Futility Closet - 334-Eugene Bullard

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 monotonous melody to Edison's Hello. This is episode 334. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Eugene Bullard ran away from home in 1907 to seek his fortune in a more racially accepting Europe. There he led a life of staggering accomplishment, becoming by turns a prizefighter, a combat pilot, a nightclub impresario, and a spy. In today's show, we'll tell Bullard's impressive story, which won him resounding praise

Starting point is 00:00:46 in his adopted France. We'll also accidentally go to Canada and puzzle over a deadly omission. At 7.30 in the morning on December 16, 1959, Dave Garroway and his producer stepped into elevator number three at Rockefeller Center in New York City. Garroway was the host of the Today program, which was watched every morning by millions of people, and the two were headed for a production meeting. They greeted the elevator operator, Eugene Bullard, and Garroway noticed something unusual. He said, Gene, what's that you're wearing on your uniform? Bullard said, Why, it's the Legion're wearing on your uniform? Bullard said, why, it's the Legion of Honor, Mr. Garroway. It's France's highest decoration. I was awarded the medal just a couple months back. Garroway was dumbfounded. Bullard said, I was in the Great

Starting point is 00:01:34 War, Mr. Garroway, and the Second War, too. I fought at Verdun, among other places. Flew combat, too. Shot down a couple of Boche planes, I did. Garroway, who had known Bullard casually for several years, said, who are you? What are you doing driving an elevator? And Bullard said, well, sir, it's a long story. As his accomplishments were publicized in the days that followed, Anthony Shannon wrote in the New York World-Telegram, Eugene Jacques Bullard is an American-born adventurer whose achievements make even Walter Mitty's daydreams look pale. He'd been born in 1895 in Columbus, Georgia, the seventh of ten children. His father had been born into slavery on a Georgia plantation,

Starting point is 00:02:11 and his mother was a Creek Indian. Until he was five or six, he played with both white and black children. He said he was as trusting as a chickadee and as friendly and loved everybody and thought everybody loved me. But the prejudice of the time inevitably reared its head. He was taunted by his friends and saw his father bullied by the white foreman at the cotton merchant where he worked. In 1904, that harassment erupted into a confrontation. The foreman hit William with an iron hook and William threw him into the cargo hold of a barge.

Starting point is 00:02:41 William came home, barricaded the door, and sat behind it with a shotgun while a drunken lynch mob pounded on it. Eventually the mob withdrew, but the encounter was a seminal event in Bullard's life. It started him dreaming of a place, he wrote later, where white people treated colored people like human beings. When he was 10 and 11 years old, he began running away from home, and he left for good when he was nearly 12 in early 1907. His goal was to reach France, where his family's roots were. His father had told him that racial prejudice did not exist there. He wandered the South for five years and, in 1912, stowed away aboard a German steamer that left him in Aberdeen. In Scotland, people treated him like one of their own. Within 24 hours,

Starting point is 00:03:22 he said, he was born into a new world and began to love everyone again. For five months, he acted as a lookout for dodgy card sharps in Glasgow, and then in August 1912, he took a train to Liverpool, where he worked as a street performer, a dock worker, a target for an amusement park game, and a helper on a fish wagon. He gravitated to Baldwin's Gym, where he offered to help out, and found he had a natural talent for boxing. He won his first fight in March 1913 and was offered a spot in fellow welterweight Aaron Lister Brown's company of fighters. Brown took him to London and oversaw his training and fighting schedule. Boxing brought him a good income, and he was popular and had a good record.

Starting point is 00:04:00 In an era when fights could last 20 rounds or more, he was seldom knocked out of a bout. In an era when fights could last 20 rounds or more, he was seldom knocked out of a bout. But his goal was still to reach France, and in November 1913, Brown arranged an exhibition there. Bullard wrote, When I got off the boat train in Paris, I was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning. Here I was in the place I had wanted to be and to see all my life, and it was wonderful. It seemed to me that the French democracy influenced the minds of both white and black Americans friends Bullard had made were called to the front. He resolved to sign up himself to fight for his new country, but the only service open to non-French nationals was the Foreign Legion. On his 19th birthday, he applied and was accepted for the duration of the war.

Starting point is 00:04:54 He described his training as five weeks of hell. Thanks to his stamina and physical conditioning, he was chosen to be one of his unit's machine gunners, and on November 28th, the regiment got orders to move to the front along the Somme River, where he got his first taste of trench warfare. The fighting was brutal. He was 10 feet away when one platoon mate was hit by a shell and literally disappeared, but he loved the camaraderie and being treated the same as any other man. He wrote, We were just a big family of 54 different nationalities, and we kept growing more diverse as the men were shot down. We all loved each other and lived and died for each other, as men should. He was reassigned to various infantry units as the men around him fell,

Starting point is 00:05:27 and in February 1916 he found himself at Verdun, the scene of a ten-month struggle and almost unthinkable carnage. He wrote, I thought I had seen fighting in other battles, but no one has ever seen anything like Verdun, not ever before or ever since. He was wounded twice by shells, the second time incurring a serious leg wound that required 90 stitches. That took him out of the fighting, and he was sent to

Starting point is 00:05:50 Lyon to recuperate from his wounds. For his valor, he received the Croix de Guerre, and at the ceremony he met an air commandant who was about to return to his squadron. The air service needed aerial machine gunners, a role that Bullard could fulfill even with an injured leg, so he agreed to go. The air commandant got him a slot in gunnery school, and beyond this, Bullard told his friends that he hoped to become a fighter pilot. At the time, there were no black military pilots. One of his friends wagered $2,000 that he couldn't do it, and he accepted. As it happened, on his first day of training, he ran into an old acquaintance from the Foreign Legion who had also transferred into aviation. The two approached the commanding officer of the gunnery school and requested a change in status for Bullard,

Starting point is 00:06:32 and on November 15th, the request was approved. He would begin pilot training at the aviation school at Tours. He spent six months in training, much of it under Jean Navarre, one of France's first air aces, who sought him out, having seen him box before the war. Bullard passed his final flight tests, and on May 5, 1917, was made a pilot in the French Air Service. He wrote later, by midnight, every American in Paris knew that an American Negro by the name of Eugene Bullard, born in Georgia, had obtained a military pilot's license. In Paris, he met his friends and collected on the wager, and he wrote, When I became a soldier and a flyer in France, I was treated with respect and friendship by my

Starting point is 00:07:10 comrades, even by those from America. Then I knew at last that there are good and bad white men, just as there are good and bad black men. He had already excelled as a boxer and an infantryman. Now, at age 20, he started his aviation career in style, flying a Spod 7 biplane bearing an emblem on each side of the fuselage, a bleeding red heart under the words, all blood that flows is red. And if that's not enough, he flew with a Capuchin monkey named Jimmy, who wore a miniature flight suit and occupied a cramped space at Bullard's feet as a sort of good luck charm. He wrote, I was determined to do all that was in my power to make good as I knew the eyes of the world were watching me as the first Negro military pilot in feet as a sort of good luck charm. He wrote, I was determined to do all that was in my power to make

Starting point is 00:07:45 good as I knew the eyes of the world were watching me as the first Negro military pilot in the world. He did well. In his second aerial combat mission at the front, he fired 78 rounds and returned with seven bullet holes in the tail of his plane. In November, he dueled with a member of Manfred von Richthofen's Flying Circus. He wrote, I saw my adversary through the sight of my machine gun and would not give up the chase. I was forced to land just behind our lines while I was being machine gunned from the ground by German infantry. Altogether, his career as a combat aviator lasted 90 days, about 25 missions. It might have gone longer, but for an incident that November in which he confronted open racism. There are different versions of the story.

Starting point is 00:08:25 One says that he climbed into a truck one night after some leave in Paris, and an unseen French soldier pushed and kicked him, saying, There's no room for your kind. Bullard grabbed the man's leg in the darkness and punched him, only to discover that he was a lieutenant. Bullard's wounds and service record saved him from a court-martial, but he was sent back to his old infantry regiment. The writers Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, who both served in the Lafayette Flying Corps and later wrote Mutiny on the Bounty, wrote in 1922, there was scarcely an American at

Starting point is 00:08:55 Avore who did not know and like Bullard. He was a brave, loyal, and thoroughly likable fellow, and when a quarrel with his superiors caused his withdrawal from aviation, there was scarcely an American who did not regret the fact. Bullard's wounds had healed well, but they prevented him from being sent back to the trenches, so he spent the last year of the war in a service battalion shuffling papers and standing guard duty far from the front. After the armistice, he reinvented himself a fourth time. In Paris, jazz was becoming popular. He became friends with a drummer and band leader named Louis Mitchell, started taking drum lessons, and began sitting in with backup bands. With two others, he helped launch the club Zellies, which became immensely popular. Through 1920 and 1921,

Starting point is 00:09:36 he would work out in the gym during the day and play in the band at night. In time, Joe Zellie put him in charge of booking all the club's talent and managing the acts that were hired, which put him in touch with the best performers in Paris. When he decided to return to the boxing ring, he combined his two ambitions. He scheduled two comeback bouts in Cairo and paid for them by performing with a five-piece jazz ensemble at the Hotel Claridge in Cairo. The band opened there on Christmas Eve 1921. On February 15th, he fought 15 rounds against Haig Asadorian, an Egyptian fighter who outweighed him by 20 pounds. It was a draw, but probably ought to

Starting point is 00:10:10 have gone to Bullard, who discovered afterward that the referee was Asadorian's brother-in-law. The second fight, which took place in Alexandria on April 28th, came to another 15-round draw. Afterward, an Egyptian prince told Bullard it was the best that his country had ever seen and gave him a hundred-pound note. He returned to Paris and, in 1923, married a wealthy white French woman. They took an apartment in the Rue Franklin with a view of the Eiffel Tower and had two daughters. We don't know the precise details, but it seems they drifted apart after that and Bullard became the primary parent. At the same time, his new career as a musician and nightclub manager was taking off. In 1929, the journalist Joel Augustus Rogers wrote,

Starting point is 00:10:50 Bullard has such a reputation that some of the leading people of Europe and America go to Zellies just to see him. His friends are innumerable. He even appears indirectly in The Sun Also Rises, where Hemingway mentions a black, southern-accented drummer who plays at Zellies. By 1924, he was a full-blown impresario, with a club of his own called Le Grand Duke, whose patron list was a virtual who's who of 1920s celebrity, including Noel Coward, Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Clifton Webb, Tallulah Bankhead, Pablo Picasso, and Fred Astaire. Edward Windsor, Prince of Wales, occasionally sat in

Starting point is 00:11:25 on drums with the orchestra. Bullard's babysitter was Josephine Baker, and his busboy was Langston Hughes. Through the 1920s, the money rolled in. At the end of that decade, he moved on to a new club he called the Squadron, or L'Escadrille, to honor his aviation service, and he also bought a nearby gym, which he called Bullard's Athletic Club. As the Depression started to tighten its grip, other clubs closed down, but Bullard's stayed open, supported by his fame, his cosmopolitan reputation, and the gym, where club patrons were preferred for membership and received private lockers and dressing rooms. In 1934, both fighters in the World Bantamweight Boxing Championships trained at Bullard's gym, and Louis Armstrong played for several nights at Les Cadrilles, and he and Bullard became friends. In 1939,

Starting point is 00:12:10 with war impending again in Europe, French military intelligence asked Bullard to keep an eye on Nazi activity in Paris, giving him a partner from Alsace-Lorraine named Kitty Terrier. Bullard spoke English, French, German, and some Italian, but the Nazis believed that no black man was capable of such accomplishment or of understanding the military significance of whatever he might happen to hear. That confidence served Bullard well, as he and Kitty eavesdropped on German conversations in Lescadrilles that spring and summer. When the war broke out in earnest, the American embassy began urging Americans to leave France, but he was reluctant to go. At 44 years old, he had

Starting point is 00:12:45 effectively been a Frenchman, now far longer than he'd ever been an American. His daughters were French citizens, and everything he owned lay in France. He didn't even have a passport. Plus, he wrote, I was never too crazy about walking away from danger. Instead, when a German invasion seemed imminent, he shuttered both his clubs and headed south in search of the French 51st Infantry, which was making a last stand against the Germans near Orléans. He fought his way among fleeing refugees and dive-bombing Stukas, managed to find the 51st Barracks at Orléans, and discovered that its commander was an old comrade from Verdun. He put Bullard in charge of a machine gun unit that helped to hold off the Germans for a time, but then a shell landed in their midst, killing 11 men and wounding 16.

Starting point is 00:13:27 Bullard was thrown 40 feet into a wall, shattering a neck bone and cracking his ribs. Realizing that he was in no shape to continue, he agreed to move on. He wrote, If I were captured with them, I would not just be interned. I would certainly be executed, not only because of my color, which put me in at least as much danger as the Jews, but also because the enemy must by now know that I had worked against them in the underground as well as being a foreign volunteer in two wars. He crossed Spain to Lisbon and caught a ship to New York in July. He wrote, I can never forget how thrilled I was at the sight of the Statue of Liberty. I wonder if she ever looked so beautiful to any shipload of Americans as she did

Starting point is 00:14:04 that day. Thanks to Kitty and the French Underground, his daughters were able to follow him to New York in February 1941. After 33 years in Europe, the culture shock was extreme. Less than two years earlier, he'd been drinking champagne every night, dining with the elite of French society, and driving a sports car. Now he shared a Harlem apartment of 750 square feet with his two daughters and found work as a longshoreman and a perfume salesman. In America, his accomplishments seemed invisible, but France never forgot him. In 1954, he was one of three men chosen to attend a ceremonial relighting of the eternal flame in honor of France's unknown soldier, and in the

Starting point is 00:14:41 fall of 1959, he received the Legion of Honor, his 15th decoration by the French government. He made some records with Louis Armstrong, but touring with Satchmo proved wearying, and at last he took the job at Rockefeller Center, where the only clues to his illustrious past were the wartime medals he wore on his elevator operator's uniform. His interview on the Today Show led to other appearances, but the American media seemed to regard him more as a curiosity than as a figure deserving lasting esteem. He wrote an autobiography, but it was turned down as too unbelievable and too French.

Starting point is 00:15:13 The greatest honor of his life, he said, came in 1960 when he was invited to a reception with Charles de Gaulle, president of the French Republic, who was in the United States to meet with Eisenhower. At the reception, de Gaulle recognized Bullard, returned his salute, and embraced him, saying, All of our country is in your debt. Thank you. When he died in 1961, he was given a full French military funeral and buried in his Legionnaire's uniform in the cemetery of the Federation of French War Veterans in Flushing, New York. In the thick of the fighting, in September 1917, a call had gone out for American pilots flying for France to join the American Air Service. Bullard had gone to Paris and proved to be in excellent physical shape thanks to his boxing, but he was turned down on the pretext of rank.

Starting point is 00:16:00 The other candidates were all lieutenants and captains, and Bullard was a corporal. That was a bitter blow, but Bullard wrote that he got some comfort out of knowing that I was able to go on fighting on the same front and in the same cause as other citizens of the U.S. In 1994, nearly 33 years after his death, Eugene Bullard finally became an American military pilot and commissioned officer. He was posthumously appointed a second lieutenant by direct order of the Secretary of the Air Force.

Starting point is 00:16:39 The puzzle in episode 326, and this is a spoiler, was about a California college student who unintentionally traveled to New Zealand because he misunderstood Auckland as Oakland. Chris Weigel in Alaska said, you should definitely check out Sydney, Nova Scotia. There are many accounts of hapless European and other backpack travelers arriving in Canada with a wardrobe intended for Australia. So yeah, apparently a number of tourists over the years have ended up in Nova Scotia when they meant to be going to Australia. The most recent example that I happened to find was from March of 2017, when Milan Skipper, an 18-year-old Dutch man, planned a trip to backpack along the Australian coast before starting college,

Starting point is 00:17:30 but instead found himself in snow-covered Sydney, Nova Scotia, which was currently expecting a serious winter storm, wearing a t-shirt, sweatpants, and a light jacket. He told the CBC, I was not dressed for the occasion. Skipper actually had suspected that something might not be right when he landed in Toronto and saw the rather small plane that he was to board to get to Sydney and wondered how that was going to make it all the way to Australia. After landing in Nova Scotia, the airline was able to fly him back to Toronto and from there back to the Netherlands where, the CBC reported, his very amused father picked him up at the airport. They quote Skipper as saying, He felt really sorry for me, but he thought only I could do such a thing. He also laughed an awful lot, just like everyone else. Although Skipper and some of the other similarly confused tourists had booked their own tickets to Sydney, some of the mistakes made over the years between the two

Starting point is 00:18:18 Sydneys have actually been made by travel agents, such as to an Italian couple in 2010 and a British couple in 2002. Unlike Erwin Kreutz, the West German tourist that we covered in episode 327, who spent three days enjoying Bangor, Maine when he'd intended to go to San Francisco, Skipper didn't stick around to see much of Canada, saying, I only saw the parking lot of the airport. But some of the other mistaken Sydney travelers did, like Creutz, make the most of their situation and spent some time in the wrong Sydney enjoying the Canadian hospitality before returning to their homes. There actually are numerous places in the world that have duplicate place names, but somehow I imagine that not too many people end up in Paris, Ohio or Paris,

Starting point is 00:19:00 Kentucky thinking they've gone to France. Chris had suggested that, for a European backpack traveler who's a bit hazy about geography, it is probably quite plausible that the Australian state Sydney is in is called Nova Scotia rather than New South Wales, and that seemed to be a good point to me. Richard Wolfe, currently living in La Jolla, California, wrote, the lateral thinking puzzle about confusing Auckland and Oakland reminded me of an experience I had at O'Hare Airport in Chicago. I was living in Rochester, Minnesota at the time and was at the gate awaiting my flight's departure. A fellow next to me asked in a foreign accent if I lived in Rochester and I replied yes. He then asked if I knew how far Eastman Kodak was from the airport. I informed him that he was headed to the wrong Rochester, as Eastman Kodak is in Rochester, New York, not Minnesota. We went to

Starting point is 00:19:49 the ticket counter and all was remedied. When I told my co-workers the next day, almost all of them had had similar experiences. So I guess to non-Americans, and maybe even some Americans, the distinction between New York and Minnesota just isn't great enough, or maybe people just don't expect that more than one place will have the same name. So now I wonder if people do end up in Paris, Ohio when they want to go to Paris, Kentucky or vice versa. And I always thought it was completely confusing that there is a Kansas City, Kansas as well as a Kansas City, Missouri. I'm sure the people who live in either one of those cities can tell plenty of stories about confused travelers.

Starting point is 00:20:29 You'd think that the flight crews on some of these planes would make it a practice just to note that? Maybe. Before they pull out of the gate, you know? Because it sounds like a lot of times it falls to the airline to sort of sort it out if someone does make this mistake. That's true. So it would be to their benefit to get it sorted out before the people arrive in the wrong city. Especially if it happens a lot. I'd previously heard that Springfield is one of the most commonplace names in the U.S. and so I started looking into that a bit. I found that

Starting point is 00:20:51 some different sources say somewhat different things about which are the most commonplace names, which might at least partly come down to what definition you're trying to use for a city or town versus any populated area. And I wasn't able to find what seemed like a really authoritative source for what might be some of the most commonplace names worldwide. But the U.S. Geological Survey has a page on this for the U.S., and that seemed like a reputable source to me. They say that, there are no official definitions of city, town, village, hamlet, neighborhood, etc. All named entities with human habitation are classified as populated place, including incorporated places, 20% of the nation's communities, unincorporated

Starting point is 00:21:32 places, the majority, housing developments not yet incorporated, and neighborhoods within incorporated places. So that's a pretty broad definition for what they are counting. But by their reckoning, Midway and Fairview have shifted back and forth in recent years for which is what the USGS calls the most frequently occurring community name in the US, with most recently Fairview having 288 occurrences to Midway's 256. They also say that while Springfield is commonly said to be the only community name found in each of the 50 states, at last count, it actually only appears in 34 states. You can find a Riverside, though, in 46 states, with only Alaska, Hawaii, Louisiana, and Oklahoma not having a community with that

Starting point is 00:22:17 name. I'm American. I'm astounded that Midway and Fairview are the top two. Yeah, I don't know what I would have guessed, but I don't think I would have thought of either of those. I guess most American places were probably named in the 19th century. Like Riverside, you can understand perfectly how something would get that name and why it would be a very common one. But those two, that doesn't make, that really surprises me. Yeah. The puzzle in episode 327, and this isn't a spoiler, was about a business owner seeing a person with a measuring tape and then permanently closing his store a month later. We received a good alternative answer to that puzzle. Dear Futilitarians, my name is Penelope and I am 11 years old. I am emailing because the

Starting point is 00:22:57 puzzle in the misplaced tourist episode piqued my interest. When I heard the puzzle, I immediately thought that the person with the measuring tape was putting down social distancing stickers six feet apart and the store shut down due to COVID. It could have worked, but your answer is good too. Love the podcast. So thank you for that follow-up, Penelope, and thanks also for the very nice pronunciation tips to help me make sure that I didn't get your name wrong. Penelope's answer is certainly a more timely one than ours was. And a perfectly good answer. It is a perfectly good answer. I didn't think your name wrong. Penelope's answer is certainly a more timely one than ours was. And a perfectly good answer. It is a perfectly good answer. I didn't think of that at all.

Starting point is 00:23:29 In a few previous episodes, we discussed stories circulating in Europe of tourists being gassed into unconsciousness and robbed in their caravans or campers, or something similar occasionally occurring in people's homes. I had managed to find similar stories going back to 2000, and then a listener had let us know that he'd been backpacking around Europe in 1991, and he and his friends had been warned about this situation on sleeping cars in trains. These updates were follow-ups to the story in episode 132, about how in 1944, several people in Mattoon, Illinois,

Starting point is 00:24:03 thought they'd been assaulted with some kind of gas in their homes. But apparently these types of stories go back even further. Eric Cohen sent an email with the subject line, Mad Gasser of the 1870s. Greg, Sharon, thank you both again for your wonderful show. Thought you might like to know that tales of burglary via sleeping gas go back at least to the 19th century, from On Board the Rocket, which seems to be a memoir by a sailing ship captain, one Robert C. Chamblitt Adams, published in 1879. The house was built of wood with wide verandas in front and rear. Posts about six feet high supported it from the ground, leaving a space under the house for air to circulate,

Starting point is 00:24:43 and rogues also, as it proved, for a few weeks before my arrival a robbery occurred, and it is supposed in this way. The thieves went under the house and bored holes in the floor of the sleeping room, through which they introduced the smoke obtained by burning the leaves of a narcotic plant. The inmate being stupefied, the thieves broke in at the front door, robbed the house, and took away an iron safe that was chained to the bed of the sleeper. Adams records this story as being told to him in Indonesia, though I couldn't find in what year he was claiming these events to have occurred. Adams reports that the rocket was built in 1851, and as Eric noted, this memoir was published in 1879, So that gives us a bit of a window for the year. But in any case, it does mean that these stories of nefarious gassers do go back quite a bit.

Starting point is 00:25:31 If anyone knows of a similar story predating this one, do let us know. That kills me that they all have this quality. If you're malicious enough to consider robbing someone, why would you be so delicate as to put into effect this elaborate plan to avoid having to confront them? It just seems really unlikely to work, too. I mean, the more recent stories, actual anesthetists weighed in and said, this seems extremely implausible that this would actually work. And there's so many things that can go wrong. You could wind up gassing yourself.

Starting point is 00:26:01 Right. Yeah. If you're burning leaves underneath a house, right? You put yourself to sleep. But it's also just to get the concentration in the room of the amount that you would need to knock somebody out would take a lot more than you think. And to know whether you've even succeeded. That's right. Right. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. We really appreciate getting your updates, comments, and feedback. So if you have any of those that you'd like to send to us, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:26:37 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 book How Come, a book of riddles by Agnes Rogers from 1953 that was sent to us by John Jerome and that we discussed in episode 306. And if you've heard some of the Rogers other puzzles that we've done, then you won't be too surprised by the outcome on this one. I know what that means. Helen was expert at her job and always courteous. However, one day as she was

Starting point is 00:27:11 going about her daily business, she stepped through a door and forgot to count. Shortly thereafter, she was dead. How come? We shouldn't laugh at that. No, I know. It's just Rogers manages to kill off most of the protagonists.

Starting point is 00:27:27 Okay. Step through a door, forgot to count. Yes. And then shortly after it was dead. Yes. Are there other people involved? No, not in a relevant way. Okay.

Starting point is 00:27:38 Was all of this related to her job? Just want to pin that down. Yes. Okay. So she was on the job when she was doing this, whatever it was. Count. Was she counting steps?

Starting point is 00:27:53 No. I guess there's a lot of things she could be counting. And I imagine it would be helpful for me to know how she died, but that's kind of a tricky thing to guess. Did she fall? Yes.

Starting point is 00:28:06 Oh. I have this picture of her like counting, like walking in the dark and counting steps and getting it wrong and falling into a hole or something. But you're saying that's not it. That's not it. She fell. If she, so if she'd counted, she was counting in order to avoid falling, I guess. No. Oh, that's not it.

Starting point is 00:28:24 Okay. She was counting something. And obviously those were all the same items or objects or behaviors. She was counting something. She was. Was that, okay, where do you start with this? She stepped through a door. Yes. And then started counting. No, forgot to count. But would normally, she's done this before, whatever it is, I guess. Yes. All right. So normally she'd step through this door and count whatever it is and count up to a certain number,

Starting point is 00:28:56 I guess. Yeah. And if she'd done that correctly, she wouldn't have fallen, right? Incorrect. If I did that correctly, she wouldn't have fallen, right? Incorrect. Counted. Okay. Really? So does part of her job involve falling? Yes.

Starting point is 00:29:18 Is she a performer of some kind? No, I don't think so. Is this free fall? Like is she up in? Yes. Oh. I'm doing terrible, but I'm happening to get some progress made. There's not a lot for you to work with here.

Starting point is 00:29:38 Step through a door, like into a space vehicle, I guess? No. Out of a space vehicle. Not a space vehicle. A cannon? No. All right. Would you say she died in a fall?

Starting point is 00:29:53 Yes. So she stepped through a door. Is a vehicle of some kind involved? Yes. And is the door that she passes through in this vehicle? Yes. Is she going into the vehicle? No. She's leaving vehicle? Yes. Is she going into the vehicle? No.

Starting point is 00:30:06 She's leaving it? Yes. Okay. So she leaves a vehicle. Yes. And counts, or forgets to count. Right. And winds up dying in a fall that otherwise would not have killed her.

Starting point is 00:30:18 Free fall. Yes. Why would you, why would you, is she counting time yes we're supposed to be but she didn't okay but what i'm not getting is why if she if she would have fallen anyway why does this fall kill her it's it's a different kind of fall i, than she would have gone through if she'd counted. Is that not right? I don't know if I can answer that exactly. All right.

Starting point is 00:30:49 Why don't you try to figure out what the vehicle is? Is she on the Earth's surface when this happens? No. She's in orbit? No. Is the vehicle moving? Yes. And she steps out?

Starting point is 00:31:03 Yes. Did she know it was moving when she stepped out? Yes. Okay, so that's not it. She's leaving a moving vehicle. Yes. But dies in a fall. Is the door she passes through at sort of ground level? No. All right, so she's falling, you'd say, from the door? Yes. Or from the height of the door? Why would counting save you from that? Counting time. Yes. Should she have counted before she'd gone through the door?

Starting point is 00:31:34 You're saying no. She should have gone through the door and counted, but she didn't. She forgot to count. And she's not falling as soon as she passes through the door, is she? She is. She is? Yes. All right. So, from the top. She goes through a door, starts falling immediately.

Starting point is 00:31:48 Yes. Oh, it's a parachute. Yes. Yes. She was a parachutist, and she didn't pull the ripcord. Such a simple solution. I just fumbled around. So, we have to add another Rogers victim to the tally.

Starting point is 00:32:00 If anyone else has a puzzle for us that they'd like to have us try, please send that to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is supported entirely by our amazing listeners. If you would 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. of the website at futilitycloset.com. Or you can join our Patreon campaign, where you'll not only help support the show, but also get more information on some of the stories,

Starting point is 00:32:31 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 intriguing 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.

Starting point is 00:32:53 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. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 334-Eugene Bullard

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