Annie Edson Taylor, Niagara Daredevil

Annie Edson Taylor was the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Taylor’s whole barrel trip was part of a much bigger story of daredevils at this natural wonder, which is tied to its industrialization and commercialization.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I went
on a trip just the other week that involved flying
into Buffalo, New York, and since we were so close

(00:22):
by Niagara Falls, we went to Niagara Falls. I had
never been there before, and it reminded me that way
back last summer, I had been planning to do a
podcast on people going over Niagara Falls in a barrel,
and then I stumbled across an article about Anette Kellerman
while I was doing the research for that. I got
completely distracted. I forgot totally about it. Having been reminded

(00:46):
by going to the actual waterfall, we are going to
get back to that today with Annie Edson Taylor, who
was the first person to go over Niagara Falls in
a barrel, and we're going to start off with a
little bit of a brief history of industrialization and commercialization
at Niagara because this whole barrel trip was part of
a much bigger story of tourism and daredevil's at this

(01:10):
natural wonder So. Niagara Falls is a collection of three
waterfalls on the border between the United States and Canada,
Ontario on the Canadian side and New York on the U.
S side, and they're on the Niagara River between Lake
Erie and Lake Ontario. The falls are the Horseshoe Falls,
the American Falls, and the bridal Veil Falls. Sometimes Horseshoe

(01:31):
Falls is known as Canadian Falls. Most of the Horseshoe
Falls are on the Canadian side of the border, while
American Falls and bridle Veil Falls are both in the
United States. Horseshoe Falls is the biggest of the three.
It's the one that's shaped like a horseshoe, like its
name suggests, and it's what comes to mind for a
lot of people when you say Niagara Falls. Yeah, it's

(01:52):
impressive in persons, it's it does have sort of the
iconic aspect to it. The area are around Niagara Falls
has been home to a number of Iroquois speaking indigenous peoples.
Leading up to the seventeenth century, a confederation known as
the Neutral lived on what would become the Canadian side
of the river. And this name comes from the French

(02:14):
describing them as neutral in conflicts between other Iroquois nations
and confederation. Uh So, this is a guess at pronunciation
because we couldn't find a clear one. But the uh
when Roarinn or when Row lived on the other side,
and the Neutral Confederation and the win Row were allies
until sixteen thirty nine. After that, a combination of wars, epidemics,

(02:36):
and other factors led to both of them being dispersed
by and absorbed into other Iroquois tribes and nations. Yeah,
there are descendants of these people surely living still today,
but there's a whole complicated history of all the various
Iroquois peoples that they were not a monolith, So some
people wound up going to completely different parts of the country.

(02:59):
Others sort of made their way into other tribes and nations.
The first European known to see the falls was probably
Father Louis Hennepin, who was a French priest in sixteen
seventy eight, and he wrote about it after he got
back to France. Although in his account he said that
the falls were six hundred feet tall, they are really

(03:19):
about a hundred and seventy feet or fifty two meters tall.
The first Europeans settlements in the area were started after
the Revolutionary War. It's hard to eyeball distance and scale
I understood, and they are quite impressive. They are I
could see where you would you would think they were
way bigger than they actually are. The nearby city of Buffalo,

(03:40):
New York, started to grow dramatically after the completion of
the Erie Canal, which connected the Great Lakes to Albany,
New York, and then from all Many people could reach
New York City via the Hudson River, and as railroads
started to expand in the nineteenth century, Buffalo became a
major railway hub. It's proximity to Niagara Halls helped make

(04:01):
the falls a major tourist destination. In eighteen o one,
Theodosia Burr and Joseph Alston visited the falls as part
of their honeymoon. They were kind of the it couple
at the time, and that's this helps set the trend
of Niagara as a honeymoon destination, although sometimes people give
that credit to Napoleon Bonaparte's brother Jerome, who also honeymooned

(04:22):
there in eighteen o four. It was another hundred years
or so, though, before Niagara Falls really started billing itself
as the honeymoon capital of the world. By the eighteen thirties,
the tourist industry was booming in Niagara Falls. Hotels and
knickknack shops and tourist attractions were popping up everywhere, and
developers were buying the prettiest vantage points along the river

(04:45):
so that they could charge people to take a look.
And people were already complaining that the area around the
falls was too commercial and too tacky. So complaints about
commercialization at Niagra not going not new remotely, and it
was much to the chagrin of European visitors. And the

(05:06):
words of Alexis de Toqueville and a letter to a
friend in one quote, if you wish to see this
place in its grandeur, hasten. If you delay, your Niagara
will have been spoiled for you. Already the forest round
it is being cleared. The Romans are putting steeples on
the pantheon. I don't give the Americans ten years to

(05:27):
establish a saw or flour mill at the base of
the cataract. This letter was president. Industry also became a
major part of the Niagara scene, with mills and their
water wheels dotting the river. Nicola Tesla famously worked on
a hydro power plant that started operation on November. Eventually,

(05:48):
there were so many mills that they physically affected the
flow of the water over the falls. Some of the
tourist attractions that still exist today date back to the
nineteenth century. The May of the Mists started operating in
eighteen forty six. That's one of the boats that will
take you up to the bottom of the falls and
a little colorful poncho. At first, the Mate of the

(06:11):
Mists was a passenger vessel that was carrying people across
the river, so it was serving a much more practical role.
When a suspension bridge opened across the river in eighteen
forty eight, the Mate of the Mists became a sightseeing vessel.
By the eighteen sixties, there was so much commercial activity
and other development at Niagara that people started calling for

(06:31):
some kind of preservation effort. A group of politicians and
prominent public figures started the Free Niagara Movement to encourage
the State of New York to buy back some of
the private land and restore it as a public park.
It was both about preserving the natural beauty of the
park and making it so that people could view the
falls for free, rather than having to pay a mill

(06:53):
owner for a peak at a view that also included
all of their industrial equipment. This eventually led to the
Niagara Reservation Act in eighteen eighty three and the creation
of Niagara Falls State Park, established as Niagara Reservation in
eighteen eighty five. The park itself was designed by Frederick
Law Olmsted. The Niagara Parks Commission was established in Ontario

(07:16):
in eighteen eighty five as well, and on the Canadian
side the area adjacent to the falls as Queen Victoria
Park today. Throughout all this time of commercialization, industrialization, and
preservation at Niagara, performers were also working at the falls,
trying to make a living by entertaining tourists, and in
the days before TV and film, daredevils were a huge draw.

(07:41):
Sam Patch, also known as the Yankee Leaper, jumped off
a platform on Goat Island, which is between Horseshoe and
American Falls, on October seven, eight twenty nine. He jumped
from a height of eighty five feet it's about twenty
six meters, and he survived. He made another jump from
a height of a hundred and thirty ft that's forty

(08:01):
on October seventeen. He survived that one too, although he
died during a jump near Rochester less than a month later.
There was also a lot of wire walking at the falls.
Jean Francois Gravelli, also known as Charles Blondin, was the
first person to cross the falls on a tight rope
on June fifty nine. About twenty five thousand spectators gathered

(08:26):
to watch him do this, and then he went on
to do a whole whole lot of other wire walking
stunts at Niagara, including carrying his manager across on his back,
and one time carrying a stove to the halfway point
and cooking breakfast on there, and once he was done
cooking this omelet or whatever, he lowered it down to

(08:47):
people on board the Maid of the Mist on the
river below. He kept doing all of this, Dare devilry
until eighteen nineties six, and he was the first of
really many wire walkers at the falls. That is a
big old ball Nope for me. Yeah there well, and
there's I mean, there is still wire walking at the falls.
Like I remember, back in the day when we were

(09:08):
owned by Discovery, they were being a much hyped wire
walk at the falls that was beyond TV. It's still
a thing. Yeah, all of that is a big note
for me. Uh, Like, why would you do that when
you could sit on the boat. I understand the impulse,
I just it's not for me. Uh. Steve Brody claimed
that he went over the falls in nothing but a

(09:30):
padded rubber suit in but there is no evidence that
this feat ever actually happened. He had also made a
disputed claim to have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and survived.
One popular stunt was to try to survive the extremely
treacherous Niagara Whirlpool, which is downstream from Niagara Falls at
a point where the river makes a sharp bend. People

(09:53):
would try to make it through this treacherous whirlpool in
barrels or sometimes protected by nothing other than a preserver.
On June sixth of eighteen sixty one, Joel Robinson successfully
took the Maid of the Mists through the whirlpool after
it was sold to a company in Montreal that would
only accept delivery on Lake Ontario. Matthew Webb, who had

(10:15):
been the first person to swim across the English Channel,
died trying to swim that stretch of the river in
eighty three. This is just a sampling of all the
dare Devil stunting that was going on at Niagara Falls
leading up to the turn of the twentieth century. But
one thing all of these dare devils had in common.
Nearly all of them were men. It was a very

(10:37):
masculine world, which made the first person to go over
a falls in a barrel even more of a novelty.
And we're going to talk about her after we paused
for a sponsor break. Annie Edson was born October thirty
eight near Auburn, New York. Her parents were Merrick Edson

(10:59):
and Luke Crisia Warren, and the family was pretty well off.
Merrick owned some milling interests in the family spent their
summers out in the country and their winters in the city,
and he also had at least two older brothers. She
had an adventurous streak from the time she was quite young.
She liked to be outdoors and to read adventure stories,
and she also had a fondness for Roman history. Her

(11:22):
father died when she was ten, and at fourteen, she
and her brothers were sent to a private seminary to
finish their educations. Four years later, Annie married David S. Taylor.
They had one child together, although the baby didn't live
past infancy. David was killed while fighting in the Civil War,
and at first Annie still had enough money to live on,

(11:44):
but it soon became clear that that money was not
gonna last forever. Her seminary education also hadn't really set
her up for supporting herself, so she enrolled in a
state teaching college. After she finished her studies at the
teaching college, she spent a few years traveling to different
cities where she had friends and family working as a teacher.
It was I mean, really, it was all over the

(12:06):
United States. She also went back to school again to
study dance and physical culture. If you remember from our
episode on Fort Shaw, Indian school, physical culture is a
combination of calisthenics and strength training in general health and
wellness that was really popular in the nineteenth century. She
started teaching dance and physical culture and even opening her
own school, even though that school failed. Sometime around Taylor

(12:31):
moved to Bay City, Michigan. By this point, she was
really unhappy with her prospects for her life. She had
gone from a comfortable childhood and youth to working as
an itinerant teacher. She had also had a series of
misfortunes in which she lost a lot of the savings
that she had, including living through both a robbery and
a fire. There were no pensions or retirement programs, and

(12:55):
she didn't want to be poor or live off the
charity of her friends, so she kept trying to think
of ways to earn money, enough money to be self
sufficient and comfortable again. According to some accounts, she had
heard about Steve Brodie's alleged stunt at Niagara Falls, and
she didn't think he had really done it. But it's
possible that having heard about that planted the seed for

(13:18):
her own stunt. Later on, in her words, quote two years,
I had been constantly studying, when not occupied in teaching,
what I could do to make money, To make it
honestly and quickly, all kinds of schemes ran riot through
my brain. Reading in a New York paper about people
going to the Pan American Exposition and from there to

(13:40):
Niagara Falls, the idea came to me like a flash
of light, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. No
one has ever accomplished this feat. I did not think
it wrong, as there was nothing immodest in the act,
nor did it involve the life of anyone. But myself.
I believe in prayer and that God will answer if
only there is faith. As my motive was not a

(14:01):
selfish one, but to succor two friends, one who has
little children, the other indelicate health, and to aid myself financially.
I believed I would live. I was determined to live
to vindicate to the world God's mercy and goodness. So
it was a side note. The Pan American Exposition in Buffalo,
which she referenced there is where President William McKinley was assassinated.

(14:25):
He was shot on September one, and he died several
days later. It's not totally clear where in the timeline
Taylor thought up this stunt or whether the assassination affected
her plans at all. Regardless, though she knew that to
make this journey and survive she would need the right barrel.
She started mocking up models, cutting them out of paper

(14:48):
and sewing them together with twine, and ultimately she designed
a custom made barrel that was about five feet or
one and a half meters tall, and it had a
twelve inch head, a twenty four inch middle, and fifteen
inch foot so that's thirty centimeters sixty centimeters and thirty
eight centimeters from head to foot. She selected white Kentucky

(15:08):
oak for the wood, with ten riveted metal hoops. Taylor
also planned for a ballast sometimes it's described as an
anvil that would be in the bottom of the barrel,
and she hoped this would make the barrel stay upright
while she floated down the river, rather than having it
just roll around every which way with her inside of it.
She looked for a cooper to make the barrel, and

(15:30):
once she found one, he refused to do it. He
thought this was way too dangerous a plan for any
person and that she would surely be killed if she
tried it, but she persisted and eventually he gave in.
The final barrel had the words Queen of the Mist
on the side. Going over the falls in a barrel
was just one step and Taylor's plan for her future

(15:53):
prosperity From there. She was planning to go on a
lecture tour, so she hired a man named Frank M.
Russell to act as her manager. She decided on October
twenty three, nineteen o one, as the day for her plunge.
This was the day before her sixty third birthday, but
thinking that no one would want to come and see
a sixty something woman daredevil or on the lecture circuit,

(16:15):
she and Russell described her as being twenty years younger.
Everyone but Taylor, and maybe also Russell, thought this was
a terrible idea. Authorities thought it was so dangerous that
they told Russell they would charge him with manslaughter if
Taylor died in the attempt. But even as everyone she
encountered tried to talk her out of it, Taylor insisted

(16:36):
that she would do it. She even did a trial
run by sending her cat over in a barrel on
the eighteenth of October. According to most reports, the cat
was frightened. But okay, it makes me her very much, frankly,
but it makes a lot of people not like her
very much. I understand, Yeah, I own thing. I read one.

(16:59):
Uh you know, there are a number of sort of
retrospectives and more recent years that people have written, and
there was one that I read that just was not
charitable in its read of her at all. And that
was one of the things the person was so mad about.
But on the twenty three, the day she had selected,
the weather was bad. High winds made the surface of

(17:19):
the already fast moving Niagara River incredibly choppy. She had
hired two men to assist her, Fred Trusdale and William Holleran.
Truesdale and Hollerand looked at the water and they said
there was no way that they could safely navigate to
the drop off point in those conditions. Taylor was crushed,
but she tried again the next day, her sixty third birthday.

(17:42):
Truesdale and Hollerand rode her out to Grass Island, and there,
away from the crowds of thousands of people who had
come to watch her do this, she took off her
hat and coat and overskirt and got into this barrel.
Inside she tied one strap around her waist and another
around her foot with the hope of keeping her head
from slamming into the top of the barrel. The barrel

(18:03):
was packed with cushioning, and once the lid was on,
her assistance used a bicycle pump to pump in more air.
Sometimes this is described as trying to pressurize it, but
she was afraid of running out of oxygen before getting
to the falls. To avoid being swept over the falls themselves,
her assistance had to cut her loose almost a mile
away so she had a lengthy journey before even getting

(18:26):
to the falls, followed by a wait for someone to
fish her out of the water. Once the air had
been pumped in, Taylor plugged the air hole with a
cork almost immediately, though it turned out that her fears
of running out of air, uh, we're maybe not totally
founded it the barrel was not airtight. It also was
not watertight. It started leaking, and soon her feet were

(18:46):
in a pool of freezing water. At about four in
the afternoon, after rowing to the deepest part of the river,
Taylor's assistance cut her loose. And that's where we're going
to pause for a sponsor break. Here's how Annie Edson

(19:07):
Taylor described those first moments adrift in the Niagara River. Quote,
my heart swelled, and for some moments I felt as
though I were being suffocated, but I determined to be
brave by a supreme effort of will. I calmed myself
at once and began earnestly to pray if it was
God's will to spare my life, if not give me
an easy death. This reminds me a little bit of

(19:30):
Henry Box Brown's account of being in the box while
being shipped around. I'm gonna say he has a much
better reason to be put in a box and sent somewhere.
I wholly concur But just that moment of like I'm trapped,
I'm just gonna pray and look like I'm either going
to gut it out or it's gonna end. Uh. The
rapids on the Upper Niagara turned out to not be
all that bad. The water in the barrel kept getting deeper,

(19:54):
and there was the constant tension and anticipation of when
she would get to the falls and whether she would
survive go over, But in terms of how rough the
ride itself was, she was pleasantly surprised. Then, at about
four twenty three, the barrel finally shot over the falls,
and her words quote, I thought, for a moment my
senses were lost. The feeling was one of absolute horror,

(20:17):
but I still knew. When I struck the water of
the lower river, the shock was not so great. But
I went down down until the momentum had spent itself.
For a few brief moments, she was completely under water.
But then the submerged barrel came back up under the torrent,
and that turned out to be worse than the anticipation

(20:37):
or the fall. She described it as being whirled like
a dasher in a churn. After several terrifying minutes, constantly
spinning and striking rocks, the barrel finally popped out from
under the cataract and Taylor lost consciousness. But then the
mate of the mist, which had resumed operation in came

(20:57):
to retrieve the barrel. Chief end Near John Ross was
the person who opened the barrel and exclaimed the woman
is very much alive or something similar. She replied something
along the lines of yes, she is, though much hurt
and confused. I don't think I would be that composed
in my initial speech after something like that, but probably

(21:20):
mine would not be fit to print. Taylor was bleeding
from a head wound when she was pulled out of
the water, and she almost certainly had a concussion, but
other than that and some bruises, she was unharmed. She
had become the first person known to go over Niagara
Falls and survive. Like we said earlier, thousands of people
had come out to watch this stunt, and it was

(21:40):
covered in the Niagara area newspapers and some other scattered
newspapers as well, But it wasn't really that big of
a news sensation elsewhere. The Boston Daily Globe had a
small feature about it, for example, but when I looked
through the New York Times archive, I didn't find anything
about it. As it turned out, her manager was in
put in a fraud or both. A lot of other

(22:03):
well publicized stunts at Niagara had been performed before throngs
of spectators who paid for a seat on bleachers that
had been put up just for the event. Russell didn't
arrange anything like that. The only thing he tried to
do to make money on the day was self signed photographs.
He also didn't do a very good job of getting
her on her planned lecture tour. She did appear at

(22:25):
the Pan American Exposition, but the only engagements that he
lined up for her after that were at Dime museums,
which she thought those were beneath her, So there's some
accountability there on her too. He did line up work
for her that she did not want to do, but
like it also wasn't the work she had been wanting
to do. Taylor's decision to build herself as forty three

(22:48):
instead of sixty three also came back to bite her
because when people did come to see her. They did
not believe that this old woman could possibly be the
forty three year old Annie Edson Taylor that they had
heard about. I actually think the fact that she was
sixty three could be the selling point right like today,
it definitely could be the selling point. But no, she

(23:09):
didn't think that was gonna work. That was a poor
calculation on their part. The closest thing that Taylor ever
got to a lecture tour was a series of engagements
appearing in department store windows where she would pose with
her barrel, and then Frank Russell disappeared, taking that barrel
with him. She found a new manager who hired a

(23:31):
younger woman to impersonate her. Taylor never got her barrel back,
even after borrowing money to hire a private investigator to
go look for it. Eventually, she had a replica barrel
made and went back to Niagara Falls, where she tried
to make ends meet by posing with this replica barrel
on the sidewalk and selling postcards. She also wrote a

(23:53):
brief autobiography in two we have quoted from it. It's
probably embellished, especially in some of the places we didn't
quote from, so for example, it took a lot of
guts to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. But
she also said that while being robbed at gunpoint, she
looked at a robber who had a gun to her
head and said, quote, blow away. I would as soon

(24:14):
be without brains as without money, And that as a result,
is Robert let her live. That just seems like an
unbelievable presence of mind in the middle of an armed robbery.
But maybe that's just me. Yeah, yeah, I don't know.
I mean, to me, it seems impossible. I couldn't pull
that off. But I also would have said a whole
lot of expletives when I came out of a barrel,

(24:35):
So I clearly I am not of a mind to
handle either of these things in the commonest of manners.
Annie Edson Taylor spent her last year's at the Niagara
County Almshouse, and she died on April at the age
of eighty three. She is buried at Oakwood Cemetery in
Niagara Falls, New York, in an area called Stranger's Rest,

(24:58):
which is the burial site of an number of Niagara Daredevils.
After Annie Edson Taylor survived her trip over Niagara Falls,
She's reported to have said, no one ought to ever
do that again, or, to be even more direct, quote,
I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a
cannon knowing it was going to blow me to pieces
than make another trip over the falls. You know. She

(25:21):
just seems like maybe she had like a way with words.
But in spite of these warnings, she did start something
of a trend. In addition to people who have been
swept over the falls by accident or have intentionally gone
over without intending to survive, at least sixteen people have
tried going over the falls in a barrel or some

(25:42):
other kind of barrel like device since Annie Edson Taylor
did it. Eleven of those people have survived. The next
person after Taylor was Bobby Leach. He went over the
falls on July eleven, so not quite ten years later.
Before his trip over the falls and a steel barrel,
he had formed with Barnamon Bailey's Circus as a diver

(26:02):
and a stunt swimmer. He did this stunt as part
of a much hyped triple challenge that also involved him
parachuting off the upper suspension bridge at Niagara and going
through the whirlpool in a barrel. He broke several bones
and as he was going over the falls, and then
after he recovered, he went on a speaking tour of
the United States in Europe with his barrel. He was

(26:25):
on a four month speaking tour of New Zealand when
he slipped on an orange peel, broke his leg and
died of complications of gangering on a So while he
did have more of a career in showmanship than Andy's
ads and Taylor did, this is definitely a case of
like him doing something she had done ten years before,

(26:45):
but becoming famous for it in a way she had
not been able to do. Yeah, he kind of had
exactly the career she had hoped for right up until
that orange peel incident. Yeah. Also, don't go over Niagara
in a barrel. It's dangerous and illegal. We're advocating going
over Niagara in a barrel. Just I mean, I again, clearly,

(27:06):
I am not a daredevil in my heart, but I
just don't get it. Sit in a nice restaurant nearby
and watch the falls and eat. That's what we did
at Niagara Falls. After walking around Niagara Falls, we had
a wonderful lunch at a lovely restaurant where we sat
there and watched the falls while we ate. That sounds great.
Would you want to give great? It was great? Do

(27:30):
you have some great listener mail? I do. This listener
mail is from Jessica, and Jessica says, Hi, Holly and Tracy,
Happy first day of summer. So this was sent on
the first day of summer. Thank you for your work
on the podcast. It helps me get through my daily commute. Here.
I've been a long time listener, but never written in
I just finished the latest podcast, Six Impossible Episodes, Evacuating Children,

(27:53):
and thought you would like to know about a connection
to a piece of nineties animation, given Holly's interest in
anime and history. In this section on Operation Baby Lift,
my ears parked up as it was one of the
few evacuations I could picture in my mind's I thanks
to the animated cartoon Hey Arnold. This seems like an
odd connection since Hey Arnold is a children's cartoons centered

(28:15):
around kids growing up in the nineties. An Operation Baby
Lift was an evacuation in the nineties seventies Vietnam, but
in a heartwarming and tear jerking episode of the cartoon,
one of the tenants in the boarding house, which the
titular character, Arnold, lives in with his grandparents, tells the
story of how he was separated from his daughter during
the Vietnam War when he put her on a helicopter

(28:38):
to evacuate to America. The story of how the character
Mr Wynn made the decision to flee the country and
eventually be separated from her in order to save her
life is told through a flashback to the war. The
show goes on to demonstrate the pain felt by parents
who were separated from their children during these types of
evacuations and the difficulty in trying to find them once

(28:58):
the conflict has ended. Mr Wynn spent twenty years making
his way to America and desperately searching in a foreign
city for his child uh. In the end spoiler alert,
Mr Wynn is reunited with his daughter thanks to one
of the other child characters, and there is a tear
inducing happy ending. I've attached a link to the clip
for your viewing pleasure. I want to say, I watched

(29:22):
this clip this morning at my desk, and I was
glad to be alone because then I was crying. Got
this cartoon that I had never seen before in my life,
and knew nothing about until this moment. Jessica goes on
to say, obviously they don't call out the country or
the name of the evacuation, but it was clear from
the context clues what conflict they were discussing. As someone

(29:42):
born well after the Vietnam War, the stories from that
time come mostly from popular media and hardly ever deal
with the impact and the people who were on the
Vietnam side. This clip is stuck with me for many
years is how devastating decisions and sacrifices people have to
make in order to give their families a better life.
The show doesn't go on to examine the relationship between

(30:03):
Mr Wynne and his daughter or explained the type of
foster family she would have been placed with, but I
thought it was an interesting look into something not often
talked about. I thought you would enjoy this odd connection
and the deeply moving way in which a children's show
can help educate on some of the harshest moments in
our history. Keep up the great podcasting cheers, Jessica. Jessica
was one of our listeners who wrote to us from Canada,

(30:23):
which was very exciting. I, like I said, had never
even really I had never watched any of this show ever.
It was barely even in my consciousness as a show
that existed. And when I first saw children's show having
something to do with Operation Baby Left, my first gut
impulse was like, oh, you were picturing Grave of the Fireflies.

(30:45):
Weren't you like something like pain? No? I was, I was, Um,
I was picturing something more like a Pooh from The
Simpsons does social commentary. Um. But you know, it's then
I looked into a little bit more and it seems
like that character is a little bit more fleshed out

(31:08):
in some cases. Um. And at least based on one
of the blogs by a Vietnamese person that I read
this morning as I was learning about this episode and
this character and this show. So that is definitely fascinating.
Thank you for writing and sending that in uh if
you would like to write to us about this or

(31:28):
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dot com. We are also on social media as missed
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(31:53):
podcasts and whatever else you used to listen to podcasts.
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