Futility Closet - 314-The Taliesin Murders

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 an umbrella for dogs to an invertible tune. This is episode 314. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. By 1914, Frank Lloyd Wright had become one of America's most influential architects, but that August, a violent tragedy unfolded at his Midwestern residence and studio. In today's show, we'll

Starting point is 00:00:38 describe the shocking attack of Julian Carlton, which has been called the most horrific single act of mass murder in Wisconsin history. We'll also admire some helpful dogs and puzzle over some freezing heat. Warning, this is a very violent story. Frank Lloyd Wright has the rare distinction of building in three different centuries. In a career spanning 72 years, he conceived a thousand buildings, of which more than 400 have been built, including a handful since the millennium. Just last year, eight of his buildings were jointly declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But his personal life could be chaotic and unhappy. He married Catherine Tobin in 1889 and settled in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, where he established an influential studio. But in 1903, while planning a house for a neighbor there,

Starting point is 00:01:31 Edwin Chaney, he fell in love with Chaney's wife, Maima. And in October 1909, the two of them shocked their spouses by announcing that they were leaving their families to sail to Europe together. She had two children, and he had six. Edwin granted Maima a divorce, but Catherine asked for more time. In the meanwhile, Frank established Maima in a new estate in Iowa County, Wisconsin, a combined residence and drafting studio across the Wisconsin River from Spring Green. He called it Taliesin, which means Shining Brow in Welsh. On Saturday, August 15, 1914, there were 11 people at Taliesin. Maima was there, as were her two children, John and Martha, who had come for their annual summer

Starting point is 00:02:11 visit. Also on the property were a handyman, a carpenter and his young son, two architectural draftsmen, and a gardener. And there were two new servants, Julian and Gertrude Carlton, a butler and a cook. They had arrived in mid-June, recommended by a caterer in Chicago. Wright himself was not there. He'd left four days earlier to join his son John and put some finishing touches on a project in Chicago. He was due back the next day. No one knew much about the Carltons. Wright later called them the best servants I had ever seen, but Julian in particular seems to have been unhappy at Taliesin and increasingly angry. In late July, a tavern keeper in Spring Green had overheard carpenter

Starting point is 00:02:50 Billy Weston and gardener David Lindblom talking about him. One of them said, he's polite and smart, but he's the most desperate, hot-headed fellow I ever saw. Don't ever contradict him. He'll fly off the handle any minute. According to Lindblom, Carlton had complained that the other workers kept running to Mr. Wright with stories about him. He'd said that if anyone around Taliesin ever did him any dirt, he would send him to hell in a minute. On August 13th, the day after Wright had left for Chicago, Julian had had a run-in with draftsman Emile Brodel. Brodel had told him to saddle his horse, and Carlton had refused, saying it wasn't his job. Brodel had called him a black

Starting point is 00:03:25 son of a bitch. This morning, August 15th, Julian had asked Billy Weston where Wright kept the gasoline. He said he needed to clean a rug. Weston told him Wright kept a barrel of fuel in the garage for his car. Now, at midday, the party sat down to lunch in two locations, as was their custom. The laborers and the draftsmen ate their meals in the far western room of the residential wing. Maima and her children sat on a screened terrace just off the family dining room, where they could look out over the valley and the river. Both parties were in the southeastern wing of Taliesin, but separated by 80 feet, Maima and the children to the east, and the workmen to the west. Just to the north of the workmen, Gertrude was finishing her preparation of the food in the kitchen.

Starting point is 00:04:09 Julian took his place on the terrace just behind Maima, wearing a clean white jacket. Martha and John sat on opposite sides of the table. Julian served out their soup, then took out a roofer's shingling hatchet and clove Maima's skull nearly in two. She fell forward onto the table and then sprawled onto the flagstone floor. The hatchet had an elongated wooden handle and a weighted iron head with two sides, a knife for sizing and cutting shingles, and a hammer for pounding nails. In the time it took Carlton to kill the boy, eight-year-old Martha managed to run through the dining room and the entry and into a courtyard, but he caught her there and struck her repeatedly until she collapsed. At about this time, Carlton's wife, Gertrude, fled the house, diving through a window and running down the road toward Spring Green.

Starting point is 00:04:49 Survivor Herbert Fritz, an architectural draftsman, told the Chicago Tribune what happened next. Quote, I was eating in the small dining room off the kitchen with the other men. The room, I should say, was about 12 by 12 feet in size. There were two doors, one leading to the kitchen and the other opening into the court. We had just been served by Carlton, and he had left the room when we noticed something flowing under the screen door from the court. We thought it was nothing but soap suds spilled outside. The liquid ran under my chair, and I noticed the odor of gasoline. Just as I was about to remark the fact, a streak of flame shot under my chair, and it looked like the whole side of the room was on fire. All of us jumped up, and I first noticed that my clothing was on fire. The window was nearer to me

Starting point is 00:05:29 than the other door, and so I jumped through it, intending to run down the hill to the creek and roll in it. It may be that the other door was locked. I don't know. I didn't think to try it. My first thought was to save myself. The window was only about a half a foot from the floor and three feet wide, and it was the quickest way out. I plunged through and landed on the rocks outside. My arm was broken by the fall, and the flames had eaten through my clothing and were burning me. I rolled over and over down the hill toward the creek, but stopped about halfway. The fire on my clothes was out by that time, and I scrambled to my feet and was about to start back up the hill when I saw Carlton come running around the house with the hatchet in his hand and strike Brodel, who had followed me, through the window. Carlton had bolted the dining room

Starting point is 00:06:08 door before setting fire to the gas, then stood in the courtyard while the men in the burning room threw themselves against it, perhaps waiting to finish them with a hammer. He must have heard Fritz's screams as he broke through the opposite window, fell onto the rocks, and rolled down the hill, and looking through the screen he would have seen that Emil Brodel was following him. He ran around the building and reached Brodel just after he landed. He swung the hatchet and hit him just over the left ear, and Brodel went down, dying. From his position halfway down the hill, Fritz saw Carlton run back around the house, and he climbed back toward the burning building. Carlton got back to the door just as the remaining men managed to break it down. As they

Starting point is 00:06:45 came out, Carlton was waiting, but apparently he'd been rattled by having to stop Brodel. He hit Billy Weston twice in the head, but only clumsily and with the back of the hatchet rather than its blade. Weston fell senseless. He wasn't killed, but he wasn't able to protect his 13-year-old son, Ernest, who was hit next and went down. Handyman Tom Brunker, badly burned, took a glancing blow and staggered away. David Lindblom was struck in the back of the head and collapsed, and then Carlton tracked down Brunker in the court and finished him. We know some of this because Herbert Fritz had hobbled up the hill and around the corner in time to witness the last of the killings. He then fainted amid the bodies. With no one left standing, Carlton took up a bucket of gasoline and

Starting point is 00:07:24 went back to the terrace off the family quarters. He doused Mema and John and set their bodies alight. With the house now burning freely and likely to kill any survivors, he looked for a place to hide. He was still carrying the hatchet. For completeness, I should add that the order of these events is uncertain because no one was in a position to see everything that Carlton did. Formerly, it had generally been believed that he set the fire, then attacked Mema and the children, and then returned to the workman's dining room. But that consensus has been shifting, both because of the distances involved and because Carlton's main target seems to have been Emile Brodel, as I'll explain. The outcome is the same. After a rampage of 12 to 14 minutes, the house was on fire and nine people

Starting point is 00:08:03 lay injured, dead, and dying around the property. At length, Billy Weston stirred and began to cast about for help. Of all the victims lying there, only Herbert Fritz had avoided Carlton's hatchet, but he seems to have remained unconscious. Next to him, David Lindblom was the least grievously injured. Weston pulled him to his feet and the two of them set off through the cornfields, running toward Joseph Reeder's house half a mile away, which they knew had a telephone. When they reached it, Reeder called the police and the neighbors, and Lindblom and Weston ran back to Taliesin, where they found a fire hose and began to put out the flames. As word spread,

Starting point is 00:08:36 neighbors and farmhands converged on the estate, many armed with rifles. They formed a bucket brigade to put out the fire, and posses to comb the fields looking for Julian Carlton. Iowa County Sheriff John T. Williams arrived with his men. He'd already ordered the local train station to send word down the line to be on the lookout for Carlton, and they brought in a bloodhound. When Mamo's body was discovered around 1245, it was still burning. Nearby, 12-year-old John Chaney's body had been so completely consumed by fire that only a few bones and a handful of ashes remained. No death certificate was ever issued in his name. In Chicago, Frank

Starting point is 00:09:10 Lloyd Wright received a call around 1 p.m. His son John remembered a strange unnatural silence filling the room. Frank told him what had happened and they hurried to the railway station. At Taliesin, the fire consumed two-thirds of the house in three hours. Around 5.30, one of the searchers, Charles Burdell, thought to look in the furnace and discovered Julian Carlton crouching on all fours in an asbestos-lined boiler. Burdell ran to find the sheriff, and in that time, Carlton drank a bottle of hydrochloric acid that he'd bought from a druggist in Spring Green. According to most accounts, he was still holding the hatchet.

Starting point is 00:09:42 He said the word acid, and a doctor examined his throat. When the crowd caught sight of Carlton, it threatened to become a lynch mob. Carlton said, they'd better let me live if they expect to find out something. It's not clear what he was referring to. Possibly he was just trying to save himself. Williams drove himself 18 miles to Dodgeville, the county seat, where deputies gave him milk for his throat and whiskey for his pain. As his victims succumbed to their injuries, the death toll eventually rose to seven.

Starting point is 00:10:08 The only survivors were Billy Weston, Herbert Fritz, and Gertrude Carlton, who was eventually discovered hiding in some brush off the road to Spring Green. David Lindblom, who had run more than a mile that day with the back of his head split open, did not die until he took time to rest. Julian Carlton eventually joined him. On learning that he had drunk acid, the doctor began predicting Julian's death even on the day of his capture, but he lived for about seven and a half weeks. He made three brief appearances for the court

Starting point is 00:10:33 proceeding, but spent the rest of his time in the Dodgeville jail, where he died on October 7th. Because his motive was unclear at the time of his death, many theories began to arise. Some speculated that Maima had fired the Carltons during Wright's absence. That can't be the case. She had praised them as ideal servants and even said they were too good to be true, and there's no evidence of ill will between them before the killings. Another theory claims there had been money problems between Carlton and Wright. Carlton had had money worries in his days as a Pullman porter in Chicago, and Wright was notoriously unreliable in paying his employees. But this seems to be rumor. It's nowhere in the news accounts, in the Carlton's testimony,

Starting point is 00:11:10 in police or court transcripts, or in the comments of Carlton's friends and neighbors. Another theory says that Julian Carlton had become a religious zealot and was purging the house of the sin of adultery. There's no evidence at all for that, and if it were the motive, it seems odd that Carlton would wait to act until one of the adulterers was out of the house. Yet another theory said that Carlton was somehow the tool of Wright's enemies. It was known, for example, that he'd made a mysterious trip to Chicago the week before the killings. But again, Carlton attacked when Wright was away, which doesn't seem to make sense.

Starting point is 00:11:40 Finally, some people even speculated that Frank Lloyd Wright himself had commissioned the killings to rid himself of a lover he no longer wanted. There's just no support for that at all. The most likely explanation is also the simplest, that Julian Carlton was somewhat unbalanced by nature and that the circumstances at Taliesin drove him to a crisis. Acquaintances who knew the Carltons in Chicago said that Julian had behaved bizarrely there, and though Frank and Maima liked him, he was disliked and mistrusted by most of the staff at Taliesin, who said he had a bad temper. His wife Gertrude consistently said he was deranged. She told Iowa County deputies, my husband had the notion that he was being pursued. He recently got to waking me up in

Starting point is 00:12:18 the night at our quarters in the bungalow to listen for noises. They're trying to get me, he kept saying. Then sometimes he would choke me and threaten to knock my brains out. He took that hatchet to bed with him. She said that two weeks earlier, Julian had forced her to tell MAMA that they were going to quit because Gertrude was lonely. Indeed, it looks as though the day of the murders was the final day of their employment. At the Spring Green railway station, Wright had told reporters they had not been engaged permanently and were to have quit our employ today. And journalist Ron McRae has found some contemporaneous classified ads seeking, quote, two girls or married couple to do housekeeping for a country house and kitchen

Starting point is 00:12:53 in the area. That corresponds with the idea that the Carltons were leaving. So what was the cause of the murders? The answer seems to be Julian's confrontations with the draftsman, Emile Brodel. On August 13th, Brodel had insulted him grossly over the saddling of a horse, and in the jailhouse, Julian said that he and Brodel, quote, had an altercation on Saturday morning, that's the morning of the murders, during which Brodel abused me for more than a half hour. He also said that at that point, he made up his mind he would get Brodel. If that's true, it compounds the tragedy.

Starting point is 00:13:24 The Carltons may have found to themselves unhappy at Taliesin, but they had made plans to leave, given their notice, and would have taken the afternoon train back to Chicago. It was only a confrontation at the last minute that drove Julian Carlton to murder. It's not clear whether he had planned to kill everyone in the house or whether that was indiscriminate rage. He said later that he'd killed the others in order to eliminate witnesses and that he'd hidden clothing in the woods intending to flee, but that rescuers had arrived on the scene too quickly and he'd been forced to hide in the furnace. But much of what he said in the jailhouse later proved to be false. It must be said that

Starting point is 00:13:57 Emile Brodel was hardly the only one who made racist comments about Julian Carlton. Carlton's race is mentioned constantly in the contemporaneous news accounts. Headlines call him a Negro maniac and a black beast. On the death certificates of Maima Borthwick, Martha Chaney, and Emile Brodel, the formal cause of death is listed as killed by a Negro. By the end of 1914, Wright had rebuilt the residential wing of the estate, which he now called Taliesin II. He wed again in 1923, after Catherine finally agreed to a divorce, but two years later, the house burned to the ground again, this time due to faulty wiring. Wright was there this time and tried to put out the fire himself. He wrote,

Starting point is 00:14:34 I was on the smoking roofs, feet burned, lungs seared, hair and eyebrows gone, thunder rolling as the lightning flashed over the lurid scene. As before, the residential wing was destroyed and the working quarters survived. He later said that God was testing his character by burning his house, but approving his work by letting the studios stand. He rebuilt again, and Taliesin III stands today as a National Historic Landmark. The trauma of the murders affected Wright profoundly. It was reflected even in his style of architecture. The prairie houses that had made him famous were replaced with cautious, insular, fortress-like buildings, some of them built of fireproof cement blocks. In that sense, the murders arguably influenced

Starting point is 00:15:14 the course of American residential design in the 20th century. He never got over the loss of Mema. One longtime apprentice wrote, In the nine years I lived and worked with Mr. Wright, he never mentioned the name of this extraordinary woman, and I never had the courage to ask about her. I suspect he might have wanted to talk if I had known how to phrase the questions, but he kept the memory of her far within his own thoughts. Much later, Wright wrote, I do not understand this any better now than I did then. Whatever the truth may be, the fact remains, until many years afterward, to turn my thoughts backward to what had transpired in the life Maima and I had lived together at Taliesin, was like trying to see into a dark room in which terror lurked, strange shadows moved,

Starting point is 00:15:54 and I would do well to turn away in time. I could see forward only, I could not see backward. The pain was too great. I have some dog updates today. Susan Gillen sent some delightful pronunciation tips for her name and wrote, Hello, Futility Closeteers. Greetings from Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. I discovered your podcast on an episode of CBC Radio's podcast playlist back in 2015, and my family have been listening ever since.

Starting point is 00:16:41 Anytime someone asks for a recommendation for a new podcast, yours is at the very top of my list. I was listening today to episode 304, The Dog Who Joined the Navy. My family is from South Africa originally, so I know this story well. I'm not sure if you discovered this fact when you were researching the story, but there is a lovely statue of Just Nuisance A.B. in Simonstown, as well as a display in the local museum about him. Hope you and yours are keeping safe in these strange times. So for anyone who is in or planning on going to South Africa, the Simonstown website says, The life and story of Just Nuisance has become so much a part of Simonstown. A statue on Jubilee Square reminds us of him,

Starting point is 00:17:17 and his grave on Red Hill is a regular stopping point for visitors. The Simonstown Museum has in its collection all Just Nuisance's official papers, his collar, and many photographs. A special display has been mounted in the museum, and a slideshow giving the story of this famous dog is shown daily to children and tourists from all over the world. And it notes that in 2000, there was a Just Nuisance Commemoration Day Parade, which included a Just Nuisance look-alike competition in which 26 Great Danes participated. The Simonstown site says this will surely become an annual event. And a Cape Town website does say that the parade and competition have been held yearly since 2000,

Starting point is 00:17:57 so we'll hope that this is still the case. I did come across the mention of the statue when I was researching the story, but I didn't know about the parade and the whole competition. I know. I thought that was great that they're holding parades for him. In episode 307, I discussed Belgian working dogs, including dogs that were bred to pull carts. Greg mentioned turn spit dogs who were bred to power spits that turned meat that was roasting over fires in England. Will Grew Mullins wrote, Greetings, Closeteers. Many years ago, I was watching Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors, and at one point Dromio is confused because Nell, the kitchen wench, his unknown twin brother's girlfriend, knows so much about him, thinking

Starting point is 00:18:36 he is his brother. He says, To conclude, this drudge or diviner laid claim to me, called me Dromio, swore I was assured to her, told me what privy marks I had about me as the mark of my shoulder, the mole in my neck, the great wart on my left arm, that I, amazed, ran from her as a witch. And I think, if my breast had not been made of faith and my heart of steel, she had transformed me to a curdled dog and made me turn in the wheel. Well, I was curious as to what a curdled dog was and what the wheel was, so I had to, this was long before the internet, look it up in a dictionary. You remember dictionaries? A curdle or cur-tailed dog is a dog no longer of use for hunting, so its tail is cut off to

Starting point is 00:19:16 signify this, and sometimes it is put to use in the kitchen as a spit dog to turn in the wheel. Be well. So yes, we do remember dictionaries, and interesting to see that Shakespeare mentioned turn-spit dogs, albeit sort of unofficial ones drafted for the purpose. Turn-spit dogs, also called a kitchen dog, cooking dog, or vernipater cur for Latin for the dog that turns the wheel, were apparently quite common in houses with larger kitchens starting in the 16th century in Great Britain. Turnspit dogs were specifically bred to run inside a wheel that was rigged to turn a roasting spit over a kitchen fireplace. The wheels were hung high up on a wall, far enough from the fire that the dogs wouldn't

Starting point is 00:19:55 overheat, and the small low-bodied dogs were sturdy enough to run for hours. They were a distinct enough breed that the zoologist Carl Linnaeus named them Canis vertigus, Latin for dizzy dog, and Charles Darwin pointed to them as an example of genetic engineering, of people breeding animals to suit some particular need. Although turn-spit dogs are mostly associated with Great Britain, there are some recorded instances of their use in America, including Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette carrying advertisements for the sales of turned spit dogs and wheels. The dogs were used in the kitchens of some of the larger American hotels,

Starting point is 00:20:30 and some historians say that it was the appalling treatment of these animals in a New York hotel that spurred activist Henry Berg to eventually found the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. An article on Atlas Obscura says that these dogs didn't just turn spits, but also sometimes worked fruit presses, butter churns, pumps, and mills, and that there was even a patent drafted for a dog-powered sewing machine that was never actually produced. Greg actually had a post on his blog about a dog-powered sewing machine that seems to have been produced but never patented, and I'll have a link to that in the show notes for anyone who wants to see the illustration of the device, as well as to a brief

Starting point is 00:21:08 post that he had on turned spit dogs, also with an illustration. Turned spit dogs were replaced starting in the mid-1800s by inexpensive spit-turning machines called the clock jack, with a weighted pulley to turn the meat, and the breed eventually went extinct. The last known surviving specimen, the taxidermied whiskey, can be seen at the Abergavenny Museum in Wales. I wonder, it seems like having a dog do that work would only be worthwhile if you could train it to just do it continuously without supervision, you know what I mean? If you have to stand there and get it to keep going, you're not saving any time. Well, I mean, I would think that there were probably people in the kitchens doing other

Starting point is 00:21:45 tasks and you probably wouldn't need to supervise it continuously. But it also saved a human from having to turn the spit, which was very unpleasant work. I mean, prior to dogs, they had small children doing it. Oh, really? Yeah. And it was very unpleasant. And you'd have to worry about your hands getting blistered and them getting too hot from the fire.

Starting point is 00:22:02 Yeah. But I just, I'm trying to picture a dog just doing that for hours without, you know, just you start him going and he'll just willingly keep trotting along. I guess if you train them well enough, I mean, maybe they need, like I said, a certain amount of supervision, but. And Sarah Gilbert wrote, the recent listener mail about the modern use of drafting dogs reminded me of some of my fondest childhood memories. Since I was a kid, my parents have owned and loved Newfoundlands. Originally bred for the water,

Starting point is 00:22:29 they were used by Canadian fishermen, as they are big, strong swimmers and can easily tow a grown man to shore. Some beaches still use Newfie lifeguards, at least as recently as the pre-COVID before times. They also could help tow full fishing nets, and once back on land could cart the day's catch to the market. We adopted our first Newfie, Sammy, when I was in about kindergarten. When my parents learned about Newfoundland's drafting abilities, they carefully rigged up a harness that attached to a slightly modified little red wagon, which my sister and I gleefully rode around in. Seeing how much Sammy enjoyed the task and the attention that it brought him, they looked for other ways to employ him. My dad worked as a softball coach at a school in the UNC system, and Sammy became the team's unofficial mascot as he was able to drag the infield between games.

Starting point is 00:23:14 This is normally done by pulling a metal grate of sorts behind a small tractor or mower, acting kind of like a Zamboni on an ice rink. Of course, I am now grown and could no longer comfortably sit in a little red wagon, let alone make my poor dogs lug me around. On an ice rink. from families who got them as fluffy teddy bear puppies who were ill-prepared for the reality of the full-grown bear-sized dog. We love the breed, but they are very high maintenance, not for the faint of heart, and you will never have a clean, shed, and drool-free home again. Thank you so much for all y'all do to produce the show, and thank you for bringing back happy memories. According to Wikipedia, Newfoundlands were originally bred to be used as working dogs by fishermen in Newfoundland. They excel at water rescues due to their powerful build, thick double coat, almost webbed paws, and strong swimming abilities. The breed is considered to be

Starting point is 00:24:16 an ideal working dog and is known for its large size, intelligence, tremendous strength, and sweet temper. The Wikipedia article has a list of several spontaneous water rescues credited to Newfs over the last couple of centuries, including that Napoleon Bonaparte was supposedly rescued by one while escaping by boat from Elba in 1815. I found a more detailed account of this story on the Psychology Today website of all places in an article about Bonaparte's relationship with dogs. Supposedly, during his escape, Napoleon lost his balance in rough seas and fell overboard. Not a strong swimmer and dressed in full uniform and wearing a large sword, he was struggling in the water when a fisherman's Newfoundland,

Starting point is 00:24:56 used by its owner to tow lines to boats and recover fishing nets, jumped in and swam to Bonaparte and helped keep his head above the water long enough for his ship's sailors to rescue him. Somehow I didn't know any of this, anything about that Newfoundlands had been bred explicitly to do things like that. Yeah, no, I didn't know either. I knew there were certain breeds of dogs that are known for being very good in the water, but I didn't realize that some of them seemed really well suited for rescuing people. As Sarah mentioned, newfs are officially used as lifeguards in several places,

Starting point is 00:25:27 with the dogs receiving significant training first. I found a BBC article from 2007 about a lifeguard noof in Cornwall, and several articles, as recent as from this year, about an Italian school for rescue dogs that has been training water rescue dogs for about 30 years. It sounded like these are usually noofs, but may also be Labradors or golden retrievers. A Times of London article from March said that Italy had

Starting point is 00:25:50 350 licensed canine lifeguards who saved a total of 33 lives last year, working on beaches and with the Italian Coast Guard. Each dog is trained as part of a team with a human counterpart, with the dog supplying strength and stamina to the team. The dogs wear red life jackets with handles on them that struggling swimmers can hang on to as the dog tows them to safety, or that the human lifeguard can use to be towed out to a swimmer in trouble to conserve their energy for dealing with the rescue. Ferucho Pilenga, who founded the school for rescue dogs, said that he was inspired to do so when the newf that he owned in the late 1980s pulled a waterlogged dinghy containing three people for half an hour, and he realized that a human couldn't do that. Unfortunately, he didn't give the story behind why the dog needed to do that, at least not in the articles that I saw. The Times article quotes

Starting point is 00:26:40 Pulenga as saying, humans swimming while pulling another person, especially in rough seas, can become extremely tired, while dogs have four legs and are like four-wheel drives. The site My Modern Met quotes the coordinator for the school as saying that a trained dog acts as an intelligent life buoy that can go by itself to swimmers in need of help and get them back to shore choosing the best route. The dogs can be trained to not only swim out to a potential rescue, but also to be lowered by rope with a human from a helicopter and to even leap from boats or helicopters to reach their targets. I'll have links in the show notes to some sites that have several photos of these intrepid canines in action during training exercises. Besides great photos of the dogs jumping into the water from different craft,

Starting point is 00:27:25 there are photos of them towing people through the water, and one photo of one dog towing a raft full of nine other dogs who are just placidly sitting in it. The Times article reports that interest in using these canine lifeguards has been spreading, and that there are now training schools for them in Germany, the U.S., Switzerland, and the Canaries and Azores, so maybe keep an eye out for them in the future if you're at the beach in any of those places. Thanks as always to everyone who writes to us. We always appreciate people taking the time to do so, so if you have any comments or follow-ups that you'd like to send, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. you'd like to send, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:28:14 It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an interesting sounding situation, and we're going to see if I can figure out what's going on, asking yes or no questions. This is from listener Garth Payne. The National Weather Service was worried that people would freeze to death in a heat wave. Why? Okay. So many things to try to check out here. Okay. People would freeze to death, meaning they would die because their body temperatures dropped too low.

Starting point is 00:28:41 Yes. In a heat wave. Was the heat wave somewhere else? Touche. No. Okay. So there's a heat wave occurring in a specific geographical area? Yes. And they're actually worried that people in that same geographical area might freeze to death. Yes. Okay. Is it because of measures that they would take to try to be less hot? The people? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:13 Yes. Is this a specific group of people that they're concerned about? No. No. Okay. So it's just people in general that happen to be living in that area at the time. That's right. Okay. Is the exact geographical location important? No. I'll just tell you it the time. That's right. Okay. Is the exact geographical location important?

Starting point is 00:29:27 No, I'll just tell you it's California. It's California. But no. So there's a heat wave in California, and they're worried that people are going to do something that's going to lead them to freeze to death. Is it in a place in California where there's really extremes between daytime daytime highs and nighttime lows? No. Oh, okay. See, that would work. So it's important, though, what the people are going to be doing to try to be less hot. Yes. And what they're doing to be less hot might actually end up with their freezing to death. That's right. end up with their freezing to death. That's right.

Starting point is 00:30:07 Are they going to be using man-made anythings to try to be less hot, like air conditioners or chemicals or anything? No. No, okay. Are they going to be going someplace particular to try to be less hot? Yes. Does it involve water somehow?

Starting point is 00:30:30 Yes. less hot uh yes does it involve water somehow yes they're gonna get into some specific body of water no they're just going to get into water in general uh somewhere between the two somewhere between the two a certain type of water like swimming pools would be like a class of water i'll say yes to that okay but not swimming pools that's right uh a class of water. I'll say yes to that. Okay, but not swimming pools. That's right. Natural bodies of water? Yes. Lakes? No. Rivers? Streams? Streams. Streams. Streams. So people are going to go get into streams to try to cool down. Yes. And the streams are going to be colder than they realize. Yes. For some specific reason. Oh, because glaciers are melting. No, there aren't glaciers in California, though. You're very close.

Starting point is 00:31:10 Like something's melting because it's so hot, and so there's really cold water coming into streams. Yeah, that's basically it. In May 2020, the National Weather Service warned that extreme heat in California could melt so much mountain snow that streams would become icy torrents. Anyone venturing in to cool off risked being swept away and suffering, quote, the rapid onset of hypothermia. Wow. As far as I could tell, it didn't actually happen, but they did warn about it. I mean, that is really interesting that they had to even worry about that.

Starting point is 00:31:40 Wow. Thanks, Carth. Thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is supported entirely by our amazing listeners. If you'd like to help support our celebration of the quirky and the curious, please check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset

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Futility Closet - 314-The Taliesin Murders

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