July 28, 2018 • 32 mins
The Cannon Ball Run is a cross-country car race famously portrayed in the campy 1981 movie "Cannon Ball Run." But it isn't fictional. Tune in as Josh and Chuck take you on a wild ride through the real (and colorful) history of this infamous race.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, everybody. Chuck here for another Saturday Stuff you Should
Know Selects edition. This week I picked How the Cannonball
Run Worked. October two thousand nine. This was a fun one,
The Cannonball Run. We certainly talked about the movie and
the sequel. It was one of my fabes growing up,
but it was based on a real race. The Cannonball
(00:20):
Run is, or was, Jeez and name sure still going on.
This has been a while since we recorded this one.
It is a a road race, a cross country road
race that seems too strange to be true that people
would actually get in their cars in the United States
and drive super fast and elude the cops all across
the country in order to win. I don't even know
(00:43):
if there was money involved, a trophy Bert Reynolds mustache.
Only you can find out by listening to how the
Cannonball Run worked. Right here, right now, Welcome to Stuff
you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
(01:05):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me
as always is our good friend Charles W. Chuck Bryant,
Are you Chuck, your good friend? How are you feeling
right now? I'm find a lot. I'm sitting yeah, Chuck
is right red right now. Everybody, it's kind of weird looking.
Thank you Martin for that are super fan and Seattle,
thank you. But he's not a superman. He's a buddy.
(01:27):
He has be He was such a fan that he
actually became a friend. He's a friend that we haven't
met yet. Yeah, so Chuck, take us back to one
in the time machine. Yes, the way back machine. You're ready,
Here we go. Okay, all right, Josh, I'm ten years old,
knee high to a grasshopper. Disco is dead. Margaret Thatcher
(01:48):
is the Prime Minister of England. I take issue with
the disco being deadline. I don't know that disco ever died. Man,
you cannot make the argument that all modern R and
B pop soul is all disco. Doco is alive. Margaret
Thatcher is the Prime Minister of England. Ronald Reagan is
in office. Just as Jimmy Carter has exited. Walter Cronkite
(02:09):
resigned from the CBS Evening News desk. That was the
said day the first AIDS case was made public in California.
Have you ever seen in the band played on? My
brother worked on that. That was a great made for
TV movie. It really was. It was really good and
he had a great experience working on that. So find
people in that movie. Major League Baseball has just gone
on strike in the summer for what will be the
(02:31):
first of eighty times over the next five years. Right,
so America is depressed, but not for long, No, because
one Mr Burt Reynolds is about to dash across the
silver screen in a little movie called Cannonball Run. Great, great,
great movie. It was a great movie. I haven't seen
it in forever. I think I probably saw it in
like n seven. It was one of the first movies
(02:53):
we rented, along with Beverly Hills, Cop, very hockey and
corny but still beloved. What's What's Yeah, everyone takes it
as a comedy because it is a comedy. But this
is not to say that it started out as a comedy. Actually,
it was supposed to be serious and Burt Reynolds part
was originally written for Steve McQueen, who died before he
could film the movie. Sadly, it was supposed to be
(03:16):
a serious movie and it didn't turn out that way.
Why would anybody want the Cannonball rutten to be a
serious movie? Well, because it was in fact based on
a real race. What what true? Based on a real race?
As you know? Yeah, I I do know after reading
this article. I think I had heard that before, but
I had no idea the details. I didn't either until
(03:37):
I wrote it. This was really amazing, Like I have.
I'm just gonna come out and say, I have a
man crush on a seventy year old Mr brock Yates.
He's a cool dude who I would have loved to
have hung out with. I bet he's still a very
cool dude and hung out with in a strictly platonic sense. Yeah,
maybe a little makeing out, but aside from that, Yeah,
(03:58):
I bet he's still away cool guy. I get that
impression he is. He Um, this is this is kind
of what I gathered about brock Yates from researching this
and reading your article. Go and say who he is.
He was a pretty much the premier automotive journalist of
his Age magazine. Eventually. Yeah, but I think he started
(04:19):
out as a journalist and something of a gonzo journalist.
I take it, um, but yeah, he he was very
well known and respected in the field. Um, and in
the early nineteen seventies America was at a fork in
the road, if you will, so to speak, and brock
Yates represented one direction and that was the out, just go,
(04:41):
and if you die, that was your number was up.
Kind of mentality behind the wheel that is, yeah, you know,
damn the torpedoes full steam ahead. Right on the other
side of the road. At on the other side of
the fork was a guy named Ralph Nader who was
still there on that other fork. He is, um he
(05:02):
for those of you who don't know who Ralph Naders.
He's run for president a couple of times. Um. He
got George Bush elected in two thousand four. Yeah. Um.
But he's also a very dedicated consumer watchawt. He has
for many years lived in a tiny, little one room apartment.
He uses a hot plate. Um. He just he lives
his very meager life so no one can say you're
(05:23):
corrupt because he goes after everybody else. And in the
nineteen seventies, in the early nineteen seventies, he was going
after the automotive industry, right he went after He wrote
this book called Unsafe at Any Speed and it was
basically about have you read it? I've read parts of
it through research and stuff. Yeah, Okay, um so, you
(05:43):
know then it was basically about how the automotive industry
was producing these incredibly dangerous vehicles right and at the time,
we didn't really have much of a speed limit. So uh,
as a as a result of his book, we like
seatbelts became mandatory, new safety design had to be instituted
by car manufacturer's a big deal. Um So, America's at
(06:03):
this fork in the road brock Yate style one and
and Ralph Nader on the other, and America went down
the Ralph Nader. I think what you're referring to is, uh,
the national speed limit. That's part of it, definitely, But
I think even more than that, it's a more of
a you know, the way you and I were raised,
where like we could do anything we put our minds to,
(06:25):
and we were special. I think that that came out
of that collective decision to go towards safety rather than
you know, fun at any cost, reckless, abandon exactly, devil,
make care sure. But yeah, the national speed limit was
definitely one part of that. Yeah, that was which was
(06:46):
that has since gone up quite a bit in certain areas,
of course it has, But even more than safety, do
you know why they set the speed limit at gas consumption. Yes. Yeah,
the the Arab oil embargo had just taken place. OPEC
was like, hey, US, we're not real happy with you
for siding with Israel during the Yam Kippur War, so
(07:08):
we're gonna cut off your oil. And they did, and
prices spiked and the US said, okay, we need to
rethink our dependence on foreign oil. Had a huge rippling effect.
But one of them was setting the speed limit at
fifty which is too slow. It is too slow, especially
in the opinion of somebody like brock Yates. I thought,
(07:28):
you're gonna say, Sammy Hagar, Yeah, he can't drive. He's tried,
he has, He's made a concerted effort, but it just
came out. He tried. I love that song. It wasn't
I don't like to drive fifty five or I would
prefer to drive faster. It was I can't d tried
and it just doesn't happen. It was very explicit. So
Chuck um this this nineteen seventy one, brock Yates saw
(07:53):
the writing on the wall that the speed limit was
going to be reduced. America was becoming something of a
mamby pamby us um and what did he do as
a result, He uh, in V one, he took a
trip across the country in a Dodge Van with three
travel mates and he drove from New York to Los
(08:13):
Angeles as a way of proving slash protesting. I believe
his quote said something like this, good drivers and good
automobiles could employ the American interstate system the same way
that the Germans were using their auto bonn Right, So
he wanted to prove that you can drive fast if
you're safe, if you're a good driver, you can get
to point A to point being a car and it's safe. Yeah,
(08:36):
and you you said reckless abandoned. There was definitely a
certain level of professionalism or um. The people who he
considered good drivers were actually good drivers. Like he had
to be a good driver to drive fast in his opinion.
It wasn't just like everybody go as fast as you can.
That wasn't the point, right, So he did so. He
(08:56):
drove a two thousand, eight hundred fifty eight miles from
New York to l A in forty hours and fifty
one minutes, which is an average of seventy miles per hour. Yeah,
which is pretty fast if you're talking about an average speed. Yeah,
because that included stops. I think stops. Uh you name it?
So Um, after that happened, I think it got a
little bit of publicity, um, by word of mouth maybe
(09:20):
the racing world. And there was a famous telegram that
came I guess a month or so later. Yeah, I
love this. Can I read it? Yeah? Yeah, it's awesome. Uh.
It says this constitutes formal entry by the Polish Racing
Drivers of America and the next official Cannonball Baker Sea
to Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. The drivers are Oscar Kovaleski,
(09:42):
Brad Nement Check and Tony Adam Awicks. If we can
find California, will beat you fair and square. So basically
the gauntlet was laid and the Cannonball Run was born,
although like you said, the official name has always been
Cannonball Baker Sea to Shining Sea Memorial Trophy. That right,
So who's Cannonball Baker. Cannonball Baker Irwin G. Cannonball Baker
(10:06):
was a He was famous for for pushing the limits
limits on a motorcycle. Yeah, so he would drive from
Canada to Mexico, from New York to l a on
an old Indian motorcycle. And we're talking starting in nineteen fourteen, right,
So like the old Indian motorcycle was basically a bike
with a motor. Yeah, that's exactly what it looks like,
you know. Um. He actually had a pretty well deserved
(10:28):
reputation for like his nickname and just the stuff he
was doing, his endurance level. Apparently on one ride, uh,
he came around a curve and was about a barrel
into a herd of cattle that was in the middle
of the road because it's nineteen fourteen, and um, he
swerved to miss him, hit a pothole, flew off of
(10:48):
his bike onto the back of a cow, which bucked
him off and eventually landed in a ditch, got up
and drove away. That is the stuff of legends. That's
how you get a race named after you, my friend, exactly. Uh.
And he went on to become the first commissioner of NASCAR,
which I thought was pretty interesting. So there you have that.
Nothing to do with Moonshine though, or did he I
(11:10):
don't know, maybe, yeah, curious. So yeah, Yates wanted to
(11:34):
pay homage to Cannonball Baker, so he named it after him,
although he did shorten the name. Cannon Ball was two
words for Baker, Yeah, for Baker, but he shortened it
to Cannonball to avoid any illegal mess. Lawyers advised him
to do that. Yeah, I thought it's kind of weird. Yeah. Well, anyway,
so you have the Cannonball originally called the Cannonball Dash, uh,
(11:55):
and then it finally became the Cannonball Run, which is
how we know it today. Right, And thanks to the
Polish Drivers of America who laid down the gauntlet. It
was a real thing. They didn't They weren't the only
ones to participate in the first official Cannibal. That first
running made in the van was considered like a preliminary
test run. It wasn't their first Cannibal because there was
nobody competing with him. So this second one, Uh, there
(12:18):
was the Polish Racing Drivers of America UM and seven
other groups including three vans. Uh. There was a huge
motor home. There was an American Motors, a m x
an MGBGT and a Cadillac Sadandaville. And this is probably
the coolest part of this entire story. Yeah, I love it,
tell him. Uh. This Cadillac was UM owned by an
(12:41):
old gentleman in New York, in Boston, in Boston, and
he wanted to And this happened back then it may
still happen now, where you would contract someone to drive
your car from one place to the other case you
didn't get it there. Richard Pryor contracted Dana Carvey and
moving really great movie. Dude. I didn't see that one.
I thought it was a stinker. No, it was good.
It was a good. So this old man put out
(13:02):
an ad in the paper, and I need to get
my car to Los Angeles. And these guys answered it
and said, we'll get your car to Los Angeles, and
unbeknownst to him it was it was one of the entries.
And um, I think one of the stipulations was the
car not be driven faster than seventy five miles per
hour at anytime or in the dark. Oh is that
the other one? And clearly they broke both of these
(13:23):
because the Cadillac averaged seventy nine miles per hour, right,
which means they were driving a heck of a lot
faster than that. I think they came in third too, yeah,
third place, Yeah, not not too bad. But I think
they got the car there in one piece and so
good for them, right, They're like, here are the keys, so, uh,
go ahead and start with the first race. Where did
it start? Where did it end? Well? It started in
(13:44):
New York at the Red Ball Garage at midnight, I
believe is when all of them started. Yeah, um. And
this was what okay, November beieve uh And the ending
place was a hotel in Redondo Beach what is it
the Portofino in right, okay, which is from pictures I saw.
It was a pretty lux little hotel. Um. And you
(14:08):
didn't have to follow any specific route. You just got
there any way you could, right. Basically the only rules were, uh,
you could have as many drivers as long as the
only one car, and you could leave at any point
within the twenty four hour window. It wasn't like everyone
started at the start line like a typical race, just
like in the movie. You would punch a time clock
for when you're starting time was, and then punch it
(14:30):
again for when you arrived. And whoever won one and
I believe there was no trophy at the time. It
was only a fifty dollar entry fee and then they
donated two hundred apiece to charity. Yeah, I thought that
was pretty cool? Why not? So apparently two days before
the race, Brock Yates had managed to finagle a Ferrari
daytona brand new Ferrari Daytona a loner out of a
(14:51):
out of an auto dealer. Um. And he had the car,
but he only had himself. He didn't have a co
pilot or a driver. Uh. And apparently he sent out
all the his invitations and a lot of two race
car drivers, like legitimate race car drivers, and they were like,
you know something, if somebody dies or something, that's gonna
look really bad for the sport of racing. And I
don't want to do that. And then uh, one guy
(15:12):
he had invited, Dan Gurney, who was a professional race
car driver, had declined initially UM. But he apparently Um
was told by his wife that his dying father in
law said you should go do this. Life is short.
So Gurney contacts um Yates the day before the race
and says, hey, can I still come? And Yates said heck, yeah, yeah.
(15:35):
And that proved to be fortuitous because they won. They
did Cannibal run, Yeah, they did. They're winning time Josh
was thirty five hours and fifty four minutes, not bad
cross country, not bad at all, and not Atlanta to
l A, New York l A, which is further Yeah,
because I've made it in thirty three hours from Atlanta
to l A. Have you. Yeah, that's way I've always
done it. Three eleven hour days is how I schedule
(15:56):
it out. I never time myself, but you know, I
went drove around the West for several weeks and lived
in a van with the dogs and all that chair
and um, I would drive like I think the longest
I drove is a twelve hour stretch. Um, that's about
all I can mustard. Yeah, that's enough for me. Yeah,
depending on how much coffee I drank or whatever, you know,
(16:17):
then that I could drive you know, six hours or
twelve hours or whatever. But it's amazing the toll that
just sitting in a car with your foot on the
gas has on you, especially when you're driving that fast. Uh.
Should we talk about some of the some of the
things they preferred to do on the on the first race, please?
(16:37):
They One of the common tactics that seemed like was
to keep it slow. In the eastern seaboard. Um, I
think New Jersey and Connecticut, in Ohio and Pennsylvania. These
states are notorious for for having some pretty hardcore highway patrolman.
Yeah still do. Yeah, like you'll get pulled over for
doing sixty? Isn't that nuts to you? Nuts? I can't
(16:59):
image are for getting pulled over for anything less than
seventy two seventy five. In Georgia, by the way, everyone flies, Yeah,
as fast as you can, as fast as you can
get away with us. How fast you drive generally. Yeah.
Even my my friend Derek used to say that the
deal with Atlanta Rush hour is everyone drives as fast
as they can till somebody recks and then there's a
big stops. Yeah, it's pretty funny to think about them.
(17:22):
So the trick was to kind of keep it slow
on the Eastern Seaboard and in the Midwest, and then
once you got to the Great Plains is when you
really opened up, yeah, and made up some serious serious time. Yeah.
They got it up to a hundred and seventy two,
I think, is how how fast they found out the
Ferrari would go. Yeah. I think twelve speeding tickets total
(17:44):
between all of the all the competitors, Yeah, between four
of the competitors. Four of them didn't get a ticket
at all. So four of them split twelve tickets. And
the famous quote l A Times it is like kind
of a blurb of an article from Dan Gurney, Right yeah,
Dan Gurney famously said, at no time did we exceed
hundred and seventy. They came close. Pretty cool. Yeah, so, Chuck,
that was the first one, and as with all cool things, uh,
(18:09):
that also began its co option. News got out, word
got out by little Yeah, the Sports Illustrated covered it, uh,
and so did the Los Angeles Times. Um. And so
when there was a second one, I think the following year,
there were a lot more competitors, right, yeah, they had
um twenty five entries a second year, and Brock Yates
(18:32):
finished second place, this time in a Cadillac UM. The
third race they skipped a couple of years, and it
was in ninety five, and they moved it to springtime
this time. And if Ferrari won the third race with
Yates and Gurney behind the wheel once again. But I
didn't know they won the third one, yes, oh no, no no, no,
I'm sorry. They beat Yates and Gurney's record time the
(18:54):
third year, Yeah, by a one minute, right, but it
was not in them. You're correct, so by five, which
but the third one, fourth, one third one was okay,
by five, it's officially co opted. There's actually corporate sponsorship.
The Right Bra company placed three ladies in Pink in
a limousine and apparently the driver fell asleep in Texas
(19:16):
and rolled the thing and I guess rolled into a
porta potty which tipped over and drenched the um the
ladies inside with its contents and where exactly so by
this time now you can see why Burt Reynolds would
have chosen more of a comedic route than a Sharky's
machine route. Yeah, well it wasn't Burt's choice. Let's should
(19:38):
we move to the final year. Yeah. What happened was
brock Yates was pretty much finished with it, and he said,
you know, it's run its course. He said he was
worried that somebody was gonna die, although no one ever
got hurt. No, but the the the roads in the
last eight years had become much more congested. Um. He
was ready to scrapped the whole thing, but he had
a friend direct your stunt man. Hell need him? How
(20:02):
need him? Or is it need him? No, it's need
him and he was. He was famous for a lot
of the early Burt Reynolds movies. He did them Hooper,
which is a great movie. Is it? I even seen
that one? Are you kidding me? I kid you not, dude.
I gotta get Hooper. That was the one about stuntman.
You have to see My Blue Heaven though. All right,
we'll get to that later. So he did Hooper, and
(20:23):
he did Um the Cannonball Run and a couple of
other of the Burt Reynolds films. Yeah, they did a
Smokey and the Bandit to Gates wrote that I'm sorry, okay,
so how over the place today we are? How need
him says, you know what, Brock, I want to make
a movie about the Cannonball Run, and so I think
the best way to do this is if we stage
(20:44):
another one and I participate with you as my partner.
So they did. They did that nine and they had
a record forty six entries this time, and a lot
of what happened in this race actually ended up in
the movie. Yeah, there's some zany madcap stuff that was
going on. Let's hear it. Well, brock Yates uh and
hel Needham Uh actually had an ambulance and Yates's wife, Pamela,
(21:08):
posed as a woman suffering from a lung condition and
as a result, couldn't fly because of the pressurized cabin,
so she had to be zoomed across the country at
a hundred miles in the back of an ambulance that
was their vehicle of choice, UM and definite. They they
modified the engine, uh and it killed the transmission, so
(21:30):
I had to be eventually towed across the finish line,
which I thought was pretty cool. Right, And in the
film that actually happened. Burt Reynolds and Dom Deloise were
the Needham Yates characters, and fair Faucet was the was
the wife. Didn't didn't what else happened that was real?
Three drivers actually did pose his priests. I remember in
(21:50):
the movie. It was awesomely it was Sammy Davis Jr.
And Dean Martin drunk priest in the movie. But I
don't know that they were posing. They really were drunk.
Part they were probably hammered. What else, Josh, I don't know.
I haven't seen the movie in a really long time.
All right, well, I got it for you. Then there
(22:10):
were in fact, um scantily clad, skin tight jumpsuits on
a couple of ladies in a sports car. I read
the opposite. I read that that was the right broad
company that inspired that part. I read the opposite. We'll
have to check that, all right, we'll do it. And
then there was a wealthy entrant that had his chauffeur
(22:32):
drive him in a Rolls Royce. And in the movie
that was Jamie Farr played a middle Eastern chic that's right, Clinger. Yeah,
you know, he and I are from the same hometown,
Talita Talita. Is that why he always wore the Talita
mud hints hat and mash Yeah, And we talked about
it incessantly. He really was not Talo. Yeah. And Tony
Paco's hot dogs that he talks about all the time,
real place, best hot dogs on the planet, really had
(22:56):
no idea. So those are just a few of the
things that actually happened. The final cannonball run that ended
up in the film Um and a Jaguar driven by
Dave Hines and Dave Yarborough one that year and they
obliterated the time period with thirty two and fifty one
minute seven mile per hour average fifty speeding tickets. That year, well,
(23:17):
there were forty two contestants. Yeah, so that was the
last one, and it has spawned imitators over the years.
Before the before Cannonball Run the movie came out, there
were already imitators. Really, yeah, there was one movie that
came out in seventy five and two that came out
in seventy six. You want to hear the weird thing
about it. David Carriden was in two of them. Really.
(23:38):
He was in uh, let's see uh Deathmatch two thousand,
Death Death Race two thousand, which was set in the future.
But he was also in Cannonball exclamation Point, which is
a farctical take on the Cannonball Run. And there was
a second one that had Gary Busey in it, or
third one that had Gary Busey, and it called the
Gumball Rally, right, and that's that's a real one. And
(24:00):
the Gunball three thousand is still in existence. Is that
European or in America? Well, they do both, and they're
quick to say that it's not a race, it's more
like an adventurous road trip. And then the lame tell him, yeah,
tell him about the European person of the Cannonball runs.
Actually to you know why because they call it the
Cannonball Run. They use that name, and this thing is
(24:21):
not even a race. The goal of the Cannonball Run
Europe is to stay as close to a sixty one
mile per hour average as you can. And in two
thousand and eight, a frigging smart car one. Oh so,
talk about a slap in the face where brock Gates
Steady would have rolled over in his grave. Yeah, he's
rolling over in his Instead he rolled over a smart
(24:42):
car with his bare hand. If anybody could do it,
Mr brock Gates could, my friend? I think? So that's
(25:21):
cannonball Runney. That's how fast have you driven? What's the
fastest you've ever driven? Oh? I don't know. A hundred
and ten. I actually once got a speeding ticket. Or no,
you want to hear a weird story. Let's here. I
don't know if this will make the final cut or
not because it's kind of long, but get this. So,
my friend and I were driving from Atlanta to Charleston
in my old Toyota Corolla. It was an eight six
Champagne colored Toyota Corolla UM and I was doing a
(25:45):
hundred and ten on I twenty during a stretch where
the speed limit. I was doing twice the speed limit.
I get pulled over by this guy in this car
um with a little dash headlight on it, spinning around
and I pull over and this guy is dressed like
a paramilitary cop and he's like, you're so dead. You're
going to jail forever, right, And he goes back to
(26:06):
his car and calls somebody, and this other guy comes
out and he comes back. He's like, you're at least
gonna lose your license. And he goes back and talks
to the guy, who he said later was the sergeant
on duty. And he comes back and he goes, you're
gonna get a ticket of some sort. And he goes
back and talks to the guy again, and he goes,
here's your license back. You guys drive safely now, and
(26:28):
let's just go. You're free to go. Exactly. So my
friend and I are looking at each other like what
just happened? But it was so surreal, and to this day,
I wonder, have you seen pulp fiction? Of course you have,
remember Zed? Yeah, I have the distinct impression that these
guys were into ZED like affairs, and something else was
(26:49):
took precedent. I I think my friend was. He's not
a good looking guy. So I'm thinking maybe they're like,
we'll pass on these two. Oh yeah, So they were
going to get you back the police station. And I
don't think they were cops. Okay, what cop would not
give you a ticket when you're driving twice the speed limit?
I got you. Yeah, I got a story. Let's hear it.
(27:10):
About four years ago, me and my buddy Scotty were
doing it was actually the last TV commercial job ever did.
It was a six Flags job and six Flags Massachusetts.
Whatever that one's called six Flags over in Massachusetts? Is it?
I think it's a great America anyway. So we go
up there to do this job, and um, what kind
of it was New Jersey? But we have to drive
hit Yeah, we we we we drive. At one point
(27:32):
my friend we had like two days off while we
were up there and had a friend in Vermont and
the third Star Wars prequel was being released that friday.
So I said, hey, man, let's go up and see
Johnny Pendell and uh rent a car and drive up
there because we had a camera truck. He said, sure
less do it. So we ran. We rented a like
a little geometro whatever the cheapest little four stroke engine
(27:53):
car you could get. And we have a time limit
because we have to make the movie. It's like a
six pm showing. And so we're speeding through Vermont, like
the hills of Vermont's lovely, and this little engine is
like and we top this hill and we see one
of those signs that say your current speed, and it
said your current speed and it blinked and went one
(28:13):
oh two. And I've never seen a triple digit on
one of those signs. So we just laughed and blaze
right through it and made the movie. It's like, call
the police, and we literally we made it right as
the movie was starting, and you know, the engine was
like it was like ticking, it was red hot. And
that that's my fast story. Well, if you have a
(28:34):
fast story, we'd actually like to hear it. Here's the caveat.
Don't go out and commit any kind of crime or
act that includes fastness. If it's already happened, then we'll
hear about it. We'll tell you the email right after
we get to listener mail, right, Chuck, Yes, Josh, all right,
let's go, Josh. I'm gonna call this, uh second, the
(28:55):
only time we've ever read a listener mail from the
same dude. Oh, I don't know about this, chuck, we
have to This is the hackster, Ryan Hack my buddy.
Uh listen to the house history podcasts, and I have
a creepy story. One of the houses I grew up
in as a kid had a hidden door. As you
go to the basement, it's more or less just blended
into the wood paneling. As you walk through the door,
(29:16):
you came to an open area with some shelving and
a workbench. There are a couple of old bike tires
and some random parts still lying around and a guy
names it and a guy names it. Every once in
a while we'd hear what sounded like people working on
their bikes and chit chatting, pounding metal, gears dropping, laughing,
chains turning. Every time we'd go into the room, there
was nothing weird. Weird. Later on we found out the
(29:37):
history of the house. Turns out one of the previous
owners was a couple that enjoyed biking and they died
in a biking accident and forgot to get them memo.
So just thinking about it gives me chills. And this
is from Ryan, and I'm gonna just go ahead and
say that Ryan Hack has inspired me to exercise because
(29:57):
he has a blog call Hacks First five k dot
blogspot dot com where he started running in Lost Weight
and is into it now. And he got me listening
to another podcast called two Gomer's Run a Marathon. I
don't know that I'm entirely okay with you leading this
extra life that I'm unaware of until you read a
(30:18):
listener mail. I know. But two Gomers Run a Marathon
is actually a really funny podcast. These two guys that
say they're Gomer's kind of nerdy and they're they're completely unathletic,
yet they want to run a marathon. So their podcast
goes through their trials and travails and it's really funny.
They get a website called two Gomers dot com. Well,
Ryan Hacks, since you got all those plugs and because
(30:40):
you had to two listener mails read on there, you
have to go contribute twenty five bucks to Keeva dot
org on Stuff you should Know Team Chuck. You want
to tell everybody else about that Kiva dot org. Go
to the click on community and search stuff you should
know Team join our team, and twenty five dollars to
(31:01):
a to as someone in need. You can now donate
to Americans. Yes, I've heard. If you're a nationalistic or
an isolationist you can still donate. But right now, as
a press time, we have raised more than in about
ten days. And uh, who has seventy Chuck? Uh, the
lousy cheap fans of the cold Bear quote unquote Nation.
(31:22):
You know, it's sad that guy's got way more fans
than we do, right, way more hundred and ten members
on his team. We got a hundred and eighties so
far already. Yeah, So way to go those of you
and the stuff you should know Nation who supported kiva
dot org so far. For those of you who want
to get on the trolley, you can go to www.
Dot kiva dot org slash team slash stuff you should know,
(31:47):
and you can become a member, and like Chuck said,
you can contribute as little as twenty five bucks and
you actually get that back if you want, sure you
can roll it over again or whatever. Yeah, yeah, so Chuck,
that's it, right, that's it. If you have a cool
high speed story, Chuck, and I want to hear about it. Uh,
if you have a great unicorn story, you know, we
always want to hear about that sending in an email
(32:08):
to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com. For
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home page
Hi, everybody. Chuck here for another Saturday Stuff you Should
Know Selects edition. This week I picked How the Cannonball
Run Worked. October two thousand nine. This was a fun one,
The Cannonball Run. We certainly talked about the movie and
the sequel. It was one of my fabes growing up,
but it was based on a real race. The Cannonball
(00:20):
Run is, or was, Jeez and name sure still going on.
This has been a while since we recorded this one.
It is a a road race, a cross country road
race that seems too strange to be true that people
would actually get in their cars in the United States
and drive super fast and elude the cops all across
the country in order to win. I don't even know
(00:43):
if there was money involved, a trophy Bert Reynolds mustache.
Only you can find out by listening to how the
Cannonball Run worked. Right here, right now, Welcome to Stuff
you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
(01:05):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me
as always is our good friend Charles W. Chuck Bryant,
Are you Chuck, your good friend? How are you feeling
right now? I'm find a lot. I'm sitting yeah, Chuck
is right red right now. Everybody, it's kind of weird looking.
Thank you Martin for that are super fan and Seattle,
thank you. But he's not a superman. He's a buddy.
(01:27):
He has be He was such a fan that he
actually became a friend. He's a friend that we haven't
met yet. Yeah, so Chuck, take us back to one
in the time machine. Yes, the way back machine. You're ready,
Here we go. Okay, all right, Josh, I'm ten years old,
knee high to a grasshopper. Disco is dead. Margaret Thatcher
(01:48):
is the Prime Minister of England. I take issue with
the disco being deadline. I don't know that disco ever died. Man,
you cannot make the argument that all modern R and
B pop soul is all disco. Doco is alive. Margaret
Thatcher is the Prime Minister of England. Ronald Reagan is
in office. Just as Jimmy Carter has exited. Walter Cronkite
(02:09):
resigned from the CBS Evening News desk. That was the
said day the first AIDS case was made public in California.
Have you ever seen in the band played on? My
brother worked on that. That was a great made for
TV movie. It really was. It was really good and
he had a great experience working on that. So find
people in that movie. Major League Baseball has just gone
on strike in the summer for what will be the
(02:31):
first of eighty times over the next five years. Right,
so America is depressed, but not for long, No, because
one Mr Burt Reynolds is about to dash across the
silver screen in a little movie called Cannonball Run. Great, great,
great movie. It was a great movie. I haven't seen
it in forever. I think I probably saw it in
like n seven. It was one of the first movies
(02:53):
we rented, along with Beverly Hills, Cop, very hockey and
corny but still beloved. What's What's Yeah, everyone takes it
as a comedy because it is a comedy. But this
is not to say that it started out as a comedy. Actually,
it was supposed to be serious and Burt Reynolds part
was originally written for Steve McQueen, who died before he
could film the movie. Sadly, it was supposed to be
(03:16):
a serious movie and it didn't turn out that way.
Why would anybody want the Cannonball rutten to be a
serious movie? Well, because it was in fact based on
a real race. What what true? Based on a real race?
As you know? Yeah, I I do know after reading
this article. I think I had heard that before, but
I had no idea the details. I didn't either until
(03:37):
I wrote it. This was really amazing, Like I have.
I'm just gonna come out and say, I have a
man crush on a seventy year old Mr brock Yates.
He's a cool dude who I would have loved to
have hung out with. I bet he's still a very
cool dude and hung out with in a strictly platonic sense. Yeah,
maybe a little makeing out, but aside from that, Yeah,
(03:58):
I bet he's still away cool guy. I get that
impression he is. He Um, this is this is kind
of what I gathered about brock Yates from researching this
and reading your article. Go and say who he is.
He was a pretty much the premier automotive journalist of
his Age magazine. Eventually. Yeah, but I think he started
(04:19):
out as a journalist and something of a gonzo journalist.
I take it, um, but yeah, he he was very
well known and respected in the field. Um, and in
the early nineteen seventies America was at a fork in
the road, if you will, so to speak, and brock
Yates represented one direction and that was the out, just go,
(04:41):
and if you die, that was your number was up.
Kind of mentality behind the wheel that is, yeah, you know,
damn the torpedoes full steam ahead. Right on the other
side of the road. At on the other side of
the fork was a guy named Ralph Nader who was
still there on that other fork. He is, um he
(05:02):
for those of you who don't know who Ralph Naders.
He's run for president a couple of times. Um. He
got George Bush elected in two thousand four. Yeah. Um.
But he's also a very dedicated consumer watchawt. He has
for many years lived in a tiny, little one room apartment.
He uses a hot plate. Um. He just he lives
his very meager life so no one can say you're
(05:23):
corrupt because he goes after everybody else. And in the
nineteen seventies, in the early nineteen seventies, he was going
after the automotive industry, right he went after He wrote
this book called Unsafe at Any Speed and it was
basically about have you read it? I've read parts of
it through research and stuff. Yeah, Okay, um so, you
(05:43):
know then it was basically about how the automotive industry
was producing these incredibly dangerous vehicles right and at the time,
we didn't really have much of a speed limit. So uh,
as a as a result of his book, we like
seatbelts became mandatory, new safety design had to be instituted
by car manufacturer's a big deal. Um So, America's at
(06:03):
this fork in the road brock Yate style one and
and Ralph Nader on the other, and America went down
the Ralph Nader. I think what you're referring to is, uh,
the national speed limit. That's part of it, definitely, But
I think even more than that, it's a more of
a you know, the way you and I were raised,
where like we could do anything we put our minds to,
(06:25):
and we were special. I think that that came out
of that collective decision to go towards safety rather than
you know, fun at any cost, reckless, abandon exactly, devil,
make care sure. But yeah, the national speed limit was
definitely one part of that. Yeah, that was which was
(06:46):
that has since gone up quite a bit in certain areas,
of course it has, But even more than safety, do
you know why they set the speed limit at gas consumption. Yes. Yeah,
the the Arab oil embargo had just taken place. OPEC
was like, hey, US, we're not real happy with you
for siding with Israel during the Yam Kippur War, so
(07:08):
we're gonna cut off your oil. And they did, and
prices spiked and the US said, okay, we need to
rethink our dependence on foreign oil. Had a huge rippling effect.
But one of them was setting the speed limit at
fifty which is too slow. It is too slow, especially
in the opinion of somebody like brock Yates. I thought,
(07:28):
you're gonna say, Sammy Hagar, Yeah, he can't drive. He's tried,
he has, He's made a concerted effort, but it just
came out. He tried. I love that song. It wasn't
I don't like to drive fifty five or I would
prefer to drive faster. It was I can't d tried
and it just doesn't happen. It was very explicit. So
Chuck um this this nineteen seventy one, brock Yates saw
(07:53):
the writing on the wall that the speed limit was
going to be reduced. America was becoming something of a
mamby pamby us um and what did he do as
a result, He uh, in V one, he took a
trip across the country in a Dodge Van with three
travel mates and he drove from New York to Los
(08:13):
Angeles as a way of proving slash protesting. I believe
his quote said something like this, good drivers and good
automobiles could employ the American interstate system the same way
that the Germans were using their auto bonn Right, So
he wanted to prove that you can drive fast if
you're safe, if you're a good driver, you can get
to point A to point being a car and it's safe. Yeah,
(08:36):
and you you said reckless abandoned. There was definitely a
certain level of professionalism or um. The people who he
considered good drivers were actually good drivers. Like he had
to be a good driver to drive fast in his opinion.
It wasn't just like everybody go as fast as you can.
That wasn't the point, right, So he did so. He
(08:56):
drove a two thousand, eight hundred fifty eight miles from
New York to l A in forty hours and fifty
one minutes, which is an average of seventy miles per hour. Yeah,
which is pretty fast if you're talking about an average speed. Yeah,
because that included stops. I think stops. Uh you name it?
So Um, after that happened, I think it got a
little bit of publicity, um, by word of mouth maybe
(09:20):
the racing world. And there was a famous telegram that
came I guess a month or so later. Yeah, I
love this. Can I read it? Yeah? Yeah, it's awesome. Uh.
It says this constitutes formal entry by the Polish Racing
Drivers of America and the next official Cannonball Baker Sea
to Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. The drivers are Oscar Kovaleski,
(09:42):
Brad Nement Check and Tony Adam Awicks. If we can
find California, will beat you fair and square. So basically
the gauntlet was laid and the Cannonball Run was born,
although like you said, the official name has always been
Cannonball Baker Sea to Shining Sea Memorial Trophy. That right,
So who's Cannonball Baker. Cannonball Baker Irwin G. Cannonball Baker
(10:06):
was a He was famous for for pushing the limits
limits on a motorcycle. Yeah, so he would drive from
Canada to Mexico, from New York to l a on
an old Indian motorcycle. And we're talking starting in nineteen fourteen, right,
So like the old Indian motorcycle was basically a bike
with a motor. Yeah, that's exactly what it looks like,
you know. Um. He actually had a pretty well deserved
(10:28):
reputation for like his nickname and just the stuff he
was doing, his endurance level. Apparently on one ride, uh,
he came around a curve and was about a barrel
into a herd of cattle that was in the middle
of the road because it's nineteen fourteen, and um, he
swerved to miss him, hit a pothole, flew off of
(10:48):
his bike onto the back of a cow, which bucked
him off and eventually landed in a ditch, got up
and drove away. That is the stuff of legends. That's
how you get a race named after you, my friend, exactly. Uh.
And he went on to become the first commissioner of NASCAR,
which I thought was pretty interesting. So there you have that.
Nothing to do with Moonshine though, or did he I
(11:10):
don't know, maybe, yeah, curious. So yeah, Yates wanted to
(11:34):
pay homage to Cannonball Baker, so he named it after him,
although he did shorten the name. Cannon Ball was two
words for Baker, Yeah, for Baker, but he shortened it
to Cannonball to avoid any illegal mess. Lawyers advised him
to do that. Yeah, I thought it's kind of weird. Yeah. Well, anyway,
so you have the Cannonball originally called the Cannonball Dash, uh,
(11:55):
and then it finally became the Cannonball Run, which is
how we know it today. Right, And thanks to the
Polish Drivers of America who laid down the gauntlet. It
was a real thing. They didn't They weren't the only
ones to participate in the first official Cannibal. That first
running made in the van was considered like a preliminary
test run. It wasn't their first Cannibal because there was
nobody competing with him. So this second one, Uh, there
(12:18):
was the Polish Racing Drivers of America UM and seven
other groups including three vans. Uh. There was a huge
motor home. There was an American Motors, a m x
an MGBGT and a Cadillac Sadandaville. And this is probably
the coolest part of this entire story. Yeah, I love it,
tell him. Uh. This Cadillac was UM owned by an
(12:41):
old gentleman in New York, in Boston, in Boston, and
he wanted to And this happened back then it may
still happen now, where you would contract someone to drive
your car from one place to the other case you
didn't get it there. Richard Pryor contracted Dana Carvey and
moving really great movie. Dude. I didn't see that one.
I thought it was a stinker. No, it was good.
It was a good. So this old man put out
(13:02):
an ad in the paper, and I need to get
my car to Los Angeles. And these guys answered it
and said, we'll get your car to Los Angeles, and
unbeknownst to him it was it was one of the entries.
And um, I think one of the stipulations was the
car not be driven faster than seventy five miles per
hour at anytime or in the dark. Oh is that
the other one? And clearly they broke both of these
(13:23):
because the Cadillac averaged seventy nine miles per hour, right,
which means they were driving a heck of a lot
faster than that. I think they came in third too, yeah,
third place, Yeah, not not too bad. But I think
they got the car there in one piece and so
good for them, right, They're like, here are the keys, so, uh,
go ahead and start with the first race. Where did
it start? Where did it end? Well? It started in
(13:44):
New York at the Red Ball Garage at midnight, I
believe is when all of them started. Yeah, um. And
this was what okay, November beieve uh And the ending
place was a hotel in Redondo Beach what is it
the Portofino in right, okay, which is from pictures I saw.
It was a pretty lux little hotel. Um. And you
(14:08):
didn't have to follow any specific route. You just got
there any way you could, right. Basically the only rules were, uh,
you could have as many drivers as long as the
only one car, and you could leave at any point
within the twenty four hour window. It wasn't like everyone
started at the start line like a typical race, just
like in the movie. You would punch a time clock
for when you're starting time was, and then punch it
(14:30):
again for when you arrived. And whoever won one and
I believe there was no trophy at the time. It
was only a fifty dollar entry fee and then they
donated two hundred apiece to charity. Yeah, I thought that
was pretty cool? Why not? So apparently two days before
the race, Brock Yates had managed to finagle a Ferrari
daytona brand new Ferrari Daytona a loner out of a
(14:51):
out of an auto dealer. Um. And he had the car,
but he only had himself. He didn't have a co
pilot or a driver. Uh. And apparently he sent out
all the his invitations and a lot of two race
car drivers, like legitimate race car drivers, and they were like,
you know something, if somebody dies or something, that's gonna
look really bad for the sport of racing. And I
don't want to do that. And then uh, one guy
(15:12):
he had invited, Dan Gurney, who was a professional race
car driver, had declined initially UM. But he apparently Um
was told by his wife that his dying father in
law said you should go do this. Life is short.
So Gurney contacts um Yates the day before the race
and says, hey, can I still come? And Yates said heck, yeah, yeah.
(15:35):
And that proved to be fortuitous because they won. They
did Cannibal run, Yeah, they did. They're winning time Josh
was thirty five hours and fifty four minutes, not bad
cross country, not bad at all, and not Atlanta to
l A, New York l A, which is further Yeah,
because I've made it in thirty three hours from Atlanta
to l A. Have you. Yeah, that's way I've always
done it. Three eleven hour days is how I schedule
(15:56):
it out. I never time myself, but you know, I
went drove around the West for several weeks and lived
in a van with the dogs and all that chair
and um, I would drive like I think the longest
I drove is a twelve hour stretch. Um, that's about
all I can mustard. Yeah, that's enough for me. Yeah,
depending on how much coffee I drank or whatever, you know,
(16:17):
then that I could drive you know, six hours or
twelve hours or whatever. But it's amazing the toll that
just sitting in a car with your foot on the
gas has on you, especially when you're driving that fast. Uh.
Should we talk about some of the some of the
things they preferred to do on the on the first race, please?
(16:37):
They One of the common tactics that seemed like was
to keep it slow. In the eastern seaboard. Um, I
think New Jersey and Connecticut, in Ohio and Pennsylvania. These
states are notorious for for having some pretty hardcore highway patrolman.
Yeah still do. Yeah, like you'll get pulled over for
doing sixty? Isn't that nuts to you? Nuts? I can't
(16:59):
image are for getting pulled over for anything less than
seventy two seventy five. In Georgia, by the way, everyone flies, Yeah,
as fast as you can, as fast as you can
get away with us. How fast you drive generally. Yeah.
Even my my friend Derek used to say that the
deal with Atlanta Rush hour is everyone drives as fast
as they can till somebody recks and then there's a
big stops. Yeah, it's pretty funny to think about them.
(17:22):
So the trick was to kind of keep it slow
on the Eastern Seaboard and in the Midwest, and then
once you got to the Great Plains is when you
really opened up, yeah, and made up some serious serious time. Yeah.
They got it up to a hundred and seventy two,
I think, is how how fast they found out the
Ferrari would go. Yeah. I think twelve speeding tickets total
(17:44):
between all of the all the competitors, Yeah, between four
of the competitors. Four of them didn't get a ticket
at all. So four of them split twelve tickets. And
the famous quote l A Times it is like kind
of a blurb of an article from Dan Gurney, Right yeah,
Dan Gurney famously said, at no time did we exceed
hundred and seventy. They came close. Pretty cool. Yeah, so, Chuck,
that was the first one, and as with all cool things, uh,
(18:09):
that also began its co option. News got out, word
got out by little Yeah, the Sports Illustrated covered it, uh,
and so did the Los Angeles Times. Um. And so
when there was a second one, I think the following year,
there were a lot more competitors, right, yeah, they had
um twenty five entries a second year, and Brock Yates
(18:32):
finished second place, this time in a Cadillac UM. The
third race they skipped a couple of years, and it
was in ninety five, and they moved it to springtime
this time. And if Ferrari won the third race with
Yates and Gurney behind the wheel once again. But I
didn't know they won the third one, yes, oh no, no no, no,
I'm sorry. They beat Yates and Gurney's record time the
(18:54):
third year, Yeah, by a one minute, right, but it
was not in them. You're correct, so by five, which
but the third one, fourth, one third one was okay,
by five, it's officially co opted. There's actually corporate sponsorship.
The Right Bra company placed three ladies in Pink in
a limousine and apparently the driver fell asleep in Texas
(19:16):
and rolled the thing and I guess rolled into a
porta potty which tipped over and drenched the um the
ladies inside with its contents and where exactly so by
this time now you can see why Burt Reynolds would
have chosen more of a comedic route than a Sharky's
machine route. Yeah, well it wasn't Burt's choice. Let's should
(19:38):
we move to the final year. Yeah. What happened was
brock Yates was pretty much finished with it, and he said,
you know, it's run its course. He said he was
worried that somebody was gonna die, although no one ever
got hurt. No, but the the the roads in the
last eight years had become much more congested. Um. He
was ready to scrapped the whole thing, but he had
a friend direct your stunt man. Hell need him? How
(20:02):
need him? Or is it need him? No, it's need
him and he was. He was famous for a lot
of the early Burt Reynolds movies. He did them Hooper,
which is a great movie. Is it? I even seen
that one? Are you kidding me? I kid you not, dude.
I gotta get Hooper. That was the one about stuntman.
You have to see My Blue Heaven though. All right,
we'll get to that later. So he did Hooper, and
(20:23):
he did Um the Cannonball Run and a couple of
other of the Burt Reynolds films. Yeah, they did a
Smokey and the Bandit to Gates wrote that I'm sorry, okay,
so how over the place today we are? How need
him says, you know what, Brock, I want to make
a movie about the Cannonball Run, and so I think
the best way to do this is if we stage
(20:44):
another one and I participate with you as my partner.
So they did. They did that nine and they had
a record forty six entries this time, and a lot
of what happened in this race actually ended up in
the movie. Yeah, there's some zany madcap stuff that was
going on. Let's hear it. Well, brock Yates uh and
hel Needham Uh actually had an ambulance and Yates's wife, Pamela,
(21:08):
posed as a woman suffering from a lung condition and
as a result, couldn't fly because of the pressurized cabin,
so she had to be zoomed across the country at
a hundred miles in the back of an ambulance that
was their vehicle of choice, UM and definite. They they
modified the engine, uh and it killed the transmission, so
(21:30):
I had to be eventually towed across the finish line,
which I thought was pretty cool. Right, And in the
film that actually happened. Burt Reynolds and Dom Deloise were
the Needham Yates characters, and fair Faucet was the was
the wife. Didn't didn't what else happened that was real?
Three drivers actually did pose his priests. I remember in
(21:50):
the movie. It was awesomely it was Sammy Davis Jr.
And Dean Martin drunk priest in the movie. But I
don't know that they were posing. They really were drunk.
Part they were probably hammered. What else, Josh, I don't know.
I haven't seen the movie in a really long time.
All right, well, I got it for you. Then there
(22:10):
were in fact, um scantily clad, skin tight jumpsuits on
a couple of ladies in a sports car. I read
the opposite. I read that that was the right broad
company that inspired that part. I read the opposite. We'll
have to check that, all right, we'll do it. And
then there was a wealthy entrant that had his chauffeur
(22:32):
drive him in a Rolls Royce. And in the movie
that was Jamie Farr played a middle Eastern chic that's right, Clinger. Yeah,
you know, he and I are from the same hometown,
Talita Talita. Is that why he always wore the Talita
mud hints hat and mash Yeah, And we talked about
it incessantly. He really was not Talo. Yeah. And Tony
Paco's hot dogs that he talks about all the time,
real place, best hot dogs on the planet, really had
(22:56):
no idea. So those are just a few of the
things that actually happened. The final cannonball run that ended
up in the film Um and a Jaguar driven by
Dave Hines and Dave Yarborough one that year and they
obliterated the time period with thirty two and fifty one
minute seven mile per hour average fifty speeding tickets. That year, well,
(23:17):
there were forty two contestants. Yeah, so that was the
last one, and it has spawned imitators over the years.
Before the before Cannonball Run the movie came out, there
were already imitators. Really, yeah, there was one movie that
came out in seventy five and two that came out
in seventy six. You want to hear the weird thing
about it. David Carriden was in two of them. Really.
(23:38):
He was in uh, let's see uh Deathmatch two thousand,
Death Death Race two thousand, which was set in the future.
But he was also in Cannonball exclamation Point, which is
a farctical take on the Cannonball Run. And there was
a second one that had Gary Busey in it, or
third one that had Gary Busey, and it called the
Gumball Rally, right, and that's that's a real one. And
(24:00):
the Gunball three thousand is still in existence. Is that
European or in America? Well, they do both, and they're
quick to say that it's not a race, it's more
like an adventurous road trip. And then the lame tell him, yeah,
tell him about the European person of the Cannonball runs.
Actually to you know why because they call it the
Cannonball Run. They use that name, and this thing is
(24:21):
not even a race. The goal of the Cannonball Run
Europe is to stay as close to a sixty one
mile per hour average as you can. And in two
thousand and eight, a frigging smart car one. Oh so,
talk about a slap in the face where brock Gates
Steady would have rolled over in his grave. Yeah, he's
rolling over in his Instead he rolled over a smart
(24:42):
car with his bare hand. If anybody could do it,
Mr brock Gates could, my friend? I think? So that's
(25:21):
cannonball Runney. That's how fast have you driven? What's the
fastest you've ever driven? Oh? I don't know. A hundred
and ten. I actually once got a speeding ticket. Or no,
you want to hear a weird story. Let's here. I
don't know if this will make the final cut or
not because it's kind of long, but get this. So,
my friend and I were driving from Atlanta to Charleston
in my old Toyota Corolla. It was an eight six
Champagne colored Toyota Corolla UM and I was doing a
(25:45):
hundred and ten on I twenty during a stretch where
the speed limit. I was doing twice the speed limit.
I get pulled over by this guy in this car
um with a little dash headlight on it, spinning around
and I pull over and this guy is dressed like
a paramilitary cop and he's like, you're so dead. You're
going to jail forever, right, And he goes back to
(26:06):
his car and calls somebody, and this other guy comes
out and he comes back. He's like, you're at least
gonna lose your license. And he goes back and talks
to the guy, who he said later was the sergeant
on duty. And he comes back and he goes, you're
gonna get a ticket of some sort. And he goes
back and talks to the guy again, and he goes,
here's your license back. You guys drive safely now, and
(26:28):
let's just go. You're free to go. Exactly. So my
friend and I are looking at each other like what
just happened? But it was so surreal, and to this day,
I wonder, have you seen pulp fiction? Of course you have,
remember Zed? Yeah, I have the distinct impression that these
guys were into ZED like affairs, and something else was
(26:49):
took precedent. I I think my friend was. He's not
a good looking guy. So I'm thinking maybe they're like,
we'll pass on these two. Oh yeah, So they were
going to get you back the police station. And I
don't think they were cops. Okay, what cop would not
give you a ticket when you're driving twice the speed limit?
I got you. Yeah, I got a story. Let's hear it.
(27:10):
About four years ago, me and my buddy Scotty were
doing it was actually the last TV commercial job ever did.
It was a six Flags job and six Flags Massachusetts.
Whatever that one's called six Flags over in Massachusetts? Is it?
I think it's a great America anyway. So we go
up there to do this job, and um, what kind
of it was New Jersey? But we have to drive
hit Yeah, we we we we drive. At one point
(27:32):
my friend we had like two days off while we
were up there and had a friend in Vermont and
the third Star Wars prequel was being released that friday.
So I said, hey, man, let's go up and see
Johnny Pendell and uh rent a car and drive up
there because we had a camera truck. He said, sure
less do it. So we ran. We rented a like
a little geometro whatever the cheapest little four stroke engine
(27:53):
car you could get. And we have a time limit
because we have to make the movie. It's like a
six pm showing. And so we're speeding through Vermont, like
the hills of Vermont's lovely, and this little engine is
like and we top this hill and we see one
of those signs that say your current speed, and it
said your current speed and it blinked and went one
(28:13):
oh two. And I've never seen a triple digit on
one of those signs. So we just laughed and blaze
right through it and made the movie. It's like, call
the police, and we literally we made it right as
the movie was starting, and you know, the engine was
like it was like ticking, it was red hot. And
that that's my fast story. Well, if you have a
(28:34):
fast story, we'd actually like to hear it. Here's the caveat.
Don't go out and commit any kind of crime or
act that includes fastness. If it's already happened, then we'll
hear about it. We'll tell you the email right after
we get to listener mail, right, Chuck, Yes, Josh, all right,
let's go, Josh. I'm gonna call this, uh second, the
(28:55):
only time we've ever read a listener mail from the
same dude. Oh, I don't know about this, chuck, we
have to This is the hackster, Ryan Hack my buddy.
Uh listen to the house history podcasts, and I have
a creepy story. One of the houses I grew up
in as a kid had a hidden door. As you
go to the basement, it's more or less just blended
into the wood paneling. As you walk through the door,
(29:16):
you came to an open area with some shelving and
a workbench. There are a couple of old bike tires
and some random parts still lying around and a guy
names it and a guy names it. Every once in
a while we'd hear what sounded like people working on
their bikes and chit chatting, pounding metal, gears dropping, laughing,
chains turning. Every time we'd go into the room, there
was nothing weird. Weird. Later on we found out the
(29:37):
history of the house. Turns out one of the previous
owners was a couple that enjoyed biking and they died
in a biking accident and forgot to get them memo.
So just thinking about it gives me chills. And this
is from Ryan, and I'm gonna just go ahead and
say that Ryan Hack has inspired me to exercise because
(29:57):
he has a blog call Hacks First five k dot
blogspot dot com where he started running in Lost Weight
and is into it now. And he got me listening
to another podcast called two Gomer's Run a Marathon. I
don't know that I'm entirely okay with you leading this
extra life that I'm unaware of until you read a
(30:18):
listener mail. I know. But two Gomers Run a Marathon
is actually a really funny podcast. These two guys that
say they're Gomer's kind of nerdy and they're they're completely unathletic,
yet they want to run a marathon. So their podcast
goes through their trials and travails and it's really funny.
They get a website called two Gomers dot com. Well,
Ryan Hacks, since you got all those plugs and because
(30:40):
you had to two listener mails read on there, you
have to go contribute twenty five bucks to Keeva dot
org on Stuff you should Know Team Chuck. You want
to tell everybody else about that Kiva dot org. Go
to the click on community and search stuff you should
know Team join our team, and twenty five dollars to
(31:01):
a to as someone in need. You can now donate
to Americans. Yes, I've heard. If you're a nationalistic or
an isolationist you can still donate. But right now, as
a press time, we have raised more than in about
ten days. And uh, who has seventy Chuck? Uh, the
lousy cheap fans of the cold Bear quote unquote Nation.
(31:22):
You know, it's sad that guy's got way more fans
than we do, right, way more hundred and ten members
on his team. We got a hundred and eighties so
far already. Yeah, So way to go those of you
and the stuff you should know Nation who supported kiva
dot org so far. For those of you who want
to get on the trolley, you can go to www.
Dot kiva dot org slash team slash stuff you should know,
(31:47):
and you can become a member, and like Chuck said,
you can contribute as little as twenty five bucks and
you actually get that back if you want, sure you
can roll it over again or whatever. Yeah, yeah, so Chuck,
that's it, right, that's it. If you have a cool
high speed story, Chuck, and I want to hear about it. Uh,
if you have a great unicorn story, you know, we
always want to hear about that sending in an email
(32:08):
to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check
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