Happy Saturday. Our recent episode on the Western World's introduction to the o copy had some parallels to our past episode on socialite Ruth Harkness, who was the first person to bring a panda into the United States, so it seemed like a good Saturday classic. This episode originally came out on June nin so enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and Welcome to the podcast. I'm calling Fry and I'm Tracy Wilson. And Uh, this is actually a topic that I've had on my witch list almost since the beginning of when Louis came on. I know, I said, I said, I'd think in the last couple of weeks that I have been trying to go back to some of those original ones. I was really excited about marcum In, but this is one that I really wrestled with because the material is a little bit emotionally difficult for me, for like sort of silly, crazy animal lady reasons. It's the story of one of those odd ambitions that only uh, the privileged are really afforded. But in the nineteen thirties and New York socialite had this dream, uh and that dream was to be the first person to capture a panda from Asia and returned to the Western world with it. And it's a u As I said, it's something I wrestle with a little bit. Um. I've been very open that I am an animal person and I struggle with the concept of animals and captivity. Uh. And I'm sure many of our listeners have similar feelings. I see both sides of the issue. I volunteered with zoos and aquariums before, and I really love it. Um. You know, captive animals in accredited facilities increased public awareness and they provide a situation where the animals can be studied and they can bolster conservation efforts. But you know, there's part of me that has to acknowledge that that is not the natural state for those animals. So, as I said, I struggle with it, probably other people do too. And this is an I kind of touchstone in the development of animals and captivity in the United States. Uh. And so, for example, the first time a Westerner even saw a panda, it was not alive. It was a pelpone display in a private home, and that was back in eighteen sixty nine. And once UH Europe and the US kind of got ahold of this knowledge. It sort of fed into a time when exploring other lands and kind of a little bit of a conquering mentality was going on, and particularly in the realm of animals, there was a lot of We're discovering new animals all the time. Well, there was also a strain of orientalism at the time, yes, and because pandas are native to China, that definitely fed the fire of it. Uh and it really ended up kicking off an obsession in the Western world with finding these black and white bears that seemed so exotic. And in the early half of the twentieth century, one woman who we will talk about today, this person I spoke of at the very beginning, really catapulted the giant panda onto the world stage and she made the species of media darling to some degree. So we're going to talk about Ruth Harkness. So Ruth Maccombs Harkness was not born into money. She married into it. She actually came from pretty humble origins. Her father was a carpenter and her mother was a seamstress, and they made their home in Titusville, Pennsylvania. She was born on September twenty one, and she had three siblings. The conservative atmosphere of the home life of the Macombs was not really something that Ruth was comfortable with. She had a little bit of edge to her. She knew there was more in the world that she wanted to discover. Uh. She became an avid reader as a consequence, and UH. The entry in her senior yearbook under her picture kind of is a great encapsulation of what she was like at this time, and it says, quote, Ruth is rather hard to get acquainted with, but after you know her, you find that she has many good qualities and is a friend worth having. I started the love It sounds like something Mary Poppins would say about someone who is cult. I just really really loved that. Ruth tried out college at the University of Colorado, but she only lasted a semester before heading to Cuba briefly to work as an English teacher. But that really did not suit her either. She had a little bit of wanderlust, uh, and she was hitting her twenties, of course, just as the jazz age was kicking off, and so Ruth moved to New York Allegedly. I think with like twenty five bucks to her name, and she got a job there as a dress designer, and she was basically kind of designing uh outfits that kind of were knockoffs of what was going on in Paris at the time, and she very quickly and very fully embraced the decadent aspects of flapper lifestyle. She really became a quintessential party girl. She was a heavy drinker, She was a heavy smoker, and she had this personality though that was really perfectly suited to social life and kind of becoming a social darling. Her friends described her as very smart and very witty, and she had a very commanding presence. She was just sort of bubbly and outspoken and kind of the perfect It was a perfect time for a girl like her to really make her way in the city. During this time, Ruth met William Harvest Harkness, Jr. And he was wealthy and had a Harvard education. Bill's father was a high powered attorney, and the young man was a regular in the society pages. The two of them were really drawn together and kind of an opposite attract scenario. Yeah, Bill was much quieter and more reserved, uh, but he was also really well traveled, and he spoke many languages, which really appealed to Ruth. And what really bonded them as a couple is that they both loved reading, and they would read together in trade books and discuss the things that they had read in the books. And they also spent a great deal of time just pouring over maps and travel journals and kind of plotting these grand adventures that they really hoped to take together one day. And this was not like the fantasy kind of planning of like one day we'll run away and spend three months in Paris, like they were really planning some trips. Uh. And they ended up dating for quite some time before they finally married all the uh. Some accounts say they basically were living as married people, like they just didn't make it all official in paperworky for a while. So, with the financial backing of his family money, Bill Harkness made an adventurer slash explorer his occupation, which is awesome work if you can get it, if you could make it for yourself. Right. So this was a time when new animals are being discovered all the time, and men like Bill would race to be the first to capture and sometimes kill one of them. Yeah, it was a you know, kind of that that sense of adventure we've talked about before. It was what fed a lot of like the Everest expeditions, but like being the first to do the thing, to see this animal, to capture this animal. There was a lot of like a claim that went with that. And Bill had just had a successful expedition to capture a komodo dragon, which I would love to do more research on that trip specifically, because those things are poisonous and me and not delightful. They do not want hugs. But he, you know, was sort of chuffed with his success from that, and he decided that he was going to be the first man to capture a giant panda. And this was in ninety four when he kind of mounted this plan, and so he made a trip to China, but he got a little blockaded. He ended up spending the next year there in China just waiting for the proper permit paperwork to all be approved, because it was not an easy thing to just stroll in and put your team together and go. But unfortunately, before his expedition could actually get underway and all of that paperwork could happen, Bill became very ill, uh, and he was treated for a while, but he ended up dying on February eighteenth of nineteen thirty six in Shanghai, and his illness, which was not initially accurately diagnosed, turned out to be throat cancer. So he had basically been withering away while he waited for these documents. Although his missives back to Ruth, we're all very peppy and upbeat. So when Bill died, Ruth inherited his money, and she also inherited the expedition equipment that he had already assembled in China. So, in a move that completely shocked all of her socialite friends Ruth, Ruth decided that instead of settling into life as a wealthy widow, she would travel to China and pick up where Bill left off. Yeah, this was really, uh a wild move. I mean she was basically saying, all that money and I inherited, I'm not going to live off of it. I'm going to spend it all to go to China and do what my husband was trying to do. Uh. And you know, this certainly seems like a crazy move for a woman who fully embraced creature comforts. I mean, she was very open that she liked sort of living her spoiled life in New York and like she wouldn't walk up block if she could take a cab. And uh, so it seemed very surprising too many people for her to just go, no, I'm going to go do that trip my husband was on. But really what motivated her was likely just a very deep grief because, as we said, it was an opposite attract scenario. And Ruth and Bill at this point had been together for a decade and they were very happily married and very close partners. They were basically best friends. But before we get to Ruth traveling off to China, uh, we're gonna take a quick ad from our sponsor. If that's cool with Tracy, let's do it. Most of what we knew about Ruth's first journey is through her letters to her best friend, Hazel Perkins, who was nicknamed Perky, and so once Ruth arrived in Shanghai, she really took a different approach to the mission than was customary and certainly different than the way Bill had handled things. Whereas normally Western explorers would go into a new place like this on these adventure and discovery expeditions, with a team of fellow Westerners, and they would lay out their plan and follow it. Ruth got rid of all of the men that he had already hired and brought on, and she opted to seek out locals as her guides and her employees, at least almost locals. She ended up hiring Quentin Young, and he was a young Chinese American college student as her god. She said of him, when Quentin Young consented to take charge of my expedition, the obstacles that he had surrounded me began to disappear. In fact, the Chinese wall of it can't be done, crumpled like the walls of Jericho. Yeah, this was not the Young family's first time assisting Americans with panda expeditions. Quentin's younger brother, Jack had actually led Teddy Roosevelt's sons on a giant panda hunting expedition in nine and in this case, the goal which was achieved was strictly to hunt the animal. With Jack's assistants, the Roosevelt boys shot and killed a giant panda and returned home with it as a hunting trophy, giving them the dubious honor of being the first Americans to kill a panda. Quentin knew the areas of Tibet where their travels were going to take them, and his guidance in this expedition really can't be understated. He was fluent in Chinese as well as English, and he was able to handle virtually every logistical need of Mrs harkness ambitious plan. Yeah. I mean, this is a woman who she uh you know, was used to getting everything she wanted, and he kind of made that happen for her again in China. Uh And Harkness and Young left Shanghai on September twenty six and nineteen thirty six, and they traveled up the Yancey River for several weeks before reaching cheng Do, which is the capital of Sichuan Province. And there they hired a complement of servants to carry loads, and they also hired a cook before they started their journey into the Tibetan highlands. What they wanted to do was to capture a baby panda. Harkness carried a supply of items that she thought would help her care for a baby panda, so she had nursing bottles and dry milk. Through her letters to Perkey, she stioned that no one really knew how to care for a panda, but she seemed enthusiastic and confident about her plan. And her idea to acquire an infant was actually another departure from the usual approach. Previous expeditions to capture a panda uh and ones that were you know, being mounted around the same time always intended to bring back an adult. But that was really quite problematic for a number of reasons. Uh. First, no matter how cute pandas are, uh, they are wild bears. They do not want to be disturbed. They do not want your hugs anymore than the komodo dragons do. Uh. The equipment for the capture would also be extremely cumbersome, so they would have to have porters to carry chains like heavy chains and traps and cages for an adult animal. And additionally, just transporting an adult would also mean that you had to deal with an adult panda's appetite, which would have included carrying a great deal of bamboo back along with it just to sustain it through the journey. Trying to get a cub instead solved most of these problems. Yeah, smaller pack it, less fuss, It was not so much bamboo portage, No, not at all. Uh So the team traveled up to thirty miles a day on foot, and sometimes the temperatures got incredibly high, north of a hundred degrees fahrenheit, and you would think that, uh, someone who had been living in privilege for so long would really struggle with it. But surprisingly Ruth apparently did extremely well on the journey. She was just driven and she you know, hoofed it all those miles. And sometimes when she would get tired, the porters would kind of make a hammock style chair for her that she could rest in for a little while and they would carry her for a bit, but mostly she did it under her own steerage there um, so she really you know, kind of stepped up to the bar. And also during this journey, at some point Harkness and her guide, Quentin Young, became romantically involved. This group was eventually met by an elderly Tibetan man. He was named Loud Saying, and he said that the word had reached him that a Western woman was looking for a panda. He said he knew where to find them, and he offered his services. So he and his son in law joined the group as they headed into the bamboo forest. Yeah, when she I read an article and one link to Injean notes, and it's kind of her relaying her story. It's much briefer than any of the other books to this journalist, and it really is very sort of um like a Curasawa film, like this elderly Tibetan man just kind of wanders out of the fog one day and it's like, I will help you find the pandas. And they have a picture in that article of an elderly Tibetan man. So I presume it is in fact accurate and non embellishment, but it seems so surreal. I thought I thought you were going to say there were seven different versions of what happened. No, not quite. In November, they set up four different camps, and they were guided to do so by information that pandas don't make nests and instead have this more nomadic lifestyle. It was only a few days before things started to get interesting. They heard noises in the forest and then a gunshot. The air was full of a really heavy mist, so the visibility was almost non existent. Ruth had been extremely clear with her team that she did not want anyone to shoot the pandas so in the heavy miss they really were not sure what was going on. Yeah, she describes being very terrified in that moment. She didn't know if they were in danger because they did you know. This was the time when China was going through some upheavals and they did, at one point, you know, encounter UM soldiers on their journeys and other you know people, So she didn't know if they were walking into something dangerous or if someone had shot a panda from her group, even though she had asked them not to. But Quentin decided that he would explore the area and he uh discovered in a hollowed out tree a tiny panda cub and he thought that someone may have shot the mother and that might have been the shot they heard, although that was never established with certainty. Uh Still, he tucked the cub into his shirt and he climbed back down to the ground with it. The panda was later named Sulin after one of Quentin's relatives, which was his sister in law, who was quite an explorer in her own right UM and would make a great podcast subject in the future. She's on my list. Mrs Harkners cared for the cub as the team made its way back to chong Do and then to Shanghai, and she had no experience in caring for babies, so she pretty much went with her intuition and did the best that she could. The porters that she and Quentin Young had hired two turns carrying the baby panda in baskets and between feedings. Um. And incidentally, while the panda was given a woman's name, it turned out to be a boy. Yeah. Yeah, poor Ruth, she you know, had never been a mother, She had no experience caring for human babies. So even though she was like, I'll just you know, try to do my best with the cub as though it's a baby, and she's like, wait, I don't know what to do with babies either. Well, in panda cubs require some pretty specific care. Yeah, and she was making it all up as she went along. Um. When she arrived in Shanghai, she did take uh the cub to a doctor to have it looked over and make sure it was okay, and it apparently passed. So getting Sulan out of China proved to be a kind of a challenge. The panda cub was seized by customs officials in Shanghai and the ship that she had booked passage on left port, so Ruth wound up remaining in China, choosing to stay in the customs shed with the panda overnight. Yeah, she didn't want to leave Sulin. Uh. And the next day, Harkness and the panda were finally released and they were allowed to, you know, book another passage and head to the US. But there was a little bit of paperwork juggling because the cub actually ended up listing on the customs document as a dog. So there are a few theories about whether or not she used her wealth to kind of finagle that, or if she just charmed someone, or if there was some sort of lucky accident to the whole thing, but Sulan was listed as a dog. Uh. They traveled back to the US on a luxury ship, so Sulian definitely got a taste of the high life. Uh. They first landed in San Francisco, and then they went on to Chicago from there, and then they finally went back to Manhattan. And what's sort of interesting about this is that throughout the journey, UH, Ruth kept Sulin with her. She basically carried this panda in her arms everywhere she went. It rode in cabs with her, it went to restaurants with her, and went to parties with her, and then when she got to New York, it actually lived with her in her New York apartment. So on the one hand, this sounds like the case of a rich lady doing something eccentric, uh with having an animal as an accessory, but really her inclination to keep the baby panda close to her was probably pretty beneficial to it. She wanted to keep it safe. Although there was significant press and exposure surrounding her being the panda Lady. Ruth and Sulin were front page news for weeks and wound up on numerous radio programs. Yeah, the there have been some that have theorized that her keeping it with her all the time up against her body kind of gave it the necessary body heat, because you know, babies are very sissif to bull even for babies to losing their body heat very quickly when they're young, so it probably did help it that she was clinging with it well. And baby pandas also, their digestive systems are not actually built to digest anything, and so the mother has to move the baby around all the time, So if she was carrying the baby panda around, that probably did help. Yeah, she's sort of accidentally, whether it was intuition or a lucky accident, she ended up doing the right thing to some degree. However, Eventually Sulin was handed over to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. UH. They bought it from Ruth for a little less than nine thousand dollars, and while it was on exhibit at Brookfield, the panda drew record breaking crowds. In a single day, more than fifty three thousand people showed up to see this panda cub because it was a completely exotic creature. And before we go on uh to talk about Ruth and Sulin and some additional adventures, let's have a quick ad from our sponsor. Seven Harkness returned to China to collect another panda, and this time she was not as well repaired. She seemed to be sort of counting on a simple repeat of what had happened the last time, but things did not work out that way new Uh. For one thing, the real sort of dramatic problem was that she got back to China and discovered that Quentin Young had gotten married in the time that she was away and he was not going to be available to join her, and I presumed certainly not to continue their romantic relationship. Uh, you never know, you never know. I'm not judging. I'm just saying it didn't seem to work out. Despite the fact that much of her success on her first expedition really was due to the guidework of Young, she you know, ever a bit obstinate. I mean, this is the woman whose friends were telling her you're crazy, You're crazy when she first decided on all of this, and she kind of dug in her heels as a consequence, Like I think she's one of those people that really is motivated to do things in spite of what other people are telling her. So even though it seems like maybe not the smartest thing to go without Quentin Young, she was like, I'm going to do it anyway, and she did. And she did manage to capture another panda cub on her own. This one was named May May, and this new cub joined Sulin on exhibit at the Brickfield Zoo, but Suland developed pneumonia and died shortly after the arrival of the second cub. Yeah, there are actually some interesting differences of accounts of what happened to sulin Um. I read one and I couldn't corroborate it anywhere, but I just want to mention it off hand in case any of our listeners go looking and find it and say, this isn't what they said. One account said that he had actually choked on a piece of food, like on a piece of bamboo that had lodged in his throat, and that he didn't die from the choking, but then he ended up getting a secondary infection from where it had either punctured something or um whatever. And one newspaper wrote it up as him having died of curiosity, which is sort of horrible and I don't know, it just rubbed me the wrong way. Uh, But most accounts that he died of pneumonia. Uh. There was a third trip that Harkness went on in and this really proved to be a significant shift in her life and a big turning point. She was successful and once again getting a cub, but before she could return to the States with it, she really experienced a pretty significant change of heart about the whole business. So in the two years since she captured su Lan all kinds of hunters from all over the world had gone on pandaquests of their own, and they weren't generally approaching them with the same good intentions that had guided Harkness. So on top of that, two cubs she had transported previously had died in transit, and all this kind of weighed on her, and she was contemplating the area where she had captured this third cub, which is near where she had had gotten both Sulian and Maymay, and Ruth was very troubled when she realized that there was a significant, visible to her drop in the number of pandas in this bamboo forest and her intent, she said when she relayed, sort of what was going through her mind at this time was that she had, you know, envisioned bringing mating pairs back to the Western world and kind of you know, fostering a panda population in the US. But things were not going as planned. Uh So, instead of bringing another panda to the US and risking its life in the process, she made a really unusual choice and she trekked back up the mountain and returned the baby panda to the wild. So this was a really detrimental move for Harkness. She had been a moneyed party girl, and at this point she had really spent a lot of her fortune on these expeditions, So returning the panda was a huge blow to her finances. Yeah, she wasn't going to get the publicity and the the you know, cost of the panda back. Uh, people were probably not going to want to interview her a whole bunch about. Oh, I felt bad and put it back. Uh. May May was in captivity for about five years, but she died very young. In then Ruth, leaving behind her trips to China, developed a drinking problem. Yeah, while she had been traveling initially in China, Harkness had really come to embrace some of the people of the area and the concepts of Eastern spirituality. And when she would write letters to Perky and other friends, she really talked about how she was, you know, kind of getting into um, this Eastern spirituality and learning to let go of attachments to possessions and people, and how it, you know, had given her this sense of peace and really, you know, brought a change in her and an ability to sort of just be in the world. But the sentiment seems like it may have been kind of one of those early exposure enthusiasm situations because it did not stay with her. Um. You know, when she was back in the States, she never seemed to find, you know, that piece that she had felt in China, and once she was permanently back in New York, she just kind of spiraled downward. On July seven, she was found dead in a hotel bathtub, and her death was ruled the result of acute alcoholic gastro. Ento writis, Yeah, it's a very set end for her. Uh. However, she has an interesting legacy. Um. There is a book, like it's the book that most people kind of point at, uh, written about Harkness, which is called The Lady in the Panda, and it's very very fascinating, But in reading it, I kind of feel like the author Vicky Croak, and she does a really good job with the book, but it feels a little bit romanticized to me. She kind of paints Harknesses as a hero character and describes her as a combination of Myrna Loy and Jane Goodall, which sounds really good, but it also sounds pretty idealized. But at the same time, she really was an extraordinary woman. So I want to be clear that I don't know how much of my own sort of perception and filters or affecting my read of it. Uh. Well, and she did alter the way the public perceived animals. She brought Sulan home to New York in her arms instead of at least or cage. Do you know, she was treating it like a baby instead of like a thing that should be put in a box. She asserted that animals had individuality and personality just like humans do, but because she was not a trained biologist, her message kind of anthropomorphized pandas, which is a little problematic. Yeah, this is an issue which you know, continues to be discussed and debated. But once people perceive an animal as human, like you know, the study of them becomes subjective. In the case of such a high profile animal, it can be a little bit detrimental in terms of the public perception and the consequential misconceptions that grow out of it. So pandas are I mean, I think you would be hard pressed to find someone who does not acknowledge that pandas are super cute, So it's easy for people to start thinking them as cute pets and like these sweet things rather than wild animals. But because you said earlier they are wild bears, they don't want to be your friend, even though they look really chill and adorable when they're rolling around in their habitats and zeus, they're not They're not humans and they're not pets. They're they're their own thing. Well, and there's a lot of ongoing debate about anthropomorphism, so these are kind of the broad strokes. Anthropomorphism can be detrimental to the study of animal cognition, and it can negatively impact our body of knowledge about animals. When it comes to an endangered animal, and you know, giant pandas are the poster animals for endangerment, it has the potential to get in the way of conservation efforts. Yeah. I mean most biologists, certainly that I have known, they try to stay really objective about it, but it's a fight. I mean, I've certainly talked to people that have said, like, no, I have to constantly remind myself, like, I'm working with an animal. This is not a human. I can't assume it's intent in its behaviors. And so, you know, if you're always struggling with something like that, it's not like you know, being able to put a piece of a drop of blood on a slide and look at it. You're interpreting things that animals are doing, and so it's really hard to stay on guard. So that's why anthropomorphism can be really tricky. Well, and it's like nature centers that are really focused on conservation and preservation, a lot of times the animals that are there don't have names. Um. And you know, somebody say, what is this fox's name? And it's well, it doesn't have a name. It's a wild animal. It's not someone's pet. So in a two thousand four census, it was estimated that there were only around six hundred giant pandas in the wild and about three hundred zoos. A lot of biologists actually think these numbers are a lot lower, especially in captivity. Female pandas really can have trouble conceiving, and their fertility windows are really narrow, sometimes as low as twelve to twenty four hours in a year. Yeah, they once each spring they become fertile. Um. Tracy actually wrote an article for the site about it that I'm in a reference in just a minute. Uh. And because of their reclusive natures, though almost everything we know about these endangered bears is from the study of captive animals. So again it's one of those things where they're pros and cons to the situation. Uh. You know, sometimes it's hard to see an animal in a captive situation, even if it's in the best possible, you know, very perfectly designed environment. But at the same time, if we didn't have them in captivity, we would not know anything about them and would not be as informed to you know, kind of pursue conservation efforts. So there are two sides to that coin. And today giant pandas living in US facilities actually still belong to China. It's not a situation like Ruth Hardness where she could go get one and then sell it here. They are all owned by China. Uh. If you see a panda in a US zoo, it is leased by the Chinese government, and those leasing fees actually go back into a fund that is used to further the study and conservation of giant pandas in their native home. UH. The Giant Panda Reserve at Woolong has been pretty successful at kind of figuring out how to breed pandas. It's still tricky. There's still a lot of work to be done, but they are getting to a point where they feel like they will soon be able to reintroduce panda's born in captivity into the wild and start bolstering their wild numbers. Having a having a panda in a zoo as an enormous financial commitment. It's really huge any animal in a zoo. I think that's one of those things people don't realize when they say, why are tickets to this place? Is so expensive and it's like, okay, keeping a whale alive for a year across like a million dollars. Well, and on top of all, you know, the food in the habitat and all that stuff. Like the amount of money that the zoo gives to China for panda conservation research is enormous um. Sue Lynn is still viewable in taxid army form along with the Tavo lions. He's on display in the Field Museum's taxid Army Exhibit. Yeah. I feel like we should get a kickback from the Field. We send people there all the time. Somebody tweeted at us that they had gone to the American Museum of Natural History to see the lines and I was like, oh no, that's wrong. Museum there in the field. Oh man, I love the field. I gotta get back here soon. Uh. And while the Ruth the work of Ruth harkne Us draws varying opinions, as we've said, there are two sides to the whole kind of capturing of an animal. Coin in this situation, at a time when shooting exotic beasts for sport was happening, she really did shift the public thinking on pandas into one of adoration. She's sometimes credited, you'll see, like in quick bios of hers, she's the woman that started the panda craze, which is kind of an interesting phrase anyway. But you know, this this shift in mindset where people suddenly saw it as a sweet thing, Let's find the interesting animal and protect it, instead of let's find the interesting animal and shooting it until it is dead. Yeah, So she's she's had a significant impact on how we view not just pandas, but many other animals. I think it it kind of shifted the way biologists and zoologists were thinking about them at the time. You know, at some point those people recognize that, like you can know everything about zoology that you know, but you're gonna need to get people that are not educated in biology and science on board with you if you're gonna get the funding to keep these efforts going, right, That's part of it. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old how Stuff Works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. Our recent episode on the Western World's introduction to the o copy had some parallels to our past episode on socialite Ruth Harkness, who was the first person to bring a panda into the United States, so it seemed like a good Saturday classic. This episode originally came out on June nin so enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and Welcome to the podcast. I'm calling Fry and I'm Tracy Wilson. And Uh, this is actually a topic that I've had on my witch list almost since the beginning of when Louis came on. I know, I said, I said, I'd think in the last couple of weeks that I have been trying to go back to some of those original ones. I was really excited about marcum In, but this is one that I really wrestled with because the material is a little bit emotionally difficult for me, for like sort of silly, crazy animal lady reasons. It's the story of one of those odd ambitions that only uh, the privileged are really afforded. But in the nineteen thirties and New York socialite had this dream, uh and that dream was to be the first person to capture a panda from Asia and returned to the Western world with it. And it's a u As I said, it's something I wrestle with a little bit. Um. I've been very open that I am an animal person and I struggle with the concept of animals and captivity. Uh. And I'm sure many of our listeners have similar feelings. I see both sides of the issue. I volunteered with zoos and aquariums before, and I really love it. Um. You know, captive animals in accredited facilities increased public awareness and they provide a situation where the animals can be studied and they can bolster conservation efforts. But you know, there's part of me that has to acknowledge that that is not the natural state for those animals. So, as I said, I struggle with it, probably other people do too. And this is an I kind of touchstone in the development of animals and captivity in the United States. Uh. And so, for example, the first time a Westerner even saw a panda, it was not alive. It was a pelpone display in a private home, and that was back in eighteen sixty nine. And once UH Europe and the US kind of got ahold of this knowledge. It sort of fed into a time when exploring other lands and kind of a little bit of a conquering mentality was going on, and particularly in the realm of animals, there was a lot of We're discovering new animals all the time. Well, there was also a strain of orientalism at the time, yes, and because pandas are native to China, that definitely fed the fire of it. Uh and it really ended up kicking off an obsession in the Western world with finding these black and white bears that seemed so exotic. And in the early half of the twentieth century, one woman who we will talk about today, this person I spoke of at the very beginning, really catapulted the giant panda onto the world stage and she made the species of media darling to some degree. So we're going to talk about Ruth Harkness. So Ruth Maccombs Harkness was not born into money. She married into it. She actually came from pretty humble origins. Her father was a carpenter and her mother was a seamstress, and they made their home in Titusville, Pennsylvania. She was born on September twenty one, and she had three siblings. The conservative atmosphere of the home life of the Macombs was not really something that Ruth was comfortable with. She had a little bit of edge to her. She knew there was more in the world that she wanted to discover. Uh. She became an avid reader as a consequence, and UH. The entry in her senior yearbook under her picture kind of is a great encapsulation of what she was like at this time, and it says, quote, Ruth is rather hard to get acquainted with, but after you know her, you find that she has many good qualities and is a friend worth having. I started the love It sounds like something Mary Poppins would say about someone who is cult. I just really really loved that. Ruth tried out college at the University of Colorado, but she only lasted a semester before heading to Cuba briefly to work as an English teacher. But that really did not suit her either. She had a little bit of wanderlust, uh, and she was hitting her twenties, of course, just as the jazz age was kicking off, and so Ruth moved to New York Allegedly. I think with like twenty five bucks to her name, and she got a job there as a dress designer, and she was basically kind of designing uh outfits that kind of were knockoffs of what was going on in Paris at the time, and she very quickly and very fully embraced the decadent aspects of flapper lifestyle. She really became a quintessential party girl. She was a heavy drinker, She was a heavy smoker, and she had this personality though that was really perfectly suited to social life and kind of becoming a social darling. Her friends described her as very smart and very witty, and she had a very commanding presence. She was just sort of bubbly and outspoken and kind of the perfect It was a perfect time for a girl like her to really make her way in the city. During this time, Ruth met William Harvest Harkness, Jr. And he was wealthy and had a Harvard education. Bill's father was a high powered attorney, and the young man was a regular in the society pages. The two of them were really drawn together and kind of an opposite attract scenario. Yeah, Bill was much quieter and more reserved, uh, but he was also really well traveled, and he spoke many languages, which really appealed to Ruth. And what really bonded them as a couple is that they both loved reading, and they would read together in trade books and discuss the things that they had read in the books. And they also spent a great deal of time just pouring over maps and travel journals and kind of plotting these grand adventures that they really hoped to take together one day. And this was not like the fantasy kind of planning of like one day we'll run away and spend three months in Paris, like they were really planning some trips. Uh. And they ended up dating for quite some time before they finally married all the uh. Some accounts say they basically were living as married people, like they just didn't make it all official in paperworky for a while. So, with the financial backing of his family money, Bill Harkness made an adventurer slash explorer his occupation, which is awesome work if you can get it, if you could make it for yourself. Right. So this was a time when new animals are being discovered all the time, and men like Bill would race to be the first to capture and sometimes kill one of them. Yeah, it was a you know, kind of that that sense of adventure we've talked about before. It was what fed a lot of like the Everest expeditions, but like being the first to do the thing, to see this animal, to capture this animal. There was a lot of like a claim that went with that. And Bill had just had a successful expedition to capture a komodo dragon, which I would love to do more research on that trip specifically, because those things are poisonous and me and not delightful. They do not want hugs. But he, you know, was sort of chuffed with his success from that, and he decided that he was going to be the first man to capture a giant panda. And this was in ninety four when he kind of mounted this plan, and so he made a trip to China, but he got a little blockaded. He ended up spending the next year there in China just waiting for the proper permit paperwork to all be approved, because it was not an easy thing to just stroll in and put your team together and go. But unfortunately, before his expedition could actually get underway and all of that paperwork could happen, Bill became very ill, uh, and he was treated for a while, but he ended up dying on February eighteenth of nineteen thirty six in Shanghai, and his illness, which was not initially accurately diagnosed, turned out to be throat cancer. So he had basically been withering away while he waited for these documents. Although his missives back to Ruth, we're all very peppy and upbeat. So when Bill died, Ruth inherited his money, and she also inherited the expedition equipment that he had already assembled in China. So, in a move that completely shocked all of her socialite friends Ruth, Ruth decided that instead of settling into life as a wealthy widow, she would travel to China and pick up where Bill left off. Yeah, this was really, uh a wild move. I mean she was basically saying, all that money and I inherited, I'm not going to live off of it. I'm going to spend it all to go to China and do what my husband was trying to do. Uh. And you know, this certainly seems like a crazy move for a woman who fully embraced creature comforts. I mean, she was very open that she liked sort of living her spoiled life in New York and like she wouldn't walk up block if she could take a cab. And uh, so it seemed very surprising too many people for her to just go, no, I'm going to go do that trip my husband was on. But really what motivated her was likely just a very deep grief because, as we said, it was an opposite attract scenario. And Ruth and Bill at this point had been together for a decade and they were very happily married and very close partners. They were basically best friends. But before we get to Ruth traveling off to China, uh, we're gonna take a quick ad from our sponsor. If that's cool with Tracy, let's do it. Most of what we knew about Ruth's first journey is through her letters to her best friend, Hazel Perkins, who was nicknamed Perky, and so once Ruth arrived in Shanghai, she really took a different approach to the mission than was customary and certainly different than the way Bill had handled things. Whereas normally Western explorers would go into a new place like this on these adventure and discovery expeditions, with a team of fellow Westerners, and they would lay out their plan and follow it. Ruth got rid of all of the men that he had already hired and brought on, and she opted to seek out locals as her guides and her employees, at least almost locals. She ended up hiring Quentin Young, and he was a young Chinese American college student as her god. She said of him, when Quentin Young consented to take charge of my expedition, the obstacles that he had surrounded me began to disappear. In fact, the Chinese wall of it can't be done, crumpled like the walls of Jericho. Yeah, this was not the Young family's first time assisting Americans with panda expeditions. Quentin's younger brother, Jack had actually led Teddy Roosevelt's sons on a giant panda hunting expedition in nine and in this case, the goal which was achieved was strictly to hunt the animal. With Jack's assistants, the Roosevelt boys shot and killed a giant panda and returned home with it as a hunting trophy, giving them the dubious honor of being the first Americans to kill a panda. Quentin knew the areas of Tibet where their travels were going to take them, and his guidance in this expedition really can't be understated. He was fluent in Chinese as well as English, and he was able to handle virtually every logistical need of Mrs harkness ambitious plan. Yeah. I mean, this is a woman who she uh you know, was used to getting everything she wanted, and he kind of made that happen for her again in China. Uh And Harkness and Young left Shanghai on September twenty six and nineteen thirty six, and they traveled up the Yancey River for several weeks before reaching cheng Do, which is the capital of Sichuan Province. And there they hired a complement of servants to carry loads, and they also hired a cook before they started their journey into the Tibetan highlands. What they wanted to do was to capture a baby panda. Harkness carried a supply of items that she thought would help her care for a baby panda, so she had nursing bottles and dry milk. Through her letters to Perkey, she stioned that no one really knew how to care for a panda, but she seemed enthusiastic and confident about her plan. And her idea to acquire an infant was actually another departure from the usual approach. Previous expeditions to capture a panda uh and ones that were you know, being mounted around the same time always intended to bring back an adult. But that was really quite problematic for a number of reasons. Uh. First, no matter how cute pandas are, uh, they are wild bears. They do not want to be disturbed. They do not want your hugs anymore than the komodo dragons do. Uh. The equipment for the capture would also be extremely cumbersome, so they would have to have porters to carry chains like heavy chains and traps and cages for an adult animal. And additionally, just transporting an adult would also mean that you had to deal with an adult panda's appetite, which would have included carrying a great deal of bamboo back along with it just to sustain it through the journey. Trying to get a cub instead solved most of these problems. Yeah, smaller pack it, less fuss, It was not so much bamboo portage, No, not at all. Uh So the team traveled up to thirty miles a day on foot, and sometimes the temperatures got incredibly high, north of a hundred degrees fahrenheit, and you would think that, uh, someone who had been living in privilege for so long would really struggle with it. But surprisingly Ruth apparently did extremely well on the journey. She was just driven and she you know, hoofed it all those miles. And sometimes when she would get tired, the porters would kind of make a hammock style chair for her that she could rest in for a little while and they would carry her for a bit, but mostly she did it under her own steerage there um, so she really you know, kind of stepped up to the bar. And also during this journey, at some point Harkness and her guide, Quentin Young, became romantically involved. This group was eventually met by an elderly Tibetan man. He was named Loud Saying, and he said that the word had reached him that a Western woman was looking for a panda. He said he knew where to find them, and he offered his services. So he and his son in law joined the group as they headed into the bamboo forest. Yeah, when she I read an article and one link to Injean notes, and it's kind of her relaying her story. It's much briefer than any of the other books to this journalist, and it really is very sort of um like a Curasawa film, like this elderly Tibetan man just kind of wanders out of the fog one day and it's like, I will help you find the pandas. And they have a picture in that article of an elderly Tibetan man. So I presume it is in fact accurate and non embellishment, but it seems so surreal. I thought I thought you were going to say there were seven different versions of what happened. No, not quite. In November, they set up four different camps, and they were guided to do so by information that pandas don't make nests and instead have this more nomadic lifestyle. It was only a few days before things started to get interesting. They heard noises in the forest and then a gunshot. The air was full of a really heavy mist, so the visibility was almost non existent. Ruth had been extremely clear with her team that she did not want anyone to shoot the pandas so in the heavy miss they really were not sure what was going on. Yeah, she describes being very terrified in that moment. She didn't know if they were in danger because they did you know. This was the time when China was going through some upheavals and they did, at one point, you know, encounter UM soldiers on their journeys and other you know people, So she didn't know if they were walking into something dangerous or if someone had shot a panda from her group, even though she had asked them not to. But Quentin decided that he would explore the area and he uh discovered in a hollowed out tree a tiny panda cub and he thought that someone may have shot the mother and that might have been the shot they heard, although that was never established with certainty. Uh Still, he tucked the cub into his shirt and he climbed back down to the ground with it. The panda was later named Sulin after one of Quentin's relatives, which was his sister in law, who was quite an explorer in her own right UM and would make a great podcast subject in the future. She's on my list. Mrs Harkners cared for the cub as the team made its way back to chong Do and then to Shanghai, and she had no experience in caring for babies, so she pretty much went with her intuition and did the best that she could. The porters that she and Quentin Young had hired two turns carrying the baby panda in baskets and between feedings. Um. And incidentally, while the panda was given a woman's name, it turned out to be a boy. Yeah. Yeah, poor Ruth, she you know, had never been a mother, She had no experience caring for human babies. So even though she was like, I'll just you know, try to do my best with the cub as though it's a baby, and she's like, wait, I don't know what to do with babies either. Well, in panda cubs require some pretty specific care. Yeah, and she was making it all up as she went along. Um. When she arrived in Shanghai, she did take uh the cub to a doctor to have it looked over and make sure it was okay, and it apparently passed. So getting Sulan out of China proved to be a kind of a challenge. The panda cub was seized by customs officials in Shanghai and the ship that she had booked passage on left port, so Ruth wound up remaining in China, choosing to stay in the customs shed with the panda overnight. Yeah, she didn't want to leave Sulin. Uh. And the next day, Harkness and the panda were finally released and they were allowed to, you know, book another passage and head to the US. But there was a little bit of paperwork juggling because the cub actually ended up listing on the customs document as a dog. So there are a few theories about whether or not she used her wealth to kind of finagle that, or if she just charmed someone, or if there was some sort of lucky accident to the whole thing, but Sulan was listed as a dog. Uh. They traveled back to the US on a luxury ship, so Sulian definitely got a taste of the high life. Uh. They first landed in San Francisco, and then they went on to Chicago from there, and then they finally went back to Manhattan. And what's sort of interesting about this is that throughout the journey, UH, Ruth kept Sulin with her. She basically carried this panda in her arms everywhere she went. It rode in cabs with her, it went to restaurants with her, and went to parties with her, and then when she got to New York, it actually lived with her in her New York apartment. So on the one hand, this sounds like the case of a rich lady doing something eccentric, uh with having an animal as an accessory, but really her inclination to keep the baby panda close to her was probably pretty beneficial to it. She wanted to keep it safe. Although there was significant press and exposure surrounding her being the panda Lady. Ruth and Sulin were front page news for weeks and wound up on numerous radio programs. Yeah, the there have been some that have theorized that her keeping it with her all the time up against her body kind of gave it the necessary body heat, because you know, babies are very sissif to bull even for babies to losing their body heat very quickly when they're young, so it probably did help it that she was clinging with it well. And baby pandas also, their digestive systems are not actually built to digest anything, and so the mother has to move the baby around all the time, So if she was carrying the baby panda around, that probably did help. Yeah, she's sort of accidentally, whether it was intuition or a lucky accident, she ended up doing the right thing to some degree. However, Eventually Sulin was handed over to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. UH. They bought it from Ruth for a little less than nine thousand dollars, and while it was on exhibit at Brookfield, the panda drew record breaking crowds. In a single day, more than fifty three thousand people showed up to see this panda cub because it was a completely exotic creature. And before we go on uh to talk about Ruth and Sulin and some additional adventures, let's have a quick ad from our sponsor. Seven Harkness returned to China to collect another panda, and this time she was not as well repaired. She seemed to be sort of counting on a simple repeat of what had happened the last time, but things did not work out that way new Uh. For one thing, the real sort of dramatic problem was that she got back to China and discovered that Quentin Young had gotten married in the time that she was away and he was not going to be available to join her, and I presumed certainly not to continue their romantic relationship. Uh, you never know, you never know. I'm not judging. I'm just saying it didn't seem to work out. Despite the fact that much of her success on her first expedition really was due to the guidework of Young, she you know, ever a bit obstinate. I mean, this is the woman whose friends were telling her you're crazy, You're crazy when she first decided on all of this, and she kind of dug in her heels as a consequence, Like I think she's one of those people that really is motivated to do things in spite of what other people are telling her. So even though it seems like maybe not the smartest thing to go without Quentin Young, she was like, I'm going to do it anyway, and she did. And she did manage to capture another panda cub on her own. This one was named May May, and this new cub joined Sulin on exhibit at the Brickfield Zoo, but Suland developed pneumonia and died shortly after the arrival of the second cub. Yeah, there are actually some interesting differences of accounts of what happened to sulin Um. I read one and I couldn't corroborate it anywhere, but I just want to mention it off hand in case any of our listeners go looking and find it and say, this isn't what they said. One account said that he had actually choked on a piece of food, like on a piece of bamboo that had lodged in his throat, and that he didn't die from the choking, but then he ended up getting a secondary infection from where it had either punctured something or um whatever. And one newspaper wrote it up as him having died of curiosity, which is sort of horrible and I don't know, it just rubbed me the wrong way. Uh, But most accounts that he died of pneumonia. Uh. There was a third trip that Harkness went on in and this really proved to be a significant shift in her life and a big turning point. She was successful and once again getting a cub, but before she could return to the States with it, she really experienced a pretty significant change of heart about the whole business. So in the two years since she captured su Lan all kinds of hunters from all over the world had gone on pandaquests of their own, and they weren't generally approaching them with the same good intentions that had guided Harkness. So on top of that, two cubs she had transported previously had died in transit, and all this kind of weighed on her, and she was contemplating the area where she had captured this third cub, which is near where she had had gotten both Sulian and Maymay, and Ruth was very troubled when she realized that there was a significant, visible to her drop in the number of pandas in this bamboo forest and her intent, she said when she relayed, sort of what was going through her mind at this time was that she had, you know, envisioned bringing mating pairs back to the Western world and kind of you know, fostering a panda population in the US. But things were not going as planned. Uh So, instead of bringing another panda to the US and risking its life in the process, she made a really unusual choice and she trekked back up the mountain and returned the baby panda to the wild. So this was a really detrimental move for Harkness. She had been a moneyed party girl, and at this point she had really spent a lot of her fortune on these expeditions, So returning the panda was a huge blow to her finances. Yeah, she wasn't going to get the publicity and the the you know, cost of the panda back. Uh, people were probably not going to want to interview her a whole bunch about. Oh, I felt bad and put it back. Uh. May May was in captivity for about five years, but she died very young. In then Ruth, leaving behind her trips to China, developed a drinking problem. Yeah, while she had been traveling initially in China, Harkness had really come to embrace some of the people of the area and the concepts of Eastern spirituality. And when she would write letters to Perky and other friends, she really talked about how she was, you know, kind of getting into um, this Eastern spirituality and learning to let go of attachments to possessions and people, and how it, you know, had given her this sense of peace and really, you know, brought a change in her and an ability to sort of just be in the world. But the sentiment seems like it may have been kind of one of those early exposure enthusiasm situations because it did not stay with her. Um. You know, when she was back in the States, she never seemed to find, you know, that piece that she had felt in China, and once she was permanently back in New York, she just kind of spiraled downward. On July seven, she was found dead in a hotel bathtub, and her death was ruled the result of acute alcoholic gastro. Ento writis, Yeah, it's a very set end for her. Uh. However, she has an interesting legacy. Um. There is a book, like it's the book that most people kind of point at, uh, written about Harkness, which is called The Lady in the Panda, and it's very very fascinating, But in reading it, I kind of feel like the author Vicky Croak, and she does a really good job with the book, but it feels a little bit romanticized to me. She kind of paints Harknesses as a hero character and describes her as a combination of Myrna Loy and Jane Goodall, which sounds really good, but it also sounds pretty idealized. But at the same time, she really was an extraordinary woman. So I want to be clear that I don't know how much of my own sort of perception and filters or affecting my read of it. Uh. Well, and she did alter the way the public perceived animals. She brought Sulan home to New York in her arms instead of at least or cage. Do you know, she was treating it like a baby instead of like a thing that should be put in a box. She asserted that animals had individuality and personality just like humans do, but because she was not a trained biologist, her message kind of anthropomorphized pandas, which is a little problematic. Yeah, this is an issue which you know, continues to be discussed and debated. But once people perceive an animal as human, like you know, the study of them becomes subjective. In the case of such a high profile animal, it can be a little bit detrimental in terms of the public perception and the consequential misconceptions that grow out of it. So pandas are I mean, I think you would be hard pressed to find someone who does not acknowledge that pandas are super cute, So it's easy for people to start thinking them as cute pets and like these sweet things rather than wild animals. But because you said earlier they are wild bears, they don't want to be your friend, even though they look really chill and adorable when they're rolling around in their habitats and zeus, they're not They're not humans and they're not pets. They're they're their own thing. Well, and there's a lot of ongoing debate about anthropomorphism, so these are kind of the broad strokes. Anthropomorphism can be detrimental to the study of animal cognition, and it can negatively impact our body of knowledge about animals. When it comes to an endangered animal, and you know, giant pandas are the poster animals for endangerment, it has the potential to get in the way of conservation efforts. Yeah. I mean most biologists, certainly that I have known, they try to stay really objective about it, but it's a fight. I mean, I've certainly talked to people that have said, like, no, I have to constantly remind myself, like, I'm working with an animal. This is not a human. I can't assume it's intent in its behaviors. And so, you know, if you're always struggling with something like that, it's not like you know, being able to put a piece of a drop of blood on a slide and look at it. You're interpreting things that animals are doing, and so it's really hard to stay on guard. So that's why anthropomorphism can be really tricky. Well, and it's like nature centers that are really focused on conservation and preservation, a lot of times the animals that are there don't have names. Um. And you know, somebody say, what is this fox's name? And it's well, it doesn't have a name. It's a wild animal. It's not someone's pet. So in a two thousand four census, it was estimated that there were only around six hundred giant pandas in the wild and about three hundred zoos. A lot of biologists actually think these numbers are a lot lower, especially in captivity. Female pandas really can have trouble conceiving, and their fertility windows are really narrow, sometimes as low as twelve to twenty four hours in a year. Yeah, they once each spring they become fertile. Um. Tracy actually wrote an article for the site about it that I'm in a reference in just a minute. Uh. And because of their reclusive natures, though almost everything we know about these endangered bears is from the study of captive animals. So again it's one of those things where they're pros and cons to the situation. Uh. You know, sometimes it's hard to see an animal in a captive situation, even if it's in the best possible, you know, very perfectly designed environment. But at the same time, if we didn't have them in captivity, we would not know anything about them and would not be as informed to you know, kind of pursue conservation efforts. So there are two sides to that coin. And today giant pandas living in US facilities actually still belong to China. It's not a situation like Ruth Hardness where she could go get one and then sell it here. They are all owned by China. Uh. If you see a panda in a US zoo, it is leased by the Chinese government, and those leasing fees actually go back into a fund that is used to further the study and conservation of giant pandas in their native home. UH. The Giant Panda Reserve at Woolong has been pretty successful at kind of figuring out how to breed pandas. It's still tricky. There's still a lot of work to be done, but they are getting to a point where they feel like they will soon be able to reintroduce panda's born in captivity into the wild and start bolstering their wild numbers. Having a having a panda in a zoo as an enormous financial commitment. It's really huge any animal in a zoo. I think that's one of those things people don't realize when they say, why are tickets to this place? Is so expensive and it's like, okay, keeping a whale alive for a year across like a million dollars. Well, and on top of all, you know, the food in the habitat and all that stuff. Like the amount of money that the zoo gives to China for panda conservation research is enormous um. Sue Lynn is still viewable in taxid army form along with the Tavo lions. He's on display in the Field Museum's taxid Army Exhibit. Yeah. I feel like we should get a kickback from the Field. We send people there all the time. Somebody tweeted at us that they had gone to the American Museum of Natural History to see the lines and I was like, oh no, that's wrong. Museum there in the field. Oh man, I love the field. I gotta get back here soon. Uh. And while the Ruth the work of Ruth harkne Us draws varying opinions, as we've said, there are two sides to the whole kind of capturing of an animal. Coin in this situation, at a time when shooting exotic beasts for sport was happening, she really did shift the public thinking on pandas into one of adoration. She's sometimes credited, you'll see, like in quick bios of hers, she's the woman that started the panda craze, which is kind of an interesting phrase anyway. But you know, this this shift in mindset where people suddenly saw it as a sweet thing, Let's find the interesting animal and protect it, instead of let's find the interesting animal and shooting it until it is dead. Yeah, So she's she's had a significant impact on how we view not just pandas, but many other animals. I think it it kind of shifted the way biologists and zoologists were thinking about them at the time. You know, at some point those people recognize that, like you can know everything about zoology that you know, but you're gonna need to get people that are not educated in biology and science on board with you if you're gonna get the funding to keep these efforts going, right, That's part of it. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. 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