Babushka Lady

Despite all the publicity surrounding the shooting of John F. Kennedy, the identity of one witness has remained elusive for decades. Beverly Oliver has claimed to be the "babushka lady," but there's still no concrete evidence to prove her assertion.

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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 and I'm Tracy Wilson, and we're coming up on
the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, which is an

(00:21):
event that is often referenced as a pretty pivotal moment
in American history, and it has spawned certainly endless debate
about conspiracies and cover ups and what actually happened. And
there are an endless array of websites to visit if
you love digging into the conspiracy angle. I don't know
about Tracy. I know I myself have never really been like,
I'm fascinated by it, But I'm not one of those
people that's really obsessed with the whole thing. When I

(00:42):
was a kid, I was really into all kinds of
like the true crime kind of conspiracy. Were kids love
a question mark? Yeah, I love a not certain angle. Yeah.
I remember like plowing through my grandmother's time life books,
kinds and subjects along this line. Yeah. I mean. Uh.
Even though there have been at various points on the

(01:04):
curve uh statements that no, no, this was solved, a
lot of people don't believe those statements um or don't
adhere to that motive thinking. And so, I mean it's
a huge, huge topic, and today we're actually just going
to talk about the assassination itself on a pretty fairly
basic level. We're not going to include all of the

(01:25):
many facets. We couldn't even begin to dig through all
of that and all of the pro and anti conspiracy
evidence in one podcast. I mean, that could be a
series and has been for some people. Uh, But our
focus today is on one of the witnesses to the assassination,
and it is a person who remains rather shrouded in
mystery even fifty years later. Yeah, it's kind of incredible

(01:47):
to me that that there can have been someone obviously
present at so high profile and events and we're still
not sure what the story is there. Um So first
we're going to talk about the assassination just in brief,
in terms of like broad stroke will hit some detail points,
kind of a refresher for people who are steeped in
American history and for our many listeners who are from elsewhere, yeah,

(02:11):
or even you know, younger listeners and maybe haven't gotten
to this yet. Uh. And it's like I said, it's
a basic rundown. It's by no means comprehensive. We've really
paired this down to the elements and details of the
event that are most relevant to today's topic. So, on
November twenty two of nineteen sixty three, US President John F.

(02:31):
Kennedy's presidential motorcade was Indeley Plaza in Dallas, Texas, en
route to a sold out luncheon at the Trademark where
the President was to speak, and he was in that
motorcade when he was fatally shot at about twelve thirty.
About forty five minutes after the shooting, Dallas Police patrolman J. D.
Tippett stopped twenty four year old X Marine Lee Harvey

(02:54):
Oswald to question him. Oswald fit was basic description of
the suspect that the police had been given, and Oswald
shot and killed him uh At two fifteen. Oswald was
then arrested for the shooting of officer Tippett. He was
apprehended in a theater where he had fled after the shooting,
and at seven fifteen PM, Oswald was arraigned for Tippet's murder.

(03:17):
And it actually wasn't until after midnight. At one thirty am,
on what was now November twenty three of nineteen sixty three,
that Oswald was arraigned for the murder of JFK. They
hadn't determined that he was their suspect until he had
already been in custody for killing a police officer. While
Oswald was being transferred from the city jail to the
county jail on November four, nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot

(03:41):
and killed the suspect. Ruby's indictment for Oswald's murder was
two days later on November twenty six, and he was
found guilty and sentenced to death on March fourteenth of
nineteen sixty four. Jack Ruby ended up dying of cancer
in nineteen sixty seven while he was awaiting new trial
after an appeal of the conviction. So that's the very

(04:01):
short version, in a nutshell, the assassination. There are certainly many, many, many,
many more details that we could go into, and resources
and lots of videos people can watch online. Um As
many people probably know, Jack Ruby shooting Oswald actually happened
on live television, so there is footage of it all

(04:25):
over the internet. It's not particularly grizsly, thankfully if you're
sensitive to that, but it is still unsettling to kind
of see that all unfold in a very chaotic It's
a little frightening obviously. Um So it's out there if
you're interested in in more details. Immediately after the shooting
of JFK, investigators, of course began questioning bystanders, anyone who

(04:49):
could have witnessed what had happened, anyone who had taken
photos or shot film, anyone who could provide any clues
as to who had shot the president uh photograph. Some
films that were taken by witnesses were developed and analyzed
by the authorities, so it became clear and all of
this that one of these witnesses had never been identified.
She's in the famous Abraham's A Pruder film as well

(05:12):
as other films and photographs. That famous film we talked
about in our Yeah. Louise Hoarez is one of the
scientists who evaluated that film to try to figure out
exactly what had happened. And this woman in question, UH
was wearing a brown trench coat in a headscarf, and
she filmed the motorcade as it passed down Elm Street,

(05:33):
and unlike other spectators, she didn't run when the shots
were fired. She kept filming, so she has some additional
footage from a unique angle that people might not have
otherwise seen. Uh. And then after that, after the shooting
had happened, she moved across the street, crossing Elm towards
the famous Grassy Knoll, along with a lot of other

(05:53):
people that were in the crowd. Uh. Some have speculated
that the crowd was sort of looking for who the
shooter had been, but if you look at it, there's
also a little bit of it seems like they're just
confused and looking around in general, like they're not even
quite sure how to process what's just happened. So, because
of her location on the south side of Elm Street
during the assassination, the film that this Mystery Woman shot

(06:17):
would have been almost a mirror to the prud footage,
and it is worth noting that she was not the
only person shooting from this angle. An a c engineer
named Orville Nix also captured the event on film from
the south side of Elm, but her vantage point also
would have included the book depository where Lee Harvey Oswald
shot from. And because of the triangular head scarf she

(06:40):
was wearing that day, which is similar to those often
associated with elderly Russian ladies. She became known as the
Babushka Lady, and her identity has been hotly debated, actually
for decades. The search for Babushka Lady includes a possible imposter,
allegations of a cover up, of course uh, and a
lot of fierce debate. But for several years after the shooting,

(07:02):
no one had any idea who this woman could be.
And before we get to the only person who's really
claimed to be her, So let's get back to the
bush Lady. So, as Tracy had said right before the break,
for many years after the shooting, no one knew who
this woman was. But in nineteen seventy that all began
to change. A woman emerged to claim the identity of

(07:25):
Baboushka Lady, and that woman was named Beverly Oliver. In
an interview with Jay gary Shaw, who is a researcher
and a writer of several books about the assassination, including
one called cover Up, The Governmental Conspiracy to Conceal the
fact about the public execution of John Kennedy, Oliver had
said that she had been there on Elm Street the
day of the shooting, and she had met Shaw by

(07:47):
chance and mentioned that she had witnessed the assassination, and
apparently he sort of felt like he had accidentally stumbled
upon this gold mine because people had been wondering who
that person was, and she just off handedly said, oh, yeah,
I was there, and he was, wait, are you this person?
And this raises quite a number of really important questions,
like who was this woman and why hadn't she been

(08:08):
silent for so long? And also why now? Yeah? So, uh,
you know she does She did mention off handedly in
that meeting, allegedly that she just didn't want it to
be a big public thing. Uh. But one of the
other things that's problematic is that some of the aspects
of her life caused people to question her credibility a
little bit. She had been a singer and a dancer,

(08:31):
though she is pretty adamant not a stripper, at a
Dallas burlesque club called the Colony Club from roughly one
and nineteen sixties six. A lot of sources you'll see
will say that she was working at the club in
sixty three, but she said in subsequent interviews that she
worked there until she was married in sixty six, and
she had worked there four and a half to five years.
So that's why we do the sixty one to sixty

(08:52):
six range. Uh. And the important thing is that the
Colony Club was right next to the Carousel Club, and
the Carousel Club was owned by Jack Ruby. Beverly Oliver
claimed to have been close with Jack Ruby and that
she had worked for him occasionally on a freelance basis,
not in his club as a normal performer, but as
a hostess and a cocktail mixer for after hours parties.

(09:13):
And she described the Carousel Club as rather sleezy in
comparison to her main place of business, which was the
Colony Club. Beverly Oliver was married briefly to George McGann,
who was also associated with the mafia and was murdered
in ninety so, which is another reason people kind of
don't give her a lot of credit. Um, you know,

(09:34):
she she does have a little bit of seediness in
her past. Yeah. These all feel like things that like
a defense attorney would be using to try to undermine
someone's credibility. Do you watch a lot of procedurals on television? Yeah.
And Oliver would have been seventeen at the time of
the assassination, and uh, in one of the questions of
like why didn't you come forward, she says that she did,

(09:54):
in fact walk across the street to the Grassy Knoll
after the shooting along with others because she had seen
official looking people there and she expected to be questioned,
but no one approached her, so she left. So it's
a little bit of a shrugger at that point, kind
of like, yeah, all right, you didn't approach them, or yeah,
that was my question. But I also can't claim that

(10:15):
I wouldn't know the mindset of a person who had
just witnessed that horrific event. I'm sure there's a little
bit of shock involved, so I don't know how a
normal a quote normal person would react. Just part of
the mystery. So according to Oliver, it wasn't until three
days later on November when she finally went back to
work at the Colony Club and then that she was questioned.

(10:36):
She described two men with FBI credentials waiting for her
at the club and they asked about her film from
the day of the shooting. She said she had it
in her makeup bag and turned it over to these
two men, and she asserts that one of them told her, well,
we want to take the film and develop it and
look at it for evidence, and we'll get back to
you in a few days. Then she said that no

(10:58):
one has seen the film since According to Oliver and
conspiracy researcher Gary Shaw, all government offices deny ever having
had possession of this film and it's never surfaced anywhere. Yeah,
and this particular story of how her film was taken
is one that people point to, uh and kind of
pick apart because it's shifted a little. There have been

(11:21):
times when it has been suggested that it was two
FBI agents and others where she's not sure if they
were both FBI, and Uh, there has been some speculation
that there were people walking around with fake credentials trying
to do potentially seedy things or cover up ethings. Uh.
So we don't really know. Uh. And the film sort
of being m I A it doesn't help matters. No,

(11:45):
But there are additional problems with her story. Uh. She
made several claims that really turned out to be a
little bit problematic. Yeah. Number One, nobody else has been
able to corroborate her claim that she was actually at
Dealy Plaza on the day of the shooting and at
the same time. No one has been able to place
her anywhere else either. Yeah, she doesn't have anybody that

(12:06):
could say I was with her or I knew she
was at place X, Y or Z, So it's really
just her word as to where she was. She also
asserted at one point that she had chosen a spot
near a man and his son on Elm Street in
anticipation in the motorcade passing by, and if you see
photos from that day, there is a man and a
young boy. However, that man, who was identified as Charles Brim,

(12:28):
had mentioned in an interview that he and his son
had first seen the motorcade at the corner of Maine
in Houston, and that they had then run over to
Elm just in time to see the motorcade passed by again,
So he couldn't have been standing there beforehand when she
said she took up her position near this family. Um.

(12:49):
There have been people that have said, like, this is
obviously a case of someone looking at a photograph and
then putting together a story based on what they see,
and that she's saying, no, no, I took it and
stood near these people when they weren't there to be
stood next to you prior to the event happening, right. Well,
then there's also the question of would you actually remember

(13:09):
that piece of it. I don't know. I don't really knew.
So then we get to the part where Oliver claimed
to have used a Yeshika Super eight zoom camera, but
that did not exist at the time of the assassination.
She's talked about this several times and tried to address
this as a criticism. Will kind of get into that

(13:30):
in just a minute, but her detractors have never found
her explanations for this to be very satisfactory. Uh yeah.
Oliver then later identified one of the men who she
said took her film as agent Redid Kennedy, who was
in fact an FBI agent, but Kennedy was actually in
New Orleans on the day that she claims he came

(13:52):
to the club. She also said that about two weeks
before the shooting, Jack Ruby introduced her to Lee Harvey
Oswald at the Carousel Club, referring to him as my
friend Lee Oswald of the CIA, which I'm not really
standard operating procedure for people who are supposed to be

(14:13):
operating in secret. Too, announced that fact to other people
and then be introduced that way. Yeah, Hi, my name
is Lee. I'm a CIA spook. Well, like I I
remember what a huge, huge deal that the Valerie plane
scandal was. Um, it was an enormous thing. Yeah, to

(14:34):
have leaked that information my understanding. I'm not in the CIA,
don't know. But my understanding is that you don't really
go around blabbing about it. There's usually a back a
secondary backstory to what your job is that it gets told.
But again, I'm not in it, I don't know. Oliver
also said that Janet Confordo, who was a dancer at

(14:55):
the Carousel Club she went under the stage name of Jada,
had witnessed grew Be introducing Lee Harvey Oswald to Beverly Oliver,
but Conforto had given interviews shortly after the events immediately
surrounding the assassination, and she had explicitly stated that she
had never seen Oswald at the club. So once again
her Beverly Oliver's account really contradicts what other people were saying. Yeah,

(15:20):
and then we get to the physical nature of what
Beverly Oliver looked like. The stature of the Baboushkal lady
compared to what Beverly Oliver looked like at age seventeen.
They don't quite match up. There even debates over whether
different images that people have claimed are the Baboosh Glady
are all the same woman. But the images mostly appeared

(15:41):
to be somebody with a thicker build than Oliver had
at that age. Yeah, most of them. She looks like
more like a middle aged woman that's a little bit heavier. Um,
whereas Beverly Oliver was a dancer and very fit. Uh
And in pictures and films from that time of Beverly Oliver,
you can see that she's a very lean well men,
So there's that. However, there's also the fact that the

(16:03):
woman was wearing a trench coat, so it obscures the figure.
It's not always clear. Well, and I know I have
a couple of coats that I put on and go wow,
this makes me look that's no, ma'am. And Tracy is
a lean girl. Uh So there are other discrepancies, and
they've all been analyzed and picked apart and supported and
refuted and argued over by Beverly believers and Beverly detractors.

(16:28):
Uh And before we get to the next bit about
how this really affected Beverly Oliver, we're gonna take a
brief moment, So back to Beverly Oliver. In an interview
with mobile Alabama paper The Harbinger in May, Beverly Oliver
mentioned how frustrating it was that people didn't believe her,

(16:49):
and she also asserted that Dan Rather, who's the only
member of the press who was allowed to see the
Zapruter footage early on, was part of the cover up
and that his career skyrocketed in aims for his involvement
in perpetuating this deception to the American people. Yeah, that
whole interview. I mean, it's with like a smaller paper,
but she really kind of comes off as she feels

(17:11):
very victimized by all of this, that there is a
cover up and that she particularly has been purposely discredited
because she somehow, you know, has this information like about
Lee Harvey Oswald knowing Jack Ruby and being in the CIA,
and that it's kind of all been a smear campaign.
And the reason that she points to for saying that
Dan Rather was part of this cover up is that

(17:32):
after seeing the footage for the first time, Rather described
what he had seen live on television and it's not
entirely accurate to what's actually in the film and in
his book that Cameron never blinks. He actually mentions these
inaccuracy of his account as being the result of relaying
rather shocking information. Uh. He has you know, he's still

(17:52):
in shock from the president being shot. He is seeing
this horrifying footage of the president being shot. He then
had to run several blocks she uh, do the broadcast
and relay this information, and he was doing it without
any notes. So he says it's just one of those
things where he did his best, but there are problems
with it, whereas all of our points to the discrepancy

(18:13):
and says he was clearly lying. Did you notice how
good his career got after that? It's all a cover up.
Also in this same interview, she was asked about Gerald
Posner's book Case Closed, in which he discredits her whole
story on the basis that it changed and that she
claimed to have used a camera that didn't exist in
nineteen sixty three. Uh, and her assertion that she was

(18:35):
introduced to Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby, and that
Ruby introduced Oswald as being with the CIA. So he
pretty much discredited her whole thing based on these definitely
problematic uh, pieces of her story. Yeah, and I'm going
to read a chunk. It's kind of longish, but it's

(18:56):
her response and it just kind of gives you interesting
insight into you, uh, kind of how she has been
dealing with these things as they've come up. One she
said that she never actually read General Posner's book. Uh,
and the interviewer in this uh this article where they
do the interview, actually reads her sections of it. This

(19:17):
is her response. She says, Well, first of all, I
would like for him to tell me how my story
has ever changed. It has never changed. I never said
that I used to super eight camera that came from
a man named Gary Shaw in a book that he
wrote called The Cover Up. I might have said to him,
and this was seventy super eight meaning eight millimeter. All
I know is that it was a prototype camera that

(19:38):
a man I was dating, who worked for Eastman Kodak
by the name of Lawrence Taylor Ronco Jr. Gave me
as a present the September before the President was killed
in November, a brand new camera, a magazine load and
I had to send these little envelopes to Rochester to
be developed. That's all I know about the camera. And
it was a Yeshika. When this came out about the camera,
I called Yeshika New York and spoke to John Start.

(20:00):
I don't know what his position was. He was very
excited to do research on the camera. Posner is right
that camera was not available to the general public in
nineteen sixty three, but it does not mean that I
could not have had a prototype camera of it. I'm
not saying it was super eight. I don't know what
it was. He also made a statement, and I have
it in writing in talking to his supervisors and people
of that time, that they felt like, probably if I

(20:22):
had used the word super eight in an interview, it's
like people going today to get something xerox. After they
came out, they just became the nomenclature for any kind
of an eight millimeter camera. She's so tired of talking
about that camera. I can tell um, Yeah, she's UM.
I mean, I can appreciate. I don't know if her

(20:45):
story is true or not. If it is, I can
only imagine how frustrating it would be to have people go,
I don't believe you, I don't believe you. I don't
believe you. But at the same time, there's a lot
of convenient mulessness in the details. And at this point
it's been so far back, and there was time in
between different interviews. I don't I don't know that it
can never be sorted through. In two thousand three, forty

(21:07):
years after the Kennedy assassination, ABC News published polling results
that found that seven and ten of the Americans polled
believed that the killing of John F. Kennedy was a plot,
although they had varying degrees of conviction. Some were sure,
some we're pretty sure, somewhere I think probably. Yeah, So

(21:27):
all of those got counted in the seven out of ten. Yeah,
so a plot and not the work of just a
loan shooter. Of of those people, scent believed also that
there had been a government cover up. Only thirty two
percent of the people polled accepted the nineteen sixty four
findings of the Warren Commission UH that determined that Lee

(21:48):
Harvey Oswald had acted alone. And at the end of
the interview that we were talking about earlier in with
reporter Gary James, James asked Oliver if she had had
any regrets, and in response, she said, I'll tell you
there are two things in my lifetime I would change
if I could. One of them would be I would
not have been on the Grassy Knoll in November twenty.

(22:11):
The second thing is I would never have opened my mouth. However,
she has gone on to kind of make a career
out of being the Baboushka lady um In. She worked
with writer Coke Buchanan and wrote a book about her
story called Nightmare in Dallas, and she still makes public
appearances as the Baboushka Lady. Yes, she did one, I
don't remember where it was, but last month she appeared

(22:34):
coming to this part of a lead up to the
anniversary so act when yeah, uh and literally, I just
want to point out once again every person mentioned in
this discussion that we've had today has been called into
question in terms of truthfulness and credibility, as has almost
anyone who has touched the story, made a documentary, you know,

(22:55):
written a blog post on the internet. Uh. It's tricky too.
It's a tricky thing to want to talk about, I
think because if you do, the second you have an opinion,
there is already going to be a herd of people
that want to disagree with you and argue it. So
it's It's a dynamic that's constantly kind of adversarial, which
is pretty fascinating. It's everyone trying to discredit everyone all

(23:19):
the time about everything related to the assassination of John F.
Kennedy and her testimony before the United States of America
Assassination Records Review Board in November, she concluded her testimony
with the following statement. She says, but I would like
to make one statement to you and to anybody else
who is interested. When all the pictures or all the

(23:41):
pieces of this puzzle is put together, and I have
faith enough in my government and in my country to
believe that eventually it will all be it will be
all out, all of it will be given to the
researchers and the research community, unredacted, unedited, undamaged in any manner.
And whenever this is all put together and we really
have the honest pick sure of what happened that day,
no one more than Beverly Oliver hopes I have to

(24:04):
stand up to America and apologize. I'm not sure what
that means. That left me scratching my head, and it's
one of those things that I was surprised. I mean,
I granted him, not like surfing all of the various
conspiracy theory boards and the various historical analysis boards that
people really do deep dives on a lot of this,
but it's not something that comes up very often in

(24:24):
most of like the writing about her. And it's such
an odd statement that I yeah, it's a really odd
statement because it was a testimony before this review board.
Presumably it was given extemporaneously, right, Yeah, you and I
both know from doing this podcast sometimes when we are

(24:44):
speaking extemporaneously, ridiculous things that make no sense come out
of our mouth. Uh. But at the same time, the
part about no one more than Beverly Oliver hopes I
have to stand up to America and apologize, it just
rings odd. It's really strange. I mean, it follows this
questioning about the discrepancy of her camera model description, but

(25:07):
it's unclear whether she means like she wants to apologize
about saying the wrong things about the camera or just
in general, which seems like that doesn't make sense in
the context of all of this unredacted. Uh, you know,
pieces of the puzzle that she hopes magically all come

(25:29):
together at some point. It's just it opens up like
a whole new can of worms. For It's like, Beverly,
what are you talking about? What are you apologizing for?
But I don't know, you know, will we ever know
the true identity of Babushka Lady. There's no telling. There
are so many crazy theories. But I shouldn't say they're
crazy their theories. We don't know what's true. Well, it's
the big question of if it isn't Beverly Oliver, then

(25:51):
who is it? Yeah? You know, is it just a
random person who somehow was in such a media blackout
that they didn't see or hear any of the many
requests for all witnesses to come forward, and anyone who
had taken film, Uh, some someone who had some clear
reason not to want to meet questions. Yeah, there have

(26:13):
even been people that have theorized that, in fact, Babusha
Lady was part of the whole thing. Uh, you know,
why didn't she run away and stop filming when this
all happened? Why did she keep filming, you know, seemingly
very calmly. Why did she know ahead of time what
was going on? Well, and the preter similarly kept filming. Yeah,
although he was much further away, she was quite close

(26:35):
to the street. Um. But yeah, there's lots of questions
and she's I will say this to that. Beverly Oliver
is not the only witness whose account has been questioned,
um and picked apart and kind of discredited, although she
is the only one that kind of emerged from a

(26:56):
cloud of not knowing who this person was after many
years well, and is a growing body of scientific study
examining how I witness. Yeah, eye witness testimony is often
vastly inaccurate. Yeah, I mean, and that's shown, like I said,
in some of the other accounts of that day by eyewitnesses.
I forget the name of the woman who um. At

(27:18):
one point, I think it was that same day she
gave an interview where she was talking about a dog
in the road and there was no dog in the road,
and so you know, some people have used that to discreditor,
but others have said basically what you say, that eyewitnesses
don't always clearly remember what's happened, especially at a very
sort of watershed shocking event. Beverley Oliver has even said

(27:40):
at various times that she didn't really remember a lot
of that day and she only came to these memories
under hypnosis. Which has made other people kind of I mean,
that's the whole other thing. So we may never know
the truth. And I feel like the further and further
we get away from that day, I mean, we're fifty
years out now, the less and less likely we will

(28:00):
ever know. Well, and it's at this point but Busha
Lady could be deceased. Yeah, we don't know. Well, it's
we're fifty years out now. At this point, we have
like an official version of the story that has been
official for quite some time, although it's been questioned by
other officials, but it's also been so deeply screwed. May

(28:22):
I think maybe more deeply scrutinized and more persistently scrutinized
than any other event in modern American history. Yeah, I mean,
I think in the modern equivalent is sort of nine
eleven and fifty years after that. It'll be very interesting
to be able to compare that and what's going on
in terms of investigation and questioning still, because I'm sure
it will still be happening to this at its fifty

(28:44):
year mark, and where will we be. And unfortunately, because
you know, so many of the players in the JFK
assassination were dead within you know, a short period of time,
we can't ever question them. Uh so maybe for ever
probably uh But in the meantime we'll switch gears. Because

(29:05):
I have some really fun listener mail. Please read it.
I will. It made me laugh so hard. This actually
came to us via Facebook and it's from our listener,
Amanda Uh and it is in response to our Haunted
Mansion episode. She says, I never felt I had anything
outstanding to tell you about, but after listening to your
recent podcast on the history of the Haunted Mansion, I
knew I had something unique to contribute. Em boy does

(29:26):
she it's so fun. She says. My grandpa's best friend SI,
and one of those family friends that are just known
as my uncle. SI was the head of sanitation for
Disneyland in the early years. This was a really important
job because Mrs Disney stipulated that the park had to
be immaculate, unlike the other fairs and parks at the time.
So SI was interested with a very big job and

(29:47):
would tell us cool stories about the early years of
the park. So when I listen to your podcast on
the Haunted Mansion and how the creators had played pranks
on the cleanup crew. I had to giggle because I
had heard that story before, but from the jan Dur's perspective,
and how so I had to defend his poor staff
even though he knew it was just in good fun. Okay,
I love that so much because you never hear that

(30:08):
ankle like we always hear the worldly crumb story about
how you know they got the note about how you
couldn't you would have to clean up your own space.
But when you think about it from the janitors side,
like just trying to protect his people from these shocking
and scary moments, let's see it, and she says, I
wanted to leave you with my favorite story he ever told. Though.
So back in the very beginning of the Parks creation,

(30:30):
when things were pretty secretive about what was happening there,
my uncle Si would do all kinds of odd jobs
for the company to get everything set up, and I
was always told that he needed to keep a low
profile on what he was doing. One of these jobs
did not go as planned, so I was trusted to
move some of the animatronic animals for the Jungle Cruise
from the studio where they were created to their new
home and adventure Land. So siloeded the animals into a

(30:52):
big truck and covered the top and sides of the
tarps so no one could see through the slats of
the truck. But as he was driving along the highway,
the tart aim unhinged and everyone could see the tigers, elephants,
and giraffes all piled up in his truck together. The
people driving along next to him and passers by gave
him very confused and concerned looks. One man seemed to
fear for size life and shouted to him that he

(31:13):
was a tiger in his truck, that there was a
tiger in his truck. So I just replied, it's okay,
I know. The man turned white, so I just laughed.
I hope this gives you a little more insight into
the park development, and I hope to hear more great
stuff from his troop in the podcast. I love that
it's so fun. Yeah, And I have to say I
love the janitorial staff at Disneyland specifically. And here's why.

(31:35):
Tell me, because when you run a race at Disneyland,
which I do a lot, the janitorial staff will put
up these huge banners when you're running through the backstage
area that say, let's say like things like Disneyland Sanitation
cheers you and they are all out there, like you know,
six in the morning, cheering for strangers, reading your name
off your bibb and clapping and they're all just so awesome.

(31:57):
They'll high five everybody as you go by, like they
just a great group of people. Holly is tearing up.
I love It's one of my favorite parts. Whenever I
do a race there. That's always like when I know
I'm coming around that corner to the sanitation office, I'm
always like, I love this pool because it's always really fun.
They're strangers who'd treat you like family well, and I'm glad.
Uncle Slide was a good boss who wanted, you know,

(32:19):
to protect his crew from undue stress, and his legacy
is that their sanitation department is still awesome. Love it.
If you want to write to us stories that will
make me miss the od and we'd be in a
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at facebook dot com, slash history class stuff on Twitter

(32:41):
at Misston History and at Miston History dot tumbler dot com.
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(33:03):
the events of that day. Well, and by the time
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It's about JFK conspiracy theories fantastic, So if you want
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is auto website, which is houst works dot com for

(33:24):
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