The Mysterious Story of Larry Bader

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0:15Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and this is Stuff You Should Know That's right. I don't want to give away what this one contains so let's just say it is the strange tale of a man named Larry Bader Yes. He went to great lengths to escape Ohio. Well, he just gave it away. Not really. This guy, Lawrence Joseph Bader, he was an Akron native. So shout out to my people, my wife's folks, and Akron. Akron, Akron, Akron, as she says, because of that bridge. If you've been through there, you know what I'm talking about. He was born in 1926 to a Catholic, pretty well-to-do Catholic family.

1:00His father was a dentist, and Livia dug up some dirt from a family friend who was like, you know, Larry and his brothers and sisters were spoiled little rich kids. Larry was pretty careless with his money because he could just get more anytime he needed it. But he was a pretty funny guy. He was a pretty fun dude, had a lot of personality, and he used to do weird things. Like one of his party tricks, he would eat a whole chicken, like including the bones. Yeah, that's special. Yeah, but put a pin in that. We're not just mentioning that strange fact for no reason. No. So he joined the Navy in 1944.

1:42I think he left high school to join the Navy because the United States was in the grip of World War II. And he served for, I think, a little under two years. And when he came back, he graduated from high school and he went to the University of Akron. But school was just not for him. and he dropped out after a semester. Apparently he was known for money-making schemes more than he was known for acing tests. I got to say, if you're known for money-making schemes after a semester, you must have been doing a lot of money-making, well, highly visible money-making schemes. Yeah, or you wear a suit that's got dollar signs printed all over it.

2:24It's a green suit with dollar signs. That's another way to become known for money-making schemes. Yeah. All my suits look like that. You know. Hey.

2:37Nothing? You threw me off. All right. So he's not lasting in college. He didn't last long in the Navy. But while he was in college, he did accomplish something because he got married. He met a woman named Mary Lou Knapp with a K. They got married in 1952 and within five years had three kids with a fourth on the way. And he was doing pretty well for himself. He was making the equivalent of about$120 ,000 a year these days as a cookware salesman. And that was about twice the median income at the time. So he's doing pretty good, but he still had some debts. He had a pretty hefty mortgage. He had a new car and was about$2 ,400 in debt.

3:22But basically, you can multiply most stuff from this era by 10 and arrive at our modern conversion rate. So, you know, roughly twenty four thousand dollars in debt is pretty hefty. Yeah. He also like he didn't pay his taxes for like five years, I think. Yeah. Not good. No. And it was bad enough. He was bad enough with the bills are behind enough that the milkman apparently said, like, I'm not bringing milk anymore until you pay your milk bill. Yeah. So the thing is, is this guy, like you said, family friend from when he was a kid, was like, he was a rich kid, but he was actually a really charming, fun-to-be-around rich kid.

4:02And apparently, as he grew up into an adult, he remained essentially the same. Like, basically, everyone who met him or had something to say about him later on basically unanimously said this guy was a good guy. So if he's like cracking under the pressure of these bills and this debt, it's not showing outwardly to anybody who knew him. One of his friends said that he was a red blooded American 30 year old family man who liked hanging out and drinking beer with friends. And his friends liked hanging around him because he was just fun to be around, essentially, without being like a reckless party animal.

4:42He was just fun to be around. Yeah, just sort of your average fun guy. Exactly. And he was also, and put a pin in this, we just were not mentioning this for no reason, he was also very good at archery, had won some competitions. So he was into archery. He was a fun guy. And everything's swimming along in his life, making a pretty good living, a little bit in debt. And then on Wednesday, May 15, 1957, he had collected some bad payment checks from vendors, from his business and said, you know what, I got to go to Cleveland to kind of clear up these bad checks with these vendors. He tells this to his wife, Mary Lou, who was, keep in mind, four months pregnant.

5:24And he said, so I'm going up to Cleveland. It's going to be the morning and then I'm going to probably do a little fishing in the afternoon in Lake Erie. And so I'll be home late. And she said what any partner should say in that situation, which is maybe you could also come home and be a father and husband instead of going fishing after you do your work. And he supposedly replied with, yeah, maybe I will, maybe I won't. All right. So I'm not saying he's some really bad guy. It may have been a cheeky response. That may have been how things went in their marriage. But he just was a little vague and that will come into play.

6:04So one of the things he did was he paid some bills before he left. And one of those bills was a life insurance premium. He had recently adjusted or changed the policy to include a nice payout for an accidental death. And he whistled as he drove off to Cleveland and eventually went to Rocky River, Ohio, which is a little town on the Rocky River, which flows into Lake Erie. and he rented a boat at Eddie's boat dock about a half a mile inland from the lake from a guy named Lawrence Cutler. Yeah, Cutler. Yeah. Anyway, he paid 15 bucks from a big roll of bills. It's also kind of important. And he said, hey, Lawrence, I want you to put some running lights on this boat because I'm probably going to be out after dark.

6:54And Lawrence said, okay, I'll do that, but it's going to cost you an extra fiver, I'm presuming here at this time. And Larry Bader paid it. Yeah, he paid it, and he was like, all right, whatever, buddy. He did notice, and this is stuff that, you know, they interviewed Lawrence afterward for reasons that we still don't know because we're keeping this a secret. Well, we know. Well, we know, yeah, sure. But he did notice that he had a suitcase with him. He thought that was a little bit weird. He said, you know, you got a storm coming. You might not want to be out there after dark. That is not what people in Cleveland sound like.

7:33Sure it is. Like a Stephen King novel about Cleveland, maybe. So people don't go in there. That's why the Browns play.

7:47So he warned him about the storm. He goes out on Lake Erie. The Coast Guard sees him and says, hey, there's a big storm coming in after sunset. And I've noticed you have some running lights. So you clearly plan on being out after dark. And he was like, it's fine. And so they said, all right, go about your way. Three hours later, that storm does come in. And Larry Bader has disappeared. They find the boat the next day, about five miles away. The life jackets are all on board. There was some scratches like it had hit some rocks. There was a bent propeller. And some accounts say that it was either a gas line had been disconnected or the gas cans were empty.

8:26But either way, and I guess it's the kind where the gas line runs directly into like a gas can that's sitting on the boat. It must have been one of those kind of boats. But basically they were like, but nothing shows the kind of distress where a human would be completely missing. Like it wasn't capsized or sunk or anything like that. No, and the life jacket was in the boat, you said, right? That's right. So that's a really, so that's a big point because the Coast Guard was like, that was one heck of a storm on Lake Erie. there's no no way that anybody could have survived this even a strong swimmer like larry bader was known to be um without a life jacket yeah one of the oars was missing but you know just do that do with that what you want right but the boat was generally in pretty good shape the thing is is like this is not an uncommon thing like people drown in lake erie pretty frequently it's a it's a great lake it's a very big lake um and just as a little side anecdote when i was a kid we used to vacation on Catawba Island on Lake Erie.

9:26And every week we would go there for a week every summer. And every time we went, I would have to wait on the beach the first half of the week because somebody had drowned. And I was convinced that if I went in the water, they would, their dead body would bump up against me. And I just couldn't even bear the thought of that. So finally I would watch the news every night. And finally, when they announced they found the missing person, then I would start to go into the lake. And you thought, I won't run into that body now. I might become one, but it's worth the risk. Right. Yeah. Because no one had any business swimming in Lake Erie back when I was a kid.

10:00What do you, what's a Catawba Island like? What do you do there? Oh, you play mini golf and putt-putt. Um, we stayed at this place. It was just like a block of, um, like I guess little condos or apartments or something like that. And everybody had beach towels like drying over like the railing and it was like on the beach like the sand came up into your little front stoop and uh it was just great it was wonderful i remember my oldest sister went on a date with the dude she met there and they went and saw top secret at the drive-in oh the vacation date that's always great man that's nice i love young josh stories uh all right so they look for larry bader for a couple of months um the coast guard was like no one's gonna survive that storm if they don't have a life jacket.

10:46But they looked anyway. And they were also like, well, he was a strong swimmer, though, so it's a little weird that the boat wasn't that damaged and he's just nowhere to be found. Some people thought he had this big wad of cash. I don't think we said, but he cashed a$400 check. So if you do the math, that's probably like$4 ,000. A lot of dough. So he may have been robbed and murdered or something. And also the suitcase was gone, So that could also explain that. But either way, they said, we just got to put this one to rest. And so in 1960, he was declared dead. And his wife got that$40 ,000 insurance policy and Social Security started rolling in.

11:30She went ka-ching. That's right. And I believe that's where we should take a break and see what happened to Larry Bader.

12:01Okay, Chuck, where we last left off, Larry Bader's missing. He's disappeared, but enough years have gone by, I think roughly three, that he's officially declared dead. His insurance policy has come in. His wife has said, this is what you get for telling me maybe I will, maybe I won't when I tell you not to go fishing. And if we rewind just a little bit to the day that Larry Bader went out on the lake and add, usually people say about three days, and zoom on over from Lake Erie over to Omaha, Nebraska. And we sit down at a little bar called the Round Table Bar in Omaha. What we will see on May 18, 1957 is a guy walk in and his name is John Johnson.

12:49Take it, Chuck. That's right. Oh, I was so busy trying to work up a Saturn joke about that 800 miles, but I couldn't do it in time. We'll wait. I'll give you an hour. 800 miles between Omaha and Akron, roughly one third the size of the distance between, and then I couldn't remember what it was on Saturn. The Cassini division? The Cassini division. So that's not a joke. That's making fun of my hard work. I know. So here's what happens. Three days after Larry Bader disappears, 800 miles away, a dude shows up in Omaha at the Roundtable Bar. You said his name was John Johnson. He said, I got this driver's license here.

13:35It's got my name on it. I was a 14-year veteran of the Navy. It's a Navy license, as you'll see. I got out because of a bad back. And I go by the name Fritz. And there was a bartender there named Betty who said he was a really well-dressed guy. He clearly had money. He was really sort of fascinating and charming. He asked me out like the second he met me, which is, I assume, what you do if you three days after you have left your wife and soon to be four kids. Oh, well. You probably ask out the first woman you see. Well, we haven't said it yet, but OK. Okay. John Johnson bore a really striking resemblance to Larry Bader also.

14:11Yeah. I mean, didn't people see that coming? I don't know. I mean, now they do. Okay. So this guy, John Johnson, a.k.a. Fritz, gets a job, not there, but at Ross's Steakhouse. And basically it was like, hey, I came from an orphanage in Boston. There were 22 boys in this orphanage. They named us all John Johnson and gave us all nicknames so they could tell us apart instead of just naming us different things. It's very strange. But they called me Fritz because I reminded them of a character from a comic, the Cats and Jammer comic, Cats and Jammer Kids comic. Different times during that period. He also would say that his Navy buddies thought his haircut made him look like a German soldier.

14:55So he went by Fritz. But either way, this is some new dude in town. and he was like, all of a sudden, the talk of Omaha. Yeah, Betty Johnson's impression was not isolated. Apparently, people who met Fritz Johnson felt essentially the same way that she did. Like he was a cool dude that you wanted to be around. Debonair, you could say. But he also was a bit of a character. And by a bit, let me just say that he bought a hearse and rearranged the back so that it was like a little lounge area for him when he picked up women on dates. And I saw one place, but it was a legitimate source, like a contemporary newspaper article that said that it, he had somehow gotten it licensed with the city as a hunting vehicle.

15:45Can you imagine anything more 1957 than that? 1957 Bachelor? Yeah. I mean, he was an avid hunter. That is not what he was going for. you think is it i mean i don't know yes you don't put a lounge area in the back of your hearse for dead deer no no i know but uh do you think he had it licensed as a hunting vehicle because like he was hunting ladies and he just wanted to be able to tell people that yes i do okay

16:18i i don't agree okay that's fine but either way with upi buddy he's an he's an eccentric dude He wears a leather beret. His apartment apparently was just a bunch of, like, beanbags and throw pillows. He had champagne parties. He had Siamese fighting fish. He was an archer. He said, you know, I hurt my back, and so archery really helps strengthen the back. And so I took up archery, and then five weeks later, he's won a state championship in Nebraska and then won 13, I believe 12 more, 13 total archery titles in the state. And at parties would do the eat the whole chicken, including the bone trick.

17:02And the last three listeners went, oh.

17:08That's right. So he's working at the bar, but he buddies up with a guy that works at a radio station, KBON. and he lets him come in there to kind of just monkey around because he was interested in broadcasting. And he's monkeying around enough to where he figures it out and dears himself like he seems to be doing to everybody, gets a job as a DJ reading the news. Yeah, I want to just backtrack a little bit and specifically say there was nobody in any interview or any article that I read about this who seemed to think that Fritz Johnson was a creep or like a jerk or like a sicko or anything like that.

17:48I know we've kind of painted him a little questionably, but there doesn't seem to be anybody who had any kind of weird vibes from him at all. He was just a fun guy to be around. And just living up the bachelor life, apparently he was saying like, I spent my youth in an orphanage having to listen to the people who ran the place tell me what to do. I spent 14 years in the Navy listening to them tell me what to do. And now I'm finally free. I'm living it up. So that's essentially, I think, the best the best way to paint his character is that he was living it up. His newfound freedom. Yeah, for sure.

18:25He we can talk about some more of his flamboyance just because it's simply really funny and interesting. When he wrote a personal check to someone, he would sign it Fritz only. and then he wouldn't put a date. I don't know why I love this so much. He wouldn't put a date. He would just put a season. So he would write a check to someone on the date of, you know, autumn and then he would just sign it Fritz. Isn't that weird that they would catch that? Well, it's the 1950s, I guess. Stuff like that would happen. It was also the 1950s, so you could collect your tip money as a bartender in a milk bottle and then just go hand that milk bottle to the uncounted to the person working at the bank and fill out the deposit slip, one quart of money.

19:12And I'm sure they thought, oh, he's such a character, but like, now I got to count on this stuff. Thanks a lot, dude. Every time he made that deposit, he'd think to himself, are you going to withhold the milk deliveries? Yeah, exactly. So one of the other things that he was known for is being a little unkind to friends who were engaged or married or about to get married. He was like, marriage is just another way to trap a fella. Yeah. Whoever gets married is a sap. Probably said something along those lines. That old thing. And then a few years after he appeared in Omaha in 1961, he got married.

19:47Yeah. He got married to a model named Nancy Zimmer, who was 21 at the time. And she had a daughter from her first marriage. She said later that they were just too young. and not only did Fritz Johnson adopt her daughter, they also had their own son. So he had a family all of a sudden within just a couple of years. Yeah, so he's working part-time at the radio station, eventually works full-time there, and then transfers over to TV when he got a job at KETV, the local affiliate there, eventually getting promoted up to sports director And also on the side, he was advising, like consulting, I guess, for archery companies because he was just so good at it.

20:33He's like, well, maybe consider making the arrow straight. I did some archery at the camp. We took a big family trip with a bunch of families, and I got the archery set out. And it was quite fun. And I'm a pretty good shot. Oh, yeah? Any bullseyes? Yeah. I was hitting some bullseyes on the rag, and I've never even done much archery. It just seems intuitive, you know, just kind of hold it steady and aim at the thing. and then let it go. You're like, I'm just as surprised as any of you. I really was. How far away, though? Are we talking like five feet? I mean, I don't know what standard archery is.

21:05I was shooting, I bet, from about, probably from about 35 feet would be my guess. Oh, that is good, man. I don't know what standard is, but everyone's like, oh, yeah, you can come up here on the thumb and do this. I was like, I actually never do this. I'm just good at it. Yeah. You just have to say that out loud with every shot. I know. Like, don't don't compliment me because you think I've worked at this. Right. This is all blind luck. That's right. Speaking of blind luck, one of the other things that kind of made Fritz Johnson a noted character around town. Hey, look at you. Is that he ended up donning an eye patch and he was one of those eye patch wearers who really needed one because they found a tumor behind his eye.

21:49I think his left eye and to remove the tumor, they had to permanently remove his left eye. So he wore an eye patch rather jauntily from what I can tell. And that just made his legend even more. So like one of the local beloved TV announcers now wears an eye patch with his little pencil thin mustache. And everybody just loves this guy so much. Let me ask you something. Are you saying that there are people who wear eye patches just for attention? that don't need them? Yeah. I mean, I've never met one, but yes, I'm sure those people are out there. I mean, they're, they're the same people who wear glasses.

22:29That's how they start. It's the gateway drug is like wearing glasses that you don't actually work. You know that I did that. I know. Are you throwing shade? you're just an eye patch where we're waiting to happen. Oh man. I hope someone writes in that knows somebody or maybe that even did that for a time. If you did this in middle school, you get a pass. like it seems like something John Hodgman might have done in middle school yeah for sure but yeah also not as a pirate you can't be dressed as a pirate it has to be like normal street clothes yeah amazing should we take our break now yeah I think there's no other place to take our second break on this alright we got another big reveal coming up right after this

23:34All right, so I promised a big reveal. Things are going great for old Fritzy. He's in a town. He's scoring with the ladies in the back of a hearse. He's eating chickens through the bone, and people think it's the best thing they've ever seen. He's on TV, for goodness sakes, with an eye patch. Can I say one more thing about the chicken eating thing? Yeah, like how do you eat bones? No, I mean, I can get that. If you cook a chicken enough, like it can be... Just dissolve it, sort of? Yeah, essentially. The thing is this. That's not a party trick that you do quickly. People have to stand around you for possibly dozens of minutes while you do this trick.

24:13Everybody watch this. Right. Stop what you're doing and come over and quietly watch me. Like, it takes a real showman to hold people's interest while you're eating a whole chicken. Yeah. I mean, the only party trick I ever did is that thing with the hat against the wall, and that takes like two seconds. I don't know what that is. You put like a baseball cap on backwards, and then you kind of get up against a wall, and then you act like you're blowing your cheeks out. and what you're doing is putting the brim against the wall such that the hat kind of levitates off your head like you're blowing it off your head.

24:47Oh, I want to see that. Why have you never done that for me? Hey, buddy. Next time I see you, the only – I mean, I haven't done it for years because I refuse to put a baseball cap on backwards because I'm a human adult. But I'll do it for you. Okay, thank you. The guys out there with their hat on backwards right now are like, what's wrong? Is that not cool? No, it's not. my only party trick was holding my breath until I fainted did you ever do that? yeah we used to do that where you'd hold your breath like you bend over and hyperventilate yourself and you take that last breath cross your hands over your chest and your friend would just push as hard as they could on your chest and you'd just faint I did it once and this is something you should not do it's dangerous yeah I shouldn't have that tone of voice right now like it was super fun?

25:33yeah did you ever actually pass out? Yeah. Yeah, I did one time and that was the only time I'd ever passed out up into that point. And it was very, very strange. It was very strange. I remember feeling like I was dropping in on a half pipe on a skateboard as I went. Oh, that's cool. I was kind of like, all right. We didn't do it. Yeah. Do not try this. It is such a bad idea. I can't believe we're even talking about it. Yeah, we should probably edit this out. Yeah, I'm sure Jerry will with her responsibleness. All right. So, like I said, he's living his best life. Then on February 2nd, 1965, a guy who knew John Bader, disappeared man, saw Fritzy at an archery demonstration at a sporting goods show in Chicago and was like, that's Larry Bader.