1904 Olympic Marathon

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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 V. Wilson. Before we get going today, we have a little bit of housekeeping. Yeah, fun housekeeping. Hey, we're going to Spain. We are. We are. If you are listening to this in the summer of twenty twenty three, which is when we're recording it. This November November two through ninth, twenty twenty three, we are going to Barcelona. I'm really excited. I'm very excited. I am finally gonna, you know, have my my weepy moment in Cigaretta Familia and have my goudy extravaganza. Yeah, here's a cool thing. You can come with us if you want. Yeah, we have a lot of fun things on the itinerary. It's a six night trip. We are going to have some tapus tours and we are going to go, as we said, segratapamilia, all kinds of fun things you can go to. Defined Destinations dot Com defined Destinations as the company who arranges these tours for us. Right on the front page, it says Barcelona, Spain, November two through nine. You can click on that, or you can go to Defined Destinations dot com slash Barcelona Dash twenty twenty three and get directly to it. Listen, this is going to be right after Halloween and there's a Gothic Barcelona tour, which is what's going to be my off ramp. Yeah, we get some questions about these, like how big is the group? Usually approximately thirty people, so it's a small group. We have a mix of planned activities and free time for people to either rest or explore on their own whatever. We have had a great time both of the prior trips that we have done like this, and we are super excited about this one. Yeah, so come and join us if that all sounds good to you, we would love to see you there. And now we can hop into our episode. So, Tracy, we've talked about the Olympics a few times on the show before we have we have even briefly touched on today's topic, but very briefly. But I think it really merits more discussion because the nineteen oh four Olympic Marathon was in the funniest way I can put it, a doozy Listen, I'm going to confess I wanted something late and breezy this time around because campaign finance was just a lot and made me very sad. This ended up making me really really angry, So brace for that. Uh. In nineteen oh four, the US hosted its first Olympics, and it was quite an event. And even that needs a little bit of setup because it was originally going to be in a different city than it ended up in. So that's where we're starting. So the Modern Olympic Games came to be largely because a man named Pierre de Coupertas spearheaded the effort to get them going. We talked about all that in our live show that we recorded at the Dallas Museum of Art way back in twenty sixteen that also ran as a classic in November of twenty twenty. And that first Modern Olympics that he launched in eighteen ninety six took place in Athens, Greece. The second one in nineteen hundred took place in Paris, and then the nineteen oh four Olympic Games were awarded to Chicago, Illinois. This was a huge achievement for the city because it meant that Chicago was going to be the first US city to ever host the Olympic Games. Philadelphia and New York had also been contenders, but ultimately they were passed over in favor of Chicago. But nineteen oh four was also the us that the Louisiana Purchase Exposition was being planned in Saint Louis. That expo had originally been planned for nineteen oh three, but it was delayed to give expo organizers a little more time to prepare, and that meant that the nineteen oh four new date would be competing with the Olympic Games for attendees. Saint Louis, by the way, absolutely also wanted the Olympics, and the expo's organizing committee came up with what could definitely be perceived as kind of a snaky way of ensuring that their event was not eclipsed by Chicago's Olympics. The committee made a deal with the Amateur Athletic Union to hold their annual track and field competition alongside the Expo. The AAU had been founded in eighteen eighty eight, and it had gained in popularity to the point that it was really the most prominent athletic organization in the United States, and this deal meant that people who may have considered traveling to either the Expo or the Olympics, would have both the Expo and a similar large athletic event in Saint Louis to the time when you know, people might not have had the funds to go to both events, and if they had to pick one for their vacation that year, you could get two and one in Saint Louis this way. This entire situation was punctuated by the fact that James Sullivan, who ran the AAU, had a history of conflict with Kubertin and had already tried to start his own international Track and Field Association because he wanted to compete with the Olympics. This conflict and competition for attendees led Kubertin, who was president of the Olympic Committee, to move the games from Illinois to Missouri, although he really did not have high hopes for it in Saint Louis. If you listen to our live show about Kuberta in the early Olympics, you've heard this quote already, but it's illustrative of his feelings on this matter, so we will use it again. Quote. I had a sort of prison sentiment that the Olympiad would match the mediocrity of the town. Kubertown stepped away from any active involvement in the Saint Louis Games the month after the change of cities was announced, in no small part because of these ongoing clashes that he had with James Sullivan. Regarding the change of location for the Games, the city of Chicago was described in newspapers as quote courteously agreeing to their transfer to Saint Louis. This was also the second time that the Modern Olympics were held alongside in expo. The nineteen hundred Games that happened in Paris were staged in conjunction with the Paris Expo, and that had been a problem because the games really did not get the spotlight that Kubertown would have hoped, and a lot of the planning which had been taken over by the Expo organizers had been pretty sloppy. So there was concern about it happening in a similar fashion in Saint Louis, and that can concern was entirely valid and also just from a planning standpoint. The decision to move these games came pretty late. Cumbertin announced the change in February nineteen oh three, and the games were to start in July the following year. The Chicago location had been chosen almost two years before that change, in May of nineteen oh one, so this really did mean that there was a very abbreviated schedule, even though there had been planning underway for the Amateur Athletic Union events. To compound the potential for disaster, there really wasn't any real documentation for organizers to follow regarding how an Olympiad should run. Kuberta had managed both the eighteen ninety six and nineteen hundred Games according to his ideology of how they should work, but he didn't write any of that down, at least not in any form that he shared with other organizers, so with him essentially out of the picture for the nineteen oh four game, this was a scenario where the people in charge were kind of making it up as they went on a very short timeline. This was not just a case of events being poorly organized. This Olympiad had a variety of events that were an extremely poor taste, and they really gave the nineteen oh four Games a legacy of colonialism and racism. One of the things that the Expo committee did was to try to intertwine the games with the exhibitions at the expo, so they were tying to the anthropology exhibits. The Olympics in the expo hosted what were called Anthropology Days. This was a two day event with athletic competitions staged that were really racist. They pitted various groups of indigenous people from around the world that were being displayed in these anthropology exhibits against one another. This was not a case where something was accepted for the time. A lot of things that we think of as accepted for the time really weren't, and people called out these competitions as racist and gross as they were happening. If you've ever seen the quote by Kubertown that states quote, it will of course lose its appeal when black men, red men, and yellow men learn to run, jump, and throw, and leave the white men behind them. That's a direct response to this Anthropology Days competition, which Kopertown called an outrageous charade. This idea was the brainchild of none other than James Sullivan. James Sullivan, I'm Not Gonna Lie emerges as one of the villains of this story. So racist garbage events aside, there were plenty of other problems plaguing the nineteen oh four Saint Louis Games. Just as had been the case in Paris, the Expo overshadowed the event. Newspaper write ups of various specific sporting events, including the marathon that we're going to talk about today, called them things like the Exposition Marathon, rather than referencing the Olympics at all. Additionally, the Olympiad, part of all of the festivities, was not particularly well attended, not by spectators and not by athletes. Some of this was because the nineteen hundred Games had gone really poorly and people were just kind of suspicious of how the Olympics were going to work. Some of this was because many countries had been drawn into the conflict of the Russo Japanese War, which started in February nineteen oh four and was ongoing when the Games began on July first. That war was still happening when the Games finally ended in late November. Plus, Saint Louis was just seen as remote, so foreign travelers were not as interested in attending. And while Saint Louis was and is a major US city to people living outside the US, it didn't necessarily seem that way in nineteen o five, and being so far from a coast meant it was just harder to get to. The way attendance shook out for athletes skewed the numbers really heavily for the US participants. There were only twelve participating nations, the US, Australia, Switzerland, Austria, South Africa, Canada, Hungary, Cuba, Greece, France, Germany and Britain. There were six hundred and thirty athletes who competed, and five hundred and twenty three of those were from the US, so the big majority. This led to a situation where some events only included US athletes as competitors. This was the first Olympics where the gold, silver, and bronze medal system was implemented. Before this, it was only the first place winners who took holl medals, and those were gold. The US, unsurprisingly took the vast majority of the medals at all levels. Of the ninety five gold medals awarded, the un US took seventy six and seventy eight silvers and seventy seven bronzes for a whopping two hundred and thirty medals total. Those numbers have kind of shifted over the years due to some of the events being coned. Numerous medals credited to the US have actually been contested right into the twenty first century because in some cases immigrants who were not US citizens were entered by the US team, and their home countries want those medals to be credited to the athlete's original nations. But the event that was perhaps the most unusual, startling and difficult to even contemplate, and there is room for plenty of additional adjectives, as you'll hear, was the marathon, and we will talk about that after we pause for a sponsor break. We mentioned some of the weirdness of the nineteen oh four Olympic Marathon in that live show we referenced earlier, including look car ride one of the competitors took, but we did not get all of the many odd and often harrowing happenings of the race, because there were a lot of strange things playing out that day, and it started with an odd assortment of competitors. There were several experienced marathoners on the start line, all of whom were from the US. Sam Miller, John Lorden, Arthur L. Newton, Michael Spring and Thomas Hicks. One of them was expected to win. Meller had won the nineteen oh two Boston Marathon. John Lorden won it in nineteen oh three. Michael Spring was the Boston Marathon's most recent champion. He had taken the prize earlier that year in April, and Newton had run the Olympic Marathon event in Paris. Thomas Hicks had two and he had come in second. There were thirty two runners on the start line on the afternoon of August thirtieth, but only four countries were represented, and the remaining twenty seven runners were really varied in their experience. There was another American competitor in the mix who had qualified by running a surprisingly short race that was spread Lures, who was a bricklayer who said he only had time to train at night. The race that got him into the Games was a special event staged by the Amateur Athletic Union. That's sometimes said to have been five miles, other times it's said to have been seven. In either case, that's a much shorter distance than a qualifier would normally need today. Yeah, I read multiple accounts of it, and then they describe it differently, so and I couldn't ever find one solid like here's even like a newspaper report that seems to have solid reporting going on. So that's what's up. South Africa was represented by two runners, Gentao and Jan Mashani. Both were part of a group that had been sent by South Africa to re enact segments of the Boer War as an exhibit. They were both part of the Bantu speaking Twana people, and they had both been messengers during the war, a job that was all running, so they were both very well conditioned for the marathon, and they both ran at barefoot. Greece had ten runners in the marathon, although none of them had trained for the race, they were pretty clear that they were there for fellowship with the other Olympians rather than any sort of attempt at winning. Runner John Furlough was Greek American. Although his citizenship was in the US, he chose to run for Greece. Cuba was represented by a man named Feligue's Carvajal, who had fundraised the money to travel to the Games himself by staging a variety of demonstrations in Cuba. In one of those, he ran from one side of Cuba to the other in the course of sixteen days. He also ran laps around city hall in Havana as part of his effort to drum up money. That was because he allegedly had been turned away from a requested meeting with the mayor, so he ran those laps to draw a crowd and get the mayor's attention, and that trick apparently worked because the mayor's office paid for his travel. Carver Hall was a mailman by trade, but that doesn't really convey the endurance needed for the job. He was a post runner. He was constantly on the move and apparently ran a lot when he was doing his roots. Like the South African competitors, he had also been a messenger runner during military conflict, carrying messages for General Maximo Gomez in the Cuban War of Independence. There are a couple of different stories about carve Hall having money issues en route to Saint Louis. One version says that the mayor didn't give him enough to cover anything but the fare he needed for transportation. Another version suggests that when he stopped in New Orleans on the way to the Olympic Games, he gambled all of his pocket money a way way regardless, Carva Hall had to hitchhike and walk his way to the competition. He also didn't really get enough to eat. He was a pretty small guy, reportedly five feet tall and one hundred pounds. He looked apparently scrawny when he got to the expo and the games. He also didn't have athletic clothes, and he ran in a white button down shirt, a beret and his trousers which had been cut short, either by Felix or by another competitor that probably would have been American competitor Martin Sheridan. They were concerned, reasonably so that he would overheat in this clothing. He also just wore normal shoes to run in. Ye. Yeah, there are pictures of him at the start line and he looks essentially dressed for a day of business perhaps, but his pants have been cut short. He still has on like the full length stockings underneath them. Though. All right, I'm going to give fair warning to any of our listeners who run, because the course conditions that we're about to talk about are flat out horrifying, and if you are not a runner, some of it's a little bit gross. Although we're not going to get supergraphic. So when the race started at three zero three pm, it was ninety degrees fahrenheit. That's thirty two point two degrees celsius, so definitely not optimal running temperature. It was also very humid. The race started in the Olympic Stadium that was filled with an estimated ten thousand spectators, and then after five laps around the track, the runners were routed out onto the rest of the course, which was not today's regulation length of twenty six point two miles. It was twenty four point eighty five. At this point, the distance of the marathon was still being tweaked as organizers kind of sought the optimal distance. The course itself was made up of an assortment of challenging conditions. According to an account written by race official Charles Lucas, it included quote no less than seven hills, varying from one hundred to three hundred feet high, some with long ascents and others with short ascents. Lucas wrote a book titled the Olympic Games nineteen oh four, which he published in nineteen oh five, and it's through his account that we have most of the information regarding what went on during the marathon. Heads up if you go looking for this book. He also says some very racist stuff in it. Regarding this course, he noted that the one in Saint Louis was quote the most difficult a human being was ever asked to run over. At Athens the road from the battlefield of Marathon, and that at Paris were boulevards compared to the course selected in Saint Louis. The running route once outside the stadium was anything but uniform. Most of the segments of it were incredibly dusty. Because of this late part of the summer, some of them were covered in loose gravel, and those dusty segments were brutal because although cars were still kind of a new and novel invention at this point point, there were some leading the runners along the course, as well as carrying race staffers and coaches alongside the runners, and those vehicles were kicking dust right into the runners' faces while they were breathing heavily from exertions, so it wasn't like they couldn't inhale it. This dust also obscured their vision, and to top things off, this was not a closed course, so runners were competing while they were also looking out for street traffic and pedestrians. Hydration was a whole story unto itself. If you run a marathon today, you can reasonably expect at least eight water stations. They may or may not include the option of a sports drink with electrolytes. Some stops may even have quick energy fuel like gels or gummies, occasionally even chocolate. That was definitely not the case for the nineteen oh four Olympics, though, there were only two water stations on the entire course, two not eight. Two uh, and that is actually not reported in all of the accounts. Lucas mentions only one as being official. One was near the six mile mark, where there was conveniently a water tower, and that may or may not have been an official station. The other was at the twelve mile mark, which Lucas mentioned, where there was a well on the course. This meant that the runners had to go at least half the race without any water, and that well water did not agree with everyone who drank it. A lot of the runners had stomach issues after drinking it. That is all a terrifying prospect, but it becomes really infuriating because this lack of water stops was not something that happened because of poor planning. It was done to those runners on purpose, and that is because James Sullivan decided that this would be a good opportunity to run an experiment to see what dehydration would do to endurance athletes during my research and stopped around the house in a full bore red rage for quite a while after reading, Yeah, this could have killed people. It almost did so. Despite all of these issues with the course, most of the runners persevered. When the race started, Fred Laures took the early lead. Thomas Hicks passed him after just a short while. John Lorden became nauseated and started to vomit and didn't complete the race. He was there for less than a mile. Within just a few miles, Miller was in the lead group and Lores and Hicks had fallen back. Despite Lorden's early dropout, the rest of the runners started fairly well, but things quickly fell apart, and we're going to talk about how after we paused for a sponsor break. As the race left the stadium and got onto the dusty roadways, Fred Lawres chugged along for nine miles, but then he started experiencing cramps. He was loaded into a support vehicle for transport, and he waved the crowds as he traveled the route back to the stadium. Once he had apparently dropped out, Hicks moved up a bit, but not enough to overtake the leaders after the brief boost that they all got from the second or perhaps first water stop right around that middle marker. As the mile markers reached into the teens, the field thimmed out quite a bit. Sam Miller lost his lead also due to cramps, which persisted to the point that he had to drop out. Another US competitor, Henry Balley, stopped running and continued at a walking pace, but another of the US runners, William Garcia, made it nineteen miles before he just could go no further. The dusty conditions meant that he had been inhaling huge amounts of particulate as he ran. This took his toll and he collapsed by the side of the course. Once he was spotted on the ground, race officials got him to emergency care. When Garcia was examined by a doctor, it was determined that he had taken in so much dust that he had damaged his esophagus and stomach and was hemorrhaging internally. This was to the point that his life was in danger. Because he had made it to medical care his conditions stabilized, he did eventually recover. Gentoo of South Africa was chased by a dog at one point and ended up about a mile off course. He still managed to finish ninth. His fellow South African delicate Jan Mashiani, came in twelfth. Perhaps the only delightful runner's story in this race is that of Cuban runner Felix Carbajal. He may not have had proper attire, but he does seem like he had a good time. He stopped on occasion to chat with spectators. He asked some people at one point if he could have one of the peaches they were eating that They told him no, but he just took two of them and ran, something that is characterized in accounts as playful and not criminal. Given the lack of supportive fluids on this course, this probably would have helped save him from some physical issues. But according to some accounts, he also picked some apples as he ran and ate those turned out. Those apples, though, were bad. They gave him terrible stomach cramps. Also, he took a brief nap before getting back up and finishing the race. I should say we don't have official documentation about that apple and nap part, but given other things we know about him, it really adds up. Although Hicks had started pretty strong and had done well for the first several miles, he started having some pretty serious issues well before the halfway point. When he reached the ten mile mark, he was so dehydrated that he needed to be carried by two men, Charles Lucas, the race official who wrote the count of the race, and Hugh McGrath, who was one of the coaches that was in the supporting vehicles. They became his two man crew for the remainder of the race. They refused him water, though even when he begged, wanting to stay true to the rules of Sullivan's experiment, the most he got was a sponge with warm water daubed around his mouth. Hicks continued with support, literally as his two crew members held him up from either side for parts of the race. You can find photos of him clearly being propped up. At the twelve mile mark, he got some water, which bullyed him for a while, but soon he asked for an assist and this is where his team gave him an elixir to keep going. That is just difficult to believe. This was egg white mixed with strychnine, which is a poison. At the time, minute doses of strychnine were believed to be a performance enhancer. The dose that was given to Hicks was a sixtieth of a grain. It seems to have helped Hicks kept moving although he was dispirited. While Hicks was being propelled along by his team, they witnessed Lures whip by them fresh as a daisy. The vehicle that had picked Fred Laure's up when he had cramps had sputtered to a stop. All of the dust had caused it to stall, and at this point Laurs was feeling better, so he got out and started running again. Hicks's men reportedly saw this and yelled at Laurs that he couldn't do that, but Laurs reportedly told them he was just going to run back to the stadium and get help for that broken down automobile. That was not what happened. When he got to the stadium, he ran a lap around the track, which is how the race finished, and then he crossed the finish line to the cheers of the crowd, who all believed that he was the winner. Lares's so called victory had thrilled the spectators who thought they had just seen the first US Olympic Marathon gold medalist finished the race. That culminated in another podcast subject Alice Roosevelt crowning him with the winner's wreath. Almost because someone in the crowd, and it's not known who yelled the lawyers had cheated his big moment unraveled because it was something that he had not earned. He claimed he had just been joking about having won the race. Yeah. Meanwhile, Hicks was still trying, but he was in very rough shape. He was reportedly pale, His eyes were described as dull and lustreless. His support team gave him another dose of egg whites and strychnine, this time with a brandy chaser. He was also bathed in warm water head to toe from a bucket that had been heated in the boiler of a steam engine car. Hicks kept going, but he also fell into a complete delirium. He was nearing the end, but he believed he had another twenty miles to go after the last two hills, which were near the end of the race, which he walked up and then shuffled down. He reached the final mile, but he begged his trainers to just let him lie down. He also begged for food, and he was given two more egg whites with brandy, although when another runner offered him what is described in Lucas's record as beef tea, so I'm assuming that's like a light broth, he was not allowed to have it. While Lucas described Hicks as kind of checked out mentally, he also described his gait as quote running mechanically like a well oiled piece of machinery. Hicks's finish was not the triumphant scenario that he was probably envisioning. When he started the race. He was basically carried. His feet were moving, but the two men who had been with him at that point for more than fourteen miles were physically holding him up up. Hicks collapsed as he crossed the tape, falling into the arms of Thomas Riley, who was one of the coaches for the American team. The dehydrated Hicks reportedly weighed eight pounds less when he finished the race than when he started, and he was in really bad shape. It had taken him three hours, twenty eight minutes fifty three seconds to finish this grueling race, and he probably came close to dying on the course. When the race was over, he was too weak to receive his award. He did not leave the stadium area for an hour, and during that time four doctors attended to him. During that time, there were other finishers. Albert J. Cory if Chicago came in second, Arthur Newton finished third, and Carve Hall finished fourth. It's been estimated that carver Hall's various stops to chat and nap cost him about an hour of time, so he probably would have won had he not done that, and it's a pity that he finished out of the metallepool because he was probably the best athlete in the race. It's worth noting that he was also the only one out there who was totally alone. He didn't have any fellow countrymen, he did not have any support staff. He was just out having a run and seemingly enjoying himself along the way. He was described at the finish line as being quite fresh and energetic and in good spirits and just a lot livelier than any of the other athletes of the thirty two men who started the race, only fourteen of them finished it. Fred Laws was banned from the Amateur Athletic Union for life, but that band did not hold. He continued to assert that he had just been playing by running that lap and crossing the finish line. Eventually, the AAU reinstated him. He won the Boston Marathon the next year. Charles Lucas made very clear in his book that he thought very little of Laws, who he thought had tainted the entire event with his fullness. Hicks's win was contested by the Chicago Athletic Association, which had sent several runners for the US team, and the charge there was that he had been helped so very much for the majority of the race that there really was no way to claim that he had won through his own stamina or power as a runner. But the Olympic referee, who had paced Hicks by car throughout said that he won and that it was an honest win, and that was the end of that. As for any scientific findings, based on the experimenting done during the race, Lucas came to the conclusion that quote drugs are of much benefit to athletes along the road, which just had a terrible conclusion to come to you from that. Today, the nineteen oh four marathon is considered the most chaotic such event in modern Olympic history. I have so many things from behind the scenes. Do you have listener mail? I do? I have two pieces again, because one is very very short. This first one is from Ben, who writes, greetings. I loved your eponymous foods discussion on beef stroking off, and I'm probably just piling onto a bunch of other comments, but I wanted to note that Russia is part of Europe. You mentioned the European influence as if Russia wasn't part of Europe a couple times. This is actually funny because I remember growing up and I was always I always got the granted I grew up during Cold War, so uss are at the time Asian part of Asian, but it qualifies as both because parts of it are in Europe and parts of it are in Asia. As we were recording that, I had the same thought and I was like, somebody's going to write to us about it really being in Europe, and it's number one. These these boundaries are arbitrary and largely made up, and a lot of them have to do with like commonalities related to language and culture, but also like that is very ill defined and vague, and I've seen whole arguments about like the underlying biases and things that are part of all of these divisions. But yeah, as I was as we were recording, I was like, it's both, so hopefully it'll be okay. Yeah. Yeah, Also that there wasn't a pylon, but I just thought I would read that because it's a good point because we didn't talk about it in the episode. That's what's up. The other is from our listener Heidi, who writes, I've been an avid listener for years and greatly enjoyed your show. It's become a weekly tradition to get caught up on a long commute. My six year old daughter has a rare genetic disease called metachromatic leukodystrophe or MLD. I Hope I said that right. Each week we travel to the University of Iowa for an experimental treatment to help slow the progression of the disease and hopefully improve the quality and length of her life. Children with late infantile MLD typically pass before the age of ten. This commute is four hours round trip and listening to you makes the drive something I look forward to you each week. Today, while driving home from the university, I listened to the episode on Eponymous Foods and Behind the Scenes Mini, both of which struck on things from my own life. I studied Russian in high school and college. While in high school, I had the opportunity to travel to Saint Petersburg in Moscow. Saint Petersburg was amazing, and I clearly remember walking down the street when our tour guide pointed at this ornate green building and said, that's where beef Stroganoff was invented. I snapped a picture of it, and as soon as I got home today I bolted to my basement to dig it out and send it to you. This was in the infancy of digital photography, so I apologize that it's a picture of a picture. By the way, the picture looks fine. I was surprised to find out from the episode that this was likely not the precise location of its origin. Nonetheless, it is still the Stroganoff Palace, and by that virtue worthy of note. I had hoped to try authentic beef stroganof while in Russia. I did not get the opportunity, but I did have several other amazing and rather interesting foods. The other food you mentioned with which I have a personal connection is capt'n Crunch. I am originally from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which is one of and perhaps the only location Captain Crunch is made. I had to laugh at your oops Alberry's reference. Cedar Rapids tagline is the city of five seasons, and this is often jokingly changed to the city of five smells. There are several factories, including Quaker Oats and Cedar Rapids, that are responsible for its unique and rather unpleasant aroma. We oftentimes joke that the only day Cedar Rapid smells good is on Sunday because this is crunch berry Day. I'm not one hundred percent sure if this was true or is still true today, but on Sundays I do remember downtown smelling a little more pleasant. In addition to the crunch berries, my grandmother made dolls and puppets and was actually asked to design the cap'n but she decided not to take on the commission. She later said she regretted this not only because of the cereals eventual popularity, but because she did not like the finished product. Had she designed it, no doubt the Captain would look very different today. I sadly don't have any pets to send photos of, but I did take a photo of my daughter. She herself is making history by contributing to research on this treatment that will hopefully improve the lives of other children with MLD after her. We are taking her and her brother's to Disneyland in a few weeks and we are so excited. She smiles so big when we talk about how she gets to go to the Bibittybobbity boutique and get the royal treatment. Thank you for always providing a world with entertainment that is both inclusive and informative. You give me hope and joy often in the moments I need it most. Give me all choked up, Heidi, I hope you guys have an amazing time in Disneyland. By the way, your daughter is adorable and she is going to be so cute once she is coded in all of the Bibittybobby glitter. That is one of my favorite things. Even though I am very openly not a big kid person, there is nothing better than seeing children like full glitter everything when come out of there, it is so joyous. I love it. This also gave me a hilarious flashback, Tracy. I don't think you moved to Atlanta in time to experience the delight of the free Doo lay factory that used to be in Shambley. No, where the Low's is in that Brookhaven Shambly kind of crossover area used to be the Freeedo lay factory. And I used to work very near there and it would smell like chili cheese doritos some days, and I did not find that gross at all. I loved it. So thinking about a town that smells like oatmeal and sugar cereals being made all the time actually sounds pretty good to me. But Heidi, I wanted to thank you for this because one I'm stroking off that might have been the building where it was invented. We don't know. You could say that. I think that's fine, And again, I hope your trip is amazing. Disneyland is one of the many places I love, love, love, I hope you eat all the Ronto wraps for me while you're there. If you like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us as missed in History on social media, and if you haven't subscribed, you can do that on the iHeartRadio app or wherever 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.