Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, here is an episode from our ten episode
Speaker 1: playlist that we're calling Offbeat History. Yeah, we're adding this
Speaker 1: to our our regular publishing schedule as one kind of
Speaker 1: big drop all at the same time on March nineteen,
Speaker 1: And that is so that you have maybe have a
Speaker 1: little bit of extra entertainment options available to you, particularly
Speaker 1: if you are self quarantined or sheltering in place. Welcome
Speaker 1: to Stuff you missed in History Class A production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Speaker 1: Tray c V Wilson. I'm Holly Frying. So how do
Speaker 1: you know how sometimes when something terrible is happening that
Speaker 1: we just can't look away from, we say it's like
Speaker 1: watching a train wreck. Yes, yes, Although people do describe
Speaker 1: actual catastrophes as train wrecks, a lot of the times
Speaker 1: it's something a lot less tangible, with way less risk
Speaker 1: of injury or death, like uh, bad speeches or product
Speaker 1: launches that go really terribly or like really crane cringe
Speaker 1: worthy TV shows, things that are not really ready, you know,
Speaker 1: things that are not really going to cause somebody to
Speaker 1: actually die. We describe as like watching a train wreck.
Speaker 1: But I always thought that was kind of weird that
Speaker 1: we would describe something, uh, like, you know, somebody's bad
Speaker 1: talent show entry that's just awful that you just can't
Speaker 1: stop staring at. Like why we would describe that as
Speaker 1: like watching a train wreck. It turns out that for
Speaker 1: a brief window from the late eighteen hundreds into the
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds, people in the United States we're watching
Speaker 1: train wrecks for fun. It's hard to come up with
Speaker 1: the exact tally of how many of them there were,
Speaker 1: because there were several different people who were arranging these
Speaker 1: things in different venues. Over the span of about forty years,
Speaker 1: there were definitely at least planned train wrecks to watch
Speaker 1: for fun, mostly playing out in the southwestern and midwestern
Speaker 1: United States, often at events like state fairs. So that's weird.
Speaker 1: Here's what it reminds me of. So when my husband
Speaker 1: and I got married and we merged our households, we
Speaker 1: found that we had multiples of things, and somehow in
Speaker 1: that deal we had three microwaves, two which were pretty
Speaker 1: good in one which was really junkie. So we gave
Speaker 1: the really good one away to somebody who needed one,
Speaker 1: and then the junkie one we took out on the
Speaker 1: back patio and we blew stuff up in it. So
Speaker 1: I kind of understand this train wreck thing. Well. When
Speaker 1: I was a kid, my elementary school had a Halloween
Speaker 1: carnival every year, and one of the things that they
Speaker 1: would do for this Halloween carnal carnival is that they
Speaker 1: would go buy a really junkie used car and you
Speaker 1: could pay a dollar to get to take a swing
Speaker 1: at it with a baseball bat. Um. So, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is it still seems weird though, so it's what we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about today. I also it's felt like we
Speaker 1: needed a little bit of a lighter topic. We've had
Speaker 1: some heavier things lately. Some lighter stuff too. I in particular, though,
Speaker 1: had researched some really heavy stuff and so I was like,
Speaker 1: let's just do something goofy. I will say this is
Speaker 1: mostly goofy. It does have a little bit of tragedy,
Speaker 1: but is overall weird and fun. Yes, the concept of
Speaker 1: someone going, hey, let's stage some recks so we can
Speaker 1: all talk at them. There is an inherent level of
Speaker 1: comedy there. Yes, So we are going to start though
Speaker 1: with the one that did actually have a few fatalities.
Speaker 1: This is the most famous and most deadly of the
Speaker 1: United States stage train rex and it was known as
Speaker 1: the Crash Crush, which took place in September of eighteen
Speaker 1: and this was the brainchild of William George Crush, passenger
Speaker 1: agent at the Missouri Kansas Texas Railroad Company, also known
Speaker 1: as the Katie, which was shortened down from its initials
Speaker 1: m KT by five the year before this event took place.
Speaker 1: The Katie had a hundred and thirty three locomotives and
Speaker 1: a hundred and sixties three cars. William George Crush came
Speaker 1: up with this idea to try to drum up some
Speaker 1: publicity for the railroad and to sell tickets on the railroad.
Speaker 1: The railroad wasn't really in financial danger in any way,
Speaker 1: but the nation was just starting to come out of
Speaker 1: the Panic of eight so the Katie was definitely interested
Speaker 1: in protecting its bottom line. The railroad was also in
Speaker 1: the process of replacing its thirty five ton locomotives with
Speaker 1: sixty ton models, so Crushed proposed they take two of
Speaker 1: those retired thirty five ton locomotives and smashed them together.
Speaker 1: It really is just like my microwave. The venue that
Speaker 1: he proposed for this stage train wreck would be a
Speaker 1: pop up town named Crush, located about fifteen miles north
Speaker 1: of Waco and about three miles south of the town
Speaker 1: of West, conveniently close to the existing Waco Dallas track.
Speaker 1: The designated spot was in a small valley with hills
Speaker 1: on three sides, making a natural amphitheater with plenty of
Speaker 1: viewing locations. They'd supplement this with things like a restaurant,
Speaker 1: a grandstand in carnival attractions selling two dollar round trip
Speaker 1: tickets on the Katie to get there and back. The
Speaker 1: Katie had some concerns about the safety of this scheme,
Speaker 1: namely that the boilers of one or both of the
Speaker 1: locomotives might explode on impact, so they asked the opinions
Speaker 1: of several of the railroad's engineers, all but one of
Speaker 1: whom agreed that the risk of an explosion was low,
Speaker 1: so William Crush was given the go ahead to proceed. First,
Speaker 1: they laid track from the existing Waco Dallas line, terminating
Speaker 1: at a two thousand one foot that's sixty depot platform,
Speaker 1: complete with a sign telling passengers that they had arrived
Speaker 1: at Crush. There was also a stretch of track for
Speaker 1: the two trains to travel down and crash into each other,
Speaker 1: which followed the natural slopes of the land, and this
Speaker 1: gave the track a slight downward grade from each end
Speaker 1: toward the middle, which would help the locomotives pick up
Speaker 1: more speed. Locomotives and one thousand one were chosen for
Speaker 1: the crash, with one painted green with red trim and
Speaker 1: the other painted red with green trim. For their pop
Speaker 1: up town, they drilled wells and installed spigots for fresh
Speaker 1: water along the spectator area. William Crush, which was apparently
Speaker 1: his fortuitous but actual real name, was friends with P. T. Barnum,
Speaker 1: so he borrowed a circumstance from Barnum to house a restaurant.
Speaker 1: They also construct lemonade stands to telegraph offices, a stand
Speaker 1: for reporters, and a bandstand. They built a wooden jail,
Speaker 1: which I found I found one source saying that that
Speaker 1: was made out of a caboose. They hired two hundred
Speaker 1: constables to patrol on the day, and they also made
Speaker 1: plans for a huge carnival complete with games and medicine
Speaker 1: shows and a variety of other diversions. Clearly they were
Speaker 1: expecting this to be a party Yeah. William Crush and
Speaker 1: The Katie advertised this spectacle heavily all through the summer
Speaker 1: of eight, calling it the Monster Crash. The crash and
Speaker 1: the preparations for it became regular news items all throughout
Speaker 1: the Texas papers and outside the state as well. Organizers
Speaker 1: fielded queries from all over the country, and in the
Speaker 1: days leading up to the actual event, William Crush estimated
Speaker 1: that there would be fifteen thousand to twenty thousand spectators.
Speaker 1: William Crush had arranged for thirty three trains to provide
Speaker 1: passenger service to Crush and the Katie started dropping passengers
Speaker 1: off around dawn on September. By ten am, there there
Speaker 1: were at least ten thousand people already on the scene.
Speaker 1: They were picnicking and playing games and listening to political
Speaker 1: speeches while they waited. More trains kept arriving all through
Speaker 1: the morning and afternoon, some of them so crowded that
Speaker 1: people were riding on the roofs of the cars. The
Speaker 1: Monster Crash was supposed to start at four, but people
Speaker 1: were still arriving as that hour drew near, so they
Speaker 1: delayed the start until five pm, at which point there
Speaker 1: were about forty people there double what William Crush had estimated. First,
Speaker 1: the two locomotives came together very slowly on the track
Speaker 1: and touched their cow catchers together. That's that little great
Speaker 1: looking thing on the front of a locomotive. They touched
Speaker 1: their cow catchers together, kind of like boxers touching their
Speaker 1: gloves before a match. Then they were reversed a party
Speaker 1: in and William Crush, on horseback, raised a white hat
Speaker 1: into the air and whipped it down to give the
Speaker 1: signal for the wreck to officially begin. The two locomotives,
Speaker 1: pulling empty box cars that were festooned with advertisements and decorations,
Speaker 1: then began moving toward each other and picking up speed.
Speaker 1: Their engineers pulled their whistle cords and tied them down,
Speaker 1: then jumped clear and ran away from the track. They
Speaker 1: estimated that at the moment of impact, each locomotive was
Speaker 1: traveling at about fifty miles per hour when they crashed
Speaker 1: into each other. The collision was incredibly violent. The box
Speaker 1: cars unsurprisingly shattered into splinters, but the locomotives didn't behave
Speaker 1: as they expected. Organizers had thought that they would basically
Speaker 1: push each other up into an inverted v and they
Speaker 1: would expend most of that energy and the upward trajectory
Speaker 1: of doing that. Instead, it was more like squeezing an
Speaker 1: accordion or collapsing a telescope, and the two giant locomotive
Speaker 1: was just folded into each other. And then, to the
Speaker 1: surprise of everyone except perhaps that one dissenting engineer, both
Speaker 1: their boilers exploded. Scalding water and flying debris from the locomotives,
Speaker 1: including pieces of iron and steel of all shapes and sizes,
Speaker 1: flew into the crowd, most of whom were along the
Speaker 1: hills at least two hundred yards away. At least two
Speaker 1: people were killed, although some accounts say there were three.
Speaker 1: Ernest Darnell, who had been who had climbed up a
Speaker 1: mesquite tree to watch, was hit with a ten pound
Speaker 1: length of break chain and was killed instantly. A young
Speaker 1: girl was hit with a chunk of iron that fractured
Speaker 1: her skull, and although she was reported to be resting
Speaker 1: comfortably afterwards, she died on the way home. There was
Speaker 1: a third man, John Morrison, who survived the wreck itself,
Speaker 1: but fell between train cars on the way home and
Speaker 1: was run over by the train and died. I haven't
Speaker 1: quite figured out if that is the third person, some
Speaker 1: of the counts referred to as being and killed or
Speaker 1: if that was a separate incident. There were also a
Speaker 1: lot of injuries from the flying debris in boiling water,
Speaker 1: and at least six of those were serious, and some
Speaker 1: of them were sustained more than a mile away from
Speaker 1: the actual crash. J. C. Dean, a photographer from Waco,
Speaker 1: had been hired to take pictures of the event, and
Speaker 1: he lost an eye when a bolt from the wreck
Speaker 1: tore through it. His response was to get up and
Speaker 1: keep working, telling his brothers, who were also photographers, how
Speaker 1: to finish the shot that he had been framing. Even
Speaker 1: in the midst of all this chaos and the tragedy
Speaker 1: that was unfolding, souvenir seekers rushed in to try to
Speaker 1: claim pieces of the wreck. Record trains hauled off the
Speaker 1: biggest remaining pieces. After the event was over, people began
Speaker 1: to leave the temporary town of Crush. As soon as
Speaker 1: the event had finished, Workers struck the tent and the
Speaker 1: other structures erected for the town, and the whole thing
Speaker 1: was essentially gone by nightfall. Willie him Crush was fired immediately,
Speaker 1: but then officials at the Katie realized they'd had an
Speaker 1: incredibly profitable day in spite of the tragedy, so they
Speaker 1: hired him back the next day, and he worked at
Speaker 1: the railroad until his retirement. In his in nineteen forty,
Speaker 1: The Katie began quickly and quietly settling lawsuits and paying
Speaker 1: compensation to the people who had been injured and the
Speaker 1: families of those who had been killed. Photographer J. C.
Speaker 1: Dean was paid ten thousand dollars and given a lifetime
Speaker 1: pass on the train. There wasn't nearly as much public
Speaker 1: condemnation as he might expect from an event that killed
Speaker 1: at least two spectators and injured many others, but the
Speaker 1: news reporting at the time was actually relatively pragmatic about it.
Speaker 1: A few weeks after the crash at Crush, composer and
Speaker 1: pianist Scott Joplin published his Great Crush Collision March. Joplin
Speaker 1: would go on to be known as the King of Ragtime,
Speaker 1: whose other most famous pieces include Maple Leaf Rag and
Speaker 1: The Entertainer, which would become the the music for the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies three films The Sting starring Paul Newman, Robert Redford,
Speaker 1: and Robert Shaw. It's unclear whether Joplin was actually at
Speaker 1: the crash, but the Great Crush Collision March was one
Speaker 1: of his earliest published pieces of music and a relatively
Speaker 1: early example of ragtime, which is a distinctly African American
Speaker 1: form of music that was at the height of its
Speaker 1: popularity from the mid eighteen nineties through the nineteen teens.
Speaker 1: And we're going to link to that in the show
Speaker 1: notes so people can listen to it. Scott Joplin is
Speaker 1: the reason I took piano lessons as a child. Really, yes,
Speaker 1: love uh. And the part of me that wants to
Speaker 1: do an episode about him is at odds with the
Speaker 1: part of me that that does not like the sad
Speaker 1: aspect of story, which is his death at a very
Speaker 1: early age from untreated syphilis. So the Katie went through
Speaker 1: waves of financial success and difficulty after this point until
Speaker 1: really starting to struggle along with the rest of the
Speaker 1: industry in the nineteen fifties. It was ultimately bought by
Speaker 1: the Missouri Pacific Railroad Company. In there's a historic plaque
Speaker 1: commemorating the Crash at Crush in McLennan County, fifteen miles
Speaker 1: north of Waco. Although the Crash at Crush is the
Speaker 1: most famous of these stage drecks, that wasn't actually the
Speaker 1: first one, and so we're going to talk about that
Speaker 1: first one and some others after a quick sponsor break.
Speaker 1: Really frequently. The crash at Crush is described as the
Speaker 1: first staged train wreck in the United States, was something
Speaker 1: that drew a big crowd, but which no other actual
Speaker 1: railroad company tried again afterwards for obvious reasons. But that
Speaker 1: September event was actually pre dated by one staged by
Speaker 1: a man named A. L. Streeter Or. He was a
Speaker 1: railway equipment salesman from Illinois. Street Or first tried to
Speaker 1: stage a train wreck in Illinois, but wasn't able to
Speaker 1: generate enough attention, so he turned his attention to Ohio,
Speaker 1: where he got the okay to conduct a crash on July,
Speaker 1: a couple of miles outside Canton. Here's how he described
Speaker 1: it in one of the ads that he ran to
Speaker 1: promote this event. Quote to monster, locomotives with full head
Speaker 1: of steam starting a mile apart, will rush toward each
Speaker 1: other at the rate of sixty or seventy miles an hour,
Speaker 1: and allowed to come together with a crash that will
Speaker 1: result in the most horrible head on collision ever seen
Speaker 1: or heard of. Street Or made arrangements to buy a
Speaker 1: couple of retired locomotives and decorated them. One was emblazoned
Speaker 1: with free trade and the other with protection, symbolically pitting
Speaker 1: the two economic theories against one another. The two engines
Speaker 1: would pull flat cars loaded down with rocks, like the
Speaker 1: crash a crash. Part of Streeter's plan involved selling train tickets.
Speaker 1: A fifteen cent fair on the Cleveland, Canton and Southern
Speaker 1: Railroad would get people to the actual location for the crash,
Speaker 1: but once people got to that location, admission to the
Speaker 1: crash itself was not free. He hoped to sell twenty
Speaker 1: thousand tickets at seventy five cents apiece so that people
Speaker 1: could then watch the crash from a designated viewing area. However,
Speaker 1: the overwhelming majority of spectators had a different idea that
Speaker 1: was to climb trees and together outside the official viewing
Speaker 1: area and watch it for free, so he only sold
Speaker 1: about two hundred tickets. In the end. Though these two
Speaker 1: locomotives never wrecked, the whole event was canceled at the
Speaker 1: last possible minute. Streeter claimed it was because spectators got
Speaker 1: too close and refused to move, ruining it for everyone
Speaker 1: else and forcing him to cancel for safety reasons, But
Speaker 1: the railroad claimed that street Or owed them two thousand,
Speaker 1: four hundred dollars for the retired locomotives, which he had
Speaker 1: never paid, so the railroad exercise their right to take
Speaker 1: them back. Spectators. Of course, we're out aged, and the
Speaker 1: ones who had paid demanded a refund. People were also
Speaker 1: upset that they had spent that fifteen dollar train fair
Speaker 1: for something that didn't actually happen. Street Or was widely
Speaker 1: criticized in the press for wasting people's time and money,
Speaker 1: even as he claimed to have lost about eight hundred
Speaker 1: dollars of his personal funds in the venture. Street Or
Speaker 1: didn't give up, though. On Memorial Day he tried again,
Speaker 1: this time in Buckeye Park in Marietta, Ohio, about twenty
Speaker 1: five miles southeast of Columbus. The locomotives this time were
Speaker 1: named the A. L. Streeter and the W. H. Fisher.
Speaker 1: Fisher worked for the Columbus Hawking and Toledo Railroad, and
Speaker 1: to add some more drama, street Or put mannequins aboard
Speaker 1: so it would actually look like there were people in there.
Speaker 1: This time, the wreck did indeed go as planned. Clarence
Speaker 1: Metters wrote about the event in National Magazine, saying, quote,
Speaker 1: twenty five thousand pairs of eyes were riveted upon one
Speaker 1: engine or another as they rushed together, and so critical
Speaker 1: was the moment that scarcely a word was spoken. On
Speaker 1: and on sped the two iron monsters at the rate
Speaker 1: of over forty miles an hour, and when the crash
Speaker 1: came it was terrific, both trains being practically destroyed. Street
Speaker 1: Or continued to organize more of these spectacles around the
Speaker 1: country until the early twentieth century. But another man organized
Speaker 1: so many of them that it became part of his
Speaker 1: personal brand, and he was Joe Connolly, who was known
Speaker 1: by the nickname head On Connolly, who staged at least
Speaker 1: seventy three rex between eighteen ninety six and nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: two and became the most famous organizer of planned train wrecks.
Speaker 1: I found one account that said that he tried to
Speaker 1: sue someone for staging a train wreck and using the
Speaker 1: term head On when that was clearly his, But I
Speaker 1: couldn't find any evidence that he had actually tried to
Speaker 1: register that trademark, so not sure what the actual status
Speaker 1: of that was regardless though. Head On Joe had worked
Speaker 1: in theater in Des Moines for decades before putting his
Speaker 1: hand to staging train wrecks, and he was scrupulous about safety.
Speaker 1: He had a very specific set of safety rules that
Speaker 1: had to be followed at any wreck he staged. He
Speaker 1: also told reporters that he had a quote lifelong desire
Speaker 1: to see such a disaster without danger to himself and
Speaker 1: thought many other people harbored the same secret desire. He
Speaker 1: was also a showman, and as his REX went on,
Speaker 1: he did things to make them more and more dramatic.
Speaker 1: He started laying small charges on the tracks that would
Speaker 1: explode when the trains rolled over them, creating tiny explosions that,
Speaker 1: in normal circumstances were used to warn other trains of
Speaker 1: incoming traffic. He'd also doused the cars in fuel and
Speaker 1: filled them with flammable materials so that they would burn
Speaker 1: after impact. Commonly made a lot of money staging these
Speaker 1: crashes over the years, and his last one took place
Speaker 1: as the fad was really starting to wane. This one
Speaker 1: was at the Iowa State Fair and thirty two. He
Speaker 1: had staged Rex at the Iowa State Fair previously to
Speaker 1: a lot of fanfare, but in nineteen thirty two, the
Speaker 1: United States was facing the Great Depression. Even naming one
Speaker 1: of the locomotives the Roosevelt and the other the Hoover
Speaker 1: wasn't enough to make the events sit right with the crowd.
Speaker 1: The explosion itself was reported to be a good one,
Speaker 1: but the response from the audience was really lackluster. That
Speaker 1: seemed like seeing two huge trains wrecked against each other
Speaker 1: for sport was needlessly wasteful in a time when so
Speaker 1: many people were hurting from money. This was doubly true
Speaker 1: when words started to spread that Connolly had charged the
Speaker 1: fair forty dollars to stage the wreck, and that the
Speaker 1: fair had lost sixty five thousand dollars that year. People
Speaker 1: who were already angry at the idea that the crash
Speaker 1: had been wasteful or furious that it had cost so
Speaker 1: much money, in addition to the wreckage of the locomotives themselves,
Speaker 1: a le Streeter and head On Connolly weren't the only
Speaker 1: people organizing these staged wrecks. As another example, in September,
Speaker 1: approximately six thousand people paid to see two engines that
Speaker 1: had been retired from the Salt Lake railroad crashed together
Speaker 1: at an agricultural park near downtown Los Angeles. Organizers for
Speaker 1: this one where James Morley and former promoted a football coach,
Speaker 1: Walter Hempele. This particular wreck didn't go all that well.
Speaker 1: The engineers tried to extort extra pay from the organizers.
Speaker 1: In the middle of the event, they were doing a
Speaker 1: prolonged run up to the actual crash, in which they'd
Speaker 1: run the trains at one another and then stop them
Speaker 1: before a collision. The engineers thought it would probably be
Speaker 1: impossible to find replacements in the literal middle of the event,
Speaker 1: so they asked for an extra three hundred and fifty dollars.
Speaker 1: Organizers managed to find replacements with no problem, though in general,
Speaker 1: engineers were pretty eager to volunteer, so the original engineers
Speaker 1: were fired and then the event proceeded as planned. He
Speaker 1: had the idea that you would get to just on
Speaker 1: purpose run a locomotive that was normally where you had
Speaker 1: to spend your working life into another locomotive and just
Speaker 1: smash it to pieces. Like that apparently was attractive to
Speaker 1: a number of engineers. Um and I really didn't find
Speaker 1: any indication that any of them were seriously injured while
Speaker 1: doing this, although I did find one that was an
Speaker 1: engineer who fell while trying to jump free of the
Speaker 1: locomotive and sprained his ankle. So uh. In this event
Speaker 1: at the Agricultural Park near downtown Los Angeles, the locomotives
Speaker 1: did run into each other whistles blaring, but the end
Speaker 1: result was pretty anticlimactic because they just sort of shammed
Speaker 1: into each other with a thud and then stopped and
Speaker 1: nothing derailed and nothing caught on fire and nothing exploded,
Speaker 1: and so people were not particularly impressed. And these are
Speaker 1: just some examples. There were lots and lots of others,
Speaker 1: and there's actually footage of several of them on YouTube.
Speaker 1: We're gonna link to that footage in the show notes.
Speaker 1: Next start going to talk about some ideas about why
Speaker 1: maybe this caught on so well. So for roughly thirty
Speaker 1: or forty years, staged train wrecks were a really big
Speaker 1: deal in the midwestern and southwestern parts of the United States.
Speaker 1: The biggest crowd reported at one of these events was
Speaker 1: a hundred and sixty thousand people, and attendance was routinely
Speaker 1: in the tens of thousands. The town of Crush had
Speaker 1: about the same population of as Dallas or San Antonio
Speaker 1: for the few hours that it existed. In nine twenty,
Speaker 1: a staged wreck on opening day of the Minnesota State
Speaker 1: Fair doubled the fairs first day attendants from the year before.
Speaker 1: All of this happened at a time when getting somewhere
Speaker 1: was a lot less comfortable and convenient than it can
Speaker 1: be today. This has led some people to speculate as
Speaker 1: to why this all caught on so well. One aspect
Speaker 1: was certainly the marketing organizers promoted their events heavily, getting
Speaker 1: lots of fanciful coverage and newspapers, and there was often
Speaker 1: a political theme to the decorations on the trains themselves.
Speaker 1: In addition to the ones that we talked about already
Speaker 1: earlier in this show, a stage direck pitted locomotives dubbed
Speaker 1: evolution and fundamentalism. After the Scopes trial in there was
Speaker 1: also a showdown between the National Recovery Act, part of
Speaker 1: the New Deal versus Old Man Depression at the Minnesota
Speaker 1: State Fair in nineteen thirty three, and for some people
Speaker 1: the attraction was related more to the general politics of
Speaker 1: the day than any specific political issue. There was a
Speaker 1: general idea that locomotives were symbols of big businesses and
Speaker 1: industries that were taking advantage of people and ruining the landscape,
Speaker 1: and so it was really fun to think about their
Speaker 1: destroying one another. And then, of course there is this
Speaker 1: fact that humanity has kind of a morbid fascination with destruction.
Speaker 1: There's a complicated set of emotional and psychological responses that
Speaker 1: feed into the general human trait of morbid curiosity. In
Speaker 1: the decades after Stage train wrecks, there were demolition Derby's,
Speaker 1: monster truck rallies, a whole slew of disaster films, true
Speaker 1: crime shows, and on and on. These are all still
Speaker 1: moneymakers in many cases. Yep. I mean, I think the
Speaker 1: thing that strikes me as so weird about the train
Speaker 1: part is that locomotives are just so big. They like,
Speaker 1: that's a lot of metal smashing together and then doing
Speaker 1: I don't know something to the scrap heap or whatever, uh,
Speaker 1: which you know, may made it seem a little odder
Speaker 1: to me than a demolition Derby or a monster truck
Speaker 1: rally or whatever. But also, I mean, people do just do,
Speaker 1: as we have shown in our some past episodes of
Speaker 1: the show, people go on onto weird stuff. Sometimes. I
Speaker 1: think that's also a factor. This is the kind of
Speaker 1: episode that happens when you're looking for something a little
Speaker 1: less heavy to write about and you google weird fads. Right,
Speaker 1: I've done similar things. Uh, yeah, it is. It's a
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think if there would ever be like
Speaker 1: a modern day equivalent attempted, Like, would anybody ever go,
Speaker 1: let's try to crash planes together. I don't know how
Speaker 1: you would possibly orchestrate such a thing, but that sounds
Speaker 1: very scary. Yes, well, and suddenly I just remembered when, um,
Speaker 1: when I was also a kid. In addition to having
Speaker 1: the elementary school Halloween carnivals where you could smash old
Speaker 1: cars with a baseball bat, um, whenever the fire department
Speaker 1: would be conducting training by burning down a derelict building
Speaker 1: and extinguishing the fire, like, there would always be a
Speaker 1: crowd to watch that. Oh, anytime there's a building demolished,
Speaker 1: there's a crowd. We had one in Atlanta not long ago,
Speaker 1: and everyone who lived in Atlanta had it all over
Speaker 1: their social media because they got up at an ungodly
Speaker 1: hour to go look at it. We're blowing stuff up.
Speaker 1: I mean, I then feel very tame for like being
Speaker 1: like what happens when you put a CD in a microwave.
Speaker 1: By the way, it's very pretty. Thank you so much
Speaker 1: for joining us today for this classic. If you have
Speaker 1: heard any kind of email address or maybe a Facebook
Speaker 1: you are l during the course of the episode, that
Speaker 1: might be obsolete. It might be doubly obsolete because we
Speaker 1: have changed our email address again. You can now reach
Speaker 1: us at History podcast at i heart radio dot com,
Speaker 1: and we're all over social media at missed in History,
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