Making things is challenging. Making memorable things is even harder. But these two curious creations are well worth the price of admission.
Welcomed Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. In the fall of the effects of the Roaring Twenties literally came crashing down. Americans had left their farms in rural towns for the promises of wealth and excess only found in big cities. Unfortunately, the stock market, which had been on a meteoric rise, finally fell from the sky and took with it the fortunes of countless investors. This kicked off a period of time known as the Great Oppression, which lasted from nineteen twenty nine until nineteen thirty nine, and during those ten years people lost their jobs, their homes, and even their lives. But one man refused to let the depression get him down. Instead, he channeled his sadness, his anger, and the last of his money into some prime swamp front property in New Jersey. His name was George Dyer, and he believed that he had been led to New Jersey by an angel. This same angel allegedly gave him a vision of what he would build on the four acres of land that he purchased for four dollars, and so George walked for ten days and one twelve miles to the South Jersey town of Vinland. Once he arrived, he got to work building himself a house with whatever he could find around him. The walls were crafted from random rocks and pieces of cement, while he used old car chassis to make floorboards. Fenders were bent into gables, and he repurposed old bed frames as doors. He even made the paint from scratch by grinding up red bricks into motor oil. Any object, vehicle part, or piece of debris was fair game for inclusion in the home. Wagon wheels formed the base of towers he built around its perimeter, and he carved up a massive cypress log for his dining table. The chairs were made from smaller stumps. Around the exterior of the property, George had dug out ponds and cultivated gardens to keep himself going. He relied on the natural New Jersey fauna for sustenance. There were plenty of rabbits and fish to eat, as well as squirrels and even the occasional frog. By the time he finished in nineteen thirty two, he was ready to unveil his Depression Palace to the world. George Dyer had built it to show visitors that they didn't have to let the current economy keep them down. He believed that and I quote, education by thought can lift all the depressed peoples out of any depression, calamity, or catastrophe. George Daner welcomed people into the palace for twenty five cents apiece and gave them grand tours of the various rooms he had structed. For example, he had guests crawled through an area named the Jersey Devil's Den before visiting a room he called the Knockout Room. This room was home to a single chair, above which George Danner had hung a large boulder. He encouraged anyone who wanted to forget their troubles to sit in the chair and let the boulder take away those worries. No one, as far as we can tell, ever sat in that chair. George was quite a character and a brilliant marketer. Robert Ripley of Ripley's believe it or Not. Fame published a cartoon about the Depression Palace, and George appeared on the nineteen fifties human interest television program You Asked For It. A documentary film titled The Fantastic Palace was also made by Universal Pictures and followed the intrepid homeowner around the house on one of his tours. The Depression Palace's popularity came to a head in nineteen fifty seven, though, when George Daner inserted himself into a very serious criminal investigation. An infant named Peter Weinberg had been kidnapped in New York State. The police and the FBI searched for weeks and were eventually led to the Depression Palace by Danner himself. He claimed that he had been contacted by the kidnappers, who had allegedly stowed the child in one of the dungeons in his home. The authorities arrived and George was forced to admit that the whole thing had been a charade. He'd done it for the attention and to draw more tourists to the house. As punishment for providing false information to federal officials, he was sentenced to one year in prison. The house was left abandoned, and tourists kept coming, but not for guided tours. They picked the place clean and stole all sorts of random objects from the property. They even burned down part of the house. Danner was released one year later at the ripe old age of one hundred. He was an old, broke and broken man with almost nothing to his name. His home was in a serious state of disrepair, which he was too old and destitute to fix up himself. He died on October nineteen sixty four, at the age of one and four. The city eventually tore the rest of the structure down in nineteen sixty nine, but it wouldn't be gone forever. In two thousand one, a nonprofit organization took up the cause to restore the eccentric home back to its former glory. Over the next sixteen years, with help from numerous grants and donations, the Palace of Depression was mostly rebuilt, and a small museum was at a next door. This strange and unconventional home continues to persist through depressions, recessions, abandonment, and new ownership, truly living up to the reason it was built in the first place. The show people everywhere that no matter how things get, home can be anywhere you make it, even apparently if that home is made out of old card parts and bed frames. One of the oldest sports in history also happens to be one of the most violent. The concept of fighting another person has existed since the dawn of humanity, but fighting someone for sports can be charted all the way back to the third millennium BC, possibly even earlier. We simply don't know because of the lack of written record from before that point. And while boxing has taken on many forms over the years, the sport we recognized today seems to find its early roots in England during the sixteenth century. Back then, it was called bare knuckle boxing or prize fighting. This was an era before weight classes were established, before they even had referees to call a match. As time passed, though, boxing as a sport was often outlawed and considered no different than any other illegal activity, but it sure was popular, so much so that Thomas Edison and his staff filmed a fights in his New Jersey film studio in the eighteen nineties. You see, Edison wanted to test his new kinscope by showing short films that he had made at the studio. This boxing movie would be one of them. In the film, two fighters named Sullivan and Corbetts went head to head their hands clad in boxing gloves, as their manager watched from outside the ring. The manager was a circus owner by the name of Professor Wilton, and his traveling show was quite a spectacle. Forty performers entertained audiences with daring feats of danger, such as jumping through flaming hoops and putting up fires. Walton's circus made appearances at countless vaudeville theaters all over the US at the turn of the century. The man himself was quite an established trainer up to that point, which made sense. Most of his family was in the training business as well. Sullivan and Corbett had trained for two years before they made the Edison film. The movie was directed by William Kennedy Dixon, one of Edison's employees and the man responsible for bringing both the kinetograph camera and the kinetoscope to life. He also came up with the idea for using thirty five millimeter perforated film in both advices, but the accountants at Edison Studios weren't convinced that people wanted to see a boxing match on film. After all, they'd witnessed such exciting sequences as a handshake in which a man and a woman shook hands for four seconds, as well as fred OTTs sneeze five second tour to force, where one man experienced the earth shattering relief of unclogged nostrils on camera. Dixon and his cameraman, William Hays, believe the boxing match would not only be exciting but also profitable. With kinetoscopes starting to appear in most major cities, people were going to line up and pay whatever it took to see the fight of the century, and so the filmmakers pointed the camera straight at the boxing ring they had set up in their West Orange studio. The fighters were brought in, gloved and ready for action as Professor Welton took a seat behind them. Watching the film today, it's hard not to sneak a glance at Welton, who can't seem to take his eyes off of Corbett and Sullivan as they rained down punches on each other for a whopping twenty seconds. That's right, Their new movie tripled the length of their previous endeavors. It was a glimpse into the future of cinema, as stories would require more time and more film to say everything they needed to say and what didn't you know it? The boxing picture was a hit and not only demonstrated the capabilities of Edison's technologies, but also the skill with which Professor Welton trained his fighters. After all, it wasn't easy tying such boxing gloves on their little paws. Oh I'm sorry, I forgot to mention Professor Welton was in charge of a traveling cat circus. His fantastic feelines could do all sorts of tricks like ride bicycles and walk across tight ropes. In fact, the cats were so well trained it only took Dixon in Heists one take to get the footage they needed of the fighting fee lines. You may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but Professor Welton proved that you can at least teach a couple of cats two box. 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 Manky, 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 world of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.