Futility Closet - 098-The St. Albans Raid

Episode Date: March 21, 2016

Seemingly safe in northern New England, the residents of St. Albans, Vermont, were astonished in October 1864 when a group of Confederate soldiers appeared in their midst, terrorizing residents, robbing banks, and stealing horses. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story of the St. Albans raid, the northernmost land action of the Civil War. We'll also learn about Charles Darwin's misadventures at the equator and puzzle over a groundskeeper's strange method of tending grass. 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. Sources for our feature on the St. Albans raid: Dennis K. Wilson, Justice Under Pressure: The Saint Albans Raid and Its Aftermath, 1992. Robin W. Winks, The Civil War Years: Canada and the United States, 1998. Stuart Lutz, "Terror in St. Albans," Civil War Times Illustrated 40:3 (June 2001). Rick Beard, "When the Rebels Invaded Vermont," New York Times, Oct. 17, 2014. "A Reminiscence of the St. Albans Raid," Montreal Daily Witness, April 5, 1878. "Confederate Raid on St. Albans, Vt.," Pittsburgh Gazette Times, Oct 21, 1914. "Leader of Raid on St. Albans, Vermont, Centre of Controversy at Champlain Celebration," Boston Evening Transcript, May 9, 1912. Edgar Andrew Collard, "Of Many Things ...," Montreal Gazette, March 28, 1969. "English View of the St. Albans Raid Case," Halifax Morning Chronicle, Jan. 24, 1865. Listener mail: Wikipedia, "Line-Crossing Ceremony" (accessed March 18, 2016). R.D. Keynes, ed., Charles Darwin's Beagle Diary, 2001. Jacqueline Klimas, "Navy Leaders Try to Stamp Out Hazing, But Many Sailors Question the Rules," Military Times, July 2, 2013. Wikipedia, "Plimsoll Shoe" (accessed March 18, 2016). This week's lateral thinking puzzle is from Paul Sloane and Des MacHale's 1998 book Ingenious 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. 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 the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 9,000 quirky curiosities from a cross-country violinist to Florence Nightingale's owl. Welcome to episode 98. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1864, the residents of St. Albans, Vermont, thought they were safe from the hostilities of the Civil War in their small town 15 miles from the Canadian border. So they were quite surprised when a group of Confederate soldiers suddenly appeared, terrorizing residents, robbing banks, and stealing horses. In today's show,

we'll tell the story of the St. Albans Raid, the northernmost land action of the Civil War. We'll also learn about Charles Darwin's misadventures at the equator, and puzzle over a groundskeeper's strange method of tending grass. This podcast is supported by our wonderful listeners. If you like the show and want to become a patron so that we can keep bringing you your weekly dose of quirky history and lateral thinking puzzles, please check out our Patreon campaign

at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the link in our show notes. Thanks so much to everyone who helps support Futility Closet. We really wouldn't be able to keep doing this without you. St. Albans is a quiet town on the shore of Lake Champlain in northwest Vermont. During the American Civil War, the people of St. Albans considered themselves pretty safe from danger up there since they were in northern New England. So they were very surprised when, shortly after 3 p.m. on October 19, 1864, a 21-year-old man with a Kentucky accent stepped onto the porch of the American Hotel and declared, in the name of the

Confederate States, I take possession of St. Albans. The man was a Confederate lieutenant named Bennett H. Young, and he'd organized this whole raid. The raiders had actually come down south into Vermont from Quebec, and their plan was to raid the three banks in town and then make a quick getaway back north across the Canadian border, which was just 15 miles to the north. Canada was a British possession and officially it was, Britain was neutral in the American Civil War. So their hope was if they could escape safely back into Canada, the Canadian authorities wouldn't arrest them outright there. And even if they did, you could argue that they hadn't done anything illegal on Canadian soil. This is all highly irregular, as you can imagine. The South, it seems like kind of an odd adventure for the

South to be undertaking. But this was the third year of the war, and they really needed to come up with everything they could think of to aid their cause. By 1864, the war wasn't going well for the South. The Union blockade that I'd mentioned back in episode 95 was causing a big economic drain. The Southern Army was prone to desertions now, and the Union was no longer allowing the exchange of Confederate prisoners. So things were really looking pretty dire, and they were willing to try things like this. In the raid, Young had set three goals. He'd hoped to get just cash money for the rebels. The South had its own currency, but its future was uncertain,

and so it was easier to pay for certain things with just using union money, and so one way to get that was just to outright rob union banks. He also hoped that if word got out that this would boost the morale of the Southern troops, who really needed it at that time. if word got out that this would boost the morale of the southern troops who really needed it at that time. Ulysses Grant was besieging Petersburg, and William Sherman was active in Georgia beginning his march to the sea, or about to begin it. And the third goal was that he hoped this would just scare the northerners, who were used to thinking of the war as taking place down to the south of them. If he could suddenly make them aware that they might be subject to raids coming down from the north, it would scare them out of their complacency and might hopefully actually cause the

north to have to divert some of its troops up to guard the northern border, which would help their cause. That was the hope in any case. So he met, he quietly went into Canada and gathered about 20 other Confederates up there in Montreal and then made several reconnaissance trips down into the Union trying to decide which town to attack. They settled on St. Albans, which was just a little market town in Vermont that also happened to be home to the state's governor, a man named John Gregory Smith. And Young, who apparently was a very bold man, actually, during these reconnaissance trips, actually visited with the governor and his wife at one point, claiming to be a theology student from Montreal. Anyway, they settled on a date for this raid, October 19th, 1864. And a few days before that date, his men began coming down into St. Albans in ones and twos, posing as horse traders, vacationers, fishermen,

and members of a Canadian sportsman's club. They didn't acknowledge that they knew one another or that anything was in the offing, but they just all managed to arrive in town shortly before the date of the raid. And then, as I said, about 3 p.m. on October 19th, about 22 young men began to appear on the main street in St. Albans in small groups. They were wearing long coats and carrying haversacks slung over their shoulders, which might have looked a little suspicious. And then at 3 p.m., Young announced himself on the porch of the hotel and read a proclamation of their intentions.

He said, gentlemen, I'm an officer in the Confederate service. I have been sent here to take this town and I am going to do it. The first person that resists, I will shoot on the spot. And then his men, this had all been planned in advance, went and robbed all three banks in town simultaneously. At the Franklin County Bank, the bandits showed up and announced to the cashiers who must have been stunned, we are Confederate soldiers.

We have come to rob your bank. They got all the cash they could and then locked the two cashiers in the vault and fled with the money. They were able to get out later. I was going to say, yeah, what happened to them? They shouted the combination through the walls to the townspeople. So that is a little happy ending there. A few hundred feet away, three raiders entered the St. Albans Bank

and surprised the teller who was counting the day's receipts. They stuffed their pockets with silver and forced the cashier to take an oath to the Confederacy, which is a poetic touch. And then at the first national bank, which was also nearby, the robbers threatened the cashier saying, you are our prisoner if you move an inch, we is a poetic touch. And then at the First National Bank, which was also nearby, the robbers threatened the cashier saying, you are our prisoner. If you move an inch, we'll blow you through. During all these robberies, eight or nine of the Confederates

outside held the villagers at gunpoint on the village green at the center of town. And the villagers, I'm sure, were shocked and didn't put up much of a fight. Altogether, the raiders gathered more than $200,000 from the three banks, and then they stole horses from the local livery stables or just from citizens on the streets to make their getaway with. As I said, they didn't meet much resistance. One local jeweler named Colin Huntington was wounded when he challenged Young, but he recovered later. And one girl apparently was injured by splinters because the raiders were shooting up the town as they rode out. But she was fine.

They had planned to actually burn the town with what they called Greek fire, which are these sort of homemade Molotov cocktails. But as it happened, it had just rained on the previous day and they couldn't get anything to burn. So they just shot. Oh, that's lucky for the town. Generally shot up the town and rode out on the stolen horses. The whole raid took less than half an hour. I just keep trying to picture how shocking this must have been to the residents of, you know,

a little town way, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of miles. Yeah, just 50 miles from Canada. This is the last thing they expected. For all the care with which they'd planned the raid itself, they hadn't really planned very carefully about how to get back into Canada.

That went relatively well. They just went racing for the Canadian border, tried to ignite some local buildings as well as a bridge about 10 miles north of St. Albans, but nothing would burn. As soon as they had left town, a band of St. Albans residents began to pursue them, and others sent a telegram to Canadian officials explaining what had happened and asking them to intercept them. And sure enough, the Canadians were waiting there when about a dozen or so of the raiders crossed the border near Phillipsburg, Quebec, and captured them there. It is true that some of them got away. An unknown number of raiders managed to avoid capture and made it to Richmond, Virginia with some unspecified amount of money.

So to some extent, the whole plan worked. Partly, yeah. But most of them were captured. It just seems surprising because you set up how very carefully they did everything on the front end, like to plan very, very carefully and then to not even think about,

well, what are we going to do after we do this? Yeah, and then I'll get to this in a second. I guess it turns into a big legal model because this is such a peculiar thing to do in the first place. Yeah. Crossing the border between two nations during a time of war it just gets it's very confused the authorities weren't quite sure what to do with them i should note that during the flight one of the raiders encountered and shot a man named elinus j morrison who was a 52 year old foreman

who was supervising improvements to the vermont and canada railway he died and earned a footnote in history as the northernmost casualty on native soil of the Civil War. There's a little footnote here because it depends on what you count as a battle. Technically, the raid was being sort of authorized not by the Confederate Army, but by the Confederate Secret Service, which means that technically you could argue

that it wasn't a battle, properly speaking. It seems more like a crime than a battle. Yeah, it sort of depends on how you define things. One source also says, oh, I should mention, sorry, too, also that the northernmost battle, just for the record, wasn't even a land battle. It was a sea battle that took place later that year off the coast of France, off Cherbourg. That's actually even further north than any of this, just for the record. Of this man who was shot, Alanis Morrison, one of my sources says that he was said to be the only Southern sympathizer in town, which I can't confirm and I think is not true, but I hope for his sake that it's not. That would be so ironic. Because it would be terrible if you spent the whole war in northern Vermont rooting for the south,

and then shortly before the war ends, a bunch of southerners ride into your town, shoot you alone, and then ride out again. Yeah, you're right. Think of it. If the gunshot didn't kill him, the irony would. Altogether, Canadian authorities captured about 13 of the raiders, including Young himself, the organizer of all this. And they had about some of the raiders, including Young himself, the organizer of all this. And they had about some of the money, my records say about $86,000, although as I say, some of the raiders who escaped to Virginia had some on a specified amount additionally, but it's not quite clear how much

that was. And as I said, there's a bit of a legal muddle about this. On November 5th, Young and his men were brought to trial before a police magistrate, but it's not clear how this ought to work. If they were just simple criminals, just bank robbers, then properly what the Canadians ought to do is just extradite them back to the United States for trial. So if this was construed as an act of war, then Britain wants a part of it, and Canada being a possession doesn't want it either. And so their legal system doesn't want to get involved in making any judgment. And the question was how to think about that, because as I said, there's really sort of no precedent for something like this. Young, as you can imagine, the organizer of the raid, asserted the latter. He said that he had acted under orders of the Confederate Secretary of War, and he presented a copy of his mission plans and addressed the court, saying, whatever was done at St. Albans was done by the order and authority of the Confederate government.

I have not violated the neutrality law of either Canada or Great Britain. The judge, Charles Joseph Corsell, by mid-December, agreed with that. He declared, this raid was an act act of war and I have no jurisdiction in the matter. Therefore, I order the prisoners released and the stolen money given back to them. Which seems strange, but again, they wouldn't, if it was understood as an act of war, they don't want to take any position in it at all.

And the Montreal chief of police, accordingly, actually helped the raiders retrieve the money they'd stolen and leave the city. It seems likely now that what actually happened there is that the judge had been bought off by Young's defense attorney, a man named Abbott. That's a bit unclear, but it seems likely something was afoot there. So the governor general actually ordered their re-arrest, and on December 17th, they began a second trial. But again, then on March 29th, you sort of reach the same outcome. The Canadian court found no grounds for extradition and ruled that the attack on St. Albans, quote, must be regarded as a hostile expedition undertaken and carried out under the authority of the so-called Confederate states under the command of one of their officers.

a third time on April 8th, this time for violating Canada's neutrality laws, but Lee surrendered to Grant the very next day, effectively ending the war, and the Raiders were just released on April 10th, so it didn't really come to any coherent conclusion. And later that month, the Canadian government paid some thousands of dollars back to each of the robbed banks back in St. Albans just to indemnify them against the loss. It's just a very confused legal model there. Yeah, I'm just wondering what the implications are, if you can just go commit crimes while the war is going on and claim you're doing it as a— Especially across a border, yeah.

Yeah. It's confusing. I hadn't realized there would be such confusion about that. So as I said, Young had set three goals for the raid, and he failed, I think we can say, in two of these. The first one was that he wanted to get cash. They did get some cash and got away with some of it, but by then the war was so near its end that this didn't really do much to help this cause of the South. He'd also hoped to help Southern morale. This, again, probably had some effect. I mean, the Southerners probably did hear

this exploit and were heartened by it to some extent. But by this time, this out was outnumbered and it was lacking in food, supplies, and weapons. So the outcome of the war was increasingly seen as inevitable. This all just happened too late. But he did succeed in his third goal, which is to inspire fear in the North. On the day of the raid, a St. Albans resident named Ann Pierce frantically wrote to her son in Boston, which gives us one of the best-known eyewitness accounts of the whole event. She wrote, a band of men appeared in the streets all at once and commenced their awful work. They were armed. There were supposed to be about 30 in number. They walked into the banks and demanded all the money, and they presented revolvers. They went into the street to kill and slay. They tried to take sore men prisoners. They called

themselves Confederate officers, devil officers, I should think. We have sent arms and men to Oh, wow. And in fact, even before the day of the raid itself was over, a printer in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, created a broadside that said, Rebel raid now being made in Vermont. Report at once for military duty in this emergency. And they started organizing home guards to defend against possible future raids, which is exactly what Bennett Young had wanted. I had mentioned that during the reconnaissance, he had come down to visit with the governor of Vermont and his wife. That woman, Mrs. J. Gregory Smith, wrote to the governor the following day saying she'd spent that day brandishing the only weapon she could find in their Montpelier house, which was an empty pistol. She said she stood in the door feeling enraged but defiant. A number of pickets blazed away every few minutes

to let the raiders know they were in readiness, even though they were a few miles south of St. Albans, so she wasn't in any real danger. So fear they certainly did inspire. When President Andrew Johnson issued his amnesty proclamation on May 29th, 1865, this is interesting, he actually accepted certain classes of people from the amnesty, and one of those was, quote, those who have made raids into the United States from Canada. So he explicitly omitted those people from the amnesty. And that meant that Bennett Young couldn't come back to the United States from Canada. He actually had to practice law in England for three years until the general amnesty came down.

It's just interesting that this seems like such a sidelight in the story that Andrew Johnson specifically accepted them. Right. And was the exception made specifically because of this case? Or were there other cases of people coming down from Canada to raid into the U.S.? I think this is the only case. He was talking specifically about these. But he went on to have quite a successful career. raid into the u.s i think this is the only case he was talking specifically about these uh but he went on to have quite a successful career he became a successful lawyer in his hometown of louisville kentucky and eventually became president of the southern railroad and apparently regarded

the whole thing in his later life as sort of this brash adventure he'd undertaken his youth in 1911 47 years after the raid he actually met with four of the leading men of st albans at a hotel in montreal to reminisce about the raid he was was 68 years old. And he said, it was merely a reckless escapade of a flaming youth of 21, steeped in the patriotism of the South. I am now as loyal to my reunited country as I was then to my cherished Confederacy. Greg had asked in an earlier episode if anyone knew anything about the term griffin as it referred to a newcomer in India. In episode 83, we covered what some listeners had sent in on this issue and then recently heard from Dan Nolan, who had previously managed to dig up some great information on oil pit squid creatures in Indiana for us. Dan says, I recently turned up a bit more about griffins as newbies. I'm afraid

it doesn't answer the mystery, but expands it. I found a reference to line crossing ceremonies. These occur when newbie sailors make their first crossing of the equator and their more experienced comrades force them to undergo elaborate pranks and hazing rituals, typically involving being baptized in seawater and having some introduction to a crew member portraying Neptune. Really, these sound like they were quite awful. In modern parlance, the newbies are called Poliwogs, i.e. tadpoles, and those doing the hazing are called shellbacks. However, there is an earlier reference by none other than Charles Darwin where the newbies are called griffins. That's very interesting.

Yeah, we hadn't heard about that. And Dan included this following passage from Charles Darwin's Beagle Diary. We have crossed the equator, and I have undergone the disagreeable operation of being shaved. About 9 o'clock this morning, we poor griffins, two and thirty in number, were put all together on the lower deck. The hatchways were battened down, so we were in the dark and very hot. Presently four of Neptune's constables came to us and one by one led us up on deck. I was the first and escaped easily. I nevertheless found

this watery ordeal sufficiently disagreeable. Before coming up, the constable blindfolded me and thus led along. Buckets of water were thundered all around. I was then placed on a plank, which could be easily tilted up into a large bath of water. They then lathered my face and mouth with pitch and paint and scraped some of it off with a piece of roughened iron hoop. A signal being given, I was tilted head over heels into the water where two men received me and ducked me. At last, glad enough, I escaped. Most of the others were treated much worse, dirty mixtures being put in their mouths and rubbed on their faces. So yeah, it is hazing. It really is just basically a hazing ritual. Yeah. And Dan says, this expands the sense of griffin well beyond India or even any colony.

There must be some mythological reference about how griffins treated their young that we are missing, or maybe some awful moralizing poem uses them as an example. Because, yeah, this is a pretty rotten way to treat your griffins. Yeah. I'd written just a little bit about line-crossing ceremonies years ago on Futility Cllause, but I had no idea that Darwin had been put through this. Yeah, this was right. This was totally new for both of us. And in episode 83, we had covered that griffin seemed to be some kind of a term for newbies, and particularly the Englishmen in India, as you had found out. But we also found that it was sometimes applied to other people who were newly arrived in an area,

but we'd never heard of it before about newbies crossing an equator. That's an entirely new definition or sense of the word for us. So I looked into this whole line crossing ceremony thing. And according to Atlas Obscura, these ceremonies began more than 400 years ago. Atlas Obscura says, Though ceremonies differ, there's a general form and a common cast of characters. King Neptune is a prominent figure, as is his representative Davy Jones. Other people often show up, including a surgeon, a barber, people dressed as bears, and a judge.

Okay, and I get most of that. Like, you know, most ships, especially going way back, had a surgeon and maybe a barber. I don't get the people dressed as bears at all part, but they didn't explain that. And as Dan notes, the ceremony is basically a hazing process that is designed to turn these newbie or virgin pollywogs into shellbacks. And then the shellbacks can go on

to haze other pollywogs in the future. The ceremonies vary a fair amount in terms of what precisely is done. I mean, there's just, you can hear of all kinds of things being done in these ceremonies, but they've traditionally been pretty unpleasant. Like, that's the common denominator.

And there have been reports of sailors who were badly injured or even maybe killed during some of them. And these line crossing ceremonies aren't just some quaint, archaic tradition. They are still being carried out today on a variety of types of ships, which surprised me, too. I thought of this

as something that went way back. And I actually, for example, found an article on this in a 2013 edition of the Military Times about how the U.S. Navy is trying to deal with these ceremonies. The Navy is trying to stamp out everything that it considers to be hazing, and that includes some of the harsher versions of these line-crossing ceremonies. So instead of the Poliwogs being whipped with a hose or covered in potentially toxic machine grease, which were examples that were given in the article, the Navy wants them to do things like having people dress in something embarrassing and sing, or getting hosed down with water.

They think that would all be preferable. or getting hosed down with water. Like they think that would all be preferable. But according to the articles, some in the Navy have been objecting to weakening these types of ceremonies with the sailors saying that the tougher ceremonies made for tougher sailors or that going through these grueling

or demeaning rituals together bonded the crews more tightly. So they actually are, some people are looking back to the older versions of the ceremony and sad that they don't do them anymore. I think that's what people say about hazing in general. People say that it does serve a function. Right, right. And I guess the people who go through it like want to believe that it had some positive features, some positive value, right? And the Navy wants these rituals to now be voluntary on the ships,

but it's been unclear how truly voluntary they really are with people actually being pressured into taking part in them and stuff. So this is apparently an ongoing issue for the Navy, at least as of 2013 when I found the article. So this was all very interesting and told me a lot more about line crossing ceremonies than I ever knew. And I now know that I really don't want to participate in one. But other than Darwin's diary, I couldn't find any other examples of using the

term griffin for those participating in the ceremonies. You were saying they're normally now called pollywogs. They are normally called pollywogs. So I'm not sure whether Darwin was using the term in like the broad sense of just a newbie, like because it did have sort of that sense to it, or maybe he was just entirely mistaken and mixed up his animals and forgot that he was supposed to be a pollywog and thought he was supposed to be a griffin.

I'm not sure. But I just, I couldn't find anything else on the use of the word griffin in this context. So, but if anybody else finds something, you can certainly let us know about it. It does sort of imply that he expected to be understood when using that term in that way. Yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe it was just in more common use back then and people understood what it meant. Right.

And like I said, maybe it just had a more general usage as the word newbie. Because that was a word that came up a lot in the articles on these line- ceremonies is the pollywogs were seen as sort of newbies or sometimes virgins but you know it's the same in that yeah that makes sense yep um and this next email concerns our most recent lateral thinking puzzles episode which was from december episode number 86 and it might be considered a spoiler if you haven't heard that episode yet. So if that's you listening right now, you might want to skip ahead a little bit. Brian Jones wrote to us about the can of paint

preventing property damage lateral thinking puzzle, saying, did you know that there is a common shoe also called plimsolls, which is so called because of its horizontal line that demarcates the place where the sole meets the body, and that line's resemblance to the plimsoll line. He says, I wore these shoes for years without ever knowing the derivation. See how educational, even our lateral thinking puzzles just elucidate things for people.

I never put that together. Well, I hadn't ever heard of a shoe called a plimsoll personally, but apparently that's because they call them that in the UK. According to Wikipedia, a plimsoll is a type of athletic shoe with a canvas upper and a rubber sole that was developed as beachwear in the 1830s. I mean, these go way back, by the Liverpool Rubber Company. And the shoe was originally called a sand shoe, but it got the nickname plimsoll in the 1870s, which is, if I remember correctly, about when the plimsoll line started really coming into use. They just adopted it. Yeah, because the colored horizontal band joining the upper to the sole resembled the plimsoll line on the ship's hull.

Or perhaps, Wikipedia says, because as with the plimsoll line on a ship, if water got above the line of the rubber sole, the wearer would get wet. Which is certainly true. Once I saw a picture of the shoes, I did recognize them. We do have these shoes in the U.S. We just call them something else. They're usually just called sneakers or tennis shoes or sometimes chucks here in the U.S. I'm quite sure I never would have thought of likening the line on them to a plimsoll line. That never would have occurred to me even after I learned what one was while struggling with that puzzle in episode 86.

Yeah. That does make some sense, though. You can see why they would do that. Yes, definitely. Especially, I guess, you know, plimsoll lines aren't really in the news these days. But I suppose in the 1870s, it would have been a bigger thing. So thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us. And if you have any questions

or comments for us, you can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to present him with an odd sounding situation and he has to work out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. This puzzle comes from Paul Sloan and Des McHale's Ingenious Lateral Thinking Puzzles. The groundskeeper at a sports complex watered the grass every evening when the sun was setting. The grass grew fine. Before a major event, though, he sprayed the grass during the midday heat. Why?

Before a major event, though, he sprayed the grass during the midday heat. Why? Say that before when? Before a certain event? A major event. A major event meaning a game? No? Maybe.

Before something took place at those, you said a sports complex, like a stadium? Yes. Okay. And by grass, you mean grass? Yes. Sprayed the grass doesn't necessarily mean he was trying to kill it. Was he spraying it with that intention? No.

Okay, he was spraying it with something else. Yes. To color it? Yes. To apply some pattern to it? No. Like not for the markings on a field or something like that? Right, not for the markings on a field. So the business about the growing the grass isn't really relevant.

The grass is just grass. Yes. The question is, what is he spraying it with? Yes. Some kind of paint or just something to mark something on the surface of the grass? No. No. He sprays it, but you say his intent isn't to kill the grass.

Right. It's to color it in some way. Yes. Okay. Do I need to know, okay, first of all, did this really happen? According to the authors

of the book, it did. But only sort of in this one instance this isn't something that groundskeepers around the world are doing every day? As far as I know.

As far as you know it's not something? As far as I know it's not something that groundskeepers around the world are doing every day. Would it help me at all

to know then specifically where or when this happened? It might. Or for what the event was. I don't know that the date and place would have a ton of meaning for you. Okay, good enough. So you said it's a sports complex. Yes.

Is that designed for one particular sport, would you say? No, probably not. So just a, okay, so it's just some sort of arena or stadium? Yeah, yeah. Would they say that? I would say that. With a field on which grass is growing? Yes.

And he's applying something to that. This is a one-time thing that he does only once? As far as I know. Okay, so it's not just his regular job. It's some special event or occasion? Yes, yes. That's related to an upcoming game? Not specifically.

I mean, as opposed to some other gathering like a concert or something. Okay, as opposed to some other gathering like a concert or something. So he's doing this in preparation for a game in particular? No, I'm trying to say no to that, but you're saying as opposed to a concert. I'm like, okay, it's closer to that than a concert. So it's something like a game? Broader than a game okay some event in which people will gather at this complex yes yes see whatever he's done on the field um yes but that i mean that's why he's doing it so it can present some kind of display or something that the the spectators or attendees will be able to see on the field?

Supposedly it wasn't done specifically for them. Okay. For the participants in the event, whatever it is? Okay. Not for the attendees, not for the participants. Right. For the media, for people who are recording the event in some way? No.

Okay, whatever he's doing that affects the grass will have an effect on that, is it a night event? That day, whenever it is. The event takes place on a given day. Sure. And then it's over. No, it's bigger than an event, but... Okay, so he applies something, he colors the grass in some pattern, would you call it? No. something he colors the grass yes some pattern would you call

it no he colors all the grass yes he colors all the grass the same color yes without the intention of killing it correct before this event whatever it is yes and then the event takes place or it's an ongoing event yeah. It takes place over some period of time. And he would say that his intention was fulfilled, that he accomplished what he was trying to do. Yes. Would it help me to know what color he sprayed the grass? Sure, yes.

Was it green? Yes. He sprayed it green. I'm sure that was the one safe question that you would not say yes to. And why would you do that? To be sure that it appeared lively, that that it didn't look like it was. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, for who though? I mean, what were they trying to accomplish? Was the grass actually alive when he sprayed it? As far as I know. It's not that it was dead and he was trying to make it look good. Right, as far as I know. Well, just for appearances, I guess, so that it would look. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you're close enough. I'll just tell you what's going on. According to the authors of the book, and I wasn't able to confirm this, but if anyone can confirm it, please let me know. They say that this happened before the 1996 Atlanta Olympics where the grass was sprayed with organic green coloring to make it look greener for the TV audience. Ah, okay. That makes sense. But like I said, I wasn't able to easily confirm that. So I'd love to hear from anybody if they know that that actually happened.

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