Behind the Scenes Minis: Dishwashers and Desmond

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about dishwashers this week. That's the thing I am very grateful for. Same. There are a few a few things I wanted to talk about, but especially that article we mentioned from where they got Josephine's name completely wrong and listed her as Elizabeth Cochrane. I don't know if that name rings a bell to any of our listeners or to you, but Elizabeth Cochrane was one of the aliases that Nellie bly used funny. It just struck me as very funny that this um, this article very repeatedly called called Lissa with cochran um. It also when I say it got stuff wrong, I mean it got stuff real wrong. And it almost made me go didn't know, I bloy like have someone confused her with Josephine Cochran and she gave a completely fake interview. Because there's so much cockamam me stuff that gets added to the story, including that she was working on elevators at that point. She never, to the best of my knowledge or research, ever worked in the elevator industry. Um, so I really was like, was this a dupe? Did somebody mess with this poor reporter for not being thorough enough to fact check who they were talking to and they just gave them a bunch of fake information. Yeah, it's so strange to me. When I was in college, I was interviewed by a reporter from the campus newspaper about stuff that was coming up for a club that I was a co president of, and they recorded the interview. I don't know what happened between that and writing the article, but it was riddled with error. Uh. They were big errors, and they were errors that made us look bad and then made the newspaper look bad. And I still am like, how how it was as much of a mess as this article. It's so weird to me, right, I I mean, we have talked many times about how there was a little more I shouldn't even say a little more, there was a lot more commonplace flourish and bias in the press. Um. That was just kind of like they could, you know, fill out a story by adding things like you know that I think this defendant isn't cute, so they must be guilty. Like, but this was just so weird, just completely made up of whole cloth. Oh, she's busy at work on an elevator. What that she had moved to New York? She not. It was just the weirdest assortment of strange, strange things. That is very odd. But boy, that's one of the great things I love about looking at old newspapers. You find things and you're like, wait, what And at first I thought, you know, because you'll have that happen if you're doing like a search through old newspapers and your search terms will pick up something that looks like it should be exactly what your subject is. But when you actually open it and look at it, you're like, oh, no, no no, no, no, this is a case of just a duplicate name or something. Nope, it was. The first part is all about how she invented the dishwasher, and then it goes into this wild cockamam storys so weird. It was super weird. We mentioned only briefly because it only ever comes up briefly in anything I have read about her. The fact that Josephine Cochrane's husband was an anti Lincoln Democrat um and was very politically active, and I don't know if It's one of those things of once he had passed, which was before she rose to prominence. She wasn't really involved in any of that anymore, or if people who wrote about her later, recognizing the importance of Abraham Lincoln, downplayed any involvement she had in in the Democratic Party at the time. I don't know, there's like nothing, it's it's an empty void of information. Um. So I know it's a mystery for me. It was one of those things that made me like, uh, you know, kind of like set up like a mere cat and go I should investigate this, and I there wasn't much to fun. Yeah, so I don't I don't know. I will tell you this, that last thing we read about Whirlpool donating a dishwasher just gave me a chuckle. And also, I will note that the the historic marker that was placed in the nineties also mentions Kitchen Aid dishwashers by brand and has the its A Aid logo on it. So some of this is definitely like a corporate quaint branding thing. Although it is interesting and I am glad that someone bought her home that wants to restore it. I think that's a cool project. Um, just in general. There are many things on historical markers that are not correct. They're like anytime I'm researching something and there's information that I find from a historical mark, especially if the marker is the only place that it says that I'm always likes. Sometimes it's like a very romanticized or kind of like, uh like more of the local lore version than what can actually be substantiated. Yeah, Yeah, I also wish we need more about George Butter's Yeah, not a lot written about him, but clearly very important to the entire thing. Yeah, seems to have known what he was doing and to have been a good dude. It's not a weasel, especially since she does call out other men she had to deal with. Yet she kept him, you know, right by her side throughout all of their their work together, so he clearly was was great to work with for her. She never said anything negative about him that I could find. There is, as I said, debate about how many dishes she actually ever washed. Some things will say she never washed dishes, and others will say, like, no, she probably actually was doing dishes at home for a long time before she decided on this, And there doesn't seem to be. I mean, it's not like people document when they do household chores normally, so there's not really any definitive evidence one way or the other. The headline of socialite didn't want to do dishes is very popular, but frankly, no one wants to do dishes. I think there are some folks who get satisfaction over the but like for a lot of us, as a chore and a not particularly pleasant Sure. We recently had an issue in our household where the dishwasher wasn't working correctly, and when the tech came to look at the dishwasher discovered a plumbing problem in the kitchen sink that prevented work on the dishwasher problem. We had to get the plumbing thing fixed first, and so in addition to the dishwasher being broken, the kitchen sink was also a problem. And I was like, my life is too many, too many things to be happening wrong in the kitchen right now. Yes, yes, when your kitchen is messed up, it is so disruptive to a point that for me anyway, and I imagine for a lot of people it is mentally an emotionally taxing Yeah. Yeah, Like I just want to fry an egg and clean up after it. That's all I want. Some years ago, before we were married, before I had even moved to Massachusetts, pat ricks landlord decided not to renew his lease, and so he had like a couple of months to find a new place to live, which in the Boston metro area is often challenging, and he had signed the lease on the new place that he found, and afterwards was like, wait a minute, I didn't see a dishwasher in the kitchen, and he hated washing dishes so much that like then this whole period of angst and difficulty of needing to unexpectedly move with that without a ton of notice, And I used some credit card reward points to buy a little model that went on the countertop that hooked to the faucet with I remember you telling me about that, uh, And it was great. I mean it could only handle like four plates, four bowls, four glasses, and some silverwared time that was like its max capacity. Um, But that thing I saw him through the whole time living in that apartment, and then us moving in together in apartment that also had new dishwasher, and then I can't remember if we donated or gave it away when we moved into the house that had a dishwasher that works most of the time. I feel like if I had one that was that little, it would be running constantly because I make a shocking amount of dirty dishes for one person personally, because I like to cook an experiment and I'll be like, I know, for dinner, I'm gonna saute twelve different things and they each need to be on separate plates before I recombine them into BA I will say, in those instances, I usually do try to hand wash as I go. It doesn't always work, and their often ends up like a pile in the sink. It's just a fact of life, dirty dishes. So thank you, Josephine for making my life easier. You talked about Viola Desmonds after many, many, many listener requests for an episode. UM, A couple of things we didn't mention. There were very there were a bunch of things that got like put into the outline and cut out that were more related to her family than related specifically to her. But that currency that she was featured on the ten dollar ten dollar bill. It's a beautifully designed bill that one awards for its design. UM it's also the first vertically oriented Canadian bank note, which as somebody who lives in the United States, which nonsensically makes all of our bills look exactly the same except for like tiny differences. They're all the same color, they're all the same size. Having one vertically oriented is like a little mind blowing. Sometimes she is described as the first woman on Canadian currency. There was one earlier woman, uh shown with a group. Um, she's the first, I think, the first woman on a bill by herself, not as part of a group picture, so that is just some Canadian currency detail. I uh really enjoyed reading her sister, Landa. Robson's book called Sister to Courage. I read both of those books, actually, Sister Courage and the one that she co wrote with her professor. And I hadn't initially found Sister to Courage, so it was something that I got to pretty late in the in the process. I had thought that it was just a book specifically about her sister, but it's more broadly like about their family and how they grew up in their parents. Um. And originally I had all these uh like little bits of stories about her parents and her family life and all I was like, this is not actually related to Viola Desmond, um, and I need to cut it out to make more room for things that are about Viola Desmond. It's interesting to me. One of the things that I kept thinking about in this episode is the trickiness of figuring out what the right course of action is on big issues. Right, because the black community was split in Nova Scotia over how she should have handled this. Yeah, Um, that's so difficult and put someone in such an awkward and hard position because you know, they probably all intellectually agreed on what would have been the right thing and what would have been fair and equal and just. But then it's more complex than that because we're all hiddens well, and the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Colored People as a group at first was also divided about what to do. Like eventually they unanimously supported the decision to go to court, but like at first, there was a lot of discussion about what the right move here. Should we push back, should we not push back? So like across the board, that was just something that involved a lot of discussion, and then people had varying opinions about Um and a lot of fear that if people did push back, that it was just kind of cause problems. And I mean that's come up with other episodes before that. This was an interesting thing to research. Being from the United States, where we have talked a lot about racism and a lot about segregation. I read a lot a lot of stuff that was written in Canada by Canadians that made comparisons to the United States. And one of the things that struck me was that, uh, they tended to describe the system of Jim Crows segregation in the United States as how it worked in the United States and the situation in Nova Scotia and can Nada was different because this was not something that was legally required and it could really vary from place to place, And it could vary from place to place in the United States too, especially outside of the South, right, a lot of places in the North did not have specific laws requiring segregation. But at the same time, like restaurants in New York City would only hire black waiters for a period to like try to maintain the appearance of slavery, to like appease Southern slaveholders who were visit visitors to New York, Like it was a there's a lot more uh, a lot more nuanced within the United States. Um that some of the things that I wrote were like a little sort of imagined the situation in Canada to be different from the situation of the United States, when really it was very similar to the situation in some parts of the United States. I'm reminded de remember when we did our episode on the Great Store Derby and the one black family that was involved, and the father saying he kind of made the opposite point of like, well, at least if I were in the United States, this would all be overt and acknowledged, whereas here everyone wants to act like this is not a thing and it is. The Other thing to remember is that there can be laws and people don't follow them, Yeah, exactly, which is a problem where I think sometimes we get the reductive teaching of like history as it relates to racism and slavery, where it's like and then there was reconstruction. It's like, oh no, I remember, I feel like I was at I was at history camp Boston. I was I was at a history event of some sort, watching people give their their papers and presentations, and there was a presentation specifically about after the Civil War, newly freed people trying to track down their family members, and then they're descendants trying to go back and reconstruct their family trees. And one of the things that people were having to just remind themselves of was that people were not necessarily following the law. Um, and you when you were trying to trace through the family tree, you couldn't just assume that a slaveholder had quote freed everybody at the same time the way they were supposed to. Like, you couldn't assume anything about that whole process just because something had been made the law. All of this stuff folds folds in together. Um. I like how she read something about Madam C. J. Walker and was like, I want to do that in Nova Scotia, Like I want to start my own business. I want to start schools for people. I want to train people, And she just did it. Yes, I had a slight chuckle, which I hope no one thought was disrespectful or reductive when we were talking about her mom sewing money into her bra because she was afraid for her safety. There was probably a much higher likelihood of a nonsafe situation than what I would have experienced. But It just reminded me of my own mother, who was always very anxious and fretful about everything and everywhere I wanted to go. Of course, as you know, I am something of a free spirit who does not take well to being told what to do. So I envisioned myself having a mother doing a similar thing and being like, you've got to get over this. Yeah, I'm gonna need to actually use the money. It cannot be sewn into my bra One of the stories about her parents that I put in the outline and then wound up taking out because um, it was not actually about her, and it was like the the episode was just becoming bigger and bigger and bigger, and I was like, there's other stuff I need to focus on here. Um. Viola desmonds uh maternal grandfather had moved to Connecticut, her mother had eventually gone to a finishing school in Boston, and she had met her father like on a summer break in Halifax, married him without telling her father, went back home as planned because she was afraid to tell her dad about this whole having gotten married without talking to him about it, realized that she was pregnant, was trying to figure out how am I how am I going to tell my dad all this that like, not only did I get married without telling him while I was on a break, but also I am like, I'm now expecting my first child. And somebody sent him a clipping of the wedding section of the church bulletin. That was how he found out. And he was like, shouldn't you could just shouldn't go back home to your husband. Now She's like, yes, in fact, I should. Wanda Robson described her grandfather as annoyed by this whole situation. Um, so anyway, oh my gracious, yeah, yeah, I'm glad I finally got to the Viola Desmond episode. I think some of the times that we have gotten requests for her have been times like when she was first appearing on the Currency and that kind of stuff, and there's just a lot of stuff out there about her, and uh, it just took me a while. So Happy Friday, everybody. I hope your weekend goes well whatever is on your plates. We'll be back with a Saturday Classic, uh tomorrow, and then we will be back Monday. Was something new? Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.