Speaker 1: A semeral is the protection of I Heard Radio. One
Speaker 1: of the most rewarding parts of this project has been
Speaker 1: getting to meet so many brilliant people then plying them
Speaker 1: with questions. Turns out, if you tell people you have
Speaker 1: a podcast, they will just talk to you and let
Speaker 1: you record it. One of the hardest parts is editing.
Speaker 1: No matter what, there was always too much great tape
Speaker 1: left over. These are some of my favorite Here to
Speaker 1: four Unaired moments from four interviews of the past season.
Speaker 1: Though everyone is speaking on a different subject, one thing
Speaker 1: they all have in common is a passion for this work.
Speaker 1: Ian Nagaski is a music reach searcher whose label, Canary
Speaker 1: Records does mostly reissues of music and languages other than English.
Speaker 1: The collection to What's Strange Place the Music of the
Speaker 1: Ottoman American Diaspora introduced me to his work and became
Speaker 1: the basis for our season one episode entitled Diaspora with
Speaker 1: the Music. Ian has collected amazing stories of performers that
Speaker 1: otherwise may have been forgotten. Here's a little bit of
Speaker 1: his story. I was a person who dug through records
Speaker 1: and went looking for old music ever since I was
Speaker 1: a kid. Uh sometime in my late teens, I started
Speaker 1: buying RPM discs um just thinking there would be something
Speaker 1: maybe interesting on them, because I'd heard reissue records of
Speaker 1: old country and blues and jazz and that kind of
Speaker 1: stuff while I was growing up, and when looked and
Speaker 1: you know, started digging into flea markets and things, going like, well,
Speaker 1: why you know what? What is this stuff? Is there
Speaker 1: anything good on here that maybe I don't know about
Speaker 1: that I hadn't run into before. So I wound up
Speaker 1: intentionally buying anything that wasn't in English, And it turned out, yeah,
Speaker 1: there there were some good music I'd never heard of
Speaker 1: before and that nobody I knew knew anything about. And
Speaker 1: I just started kind of gathering these things up real cheap,
Speaker 1: ten cents apiece, dollar apiece, and over the years I
Speaker 1: would play them for friends, and then eventually I wound
Speaker 1: up with a lot of them, and I kept asking
Speaker 1: questions of people, do you know what this is? Is
Speaker 1: there a story here? And I started gathering stories that
Speaker 1: related to the records that I already owned, and then
Speaker 1: I started finding out bigger stories about how different ones
Speaker 1: of the records connected with one another. About two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: I put out a C D it was kind of
Speaker 1: a best of my record collection for a label called
Speaker 1: Dust Digital. That record is called Black Mirror Reflections and
Speaker 1: Global Musics, And for that record, I wound up including
Speaker 1: in the liner notes the back stories to every record
Speaker 1: that was on there, you know, as much information as
Speaker 1: I could find out. In the process of learning those
Speaker 1: stories and writing those notes, I kind of developed some
Speaker 1: skills in research and have been sort of developing that
Speaker 1: ever since. So a little bit more than a decade now,
Speaker 1: I've been doing reissue records of old stuff and languages
Speaker 1: that I don't speak with. Some of the variety of
Speaker 1: stuff that you're finding, I guess in that early period,
Speaker 1: I remember the first three records I ever bought at
Speaker 1: a flea market in Newcastle, Delaware. I got a Carter
Speaker 1: family record on Montgomery Ward Records called the Cowboys Lonesome
Speaker 1: Song to His Heard. I knew who the Carter family were,
Speaker 1: and I thought that was a good title, So for
Speaker 1: ten cents I was good on that one. I got
Speaker 1: a record that was in Japanese that turned out to
Speaker 1: have been recorded in Hawaii. UM one side was called
Speaker 1: the Song of Are Young, which was a song about
Speaker 1: a a sad pilgrimage in Korea. Uh, it was structured
Speaker 1: as a twelve bar blues and it was in three
Speaker 1: or four time, so it's a twelve bar blues waltz
Speaker 1: in Japanese recorded in Hawaii. I thought, well, that's interesting.
Speaker 1: And then the other record was a record by um.
Speaker 1: They were then called the Bagelman's Sisters. They were later
Speaker 1: renamed the Berry Sisters, and they were basically the Yiddish
Speaker 1: language Andrews Sisters during the and uh, yeah, they were
Speaker 1: pretty good. And the guy who sold me the records
Speaker 1: was this um, big, very very stoned guy who looked
Speaker 1: at these records and looked at me. I was nineteen
Speaker 1: years old or eighteen years old, and he just goes,
Speaker 1: Bagelman Sisters, are you going to listen to that? I
Speaker 1: think I will. And I bought a little turntable, a
Speaker 1: little like classroom turntable that same day for maybe like
Speaker 1: ten bucks at the flea market. We're great, and so yeah,
Speaker 1: I just started picking stuff up whatever it was. You know,
Speaker 1: next thing, you know, some buddy's yard sale. They've got
Speaker 1: a box of old records in Russian and you know
Speaker 1: how much were the box? And they go five bucks
Speaker 1: and you go all right, let's figure out some Russian records.
Speaker 1: So one thing would lead to another. So what yard sales,
Speaker 1: estate sales, thrift stores? I feel I feel like you've
Speaker 1: told me you've literally pulled records like out of the
Speaker 1: trash before. Sure, lots of times, yeah, um, a lot
Speaker 1: of basements, a lot of addicts, um, you know, putting
Speaker 1: ads in. You know, hey, if you have any older records,
Speaker 1: I'd like to come look at them. And you know,
Speaker 1: next thing, you know somebody's polka collection, but you know,
Speaker 1: old stuff, and go okay, well, you know how much
Speaker 1: for everything? When I started looking into one particular story,
Speaker 1: I kind of put out an ap B to everybody
Speaker 1: I knew who was a record head. By that time,
Speaker 1: I owned a record store myself, so I knew a
Speaker 1: lot of record people. And one buddy of mine, Angela
Speaker 1: Sawyer in Boston, wrote to me and she goes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've got a bunch of stuff in like Turkish. I
Speaker 1: guess it's been sitting, uh under my TV stand for
Speaker 1: about ten years. Spent maybe a dozen records. And I said, well,
Speaker 1: that sounds like maybe something I would want or need,
Speaker 1: And she sent me these records. They were all made
Speaker 1: by Armenians and Greeks, uh, and we're big sellers in
Speaker 1: the Boston area where there were a lot of folks
Speaker 1: from that community. And I asked her, you know where
Speaker 1: did where did you get these? And she said that
Speaker 1: in college she had a roommate who would pick up
Speaker 1: any records she saw on the side of the whee,
Speaker 1: the side of the road that had been left out
Speaker 1: for the trash to take. Um, just knowing that Angela
Speaker 1: liked old records, and because she she didn't have any
Speaker 1: particular discrimination herself this college roommate, but was just a
Speaker 1: sweet person. Almost everything she brought her was, you know,
Speaker 1: mouldy copies of Barber's drysand records. Um, you know, just
Speaker 1: the kind of stuff you would find in goodwill. And
Speaker 1: then every once in a while there'd be something that
Speaker 1: was unusual, and um, Angela would dutifully like tuck that
Speaker 1: away because she's like an obsessive record nerd. And so
Speaker 1: for ten years, these records in Turkish just sort of
Speaker 1: sat under her and her TV stand And I said,
Speaker 1: you know, how much do you want for him? And
Speaker 1: she's like, no, no, no, no, no no, no, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's not like that these are for you. Obviously,
Speaker 1: I've been holding onto them for all these years, not
Speaker 1: knowing it was you they were going to. But that's
Speaker 1: who gets them. And so a lot of records have
Speaker 1: come to me like that. A lot of people have
Speaker 1: seeing that I was interested and cared when no one
Speaker 1: else was. And that's really how I wound up with
Speaker 1: a lot of them. When did um records that were
Speaker 1: immigrants from the Ottoman Empire start factoring into that collection? Um,
Speaker 1: let me think the first two records that I ever
Speaker 1: bought in Turkish actually bought both of them in uh
Speaker 1: in Boston at a record store that happened to sell
Speaker 1: seventy eight and happened to sell seventy eight in languages
Speaker 1: other than English sometimes um. One was a record made
Speaker 1: about nineteen sixteen by a violinist named Naimed carra Cond.
Speaker 1: The other was a record made about six by a
Speaker 1: nudist and singer named Achilles poulos Um. They were both
Speaker 1: fifty cents plus tax at a record store called Stereo Jack's.
Speaker 1: So those were things that I just had kind of
Speaker 1: lying around as well, this is neat and cool. I
Speaker 1: didn't know what they were. I didn't know what they meant.
Speaker 1: And years later, when I stumbled across a box, a
Speaker 1: couple of boxes of records in Greek, I noticed that
Speaker 1: the recording dates and record label catalog numbers were roughly
Speaker 1: about the same. You know, they must have been made
Speaker 1: about the same time, the same place, the same studios.
Speaker 1: I figured out New York City, and I go like, wait,
Speaker 1: did these people know each other? Was this part of
Speaker 1: a scene? Was there a community here that maybe was
Speaker 1: happening that I haven't heard about? And started asking around
Speaker 1: and looking for stuff that had been written and couldn't
Speaker 1: find much of anything. But with enough asking around and
Speaker 1: enough reading, I figured out that yeah, that's exactly what
Speaker 1: had happened there. There was, in fact a community of
Speaker 1: immigrants from the Near East, and these records were made
Speaker 1: by people who, if they didn't know each other directly,
Speaker 1: certainly new people in common and lived in the same
Speaker 1: world and had very similar experiences being immigrants the United
Speaker 1: States at the same time. H. David Weinstein is a
Speaker 1: media historian and author who serves as a Senior program
Speaker 1: director for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Without his
Speaker 1: book The Forgotten Network, Dumont and the Birth of American
Speaker 1: Television and his years of dogged research tracking down old
Speaker 1: kinescopes of long lost broadcasts. Our Dumont episode would have
Speaker 1: never been possible. The Dumont television network was once a
Speaker 1: household name, but in six decades off the air, it
Speaker 1: has fallen into deep obscurity. I asked David what it
Speaker 1: was about this dusty corner of history that's so captivated him?
Speaker 1: Say hello or something, so we get a little Mike
Speaker 1: check for you. Hi. Ex, Dumont is the greatest network ever.
Speaker 1: Did all kinds of amazing, amazing things. It invented sound,
Speaker 1: it invented video, it invented audience, did everything. It's ironic
Speaker 1: that the Dumont name is like the punchline of jokes
Speaker 1: about antiquity, right, being that they invented so many features
Speaker 1: that are just like, oh, they were the first ones
Speaker 1: to do that. Everybody does that now. Yeah. Certainly with
Speaker 1: network broadcasting after the war, UH, Dumont and NBC were
Speaker 1: the first ones to even think of a television network,
Speaker 1: the idea of broadcasting the same program in multiple cities,
Speaker 1: and Dumont did it in New York and Washington and
Speaker 1: was very much um focused on building that national network. Uh.
Speaker 1: They were among the first to do any kind of
Speaker 1: television programming. They are especially creative during World War Two
Speaker 1: and preparing for the post war explosion in commercial television. UH.
Speaker 1: They were also innovative in their daytime schedule. They're innovative
Speaker 1: in some of their business models. For example, rather than
Speaker 1: a single sponsor or paying for and controlling the whole program,
Speaker 1: which was the radio model that went into television, Dumont
Speaker 1: chopped up its program into multiple sponsors, each of which
Speaker 1: would have a short segment, which is really the forerunner
Speaker 1: of television advertising as we knew it for much of
Speaker 1: the network era. UH. Dumont also had tons of just
Speaker 1: creative programs, many of which we've talked about. Shows like
Speaker 1: The Playing Kloseman, Cavalcades, Stars, even Captain Video I think
Speaker 1: really belongs in that category. So I mean this may
Speaker 1: sound weird. I wrote the book between and two thousand four.
Speaker 1: I was I was younger then, and I was really
Speaker 1: into punk rock and indie rock and UM. I also
Speaker 1: Dumont as a punk rock television network, even though I
Speaker 1: didn't write this. A television itself was very punk rock.
Speaker 1: And what I mean by that it was Dumont was young, creative,
Speaker 1: They were an underdog. They're an outsider in the industry,
Speaker 1: underfunded budget, so they were really creative. It was almost
Speaker 1: amateurish at times, but in that amateurism you found a
Speaker 1: lot of really cool, interesting stuff. There was a sort
Speaker 1: of independence among the people who worked there, and there
Speaker 1: was certainly a community from what I've learned in talking
Speaker 1: to people at the network, but there was also a
Speaker 1: sense set in watching the shows you were almost part
Speaker 1: of this sort of weird little community of people who
Speaker 1: were into the same things that you were. Whether it
Speaker 1: was Captain Video and then there was some merchandise related
Speaker 1: to that, or whether it was some of the other
Speaker 1: programs that even now sort of have a cult following
Speaker 1: among TV collectors, among you know, people into all time television.
Speaker 1: It had this sort of many of the Dumont programs
Speaker 1: had this sort of weird niche following that continues to
Speaker 1: this day. Done it's not rolling night tonight, what do
Speaker 1: you dressed up? Well? Wow, all my friends are here,
Speaker 1: I see Andy, Mary cal were from my lame like
Speaker 1: the Garden, Oh my friends ahead and no Minimum again
Speaker 1: a good time. I think it really did come out
Speaker 1: of not just punk but just in general sort of
Speaker 1: liking to mind the history of pop culture for things
Speaker 1: that have been forgotten and don't deserve to be whether
Speaker 1: old music, old movies. I've never been the kind of
Speaker 1: person who just sort of flips on the commercial radio
Speaker 1: station and that's it. I like to figure out where
Speaker 1: things came from, the origins and sort of cool stuff
Speaker 1: that has maybe been overlooked, and Dumont certainly fit that bill.
Speaker 1: And as I learned more, I sort of became seduced
Speaker 1: by some of the programs. In some cases, it is
Speaker 1: because so much of it was live, an ephemeral and
Speaker 1: even the hunt to find them and and find seeing
Speaker 1: things that I felt people hadn't seen in years in
Speaker 1: the live programs that was worth seeing. It was really cool,
Speaker 1: that was really inventive. That helps understand how television became
Speaker 1: so popular. Um when I was doing the research, there
Speaker 1: was still a sense of television had a golden age,
Speaker 1: and they were sort of dramas that were on the
Speaker 1: other networks and stuff like Marty, stuff that had you know,
Speaker 1: survived that was pretty easy to find, or stuff like
Speaker 1: Milton Burrower and Sullivan. And I wanted to take a
Speaker 1: little bit deeper and see what else was going on
Speaker 1: and I get excited when I find cool, different stuff
Speaker 1: that helps me connect the past in the present. Sarah
Speaker 1: Wasserman is a professor of English and Culture material Studies
Speaker 1: at the University of Delaware. She has a book coming
Speaker 1: out in called The Death of Things that looks at
Speaker 1: ephemera in twentieth century American fiction. I asked her how
Speaker 1: she ended up as the FEMA teacher. Part of it
Speaker 1: is just that you start doing one thing and it
Speaker 1: has all kinds of offshoots and rabbit holes, and if
Speaker 1: you're curious and maybe a little nutty like I am,
Speaker 1: you tend to tend to follow them instead of staying
Speaker 1: on one focus. But it really started, you know, I
Speaker 1: did a PhD in literature in an English department, and
Speaker 1: I was reading all of these novels, all these American novels, primarily,
Speaker 1: and I was thinking a lot about why there was
Speaker 1: so much stuff in these novels, and then in particular,
Speaker 1: why there's so much disappearing stuff, you know, why our
Speaker 1: novelists writing about pop up buildings and paper that disappears
Speaker 1: and stand collections that go missing and things like that.
Speaker 1: So it started from being someone who liked to read
Speaker 1: and and studying literature in a scholarly way. But I
Speaker 1: wanted to understand why there were these objects and in books,
Speaker 1: in fiction, and um that sort of led me to
Speaker 1: doing this material culture stuff. I'm not someone who goes
Speaker 1: primarily to a museum and looks at, you know, American
Speaker 1: pewter or a line of teapots. I'm thinking about why
Speaker 1: authors are writing about those objects. But in trying to
Speaker 1: do that, obviously I've I've learned to kind of go
Speaker 1: to the archives, go to collections, look at things that
Speaker 1: authors might be writing about, and and try to make
Speaker 1: sense of it. That way working is hardly ever glamorous.
Speaker 1: When I was in grad school, I did this dissertation
Speaker 1: writing boot camp over a break where they like lock
Speaker 1: you in a room and you have to write. And
Speaker 1: the way they started as we all sat around a
Speaker 1: table and everyone had to go around and say what
Speaker 1: they were working on. And this is at Princeton, brilliant people,
Speaker 1: and everyone's going around and saying what they work on,
Speaker 1: this project on the Revolutionary War whatever. And the woman
Speaker 1: next to me said, I'm writing. I'll see if I
Speaker 1: can remember. I'm writing a dissertation. It's a comparative literature
Speaker 1: dissertation that looks at Chinese, French and German literature and
Speaker 1: it's about the concept of everything. So when did writers
Speaker 1: start thinking about the totality of the world. And I
Speaker 1: had to go after her and just said, yeah, I'm Sarah.
Speaker 1: I'm writing a dissertation about trash um. So you know,
Speaker 1: it's important to be to be humble. So I think
Speaker 1: that these objects do teach us a lot and and
Speaker 1: make a lot of meaning. But I think part of
Speaker 1: what you're saying in your pitch is that they can
Speaker 1: be overlooked and they can be seen as as minor,
Speaker 1: and so they don't enter the history books as much.
Speaker 1: We need these other formats to explore them. Sarah's interview
Speaker 1: forms the basis of our episode. If what one of
Speaker 1: the topics we mentioned is the nine New York World's
Speaker 1: Fair and the Souvenir Craze that a company that ephemeral event,
Speaker 1: which gave me the opportunity to inquire about Sarah's own
Speaker 1: color action. After you came out of Futurama, which was
Speaker 1: General Motors Vision and sort of model city of the future,
Speaker 1: you would get a little button that says I have
Speaker 1: seen the future. That'd be a great button have Do
Speaker 1: you have one? I don't have one. I don't have one.
Speaker 1: I have a bunch of ahema. You know, when you
Speaker 1: start to work on a phemera, people come and give
Speaker 1: you a phemera as presidents. So I do have quite
Speaker 1: a lot from the Nine Worlds for but I don't
Speaker 1: have one of those pins. They are actually pretty desirable
Speaker 1: collectors items because not not many of them are left, right,
Speaker 1: Please give me just a little audio tour of like
Speaker 1: some of them that you have. Gosh, so I have
Speaker 1: a lot of I don't know how to describe these.
Speaker 1: They're not really a genre that's around anymore. So from
Speaker 1: the fair, I have a lot of souvenir booklets. So
Speaker 1: they're really interesting because I mean it's fair. So they're
Speaker 1: mostly drawn, as you know, they're not photographic records, and
Speaker 1: they take all different forms. So they're like fans with
Speaker 1: the photo of the Paris here and the trial on
Speaker 1: where the two iconic buildings, and they get sort of
Speaker 1: put on everything. Um. And there's a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: little drawn books that tell you about the different exhibits
Speaker 1: and their fans. I think I have a kazoo um
Speaker 1: a sewing kit from the fair that someone gave me,
Speaker 1: and then going forward to some of the other ephemera
Speaker 1: that I that I talked about that I've managed to
Speaker 1: sort of get from my own nerdy collection. I have
Speaker 1: a bunch of stamps. So um, I think I have
Speaker 1: all the stamps that Philip Roth writes about in his
Speaker 1: novel The Plot against America. Um, how many stamps is that? Fifteen?
Speaker 1: They're so, I want to say, and they're They're pretty unusual,
Speaker 1: most of them. So, for reasons that I won't necessarily
Speaker 1: go into the main character also called Philip Um collect
Speaker 1: stamps and he he's interested and obviously the ones that
Speaker 1: are more valuable, which tend to be like things with erata.
Speaker 1: So you know, the plane in the middle is printed
Speaker 1: upside down because when they put the stamps through the
Speaker 1: through the printing machine the second time they had a
Speaker 1: positioned the wrong way. Things like that. So I have
Speaker 1: some stamps. Um. I have an interesting I write about
Speaker 1: Philip K. Dicks The Man in the High Castle, which
Speaker 1: some of your listeners will know not as a novel
Speaker 1: but as a TV show. And in the novel there's
Speaker 1: this thing UM called cards of War from during the
Speaker 1: Second World War, which are They're they're like playing cards,
Speaker 1: I guess, and on one side they depict a really
Speaker 1: gruesome illustrated scene from a war and on the reverse
Speaker 1: side there you know, there's details about what this battle
Speaker 1: was or what this military maneuver was. Um. So they
Speaker 1: really range from you know, the lovely little kazoo to
Speaker 1: the grim war cards. Where you did you collect ephemera
Speaker 1: before you became Uh, that's a good question, So my
Speaker 1: answer would be no. But upon thinking about it, I'm
Speaker 1: not a collector. I'm a pretty minimalist person. Um. I
Speaker 1: don't need to Marie condo my house because I've already
Speaker 1: tidied as I go. We could talk about my reconduct too,
Speaker 1: But I think about my childhood and and I think
Speaker 1: many adults who don't collect in their adult life were
Speaker 1: collectors as children, and I certainly was. I had a
Speaker 1: sticker album. I had things that were maybe less ephemeral,
Speaker 1: like a collection of troll dolls, um, a collection of
Speaker 1: Bonnie Bell lips mackers. I like things that you could
Speaker 1: organize by color. Um. So now I don't. I don't
Speaker 1: collect things like that. I do, though, have a small
Speaker 1: collection of strange fortunes from fortune Cookies. So fortunes with
Speaker 1: typos or very odd phrasing in them. Um. But other
Speaker 1: than that, no, I was not. I was not into
Speaker 1: ephemera before I started this research. Do you have a
Speaker 1: favorite strange fortune? Oh? My favorite one is probably this one,
Speaker 1: which just says you are always on our minds. Wow,
Speaker 1: I like I like that. It's yeah, it's collective. Someone's
Speaker 1: you know, multiple people who made that cookie are thinking
Speaker 1: of me. I don't know. Maybe would have rather not
Speaker 1: gotten that message. One more thing. When we recorded the
Speaker 1: interview earlier this year, it seemed like everyone was cleaning
Speaker 1: their homes because of a new show on Netflix. I'm
Speaker 1: really interested in the fact that Marie Condo is this
Speaker 1: juggernaut right now. And it's not like in the early
Speaker 1: aughts we had Hoarders, the TV show Hoarders, right, and
Speaker 1: it was super pathological. It was like, look at this
Speaker 1: person and all the things they haven't thrown away and
Speaker 1: the cat that died and they didn't even notice because
Speaker 1: they have too much stuff. And Marie Condo was not
Speaker 1: that right. Marie Condo is the show that's done with
Speaker 1: love and care, um, and it's a really non pathologizing
Speaker 1: show about people letting go of their stuff. So I wonder,
Speaker 1: as I'm finishing this book, and it's something I've been
Speaker 1: working on for a long time, too long, really, um,
Speaker 1: if there is a shift, if the tide is turning,
Speaker 1: and it might be linked to some of the things
Speaker 1: that you mentioned earlier about digital technology and people getting
Speaker 1: more used to living among less stuff. But I just
Speaker 1: think it's a really the time is ripe for for
Speaker 1: this question, for the show, for for these considerations of
Speaker 1: disappearing objects, And I think that the Marie Condo is
Speaker 1: a sort of symptom of that. Elizabeth Cobbs is a
Speaker 1: historian with more qualifications than I could hope to list.
Speaker 1: Stopping through Atlanta on tour for her newest book, The
Speaker 1: Tubman Command, she joined me in studio to talk about
Speaker 1: her work The Hello Worlds America's First Women's Soldiers, which
Speaker 1: tells the stories of brave souls who enlisted as telephone
Speaker 1: operators for the U. S. Army Signal Corps during World
Speaker 1: War One. Our conversation became the episode Switchboard. We actually
Speaker 1: had finished the interview when we're standing outside the booth.
Speaker 1: When we got to talking about ephemera specifically, Elizabeth asked
Speaker 1: if we could jump back into recording, and that's where
Speaker 1: the following piece of tape comes from. The way she
Speaker 1: talks about a historian's job of reaching into the past
Speaker 1: is for me what this whole endeavor is all about.
Speaker 1: One of the things we do as historians is we
Speaker 1: look at ephemera, which we consider to be the tangible
Speaker 1: material objects that surround documents. So one of the ephemera
Speaker 1: that the Hello Girls had, which to me, was so
Speaker 1: indicative of their sense of humor. I was at Mark
Speaker 1: Howe's home and looking at the things he had collected
Speaker 1: of the Hello Girls, and I found He said, look
Speaker 1: at these tiny binoculars. Now, these tiny binoculars look like
Speaker 1: the size of a penny, like like a little tiny
Speaker 1: charm embracelet, kind of charm that you might wear in
Speaker 1: a bracelet. So I said, oh, those are cute. Aren't
Speaker 1: those cute? And I put them back down. He said, no, no, really,
Speaker 1: look at them, look through them. So I lived at
Speaker 1: these tiny souvenir binoculars that one of the Hello Girls
Speaker 1: had brought back and showed her friends, and I could
Speaker 1: see this little glimmer of light and I said, oh, yes,
Speaker 1: why could see light comes through them? He said, no,
Speaker 1: I really look through them. So I looked through them,
Speaker 1: and on one side of the binoculars there's a naked
Speaker 1: lady holding up a mirror and looking saucily at the
Speaker 1: at the viewer. And the other side of the binocular
Speaker 1: there's two naked ladies who are standing in a mirror.
Speaker 1: And there was its French pornography. And so these Hello
Speaker 1: girls had this just wild sense of humor, you know
Speaker 1: that that they brought back all kinds of souvenirs, letter
Speaker 1: openers and you know, books and and such things, and
Speaker 1: even yes, even a little French pornography. For the heck
Speaker 1: of it. They were I'm telling you, the optics on
Speaker 1: this thing were amazing. And that's now, by the way,
Speaker 1: all at the World War One Museum in Kansas City.
Speaker 1: All of these things that that are indicative of the
Speaker 1: women's experience, you know, from their uniforms, to their trench helmets,
Speaker 1: to their gas masks, to their mess kits, to their
Speaker 1: crazy little French pornography, which they found apparently very musing,
Speaker 1: at least one of them did. When you when you
Speaker 1: went out and found these diaries, specifically, what I'm thinking,
Speaker 1: because there's lots of diary entries. I mean, what do
Speaker 1: you get to see the actual Well, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: the interesting thing because since there was no effort really
Speaker 1: to collect these women's experience, I had to go all
Speaker 1: over the place. I had read that there was this attorney,
Speaker 1: so I tracked him down in Seattle and flew to
Speaker 1: Seattle one day, and he had some boxes and we
Speaker 1: went through them, and in one of his boxes I
Speaker 1: found a diary. And on the diary it had a
Speaker 1: phone number. So I first of all read this amazing
Speaker 1: diary that no one had ever seen before, and and
Speaker 1: then I called the phone number that was on it,
Speaker 1: and that went to somewhere in Saucelito, which is in California,
Speaker 1: in the Bay Area, and and that was a man
Speaker 1: who said, oh, yes, well I my aunt. My aunt
Speaker 1: was a Hello girl, and I have her records. So
Speaker 1: I went and looked at that group of records, and
Speaker 1: in that there was a memoir. In fact, that was
Speaker 1: where I found Merle Eagan's memoir. And and then from
Speaker 1: all of that, and then I began to think, I've
Speaker 1: got to get Grace Banker. I've got to get the
Speaker 1: woman who led the first contingent was sort of my
Speaker 1: holy Grail and I have a friend who's absolute crackerjack investigator,
Speaker 1: and I said, can you find me a descent of
Speaker 1: Grace Banker? And she called me the next day and
Speaker 1: she says, I think they're in a nursing home in
Speaker 1: New Hampshire. So that I'm on the trail of something
Speaker 1: in New Hampshire and I get on the phone and
Speaker 1: call this man, old man who calls me back and says, well, yes,
Speaker 1: my my mother in law was Grace Banker and she
Speaker 1: passed away a long time ago. And I said, do
Speaker 1: you have anything of hers? And he said, well, well,
Speaker 1: we have a diary. Now. I had seen references to
Speaker 1: a ten page diary excerpt that Grace Banker had once published,
Speaker 1: and I thought it might be the whole thing. So
Speaker 1: I said, how many pages is it? And he said, well,
Speaker 1: it's a it's about ninety pages. And so then I
Speaker 1: knew I had a book. I knew I had a
Speaker 1: book because I had Grace Banker's diary, the diary of
Speaker 1: Bertha Hunt, who was a signal cooperator from Berkeley, California,
Speaker 1: and Merle Eagan's memoirs, and that combined with the Army
Speaker 1: personnel records in St. Louis and the army records in
Speaker 1: the United States Archives in Washington, d C. And then
Speaker 1: the newspaper records. You know, I was on the trail
Speaker 1: of a real book. When you've got that diary and
Speaker 1: you're like, you're really literally like holding it right, and
Speaker 1: you're maybe the only person that's ever edit or at
Speaker 1: least read it in what seventy years or something. We're
Speaker 1: reading maybe a hundred years. I mean people, you know,
Speaker 1: Grace Banker came back and she put it in her trunk.
Speaker 1: And I was talking with her granddaughter when I was
Speaker 1: first telling the family about my interest in their you know,
Speaker 1: their their mother or grandmother, and um, she said to me,
Speaker 1: Caroline Timby, she said, well, I have my grandmother's trunk,
Speaker 1: but I've never looked in it. So I said, oh,
Speaker 1: my gosh, you have FaceTime. I have an iPhone? Do
Speaker 1: you have an iPhone? So we're we're bringing each other's
Speaker 1: faces up where we're talking each other and looking at
Speaker 1: each other, and I say, well, let's can I see
Speaker 1: the trunk too. So she walks me on my iPhone
Speaker 1: into her grandmother's store in the family storage and there's
Speaker 1: a green trunk, this green leather army trunk that stamped
Speaker 1: U S Signal Corps Grace Banker. And she lifts the
Speaker 1: lid and there's grandma's stack of letters, and there's grandma's
Speaker 1: trench helmet, and there's grandma's gas masks and mess kit
Speaker 1: and and uniform. And this trunk has not been opened
Speaker 1: and we don't know how many decades, and suddenly it's
Speaker 1: just all there. It's like this you know, magic trunk.
Speaker 1: It's like a treasure chest as and and so the
Speaker 1: family is now donated most of it to the World
Speaker 1: War One Museum in Kansas City, but I think there
Speaker 1: are pieces of it they just you know, they just
Speaker 1: can't unclench their fists and let go off because it
Speaker 1: is you know, it says treasured memento. But there's something
Speaker 1: like holding that handwritten note that who knew, who knew
Speaker 1: of whould ever be read again? Maybe you know you're
Speaker 1: seeing it for the first time in a hundred years.
Speaker 1: It's like a do you feel like a psychic link back?
Speaker 1: I do? I you know, it's okay, here's a weird thing.
Speaker 1: The historian to me, it's like the dead or present
Speaker 1: with us, you know they are We'll be dead too
Speaker 1: soon enough, and we'll leave our own ephemera. So I
Speaker 1: always feel like writing history is like reaching through this
Speaker 1: beaded curtain and and and holding someone's hand who's on
Speaker 1: the other side, you know, trying to bring them closer
Speaker 1: so we can see them. Hope that doesn't sound too ghoulish,
Speaker 1: but to me, it just feels very intimate and personal.
Speaker 1: With every book I've written, you know, it's it's always
Speaker 1: I'm there to to meet them. I mean, there to
Speaker 1: meet Harriet Tubman, there to meet Alexander Hamilton. I've written
Speaker 1: a couple of novels on those and some other people
Speaker 1: as well, and and I always just you know, that's
Speaker 1: I feel my mission, and the mission of historian is
Speaker 1: get the dead to stand up and walk, you know,
Speaker 1: tell the story. My sincerest gratitude to Elizabeth Cobbs, Sarah Wasserman,
Speaker 1: David Weinstein, Ian Nagaski, and all our other amazing guests
Speaker 1: this season for lending their credibility to our fledgling podcast. Finally,
Speaker 1: we wanted to say thanks to you for, instead of
Speaker 1: the infinite amount of other things you could be doing,
Speaker 1: choosing to listen without you. There's no show if you
Speaker 1: feel so inclined, drop us a line, let us a
Speaker 1: little review, hit us up on social media. We'd love
Speaker 1: to hear from you. Learn more about everything you heard
Speaker 1: here at ephemeral dot Show. For more podcasts from I
Speaker 1: heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.