Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosity is a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world
Speaker 1: is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an
Speaker 1: open book, all of these amazing tales are right there
Speaker 1: on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to
Speaker 1: the Cabinet of Curiosities. Picture of Valentine's Day card. You
Speaker 1: probably see pink and red hearts, maybe a fun rhyme,
Speaker 1: maybe one of those postcards printed for students to hand
Speaker 1: out in class, Snoopy or some superhero saying beat my Valentine,
Speaker 1: ready to be passed along with some candy hearts and
Speaker 1: a shy smile. It's a sweet tradition, but for a
Speaker 1: day celebrating the chance to turn a private crush into
Speaker 1: something more. Valentine's Day wasn't always so sweet, And of
Speaker 1: course there have always been people who didn't exactly feel
Speaker 1: warm fuzzies every time that day came around. So what's
Speaker 1: in it for them? Well, the Victorians had an answer
Speaker 1: for that. Recently, a historian looking through a British museum
Speaker 1: found a leather bound volume of Valentine's cards from around
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy. The kind of display book that a salesman
Speaker 1: would bring to stationary stores to show business owners what
Speaker 1: they could bring their to their shelves on Valentine's Day.
Speaker 1: The first half of the book is predictable, cherubs, flowers,
Speaker 1: silver spirals, the kinds of classy cards Victorian lovebirds might
Speaker 1: buy for each other. The second half, though, is more
Speaker 1: for the mocking birds. The back of the album is
Speaker 1: full of postcards that were printed with devastating insults and
Speaker 1: hurtful rhymes. The illustrations are rude caricatures and crass parodies
Speaker 1: of lovely greetings. Some of them even cross over the
Speaker 1: line from the hideous to the obscene. Compared to the
Speaker 1: other cards, they're a little rougher there, rented quickly on
Speaker 1: cheap sheets of paper. After all, you probably want to
Speaker 1: put most of your money into praising your friends, not
Speaker 1: insulting your enemies. Even so, there were plenty of choices
Speaker 1: for the discerning buyer. Take, for example, the card showing
Speaker 1: a gentleman in striped trousers getting a bucket of water
Speaker 1: splashed in his face by a smiling woman. His hat
Speaker 1: flies off the edge of the page, and the rhyme
Speaker 1: underneath it reads it says as plain as it can say,
Speaker 1: old fellow, you best step away. Another example is a
Speaker 1: card that's covered in delicate calligraphy but ironically reads, indeed
Speaker 1: you are a little prig for home. I do not
Speaker 1: care one fig. Now I'm not saying they would win
Speaker 1: any prizes for poetry, but if you want to put
Speaker 1: a suitor off your case, looking at the grin of
Speaker 1: the woman with the bucket of water gives us a
Speaker 1: glimpse of how someone might feel putting their coins down
Speaker 1: on the counter in the stationary shop. But these mocking
Speaker 1: cards weren't just printed to stop unwanted attention. They were
Speaker 1: also called vinegar Valentine's printed in the event that you
Speaker 1: just wanted to insult someone in your life, holiday or
Speaker 1: no angry at a salesperson for how you were treated
Speaker 1: in their store. There's a card for that, illustrated with
Speaker 1: an obnoxious cashier behind the counter. There were cards printed
Speaker 1: to sling at school, teachers, neighbors, and so many more.
Speaker 1: Look any trip to the comments section on a website
Speaker 1: will show you that cheap insults have never gone out
Speaker 1: of style. So that raises the question why there aren't
Speaker 1: more of these cards around the fact of the matter
Speaker 1: is they didn't last. First of all, they were probably
Speaker 1: thrown away when they were received because these Valentines didn't sing.
Speaker 1: They stun One writer from the time remembered getting one,
Speaker 1: and she said that she threw it directly into the fire.
Speaker 1: Still enough of them have survived that today. Historians guessed
Speaker 1: that something like seven hundred and fifty thousand Vinegar Valentine's
Speaker 1: were being sent each and every year. But even as
Speaker 1: they rose in popularity, there was plenty of pushback to
Speaker 1: Valentine's Day has its fans, and they weren't too happy
Speaker 1: that a day celebrating innocent love was being polluted with
Speaker 1: overly malicious notes. And there's another twist on all this
Speaker 1: too that may be part of the outrage against Vinegar Valentine's.
Speaker 1: You see, the Victorian era was a time like today
Speaker 1: when cards could be sent through the mail anonymously. What's
Speaker 1: different from the present is that these were the days
Speaker 1: before the English mail use stamps. Letters and cards could
Speaker 1: just be dropped into the mail without the sender paying
Speaker 1: up front to get them delivered. The mail still had
Speaker 1: to be paid for, though, and who ponied up the
Speaker 1: person who received the mail, which means that people actually
Speaker 1: had to pay for the privilege of being insulted. Today,
Speaker 1: a lot has changed, and even for those of us
Speaker 1: who don't enjoy all the sugary sweetness of candy hearts,
Speaker 1: at least we can all be grateful to leave behind
Speaker 1: their tradition of adding insult to injury. Amelia was used
Speaker 1: to going anywhere she wanted. That's because she could fly.
Speaker 1: And yes, I'm talking about that Amelia Amelia Earhart. She
Speaker 1: didn't start out as a pilot, of course. During the
Speaker 1: eighteen flu pandemic, she was one of the most trusted
Speaker 1: nurses aids in a military hospital, working night shifts in
Speaker 1: the pneumonia ward. But it was in the winter of
Speaker 1: that year that she first caught an interest in flying.
Speaker 1: She remembered that some of the military officers she knew
Speaker 1: from the hospital were being trained to fly, and in
Speaker 1: her time off from nursing duty, she would go to
Speaker 1: their makeshift airfields and watch them take off. She never
Speaker 1: got over the sting of the snow on her face
Speaker 1: as it was blown back from the propellers. Within just
Speaker 1: a few years, those propellers were hers. She had her
Speaker 1: first flying lesson from another woman pilot named Netta Snook.
Speaker 1: By that summer, she had scraped together enough money to
Speaker 1: buy a yellow biplane that she called the Canary. The
Speaker 1: next fall, Amelia broke a world record for female pilots,
Speaker 1: and she took her little plane up to fourteen thousand feet.
Speaker 1: She wasn't done, of course. She had always had a
Speaker 1: reputation for being curious and bold, and the more she flew,
Speaker 1: the more ambitious she got. In she became the first
Speaker 1: woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, but she wasn't
Speaker 1: the pilot. She became the first woman to travel over
Speaker 1: the ocean by air, but the fact that she was
Speaker 1: only a passenger for the trip didn't sit well with her. Obviously,
Speaker 1: she knew how to fly. She had already been piloting
Speaker 1: shorter flights for almost ten years, so it's no wonder
Speaker 1: she wasn't quite happy sitting there while someone else worked
Speaker 1: the controls. After all, she wasn't a woman who was
Speaker 1: happy with being bred to humility, as she later said, No,
Speaker 1: Amelia was born for altitude, so it was a triumph
Speaker 1: of both her talents and her courage when she finally
Speaker 1: flew herself across the Atlantic two years later in ninety
Speaker 1: two successes like that opened new doors for her. When
Speaker 1: she got home from that trip, she had standing invitations
Speaker 1: to just about anywhere she liked. After all, who wouldn't
Speaker 1: want to host such a trailblazing spirit. So the dinner
Speaker 1: parties where Amelia found herself were more and more lavish,
Speaker 1: and more and more exciting. But no matter how exciting
Speaker 1: they got, they still never quite met Amelia's high expectations.
Speaker 1: Take for example, one particular dinner she attended on April
Speaker 1: ninety three. It was about a swanky as it gets.
Speaker 1: In those days. The newspapers love to report on what
Speaker 1: Amelia would wear to her high profile gatherings, and that
Speaker 1: night she went hatless but wore high heels, a long
Speaker 1: white gown, a short black coat, and white evening gloves,
Speaker 1: just the sort of thing high society papers would expect
Speaker 1: from a high society dinner. What no one expected, though,
Speaker 1: was that halfway through Amelia would turn to her hostess
Speaker 1: and invite her out into the night sky. On a whim,
Speaker 1: she suggested a flight to Baltimore. Perhaps just as surprising,
Speaker 1: her hostess agreed it wasn't because it was a nice night,
Speaker 1: though honestly, the clouds were low, and it was spluttering rain.
Speaker 1: But the whole dinner party jumped up from the table
Speaker 1: and called ahead to the airport. Amelia Earhart was taking
Speaker 1: them into the sky. The airport scrambled to get ready.
Speaker 1: One newspaper said that the airstrip was just one gigantic
Speaker 1: mud puddle that night, lavishly streaked with water that hadn't
Speaker 1: soaked in. But Amelia marched her high heels to the
Speaker 1: waiting plane and ushered the dinner party inside. Soon enough
Speaker 1: they were in the air. Some of the passengers remembered
Speaker 1: that Amelia didn't even take off her heels and gloves
Speaker 1: to fly. She was instantly at home. Now she was
Speaker 1: the hostess and the rest of the group were simply
Speaker 1: along for the ride. Amelia flew them along the Potomac River,
Speaker 1: buzzed the Capitol Building, and then turned northeast towards Baltimore.
Speaker 1: She made an impression that night, but then she always
Speaker 1: seemed to do that everywhere she flew. This time, though,
Speaker 1: Amelia's hostess was so inspired that she asked for flying lessons,
Speaker 1: and Amelia agreed. Those lessons never came about, though that
Speaker 1: woman's husband felt that flying was just too dangerous, which
Speaker 1: is understandable. He was accustomed to worrying about danger being
Speaker 1: the President of the United States. So while Eleanor Roosevelt
Speaker 1: never got her chance to learn from Amelia Earhart, it's
Speaker 1: clear they would have made quite a pair, the First
Speaker 1: Lady and the First Lady of Flight. I hope you've
Speaker 1: enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe
Speaker 1: for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the
Speaker 1: show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was
Speaker 1: created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
Speaker 1: a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can
Speaker 1: learn all about it over at the World of Lore
Speaker 1: dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,