Behind the Scenes Minis: Lyon and the Family

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy B.

00:00:15
Speaker 2: Wilson.

00:00:16
Speaker 1: We talked about Patrick Lyon in the first US bank robbery this week. I did not know this story in any way at all. I had never heard any aspect of it. And when you told me this is what you were working on, I was also like, oh, a bank robbery. I cannot even think of when is the last time we talked about a bank robbery on the podcast. I know, and I will confess to you I was actually researching another bank robber when a different bank robbery was invoked as the first bank robbery in the US, and I went and looked for that and I was like, wait a minute, there's one way before this. And so that's how I ended up down this particular rabbit hole, which completely fascinated and engaged me. We did not mention during the show, but Carpenter's Hall still exists. You can even book it for events. I imagine it's pricey, but I haven't looked into it, but that'd be a cool place to do something. One of the things that I didn't put in the outline, but is interesting to me is that Patrick Lyon was laid to rest next to his daughter Clementina, but not either of his wives. And I wasn't sure why. People I don't know if they ended up in their own family cemeteries or plots, and Clementina was in one that they had started for the Lions. I'm not sure what that is. But he's with her and not either of his wives, which is just kind of interesting. There is a full, I think it's what one hundred and thirty ish pages publication of everything that happened in that trial. Oh wow, which is a lot of testimony, which is why I was saying, it becomes so obvious after you keep reading it for a while that it's like the bank just really didn't like him and decided that that was who had done it, and they just dug in and could not be convinced otherwise. Right, And it's like testimony on testimony on testimony of like he's the most suspicious, and because Cunningham had died, they were able to kind of manipulate his what would have been his side of the story to shore up their own thing of like, oh, Cunningham would never ever have done anything wrong with a key. And it's like the guy that robbed the bank told you that was his guy on the inside, right, but now you make him like this paragon of virtue.

00:02:48
Speaker 2: It's so weird.

00:02:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, that part of it reminded me of all kinds of like wrongful conviction, wrongful accusation stuff. It still happens today, where the rationale is like, oh, she didn't seem emotional enough when she was telling us about her husband's death. Uh. Oh, he seemed to be too focused on the detail of what was happening when that guy was in his shop. And I'm just like, so often all of that stuff is just encompassed in the breadth of how we experience and express ourselves as humans. Yeah, uh, and then becomes like justification for an entire case against someone.

00:03:35
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:03:35
Speaker 1: It's so weird to me that they're like, how is your memory so good? Well, maybe he just has like a you know, nearly photographic memory people do well. And none of what we read seemed all that detailed to be right. It's like, well, the guys came over. It would be weird enough if I had, if I were in my little office that presumably did not have a lot of foot traffic, and someone related to the business I was doing came over with another friend that I didn't know. He chatted for a minute, and then they left, and then that unknown person showed back up again while I was with another customer, just walked around by themselves for a little while. I would remember that that's not that's a memorable event for most people, right.

00:04:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's super duper weird. The minuteness.

00:04:25
Speaker 1: They keep talking about the minuteness.

00:04:27
Speaker 2: Like that just doesn't seem that minute to me.

00:04:29
Speaker 1: At first, I was I thought I was reading like paraphrases of one person's quote that kept bringing up, like specifically the word minuteness and minute, and I was like, no, it just shows up repeatedly. They just somewhere in their whole thing, they were like, he was so minute, and that's what they all started repeating. Yeah, bizarre. Yeah, one of the funnier parts of the testimony. To me, again, it's not funny that he was held wrongfully, but some of the ways that people behave is comedic to me, and especially in context of the world we live in today. And one of the big fox sie of the whole thing that kept coming up was whether or not Smith, who was the cashier of the bank, ever swore or cursed, Okay, like that being some sort of marker of whether or not he was a gentleman. And his barber named Jay initial j Riser was very forthright about like, yes, he swears in my chair all the time, Like, yes, of course he does. And it just was so funny to me that there was a whole side argument going on about whether this person ever used foul language or not, and sitting in the year twenty twenty four, where there is a whole lot of wild and wooly stuff going on in the public and political stage, the idea of a fixation on whether someone you know ever dropped the word damn as a bomb in a sentence, like, Oh, that's that's so quaint, right. It's kind of like when we did our episode a while back on James Fair and his affair, his extramarital affair got him drummed out of Congress, and I'm like, how quaint It's.

00:06:32
Speaker 2: Wild to me.

00:06:43
Speaker 1: The other fun part is that after painting Lyon's portrait, Nagel's career really took off. Yeah, he kind of even though that portrait was definitely a departure from the accepted style and composition of the time. Like normally, if you were going to get your portrait painted and you hired someone to do it, you wanted to look like a fancy pantsy unicorn. You wanted to be featured in your absolute best thing, not looking sweaty in front of a blacksmith forge. But everyone loved that portrait so much, and it got so much attention because of its unique qualities that like suddenly he was the it portraitist for a lot of people in Philadelphia and beyond. Right, even though most most people I think today would say this is still like one of his very or two now of his very best works, but it is quite interesting. I love the pettiness of no put you put Walnut Street Prison in that portrait with me?

00:07:41
Speaker 2: You do it.

00:07:42
Speaker 1: I'm I'm not letting anybody forget what those.

00:07:45
Speaker 2: Weasels did to me.

00:07:47
Speaker 1: I love everything about that level of pettiness. Anyway, Anyway, bank robberies will never know really where that key came from. Yeah, somebody had one, we don't know. But since you know, it seemed like Isaac Davis spent a lot of time gawking at the keys while he was there. I mean that here's what happens in my head and my fanciful how did this potentially play out? The what if scenario is, did he send that woman in to engage lying in conversation and then he went in and diod time like a really fast like wax imprint of a key.

00:08:31
Speaker 2: That's my theory. I'm reminded of some.

00:08:36
Speaker 1: Book that I read when I was a child, so I just I don't remember. Somebody in the audience may remember and send us an email, but it was a book that I read, like in elementary school years. I think that involved a kid at a boarding school that needed to break into a place and made an impression of the teacher's key into a bar of soap and then whittled it out of would And I'm like, that's that's what I think happened here.

00:09:04
Speaker 2: Something cool, something cool.

00:09:09
Speaker 1: But yeah, I'm I'm delighted that this was one that took you my surprise a little bit, because yes, it's a again not fun that he was wrongfully imprisoned, but it is a fun story, yes, in terms of how it all goes and how weird it is, and also who robs a bank and then deposits the money in the same bank.

00:09:29
Speaker 2: I thought about that a lot.

00:09:30
Speaker 1: I was like, what that would bless your heart moment. I'm not saying I would ever rob a bank, but if I robbed a bank, I would not be putting the money in any bank, right, definitely not in the same bank, not in the bank. Yes, and again I did not rob any bank. Wild that a person would take that course of action, It is really really kooky to me. I wish, oh how I wish that we could get the story of logic on that of like, yeah, like what what was the decision making process there?

00:10:12
Speaker 2: I know what I'll do?

00:10:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, And Isaac Davis kind of blips out of the whole thing. Apparently there was a moment it gets invoked during the trial record that he had been back he like left Philadelphia. He upoutied once they were like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, your pardon. Apparently he had been in Philadelphia at some point early in the eighteen hundreds, and at that point Patrick Lyon was like, does anybody want to question this guy? Like do you want to get initial information? And nobody did. But I saw in one thing and I wasn't able to verify it. It may have been in the materials I had, but there was a lot of them, so I may have just missed it that he patrick Lyon had actually gotten Davis to write a letter saying explicitly patrick Lyon was in no way connected to that robbery. He did not get involved at all. This is now in writing, It's not just me talking to the bank dudes. And yet everybody was like, yeah, but still we think he did though, but are you sure, because we're pretty sure he must have. He's just he's a mastermind, clearly right. Another thing that plays out in the rich fantasy life of my head, in the fictional version of this in the petty Olympics, is that at one point, one of those weasels houses burning down, and Patrick Lyon is like, oh really you want a firetruck, just standing outside the guy's house watching it burn while he sits with his fire truck apparatus. That's not really how any of that would have worked, but in my head, in the petty comedy of my head, right, if you were writing this screenplay, that would have been kind of fair, Like remember how you held me for months in a root seller and barely fed me enough to live and then told my friends they couldn't see me anymore. I mean, I it seems a little fair at that point, Yeah, it seems a little fair. Those are really sad. There's one piece of testimony from one of his friends. It was like I visited him initially, but then they stopped letting me in, and I had seen him looking worse, but then I couldn't see him anymore. And it's just like, it's so beyond wrongful imprisonment because at that point it's just weird and cruel. It's like you haven't been charged with anything, and yet you get essentially like isolation.

00:12:33
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:12:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the comical elements of this episode for me, are are kind of counterbalanced by having, you know, read the coverage of so many things about people who were wrongfully convicted or wrongfully accused and in some cases like substantial evidence that they did not commit the crime, and we're then executed for it.

00:12:58
Speaker 2: And so it's like, well.

00:13:00
Speaker 1: This goes back all the way to the beginning of the legal system in our country. I mean, this one is nice because in the end, you know, he proves the truth right, takes them for a ride legally, and comes out victorious, So it's a little easier to stomach because of all that. Right, if it had ended terribly and he had not, as he feared, gotten out of jail, then.

00:13:30
Speaker 2: It would not be a fun episode at all.

00:13:32
Speaker 1: Right, And he did apparently at one point have yellow fever while he was imprisoned, but he survived it, which is extraordinarily fortunate because a lot of people did not. And he also kind of started to advocate in general for people who were held whether they were one, he said, there are a lot of innocent men in that jail, and two they're not getting treatment, Like, they're not living in hygienic conditions, even the ones that had a better air quoting could because it clearly wasn't a better situation than what he had, Like, he's like, they're still getting sick, there's still a lot of infection, and nobody's being treated or cared for. So I don't know that that really had a direct impact on anything in terms of like improving care. Clearly, you know, there were a lot of people who still felt very comfortable talking trash about him even after he had lived through that improven his innocence. But right, right, humans, you disappoint me. But also when you deposit, you're stolen money in the place you stole it from, you delight and enchant me. It's a mixed bag, but it's yeah, fundamentally, like I said, the underdog comes out on top in the end, Right lives a great and wealthy life, sticks it to everybody with his portrait.

00:14:54
Speaker 2: I love it.

00:14:56
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:15:08
Speaker 1: One of the things that we did this week was talked to Toby Ball about the podcast Rip Current. I wanted to talk to Toby for a couple of reasons. One, this all started with Nomes Griffin, who's one of the producers at iHeart who worked on this show, sending a note to me say, Hey, what if Toby were on your show? And I thought it would be an interesting opportunity one to talk about some history that's a little more recent than you and I totally cover, to talk about what it's like to make a podcast that's so very different from yours and mine, because what the two of us do is we researched the episode, and we write the episode and then we record.

00:15:49
Speaker 2: It right.

00:15:51
Speaker 1: And Rip Current involves a lot more going through archival audio and interviewing a lot more people and all of that kind of stuff, and I personally have not worked on a show that involves that kind of production, but.

00:16:05
Speaker 2: You have, I sure have.

00:16:07
Speaker 1: I have not at all, But you take on a lot more other projects at work than I do regarding making other podcasts.

00:16:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I.

00:16:18
Speaker 1: Thought that might be an opportunity for our listeners to sort of hear what the behind the scenes is like on another type of podcast that is also talking about history.

00:16:29
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:16:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, those are always tricky. There's a moment early on where I usually when I'm dealing with something like that, and it's always my own fault. I'm always like, here's how we should do this, and then we actually get all the stuff, and then I just want to start crying because I'm like it's too much too dig through. Yes, one of the things that we talked about in the interview was like the process of getting all of the information together. Holly has not heard the interview yet, so I am telling Holly Toby's method for putting together his thoughts and his information and his research involves index cards of different colors and then putting those together. And I got the impression when he said that that he that we might think that was an odd thing to do, But I was like, oh no, that was absolutely my process for a long time until it became easier to move things around with a mouse. Yet I still like handwritten, Yeah, I do, whether it's index cards or I got really into for a while, like just at home, I keep a giant whiteboard, huh. And I had at one point, like when we were doing drawn and I was trying to figure out some of this stuff, I kind of had like this weird numbering system where I would just as we did an interview, I would number the interview and be like, this is interview number one, two, this is three, and then I would stack those numbers into a grid by topic where it would be like that one talked about you know, early Walt Disney studios. This one talked about you know, termite terrace and those studios. This one talked about bugs bunny. This one did not. And that's how I did. So what a visual is great for me? Right, I can parse it out a little more easily that way. Yeah, there are things that I do like writing by hand, making a little chart or a list or whatever, But writing things out by hand is so much more laborious for me than typing it. Yeah, that if I can type something, that's usually what I'm going to choose to do. We also had a moment the two of us while I was listening to episodes of Rip Current that I found funny, and I thought we would sit here a little bit. And so, parents, teachers, if you're listening to this with younger people, I'm just gonna say, maybe skip ahead just a little couple of minutes, or I'm not sure.

00:19:02
Speaker 2: I think this is the Friday episode, so.

00:19:04
Speaker 1: Maybe even this is a place to just check out of this behind the scenes, because we're gonna be talking about some Manson family stuff. So I was listening to Rip Current, listening to all of the episodes that had come out so I could prepare for this interview, and there was audio footage of one of the members of the Manson family talking about how like their sexual relationships with each other and said something like, we would have sex with each other, and we would have sex with him, We would have sex with each other with him, just like a family. And I was not expecting the just like a family. And I said what out loud, And then when I relayed that experience to you, you were like, did you not know that? And I was like, I knew the first part, but it was just like a family that really threw me. Ye, And that is when we realized that, like our our familiarity with the Manson family, very different experiences. Yeah, I mean I have a few, right. I had mentioned that, like Manson was another one of those things that got talked about in my house growing up a lot, and that my mom and my two sisters read Helter Skelter together. Yeah, and Helter Skelter would not have been a book that was allowed to be in our house, right. But to be clear, like my sisters are much older than me. It wasn't like my mom was like, hey, eleven year olds, would you like? It was like they were late teenagers at that point. Okay, yeah, probably junior and senior year of high school.

00:20:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember correctly, but so so.

00:20:44
Speaker 1: But then also, it's come up in various other points in my life, like there was a play called Your Children about Charles Manson that somebody I knew in college. Did I think a staged reading of so? I was just very familiar with that material, but in that way that you think that your experience is universal. I was like, Tracy, what are you talking about you've never heard this book, yeah, And I was like, I've never I had never heard that clip. I had never read that as a quote. The first part of it about how they were all like basically all having sexual relationships with each other and together. That was not the surprising part. It was the then equating that to like a family, as though that's all how all families work, And I was like, what.

00:21:33
Speaker 2: Ambling right now?

00:21:36
Speaker 1: Because I grew up in a household, I would say I was pretty sheltered raised Methodist, which growing up Methodist in North Carolina in the nineteen seventies and eighties, on the spectrum of Protestant religions, I feel like kind of in the middle in terms of how conservative, broadly speaking we tended to be. But also Satanic panic happened, and my mom was very concerned about anything that might lead my brother or me into devil worship, So anything involving Charles Manson was off the table for being appropriate to read or talk about, right. I guess part of it for me too, is like if my mom said that, I'd.

00:22:29
Speaker 2: Be like aunt well.

00:22:31
Speaker 1: And I was also very much a rule follower in contexts where the rules made sense to me, and I thought they mattered, so like I did not. I did not do homework that I thought was a waste of my time, even though doing the homework was the rules. But if my mom told me that I needed to do a load laundry every day, then I was going to do the load laundry every day. I mean, I think it's safe to say I was a more rebellious child than you.

00:23:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it seems correct.

00:23:05
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:23:08
Speaker 1: I didn't have a ton of respect for anybody. I even remember telling my mom when I was like seven, you don't get my respect just because you're older than me, yeah, which I feel like you would never have said to your parents.

00:23:21
Speaker 2: No, no, no.

00:23:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can imagine how well that went over.

00:23:26
Speaker 2: Yeah I didn't.

00:23:28
Speaker 1: I didn't start being more rebellious until I was like in my teens and started trying to do stuff like date. But even then, like there were still there were still a lot of rules, and if I broke the rules, there were definitely consequences for having done that, and I still tended to be like a rule follower in a lot of other ways.

00:23:49
Speaker 2: So anyway, all exchange made me laugh.

00:23:56
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, I'm glad I have gotten to do a couple of interviews lately. One of them will not be out yet by the time this episode comes out, so folks can look forward to having another interview suit related to another podcast. So again, Happy Friday everyone, whatever's happening on your weekend. I hope it's great, and I hope that you come and join us tomorrow for a Saturday classic and on Monday for something brand new. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.