This American Life - 535: Origin Story

Episode Date: March 9, 2025

Little-known and surprising stories of how all sorts of institutions began. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.Prologue: Host Ira Glass talks to business professor Pino Audia and Fast Company magazine columnist Dan Heath about corporate creation myths and why so many of them involve garages. (7 minutes)Act One: Sarah Koenig tells the story of her father, Julian Koenig, the legendary advertising copywriter whose work includes the slogan "Timex takes a licking and keeps on ticking" and Volkswagen's "Think Small" ads. For years, Sarah has heard her dad accuse a former partner of stealing some of his best ideas, but until recently, she never paid much attention. Then she started asking her dad for details of this fight for his legacy, and what she learned surprised her. (20 minutes)Act Two: Producer Sean Cole visits Chad's Trading Post in Southampton, Massachusetts. One person who works there wears a shirt that says "Chad's Brother;" other shirts say "Chad's Best Friend," "Chad's Cousin," and "Chad's Father." Pictures of Chad are everywhere. Chad's dead. The family explains. (14 minutes)Act Three: Peter Sagal, host of NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me, tells Ira the origin story of one of the worst movie sequels ever made. (5 minutes)Act Four: Reporter Mary Wiltenburg tells the story of a little boy stymied by the question "Where do you come from?" (8 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.

Pino Audia teaches in the business school at Dartmouth and he researches the question, how do entrepreneurs get created? And at some point he noticed that his students and many of his colleagues actually have an opinion about this. They believe entrepreneurs make themselves. You know, you head off on your own, you write a business plan, you start in your own garage. And the garage, by the way, is not a metaphorical garage. It is a garage, a literal garage.

Hewlett Packard started it in a garage. Apple Computer had a garage. Disney, the Patel Toy Company, the Wham-O Toy Company. It is about big dreams and humble beginnings and success in the face of adversity and doubters. And also the idea that regardless of who you are, regardless of how humble your beginnings are, you can turn something into an immense success story if you work hard. and also the idea that regardless of who you are, regardless of how humble your beginnings are,

you can turn something into an immense success story if you work hard. And that was the point in time in which I got interested in the story of the garage as a myth. A garage is a place of possibilities. It's a place where things can get invented, and a place where things can get invented and a place where entrepreneurs begin. This is a promotional video that Hewlett-Packard put together after it spent millions to buy and restore the original garage where its two founders started a company that is still one of the largest technology firms in the world. In 1938, in a garage in Palo Alto, California, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard set to work to start a new company.

They had a few hand-operated punches, a used Sears Robuck drill press that had just made the trip west in the back of one of their cars, and they had a rented flat with a garage. Professor Adia doesn't argue with any of this, but he says that when you ask actual entrepreneurs, and this is true in survey after survey, you find that most of them begin

not by going off into their garage, but by working for somebody else. Making contacts, learning the business. So this is a very robust finding which tells us that actually if you want to become an entrepreneur the obvious thing to do is to first go get a job in an industry you're interested in and learn and then eventually later try to create a company. Even Bill Hewitt and Dave Packard weren't exactly outsiders. They studied electrical engineering at MIT and Stanford. Packard had worked at General Electric. A former professor of theirs from Stanford gave them leads and hooked them up, for example, with a firm called Litton Engineering, who let them use equipment that they didn't know

themselves yet. Just as, decades later, the founders of Apple Computer, 21-year-old Steve Jobs, was already working at Atari, and 25-year-old Steve Wozniak was at Hewlett-Packard when they started Apple in Jobs' garage. And for example, because case of Steve Jobs, he benefited greatly from the support that he got from the Atari people because they introduced him to investors.

Pino Adia has tried to find mentions of garage entrepreneurs or anything like it in other countries and didn't come up with much. He says it seems to be a very American idea, very close to other American ideas about opportunity for everybody. The Apple and Hewlett-Packard garages have now become such a part of Silicon Valley myth that it's made other tech companies want their own stories like it. Google, for example, they did not start in a garage. The founders began working on the search engine in 1996 when they were at Stanford. They didn't actually move into a garage until 1998.

They already had investors, and they were just in the garage for five months. But in 2006, Google bought that garage, this company landmark. It's like no one wants to hear the story of the rich, well-connected guys who meet up at the Marriott Conference Room to hatch a business plan. You know, there's no romance in that.

Dan Heath has written about these origin stories in Fast Company Magazine. He says that one way to measure just how appealing these stories are is to count all the ones that get quoted widely, even though they aren't remotely true. For instance, when eBay began, a story circulated that its founder created the company so his fiance could buy and collect Pez dispensers more easily.

Not true. One of the creators of YouTube used to claim that the idea for the business came after a dinner party in 2005, where two of the company's masterminds, Chad Hurley and Steve Chin, shot some video and then tried to post it online and found out just how hard that was back then. Now, that is at a minimum an exaggerated tale. In fact, there's a third founder of YouTube who claims the dinner party never happened.

And Steve Chin later admitted in Time Magazine that the dinner party was embellished to provide a better founding myth. And I do want to say that while it feels like a little bit of a letdown to realize that this dinner party story is not, you know, the whole truth, I feel like it's a little bit unfair for us to expect more of them than the creation of YouTube. I mean, here's this incredible site, and in some sense, that's not enough for us.

We want YouTube to have emerged from some kind of, you know, everyday experience. It's like, it's not enough to have the value of their work. We also want there to be a really compelling story that started it. Now, in the article that you wrote for Fast Company, you point out that our attachment to these kinds of mythic creation stories is so strong that we have even exaggerated the Christopher Columbus story.

Well, Christopher Columbus, as we all know, wanted to prove that he could reach India by sailing west. But no one believed his crazy theory that the earth was round. And in fact, his own sailors en route were terrified that they were about to fall over the edge of the earth and they almost mutinied So there's a guy named James Lowen a professor at University of Vermont who has pointed out that the virtually every element of the story is false That in fact, we still don't really know where Christopher Columbus was going There's a lot of disagreement among historians and even Columbus's best-known biographer isn't totally

sure where he was headed. And furthermore, there was no element of is the earth round or flat here. Most people at that time already knew that the earth was round. The evidence was there for them to see. They noticed that if another ship is receding into the horizon, their hull disappears first and then the mast later, which implies that there's some kind of curvature in play. And again, you know, here's a guy who crossed an ocean and became one of the first Europeans to set foot on a new continent, And yet we want more from this guy. We want him to be having hand-to-hand combat

with his crew en route. We just crave the drama, we crave the obstacles. ["The Outsider's Guide to the Future"] Well today on our show, origin stories. We love them so much that sometimes it is hard not to make them up. From WBEC Chicago, it's This American Life, Act 1 of our show today. Madman, Act 2, Silent Partner, Act 3, Wait, Wait, Don't Film Me, Act 4, Bill Clinton's 7-year-old brother. Stay with us. can convert between up to 40 currencies at the mid-market exchange rate. Visit wise.com. TNCs apply.

This is American Life Today Show as a rerun, act one, madman. Well, this first story is about a fight over the origin of certain ideas. A fight over who really came up with those ideas. Sarah Koenig tells a story about her dad, Julian. All my life, I've heard the hallmarks of my father's achievements. I invented thumb wrestling. That was in 1936 when he was a counselor at Camp Greylock for boys. They already had arm wrestling for the boys and leg wrestling.

But we needed another wrestling and I invented thumb wrestling with the same rules as a hockey puck face-off. One, two, three, go. It just came to you like just a stroke, oh we should use our thumbs? It was just a devastating moment. The discoveries kept coming. Shrimp, for instance. I want popularized shrimp in America. In 1941, my father, a shrimp lover, was discouraged that there were only two places on Broadway in New York where you could get shrimp. So then in Biloxi, Mississippi, and bear with me here because this story barely makes any sense, so he's in Biloxi on his way to Mexico with some buddies and he sees this government boat about to go out to track the migratory path of shrimp.

And he talks his way onto the boat, by explaining that he loves shrimp, apparently. And he goes out on this boat, and they find the shrimp breeding grounds or some such. The rest, of course, is history. Then, back in New York, I patrolled Broadway and Anvira, asking for shrimp. Shrimp. Shrimp. More. And this way, talking it up by popularized shrimp. No question about it. It seems like really, really thin evidence that you popularized shrimp in New York. We're not making any claim on the industry. My dad does make a claim on the word character, that he came up with the idea to use it to mean a person of unusual or eccentric qualities.

You have a character in a play, of course, but it wasn't in common usage as, he's a character. And what made you, do you remember why you started using it? I just shifted it, adapted it. So Norman Mailer thinks that he developed it. I take precedence. According to my father, Norman Mailer also said he invented thumb wrestling. Mailer, who died in 2007, was a famous thumb wrestler, but not its inventor, because as we now know, my dad invented it at Camp Greylock for Boys and that's the rub. You can't prove the origin of any of this stuff and it's annoying when

people like Norman Mailer take credit. My dad would like people to recognize him for his contributions to shrimp and character and thumb wrestling but he's not going to make us stink if they don't. His real legacy, though, in advertising, that's another story. That he's willing to fight for, and he has been fighting for it, for decades. My father was a legendary copywriter. He wrote Timex Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking. He named Earth Day Earth Day. It falls on his birthday, April 22nd, Earth Day birthday. So the idea came easily.

The magazine Advertising Age made a list of the top 100 advertising campaigns of the 20th century. The Marlboro Man is on it, and the Energizer Bunny, Good to the Last Drop from Maxwell House, and the Keep America Beautiful Crying Indian. But the number one ad, the top of the 100 list? Think small. That was Volkswagen's American campaign to sell the Beetle in 1959, and my father wrote it.

A picture of a tiny car on a big white page, and some amused self-deprecating copy. That ad was followed by Lemon, another VW ad so iconic, and made it onto the TV show Mad Men, the show set in 1960 about an ad agency that's slightly behind the times. In this scene, the agency's creative team contemplates the Lemon ad.

I don't know what I hate about it the most, the ad or the car. You know, they did one last year, same kind of smirk. Remember Think Small? It was a half-page ad and a full-page buy. You could barely see the product. I don't get it. At the time, these ads were revolutionary.

In the beginning, there was Volkswagen, another famous New York ad man wrote. That was the day when the new advertising agency was really born. Here's another scene from Mad Men when Don Draper, the agency's creative director, interviews some new talent. After he looks at their portfolio, he hands it back to them with this line. Looks good. By the way, it has Julian Koenig's fingerprints all over it. It's Julian Koenig, actually. My father. And what has

irritated him for so long is not that he's not recognized for his talent. I mean the people who write Mad Men clearly know who he is. It's that some of his best work has been claimed by someone else. In my instance the greatest predator on my work was my one-time partner, George Lewis, who was the most heralded and talented art director, designer. And his talent is only exceeded by his omnivorous ego. who ever once would have been accepted, that the word would be we did it, regardless of who originated the work.

The word we didn't evaporated from George's vocabulary and it became I. If you've heard of anyone in the advertising industry, it might be George Lois. He's well known for a lot of things, but maybe especially for his provocative and funny Esquire magazine covers from the 1960s, like the one of Muhammad Ali posing as Saint Sebastian. But before that, George Lois worked at Doldane-Burnbach, and so did my father. In 1960, they both left DDB and joined up with another guy,

Fred Papert, to form their own upstart agency called PKL, Papert, Koenig, and Lois. George Lois wouldn't talk to me for this story. "'I'm not gonna get into a sophomore fight "'with a disgruntled ex-partner,' he wrote in an email. "'I can't say I blame him. "'I've had mixed feelings about this fight. "'Of course I wanna stick up for my father, take his side. "'But I've also thought there's something

"'inherently undignified about the whole thing. Like it's beneath my father to care whether or not George Lewis is taking credit for this or that slogan from 1962. So I never really paid attention to the details. Until now. Lately it's been coming up more, or at least more publicly, so I started asking questions. According to my father, it all started with the Harvey Prober account. Harvey Prober made elegant modern furniture. My dad says he came up with the ad. A beautiful chair with a matchbook under one leg and the line, if your Harvey Prober chair wobbles straighten your floor.

And a piece of copy that went with Holland, a friend of mine, came running into my office to say, George is upstairs with a Japanese editorial writer. They're doing an interview with him and he's claiming a Harvey Probert chair ad and he wrote it. So I called George down to my office and remonstrate, that's what men do frequently with him. And he says, I never said that, I would never say that. And he went back to his office and a little while later, Ron comes bursting into my office saying,

George said, I told that son of a gun how to get off. Meeting you, meaning he had told you. Told me where to get off. So that was really the start of it. In 1972, George Lois published a book, the first of many, about his career called George Be Careful. In it, he describes going to the Harvey Prober furniture factory in Massachusetts with my dad. Each chair was placed on an

electronic test platform to be sure it was absolutely level, Lois wrote. Got a book of matches? I asked Julian, a heavy smoker. He handed me a match book and I slid it under one leg of the chair on the test platform. I've got the ad, I said. If your Harvey Prober chair is crooked, straighten your floor. Julian scowled and shot back. Asshole. If your Harvey Probert chair wobbles, straighten your floor. That was the way the ad ran, and that was the way we built the first Red Hot creative

agency. And none of that ever happened, as described by George. He didn't ask me for a matchbook. He didn't slide it under the leg of a chair and say, I've got the ad. None of it is true. But his makes a better story. His is a marvelous story. George is a talented storyteller with a vivid imagination. The only thing that could exceed it would be the truth. There were other instances, also regarding ads that were groundbreaking for their time. A campaign for the New York Herald Tribune, who says a good newspaper has to be dull.

Some famous Xerox commercials showing a little girl operating a copy machine, and later a chimpanzee doing it. Add several people who worked on the account who complained that George literally had nothing to do with. Then there's the ad for coldine cough medicine. The page is entirely black, with just two quotes at different heights, meant to show a couple talking in bed. John, is that Billy coughing?

says the wife. Get up and give him some cold bean, the husband replies. In an interview 20 years later, George Lewis said, the idea for the ad hit me like a brainstorm. This was the first time there would be no copy, no package design, no trademark, he said. It was really the beginning of a new creative revolution. It was one of those ads that made history effectively.

Again, my dad is adamant that the whole ad, copy and design design were his. There are many possibilities here of what's going on. George Lois could be lying. Or George Lois could have convinced himself in some way that what he's saying about all this stuff is true. Or my dad could be doing the same thing, remembering stuff that happened when it didn't happen. Or I suppose my dad could be lying.

I'd worry about those latter options more if my father was the only one disputing George Lewis's version of history, but he's not. There's the photographer Carl Fischer, who worked with George Lewis for more than 30 years and shot many of the most famous Esquire covers. Carl Fischer says George is taking credit for cover ideas and photographs that were Carl's

and talked in detail about certain photo shoots, like about flying to Las Vegas to shoot the boxer Sonny Liston as Santa, and even placing the Santa cap on Liston's head. Or rushing Italian actress Verna Lisi into a photo shoot in New York for this famous cover where she's pretending to shave her face. But Fisher says George wasn't there for either shoot. In fact, the Lisi shoot happened in Rome and he still has receipts to prove it. And then there's Shelley Zelaznik, the first editor of New York magazine. George once told a reporter quote, my hand on the Bible, I, George Lois, created New York magazine. Mr. Zelaznik says that's simply not true. He himself remembers making the first dummy front page one hot August night in

1963. Not only that, he's never met George Lois. As for George's version, he told me, I'm at a loss. I don't know why grown-ups do things like this. But the story my father objects to the most isn't about ad copy at all. It's personal. Papert, Koenig and Lois had gotten the Dutch Masters cigar account and their TV spokesman at the time was this famous comedian Ernie Kovacs. So my dad flew out to LA to meet him and they hit it off. And Ernie and I spent the day together, driving around and lunched together.

Ended the afternoon in the lobby of the hotel I was staying in, the Beverly Hilton. He was not allowed past the lobby because he had short pants on. And then he went off to go to a party that night. And on his way home, there being a rain, his car skidded and went into a pole and Ernie killed himself. I was on a plane back to New York and learned about it the next morning. So unfortunate incident, but certainly memorable for me and lo and behold. Lo and behold in his 2005 book Celebrities, which is spelled with a dollar sign instead of a C at the beginning, George tells the story of his lovely poolside lunch with Ernie, his car ride to the airport with Ernie, his red-eye flight back to New York, and his learning the following morning from a stack of stillbound newspapers

that Ernie had been killed in a car crash. My father has tried to fight back, aggressively at times. For instance, after the Ernie Kovacs story appeared in Celebrities, my dad retaliated in the medium he knows best. He wrote an ad. I wrote an ad, Lo-Loa-Lois. That's Lois, L-O-I-S. And I wanted to print it in the New York Times as a book review, a public service book review. The Times didn't run it, but it did run an ad week, though toward the back of the magazine, and it got no response. Over the years, he and some of

his former colleagues have written to reporters at the New York Times and other places trying to correct the record but their letters have mostly been ignored. Just last year a Times story about an exhibit of George Lewis's Esquire covers credited him in the very first paragraph with Think Small, the Xerox ads with the chimp and a couple of other campaigns people say George either didn't originate or didn't even work on. Finally, the Times printed a short correction, giving Think Small back to my dad, but it was a small victory, three weeks after the fact.

In the mid-80s, my dad wrote a letter to George directly, threatening to sue, it seems, and received a letter back calling him a sad, tortured, and tragic figure. All in all, my father's efforts haven't really done the damage he's hoped, or really any damage at all. He's an indignant basset hound, nipping at the heels of the media's Great Dane. George Lewis is a good talker, with an engaging personality, and he's become something of a spokesman for the advertising industry. There are quotes in the newspaper, and magazine profiles, exhibits, books. Errors printed once are repeated and repeated. So if you look up Think Small on the internet, for instance, you'll find it

attributed to Julian Koenig. But you're also likely to learn that George Lois wrote it. I liked when he took credit for accounts he never had anything to do with because that made it almost comical. All the Xerox stuff, Xeroxed in the capital I got, was done by Sam Scali and I think Mike Chappell and George at the end started taking credit for that too. That's Fred Papert, the P of PKL. He was the guy who recruited Lois and Koenig to make a new agency in 1960. Now he's one of the guys responsible for redeveloping Times Square as president of the 42nd Street Development Corporation. He knows the stories all too well.

Xerox, Harvey Prober, Coldeen, Ernie Kovacs even. It's nuts. I think he's really a scull of screw-loose. I think George truly doesn't know what he's doing. But it's nutty on both sides. Fred's in my dad's camp and so far as he knows and believes my dad is telling the truth. But his support more or less stops there. And he's categorical on this point, that my dad is himself acting like a nut, wasting his time.

They've talked about this on Rides to and from the Racetrack. The reason that Julian should not be fussing about this stuff at this stage is A, nobody gives a s***. B, anybody that would give a s*** knows already what it's about. This is what George does, is George's thing. And it's just gotta put a lid on it. But I've had this conversation with him 100 times, and he gets really pissed off.

So I know he's got to screw loose too. Your father can be a pain in the ass, you know. And even being testy if you say to him, Julian, f*** off already. We've heard this story and we know about the wobbling chair or the wobbling floor. I've forgotten which one. If you have no idea how many letters we wrote to the New York Times, to the advertising age, to this and that, this is a dialogue between old farts. Julian's in another world from these kinds of things. Julian is one of the

great thinkers and creators in the advertising business. If some nutcase claims credit, who cares? And he doesn't even like me very much. You have to understand that that's where we start. Well, it's true. I mean, I think, because he goes to the river, but he goes to the races with me because I have a car. I mean, I think, because he goes to the river, but he goes to the races with me because I have a car.

My father recognizes that there are only about four people left on earth who care about this stuff. It's just that he happens to be one of them, and he cannot let it go. I assume if I had a different personality, I would say I know what I have done or not done and let it go at that. But I'm a fallible fellow and obviously with ego of his own and I resent being burgled. The odd thing about all this, as my older brother John points out, is that my father's never exactly been a champion of advertising. And he never believed he didn't have a... he wasn't a true believer in the business.

I mean, I remember him saying to me as a kid, you know, if you don't find something you want to do and really work at it, you're going to end up like me, a writer of short sentences. That's verbatim. And so it's a little ironic, you know, because he didn't care. That's the thing, Sarah. You know, all those years he didn't care because I think he thought it was beneath him. And the business, in some ways, was not beneath him, but was not serious enough to care that much about. And now he does.

I understand why he cares. He's 88 years old now, so his legacy, understandably, is on his mind. And even though he did campaigns for all sorts of good causes, gun control, nuclear proliferation, Robert Kennedy's senatorial and presidential campaigns, my father's not quite satisfied with his life's work. Advertising is built on puffery, on at heart deception. And I don't think anybody can go proudly into the next world with a career built on deception, even though no matter how well they do it. You're not necessarily proud that you had a career

in the field of advertising, and that's your legacy, but you are proud that you were the best in the business at the thing you chose to do. I could have said it better myself. If he could go back choose another career. My father would have liked to have been an environmentalist of some kind which is why he'd really like to be remembered for something almost nobody knows he did, naming Earth Day. It agitated him to look up Earth Day on Wikipedia recently and not see his name anywhere. So a few days ago, I added it. Sarah Koenig. We first started writing this story back in 2009.

Sarah's dad Julian Koenig died five years after that. He was 93. George Lois died a few years after that. These days Sarah is the host of the serial podcast. She worked as a producer at our show for a decade before that. Coming up, Peter Sagal, long before Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, his lost years in Havana, that's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. This is American Life from Ira Glass.

Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Origin Stories, where we go back to figure out where things came from. We arrived at Act Two of our program, Act Two, Silent Partner. So years ago, Sean Cole visited Chad's Trading Post, a restaurant filled with frilly knick-knacks in Southampton, Massachusetts. It's a restaurant with a very distinct origin story. The first time my girlfriend Mary Ellen and I walked into

Chad's trading post she noticed that only boys work there and thought it was weird. Normally she said in a place like this a small country restaurant you only see girls working. She pointed to the cover of the menu which read dedicated to and operated proudly in the memory of Chad D. McDonald, 31274 to 31190. She leaned into me and whispered, do you think the owner hires only boys because they remind her of her son? I certainly thought this was possible and sad in a way that makes you feel embarrassed for that person. Then a man came over and poured us some coffee, and when he turned around there in huge white

letters on the back of his blue polo shirt, it said, Chad's brother. Do you think that's what they call all the managers here? I asked Mary Ellen. Do you think that's really Chad's brother? Then another friendlier manager type came over and asked us how we were doing and if we needed more coffee. And I noticed his shirt. My shirt says Chad's best friend. Logo over on the right hand side.

And it just tells the customers who we are. You got Chad's best friend, you got Chad's brother, Chad's dad. And we had Chad's mom too, but she's doing other things. This is the story of Chad's trading post. From the time he was 12, Chad and his brothers and a few friends had always talked about starting a small restaurant together when they graduated high school. They'd planned out menus,

Chad's father took him looking for locations, but Chad died in a shooting accident two days before his 16th birthday. Chad's father, Glenn, his brothers, Scott and Corey, and his best friend, Mike, tell the story. The boy who shot and killed my son was his younger brother's best friend. It was myself and my best friend at the time,

and Chad, and they were cleaning up the cellar for his birthday, oh, you were there too, yeah. We were in the kitchen cooking sausage. Yeah, we were cooking dinner. But they were downstairs cleaning, and I was upstairs, my mother had just left, and me and Cory were upstairs cooking dinner, and they came up for a break, went in the room.

And we heard like a little firecracker go off, you know? And then the person came out of the room, he had blood on his hands, he's, you know, freaking out. I shot Chad, I shot Chad. The official ruling, which was that Chad picked up a gun, pointed at this fellow, said bang. The other fellow picked up a gun pointed back at Chad, pulled the trigger and that was all.

So I called 911 and I paged my mother and you know, then the police got there. I was charged for involuntary manslaughter because it was my handgun that ultimately killed Chad and that I was not aware that he had two of my handguns out of my cabinet in his bedroom at the time. And frankly, that was something I should have been aware of. In 1993, the year Chad would have graduated from high school, the year he and Mike and his brothers and his father had planned to open a restaurant, they decided to open Chad's Trading Post.

This is Chad's corner of the restaurant. You notice the menu board. It tells you to welcome to Chad's Trading Post family restaurant. It says, nobody leaves hungry. And with all the specials of the day. It also has a claimer in the bottom that's named in memory of Chad D. McDonald on the date of his birth, which is 3-12-74. In all of the interviews I've ever heard and seen of an emotional nature, the person

answering questions doesn't begin to cry until well into the interview. Chad's dad began crying before he even turned on my tape recorder. I asked him for a quick tour of the restaurant. It's a nice place. Homey. Even proofy, though all the men who created it are tattooed, muscly, working-class guys, Chad's father included. To the left of that shows you the last and most recent picture of my son, which was taken

about six weeks before he died. And the picture of the two boys that were named in memory of him. His younger brother's son, who was Ian Chadwick, and his best friend's son, who was named Chad Michael. This photo originally showed the two babies in Glenn's arms, but they had the photographer alter the photo, insert Chad's head over Glenn's. What they did was took the picture and replaced by computer Chad's picture over mine. It's actually my arms holding him, but the rest of it's all Chad.

Glenn showed me a painting in another corner of the restaurant. It was the comedy and tragedy masks from the cover of Motley Crue's album, Theater of Pain, Chad's favorite record. After he died, Chad's friends and brothers adapted the design into a memorial to him. It appears on their shirts, two brass masks hang over the door, smiling and frowning. A huge flag with the masks hangs in the breeze outside, too heavy to flutter. Chad's brother Scott calls them the faces. This was my first tattoo.

I got the comedy and tragedy faces with the memory of Chad Banner. And that was my first tattoo. And I got that for the obvious reason though. That's pretty much the family symbol now. It started off with my father getting it. Because this was the tattoo he wanted to get without the banners. But that's what he wanted to get.

That's what he planned on getting the following year for his birthday. I mean he already had it planned out. So my father came home with it one day and he got it. So you and your dad though aren't the only... No, there's me and my father, Steve Prisbian, Mike Richburg, who still works here. My grandmother has the sad face. On her chest too. Yeah, she has it on her chest too.

And Eric Marwick, who who worked here has it also. And it's good. It's nice to see people. There's probably altogether 15 people that have his name tattooed on them. We used to sit around the kitchen table and take a needle and wrap thread around it and dip it in calligraphy ink and tattoo each other with it. And there's quite a few people who we masterfully tattooed Chad's name on their arm, whether they like it now or not. It's still there.

They've tried to stay as close to Chad's vision of the restaurant as possible. He never specified decor, so they've had a free hand there. He and Mike actually drafted a menu for the place, and the families kept about half of it. The other half was slow-baking recipes that no customer would ever wait for. Chad was also a lot of fun, everyone says, a lot of fun, a comedian. And they say that's why they joke around so much at Chad's Trading Post. Scott says when he sees a heavyset customer that comes in a lot, he says, hey, tubby.

He builds towers of little creamer packages on the bald head of another customer. Glen throws crumpled up napkins at his employees. They have water fights. All this levity in a place that's essentially a large roadside memorial that serves massive omelets. Chad was here. We'd have the place upside down by now. How do you mean? Oh, and it's been fun.

We really have fun now, but I think if he was here, you know, we wouldn't have all that tension of his passing on our shoulder. You know, the only tension we'd have is how much trouble we're going to get into. Because I got to say, I mean, you know, when I was here with Mariella, and, you know, and we, you know, we didn't know anything about the restaurant either, obviously. We just, you know, found it. And, you know, the first thing we saw was the menu, and then we saw the back of Scott's shirt, and, you know, I mean, it was a little creepy.

I've never gotten that response before. Never gotten a response that was creepy. I always got the response that's a very nice thing to do, it's very genuine, and it's heartwarming. I've never gotten creepy before. Well, I just mean that it's like there's somebody else here in the restaurant that's not really here. But you know what I mean? It's exactly what it is. He's here. He's here with us and we kind of have to yell at him once in a while because every time something silly or stupid happens

or you've got to blame somebody and he's one to pull a prank on me for that. He's definitely here, but there's nothing creepy about it. There's nothing creepy about it. I think I can safely say I have never seen any other family keep someone alive to this degree. They've gone out of their way to construct a world where they couldn't possibly forget Chad. A jumbo-sized photo of Chad stood behind Scott and his wife at their wedding.

They believe Chad has protected their lives in serious accidents, that he brought Mike's son through a recent infection unscathed. Chad's room is the same as it replaced the carpet. MUSIC Before they did all this, right after Chad died, they all say they were lost. Mike said he wanted to crawl into a hole. Scott and his father had to make a deal with each other that neither would kill himself.

Scott and Corey went into counseling. Scott says it didn't help much. You know, but that's how it was when it happened. I mean, you didn't know what to do. I had no idea what to do. I walked in the bathroom, I look in the mirror, and I'm staring at myself in the mirror, and I flipped out and started punching the mirror.

So now both my hands are cut, and I'm bleeding all over the place, and sitting on the floor crying, and I have no idea why. You know when you're that old and something like that happens you don't have any idea what to do in any circumstance. You know walking across a bridge looking down. Yeah maybe. You sit there and think about it for a few minutes. It takes a lot out of you. It takes a lot out of your mind. You know and counseling made it worse for a few minutes. It takes a lot out of you. It takes a lot out of your mind. You know? And counseling made it worse for a while.

What made it better, what Glenn says saved them, was starting the family business. Chad's business. But is it, I guess, is it healthy? I mean, is it... I think everybody grieves in a different way. For me, it is. Because I'm doing something constructive. I was semi-retired and disabled before. I'm still disabled, but I was just vegging. I was sitting at home feeling sorry for myself and doing nothing.

When the idea came up from his brother Scott, and we started looking into it rather seriously, we found the place. It was almost like a breath of fresh air was something we could all do in memory of his brother and have some fun with it, and we have for seven years. Healthy? I don't know. I mean, the psychiatrists say many different things. People who blithely say things will get better over time have

never been here. Things never get better. They get a little less immediate. So we worked this in memory of him as a way of keeping him immediate to us. Nobody forgets. We get along this way. We get by this way. The whole bunch of us get by this way. MUSIC In Northampton, where I used to live, there's a couple, and they own a cafe.

And at one point, they had a couple and they own a cafe. And at one point they had a child who lived 19 days. And after they disconnected him from life support, they built a shrine in their restaurant for him. Pictures of him connected to white tubes, dotted the walls and beams. And his father, a musician, would perform a song at the cafe weekly, as I remember it, comparing his son to a salmon, and to the messiah. And some of us, at first, though we knew it had to be hard, felt a little embarrassed for them, as though this tragedy had driven them a little

crazy. I think it's hard for us to know exactly what to do or say when we see public mourning like this, because we see it so rarely. The intensity of it is shocking. It's too naked. And usually we think that if you hold on to someone after their death this way, you can't live your own life. But clearly, you can. Sean Cole.

In the years since we've broadcast this story, Chad's trading post closed down. The family kept Chad's memory alive for a while in a new restaurant called Chad's Good Table ten minutes away, but then they sold off that restaurant. These days, his memory is honored by four different boys who have been named after him. ["Wait, Wait, Don't Film Me"] Act 3, Wait, Wait, Don't Film Me. Now, this origin story. Our public radio colleague, the host of NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me,

Mr. Peter Segel, used to be a playwright. And to give you a sense of the kind of work that he did as a playwright his most successful play He says was about a Holocaust denier and the Jewish attorney who represented that Holocaust denier in court and so it was all you know intellectual arguments and drama and Involved the Holocaust and questions of the First Amendment law and it came to the attention of this producer Lawrence Bender Who is most well known for being Quentin Tarantino's producer.

So he produced, among many other movies, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and so on and so forth. Back in the 90s, when all this happened, Bender read Peter's play and liked it and called him up and asked Peter if he wanted to write a movie. And Peter basically had been waiting for this phone call from Hollywood forever. I mean, there was, I think the year of 1992,

my annual income was $10,000. I was, yeah, this was the phone call that you wait for. So after tossing around some different ideas for this film, Lawrence Bender introduces Peter to this woman who he works with, who at 15 had been an American in Cuba when the Cuban Revolution happened. Maybe there's a film in that. So Peter starts writing this film that's half romance,

growing up film, half politics, about an American teenage girl in Cuba in the 50s. And I had no, I didn't know anything about the Cuban Revolution, but one of the things I found out was that everybody involved with it was incredibly young. Castro himself was only 29. They were all 17, 18, 19, 20 years old,

these guys up in the mountains with him. And one of the things that actually happened was almost as soon as they took over, the Cuban Revolution, these wonderful young Democrats, you know, freedom-loving rebels from the mountains, started executing people on television. And in my original conception, there were two parallel stories. There was Maria, who I called the central character, who had a rebellious, more typically adolescent rebellion going against her own parents. And then there was her romantic interest,

a character named Josefo, who was a Cuban and was sort of a third column rebel underground guy living and working in Havana to undermine the regime, sometimes through violence. And eventually this film did get made and... It did. It did. It finally got made a bit later and I'm just gonna play a clip here from it. Oh God, I love dancing with him.

Did it ever occur to you that that boy might be using you? A nice American girl who can be his ticket out of here? You may love dancing with that boy, but there are more important factors here, like your family and your future. Why does it have to be either or? Just because you gave up your passion? Why should I? So that's a clip from the film. You want to just let people know the title of the film?

The title of the film is Dirty Dancing 2, colon, Havana Nights. I have to say, I watched the movie last night. I watched Dirty Dancing. The whole thing? Yeah. There is not a single line of dialogue in that movie that I wrote. So how does the film go from political coming-of-age drama to Dirty Dancing to Havana Nights? Well, of course, it's an old Hollywood story.

Peter writes his film. he turns it in, they ask him to make it more like, oh, maybe could it be more like Dirty Dancing, Innocent Girl with a semi-dangerous guy. And sometimes I think back on the experience and I say, you know, I should have said to them, hey, if that's what you want, I'm really not the guy for it.

He says, each draft got worse and worse, even he didn't like it, finally it was shelved. Years later, the producer who actually owned the rights to the film Dirty Dancing teamed up with Laurence Bender to make a sequel in somebody thought of Peter's old script. All the politics of the film got reduced to this one moment where really unconnected to anything else in the film, somebody attempts to shoot some unidentified political figure

at the climax of the dance contest. And then later in a moment of obligatory foreshadowing, our couple talks about whether Castro would ever kick out Americans from Cuba. I'm just saying that- What, that I might have to leave? Could happen. But they wouldn't do that. Not if the whole idea is to give people their freedom.

Can I ask you what it was like for you to watch the film? For you to sit in a theater and watch the film? It was fine. It was really fine. Oh, honey. No, no, no. I mean this. Let me put it this way. Before I got that call, this experience had been a failure. I mean, I remember at that time, you know, just lying in bed going, well, I had my shot and I blew it, you know, all I ever wanted

was a shot and I got my shot and it failed. I did a bad job. And so then when I got the phone call, it's like, oh, it's going to be main and it's going to be Dirty Dancing 2. That's a happy ending. That's a much better ending than the ending I thought I had, which was that it was just a disaster. Act Four. Bill Clinton's seven-year-old brother. So reporter Mary Wootenberg spent years writing about two boys, brothers who were born in a Tanzanian refugee camp and then settled in Georgia in the United States in 2006. Many of her stories focused on the older brother, nine-year-old Bill Clinton Haddam.

His dad was a big fan of the former president. After a tough first year in the United States, Bill seemed to have settled in. But his little brother, Igay, was still struggling to understand his own origin story. To get his seven-year-old brain around who he was and where he came from. At some point, Mary had spent so much time with these two boys that she was more than a reporter. She was more like a member of the family.

Anyway, here's Mary. Igay calls me on the phone almost every day. Sometimes he leaves messages. First unheard message. Hello, Mary. This is me, E.E. And, um, the bill is going to summer school, and now I'm not going to summer school. Okay, this is me, E.E. Okay, bye. In between the messages, we have long chats. I tape most of our conversations because I'm writing these articles about him and his family.

And the conversations always seem to start with one of two questions. When can I come to your house? Or when are you coming to my house? Hello? Mary, you almost here? Oh, I'm there, I'm gonna be there soon. I'm in the car right now driving to you

and there's a little bit of traffic. You're driving now? I'm driving right now. You're to you, and there's a little bit of traffic. You're driving now? I'm driving right now. You're coming to take us home, right? I am, yes. So, you know I'm crazy about this kid. He's sweet, nosy, funny. He's been to my house a bunch

since I started doing these stories. But the first time he came over, six months ago, he announced to me and my husband and his brother, Bill Clinton, that from now on, the first grader, over, six months ago, he announced to me, my husband, and his brother, Bill Clinton, that from now on, the first grader, formerly known as Igay, would be going by his middle name, John. I'd already known something was up,

because that afternoon, my husband took Igay to the park. Igay was up on the jungle gym, when a girl about the same age called over from the swing set and asked his name, and he got all weird and wouldn't answer her. She thought he hadn't heard her, so she hopped off the swing, came over to the jungle gym, and asked him again, what's your name? Igay got this kind of cornered look and said, I don't know my name. But by later that night, he seemed to have made a decision.

He was now John. In our living room, he struggled to type his new name into a video game. J, O, wait was it J or G? Then Bill offered to help and Ige said, I know how to spell my own name. Ige picked up English first and best of anyone in his family. But his teachers say Ige's more confused about where he's from and who he is than other seven-year-olds they've seen. And the charter school Ige and Bill attend is about half refugees,

so you'd think they'd see a lot of this. Teachers say no. Little kids usually realize pretty fast that most people who ask, where are you from? They don't want the whole story. And it doesn't really matter if you say you're from Burma, where your parents were from, or Thailand, where you lived in a camp. In first grade you just pick one and get on with your day. But for Ike, where are you from has never felt that simple. All winter he seemed to be revising his story. First he denied the camp he'd lived in his whole life, hated the word refugee.

Then he started saying he wasn't from Congo, his nationality, or Tanzania, where he was born, or Africa at all. He'd say, I'm from here, or America. Watching TV, he'd point to rich white kids and say, that's me. At home, he'd point to rich white kids and say, that's me. At home, he threw tantrums. At school, he sometimes seemed almost catatonic. He wouldn't answer questions, wouldn't meet people's eyes.

His parents, his teachers, everyone felt helpless. They didn't know what set him off or how to reach him. And he seemed to regress. If he were sitting on the couch, he'd snuggle up or take my hand. The slightest things made him cry. He seemed lost. One night on the phone, I reminded him where he was born, in Tanzania.

I'm from Tanzania, he said. I'm from Tanzania? Uh-huh. I am? Well, that's where you were born. You were born, Where am I from? Well, you were born in Tanzania, and your dad came from Congo,

and your mom came from Rwanda. So your family has a lot of places where you're from. Okay. Bye. Bye. Iggy's parents didn't mind calling him John. They were just kind of puzzled. The idea that you could hate your name seemed like one more baffling thing about America. They just had no idea what Iggy was going through, and it made Iggy feel more distant

from them. A while back, I was riding with Iggy and his parents in their car when he said to me, I don't want to live with my mom. I thought it was a set up for one of his jokes, so I said, You don't want to live with your mom. Why? He said, I want to live with you. I said, No, you don't want to live with me. But then Ige got all serious and said,

But what if I forget my language? I said, What do you mean? And he said, if I forget my language, I can't live with them because they won't understand me. Later on the phone, we talked about what it's like for him talking with his mom. When you speak English, does she understand you? No. So maybe you're learning faster, huh? I just forget it right now.

Swahili? Yes. Like what do you forget? Everything. And then at some point this spring, Ige just went back to being Ige. A lot of things happened for him at once. His green card arrived, his reading took off. It took me a while to notice that

John had vanished. His teachers don't remember either exactly when he stopped correcting them, but by the last month of school he was taking his turn in the semicircle with everyone else. No drama, just my name is Ege and I'm from Congo. And suddenly he was volunteering details about his life in the camp. Games he'd played, his mud brick house. Ige seemed to be making peace with his past and his name. And he moved on to other burning seven-year-old questions.

What's a bingo night mean? Oh. Ha ha ha. Ha ha. Um, you know how you play bingo at school? Yeah. It's like a night when a bunch of adults get together, maybe kids too, and they play a game that's like that only with numbers instead of words.

Okay, I'm waiting for you. Oh, okay. I'll see you soon. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. But just when it seemed like Ige had finally accepted his own name, the other shoe dropped. The last week of school, Igay asked me, um, what does gay mean? I told him gay can mean happy, or it can mean when a man loves another man.

Igay started sobbing. We were in his kitchen and he just collapsed against the fridge. Finally he choked out what was wrong and it turned out that some second graders had been taunting him, Ege, you're gay. And he told them, that's not a word. It was just one more strike against that name. But for now, John hasn't reappeared. Ege is sticking with Ege.

The other day, when we were riding in the car, I said some offhand thing about needing to call my mom. Ige said, you have a mom? I said, yeah, of course. He could not believe it. How had he not known about this before? This year, it's been hard enough for Igay to put together his own story. The idea that I, wait, everybody, comes from somewhere? It kind of blew his mind.

Mary Wilton Berg. She wrote about Igay, Bill Clinton, and their family for the Christian Science Monitor. Today's show is a rerun and Igay is now 23. He still talks to his mother in Swahili. You can read more of the family stories at marywiltonberg.com yourself give yourself a break life was a man to be run to resist all the you well program was produced today by lisa pollock and myself with alex blimberg sean cole jane marie sarah canick elissa ship and nancy opdyke our senior producer for today's show is julie snider production help from j.p dukes music help from jessica hopper help for today's show is Julie Snyder, production help from J.P. Dukes, music help from Jessica Hopper, help on today's rerun from Michael Kamatay, Angela Gervasi, Catherine Raymando, Stone Nelson, and Ryan Rummery. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, thanks today to Bob Fokinflick, Matt Holtzman, and

Hank Rosenfeld. Pino Adia's research paper about garages and entrepreneurs that I talked about at the beginning of the show was done with Christopher Ryder. Dan Heath, who I also talked to at the beginning of the show, has now hosted the podcast, What It's Like To Be. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torrey Malatia, who hears himself quoted in these credits every single week on our program and says,

I never said that. I would never say that. I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Live. ["This American Live"] Next week on the podcast of This American Live, Daniel Sausage is a comedian. And after one of his shows, a fan walked up and told Daniel that he ended his marriage after watching Daniel's special. Even showed him the divorce papers.

Then it happened again and again. Fans got in touch to say they'd broken up with their partners after seeing Daniel's show. The comedy routine powerful enough to end your marriage, listen if you dare. Next week on the podcast, on the local public radio station. ["The Daily Show"]