Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Church Choir That Didn't Explode

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

Perhaps the most amazing coincidence ever documented took place when a church in a tiny town in Nebraska exploded in 1950.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Dave is here in spirit. He

wanted to let us know that he's thinking of each and every one of you individually and this is short stuff. That's right. I was raised in the church choir, my friend. So this one hits really close to home, actually not at all. Right. But I did sing in the church choir. I've seen church choirs perform before. So it really hits home for me too. This is a really fun story, I think. Is this, were you familiar with this story before? Nope. You know where I first heard of it? A time life books ad. Are you really? Is there anything those things haven't taught us?

I don't know. I wish I had a set of those. Those are fun. Me too. We'll have to go on eBay and look for them together. Oh, I'm sure they're all there. So what we're talking about is not necessarily just a church choir. It's almost tangential to it. What we're really talking about is one of the most astounding coincidences in the history of documented history. Like there's no coincidence that really holds a candle to this in my book. And there's plenty of coincidences. I remember we did an entire episode on one. Remember the poor guy who was in both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bonds and survived them both?

Yeah. There's been some amazing coincidences before. This one, to me, takes the cake. It's a pretty good one. And we're talking about a terrible incident that happened, but it could have been a lot worse on the evening of March 1st, 1950, in Beatrice, Nebraska, when a church blew up. I mean, blew up. Like the walls blew out. The roof came down. Windows got knocked out of houses in the vicinity. A radio station got knocked off the air by the blast. However, that works. It was a big time explosion that just destroyed this church. Yeah. And I guess we should go ahead and say how this happened. The idea is that there was probably a gas leak, and that gas leak just did what gas leaks do and filled a space with gas.

And there was a gentleman there who would show up. What was his name? Was it the Reverend himself? It was the Reverend. Yeah, Walter Clemple. Yeah. What a great Reverend name, Reverend Clemple. What a 1950s Nebraska Reverend name, too. So he shows up at his Westside Baptist Church, like he always does, ahead of time, to light the furnace to get it nice and warm for choir practice, because in early March in that part of Nebraska, it can be a little chilly. And then he went back home to go to dinner. And so the idea is that this gas fills up. It eventually reaches the flame of that furnace, and church explodes. Okay. So a church exploding from a natural gas explosion lit by a Reverend. This is not all about making Reverend Clemple look bad. No. He didn't

light that furnace because he wanted to blow up the church. Like you said, he was lighting it for choir practice. What makes this astounding is that that explosion took place at 7.25 p.m. on March 1st, like you said, 1950, which was a Wednesday. And every Wednesday was choir practice. And every Wednesday at 7.20 p.m., choir practice started. So this explosion that destroyed the entire church took place five minutes after choir practice officially started. And the thing that makes this the most astounding coincidence of all time is that not one single member of that 15-person choir was in the church at the time. Every single one happened to be late. That's right. And I think we should save the reasons for everyone being late till after the break with a little cliffhanger.

But before the break, if you're trying to figure out the odds of something like this happening, there's no exact scientific way to do that, obviously. But what they can do and what they have done is look back and said, well, how often were people generally late at choir practice at this church? And what are the odds of that happening to everybody? And they kind of went back and look at past choir practices and saw that each person would be late about 25% of the time, one in every four choir practices. So everyone being gone for this specific night ended up being a, you guessed it, one in a million chance. Yeah, I think all of them had either an equal chance or twice the chance of being struck by lightning that year as this actually happening is all of

them being late for choir practice at the same time. Okay, I think that's a great setup. We'll come back after our short break and we'll talk about why these folks were late right after this. So, I'm here to help you. I promise you, seriously, I swear, and you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. And so my husband, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So before we get going on the reasons, I think one important thing we didn't point out is it's not like everyone got on a bus somewhere to go to choir practice and the bus broke down. Like everyone was late for their independent reasons. Some had a little bit of overlap, as we'll see. But that's sort of the remarkable part of all this. Yeah. Yeah. It is amazing. So Reverend Clemple, he usually got there as early as anybody. He

usually got there about seven, 10. And it turns out that his daughter who was going to come with him, Marilyn Ruth, the dress she had put on it was dirty. So his wife, the Mrs. Reverend Walter Clemple, had to put a new dress on the ironing board, get it ready. And that made the family late. That's pretty, okay, I like that one. That's a good one. It just keeps going from there, though. And we should mention we could not find Reverend Walter Clemple's wife's name. We are not just doing the antiquated thing of calling a woman Mrs. so-and-so, so-and-so husband's name. Right. Thank you for that. Of course. So let's go over some of these. All right. So like I said, he just keeps going from Reverend Clemple and his family's reason for being late.

Next up, we've got Ladona Vandergrift, which sounds like a made-up name. It does. She was struggling with the geometry problem. She was a sophomore in high school, and she was like, I'm not letting this problem beat me. I have to finish this before I leave for choir practice. That's the best part of this whole story, I think. I think so, too. So she, not only did that make her late, but it also ended up making the Estes sisters, Rowena and, um, uh, what was her name? Sadie. Rowena and Sadie Estes were late because of Ladona indirectly, as well. Right. Because I think they were supposed to, uh, were they supposed to ride together? Yeah. Well, no, they had car trouble. The Estes sisters had car trouble. Oh, okay.

So they called Ladona Vandergrift and said, hey, can you come pick us up? She said, just after I figure out this Pythagorean theorem thing. Oh, yeah, yeah. So they were supposed to ride together. I got you. Yeah, yeah. But they weren't supposed to. They only called her. But they would have arrived had their car not been in trouble. And then even furthermore, had Ladona not been doing geometry, all three of them might have made it on time. Yeah, they were double-blessed. Yes, pretty amazing stuff. And of course, the reason I say double-blessed is obviously with a situation like this in a church, the entire church believes that this was God's hand, uh, leading them away from that explosion. Yeah. Naturally. I would do.

Indubitably. Indubitably. Uh, what else do we have here? We have Mrs. Leonard Schuster. And, and Schuster went to her mom's house to get her ready for a missionary meeting, apparently. So that's what made, uh, Schuster late. Right. Had the entire mom's shoes. And then we tie them each to their own shoe. What about Herbert Kipf? He was a lathe operator, which is, that's a lathe operator in Nebraska's name in 1950 for sure. Yeah. He supposedly had a letter that he had been putting off writing and he finally sat down to write it. And the letter itself made him late. Um, and that's apparently unusual for him. He wasn't necessarily the most prolific letter writer, but that was the one for him.

You know what it sounds like to me? What? It sounds like choir practice wasn't much of a priority for anyone there. It kind of sounds like it. I got a math problem. I really need to write this letter. Yeah. Or Joyce Black really demonstrates that too. She was a stenographer. She said, um, and by the way, she was saying all this, they were all saying all this stuff too. Life magazine. Yes. Which did a article on this a couple of weeks after it happened called why the choir was late. Um, she said, I was feeling just plain lazy. It was very cold out. My house was cozy and toasty and I was just hanging out there. That's why I was late. She was the most forthright of

all of them. Yeah. Very honest, very honest. The piano player herself, Marilyn Paul, usually the piano players, they're pretty early. And I think Marilyn had a knack for arriving about a half hour early, but old Marilyn must have eaten some turkey for dinner because she fell asleep and her mom woke her up at 7.15. And she said, all right, well, I gotta get out of here. I'm kind of already late. And it says here, she only had time to tidy up and then leave. Right. Oh, I'm running late, but let me clean up a bit first. So her mom was actually the choir director and she was late because Marilyn was late. So I, like, like in all of this stuff too, I wonder if like she was mad at Marilyn or was like, why are you not waking up at 7 in the

evening? Who naps like that? Or if everybody was very patient. I like to think they're all very patient and polite waiting for one another, you know? Well, it says that mom tried unsuccessfully to awaken her earlier. Right. That's what I'm saying. I love it. There was a gas leak at church and a carbon monoxide leak in the Paul's house. Will you wake up? And then Lucille Jones and Dorothy Wood, they were neighbors and they were both in the choir, so they would naturally ride together. And one of them, oh, I think it was Lucille. Lucille was listening to a radio program from 7 to 730, probably Mannix or Kojak. Right. And again, Dorothy was just sitting there patiently waiting for her friend to finish listening to this radio program. Unbelievable.

We also left out Harvey All the last one. What did Harvey do? He had the worst excuse of all of them. He was taking care of his kids. His wife was out of town. Right. And he started talking. And I guess talking makes Harvey lose track of time, but he lost track of time and ended up being like... Who's he talking to? I guess as kids, I'm not sure. I could not for the life of me find that Life magazine article directly. We have to thank our friends at Snopes for helping us out big time with this one. Yeah. It's probably the kids were like, dad's finally talking to us. Right. He's paying attention to us.

Yeah. But I can tell he doesn't know what time it is. Yeah. This is one of the stories I'm glad there wasn't some gross dark thing underneath. Nope. It was all above the boards and amazing. So all of those people for all those different reasons were late to choir practice. And had they all made it on time, they would have perished in that explosion. I love it. Thanks Time Life books. Thanks Snopes. Thanks to you, Chuck. Thanks to Dave for producing this. Thanks to you guys for listening to it. And short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.