Futility Closet - 021-A Gallant German Fighter Ace

Episode Date: August 4, 2014

In December 1943, American bomber pilot Charlie Brown was flying a severely damaged B-17 out of Germany when he looked out the cockpit window and saw "the world's worst nightmare" off his right wing -- a fully armed German fighter whose pilot was staring back at him. In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow the strange drama that ensued, in which German fighter ace Franz Stigler weighed the human impulse to spare the wounded bomber against his patriotic duty to shoot him down. We'll also consider whether animals follow the 10 commandments and wonder why a man might tell his nephew that his dog will be shot. Our segment on Charlie Brown and Franz Stigler is drawn largely from Adam Makos' 2012 book A Higher Call: The Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II. The book trailer contains brief interviews with both men: Sources for our segment on Ernest Thompson Seton and the 10 commandments: Ernest Thompson Seton, "The Natural History of the Ten Commandments," The Century, November 1907. Theodore Roosevelt, "Nature Fakers," Everybody's Magazine, September 1907. Ralph H. Lutts, The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science & Sentiment, 2001. Paul Dickson, Words From the White House, 2013. Our post about Seton's belief that the commandments are "fundamental laws of all creation" and thus might be discovered in the animal world originally appeared on April 21, 2010. The episode in which Seton's father presented him with a bill for his rearing appears in his wife's 1967 collection of his writings, By a Thousand Fires. Our post recounting it ran on July 8, 2014. Here's Jackie Cooper crying in Skippy (1931), just after hearing that his dog has been shot: You can listen using the player above, or subscribe on iTunes or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to Futility Closet, a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This is the audio companion to the popular website that catalogs more than 8,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to Episode 21. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll describe a dramatic encounter between an American bomber and a Nazi fighter in the skies over Germany in 1943, consider whether animals follow the Ten Commandments, and wonder why a man would falsely tell his nephew that his dog has been shot.

Also, just a note for our regular listeners, we're going to be off next week. We'll be posting episode 22 on August 18th. This is a story about what you'd have to call gallantry in the skies over Germany during World War II. It's a story that concerns basically two men, an American bomber pilot named Charles Brown and a German fighter ace named Franz Stiegler. And even Brown says that it's really a story about Franz Stiegler and his generosity of spirit, basic humanity, I think, and the last place you'd ever expect to find them. What happened was that on December 20th, 1943, Brown was part of a bombing mission that went across from an American airbase in the United Kingdom across the North Sea and into Germany

to bomb the town of Bremen, which they did. This was Brown's first mission, and it went, unfortunately, terribly, terribly badly for him. During the approach to the bombing run, they were hit badly by anti-aircraft fire, which knocked out two of his plane's engines, which made them start to straggle backward and made them a prime target for more than 12 German fighter pilots. So his plane was just terribly badly shot up. They lost their oxygen, hydraulic, and electrical systems, and the rudder and an elevator were lost. The tail gunner was killed, and most of the crew were wounded, including Brown himself, who was hit in the right shoulder. Because they lost the oxygen, he actually passed out and came to watching the ground zooming

up at him. The plane was diving and he managed to pull out of the dive with only a thousand feet to spare. So now they're all injured and exhausted and terrified in a very badly damaged plane over enemy territory. The rest of the formation is gone now. And there doesn't seem to be anything to do except try to limp all the way back to the UK, which means not just getting across the North Sea, but even getting that far means getting across this heavily fortified area of the German coast, which has a lot of anti-aircraft batteries. And they're in no position to deal with any of this, but there just doesn't seem to be any alternative to it. So Charlie Brown starts limping back across Germany, trying to get back to England, when the worst thing that could happen happened. They were spotted by this German fighter ace, Franz Stigler, who was on the ground refueling and who recognized them as an American bomber and took off and caught up to them, which should have been the end of the story. They were an easy target for any fighter.

And Stigler was decorated and had 22 missions to his credit. This would have been easy for him to take care of. But as he approached them, he found that the tail gunner and the bomber didn't return any fire. He wasn't being fired on, and so rather than take down the plane immediately, he sort of began to register how badly damaged the American plane was. He saw that the bomber's left stabilizer had been shot away. The tail gunner's compartment had been obliterated by shell fragments. He could see the tail gunner's fleece collar of his coat was red with blood, and there were icicles of blood hanging from his guns, which weren't firing. Yeah, it was just terrible.

So the more he looked at it, the more he sort of marveled that this plane was flying at all. Every foot of the bomber's metal was studded with bullet holes, which had flaked away the paint. The waist gun was missing. The top gun turret was empty. The radio room was blown apart, and the bomber's plexiglass

nose had been blown away. So the thing is just barely airworthy at all. And in fact, you could even see inside it. Exploding shells had stripped away the plane's skin, so he could look basically through its ribs and see the crew inside trying to care for their wounded. And he began to have some misgivings about shooting this plane out of the sky. It's true it had bombed Bremen, but it was no danger to anyone at this moment, and he couldn't really justify shooting them down, even though it was no danger to anyone at this moment, and he couldn't really justify

shooting them down, even though it was an enemy plane. He could remember the words of one of his own commanding officers who'd said, Your fighter pilots first, last, always. If I ever hear of any of you shooting at someone in a parachute, I'll shoot you myself. And he later said, To me, it was just like they were in a parachute. I saw them and I couldn't shoot them down. They were just so helpless that he couldn't bring himself to kill them.

As I said, this was Brown, the American pilot's first mission. Stigler had already achieved 22 victories. There's a number of things you have to know about Franz Stigler. One is that this would have been super easy for him to do. In fact, he stood to win a Knight's Cross if he did it, the highest award for Nazi

bravery in battle. If he took down one more plane, he would win that. And this cross if he did it, the highest award for Nazi bravery in battle. If he took down one more plane, he would win that. And this would be very easy to do in this case. And even more important, he himself faced execution if he didn't do it, because having the opportunity to take down an enemy plane and foregoing it amounts to treason. It's sort of a betrayal of his country's cause. So not only would letting them go be contrary to his own best interest, but it would actually endanger his own life. But he couldn't bring himself to do it.

He thought, this will be no victory for me. I will not have this on my conscience for the rest of my life. The Americans could see that he was back there, but didn't know who he was or why he wasn't killing them. Americans could see that he was back there, but didn't know who he was or why he wasn't killing them. The ball turret gunner remembered, he said, he came up on our right wing so close that his wing actually overlapped ours. I kept my dead guns trained on him. We looked directly at each other. So Stiegler is sort of shadowing them at this point, but not firing and just kind of escorting them, I guess is what you'd have to call it. I guess that could have been pretty perplexing for the Americans.

It was. You have to remember, they were in shock at this point. If you remember, Brown said that he, remember he had passed out. So Brown confusedly thought that this was one of the fighter pilots that had attacked them during the approach to the bombing run. And perhaps he wasn't firing because he'd run out of ammunition or something. They didn't know what to make of them. It's very scary to have one of these fighters right on your wing yeah but they had no way to communicate with them and they they were had enough to handle just

trying to fly this damaged plane home and attend to their wounded um so brown figured this out sort of one by one the crew became aware that they were being escorted by this German plane. The way that Brown, the pilot, became aware of it was Hugh struggling to fly the plane and worrying about engine four, which is out to the right. So he glanced out past the co-pilot's window to see the engine and saw this, he called it the world's worst nightmare, just sitting on his wing.

This nasty, dangerous-looking German fighter pilot flying along beside them and not firing. So that's already a huge life-saving favor that Stigler has done them, but he does them two more, or tries to. One is that, as I mentioned, they have to get, in order to get out into the North Sea, they have to get out of Germany, which means crossing this big, heavily fortified anti-aircraft battery on the coast, which would normally have had no trouble shooting them down. They're just a sitting duck up there,

an American bomber trying to fly slowly home. But what they actually saw instead would look like an American bomber escorted by a German fighter, which is hard to understand. Why would a fighter ever escort a bomber? They thought perhaps that it was a captured American bomber that was being flown out for reconnaissance or something. But in any case, it's being escorted by a German fighter, so they can't afford to fire on it. Because they might hit the German fighter. Yeah, so they didn't fire. And that means that in that sense, Stigler spared them twice. He didn't shoot them down himself and he... His presence. Yeah, prevented them from being fired on by the anti-aircraft battery. So they got safely out of Germany and out over the North Sea.

And even that isn't the end of his goodwill. As I said, Brown, the only thing he could think to do in his shock was just to try to fly all the way back home to the UK. But Stigler, the German pilot, realized that Sweden was only 30 minutes away in flying time. Sweden, in the war, was neutral, and under the rules, they would be allowed to land there, but then they'd be interned, meaning they'd just basically have to sit out the rest of the war. But they'd be safe. But they'd be safe, and they could land safely and get medical care, and that's preferable to trying to fly across the North Sea and failing and ditching and drowning.

Right. Which seemed like really the most likely outcome otherwise. So Stiegler realized this, but the Americans didn't. And Stiegler began mouthing the word Sweden to the co-pilot, who you can imagine had no idea what to make of that, and just shrugged at him. So Stiegler switched over to the left side, to the pilot side of the plane, and mouthedened to him. And Brown, also uncomprehending, just shook his head, confused.

So Stiegler said later, he ignored my signals. He and his crew needed doctors. I kept motioning to him, but he kept going, both arms wrapped tightly around the controls. The bomber, I believed, was doomed to crash in the sea. All aboard would be killed. So finally, the Americans, it's like being shattered by a hornet or something. They're just very worried about this thing and can't understand why he's not firing on them. So finally, Brown, the pilot, ordered his flight engineer up into the top turret,

which had working guns. And when Stiegler saw the guns revolving toward him, he finally peeled away. He saluted to the pilot before he did so and then peeled away and flew back to his base saying to himself good luck you're in god's hands so what this amounted to is the two enemies ostensibly had flown for together for 10 minutes which is a very long time without exchanging a word and uh stiegler flew back to his base and didn't tell his superiors what had happened for for obvious reasons, Brown actually did manage to get all the way across the North Sea and back to his American air

base in England and did tell his superiors, who asked him not to share the story with others unless they come to think sympathetically of enemy pilots, which you can understand given the circumstances, but it's kind of unfortunate that that story like that gets suppressed. So both of them lived past the rest of the war. And then after that, Brown went to college and returned to the Air Force. He later served as a foreign service officer with the State Department and finally retired in Florida. So decades have gone by. Unbeknownst to him, in the meantime, Stiegler had moved to Canada in 1953 and became a successful businessman there.

But they didn't know each other's names. They didn't know anything, except both of them knew this strange experience they'd both been through. So in 1986, 40 years after the war now, Brown began searching for this German pilot who had spared him and has almost nothing to go on and spent four fruitless years trying to get any leaves at all. almost nothing to go on and spent four fruitless years trying to get any leads at all. Finally, uh, he wrote to a combat pilot association newsletter and explaining the story and asking if anyone could get any leads and received a letter from Stiegler

in Canada, which must've been a shock. Yeah. Uh, saying he was now living in Canada and the two, uh, got in touch and realized because they both knew so many details about the story that they must, you know, this must really be Stiegler and Brown. And they became very close friends and actually

died within several months of each other in 2008. I'll put a video of interviews with them shortly after the reunion in the show notes. It's interesting to see that they're both really obviously moved by telling the story, but Stiegler, interestingly, seems even more moved than Brown. He just seems like a really decent man, and it was really, I don't know, touched by the whole experience. So the whole thing, in my mind, is a testament to Stiegler's humanity. Asked later why he hadn't fired on Brown's shattered bomber, he said, I looked across at the tail gunner, and all I could see was blood running down his gun barrels. I could see into Brown's plane, see through the hole, see how they were all shot up. They were trying to help each other. And he recalled the

words of his commanding officer, you follow the rules of war for you, not your enemy. You fight by rules to keep your humanity. We'll have a link to our story about Charlie Brown and Franz Stiegler, as well as the video interviews with both of them, in our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. If you've been enjoying the esoteric trivia that we talk about in these podcasts, you should be sure to check out our book, Futility Closet, an idler's miscellany of compendious amusements, which contains hundreds of intriguing distractions, as well as wordplay, puzzles, paradoxes, and other bite-sized amusements and conundrums. Look for it on Amazon or iTunes and discover why other readers have called it

awesome and addictive and small increments of joy. On July 8th on Futility Closet, I ran a post about the British nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton. That post wasn't about his writing, it was about this unfortunate episode in his youth when he was 21 years old on his 21st birthday in 1881, his father, who he called the most selfish man he'd ever knew or heard of, called him into his study and presented him with a bill for every, he had an itemized list of every penny he'd ever spent on rearing him, all the way back to the doctor's bill for his delivery. It came to $537.50 and he asked to be reimbursed for that, or he was going to start charging him 6% interest. And Seton, who already knew how selfish he was, was staggered by this,

and basically left for Manitoba and never spoke to him again, but he did pay the bill. Anyway, I knew at that time who Ernest Thompson Seton was because I'd written about him before, four years ago in April 2010, when I wrote a post about the fact that he believed that animals follow the Ten Commandments. Seton went on to be a famous nature writer about 100 years ago. interest in nature because the first United States National Park, Yellowstone, opened in 1872, and then six more opened in up to 1900. So there was just a lot of interest in nature in general, and people were getting used to the idea of the theory of evolution. And so there was just a lot of interest in that sort of thing, and a lot of writers accordingly writing and making successful careers of it, including John Muir and John Burroughs.

But so one of those was Seton, who had written in 1898 a book called Wild Animals Have I Known, which was a collection of stories, which was actually one of the most popular books of its day. Anyway, this particular piece, which he called The Natural History of the Ten Commandments, was originally started as a magazine article in the century in November 1907, but he turned it into a book later on. And in it, he says, basically, he's been developing a theory that he says the Ten Commandments are not arbitrary laws given to man, but are fundamental laws of all creation. And he says if that's true, then we ought to see evidence of it in the natural world,

and particularly in the animal kingdom. If an animal breaks one of the Ten Commandments, it ought to pay some negative consequence for it, either by being punished by its own kind or just, you know, some outcome will befall it because that's just not what nature wants them to do. Okay. And he goes through in the article and in the book, giving examples of this, he says from his own experience, and I'll run through some of those briefly here. For instance, thou shalt not kill. He says, newborn rattlesnakes will strike instantly at a stranger of any other species, but never at one of themselves,

meaning they're instinctively guided away from killing each other because this is divine law. Because of the commandment, not for any other reason. No. And I think you sort of have to read between the lines here. He's not saying that individual animals have reflective intelligence that lets them draw moral. So it's not that the individual animals have a sense of morality. No, but other nature writers at the same time were saying that. There's one in particular, William Long, who wrote chiefly for children,

who said things, he said animals run schools in order to teach each other how to do things. He insisted he had seen a woodcock fashion a cast for its leg out of clay and straw, just completely anthropomorphizing animals and then writing stories for children about that. So there were some writers who were saying exactly that, that animals are little people and there's this thriving society out in the woods. That we're just not aware of. And that's what drove, for instance, John Muir and John Burroughs crazy. Because there are other, I think, better credentialed or clearer eyed nature writers who thought this was a poppycock and started to call them on it. And that's what starts to happen here.

Seton is not saying that. She thought this was a poppycock and started to call them on it. And that's what starts to happen here. Seton is not saying that. Seton is saying this is instinctive, but he's also saying that it's there, that they're at least following the Ten Commandments. Here's some more of the commandments and his evidence for the fact that they're following them. Honor thy father and mother. He says if a hen sets out foraging with her chicks and one falls behind

and doesn't attend to her when she clucks at him to catch up, he gets lost and dies. And that's... Oh, so that's due to the commandment, not any other reason. Right. Okay. Thou shalt not commit adultery. This is... He has a lot to say about monogamy.

Yeah, I was going to be very curious about this. The trouble with adultery is that you bring on epidemic plagues onto your species if you're too promiscuous. You are? He has a lot to say. He looks down his nose at particularly northwestern rabbits and voles. He says, of rabbits wild or tame, the least said the better. He thinks rabbits are total sluts.

But he says, so it is extremely interesting to note, this is his words, interesting to note that the animals and their blind groping for an ideal form of union have gone through the same stages and arrived at exactly the same conclusion as humans. He says monogamy is the best solution to the marriage question and is the rule among all the higher and most successful animals. For instance, he greatly admires gray wolves. He says not only have they through strict monogamy eliminated much possibility of disease and given their young the advantage of two wise protectors, possibility of disease and given their young the advantage of two wise protectors, but they have even developed a spirit of chivalry, that is, the male shows consideration for the female in the non-mating season on account of her sex. And he admires this. So he thinks the higher up the scale you go toward monogamy, the more sort of advanced your species is. And says as much, quoting the

commandment, he says, to sum up, there is evidence that in the animal world there has long been a groping after an ideal form of marriage. Beginning with promiscuity, they have worked through many stages into pure monogamy and other things equal. Species owing to natural laws are successful in proportion as they have reached it and therefore have developed an instinctive recognition of the seventh commandment. See, I would just love to see what his data is on that because, I mean, so many animal species are not monogamous. I know. I think are rather successful in that, but I would love to see what his, you know, thesis is. Reviewers at the time weren't sure he was serious, but if you read the book and you read the article, there's not a whiff of humor in it.

Wow. He's really convinced of this. Okay. Stealing. He's worked out to an actual law. He says the animal law is, quote, the producer owns the product. Unproduced property belongs to him who discovers and possesses it.

One example of this he gives is, he says, a stick found in the woods is the property of the rook that discovers it and doubly his when he's labored to bring it to his nest. This is recognized law. He gives another example of an Eskimo dog, a little one, that found a bone and hit it. And a larger dog saw him do this and started to approach the bone,

and the little dog ran in front of it and defended it courageously, when he would certainly have lost an outright fight against this larger dog, at which the larger dog slunk away shamefully, apparently, because it knew in its soul that stealing was wrong. That it was morally wrong, yeah. All the data are just anecdotes of this that he insists he's seen, and that other people think you can't possibly have seen that because it doesn't happen. Just a couple more of these.

Thou shalt not bear a false witness, he says. Oftentimes a very young dog will jump at a conclusion, think, or hope he has the trail. Then, allowing his enthusiasm to carry him away, give the first tongue, shouting in dog language, trail, and the other dogs run to this, but if a careful examination shows that he was wrong, the announcer suffers

in the opinion of the pack, and after a few such blunders, the individual is entirely discredited. See? I see. I'm increasingly convinced. And the last one I have here is thou shalt not covet. He cites the example of a hen that had made a nest in a certain place and another hen basically commandeered the nest and wound up breaking all the eggs. The eggs of both hens were destroyed. So there you go again, just violating this natural law,

which sort of pervades the universe, brings on bad consequences. Does he think that animals actually keep the Sabbath? No, that's the interesting thing. If you're counting here, I've gone through six examples and he stops there, which I guess there's a certain honesty in that. He says, I could find nothing in the animal world that seems to suggest any relation to a supreme being, which means you throw out the first four commandments. He didn't think

thank God he didn't try to contend that animals avoid working on Sunday, they don't avoid taking the Lord's name in vain, and they don't make graven images. I mean, they don't avoid making graven images. I suppose they do not take the Lord's name in vain. Yeah, you can argue that. So maybe they're keeping seven

of them then. But that doesn't demolish his whole theory. He just says, he concludes the first four commandments have a purely spiritual bearing. The last six are physical, he says. Man is concerned with all the animals, only with the last six.

But he did stick to that and turned this whole idea into a book supported again by anecdotes left and right that only he could possibly have seen. Right, that he reads into these situations. So as I say, he was writing this way, and as I said, William Long was writing even more anthropomorphically about animals and getting other naturalists increasingly irate.

John Burroughs said at one point, suppose, one of Long's arguments was he was writing for children, and he said, if you can sort of write engaging stories with moral points, it's a way of interesting children in the natural world and in morality, moral teachings. And Burroughs wrote back quite sensibly saying, suppose we found that someone had been teaching children that Washington had crossed the Delaware in a balloon.

That's vivid. It's entertaining. I'm sure it would interest kids in history, but it's not true. It didn't happen. You can't just make stuff up. So they were sniping back and forth about this when the person, more than anyone who really settled this, believe it or not, is Teddy Roosevelt, the sitting president of the United States of America, who basically wrote an article in Everybody's Magazine in September 1907 saying, cut it out, which is an extraordinary step for a sitting president to take. Roosevelt obviously was an avid hunter and outdoorsman,

so I think it was kind of close to his heart. But I think it's striking that he would go to that expedient. He wrote basically excoriating Long, the one who was really anthropomorphizing animals in these stories, and said, here's a quote from Teddy Roosevelt. In one story, a wolf is portrayed as guiding

home some lost children in a spirit of thoughtful kindness. Again, one of these storybook wolves, when starving, catches a red squirrel, which he takes around as a present to propitiate a bigger wolf. If any man seriously thinks a starving wolf would act in this manner, let him study hounds when feeding, even when they're not starving. And he particularly took him to task about this one other episode he'd written about where he said wolves were hunting a caribou, and one wolf would sort of lean under the fleeing caribou and bite right through its heart,

which is, if nothing else, anatomically impossible. So Roosevelt just very publicly sort of scorned all of these sort of anthropomorphizing just-so stories that Seton and particularly Long were writing. And that sort of put an end to it. I mean, the whole thing was probably starting to die out anyway, but having the President of the United States sort of lean on you, I think, is enough to sort of give any writer pause, I think. So that was sort of the end of it. The whole controversy was known as the Nature Fakers controversy,

but Seton and Long were really at the heart of it. Nature Fakers? Yeah, that was the title of roosevelt's article someone else had coined the phrase but basically it's the idea that you can't blind yourself studying nature is great studying uh the even studying the behavior of individuals within a species is totally fine but you can't start out by deciding what you're going to find and let that blind you to looking at seeing what you're doing. Right. I mean, that's bad science to decide what you want the answer to be and then try to cherry pick and look for anecdotes that support what you've already decided you're trying to find. Yeah. Which is bad science. Exactly.

Exactly. That's, that's all this turned out to be. So it's a, I guess a good lesson now for today's biologists, but it's kind of now become an entertaining episode from the biology of the past. We'll have links to our posts about Ernest Thompson Seton in our show notes. So this is our lateral thinking puzzle segment. This week, Greg will be giving me a scenario, and I'm going to have to try to solve it using just yes or no questions. I want a catchy name for this segment.

If you have a catchy name for this segment, send us one. Right. We need a different name, yes. Okay. You ready? Okay. A man tells his nephew that his dog will be shot. The boy is overwhelmed with grief, but discovers a little later that the dog is fine. What's going on? Shot with a gun?

Yes. Okay, not shot, like getting vaccinations shot. Oh, that's good. I didn't think about that. Yeah, okay. Okay, a man tells his nephew, the nephew is a human boy. Yes, very good.

A man tells his nephew that his dog, the man's dog? No. The nephew's dog. Yes. Yes. Very good. Man tells his nephew that his dog, the man's dog? No. The nephew's dog. Yes. Will be shot. Yes. With a gun. Yes. Okay. Shot with a gun that shoots metal bullets. Yes. Not a water gun or something. You're very good at this. Okay. His dog will be shot with metal bullets, not like a tranquilizer dart or... Correct. Yes. And the nephew is upset. Yes. Because he thinks his dog is going to be shot with a metal bullet. Right.

And then a little while later, the dog is fine. Yes. Was the dog shot? No. Were they play acting or making a movie or, you know, doing this as some kind of game or pretense? Yes. They were acting? No.

This was a game? No. This was some kind of pretense? I'm trying to think what I asked, and you said yes to it. So they were, okay. The man said to the, the uncle said that the dog was going to be shot. Yes. And he said that not meaning it literally as the truth. No, that's not true.

He meant it literally as the truth. When he said your dog is going to be shot, he knew that this was a true statement in real life. No, he was... No. I'm sorry, say that again. So he didn't... When he said your dog is going to be shot, he did not mean that to be a true statement in real life. There was some kind of pretense or deception. Yes, yes, pretense or deception, yes.

Okay, it was pretense? Uh, yes. It was deception. It was deception. He needed the nephew to be crying because the nephew was an actor and he needed to cry for a scene. So he said your dog is going to be shot to get the nephew to be crying because the nephew was an actor and he needed to cry for a scene so he said your dog's gonna be shot to get the boy to start crying you're amazingly good at this is that it is it i'm sorry to say this is true oh oh jackie cooper

the child star from the 1930s in 1931 starred in a film called skippy and there's a scene in there that the film was directed by his uncle a man named norm Skippy. And there's a scene in there. The film was directed by his uncle, a man named Norman Tarog. And there's a scene in there where Jackie Cooper had, his character had to cry convincingly. And they couldn't get Jackie Cooper. Jackie Cooper was a gifted actor, but they couldn't get him quite to do it the way that Norman wanted him to. So Jackie was nine years old at the time and had a dog on the set.

And so what Tarog resorted to was having them lead the dog off the stage. And then there was a security guard there. The guard drew his gun from its holster, walked off the stage out of sight with the dog and fired the gun. Oh, my. This really happened. And Jackie Cooper, you can imagine, was beside himself, cried so much that he said I could, this is, he wrote this in his 1981 memoir, which is called Please Don't Shoot My Dog. Oh, no. He said, I could visualize my dog bloody from that one awful shot.

I began sobbing so hysterically that it was almost too much for the scene. that it was almost too much for the scene. Norman had to quiet me down by saying that perhaps my dog had survived the shot, that if I had hurried and calmed down a little and did the scene the way he wanted, we would go and see if my dog was still alive. Oh, that's just mean. So I did the scene as best I could. That is so mean.

So they did the scene. I've got a clip of it. I'll put it in the show notes. He's really an amazingly good actor, especially for nine years old. But that scene, the film is a comedy, but that one scene is really sort of pathetic, especially with this horrible scene behind it. Anyway, he still didn't get over it. They got through the scene, and he found his dog was okay, but then he writes, that night I couldn't eat, and I couldn't stop crying, and I couldn't sleep. They had to call a doctor who came and gave me a little something to calm me down.

I kept throwing up and crying, and I was a mess. The shot the doctor gave me let me go to sleep. In the morning, my grandmother said that I had worried everybody. I felt very bad about that. Two more things about this. This is 1931. Jackie Cooper was actually nominated for Best Actor for his portrayal in that movie. He was nine years old, which is a record at the time.

That's one thing. Even more amazing is that this evil director, Norman Tarrag, his uncle, was nominated for and won Best Director. Oh, wow. And in the book, believe it or not, Jackie Cooper says, looking back, I think he deserved it. He thought his methods were reprehensible, but he thought the movie he made was good. Anyway, he was still bitter. Since he wrote this memoir in 1981, this is now 50 years after the fact, and Jackie Cooper wrote, later people tried to rationalize to me that I had gained more than I lost by being a child star. They talked to me about the money I had made. They cited the exciting things I had done,

the people I had met, the career training I'd had, all that and much more. But no amount of rationalization, no excuses can make up for what a kid loses, what I lost, when a normal childhood is abandoned for an early movie career. Oh, wow. So it's a terrible story, but you figured it out almost instantly. Well done. That's a very interesting story. If any of our listeners have any puzzles that they'd like to see us try to use in this segment... Especially for Sharon, because she's so wickedly good at solving these things.

You can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That's it for this episode. You can see our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com, where you can post comments or questions, listen to past shows, and see the links mentioned in today's episode. You can also email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. If you enjoy Futility Closet, be sure to look for the book on Amazon.com or check out the website at futilitycloset.com, Thank you. Click the donate button in the sidebar of the website or leave a review of the book or podcast on Amazon or iTunes. Our music was written and produced by Doug Ross.

Futility Closet is a member of the Boing Boing family of podcasts. Thanks for listening.