Futility Closet - 077-The Sourdough Expedition

Episode Date: October 12, 2015

In 1910, four Alaskan gold miners set out to climb Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America, to win a two-cent bar bet. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the surprising story of the Sourdough Expedition, a mountaineering effort that one modern climber calls "superhuman by today's standards." We'll also hear about a ghoulish tourist destination and puzzle over why a painter would blame himself for World War II. Sources for our feature on the Sourdough expedition: Bill Sherwonit, "The Sourdough Expedition," Alaska 68:4 (May/June 2002), 28. Jason Strykowski, "Impossible Heights: The Alaskan Miners Who Conquered Mount McKinley," Wild West 24:4 (December 2011), 20. Terrence Cole, ed., The Sourdough Expedition, 1985. W.F. Thompson, "First Account of Conquering Mt. McKinley," New York Times, June 5, 1910. Listener mail: The Telegraph has a photo of the mummies in the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo, Sicily. Wikipedia has a photo of Rosalia Lombardo, the immaculately preserved 2-year-old embalmed in 1920, and another appears here: Karen Lange, "Lost 'Sleeping Beauty' Mummy Formula Found," National Geographic News, Jan. 26, 2009 (accessed 10/10/2015). This week's lateral thinking puzzle is from Paul Sloane and Des MacHale's 2005 book Outstanding Lateral Thinking Puzzles. You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, and all contributions are greatly appreciated. You can change or cancel your pledge at any time, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation via the Donate button in the sidebar of the Futility Closet website. 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 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 77. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1910, four Alaskan gold miners set out to climb Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America, just to prove that it could be done. In today's show, we'll tell the story of the Sourdough Expedition, a mountaineering adventure that one modern climber calls superhuman by today's standards.

We'll also hear about the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo and puzzle over why a painter would blame himself for World War II. This podcast is made possible by all our patrons. There definitely would not be a Futility Closet podcast if it weren't for the amazing support of our fans. Last December, Greg and I started a Patreon campaign and set a minimum goal for what it would take to cover the many hours a week it takes us to make a good show. And we are now at 97% of that goal.

So thank you to everyone who has been supporting the show. And if you would like to join them and help us keep making this podcast, please check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the link in our show notes. The highest mountain peak in North America is Denali, which has a summit elevation of 20,310 feet above sea level. This made some headlines recently, at least in the United States, because its former official name had been Mount McKinley, and that has been changed now officially to Denali, which is the native Alaskan name that many Alaskans have always used for it. What's interesting, one of the many interesting things about the mountain is its early climbing history is murky. About 100 years ago, a number of

expeditions made attempts on the summit that were sort of equivocal or dubious or poorly documented, so it's hard to know who actually made it to the top first. The first of these was by a New York physician named Frederick Cook, who had made two bids for the summit, one in 1903 and one in 1906. He claimed he had made it after the second of those two, and he published a book called To the Top of the Continent, but that was always kind of looked on grumblingly by particularly Alaskans. First of all, because Cook was an Easterner

and didn't know the region's harsh conditions well. And second, because his claims just seemed dubious. It wasn't at all clear to them that he actually had made it to the top. I guess he had no verification or witnesses or anything. Well, I'll get into that later. He put forward some purported proof, like photographs and maps and things at the time, but particularly people who knew that area well kind of started to see holes in it. It was widely accepted at the time, but in Alaska in particular, people had their doubts.

And that controversy was inflamed three years later in September 1909 when Cook claimed to have reached the North Pole first. This is the same Frederick Cook who had sort of raised Robert Perry up there. Cook came back first and said he had made it to the pole. And then Perry came back and said, no, I don't believe that's correct. I think I did. And as people looked into it, it looked like most of the evidence seemed to support Perry. Well, that got back to Alaska and the Alaskans who had doubted him from the first said, well, if he wasn't quite right about reaching the North Pole, how do we know we can trust him that he reached the top of Mount McKinley? One of the skeptics was a man named Thomas Lloyd, who was a Welshman, actually.

He'd been born in 1860 and then had emigrated to Utah, where he served as a sheriff for a while. And then in the Klondike Gold Rush, he moved to Alaska and settled in the Kentinchina Hills, which is a mining community north of the mountain. In November 1909, this whole story is glorious. In November 1909, he was sitting in a saloon in Fairbanks discussing this whole debacle with a bartender whose name was Bill McPhee. And they got to talking about how hard it would be for anyone to climb Mount McKinley. The bartender, McPhee, said he didn't believe that any living man could make the ascent. Lloyd, who was a very accomplished outdoorsman, said he'd recently ventured up much of the mountain. McPhee said that Lloyd was too old.

He was over 50 years old at the time and overweight. Said he doubted that. And Lloyd said that for two cents, he'd showed it could be done. So everything I am about to tell you was done for a bar bet of two cents. Two cents. This was later sort of expanded. McPhee got together $500 and offered that sum to anyone who would climb the mountain and, quote, prove whether that fellow cook made the climb or not.

And they got two other businessmen to chip in 500 bucks apiece. So that was enough money to actually fund an expedition. And Lloyd accepted that challenge and put one together. He didn't go for sort of the elite explorers like Cook, who had a lot of experience with high altitude exploration. What he went for were other people he knew, basically, other gold miners and prospectors and outdoorsmen from that region, who he thought would be better to try climbing the mountain. And this whole thing is just preposterous.

He basically tried for the mountain with himself and three other men, only one of whom was under 40 years old. His mining partner, a man named Billy Taylor, was 27, but they also brought two of their longtime employees. Charlie McGonigal was 40 years old and Pete Anderson was 42. This whole undertaking is known as the Sourdough Expedition because that's what these sorts of miners were called. They favored using sourdough to make bread and that's just sort of what people called them. So this is called the Sourdough Expedition. They may have lacked fitness, but they knew the area well and they had years of experience in the mines around the mountain,

and so they were familiar with the terrain and the temperatures, and they were all very accomplished in hunting and dog sledding, so they were just very accomplished outdoorsmen. Thirty years after the climb, Taylor said, he just knew fellers who were pretty skookum, which is a fine word that I had to look up, which means strong or heroic, and which they certainly proved on this whole trip. They packed not as if they were packing for a mountaineering expedition,

but mostly just as if they were going prospecting. In hindsight, this looks like intelligent insight. Without hindsight, it looks like reckless arrogance. Yeah, I was going to say, or maybe just what they knew. Like they're packing for what they knew. Yeah, the whole thing is just crazy. They brought basically only the bare essentials. Dried fruit, dried meat, coffee, and donuts.

Donuts. That's what they went up Mount McKinley with. Donuts. They mushed out of Fairbanks in December 1909 with four horses, a mule, and a dog team. There were actually seven men in the party to begin with, but three of them quit before the actual climbing started, so they were just down to the four that I named. December might seem like a strange time of year to try to climb a mountain in Alaska, but they chose the dead of winter because the ice and snow would be relatively stable then. Apparently, in the other seasons, the glaciers and ice fields can shift around, which increases the danger. So that is sensible.

They knew that, at least. That helped them. increases the danger. So that is sensible. They knew that at least. That helped them. The whole expedition would last four months. So they left Fairbanks and no one heard anything from them, except for one brief communication, in four months.

The best part of this, or one of many great parts of this, is that if they did get to the top, they needed some way to prove it. That was the whole problem with Cook's claim. His claim was dubious. So the way they chose to do this was to carry with them a 14-foot spruce flagpole with a 6-by-12-foot American flag, thinking that if they got to the top, they would just plant a giant flag up there, and then from a rooftop in Fairbanks, with a good telescope, you might be able to see the flag.

Or if not from Fairbanks, then at least from Continchina, which is closer. But that was the whole sort of solution to how they were demonstrably going to prove that they'd gotten up there was just to plant a gigantic flag, which meant carrying a 14-foot spruce flagpole up what turned out to be an extremely steep mountain. They spent most of February establishing camps in the foothills on the north side of the mountain, and then on March 1st, Lloyd wrote in his diary, they began prospecting for the big climb. More craziness here. They traveled unroped, mostly when you're climbing up McKinley.

Modern mountaineers would consider this foolhardy. You want to rope yourself to the people just for safety. It's not clear why they didn't. Years later, Taylor simply said didn't need them. No one knows quite what that means. They had no special alpine mountain climbing gear. They wore climbing gear. What they had was very basic. They had snowshoes, homemade crampons, and these crude ice axes. They wore bib overalls, long underwear, shirts,

parkas, mittens, and insulated rubber boots. Their scientific equipment included a barometer, which they soon lost, a $5 Kodak camera, a watch, a thermometer, and Tom Lloyd's memorandum book. The loss of the barometer is important because they were going to use that to measure their elevation as they went up. So Tom Lloyd kept notes of where he thought they were in the journal, but those have been shown later to be wildly off because they didn't have a way to measure their altitude. So they didn't actually know where they were on the mountain. Yeah, and in fact, for that reason, to this day, no one knows with perfect accuracy quite what the route up the mountain was because there's no way to, I mean, it's been reconstructed very well, but they don't quite know perfectly because they just didn't have a way to measure

quite how high they were. Anyway, they got up there with their pole. They made their first attempt on the summit on April 1st, 1910, but stormy weather turned them back. And then Taylor Anderson and McGonagall tried again two days later on the 3rd, bringing a bag of donuts, three thermos bottles of hot chocolate, and their pole. Lloyd, the guy who had led this whole expedition and who started the whole thing with the bet, was down below for reasons that aren't clear. It's thought that perhaps he was suffering from altitude sickness, so he wasn't with them when they actually made the attempt on the summit.

And in fact, McGonagall also stopped a few hundred feet below the summit itself. He told a historian later, No, I didn't go clear to the top. Why should I? I'd finished my return carrying the pole before we got there. Taylor and Pete finished the job. I sat down and rested, then went back to camp. Which seems like a very strange thing to say, to go all that way and stop just a few hundred feet short of the goal.

No one quite knows why he stopped either, but it's speculated that possibly he too was suffering from altitude sickness. I just didn't want to say that. Yeah, but that left Taylor and Anderson to go on to the top, which they did. Late in the afternoon of April 3, 1910, they got to the top of the North Peak, which is 19,470 feet. Just to be clear about this, the mountain has two peaks, a North Peak and a South Peak. The South Peak is actually a little bit higher by 850 feet, but the North Peak, my

sources say, is actually recognized as the more difficult ascent. It's not clear why they didn't go for the South Peak. Two possible reasons are that they just didn't realize that the south was a bit higher. And also, if you remember, they were going to prove all this by planting a giant flagpole. Right. And that was hoped to be visible either from Fairbanks or from Contention, both of which are north of the mountain. So they'd want to plant it in a position on the mountaintop that was visible from points to the north. That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense.

Taylor remembered 27 years later that they spent two and a half hours on the summit, though the temperature reached as low as minus 30 Fahrenheit that day. He said it was colder than hell. Mids and everything was all ice. They tried to plant the flagpole on the very top and couldn't get it in. They were forced to plant it a few hundred feet below the top. He said, quote, We built a pyramid of rocks about 15 inches high, and we dug down in the ice so the pole had a support of about 30 inches and was held by four guy lines, just cotton ropes. We fastened the guy lines to little spurs of rock.

And then they climbed back down, collected McGonagall, and went all the way back down to the camp where Lloyd was. That climb, I mean, leaving aside the fact that they made it to the North Peak safely, that day's climb is an astonishing piece of mountaineering. They climbed altogether more than 8,000 vertical feet and descended to the camp in 18 total hours of climbing, which one of my sources says

is an outstanding mountaineering feat by any standard. By comparison, most modern McKinley expeditions climbed no more than 3,000 to 4,000 vertical feet on summit day. That's about half the distance. And that typically takes 10 to 15 hours. So this, for people who weren't mountaineers, it's an amazing bit of climbing, even leaving aside the summit. So they've got safely back down to the bottom of the mountain. And the other three just returned to Cantisna. They had accomplished what they set out to do.

They didn't think of themselves as mountain climbers. They were just miners, so they went back to mining. And Tom Lloyd went back to Fairbanks to collect his two cents and told everyone that the party had reached the peak and raised the pole, and this is significant, that they'd found no evidence on the way to substantiate Frederick Cook's claims to have made the summit. Just to close that loop, Cook's claim fell apart. A lot of it was based on a photograph called The Summit of Mount McKinley

that was later shown, someone figured out he'd actually taken it fully 19 miles away from the mountain. It was just, the whole thing was just put together. In fact, the ridge that he did shoot is entertainingly now known as Fake Peak. So Cook didn't do it, and Lloyd explained that they had. The story made headlines around the country,

brought a congratulatory telegram from William Howard Taft. The New York Times had bought rights to the story, and on June 5th, 1910, they published a three-page firsthand account by Lloyd of this whole wonderful story. The problem is that here it starts to fall apart, and I think this is tied in with Thomas Lloyd's personality, really. He claimed more than had actually happened. He claimed that all four men had made it to the top and that they'd climbed not just the North Peak but also the South Peak.

Oh. Which is unfortunate. Yeah. Like he didn't need to have embellished it like that. Right. North Peak, but also the South Peak. Oh. Which is unfortunate. Yeah. Like he didn't need to have embellished it like that. Right. I mean, the truth is good enough. Yeah. No one knows.

Apparently, from what people say in these accounts, a lot of this is just tied in with his personality, which is hard to read at a distance. But I was thinking as I was researching this, if he was actually down below nursing a cold or altitude sickness, and the other three were trying for the summit, you could sort of see why he would be reluctant. He'd been the one who put the whole thing together and made the bet. Right, and he wouldn't want to acknowledge that.

He wouldn't want to acknowledge that that was the case. But the answer is not to just acknowledge it. Right, and well, why claim that they climbed both peaks, too, which is that's going to be really hard to substantiate. Yeah, and so it started to fall apart. People began to express skepticism, and varying claims began to circulate. One big problem is that no one could see the pole, this whole big plan of seeing it with a telescope. Oh, nobody could see it.

So, understandably, people began to express some real skepticism. They couldn't see any evidence, and his claims, there were varying claims going about. Apparently, Lloyd always maintained that all four of them had made it to the top, but apparently privately to some friends he had acknowledged that he had been down below and that got out so now there are different conflicting stories going about it and it all looks terrible there's no hard evidence and there are different

stories about what happened and no one can see the flagpole so to make it worse the other three Taylor McGonigal and Anderson had made a pact to let Lloyd do the talking this is either out of respect to him as the organizer or out of, one of my sources says, in recognition of his need for attention. Interviewed in 1937, Taylor said, he was the head of the party and we never dreamed he wouldn't give a straight story. I wish to God we'd have

been there. We didn't get out till June and then they didn't believe any of us had climbed it. So the media coverage gets greater and greater. So there's increasing pressure for evidence that they succeeded. The photos they'd taken on the trip, they'd taken some of this little $5 camera, but those weren't satisfactory for reasons I haven't been quite able to understand. Either they didn't come out or they just weren't enough to show that they'd made it all the way to the top. But that wasn't good enough. So Lloyd finally, that spring, asked the other three to make a second descent to get additional photos. And in May, the other three without him went out as high as Denali Pass, which is about 18,200 feet, and took some more photos.

That second expedition is very poorly documented. Apparently, they didn't camp at all. They just went up to 18,000 feet and came down again, which is, I'm sure, a fantastic story in itself, but no one knows much about it. So the whole thing is starting to fall apart and just recede into history as just a bit of sort of an Alaskan tall tale told by these crazy gold miners who said they'd gotten to the top of Mount McKinley on coffee and donuts. In 1912, two other climbers, Belmore Brown and Herschel Parker, climbed, made their their own attempt and said they saw no evidence along the way of the pole, and they had carefully documented their ascent, so that carried a lot of

weight. But in June 1913, an archdeacon and explorer named Hudson Stuck made the first undisputed climb to the South Summit, the Mountain's True Summit, and along the way they decided maybe to look for this pole they'd heard about. Stuck wrote in his book about this called The Ascent of Denali, While we were resting, we fell to talking about the pioneer climbers of this mountain who claimed to have set a flagstaff near the summit of the North Peak, as to which feet a great deal of incredulity existed in Alaska for several reasons. And we renewed our determination that if the weather permitted, when we reached our goal and ascended the South Peak,

we would climb the North Peak also to seek for traces of this earlier exploit on Denali. And they did this. When they got to a position where they thought they'd be able to see the place where the pole ought to have been, they started looking for it. Stuck writes, all at once, Walter Harper cried out, I see the flagstaff, eagerly pointing to the rocky prominence nearest the summit, the summit itself covered with snow. He added, I see it plainly. The flag was gone now, but the pole was still standing there, invisible to all of them. So there's finally proof. Yeah. Harry Carston's, this is quoting again from the book, Harry Carston's looking where he pointed, saw it also, and whipping out the field glasses, one by one, we all looked and saw it distinctly

standing out against the sky. With a naked eye, I was never able to see it unmistakably, but through the glasses it stood out, sturdy and strong, one side covered with crusted snow. We were greatly rejoiced that we could carry down positive confirmation of this matter. They didn't photograph it, but Stuck wrote, Taylor and Anderson reached the top, about 20,000 feet above the sea, and firmly planted the flag staff, which is there yet. This is amazing for a lot of reasons, the biggest of which is that that party, Hudson Stuck's party, was the only party ever to verify the flag lot of reasons. The biggest of which is that that party, Hudson Stuck's party, was the only party ever to verify

the flagpole's existence. The next party to try to climb the North Peak was fully two decades later in 1932, and they failed to find any evidence of it, which is not surprising because the conditions up there are just terrifically harsh. So the flagpole would just have been destroyed by that point.

Yeah. Which means that it was almost just sort of an accident. If Hudson Stuck hadn't happened to climb when he did in time to see the flagpole standing there... Yeah, then nobody would ever know. And no one would believe it. This whole thing would just be thought some crazy claim made by Thomas Lloyd, who couldn't possibly have succeeded. So it's just only good fortune that someone managed to get up there in time

to see the flagpole that they'd placed. And it's now generally accepted that the sourdough expedition did succeed, that they got to the north peak of Mount McKinley before anyone else had. In fact, for more than 40 years after all this, to about the middle of the 20th century, every successful climb to the summit of Mount McKinley followed the route that had been discovered by Tom Lloyd and his other climbers. A former McKinley guide named Jim Hale said, for those guys to reach the top with homemade equipment and so little climbing experience while hauling a spruce pole is just incredible. It's superhuman by today's

standards. Those guys had to be tough as nails. Lloyd, as I said, went to his deathbed maintaining that all four of them had made it to the top of the mountain. I guess once he made that claim, he sort of had to stick to it. But over time, the other members started to tell conflicting stories to friends and various writers, and eventually they admitted that only Taylor and Anderson had reached the North Summit and that none of them had reached the South Summit, but it's still an amazing accomplishment. Hudson Stuck called the sourdough expedition, quote, a most extraordinary feat unique in all the annals of mountaineering. We have a further update on interesting corpses. In episode 72, we talked about Jeremy Bentham wanting to have his corpse preserved for the use of his friends or other practical purposes.

After his death, his preserved body spent several years in an office of a good friend and eventually ended up in a museum at University College London. Then last week, I reported on some further adventures that his corpse had undergone. Irene Liberale had something further to add to the idea of people being preserved after death as monuments or for continued interaction with their loved ones. Irene said, I've been listening to your podcast for a while now. It's very entertaining and I love the lateral thinking puzzles. I've recently listened, a bit late I know, to episode 72 about the misadventures of famous corpses. In particular, I refer to the story of the man who

asked for his body to be preserved so he could sit around and become a sort of permanent macabre decoration. This gentleman would have felt at home in the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo, which hosts a display of thousands of mummified corpses. It started in the 16th century, I believe, when some Capuchin friars found out that the bodies of some recently deceased brothers had been naturally mummified. The friars decided to start mummifying the bodies, letting them stand around the walls in a sort of permanent vigil. Eventually, it became fashionable in Palermo to be exposed in the Capuchin catacombs after death. The mummification process was

expensive, so it was a sort of status symbol. The family sort of rented a space, and the body would be placed in an open coffin or sitting up, etc., and then the families could visit and hold the dead relative's hand during the weekly prayer, and so on. It was very much a business for the Capuchins, because if you didn't pay rent, then Grandma's body was moved to a shelf. Not to mention that during the Romanticism, the catacombs were a popular destination in a gentleman's grand tour. They stopped interring new people around 1900, but it's still a popular tourist attraction. From what I was able to find out about the Capuchin catacombs, they contain about 8,000 corpses and over 1,200 mummies.

God. Yeah, that's a lot. Apparently, some of the bodies are better preserved than others. So they are currently in various states. I mean, some of them are pretty skeletal looking and others are like pretty lifelike. The bodies are all dressed in either their usual clothes or people would request in their wills like specific garments that they wanted to wear. Or they would even put in their wills that they wanted their relatives to change their clothes regularly.

Really? Yeah. After death? Yes. Well, you know, some people want to keep up with fashion, I guess, even after death. And apparently the halls of the catacombs are divided into categories. Men, women, virgins, which is distinct from men or women. Children, as distinct from virgins.

Priests, monks, and professionals. So apparently there's like full segregation even after death. They did stop accepting new corpses for interment in 1880 with just a couple of exceptions past that. And one of the very last interments was a two-year-old girl named Rosalia Lombardo, who was preserved in 1920, but whose body is actually still remarkably intact. She was preserved with a procedure that was then lost for decades, but was finally rediscovered in 2008. An Italian anthropologist managed to track down the family of the embalmer, who had developed his own remarkably effective combination of substances. There are photos online of Rosalia and what she looks like now,

and it's really eerie because she just looks like she's sleeping. She has like a full head of really wonderful-looking hair with a cute little hair bow in it. It's really eerie. You said that was 1920? Yeah, 1920. So it's 95 years ago. Yeah, and I mean, she just looks like a sleeping child.

It's just eerie to see. Irene ends her email by saying, I'm wary of Googling for more information because the photographs are rather creepy, which they are if you don't like seeing dead people. But I certainly haven't heard of anything similar. I don't know if the gentleman you mentioned in your podcast knew about this charming Sicilian landmark, but if he did, I'm sure he'd have approved. If anything, all those bodies are very useful for scientists who have studied the embalming process, and also for historians, since they provide a plethora of information on centuries of clothes

and ornaments. That makes sense. Yeah, and that's a really good point, as Bentham, being the founder of modern utilitarianism, would almost certainly have approved, since these corpses are all being useful. Put to some use, yeah. Yeah, well, if nothing else, they were earning money for the friars. So thanks to Irene for writing in, and next week we plan to have an update on listeners' contributions about last week's episode on the use of games and playing cards to aid British POWs in World War II. So be sure to tune in for that. And if you have any questions or comments for us, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com.

I'm going to be trying to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to present me an odd or interesting sounding situation, and I have to work out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. This is from Paul Sloan and Des McHale's 2005 book, Outstanding Lateral Thinking Puzzles. Oskar Kokotschka, an Austrian abstract expressionist painter, arrived in England in 1938 after having escaped from the Nazi terror in Europe. Kokotschka was an artist and had never been a politician, yet he blamed himself for the dangerous state that Europe was in and later for the catastrophe of World War II.

Why? Is this a true story? Yes. So this is an Australian abstract painter. Austrian. Austrian, sorry. That would make a lot more sense. An Austrian abstract painter, and he blamed himself for... For the Nazi terror and

later for World War II. Oh my. Okay, that's an awfully big responsibility to take on for a person. Okay, does this relate to something that he either painted or didn't paint? No. Okay, so you wouldn't say this is related to the fact that he was a painter? I wouldn't say that. Wait. Okay. Would you say that this is related to the fact that he's a painter? Yes.

Yes. Okay. So it has something to do with his occupation as being a painter. Yes. Specifically a painter? Yes. Okay. Not like some other artwork or just a creative person in general.

Correct. Specifically related to painting. But not a painting that he did or failed to do. That's right. But his being a painter. So it's not related to one of his paintings. That's right. Is it related to somebody else's paintings?

You could say that, sort of. A specific person's paintings? Yes could say that, sort of. A specific person's paintings? Yes. A student of his? No. A colleague of his? No.

Another Austrian? Yes. Okay. So somebody that wasn't Oscar. Right. Painted something. Yes. Won something? No.

A series of somethings? A group of somethings? A bunch of somethings. Yes. Won something. No. A series of somethings. A group of somethings. A bunch of somethings. Yes. A bunch of somethings. Put it another way. Okay. Somebody other than Oscar did some paintings.

Made some paintings that are germane here. Well, yes. It's more, I'll give you a little bit of a hint here. It's not that they made some specific series of paintings or that they were a painter. There was somebody else that is a painter and that's important. Yes. Because his paintings got confused with Oscars or were taken for being Oscars? No.

Either deliberately or undeliberately? Okay. No, this doesn't relate so much to any particular paintings. It's more about... Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Hitler was into into art yes this is something to do with he he fancied being a painter didn't he yes did he train with oscar no no um um so this is hitler who's the painter you're thinking of yes um did oscar have a chance to have killed Hitler and didn't somehow?

No, but that's a great guess. I guess they were, okay. Did Oscar feel that he had a chance to influence Hitler in some way that he didn't? I'll say yes to that. Did he feel that he did influence Hitler in a way that he shouldn't have? Yes. Did he feel that he somehow caused Hitler's anti-Semitism? No. Yes. No.

Okay, so he felt that he had influenced Hitler in a way that went on to lead to all the awful events that happened. Yes. Due to Oscar's influence on Hitler. Um. Direct influence on Hitler? No, indirect influence on Hitler. No. Indirect influence on Hitler? Yes. Through a third person?

Through a group of people? Oh, oh, I'm trying to remember my history here. Was it, Hitler tried to get into some kind of school and was denied. Yes. Yes. Oh, and that was like a big, they think that was like a big psychological factor in the course of events later. So was he on the committee that helped deny Hitler entrance into the art school that Hitler wanted to get into? No, but you're very close.

Maybe it wasn't an art school. Hitler wanted to go to some school. That's right. Doesn't matter what kind of school it was. I can't remember. Some kind of artistic school or something? That's good enough, yeah. And he was denied entrance. That's right. And then they think that possibly his anti-Semitism might have dated to that, that he thought it was some Jewish members of the committee that denied him entrance.

Yes, basically. And that if he'd gone maybe to this art school, maybe it would have changed the whole direction of his life. That's all true. That's all true. That's all true, but that's not quite it. There's a little bit more. No, you're very, very close. Okay, so is it something specifically that Oscar did?

Something more specifically than that he was on the committee? Yes. Did he specifically vote against Hitler coming in? I mean, or he specifically tried to argue to the other committee members not to let Hitler in? No, he wasn't on the faculty. He wasn't on the faculty. Oh, he didn't write a letter of recommendation. Or he wrote a bad letter of recommendation.

No, they were both... Oh, he got in instead of Hitler! God, you're really good at these. Yes, that's it. Oh, well, then it's not his fault! Sloane and Mikhail write, Apparently this is true. Oskar Krakowska applied to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1907.

A young man called Adolf Hitler also applied. Oskar was successful, but Hitler just missed being accepted. Had Hitler taken Oskar's place, it is likely he would have followed art rather than politics as a career. And I found some support for this in the Bulgarian writer Elias Kennedy's 2005 memoir, Party in the Blitz. Reading from that now. At the beginning of the war, when I saw him, meaning Kokochka again, two or three years after our first meeting in Prague, I hadn't been with him for more than half an hour when he made me his monstrous confession.

He was to blame for the war in that Hitler, who had wanted to be a painter, had been driven into politics. Oskar Kokochka and Hitler were both applying for the same scholarship from the Viennese Academy. Kokochka was successful, Hitler turned down. So that is quite a lot of guilt to put on yourself. That's a lot of guilt to put on yourself for something that he didn't directly do. I mean, he wasn't involved in the decision. Yeah. That's why I kept thinking he must have been involved in the decision if he's taken responsibility for it. Let me read just one more paragraph from that.

In this way, Kokoschka was to blame for the war. He said it almost beseechingly with far more emphasis than he usually had, and he repeated it several times in a conversation that had moved on to other matters. He brought it back, and I had the dismaying impression that he was putting himself in Hitler's place. It was impossible for him to be implicated in history without having some significance, even if it were guilt, a rather dubious guilt at that. That's really sad. If anybody has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to use,

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