Alexander Turney Stewart

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So Alexander Turney Stewart
is known as the creator of the department store. He

(00:22):
started his business in New York when he was kind
of a small time immigrant merchant in one little storefront,
and then he grew this into a massive firm and
made himself a huge fortune in the process. But in
my opinion, the most interesting parts of his life story
come at the end, and this one has some twists,
including one that took place after Alexander died. So Alexander

(00:47):
Tourney Stewart was born in Lisbonne, County Antrim, Ireland on
October twelfth, eighteen oh three. After Irish partition, this became
part of Northern Ireland. His parents were Alexander Stuart and
Margaret Turney Stuart, and by the time the younger Alexander
Stewart was born, his father had already died. He grew

(01:08):
up in Belfast, being raised by his grandfather, John Tourney,
and that was after his mother remarried and left Ireland
with her new husband to live in the United States.
It isn't totally clear like why he lived with his
grandfather instead of going with his mother, but we do
know that his grandfather wanted Alexander to join the clergy.

(01:30):
I will say, particularly related to these very early years
of his life, you will read a lot of different
biographies that very confidently say things that all contradict each other.
So this is definitely the amalgamation of pattern recognition of like, Okay,
these things do all seem to crop up in all
of them. There are like some versions, for example, to

(01:52):
say his father died when he was a toddler versus
before he was born. Mysteries will abound. Probably Alexander attended
Belfast Academical Institute and then moved on to Trinity College,
and that is where he was studying when his grandfather died,
and at that point his formal education ended, although he

(02:12):
had gained a very solid foundation and would value the arts, literature,
and philosophy for the remainder of his life. He had
apparently an appointed guardian who was a Quaker and who
seems to have been receptive to Alexander's non clergy ambitions
to travel to the US to try to make his
fortune there. This Guardian is mentioned but not named, in

(02:35):
the book Men of Our Day or biographical sketches of patriots, orators, statesman,
general's reformers, financers and merchants now in the stage of action,
including those who in military, political, business, and social life
are the prominent leaders of this time in this country.
That's all one title. That book was written by LP.

(02:56):
Brockett and published in eighteen seventy two. Yewort was still
alive at that time, and it includes a biography of him,
which does offer more details than are found in other places.
There's not a lot of sourcing information for those details.
It did indicate that this nameless Quaker guardian had enough
connections through the Quakers to get letters of introduction for

(03:18):
Alexander so that he could present himself to various merchants
in New York when he arrived there in eighteen eighteen.
When Alexander Stewart got to New York City, he started
looking for career opportunities and in the meantime taught classics
to make ends meet. He left teaching when he formed
a partnership with a merchant to learn the trade from,

(03:39):
but then that fell through and he briefly returned to Ireland.
This was also in part so he could convert his
inheritance that his father left him into cash. This was
something that he inherited on his twenty first birthday. According
to an account written by Elbert Hubbard in nineteen sixteen,
Stuart intended to use use some of that money to

(04:01):
pay for his last two years at Trinity, but when
he got there, he found that life in New York
had changed him to a degree that now the school
felt quaint, his schoolmates seemed much younger. He kind of
lost his interest in rolling again. Yeah, there's one story
that other students had just kind of automatically started calling

(04:22):
him sir as though he were an adult test compared
to them still being college kids, and he just was like,
I don't belong here anymore. Instead, he used that money
from his windfall to purchase fine Irish laces, primarily from Belfast,
as well as linens and poplins, and several thousand dollars

(04:44):
worth of it. Stuart then traveled with those goods back
to New York and started a dry goods business in
eighteen twenty three at two eighty three Broadway. In one
telling of this story Alexander had first trusted a man
that he met on the crossing from Ireland back to
New York to sell those goods, and the man did

(05:05):
make sales, but then he used the money to buy
himself and his friends a great many drinks. And so
Stuart realized he really couldn't count on anyone but himself
to sell his wares, and he started running the shop.
He was essentially the one employee who was handling bookkeeping, administration, stocking, sales, etc.

(05:25):
He also placed a notice in the New York Daily
Advertiser which read, at Stewart just arrived from Belfast offers
for sale to the ladies of New York a choice
selection of fresh dry goods at two hundred and eighty
three Broadway. In the moment he opened that shop, he
had customers. He was very good with women customers because

(05:46):
he was polite and respectful, but he was also very friendly.
He would also throw little extras in with their purchases,
like a card of buttons, or some thread or a
little bit of braid trim, and he made friends with
them essentially and made a very loyal cut customer base.
He greeted every single customer personally and That was a
practice that he maintained for more than a decade before

(06:08):
his business had simply grown too large to continue doing that.
Soon he had moved to a larger space at two
sixty two Broadway that had a parlor on the second
floor with a dressing room, and according to some versions
of his story, he also had the first full length
mirrors in the US. For this new, slightly larger shop,

(06:29):
he also started having regular sales and on occasion, having
sidewalk sales, where he would open a case of goods
right on the sidewalk in front of the store and
then sell whatever was in it to the first interested customer.
This got him in a little bit of trouble. The
business next door complained and police arrived and told Stuart
that he had to keep the sidewalk clear. Stuart turned

(06:52):
this into a sales opportunity, and he advertised that his
shop had too much stock to fit inside of it
and they were having a cost sale so that their
neighbor would not be inconvenienced any longer. That same year
that he started his business, the twenty year old Alexander
also got married to a young woman named Cornelia Mitchell Clinch.

(07:15):
Cornelia's father was a merchant who dealt in supplies for ships.
The couple had children. The number of children is not known.
They all sadly died soon after being born. Alexander and
Cornelia seemed to be genuinely devoted to one another. Yeah,
that devotion will manifest later on. From the start, it

(07:36):
seems like Alexander Stewart had very strong feelings about how
his business should be run. For example, one of his
salesmen quit the first week because Stuart didn't want him
making any false claims about their fabrics just to make
a sale. That salesman told him that everyone did business
that way, and Stuart was very clear that he did
not want that to be his reputation. But Stuart was right,

(07:59):
and he was a really good businessman, intuiting moves in
the market and capitalizing them. That eighteen seventy two Brocket
biography includes the following description of his business savvy quote.
Mister Stewart early began to survey the political field, and
when he foresaw a storm ahead, there would be a
silent purchase of all of certain goods in the market,

(08:20):
which would be sure to rise in a certain contingency
At other times he was the first to foresee a
falling market and to put his goods before the public
with such swiftness and address that he cleared his shelves
with the least loss, while his slower friends were carried
under the current. There was a time during the war
when mister Stewart held more cotton goods than all the

(08:43):
other dry goods firms put together. There was also a
time when he was the first to sell at the
reduced price. He also was said to have just been
so good at knowing the market values of things and
memorizing them that even in his later life, he could
recite what the average prices of various staple items had

(09:04):
been in each year of the preceding several decades. There
are a number of big drivers of Stuart's success in
the dry goods business. One was that from that very
first purchase of laces in Belfast, he always paid cash
in full for any of his merchandise. He said to
have never bought anything on credit, so in times when

(09:26):
the market had a dip, he wasn't suddenly on the
hook to pay off stock that was sitting on the
shelves going unpurchased. He was also said to have never
speculated with even a penny on the flip side of
this policy, though he did offer his customer's credit accounts
for another thing. He had set prices so prior to this,

(09:49):
the customary business approach to sales involved a lot of haggling.
A customer made inquire about the asking price of an item,
and then both the seller and the buyer would try
to get the best deal for their own interests. But
Stuart thought this was inefficient, and also as someone who
was running a massive operation over time with so many salespeople,

(10:09):
it meant that he wasn't able to control every transaction.
So a set price meant that no time was spent
negotiating prices, and everyone from the customer on up to
Stuart himself knew the retail price of any given item.
He also allowed customers the chance to return or exchange purchases,
which was not customary at this time, and he understood

(10:33):
that stock that wasn't moving was bad for business. It
made the retail space look dated, and so he would
sell the less popular merchandise below cost just to get
it out so he wouldn't have this outdated stock sitting around,
and this worked. He was known to always have fresh items,
and then that kept customers returning regularly, so at Stuart

(10:55):
and Company was always profitable. The other way that Stuart
excelled in business also involved streamlining, but this was not
great for his employees. He sounds like a hard person
to work for. He established a set wage for everyone
who worked for him, which sounds fairly fair at a
time when a lot of people were working on commission.

(11:17):
That money was consistent, but it was also kind of
a low rate of pay, and employees were financially on
the hook for their performance, meaning that if they underperformed,
Stuart would find them. He was also said to have
fired a carpenter for something as small as losing a nail.
He had this reputation for being really, really miserly when

(11:40):
it came to dealing with his employees. But there's this
contradictory thing, which is that he also had employees who
were with him from early on in his business that
stayed until the day he died and beyond. We're talking decades,
so there seems to have been at least some level
of loyalty to him among his workers, which makes it

(12:00):
a little harder to parse out whether he was a
rough boss or a good one. Yeah, I've I've worked
at places that I thought had like really legitimate problems
that coworkers of mine were there for years and years
and years, and it was like the things that they
liked about the job just kind of outweighed the rest
of it. Coming up, we'll talk about some of the

(12:22):
big moments of growth for at Stewart and Company, but
first we will pause for a sponsor break. In eighteen
forty six, after twenty three years in business, Stewart's enterprise
was so successful that he built a huge new facility

(12:44):
to house it. This building was nicknamed the Marble Palace
because it had a marble facade and it was the
first purpose built retail space in New York City. Like
not a building that could be used for retail was
only intended for retail. Teen fifty he was reportedly selling
ten thousand dollars worth of goods a day. The Civil

(13:06):
War was a lucrative time for Stuart. When this started,
he became the supplier of the uniforms to the Union troops.
He was an active supporter of the Union, and his
work would come back with efforts to honor him later
on right in the middle of the war in eighteen
sixty two, he had to expand, so he built another facility,
this time a huge retail store on Broadway that's believed

(13:29):
to have been the largest retail store in the world
at the time. Once this massive space, which was dubbed
the Iron Palace, was up and running, he was doing
a reported fifty thousand dollars in sales every day. Yeah,
we always talk about how it's very hard to like
make equivalencies of money over time, but one of the

(13:51):
ones I read was like, this is like one point
five million dollars a day that his business was doing,
so trying you like more than ten million dollars or
around ten million dollars a week, which is a lot.
With the building of the Iron Palace, Stuart is often
cited as the inventor of the departments tour because he
had over time diversified his offerings from things like fabric

(14:12):
and trim to adding in ready made garments from Europe
as well as anything a person might need for their home,
and they were set up in different departments. He had
also managed to shift the nature of shopping from simply
being a necessary errand to kind of being a leisure activity.
From the early days of his small shop, he had

(14:33):
always focused on the shopper's experience, and that methodology carried
through to his company's largest iterations. In eighteen sixty eight,
you'lyss assessed. Grant was elected president, and because of the
work that Stuart had done with the Union Defense Committee,
he was offered a position in the new president's cabinet.
That was as Secretary of the Treasury. It turned out

(14:56):
though he could not take that role. The seventeen eighty
nine Act of Congress establishing the Treasury Department, which was
signed into law by President George Washington, included language that
specifically excluded someone like Alexander T. Stewart because he was
a merchant. The specific language is in section eight of

(15:17):
the Act, and it reads quote that no person appointed
to any office instituted by the Act shall directly or
indirectly be concerned or interested in carrying on the business
of trade or commerce, or be the owner, in whole
or in part of any sea vessel or purchased by
himself or another in trust for him, any public lands

(15:37):
or public property, or be concerned in the purchase or
disposal of any public securities of any State or of
the United States, or take or apply to his own
use any emolument or gain for negotiating or transacting any
business in the said department, other than what shall be
allowed by law. Grant wanted Stuart to be Secretary of

(16:00):
the Treasury so badly that he asked Congress to override
that part of the Act. Congress did not do that, though.
No there's some political issues that were involved in why
it got shut down, but it was not going to happen.
The year after the cabinet position was offered and then retracted,
Stuart began work on his Manhattan mansion on the corner

(16:22):
of thirty fourth and Fifth Avenue. This was one of
the very first such luxury homes on Fifth Avenue. It
was three floors plus an attic, and like his first
big store, it had a marble facade. Though he was
incredibly successful and had more money than anyone could likely need,
Stuart always had an eye on expanding his business and

(16:45):
his wealth. After years of buying from textile mills to
resell the stock at retail, he decided to gain a
financial foothold in the manufacturing side himself. He purchased controlling
interest in several mills to further add who was business.
Stuart next expanded internationally. Ireland, England, France, Scotland, Germany and

(17:06):
Switzerland were all homes to Stuart offices. Some of those
countries also had warehouses where purchased goods were stored before
being shipped to his US retail operation. The stability of
Stuart's business and its huge growth led to accusations that
he was purposely trying to put smaller goods dealers out
of business, and he made a number of statements on

(17:29):
this matter that are kind of open to interpretation, which
is how a lot of his life is. He was
adamant that he adhered to his business principles and that
anyone who didn't was doomed to fail. Things like his
refusal to buy stock on credit were part of those principles.
That sounds great on paper, but it would of course
exclude anyone who had not had the good fortune to

(17:50):
inherit a sum of money to start a business. Additionally,
he made statements that explain that some of his expansions
were just necessary to prevent logistical issues, things like one
building having been too small to put an entire department
on one floor. So he had to build a new
space so that he could make that not a big
train wreck. He also told an interviewer once that he

(18:13):
had been pressured to start selling specific products in one
of his stores by customers, but that quote, the moment
we throw open that department for retail trade, a great
many smaller deals in the vicinity will suffer. The advantages
we possess are so superior that competition of small dealers
is out of the question. And the moment they feel

(18:34):
the pressure, they cry out against monopoly and attribute all
kinds of vindictiveness to the firm. But he then went
on to say that the public would really benefit from
his ability to both manufacture and sell because that cut
down costs. While Stuart was shrewd in business, he could
also be generous. During the Irish famine, he raised money

(18:56):
to send to Ireland for aid. When things became particle,
particularly dire for mill workers, he chartered a ship and
sent it to the area where he'd grown up that
was filled with food for the workers there. And there
was also an offer that came with the ship, which
was that anyone who wished could board it and return
with it to the United States. This is often cited

(19:18):
as Stuart's big philanthropic effort as though it was the
only such grand gesture, but there were actually others. For example,
in the wake of the Franco German War, he similarly
sent a boat to France, this time it was loaded
with flour, but that did not, however, have the same
offer to take people back to the US. In North America,
he gave very generously to Chicago to rebuild after the

(19:41):
eighteen seventy one fire. All of this falls in line
with the ideal that he mentioned in a letter to
Ulyss Assess Grant during his presidency quote, the merchant of
the future will not only be an economist and an
industrial leader, he will also be a teacher and a humanitarian.
Stuart also started buying up real estate in New York,

(20:03):
which we have talked about many people on the show
that have done this and that being kind of a
big keystone to their wealth growth. He acquired two hotels,
the Metropolitan and the Grand Union, and two theaters, the
Globe and Niblo's Garden, And then in eighteen sixty nine
he purchased a twelve mile tract of land on Long

(20:24):
Island known as the Hempstead Plains. He paid fifty five
dollars an acre for that plot of land, and then
acquired an additional fifteen hundred acres from the surrounding residents.
On this vast expanse, he intended to build his own city,
which he named Garden City. Today, it is recognized as
one of the first planned communities in the United States.

(20:47):
He mapped out residential and commercial spaces and even set
up a brickyard so that construction could be localized as
much as possible. By eighteen seventy six, Alexander Stewart had
created something true, truly remarkable. There were roads, there was
green space. There was infrastructure, including a state of the
art waterworks and a railroad for commuters. There was a hotel,

(21:10):
the Garden City Hotel, which was adjacent to the railroad station.
There were these lovely, brand new Victorian houses that people
could rent for one hundred dollars a month, but there
weren't many residents yet. And then, with this project still
not completed, Stuart died on April tenth, eighteen seventy six,
at the age of seventy two. In a moment, we'll

(21:32):
talk about what happened after his death, including a rather
surprising turn of events. But first we'll take a quick
break and hear from the sponsors that keep stuff you
missed in history class going. Stuart was the third richest

(21:54):
man in New York when he died, and the only
one in the top three who had not inherited his wealth.
Estimates of Stuart's net worth at the time of his
death ranged from forty million to fifty million dollars that
is not adjusted. Throughout his life as a successful businessman,
Alexander T. Stewart received a steady stream of letters from

(22:15):
people claiming to be relatives and asking, of course, for money.
When he died. This stream continued, now addressed to his
widow in the hope of gaining some of the fortune
they claimed they were owed as next of kin, and
this escalated and dragged out for years. In eighteen seventy eight,
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote of the problem, quote, mister

(22:36):
Stewart died under the impression that his relatives were few
and quickly enumerated. Upon his death, the number who sprang
up in all parts of the country claiming kinship and
rights under the will was astonishing. Suits were begun in
large numbers by all sorts of people. Stuart had left

(22:56):
money to a variety of people in varying amounts, but
as he and Cornelia had not had any children live
past infancy, he had no primary heir. He also had
not set aside any kind of charitable trust for the
bulk of his money, and his is considered to be
a great fortune lost through a steady trickle to things
like legal fees and a little bit to ransom. That's

(23:20):
because on November seventh, eighteen seventy eight, so two and
a half years after Alexander Stewart died, his remains were
stolen out of their grave at Saint Mark's Church in
the Bowery. There was evidence that whoever had taken Stuart's
body had unceremoniously dragged it out of the churchyard and
over a fence, although it seemed as though they had

(23:41):
entered through the padlocked gate using a key. A reward
was offered in the New York Times by Stuart's right
hand man and executor, Henry Hilton, but that caused massive
confusion as people came out of the woodwork with all
kinds of claims of knowing the location and the body
of the body. And what had happened, only for those

(24:03):
claims to run cold. This is unsurprising given what happens
when rewards are offered. Yes, exactly. If you have wondered
about folks like Burke and Hare and people that were
known for grave ropping for medical purposes, a lot of
them were like, yes, I know where it is, and

(24:25):
then it was like you're not going to get the reward,
and they were like forget it. Then, well, most of
the people that were stealing bodies for medical purposes, it
was not two and a half years later. No, this
would not have really been a viable body to you. No,
although those were folks that were known for those crimes,
were the first to be investigated. No, I think because

(24:46):
it was like who else Rob's graves? It's weird. The
strongest lead in the case came in early eighteen seventy nine,
so just a few a couple of months after he'd vanished,
when the Postmaster of New York, Paul Henry Jones, was
contacted by someone named Romayne who said he had the remains,
which did sound like a funny turn of phrase to me,
and who provided the name plate, which had also been

(25:09):
stolen from the casket as proof. But this whole thing
only cast suspicion on Jones when he claimed to have
been contacted with the lead and nothing came of it.
In eighteen eighty one, authorities received a tip that the
body was in Cypress Hill Cemetery in Brooklyn. That site
was excavated, but Stuart's remains were not found. Cornelius Stuart,

(25:33):
undoubtedly frustrated that neither the police nor the private investigators
that Hilton had hired were making any headway, is said
to have taken matters into her own hands and started
communicating with the purported grave robbers. She traded twenty thousand
dollars for a map to a meeting point and a
designated time. Her nephew made the trade in a late

(25:55):
night meeting and returned with a bag of bones and
a piece of the velvet that headlined Stuart's coffin. At
least that's how things played out, according to the account
of George Washington Walling, who had been chief of the
NYPD when Stuart's body was stolen. He wrote a book
titled Recollections of a New York Chief of Police in

(26:16):
eighteen eighty seven, in which he included this story. He
also relayed the detail that the Stuart tomb had been
broken into a month before the theft, although nothing had
been taken. His version also indicated that Hilton didn't want
to give the grave robbers anything on principle, but that
Cornelia wanted her husband's remains desperately. Whether or not the

(26:38):
remains that Cornelia got back were Alexander's, that's a matter
of debate. And then to explain what happened to them next,
we have to go back to the Garden City project.
Cornelia Stuart had after her husband's death, really become the
stewart of Alexander's plan for Garden City, including allocating one
million dollars for a cathedral to be built in his memory.

(27:03):
She also managed to get the Diocese of the Episcopal
Church to move its main offices to Garden City they
had been in Brooklyn. She also spearheaded the building of
schools and other key elements to turn Garden City into
a viable community, and people started to move there. When
Alexander Turney Stuart, or at least what his wife believed

(27:25):
to be him, was buried the second time, it was
in the Cathedral of Incarnation in Garden City. When she
died two years later, she was buried by his side,
And an interesting bit of coincidental timing, when Alexander's body
was stolen from the grave in Manhattan, it was scheduled
to be moved just days later to be reinterred in

(27:46):
Garden City. Yeah, there are a lot of theories that
that whole thing was like an inside job by somebody
that knew this plan, and they were like, it's going
to be moved anyway, it'll be ready. We don't know.
One of the tragedies of the flailing nature of the
Stuart Fece fortune was that their house on Fifth Avenue
was demolished in nineteen oh one, and when the mansion
was destroyed, so were most of Alexander's in Cornelia's papers,

(28:09):
so there's little record of their day to day lives.
Even in his own time, he was seen in contradictory
terms by some as a miser, by others as a
generous benefactor, as a moral man in business, and as
a cutthroat who would crush the little guy. As the
years have passed, exactly where he falls on any spectrum

(28:31):
of measure of his character gets blurrier and blurrier and
more open to interpretation. We do have a quote from
Stuart given during an interview, which seems to sum up
his business ideology and to some degree who he was
as a person. Quote. People come to me and ask
me for my secret of success. Why I have no secret?
I tell them My business has been a matter of

(28:54):
principle from the start. That's all there is about it.
If the Golden rule can be incorporated into purely mercantile affairs,
it has been done in this establishment. And you must
have noticed, if you have observed closely, that the customers
are treated precisely as the seller himself would like to
be treated were he in their place. That is to say,

(29:14):
nothing is misrepresented. The price is fixed once and for
all at the lowest possible figure, and the circumstances of
the buyer are not suffered to influence the salesman in
his conduct. In the smallest particular. I think you will
find the same principle of justice throughout the larger transactions
of the house, and especially in its dealings with employees.

(29:37):
I do not speak of it as deserving of praise.
We find it absolutely necessary. What we cannot afford is
violation of principle so if nothing else, he was the
man of principle. That's Alexander T. Stewart, who I find
to be quite a fascinating gent. Do you have some
listener mail for us? I do. I'm going to read

(29:59):
two because there's short ish. Both of them are about
our William Morgan episodes. She got a good bit of
mail about this. One is from our listener, Shane. Shane,
get ready to play this for your class, Holly and Dracy.
I am a longtime listener who really enjoyed your two
part episode on William Morgan. I teach advanced placement US history,
and my students have always found this incident fascinating. Sidebar, Shane,

(30:23):
thank you for being an educator. Okay, back to the letter.
You added much more depth to what I knew and
will make that lesson even better. The political consequences of
the Anti Masonic Party is probably more impactful to what
we are studying. They were the first party to have
a nominating convention. But I wanted to add a fun fact.
All three candidates for president in eighteen thirty two, Andrew Jackson,

(30:44):
Henry Clay, and William Wirt were in fact Mason's This
is particularly odd since William whort was running as the
anti Mason candidate, I have read everything from that he
was a non practicing Mason who grew weary of them,
to the idea that he was a player in the
party who just ironically got nominated. Either way, it's an
interesting twist. You make my commute far more interesting. Two

(31:07):
mornings each week, I sent you this email from the
city of Sandusky, one of the few towns in the
United States laid out upon its founding on the Masonic
symbols of a square and compass. It helps explain some
odd five way intersections and sharp turns now. Sandusky is
much more well known for its amazing theme park, Cedar
Point roller coaster Capital of the World, and it's beautiful

(31:30):
revitalized downtown waterfront. Ps. If you happen to mention this
feedback in a future episode, I can use it to
prove to my students that I am still a history nerd,
which I find to be a compliment. I mean, you
want your history teacher to nerd out over history. I
got a shout out in a twenty ten episode and
unearthed in twenty ten five historical fines and to that effect,

(31:52):
and I play it in class every single year. Well, Shane,
now you can do it again. Thank you again for
listening all this while, and again for being an educator.
We sure do appreciate it. And then I have one
more that is a little shorty about the Morgan affair.
This is from our listener Eric, who said I've enjoyed
your excellent broadcast about freemasonry and the Morgan affair. I'm

(32:13):
a member of an Albany, New York Lodge, and our
district Masonic burial plot is in Albany Rural Cemetery. It
was consecrated on September twenty fifth, eighteen eighty eight, and
is located very near the grave of Thurlow Weed, who
was laid to rest in eighteen eighty two. Every time
I visit our plot for a memorial service, I look
at the classical broken column marking it symbolizing life cut short,

(32:36):
and can't help but picture it as a rebuke to Weed.
For my pet tax, I attach a picture of my
eleven year old boy, Trevor, the best cat ever. Trevor
is so cute and looks a little like you might
be trouble in the best way. Thank you, thank you,
thank you for that Eric Thurlough Weed i s you'll
recall featured somewhat prominently in that episode. So if you

(32:58):
would like to write us with you or insights on
such things, or just to say hi, you don't have
to have any kind of comment on an episode. If
you don't want, just like email, you can do that
at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also
find us on social media and you can listen to
the show and subscribe anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts.

(33:24):
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