Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - A Local History

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

Who loves small town history?? Maybe not our hosts, it turns out.  But you listen and let us know! And as always big thanks to our sponsors. Go to CreditKarma.com or the Credit Karma app to find the card for you. Thanks Truebill.com/qq.  it could save you thousands a year. Thanks, BetterHelp.  Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/QQ. Shop with confidence — get Honey for FREE at JoinHoney.com/qq

I've got a quick, quick question for you, alright? I wanna hear your thoughts, I wanna know what's on your mind I've got a quick, quick question for you, alright? The answer's not important, I'm just glad that we could talk tonight So what's your favourite? Who did you get? What do I be? What was it I could wear? What do we know? I'm sorry, baby, Daniel O'Brien When will I be remembered? Was it out there? Worded all the time Oh, forget it Saw a movie, Daniel O'Brien

Two best friends and comedy writers If there's an answer, they're gonna find it I think you'll have a great time here I think you'll have a great time here So hello again and welcome to another episode of Quick Question with Soren and Daniel, the podcast where two best friends and comedy writers ask each other questions and give each other answers. I am one half of that podcast, senior writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, author of How to Fight Presidents with No One.

of how to fight presidents with no one. And third fact about myself, one of Hazlitt, New Jersey's favorite sons, Daniel O'Brien, joined as always by my co-host, Mr. Soren Bui. Soren, say hello. Hey, everybody. I'm Soren Bui, aka the Carbondale Kid out of Colorado. I write for American Dad and I do a number of other things, but they're not really notable in this podcast. They're notable to people in my little circle, but outside of that, why would you care? You don't need to

know what I'm growing this spring. It's not valuable to you in any way. It's useless. What are you growing this spring? Okay. So I'm growing cucumbers and then I've also got some strawberries that are just taken off. Mint, obviously. That's a go-to, but you really got to keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't get out of control. Beans, now most people aren't going to grow their beans in the spring or summer. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Soren, that's a winter harvest and you're absolutely right.

I got a great spot though. Don't worry about it. Shaded, they love it there. Yeah, the house where I'm living now, mint is growing on the side of it. The owner just told me the other day, he was like, hey, you can see the mint has grown good. So if you want some mint in your cooking or whatever, you can just take some whenever you want. I didn't realize it was a thing that can get out of control. Yeah. It's a weed basically. I've noticed it on the way to my grocery store too. There's like some nice shrubbery and then at the base of the shrubbery

is just tons of mint growing there. It's tough to get a handle on. If you let it go for too long, just ruins your garden. Yeah. I wonder if my landlord grew it or if it just happened to us. Could just get some volunteers. That's what we in the green thumb community call plants that grow on their own. Really? Volunteers? That's fun. Yeah. I don't mind that. Let's thank Honey for sponsoring this episode.

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Do it. I think I'm just going to leave a pause in here and I won't know if you didn't do it or not. Do it. Thank them. Create your own karma. Ready to find the card for you? Head to creditkarma.com or Credit Karma app and check out your personalized mix of offers today. Thanks to Truebill for supporting our podcast. From forgotten free trials to automatic renewals, when big companies keep charging you, Truebill is your secret weapon to save you money on subscriptions you don't need. Go right now, truebill.com slash QQ. It could save you thousands a year. So we're going to get into the show. We're going to ask each other questions, give each other answers. I think early in this year, I said one of my New Year's resolutions was to start trying on this podcast. And broadly, I didn't do that. But one of the specifics in that was I was going to stop audibly stretching into the microphone.

And I definitely didn't stop doing that either. I think you should give yourself a little bit of credit because these last two podcasts, this one and the one we did before this. Well, not you, obviously. You didn't stop doing that either so I think you should give yourself a little bit of credit because these last two podcasts this one and the one we did before this well not you obviously you didn't do shit but the one before this and this one I don't think I've ever tried harder for this podcast than on these two with the homework that I've done even even though the stuff that I did in the last one was was uh fugazi it was still a tremendous amount of work, I thought. I still like, I had notes in front of me. Everything that I was saying when I was talking about Layla and when I was talking about the whole study, that's like written out.

A bunch of stuff, like prepared paragraphs for you. And now this one is another one where we both did a bunch of research and work on it. Yeah. So if you didn't listen to the previous podcast, go back to listen to it. Dan and I listened to, we've created songs for first dates. Yeah. We created songs for first dates. It's wonderful.

There are no tricks to it whatsoever. Listen to it. And then this one, we tasked each other a while ago. I don't even remember how it came up, but we tasked each other with going back and trying to research as much as we could about our hometowns. Yeah. And then bringing to each other essentially a book report on the most interesting facts. Yeah. What attracted me to it was I know that we're both from small towns that aren't really on the map in a big way. And I'm just'm just i've i've bounced around to to to various places and like

i've lived in uh like like very historical places with a whole lot of information about it so you can you can like really trace the the life of some of these more famous cities uh and i was just curious how much was available about my hometown of Hazlitt, New Jersey, if any of it was interesting. And if there was enough stuff to talk about to fill a whole podcast. Yeah. And I wanted Soren to do the same with his small town. I'm not really sure if we're going to get there, but.

So at the beginning of this, when I said who I was and like that you wouldn't care about these little things about that are only pertinent to me and my closest friends. I feel that way about small towns, like the information that's available to me from the historic societies and everything of these small towns is that they have no idea what's interesting about their town. They are going to present you with a shitload of information that's only interesting to somebody who happens to live there. And if you live there, then you're like connecting dots, essentially. You're being like, well, I see that house all the time.

Oh, I see. That's an old house that's from like the beginning when this town was first sanctioned or whatever. And then you're starting to like connect these things but when you somebody's coming in cold they've got no context of how to hook someone because they can't see the forest of the trees and I had to sift through so much dog shit about where I grew up to come up with information that anyone else in the world would care about that it was I was blown away and I was mad. I was mad that there's not two separate groups of information.

The information for people who are like, live there and already have context and want to know more. And the people were just like, huh, there's a town called Bowie. My last name is Bowie. I wonder what I can learn about it. And then I don't have to sit through like all the names of the generations of people.

I don't have to find out when a certain house was destroyed and there's nothing like they tell me everything there is to know about a certain house and that it was destroyed in a fire and there's nothing left of it. And I'm like, well, then that means nothing. That's gone. That's gone from history. I don't care. You, you wasted so much of my time to tell me about something that doesn't exist and will never exist again. Yeah. I think there's, there's, there's room for both to exist certainly and i think you're you're saying the same thing too where you want there to be two groups because like

there's uh like a massive living oral history project about monmouth county that uh i i think is valuable as like a a strange little tome to exist but it's it's no one knows what's interesting about it it's really it's like a person who's just like hey i'm very old and i found this person who's even older so i'm gonna just ask him questions and like see where this goes and so this guy was like my father was the first italian to own a farm in Hazlitt. It's like, okay, we'll write that down. So now we all know that. And I was like, he gave the fire department $5,000 as a loan. That was a lot of money back then.

It was $5,000. What did they buy with the $5,000? I'm like, oh boy. Go back to the farm, I guess. I don't know. I'm like, oh boy, go back to the farm, I guess. I don't know. I found, there were like, I even went, not just in the historical society and what's available online.

Like I went and listened to old shows from the local radio station called Katie and Kay from my hometown to like where they would interview some old timer homesteader where they're like, you get more information or somebody who was in charge of the preservation society. And as you're listening to their stories, they get, they're so obsessed with the names of people that didn't do anything of like real note. They just live there. And they were the most prominent people there because they had a carriage or whatever. So they'd be like, I'd be hearing the story about this woman, Hattie Thompson and the house that she lived in. And then

they'd be like, and then when she died, her son took over and her son kept the garden going. And then when she died, her son took over and her son kept the garden going. And then his son kept that garden going. And for over three generations, they kept the garden alive. And I'm like, that's it? That's not radio. Granted, I only do podcasts. I have no training, but I don't think that that's radio. Yeah.

I have no training, but I don't think that that's radio. Yeah. How should we do this? What are some interesting things that you found? Yeah. All right. Why don't I give you some slug lines and you tell me what sounds like the most interesting thing to you. Okay. Okay. Okay. Potato harvest, Dan. All right. Mines or you okay okay uh okay potato harvest stand all right mines or a valley curse I think I want to start with mines because I my gut tells me that ties into why your town is called Carbondale. And I think if we both start with why our towns got their names, that might be something. That's a good idea. So I thought so too. I

thought my entire life that Carbondale was called Carbondale because there were coal mines all around it. And that is true. There are coal mines all around it, but those coal mines didn't start showing up until almost 20 years after the town was, let's see, 1870s. No, no, no, no, no, no. One second. When was the town incorporated? Oh, yeah, almost 20 years after the town was incorporated. So the reason it's called Carbondale is because a bunch of homesteaders

moved from Carbondale, Pennsylvania out here. And they did, in fact, mine, but up in the valley, like up in Aspen, they mined for silver and all up and down the Aspen Valley. And then up in this other area called Redstone, which is where I got married, up past that is in a town called Marble.

And they mined a lot of marble from there. And all this mining was going on up there. Where I lived was just this basin. And Carbondale was just designed to basically feed all these miners. It was a place where they could hunt on up there, that where I lived was just this basin. And Carbondale was just designed to basically feed all these miners. It was a place where they could hunt and ranch and farm. And that was it. And the reason they call it Carbondale is because it was familiar, because they all came from Carbondale, Pennsylvania. Yeah.

Isn't this thing like a lot of, like the Beverly name throughout Los Angeles, didn't that come over from Massachusetts? I don't know. Okay. I think it's a name that's like all over the place and I wanted to look into who this Beverly was and it was like a Massachusetts trading company. That sounds about right.

Yeah, it's everywhere. Slapped on everything here. Yeah. Our town Hazlet. One fun thing that I found about this is I believe we are the only Hazlet in America, which is pretty exciting. Really? Yeah. And I think the reason for that is we were, Hazlet Township was originally incorporated as Raritan Township in 1848 and didn't actually become Hazlet until 1967, which is way later than I thought it was,

but it's named Hazlitt after this guy, Dr. John Hazlitt, who was like the town surgeon for a while. Like the town was like, hey, we need a doctor. He's like, fine, I guess I'll live here. And just like was the local doctor and owned a big chunk of land and agreed to let a railroad station be built on his land. Railroad station and a post office. And those two things, post office and railroad station, those are things that have a tremendous impact on whether or not you get to be a town. Yes.

Well, it's a station stop, so it's going to need a name. We should name it after the guy who gave up so much of his land for us to have this, Dr. John Hazlett. And the weird thing that I've talked to a couple of different Hazlett historians. No one knows this answer. He spells his name or spelled his name because he's dead as hell. H-A-Z-L-E-T-T. And our town is with one T and no one knows why we did that.

Oh, lost the time. I know. I found that mice research as well was like how important a railroad and a post office was. If you have a post office there that like establishes you as a depot, essentially, where like people are going to stop. And there was like huge fights in Carbondale. There was another town that was going to be born right next to it. Basically, there was even before Carbondale, there was Satank, which is like this one little area that still exists in Carbondale and another one called Cooperton. And they're trying to like, Satank had a mail, like a mail service, a mail depot. And Cooperton was like, you got to move your mail depot to us because we're going to be the town.

And Satank was like, no. And Cooperton eventually failed because of it. Carbondale sprouted up where Cooperton was. And even Carbondale was like, move the fucking post office. And then Satank was like, no. And to this day, Satank isn't technically part of Carbondale. It's its own little community. And I didn't even realize this. It's its own offshoot. It's not sanctioned at all. It's just like, it doesn't even have, it still has dirt roads.

There's no light fixtures or anything like that. And I just didn't understand as a kid, this part, it was just this like dogmatic fight where the Satank was like, no, we're not gonna be part of your town. We're not doing it. We're our own town. And we're called Satank and we're not changing that either. Yeah. I guess that means- We think it's exotic. I think it means sitting bare in Northern Ute. I will get into the relationship with the Northern

Ute or the Noosh people. This is as bad as you could possibly imagine. When you picture homesteaders coming across to take land in the West and just grabbing it, gobbling it up from Native Americans and promising them other places to live and then reneging on those promises that's exactly where i live it was a dark it was like researching this was such a bummer okay i didn't get into native american land ownership i'm sure i know there's plenty of native american population in all throughout new jersey obviously but that my research just didn't touch on that what i know of hazlet the thing that became the the i guess biggest bummer of this is that if there's anything to define this town it's uh constantly tearing down

and rebuilding like there's no real nothing in hazlet is particularly old because everything just gets replaced with different things it was a town that was like defined by agriculture for a very long time and then uh we just got rid of all the farms we just got rid of them we were like all right we're gonna we're gonna be yeah we're gonna be like a town town now and got rid of every farm got rid of everything that like looked kind of old. For a while, we had this factory in the center of town, this like canning factory for ketchup. We all call it the ketchup factory, but it was canning a bunch of different tomato and apple products. And that got mostly torn down, except there was a long chimney, just this like brick chimney that stood in the middle of town my whole life. That was like, oh, yeah, there's the chimney from the ketchup factory that we could just like go look at.

It was the oldest thing we had, it seemed like. Yeah. And that got torn down in like 2002. So when they were tearing these down, was it just like the town was like, we're onto something new. We're onto some new shit. Or was the town started to falter and they're like, we got to figure something out fast. I think it's a mix of both i think with the ketchup factory they uh i think they ended up selling bricks of the the old chimney to uh to raise money for something

something post 9-11 i don't know where the money went okay but it was like 9-11 happened and we need to make some money to send to to new york because there was uh the other thing about hazlitt is because of our our proximity to a train station a lot of people lived there and worked in new york so a ton of people from hazlitt middletown area were like a a large percentage of us were in the towers on 9-11, which I did not realize until my dad told me a couple weeks ago. Wow. That's an interesting fact to figure out. And so when your town started, sorry to go so far back,

but what did it center around? Like what was the commerce there? Farms. It was all farms. But what were they farming? We had the, oh, i don't know oh okay like fruits and vegetables i guess corn tomatoes should i keep going lettuce no that's fine great so farms and then and then the and then

transition to factory after farms yeah it was just that the that one main factory and then like really if i could paint a picture of hazlet and and i i should should have said this earlier i loved growing up in hazlet i really love that town i still have a lot of love for it which will tie into the to the end of my spiel eventually if we ever get there um but if you could like paint a picture of Hazlitt, it is like quintessential American suburb. It's some woods and a lot of shopping malls and a movie theater. Oh, the movie theater was one of our defining things for a while. We had the last drive-in movie theater in New Jersey. Okay.

It was in Hazlitt. And that was a very exciting place for us to go to as kids. We saw big movies there. I think we saw Arachnophobia there. And then it was torn down in the early 90s to make way for the Hazlitt Multiplex, a movie theater with 12 screens, which was my first job. And in my research of this found there's a 10-minute documentary called exit the last New Jersey drive-in about this this drive-in movie theater getting torn down and it's it's a funny time capsule for a bunch of reasons it's it's wild to see sometimes I think the the there didn't used to be weirdo kooks until the internet gave them all a platform.

But I watched this documentary and the documentary filmmaker found these two incredibly weird guys. And I was like, I'm going to interview these guys to see if they have strong feelings about this movie theater getting torn down. And they did. Just this very large guy with a cane and another guy who didn't take off his sunglasses and had a Mohawk. And they're like, we're here protesting because they're going to, they're going to tear down this, this drive-in, the last drive-in in New Jersey. It's a great thing.

They're going to tear it down and they're going to replace it with a multiplex. Like the world needs more multiplexes, 12 screens. We don't need that. We need, we need more drive-in movie theaters. And you'll notice that all the people who are tearing them down are wearing suits they're not dressed like the people who go to the movies they're wearing suits so we're protesting and the documentary the filmmaker goes how are you protesting the guy goes well well i'm thinking of going on a hunger strike. Like, okay.

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That's B-E-T-T-e-r-h-e-l-p dot com slash qq um i guess it i i'm realizing now it is important for me to to know like what the topography is of where you live like is it a valley is it hilly is it forested it's it's pretty pretty flat and there were some like like woods there's a couple of parks with woods in them and some lakes and we are we're we're close to the shore one of the things that that has been said about hazlet is because we are at this great train station and uh our exit off the garden state parkway, which is the big road throughout New Jersey that gets you everywhere.

Our stop off the parkway intersects with Highway 35 and Highway 36, which are also big. I realize this is just about roads, but they're all important roads that all come together in Hazlitt that make this spot like a good gateway to the shore, we've been called a lot, because people pass through here and good gateway to the shore we've been called a lot because ah okay

people pass through here and then get to the shore but that said we never we never like steered into being a shore town there are plenty of cute shore towns around hazlet that like owned owned their their status as like beachy areas and we just didn't we were we were again like shopping malls and commerce and and hard to really find too much character because we kept tearing things down okay so a soulless little community yeah there's a woman for the 150th wrote an essay just about Hazlitt. And she wrote at one point, we have few reflections of Hazlitt's past. How about her future? If I may borrow and bring to home the words of our late president, John F. Kennedy, ask not what Hazlitt can do for you, but what you can do for Hazlitt.

And so the future is in our hands, yours and mine. Those of us who call Hazlitt home by birth and those who call Hazlitt home by choice. Great. Which is where I come in, honoring this wonderful town with a podcast. Now, what was the, this is a question that I'm sure you get a lot, and I apologize if this is ignorant. What was the mafia presence in your town? That's such a funny question. There is no mafia. There never was the mafia presence in your town um that's such a funny question there is no mafia there never was a mafia great okay so pretty prevalent good we actually uh there was no

mafia presence as far as i know but i did go to the notable people section of hazlitt on wikipedia uh and a couple of interesting things about that. You got two O'Briens on there. There's Daniel O'Brien, born a year that is not the year that I was born. And that's totally fine. I'm a notable person from Hazlitt. And the other O'Brien there, Skip O'Brien, my uncle.

Whoa. So it's not a long list of people who are notable from Hazlitt and two of them are the real O'Briens. What did Skip do? He was an actor. He was recurring on the very first iteration of CSI and he was in just a character actor

in Black Sheep and Liar Liar. It was such a real kick to bring my friends to the movie theaters and like that's my uncle point him out but I turned to this because as I was going through this list of notable people the second name on the list is

James Coonan and his thing is former head of the Irish American gang the Westies oh perfect that's like what the Dead dead rabbits is based off of yeah jesus uh okay all right um my town is like is very different in that it's it's so clearly a started as a homestead of the west where people went out to like venture out and they were guaranteed from like Lincoln. They're like, Hey, if you want to go live out here, you can have 90

acres if you want it. And everyone's like, okay, I'll do that. And they just went out and did it. Um, but the, it originally belonged to the Northern Ute nation and they don't call themselves Utes. They call themselves the Noosh. And, uh. They signed an agreement pretty early on as homesteaders started to come out and take up residence in Aspen area to try and bind for silver. They negotiated with the US government and they were like, okay, we will stay down valley. This is just like the Aspen Valley, it's also called the Roaring Fork Valley because it's named after the river, which is the Roaring Fork. They are going to stay down valley. They signed this agreement according to this book called Marble, Colorado City of Stone, that they would live in the Elk Mountains, which is the Elk Mountain range around where I live, until the rivers ran.

As long as the rivers ran and the grasses grew, this was Ute territory. Almost like not even a decade later, the mining community was like, no, this land is too good. It's too fertile. We need it. And they just took it. They just took it from the Utes. And the way that they did it was brutal. They started to do it kind of slowly and deviously, and then the Utes kind of figured out what was going on and their liaison, their white liaison, who was trying to convince them that they should really move to Utah where there's nothing. They eventually got mad at him and one of the Utes stabbed him in the mouth saying, I couldn't listen to his lies anymore. And then what became known as what was the Meeker Massacre, which happened not too far from where I grew up. A Meeker incident or Meeker Massacre, depending on which side you were on.

But it was just like this moment that the white settlers were looking for to like, all right, now we got to go after these Native Americans. And so a bunch of people died on each side. The Utes fled to try and get across the border, and they got chased by a bunch of people from Aspen. All these towns in this valley put together posses to go after them and really just wanted to kill them. They were looking for the entire time for reasons to kill them. And it's brutal. And eventually, they were all forced out. In 1881, all the Utes were marched out of Colorado, unlike this Trail of Sorrows, essentially. And yeah, it's brutal. But there is what some people say that there's this curse on the Roaring Fork Valley or the Aspen Valley.

They say that anyone who lived there is condemned to return whether they want to or not. So like the actual quote is the Utes cursed anyone who slept in the shadow of mount soprus would be doomed to never leave mount soprus is the mountain that sits over my town i should also give you just a quick topography of the area so you understand my town is the basin of these two glacier valleys like glaciers have created these giant u-shaped valleys In the middle of it is this giant mountain called Mount Sopris that's 13,000 feet. And then at the base of it is a town called Carbondale. And it's like this mountain belongs

to Carbondale essentially. It's the only town you can see it from. And it's just like, it's there. It's clearly, it's like a volcano sitting over Pompeii. And so yeah, anyone who sleeps in the shadow. So a lot of people, that rumor had been passed down even when I was a little kid, I remember hearing it. And there's, to like the curse's credit,

there are a lot of family, any one of these families that I learn about, the earlier homesteaders, I'm like, yeah, I know that family. Like, I know that lineage. Like, they all stuck around. And I think that that happens frequently in small towns anyway where

people everybody just yeah there are a lot of a lot of names in historical documents that it was like oh yeah I know that that name is just just around town yeah I know that family like yeah yeah I know the lineage of I know the end of that lineage and so there was clearly a lot of that happening but it is it is cool that my town has a curse yeah um yeah i don't think we had a curse i don't think we had like any very hazlitt specific like haunted stories there were there was i lived down the street from my elementary school and there was woods behind it and so we would always go and hang out in the woods. And even our spooky folktales growing up weren't like werewolves or vampires. It was like, yeah, we heard there's some guy who lives in those woods. Just like a living adult man who chose to live in those woods. Like, oh yeah, that's way scarier than werewolves.

Yeah. The town urban legends, I think, is far more fascinating like what was your town's early urban legends is like very because that stuff doesn't show up on the internet but that's the stuff that just gets passed down from kids to kids um we had a family in my town actually instant tank that i feel like it's i put us in in legal jeopardy, even say their last name. So I won't, but they were a town that everyone was, they'd been in the, in the area forever. They didn't associate with most of the rest of the town. There were long standing rumors that they were inbred. And when you'd go past their house, there were cat skeletons in the yard. And so there were rumors that they also ate their cats. I don't think that was true.

And at one point the town kind of pitched in because they were living in a shack, essentially. They put up a bunch of plywood and the town all pitched in and basically got them a mobile home to live in. But still, all these bones and antlers in their yards all the time and they would ride around town on these three-wheel bikes

and it was haunting. They were our Boo Radleys, essentially. We had this story that I lived on a street called Cresci Boulevard. And we had this story that it was named after this guy, Cresci. And there was the Cresci house where he lived. And the story was that he went nuts and killed his wife. But uh there was always some incredibly elaborate final destination style series of events where his head got accidentally cut off like he killed his wife and then there was a bunch of axes hanging like he kept his axes on the ceiling and one of them fell down and slices that off

stuff that like even as a child's trained credulity where it's like i know i'm seven years old but like who puts axes up there why would he do that and then the other the other aspect of this story that made it not ring true as i got older was like hey uh we weren't named after a guy named John Cresci. Like the, the, this is the street of a town. And, and like, I don't know what street you grew up on, but in most neighborhoods there are, there are themes to streets.

So like every street in my neighborhood is named after a County in Ireland. Oh, interesting. So we're not named after like some guy who had a house here where it's like, it's Cresci and Briscoe and Cavan and Limerick and Dundall. Yeah. That's awesome. I like that story a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. There were rumors throughout my childhood that Sopris, this giant mountain above us, that it was like the people saw UFOs going into the backside of it, that it was hollow. And it was like the people saw UFOs going into the backside of it, that it was hollow. And then we had a cemetery that was up on the hill on this potato farm, this old potato farm. Oh, yeah. We didn't get into the potato farms yet. Yeah, the potato farms. Okay. We don't have to get into the potato farms.

No, let me tell you. Just to give you the only things that are worth caring about with the potato farming is that my town was like, it was a little Ferris Bueller-y in that every time that it was on the verge of collapse, some new thing would come and save it, and it would boom again almost immediately. place where the people would hunt and farm for, to feed all these farmers. I'm sorry, feed all these miners. As that started to kind of dry up, uh, as the mines dried up because of the silver scare in the late 1880s, early 1890s, uh, then they were like, well, you know what? We actually don't need to just feed these farmers. We're produced. You could produce potatoes so well here that we're just going to start selling those all over the world. And so there was a while where Carbondale was producing more potatoes than the entire state of Idaho. And they were coming up with, yeah, so like a bunch of the types of potatoes that we have

now that are like common, those were all invented or like mutated in Carbondale and created there. And they were sending out more truck car loads on trains of potatoes than they were ore and then after a while there's like a this the potato a bunch of other people started growing all over the country and so like the price of potatoes dropped and this town started to shrink and it looked like it was going to die and then all of a sudden it would be saved again by something else which in this case was coal and like they started coal mining and like the town was saved again it started to grow again and And then as soon as mining, like the mine shut down, it started to shrink again. And it looked like on the verge of collapse. And then all of a sudden,

tourism took off in Aspen because it was the end of World War II. And all these guys who were in the 10th Mountain Division, which was like the skiing shooting division, they were all trained up in Leadville. And like, yeah, they're just trained to be mountaineers with guns basically. And they trained up in the high mountains up above Tennessee Pass, which is like kind of close to where I grew up. But as they were doing it, they're like, this skiing is actually pretty fun.

I think that we could create a ski resort here. And so they came back, the ones that survived came back from World War II. And they were like, Aspen looks like a pretty good place to start, this little mining town, like let's create a ski resort here. And when they came back, the ones that survived came back from World War II and they were like, Aspen looks like a pretty good place to start. This little mining town, like let's create a ski resort here. And when they did that, every, all down the valley, all these places, Basalt and Snowmass and Elgibel and Carbondale, like they just started to blow up and boom. And so like every single time it looked like this town was going to die, something else would come along and save it.

Yeah. going to die, something else would come along and save it. Yeah. I've got a few more things to say about my beloved jersey. Hey, want a new credit card, but not sure how to choose? You don't need to apply for the first offer you see in the mail. Credit Karma can help you zero in on the right option for you and apply with more confidence. Have you ever been rejected for a credit card before? It happens way too often. Don't feel bad about it. That's why Credit Karma created Karma Confidence Technology, helping their members apply with more confidence.

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to Credit Karma and check out your personalized mix of offers today. Go to creditkarma.com or the Credit Karma app to find the card for you. That's creditkarma.com. Do you know why free trials renew without your consent? It's a scam. Don't let greedy corporations pocket your money. Download Truebill to take control of your subscriptions. What they do is they wait, they give you like a yearly subscription, they'll wait until the day that it's coming up, you won't get any sort of notification, and then once it renews, BAM! They'll tell you, hey, good job, you auto-renewed, and you have to go, oh, well, I might as well wait. As long as I have it for a whole year, I'll wait until next year, and then you're gonna forget.

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saved $120 for the same year on my SiriusXM bill, and saved $840 a year on my car insurance. I don't know if that's what Matthew B sounds like. I'm projecting, I think, but I like him. I think I like him like this. Don't fall for subscription scams. Start canceling today at Truebill.com slash QQ. Go right now. Truebill.com slash QQ. It could save you thousands a year. Truebill.com. I was talking to... This isn't even about the town. I had a phone call with a historian a couple of days ago who was incredibly helpful and scanned a bunch of articles and letters

for me to read and go through. And as I was explaining to her why I wanted this information for this podcast she's like and and so and and your listeners this will be interesting to them no and i had to be like listen i mean so here's the thing lady uh weirdly yes but i i don't think i can handle any follow-up questions because like i agree with you i don't think they should be but i don't think they should have been interested in a single fucking thing i've ever said and they just keep coming back so i don't like i don't i'm not going to say the words out loud they'll think it's interesting because I'm saying it, but that's sort of how we've

carried this show on for 150 episodes or whatever. I don't know that they will find this interesting at all. I don't think so. I barely find it interesting, but I'm like trying to like pull out the facts that I think are the most valuable. But talking to my parents was the most demoralizing thing about this because I asked them questions. They lived in the valley forever in carbondale and so i was like well what do you know like what can you tell me about it

and uh like what is this for and i was like my podcast and my dad was like and do you so is that like a is it a talking thing and i was like oh like not only do you not even know that i have a podcast you know you're not entirely sure what a podcast is yeah it's like yeah it's a talking thing i'm essentially gonna like give dan a book report and it's like okay dan from oxy like no different daniel uh i do a podcast called quick question my mom was like oh I've heard you talk about that. Yeah, I'm going to tune in, which was like the most, which is like your parents call like a sketch a skit.

I'm going to tune into a podcast as though like it's coming on at a certain time. Yeah. And she could just go sit by a fireside chat and turn on the radio and listen to it. I was like, I don't even want to talk about it anymore. But anyway, yeah, it was like town full of potatoes. The potatoes did really well there. There was even one pint. There's a guy, Kid Curry. Have you ever heard

of Kid Curry? No. This is like one of the rare claims to fame that Carbondale has. Kid Curry ran with the Sundance Kid and Bush Cassidy and the Wild Bunch. He was very famous for just killing people with no regard for who theyunch. He was very famous for just killing people with no regard for who they were. He was super dangerous. In 1904, he robbed a train that was coming out of

the Roaring Fork Valley because he thought it was full of silver and it ended up being full of potatoes. And then he got- That's lovely. And then he got, as like the sheriff chased him through this town called Parachute, where he robbed the train, he got shot and then sat like by himself, surrounded by potatoes, I assume, shot himself so they couldn't be taken alive. Died trying to steal potatoes. God. Must have been a brief moment of like, I can sell anything. I can sell potatoes. It's not what I wanted, but like, somebody wants potatoes.

There's money in potatoes. How many of these can I carry in my shirt? If I just fold it up, I think I get like $10 worth. $10 is all I need from this robbery. But then you know what? Then I walk into town and someone's like, that's Kid Curry. What's he got? No, I can't.

I can't walk into town with potatoes. I can't. I guess't walk into town with potatoes. I can't. I guess I'm going to kill myself. Yeah. I think this is going to be it. This is too embarrassing. Everybody's going to hear about this butch and the Sundance Kid down in South America

or wherever they are now. They're going to hear and they're going to fucking laugh their asses off. Can't live with that. My only small other final Hazlitt point is talking to this historian. Because while explaining the podcast, I was like, well, it's people are interested in it because it's my buddy and I. And we used to work for comedy website.

Now we both work for TV shows. And like this is essentially people listening in on our phone conversations. And that's what they like about it, I think. And she was like, what do you do for TV? And I explained that I write for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. And she, I am now very happily

roped into doing something for the town of Hazlitt. I don't know what exactly. But she was like, we've got, in 2023, it's going to be Hazlitt's 175th anniversary we would love for you to do something with us if that's interesting and i'm like fuck yeah absolutely that's interesting i don't know what we're talking about i don't like i don't know how i can use my specific talents to help the town at this point but i would love to do some kind of big

fucking fuck off 175th anniversary hazlet party whatever whatever that could mean man this is gonna end up being you they're gonna say will you do othello for us in the shakespeare in the park or like something like that where you're gonna be like this is, I will be, it will ruin me if I do this. It'll be something like, do you think, can John mention Hazlitt on the show? And I'll be like, oh God, no, absolutely not. That's what I was worried about. As soon as like you mentioned the show,

I could just picture like the glimmer in her eye of like, oh, that would be a great way to get the word out. You work on television. You mentioned it on your show. Just mention it. Yeah. Just say like how it seemed like a like a a vacation away you know just like a like a like a surprise vacation like who would think to vacation in haslet it's near the beach it's near the city just like get

john to say on the show all joking aside hasitt's a wonderful town to spend the summer. It's like Colleen's aunt at one point when I told her that I wrote for a show called American Dad, she was like, oh, she teaches music. My students could do the theme song. That would be great. That would be great. That's not going to happen. It won't happen in a million years. I think that's a great idea, but we can't, I have no say over that. But so far,

this person who has been very helpful and lovely and wonderful hasn't asked me to have John do anything. She's she very open book. Do you want to do something for the 175th anniversary? And now I have about a year to figure out what that is. I think she knew the right combination of words to light my ego on fire. She said, your hometown would love

your talent. I'm like, what? Oh, that's it. Here we go. You get to talk at a podium, I think. I'll do it. I'll be mayor. Yeah, you're going to talk in front of 12 people at a podium where it's just too sunny that day. Yeah, I'm going talk in front of 12 people at a podium where it's just like too sunny that day. Yeah, I'm gonna talk to a few people and like

I'm gonna say a quarter of the audience will be my parents coming in from out of state. Yeah. Flying in from North Carolina to see it. The only thing that's

around a whole crew of people who've moved out of there and then a bunch of fucking weird cracked fans yes who somehow tracked down the figure it out yeah thank you yeah that will definitely happen you're not you're all great and I love you these aren't crack fans these are our show fans and these were way better right these guys are that's right. These guys are dynamite. We got rid of all the fake fans. Okay. In my research, the thing that actually became interesting to me was when history caught up to my lifetime, which was like things started to click into place for

me that I didn't previously understand, like that the mine still existed. The coal mines were going when I was a kid and a year before I was born, there was like a big coal mine disaster. There was a explosion in this place called the Dutch Creek mine. And I guess when you mine coal, there's like, you're producing a bunch of methane. As you dig through coal, it leaks out a certain amount of this methane gas. And they've got big things, fans and stuff designed to push it all out. But for whatever reason, this one area, this chamber wasn't doing it. And this headlamp, a faulty headlamp sparked and blew it up. And so 15 miners died. And for a small town, that's a huge deal because these guys are like 20 to 30. These are like the members of the community.

And so they all have families. So there were kids. Manhattan, 15 minors die a day. No one cares. No one gives a shit. My brother was in school at that time. I think like Montessori or some preschool or kindergarten. But kids in his class suddenly didn't have dads. And so that had a big effect on the town. And then not long after that, in 1991, the mine shut down. It didn't even occur

to me that there were still miners there while I was growing up there. But this like had a devastating effect on the community where all these guys lost their job at once. And like looking back on it, I'm like, okay, yeah, that sort of makes sense. There was like some real, things kind of got dilapidated for a little bit there where the community shrunk, where the size of the town started to wither. And I was like, okay, that checks out. Before like, obviously the boom town, the stuff from all, everything bled down valley from Aspen, all that money.

And then, and then obviously grew, grew, grew again. down valley from aspen all that money and then and then obviously grew grew grew again but boy not realizing that like even mining was part of my lifetime was was crazy to me that's that is a tremendous difference between our two towns because because ours was after the farming i know i mentioned the one factory but we weren't like a factory town there wasn't an industry that one factory but we weren't like a factory town there wasn't an industry that employed a lot of the townspeople like it was like truly hazlitt was a great place to live if you worked in new york and wanted to live somewhere with more room and and fresh air and everything like that we were we were purely just like a suburb for new yorkers do they call that a bedroom community where you live uh no oh must be like ed's and dryer's ice cream it's just different regionally we we where i lived at all these towns

are called bedroom communities for aspen like everyone would go sleep there in their bedrooms and then come back and work in aspen uh bedroom community hey I I can't talk about this anymore then let's stop oh good okay I'm actually let's see I'm doing a

dumb experiment to see if there are any listings in Hazlet on Airbnb there are not Madawanlitt on Airbnb. There are not. Matawan, which is one of our neighboring towns. Well, anyway, if you want to go to one of these towns, you're welcome to, and you can go experience all this for yourself,

all the excitement that we just described. Oh, yeah. And like, seriously, get ready. We're going to fucking blow it out for the 175th anniversary of hazlitt unless me talking on this podcast has has got to be banned from the event i guess i'll find out i think i think any publicity is good publicity for hazlitt at this point sounds like it's not on the up and up stand if airbnbs aren't even like operating there

it's a lovely town it's a great place to raise a family. Go to Carbondale. It's really fun. Are you just, are you going to read the socials or, I kept thinking any minute now you're going to, you're going to jump in and start reading the socials. On Twitter,

you can follow Daniel at DOB underscore Inc. You can follow me, Soren at Soren underscore LTD. You can follow me, Soren, at Soren underscore LTD. You can follow Quick Question at QQ underscore Soren and Dan. We also have a sound engineer, a producer, an editor. His name is Gabe Harder. You won't find him anywhere. And our theme song is by Me Rex.

And you can find Me Rex's music on Spotify, but you can also find it on merex.bandcamp.com. We have an Instagram as well. It's QQ underscore with underscore Soren underscore Dan, no, and underscore Daniel. Don't go there. It's not worth it. Uh, we also have a Patreon that you can follow and get some, some extra content where we answer questions by you. Uh, if you're a subscriber, you can ask us a question and we'll look through it and we'll say, hey, these look like fun to answer and we'll answer them just for those subscribers. You can go to Patreon slash quick question and find all that. Haslett, Kid Haslett. Bye. Haslett kid. Carbondale kid. I've got a quick, quick question for you, alright? I wanna hear your thoughts, I wanna know what's on your mind

I've got a quick, quick question for you, alright? The answer's not important, I'm just glad that we could talk tonight So what's your favorite? Who did you get? What do I be? What do I remember? What's it up with? Where did all the boys go?

Oh, forget it Saw a movie, Daniel O'Brien Two best friends and comedy writers If there's an answer, they're gonna find it I think you'll have a great time here I think you'll have a great time here