Case #6 Kotter

Summary

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Mystery Show – Case #6: Kotter

Podcast: Mystery Show
Host: Starlee Kine
Episode Title: Case #6: Kotter
Release Date: July 31, 2015

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Episode Overview

In this episode, host Starlee Kine tackles a peculiar and charmingly trivial mystery submitted by her friend Jonathan: Why does the Welcome Back, Kotter lunchbox, displayed at the Smithsonian, feature a scene that makes no sense—a character holding up a denim jacket with its sleeves tied into knots? Did this odd image actually happen on the show, or did the lunchbox illustrator invent it? With Starlee’s signature wit and an investigative journey spanning TV re-runs, interviews, and even professional wrestling locker rooms, the episode asks: what’s with the knots, and where did this mysterious prank originate?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Genesis of the Mystery

[01:03 – 07:52]

• Jonathan, a passionate Welcome Back, Kotter fan, sees the lunchbox at the Smithsonian and is baffled by the depiction of a knotted-sleeve prank.
• Recalls being so obsessed with the show he used to tape the audio and memorize lines like, “My mother was a saint!” (Jonathan quoting Vinnie Barbarino, [02:45])
• Jonathan pleads with Starlee to investigate the origin of the scene.

Memorable Quote:

"They could have put Freddy Boom Boom Washington doing the air base… Barbarino doing the Barbarino dance. Why this?"
—Jonathan [07:04]

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2. Exhausting Canonical Explanations

[08:01 – 14:57]

• Starlee delegates seasons of Kotter to her investigators to see if the jacket prank ever appeared in the show.
• Recap of Kotter’s denim-heavy wardrobe and penchant for pranks, but nothing resembling the lunchbox scene.

Notable Quotes:

"Denim is so pervasive in Welcome Back Kotter…"
—Lisa, Investigator [09:40]

"As far as I can tell, that jacket thing never happened in season two. I'm a little afraid I was watching so closely, I missed it…"
—Eric, Investigator [11:02]

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3. Speaking with the Show Creators

[14:57 – 24:11]

• Starlee meets Alan Sachs (co-creator), who shares an unrelated but wild story about being held at gunpoint by Phil Spector, triggered by the phrase “who’s we?” [15:02–21:47]
• When questioned about the lunchbox, Sachs admits with candor:

Memorable Quote:

"Oh, that. I don’t remember."
—Alan Sachs [22:04]

• Sachs confirms he had no input on merchandise imagery and didn't know what the knotted jacket was about.

• Starlee then gets email input from Gabe Kaplan (who played Kotter):

“I think you're making way too much out of this… The images are solely from the mind of the illustrator."
—Gabe Kaplan (via email) [24:30]

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4. Who Was the Illustrator?

[25:37 – 47:45]

• Starlee investigates Aladdin Industries and Elmer Lennart (the artist).
• Interviews with Beverly and “Joe the neighbor kid”—Elmer’s protégés and friends—paint Elmer as exacting, intensely dedicated, and a craftsman with quirky humor.
• Elmer was notorious for inserting shirt/hand gags in his illustrations and sometimes painted himself into the scenes.
• Beverly recalls Elmer advised her to practice her weaknesses: “Don’t run away from something you’re not good at. Go at it, learn it.” [31:07]

Memorable Quote:

"He spent so much time and took so much pride in what he was doing. He very much loved his work… I can attribute the fact I wanted to become a commercial artist because of him."
—Joe, Neighbor Kid [30:19]

• No one directly remembers the reason for the jacket knots, though Beverly suspects:

"It might be a joke, but what's the joke? … You try to put on your jean jacket and the knots are in the sleeve, and you can't get it on.”
—Beverly [41:38]

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5. Tracing the Prank’s Origin: Wrestling, Sitcoms, & Pranking Traditions

[45:01 – 56:48]

• Starlee explores whether Elmer’s wrestling background inspired the prank, but professional wrestler (and seamster) Colt Cabana hasn't seen it as a wrestling move:

"There's wrestling moves where you can actually put a person in a physical knot."
—Colt Cabana [49:37]

• The prank of tying sleeves in knots does show up elsewhere: in an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, written by Dave, who admits it just popped into his mind:

"No, no, it came from my mind, I guess."
—Dave [55:40]

• Still, the direct link is elusive; perhaps it’s simply an old, mischievous idea.

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6. The Cowboy Connection

[66:14 – 69:43]

• The eureka moment arrives: Starlee finds John, dubbed “the modern cowboy,” who confirms it’s an old cowboy prank:

“I've done it many times. Uncountable times… All of us think in simple cause and effect terms. Our arm is a sleeve. Our arm will go through the sleeve.”
—John the Cowboy [66:14]

• Cowboys left shirts lying around at roundups; others would tie the sleeves, leaving the prank victim to struggle.
• The prank migrated into other contexts—like church choir robes.

Memorable Exchange:

"Do you think this is a distinct cowboy prank?"
—Starlee [68:37]

"The knotted sleeves… only people I ever knew who did it."
—John the Cowboy [68:40]

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7. Conclusion & Resolution

[69:02 – 70:14]

• Jonathan expresses satisfaction: the mystery of the knotted sleeves is solved—it was an old, obscure American prank (even if not iconic).

"This is very satisfying. This is great."
—Jonathan [70:09]

• Starlee gifts Jonathan the lunchbox, transforming his home into a mini-Smithsonian.
• The true “mystery” transcends the TV show: how everyday absurdities and personal quirks can become lasting artifacts.

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Highlighted Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• "My mother was a saint." —Jonathan quoting Kotter ([02:45], recurring joke)
• "He’s accusing somebody of doing something to his jacket… He’s saying to Travolta, ‘You tied this up, you tied knots in my shirt.’" —Alan Sachs ([22:40])
• "I think you’re making way too much out of this… The images are solely from the mind of the illustrator." —Gabe Kaplan ([24:30])
• "His sketches and concepts were just unbelievable." —Beverly, on Elmer ([27:18])
• "You could always tell an Elmer lunchbox by the character's hands… Each finger was individual, defined." —Starlee ([31:53])
• "It might be a joke, but what's the joke?" —Beverly ([41:38])
• "I can't say that I have [seen this in wrestling]." —Colt Cabana ([49:37])
• "I've done it many times. Uncountable times." —John the Cowboy ([66:14])
• "This is very satisfying. This is great." —Jonathan ([70:09])

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Fun Anecdotes & Cultural Connections

• Alan Sachs' harrowing Phil Spector story ([15:02–21:47])
• The rigid approval process and superstar egos behind every lunchbox design (Rex Harrison’s eye color dispute, Disney's 30 concepts for one box)
• Starlee and her team spot a Welcome Back, Kotter lunchbox perched atop a random coffee shop ice machine ([58:08])—the mystery haunts them everywhere.
• Professional wrestling subculture’s ribbing/prank parallels, especially the anecdote of hiding a champion’s belt ([50:57])
• Realization that both Beverly and Joe ended up in lunchbox art themselves

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Key Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:58 – 07:52: Jonathan’s mystery presented; origins of his Kotter fandom and lunchbox discovery
• 08:01 – 14:57: Investigators watch Kotter for signs of the prank
• 14:57 – 24:11: Interview with co-creator Alan Sachs; Gabe Kaplan’s email
• 25:37 – 47:45: Inside Aladdin Industries, Elmer’s colleagues reflect on his life and creative choices
• 49:37 – 52:55: Wrestling world and pranks, with Colt Cabana
• 54:34 – 56:48: The Always Sunny in Philadelphia connection explored
• 66:14 – 69:43: Discovery of the cowboy origin
• 69:02 – End: Resolution, Jonathan receives the lunchbox

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Tone & Style

• Playful, curious, and wry throughout—Starlee’s narration is self-deprecating, gently mocking the absurdity and sweetness of the quest.
• The episode leans into the nostalgia and oddity of TV memorabilia, elevating a trivial question into a meaningful adventure about cultural memory, personal obsession, and the quirky ways small mysteries endure.

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In Summary

Case #6 “Kotter” takes what sounds like a small, absurd question—why a lunchbox shows a prank never seen on Welcome Back, Kotter—and spins it into a wide-ranging exploration of American pop culture, artistic invention, and the persistence of old jokes. Ultimately, the knotted-sleeve jacket prank is found not in the canon of TV, but in a forgotten cowboy tradition—and in the whimsical mind of an artist, Elmer Lennart, whose work continues to boggle and enchant. As always, Starlee Kine delivers a tale that's less about the answer, and more about the pursuit.

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Transcript

[Starlee Kine]

From Gimlet. I'm Starly Kine, and this is Mystery Show. Why is there time? Every week I solve a new mystery. Why is there space mysteries that can't be solved? Online mysteries you can't solve yourself? Why are there dogs and cats and trees in the human race? Up until now, there hasn't been anyone to help with this. That person is now me. Those mysteries.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Tomorrow I'll find out what I should know.

[Eric (Investigator)]

Those mysteries I don't even know. But I don't even know those mysteries.

[Starlee Kine]

They're hanging round and round and round and round.

[Jonathan]

Should I start from the beginning?

[Starlee Kine]

Does the beginning mean childhood?

[Jonathan]

Not that beginning.

[Starlee Kine]

This mystery belongs to my friend Jonathan.

[Jonathan]

A couple weekends ago, I went to the Smithsonian institute in Washington, D.C. but I didn't do any of, like, the smart things and go see, like, you know, documents. I looked at Dorothy from the wizard of Oz's shoes, Archie Bunker's chair, you know, the dumbass part of the museum. So I saw that stuff. And then 10 minutes later, I went to the cafeteria to get something to eat.

[Starlee Kine]

How many minutes did you spend getting lunch and how many minutes did you spend at the museum?

[Jonathan]

I probably spent more time at the cafeteria. It was a good lunch. And on the way in, they have behind glass all of these lunch pails. And what caught my eye was a welcome Back Cotter lunch pail. The sitcom from the 70s starring Gabe Kaplan and John Travolta about a group of four guys in high school. I guess they were learning disabled or youth at risk juvenile delinquents. Yeah, they were juvenile delinquents, I guess. Yeah. With learning disabilities, definitely. Arnold Horschak either had a learning disability or was just Jewish, but back then it was funny and they called them sweaths. I was a huge welcome Matt Cotter fan. Like, I loved it so much that not only did I watch it, I used to tape record. I had an audio tape recorder, and I used to tape episodes and then listen to them again later, like, as though they were radio plays.

[Starlee Kine]

Really?

[Jonathan]

Yeah. And I used to even, like, memorize lines that I thought were cool that I could use in school. Like, your mom's so low that she could play handball against the curb. There's a lot of mother jokes. Like John Travolta's character Vinnie Barberino would always say, not about my mother. My mother was a saint. Remember that?

[Starlee Kine]

Nope, absolutely not.

[Jonathan]

I. In fact, I think I just used that line on you last time I saw you. I said, hey, like, you brought up my mother. And I said, My mother's a saint. I was quoting Vinnie Barberino.

[Starlee Kine]

At this point, it seemed harder to believe that Jonathan had ever said anything to me that wasn't from welcome Back Cotter.

[Jonathan]

So I was studying the scene depicted on the lunch pail, and there was something in the image that made no sense to me. And I just stood there for quite a while, holding my tray full of food, just staring at this lunch pail, trying to figure out what the. What the image. What I'm going to do is I'm going to summon it up because they.

[Starlee Kine]

Took a photograph of it, a photo on Jonathan's phone. Now, that piqued my interest.

[Jonathan]

I could show you my iPhone. I mean, I've got, like. I've only taken maybe four pictures. One of my niece, one of my nephew, maybe a picture of a parking sign. So I remembered where I parked or something. And then this welcome Back Kotter lunch pail. I don't like to waste. I don't like to waste memory, said.

[Starlee Kine]

The man whose childhood memories were filled to capacity with welcome Back Cotter episodes.

[Jonathan]

Okay, now, in the scene, you see all four Sweathogs and Mr. Cotter, they're all standing outside a locker bank, and Juan Epstein and Vinnie Barberino look as though they're about to get into a fight. And that's the moment that's been immortalized on this. On this lunch pa. So I was like, that's really odd. Juan would never fight with Barbarino. They were all friends. So I looked at it more closely, and I realized Juan Epstein is holding his jacket, which is like a denim jacket, a jean jacket, the kind of jacket that a juvenile delinquent in the 70s might wear. And the sleeves of the jacket have knots in them, like someone has taken the sleeve, like a length of rope or a shoelace and has just tied knots in it.

[Starlee Kine]

Epstein is dangling the jacket in front of Barbarino accusingly, as though it were a dead pet left on his porch by a madman.

[Jonathan]

Freddy Boom Boom Washington is behind them, and Arnold Horshak is behind Barbarino and looks like he's pulling Barbarino back.

[Starlee Kine]

If you need a visual picture, one of those huge Renaissance paintings of Christ being taken down off the cross, crown of thorns on his head, lifeless body cradled by his disciples. The lunchbox scene is a lot like that, except instead of Christ, it's a jean jacket with knots in the sleeves.

[Jonathan]

What makes it so inscrutable to me is the presence of the sleeve knotted jacket. It's something I've never. Have you ever heard of that, like, jacket sleeve knotting? What is that about? Was that, like, a thing? Was that a prank that people pulled in the 70s?

[Starlee Kine]

Jonathan had thought museums were places you go to grab a nice lunch. Turned out they also contained mysteries.

[Jonathan]

Cause I can't find it on the Internet. I looked up all kinds of different permutations. Knotting, jacket sleeves, knots in coat sleeves, knot, sleeve, joke, or.

[Starlee Kine]

But while the knots in the sleeves might have been what most confounded Jonathan, it was the injustice of it that most wounded him. Millions of years from now, when the world has turned to dust and nothing but the wall of lunchboxes is left standing, this is how welcome Back Cotter would be regarded by future civilizations.

[Jonathan]

I don't think it's an image taken from the actual TV show. I think that whoever the artist was who created the picture might have never seen the show.

[Starlee Kine]

Have you seen all the episodes?

[Jonathan]

Yes. Repeat like. Yeah, many times over and then also.

[Starlee Kine]

Listen to the audio. Some of the episodes.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I would listen to the audio afterwards. Yeah.

[Starlee Kine]

And you don't remember the sound of, like, denim being pulled taut?

[Jonathan]

What would that sound be?

[Starlee Kine]

And like all the great armchair lunchbox designers before him, Jonathan had some ideas of his own about how it should have gone.

[Jonathan]

They could have put Freddie Boom Boom Washington doing the air base, and he'd go, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom boom. They could have put Arnold Horchak raising his hand and going, ooh, ooh, ooh. Barbarino doing the Barbarino dance. Why this? I'm wondering, where does this come from? Was it a thing? Was it a national craze, like the, you know, the Charleston in the 20s or something? Jacket nodding in the 70s. And it's just something lost to us. So I'm curious about that. And I'm also curious about whoever the artist was who created the picture on the lunch pail, whether it was drawn from his own history or something that he just invented wholesale. So I am imploring you to get to the bottom of this, of this mystery.

[Starlee Kine]

It doesn't sound like you're imploring me. Why don't I come back?

[Jonathan]

The imploring. Then I'd like you to help me. I'd like you to help me get to the bottom of this.

[Starlee Kine]

There you go.

[Jonathan]

Okay.

[Starlee Kine]

As someone who's been in the mystery business for weeks, this case, frankly, seemed a little beneath my experience level. The knotted jacket had probably been on the show and Jonathan had just forgotten. Just like he would have forgotten where he parked that one time if he hadn't Taken a picture of the space or just like how he'd forgotten to document the rest of his whole entire life. But nonetheless, I agreed to take on his case. I'd spend a few hours on it. You know, a favor for an old palace. Besides, I always have been a sucker for a good, imploring. Welcome Back Cotter was on for four seasons, but the last season was shot in 1979, and the Lunchbox came out in 1977. That meant a scene couldn't be in season four. I was making brisk work of this. Already there were 22 episodes a season, each episode 24 minutes long. Without commercials. That's 1584 minutes, or a little more than one full day. I didn't have that kind of time, not without it cutting into my watching other television shows. So I enlisted the help of two of my investigators. I told them that ideally they'd find the scene itself, but they were to be on the lookout for other clues, too. Anything knotted, anything denim. And of course, any pranks, hijinks, escapades, capers, antics, or larks. If there was so much as a banana peel out of place, I wanted to hear about it. Whatever is going on in that picture in the lunchbox is way too complicated for the typical plot line of a welcome Back Cotter episode. Lisa Took the First Shift, season one. Okay, do they wear a denim shirt? Oh, my God. Denim is so pervasive in welcome Back Cotter. Now we're getting somewhere. When they have all the extras and the sweathogs in the room, it's just a sea of denim. I made notes on this. Okay, there's denim jackets, denim jeans, denim shirts, bell bottoms that are denim, and then with patches of other kinds of denim. There are people who wear outfits where the top is a denim shirt and the bottom is jeans. A lot of them have jeans with no back pockets. That's weird. Vinnie Barberino has a denim jacket that's actually like, I didn't know this was ever cool, but it's more like a barn style jacket cut with the bigger pockets. It's like a mom jean jacket. You know what I'm saying? But he has such a long torso. I don't know if they had any choice. I have to say, one of the top 10 things that stood out to me was the length of John Travolta's torso. Are pranks a significant part of the show? They're definitely there. There are pranks. Okay, so like, a typical prank from season one would be like, oh, we took the signs off the bathrooms. And we put the sign for girls.

[Beverly]

On the boys bathroom.

[Starlee Kine]

We put the sign for boys on the girls bathroom. That's a solid prank. You like that? Wait till you watch your season. Believe me, I will wait. Because first I had to check in with Eric about his season.

[Eric (Investigator)]

As far as I can tell, that jacket thing never happened in season two. I'm a little afraid that it's gonna be a situation where I was, like, watching it so closely. I missed it, you know, I finished them at, I think 12, 15 at night. And I got to the end and I was like, all right. I didn't see it, did I?

[Starlee Kine]

I can't believe you. I'm not sure.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

I know.

[Eric (Investigator)]

I got really excited. I think it's episode three, maybe the vice principal character was rummaging through the Sweathog's lockers. They get to Bobarino's locker and they open it up and he pulls out a jacket. I'm like, oh, this has got to be it. There's gotta be something here. So I watched really intently because it was so heavy on the jacket.

[Starlee Kine]

You lean in close to the screen for that one.

[Eric (Investigator)]

I leaned in so close to the screen.

[Starlee Kine]

Is your nose pressed to the screen?

[Eric (Investigator)]

It was not pressed to the scre.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

What?

[Starlee Kine]

Watching intently, looks like.

[Eric (Investigator)]

I'm sorry to have let you down again.

[Starlee Kine]

It was time for my season. Season three. By season three, the cast of welcome Back Cotter were some of the biggest stars in the country. In interviews from that time, the Sweaths acknowledged the danger of becoming so famous so young, they knew they wouldn't be 26 playing 16 years old forever. The trick to staying relevant to Robert Hedges, who played Epstein was to do it all. Act, direct, produce. He'd already started a film production company called Sativa, which was Latin for marijuana, sort of. That year, John Travolta starred in both Saturday Night Fever and Grease. His scene stressed me out. I kept looking for indications of lack of commitment to the role of Barbarino now that he'd become a movie star, such as the phoning in of his catchphrase, only doing the who and the what, but not bothering with the wear. Welcome Back Cotter takes place on four sets, more or less. The classroom, the hallway by the lockers, the schoolyard, and the Cotter's living room. The same articles of clothing appear over and over again. One shirt in particular, a T shirt with a bald eagle ironed on, kept showing up on different sweathawks as though they were real life friends who shared each other's clothes. There was no knotted jean Jacket in season three. I did, however, find an important bit of Cotter pranking philosophy. In episode 18, a new girl, Angie, enrolls in their one room schoolhouse, James Buchanan High. She walks into class and the sweathogs go nuts. I'm pretty sure you can see Epstein's heart beat out of his chest through his shirt, all Bugs Bunny like. But Angie's not interested in dating the Sweaths. She wants to become one of them. She drops paint on the vice principal as a way of impressing the guys. But Barbarino calls her an amateur. Our stunts always have two things he tells her. They're original and they leave no evidence. The knotted jean jacket prank satisfied both criteria. It was so original, no one had ever heard of it. And apparently it left not a shred of evidence behind. I needed to talk to someone who worked directly on the show. Maybe the lunchbox image came from something that happened on the set, like an inside joke. 5 out of 6 of the main welcome Back Cotter cast members were either dead, turn me down when I asked, or were John Travolta dealing with the release of Going Clear on hbo. The six was Gabe Kaplan, who played Cotter himself, as in welcome Back comma. I was given his cell phone number but didn't hear back. So I tried the man who he co created the show with, Alan Sachs. Dear Mr. Sachs, I wrote, there's an image on the Cotter lunchbox that we just can't understand. Hi, I'm here to see Alan Sachs. Alan got back to me right away and gave me his address so I could come talk to him about it in person.

[Jonathan]

How you doing?

[Starlee Kine]

I'm good. He had just one question, though. Who was we?

[Alan Sachs]

So before we get started, although maybe we are started, I wanted to tell you something.

[Starlee Kine]

Yeah.

[Alan Sachs]

When you said we, you know, in the email, then I responded to you, who's we? It struck something that was really one of the real interesting events in my life. I was held at gunpoint by Phil Spector for like five hours. When was this? It was 1980. I was producing this pilot for ABC and who better for me to get to do the music than Phil Spector? And I got him on the phone and he says, great, come on over. So we set up a time, he and I, and his secretary calls me to confirm and she said, who's coming? And I said, I'm coming myself. And he said, okay, I'll let Phil know that come at 7:30. But as I'm leaving the office, the casting director is there. He said, what are you doing, let's go get some Japanese food. And I said, okay, let's do that.

[Jonathan]

And.

[Alan Sachs]

But I gotta go over to Phil Spector's house tonight. Why don't you take a ride with me? We'll go up there, we'll listen to some music and then we'll go out to eat. Afterwards we get in my car, we start driving down the Sunset Strip. You know, we're smoking a joint, we're listening to Dire Straits on the radio on the way to Phil Spector's house, very excited. So now we get to the end of Sunset and he lives up a cliff, cul de sac in Beverly Hills. As we're getting closer, there's barbed wire signs that say, no trespassing. Protected by Smith and Wesson. Press the buzzer, the gate opens up. Drive my car in, park it. We get out. Two dogs come charging at us.

[Jonathan]

Oh my God.

[Alan Sachs]

The door opens up and there's a guy standing in like a karate suit, a giant. He said, hi, I'm George, I'm Phil's man. Hi, George, I'm Alan, this is Kathy. Come on in. We go in, George closes the door and he locks it with a key from the inside, Click, click, click. And puts the key in his pocket. So I look at Kathy and the only way I know we can get out of there is, is that George has to open up the door. He brings us into, you know, this beautifully appointed living room. Tiffany shades, leather bound books, leather chairs, pictures of Lennon, pictures of the Ramones, pictures of Ike and Tina, the Reichs brothers. And suddenly at the very far end of the room, huge, huge rooms, we hear rustling. Then Phil Spector comes down the steps and he looks over at Kathy and I and he screams at the top of his lungs, there's too many people here. There's too many people in my house. See, he wasn't expecting Kathy. That's why the Wii. This is, this is the Wii. He's screaming, ah, there's no, too many people here. I go, wait, no, no, wait. It's just me and Kathy who works for me. He goes running out, He comes down about a half hour later, sits down at the coffee table, shakes my hand, and he looks at me and says, what are you doing here? I said, well, you know what I'm doing here. I called you, we spoke on the phone. I want you to do the music for this pilot that I'm doing. He said, no, no, no, you're here because you want to go back and tell people I drink too much, I take drugs, And I play with guns. With that. He stands up, he takes off his jacket, and he's strapped with the biggest gun I've ever been in a room in. In my life. And now the gun comes out. And I said, put that shit away, man. I got to get out of here. He said, no, no, you're not. We're not ready to go yet. And for the next six hours, there's all sorts of, like, waving the gun around insanity. He asked me if I knew karate, and I said, no. He said, come on, I'll show you karate. And then he said, do you like Leonard Cohen? I said, I love Leonard Cohen. He said, good. I want to play you some tracks. And so now we have to go and lay down in his music room. I'm on the floor. He's on the floor. Kathy's on the floor. The gun is between us, and we have the headset on, and we're listening to Leonard Cohen singing. You like Leonard? Death of a Ladies Man. That album. I'm listening to the tracks of Death of a Ladies man, you know, with Spectre, with a gun between us. And then he said, come on, I wrote the music for you. You wrote the music for me? Are you kidding me? Wow. So we go up to the piano room, and he starts playing on the piano a dirge, and I can't sing, but it goes like. We're all rock and rollers, Rock and rollers all trying to earn a living before the final curtain call. And the gun is, like, on the piano. And he would pick it up every once in a while and go, ha ha ha. Come on, Alan, sing it with me. We're all rock and rollers. Rock and roll is all trying to earn a of lot living before the final curtain. So this went on for hours, Till finally some guy who worked at a radio station, he was working the late lobster shift, he was getting off and called Phil and said, hey, I want to come by. I want to come by with this woman I'm with, you know. Phil said, yeah, come on by. So when this guy. We were able to scurry out of the room like kittens. And then we were gone the next day. He sent me, like, all sorts of gifts, like Phil Spector cocktail napkins. And the note that said, hey, Al, I really had a swell time with you last night. Let's do it again soon.

[Starlee Kine]

Do you use the song the Dirk?

[Alan Sachs]

No, no. But the president of ABC said to me, well, did you get Phil Spector to do the music? Does he want to do it? I Said, you know what he does. But I tell you something, Marty, you gotta have the next meeting with him. Cause I'm not. So when you said we.

[Starlee Kine]

Who's we?

[Alan Sachs]

I didn't want a surprise. I was doing my Phil Spector, so now we could talk about Carter.

[Starlee Kine]

I decided to get right to the point, lest I let another careless pronoun slip out. I asked Alan, if it wasn't too much trouble, would he please tell me every single thing he knew about the welcome Back Kotter lunchbox?

[Alan Sachs]

Oh, that. I don't remember.

[Starlee Kine]

Of course he didn't.

[Alan Sachs]

I didn't really care about the merchandise in Cotter.

[Starlee Kine]

Didn't care was one way of putting it.

[Alan Sachs]

Another was I got screwed on that show.

[Starlee Kine]

Alan had sold the pilot for Kotter within six months of moving to Hollywood. He had no idea what he was doing. He didn't get syndication rights. He didn't get merchandising rights. He did get a lot of hotel pool lounging time in, though. But until that counts as legal tender, as I've often petitioned for it too, there wasn't much he could do with that. Now, I showed Allen the image on the lunchbox. What do you think is happening in that?

[Alan Sachs]

This is Epstein's jacket.

[Starlee Kine]

Okay.

[Alan Sachs]

He's accusing somebody of doing something to his jacket.

[Starlee Kine]

Okay. Do you see the knots in the sleeves?

[Alan Sachs]

Oh, yeah. What is that all about? I don't know why that happened. He's saying to Travolta, you tied this up. You tied knots in my shirt.

[Starlee Kine]

Why would they tie knots in the shirt? Is that a thing? Was this a thing in your childhood?

[Alan Sachs]

I have no idea. I have no idea.

[Starlee Kine]

You're. By the way, you're like wearing what's on the lunchbox. You're wearing a denim shirt, button down shirt, and jeans.

[Alan Sachs]

This is from Japan.

[Jonathan]

Okay.

[Alan Sachs]

This is. This is a Japanese denim shirt.

[Starlee Kine]

Very nice.

[Alan Sachs]

I haven't even worn this shirt in like four years. It was in the back of my closet.

[Starlee Kine]

So you didn't dress for the lunchbox, but you just happened to like, I.

[Alan Sachs]

Didn'T dress for the lunchbox? No, no. That would have been fucked up. That's funny. But it's spring. I wanted to wear a transitional shirt that will get me from the winter to the spring in like a very subtle way. And I wanted it to be soft.

[Starlee Kine]

I left Allen's no closer to understanding the purpose of putting knots in a jean jacket sleeves, but much more open minded about the versatility of denim in general as an option all year round. Allen was still in touch with Gabe Kaplan and he connected the two of us by email. I updated my client. I talked to Alan Sachs, who's the co creator of welcome at Cotter. Great guy.

[Jonathan]

What about Gabe Kaplan? Unavailable.

[Starlee Kine]

Oh, do you want me to see the.

[Jonathan]

What? You spoke to Gabe Kaplan. No, you didn't.

[Starlee Kine]

From Gabe Kaplan. Oh. To Starley. Email right here.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Oh, okay.

[Starlee Kine]

Sent at 1:02am Hi, Starlie. I think you're making way too much out of this. The images are solely from the mind of the illustrator. He probably saw a couple of shows and came up with his ideas. If you ask me to guess what action the picture is trying to detail, my guess is that as Cotter and the sweathogs look on, Epstein is challenging Barbarino in some way. I like that he refers to him as Cotter. There's nothing behind the grassy knoll, Gabe. Which means definitely. There's definitely something behind the grassy knoll. Nice try, Gabe Kaplan, but your clever attempt to call me off the case backfired. I now had a new direction to head in toward the mind of the lunchbox's illustrator. It was none too soon either, as the lunchbox mystery seemed to be tightening its grip on Jonathan's already caught or clogged mind.

[Jonathan]

When I'm on the subway going to work, I look at people sitting across from me and I think, which of them has jackets whose sleeves would lend themselves to being knotted the easiest? Like I've seen someone in a fur coat and I'd think, oh, that would be a really hard one to Jacket, sleeve, knot.

[Starlee Kine]

But an interesting challenge.

[Jonathan]

An interesting challenge? Yes. You know, see someone with an overcoat or one of those sleeveless jackets, and then you think, well, what are you going to do with that?

[Starlee Kine]

What am I going to do with that? Find out after the break. Welcome back. Welcome back. Welcome back. I'd moved on to my next person of interest, the creator of the lunchbox. I needed to find this outsider, this dilettante who'd waltzed in and gotten Jonathan's role models all wrong. I quickly found a name. Elmer Leonard. Not the author of Get Shorty Lennart with a T and Elmer with an ER. Elmer worked for 30 years at Aladdin Industries. Aladdin made lunchboxes, lots of them. If you were a child before you were an adult and you relied on food for sustenance, chances are good that you carried a lunchbox. Illustrated by Elmer. Interrogating Elmer about the welcome Back Cotter lunchbox, though, would be difficult, if not impossible. Elmer wasn't alive. I take back the Part about calling him a dilettante. To solve the mystery, I would have to assemble a dossier based on eyewitness accounts. If Elmer was the Don Draper of lunchboxes, which he was, I just said it. Beverly was his Peggy.

[Beverly]

When I first started working with him, I was 23. He loved doing lunchboxes. His sketches and concepts were just unbelievable.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

He was just good.

[Starlee Kine]

So I understand you lived across the street from Elmer Leonard.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

I did.

[Starlee Kine]

This is Joe, the neighbor kid.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

My family built a house right across the street from his house when I was 4 years old. And these were big Southern neighborhoods, really big lots. As his house was up on a big hill in clear sight from my home and had a paved driveway. And above the garage was his studio. And I remember going into his studio as a kid, walking over there on my own. I don't even remember if he invited me or if I invited myself. He would let me watch him paint. At the time, I was married to a woman that it didn't work out in the long run, but I was freelancing and she wanted me to have a regular job.

[Starlee Kine]

And this is Dan, the late in life friend.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

And I went down to interview for Aladdin. They were looking for an illustrator. And actually I met Elmer the first day.

[Beverly]

Elmer was a very unique, very talented individual.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

He was not unpleasant, but he wasn't like gregarious at all.

[Beverly]

He was very demanding, very, very quiet.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

He was gruff, very, very reserved.

[Beverly]

Some people had a hard time with him, but Elmer and I got along great. Really. Inside, Elmer was a teddy bear.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

I, unlike Mr. Linhart, am a very talkative, very verbal kind of personality. But I don't recall him at all acting annoyed by my questions. And he certainly, you know, talked to me a lot. He asked me. One of the first things he asked me was, did you carry a lunchbox when you were a kid? And I said, yeah, I carried Davy Crockett. And he said, I did the artwork. That's one of the reasons I took the job. I liked the idea of working with Elmer. You know, here's the guy that illustrated the lunchboxes that I admired as a child. Made me feel like I was in the presence of something I actually owned. The doctor do little lunchbox. So I brought him my lunchbox. I said, mom says you did this painting? And he goes, I did. He pulled out the illustration boards with those paintings on them. And the illustration had little tick marks and instructions.

[Starlee Kine]

And did it look just like your lunchbox?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

It did, but, you know, I don't know if you've ever, like, seen a poster of a Monet painting and then seen it in person. The vibrance of the real thing is incredible. I loved my lunchbox. But here was this original painting that was, that was the same size but much more vivid. He spent so much time and took so much pride in what he was doing. He very much loved his work. I mean, that really set me on a path. Ultimately, I can attribute the fact that I wanted to become a commercial artist because of him.

[Beverly]

He'd say, don't run away from something you're not good at. Go at it, learn it. Like when I was building my house, I said, elmer, I need to build me a retaining wall. So Elmer brought me in a book, how to Lay Block and Brick. And so then I studied how to lay brick. One night my dad was calling me about midnight, said, what are you doing, Bev? I said, oh, I'm pouring footing for my retaining wall. He went, you're doing what? You know, my father going through World War II, he was, you know, the man is the head of the household, you know, and I never resented my father for that. It's just that's the way he was brought up. But when Elmer come along in my life, he convinced me there wasn't anything I couldn't do.

[Starlee Kine]

One time, Beverly told Elmer that she was terrible at drawing hands. He told her that she should practice drawing them 15 minutes every morning, over and over again. You could always tell an Elmer lunchbox by the character's hands, while other artists only showed fists or hands that were one meshed together unit. On Elmer's, each finger was individual, defined. It's true. On the Cotter lunchbox, you can see every last wet hog digit. Mr. Cotter's hand drawn his hips, his fingers splayed as he shoots his students. A what Are yous Guys Up To Now?

[Jonathan]

Look.

[Starlee Kine]

Epstein's left hand grips the knotted jacket sleeve while his right hand points its index finger at it. The pointing finger, in fact, seems to have been one of Elmer's go to moves. On the Beverly Hillbillies lunchbox, Jethro points out the family's fancy new digs as they pull up in their jalopy piled high with everything they own. On the Adam 12 box, a terrifying little girl clutching a teddy bear points gleefully at her brother who's gotten his head stuck at a gate. And it goes without saying that Elmer was the perfect artist to capture and tin the most famous pointing finger of the 1980s et. Since the lunch boxes were commissioned before the actual film or TV show came out. The Aladdin illustrators were sent footage that they then chose images from. Sometimes they were invited to secret screenings. It was Elmer who came up with Aladdin's signature style, to have the images on the lunchbox tell a story so that the kid who it belonged to would want to look all over it. Like miniature, portable versions of the films and shows they loved. And Aladdin, based in Nashville, was like a miniature version of the Hollywood studio system. There were the trips to LA to meet with bigwigs.

[Beverly]

I went in this huge office and it was all glass. Back in the back.

[Starlee Kine]

That's Beverly again.

[Beverly]

And in walks this guy. He was all real disheveled, and he looked like somebody had been cleaning up. You know what I mean? And he turned around and it was Spielberg.

[Starlee Kine]

Spielberg himself had to approve the lunchbox. Yes, he wanted to.

[Beverly]

Mm.

[Starlee Kine]

There were the fragile egos of movie stars to consider.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Rex Harrison was in every surface of the freaking lunchbox because he was Dr. Dolittle. So, you know, five different instances of Rex Harrison standing there with a push me, pull you and the big giant snail. And we spent some time looking at it, and he showed me a few things. And then he says, and. And you see the color of his eyes? I say, yeah. And it's this tiny little dot of paint. He said, I had to redo that several times because Rex Harrison told me that his eyes were not that color.

[Starlee Kine]

As well as the fickle, impossible to please taste of network executives, every year.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

I had to come up with a new concept for Mickey and Minnie lunchboxes. I had Mickey and Minnie in Paris, and Mickey and Minnie in a nostalgic soda fountain. Mickey and Minnie. Caveman pirate. Mickey and Minnie. I mean, it was a long process. Doing one illustration. Illustration. Because there's approval from Disney at every stage. She would send concept after concept and they would, you know, no, let's see some more. I think on one, I wound up doing about 30 different concepts till I got so frustrated that I did Mickey holding the leash, looking down at Pluto squashed on the road with tire tracks down his back.

[Starlee Kine]

What? You killed Pluto?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Yeah, I ran him over. He had the little crosses on his eyeballs. And I sent it to Disney. And the art director at the time, she called me up and she said, you know, we're not going to approve that. But all the artists here passed it around and had a good laugh.

[Starlee Kine]

There was the ever present risk of producing a flop.

[Beverly]

Duke's a Hazzard. When we first saw that show out in California, we thought, oh, My God, that is the stupidest show. And then all of a sudden, you know, it became one of our top.

[Starlee Kine]

Sellers, or of passing on a hit that would then go to a competing studio, or in Aladdin's case, arrival lunchbox manufacturer Thermos.

[Beverly]

When Star wars came out, me and the girl from marketing said, we gotta go with Star Wars. Space has never done well for us. Star Trek didn't do that well. Lost in Space didn't do that well. Black Hole. Black Hole was a bomb. And we kept saying, oh, but this is different. It's different. We ended up not taking it.

[Starlee Kine]

You passed on Star Wars?

[Beverly]

We passed on Star Wars. So Thermos Took was one of the most popular of all time lunchboxes.

[Starlee Kine]

And in between, there was lounging by hotel pools. A few years ago, Beverly also visited the Smithsonian cafeteria.

[Beverly]

And I was looking at all the TV stuff, you know, straight out. And then I turned around, and then here's just this wall of lunchboxes. And I went, oh, there's my Sesame Street. Oh, there's Gremlins. Oh, there's Goonies. My brother, he lives in Knoxville, but he. He was a banker. He always saw my art as just a hobby, you know, because my father, he would say, we can't afford for both of you to go to college. So, you know, your brother will go because, you know, he'll be the breadwinner of the family and he needs to go. And my brother, he finally said to me, beth, you know, why don't you just go and get you a real job? And I said, I have a real job. I got to illustrate lunchboxes for almost 30 years. I got to do something I really loved doing. And besides, I'm in the Smithsonian and you're not. And he just kind of stopped.

[Starlee Kine]

Did you like doing it?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

I loved it. That's the only job working for somebody else that I looked forward to going to work every day, especially when I was working on an illustration. It was merchandising and licensing and all that stuff, but at the same time, it was, you know, smiling faces on a half a million kids. Elmer and I did the last one together. That last year was when he seemed to really need a friend. He was kind of, you know, being pushed into pasture, and there was no work for him. I know he called me and asked me if there was anything he could do down there. And I think that was maybe two weeks before he died.

[Beverly]

It was in July of 1985, and I had gone to Florida with a bunch of girls. And right before I left. Elmer and I were talking. I said, you've always done a portrait of other people. Well, when I get back, I want you to do a portrait for me. And he goes, okay. The day before I came home, he died. He had been out mowing his lawn that day, and he came and sat down in the chair to rest up on the porch, on the patio. And that's where he died. He left me over 400 of his books. He said he wanted me to have them because he thought I would use them.

[Starlee Kine]

Elmer was a private person. When he died, there wasn't an obituary published at his request. When did you go to high school? What decade?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

The seventies.

[Starlee Kine]

The seventies?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

I'm 52 now.

[Starlee Kine]

Was jacket nodding a big prank in your day?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

No.

[Starlee Kine]

Okay.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

I don't think so.

[Starlee Kine]

Elmer painted the welcome back cotter lunchbox.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Did he really? He did that one, too.

[Starlee Kine]

So I guess the neighbor kid wasn't gonna help me solve my mystery. Dan had no memory of it either. But Beverly, she was working with Elmer the year he got the Cotter account. I was sure that if anyone would know why he chose to put the knotted shirt prank on the lunchbox, it would be her. But when I asked her about it, she said she had a vague memory of him working on it, but couldn't recall any actual specific details beyond that. There's an image on it, the lunchbox, that has one of the characters holding up this denim jean jacket with knotted sleeves. I can't figure out what the jean jacket means.

[Beverly]

It might be a joke, but what's the joke? The joke is that you try to put on your jean jacket and the knots are in the sleeve, and you can't get it on.

[Starlee Kine]

Do you think that's a good joke?

[Beverly]

I think it's a joke. But there were times when you didn't question Elmer.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

I don't think I've got that cotter lunchbox.

[Starlee Kine]

Do you have a lot of lunchboxes?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

When I first went there, I started saving one of each one that I illustrated. I've probably got, oh, maybe 50 or 60 hanging from the rafters in the kitchen.

[Starlee Kine]

Hanging?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Yeah. I live in an old log House. It's 150 years old, and the rafter runs across the room and just has nails with rows of lunch boxes looking at them. Right here, Most of them.

[Starlee Kine]

Can you see a bunch of Elmers right now?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Yeah, several. Let's see, there's Mouseketeers. I don't know if you ever saw the bicentennial lunchbox. The little cartoon characters, signers of the Declaration of Independence. Those characters he based on himself and his wife.

[Starlee Kine]

Aha. Elmer painting himself into the bicentennial image was the first tangible piece of evidence I had that he'd made something up on a lunchbox. Unless he really was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

I'm reaching up here. I'm getting it right now. That's Elmer. Yeah. And that's his wife. And it's Betsy Ross. She's sitting there sewing stars on the flag. And he's holding up his shirt with star shaped holes in it with a gruff look on his face. And that's his sense of humor.

[Starlee Kine]

What, the cut stars?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Yeah, that's the kind of humor that he put in his illustrations.

[Starlee Kine]

Can't help point out. Another shirt based gag. Just like welcome back Cotter.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Hadn't thought about that.

[Starlee Kine]

Maybe that's his wheelhouse. Elmer's son is on the Dr. Dolittle lunchbox. As an islander holding a rope attached to the giant snail. Beverly posed as the bionic woman standing in Elmer's office, pantomiming, ripping a phone book in half. It's her body in the final image with Lindsay Wagner's face on the land of the giant lunchbox. Elmer apparently just went for it. The stars of the show are so tiny, you can't even make out who the actors are. They've been captured by a giant. And it's his face that takes up most of the image. That's Elmer's face. It's huge. The only thing that takes up more space are all ten fingers of his giant hands. At Aladdin, illustrators weren't allowed to sign their boxes. Everything you did at Aladdin belonged to Aladdin. Perhaps the Cotter scene was another way for Elmer to insert himself into his illustrations, by creating an image that was both original and left no evidence. But even if that were the case, where had he gotten the idea for the knotted sleeve prank in the first place? Had it come from his own life?

[Beverly]

He was one of the first TV wrestlers.

[Starlee Kine]

Really.

[Beverly]

He'd go wrestling at night and then he would draw during the day. He had a big nose from all the getting beat up all the time. Starling. He used to bring film in, 8 millimeter film. And he would show. He put it on up there against the wall, you know, in the back. And this was him in Chicago wrestling. And back then, you know, there was always the good guy and the bad guy, and he was the bad guy. And he was hilarious because he would kind of stand there with his kind of shuffle you know, like a banny rooster getting ready to attack. And I say, ellie, you were so mean. You were the one who sneaked up behind the referee and pinched him and made faces. And he goes, well, that's what I was getting paid to do, Beverly. I was the one who's always supposed to cause the trouble.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

We grew really close. We had a lot of fun. One time, we went to North Carolina together. We had a printer over there, and we went over there for a proofing run. And while we were there, I wanted to go to the art museum. And he didn't want to go to the museum. He wanted to go to the mud wrestling. He was not a big fan of modern art, and that's, to put it mildly. He was a devoted craftsman. When you lay a line on a illustration board with a number two sable brush with the confidence to be able to make it a good, clean, sharp line that thins where you want it to and thickens where you want it to, it takes a real masterful stroke to do that. And then you have somebody tying a bucket on the string and poking a hole in the bottom of it and swinging it back and forth over a canvas. It was all just garbage to him. You know, it was a scam that somebody had sold, you know, to the public.

[Starlee Kine]

Unlike professional wrestling.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Yeah, exactly. And so we decided to go to the museum early and go to the mud wrestling afterwards.

[Starlee Kine]

You know what they say. One man's mud wrestling is another man's cafeteria lunch. If I say professional wrestler.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Yeah. Do you think of Elmer when you say professional wrestler?

[Starlee Kine]

Yes.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

I do not.

[Starlee Kine]

Well, that's what he was before he was.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Really?

[Starlee Kine]

Yes, before he was painting lunchboxes.

[Beverly]

That's awesome.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

I never knew that. You are full of wonderful information.

[Starlee Kine]

The prank, it doesn't seem to have ever happened on the show, and it doesn't seem to represent the show.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

It never happened on the show. So it could have come completely out of the creative imagination of Elmer Linhart?

[Starlee Kine]

Yes.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

I mean, now that I know he was one of these professional wrestlers, he probably did that very prank.

[Starlee Kine]

Oh, you think it's a wrestling move?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

I mean, just the fact that he went into that world, which is full of pranks, you gotta come up with creative ways of combating your. Your opponent.

[Starlee Kine]

Wrestling move. Yeah, I like that. Okay, I'm gonna look into that. You did good, neighbor kid. You did good. Okay, so I just needed to find a wrestler who is equally conversant in both pranks and clothing. That wrestler was Colt Cabana.

[Eric (Investigator)]

Oddly enough, I make my Own outfits.

[Starlee Kine]

Really?

[Eric (Investigator)]

Yep. It's a great craft to have as a wrestler. Like, we deal with Lycra and materials and outfits a lot. And even though I'm, you know, 6 foot 1, 240 pounds, I sit at my little sewing machine and I sew away.

[Starlee Kine]

That's adorable.

[Eric (Investigator)]

Thank you.

[Starlee Kine]

You know, that's adorable. While the rest of us have been going on with our everyday lives, buying clothing in stores, cracking cases, restoring wonder to an otherwise drab universe, there's been this whole world of competitive professional wrestling happening out there, perhaps to fill the chasm left behind by the demise of competitive lunchbox manufacturing. Can you. Have you ever seen a wrestling move that involves knotting a jacket?

[Eric (Investigator)]

I can't say that I have. There's wrestling moves where you can actually put a person in a physical knot.

[Starlee Kine]

With some weariness. I showed Colt the image.

[Eric (Investigator)]

What's happened is it's been tied in knots at the sleeves, so you can't put your. You can't put your hands into the sleeves.

[Starlee Kine]

That part I didn't need a professional to tell me. Colt thinks the jean jacket that Epstein's holding actually belongs to Barbarino, a belief I find confusing and wrong. But I allow him to proceed in this situation.

[Eric (Investigator)]

Travolta was in class and he was in a hurry, and he had to leave. And then he left his sweet denim jacket behind. Right. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna tie both of his sleeves in a knot, because there's gotta be consequences for him leaving this around.

[Starlee Kine]

Wrestlers pull pranks on each other so often, they have their own word for them. Rips.

[Eric (Investigator)]

If I leave my phone in a wrestling locker room and I come back 20 minutes and it hasn't been tampered or screwed with, I am singing to.

[Starlee Kine]

The gods in the wrestling world. I like that. Like, putting anything down qualifies as you asking for it. Let us never forget the cautionary tale of a prank that was pulled on a wrestler friend of Colt's by Colt on the night the friend won a big championship.

[Eric (Investigator)]

So he just won the title, and he was so happy, like it was a dream come true and everything that he had ever wanted in his life. You know, I would have thought he would have been sleeping with his title belt and would have never let go of it, but for some reason, he. He left his. His championship on the desk in the back. And so of course, I took the belt and I. I snuck into the. The wrestling ring itself, climbed up the scaffold, and I cascaded my way up to the very top of the building and hooked that title belt up there.

[Starlee Kine]

When you say you climbed up the.

[Eric (Investigator)]

Scaffold, there was ladders and tables and chairs.

[Starlee Kine]

Did you just stack 20 chairs on top of each other and then climb up those to the top?

[Eric (Investigator)]

You know, it's wrestling.

[Starlee Kine]

It's Donkey Kong.

[Eric (Investigator)]

It's the greatest. And, you know, he was so upset.

[Starlee Kine]

He was genuinely upset, genuinely upset.

[Eric (Investigator)]

Yelling like, where's my title? You know, there's a room of, you know, 50 people just casually looking up to the sky. We just all would just kind of look up and then look down. And eventually, I think after threatening to punch somebody, basically almost crying, we let him have his belt back. And those are the guys that get ribbed, because why rib somebody who, who's not gonna care? Like, there's no fun in that.

[Starlee Kine]

And they never learn, do they?

[Eric (Investigator)]

Never.

[Starlee Kine]

I still hadn't found anyone who had ever done the not tying prank, or anyone who had ever had it done to them or anyone who had ever heard of it being done. But who better than a wrestler to find out for Jonathan whether or not it worked as a prank? You can borrow that ribbon. I mean, you can use it when you're on tour.

[Eric (Investigator)]

I mean, I'll take requests, you know, I'll take requests. I'm gonna give this a try and I'll let you know how my opponent enjoyed it or did not enjoy the rib.

[Starlee Kine]

You're really gonna try it?

[Eric (Investigator)]

I wrestle for 10 minutes a night and I have so much time to waste.

[Starlee Kine]

With my partner out on the streets, I shifted to desk work. One of my investigators, Eric, had disappeared down a rabbit hole of pranking related library research. I probably should have called someone, but instead it gave me an idea. Beverly had told me that if Aladdin wasn't sent enough source material to work from, the illustrators would use outside material to fill in details of their drawings. What if Elmer hadn't gotten the knot tying prank from welcome Back Cotter but from another show? And then had just transplanted the prank onto the Cotter lunchbox? I found a 10 minute clip of Family Feud where the Cotter cast competed against the Love Boat cast that was immediately apparent would be of no help, but which I nonetheless watched from beginning to end and then sent to Jonathan, who also watched it from beginning to end. It was oddly hypnotic. Horseshack wears a leisure suit in it and Richard Dawson at one point sucks his own th. And then finally, I caught a break via another half hour sitcom about four misfits and the just who's the adult and who's the kid here? Authority figure in their lives. Always sunny in Philadelphia. The show hadn't even come close to existing when the lunchbox was made. Or for that matter, when welcome at Cotter was on. But aside from that one technicality, everything else tracked. Okay, so the episode I want to talk to you about is in season five, and it's episode 12, the season finale.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Sure, yeah. It's the first episode I ever wrote. It's the first anything I ever wrote.

[Starlee Kine]

This is Dave in the episode he wrote. The character played by Glenn howerton and Danny DeVito have a rivalry with a local bar. They break into the bar owner's house and start pulling pranks. What were those pranks?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

I remember they did his taxes. They nailed his shoes to the ground of his closet. I believe they cut his shower curtain at waist high.

[Starlee Kine]

Good one.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

And they tie his shirts in knots. They tie his shirt sleeves in knots.

[Starlee Kine]

Now, where did you get the idea for Frank to tie the shirt sleeves and knots?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Oh, man. Honestly, I have no idea.

[Starlee Kine]

So you wrote a scene with a knotted sleeve prank and you don't know where that came from?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

No, no, it came from. From my mind, I guess.

[Starlee Kine]

Did that make sense to you? Why that's a prank?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

I'm not gonna sit here and say it's an amazing prank, but, yeah, I think I got it.

[Starlee Kine]

What are your feelings about welcome Back Kotter?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

You know, it's a distant memory.

[Starlee Kine]

There's a lunchbox that welcome Back Kotter had, and on the lunchbox, Epstein is holding up a jean jacket. The sleeves of the jacket are tied in knots. There's been a mystery about what that jean jacket means. And your episode's one of the only pieces of evidence I've ever seen that it's a prank.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Uh huh.

[Starlee Kine]

What does it mean?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Yeah, well, I can't help you there, but I swear I'm gonna go back and watch some welcome Back Potter. Well, I would love nothing more than to hold the key to your mystery, but I'm sorry, it sounds like I've made your life even harder than it was before you started this phone call.

[Starlee Kine]

I'm beginning to suspect conspiracy. Before starting this case, I had never realized Cotter was so dangerous to the establishment. Of course, the real question was, why? Ask yourself why was it no one at Aladdin remembered a single detail about the wench box getting made? Ask yourself why did Jonathan appear to be the only person who'd ever wondered about the knotted jacket? Ask yourself why didn't anyone seem to know There was a comma in the title of the show, to quote Donald Sutherland paraphrasing a fictional amalgam of real life people in the film jfk. There was an air of, oh, I don't know, make believe to the whole thing. How else do you explain what happened to one of my investigators? Alex, in the midst of us working on the case.

[Eric (Investigator)]

I have something to show you. So I was at this coffee shop near my house this morning, and I was meeting somebody to talk about something. We don't need to get into the details.

[Starlee Kine]

And that's the least suspicious thing he said.

[Eric (Investigator)]

Anyway, I looked up and I saw this just above the espresso machine, just sitting there.

[Starlee Kine]

So weird.

[Eric (Investigator)]

The exact welcome back to Hudder lunchbox where he's nodded. The jacket just, like, randomly perched on top of an ice machine in this coffee shop that I happened to be at this morning.

[Starlee Kine]

Did you ask them about it?

[Eric (Investigator)]

Yeah, I did. Yeah, I asked what was it? And they were like, oh, it was this show back in the 70s. Like, I know, I know, but what about the lunchbox? Since they started working there, it'd just been sitting there. They don't know where it came from. And they were like, yeah, I have no idea.

[Starlee Kine]

Or so they said. Who knows what they found out before their minds were erased.

[Eric (Investigator)]

It was really like, you know the Led Zeppelin album the Presence has. It was like this big double album. And it was like all these like, really domestic scenes, like just like sort of like sort of Norman Rockwell sort of scenes, like people and, like, eating breakfast and sort of like these stiff poses. And then there was this like, weird little black monolith that was just placed in different places all around it. And, like, that's what this felt like. Oh, my God. It's like tracking me. The weirdest thing. Trying to remember now what it was.

[Starlee Kine]

Just as I'd feared.

[Eric (Investigator)]

Yeah, yeah, I totally forgot.

[Starlee Kine]

Yeah, they'd gotten to Alex. How else do you explain the email I got shortly after from Alan Sachs that read, quote, just received this from a fan in Missouri asking for my autograph, had never received a request via mail asking me to sign a picture? What kind of voodoo you working? The picture he'd been sent to sign was naturally of the lunchbox, but you already knew that it had been scanned onto a piece of paper, the lunchbox just floating without comment, without explanation in the middle of the page. How else do you explain the following exchange between me and the company that held the original merchandise license for the lunchbox? Walper Productions. Walper Productions is no longer, but I wrote to the curator of its archives asking for any information related to the lunchbox. She responded that she'd done a search of the quote Cotter merchandising binder but hadn't come across any mention of the lunchbox at all. She'd be happy to set up an appointment for me to come visit the Arxiv in person, though to look through larger sets of folders pertaining to publicity, marketing and miscellaneous for Cotter at large. Terrific, I said, and suggested a date, at which point I received another email. I actually had a chance to go through the other Cotter files. Sadly, I was not able to find any documents that addressed a specific question you were seeking to have answered. I will keep an eye out for you. However, I'm really sorry for this news. I wrote back again saying basically that my idea of a good time was combing through files that more than likely led to nothing and could I please still set up an appointment? Sure, wrote back the curator. Except the reading room would be closing in a couple weeks for some months. Well, then could I make an appointment appointment before it closed? Unfortunately, came the reply. The reading room was all booked up for the remaining days it was open. Maybe there'd be a cantillation. I tried. Could she let me know if so, that was the last I heard from her. I doubt she was ever heard from by anyone ever again. Actually, I did get an email from our colleague, though the material that you originally requested is not part of the collection, I'm not sure what you are expecting us to produce for you to look at. I had no idea emails could make the sound of a slamming door. I had arrived at the point that all investigators do when confronted with a mass conspiracy. The obsessive revisiting of evidence while your family moves out. I found myself returning to the Cotter episodes, hunting for that one clue I must have missed. And that's when I saw lunchboxes. You could just barely make them out. They were perched on a shelf in the sweathog's classroom, back and to the left of John Travolta's hair. Planet of the Apes and the Disney Bus, Both Elmer's. In the next episode, a third box appeared and then a fourth. I watched more episodes, fast forwarding until I got to the classroom scene. Sometimes the boxes moved to the window. Sometimes they went back down to 2. The Disney bus was a constant. Always there, always watching, never learning. Still think there's nothing behind the grassy knoll? Mr. Cotter, are you ready? When?

[Eric (Investigator)]

It's now time for tonight's main.

[Starlee Kine]

Meanwhile, somewhere in a sea of spandex, some of it hand sewn.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Oh, well, you're a likable guy, Phil.

[Eric (Investigator)]

I cheer you.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

I must go away.

[Eric (Investigator)]

This is Colt Cabana. I'm in a locker room right now. Marty Squirrel.

[Jonathan]

Hello.

[Eric (Investigator)]

You don't know what we're doing, right? I have no idea. Really. No. You agreed to play on a real. Yeah. It's gonna end up getting me lots of trouble, which, you know, happens quite a lot. Anyway, we're. So here's what we're gonna do. This is Doug Williams Now, Doug Williams, 22 year veteran of professional. I used to watch him when I.

[Starlee Kine]

Was maybe like 12. Look up to him.

[Eric (Investigator)]

So will you bring that over to us? Rob has actually brought back his coat. His new. His new coat. He just bought this.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

He just bought this nice robe.

[Eric (Investigator)]

Yeah. This lovely, great British Union Jack robe, which is only worn twice.

[Starlee Kine]

Yeah.

[Eric (Investigator)]

So. So we're going to tie this in a knot.

[Starlee Kine]

Oh, no.

[Eric (Investigator)]

Yeah. And we're going to have to get his reaction.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Oh, no. I feel bad already.

[Eric (Investigator)]

Yeah.

[Starlee Kine]

I'm not.

[Eric (Investigator)]

I'll take all the blame. Okay. You say that now. I feel that's going to backfire on me. Here we go. Oh, God. Hold on. So you have one end, I have the other. Yeah. And now we're both gonna pull. Kind of tight. This is hard, but I'm kind of.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Worried we're gonna break it now.

[Eric (Investigator)]

It's not gonna break because it's out of spandex.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Okay.

[Eric (Investigator)]

But the stitching I'm worried about. Okay. This is pretty tight. Maybe needs to do more.

[Starlee Kine]

You want to do three.

[Eric (Investigator)]

Three knots? Yeah.

[Starlee Kine]

Oh, there we go. Yeah.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Marvelous.

[Eric (Investigator)]

You're right. That's Doug talking about his match afterwards. He doesn't know yet. He looks like he's.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

He's really blowing up.

[Eric (Investigator)]

As though he's all hot and sweaty. So he might be mad. Yeah, we'll see.

[Starlee Kine]

Someone made a mess of my robe.

[Eric (Investigator)]

I'm not impressed.

[Starlee Kine]

I now knew the knotted sleeves could be done as a prank. But the mystery was where the prank had come from. And I still didn't have proof that anyone besides Colt Cabana had ever done it before. And Colt couldn't have been the inspiration for the lunchbox because that's not how time works. And then there came the day that my investigator Eric resurfaced, pale and unshaven, clutching a page from a book called the Modern Cowboy. I have a question for you about a prank that is done that involved tying shirt sleeves and knots.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

I've done it many times. Uncountable times.

[Starlee Kine]

This is John the cowboy, comma modern. So what is the prank?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

First, they struggle to get their arms in, not suspecting that it's been tied in a knot.

[Starlee Kine]

And is it a satisfying payoff when someone can't get the shirt on?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

All of us think in simple cause and effect terms. Our arm is a sleeve. Our arm will go through the sleeve.

[Starlee Kine]

So it's a disruption to the normal flow of events.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Yep.

[Starlee Kine]

And then that is enough to produce laughter.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

They just can't get their arm in it. When cowboys go out on a roundup day, they usually start at daylight. And as the day gets warm, the guys shed their long sleeve shirt. And that makes it easy.

[Starlee Kine]

So you just lied and wait?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

I'm a patient man.

[Starlee Kine]

You're the first person I've ever spoken to who's not only heard of the knot tying prank, but has done it. As far as I know. You invented this prank.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Well, I think I probably learned from an old rancher. Most of them were jokers who had impish senses of humor and were all very capable of pulling pranks.

[Starlee Kine]

So, like, is it if you see an article of clothing that's just laying there, it's hard for you to not think that you have to tie that in knots.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Yeah. You must seize the opportunity. You can tie a knot in a church choir robe pretty easily. The ladies in our soprano section are never suspecting a prank.

[Starlee Kine]

How do they react?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Well, they always know who did it.

[Starlee Kine]

Is it easier to tie a choir lady's robes in knots or a cowboy's, like, shirt?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Shirts are easy. Choir robes are more difficult. But the ladies in the choir, they're not vengeful.

[Starlee Kine]

No.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Although one of them did staple my music folders together and I didn't know it.

[Starlee Kine]

Your sheet music together?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Yeah.

[Starlee Kine]

That's a good prank.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

That's a good prank.

[Starlee Kine]

Do you think this is a distinct cowboy prank?

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

The knotted sleeves, they're the only. Only people I ever knew who did it.

[Starlee Kine]

Now it could be considered a church choir prank.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Yeah, I guess so. Seemed like a pretty good addition to my repertory.

[Starlee Kine]

So you're satisfied that it's a prank? We've proven it.

[Jonathan]

To prank. I'm satisfied that. That this knotted sleeve prank has a history in this country that's as old as the cowboys who tilled the soil with their pranks. It makes sense that cowboys would think to do that because they're always thinking about ropes and knots and lassos and stuff. So I guess they would be the ones to really See a rope in a sleeve where other people don't. Do you think the cowboys made the knots so tight? Like, if you get two guys play tug of war with that sleeve and make the knot as tight as they possibly can, maybe you could just never get it out again. Because then maybe it would be not such an innocent prank. Because then you. Let's say you do it in both sleeves, and then the person freezes to death because they can't get their coat on.

[Starlee Kine]

Like if you were stranded on a mountain.

[Jonathan]

Yeah.

[Starlee Kine]

If you were climbing Mount Everest and then someone removed their coat and then you did. You chose to do it then.

[Jonathan]

And then your friend would be like, what? Why would you do that? And they'd be so angry. Then they would, like, continue. They'd have to cut it off, and then their arms would get frostbite, and then they'd have to lose their arm. That's a terrible prank.

[Starlee Kine]

Truthfully, do you find this satisfying?

[Jonathan]

Not at all. I'm just kidding. No, it's very. This is very satisfying. This is great.

[Starlee Kine]

I did all this for you.

[Jonathan]

It's like, normally lunch pails are filled with just sandwiches that you throw in the garbage because your mother makes bad sandwiches.

[Starlee Kine]

We're talking about a jacket. Generic mother here, right?

[Jonathan]

Yeah, not my mother. My mother was a saint.

[Starlee Kine]

I get that reference now.

[Jonathan]

Thank you. Wow. Do I get to keep this?

[Starlee Kine]

You do.

[Jonathan]

No. Come on. I was just being obnoxious. Really?

[Starlee Kine]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jonathan]

Are you kidding?

[Starlee Kine]

I would have wrapped it, but it's kind of like already in a box.

[Jonathan]

This is fantastic. It's going to turn my home into the Smithsonian.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

Now come the day you walk through that door finally see why you've always.

[Starlee Kine]

Been sure hope that you you find what you're looking for I hope that.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

You find what you're looking for.

[Starlee Kine]

Open your eyes. Open your eyes.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

You go, you go.

[Starlee Kine]

Mystery show is produced by Alex Blumberg, Wendy Doerr, Eric Mennell, and me. Producing help for this episode from Caitlin Roberts and Melinda Shopson. Eli Horowitz is contributing editor. John Delor engineered this episode. Thanks also to Matt Lieber. Original score for this episode by the band White Dove, who are so talented that I need all of you to make them famous immediately. Emmy the Great did my tremendous closing song, which is available on Spotify for all of you who have been asking. Opening song by Sparks. Thank you to the Smithsonian. Lawrence Weschler, Kent Bocklin, Kurt Lenart, Yant Wyatt, Emily Condon, and Heather Rowe. Arthur Jones made our logo, which is now also on a T shirt. You can get the Mystery Show T shirt if you sign up for a Gimlet membership. The front of the T shirt has Arthur's logo. The back has a Jake Gyllenhaal height chart in case you see him while you're wearing it and need a handy way to measure him. The sleeves of the T shirt are probably too short for knot tying purposes, but hey, if you're feeling confident, who am I to stop you? And if you haven't listened to the Gimlet show, reply all you should. Okay, now this is the hard part, guys. This is the last episode of season one of Mystery Show. Did you think I was going to say last episode, period? No way. I will be back soon with new mysteries for season two as quickly as I can. Some of those mysteries might be yours, so keep sending them to me@ mysteriesimletmedia.com I know you all waited a while for this one and that I threw out some dates that turned out to be, I guess, red herrings. You guys were all very kind and very patient and I wanted you to know how much that meant to me. I read every tweet, every email, every message, and I'll miss you guys while I'm gone. There isn't a new clue this time, but I did want to give you an explanation for the old one. The opening credits to welcome Back Cotter featured a sign. Welcome to Brooklyn, fourth largest city in America. Honorable Sebastian Leone, borough president. None of you guys got it, which is okay. Your guesses were even better.

[Joe (Neighbor Kid)]

You go far.

[Starlee Kine]

You could go far. You go far.

[Jonathan]

Did you know I have a welcome at Cotter Puzzle? It's a life size puzzle.

[Starlee Kine]

Life size. Define life size.

[Jonathan]

Like six feet tall.

[Starlee Kine]

No, it's not. What is it?

[Jonathan]

Of Gabe Cotter.

[Starlee Kine]

No, it isn't.

[Jonathan]

Yes, it is.

[Starlee Kine]

I don't believe you.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, it's like 10 big pieces that you lay on the ground and then you can lie beside. Gabe Cotter.

[Starlee Kine]

When did you get it? As a child. No, as an adult, you got it.

[Jonathan]

Listen, I was sharing something that I thought might be pertinent to our case.