Futility Closet - 281-Grey Owl

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 11,000 quirky curiosities from walking sculptures to an unsolved cipher. This is episode 281. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In the 1930s, the world's best-known conservationist was an ex-trapper named Gray Owl, who wrote and lectured ardently for the preservation of the Canadian wilderness. At his death, though, it was discovered

Starting point is 00:00:37 that he wasn't who he'd claimed to be. In today's show, we'll tell the story of his curious history and complicated legacy. We'll also learn how your father can be your uncle and puzzle over a duplicate record. On the evening of November 9th, 1936, a tall, hawk-faced man stood up before a crowd of 1,700 at the King Edward Hotel in Toronto. He was dressed in buckskins and wore his long hair in braids. In a deep voice, he told them, Canada's greatest asset today is her forest lands. In my latest book, I have attacked the average Canadian's ignorance of his own country. He is prouder of skyscrapers on Yonge Street and the price of hogs. He can have those any time, but we can't replace the natural resources we are destroying as fast as we can.

Starting point is 00:01:29 He called for an end to the plundering of the wilderness, one of Canada's most precious resources. He was called Gray Owl, and he knew his subject from direct experience. He had himself spent years as a trapper in the northern forest until an arresting experience in the spring of 1928. He had just trapped and killed a mother beaver when he heard the crying of her two kits. He had found them and was preparing to shoot them when his wife, Anna Herio, begged him to spare them, and at her insistence he agreed to take them home. In the year that followed, they won him over. He wrote, they seemed to be almost like little folk from some other planet whose language we could not yet quite understand.

Starting point is 00:02:06 To kill such creatures seemed monstrous. I would do no more of it. Instead of persecuting them further, I would study them, see just what there really was to them. I perhaps could start a colony of my own. These animals could not be permitted to pass completely from the face of this wilderness. He resolved to stop trapping beaver. To make up the lost income, he wrote an article about his experiences for the British magazine Country Life, and that succeeded so well that the magazine asked

Starting point is 00:02:30 for a book. The Men of the Last Frontier appeared in late 1931. It was a hit, but it said little about Gray Owl's early life. The foreword said only, it should be explained that the author is a half-breed Indian whose name has recently become known throughout the English-speaking world. His father was a Scot, his mother an Apache Indian of New Mexico, and he was born somewhere near the Rio Grande 40-odd years ago. Gray Owl emerged as one of Canada's pioneer conservationists, one of the first Canadians warning of the vulnerability of the nation's wildlife, fish, and forests. Excerpts from the book were picked up in Canadian and American magazines and school readers, and Gray Owl's writings came to the attention of the Parks Branch, which made him caretaker

Starting point is 00:03:11 of park animals at Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba. He began making films for the Park Service, and after six months, moved to Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan, where he lived in an 18-by-20-foot log cabin on Lake Adjawan that was fitted with a tunnel so that the beaver he tamed could build their lodge both outside and inside the cabin. He lived there from 1931 to 1938, writing three more books and welcoming visitors as his fame grew. His story was naturally suited to appeal to the press. He wore buckskins and feathers and was working to save the Canadian national animal. By 1935, his message had spread

Starting point is 00:03:45 widely enough that his publisher arranged a tour of England, where his billing as a modern Hiawatha made him a huge success with audiences eager for a romantic diversion from the Great Depression. He gave 200 lectures to more than a quarter million people, with hundreds turned away at the door. He told his audiences, remember, you belong to nature, not it to you. And the films he made underscored his message and were shown at schools, church groups, and service clubs across North America and Europe. In late 1937, he undertook a second tour of Britain, this one including a Royal Command performance at Buckingham Palace, and he followed that up with a three-month tour of North America. By the time he got back to Beaver Lodge in April 1938, he was exhausted, and only three days after his return, he had to be rushed to the hospital. It was only a mild case of pneumonia,

Starting point is 00:04:30 but he was too weak to fight it, and he died on April 13th at age 49. He was buried on Lake Adjawan, on the ridge above Beaver Lodge, where he'd written his books. In his obituary, the Toronto Globe and Mail called Gray Owl, quote, the most famous of Canadian Indians, and media throughout Europe and North America reprinted the story of his origins. But then an Ontario newspaper called the North Bay Nugget released a story it had been holding for three years. In 1935, a woman named Angele Bellini had told a reporter that she was Gray Owl's legal wife, that he'd abandoned her and their one-year-old daughter 25 years earlier, and that he was an Englishman. he'd abandoned her and their one-year-old daughter 25 years earlier, and that he was an Englishman. The newspaper's editor, Ed Bunyan, had decided to hold the story. In the grip of the Depression and gathering global tensions, Gray Owl had been presenting a message of toleration and kindness,

Starting point is 00:05:15 and Bunyan hadn't wanted to expose him. But as journalists investigated the story, it turned out to be true. Gray Owl had no ancestry at all among indigenous peoples. His real name was Archie Bellany, and he'd been born to English parents and raised in the town of Hastings on the English Channel. The news triggered an international scandal. In the first shock of the revelation, many people felt betrayed, and in some cases his books were withdrawn from sale or his real name inserted in place of the pseudonym. Even apart from the cultural appropriation, Bellany had had a checkered past. He'd run into trouble with the police over drunkenness and had a bigamous marriage and several abandoned children.

Starting point is 00:05:50 British headlines read, Grey Owl English Boy and Grey Owl Had Cockney Accent and Four Wives. He'd been born Archibald Stansfeld Bellini in Hastings in 1888. His father was a ne'er-do-well who had abandoned Archie's mother and died eventually in North America. Archie had been raised chiefly by his Aunt Ada, who had taught him at home until he was 11 and instilled in him a love of literature and music. As a boy, he'd been enthralled by stories of American Native people, reading Longfellow and James Fenimore Cooper, and idealizing them from an early age. A companion from Hastings Grammar School remembered Archie's gang giving war whoops and carrying pretend tomahawks.

Starting point is 00:06:26 Archie also had a fanatical love of animals and convinced his aunt to let him keep rabbits, snakes, and mice on the top floor of their house. As a lonely boy, he invented two fictional parents, the mother an Apache and the father a Western Plainsman. That was the first glimmer of Gray Owl's fictional story. Archie was a mediocre student and left school at 15 to work at a lumberyard, but he still admired the indigenous Canadians and yearned to go and live with them. At last, when he was 17 years old, his aunt relented and allowed him to go. He sailed to Halifax in March 1906 and found his way to Lake Tamagami in northern Ontario, the home of a small Ojibwe community. He stayed with a family there whose niece, Angele, taught

Starting point is 00:07:04 him their language and gave him lessons in trapping and canoeing. He married her and fathered a daughter, but abandoned them a year later. She was the one who later revealed his identity to the newspaper. Though he remained legally married to Angele, he entered and left a succession of relationships through the years that followed as he served as a forest ranger and trapper in eastern Canada and passed through England as a soldier during World War I. He returned to Canada to find the north woods overlogged and overhunted, and he found it difficult to make a living as a trapper. In the lumbering town of Biscotasing, he became friends with a local Ojibwe family called the Espanols and stayed with them for several years, learning more about the Ojibwe way of life and language and gaining a new

Starting point is 00:07:41 appreciation of the northern forest. To resemble an indigenous Canadian, he dyed his brown hair jet black and colored his skin brown with henna, and he would pose for hours in front of a mirror trying to look convincingly indigenous. In the summer of 1925, he met a young Iroquois waitress named Gertrude Bernard and suggested that they spend the winter trapping together in the Abitibi region of Quebec. There he fell in love with her and gave her the name Ana Hario. It was she who prevailed on him to spare the beaver kits, and his conservation and writing career had followed from there in character as Grey Owl. To be sure, this didn't fool everyone. He had blue eyes, and he dressed as a romantic parody of a fictional Indian. He claimed to have learned English as a teenager, studying descriptions of bear traps and shotguns

Starting point is 00:08:24 in mail-order catalogs, but his prose style was so mannered that one university professor accused him of using a ghost writer. In his fourth book, he'd written, I once spent a season in the great high oasis of Riding Mountain, with its poplar forest and rolling downs carpeted with myriad flowers, that stands like an immense island of green above the hot, dry sameness of the wheat-stricken Manitoba prairie that surrounds it. In fact, he'd won top marks in English at Hastings Grammar School. He tried to escape detection by introducing grammatical errors, misspellings, and bad punctuation in his writings and insisting that these be included in the printed books, but the result was patchy and inconsistent. The Ojibwe did see through him, as did many of the white people

Starting point is 00:09:04 of the Canadian back woods. A fellow trapper named Vince Crichton said, Bellini was cruel to both wildlife and humans and had little if no respect for women. He was a cheat, a rogue, imposter, thorough drunkard, and would steal anything that he could carry. I have seen Bellini stripped. His skin was very white, except his arms, hands, neck, and face, which were very brown, colored by dyes obtained from Edward Downey, druggist for many years at Chapelleau. He dyed his hair jet black, but could not change the color of his eyes from blue to brown. A Quebec man once told Archie, if you're an Indian, I'm a Chinaman. But the people who could have exposed him seemed to feel that the good he was doing was

Starting point is 00:09:40 valuable. At a lecture at Oxford in 1936, a student of the North American Indigenous Peoples saw immediately that gray owl's greeting, hau kola, rang false. It was a term of goodwill among the Sioux, but gray owl claimed to be an Apache who had lived among the Ojibwe. The student wrote, my heart sank, but as he got going, the Hiawatha stuff vanished and we got down to the real gray owl, a man of acute perception, poetic feeling, and whimsical humor, and an ardent faith in his mission of wildlife conservation. The University of Calgary historian Don Smith says Gray Owl was decades ahead of his time and cast a tremendous shadow over subsequent conservationists. University of Sussex historian Clive Webb says it's very easy to dismiss Gray

Starting point is 00:10:19 Owl as a fraud, but, quote, I think you do have to separate some of his personal shortcomings from his great work as a conservationist. A spokeswoman from Prince Albert National Park told BBC News in 2013 that Bellini's impersonation of a native was still contentious for some local First Nations people. She said, he was an eccentric person and some of his personal choices in life have been criticized, but his efforts to promote conservation and the protection of habitat and wildlife are still resonant today. Bellini himself seemed to understand that the persona he'd adopted helped to advance his appeal for conservation. A friend who believed gray owl was Apache once asked him why he presented himself so flamboyantly. He answered, people expect it. It means a great deal more to them to see me in

Starting point is 00:10:58 beads and feathers than if they merely saw a plain woodsman playing with a beaver. This is something they will remember, and brother, I want them to remember. That is part of my job. That doesn't excuse his deceit, but it can be said in his favor that he didn't adopt the disguise cynically. He'd yearned to be a native since boyhood, long before he had any thoughts of writing or fame. He'd gone to Canada because he thought he belonged there, and he pleaded for the preservation of the forest because he genuinely cared about it. During the uproar when he was first outed as an imposter, the Times of London had written, if in the pursuit of his strange and lonely path, Greyal thought it well to adopt a race and a tradition that were not in fact his own, not in order to deceive his fellow men or to amuse the children who so loved him,

Starting point is 00:11:37 but in order to feel himself in body and spirit the being he desired to be, he did it that the truth of him might be the more true. A former neighbor in England asked, how did the soul of an Indian find its way into a British boy? It's not clear that even Archie Bellini knew the answer to that question, but he managed to spend his odd life realizing a deeply felt identity. As Gray Owl, he once told a reporter, I'm just a round peg in a round hole. The puzzle in episode 275, sent in by Jesse Schloud, and spoiler alert for the answer, was about how blood tests would show Jesse, a man, to be genetically the mother of his sister's child, because Jesse had received a bone marrow transplant from his sister,

Starting point is 00:12:33 making his blood now genetically identical to hers. Alan Ricks wrote, I guessed that it was a bone marrow transplant because I was aware that such a transplant would slowly change the recipient's blood type to that of the donor's. However, I was completely unaware that the very DNA of the recipient's blood would also change. My mind immediately went to crime mysteries. You commit a murder, leave blood at the scene, then get a bone marrow transplant and are declared innocent through a DNA test. This was such a cool concept to me that I looked up what exactly was happening. The transplant turns you into a genetic chimera. A chimeric person has a mix of DNA inside them. The stem cells you receive have the donor's DNA, and so will the white blood cells they

Starting point is 00:13:11 produce. You now have your own DNA in the vast majority of your cells, but your donor's DNA in your blood. But it doesn't just stop there. And at this point, I should mention for those who aren't well-versed in Greek mythology that a chimera is an animal composed of parts of different animals, often depicted with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail, and the word has now also come to refer to an organism that has multiple sets of DNA.

Starting point is 00:13:38 Allen reports that research has found transplant donor DNA in recipients' nail cells and urine, and that other studies suggest that donor DNA can migrate into the epithelial cells that line the surfaces of the body, such as the mouth and organs. Allen cited a 2004 case where semen collected from the scene of a sexual assault matched with semen in a criminal database, but confusingly, the match was for someone who was already in jail at the time of the assault. Further investigation revealed that the inmate who matched had received a bone marrow transplant from his brother, and the test results in the database, though from the inmate's sample, actually showed the brother's DNA, and it was eventually found to be the inmate's

Starting point is 00:14:20 brother who had committed this crime. The article quotes a genetics researcher who says, this case points out the small risk that potential marrow donors take by having their DNA profile turning up in a crime database if the recipient later commits a crime. But this risk is probably better than the alternative. And this really does open up a whole vista of possibilities, if not for actually committing crime, since we don't usually recommend that, but for writing crime stories or maybe lateral thinking puzzles. And presumably, Jesse's sister trusts Jesse to not leave her DNA at crime scenes. Allen also noted that people can be chimeric naturally in rare cases, and this can create some perplexing situations from what I read about it. Congenital chimerism can occur when fraternal twin embryos join together early in pregnancy to form one fetus with two sets of DNA. Unlike people who have received transplants,

Starting point is 00:15:16 congenital chimeras would usually have no reason to even suspect that there might be odd issues with their DNA until some unusual situation occurs. For example, when a mother living in Washington state named Lydia Fairchild sued her ex-partner for child support in 2002, the required paternity test did prove that the man she was suing for support was indeed the father of her children. But in a very odd twist, the DNA tests also showed that she was not actually their mother. Not only was Fairchild then denied governmental assistance for her children, but she was accused of trying to perpetrate a fraud, and she was threatened with having her children taken from her. She went through several court hearings trying desperately to prove that she was indeed the mother of her

Starting point is 00:15:58 children, and got turned down by several lawyers who wouldn't take her case, given that the gold standard of DNA tests were against her. The state was so suspicious of Fairchild that when she gave birth to her third child, a court officer was stationed in the delivery room in order to witness immediate DNA testing of both Fairchild and the baby. The testing again showed that Fairchild was not the baby's mother, causing officials to believe that she was trying to perpetrate some kind of surrogacy scam. But the lawyer who did finally agree to take Fairchild's case, after a lot of sharp suspicious questioning of her, learned about a similar case in Boston of a chimeric woman whose DNA appeared to not match that of her own children. That was the

Starting point is 00:16:40 breakthrough that Fairchild desperately needed, and more extensive testing eventually showed that while DNA from Fairchild's skin and hair didn't match her children's, DNA from her cervix did, finally confirming their relationship and verifying another example of human congenital chimerism. That just sounds like a nightmare. So what looks like an objective test seems to show that you're not the mother of your own children. Right, right. And can you imagine how crazy making that would be? I mean, she knew she was the children's mother, but you can't prove that. How would it even occur to you what was really going on?

Starting point is 00:17:12 That just sounds insane. Yeah. I'm sure she was immensely relieved when it finally got straightened out, but it took quite some time. Yeah. On this topic, Nereus Yuzumas, a self-described fan from Lithuania, wrote, I have just finished listening to the lateral thinking puzzle in episode 275, and I got the answer right away, only because I have just read of an exactly similar situation. Not only that, while reading about the case of bone marrow donors' DNA replacing the DNA in the white

Starting point is 00:17:42 blood cells of the recipient, I came across this story of curious parenthood. It basically tells the story of someone who, after doing a paternity test, found out that he is in fact an uncle to his own child. It turns out that he is a chimera and has residual DNA of his unborn twin that he absorbed while in the womb, and this twin is genetically his child's father. I find this to be mind-blowing how life finds a way and how from a hereditary and evolutionary context, someone who was not even born can have offspring. This could also be an interesting lateral thinking puzzle, if only a bit in the same vein as the previous one. That would be a very difficult lateral thinking puzzle.

Starting point is 00:18:19 You're right, too. It sounds like the plot of a really contrived novel or something, you know? Yes. And Nereus sent us links to articles on this story about a man who had fathered a child with his partner by means of intrauterine insemination. When they later learned that the child's blood type didn't match that of either of his parents, the man took two paternity tests, the results of which excluded him from being the child's father, leaving the parents to fear that the fertility clinic had inseminated the mother with a different man's sperm. More extensive genetic testing results of which excluded him from being the child's father, leaving the parents to fear that the fertility clinic had inseminated the mother with a different man's sperm. More extensive genetic testing revealed that the man

Starting point is 00:18:50 appeared to be about 25% related to the child, suggesting that he was the boy's uncle. With the help of a geneticist, they were able to figure out that the man was a genetic chimera, and that the cells that he had apparently absorbed from his unknown fraternal twin had included germ cells, the cells that develop into eggs or sperm, and that had resulted in the unborn twin's DNA being passed on to the child. This case, reported in 2015, is claimed to be the first reported case

Starting point is 00:19:16 of standard DNA testing excluding someone's paternity due to chimerism, though I have to wonder whether it's unknowingly happened before, where someone was told that he wasn't a child's father when he actually was. Yeah, I was just thinking that there must be cases of this where they didn't figure it out. Right, and nobody would ever know, and that could have caused a lot of heartbreak or difficulties in various situations. On the topic of the effects of bone marrow transplants, Chaim Schramm sent us a New York Times article from December about a study conducted by the Washoe County Sheriff's

Starting point is 00:19:50 Department in Nevada on one of their IT workers, Chris Long, who needed a marrow transplant. According to the article, tens of thousands of people receive bone marrow transplants each year to treat various blood cancers and other blood diseases, so the spreading of a donor's DNA really could be an issue for crime labs. Thus, a colleague at the Sheriff's Department encouraged Long to undergo a series of DNA tests from various parts of his body, starting before the transplant and continuing for the next four years so that they could see the effects of the transplant. They discovered that within four months, Long's blood had, not surprisingly, been replaced with blood that matched the donor's. Swabs from his lip, cheek, and tongue also contained some of the donor's DNA, with the specific percentages rising and falling over time.

Starting point is 00:20:35 Of the different samples taken, only Long's chest and head hair were unaffected by the transplant. But the most unexpected finding for the lab was that four years after the transplant, the DNA in Long's semen had been entirely replaced by the donor's. Now, that doesn't mean that a bone marrow recipient would actually pass along the donor's genes to his children, according to marrow transplant experts who were cited by the New York Times, as a donor's blood cells shouldn't be able to create new sperm cells, which would be necessary for transmitting the DNA to an embryo. However, this change in the semen's DNA could cause real problems for a crime lab, as in the earlier case that I mentioned. That's fascinating, the whole thing.

Starting point is 00:21:20 The New York Times also covered a few more cases where bone marrow transplants had caused confusion, such as a case reported in 2005 where investigators were skeptical of an Alaskan woman's claim that she had been sexually assaulted because she stated that there had been one assailant and the DNA analysis was consistent with there having been two. It was eventually determined that the second DNA profile they were seeing had actually come from the woman's bone marrow donor. In 2008, there was confusion when trying to identify a victim of a traffic accident in Seoul, South Korea. Analysis of the blood originally identified the individual as a woman, though the victim was actually a man. In this case, in which it turned out that the man had received a bone marrow transplant from his daughter, DNA from the man's kidney showed the

Starting point is 00:22:00 correct identification, while samples from his spleen and lung contained both male and female DNA. That's like a whole new dimension that I guess detectives in the justice system have to consider now. Yeah, and I don't know how widespread this understanding is yet. Like, I think people are just sort of twigging onto it now. Yeah. Chimerism isn't just seen in humans and is actually rather common in some other species. Most marmoset monkeys, for example, are chimeras. Marmosets are almost always born as fraternal twins, but unlike humans, which become chimeras when one twin dies and is absorbed by the other, marmoset twins typically exchange cells with each other in utero as their placentas fuse and create a network of blood

Starting point is 00:22:45 vessels through which cells pass between the siblings. This means that most marmosets show at least some DNA from their twin in various parts of their bodies, although the exact amounts and locations vary from one marmoset to another. Most marmosets are germline chimeras, which means that they may pass on their siblings' DNA to their own offspring. And it's been found that over half of male marmosets actually carry their brother's sperm, making many male marmosets' uncles to their own children. And I guess luckily not too many marmosets tend to be trying to verify parentage through DNA tests, as I imagine that would be a real mess. Yeah, I was going to say, marmoset crimes must be very hard to solve.

Starting point is 00:23:21 Very hard. And lastly, just to cover what some people might be wondering, one of the articles that I read did ask whether a regular blood transfusion would cause problems with DNA testing. I would imagine that blood transfusions are probably even more common than bone marrow transplants, so that could be a pretty important question, especially for crime labs. But at least according to Michelle Gong,

Starting point is 00:23:42 an assistant professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the answer is no. She was quoted as saying, studies have shown that donor DNA in blood transfusion recipients persists for a number of days, sometimes longer, but its presence is unlikely to alter genetic tests significantly, which must be a relief for law enforcement, I would imagine. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. If you have any updates or comments, please send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me a strange sounding situation, and I have to see if I can puzzle, Greg is going to give me a strange-sounding situation, and I have to see if I can figure out what is actually going on, asking yes or no questions.

Starting point is 00:24:29 This is from listener Paul Kapp. He writes, Just finished listening to episode 238 and the lateral thinking puzzle featuring one of Wayne Gretzky's NHL all-time records. Based on the introduction, I thought it would be a completely different odd-sounding situation about another of Gretzky's

Starting point is 00:24:44 mind-boggling suite of statistical records. This is the one I was thinking of, wrapped up as its own puzzle. Wayne Gretzky holds the record for the quickest player to score a thousand points, goals plus assists. He also holds second place in the same category. How? Does it have anything to do with playing for different teams or in different countries? No. Different positions, playing different positions? Nope. See, that would work, though.

Starting point is 00:25:16 If there's like a record for this position and a record for that position. Yeah, just stop. You've got an adequate answer whether it's true or not. See, that would work. So he holds both first and second place basically in the same statistic is what you're saying. If I understand correctly? Yes. Yes and no.

Starting point is 00:25:38 I'm waggling my eyebrows subtly. Okay. Okay. Let me try testing the different parts of that question then. Okay. There is a statistic which has to do with how quickly you earn a thousand, or how quickly you earn... Score a thousand points. Score a thousand points.

Starting point is 00:25:56 Yes. So by quickly, do you mean the number of games or the amount of time played? Do you mean one of those two things? Games. Number of time played? Do you mean one of those two things? Games. Number of games played. So it's how few games can you play and get to a thousand points? That's right. Okay. He holds both first and second place in this category. Yes. He himself. Yes. Not somebody else named Wayne Gretzky, a twin brother with the same name. No. Wayne. Same guy.

Starting point is 00:26:26 Okay. But would you say there is some difference between the two? Yes. So some difference, hmm, a difference in the way the points are scored? No. A difference in the circumstances under which the points are scored, like whether there's overtime or not overtime. I don't know much about hockey.

Starting point is 00:26:53 No. I'm making stuff up here. And you don't, for the listeners too, you don't have to know much about hockey to get this possible. You know, scored under these circumstances versus those circumstances. No. So it's not neither of those things. Time periods?

Starting point is 00:27:07 What do you mean? Well, if I remember from the other puzzle, like he retired and came back, so he would have played in two different time periods, or do you count him as starting his career over? So the two... No, but you're sort of on the right track. Something to do with time. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:27:24 The time when the games were played uh yes keep going the time of day when the games are played no the years in which the games are played uh yes whether it's like regular season or postseason no um or championship games or anything special like that. No, no. Okay. I already forgot. I went down another alley and forgot what you said on the last one. You said... He's the quickest player to score 1,000 points.

Starting point is 00:27:55 No, no, no. But I'm trying to remember what you said about time. Did you give me any yeses yet for anything other than time? Yes. You're on the right track. Basically, it has something to do... But I don't have... With when the points were scored.

Starting point is 00:28:04 With when the points were scored. And it has something to do with when the points were scored. With when the points were scored. And it's not to do with overtime versus regular game or postseason versus regular season. But when the points were scored, have anything to do with his age? Yes. Oh, whether he was like, I don't know how it works in hockey, but like in baseball, you have like minor leagues and major leagues. So like whether he was playing in a different. No.

Starting point is 00:28:27 Like when he's younger in his career, you know, he's playing in a different league or something. Wayne Gretzky is a very high scoring player. I agree. That's the one thing I know about him. So here's another clue. Something vaguely to do with his age and time. Okay, so he scored his first 1,000 points in a certain number of games. Presumably when he was younger.

Starting point is 00:28:55 Right, and took first place in that category. Yes, and then it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that he retired for a while. No, but that's close. So he gets to that point, scores 1,000, and then takes first place in that record. Oh. Then what happens after that? He starts scoring another 1,000 points? Yes.

Starting point is 00:29:12 So it's the score of the second 1,000 points? Amazingly, yes. Oh, my. Gretzky's career total of 2,857 points makes him the only player to surpass 2,000 points. He scored his 1,000th point in 424 games. Mario Lemieux achieved this in 513 games, making him the second fastest player to this plateau. However, Gretzky was able to score points 1,001 through 2,000, a different set of 1,000 points, in 433 games, still 80 games faster than Lemieux's first 1,000, giving G Redsky, 2,000 points in just 857 games.

Starting point is 00:29:45 Now, that is super impressive. Yeah. That's just mind-boggling. That really is. So thank you for that puzzle, Paul. And if anybody else has a puzzle to send in, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet really relies on the support of our listeners. If you would like to become one of our wonderful patrons who help support the show and get bonus materials such as outtakes, more discussions on some of the stories, extralateral thinking puzzles, and peeks behind the scenes of the show, then check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset.

Starting point is 00:30:21 Or see the support us page at our website at futilitycloset.com. At our website, you'll also find over 11,000 quirky curiosities, the Futility Closet store, information about the Futility Closet books, and the show notes for the podcast with links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments for us, you can always email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by the always talented Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 281-Grey Owl

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.