Sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes you don't. Either way, it can make for quite a curious tale.
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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Second chances are hard to come by in life. We don't usually get the opportunity to redo a terrible job interview, or make things right when we've wronged a partner. Life is oftentimes a one way trip with no stops, and we're just along for the ride. But one man achieved the unimaginable. After being involved in one of the most tragic events in history. He persevered. He received the second chance of all second chances, and refused to let his circumstances sink him. His name was Richard Norris Williams the Second, although he often went simply by Dick Williams. He was born in Geneva, Switzerland, to American parents from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He could trace his lineage directly back to Benjamin Franklin. After years of private tutelage at a Swiss boarding school, he decided to take up a new hobby, tennis. From the age of twelve, Williams trained and honed his skills on the court, leading to his victory at the Swiss Championship in nineteen eleven. The following year, he and his father traveled to Cherbourg, France, where they boarded a ship bound for America. Norris had been accepted at Harvard and planned to become a success both as a tennis star and as a student. Their trip started out fine, with nothing but blue skies above and a rich future ahead of them. They even dined with a captain for dinner one night, but then tragedy struck. Word quickly spread through the decks as guests panicked and filled the lifeboats. The show ship was sinking. It had apparently struck an iceberg. That's right, Richard Williams and his father were on board the Titanic, but the two men didn't abandon ship, at least not at first. Actually, they stayed back, helping others to pile into the lifeboats. They even gave away their life jackets to those who they felt needed them more. Williams then discovered someone was trapped in a room while the vessel was going under, so he ran back to free them. By the time he returned, there was nowhere for him to go. In a last ditch effort to save himself, Williams leaped from the Titanic's main deck into the frigid waters of the Atlantic. The shock of the cold nearly paralyzed him, but he fought to survive as long as possible. His father, on the other hand, was not so lucky. Apparently, he'd been hit by one of the ship's funnels as it fell into the water, killing him instantly. Meanwhile, Williams noticed that one of the collapsible lifeboats had taken on water but was still afloat. Over two dozen passengers were holding onto it for support. He swam over and took hold, hanging on along with them until help arride. Six hours later, he was one of thirteen surviving members of that group who'd been rescued and brought aboard the Carpathia for examination. Unfortunately, his time in the water had done extensive damage to his legs. They were frostbitten, and there was no other choice than to amputate both of them. Williams pleaded for an alternative. I'm going to need those legs, he said, and got to his feet, pacing around the deck, hoping to bring them back to life. In William's mind, taking his limbs would be the end of everything, his future, his tennis career, and maybe even his life, and so he walked. He got up every few hours and walked around the deck of the Carpathia, hoping the exercise would restore the feeling in his legs. Well. To his and everyone else's surprise, it worked mostly. Over the next three months, he did regain sensation in his legs, but not completely, and when he was on them for too long they caused him a great deal of pain. But twelve weeks after the Titanic sank and doctors told him he was going to lose his limbs, Richard Williams got back on the court. In fact, he didn't just play. He played against a fellow Titanic survivor named Carl Howell. Bar Williams won the first two sets of their match, but Bear managed to outplay him in the end. Still, Richard kept going, and in nineteen twenty four he took home the gold at the Paris Olympics, winning in mixed doubles with his partner Hazel Hotchkiss Whiteman. Even though Richard Williams didn't take home the trophy against Bear, he arguably earned an even greater victory, an Olympic gold medal for one, but he also survived the sinking of the Titanic. He beat frostbite, and he managed to return to the game he loved when the odds were stacked against him, Game, Set, and match. George Wheeland carefully wiped the dirt from the strange little hunk of rock he had freed from the dusty ground. He'd been digging in the Black Hills of South Dakota for a few years now, and he'd found plenty of fossilized treasures, from tiny dinosaur bones to massive tortoises shells, but he'd never seen anything quite like this. As he used a small soft brush to carefully remove the dirt from its crevices, a pattern started to emerge. The rock was round, with regular divots that suggested a rough texture like a pineapple, but this plant had died millions of years before pineapples had ever existed. What George held in his hand was a psycatoid, an ancient plant that had once covered the Black Hills. But it was so much more than a simple plant. The fossil George held in his hand would become an all consuming obsession that would take over the rest of his life. Although George wasn't born until eighteen sixty five, this story starts much earlier. It began seventy million years ago, in the Cretaceous period, the time when triceratops and t rex's roamed what would be the United States, and the time when, one day, in that same area in South Dakota that he found himself in later, a landslide buried hundreds of psychatoids. They remained hidden for millions of years, the pressure and heat slowly turning their organic matter to hard rock. They would have stayed there too, if it wasn't for America's agricultural expansion. In the early eighteen nineties, ranchers that had settled in the area started to report what they called petrified pineapples. They began selling them as souvenirs, which eventually sparked the interest of the nation's early paleontologists, and so Yale sent a young grad student named George Wheeland to investigate in eighteen ninety eight, and well, you know, the rest. Beyond studying the psycatoids, George believed the first order of business was protecting them. The first fossil had been discovered in the area six years earlier, and already many of the specimens were gone, sold by ranchers, taken by collectors, and requisitioned by researchers. The rich trove of fossils was already being depleted, so George began a campaign to get the region protected. In nineteen oh six, when Teddy Roosevelt passed a law allowing the federal government to take over land regarded as a national monument, George knew that this was his chance. He wrote hundreds of letters petitioning that the cycadoid fields should be designated as a national monument. Despite his best efforts, though the government refused, so George would have to get creative. In nineteen twenty he acquired one hundred and sixty acres of land in the Black Hills, including that sycatoid site. Then he told the federal government that he would donate the land to them if and only if they made it into a national monument. They agreed, and in nineteen twenty two, President Warren G. Harding declared the area the Fossil Cycad National Monument. For the next decade, that National Monument had a quiet existence. It was established when the government was running into budget constraints, so it was never assigned a superintendent or staff like other national parks. Instead, it just got a small wooden sign and was monitored by local ranchers, the same ones who used to sell the fossils to tourists. So perhaps it wasn't a surprise when in nineteen thirty three the park was found to be almost completely empty. That year, a group of researchers headed to the National monument to collect fossils to display at the Chicago World's Fair. They weren't even able to find the site at first, and when they got there, there were no visible psychatoids anywhere. The wealth of the specimens had been stolen, and the biggest shock was who did the stealing. For years, George had been instrumental in protecting the psychatoids from tourists and resellers, but perhaps he should have been protecting the park from himself, because while visitors took occasional souvenirs, it was George who stole several thousand pounds of fossils from the national monuments he helped create. Ever since he started digging in a night, George had been taking samples back to Yale. Many were cataloged in the university, but some were just taken to decorate George's home. His obsession with the psychatioids led him to take cartfuls of the fossils away from their natural resting ground. Sadly, with all of George's efforts to preserve the National Monument, he was the author of its demise. Fossil Psycad National Monument never opened to the public. It never built a visitor center or established a museum, and in nineteen fifty seven, just four years after George's death, it became one of the few national monuments to lose its protected status. Today, you can still drive by the site to see what little is left. Beyond the old sign, you'll find the evidence of one man's a cover up that required a whole lot of digging. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manke in partnership with how Stuff Works, I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.