Selects: Flagpole Sitting: A Real Fad

6:09Chuck Bryant:Oh. From Hardy Danger. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, wait. Dun, dun. Is that it? That's not it. No.

6:22Josh Clark:My band actually covers Flagpole Sitting. It's a fun song.

6:25Chuck Bryant:Okay. That's great. I'm going to have to go listen to it because I feel like I'm missing out. But is that song about flagpole sitting? Is it about Shipwreck Kelly in particular?

6:35Josh Clark:No, it's not. But it does have one line that says, run it up the flagpole and see. and that's the only time it references flagpoles at all.

6:45Chuck Bryant:Sees what?

6:47Josh Clark:Who salutes but no one ever does, I think is the next line.

6:51Chuck Bryant:Hmm, that rings a bell.

6:53Josh Clark:I was looking into the mirror. Oh. I think a little bit clearer. Sure. Running up the flagpole and see who salutes but no one ever does.

7:05Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I'm not sick, but I'm not. That's it. Who is that?

7:09Josh Clark:Harvey Danger. Harvey Danger?

7:10Chuck Bryant:Okay, yeah, that's a great song. I love it.

7:12Josh Clark:Yeah. Who, a fellow podcasting friend, John Roderick, actually, Sean Nelson was a friend of his in Seattle. And he played bass for a little while in Harvey Danger.

7:22Chuck Bryant:Oh, very. Wow, man. This is all coming first. I got one more for you. What you got? I used to have that song. And I don't know where I downloaded it from. This would have been probably back in the Napster days or something. Whoa. And it was mislabeled as Brian Jonestown Massacre. And I was always like, this does not sound like Brian Jonestown Massacre. Now I know it most definitely wasn't Brian Jonestown Massacre. Wow.

7:48Josh Clark:All right. We haven't even talked about flagpole sitting yet.

7:51Chuck Bryant:No, we haven't, which is a crime because it's actually one of the more interesting weirdo fads that's ever come this way in America. And it was in the 20s. It started, we actually, we know who patient zero was of flagpole sitting. And it's easy to tell because it is such a bizarre thing to do that if you can find the person who did it first, who claims to have done it first, they're probably correct. And in this case, you can trace it back to sometime around January of 1924, supposedly, potentially, in Hollywood, California, part of Los Angeles. And there was a man named Alvin Shipwreck Kelly who supposedly climbed up on a flagpole as part of a promotion for a movie and sat there for a full 13 hours and 13 minutes to help draw a crowd.

8:45Chuck Bryant:And boy, did he ever.

8:47Josh Clark:Yeah, which, you know, it sounds like a long time to sit on a flagpole, but that is kid stuff compared to where this is headed. Yeah, for sure. That's an aperitif.

8:58Chuck Bryant:But it's a good first attempt, you know? Yeah, and so, you know, it sounds strange because when you think of a flagpole,

9:05Josh Clark:you're like, what are they sitting on? It's a modified flagpole that basically there are different kinds, but usually it's sort of like a bar stool at the top of a flagpole, And it's that lo-fi. And you climb up there, and you sit, and that's all you do.

9:21Chuck Bryant:That's it. I mean, whatever else you want to do to use yourself or whatever, that's up to you. But as far as being considered a flagpole sitter, that's it. You sit on top of a flagpole for as long as you can.

9:34Josh Clark:All right. So let's talk about this guy because Shipwreck Kelly was a pretty interesting character.

9:40Chuck Bryant:and I have to say there's a memory palace episode about him that I specifically didn't listen to beforehand because I didn't want to unconsciously rip it off wow go listen to that yeah our old

9:49Josh Clark:buddy Nate I'm going to check that out for sure so Alvin Kelly he was born Aloysius Anthony Kelly in New York City in Hell's Kitchen in a tenement in 1893 and had a very sad start to his life in that his father had already passed before he was born. His mother passed in childbirth, and that basically meant he was shuttled around to relatives and orphanages from the minute he took his first breath.

10:20Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and apparently from a pretty early age, he would do things like climb flagpoles and other tall stuff, and working at heights became kind of a recurring theme in his life. It was supposedly by age seven, he was climbing flagpoles. Within a few years after that, he was starting to scale the facades of some of the buildings in his neighborhood. And by the time he was 13, and bear in mind if this guy's biography seems a little thin, he just came out of nowhere in 1924 for sitting on a flagpole. So all of the info about him came from him to reporters who were reporting in the 1920s. So just fabrications are flying around left and right.

11:02Chuck Bryant:Sure. But supposedly he ran away at age 13 and ran off to join the crew of a cargo ship and start his life sailing the seas.

11:13Josh Clark:Yeah, and he did a lot of kind of odd jobs, or maybe not odd jobs, but just jobs that didn't have anything to do with one another over the next couple of decades. He was in the movies as a stand-in and a double. He was a stunt person, a stunt pilot, a high diver, a boxer. This part I love. There's actually a name for people that repair church steeples. What is that? Steeplejack. He was a steeplejack.

11:40Chuck Bryant:That is definitely a band name for sure. Steeplejack? Oh, yeah. It sounds like maybe an industrial band, but like on the light side, like they're technically too melodic to actually be considered industrial, but they still call themselves industrial.

11:55Josh Clark:That's become my favorite part of this whole band name thing. Is it? Is you describing what kind of band it is.

12:01Chuck Bryant:Oh, okay. I love it. Well, thanks, man. That makes me feel warm and pleasant.

12:06Josh Clark:So World War I comes along, and he was in the Naval Auxiliary Reserve as an ensign and served on the USS Edgar F. Luckenbach during that war. Yep.

12:20Chuck Bryant:So he did have some sort of, well, I should say, I don't know if anybody's corroborated that. but we'll just take all that at face value because it doesn't really matter at this point but he eventually picked up the nickname Shipwreck and there's a lot of different explanations for this and he's given or he gave multiple different explanations depending on what reporter he was talking to but one of the numbers that gets bandied about pretty frequently is that Shipwreck Kelly was so named because he survived 32 different shipwrecks at sea, which is where shipwrecks tend to happen.

12:58Josh Clark:Those were the good old days. Yeah. You just make up stories about yourself.

13:03Chuck Bryant:Do you remember when we talked about, we did an episode on the world's either luckiest or unluckiest people? Mm-hmm. And do you remember that one guy? He was like, I survived a car that fell off a cliff and I survived a train wreck and all that. He was doing his jam in like 2005, remember? Oh, was he? Yeah. Yeah, he was pretty recent, if I remember correctly. Remember his son came out and was like, everybody, this is not true. Right. Like, none of what you're talking about is true. My dad just fooled you all.

13:33Josh Clark:We don't know if Shipwreck Kelly actually survived the Titanic like he claimed, but we do know that he was not on the roster on the Titanic. So I am going to venture to say that he made that one up.

13:45Chuck Bryant:And there were three Kellys on board who were survivors, but all three of them were women. So, yeah, he probably wasn't on the Titanic. Maybe he did survive some shipwrecks. He was at sea, most likely. But the point is they called him Shipwreck Kelly. And I guess somebody went to the trouble of digging up that some reporters who covered his boxing career are probably the likeliest source for where he got his nickname Shipwreck, right?

14:12Josh Clark:Yeah, which I love because I guess he wasn't a great boxer because they said that he was often adrift and ready to sink.

14:22Chuck Bryant:Isn't that great? Shipwreck Kelly. It's a great nickname and an even better origin story than Surviving 32 Shipwrecks, if you ask me.

14:29Josh Clark:Yeah, and the other thing we don't know for sure is even if that Hollywood movie premiere story is correct in his first major outing as a flagpole sitter because yet another story says, no, this is actually in Philadelphia at a department store, and he just did it on a dare. And the department store got a lot of business because people were standing around looking and then doing some shopping. So they were like, hey, stay up there and I'll give you some extra dough.

14:56Chuck Bryant:Yeah. So either way, it's pretty widely held that Shipwreck Kelly was the guy who started the flagpole sitting craze. Right. And it was a craze because this is a time where you could go sit on a flagpole for 13 hours and 13 minutes. And newspapers around the country would pick up the story and write about it. and you would suddenly become famous overnight. And that's exactly what happened to Shipwreck Kelly. So that's prong one toward this becoming a fad in the 1920s. The other criteria is that people have to want to topple that record. And that was very widespread at the time, too, because the 1920s were actually really big into fads.

15:41Chuck Bryant:Like people would take up weird fads and just go nuts over them for basically the whole decade. Yeah, you know, people had time and they had fewer distractions.

15:52Josh Clark:Yeah, no TV. So, like, someone doing a dance-a-thon for 28 hours or sitting on a flagpole for a day, you know, it's an interesting story back then. It's sad that that was interesting, but it was.

16:08Chuck Bryant:Right. So, we'll talk about dance marathons and then we'll take a break, okay? Okay. Okay.

16:33Chuck Bryant:I'm Martha Stewart from the Martha Stewart Podcast.

16:36Josh Clark:In this special episode brought to you by McCormick Signature Seasonings, I got to chat with Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian about his new venture, Retrieve Air. We also get to talk about his family life and playing the weekend chef. I'm a simple man. I use honey from the farm and I got my crepe. That's it. The girls like their Nutella. That's my breakfast ritual. I'm usually phoning in lunch a little bit because I'm really planning on a delightful dinner. The girls really like steak. I spoil them. So even if I'm doing kebabs, I'm using ribeye, I'm doing it right.

17:10Chuck Bryant:Okay, well, please. Listen to the full episode of the Martha Stewart Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

17:19Josh Clark:Amazon Health AI presents Painful Thoughts. I, um, I can't stop scratching my downtown. Yeah, but I'm not itching to go downtown and tell a receptionist I'm here to talk about my downtown. Some things you'd rather type than say out loud. There's no question too embarrassing for Amazon Health AI. Chat your symptoms and get virtual care 24-7. Healthcare just got less painful.

17:51Chuck Bryant:What does it feel like to have a better laptop like the Dell XPS powered by Intel Core? Well, with a premium design that's thin and light, it feels smooth. Very smooth. For a better feel in your hands and less weight on your shoulders.

18:04Josh Clark:That's right. Right. It's also got a very responsive touchscreen and it just feels fast and precise. And that's for better scrolling, zooming and swiping. So everything just flows. And with long lasting battery life, it feels like nonstop energy for a better way to work without being near a charger.

18:18Chuck Bryant:Built for those who want better. The Dell XPS built for you.

18:43Chuck Bryant:Oh, wait. I got that backwards, Chuck, I just realized. Hopefully Jerry figured it out and there was an ad in there somewhere.

18:49Josh Clark:I think we should just leave it just like that, though. That'll be fun.

18:53Chuck Bryant:Okay. So we're going to talk about dance marathons now, after the ad break, despite what I said before. And dance marathons are a super 20s example of a crazy fad that kind of came along and got everybody by the hackles. And people across the country started entering basically dance marathon competitions. All because of one person, one woman, a dance instructor named Alma Cummings. That's right.

19:22Josh Clark:32 years old. She danced for 27 hours at the Audubon Ballroom in New York in 1923 with six different dance partners. And it was a weird time because it wasn't just dancing. It was endurance challenges as a whole were just all the rage and punishing your bodies and all these weird random ways from yo-yoing to hula hooping to rocking in a rocking chair or skipping rope to dancing. Dancing was the big one. And that's where, you know, if you see these videos of these marathon dance competitions, it's just it looks like hell on earth. It looks awful. Yeah.

20:06Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah. They didn't seem very fun at all. But Alma Cummings just kicked the whole thing off. And again, just like Shipwreck Kelly, who would follow, I guess, a year later or even, yeah, about a year later, she got a lot of publicity. There's like a famous photo of her with her feet in a tub of water soaking at home. and she's holding up her shoes and they have holes in the soles where, you know, she wore holes from dancing for 27 hours. And I guess, like you're saying, people were bored or there wasn't as much to do, but also there really seems to just be a profound hunger for celebrity, however you can get it.

20:44Chuck Bryant:And that seemed to like really drive people who wanted to be like, well, if this lady got this much attention for dancing 27 straight hours, maybe I can get even more attention for dancing 30 straight hours. And so within just like, I think, three weeks of Alma Cummings setting this record for dancing, it had been broken nine times at least from people trying to seek the same kind of publicity she got.

21:09Josh Clark:Yeah, and you know, it's funny. It really, like we talk about these days how everyone wants their 10 minutes or they want to be reality show famous or whatever.

21:18Chuck Bryant:Has it been whittled down to 10 now? I thought it was like 15.

21:21Josh Clark:Well, like that's something new and it's really not. Like this is sort of the version of that back then was I want to be famous. I want my names in the papers, but I'm not particularly skilled enough to do anything to do that. So I'll rock in a rocking chair for three days. Yeah. You know?

21:40Chuck Bryant:And hopefully they will come. If I rock, they will come. And it's – That was a pity laugh at best, but I appreciate it. Well, that was a bad joke. Yeah. Admittedly.

21:52Josh Clark:But it would – and we should shout out a bunch of great websites here because this next bit came from Atlas Obscura, one of our favorite sites. And also our dearest of old sites that we always have loved, Mental Floss, Ripley's, History Daily, J. Mark Powell, and Historic Pelham, which is great. But Atlas Obscura talks about in the 30s, and this is really kind of depressing, during the Depression.

22:24Chuck Bryant:It's very appropriate.

22:25Josh Clark:Is that sometimes people would enter these dance marathons because it would be somewhere they could sleep and eat for a week at a time when they didn't necessarily have a home or food.

22:38Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it was extremely depressing. or just the prize money that was offered in the groups of the depression might be enough to keep your house from being foreclosed on. So, yeah, the thing is, you know, you can blame promoters for continuing this long beyond the fad, but the promoters wouldn't have been putting these on and offering this prize money were it not for all the crowds that would show up every day to watch these people get increasingly closer to, you know, catastrophic exhaustion from dance marathons. Because there were rules where probably early on in the dance marathon, you could sleep or rest for 15 minutes of every hour.

23:20Chuck Bryant:And then after like a week, a week of this dance marathon going on, the promoter might be like, oh, okay, well, we need to step things up a little bit. And you will now have three minutes per hour, every 24-hour period in a day, to where you can rest. rest. And then toward the end, they'd be like, no rest. I think I read about one where the last 57 hours of a multi-week dance marathon had no rest. So these people danced for more than two straight days constantly. You had to constantly be in motion and your knees couldn't touch the ground or else you'd be disqualified. Yeah.

24:00Josh Clark:And if you look at footage of this stuff, I mean, it's charitable because what they're doing is dancing toward the end. It's just hanging, it looks like two corpses hanging on each other, sort of swaying back and forth. Yeah. I don't get, I mean, any of these things, even the modern day versions of like these contests where you have to keep your hand on a car or whatever. Hand on hard body. Oh, man. Or sit in the car. I knew a guy that did one of those where he tried to win a Volkswagen Beetle by sitting in it with four other people in a mall. I'm just like.

24:33Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah, you told us that story before. Did he win or not?

24:36Josh Clark:I think he did. But there's just no way.

24:40Chuck Bryant:Kill me. Yeah, it would be really awful for sure. Because let's say for one of those contests, let's say you don't win.

24:50Josh Clark:Then you've just sat in a car with three strangers for a week, and you didn't even get the car.

24:55Chuck Bryant:But even if you did get the car, imagine yourself five years on, and that car is like— Cursed. There's tears in the seats or something like that, you know? And, like, the glove compartment won't close. It's, you know. I mean, I guess you've got a story to tell at cocktail parties, but even that would wear thin after a while. Yeah. But, Chuck, we need people to do stuff like that because there's something about contests like this. There's something about fads like flagpole sitting that keep humanity from becoming too cerebral. You know what I mean? from just becoming like computers, basically. We need people to do stuff like this because it brings out some juvenile something in us that makes us want to find out about it or learn about it or talk about it.

25:46Chuck Bryant:And I think that's good. I think that's healthy for our species. All right. It's my take. It's genuinely off the cuff. I'm actually just surprised at myself that I just said that out loud.

25:58Josh Clark:You're just riffing. Yeah. So Shipwreck Kelly, back to flagpole sitting. That initial 13-hour, 13-minute sit, like you said, inspired so many others to break it. And it was getting broken in pretty short order, kind of like the dance-a-thons. There was a woman named Bobby Mack from L.A. who did it, a guy named Joe Holdom Powers, who did this in Chicago for 16 days. another guy for 51 days named Bill Penfield.

26:32Chuck Bryant:Yeah, so let's point this out. Take a second here. Shipwreck Kelly did 13 hours and kicked off a national fad. These people are now into weeks at a time. 51 days is more than seven weeks up there.

26:44Josh Clark:Yeah. It's pretty impressive. That's a long time. I'm impressed at least.

26:47Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

26:49Josh Clark:Are you bucking the cerebral?

26:51Chuck Bryant:Yes, right now.

26:52Josh Clark:Can you tell? Let me see here. In the 20s, there was a 15-year-old boy who set the kid record for 10 days, 10 hours, 10 minutes, and 10 seconds. I think that was planned.

27:06Chuck Bryant:Yeah, if not, then—but see, there you go, Chuck. We're thinking about that. It's making us think. This little kid is making us think. We've got to avoid that. It needs to be random combinations of numbers so we don't start thinking about it.

27:19Josh Clark:We should also point out that not everyone was like, oh, this is the best thing ever. in Cosmopolitan Magazine. Cosmo called it competitive imbecility. Yeah.

27:31Chuck Bryant:This is fine. We need that, too. I have to say, I want to say something here. It's a little PSA. This might not even ever make it in the final edit. Oh, boy. So I'll just say it to you. How about that?

27:40Josh Clark:Uh-huh.

27:41Chuck Bryant:I would say the last, like, few weeks of episodes, there's been, like, some good ones here or there. But overall, I find that they've been less good because I am so sick of myself because we've been so entrenched in the book right now. So it's like living, breathing S-Y-S-K, which is us, and having to confront myself and my own personality and sense of humor and whether that's actually funny and just constantly thinking about this on top of doing the podcast, on top of the other stuff we're trying to do now too. and I am so sick of myself, I can barely tolerate listening to myself talk. So if anyone's picked up on the last few episodes, like in the last few weeks, just being a little ho-hum, that's why, and I apologize.

28:37Chuck Bryant:Maybe we'll go back and redo them one day. Wow.

28:40Josh Clark:News to me.

28:43Chuck Bryant:I think you've been great. Hey, thanks a lot, man. That's ultimately what I was fishing for.

28:48Josh Clark:All right, well, if you want to cut that part out, Let me pick this up by saying, and I'm sure you've made a great point, Josh.

28:57Chuck Bryant:Nice. So back to Kelly, right? Yeah. You've got all these, I'm sure Shipwreck Kelly deemed slack-jawed yokels, ho-hums, that kind of thing, who were out there trying to topple his record, and they did. Some of them did topple his record, but nobody had turned this into a business like Shipwreck Kelly had. He was a one-man money-making machine who made his money just by sitting on top of a flagpole. Good money. Because he was really good at self-promoting. Like, there wasn't a reporter whose ear he wouldn't bend if he got the chance. And in these reports or these articles, he would say things like, yeah, I'm in town for this, but if anybody has any other offers, I'm wide open and I'm staying at, you know, the Cambridge Arms itinerant hotel for the next few days if somebody wants to get in touch with me there with a job offer.

29:48Chuck Bryant:Like he was really good at attracting job offers specifically for flagpole sitting.

29:54Josh Clark:Yeah, and he made good dough. I mean, this is good money any time. If he made$100 an hour like he claimed to, other people said, no, it really wasn't that much. It was probably closer to anywhere between$100 and$500 a day. Still a lot of money.

30:10Chuck Bryant:Sure. And like you said, it was like he was almost like a celebrity version of a sign spinner.

30:20Josh Clark:Like if you could pay George Clooney to sign spin in front of your mobile phone store, that was sort of what Shipwreck Kelly was.

30:30Chuck Bryant:That's a great one. I got one too. It's almost like if there was a cult of personality built up around, like, the flapping, dancing windsock guy that they put out in front of, like, mattress stores in, like, 2005. Yeah, I love those dudes. Okay. Those are fun. I think both of those are high-quality analogies.

30:53Josh Clark:Well, we'll see which one Jerry uses in the edit. Okay. Let me see here. Here are some of his longer sits. He did 146 hours at the Old Westgate Hotel in Kansas City.

31:05Chuck Bryant:Not bad. 312 hours in Newark, New Jersey atop the St.

31:11Josh Clark:Francis Hotel. That's pretty good.

31:15Chuck Bryant:Sure.

31:16Josh Clark:I don't know what that is in days, but...

31:19Chuck Bryant:312 hours? Let's see. If you divided that by 24 as you should, you would come up with something along the lines of 13 days on the nose. Hmm.

31:30Josh Clark:All right. Well, how about 22 days? And this was in conjunction with the dance marathon at none other than Madison Square Garden.

31:39Chuck Bryant:Yeah, because I don't know if we said it or not, but there was a dance marathon at Madison Square Gardens that was actually shut down by the health department because they decided it had gone on too long, 10 days, and that it deemed a threat to the health of the participants. That wasn't the one that he sat in, but there was one the following year where for, what was it, 22 days? Yeah. That means that the dance marathon went on for 22 days. But imagine that. So you've got these two endurance fads just interweaved in this way that the universe almost like collapses in on itself because they're put together too close together, you know?

32:19Josh Clark:Yeah, and here's how he would do it. He would sit on that bar stool-like thing, and it was padded, and he would eat and smoke cigarettes and shave apparently, and they would send this stuff up with a bucket and a rope. And tell him how he would sleep because this is what I really kind of wanted to know.

32:46Chuck Bryant:So you said his seat was like a bar stool, a round bar stool basically, right? And it was on a pole, a flagpole appropriately. And then in the flagpole, you'd have two holes drilled just beneath the seat. And now that I'm doing it, I'm like, that's really hard to reach. So now I'm questioning whether this is true or not. He might have had long arms. Maybe so. Long thumbs. So he would plug his thumbs into those holes drilled into each side of the flagpole so that when he started to lean forward, the pressure from the flagpole on his thumbs would kind of cut into his skin and wake him up just enough that he would adjust himself.

33:25Chuck Bryant:And apparently he got so good at this that he would adjust himself to sit back up so he wouldn't fall over off of the flagpole while he was still sleeping. Like he wouldn't wake up. He could just adjust himself in his sleep.

33:37Josh Clark:That's right. And he'd have his little, I don't know if they're little, but he would have his ankles locked around the pole and apparently it would tether a leg to keep him from catastrophe. catastrophe, but I think it's very dubious that that was a solid, life-saving rig.

33:56Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And I mean, like some of these flagpoles, he's sitting on 30 feet, 50 feet. One of them, I guess the impression I had, the one that you mentioned on Kansas City's Westgate Hotel, that that flagpole was on the top roof of the hotel. So, I mean, he was up there for sure. And And if something had gone wrong, he would have, yeah, that tether probably would not have done terribly much. Or it would have done a lot to keep his leg hanging up there, but the rest of them would have kept going to the ground, you know?

34:27Josh Clark:How did he pee-pee and poo-poo?

34:29Chuck Bryant:He had a little contraption for that with the tube that went down. Okay. But here's the thing. So you're a traveling flagpole sitter. You're relying on the help of other people on the ground. You need food. when you pee and poop into that contraption that leads to a tube that goes down to the ground, you don't want that just leaking out for the spectators to see and smell and experience. You need it to go into a bucket that somebody's going to go take away and dump. So you're relying on this kind of group of assistants and hands that probably the promoter maybe helped hire for you. Maybe you make a friend along the way who just kind of travels from town to town with you for a little while.

35:09Chuck Bryant:That's what I think.

35:10Josh Clark:He had, Shipwreck Kelly had an assistant. He had a boy. That was the worst job in show business.

35:17Chuck Bryant:Right. He had a lad who would help him. Yeah. Yeah. So, but it would be a pretty bad job. Yeah. But anyway, so he had to, I mean, he had to eat and he didn't eat much. He would apparently just kind of almost do a broth fast, augmented with cigarettes and coffee. He would stay up for four days at a time. Because living on a flagpole is not exactly the most comfortable place you can exist for 22 days or 13 days or however long.

35:50Josh Clark:No. And it eventually turned against him in that the money dried up after he did this sort of big Atlantic City stunt that we talked about. And it was the Great Depression. And eventually people were kind of like, I don't really care so much about this dumb stunt because I'm starving and I'm broke. and I'm homeless. Right. And the kind of tide of public opinion turned such that in 1935, he went to do this in the Bronx, and he was actually arrested for public nuisance.

36:21Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

36:21Josh Clark:And I'm sure he was like, but I'm Shipwreck Kelly.

36:25Chuck Bryant:Right. But, I mean, think about it. It's like everybody's sick of you now, Kelly, and your shtick. We're all just depressed in the Depression, so maybe we'll do a dance marathon, but we're not going to watch you sit around in a flagpole anymore. And there was a contemporary article that was written at the time that said that he attributed the decline of flagpole sitting directly to the stock market crash. And he said that people didn't want to see anything higher than their securities, stock securities at the time, which were not very high.

36:55Josh Clark:And everyone went, that's just not even a joke in good taste. And he would punch his human familiar in the mouth and say, you told me to tell that joke.

37:09Chuck Bryant:man that was gangbusters chuck do you watch that show got me what we do what we do in the shadows uh i've seen some episodes of it uh you know we were talking about it and one of the pas i think wrote in to say that uh they were they were just blown away that we were we're giving such big ups to their show i think i remember that if you talk to matt Barry Tall, he's a comedy genius. I never heard anything back. Man, he's great. But, oh, have you seen An Evening with Beverly Loughlin? No. How do I know that name? So it's Craig... Robinson? Yes. From The Office, right? Yeah. He plays a guy named Beverly Loughlin.

37:54Chuck Bryant:And Aubrey Meadows? Aubrey Plaza? Or Audrey Meadows. Plaza. That's right. Man, I'm really screwing this up. Yeah, and then, okay, so she's the main character. Jemaine Clement, I know him. You got that. He plays, well, you just have to see it. Well, he was in What We Do in the Shadows, the movie. Right, right. So I think he co-created it, too. This is what all ties into this. He and Matt Barry are also in this, too. Matt Barry's in the TV version of What We Do in the Shadows. Yes. Jemaine Clement helped create it. But it's definitely worth watching. is purposefully very bizarre, which can get really annoying really easily, but this movie pulls it off very well, like purposeful bizarreness for humor.

38:41Chuck Bryant:And it's a good movie. It's worth watching. Okay, it's worth watching. I'll leave it to you to decide whether it's a good movie or not.

38:50Josh Clark:Well, I love everybody in it. That's a great cast.

38:52Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I mean, it's worth watching. How about that?

38:56Josh Clark:All right. Should we take our second break here? Can you believe we have it?

39:00Chuck Bryant:Yes, I can. All right.

39:02Josh Clark:Let's do our other break, and then we're going to talk about – we're going to wind up this flagpole sitting thing right after this.

39:24Chuck Bryant:I'm Martha Stewart from the Martha Stewart Podcast.

39:27Josh Clark:In this special episode brought to you by McCormick Signature Seasonings, I got to chat with Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian about his new venture, Retrieve Air. We also get to talk about his family life and playing the weekend chef. I'm a simple man. I use honey from the farm and I got my crepe. That's it. The girls like their Nutella. That's my breakfast ritual. I'm usually phoning in lunch a little bit because I'm really planning on a delightful dinner. The girls really like steak. I spoil them. So even if I'm doing kebabs, I'm using ribeye, I'm doing it right.

40:01Chuck Bryant:Okay, well, please. Listen to the full episode of the Martha Stewart Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

40:10Josh Clark:Amazon Health AI presents Painful Thoughts. I can't stop scratching my downtown. Yeah, but I'm not itching to go downtown and tell a receptionist I'm here to talk about my downtown. some things you'd rather type than say out loud. There's no question too embarrassing for Amazon Health AI. Chat your symptoms and get virtual care 24-7. Healthcare just got less painful.

40:42Chuck Bryant:What does it feel like to have a better laptop like the Dell XPS powered by Intel Core? Well, with a premium design that's thin and light, it feels smooth. very smooth, for a better feel in your hands and less weight on your shoulders.

40:56Josh Clark:That's right. It's also got a very responsive touchscreen, and it just feels fast and precise. And that's for better scrolling, zooming, and swiping, so everything just flows. And with long-lasting battery life, it feels like nonstop energy, for a better way to work without being near a charger.

41:10Chuck Bryant:Built for those who want better. The Dell XPS, built for you.

41:36Josh Clark:Okay, so Kelly, when we left off, the public turns on him. They don't care about him anymore. He's probably drunk in some hotel room somewhere with his human familiar. Talking about the good old days at this point. yeah yeah it is kind of sad i get the impression um that the memory palace episode really focuses on

41:57Chuck Bryant:the sad decline of shipwreck kelly because i mean he was a celebrity a national probably international celebrity for like a decade a decade for sitting on flagpoles and uh then all of a sudden he's just done like society drops him like a hot potato and he's penniless and on public assistance, basically.

42:19Josh Clark:Yeah, and he died a very sad death. He did, and I think his final flagpole sit was all the way in the 1950s in Orange, Texas in 1952. He was almost 60 years old at this point, and he had, during the publicity run-up to this, had two heart attacks. well was he sitting on his pole for publicity or was this part of the pole sitting when he had the heart attacks

42:51Chuck Bryant:he was he had the heart attacks on the pole during the publicity

42:54Josh Clark:oh so the actual sit was another publicity stunt for some place right yeah

43:00Chuck Bryant:I don't know what business it was for I didn't see that but I did see that the promoters were like come down right now we don't think you're going to survive a third heart attack so stop. Which is crazy. I mean, he was only 59 at the time.

43:15Josh Clark:Yeah, but 59 in the 1950s, that was a tough... I guess so. That's a tough 59.

43:20Chuck Bryant:When your name was shipwrecking?

43:21Josh Clark:Yeah. But he did die of that third heart attack like a week after that, right?

43:28Chuck Bryant:Yeah, he was walking around New York on 51st Street, and he dropped dead on the sidewalk from a heart attack, and he was found holding a scrapbook of all, like, clippings of newspaper articles about him during his heyday. Oh, man. Isn't that sad? It's like a movie. Yeah, I can't believe this is a movie. He's, I mean, he's a goldmine just waiting to be, well, mined.

44:01Chuck Bryant:Wait, wait, wait. There's one other thing about him before we move on. What do you got? After he was done with his flagpole sitting career, the heyday of it, one of the jobs he had was as a gigolo, a male escort who would dance with whoever wanted him to dance at the Roseland Ballroom near Times Square.

44:22Josh Clark:He was a private dancer. A dancer for money. I've been to Roseland. Seen some good shows there.

44:29Chuck Bryant:Yeah, well, you were where Shipwreck Kelly danced for a dime a dance. because he was a gigolo.

44:35Josh Clark:I would have paid for that dance. Sure. Tell him to sit on my head.

44:42Chuck Bryant:Hey, he'll do what you want him to do.

44:45Josh Clark:Oh, boy. So we looked, or rather you looked, because you put this one together, and you found one death from flagpole sitting. Isn't that right?

44:55Chuck Bryant:That's all I could turn up. Surely, surely there were more, but I could really only find one, and this guy was wonderful in every way. Dick Blandy? Dixie Blandy. Richard Dixie, D-I-X-I-E, Blandy. Dick Dixie Blandy. Sure. So Dixie Blandy, he was a flagpole sitter who was contemporaneous to Shipwreck Kelly. A little bit. Surely he was directly inspired by Shipwreck Kelly. He came along and started in 1929, which is almost the worst year you could join the flagpole sitting movement because just the next year, Shipwreck Kelly had his triumphant sit aboard like a—or above a two—what?

45:42Josh Clark:Triumphant sit. It's just great. Yeah. Yeah.

45:45Chuck Bryant:Well, it was triumphant for a couple of reasons. One, it was his longest sit, I believe 22 days, 23 days, something like that. And secondly, above the top, a 200-foot flagpole. For weeks, he sat up there. That's triumphant, if you ask me. But he did his in 1930, and everybody dropped him right after. Dixie Blandy just started in 1929. But even though people said flagpole sitting is so out, we're not going to bother even looking up when we see somebody on a flagpole, Dixie Blandy said, you know what, I'm not giving up on this. And he continued to make a career out of it wherever he could.

46:25Josh Clark:Yes, until he died from flagpole sitting at the age of 71. In 1974, he fell off of his flagpole. It was a 50-foot pole. And where was this? In Harvey?

46:41Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I get the impression in Pennsylvania.

46:43Josh Clark:Harvey, Pennsylvania?

46:45Chuck Bryant:Yeah, because the article that reported on it as if it were something of a nearby event was called the Reading Eagle. And Reading is in Pennsylvania, right?

46:55Josh Clark:Yeah. Is it Reading?

46:57Chuck Bryant:Whatever. I can't tell you how many times I've been told that since I was a child playing Monopoly. And it's just never stuck for some reason.

47:07Josh Clark:Oh, was that the titular railroad?

47:10Chuck Bryant:Mm-hmm.

47:10Josh Clark:Oh, okay. The Reading Railroad. We said Reading.

47:14Chuck Bryant:Yeah. That's right. That's what I said too, but apparently it's Reading.

47:17Josh Clark:Well, I didn't know. I didn't know it was the same thing. But either way, this is where Harvey, and of course, it's always like the grand opening of a shopping center or something. Yeah. And that's what was going on here. It's a four-day promotion, and he basically said, I think this pole was attached to a trailer, and the trailer moved. Is that right?

47:39Chuck Bryant:Well, he asked the security guard to move the trailer so they could make room for what I took to be a cherry picker that could go up and get them. This is hours before the end of his four-day sit. And when the security guard, I guess, who had never tried this before, moved the trailer, a guy wire that was stabilizing the pole became taut and actually pulled the pole, snapped the pole in two. Wow. With Dixie still on top of this 50-foot pole, and he landed skull first from what I can tell onto the asphalt below.

48:12Josh Clark:Oh.

48:12Chuck Bryant:That's not what you want to open your grocery store with.

48:16Josh Clark:No, or to close your flagpole sit with.

48:20Chuck Bryant:No, either way, it's a bad jam. If you're going to fall, fall early. This was not his only accident, too. This was the one that got him, but he had fractured his skull before when he was thrown off a pole in a storm in 1955. And then there was, this is heartwarming, in 1961, he was doing a pole sit for a promotion dressed as Santa Claus. and he was shouting Merry Christmas. That was his job. Sit on the top of the flagpole and shout Merry Christmas. And apparently it got to the point where he finally yelled down that he was getting numb and he had to be taken to the hospital.

48:55Josh Clark:Yeah.

48:56Chuck Bryant:Which is, this is what I'm talking about, man. Just no thought. It doesn't take thought to just think about flagpole sitting, and I love that about it.

49:05Josh Clark:Yeah. Merry Christmas. Hey, Merry Christmas.

49:07Chuck Bryant:Merry Christmas. I think there's something wrong up here. I got to go to the hospital because I'm sitting on top of a flagpole dressed as Santa Claus shouting Merry Christmas for three days and it's December in Pennsylvania.

49:18Josh Clark:In Reading, it's reading. Right. This was, you know, these were definitely the waning days. This was in the 1970s. There were some other stunts throughout the years here and there. A couple got married atop a flagpole. Let me see here. A 17-year-old in 1963 named Peggy Townsend. spent 217 days on a pole for a contest for a radio station. And then the granddaddy of them all, this guy Kenneth Gidge, Ken Gidge, 248 days in 1971. This guy would later on be a state rep for New Hampshire. And he, I mean, reading his account, he was basically like, it was terrible. Right. And I hated it. Not only that, he had a parakeet.

50:12Chuck Bryant:He had his parakeet with him named Nixon, and he said that his parakeet came to hate him, like despise him. He said he didn't think any animals ever hated somebody more than that parakeet hated him, probably because he made him stay up there in this little tiny house on top of a fiberglass pole that would sway back and forth. He couldn't lay down straight in it because of the pole, so he had to lay wrapped around the pole. It sounds really horrible and terrible, And he did it to get publicity because he was an out-of-work actor, I guess, at the time.

50:44Josh Clark:Yeah. Like I said, to call it a thing, a house is generous. It's this little, I mean, you can see a picture of it. But it was some sort of shelter, at least. He wasn't just sitting like on a bar stool like Shipwreck Kelly for 248 days. Sure. But it was bad. And it's just funny reading these quotes from him. He did not have a good time. And he just basically kind of talked about how awful it was.

51:07Chuck Bryant:yeah he said they said that he lost 15 pounds three inches from his waist and 13 days of sleep just within the first three months and that when people would come out like when the weather is nice people come out and shout questions up to him and he talked to him uh and he said the men usually asked um if he sleeps and how he goes to the bathroom and then women asked if he was lonely which i find very sweet but um i mean remember we started out here at 13 hours is what kicked this off. And this guy, Kenneth Gidge, has brought it up to 248 days. But Chuck, that does not seem to be the record any longer.

51:46Chuck Bryant:In fact, the record may never be broken ever. What do you think?

51:51Josh Clark:Yeah. H. David Werder of Weeki Wachee, Florida. Man, this is unbelievable. Sat for 439 days, It's 11 hours, 6 minutes. Yeah.

52:04Chuck Bryant:His sit went from 1982 to 1984. That's amazing. Yeah, and it was outside of an appliance center in Clearwater, and he didn't do this as like a publicity stunt for that appliance center. He did it to protest gas prices at the time.

52:22Josh Clark:Yeah, that's how you see these days sometimes is protests. Sure.

52:27Chuck Bryant:But gas at the time was 99 cents a gallon. That's cute. So his protest didn't work at all. But he spent 439 days of his life on a flagpole because he was mad about the price of gas. Wow. No thought whatsoever to a zen-like beautiful state is what this man achieved.

52:48Josh Clark:Is that the overarching theme?

52:50Chuck Bryant:Yep, I think so, man. All righty. You got anything else?

52:53Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, we should mention David Blaine. And he very famously did this standing in 2002. Remember that?

53:03Chuck Bryant:For how long? No, I don't remember that at all.

53:05Josh Clark:He stood atop a 90-foot pole for 35 hours in Bryant Park in New York. And this is when he was doing those. I love the guy as a street magician and give me a little levitation trick. But when he was like, I'm going to hold my breath or I'm going to be encased in ice or stand on this thing, that's when I lost interest.

53:25Chuck Bryant:oh yeah yeah i like street magic too it's pretty great stuff yeah but yeah he stood

53:31Josh Clark:it's tough to stand i mean sitting is is hard but standing is a whole different

53:35Chuck Bryant:deal yeah for sure i wouldn't want to do it nope so uh you got anything else about flagpole sitting i don't well then chuck that means of course it's time for listener mail

53:52Josh Clark:this is oh this is just funny remember in Bruxism I talked about my Dr. Tuggle this comes from Joe in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania he said hey guys thanks for your entertainment knowledge your discussion of doctor names at the end of the Bruxism podcast reminded me of two anecdotes my ex-wife had a dentist in San Francisco named Dr. Drilling

54:17Chuck Bryant:no

54:18Josh Clark:pretty good huh

54:19Chuck Bryant:sure

54:21Josh Clark:And this is even better. He said, second, this one never gets appreciated as much by others for some reason. It must just hit me the right way, but I'm with you, Joe. It hits me too. She worked in medical administration, and her boss at one point was named Dr. Wachter. W-A-C-H-T-E-R. It's pronounced Wachter. And he said, I could just imagine her submitting daily reports using baby talk going, here, Dr. Wachter, here are your reports for the day.

54:54Chuck Bryant:Man, this guy is our new mascot here on the show. I think we need to actually get him on here. What's his name?

55:00Josh Clark:Joe in Gettysburg. I love it.

55:03Chuck Bryant:Yeah, Joe, way to go. This is one of the best listener mails I think I've ever heard, Chuck.

55:07Josh Clark:Dr. Wachter.

55:09Chuck Bryant:Well, if you want to be like Joe and try to topple his record as the greatest email listener mail writer of all time, take your best shot you can wrap it up spank it on the bottom run it up the flagpole and see who salutes it at stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com

55:30Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio For more podcasts from iHeartRadio visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows

55:46Josh Clark:Seven bucks? That's barely the delivery fee on an order of Dan Dan noodles. But seven bucks is enough to get you out of the house and into something interesting, adventurous. Because for seven scrawny bucks a month, Do More gets you at least one pair of tickets to something you'll be psyched to attend. A concert, comedy, perhaps that new exhibit. Stuff you like and stuff you didn't know you did. Yet. Try it free for a month at DoMoreStuff.com slash free. And do more. M &M's Popped Caramel do sound different. Oh no, people are going to be obsessed. What do you mean? People hate the sound of chewing.

56:27Josh Clark:Maybe they won't like the crunch. Maybe we're saved. Wait a minute. Yellow. Huh? Have you been eating them this whole time?

56:38Chuck Bryant:Mmm, so tasty.

56:40Josh Clark:Hands off us. M &M's Popped Caramel. It's more fun together.

56:47Chuck Bryant:When you're a maintenance engineer in a beverage manufacturing plant, you keep production lines moving and quality on track because there's no room for slowdowns.

56:56Josh Clark:With Grainger's vast selection of high-quality motors, sensors, belts, and hard-to-find parts, you can get what you need fast and all in one place, so nothing gets in the way of getting the job done.

57:08Chuck Bryant:Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com, or just stop by.

57:12Josh Clark:Grainger. For the ones who get it done. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.