Behind the Scenes Minis: Jane and the Clicker

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio. Hello and Happy Friday. AM Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Jane Cunningham Croley aka Jenny June this week. Yeah, and I can tell listeners about the full on panic that I had getting your email, because I I don't remember her being mentioned in the paper Patterns episode. If she did, it was not in my head anymore. But when I saw the name Jenny June, what was in my head instantly was someone we have talked about on the show before who also knew used the name Jenny June. And that was the person who wrote under the names Earl Lynde, Ralph Werther and Jenny June. And one of the things we mentioned in that episode, which I'd also forgotten that one detail, was that he he said he did not know at the time when he started using the name Jenny June, that that name was already being used by someone else. And so, like we mentioned, we mentioned Jane Cunningham Crowley in this other episode, I had forgotten that one to tail. So when I just I opened my email this morning and I just saw a file name called Jenny June. I was like, oh, no, did we accidentally repeat an episode topic. No, it is in fact a different person. Yeah, I am very, very fascinated by Jane Curley. Yeah, because there are ways in which I'm like, I get you, babe, I get and there are other ways and I'm like, you are a snit. I will confess throughout all of the research. In my head, everything she wrote as I was reading it was read in the voice of Emelda Staunton. Joe, Okay, well, we need to know. There was a phrase that I read that her brother said a couple of different times. I don't know what he means. This is one instance of it. It may surprise even those who knew her well to learn that her physical timidity was great and at times painful. Now, I don't know if he's literally saying she was shy and that was painful, or that he is literally saying she has some physical ailment that is painful. Like he and she both wrote in very stilted language, where things like timidity might not mean what you think it means. Yeah, when you've read it, I interpreted it as painfully shy. But also, in addition to both of them writing in kind of a stilted way, like language use evolves over time. Yep. So if I went and looked at like the Oxford English Dictionary or something, would I find earlier connotations of any of that that we don't really use as much of it now? Who knows? Yeah? I mean I I squirreled around, and I never found anything satisfactory. But again, also his writing style, yeah is not. His writing style is exactly what you might anticipate of someone who was a minister in the eighteen hundreds who was used to writing sermons, do you know what I mean? Not bad? Yeah, not an easy read either, yeah, right, Like probably easier than some people. But because after all, he was Unitarian, one of those untrustworthy Unitarians according to their fellows, according to their English detractors that they live. There are so many things in here that kind of tickled me, and a lot of the stuff that I ended up reading I really enjoyed, like especially the back and forth in various newspapers. One of the things that I thought was really interesting that I read was not written by her but by another woman. That was like a letter to the editor thing in response to something the newspaper had written about Soorosis when it had first formed, because apparently it had been a big thing of like, what is the point, why are you even doing this? What good are you doing? And this woman wrote this very lengthy but very pointed response of like, do you recognize that if a woman starts an enterprise, the first thing that gets asked is who are you helping? How is this of benefit to anybody else? What is the point of this? But men can start a club and you're like, cool, I guess they just want to smoke cigars together, Like nobody asked them what their bigger purpose and social benefit is. I was like, oh, bless you eighteen sixty eight lady, who's real mad at this guy? Yeah? I think we've talked about a couple of people on the show who were members of Soorosis. Oh yeah, I mean it was huge and particuarly in New York. A lot of very well known people became members. Yeah. I feel like one of them was maybe Emily Warren Roebling. Probably not, would not be surprising at all. Right, I didn't look up the full roster because I got very bogged down and reading people argue in newspapers. It became fun. It wasn't even sources at that point. It was just like woo and then what she say? There was also a moment in that very not cool passage. There are several not cool passages when she's talking about like what are you gonna do as a woman like teaching? You don't know anything to teach it? And her point was that, like, you are so young, you don't have the life experience to be able to be a teacher. But knowing that she as a young woman, her first job was a teacher, I'm like, do you just remember feeling like you didn't know what you were doing and that's what this is? Or were you conceded enough to think that you were the exception that was ready to be teaching. I don't know. I don't know the answer. Yeah, I can't go back and interrogate Jane Henning him Croley, ma'am, what is your point here? Fascinated? Fascinated? You mentioned I don't know how you put it that her writing is often very condescending, and it is. Yeah, I found that passage in particular about you know, don't be a teacher because you don't know anything. I was like, well, what do you want me to do? Man? And also, this is a little patronizing the way you just wrote that. Yeah, I mean, and that that is very much in the style of her writing as Jenny June, where it is very like I know better. It's like the advice columnist kind of thing. And especially at that point she was an older woman and she had really she was very well respected, but she definitely took that to heart and was like, I'm the expert on all the things. So mhmm, you are clearly a ding dong my darling child, which is kind of funny. Makes me laugh. No, thanks, like, oh honey, bunny. Yeah. Her writing is also not an easy read, aside from it being of the time. Sure, it's extra the phrasing does not read naturally to me at all. Okay, but it's still interesting. Yeah. I remember one of the things. I don't remember which specific thing, but one of the things that I was reading that was a quote in the episode. I remember getting part way through and my brain kind of like slipping between the gears. Yeah, having to go back and be like, wait, what am I saying right now? Jenny June? What do you get Matt? Yes, Her books that cookery book. It literally would make you, I rate because a lot of it is like, why are you so stupid? Stupid? Be a smart be a smart girl, learn how to cook, which is kind of fascinating to me. Yeah, because she was clearly in many ways at odds with her own ideology. But right didn't recognize that, as is often the case, it's easy for us to see it with the passage of time. But you know, she was somehow thought, I mean, clearly, this is a woman that had a lot of energy, right, Yeah, you can raise four kids, keep a house. And like, when I tell you about how she includes in that book her schedule of housekeeping, I'm exhausted. It's like, and then you have to iron the sheets and blankets, but put them away carefully so that you know they won't get wrinkled. And I'm like, mmmmm, no, ma'am, that's not gonna happen here. And then that she was writing often till the wee hours of the morning to keep up with her schedule, and then you know, scheduling meetings with other women to form this group and keep it running and stuff. I was just like, I don't I'm just like, it can feel really good to get into a bed with a nice Chris sheet. But no one cares if your sheets are ironed. No one, no one. I mean admittedly, right, this is a time before everybody had washers and dryers, so right, you know my thing is like pull your sheets out of the dryer, fresh, fold them. Then they'll be nice and crisp for you know, when you need them, which was not the case then. But I can't even no, no, no, I would not be ironing the sheets, blankets, table linens, et cetera. Yeah, because Holly's lacey, Yeah in this way, Yeah, she seems like a dynamo. Yeah. I might iron the table linens if I was having a fancy party immediately before the party. Yeah, but I don't think I actually even own any table linens that could be ironed, So this is moot. Yeah, I'm a steamer person in instances such as that, I don't. I will use an iron when I sew, but I don't really like it for my clothes or my right and I don't steamer. Yeah, I own an iron, and somewhere in our home there is an ironing board. I feel sure, but I could not tell you the last time I used them. I actually think the last time our iron has been used. My spouse has this battle vest that he wears that when he works at conventions that has all these different patches sewed on, and a lot of them are patches that have an iron on component. But he also sews them. Yeah, but he will sometimes position them and iron them first to get them secured into that place rather than trying to pin them where he wants them to go. I'm pretty sure that is the most recent iron usage in our house. See, I do have the good fortune when it is kept clean, which it often isn't of having a three foot by seven foot ironing surface in my sewing room, Like that's my cutting table, which you may or may not recall, is very big and it's covered in like stuff that can handle thermal so I can iron right on it, but I still don't ever want to do it. I also never will iron on a patch even if it has the iron on stuff, because in my ding dong head, I'm always like, what if I want to take that patch off one day and put it on something else and I don't want the adhesive to mess with the Now listen, when I make patches like on my embroidery machine for other people. Do I always put an iron on backing on it, Yes, because I know not everyone else wants to hand soap patches on stuff. Yeah, but I will always stitch it on. I don't know, just one of my weird things. Yeah, ever preserving. I bet that Jane Crowley would not approve of iron on patches for some reason. Probably not. Probably not. Shouldn't approve of a lot of things. But you know, you better know how to cook, or you're going to jail. Apparently I'm going to go to a restaurant and have somebody else bring me food, because there's no greater joy than sitting down and having someone bring me a delicious beverage and a meal. I love my whole soul. Talked about the invention of the television remote control this week. Yeah, a thing that was slightly earlier than I thought based on my own memory of my childhood. Yeah, and some of that is because it was still a luxury item when we were kids. Yeah. Yeah, my parents didn't have My parents didn't even have a VCR until like well after everybody else had one. Yeah. I remember when the VCR was purchased for our household. Which was later I was already in college. Yeah, I was not already in college. Yeah, but I was at a point where, like most of my classmates had a VCR already by the time we got we were early adopters of some other stuff, like when a lot of classmates had a Nintendo, we got a computer. So that was sort of like a little different track of technology in the house. But like I remember the televisions with a dial that you had to visitally crank crank it around. You get up on Saturday morning, you want to go watch your cartoons. It's on the wrong channel. You just grab it and fling it around, and I like remember the ratcheting sound of that. I have like a tactile memory of wrenching the TV dial around. Yeah. I mean I was lucky because my favorite cartoons were running in a block. Yeah, so it was like, you know, you got your Smurfs and Snorks. Well, that's two hours of your morning set up right there. Correct, Happy as a clam the Barbarian. And then I've talked before about how our household had a number of rules and we were only allowed I think two hours of TV on Saturday morning. It might have been longer than that, but there was an hour a number of hours that was allowed. And the reason I think it was two hours is that I feel like we were watching four different cartoons in that time, and Smurfs and Snorks was definitely a block of that time. I feel like at some point I should do an episode about Snorks and how they are not a copy of Smurfs. I feel very strongly about this issue. They came out around the same time in Europe. I really thought you were about to say, I think I should do an episode on all of Tracy's weird rules from her children. No, I don't feel nearly as strongly about that as I do Snorks and Smurfs. Listen, man, give me Casey an all Star all day long, all day. Yeah. I remember the first remote control that we ever got that was pretty basic, with on and off and different numbers for the different channels, and I also remember the facing of it kind of delaminating from the body of it over the time. Over time. Yes, my parents' house now has so many remotes for different purposes, and my mom's speech generating device has the ability to be the remote control for the things that are related to the team Ooh, that's cool. This is actually something I had to write letters. I don't remember if it was letters to my like congress people, or if it was commentary on a proposed rule change, but there was a discussion of how Medicare and Medicaid we're going to stop allowing that technology on speech generating devices because it was seen as like a luxury and they weren't even going to allow people to like add that on out of pocket. Oh weird. It was going to be like if you added remote control technology, the entire thing was not going to be covered. And it was like, okay, but this is like one of the very limited ways that my mother can have control over her own environment, and if you take this away from her, she is reliant on other people in a way that she would not have been if she could just control the television herself. Viam Yeah, so, and that was a change that did not happen if I remember correctly. So anyway, that's a very sophisticated remote control because it can control all of the television stuff and then also communicate I'm gonna say, and also the weather. Just to be funny, but wouldn't it be great if we did just have remote controls to control the weather. We don't need to fish do it? Okay? Anyway, it's a Leelu and stitch. Oh yeah, pudge controls the weather. There was a great quote that I read while I was doing research for this. I have not read this person's book. James Glake. I'm not sure pronunciation. It's g l Eick wrote a book called Faster, The Acceleration of just about Everything, and was quoted in one of the articles I was looking at in terms of how the remote control changed television programming okay, and the quote was, now every television programmer works in the shadow of the awareness that the audience is armed. And this was one of those things. It was tied to a bigger discussion in that article about how once people had remote controls and they could control what they were watching from their chairm a lot of TV writers, editors, et cetera. Executives became keenly aware of the fact that they didn't keep everything. If they didn't keep everything really snapped and engaging all the time, people would turn away. Yes, So like when you think about the short attention span that people have today, often attributed to smartphones, YouTube TikTok et cetera. Like the roots of it go go back to the fifties though, so we can't only blame the modern stuff. You have to recognize that, like these shifts were happening in in ways way before we ever got there. Yeah, way before we ever got to where we are today. So it was just very very interesting the idea that that had added a different type of choice agency to people's entertainment and leisure time. Whereas before they might have been like, Eh, just leave it on, I'm tired. Then now they don't do that any You have the youngest person in the room, it's their job to change channel. Yes, it then became their job to go get the clicker. Yes. I will also say too that the remote control as you mentioned in your house right and everybody in the eighties, there was a lot of discussion as it became really prolific because the infrared remote controls also became entered the market at a much more comfortable and achievable price point than their predecessors. So suddenly a lot of people were getting them very quickly, and there was so much discussion about how it was going to ruin everyone's life and make them sedentary. But like TV dinners have been around since the forties, is that when the first one, maybe that's one I'll look into. They've been around a long time, Like, it's not only this one thing. Yeah, Almost any time you want to discuss like a shift in cultural norms, you have to recognize that there is rarely just one thing that is responsible for any of them. And when you oversimplify, you are creating a problem of understanding where if you wanted to try to solve the situation, you only address that one thing. You're not going to fix Jack, It's just there's nothing it's important to remember. Yeah. Yeah. Also, the amount of physical effort it takes to get up and change the channel on the television is definitely not going to counteract all four calories that you burn doing. Yeah, if you're extra energetic about it. Yeah, it's a false, false way to consider it. I was very fascinated by this idea from the nineteen fifties that Eugene McDonald's, founder of ZnI, had that if you muted commercials, they would eventually go away because they were ineffective, right, And the reason this struck me as hilarious was do you remember in the nineteen eighties when MTV started muting their commercials. When was this this in the nineteen eighties, I'm pretty sure it had not been around very long. They just played their commercials without sound. But what happened was they actually got better viewer engagement on commercials because people would get up go in their kitchen to get their beverage, their popcorn, their snack, whatever, and when they heard no sound coming out of the TV, they would run back in thinking something was wrong, and so they actually pitched it to advertisers. Is my understanding, as this is actually a benefit because people are actually looking at your ad now, whereas when we run them with sound, people just tune the whole thing out. Yeah. I have no memory of this, and I don't know. It could be because we were also it took a while before there was cable at our house. Oh, we didn't have cable forever. I watched a friend's house. Yeah, in part because we'd lived in the country and so there wasn't cable at all for a while. And then once we did get cable, we had a very base cable package that didn't include some of that at first, at least, so I don't remember it. I'm looking at a Reddit discussion right now where someone had written in and said, I have a memory of watching MTV when the network first launched. All of the commercials were silent, that is, the sound cutout when it broke away from music videos for commercials, And this person is like, I've been asking other people and they said that wasn't it. That didn't happen. But other people are like, oh, no, I remember that, but I think I don't know how long it lasted, which might be why the confusion arises where people are like, that's not my experience. It's like, well, my years were you watching. I think that was like early in the launch of MTV when it was brand new, and if you signed up for cable when it was brand new, you would get the MTV button. Do you remember that? No, oh, the coveted MTV listen. I was not cool enough. My family was certainly not cool enough. We were not signing up for cable, and I was not getting the cool MTV button. But now I look back and go, that was so important to like twelve year old me, and now I'm just like, who cares. I have a vague memory of like one friend having MTV at their house and like barely having any experience with it until it had been around for a while. Oh no, the amount of sleepover skyrocketed as we all wanted to go to the MTV houses and then like, don't even get me started on one hundred and twenty minutes because that was my bible as a teenager. Do you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, on Sunday nights, they would run one hundred and twenty minutes of kind of alternative new wave stuff. Give me all of it, Give me all of it. That's the first time I ever heard of was Costello's strict Time, which is one of my favorite songs of all time. Amazing, Oh my god, all of yeahz Yeah, those are good times, like you. This happened a little sooner than I would have entedid Yeah, in terms of it going on nineteen fifty, yeah, I would have put it in the seventies just because of like when it was available at my house. Yeah, but that was that was the need for you know, LEDs to be developed in infrared to happen, and LEDs to become inexpensive enough that they could be used for such things. It's very fun looking at the diagrams on the patent applications for these, because like the one for the space command Listen. I've looked at a lot of patent applications, and I will be the first to tell you that when you get into electronic circuitry, my brain kind of blips out of the situation. It's like, I don't know, I don't know what any of this is. But that one is one where I'm like, oh, I can actually parse what this is, because, yeah, because it was a little bit simpler, it was sort of ingeniously and elegantly simple in its design, and it needed no batteries, which I'm that's if you introduced a no battery remote today, I think people would snap it right up right. Maybe, Yeah, Yeah. We had very recently had an issue where the battery died in the remote that we use for almost all television applications at our house, and I turned on the television and then it sent some sort of signal without me pressing anything that put it onto some channel that was coming over the cable, which is ninety nine percent not what we used the TV for. And then the batteries were dead, and so the TV was on. It was on some random cable channel, and it took me a minute to be like, why won't this work? Oh, it is the batteries. Yeah, And unfortunately we had spare batteries in the house. Otherwise I would have had to fish around trying to find where the buttons are that are invisible on there. That's very funny. Oh oh, TV. What is the Homer Simpson line, teach your mother secret lover television? Listen? I love it. TV is never turns off at our house. Yeah, never turned off at my house growing up. Keep it on all the time here cats like to watch it at night. All good. We're the opposite. Your TV's off all the time. It's off most of the time. It turns on periodic. It usually turns on. There are things that we watch together as a couple. We turn it on to watch that. Often as I am kind of winding down in the evening, I will watch some kind of chill television show that is not causing me any stress or anxiety. But otherwise it's awful lot of the time. No on all the time, muted most of the time, but it's on. We're playing a game. If we're in a phase of some game that is being played, on a console. TV is on for that, but I rotate O, that's the downstairs TV. That's okay. I was gonna say we only have one, but we technically have to. But the second one I like, I never interact with. It is in the upstairs attic space where I rarely go one, two, three, four five. We have five. Yeah, living room lounge, our little gym. That one doesn't get used very much right now because the plants are living in there. One in my sewing room, and then I have another one that's not plugged in anywhere. Yeah, I have an iPad emergency. I have an iPad that serves the purpose of a TV that is on the exercise bike. Yeah, on a little stand that I used to watch a TV show while I try to exercise. We used to always have the TV that was turned on. This is this is more personal sad times to Cartoon Network just all the time. Oh yeah, Cartoon Network is no longer part of our cable package. It has now moved to a premium cable package. And I have the sads, but now it's just Golden Girls kind of constantly on the channel which I've discovered runs Golden Girls at all hours day and night. I didn't know it either is or until very recently. Was also in one of the streaming services, what do you mean, Golden Girls? Yeah, was on, but I'm not streaming all the time. I'm I just have TV on. Yeah, And I had to figure out where the TV on all the time needed to be tuned because cartoons, because it's not cartoon anymore. Yeah, it was a cartooning sad. If this is your weekend coming up and you want to veg out in front of the television, rock on, I believe in you. Sometimes it's the best listen. I'll put on a thing that's going to run a million hours of ongoing content when I'm trying to clean the house or do chores, and it's the best I'll watch and or over and over seven times a month. I don't care if you get to watch TV and that is what delights you, wonderful. If that's not interesting to you, I hope whatever it is that you love is something you get to engage in a whole bunch this weekend. If your weekend, in terms of your time off, doesn't line up with the weekend calendar, I hope that you still have the best possible couple of days ahead, and that everyone is kind to you, and that you eat delicious things and you feel joy, and that the troubles of the world are not so great that you cannot find delight in your every day. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic, and then on Monday we'll have 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 show.