Speaker 1: Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda Land Audio in
Speaker 1: partnership with I Heart Radio M We're doing something a
Speaker 1: little differently on today's episode of our show. Today, we're
Speaker 1: talking to Mo Rocca, who is um on many interesting things,
Speaker 1: the hosting creator of the hit podcast Mobituaries and author
Speaker 1: of the New York Times bestselling book Mobituaries, Great Lives
Speaker 1: Worth Reliving. Welcome to Criminalia. I am Maria Tremarque, and
Speaker 1: I'm Holly Fry and Mo. I am so delighted to
Speaker 1: have you here. I am a longtime fan. The Presidential
Speaker 1: Pets book is a favorite. Yes, mine too, mine too, Yes,
Speaker 1: I am truly howled not a lot of people bought
Speaker 1: that book. Well, it's sold like hotcake at my house, right,
Speaker 1: big hit in my world. Thank you. I mean, you
Speaker 1: have a lot of great stuff under your belt. You
Speaker 1: have a I'm time Emmy because she wrote the six
Speaker 1: or fourth annual Tony Awards, which is amazing. That was,
Speaker 1: And you have been a CBS Sunday Morning correspondent. You
Speaker 1: do a lot of stuff, but I love that you
Speaker 1: are working so much in history. Right now, today we're
Speaker 1: going to talk a little bit about your show mobituaries
Speaker 1: and all of the interesting ways that you encounter history
Speaker 1: through this lens. So it's such a specific but really
Speaker 1: smart way I think to talk about history. Was there
Speaker 1: a specific person or topic that was the inspiration for this,
Speaker 1: and then once you realize you were going to do it,
Speaker 1: was there an obvious best choice of where you were
Speaker 1: going to start telling these stories? Holly first of all,
Speaker 1: and Maria, I'm so happy to be here. I do
Speaker 1: have to say. You mentioned that I won an Emmy
Speaker 1: for writing for the Chinese and I'm thinking that if
Speaker 1: I could win a Grammy singing about the oscars, that
Speaker 1: gave me an ego. It's a technical egot, and that's
Speaker 1: the most important. Yes, it's the hardest type to have.
Speaker 1: I thought of the idea for obituaries before I had
Speaker 1: a specific person in mind. But I will tell you
Speaker 1: the very person that we did, which was not my idea.
Speaker 1: It came to me through my then producer Meg and
Speaker 1: Marcus was on Meter, who was this wildly famous for
Speaker 1: the time impersonator of John of Kennedy, then President, whose
Speaker 1: career died when the president was assassinated. And it was
Speaker 1: one of these boards where it combined politics with pop culture.
Speaker 1: It was a dramatic story. It really what my appetite
Speaker 1: for doing more of this. It just felt like you
Speaker 1: could get through history and so many different ideas through
Speaker 1: a you know, it's a really grim topic in an
Speaker 1: entertaining way. We did an episode on the Rural Courge
Speaker 1: about when really popular sitcoms of the sixties, which were
Speaker 1: almost all about rural America Greenaker's Petticoach jump and replaced
Speaker 1: in one health group by more urban sitcoms, and there
Speaker 1: was a real history story there wasn't just about fun sitcoms.
Speaker 1: We also are pretty curious what that research and prep
Speaker 1: processes like after that. I know, we go through a
Speaker 1: lot ourselves coming up for others, and there's always those little,
Speaker 1: those spiders stories that don't quite make it into what
Speaker 1: you're doing, but they're one or two sentences that are
Speaker 1: always really interesting about someone or your research process changes,
Speaker 1: I think constantly. But I'm curious how yours is too.
Speaker 1: I mean, the rabbit holes are really fun, pulling yes
Speaker 1: little threads. So when we were researching one on from
Speaker 1: this pain, I was actually listening to the audio book
Speaker 1: of our experts, Biography of Pain, written by a guy
Speaker 1: named Craig Nelson, not to be confused with Nelson Couch,
Speaker 1: but there was literal parenthetical, at least it sounded like
Speaker 1: a parenthetical on the audiobook. It was one line that
Speaker 1: mentioned a museum exhibit in Hamboard in seventeen fifty five
Speaker 1: where Swedish spotmissed Carl Linnaeus disproved the thousands year long
Speaker 1: belief in dragons. And I thought, well, what is this
Speaker 1: right one sentence like the author at that point was
Speaker 1: talking about the Enlightenment, and just toss decide that Carl Linnaeus,
Speaker 1: the Swedish spotmiss was in Hamburg to look at a
Speaker 1: seven headed high draw on exhibit and realized it was
Speaker 1: a faith, thus disproving the existence of dragons. I wasn't
Speaker 1: going to let it just fly by, Like I'm not
Speaker 1: a big Game of Thrones person, but I know a
Speaker 1: lot of dragons fly. But anyway, so that's part of
Speaker 1: the fun of it, is when you stump something and
Speaker 1: you stumble on a little detail and it leads you
Speaker 1: in the whole of the direction. So that kind of
Speaker 1: leads me to my next question because I know, I mean,
Speaker 1: Maria and I both know history is full of little
Speaker 1: surprises and you think you're talking about one topic and
Speaker 1: it turns out to be actually something completely different. And
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk to you about your episode Death
Speaker 1: of a Name Mildred, Bertha and Todd, where you talk
Speaker 1: about names and how they shift. Mildred Gallars, who is
Speaker 1: known as access Sally, who kind of parallels some stories
Speaker 1: we've told. I'm wondering what your biggest surprises were when
Speaker 1: you were researching her, and at what point you were like, wait,
Speaker 1: this woman was tried for treason in the US and
Speaker 1: was the first woman to be so. And I suspect
Speaker 1: because I know you did an episode right on Douglas Chandler,
Speaker 1: is that right, who also was tried for treason or
Speaker 1: convicted of it? So you're going to know more than I.
Speaker 1: But I think that there aren't a lot of people
Speaker 1: who have been convicted of treason. And so when one
Speaker 1: of the producers of the Names episode gave me a
Speaker 1: list of Mildred's, my eye went right towards Mildred Glars.
Speaker 1: And so when I went to visit my fifth grade teacher,
Speaker 1: Mildred Venisi, and we were talking about different Aldred, I
Speaker 1: knew that it would be a fun thing to bring
Speaker 1: up this woman convicted of treason who was a propagandist
Speaker 1: for Nazi Germany. I was surprised that I didn't know
Speaker 1: about this woman in learning about her that after her
Speaker 1: prison terms she ended up teaching music in Ohio. I'm
Speaker 1: wondering what she taught the kids, and obviously her career changed.
Speaker 1: I guess if she had taught them eight old vice
Speaker 1: it wouldn't have been It might have been a little loaded.
Speaker 1: But the um again one of those kind of ancillary
Speaker 1: benefits of doing these deep dives on a topic like
Speaker 1: names that seemingly just a lot of fun, and it is.
Speaker 1: But then suddenly to learn about someone picked of treason
Speaker 1: and Mildred, Oh, treasonus Mildred, that's the Mildred that we
Speaker 1: were looking for. That would be a great name for
Speaker 1: a pet. Treesonus Mildred to the Treasons Mildred. Also like,
Speaker 1: you know, just maybe you're getting a Christmas card from
Speaker 1: military lars and seeing trees and greetings something like that.
Speaker 1: I swear you just launched like a new business model.
Speaker 1: You get royalties from that, right, This kind of still
Speaker 1: builds on that idea of surprises. Our entire premise of
Speaker 1: this show is that we're looking at historical crimes because
Speaker 1: a lot of the time, when you see them in
Speaker 1: the rear view mirror, you realize that some historical criminals
Speaker 1: look actually pretty sympathetic, others that maybe heroes don't look
Speaker 1: as great all the time. Have you had your expectations
Speaker 1: or assumptions subverted by any of your subjects. I had
Speaker 1: expectations subverted, as it's such a great point that things
Speaker 1: that we think of as terrible times almost seemed sort
Speaker 1: of sad and kind of limp in pathetic, and heroes
Speaker 1: of course change. I knew that I would sympathize with
Speaker 1: Billy Carter, with the younger brother of Jimmy Carter, going
Speaker 1: into it, I didn't realize how much I would. I
Speaker 1: think that's maybe a process of I don't want to
Speaker 1: say necessarily falling in love with the subject, But I
Speaker 1: think the deeper you get into search on somebody, the
Speaker 1: more you do tend to empathize. I can't think of
Speaker 1: somebody who I ended up disliking. Maybe I'm a little
Speaker 1: bit of a chunk um. I felt more deeply for them,
Speaker 1: And that was certainly the case of Billy Carter, who
Speaker 1: played sort of the entertaining goofball. But the more we
Speaker 1: got into it, the more it became a parent. That
Speaker 1: what a situation to be placed in. He was a
Speaker 1: father of six, I think before he was forty and
Speaker 1: his wife they were raising a big family in this
Speaker 1: very small town. Even in n national and international media.
Speaker 1: Was a big deal to descend on this tiny town
Speaker 1: in Georgia, and he placed under that microscope. I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna plant this seed because I actually think you could
Speaker 1: do an entire episode on baby Brothers, because you talking
Speaker 1: about Billy makes me think of Lester Hemingway, who I
Speaker 1: don't know how much you know about him, but Ernest
Speaker 1: Hemingway's little brother had absolute like idolized his big brother
Speaker 1: and kind of lived in his shadow and tried to
Speaker 1: do all these crazy things to try to like make
Speaker 1: a name for himself, including establishing his own country on
Speaker 1: an island by using that loophole that if an island
Speaker 1: had enough back guano, the U s could claim it
Speaker 1: because it was a necessary fuel and fertilizer at the time.
Speaker 1: But there are a lot of I the younger siblings
Speaker 1: that are really interesting in history. I think he just
Speaker 1: gave me three episodes and one right. For the Mombenturies book,
Speaker 1: we did do something on siblings and the Bronte's brother,
Speaker 1: Brandon Bronte. I can't remember. It's not Brandon, but it's
Speaker 1: something like that. And you know those Bronte sisters, I
Speaker 1: mean they were really productive. I mean they were really
Speaker 1: talented helping their little brother. You know, it's so interesting
Speaker 1: that you brought up sjuana. President Franklin Pierce one of
Speaker 1: his big accomplishments. I mean, he helped tear the country
Speaker 1: apart and let us into the Civil War, but he
Speaker 1: also monopolized the international supply iguana, like hasting the guano islands,
Speaker 1: and it really was a very valuable prolizer. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a there's actually a three line there that you could
Speaker 1: probably pursue, telling you do a whole season that's to
Speaker 1: animal poop likes as long as it tid gently touches
Speaker 1: the subject. He could. For a long time, I couldn't
Speaker 1: feel I said guano was actually poop. I understood that
Speaker 1: penguins pooped, but I thought the guana was just this
Speaker 1: paste that they kind of admitted. I love this idea
Speaker 1: that you think there's a secondary cloac situation happening where
Speaker 1: they just like they make up pace. Oh that's no
Speaker 1: fertilizer gland? Did you not know fertilizer gland? Exactly? I'm dying.
Speaker 1: Fertilizer does sound a lot more romantic to say Guando
Speaker 1: than I think. Yeah, I'm gonna laugh about Guano for
Speaker 1: a minute, Um, Maria, were you about to go? Actually?
Speaker 1: I was gonna make a joke about Douglas Chandler and
Speaker 1: Paul Revere, but then I decided not. He used to
Speaker 1: refer it in I did look a little bit. I
Speaker 1: knew I did not know anything about Douglas Chandler. Chandler
Speaker 1: is an interesting kind of guy. Holly and I talked
Speaker 1: a lot about this on all of these people, like
Speaker 1: where did this really come from? What grew in his
Speaker 1: life that got him to the point where he was
Speaker 1: taking the five point summary of propaganda points from the Germans?
Speaker 1: You know, what we traced him back to was losing
Speaker 1: his wealthy family and all of his money in the depression,
Speaker 1: and he blamed it all on the Jewish community. And
Speaker 1: he just went from there and he went to Europe
Speaker 1: and everything that he saw there pleased him because it
Speaker 1: wasn't American, really he stayed. He did many broadcasts anti
Speaker 1: US broadcast, but Chandler, I think was one of the
Speaker 1: stories where I found him looking at someone else. Actually,
Speaker 1: I believe I might have been researching as a Pound
Speaker 1: and his propaganda as repound speaking, and I think that's
Speaker 1: when Douglas popped off, because his was actually similar in
Speaker 1: that radio broadcast shortwave radio format. He's an interesting guy
Speaker 1: who doesn't get a lot of name attention, but who
Speaker 1: is exactly in that Nazi propaganda hole that I wanted
Speaker 1: to try to avoid the entire season, that we didn't treasonist,
Speaker 1: and yet here we were with Douglas Chandler. Yes, sort
Speaker 1: of a lightweight as a Pound, which would make him
Speaker 1: Ezra Bunch. That's a great cartoon character, as he's not
Speaker 1: really very good at verse, but he tries real hard.
Speaker 1: He Ghoest writes for people on the side. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: ask you a sort of heady question, MO, When historians
Speaker 1: of the future right your obituary, what do you hope
Speaker 1: it includes? What's the thing where you're like, they better
Speaker 1: tell people that I did X Y or Z. I
Speaker 1: thought about what I taught my first line to be,
Speaker 1: and it's all in that opening line in that clause, right,
Speaker 1: I wanted to be Morocca Comma, who made people interested
Speaker 1: in things they didn't expect to be interested in. Comma
Speaker 1: died today. He was a D seven period whatever. But
Speaker 1: I actually would love him to include my pets book. Um,
Speaker 1: I want them to include my cooking show. Oh yes,
Speaker 1: I forgot to bring this up earlier. I loved that idea. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think, um, for a time, I probably would
Speaker 1: have wanted the fact that I was a self taught
Speaker 1: gymnast to be included. But I think at this point
Speaker 1: I never learned to do a back hand spring unassisted,
Speaker 1: which had been like a goal. By the time I
Speaker 1: had thirty, then it was a goal, but I hit forty.
Speaker 1: Then by the time I hit fifty, and I just
Speaker 1: think at this point maybe a cause of death concerned.
Speaker 1: So what a hundred and seven? That's when you go
Speaker 1: for it on the backhand spring exactly like I can
Speaker 1: do this, and do you do it perfectly? What a
Speaker 1: great way to go out. If I knew that, okay,
Speaker 1: tomorrow I'm going to die in my sleep, why not
Speaker 1: just go for the hon assisted backhand spring right then?
Speaker 1: That will put you in the history books. Right, absolutely,
Speaker 1: put your camera up and take a little video of it.
Speaker 1: Like some person in the future will be reading about
Speaker 1: like strange deaths and they'll be like, oh, and then
Speaker 1: that time that Morocca died doing an assistant backhand spring
Speaker 1: at the age of a hundred and seven, and they'll
Speaker 1: be like, what we have to do an episode of
Speaker 1: this guy. Yeah, he didn't stink the landing something like that.
Speaker 1: We'll make sure you have a good headline, like perfection, Maria.
Speaker 1: Do you want to ask the most important question we
Speaker 1: ask on all of ours. Holly and I have a
Speaker 1: thing at the end of our Criminalia shows where we
Speaker 1: do a cocktail and mock tail. It's related to the
Speaker 1: topic that we've been talking about, sometimes loosely, sometimes very
Speaker 1: We were wondering before we let you go for your day,
Speaker 1: do you happen to have a favorite cocktail or mocktail?
Speaker 1: I like an old fashioned because there's a part of
Speaker 1: me that likes that moment between me and the bartender
Speaker 1: where the bartender is thinking, really because you've got to
Speaker 1: get the more the pestle and the cherry and the
Speaker 1: orange and do the muddling. And it's also kind of
Speaker 1: like I'm old fashioned such as it isn't like kind
Speaker 1: of the word muddle anyway, muddling through? Aren't we all
Speaker 1: just trying to muddle through? But yeah, I like that.
Speaker 1: But I also have dreams of a cocktail called a
Speaker 1: Shirley temple black. Oh yeah, but surely temple black I
Speaker 1: guess would be ginger ail with grenadine and is it colua? Right, Holly? Yeah?
Speaker 1: What would make it dark? Listen, here's what I would do,
Speaker 1: like a black spice drum. No, that's it, that's hitch. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: we accidentally made a cocktail this time, I know, right,
Speaker 1: So Holly experimented once or twice also with charcoal in
Speaker 1: her cocktails. I have. You have to be really careful
Speaker 1: using activated charcoal to darken a drink, as we always
Speaker 1: tell our listeners, but I say it every time. Don't
Speaker 1: give someone a drink with activated charcoal in it if
Speaker 1: they don't know it, because it will mess up medication
Speaker 1: absorption and whatnot. That's a quick way to do. You
Speaker 1: have to be very very judicious. But I think lately
Speaker 1: I've been trying to figure out other ways to make
Speaker 1: drinks that are dark. A little black spice drum is
Speaker 1: usually my go to. Or another one that I've started
Speaker 1: playing with lately is to drop a couple of black
Speaker 1: tea bags in like a mason jar of vodka gin
Speaker 1: and you get a very dark spirit out of that spice,
Speaker 1: or do whatever else you want. There's surely temple black well.
Speaker 1: I like that, he go like the end. A friend
Speaker 1: of mine, her husband is Scottish and he probably introduced me,
Speaker 1: I guess, years ago to sort of single malt sculpches
Speaker 1: and I love I said, I wanted to taste like dirt.
Speaker 1: What is that? Kind of what charcoal does do it?
Speaker 1: It doesn't add a ton of flavor. It really does
Speaker 1: more to just shift the color. But because charcoal absorbs
Speaker 1: everything if you're on a medication, also, like nutrients that
Speaker 1: you eat that day are not going to get to
Speaker 1: yourselves because they're going with the charcoal. So it's one
Speaker 1: of those things you have to be very judicious about.
Speaker 1: It's the kind of thing if you're doing like a
Speaker 1: Halloween or some other event where you do a specific
Speaker 1: cocktail that has charcoal in it, you drink one that's
Speaker 1: not a this is my drink for the night kind
Speaker 1: of setup. So yeah, this is I know, I only
Speaker 1: go with clean coal technology from my lir. Now this
Speaker 1: is what I'm gonna have a gas based cocktail if
Speaker 1: clean burning gas work on that. We've shifted a little
Speaker 1: away from history, but I want to make sure we
Speaker 1: thank you Moe for spending this time with this with
Speaker 1: It's a light a way to to talk about history.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. It's just been a lot of
Speaker 1: fun and I was just I'll go listen to more
Speaker 1: Douglas Chandler, but I probably won't. Don't do that. Don't
Speaker 1: do that, but make sure no save Douglas Chandler for
Speaker 1: another day. But I want to make sure that you
Speaker 1: tell our listeners where they can find Mobituaries so they
Speaker 1: can get more of these very fun stories, and where
Speaker 1: they can find your book. You can find Mobituaries wherever
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts, and you can find a Mobituaries
Speaker 1: book and the audio book wherever you get your books.
Speaker 1: We're in the middle of our third season now and
Speaker 1: we have plenty of I hope surprising and engaging stories
Speaker 1: coming up the podcast. I love it. I will be listening.
Speaker 1: I can't wait for the last having my episode. I
Speaker 1: thank you again Moe for spending this time with us,
Speaker 1: for our listeners. I also want to thank you, and
Speaker 1: I really do hope you check out mobituaries. If you
Speaker 1: love Criminalia, you're going to be addicted instantly, and we
Speaker 1: will be right back here next week. We're going to
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about artists, and then we'll
Speaker 1: have another cocktail and we'll see right back here. Criminalia
Speaker 1: is a production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shonda land Audio,
Speaker 1: please visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to your favorite shows.