Unknown America Scripts

Episode 1: Toledo, IA

Hello, my name is Hali Palombo, and this is Unknown America on WGXC ACRA 90.7 FM. Unknown America is a weekly radio show that casts a light on the lesser known people, places, events and otherwise overlooked aspects of the United States of America - be they mysterious, dark, comical, strange or otherwise valuable.

This episode chronicles a visit to the lesser-known Toledo - Toledo, Iowa, a beacon of perfect American liminal space.

I used to work a nice corporate job at a desk. When you worked there a certain amount of time, they would give you a solid month off to do with whatever you liked. I chose to take my month shortly after my mother's passing. My initial plan for this time was to grieve in an extended manner, and to take a long trip through what I had been jokingly referring to to my coworkers as the "bargain-bin states" - Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming.

This was a joke, of course. In reality, I didn't find these states to be that way at all - in fact, to me, they had the capacity to be the most interesting simply because they were the least known. Same as the deep sea, who knows what one could stumble upon in the dead center of Nebraska? Who's to say the conversation one would have with the teller at a bank in Cody, Wyoming would be any more or less interesting than one with an artist in New York City? The teller may have had more opportunity to meander through the gardens of their own thoughts and to turn small daily occurrences over in their minds, drawing brand new conclusions that do not stem from the opinions and reflections of their peers, but rather a series of gentle, personal connections made over the course of a long lifetime in a quiet place. There is value in both a small town mind and a big city mind, and it's unfortunate that sometimes people do not see that.

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It is very late at night and I am headed towards Monowi, Nebraska. I am getting a late start because one hour at the World's Largest Truck Stop in Iowa turned into four hours. If you ever make it out there, you'll see why. There's a barber, a laundromat, a movie theatre, restaurants, a tremendous CB and trucker supply store, and a gift shop with every absurd trinket you can think of. If you stopped there with an hour budgeted, you would exceed your hour too.

You see, Monowi held my interest because it has one resident. During the 2000 census, the village's population stood at a mere two individuals: Rudy and Elsie Eiler, who were married. Rudy passed away in 2004, leaving Elsie as the sole resident. In her new role as mayor, she granted herself a liquor license, and is tasked with annually submitting a municipal road plan to secure state funding for the village's four street lights. It's also home to the Monowi Tavern, a bar managed by Elsie catering to passing travelers and tourists. Additionally, she oversees Rudy's Library, a collection of five thousand volumes established in memory of her late husband.

Monowi was as close to an end goal as I had on this trip, although deep down I got the sense that it would be more dictated by the long, thin fingers of grief. Grief is exhausting. Plan as thoroughly as you like, but grief tends to tell you where to go and what to do at the end of the day. I was simply too tired to continue and had to find somewhere to sleep. Maybe I would continue to Monowi in the morning.

When I am entering a place that I have never seen or heard of before from the off-ramp of a highway, even if the place itself is painted with the general color palate of its surrounding state or county, I get this thrill. A feeling of potential - that anything could happen, anybody could be encountered. Anything could be around the corner. Just a general excitement about learning of a brand new place. I am addicted to this feeling. I spent so much time driving as a teenager. I drove to rest stops alone. I drove from Naperville where I grew up, a very nice town in Illinois, to Indiana, just to enjoy the vague differences. I was, and am, crazy about trying new roadside diners, even if the diner is just a part of a chain of the same diner, like Iron Skillet or Perkin's. It brings about in me a feeling like I am an observer - watching truckers whose names I will never know eat their meals and get back on the road.

My trip to Toledo, Iowa is not something I had planned for even a moment, nor was it a place that I had heard of until I saw it on a road sign. It could have been absolutely anything. Despite being quite tired, I was thrilled. But as that feeling subsided, it was replaced with something stranger. When I pulled off the dark freeway into Toledo, I wasn't nervous and I didn't feel unsettled as sometimes I feel that late at night driving. In fact, as I drove a few minutes down the main thoroughfare, I knew that I had accidentally discovered the most in-between place I had ever been in my life. A perfect liminal space. Perhaps you're familiar with the term. It's a location of transition established for a person to travel through to get where they are going next. It holds more meaning as a whole, as an idea or concept, than a standard space where you travel to and stay intentionally.

I'll draw you a map of Toledo, a place with a population just under 3,000, but you have to close your eyes to see it. You get off the highway on the right side (I can't recall the exit). You're immediately greeted with a Motel 6 on your right, a small industrial type facility a half a mile up the green grass on the right side of the same road, and a large multi-block shopping plaza that took up a good portion of the town. The shopping plaza area, according to a notebook I am looking at while I write this, contained the following businesses: State Bank of Toledo, Medicap Pharmacy, Murph's Creamery and Grill, Kwik Star, and Dollar Fresh Market. It is rural but not too rural, and as flat as one would expect.

The streetlights are few and far between and they cast the world in a quiet yellow light. The silence is astounding - quieter than any place I have ever been. The only things that I can hear are the exceedingly rare cars driving past on the freeway and the warm hum of electrical boxes. It feels simultaneously pulled from a dream but also like it has no memory, the spawn point of all warm life, that which upon birth pauses for a beat, then shuffles out towards more opportune terrestrial living, towards the ocean, or far Canada, or even just Iowa City. Here for a moment, not meant to stay.

The largest commercially-owned business in Toledo was a grocery store, Fareway Meat and Grocery, perhaps a chain in Iowa but nowhere else. The awning was red and yellow, and the words on the awning had somewhat of a carnival look to them - jaunty. The light that emitted from it was butter yellow, bright as if the place was open. Why do stores keep their lights on all night? I pulled my car up to it and got out and looked in a window. And, exactly as one may assume, no one was inside, but the shelves inside held boxes of an even mix of foods I'd grown up eating, and foods I'd never heard of or seen. A particularly memorable item was a tall cylinder, red, that simply said "IOWA'S BEST BISCUIT". Biscuit mix is what I figured, but what made a biscuit mix a uniquely Iowan biscuit mix I was unsure about.

Down the road a bit from the grocery store was a laundromat (where I'd do my laundry the next day) a stone's throw from a trailer park and a hair salon. Across the road was an additional small industrial processing facility of some sort, and in sight was the Motel 6 I'd chosen to stay at. I drove to it, the only business that was in my lexicon of recognizable locations in this town other than a Casey's gas station, and parked. Outside I was met with more dead silence. There were two things of note nearby - a small fenced-in de-facto "dog park" that it looked like somebody built with chicken wire for their two highly obedient dogs which happened to be sitting inside of it, and a Chinese restaurant called A9 Chinese Restaurant. Small, with a red awning. I wondered if it could possibly be the best Chinese food I had ever had and decided to give it a try tomorrow if I felt up to it. More likely than that it would be just OK, which would be fine too. I swung my camouflage bag and suitcase over my shoulder and locked up my car and approached the Motel 6.

I opened the door and looked around. The lobby of the motel was normal, but also had that way about it when a franchise owner tries to put a spin on things, a couple of odd decorative choices here and there. There was a large rug on the ground covered in a tropical fish print that an exceedingly normal couch sat on top of. A poster sunbleached nearly beyond recognition behind the desk said "SEPTEMBER 11TH, 2001: WE WILL NEVER FORGET" with an eagle flying past a flag. The eagle looked mad. A sign next to the check-in desk stated "FREE BREAKFAST" in a Times New Roman font but bore no other information at all. The light was fluorescent and gave the scene an alien glow.

The clerk was friendly and functioned like one with no internal clock - not a hint of exhaustion on her face, given the time of day. I was worried that my last-minute check-in request would annoy her.

"Hi, I'd like a room?" I said.

"Of course! Not a problem... anybody with you? Did you want one bed? Two?"

"Oh, it's just me. Any room configuration works fine for me, whatever you like."

"Great." She punches some things into the computer. I always wonder what it is exactly is being done on those computers. It's probably pretty standard stuff, but the fact that I never get to see the screen while they're doing it drives me nuts. It could be anything!

"So what brings you through town? You don't look like the sort we get around, 'specially this late. Usually mostly workers on the road."

I pause for a moment. Typically, I would say something generic but I felt driven to engage.

"Well, I got a bunch of time off of work so I planned a long road trip."

She laughed. "Why out here for a road trip?"

"Well, I wanted to go to this town that is up in Nebraska. It only has one person living in it. I wanted to meet her and maybe interview her or just have a drink with her."

She stopped typing and thoughtfully looked into space. "Why's only one lady living there? Did she have a husband that died?"

"Yes, that is precisely what happened. She had her husband living with her but he ended up passing away. She started a memorial library in his name. The town is called Monowi."

"If my husband died, I don't think I would want to live all by myself. I wonder why she chooses to live that way."

I suddenly think of my family. After my mom died, we didn't communicate very well. We still don't. I have hope that things will rebuild themselves, and I know I have not been putting in enough effort on my end. I have just had a lot on my mind. A person being there and then being gone is a lot to comprehend. The laughter, the resentment, her baking, her unusual way she loved. It's strange for a person that dynamic and strange and frustrating to not be in the world anymore.

"I wouldn't want to live all by myself, either," I say.

"Well, that'll be $56.00. You're in room 423. Here's your key and let me know if you need anything. Breakfast is 6 to 8." Young, she had a smile with one front-bottom-left tooth missing a little bit of it, blonde hair in a ponytail, an angular face, and she either smelled like a warm blueberry candle or there was one nearby. I noticed she had a cigarette behind each ear, held like a pencil. I assumed that she put one behind her ear, forgot about it and then put the other behind her other ear. She noticed me staring at them.

She laughed. "One is for my husband. In high school every other day one of us would bring the other a cigarette and we would smoke them together in the parking lot. He drives a truck so he's on the road all the time and I haven't seen him for two weeks. I wanted to make him laugh before we have dinner and he gets back on the road again. He's David."

Before I can say anything she says "I like it here because it's quiet. I don't mind David being gone too much."

There's a brief moment of quiet. "Well, thanks. Have a good morning or night," I say. "Whatever time it is."

"I will! Sleep well. Remember there's breakfast."

"I'll remember."

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My room is on the first floor and when I open the curtains I can see my car and the little dog area that I described before. It's about 2:30 AM. I disrobe, turn all the lights off and turn the television on to the Weather Channel, as is tradition when I am in a motel in a strange and new place and am attempting to sleep. I remember it's something my mother and I had in common that we did not learn about until later in life. I imagined her in a motel room in another dimension with her head on her pillow, listening to the weather report for the astral plane. It made sense in Toledo to think of our heads on the opposite sides of the same pillow, mine on top and hers on bottom, like we're so close to phasing through dimensions and getting to see each other again. Like she's mere inches away. What does her motel room look like? Why is she there? Is she by herself or is she with Steve? I get the feeling she's by herself. Is it day or night wherever she is? Is she just waking up or lying down to sleep? I hope wherever she is, even if it's nowhere, that she's comfortable and that a little television is playing her The Weather Channel.

I looked out the window at the parking lot and think of all the times I have stayed in motel rooms. I have never had a motel stay that felt quite like this one. I was there for almost no reason. I was alone. I was somewhere I had not only never been before, but had never heard of before, and knew I would likely never return to. I still wasn't sure what day it was. I stared up at the ceiling. I couldn't sleep. I slipped my shoes on and walked down one of the long hallways that led to the lobby.

The clerk was there. "Everything OK?" She sounded genuinely concerned. It was nice.

"Yeah, just can't sleep. Going out to my car for a few minutes."

I opened the door and went outside. It was just as dark and quiet as it had been an hour or so ago, save for the Chinese restaurant's "Open" sign being on, for some mysterious reason. The two dogs were still sitting in their makeshift pen. I went over by my car and got inside and drove absentmindedly back over to the parking lot in front of the grocery store and let my car idle and got out of it.

I tried to place how I was feeling. I realized it was something new. It's beautiful to unlock a new feeling. I felt a shatterproof equanimity that no scientist anywhere could explain - the mind-eviscerating scramble of how it feels when God takes someone you love away felt a sudden, swift and unanimous resolution. For just a moment, complicated and dark thoughts about mortality fell away and it was just me, my uncombed hair, the car stereo tuned to barely audible AM, my mind clear like a glass of cold water. I felt born again and ready to start over, like I had discovered some divine origin point. I saw nobody driving, nobody on foot, and only a small handful of lights on in the trailers and homes. Saturated in the dim butter-yellow light of the grocery store, I held nothing in my hands and stood very still in a little world of multipurpose facilities the purposes of which I could not know, patchy green and brown grass, a place where which to get a hamburger and medicine and above me, a vast network of stars, untainted by the collective blinding lights of a big city that demands your participation, screams at you that it needs you. Toledo didn't seem to need much of anything from me. It didn't seem to need much of anything at all, and felt like it would be there until the end of time.

I stood there a couple more minutes, went back to the motel and fell asleep.

I woke up around 6 AM, just in time for breakfast, which was a waffle iron, a bowl of batter, a few tall tupperware containers of cereal and milk, and a couple of other things. I ate in their small dining room alone, handed the new clerk my key and left. When packing up, I realized that I had to do laundry, as I had been on the road for a few days. I remembered the laundromat near the trailer park and decided to head over.

Toledo during the early morning is what one would think it would be in a town of 3,000. Cars, but not enough to call what was happening proper traffic, and a few people here and there. I drove about two minutes to the laundromat and got out of the car with my suitcase.

Inside the laundromat was me and one other woman at the very far end. We didn't interact in any way - she may not have noticed that I was there. The motif was flowers, a garden theme. White painted fences separated the washing machines, and a sun was painted on the wall. There was a community bulletin board hanging on the wall advertising dance lessons, lawn mowing, and some other household services. I put .75 cents into a box on the wall in exchange for a little box of detergent and got started doing my small pile of laundry.

Something I liked about the laundromat was there was no music playing. That way, I could just take in the ambient sound. I liked hearing the clothes go round and round and the woman shuffling around at the other end of the store. While things were drying, I fiddled around with my Video8 camera, and took some shots of the walls, laundry machines, and, for some reason, myself in the bathroom mirror. Eventually, the other woman left and I folded up my laundry and left as well.

At that point, I leaned against my car outside and wondered what to do next. I decided to pick a direction and drive. I had three weeks to kill, after all. I ended up in a small town in Iowa where I came across the American Gothic house purely on accident, which is a story for another time.

Sometimes when I come across a small town I like, I will visit it repeatedly to go to a diner of interest or a spot I enjoy. But I knew I would likely never see Toledo again. I think it played its role in my life just as it was meant to, and visiting again would undo a part of a story that was already written, mess with the fabric of reality. So I decided to leave it be.

There was one last thing I wanted to do, though. I pulled into the parking lot of the red and yellow grocery store with a five dollar bill in my hand and bought a container of the "IOWA'S BEST BISCUIT" mix. It was a plain red cylindrical tube with bold white writing and a modest ingredient list. The packaging was so basic that it sort of seemed like it came from a company that distributes food to prisons and schools. I would make the biscuits a few weeks later. They were OK.

I walked back to my car and got inside, headed towards the freeway, leaving quiet Toledo behind. I drove past the motel, past the makeshift dog enclosure and past the Chinese restaurant. I thought of my mother briefly for reasons unknown. I wondered if there were any other places like Toledo. If there were, I decided definitively that I would only ever find them on accident.

This has been Unknown America. Thank you for listening. ]this is Unknown America on WGXC ACRA 90.7 FM. hali palombo, signing off.

Episode 2: The House on the Rock

This episode is about the Midwestern tourist attraction The House on the Rock - an utterly mind-boggling testament to one reclusive Wisconsinite's disposable wealth, and perhaps lunacy.

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Somewhere in between Dodgeville and Spring Green Wisconsin - there is what some would refer to as a tourist attraction called The House on the Rock. The House on the Rock defies all description and rational explanation. Even Wikipedia doesn't really know what to call it other than a "tourist attraction", and a bit more descriptively, "a complex of unconventional interests", which I find to be a bit more faithful a statement to the source material.

*** Maybe you would refer to it as a museum. I don't know what else to call it, at least if I were trying to list it in a directory or phone book. It's not a real house. Nobody lives there, not that I know of... it's not a store, because you cannot buy anything. It's more of a showcase of endless impulse purchases, hoarding and fabrications, a maze of stuff.

None of that is hyperbole or exaggeration in the slightest. I suppose if a random person were to ask me what The House on the Rock in Spring Green, Wisconsin is in as few words as possible, I would tell them it is a gigantic building filled with a rich dead architect's collection of... well, everything. Guns, suits of armor, taxidermied animals, dollhouses... and that it has a giant carousel inside of it. And automatic orchestras, not just one, but a whole bunch. And some of it was created from trash the architect found and passed off as real. And all of it, maybe, probably, was constructed for the sole purpose of making this rich dead architect money so he could build more buildings.

The House on the Rock is spitefully maximalist and organized in a way that only the creator could truly explain. Its contents range from highly valuable to totally valueless, with a bulk of the items resting somewhere in the middle and veering towards the latter, even to the point of being likely recreations of the real thing constructed from garbage. And no matter how much you relay its contents or your experience there to friends, you will never tell them the full story, just because there is so much there and everywhere you turn, you see something you hadn't seen last time you went. It is a sensory hurricane, a flea market kaleidoscope. Everywhere you look there is more and more and more, unfurling like a rug before you, frying your senses, leaving you overstimulated, incredulous, baffled, gasping with awe and, at least in my experience, hungry for sleep. It is one of many, many things a man can do with several millions of dollars. This man's name was Alex Jordan Jr., Wisconsin's very own Howard Hughes of roadside entertainment.

A story told by Madison native, industrial photographer, outsider artist and graphic designer Sid Boyum

places the inspiration for the house in a meeting between Alex Jordan Jr. and Frank Lloyd Wright. Jordan supposedly drove with Sid Boyum to show Wright the plans for a building, the Villa (Viyya?) Maria in Madison. Jordan idolized the famous architect and hoped for his approval. Wright looked at the plans and told Jordan: "I wouldn't hire you to design a cheese crate or a chicken coop. You're not capable."

On the drive home Jordan angrily pointed to a spire of rock and told Boyum: "I'm going to put up a Japanese house on one of those pinnacle rocks and advertise it." According to one of Jordan Jr.'s biographers, Wright apparently didn't forget the incident and complained publicly to County officials about the house the Jordans were building, and bought a nearby piece of property to get back at Jordan.

Not only is this interaction out of character, it's also disproven by fact. Observe: Frank Lloyd Wright was in Japan working on the Imperial Hotel when this interaction allegedly took place. Also, when this would have occurred, the artist that Jordan allegedly expressed his intentions for the spire of rock to would have been 9 years old. The legitimacy of this account is called into question frequently. Allegedly, Sid, a literal "World Champion Liar" at Burlington, Wisconsin's Burlington Liars' Club - an Unknown America episode in and of itself - for one reason or another, wanted to paint Alex Jordan Jr. out to be somewhat of a P.T. Barnum character, a man who didn't mind stretching the truth to make a few extra bucks. He didn't really need to fabricate a story, though, because as it turns out, the truth wasn't all that far off.

Alex Jordan Jr. was by all accounts, reclusive. There is not a ton of public information about him, which adds to the mystique. Accounts from his employees, friends and relatives - some scorned, so take this with a grain of salt - describe a complicated man who either loved people deeply or despised them. He, according to one biographer, "did not enjoy or seek personal publicity", and only really continued to develop the House to finance his elaborate electronic and architectural projects, yet he created a place so strange and memorable that he is an utterly impossible figure to ignore when discussing his work. He had seemingly no problem at all recreating antiques and valuables with things he found around, or encouraging others to do it for him. Whether this was mostly to entertain people, entertain himself or to make money, it is not known with certainty, but it's likely that it's some combination of the three.

The House on the Rock was built on top of Deer Shelter Rock, a tall column of rock in Iowa County, Wisconsin. The architecture of the House itself was heavily inspired by one of Alex Jordan Jr.'s former hero turned imaginary enemy, Frank Lloyd Wright. Alex didn't get the style quite right, though - how could he?While the visual elements of a Frank Lloyd Wright work are decidedly there, they are frankensteined together in a somewhat alarming fashion, seemingly following the contours of the rock upon which they were built rather than any precise vision that the architect had when he sat down to plan, more like a sculptor than an architect. This is compounded by the fact that every passing decade of Jordan Jr.'s lifetime, a massive new wing was built that contained a new "exhibit", and these wings often did not obey the architectural style of the original building, making for a truly bizarre looking structure, an architectural chimera of sorts, melting into the spire of rocks underneath it. It's a strange thing to see.

Funnily enough, the House is in the same town as Frank Lloyd Wright's Tallesin (tolly-ess-in) studio and home. This was likely far from being a coincidence. Tallesin is beautiful, even in its third incarnation (the first two had burned down, one on behalf of a disgruntled employee, and another due to faulty electricity). When viewed as a duo, it's easy to see the wild and severe contrasts between the two, yet they share a lot of architectural similarities. The House on the Rock is Tallesin's cartoon inverse, sort of like looking at it in a funhouse mirror. Tallesin is sparse, with ample natural light, wide open space and a simple and understated exterior, but it shares an undeniable silhouette with its counterpart. They're so different that they shouldn't exist on the same planet, but it's easy to see where inspiration was likely drawn by Jordan Jr. when designing his work. Both men are, as writer Jane Smiley put it, "eccentric and single-minded", but one charging full-speed-ahead towards lunacy, and the other taking a more subdued approach to his method of creation.

According to The House on the Rock's website, there is a different story, which follows.

Alex Jordan Jr. was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1914, where he lived his entire life. After graduating high school, he attended the University of Wisconsin, where he had wanted to major in pre-med. After some time there, he found himself growing quite restless with college. It limited him and his increasingly more ambitious ideas. After dropping out of college, he worked for Rayovac and helped his father maintain an apartment building owned by his father. This is where he gained knowledge of construction. During World War II, he worked at an ammunition factory.

In the 1940's, Jordan Jr. discovered Deer Shelter Rock and began having small picnics on top of it. Then, he started bringing his tent and camping there. One night, his tent blew away, and from that day, he decided he wanted to build something more stable, which is how he got the idea for House on the Rock. He built a small studio with a fireplace after renting the rock and a bit of land around it from a farmer, and when his parents saw the work he was doing and heard his ideas, they helped him buy the entire 240 acre property.

Jordan Jr. built the House initially not at all for tourists, but mostly for himself. He was so irritated by people ceaselessly trying to get a closer look at his private creation that he began charging a fifty cent admission fee to get people to go away, but it turns out people were more than willing to pay. He continued his work on The House as it started resembling what it looks like today. He never married or had children, just worked at The House on the Rock with who is described as his "companion and love of his life", Jennie Olson, who lived in the apartment right next to his.

He was totally devoted to The House on the Rock. It was his only source of income. Every dime he made went back into the care and keeping of the place. He spent the remainder of his healthful life working on it, but in 1964 after smoking four packs of cigarettes a day, drinking, eating whenever he was hungry and sleeping whenever he wanted, he had a serious heart attack that damaged 30% of it. Then, in 1972, he was involved in a nearly fatal car accident in which he broke his neck. This marked the beginning of the end of Alex, as he was in chronic pain.

On December 14th, 1988, Alex realized that he no longer had the physical or mental capacity to own The House on the Rock, and sold it to a business associate, Art Donaldson. A collector and businessman, he shared many interests with Alex. Alex trusted Art to take care of his work, whose family still owns the House on the Rock as a privately held business.

Alex took the title of Artistic Director after the sale. While his body did end up failing him, he remained creatively viable until the end. He was hospitalized on October 11th of 1989 and died roughly one month later. At his request, his ashes were spread over the House on the Rock, which happened in December of 1989.

That is the end of the House's account of the life of Alex Jordan Jr.. Whether or not it is more or less accurate than the other accounts I have read, I could not say. One could argue that since it comes directly from the source, that it is more accurate than any other account. On the other hand, it could be dramatized or exaggerated in some way. This is the pain point I'm encountering in my research about The House. Unlike a whole lot of history, where everyone can generally agree on one story, there are many about Alex Jordan Jr. and his life, and only a slight majority of sources seem to agree. The account of it you are hearing is a somewhat curated look at what most seem generally agree upon, so take all of it with a grain of salt.

What all sources I encountered but Wikipedia do have in common is that they are emotionally biased or written skeptically. Even the most popular biography written about Alex Jordan Jr. is written from the perspective of someone who thinks he is probably a con artist.

Something I saw all sources agree upon is that Alex Jordan Jr. built The House on the Rock mostly for himself, initially, and started charging a fee for admission to get people to leave. Whether or not this ended up being good or bad to him at the end of his life is uncertain, but he did indeed seem to make The House his life's work. If he desired a more reclusive way of living, and could not stand the company of others, he had a funny way of showing it. But who knows? People contain multitudes, and it's obvious that whoever had the mental capacity to create something as bizarre and massive as The House on the Rock is a very complicated person.

Walking into The House on the Rock, everything seems relatively normal. The entrance in no way prepares you for what you are about to see. But after paying admission and entering the foundational aspect of the House on the Rock - the "House" itself, a Frank Lloyd Wright meets 1960s bachelor pad compound complete with dark corners, low ceilings, and Hookah-lounge style furniture - you start to feel something in the pit of your stomach, like things are about to spiral out of control very, very quickly. And there are tells before they do, a random bassinet on a ledge above a doorway for no obvious reason, a stray doll in a corner somewhere. Then before you know it, you are deep within a maze of chaotic clutter from which there is no obvious exit, and it goes on this way for many hours before you are finally able to leave. Surely there were emergency exits... surely... but when I went myself, I had a hard time seeing them.

I am about to relay to you a list of the contents of the House on the Rock, by no means complete. These are just the strangest things that I saw on one of my visits there:

The House on the Rock contains, in part:

- a to-scale recreation of an early 20th century American town, complete with storefronts, cars and streets

- a large collection of automated orchestras and music machines which are partly illusion - some of the instruments play, but the strings and woodwinds in particular do not; their sound is produced by organ pipes, while visitors are fooled by the motion of the instruments

- old circus memorabilia

- a 200 foot statue of a "whale-like creature" and a squid fighting each other

- hundreds of cars, some genuine, most replicas, although in most cases it is not indicated which is which

- the largest indoor carousel in the world, above which hangs 182 chandeliers and many mannequin angels

- a Koi pond with 14 foot waterfalls

- bathrooms decorated with taxidermied animals, mannequins and fake flowers

- "The Infinity Room", a 218 foot structure protruding from House on the Rock that gets narrower and narrower, creating an optical illusion that it goes on forever

- a massive hangar filled with to-scale models of airplanes

- several antique stores' worth of gaudy and dusty antiques

- a strength tester complete with hammer, commonly seen at carnivals and state fairs

- a fully functional tarot card reading automaton

- a collection of spitoons and tobacco

- a collection of old cameras

- a human-sized and seemingly functional music box

- a fully functional model railroad

- dioramas of everything you can think of spread throughout, I lost count of how many

- a collection of fully furnished Victorian dollhouses

- carved ivory, the legitimacy of which should likely be questioned

- an automated band that honks out a truly demented version of Octopuses' Garden by The Beatles which echos long after you witness it

- a vast collection of firearms, antiques included, the legitimacy of which should likely be questioned

- a series of what were claimed by Jordan Jr. to be authentic Tiffany Lamps - later proven to be fakes

- a allegedly "authentic" car from the 1920s that was actually built from motorcycle parts and an old carriage

- seemingly inauthentic suits of armor fabricated by associates of Alex Jordan Jr.

- "crown jewels", the legitimacy of which is yet to be confirmed in a public fashion

This is not even half of the collection. It's probably not even a tenth. There's no such thing as overstatement when describing The House on the Rock. There will always be much, much more to it than whatever you relay to whoever you are talking to, no matter how long you talk. It inspires an immediate sort of amnesia in a person, like your brain is so overloaded by the sheer amount of sensory input it is being fed that it either short-circuits or purposefully leaves things out to free up bandwidth for other things. Some things about the House, I only remembered months later while doing a completely unrelated task. These memories were either ghostly and vague, like navigating a dream or looking at an underdeveloped photo from a pinhole camera, or shocking in their quality and clarity, like I was still there observing it firsthand. There was no middle ground at all. Photographs and video were seemingly allowed, so one could revisit their memories firsthand, but I was far too distracted on both my visit as a child and my visit as an adult to do such a thing. View my list as a fractal that expands the closer you get to it, because it's by no means a solid testament to the real thing.

As I am sure you can surmise after hearing my list, the reclusive Jordan Jr. seemingly had no problem stretching the truth and would frequently fib about the origin of the items being authentic and not created from materials off-site by what he vaguely referred to as "associates". In 1978, a disgruntled employee even reported Alex Jordan Jr. and the House on the Rock for consumer fraud, which resulted in a thorough investigation of the site. As a result of said investigation, the printed brochure was pulled and rewritten, and all of the signs alleging all structures and items were totally and completely real were removed and destroyed. One can assume this was done as discreetly as possible, as to not raise questions. The names of the exhibits were allowed to stay up. This encouraged viewers to come to their own conclusions, whatever they wished them to be, without providing a great amount of detail swaying them in one direction or the other. Jordan Jr. likely hoped that his customers would simply make their own story up in favor of him from the vague handful of ingredients that he supplied them with, and he wouldn't have to lie outright - thus avoiding the long arm of the law and any repercussions that came with it, including receiving a fine or worse yet, being closed down. Additionally, the natural conclusion can be drawn that if one or even a few fake things are among a handful of real things, chances are the fake thing is totally real, and there's no need for suspicion. It's much easier to suspect the legitimacy of a thing when the fake is standing alone, and not lost in a crowd of very similar company. Alex Jordan Jr. likely recognized this and consequentially elected to make his collections a potpurri of Simulacrum, rather than being entirely fake. If these two Model T cars are real, why would the third be built from lawnmowers or parts of a baby carriage? That wouldn't make any sense.

The interesting thing about The House is that this doesn't matter so much. In fact, I would not suspect great outrage if the public, even after paying, were told that many relics they were viewing were not real, but fabricated. When visiting The House on the Rock, you're not viewing it in the way you would a furniture catalogue or a grocery list, systematically itemizing everything you just saw - you're observing it in the way you would have a dream. Who is bent over with a magnifying glass nitpicking or questioning reality in a dream? One generally doesn't leave The House wanting to write a review - they leave trying to figure out if whatever they just saw really happened, which makes it a profound experience.

One of the strangest things on my list is The Infinity Room. It's billed as a top attraction and selling point at the House, with its image plastered on mugs, shot glasses, commemorative coins, and the like. It's a long, narrow structure that extends out over the valley below, jutting violently out of the side of the building. It is constructed almost entirely of glass, a narrow walkway surrounded by windows on all sides. As visitors traverse the walkway, they experience the sensation of being suspended in mid-air, with panoramic views of the surrounding landscape and the feeling of infinite space stretching out before them. It gets narrower and narrower until the footpath vanishes and the structure comes to a pointed end. If I remember correctly, there is a potted plant at the very end of The Infinity Room, but then again, that could be my brain creating an amusing detail where there is not one to add some touchstone to reality to the bizarre sight, a thing that I recognized and was certain of. If anyone listening would like to tell me if The Infinity Room actually has a potted plant at the end of it, email me at hali@halipalombo.com. I would greatly appreciate it.

In short, when viewing The Infinity Room, you get the feeling that Alex Jordan Jr. would have happily defied the laws of physics if he were permitted to do so, but he couldn't, so he built this thing instead.

That's the strangest thing about every part of this place. It seems like Jordan Jr.'s primary goal was to defy any sense of logic and reason. It's like what are referred to as "spite houses" - structures built simply to spite another for existing - but The House on the Rock was conceived of and built in spite of sanity. It's like if your neighbor were to build his house directly in your sunlight mostly just to get your goat, but Alex Jordan Jr. built what he did for the sole purpose of making you lose your mind, laughing the whole time.

My indoor tour ends with the House on the Rock's tremendous indoor carousel, the largest indoor carousel in the country, dizzying in its magnitude. The carousel is blood red and gold and situated in one of the darkest rooms in the House, with 269 animals, 20,000 lights, 183 chandeliers, and dozens of fully sized mannequin angels hanging overhead. There's not a single horse on the carousel itself - however, a wall adjacent to the carousel is hung with many carousel horses, as if the horses on were at one point removed and replaced, a final nod to the air of defiance of logic and convention the place carries throughout. Through the exit is a Japanese-style garden with a large, loud waterfall - aggressive even in its tranquility, more like a waterpark than an oasis. The long walk you take to your car allows you to regain your composure to some degree, but even as I headed back, I felt intoxicated. I couldn't help but ask myself, "is this really happening, or am I just looking at another collection"? "Is this my life, or is it a just thoughts, feelings and memories arranged to look like one?"

To some, going to the House on the Rock could be an unpleasant experience. Anyone with even a faint streak of minimalistic inclination or alternately, any sense of claustrophobia in their blood would likely lose their mind. Everything is exactly as dusty as you would expect - it would take a team of a hundred people to clean the place thoroughly, and I wouldn't be surprised if nobody ever has even attempted. In some areas, the ceilings are low, the rooms are very dark and when too many people are there it is very difficult to move at will. But to a certain kind of person, The House on the Rock is an impressive feat by somebody with few moral qualms about perhaps scamming people who didn't care if they were being scammed or not. My opinion is that it takes all kinds. Personally, I'd shake Alex Jordan Jr's hand and ask him what on earth he was thinking. My guess is he would not have a straight answer.

I will conclude with a quote by a late in life associate of Alex Jordan Jr. that sums him up a bit better than any of my observations here could. When asked about the authenticity of the relics in the House on the Rock, the associate had this to say:

"We were creating entertainment. We were not making a historically accurate representation. There was never any need to worry about historical accuracy. We were creating a fun place. We could fabricate any antiques we wanted to—that was the fun of it. It was just one guy's great big sandbox, where he kept building stuff. I suspect that Jordan would pay more for a good copy than he would for an original, because he could sit in a corner and laugh about the way he fooled everyone."

This has been Unknown America on WGXC ACRA 90.7 FM. Hali Palombo, signing off.

Episode 3: Tornadoes

Hello, my name is Hali Palombo, and this is Unknown America on WGXC ACRA 90.7 FM. Unknown America is a weekly radio show that casts a light on the lesser known people, places, events and otherwise overlooked aspects of American history - be they mysterious, dark, comical, strange or otherwise valuable.

This week's episode is a bit less formal and all about tornados - their first recorded instances in America, their impact on the infrastructure of some parts of the country, tornado induced supernatural beings, a couple of accounts of living through them, and some other fun stuff. Stay tuned.

theme song

There are no instruments that sound exactly like a tornado siren. Some are similar when processed in a certain way, but there isn't anything that comes close to being a totally perfect mimic. You can't play tornado sirens on the radio for very obvious reasons, so I cannot demonstrate one right now, but it's relatively likely that you have heard one at some point over the course of your life. And there is nothing quite like the feeling of dread you get hearing a tornado siren. Even when it's just a test, it's a really frightening experience. Up close, it's ear-splittingly loud - anywhere from 100 - 135 decibels. But somehow it's more frightening to hear the farther away from it you get, as sometimes a shadowy figure off in the distance is. Hearing the lilting and far away tones carried by the breeze through an open window inspires a fear that is hard to describe and not really like anything else I have felt before. It's a strange sense of terror and excitement, because you don't know what exactly is about to happen. Will the tornado just pass through? Will it destroy my house? Will it touch down and then disappear? There is no way to know the exact answer to any of these questions, which is something that is inherently frightening about all extreme weather. You cannot be sure what exactly is going to happen. Anything could change at any moment. You just have to wait and see.

Some of the earliest recorded instances of tornadoes were during the 1800s, when the US Army began studying them extensively. The tornado sirens used today were not utilized - there was no technology that could create something as prolonged and as loud as the civil defense sirens introduced later on - so people had to find different means of alerting their area. Anything that was capable of creating a loud noise was used. People were alerted via instruments - horns and church bells - and sometimes cannons. Some simply ran through the town and yelled. One plan from the 1800s called for telegraph wires that snapped in high wind, triggering the mechanism of a cannon. As one can imagine, these alerts did not create loud enough of a sound to alert every possible casualty as they do now, so there were likely more deaths, although unrecorded. After it was noted that these actions tended to create a great deal of panic - as any good siren should do - the alert sounds in all of their forms were banned outright. When a tornado was coming, it was against the law for you to make any kind of spontaneous public outreach to usher people to safety. In 1886, using the word "tornado" was banned in all weather forecasts by the Army as to not incite panic and potential trampling incidents. While it is good to avoid public trampling and chaos, banning this sort of alert likely cost many lives. The ban remained in place until a staggering 1948. On March 20th, 1948, a massive tornado tore apart over fifty of the Air Force's aircraft, which caused the United States to start thinking more seriously about how exactly to warn the country about potential threat by tornadoes. This is also the day that the ban of the use of the word "tornado" in forecasts fell. I will say that it is unfortunate that it took destruction of United States property to get the country to take such a severe and devastating weather event with so little research done on it seriously, but at least it was finally being studied in a real capacity.

It would be a really long time - 1970 - before civil defense sirens, introduced during wartime, would become used regularly to warn people of tornadoes. The time between 1970 and when tornadoes were recorded was littered with casualties that could have been prevented if a good alert system was in place. While sirens did cause a degree of what the US Army would have referred to as "mass hysteria", but nowhere near to the degree that they had figured, it remains one of the most impactful ways to get a large group of people's attention and warn them that they are in very immediate danger. What sound is more instantly identifiable than a siren is? There are very few that incite those immediate feelings of panic in a person, and that are more widely recognized. As a side note, I spent a few hours listening to various sirens from all over the world. If you're interested in hearing a really scary one, check out New Zealand's, and if you're interested in hearing the exact opposite of New Zealand's, try Japan - quite frankly the least frightening siren I have ever heard.

I'm in the Midwest - Illinois, a very recent member of the group of scientifically recognized states where tornadoes happen most - and most everyone I know has a tornado story or knows somebody who has a tornado story somewhere else in another Midwestern state. I have two. One is vague and sometimes I question it. It is painted in watercolor in my brain, so washed out that I barely know if it's something that happened or something that took place in a dream. My late mother and I are standing on a porch or at a back window. I am in her arms, a baby. I don't know what state we are in other than that it is Midwestern, it must be either Illinois or Minnesota because I was born in one and raised in the other. We are staring out over a field at a tornado. The tornado looms in the dark sky, far away enough to not scare me. Eventually, we head to the basement and wait it out. Whether or not this was a dream, it was certainly memorable enough to remain in my memory for nearly three decades. If my father listens to this episode, can you let me know if this really occurred?

I also have a definite story. I am living in my house in Forest Park, Illinois about four or five years ago. Around 9 PM, a tornado sweeps over a town two miles away from where I am huddled in the basement. It's the town the mall is in. It damages a couple of buildings. Trees fall on cars. I am scared. I'm afraid it is going to hit the house. It's not like my dream or childhood memory, tucked safely away in the arms of a parent. Luckily, everything turns out OK in the end. Around 10 PM, I leave my basement and go upstairs. I look outside, fearfully, and see that the only significant damage in my immediate area is part of a neighbor's tree is lying across the middle of the road. I learn that seven tornados touched down that night, most of them not too far from where I was living.

Tornadoes are nearly otherworldly - emotionless columns stretching down from the Heavens, picking up cars and dumpsters and big chunks of houses and sometimes water and very, very rarely, sometimes snow - and sending it sailing through the air. They pick up people. They picked up a man named Matt Suter, who was carried 1,307 feet, all within the safety of his mobile home. Then he was thrown from the tornado sailed over a barbed wire fence, where he woke up. Nobody has ever travelled as far as Matt did and lived through it and almost certainly emerged a quite different person. Really, everyone emerges from a tornado a bit differently from who they were when they ran down to their basement, regardless of whether or not it destroys anything that belongs to them. Having tangible evidence that you are truly at the mercy of the world around you is something that you never really forget. You could spend your life accruing resources, spend them all on building a home, buying big and small things, and in an instant, have it all taken away, forcing you to start life over from scratch.

In Tornado Alley, a large stretch of land that spans the middle of the country (and as of a day ago, declared to be migrating even further East, absorbing Illinois), this is a known fact among the people that live there. When traveling through it, the old money feeling you get in some places on the far East coast, or the sense of magical ancient permanence of the West coast, a landscape littered with spirit totems in their many forms, neither are present in Tornado Alley. Things seem like they're used to being picked up and thrown around, or like they'll be picked up and thrown around at some point in the near future, disposable, a TV dinner landscape.

Unlike other parts of the country where structures and life itself is a matter of fact and nothing is likely to be destroyed spontaneously, there is a liminal sense and a lack of permanence in the central and Midwestern US that is infused into everyday life. I spent a great deal of my young adulthood driving through tornado alley - there are so many barren cornfields and towns that I would refer to as being "fleeting". They all look the same - big green fields with neutrally colored duplexes, all built within the past few decades or even less. If you navigate to Google Maps and drop the little yellow guy into Caddo, Oklahoma, one of the top ten places in the United States most impacted by tornadoes, you'll see a small and relatively barren town with plain and new looking houses, brand new fences, and wide open fields where something likely stood that is no longer there.

Iowa, part of Tornado Alley, is especially this way as well, I find. The buildings you see there generally do not have a feel about them like they're matter-of-facts of the state. They are not ornate or storied, but obviously constructed within the past fifty years. There are of course many exceptions - beautiful old movie houses, farms... but they were built like they anticipated their possible destruction, incredibly sturdy, like they could withstand most anything. Which they have, and they will until the end.

In some places, tornadoes are so frequent that anything that isn't built in a way that will withstand a tornado will inevitably be wiped out, which has a really big impact on the way things look. Regardless of this, people generally rebuild. You will find many people happily living in these areas, people who have been there for generations and have no intention of moving anytime soon. The cost of living in Tornado Alley is, from what I understand, significantly less than a very large part of the country. Also, when your family has its roots in a place, it's hard to pick up and go, especially in rural communities like you find all over the place in Iowa.

All of this makes me wonder what life is like in a place like Caddo, Oklahoma. Do you feel a sense of transience all of the time, like no matter how hard you plant your post in the ground, it's bound to get torn out and thrown away? Does it make living there feel odd? Is rebuilding again and again and again feel exhausting? At the end of the day, is it worth all of the effort? Do you feel as though you are living at the mercy of the weather all of the time?

A random thought about tornadoes and where they happen... I woke up this morning thinking about Hawaiian tornadoes. I thought they were impossible, but upon starting my research for this episode, I learned that there is no place in the United States where a tornado is completely impossible. They happen everywhere, and Hawaii is not an exception. Hawaii has about one tornado a year, most of which are EF0 tornadoes - an EF0, according to the Enhanced Fujita scale, a measuring tool for the severity of the tornado that I won't get into here, is the least severe type of tornado that can occur. Windspeeds of an EF0 rarely exceed that of a car moving slow on the highway, about 65 miles per hour at their minimum. EF0 tornadoes generally do not cause any fatalities - regardless of its ranking on the Fujita scale, no Hawaiian tornadoes recorded since 1950 have ever caused a person to die. Hawaiian tornadoes can cause damages to some extent, but a vast majority of them appear for a little while, drift across white sand and dissipate just as quickly as they formed, or form over the water and live their short life as a waterspout. Encountering a tornado in Hawaii is perhaps frightening to some, but for the most part an amazing novelty, and something they are unlikely to see again for a very long time, if ever again.

Despite Tornado Alley being nowhere near either of them, most of the earliest recorded instances of them occurred in either Massachusetts or West Virginia. The earliest mentioned instance of what could be a tornado in the United States was in 1643 (this show isn't called Unknown Italy or Unknown Sardinia, so I won't speak about it much, but the first recorded tornado ever was in Sardinia in the year 200). Due to the lack of information about the American event, it is generally not referred to as a tornado - rather a "wind event" that, while somewhat unlikely, could have been a hurricane too, or simply a very strong gust of wind. The instance's only recorded documentation came from Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop. He had this to say: "There arose a sudden gust at N.W. so violent for half an hour as it blew down multitudes of trees. It lifted up their meeting house at Newbury, the people being in it. It darkened the air with dust, yet through God's great mercy it did no hurt, but only killed one Indian with the fall of a tree. It was straight between Linne [Lynn] and Hampton." Outside of this brief account of the event, there is not a whole lot to go off of, so it is not considered to be the first official documentation, rather a somewhat shaky description of something that could have happened.

What is considered to be the first actual official documentation in America came a bit later, in 1671, from a visitor to nearby Rehoboth, Massachusetts. Rev. William Adams of Ipswich was visiting on October 16th. His account of what he saw is very clear and, in my opinion, cannot be mistaken for anything other than a tornado. He wrote that the tornado was “...carrying about 20 rods (330 feet) in breadth, tearing up by the roots, or breaking the bodies of almost all trees within its compass saving only some small and low ones, and it is thought in all probability to have gone 15 miles in length.” Since Rehoboth at this time was very sparse and unpopulated, it is unlikely that there were any fatalities and only trees and the occasional piece of property were destroyed, but there is no definitive record of whether or not this is the case. Given by his description, it sounds like there's a good chance the only things that were destroyed in the place were trees.

The first confirmed fatality caused by a tornado was in Massachusetts as well just a few years later, in 1680. One person died. Not a whole lot is known about the tornado or the fatality that I can find, other than the fatality was a servant. It's a shame that more isn't known about them. Today, we have a solid frame of reference about what a tornado actually is, why they occur and how to protect ourselves from them. A servant in 1680 likely had very little to no frame of reference for what they were seeing and what was ending their life. It could easily have been, to them, the hand of God sprouting from the sky and plucking them off the face of the earth or dropping debris on them for reasons totally unknown. That is one of the many mercies and comforts provided to us by scientific research - when it's our time to go, we generally know exactly what is going on and a vague idea of how the last handful of moments are going to feel. Thanks to the internet and published work, we can see a photograph of a tornado within seconds of one occurring to us. A servant in 1680 had probably never seen a depiction of a tornado illustrated. They definitely never saw one photographed, as the first photograph of one did not occur for hundreds of years. So what they encountered that day - a complete unknown - could have been frightening to them in a way that many people today will for better or worse, will never get to experience.

The very first known depiction of a tornado in the United States did not occur until 1884, hundreds of years later, when a photograph was taken of one. The photo was taken by somebody in Garnett, Kansas, on April 24, 1884. It occurred just after the Enigma tornado outbreak, a huge outbreak of tornadoes with an uncertain amount of fatalities, but they likely broke 200. The image is one of my favorite photographs ever. I believe that the tornado is distant. I's really hard to tell if a tornado you're looking at is a comfortable distance from you, especially when there is nothing standing between you and the tornado, but in this case, the tornado is partially obscured by several buildings - they appear to be houses. Given what Garnett was like in 1884 - a good sized town - it's likely they were people's homes, but it's hard to know for sure. Given the relatively far away buildings between the photographer and the tornado, I am led to believe the photographer was not in harm's way when they took it, and was probably at a pretty safe viewing distance. This doesn't make the photograph any less exciting to look at, though. First off, the tornado is really big, and of a very irregular shape. It's not wide as the most destructive tornadoes generally are, the sort of tornado you are maybe imagining, but it's long and snakelike, twisting and curled up, cast down from the sky like God threw down a rope. The bottom is very thin and tight and at the very top of the funnel it unfurls into a long dark cloud. Even when rendered in sepia, you can tell the cloud is incredibly dark, maybe even black, but the funnel itself is quite light and blurry, giving the impression that it was in very active motion when the photo was taken. Given the somewhat crude nature of photography in the late 1800s, you can assume taking this photo was a lot more work than it would be today. The photographer - I cannot find their name - probably had to stand still for a while to capture the perfect image. I'm glad they did, because it's a truly beautiful photograph and a somewhat rare thing - a photograph from the 1800s that is full of action, life and movement. It captures the essence of a tornado - something nearly supernatural, unpredictable and quite unlike anything else, dropping down from seemingly nowhere and embedding itself into your memory. It's hard to forget.

Out of sheer curiosity and for fun, I went onto Google Patents and looked up the word "tornado" to see what tornado related inventions were being dreamt up. Here are some that I found to be interesting and a little crazy:

A Dental micro-tornado tissue cutting and removal method and apparatus. It's a drill-like device that creates a tiny cyclone of sand-like material that is used like a drill by dentists to make incisions in gums.

A device that harnesses wind energy from tornadoes and converts it into electricity that can be stored and used later.

A portable modular tornado safety shelter that can be kept in your car.

A giant gun that shoots a liquid that freezes a tornado in its tracks and destroys it.

An elaborate blueprint for an underwater tunnel system built to protect people from tornadoes.

A "tornado protection net".

A giant gun that shoots out "shock waves" that destroy tornadoes.

These ideas, to me, demonstrate the frame of mind people fall into when thinking about torna does. Something as powerful as one is hard to consider in a frame of mind that is anything less than fantastic and unrealistic, resulting in these "What if..." sorts of concepts that are not easily executed in real life. I suggest looking these patents up yourself and reading about them and viewing the blueprints and diagrams, some of which were seemingly drawn with great passion. They're inspiring to me - I love wild and unrealistic ideas, and these ideas - a gun that freezes a tornado on sight and a net that captures tornadoes - are about as wild and unrealistic as they get. Go give them a look if you have time.

A surprisingly contested aspect of the tornado is what is widely referred to as "the eye". Surely you have heard somebody reference it before. I thought its existence was a known part of the anatomy of the tornado, but I guess not. According to some, the eye of a tornado is the spot in the dead center of a tornado that is silent and quiet and still. I find wildly varying opinions on whether or not a tornado has a proper "eye" like some claim that they do. Some reliable sources state that the very concept of an eye is ridiculous and dramatized and likely originated from a film from the 1990s, and others say that they are likely real and have been detected on radar time and time again and pledge their certainty. There are two known, although scientifically unconfirmed, first person accounts of a person who spent time in the eye of a tornado, and these accounts existed long before the film did. Both of the accounts happen to come from farmers, one in Kansas and one in Texas, neither of which knew each other, about twenty five years apart. The accounts mirror one another, which to me might indicate that the farmers had a very similar experience.

The initial account comes from Will Keller, a resident of Greensburg, Kansas. On June 22, 1928, while inspecting the aftermath of a recent hailstorm on his wheat fields with his family, Keller noticed an umbrella-shaped cloud in the distance. Sensing the potential formation of a tornado, he quickly ushered his family into their storm cellar. However, before joining them, he paused to observe the approaching funnel clouds, a familiar sight for him. He stood quietly and did not move, watching the tornado closely. Keller described being transfixed as the tornado passed directly overhead, noting an eerie stillness and a very strong, gassy odor, with lightning illuminating the swirling walls that surrounded him. Then, as soon as it appeared, it passed over him, his family still huddled in the cellar. Remarkably, his house remained unscathed - according to him, nothing was damaged - while his neighbor's home was totally destroyed.

The second account, provided by a man named Roy Hall, further supports Keller's experience. Hall, a soybean farmer from McKinney, Texas, recalls an incident one spring afternoon in 1951. As a storm approached, he sent his family indoors for safety but stayed outside to monitor the situation. Observing green rain sheets preceding the tornado, he eventually sought shelter indoors as hail began to fall all around him. Suddenly, the surroundings fell silent before the tornado struck, tearing off his roof and exposing him to the swirling vortex overhead. Inside the tornado, Hall described a smooth wall of clouds illuminated by flashes of lightning, with smaller twisters swirling around him. Despite the destruction it wrought, including claiming the lives of 100 Texans, Hall and his family emerged unharmed once the tornado had passed. All that remained was the wreckage of his family home framed by a brilliant blue sky.

Both of these accounts relay moments of strange quiet, meditative moments in the midst of chaos. I sort of envisioned both stories as time stopping for just a moment. And both accounts do have a cinematic way about them - like they would be very fascinating to see as a movie - but that doesn't necessarily make them false. I also don't really see what a farmer would gain lying about this sort of thing, especially if it's just a personal account told to a family member or friend. I suppose we will never really know the entire truth. I am inclined to believe them both, but I will let you draw your own conclusion.

As a public service announcement of sorts, here are some common myths about the tornado that could potentially put your life in danger.

Do not use overpasses on the highway as tornado shelters! Stopping under an overpass in an attempt to protect yourself from a tornado is a very bad idea. Deadly flying debris can still be blasted into the spaces between bridge and grade, and impale you. The bridge itself may fail in the process large flying objects, or even collapsing onto people under it. The structural integrity of many bridges in tornado winds is impossible to test for - even for those which may look sturdy.

Do not find the nearest large lake and use it for protection! While a cold lake can provide a locally stable environment, chances are a thunderstorm producing a tornado moving toward a cold lake has something much larger driving it than the cold water can inhibit. Seek shelter immediately!

Do not open all of your windows to prevent your house from exploding! (stop music and say "what?" and then pause) What? Opening the windows is absolutely useless, a waste of precious time, and can be very dangerous. Don't do it. You may be injured by flying glass attempting it. If the tornado does hit your home, chances are very good that it will be destroyed anyway, making this effort a waste of your time. Seek shelter in a basement immediately!

Mountains, River Valleys and Large Lakes Inhibit Tornados do not cause "Splitting Storms"!

While conditions would not be optimal for tornado development on top of mountains or over Lake Michigan, tornadoes have been documented to cross the Appalachian Mountains and cross a 10 thousand foot tall mountain in Yellowstone National Park. Strong tornadoes have also crossed the Mississippi River and other large rivers and lakes. Seek suitable shelter immediately!

For more information on how best to get through a tornado safely, visit www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/.

I am going to end this episode with something supernatural. I learned recently of the Joplin Butterfly People.

In Joplin, Missouri in 2011, there was an EF5 tornado - one of the strongest that can occur. It leveled all of the buildings in the area, and 158 people lost their lives. After the incident, some noticed their children talking about "butterfly people". When asked for more detail, the children described that in their moments of terror, they were visited by large entities that lifted them from the debris and protected them from the violent winds of the tornado. All of the children described the entities in the same way - large humanoids with the heads of butterflies, antenna and massive wings. They resemble Mothman. Some children also claimed that they saw these creatures carry people to the afterlife. Children would draw the Butterfly People, both in groups and by themselves, and mysteriously, all of the drawings looked similar.

Many theories have come to pass. The most popular theory is that it was a case of mass hysteria induced by the stress of the tornado. Believers in the supernatural and the religious think that the Butterfly People were angels sent to protect their children described in a way by the children that they were a bit more familiar with than the concept of an angel. It's impossible to know for sure, just as it's impossible to know a lot of things for sure. According to some residents of the town, though, the idea of Butterfly People helping them to safety gave them courage and motivation to keep rebuilding and move past tragedy. In the wake of something so profoundly frightening, I wouldn't mind the help of a Butterfly Person, too.

This has been Unknown America on WGXC ACRA 90.7 FM. Hali Palombo, signing off.

Episode 4: The Burlington Liars’ Club / P.T. Barnum’s Early Career

This episode will concern the Burlington Liars' Club and its history - a Wisconsin organization that nominates a yearly "Liar of the Year". And I'll talk a bit about the career of esteemed liar and pioneer of the american circus, P.T. Barnum. Stay tuned.

Have you ever told a lie? I figure you have, because most everyone has lied. Here's some statistics.

Most people lie at least once a day. 40% of people lie in their resumes. By four years of age, 90% of children understand the concept of telling a lie, likely lying occasionally to their parents - as most lies, by adults or children, are told to our parents.

80% of all lies told are "white lies" - things that in the long run, are not hugely consequential. But occasionally you will meet a prolific liar. Somebody who lies about anything and everything. Their background, their accomplishments, and even their interests and hobbies. They'll spin yarns so elaborate in their scope that it becomes difficult to know if they are being honest about anything. In 1929, these people were built a home in Burlington, Wisconsin. It was called The Burlington Liars' Club.

The origin of the Burlington Liars' Club was, funnily enough, perhaps based on a lie. A correspondent for the Milwaukee Journal and the Chicago Daily News named Mannel Hahn was having trouble putting food on the table. It was a slow year for local news at the town newspaper he worked at. He decided that if he was going to make any money, he needed to come up with an excellent story. Since there were no stories to tell, other than reporting on the occasional Wisconsinite receiving a ticket or getting into trouble with the law, he decided to take things into his own hands and fabricate one.

Mannel, often mispronounced as "Manuel", was Desperate for some kind of idea as to what to write about - he had a whole lot of bills to pay - he sat down at his desk and got to thinking. After a while, he landed on writing about a "liar's club". The "liar's club" he described in his article was a panel of judges that awarded medals to a liar that they chose from a group of hand-picked contestants that they considered to be the all-time best - within their town of Burlington, Wisconsin, that is. The contestent who came up with the most bombastic, engaging, creative and funny lie was awarded a medal and a title of the World Champion Liar.

While this at first blush sounds like a pretty crazy story, it was actually rooted in reality to some degree. There really was a bit of a Liar's Club, if a very informal one. It was a group of firemen, police officers and the police chief, newspaper writers and a few older retired men that resided in Burlington, Wisconsin - Mannel Hahn included - that met up at the police station every week to try to out-lie each other for no reason other than their own amusement. Hahn decided that this was a funny enough thing to turn into a story he could pass off as real.

The following is an account of the basis of the story of the Liars' Club. Most of my account of the Liar's Club is based on his telling of it. It is excellently written - to me, he writes like Ring Lardner, if you're familiar, who was a sports columnist primarily based in Chicago in the early 1900's. I will be reading a few passages directly from Mannel Hahn's account so you can enjoy it too.

"There was a basis of fact for my yarn. Every morning a group of quite reputable persons met in the police station and swapped stories. There were a couple of lawyers, the older and retired men of the city, the police chief, an officer or two, and the two newspaper men -- Otis C. Hulett, of the Racine paper, and myself. Telling "tall tales" was our daily pastime. They ranged from actual experiences in the World war and in sailing the seven seas -- we had a retired captain as one of our regulars -- to yarns taxing the imagination of the teller and the credulity of the listener. Any particularly vivid "lie" was sure to rouse a cry from "Pink" Schenning, a red-headed policeman, of "Give him the medal!""

In the story he made up, Mannel wrote that the candidates for the World's Best Liar were presented before a jury comprised of lawyers and newspaper men who were deemed "competent to judge lies". The award in this fictitious story was given to a retired sea captain, Anthony Delano, for his story of a whale he once passed on his travels that he measured to be about three miles long. Delano did actually exist and was a resident of Burlington, Wisconsin, where this story is based.

Upon reading his story, the Milwaukee Journal was delighted. They wanted to send somebody down to take a photograph of the award winner with his medal. Mannel, despite having absolutely no idea how he was going to pull it off, reluctantly agreed to the photoshoot and got to work figuring out what to do. He got in touch with the photographer for the Milwaukee Journal, his name was Charles Warner, and Captain Delano, the fictitious winner of the World Champion Liar award, and had some private pictures taken for the newspaper. He pulled a medal he received in South America - the actual nature of the medal is not public knowledge - and got a photograph of Chief Beller, one of the police officers in his "Liar's Club" pinning it onto the lapel of the sea captain in question who was in on the lie, Captain Delano. According to Mannel, there had actually been a leather "medal" awarded once to Delano legitimately, but the whereabouts of the medal is currently unknown. The article was published, and Mannel Hahn received his check for the article. Case closed, or so Mannel thought. Little did he know, his story was making the rounds.

Shortly after the initial publication of his story, a news station had condensed his article into a few paragraphs and broadcasted Mannel's tale over the air. Then, a Burlingtonian in Florida who was on vacation at the time of the article's publication saw an adaptation of an article in a Florida newspaper, and he clipped it out and mailed it to Mannel, who was very amused. Then a newspaper in New York City caught wind of the story and published it, and then Los Angeles. The entirely fictitious "Burlington Liars' Club" was making national news, fast. Mannel found this to be pretty hilarious, and shortly afterwards the Untied Press hired him to publish a weekly column in the same thing of his first article. Shortly after this, he finally got a "real job" in Chicago - one that paid all of his bills and more - and moved to a suburb outside of city limits. His fib ended up being a huge turning point, if not a crowning achievement of his career, and most people were none the wiser that it was in fact all made up.

Some time passed. About a year after the initial publication, Mannel received some interesting news out of the blue. He had not thought about the story in a long time. Here's Mannel's account of what occurred.

"A year after my magnum opus had been unveiled to the world, I was invited back to Burlington for a New Years Eve party, and was just getting ready to leave when the Chicago Tribune called. Was I the "president of the Burlington Liars' club?" It was the first I had heard of such an office, but a quick thought assured me I had invented the club, so could also invent its president! I tried to get the reason for the question, but they hung up."

It turns out, many major news outlets, the Chicago Tribune included, were clamoring to know who won World's Best Liar this year, which was the reason for the contact. Thinking quickly, Mannel awarded it, so to speak, to last year's completely fabricated runner-up. This was reported on in many newspapers as being the honest to god truth, dragging the then-fictitious "Burlington Liars' Club" into the spotlight once again.

Mannel got to thinking after he told another lie to many major newspapers, who eagerly reported on his story. The Burlington Liar's Club was gaining enough notoriety this time around that people were asking about it faster than he could continue to manufacture lies about it. Why not make it a reality? He decided to do just that. Mannel began hunting for a potential location for the Burlington Liar's Club, which he located relatively quickly within the town.

In Mannel's words: "the perfect third party was found. It was Lawrence J. Stang, whose "variety store" had all the traditional characteristics, save one, of the village meetin' place -- a long, lank proprietor with spectacles on his nose, and a full-bellied wood or coal-burning stove. The missing item, of course, is the cracker barrel. So, Larry, Pink and Otey formed a partnership and moved from the harsh cleanliness of the police station to the comfortable, photogenic atmosphere of Larry's big stove."

After getting established at Stang's general store, they began to get organized. Membership cards were printed. Apparently, some actual medals were produced for those awarded the title of world champion liar. Mannel's bizarre tale that he told to pay his bills and put food on the table was evolving into something a lot bigger than he thought it would. Long letters from liars around the country were piling up. Captivated by the Burlington Liars' Club, they spun their own yarns in an attempt to secure the title of the World Champion Liar. Here is a lie told to the Club in one of those letters, relayed by Mannel - the liar won the third and up until that point, the only legitimate title:

"Orrin Butts, of Bay City, Michigan. Orrin was the hero of an emergency operation, in which a farmer, devastatingly gored by a bull, was reviscerated with the stomach of a close-to-hand sheep. The farmer recovered, but not long after grew horns, and after the second year sprouted wool all over, so that thereafter he sheared 30 to 40 pounds each spring."

Another excellent one, in his words, that secured the 4th World Champion Liar title:

"Phil McCarty told how his cat lost a foreleg. The cat having been a master mouser, out of gratitude Phil fashioned a old-style peg to the stump. After Kitty had accustomed herself to the new limb, imagine Phil's surprise when her mousing score increased. Instead of the former use of claws, Kitty developed a new technique: she hid in the shadows and brained the mice with her peg leg, used as a club!"

On a personal note, I would love to have been the one to get to read all of these amazing letters. In its long tenure, the Burlington Liar's Club receives thousands and thousands of handwritten letters from fibbers all over the country. People of all different ages - children and adults, social classes, men and women both, and the rich and poor, write in with their lies in an attempt to receive the prize. Only one winner can be chosen each year, but there's no doubt that there was some seriously amazing creativity present in the entries. I'd particularly love to read all of the lies told by kids who entered the contest - I bet that they are especially creative and absurd.

In good time, the club had more than enough money to replace the woodburning stove in the store they met in for a heat source a bit more modern and up to date, which they ammassed from the $1 fee it cost to both join the Burlington Liars' Club and submit your lie. But winning the award of World Champion Liar did not earn you any actual money or prize of a monetary value. You just got the title, your name in the newspaper, and a handsome membership card printed on nice sturdy paper. Before 1933, you had to be over the age of 70, and a resident of Burlington, Wisconsin. A few years after this, fueled by a great deal of interest from the public outside of Burlington, they opened the contest up to people across the US. There was no shortage of mail from people all over America - in just the first couple of years they received no less than 1,500 letters. A few decades later, when the contest began to be a worldwide competition, contestants all over the world were invited to write in with their lies, which they did. For a while, there was only one rule as to who could not write in after the rule about the winner needing to be from Burlington, Wisconsin was lifted: "no professional liars" were allowed. All this means is no politicians or lawyers could compete, as the very nature of their profession was generally telling small or large lies. There are a few exceptions, though - sometimes the Best Professional Liar title is given to one.

A brief aside, my very favorite lie that I read has to be the winner from 1933. It's also the favorite lie of Mannel Hahn. Here it is, in Mannel's words:

"Out of the whole crop, the 1933 winner seems to me -- a retired connoisseur of lies -- the outstanding lie to date. It was the effort of Bruno Ceresa of Langeloth, Pennsylvania. His grandfather, related Bruno, had a clock so old that no one knew how long it had been in service, but there was a hole through the back of the case where the shadow of the swinging pendulum had worn through!"

I think that's such a clever and beautiful image. There's a photo I came across in my research of Bruno Ceresa. He was a man who resembled Harpo Marx a bit in the face, with a shock of black hair that could be a wig, in a baggy suit. In the photo, he is standing in front of the microphone, presumably relaying his lie to an audience after winning his title. I could be wrong about that, though. I mention this photo of him because it's worth looking up: he's clearly a character, as I am sure a lot of these winners were, especially the earlier ones. He has a Vaudeville meets used car salesman look about him and he has a friendly, easy smile. He does look like he could be right out of the movies. That's something I like about looking at a lot of photographs of people from the 1920s and 1930s - I don't know whether or not it's the black and white, high contrast nature of the images, or the fashion, but everybody looks like they could be in the movies to me. I would have loved to have talked to Bruno - he probably had some really interesting stories to tell. Whether or not they were actually true is besides the point.

My second favorite lie that I read was submitted by a 12 year old girl who won the 60th Burlington Liars' Club World Champion Liar contest - she claimed that her sister was so thin that she could use a Cherrio for a hula hoop. That's so funny to envision - I love the way kids' brains work. I really hope she still has the membership card in her wallet.

Here's Mannel talking about what kind of lies are told to the Burlington Liars' Club by contestants seeking out the prize.

"What kind of lies come in? Only a few rise above what might be called "type lies." Practically every one entered conforms to the pattern of exaggeration. Most of them are duplicates in structure of age-old lies. One of the favorites is some variant on the snake that struck a fence post or hoe handle, which then grew so large that 243 cords of wood came from it before it was down to its original size again. Another is some variant of the Grand Canyon guide who fell from the top of the canyon while wearing rubber boots. He landed on his feet and bounced back up, thus saving his life -- but he kept right on bouncing, so after three days they had to shoot him to keep him from starving to death.

Others fall definitely into the Paul Bunyan saga: such as the fish so large it took 48 hours for the water to fill the hole in the river when it was pulled out; or the railroad locomotive so large that a man who fell into the water tank next showed up in the gauge glass; and, very definitely, the story of the wells in Kansas which, after a severe dust storm, stuck out of the ground so far that the farmers roofed them over for silos. This is a direct borrowing of Paul's well in Dakota that stuck up 634 feet after a storm until he sawed it down and split it up into post holes, which he sold to the farmers in Missouri for more than his lumber cut yielded.

One thing is evident -- and a matter of pride for America: all the stories are clean, parlor stories!"

The Burlington Liars' Club has remained active, save for a brief hiatus in 1980 due to perceived lack of interest. The club was revived the very next year, though. At this point, it has been active for nearly a hundred years.

Nowadays the Burlington Liars' Club is nowhere near what it was in its heyday. There's no brick-and-mortar location for the club save for a bar in Burlington that calls itself The Liars' Club as a nod to the association. They hold a music festival every year called Tall Tales. In 2020, the Burlington Liars Club only received 75 letters in total, compared to what they used to get. The winner still does make the end-of-the-year news, though, if not in as elaborate a fashion as they used to.

If you would like to enter the contest for 2024, mail your tall tale to: Burlington Liars’ Club, P.O. Box 156, Burlington, WI 53105 or send an email to: championlies@gmail.com along with your name, address and your tall tale. If you or someone you know would like to become an official card carrying member of the Burlington Liars’ Club, include $1 for each membership along with a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

I'm not sure what country on earth is the most prone to telling tall tales and stretching the truth. I do know that America certainly has a long and illustrious history of it. Whether it's to advertise something, entertain or simply make the truth a bit more compelling, it's all over the country's history. When I sat down to research this episode I tasked myself with coming up with some of the USA's best and most notorious liars, and the most historically signifigant lies. A figure that was certainly one of the most influential liars ever was P.T. Barnum.

If you're not familiar with him, P.T. Barnum was an American showman, businessman and politician. He is most often remembered as being the man who founded the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. I would call him the great great grandfather of the American hoax. I'm going to talk a bit about one of the first notable Barnum creations, Barnum's American Museum.

P.T. Barnum was a fascinating figure. He seemed to have absolutely no problem creating, and more significantly platforming many hoaxes. He lied in an attempt to entertain people and, it seems above all, to make more money. The phrase "there's a sucker born every minute" has been often attributed to him, but there's no concrete proof he said the phrase. It is attributed to him for a reason, though. By all accounts, it seems to be an accurate credo by which he lived his life.

At the start of his career, Barnum purchased an entire museum in New York City called the Scudder's American Museum which he renamed after himself - Barnum's American Museum - and then used it to display various hoaxes and human curiosities, including the Fiji Mermaid, which was simply the torso of a monkey sewn to the back of a fish, and General Tom Thumb, a man with Dwarfism who attained a wild degree of success in his tenure as P.T. Barnum's performer. Barnum's museum also notably contained the very first aquarium established in the United States, and several exhibits that were totally legitimate in their scientific value. It was a very mixed bag, which is what made the museum fascinating. You did not know if you were looking at something that was completely real or totally made up, and back in the late 1800s, there was more of an inclination to believe what you were being told as you could not fact check anything on your phone. Things were less cynical and less frequently questioned, so the sense of wonder with which people embraced hoaxes was more prominent. This likely made the museum, which was only open for about twenty years before its demolition, a pretty cool place to go.

Before its demolition PT Barnum's museum was a zoo, wax museum, theater, freak show, lecture hall and a lot more. Here is only a short list of some of the articles it contained: dioramas, panoramas, "cosmoramas", scientific instruments, modern appliances, a flea circus, a loom powered by a dog, the trunk of a tree under which Jesus' disciples supposedly sat, an oyster bar, a rifle range, waxworks, glass blowers, taxidermists, phrenologists, pretty baby contests, Ned the learned seal, the Fiji Mermaid, midgets, Chang and Eng the Siamese twins, a menagerie of exotic animals that included beluga whales in an aquarium, giants, Native Americans who performed traditional songs and dances, Grizzly Adams's trained bears and live performances by magicians. This was only part of what you could see at the museum. At its peak, the museum was open fifteen hours a day and had as many as 15,000 visitors a day. Bear in mind the population of the US was only around 32 million when the museum was open in the latter half of the 1800s, so 15,000 people a day is no small feat.

Some of the most engaging parts of the museum, and the favorites among a lot of museumgoers, were the more fantastical exhibits. This included the Fiji Mermaid, the flea circus, the tree trunk that was used as a chair by disciples of Jesus. Unfortunately, there were also what were human beings on display, advertising people as circus acts or "freak show" members for reasons that range from the color of their skin to birth defects. A couple of performers included supposed “Aztec” children who were from El Salvador, and two supposed siamese twins named Chang and Eng. They were real conjoined twins, but Barnum played up their supposed cultural heritage a great deal. to attract more attention. Since it was rare to see people who were, at the time, a vast minority in the US, and it was not possible to simply get out your iPhone and google "siamese twin" like it is today and look at a picture of them to satisfy your curiosity or better than that, to distinguish fact from myth, people were quite unfortunately mystified and fascinated by these people, while Barnum drew a spectacular profit. In his feeble defense, he did apparently pay his exploited performers very well, in some cases the equivalent of what sports stars would make today. And later on, he did attempt to persuade the public that he was sorry for his various exploitations, but you have to bear in mind that he was running for political office at the time. He could have been saying anything to try to get a vote. He could have been saying anything to get what he wanted, so take his apology with a grain of salt.

PT Barnum's more ridiculous and controversial exhibits were generally heavily promoted acts of deception on Barnum's part, but one of the key factors in the American Museum's success was Barnum's advertising strategy, which involved embellishing the truth. Barnum aimed "to make the Museum the town wonder and talk of the town." To achieve this, he was willing to "exploit his patrons' ignorance and credulity from time to time,". It didn't seem like people minded it all that much. If you listened to the Unknown America episode about The House on the Rock, he reminds me a bit of Alex Jordan Jr. in that way. I don't feel like it would make all that big of a difference if people knew they were being lied to. They were being entertained. That's a strange thing about the circus and carnivals. There are qualities about them that are obvious scams, it's pretty obvious that you are being deceived, but you are allowing it to happen because you are having that great of a time. I have mixed feelings about circuses entirely due to some of their treatment of animals, but there is admittedly somewhat of a magical feeling about them, like you are partaking in a very old ritual where you have to hang your preconceived notions about reality at the door to get full enjoyment from the experience.

Barnum leveraged the appeal of his popular attractions by often publishing newspaper articles that claimed his exhibits were fake, enticing audiences to return to see them for themselves. He produced numerous large, colorful posters showcasing the museum's various exhibits. These posters frequently exaggerated the attractions, yet visitors continued to return even after realizing they had been misled. The poster for the Fejee mermaid was so large it covered most of the museum's front. Again, the Fiji Mermaid was just a monkey sewn to a fish, but it drew in incredibly large crowds that were shocked and astonished by it.

In November 1864, the Confederate Army of Manhattan made an unsuccessful attempt to set the museum on fire and were unsuccessful. However, on July 13, 1865, the American Museum was completely destroyed in an unrelated fire. During the fire, it's said that a firefighter named Johnny Denham killed an escaped tiger with his axe before heroically carrying a 400-pound woman, one of the circus acts, out of the burning building on his shoulders. This has not been confirmed as being totally factual by any source. Barnum's New Museum opened on September 6, 1865, at 539-41 Broadway, between Spring and Prince Streets, but it too burned down on March 3, 1868. After these events, Barnum transitioned into politics and the circus industry.

I'll end this episode with a funny story about P.T. Barnum. He was quite poor, but when he was a young child, he had no idea. His grandfather, another huckster - perhaps it ran in the family - told him that he was the richest child in town. When he begged him to see his inheritance, he walked P.T., his friends and some family a mile to a swamp, gestured to it flamboyantly and said, "There it is!"

His friends and family roared with laughter. After a moment, P.T. Barnum did too. Maybe it's a little fun to be lied to.

This has been Unknown America on 90.7 WGXC, Acra. Hali Palombo, signing off.