Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Freak Shows Worked

Episode Date: July 2, 2022

Not too long ago, people would pay money to gawk and stare at a performer with a physical disformity. They were called freak shows and they began in large part thanks to P.T. Barnum, whose circus we still enjoy today. Sounds awful, but some of these performers became rich folks as a result. Exploitive? You decide, after taking in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, it's Josh and for this week's Select, I've chosen our March 2016 episode How Freak Shows Worked. It's one of those episodes that turns out to be more complicated and complex than you might expect. And as an aside, a pre-aside I guess, I'd like to say rest in peace to Ronnie and Donnie Galleon, who we lost in 2020 and who come up in this episode. Okay, sit back, release your expectations, and enjoy this classic app.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Glark. This is Charles F. B. Chuck Prime. This is Jerry. And this is Stuff You Should Know. You intro'd as if you were asleep, and I just walked by and poked you with a pool cube, and that's your first thing you do is you wake up and just go, hey, welcome to the podcast.

Yeah, that's what I do. How are you, sir? Man, I'm feeling fine. Yeah? Yeah. Good. Feeling fine. That's a Simpsons reference.

From what? The Shining one. Oh yeah, the Shining? Uh-huh. Classic. That's a good one. So a couple of quick matters of business. Okay.

A little COA at the beginning. Yes. We're talking about freak shows. Right. And we will be saying freaks and things like that. Yeah. That is obviously an antiquated term. Yes.

But there are a lot of quotes in here, and a lot of references to freaks and midgets and pinheads, and all these awful terms that they used to call these people that had physical deformities and maladies. So it's not us speaking in historical context. Yeah. Like we get the insensitivity. Yeah. And we're not being insensitive here.

Of course not. Yeah. And we want to shout out a few. We used a couple of HowStuffWorks articles, as well as one from History Magazine by Laura Gonde. Priceonomics, Zachary Crockett wrote one. Yeah, who I have to say, I'm a fan of that dude's work. Yeah, it was a good article.

Priceonomics has written some really interesting articles. Agreed. And then one from humanmarvels.com, which is just a good website, by Jay Tithonis, penown. I know that's not pronounced right. P-E-D-N-A-U-D. Yeah, that's a tough one. Penown.

Yeah. I assume the D is silent. Yeah. Or maybe not. Maybe it's penowed. Penowed. Penow. Penowed.

Huh. Freaky. And a couple of other places we visited. And everyone says the same thing, but it's a nice well-rounded thing, I think. Yeah. Well, we're talking about the history of freak shows, and there's only one history. Certain things happen. And we found very quickly that you can't extract freak shows from PT Barnum or vice versa.

No. They are inextricably bound. But freak shows, Barnum was working in the 19th century, but the concept of freak shows, which is basically someone who is a human curiosity, and that could be someone who is born with a genetic deformity, a physical deformity, some sort of mental incapacity, or some people have turned themselves into human curiosities, say through the wonder of tattooing or learning to swallow swords or something like that. Yeah.

Or like these days, body modification, like the Jim Rose show. Right. Or there's one in Coney Island still that does a traditional show. Yeah. Side show by The Seashore. Right. Also a great song by Luna, one of my favorite bands. So the whole concept of this, of having a human curiosity and basically charging gawkers

to look at it, it dates back quite a ways. Well, actually not that far. The 16th century. That's pretty far. I guess so. But you would think like, well, the Greeks or the Romans did this. But apparently, no, everybody was fairly, from what I understand, everybody just kind of steered clear of human curiosities to that point.

Yeah. They feared them. Right. They were locked away mainly, because they thought it was some evil curse. Or punishment from God, and this wasn't someone you wanted to consort with, else you might bring back, bring down the wrath of God upon yourself. That's right. But like you said, in the late 1500s, people started to say, you know what, I'm curious

about someone with hair growing all over their face. I'm curious about the human curiosity. Exactly. And I don't, Chuck, I want to say, I don't think it's coincidence that about this time science was starting to spread throughout Europe. Oh, sure. So the idea that this was God's wrath was taking a bit of a backseat to, this is a human condition of some sort.

Yes. But not so far down the road of science to where there was this intermediate period where they were gawked at. Right. And as we'll find out later, science would eventually take part in ending the side shows. Right. It created them and it ended them. Yeah.

It's kind of neat. Good way to look at it. So one of the first viewings or one of the first people put on display, and this is also going to be, we'll get into it later, but the morality of this is very up and down with exploiting people and these people that would normally be locked away, actually having super lucrative careers. Sure. Long lasting, made them rich.

Well, plus also, I think one of the authors, I think it was Crockett points out that early on if you were in a freak show, there was a good chance that you had been abandoned by your parents, became a ward of the state and adopted by somebody who just ruthlessly exploited you and maybe barely took care of you. But one thing you can definitely say too is credit as Barnum came into it and basically normalized or created an industry out of freak shows or for freak shows, conditions definitely changed and the exploitation seems to have lessened somewhat. Yeah.

I think with the big names like Norman and Barnum, I think there were all manner of minor side shows that probably didn't treat them as well. Right. And usually Barnum and Norman bought their curiosities from those minor side shows, lesser showmen. True. Exactly. So we're talking about Tom Norman out of England.

Yeah. They were basically counterparts. Yeah. But back to one of the earliest quote unquote freaks was a man named Lazarus Colorado who was a conjoined twin. He had a brother, Johannes, who was upside down on his chest. And technically he was a parasitic twin to Lazarus. Oh, not conjoined twins.

They were conjoined, but Johannes didn't eat. Oh, okay. He didn't speak, he never opened his eyes, and apparently the only way you could get a physical reaction out of him was if you rubbed his chest, it would make him squirm. Like Quaid in total recall. Very much. Gotcha. So he went on tour, performed before King Charles the first in the early 1640s.

But it was not a big deal. It wasn't a super lucrative. Side shows weren't really a thing at that point. No. I was saying, you guys are going to ostracize me? Well, I'm going to charge you to look at me then, and I'm going to support myself and my brother doing this. He did it himself.

It's not clear whether he worked with a manager or not, or a promoter, but he definitely made his own choice to go do this. Yes, exactly. And he was apparently an otherwise handsome man. That's how everyone described him, which I think probably for the court or Europe who came and looked at him, probably just made it even more mind boggling. But he's such a good guy. Right.

P.T. Barnum, and I think we should do a whole podcast on P.T. Barnum at some point to really close out the circus suite. Well then we shouldn't mention him again. In the show? No. Barnum, as a teenager, he always had a pinchant for making money in sort of weird ways. He ran his own lottery as a teenager in Connecticut, and he said, here's what I'll do. I can just sell these tickets.

I'll give out prizes in varying levels from $25 on down to like $0.25. Sure. That's the lottery. Yeah. But it was a very well thought out for a teenager. He wasn't just like, just one prize. He'd spread it out so he would entice people to play more, and he actually made a lot of money from it until they outlawed the lottery.

Yeah. He was making like $11,000 in today's dollars a week. As a teenager. Yeah. 19. Not bad. But then Connecticut and the rest of the country said, no, more lotteries for now. We'll bring that back up later though.

Don't you worry. TBC. And he had to find other ways to make work, moved to New York City. And in 1835, England is where a lot of this started. We'll talk about Norman in a second. But he got his cue from England and said, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to buy a person, I'm going to buy my first freak, this blind paralyzed slave woman, and this is a hallmark of freak shows, is I'm going to make up a story about her

that's sensational and crazy, like a Ripley's Believe It or Not kind of thing. Right. And Barnum in particular was well known for just taking these things to the nth degree. Sure. No one's going to buy that. But he could sell it in such a way that people believed it because they were exponentially dumber back then. The story for her was that she was 160 years old, was George Washington's nurse, and you

can pay to see her when in fact she was only 80 years old. She was half that age. Yeah. And her name was Joyce Heth. Yeah. She was just an old lady, right? Yeah. A woman who was paralyzed and blind and was being exploited by P.T. Barnum in the year

before her death. That's right. So she dies, but before then, as he's touting her as this 160-year-old former nursemaid to George Washington, that gets an initial reaction and then ticket sales drop, and then P.T. Barnum did something quite smart. He wrote an anonymous letter to a Boston newspaper and accused himself of being a fraud and saying that the 160-year-old woman was a fake, that she was actually a machine, a robot, made of whale skin and wood, and ticket sales went right through the roof again.

Man, what a guy. There should be a good movie about him. I can't believe there's not. Like a modern one. I'm sure there is, you know. Surely like the, what's the one, the greatest show on earth was a movie, right? Yeah. And then like a DW Griffith movie or something like that.

Yeah, that's what I mean. Tom Cruise should play him. Yeah. It should be directed by Michael Bay. Russell Crowe should. No, not Russell Crowe. Well, how about who could play P.T. Barnum? You know who, he would be good at it, but it'd just be so him, Sam Rockwell.

Oh, totally. He could play anything. So I'd rather see somebody even broader playing him. Yeah. I heard recently. Oh, Gina. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead.

I mean, who would end up playing him is frigging Hugh Jackman. And everyone would just say, oh man, yeah, because he can do cartwheels. Yeah. What were you going to say? Somebody, it might have been during the Bill Gates interview or something yesterday that somebody said that, no, it was on CNN. Tom Hanks is the most trusted person in America. What?

Like for some poll found that like the most trusted person in America is Tom Hanks. Were we on the list? I don't think so. No. Sure. You got to trust Tom Hanks. We're not even also rands. We're never rands.

All right. So he purchased that woman. What was her name? Joyce Heth, J-O-I-C-E-H-E-T-H. For $1,000 and he made about that every week from exploiting her. I imagine that she got very little of that. Yeah. Although you can't necessarily say that.

I didn't see what she was paid. True. She was very likely paid and she was probably fairly well taken care of, especially considering that she probably just, and this is based on how Barnum treated other people later in a documented manner, but he, I don't want to say he rescued her from slavery because she went from being a slave to being owned by somebody who exhibited her, but it's not a guarantee or a given that her situation got worse after she was purchased by Barnum. Right.

Does that make sense? Yes. Man, that felt like a minefield. I was talking about slavery, human exploitation, a blind woman who was also paralyzed. Good luck, sir. His first big hoax after that, or well, actually, I guess it wasn't a hoax aside from the made-up story, but he had a real hoax. Yeah, that was a hoax.

Well, a hoax, sure. But this was a hoax in 1842 because it was nothing about it was real. He was promoting something called the Fiji Mermaid, which was basically rogue taxidermy as all it was. That's exactly what it was. It was a creature with a head of a monkey and the tail of a fish that he bought from Japanese sailors. Well, he didn't.

He got it from a sailor who bought it from Japanese, and actually it was Japanese fishermen. Yeah, and he, well, what's the difference? Well, they're like traditional, they didn't necessarily go to sea. They were like islanders. Gotcha. And this is like traditional art for them, folk art. Okay. So not a sailor, but fishermen.

Right. That's Pet Entry 101. Sorry, man. I get so fixated on things. Yeah. And he leased it for $12.50 a week, $12.50 from the owners of said rogue taxidermy. And he tried to print up pamphlets and try to convince everyone it was some real thing. So he actually had a partner named Levi, what was Levi's name?

He's definitely an overlooked guy, Levi Lyman. Can you imagine like being PT Barnum's partner? Like you'd never be in the spotlight, right? So Levi Lyman posed as a English doctor, a scientist who was in possession of this mermaid and PT Barnum very publicly was trying to get his hands on the mermaid and this guy was very publicly resisting him because it was a man of science and this was the real deal. Right.

And it helped just convince everybody, including the newspapers that like this was the genuine article. Man, just rubes. A nation, a world of rubes, it seems like. He ended up opening up a museum on Broadway in New York City in the 1840s, sort of like Ripley's believe it or not kind of thing, curiosities and weird things. Yeah. That's his stock in trade.

And then we should talk about his counterpart in England. Tom Norman. Yeah, Tommy Norman. Tommy Norman. He was named the Silver King and Barnum actually gave him that name apparently after meeting him and he said, boy, what a huge silver, showy, silver watch you have there. You're the Silver King. He goes, I am the Silver King.

I've been waiting my whole life for somebody to notice. Exactly. So he was doing the same thing in England. And he actually toured with Joseph Merrick, the elephant man. Yeah. And he got castigated by a lot of people saying you're exploiting this guy, John Merrick. Is it John or Joseph? Would I say John?

Yeah. And it's like an ongoing thing. Oh, is it? Yeah. I can't remember if it's, well, let's find out. No, it's Joseph for sure. I just misspoke. Oh, sorry.

He was attacked specifically in a memoir by Dr. Frederick Treves called The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences. And he shot back and he said, you know what, I haven't mistreated Merrick, I haven't abused him. He wasn't forced to do anything. And he said, in fact, the big majority of showmen are in the habit of treating their novelties as human beings and in a large number of cases as one of their own, not like beasts. So, you know, the morality battle was being waged even back then.

Yeah. And I mean, if you think about this time when people would go look at people who had physical deformities and pay for it, just look at them just standing there, you think, well, the whole world was pretty evil and amoral at the time. Not necessarily true. There's a lot of people who railed against this stuff, like Frederick Treves, who was portrayed by Anthony Hopkins, right? Isn't that him?

Oh, I don't know. Yeah, he was. In The Elephant Man, the movie. Oh, was he actually Merrick's doctor? Yes. Oh, okay. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah.

Man, that movie. Oh, yeah. David Lynch. God, one of the best ever. And then there was an historian who at the time, I think in like the 1860s, he wrote, his name was Henry Mayhew, and in 1861, he was British. He wrote that these freak shows were nothing more than human degradation. And he said something that sucked out to me, Chuck.

He said that the men who preside over these infamous places know too well the failings of their audience. And I think he really hit the nail on the head by, he wasn't accusing the showman because I think he understood that most of these people were just under contract. And he wasn't accusing the people, the actual human curiosities, the freaks themselves. He was rightly placing the blame for all this on the observers, the Gawkers. Right. Like if there wasn't a market for it, they wouldn't be doing it.

Yeah. Like you're the one who is having the moral failing, who's paying the ghost see this person who may or may not be exploited. You don't know. Yeah. And it's really on you, audience. Yeah. It's pretty, it's a lot of foresight for back then.

I thought so too. It's not like, the point was, it's not like everybody was just going along with this. People have had a problem with it basically the whole time freak shows were around. Right. All right. Well, let's take a break and we'll talk a little bit more about the evolution of the side show right after this. I'm Mangesh Atikulur and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment

I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop.

But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back. I brought my pencil. What's that? Oh, Van Halen. Give me some to write on, man. I didn't get that at first. I'm impressed that you did get it. Yeah.

Nice. That was from Van Halen, popular song hot for teacher. Yeah. From 1984. And we are now 1980s DJs. So the side shows became a legitimate thing, a big way to make money. There were different kinds. There was one called a 10 in one show, which I believe the side show by the seashore is

today. Oh, I know. You did it. Through my missing tooth. And that is when you have 10 people on display on a platform at once and people just walk by and look at them. Yes. It's not like a performance.

No. It's just there's a bearded lady. There's the dog face boy. There's the tattooed man. Right. And they're all to stand in there. Yeah. That's a 10 in one.

Like get your look. Yoko. They had things. And this was all to drum up more money. They would advertise something as adults only or a man only even performance. Right. But not only performance frequently had a stripper. Well, sure.

You know? Yeah. Or stuff that they thought that were just like a woman shouldn't see or children shouldn't see. I don't know if it was as much of that as if it was to just trump up like, oh my God, it's so bad that a woman can't lay her eyes upon it. I see. I think it was all part of the show.

That's my feeling at least. One of the things that they displayed was something called a pickled punk, which is awful. Especially when you find out what it is. Yeah. It's basically an abnormal fetus and a formaldehyde and a jar. And you could go by and look at pickled punks and gawk at them for money. It's awful. Yeah.

This is what people did like on Saturday nights in Kansas. So usually the side shows or the freak shows, at first they were, you would be some enterprising entrepreneur in some small town. And you would notice that a little youngster had a third leg. And your thought was, I can really make some money with this kid. Sure. So you'd go to their parents and you'd say, I will give you 20% of all of the earnings of your child.

If you let me take him on the road and he will stay in the finest hotels and wear the best clothes. Yeah. As the human tripod. Exactly. Yeah. He will become famous and the world will love him. Just let me handle it.

I'm going to be his manager from now on. And the parents would very frequently, especially if they were poor, would say, that's great. Yeah. Do that. Give me some money up front, though, by the way. Yeah, especially because a lot of times some of these people were burdened on their family. Sure. Because of their health condition.

Yeah. So they were happy to be rid of them. It's all very sad. Okay. So that's how it definitely started out. And then it went on like that for a very long time as well. But once Barnum and Norman and some of the other guys, the big guys came around, they would just basically keep an eye out for that kind of thing.

Or they would be approached by these guys who would essentially be middlemen, kind of like somebody who discovered a boy band selling their contract to a bigger record company. But this was with human curiosities. People with the third leg or hypertrichosis or what have you. And then Barnum would take them and would just take whatever exaggerated origin story that they came with and just throw it out and come up with one 10 times more. And after George Washington's nursemaid, Joyce Heth died. Who was not George Washington's nursemaid.

He started looking around for his next collaborator, if you could call him that. And he found out that he had a distant cousin, a fifth cousin named Charles Stratton, who would stop growing when he was about two years old. Yeah, he never completely stopped. He grew very slowly. Yeah, he made it to like just over three feet, I think by the time of his death. Yeah, he died at 45 of a stroke and he was 3.35 feet tall. But grew so slowly.

I mean, he was General Tom Thumb, very famously. Renamed General Tom Thumb by his half-fifth, twice-removed cousin, PT. Well, what does that stand for even? Paul Thomas Anderson Barnum. So he said, you know what, this is great. You are a small person and you're cute as a dickens. So let me dress you up in little adult suits and you're my new sidekick. Yeah, he collaborated with the kid's dad and said, let's make some money.

And he taught him how to sing and dance, pretend he was Napoleon. Yeah, he did impressions. Cupid, he played Cupid sometimes. And then he told everybody that this little five-year-old kid was actually 11, which made it all the more astounding that he was that small. Which he didn't even need to do. No. So about the next like 15 or so years, turned Tom Thumb into what was essentially the first

international celebrity. Was he the first international celebrity? Pretty much. Wow. Yeah, Tom Thumb was a sensation. Queen Victoria was a huge fan, met with him twice, at least twice. She apparently was really big into side shows, but Tom Thumb was her favorite. And they made so much money off of their first European tour that Barnum bought his museum

with the proceeds. Is there anything grosser than the Queen of England laughing at a small person imitating Napoleon for money? She may have even known Napoleon at the time. Oh, I'm sure. That probably made it all the funnier to her, unbelievable. But he was a rich dude. He was paid in today's dollars.

Who, Tom Thumb? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Over $4,000 a week and retired and lived the high life in New York City. And he didn't feel like he was exploited. No, he actually got married. I saw that he had children, but I only saw that one place. I didn't see it anywhere else.

But he was married and actually right after the marriage was brought to the White House to hang out with Abraham Lincoln and Mrs. Lincoln. Yeah, he had 20,000 people at his funeral. He was, again, he was a very big deal. And from what I understand, at the end of the day, he shed his persona. He was just Charles Stratton, Uber wealthy little person. And when he was doing his show, he was Tom Thumb, who would dress up as Napoleon or whatever and take your money.

But he and PT Barnum together really made a ton of cash. Tom Thumb was a little better at managing his cash than Barnum was because Barnum fell in hard times. A lot of people don't realize this, but he made some actually really bad investments over time, too. Yeah, he invested a lot of his money initially back into his business, which was smart. Right. But a lot of times he would be like, this is going to be a hit and it wouldn't be a hit.

He didn't have the Midas touch necessarily. And he fell in hard times more than once from one of the times Tom Thumb or Charles Stratton bailed them out. Oh, really? I get the feeling Barnum didn't know when to leave well enough alone. You know? Yeah. Like he had a big thriving business and he just kept wanting to push it further and

further. Sure. Hugh Jackman, I'm telling you. So now we will talk about a couple of people who are afflicted with something, well, they were microcephalic, which means that they have a cone shaped head. Smaller than normal shaped head as well. Yes, if you're a Howard Stern fan, then you know, Beetlejuice, he has this condition. And they used to call them pinheads back in the day.

Yes. Awful term. Right. And there were a couple of notable, I'm not even going to keep saying that, but a couple of notable people that performed in these freak shows. One was Zip, William Henry Johnson renamed Zip, Z-I-P, he was from New Jersey born to newly freed slaves. And when Barnum found him, he says, you know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to make up the story that you were found during a guerrilla expedition near the Gambia River. I'm going to shave your head, except for a little ponytail tuft on top. I'm going to dress you in a suit of fur and you get up on that stage and grunt like an animal. Yeah. He was paid a dollar a day at first to not talk to grunt. And I guess to play the violin really badly.

Yeah. I didn't get. He was paid a dollar a day to start. Oh, okay. I thought that might have been part of the story, but he was in fact paid a hundred dollars a day. Later. Okay.

He became a very popular freak, I guess. The thing is, is he, William Henry Johnson, was probably not microcephalic at all. He microcephalic, microcephalic is totally different. Like, he actually, they think now that he had just like a slightly abnormally shaped head that was exaggerated by the haircut that they gave him. Oh, yeah? And that he actually had no diminished mental faculties at all and he was just pretending the whole time and not only fooling crowds, but he was also fooling promoters.

Yeah. Because that's one of the hallmarks of that condition is, I believe, that usually it's a company by cognitive, stunted cognitive development. Yeah. It's not severe. Yeah. But not in his case. He was super smart and when he died, said, we fooled them all to his wife.

Yeah, that's what he did. No, he was a sister. Oh, a sister. On his deathbed. They were also married. Right. Not true. So he made a lot of money too.

He did. He apparently retired with millions. A millionaire. So he's not the only, again, pinhead is what this specific type of freak was called. Man, I can't believe I just said that. This feels so wrong. I know. Yeah.

But there's a very... Maybe sideshow performer. Okay. And Chuck, another very famous sideshow performer who was also, I guess, technically under the umbrella of pinhead, who actually was microcephalic, was Schlitze. Yes. Schlitze is one of my favorite people of all time. Yeah.

Schlitze, they don't know for sure his real name, but they believe it's Simon Metz, born in 1901 in the Bronx. And by all accounts, from everyone who ever met Schlitze. Everyone. Loved Schlitze, and he was a ray of sunshine and a nice, sweet, caring, kind-hearted man. Yes. Loved life. Anything that you would take for granted, Schlitze probably enjoyed the heck out of.

And he was very frequently billed as a woman. I think he was billed as an Aztec warrior at first. And then maybe even an Aztec woman. But he wore dresses all the time because he was incontinent, and this just made it the whole thing easier. So he was billed as a woman for a very long time, and including in the movie Freaks, the Todd Browning movie from 1932, Schlitze was in that. And Schlitze actually has this big scene that he has a whole speaking dialogue section.

And to this day, no one has any clue what he says. Yeah, should we talk about Freaks now, or take a break and then talk about it? Let's take a break. All right. I'm Mangesha Tickler, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology.

And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good.

There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Find a Skyline Drive in the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. All right, so the movie freaks. I've seen it, have you? I saw it for the first time this morning.

No way. Yeah. Wow. I love it. Oh, good. Yeah, it's a 1932 pre-code film. There was a time between 1929 when they started making movies until 1934, when the motion picture production code kicked in.

The Hayes Code. Yeah, and properly called the Hayes Code. For five years there, you could do whatever you wanted, I guess. And that's when this director named Todd Browning made a movie called Freaks about sideshow performers. And this guy was, the director actually ran away and joined the carnival when he was 16 and worked as a carnival barker, and even participated in stunts, and he's a circus guy. Right, and he had a lot of sideshow performers as friends, and you can tell in the movie who's

side he's on. Yeah. They're the heroes of the story, they're the protagonists, the antagonists are normals or whatever, and it's a really morally fraught movie these days, but if you just step back and think of it as like this guy having an affinity for sideshow performers and giving them a shot at stardom, being on the big screen for what they are, for who they are, for what they can do, then it's a really kind of a heart-growing tale. Okay, heart-growing?

Yeah, in a very weird way. Interesting. It's wrenching to watch. When's the last time you saw it, college? Yeah, it's been a long time. You should see it again. All right, we'll check it out. It's tough to watch, it's gut-wrenching.

There are a lot of, well, let's just talk about some of the performers in the movie. One of them who stands out is Johnny Eck, John Eckhart Jr., who was a twin, and he was born with a condition. Everyone said that he was cut off at the waist. Not exactly true. We actually had unusable underdeveloped legs that you never saw, but it appeared as though he didn't have anything from the torso down, and as from a young kid, I believe he was even walking on his hands before his twin brother was even standing.

So he was very advanced in a lot of ways. He's a very smart guy. Oh, he's a painter? Yeah, very accomplished. A magician? Uh-huh. And he had a great personality, too, you could tell. Yeah, and apparently he was good buddies with Browning, and Browning always wanted him around

and by his side and was like, you need to come sit with me by the camera, and almost like his, I don't know if you could consider him a co-director, but he always wanted him nearby. Pretty neat. Yeah. Yeah. Daisy and Violet Hilton? Yeah. Can join twins, right?

Yeah, which they called Siamese twins back in the day. Thanks to Chiang and Aang Bunker, right? Yeah. They were actually some of the first super famous. They were from a Siamese fishing village, and that's where the term came from. Yeah, and Siam was what we now call Thailand. That's right. And Chiang and Aang were born in 1811, and they actually performed on their own.

For many years. Yeah. Made a ton of money. Right. They got married, had kids. Moved to North Carolina. Yeah, of all places. And that, well, actually, interestingly, Daisy and Violet ended up in North Carolina, too.

Oh, yeah, but under much, much worse conditions. Yeah, but to finish with Chiang and Aang, they eventually lost their money. They were millionaires, lost their dough, and then worked for Barnum later on in life. But I get the impression that they did it kind of at their leisure, almost, and ended up re-amassing another fortune. Oh, interesting. From working with Barnum. Yeah, and they fathered 21 children between them, married a pair of sisters. Man.

Who were not conjoined. Yeah. They each had a house, and they would spend three days at one house, three days at the next house. And yeah, they had 21 kids. Pretty amazing. Yeah. So Daisy and Violet Hilton, they were known as Simon's twins back then. Of course, we don't use that term anymore.

But I mean, I remember that term when I was a kid. Sure. So it's definitely like held on for way too long. Remember Ronnie and Donnie Galleon? Oh, yeah. Are they still with us? Let's find out. Go ahead.

You're checking that. I'll continue. I believe that Browning spotted Daisy and Violet and said, you guys are great. You're pretty. You can sing. You'll be a big part of my movie. And they had been performers all along. By 18, they were on tour with Bob Hope as part of his dance troupe and made quite a bit of money.

But sadly, their story ends in North Carolina because they made an appearance in 1961 at a midnight showing of freaks at a drive-in, and their manager ditched them. And this part I don't get. They had no way to leave North Carolina, so they just stayed there. Yeah, they had to get a job. That just seems odd to me. If you don't have any money and no one to call to ask for money, you go get a job at a grocery store and hope that you can live. And eventually die there?

Yeah. It seems like they would have gotten enough money to leave and go back to wherever they lived. Well, they died in Charlotte, North Carolina of the Hong Kong flu. What is that? It was a flu epidemic that originated in Hong Kong. It was a different world back then. Siamese twins died of Hong Kong flu. I know, none of that seems politically correct to say.

No, it doesn't. Who else was in freaks? Let's see. There were a pair of little people named Harry and Daisy Earls, and they played Hans and Frida, right? Yeah. Hans is like the ringmaster of the sideshow, and Frida in real life, Daisy, was known as the Midget May West. And in the movie, they're engaged, but actually in real life, they were a brother and sister. Yeah, and they were in the Wizard of Oz, even, as munchkins, and were in a bunch of movies with Laurel and Hardy as well.

So lifelong performers. Yeah. So this whole movie, and again, we didn't finish with Schlitzy. Schlitzy was in it too, and had this whole big speaking part, and was just adorable in the movie. Yeah. Schlitzy's personality just shines right through the movie. Yeah, very likable. Yeah, and Schlitzy was actually adopted.

No one had any idea who Schlitzy's biological family was. Right. They were not around. So the people he performed with and worked for actually took care of them. And when his adopted father died, his father's daughter, biological daughter, said, Hey Schlitzy, I'm going to commit you to an asylum in Los Angeles. Yeah. And that's where Schlitzy was until one day, just by total chance, Chuck, another circus performer,

I think a sword swallower, right? Yeah, named Bill Unks. He said, You're Schlitzy. Yeah. What are you doing here? You look so sad, and Schlitzy was like, I remember you. Let's go. So Bill Unks intervened and got Schlitzy out of the institution, and he got to live out

his days hanging out in the park, being recognized by passersby. Yeah. He lived near MacArthur Park in downtown L.A. and lived all the way up until 1971. Yeah. At age 71. Yeah. So, you know. You got to see Schlitzy.

You should see Freaks, but even if you don't see Freaks, look up Schlitzy's part. Agreed. It'll probably make you want to see Freaks. Well, some people say that it's still around and that it's just on TV in the form of reality shows. Yeah. Like basically that same sentiment and everything still is found all over television. Yeah.

Exploiting people, like exploiting obesity and exploiting dwarfism. Sure. Yeah. It's on television now. But the actual sideshow itself, well, it went away in a lot of ways, at least as far as like a traveling sideshow went. And it went away with the rise of the rights for the disabled, that movement that came along, starting in about the late 19th century, early 20th century, and then really gaining

steam by about the time Freaks came around the movie. Yeah. So there are a few things that kind of killed it, but one was definitely, like you said, science invented it and killed it. And here's something that is sort of reprehensible that I found out. There's a lot of these sideshows would try and keep doctors away from the people. Yeah. Because they thought, I don't want a doctor coming in here and saying that the dog face

boy actually has hypertrichosis and it's a condition where you have hair all over your face. Yeah. And it was a caveman. Yeah, exactly. Did you know actually there was another, there was a woman named Julia Pastrana and she had hypertrichosis too and she ended up marrying her manager. They were married, they had a baby together and she died during childbirth and the baby

was born stillborn and her husband manager, who ostensibly loved her, said, show must go on. Yeah. His wife and their stillborn baby and then took them around to display them in the sideshow as ever. Unbelievable. So, again, doctors would come along and start explaining these things and that helped kill the sideshow.

The rise of television and at home entertainment, people weren't going out to places like sideshows anymore. Yeah. They could stay in their house and watch television. And apparently you could still find sideshows like that American Horror Story, was it Freak Show? I think so. Last season or whatever?

Yeah, I don't watch that, but yeah. It was set in, I think, the 50s and I think at that time you could still see traveling sideshows here or there, but they were pretty broken down. Oh yeah, by that point they were pretty much gone. But by the 60s, there was a girl named Carol Browning and all I could find was that she had deformed arms and legs. I don't know what that means, but that was the description that was given of her. But she went to a sideshow and when she visited the carnival in North Carolina, I think she

lived in Charlotte, no, Raleigh. And Carol... What is it with North Carolina? That's where things begin and end with sideshows. Well, Carol Grant, I think was her name, Carol wrote a letter to the Agricultural Commission. The Agricultural Commission is in charge of sideshows at the time, at least in North Carolina, and said, this is wrong. This is beyond wrong.

I'm offended by this and this should not be allowed to happen. And she actually sparked a national conversation about whether sideshows should be allowed to be around, even if performers wanted to be a part of them. And that was the final death knell, that conversation. But a lot of people came out and said, hey, you know what, these people, you guys call them freaks, but you also empty your pockets to them. And they're wealthy, they enjoy the acclaim, they enjoy the money. And it's actually you who has the problem and it didn't have much of an effect.

Sideshows went away and a lot of the sideshow performers ended up going from being pretty wealthy or well paid or having a steady income to being broke and ending up being abandoned by their managers like Daisy and Violet. Yeah, it's a tricky ground. It is. It's pretty much sad all the way through, except for some success stories. And that makes the whole thing so morally ambiguous. If you think about it, it's just so easy to look from here and be like, you named your

movie freaks or you charge people to look at the elephant man, but what about those people who said, I'm cool with this, I'm signing on for this. This is making me very wealthy, I'm happy, I've had all sorts of opportunities that weren't open to me before and I love what I do. What do you do about that? You can't condemn it. It's not an easy black and white thing to deal with. Yeah, it's called a moral ambiguity.

You said that there have always been them, them, those. Them moral ambiguities. They're always will be. You got anything else? No. If you want to know more about side shows, freaks, that kind of thing, you can type those words into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for Listener Mail.

Hey, before Listener Mail, what about Ronnie and Donnie? Oh yeah. Ronnie and Donnie are alive. Awesome. They are 64 years old as of this past October, I think 21st. And they are the world's longest living conjoined twins. They're adorable too. They're Ohioans, right?

If I remember. I believe so, yeah. Very nice. What documentary did we see on them or something? I can't remember, but we talked about them a lot over the years. Yeah. So that's great news. Yeah.

But they're still at it. All right. So Listener Mail, I'm going to call this one, quick feedback on the Bill Gates podcast. Oh, that is quick turnaround. Hey guys, my name is Brendan Cologne, announced like Cologne. And I'm a PhD student at Hobbett Medical School in Pamela Silver's lab, working on artificial photosynthesis. Shout out Pamela Silver.

How about that? I'm a longtime fan of the show and wanted to say what you guys did. You did a great job covering renewable energy with Bill Gates. During the episode, there was a question about the current limitations of artificial photosynthetic systems. At present, the biggest issues are scalability, the cost energy in producing the building materials and the efficient extraction of produced fuels. These are standard engineering hurdles, but like Mr. Gates said, we can call him Bill

by the way. I don't think you can, Brendan. We can. But we can. These are standard engineering hurdles, but like Mr. Gates said, the final product needs to be viable. Specifically, such a product would need to harvest and store more energy in the short term than what was required to build it.

Makes sense. And do so on the cheap. Fortunately, biotechnology and photovoltaic technology is advancing at a breakneck pace, so the future of this technology looks bright. As new biochemistries are discovered, more products will be available for production. And one vision of this technology is a local and individualized production of chemicals on demand. Hope this helps.

Feel free to reach out. Cheers, Brendan. Thanks, Brendan. Yeah. Brendan Cologne pronounced Cologne. That's right. If you are an expert in something that we talk about, we love hearing feedback from people like you.

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