Charlotte Cooper Sterry, Tennis Champion

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

00:00:16
Speaker 2: Today we are going to talk about Charlotte Cooper, also called Charlotte Sterry or sometimes Charlotte Cooper Sterry, who also went by the nickname Chatty. She was a tennis player whose marriage in nineteen oh one meant that news reports about her career variously called her Miss Cooper or Missus Sterry or Missus Sterry previously Miss Cooper, or sometimes even Missus Alfred Sterry. Some of the records she set during her lifetime playing tennis were unbroken for almost a century. One of them actually still stands. We've also never really covered the history of tennis on the show before, so we're going to kick it off with just a little bit of that, with some of the focus specifically on Wimbledon, since a lot of her athletic record was as a Wimbledon champion. Wimbledon is still considered one of the most prestigious tennis championships in the world, and that reputation was already established when she started competing there.

00:01:17
Speaker 1: When we say, Charlotte Cooper was a tennis champion. We, of course mean lawn tennis, played with rackets and a ball on a rectangular court with a net across the middle, usually outdoors, although in spite of the name, lawn tennis mostly not on grass anymore. But there is also court tennis, also called real tennis or royal tennis, which is typically played on an indoor court that looks fairly rectangular but is really asymmetric. On top of being asymmetric, these enclosed courts also are not standardized, and they have various nooks and galleries and other openings around the sides, with a visibly sagging net across the middle. Both of these tennis games can be played as singles or doubles, and both use a similarly confusing scoring system, but otherwise they are very different sports, with different rules, different types of balls, and different rackets.

00:02:12
Speaker 2: Lawn tennis and court tennis share a lot of history, though various games involving balls and paddles or rackets stretched back to the ancient world, but the clearest precursor to both of these types of tennis developed in medieval France. This was called jude pump or game of the hand or hand game. At first, this was played using a rope rather than a net, and a stuffed bag rather than a ball, and then people just use their hand rather than a racket.

00:02:42
Speaker 1: Judepum was played indoors, and as it was introduced from France to Britain, it was just called pum, which people spelled all kinds of different ways, gradually getting closer to the way palm is spelled today, as in the palm of the hand. In the fourteenth century, as the game was becoming more popular on both sides of the Channel, people started to shift from using their hand to using some kind of paddle. At first, this was not a strung racket. It was a long handled, wooden paddle that looked almost like a small ore in. The word tennis was used to describe this game by the start of the fifteenth century, probably pronounced to nie, I don't know baby. That would make sense since this game was played indoors, it was most popular among the kind of people who had room to do that, meaning royalty and the wealthy court. Tennis is one of several sports to become known as the sport of.

00:03:40
Speaker 2: Kings, and the number of royal deaths are somehow associated with it. This is not an exhaustive list, but on June fifth, thirteen sixteen, King Louis the tenth of France died at the age of twenty six after playing a very strenuous game of tennis and then drinking a bunch of chilled wine. That's what happened. His exact cause of death is not really clear though. King James the First of Scotland also liked to play tennis, and he had been playing a lot of it at Blackfriar's Monastery in Perth in February of fourteen thirty seven, when some assassins came.

00:04:16
Speaker 1: To kill him.

00:04:18
Speaker 2: The king used the iron tongs from the fireplace to lift up a floorboard, planning to escape from the assassins through the sewers, but then he found his way blocked with stones, and that was something that he had ordered three days before because he kept losing his tennis.

00:04:35
Speaker 1: Balls down a drain hole. And then Queen Anne Boleyn, wife of Henry the eighth, was also at a tennis match in fifteen thirty six when a messenger arrived to tell her to present herself before the Privy Council. After that she was beheaded. There's also the tennis court oath or the semon de ju du poems. On June twentieth, seventeen eighty nine, at the start of the French Revolution, the King had summoned the Estates General to deal with a serious economic crisis, and the Third Estate or the Commoners, had realized that any of their proposed reforms could be blocked by the combined First and Second Estates or the clergy and nobility. After the Third Estate tried to establish itself as the National Assembly and was joined by some members of the other Estates, the King had them locked out of their regular meeting room at the Palace of Versailles. Fearing that the King was going to try to dissolve their assembly or otherwise attack them, they gathered in the tennis court, where they swore quote never to separate and to meet wherever circumstances require until the Kingdom's constitution is established and grounded on solid foundations.

00:05:49
Speaker 2: I had always imagined this meeting as happening outside, but it did not. It was inside. Lawn tennis or field tennis diverged for this indoor style of court tennis in the nineteenth century, and usually the person who's credited with establishing the game of modern lawn tennis is British Army major Walter Clopton Wingfield, who was born in Wales. He came up with a collection of portable equipment that could be set up and played on the same types of fields where people were already playing croquet. We ran our episode on the history of croquet as a Saturday Classic in April of this year. People in this part of Europe had already been playing outdoor games with balls and nets and paddles or rackets, but Wingfield's rule set and this equipment kit really helped popularize it.

00:06:43
Speaker 1: Wingfield's game had some differences from modern lawn tennis, though One was the name. He called it, sharisticky, from Greek words meaning something like ballgame. Wingfield's rules described a field shaped like an hourglass, with the central net at a point that was narrower than the ends of the court. This hour glass shape may have just been to make the court different enough from existing rectangular game courts that he could apply for a patent, and he was granted a patent in eighteen seventy four. That same year, lawn tennis was introduced into the US, Although there's some debate about exactly who should get the credit.

00:07:21
Speaker 2: Spheristikei also had a different scoring system. Today, lawn tennis and court tennis follow the same basic scoring in which one point is fifteen, and two points is thirty and three points is forty.

00:07:36
Speaker 1: And there's other.

00:07:37
Speaker 2: Stuff beyond that, which can all be looked up on the internet for anybody who wants the details or the speculation about why this is how it's scored. Uh, there's various conjecture about why that is that we don't really know. Sporistiky, on the other hand, was scored like badminton, which was developed around the same time and named for the Duke of Beaufort's badminton house in Glass. To share and badminton, a point is a point and the winner is the first player to reach a certain number of points. The exact number has varied over the years, and the particulars of badminton scoring are also available on the internet. Although the names fistiki did not stick around, lawn tennis started to overshadow court tennis, and the term real tennis was coined in the early twentieth century to make sure people understood that they were talking about the royal one, not the one being played out on the croquet pitch. As the popularity of real tennis declined, some of the spaces that had housed those indoor courts were repurposed into things like museums or theaters. Today, there are about forty real tennis courts still in use in Australia, England, France and the United States. The history of the Wimbledon Championships, often just called Wimbledon, started not long after Walter Clopton Wingfield got that patent. In eighteen six seventy seven, the All England Croquet Club changed its name to the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club after setting aside some of its croquet space for tennis. The club held its first championship in eighteen seventy seven. As well, it had men's singles only, with twenty two players, and the competition, the first Wimbledon Championship, adopted the earlier scoring system from court tennis rather than Wingfield's more badminton like system, and by eighteen eighty the club's official rules were pretty similar to today's. Wimbledon's first men's doubles championship took place in eighteen eighty three, and the first women's singles event followed a year later. The first woman to win Wimbledon was Maud Wilson. The first permanent spectator stands were built at Wimbledon in the mid eighteen eighties, largely due to the popularity of twins Ernest and William Renshaw, who won a total of thirteen titles between eighteen eighty one and eighteen eighty nine. This surge and interest in tennis during their time as players was nicknamed the Renshaw Rush, and even though lawn tennis is often called the sport of kings, its connection to royalty did continue. In the early twentieth century, the Prince and Princess of Wales, the future King George the Fifth and Queen Mary visited Wimbledon, and in nineteen oh seven the Prince became Wimbledon's patron. Members of the royal family have continued to serve as Wimbledon's patron since then. Today that is Catherine, Princess of Wales. Various royals have also served as president of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, including Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, who served for more than five decades. Ending in twenty twenty one. Of course, lawn tennis was becoming popular in other parts of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well. The United States National Lawn Tennis Association was established and held its first championship in eighteen eighty one, the first National French championships were held in eighteen ninety one, and the Lawn Tennis Association of Australasia held its first tournament for men in nineteen oh five. Today, winning the Australian Open, the French Open, the Wimbledon Open, and the US Open is known as a Grand Slam. Wimbledon is the only Grand Slam championship still played on grass. Charlotte Cooper's Wimbledon debut took place less than a decade after its first women's championship, and we will have more on that after a sponsor break. Charlotte Reinegal Cooper was born in ealing London on September twenty second, eighteen seventy. Her parents were Henry Cooper and Teresa Georgiana Miller Cooper, and she was the youngest of their six surviving children. Teresa had been born in Chile and that's where she met Henry while he was working as a merchant seaman. They got married in Chile, and Charlotte's three oldest siblings were born there as well. Henry Cooper died when Charlotte, also known as Chatty, was just five. We don't really have much detail about any of this, but the family doesn't seem to have struggled financially. After his death. Chatty and her siblings pursued various sports, with Chatty being particularly fond of both hockey and tennis. In a nineteen oh three book on tennis, player and commentator Arthur Wallace Myers described how Charlotte's years of playing with her siblings lay the foundation for her later success.

00:12:40
Speaker 1: Quote.

00:12:41
Speaker 2: Constant practice with members of her own family, especially with her elder sister, brought her to perfection at a very early date. But it was as a volleyer then quite a rarity among ladies that miss Cooper sprang into fame and made such an impression on the public, ally ing, if you like me, don't really know much about tennis, that is, hitting the ball back to an opponent before it has bounced.

00:13:10
Speaker 1: Charlotte noted the importance of playing with her family members as well although when more of a focus on her brothers. She contributed a chapter on ladies tennis to this same book, and in it she wrote, quote, Personally, I attribute my success mainly to indulging in outdoor pursuits from my very early childhood and joining with my brothers in whatever games they played. Later on, when I started tennis, I found what great advantage all this had been to me. She also stressed the need to learn to do each tennis stroke correctly, because unlearning bad form could be very difficult. Quote.

00:13:47
Speaker 2: I believe the best way to learn strokes is to trespass on the good nature of one of the first class men players and get him to point out how they ought to be taken. Once this knowledge has been acquired, should be followed by practicing each stroke separately. A great mistake I think many lady players make is by always playing in practice only to win and not to improve their weak points. A good half hour's knock up with the latter object in view is of far more value than many sets played with the sole idea of bettering your opponent.

00:14:24
Speaker 1: By the age of thirteen, Chatty was playing and being coached at the Ealing Lawn Tennis and Archery Club. Her coaches there included C. H. Martin, who would be a runner up in the men's doubles at Wimbledon in eighteen ninety four, and Harold Mahoney, who had been born in Scotland to Irish parents and would go on to win the men's singles championship at Wimbledon in eighteen ninety six. Charlotte Cooper won her first title at Ealing when she was fourteen. In a book on tennis that was published in nineteen ten, she said, quote winning my first championship of the Ealing Lawn Tennis Club at the age of fourteen was a very important moment in my life. How well I remember, bedecked by my proud mother and my best clothes, running off to the club on the Saturday afternoon to play in the final without a vestige of nerve, would that I had none now and winning that was the first really important match of my life. Cooper became known for a playing style that was more aggressive than what was typically expected of women players, something that she did while playing in skirts that came almost to the ground. She also served overhead at a time when most women served underhand. To quote her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography quote her game was all attack, but that same biography also described her as having quote smiling, good temper, and great sportsmanship. This included her friendly rivalry with Blanche Bingley later Blanche Hilliard, who was about seven years older than she was and had competed in the first ever women's championship at wimb Both of them played and trained at the Ealing Club, including against each other, and in the words of Missus Lambert Chambers in the nineteen ten Lawn Tennis for Ladies, quote, it was soon regarded as a certainty that where Missus Hilliard and Missus Sterry entered the lists, one or the other, and not one more than the other, was destined to emerge victorious. In her nineteen oh three chapter on Ladies Tennis, Charlotte said of her friend and rival, quote, Missus Hilliard is a splendid example of the true fighter. Her persistency and pluck on the court are wonderful, as for her staying power. She seems to be able to last forever. She certainly heads the list of the most victorious in ladies singles and is one of the most sporting of them. Certainly, no keener player ever stepped on a tennis court. It does not matter if her adversary happens to be a third class player to whom she could owe forty and give thirty. She is always is just as nice to her as if she were her equal. Just the same again, in handicap matches, whoever her opponent or partner may happen to be, she is just as keen as if it were a championship single. Many a valuable lesson can be learned by playing against or watching missus Hilliard.

00:17:18
Speaker 2: I also found another thing that was by Blanche Hilliard that was like similarly crazy, talking about how great she was. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, people really only played tennis in Britain during the warmer months, and Cooper stayed fit in the off season by running and playing other sports, including hockey. But she wrote that she didn't think it was a problem to take a break from tennis during the winter.

00:17:44
Speaker 1: Quote.

00:17:45
Speaker 2: My idea is that one plays just as well in the summer without winter practice. It is rather a good thing to have a few really good hard practices on a hard court at easter time, so as to start with renewed energy and with a you to thoroughly enjoying the game and doing one's best at it, instead of making a labor of it, which it must become if one never puts away one's racket. There are various winter games to keep one's eye in practice, such as golf, badminton, and may I be bold enough to mention it ping pong, a game which certainly requires quickness of the eye. Cooper made her debut at Wimbledon in eighteen ninety three at the age of twenty two. That year, Lottie Dodd won the championship and Blanche Bingley Hilliard, listed as Missus g W. Hilliard, was the runner up. Lottie Dodd had won the women's singles championship at Wimbledon five times, starting when she was only fifteen, and she retired from competitive play after her eighteen ninety three win. That same year, Charlotte Cooper won the Ilkley Open at the Ilkley Lawn Tennis Club in West Yorkshire. Cooper won her first Wimbledon title in eighteen ninety five, and then There are a couple of different versions of how her family reacted. She was staying with her brother, although in some accounts it was her uncle, regardless, he didn't live far away, and she was riding to Wimbledon every day with her tennis racket strapped to the bicycle frame. When she got back after her win, her brother asked her where she'd been, and she said at the championship and she had just won it, and her brother, who was pruning the roses when she got there, just carried on with pruning the roses. In the version word this was her uncle. He similarly didn't really react other than saying that he was going to go make some tea.

00:19:40
Speaker 1: A lot of the articles online about Charlotte Cooper Sterry today are sort of one page profiles of tennis players or Olympic athletes, and many of them say that she became deaf at the age of twenty six. This would have been about a year after her first Wimbledon win. There's really not much detail about this, aside from a couple of sources that say it was because of an infection near the end of her life. In nineteen sixty five, Harry Weaver interviewed her for The London Observer in the lead up to that year's Wimbledon Championships. That article describes her as deaf from the age of twenty six, which might be the source for this detail. In a book about Wimbledon that was published after her death, her nephew Tony Cooper is also quoted as saying he thought he was right in saying she had never heard the ball bounce because of her deafness.

00:20:31
Speaker 2: It doesn't seem like she really wrote or spoke about this during her competitive tennis career. She did, I was not able to find anything about it, but that's not particularly surprising given attitudes about disability in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and since people used the word deaf to describe a range of hearing loss. We also don't really know what that meant for her, or whether she thought it affected her playing at all or led her to play any differently.

00:21:03
Speaker 1: It is possible, though, that this highlights something about her skill as a player. In more recent years, various players have talked about the role that sound and hearing can play in the sport of tennis, like the sound that the ball makes when struck with the racket can offer clues about how hard it was hit, how well it was hit, and how much spin is on the ball. For most people, auditory reaction time is faster than visual reaction time, so these sounds can give a player a tiny edge overseeing what the ball is doing. Some players have argued that if their opponents make too many grunts or other noises, or if there are background sounds like crowds or airplanes, it can affect their game. There have even been some studies in which players have been asked to wear noise canceling headphones, with the loss of those audio cues seeming to negatively affect their performance. Without more detail or information directly from her own experience, can really only speculate about how Charlotte Cooper's deafness may have affected her tennis game and other parts of her life, as well as what, if anything she or others may have done to make things more accessible. But if this description of her as deaf did mean that she had lost all of her hearing and the year that happened, that's all correct, that would make her one of the first known deaf athletes to be competing at this level. It would also make her the first known deaf Olympic champion. We're going to talk more about that after a sponsor break.

00:22:43
Speaker 2: After her eighteen ninety five win at Wimbledon. Charlotte Cooper won again in eighteen ninety six. Then she was runner up to Blanche Hilliard in eighteen ninety seven, and then one again in eighteen ninety eight. In eighteen ninety nine and nineteen hundred, Hilliard won with Cooper as runner up. They just had a few years swapping back and forth with which of them was the Wimbledon champion. Between eighteen ninety four and eighteen ninety eight. Cooper also won five mixed doubles championships at Wimbledon, with Harold Mahoney and another with Hugh Lawrence Doherty in nineteen hundred, although at this point mixed doubles was not formally considered part of the Wimbledon championships. That didn't happen till nineteen thirteen. Doherty's brother Reginald, who was also known as Reggie or RF, was also a tennis player, and he and Charlotte won several mixed doubles titles in England and Ireland. The nineteen hundred Olympic Games have made a lot of appearances on the show at this point, and Charlotte Cooper was there. She was one of twenty two women to compete in the nineteen hundred Games and won the women's singles in tennis. Another person we just mentioned, Helen de Bortales, had been part of the winning team in the one to two ton sailing event a couple of months before, so this made Cooper the first woman to win an Olympic event as an individual competitor rather than part of a team.

00:24:06
Speaker 1: She and R. F. Doherty also won in mixed doubles. The tradition of awarding gold, silver, and bronze medals to the first, second, and third place winners did not begin until the next Olympic Games in Saint Louis in nineteen oh four.

00:24:20
Speaker 2: On January twelfth, nineteen oh one, Charlotte Cooper married Alfred Sterry, who was a solicitor. That year, she was the first place winner in women's singles at Wimbledon, listed as Missus A. Sterry, and the runner up was Blanche Hilliard listed as Missus G. W.

00:24:36
Speaker 1: Hilliard.

00:24:38
Speaker 2: Sterry won the Wimbledon championship that year without losing a single set. It doesn't seem like there was a perception that Charlotte Cooper Sterry would give up tennis after getting married Arthur Wallace. Meyer's nineteen oh three book Lawn Tennis at Home and Abroad, says of her marriage, quote, as Miss Cooper, her career on the courts was nothing less than marvelous in its concent distancy and brilliant in its achievement, And as missus Sterry, there is every reason to believe it will continue for many years to attract and retain attention. She did take a couple of breaks from competitive play, though. In nineteen oh two, Charlotte was the runner up in women's singles at Wimbledon. The winner was Muriel Robb and this was at the time a record for the longest final, with fifty three games played. Then Charlotte and Alfred had a son, Rex, in nineteen oh three. Charlotte was runner up at Wimbledon again in nineteen oh four, this time against seven time Wimbledon champion Dorothea Catherine Douglas later Dorothea Lambert Chambers. In nineteen oh five, Charlotte gave birth to a daughter, Gwendolyn, also known as Gwen. In nineteen oh seven, Charlotte Cooper Sterry had what is regarded as one of her biggest wins, Wimbledon had become an Internet national event by about nineteen hundred, and the first player from outside the UK to win a singles title at Wimbledon was American May Sutton in nineteen oh five. Sutton had been born in England but moved to California as a child and had learned to play and started competing in the US. Sutton had become the youngest women's tennis champion in US history in nineteen oh four, and would go on to be the first woman inducted into the International Tennis.

00:26:26
Speaker 1: Hall of Fame. In nineteen oh six, she was runner up at Wimbledon against Dorothea Lambert Chambers, and when she returned in nineteen oh seven, she lost only one game during her time in the UK, which was to Charlotte Cooper Sterry, although to be clear, that was not at Wimbledon but at Liverpool.

00:26:44
Speaker 2: Sterry later wrote of this quote, I had heard a great deal about Miss May Sutton, who made her first appearance in England in nineteen oh five, beating everybody without the loss of a set. I had also heard she was a giant of strength, and that the harder one hit, the more she liked it. The first time I met her was at Liverpool in nineteen oh seven. I did not play the previous season. I was determined to introduce unfamiliar tactics, giving her short balls in order to entice her up to the net. The result was that many of her terrific drives went out, and I think this was primarily the reason why I was the first lady in England to take a set from her. I recollect her telling me after the match was over that my game was very different to any other she had ever played, and that she was not anxious to meet me again, remarks I took as a great compliment. In nineteen oh eight, Charlotte Cooper Sterry made her Wimbledon comeback, seven years after her previous win, once again winning the women's singles without losing a single set. She was also part of the winning pairs in both women's doubles and mixed doubles, although neither was officially part of the Wimbledon championship yet. Sterry's age at this point was thirty seven years, two hundred and eighty two days, making her the oldest woman to be a Wimbledon champion. That is a record that still stands today. Wimbledon Open to both professionals and amateurs in nineteen sixty seven, with the first open tournament happening the following year. So sometimes Serena Williams is cited as the oldest woman to win Wimbledon in the open era. Sterry's nineteen oh eight wins also made her one of only a handful of people to win Wimbledon after giving birth. Although nineteen oh eight was her last Wimbledon win, Sterry continued to compete there until nineteen nineteen, at the age of forty eight. This was her eighteenth time competing at Wimbledon, and she won her opening match that year. After this, she did continue to play tennis, but she retired from competing. The International Committee of Sports for the Deaf was established in nineteen twenty four, which was also the year of the first International Silent Games, also known as the Deaf Olympics. Those were held in Paris. We don't really know whether Charlotte Cooper Sterry was involved in this in any way, but she would not have been a competitor there Apart from her retirement in competitive play in that first year, only men's tennis events were held at the Silent Games. Today, the Deaf Olympics are sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee. Charlotte's daughter Gwen also became a tennis player as well, and made her first appearance at Wimbledon in nineteen twenty five, and really their whole family was active in this sport in one way or another. Charlotte's husband Alfred, served as president of the International Lawn Tennis Federation, and her son Rex served as vice chair of the All England Lawn Tennis Club. Sterry had a personal goal of becoming the oldest living Wimbledon champion, which for a time she was. In nineteen sixty one, a celebratory lunch was held in advance of the Wimbledon Championships, and she was the oldest guest there at the age of ninety.

00:29:59
Speaker 1: Charlotte Coque Sterry died on October tenth, nineteen sixty six, at the age of ninety six. By that point she had lost much of her sight. Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent was president of the All England Tennis and Croquet Club at the time and set what Charlotte's son Rex described as a very genuine letter and telegram in condolence during her tennis career, Charlotte Cooper Sterry made it to the Wimbledon finals eight times in a row between eighteen ninety five and nineteen oh two, a record that remained until Martina Nevertalova made it to her ninth consecutive Wimbledon finals in nineteen ninety In total, Sterry won the women's singles at Wimbledon five times, as well as championships in Ireland and Scotland and various other championships and Challenge Cups all around the UK. She also was part of the winning pair in mixed doubles at Wimbledon six times, five of them consecutively, before mixed doubles was recognized as an official championship there. She made it to the finals of the first recognized women's doubles championship in nineteen thirteen. A century later, in twenty thirteen, she was posthumously inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. I kind of love her.

00:31:15
Speaker 2: I wish we had more detail about, like her personal life beyond tennis, because pretty much everything I found about her was about tennis, and athletes do have other things in their lives besides.

00:31:31
Speaker 1: The sport that they're right. No, I also have a little listener mail fantastic. This is going back to.

00:31:40
Speaker 2: Our various conversations we've had about Google street View. This is from I think Leah, I did not ask about name pronunciation. This is titled street View Bikes. My friends and I did the first imagery back in two thousand and nine, and the email says, Hi, Holly and Tracy, I've been listening for many years and finally am writing because you asked about interesting StreetView images. You probably know that there is a StreetView bike, but you might not know the story behind the first images taken on a hilly bike trail in Monterey, California. The StreetView team had modified a tricycle petticab to carry the camera and computers another hardware, but they were having trouble making it work. The hardware was so heavy that it kept warping the bike wheels and they couldn't go up hills. Several of US bike geek slash Google software engineers who worked in the same office as the StreetView team helped out by rebuilding the wheels and adding pedals with clips to allow more effective writing. Our test run is the first public imagery from the StreetView bike. We can probably see us because we tried to say out of view, but that trike was so heavy we had to switch off periodically. I'm including a picture that I suspect were scrubbed out of so you can just see our helmets. I'm including his pet tax pictures of my black Golden Retriever mix Vanta, named after the paint. He's ninety pounds of fuzzy, goofy cuddy and friendly. Let's open dog pictures. Oh my goodness, what a happy dog face like That dog is therapy. You don't even have to meet them.

00:33:24
Speaker 1: And yeah, there is.

00:33:26
Speaker 2: This picture is just sort of, you know, a view of the ocean with.

00:33:31
Speaker 1: A strange little visual artifact kind of in the middle of it, which definitely looks like it could be two people's bike helmets digitally with the rest of them digitally scrubbed from the image. Thank you so much for this email and these pictures and this story. I love it.

00:33:48
Speaker 2: I did not know that Google street View is going to become the source of amazing emails and discussion that it has when we mentioned it, not even in like a particularly serious way.

00:34:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, so the briefest of mentions.

00:34:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, so if you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, we're at history Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and we're on social media at miss in History. You can subscribe to the show on iHeartRadio app and wherever else you like to get your podcasts. 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.