0:01

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,

0:03

a production of iHeartRadio

0:12

Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson

0:14

and I'm Holly Frye. Today we talked

0:16

about the collision of

0:18

the SS Andrea Doria and the Stockholm

0:21

and the rescue successfully

0:23

of most of the people who

0:26

were on the Andrea Doria before it sank,

0:29

which I don't want to make light

0:32

of the fact that I think

0:34

fifty one people were killed, but

0:38

so often the shipwreck episodes

0:41

involve almost all hands

0:44

being killed in like a terrifying nighttime,

0:47

freezing water situation. That

0:51

having an episode where it was much

0:53

more about the rescue,

0:56

the successful rescue of so many people

0:59

at the same time, though so many eerie similarities

1:02

to the Empress of Ireland disaster, especially

1:05

the parts with the colors

1:07

of the side lights and the turning the

1:09

wrong direction to turn into something

1:11

rather than away from it. I was like, I literally wrote

1:14

this exact shipwreck previously. Yeah,

1:19

it's it's eerie, right, But

1:22

then when you consider the

1:24

scenario, I guess it feels less

1:26

weird because they

1:29

were in such similar conditions that

1:31

it kind of makes sense. Yeah, the same problems

1:33

would have arisen. Yeah,

1:36

which stinks. Yeah,

1:40

it breaks

1:42

my heart that it's a case where

1:45

probably no one ever felt

1:48

at peace about it afterwards. It was

1:50

evolved since there was never any formal

1:54

declaration or finding about what had taken

1:56

place. Yeah,

1:58

And I also read so many articles that

2:01

like stridently argue

2:03

a thing, and then there's

2:05

another argue that or another paper

2:07

that like stridently argues that paper

2:10

number one is wrong, and

2:13

I don't know which

2:15

is correct. One

2:18

thing that we didn't get into

2:20

that some sources do point out is

2:24

that the fact that

2:26

radar, in terms of civilian

2:30

passenger ships, radar

2:33

a fairly new innovation. A

2:37

number of commentators were like, radar

2:41

should be a navigational tool,

2:45

not the source of your

2:47

navigation, right, And

2:50

it reminded me of things

2:52

that have happened in more recent years

2:55

where there have been either crashes

3:00

or people who've gotten lost

3:03

in a perilous way from

3:06

the reliance on GPS and

3:09

sort of going where the GPS directions

3:12

direct a person to go, sometimes

3:15

bypassing numerous signs that

3:17

say something like seasonal road

3:20

not maintained in winter and that kind

3:22

of thing. I've just I

3:24

felt some similarities there. Or

3:28

if you're like a relative that I have who

3:30

I will not throw into the bus, and

3:32

you're not. You're still using one

3:34

of those old GPS machines

3:37

and not like a thing on your phone, and

3:39

it requires you to occasionally plug

3:43

it into something so it can get current maps,

3:46

and you don't do that. Look,

3:49

I'm just saying there have been some arguments. As we

3:51

stand in the middle of nowhere. My spouse's

3:54

car has a built in GPS and

3:56

I'm not gonna throw him under the bus to explain

3:59

why it can not be updated. But

4:02

there have been a couple of times where

4:04

the ten plus year old maps on the

4:06

car have caused a problem,

4:09

And I'm like, we just just use your phone.

4:12

Just plug in that phone. But just use the phone,

4:15

I will say, in defense of

4:17

your phone's GPS maps. Also, I

4:20

feel like, and I could be wrong, the

4:23

last eighteen months to two years,

4:26

they got a whole lot better like

4:29

where they're Actually what made

4:31

it apparent to me is that there is a

4:34

specialty vet we had to go to for a

4:36

while, huh. And it's in a part

4:38

of town where there was just tons of construction

4:40

constantly going on, huh.

4:43

And the maps were doing a pretty good

4:45

job of keeping up with the day to day

4:47

shifts in lanes and road closures.

4:50

Yeah. I have run a foul

4:53

of this a couple of times

4:55

very recently, where

4:58

there were road closures that

5:00

the maps didn't know about and

5:03

the map was like, turn left here, and I'm like, well,

5:05

there's a solid barricade across the

5:07

entire road, so I definitely cannot

5:09

do that. That's just the off road part of

5:11

your journey. Did you know? Were you not ready

5:13

for that? The other thing

5:17

that I like, I don't want to name any specific

5:20

mapping service, but

5:23

I have had issues with the

5:26

map wanting to plot

5:28

sort of a shortcut for me to

5:32

go down a neighborhood street that like

5:34

really doesn't need a bunch of additional

5:36

car traffic on it, and then at the end

5:38

of that neighborhood street, I'm going to turn left

5:41

across a very busy road at

5:44

with no stop sign or no stoplight

5:47

or no anything to make the turning

5:49

left there easier. And I'm like,

5:51

this is irritating me. I would

5:53

rather have gone the one entire

5:56

block longer way right and

5:58

not have to deal with this. But anyway,

6:00

that's me being overly reliant

6:03

on the GPS I

6:06

try to often give it the parameters of

6:08

like longer is

6:10

fine if you were left

6:13

turned sure, or like

6:15

I don't want to mess with the highway, Like I'm

6:17

fine driving on the Interstate, but sometimes

6:20

in Atlanta during busy traffic

6:22

times, yeah, give me surface streets

6:24

all day long, I don't. I don't want to mess with the highway.

6:27

One of the worst experiences

6:31

that I had in this regard, Patrick

6:33

had turned on. This

6:36

was in the car. This was using the car

6:38

maps, which we pretty much

6:40

don't use anymore, but he had

6:42

turned the car setting on too avoid

6:45

highways because it was rush hour and he

6:47

needed he needed to drive into Boston

6:49

for a particular thing, and there was some reason that

6:51

it had to be done in the car,

6:54

because wow, do I not ever

6:57

want to drive into

6:59

Boston. And then

7:03

the next day I had

7:05

gone out to Harvard,

7:07

Massachusetts, not Harvard University,

7:10

the town of Harvard, Massachusetts,

7:13

which is like a little farther out,

7:16

and I didn't realize

7:18

avoid highways was on, and

7:21

this is a trip that should really

7:23

ideally happen on a highway,

7:26

right, And I'd like, I didn't

7:28

realize what was going on, and I kept being like

7:30

the highways right there, and the car

7:33

was like do you turn over here? Though

7:38

over here? Yeah, it was a bit frustrating

7:40

anyway. A

7:43

couple of random side notes. Harry

7:46

A. Trask, who was awarded Pulitzer

7:49

Prize and Photography for like some really

7:51

stunning photos of the Andrea

7:54

Doria as it was thinking, was

7:56

also the person who took

7:58

the photo during the nineteen

8:00

sixty seven Boston Marathon,

8:03

Oh, showing Jock

8:05

Simple, who was a race organizer trying

8:08

to physically manhandle

8:10

Catherine Switzer. Yeah

8:13

out of the race. Oh, that picture is so good.

8:15

I mean it's not a good moment, but it's a great capture.

8:17

It is a great capture of a picture. Other

8:21

random thing, I have seen a

8:23

piece of art from

8:26

the Andrea Doria. Back

8:28

in like twenty sixteen or twenty seventeen,

8:31

there was an exhibit at

8:33

the Peabody Essex Museum

8:36

in Salem. It was called

8:38

ocean Liners, Glamour, Speed

8:40

and Glory. Patrick specifically

8:43

wanted to go to it because he was writing

8:46

a story that was set aboard an

8:48

ocean liner. And I

8:52

I don't remember if there was something there from

8:54

the Andrea Doria besides this one thing,

8:56

but one of the things was an

8:59

artwork panel, a

9:02

very like mid century style

9:04

panel on

9:07

wood depicting the Zodiac

9:09

that had washed to shore on

9:12

Nantucket after the wreck. I'm

9:14

not sure what else I may have seen at

9:17

this exhibit, because somehow

9:19

the only photo I have remaining

9:23

on my phone, and I did not go

9:25

look for backups to see what was on the backups.

9:28

But the one picture from this exhibit that is

9:30

still on my phone is one from It's

9:33

a literal deck chair from the Titanic,

9:36

Nice, which was the

9:38

only photo that I had easily

9:40

accessible. As

9:43

we were discussing the photograph

9:46

being taken as the ship

9:48

was sinking, I was reminded of when

9:50

we talked about the sinking of the Titanic and

9:54

the first hand account

9:56

being thrown over

9:58

to the

10:01

waiting reporter in the boat and the people

10:03

getting off the rescue ships

10:06

able to purchase the newspaper with the story

10:08

of what had just happened. Is yeah,

10:10

the port,

10:12

which is just going to be a weird thing. Like can you mentione

10:15

seeing that photograph the next day and

10:17

being like, right, yeah, I was there

10:19

for that. This was also one of

10:21

the first disasters

10:24

of this I don't know, but I

10:26

don't want to like definitively

10:28

say a timeline,

10:31

but one of the first major disasters

10:34

that everybody was able to see a bunch of stuff from

10:36

on television, And we

10:38

didn't really mention that in the episode at

10:40

all. But like there's more

10:43

of you know, people who were alive

10:47

in the fifties and

10:49

old enough to remember the fifties, like it's a

10:51

wreck that a lot of people remember seeing

10:53

footage of on TV, you

10:57

know, and then people alive in the eighties, which

10:59

I was my have memories of the anti

11:01

climactic safe opening, which I don't

11:03

remember at all. I don't either, who

11:05

knows if I watched this. It

11:07

reminded me a bit of when when

11:10

there's a time capsule somebody finds

11:12

and opens and it turns out what's in the time

11:14

capsule is like molded

11:17

or just you know, usually what's

11:19

in a time capsule. We've

11:22

got a whole episode on time capsules back

11:24

in the archive, but like a lot of times,

11:26

what's in there doesn't turn out to be as exciting

11:28

as what people imagined

11:31

is going to be there when they open it. Yeah,

11:36

that makes me think of the Crypt of Civilization, which

11:38

makes me laugh and laugh a little bit, which

11:40

is you know the

11:43

air tight room at Oglethorpe University

11:46

that's, yeah, supposed to

11:48

be opened in eighty

11:51

one thirteen. Yeah,

11:55

I don't remember when we've talked about that, but I remember

11:57

talking about it. I don't either, but I walked by it

12:00

almost every day for many years. So yeah,

12:02

yeah, because I worked there for a bit, I

12:06

am very much of the opinion

12:08

that a life lived in fear is a life half lived.

12:11

Sure, thank you, Boss Lehmann

12:13

for that one, if you know, you know, But

12:16

I am not a

12:19

cruise person. And

12:22

then every time we do one of these, I'm like, I'm really

12:24

not a cruise person. But yeah, I'm

12:26

still going to go on another cruise at some point,

12:28

I'm sure. Yeah, yeah, I

12:31

will be on the deck watching for other ships.

12:37

Yeah.

12:39

I used to be this way

12:42

about airplanes. Yeah.

12:46

And then when Patrick and I got married and we were

12:48

planning a honeymoon, the thing that like, I was much

12:50

better about flying by that point, I had worked on

12:52

it because I needed to be able to fly for my job,

12:56

but I had never at that point flown across the

12:58

ocean before, and I was very nervous

13:01

about that. And that is how we wound up going to

13:03

Iceland, a place

13:05

that you and I are returning to, Yeah,

13:08

in November. Yes, yeah,

13:12

I'm not sure at this moment if there are still

13:15

tickets available right

13:18

now, it is listed, it is listed

13:20

as sold out. Okay, We're

13:22

not sure if there's gonna be an ability

13:25

to expand the number or not.

13:28

Yeah, So stay tuned. If you missed

13:30

it and you still want to try, keep checking

13:32

back. Yeah, And you can go to Defined

13:35

Destinations dot com and you can

13:37

check it out and see if it's even something you would

13:39

be interested in doing. Talked

13:50

about barb wire YEP. One

13:53

of the resources that I came across

13:56

is pretty interesting. It

13:59

is actually like a blog and a personal

14:01

page. But this person has

14:04

gotten a lot of people that work

14:06

in the history space to write for it. And

14:09

that is a site run

14:11

by Jesse hash LaRue.

14:13

She is, I believe the like a great

14:16

niece of Jacob Haage. And

14:18

so his story is a

14:20

little, you know, other than that one book

14:22

that he wrote, there's not a lot that people know about

14:24

his early life. There's not a lot,

14:27

you know, he has in some cases

14:29

in recent years kind

14:31

of fallen out of the story for people

14:34

and she's trying to piece the story back together,

14:37

and she's gotten like people that you

14:39

know, run historical sites in the area

14:41

to write about this entire story

14:43

and their relationship between these two men.

14:46

So I really really appreciate that because that's a pretty

14:48

good one.

14:51

I sort of love Jacob Page because

14:53

he is I

14:55

say this in a complimentary

14:57

manner, an odd duck, because

15:01

he like one of the things that he did

15:04

as all of this was happening and he was feeling

15:06

very frustrated, was he wrote

15:08

poetry about the people that

15:10

he felt were stealing his ideas.

15:13

Oh that's funny, And I have

15:15

one of these poems I'm so excited, which

15:17

goes, this life is not all

15:19

sunshine as barb fence scalpers

15:22

have found the crosses they bear

15:24

are heavy, and under them lies no

15:26

crown. And while they're seeking the roses,

15:29

the thorns full off they scan. Yet

15:32

let them, though they're wounded, be as happy

15:34

as they can like

15:38

knife twist. I

15:41

love it. I love it. There

15:43

is also a really really cool

15:47

part of his story and developing

15:50

his esque curve wire that I left

15:53

out because it's not really germane to the way

15:55

things played out. But before he started

15:57

working with wire

16:00

and metal to work on a fence. He

16:02

did an experiment planting

16:06

o sage orange seeds.

16:08

Oh yeah, which for

16:10

anybody that doesn't know what that plant is, it's not an

16:12

orange in the citrus sense. It's

16:15

like a hard fruit that looks very lumpy.

16:17

It's round like an orange, but it's not, to

16:20

my understanding, very delicious. People don't

16:22

usually eat it. But it

16:24

has these kind of vines that have

16:26

natural spiky bits on

16:29

them, and he thought, oh, if I could grow

16:31

that to wind with wire, I could

16:33

really do something that's organic and cool.

16:37

That didn't work out, It just was too

16:40

too hard to make it happen, but it was

16:42

an interesting idea. Yeah,

16:44

there's I don't

16:47

know which of the which

16:49

of the shows it

16:51

was that I was watching during

16:53

early COVID, but I watched all of

16:55

these shows that were like

16:57

a historian and a couple

17:00

of archaeologists go to live in

17:02

the manner of you know,

17:04

farmers long ago in Britain. And

17:07

in one of those there was a

17:10

fence that they were constructing

17:13

and it was out of like very dense

17:17

kind of spiky vegetation.

17:20

Yeah, not out

17:22

of like planks or wire

17:25

or whatever. And I'd like, I

17:27

don't remember thinking that was pretty

17:29

cool because growing up in a place where

17:32

there were farms and people had cows,

17:34

like, the kinds of fencing

17:37

that we saw day to day were

17:39

chain link, split

17:41

rail fences and barbed

17:44

wire or electrified. Right.

17:47

That was the other thing, the

17:50

other thing I didn't talk about on the show that I thought

17:52

was really interesting and it became its own little rabbit

17:54

hole for me, but not really germane. Here

17:58

is some of the stuff that had and in

18:00

Texas, while the ranchers

18:03

there were deciding whether or not they wanted

18:05

to deal with barbwire, okay, because

18:09

there were actually a lot of issues

18:11

brought up about whether

18:14

or not it was humane to use, and

18:16

as a consequence, there was a lot of legislation

18:19

passed in Texas, way ahead of a lot of other

18:21

places about humane treatment

18:23

of animals and a lot of them. Was that my

18:26

understanding, Again, I read

18:29

this as someone's account. I didn't look up the actual

18:31

legislation, but like one of

18:33

the pieces allegedly is that they

18:36

were like, okay, but if you're going to use this kind

18:38

of fence, you have to build a

18:40

second fence of like wood,

18:43

so that the animals would hit that first

18:46

instead of dragging their hides along

18:48

barbed wire. Yeah, right

18:50

away. And so if you have ever, I mean I

18:53

have driven around the country many times, you

18:55

know, traveling from the time I was a kid

18:57

my parents were begin to driving, and I remember

18:59

seeing these double fences where it's

19:01

like a barbed wire fence with a wooden slat

19:04

fence, and I always thought, oh, they put

19:06

a new fence up and didn't take the old one down. No,

19:08

In many cases, that is actually to protect

19:11

the animals within from the hurt

19:13

because they were very worried, especially with some

19:15

of the

19:18

the previous versions of barbed

19:20

wire, like the ones that had like spikes sticking

19:22

out of wood that were more knife

19:24

like than pokey. Even though pokey

19:27

is also damaging to an animal, right

19:29

that it would cause big cuts in them, and

19:31

that they would get infected, and that worms would

19:33

grow in them like they would and so which

19:35

of course humane

19:38

or not. That's also a financial consideration,

19:40

right if you're driving cattle that is ruining

19:44

your assets well, and in addition

19:46

to like injury to

19:49

the animals hides,

19:52

you know, there's also

19:54

issues with like especially as fences

19:57

break down for whatever reason. Stepping

20:01

on the barbed wire or ingesting pieces

20:04

of it. There are so many other things that

20:07

that can happen as a result.

20:19

We talked almost exclusively about

20:21

barbed wire in the context of like ranches

20:24

and farms and containing

20:27

animals or keeping animals away from crops,

20:30

and we didn't because it wasn't really germane to these

20:33

men's story. We didn't really touch on the fact

20:35

that, like almost immediately after it was developed,

20:39

barbed wire was also used for things like

20:41

trench warfare and like

20:45

surrounding the walls of prisons, like

20:47

that kind of stuff. So

20:49

this suddenly widely

20:52

available, pretty inexpensive

20:56

tool put

20:58

to a lot of other uses. Also, Yeah,

21:01

I mean it's interesting, right. We talked about how

21:03

much it shaped the

21:05

way the US kind of developed in terms

21:07

of landownership, but we didn't talk about those things

21:09

which are another outcropping of this

21:12

one invention, and that really shaped

21:15

a lot of things

21:17

that are still impacting our society today.

21:21

It's very, very fascinating

21:23

to me that one concept became

21:27

the seed of so much other stuff. We

21:31

will find ways to make anything problematic

21:34

as a species.

21:37

That's our specialty. Yeah, everybody'd

21:42

be cool, be

21:45

cool, I understand the desire to keep

21:47

cows out of your garden,

21:51

which was allegedly why Joseph

21:55

Glidden was interested in this

21:57

in the first place, was that his wife Lucinda

21:59

was like, like, your

22:01

cows keep eating my vegetables.

22:06

But I couldn't ever get a you

22:09

know, a corroboration on sharing

22:11

the story. But I love it. Yeah,

22:14

listen, who among us? I can't grow

22:16

amorant anymore because the squirrels eat it all

22:19

before it becomes anything good. Just

22:22

a pity. But I'm just like, okay, squirrels.

22:24

Yeah. We

22:27

have a lot of rabbits in our neighborhood, and

22:30

I think they're very cute. And I

22:32

also don't have a garden

22:34

of food plants, and

22:37

I know a lot of the like our

22:39

urban community gardens in the Boston

22:41

area, like, rabbits are a huge

22:43

problem because they are

22:46

very cute, but it's

22:48

really hard to keep them out of

22:50

the gardens, and so people come in and you

22:52

know they're they're vegetables that they've

22:55

been working so hard on growing

22:57

have been eaten up by rabbits. Also

23:02

a lot of strategies to try to keep

23:04

the rats out of both the garden

23:07

plots and like any storage

23:10

for mulch or anything like that. Yeah,

23:14

it's tricky. This is the hard part,

23:16

even if you're like a small at home

23:18

gardener wanting

23:21

to be friends with nature and also

23:24

keep them from thwarting all of your efforts

23:26

in the gardening space. Tricky,

23:28

tricky. That's one of the things that's also quaint.

23:31

In that little book that we talked about

23:32

that Washburn

23:34

and Mowen and Ellwood put out, they

23:38

do talk about like in their usage

23:40

cases, it's like, even if you

23:42

just have a small crop of squash

23:44

and cucumber, barbed

23:46

wire is the solution for you. I'm

23:52

remembering when because we

23:54

grew pretty much all the vegetables that we

23:56

ate when I was growing up, and

23:58

I remember when

24:00

it came to like our lettuces and

24:03

cabbages, we had these wire

24:05

cages and going down the row

24:07

and like putting a wire cage

24:09

around each of those to try to keep

24:12

the rabbits from eating them so

24:14

that we could eat them. Yeah.

24:18

Yeah, I'm spoiled enough that I'm just a hobby

24:20

gardener and I can be like, it's fine, go

24:22

ahead and eat it. You

24:24

can have the pumpkins. You're

24:26

so cute, Hi

24:29

baby, that's me. Yeah, a ding dong

24:31

would know no real focus

24:33

in terms of that. If

24:37

you're a gardener and it's time where

24:39

you live and you have some spare time

24:42

this weekend, I hope you get to go out and play

24:44

in your garden and do something that makes you

24:46

happy and feel fulfilled and

24:49

maybe add some greenery and either some

24:51

flowers or delicious things to your life

24:54

if it works. I have mixed luck, but

24:57

my zinnis are happy this year in the high biscus

24:59

hit just started regrowing, So okay. If

25:03

you don't have time for any such things, or if

25:05

that's not your jam, I hope you get

25:07

a minute or two to do something that makes

25:10

you feel good and relaxed. And I also

25:12

hope that everybody's cool to each other. We

25:14

will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode

25:16

and then on Monday with something brand new.

25:24

Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of

25:26

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25:28

from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio

25:31

app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

25:33

you listen to your favorite shows.