Selects: Flagpole Sitting: A Real Fad

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1:43We're all pretty drunk most of the time and gaining weight, but that's okay. We're going to let each other up because it's a global pandemic. This episode is called Flagpole Sitting, colon, a real fad. And it was. People would sit at the top of flagpoles for as long as they could. And it was a part of a weird time in American history. So check out this episode, not on Harvey Danger, the band who sang the song Flagpole Sitta, as did my cover band, but Flagpole Sitting for real. Check it out right now.

2:14Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

2:29Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant right over there. Jerry's out there somewhere, and this is Stuff You Should Know. You know, Chuck, I have to say, yes. Every once in a while, the amazing theme song from our short-lived television show comes into my head. And it'll just, it's just a complete earworm. Yeah. Because I just hear the end of it over and over and over again. And it's actually pretty pleasant. It doesn't bother me. I love it. I haven't heard that song in a while. Well, you need to go listen. That was the Henry Clay people,

3:03right? Yeah. Our buddies, Joey and Andy Sierra. California boys, Southern California boys, men. Didn't they go to like Harvard or something crazy like that? Joey ended up going to Harvard, and then I think Andy went to AFI, and then Joey, I think, went back to film school. And they're both writing, you know, screenwriting. Man, that's great. Andy's got a, he wrote this Andy Samberg movie that's coming out soon. Really? Which one? What's it called? It is called Palm Springs, I think.

3:39Wow. And he wrote it? Yeah, dude. That's fantastic. Congratulations. And he wrote on the TV show Lodge 49. Yeah. I haven't seen that. Palm Springs. But that, um, that guy, Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn's son, I love that guy. Yeah. He's great. I think he's one of the coolest people walking around on the planet today. Yeah. I haven't seen Lodge 49. It's supposed to be awesome. And, um, Andy was a writer's assistant and then ended up on the staff and they're, they're both doing great.

4:09Man, that's great. Congratulations to both of you guys. He's got a little baby now. They're both married. Nice, man. That's nice. And that's an update on the Sierra Club, as I call them. There you go. Um, let's see. What else? I guess that was it. How did that come into your head, though? The song? Like, what made you think of that? Nothing. I was just out back, like, mowing the lawn with my big old lawnmower. Uh, and it just popped in my head. I was probably thinking of something I had to do that had to do with stuff you should know. And I thought stuff you should know. And when I thought it, I thought it as stuff you should know. Didn't it? This is

4:44the second time you mentioned the size of your lawnmower. Yeah. And now you just got to send me a picture. Is this one of these things that you stand and it, and it, and it wheels you around like some, uh, weird land speeder? You mean like a skag or something? No. This is just a good old fashioned Toro that is, because it's gas powered, I got it like on super discount, um, because everybody's making like really good electric lawnmowers. Yeah. Um, but this one was, you

5:16know, it was on discount and I liked the look of it. Yeah. It's a good looking mower, huh? Yeah. I was like, I like your style. Come on with me. Is it red? Yep. Yeah. It was red Toros. Yeah. It's nice. Takes you back to days of paper routes and stuff like that, doesn't it? I thought you were mentioning the song because you were thinking of the song Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger. No, I wasn't, uh, at all. Okay. But that's a great segue, Chuck, because it just

5:46so happens, and you may be aware of this, for talking about flagpole sitting today in this episode. That's right. And I've been singing that song in my head all day. Now, I don't, I don't know that song. You know it. It was a, well, maybe not. It was a, it was a top 40 hit in the nineties, uh, kind of during the grunge era. It was, it was a power pop hit that kind of, oh, from Hardy Danger. Wait, is that it? That's not it. No. My band actually

6:21covers, uh, Flagpole Sitta. It's a fun song. Okay. That's great. Uh, I'm going to have to go listen to it, uh, because I feel like I'm missing out. But what that song, is that song about flagpole sitting? Is it about Shipwreck Kelly in particular? No, it's not. But it does have one line that says, uh, run it up the flagpole and see. And that's the only time it references flagpoles at all. Sees what? Uh, who salutes, but no one ever does, I think is the next line. Hmm. That rings a bell. I was looking into the mirror, a little bit clearer. Sure. Run

7:00it up the flagpole and see who salutes, but no one ever does. Yeah. Uh, I'm not sick, but I'm not. Well, who is that? Harvey Danger. Harvey Danger. Okay. Yeah. That's a great song. I love it. Yeah. Who a fellow, uh, podcasting friend, John Roderick, actually, uh, Sean Nelson was a friend of his in Seattle and they, he played bass for a little while in Harvey Danger. Oh, very. Wow, man. This is all coming first. So, I got one more for you. What you got? I used to have that song and I don't know where I downloaded it from. This would have been probably

7:31back in the Napster days or something. Whoa. Um, and it was mislabeled as Brian Jonestown Massacre. And I was always like, this does not sound like Brian Jonestown Massacre. Now I know it most definitely wasn't Brian Jonestown Massacre. Wow. All right. We haven't even

Patient zero of flagpole sitting

7:48talked about flagpole sitting yet. No, we haven't. Um, which is a, a crime because it's actually one of the more interesting weirdo fads that's ever come this way in America. And it was in the 20s. It started, we actually, we know who patient zero was of flagpole sitting. And it's easy to tell because it is such a bizarre thing to do that if you can find the person who, who, who did it first, who claims to have done it first, they're probably correct.

8:19And in this case, you can trace it back to sometime around January of 1924, supposedly, potentially in Hollywood, California, part of Los Angeles. And there was a man named Alvin Shipwreck Kelly, who supposedly climbed up on a flagpole as part of a promotion for a movie and sat there for a full 13 hours and 13 minutes to help draw a crowd. And boy did he ever. Yeah. Which, you know, uh, it sounds like a long time to sit on a flagpole, but that is

8:50kid stuff. Yeah. Compared to where this is headed. Yeah, for sure. That's an aperitif. But it's a good first attempt, you know? Yeah. And so, you know, it sounds strange because when you think of a flagpole, you're like, what are they sitting on? It's a, it's a modified flagpole that basically there are different kinds, but, um, usually it's sort of like a bar stool at the top of a flagpole. Mm-hmm. And it's that lo-fi and you climb up there and you sit and that's all you do. That's, that's it. I mean, whatever else you want to do. Well, sure, you do other stuff.

9:24To amuse yourself or whatever. Yeah. That's up to you. But as far as being considered a flagpole sitter, that's it. You sit on top of a flagpole for as long as you can. All right. So let's talk about this guy because Shipwreck Kelly was a pretty interesting character. Uh, yeah. And I have to say there's a Memory Palace episode about him that I specifically didn't listen to beforehand because I didn't want to unconsciously rip it off. Wow. But go listen to that. Yeah. Our old buddy Nate,

The early life of Shipwreck Kelly

9:49I'm going to check that out for sure. Mm-hmm. So Alvin Kelly, uh, he was born Aloysius Anthony Kelly in New York City in Hell's Kitchen in a tenement in 1893 and had a very sad start to his life in that his father, uh, was, had already passed before he was born. His mother passed in childbirth and that basically meant he was shuttled around to relatives and orphanages, uh, from, you know, the minute he took his first breath. Yeah. Um, and apparently from a pretty,

10:22pretty early age, he would do things like climb flagpoles and other tall stuff and like working at heights became a kind of a recurring theme in his life. Um, it was supposedly by age seven, he was climbing flagpoles. Within a few years after that, he was starting to scale the facades of some of the buildings in his neighborhood. Mm-hmm. And by the time he was 13, and bear in mind if this guy's biography seems a little thin, he just came out of nowhere in 1924 for sitting on a flagpole.

10:53So all of the info about him came from him to reporters who were reporting in the 1920s. So just fabrications are flying around left and right. Sure. But, um, supposedly he ran away at age 13 and ran off to join, uh, uh, the crew of a cargo ship and start his life sailing the seas. Yeah. And he did a lot of kind of odd jobs, uh, or maybe not odd jobs, but just jobs that didn't have anything to do with one another, uh, over the next couple of decades. He was in the movies as a, a stand-in and a

11:24double. He was a stunt person, a stunt pilot, a high diver, a boxer. Uh, this part I love. Uh, there's actually a name for people that repair church steeples. And what is that? Steeplejack. He was a steeplejack. That is definitely a band name for sure. Steeplejack? Oh yeah. It sounds like maybe an industrial band, but like on the light side, like they, like they're technically too melodic to actually be considered industrial, but they still call themselves industrial. It's become my favorite

11:55part of this whole band name thing. Is it? Is you describing what kind of band it is. Oh, okay. I love it. Well, thanks man. That makes me feel warm and fuzzy. So, um, World War I comes along and he was in the Naval Auxiliary Reserve as an ensign and served on the USS Edgar F. Luckenbach during that war. Yep. So he did have some sort of, well, I should say, I don't know if anybody's corroborated that.

12:25Um, but we'll just take all that at face value because it doesn't really matter at this point. But what he eventually picked up the nickname shipwreck and there's a lot of different, um, explanations for this. And he's given, or he gave multiple different explanations depending on what reporter he was talking to. But one of the numbers that gets bandied about, uh, pretty frequently is that shipwreck Kelly was so named because he survived 32 different shipwrecks at sea, which is where

12:56shipwrecks tend to happen. Those were the good old days. Yeah. You just make up stories about yourself. Do you remember when we talked about, um, we did an episode on the world's either luckiest or unluckiest people? Mm-hmm. And do you remember that one guy who was like, I, I survived a car that fell off a cliff and I survived a train wreck and all that. He was doing his jam in like 2005. Remember? Oh, was he? Yeah. He was pretty, pretty recent if I remember correctly. Remember his son came out and was like, everybody, this is not true. Right. Like none of what you're talking about is

13:30true. Well, we don't. My dad just fooled you all. We don't know if a shipwreck Kelly actually survived the Titanic like he claimed. Uh, but we do know that he was not on the roster on the Titanic. So I am going to venture to say that he made that one up. And there were three Kellys on board, but who were survivors? But all three of them were women. So yeah, he probably wasn't on the Titanic. Maybe he did survive from shipwrecks. He was at sea most likely. But the point is, is they call him shipwreck Kelly. And I guess somebody, uh, went to the trouble of, of digging up that, uh, some

14:04reporters who, uh, covered his boxing career are probably the likeliest source for where he got his nickname shipwreck. Right. Yeah. Which I love because, uh, I guess he wasn't a great boxer because, uh, they said that he was often adrift and ready to sink.

14:21Isn't that great? Shipwreck Kelly. It's a great nickname and an even better origin story than surviving 32 shipwrecks if you ask me. Yeah. And the other thing we don't know for sure is even if that Hollywood movie premiere story is correct in his first major outing as a flagpole sitter, because, uh, yet another story says, no, this is actually in Philadelphia at a department store. And he just did it on a dare and the department store got a lot of business because people were standing around looking and then doing some shopping. So they were like, Hey, stay up there

14:53and I'll give you some extra dough. Yeah. So either way, it's pretty widely held that shipwreck Kelly was the guy who started the flagpole sitting craze. Right. And it was a craze because this is a time where you could go sit on a flagpole for 13 hours and 13 minutes and newspapers around the country would pick up the story and write about it. Um, and you would suddenly become famous overnight. And that's exactly what happened to shipwreck Kelly. So that's prong one toward this becoming a fad in the

15:271920s. The other criteria is that, um, people have to want to topple that record. And that was very widespread at the time too, because the 1920s were actually really big into fads. Like people would take up weird fads and just go nuts over them for basically the whole decade. Yeah. You know, people had time and they had fewer distractions. Yeah. No TV. So like someone doing a dance-a-thon for 28 hours or sitting on a flagpole for a day, you know, it's a, it's an interesting story back then.

16:04It's sad, but that that was interesting, but it was. Right. So, uh, we'll, we'll talk about dance marathons and then we'll take a break. Okay. Okay. Okay.

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17:28how are we going to accomplish this goal? We won the AT&T small business contest grant. That $50,000 got us over the finish line where we built the first AI powered grocery shipping container in the country. For Jalea, it's about building a legacy to show the world that you can solve any problem when you work together. Having the support of AT&T, the city of Atlanta, is huge. Look at how many people we've been able to help. Connecting changes everything. AT&T.

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19:03Oh, wait. I got that backwards, Chuck, I just realized. Hopefully, Jerry figured it out and

Dance marathons of the 1920s

19:15there was an ad in there somewhere. I think we should just leave it just like that, though. That'll be fun. Okay. So, we're going to talk about dance marathons now, after the ad break, despite what I said before. And dance marathons are a super 20s example of a crazy fad that kind of came along and got everybody by the hackles. And people across the country started entering basically dance marathon competitions. All because of one person, one woman, a dance instructor named Alma

19:47Cummings. That's right. 32 years old, she danced for 27 hours at the Audubon Ballroom in New York in 1923 with six different dance partners. And it was a weird time because it wasn't just dancing. It was endurance challenges as a whole were just all the rage and punishing your bodies and all these weird random ways from yo-yoing to hula hooping to rocking in a rocking chair or skipping

20:19rope to dancing. Dancing was the big one. That's where you, you know, if you see these videos of these marathon dance competitions, it's just, it looks like hell on earth. It looks awful. Yeah. Oh, yeah. They didn't seem very fun at all. But Alma Cummings just kicked the whole thing off. And again, just like Shipwreck Kelly, who would follow, I guess, a year later, or even, yeah, about a year later, she got a lot of publicity. There's like a famous photo of her with her feet in a tub of water soaking at home. And she's holding up her shoes and they have holes

20:54in the soles where, you know, she wore holes from dancing for 27 hours. And I guess, like you're saying, people were bored or there wasn't as much to do. But also there really seems to just be a profound hunger for celebrity, however you can get it. And that seemed to like really drive people who wanted to be like, well, if this lady got this much attention for dancing 27 straight hours, maybe I can get even more attention for dancing 30 straight hours. And so within just like, I think,

21:24three weeks of Alma Cummings setting this record for dancing, it had been broken nine times at least from people trying to seek the same kind of publicity she got. Yeah. And you know, it's funny. It really, like we talk about these days, how everyone wants their 10 minutes or they want to be reality show famous or whatever. And like- Has it been whittled down to 10 now? I thought it was like 15. Well, like that's something new and it's really not. Like this is sort of the version of that back then was, I want to be famous. I want my names in the papers, but I'm not particularly skilled

22:00enough to do anything to do that. So I'll rock in a rocking chair for three days. Yeah. You know? And hopefully they will come. If I rock, they will come. And it's- That was a pity laugh at best, but I appreciate it. Well, that was a bad joke. Yeah. Admittedly. But it would, and we should shout out a bunch of great websites here because this next bit came from Atlas Obscura, one of our favorite sites, and also our dearest of old sites that

22:32we always have loved. Mental Floss, Ripley's, History Daily, J. Mark Powell, and Historic Pelham, which is great. But Atlas Obscura talks about the, in the 30s, and this is really kind of depressing, during the Depression. It's very appropriate. Is that sometimes people would enter these dance marathons because it would be somewhere they could sleep and eat for a week at a time when they didn't necessarily have a home or

23:04food. Yeah, it is extremely depressing. Or just the prize money that was offered in the grips of the Depression might be enough to keep your house from being foreclosed on. Yeah. So, yeah. The thing is, is, you know, you can blame promoters for continuing this long beyond the fad, but the promoters wouldn't have been putting these on and offering this prize money were it not for all the crowds that would show up every day to watch these people get increasingly closer to, you know, catastrophic exhaustion from dance marathons. Because, like, there were rules

23:38where, you know, probably early on in the dance marathon, you could sleep or rest for 15 minutes of every hour. Yeah. And then after, like, a week, a week of this dance marathon going on, the promoter might be like, oh, okay, well, you know, we need to step things up a little bit. And you will now have three minutes per hour of every 24-hour period in a day to where you can rest. And then toward the end, they'd be like, no rest. I think I read about one where the last 57 hours of a multi-week

24:14dance marathon was, like, had no rest. So these people dance for more than two straight days constantly. You had to constantly be in motion and your knees couldn't touch the ground or else you'd be disqualified. Yeah. And if you look at footage of this stuff, I mean, it's charitable because what they're doing is dancing toward the end. It's just hanging. It looks like two corpses hanging on each other, sort of swaying back and forth. Yeah. I don't get, I mean, any of these things, even the modern day versions of, like, these contests

24:44where you have to keep your hand on a car or whatever. Uh-huh. Hand on hard body. Oh, man. Or sit in the car. I knew a guy that did one of those where he tried to win a Volkswagen Beetle by sitting in it with four other people in a mall. I'm just like... Oh, yeah. You told us that story before. Did he win or not? I think he did. But there's just no way. Kill me. Yeah. It would be really awful for sure. Because let's say for one of those contests, let's say you don't win. Then you've just sat

25:18in a car with three strangers for a week and you didn't even get the car. Yeah. But even if you did get the car, imagine yourself five years on and that car is like... Cursed. There's tears in the seats or something like that, you know? I know. And like the glove compartment won't close. It's, you know... I mean, I guess you've got a story to tell at cocktail parties, but even that would wear thin after a while. Yeah. But Chuck, we need people to do stuff like that because there's something about contests

25:49like this. There's something about fads like flagpole sitting that keep humanity from becoming too cerebral. You know what I mean? From just becoming like computers, basically. We need people to do stuff like this because it brings out some juvenile something in us that makes us want to find out about it or learn about it or talk about it. And I think that's good. I think that's healthy for our species. All right. It's my take. It's genuinely off the cuff. I'm actually just surprised at myself

26:24that I just said that out loud. You're just riffing. Yeah. So, Shipwreck Kelly, back to flagpole sitting. That initial 13-hour, 13-minute sit, like you said, inspired so many others to break it. And it was getting broken. In pretty short order, kind of like the dance-a-thons. There was a woman named Bobby Mack from L.A. who did it. A guy named Joe Holdom Powers, who did this in Chicago for 16 days. Another

26:55guy for 51 days named Bill Penfield. Yeah. So, let's point this out. Take a second here. Shipwreck Kelly did 13 hours and kicked off a national fad. These people are now into weeks at a time. 51 days is more than seven weeks up there. Yeah. It's pretty impressive. That's a long time. I'm impressed, at least. Yeah. Are you bucking the cerebral? Yes, right now. Can you tell? Let me see here. In the 20s, there was a 15-year-old boy who set the kid record for 10 days, 10 hours,

27:2910 minutes, and 10 seconds. I think that was planned. Yeah. Yeah. If not, then... But see, there you go, Chuck. We're thinking about that. It's making us think. This little kid is making us think. We got to avoid that. It needs to be random combinations of numbers so we don't start thinking about it. But we should also point out that not everyone was like, oh, this is the best thing ever. And Cosmopolitan magazine, Cosmo called it competitive imbecility. Yeah. This is fine. We need that, too. I have to say, I want to say something here. It's a

28:02little PSA. This might not even ever make it in the final edit. So I'll just say it to you. How about that? I would say the last few weeks of episodes, there's been some good ones here or there. But overall, I find that they've been less good because I am so sick of myself. Because we've been so entrenched in the book right now. So it's like living, breathing, S-Y-S-K, which is us, and having to confront myself and my own

28:38personality and sense of humor and whether that's actually funny and just constantly thinking about this on top of doing the podcast, on top of the other stuff we're trying to do now, too. And I am so sick of myself, I can barely tolerate listening to myself talk. So if anyone's picked up on the last few episodes, like in the last few weeks, just being a little ho-hum, that's why. And I apologize. Maybe we'll go back and redo them one day. Wow. News to me.

29:10I think you've been great. Hey, thanks a lot, man. That's ultimately what I was fishing for. All right. Well, if you want to cut that part out, let me pick this up by saying, and I'm sure you've made a great point, Josh.

29:24Nice. So back to Kelly, right? Yeah. You've got all these, what I'm sure Shipwreck Kelly deemed slack-jawed yokels, ho-hums, that kind of thing, who were out there trying to topple his record. And they did. Some of them did topple his

Kelly turns sitting into a business

29:41record. But nobody had turned this into a business like Shipwreck Kelly had. He was a one-man money-making machine who made his money just by sitting on top of a flagpole. Good money. Because he was really good at self-promoting. Like, there wasn't a reporter whose ear he wouldn't bend if he got the chance. And in these reports or these articles, he would say things like, yeah, I'm in town for this, but if anybody has any other offers, I'm wide open and I'm staying at, you know, the Cambridge Arms itinerant hotel for the next few days if somebody wants to get in

30:14touch with me there with a job offer. Like, he was really good at attracting job offers specifically for flagpole sitting. Yeah. And he made good dough for back then. I mean, this is good money anytime. If he made $100 an hour like he claimed to, other people said, no, it really wasn't that much. It was probably closer to anywhere between $100 and $500 a day. Still a lot of money. Sure. And like you said, it was like, he was almost like a celebrity version of a sign spinner.

30:47Like, if you could pay George Clooney to sign spin in front of your mobile phone store, that was sort of what Shipwreck Kelly was. That's a great one. I got one too. It's almost like if there was a cult of personality built up around like the flapping dancing wind sock guy that they put out in front of like mattress mattress stores in like 2005. Yeah. I love those dudes. Okay. Those are fun. Both. I think both of those are high quality analogies.

31:20Well, we'll see which one Jerry uses in the edit. Okay. Uh, let me see here. Here, here's some of his longer sits. Uh, he did 146 hours at the old Westgate hotel in Kansas city. Not bad. Uh, 312 hours in Newark, New Jersey atop the St. Francis hotel. That's pretty good. Sure. I don't know what that is in days, but.

31:46312 hours. Uh, let's see. Uh, if you divided that by 24, as you should, you would come up with, uh, something along the lines of 13 days on the nose. Hmm. All right. Well, how about 22 days? And this was in conjunction with the dance marathon at none other than Madison square garden. Yeah. Because I don't know if we said it or not, but there was a dance marathon at Madison square gardens that was actually shut down by the health department because they decided it had gone on too long, 10 days, and that it deemed a threat to the health of the participants. That wasn't the one that

32:22he, he sat in, but there was one the following year where for, what was it? 22 days. Yeah. That means that the dance marathon went on for 22 days, but imagine that. So you've got these two endurance fads just interweaved in this way that the universe almost like collapses in on itself because they're put together too, too close together. You know?

How flagpole sitters survived the poles

32:45Uh, yeah. And here's how he would do it. He would sit on a, on that bar stool like thing and it was padded and he would, um, you know, eat and smoke cigarettes and shave apparently. And they would send this stuff up in like a, with a bucket and a rope and tell him how he would sleep because this is what I really kind of wanted to know. So, so you said his, his seat was like a bar

33:16stool, a round bar stool basically. Right. And it, um, it was on a pole, a flagpole appropriately. And then in the flagpole, you'd have two holes drilled just beneath the seat. And now that I'm doing it, I'm like, that's really hard to reach. So now I'm questioning whether this is true or not. He might have long arms. Maybe so. Long thumbs. But, uh, he, so he would plug his, his thumbs into those holes drilled into each side of the flagpole so that when he started to lean forward, the pressure from that, uh, the flagpole on his

33:46thumbs would kind of cut into his skin and wake him up just enough that he would adjust himself. And apparently he, he got so good at this that he would adjust himself to sit back up so he wouldn't fall over off of the flagpole while he was still sleeping. Like he wouldn't, he wouldn't wake up. He could just adjust himself in his sleep. That's right. And he'd have his little, uh, I don't know if they're little, but he would have his ankles locked around the pole and apparently it would tether, uh, a leg to keep him from, uh, catastrophe. But I, I think it's very dubious that that was a solid life-saving rig.

34:22Yeah. And I mean, like some of these flagpoles he's sitting on 30 feet, 50 feet. Um, one of them, I guess the impression I had, the one that you mentioned on, um, Kansas City's Westgate hotel, that that flagpole was on the top roof of the hotel. So, I mean, he was up there for sure. And if he had something gone wrong, he would have, yeah, that tether probably would not have done terribly much or it would have done a lot to keep his leg hanging up there, but the rest of them would have kept going to the ground. You know, how did he pee pee

34:54and poopoo? Uh, he had a little contraption for that with the tube that went down. Okay. But here's the thing. So you're, you're a traveling flagpole sitter. You're relying on the help of other people on the ground. You need food. You're, when you pee and poop into that contraption that leads to a tube that goes down to the ground, you don't want that just leaking out for the spectators to see and smell and experience. You need it to go into a bucket that somebody is going to go take away and dump. So you're relying on this

35:25kind of group of assistants and hands that probably the promoter maybe helped hire for you. Maybe you make a friend along the way who just kind of travels from town to town with you for a little while. That's what I think. He had, Shipwreck Kelly had an assistant. He had a boy. That was the worst job in show business. Right. He had a lad who would help him. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so, uh, but it would be a pretty bad job. Yeah. But anyway, so he had to, I mean, he had to eat and he didn't eat much. He would apparently just kind of almost do a broth fast,

36:00um, augmented with cigarettes and coffee. Um, he would stay up for four days at a time because like living on a flagpole is not exactly like the most comfortable place you can exist for, you know, 22 days or 13 days or however long. No. And it eventually turned against him in that, uh, the money dried up, uh, after he did this sort of big Atlantic city stunt that we talked about and it was the great depression. And eventually people were kind of like, I don't really care so much about this dumb stunt because I'm starving

36:34and I'm broke and I'm homeless.

The Great Depression declines the fad

36:37Right. And, uh, the, the kind of tide of public opinion turned such that in 1935, he went to do this in the Bronx and he was actually arrested for public nuisance. Yeah. And I'm sure he was like, but I'm shipwreck Kelly. Right. But I mean, think about it. That's like, everybody's sick of you now, Kelly and your shtick. We're all just depressed in the depression. So maybe we'll do a dance marathon, but we're not going to watch you sit around in a flagpole anymore. And, um, there was a, a contemporary article that was written at the time that said that, um, he, he attributed the decline of flagpole

37:13sitting directly to the stock market crash. And he said that people didn't want to see anything higher than their securities, stock securities at the time, which were not very high. So. And everyone went, that's just not even a joke in good taste.

37:27Right. And he, and he would punch his human familiar in the mouth and say, you told me to tell that joke.

37:36Man, that was gangbusters, Chuck. Do you watch that show? You got me. What we do, what we do in the shadows? Uh, I've seen some episodes of it. Uh, you know, we were talking about it and one of the PAs, I think, wrote in to say that, uh, they were, they were just blown away that we were, we were giving such big ups to their show. I think I remember that. If you talk to Matt Berry, tell him he's a comedy genius. I never heard anything back. Man, he's great. But oh, have you seen An Evening with Beverly Loughlin?

38:07No. How do I know that name? So it's, uh, um, Craig. Robinson? Yes. From The Office, right? Yeah. He plays a guy named Beverly Loughlin. And, uh, Aubrey Meadows. Aubrey Plaza? Or Audrey Meadows. Plaza. That's right. Man, I'm really screwing this up. You're great with first names, though. Yeah. Um, and then, uh, okay. So she's the main character. Jemaine Clement. I know him. You got that. Uh, he plays, well, you just have to see it.

38:39Anyways, a really- Well, he was in What We Do in the Shadows, the movie. Right. Right. So he, I think he co-created it, too. This is what all ties into this. He and Matt Berry are also in this, too. Matt Berry's in the TV version of What We Do in the Shadows. Yes. Jemaine Clement helped, helped create it. But, um, it's definitely worth watching. It is purposefully very bizarre, which can get really annoying really easily. But this movie pulls it off very well. Like, purposeful bizarreness and, for humor. Um, and it's a good, it's a good movie.

39:10It's worth watching. Okay. It's worth watching. Okay. I'll leave it to you to decide whether it's a good movie or not. Well, I love everybody in it. That's a great cast. Yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's worth watching. How about that? All right. Should we take our second break here? Can you believe we have it? Yes, I can. All right. Let's do our other break, and then we're going to talk about, we're going to wind up this flagpole sitting thing right after this. Hey there.

39:52Before this podcast continues, I need you to fill out 37 forms about your listening history. I'll wait.

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Shipwreck Kelly's later years and death

41:57Okay, so Kelly, when we left off, the public turns on him. They don't care about him anymore. He's probably drunk in some hotel room somewhere with his human familiar.

42:29Talking about the good old days at this point. Yeah, yeah, it is kind of sad. I get the impression that the Memory Palace episode really focuses on the sad decline of Shipwreck Kelly. Because, I mean, he was a celebrity, a national, probably international celebrity, for like a decade, a decade, for sitting on flagpoles. And then all of a sudden, he's just done. Like, society drops him like a hot potato, and he's penniless and on public assistance, basically.

43:01Yeah, and he died a very sad death. He did, and I think his final flagpole sit was all the way in the 1950s in Orange, Texas in 1952. He was almost 60 years old at this point. And he had, during the publicity run-up to this, had two heart attacks.

43:24Well, was he sitting on his pole for publicity, or was this part of the pole sitting when he had the heart attacks?

43:32He had the heart attacks on the pole during the publicity. Oh, oh, so the actual sit was another publicity stunt for some place. Right, yeah. Okay, I gotcha. I don't know what business it was for. I didn't see that. But I did see that the promoters were like, come down right now. We don't think you're going to survive a third heart attack, so stop. Which is crazy. I mean, he was only 59 at the time. Yeah, but 59 in the 1950s, that was a tough... I guess so. That's a tough 59. When your name was Shipwreck?

44:02Yeah. But he did die of that third heart attack like a week after that, right? Yeah, he was walking around New York on 51st Street, and he dropped dead on the sidewalk from a heart attack. And he was found holding a scrapbook of all, like, clippings of newspaper articles about him during his heyday. Oh, man. Isn't that sad? It's like a movie. Yeah, I can't believe this is a movie.

44:33He's, I mean, he's a goldmine just waiting to be, well, mined.

44:42Wait, wait, wait. There's one other thing about him before we move on. Okay, what do you got? After he was done with his flagpole sitting career, the heyday of it, one of the jobs he had was as a gigolo, a male escort who would dance with whoever wanted him to dance at the Roseland Ballroom near Times Square. He was a private dancer. A dancer for money. I've been to Roseland. I've seen some good shows there. Yeah, well, you were where Shipwreck Kelly danced for a dime a dance because he was a gigolo.

45:17I would have paid for that dance. Sure. Tell him to sit on my head. Hey, he'll do what you want him to do. Oh, boy. So we looked, or rather you looked, because you put this one together, and you found one death from flagpole sitting. Isn't that right? That's all I could turn up. Surely, surely there were more, but I could really only find one.

Dixie Blandy and other extreme sitters

45:41And this guy was wonderful in every way. Dick Blandy? Dixie Blandy. Richard Dixie. D-I-X-I-E Blandy. Dick Dixie Blandy. Sure. So, Dixie Blandy, he was a flagpole sitter who was contemporaneous to Shipwreck Kelly. A little bit. Like, during, surely he was directly inspired by Shipwreck Kelly. He came along and started in 1929, which was almost the worst year you could join the flagpole sitting movement,

46:15because just the next year, Shipwreck Kelly had his triumphant sit aboard, like, or above two. What? Triumphant sit. It's just great. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was triumphant for a couple of reasons. One, it was his longest sit, I believe, 22 days, 23 days, something like that. And, secondly, it was above a top, a 200-foot flagpole. For weeks, he sat up there. That's triumphant, if you ask me. But he did his in 1930, and everybody dropped him right after.

46:49Dixie Blandy just started in 1929. But even though people said flagpole sitting is so out, we're not going to bother even looking up when we see somebody on a flagpole, Dixie Blandy said, you know what, I'm not giving up on this. And he continued to make a career out of it wherever he could. Yes, until he died from flagpole sitting at the age of 71. In 1974, he fell off of his flagpole. It was a 50-foot pole.

47:19And where was this? In Harvey? Yeah, I get the impression in Pennsylvania. Harvey, Pennsylvania? Yeah, because the article that reported on it as if it were something of a nearby event was called the Reading Eagle. And Reading is in Pennsylvania, right? Yeah. Is it Reading? Whatever.

47:41I can't tell you how many times I've been told that since I was a child playing Monopoly. And it's just never stuck for some reason. Oh, is that the titular railroad? Mm-hmm. Oh, okay. The Reading Railroad. We said reading. Yeah, that's right. That's what I said, too, but apparently it's Reading. Well, I didn't know. I didn't know it was the same thing. But either way, this is where Harvey, and of course, it's always like the grand opening of a shopping center or something. Yeah. And that's what was going on here. It's a four-day promotion.

48:11And he basically said, I think this pole was attached to a trailer, and the trailer moved. Is that right? Well, he asked the security guard to move the trailer so they could make room for what I took to be a cherry picker that could go up and get them. This is hours before the end of his four-day sit. And when the security guard, I guess, who had never tried this before, moved the trailer, a guy wire that was stabilizing the pole became taut and actually pulled the pole, snapped the pole in two.

48:44Wow. With Dixie still on top of this 50-foot pole, and he landed skull first, from what I can tell, onto the asphalt below. Oh. That is not what you want to open your grocery store with. No, or to close your flagpole sit with. No. Either way, it's a bad jam. If you're going to fall, fall early. This was not his only accident, too. This was the one that got him. But he had fractured his skull before when he was thrown off a pole in a storm in 1955. And then there was—this is heartwarming—in 1961, he was doing a pole sit for a promotion dressed as Santa Claus, and he was shouting Merry Christmas.

49:25That was his job. Sit on the top of the flagpole and shout Merry Christmas. And apparently, it got to the point where he finally yelled down that he was getting numb and he had to be taken to the hospital. Yeah. Which is—this is what I'm talking about, man. Just no thought. It doesn't take thought to just think about flagpole sitting, and I love that about it. Yeah. Merry Christmas. Hey, Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. I think there's something wrong up here. I got to go to the hospital because I'm sitting on top of a flagpole dressed as Santa Claus shouting Merry Christmas for three days, and it's December in Pennsylvania.

49:59In Reading. It's reading. Right. And this was, you know, these were definitely the waning days. This was in the 1970s. There were some other stunts throughout the years here and there. A couple got married atop a flagpole.

50:15Let me see here. A 17-year-old in 1963 named Peggy Townsend spent 217 days on a pole for a contest for a radio station. Yeah. And then the granddaddy of them all, this guy Kenneth Gidge, Ken Gidge, 248 days in 1971. This guy would later on be a state rep for New Hampshire.

50:41And he—I mean, reading his account, he was basically like, it was terrible. Right. And I hated it every second of it. Not only that, he had a parakeet. He had his parakeet with him named Nixon, and he said that his parakeet came to hate him, like despise him. He said he didn't think any animals ever hated somebody more than that parakeet hated him, probably because he made him stay up there in this little tiny house on top of a fiberglass pole that would sway back and forth.

51:13He couldn't lay down straight in it because of the pole, so he had to lay wrapped around the pole. It sounds really horrible and terrible. And he did it to get publicity because he was an out-of-work actor, I guess, at the time. Yeah. Like I said, to call it a thing, a house is generous. It's this little—I mean, you can see a picture of it. But it was—it was some sort of shelter, at least. He wasn't just sitting, like, on a bar stool like Shipwreck Kelly for 248 days. Sure. But it was bad, and he—and it's just funny reading these quotes from him.

51:44He did not have a good time, and he just basically kind of talked about how awful it was. Yeah. He said—they said that he lost 15 pounds, three inches from his waist, and 13 days of sleep just within the first three months. And that when people would come out—like, when the weather was nice, people would come out and shout questions up to him, and he'd talk to him. And he said the men usually asked if he sleeps and how he goes to the bathroom. And then women asked if he was lonely, which I find very sweet. But, I mean, remember, we started out here at 13 hours is what kicked this off.

52:17And this guy, Kenneth Gidge, has brought it up to 248 days. But, Chuck, that does not seem to be the record any longer. In fact, the record may never be broken, ever. What do you think?

Records and modern flagpole protests

52:32Yeah, H. David Werder of Weeki Wachee, Florida. Man, this is unbelievable. Sat for 439 days, 11 hours, 6 minutes. Yeah. His sit went from 1982 to 1984. That's amazing. Yeah, and it was outside of an appliance center in Clearwater. And he didn't do this as, like, a publicity stunt for that appliance center. He did it to protest gas prices at the time.

53:03Yeah, that's how you see these days sometimes, is protests. Sure. But gas at the time was 99 cents a gallon. That's cute. So his protest didn't work at all. But he spent 439 days of his life on a flagpole because he was mad about the price of gas. Wow. No thought whatsoever to a zen-like beautiful state is what this man achieved. Is that the overarching theme? Yep. I think so, man. All righty. You got anything else?

53:35Yeah. I mean, we should mention David Blaine. He very famously did this standing in 2002. Remember that? For how long? No, I don't remember that at all. He stood atop a 90-foot pole for 35 hours in Bryant Park in New York. Wow. And this is when he was doing those—I love the guys, the street magician, and give me a little levitation trick, but when he was like, I'm going to hold my breath or I'm going to be encased in ice or stand on this thing, that's when I lost interest.

54:07Oh, yeah. Yeah. I like street magic, too. It's pretty great stuff. Yeah. But, yeah, he stood—it's tough to stand. I mean, sitting is hard, but standing is a whole different deal. Yeah, for sure. I wouldn't want to do it. Nope. So, you got anything else about flagpoles sitting? I don't. Well, then, Chuck, that means, of course, it's time for Listener Mail.

Listener mail about doctor names

54:33This is—oh, this is just funny. Remember in Bruxism, I talked about my Dr. Tuggle.

54:42This comes from Joe in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He said, Hey, guys, thanks for your entertainment knowledge. Your discussion of doctor names at the end of the Bruxism podcast reminded me of two anecdotes. My ex-wife had a dentist in San Francisco named Dr. Drilling. No. Pretty good, huh? Sure. And this is even better. He said, second, this one never gets appreciated as much by others for some reason. It must—she just hit me the right way, but I'm with you, Joe. It hits me, too. She worked with a medical—worked in medical administration, and her boss at one point was

55:17named Dr. Wachter. W-A-C-H-T-E-R. It's pronounced Wachter. And he said, I could just imagine her submitting daily reports using baby talk going, here, Dr. Wachter, here are your reports for the day.

55:35Man, this guy is our new mascot here on the show. I think we need to actually get him on here. What's his name? Joe in Gettysburg. I love it. Yeah, Joe. Way to go. This is one of the best Listener Mails I think I've ever heard, Chuck. Dr. Wachter. Well, if you want to be like Joe and try to topple his record as the greatest email listener mail writer of all time, take your best shot. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, run it up the flagpole, and see who salutes it at stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

56:12Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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