Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - "Lunch Atop A Skyscraper"

Episode Date: October 20, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why the photograph "Lunch Atop A Skyscraper" is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Lunch atop a skyscraper, known for being that photo. Famous for the construction guys on a beam eating lunch. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why lunch atop a skyscraper is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there folks. Hey there, Ciphalopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden, Katie.

Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of the picture called lunch atop a skyscraper? I'm familiar with it. I've always felt like if it was me. eating lunch, I would be really afraid not just about falling to my death because they're all sitting on like a beam that appears to be a long way down, but also just dropping things and having them land on random people's heads. I assume they're in New York. This is what it kind of looks like to me. Yeah, Manhattan. Manhattan, yeah. And so it's like, if I drop a grape,

does that kill someone? I don't know. Thank you. I, at some point when I was a little kid, we were on one of our Chicago land area trips to the Sears Tower and somebody made a claim about if you dropped a penny off the top, it would be lethal to anyone below. Yeah. And I just spent like the rest of my life worried about that. Yeah. Not all the time, but when I think about tall buildings comes up. Right.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't think dropping a grape would probably kill someone. Probably the grape would be pulverized in the ordeal. But, yeah, like you. Or a helpful falcon snatches it. yeah see this is what they're missing helpful falcons for a sandwich retrieval oh can we also get some napkins and then it goes down it brings up napkins and then yeah i mean i think that i've seen this picture a lot in stupid meme contexts as well like as seeing it in a historical context where yeah people will say

things to the effect of this is when men were men and it's like wait this is when men were cool with just maybe slipping and falling and dying like i don't i didn't realize that that was sort of a prerequisite for being a man eating eating your lunch over a vast chasm i didn't realize that was sort of like the yeah that you need you need that to you know yeah i have that same relationship all around. I would be always surprised why they're about to die. Right. Also, I've seen it in a ton of meme type situations. And by the way, shout out to Blue Crab on the Discord for this suggestion. It was a hit in the polls on the Discord. And I'm so glad that it's an episode because we've done several fine art episodes. This is our first one about a photo and it's like the paintings we've done

before where it's in everybody's heads. And it particularly kept reminding me of the first Siff about a painting, which is American Gothic. where it's been memed very heavily. Like, I've seen a version of lunch atop a skyscraper where they're all the Muppets and stuff like that. Yeah, for sure. It's very iconic. You know, you've got, they're all wearing kind of like newsboy hats and overalls or they're shirtless. Yeah, yeah.

One guy's like sharing a cigarette with lighting a cigarette or sharing a cigarette with another guy. Yeah, they're all just hanging out, having a good time. Yeah, your mental picture is pretty much right at home. You see it in your head. What if one of their shoes fall off? Then that falcons really got to come through. Can I carry a shoe? We'll see.

I don't know. I don't know. Can a falcon carry a shoe? It depends on what kind of falcon we're talking about here. I used to follow a account called Manhattan Bird Alert that would track a falcon in Manhattan. So I think that's really coming through here. I don't think people associate Manhattan with falcons unless they're me. Right.

They do live there. Anyway, let's get into stuff about this photo, because on every episode we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called Numbers in the City where the pod is on. All stats on said pod till the break of dawn. Very good. Yeah. That name was submitted by Andy Wilson.

Thank you, Andy. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make a miscellion way you can be as possible. Submit through Discord or to siftpod at gmail.com. And it's a pretty quick number section. The first one is a date. The date is October 2nd, 1932. Yeah, that looks like where this is from.

It feels like 1932. Yeah. And this photo was first published and titled on that date, October 2nd, 1932. And it ran in a newspaper. October 2nd was a Sunday, and a newspaper called the New York Herald Tribune put out a Sunday supplement with this black and white white photo, and they captioned it, lunch atop a skyscraper. You know, one other thing I realized is that I had always just, like, somehow associated it with the construction of the, my brain is broken.

I keep trying to say Eiffel Tower. That's not it. That's not what that building is. That's not what the tallest, what was once the tallest building. Empire State Building. Good God. I can't believe Eiffel Tower

snuck in there and was trying to try to serve The French I blame the French for this I blame the French for this I'm becoming two Europeans So the Empire State Building

I've always like associated it with the construction of the Empire State Building I realize I actually have no reason to necessarily think that other than it's in old time New York I have the exact same belief. And I think a lot of people assume it's from construction of the Empire State building, mostly because for about four decades, that was the tallest building in the world. It's a big

deal. It's still landmark. But they were building something called the RCA building, about 15 blocks north. Okay. So that's another number. It's about 15 blocks north of the building everyone thinks this is. Right. Because you can't see the Eiffel Tower. Cut! The Empire State. Jesus. I mean, you can't see it. It's true. It's technically. correctly correct. You can't see the Eiffel Tower. Everything Katie said is right. If you're emailing us right now, stop. Help. And you don't see the Empire State Building because they're there and that's what they're building. What is the like assumption in my mind? Yeah. And this could have been taken from that vantage point. It's not quite a number. I just, I feel like cardinal directions have a number in stats vibe. The one there would be North Northwest is like the direction, the camera. is pointing because they're blocks north of the Empire State Building, but the camera's pointing from Midtown Manhattan up towards Central Park and also the Hudson River, which is west of Manhattan.

Yeah. Folks, if you don't know New York City, don't worry, it's not going to be a super New York direction specific episode. But these are some basics. Yeah. If you've never experienced sort of the rigid block pattern of New York City and you're used to like the much more squiggly California. Don't worry about it.

Oh, those squiggly Californians. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so this photo was taken in construction of the RCA building, which is around 48th to 51st Street in Manhattan, more numbers. What does RCA stand for? It's Radio Corporation of America. Oh, okay.

And they came up recently on the cathode ray tubes episode. It's basically the giant tech company of the 1930s. Ah, nice. Before we had the Google and the apples and so on. RCA was one of our massive national companies. Okay. So does it have like a radio tower on it on top of the tall building? Not really, but we'll get into that more in a little bit because the building's still with us,

but under a different name. And either way, this photo, it ran in the newspaper in 1932 and their caption has just become its title. But the paper did not credit a photographer and it did not identify anyone in the image, which was also pretty common in 1932. Today's newspapers would probably credit all that. Yeah, that's interesting that that custom has changed because you would think that if it was like a drawing or a painting, I would definitely credit the artist. But for a photograph, it's like, man, what are you? You're just, you're not, you're not responsible for this. The machine is. Yeah, this was a time when especially photographers for journalism, they were seen as just working for hire and not important.

And anyone could have taken the photo was kind of the vibe. Yeah. The idea that a photograph actually requires a perspective, framing, et cetera, maybe was not as much sort of thing. Just like you're capturing reality versus you're capturing a specific person's view of reality. It's true. Yeah, we were still getting there. And so later in the episode, we'll explore,

who took this picture and who's sitting in the picture because it's surprisingly mysterious. And the next quick number is 11 because that is the number of people in the picture. There were 11 guys on the beam. Originally there were 12. We lost one of them. If that had happened, that would really fit their job.

Yeah. My other favorite element is that when you look closely at the photo, none of them are in the middle of eating, really. There are lunch boxes in their hands or laps. There's at least one cup, but nobody's really biting or chewing anything. There's some smoking, and the guy furthest to the right has a big glass bottle that's typical of alcohol. But I find the title ironic because they're not quite eating lunch.

They're sort of sitting with items. I'm also curious because I think I always had a sense of them having tin lunch pails where it's like the old-timey thing. but these kind of actually look like cardboard boxes. They don't actually look like they're the sort of the classic tin lunch pails. So that's a false memory I have of this. They are wearing welding gloves, which seems bad for eating lunch. Some of them are. That too.

Yeah, they're not really eating. They just look like they're eating. Right. And we're about to get into why the last couple numbers are just height stuff because it's shocking. The next number is 57 stories. Wow. That's how high up they are. They're on the 57th story on an exposed steel beam.

Yeah. So I don't think they're, if they do fall, I don't think that's good for them. It's not. Yeah, their distance up is about 850 feet, which is about 260 meters in metric. It's approaching triple the height of the Statue of Liberty, pedestal and statue all combined. It turns out the men are really up there because one myth about this photo is that they're not actually that high up in the air because who would do that? It's so dangerous. But it's like green screen and they got a mat under them or something.

Yeah, like there's a famous hoax photo from right around this time, the 1910s where ladies pretended to be with fairies, but it was really just sort of a collage of faking stuff. And some people claim this photo is one of those fake collages because why would it? anyone be this high and this dangerous of a way. But it's real. They're just really in danger. I've also heard that like out of frame you see that they're actually like underneath them is all the construction. So that rather than being like so high up over the city, they're actually only like 20 feet or so up above the construction. So if they fell, they wouldn't fall the way to the ground. They'd fall to the construction. But I don't know if that's true. Yeah, that one's interesting because it could be true and it broadly doesn't matter. Because in the day-to-day work of this

kind of iron work, they really were in massive danger all the time. Fun. And so even if this specific photo was safer, these guys were really in this kind of danger all the time. These were the charming cavalier days before OSHA. And we need we got to, you know, people think that, oh, it's great now that people aren't getting grease burns and falling to their death and getting bisected by service elevators. But man, you know, have you considered sucking it up? Right. And don't come to me with your I'm bisected. I can't physically suck upward anymore. Yeah. If you tried harder, you could. Okay. Yeah, those by people always trying to shove the fact that they're bisected down our throats.

That's the kind of bi people we discriminate against, bisected people. Bissected people. Yeah. We're going around like, I don't trust either half of them, you know what I mean? Pick a half. Yeah. Why you got to be both halves? And all this wild. like psychedelic danger gets us into takeaway number one.

Lunch atop a skyscraper is a staged yet real photo of the danger iron workers faced to build 30 rock. What was the RCA building is now 30 Rockefeller Plaza where they make Saturday Night Live and so on. Right. It's the TV show with Tina Faye and Alec Baldwin and all the rest. Yes. Yeah, in the intro, you're looking at it. Yeah, yeah. That's iconic. They've got the ice skating rink and the sort of Einrandian statue out in front of it. I've always felt like that's like one of the stronger cool design things that we did in the U.S. And then we kind of screwed it up. We screwed it up when we like, what if we're actually, what if we make buildings entirely out of bland windows? Wow, anti-blanned window. And so.

Yeah. These are guys, contrary to the reasonable myth that's the Empire State Building, they are building the central structure of Rockefeller Center, which is 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Right. And they staged this photo, but the guys who posed for it did it between a bunch of real activities exactly like this. Yeah. And so it was a promo photo for the thing, but also these are actual ironworkers who constantly could have fallen to their death. I've seen cartoons

I've seen Tom and Jerry I've seen Bugs Bunny etc I know how these things work you got a bunch of beams being held up by cranes and you're running after each other and like conveniently a crane with a beam always

arrives in time when you're about to like run to the end of one beam so that you keep running onto the next beam so yeah I think it's that's how it works right so like if you do fall there's a convenient beam that just at that moment is being hoisted up by a crane that you will be caught on so and it's also a really pleasant work experience because the constant soundtrack is

da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da exactly and you can kind of like you can kind of like you can sort of pop by like chew a bunch of bolts and spit them out and then that's how you willed things Yeah, I feel like a lot of those cartoons were inspired by many thousands of people with real jobs that were that, but without the fun, you know? Yeah. This is that, but without the convenient beams and soundtracks. They really, yeah, I have never really thought about it before how cartoons were sort of like propaganda in a way that made it seem like a lot of this factory work was not a nightmare. Yeah. Or not, like, construction, not factory work.

Sorry. Well, that too. But, yeah, like a lot of this construction work was not a nightmare that it was fun. That if you were Popeye, it was a fun thing you could do. Yeah, basically this whole episode is a celebration of Manhattan iron workers. Yeah. And their heroic, difficult work to construct the major city of the United States. And kind of one of the greatest cities for receiving immigrants in world history and a really exciting place.

So good job. Awesome. Yeah. And this is a photo of some of them. It's basically a staged photo of the real thing. Like, these guys are not eating lunch, actually. That's why they're wearing giant gloves that you wouldn't pick up food with. And that's why there's no food in their mouths.

Unless it's a real hot pizza, which is, I think, like, if you have a really, really hot piece of pizza, those gloves would be useful so you don't burn your fingies. Yeah. Although, when you need a welding glove to pick up pizza, it's probably too hot for your mouth. That's a pro tip from me, Katie. Like, they're just wearing one of those big flat welding masks and smashing the pizza into it. That's a safe way to do it. This whole episode, there's two key sources that highly recommend will link them. One is a fantastic journalistic feature for History.com, tons of interviews and sourcing.

It's by award-winning journalist Tony Tecaronia K. Evans. And then the second one is a documentary, which I loved watching. It's called Men at Lunch. It's from 2012. It's by director, Sean Okoolin, and it's streaming on guide doc. TV. We'll link that. You can watch it.

And then other key sources for this takeaway are reporting for Smithsonian Magazine by Saracuda for the New York Times by Richard D. Hilton and history.com by Tim Ott. Because this picture is like mega famous in a way that has also sparked urban legends. Like we said, it's not the Empire State Building. That was finished in April 1931. So when this photo came out in late 1932, there weren't exposed beams there. It was down the street at the RCA building. Yeah.

I mean, I had no reason to just assume this was the Empire State Building other than I had learned about that at around the same time I would see this photo, right? It was probably in my history book, the page after learning about the Empire State Building. Yeah, same. And it's a very reasonable myth people have because. This photo captures a lot of the spirit of that without specifically being that. Yeah. It doesn't feel like it's a false version or something. Yeah.

And the reason this photo exists at all is that it was taken to promote renting out the space and the building they were constructing to tenants. Because it was the central building of one of the most ambitious construction projects in American history. It's called Rockefeller Center. And this Rockefeller Center was a truly wild proposition because it was built by John D. Rockefeller Jr., the only son of one of the richest men ever. John Sr. built a giant fortune through oil companies and other investments. And then John Jr. said, I'm going to build a set of 14 office buildings sprawling across the middle of Manhattan before there's very much office space up there and at the worst time of the Great Depression. And I'm just going to hope the economy is in decent shape to fill these offices by the time we're done. Right.

And if it's not, I'm going to lose a lot of money, even though I'm rich. Like, it's still a lot of money by my standards. Well, you know, I mean, I guess if you're sort of like an oil barren-esque person, you can afford to take that risk. But I don't know. I mean, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that there will at some point be an end to the department. impression. It's true. And he was right. And as they finished it, they rented out more than 99% of the offices. So it worked out. Not that I'm rooting for an oil tycoon's son to succeed, but it worked out. Finally they get theirs. I'm so happy for them. Yeah. Like if you've heard of the Rockefellers being

famous, this is the son of the guy who is that famous wealth. Yeah. Yeah. And built out the family. What a, what a, what a, what a charming story of the American spirit. A real, a real riches to more riches story. Exactly. Concentrating wealth in Manhattan. We all love that. That's really good. Yeah.

And so they took this picture near the end of construction because they were trying to get leases signed. So they're way up on the 57th story because this tallest building in all of Rockefeller Center will be 66 stories, plus. a few observation decks on top. So they were almost done. They started taking promo photos. I see. Yeah. I mean, there's nothing like that's going to get my butt to rent a building as seeing

people on an exposed beam. Yeah, like imagine if there were floors between the beams. You could be on those floors is kind of the pitch. And also just that it's spectacular, you know. Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. And so that central building, this whole development becomes named Rockefeller Center.

And there's a lot of tenant turnover. So what was the RCA building gets filled in by General Electric and also NBC. And then they make Saturday Night Live and the Tonight Show and the premise of the sitcom 30 Rock are all there. My sense is like any sort of talk show type thing I'm watching on TV is probably there. I know maybe that's oversimplifying things. But, yeah, that's my understanding of it. Right. Yeah, kind of there or a couple LA studios.

But yeah, it's been, like, these guys are building a very central media and mass cultural building in American history and the world. Yeah. But the original, was it for, like, media that it was sort of built for? Not really, yeah. Like, they planned on the first tenant being RCA and some of the other buildings in this development were initially called stuff like the United States rubber company building because it was going to be a rubber company. But then later book publishers come in. A lot of the changeover in Rockefeller Center fits the broader changeover toward media and publishing in New York. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. And the project worked out because the offices are usable for a lot of projects. So, yeah. Good job these guys on the beam. I'm sure they got paid handsomely for building one of the most famous skyscrapers in New York. So they sort of got paid well. Oh. Basically, because again, like a myth about this is that it's sort of Photoshopped and they weren't in danger. And Photoshop, I'm using that term loosely.

It didn't exist yet. But these were all... Well, no, actually, Photoshop's did indeed exist at this time, Alex. And Doctor... I forgot where the software name came from. Doctoring photos also did exist at the time. So, like, if you took your photo to a shop, they might doctor your photo. But, yeah, Adobe also existed, like, thousands of years before that.

But the actual company, Adobe Photoshop, yeah, did not. Yeah, before the Rockefellers, there were rocks and fellas. So, you know, both those were around in the Stone Age. Yeah, that was fun. We should go back to that. And, yeah, and these ironworkers, there's still people who do dangerous iron work, but in the late 1900s there started to be automated equipment that made it truly safer. And before that, some extra, you know, harnesses, ropes, anything? I'm pretty sure we had harnesses at the time, right?

And we certainly had rope at the time. So it's a little, seems like maybe not necessary to take that. this level of risk? It's not like we didn't have the technology to make them safer. Mostly, yeah. The one big limitation is as you go up and up and up building the building, you might want guys at a point where there's nothing above them to hang from. I see. Yeah. But what about below them? Because like if you fall and you're tied to something below you, it's still better. And they just didn't. Yeah. So the ironwork job is much more dangerous than you would think. And that's why this photo is substantially real. Like they were told to all

pose in a bigger group for a meal type that didn't really happen. They would not eat way out on beams like this. But they were constantly walking on extraordinarily thin, rickety steel beams. According to Christine Roussel, who's an archivist for modern-day Rockefeller Center, the beams got narrower on higher floors to decrease the weight. And around this floor, the guys are pictured on most beams were only four inches wide. Four inches is about 10 centimeters. Yeah. So maybe wider than an adult's foot, you know? Yeah, that's, I don't, I'm going to be honest with you, Alex. I don't love that. Like, that's not, uh, I don't, I don't, I don't think that's great. But yeah, I guess this is back when men were men and they would have untreated syphilis and just suck it up. Yeah, and these guys in between

this almost relatively safe photo of just sitting down on beams, they would be walking on them like balance beams and there's also footage in the documentary of guys walking on a beam and then holding another beam in both their arms at the same time with no ropes or harnesses or anything. So like what about the wind though? Because like you're up when you're high, I know when you're higher up wind can happen. Yeah. The people who did this just described that as being part of the job. Okay. According to Lynn Beauvais, who's descended from a four-generation family of ironworkers,

quote, in the old days there were no safety lines and they didn't wear helmets. Also, it was always windy up there. And in winter, the men cleaned off the steel beams of ice and snow before working on them. Yeah, but like sometimes if my posture's not good when I'm doing podcasting or writing, I get, like, I'm in danger of sciatica. So, like, do you think that they dealt with serious dangers, like the ones we face as podcasters today? As we always say, we do the most important job. Right.

It's, you know, one of the more dangerous. And because of the microphones, if we chew, if we eat lunch, ruins the show. So actually. Right. So we're at risk of our blood sugars not being at an ideal level. So think about that before you, you know, before you. Lionize these guys. Good God, though.

I, yeah, that's, I don't know. I feel like there's got to be, like, it's impressive for sure. It's very cool and impressive. But it's also just like, but clenchingly terrifying that people would have to do that as a job? Absolutely. And there were basically a few things that drew people to do it at all. One was what was considered excellent pay for blue collar work. Okay. They made $1.50 an hour in old-timey money, which was good money. Hot dog. Right, because a hot dog was a penny or whatever. Sure, that could buy you 100 hot dogs. A guy walking down to be him with 100 hot dogs for his

crewman. Now that's a lunch. The other thing is the company's would recruit relatively recent immigrants. Okay. The main groups were Irish folks, German folks, Scandinavian folks, and also our entire bonus show is about Mohawk ironworkers, Native American folks. So they're not immigrants, but they were disadvantaged in a way where they looked for work that was not reserved for the upper classes. Interesting.

So we would basically, you know, trade off people's safety for, payment when they were in an economic position that was really vulnerable. I feel like there's a word to describe that. Yeah. I mean, it's not a good word, for sure. And I think it, I think it, like, rhymes with hexploibation. Yeah, the other thing that these companies did is they just factored iron worker deaths into their budgets and planning.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. The documentarians for men at lunch interviewed non-futable. fiction author, Jim Radsenberger, who's written a lot of books about ironworkers. And he said that a typical skyscraper developer factored in one dead worker per 10 floors. And then the iron worker unions were always bringing in new guys and training up new people because across New York City, in this era, about 2% of the teams died each year. And another 2% were permanently disabled. Good God. And so they needed new guys. And the unofficial motto among 1933,

New York Iron Workers was, quote, we do not die, we are killed. Right. Like the idea is you don't just plan on retiring. You plan on, I'm going to make a lot of money fast and hope I get lucky. Yeah, that's pretty gnarly. Like, were most of the deaths falling deaths? And mostly falling, yeah. Okay, that does make sense.

Or getting like something dropped on you is the other one. it is pretty chilling though the sort of cold like math of it of like we can afford to lose this many human beings with thoughts and lives per quarter and it's fine yeah and they would just go up into essentially thin air and create the structure that they lacked while they're up there and they do it usually in teams of four where each guy has a specific job. There'd be a guy called a heater who fires rivets in a portable forge until they're red hot and then tosses the hot rivets to a second guy called a sticker in who catches them in a metal can or a glove. They're basically playing baseball in a scary way. And then a third guy called a bucker up, braces the rivet with a bar. And then a fourth guy called a riveter uses a pneumatic hammer to mushroom out the rivet stem to secure the locking steel. You don't need to know the exact technical elements of it, but they're up on beams that are barely wide enough to hold a

foot, like a human foot, and then tossing and catching and slamming in incredibly hot rivets hundreds and hundreds of feet up in the air. Yeah. So it's surprising the death toll wasn't higher. Yeah, I can think of a few things that could happen. That would be bad personally. Because you might fall trying to make a catch, you know, and also, why are these guys catching anything? It's because it was cheaper to do it that way. Yeah, you could get hit in the face. Yes. Yeah.

With like molten metal or whatever. I don't want to be a Debbie Downer, but these kinds of like safety problems are still, we might not see them as much like in the U.S., but there's certainly like when you look into mining, say rare elements around the world. You do actually see a lot of this where people are exposed to really dangerous conditions. And the thing Alex just said about how they're catching them because it's cheaper, whereas they could potentially have a different system that's safer for them, but it costs money and time. Yeah. That's the same kind of calculation happening today. We just might not see it in the U.S. It's usually that it's kind of been outsourced to poorer regions. And it's people make the same calculation, both the ones at the top are like, yeah, I can lose like 100 guys a year. or whatever, and it's fine. And then the people who are actually doing the dangerous labor, it's like, yeah, I'm dirt poor, and this is, like, the only thing I can do to really get a good income to my family.

But, I mean, I'm not saying that people aren't still exploited in the U.S., that definitely happens. But, yeah, this level of, like, dangerousness certainly is still the case at, like, work sites around the world to make things like our iPhones. Yeah, a lot of corporations make these choices. Yeah. And so when we when we see this picture in the modern day, I think we almost see it as, well, it's history. It was just probably okay or there's something I don't understand about the danger of it. But part of why it was an extraordinarily popular picture when it was published is that people pretty specifically understood these are 11 guys who do an incredibly dangerous thing. Right. And this is a fun image of the thing. This image would not happen without posing, but it depicts something real that they are doing before and after this brief pose.

The sentiments towards it. I'm curious because it's not like people would see this photo and go like, oh, man, we need OSHA. Like, oh shit, we need OSHA. It seems like a lot of the response would be like, whoa, that is a cool photo. guys are doing a cool, dangerous job, this idea of, like, well, they're choosing to do this job. And so that makes them brave, but it doesn't make us rethink sort of like, wait, should we be having stuff? Like, like, should people be in the position where they have to make this decision? There's still these like weird calculuses that happen where it's like, how much

is a human life worth in terms of like, how much will the company be sued if they get you know, turned into a pancake. Right. And yeah, at the time of this photo, as you wondered, people didn't really sweat the safety. They were mostly inspired by it. Yeah. And this reminded me of the American Gothic episode long, long ago, because that painting was famous right away, even though it's one oil painting before television and the internet and other easy ways to pass around a photo. that people just put it in the newspaper or clipped it and saved it and shared it in a way that made it famous.

And the same thing happened with this picture in the newspaper. And its fame is also part of takeaway number two. Lunch atop a skyscraper was one of three Manhattan icons who lifted America's spirits out of the Great Depression at the same time. It is literally uplifting because they are on a beam. that is lifted up. But so that people like this was like an uplifting photo for people. Yeah, they found it inspiring in a bunch of ways between the technology and the danger and also especially the signs of economic anything because October 1932,

it's truly in the worst depths of the Great Depression in a few ways. And there was a weird thing where really simultaneously this picture and Babe Ruth and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's all amazed the country at the same time. Yeah. I mean, that was such a good candy bar. Are you kidding me? Babe Ruth. It's a really good one. I do really like it. It's great.

A lot of peanuts in it. Yeah, and allegedly named after Grover Cleveland's daughter, which doesn't make any sense. What? No. Are you serious? It's not named after Babe Ruth? It's basically named after Bay Ruth, but the company didn't want to pay Babe Ruth any money. Oh, for God.

I said it was named after Ruth Cleveland. There's nothing I enjoy that doesn't have something sinister behind. And I don't think they paid Ruth Cleveland either, so I don't know why they even lied. Yeah, it's like, ooh, this is a nice little candy I'm eating yet. It's like actually about exploiting this guy. Goodness gracious. All right, well, tell me about Babe Ruth and Franklin. Delano Roelsovelt. That's not how you say his name.

Roosevelt. Ruthsavelt. Ruthsavilt. Yeah, the key sources here are that documentary men at lunch and also digital historical resources from the National Archives, from George Mason University, from the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, and then a few baseball resources from baseball reference.com and an ESPN feature by David Schoenfield. This photo makes a lot more sense if you see it as one of a

a few iconic messages where it's New York City telling the entire country that we're going to get out of the Depression. Yeah. That's why it was truly, truly an icon. As people said, there's a depression now, but look at these men doing God-like things on a beam for the economy and for all of us. Great. When we hear a story about someone doing something highly dangerous and almost seeming to

laugh in the face of that danger, even though it's a real danger. and it does sometimes kill them, like, it's inspiring. It's not, it seems like it should be something that should be horrifying and make us think like, oh, damn, this isn't not a good situation, but it is like, it's also inspiring. I mean, like, for a long time, this was how a lot of like war heroes, right? Like you're in a horrible war and you come back, you know, without an eye or without a leg, but it's like it's like people are inspired by that rather than being like oh god this is awful it's a it's a really interesting i don't know i'm i'm i just i'm not saying that people are

stupid for having that reaction i just think it's a really interesting reaction that we have to something dangerous where it's like oh man if they can like sit above a chasm of death to like quote unquote eat their lunch like yeah maybe we will get out of this great depression is that danger thing and then especially these other two icons it's almost a sports championship kind of feeling where you get an uplift even though a baseball team owned by a private individual wins a championship in a way that doesn't benefit you at all but still like it's your team and you walk around a little happier the next day it's both of those things at once this picture yeah it's also like the evidence that something is being built where which, when you're in an economic depression, that's like good to see, right? You know, it's like, oh, well, they're building something. That must mean stuff is happening and they're anticipating jobs coming back. Yeah, because to some Americans felt like the economy could truly end.

Right. And like we'd all be in a sort of dystopian situation going forward. Right. The crash started in October 1929. So this photo was published about three years later. And apparently when it was published in 1932, national unemployment was around 24%. That's a lot. A quarter of adults were trying to get a job and couldn't.

Yeah. Which means if you have a job, you feel like you're about to lose it. It's an awful time. Terrifying, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so this publishes October 2nd, 1932. People are partly happy to just see anybody with a.

job and that's part of why they weren't worried about their safety yeah they said i'm starving so i'm not worried about this guy falling yeah like whatever yeah it it makes a lot of sense i mean we were like there was a point at which was like we were like yeah what if this is just the end of america and the rockefellers really are just some fellers that have some rocks right uh and we don't have it and we'll need those rocks and they'll have all the rocks so there will still be a disparity between us and them except we're reduced to row It's like those survivalists and right-wing advertisements for buying gold, but for buying rocks. Yeah.

Buy rocks. Well, what's harder? Like some soft gold? Like, what are you going to do some gold? The rocks is where it's at. Gold's one of the weakest rocks, yeah. If you want to hunt a bison. Gold's a week at.

Wait a minute. I don't want to do that. Gold's a weak rock. It's not going to bust the brains of a bison. It's true. Gold bounces off. I've tried. Yeah.

Take my gold. I love you. They're like, yes, a thousand times, yes. And so a truly amazing bit of timing happens here. Because I said the other two icons are FDR and Babe Ruth. And Babe Ruth does maybe the most famous thing he's ever done. Baseball. Within 24 hours of this photo being published.

Okay. It's baseball, right? Yes, baseball. Yeah, broadly. I know history. It's hard to overstate how important Babe Ruth is in the entire sports history and celebrity history of the country. He pretty much made baseball a sport.

Borderline invented hitting home runs rather than trying to just slap hit singles. He also made the New York Yankees a famous team at all. They won all of their first four championships with him. Before that, they were just an obscure weird team in the Bronx. Right, right. Would you say baseball became the national sports game because of Babe Ruth? It did, yeah. Okay.

So, again, this photo publishes October 2nd, 1932. The previous day, October 1st, is game three of the 1932 World Series. Babe Ruth points a direction toward the crowd while at bat and then hits. say home run in that direction immediately afterward. Wow. Amazing. Later experts think it was just something weird. We don't know exactly why he pointed his arm at all, but the public decided he had called his shot and like promised to hit a home run into an exact spot. This was also Ruth's last title. He overcame his aging body. Right. And then the next day, October 2nd, they completed a sweep to win a World Series that really cemented Ruth and the Yankees and the whole legend.

In truth, he saw a weird bird over there and he wanted to hit it with the ball. I don't like the look of that bird. I'm going to get that. And yeah, it might be the most famous baseball play of all time, Babe Ruth seeming to guarantee a home run. Yeah, I mean, that is majestic to be able to do that. Yeah. And like sitting at a high beam, like it's physically impressive into the air. And yeah, it's cool, yeah.

Yeah, like what you're saying, like these god, it's like godlike feats by normal guys. Yeah. And then meanwhile, as both of those things happen, it's only about a month till the 1932 presidential election. And incumbent president Herbert Hoover has only recently become a villain because he just won't use the government to do anything about the depression. He says charities and businesses should fix it and they can't on their own. Yeah. And Challenger candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt is not only promising to act on the Depression, but also saying that we should end alcohol prohibition. He's also a brilliant public speaker.

As soon as he's in office, he'll take immediate action on all of that and also start doing what feels like science fiction, which are his so-called fireside chats, where there's a radio broadcast from the president personally to tell you how we're going to work on this. Yeah, the voice of the president reassuring you in your own living room coming from like a box. It's, that's wild. Yeah, it felt like teleportation or something. Yeah, there's never like a parisocial personal relationship that the president would have with Americans kind of in that way before that point. And a total 180 from Herbert Hoover just sitting at an office and saying, it'll fix itself when a quarter of people don't have a job. Yeah, it's like, I don't think that we have a lot of like things named after Herbert Hoover. Well, there's the Hoover Dam, which also killed a lot of people.

Yeah, and it was also kind of a scam by one of Hoover's cabinet members to make it named after him, which is cool. Fun. FDR didn't like it that they did that. Yeah. Yeah, so like this photo in a sort of extraordinary set of timing, along with Babe Ruth calling his shot and FDR revolutionizing the presidency and the Depression, is sort of three miracles on top of each other to the American public and truly changes the national mood. And it's all from Manhattan specifically. FDR lived between Manhattan and the Hudson

Valley, also went to school at Columbia, lived in Manhattan a lot before becoming governor of New York, and then Ruth's Yankees played in the Bronx. He called his shot at the away stadium in Chicago, but still, and then those iron workers are working on 30 Rock. Manhattan inspired the entire country in the fall of 32. Yeah. Now the picture makes sense to me. Like, okay, this is why we still look at it at all. Great.

It's a very cool picture. I think it's very thought-provoking in a number of ways. And I do like, one thing I really like about it is you can really, like, if you zoom in on it, you can really kind of get little snapshots of the different people's personalities. so it's not even though like you can definitely look at this through the framework of exploitation it is also deeply humanizing of the subjects like they they're not just like wearing all wearing welding masks and stuff you can see them some of them smiling some of them talking sharing cigarette uh you know like uh different they're not all wearing the same uniform right

Like they have kind of different types of work clothes. One of them doesn't have his shirt on. And yeah, I mean, they're different ages. There's one guy who looks basically like a kid. There's one guy who looks kind of like an old grizzled guy. So it's a very, it's a very human photo. These guys are like human beings and it's very clear from the photo. So it's, yeah, it's really interesting.

It is. And that's a perfect segue into the rest of the show. we'll find out who these guys are as much as we can. All right. We've also done a bunch of numbers and two heroic takeaways. So let's take a short break and have lunch on a very high beam above an entire city. That sounds good. I'm going to get really heavy foods.

So if people get hit with them, they'll be like, ow. Who hit me with a bugle? Because that's conical because that seems like that hurt. I like it's some kind of industrial bugle where it's, you know, a couple feet wide. I get the rivets and the bugles mixed up sometimes And I eat a rivet every so often I don't think I don't think bugles are on people's radar anymore

Honestly as a snack They're tremendous They're good And you can put them on your fingers And look like a witch And there's a ranch flavor now. It's great. Bougals. Anyways, taking a break.

We should have tried to get a bugle sponsorship. Anyway, we're back. And we've got two further takeaways about the humans in this photo and the human behind the camera. The quick one is takeaway number three. We still don't know who took this photo. What? And one leading candidate has a confusing name. Okay.

Well. There's at least three people who plausibly could have taken lunch atop a skyscraper, and one of them is named Charles Ebbets, which is the same name as the key original owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team. It's just a different guy. I thought you were going to say you had a confusing name because it was like, Joe, not a cameraman. Oh, yeah. George did not take this photo. The key sources are they're reporting by Tony Tecaroni K. Evans. Also, a New York Times feast by John Anderson. And I'm also going to link a Reddit post that's an excellent example of the internet getting this attribution wrong.

Poor Reddit. They did delete it, but after it got thousands of upboats in R slash picks. So, oh well. Yeah. As I mentioned before, this was published without any attributions. Also, the original negative is now owned by a licensing company called Corbus. It's in a really remarkable underground storage facility called Iron Mountain. And they say they don't know who took this photo.

It doesn't say. And is it underground to protect it from the elements or something? Partly that and there was just cave space and stuff, yeah. There's just space among the mole people. Basically, yeah. And until 2001, there were just kind of no theories about who took it. We just didn't know. And then in 2001, the descendants of photographer Charles Abbott's claimed to have proof that he took this photo on September 29th of 1932.

He was a major photographer. He did this sort of high altitude work. And the people at Corbus initially believed this claim until they got pushed back from other experts, including the Rockefeller Center archivists. And their biggest counter argument is that they think the photo was taken more than a week early around September 20th. And they say they can't prove it was not Abbott's, but they also can't prove Abbott's was on site that day. And they have solid information that two other photographers were on site, including photos of the photographers, balancing on beams, holding huge cameras. Like the photographers doing this had to do iron worker type danger to take the photos. Wild to me that they didn't say any.

Like they never were like, yeah, I'm. Yes. It was like their family after the fact, presumably after. after they had died, being like, this was my grandpa or my uncle or whatever and not, the actual person never took credit for it, despite it being such a, I mean, I'm sure there are a lot of like guys in bars being like, that was me. I did that photo. But no one was able to actually officially take credit for it. That's my biggest surprise too. Yeah. Like this photo, like we said, it was famous immediately. It's not like it was a recent meme. And none of them

bothered to make sure everybody knew it was them. It's wild. Yeah. That is, that's, that's wild. Yeah. Or even lie about it, you know, anyway. Right. Well, but I'm sure there were plenty of people who lied about it, but none of them were convincing enough. Oh, that's true. Yeah. Yeah. The, yeah, the Rockefeller Center people say that a photographer named William Leftwich and another photographer named Thomas Kelly are documented definitely on the site and up high on the date that they think the photo was taken. So this Reddit Postal link, the poster claims that they're showing you a picture of Charles Abbott's in the middle of taking this photo, but the top comment says it's a photo of Thomas Kelly. And either way, he might not have taken the photo. So this was deleted

and, like, people are both misattributing the photo and misattributing photos of photographers who could have taken it, you know? It's very wacky. Yeah, this is not the first time Reddit has been confidently wrong about identifying someone. Yeah. You remember during the Boston bombing, they, yeah, it's like the rush to try to identify who did it. That was a big fiasco because like an innocent person was like, like, ah, this guy definitely did it, which generally speaking, you don't want to do that.

For this, it's a lot more benign because it's just giving someone credit for a photo. But yeah, it's a, it's benign. One of the dangers of social media. Exactly. And so all we know is this photographer did an amazing job. Because like you were saying, Katie, the art of photography was not 100% respected yet. And this person really captured something evocative, no matter what, no matter what area you're in. And the other thing we know is the original negative was on a glass plate.

And according to Corbus' archivists, most of these skyscraper picks were on lighter material like plastic. So this person balanced probably on another beam with a very heavy negative and a very heavy camera and caught a really natural and loose photo of these guys sort of being childlike. It's wild. A photo, I think, sometimes does a lot of work to sort of erase the person behind the camera because we're like, oh, this is like a just impression of real life captured by a machine. And sometimes we have the impression of, like, it being just straight up, like, objective reality without there being any kind of subjectiveness of the actual person who took the photo. Yeah. What is the photographer going through to take this photo? And then what's their perspective? And we may never know whether it's Charles Abbott's or William Leftwich or Thomas Kelly or somebody else.

But the other thing we do know is our last takeaway number four. So far, we've identified four of the 11 men in the lunch atopas skies graper photo. Okay. So you're a little more successful with that, probably because we have images of them. Yes. Yeah, it was matching faces to faces. And this happened in two waves in recent times. We identified one pair of guys and then another pair of guys.

And it was two completely separate processes. It was looking through the archives of photos. and then it was a guy in Massachusetts visiting a pub in Ireland are the two ways we got information. I mean, you know, like pubs are libraries of information. Almost. Not all of it true, but, you know, it's prolific at least. Certainly stories.

Yes. The central problem of identifying anybody on this photo is a lack of records because the photographer and the newspaper doesn't write eye names down. and apparently the ironwork crews weren't usually logged or tracked very much at all. And you would think we would either know none of the names or all of the names. Right. Like some kind of amazing computing or survey would have solved all of it or we'd know nothing. But instead we know just four.

Like from cartoons, what I know is they clock in, like a big whistle blows and it kind of moves around like a mouth when it blows. And then people clock in with like a card. and it's got like your name on it and you know so that's like that's how I imagine they go to work every day so I would imagine they just have all those cards with their names on it kept somewhere right because then the sheepdog and the wolf or Fred Flintstone are logged by the accountants right and the accountant is like a stegosaurus with a little green visor yeah yeah that's another thing is I don't see like where we've got I don't see any dinosaurs in this photo so I I'm kind of doubtful of its authenticity.

The lunch on the skyscraper is that big rack of ribs that tips over Fred Flintstone's car. So then it tips the beam over and they all fall. Right, like a brontosaurus is the one I thought being used as a crane to lift these things up. Yeah. But that is literally Fred Flintstone's job. He's like a construction worker and he uses like a brontosaurus as a, I guess I don't really know the name of large construction. vehicles, but like as a digger or something. Yeah.

I think I know more about dino species than construction equipment. That's funny, huh? Yeah. What an impractical amount of knowledge I have. So yeah, so if you want to know who we've identified in the photo, you don't have to pull it up now or anything. But the first pair we identified are the guys who are the third person from each end, third from the left, third from the right. And then the other pair we identified is each guy on the far ends. Mm-hmm.

So that's who we know. All right. And this first pair, it came from a lucky find in Rockefeller Center's archives of another photo from the same day. Right. They turned up another photo that we'll link of a few men pretending to sleep on this same beam. Yeah. Like more goose.

Yeah, that was not something I would assume they would actually do because you do roll over in your sleep and that would not be. ideal situation in this specific location. Yeah, part of the iconicness of lunch atop a skyscraper is maybe they could eat lunch that way. Right. But you wouldn't sleep that way. Nobody cared about that photo.

It's just jokes. Then it just looks goofy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, also deeply scary because they are like genuinely pretending to sleep on a beam that is a deadly drop, but they aren't actually asleep. It's true. They're in enormous danger.

Yeah. And then the archivists were astonished to not only find this joke sleeping photo from that same situation, same angle. It also had names of the people in the picture on the back. Okay. So we got some of them. It's the same face and clothes and everything. So we're 100% sure that the man third from the left is an iron worker named Joseph Echner. And the man third from the right is a guy named Joe Curtis.

And we don't know a lot more about them, but those are their names. That's who they are. Statistically speaking, I think that the other ones have a pretty high chance of being named Joe. Like we already have two data points that are all leaning in the Joe direction. I grew up Catholic. Catholics love the names Joseph and Mary. Those are huge. So a lot of Catholic immigrants, you know. A lot of them are probably named Joseph and a lot of them are probably named Mary, 50-50.

I've solved the problem. Yeah, the other nine guys are named Mary, yeah. Yeah. So we're 100% sure who those guys are, and it took until the early 2000s to find out. And then we got another pair a totally different way. In 2007, there was an American named Pat Glynn. And Pat Glynn lived near Quincy, Massachusetts, and is also a first-generation American, the son of an Irish immigrant. And then he made a trip to Ireland to see the village his dad is from.

That's a village called Shanaglish and County Galway. And he went to a pub called Wheelan's Bar, basically because it's the only thing in this tiny village. And according to the public and Michael Weillan, he had a copy of that photo on the wall just for vibes. It's a famous and fun photo. And maybe some of the guys are Irish immigrants. There's Irish pride in building America. It's just a fun bar decoration. Yeah.

And then apparently Pat Glynn had never looked closely at this photo until he was bored in the bar. And then he said, oh, there's my dad. Oh, wow. Which is kind of weird. Like, it's been a famous photo his whole life. And he knew his dad was an iron worker in Manhattan. But he'd never looked at it until he was bored with a Guinness. Yeah.

That's wild. I had a kind of experience like that There's in Bakersfield There's like a pretty famous I mean locally famous not nationally Ice cream shop called De Wars And my grandpa is from Bakersfield And it's not there anymore

But when I was younger We found that there's like a photo Of a bunch of like kids Like high school kids I think they're either eating the ice cream there Or it's something It's like part of some sort of newspaper clipping. And it's like a photo of my grandpa.

Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. And you said it's not there anymore? Like the picture or the place? No, the place is still there. They just like, the picture's not there anymore. Okay.

Big recommendation. I know it's not as famous as like the people on the beam constructing America. But yeah, it is a weird, it is a weird experience to like go somewhere and be like, oh, yeah. I know that guy. Yeah, like ever since photography's gotten relatively common, that can just happen. Yeah. What a thrill. Yeah.

You know? It's fun. And then Pat Glenn said, oh, my God, my dad's in the picture. He's the guy on the far right end holding a glass bottle. And then he kept looking at the picture and he said, I need to call my cousin. Because the guy on the far left end was Pat's uncle, his cousin's dad. Wow. Amazing.

And so that's the guy smoking the cigarette? Yeah, and these are very Irish names. Pat contacted his cousin. His cousin is Patty O'Shaughnessy. And then Patty's father, Maddie O'Shaughnessy, was Sonny Glynn's brother-in-law, and Sonny Glynn is the guy in the far right. Maddie O'Shaughnessy is the guy in the far left. And they were just looped into this photo op and became icons.

So Joe, Joseph, Maddie, and Patty, we got those guys. So we can expect other names to rhyme in a cute way. Right. It's all going to be like Bob Rob. Yeah. Mary Boberi, Banana Fanafoferi. Yeah, we got them all. Identified them all.

That's really, that is very cool. I mean, it's like, but it's surprising to me that his dad wasn't like, hey, you know, that famous photo. Like, that's me in there, you know? Yeah. Like, it seems like everybody involved in this was either humble about it or didn't care about being famous or something. Because we can confirm all four of the names that we've confirmed are not only in it, but never talked about it, really. Wild. Because their descendants had no idea.

Yeah. It was archivists and then a lucky son happening to focus on it. It's the only reason they found out. Yeah. It's like, well, did you do anything cool when you were? worked on the, on building the skyscraper dad's like, oh, I found a penny once. Oh, was it an interesting penny? No.

I spent it. I don't know. I guess if you're, if you spend so much of your time, like walking with a very thin beam separating you from certain death with a long period of just screaming, maybe you're like, you're just blah, like the idea of getting credit for it is just like, eh, Whatever. I don't know. I have that theory.

And the other theory is it's almost like they're war veterans or something. And it was so awful they don't want to talk about it. Yeah. It's one of those. It's some kind of taciturn male mid-century thing. Yeah, like maybe one of them died, like one or more of them in this photo died pretty memorably or horribly in terms of like falling and they just don't want to talk about it. Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah. I also think that there's a lot of generational, like as millennials were used to talking about our feelings, but that didn't always used to be the case where people would do that. Yeah. Yeah. In the FDR and Babe Ruth days, you just keep eating hot dogs and drinking whiskey and not saying anything, you know?

Yeah. And I'm not saying that's good. Like, that's not necessarily a good thing. But yeah, like the greatest generation, right? Like a lot of that was just like, yeah, just don't talk about the war. And I feel like the baby boomers like, you do talk about it, but you're very angry and you also don't confront your feelings too much. You just like, you know.

It's true. Yeah, the boomers really started talking about not processing, huh? Yeah, I don't want to, again, I don't want to stereotype. There's like plenty, there's plenty of boomers who know how to introspect about their feelings. I know, I know some of them. So, but I think in broad strokes, right, like the idea of processing trauma was not something that was at all available. to the greatest generation and then, you know, like probably not completely there for boomers either. So, yeah, maybe it was just something where it's like, yeah, I just don't talk about my time working on a skyscraper.

That's like normal to not talk about it. Yeah, I think they're like, I don't talk about anything. So why would I talk about that subject? Yeah. I don't talk. I don't speak at all. I only chew rivets and spit them out on the beams to build buildings that way. Let's talk and more spittin

Pink, ping, ping, ping, yeah Yeah Folks is the main episode for this week Welcome to the outro with fun features for you Such as Help Remembering this episode With a run back through the big takeaways Takeaway number one, lunch atop a skyscraper is a staged yet real photo, showing the extraordinary danger ironworkers faced to build 30 rock. Takeaway number two, lunch atop a skyscraper was one of three Manhattan icons who simultaneously lifted America's spirits out of the Great Depression.

The other icons are Babe Ruth, calling his shot, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, revolutionizing the presidency. Takeaway number three, we still don't know who took this photo, and one leading candidate had the same name as the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Takeaway number four, so far we've only identified four of the 11 men in the lunchtop a skyscraper photo, which indicates none of them ever really talked about being in the photo, even though it's world famous. And then a few numbers before that about the location of this photo, the astounding height.

of this photo, the 1932 timing of this photo, and more. Those are the takeaways, and I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week, where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the Mohawk Skywalkers who continue to build Manhattan and the recent Mohawk neighborhood in Brooklyn. If you've seen the New York City skyline, you have seen the handiwork of Mohawk people

who continue to be ironworkers to this day. Visit sifpod.f.fund.fund for that bonus show for a library of more than 22 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include an amazing documentary. It's a film called Men at Lunch. It's from 2012. It's by director Sean O'Coolin and funded in part by the Irish Film Board. Another crucial source for the whole episode is journalism by award-winning writer Tony Tecaroni K.

Evans. He's a Mohawk native person, also an award-winning journalist, now based in Idaho. We're also leaning on a couple New York Times pieces, one by John Anderson, another by Richard D. Hilton, tons of historical recordkeeping from the U.S. National Archives, from George Mason University, from the University of Virginia. And if you're a sports fan, you might particularly like what we're linking from baseball reference.com or from ESPN, a feature by David Schoenfield. This episode's out during playoff baseball, and I think what we're linking makes a pretty good case for the 1932 world series being the most iconic series in baseball history. So, like a lot of sift topics, this leads you down a lot of amazing rabbit holes if you keep going. That page also features resources such as native-dashland.ca.

I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lenape people and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skatego, people and others. Also, the location this photo was taken is Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Lenape people. And then Katie taped this in the country of Italy. I want to acknowledge that in my location, in 30 Rock's location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people in life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you

something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 5. That's about the topic of microwave ovens. Fun fact there, one microwave oven briefly interfered with all of the data at the main astronomical observatory in Australia. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budo's band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back

next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artists-owned shows. directly by you.