Futility Closet - 309-The 'Grain of Salt' Episode

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 a dreaming poet to a five-year-old patentee. This is episode 309. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Sometimes in our research, we come across stories that are regarded as true, but that we can't fully verify. In today's show, we'll share two such stories from the 1920s about a pair of New York fruit dealers and a mythologized bank robber and discuss the strength of the evidence behind them.

Starting point is 00:00:43 We'll also salute a retiring cat and puzzle over a heartless spouse. Okay, I'm calling this the grain of salt episode because I have two stories that I can't quite pin down. They're both presented as true in reputable sources, and I had considered each of them for a full episode. But when I dug into them, I found the evidence was thin, thinner than I could really support. On the other hand, I can't find anyone who denies outright that either one is true. So I'm just going to tell both stories here, and maybe someone can debunk them conclusively or shed some light or even confirm them.

Starting point is 00:01:20 They're interesting stories, at least. them. They're interesting stories, at least. The first concerns two brothers, Tony and Nick Fortunato, who came to the United States from Italy around the turn of the 20th century and, over 25 years, worked their way up to become prosperous fruit dealers in New York City. The story goes that one day in the spring of 1929, an imposing man with a handlebar mustache walked into their place of business in Midtown New York. He identified himself as T. Remington Grenfell, vice president of the Grand Central Holding Corporation, and he congratulated them on having been chosen from among all the top fruit dealers in New York.

Starting point is 00:01:53 The brothers thanked him and said, chosen for what? Grenfell told them that they were making a change at Grand Central Terminal. There was a big circular information booth in the middle of the main concourse, and travelers had been overwhelming the staff there with unnecessary questions. So after April 1st, essential information would be given out at the ticket windows instead, and the information booth would be leased to sell fruit. The holding corporation had made a lengthy study of the city's top dealers and had chosen the Fortunato brothers to run this fruit stand.

Starting point is 00:02:22 The brothers saw immediately that this was a huge opportunity. The terminal was one of the busiest train stations in North America. They said they were flattered to be chosen and asked what the rent was. Grenfell said, the money is secondary to us at Grand Central. We're asking only $100,000 a year in advance. The brothers had the money and $2,000 a week did not seem unreasonable. The stand would operate around the clock, and the passing traffic of potential customers, especially during daylight hours, would be among the densest in the city. And they wouldn't have to limit their sales to apples and oranges. The real profit would come from expensive fruit baskets and boxes of candy and nuts, dates, and figs. Grenfell added that if after six months the booth didn't show a profit of at least $1,000 a week,

Starting point is 00:03:05 the brothers could cancel the contract and half their advance would be returned. He opened his briefcase and laid out some documents spelling out the details. The stand they built had to be a conservative, dignified structure that matched the decor of the station, but all the requirements seemed reasonable. The brothers envisioned a huge success, but said they wanted to think it over. Grenfell looked hard at them and cleared his throat. He said, I'm afraid there won't be time for that. After all, we at Grand Central are not asking you for anything.

Starting point is 00:03:32 We are offering this opportunity to you. He said that their number one competitor was next in line for the opportunity and was eager to get it. The brothers renewed their enthusiasm and told him they were definitely interested in the deal. Grenfell suggested they meet with the president of the Grand Central Holding Corporation, and they agreed. He ushered them into a chauffeur-driven limousine and took them to a tall office building connected to the terminal. There he led them to an office suite whose door read, Wilson A. Blodgett, President, Grand Central Holding Corporation. Inside, a secretary invited them to take a seat. Blodgett was in his office,

Starting point is 00:04:05 and as they waited, they could make out his side of a telephone conversation. To their horror, they realized he was talking to their rival in the competition for the fruit stand. Before they could act, Blodgett told him, very well, the deal's closed. Have your certified check for $100,000 in my hands by noon tomorrow, and the booth is yours. He hung up and called them into his office. He was friendly at first and offered them cigars, but when Grenfell explained his mistake, he became deeply embarrassed. He said he'd been under the impression that the Fortunatos couldn't raise the $100,000, so he'd given the deal to the next name on the list. Grenfell said, but these two gentlemen can

Starting point is 00:04:39 produce such a certified check, WA, can't you gentlemen? The brothers insisted that they could. That left Blodgett in a quandary. He was an ethical man, and he'd already offered the stand to someone else. He mulled the problem over and at last said to Grenfell, I guess the only fair thing the railroad can do now is to let the first one here with the check have the booth. The brothers agreed. They got up early the next morning and were at the bank as soon as it opened, and they hurried back to the corporation office with a certified check for $100,000. Grenfell and Blodgett were there waiting for them. The secretary fetched a notary, the papers were all signed and witnessed, and the

Starting point is 00:05:13 Fortunatos handed over the check, shook hands, and departed in a hurry. Only 13 days remained before April 1st, and they had a lot of work to do, buying lumber and building materials, hiring carpenters, and ordering fruit to stock the stand. When the great day arrived, they made sure that the building materials arrived early at the terminal, and at 9 a.m., when their lease was due to start, they presented themselves at the information booth and asked when they might begin work on the conversion. The man looked puzzled, and Tony showed him the contract. The man read it and looked even more puzzled. The three other men in the booth read it as well and shrugged. The first man handed the contract back to Tony and said, this must be a joke of some kind. Tony said, joke? Me and my brother here have leased this booth for $100,000.

Starting point is 00:05:55 By now, the lumber was being carted in and the carpenters were setting to work, which made it hard for travelers to reach the booth. The noise attracted a railroad policeman who asked some questions, inspected the contract, exchanged glances with the men in the booth, and set off to find someone in authority. It took more than an hour for word to filter up through the offices of the New York Central Railroad, but at length a vice president presented himself at the booth. He explained to Tony and Nick that the railway had no plans for a fruit stand. The information booth would remain just as it was, and he told them, there is no such thing as the Grand Central Holding Corporation.

Starting point is 00:06:32 The brothers insisted that there was and took him there, but when they reached it, the office was vacant and the name on the door was gone. The brothers hurried to their bank to see what had happened to their check. It had been deposited at another local bank, but that bank was reluctant to give them any details. It had to protect its depositor against two wild men with an odd story about a fruit stand. The brothers went to the police and returned with a detective who specialized in confidence work. He was able to learn that two men had opened a joint checking account there not long ago, passing off the Grand Central Holding Corporation as a brokerage outfit. In those days, banks did not inquire too closely into the backgrounds of new depositors. They had charmed a bank officer out of requiring references and made an initial deposit of $100,000. They had let the deposit sit for a week

Starting point is 00:07:15 and then began making withdrawals of $10,000, $15,000, and $25,000 at a time. By Saturday, March 30, the last banking day before the Fortunatos arrived at the terminal, By Saturday, March 30, the last banking day before the Fortunatos arrived at the terminal, the account was down to $1,000. The brothers could not spot Grenfell or Blodgett in the rogues' gallery of criminal photographs that the New York police kept on file. They took their case to Raymond Schindler, the celebrated private detective who specialized in identifying conmen, but no one who had met the men—Nick and Tony, the bank employees, or the man who'd leased the office, was able to offer much useful information, and after a year, Schindler was forced to tell the Fortunato

Starting point is 00:07:48 brothers that he couldn't help them. Some sources say that the brothers became convinced that the railroad had been in on the swindle, and that for several years they would stop by the station occasionally to berate the employees at the information booth, but they never got their money back. That's the story, and as I say, it's thinly supported. Supposedly, this happened in 1929, but the earliest mention I can find is 1968. There are no mentions that I can find in contemporaneous newspapers, and no one who mentions this story seems to cite sources. The details in the various tellings do match, however, including the specifics of the deal that Grenfell was offering and the fact that 13 days passed between the closing of the deal and the start of the lease. And April Fool's Day did fall on a Monday in 1929, but that hardly proves

Starting point is 00:08:29 anything. On the other hand, I can't find anyone who says outright that this is false. I think that just from my perspective, the part of it that seems hardest to believe is the business with the bank that you could open up a joint checking account in the name of a holding company associated with Grand Central Terminal and the bank wouldn't ask any questions and just allow anyone to do that. It just seems like that's asking for trouble and much too lax. I don't know. I mean, I guess we'd have to know what the banking regulations were in 1929. I think the part that bothers me the most is that there were no contemporaneous accounts of it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:02 That's always maybe a troubling sign. Yeah, normally what you find in a case like this, especially because I think this is a good story, it's just entertaining. And in my experience, what tends to happen is other people research it independently using different sources and you sort of build up an incredible base of sources.

Starting point is 00:09:17 And I just don't see that here. The whole thing is a lot more wobbly than you'd normally expect to find in a case like this. The second story is about a bank robber in the 1920s named Herman Lamb, sometimes known as Baron Lamb. He's been called the father of modern bank robbery and the most efficient bank robbery planner of all time. But as with the Fortunatos, I can't seem to confirm that reliably.

Starting point is 00:09:38 Lamb was born in the German Empire in 1890, and shortly before World War I, he was forced out of his army regiment there for cheating at cards. He moved to the United States and turned to a life of crime. In 1917, he was serving a sentence for grand larceny in Utah State Prison when he resolved to apply himself seriously to the enterprise of bank robbery. He created what became known as the Lamb Technique, a method that was said to bring Prussian precision and discipline to the art of robbing a bank. Lamb believed that a robbery required all the planning of a military campaign, including provisions against unexpected trouble.

Starting point is 00:10:13 He thought through every stage of a successful robbery, and when he got out of prison, he organized a gang and began to drill them in his new technique. Lamb would spend hours in a bank before robbing it. He'd draw up a floor plan, noting the locations of guards, alarms, and tellers, and indicating safes and vaults and the staff members who could open them. Sometimes he'd arrange a full-scale mock-up of a bank's interior, and the gang would conduct practice runs, timed with a stopwatch. Each gang member was given a specific job, such as lobby man or vault man, and Lamb drew up a timetable to show when each stage of the robbery had to be completed. The cardinal rule was that the gang had to leave the bank at a specified time, no matter how much money they'd managed to get.

Starting point is 00:10:50 The robbery was only the first stage. Even more vital was the getaway. Lamb hired drivers with experience in auto racing or rum running, preferably both, and gave them nondescript cars with high-powered engines. He measured local back roads to a tenth of a mile and attached a detailed map to the car's dashboard marked with the escape route, local landmarks, alternate turns, and speedometer readings, and he and the driver spent days timing dry runs under different weather conditions. Reputable sources say that this plan worked for almost 13 years.

Starting point is 00:11:20 Between the end of World War I and 1930, Lamb's gang is said to have used it in dozens of robberies that netted more than a million dollars. Things finally went wrong during a robbery of the Citizens State Bank of Clinton, Indiana on December 16, 1930. The robbery itself was successful, and the gang came out of the bank with more than $15,000. But as they reached the getaway car, the driver saw the local barber approaching suspiciously with a shotgun. And now all Lamb's careful planning failed him. He was betrayed by four different automobiles in a single morning. The getaway driver panicked, made a U-turn, jumped the curb, and blew a tire.

Starting point is 00:11:56 The robbers commandeered another car, but that wouldn't go faster than 35 miles an hour. The owner had rigged it to keep his elderly father from driving recklessly. They flagged down a cattle truck, but that overheated. And they commandeered another car, but that was low on gas. After a desperate chase of over 70 miles, they were finally cornered at an Illinois farmhouse by 200 police officers and vigilantes. In the gun battle that followed, Lamb and the driver were killed, and another member, 71-year-old Dad Landy, chose to shoot himself rather than spend his last years in prison. The two robbers who survived, Walter Dietrich and Oklahoma Jack Clark, were sent to prison in Michigan City, Indiana, where, the story goes, they met members of John Dillinger's gang and were allowed to join them in an escape on the condition that they teach them the details of Lamb's technique, which Dillinger then used in his own career. Like the Fortunato story, this is

Starting point is 00:12:45 entertaining but hard to pin down. It's cited in the Encyclopedia of American Crime and in various histories of bank robbery, but these tend not to cite their sources. Other resources point to historian John Tolan's 1963 biography of John Dillinger, but that gives only a few paragraphs to Lamb and cites no sources itself. And, as with the Fortunatos, I don't find much confirmation in news accounts of the time. The most thorough biography of Lamb was written in 2012 by Walter Middlestadt, who finds that Lamb's career in ordinary crime was undistinguished. He writes, today Baron Lamb remains a figure more legendary than real. When Lamb died in 1930, the Federal Bureau of Criminal Identification produced a rap sheet of his run-ins with the law.

Starting point is 00:13:24 He was arrested at least six times in his career for robberies, burglary, and vagrancy, 1930, the Federal Bureau of Criminal Identification produced a rap sheet of his run-ins with the law. He was arrested at least six times in his career for robberies, burglary, and vagrancy, but he did hard time only once, a year and a half, in Utah State Prison. Middlestad writes, I sometimes wonder whether, if Baron Lamb hadn't gone out so spectacularly, we would have heard of him today. But conceivably, that's a sign of success rather than failure. When Lamb succeeded, he evaded the authorities and left no record of his participation except what can be inferred through physical descriptions and the methods he used.

Starting point is 00:13:52 He had at least seven aliases and did not boast about his crimes. So it's not clear. Middlestead says that Lamb may or may not have been the first scientific bank robber and adds he may not have originated the Lamb method, but he probably used it more effectively and more often than anyone else. He was certainly busy. He committed perhaps four robberies in the last two weeks of his career, and at his death, the authorities in Indiana suspected that he might have been involved in as many as 24 crimes along the Illinois-Indiana border. As to Dillinger, whatever he knew about Herman Lamb would have been picked up from Lamb's henchmen, but this may have been important. Dillinger's associate Edward Shouse told police that his gang rehearsed their robberies as Lamb's did, and they prepared a careful getaway plan, insisting on the best late model cars. There are some differences. For instance, Dillinger used to plant cans of gasoline along the getaway route while Lamb would carry a can in the back of the car.

Starting point is 00:14:43 along the getaway route while Lamb would carry a can in the back of the car. So that's another one that's just sort of open-ended. I wanted to tell the whole story about Lamb, but surprisingly little turns out to be known with any confidence about him. I should say that the surest part of the whole story is that ridiculous final day when everything went wrong, which is sort of ironic. That all really did happen. That's the best supported part of the whole story.

Starting point is 00:15:01 That's pretty well documented. That actually all happened to him. I wonder with both of these, especially because you're saying that the sources you look at, they don't cite their own sources. You could have where one person writes up the story. Exactly. And then

Starting point is 00:15:15 everybody else accepts it as true and repeats it, and you don't know that they're all referring back to the same original erroneous source. Especially in cases like this where they're both sort of prepossessing. They're both kind of entertaining stories. And so I think people...

Starting point is 00:15:31 Want them to be true. Want them to be true or want to tell them. Yeah. I'm sort of guilty of that here, but at least I'm being as clear as I can that I suspect Although, at least in this one, if that last final day of lambs was actual... I mean, that is the most spectacular part of the whole story. So it's interesting to hear that that actually is the best documented. Especially in his case, because there's this huge ironical comeuppance.

Starting point is 00:15:53 Like if there's a god who frowns on carefully planned crime, he just totally clobbered him on one day. You know, if that had to happen to anyone, the fact that it happened to Herman Lamb is really ironic. Anyway, that's it. The Fortunato Brothers and Herman Lamb. If anyone knows anything more about either of these stories, pro or con, I'd be glad to hear from you. You can write to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. The main story in episode 302 was about how in 1929, a German couple fled civilization to live on an uninhabited island in the eastern Pacific. After the episode, Powell Shops, who has been very kind in not minding how I pronounce his name, and he can let me know if I managed it any better this time, wrote,

Starting point is 00:16:47 This Monday, I read an article in the German newspaper Die Welt about the Galapagos affair. When I read it, I thought that this would be a good story for you, and later I discovered to my surprise that you ran exactly that same story that same day. The German TV channel ZDF produced a documentary about that very topic that ran on Sunday. What a strange coincidence, or was there some anniversary that you both honored? One curious detail I read in the article and did not hear in your podcast was that Friedrich Ritter and Dora Strauch got all their teeth pulled in Germany to avoid toothache and got steel dentures. How odd is that? Love your show. And I asked Greg about the timing of the episode,

Starting point is 00:17:25 and he confirmed that it was just a big coincidence. I also asked him about the detail about Rita and Strauch having all their teeth pulled, and he said that this was a common story that was told about the couple, and that Strauch herself had written about this, saying, It has often been said of us that as a preliminary to our departure, we both had all our teeth extracted. This is not the case. It is our departure, we both had all our teeth extracted. This is not the case. It is true that Dr. Ritta had all his taken out, but this was some months before we left and for quite a different reason. For years, he had been carrying out a system of eating which required an intensive mastication of each mouthful.

Starting point is 00:17:58 The result was that he had worn his teeth to stubs and it had come to the point where he must have them crowned if they were to be of any further use to him. He preferred to have them all removed, especially as he had a scientific desire to find out whether gums might be so far toughened as to become a substitute for teeth in chewing. My own teeth were no better than average, and had always necessitated regular visits to the dentist. On Floriana they were very soon to fail me, and it was then that we realized with sorrow that Friedrich had failed to take any dental equipment with him. I had to suffer So the actual story about the teeth was a little more complicated than the commonly reported version and sounds really awful. Yeah, as I remember, he didn't even bring any painkillers. I might be wrong about that, but I don't think I am.

Starting point is 00:18:46 So she just had to go through all of that, just having her teeth pulled out and just enduring the pain on a desert island, basically. And presumably they had some kind of dentures or something that they could use for chewing? She doesn't say, as I remember. But perhaps they did. She just makes it sound awful. Sounds awful. And there was some major breaking news from the UK earlier in August

Starting point is 00:19:08 that a few of our listeners let us know about when Palmerston, the chief mouser at the Foreign Office, suddenly resigned his post. I had last reported on Palmerston back in episode 280 when he had been mysteriously absent from the Foreign Office for about six months, but then returned in December, and it was reported that the poor Maghi had needed a break to recover from both stress and overfeeding. He had gone back to work with new Palmerston protocols in place to try to address both of those issues, but the UK's top diplomatic cat apparently recently decided that he preferred

Starting point is 00:19:40 the more relaxed, quieter lifestyle away from the limelight after all. In his resignation letter, signed with Paw Prince and posted to his Twitter account at Diplomag, Palmerston also said that like so many others during the pandemic, he will now work from home. Some of his colleagues shared some of their memories of Palmerston. For example, the director of the department's Diplomatic Academy tweeted, He left us a slightly chewed dead mouse next to my desk once. We were, of course, not very grateful. It's reported that there won't be a wider reshuffling of mousers, so Larry will still be mousing at 10 Downing Street,

Starting point is 00:20:16 while Gladstone will remain at his post at the Finance Ministry. And there was no word that I saw from Larry on his feelings at the retirement of his previous chief rival, though I would imagine he must be at least a little relieved. And thank you to everyone who let us know about this story, which I wouldn't have seen otherwise, and for sending the very helpful links. We don't have those intrigues in our country, do we? Not that I'm aware of. I mean, presidents have pets, but there's not this. Yeah, the rivalry between them. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:20:52 And coincidentally, Yulia Semychuk, who didn't care how I pronounced her name, recently wrote to us, Hello, dear podcasters. I have been following updates on Larry and other employed cats with much interest and have just finished episode 246, where you speak about how the Japanese are particularly obsessed with cats and how much cats are involved in the local economy. You also asked whether this is only a Japanese thing or other nations are into it as well. I am in no way an expert on Asian cats culture as I live in Ukraine, but I wanted to share some information on a popular phenomenon that originated in Asia, cat cafes. Cat cafes are usually coffee shops, which also serve you some love and affection in the form of kitties you can pet and play with. They started in Taiwan in 1998, and the concept

Starting point is 00:21:31 was quickly picked up by, of course, the Japanese. Apart from the obvious reasons of their popularity in Japan, I mean, who can resist, there were some objective reasons behind this, such as the small size of apartments in Japan and strict rules as to pet ownership. The trend spread around Asian countries, and as I found out, around the world now too, including Europe and the U.S. For example, this CNN article states that there are over 125 cat cafes in the United States. I have a tiny bit of personal experience to share. Last year, I visited Shanghai for work, and when, casually strolling around the popular shopping district and ultimate tourist trap, Tianzi Fang, I bumped into a cat cafe named Tono's. I had only a vague idea at that time that such a thing as cat cafes existed, and had never seen

Starting point is 00:22:16 one before. Tono, as it occurred, is the chief cat of the restaurant, and the rest of the cats working there are his descendants, or so the family tree on the wall claims. I walked inside and it felt like stepping in the closet to Narnia. Outside, the busy district is roaring, moving, and shouting. People are bargaining for souvenirs, eating, laughing, and taking selfies. Inside, a bunch of cats are half sleeping, half meditating in two large baskets on the windowsills. Cats are dressed in beautiful red uniforms to show that they are the official employees of the place. But apart from the red vests, you can't really tell where one cat ends and another starts. They are rolled together in a giant ball of fur. If you touch it, it feels like touching a warm cloud of cotton candy. Cats radiate peace and coziness and don't show even the slightest

Starting point is 00:22:58 interest in the calamities of the outside. At that very moment, I felt like the world behind the window doesn't exist, no more than a hoax, and the only true place is the one inside. Inside Tono's place, inside our hearts and minds. To be happy sometimes, all you need to do is take a step aside, pause, and let your inner cat purr to you. I am attaching here a couple of photos I took to share that ultimate feeling of zen with you. I think it is very important that we recognize the undoubtedly significant contribution of working cats to the global economy and to the global mental health. Many thanks once again for your wonderful and inspiring work. So I don't know whether cat cafes are still open

Starting point is 00:23:37 as much as they were now that so many places have had to close, but I think they sound like a lovely idea at any time, and perhaps even more so now. And we'll have Yulia's photos in the show notes. The uniforms some of the cats are wearing are really sweet. There are, or at least until recently were, cat cafes in many different countries around the world, with some being more along the lines of a pet rental service, and some with the goal of getting the kitties adopted. But as Yulia noted, the concept really caught on in Japan, and according to a July 2019 CNN article,

Starting point is 00:24:09 Japan had more cat cafes than anywhere else, around 150 of them at the time of the article. Apparently, they were so popular in Japan that the concept broadened out to include various other cafes with rabbits, goats, or piglets, and even stuffed animal versions of large white hippo-like characters called moomins that would share a table with customers. And that last one might actually still work really well these days with social distancing requirements. You can eat with a

Starting point is 00:24:34 large stuffed animal. I'd actually heard that there are some restaurants around the world doing that with like life-size dolls or mannequins that they put them at your table with you to enforce social distancing so you get to eat with a doll. I like that. From cats to bears, another long-running topic on this show. We've had a few discussions about round door handles supposedly making doors more bear-resistant

Starting point is 00:24:57 than lever-style handles. And Alex Thompson sent an email with the subject line, some bears don't care about handles, that said, it seems even round handles can the subject line, some bears don't care about handles, that said, it seems even round handles can't save you from some bears. And Alex sent a link to a video of a bear smashing open the front door of a home with parts of the door frame just flying off, just simply ignoring the door handle altogether.

Starting point is 00:25:19 From what I was able to find, this video seems to have been recorded by a home security camera in July in the Lake Tahoe area in the western U.S. And to me, the bear seems perhaps concernedly experienced at doing this, as it even puts out a paw to steady the door from swinging back closed once it is bursted open. What interested me about that is that the bear knows that the door is a door, you know? Yeah, that's true. Because it's not clear that that's a way into the house. It's totally got the concept right. And it understands that the door is going to swing back closed. So it's like, how many times is this? And it doesn't seem, it just seems like totally nonchalant about

Starting point is 00:25:54 the whole thing. It's like it smashes through the door, casually puts out his paw to keep the door from closing again, casually strolls right in. I just do this all the time. And Alex Bauman sent a photo that he saw on Facebook that he said shows that delivering parcels in Canada can be more adventurous than elsewhere. The photo was of a postal slip left at a homeowner's mailbox in British Columbia when the letter carrier couldn't deliver a parcel to the home. Under the section for why the parcel couldn't be delivered, the carrier had checked the box for other and then written bear at door. When this happened back in September 2014,

Starting point is 00:26:33 CBC Radio reported that the postal worker said that he had tried to scare the bear off by driving toward it in his van, but that the bear wouldn't budge, and he figured that a bear at the door would be a legitimate reason for not delivering the package. The homeowner thought that the whole thing was quite amusing and posted it to his Twitter account with a photo of the form and wrote, okay, fair enough, Canada Post Corp. That's a decent reason to not drop the package off at my door. Mashable said of the whole incident that apparently now the unofficial motto of the Canada Post is, neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. Bears do, though.

Starting point is 00:27:12 We don't mess with bears, which I think is a rather wise philosophy in general. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. We really appreciate getting your comments and follow-ups. So if you have any to send to us, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to give him a strange sounding situation, and he's going to try to work out what's going on, asking yes or no questions. This is another puzzle from the delightful book, How Come? A Book of Riddles by Agnes Rogers from

Starting point is 00:27:49 1953 that was sent to us by John Jerome and that we discussed in episode 306. And the wording of this puzzle has a bit of a 50s flavor. Mrs. Simmons, a suburban housewife, was very fond of her mother-in-law. One morning after breakfast, she went marketing, then stopped, as she often did, to have a mid-morning cup of coffee with the older woman. When she returned home, the first thing she saw was the remains of her husband who had blown out his brains. Instead of calling a doctor or the police, she calmly went about her domestic duties. How come? Oh my gosh. Is the whole book like this? Yes. Mostly. Okay. Okay. Let's just nail this down. By mother-in-law, you mean her husband's mother? Yes. And by blown out his brains, you mean he shot himself to death.

Starting point is 00:28:45 Yes. And he's dead. Yes. And you say after she saw that, she went about her normal... Routine. Routine. I like the 1950s, her domestic duties. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:28:58 Okay. So she understood that he was dead. Yes. she understood that he was dead. Yes. And by going about her domestic duties, that means that she wasn't surprised to find him dead? Correct. Had he been dead for some time?

Starting point is 00:29:16 Yes. So she knew... This does not solve the puzzle at all. Did she know he was dead before she left the house? Yes. puzzle at all she did she know he was dead before she left the house yes so he had did he really kill himself yes all right so sometime earlier he'd killed killed himself yes and then she'd gone out yes and ran this errand and also had oh is this to get an alibi no okay so she visited her mother-in-law.

Starting point is 00:29:46 Yes. His mother. Yes. And had tea with her? Coffee, yes. Coffee. Knowing that her husband was dead at that time? Yes.

Starting point is 00:29:55 All right. Did she want him dead? No. She... How... All right. She... How... All right.

Starting point is 00:30:07 So do I need to work out how much earlier he had killed himself? I don't have a specific amount, but I have... Was it a significant amount of time? Yes. What did she see exactly when she came home? When she returned home, the first thing she saw was the remains of her husband who had blown out his brains. Okay, were they in an urn? Was it?

Starting point is 00:30:29 Yes. That's exactly it. Mr. Simmons's remains were ashes preserved in a small casket which his loving widow kept on the living room mantelpiece. The tragedy had taken place years before. So definitely another example of a puzzle that was more dramatically grisly than it really needed to have been, right? Yeah. But that is sort of part of the charm of this puzzle. I know, it seems sort of pleased with itself at the end there.

Starting point is 00:30:56 If anybody else has a puzzle for us to try, please send that to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. And if you'd like one of us in particular to read the puzzle, please put that in the subject line. Futility Closet is supported entirely by our incredible listeners. If you'd like to help support our celebration of the quirky and the curious, you can find a donate button in the support section of the website at futilitycloset.com. Or you can join our Patreon campaign, where you'll not only support our show,

Starting point is 00:31:27 but also get more discussions on some of the stories, extra-lateral thinking puzzles, outtakes, and peeks behind the scenes. You can find our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see our website for the link. At our website, you can graze through Greg's collection of over 11,000 delightful distractions. Browse the Futility Closet store, learn about the Futility Closet books, and see 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 email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. All our music was written and performed by the incomparable Doug Ross.

Starting point is 00:32:04 Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 309-The 'Grain of Salt' Episode

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