May 28, 2019 • 39 mins
Whether we’re talking yesterday’s newspaper, pamphlets from museums, or even old lottery tickets and straw wrappers, the world is chock full of things that were not meant to last. Today the guys join Alex Williams, the creator of the new podcast Ephemeral, to explore the strange, beautiful, disturbing and tragic stories of things that came and went, from the Collyer brothers to Pizzaria chips.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thanks so much for tuning in.
Peak Behind the curtain, it is officially summer in Atlanta.
The humidity and the heat combined to drape the city
in soup. It feels like walking through soup. So I
am very, very glad to be here inside our air
conditioned studio. My name is bet, my name is not.
(00:49):
The shipping container is icy cool today, and outside it
is sort of there's this miasma, this sort of funk,
this patina of awful hot, sweaty grossness that does kind
of enveloped the city. And it happened overnight, didn't it.
It just happened overnight. Yeah, it permeated, It permeated this
fair metropolis of ours. I always forget about how dire
(01:10):
this situation becomes when we hit summer in Atlanta, And
you know, this may mean that we're in here recording
uh more episodes. We do want to start the show
with a big shout out to our guest super producer
Ramsey Ram Jams Young, So everybody give him a fine hello.
Do we get does he get a sound a sound effect? Yeah?
(01:33):
That's kind of good. Yeah, it was very good. That's good.
And of course this does not mean that we will
ever forget our wonderful are our third amigo, right, uh,
super producer Casey Pegram gone but not forgotten, gone, I say,
but gone where ben Uh like that we were talking
(01:53):
about this. So I have a theory. Every year or so,
Casey disappears, and in France, someone else reappears, a very
different person who happens to look a little bit like
our dear friend Casey Pegrhum. Uh. This guy, we imagine,
is a member of the criminal underbelly of Paris uh,
known only by the name bush Yeah. And he dawns
(02:16):
a completely different get up in the form of a
very slick looking leather jacket, a single dangly cross earring
on his left on his left ear, and sometimes he
wears fingerless gloves and rides around one of those cool
little mod motorbikes in the pictures. Yet, and uh, we
strongly suspect that he may have one or more secret families.
(02:38):
It's true. None of this. We can neither confirm nor
deny any of this. We are wildly speculated. It's all true.
They'll put the pieces together people. All Right, we're gonna
have to let a Casey have his day in court
here and defend himself. But you know, Casey's not here.
We're joining with Ramsey helping us pick up the slack here.
Casey's doing his double life. But that's not the only
person that we have on this show today, is it?
(02:59):
That's asolutely true? This is a special episode that I
know we were both very excited about. We have in
our network a brand new podcast that we're we're all
huge fans of, sincerely huge fans of, and it happens
to be created by one of our close friends who
(03:21):
you may have heard mentioned on our show or other
shows before. Folks, Let's give it up for Alex Williams,
the brains behind the podcast we call Aphemeral because that's
the name of the podcast. Hi, Alex makes us call
it that just by virtue of having titled in and
being a very good title and a very fine podcast.
Thank you for being here. What a flattering introducts. I'm
(03:43):
I'm I'm very happy to be here. Here's the thing.
We've been working with you for quite some time now.
We've kind of seen you grow and develop and become
more and more of a badass in with the pros
referred to as the podcast space and making wild gesticulating
quote fingers when I say that you really have to
but here's the thing. You really took it another level
in terms of making not only a history podcast, but
(04:05):
something that I I referred to and I describe it
to friends as something akin to like poetry meets sound,
collage meets some music, concrete meets history, And I think
it's just a really beautiful piece of work. And I'm
just beyond stoke that it's on our network and that
you're the guy behind him. So we'd like to ask you.
That was such a good pitch. I don't know if
(04:26):
I could pull that up, but that was great. It's good. Well,
now it is your turn, so we'd like to ask
you some questions about if them, about your your inspiration
behind it. But first, yeah, with with that excellent description
that Nol just just decided, what, how would you describe it?
How do you describe it? When when someone's like, hey,
what's this thing you're working on? I start stammering and sweating,
(04:50):
and I try to make it as concise as possible.
I was thinking of a quick Pitch and Bed the
other night, it's uh, something like a show about fleeting
moments and the things they leave behind, because that's what
is right is is sort of a remnant of a
thing that no longer is around, I guess kind of
(05:11):
or the idea of things being ephemeral means that they're
fleeting or that they're here today gone tomorrow, but they
do leave behind some kind of residue if you know
where to look. Right. Yeah, So the word itself is
kind of tricky. In the textbook, ephemera might just mean paper, right, broadsides, tickets,
(05:32):
pamphlets for museums, basically anything printed, hand printed, you know,
printing press, computer printed that wasn't meant to be saved.
But then it gets into the issue of like how
do you determine whether something was meant to be saved
or not, right, Like, for instance, a train schedule from
the early nineteen hundreds. Now, the ones that are around
(05:54):
are considered things to be things that have historical value, right,
But when they were print did they were thought to
have a definitive and very short lifespan or span of utility.
One of the really classic examples is the stamp the
episode I'm working on that will come out on Monday.
Is about this, Well Monday, that might that might not
be the monday it will come out on. It will
(06:16):
come out on a Monday. I don't know when this
will come out. But the stamp is a really classic example. Right.
So you've written a letter to your friend Noel, and
you've stamped, and you've put in the in the mailbox
and he gets it and he rips it open and
reads the letter and he's, you know, overwrought with emotion.
Whatever he throws out or hopefully recycles the and that's it.
But but Noel happens to have a great stamp collection,
(06:39):
and I've sent him, you know, uh, inverted Jenny stamp
from the nineteen thirties, and so he is overwrought with emotion,
not because of my great prose, but because this is
a great addition to his stamp collection, because he is
a philetist or philist is how it how it's pronounced
pH I l A t I s t. One who
(07:00):
likes stand what's the root word of Filettist could also
be one who filets, you know, That's what I would think,
because that's how the British pronounced filet they pronounced it,
fill it. They do a hard tea sound at the
end of it. I always find that very interesting because
sometimes the Brits seemed like they really own the word,
and sometimes they just feel like they're mispronouncing it just
to be cute. Cute, sort of like aluminium, Like, that's
(07:22):
not the word, Brits. Come on, it's aluminium. You're adding
syllables there that don't belong the American English. To be fair,
we can't really criticize the people who are doing it first.
That's also fair. Ben. If they want to add an
extra p on shop, then that's kind of their call.
Uh yeah. To answer that question about etymology, it's interesting
(07:44):
because it comes from French and Greek, so uh telia
means exemption from payment. The French philo means loving, so
it's loving exemption from payment, which is right now. But
it's it makes sense, but done. I asked me to
explain it. Well, we can learn more about this. What
(08:07):
what did you what are you exploring on this episode
concerning stamps? Oh, well it's not. It's all over it
so it's much worth than uh you know. One of
the things that we're doing is actually taking the word
apart in this in this episode, So if emera comes
from the root where it's epi meaning honor of, like epicurious,
(08:29):
epidermis uh and camera meaning day, it's like a Latin
Greek combination word. And so it starts being used by
people in uh, you know the age of Enlightenment, I guess, uh,
to describe things that only last for a day, the mayfly,
you know, certain species of plants that flower and wither
(08:51):
in a day. Uh. And then you know it becomes
with time more broadly used to describe things that don't
last a long time, you know, or fleeting. And that's
when we start getting into trouble because like in a
you know, the metrics of like a human life, maybe
like a hundred years at best, something that doesn't last
(09:11):
for long means something different than like geologically uh, like
melting polar ice caps or ephemeral At this point, or
was it who was that philosopher said all is ephemra?
How have I never heard that? I've never heard of that.
Maybe it's maybe it's a philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Okay, there
we go. Ephemeral, both what remembers and what is remembered,
(09:34):
there we go. How have I never used that quote
for something? Your tagline hang out on the show were often, Man,
I'm full of vaguely remembered one liners from ancient philosophers.
So I mean, I guess ephemeral. Ephemeral, by its nature
is sometimes a little hard to describe, as is the show.
It's not something that you can just encapsulate in a
(09:54):
quick elevator pitch. So I put forth that we listened
to a little bit of a clip that can then
set up a discussion. What do you say, Oh, sure,
let's do the call your brothers, Yes, sir. As a
kid Franz Lids, his father would tell him scary stories
before bed. Only these stories were true. My father, or
the scientist, engineer, inventor, who had never really had much
(10:18):
use for fairy tales. He preferred real life grotesqueries to fiction,
and so at that time I would listen rapidly to
his urban horror stories. The most macabre tale was one
of the Callier brothers, the hermit hoarders of Harlem, in
(10:39):
their four story brownstone at the corner of Fifth Avenue,
and the brothers sealed themselves up through the Great depression,
both world wars and as Harlem shifted from a rich
white suburb to a poor black slum. It was there
in that brownstone that they amassed one of the world's
legendary collections of urban un and in the end, that
(11:01):
colored brothers had tons of junk stored in their brown stone.
And so I get this image of this horror house.
Things like pattered toys, Christmas trees, chandeliers, rusted bicycles, broken
baby carriages for moldering hope chests, fourteen pianos who added
(11:22):
babies and formaldehi and newspapers, hundreds of thousands of newspapers.
It was a collection so extraordinary that their accomplishment, such
as it was, confirms like a New yorkers worse nightmare,
that they're crumpled people living in the crumpled rooms, with
(11:43):
their crumpled possessions, the crowded chaos of the city refracted
in their homes. It's not that New Yorkers bored more
than other people, so they have less room to hold in.
So they call your brothers O L L y e
er were just as they're described in that clip right there,
(12:05):
what we would call compulsive hoarders. Yeah, I don't know
the history of the term hoarder, if if we're applying
a modern term and achronistically, but yes, Cords, I suppose
maybe it's like an older term, but hoarders certainly, could
you tell us a little bit more about these brothers.
So there's really one book on them, and it's it's
(12:28):
a by a fantastic, exquisite writer named Franz Lids who
grew up hearing you hear his voice in the clip.
He grew up hearing these stories from his father as
as bedtime stories, as scary stories that he wouldn't tell.
He would tell Franz these stories, but not not Franz's sister.
For whatever reason, I thought that was interesting, and so
(12:49):
when Franz grew up, he decided to learn everything that
he could because no one had really written anything, you know. Besides,
they were sort of part of the urban legends of
Harlem and of New York to the point where it
was almost a cautionary tale. Like even the the New
York Fire Department would I believe. They had a term
that they used called Collier's mansion syndrome that referred to
(13:13):
extreme instances of extreme clutter in apartments that were fire hazards.
So it almost became, as the name of the book implies,
called ghost de men. These these guys almost cast kind
of a specter over this particular region to the point
where they were so embedded in the cultural and oral
tradition storytelling like ghost stories, that became this kind of
(13:33):
cautionary tale almost right. Yeah, there's also a there's also
a racial element to that too. The two brothers, Langley
and Homer moved with their parents from Manhattan to the
budding community of Harlem in the eight nineties sort of
an economic boom time, and Harlem is this new, rich,
(13:54):
fancy suburb for people that like want to get out
of dirty New York, you know, get out to racation. Basically, well,
it actually, uh, the economy crashes and there's there's a
big bust and all of these rich families like move
out and there's all these empty space in Harlem. And
then there was overtly racist practices taken on by the
(14:18):
landowners and Harlots literally things that were called like Negro surcharges,
and they would take these big, beautiful um brownstone mansions.
Like the Color Brothers lives in a four story brownstone
mansion and divide them up into you know, six seven,
eight nine rooms, fill them up, over charge African Americans
(14:40):
to live there. But so anyways, the Collier brothers were
some of the few white residents at that point too.
So legend is that neighborhood kids would chuck rocks at
their windows and stuff and call them ghosting men, both
referring to like they're sort of creepy hermit never come
out of the house. Is there's someone dead in there?
Sadly vibe and also you know, perhaps a racial connotation.
(15:10):
It's interesting too because the there's a parallel story this
reminds me of, which is the Masal's film Great Gardens,
where it's you know, this mother and daughter that live
in a very they come from affluence. They live in
this very similarly decrepit kind of mansion out in you know,
the burbs, away from New York City, and they're completely
kind of delusional and sort of exist in this strange
(15:32):
bubble together. And that's sort of what ended up happening
with the Collier brothers where they got to a point
I believe one of the homer I believe was like
a child prodigy and like ended up getting some advanced
degrees and did really well for himself for a time,
and then they ended up just kind of withdrawing completely
from society. And that's when the extreme hoarding that we're
talking about started to begin. And that's also where the
legend stuff kind of comes in. Right. They really both
(15:55):
were prodigies, had advanced degrees from Colombia and like admiralty
law and like what even is that first? Is it
like maritime stuff? I'm similar, yes, and uh I believe
also one of them was quite a talented pianist. Is
that Langley played at Carnegie Hall and was followed by
(16:15):
the the famous pianist at the time, Paderewski. But Paderewski
quote got better notices than hey, so he gave up
the piano. So, you know, it can always be discouraging
to work that grind of the music industry, regardless of
the era in which you live. Let's let's talk a
little bit about what, uh, what this timeline of degradation
(16:41):
looks like. Because while they were infamous in their neighborhood,
in their community, especially as things started to get worse
and worse for them mentally, and uh, you know, Homer
got a stroke, Uh, they they started becoming more and
more reclusive. Right. They didn't reach national attention until nineteen
(17:02):
thirty eight, when The New York Times reported a false
story about them and said that they had turned down
an offer of a hundred and twenty five grand for
their house. Yeah, there's a lot of strange sort of
tabloid Uh A New York had eleven newspapers in those days.
There was lots of lots of things that sort of
bounce around in an echo chamber, I suppose. So there's
(17:24):
a lot of strange leads that you can follow with
the Collier brothers that you never really get an answer too.
I should say that Homer quits his job, Langley stops
playing the piano. Their father has moved back to Manhattan.
At some point, they stay in the house with their
mother and really sort of start shuddering in in there,
you know, in their sort of mid twenties. And then
their mother passes away. She passes away and is buried
(17:45):
in some sort of bizarre um kind of cult like ceremony,
just whisked out of a window one night and taken
to a sanitary that's very far away on foot. And uh,
it's never in the paper or anything. There's no obituary.
She's just she's just gone one day, and they wanted
to keep it private. I suppose after that they more
(18:06):
or less had no contact with the outside world. I
believe Homer lost his eyesight, became essentially legally blind, and
he I'm gonna illustrate it for you here, Uh had
rheumatism and was doubled up like this with his knees
below his chin. So for the description, just since we're
an audio show, Alex has assumed a somewhat fetal x
(18:27):
position with both legs folded up against his chest and
his arms folded around holding his legs. Oh, I mean
this part, that's all you know. The arms is just me.
That's that's my thing. But so poor the poor guy.
And in his thirties this happened. I believe lost his eyesight.
Langley became his brother's keeper, and I mean, I really
(18:50):
do think they were. They loved each other and were
very dutiful to each other. H Langley devise this scheme
of feeding his brother a hundred oranges a day in
orders who regained his eyesight. That's one of the poll
quotes we have left of Langley Callier and U he
saved him newspapers, hundreds of thousands of newspapers when he
(19:13):
could read again, when he could read again, which is
heartbreaking and sweet. These newspapers obviously there yellowing, rotting there.
You know, it's a four story, humongous mansion. Langley made
them into arches and tunnels and made an inner framework
(19:34):
for their mansion out of newspapers and all kinds of
other to try this. I mean, there's really no I
have incredibly long lists of this stuff that I've I've
pulled from different stories. Oh yeah, let's see baby carriages,
rusted bikes because because apparently Langley was so Homer never
sought medical help for his rheumatism. Is that is that correct? Well,
(19:58):
it's hard to say. It's hard to be slewed about anything.
I mean, you know, like I said, we have the
one book anything there. There's there's things that we just
will never know we have for primary source because it
sounds like a lot of the headlines of the time,
the contemporary papers you mentioned, we're just reporting stuff that
would sell papers. Uh, there was we don actually don't
talk about this. In an episode, there's one reporter, Helen
(20:19):
Warden is her name, Langley sort of took a liking
to her. She was waiting outside of his apartment or
outside of the brown stone. One day around midnight he
came out to make his nightly rounds. He would walk
around the city and just drag a cardboard box with
a string behind him and fill it up with just
whatever stuff he came across, all kinds of things. Uh.
(20:41):
She met him out there one one night at the
at the outside the brown stone, and he just sort
of started unloading information on her. Uh. She made mention
of maybe visiting inside the house one day, and he's
and that's when he stopped and took off off. Yeah,
(21:01):
and this is this is interesting because around this maybe
around this is after the time when h. Langley began
not going out until midnight, right and then returning home
with junk. Uh So, one of the things that people
familiar with this story probably always mentioned. It's certainly thing
that I bet producers would mention when they're talking about
(21:23):
fictional adaptations will be the booby traps. Where the booby
traps real? That's a question people, They were very real.
That's the big kicker. I mean talking about this labyrinthine
infrastructure of garbage essentially, right. I mean it was like
walled up kind of every window, every door full, and
they rigged it so that things would literally if they
(21:46):
were intruders or dare we say, some sort of like
tomb Rader type situation, people would get got They just
they really wanted to be left alone. I mean, there's
certainly is some some paranoia and some fear built into
that collection collecting habit. I heard that the booby traps
were not a not a thing that they had just
(22:06):
come up with out of the blue. I heard it
was a reaction to a number of attempted burglaries on
the house when people began to think that they were
hoarding not only junk but also a financial fortune. So
maybe there was some logic behind it. They were from
a well to do family at some point they reportedly
owned a large section of waterfront in New York. Actually
(22:30):
their parents were like cousins and uh oh that well
to do yeah, came over on the speedwell from England. Yes,
So I don't know if anyone ever tried to actually
burgle their house, but there's certainly you know, all their
utilities got cut off one after the other, so people
from the city would try to get in their house.
Police officers absolutely, and uh, you know Langley would occasionally
(22:53):
just sort of reach his head out the window and
scream go away, or they would just say nothing to them. Uh.
Sort of brings you right to this fateful day. Oh
are you talking about in March one when police received
an anonymous tip. That is the very uh, that's very
damn talking about. You know, No, you're in this episode,
(23:16):
in the recreation of this that we do. No, that's right.
What did I do? I don't. It's been so long.
You've been working on this for such a long time.
You've been doing recreations. I have absolutely you will. Uh
you and Chuck are you know? Maybe well, we'll leave
it to the listeners. But this your voice and our
our friend and colleague Chuck Bryant are intertwined in this.
(23:40):
That's awesome. This is the one where the cops like
yelling up at the window. I do remember this now, OK,
no spoilers there, but yeah, definitely, uh there. That's the
kind of stuff you can expect in this show. It's
not only you know, it's not like this whereas me
and Ben Gabbin about history. It's a real experiential thing,
and it's got a lot of these kind of cool
production touches that really make it spe But what happened
(24:01):
that day, so this is what we said March seven,
that fateful day, the police receive an anonymous phone call. Well,
Charles Smith is the guy who gives the phone call.
I've never don't We've never been able to fall up
on Charles Smith did the air quotes there, so I
forgot that doesn't come through. Charles Smith calls the police
(24:21):
and reports a body at the call your residence. Police
show up, police that have been there before, and no,
this place is booby trapped, so they proceed with caution.
But they do break down the door and it is
walled up with junk. They can't get through. They start
acting their way through and uh vapor of decay erupts
(24:43):
out onto the street. Let see, very much like Atlanta
in the summer, very much for basically a whole day,
they're trying to get in different ways. It's all tunneled.
They know that there's booby traps, things like feces and
jars and bricks and nails and things like that. Really terrible,
(25:07):
horrible things that could very much enter a person. Someone
breaks through, takes a ladder up to the second story,
breaks through window and finds Homer Callier. Uh, doubled up
as he always is in the corner, but he's shriveled
up and dead. How long had he been dead? Did
it seem, for lack of a better word, fresh, or
(25:27):
was the corpse like well it I'm not sure how
soon they were able to determine it, but it had
it had been a while. It had been a while.
And then the real question was where's Langley as he
killed his brother? Has he fled? And the search that
went on took weeks to find Langley Callier. Did they
(25:49):
search the city or the house? It was an international search. Yeah,
like I said, eleven newspapers New York at the time.
So that echo chamber is going crazy. Langley Callers are
getting sighted everywhere in different cities in the Carolinas and
Chicago on trains extra there's a moment where a guy
(26:10):
there's a photograph that gets published in some paper of
a guy literally holding a sign that says, I am
not Langley call here because he's got kind of like
a little beard and a little scruffed and uh, and
maybe it looks a bit like one of the call
Your brothers. So this is all clearly building to a
conclusion of sorts. It turns out, however, that Langley call
(26:30):
your has not crossed the Atlantic. He has not smuggled
himself into Canada or Mexico. Where where, where exactly is he?
It's very tragic. He's found ten feet from where his
brother Homer was found, and it's a it's it's a
number of weeks later. Uh, there was so much junk,
and they'd spent all this time clean clearing, a police
(26:53):
and firefighters clearing it. Then eventually professional cleaning cruise or
clearing cruise rather just ten ft from his brother. He
was coming to bring him food and caught one of
his own booby traps. Died there, and Homer died of neglect.
He hadn't been fed. And so you end up with this,
(27:15):
like when Nol was talking about earlier, this sort of bizarre,
stranger than fiction tale that's embedded in folklore, and it
reads a bit like a morality tale. But then I
don't know what it is that they call your brothers?
Did that was so wrong? Like I think I say
(27:36):
in the episode, I mean, probably they should have paid
their taxes and stuff. But it's also a very distinctly
New York kind of story where it's like you're surrounded
by people. Being in New York, every inch, every scrap
of space is used up, is you know, occupied, and
you have no like there's no sense of freedom kind
(27:57):
of when you're walking around New York. Like it's a
beautiful place and there's a lot going on, but it
does have this claustrophobic feeling to it anyway. So the
idea that, especially now knowing we know about real estate
prices and all that, that two men would just like
own this quite opulent set up and just allow it
to become this absolute nightmare in that way, and it
(28:19):
speaks to kind of the cluttered feeling of New York
as a city. I think it's a very interesting parallel there.
And yes, is there anything wrong with being a hoarder
or collecting things or any of that stuff. No, but
this speaks to something I think a little bigger than that,
and that paranoia and the fact that these two were
all they had and they got into this like you know,
(28:41):
kind of cycle of just not wanting anybody else to
be in their lives at all. And yet they're living
in the most populous place in the country. Whether it's
so much culturally going on in such an interesting time
and history to write, Franz Lids calls it a New
Yorker's worst nightmare. Uh. You know this also calls to
(29:01):
mind a documentary called Cropsy. Are you Familiar with Us?
Cropsy is a documentary about an urban legend regarding a
boogeyman like figure that stalks people in this in the
area surrounding a place called the Willowbrook Mental Institution, which
had been closed down and in the In the course
(29:24):
of this documentary, they find that this boogeyman like figure,
this modern urban legend, is based on fact, and there
is a real uh, there is a a pearl of
truth inside this this uh clamshael of scary urban folklore.
We got there so uglier than a Joe Montana pass.
(29:46):
I haven't seen that documentary, but I didn't remember it
until you started talking about it. And it's good. It's
a worthwhile documentary. I need to rewatch that. Now. You've
heard us talk a little bit about the call your brothers, folks,
But if you want to truly experience the story, which
(30:08):
goes much deeper than what we've discussed here. We highly
recommend that you get the too your favorite podcast app
of choice started on the seventeenth of June to Talk
Out to check out the Call your Brother's Story. However,
there are other episodes of Ephemeral available now, Like, as
you're listening to this, please listen to the rest of
(30:29):
our show before you listen to the next one. But
what are some what are some topics that really uh
stuck out in your mind that you've published recently. Well,
we've just published an episode uh with interviews uh Sarah Wasserman,
who's a professor at the University of Delaware. It's basically
and ephemer teacher. Oh wow, yeah, And so she's the
(30:51):
people the person who can really answer some of the
tough questions that we've brought up at the top of
the show. The episode before that is a study of
Ottoman American diaspora music. You might say, what immigrants from
the collapsing Ottoman Empire in the early part of the the century,
the teens, twenties, thirties, fleeing like people are from all
(31:15):
over the world coming to America and recording heart stopping
beautiful music in New York, mostly Chicago for big labels
like Columbia Victor and then also some small independent labels too,
So music and Greek and Arabic that has largely, almost
(31:37):
entirely been forgotten, these records that were pressed in in
in limited in limited quantities because of some sort of
racist practices at time. That's astonishing. You know. Um, part
of the area where I and one of our one
of our colleagues, Dylan Fagan, is from in Tennessee is
(31:59):
as a huge population of Lebanese immigrants who have left.
I think Lebanon was at least in name ruled by
the Ottoman Empire until that collapse from what post World
War one. Ish. And I think I've heard some of
I I have to listen to this. I think I've
heard something that might qualify in this genre that's bizarre
(32:22):
to me. And I mean there's all kinds it's not
there's all kinds of music, and there's party songs, there
are heart prick songs. Uh, and there's fantastic singing and
food playing and things that you don't I don't really
have the vernacular to describe, but we we interview in
this episode, uh, and really where all of The inspiration
(32:46):
for it came from is um, a gentleman named Iannagaski
who is in Baltimore and does reissue records of this stuff,
literally sometimes pulls them out of the trash. I've I've
seen pictures of some of these records that they have
so abused, and does everything he can two salvage them,
(33:06):
to save them, to learn as much as he can
about the performers. Sometimes you can't find anything. Sometimes you
get lucky and spread the word about it. So it's
it's a it's a fantastic interview that that's part of that.
And the music and it is it's some of my
favorite music now I would love to hear it and
don't have to take our word for it. You can
(33:26):
tune in and check out this music yourself. And that's
the thing. Even what you're gonna get with this show
is the the conceit of the show is such a
cool one. But it also allows for such a broad
range of topics, which I think is really important even
for a show like what we do. Like our only
lynch pin is that these stories are in some way bizarre, strange,
(33:46):
or ridiculous or hilarious, and so that gives us like
kind of carte blanche to go in all kinds of
different directions. Similarly with your show, UM, very different show,
but very similar heart in terms of just like being
fascinated by things and want to get answers to why
things play out the way they do in history, and
just kind of I think anyone that is into this
show even remotely is going to be very much into
(34:08):
your show as well. To me, it's a it's a
there's something about it, And please take this for the
profound compliment it is that reminds me of the free
associative nature of the film Waking Life, the way that
it connects in this very very intentional but dream like state.
(34:28):
You know what I mean? This is this is one
of the podcasts that, UM, I hear a ton of shows,
but this is one of the ones that comes with
a very new and unique voice and and I mean
that sincerely. You can compare me to Richard Linkletter anytime.
So it looks like we're going to we're going to
(34:50):
have to save our our our own explorations of things
that came and went for another day. But shout out
to Pizzeria Chips. I miss you. If you're listening if
a big demo of our show is uh, ext sentient
pizzeria chips, potato chips, terrified gained sapience. Yeah, I was
gonna talk about Beta Max tapes that were only literally killed.
(35:14):
Production was killed by Sony like in and I believe
they stopped distributing the players and recorders of Beta Max
tapes only a couple of years before that. But that
used to be kind of the like go to for
high resolution news footage and archiving. And now I actually
have a stack of Beta maxes on my desk right
now that I'm trying to find a place that can
(35:35):
transfer them digitally, and there are folks that still have them,
whether their news agencies or like companies that specialize and
digitizing your family memories. That's big business now because of
this nature of ephemera. And not only is the medium
antiquated now, the way of playing it back is gone
or much more scarce. And that's that you have a
(35:56):
really great trailer for your show that's all about answering
machine messages and how that used to be such a
cultural thing that people would do and it was important
to leave a really good message and just the idea
of these things that kind of came and went left
an impression, and now it's almost this kind of like
specter that like hangs over society and it's really interesting
and I'm looking forward to hearing more from Phemeral with
(36:16):
Alex Williams. I'm going to I'm going to save that.
I have this great list that I'm gonna save and
post on our Facebook page later for Ridiculous Historians. Because
I did an okay job just mentioning pizzeria's. It's really
hard not to just immediately start talking about them. So
I'm just gonna like mention some things that left and
(36:36):
then we'll pick it up later. So check us out
on our Facebook page, Ridiculous Historians. You should be able
to find a Phemeral wherever you find your favorite podcast
like Ridiculous History and so on. In the meantime, Alex,
thank you so much for for coming on the show.
Actually another started with a peek behind the Curtain. Let's
end with one. Our office actually close to a few
(36:59):
hours ago we were able to convince you to just
stay over and take this strange journey with us. You know, before,
I feel like I would be remiss to not mention
that Ridiculous History was the first show that I helped make.
At the very beginning it was it was the three
of us at the very very beginning of it. And Alex,
I'm not sure if you know this or not, You've
(37:20):
got so much on your play. We thank you at
the end of every episode for the wonderful theme that
you composed. So now we can do our little thank yous,
and we can do it in person. Thanks to Alex
Williams who composed our theme and for being here today
for an interview. I didn't know that you and I
very much appreciate it. Yeah, we we are big fans
of thanking people in this show. But also like to
(37:41):
thank super producer Ramsey Ram Jams, you don't thank you
so much for saving the show, Ramsey, Thanks for having me. Guys,
absolutely our pleasure. Thanks to you, Super Producy, Casey Pegram
here in spirit and not forgotten galvanting around Paris right
now living his best second life. Um and thanks to
Christopher Hasiotis you know, also here in spirit. Thanks to
(38:03):
uh Jonathan Strickland a k a. The Quister, as well
as our research associate Gabe l who desperately needs a nicknames.
So send some suggestions our way. Ben, Thanks to you
for always being a friend and a confidant down that
road back again you know the drill? Yeah yeah, thanks
to you as well. Noel. We are gone forward today.
(38:24):
That sends our episode, but not our show. You can
also find us on our aforementioned Facebook page. You can
find us on Twitter. You can find us at Instagram.
You can also find our weird personal Shenanigan's Misadventures and
malarkey on our personal instagrams. I'm at Ben Bolan actually
changed my handle, I am now at how now Noel Brown?
(38:46):
And where can they check out? Ephemeral on the social
media is Alex at Ephemeral Show. We'll see you next time,
fols him. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit
(39:17):
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thanks so much for tuning in.
Peak Behind the curtain, it is officially summer in Atlanta.
The humidity and the heat combined to drape the city
in soup. It feels like walking through soup. So I
am very, very glad to be here inside our air
conditioned studio. My name is bet, my name is not.
(00:49):
The shipping container is icy cool today, and outside it
is sort of there's this miasma, this sort of funk,
this patina of awful hot, sweaty grossness that does kind
of enveloped the city. And it happened overnight, didn't it.
It just happened overnight. Yeah, it permeated, It permeated this
fair metropolis of ours. I always forget about how dire
(01:10):
this situation becomes when we hit summer in Atlanta, And
you know, this may mean that we're in here recording
uh more episodes. We do want to start the show
with a big shout out to our guest super producer
Ramsey Ram Jams Young, So everybody give him a fine hello.
Do we get does he get a sound a sound effect? Yeah?
(01:33):
That's kind of good. Yeah, it was very good. That's good.
And of course this does not mean that we will
ever forget our wonderful are our third amigo, right, uh,
super producer Casey Pegram gone but not forgotten, gone, I say,
but gone where ben Uh like that we were talking
(01:53):
about this. So I have a theory. Every year or so,
Casey disappears, and in France, someone else reappears, a very
different person who happens to look a little bit like
our dear friend Casey Pegrhum. Uh. This guy, we imagine,
is a member of the criminal underbelly of Paris uh,
known only by the name bush Yeah. And he dawns
(02:16):
a completely different get up in the form of a
very slick looking leather jacket, a single dangly cross earring
on his left on his left ear, and sometimes he
wears fingerless gloves and rides around one of those cool
little mod motorbikes in the pictures. Yet, and uh, we
strongly suspect that he may have one or more secret families.
(02:38):
It's true. None of this. We can neither confirm nor
deny any of this. We are wildly speculated. It's all true.
They'll put the pieces together people. All Right, we're gonna
have to let a Casey have his day in court
here and defend himself. But you know, Casey's not here.
We're joining with Ramsey helping us pick up the slack here.
Casey's doing his double life. But that's not the only
person that we have on this show today, is it?
(02:59):
That's asolutely true? This is a special episode that I
know we were both very excited about. We have in
our network a brand new podcast that we're we're all
huge fans of, sincerely huge fans of, and it happens
to be created by one of our close friends who
(03:21):
you may have heard mentioned on our show or other
shows before. Folks, Let's give it up for Alex Williams,
the brains behind the podcast we call Aphemeral because that's
the name of the podcast. Hi, Alex makes us call
it that just by virtue of having titled in and
being a very good title and a very fine podcast.
Thank you for being here. What a flattering introducts. I'm
(03:43):
I'm I'm very happy to be here. Here's the thing.
We've been working with you for quite some time now.
We've kind of seen you grow and develop and become
more and more of a badass in with the pros
referred to as the podcast space and making wild gesticulating
quote fingers when I say that you really have to
but here's the thing. You really took it another level
in terms of making not only a history podcast, but
(04:05):
something that I I referred to and I describe it
to friends as something akin to like poetry meets sound,
collage meets some music, concrete meets history, And I think
it's just a really beautiful piece of work. And I'm
just beyond stoke that it's on our network and that
you're the guy behind him. So we'd like to ask you.
That was such a good pitch. I don't know if
(04:26):
I could pull that up, but that was great. It's good. Well,
now it is your turn, so we'd like to ask
you some questions about if them, about your your inspiration
behind it. But first, yeah, with with that excellent description
that Nol just just decided, what, how would you describe it?
How do you describe it? When when someone's like, hey,
what's this thing you're working on? I start stammering and sweating,
(04:50):
and I try to make it as concise as possible.
I was thinking of a quick Pitch and Bed the
other night, it's uh, something like a show about fleeting
moments and the things they leave behind, because that's what
is right is is sort of a remnant of a
thing that no longer is around, I guess kind of
(05:11):
or the idea of things being ephemeral means that they're
fleeting or that they're here today gone tomorrow, but they
do leave behind some kind of residue if you know
where to look. Right. Yeah, So the word itself is
kind of tricky. In the textbook, ephemera might just mean paper, right, broadsides, tickets,
(05:32):
pamphlets for museums, basically anything printed, hand printed, you know,
printing press, computer printed that wasn't meant to be saved.
But then it gets into the issue of like how
do you determine whether something was meant to be saved
or not, right, Like, for instance, a train schedule from
the early nineteen hundreds. Now, the ones that are around
(05:54):
are considered things to be things that have historical value, right,
But when they were print did they were thought to
have a definitive and very short lifespan or span of utility.
One of the really classic examples is the stamp the
episode I'm working on that will come out on Monday.
Is about this, Well Monday, that might that might not
be the monday it will come out on. It will
(06:16):
come out on a Monday. I don't know when this
will come out. But the stamp is a really classic example. Right.
So you've written a letter to your friend Noel, and
you've stamped, and you've put in the in the mailbox
and he gets it and he rips it open and
reads the letter and he's, you know, overwrought with emotion.
Whatever he throws out or hopefully recycles the and that's it.
But but Noel happens to have a great stamp collection,
(06:39):
and I've sent him, you know, uh, inverted Jenny stamp
from the nineteen thirties, and so he is overwrought with emotion,
not because of my great prose, but because this is
a great addition to his stamp collection, because he is
a philetist or philist is how it how it's pronounced
pH I l A t I s t. One who
(07:00):
likes stand what's the root word of Filettist could also
be one who filets, you know, That's what I would think,
because that's how the British pronounced filet they pronounced it,
fill it. They do a hard tea sound at the
end of it. I always find that very interesting because
sometimes the Brits seemed like they really own the word,
and sometimes they just feel like they're mispronouncing it just
to be cute. Cute, sort of like aluminium, Like, that's
(07:22):
not the word, Brits. Come on, it's aluminium. You're adding
syllables there that don't belong the American English. To be fair,
we can't really criticize the people who are doing it first.
That's also fair. Ben. If they want to add an
extra p on shop, then that's kind of their call.
Uh yeah. To answer that question about etymology, it's interesting
(07:44):
because it comes from French and Greek, so uh telia
means exemption from payment. The French philo means loving, so
it's loving exemption from payment, which is right now. But
it's it makes sense, but done. I asked me to
explain it. Well, we can learn more about this. What
(08:07):
what did you what are you exploring on this episode
concerning stamps? Oh, well it's not. It's all over it
so it's much worth than uh you know. One of
the things that we're doing is actually taking the word
apart in this in this episode, So if emera comes
from the root where it's epi meaning honor of, like epicurious,
(08:29):
epidermis uh and camera meaning day, it's like a Latin
Greek combination word. And so it starts being used by
people in uh, you know the age of Enlightenment, I guess, uh,
to describe things that only last for a day, the mayfly,
you know, certain species of plants that flower and wither
(08:51):
in a day. Uh. And then you know it becomes
with time more broadly used to describe things that don't
last a long time, you know, or fleeting. And that's
when we start getting into trouble because like in a
you know, the metrics of like a human life, maybe
like a hundred years at best, something that doesn't last
(09:11):
for long means something different than like geologically uh, like
melting polar ice caps or ephemeral At this point, or
was it who was that philosopher said all is ephemra?
How have I never heard that? I've never heard of that.
Maybe it's maybe it's a philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Okay, there
we go. Ephemeral, both what remembers and what is remembered,
(09:34):
there we go. How have I never used that quote
for something? Your tagline hang out on the show were often, Man,
I'm full of vaguely remembered one liners from ancient philosophers.
So I mean, I guess ephemeral. Ephemeral, by its nature
is sometimes a little hard to describe, as is the show.
It's not something that you can just encapsulate in a
(09:54):
quick elevator pitch. So I put forth that we listened
to a little bit of a clip that can then
set up a discussion. What do you say, Oh, sure,
let's do the call your brothers, Yes, sir. As a
kid Franz Lids, his father would tell him scary stories
before bed. Only these stories were true. My father, or
the scientist, engineer, inventor, who had never really had much
(10:18):
use for fairy tales. He preferred real life grotesqueries to fiction,
and so at that time I would listen rapidly to
his urban horror stories. The most macabre tale was one
of the Callier brothers, the hermit hoarders of Harlem, in
(10:39):
their four story brownstone at the corner of Fifth Avenue,
and the brothers sealed themselves up through the Great depression,
both world wars and as Harlem shifted from a rich
white suburb to a poor black slum. It was there
in that brownstone that they amassed one of the world's
legendary collections of urban un and in the end, that
(11:01):
colored brothers had tons of junk stored in their brown stone.
And so I get this image of this horror house.
Things like pattered toys, Christmas trees, chandeliers, rusted bicycles, broken
baby carriages for moldering hope chests, fourteen pianos who added
(11:22):
babies and formaldehi and newspapers, hundreds of thousands of newspapers.
It was a collection so extraordinary that their accomplishment, such
as it was, confirms like a New yorkers worse nightmare,
that they're crumpled people living in the crumpled rooms, with
(11:43):
their crumpled possessions, the crowded chaos of the city refracted
in their homes. It's not that New Yorkers bored more
than other people, so they have less room to hold in.
So they call your brothers O L L y e
er were just as they're described in that clip right there,
(12:05):
what we would call compulsive hoarders. Yeah, I don't know
the history of the term hoarder, if if we're applying
a modern term and achronistically, but yes, Cords, I suppose
maybe it's like an older term, but hoarders certainly, could
you tell us a little bit more about these brothers.
So there's really one book on them, and it's it's
(12:28):
a by a fantastic, exquisite writer named Franz Lids who
grew up hearing you hear his voice in the clip.
He grew up hearing these stories from his father as
as bedtime stories, as scary stories that he wouldn't tell.
He would tell Franz these stories, but not not Franz's sister.
For whatever reason, I thought that was interesting, and so
(12:49):
when Franz grew up, he decided to learn everything that
he could because no one had really written anything, you know. Besides,
they were sort of part of the urban legends of
Harlem and of New York to the point where it
was almost a cautionary tale. Like even the the New
York Fire Department would I believe. They had a term
that they used called Collier's mansion syndrome that referred to
(13:13):
extreme instances of extreme clutter in apartments that were fire hazards.
So it almost became, as the name of the book implies,
called ghost de men. These these guys almost cast kind
of a specter over this particular region to the point
where they were so embedded in the cultural and oral
tradition storytelling like ghost stories, that became this kind of
(13:33):
cautionary tale almost right. Yeah, there's also a there's also
a racial element to that too. The two brothers, Langley
and Homer moved with their parents from Manhattan to the
budding community of Harlem in the eight nineties sort of
an economic boom time, and Harlem is this new, rich,
(13:54):
fancy suburb for people that like want to get out
of dirty New York, you know, get out to racation. Basically, well,
it actually, uh, the economy crashes and there's there's a
big bust and all of these rich families like move
out and there's all these empty space in Harlem. And
then there was overtly racist practices taken on by the
(14:18):
landowners and Harlots literally things that were called like Negro surcharges,
and they would take these big, beautiful um brownstone mansions.
Like the Color Brothers lives in a four story brownstone
mansion and divide them up into you know, six seven,
eight nine rooms, fill them up, over charge African Americans
(14:40):
to live there. But so anyways, the Collier brothers were
some of the few white residents at that point too.
So legend is that neighborhood kids would chuck rocks at
their windows and stuff and call them ghosting men, both
referring to like they're sort of creepy hermit never come
out of the house. Is there's someone dead in there?
Sadly vibe and also you know, perhaps a racial connotation.
(15:10):
It's interesting too because the there's a parallel story this
reminds me of, which is the Masal's film Great Gardens,
where it's you know, this mother and daughter that live
in a very they come from affluence. They live in
this very similarly decrepit kind of mansion out in you know,
the burbs, away from New York City, and they're completely
kind of delusional and sort of exist in this strange
(15:32):
bubble together. And that's sort of what ended up happening
with the Collier brothers where they got to a point
I believe one of the homer I believe was like
a child prodigy and like ended up getting some advanced
degrees and did really well for himself for a time,
and then they ended up just kind of withdrawing completely
from society. And that's when the extreme hoarding that we're
talking about started to begin. And that's also where the
legend stuff kind of comes in. Right. They really both
(15:55):
were prodigies, had advanced degrees from Colombia and like admiralty
law and like what even is that first? Is it
like maritime stuff? I'm similar, yes, and uh I believe
also one of them was quite a talented pianist. Is
that Langley played at Carnegie Hall and was followed by
(16:15):
the the famous pianist at the time, Paderewski. But Paderewski
quote got better notices than hey, so he gave up
the piano. So, you know, it can always be discouraging
to work that grind of the music industry, regardless of
the era in which you live. Let's let's talk a
little bit about what, uh, what this timeline of degradation
(16:41):
looks like. Because while they were infamous in their neighborhood,
in their community, especially as things started to get worse
and worse for them mentally, and uh, you know, Homer
got a stroke, Uh, they they started becoming more and
more reclusive. Right. They didn't reach national attention until nineteen
(17:02):
thirty eight, when The New York Times reported a false
story about them and said that they had turned down
an offer of a hundred and twenty five grand for
their house. Yeah, there's a lot of strange sort of
tabloid Uh A New York had eleven newspapers in those days.
There was lots of lots of things that sort of
bounce around in an echo chamber, I suppose. So there's
(17:24):
a lot of strange leads that you can follow with
the Collier brothers that you never really get an answer too.
I should say that Homer quits his job, Langley stops
playing the piano. Their father has moved back to Manhattan.
At some point, they stay in the house with their
mother and really sort of start shuddering in in there,
you know, in their sort of mid twenties. And then
their mother passes away. She passes away and is buried
(17:45):
in some sort of bizarre um kind of cult like ceremony,
just whisked out of a window one night and taken
to a sanitary that's very far away on foot. And uh,
it's never in the paper or anything. There's no obituary.
She's just she's just gone one day, and they wanted
to keep it private. I suppose after that they more
(18:06):
or less had no contact with the outside world. I
believe Homer lost his eyesight, became essentially legally blind, and
he I'm gonna illustrate it for you here, Uh had
rheumatism and was doubled up like this with his knees
below his chin. So for the description, just since we're
an audio show, Alex has assumed a somewhat fetal x
(18:27):
position with both legs folded up against his chest and
his arms folded around holding his legs. Oh, I mean
this part, that's all you know. The arms is just me.
That's that's my thing. But so poor the poor guy.
And in his thirties this happened. I believe lost his eyesight.
Langley became his brother's keeper, and I mean, I really
(18:50):
do think they were. They loved each other and were
very dutiful to each other. H Langley devise this scheme
of feeding his brother a hundred oranges a day in
orders who regained his eyesight. That's one of the poll
quotes we have left of Langley Callier and U he
saved him newspapers, hundreds of thousands of newspapers when he
(19:13):
could read again, when he could read again, which is
heartbreaking and sweet. These newspapers obviously there yellowing, rotting there.
You know, it's a four story, humongous mansion. Langley made
them into arches and tunnels and made an inner framework
(19:34):
for their mansion out of newspapers and all kinds of
other to try this. I mean, there's really no I
have incredibly long lists of this stuff that I've I've
pulled from different stories. Oh yeah, let's see baby carriages,
rusted bikes because because apparently Langley was so Homer never
sought medical help for his rheumatism. Is that is that correct? Well,
(19:58):
it's hard to say. It's hard to be slewed about anything.
I mean, you know, like I said, we have the
one book anything there. There's there's things that we just
will never know we have for primary source because it
sounds like a lot of the headlines of the time,
the contemporary papers you mentioned, we're just reporting stuff that
would sell papers. Uh, there was we don actually don't
talk about this. In an episode, there's one reporter, Helen
(20:19):
Warden is her name, Langley sort of took a liking
to her. She was waiting outside of his apartment or
outside of the brown stone. One day around midnight he
came out to make his nightly rounds. He would walk
around the city and just drag a cardboard box with
a string behind him and fill it up with just
whatever stuff he came across, all kinds of things. Uh.
(20:41):
She met him out there one one night at the
at the outside the brown stone, and he just sort
of started unloading information on her. Uh. She made mention
of maybe visiting inside the house one day, and he's
and that's when he stopped and took off off. Yeah,
(21:01):
and this is this is interesting because around this maybe
around this is after the time when h. Langley began
not going out until midnight, right and then returning home
with junk. Uh So, one of the things that people
familiar with this story probably always mentioned. It's certainly thing
that I bet producers would mention when they're talking about
(21:23):
fictional adaptations will be the booby traps. Where the booby
traps real? That's a question people, They were very real.
That's the big kicker. I mean talking about this labyrinthine
infrastructure of garbage essentially, right. I mean it was like
walled up kind of every window, every door full, and
they rigged it so that things would literally if they
(21:46):
were intruders or dare we say, some sort of like
tomb Rader type situation, people would get got They just
they really wanted to be left alone. I mean, there's
certainly is some some paranoia and some fear built into
that collection collecting habit. I heard that the booby traps
were not a not a thing that they had just
(22:06):
come up with out of the blue. I heard it
was a reaction to a number of attempted burglaries on
the house when people began to think that they were
hoarding not only junk but also a financial fortune. So
maybe there was some logic behind it. They were from
a well to do family at some point they reportedly
owned a large section of waterfront in New York. Actually
(22:30):
their parents were like cousins and uh oh that well
to do yeah, came over on the speedwell from England. Yes,
So I don't know if anyone ever tried to actually
burgle their house, but there's certainly you know, all their
utilities got cut off one after the other, so people
from the city would try to get in their house.
Police officers absolutely, and uh, you know Langley would occasionally
(22:53):
just sort of reach his head out the window and
scream go away, or they would just say nothing to them. Uh.
Sort of brings you right to this fateful day. Oh
are you talking about in March one when police received
an anonymous tip. That is the very uh, that's very
damn talking about. You know, No, you're in this episode,
(23:16):
in the recreation of this that we do. No, that's right.
What did I do? I don't. It's been so long.
You've been working on this for such a long time.
You've been doing recreations. I have absolutely you will. Uh
you and Chuck are you know? Maybe well, we'll leave
it to the listeners. But this your voice and our
our friend and colleague Chuck Bryant are intertwined in this.
(23:40):
That's awesome. This is the one where the cops like
yelling up at the window. I do remember this now, OK,
no spoilers there, but yeah, definitely, uh there. That's the
kind of stuff you can expect in this show. It's
not only you know, it's not like this whereas me
and Ben Gabbin about history. It's a real experiential thing,
and it's got a lot of these kind of cool
production touches that really make it spe But what happened
(24:01):
that day, so this is what we said March seven,
that fateful day, the police receive an anonymous phone call. Well,
Charles Smith is the guy who gives the phone call.
I've never don't We've never been able to fall up
on Charles Smith did the air quotes there, so I
forgot that doesn't come through. Charles Smith calls the police
(24:21):
and reports a body at the call your residence. Police
show up, police that have been there before, and no,
this place is booby trapped, so they proceed with caution.
But they do break down the door and it is
walled up with junk. They can't get through. They start
acting their way through and uh vapor of decay erupts
(24:43):
out onto the street. Let see, very much like Atlanta
in the summer, very much for basically a whole day,
they're trying to get in different ways. It's all tunneled.
They know that there's booby traps, things like feces and
jars and bricks and nails and things like that. Really terrible,
(25:07):
horrible things that could very much enter a person. Someone
breaks through, takes a ladder up to the second story,
breaks through window and finds Homer Callier. Uh, doubled up
as he always is in the corner, but he's shriveled
up and dead. How long had he been dead? Did
it seem, for lack of a better word, fresh, or
(25:27):
was the corpse like well it I'm not sure how
soon they were able to determine it, but it had
it had been a while. It had been a while.
And then the real question was where's Langley as he
killed his brother? Has he fled? And the search that
went on took weeks to find Langley Callier. Did they
(25:49):
search the city or the house? It was an international search. Yeah,
like I said, eleven newspapers New York at the time.
So that echo chamber is going crazy. Langley Callers are
getting sighted everywhere in different cities in the Carolinas and
Chicago on trains extra there's a moment where a guy
(26:10):
there's a photograph that gets published in some paper of
a guy literally holding a sign that says, I am
not Langley call here because he's got kind of like
a little beard and a little scruffed and uh, and
maybe it looks a bit like one of the call
Your brothers. So this is all clearly building to a
conclusion of sorts. It turns out, however, that Langley call
(26:30):
your has not crossed the Atlantic. He has not smuggled
himself into Canada or Mexico. Where where, where exactly is he?
It's very tragic. He's found ten feet from where his
brother Homer was found, and it's a it's it's a
number of weeks later. Uh, there was so much junk,
and they'd spent all this time clean clearing, a police
(26:53):
and firefighters clearing it. Then eventually professional cleaning cruise or
clearing cruise rather just ten ft from his brother. He
was coming to bring him food and caught one of
his own booby traps. Died there, and Homer died of neglect.
He hadn't been fed. And so you end up with this,
(27:15):
like when Nol was talking about earlier, this sort of bizarre,
stranger than fiction tale that's embedded in folklore, and it
reads a bit like a morality tale. But then I
don't know what it is that they call your brothers?
Did that was so wrong? Like I think I say
(27:36):
in the episode, I mean, probably they should have paid
their taxes and stuff. But it's also a very distinctly
New York kind of story where it's like you're surrounded
by people. Being in New York, every inch, every scrap
of space is used up, is you know, occupied, and
you have no like there's no sense of freedom kind
(27:57):
of when you're walking around New York. Like it's a
beautiful place and there's a lot going on, but it
does have this claustrophobic feeling to it anyway. So the
idea that, especially now knowing we know about real estate
prices and all that, that two men would just like
own this quite opulent set up and just allow it
to become this absolute nightmare in that way, and it
(28:19):
speaks to kind of the cluttered feeling of New York
as a city. I think it's a very interesting parallel there.
And yes, is there anything wrong with being a hoarder
or collecting things or any of that stuff. No, but
this speaks to something I think a little bigger than that,
and that paranoia and the fact that these two were
all they had and they got into this like you know,
(28:41):
kind of cycle of just not wanting anybody else to
be in their lives at all. And yet they're living
in the most populous place in the country. Whether it's
so much culturally going on in such an interesting time
and history to write, Franz Lids calls it a New
Yorker's worst nightmare. Uh. You know this also calls to
(29:01):
mind a documentary called Cropsy. Are you Familiar with Us?
Cropsy is a documentary about an urban legend regarding a
boogeyman like figure that stalks people in this in the
area surrounding a place called the Willowbrook Mental Institution, which
had been closed down and in the In the course
(29:24):
of this documentary, they find that this boogeyman like figure,
this modern urban legend, is based on fact, and there
is a real uh, there is a a pearl of
truth inside this this uh clamshael of scary urban folklore.
We got there so uglier than a Joe Montana pass.
(29:46):
I haven't seen that documentary, but I didn't remember it
until you started talking about it. And it's good. It's
a worthwhile documentary. I need to rewatch that. Now. You've
heard us talk a little bit about the call your brothers, folks,
But if you want to truly experience the story, which
(30:08):
goes much deeper than what we've discussed here. We highly
recommend that you get the too your favorite podcast app
of choice started on the seventeenth of June to Talk
Out to check out the Call your Brother's Story. However,
there are other episodes of Ephemeral available now, Like, as
you're listening to this, please listen to the rest of
(30:29):
our show before you listen to the next one. But
what are some what are some topics that really uh
stuck out in your mind that you've published recently. Well,
we've just published an episode uh with interviews uh Sarah Wasserman,
who's a professor at the University of Delaware. It's basically
and ephemer teacher. Oh wow, yeah, And so she's the
(30:51):
people the person who can really answer some of the
tough questions that we've brought up at the top of
the show. The episode before that is a study of
Ottoman American diaspora music. You might say, what immigrants from
the collapsing Ottoman Empire in the early part of the the century,
the teens, twenties, thirties, fleeing like people are from all
(31:15):
over the world coming to America and recording heart stopping
beautiful music in New York, mostly Chicago for big labels
like Columbia Victor and then also some small independent labels too,
So music and Greek and Arabic that has largely, almost
(31:37):
entirely been forgotten, these records that were pressed in in
in limited in limited quantities because of some sort of
racist practices at time. That's astonishing. You know. Um, part
of the area where I and one of our one
of our colleagues, Dylan Fagan, is from in Tennessee is
(31:59):
as a huge population of Lebanese immigrants who have left.
I think Lebanon was at least in name ruled by
the Ottoman Empire until that collapse from what post World
War one. Ish. And I think I've heard some of
I I have to listen to this. I think I've
heard something that might qualify in this genre that's bizarre
(32:22):
to me. And I mean there's all kinds it's not
there's all kinds of music, and there's party songs, there
are heart prick songs. Uh, and there's fantastic singing and
food playing and things that you don't I don't really
have the vernacular to describe, but we we interview in
this episode, uh, and really where all of The inspiration
(32:46):
for it came from is um, a gentleman named Iannagaski
who is in Baltimore and does reissue records of this stuff,
literally sometimes pulls them out of the trash. I've I've
seen pictures of some of these records that they have
so abused, and does everything he can two salvage them,
(33:06):
to save them, to learn as much as he can
about the performers. Sometimes you can't find anything. Sometimes you
get lucky and spread the word about it. So it's
it's a it's a fantastic interview that that's part of that.
And the music and it is it's some of my
favorite music now I would love to hear it and
don't have to take our word for it. You can
(33:26):
tune in and check out this music yourself. And that's
the thing. Even what you're gonna get with this show
is the the conceit of the show is such a
cool one. But it also allows for such a broad
range of topics, which I think is really important even
for a show like what we do. Like our only
lynch pin is that these stories are in some way bizarre, strange,
(33:46):
or ridiculous or hilarious, and so that gives us like
kind of carte blanche to go in all kinds of
different directions. Similarly with your show, UM, very different show,
but very similar heart in terms of just like being
fascinated by things and want to get answers to why
things play out the way they do in history, and
just kind of I think anyone that is into this
show even remotely is going to be very much into
(34:08):
your show as well. To me, it's a it's a
there's something about it, And please take this for the
profound compliment it is that reminds me of the free
associative nature of the film Waking Life, the way that
it connects in this very very intentional but dream like state.
(34:28):
You know what I mean? This is this is one
of the podcasts that, UM, I hear a ton of shows,
but this is one of the ones that comes with
a very new and unique voice and and I mean
that sincerely. You can compare me to Richard Linkletter anytime.
So it looks like we're going to we're going to
(34:50):
have to save our our our own explorations of things
that came and went for another day. But shout out
to Pizzeria Chips. I miss you. If you're listening if
a big demo of our show is uh, ext sentient
pizzeria chips, potato chips, terrified gained sapience. Yeah, I was
gonna talk about Beta Max tapes that were only literally killed.
(35:14):
Production was killed by Sony like in and I believe
they stopped distributing the players and recorders of Beta Max
tapes only a couple of years before that. But that
used to be kind of the like go to for
high resolution news footage and archiving. And now I actually
have a stack of Beta maxes on my desk right
now that I'm trying to find a place that can
(35:35):
transfer them digitally, and there are folks that still have them,
whether their news agencies or like companies that specialize and
digitizing your family memories. That's big business now because of
this nature of ephemera. And not only is the medium
antiquated now, the way of playing it back is gone
or much more scarce. And that's that you have a
(35:56):
really great trailer for your show that's all about answering
machine messages and how that used to be such a
cultural thing that people would do and it was important
to leave a really good message and just the idea
of these things that kind of came and went left
an impression, and now it's almost this kind of like
specter that like hangs over society and it's really interesting
and I'm looking forward to hearing more from Phemeral with
(36:16):
Alex Williams. I'm going to I'm going to save that.
I have this great list that I'm gonna save and
post on our Facebook page later for Ridiculous Historians. Because
I did an okay job just mentioning pizzeria's. It's really
hard not to just immediately start talking about them. So
I'm just gonna like mention some things that left and
(36:36):
then we'll pick it up later. So check us out
on our Facebook page, Ridiculous Historians. You should be able
to find a Phemeral wherever you find your favorite podcast
like Ridiculous History and so on. In the meantime, Alex,
thank you so much for for coming on the show.
Actually another started with a peek behind the Curtain. Let's
end with one. Our office actually close to a few
(36:59):
hours ago we were able to convince you to just
stay over and take this strange journey with us. You know, before,
I feel like I would be remiss to not mention
that Ridiculous History was the first show that I helped make.
At the very beginning it was it was the three
of us at the very very beginning of it. And Alex,
I'm not sure if you know this or not, You've
(37:20):
got so much on your play. We thank you at
the end of every episode for the wonderful theme that
you composed. So now we can do our little thank yous,
and we can do it in person. Thanks to Alex
Williams who composed our theme and for being here today
for an interview. I didn't know that you and I
very much appreciate it. Yeah, we we are big fans
of thanking people in this show. But also like to
(37:41):
thank super producer Ramsey Ram Jams, you don't thank you
so much for saving the show, Ramsey, Thanks for having me. Guys,
absolutely our pleasure. Thanks to you, Super Producy, Casey Pegram
here in spirit and not forgotten galvanting around Paris right
now living his best second life. Um and thanks to
Christopher Hasiotis you know, also here in spirit. Thanks to
(38:03):
uh Jonathan Strickland a k a. The Quister, as well
as our research associate Gabe l who desperately needs a nicknames.
So send some suggestions our way. Ben, Thanks to you
for always being a friend and a confidant down that
road back again you know the drill? Yeah yeah, thanks
to you as well. Noel. We are gone forward today.
(38:24):
That sends our episode, but not our show. You can
also find us on our aforementioned Facebook page. You can
find us on Twitter. You can find us at Instagram.
You can also find our weird personal Shenanigan's Misadventures and
malarkey on our personal instagrams. I'm at Ben Bolan actually
changed my handle, I am now at how now Noel Brown?
(38:46):
And where can they check out? Ephemeral on the social
media is Alex at Ephemeral Show. We'll see you next time,
fols him. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit
(39:17):
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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