Clarence Birdseye and the Rise of Frozen Foods

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy he Wilson. So, when writing about Clarence Birdseye, who is our topic today? For his full length biography on him, author Mark Kurlanski wrote, quote, Birdseye wrote numerous articles about himself and his ideas, but the subject himself is not always an infallible source either, especially a man like Bird's Eye, who had an image of himself that he wanted to promote, a very American image of a lot of audacity, not much intellect, and a pioneer spirit. The first and last of these were largely true, the second manifestly not. But regardless of whether he fudged some details in his life story to make it more appealing, Clarence birds who eventually went by Bob, and we'll mention that in the episode, really changed the way that people thought about and prepared food in the twentieth century. There are, for the sake of clarity, up top to Clarence Bird's Eyes. In this episode, father and Son, we will refer to the main focus just as Clarence birds Eye or sometimes Bob Bird's Eye and his father we will refer to as Clarence Senior. Also, we have to give you a little heads up here because Bird's Eye was a very interesting and eccentric man, and he's often touted as a naturalist and worked as one, but maybe not the image you have in your head when you hear that word today. He was part of that era where being a naturalist often included killing animals. We're not lingering on any of that, but he did a lot of things that would be seen as deeply problematic by today's standards, particularly regarding animal cruelty. So just know that going in to this episode, Sorry, I was dwelling on the idea that an American image includes audacity and pioneer spirit, but not intellect. I know. Clarence Birdseye was born on December ninth, eighteen eighty six, in Brooklyn, New York. His father was Clarence Frank Birdseye, who was a very successful lawyer and wrote several textbooks. His mother was Ada Jane Underwood, who married Clarence Senior in eighteen seventy eight when she was twenty three. Birdseye grew up in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, and had eight siblings, so Clarence was the sixth of the nine total kids, and from an early age, Clarence was deeply interested in nature. The younger Clarence Birdseye was not an athletic boy, and instead he preferred to spend time by himself outside on the family farm that Clarence Senior bought on Long Island, which they called Windycote. His mother saw a budding naturalist in Clarence, and he seemed to agree. But this was not a case of a sensitive child who was one with nature. He was a boy who liked to shoot and hunt. When he was ten, he trapped live muskrats and shipped them to an English estate that was stalking their grounds with animals for hunting. He also advertised that he offered lessons in taxi derby. At the age of eleven, when Clarence was in high school, the family moved to Montclair, New Jersey. One of the interesting things he did a teenager was take a cooking class, and that was something that was considered unusual for boys at this time. He also started going by the name Bob Yeah. That class was part of his high school curriculum. It was kind of like opting into a home at class that was other than him, all girls, which is just an interesting choice, but sometimes that's cited as the beginning of his fascination with food. At the age of nineteen, Clarence enrolled at Amherst College in Massachusetts with the goal of getting a biology degree. This is interesting as Amherst didn't and doesn't offer science degrees, so he was still going to get a BA even with a biology major. And during college he rescued an infestation of rats behind the Amherst butcher shop that were going to be exterminated. This wasn't because he was soft about animals being killed. He recognized them as being a rare species. It was in danger of extinction, and he actually got Columbia University interested in this colony of rats. He got paid to ship the school a batch of them. In fact, he sort of always seemed to be mixing his love of nature with his love of a good hustle. He never got that college degree, though, he ran out of money after his second year and he had to drop out and join the workforce. There's also some suggestion that he got hired away from his biology program by the US government, and that is why he didn't finish. The idea of a financial hardship in particular is interesting because Birdseye was just He was not from a fan of humble means. His father was a high profile New York lawyer. It seems like the family did have a significant financial crisis, though, and that was around the time that birds Eye dropped out of college because he didn't have money. Apparently he tried to get a loan to continue college, but that loan was denied. Yeah, there are some question marks around Clarence Senior's business dealings. We're going to talk about a big financial crisis that comes a few years later. But knowing that that one is coming, I was a little like, hm, I wonder what exactly happened here. Birds Eye, though, did get hired by the US Department of Agriculture after school, and he was sent to the US Southwest for work on a biological survey. He was living in Arizona in New Mexico during this time, and he also became keenly aware while he was there of the value of animal firs, and that would drive some of his moves later. He worked various jobs in New York after the survey was completed and he returned to the East Coast, but he also started a new side hustle, importing animal firs from contacts he had made in the American Southwest and then selling them in the city. He also worked in an office job for the US Department of Agriculture, but he was really too restless to be happy working in an office. During this phase of his life, Clarence also met the daughter of cartographer Samuel Gannett. Eleanor Gannett, was an undergrad at George Washington University when they met. That started a five year courtship before the couple married in August of nineteen fifteen. But before that, the Department of Agriculture sent Bob Bird's Eye to Montana in nineteen ten, and this actually brushes up against our recent episode on eponymous diseases because he was there to collect tics for the study of Rocky Mountain spotted fever. We mentioned already that he loved to hunt, and this job involved a lot of hunting because he collected the tics off of wild game that he shot. He apparently, throughout his life touted how lucky he was that he could hunt with no limitations while he was there. This was a job that came with a high degree of risk for all the reasons we talked about in that eponymous diseases episode, but for someone like Bird's Eye, it was also a perfect fit. In interviews throughout his life, he downplayed his work on that project as insignificant, and he tended to talk about the hunting part of it, but he is recognized as being hugely important to the study of it that enabled treatments to be developed. Among other things, he wrote a report with recommendations on how to control the spread of Rocky Mountain spotted fever titled Some Common Mammals of Western Montana in relation to Agriculture and Spotted Fever. After the study, he stayed in Montana and he continued to trap animals to eliminate predators for the local farmers. The sounds really awful by modern standards, probably even standards of the time. One of his projects was testing poisons to see which of them was most effective. Reminds me a little bit of when they tried to figure out how much arsenic needed to go in the tick dip by experimentation on the animals. Yeah, In nineteen twelve, Bird's Eye moved on to a new assignment in Labrador, on the eastern coast of Canada, although at the time Newfoundland and Labrador were not part of Canada yet. Really this assignment was an invitation proffered by Wilfred Grenfell, a British born medical missionary. Grenfell had been working in Labrador for years by this point. He worked to develop the availability of medical care and other necessities to areas that were sparsely populated and depended on fishing and trapping for food and for income. And he needed help in this work, and this was exactly the kind of job that Bird's Eye was drawn to, so it was a great fit and these two men reportedly got along really, really well. While he was there. Birds Eye also taxadermied birds to send to Washington, d c. For the US Biological Survey, and that soon expanded to also preserving various insects and really anything that was requested. The trapping in particular was interesting to birds Eye. He saw the potential of starting a business venture if he could get investors from New York to buy in on it. After researching and studying the health and habits of foxes, he was in business as a fox breeder and a fur trader. Ultimately, new legislation in Newfouland put an end to the fox breeding business. He did continue having them processed for fur though. Birdseye also started writing about this work and published some articles as a possible start to another career, but that did not really get off the ground. This was also a time when Birdseye was in a unique situation regarding food food. He didn't really have access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Those had to be imported at very great expense. He ate a lot of canned food, which he actually liked, and he also learned a lot about how to prepare the foods that were available locally, like salmon and game in new ways. He welcomed new culinary experiences and he was willing to try just about anything, anything even polar bear, seal meat, and skunk. Coming up, we will talk about Bird's Eyes returned to the US, but first we will take a quick sponsor break. Bird's Eye returned to the US in nineteen fifteen, and at that point he felt like he had made enough money through his fur business that he was ready to truly start a life with his beloved Eleanor, so once the pair got married, Bob and Eleanor planned to travel to Labrador together. This was an adjustment for Eleanor, but she completely rolled with it, and she learned all the skills needed to survive in the wintery climate. By the time their first winter there was over, Eleanor was pregnant and they returned to New York. Bob actually went back to Labrador pretty quickly after making sure that Eleanor's needs were taken care of. The couple had made a plan. She was going to have the baby in New York and then she would travel to Labrador once the baby was old enough to go on the journey. Their son, Kellogg, was born on September sixth, and by mid October he and Eleanor were headed north and settled into family life in the cold. There were a couple of different stories about what led Bird's Eye to thinking about the way foods freeze. One is that while he was ice fishing with some of the indigenous people of Labrador, he noticed that because of the freezing temperatures, fish were freezing almost as soon as they were pulled out of the water. The fish would then be stored that way, and he marked and how fresh they tasted when they were thawed and cooked later. Another version of this is that the people who lived there were freezing their food for the harsh winters when the fresh fruits and vegetables would be less successible. Biographer Mark Kurlansky shared in his book about Bird's Eye the naturalist's fascination with water, finding what he called a quote state of equilibrium, by which he meant that it would stabilize the point right before freezing, and then would seem to freeze instantly when it was poured into another vessel. The reality is that Bird's Eye was noticing and studying all these things and performing tests on meats that were frozen at different times of the year by thinly slicing them and observing the different textures on the interior of the frozen food. He did start thinking about why the fish and other meat that he saw frozen in Canada stayed delicious, which is not the case with other frozen foods that he had experience back home. He noticed the variables that were in place during freezing there, the temperature, the ice, and the wind, and he ruminated on these factors a lot, and he started performing his own experiments. He started first with vegetables like cabbage, and then moving up to meats, and eventually he realized that instant freezing meant that the crystals that formed in those foods were much smaller and they wouldn't damage the cellular walls of the food. When the United States entered World War One in the spring of nineteen seventeen, Bird's Eye returned home, but there was a more personal battle bubbling up in the Bird's Eye family. A news article from May of nineteen seventeen that appeared in multiple newspapers ran with the headline quote alleged cleanup of one point nine million dollars in two days. This was about the finances of the Life and Trust Company of Pittsburgh. The article read, in part quote, the institution is believed to have been wrecked. According to a statement issued, Clarence Birdseye of New York, in a period of two days, milked the company of one point nine million dollars through a board of dummy directors. Warrants have been issued for the arrest of Bird's Eye and his five alleged associates, all of New York. One of those five associates was Birdseye Junior's brother, Kellogg. By the end of the year, the insurance company had been liquidated and Clarence Senior was being sued to recover the lost money. Birdseye Senior and Kellogg Bird's Eye were eventually sentenced to two years in prison. Yeah, just in case it's not obvious, the Kellogg name was popular in the birds Eye family. Both Clarence the younger, Clarence's brother and his son were named Kellogg. Birdseye Junior was never particularly interested in the world of finance in law, like his father and brother, and we don't actually know what his personal feelings about all these legal troubles were. We'll talk about it somewhere and behind the scenes, but this was not an openly demonstrative person, so we really don't have a lot of insight about how he felt about much of anything. It is possible that he wanted to distance himself from the entire situation. He and Eleanor and their young son chose to move to Washington, d c. As this was going on, which was close to her family rather than his. When they were there, birds Eye first worked for a construction company and then he moved on to the US Housing Corporation, and then another shift to work for the US Fisheries Association. Working for the Fisheries made Bird's Eye once again focus on frozen food because part of the work of the Fisheries Association was looking at ways to improve the shipping of fish. As Bob Bird's Eye investigated the industry, he was appalled at how sloppy things were in terms of production and sanitation. He thought he could do better and ensure that clean, fresh tasting fish made it to consumers tables. Initially, he focused his work on packaging, and he developed a shipping container to keep fish cold in transit, but it was not as effective as he hoped, and he started to contemplate the things that he had noticed and studied when he was living in Labrador. In nineteen twenty two, he quit his job to start working full time on developing his ideas for food freezing techniques. This was a huge gamble. At this point, he and Eleanor had two kids, and they had another on the way. Birdseye was not the first person to work on freezing food for the consumer market, and specifically not fish, but previous efforts tended to have a bad, grainy texture, frozen food did not have good associations on the consumer market at this point, even with other inventors also trying to figure out fast freezing. In nineteen twenty three, Birdseye drummed up investors to start his first frozen and food company. This venture was focused on the food he had gained expertise in through his various jobs in the preceding years, exclusively fish. Bird's Ic Seafood opened its door in Lower Manhattan that same year. He once again focused on packaging, but he realized that innovating the container for the fish wasn't really going to solve the problems that were facing the industry. He had to rethink the freezing process on a large scale. In nineteen twenty four, he was granted a patent for his food freezing machine. His basic process flash froze foods, which were already packed into waxed cardboard packaging. This packaged food would run through a pressurized space between two frozen plates. The process enabled the foods to be frozen so quickly that they didn't develop water crystals in them, which was part of what helped them retain their original fresh flavor. And this process worked on vegetables and fruits as well as fish. The big differentiator between Bird's Eye method and his competitors was in the temperature. A lot of other companies froze their foods just below freezing, but recalling the harsh winters and Labrador, Bird's Eye froze his foods colder than forty five degrees below zero fahrenheit. His patent titled method of Preserving Piscatorial Products Which I Love, makes clear that the benefit is to consumers that are not in close proximity to fresh seafood, stating quote of great importance is the fact that the ability to freeze fish without in any way adversely affecting it as an article of food makes it possible to supply this highly desired commodity to inland points far removed from the greater rivers and the oceans where the fish is caught. Soon he actually had another patent for the cartons that he was using in the process. But though this was all clearly innovative it was a huge step forward for frozen foods, it did not meet with success, and an echo of the abrupt end to his college education, he just ran out of money, but this time birds Eye had insurance, literally he had cashed out his life insurance policy for more money so that he could keep working on his frozen seafood company. It also didn't sustain the company, though, and as nineteen twenty five loomed, the money once again ran out. This time, he sold his house and he moved the family to Gloucester, Massachusetts, to be in a port city with a busy fishing industry. He and Eleanor also had a fourth child during this financially precarious time. Yeah, he basically was like, I'm going to keep going, so let's sell our house and let's go to Gloucester. Uh. He clearly had a vision. Things didn't luckily stay precarious for terribly long, though, because birds Eye got several high profile investors, including JP Morgan, to fund a new venture. This time, he was not planning on opening a storefront to offer his frozen food product. Bob Birdseye was planning to create machines to sell to the food processing industry. By this point, the legal problems that Clarence Senior and his brother Kellogg had been involved in had more or less been resolved, and for the first several years of this new venture, Kellogg became the vice president of Bob's new company. The new facility that he built was customized to handle the process that Bird's Eye had invented, and he named this new enterprise General Seafoods Corporation, and there he worked constantly to innovate what frozen food could be. This was an expansive effort that worked to innovate the entire seafood industry, not just in freezing, but in packaging and even prepping the product before freezing. The idea of a fish already scaled and fill aid before it was frozen for an easy consumer use didn't really exist before Birdseye worked with engineers to develop the machines that could perform those times. Yeah, he had a scaler and a you know, a fish flayer. He just invented so many pieces of this process. In nineteen twenty seven, he filed for another patent method of preparing food product, which he touted as follows quote. A method of freezing which requires more than a very short space of time for freezing impairs the natural qualities and flavors of comestibles. In the case of fish or meat, for instance, slow freezing disrupts the cells of the animal tissue with loss of the pristine qualities and flavors, and rapid deterioration after thawing. By my new method, I am able by means which are economical and commercially practical, not only to affect any desired degree of refrigeration, but to quick freeze a comestible into a compacted frozen block having comparatively fewer spaces in which the pristine qualities and flavor of the comestible are retained and remain unimpaired for a substantial period after the block has been thawed. That patent was granted in nineteen thirty. Bird's Eye, like many inventors we have talked about before, continued to refine his process in his machinery, and he filed a lot of update patents, including one for a continuous belt on his freezing apparatus. He didn't invent fast freezing, but he never stopped looking for ways to improve it. There were more things than belts that had to be refined and rethought. For one, all of this innovation didn't erase the years of concerns people had developed regarding frozen foods. Birds I kept working to address this distrust, paying for food safety tests to show the food was free from problems and contaminants, and all of the packaging had to be rethought, from plastic wraps to packaging inks and birds. I worked with partner companies to develop all these things. Bird's Eye's company still was not making any money. They needed investors or a buyout. One of the things that Bob Bird's Eye was known to do, and the hopes of drumming up interest from financial sources, was to send them frozen foods to show them how effective his process was. Yeah, there are stories of him like serving big wigs of industry like fancy lunches and then saying all of this was frozen food once to watch them go ooh. Eventually, that desired deal came through, and it was a huge one. A company called Postum Incorporated bought Bird'seyees company out in nineteen twenty nine for twenty three point five million dollars, which was absolutely unheard of for the time. His company had actually been valued just a couple of years earlier at less than two million dollars, so this seemed absolutely bananas to a lot of people. Marjorie Meriweather post the post and Foods heiress who is often credited with brokering this deal is on my short list. I became very interested in her in a little side rabbit hole while I was working on this episode. But the Postum company worked with Goldman Sachs to secure funding for this massive buyout. Part of the huge expense was that the patents were included in the deal, along with all the company's machinery and other assets. Postum really thought that Clarence Bird'seye had developed the future of food. Postum changed its name to General Foods Corporation shortly after the buy and started selling on the New York Stock Exchange two and a half months after the deal was announced. Within two years, as the company continued to lose money in the wake of the nineteen twenty nine stock market crash, Goldman Sacks let the Posts buy out their shares in the company. We'll talk about how Bird's Eye's life changed once he was a millionaire, but first we will hear from the sponsors that keep the show going. Whereas Bird's Eye maintained a role in the General Foods Corporation after the buyout, working as president of the division that retained the name, Bird's Eye Frosted Foods, and then he also worked as a high level consultant. Because of the timing of that buyout, he managed to weather the Great Depression quite well, as he had a steady salary with the company and he was able to continue his work developing new areas of the frozen food market. He also built himself a beautiful new house in the early nineteen thirties. While most people were struggling, he continued to hunt game because he loved it, sometimes shooting things right from his porch. Although he was certainly wealthy enough to not need to hunt for food. He also managed to keep a couple dozen other people employed in his lab at a time when jobs were really sparse. A lot of the techniques used in the frozen food industry today were initially worked out in his Gloucester lab, like keeping fruit from browning by using a sorbic acid. Yeah, it's just vitamin C. What the Post and Company had brought to that huge deal that Bird's Eye had never really managed well on his own was advertising and public relations. Over the course of several years. Immediately after the buyout, newspapers started running stories about a new quick freezing process that kept foods tasting fresh. The Baltimore Sun, for example, ran a piece in November of nineteen twenty nine titled food that is fresh though frozen. New preserving process aims to maintain cell structure. Already, the tide was turning in the way frozen food was perceived, as evidenced by this passage from the article quote, the quick freezing principle seemed so simple and its advantage is so great that one's imagination need not be stretched at all to visualize many startling outgrowths of its adoption of fresh food distributing agencies with the airplane to furnish quick transportation and the light practicable packages possible where no refrigerant is required, the range of fancy fresh meats and fruits made available to centers of population is vastly expanded. You heard that right. At the time, there was a belief that the food packaging could be all that was needed to keep the frozen food ice cold. That same article notes quote, it is asserted the excessive coldness of the food packaging itself makes it possible to hold it for days without icing or other refrigerant. Mirror packing, an insulated, nearly air tight container such as a sealed corrugated pasteboard carton is all that is necessary to assure first class condition for long periods. We knowed that was wrong, but at the time it seemed feasible. Even with the pr nohow of the Postum team, frozen food still had a slow acceptance rate. A handful of grocery stores, and I mean a handful. It was less than a dozen agreed to stock frozen foods through their company, but it was a really hard sell. Customers came in and they asked a lot of questions, but purchases were a lot less frequent. Over time, though, the numbers crept up. But General Foods spent a lot of money to get those numbers, including supplying the costly refrigerated cases that the food could be stocked in. Those cases cost fifteen hundred dollars each, but they were also expensive for the store because they used a lot of electricity. This caused a whole lot of consternation in the industry, so eventually Bird's Eye Foods contracted with another company to make less burdensome freezers. They were less expensive for Bird's Eye, and then they rented those to the stores and they were less expensive to run, so the end result was a better financial situation for everyone. In nineteen thirty five, birds Eye founded the Bird's Eye Electric Company. It started with a desire to add reflectors to the insides of light bulbs to offer greater illumination for display uses. He patented the reflecting electric lamp in nineteen thirty five, and it has continued to be used to the present day. He sold the electrical company to Wabash Appliance Corporation in nineteen thirty nine. Also in nineteen thirty nine, he invented a gravity froster, which froze individual items a single piece at a time. That sounds like it would be slow and weird, but it was totally automated, so ultimately it ended up being faster than previous freezing machines. It also needed less effort from an operator, so one person could run multiple machines at a time. This turned into a new company that built and leased the gravity frost machine to other companies that were making frozen foods. In nineteen thirty eight, interest in frozen food had grown to the point that a magazine called Quick Frozen Foods was launched. Bird's Eye was not the one who started it, but he did serve as an advisor. This was one of many things he became involved in as frozen foods became more of an established industry and he had more time for other projects. One of the other things he was involved in was whaling. He had invented a harpoon that had a thrust mechanism to give it greater force than throwing a harpoon by hand. That same year, his advocacy helped initiate an update to the Pure Food and Drug Act of nineteen oh six, which put stronger requirements in place for quality standards related to frozen foods, something that he and other people in the industry saw as vital to rehabilitating the way frozen food was perceived. Birds Eye once again innovated the way frozen foods were offered in nineteen forty four. At that point, he started exploring refrigerated train cars as a way to ship foods. He ended up leasing box cars that the Bird's Eye Frozen Food Company could pack and prep This is a huge moment in the way frozen foods were handled because it made it possible for companies like Bird's Eye to vastly expand their customer territory and it inspired a lot of other companies to start thinking about similar initiatives. In nineteen forty nine, he started working on dehydrating foods. This work started out simply just with a hot plate flipped to be an overhead heater for some cubed bread and an electric fan blowing on the cubes at the same time. From those basic beginnings, he started to combine various methods being employed by other people working in the field to fine tune his quote anhydrous food preparation. Over the course of six years, he started a company and marketed it and got some interest, but the novelty kind of wore off, and birds Eye recognized that it would take a massive effort to get anhydros food to be anywhere near as successful as frozen food. He turned his focus to other things, including Holly's beloved topic of hydroponics. He was one of the early proponents of the idea that cities like New York could produce all the food plants they needed if they converted the rooftops to hydroponic gardens. But at this point Bird's Eye was also starting to slow down. He developed angina, and he was encouraged to relax and stop his constant busy ways for the benefit of his heart health. This is actually the opposite of what people with angina would be told today, but at the time that's what the medical advice was. So this resulted in an interest in gardening, which his wife, Eleanor, was already very interested in. The couple ended up co authoring a book titled Growing Woodland Plants in nineteen fifty one. Over his life, Bird's Eye was granted hundreds of patents, almost three hundred. Some of these were improvements to existing inventions, but others were ventures into areas that were completely separate from his food processing work. In the early nineteen fifties, Bird's Eye started working on another project, which was making paper, but not in any way that it had been made before. He was working on a way to make paper pulp using leftover cane stock scrap that remained after sugar production. He got a financial backer, which was W. R. Grace and Company, who produced sugar. This resulted in a late in life move for Bob and Eleanor. They went to Peru, where the Grace Company had huge sugarcane fields and had built a paper plant. In nineteen fifty five. The Bird's Eyes moved back to New York, where Bob's work with the Grace Company shifted to marketing the new process he had developed over the preceding several years. But while those efforts were underway, his health took a sharp decline, and he died of heart failure on October seventh, nineteen fifty six. Bird's Eye had received an honorary degree from AMers fifteen years earlier, and in his end of life planning, he requested that instead of flowers, anyone wishing to pay their respects should donate a college fund that he established at the school to prevent other students from cutting their education short as he had done. Today, ninety nine percent of households in the US report purchasing frozen foods, and the global frozen food industry is valued at more than two hundred and thirty billion dollars. Yeah, he was right. He made some scary moves, but he was ultimately right. And even post THEMS buyout, which a lot of people kind of criticized them over and being like, why did you pay twenty three million dollars for a company that's not worth two And they were like, we see the future, and they were right. Listen, it takes a lot of bravado to gamble that way. It might take some people a little bit of bravado to deal with today's listener mail because it's about spiders. This is from our listener, Shandra, and I love it, Shandra Wrights. Since you were talking about spiders a few weeks ago in a behind the scenes episode, I wanted to share couple of pictures from New Mexico. The first is a cat faced spider, which is a type of orb weaver. It's been hanging out on my patio for weeks, maybe months at this point. I watched it clean a fallen leaf out of its web one day. Neat creature. It's absolutely adorable. In my opinion, this little bdonk looks like a kiddy face. Come on here, don't want that. The second picture is only the second tarantula I've ever seen. It's cool to see them walking down the trail. That is all happy October. Look at that pretty tarantula. I know not everybody loves a tarantula. I think they're very beautiful. We all know I love spiders. Char Angela is very cute. When I was very, very tiny, I lived in Arizona, and I love seeing the tarantulas running around, Like after the rare rain, they would all come up from their little burrows and be in the streets, and I thought it was the cutest thing ever because I was a weird child. I don't know what else to tell you. Uh, if you were a weird child who loved tarantula's or if you're a weird child now, or if you just love Taranngela's or anything else you can write and tell us about that. You can do that at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also subscribe to the show if you haven't gotten around to that yet. That is easiest pie to do on the iHeartRadio app, or really anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. 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.