Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
Speaker 1: for tuning in. Big shout out to our super producer
Speaker 1: mister Max Williams.
Speaker 2: Who uh, no, I did it wrong again? It's either
Speaker 2: one works, man, No, I don't want to know the
Speaker 2: right one. What's the proper military? It's hoorah, guys, whorah.
Speaker 1: Yeah we got there. We also have company. You're Noel Brown,
Speaker 1: I'm Ben Bowling. We had an astonishing bit of luck recently, folks.
Speaker 1: Funny thing happened on the way to this studio. As
Speaker 1: they say, it all began when we started talking about obituaries.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: They're a genre of literature all their own sadness, but
Speaker 1: surprisingly there's often a touch of whimsy and a little
Speaker 1: bit of a spite at times. But yeah, more than anything, right,
Speaker 1: I think we can all agree there's a profound humanness
Speaker 1: to them, and they provide a unique insight into history.
Speaker 1: This led us to know the absolute best exploration of
Speaker 1: obituaries in all of podcastory, all of broadcasting.
Speaker 4: I would say, podcastdom.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's American English, right, we're freestyling. Uh, we
Speaker 1: cannot wait to explore Mobituaries with Mo Raka, created and
Speaker 1: hosted by none other than a personal hero of ours, Max.
Speaker 1: Can I get some like drum like? Yeah, yeah, perfect? Uh,
Speaker 1: the journals, the humorous, the author and all around top
Speaker 1: notch man of letters, mister Moe Rocket get this, Nol,
Speaker 1: the man himself is here with me.
Speaker 4: Here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's right here, Mo, thank you for joining.
Speaker 3: Us, Thank you for having me. I'm sitting on my
Speaker 3: throne in podcasting. I just yeah, I just made it
Speaker 3: up myself, the throne. I'm actually standing. But thank you
Speaker 3: for that introduction.
Speaker 2: I've always been a fan of the word christendom, you know,
Speaker 2: like in King Arthur Tales, and I've never fully understood
Speaker 2: what I get the gist.
Speaker 4: It just has a weight to it.
Speaker 2: But I think applying that to the world of podcasting
Speaker 2: is appropriate.
Speaker 3: Mo.
Speaker 4: Well, do you know what christendom means in that parliance?
Speaker 3: You know? But I don't know exactly, but I do
Speaker 3: know that I hear like the strains of Camelot in
Speaker 3: the back and ground. I just want Richard Burton to
Speaker 3: come in here and start narrating this podcast.
Speaker 2: This episode has something to do with Christianity.
Speaker 4: Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, this is so.
Speaker 1: We are as as you could tell them what we like.
Speaker 1: You are huge fans of history. You've always had this
Speaker 1: abiding interest in history through a very i would say,
Speaker 1: human perspective, like what is the soul of the story?
Speaker 1: And that really shows that really comes out and presents
Speaker 1: in mobituaries. I think Noel and me and our fellow
Speaker 1: listeners playing along at home would love to hear a
Speaker 1: bit of an origin story. How did mobituaries come to be?
Speaker 3: Well? I did begin to love obituaries in part. I
Speaker 3: think it was first of all, as I myself was
Speaker 3: getting older, I inherited it from my father. My father
Speaker 3: loved obituaries and he wasn't a gloomy guy at all.
Speaker 3: Growing up and in the Washington, DC area, there were
Speaker 3: two daily papers when I was a kid, and my
Speaker 3: father would read them, both the Washington Star and the
Speaker 3: Washington Post, and he'd say, oh boy, the obituaries is
Speaker 3: my favorite section of the paper. And I think he
Speaker 3: liked it because it had you know, if it's if
Speaker 3: it's done right, there's like a real sense of romance
Speaker 3: and of sweep, and it's sort of like the highs,
Speaker 3: the lows, the triumphs, the tragedies, and when you read them,
Speaker 3: you can if they're done right, it's it does sort
Speaker 3: of feel like a like a like a trailer for
Speaker 3: an Oscar winning biopic sort of. And I think that's
Speaker 3: probably where I kind of got the like for them.
Speaker 3: And then as I got older, I continued reading them
Speaker 3: and it seemed like a great way to do a
Speaker 3: profile of a person, to tell a person's story, you know.
Speaker 3: And as I started meeting obituary writers, I found out
Speaker 3: that it's a kind of a more and more coveted beat,
Speaker 3: you know, I mean print journalism. Obviously things are really
Speaker 3: really rough and not getting any better unfortunately. But I
Speaker 3: think it used to be I guess pun intended sort
Speaker 3: of a graveyard for writers where they'd end up at
Speaker 3: the end of their careers. But but now I think,
Speaker 3: you know, the o bit writers at the Washington Post,
Speaker 3: they've got a really vibrant department there, and uh and
Speaker 3: you know, the head over there said, look, it's like
Speaker 3: you're you get to write for sports, you get to
Speaker 3: write for business, you get to write for entertainment because
Speaker 3: it depends who dies. And also just it's it's handy
Speaker 3: having a first name like Mo because you can turn
Speaker 3: it into a bunch of different things. And you know,
Speaker 3: if my name were Cecil or something, I wouldn't have
Speaker 3: a podcast. So yeah, way.
Speaker 2: And in the modern time too, it's interesting to think
Speaker 2: about all of the ongoing iterations that an obituary goes
Speaker 2: through before the person even dies. And there have been
Speaker 2: cases where it accidentally got leaked or something and it
Speaker 2: was mispublished. And you know, what must that be like
Speaker 2: to be that person that's constantly updating the obituary of
Speaker 2: a very prolific artist or a musician or you know, personality.
Speaker 4: And then finally when it's time to pull.
Speaker 2: The trigger, you've kind of been working on it ongoingly
Speaker 2: for some time, right.
Speaker 3: I know, you know it's there. There was this great
Speaker 3: documentary I wish I could remember the name of it,
Speaker 3: about the New York Times obituary department a few years ago.
Speaker 3: It'll come to me. But there is the guy who
Speaker 3: would go down basically into the dungeon and pull up
Speaker 3: these obituaries when they needed updates. Some of them were
Speaker 3: just print, they hadn't even been digitized. And I think
Speaker 3: there's a record for how long the gap was between
Speaker 3: something being written and something being published. And it was
Speaker 3: an Ada trix of course, like remember Ada Trixes. And
Speaker 3: it was some daredevil young woman who was a pilot
Speaker 3: I think in her teens and then lived until her nineties,
Speaker 3: so that it had been like over eighty years. What
Speaker 3: I found fascinating with the obituary writers I met I'll
Speaker 3: never get over this is one of the writers at
Speaker 3: the Times told me that there are people who cold
Speaker 3: call the Times to talk about their own obituary. I mean,
Speaker 3: if that isn't confidence, crazy hutspell, Like, Hi, I'm calling
Speaker 3: to talk about you know, I just thought I had
Speaker 3: some free time, and I'm calling to talk about the
Speaker 3: obituary you are already writing about me.
Speaker 4: Is that confidence or conceitedness?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're right, it's worse than that. And I would
Speaker 3: be so tempted to just say, you know, we're still
Speaker 3: on the fence. We're just.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is our thing. Yeah, I would live your life.
Speaker 3: If you If you accomplish a little bit more in
Speaker 3: these last years, then I think it'll push you over
Speaker 3: the top into contention.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: As far as getting getting covered, it's almost like getting
Speaker 2: your wedding covered by the New York Times.
Speaker 4: Big get for so many people.
Speaker 1: Who Yeah, uh, there's also Uh, it's funny to me
Speaker 1: that you talk about that that record for our Avia tricks,
Speaker 1: our aviator, right, because just clocked what you.
Speaker 4: Meant by that word. By the way, I get it now,
Speaker 4: demand of letters tell you that's good.
Speaker 1: I would say my money would have originally been on
Speaker 1: Henry Kissinger because I feel like people kept writing that obituary.
Speaker 4: And uh, what a complex legacy. I mean, awful guy.
Speaker 2: I think we would maybe agree, maybe not, but very
Speaker 2: complex and how do you sum that life up?
Speaker 3: Well? I know it's also interesting. It would be interesting
Speaker 3: to see all the different versions to see where things fall,
Speaker 3: like I you know, with Jimmy Carter, where his post
Speaker 3: presidency falls versus his presidency itself. I mean, that's definitely
Speaker 3: changed over the years. I think that Bill Clinton impeachment,
Speaker 3: I'd be really curious where that falls at this point.
Speaker 3: It's probably moved up down. I mean it'll probably be
Speaker 3: in that first line, you know, you know William Jefferson
Speaker 3: Clinton Comma, the forty second president who also Coma died today.
Speaker 3: But that that clause, that's where everything's really packed in there.
Speaker 3: But how it changes. Yeah, Another one that's wild is
Speaker 3: is when somebody has lived so long that people have
Speaker 3: forgotten who they are, but they were still important. So
Speaker 3: Madame chen Kaishak, the wife of the Chinese nationalist leader,
Speaker 3: I think she lived. I had to check this. I
Speaker 3: think she lived until she was at one hundred and six,
Speaker 3: and it had been so long since she was, you know,
Speaker 3: at the center of the world. And news that I
Speaker 3: was by one of four people who read the whole
Speaker 3: oh bit, and it was incredibly long, this obek because
Speaker 3: it clearly had been written at a time when her
Speaker 3: death would have been really big news. But she just
Speaker 3: lived so long.
Speaker 1: And this is something that I think we all really
Speaker 1: enjoy with mobituaries, because again I keep coming back to
Speaker 1: the way that you explore history in such a human,
Speaker 1: soulful perspective. I also have to give a shout out
Speaker 1: to my Grandmother's Ravioli.
Speaker 4: Thank you, not specifically yours, but the program. Yeah, my grandmother.
Speaker 1: It was just one of my mom's favorite shows.
Speaker 3: Kidding, no, no, I'm so happy to hear that I loved.
Speaker 3: You know, both both the mobituaries and my grandmothers were
Speaker 3: Abbioli were projects that I felt very very personally about,
Speaker 3: and and hey, yeah, I loved doing it so much.
Speaker 3: I went for those who don't know. I went around
Speaker 3: the country learning to cook from grandmothers and grandfathers in
Speaker 3: their kitchens. But it was really about learning who they
Speaker 3: were in their life story and what mattered to them,
Speaker 3: and just having fun with them. Also. I loved it
Speaker 3: so much, So thank you Ben.
Speaker 2: Oh Well, there's so much history and love and you know,
Speaker 2: caring built into recipes, the way they're kept, you know,
Speaker 2: the handwritten notes and the iterations, and maybe some of
Speaker 2: them are just committed to memory and passed down through
Speaker 2: family members. All of that I just think, in and
Speaker 2: of it's another example much like obituaries, where it's sort
Speaker 2: of a backdoor into.
Speaker 4: History in a very interesting way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's right.
Speaker 1: Have you encountered things in your in your work, because
Speaker 1: we're four seasons in obituaries, have you encountered have you
Speaker 1: encountered stories that really surprised you, like in an unexpected way,
Speaker 1: because each each one feels so unique, you know, it
Speaker 1: feels like every I feel almost like I'm asking you
Speaker 1: if you have a favorite child, but I'm not, I promise,
Speaker 1: like the ones that like hit you, similar to Madam,
Speaker 1: to Madame Chang Kaishek's thing where you thought, oh, I
Speaker 1: thought this would be pretty simple, but holy smokes, the
Speaker 1: plotswist here.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think there definitely have been those. I mean,
Speaker 3: I think Chang and Aang, the original so called Siamese
Speaker 3: twins where that that term came from, who were from
Speaker 3: Siam what is now Thailand and moved to the United
Speaker 3: States as teenagers and became from some of the first
Speaker 3: celebrities in America when the only thing that Americans had
Speaker 3: has past times in the nineteenth century early nineteenth century
Speaker 3: was a cock fighting, you know, drinking hard cider and
Speaker 3: card playing. And they became really famous, right right, all
Speaker 3: at the same time, and they became really really famous,
Speaker 3: and it was really sort of sweeping story about these
Speaker 3: guys who were exploited and managed to make lives for themselves.
Speaker 3: But as they became successful, they ended up owning a
Speaker 3: plantation and owning slaves, and not just slaves, they bought
Speaker 3: very young slaves almost as investment properties. So it was
Speaker 3: obviously an incredibly ugly side to that story, but I
Speaker 3: liked doing the story because it they kind of packed
Speaker 3: all of America into their lives. They were an immigrant story.
Speaker 3: They really had pulled themselves up from their bootstraps. It
Speaker 3: was a story about celebrity, It was a story about
Speaker 3: racial prejudice, and then it was against them, and then
Speaker 3: it was a story about assimilation, and then about slavery.
Speaker 3: So it was like whoa. It was like taking all
Speaker 3: of American history and combining it into one story. And
Speaker 3: you know, I like doing it because I don't think
Speaker 3: I think we took care with that, but we didn't
Speaker 3: tiptoe and I was very happy about that because I
Speaker 3: don't think people want people tiptoeing around this stuff. And
Speaker 3: you know, either.
Speaker 5: Way, it's interesting too because a lot of the purpose
Speaker 5: and I would love to hear your thoughts on what
Speaker 5: you think the purpose of an obituary is, but is
Speaker 5: to kind of set the record straight in a way.
Speaker 2: It's like sort of to prevent in some ways as
Speaker 2: a functional item, you know, people from spreading rumors about someone's.
Speaker 4: Life or what they may or may not have done.
Speaker 2: And it's sort of meant to be this pithy, definitive,
Speaker 2: you know, declaration of what a person, who a person was.
Speaker 2: Do you have any other maybe ways you could elaborate
Speaker 2: on what the purpose of an obituary.
Speaker 3: Is, well, that's interesting. I hadn't even I don't know
Speaker 3: that I've really given it thought in that way. So
Speaker 3: I'm I'm happy to do that. I mean, I think
Speaker 3: it's a first draft of history because a lot of
Speaker 3: them do have errors. So there have been there there
Speaker 3: have been obituaries that I've loved, like Irving Berlin, and
Speaker 3: I can't cite exactly what was wrong, but when you
Speaker 3: go back and fact check it, now there were just
Speaker 3: think that we're wrong. And uh. I think the trick though,
Speaker 3: is that it kind of has to to be faithful
Speaker 3: to the person. It does have to have head and
Speaker 3: heart in it. So I think that's why it's important
Speaker 3: that reporters when they do these obituaries, or we when
Speaker 3: we do these these podcasts obituaries, try to talk to
Speaker 3: relatives about how they felt about a person, because feeling
Speaker 3: sounds really obviously inexact and uh, you know, undefinable. But
Speaker 3: it is part of who the person is, what the
Speaker 3: person meant to other people, So it's not it can't
Speaker 3: just be just the basmam kind of writing. It does
Speaker 3: actually have to it does have to have an emotional component.
Speaker 3: I think actually to be accurate. So it sort of
Speaker 3: seems counterintuitive, but I think it. I think it does
Speaker 3: have to do that as opposed to say, just reporting
Speaker 3: on like election returns or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right right, and spoiler for later in today's program
Speaker 1: by pal Noell found some obituaries that we would like
Speaker 1: to share with you later on for some reactions, because again,
Speaker 1: it's such a you know, it is inherently a tragedy
Speaker 1: whenever someone passes, right, even if you don't particularly care
Speaker 1: for them, But it also has this amazing opportunity. I
Speaker 1: really do believe it is a genre of literature and
Speaker 1: should be considered as such. But we could talk literature later.
Speaker 1: We have as we tease the earlier we have thought arduously
Speaker 1: mo about things of yesteryear. Our conversation was not just
Speaker 1: obituaries for people, right well, we wanted to explore with
Speaker 1: you are somewhat of a swan song for things that
Speaker 1: have passed, and Noy Nolan and I were very excited
Speaker 1: about this one. No where do where do you think
Speaker 1: we start? Do we embarrass ourselves with our telling more
Speaker 1: group text about pagers?
Speaker 4: You mean in general?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh, in general?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we do occasionally it's sort of professionals at embarrassing ourselves.
Speaker 4: But we're okay with that. We lead into it. Yeah, Pagers.
Speaker 2: You know, it's funny because I was thinking about the
Speaker 2: idea of dead things, and sometimes a thing can be
Speaker 2: dead in terms of its mainstream use, but it can
Speaker 2: still be very much alive in more of a niche way.
Speaker 2: And I think we live in this era where obsolescence
Speaker 2: is so commonplace and because of the technological you know,
Speaker 2: advancements exponential, I think there's a pushback against it. People
Speaker 2: almost resent it, and a are like, you know, so
Speaker 2: I want to hold on to the things of the past,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 4: And Ben found a great word.
Speaker 2: I don't want to spoil it, but yeah, but that
Speaker 2: refers to building things into modern designs that represent the
Speaker 2: ways of the past, or something that might be what
Speaker 2: was the word, Ben?
Speaker 4: Can you already knows it?
Speaker 1: Skew warfs, you know, like would you have the little
Speaker 1: floppy disk icon on a computer for save? And who
Speaker 1: uses floppy disk?
Speaker 3: Not?
Speaker 4: I never thought of that, Yeah, And you pointed out.
Speaker 2: I was like, you said it the word, and I
Speaker 2: was like, oh, I immediately understand what that is. But
Speaker 2: I'm trying to think of examples and Ben pointed out
Speaker 2: in cars, there's a lot of like anachronistic things that
Speaker 2: are built into modern car designs that don't do a thing,
Speaker 2: but they're like mainly ornamental. But in an older model
Speaker 2: car it would have been a very you know, crucial component.
Speaker 2: But it's a way of sort of building the past
Speaker 2: for folks that maybe it would give some comfort to
Speaker 2: to the future. But pagers is such an interesting thing
Speaker 2: because it we look at it now and it really
Speaker 2: just screams the nineties, you know. I mean it's like
Speaker 2: I had a clear green Motorola pager. You'd get little
Speaker 2: charms for them and stuff, and you know, it went
Speaker 2: from being a thing that only doctors had that almost
Speaker 2: represented this position of prominence to this thing that everybody had.
Speaker 2: I had one when I was, you know, a teenager,
Speaker 2: and now it's back around to be you know, went
Speaker 2: from tens of millions of people having pagers to now
Speaker 2: it's just a hospital thing again.
Speaker 4: So it's sort of gone full circle in a weird way.
Speaker 2: But I just thought it would be interesting to talk
Speaker 2: a little bit about the history of pagers. I didn't
Speaker 2: realize they went back as far as nineteen twenty one.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they were used.
Speaker 2: It was it was early examples, not a hand you know,
Speaker 2: little thing you clip on your telegraph. It was more
Speaker 2: like the wire yes, exactly. It was more like a
Speaker 2: wire service almost. It was essentially a way of transmitting.
Speaker 2: It was a lot more like a telegraph, exactly. Ben
Speaker 2: it was the in nineteen forty nine act. Well, the
Speaker 2: original one was used something akin to what we'd not
Speaker 2: as pagers by the Detroit Police Department in nineteen twenty one,
Speaker 2: But in nineteen forty nine, the very first telephonic pager
Speaker 2: was used. The adventure was a guy named Al Gross,
Speaker 2: and his pagers were used in New York City's Jewish Hospital.
Speaker 2: And at this point, much like the early telephones, wasn't
Speaker 2: a consumer device. It wasn't available. It was only available
Speaker 2: to professional circles, and then of course into the eighties
Speaker 2: and by the nineties they were everywhere. And I just
Speaker 2: thought it'd be fun to briefly talk about do you
Speaker 2: remember pager codes?
Speaker 1: MO? Did you have a pager? MO?
Speaker 3: I don't think that I did. I think I'm sure
Speaker 3: I wanted one, and if I did, well, you know,
Speaker 3: when I worked at piezria UNO's and I was at
Speaker 3: a form of a pager piece when I worked at
Speaker 3: Pizzera Unos, which was very high stressed in Georgetown, because
Speaker 3: they had something called the five minute lunch I think
Speaker 3: that's what they called it.
Speaker 2: And if you didn't get it, if it arrives or
Speaker 2: you get it free or something like that by clime exactly.
Speaker 3: And I mean it would create like basically collisions like
Speaker 3: in the in the you know, among the waiters because
Speaker 3: you were rushing to get the personal sized pizza to
Speaker 3: the table in five minutes. But I think were there
Speaker 3: must have been some buzzer system that told us and
Speaker 3: maybe when I when I actually delivered pizza also, But yeah,
Speaker 3: but I don't think I ever had one kind of
Speaker 3: yeah that would I just clip to my belt that
Speaker 3: I'd just wear during during the day. Did either of
Speaker 3: you guys have that?
Speaker 4: Or yeah I did, and I know Ben said he
Speaker 4: had he had one as well.
Speaker 1: I feel like, I feel like I need to preface this, guys.
Speaker 1: I had two pagers. I was not a drug dealer.
Speaker 1: I was a very straight laced kid. I was also
Speaker 1: not a doctor.
Speaker 3: I was doogie houser.
Speaker 1: I just had helicopter parents, you know. So, uh, the
Speaker 1: the thing that's interesting too with the pagers, is now
Speaker 1: we're not just talking about an artifact, a physical device.
Speaker 1: We're talking about a medium of communication, right, And so
Speaker 1: some of these codes, maybe I'm going to be quizzed
Speaker 1: along with you. Mo nol is our quiz master for this.
Speaker 1: We're going to see whether we can guess the meaning
Speaker 1: of some codes, and I'll try to help out the
Speaker 1: team as best that I could.
Speaker 4: But no, no, that's a great setup. Bend.
Speaker 2: Just just to add, it wasn't until nineteen fifty eight
Speaker 2: that the FCC approved the pager for public use, and
Speaker 2: then Motorola swooped in in nineteen fifty nine, creating a
Speaker 2: personal radio communicator's kind.
Speaker 4: Of what they call it wasn't even called a pager.
Speaker 4: They did coin the term.
Speaker 2: They coined the term pager Motorola Company. But these early
Speaker 2: ones looked more like walkie talkies. I mean, they were
Speaker 2: absolutely massive. But into the eighties and nineties, like I
Speaker 2: was saying, you know, the whole purpose of a pager
Speaker 2: is you also it required another thing, you know, you
Speaker 2: had to have a phone, right, So I've always found
Speaker 2: them to be a little clunky, but it made sense
Speaker 2: because you would page somebody from a phone with the
Speaker 2: number of the phone, and then they would call you back.
Speaker 4: That was the intent of the way it was originally
Speaker 4: set up.
Speaker 2: But if you got a little clever, you could like
Speaker 2: do an early form of texting just by using alpha numeric,
Speaker 2: you know, things that maybe represented the way it would
Speaker 2: sound when you'd say the numbers out loud, or maybe
Speaker 2: it was meant to be flipped upside down, or a
Speaker 2: one would represent a and the alphabet you know, et cetera.
Speaker 2: You could you know, do like send kind of complex
Speaker 2: messages like that, at least limited by the size of
Speaker 2: the screen. So typically these were pithy, kind of three
Speaker 2: to five characters. So one that I think maybe is
Speaker 2: an easy one that most people might remember is one four.
Speaker 4: Three, yeah, I do one one. People still use this today.
Speaker 3: It's a check mark if right. I'm just looking at
Speaker 3: thinking of a phone like that.
Speaker 4: Should that's good?
Speaker 2: Think more in terms of the this is you'd have
Speaker 2: to know what the thing was, and this couldn't be
Speaker 2: interchange with other things. Each number represents the number of
Speaker 2: letters in the word.
Speaker 1: Oh, oh, yes, I love yeah, I love you very
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. Next, can we get like applause or you win?
Speaker 1: Kind of sorry going to full game show guys. All right? Uh?
Speaker 1: That okay? That one I think stood out and that
Speaker 1: was a great hint. Noal uh, it's the number of layers.
Speaker 1: This reminds me of talking about ciphers and codes, because
Speaker 1: that's really everybody with a pager becomes a cryptographer at
Speaker 1: some point.
Speaker 4: It sounds like, right, it's weird though on this.
Speaker 2: I found this site like on Reddit where they're like
Speaker 2: a like a listicle of all of these or some
Speaker 2: of them kind of collated. And another version of I
Speaker 2: love you is eight three one because it's eight letters,
Speaker 2: three words one meaning it's kind it's a little hammy
Speaker 2: and that's someone.
Speaker 3: But how did you know who the message was coming from?
Speaker 3: Forgetting this? Did the pager indicate who was sending the message?
Speaker 2: I don't think so, because that would have been almost
Speaker 2: like a like a caller ID thing by that point
Speaker 2: would have been an extra charge if it was even available,
Speaker 2: because a caller ID it was a special box you
Speaker 2: had to get.
Speaker 3: It's still nice to get that message to know that someone.
Speaker 2: Sorry, Well here yes, absolutely mo, and I remember now
Speaker 2: people would have their own kind of sign offs. Yes,
Speaker 2: so it might be then again, an alphanumeric approximation of
Speaker 2: first your first or last name, and it would be
Speaker 2: a known thing. And especially if you start thinking about
Speaker 2: the way these were used for things like drug deals
Speaker 2: or more under the radar kind of activities, it would
Speaker 2: be like sending ciphers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know it. Also, you know, as someone with
Speaker 1: cartoonish social anxiety, I'm surprised that I survived the pager
Speaker 1: eraic is like if you guys get those texts sometimes
Speaker 1: right where they just say, hey, call me. If they
Speaker 1: don't say what.
Speaker 4: Call who.
Speaker 2: I'm going to do one more purely numerical one, and
Speaker 2: I'm going to do one a different style, and then
Speaker 2: I'm out. But you guys might know this, maybe from
Speaker 2: hip hop lyrics. I believe it is a police code.
Speaker 2: I know Mo's a big hip hop head, and you'd
Speaker 2: likely are, uh, one eight seven.
Speaker 1: Oh dirty pool, it's not good.
Speaker 2: It's bad news. The lyric and the in hip hop
Speaker 2: would be one eight seven on a mother fing.
Speaker 1: Cop or the Sublime song.
Speaker 2: He says that in that one too, doesn't he Yeah exactly,
Speaker 2: but I believe isn't he is an he referencing something
Speaker 2: in in another song?
Speaker 4: Maybe not, I don't know.
Speaker 3: Seven I just keep thinking over eating. I ate seven
Speaker 3: of what like this?
Speaker 2: This would be a reference, Yeah, that is this would
Speaker 2: be a reference to a literal I believe police code
Speaker 2: like fifty one. Fifty is a code for someone who
Speaker 2: is having a psychiatric break and needs to be committed
Speaker 2: or something. So one eight seven is a police scanner
Speaker 2: code for murder. Oh okay, wow, So if you send
Speaker 2: somebody one eight seven, that's bad news.
Speaker 4: Or if you're good.
Speaker 1: Again, if you get that, if you have your pager
Speaker 1: and you don't know exactly who's texting you and you
Speaker 1: get what eight seven, that's terrified.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, I mean it could being sure, it could
Speaker 3: be rad as I'm going to kill you, right.
Speaker 4: If there's no other context.
Speaker 3: No, and that kind of aggression causes hypertension. It's like, yeah, anyway,
Speaker 3: if you're on the receiving end of that, you don't
Speaker 3: want that.
Speaker 2: Kill you slowly by sending you cryptic Uh you know,
Speaker 2: it's the spirited messages.
Speaker 1: It's up there with nine to one one.
Speaker 4: And by the way, that was a big thing.
Speaker 1: If any of my middle school friends are listening, you guys,
Speaker 1: it was never an emergency.
Speaker 4: Never was it. Ever.
Speaker 2: You could just send one, four three. People would just
Speaker 2: done one one. At the end of the time, I
Speaker 2: do think this is all coming back to me. Now
Speaker 2: this is my last one. This is think of this
Speaker 2: one in terms of like this. These are numbers that
Speaker 2: represent letters visually. So we've got six thousand, asterisk eight
Speaker 2: four three six oh oh oh asterisk just to just
Speaker 2: to indicate a space.
Speaker 3: Oh ass just for the space, yeah, six thousand space
Speaker 3: and what was after the asterisk eight for to three.
Speaker 1: I feel like I need a little pad of paper.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you probably always like.
Speaker 3: Want it to be Teddy Roosevelt, because I feel like
Speaker 3: it should be like glasses and a mustarda like vis
Speaker 3: there's a way I think with like numbers to make
Speaker 3: a Teddy Roosevelt or something. But anyway, oh gosh, yeah,
Speaker 3: I want to know about this. Yeah, I don't know what.
Speaker 3: These are so esoteric, weird, they're barely meant to be solved.
Speaker 3: You're closed, go something. Think about this.
Speaker 2: The two o's in the middle represent one letter, and
Speaker 2: the final O is meant to be a different letter,
Speaker 2: but it's the same number.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna give.
Speaker 2: Okay, it would be goodbye, goodbye, six thousand. Well, you
Speaker 2: have to think about these two in terms of the blocky,
Speaker 2: little little digity numbers. So the six looks a lot
Speaker 2: like a G, and the o's you know, can be
Speaker 2: a an O or a D. And then eight for
Speaker 2: three the four is the Y and three is a
Speaker 2: weird backwards E.
Speaker 3: I actually find goodbye more menacing than one eight seven.
Speaker 4: It's like I'll never see you again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's already done.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the hit Man is on the way. Yeah.
Speaker 2: How I feel when people end the text with a period,
Speaker 2: I feel period, See we are we are not the same, Ben,
Speaker 2: we'd not you and I, but we are in many ways.
Speaker 4: That was my little.
Speaker 2: Little blast from the past with page and then again
Speaker 2: I thought it was an interesting twist MO because you know,
Speaker 2: again there were millions of folks. This is there's a
Speaker 2: you know, a massive moment for these things with consumers.
Speaker 2: They started exclusively in hospitals, and now they're exclusively once
Speaker 2: again in hospitals. So not dead, but certainly not alive
Speaker 2: in the same way that it once was. So I
Speaker 2: think that counts.
Speaker 3: It reminds you. By the way, a little bit of
Speaker 3: CB radios, which I wanted to do them a victuary on,
Speaker 3: but it turned out that they weren't dead. The CBE
Speaker 3: radios still and I'm really bad with this, but they're
Speaker 3: there if everything else goes down in the world.
Speaker 2: But screemon zombie shows all the time. Someone's got one
Speaker 2: of those laying around zombie shows like Apocalyptos. Right, it's
Speaker 2: a big deal if they have a CBE radio because
Speaker 2: there are people that have them still and they work.
Speaker 1: And also the name Ham Radio just confused and bedeviled
Speaker 1: me for a long time, as.
Speaker 4: It's not the same as CB is it. I'm confused too,
Speaker 4: I think they're different.
Speaker 1: Okay, but the one thing is that the Ham radio
Speaker 1: name is misleading, especially for someone like me who is
Speaker 1: always low key starving.
Speaker 4: You know, it's not powered by Ham.
Speaker 1: Then they don't even talk about Ham most of the time.
Speaker 1: It like occasionally comes up in their conversations. Anyway, I put,
Speaker 1: do you go Ham? When you use the Ham radio,
Speaker 1: you're just yelling at people and just being really aggressive.
Speaker 1: This is a dumb and true story. As a boy scout,
Speaker 1: I got a Ham radio and I figured out it
Speaker 1: wasn't like a secret network of food fans.
Speaker 4: And I put it in the attic.
Speaker 1: Can you look at this point, though, I suggest, with
Speaker 1: this wonderful history of the Pager, mo, if you were
Speaker 1: to be so kind, could you give our listeners playing
Speaker 1: along at home a bit of an off the cuff
Speaker 1: obituary for the Pager anything you'd like to say.
Speaker 3: Okay, we should probably start with a cold open one
Speaker 3: four three, I love you, I'm going to kill you,
Speaker 3: six thousand asterisk something something something goodbye.
Speaker 4: That could be the whole thing. It's poetry.
Speaker 3: I'm Morocca, and this is mobituary. Is this moment you
Speaker 3: go the patre a lost language and then we'll just
Speaker 3: have to give it a date or something.
Speaker 4: You know, that's it. Yeah, poetry, poetry.
Speaker 1: Wow?
Speaker 2: Is there a form though that you have to adhere to?
Speaker 2: Is there like a number of word counts? Like what
Speaker 2: is the kind of tried and true formula for a
Speaker 2: good obituary?
Speaker 4: And like you know and all of that stuff.
Speaker 3: Well, I you know that all important first sentence that's
Speaker 3: got to be like action packed, that's got to be
Speaker 3: a winner, and that is and sometimes they're disappointing. Sometimes
Speaker 3: people punt and just sort of say, you know, for
Speaker 3: a world leader who lived many many years, I mean
Speaker 3: I've seen some that are that are that are real letdowns,
Speaker 3: But you got to pack it right in there. And
Speaker 3: you know, in the mobituary's book, in the preface, I
Speaker 3: wrote about how you know Bill Cosby's first line is
Speaker 3: going to be packed with a lot because of how
Speaker 3: much has happened in his life. So the first paragraph
Speaker 3: is usually two sentences. Excuse me. So there's that first line.
Speaker 3: So Moroka Kama who blankety blank blank bank bank Kamma
Speaker 3: died today. Period he was one hundred and eight years old.
Speaker 3: We hope period. But I think I think for the
Speaker 3: written ones, the ones I like, they have a very
Speaker 3: a detail usually about the person early in life that
Speaker 3: was significant and kind of presaged predicted something larger. So
Speaker 3: there's there's a great obituary for Alfred Hitchcock, and I'm
Speaker 3: going to get the age wrong, but it has a
Speaker 3: detail that when he was like six or seven in
Speaker 3: the English village he was growing up in that the
Speaker 3: local jailer and a kind of early version of a
Speaker 3: Scared Straight program, took him to the local jail, threw
Speaker 3: him into a cell, slammed the door behind him and
Speaker 3: said that's what happens to bad little boys.
Speaker 2: And that he'd done something yeah, it was degation, no exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And that that clanging sound of the door slamming
Speaker 3: behind him reverberated in his memory and imprinted itself in
Speaker 3: such a way that, at least in the view of
Speaker 3: the obituary writer. This then shows up later in a
Speaker 3: lot of his work about mistaken identity and crime and punishment.
Speaker 3: And so, I mean, all I can say is, for
Speaker 3: fans of Pitchcock, thank god he was traumatized as a child,
Speaker 3: you know, because we wouldn't have had these great movies.
Speaker 3: And I can't see a wisame way about like stars
Speaker 3: like And this is a little bit of a tangent,
Speaker 3: but I kind of do feel that way about like
Speaker 3: Sammy Davis Junior and Judy Garland, like two of the
Speaker 3: great entertainers of the twentieth century, they didn't have childhoods, and.
Speaker 4: That is wrong.
Speaker 3: On the other hand, I think if they had had
Speaker 3: normal child elhood's, I don't know that we would have
Speaker 3: gotten such great performances out of them.
Speaker 1: You know. That reminds me a little bit of the
Speaker 1: obituary episode on Audrey Hepburn with the yeah, with the
Speaker 1: the facts that the it's like the scars make the
Speaker 1: person in a in a very real way, you know,
Speaker 1: and here's something there's something deep, and you know I
Speaker 1: hesitate to wax philosophical, but there's again there's there's a
Speaker 1: an art, a craft to writing these. I got to
Speaker 1: tell you about one of my favorite ones, uh, in
Speaker 1: my favorite formats is the gallows humor of the satirical
Speaker 1: or whimsical obituary. You know, like you're reading something that
Speaker 1: says h William Jefferson Clinton Comma, amateur saxophonist Comma, Like
Speaker 1: I love that kind of stuff. Have you run across
Speaker 1: obituaries that surprised you with humor?
Speaker 3: It's hard me to think of them specifically, but I
Speaker 3: know exactly what you're talking about. The British are really
Speaker 3: good with that, are really kind of like, you know,
Speaker 3: are kind of racing sometimes at the obits and are
Speaker 3: are much are much less reverential. I think also in
Speaker 3: this age of paid death notices obituary, obituary writers are
Speaker 3: extremely sensitive about being lumped in with the paid death notices,
Speaker 3: where you know, families put these things together and then
Speaker 3: just buy space on.
Speaker 4: The paper such as a distinction.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're super sensitive about that, and uh, and it's
Speaker 3: actually the paid death notices are frankly keeping a lot
Speaker 3: of small town papers alive because it's a really important and.
Speaker 4: Consider that an obituary at all. It is and it isn't.
Speaker 3: Kind of right, it's technically not an obituary. It's not reported,
Speaker 3: it's a it's a it's submitted by a family member
Speaker 3: or a loved one. But those sometimes are really funny.
Speaker 3: I've read some. I wish I could give you more
Speaker 3: specific examples, but but I've read some that are very,
Speaker 3: very funny about you know, you know, one written very
Speaker 3: life by a son about a mother I think in Florida,
Speaker 3: who was She was just really profane, but the son
Speaker 3: clearly loved her, and it really painted a picture that
Speaker 3: it's like a future Oscar winner, like winning role if
Speaker 3: somebody portrays that person.
Speaker 2: I just think that's such an important distinction, because I
Speaker 2: think what most people think of obituaries as are those things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, now they do, Yeah, because few people get the
Speaker 3: real obituary.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've got I've got one that fits exactly what
Speaker 1: we're talking about here, gentlemen, from the Fayetteville Observer, and
Speaker 1: in depth thing will just give you the beginning. This
Speaker 1: is an obituary for Renee mandel Horn, and it goes
Speaker 1: like this, el Paso, Texas, a plus size Jewish lady
Speaker 1: redneck died in El Paso on Saturday. Of itself, hardly
Speaker 1: news or good news if you're the type that subscribes
Speaker 1: to the notion that anybody not named you dying in
Speaker 1: El Paso, Texas is.
Speaker 4: Good niece not named you?
Speaker 1: Yeah, in which case, have I got news for you?
Speaker 1: The body fertile, redheaded matriarch of a sprawling Jewish Mexican
Speaker 1: redneck American family has kicked it and this is this
Speaker 1: is like written by her children, and there's so much
Speaker 1: love in it. But it's almost like a Friar's Club
Speaker 1: roast or something the way it just gets.
Speaker 3: And Ben, I have actually thank you for reading that
Speaker 3: it is. People should go and find it. I have
Speaker 3: read that it is really great.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you like that one as well. It passes
Speaker 1: like the obituaries test.
Speaker 3: What a great way to send off someone you love
Speaker 3: with humor that way. Well, also because I remember reading
Speaker 3: that it went viral, I think, and I'm pretty sure
Speaker 3: it did. And I think the reason is that it's
Speaker 3: so great is because it's written in the spirit with
Speaker 3: which the woman lived your life. If you were really
Speaker 3: just to give the facts of that woman's life, it
Speaker 3: wouldn't do her justice, or even talking about how to
Speaker 3: people felt about her would still not do her justice.
Speaker 3: This family went one better and they actually wrote it
Speaker 3: in the style in which in a style that reflected
Speaker 3: who she was. I mean, that's that's like, really that
Speaker 3: is really a tribute our literature.
Speaker 1: Nerd stuff is coming out too, because you're talking about
Speaker 1: how the aesthetic of the form.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, the form reflected her.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's crafted in her image.
Speaker 3: Wow, it was a roast, as you put it, It's
Speaker 3: a roast of a woman who probably loved roasts, right, Like,
Speaker 3: I always thought that Bob Barker's I had this image
Speaker 3: for a long time that his would have been written
Speaker 3: almost like like a plinko board from like trisis right?
Speaker 3: Like the column. I always thought it would be kind
Speaker 3: of interesting if like the first column and it kind
Speaker 3: of shifted and then would like almost like the path
Speaker 3: that the that the coin makes you're during a successful plinko?
Speaker 4: Is that done though? Like a house of leaves kind
Speaker 4: of a approach?
Speaker 1: Right? Like?
Speaker 2: So is that a thing I would love to see
Speaker 2: really mega out there weirdo creative obituaries.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that. Yeah, I'm trying, Yeah, I think
Speaker 3: it would be great. I'm trying to think, who is
Speaker 3: a luminary now in what form their op it would take? Yeah,
Speaker 3: that would reflect who they are. I mean, I just
Speaker 3: suppose you like a poet should be kind of written
Speaker 3: in poetry, right, Like you know, I hope Theodore guyse
Speaker 3: ELL's I hope was in rhyme. You know, when doctor
Speaker 3: Seuss died. I don't know, somebody hoped it that way.
Speaker 1: Ezra Pounds was like twenty eight pages. It got edited
Speaker 1: down to two lines or something.
Speaker 3: And at the end it was incredibly anti semitic, and
Speaker 3: at the end it was super that's the lotrap with
Speaker 3: just anti semitism.
Speaker 1: Right, So we also see, like you know, I do
Speaker 1: want to make sure we also mentioned the title of
Speaker 1: the book. This is not just a podcast, folks, mobituaries
Speaker 1: Great Lives worth reliving.
Speaker 4: This is.
Speaker 1: Tell Us again at home, tell Us the order of operations?
Speaker 1: Which came first? Was it the So we've got the
Speaker 1: inspiration the interest. Growing up, your father is regularly reading
Speaker 1: newspapers for obituaries in DC, and you have that lifelong
Speaker 1: love of history coupled with this, do you create the
Speaker 1: book first and then the podcast or.
Speaker 3: Well, i'll give you a sort of the blunt sort
Speaker 3: of business kind of background on it. I had this
Speaker 3: interest in obits, and Simon and Schuster said, we'd love
Speaker 3: you to do a book and a podcast about this,
Speaker 3: but the book can't just be the podcast, which I
Speaker 3: wouldn't want to do anyway. I wouldn't want to just
Speaker 3: do a podcast and then take the transcripts and put
Speaker 3: it into a book. So they were really done in parallel.
Speaker 3: But what was interesting to me is I realized, and
Speaker 3: I think you guys can understand, certainly understand this, is
Speaker 3: that for an audio, for the audio medium, you know,
Speaker 3: it's much it's much more satisfying to do subjects that
Speaker 3: are from the recorded era, the sound recorded era, so
Speaker 3: it's much harder. So when we did a podcast, I
Speaker 3: love the creative challenge of doing the podcast episode about
Speaker 3: Tom Payne, but you know, he died before there was
Speaker 3: any recorded sound and so it required a different kind
Speaker 3: of creativity. But for the most part, doing somebody like
Speaker 3: a Sammy Davis Junior or an Audrey Hepburn, you know,
Speaker 3: it made more sense for the podcast, and then for
Speaker 3: the book, doing ancient things like you know, death of
Speaker 3: cities and countries and things from the ancient world were
Speaker 3: more appropriate. So that's kind of how some stuff ended
Speaker 3: up in the book and some stuff ended up on
Speaker 3: the podcast.
Speaker 4: Okay, sense.
Speaker 2: Also, I mean we've found too that you know, a
Speaker 2: lot of times, despite the best efforts of you know,
Speaker 2: voice performers who do the audiobook version, things that are
Speaker 2: written to be read are often not the same as
Speaker 2: things that are written to be spoken.
Speaker 3: Well that's true. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And
Speaker 3: and yeah, so things that were written to be read
Speaker 3: it ended up in the book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, hold the payphone spoilers, folks, This is going to
Speaker 1: be a two parter. We were so excited in a
Speaker 1: wide ranging conversation with mister Moraka and Nola's just so
Speaker 1: generous with his time. We get weird with it. This
Speaker 1: guy knows a lot of stuff about a lot of things.
Speaker 2: Well, that's the thing we went in with like this
Speaker 2: whole format where we were going to do like all
Speaker 2: of us, we're going to bring like a dead thing
Speaker 2: and you know, do it like we do with some
Speaker 2: other guests, where we each kind of have our own
Speaker 2: little segment, but it ended up just organically having so
Speaker 2: much to offer the conversation that we you know, sprinkle
Speaker 2: that in here and there, you're gonna get some dead things.
Speaker 2: You're gonna get some I don't even want to tease it.
Speaker 2: It's too good. What a guy. I think we're all
Speaker 2: fans already of his work, and just to see that
Speaker 2: he's a genuinely lovely and generous guy.
Speaker 4: Was just a delight for all of us.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and with that, we can't wait for you
Speaker 1: to join us on Thursday later this week when we
Speaker 1: returned Mobituaries with Moe Raka Part two. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: big big thanks to our super producer, mister Max Williams.
Speaker 1: Huge thanks to our composer we have our own composers,
Speaker 1: Max's brother, Alex Williams.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he knew we were talking to Mo and said
Speaker 2: he was a big fan, and it just organically came
Speaker 2: up that I feel like there's a spiritual connection between
Speaker 2: what Alex does on Ephemeral and most mobituaries, so I
Speaker 2: just thought it was appropriate to shout him out in
Speaker 2: that respect. Huge thanks to Christopherciotis, Eves, Jeff Coates here
Speaker 2: in spirit a J. Jacobs, Bahamas Jacobs, whatever.
Speaker 4: That was, Where that comes from? I want to know,
Speaker 4: but I'm never going to find out. And I love that.
Speaker 1: And of course, of course, let's think again. People like
Speaker 1: Rebecca the raccoon spoiler. I'm sorry, pets are people too.
Speaker 1: Let's thank Jonathan Strictly aka the Quist.
Speaker 2: Gage the Yang to AJS Yen perhaps or vice versa.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Ed, No, thanks to you. I can't wait
Speaker 1: for this to get on the air.
Speaker 2: Same, We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts
Speaker 2: from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 2: you listen to your favorite shows.