"Five Minutes of Fire": The Catcher in the Rye, Eisenhower, Vaccine

<v Speaker 1>I'm Jason Colvin, I'm D. Graves.
<v Speaker 2>Give us five minutes and we will give you the fire.
<v Speaker 1>Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Surely You Can't
<v Speaker 1>Be Serious Podcast Special Edition five Minutes of Fire. We
<v Speaker 1>are here talking about the lyrics of We Didn't Start
<v Speaker 1>the Fire by Billy Joel. We're covering only five minutes
<v Speaker 1>at a time, which is about to link with the song,
<v Speaker 1>so it works out kind of nicely. So please join
<v Speaker 1>us as we dive into some new lyrics today.
<v Speaker 2>All right, guys, So here are the topics that we're
<v Speaker 2>going to be covering today.
<v Speaker 1>The Catcher in the Rye, Eisenhower, and vaccine.
<v Speaker 2>And okay, what can you tell me about the Catcher
<v Speaker 2>in the Rye?
<v Speaker 1>Okay? So The Catcher in the Rye was initially supposed
<v Speaker 1>to be an adult book, but it found favor with
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of kids. It became a humongous success. Now,
<v Speaker 1>the author of the book, JD. Salinger, didn't like the
<v Speaker 1>attention that he was getting, and so he went into hiding,
<v Speaker 1>tried to avoid all publicity. But the book, it is
<v Speaker 1>a lasting book that just never dies. Because the Holden
<v Speaker 1>call Field character in the book, his angst and frustration
<v Speaker 1>with the world around him is something that is universally
<v Speaker 1>shared over decades of time. What's interesting is it is
<v Speaker 1>a book that, for some reason the sixties started to
<v Speaker 1>get on the list to be banned from high schools
<v Speaker 1>and libraries. But what's an interesting fact about it is
<v Speaker 1>it's associated not only with this angst, but with several
<v Speaker 1>assassination attempts that are very famous, including Robert John Brando's
<v Speaker 1>murder of Rebecca Schaeffer, John Hinckley Junior's assassination attempt on
<v Speaker 1>Ronald Reagan, and after he shot John Lennon. Mark David
<v Speaker 1>Chapman was arrested with a copy of the book that
<v Speaker 1>he had purchased that day, and the note in the
<v Speaker 1>book was to Holden call Field from Holden call Field.
<v Speaker 1>This is my statement. As I mentioned, he kept himself
<v Speaker 1>out of the limelight, and according to Kevin Knielan on
<v Speaker 1>Saturday Night Live News, it was to tell everyone it's
<v Speaker 1>actually pronounced Sallinger. All right, Jason, what can you tell
<v Speaker 1>me about Eisenhower? Okay?
<v Speaker 2>David Dwight Eisenhower served as the American President from nineteen
<v Speaker 2>fifty three to nineteen sixty one. That's our thirty fourth president.
<v Speaker 2>He was born in Dennison, Texas, raised in Abilene, Kansas.
<v Speaker 2>Graduated from West Point in nineteen fifteen. He went on
<v Speaker 2>to become the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force
<v Speaker 2>in World War Two, but he never saw active combat
<v Speaker 2>in his thirty five years in the military.
<v Speaker 1>Wow.
<v Speaker 2>So he's in charge of what we call the Invasion
<v Speaker 2>of Normandy or D Day. He ran for president. His
<v Speaker 2>primary goal was containing communism and reducing the deficit. Thank god,
<v Speaker 2>we got that under control. In nineteen fifty three, he
<v Speaker 2>actually considered using nuclear weapons to end the Korean War.
<v Speaker 2>He ended McCarthyism by openly invoking executive privilege. He signed
<v Speaker 2>civil rights active nineteen fifty seven, integrading schools in Little Rock,
<v Speaker 2>which we'll talk about very soon. He also led the
<v Speaker 2>American response to Sputnik to help create NASA, which launched
<v Speaker 2>the space race. Died of a heart attack in nineteen
<v Speaker 2>sixty nine. That's Dwight Eisenhower. All right, d what can
<v Speaker 2>you tell me about vaccine?
<v Speaker 1>Okay, So the vaccine that we've got to be talking
<v Speaker 1>about here is the vaccine for polio. Polio virus had
<v Speaker 1>been around for decades. By the time the fifties rolled around,
<v Speaker 1>and it was epidemic. In nineteen fifty two, a guy
<v Speaker 1>named Jonas Salk came up with a vaccine that was passed.
<v Speaker 1>He is widely regarded as the guy who cured polio.
<v Speaker 1>And just to tell you how bad it was that year.
<v Speaker 1>Normally there were twenty five thousand cases a year. That
<v Speaker 1>year there were about fifty eight thousand cases. So it
<v Speaker 1>was extremely important to people that, I mean, some of
<v Speaker 1>the kids' biggest fear was getting polio. So they engage
<v Speaker 1>on the biggest medical experiment that has ever been done.
<v Speaker 1>Started off with four thousand kids in high school and
<v Speaker 1>ultimately encompassed about one point eight million people. Now what's
<v Speaker 1>sad is only about four hundred thousand of those folks
<v Speaker 1>actually got the vaccine. About two hundred thousand of them
<v Speaker 1>got a placebo, and the other one point two million
<v Speaker 1>were just the control group. They didn't get anything at all.
<v Speaker 1>They announced the results of the field test on April twelfth,
<v Speaker 1>nineteen fifty five. You'll remember that's the tenth anniversary of
<v Speaker 1>the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who probably was paralyzed
<v Speaker 1>as a result of polio symptoms, but the vaccine had
<v Speaker 1>been sixty to seventy percent effective from the poliovirus type one,
<v Speaker 1>ninety percent effective for the poliovirus types two and three,
<v Speaker 1>and ninety four percent effective against the development of bulber polio.
<v Speaker 1>By nineteen fifty seven, the cases were reduced fifty six
<v Speaker 1>hundred in the US. By nineteen sixty one there was
<v Speaker 1>only one hundred and six, and eventually throughout the world
<v Speaker 1>countries would become what they called polio free. The most
<v Speaker 1>recent one twenty fourteen, India was declared polio free. Side
<v Speaker 1>note a quote I remember from a Dunesbury book that
<v Speaker 1>I read back in the eighties from cher Yeah, she said,
<v Speaker 1>I believed I was an angel sent from heaven to
<v Speaker 1>cure the polio vaccine, and when Jonah Sulk did it,
<v Speaker 1>it really pissed me off. Okay, guys, that does it
<v Speaker 1>for today's episode. Join us next time for five minutes
<v Speaker 1>of fire.