Behind the Scenes Minis: Impossible Shoes

Published Dec 6, 2024, 2:00 PM

Tracy talks about getting listener requests, and wonders about the details of one the stories from Monday's show. Tracy and Holly talk about the size of Lynn, Massachusetts, and Holly waxes rhapsodic about shoes. 

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Had our latest six Impossible episodes. Yeah, I remembered doing one six impossible episodes of listener requests previously, and I started my document for writing this outline in and then I tried to save it as six Impossible Episodes listener requests too, and my computer said there's already a file by that name. And I said, excuse maam, ma'am, when did that happen? So I had to go refresh by memory. I like doing six impossible episodes for a number of reasons. I especially like when it gives me the chance to just get a whole pile of listener requests. We've said before we have way more listener requests then we can possibly ever do. That does not mean stop sending them. We also love getting them. And we get listener requests that are things that I just never would have thought of. Uh. Sometimes I'll get a listener request that makes that is somebody that I know about and for whatever reason, have just never thought of doing an episode about, And I'm like, that's amazing. That's a great idea. And then some of the favorite episodes we have ever done before have been listener requests of people or organizations or events or whatever that for whatever reason, I just did not know about before getting the note. So, uh, we welcome the listener requests and acknowledge that the list is longer than humanity has room for in our lives. Yeah. I even had while we were in Iceland a couple of people come up to me and be like, I'm so sorry. I know you get so many, but I have something and I'm like, go ahead, like, please bring us more ideas. We may or may not be able to act on them, but they're great. I have feelings yeah about Googain's husband, and they are uncharitable. Okay, I'm like, you petty, jealous, weasel, That's pretty much what they are. Yeah, And I so the information that I was able to find about her biography was really thin. Like there are all of these books of patterns, plenty of them. You can, you know, see the kinds of things that she was knitting or crocheting or doing with other needles or whatever. You can look at all of that. There's just not a lot of detail about her life.

Uh.

And the source that I read that talked about this made it sound like sort of a deal that they struck that was like I get to keep all of my books and copyright and you get to cut me out of the will. And I was like, that seems a little odd to me. I don't know if that's accurate. I think these two elements of it are correct, but I don't really know for sure that they were linked together in that way, right, that it was a cause and effect.

Yeah, so yeah, that's not sure on that.

Yeah. Nellie Cashman was clearly an astounding person. I know, she sounds very fun. She sounds very fun and cool in a lot of ways. And I super admire the fact that she you know, when there was a new discovery of gold or silver, she would show up and she would start a restaurant in a boarding house and like was able to make her way and you know, a time when a lot of women didn't have opportunities like that, and so she was an outlier in a lot of ways. I do wonder how much of some of the most dramatic events in her life are maybe a little embellished.

Yeah, oh yeah, Like.

I have questions about how if these men at the mine were already starving and developing scurvy, and it also took her weeks to get to them and they all survived, that seems like a lot of how all of those things, there's a lot of malady math to be working out, like how could all of that have simultaneously been true? And it's one of those things where all of the things she definitely for sure did are all notable enough on their own that if those things are embellishments, like we didn't need the embellishments for her to be incredibly cool, right, So Yeah, And I also like her getting people to tear down the grandstand that people were going to watch the hanging from, because while we've talked many times about public executions and times and places in which going to see a public execution was regarded as a like an acceptable thing to do and people had kind of a raucous party over it, the fact that she was like, nuh, that's appalling, and I'm ritten down a grandstand and you were not selling tickets to this. Yeah.

I like the gumption.

I do too. I always find those stories, I mean, we've talked about them a million times. The one that sticks out to me is that Christopher Lee saw the last public guillotining in France, which is so recent in history, and I'm just like, how weird and ghoulish is that.

Yeah.

I don't know if I'm just hyper sensitive to such things, right, but I don't feel like I am. I feel like I'm a human with empathy and sympathy. Yeah, so it just feels yucky. Yeah, Yeah, I do definitely recommend looking at that huge archive of Teeny Harris's photographs. Yes, we could spend hours and hours looking at that. It'd also spend hours and hours looking at Jangka Gains knitting and Kurheg books and like neither of those things just translates into an audio podcast, right.

Yeah.

Also, I feel like we should say if you go looking at Teedy Harris's pictures, I know, we said he was like super dapper, friends, you need to brace yourself for how very handsome and charming this man was. Like I had read about him in passing in like some photography book, and then I had looked at this and was like, oh, I should go do the thing, and I just was like, dear lord, Yeah, movie star handsome yeah, so cute brace.

I'm just telling you, no brace right right.

Yeah, So we tend to do I tend to do six impossible episodes every six months, a couple times a year or so. So they'll roll around again. Don't know what the theme will be, too sense to just be whatever strikes my fancy. At a particular time, we talked about Jon Mattzliger this week. Bless you Jon Mattzaliger because I love shoes. Yeah, a little shoe problem, and most of the machinery running today is still built on the concepts that he developed. Yeah, I really feel like the key is that, unlike probably many of the other people trying to build a machine to do this was the time that he spent watching handcrafters do it right, Like that was the thing he was so finicky about trying to capture.

Yeah. Love.

The discussion about the Laster's Union really reminded me of the Ludites, which we have an episode on that's already been as a Saturday Classic. But the Ludites were not anti technology. They were against technologies that were putting people out of work and also in that case, making an inferior product, yeah, which was not the case they actually the Luddites are actually invoked in that nineteen fifty five article that we quoted because that historian specifically is like, this one was very different from the way the Luddite uprising happened. Nobody was trying to destroy machinery. So that author does kind of a brief, a very brief comparison of the two. Yeah, I think had the stocking frames and things that the Luddites were objecting to, number one not been cranking out inferior product and number two not been putting people out of work, it probably also would have been a situation where people were like, great, now I can make Now I can make my living without breaking my body. Yeah, without breaking my body. Yeah, but that was not the case, and.

It would not have been the case with the shoe.

Lasting machine had the factory owners just replaced all of the lasters with children or people who had no training. So, like the laster's advocacy for themselves, I think is a big thing that made that a different situation.

Yeah.

One of the theories that I read, and I don't have a lot to expound on it, but it would make a little bit of sense, is that there are some people that believe that Matt Sealiger got so sick because he was so driven, he was physically exhausted all the time, like that his immune system was just not able to function. I don't know, but I wanted to mention it in case anyone was curious. The other thing though, that I wanted to mention because when we were reading, particularly at the end, Tracy, you had that moment of like two hundred and thirty factories in this one place. Yes, at the time, Lynn and all the Massachusetts, but specifically Lynn was making most of the shoes that went all over the US and some parts of Europe so well. And my disbelief at the number factories was coming in part from living close to Lynn and sort of knowing what the lay of the land in this region is like, and that just still felt like so many.

She has.

Just sort of, you know, having a sense of where all these towns are and cities are and how connected they are to each other.

So yeah, I.

Probably wouldn't have had that question if I didn't know exactly where Lynn was. Right, Man, it's the shoe capital. So I bet if you walked around Lynn, oh, I had that thought, Yeah, you would start noticing some Yon Matzelaiger stuff.

For sure.

I really really do love though, that he is still inspiring shoemakers today. To me, that's just like the coolest legacy ever right to be like, Hey, I have made sneakers for the biggest shoe brands in the world, but what I really want to do is honor this guy who was a black convenor that gets very little play on the world stage. Yeah, And I just love.

It so much, love it.

I like that after becoming disabled and ill, he still had his community. Yes, Because like if we lived in a perfectly accessible world, where all the buildings and all the transportation and all the everything was accessible to everyone, there would still be people who couldn't really get out of their homes because of their illnesses or disability or just the amount of effort that it takes to get ready and leave the house. Yeah, and that can be incredibly isolating. Frequently, even people who do have church communities or other seemingly tight knit communities, will all of those folks drift off after a while and then just be in a situation where they're really isolated and don't have a lot of contact with other people. So the fact that he continued to have that social network and social support is something that I appreciate about his story and the community that he had around him. Well, And what's interesting, I did not get to go super far down this rabbit hole, but it seems like the reverberations of that community continued well into the twentieth century, because like that stamp that was made I only read like one little blurb about its origination was instigated by a woman whose parents had been part of his social circle, and she was like, Hey, you know, this was someone everyone loved, and long after he was dead, everybody talked about how much they loved him in addition to how important his work was. Yeah, maybe we should make an honor to him. So, like, I feel like that's like an incredible legacy of community right there. Yeah, she grew up hearing about this guy for decades.

Right, I love it, Right, I love it.

I'm still baffled by two hundred and thirty shoe factories. We've talked about it three timess Like, and even knowing the importance of shoes, that's still so many factories doesn't help to consider the fact that factories in the early nineteen hundreds were much smaller than factories today.

Yeah for sure.

Yeah, like you could think of them as you know, some I'm sure we're huge in cavernous, but many were probably like the size of a nice house. Okay, right, Like yeah, they're not necessarily all big giant echo chambers of like multi levels, like hundreds of people shy in their factories that we think of today. Yeah, I mean I think the population of Lynn at this time was something like thirty five or forty thousand people.

Yeah, so like it is anyway, shoes, so many.

She everybody worked in shoes essentially, It's like their entire identity. Anyway, shoes. I love them. Bu bum thanks Jan Matzelaiger because I like my shoes and I have a lot. As we know, Yes, Holly is recording in a shoe closet my overflowish.

Yeah.

I can see behind Holly as we are recording one of those like over the door shoe organizers, and then there is a shoe shelf that I can also see off to Holly's right. Yeah, and then the whole room behind me, our entire guest room is Florida ceiling shelves with shoes. When people come to stay, I always joke that I'm going to make them sign an NDA that they will not disclose the number of shoes they have.

With the house.

Look, it's a lot, and I love them. And because I have a lot, they never wear out because I'm rotating. Sure, I'm trying to be to slow my role on acquisitions because I'm not a shoepace. But then somebody will make some adorable, cool, kitchy, ridiculous shoe and I'm like, I have to have that, right, I can kiss it. I can even if I don't wear it. I need it.

Yeah, Yeah, shoes, I love them.

I love them. I don't have to send anybody to college. We don't have kids, right in my shoes. I do remember there was an episode that you had referenced once of Judge John Hodskin about a couple that was arguing over shoes, and you blurted out the number of shoes the woman had, like as though it was an astronomical number, and I was just real quiet for a second.

Yeah.

I also don't know if I I remember that conversation. And I also think I was like recreating this episode from memory, and I don't know if the number I said was the right number. But the number I said was definitely a number of shoes that I would feel like is a lot.

If she.

Yeah, I mean not listen. If you only want four to ten to twenty pairs of shoes in your life, that seems very lean to me. But that's what a lot of people run with. And keep in mind, like I have collected shoes for decades, so like it's not like I go out every day and buy twenty more pairs of shoes. Yeah, some of these shoes are old. Some are shoes that were given to me that were antiques that are still wearable. In some cases, they're all over the map. Anyway, I love shoes. That's thank you, yan Earn Smatsalager because I love shoes and you make me smile all the time with your invention.

The end.

If this is your weekend coming up, I hope that you get to wear as many shoes as you wish, maybe change them every twenty minutes if you want.

I'm not gonna judge.

If shoes aren't your thing, I hope whatever makes you happy is something you can engage with this weekend. If this isn't time off, I still hope you find things that make you happy. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday you'll have something brand new.

Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff You Missed in History Class

Join Holly and Tracy as they bring you the greatest and strangest Stuff You Missed In History Class  
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 2,440 clip(s)