"Five Minutes of Fire": Harry S. Truman, Doris Day, Red China

<v Speaker 1>Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Surely You Can't
<v Speaker 1>Be Serious Podcast Special Edition five Minutes of Fire. We
<v Speaker 1>are here talking about the lyrics of We Didn't Start
<v Speaker 1>the Fire by Billy Joel. We're covering only five minutes
<v Speaker 1>at a time, which is about to link the song,
<v Speaker 1>so it works out kind of nicely. So please join
<v Speaker 1>us as we dive into some new lyrics today.
<v Speaker 2>All right, guys, so here are the topics that we're
<v Speaker 2>going to be covering today.
<v Speaker 1>We're gonna be talking about Harry Truman, Doris Day, and Red.
<v Speaker 2>China, Harry Truman, Doda de What do you know about
<v Speaker 2>Harry Truman.
<v Speaker 1>Harry Truman was the thirty third President of the United States.
<v Speaker 1>What you may not know is that he had only
<v Speaker 1>been vice president for a couple of months before he
<v Speaker 1>had to take over as president because Franklin Delano Roosevelt
<v Speaker 1>suddenly died of a cerebral brain hemorrhage unexpectedly. The thing
<v Speaker 1>that you may not know is that Harry Truman hadn't
<v Speaker 1>got any information about what was going on with the
<v Speaker 1>Soviets or the development of the atomic bomb. But four
<v Speaker 1>months later he was going to have to make the
<v Speaker 1>decision to drop the bomb on two different cities in Japan.
<v Speaker 2>Wow.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. So he was born in eighteen forty four. He
<v Speaker 1>was a farmer in Missouri. He served in World War One.
<v Speaker 1>He's got a middle initial of S, and a lot
<v Speaker 1>of people know, hey, the initials doesn't actually stand for anything,
<v Speaker 1>it's just S. But as it turns out, it was
<v Speaker 1>a way that he could be named after both of
<v Speaker 1>his grandfathers. One of them had the middle name Ship,
<v Speaker 1>the other one had the first name Solomon, and so
<v Speaker 1>the S stood basically for both of their names. He
<v Speaker 1>became vice president for the third term of FDR because
<v Speaker 1>he had uncovered about fifteen million dollars worth of waste
<v Speaker 1>that was going on during the war and had solved
<v Speaker 1>that problem. We start this song with Billy Joel's birth
<v Speaker 1>right nineteen forty nine. So when he was president in
<v Speaker 1>forty nine, the Soviets blockaded the western part of Berlin,
<v Speaker 1>weren't letting anything come in, and so it was Truman's
<v Speaker 1>idea to go, Okay, you're not going to let us
<v Speaker 1>drive the fo in, we will airlift it in. And
<v Speaker 1>so that's what they did. He started airlifting supplies into
<v Speaker 1>western Berlin and on May ninth, nineteen forty nine. Billy
<v Speaker 1>Joel was born on May eleventh, nineteen forty nine. Just
<v Speaker 1>two days later, the Soviets pulled back their blockade because
<v Speaker 1>of what Harry S. Truman did. Wow, that's incredible. All right,
<v Speaker 1>tell me what you know about Doris Day.
<v Speaker 2>Okay. Doris Day was born Doris Mary Ann Koppelhoff in
<v Speaker 2>nineteen twenty two. Kopplehoff is not the greatest, right, So
<v Speaker 2>here's the thing. She began her career as a singer.
<v Speaker 2>She changed her name to Doris Day after singing the
<v Speaker 2>song day after day, day after day. So she landed
<v Speaker 2>her role in a movie called Romance at the High
<v Speaker 2>Season nineteen forty eight, after impressing the writer and the
<v Speaker 2>director Afting hearing her song Embraceable U. From there, she
<v Speaker 2>started several musicals, including By the Light of the Silvery Moon,
<v Speaker 2>which I know from Looney Tunes and so do you.
<v Speaker 2>She also started in the movie Calamity Jane and the
<v Speaker 2>Man Who Knew Too Much, the Alphad Hitchcock classic. Now. Then,
<v Speaker 2>from that movie she sang her signature song k Sara Sarah,
<v Speaker 2>but she hated that song when they came to her
<v Speaker 2>and said, you're gonna sing that. She's like, fine, I'll
<v Speaker 2>sing this one time and that's it. Well, it became
<v Speaker 2>her signature song. She's sang in a billion times after that.
<v Speaker 1>Right.
<v Speaker 2>She also starred in a movie I'll See You in
<v Speaker 2>My Dreams. Go back to our Patreon episode where we
<v Speaker 2>did on the Giant song and Pillow Talk with Rock
<v Speaker 2>Hudson where she became a lifelong friends with Rock Hudson.
<v Speaker 2>Most people don't know this. She turned down the role
<v Speaker 2>of Missus Robinson in The Graduate how About that It's
<v Speaker 2>Been Cool? She turned it down because she didn't like
<v Speaker 2>the subject matter, and she was dubbed the world's oldest
<v Speaker 2>vergeon because of her squeaky clean image. She hosted several
<v Speaker 2>TV shows and became an animal and AIDS activist. Now then,
<v Speaker 2>she's name checked in We Didn't Start to Fire by
<v Speaker 2>Billy Joel, Obviously, Wake Me Up Before You Go Go
<v Speaker 2>by Wham You Make, Wrap Her Up by Elton John
<v Speaker 2>and dig It by the Beatles. She also did several
<v Speaker 2>songs with Johnny Ray, who we're gonna be talking about tomorrow. Okay,
<v Speaker 2>de what do you know about Red China?
<v Speaker 1>Okay? There is far too much history for me to
<v Speaker 1>tell you the whole story about Red China, but I
<v Speaker 1>will tell you this. It has been Red China for
<v Speaker 1>about eighty years now. Before that, it was a dynasty
<v Speaker 1>for about two thousand years, so that's pretty freaking impressive.
<v Speaker 1>But in nineteen twelve the dynasty was broken up and
<v Speaker 1>China kind of became the subject of various factions run
<v Speaker 1>by war lords. And then Shang Kai Shek took over
<v Speaker 1>and he started running everything as best he could, which
<v Speaker 1>he made a lot of progress, but he was also
<v Speaker 1>kind of an asshole, and so the Communists in nineteen
<v Speaker 1>twenty seven started a war with Shang Kai Shek's Kuming
<v Speaker 1>Teng government, and that civil war went on for a
<v Speaker 1>long time. Nineteen thirty seven Japanese War starts as well.
<v Speaker 1>But then by October first, nineteen forty nine, the Communists
<v Speaker 1>win and the official proclamation of Communist China takes place.
<v Speaker 1>Now they called themselves the People's Republic of China, but
<v Speaker 1>over here in the US we called them Red China
<v Speaker 1>because they were the Communists. Side note. Nineteen eighty nine,
<v Speaker 1>when the came out, there were political reforms going on
<v Speaker 1>in China, and that is when we had the Tenaman
<v Speaker 1>Square protests and mask. That's it for today, folks. We
<v Speaker 1>will catch you on our next episode.