Bitchy History - June 18, 2024


Father's Day Special


Episode Stats


Length

59 minutes

Words per minute

156.8

Word count

9,319

Sentence count

379


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 something that's you know kind of bitchy pretty bitchy bitchy i know it's just you know bitchy
00:00:07.700 well first of all you're a little bitchy that's that's next level bitchy welcome to bitchy history
00:00:14.480 the irreverent history podcast where one history professor gets to bitch about history and the
00:00:18.800 impact it has on the world today hi guys i know it's been a while uh a very long while i've been
00:00:25.760 very distracted and haven't really felt like putting out episodes of the
00:00:28.100 podcast. But today we are having yet another one of those special editions. We
00:00:32.780 had my Mother's Day episode, now we're having the Father's Day episode. So this
00:00:35.660 is my dad. We're going to be talking about his life experiences and some of
00:00:39.560 the interesting things that he's done over the course of his life and, you
00:00:42.580 know, historical events that he's witnessed and things like that today.
00:00:45.500 You'll be getting this a couple of days after Father's Day because I honestly
00:00:49.520 was too wiped out from a trip to the Salt River on Sunday to record on
00:00:55.100 Father's Day. So, but you'll get it, you'll get this episode soon. So anyway,
00:00:58.700 here's my dad. I'll let him introduce himself. Hi, I'm Carol Walker, and of course
00:01:03.680 you've already, if you saw it, you met my wife. Yeah, go back and watch the other
00:01:07.860 episode after this one if you haven't, because there'll be references,
00:01:11.120 obviously. We've been married quite a while. I'm not gonna tell you how long.
00:01:15.380 You don't need to know that. You don't need to know the age. Yeah. But, I grew up in the 60s, and most of you
00:01:23.180 probably ideas what people who grew up in the 60s were doing at that time. I was
00:01:28.700 not that way because I was growing up in a rural small state where most people
00:01:35.940 didn't even know about all those things that other people were doing except from
00:01:39.980 TV. Right, exactly. Though one thing I did want to talk about was, it's something
00:01:44.540 that I always mention to my students when we talk about like the history of
00:01:47.960 like the Civil Rights Movement and stuff like that, I always mention the fact that
00:01:50.360 that you were growing up during the era of integration, right?
00:01:55.040 And I've always found it really interesting
00:01:57.540 to think about how recent that period actually is,
00:02:00.440 and the fact that my dad went to school
00:02:02.700 at a school that had not been fully integrated
00:02:04.280 when he was going to school there,
00:02:05.760 which I think is really interesting.
00:02:07.720 Would you share a little bit about that?
00:02:09.060 Yes, in fact, I grew up in a time
00:02:12.400 when schools were completely segregated.
00:02:15.700 Up until my time, the sixth grade,
00:02:20.360 none of the schools in our school district were integrated the they had
00:02:26.280 separate schools at a different place and believe me separate but equal this
00:02:32.260 that did not happen yeah they were not equal school that they were not equal
00:02:37.360 even going to the better school I knew that they weren't get the getting the
00:02:42.060 education that we did and when someone says oh black people don't score high
00:02:46.580 well of course they don't score as highly in some cases in some ways
00:02:51.700 because they're not they're not given the chance to learn what what other
00:02:57.500 people learn exactly yeah it's ridiculous to assume that people are
00:03:01.640 going to have the same level of success if they don't have the same level of
00:03:04.640 access to you know things and an education that other people have it's
00:03:10.020 ridiculous yeah and in my life when I when I got out of sixth grade and went
00:03:15.620 into what they called junior high at that time or middle school now they
00:03:20.900 started integrating but they integrated the first three grades what grade one
00:03:26.120 two and three and they continued it upwards one year at a time so therefore
00:03:32.380 I went to junior high seventh eighth and ninth grade with no black people in the
00:03:39.120 school I graduated from that and went to senior high and at that next year was
00:03:45.140 when there were the first people black people in the junior high school so it's
00:03:50.180 never you kind of missed it out you missed out on it and I continued and
00:03:53.660 when I graduated the next year there were people in the senior high schools
00:03:58.020 so you just kind of people and so it was I grew up entirely in an in a
00:04:05.040 segregated situation and I knew that my family and my relatives
00:04:14.080 from what they said they were very biased they were anti-integration just a little they were
00:04:22.040 all anti-integration can't imagine they were anti anything that mixed the races in fact so
00:04:28.460 it took me a long time to break away from that and i i know still that i have section you know
00:04:37.780 parts of me that still had that feeling. I have to fight it. Yeah. It's about
00:04:43.960 unpacking it, like figuring out where your problems are and unpacking those
00:04:49.120 things, definitely. Because it affects you when you grow up that way, especially if
00:04:52.220 you go to school that way and then you, you know, go to, you know, you'll grow up
00:04:58.480 in a family like that. It's going to have problems. It's going to cause problems,
00:05:01.360 right? Yeah. It's going to affect you. Yeah, exactly. I remember you told me once
00:05:06.520 that like going being in the military helps like kind of change your views on
00:05:13.000 that because the military was integrated and you were not serving with people
00:05:16.000 who are all the same as you as well right yeah so yeah my dad's done a lot
00:05:20.620 of interesting things some of the things he won't let us talk about I don't know
00:05:24.740 if they're still classified I don't know I don't know I asked him once if he'd
00:05:28.840 ever killed a man and his response was very enigmatic all I said was not
00:05:33.100 directly. It's enigmatic, right? It's an enigmatic statement, but he has a few
00:05:38.200 stories that he's put in Ixnay on. We can't talk about, even though they're
00:05:42.040 stories I know. He doesn't want to talk about them in public. But yes, we're
00:05:45.880 gonna talk a little bit about some of his times. Obviously, you're growing up
00:05:49.660 during the beginnings of the Vietnam, during the Vietnam War, right? And so
00:05:54.700 you're, you ended up being, well, let's, you talk the story about how you got
00:05:58.820 pulled into that. Well I graduated in 1966 which is a long time for some of
00:06:03.740 y'all. Long time for me actually but after about after about a year when I
00:06:12.740 was working I decided I needed something else and I decided I would just to let
00:06:18.440 you know this is the kind of a background I decided I would go on a
00:06:22.760 road trip took this road trip my plan was to go to California probably the end
00:06:29.240 up in San Francisco you know during when San Francisco was at its heights in the
00:06:36.580 Haight-Ashbury district where everyone was there the Rolling Stones were
00:06:41.960 growing up or starting up at that time yeah my dad was getting the other my dad
00:06:48.200 was cool maybe and so I thought about that the problem is somewhere along the
00:06:57.440 way outside of Winslow not Winslow but what's the town on the west side of
00:07:06.140 Arizona Payson no Kings Kings Kingsman yeah Kingsman Arizona I turned north I
00:07:14.480 was planning to go to Las Vegas at the same time found out it turned out I was
00:07:20.880 a little bit sleepy and I was traveling along and I wrecked my car by drifting
00:07:28.640 off the road and hitting a bridge it was a short bridge so all it did was make
00:07:34.460 the car fly up in the air and and it landed about 30 feet beyond the bridge
00:07:42.580 funniest thing that happened in that I had a case of Cokes in the back of the
00:07:47.800 car my driver's side window was open none of the other windows were open when I
00:07:54.040 looked back after the accident there were no Cokes in the back of the car
00:07:57.580 they just I looked around and all the Cokes were on the highway somewhere
00:08:02.020 around there they had flown through the driver's side window missing my head by
00:08:07.020 inches maybe centimeters because with the abrupt stop they just flew forward and
00:08:17.360 as the car was spinning they went right out the window that was the funniest
00:08:22.520 thing yeah always wear your seat belt or else I wouldn't exist right this bad
00:08:26.520 bad situation right you know always wear your seat belt at that time so I'm still
00:08:32.440 alive yeah obviously but yeah and uh so then i i sold the car to a junkyard because it was it was
00:08:41.280 trashed got a bus came back to my hometown and at that time picked up the when i picked up the mail
00:08:49.760 i found a notice from the draft board said oh we need you to come down to the capital city of
00:08:56.520 arkansas where i lived and do have a physical get injected inspected neglected and detected
00:09:06.840 now all of those things that they do at those draft board places uh unlike
00:09:14.840 some other people i did not go in drug no no you didn't pull an arlo guthrie on them no
00:09:20.200 So if you heard that story from Arlo Guthrie, I was not there.
00:09:26.080 I thought I was being serious about it.
00:09:28.920 Probably should have been different.
00:09:30.360 So I went through all of that.
00:09:33.500 They sent me home.
00:09:36.100 I went to the draft board and said, where am I on the draft list?
00:09:42.760 And they said, oh, you're good for this month.
00:09:45.700 And I said, well, this month's half over.
00:09:49.160 What about next month?
00:09:50.080 Oh, you're good for that too. And I said, but in August you'll be drafted. So I
00:09:55.660 decided maybe I should try to select where I went. I had several choices. I
00:10:04.660 could try one, a different military instead of being drafted into the army,
00:10:08.500 different part of the military, or in fact I could, I could have left and gone
00:10:13.180 the candidate. I decided that was not the best option. So I went down and checked
00:10:21.460 and the only people who had openings immediately were the Marines and I
00:10:27.640 thought that's probably gonna be worse than the army. Probably just a little bit.
00:10:30.740 Yeah. So I signed up with them and they put me in a group supposedly called
00:10:42.360 ASA the army security agency which means I was going to be doing desk work and
00:10:51.180 after we got in there we decided that our best term we were obviously we're
00:10:57.240 not airborne so we called ourselves chair born but you know it's it's desk
00:11:02.040 work but it's spy desk work right it was cool yeah I was a chair board spy no
00:11:08.040 No, James Bond, but like, you know, you were still doing cool stuff.
00:11:12.680 And we started doing things there.
00:11:15.780 And our job was to decipher or decode the traffic from other countries around there.
00:11:26.040 I won't mention which countries.
00:11:27.720 We were in a little country called Ethiopia at the time.
00:11:33.780 And it was ruled by an emperor whose name was Haile Selassie.
00:11:38.040 you can look that up and he had a what he had one son I won't tell you his name
00:11:46.980 because I don't remember it anymore I only met him a few times and in fact the
00:11:55.660 funniest story is we I would them with downtown and did what most people in the
00:12:00.760 army do we went to a bar and drank might as well on your day off yeah and some
00:12:07.560 guy came up to us who looked well-dressed and said, ask us if we wanted to go to a party.
00:12:15.020 And being young and stupid in the army, we said, sure, we'll take an invitation from some stranger
00:12:22.520 to go to a party. Go to a secondary location with somebody we don't know. And so we did. We followed
00:12:30.180 them in our cars and we drove up to this fairly large, well, massive house and went
00:12:41.360 through a gated wall with with guards around it. And I thought, I really did
00:12:50.040 think there was some, there could be something wrong here, but we went on in
00:12:53.460 and sure enough there was a party in the house and we were there for two, three,
00:12:59.400 maybe four hours, and then this guy walked up to us and said, hi, I just want to thank you for
00:13:06.680 coming to my party, and said his name, which I immediately forgot. You've been probably drinking
00:13:15.260 a lot, to be fair. True. So, you know. But I asked someone later, who was that? He said, oh, that's the
00:13:22.180 son of the emperor okay he just likes to throw parties and he likes the u.s military for some
00:13:30.640 reason likes to bring him around yeah and so that's he has people to go out and just pick up
00:13:36.720 people you know or ask people who are in the military if they want to go because i and it's
00:13:42.040 obvious that we were in the military because we're all speaking english not italian or uh ethiopian
00:13:48.520 Right. And I mean, it's not like the military didn't, it wasn't kind of, you guys all have the same haircuts, so the same out, you know, look a certain way. It's pretty easy to pick out an American GI in a bar.
00:14:00.500 Yeah, even though we were dressed in civilian clothes, not our military uniforms, it was easy to pick out.
00:14:05.420 Yeah, but you got, it's the haircut. It's, you know, and the, what do they call them, the birth control glasses. It's pretty easy to locate American GIs, especially back in the 60s.
00:14:15.500 Now, and the funniest thing about that situation is that, as I said, Haile Selassie, the emperor, had one son.
00:14:22.120 I found out later that he had had, I'm not sure how many, eight, nine, ten sons.
00:14:29.080 More of them anyway.
00:14:30.360 Quite a few more.
00:14:31.240 Yeah.
00:14:31.780 Some daughters too, but they were still around.
00:14:34.840 This one that I met was probably the youngest or maybe the second to the youngest.
00:14:41.200 he was the heir to the throne
00:14:46.040 of the emperor and the reason he was
00:14:49.880 was because all the other eight or seven, eight, nine sons were gone
00:14:54.100 they had all died, some in
00:14:56.780 unusual accidents and some
00:15:02.020 in very obvious were killed
00:15:05.460 Right. We won't speculate on how, but, you know, it was suspicious.
00:15:12.040 Yes. And the situation was that the son of the emperor lived in the town where we lived, where the base was, because it was 250 miles from the capital.
00:15:26.960 and he was required to stay there at all times.
00:15:34.420 He couldn't come to the capital.
00:15:36.360 I'm assuming at that point that the emperor was a little bit paranoid
00:15:40.940 about him being close to him.
00:15:42.740 Maybe just a teeny bit.
00:15:44.020 So not a great relationship with that family.
00:15:47.780 Awkward Christmas dinners, I would assume,
00:15:50.400 if in fact they had Christmas dinners.
00:15:52.820 They probably did since they were Coptic Christian.
00:15:55.960 Oh, right. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. I, I'm an American historian. Don't, don't look at me when I know absolutely nothing about Ethiopia. But yeah, so that makes sense.
00:16:05.960 But the main church there was Coptic Christianity, and often we went to a place down by the ocean in a town called Masala, and that was part of the area.
00:16:23.820 The area we were in of Ethiopia was called Eritrea.
00:16:27.720 It was a state or province of Eritrea
00:16:34.560 that had been given to Eritrea as a trust territory
00:16:39.700 after World War II.
00:16:42.500 And a few years later in the mid-50s,
00:16:46.300 Ethiopia just annexed it and said,
00:16:49.240 you're part of our country.
00:16:51.320 The people who lived there were not entirely happy
00:16:53.740 with that. And in fact, when I was
00:16:55.840 there in the
00:16:57.160 late 60s, there was a lot of
00:16:59.700 semi-warfare
00:17:04.000 going on. Yeah, I mean, like you
00:17:05.860 said, there was little things that the
00:17:07.740 rebel, like that was the
00:17:09.560 Eritrean rebels.
00:17:12.240 They would do all sorts of crazy
00:17:13.700 stuff back then, yeah. Yeah, they were called the ELF.
00:17:16.380 They called them the Eritrean
00:17:17.880 Liberation Front.
00:17:20.080 Like all the Liberation Fronts,
00:17:21.840 they were probably a little bit
00:17:23.440 communist
00:17:24.380 or socialist
00:17:27.260 in any way.
00:17:28.640 And they probably got support
00:17:31.080 from communist countries because
00:17:33.180 that was anything to upset
00:17:35.460 the relationship between Ethiopia
00:17:37.520 and the United States would be something
00:17:39.380 that the
00:17:40.200 Soviet countries or Soviet
00:17:43.360 related countries would love.
00:17:46.220 Right.
00:17:46.900 And not that there wasn't a reason.
00:17:50.260 Yeah.
00:17:50.440 I mean, Eritrea wanted
00:17:52.400 to have their area back they're like this is our country we should be able to have it which is
00:17:55.920 completely reasonable and so we would go down to masawa which was on the coast and we'd swim in the
00:18:02.520 red sea and do things and go around and so that was that was good times yeah yeah i mean it was
00:18:08.940 better than being in vietnam certainly right that's right because the at the time when i was
00:18:14.680 went in, there was a great chance
00:18:17.520 because Vietnam was at its height, the Vietnam War
00:18:22.600 was at its height, and in fact in 67
00:18:25.260 we went in and in October
00:18:29.380 of 67 I went to a place where they trained people for the ASA
00:18:34.820 Army Security Agency and went through a class
00:18:38.880 in code breaking. The class
00:18:42.940 before us, which graduated about a month before us, out of 18 people, 17% to Vietnam.
00:18:53.780 Now, that's beside the fact that the recruiter with whom I signed for this duty promised
00:19:03.960 that no one as a member of the Army Security Agency ever went to Vietnam.
00:19:10.760 Right.
00:19:12.200 And he was only partially lying.
00:19:17.120 We're right.
00:19:17.800 They didn't call him ASA when they were in Vietnam.
00:19:20.480 Because what they did is the moment you,
00:19:22.600 before you stepped on the plane to fly to Vietnam,
00:19:25.280 they transferred you from the MOS we had,
00:19:30.840 the service designation of Code Breaker to radio operator.
00:19:37.740 So all the people who went to Vietnam were radio operators.
00:19:41.200 So they kind of just, there was a bait and switch, right?
00:19:43.300 It was very possible.
00:19:44.120 They were like, you won't go to Vietnam if you sign up with this.
00:19:47.060 And you were like, great, awesome.
00:19:48.280 That's exactly what I wanted.
00:19:49.580 Actually, he didn't say I wouldn't go.
00:19:51.260 He just said nobody in the Army Security Agency goes to Vietnam.
00:19:54.740 But the implication was that, oh, you won't have to go to Vietnam if you sign up for this.
00:19:58.520 And then it's like, oh, it's a bait and switch.
00:20:00.500 They just changed the name of your job and then sent you off to Vietnam anyway.
00:20:03.880 But luckily, you were in the right class, so you didn't have to do that.
00:20:07.540 so they sent me the Ethiopia which was East Africa fairly nice we were on a
00:20:13.640 mountain at about 8,000 feet and you could you could clock the rain in them
00:20:21.880 in the rainy season because during the early part of the rainy season it
00:20:26.740 started raining at 1 o'clock then later it'd be 1 30 and then 2 o'clock and then
00:20:31.420 2 30 and then it quit raining okay and then there was no more rainy there was
00:20:35.700 no more rain until the next spring. Right. Yeah. At least you got some rain.
00:20:40.860 Yeah. Where we live now we're not getting any rain. It was actually quite
00:20:44.880 sufficient to fill up the reservoir and usually we had enough water in the
00:20:49.580 reservoir until the next rainy season. Well that's good. Yeah. Yeah. Could be
00:20:54.340 worse. But what we did was we sat in offices as I said chair board and we
00:21:01.260 broke codes. And if anything interesting came up, we sent it back to NASA or NSA. We sent it back
00:21:11.760 to NSA, the National Security Agency, in Washington. And they looked at it and decided it was really
00:21:18.780 important. Actionable, right? Actionable, yes. And when I said that I'd never killed anyone directly,
00:21:27.140 uh that's it was that saying we did not just me but we did decode a series of messages which we
00:21:36.940 sent back to NSA which they sent to the defense intelligence agency which then when it sent it
00:21:48.140 on to the military, and there was some action taken, and so it was, the action was taken
00:21:56.960 because of what we sent them, and we heard that there was some military, you know, not
00:22:05.580 just the military was there, but they had a firefight with someone, so technically,
00:22:11.800 yeah, so technically some people got killed, or maybe got killed, I didn't really get the
00:22:15.980 full story not being at the at the at the place where it was right here it was a need to know
00:22:22.220 kind of situation but yeah you got lots of information that would get passed around yeah
00:22:26.820 now if you need to know that's the whole point there is a there are various classifications
00:22:33.620 confidential secret top secret then it goes to top secret code word and then it goes to top
00:22:40.960 secret code word need to know and then the last one is top secret code word eyes only which means
00:22:48.620 you read it and then kill yourself is that a real one or is that one in movies no you don't
00:22:54.600 think that's just in movies you can read it and you can that person cannot but you never pass it
00:23:00.800 on to anyone else who is not has you know it was like something they would pass on to the president
00:23:07.680 or the Secretary of Defense, and it never got passed anywhere else,
00:23:12.140 unless it was passed to the State Department for some action.
00:23:15.460 Right.
00:23:15.760 You know.
00:23:16.760 So it becomes a very closed set with only a few people,
00:23:22.800 fewer and fewer people, knowing about certain things.
00:23:25.700 Speaking of passing things on to the President,
00:23:28.580 I think my favorite story that you ever shared with me
00:23:30.940 has to do with passing things on to the President.
00:23:33.160 Okay.
00:23:33.740 We've got to tell them that, because it's hilarious.
00:23:35.900 There is a, or at least there was at that time, a special code that you could send with a message
00:23:42.960 when you thought that it was urgent and necessary, immediate eyes only.
00:23:49.280 And we ended up getting a message from a, in a communication from the country of Egypt.
00:24:01.640 It was a message going from Cairo, their capital city,
00:24:09.380 out to some other section.
00:24:12.680 I can't even remember where it went.
00:24:14.880 But one of the things in it, it said that they were talking about
00:24:20.100 there was a sad thing, and that Abdul Nasser,
00:24:24.080 Mat. Now, Mat
00:24:27.040 in the Egyptian Arabic
00:24:31.000 means is dead. Abdel Nasser at that time was
00:24:35.040 the president of Egypt. He had been president
00:24:38.860 for about 15 years at that time.
00:24:44.060 And there was some unrest, so knowing
00:24:46.960 that, the implication was
00:24:50.540 that maybe the president of Egypt had been killed.
00:24:55.600 So we sent that on to Washington with the code.
00:25:02.280 And what they do with that code is no matter what time they get it,
00:25:06.080 they pass it immediately to the president.
00:25:09.780 Well, the time that we got it, as opposed to the time in Washington,
00:25:15.700 it doesn't matter what time we got,
00:25:16.900 the time in Washington when they got it was about 1 a.m. in the morning. So by
00:25:24.820 the time they got it processed and took took it to the president, so they went in
00:25:30.820 and woke up the president at about 2 30 a.m. in the morning so that he could
00:25:36.720 handle this situation in case it was a real assassination of the president of
00:25:43.480 Egypt and so there he was awake middle of the night and one thing you have to
00:25:51.880 remember is Abdul is a name in especially in Egypt that's about as
00:25:58.720 common as John in the United States and Nasser is almost as common as Smith so
00:26:06.100 there were probably a lot of Abdul Nasser's right but it did
00:26:13.300 come from a source that we felt could be real it was a high level like it was if
00:26:20.980 they wouldn't be just sending that message on that code in that in that way
00:26:24.700 if it was just some random person who had died right yeah okay so there we are
00:26:29.560 we have the president up they dealt with it found out that Abdul Masir was
00:26:33.740 actually still alive the president of Egypt and it went on and about four
00:26:41.200 months later we got another message and it was a highly critical level message
00:26:49.640 and it said the same thing basically so we sent it on and they woke up the
00:26:59.720 president probably about 3 o'clock in the morning the president being Richard
00:27:04.540 Nixon so you don't have to feel too bad about the president being woken up in
00:27:07.420 the middle of the night. He had it coming. It's fine. You don't have to feel bad about it. So we sent that on and it turned out to be false as well. About a month later we got a message from the National Security Agency with a something from the White House saying don't ever use that code again. You were not trusted anymore. It wasn't your fault. You were doing your job. You were passing along information that was obviously you thought it looked legit.
00:27:37.420 They suspended our ability to use that code to wake up the president.
00:27:44.100 I don't know how long.
00:27:45.280 I was long gone before they ever released that again.
00:27:48.200 I'm guessing Nixon was just not amused at all.
00:27:50.780 Like, after two times, he was like, these guys are idiots.
00:27:53.340 Take that away from them.
00:27:54.300 They don't get the right to wake me up anymore.
00:27:57.000 But it wasn't your fault.
00:27:58.260 It was legit information.
00:28:00.520 It's just that Nixon was a very petty, tiny little man and did not like being awakened.
00:28:05.160 Being awakened at 3 o'clock in the morning.
00:28:07.420 For false information. But I just love that. I love the idea of Nixon just being woken up again.
00:28:13.500 Is it the same thing? Oh my god. Just hating it.
00:28:18.200 So, whether he liked it or not, we sent it.
00:28:20.340 You sent it. Well, it was your job. What if you hadn't sent it and it was really the president?
00:28:26.320 Then we would have all been in trouble.
00:28:28.100 Right? Like, that would have been bad. You had to send that information up the chain of command.
00:28:32.920 That was your job, right?
00:28:34.160 exactly so you uh you know you were you were doing spy stuff right you know
00:28:44.800 most radio intelligence that's what they call it uh our communications intelligent
00:28:54.140 intelligent what they call it is comment and most of it is iffy right I mean you
00:29:03.740 can't really know what and what you have to do what you have to know when you get
00:29:10.760 comment radio intelligence saying a certain thing you have to verify it with
00:29:16.760 what they call comment or human intelligence they go ask somebody in
00:29:21.860 other words. Yeah, go ask somebody for real if it's a real thing, yeah. And
00:29:27.180 obviously the United States had people they could ask in Egypt, or most other
00:29:35.920 countries in fact. Right. So that's how they verified that it was, that the
00:29:43.180 situation, maybe Abdel Nasser was dead, but it wasn't the President Abdel Nasser.
00:29:48.860 It was somebody else. And it might have even been a high-level person. Like you said, it was a common name, so, you know. But, you know, if you heard a message over the radio saying that Richard Nixon is dead, like, okay, that's legit. You're going to have to pass that on to somebody, even if it turns out that the Richard Nixon who's dead is not the President of the United States.
00:30:09.560 That's right.
00:30:10.680 So, yeah, it wasn't your fault.
00:30:12.820 You had to do your job, right?
00:30:14.340 So, but then, so you eventually, I mean, obviously, you eventually got out of the military.
00:30:20.020 You weren't planning on making a career out of it.
00:30:22.060 You just signed up because you kind of had to, or else you wouldn't get any choices on where you went.
00:30:27.500 Which, notably, I just want to go on to a little sidebar here.
00:30:31.040 Notably, there is a reason why there actually was a very small percentage of people who served in
00:30:36.160 Vietnam that are during the Vietnam War that were drafted. Like, everyone will look at those numbers
00:30:41.560 and say, oh, well, the draft wasn't that big a deal. But the fact was, is that many people did
00:30:46.200 what my dad did, which was say, oh, I'm about to get drafted. I'm gonna go sign up because it gives
00:30:51.280 me some more freedom to get assigned to different areas or kind of have some sort of power over how
00:30:58.700 I get, you know, assigned, which was beneficial, right, instead of just being drafted, so.
00:31:04.380 And as long as we weren't in a big war, being in the Navy on a ship was a lot better than being
00:31:09.100 an infantryman in the Army and going out there slogging through the rice fields and being shot
00:31:19.240 at. Right, or, you know, doing war crimes, depending upon which unit you were with, right?
00:31:25.020 But yeah, it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, the numbers of people who actually
00:31:28.580 got drafted, not that high, but that's because, well, if your choice is
00:31:32.420 voluntarily showing up and signing up and getting a better placement, or being
00:31:37.520 drafted and not having any control at all, you might as well just sign up, right?
00:31:41.720 Because they draft you, they put you in the military, in the infantry. Right, so
00:31:46.320 even if you didn't want to do that or you thought, you know, that you could pass
00:31:49.040 some tests like you did that would put you into a better position, because my
00:31:53.240 dad's smart, so, you know, he took some tests and they were like, okay, we don't
00:31:57.300 you as a grunt in the inventory we'll put you somewhere else right yeah in other words they
00:32:02.660 have a military intelligence test and those two words don't really go together very well
00:32:10.100 but apparently sometimes they uh do do pick things so i scored high enough on that test
00:32:16.900 that they said we think you can do something else for us it's better it's just it's a good thing
00:32:20.980 yeah not better for you better for me them well yeah but at the very but it didn't turn out to be
00:32:25.940 better for you in the end gratefully so you know didn't end up being the worst thing you could have
00:32:31.300 been could have been a worse situation certainly yeah and ethiopia wasn't so bad yeah highs were
00:32:38.400 in the 90s lows in 35 about 35 or 40 hardly ever got shot at no hardly ever hardly ever got shot
00:32:46.400 at the elf occasionally but not not on a regular basis some of the elf had some anger at the u.s
00:32:54.000 army and said occasionally there would be shots fired from a distance toward the uh radio listening
00:33:00.880 post that we had which was about 20 miles out of town uh it was 20 miles out of town
00:33:07.920 because it took about 100 acres of land to put all the antennas up yeah because they had
00:33:15.040 about 300 antennas out there listening to both normal radio chatters you'd consider but also
00:33:22.640 So, satellites and other things that were around.
00:33:27.840 Right.
00:33:28.400 I just remember several years ago, this was when I was still an undergrad, I did a research
00:33:33.540 project where I was like, you know, I interviewed you about your time in the military, and then
00:33:39.480 I had to like write up a paper about this.
00:33:41.840 It was for one of my public history classes, I remember.
00:33:44.100 And I did some research on the place where you were stationed, the base you were at there,
00:33:50.560 that listening post.
00:33:51.560 And I will always be cracking up over the New York Times article I found in the New York Times
00:33:56.660 archive where the military was denying that it was a listening post. They're like, no, because it was
00:34:02.920 the student Eritrean student front or whatever who was protesting the American presence there
00:34:09.500 in Ethiopia and was saying that this was a spy. This was a spy base. You guys were spying on
00:34:16.340 things. And the American military is like, no, we're not. And I'm like, they totally were. That
00:34:20.720 was exactly what they were doing. They were spying, but of course they were going to deny it. That's
00:34:23.800 what they do. But it's just the funniest. It's like a, just a, an article that ages so poorly
00:34:29.120 because I'm like, yeah, they were definitely spying no matter what the military was saying.
00:34:33.120 Yeah. Well, and, and as an after note on that, uh, the province of Eritrea did finally get its
00:34:39.780 independence from Ethiopia, uh, in the late seventies. Yeah, they did get it. So good for them.
00:34:45.740 So, Ethiopia kept a little section down at the southern end of the province of Eritrea, which was about 10 or 20 miles wide, but it gave them a port on the Red Sea.
00:35:00.960 They really wanted that access.
00:35:02.360 They really wanted that port.
00:35:03.780 I mean, better to not be landlocked, I guess.
00:35:05.760 That makes sense.
00:35:06.640 So, then you, I know you got out a little bit early than you were earlier than you were supposed to.
00:35:12.320 You told me that once.
00:35:13.420 but you got you know you got to come home after that which is great yeah the yeah well and at the
00:35:20.580 end of my my end of tour of service was one date but at that point the Vietnam action was starting
00:35:31.980 to wind down and they started to let everyone else everyone out that they could so they let me out
00:35:38.000 two weeks early, which makes it hard for me to think of Friday the 13th as a bad day because
00:35:45.180 that was the day I got out of the military. So that's a good luck day for you. The number 13,
00:35:50.860 much like with Taylor Swift, is your lucky number. Yeah, it should have been Friday the 27th if they
00:35:55.820 let me out two weeks early. Nice, yeah. So you came back to the States, back to Arkansas, right?
00:36:05.200 Was that where you went immediately after getting back, or did you...
00:36:07.960 I went right, came right back to Fort Smith, Arkansas,
00:36:11.700 the city which some people call Hell on the Border.
00:36:14.860 I mean, that's a reasonable name for it.
00:36:18.120 Yes, but that was called that because it was the border town between Arkansas
00:36:25.520 and what was then in the 1880s and 1890s and early 1900s Indian Territory.
00:36:34.300 and if you know any history about the judge isaac c parker the hanging judge was the
00:36:42.220 judge of the federal court in fort smith at that time and had these marshals who went into indian
00:36:49.100 territory uh to bring back criminals who had committed crimes and then escaped into indian
00:36:56.460 territory uh he's called the hanging judge but you have to understand actually hit the number
00:37:03.500 of people he hanged by percentage was much lower than many other judges he just got a reputation
00:37:11.500 he just got a reputation but he because he had a gallows that he could hang five people at the
00:37:16.620 same time yep and then i did often and when i was in elementary school they took us to visit the
00:37:21.180 hanging judge courthouse and let us take pictures on the gallows which is a really dark thing to
00:37:25.580 let elementary school students do it's just very strange uh but yeah they did that they did that
00:37:30.860 that in elementary school it was weird and I could say truthfully the reason
00:37:35.000 he hangs so few was because many of them who would have been hanged were never
00:37:39.620 brought back alive yeah marshals got a little bit trigger-happy occasionally I
00:37:43.760 mean no they didn't want to they didn't want to go back you know the point is
00:37:49.520 that they were sent out to bring these people back because they already knew
00:37:54.200 they'd committed the crime they'd already been tried in fact and they had
00:37:58.880 escaped, and they were told, bring him back one way or the other. And if the guy
00:38:05.300 shot at them, then they shot at them back. And to be fair, I mean, it's not like
00:38:09.740 Fort Smith was still like that during the 20th century. Probably not,
00:38:14.600 anyway. No. It wasn't quite that crime-ridden by the time you were
00:38:19.000 living there. But yeah, it is a weird period of history, which is
00:38:26.000 immortalized in a lot of movies what is the movie that that's got The Hanging
00:38:30.400 Judge in it oh my gosh they made it remade it a few years ago True Grit
00:38:35.380 True Grit yeah that's the one that's the one that's set with The Hanging Judge
00:38:39.800 that's the one it was made once with John Wayne in it and it was remade later
00:38:44.120 with I cannot remember we went to see it in theaters I think when it came out but
00:38:49.140 I don't remember anything about it it wasn't bad I just don't it wasn't
00:38:54.000 memorable i guess um but yeah from arkansas what the country singer from arkansas i don't know
00:39:02.000 he was in true grid with john wayne okay well there you go i don't think i've seen the original
00:39:07.620 one but yeah arkansas appears occasionally in film very occasionally but the truth is
00:39:13.860 if you look at the original show you'll notice huge mountains in the background
00:39:20.060 You don't have those. When you're traveling from Fort Smith into Oklahoma, there are no huge mountains in the background. It's all plains. So they were filming that probably in California or Colorado.
00:39:33.980 Of course, you know, that's much easier to do it there, right? So you moved home. You went to college, right? Because you decided to, and that's where you met mom. Yes. Right. So you met mom there.
00:39:46.680 and she stalked you.
00:39:49.320 We already talked about that
00:39:50.140 in the last episode.
00:39:51.360 The episode with my mom.
00:39:52.600 You can go back and watch that.
00:39:53.520 We told the whole story there.
00:39:56.680 I met my wife, Karen,
00:39:59.840 and we started...
00:40:01.900 Actually, I wouldn't say
00:40:03.940 we started dating.
00:40:04.860 We had one date.
00:40:07.420 I came home.
00:40:08.720 I brought her home
00:40:09.680 and her father
00:40:15.340 now you have to understand that i had been out of the military for over a year and i had not had a
00:40:23.720 haircut in that time i'll try to i'll try to insert a picture of their wedding or something
00:40:28.280 in this video so you can understand what he looked like at the at this time yeah nor had i shaved
00:40:33.020 in all that time so i had a long beard and i had a long hair down to my shoulders about
00:40:40.520 and her father was a well very conservative guy he didn't like hippies
00:40:48.680 and he immediately assumed I was one I won't deny that I looked like one I'm
00:40:54.740 not so sure I acted like one but you had a little bit of that vibe going on in
00:40:59.960 your way you dressed right and so I brought her home and he came out to the
00:41:07.580 car before she went in, got her out, and then told me in no uncertain terms with
00:41:17.480 a gun in his hand. A shotgun? Yeah, that I was not to see her again. Not having any
00:41:25.220 damn hippies dating his daughter. No, no. Okay, I was reasonable about that,
00:41:32.760 especially considering that he had a gun. You don't want that, yeah. So I left and I don't know
00:41:40.920 how much you heard from the previous one, but... Didn't mom run away from home? Yes.
00:41:50.400 Yeah. I left home. I've been given a photo so that you can see here.
00:41:57.900 this is this is my dad so you can see his long long hair and you know what I
00:42:03.480 don't know what what grandpa was getting getting around to being mad about my mom
00:42:06.660 looks like a hippie too so but yeah but anyway so after that we continued dating
00:42:14.820 and got married later a lot of people gave us they said our marriage would
00:42:22.260 lasted about six months. We've outlasted that by 50 times more. Yeah, I know, but I mean, he's
00:42:33.100 underselling, right? He's underselling this because how long after
00:42:38.060 your first date did you propose? About three months. And how long after that
00:42:45.100 proposal did you get married? About a month. Yeah, so there was a reason why
00:42:49.980 People were like, I don't know if this is going to last.
00:42:51.780 This was a pretty fast, like, this moved pretty quickly.
00:42:53.980 They've been friends for a while, but, like, it moved pretty quickly.
00:42:57.680 To be fair, yeah.
00:42:58.920 It did.
00:42:59.600 The first date was probably late April, early May.
00:43:04.820 The proposal was in early July.
00:43:11.360 The marriage was in August.
00:43:13.120 You're coming up on that.
00:43:13.900 You're coming up on that anniversary pretty soon.
00:43:16.960 Yeah, the next anniversary.
00:43:17.780 so yeah we managed to last yeah he managed to last it's a kind of rarity in many cases these
00:43:25.820 days really so yeah i got i'm privileged i'm not the child of divorce it's nice but yeah so yeah
00:43:33.160 um so we went to college we'll skip through all that that was nothing too interesting it's not
00:43:40.040 nothing too interesting and uh and then i when i graduated i got a job uh working offshore
00:43:54.120 not offshore as in me offshore banking but offshore as in the oil field oil business yeah
00:44:00.280 i was on a drilling rig
00:44:02.360 in fact it was the second one I was on was was a ship called the Glomar Explorer and there's
00:44:14.600 a history behind that ship too it was actually built for global marine by the CIA cool it was
00:44:25.360 built for them because they wanted that ship the central portion that they used
00:44:32.920 for the drill platform when I was there was actually used for a long arm I'm not
00:44:40.360 sure exactly what it looked like but they they sent something down because
00:44:44.740 they had evidence that a Russian or Soviet submarine was under a few
00:44:53.300 thousand feet of water out in the Pacific and they wanted to bring that
00:45:01.060 submarine up and investigate it because and they they they finally did manage to
00:45:08.180 get it up in in two pieces but and they managed to get all the Soviet Navy
00:45:15.200 people up they brought the from my information of course they weren't
00:45:22.460 telling me anything but for my information they took it to San Diego
00:45:26.220 which is the main place in on the West Coast and they took that the the the
00:45:35.180 Soviets obviously were very irritated and angry and they said they wanted
00:45:40.220 their sub back and they said they said yeah we're sending your men back right
00:45:44.840 now and then they did they put them all in caskets and and sent them back to the
00:45:49.760 Soviet Union immediately the ship they kept for a year I mean you got to do
00:45:54.560 some investigation you gotta do something they did send the ship back
00:45:58.280 but it was in several thousand pieces but that's not a lot more because they
00:46:03.680 had taken it completely apart to examine every little piece and no so they would
00:46:09.860 know exactly how everything was built on those subs right yeah they had to take
00:46:15.200 that opportunity right I mean if your subs gonna sink right there in the
00:46:19.880 right near in American waters we're gonna take an advantage of it right well
00:46:23.320 it wasn't actually it was in international waters but yeah where we
00:46:27.140 could get to it it's finders keepers at that point really yeah the Soviets did
00:46:32.060 not know where the sub was they knew they knew us an area that their best
00:46:39.080 guess was up an area of about 200 miles wide so benefit bit of it asks to go
00:46:45.140 searching for that right it's a lot easier for the cia to do it than it was for them they went
00:46:49.560 out there and i don't know how they found it but they did and uh so is that when you were on like
00:46:56.180 were you stationed on the ship when that happened or was that okay that was before you were on the
00:46:59.780 show okay that was yeah that was then after they did that they gave the ship to global marine
00:47:07.620 And Bubble Marine built a drilling platform on it in that same hole.
00:47:17.620 And they used it to drill oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico.
00:47:21.860 So you were living down in Louisiana with that.
00:47:24.600 That was, of course, if you watched the episode with my mom,
00:47:27.520 that was when the whole library card incident occurred in Louisiana.
00:47:33.160 But I'm not going to give you more detail on that.
00:47:35.120 Go back and watch that episode.
00:47:37.020 So, yeah, living in Louisiana, working in the oil fields, which is not a terribly safe job.
00:47:41.940 I just remember you telling me stories about a lot of alligators.
00:47:45.820 Oh, yes.
00:47:46.280 After a while, I joined another group, which did, well, sometimes when they put a pipe down in the ocean, or on land even, or in the swamps,
00:48:02.940 they get it down for a ways and it gets stuck either the drill hole caves in or
00:48:11.620 something else happens and they get the pipe stuck and so I went to work for a
00:48:16.740 company that specialized in freeing stuck pipe or as much as possible
00:48:23.280 sometimes they just had to take what they could get and leave the rest and
00:48:30.200 remembering that the drill pipe costs as much as $5,000 per joint.
00:48:37.300 They really want to get that free.
00:48:39.040 They really do, yeah.
00:48:40.440 So you had an interesting job that involved explosives and Louisiana marshes and alligators.
00:48:48.620 Yeah, sometimes we went out one time on a job in the Atapalaya Basin, which is a swamp area that covers about half of southern Louisiana.
00:49:04.300 Right.
00:49:05.700 And we were 20 miles.
00:49:09.060 We stopped on a highway in a place where they had a dock.
00:49:16.440 and we got on a boat
00:49:18.400 with all of our equipment
00:49:20.540 and they took us down to the
00:49:24.180 ship.
00:49:27.380 It was about a 20 mile trip
00:49:29.280 just to get through
00:49:30.300 get there.
00:49:32.060 Yeah.
00:49:32.420 And you'd sit there on the ship
00:49:34.400 where they were drilling
00:49:35.240 and 20 foot alligators would swim by.
00:49:39.460 That's not a fun job.
00:49:40.900 That sounds a little bit of fun to me.
00:49:42.300 But we were too high for them to get up.
00:49:44.120 Fair enough.
00:49:44.780 But still, it's a bit of a terrifying thing.
00:49:48.140 I'm scared of alligators.
00:49:49.480 They are too fast and just terrifying.
00:49:53.620 I don't know.
00:49:53.960 Yeah.
00:49:55.640 Anyway, interesting times, but most people wouldn't find it all that interesting.
00:50:02.240 I think it's interesting.
00:50:03.640 I don't know.
00:50:04.300 I think you guys should find it interesting.
00:50:06.120 It's a cool job.
00:50:06.840 But actually, at one point, I had to, I was, most, I'm not really big, you know, I'm a little less than six feet. And most of the people on these ships, on these drilling rigs, were 6'2", 6'4", they were big guys.
00:50:28.520 After all, they're handling great big 90-pound lengths of pipe, and we got
00:50:39.080 prepared for a job at one point and taped everything up. Now, I was carrying a
00:50:44.720 six-foot rod that hooked onto the bottom of the pipe for it to go down into a
00:50:49.640 section. It actually hooked on on the end of a cable that was going to be
00:50:55.780 sat down in there and it had six or eight six-foot pieces of primer cord
00:51:05.100 attached to it with a with the explosive device hooked on oh that's fun yeah so
00:51:16.300 it's all ready to explode any huge any electrical shock would have detonated it
00:51:22.300 and possibly even dropping it would detonate it not not necessarily likely
00:51:30.940 but so I was carrying this over and I started at the stair and I was you know
00:51:38.140 the stairs are about 20 feet high and I was about five or six feet up it miss a
00:51:43.880 great big Hawking guy came on started down he got down about four steps
00:51:52.260 and he waited for me to back up and i said you see this thing i'm holding
00:51:57.960 he said yeah i said if i back up and fall it's going to blow everything up including you
00:52:05.040 so he's gonna have to back up so he backed up i mean it's a good threat it's a good threat like
00:52:11.740 this is this is not a thing you want to mess with you might mess with me if i was by myself
00:52:16.720 you're not gonna mess with me while i'm holding an explosive it's not it's got the they got the
00:52:20.620 effective basically eight sticks of dynamite on this thing we don't want to do that you need to
00:52:25.440 you need to be the one to back up yes and you know that was the only time you know he just
00:52:31.080 kind of looked at me and backed up we didn't say anything more about it he was a little like okay
00:52:36.300 fine fine his ego was a little messed up but he he's gonna live with that all right so usually
00:52:42.940 with my mom the last thing we kind of wrapped up with was just kind of asking about a few like
00:52:47.720 particular, um, historical events that happened, you know, the major historical events that happened
00:52:53.880 while you were, uh, while during your lifetime. So I'm going to kind of do some of the same ones
00:52:58.380 with you. Um, we start off with the JFK assassination. So how, uh, what, what do you
00:53:03.300 recall about that? Well, it was 1963. I was 15 years old in high school, I believe. And
00:53:15.640 I was sick and home at the time. So, who knows? Maybe I was sick. Maybe I just didn't want
00:53:26.200 to go I think yeah right but I was at home and so I was watching the watching TV and they were
00:53:34.460 showing the parade in in Dallas with the president and his entourage and all the other people
00:53:42.720 and as I was sitting there watching this I'm thinking boy this is boring
00:53:49.780 there was this shot
00:53:52.360 it's not boring anymore
00:53:54.180 and then a couple of more shots
00:53:56.440 and
00:53:57.820 and all these people
00:54:02.540 started yelling they'd shot the president
00:54:04.420 it's weird to have been watching
00:54:06.480 I mean I know a lot of people were watching it on TV
00:54:08.420 but it's just very odd to have been watching
00:54:10.580 it on TV when it happened
00:54:12.000 I don't know
00:54:12.620 so how did
00:54:15.360 if I'd had more stations at that time
00:54:18.340 I probably would have been watching something else.
00:54:20.740 I mean, it wasn't your, you know, you're 15 and you're home from school.
00:54:24.080 You're going to watch cartoons if you can or watch fun stuff if you can.
00:54:27.900 But yeah, so how, what do you recall about like the reaction to that?
00:54:34.280 Like not necessarily the day of, but like in that period of time,
00:54:37.080 like how do people react to it?
00:54:39.140 Everybody was shocked.
00:54:42.400 In fact, they were,
00:54:43.420 they were saddened
00:54:48.460 you know
00:54:49.240 it was
00:54:53.320 in a way
00:54:55.000 was like
00:54:56.300 now I understand
00:55:00.000 I didn't vote for John Kennedy
00:55:01.360 because obviously I couldn't
00:55:03.040 you couldn't have voted for him
00:55:05.000 but
00:55:05.280 everyone thought he was a great president
00:55:09.960 I've learned since then that he wasn't
00:55:12.380 quite as
00:55:13.020 he might have been fine as a president
00:55:15.900 as a person
00:55:16.900 but
00:55:18.800 anyway
00:55:20.840 but he was represented
00:55:22.880 he represented
00:55:24.420 an attitude
00:55:26.300 a kind of
00:55:27.760 hope for the future
00:55:30.240 that things were going to get better
00:55:36.740 and then suddenly
00:55:38.620 we had Lyndon Johnson
00:55:40.620 for president
00:55:41.920 Which is not the same vibe as JFK by any means.
00:55:46.400 No, I mean, he certainly got a lot of things done
00:55:48.480 during his time in office,
00:55:49.560 but he was not the same kind of person JFK was at all.
00:55:54.700 Yeah, in many ways.
00:55:57.280 Yeah.
00:55:57.460 Well, I know when Lyndon Johnson got elected vice president,
00:56:02.560 he owned two or three TV stations
00:56:08.940 and several radio stations in Texas
00:56:12.660 and had a big corporation worth a lot of money.
00:56:15.500 I'm not sure how much.
00:56:18.220 Sounds like he was a hard worker, right?
00:56:20.740 I'm not sure if that was it or not
00:56:22.200 because I know that when he got elected to president,
00:56:24.920 to Congress after World War II,
00:56:31.440 and I'm not sure whether it was in 46 or 48
00:56:34.140 that he got elected and went in there in 47 or 49,
00:56:38.940 and he was still serving in the House, a job where they were paid about $40,000 a
00:56:46.020 year. When he got elected and he had to go to Washington to be sworn in, he had
00:56:53.160 to ride a bus and he had to borrow the money for the bus ticket. Twelve years
00:56:58.140 later, when he was elected vice president, he was a multimillionaire. It's
00:57:03.620 questionable, right? I don't know. Politicians are getting real wealthy
00:57:07.280 sometimes you know forty thousand dollars a year times 12 years doesn't
00:57:13.580 amount to multi-million dollars right but anyway but speaking speaking of JFK
00:57:20.280 kind of a side relation to this the moon landing so how I know you said you were
00:57:26.300 in the military when the moon landing I was in Ethiopia when when the moon
00:57:30.000 landing occurred when uh uh neil armstrong and grissom i can't remember the names honestly
00:57:37.600 no i'm sure he's the only one i ever remember i feel bad for the other guys but i always know
00:57:41.320 neil armstrong right of course he's the one everyone remembers and so we were allowed to
00:57:46.200 see it on tv you know even though we were there and uh actually i may not even you know we worked
00:57:54.900 schedules then, so who knows if I was supposed to be at work or not, but so we
00:58:00.900 did did watch it, you know, the classic line, that's one step for a man. One giant
00:58:07.320 leap for mankind, right, yeah. I've always liked, I mean, it's not really
00:58:12.400 completely related to it, but I've always liked the JFK speech about going to the
00:58:15.800 moon, the moonshot speech, it's one of my favorite, for all, for any flaws he might
00:58:19.980 have had, JFK could deliver a speech, that man could deliver a speech, this
00:58:23.680 moonshot speed speech is amazing yeah because he said we don't go because we have to we do the
00:58:29.600 things because they're hard we do it because you know it's a good speech um i usually try to put
00:58:34.980 that into my my lectures when i'm teaching that period of time because it's a it's a good one to
00:58:38.960 listen to but thank you for tuning in for this special father's day edition of bitchy history
00:58:43.880 once again we ran out of recording space i really need a new iphone with more storage
00:58:48.540 or i need to delete some taylor swift albums off my phone i've had so much fun making these
00:58:53.180 episodes with my parents and if you have questions for either of them please let me know thank you
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