Futility Closet - 205-The White Mouse

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from an impromptu town to a hidden sonnet. This is episode 205. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Sonnet. This is episode 205. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1928, Nancy Wake ran away from her Australian home and into an unlikely destiny. She became a dynamo in the French resistance, helping more than a thousand people to flee the Germans and organizing partisans to

Starting point is 00:00:38 fight them directly. In today's show, we'll tell the story of the White Mouse, one of the bravest heroes of World War II. We'll also marvel at mailmen and puzzle over an expensive homework assignment. Nancy Wake was born in New Zealand in 1912 and had a traumatic childhood. Her father moved the family to Sydney when she was a toddler and then not only abandoned them but sold their home, which forced her mother to find new lodgings and raise the children by herself. She never got along with her mother, and when she was 16, she left home literally through the window. One day she said she was going out, her mother said she couldn't, so she jumped out the window and vaulted over the fence. She took a clerical job with a shipping company and was still wondering what to

Starting point is 00:01:21 do with her life when a sympathetic aunt sent her 200 pounds and she set out to see the world. She made her way to Vancouver, then New York, and finally London, where she enrolled in a journalism school and got her degree at 21. She went for an interview with Hearst Newspapers, and the interviewer told her the Middle East was an area of growing interest, so she showed him that she could write in Egyptian, and he gave her a job at a Paris news bureau. In fact, she didn't know Egyptian. She just wrote shorthand backward and then pretended to read it back. She said, I was so good at that kind of

Starting point is 00:01:48 thing, I should have been a criminal. That got her to Paris, where she got a small apartment. Her writing began to appear in Hearst newspapers across America, and she made connections with other journalists. In October 1934, she headed to Marseille to report on a visit by King Alexander I of Yugoslavia. During his stay, he was shot by an assassin. The rise of fascism was the story of the day, and Hitler was rising to power, so she headed to Vienna to learn more. The city was overrun with brown shirts, and she saw roving gangs of Nazis randomly beating Jewish men and women in the streets. She said later, What I'll never forget is being in the main square of Vienna and seeing these poor,

Starting point is 00:02:21 unfortunate Jews being tied to these massive wheels that were rolled along, with them being turned over and over as the wheels turned. And even as they went, these huge, fat brown shirts were beating them with whips. Right there and then, I made up my mind that if ever I got the chance, I would do everything in my power to hurt them, to damage the Nazis and everything they stood for. She returned to Paris and spent the next few years there, working as a journalist while Europe sank further into flames. In 1936, she met a Marseille industrialist named Henri Fiocca. She said later, he was tall, he could dance the tango. And if you dance the tango with a nice tall man, you know what eventually will happen, don't you? They were married that year, the same year that Hitler

Starting point is 00:02:58 invaded Poland and Britain and France declared war on Germany. Just before Christmas, Henri was called up to serve in the French army, and she wanted to take an active role as well. She made Henri promise that if hostilities broke out, she could use one of his trucks to carry wounded soldiers. She didn't have long to wait. Germany rolled through Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium. She took a truck from one of Henri's factories and had it converted into an ambulance. Then she drove to the far north of France near the Belgian border and began to ferry wounded soldiers from the front lines. Hitler pushed across the border in May 1940, seeming unstoppable, and Nancy loaded the ambulance with as many refugees as it would carry and headed south. Britain alone now stood against the strength of Nazi Germany. When she got back to Marseille,

Starting point is 00:03:39 it had been bombed by Mussolini's forces. She shut herself up in her room and cried for three days. In June, Marshal Pétain signed a formal armistice with Germany in which the northern two-thirds of France would be formally occupied and governed by the German army, and the southern third would remain nominally free. That included Marseille, where Nancy was living, and where Henri soon rejoined her. He was all right, but they were both horrified by the fall of France. The two of them met a French army officer who was helping to organize something he called the Resistance. When he saw that they had sympathetic views, he asked them

Starting point is 00:04:08 to take a package with them when they went to Cannes the following weekend. Nancy never found out what was in the package, but it became her entree into the French Resistance. Henri was occupied with his business, but Nancy began to act as a courier, delivering clandestine packages that often contained parts of radio transmitters. The Germans knew this was happening, but they could only fight back by punishing the people they caught, often with imprisonment. Meanwhile, the resistance gradually organized itself over a wide area, setting goals and learning to organize its efforts. Through 1940 and 1941, she continued to serve as a courier while keeping up a front as a social butterfly around town. She carried forged papers that

Starting point is 00:04:43 identified her as a doctor's secretary in case she was ever arrested, but she tended to evade suspicion because she was an attractive woman. She said, it was much easier for us, you know, to travel all over France. A woman could get out of a lot of trouble that a man could not. As the war intensified, she helped a Scottish officer to set up an escape network of safe houses to help people flee across France to the Pyrenees and make their way into Spain. Increasingly, this included Jewish refugees fleeing the final solution, which was now fully underway. In November 1942, the German high command sent Wehrmacht troops into southern France to guard against an Allied attack from the south.

Starting point is 00:05:16 Nancy kept up her courier duties but found it increasingly hard to maintain her cover as a frivolous socialite. Eventually, she learned that the Germans had nicknamed her the White Mouse because of her ability to disappear just when they thought they'd cornered her. She later told a reporter, I must admit I got a swelled head. I thought, God, I've got a code name in Berlin. But she could feel they were closing in. It was only a matter of time before they caught her. One day, a local bistro owner told her that he thought he'd seen someone follow her as she left her apartment that morning. She had noticed a clicking sound on her telephone line lately, and just three days previously, someone had surprised a man going through her mailbox.

Starting point is 00:05:48 Henri told her she must leave immediately. He would follow once he'd made arrangements to keep his business running. They agreed that she would follow the same route as the refugees she'd been helping, across the Pyrenees to Spain and from there to England. She made six failed attempts to get out of the country. Something always seemed to go wrong. On one occasion, she was arrested by the police and questioned for four days, but they didn't seem to realize who she was. On another, she had to jump from a moving train and lost all her possessions. In the end, she fled back to Marseille, but she didn't want to endanger Henri by contacting him.

Starting point is 00:06:16 Finally, she joined a small group of soldiers and hiked with them across the mountains. After seven attempts, she was finally in Spain and free to make her way to England. There, she was met by the assistant chief of the British intelligence service and driven to a suite they'd booked for her at the St. James Hotel. They'd heard of her exploits, and they asked her to join the special operations executive, whose job was to coordinate subversive and sabotage activity against the enemy. They would train her and then drop her back behind German lines so she could start preparing the French for an Allied invasion. She couldn't have known this during her girlhood in Australia, but she was born for this sort of work. One of her trainers called her, quote, a real Australian bombshell, tremendous vitality, flashing eyes,

Starting point is 00:06:52 everything she did, she did well. Training reports that she was a very good and a fast shot with excellent field craft. One evaluation read, excellent character, very good mixer, very broad-minded, kind, keen, and reliable. Off parade, she enjoys life in her own way, drinks and swears like a trooper. With the other trainees, she learned everything, how to fight hand to hand, how to live off the land in a forest, how to blow up a train, how to recognize German insignias and plane silhouettes, how to disable a car with sugar, how to blow up a bridge, and how to survive a Gestapo interrogation. They were taught to do things in the French manner, comb their hair, handle knives and forks, answer the telephone, call for a waiter. There was even a dentist on call to remove English fillings from their teeth

Starting point is 00:07:34 and replace them with gold ones in the French style. In February 1943, Germany had declared that every French person of reasonable health and working age must be available to work in Germany. In response, tens of thousands of French men had headed for rural areas, where they joined up and formed les maquis, which is a uniquely French word that means scrubby underbrush. They came to symbolize the French resistance, and the SOE began to focus on arming those men. She was among 39 women and 430 men who were parachuted into France in April 1944. Her team landed in Louvergne. It was rugged country, mountainous, and inaccessible. They found the Maquis there and notified London of the armaments they needed, and the British dropped them by parachutes six nights in a row. There

Starting point is 00:08:14 were about 22,000 Germans in Nancy's area, and during the skirmishes that followed, about 7,000 Maquisards joined forces against them. While they armed these men, Nancy's team also began to train them. The Maquis used their new weapons to harass the Germans, Nancy's team also began to train them. The Nike used their new weapons to harass the Germans, but they didn't start a full assault. Nancy's team wanted to conserve their strength until the D-Day landing. They could conduct raids to keep the Germans nervous and operating below maximum efficiency, but the real battle still lay ahead of them. When she noticed that the parachute drops were becoming more substantial, she suspected that the Allied invasion was near. On the evening of June 5, 1944, the eve of D-Day, a BBC announcer read some apparent gibberish into a microphone.

Starting point is 00:08:50 The crocodile is thirsty. You may now shake the trees and gather the pears, and other phrases. That was the signal to move forward. Resistance fighters began moving toward more than 1,200 targets across France, bringing tons of high explosives with them. Then they attacked. Nancy said, we were flat out buggering up everything we could, everything we could blow up. I was blowing things up day and night, bridges, railway lines, roads, in no fear of the Germans. This was really what we had come here to do, and now it was a positive joy to do it. As German divisions raced to defend Normandy, the Makisar worked to slow them down. And now that the fight was on, they got an influx of new recruits. Altogether, when the Allies hit Normandy, the defending Germans lacked 50 divisions,

Starting point is 00:09:28 all of them bogged down in remote parts of France, unable to cross bridges that the resistance had destroyed. The Germans turned to crush the resistance. Nancy's team were generally able to evade them using guerrilla tactics, but at the height of one battle, her radio operator had to destroy his radio codes and bury the radio itself to keep it out of Nazi hands. That left them unable to communicate with London, and that meant that someone would have to ride by bicycle to Chateauroux, a distance of 200 kilometers, where they could get a message to London asking for a new radio. Nancy said she'd go. She said later, I volunteered for it not because I'm brave, but because I was the only one who could do it, being a woman. A man

Starting point is 00:10:03 would be stopped on the road, but she might be able to get through. She spent the next 24 hours putting together the most attractive outfit she could, and she used the last of her makeup. She took no weapons at all, and she had no identity papers to show if she were stopped. She said, I just concentrated on doing one more turn, one more turn, one more turn as the miles slipped by. She slept in barns and ate quietly in restaurants and bistros. She said later, it was absolutely imperative that even though I was exhausted and windblown from traveling so far, I not look that way. Whatever German patrol saw me had to think I was simply a young housewife toodling along home or to the village, who was not worth bothering with, but not someone doing a major trip. She even bought some vegetables at a market to carry along with her in a bag.

Starting point is 00:10:43 At German checkpoints, she said, I would just look over to the officer, flutter my eyelashes, and say, do you want to search moi? And they would laugh flirtatiously. No, mademoiselle, you carry on. When she got within 50 kilometers of Chateauroux, there were so many German trucks that it was dangerous to stay on the road. She looped around the town and came in from the northwest rather than the south. There was a checkpoint there, but she made it as if she was quite happy to stop and show them her papers, and they waved her on. She had covered more than 200 kilometers in just over a day and a half. She ordered the radio drop, then turned around and headed wearily back.

Starting point is 00:11:14 She said, every time I turned the pedals, I was wracked by pain, so I wanted to turn those damn pedals the very least I could. Many times I wanted to stop and have a pee, but I thought if I do, I'll never get on again, so I had to pee my pants. When she got back to camp, she had pedaled just over 400 kilometers in 72 hours. She said, I got back and they said, how are you? I cried. I couldn't stand up.

Starting point is 00:11:34 I couldn't sit down. I couldn't do anything. I just cried. For the next few days and nights, I could barely move, as all the skin had been rubbed away from the insides of my thighs, so I really just had to lie there while the village doctor applied dressings and then spend a few days immobile till I could walk again. In 2001, the Australian author Peter Fitzsimons interviewed her for a biography and found that she hadn't ridden a bike again in the ensuing 54 years, but she said that of all the things she had accomplished during the war, she was most proud of that marathon ride.

Starting point is 00:12:03 Her maquisar continued to fight. Her partner, John Farmer, later told the Daily Telegraph, she was magnificent and incredibly popular with the maquis. The partisans, many of them pretty tough boys, worshipped her and were all a little scared of her. After one night in August, she became almost a legend in maquis country. The Germans found our camp and attacked. There were only 80 of us. Nancy, armed with a small Colt automatic, which she always carried, and a bazooka, led a section of 10 men against a German machine gun post, knocked it out, and led the section safely back. That summer, she was told that a nearby band of Maquis had captured three women who they said were spies. She interrogated them. The first two seemed innocent, and she let them go, but the third

Starting point is 00:12:38 said she proudly supported the Nazis. Nancy said, I'm sorry, but we cannot release you, and we do not have the facilities to keep you. This is war, and you must have known the penalties for spying on the Maquis and reporting their movements to the Germans before you began to do it. You will have to be shot immediately, and I would like you to prepare for that. Nancy gave her address and tried to arrange a firing squad, but the Maquis balked at killing her. Nancy said, if you don't, I will. Finally, they shot her while Nancy sat under a tree and ate her usual breakfast of stale croissants and coffee. She said later, I was not a very nice person, and it didn't put me off my breakfast. After all, she had an easy death. She didn't suffer. I knew her death was a lot better than the one I would have got. And if I hadn't done it, and she had got away and reported to

Starting point is 00:13:17 the Germans what the Maquis were up to, how could I ever face the families of the Maquis Tsar we lost because of it? It was definitely the right thing to do. On August 15th, the Allies came ashore on the Mediterranean coast and the Germans, now caught between forces in the south and the north, began to withdraw altogether from France. The Makisar kept up the fight, trying to kill as many of them as possible. One night, Nancy's team hit a heavily guarded armaments and munitions store in the Montmouchet area. Nancy led a band of four Makis that was to neutralize the two sentries who guarded the western gate. Nancy waited for the right moment and charged an isolated sentry, hoping to overpower him before he saw her. He turned at the wrong moment and raised his bayonet, and she hit him with a blow two inches below the ear, breaking his neck just as she'd been trained.

Starting point is 00:13:57 A local doctor stitched up her bayonet wound. She said, I did not weep for that sentry. It was him or me, and by that time I had the attitude anyway that the only good German was a dead one. Later that month, they got word that Paris had been liberated. During the celebrations, she met a friend who asked what she was going to do next. She said she would go back to Marseille and see Henri, and the friend said, oh no, Nancy, don't you know? He's dead. Nancy collapsed in tears.

Starting point is 00:14:19 All through her activities in France, she had avoided contacting Henri for fear of compromising either him or herself. At one point, she'd even walked within 100 meters of their home, saw a light burning, and knew he was there. The woman had no more information. She knew only that the Germans had killed him because he wouldn't cooperate with them. Her partner, John Farmer, said anyone would have been torn apart by the news, but in Nancy, it seemed so much worse because she was always such a happy, joyous soul. This was the only time I ever saw her seriously, seriously distressed. Her friends accompanied her as she made her way to Marseille, threading her way among burned-out German vehicles, destroyed bridges, and a tide of movement coming the other way.

Starting point is 00:14:53 In town, she found her old butcher, who told her what had happened. A resistance leader had been taken by the Gestapo in March 1943. While he was in jail, he tried to pass some information to Henri, and the Gestapo arrested him. A French pastor who'd survived the same prison later told Nancy that the Gestapo had realized that Henri's wife must be the White Mouse and subjected him to daily beatings and torture. When he wouldn't talk, the Germans got Henri's father to beg his son to tell them about her. Henri told him never again to speak to him of such things, or he'd no longer call himself his son. In the end, they couldn't get an answer, and Henri was shot at dawn on October 16, 1943. Nancy said, I blamed myself for the death of that wonderful man, and I always will. She decided to leave Marseille. Henri was gone, and her old apartment was a wreck.

Starting point is 00:15:35 It had been occupied by three Gestapo agents after Henri was arrested, and her bank had been looted in the last days before the Germans had left. She would have to start over entirely. To the east, the war with the Germans continued, but her war was over. On October 16th, she flew back to London. She was fortunate to have survived. Of the 469 SOE operatives in the French section, just under 100 had been killed in action, and many were wounded. Of the 39 women who had been given missions, a dozen had been killed outright, and three had been imprisoned and tortured. In after years, she lived alternately in England and Australia, where she ran for office three times unsuccessfully.

Starting point is 00:16:10 Nancy Wake was the most decorated woman of World War II. She received the George Medal, Britain's second highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, the United States' second highest, and the Legion d'honneur, the highest military honor that France bestows. In 1994, she raised an uproar by selling her medals, not because she needed the money, she said, but because she had no heirs to give them to. Anyway, she said she was probably going to hell and they'd only melt. She died of heart and kidney failure in Kingston Hospital, London, on August 7, 2011. She was

Starting point is 00:16:38 cremated privately and her ashes were scattered at Montluçon in central France. She had said, I want my ashes to be scattered over the mountains where I fought with the resistance. That will be good enough for me. We've mentioned mudlarking a few times on the show, most recently in episode 185. Mrs. Trevithick sent our way a couple of tweets from some mudlarks, which made me realize that there are active mudlarks on Twitter, sharing all their finds from the Thames. The two tweets noted by Mrs. Trevithick were, George III cartwheel penny found on the Thames foreshore. It's made of copper and weighs two ounces. These were only ever minted in 1797 and the first to be minted on a steam-driven machine.

Starting point is 00:17:32 Whoever could have lost such a large coin for me to find centuries later? Accompanied by photos of the coin and with a photo of a handgun, another stunning morning for a Thames mudlark. Alas, not every find is pleasant. Just discovered this on the foreshore. Yes, there's got to be a story behind that, right? Not a good one. And I guess some people don't realize that the things they throw away into the Thames may not stay in the Thames. Sort of like with Cobden Sanderson and his Doves type. He thought that was going into the Thames for good, and then a lot of it ended up being

Starting point is 00:18:07 recovered. I can't remember this now. There's a Dickens novel, Our Mutual Friend, which starts with someone discovering, I think, a body in the Thames. But I think there's mudlarking figures in that, too. That must happen all the time, where evidence comes to light and actually convicts someone. That would make a good story or a good lateral thinking puzzle, right? And browsing

Starting point is 00:18:25 through some of the mudlarking tweets on Twitter, I could really see why someone would get hooked on mudlarking. It just fascinates me to think of the vast numbers of all of these objects, some of them from centuries ago, just waiting in the Thames for someone to find them. And it's amazing to think that after so many decades of mudlarks combing over the whole area, they can still find so many items, with some of them going all the way back to the Roman era. And one of the tweets that caught my attention said, I love to think that the Thames foreshore is like a giant collage made up from historical bits and pieces from London's past. So that coin that you mentioned was in the river for hundreds of years? Presumably, yeah. And then just came to light one day. That's what's amazing,

Starting point is 00:19:06 is some of this stuff they're finding is from the Roman era. So it's been, you know, centuries. And it just somehow suddenly gets tossed up onto the shore. Yeah, you'd think something that old would, if it's not found, would just get buried so deeply it would never come up again. Yeah, that's what kind of amazes me.

Starting point is 00:19:22 I guess I don't know the dynamics of the river well enough to know why something would stay in it for centuries and then suddenly be tossed up on the shore for someone to find, but they find stuff just continuously. pilot who was less affected by G-forces because he had no legs. Hello, PodCat family. I've briefly popped by in the past to say hello and thank you for all the fascinating entertainment. But after hearing the puzzle in episode 201, congrats on hitting your 200th episode, by the way, I decided to chime in with a fun fact. I spent five years and three deployments to the Persian Gulf in the U.S. Navy from 2000 to 2005

Starting point is 00:20:05 as an air crew survival equipmentman, maintaining and inspecting survival equipment for F-A-18C fighter pilots. Go Squadron VFA-113 Stingers at NAS Lemoore! I knew the answer to the critical thinking puzzle right away, as pilots must don an anti-G suit, among many other things, before each and every flight, no exceptions. The G suit's sole purpose is to keep the pilot from blacking out while pulling Gs, and looks much like cowboy chaps that hug your legs, accompanied by a long hose that connects internal bladders to an air supply system. While in flight, the harder a pilot turns

Starting point is 00:20:42 in any direction and pulls Gs, the anti-G suit equipped with these inflatable bladders will quickly respond by filling the bladder with air, thus squeezing both legs tightly so as to minimize the amount of blood being pulled down from your head to your legs and prevents you from passing out and ultimately crashing a multi-million dollar jet without the opportunity to punch out, eject in time. The harder you pull, the more it squeezes and can sometimes be quite painful. Lastly, fun side note, I've had friends very nearly black out on roller coasters and various

Starting point is 00:21:16 other theme park rides caused by the G-forces. An easy trick to prevent this from happening, or if you happen to find yourself in a mid-air dogfight without a G-suit for whatever odd reason, you should always focus on flexing your legs, thighs, and calves as tightly as possible to restrict blood flow, and this will combat blacking out by leaps and bounds. Enjoy! And thanks again for all you both, three, do. So thanks, Wynn, for the further information and useful tip for roller coasters and midair dogfights. And go Squadron VFA 113 Stingers! Sasha, I'm sure you must be aware of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle and their famous police reports, daily reports from in and around Bozeman, many mundane calls from people with minor concerns, often stories about deer and bears, many tales from drunken people being given rides home.

Starting point is 00:22:20 I thought I'd grab a large sample of these, about 16,000 reports from five years or so, and feed them through a neural net like the recent recipes you covered. And I don't think I was aware of the daily police reports from Bozeman, Montana, but they are rather fun to read. I read a few days' worth, and as Dave noted, most of them are fairly minor concerns, such as an officer helping an out-of-town couple find the apartment they were staying in, or a caller reporting that a neighbor was training a dog with a squeaky toy and it was disturbing the caller, and a man reporting that someone neighbor was training a dog with a squeaky toy and it was disturbing the caller, and a man reporting that someone had spit on his car. There were a few slightly more significant concerns, such as drunk customers,

Starting point is 00:22:58 a missing husband who later turned up, and a woman who had locked herself out on a balcony, as well as some slightly stranger ones, like cows running loose in a neighborhood and a man who thought he was hearing hissing from under his bed, but didn't want to give his location or have a deputy come to his house. So they gave the man examples of what animals are native to the area that hiss and could hide under his bed. I wonder how that story ended. Yeah, they didn't have a follow-up on that. But overall, Bozeman seemed like a pretty quiet place to live, at least for the days that I saw. Dave sent quite a collection of the software-generated police reports based on these real ones, and I chose a few to read on the show.

Starting point is 00:23:36 As with many of the recipes, some of these were somewhat nonsensical, but they were fun to read. A few of the generated reports were even more mild than some of the real ones, such as a man on Oroborso residence was seen walking alone to a friend's home, or a caller reported seeing a man who was fine. And I thought, well, maybe that's a really rare occurrence in Postman. And you can tell that there must be many reports about dogs and other animals in the original database, given the number of generated reports that contain them, such as an officer helped push a deer on 3rd Avenue at 1227 a.m., a duck and a caller complained about a dog on the sidewalk at 205 a.m., the driver was found to be a dog in the parking garage, which I guess would be noteworthy. Officers issued chickens with a stop sign at 1245 a.m. Someone stole a bottle of cats from Walmart, was found,

Starting point is 00:24:33 and she said they fell off. An intoxicated man hit an injured dead dog or a construction worker on Lone Mountain Road. I guess the distinction there would be kind of important. A man reported that a dog was seen smoking marijuana and stuck on Saddle Avenue. A woman said that she had just about painted her dog on Rouse Avenue. And a resident on a truck was seen trying to steal a bear on Frontage Road. There were also a lot of people warned for all sorts of things in Dave's neural net reports like, a man was warned for walking in a parking lot. The man was locked. A man was warned for sleeping and threatening to be a bag of night. A man was warned for being a bear on a scam. And a man was warned for being in a story at 2.40 a.m. And one other one that caught my imagination was, a caller wanted a deputy to see if he could get a message from the wind.

Starting point is 00:25:31 Oh, that's nice. I just thought that was rather poetic, right? It's kind of interesting to see what these neural nets come up with. Well, it's funny. It's like the recipes. That's sort of, I've never been to Bozeman, but it sort of gives you an impressionistic view of what the actual original is like. Yeah, you can sort of work backwards. Yeah. And lastly, listeners who have been with us from the beginning or who have dug back into

Starting point is 00:25:52 the archives might remember that early on we were doing a weekly challenge. The one from episode nine asked, what was the craziest belief you had as a child? We recently received a new reply to that question. My name is Stacy Mitchell, and I just discovered your website and podcast. I know I'm a little bit late to the train. I just finished listening to episode nine where you asked what is something you believed as a child. I felt like I need to share as mine is a bit unusual. I grew up in a small town of 3,000 people. In my town, there were no mailmen and we needed to go to the post office to pick up our mail. I believe that mailmen were a work of fiction for books and movies. It was not until I was 16 years old and moved to a big city that I asked my mom where the post

Starting point is 00:26:34 office was. I was baffled to learn that a mail person would be delivering the mail directly to our house. The mailman is real and not make-believe. Thanks for the podcast. I can't wait to catch up and hear all the wonderful stories of the world you have to share. That's like finding out Santa Claus is real. The Tooth Fairy. Yeah. So, Stacey, at some point you will hopefully get to this episode and learn that we were quite charmed with your email about not believing in mailmen. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. If you have anything that you'd like to add to the conversation, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:27:16 It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an interesting sounding situation, and I have to work out what is actually going on, asking only yes or no This is from listener Simone Hilliard. Okay, she must have figured out that there was some kind of error or something had been being done wrong. No. Or something had been omitted to being done that should have been done. That's a great question, but that's not it. That's not it.

Starting point is 00:27:49 Oh, okay. Did she figure out that something was fake? No. Okay. One girl's homework assignment. Does it matter what grade she's in or what age she is? No, not really. This is like pre-college yeah i think

Starting point is 00:28:06 she'd be about 11 or 12 okay um and it it cost the u.s government did you say yes in the late 1970s did it like literally cost the u.s government like they had to pay out this money yes ah okay um did they pay it out to the girl no to her school no hmm to some group that she is somehow connected to no did she do uh did she do her homework assignment would you say this is like for a social studies kind of class or a history class something like that it happened to be but it didn't need to be i guess it didn't have to be okay i'm kind of imagining that she did some kind of research into something uh like she wrote a paper looking into something yes i don't know how much to say here. Sort of. She was working on a paper.

Starting point is 00:29:08 Okay. Is this like something she uncovered while doing some research? No. No. Did she get hurt somehow and the government had to, no, that would be the money would go to her or her? No, I'm sorry to be so. Did she die?

Starting point is 00:29:24 No, for once. Okay. Her identity is important, her specific identity. Her specific identity. Is it somebody I would have heard of? Yes. Oh, really? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:35 And this is in the US? This all happened in the US? Yes. So she went on to become somebody famous? No, she was famous at the time. She was already famous as a child? Yes. For something she had done?

Starting point is 00:29:50 No. Just for who she was? Yes. Oh, was she the daughter of the President of the United States? I don't know how you do this. Yes, she was. Was it Jimmy Carter's daughter? Amy Carter, yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:02 Oh, so how did her homework assignment... Oh, because the Secret Service has to follow her wherever she goes, so she went somewhere and the Secret Service had to go there too? No. Or they had a flyer there specially in a special... No, I mean, that's another great guess. Oh, so was it just the act of her doing her homework that somehow was costly as opposed to something that she uncovered or found while doing her homework. Just the act of doing her homework.

Starting point is 00:30:30 Like where she was doing it or how she was doing it or. It's actually neither of those things. It's neither of those things. She was given an assignment. Okay. And I don't want to give anything away. She was given a homework assignment. Right.

Starting point is 00:30:46 And. Was she doing this assignment like in her residence only, would you say? Like she could have done this in her room? Yes. Oh, she could have. Okay. But was she using some kind of expensive resources that the government had to pay for? Yes.

Starting point is 00:31:03 You're almost there. To do the assignment. Is it a resource that a child would normally use to do their homework? No. No. And that's sort of the point. And that's sort of the point, that she expensively used, I don't know, computers or... Yes.

Starting point is 00:31:21 Was it computers? Yeah. Something to do with computers. You're basically there. Let's give it to you. One Friday during Jimmy Carter's presidency, his daughter Amy got stuck on a homework question about the Industrial Revolution. She took the question to her mother, Rosalyn, who didn't understand it either and asked one of her aides to call the Labor Department. The homework was

Starting point is 00:31:37 due on Monday. The Washington Post reported, on Sunday afternoon, a truck arrived at the White House loaded with a computer printout giving a full answer to what someone in the department had considered a serious question from the president. To compile the printout, the Labor Department had kept a full computer team working overtime during the weekend. A horrified Rosalind Carter was told the research had probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime. Oh, my gosh. To add insult to injury, Amy got a C on the assignment. Oh, wow. So thank you, Simone, for signing me in.

Starting point is 00:32:05 Thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle that they'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. This podcast is supported primarily by our incredible listeners. If you would like to help support our celebration of the quirky and the curious,

Starting point is 00:32:24 you can find a donate button in the our celebration of the quirky and the curious, you can find a donate button in the support a section of the website at futilitycloset.com. Or you can join our Patreon campaign, where you'll get extra discussions on some of the stories, more lateral thinking puzzles, peeks behind the scenes, and updates on Sasha, the official Futility Closet podcast. You can find our Patreon page at patreon.com Thank you. If you have any questions or comments for us, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by Greg's awesome brother, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 205-The White Mouse

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