Transcript

10.1.26 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and today
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Speaker 1: I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine, dated September-October 2026.
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Speaker 1: As a reminder, Radio Eye is a reading service intended
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Speaker 1: for people who are blind or have other disabilities that
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Speaker 1: make it difficult to read printed material. Please join me
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Speaker 1: now for the first article, which is Part 2 of
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Speaker 1: For Many Americans, COVID is Still a Chronic Disabling Disease.
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Speaker 1: These Scientists Are Working Tirelessly to To Bring Them Relief,
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Speaker 1: by Mike Mariani. In the first part of our story,
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Speaker 1: we meet Julia Moore Vogel, a computational biologist whose 2020
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Speaker 1: COVID infection developed into severe long COVID, transforming her from
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Speaker 1: an active scientist, runner, wife, and mother into someone who
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Speaker 1: spends much of each day managing debilitating fatigue, cognitive symptoms,
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Speaker 1: and post-exertional crashes. Her experience reflects the broader struggle of
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Speaker 1: millions of Americans with long COVID. Patients have faced skepticism,
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Speaker 1: few proven treatments, and a medical system still trying to define, diagnose,
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Speaker 1: and understand a complex chronic illness that can affect multiple
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Speaker 1: organ systems and keep people from work and daily life.
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Speaker 1: Part one highlights the scientists trying to solve long COVID's
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Speaker 1: biological mysteries, especially Michael Peluso, and colleagues at UCSF who
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Speaker 1: run a program at the university called Long-Term Impact of
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Speaker 1: Infection with Novel Coronavirus, abbreviated as the LINC program. Their
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Speaker 1: work investigates several possible mechanisms, including immune dysfunction, reactivated viruses,
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Speaker 1: mitochondrial disruption, and viral reservoirs, with growing attention on whether
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Speaker 1: remnants of SARS-CoV-2 persist in tissues such as the gut
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Speaker 1: and bone marrow. Through patient-led advocacy, large observational studies, and
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Speaker 1: shared biospecimen banks, researchers are gradually building the evidence needed
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Speaker 1: to identify biomarkers and develop treatments, though Part 1 makes
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Speaker 1: clear that long COVID remains difficult, urgent, and far from
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Speaker 1: fully understood. Here now is Part 2. In May, a
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Speaker 1: few months after I met Tim Henrich, a translational virologist
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Speaker 1: at UCSF. He presented new research at a long COVID
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Speaker 1: symposium organized by Polybio, demonstrating what a chain reaction triggered
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Speaker 1: by viral persistence might look like. Using a form of
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Speaker 1: biological analysis known as transcriptomics, which records a snapshot of
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Speaker 1: a cell's RNA molecules at a given moment and reveals
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Speaker 1: which genes are actively turned on and off, possibly by
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Speaker 1: a viral infection. Henrik showed how the gut tissue of
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Speaker 1: long COVID patients revealed signs of immune dysregulation. Near viral reservoirs,
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Speaker 1: certain immune systems weakened while others were amplified. This suggests
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Speaker 1: that the immune system was detecting the virus but mounting
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Speaker 1: a disordered response to it, possibly because the virus or
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Speaker 1: proteins it released interfered with its defenses. These responses, he argued,
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Speaker 1: could explain not only why the immune system was failing
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Speaker 1: to fully clear the virus from the body, but also
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Speaker 1: how its persistence may be causing chronic inflammation. The findings
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Speaker 1: have yet to be published, and Peluso, a co-author of
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Speaker 1: the paper with Henrik, was careful not to get ahead
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Speaker 1: of the peer review process. But he did allow that
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Speaker 1: the research represented a meaningful step forward. It suggests that
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Speaker 1: there is biological activity that is occurring in these spaces
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Speaker 1: that are either allowing these reservoirs to persist or are
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Speaker 1: a consequence of the reservoirs, he said. Polybio's website goes
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Speaker 1: so far as to describe the new findings when combined
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Speaker 1: with similar data sets presented by other researchers as a, quote,
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Speaker 1: major working model of long COVID mechanism, gut viral persistence
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Speaker 1: leading to incomplete clearance and immune dysregulation. A few weeks later,
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Speaker 1: I traveled to visit Julia Moore Vogel. Despite, and in
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Speaker 1: some perverse way because of, her own deteriorating health, she
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Speaker 1: has emerged as a prominent patient scientist in the long
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Speaker 1: COVID field. In 2024, Vogel moved with her husband and
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Speaker 1: daughter to upstate New York to be closer to her parents.
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Speaker 1: Late last year, they bought a house in Skadacoke, a
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Speaker 1: quiet town of 7,000 hunched on the banks of the
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Speaker 1: Hoosick River. When I pulled up to it, a canary
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Speaker 1: yellow colonial-style house with white shutters, and a center gable framing,
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Speaker 1: an ice-glazed roof. The front yard was carpeted in snow.
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Speaker 1: I met Vogel in her kitchen, and from her wheelchair,
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Speaker 1: she led me through her house and daily routine. Vogel
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Speaker 1: still works at Scripps. Her position remains fully remote. While
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Speaker 1: she continues to work on the All of Us study,
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Speaker 1: she is now also an assistant professor at the Institute,
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Speaker 1: focused on long COVID, where she works to get drug
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Speaker 1: trials off the ground. I have felt since 2020 that
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Speaker 1: we need to be doing clinical trials to help people
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Speaker 1: feel better, she said. Leading me out of the kitchen
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Speaker 1: and into the dining room, Vogel pointed to a long
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Speaker 1: wooden table with an iron, fabrics, and a small machine
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Speaker 1: with a silver needle plate, an embroidery station. It's a
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Speaker 1: really good sedentary thing, she said. I make gifts for
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Speaker 1: all my disabled friends that I've never met. In the
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Speaker 1: corner of the room was an elevator installed after her
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Speaker 1: family purchased the home. Vogel agonized over the decision for months,
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Speaker 1: unnerved by the cost of the project. I really waffled
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Speaker 1: about it because it was so expensive, she told me.
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Speaker 1: I was like, I really don't want to spend my
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Speaker 1: emergency fund on this. And my dad, who also uses
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Speaker 1: a wheelchair, was like, Julia, this is an emergency. Vogel
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Speaker 1: took the elevator upstairs and I met her in her bedroom.
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Speaker 1: an unembellished space where she spends most of her day.
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Speaker 1: When we entered, the room was dimly lit. Bright lights
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Speaker 1: can induce post-exertional malaise, leaving her with painful migraines. She
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Speaker 1: does most of her work from her mattress, and everything
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Speaker 1: she needs during the day, medications, supplements, tea, notes, are
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Speaker 1: an arm's length from her bed. Vogel is dogged in
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Speaker 1: maintaining a demanding work life. She runs a clinical trial
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Speaker 1: of her own design that repurposes the GLP-1 receptor agonist
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Speaker 1: terzepatide to see whether its anti-inflammatory effects can benefit long
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Speaker 1: COVID sufferers. She has already tried another GLP-1 and found
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Speaker 1: that it wasn't an effective treatment for her, but she
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Speaker 1: is determined to see if the drug class can help others.
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Speaker 1: The trial is still underway, which means data is not
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Speaker 1: yet available, and because she is a principal investigator, She
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Speaker 1: remains completely blinded, but some participants have anecdotally reported marked
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Speaker 1: improvements in their symptoms, and Vogel is hopeful that the
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Speaker 1: data will bear out their experiences. A few intrepid physicians
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Speaker 1: already prescribe terzepatide in an off-label capacity. One, David Kaufman,
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Speaker 1: a leading HIV-AIDS physician and a co-founder in 2017 of
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Speaker 1: the Center for Complex Diseases, presented survey data last year
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Speaker 1: showing that between 60 and 90 percent of patients responded
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Speaker 1: positively to small doses of GLP-1. Vogel's trial is one
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Speaker 1: of around 90 long COVID drug trials that are underway
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Speaker 1: or have concluded worldwide. The NIH is also tracking hundreds
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Speaker 1: of other trials that focus primarily on behavioral treatments such
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Speaker 1: as diet and exercise. In addition to studies of Paxlovid, ambaricidinib,
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Speaker 1: which have yet to show convincing evidence that either is
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Speaker 1: an effective treatment for long COVID. Researchers are examining a
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Speaker 1: range of other existing medications, including the diabetes drug metformin,
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Speaker 1: meant to improve metabolic energy, and the antidepressant fluvoxamine, which
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Speaker 1: has reduced fatigue in some patients. The heart disease drug evabradine, meanwhile,
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Speaker 1: failed to improve dizziness and fatigue in patients who developed
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Speaker 1: heart problems after a COVID infection. Another study, which is
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Speaker 1: expected to begin this fall, will investigate whether a combination
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Speaker 1: of repurposed HIV and cholesterol drugs, meriviroc and atorvastatin, can
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Speaker 1: improve both physical and neurocognitive symptoms, including brain fog, fatigue, dizziness,
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Speaker 1: and indigestion. At least one cancer-fighting biologic therapy, known as ANCTIVA,
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Speaker 1: which may boost immune response, is in safety trials at UCSF.
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Speaker 1: and microbiologist and co-founder of PolyBio, Amy Prohl, Peluso, and
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Speaker 1: other researchers are working with a small pharmaceutical company called
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Speaker 1: InVivid to see if its experimental monoclonal antibody, which can
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Speaker 1: neutralize diverse COVID variants, might be an effective treatment for
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Speaker 1: long COVID. It's one of the most anticipated trials from
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Speaker 1: both the patient community and the research side, Prohl told me.
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Speaker 1: As desperately needed as these drug trials are, however, None
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Speaker 1: of the therapies was designed to treat long COVID. That's
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Speaker 1: what makes the work of Peluso, Henrik, and other early-stage
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Speaker 1: researchers so essential. The hope is that once scientists firmly
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Speaker 1: establish long COVID's pathology and doctors can reliably diagnose the
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Speaker 1: disease with blood work or other lab tests, researchers will
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Speaker 1: have a much easier time persuading pharmaceutical companies to invest
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Speaker 1: in developing new targeted drugs. Only then, if all goes well,
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Speaker 1: will long COVID patients see new experimental medications in the
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Speaker 1: pipeline that may one day alleviate their symptoms. perhaps even
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Speaker 1: return them to their pre-COVID baselines. That we may be
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Speaker 1: approaching the end of the beginning phase of this long trajectory,
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Speaker 1: nearly seven years on from COVID's emergence, is a testament
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Speaker 1: to the perseverance of patients and researchers like Vogel, for
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Speaker 1: whom advocacy is no easy task. In her bedroom, Vogel
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Speaker 1: reflected on why she maintains such a grueling professional load
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Speaker 1: in spite of her severe physical limitations. a balancing act,
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Speaker 1: she confessed, that requires her to ruthlessly prioritize her days,
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Speaker 1: often giving most of them over to her job. Just
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Speaker 1: the day before, in addition to her research duties, she'd
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Speaker 1: participated in two video calls related to long COVID awareness
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Speaker 1: and education. One was a panel with Nancy Klimas, an
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Speaker 1: expert on infection-associated chronic conditions. On the other, she briefed
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Speaker 1: officials from public health departments all over the country, on
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Speaker 1: the disease. I'm self-conscious on Zoom, she admitted. You can
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Speaker 1: tell I'm sitting in bed because you can see the
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Speaker 1: stuff behind me. But she fills her work days with
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Speaker 1: such talks and virtual meetings anyway, she says, because she
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Speaker 1: believes that while progress is closer than many people realize,
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Speaker 1: it is not inevitable. Having the capability to help the community,
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Speaker 1: I feel a moral obligation to use my skills for
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Speaker 1: that purpose because I feel like there's reason for hope.
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Speaker 1: And I want other people to know that, to feel
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Speaker 1: that hope. And with this article, did you know the
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Speaker 1: objects the Smithsonian collected related to the COVID pandemic? Among
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Speaker 1: the artifacts acquired by the Smithsonian include the vial that
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Speaker 1: held the first COVID vaccine administered in the United States
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Speaker 1: and the recipient's vaccination card, and a test kit designed
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Speaker 1: to detect a patient with asymptomatic COVID. The next article
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Speaker 1: is part one of some of the earliest automobile enthusiasts
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Speaker 1: signed up to help the Allies in World War I.
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Speaker 1: They also ushered in the mechanization of war. When the
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Speaker 1: gentlemen drivers of Britain's Royal Automobile Club volunteer force shipped
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Speaker 1: their roadsters and racers to face the Germans, they became chauffeurs, couriers,
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Speaker 1: and inadvertent combatants by Joshua Hammer. It was growing dark
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Speaker 1: on August 25, 1914, when Toby Rawlinson cautiously steered his
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Speaker 1: silver Hudson Roadster into the town of Landrecies, France, about
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Speaker 1: 15 miles south of the Belgian border. A volunteer driver
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Speaker 1: and scout attached to the British Expeditionary Force, Rawlinson, dressed
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Speaker 1: in civilian clothes, drove down a cobblestone street, watching for
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Speaker 1: enemy patrols. Suddenly, a battery of British horses galloped up
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Speaker 1: behind him, forcing him off the road and onto a
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Speaker 1: railway embankment. The car struck the curb, its carburetor smashed
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Speaker 1: against the asphalt. Copper induction pipes tore loose. The Hudson,
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Speaker 1: he later wrote, was hopelessly out of action. As he
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Speaker 1: searched the town for a way to repair the car,
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Speaker 1: a column of spike-helmeted German soldiers burst from the adjacent forest.
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Speaker 1: British infantrymen scrambled into position. Rolinson was caught in the
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Speaker 1: open looking for a tow-rope. Gunfire erupted nearby. Shrapnel from
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Speaker 1: German field guns smashed onto rooftops. A commander shouted, Fix bayonets!
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Speaker 1: Rolinson found himself stranded as a battle ignited around him.
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Speaker 1: Yet the way he later told the story in a memoir,
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Speaker 1: Adventures on the Western Front, it was little more than
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Speaker 1: an inconvenience. The gunfire made a devil of a noise,
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Speaker 1: he allowed. and the flying bricks and tiles were exceedingly unpleasant.
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Speaker 1: What followed, however, never left him. Our machine guns held
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Speaker 1: their fire until the last moment, he wrote, but when
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Speaker 1: they did at last open fire, a really appalling slaughter resulted.
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Speaker 1: The German column simply faded away, leaving the street up
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Speaker 1: which they had been advancing absolutely choked with their wounded
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Speaker 1: and dead. Rawlinson, 47 was the unofficial leader of an
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Speaker 1: improbable unit, the Royal Automobile Club Volunteer Force, 25 motoring
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Speaker 1: enthusiasts who had come to the killing fields of France
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Speaker 1: at the outbreak of the Great War, bringing their own
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Speaker 1: cars with them. They were ex-Olympic athletes, big-game hunters, Boer
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Speaker 1: War veterans, sheltered heirs, notorious rakes, even the London-based American
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Speaker 1: representative of a Cleveland automaker. Some were too old to enlist.
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Speaker 1: Rawlinson had last carried a rifle while stationed in India
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Speaker 1: during the reign of Queen Victoria. But they possessed two
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Speaker 1: things that the British War Office urgently needed— speed and mobility.
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Speaker 1: At a historical moment when automobiles were still primarily the
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Speaker 1: expensive playthings of aristocrats, these men found themselves hurled into
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Speaker 1: the grim mechanics of modern combat. For several harrowing months
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Speaker 1: they would serve as chauffeurs, couriers, ambulance drivers, scouts, and
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Speaker 1: unofficial combatants, their contributions long neglected and lost to time.
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Speaker 1: They experienced the First World War's fast-moving opening phase at
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Speaker 1: intimate range, before Europe dug itself into static and stultifying trenches.
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Speaker 1: The retreat to Paris, the Battle of the Marne, the
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Speaker 1: Siege of Antwerp, the Carnage of Ypres. The drivers carried
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Speaker 1: messages between Allied armies and identified enemy movements, plugged gaps
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Speaker 1: in the line, and, at critical moments, helped stave off collapse. All, miraculously, survived.
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Speaker 1: They were also at the vanguard of a new kind
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Speaker 1: of warfare. The world they had known, of cavalry charges
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Speaker 1: and hand-to-hand fighting, disappeared almost overnight into something mechanized and merciless.
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Speaker 1: Within months, Europe was killing entrenched soldiers on an industrial scale,
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Speaker 1: with machine guns, poison gas, artillery barrages, and soon tanks
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Speaker 1: and airplanes. The Royal Automobile Club's volunteer drivers were not
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Speaker 1: merely transporting officers and dispatches. They were witnessing the birth
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Speaker 1: of modern war. In the years before the war's outbreak,
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Speaker 1: British military planners had anticipated that the next European conflict
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Speaker 1: would be industrial, and at least partly motorized. In 1913,
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Speaker 1: the United Kingdom counted roughly 140,000 cars and 180,000 motorbikes.
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Speaker 1: The last horse-drawn bus vanished from London's streets the next year,
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Speaker 1: replaced by motorbuses. Across the Atlantic, Henry Ford's assembly lines
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Speaker 1: were producing a Model T every 90 minutes, a pace
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Speaker 1: no European manufacturer came close to matching, but a harbinger
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Speaker 1: of the industrial tempo the war itself would soon adopt.
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Speaker 1: The Royal Automobile Club, RAC, stood at the center of
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Speaker 1: this transformation. Founded in London in 1897 by Frederick Richard Sims,
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Speaker 1: a pioneer designer of gasoline engines, the RAC opened a
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Speaker 1: grand headquarters in 1911 on Pall Mall near Buckingham Palace,
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Speaker 1: complete with Turkish baths, a heated indoor swimming pool, and
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Speaker 1: a domed atrium. Winston Churchill, Arthur Conan Doyle, and other
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Speaker 1: luminaries fraternized beneath chandeliers in the elegant dining room and library.
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Speaker 1: I doubt if there be collectively a wealthier club in
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Speaker 1: the world, one Edwardian-era journalist once observed. Like the war office,
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Speaker 1: club members speculated openly about a coming conflict with Germany.
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Speaker 1: Conan Doyle imagined automobiles whisking a swarm of sharpshooters into battle.
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Speaker 1: Edward Shrapnel Smith, an influential British magazine editor and early
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Speaker 1: advocate of motor transport, warned that the War Office's existing
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Speaker 1: vehicles would have disgraced a third-class engineering shop. Yet for
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Speaker 1: most members, and for the British public at large, war
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Speaker 1: remained an abstraction. In July 1914, drivers from England, France,
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Speaker 1: and Germany competed at the French Grand Prix in Lyon,
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Speaker 1: even as Europe edged toward catastrophe. German Mercedes outran French Peugeots,
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Speaker 1: an unsettling portent that few spectators paused to interpret. The
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Speaker 1: RAC Journal continued to praise Germany as a touring ground
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Speaker 1: of infinite variety, inhabited by gentle, unsophisticated people. The illusion
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Speaker 1: dissolved in late July. A month after Archduke Franz Ferdinand's
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Speaker 1: assassination in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb nationalist, Austria-Hungary declared
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Speaker 1: war on Serbia, alliances snapped into place. German armies surged
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Speaker 1: into neutral Belgium, aiming to sweep through northern France and
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Speaker 1: seize Paris. Britain accused Germany of violating Belgian sovereignty and,
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Speaker 1: on August 4, declared war in response. Within days, thousands
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Speaker 1: upon thousands of men of every class, profession, and age
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Speaker 1: already thronged the recruiting offices, begging and beseeching to be employed,
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Speaker 1: recalled Christopher Darcy Bloomfield Saltern Baker Carr, a 36-year-old retired
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Speaker 1: infantry officer from Cornwall. Baker Carr was among them. At
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Speaker 1: the war office, the quartermaster general listened to his entreaty,
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Speaker 1: I want to be in this show, and offered advice.
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Speaker 1: The army had proposed to the president of the Royal
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Speaker 1: Automobile Club that he recruit a squad of drivers for
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Speaker 1: the fight. Go to the RAC and register your name,
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Speaker 1: Baker Carr recalled him saying in his memoir From Chauffeur
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Speaker 1: to Brigadier. They've offered to send cars to France. Baker Carr,
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Speaker 1: who had earned a medal for valor as a young
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Speaker 1: rifleman in Sudan in 1898, hurried to the Pall Mall mansion.
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Speaker 1: Hundreds of applicants were inundating the club. From the group,
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Speaker 1: two dozen, including Baker Car, were chosen. Some were competitive
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Speaker 1: motor car racers, like Rawlinson, whose open-seat Roadster, equipped with
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Speaker 1: a four-cylinder engine, was the fastest model produced by the
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Speaker 1: Hudson Motor Car Company, founded by eight Detroit entrepreneurs in 1909.
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Speaker 1: Jimmy Radley, a daredevil driver, aviator, balloonist, and heir to
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Speaker 1: a Yorkshire coal mining fortune, arrived in a pastel blue
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Speaker 1: 50-horsepower Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. It was the same car that
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Speaker 1: he'd driven in the 1913 Alpine Trials in Austria, an 1,820-mile
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Speaker 1: competition that included 19 mountain passes and more than 800
21:21
Speaker 1: miles of difficult terrain. Radley had begun the race in
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Speaker 1: typical style by pouring a glass of champagne into his
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Speaker 1: Rolls radiator. Other volunteers were wealthy amateurs. H. Stanley Westcott,
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Speaker 1: a rare automobile connoisseur, brought a four-cylinder racer built by
21:39
Speaker 1: the Diato Company of Turin, Italy. Founded as a high-quality
21:43
Speaker 1: carriage maker in 1835, the firm sold roadsters to elite
21:47
Speaker 1: customers such as the Italian royal family and, during the war,
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Speaker 1: the racer and future entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari. Later, Westcott switched
21:58
Speaker 1: to a sleek luxury automobile produced by the Spanish manufacturer
22:02
Speaker 1: Hispano Suiza. Hugh Grosvenor, the 2nd Duke of Westminster, a
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Speaker 1: libertine aristocrat who divided his time among a 54-bedroom ancestral
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Speaker 1: home in Cheshire, hunting estates in Scotland and France, and
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Speaker 1: a Grosvenor Square mansion, contributed one of his 17 Rolls Royces,
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Speaker 1: though he often left the driving to his chauffeur. Frederick
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Speaker 1: Abernathy Coleman, the London-based American representative of Cleveland's White Motor
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Speaker 1: Car Company, volunteered with his White Model 30, a gasoline-powered
22:34
Speaker 1: successor to the firm's now-obsolete steam vehicles. The car, featuring
22:39
Speaker 1: an all-leather interior and nickel plating, had debuted at an
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Speaker 1: English automobile show only in 1908. Described in a 1907
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Speaker 1: Vanity Fair cartoon as a journalist, soldier, man of business, moralist,
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Speaker 1: and philosopher of the peripatetic school, Coleman had covered the
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Speaker 1: Boxer Rebellion in China and was, he said, swept up
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Speaker 1: in the Allies' righteous cause. Together, they formed a unit
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Speaker 1: unlike any other in the British Army. On the evening
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Speaker 1: of Friday, August 21, 1914, the volunteers assembled at Southampton
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Speaker 1: and drove their cars into the hold of the troop
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Speaker 1: ship Gloucester Castle. They had packed spare tires, gasoline cans, tools,
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Speaker 1: and pumps, and wore improvised khaki uniforms and RAC armbands.
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Speaker 1: Coleman had purchased his ill-fitting khakis from a theatrical costume
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Speaker 1: designer in London, and Baker Carr recalled, looked like a
23:36
Speaker 1: prosperous banker in unsuitable fancy dress. In the smoking-room on
23:41
Speaker 1: the main deck, amid a well-stocked commissary, the wildest conjectures
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Speaker 1: as to our future employment were being put forward, Baker
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Speaker 1: Carr wrote. Some imagined themselves racing through enemy lines at
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Speaker 1: eighty miles per hour, carrying messages on which the fate
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Speaker 1: of armies depended. Others suspected that they would end up
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Speaker 1: as glorified taxi drivers. Acquaintances were quickly made, Rawlinson noted,
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Speaker 1: which are never likely to be forgotten. They were sailing
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Speaker 1: into a crisis. The Belgian government had fled Brussels the
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Speaker 1: day before, and German troops had occupied the city without
24:17
Speaker 1: firing a shot. In its first engagement, the 90,000-man British
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Speaker 1: Expeditionary Force, commanded by Field Marshal John French, had been
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Speaker 1: forced to withdraw from Mons and was retreating south and west.
24:31
Speaker 1: Five German armies were advancing across northern France in accordance
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Speaker 1: with the Schlieffen Plan, intent on outflanking the French and
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Speaker 1: British forces and seizing Paris in a matter of weeks.
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Speaker 1: There was, wrote one military observer, a very real danger
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Speaker 1: of annihilation. At dawn on August 22, the Gloucester Castle
24:51
Speaker 1: docked at Le Havre. Wearing a leather jacket, racing goggles
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Speaker 1: and a cap, With the Union Jack mounted on the
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Speaker 1: Hudson's hood, the walrus-moustached Rawlinson led the 25-vehicle convoy inland
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Speaker 1: toward Amiens, where the British had established a headquarters. By then,
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Speaker 1: the entire British expeditionary force had been ferried to the
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Speaker 1: front by rail, which meant that few French, military or civilian,
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Speaker 1: had yet to lay eyes on their allies. The French
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Speaker 1: military had a lot of questions about what the British
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Speaker 1: commitment was going to be, says Rawlinson. Christopher Phillips, a
25:27
Speaker 1: lecturer in the history of warfare at Aberystwyth University in
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Speaker 1: Wales and an expert in civilian-military cooperation on the Western
25:36
Speaker 1: Front in World War I. The cars charging through villages
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Speaker 1: gave a sense of presence. They announced that the British
25:43
Speaker 1: are here. These guys conveyed real purpose. Rawlinson, the only
25:49
Speaker 1: volunteer fluent in French, knew the back roads of Normandy
25:52
Speaker 1: and Picardy intimately from his years of auto-racing in the countryside.
25:57
Speaker 1: In village after village, crowds surged forward, showering the cars
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Speaker 1: with flowers and fruit. At least one member of the
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Speaker 1: party suffered from a black eye, Baker Carr recalled, caused
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Speaker 1: by an apple thrown by a too-enthusiastic admirer to him
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Speaker 1: while traveling at a speed of fifty miles an hour.
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Speaker 1: White dust lay inches deep on the roads, coating the
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Speaker 1: drivers until they resembled flour millers. I remember no road
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Speaker 1: race which presented so many difficulties, Rawlinson recalled. He was
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Speaker 1: accustomed to difficult races. Born into one of Britain's most
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Speaker 1: formidable families, Alfred Rawlinson, known to everyone as Toby, had
26:37
Speaker 1: grown up steeped in ambition, scholarship, and privilege. His father,
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Speaker 1: Henry Creswick Rawlinson, had been a soldier and diplomat in
26:45
Speaker 1: the Middle East who had won fame by deciphering ancient
26:49
Speaker 1: cuneiform inscriptions. Toby's older brother, Henry, would rise to command
26:54
Speaker 1: armies on the Western Front. Rawlinson himself had excelled wherever
26:59
Speaker 1: danger and competition intersected. He served as an officer with
27:03
Speaker 1: the 17th Lancers in India, won a gold medal in
27:07
Speaker 1: polo at the 1900 Paris Olympics, and raced a French
27:11
Speaker 1: de Rock roadster on the Isle of Man. He flew
27:15
Speaker 1: experimental aircraft alongside the Wright brothers and survived the kinds
27:19
Speaker 1: of crashes that killed others, including his friend Charles Rolls,
27:24
Speaker 1: co-developer of the Rolls-Royce, who died when his biplane plunged
27:28
Speaker 1: to the ground before a crowd in Bournemouth in July 1910.
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Speaker 1: France would test Toby in a different way. The volunteers
27:37
Speaker 1: were dispersed to bases across the north and put to work.
27:41
Speaker 1: They chauffeured officers between command posts and field positions, reported
27:46
Speaker 1: on the condition of Rhodes, searched the countryside for waylaid
27:50
Speaker 1: or disoriented infantry units, helped direct French and British soldiers
27:54
Speaker 1: as they marched to the front, and carried messages between generals.
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Speaker 1: This concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for today. Your
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Speaker 1: reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening and
28:05
Speaker 1: have a great day.