Futility Closet - 113-The Battle Over Mother's Day

Episode Date: July 11, 2016

  Anna Jarvis organized the first observance of Mother's Day in 1908 and campaigned to have the holiday adopted throughout the country. But her next four decades were filled with bitterness and acrimony as she watched her "holy day" devolve into a "burdensome, wasteful, expensive gift-day." In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast, we'll follow the evolution of Mother's Day and Jarvis' belligerent efforts to control it. We'll also meet a dog that flummoxed the Nazis and puzzle over why a man is fired for doing his job too well. Intro: For its December 1897 issue, The Strand engaged three acrobats to create a "human alphabet." In 1989 researchers discovered a whale in the Pacific that calls at 52 hertz -- the only one of its kind. Sources for our feature on Anna Jarvis: Katharine Lane Antolini, Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Struggle for the Control for Mother's Day, 2014. Katharine Lane Antolini, "The Woman Behind Mother's Day," Saturday Evening Post 288:3 (May/June 2016), 82-86. “Miss Anna Jarvis Has New Program for Mother's Day,” The [New London, Conn.] Day, May 9, 1912. “The Forgotten Mother of Mother's Day,” Milwaukee Journal, May 13, 1944. “Founder of Mother's Day Dies Penniless, Blind at 84,” Pittsburgh Press, Nov. 26, 1948. Cynthia Lowry, “Woman Responsible for Mother's Day Died Without Sympathy for Way It Turned Out,” Associated Press, May 4, 1958. Associated Press, “Mrs. Anna Jarvis Inspires 'Mother's Day' Observance,” May 10, 1959. Daniel Mark Epstein, “The Mother of Mother's Day,” Toledo Blade, May 3, 1987. Marshall S. Berdan, "Change of Heart," Smithsonian 38:2 (May 2007), 116-116. Jackie the parodic Dalmatian: "Hitler-Saluting Dog Outraged Nazis," World War II 26:1 (May/June 2011), 16. "Hitler-Mocking Dog Enraged Nazis, According to New Documents," Telegraph, Jan. 7, 2011. "Nazi Germany Pursued 'Hitler Salute' Finnish Dog," BBC, Jan. 7, 2011. Kirsten Grieshaber, "'Heil Rover!' Hitler-Imitating Dog Enraged Nazis," NBC News, Jan. 7, 2011. Nick Carbone, "Man's Best Fuhrer: Was Hitler-Saluting Dog a Threat to the Nazis?", Time, Jan. 9, 2011. Michael Slackman, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in Finland Who Was Trained to Give a Nazi Salute," New York Times, Jan. 11, 2011. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Steven Jones, who sent this corroborating link (warning: this spoils the puzzle). You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or Google Play Music 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 on the Support Us page 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 the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 9,000 quirky curiosities from a human alphabet to the world's loneliest whale. This is episode 113. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Anna Jarvis organized the first observance of Mother's Day in 1908 and campaigned to have it adopted throughout the U.S.

But she then spent the next 40 years bitterly fighting to control every aspect of the holiday. In today's show, we'll follow the evolution of Mother's Day and Jarvis' belligerent efforts to dictate how it should be celebrated. We'll also meet a dog that flummoxed the Nazis and puzzle over why a man is fired for doing his job too well. Anna Jarvis was a little girl in 1876 when she heard her mother close a Sunday school lesson with this prayer. I hope and pray that someone sometime will found a Memorial Mother's Day commemorating her for the matchless service she renders to humanity in every field of life.

She is entitled to it. Her mother, interestingly, had been upset by the antagonisms that wracked West Virginia after the Civil War. West Virginia was a border state during the war, and brother literally fought against brother sometimes. And even after the war, there was a lot of antagonism there. brother sometimes, and even after the war, there was a lot of antagonism there. So her mother called together the mothers she knew to lay plans for what she called a Mother's Friendship Day and sent an invitation to every former Union and Confederate soldier in the area, and this was a big success by all accounts. One observer wrote, it was a truly wonderful sight to see the boys in blue and the boys in gray meet, shake hands, and say, God bless you, neighbor, let us be friends again.

The family moved from West Virginia to Philadelphia after the father died in 1902 and the mother died just three years later in 1905. And Anna, who loved her mother, planned to commemorate her with an idea for a national observance of a day honoring mothers. She chose the second Sunday in May because her mother had died on May 9th, 1905, and because she wanted it always to fall on the Sabbath. And she chose her mother Anne's favorite flower, the white carnation, as the official emblem, which all sounds innocent enough so far. The first observance was on May 10th, 1908, in both places, actually, at an Episcopal church in West Virginia, and with 15,000 people in a Philadelphia auditorium. Anna, who was then a 45-year-old insurance clerk, then this was such an encouraging success that she set out on a seven-year speaking and letter-writing campaign, writing to every state governor and any local or national figure that she thought could advance the movement.

She just wanted this established as a national holiday. And this was a huge success. The following year, 42 additional states had joined them, and by 1911, the holiday had expanded into Canada, Mexico, South America, Australia, Africa, China, and Japan. And in fact, on May 9th, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed the first congressional resolution and presidential proclamation calling upon all citizens to display the national flag in honor of American mothers on the second Sunday in May. So you would have to say, I think almost anyone would say this effort had been a huge success in just establishing one day when we sort of stop mothers on the second Sunday in May. So you would have to say, I think almost anyone would say this effort had been a huge success in just establishing one day when we sort of stop and mark the importance of motherhood to our society. But Anna responded to this in an

oddly parochial way. She tried to make it more private. She was almost immediately unhappy with the way people were observing it. She thought it was overly commercial and it wasn't reverent enough. In 1912, she incorporated what she called the Mother's Day International Association and sort of took it on as a full-time job for the next four decades to protect, I guess, what you'd have to call the sanctity of the holiday. Her mother's death had left her independently wealthy, and she sort of spent all her time trying to get people to observe Mother's Day in the right way. The way she thought it should be observed.

Yeah, which isn't— it's not clear to me even after researching this what exactly that was i mean everyone who observes mother's day does it because they love their mothers and just want to tell them so but for anna jarvis it was never quite she always thought it was too commercial and i guess not private or sincere enough i don't know it's not really clear but she was very strident about it. And she did this, as I say, for 40 years. At first, she embraced the industries that sort of were drawn into the movement, florists and confectioners in the greeting card industry, and sort of saw them as commercial allies in promoting this idea of having a Mother's Day at all. But that relationship started to deteriorate in 1912 when she incorporated this association. She copyrighted the white carnation emblem and the words Mother's Day, the phrase Second Sunday in May, and her own photograph. And she issued public statements like this.

Warning. Any charity, institution, hospital, organization, or businessting the holiday as an excuse to sell things, it sounds like. Yes. She said what she wanted was a sentimental, reverent, sort of child-centered holiday, what she called a holy day and not, quote, a burdensome, wasteful, expensive gift day. So the gift-giving was a big part of it, but all the same, there was something more to it. She thought it was not expressly religious, but it ought to be more reverent, I guess, is the word. From 1912 to her death in 1948, she was unwilling to accept Mother's Day as a public holiday. In fact, she railed against statements that credited President Wilson with commemorating it because that sort of established it as a national holiday

in the United States. And she wanted it to be thought of, I guess, more as a private holiday that she owned and that other people sort of licensed, I guess. So this put her increasingly at war with the floral confectioners and greeting card industries. Her complaint wasn't that other people were making money where she wanted to. It's not that it wasn't about money. She was independently wealthy and she was funding all this through her inheritance. But she wanted to keep control of the day and how it was observed. And this put a good example of this is her interactions with the floral industry because they got into it almost immediately. In 1922, she endorsed open boycotts

against the florists who raised the prices of white carnations every May. She showed that before all this had started, a carnation cost half a cent in 1908. She said the price had jumped to 15 cents by 1912. And by the early 1920s, they were a dollar. And she mocked this, saying in typically strong language that these were profiteers who would take the coppers off a dead mother's eyes. That's typical. The florists first tried to make peace with her. They offered a commission on all the carnations they sold to sort of support the general cause, but she rejected this. She wrote a press release to florists saying,

What will you do to rout charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers, and other termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest, and truest movements and celebrations? The florists, I think quite reasonably, pointed out that this was her idea. She said, hey, let's have a holiday in spring where people exchange carnations. And they thought, well, we're florists. People are going to come to us for the flowers. This wasn't our idea. It was yours. They said they couldn't help profiting by it.

They said people demand flowers. Also, and I think importantly, she had proposed the white carnation as sort of the national emblem for this holiday because that had been her mother's favorite flower. But it turns out that carnations bloom outdoors in late summer. And the florist said, understandably, if you want to have this holiday in the spring, we're going to have to grow the carnations in greenhouses. And that costs money. There's just no way around that. So they weren't necessarily charging a lot of money just— Just to make a profit.

Yeah, just to capitalize on what she had done. It was sort of a problem with a supply. Yeah, and I think, in my opinion, she was overreacting. Certainly, I'm sure there are florists in other industries that do profiteer, that try to make an inordinate amount of money off the holiday. But I think a lot of them were just trying to supply a demand that she mostly had been the one who created. She tried to switch tracks and adopted a celluloid button as a substitute for the flowers and had tens of thousands of those manufactured at her own cost. But most people would rather give a flower than a button.

So that didn't really go anywhere. And the same thing happened with the confectioners and greeting cards industries. She had her own supplies made up, like these celluloid buttons, and tried to encourage people to use those quote-unquote official Mother's Day supplies and said they should forego the holiday entirely

if they couldn't use the official supplies. She said if you were a friend of Mother's Day, if Mother's Day is helpful to you in any way, it is indeed a very small thing for you to use the official Mother's Day supplies. And if they can't use them, she said, all that is asked of you is to forget Mother's Day entirely just as you forget its welfare. There's this sort of wounded, resentful quality to it.

She just wants to own the holiday. Yeah, I should mention. Completely own it. I should mention, too, the irony here is that she was not a mother herself. She never had children. So it's not that she wanted a higher level of respect for herself. That's not what was behind this. I guess she must have had an interesting relationship with her own mother is all I can think because nothing seemed to satisfy her.

The person I know in the research who's done the most looking into this is a historian at West Virginia Wesleyan College named Catherine Lane Antolini, who points out that it's not just Mother's Day. Since 1910, most public holidays involve some degree of gift-giving. People just like to give gifts. It's not a crime. People just like to express their feelings toward other people, not just mothers, by exchanging gifts with them. So it's not, again, it's not outright profiteering most of the time. Here's just a list. I know it sounds like I'm being mean to this woman, but here's, I just want to give you a list of just the tone of her campaign and trying to stamp out what she thought is rampant commercialism just down through these four decades. These are in no order. She dumped a salad on the floor of the Wanamaker Tea Room in Philadelphia when she learned that it

had been offered as a quote-unquote Mother's Day salad. In 1923, she crashed a retail confectioner's convention to protest what she called price gouging on Mother's Day. In 1925, she was arrested for disorderly conduct after disrupting an American war mother's convention in Philadelphia, claiming that their fundraising drive, which featured the sale of white carnations, was just profiteering instead of aiding World War I veterans, as they said they were doing. She filed a lawsuit in New York City against the governor, the mayor, the police commissioner, a U.S. senator, and two ministers over a scheduled Mother's Day rally to benefit handicapped children, saying that they'd violated her copyright on the term Mother's Day

and increasing the price of a carnation, which commercialized the day they had to cancel that event. And she assailed even people themselves who bought any of these products. She wrote, A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy, you take a box to mother, then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment. That sounds like it was directed at a specific person. I don't know what the story is there.

I also wonder what her own mother would have thought of this, because this was being done in her name. We'll never know that. At the peak of her battle against commercialization, she allegedly had 33 pending lawsuits against various people and companies. Occasionally also

as the 20th century went on, well-intended other people would occasionally start other observances commemorating motherhood in general. Not because they're trying to steal her glory.

Steal her holiday. They just, you know, wanted to commemorate motherhood for various reasons. Here's just an example of sort of the strident tone she wrote about one of these. His plans for getting funds are daring and far-reaching, as you may see when you receive his printed matter. I have told him I think he's one of the biggest rascals out of Sing Sing. Another organization started to try to help expectant mothers. organization started uh to try to help expectant mothers she called this the expectant mother racket and said his leaders were trying to use them to draw salaries and luxuries for themselves rather than actually help the mothers she wrote somebody should page dillinger and tell him what

a piker he was to bother with the little stuff in banks had he allied himself with mother's day committees of prominent ladies he might be high and mighty as they on earth instead of where he is so just she just assumed really negative motives for everything. For absolutely everything, yeah. In all this research, I haven't found anything that she approved of at all, which is really sad because it was, I think to any objective observer, a huge success, what she was trying to do. As the 20th century went on, people also established or proposed

a Father's Day and a Parent's Day, which predictably now she opposed that as well. She said, when a son or daughter cannot endure the name mother for a single day of the year, it would seem there's something wrong. One day out of all the ages and one day out of all the year to bear the name mother is surely not too much for her. In 1933, Congress actually amended its original resolution commemorating Mother's Day to call on Americans to make contributions to various social organizations to provide relief during the Great Depression, which was at its height at that point. And she opposed that as well. She had deliberately excluded a civic dimension from her observation.

She thought it should be sort of a private commemoration between children and their mothers. She said she was amazed and dismayed and called the new legislation vicious. And she called the new Mother's Day a beggar's day that demeaned American mothers. She said charity was amazed and dismayed and called the new legislation vicious, and she called the new Mother's Day a beggar's day that demeaned American mothers. She said charity was misplaced on a day meant for, quote, gratitude to the living and reverent memories for the deceased. In fact, she grew so bitter that eventually she threatened to just stop Mother's Day altogether, although at that point it's hard to see how anyone could have done that because it had been, whatever she thought, had been entirely accepted as a national sort of public holiday. Yeah. been entirely accepted as a national sort of public holiday yeah uh she sustained all of this ire until she was physically unable to continue uh she spurned actually commercialism to the extent some occasionally an industry or someone would reach out to her with an offer

uh that would have netted money for her association like they said well let's let's commemorate it together and if this happens to make money, then we'll share it with you and that'll help advance your cause, which seems like a reasonable thing. But she turned those down, preferring to spend her own inheritance money on the whole effort.

And that gradually, great though it had been at the start, caused her own funds to dwindle and she eventually became poor. In November 1943, she wandered into a Philadelphia hospital seeking help, weak, nearly blind, and impoverished, and a group of 12 supporters formed a committee to oversee her business affairs and find her a residence in a sanitarium. She had been living with her sister, who couldn't be convinced to

go as well, and her sister actually died two months later. Jarvis's own mental and physical health deteriorated over the next four years, and finally she died on November 24, 1948, and was buried in an orchid dress with a string of pearls around her neck and a spray of carnations on her casket. At the time of her death, 43 nations celebrated Mother's Day, which again I think is a huge, overwhelming success, but I'm sure she didn't see it that way. She had run all of this, this association.

She was just a one-person show. She had one assistant, I think, in all this, and accumulated so much material that she had to buy the house next door as well. They found five tons of papers that had to be removed from that house after she died. And she was still popular at the end. In 1947, this committee that took care of her received more than 1,200 pieces of mail addressed to her from, among others, President Truman, leaders of religious and social organizations, and letters from individual well-wishers. leaders of religious and social organizations, and letters from individual well-wishers.

Antelina, this historian, points out that whatever she herself thought, the degree of commercialization of Mother's Day actually helped spread it and promulgate it as a national holiday and helped it take root. And as I say, most people like to give gifts, and so whatever Anna Jarvis thought, it was actually the participation of these commercial industries that helped to establish it as the institution it is today the holiday celebrated centennial in may 2008 and uh in that year more than 80 percent of americans celebrated it it's now for better or worse i think for better a multi-billion dollar industry for retailers and the second highest gift-giving day behind Christmas. Our show really relies on the support of our listeners to be able to keep going. So if you value Futility Closet and learning a really good excuse for not buying your mom a gift for Mother's Day, then please consider becoming a patron to help support the show.

If you pledge at least a dollar an episode, you'll get access to our activity feed, where you'll find outtakes and extralateral thinking puzzles, and learn what's going on behind the scenes of the show. So if you want to help out, please check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the supporters page of the website. And thanks so much to everyone who helps keep Futility Closet going. We really couldn't do this without you. This is just a little, I guess you'd call it, anecdote from my research. In 2011, a German historian named Klaus Hillenbrand

was researching Nazi-era activities in the German Federal Archive when he found a record that concerned a Finnish businessman named Thor Borg. Borg had a Dalmatian mix, a dog named Jackie, and on January 29, 1941, the German vice consul in Helsinki wrote to his superiors that, quote, a witness who does not want to be named said he saw and heard how Borg's dog reacted to the command Hitler by raising its paw. This set off a whole flurry of documents and diplomatic cables because no one in Germany understood what they ought to do about this, if anything. I guess you could see

either way. Either it's sort of mocking Hitler or it's a great compliment, right? They even trained their dog to give a Nazi swig. I mean, it doesn't sound that remarkable to me. Dogs are pretty easily trained, I think. Well, apparently the Nazis were very sensitive about this kind of thing. German diplomats were directed to gather evidence on the dog and its owner. It was known that Borg's wife, Josephine, she was German, but she was known to oppose the Nazis. So I guess that maybe put kind of a spin on this.

Oh, I see what you think. Yeah, so if they thought it was mocking Hitler somehow. But how do you— How do you decide if a dog is mocking Hitler? This happened in the months before Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. So Finland was cooperating with Nazi Germany at this point. So there was diplomatic exchanges between the two and kind of a flurry of not knowing what to do. They finally summoned Bork to the German embassy in Helsinki,

and he admitted that on a few occasions his wife had said Hitler and that the dog had responded with a raised paw. No one quite says this in the accounts I'm reading, but I gather she trained him to do this. Deliberately, yeah.

Someone did. I don't, it's not clear who. He said it had happened earlier, though. Quote, The rumor might emanate from an episode in the summer of 1933 which happened within my family only and which had no ulterior

political background whatsoever. 1933 was shortly after not clear what to do. Borg denied that his family or Jackie had done anything, quote, that could be seen as an insult against the German Reich, which I guess is true. Can't prove that it is an insult. The embassy officials weren't taken in by this. They were still skeptical and reported that, quote, Borg, even though he claims otherwise, is not telling the truth. There were discussions that took place among the foreign office, the economic ministry, and even Hitler's chancellery. The economics ministry noted that the country's chemical giant, E.G. Farben, was a major supplier for Borg's pharmaceutical company and offered to sever all ties with it, which really would have hurt him badly. I mean, they really took this really seriously.

And the Foreign Office considered charging him with insulting Hitler. But the key was that the witnesses who had seen the dog actually raise its paw refused to repeat their testimony before a judge. So the whole thing kind of fell apart. Finally, in March 1941, the Nazis decided that, quote, it is not necessary to press charges. Oh. I don't know.

I don't know what would have happened to the dog. There is no evidence, by the way, that Hitler, who was himself a dog lover, was ever told about the incident. Jackie the dog died of natural causes. Borg died in 1959, and his wife Josephine died in 1971. Hillenbrand, the historian who dug all this up, said, quote, this is a funny story, but it is a Nazi story which tells how they were looking for enemies everywhere. He called the episode completely bizarre. He said just months

before the Nazis launched their attack on the Soviet Union, they had nothing better to do than to obsess about this dog. He told the New York Times, the dog affair tells us the Nazis were not only criminals and mass murderers, they were silly as hell. There are very few things you can laugh about because what they did was so monstrous. But there were two or three dozen people discussing the affair of the dog rather than preparing for the invasion of the Soviet Union. They were crazy. 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 try to figure out what's going on,

asking only yes or no questions. Are you ready? Yes. Okay. We had a puzzle recently about a man who made many mistakes while performing his job and was afterward praised for his performance. Stephen Jones wrote to say that he has a puzzle

that is pretty much the opposite. Stephen's puzzle is, a man does his job extremely well and is fired because of that. Why? Okay. So this is true. This is true.

Do I need to know where it happened? No. Or when? No. Okay. He does his job. We can say he does his job really well. Yes.

But is fired. Because of that. Man, it's hard to even know how to start with this thing. So was he fired for a reason other than poor performance of his job? Correct. Other than. So he did perform it well. He did perform the job well.

And he was fired for some other reason. In other words, can I just discard the actual performance? No, no, no. No, he was fired because he was doing the job so well. Okay. Is there crime involved? No. All right.

Is it a white-collar job, would you say? Yes. Technical? No. Not a technical job. Like a desk job? No. Maybe it's not white-collar then.

Okay. I'm not sure what field this is encompassed in. Okay. Was he fired for what we would call, no you wouldn't say that, dishonesty or malfeasance or anything like that? Correct, he was not fired for anything like that.

Was he fired by the same person or organization that had assigned the job? Yes. So they had assumed a different outcome? Did he give them what they expected to get? Yeah, I guess. I mean, that's a little vague.

Well, okay. Okay, will it help me to figure out exactly what his line of work was? Yeah, or at least broadly. Okay. Was it in commerce of any kind? No, no. Manufacturing? No.

Transportation? No. These usually take a long time to figure out. Was it done primarily indoors? Yes. With other people? Yes. But not at a desk?

Right. And it's legal, you said. Yeah. I'll tell you, it's in the entertainment field. Okay. To get you going, because this is kind of a very vague start. Is he a performer himself of any kind? Yeah, I guess you'd say so.

An entertainer, I mean. Yes, I suppose. For an audience. No, not in this job. Okay, but he's in the entertainment business. Yes. So he's producing works of entertainment for audiences. He isn't, but he's working in that field.

All right, so he's like maybe a film director or something like that, someone who's sort of behind the scenes working in that industry? Behind the scenes, yes. Okay. You'd call him a creative person? Not in this job, no. Okay. Is this someone I've heard of?

Yes, actually, but you have not heard of him doing this job. All right, but I know his name. Yes, but that won't really help you with this puzzle because he's doing something different than his normal job. Okay. What you would associate him with. But just so I know, is he alive today? No. Okay.

Okay, entertainment. Is he in the film industry? Well, not for this job. Right, no, no. But in this job? In this job, no. It's not in the film industry. Music?

No. Broadcasting of any kind? Yes. Radio? No. Television? Yes. Television broadcasting, but not in front of the camera? He's not in front of the camera. But he's involved, is he a writer? No. A director? No. A producer of some kind? No, it's really behind the scenes and he's not producing anything creative himself. You wouldn't say he's doing anything creative. Okay. He's just working in that industry yes do we need to know more than that um i'm trying to think what's going to help you with this puzzle um you can say you don't know and i'll just keep whacking yeah yeah i'm trying to think what's the right so he's working on a

television show would you say yeah yes do it would it help me to know which one? Yes, or at least the genre. Comedy? No. Drama? No. Variety? No. Like a talk show? No. News?

No. I'm running out of, the game shows? Yes. Okay, so he's worked, this just got really interesting. He's worked behind the scenes on a television game show. Yes. But not in any particularly creative capacity. Correct.

And was assigned a task to do and did it correctly. Did it extremely well. But then was fired as a result. Yes. Okay. Yes. And that's all very important. Would you say that he succeeded to a fault? Yes.

He found a way to do the assigned tasks so well. Yes, and it's not one specific task, but it was all of his tasks. All right, so he had sort of an ongoing role there behind the scenes of this game show. Yes, and he's actually doing it too well. That's it, right. Is there money involved? I mean, did this cost the network money, and that's why they fired him? No, no.

Okay, a game show. Would it help me to know which one specifically? I'm not sure. I don't know if you would it's an american game show yes yes okay um and i don't need to know the time period you said i know the time period but it's it's i don't know that that would necessarily help you was it like a quiz show no all right so it wasn't like he was writing questions right right was it something oh you said it wasn't creative though so it wasn't like that where he was or something. Right, right. Was it something, oh, you said it wasn't creative, though. Right. So it wouldn't be something like that where he was actually preparing content of any kind that would appear on the show.

Exactly, he was not, right, he was not. Was it something to do with the advertisers? No. Was he an employee of the network? Yes. I mean, he worked for the network? Yes. Does this have to do with the actual broadcast itself, the time or location where it was

broadcast? No. So he's doing something very behind the scenes for the game show that they hired him to do and he's doing it so well that they actually can't use him and that's the kind of the lateral thinking part is what was he doing just too well can't use him meaning he sort of made himself redundant not redundant but they weren't they weren't going to be able to use him in this job because he was just too good at it. That's actually the lateral thinking part.

Too good at working behind the scenes of a game show. Yeah. Okay, obviously they didn't have that in mind when they gave him the task. Right. They thought he'd be doing something useful that would help the show. Yes.

So to that extent, his efforts would have appeared on the screen in some way. I mean, it would have... No, no, no. You never would have seen him on the screen. No, not him, but he was making some contribution. You said... I'm trying to figure out... You said it wasn't creative, his work. Right. But it did make some difference to the show.

The show needed somebody in his role. Okay. He wasn't a performer, director, producer. Nothing like that at all. He wasn't advertising. Very behind the scenes, not producing anything. And you said it wasn't technical. He wasn't a performer, director, producer. Nothing like that at all. He wasn't in advertising. Very behind the scenes, not producing anything. And you said it wasn't technical. It wasn't technical. He wouldn't have needed any special training for this job of any kind.

Was he an announcer? No. He would have needed no training whatsoever. Like on day one, they could have put him in this job when he'd never done anything like this before. Interacting with the audience in some way? Nope. The audience would never have seen him. And I'm trying to think what roles there are on a game show.

Could he have fulfilled the same role on some other kind of show, like a drama or something? No. Had to be a game show. Had to be a game show. Was it? Okay. And you said it involved other people? Or he interacted with other people?

He probably would have interacted with other people in the course of his job. People who were in front of the camera, like the host or the guests? Probably not. I keep wanting to ask if he wrote any of this. No, he didn't produce anything. He didn't create anything. any of this. No, he didn't produce anything. He didn't create anything. Okay, so on a game show, basically people just

compete to play a game, and he wasn't involved in any way in devising the game? He was not involved in devising the game. In running it somehow? No. Let me tell you in case this helps you, it was the game show Beat the Clock. Okay.

Which was the game show Beat the Clock. Okay. Which was a game show where people had to do crazy challenges that they had to compete within a given time limit in order to win. Was he involved in any of that in thinking up or arranging the... No.

I'm trying to think how you would make yourself... You said they didn't need him anymore. Not that they didn't need him anymore. They couldn't use him. They used someone else. They would need it to have hired someone else other than him. I vaguely remember Beat the Clock.

Okay, so was he involved in arranging prizes? Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. And what could he be too good at? Just so good that they just couldn't use him in that capacity um well i can't i can't seem to pin down his role so it's very hard to answer that um very very behind the scenes the audience would never have seen him um i i guess should i just tell you i think you'll have to i'm not getting anywhere he was um this was james dean by the way with a very young man um it was his job to test all the challenges

that the show would use in order to send the set the benchmarks for the contestants james dean james dean when he was like in his very earlys, yes. The problem was he was extraordinarily good at the games, meaning that his results couldn't be used to set reasonable benchmarks for the players, and he had to be let go. Wow, and they just hired someone else to do it. And they would have had to hire, right. So they would have had to,

they wanted somebody to play test all the crazy challenges and see how long it would take them, and he just flew through them so well. That's amazing, especially James Dean of all people. I know. So thank you for the puzzle, Stephen. And if anyone else has a puzzle for us to try, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com.

That's another episode for us. If you're looking for more quirky curiosities, check out our books on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com where you can sample more than 9,000 frappant bagatelles. At the website, you can see the show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes. If you like our podcast and want to help support it, either with a one-time donation or through an ongoing pledge, please see the supporters page of the website. You can also help us out by telling your friends about us or by leaving a review on iTunes or other podcast directories.

If you have anything you want to say to us, you can reach us by email at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by the wonderful Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.