The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 90: A Man Well Hung

Episode Date: February 6, 2018

People came from miles around just to see it.

The ocean delights us as playful otters restore coastal kelp forests. The ocean teaches us how our choices impact even the deepest places. The ocean connects us. Visit Monterey Bay Aquarium.org slash connects. This is the way I heard it. On October 1st, 1788, 40,000 people traveled from all over Scotland to see a burglar hang in the public square. It was the largest turnout for a public hanging in the history of the world. Which begs the question, what exactly does a burglar have to steal to inspire 40,000 people to cheer his death?

By day, William Brody was a happily married locksmith, a respected family man with a reputation as a maker of fine furniture. Officially, he was the Deacon of Rights, a title that afforded him a seat on the town council. By night, however, the deacon was a hard-drinking lover of cards and dice. He kept a mistress, unbeknownst to his wife, a second mistress, unbeknownst to his first mistress, five bastard children, and a massive gambling debt he serviced by robbing his own customers, usually by letting himself into their homes with keys he copied after installing their new locks. For 20 years, William Brody lived a double life. And when they strung him up, no one in the crowd was sure exactly who it was.

up there dangling from the end of that rope. Maybe that's why somebody came to watch. 85 years later, to the day, a 23-year-old writer found himself hunched over his father's antique desk, not writing. Instead, Bob was staring at a stack of blank pages, like a slab of untouched marble waiting for the sculpture's chisel. The empty sheets taunted him with their endless possibility. How exactly should the young author begin his career as a man of letters? With a poem, an essay, a play, a novel, maybe a pirate adventure? No, that's stupid. Nobody's going to read a pirate adventure.

What was he thinking? Before long, Bob concluded that he was incapable of filling those blank pages with anything worth reading. So he left them neatly stacked on his father's antique desk and fled to the sanctuary of his favorite brothel, where he continued his search for inspiration with the help of two hookers and a bottle of scotch. Would polite society have been scandalized by Bob's presence in such a lowly place? Would his parents and their friends have been mortified by his behavior?

You better believe it. Like his father, an engineer who designed and built lighthouses all over Scotland, and his grandfather, an engineer who designed and built lighthouses, all over Scotland. Most of Edinburgh expected Bob to become an engineer who designed and built lighthouses all over Scotland. But Bob had made other plans and shared them with no one but the fine folks in Edinburgh's gambling halls and bordellos. There, he revealed a personality completely at odds with the boy his parents thought they raised, that of a true bohemian committed to changing the world with pen and paper. Anyway, on this particular evening,

evening in this particular Bordello. Bob's presence just happened to coincide with the 85th anniversary of Deacon Brody's execution, a fact brought to Bob's attention by one of the aforementioned hookers with a simple toast. Here's to the good deacon, hanged on this very day 85 years ago, but alive and well in our livers and loins. The name hid him like a serendipitous slap in the face, Deacon Brody. course. The cure to his writer's block had been staring him in the face all day. In a flash, Bob knew precisely how he would fill those empty pages. He would offer the world a profound rumination on the duality of man. He would do so in the form of a play, a glorious play, and he would write that play on the desk made for his grandfather a hundred years ago,

a desk that bore the name of the craftsman who made it, William Brody. Call it kismet or coincidence or divine intervention. Whatever it was, Bob was reinvigorated. He bid the whores a pleasant good evening and ran home to write the play that would make him a respectable author. He called it Deacon Brody, the double life. It took a while. Bob was not a writer to be hurried.

and along the way his parents were devastated by their son's choice of vocation. Likewise, polite society was shocked that a fine lad like Bob would refuse to follow in his father's footsteps. But Bob was determined, and soon he was a published playwright. And soon after that, his first play finally premiered on the London stage. And there, Deacon Brody, the Double Life, was seen by virtually no one. It closed a week after opening. Bob was crushed, obviously, but refrained from drowning his sorrows with the strumpets and nere-de-wells at the closest gin-joint, because Bob was now a married man and resolved to live a more congruent life than the subject of his first and only play.

So he tried again, this time with that pirate adventure, the one he had wanted to write in the first place, the one that went on to become an international bestseller and eventually a major motion picture. Yes, it was Treasure Island that put Bob on the map, and after that, kidnapped, would secure his place as a writer of great fiction. Many others would follow, but as it turns out, it was his failed play that ultimately led to his most enduring work, not because his play enjoyed a revival, but because it eventually led to a rewrite. Six years after the double life bombed in London, Bob once again put pen to paper and ruminated upon the duality of man.

But this time he did it not through the story of the burglar who built the furniture in his father's home, but through his own efforts to live a double life. The result? A breathtaking masterpiece written over. the course of just three days that leaves the reader to wonder who among us is really as they appear. Maybe that's why 40,000 people showed up to see Deacon Brody swing, to stare not just at the burglar on the gallows, but at each other, to look around and wonder who else might be hiding their true self behind a smiling exterior.

That's the question that vanquished Bob's Writers' Block 145 years ago, a question that prompted a would-be lighthouse builder to provide an answer, an answer that still gives us pause today, such is the legacy of Robert Lewis Stevenson and the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Anyway, that's the way I heard it. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more.

Granger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Granger offers millions of products in fast-dependable delivery. So you can keep your facility stocked, safe, and running smoothly. Call 1-800-Grangeer, click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done. Thank you.