← This American Life
This American Life
535: Origin Story
01:00:25
Little-known and surprising stories of how all sorts of institutions began.
Loading summary
Transcript195 lines
- [00:01]
Capital One Advertiser
This message comes from Capital One. Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts. What's in your wallet terms apply. See capitalone.combank for details. Capital One NA Member FDIC support for.
- [00:17]
Best Western Advertiser
This American life comes from Best Western hotels and resorts. From adventures to trips down memory lane, Best Western has you covered. With over 4,000 hotels worldwide, you're sure to find the right hotel for your next getaway. Life's a trip. Make the most of it@bestwestern.com.
- [00:34]
Ira Glass
Pino Audia teaches in the business school at Dartmouth, and he researches the question, how do entrepreneurs get created? And at some point, he noticed that his students and many of his colleagues actually have an opinion about this. They believe entrepreneurs make themselves. You know, you head off on your own, you write a business plan, you start in your own garage. And the garage, by the way, is not a metaphorical garage. It is a garage, a literal garage. Hewlett Packard started it in a garage. Apple Computer had a garage. Disney, the Mattel Toy Company, the Wham O Toy Company. It is about big dreams and humble beginnings and success in the face of adversity and doubters. And also the idea that regardless of who you are, regardless of how humble your beginnings are, you can turn something into an immense success story if you work hard.
- [01:22]
Julian Koenig
And.
- [01:22]
Ira Glass
And that was the point in time in which I got interested in the story of the garage as a myth. A garage is a place of possibilities. It's a place where things can get invented and a place where entrepreneurs begin. This is from a promotional video that Hewlett Packard put together after it spent millions to buy and restore the original garage where its two founders started a company that is still one of the largest technology firms in the world.
- [01:52]
Pino Audia
In 1938, in a garage in Palo.
- [01:55]
Ira Glass
Alto, California, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard set to work to start a new company. They had a few hand operated punches.
- [02:06]
Pino Audia
A used Sears Roebuck drill press that had just made the trip west in.
- [02:09]
Dan Heath
The back of one of their cars.
- [02:11]
Fred Papert
And they had a rented flat with a garage.
- [02:15]
Ira Glass
Professor Adia doesn't argue with any of this, but he says that when you ask actual entrepreneurs, and this is true, in survey after survey, you find that most of them began not by going off into their garage, but by working for somebody else, making contacts, learning the business. So this is a very robust finding which tells us that actually, if you want to become an entrepreneur, the obvious thing to do is to first go get a job in an industry you're interested in and learn and then eventually later tried to create a company. Even Bill Hewitt and Dave Packard weren't exactly outsiders. They studied electrical engineering at MIT and Stanford. Packard had worked at General Electric. A former professor of theirs from Stanford gave them leads and hooked them up, for example, with a firm called Litton Engineering, who let them use equipment that they didn't know themselves. Yet just as decades later, the founders of Apple computer, 21 year old Steve Jobs was already working at Atari and 25 year old Steve Wozniak was at Hewlett Packard when they started Apple in Jobs garage. And for example, that gives us Steve Jobs. He benefited greatly from the support that he got from the Atari people because they introduced him to investors. Pino Aria has tried to find mentions of garage entrepreneurs or anything like it in other countries and didn't come up with much. He says it seems to be a very American idea, very close to other American ideas about opportunity for everybody. The Apple and Hewlett Packard garages have now become such a part of Silicon Valley myth that it's made other tech companies want their own stories. Like it. Google, for example, they did not start in a garage. The founders began working on their search engine in 1996 when they were at Stanford. They didn't actually move into a garage until 1998. They already had investors and they were just in the garage for five months. But in 2006, Google bought that garage its company landmark.
- [04:07]
Dan Heath
It's like no one wants to hear the story of the rich, well connected guys who meet up at the Marriott conference room to hatch a business plan. There's no romance in that.
- [04:18]
Ira Glass
Dan Heath has written about these origin stories in Fast Company magazine. He says that one way to measure just how appealing these stories are is to count all the ones that get quoted widely, even though they aren't remotely true. For instance, when ebay began, a story circulated that its founder created the company so his fiance could buy and collect PEZ dispensers more easily. Not true. One of the creators of YouTube used to claim that the idea for the business came after a dinner party in 2005 where 2 of the company's masterminds, Chad Hurley and Steve Chin, shot some video and then tried to post it online and found out just how hard that was back then.
- [04:53]
Dan Heath
Now that is, at a minimum, an exaggerated tale. In fact, there's a third founder of YouTube who claims the dinner party never happened. And Steve Chin later admitted in Time magazine that the dinner party was embellished to provide a better founding myth and I do want to say that while it feels like a little bit of a letdown to realize that this dinner party story is not the whole truth, I feel like it's a little bit unfair for us to expect more of them than the creation of YouTube. I mean, here's this incredible site and in some sense that's not enough for us. We want YouTube to have emerged from some kind of everyday experience. It's not enough to have the value of their work. We also want there to be a really compelling story that started it.
- [05:48]
Ira Glass
Now, in the article that you wrote for Fast Company, you point out that our attachment to these kinds of mythic creation stories is so strong that we have even exaggerated the Christopher Columbus story.
- [06:02]
Dan Heath
Well, Christopher Columbus, as we all know, wanted to prove that he could reach India by sailing west. But no one believed his crazy theory that the Earth was round. And in fact, his own sailors en route were terrified that they were about to fall over the edge of the earth and they almost mutinied. So there's a guy named James Lowen, a professor at University of Vermont, who has pointed out that virtually every element of the story is false. That in fact we still don't really know where Christopher Columbus was going. There's a lot of disagreement among historians and even Columbus's best known biographer isn't totally sure where he was headed. And furthermore, there was no element of Is the Earth round or flat here? Most people at that time already knew that the Earth was round. The evidence was there for them to see. They noticed that if another ship is receding into the horizon, their hull disappears first and then the mass later, which implies that there's some kind of curvature in play. And again, you know, here's a guy who crossed an ocean and became one of the first Europeans to set foot on a new continent. And yet we want more from this guy. We want him to be having hand to hand combat with his crew en route. We just crave the drama. We crave the obstacles.
- [07:33]
Ira Glass
Origin stories. We love them so much that sometimes it is hard not to make them up. From WBEC Chicago, it's this American Life. Act one of our show today. Madman. Act two Silent Partner act three. Wait, wait, don't film me. Act four Bill Clinton's seven year old brother Stay with us. This message comes from Apple Pay. Everyone knows that credit card numbers can be stolen. But you know what's harder to steal? Your face with Apple Pay, your purchases are authenticated by you thanks to face id. Just double click, smile and tap to pay the Apple way with each tap your card number and your purchases stay secured. Compatible Devices required Terms of Pie Support.
- [08:28]
Best Western Advertiser
For this American Life comes from your part time controller. The Nonprofit Accounting specialists For over three decades, YPTC has provided customized financial management to nonprofit organizations with their US based staff. From bookkeeping to financial reporting, budgeting, cash flow management and dashboards to CFO level strategy. YPTC takes care of the numbers so nonprofit leaders can focus on what matters most. Your mission. YPTC will help maximize your impact. Learn more@yptc.com.
- [09:02]
Ira Glass
This is American Life Today show is a rerun Act 1 Madman well, this first story is about a fight over the origin of certain ideas. A fight over who really came up with those ideas. Sarah Koenig tells a story about her dad, Julian.
- [09:17]
Capital One Advertiser
All my life I've heard the hallmarks of my father's achievements.
- [09:20]
Julian Koenig
I invented thumb wrestling.
- [09:22]
Capital One Advertiser
That was in 1936 when he was a counselor at Camp Greylock for boys. They already had arm wrestling for the.
- [09:28]
Julian Koenig
Boys and leg wrestling, but we needed another wrestling. And I invented thumb wrestling with the same rules as a hockey puck. Face off. One, two, three, go.
- [09:44]
Capital One Advertiser
It just came to you like just a stroke. Oh, we should use our thumbs.
- [09:48]
Julian Koenig
It was just a devastating moment.
- [09:54]
Capital One Advertiser
The discoveries kept coming. Shrimp, for instance.
- [09:57]
Julian Koenig
I want popularized shrimp in America.
- [10:00]
Capital One Advertiser
In 1941, my father, a shrimp lover, was discouraged that there were only two places on Broadway in New York where you could get shrimp. So then in Biloxi, Mississippi, and bear with me here, because this story barely makes any sense. So he's in Biloxi on his way to Mexico with some buddies and he sees this government boat about to go out to track the migratory path of shrimp. And he talks his way onto the boat by explaining that he loves shrimp, apparently. And he goes out on this boat and they find the shrimp breeding grounds or some such. The rest, of course, is history.
- [10:30]
Julian Koenig
Then back in New York, I patrolled Broadway at Nunviro asking for shrimp, shrimp, shrimp, and this way talking it up by popularized shrimp. No question about.
- [10:48]
Capital One Advertiser
Seems like really, really thin evidence that you popularized shrimp in New York.
- [10:55]
Julian Koenig
I'm not making any claim on the industry.
- [11:00]
Capital One Advertiser
My dad does make a claim on the word character that he came up with the idea to use it to mean a person of unusual or eccentric qualities.
- [11:07]
Julian Koenig
You have a character in a play, of course, but it wasn't in common usage as he's a character.
- [11:15]
Capital One Advertiser
And what made you do you remember why you started using it?
- [11:19]
Julian Koenig
I just shifted it, adapted it though. Norman Mailer thinks that he developed it. I Take precedence.
- [11:28]
Capital One Advertiser
According to my father, Norman Mailer also said he invented thumb wrestling. Mailer, who died in 2007, was a famous thumb wrestler, but not its inventor, because as we now know, my dad invented it at Camp Greylock for boys. And that's the rub. You can't prove the origin of any of this stuff. And it's annoying when people like Norman Mailer take credit. My dad would like people to recognize him for his contributions to shrimp and character and thumb wrestling, but he's not going to make us stink if they don't. His real legacy though, in advertising, that's another story that he's willing to fight for. And he has been fighting for it for decades. My father was a legendary copywriter. He wrote Timex takes a licking and keeps on Ticking. He named Earth Day Earth Day. It falls on his birthday, April 22nd. Earth Day birthday. So the idea came easily. The magazine Advertising Age made a list of the top 100 advertising campaigns of the 20th century. The Marlboro man is on it. And the Energizer Bunny. Good to the last drop from Maxwell House. And the Keep America Beautiful, Crying Indian. But the number one AD, the top of the 100 list, think small. That was Volkswagen's American campaign to sell the Beatle in 1959. And my father wrote it. A picture of a tiny car on a big white page and some amused, self deprecating copy. That ad was followed by Lemon, another VW ad so iconic it made it onto the TV show Mad Men. The show set in 1960, about an ad agency that's slightly behind the times. In this scene, the agency's creative team contemplates the Lemon ad. I don't know what I hate about.
- [13:00]
Julian Koenig
It the most, the ad or the car.
- [13:02]
Ira Glass
Yeah, they did one last year. Same kind of smirk. Remember Think Small? It was a half page ad on a full page buy.
- [13:08]
Capital One Advertiser
You could barely see the product.
- [13:09]
George Lois
I don't get it.
- [13:11]
Capital One Advertiser
At the time, these ads were revolutionary. In the beginning. There was Volkswagen, another famous New York ad man wrote, that was the day when the new advertising agency was really born. Here's another scene from Mad Men when Don Draper, the agency's creative director, interviews some new talent. After he looks at their portfolio, he hands it back to them with this.
- [13:29]
Julian Koenig
Book'S good, by the way.
- [13:31]
Pino Audia
It has Julian Koenig's fingerprints all over it.
- [13:34]
Capital One Advertiser
It's Julian Koenig, actually, my father. And what has irritated him for so long is not that he's not recognized for his talent. I mean, the people who write Mad Men clearly know who he is. It's that some of his best work has been claimed by someone else.
- [13:49]
Julian Koenig
In my instance, the the greatest predator on my work was my one time partner, George Lois, who is the most heralded and talented art director designer. And his talent is only exceeded by his omnivorous ego. So where once would have been accepted that the word would be we did it. Regardless of who originated the work, the word we didn't evaporated from George's vocabulary and it became I.
- [14:32]
Capital One Advertiser
If you've heard of anyone in the advertising industry, it might be George Lois. He's well known for a lot of things, but maybe especially for his provocative and funny Esquire magazine covers from the 1960s. Like the one of Muhammad Ali posing as Saint Sebastian. But before that, George Loewis worked at Doldane Birnbach and so did my father. In 1960, they both left DDB and joined up with another guy, Fred Pappert, to form their own upstart agency called PKL Papert Koenig and Lois. George Lois wouldn't talk to me for this story. I'm not going to get into a sophomoric shit fight with a disgruntled ex partner. He wrote in an email. I can't say I blame him. I've had mixed feelings about this fight. Of course I want to stick up for my father, take his side. But I've also thought there's something inherently undignified about the whole thing. Like it's beneath my father to care whether or not George Lois is taking credit for this or that slogan from 1962. So I never really paid attention to the details until now. Lately it's been coming up more, or at least more publicly. So I started asking questions. According to my father, it all started with the Harvey Prober account. Harvey Prober made elegant modern furniture. My dad says he came up with the ad. A beautiful chair with a matchbook under one leg. And the line, if your Harvey Prober chair wobbles, straighten your floor. And a piece of copy that went with it that he thought was very good.
- [15:50]
Julian Koenig
And a year or so later, or a couple of years later, Ron Holland, a friend of mine, came running into my office to say George is upstairs with a Japanese editorial writer. They're doing an interview with him and he's claiming a Harvey Probate chair ad that he wrote it. So I call George down to my office and remonstrate. That's what men do frequently with him. And he says, I never said that. I would never say that. And he went back to his office. And a little while later, Ron comes bursting into my office saying, George said, I told that son of a gun, know how to get off.
- [16:41]
Capital One Advertiser
Meaning you.
- [16:42]
Julian Koenig
Meaning he had told you, told me where to get off. So that was really the start of it.
- [16:48]
Capital One Advertiser
In 1972, George Lois published a book, the first of many about his career called George Be Careful. In it, he describes going to the Harvey Prober furniture factory in Massachusetts with my dad. Each chair was placed on an electronic test platform. To be sure it was absolutely level. Lois wrote. Got a book of matches? I asked Julian, heavy smoker. He handed me a matchbook and I slid it under one leg of the chair on the test platform. I've got the ad. I said. If your Harvey Prober chair is crooked, straighten your floor. Julian scowled and shot back ass. If your Harvey Prober chair wobbles, straighten your floor. That was the way the ad ran. And that was the way we built the first red hot creative agency.
- [17:28]
Julian Koenig
And none of that ever happened as described by George. He didn't ask me for matchbook. He didn't slide it under the leg of a chair and say, I've got the ad. None of it is true.
- [17:41]
Capital One Advertiser
But his makes a better story.
- [17:43]
Julian Koenig
His is a marvelous story. George is a talented storyteller with a vivid imagination. The only thing that could exceed it would be the truth.
- [18:04]
Capital One Advertiser
There were other instances also regarding ads that were groundbreaking for their time. A campaign for the New York Herald Tribune. Who says a good newspaper has to be dull? Some famous Xerox commercials showing a little girl operating a copy machine. And later a chimpanzee doing it. Ad. Several people who worked on the account have complained that George literally had nothing to do with. Then there's the ad for coldine cough medicine. The page is entirely black with just two quotes at different heights. Meant to show a couple talking in bed. John, is that Billy coughing? Says the wife. Get up and give him some colding. The husband replies. In an interview 20 years later, George Lois said the idea for the ad hit me like a brainstorm. This was the first time there would be no copy, no package design, no trademark. He said it was really the beginning of a new creative revolution. It was one of those ads that made history effectively again. My dad is adamant that the whole ad, copy and design were his. There are many possibilities here of what's going on. George Lois could be lying. Or George Lois could have convinced himself in some way that what he's saying about all this stuff is true. Or my dad could be doing the same thing. Remembering stuff that happened when it didn't happen. Or I suppose my dad could be lying. I'd worry about those latter options more if my father was the only one disputing George Lois version of history. But he's not. There's the photographer Carl Fisher, who worked with George Loewis for more than 30 years and shot many of the most famous Esquire covers. Carl Fisher says George is taking credit for cover ideas and photographs that were Carl's and talked in detail about certain photo shoots, like about flying to Las Vegas to shoot the boxer Sonny Liston as Santa and even placing the Santa cap on Liston's head. Or rushing Italian actress Verna Lisi into a photo shoot in New York for this famous cover where she's pretending to shave her face. But Fisher says George wasn't there for either shoot. In fact, the Lisi shoot happened in Rome, and he still has the receipts to prove it. And then there's Shelley Zelasnek, the first editor of New York magazine. George once told a reporter, quote my hand on the Bible, I George Lois created New York magazine. Mr. Zelasnik says that's simply not true. He himself remembers making the first dummy front page one hot August night in 1963. Not only that, he's never met George Lois. As for George's version, he told me, I'm at a loss. I don't know why grownups do things like this. But the story my father objects to the most isn't about ad copy at all. It's personal paper. Koenig and Lois had gotten the Dutch Master's cigar account, and their TV spokesman at the time was this famous comedian, Ernie Kovacs. So my dad flew out to LA to meet him and they hit it.
- [20:46]
Julian Koenig
Off, and Ernie and I spent the day together, driving around and lunch together ended the afternoon in the lobby of the hotel I was staying in, the Beverly Hilton. He was not allowed past the lobby because he had short pants on. And then he went off to go to a party that night, and on his way home, there being a rain, his car skidded and went into a pole and Ernie killed himself. I was on a plane back to New York and learned about it the next morning. So, unfortunate incident, but certainly memorable for me. And lo and behold, lo and behold.
- [21:42]
Capital One Advertiser
In his 2005 book Celebrities, which is spelled with a dollar sign instead of a C at the beginning, George tells the story of his lovely poolside lunch with Ernie, his car ride to the airport with Ernie, his red eye flight back to New York and his learning the following morning from a stack of stillbound newspapers that Ernie had been killed in a car crash. My father has tried to fight back aggressively at times. For instance, after the Ernie Kovach story appeared in Celebrities, my dad retaliated in the medium he knows best. He wrote an ad.
- [22:12]
Julian Koenig
I wrote an ad. Lois. Lois. Lois.
- [22:18]
Capital One Advertiser
That's Lois L O I S. And.
- [22:21]
Julian Koenig
I wanted to print it in the New York Times as a book review, a public service book review.
- [22:29]
Capital One Advertiser
The Times didn't run it, but it did run in Ad Week toward the back of the magazine, and it got no response. Over the years, he and some of his former colleagues have written to reporters at the New York Times and other places trying to correct the record, but their letters have mostly been ignored. Just last year, a Times story about an exhibit of George Lois Esq. Covers credited him in the very first paragraph with Think Small. The Xerox ads with the chimp and a couple of other campaigns people say George either didn't originate or didn't even work on. Finally, the Times printed a short correction giving Think Small back to my dad. But it was a small victory. Three weeks after the fact, in the mid-80s, my dad wrote a letter to George directly threatening to sue, it seems, and received a letter back calling him a sad, tortured and tragic figure. All in all, my father's efforts haven't really done the damage he's hoped, or really any damage at all. He's an indignant basset hound nipping at the heels of the media's Great Dane, George Lois is a good talker with an engaging personality, and he's become something of a spokesman for the advertising industry. There are quotes in the newspaper, magazine profiles, exhibits, books. Errors printed once are repeated and repeated. So if you look up Think Small on the Internet, for instance, you'll find it attributed to Julian Koenig. But you're also likely to learn that George Lois wrote it.
- [23:47]
Julian Koenig
I liked when he took credit for accounts he never had anything to do with because that made it almost comical. All the Xerox stuff, Xerox and the capital I got was done by Sam Scali and I think Mike Chappell, and George at the end started taking credit for that, too.
- [24:05]
Capital One Advertiser
That's Fred Papert, the P of pkl. He was the guy who recruited Lois and Koenig to make a new agency in 1960. Now he's one of the guys responsible for redeveloping Times Square. As president of the 42nd Street Development Corporation, he knows the stories all too well. Xerox, Harvey Prober, Kolding, Ernie Kovacs, even.
- [24:25]
Julian Koenig
It's nuts. I think he's really got a screw loose. I think George truly doesn't know what he's doing. But it's nutty on both sides.
- [24:36]
Capital One Advertiser
Fred's in my dad's camp insofar as he knows and believes my dad is telling the truth. But his support more or less stops there. And he's categorical on this point that my dad is himself acting like a nut, wasting his time. They've talked about this on rides to and from the racetrack.
- [24:51]
Julian Koenig
The reason that Julian should not be fussing about this stuff at this stage is A, nobody gives a B. Anybody that would give a knows already what it's about. This is what George does is George's thing. And it's just gotta put a lid on it. But I've had this conversation with him a hundred times and he gets really pissed off. So I know he's got a screw loose too. Your father can be a pain in the ass, you know. And even being testy, if you say to him, julian, off already. We've heard this story, now we know about the wobbling chair, the wobbling floor. I've forgotten which one. You have no idea how many letters we wrote to the New York Times to the Advertising Age, to this and that. This is a dialogue between old farts. Julian's in another world from these kinds of things. Julian is one of the great thinkers and creators in the advertising business. If some nutcase claims credit, who cares? And he doesn't really even like me very much. You have to understand that that's where we start. Well, it's true. I mean, I think, because he goes to the river, but he goes to the races with me because I have a car.
- [26:16]
Capital One Advertiser
My father recognizes that there are only about four people left on Earth who care about this stuff. It's just that he happens to be one of them and he cannot let it go.
- [26:24]
Julian Koenig
I assume if I had a different personality, I would say I know what I've done and those dear and near to me know what I have done or not done and let it go at that. But I'm a fallible, fallible fellow and obviously with ego of his own. And I resent being burgled.
- [27:01]
Capital One Advertiser
The odd thing about all this, as my older brother John points out, is that my father's never exactly been a champion of advertising.
- [27:08]
Sarah Koenig
And he never believed he didn't have a. He wasn't a true believer in the business. I mean, I remember him saying to.
- [27:15]
Fred Papert
Me as a kid, you know, if.
- [27:17]
Sarah Koenig
You don't find something you want to do and really work at it, you're.
- [27:21]
Fred Papert
Going to end up like me, a.
- [27:22]
Sarah Koenig
Writer of short sentences that's verbatim. And so it's. It's a little ironic, you know, because he didn't. He didn't care. That's the thing, Sarah, you know, all those years, he didn't care because I think he thought it was beneath him, and the business, in some ways, was.
- [27:41]
Ira Glass
Not beneath him, but was not serious.
- [27:44]
Sarah Koenig
Enough to care that much about.
- [27:46]
Fred Papert
And now he does.
- [27:48]
Capital One Advertiser
I understand why he cares. He's 88 years old now, so his legacy, understandably, is on his mind. And even though he did campaigns for all sorts of good causes, gun control, nuclear proliferation, Robert Kennedy's senatorial and presidential campaigns, my father's not quite satisfied with his life's work.
- [28:06]
Julian Koenig
Advertising is built on puffery, on, at heart, deception. And I don't think anybody can go proudly into the next world with a career built on deception, even though no matter how well they do it, you're.
- [28:30]
Capital One Advertiser
Not necessarily proud that you had a career in the field of advertising and that's your legacy, but you are proud that you were the best in the business at the thing you chose to do.
- [28:41]
Julian Koenig
I couldn't have said it better myself.
- [28:50]
Capital One Advertiser
If he could go back, choose another career. My father would have liked to have been an environmentalist of some kind, which is why he'd really like to be remembered for something almost nobody knows he did. Naming Earth Day. It agitated him to look up Earth Day on Wikipedia recently and not see his name anywhere. So a few days ago, I added it.
- [29:17]
Ira Glass
Sarah Koenig. We first ran this story back in 2009. Sarah's dad, Julian Koenig, died five years after that. He was 93. George Lois died a few years after that. These days, Sarah is the host of the serial podcast. She worked as a producer at our show for a decade before that. Coming up, Peter Sagal, long before. Wait, wait, don't tell me. His lost years in Havana. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio.
- [29:42]
Capital One Advertiser
Wait.
- [29:42]
Ira Glass
When our program continues.
- [29:46]
Best Western Advertiser
Support for this American Life comes from Mint Mobile. Tired of spending hundreds on your monthly wireless bill? Enter Mint Mobile. Mint has plans starting at 15 bucks a month with high speed data and unlimited talk and text shop plans@mintmobile.com American upfront payment of $45 for 3 month 5 gigabyte plan required. New customer offer for first 3 months only. Then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See Mint mobile for details Support for this American Life comes from Capella University Learning doesn't have to get in the way of life. With Capella's Game changing flexpath learning format, you can set your own deadlines and learn on your own schedule. That means you don't have to put your life on hold to earn your degree. Instead, enjoy learning your way and pursue your educational and career goals without missing a beat. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella. Edu Support for this American Life comes from Goodrx. Looking to take control of your health? With Goodrx you can find big savings on your prescription medications. Goodrx lets you compare prescription prices at over 70,000 pharmacies and instantly find discounts of up to 80%. And even if you have insurance or Medicare, GoodRx may beat your co pay price. So for simple smart savings on your prescriptions, go to goodrx.com Tal.
- [31:09]
Ira Glass
This is American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program of course we choose the theme bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show Origin Stories where we go back to figure out where things came from. We arrived at Act 2 of our program. Act 2 Silent Partner so years ago, Sean Cole visited Chad's Trading Post. A restaurant filled with frilly knick knacks in Southampton, Massachusetts is a restaurant with a very distinct origin story.
- [31:37]
Pino Audia
The first time my girlfriend Mary Ellen and I walked into Chad's Trading Post, she noticed that only boys work there and thought it was weird. Normally, she said, in a place like this, a small country restaurant, you only see girls working. She pointed to the COVID of the menu which read Dedicated to and operated proudly in the memory of Chad D. McDonald. 3:12:74-3:11:90 she leaned into me and whispered, do you think the owner hires only boys because they remind her of her son? I certainly thought this was possible and sad in a way that makes you feel embarrassed for that person. Then a man came over and poured us some coffee and when he turned around there in huge white letters on the back of his blue polo shirt, it said Chad's Brother. Do you think that's what they call all the managers here? I asked Mary Ellen, do you think that's really Chad's brother? Then another friendlier manager type came over and asked us how we were doing and if we needed more coffee and I noticed his shirt.
- [32:49]
Sarah Koenig
My shirt says Chad's Best Friend logo over on the right hand side and it just tells the Customers, who we are. Yeah, Chad's best friend. You got Chad's brother, Chad's dad. And we had Chad's mom, too, but she's doing other things.
- [33:06]
Pino Audia
This is the story of Chad's trading Post. From the time he was 12, Chad and his brothers and a few friends had always talked about starting a small restaurant together when they graduated high school. They'd planned out menus. Chad's father took him looking for locations. But Chad died in a shooting accident two days before his 16th birthday. Chad's father, Glenn, his brothers Scott and Corey, and his best friend Mike, tell the story.
- [33:33]
Sarah Koenig
The boy who shot and killed my son was his younger brother's best friend.
- [33:39]
George Lois
It was myself and my best friend at the time and Chad. And they were cleaning up the cellar for his birthday. Oh, you were there, too?
- [33:48]
Pino Audia
Yeah, we were in the kitchen cooking sausage.
- [33:50]
George Lois
Yeah, we were cooking dinner. But they were downstairs cleaning. And I was upstairs. My mother had just left, and me and Corey were upstairs cooking dinner. And they came up for a break, went into the room, and then we heard, like, a little firecracker go off, you know. And then the person came out of the room, and he had blood on his hands. He's, you know, freaking out. I shot Chad. I shot Chad.
- [34:12]
Sarah Koenig
The official ruling, which was that Chad picked up a gun pointed at this fellow, said, bang. The other fella picked up a gun, pointed it back at Chad, pulled the trigger, and that was all.
- [34:25]
George Lois
So I called. I called 911. Then I paged my mother, and, you know, then the police got there.
- [34:38]
Sarah Koenig
I was charged for involuntary mansion because it was my handgun that ultimately killed Chad and that I was not aware that he had two of my handguns out of my cabinet in his bedroom at the time. And frankly, that was something I should have been aware of.
- [35:03]
Pino Audia
In 1993, the year Chad would have graduated from high school, the year he and Mike and his brothers and his father had planned to open a restaurant, they decided to open Chad's Trading Post.
- [35:19]
Sarah Koenig
This is Chad's corner of the restaurant. Notice the menu board. It tells you to welcome the Chad's Trading Post family restaurant. Says nobody leaves hungry and lists all the specials of the day. It also has a claimer in the bottom that's named in memory of Chad D. McDonald. The date of his birth, which is 3, 1271.
- [35:39]
Pino Audia
In all of the interviews I've ever heard and seen of an emotional nature, the person answering questions doesn't begin to cry until well into the interview. Chad's dad began crying before he even turned on My tape recorder. I asked him for a quick tour of the restaurant. It's a nice place, homey, even proofy, Though all the men who created it are tattooed, muscly, working class guys, Chad's father included.
- [36:06]
Sarah Koenig
To the left of that shows you the last and most recent picture of my son, which was taken about six weeks before he died. And the pictures of the two boys that were named in memory of him. His younger brother's son, who is Ian Chadwick, and his best friend, Sun Hunter. His name, Chad Michael.
- [36:34]
Pino Audia
This photo originally showed the two babies in Glen's arms, but they had the photographer alter the photo, insert Chad's head over Glen's.
- [36:44]
Sarah Koenig
And what they did was took the picture and replaced by computer Chad's picture over mine. It's actually my arms holding him, but the rest of it's all Chad.
- [36:56]
Pino Audia
Glenn showed me a painting in another corner of the restaurant. It was the comedy and tragedy masks from the COVID of Motley Crue's album Theater of Pain, Chad's favorite record. After he died, Chad's friends and brothers adapted the design into a memorial to him. It appears on their shirts. Two brass masks hang over the door, smiling and frowning. A huge flag with the masks hangs in the breeze outside, too heavy to flutter. Chad's brother Scott calls them the faces.
- [37:28]
George Lois
This was my first tattoo. I got the comedy and tragedy faces with the memory of Chad Banner. And that was my first tattoo. And I got that, you know, for the obvious reason. That's pretty much the family symbol now. You know, it started off with my father getting. Cause this was the tattoo he wanted to get, you know, without the banners, but that's what he wanted to get. That's what he planned on getting the following year for his birthday. I mean, he'd already had it planned out, you know, and so my father came home with it one day and he got it.
- [37:57]
Pino Audia
And you and your dad, though, weren't the only.
- [38:01]
George Lois
No, there's me and my father, Steve Prisben, Mike Richburg, who still works here. My grandmother has the sad face. Eric Marle. Yeah, she has it on her chest. And Eric Marwick, who worked here, has it also. And it's good. It's nice to see people. There's probably altogether 15 people that have his name tattooed on him. We used to sit around the kitchen table and take a needle and wrap thread around it and dip it in Clearfinc can tattoo each other with it. And there's quite a few people who. We masterfully tattooed Chad's name on their arm. Whether they like it now or not, it's still there.
- [38:58]
Pino Audia
They've tried to stay as close to Chad's vision of the restaurant as possible. He never specified decor, so they've had a free hand there. He and Mike actually drafted a menu for the place, and the families kept about half of it. The other half was slow baking recipes that no customer would ever wait for. Chad was also a lot of fun, everyone says, a lot of fun. A comedian, and they say that's why they joke around so much. At Chad's trading post, Scott says when he sees a heavyset customer that comes in a lot, he says, hey, tubby. He builds towers of little creamer packages on the bald head of another customer. Glenn throws crumpled up napkins at his employees. They have water fights. All this levity in a place that's essentially a large roadside memorial that serves massive omelets.
- [39:50]
Sarah Koenig
If Chad was here, we'd have the place upside down by now.
- [39:54]
Pino Audia
How do you mean?
- [39:55]
Ira Glass
Oh, it's in fun.
- [39:56]
Sarah Koenig
You know, we really have fun now. But I think if he was here, you know, we wouldn't have all that tension of his passing on our shoulder. You know, the only tension we'd have is how much trouble we going to get into.
- [40:15]
Pino Audia
Yeah, because I gotta say, I mean, you know, when I was here with Mary Ellen, you know, and we, you know, we didn't know anything about the restaurant either, obviously. We just, you know, and, you know, the first thing we saw was the menu, and then we saw the back of Scott's shirt. And, you know, I mean, it was a little creepy.
- [40:36]
Sarah Koenig
I've never gotten that response before. Never gotten the response that was creepy. I always got the response. That's, you know, a very nice thing to do. It's very genuine and it's heart. Heartwarming.
- [40:48]
Ira Glass
I've never gotten creepy before.
- [40:49]
Pino Audia
Well, I don't, you know, I just mean that. I mean, it's like there's somebody else here in the restaurant that's not really here, but you know what I mean?
- [40:57]
Sarah Koenig
It's exactly what it is.
- [40:58]
Capital One Advertiser
He's here.
- [41:00]
Sarah Koenig
He's here with us. And we kind of have to yell.
- [41:04]
Capital One Advertiser
At him once in a while because.
- [41:05]
Sarah Koenig
Every time something silly or stupid happens or gotta blame somebody and he's one to pull a prank on me for that, so. Oh, he's definitely here. But there's nothing creepy about it.
- [41:23]
Pino Audia
I think I can safely say I have never seen any other family keep someone alive to this degree. They've gone out of their way to construct a world where they couldn't Possibly forget Chad. A jumbo sized photo of Chad stood behind Scott and his wife at their wedding. They believe Chad has protected their lives in serious accidents. That he brought Mike's son through a recent infection unscathed. Chad's room is the same as it was the day he was shot in it, with two exceptions. They took down the girly pictures from the wall and they replaced the carpet before they did all this, right after Chad died, they all say they were lost. Mike said he wanted to crawl into a hole. Scott and his father had to make a deal with each other that neither would kill himself. Scott and Corey went into counseling. Scott says it didn't help much, you.
- [42:23]
George Lois
Know, but that's how it was when, when it happened. I mean, you didn't know what to do. I had no idea what to do. I walked in the bathroom, I look in the mirror and I'm just staring at myself in the mirror. And I flipped out and started punching the mirror. So now both my hands are cut and I'm bleeding all over the place and sitting on the floor crying and I have no idea why. You know, when you're that old and something like that happens, you don't have any idea what to do in any circumstance. You know, walking across a bridge, looking down. Yeah, maybe you sit there and think about it for a few minutes. It takes a lot out of you. It takes a lot out of your mind, you know. And counseling made it worse for a while.
- [43:04]
Pino Audia
What made it better, what Glenn says saved them, was starting the family business, Chad's business. But is it, I guess, is it healthy? I mean, is it.
- [43:15]
Sarah Koenig
I think everybody agrees in a different way. For me it is because I'm doing something constructive. I was semi retired and disabled before. I'm still disabled, but I was just vegging. I was. I was sitting at home feeling sorry for myself and doing nothing when the restaurant idea came up from his brother Scott. And we started looking into it rather seriously. We found the place, it was almost like a breath of fresh air. Was something we could all do in memory of his brother and have some fun with it. And we have for seven years. Healthy.
- [43:53]
Julian Koenig
I don't know.
- [43:54]
Sarah Koenig
I mean, the psychiatrists say many different things. People who blithely say things will get better over time have never been here. Things never get better. They get a little less immediate. So we work this in memory of him as a way of keeping him immediate to us. Nobody forgets, can we get along this way? We get by this way. The whole bunch of us get by this way.
- [44:34]
Pino Audia
In Northampton, where I used to live, there's a couple and they own a cafe. And at one point they had a child who lived 19 days, and after they disconnected him from life support, they built a shrine in their restaurant for him. Pictures of him connected to white tubes dotted the walls and beams. And his father, a musician, would perform a song at the cafe weekly, as I remember it, comparing his son to a salmon and to the Messiah. And some of us, at first, though we knew it had to be hard, felt a little embarrassed for them, as though this tragedy had driven them a little crazy. I think it's hard for us to know exactly what to do or say when we see public mourning like this, because we see it so rarely. The intensity of it is shocking. It's too naked. And usually we think that if you hold on to someone after their death this way you can't live your own life. But clearly you can.
- [45:42]
Ira Glass
John cole, in the years since we first broadcast this story, Chad's Trading Post closed down. The family kept Chad's memory alive for a while in a new restaurant called Chad's good table, 10 minutes away. But then they sold off that restaurant. These days, his memory is honored by four different boys who have been named after him. Act 3 Wait, wait, don't film me. Now, this origin story. Our public radio colleague, the host of NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Mr. Peter Sagal used to be a playwright. And to give you a sense of the kind of work that he did as a playwright, his most successful play, he says, was about a Holocaust denier and the Jewish attorney who represented that Holocaust denier in court.
- [46:30]
Fred Papert
And so it was all, you know, intellectual arguments and drama and involved the Holocaust and questions of the First Amendment law. And it came to the attention of this producer, Lawrence Bender, who is most well known for being Quentin Tarantino's producer. So he produced, among many other movies, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and so on and so forth.
- [46:47]
Ira Glass
Back in the 90s when all this happened, Bender read Peter's play and liked it and called him up and asked Peter if he wanted to write a movie. And Peter basically had been waiting for this phone call from Hollywood forever.
- [46:57]
Fred Papert
I mean, there was, I think, the year of 1992, my annual income was $10,000. I was yeah, this was the phone call that you wait for.
- [47:04]
Ira Glass
So after tossing around some different ideas for this film, Lawrence Bender introduces Peter to this woman who he works with, who at 15, had been an American in Cuba when the Cuban Revolution happened. Maybe there's a film in that. So Peter starts writing this film that's half romance growing up film, half politics, about an American teenage girl in Cuba in the 50s.
- [47:25]
Fred Papert
And I didn't know anything about the Cuban revolution, but one of the things I found out was that everybody involved with it was incredibly young. Castro himself was, was only 29. They were all 17, 18, 19, 20 years old, these guys up in the mountains with him. And one of the things that actually happened was almost as soon as they took over the Cuban revolution, these wonderful young democrats, freedom loving rebels from the mountains, started executing people on television. And in my original conception, there were two parallel stories. There was Maria, who I called the central character, who had a rebellious, more typically adolescent rebellion going against her own parents. And then there was her romantic interest, a character named Josepho, who was a Cuban and was sort of a third column rebel underground guy living and working in Havana to undermine the regime, sometimes through violence.
- [48:18]
Ira Glass
And eventually this film did get made. And it did, it did. It finally got made a bit later. And I'm just going to play a clip here from it.
- [48:26]
Capital One Advertiser
Oh God, I love dancing with him.
- [48:30]
Sarah Koenig
Did it ever occur to you that.
- [48:31]
Capital One Advertiser
That boy might be using you?
- [48:33]
Pino Audia
A nice American girl who can be.
- [48:34]
Capital One Advertiser
His ticket out of his.
- [48:35]
Pino Audia
No, no, that's not true.
- [48:36]
Capital One Advertiser
You may love dancing with that boy.
- [48:37]
Julian Koenig
But there are more important factors here.
- [48:38]
Capital One Advertiser
Like your family and your future.
- [48:40]
Pino Audia
Why does it have to be either or? Just because you gave up your passion?
- [48:42]
Julian Koenig
Why should I?
- [48:46]
Ira Glass
So that's a clip from the film. You want to just let people know the title of the film.
- [48:50]
Fred Papert
The title of the film is Dirty Dancing 2 colon Havana Nights.
- [48:59]
Ira Glass
Now, I have to say, I watched the movie last night. I watched Dirty Dancing, the whole thing. Yeah.
- [49:07]
Fred Papert
There is not a single line of dialogue in that movie that I wrote.
- [49:11]
Ira Glass
So how does the film go from political coming of age drama to Dirty Dancing to Havana nights? Well, of course, it's an old Hollywood story. Peter writes his film, he turns it in, they ask him to make it more like, oh, maybe could it be more like Dirty Dancing? Innocent girl with a semi dangerous guy.
- [49:27]
Fred Papert
And sometimes I think back on the experience and I say, you know, I should have said to them, hey, if that's what you want, I'm really not the guy for it.
- [49:34]
Ira Glass
He says each draft got worse and worse. Even he didn't like it. Finally, it was shelved. Years later, the producer who actually owned the rights to the film, Dirty Dancing, teamed up with Lawrence Bender to make a sequel. And somebody thought of Peter's old script, all the politics of the film got reduced to this one moment where really unconnected to anything else in the film, somebody attempts to shoot some unidentified political figure at the climax of the dance contest. And then later, in a moment of obligatory foreshadowing, our couple talks about whether Castro would ever kick out Americans from Cuba. I'm just saying that.
- [50:07]
Capital One Advertiser
What?
- [50:07]
Pino Audia
That I might have to leave?
- [50:09]
Ira Glass
Could happen.
- [50:12]
Capital One Advertiser
But they wouldn't do that.
- [50:14]
Ira Glass
Not if the whole idea is to give people their free. Can I ask you what it was like for you to watch the film? For you to sit in a theater and watch the film?
- [50:25]
Fred Papert
It was fine. It was really fine because.
- [50:29]
Ira Glass
Oh, honey, no, no, no.
- [50:32]
Fred Papert
I mean this, let me put it this way. Before I got that call, this experience had been a failure. I mean, I remember at that time, you know, just lying in bed going, well, I had my shot and I blew it. You know, all I ever wanted was a shot and I got my shot and it failed. I did a bad job. And so then when I got the phone call, I was like, oh, it's gonna be made and it's gonna be Dirty Dancing 2. That's a happy ending. That's a much better ending than the ending I thought I had, which was that it was just a disaster.
- [51:08]
Ira Glass
Act 4 Bill Clinton's seven year old brother so reporter Mary Wiltenberg spent years writing about two boys, brothers who were born in a Tanzanian refugee camp and then settled in Georgia in the United States in 2006. Many of her stories focused on the older brother, nine year old Bill Clinton Haddam. His dad was a big fan of the former president. After a tough first year in the United States, Bill seemed to have settled in. But his little brother Ige was still struggling to understand his own origin story, to get his seven year old brain around who he was and where he came from. At some point, Mary had spent so much time with these two boys that she was more than a reporter. She was more like a member of the family. Anyway, here's Mary.
- [51:52]
Mary Wiltenberg
Ige calls me on the phone almost every day. Sometimes he leaves messages.
- [51:57]
Julian Koenig
First unheard message.
- [51:59]
Mary Wiltenberg
Hello Mary, this is me, eager.
- [52:02]
Capital One Advertiser
And the good news is Bill is going to summer school. And now I'm not going to summer school.
- [52:10]
Ira Glass
Okay, this is me.
- [52:12]
Mary Wiltenberg
Okay, bye. In between the messages, we have long chats. I tape most of our conversations because I'm writing these articles about him and his family. And the conversations always seem to start with one of two questions. When can I come to your house? Or when are you coming to my house? Hello, Mary, you almost here? Oh, I'm there. I'm gonna be there soon. I'm in the car right now driving to you, and there's a little bit of traffic. You driving, Merle? I'm driving right now.
- [52:42]
Ira Glass
You're coming to take us home, right?
- [52:44]
Mary Wiltenberg
I am, yes. So, you know I'm crazy about this kid. He's sweet, nosy, funny. He's been to my house a bunch since I started doing these stories. But the first time he came over six months ago, he announced to me, my husband and his brother Bill Clinton, that from now on, the first grader formerly known as Ige would be going by his middle name, John. I'd already known something was up, because that afternoon my husband took Ige to the park. Ige was up on the jungle gym when a girl about the same age called over from the swing set and asked his name. And he got all weird and wouldn't answer her. She thought he hadn't heard her, so she hopped off the swing, came over to the jungle gym and asked him again, what's your name? Ige got this kind of cornered look and said, I don't know my name. But by later that night, he seemed to have made a decision. He was now John. In our living room, he struggled to type his new name into a video game. J. O. Wait, was it J or G? Then Bill offered to help, and Ige said, I know how to spell my own name. Ige picked up English first and best of anyone in his family. But his teachers say Ige's more confused about where he's from and who he is than other seven year olds they've seen. And the charter school Ige and Bill attend is about half refugees, so you'd think they'd see a lot of this. Teachers say no. Little kids usually realize pretty fast that. That most people who ask, where are you from? They don't want the whole story. And it doesn't really matter if you say you're from Burma, where your parents were from, or Thailand, where you lived in a camp in first grade. You just pick one and get on with your day. But for Ike, where are you from? Has never felt that simple. All winter, he seemed to be revising his story. First, he denied the camp he'd lived in his whole life. Hated the word refugee. Then he started saying he wasn't from Congo and his nationality, or Tanzania, where he was born, or Africa at all. He'd say, I'm from here or America. Watching tv, he'd point to rich white kids and say, that's me. At home, he threw tantrums. At school, he sometimes seemed almost catatonic. He wouldn't answer questions, wouldn't meet people's eyes. His parents, his teachers, everyone felt helpless. They didn't know what set him off or how to reach him.
- [55:13]
Sarah Koenig
Him.
- [55:14]
Mary Wiltenberg
And he seemed to regress. If he were sitting on the couch, he'd snuggle up or take my hand. The slightest things made him cry. He seemed lost. One night on the phone, I reminded him where he was born. In Tanzania. I'm from Tanzania.
- [55:30]
Capital One Advertiser
He said, I'm from Tanzania.
- [55:34]
Pino Audia
Uh huh.
- [55:35]
Julian Koenig
I am.
- [55:36]
Mary Wiltenberg
Well, that's where you were born.
- [55:41]
Julian Koenig
Where am I from?
- [55:43]
Mary Wiltenberg
Well, you were born in Tanzania and your dad came from Congo. Your mom came from Rwanda. So your family has a lot of places where you're from. Hey, boy. Bye. Ike's parents didn't mind calling him John. They were just kind of puzzled. The idea that you could hate your name seemed like one more baffling thing about America. They just had no idea what Ige was going through. And it made Ige feel more distant from them. A while back, I was riding with Ige and his parents in their car when he said to me, I don't want to live with my mom. I thought it was a setup for one of his jokes. So I said, you don't want to live with your mom? Why? He said, I want to live with you. I said, no, you don't want to live with me. But then Ige got all serious and said, but what if I forget my language? I said, what do you mean? And he said, if I forget my language, I can't live with them because they won't understand me. Later, on the phone, we talked about what it's like for him talking with his mom. When you speak English, does she understand you? No. So maybe you're learning faster, huh? I just forget it right now. That's why he really? Yes. Like what do you forget? Everything. And then at some point this spring, Ige just went back to being Ige. A lot of things happened for him at once. His green card arrived. His reading took off. It took me a while to notice that John had vanished. His teachers don't remember either exactly when he stopped correcting them. But by the last month of school, he was taking his turn in the semicircle with everyone else. No drama, just my name is Ige and I'm from Congo. And suddenly he was volunteering details about his life in the camp games he'd played his mud brick house. Ige seemed to be making peace with his past and his name. And he moved on to other burning seven year old questions.
- [57:52]
Capital One Advertiser
What?
- [57:52]
Mary Wiltenberg
Dingo nights. You know how you play bingo at school?
- [58:00]
Capital One Advertiser
Yeah.
- [58:01]
Mary Wiltenberg
It's like a night when a bunch of adults get together, maybe kids too, and they play a game that's like that, only with numbers instead of words. Okay, I'm waiting for you. Okay, I'll see you soon.
- [58:14]
Ira Glass
Goodbye.
- [58:15]
Mary Wiltenberg
Goodbye. But just when it seemed like Ige had finally accepted his own name, the other shoe dropped. The last week of school, Ige asked me, what does gay mean? I told him, gay can mean happy, or it can mean when a man loves another man. Ige started sobbing. We were in his kitchen and he just collapsed against the fridge. Finally, he choked out what was wrong. And it turned out that some second graders had been taunting him. E. Gay. You're gay. And he told them, that's not a word. It was just one more strike against that name. But for now, John hasn't reappeared. Ige's sticking with Ige. The other day when we were riding in the car, I said some offhand thing about needing to call my mom. Ige said, you have a mom? I said, yeah. Of course. He could not believe it. How had he not known about this before this year? It's been hard enough for Ige to put together his own story. The idea that I wait. Everybody comes from somewhere. It kind of blew his mind.
- [59:35]
Ira Glass
Mary Wilkenberg, she wrote about Ige, Bill Clinton and their family for the Christian Science Monitor. Today's show is a rerun and. And ige is now 23. He still talks to his mother in Swahili. You can read more of the family stories@marywiltenberg.com Dear John, don't be hard on yourself.
- [59:57]
Julian Koenig
Give yourself a break.
- [59:59]
Dan Heath
Life wasn't meant to be run.
- [60:03]
Ira Glass
The race is over.
- [60:06]
Julian Koenig
You won't.
- [60:08]
Ira Glass
Well program was produced today by Lisa Pollack and myself with Alex Bloomberg, Sean Cole, Jane Marie, Sarah Koenig, Alyssa Shipp and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Production help from JP Dukes. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Help on today's rerun from Michael Comite, Angela Gervasi, Catherine Raymondo, Stone Nelson and Ryan rummery. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, thanks today to Bob Folkenflick, Matt Holtzman and Hank Rosenfeld. Pino Audia's research paper about garages and entrepreneurs that I talked about at the beginning of the show was done with Christopher Ryder. Dan Heath, who I also talked to at the beginning of the show is now host of the podcast what it's like to be this American Life is delivered to public radio stations by prx, the public radio exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co founder, Mr. Tory Malatea, who hears himself quoted in these credits every single week on our program and says, I never said that.
- [61:00]
Julian Koenig
I would never say that.
- [61:01]
Ira Glass
I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American Life, next week on the podcast this American Life. Daniel Sauce is a comedian, and after one of his shows, a fan walked up and told Daniel that he ended his marriage after watching Daniel's special, even showed him the divorce papers. Then it happened again and again. Fans got in touch to say they'd broken up with their partners after seeing Daniel's show, the comedy routine powerful enough to end your marriage. Listen if you dare. Next week on the podcast on your local public radio station, you this message comes from NPR sponsor Rosetta Stone, an expert in language learning for 30 years.
- [62:02]
Capital One Advertiser
Right now, NPR listeners can get Rosetta.
- [62:05]
Ira Glass
Stone's lifetime membership to 25 different languages for 50% off.
- [62:10]
Capital One Advertiser
Learn more at RosettaStone.
- [62:12]
Ira Glass
Com NPR.