0:00

Hey, listeners, we are soon to be

0:02

appearing at New York Comic Con as part

0:04

of New York Comicon presents their evening

0:06

programming. We are going to do an episode about

0:09

the creation of what is usually credited

0:11

as the first comic book, and we'll be talking about the man

0:13

who did it and how that came to be, and

0:15

if you want to get in on that, we would love to see

0:17

you for our live show. It is taking place on October

0:20

sixth, from nine point thirty to eleven

0:22

at the Hudson Mercantile. Again that runs during

0:25

New York Comic Con, and for more

0:27

information on it, you can visit our website

0:29

Missed Inhistory dot com. You will

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click on the link this is live shows and you can

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get all the info and a

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link to order your tickets. We hope to see you there.

0:40

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History

0:42

class from HowStuffWorks dot com.

0:50

Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

0:53

I'm tra CYB. Wilson. I'm Holly Frye.

0:56

So Holly. You know how sometimes when something

0:58

terrible is happening that

1:01

we just can't look away from, we

1:04

say it's like watching a train wreck. Yes,

1:07

yes, although people do describe

1:10

actual catastrophes as train wrecks.

1:13

A lot of the times it's something a lot

1:15

less tangible with way less risk

1:17

of injury or death, like bad

1:21

speeches or product

1:24

launches that go really terribly or like

1:27

really cris cringeworthy TV

1:30

shows, things that are not really

1:32

ready, you know, I mean, things that are not really going to cause

1:34

somebody to actually die. We describe as

1:36

like watching a train wreck. But I always thought

1:39

that was kind of weird that we would

1:41

describe something like,

1:44

you know, somebody's bad talent

1:46

show entry that's just awful that you

1:49

just can't stop staring at. Like why we would describe

1:51

that as like watching a train wreck. It

1:54

turns out that for a brief window from

1:56

the late eighteen hundreds into the early

1:58

nineteen hundreds, people in the United States were

2:01

watching train wrecks for fun. It's

2:04

hard to come up with the exact tally of

2:06

how many of them there were, because there were

2:08

several different people who were

2:11

arranging these things in different venues.

2:13

Over the span of about forty years, there

2:15

were definitely at least seventy

2:18

five planned train

2:20

wrecks to watch for fun, mostly

2:22

playing out in the southwestern and Midwestern

2:24

United States often at

2:27

events like state fairs. So

2:29

that's weird. Here's

2:33

what it reminds me of. So

2:35

when my husband and I got married and

2:37

we merged our households, we

2:40

found that we had multiples of things, uh

2:42

huh. And somehow in that deal we had three

2:44

microwaves, two

2:47

which were pretty good, in one which was really junkie.

2:49

So we gave the really good one away to

2:52

somebody who needed one, and then the junkie

2:54

one we took out on the back patio and we blew

2:56

stuff up in it. So I kind of understand

2:58

this train wreck thing. Well.

3:01

When I was a kid, my elementary

3:04

school had a Halloween carnival

3:06

every year, and one of the things that they would do for

3:08

this Halloween carnival is that they would

3:10

go buy a really

3:13

junkie used car and

3:15

you could pay a dollar to get

3:17

to take a swing at it with a baseball bat. Yes,

3:22

so yes, this is It

3:24

still seems weird though, so it's what we're going to talk about

3:26

today. I also, it's felt like we needed

3:28

a little bit of a lighter topic. We've had some

3:31

heavier things lately, some lighter stuff too.

3:33

I in particular, though, had researched some really

3:35

heavy stuff and so I was like, let's

3:37

just do something goofy. I will say

3:39

this is mostly goofy. It does have a little bit

3:41

of tragedy, but is overall weird

3:44

and fun. Yes, the

3:47

concept of someone going, hey, let's

3:49

stage some rex

3:52

so we can all gock at them. There

3:54

is an inherent level of comedy there. Yes,

3:58

So we are going to start though with the one that

4:00

did actually have a few

4:02

fatalities. This is the

4:04

most famous and most deadly of the

4:06

United States stage train wrecks,

4:09

and it was known as the crash at Crush,

4:11

which took place in September of eighteen

4:14

ninety six, and this was the brainchild

4:16

of William George Crush, passenger

4:19

agent at the Missouri Kansas Texas Railroad

4:21

Company also known as the KD which

4:24

was shortened down from its initials MKT

4:27

by eighteen ninety five. The year before this

4:29

event took place, the KD had

4:31

one hundred and thirty three locomotives and

4:33

one hundred and sixty three cars. William

4:37

George Crush came up with this idea

4:39

to try to drum up some publicity for

4:41

the railroad and to sell tickets on

4:43

the railroad. The railroad

4:45

wasn't really in financial

4:47

danger in any way, but the

4:50

nation was just starting to come out of the

4:52

Panic of eighteen ninety three, so the KD

4:54

was definitely interested in protecting its bottom

4:56

line. The railroad was also

4:59

in the process of replacing its thirty

5:01

five ton locomotives with sixty ton

5:03

models, so Crush proposed

5:06

they take two of those retired thirty

5:08

five ton locomotives and smash them together.

5:10

It really is just like my microwave. The

5:15

venue that he proposed for this stage

5:18

train wreck would be a pop up town named

5:20

Crush, located about fifteen miles

5:22

north of Waco and about three miles south

5:24

of the town of West, conveniently

5:27

close to the existing Waco Dallas

5:29

track. The designated

5:31

spot was in a small valley with hills

5:33

on three sides, making a natural

5:35

amphitheater with plenty of viewing locations.

5:38

They'd supplement this with things like a restaurant,

5:41

a grandstand in carnival attractions,

5:44

selling two dollars round trip tickets

5:46

on the KDI to get there and back.

5:50

The KD had some concerns

5:52

about the safety of this scheme,

5:55

namely that the boilers of one

5:57

or both of the locomotives might explode

5:59

on impact, so they asked the

6:01

opinions of several of the railroad's

6:04

engineers, all but one of whom

6:06

agreed that the risk of an explosion was

6:08

low, so William Crush

6:10

was given the go ahead to proceed. First,

6:13

they laid track from the existing Waco

6:16

Dallas line, terminating at

6:18

a twoy one hundred foot that's

6:20

six hundred and forty meters depot platform,

6:22

complete with a sign telling passengers

6:25

that they had arrived at Crush. There

6:27

was also a stretch of track for the two trains

6:29

to travel down and crash into each

6:31

other, which followed the natural slopes

6:34

of the land, and this gave the track

6:36

a slight downward grade from each end

6:38

toward the middle, which would help the locomotives

6:40

pick up more speed. Locomotives

6:43

nine to ninety nine and one thousand and one

6:45

were chosen for the crash, with one

6:47

painted green with red trim and the other

6:49

painted red with green trim.

6:52

For their pop up town, they drilled

6:54

wells and installed spigots for fresh

6:56

water along the spectator area. William

6:59

Crush, which was apparently his fortuitous

7:02

but actual real name, was friends

7:04

with P. T. Barnum, so he borrowed a circus

7:06

tent from Barnum to house a restaurant.

7:09

They also constructed lemonade stands

7:12

to telegraph offices, a stand

7:14

for reporters, and a bandstand. They

7:16

built a wooden jail, which

7:19

I found one source

7:21

saying that that was made out of a caboose. They

7:24

hired two hundred constables to

7:26

patrol on the day, and they also

7:28

made plans for a huge carnival, complete

7:31

with games and medicine shows and

7:33

a variety of other diversions. Clearly

7:35

they were expecting this to be a party. Yeah.

7:40

William Crush and The Katie advertised

7:42

this spectacle heavily all through

7:44

the summer of eighteen ninety six, calling

7:46

it the Monster Crash.

7:48

The crash and the preparations for it became

7:51

regular news items all throughout the Texas

7:53

papers and outside the state as

7:55

well. Organizers fielded

7:57

queries from all over the country, and

7:59

in the day leading up to the actual event, William

8:02

Crush estimated that there would be fifteen

8:04

thousand to twenty thousand spectators.

8:07

William Crush had arranged for thirty

8:10

three trains to provide passenger

8:12

service to Crush and the Cadie

8:15

started dropping passengers off around

8:17

dawn on September fifteenth, eighteen ninety

8:19

six. By ten am, there

8:22

were at least ten thousand people

8:24

already on the scene. They were picnicking and playing

8:26

games and listening to political speeches while

8:28

they waited. More trains

8:31

kept arriving all through the morning and afternoon,

8:33

some of them so crowded that people were

8:35

riding on the roofs of the cars. The

8:38

Monster Crash was supposed to start at

8:40

four but people were still arriving

8:43

as that hour drew near, so they

8:45

delayed the start until five pm, at

8:47

which point there were about forty thousand people

8:49

there, double what William Crush had estimated.

8:53

First, the two locomotives came

8:55

together very slowly on the track and touched

8:58

their cowcatchers together. That's the little,

9:00

great looking thing on the front of a locomotive.

9:04

They touched their cowcatchers together, kind

9:06

of like boxers touching their gloves before

9:08

a match. Then they were reversed

9:10

apart again, and William

9:12

Crush, on horseback, raised a white

9:14

hat into the air and whipped it down

9:17

to give the signal for the wreck to officially

9:19

begin. The two locomotives

9:21

pulling empty box cars that were festooned

9:24

with advertisements and decorations, then

9:26

began moving toward each other and picking

9:28

up speed. Their engineers

9:31

pulled their whistle cords and tied them down,

9:33

then jumped clear and ran away from

9:35

the track. They estimated that

9:37

at the moment of impact, each locomotive

9:40

was traveling at about fifty miles per

9:42

hour when they crashed

9:44

into each other. The collision was incredibly

9:47

violent. The box cars unsurprisingly

9:49

shattered into splinters, but the

9:51

locomotives didn't behave as

9:53

they expected. Organizers

9:56

had thought that they would basically push each other up

9:58

into an inverted V and the they would

10:00

expend most of that energy and the upward

10:02

trajectory of doing that. Instead,

10:05

it was more like squeezing an accordion

10:07

or collapsing a telescope, and the two giant

10:10

locomotives just folded into each

10:12

other, and then, to the surprise

10:15

of everyone except perhaps

10:17

that one dissenting engineer, both

10:19

their boilers exploded. Scalding

10:22

water and flying debris from the locomotives,

10:24

including pieces of iron and steel

10:27

of all shapes and sizes, flew into

10:29

the crowd, most of whom were along

10:31

the hills at least two hundred yards away.

10:35

At least two people were killed, although

10:37

some accounts say there were three. Ernest

10:40

Darnell, who had climbed up a mesquite

10:42

tree to watch, was hit with a ten pound

10:44

length of brakechain and was killed instantly. A

10:47

young girl was hit with a chunk of iron that fractured

10:49

her skull, and although she was reported

10:52

to be resting comfortably afterward,

10:54

she died on the way home. There

10:56

was a third man, John Morrison,

10:58

who survived the wreck itself, but

11:01

fell between train cars on the

11:03

way home and was run over by the train

11:05

and died. I haven't quite figured out

11:07

if that is the third person some

11:09

of the counts referred to as being killed,

11:12

or if that was a separate incident.

11:14

There were also a lot of injuries

11:17

from the flying debris and boiling water

11:19

then at least six of those were serious, and

11:21

some of them were sustained more than a mile

11:23

away from the actual crash.

11:26

J. C. Dean, a photographer from

11:28

Waco, had been hired to take pictures

11:30

of the event, and he lost an eye when a bolt

11:33

from the wreck tore through it. His

11:35

response was to get up and keep working,

11:37

telling his brothers, who were also photographers,

11:40

how to finish the shot that he had been framing.

11:44

Even in the midst of all this chaos

11:46

and the tragedy that was unfolding, souvenir

11:49

seekers rushed in to try to claim

11:51

pieces of the wreck. Wrecker

11:53

trains hauled off the biggest remaining

11:55

pieces. After the event was over, people

11:58

began to leave the temporary of Crush.

12:00

As soon as the event had finished, Workers

12:03

struck the tent and the other structures erected

12:05

for the town, and the whole thing was essentially

12:08

gone by nightfall. William

12:11

Crush was fired immediately, but

12:14

then officials at the KADI realized

12:16

they'd had an incredibly profitable day

12:18

in spite of the tragedy, so they hired

12:20

him back the next day, and he worked

12:23

at the railroad until his retirement in nineteen

12:26

forty. The KD began quickly

12:28

and quietly settling lawsuits and

12:30

paying compensation to the people who

12:32

had been injured and the families

12:34

of those who had been killed. Photographer

12:37

J. C. Dean was paid ten thousand dollars

12:40

and given a lifetime pass on the train.

12:43

There wasn't nearly as much public condemnation

12:46

as he might expect from an event that killed at

12:48

least two spectators and injured many others,

12:51

but the news reporting at the time was actually

12:53

relatively pragmatic about it. A

12:55

few weeks after the crash, at Crush, composer

12:58

and pianist Scott Joplin public his

13:00

Great Crush Collision March. Joplin

13:03

would go on to be known as the King of Ragtime,

13:05

whose other most famous pieces include

13:07

Maple Leaf Rag and The Entertainer,

13:10

which would become the theme music for the nineteen seventy

13:12

three film The Sting starring Paul

13:14

Newman, Robert Redford, and Robert Shaw.

13:17

It's unclear whether Joplin was actually

13:19

at the crash, but the Great Crush Collision

13:21

March was one of his earliest published

13:24

pieces of music and a relatively early

13:26

example of ragtime, which is

13:28

a distinctly African American form of

13:30

music that was at the height of its popularity

13:33

from the mid eighteen nineties through the nineteen

13:35

teens. And we're going to link to that in the show

13:37

notes so people can listen to it.

13:40

Scott Joplin is the reason I took piano

13:42

lessons as a child. Really, yes,

13:45

I love it, and the part of me that wants

13:47

to do an episode about him is at odds

13:49

with the part of me that does

13:51

not like the sad aspect of the story,

13:54

which is his death at a very early age from

13:56

untreated syphilis. So

14:00

the Katie went through waves of financial

14:02

success and difficulty after this point

14:05

until really starting to struggle along

14:07

with the rest of the industry in the nineteen fifties.

14:09

It was ultimately bought by the Missouri

14:11

Pacific Railroad Company in nineteen eighty nine.

14:14

There's a historic plaque commemorating

14:16

the Crash at Crush in McLennan County,

14:19

fifteen miles north of Waco. Although

14:22

the Crash at Crush is the most famous

14:25

of these staged wrecks, it wasn't actually the

14:27

first one, and so we are going to talk about

14:29

that first one and some others after

14:31

a quick sponsor break. Really

14:38

frequently, the Crash at Crush is

14:40

described as the first staged train

14:42

wreck in the United States. It was something

14:44

that drew a big crowd, but

14:46

which no other actual railroad

14:48

company tried again afterward for

14:51

obvious reasons. But that September

14:53

fifteenth, eighteen ninety six event was

14:55

actually predated by one

14:57

staged by a man named Al Street.

15:00

He was a railway equipment salesman

15:02

from Illinois. Streeter first

15:04

tried to stage a train wreck in Illinois,

15:07

but wasn't able to generate enough attention, so

15:10

he turned his attention to Ohio,

15:12

where he got the ok to conduct a crash

15:14

on July twentieth, eighteen ninety five,

15:17

a couple of miles outside Canton. Here's

15:20

how he described it in one of the ads that he

15:22

ran to promote this event. Quote, two

15:24

monster locomotives with full head of

15:26

steam, starting a mile apart, will

15:28

rush toward each other at the rate of sixty

15:30

or seventy miles an hour, and allowed to

15:32

come together with a crash that will result

15:35

in the most horrible head on

15:37

collision ever seen or heard of. Streeter

15:40

made arrangements to buy a couple of

15:43

retired locomotives and decorated them.

15:45

One was emblazoned with free trade

15:47

and the other with protection, symbolically

15:50

pitting the two economic theories against

15:52

one another. The two engines would

15:54

pull flat cars loaded down with rocks

15:58

like the crash a crash. Part of Streeter's

16:01

plan involved selling train tickets

16:03

a fifteen cent fair on the Cleveland Canton

16:05

and Southern Railroad would get people to the

16:07

actual location for the crash,

16:10

but once people got to that location,

16:12

admission to the crash itself was not

16:14

free. He hoped to sell twenty thousand

16:17

tickets at seventy five cents apiece so

16:19

that people could then watch the crash from a designated

16:22

viewing area. However, the overwhelming

16:24

majority of spectators had a different idea

16:27

that was to climb trees and together outside

16:30

the official viewing area and watch it for free,

16:33

so he only sold about two hundred tickets

16:37

in the end. Though these two locomotives

16:39

never wrecked, the whole event was

16:41

canceled at the last possible minute.

16:44

Streeter claimed it was because spectators

16:46

got too close and refused to move, ruining

16:49

it for everyone else and forcing him to cancel

16:51

for safety reasons, but the

16:53

railroad claimed that Streeter owed them two

16:56

four hundred dollars for the retired locomotives,

16:59

which he had known paid, so the

17:01

railroad exercised their right to take

17:03

them back. Spectators,

17:06

of course, were outraged, and the ones who

17:08

had paid demanded a refund. People

17:10

were also upset that they had spent that fifteen

17:13

dollars train fare for something that didn't

17:15

actually happen. Streeter was

17:17

widely criticized in the press for

17:19

wasting people's time and money, even

17:21

as he claimed to have lost about eight hundred

17:23

dollars of his personal funds in the venture.

17:26

Streeter didn't give up though. On Memorial

17:29

Day eighteen ninety six, he tried again,

17:32

this time in Buckeye Park in Marietta,

17:34

Ohio, about twenty five miles southeast

17:37

of Columbus. The locomotives

17:39

this time were named the AL Streeter

17:41

and the W. H. Fisher. Fisher

17:44

worked for the Columbus Hawking and Toledo

17:46

Railroad, and to add some more

17:48

drama, Streeter put mannekins aboard

17:50

so it would actually look like there were people in there.

17:54

This time, the wreck did indeed

17:56

go as planned. Clarence Metters

17:58

wrote about the event in National Magazine,

18:00

saying, quote, twenty five thousand pairs

18:02

of eyes were riveted upon one engine

18:05

or another as they rushed together. And

18:07

so critical was the moment that scarcely

18:10

a word was spoken. On and on

18:12

sped the two iron monsters at

18:14

the rate of over forty miles

18:16

an hour, and when the crash came it

18:19

was terrific, both trains being

18:21

practically destroyed. Streeter

18:23

continued to organize more of these spectacles

18:26

around the country until the early twentieth

18:28

century. But another man organized

18:30

so many of them that it became part of his personal

18:33

brand, and he was Joe Connolly,

18:35

who was known by the nickname head On Connolly,

18:38

who staged at least seventy three wrecks

18:40

between eighteen ninety six and nineteen thirty

18:43

two and became the most famous organizer

18:45

of planned train wrecks. I

18:48

found one account that said that he tried

18:50

to sue someone for staging

18:53

a train wreck and using the term head on when

18:55

that was clearly his, but

18:57

I couldn't find any evidence that he had actually to

19:00

register that trademark, so not sure

19:02

what the actual status of that was. Regardless

19:05

though, head On Joe had worked in theater

19:08

in Des Moines for decades before

19:10

putting his hand to staging trade wrecks,

19:12

and he was scrupulous about safety. He

19:14

had a very specific set of safety

19:17

rules that had to be followed at any wreck

19:19

he staged. He also toll reporters

19:22

that he had a quote lifelong desire

19:24

to see such a disaster without danger

19:26

to himself and thought many other

19:28

people harbored the same secret

19:30

desire. He was also a showman,

19:33

and as his res went on, he did

19:35

things to make them more and more dramatic. He

19:38

started laying small charges on the tracks

19:40

that would explode when the trains rolled over them,

19:42

creating tiny explosions that, in normal

19:45

circumstances were used to warn

19:47

other trains of incoming traffic. He'd

19:49

also douse the cars in fuel and

19:52

filled them with flammable materials so that they

19:54

would burn after impact. Connelly

19:57

made a lot of money staging these

19:59

crashes over the years, and his last one

20:01

took place as the fad was really starting

20:04

to wane. This one was at the Iowa

20:06

State Fair in nineteen thirty two. He'd

20:09

staged recks at the Iowa State Fair previously

20:11

to a lot of fanfare, but in nineteen

20:13

thirty two, the United States was facing the Great

20:16

Depression. Even naming one

20:18

of the locomotives that Roosevelt and the other

20:20

the Hoover, wasn't enough to make

20:22

the event sit right with the crowd. The

20:25

explosion itself was reported to be a good

20:27

one, but the response from the audience

20:29

was really lackluster. That seemed

20:31

like seeing two huge trains

20:33

wrecked against each other for sport was

20:36

needlessly wasteful in a time when so

20:38

many people were hurting for money. This

20:40

was doubly true when words started to

20:42

spread that Connolly had charged the fair

20:45

forty thousand dollars to stage

20:47

the wreck, and that the fair had lost sixty

20:49

five thousand dollars that year, people

20:52

who were already angry at the idea that

20:54

the crash had been wasteful or furious

20:56

that it had cost so much money. In addition

20:59

to the wreckage of the lower locomotives themselves,

21:02

al Streeter and head On Connolly weren't

21:04

the only people organizing these staged

21:06

wrecks. As another example, in

21:08

September nineteen oh six, approximately

21:11

six thousand people paid to see two

21:13

engines that had been retired from the Salt Lake

21:15

Railroad crashed together at an agricultural

21:18

park near downtown Los Angeles.

21:21

Organizers for this one were James Morley

21:23

and former promoter football coach Walter

21:25

Hemple. This particular wreck

21:28

didn't go all that well. The engineers

21:30

tried to extort extra pay from the organizers.

21:33

In the middle of the event. They were

21:36

doing a prolonged run up to the actual

21:38

crash, in which they'd run the trains at one

21:40

another and then stopped them before

21:42

a collision. The engineers

21:44

thought it would probably be impossible to find

21:46

replacements in the literal middle of the

21:48

event, so they asked for an extra three

21:51

hundred and fifty dollars. Organizers

21:53

managed to find replacements with no problem, though

21:56

in general engineers were pretty eager

21:58

to volunteer, so the original

22:00

engineers were fired and then the event

22:02

proceeded as planned. Yeah,

22:05

the idea that you would get to just on purpose

22:09

run a locomotive that was normally where

22:11

you had to spend your working life into another

22:13

locomotive and just smash it to pieces like that

22:15

apparently was attractive to

22:17

a number of engineers, and

22:21

I really didn't find any indication

22:23

that any of them were seriously injured while

22:26

doing this, although I did find one that was

22:28

an engineer who fell while trying

22:31

to jump free of the locomotive and

22:33

sprained his ankle. So

22:36

in this event at the Agricultural

22:38

Park near downtown Los Angeles, the locomotives

22:41

did run into each other whistles blaring, but

22:44

the end result was pretty anti climactic because

22:47

they just sort of whammed into each

22:49

other with a thud and then stopped and nothing

22:51

derailed, and nothing caught on fire, and nothing

22:53

exploded, and so people were not particularly

22:55

impressed. And these are just some

22:58

examples. There were lots of life of

23:00

others, and there's actually footage of several

23:02

of them on YouTube. We're going to link to that

23:04

footage in the show notes. Thanks.

23:06

We're going to talk about some ideas about why maybe

23:09

this caught on so well. So

23:17

for roughly thirty or

23:19

forty years, staged

23:21

train wrecks were a really big

23:24

deal in the Midwestern and southwestern

23:26

parts of the United States. The biggest

23:28

crowd reported at one of these events was

23:30

one hundred and sixty thousand people,

23:33

and attendance was routinely in the

23:35

tens of thousands. The town

23:37

of Crush had about the same population

23:40

as Dallas or San Antonio for the few

23:42

hours that it existed. In

23:44

nineteen twenty, a staged wreck on opening

23:46

day of the Minnesota State Fair doubled

23:49

the fair's first day attendance from the

23:51

year before. All of this happened

23:54

at a time when getting somewhere was

23:56

a lot less comfortable and convenient

23:58

than it can be today. This

24:01

has led some people to speculate as

24:03

to why this all caught on so well. One

24:06

aspect was certainly the marketing organizers

24:09

promoted their events heavily, getting lots

24:11

of fanciful coverage and newspapers, and

24:13

there was often a political theme to the decorations

24:16

on the trains themselves. In

24:18

addition to the ones that we talked about already

24:20

earlier in this show, a stage

24:22

wreck pitted locomotives dubbed evolution

24:25

and fundamentalism after the Scopes

24:27

trial in nineteen twenty five. There

24:30

was also a showdown between the National

24:32

Recovery Act, part of the New Deal versus

24:34

Old Man Depression at the Minnesota State

24:37

Fair in nineteen thirty three,

24:40

And for some people the attraction was related

24:42

more to the general politics of the day

24:45

than any specific political issue.

24:47

There was a general idea that locomotives

24:50

were symbols of big businesses and

24:52

industries that were taking advantage of people

24:54

and ruining the landscape, and so it was really fun

24:56

to think about their destroying one another. And

24:59

then, of course is this fact that

25:01

humanity has kind of a morbid fascination

25:04

with destruction. There's a complicated

25:06

set of emotional and psychological responses

25:09

that feed into the general human trait

25:11

of morbid curiosity. In

25:13

the decades after stage train wrecks,

25:15

there were demolition derbies, monster truck

25:18

rallies, a whole slew of disaster

25:20

films, true crime shows, and

25:22

on and on. These are all still

25:24

money makers in many caseses yep,

25:28

I mean, I think the thing that strikes me is so weird

25:30

about the train part is that

25:32

locomotives are just so big.

25:35

Yeah, they like, that's a lot of

25:37

metal smashing together and

25:39

then doing I don't know, send negative the scrap

25:41

heap or whatever, which

25:44

you know, may made it seem a little odder

25:47

to me than a demolition derby or

25:49

a monster truck rally or whatever. But

25:51

also, I mean, people do just do, as

25:53

we have shown in our some past episodes

25:55

of the show, people go on on to weird stuff

25:58

sometimes. I think it's

26:00

also a factor. This

26:04

is the kind of episode that happens when you're looking for

26:06

something a little

26:08

less heavy to write about

26:11

and you google weird fads. Right,

26:14

I've done similar things, Yeah,

26:18

it is. It's a I'm

26:20

trying to think if there would ever be like an

26:24

modern day equivalent attempted, Like

26:26

would anybody ever go, let's try to crash

26:29

planes together? I don't know how you would possibly

26:32

orchestrate such a thing, but that sounds

26:36

very scary. Yes, well,

26:38

and suddenly I just remembered when when

26:40

I was also a kid, in addition to having

26:42

the elementary school Halloween carnivals

26:44

where you could smash old cars with a baseball bat,

26:48

whenever the fire department

26:50

would be conducting training by

26:53

burning down a derelict building

26:55

and extinguishing the fire. Oh yeah,

26:57

like there would always be a crowd to watch

26:59

that. Oh, anytime there's a building demolished,

27:01

there's a crowd. We had one in Atlanta not long ago,

27:04

and everyone who lived in Atlanta

27:06

had it all over their social media because they got up

27:08

in an ungodly hour to go look at it. We're

27:12

like blowing stuff up. I

27:16

mean, I then feel very tame for like being

27:18

like what happens when you put a CD in a microwave.

27:22

By the way, it's very pretty. Do

27:25

you have some listener mail? I do.

27:28

I was in our Atlanta office recently,

27:33

which is a treat whenever I get to do that, and

27:35

I went through some of our incoming

27:38

parcels, and so I have some thank yous

27:40

to give out for that. First

27:42

is Katie Katie sent us

27:45

suffragetsu t shirts if

27:49

you have not heard about suffragetsu.

27:51

Basically in the nineteen teens

27:54

during the suffrage movement, a lot of women

27:56

were studying jiu jitsu for self

27:59

defense purposes, and so these

28:01

are t shirts

28:04

showing a suffragette

28:07

defending herself or

28:10

depending on how you're looking at it, just

28:13

throw in a police officer. So

28:16

thank you for the suffragiitti

28:19

shirts. This is also from

28:21

quite a while ago after our episode

28:24

on Walt Whitman, Kristen

28:26

sent us an exhibition catalog

28:29

called Bold Cautious True Walt Whitman

28:32

and American Art of the Civil

28:34

War era, which is just

28:37

lovely collection. And

28:39

then lastly, thank

28:41

you to Nancy for sending us

28:43

the Naughty Fairies adult coloring book of bad

28:45

Words and were Satitudes. I

28:49

was delighted to see a couple of copies

28:51

of that and on my desk. So thanks

28:53

to all three of you and to

28:56

the other folks who have sent us faarious

28:58

parcels that we try. We try

29:00

to keep a list and thank

29:03

everybody, but I know sometimes we fail. So usually

29:05

that's my failure, since I'm here and

29:07

it all ends up on my desk there are days when

29:09

I'm just like, can't look at this. I'm so busy

29:11

working on a thing, and then it gets pushed aside.

29:14

And then there have been times I'm sorry to admit

29:16

this listeners where like which

29:18

note goes to which parcel has gotten jumbled?

29:21

And I'm like, oh, dear mon

29:23

dieu, I can't figure it. Because sometimes they're obvious,

29:25

like it will reference the gift, and other times it's

29:27

just like, here's the thing that we thought you would love, and

29:30

I'm like, I don't know which thing it is, So

29:32

I apologize that is my mediocre

29:35

spatial organization skill. We've

29:37

also had a couple of things this

29:40

year from listeners outside

29:42

of the United States run a foul of customs

29:45

and be apparently tied up in customs for

29:47

a really long time before getting to us, and then

29:49

it becomes awkward, Hey,

29:51

remember that thing you mailed eight months ago?

29:54

Yeah, we just kind of thanks So

29:56

anyway, thank you so much to all of our

29:59

generous life listeners, uh

30:01

for sending us such lovely

30:03

and thoughtful things. If you would

30:05

like to write to us, we're at History Podcast at

30:07

HowStuffWorks dot com. We're also on Facebook

30:10

at Facebook dot com. Slash mist in History

30:12

and on Twitter at Myston History, our

30:14

Tumblr, our Pinterest, our Instagram,

30:16

all of these things on social media, we are at mist

30:18

in History. Our website mistanhistory

30:21

dot com is where you will find a searchable

30:23

archive of every episode we have ever

30:25

done. We will also find show notes

30:27

for all the episodes Holly and I have done together.

30:30

We will link to several YouTube

30:32

videos of locomotives

30:35

smashing into each other in the

30:38

player page for this particular episode,

30:40

along with Scott

30:42

Joplin's March that was about the crash

30:44

at Crush, So you can do all that on a whole

30:47

lot more at our website, which is missed Inhistory

30:49

dot com.

30:55

For more on this and thousands of other topics,

30:57

visit houstuffworks dot com