Hyperfixed - Casey Wants to Believe

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

This week - Casey has been chasing the origin of a very specific piece of ephemera for years. He came to us for help.If you like this episode and want to hear more, please sign up for our premium feed here!https://hyperfixedpod.com/joinIf you would like to join at the $60 yearly level and receive your very own Big Chub Chet's button, you can do so here:https://hyperfixedpod.com/buttonThere are a limited number so get them before they're gone! LINKS:Busy Beaver Button MuseumThe Button in Question (Spoilers! don't look until the episode is done!)

Hey, this is Alex. This may be an unusual content warning, as there's nothing, like, thematically inappropriate in this episode. I mean, I do say the F word a couple times, but that's not particularly out of the ordinary for this show. However, in this episode, we say the word diarrhea a lot. Like, seriously, a lot. So, if you're listening with children,

or like me, you have the mind of a child, just don't say I didn't warn you. This is Hyperfixed. On this show, listeners write in with problems, big and small, and I solve them. Or, at least I try. And if I don't, I give a good reason why I can't. This week, Casey wants to believe. Oh my god, dude, I have been telling everybody about this one.

Oh good, you too, huh? This is Casey. He's a librarian at a small liberal arts college. He's got real gentle giant vibes. Kind of reminds me of a Viking. And I know this is a young show. We're only on our fourth episode, but he has submitted maybe my favorite problem of all time. It's going to be hard to top. I'm so excited. This is the problem I was born to solve. Man, I am very happy to hear that.

But before we get into that, there's a few more things about Casey I think you need to know. The first is that he loves research. I love research. See? Told ya. That is a big part of why I became a librarian, is I, for as long as I've been on the internet, have loved going down rabbit holes. In his spare time, Casey loves digging around on the internet for information he can use to edit Wikipedia entries, especially the sports entries. But here's the second thing

you should know about Casey. He's not into the icons, the Wayne Gretzky's, the Michael Jordan's, the Tom Brady's. He's into the real obscure ones. I really enjoy finding a lesser known player or coach or team that has a page that has one or two sentences, if we've all seen the Wikipedia page with one sentence. And even if I add four or five sentences to that, at least there's something else out there, a little more information out about that person team. So the buttons is the same thing. The buttons. This is the third thing you should know about Casey. Back in 2020, just before he finished up his library science degree, he was looking for an internship. And in keeping with his personality, he wasn't interested in locking down the Tom Brady of library science internships.

You know, the New York Public Library, Library of Congress. So when he saw a listing for an internship at a place called the Busy Beaver Button Museum, he knew he had to apply. at a place called the Busy Beaver Button Museum, he knew he had to apply. Just to make sure our listeners aren't picturing, like, you know, the buttons on their pants, can you describe the buttons we're talking about? Yeah, I got that question a lot when I said I was doing research for a button company. These are the buttons which would get pinned to a shirt or your backpack or a jean jacket if you were cool enough to have one back in the 80s. I still have a jean jacket with pins all over it, and I still think that I'm very cool. And you definitely are. I can't believe we're only

four episodes into this show and the guests are already making fun of me. Anyway, the Busy Beaver Button Museum is based in Chicago. Part of it is an e-commerce custom button business. And the other part is a non-profit museum. That's the part that Casey worked for. And they have thousands of buttons they've gotten as donations and collected over the years, and they're trying to get them online onto their website. I went onto this website while I was talking to Casey, and the collection is actually pretty amazing. There are buttons for everything from political candidates to party caterers, buttons for 7-Up and AIDS awareness, a novelty troll doll button with a wisp of hair that stretches out from the top, and a button commemorating the 1896 meeting of the Iowa

State Medical Society. It's so funny, like, all of these buttons have like a little bit of history. Like, I'm looking at one right now. It's a fast food restaurant that was owned by Mike Ditka called Ditka Dogs. Yeah, there's some fascinating stuff in there. Casey's job was to research the history of the buttons in the archive. And then he'd put together a write-up of where they came from. And then a picture of the button in his historical synopsis would become a page on the Busy Beaver website. And there's a massive database when I started this internship

of all the buttons you could pick from. And I did not pick the ones that said, vote for Ike. Of course he didn't. Just like with those Wikipedia entries, just like with his choice of internships, Casey picked the most niche, obscure buttons he could possibly find. What is it about you that makes you want to preserve that stuff? I think a lot of it is my own personality, my own experiences. I was a college football player, but I played at a very small Division III college. So I was never on television.

Yeah, I think just never really having been in huge major limelight kind of draws me to these smaller stories, which can be just as interesting. Just because they weren't on ESPN or there's not a book written about this button doesn't mean there's not some interest there that could be entertaining or informative for somebody else. This is a very admirable, very Goldman-esque way of approaching the world. And it's also precisely what led Casey to the problem we're talking about today. about today. Okay, so just to set the scene for you, Casey's at home. This is a remote internship, so he's doing this whole thing from his bedroom. And he's sitting at the computer with this massive list of unidentified buttons open in front of him. I was looking at a list of buttons and just

scrolling through because you got to pick randomly. And my eye caught the word diarrhea. So unless you're a medical professional, diarrhea isn't one of those words you typically encounter in a work setting. So Casey stopped scrolling and read the rest of the button, which said, ask me about our new diarrhea-inducing chili cheese fries. And for me, it was a say no more moment. I put my name next to it to claim it, and I'm off to the races on this thing. So Casey's goal is to figure out as much as he can about where this thing came from and why it was made.

And he has some clues to help him figure it out. It does have the name of the business in what's called the curl text. Yes, it's a very technical term that we use in the button industry. Curl text is the industry's term for the little bits of writing that curl over the edge of the button. So you can really only see it if you're looking at the back of the button. It's also sometimes called rim text. The curl text reads, Big Chub Chet's Down Home Ranch Style Kitchen, 35th and Main, Custer City, Oklahoma. Now, given this wealth of information, this should be a quick assignment.

Casey has the name of the restaurant, he has its location, and he has the name of a very unique menu item, the aforementioned diarrhea-inducing chili cheese fries. This should all be Google-able, but it isn't. If you make a Google search for ask me about our new diary-inducing chili cheese fries, you get WebMD. You get message boards about how these chili cheese fries gave me this condition. So Casey tries putting quotation marks around the search to make sure that he gets results with those words exactly.

It might be one of the few times Google says, no, there's nothing here. So then he tries searching the curl text. He searches Big Chub Chet's down-home ranch-style kitchen. Again, nothing's out there. If you go to Google Maps and look at Custer City, Oklahoma, you'll notice there's not even a 35th Main Street. There is a Main Street in Custer City that's bisected by numbered streets. But they stop at 9th Street, not 35th Street. And just to be clear, Custer City is small. According to the 2020 census, the population is 367.

On his quest to find Big Chub Jets, Casey searched through newspaper archives. He contacted the official Custer City Facebook page, but he always came back empty-handed. That's honestly where this, for my research, kind of stopped. I did spend a little time trying to find out if there was another city in Oklahoma that was previously named Custer City, but changed its name. And I think at that point, I realized I was a little bit too close to Russell Crowe and A Beautiful Mind with the newspapers on the wall and the red string connecting them. This all happened back in 2020, more than four years ago. And Casey is still thinking about this button. It's become such a preoccupation for him that his brother made him a poster like the one that Mulder had on the X-Files that says,

I want to believe with a UFO on it. Except instead of a blurry flying saucer image, it's a photo of this button. Casey sent us a picture of the poster. It's hanging above his desk at home. Do you have a theory, any theory about where this came from? I have a couple, and they're kind of sad. Uh-oh. I guess my theory, and there's two different ways to look at it, is that this was just made as a practice.

Either for a class, like a Photoshop class or a marketing class. And the assignment was make a button advertising something. It's make a fictional restaurant or make a fictional company. And this is what the student did i don't think it's outlandish to think that this ask me about our diarrhea chili cheese fries is something that was just made for fun but then why would there be the curl text that's that's the biggest mistake that's the detail that doesn't make any sense because i was sitting there thinking like mate what if what if like someone made like a like a student film and they had to you know make this button

for it but then why would there be an address on it that part makes no sense that that that level of detail like the stanley kubrick level of detail on a movie prop. And they chose to locate this fucking place in the middle of nowhere. No one knows that Custer City exists because 300-something people live there. Hold on, what did the census say? It's 367 people at the time of the 2020 census? Yeah, it's a very small place. I'm not even sure that they could handle something like Big Chub Chet's down-home ranch-style kitchen, if we're being honest.

I understand that this is not an important problem. In fact, it may be the least important problem I've ever attempted to solve. But when Casey sent me a link to the button's website, and I saw the mysterious diarrhea button for the first time. I could feel it pulling me in. I was helpless to its charms. For better or worse, I do believe this is my fate. That these are the stories I was put on Earth to tell. I think we can figure it out.

I think we've got to be able to figure it out. Someone out there made this thing. Not only did someone out there make it, but they, like, designed it. Yeah. It's not bad looking either. If you zoom in on it, it's a decent photo. There's no pixelation. It's a well done piece of art, I would say. There's even a little drop shadow under the text. Right. It really looks disgusting, though. It looks super gross. It does look like a river of molten cheese and then some meat at the bottom. And it is very close up. It's a pretty gross one.

It's way too close up. Oh, my God. This is the problem that I was born to solve. This is the only thing that I've ever wanted in my life is to solve this problem. Oh, brother, let's do this. The obvious first step was to reach out to the Busy Beaver Button Museum and ask them if they knew anything about where this button came from. And in my dream version of this call, they would tell us they knew the name of the person who donated the button.

And then we would call that person and ask where they got it. And then that person would tell us where they got the button. And on and on we'd go like that, meeting fascinating people along the way until we finally found our way to Big Chub Chet himself and our very own plates of diarrhea-inducing chili cheese fries.

But that's not quite how things worked out. This is Viewer Book Company. This is Kristen. I think that you're the person I was calling to find out how to get in touch with. My name is Emma Cortland. I'm a podcast producer. When Hyperfix producer Emma Cortland called the Busy Beaver's main line, the person who answered was actually one of its co-founders, Kristen Carter. Beaver's main line, the person who answered was actually one of its co-founders, Kristen Carter. Kristen founded Busy Beaver Buttons back in 1995, and she launched the museum in 2010. Each side has its own archive, and between the two of them, the Busy Beaver has about 160,000 buttons in their collection. And yet, when Emma asked about the diarrhea button, Kristen knew exactly what she was asking about and who made it.

After the break, Busy Beaver co-founder Kristen Carter, who pretty much shares a name with the creator of the X-Files, Chris Carter, connects us with the mystery bun maker. Welcome back to the show. I will say, at the time, it felt like the worst news I could possibly hear. Again, this is Hyperfix producer Emma Cortland. I mean, I think we were all a little heartbroken. I don't know if you remember this, Alex, but you actually got sick like right after this. And I don't think that's entirely a coincidence.

My heart couldn't take finding out the answer to this button not being exactly the way I imagined it in my head. So before the break, Emma called Busy Beaver and its founder, Kristen Carter, said that she knew who made the diarrhea button. And the reason she knew is because he was an employee. And yeah, I may have had a moment of like, okay, nothing means anything. Let us never speak of the diarrhea button again.

Let's move on to another story and toss this one in the dustbin. You were sad. It just felt like, oh, this is so magical. This is such a weird object. This is like, if they made Indiana Jones set in modern day, I would be Indiana Jones and this would be the object I was searching for. Except it turned out not to be the Ark of the Covenant or the, uh, what is the thing that he gets in The Last Crusade? The Holy Grail.

No, the Holy Grail. A monkey goes to find a monkey. No, he goes to find the Holy Grail. It's a little bit more important. So it's not the Ark of the Covenant. It's not the Holy Grail. It's just not magical. I know.

And I definitely felt a lot of what you were feeling. But I think the reason that I wanted to keep working on this was because it still felt unresolved to me. Like, why did they assign an intern to log and archive this button if they knew it was made by an employee? Right? Not only that, like, they didn't give him any information about it. So if it was made by an employee, they didn't let him know. And, like, again, why is there curl text with the name of a business and a location that doesn't exist? Right.

So while you were sick, I decided to reach back out to Kristen. And like, what did you find out? Well, first of all, I learned that buttons are truly an American art form, like jazz. Oh, yeah, 100%. I mean, they were invented in Newark, New Jersey in 1896. That's so bananas. So yeah, we traced the lineage back to George Washington's inauguration.

So when he was inaugurated, everyone was like, hey, we started a country, let's make souvenirs. So they made all these different souvenir, like buttons that have different engraving or stamps on them. We need to let people know. I mean, the goal of the Button Museum is to tell as much American history as possible through pinback buttons.

I like that you went into this conversation as if you were planning to demand answers, and then immediately were just like, oh my God, buttons are wonderful. I love them so much. I don't know how someone could not fall in love with the fact that America invented buttons because it needed party favors at its little celebration. I think that's adorable. But honestly, it was a dozen things. Kristen told me that the button community has this council of elders, the APIC. They have a Facebook page where you can post questions about the origins of different buttons and they'll help you figure it out because that's just what they like to do. And some of the most interesting stuff on the Busy

Beavers website has been submitted randomly by people outside of the museum. We do get people often like saying, hey, I know about this button, you know, or I know about the backstory of this button. And even more frequently, we have people Googling themselves or Googling something they did and finding the button that matched what they were doing. This happened with the Grateful Dead button. Apparently, there's only one Grateful Dead button that's considered authentic. It's designed by this guy named Gil Sanchez. And his son looked it up and he gave us all sorts of information. And it was a lot of stuff that collectors didn't know. So like that one, we learned that there were 300 in the first run.

And that was the only run. And somebody redid those buttons, but they took Gil Sanchez's name off. So collectors will know which is which. So when Kristen says the museum is using buttons to preserve history, she's talking about these little relics of the past, these individual stories and expressions that might otherwise have been forgotten. And yeah, that's just very romantic to me. Okay, so, I mean, I get it.

I see why you found passion in the button universe. But like, if she already knew where this button came from, how did it end up on the list of buttons to research? Oh, yeah. Okay. So the short version of this is that the museum is a very small operation. There's only one librarian, she works part time, and there are tens of thousands of buttons waiting to be cataloged. waiting to be cataloged. So when an in-house button makes it into the museum collection, which almost never happens, it may be years before she gets a chance to photograph and measure it. And since there's already very little crossover between the e-commerce business and the non-profit, by the time this one wound up in the research pile, the story of its origin had been lost to time. The other thing that happened is that while Kristen was on the call with me, she got an email from this guy who made the button. His name is Nick Raleigh.

Apparently, she'd written to him about the curl text, which, remember, is also called rim text. I just heard back from him about why the back rim text, if you want to hear it. Yes, please. So he says the rim text was to help legitimize the button. So if someone found it 25 years later, it would only further them to question if it was in fact a real place. Why does he want people to question if it's a real place? That's what I wanted to know as well. So I asked Kristen if she would put me in touch with him.

She connected us over email. That's what I wanted to know as well. So I asked Kristen if she would put me in touch with him. She connected us over email. And Alex, I am so glad I talked to this guy. Because that magic you thought we lost, it turns out, it was there the whole time. This sounds ridiculous to say out loud, but this conversation we're having is like the fate of the button. This is Nick Rowley, the man behind the diarrhea button. He spoke to us on a call with his friend, Eric Harms, who helped him with the visual design of the button. So if you hear some snickering in the background, that's Eric.

It's like a dream come true for this to come full circle. Oh my God. Because that was the intention of it in a way. Nick is a huge collector of things. Even before he worked at the Busy Beaver, he had a ton of buttons. And of all his collectibles, his absolute favorites were the ones that made him wonder, like, why in the world did someone make this? So when he came to work at the Busy Beaver, he found himself surrounded by all of these people who were investigating the kind of weird stuff that he was into. Nick got inspired to make a button that gave someone else the feeling that

he got when he discovered his favorite buttons. Honestly, if I'm being perfectly honest, I think this came to me one night, stoned on a couch in my living room in my 20s, like trying to just come up with something ridiculous. And the dietary habits of my friends in their 20s was also inspiring to it. We knew a bar that would have free wings every Friday night if you got one beer. So for like 20-something dudes, it was like, let's go buy one beer, nurse it, and just eat 100 wings. And then these guys, everyone's discussing, some of these dudes are getting like tummy aches. I won't go into the details of it, but it's not agreeing with them.

So it kind of, that made me think about it a little bit. Cheese fries seemed better. But the deeper idea, which is the true beauty of you coming to us to talk about this. But the actual, and this was the idea from the get-go, was I love buttons. I've got a, you know, people have got junk drawers, stuff like, that's where buttons go. They get lost in time. People forget about them. They get sometimes preserved.

And you find buttons later on, and you're like, oh, I never even heard of this political candidate, or what's this for? I wanted to make a button that someone would find 25 years later and be like, what the hell is this? Why would any restaurant use the word diarrhea on a button? That has to be one of the worst words you could ever use to try to sell food. You've got to be kidding me. But it wasn't enough for someone to have that thought and then move on. In order for the button to really capture the feeling Nick was going for, the person who found the diarrhea button would have to think it came from a real restaurant. So Nick took the idea to Eric Harms, who was one of the Busy Beavers in-house designers at the time.

And Eric said, you've got to add curl text. We had to legitimize it somehow, right? Yeah, a lot of businesses would put their addresses. And I just told Eric, I think Eric, you came up with that, right? I was like, just come up with a business in the middle of the country. So it seems like it'd be harder to find. And that's how they came up with Custer City, Oklahoma? Yep.

I told them about Casey and they were absolutely delighted. And they were really so delighted to know that this had worked out exactly the way they dreamed it would. It is actually amazing. I am sorry that it isn't an actual restaurant for him. I know he would have loved that more than... I feel sad for him in that sense

but selfishly I don't know this dude so who gives a shit? We'll talk I guess afterwards and I'll send him I'll find I know I have some so I'll send him some extras and some other fun buttons I made and I know that that was going to mean so much to him because truthfully like not only

has he had this obsession but the only like the only manifestation of it has been this like shitty scan of it online he's never held one of these buttons before so alex uh i know this is normally your line but um before i send you off to follow up with casey i want to ask you knowing all of this how do you feel oh my god dude magic restored this is perfect this is exactly what wanted. I wanted a story with a journey. And this isn't just like a short, this isn't like a six week journey. This is like a 15 year journey.

What more could I possibly ask for? It really feels like when you were a child and your school project was to like build a time capsule where you buried all of the treasures that would tell you about the moment in time when you were doing that and then someone actually dug it up and found it but not only that like this isn't even digging it up it's like literally up on a website for us to look at it is hidden in plain sight i mean i'm honestly kind of surprised it took this long for someone to find it one of the things that he kept saying to me over and over again was that he's just like, I anticipated this taking 25 years. I can't believe I undershot.

And he said, but I'm so glad that I'm of an age when I can still enjoy this. With the complete answer in hand, it was time to go back to Casey. I think one of the funniest emails I ever got was Emma's invite to this meeting, and it said, diarrhea follow up with Alex. It really has made like for a lot of wonderful jokes, especially since, you know, there are people who are only passingly familiar with what we're working on, who are like members of our slack, like Breakmaster Cylinder, who does music. So they'll see us. They'll see us feverishly typing in a channel called Diarrhea Button and be like, what the fuck is going on here? It's great. So I have some good news and I have some bad news. Okay. I'm going to

start with the bad news, which is that you were very close to your answer. I told Casey that as soon as we reached out to the Busy Beaver, they told us that the button had not been made by a restaurant and that as far as they knew, there was no such thing as Big Chub Chet's down home ranch style kitchen in Custer City or anywhere else. And Casey admitted he was bummed out by the news, but it was what he expected. But then I got to tell him the good news. During our first conversation, you told us that you strongly wanted this to be a restaurant, and more than that, you did not want it to have been a joke or a school project right what i

take that to mean is that like what you were afraid of is that this thing didn't have a story like it didn't have anything interesting behind it yeah right because if it was a school project or something it was just a throwaway just to get the points for the assignment. And there's not anything all that interesting behind it other than the design of it, I guess. So the good news is this. I told Casey that we found the person who made the button, that he's a longtime button collector named Nick Rowley.

And that when we asked him about the diarrhea button, he said it was like a dream come true. We told him all about how the button came to be, about how Nick's most treasured collectibles are the ones that make him wonder, why in the world did someone decide to make this? And about how, when he got the opportunity to make a button of his own,

he wanted to make one that gave someone else the same feeling that his favorite buttons gave him. And what he said to us was, I wanted to make a button that someone would find 25 years later and be like, what the hell is this? Why would any restaurant use the word diarrhea on a button?

Wow. Mission accomplished. So Nick was so glad to get this call, this call that he had been waiting for since 2010, assuming that he would never get. And as a gesture of gratitude, he wants to send you your very own diarrhea chili button. Oh my gosh. How many were made? Is this like one of one? He made like 20. There were very few. Whoa! That is an honor. And I will cherish it forever. This one was a clear win. Nick was happy. Casey was happy. I was happy. But there was one more thing I wanted to share with Casey before I said goodbye.

Very quickly before we end the call, I just wanted to... Hold on just a second. I wanted to drop something in the chat for you. Okay. I was thinking about something that Casey had said on our first call, about how part of the reason he was drawn to niche history was because he'd never really been in the spotlight before. And in the small way that i could

i wanted to do something to change that i'm wondering if you could follow this link did i get it yeah and just shady like it is a very shady link um and just uh take a look at it and tell me what it can you read it for me but yeah. I see, the first thing I saw was my name. So I knew this wasn't the original text that I had came up with. The link opens to the Busy Beaver website. The page for the diarrhea button that Casey has seen countless times before.

Only now it's a little different. Under additional information where it used to say nothing, it now says in 2024, this button became the subject of a podcast episode when a librarian named Casey Koss became obsessed with finding the person who made it. A few days before this conversation, we wrote to Kristen and asked if we could update the entry for the diarrhea button. And she said, yeah, go for it. So now, if you search for it, you'll see the story of this button with Casey's name right up top.

Well, that's fantastic. I am honored to be immortalized on the Busy Beaver Button Museum and to be part of this story. Wow. Thank you both. This is fantastic. What a cool, what a cool experience. I honestly thought I would never get the answer to this because it's so obscure. I also thought that I'd never get the answer because there's two, that intersection does not exist. I was just like, what the, I was wondering if like, maybe there was like nuclear bomb testing going on on this part of the country and they just erased certain parts of the city by blowing it up. I had no idea. Oh, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. I am so happy to have, to have an end to this. Now I can go on to the next inane mystery that I need to solve. You know,

if you're just dedicated enough to that cause, you can make a whole career out of it. It's what I did. Casey is now in possession of his very own Big Chug Chats button. And with the blessing of everyone involved in this story, we've been given the go-ahead to make a limited second pressing of the Big Chub Chats Ask Me About Our Diarrhea-Inducing Chili Cheese Fries button. If you go to hyperfixedpod.com slash button and get a Hyperfixed Premium Membership, in addition to getting bonus episodes and all the other perks of being a premium podcast member, we will send you your very own big chub chats button and to make sure that button counterfeiters won't try and pass it off as a first pressing and sell it for an inflated price

we added hyperfix podcast 2024 to the curl text Thank you. Emma Cortland and me, Alex Goldman. The music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and Mace. The show is engineered by Tony Williams. Fact-checking by Sona Avakian. You can get bonus episodes, join our Discord, and much more at hyperfixedpod.com slash join. And if you want your very own diarrhea button, you can get that, as well as all the other stuff,

at hyperfixedpod.com slash button. But that's only for 500 people, and then it's gone forever. Hyperfixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at radiotopia.fm. Last thing, the Busy Beaver Button Museum

is always looking for volunteers to help research the buttons in their collection, so if you're interested in helping out, you can email their archive manager and their internship coordinator at internship at buttonmuseum.org. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next week if you're a premium member, or a week after that if you're not. Take it easy!