of the incident, as well as the last living survivor.
She died in two thousand four at the age of
one hundred. By that time, she was Adela Lebaneau Weatherspoon.
(27:56):
Two of her sisters also died in the disaster, one
of whose body was never found. Laws passed after the
disaster regulated the excursion boat industry more strictly, including requirements
for crew training and equipment maintenance. The disaster has also
been noted as one of the inspirations for more formalized
life saving programs in the United States and for children
(28:18):
to be routinely taught how to swim. It's not totally
clear how direct this connection is, though, As the story goes,
Wilbert E. Longfellow of Rhode Island, known as Commodore, was
distressed about this disaster, and so he started working with
organizations to teach children how to swim. Longfellow was definitely
involved in this work, There's no doubt about that at all,
(28:39):
but several of its milestones were still a few years off.
When the Slocum happened in nineteen fourteen, Longfellow started working
with the American Red Cross to develop water safety and
swimming programs. He worked with the y m c A
and the Boy Scouts in the nineteen teams as well,
but it was still some time before it was considered
appropriate for women and girls to wear swimsuits that you
(29:01):
could actually swim in. That's something that we talked about
more in our episode on Annette Kellerman Tracy, what what
is the what is the listener mail situation? And is
it a little uplifting after all of this very very
sad material. My My listener mail is an update on
the shoes hidden in Walls question. Uh, if you have
(29:25):
not been listening to all of the episodes recently, we
got a listener mail about the practice of hiding shoes
in walls to deter evil spirits and witches and such.
And Holly and I had a whole conversation in which
I was like, I feel like we talked about this
on the show, but I can't find evidence that we
did anywhere. And Holly also recalled having talked about it
(29:46):
on the show, and we put it out to listeners
to help us remember when this happened. So the first
person to tell us this was Stephanie. And Stephanie says, Tracy,
you remember the conversation you did have about him hidden mints.
You talked about it during the live show about John
Quincy Adams at Adams National Historical Park. However, your batteries
(30:08):
entered the Adams Triangle and did not record the live show.
I think during your re record you briefly mentioned the
conversation and Holly saving a spider. I forgot about that spider. Yeah,
that was a great, a great little moment where um
we we rescued a spider and one of the park
(30:29):
staff came and helped us out with that. Um yeah.
As soon as she posted that comment on our Facebook,
I remembered immediately that that was where it had happened,
and I think I replied something along the lines of yes,
with about fifteen says afterward and some exclamation points. And
then we also got a note from one of the
park staff that we worked with confirming that was the case,
(30:51):
not that not that I doubted what stuff that he
was saying at all. Um So we've heard from a
few folks who were there and remember that that is
where we talked about the shoes and walls. So thank
you everyone for uh filling that hole in my memory.
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, where at History Podcasts at how
stuff Works dot com, and then we're all over social
(31:11):
media at miss in History. That is where you will
find our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. You can come
to our website, which is missed in History dot com
and find the show notes to all the episodes Holly
and I have ever worked on and a surtable archive
every episode ever. And if you can subscribe to our
show on Apple podcast to the I heart Radio app,
and wherever else you get podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
(31:38):
History Class is a production of I heart Radios How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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