‘The Rev’ Rose Mackenberg

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Halloween season is in full swing. It's the best time of year, both in life and the podcast. Uh And today we're going to talk about a woman whose story is very intertwined with someone who has come up on the show before, but today's subject, Rose Macknburgh, never has, to the best of my knowledge, I sure like her. She's one of those historical figures I think I would love to have a drink with and hang out with because she's funny. She spent decades working to uncover fraud taking place in the name of spiritualism. So today we're going to talk about a few of the more high profile moments in that career and how she turned to educating the public about her work so that they would not be taken in by Charlatan's. We've talked before about Harry Judini and his relationship with spiritualism. That came up recently in brief in our episode on Helen Duncan. If you were there for our live streaming event in March of this year, you heard us talk about his disagreement on all of this with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in more detail and how that ultimately damaged their once close friendship. Additionally, previous hosts Katie and Sarah did an episode on Houdini way back in two thousand nine. We had that as a Saturday Classics. So we're not going to rehash his whole entire life story, but we will do a very quick refresher because his rise to fame and eventual shift in how he viewed spiritualism is really important to Rose Makenburgh's story. So Houdini, who was sometimes um believed by people to have had some sort of supernatural ability, spent several decades himself studying spiritualism and psychic phenomena. He amassed a really impressive collection of literature on the subject, dating he claimed all the way back to fot nine. He also attended hundreds I would even guess possibly thousands of seances, and he always said that he kept an open mind, but that no mystical happening had ever been recreated under test conditions, And he really did seem to want to have some shred of hope regarding the afterlife and a possible way to connect to it. Part of his initial draw to seances was a desire to communicate with his dead parents, and as he came to the conclusion that most, if not all, mediums were just fakers who were trying to cash in on the sorrows of desperate people, Houdini made it a personal mission to expose these kinds of frauds. In Judini published the book A Magician among Spirits, which exposed a lot of the tricks that were being used to fake seances, as well as other tricks that were used by people claiming to be mediums. He wanted to gather even more evidence of slight of hands being sold to people as actual supernatural events. Now we don't have a whole lot of information about Rose Mackenburg's early life. We know she was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July tenth, eight two. Her childhood isn't really particularly well documented. That's not that unusual. Her parents were Louis and Anna Mackenburg, and they were Russian immigrants. Once she was an adult, she worked for a little while as a young woman as a law office stenographer, and then we know that by the time Harry Houdini had turned his attention to debunking mediums. Rose was working as a private investigator, and a friend is said to have introduced Mackenburg to Houdini. When Rose was investigating a medium who one of her clients believed was a swindler, and Houdini consulted with her about how she might expose the man. But he also was pretty impressed with Rose, so he then asked her if she might be interested in doing similar work for him on a regular basis. That request would change the course of Rosa's life, but she really wasn't sure she wanted to accept this famous magician's offer at first. She later recounted an interviews that when she met Harry Udini, she really believed in spiritualism and the ability of some people to connect to and communicate with people in the afterlife. She was frank with Hudini about this. She had no interest in taking on a smear campaign against spiritualism. Judini reassured her that he wanted only to expose frauds and that if there were a real medium out there, she could not be in a better position to find them. So she became his advance agent and investigator. She joined a team that the magician had hired that heartedly included twenty people. Yeah, those were just his people that were like working on this project of his to debunk fraudulent mediums and for her investigations, Makenburg often wore disguises in her early assignments. This was part just of assuming an identity of someone who had a backstory that usually involved the type of loss that would normally send someone to a psychic for help, like contacting a lost loved one. But as her career went on, Rose also ended up needing disguises just to keep people from recognizing her, because as she uncovered frauds, those frauds started sharing information about who she was and what she looked like with other people in their industry. There is a very funny photo spread, they're actually several that have been published in her career, in which she demonstrates some of the personas and costumes that she would use to go undercover, and these are quite charming. They included her posing as in her words, us smartly garbed widow, a rustic school teacher, a small town matron, a credulous servant girl, a believing semi invalid, a woman seeking lost, relatives of vamp from the country, and my personal favorite, a tipsy consultant um. That picture, if you ever find it, is quite funny. She looks like she is costumed in what you would stereotypically think someone like a fortune teller would be, but when she had her picture taken, she made sure to look like she was a little intoxicated, and it is a very funny picture. Rose had a pretty unique face, so she doesn't actually look all that different as a person from photo to photo, but her outfit and her physical demeanor are different enough for each of these disguises and others that for someone working only from a written description, she probably wouldn't have garnered attention. In addition, Rose was pretty deliberate in crafting her various looks. She told a reporter in the late nineteen thirties that she normally visit the local department store of any town that she was sent to. She would just watch the women shopping in there to make sure that she was buying clothes that matched and blended in with the styles that were favored by the locals, and she would take as much as a week to really learn the way people from the area spoke and interacted with each other. Only after she really felt like she had this whole thing down would she start visiting the town's mediums. And in addition to faux seances, Rose also uncovered a lot of inappropriate behavior on the part of men claiming to be mediums. She noted in many of her reports that men would grope her or even try to coerce her into undressing or allowing them to access her body in various ways under the guise of doing their work. It was always clearly sort of sexual and kind of gross in nature that would eventually become so common and so troubling in these reports that Harry Hudini suggested that Rose start carrying a gun in case things ever got to a point where she felt she was in danger, and she refused. The sexual harassment, though, started right from the beginning, and it persisted throughout her career. One of the most significant investigations that Rose conducted in her early career as a debunker involved a man who claimed to be a medium. He was named the Reverend Charles H. Gunzulis. Gun Soulis was operating out of Indianapolis, Indiana, in the early nineteen twenties and Rose was sent to visit him. That was six weeks before Houdini was scheduled to have a performance in Indianapolis, and for this visit to Gonzolos, Rose took on those guys of a mother whose baby had recently died. She told Charles Gounzulis that she was consumed by grief and she wanted more than anything to just make sure that her baby was happy in the spirit realm, and gun Soulis began his act. There were two spirit characters that Gonzulis claimed he connected with in the afterlife to help him in his quest. One was a woman named Ella, who he referred to as his spirit wife. The other was a Hindu guide that Gonzulis told Macknburg was eight hundred years old. This fake medium then told Macknburg that he would teach her to contact the afterlife by using a bowl of water as a scrying glass for the low price of twenty five dollars. She took that offer and she had several lessons with Gonzlis. He told her quote, I see you were going to have three guides, a Jewish, German and Italian. Does this mean anything to you shalom aleckum, and that mentioned that we made of sexually predatory behavior that Rose frequently ran into. Well, here it is. Gonzlis also told her, after she had presented herself, remember as a grieving mother, that this whole process was going to work better if she took off her clothes. Rose did not do that, but she did write a very detailed report of this entire experience for Harry Hudini, in which she described Gonzulis's manner as quote, Oily, We're gonna pause here for a quick sponsor break, and when we get back, we will talk more about Gonzulis and his relationship to both Spiritualism and to Hudini. So this particular assignment to visit Charles Gonzulis have been given to Rose because Houdini had a bit of history with Gonzolas. Gonzulis was to be frank a piece of work. In the early nineteen twenties, he had preached sermons in defense of the Ku Klux Klan, claiming that quote, the ku Klux Klan is putting the church back on its feet. Christ was the first klansman and was crucified for saying what he believed if Christ were here this morning, the chances are he would speak on the same thing I am speaking about. So gross. He often boasted about being the first Indiana minister to join the clan, but by the time he got the attention of Houdini, he had moved on from the clan because they had mocked his interest in spiritualism. And then he quickly became a rising star in the spiritualist movement. He was listed in the edition of Hartmann's Who's Who in Occult, Psychic and Spiritual Realms, which was published by the Occult Press. In addition to making very strange claims as a spiritualist minister, including that Jesus was visiting other planets and would come back to Earth in the year two thousand, Gonzolis also made threats. Weeks before Rosa's visit, Gonzlis had written to Harry Houdini proclaiming himself to be one of the country's leading spiritualists, and Gonsulis very much did not appreciate Houdini's efforts to expose fraud in the spiritualist community. He wrote, quote, it might be of interest to you when I tell you that I know how all of your tricks are performed while you are making an exposure of spiritualism. It might be interesting if we made an exposure of your tricks and published in the papers. That's what interest the public and other magicians, don't you think so? This really did not scare Houdini, and he dispatched Rose. And when Houdini then gave his Indianapolis performance at them or A Theater six weeks after Rose Macknburgh's visit with Charles Gonzoliz, Gonzolis was in the audience, Harry Houdini took the opportunity to expose the local medium. He gave details to the audience about what had happened during Rosa's visit. He had Rose joined him on stage to give details of her interactions with Gonzolas and how he had connected to her husband and children on the other side, even though in reality she had never been married and she had no children. Rose was not the only detective that Houdini had sent to Gonzolis, and others were brought forth during the performance to share their stories as well. This included one from the National Detective Agency who had done a lot of research on the man and had assembled a detailed dossier about his entire life. Gudini asked Gonzolis if he'd like to respond to the accusations. So this incident was also written up in local papers and describes what happens. Quote. Mr Gunzlis declared that he is with Houdini in his effort to drive out fraudulent mediums, and that he admitted that out of mediums are fraudulent. Mr Gunzulis evidently concluded he was outnumbered when none in the audience rallied to his support, so he finally offered Mr Houdini his hand, which was taken and bowed himself out. It was after eleven o'clock before the controversy was over, so basically he did not defend himself. This same pattern of Makenburg traveling ahead of Houdini to towns on his tours and then visiting mediums and cataloging their every interaction with her so that Whodini could use those details on stage to reveal the frauds during his shows was something that played out over and over that was really their like whole approach. Another approach that Rosen Houdini took to expose frauds was for Rose to attend a seance and watch carefully for how the medium involved was tricking their clients. During those seances, she'd alert Houdini. He would help her arrange to have another seance appointment, this time with members of the press surreptitiously attending as spiritualists. The reporters would be briefed ahead of time on the way that given mediums act played out, so that one of them could take a flash photo at exactly the right moment to capture their deception. Yeah, they outed a lot of people doing these two things. Rose's work did not only expose self proclaimed medium she also exposed services that would certify mediums as clergy of spiritualist churches. Rose paid so many used for the certifications of ordination that among Houdini's staff she started to be called by the nickname the Rev. Her name even occasionally appeared in print as the Reverend Rose Makenburgh. She wrote of her ordinations quote, I have myself, in my several investigations, been regularly ordained a spiritualistic minister, not once but six times. At the most. It took me three days to be ordained, and once I was ordained in twenty minutes. All that I required besides a five dollar to five dollar fee was the claim that I could hear and see, which means in spiritualistic circles, the ability to hear spirit voices and see spirit forms. Those who ordained me were so incurious once they got their fee that they paid no attention to the ridiculous names I had assumed for the occasions, the Reverend Alicia Bunk all Is Bunk and the Reverend f Rod Fraud I love her. She also encountered a really particularly gross instance of sexual harassment that I would say borders on sexual assault during one of her ordinations, in which your Reverend, who she only ever named publicly as Reverend X, told her that to be ordained as a woman, she would first have to be purified by the man who ordained her. He fondled her ankles, which she described as completely revolting, although she stuck it out to get more evidence of his fakeery. He then attempted to pull her close to him, and things got a little out of hand, and that is when she extricated herself from the situation. In n Houdini famously appeared before the House District of Columbia committee as part of an investigation into mediums and fortune telling while legislation against it was being considered. That legislation, introduced by Senators Royal S. Copeland and Saul Bloom, both of New York, would have made fortune telling in the Strick of Columbia subject to a quote penalty not to exceed two hundred fifty dollars or imprisonment not to exceed six months. Houdini was adamant that anyone billing themselves as a clairvoyant was a sham, just trying to make a buck, and that stance brought a lot of people who made their livings as mediums to the hearings to defend themselves. There were actually two hearings. One was in February, it was just one day, and then there were several days later in May, and during these Houdini gave demonstrations of how spirit mediums tricked people into believing they had been speaking with spirits. In one demonstration, he used a long trumpet. This was something that a lot of mediums were using, and he had different people hold that trumpet up to their ear, and although no one ever detected Houdini saying anything, the participants in the demonstration each reported that they had clearly heard sentences spoken by seeming spirits through the trumpet. Kudini also offered ten thousand dollars cash to anyone who could prove during these hearings that they were a true medium. One of the tests was for someone who claimed they could speak with spirits to come forward and tell him what nickname his mother had called him by as a boy. No one ever did it. Kudini declared in his testimony, quote, this is the only place in the United States of America where a crook or clairvoyant is licensed for twenty five dollars and under that can blackmail or commit any crime under the calendar and get away with it. There are millions of dollars stolen by clairvoyants and mediums every year, and I can prove it. He declared palmistry a fraud, and when asked about astrology, noted that sometimes astrologers make good guesses, but that quote, I don't believe that chunks of mud a million miles away can tell me what will happen to me or mine. Yeah. He famously also had made this scroll out of all the ordination certificates that rose in. Other agents of his had acquired in the course of their investigations, and he unrolled this entire huge scroll out um. It was very theatrical his testimony, and in addition to giving that testimony, Harry Judini also cross examined witnesses testifying in defense of spiritualist mediums, and he also called his own witnesses. Remember this is not like a court of law, it's a hearing, so it doesn't work quite the same. In case that sounded weird to you. Rose was one of the people that Houdini asked to testify, and the most pertinent of her experiences regarding this investigation was a visit she had with a woman named Jane Coates. Coats was a very popular medium in Washington, d c. And she had, according to Macknburg, divulged some rather sensitive information about the ongoing debate over spiritualism and this law proposed to outlaw it in the nation's capital. Rose testified that Coates had told her that there were too many believers in office for the law to ever come to fruition. And Rose said that Coates had told her quote, I know for a fact that table tipping seances are held in the White House with President Coolidge and his family. Coats also named three senators who had she told Rose visited her for psychic readings and frequently consulted mediums. Those were James Eli. Watson of Indiana, Arthur Capper of Kansas, Clearance Dill of Washington State, and Duncan Upshaw Fletcher of Florida. Rose's testimony was explosive, as in Jane Coates stood up and started yelling denials of Makenburgh's account almost immediately. Coats, in another medium known as Madame Marcia, had asked to stand close to Macknburg as she testified, so when these outbursts happened, Coates was yelling right next to her. These things quickly escalated, and assume there was so much yelling and even raised fists that the committee lost control of the hearing and had to call in a journment. Even after the session was cleared, the argument carried on as people were shuffled into the hallway. The New York Times account of the proceedings read quote, Today's session was unusually disorderly and came near winding up in a free for all fistfight. Cries of liar, fake, and producer were exchanged by Houdini and his assailants, and the din reached such a point that members of the committee demanded the police be called. When speaking with reporters after leaving the hearing, Jane Coates said that Rose Macknburg had distorted what she actually told her. Coats clarified that she had never told Rose that seances were held at the White House, but that they took place quote under the shadow of the White House. She also clarified that while she had been consulted by senators, she had not ever had a meeting with a member of the President's cabinet. She also insisted that she had known Mackenburg was an investigator the entire time that she was with her. There is a whole secondary reason that Jane Coates would have been really upset about Rose's testimony. That had nothing to do with exposing her as a fraud, but it was about upsetting the president. Probably nobody would want to do that, But in this case there was a very specific reason. According to The New York Times, Mrs Coates was quote interested in a claim bill that had passed Congress and was before President Coolidge for signature, from which she was to receive twenty five thousand dollars for eighty five cows killed by the government on her family's farm in Maryland several years ago. Of course, she would not have wanted to do anything or have anything said in that hearing that might cause the President to veto that bill instead of signing. And she claimed that she was going to clean up the spiritualism community with the money once she got it, and, according to the Times quote, put it on a high plane. The Coolidge administration was eager to stay away from all those kinds of claims and heart because the preceding Herding administration had been associated with mediums and it was an embarrassment. Houdini wrote President Coolidge an apology letter, insisting that he had never wanted to embarrass the president, only to expose Charlatan's The White House gave no official denial of the claims that seances had been held with members of the Coolidge family present, but there was an informal statement that the Coolidges were not interested in spiritualism. Despite Houdini's compelling evidence, including Makenburgh's testimony. This bill did not become law, but the whole event expanded public awareness of fraudulent mediums. Yeah, it got written up nationally in the papers, so people were suddenly a lot more aware that there was an entire industry of fake mediums. In just a moment, we're going to talk about Rose's life beyond her work with Houdini, but first we will pause for a sponsor break. If you are familiar with Harry Judini's story, you may have already done some quick math and realized that by the time he hired Rose Macknburg, he only had a couple of years left in his life. He died in ninety six. That was later the same year that the hearings before Congress took place, of paritonitis caused by a rupture appendix. But though her boss died, Rose, who was still just in her early thirties at this time, stayed on the path that he had opened up for her. She continued to investigate fraudulent claims of psychic abilities and spiritualism, and she had new clients for this, primarily insurance companies, the better business bureau, banks, and sometimes even police. And while she and Harry had a pact similar to the one that he had made with his wife, it's often famously talked about that if there was a way to communicate from the afterlife, whoever died first would reach out. Rose said she never heard from Houdini after his death. In the nineteen thirties, Makenburg went to visit a medium in Chicago named Herman E. Parker, after being privately commissioned to do so. She claimed to be a widow Mrs Rosalind Richards, still in a state of fresh grief from only recently losing her husband. She later recounted that in disguises of grief like this one quote, a touch of onion at the eyes gave me the proper facial appearance. Rose's disguise was one of plainness, and Parker clearly thought she was poor. He charged her only a dollar for her seance. He said that he had made contact with her husband, and that the deceased was there in the room with him, and that he was okay, and then he started wrapping up the proceedings. But then Rose bated Parker by telling him that she had hoped to ask her husband about the three thousand dollars she had been offered in a settlement. She noted in writing after the fact that it was really comical to see Parker suddenly become a lot more invested in helping her, but that if she had been a real grieving widow, it would have been tragic and frightening. After having learned that the fictional Mrs Richards not only had three thousand dollars coming to her, but also had fifteen hundred dollars in the bank, something that he learned by insisting her dead husband wanted to know the details of her finances in order to advise her. Parker told Rose he was receiving messages from the beyond to invest one thousand dollars with a man named Wilcox. Of course, Parker knew a man named Wilcox who owned a transportation company, so Rose wrote Wilcox a deposit check for twenty five dollars, for which she got a receipt That was evidence she was very purposely collecting, and then she went to the Investors Protective Bureau and relayed the entire series of events in her report. Both Parker and Wilcox were, according to Rose, tried and found guilty. While she continued to conduct investigations herself, she also became an educator. She gave lectures and wrote articles detailing the tricks that fraud psychics use so that lay people could spot them and not be taken in by these simple tricks. One message that she always included, Justice Houdini had was that she had no problem with people who believed in spiritualism. She only wanted to expose fraudulent mediums who exploited those beliefs for financial game. She wrote about widows who were cheated out of everything they had, and how even men who seemed worldly were drawn in by the promise of information that would lead them to riches. In an article titled when Crime Poses as Spiritualism, Rose wrote, quote, after ten years experience as a private detective working with commercial agencies, lawyers, and district attorneys, it is my considered opinion, although I have worked on gambling, robbery, blackmail, and murder cases, that the most vicious criminals in America are the Charlatans who betray and plunder their heartsick victims in the name of the dear departed dead. She went on to say, quote, My work has often led me into the squalid dens where the cheapest and most despicable of these criminals practice. Third rate magicians whose skill in deception is so little that their prey, by necessity, must be the uninformed and unprotected poor. One of the lessons that Makenburg tried to impart to people was that spiritualist fraud tends to rise in times of strife and uncertainty. That has become like an accidental theme of our October episodes this year. It was not planned, but it keeps coming up. She noted that during wars and economic downturns, psychics seem to pop up everywhere because people who are in a state of uncertainty are desperate for something to give them hope or solace. She wrote of this problem in nineteen one, quote, to these Charlottean's who take a cruel and vantage of human grief and anxiety. War brings boom times. The anguish of friends and relatives of dead, wounded, or missing servicemen offers a fertile field for heartless deception. Fathers, mothers, wives, sweethearts, and others close to those the Armed Service flocked to the seances of those counterfeit dealers in the occult. During the late stages of World War Two, Rose even had Chicago journalist E. W. Williamson go with her on her investigations also undercover, of course, and that experience became a series for the Chicago Tribune in which Williamson relayed all the same kinds of stories that Rose had been telling since the nineteen twenties, covering mediums who were claiming to have contacted dead relatives that were purely made up. On April tenth, Rose died in her apartment at three ten West twenty four Street in Manhattan. That is in Chelsea, in case you're trying to men really make a picture of where she was at. During her time as a spiritual investigator, she had taken part in thousands of investigations, and while some fake mediums once exposed claimed that they had known who she was, she had never been questioned by any of them during any of their interactions. Rose was very widely in her approach and she always managed to get her evidence. She once famously said of her work quote, I smell a rat before I smell the incense. Rose was very witty and a very funny writer. She wrote an autobiography titled So You Want to Attend a Seance, but that was never published. She did leave a lot of great quotes and the articles that she wrote an interviews that she gave seven she was quoted as saying, I never married, but I have received messages from a thousand husbands and twice as many children in the world to come. Invariably, they told me they were happy where they were, which was not entirely flattering to me. I love that quote. But though her wit can be cutting and she was incredibly sharp, she was also always, as we've said, incredibly careful to assure believers and spiritualism that she was not out to get them, just as Houdini had. She wrote in one of her articles, quote, although I am skeptical of the claims advanced by spiritualism, I have only the greatest respect for those who genuinely believe that communication with the debt is possible. The attempts I have seen to materialize spirits from the Great Beyond must be numbered in the thousands. But I have never been convinced that any message received was genuine. Yet, although I am skeptical of the claims made even by genuine spiritualists, let me confess now that I can find it in me to hope they are right. We all of us, I believe, must share that hope in some measure what a comfort it would be. And that is Rose Macknburgh, who I adore. She's such a fun one and I really I hope people will seek out photos of her and her various disguises, some as the art that will appear on social media, but there are lots of them and they are very very funny. Since the social media art nowadays is pretty much always square, it's only a couple of them because that what fits, that's what fits in a square. Oh, she's so good. If you just do an internet search on Google or any other search engine of her name and do an image search, you're going to find lots of pictures of her because she for those kinds of pictures for newspapers. She would like do the whole pose an expression, and it's very very entertaining. I have a listener mail from our listeners Sarah about um baby kissing and pasts and sewing, so it's it's covering lots of vases. Sarah writes, Dear Holly and Tracy, I want to thank you so much for having absolutely fabulous programming. First and foremost, I'm almost all the way through the archive, and it gets me through driving around and running errands. I had to stop folding laundry to shoot off this quick message before I forget is I'm basically a squirrel with shiny objects too. She writes, you brought up kissing babies, which absolutely makes me bonkers. But your comments on Today's Behind the Scenes about the campaign to kiss your baby to check for cystic fibrosis really struck a chord. My best friend's daughter, in fact, has cystic fibrosis, and I remember she called me when the baby was about three months old after her checkup and she was categorized as failure to thrive. In to note, she had a very intense burst situation where she um was actually born in the front seat of the car in the hospital parking lot. That sounds absolutely harrowing to me. Labor and Delivery kept arguing with the emergency department that it was an emergency situation since the baby was already born. Labor and Delivery didn't want to admit her. So after some time and back and forth, they finally got into the emergency department. But a lot of the testing that normally gets done right after birth did not happen. We have talked about that testing before on our show. In the Virginia apcar episode. She was categorized as an accidental home birth, and we knew that mom's family was a carrier for the cystic fibrosis gene, but when they tested Dad, they did not do a big enough spectrum and the baby ended up with a rarer genetic mutation of cystic fibrosis that was outside of the scope of the test they had done. I remember getting a phone call, which was funny because we don't call each other. We text, so I knew something was up, and she said to me that the baby might have cystic fibrosis, and I had no idea what that was. So she was giving me a quick rundown, and I said, did you lick her? Is she's salty? And my best friend said no, And then she did, in fact proceed to lick the baby and declared to me she tastes like a potato chip. A couple of a couple of weeks of genetic testing and specialist appointments and back and forth to doctor's offices, she does have systic fibrosis. And now she is a vivacious nine year old who was absolutely amazing in every single way and very healthy, in part due to my best friend's absolute militant sanitation and medication regiment, in part by a few medical breakthroughs that's happened in the last ten years. This is a fascinating version of that. Right, we talked about how that is not normally the thing that people would do anymore to test in that way, But this is one of those rare situations where like things have fallen through the cracks, right, I mean, at least here in the US, where most people give birth in a hospital. Not everyone, but most people give give birth in a hospital, And like in a hospital, there's a a collection of screening stuff that's supposed to happen immediately after birth or shortly after, which isn't how it works in the whole entire rest of the world. But yeah, yeah, I had not. I had certainly not considered like those strange outlier scenarios where those tests might not happen in the corporate timeline. But that's interesting. Sarah also goes on to say, I, in fact, am also not a hugger. I've become much more relaxed and better about this in the last ten years, especially after I started playing roller Derby. You get a little bit touch desensitized, and I'm better about knowing if their people are huggers, and so I can accommodate and mentally prepare. I still don't appreciate a full frontal hug unless I know you very well. I'd prefer a crisp pie. Five. We were out of state doing the arduous task of cleaning out my mom's apartment after she had passed, and my best friend came with me. She is also not a hugger. We were sorting things and donating piles, and my friend is in my mom's room sorting through clothing. I'm in the living room, where We've had a few neighbors come by to give their condolences, which I very much appreciated, and one neighbor came in, mind you, I am absolutely filthy. I'm sweating. It's hot. We're moving boxes. In the last year of my mom's life, her mobility really went down, so there's a lot of cleaning that just didn't get done. One of the neighbors starts moving forward towards me with arms a kimbo, and I won a jump back, put my arms up in a defensive motion and screech. I'm not a hugger. I can hear my best friend in the bedroom of this tiny apartment suppressing a cackle as I start to word vomit apologies trying to explain to the stranger I don't like hugging. Thank you so much for coming by. I do appreciate the sentiment, all a slightly panic tone. We still laugh about that day. It was one of the highlights of an otherwise difficult weekend. Holly. I also want to send a specific thank you for encouraging me to not be afraid of zippers. I finally started learning to sew after many, many years of threatening to learn how to sew into all the Halloween fabric out right now. I was inspired to make some simple gathered skirts, but I am not a fan of elastic waistband hey me either, uh, and I knew that I would have to learn how to use my zipper foot. After many many YouTube videos, I plucked up the courage and installed a zipper and realized it really, in fact, was not that hard. And now I have three fabulous skirts that I can can't wait to wear all year long, and hopefully we'll have time soon to figure out how to transition the skill into dresses. Uh. There are pictures of these skirts are very cute. I also don't like an elastic waistband. It's just not very flattering for a lot of people. Uh. And then there are pictures Lord Hamish, the cat who's adorable uh and likes to sleep on top of projects. Black fabric always a favorite. I know that dance bark Vader. It's a very good boy and does not care, likes the couch all to himself. So we get cat and dog pictures and they are so cute. Um, Sarah, this is adorable. So thank you for sharing all of this because you hit so many points of things we've talked about. Those skirts are very very cute. You're gonna look fabulous all season long and all year long. Kiss those cute pets for us. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History And if you haven't subscribed yet, go ahead and do that. It's so easy. You can do it on the I heart Radio app or wherever it is you are listening to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.