00:00:00
This is exactly right. Some far off concept. It's already here. Next starts now.
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Hyundai, an official partner of FIFA. Goodbye. What's up, y'all? Summer's got a different tempo.
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Everything's a little looser, brighter. One plan turns into another. You hear something, you stay a little longer.
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Next thing you know, you're somewhere you didn't plan to be. It's those in-between moments.
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That's where the ideas hit. Conversations stretch out. Little memories sneak up on you.
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Sometimes it's just about what's in your hand. That color. That chill. The new Tropical Butterfly Refresher from Starbucks.
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Guava and passion fruit flavors with mango pineapple flavored pearls. Yeah, that feels like summer before you even taste it.
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Funny how one small stop becomes the best part of the day. Start your summer rhythm with Starbucks.
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Try the new Tropical Butterfly Refresher from Starbucks. Hey everyone, it's Kel Penn.
00:01:28
I'm inviting you to join the best sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast, Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club.
00:01:36
Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible.
00:01:42
It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:58
My favorite bird Hello! Hello! And welcome to my favorite birder. That's Georgia Hardstart.
00:02:19
That's Karen Kilgara. This is Thanksgiving. Who can now talk about her favorite British procedurals again.
00:02:26
Oh my God, we're back. It was like, thank God we have something to talk about at the top of the show now that the strike is over.
00:02:33
Jesus. The actor's strike is finally over. Congratulations to Fran Drescher and all of her negotiating powerhouses who went in, got those actors a deal.
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Hell yes. Now we can talk about television the way we're supposed to on this true crime podcast.
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Our passion, truly, when it comes down to it. It's not like I could read a book or anything.
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I was just going to say, there's only so many fucking books I can talk about. I do have one this week, but that means it's really good because...
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It broke on through. I want to talk about it. Yeah. I have been making a list in my notes app since the beginning of like shows that I'm
00:03:11
like, well, and boobies and shit. They're like, well, we can talk about it again.
00:03:14
I'm going to tell her that she should watch this and I'm going to tell her that she...
00:03:16
I've been watching that. And now they're still like dated, kind of. I know. Well, it like season two of This Fool premiered like truly, I think it was like the day after the writer's strike began.
00:03:30
Right. And it's such a good show made by such great people with so many hilarious actors on it.
00:03:38
Yeah. And I know that must have been so heartbreaking for Chris Estrada to just be like, well, there's my second season of my show I can't speak of.
00:03:45
Same with the first season of Michelle Boutot's show, Survival of the Thickest. I was like, I can't wait to talk about that. And like the day of, I mean, it's gotta be nice not
00:03:54
to have to do the rounds of like fucking press all day, but still. I bet if they had to pick though,
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they'd be like, give me them rounds. Because I actually saw people talking about Survival of
00:04:05
the Thickest on TikTok and I got so excited. And then I wanted to come and talk about that.
00:04:10
Right. But it's like, it's the same thing as talking about it. So we can now all fully
00:04:15
endorse our favorite television, movie, premiere, whatever we want. I have one that like, I want to scream it from the rooftops is like one of the best shows I've
00:04:26
ever seen on TV. Second season came out. It's like top three with like, or like of recent shows
00:04:33
with like Fleabag, I'd say. Reservation Dogs? No, that's not it. But I do love that show. But
00:04:38
the second season of Our Flag Means Death with Taika Waititi. And how do you say his name?
00:04:46
Reese? Reese Darby. It is one of the most beautiful shows I've ever seen. Like, it's these two men,
00:04:54
these two pirates in love. There's so much love there. And it's just so heartfelt and gorgeous.
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I cried at the end. Like, I can't recommend a show enough. You know, what's funny is I watched the first season and I did not watch the second season.
00:05:09
Well, it came out so quietly in the middle of the fucking strike. Thank you. That's right. I'm going to put it on my list.
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It's like not on you, I feel like. Good. Thank you. Finally. Well, I just recently, and this is an old one, but it just is funny because I just realized I was looking for things.
00:05:18
Okay. What do you have? I've watched everything out of Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Finland.
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I just saw oh I can get all the seasons of Flight of the Conchords because there's not a moment of
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that show that I don't love and it's so funny that that's because Reese Darby the way he goes about
00:05:42
playing that manager and how earnest he is and how he makes them say present and like do the
00:05:50
roll call and say present it's so positive so positive they're at the New Zealand consulate
00:05:54
or whatever they supposed to be It just like the funniest best Yeah And the songs are just so good I the hip hop hippopotamus My lyrics are bottomless That right Oh my God
00:06:05
No, that's one of them. Okay. So that's a good, this is a good, like, I feel like recommendations corner
00:06:10
for people over Thanksgiving weekend. Oh yeah. Who like need a comic, cause they're all funny shows.
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Need like a comedy break from their devastating night with their families. Just me, anyone?
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Just kidding. We're not spending Thanksgiving with my family. So no, I'm just kidding.
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I love that you're at the point where you're just like, look, it's going to be devastating.
00:06:31
Also, there's cranberry sauce. So let's just do this thing. Let's get into it. Oh, but I was going to say, did we, I don't think we were able to talk about how unbelievably
00:06:43
great Nate Bargatze was on SNL. Were we? It's funny because I had on my list to talk about Boy Genius this past week for us on
00:06:51
SNL. I did too. look, look, boy genius on SNL right there. Twins, we're twins. Like chills. They were so fucking
00:07:00
good. And I just picked, I saw them up there. It was like seven women on stage or six women on
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stage. And I just thought to myself, like, if I were a six year old girl watching this right now,
00:07:11
my life would have been different. Like, I just think it was just life-changingly epic. So great.
00:07:18
It's like, look, none of those people are looking for old gals to say, we think your band is neat, of course.
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But I swear that feeling like the suits and the rock and the fucking lighting and the just how good they are.
00:07:37
It was just I just felt so, I guess, proud. But also exactly that thing of you could find it.
00:07:45
you know, the Go-Go's first album came out, I think I was 11. So you had to really go out of
00:07:51
your way to be like girl bands and that vibe of like female power. Together. And like, none of
00:07:58
them are the lead singer. That was so cool too, where it's like you each contribute what you
00:08:02
can and what you have. And it's just like, all good. It's all good. It all works so well.
00:08:08
so good so great but then i did start paying more attention to snl because james austin
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johnson went on to it and i just love him as a performer and he's an la comic repping um but then
00:08:22
i thought i saw a an interview with nate bargazzi before i understood that he was the host and i
00:08:29
thought he was somehow he got cast as a cast member and i was like that's so weird he is like
00:08:35
a touring gigantic comic. It made sense because it was like, oh, that's right. They have to get
00:08:41
people who can do comedy, but aren't like actors that'll get in trouble, you know, in that way.
00:08:46
Right. Right. So good. So good. Just did so good. That's another one where you're just like,
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oh my God, that same feeling of like proud. Yes. Why am I proud? It has nothing to do with me and
00:08:57
I've no right to feel this way, but boy, am I proud. I feel like we get that sometimes from
00:09:01
people when we meet them, no brag, but full brag of like, I know this is weird, but I'm proud of
00:09:06
what you guys have done in a weird way because I've been with you from the beginning. And that
00:09:11
feels good. We can take this out if it sounds too braggy. I don't think it does because I'll say
00:09:15
this to bring myself down a notch. Anytime anyone says that to me, I immediately start to cry
00:09:21
because you would have to get a pair of pliers and rip my dad's teeth out to say anything like
00:09:28
that freely just as a free admission on the sidewalk for some reason from your dad yeah being
00:09:34
proud saying anything like I'm proud of you or this makes me when we had whatever our first big
00:09:41
wave that was overt success my sister made my dad call me and say those words exactly because that's
00:09:48
like a weird I think like when you have immigrant parents as my father did you don't have a lot of
00:09:54
time to be fucking around in emotional shit. There's not a lot of room. There's not enough
00:09:59
resources. Nobody, it's like, no, you have to go get a job. We're not going to talk about feelings.
00:10:04
So he's not totally used to it. So I just really love that the fact that everybody is being raised
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in a way these days where it's not that big of a deal. You can be like, Hey, well, it's such a
00:10:17
vulnerable thing for a dad. You know, I think the reason my dad does actually say that all the time
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and even said it when I was just like a fucking piece of shit, like juvenile delinquent.
00:10:27
I'm proud of you. And I was like, you sure? Because I just got out of rehab. So like, I don't know.
00:10:31
It's like, I'm proud of you for getting out of rehab. Like, okay. It's because his immigrant parents didn't fucking do that.
00:10:36
And I like, he knows how much it, you know, affected him. And so he's sure to do that.
00:10:41
What's up, Marty? Marty. And Jim. Jim did it though. He did it. He does it. He knows.
00:10:46
Like, he's like, everything was fine, but okay. I'll concede this one point. Like he'll have the discussion while fighting vehemently that they all had a great time and everything was fun times, which, you know, that's another yet another coping mechanism.
00:11:00
Anyway, we won't talk about his problems anymore. This is a true crime podcast. I love dissecting parents' problems.
00:11:06
It really is a like, how did they ruin you and why? How is it not your fault? Right.
00:11:11
what were their parents doing that dictated kind of some of these things that make no sense now,
00:11:16
much in the same way that like the kids of today are just like, why are boomers like this? And why
00:11:22
are Gen Xers like this? And it's like, because the people who made us this way, you never see
00:11:27
or hear from. You know, your grandparents that are so wonderful and lovely to you,
00:11:31
they were terrible parents to your parents. Yes. My mom was, I think, mad for a long time
00:11:36
of how good my grandma was to us. And she was like, yes, that is not the woman I knew.
00:11:41
Same. My mom was like, well, it must be nice now. Like, shit. I think the idea is you forgive them for who they were,
00:11:49
your parents. That doesn't mean you can't have your hurt. But that the idea I guess right Yes for sure And that in that moment when you like your feelings are valid you are right and you have your reasons as my therapist once said And you not wrong Exactly But then that also because everyone parents did a version
00:12:09
of this, of course, some way, way, way worse or just not even around. But because essentially the
00:12:17
parent wound is eternal, you can know that anyone else you talk to has some sort of thing like that.
00:12:25
Like everybody loves to be like, no, but I'm fucked up. And it's like, but the big Zen
00:12:30
discovery is you're not, comparatively speaking, you're right in the pocket. Yeah. Because everybody
00:12:36
got a thing when they were too young to have a thing. Totally. And acknowledging it, you mean had
00:12:41
a baby before they were too young to have a baby? I think that's fucking first and foremost.
00:12:46
Are you accusing Janet of being an unwed mother? No, because she was like almost 40 when she had me.
00:12:52
So that doesn't even count. You know what I mean? Oh, shit. She has no excuse. Thanksgiving.
00:12:59
This is your content. Thanksgiving. You won't go, but you'll do it right here. Thanksgiving.
00:13:06
Are you eating hot dogs alone? That's cool. Thanksgiving. Okay. I mean, there's more, but we can do it next week instead.
00:13:16
This podcast could be a whole recommendations corner. Oh, give us a recommendation just so we know where we are.
00:13:21
Okay, not a TV show. Great. But a book, a book I'm listening to that I'm, it's one of the ones that I'm halfway through
00:13:27
and I'm recommending it anyways, because it is so good. I don't care how it ends.
00:13:31
Another one of those. Sure. It's called The Future by Naomi Alderman. And it is a, right now in the middle, it's a pre-apocalyptic, strong female, techie girl
00:13:44
leads and the apocalypse is coming. There's fucking tech billionaires that you hate.
00:13:50
There's also like culty vibes. It's just like this adventure leading up to the apocalypse.
00:13:55
It's like really exciting. It's so good. I love the characters. Highly recommend it.
00:14:01
I applaud your bravery for being able to read fiction about an impending apocalypse where
00:14:08
literally they're like, hey, there's a, there's a volcano that's about to go off in Iceland where
00:14:13
They're like evacuating this. I believe it's a southwestern part of Iceland where the Blue Lagoon is where I hope to go someday.
00:14:21
And then there's also a volcano going off in Italy. Oh, and the whole floods in Italy, too, have been crazy, right?
00:14:27
There were those floods. We're acting like weather was also affected by the actor's strike.
00:14:33
We could. No, it is very like there is a lot of like because it's like maybe 30 years in the future.
00:14:39
So it's not that far away. she references the pandemic in 2021 you know what i mean like oh okay it's so it's scary and it's
00:14:46
also like there's no aliens coming down it's like our own man-made fucked up-ness that is the reason
00:14:52
that apocalypse is coming which is like yeah so it's hard it's hard that doesn't scare you worse
00:14:59
yeah but you don't think i love having anxiety you don't think my baseline is i need anxiety
00:15:05
to like thrive and survive? Shit, dude. I mean, then, you know what? Then thrive and please survive.
00:15:12
I don't even want to survive the apocalypse that much. So like, I don't even know what I'm.
00:15:17
Well, you know what? Let's not decide right now. We can survive. We cannot decide.
00:15:20
It doesn't have to be today. Like, is it spiders? Then no, good. Is it mold? Then yeah, that would be cool.
00:15:25
Wait, wait, a spider apocalypse is the worst fucking idea. You just said there would be a ton like every day.
00:15:33
you're like, hey, oh, I just got a cobweb in my mouth and it just builds and builds until they're
00:15:37
everywhere. Did you read about those people like maybe 10 years ago who bought a house and then it
00:15:42
turned out like infested in a way that like spiders were coming out of the walls? No. And
00:15:48
they had to fucking leave and like sued the past owners who didn't tell them that. What? It was
00:15:54
infested with spiders in a way that they were unable to get rid of them. Like, hold on. Are
00:15:59
you thinking of the movie Arachnophobia because you weren't allowed to talk about it? That movie
00:16:03
ruined me. That movie was legit awful. There were spiders coming out of the shower head. And then when they were in the slippers.
00:16:12
I didn't shower for a long time after that movie when I was like eight. My mom was like, you gotta shower. And I'm like, what?
00:16:17
I can't. Yeah. It's like, no, you have to monitor our fucking entertainment lady because that's what needs
00:16:23
to be happening. Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. Leave your kids unattended with that weird aunt that you don't really talk
00:16:32
to that much. All right. All right. Let's do this. Let's actually do this podcast.
00:16:38
They're trying to get through this. It's Thanksgiving. Let's just give them. I know.
00:16:41
Sorry. We're here with you. It's Thanksgiving. Hey, what's up? I love your room.
00:16:46
It's so cute. This is our podcast network. Exactly right. Media highlights. This week, Roz Hernandez's guest on Ghosted is actress Rachel True.
00:16:56
You know her from The Craft, the iconic spooky movie of 1996. Erin and Erin have a new episode of this podcast.
00:17:03
will kill you about lymphatic filariasis, also known as elephantiasis, not elephantitis,
00:17:12
which we've all thought this entire time. I so want to jump in and correct you, but it's not that.
00:17:17
It's not. It's elephantiasis, which causes part of the body to become grossly enlarged
00:17:24
due to a lymphatic blockage. We've been pronouncing elephantitis incorrectly for hundreds of years?
00:17:34
It's because of Breakfast Club. I blame the Breakfast Club. Okay. Over on Lady to Lady,
00:17:41
Babs, Tess, and Brandy are joined by comedian and Emmy-nominated Daily Show writer,
00:17:45
X Mayo. And lastly, we want to give a shout out to our own in-house graphic designer,
00:17:52
Vanessa Lilac. In addition to brand new merch design she created the art for the show Buried Bones and Infamous International which we love And so she has our brand new merch design Everything is fun and wearable It doesn scream I wearing podcast merch There no F words on anything
00:18:06
It's really cute. I love the little heart. It's sweet. It's really sweet. Little heart MFM and there's stars on things, which of course I love.
00:18:14
So check everything out at myfavoritemurder.com. And we hope you love it too. Yeah, we just wanted to give Vanessa a shout out because it's so fun to have an in-house
00:18:22
graphic designer that then goes like, oh, I have ideas for your merch. And we're like, yay,
00:18:27
let's see them. And then truly it was like looking through, I was like, is this a catalog?
00:18:32
Like, what are we looking at? Because it was like so good. Hearts and stars are like, do you know me? Oh my God.
00:18:39
My lucky charms. We should just do a whole line of lucky charms, MFF merch. Moons, hearts, moons, stars, clovers. I actually recently bought a box of lucky charms.
00:18:52
There's a new thing. I think it's unicorns. Vince bought a box at Halloween of the chocolate.
00:19:00
What are the chocolate Lucky Charms that they have for Halloween? Count Chocula.
00:19:03
Count Chocula. And he was like, have a bite. And I was like, okay. Then I ate the rest of his bowl and drank the milk out of it, which I haven't done since
00:19:12
I was a kid. Like that shit is legit. That shit, Boo Berry, Count Chocula. And there's another Franken.
00:19:20
Is there a mummy? Oh, Franken. uh blueberry might be the mummy there's frankenberry i think frankenberry that's it yeah
00:19:28
but anyway that shit came out when i was like nine and it'd be like part of your daily balance
00:19:33
breakfast where it's like no it's not it's not but those ones we never got to get that cereal
00:19:41
unless we were on like summer vacation or there was a special reason to do it so then it was like
00:19:47
way over your special reason now is being an adult i feel like my special reason is every day
00:19:53
a sugar cereal day and i have four boxes of it on my counter and i can have any kind i want
00:19:58
whenever i want make sure you have it with oat milk so it's healthy you know what i have is a
00:20:04
small glass of orange juice uh two pieces of toast cut diagonally just like the commercial
00:20:09
where i'd be like hey no one made me toast yeah i had to get these cheerios myself yeah yeah uh yeah
00:20:16
yeah yeah Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the audible and iHeart audiobook club.
00:20:26
This week on the podcast, I'm sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook
00:20:33
Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science and what happens when you
00:20:40
wake up alone very far from earth. I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting
00:20:46
And that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections.
00:20:50
And it's like, OK, yo, yo, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it.
00:20:54
I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it.
00:21:03
But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me. And I left it on the mic.
00:21:09
That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh, my God, I cried at the end.
00:21:14
It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Irsay. The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club.
00:21:19
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00:23:00
of true crime podcasting right now because that other part is a highly contested portion of our
00:23:05
show the first 15 minutes after eight years still getting complaints about it love it we love the
00:23:11
interaction. We love hearing opinions. We love entertaining other concepts and then going,
00:23:18
yeah, you know what? No, we're going to do it our way. That's right. This story that I'm going to
00:23:22
tell you right now, Georgia. Okay. First of all, someone named Claire DeAngelia suggested it to us
00:23:29
over on Instagram. So thank you, Claire. What are you doing over there, Karen? I wasn't on there.
00:23:34
Someone else got it. So this story takes place in late March of 1982, where at Alpine Meadows,
00:23:41
on the northwest side of Lake Tahoe. Did you ever go to Alpine Meadows in the 80s?
00:23:47
No, we didn't do Tahoe. Not Tahoe people, yeah. In California, Lake Tahoe is a very specific place
00:23:53
to go in the summer and the winter, but it's mostly for the really ski areas Ski-based people.
00:24:01
And boating people. Yes, boating people. My friend Alicia Gonzalez once yelled at her boyfriend who invited her to go to Tahoe and she screamed, I'm not white, at him.
00:24:11
Which is one of my favorite lines of all time. Alicia Gonzalez. That's how I kind of felt from Irvine.
00:24:16
It was like, well, Jewish people don't go there. Right. Right. Skiing families were just a very specific set, I think.
00:24:25
Yeah. My dad tried it with us because he had nothing to do with us every other weekend.
00:24:29
And when we were with him, you know, it was like, oh, no, what do I do with these kids?
00:24:32
And, you know, someone always cried at the end. Yeah. It's like, I don't know. I think you have to start young with parents who know it and get it.
00:24:42
Yeah. And you don't have to rent your fucking jacket from ski lodge or whatever.
00:24:46
And also there's nothing worse at the end of the day. Those rented like bib overall snow pants that like you've been going down a snowy hill on a disc a bunch of times because you took your skis off.
00:24:58
and now you're just soaking wet because nothing's waterproof. The whites of your eyes get sunburned if you don't wear fucking goggles or whatever.
00:25:06
I'm positive I've told you this story. And then I swear to God, we're going to...
00:25:11
Oh, I did start. That's why we're talking about this. The first time we ever went skiing in Tahoe of the outfit that we rented,
00:25:18
the one thing I got to buy and keep were mirrored Varnay sunglasses, not the brand name.
00:25:22
And my sister got the same ones as I did. And so I could see myself perfectly in my sister's sunglasses.
00:25:29
And I was so distracted by my own image that I didn't listen to anything that the ski instructor
00:25:35
said when he's like pizza and French fries or whatever, like teaching you how to stop
00:25:39
and everything. So we went to go down the bunny hill the first time and I just had no idea what to do.
00:25:44
And then I got to the bottom. I was like, thanks. Thanks so much. I'm going to be taking these skis off.
00:25:49
Going to go find my mom in the lodge. The lodge. But you know, you looked great.
00:25:53
At least you knew you looked great in those sunglasses. I really did. I had a kicky, cute haircut, some fun bangs.
00:26:00
And I was like, this is going great. And then I was like, except for the part where I don't know how to ski and now we're skiing.
00:26:07
Anyway. Okay. So that's a little background for everybody. It's a lot of background for everybody.
00:26:12
It's March. So it is like early spring. And basically everyone's flocking to the area because they're trying to get in their last few runs of the ski season.
00:26:22
but what they don't know is they're about to be hit by an unprecedented early spring storm
00:26:30
which will end up being a devastating event that both changed and claimed lives this is the story
00:26:37
of the 1982 alpine meadows avalanche the main source i'll be using today is the 2021 documentary
00:26:45
buried the 1982 alpine meadows avalanche which you can watch right now on netflix i saw it
00:26:52
trending on Netflix. And I was like, oh, that's weird. That's the story I'm about to do. I don't
00:26:57
know which came first, but the documentary is from two years ago. So that's a good family
00:27:02
Thanksgiving watch. I don't know why I'm insisting on bringing up Thanksgiving over and over again.
00:27:07
Got to. It's because it's current and you love current events. I really do. I'm sure I didn't
00:27:13
watch it because the idea of an avalanche makes me so claustrophobic that like, I just can't even,
00:27:19
And it's scary. Of all the disaster stories that we've told, is that your worst one?
00:27:25
Yeah. I wouldn't even go in a changing room. Like if I'm going to try on clothes, I wear a skirt and like a thin top to like just throw
00:27:33
on by a mirror. Just do it right there on the floor? Yeah. I don't, I'm like, that's how claustrophobic I get is I can't go in a changing room.
00:27:40
So the idea of an avalanche and being unable to move is a nightmare for me. It's so true.
00:27:49
So there are going to be some parts that I'm going to then point out before I describe them to you because.
00:27:54
I can handle it. Yeah. Okay. It's awful. So it's Wednesday, March 31st, 1982. And this late spring storm has been dumping huge amounts of snow onto the slopes at Alpine Meadows.
00:28:08
Between six and seven feet of snow have fallen since March 27th when this storm first rolled in.
00:28:15
So that might sound like good news for people in the ski business, but the amount of snow to fall has slowly become not great to bad to overwhelming.
00:28:25
And the storm has brought gusts of wind of up to 100 miles an hour. The local roads are barely passable.
00:28:33
There's only a few ski lifts still running because of the storm that's rolled in.
00:28:38
So I think most of the time, and this is just guesswork because I don't ski and I have not spent a lot of time at resorts.
00:28:43
but I bet you that snow itself doesn't stop the ski lifts from running because people are like
00:28:50
no I love it we want to go we love snow whatever so they probably wait until things get you know
00:28:55
yeah bad or it's like they allow the like professional people up there because they
00:29:01
can handle it maybe I'm sure there's some sort of line of demarcation where they're like oh
00:29:05
this ski lift is swinging back and forth so badly that we can't have this anymore but
00:29:10
But maybe not. It was the 80s after all. Yeah, maybe. No seatbelts. So there are multiple ski areas up in this part of the state that are being affected by this severe weather.
00:29:22
But it's creating a particularly dicey situation at Alpine Meadows because it is classified by the U.S. Forest Service as being an A-level avalanche area.
00:29:33
So if you're looking from overhead down at Lake Tahoe, Alpine Meadows is over on the left and it's basically at the base of some, I want to say mountains, but it just goes right up behind them.
00:29:46
And it's like basically like super steep right there. And it creates A-level avalanche conditions.
00:29:52
And in fact the Reno Gazette Journal reports that quote at the time the resort recorded the highest number of avalanches annually of any ski area in the United States Wow
00:30:05
So, yeah, Alpine Meadows was basically kind of known for being at least at risk for avalanche.
00:30:12
So because of that A-level classification, the crew at Alpine was always on a diligent avalanche control program that required daily maintenance of the ski slopes.
00:30:23
and this maintenance, it doesn't sound serious when I tell you what they used to do, but it was
00:30:29
treated very seriously. So each morning members of the ski patrol, they would break off into teams
00:30:35
and then they'd head up into the mountain to what are called starting zones, which are the spots,
00:30:41
the resorts avalanche forecasters have pinpointed as being particularly high risk for breakage and
00:30:46
slides. And then the crews basically go up. They try to beat nature to the punch by triggering
00:30:51
mini avalanches before a real, you know, major one can happen. In March of 1982, it's reported
00:30:58
Alpine Meadows has around 300 of these starting zones. So it's an enormous task. They basically
00:31:05
have to go out and try to trigger avalanches every day. I just hope those people got paid well,
00:31:10
because that isn't a great job. No. Well, it's the early 80s. I don't really know about their pay.
00:31:17
I think minimum wage is the same as it is now. Yeah, I think they've been able to keep minimum wage where it was in 1982.
00:31:27
But because it's a ski resort, this team, the ski patrol, is made up of majority young outdoorsy guys who live for skiing.
00:31:36
So the idea of getting paid anything at all to throw on gear, head up to those starting zones and use rifles, explosives and even military grade ammunition.
00:31:46
to blow up packed snow is probably a dream come true. Yeah. Kind of pays for itself when you're
00:31:53
that good. Not to generalize. I'm sure there were some shy poets in there as well, but for the most
00:31:59
part, they're just like, yeah, give me that stick of dynamite. I'll be right back. So this storm
00:32:06
on this day that we're talking about is creating a lot of work for the ski patrol, trying to just
00:32:13
keep pace with this snowfall. So normally they'd go out and do it once and they'd be done for a
00:32:17
while because it doesn't snow that often because it's accumulating. They have to basically keep up
00:32:23
with it. Plus whiteout conditions are making it not only hard for them to see their starting zone
00:32:29
targets, but very dangerous, if not impossible to access them. So it gets to the point where
00:32:34
their normal avalanche prevention routine is being basically impacted by this storm that just kind of
00:32:40
won't quit. And as members of the ski patrol work toward the resort's ridgeline, Alpine Meadows'
00:32:46
beloved mountain manager, a 40-year-old man named Bernie Kingery, is working in the Summit Terminal
00:32:52
Building, which is at the base of the slopes. So this building is a three-story wooden A-frame
00:32:58
building, just like you see everywhere in the snow areas. And it houses, among other things,
00:33:05
a lift control room, administrative offices, a ski school, and locker rooms for the staff.
00:33:12
So Bernie is not only an avalanche expert in his own right, but he is the captain of the ship that
00:33:19
is Alpine Meadows. So right now, his job is to figure out how he's going to keep his staff safe
00:33:26
as more and more snow dumps onto the area and they need to go out and do this avalanche prevention
00:33:33
work to keep everybody else safe. As this day is going on, it doesn't take long for Bernie to
00:33:39
realize that they have to shut down Alpine Meadows and most staffers will need to go home until the
00:33:45
mountain can be stabilized and all of the avalanche mitigation tactics have been used. So to do this,
00:33:52
Bernie will ask a skeleton crew of ski patrollers to stay on to continue carrying out the avalanche
00:33:58
control measures basically as the storm goes and they'll blast the starting zones. And then a few
00:34:04
of them will be tasked to basically warn drivers against entering the area. So they have to kind of
00:34:10
protect anywhere the snow might come down from the mountain. So, you know, they want to make sure
00:34:16
people aren't like, Hey, what's going, can we still ski over there? Whatever. So of course,
00:34:21
This is 1982. So it's a pre-cell phone era. Most Alpine Meadows employees basically find out that
00:34:28
they're closing the place through word of mouth. Oh, cool. So just like, you know, you probably
00:34:34
have to go up if somebody's up at the top of the mountain, get up there and tell them, or if
00:34:38
somebody's coming down, it's like, remember to tell them when they get back or whatever.
00:34:41
Go to the hot dog stand and like, let them know. Yeah. Go to all the main places where you're
00:34:45
hanging out. But word gets around and eventually they start calling the employees that were so
00:34:51
supposed to come in that day, including 22-year-old ski lift operator, Anna Conrad.
00:34:56
She's from Glendora, California, but she goes to UC Davis. Is Glendora near Irvine?
00:35:01
No, I don't think so. I think it's near Pasadena, isn't it? You just think it sounds nice?
00:35:06
I've just seen it when I look for estate sales, so it sounds familiar. Oh, yeah. So Anna's from Glendora, but she goes to UC Davis, which is two hours away from
00:35:16
Alpine Meadows. And Anna's an active member of the UC Davis Ski Club. She's taken survival
00:35:22
training courses. She's passionate about the outdoors and about skiing. And that's why she
00:35:27
went up and took the job at Alpine Meadows. And of course, she is thrilled to have the day off
00:35:32
because her boyfriend, Frank Yeatman, is visiting her for spring break because he also goes to UC
00:35:38
Davis. That's where they met. So Anna and Frank passed the morning cooped up inside, which is like
00:35:44
The phrase cooped up, I disagree with. No, they're fine. You mean my absolute dream to be snowed in with my boyfriend and just like sitting around?
00:35:52
Yeah. The greatest. They're like college kids. They not cooped Yeah There no cooping here No So they hang out with some of Anna friends They play some board games They you know try to stay cozy in the cold weather
00:36:05
But by the early afternoon, they both want some fresh air. So even though it's terrible weather, Anna and Frank decide that they're going to go cross-country skiing.
00:36:15
That'll cure their cabin fever. But Anna needs to grab a pair of ski pants out of her work locker.
00:36:20
So their first stop will be at Alpine's Summit Terminal Building, which is a mile away from her rented cabin.
00:36:27
So it's all very walking distance. Neither Anna or Frank are aware of this increasing avalanche risk that everyone at Alpine is dealing with that day.
00:36:39
When they arrive at the Summit Terminal Building, Bernie's giving careful instructions to staffers Jeff Scover, Tad DeFelice, and Randy Buck.
00:36:49
the three most 80s names I've ever heard in my life. Say them again. Jeff Scover.
00:36:54
Yep. Tad DeFelice. Tad. And Randy Buck, who broke my heart. He broke my heart. Why, Randy?
00:37:03
Doesn't Randy Buck sound like a guy who'd be like, I never said that. Yeah. He'd be like, wait, what?
00:37:07
Good old Randy Buck. And you're like, you said you didn't have a girlfriend, Randy.
00:37:11
Randy, God damn it. So these are the guys that are going to be tasked with guarding the main access road
00:37:17
and turning back any visitors or people coming close by. Also, there's 22-year-old Beth Morrow,
00:37:23
who assists Bernie with his avalanche control duties. So Anna and Frank say hello to the group,
00:37:30
and they go up the staircase to the second floor locker room. And as they do, Bernie picks up the phone,
00:37:36
and he dials the assistant director of Ski Patrol, 32-year-old Larry Haywood. And then, so what happens from here on
00:37:44
is because Larry Haywood tells the story, in the documentary. Uh-oh. Yes. So in the office, an urgent cry comes over the radio.
00:37:54
It turns out it's ski patroller Jake Smith. He's been blasting up in the blast zones on the mountain range,
00:38:01
and he is headed back on his snowmobile. And when his voice comes over the airwaves,
00:38:05
he's screaming one word over and over, avalanche, avalanche, avalanche, avalanche.
00:38:11
Oh, my God. So Bernie on the phone tells Larry, hold on. And then he puts the receiver down.
00:38:16
He picks up the radio mic to ask Jake where, but there's no response. And seconds later, the summit terminal building begins to shake violently.
00:38:26
So violently, everyone in the room can see the building's steel beams bouncing up and down.
00:38:33
And then there's a loud hissing noise. But before anyone can process what's going on, there's a horrifying bang.
00:38:40
Everything goes black. Jake's kind of a hero, right? Because while he's zipping away, freaking out, he's still able to fucking give them at least a couple seconds warning.
00:38:50
That's amazing. Yes. Entirely a hero. And like basically came back down to make sure he could do that.
00:38:56
Yeah. There's a writer named Jennifer Woodleaf who wrote about this event. And she describes the scene at Alpine Meadows saying, quote, the mountain unzipped itself all the way around.
00:39:08
Oh, I got the chills. That's a really great descriptor. It is. It like puts that picture in your mind where it's just like so much snow fell all at once, like how big that thing was.
00:39:19
So despite the staff's best efforts to manage this snowfall during the storm, an enormous avalanche has flown downslope at an incredible speed, picking up trees, rocks and debris along the way.
00:39:32
Some sources put the breakage at a thousand feet wide, which is about the length of a cruise ship.
00:39:38
Holy shit. Horrifying. The tree thing is always crazy to me about avalanches where it's like, same with tornadoes, where it's like, it just picks cars up.
00:39:47
It just picks trees up. No big deal. Oh, yeah. Rips them right out of the ground.
00:39:51
And boulders, gigantic boulders. I forgot about them. So this enormous mass of snow has smashed straight into the resort's base area and swallowed several buildings and chairlifts, including the Summit Terminal Building.
00:40:05
All across this large ski area, power and telephone lines are ripped away. when word spreads that an avalanche has engulfed alpine meadows the staff who are not on site the
00:40:16
people who had that day off or who are called to say don't come in and the locals who live in the
00:40:22
area mobilize they all grab shovels and run over and start digging themselves soon there are about
00:40:30
a hundred volunteers furiously shoveling snow and yelling for survivors the first three people are
00:40:37
found and it's Jeff, Tad and Randy who by some miracle. So worried about them. I know, right?
00:40:44
They were all fine. They're basically somehow miraculously okay. Oh my. And they found them
00:40:51
and they found them. The three men tell the searchers who was inside the summit terminal
00:40:56
building at the time at the avalanche. So now the team knows they're looking for Bernie,
00:41:01
for Beth, for Anna and for Frank. So did the building get like collapsed or is it just buried?
00:41:07
When the avalanche came through, it blew out the walls and the windows. So it was just basically like what was there was not there.
00:41:14
Taring it down. Holy shit. Okay. Got it. So then two Alpine's Meadows staffers come in and report that they saw three people buried by the avalanche in the parking lot and that one of those people is a child.
00:41:29
So these people basically witnessed these other three people getting caught in the avalanche.
00:41:35
and the three people are soon identified as a Eureka-based surgeon named Leroy Bud Nelson
00:41:42
and Bud's 11-year-old daughter, Laura, and then a man named David Hahn. The three had ventured out
00:41:49
of their nearby condos also to get some fresh air, like, because they had been cooped up because of
00:41:55
a storm So it a terrifying situation with multiple people buried in the snow And of course time is of the essence Larry Haywood who was on the phone with Bernie and the call went dead
00:42:07
he rushes to the site and later says, quote, if you're buried in an avalanche and assuming you're
00:42:12
not even killed in the trauma of buildings coming apart, your potential for survival is really low
00:42:18
after 30 minutes. I mean, it's really low. Wow. End quote. And that is true. The Tahoe Guide
00:42:25
website reports that, quote, depending on the consistency of the snow, just 40% of avalanche
00:42:31
victims survive 15 minutes after being buried. Holy shit. And rates drop precipitously after that.
00:42:38
So it's, sorry to tell you this, kind of worse than maybe you ever thought because it's not just
00:42:44
that you're caught in it, but you have to get out quickly. So I never knew that. I mean, I don't
00:42:50
know. I guess I just didn't think about it, but that shocked me when I was like, oh my God, that's
00:42:55
so fast. So over a hundred volunteers are using probes and shovels to search for survivors,
00:43:02
but the weather is unrelenting. The snow is incredibly dense and it's also filled with debris
00:43:08
and they have acres of terrain to search. They're also working with limited equipment
00:43:14
because all of Alpine Meadows' avalanche rescue supplies and the closet they are kept in has been destroyed.
00:43:20
So that's all within the damage. So these volunteers are forced to make do with the chainsaws,
00:43:29
the shovels, and the cables that the locals who have showed up and supplied them with.
00:43:34
Basically, it's just whoever brought something, that's what they were using. And thank God the people that live nearby understood
00:43:42
that they were needed and showed up for it because it was a horrible job to do. And they did it and
00:43:47
like came together. And it was probably dangerous, right? Because you probably get another avalanche
00:43:52
if you're fucking with the avalanche, right? Oh yeah. No one could tell you they weren't going to.
00:43:56
I mean, anything is kind of possible. It's just like, they're just out there in the elements now
00:44:01
trying to help any way they can. And it's not easy work. As the hours pass, searchers face the fact
00:44:07
that they're much more likely to find a body than they are find a survivor. Before the end of the
00:44:12
day, a group of searchers finds a mangled snowmobile, and then they immediately recognize
00:44:18
that it's Jake Smith's, the one who radioed in, warning everybody. And as searchers canvass the
00:44:26
area, they pick up an avalanche beacon signal nearby. They begin to dig, and tragically,
00:44:32
they find Jake Smith's body. It's immeasurably difficult for the searchers who find him because
00:44:37
they're also his coworkers and the staff and the crew at Alpine Meadows, they had this, their own
00:44:44
little culture and their own, you know, they were all friends and they all like lived right by each
00:44:50
other. It was like, you know, they were on the mountain together. Jake is really popular. He's
00:44:55
a beloved staffer at Alpine Meadows. He was adored for his kindness and his sense of humor.
00:44:59
And he was only 27 years old. There was a young ski patrol, ski patroller, I guess we'll call him
00:45:05
named Lanny Johnson, who was also part of the tight knit community at Alpine, was great friends with his coworkers. And he's there when they find Jake. And he would later
00:45:16
say, quote, when something like this happens and you dig your friend out of the snow and you're
00:45:21
solidifying this reality that he's dead, all you can do is block your feelings out. You have a job
00:45:26
to do and you shut that stuff down. Yeah. Because this is like, they have now, I believe,
00:45:34
five more people to find or eight more people, including the three people in the parking lot.
00:45:40
And just this huge, like, where do you go? How do you start? It's just a massive white in front of
00:45:45
them. So as the search grinds on, the Alpine Meadows staff and volunteers become more and
00:45:51
more physically and emotionally exhausted. It's terrible conditions, tough work. The power and
00:45:58
phone lines are out. And as the sun goes down, the entire resort goes dark. There's no heat
00:46:03
and there's not much food. As the hours continue to pass, searchers are afraid they won't be
00:46:09
rescuing. They'll be recovering. So the next morning, Thursday, April 1st, the weather finally
00:46:17
starts to clear. And as good as that news is, there's now an extremely high risk of another
00:46:23
avalanche happening because of all the snow that piled on during the storm. Since the weather has
00:46:29
improved the ski patrol heads up to those starting zones again to try to stabilize the mountain
00:46:35
lanny johnson and avalanche forecaster jim plane pack some dynamite and they get in a helicopter
00:46:41
and they go up to the ridge line lanny says quote i would sit in the front and i would tell jim when
00:46:48
to throw jim would light it off and throw it until we were out of them so they're just lighting sticks
00:46:55
of dynamite from a helicopter and throwing them out to try to like pre-trigger it.
00:46:59
It sounds so dangerous. It's like dangerous in every direction. I had the opportunity once to go into a news
00:47:05
helicopter and I was like, um, no, thank you. Have you been in a helicopter? No, I don't think I ever want to be in a helicopter.
00:47:13
So we're going to Hawaii for Christmas. Oh. And Vince wants to take a helicopter over a volcano.
00:47:20
Do you have any Xanax? I don't have Xanax. And then of course I researched like helicopter crashes in Hawaii.
00:47:27
And it's like, well, actually they're very under reported because the companies pay out
00:47:32
the family. You know what I mean? And they'll say, I don't know if I can do that. We'll decide
00:47:36
right before I step on. Yeah. I would say if you're going to do it, you better have some Mai
00:47:42
Tais and you better, you know, get right with God. You should definitely stop doing research
00:47:48
in between. That's for sure. That's my personal opinion. No, it sounds like it's like a challenge.
00:47:54
It's terrifying. All I'm saying is, cause look, there's people who are like, I went in a helicopter.
00:47:59
I loved it. Good. great god bless you i was standing next to a new helicopter and i turned to the producer next to me
00:48:04
and i was like you want to do this because i absolutely don't want to do this and she was
00:48:07
like i'd love to do it and i'm like great and it was not i'd never thought about it i didn't think
00:48:13
it would be yeah an issue it was not that and then the moment i was like supposed to do it i was like
00:48:18
i will be suffering the entire time were you bummed that like everything was fine so you actually
00:48:24
could have gone on it and it would have been fine not to say you wanted them to crash i was bummed
00:48:29
I wasn't proven right by a horrible crash. Georgia. I think too many. Too many things. Yeah. Okay. So in the early afternoon, when they get all that done,
00:48:43
it's deemed safe. Volunteers are able to then continue the search in the resort's base area.
00:48:49
And that is when, sadly, they find the body of 11-year-old Laura Nelson. She was close to where
00:48:56
her father was discovered the day before. The searchers also locate 22-year-old Beth Morrow.
00:49:03
She was 100 feet away from where she last sat with her co-workers in the Summit Terminal building.
00:49:08
Oh my God. So that also kind of gives you a sense of the power of the snow moving like that. But then
00:49:17
also just that idea of like, it kills me to think about that like communal feeling that they all had,
00:49:23
like hanging out in that building, trying to problem solve. It was part of the job. This is
00:49:27
what they did. They love to do it. Now that's so tragic. Yep. Then the volunteers find the body
00:49:34
of 22 year old Frank Yeatman, who was Anna's boyfriend who came to visit her. Lanny Johnson
00:49:41
will later say, quote, when we pulled him away, this was the first time I got what I call FaceTime.
00:49:47
If you want to minimize PTSD, when you go to a scene, minimize FaceTime. He did not look happy.
00:49:55
As a matter of fact, he looked horrified. And it was frozen in that position. But at the same time, I had a job to do.
00:50:04
Stuff the anxiety. Don't pay attention to it. You're working. FaceTime. I mean, that's just it is.
00:50:10
the people that were like the seasonal crew at Alpine Meadows were not prepared. I'm sure not
00:50:17
trained to be digging for the bodies of their friends and coworkers. I mean, it sounds like
00:50:22
they're soldiers, but soldiers are trained to deal with that. Yeah. Holy shit. So Lanny does his best to bury his emotions. And instead he turns to logic because he realizes
00:50:35
that Frank was found in or near the employee locker room. And that means Anna could be somewhere close by.
00:50:43
So he starts yelling, Anna, Anna, if you're in there, we're coming to get you. Just like if she's there and can hear him.
00:50:51
But Lanny's theory doesn't pay off. The day ends with no more discoveries. Now it's Friday, April 2nd.
00:51:00
Two days have passed since the avalanche. But that break in the storm is ended. and now more severe weather has rolled in.
00:51:08
So at this point, nearly nine and a half feet of snow has fallen at Alpine Meadows.
00:51:13
Wind gusts are picking back up. The wind is now between 75 and 125 miles an hour
00:51:19
and it's hammering that dense snow pack on the ridges above the resort. Once again, the crew's in a tough spot.
00:51:26
Not only do these conditions make it nearly impossible to conduct a search for the remaining missing people,
00:51:31
But again, they hamper the ski patrol's avalanche control measures. So with each passing hour, the avalanche danger builds.
00:51:40
But the search continues for Bernie and Anna. Among the volunteers that have shown up to help people dig and search, there are a few rescue dogs.
00:51:52
And these are the early days of using dogs in search and rescue efforts, in avalanche search and rescue efforts in the U.S.
00:51:59
And so for a while, these dogs that were at least here, they didn't seem like they were being helpful per se. One dog found someone's lunch in the snow. Another found a mouse. So it would be like the dog would indicate everyone would get excited and then it wouldn't be the thing they wanted. And so, of course, they're like, oh, these dogs aren't that useful.
00:52:19
Also, the scene itself is so chaotic. The dogs are picking up on a million cents. They can't focus. Like, there's things where things wouldn't be or shouldn't be, so it's not like a normal situation.
00:52:30
But early that Friday, a German shepherd named Bridget gets super excited and her handler, Roberta Huber, thinks she's found something.
00:52:41
Roberta is insistent that the searcher should check the area Bridget is hitting on, which isn't far from where the Summit Terminal Building once stood.
00:52:50
but because of the other dogs kind of hit and miss records at this point there's not a ton of
00:52:56
belief the rescuers go over there and dig and dig where Bridget indicated upwards of 15 feet into
00:53:03
the snow but they don't find anything and the weather is making everything worse so as they're
00:53:09
out there trying to dig and do all of this it's like a blizzard basically the winds are raging
00:53:13
it's really hard to see and worried that another avalanche could happen at any moment forecaster
00:53:19
Jim Plain makes the difficult decision to call the search off for the rest of the day.
00:53:24
And he says, quote, my training is screaming at me. You got to protect the rescuers.
00:53:28
So I made what very honestly is the most difficult decision I've ever made in my life.
00:53:34
So they're having to manage their own crisis and their own like horrible disaster scene.
00:53:41
Just crazy. So now it's Saturday, April 3rd. There's a full blown blizzard raging outside.
00:53:48
the search can resume Snow falls throughout the following day There now over 12 feet of new snow 12 feet Holy shit Over one story of new snow on the ground And this winter storm is being called the worst in the history of the Sierras Yeah So it like a horrible combination
00:54:08
So on Monday, April 5th, which is five days post avalanche, the weather is still bad,
00:54:14
but manageable enough that searchers can finally reconvene at the base of Alpine Meadows and start
00:54:20
work again. And Roberta Huber brings her dog Bridget back to the scene and they go back to
00:54:26
the same area Bridget indicated two days earlier. And Roberta will later say, quote, Bridget wasn't
00:54:33
fooling around. She was on full alert and she went right into that hole. So once again, the volunteers
00:54:39
start digging and digging and digging, but there's nothing there. And at first they think Bridget hit
00:54:45
on something random again, like that dirty ski sock that's down because there's lockers down there.
00:54:51
And then they see it. A hand pops out from the icy hole. Then it vanishes so quickly
00:54:59
that one of the searchers yells, did you see that? The group keeps on shoveling until they find Anna Conrad
00:55:07
and she's alive. Five days. Bridget was right. Bridget was right. Bridget. There's a moment of absolute euphoria when Anna is pulled from the snow.
00:55:19
The crew wildly cheers. Some people cry. They all cried. But there's no time to waste.
00:55:26
She's been buried alive for five days in the snow. She has a serious concussion.
00:55:32
She's confused. She's dehydrated. She's hungry. She has very bad frostbite. She's covered in bruises.
00:55:40
Of course, they call the authorities. Anna is loaded onto a helicopter. She's flown to a nearby hospital and reportedly her first request
00:55:50
when she like can speak and is okay is for a beer. Damn. Which I love. She earned it. How did she
00:55:58
survive five days? I don't know. But with that, Anna Conrad becomes the longest survivor of an
00:56:05
avalanche in US history. Holy fuck. She beat the odds. And Bridget locating Anna becomes the first
00:56:12
time a dog has located and saved a living person from an avalanche in North America.
00:56:18
Good girl. That's a very good girl. It's a real record setting, kind of incredibly against the
00:56:24
odds moment. Roberta would go on to say that on the night of Anna's rescue, quote, Bridget got a
00:56:31
steak. Yes, she did. Oh my God. So Anna's survival really is nothing short of a miracle. She was
00:56:39
buried in a two by five foot space under a bunch of lockers. These lockers created an air pocket
00:56:46
around her and saved her life. And Anna has talked about these five harrowing days extensively over
00:56:53
the years. She doesn't really remember much about the moments right before the avalanche,
00:56:57
but she says, quote, everything went black. When I woke up, I was in a black hole. I couldn't see
00:57:03
anything, but I could move. I wasn't pinned, but there wasn't a lot of space. I couldn't stretch
00:57:08
out. I couldn't remember what I'd been doing. I had no recollection of where I'd been. My head
00:57:14
just pounded. I had a serious, serious concussion. I didn't seem to be hurt anywhere else, but it
00:57:20
hurt to move because my head hurt so badly. End quote. So Anna would go on to say that while
00:57:26
buried in the snow, she could hear noises from above. This included the ski patrol's avalanche
00:57:32
blasts. And at one point she could hear Lanny yelling her name, which is so awesome. She actually
00:57:40
says that she yelled back at the top of her lungs, but no one could hear her, but she never gave up
00:57:46
hope that she'd be rescued. She says, the thing that I cannot understand that I can't explain
00:57:51
that was a gift that was given to me is that the entire time that I was in that hole, I never,
00:57:57
ever remembered that my boyfriend Frank was with me. I always felt positive that I would be out of
00:58:03
that hole to make sure I could communicate with him how much he meant to me. I didn't remember
00:58:08
that I had seen Bernie and Beth minutes before this happened. I never had the inkling that all
00:58:13
of those people were most likely dead. Oh my God. So in a way, it's good that she was just in the
00:58:21
space that she was in and she wasn't also just burdened with the bigger picture. Right. She
00:58:26
They probably didn't panic and that probably like saved oxygen. Am I just making that up?
00:58:31
I don't know. I mean, it could have. It could have. So shortly after Anna's rescue, the searchers finally locate the resort's beloved captain, Alpine Meadows Mountain Manager, Bernie Kingery.
00:58:42
He is found 60 feet from the summit terminal building wreckage with his hand clenched in a fist as if he were punching upwards through the snow.
00:58:51
Oh, my God. avalanche forecaster jim plane later says quote we all looked up to bernie we loved bernie he was
00:58:59
our guy our fallen leader i always thought it was fitting that he was the last one found that's how
00:59:05
he would have wanted it and quote so sad in the coming days weeks and years the survivors of the
00:59:12
alpine meadows avalanche have to deal with the unspeakable grief and trauma as well as the
00:59:18
physical injuries that they sustained. Alpine Meadows staffers and some volunteers who responded
00:59:24
to the scene deal with nightmares, anxiety, survivor's guilt, and PTSD. Jim Plain says,
00:59:30
quote, I do believe we did our best. We fought it hard and we still lost. So sad. But there are bright spots. After the disaster, Anna Conrad continues to bring a sense
00:59:44
of hope to the community as she recovers. She will lose part of her right leg and the toes on
00:59:50
her left foot due to frostbite but only 10 months after that Anna will get back on her skis using a prosthetic leg Wow She eventually graduates from UC Davis She starts a family She continues skiing And eventually she begins to teach ski safety at another Northern California ski area Mammoth Mountain
01:00:12
Anna has said, quote, I don't believe in holding back because of something that has happened in my life.
01:00:16
With the loss of my leg and toes, things aren't as easy to do, but it doesn't stop me.
01:00:23
Badass. So that normally would be the end. But then Maren included some avalanche safety tips.
01:00:30
Do you want to hear them? Of course I do. I always love to end my stories with like an awesome quote from a survivor or person that was through it.
01:00:38
And that Anna quote was so good. But this is kind of fun too. If you're someone who enjoys outdoor winter activities.
01:00:45
Not it. Seriously, like of our audience. We're talking to maybe 25% of the people here.
01:00:52
Are you an indoors person? Yes. Anyways, if you like outdoors activities, you probably are aware of how to protect yourself in avalanche prone areas.
01:01:02
But just in case you don't know, here are some tips. The first tip is take an avalanche safety course.
01:01:09
Okay. Thank you for that one. Thanks so much. But also be sure to always research the area that you're going to go ski or snowboard in.
01:01:19
Has it had any avalanches lately? are there any active alerts from the U.S. Forest Service Avalanche Center? Be sure to look out for
01:01:26
any warnings about elevated danger levels and current snowpack conditions in the local news
01:01:31
or at local information centers. So they do want to be like me and obsessively look for the worst
01:01:37
possible scenarios. Yes. I think that is a inarguable safety tip. Yeah. Do your research,
01:01:44
figure out the risk factor and then make your decisions going from there. And if you need it,
01:01:51
like especially if you're going to cross-country ski or do skiing, I don't know, up high or whatever,
01:01:56
bring essential equipment like an avalanche beacon, a collapsible probe, collapsible shovel,
01:02:03
avalanche airbag. And if you wear a helmet, it not only protects your head from injury,
01:02:08
but it can also create an air pocket for you. Oh, yeah. Never don't wear your helmet. Finally, when you're skiing or snowboarding,
01:02:16
Be sure to travel with a group and be a big nerd and talk with that group through a potential communication plan and maybe even a rescue plan.
01:02:28
Okay. Bring a dog. Bring Bridget. Oh, my God. Get Bridget. See if Bridget's free that weekend.
01:02:34
Anyway, that's the story of the 1982 Alpine Meadows avalanche. Holy shit. That was exciting and scary and tragic and terrifying.
01:02:46
I know. All the things. It's just horrifying. And, God, 1982 seems like so long ago now.
01:02:55
It was. It was, actually. Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club.
01:03:08
This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook project Hail Mary.
01:03:16
massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science and what happens when you wake up alone
01:03:22
very far from earth. I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that
01:03:28
frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections and it's like,
01:03:32
okay, yo, yo, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no,
01:03:36
at this point it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have
01:03:41
in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me,
01:03:49
and I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end.
01:03:55
It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club
01:04:00
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Data accurate as of 2020-26. Changing directions as we like to do. Okay. This is an old timey one.
01:05:42
It starts in 1857, your favorite period. I love that era. In fucking England, your favorite place and era.
01:05:51
This is this is this borderline Victorian England Holy shit Have you been watching Bodies on Netflix I haven but I heard about it The time traveling murder mystery That starts in Victorian England You love it It very interesting
01:06:05
Okay. So my story today is about a man who was instrumental in giving us the Oxford English Dictionary.
01:06:14
Oh. Which is our most complete record of the history of the English language, which I'll get into.
01:06:20
But before he helped with this immense project, he killed a man. This is the sad tale of William Chester Minor.
01:06:30
My main source for today is a book that you may have heard of. Originally, the book was called The Professor and the Madman.
01:06:37
But that is now a title that the author, Simon Winchester, isn't comfortable with, you know, because the word madman is antiquated and offensive in regards to mental illness.
01:06:49
So the name of the book is now The Surgeon of Crowthorn by Simon Winchester. But I think most people remember the book The Professor and the Madman.
01:06:59
Right. It's a good book. Anyways, that's all to say that in 1857, a group of British academics and intellectuals
01:07:07
propose an ambitious project to create a better dictionary than what is currently available.
01:07:13
You're like, well, what is currently available? I was going to ask that, actually.
01:07:17
And I was curious, too. It's prompted in part by this desire that they want like regular people, common folks
01:07:25
to be able to read the Bible. But also there are no real standards around spelling and meanings.
01:07:31
So they want people who aren't intellectuals to be able to read the Bible and understand
01:07:36
it and for them to communicate better. And just to demonstrate how badly a fuller English dictionary was needed, the first solely
01:07:45
English Dictionary, which was Robert Cardree's A Tale Alphabetical published in 1604, only had
01:07:53
around 3,000 words in it. He was like, we're just going to do top 3,000. Let us know your votes.
01:08:02
What would the BuzzFeed article be? Like, I saw the top 3,000 words and I almost died.
01:08:07
And they're all from the Bible. And more recent dictionary made by Samuel Johnson in 1747, so still a fucking hundred years ago, still only had around like about 43,000 words in it, which sounds like a lot, but that's not enough.
01:08:23
It's not enough. For how I need to express myself? No way. Okay. Just try that. Those just had words also. So the idea for this ambitious project would give
01:08:33
a full history of the English language with all the words, their origins, their uses,
01:08:39
and how those uses had changed over time. So it was really almost just like making a yellow pages
01:08:46
for words. And kids, the yellow pages is an old book we used to get for free. Oh, man.
01:08:56
I didn't think about that one. Because we're from Victorian England, too. It was a booster seat.
01:09:02
The project changes hands and stalls out multiple times for the first 20 years. So it's just kind of an idea.
01:09:08
It's slowly being built, but it is a huge undertaking. So it's like one person's idea as opposed to like a company that makes big books or something.
01:09:16
Yes, it's British academics and intellectuals. They want to make it. So in 1879, a man named Dr. James Murray takes over the project and he brings it to Oxford University.
01:09:29
Hey. Which dedicates resources to creating the new dictionary and becomes the publisher.
01:09:34
So this is where it like really gets legs. This is where it really firms up. This is where it gets called the Oxford English Dictionary.
01:09:41
Now it's all making sense to me. Now it all comes together. Words are important.
01:09:45
Dr. Murray works in a little building on the Oxford University grounds that he names the
01:09:51
scriptorium. He sends out a call for English speaking volunteers. Obviously, he can't do this on his own.
01:09:57
It ends up being more than 400,000 words. Oh, okay. So that one that I talked about was 43,000 words.
01:10:05
Yeah. Clearly, it's a big undertaking. So it's way bigger. Yeah. So he calls for people to help him.
01:10:11
he asked for them to send in quotations from books that demonstrate the uses for various words.
01:10:17
So the whole thing of like, use that in a sentence, this is where it comes from.
01:10:22
And just mail that in from your home? Yeah. Okay. Just start like all your, you know, you rich people have these like libraries,
01:10:27
like find words that are interesting to you or that are like, that you have in this book from, you know, the 1600s and tell me the use of it
01:10:34
and where it's from and blah, blah, blah, blah, you know? No, my answer would be like, it's your job.
01:10:39
You do it. I have to, I have to tend to the sheep. Yes. Yeah. He has intellectuals who have a lot of time on their hand.
01:10:47
Who are not shepherds. That's right. Okay. I get it. So he does this by giving pamphlets to booksellers to put inside the books they sell.
01:10:56
So almost like, you know, when you get a bookmark at your favorite independent bookstore.
01:11:00
Copperfields, Petaluma. Yay! Skylight. Hey! Los Angeles. Yep. So they put it in a book.
01:11:04
So Dr. Murray thinks the project will take 10 years to complete, is his idea. But after the first five years, the first section of the dictionary is done, and it only covers the word A through the word ant.
01:11:16
And that's five years. So shit. Exactly. I'm sure that word was in there. Over the next 10 years, thanks for the help of lots of volunteers, the work starts to move a bit faster.
01:11:27
One volunteer in particular has made more contributions to the dictionary than anyone else, like star people over here.
01:11:33
He is a Dr. W.C. Minor, a surgeon living in Crowthorne, England. One evening, Dr. Murray is entertaining a guest at the scriptorium.
01:11:44
It's an American, a head librarian from Harvard. The Harvard librarian tells Dr. Murray that he had warmed the hearts of many Americans
01:11:53
by specifically referencing the contributions of this Dr. Minor person in the preface to
01:11:58
the section of the dictionary that it archived. even published. So they put out the A through Ant and he like thanks this Dr. Minor who he doesn't
01:12:06
know, but had kept sending in words and contributed a lot. Dr. Murray is confused. So the Harvard
01:12:12
librarian, like, why are you guys so thankful for me thanking him? He's helped. So the librarian
01:12:17
explains Dr. Minor is an American. So that's cool. Who killed a man in London? Oh, so it's
01:12:25
interesting that you're thanking him, essentially. He does live in the town of Crowthorne, but he
01:12:30
lives there as a patient in what was then known as the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.
01:12:37
Oh, Broadmoor's back. Here it is again. It was legendary, that place. Yeah. So let's talk about this W.C. Minor. William Chester Minor is born in 1834 in Ceylon,
01:12:49
a former British colony, which is now Sri Lanka. His parents are missionaries, which is like,
01:12:56
and he is a part of an aristocratic American family who have been in Connecticut since the mid 1600s.
01:13:03
So they're pinkies out highfalutin. These are ski people, right? Definitely ski people.
01:13:11
Ski people, for sure. Like ski, like season people. They do not rent. They own their own ski pants.
01:13:16
Chalet. They own a fucking chalet, I bet. William's family belonged to the Congregationalist Church, which grew out of Puritanism.
01:13:26
Is it Puritanism? So when William is three years old, his mother died. No, no, I just, sorry, you just mispronounced.
01:13:33
Oh, Puritanism. I thought you were like, oh yeah, them. I know you were like, good job making conversation.
01:13:42
Which grew out of Puritanism. So as you can imagine, it's very conservative. Yeah.
01:13:48
So when William is three years old, his mother dies of tuberculosis, or what was then called
01:13:52
consumption. And his father quickly remarries, and William has six half-siblings from that marriage,
01:14:00
though some die in childhood. So the mission accommodations are rustic. The library is full of books, and the school is excellent.
01:14:06
So William gets a good education, and the family travels extensively, particularly to
01:14:12
Southeast Asia. William grows into a man whose friends describe him as sensitive and highly courteous.
01:14:18
very bookish, very gentle. He attends Yale Medical School. And the process is different
01:14:23
from modern medical school. I feel like it's probably a lot harder now than it was then.
01:14:28
I would imagine so. Yeah. I feel like you just watch a lot of like dissections back then. And then you're like,
01:14:34
you're a doctor now. And then you just like inhale. What is it? What's the stuff that you like?
01:14:40
Ether? Yes. Oh. That's what Curious George inhaled. Remember when he... I don't know what did you know.
01:14:47
That's my favorite part of that book. When he inhales ether and then is like X'd out, his eyes are X's.
01:14:53
I don't remember that at all. Were you thinking of the Nick too? When they're like.
01:14:57
I was thinking of the Nick and I could not think of the name. Got it. Great show.
01:15:00
So I switched to Curious George. Next obvious conclusion. Curious George. Oh man.
01:15:10
Not great. Is there ether in that cup you're drinking out of? Okay. It takes around the same amount of time.
01:15:15
So after all his education and apprenticeship, it's 1863 and he's 29 years old when he becomes a doctor.
01:15:22
The Civil War is underway. It's about halfway through. So William joins the Union Army as a surgeon.
01:15:28
After a year or so of working at an army hospital in New Haven, he is sent to the front in Virginia and is thrust for the first time directly into the extreme violence going on.
01:15:40
It's chaos. It's misery. Welcome to the Civil War. It's the Civil War. So Simon Winchester writes, quote, the sounds in the first aid tents were unforgettable.
01:15:50
The screams and whimperings of men whose lives had been ruined by cruel new guns and in
01:15:56
voracious and ceaseless battles. Some 360,000 federal troops died in the war and so did 258,000 Confederates.
01:16:05
And for everyone who died of wounds caused by the new weapons, so too died from incidental
01:16:11
infection, illness, and poor hygiene. end quote so like rough not okay there's a reason that in many of our other favorite pieces of
01:16:21
fiction there's always a ex-civil war doctor who goes on to become whatever blank alcoholic or
01:16:29
addict or whatever because those those doctors saw a lot of horrible shit and had to manage
01:16:37
and then just come home like there was no such thing as ptsd or no there no that's a modern
01:16:43
invention. Yeah, that's right. Wow. So the particular battle he is sent to the Battle of
01:16:49
the Wilderness, which already sounds like a bad time, has all the hallmark gruesomeness of a Civil
01:16:55
War battle. It's fought in dense forest and brush. So all the fighting is essentially hand to hand.
01:17:01
Oh, that face to face thing you were just talking about. Yeah, I'm not good. Right. But there's an
01:17:05
added horror. And that is a massive forest fire that breaks out in the middle of the battle. So
01:17:11
injured soldiers are burned alive. Oh, God. So he's this kid from aristocratic family,
01:17:17
goes to become a doctor and suddenly is seeing these horrors of wars. I'm sure there's so many
01:17:21
stories like those. This particular battle and in the Civil War in general, there's a huge problem
01:17:27
with desertion. Because there is an actual fire to run from in the Battle of the Wilderness,
01:17:33
desertion rates are particularly high. There are various punishments for desertion,
01:17:38
But one of them is for the deserter to have the letter D branded into his skin. Wait, that can't count, though, if your surroundings are on fire.
01:17:47
Like, that's crazy. And guess who they made brand these soldiers? The doctor? That right The doctor who has taken an oath of taking care of his patients they force them to brand these horrible poor soldiers So William is forced to brand a D on the face of an Irish soldier who fought with a special Irish regiment for the Union Army
01:18:12
So it's like an Irish dude who's so prejudiced against, joins the army, fights for you on your side, is branded a deserter, and you have to fucking brand him with that.
01:18:24
Like, it's just... It's time to go back to Galway and be like, hey, it's not very cool over there.
01:18:32
No. So obviously this situation is worse for the man who gets branded, let's say.
01:18:36
But as a gentle person and as a doctor, this experience is highly traumatic for William.
01:18:41
After the Battle of the Wilderness, William is sent to posts in cities, treating soldiers in hospitals.
01:18:47
While he's posted in New York, people start to notice that his behavior is getting a little eccentric.
01:18:52
He spends the bulk of his free time in a company of sex workers, which I think at the time, you know, was really taboo.
01:18:58
And he's taken to carrying a revolver with him, even when he's out of uniform. He begins to be outwardly paranoid about his fellow soldiers and says he can hear them whispering about him.
01:19:09
He complains of vertigo and headaches, which to me sounds like a concussion. Or PTSD. There's like a million things it seems like it could be.
01:19:17
Yeah, but the concussion thing can also change your personality in a really drastic way.
01:19:21
So like, who knows if that happened? But yes, all the things. By 1868, when William is 34 years old, his colleagues, friends, and family know that he is unwell and doctors are recommending that he be treated in what they, at that point, refer to as an asylum.
01:19:36
At the time, he is not given a particular diagnosis. He agrees to go to the asylum, but feels terribly ashamed.
01:19:42
And he asks that the army keep his condition a secret. He's sent to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. and spends 18 months there,
01:19:50
which is a long time. Yeah. So something's up. The doctors allow him to go for walks in the grounds and in the countryside,
01:19:56
but his fears and delusions never really go away. When he's discharged from the hospital, he's also released from the army.
01:20:03
Liam can't practice medicine anymore, and it's 1871 when he's 37. So he decides to go to Europe to try to relax and to paint and to see the sights.
01:20:14
Remember, he comes from a family of means, essentially. So he's able to do that, which sounds great.
01:20:22
He travels by train to various European capitals. But by the end of 1871, he returns to London and rents a room in Lambeth, which is a gritty
01:20:31
working class neighborhood. So it's interesting that he had the means to stay wherever he wanted.
01:20:35
He chose there. But it might be because this is one of Victorian London's most active red light districts.
01:20:42
and William seems to get most of his social and sexual fulfillment from sex workers.
01:20:47
So he seems to feel at home there. So unfortunately, William's mental health deteriorates further
01:20:52
as soon as he's moved into his room in Lambeth. His landlady says that he seems anxious
01:20:57
and frequently asks her to move the furniture in his room around to prevent break-ins.
01:21:02
He tells his landlady that he is particularly worried that an Irishman will break into his room and kill him.
01:21:08
So he's having flashbacks to when he had a brand that Irishman. Throughout the winter of 1872, William wakes up to see a menacing figure in his room, and on multiple occasions, he goes to Scotland Yard to report this.
01:21:21
He reports that members of a militant Irish nationalist group have been breaking into his room and hiding in the rafters.
01:21:28
Of course, such Irish militants didn't exist at the time and were fighting against British colonialism, which, remember, he grew up in.
01:21:35
Right. So it's likely that William's paranoid delusions involved Irish freedom fighters having a vendetta against him personally.
01:21:43
So about two in the morning on February 17th, 1872, William wakes up in the middle of the night to see a man standing at the foot of his bed.
01:21:52
William has started sleeping with his revolver under his pillow, so he grabs for it.
01:21:57
And as he does, the man runs out of his room, down the stairs and outside into the cold London night.
01:22:04
And so William runs after him. He looks down the road and sees a man around the corner from the boarding house. So thinking it was the man that he supposedly saw, William shouts at him and then fires his revolver four times.
01:22:19
Of course, there was no man in William's room. There was a real man outside in the street.
01:22:26
And the man that he has shot is named George Merritt. George works at the Red Lion Brewery shoveling coal.
01:22:33
And he and his wife, Eliza, have six children ranging from a year old to 13 years old.
01:22:39
And Eliza's pregnant with a seventh child. Oh, no. The doctors try to save George, but his carotid artery has been severed and his spine has been
01:22:48
broken and he dies. So William is arrested immediately. He doesn't make any attempt to
01:22:54
flee. He's holding the revolver when the police approach him. He goes willingly to the police
01:22:58
station, insisting now he realizes he shot the wrong man and that there was someone in his
01:23:03
bedroom, which he insists upon, and that that person is still at large, but it's clear that
01:23:08
he's having delusions. Shootings are extremely rare in London at this point. So this incident
01:23:13
attracts a lot of press attention. And because William is an American soldier, it also causes a
01:23:18
bit of a diplomatic stir. So it's covered widely in the papers in both London and the United States.
01:23:24
So William's trial begins two months later in April. He's found not guilty for reasons of insanity
01:23:29
and a sentence to be treated at Broadmoor. There's no timeline to the sentence. It's one of those,
01:23:34
quote, until Her Majesty's pleasure be known, which basically means he's to be held indefinitely.
01:23:41
broadly broadmoor is england's psychiatric hospital that treats violent offenders when
01:23:46
william is admitted in the spring of 1872 it's quickly determined that he poses no immediate
01:23:51
threat and so he assigned to a somewhat more comfortable cell block i sure it helped that his family had money too right then the next line says also because he has money he gets some favorable treatment Yeah that how it works Yeah He gets two cells combined to make an extra large one
01:24:08
And American diplomats pull some strings so that he can have most of his clothing and belongings moved in.
01:24:14
He has his entire collection of books shipped over from New Haven and uses his monthly army pension to order even more books from bookstores in London.
01:24:22
And pretty soon the cell is lined from floor to ceiling with books. He's allowed to spend some time outside each day and spends most of his time going for walks, reading and painting.
01:24:32
So not the worst for him. Not the worst, but also it is Broadmoor, which is like not great.
01:24:38
It's prison essentially. Over the next several years, William is generally at peace during the day, but his nights are still plagued by delusions.
01:24:45
He wakes up terrified each morning, convinced that people have gotten into a cell
01:24:49
and has sexually abused him or have forced him to sexually abuse other people. So his delusions are a lot about like sexual desires.
01:24:57
When he was a younger child, he felt like he was like possessed because he was obsessed with these things,
01:25:05
but it's probably more likely because he's from this religious family, you know?
01:25:08
Yeah, and the Puritanism, which is like the craziest, most extreme. Did you watch the movie, The Witch?
01:25:13
I started it. Should I finish it? It's so good. Is it? It's really good. But it is just about that.
01:25:19
It's the kind of religion where you just can't win. You're never doing enough. You're never good enough.
01:25:25
You're always bad. It's just such a drag. Yeah. Yeah. In 1879, when William was about 45 years old, he writes to Eliza, the widow of the man he killed, to apologize and to offer money to her family.
01:25:43
Eliza accepts the apology and the financial assistance as well, of course, and asks if she wants to visit him.
01:25:50
His doctor allows it. The first visit goes well. And Eliza starts visiting him each month.
01:25:56
And then she starts taking book orders from William. And so each time she visits, she brings some and he gives her money to buy more.
01:26:03
I was going to say, I'm so happy to hear that he was giving her money because he has it to give.
01:26:10
and a woman being widowed pregnant with her seventh child is the beginning of every dickens
01:26:17
story basically like just here comes a very sad story so the idea that that it's not just him
01:26:25
sitting there buying himself books it's like he's actually helping and then she's probably like wow
01:26:30
thank god you're helping i'll help you too i mean he reached out to apologize which means
01:26:35
like what he wasn't in his right mind. Yeah, he wasn't in his right mind. But when he was,
01:26:40
he knew right from wrong and he wanted to atone for that. So it's amazing that she accepted it.
01:26:45
Yeah, it is. So incredible. So in one of the books that she delivers, William discovers
01:26:51
a pamphlet asking for volunteers to help compile the Oxford English Dictionary. And we're back.
01:27:00
Because he already has such an extensive book collection at his disposal, So William's able to get started right away.
01:27:05
He works at a meticulous system, which is essentially his own index of words. It's an alphabetical list of every interesting word he comes across.
01:27:14
And it notes every reference to that word in each book in his collection. So he's basically asked Jeeves, like from way back.
01:27:22
And also he has a purpose that isn't being a doctor, which is probably triggering to his PTSD.
01:27:30
It isn't like his life from before. it's like suddenly you can use your brain in different ways and you can trust how you're
01:27:38
using your brain. It's not scaring you or making up things that aren't real. Right. And it's like such a pattern. There's just like rules to this thing you're doing. It's not
01:27:48
just like your imagination working. Right. Yeah. The team at Oxford realizes that this person,
01:27:53
William, is their most valuable volunteer and they can simply tell him which word they're
01:27:58
currently working on and he'll write back with a long list of useful quotations for that word.
01:28:02
So they're like stoked that he's there, but they don't know where he's writing from
01:28:07
or what he's done, you know? For a while, this seems to make William more peaceful
01:28:11
and settled. He is given more lax treatment. At one point, he asked for a knife to cut the untrimmed pages of some of his oldest books
01:28:19
because some handmade books used to come with some of the pages folded. So you would have to cut along the fold
01:28:25
to read the pages inside the fold, which is interesting. So he's allowed to have the knife,
01:28:30
which is unheard of at Broadmoor. So this goes on for about a decade before Dr. Murray learns the
01:28:37
truth about who his favorite wordsmith, William, is. And so Dr. Murray starts to visit William.
01:28:47
The two form a friendship, and Dr. Murray takes the train to Broadmoor often to walk with William
01:28:52
outside or to sit with him in his book-filled cell. So William spends about 10 more relatively
01:28:58
happy years working on the dictionary and visiting with Dr. Murray before his mental health deteriorates
01:29:04
even further. The terrible nighttime delusions have never really gone away, but they began to
01:29:10
spiral out of control again. You know, he's getting older. His strict religious upbringing,
01:29:15
which he had largely stopped thinking about, comes back and he starts having the same
01:29:20
obsessively guilty thoughts about his sexuality that he had as a teenager. He's also read with
01:29:26
interest about the invention of air travel but at night this causes him to be convinced that he's
01:29:31
being taken out of his cell and flown to distant cities to commit sexual acts against his will
01:29:37
so like that's his delusion ultimately this leads him to self-harm in a very gruesome and upsetting
01:29:44
way with that paper knife he had been allowed to hold on to so yeah there's some genital mutilation
01:29:50
going on genital mutilation is that what you said of himself yeah oh yeah for the next several years williams family in america go back and forth with authorities in England to negotiate having William sent back to the States
01:30:05
Finally, in 1910, the British Home Secretary, who is 35-year-old Winston Churchill.
01:30:12
Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill. Approves the request. Dr. Murray comes to Broadmoor to sue William off
01:30:19
and sends him back to America with the first six completed volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary.
01:30:26
Wow. By this point, Dr. Murray has been knighted for his work on the dictionary.
01:30:30
So he's actually Sir James Murray. William, who is now 76 years old, goes back to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C.
01:30:38
and is given the relatively new diagnosis of schizophrenia. But I don't, that doesn't sound like a correct diagnosis
01:30:46
to me, I'm a professional. To you, yes. The professional me. The professional. It's just, it's not concurrent.
01:30:53
I feel like that is a real, very specific kind of thing that it's not just the delusions, right?
01:31:00
No. Yeah. In 1919, when he's 85, William is transferred to a home for mentally ill elderly people near his family home in Connecticut.
01:31:10
And he dies a year later in 1920. The Oxford English Dictionary is completed eight years later.
01:31:17
So remember that 10 years it was supposed to take? Yeah. In 1928, it contains more than 400,000 words and almost 2 million quotations.
01:31:27
Wow. No one knows exactly how many were contributed by William, but it was at least tens of thousands
01:31:33
of them. Wow. Which is like, that's how it was created. It was like Wikipedia with no internet.
01:31:43
Right. Right. William's collection of books that he had can be found in Oxford University's famous
01:31:50
Bodleian libraries, so that his books still exist. And that is a story of William C. Minor,
01:31:56
who suffered tremendously, caused tremendous suffering, and left us with a legacy of language.
01:32:03
Amazing. Again, that book that you should read is called The Surgeon of Crowthorn by Simon Winchester.
01:32:09
Nice. Wild. Oh, my God. Almost two hours. Oh my God, this is a true holiday spectacular.
01:32:15
Miracle. It's a Thanksgiving miracle. Also, I bet Simon Winchester's book is sitting on your parents' nightstand
01:32:23
in their guest room with the old title. Right. Old title is still in effect because I'm almost positive it's on my dad's.
01:32:30
Yes. Absolutely. The old one was called The Professor and the Madman. So if you see that, steal it from your parents.
01:32:36
Yes. It's yours now. That was a really good dad book, but here's why this is great.
01:32:42
I've never thought to pick up that book in my dad's guest room because I'm like, I'm not interested in that.
01:32:47
I was riveted the entire time. It couldn't be more compelling. And also just that idea of like a man who then kind of served after he served, continued serving.
01:33:00
And did a horrible thing, but. But not in his right mind. Right. And like people contain multitudes.
01:33:07
And I think that Widow really, she's the hero of this. Eliza. Where it's just like, oh, yeah, you can apologize.
01:33:14
Yes, you can. And also we can be friends. And I don't know. I like that story. Good job.
01:33:21
Thanks, you too. Thank you, everyone, for listening. We appreciate you. We're thankful for you.
01:33:27
We're so thankful for you. Don't forget, this is the beginning of the true holiday season of trying to get stories out of your parents that they would never tell you when you were younger.
01:33:38
And now you have to make them tell you of things that happen in your town, things that happen in your family, and things that we would want to hear on the minisodes because there's a million stories that you'd want to hear.
01:33:50
We were watching a JFK documentary the other night. And so I was thinking, ask your parents or your grandparents, depending how old you are, where they were when they found out that JFK had been killed.
01:34:00
Oh, that's right. Because that, like, I think that they all have PTSD from that day forward.
01:34:06
For sure. And they don't talk about it. So you asking them that. So send us your hometowns of where your parents or grandparents were the day JFK was shot at
01:34:14
my favorite murder at Gmail. What if we turn like a bunch of Thanksgivings into like parents and grandparents weeping
01:34:21
at the table? Yeah. I mean, that just might be the wild turkey talking though, not the actual.
01:34:27
We just, I love that we don't think of a thing that's like, hey, what about your favorite
01:34:31
Christmas tree or whatever? We're like, we need, we want to know when your dad was traumatized, where he was, how old he was.
01:34:39
What is wrong with us? Please tell us. Because it makes us feel better. Because then it's like, yep, get your dad in here.
01:34:46
He's in this group too. Yeah, that's the true human experience. Yeah. Admit you're traumatized.
01:34:53
Tell us how. Make us feel better about ours. This is what we're all trying to do before we leave this great magma-filled planet of ours.
01:35:01
Right. Right. Also, stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Elvis, do you want a cookie?
01:35:12
This has been an Exactly Right production. Our senior producer is Alejandra Keck.
01:35:22
Our managing producer is Hannah Kyle Creighton. Our editor is Aristotle Acevedo.
01:35:27
This episode was mixed by Liana Squalache. Our researchers are Maren McClashen and Allie Elkin.
01:35:33
Email your hometowns to MyFavoriteMurder at gmail.com. Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at MyFavoriteMurder and Twitter at MyFaveMurder.
01:35:40
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