Endless Thread - Gator Roll

Episode Date: February 9, 2018

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Endless Thread brings you three love stories brought to you straight from Reddit. You’re not crying, your eyes are just sweating.

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Produced by the ILAP at WBUR, Boston. Amory, do you know what the people's elbow is? The people's elbow? No, I have no idea. Okay, so you probably don't know who made the people's elbow famous. I'm going to play you some archival tape. Okay. So that is my Twitter namesake, doing his signature,

wrestling move. I call myself the Brock Johnson on Twitter for a reason because of Dwayne the Rock Johnson, or as I like to call him, our next president. Sure, Ben. So were you big into pro wrestling as a kid? I mean, I was on the high school wrestling team, so I know what it is to wear a singlet and be made fun of for it. But I didn't watch the TV stuff too much. I was into the famous guys. Razor Ramon. Take a look at me. I am Razor Ramon. Take her. I'm back.

And Brett the Hitman Heart. This is Brett the hitman heart. Brett the hitman heart. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's fitting because this episode is actually all about the heart. Yes, and here is where we make the connection between pro wrestling theatrics and the heart. Connie and Travis are redditors from Missoula, Montana.

They are a couple. And when people ask them how they met, they usually lie. Let's see. I like to tell people, the one that I've been using lately, we met at a coffee shop when he took my coffee, you know, when they call out vanilla latte, and they sat on the counter, he took my vanilla latte, and so he had to buy me a new one.

Dog park. Neither of us have dogs. That doesn't work. We're lying anyway. That's fair. All lies. Where did they actually meet? Squared circle. That is a reference to a wrestling ring.

It's square, but it's a ring, so it's a squared circle. Squared circle, that dating app for wrestlers. Just kidding. It is a community on Reddit for wrestling fans like Connie and Travis. So what happened was there was this big thread, and it was everybody posts where you're from or where you're living so that maybe people can find other people to watch wrestling with. And I was scrolling through, and I saw a comment that said,

Missoula, Montana. And I said, oh my god no way because what are the odds you know it's a small town um in a big country and a big subreddit and so i was super excited and it was Travis did you guys move pretty quickly to you know the next step in your relationship aka watching wrestling together so we took the step to watching wrestling together pretty quickly i meet this guy from the internet and then like three days later i'm just over at his studio apartment sitting on a futon drinking beer watching wrestling.

If you guys could describe your relationship in one wrestling move, what would it be? Rainmaker? Wow. Sorry, this is a question I never thought I would be asked in my life. Describe our relationship in one wrestling move. I mean, Travis was pretty quick. The first thing that came to mind was gator roll. So a gator roll is you and.

your opponent are both kind of on the ground. It's just like a little transitional move, but I love it so much. And you've got your opponents like arms in a weird thing and their face kind of in a lock. And then you're both laying on the ground and you just kind of roll together. And you're rolling the other guy along with you. And it's just so simple and fun. How did your friendship progress and when did it turn romantic? So what happened was we were watching wrestling hanging out three, four nights a week.

And then one night at the apartment, somebody made a move. I don't remember who made the move. There was a move made. Wrestling moves? No, romantic moves. Are you talking like gator roll? Is that what we're talking about? That's basically what started it.

Yeah, essentially. Do you guys think that, like, as pro wrestling fans in a relatively small town, do you think you would have eventually found each other? That's hard to say. Honestly, we probably would have met each other two years from now, and wrestling would have never came up, so we would have never crossed paths again. I think that Reddit is a big reason of why we're together

because if it hadn't been for that and it hadn't been for a space to share that interest, then we wouldn't have ever met up or found out what we had in common. Connie, Travis, thank you very much for telling us your crazy wrestling romantic story. Yeah, of course. Thank you. Thanks for talking with us.

Ben, I have an idea. Okay. Is it about this episode's title? something about love and Valentine's Day because obviously that's what we're doing here. Sort of. It's really about Travis and Connie's favorite wrestling move. I think we should call this episode

Gator Roll! I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and this is Endless Thread, a show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. I'm here with my producer, Amory Sebertson, and we are finding all kinds of stories. We are going to listen to Redditors tell their stories. We're going to wade into the comments.

It's going to be great and weird and fun and hopefully enlightening. One does not simply walk into our show without saying how it is made. We are coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station, and we are making this show with a little help from our friends at Reddit. Ben, did you ever have love letters? I'm sure somewhere in my house there's like at least a few pages of folded up binder paper with like a few nice things a young lady said to me once before she, she knew me enough to know better.

Well, this next story is about something a little more advanced. It's about a whole bunch of correspondence that took place over a few years when a particular couple was living apart in the early 1950s. Yeah, we're talking like 1950 PR, as in pre-reddit. I don't think PR is a thing, but sure, yes, pre-reddit. Though a photo of this correspondence was taken and posted on Reddit. Yeah, but first, it was disembarkened. discovered by a redditor named Kate Laude.

Well, when my mom passed away last March, my brothers and I had about a week together, and we decided to use our time very productively to go through my mom's things. And I was in charge of the bureau, and I got to the bottom of the bureau, bottom drawer, back corner. Okay.

And there was this wonderful box, tied up really tightly, a big pink box. I took it into the kitchen, and my brothers and I got some scissors and opened it up, and we just gasped. I'd say like 85 to 100 letters, all roughly the same size and aged. You know, they're kind of light brown from the years

that my parents were apart. Yeah, so your parents have kind of an interesting love story, right? I mean, they met, well, your mom was a teenager and... Yeah, jail bait. My mom was 16 when they met at her sister's wedding. Up in Maine, Portland, Maine. my dad was a student at Princeton, and he and my mom, as the story goes, were just smitten the day they met each other. So we never really knew what that meant, you know, for the 1950 version

of smitten. What does that exactly mean? Does that mean they, you know, smiled at each other and danced a waltz? What does that mean? But they, he, of course, went back to schools. She went back to high school and she was too young for anything formal to be to take place so they kind of corresponded for a couple of years and we knew the story we didn't know about the letters were you worried about opening them up i think the metaphor to candy is very appropriate because if you read one you're you know you're just going to be lost for the next several hours because you're going to devour the box but yet sometimes reading one isn't enough and you have to even be in the right mood to get started with that first letter. I think my younger brother, Ben, picked out the first letter and started

reading, and he put it down. And I said, what's the matter? And he said, I just, I can't do it. And I saw something in the letter that he had put down about the word bottom. And I thought, okay, I guess my younger brother just doesn't want to see my mom maybe as having been, you know, sexual. You know, you don't want to see your parents that way, of course. So I, I think the box was this treasure that we kind of didn't want to disturb. I think in some ways a little goes a long way of someone else's love story. I've gone way down the rabbit hole now. I've really delved very deeply.

I've eaten a lot of chocolate. It's interesting that you describe this kind of awkwardness around this idea that your parents were sexual beings, right? I mean, and that's, of course, totally normal. That's the reason that you and your brothers exist, right? you know, people age, but they're really the same people inside. Right. Of course. Of course.

I do think there's a timidity to talking about sex in the kind of pre-internet age where things, you know, little words mean tremendously huge things, and there's a lot written between the lines. There's some sexting in these letters. There is a little bit, yeah. So I could tell you about that if you would like to hear. Yeah, please. Why not?

Well, yeah. They're not my parents. Yeah, exactly. I was trying to, I couldn't help seeing these references to a purple hat, right? So I'm, I've got a terribly dirty mind. I immediately went to what I thought they were referring to. Whoa. And I, you know, so I just, I had an open mind and I thought, all right, let's, I have no idea.

I wasn't there. No one else was either, let's see where this goes. And I think ultimately I did find out that my mother actually gave my dad a knitted purple hat with a tassel. You know, it was actually a hat. She lived in Maine. They went skiing. It was just a hat, Kate. So my imagination is a third person here.

It's not just between the two of them. It's between the three of us, them and my imagination. Tell me how many – you said that you've eaten a lot of chocolate. How many of these letters have you read? I've probably read about eight or nine. And they're long. I mean, most of them are about 10 pages long. You know, let's be honest, my dad never wanted anyone else to read these letters. They wanted my mom to read them.

I think he would probably be dying if he knew that his daughter were reading them. But it's such a great opportunity to really know more of a 360 about this man. We know a lot about my dad. He was a very public person. But these private years, what he kept just for my mom, I never knew. So it's been fun to see their playfulness. Can you read us an example by any chance of this stuff that you're talking about? Yeah, okay.

So here's a fun little image. So he's writing to my mom, this is maybe a month and a half after they've met. And he'd just gotten one of her first letters while he was at college. And he says, your letter could not have come at a more perfect time. I say more perfect because by definition, as far as I am concerned, your letter always arrives at a perfect time. I was just dashing back to the room at 11 a.m. from my last final exam, hoping to have a few moments to grab something to eat, no breakfast, before taking a shower and dressing for the wedding of one of my roommates. As I went through the door, I saw some mail in the slot and I grabbed it. I found your letters, and all my excellent intentions of eating and being on time at the wedding were immediately exploded. As it turned out, I neither got anything to eat, nor was I on time for the wedding. With a letter from Judy, I stumbled through the wedding. and the reception afterwards, letter always in hand

in a somewhat haphazard but very happy state. Did anything in these letters change your view of your parents? You know, it made me wonder about a few things, Ben. I think I wondered whether my mom was as free with her love in her letters to him, whether he was the pursuer and she was maybe not so much. I always kind of thought of it as a very equal relationship, but she may have been kind of the reluctant bride, as they say. What makes you say that?

I don't, well, I don't have her letters. Right. I don't, sometimes he says about how she didn't write and made him so bereft that he hadn't heard from her. And I want to say, come on, mom, this guy is nuts about you. Come on, send him a few letters. Don't play hard to get. But how much she cared about him is clearly outed,

and the fact that she kept these letters in this box for all this time. Well, they were the love of each other's lives. Do you think your mom intended for you to find these? I think she didn't probably want us to find them for a while. She wouldn't have tied the box so tightly. I think she would have been delighted, actually, to have us see them and read them. Because what does it matter now?

You know, all the letters show is that falling in love is a, incredibly special and unusual thing and that real deep love is is rare and kick-ass wonderful and i don't know why anyone would want to hide that which is why i posted the picture of the box on reddit because i think there was someone who was despairing about a long-distance relationship i was on a long-distance relationship subreddit and i thought well i should just show them this box of letters from these people who lived apart for so long but then had this 62-year marriage Just as a little beacon of hope that, you know, yes, you're apart now, but the whole future is ahead of you. And there may be wonderful, wonderful things, even though you can't see it right now.

So does any, does anything about this experience make you emotional? Oh, my gosh. Absolutely. I, when my dad started in law school, I guess he, they'd been dating for maybe nine months. and he wrote her what looks like kind of an affidavit. It's not really a letter. It's a typed document. And it's all about him chasing around New York City

to get her what she wanted for Christmas. Okay, it says, attention, general note regarding use of this pocketbook. This pocketbook is especially designed for year-round, all-purpose, rain or snow, weekdays or holidays, walking or riding use. I chased down a number of handbag ads downtown, but no one ever heard of a green shoulder bag.

My tour took me 40 blocks, and I wound up at one of the first places I had visited and bought this. I told the saleswoman about my choice, and she coughed and politely suggested that I had picked out a little girl's bag. Sweetie, have a very merry Christmas and get lots of pretty things and be reasonably good. About the only thing I can give you that I have knowledge of, sweetie, is my everlasting and terribly sincere love.

In terms of money, sweetie, it isn't worth a nickel, but it's all I really have. Sweetie, I love you so much. You are my Christmas and my Wednesday in October. And all I could ever come close to dreaming of. I wish I could see you sitting in front of the Christmas tree now with tags and ribbon and paper around you. That's what I'll be thinking when the gang gathers around archery at home.

I love you, sweetie. I could never tell you how much. What are you going to do with the box? I think it's just a lovely testament. It's something to have. as a kind of an heirloom in a way.

Yeah. You're not like sticking your finger down your throat right now, Ben, are you? Not at all, not at all.

And it's funny the lovi-dovey parts of the letters doesn't change. It's there from the first letter to the last one in 1955.

There's still this, you know, I've never felt anything this strong. I can't imagine living without you. You know, I can't wait

to be back with you and, you know, play with your ankles and see your cheekbones, all these delicate things. It endured, which is a lovely thing to say about two people. Well, may we all be lucky enough to play with someone's ankles? Amen. Amen. Right. Kate, thank you very much for talking with us. Yeah, Ben. Thank you. It's been a lot of fun. More stories about playing with ankles in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories.

Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know.

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Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org. Okay, Amory, we've got one more. It is also a love story where someone's on the outside looking in. Yeah, and the story starts in the Ask Reddit subreddit, where people throw random but kind of universal questions out into the Reddit sphere and then just see what people respond with. So Zach Fick from Sioux Falls, South Dakota,

saw a post on here that asked, What happened to your first love? I'm kind of a sucker for, romantic gestures and everything like that. So he sat down to write a love story. Not his love story, though. This is one he witnessed when he was in high school. It started about a decade ago.

I drive to and from work on the same route like many of us do. And at the top of my hill, you take a right, and it starts to curve. And on this curve, the first house I come across is an Asian family. And they're just always active out in the yard. It seems like a really happy family. And about five houses down on the other side of the street is a red-haired family that you really can't help but notice because they're always riding unicycles, juggling, just doing always sort of the odd games. And so that's where the story starts with these two families. The Asian family has a daughter.

who Zach thinks is about 10 years old at the time. She plays basketball in her driveway all the time with her dad and siblings. The red-haired family has a son who appears to be about the same age as that girl down the street. Yeah, so this boy who's around her age was seemingly taking notice to her playing basketball because all sudden I saw him with his own basketball out on the driveway, dribbling with two hands, like you might expect a beginner to do. and, you know, fast forward a few months. Maybe it was even a year.

He's up on the roof of his house all by himself, putting this basketball hoop on the front of their garage. I like to imagine he probably saved up and bought this hoop himself. He'd sort of make a shot, and then he'd go over, grab the ball, and kind of glance over his shoulder down the street, just in my mind to see if she noticed. And I think a lot of people can relate to that. always make a shot and well I hope she saw that. Now I want to fast forward a little bit in this

story to when it appears they're in high school or even further along in high school and now they aren't practicing alone on their driveways anymore. They're actually shooting around together and he's always got a big smile on his face and I can just imagine he's throwing out little quips or jokes and just making her practice time all the more enjoyable while she's getting in the reps that she feels she needs to do something great. Yeah, I might have been projecting a little bit in there. I was just a little bit older at the time, and so I was just hoping this would continue for their sake, because you always kind of want to believe that love can start as young and survive on. forever. I just thought this story finishes with at least a little taste of that happily ever after.

So I think it was I'm leaving, but I drive by early evening. I come around the corner, but all a sudden I see the boy walking down towards the house and my heart kind of skips beat and my eyes get wide and I turn around and sure enough, he's working. a tux. So I'd take another lap around the block and drive by right as he's about getting to the girl's house and there's her whole family just lining up for pictures and everyone seems so happy. And that's sort of solidified in my mind that this wasn't just something I was projecting that it was something that I saw so long ago when I saw him looking over his shoulder, years before peeking down the street to see if she had noticed him making a shot.

And it kind of appears he took a shot and swished it. Yeah, so my guess is they would be in college. Again, throughout this whole thing, I have no verification of age. But yeah, I would say they're in their 20s now. And where they're at, that I don't know if they're even in town anymore. but in my heart they're still together, and they always will be. Well, Amory, this closes our Valentine's Day card for listeners. Yep. You know those elementary school Valentine's Day card, Ben?

Did you have a favorite one of those? I think I liked the Peanuts ones, like the ones with Linus and Lucy and Charlie Brown. But I also liked those lacy, fancy ones that had people actually professing their crushes on you. Oh, so you did get some love letters. I mean, mostly other people got them and I pined after them, but what about you? What kinds did you like? You know, I got to say, I'm kind of just in it for the chocolate. That's what love is about.

And on that note, let's go get us some red M&Ms, maybe some Twizzler, cherry, pulling peel, and all that good stuff. We can eat ourselves to happiness. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, who when we ask if she likes the episode we've put together, she always says, No, no, no, no. Yes! Iris Adler is our executive producer in human proof that we are Totally Not Robots. Mix and sound design by John Parati and Paul Vicus, who like to make the show sound. Interesting as...

Our web producer is Megan Kelly, who looks at our attempts at writing web copy and always goes... Aw. Our intern is Chris Yulian, who when we put him on a task, he politely says, Hold my beer. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, and whenever we have our weekly meeting with him, we can all agree. It was... Oddly satisfying. Our theme music is by Squelcher. Thanks to

Redditor N94 Games for our artwork this week. It was titled, Close Your Eyes While You Kiss Me. Thanks to all the Redditors who told us their stories this week, including Doomy McDoom-Dum. You can find his story on our Reddit user page. And Redditors, if you want

to make art for an upcoming episode, us up at Endless Thread at WBUR.org. We're about to tackle the opioid crisis in how one Redditor got clean. So there's your inspiration if you want some. Find us on Reddit and Twitter at Endless underscore Thread. Today's episode featured stories about romance going right. But hey, we know that's not always the case. So if you've got a terrible, no good, very bad story about romance, we want to hear it. Write to us. Send us a voice memo with your story. Endless thread at WbUr.org. We're also online. at WBUR.org slash endless thread.

You can subscribe to the show on your podcast app of choice. Please do that. We promise if you make this relationship official and go podcast steady with us, you won't regret it. Also, if you love the show, write us a review. It helps other people find us. You should know our show is produced by Amory Severson. I'm senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson.

I'll let myself out.