Latest / OneLegUpAlex Media / One Leg Up On American History with Tom McMillan; Learn About the LI 106th Rescue Wing Aiding Titan Submersible Search
Transcript
- 0:02Here's your host, Alex GrITT, and welcome inside to this edition of the
- 0:08Alex Garrett Podcast Network. It's the one Leg Up feature once again, and
- 0:14right off the bat here I want to give one leg up to the one
- 0:18hundred and sixth Rescue Wing. Yes, they deserve a lot of kudos tonight
- 0:22as the West Hampton based New York National Guard transport plane is in the rescue
- 0:29search for the Titan submersible, you know, the submersible that have five people
- 0:35aboard it that has gone missing on an expedition to the Titanic wreckage. As
- 0:42ironic and as tragic as this is that the Titan submersible is meeting the same
- 0:49fate possibly that the Titanic is, it is good to see that there is
- 0:55a rescue wing from Long Island out here helping out the cause in the North
- 1:02Atlantic. One hundred sixth Rescue Wing. Give them a shout out at kudos
- 1:07today six crew members, one combat rescue officer and four parachute jumpers and two
- 1:12crew chiefs who's been on the scene since six thirty pm Monday night and has
- 1:19been searching and conducted search operations. According to Captain Charon Campbell, a spokesperson
- 1:27for the New York National Guard unit. Kudos to Michael O'Keefe of Newsday for
- 1:33picking up on this story. It's kind of funny. I mentioned a while
- 1:36ago that I wanted to enhance my observation skills because that's what my dad did.
- 1:42And sure enough, here was a Newsday two dollars fifty cents by the
- 1:47way, and I'm like, well, let me pick it up, only
- 1:49to tell you this great story about thee hundred and sixth Rescue Wing in a
- 1:56trying to rescue a very unfortunate situation. I mean, lives or at stake,
- 2:00hours are at stake here, but credit to the one hundred and sixth
- 2:06rescuing of the New York National Guard Transport, Plane Transport and New York National
- 2:14Guard. And that's where we start tonight on the One Leg Up with Alex
- 2:19Scare podcast because in just a couple of minutes, I'm gonna play you my
- 2:23conversation with Tom McMillan. Now Tom McMillan, Okay, he is actually just
- 2:31retired from the Pittsburgh Penguins after a twenty five year career in sports media,
- 2:37and he's talking about history. He's talking about the American flag. That was
- 2:42the basis of Francis Scott Keys stars making Will banner. So don't miss that.
- 2:47You don't want to miss that momentarily. But the other thoughts I had
- 2:53today was the top of Newsday, the lead story in Newsday about three point
- 3:00three billion dollars being shelled out. So a cable, let me get this
- 3:06right for you. A cable could go along Long Beach providing power that would
- 3:15hit upstate in New York and would empower upstate in New York. I should
- 3:20say yes, Kathy Hokel and Albany signing off on this bill for wind farm
- 3:31cable land that would make land vault and connect to the power grid and it
- 3:38would all go through Long Beach. I think it's kind of crazy. And
- 3:46they say this is to make energy goals of twenty thirty and then if they
- 3:53don't do this cable that would run twenty miles offshore or starting in Long Beach.
- 4:02Keep in mind, um they would mean they're called it's insanity. You
- 4:08talk about oceanography, This is insane. A three billion dollar project to send
- 4:15offshore energy to the Bronx and Westchester windmills. When when has that gone?
- 4:26Right? I ask you on the Alex Garrett Podcast Network a plan to bring
- 4:32Long Island power upstate using a miles long cable that would make Landbowl and Long
- 4:44Beach and run to a substation in Island Park and then what twenty miles more
- 4:48off. Sorry, it's insane. It's insane. So I hope, I
- 4:58hope someone has sense in Albany not to let this happen. I'm gonna cite
- 5:03that article on the description of the podcast tonight and when we come back,
- 5:11when we come back on One Leg Up with Alex Garrett. One man who
- 5:14has one leg up on history is Tom McMillan, and he's written a book
- 5:18about a two hundred and nine year old American flag that has been preserved right
- 5:26up intil twenty twenty three and hopefully beyond at the Smithsonian. He'll tell us
- 5:30all about it next on the Alex Skirrett Podcast Network. Well, you know,
- 5:54this show should really start with the star Spangled banner, because yes,
- 5:58last week was Flag Day. But I believe and maybe my next guys believes
- 6:02as well, that in a very patriotic month of June, you know it
- 6:06is flag Day, there are some patriotic moments of this month. But the
- 6:11conversation about Flag Day shouldn't just end on Flag Day. And I want to
- 6:15start there. When my next guess, Tom McMillan, who we'll get through
- 6:18his book in one second. But Tom, you've written about the oldest star
- 6:23spangled banner that's still around. Tell us what you've written the book. Our
- 6:30flag was still there. I was just fascinated about the flag from Fort mckennry
- 6:33that our national anthem. Everybody knows that our national anthem was written about it,
- 6:39but pretty much when I looked at it, I think all people really
- 6:41know where the okay flu that when the battle Francis caught Key saw it wrote
- 6:45a song. But that flag still exists two hundred and nine years later.
- 6:48It's at the Smithsonian, and I think people visited and we just off in
- 6:54the way history is. We just know a snippet of it. I thought
- 6:57I was looking into it. So this is a fascinating story of the journey
- 7:00of that flag. What I could do the most famous flag in US history
- 7:04in those two hundred plus years from Fort mckenry and Baltimore to the Smithsonian and
- 7:10all the ebbs and flows in between. And I gotta ask you, how
- 7:14did you track this down? I mean, you weren't around in eighteen fourteen,
- 7:16but how did you track down the remainder of this beautiful story here?
- 7:21Yeah? Well, he went to the Fort mckennry in Baltimore. They have
- 7:25good resources, the Smithsonian and DC was tremendous. They had about four hundred
- 7:30pages of research. I don't think many people have ever asked them for it.
- 7:32I was able to pour through that, and then I was really lucky
- 7:35and made it really personal Alex because I was able to track down some direct
- 7:40descendants of George Armistead, who was the commander at Fort McHenry and the guy
- 7:45who thought of the flag and actually took it home after the battle, kind
- 7:48of in violation of army regulations, but he took it home and it remained
- 7:53in the possession of that family for ninety years, which is one of the
- 7:57reasons that exists today. So those family members had some tidbits and photos and
- 8:01really interesting things that made it personal for me. It was a patriotic journey
- 8:07from me. That was cool. So Fort McHenry, Smithsonian National Archives and
- 8:09family descendants Toe and Tom McMillan. He is the author of Our Flag was
- 8:15still there, the Star spangled banner that survived the British and two hundred years,
- 8:20and the Armist of Family. Now we'll get to the Armist of Family
- 8:22a little more. But people may say, well, why are you doing
- 8:24this a week after Flag Day? But a story like this, it just
- 8:28shows that the American history continues even after one day a year, right absolutely,
- 8:35and you know, and we're patriotic in the fourth of July, and
- 8:37this battle at Fort McHenry when Key saw the flag was actually in September September
- 8:43thirteenth and fourteenth overnight he saw them warning the fourteenth. So this is a
- 8:48why you know, a spreading story, and the journey of the flag isn't
- 8:52just one day either. I Mean a lot of the book is how and
- 8:56why it survived. A rather incredible story. That so when you go to
- 8:58the Smiths today and you see it, I hope if people read it to
- 9:03appreciate everything that all the people who were involved to get it here over those
- 9:09those centuries that we can still look at it and it's really dramatic when you
- 9:13see it, when you see it in the museum, when you say spread
- 9:16out, no, no kidding, there are more than eight feet of material,
- 9:20aka the largest American flag during the War of eighteen twelve cut into small
- 9:24pieces. Now is it non American too? Would this be considered desecrating the
- 9:30flag by cutting into pieces? Give us your thoughts on well, we would
- 9:31have been yet part of the story. Again, there are different traditions in
- 9:35different centuries. We have to put ourselves back at that time. Yet for
- 9:39the for the listeners, the flag originally was thirty feet by forty two feet
- 9:45huge flag at the Smithsonian's now thirty by thirty four It's it's eight feet shorter.
- 9:50It's because in the mid eighteen hundreds, the Armistead ladies, his wife
- 9:54and his daughter would do something that would because as you said, would be
- 9:58considered sacrilegio to us today, but it was commonplace back then. They would
- 10:01cut off pieces of the flag and give them as souvenirs to battle veterans and
- 10:07maybe their families dignitaries in Baltimore, and over several decades they cut away eight
- 10:13feet. I was talking to one of the archivists at the Smithsonian and she
- 10:16said, yeah, you know, we would be a gas at that today.
- 10:20You could not do that today, But back then, in the eighteen
- 10:22hundreds, that's what you did. So they cut away pieces of the flag
- 10:28and some of those have been returned to the Smithsonian. They have some of
- 10:31those pieces available as well, but some of them are still in homes and
- 10:35little museums around the country. Tell us about that. Where does the flag
- 10:37live today? It's at the at the National Museum of American History in Washington,
- 10:45DC with the Smithsonian actually about fifty eight loose track of time. In
- 10:50the early sixties, Uh, the Smithsonian itself was just one museum back then.
- 10:54Now it's multiple, but it was just one museum and everything was getting
- 10:56cluttered, and they decided back then that they would create a museum just for
- 11:01American history, and they built it around the Star Spangled banner. Flag Hall
- 11:05was on the second floor and it's still there on the second floor. They
- 11:07did a massive renovation about fifteen years ago, in two thousand and eight.
- 11:11It's really dramatical the way they've done it because you have to take care of
- 11:15that textile that's two hundred and nine years old. They had to do a
- 11:18lot of work on it, but it's still there. So people, you
- 11:20know, in those museums in DC are free people go in every day,
- 11:24and I went down there several times. And sometimes you know, when you're
- 11:30write, you get writer's block. And I live in Pittsburgh, but if
- 11:31I got that, I would drive down to DC and go see it.
- 11:35And I was inspired just by looking at it and thinking, you know,
- 11:39nobody's really told this story beginning to end. I want to be the one
- 11:43who's able to tell the story. Well, it seems like this is the
- 11:48flag that the rocket drag Laire bombs versing in the air were reflecting. And
- 11:50I got to ask you, where are the descendants of Armistead that talked to
- 11:56you? How did you get this behind the scenes looking if you will,
- 12:01Yeah, well I did. I cold wrote them letters. I did some
- 12:05research. You can find a lot of things on ancestory dot com. And
- 12:09I just cold wrote them letters, explained to them who I was and what
- 12:11I was doing. And they were extremely gracious. Some folks in Philadelphia and
- 12:16some folks in Florida. They were excited that someone was talking about it,
- 12:18and they had me to their homes and they provided They were very very great,
- 12:24provide some photos for the book, provided some documents. Actually because of
- 12:28this Alex. One of the things I'm promised of a little side view here
- 12:31is because of the research, I was able to put some of them in
- 12:35touch with the people of the Smithsonian, and they have donated several of George
- 12:39Armistead's items now to the Smithsonian. They were in their home. He had
- 12:43he had in his home. I saw them in Philadelphia. They had his
- 12:46original US Army commissions that were signed by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and
- 12:54James Madison. They were in their home and they had in eighteen sixteen painting
- 12:58of him and those things. Now, the Smithsonian was very excited and that
- 13:01the armist had decided, you know, we have these in our home.
- 13:05It's nice, but if we give it to the Smithsonian, we know it'll
- 13:07be preserved for all times. So the Smithsonian authenticated those pieces and they have
- 13:11now been donated down there. So it's kind of a cool little thing for
- 13:15me as an author. It wasn't the purpose of the book, but because
- 13:16of that I was able to put those two together, and those items are
- 13:20will not be available to the American public. I gotta ask you this because
- 13:24you know, we just kind of went out the gate here about the flag.
- 13:28But you are Tom McMillan, and for those who are just listening to
- 13:30the show for the first time, listening to you for the first time,
- 13:33give us some insight into who Tom McMillan is. You are a historian and
- 13:35an author. Yes, I actually just retired from my profession, which was
- 13:41in sports media and communications. Believe it or not, I was a writer
- 13:46and a broadcaster and then I worked as VP Communications for the Pittsburgh Penguins of
- 13:48the NHL for twenty five years. But history was always my passion and I
- 13:54my wife and I volunteer at historic sites and as I got on in years,
- 13:58I I thought I can write a little bit. I'll try to write
- 14:01some books. This is actually my fourth book. I wrote one on Flight
- 14:03ninety three, September eleventh flight that crashed I live in Pittsburgh, one hundred
- 14:09miles from where I live. In two on the Battle of Gettysburg. I'm
- 14:11a total Civil War nerd. But this one there's an Armistead family member who's
- 14:16famous at Gettysburg, who was involved in Pickett's charge. And by researching that
- 14:20book is when I really stumbled across some of this information and I thought,
- 14:24this is the kind of story that I want that. I want to do
- 14:28so the sports media and communications was my profession, but history and history writing
- 14:33is my hobby and will continue to be so. All right, low side
- 14:37note because my dad raised me in sports and we were at Lamieus what we
- 14:39thought was his last game against the Rangers back at the Igloo years ago or
- 14:45so, So there's a little history there, how about that? Yeah,
- 14:48so when you know about Penguins history, I got to ask you. I
- 14:52mean, twenty five years you saw them win the Cup with Crosby and we'll
- 14:56see they've kind of waned a little bit here, but are they going to
- 14:58be a force season? Yeah? Well it's you know, there's an ebb
- 15:01and flow of sports. They they have beaten back the curve because they made
- 15:07the playoffs for sixteen straight years. His past year was the first year they
- 15:09missed in seventeen years. That's almost impossible to do. You can't in the
- 15:13salary cap area you were, It's really hard to do that. So just
- 15:16that sustain the excellence for that long, I mean, you can't stay on
- 15:20top forever. But Crosby and maltenal Tang are still here and there's a new
- 15:24GM, so they're gonna they're gonna try to retool and take another run.
- 15:28But it has really been a golden era and I was very privileged to have
- 15:31a front row view with those Lemieux teams which I covered for the Pittsburgh Post
- 15:35Gazette, and then the Crossby teams, which where I was involved as an
- 15:39executive. To be part of those Stanley Cups one of some of the great
- 15:43memories of my life. Obviously, it's amazing that I brought you on talking
- 15:46about the American flag and here we are talking about the Penguins, but I've
- 15:50kind of had a bit of a history with them as well. And of
- 15:52course I'm a Cutching now and Pittsburgh the Pirates have a come along now this
- 15:56year as well. I'll love to see what happens there. Yeah, it's
- 16:00it's a good sports town. And it was easy if you love sports,
- 16:04which I did, and loved writing, which I did. It was easy
- 16:07these getting motivated, they get into that kind of career. But alex I,
- 16:11when they would say asking this history stuff, I would say, for
- 16:14most people, sports is their escape from their real job, their escape from
- 16:18their life. And I say, when you work in sports, you need
- 16:21in a permit and so history was my sports. That's what I did in
- 16:25my downtime, and it was a love of history for many many years before
- 16:29I started writing. That led to this and now in retirement, this is
- 16:33really what I'm doing. And to tell this story, you know, be
- 16:36able to tell this patriotic story. I try to, you know, to
- 16:38touch stories and maybe haven't been told before, and this was one that really
- 16:41hadn't been And I think you appreciate it too. As a history lover.
- 16:47At least half the funnest the research and learning, and then you have to
- 16:49sit down and write. But I learned so much myself writing this book,
- 16:53and I was I'm a pretty good student of history, and I was astounded
- 16:56at how little I knew about this flag story. So I thought, yeah,
- 17:02obviously, uh not every day you get to go onto an army base
- 17:06and a fort, So as Fort mckenry the only base you've been to?
- 17:10Oh no, I mean it's Fort McHenry is essentially a national park. It's
- 17:14part of the National Park Service. So I had visited there plenty of times
- 17:18before, just through my life. Whenever you're in Baltimore, I always went
- 17:22to Fort McHenry, never thinking I was going to write a book. So
- 17:26it's a it's a special place because the walls of the fort are still there.
- 17:30I mean you can stand there and look out on the water in Baltimore
- 17:33Harbor and almost you can see where key Ship was and imagine what was happening
- 17:38that day. And the big flag flag flies over the fort. So it's
- 17:41uh, you know, it's a former military base, but now it's a
- 17:45you know, they call it a National Historic Site, but it's basically run
- 17:48by the National Park Service. Uh, free to the public. There's no
- 17:52charges. You go to Fort mcchenry as a historic site, though I know
- 17:53they can't really change much. I mean I don't know we're getting into the
- 17:56base or not. But are there relics from the base that you can and
- 18:00see at the park. Well, the outer walls of the fort are still
- 18:04there now selling them bad that have been prepared over the years. Again,
- 18:07the fourth continued in existence after the War of eighteen twelve. It was it
- 18:12was pretty much a Union prison during the Civil War. The Federal Army used
- 18:15it and was used into the eighteen hundreds. Yea, the hour structure of
- 18:19the fort is still there and they have the guns placed or replica guns obviously
- 18:25placed where those guns used to be. So it's set up, it's set
- 18:29up the way it looked during the battle in September of eighteen fourteen, that
- 18:33the key would have seen from the water, So you really get it's kind
- 18:36of an eerie feeling when you go there. They've done a great job of
- 18:38preserving. They know where the footprint is of the fort, and so the
- 18:42visitor center is off a little bit and you walk over and and and they
- 18:48always have a flag raising ceremony every day. The flag there, The idea
- 18:52of the flag is really the focus of what they do with the program.
- 18:56All right, well, I gotta ask you this. Do you know how
- 19:00they folded this this huge American flag at the end of the day, even
- 19:03when there was no battle, because obviously that's a big part of the military,
- 19:06is the folding of the flag, that taking it down at the end
- 19:08of the day, type of ceremony it is. I'm not sure, I'll
- 19:14tell you. I don't know the details about that. From the early eighteen
- 19:17hundreds, my guess is they weren't as precise as they are now. I
- 19:21think those I think those traditions and regulations developed over time. Remember the War
- 19:26of eighteen twelve was only was only thirty six years after the declaration of independence.
- 19:33I mean, we were still a really young country and here we are
- 19:37at war with England again. So I think, you know, the country
- 19:40was just in its embryonic stage, just both governmentally and traditional wise. So
- 19:44I'm not really sure, but I don't think it was as precise back then
- 19:47as it is now. It's certainly now they're very precise regulations of what of
- 19:52what you would do with the flag. So this flag, it's part of
- 19:56this two hundred and nine year old flag that he saw, I mean part
- 20:00it was the Armistead ladies in his destent that did protect it. But there
- 20:04were times, there were months when it was just rolled up and put us
- 20:07at campus sacked. They didn't have the technology or the knowledge of flag preservation
- 20:12that we did today, so they probably did some things that ended up causing
- 20:18some damage, but they wouldn't have known that. They didn't have to informitate.
- 20:21They did the best they could, and they certainly did well enough that
- 20:25the flag survived. And then it's had two major rehab projects, one of
- 20:29the early nineteen hundreds and one of the early two thousands, and now they're
- 20:32convinced that it's gonna it's gonna exist for many, many decades, if not
- 20:37centuries, into the future. All Right, I gotta ask you this,
- 20:40Tom, because obviously, um, you say, of documents and letters,
- 20:45do we get to see the words of George Armistead and the plans of him
- 20:48unfolding in this book? Oh? Absolutely, I get into his It was
- 20:53a it was a distinguished military family. Armisteads had been in some sort of
- 20:56the militaries. It's the year sixteen eighty pack back in Virginia. He and
- 21:00three of his brothers were professional US Army officers. So yes, he took
- 21:04over the fort in eighteen thirteen, a year before the battle. That's when
- 21:08he ordered the flag. So we do the build up. The war is
- 21:11going on, but it hasn't come down to Baltimore. So yes, that
- 21:14whole summer they know that British are coming, they don't know exactly when.
- 21:18Really, And then I was able to obtain his post battle report that he
- 21:22wrote maybe ten days after the battle, where he describes what happens, and
- 21:26I quote that extensively. Sometimes you don't want to use long quotes in your
- 21:32books. You want to write around it, but that I thought that stuff
- 21:34was so important that I wanted to let his words tell that story rather than
- 21:38mine. So those things, you know, we're available. It's a little
- 21:41easier to do research now with the internet. You can go online, but
- 21:45not a lot of people have seen them, and so I think some of
- 21:48the information, even though it's two hundred years old, is really going to
- 21:52be new to a lot of a lot of readers who again just no kind
- 21:55of really top line of this story at Fort mckennery with Francis Scott Key,
- 22:00Well, why I love this month is because not only a flag day,
- 22:02but I believe it's the birthday of the Army. I mean, there's a
- 22:04lot going on as far as patriotic and I feel like you you probably touched
- 22:08on that as well. Yeah, the US Army was the Continental Congress formed
- 22:14the Army in June of seventeen seventy five. That's when they appointed Washington in
- 22:18the first General. So it all it all ties in um there's there's there's
- 22:23a lot that happened this when you look at this period of Junior and going
- 22:26to the first week of July was the July in the Battle of Gettysburg the
- 22:30first week of July. There's really a lot of American history that has happened
- 22:34in this three or four or five week period. Having said that, you
- 22:37can probably take any five week period and then you know, we have a
- 22:40lot of history in our country, but this is this is a I think
- 22:42a patriotic time, and it was a nice time to focus on the flag.
- 22:48You are a historian, Tell us about the other books you've written as
- 22:51well, just to get people up to speed on the work of Tom McMillan.
- 22:55Yeah, I worked the first book, but I took a shot to
- 22:59try to do this. Lesten tore it could be successful. Was on flight
- 23:02ninety three September eleventh flight where the passengers and crew fought back at Crashton Shanksville,
- 23:07Pennsylvania, which and my interest was we were all affected by nine to
- 23:11eleven, those of us alive at the time, but it was very I
- 23:15mean, it's only a hundred miles from Pittsburgh, so I would go out
- 23:17there and look at the site. And about ten years later I'd realized,
- 23:21you know, there'd been a lot written about what happened in New York in
- 23:23DC, but not much really written about Shanksville, and so I really wanted
- 23:27to dig into that flight, and I talked to some family members and it
- 23:30was quite an emotional journey to write that book. And that was my first
- 23:34one. It's still for sale and they have it at the Flight ninety three
- 23:37National Memorial. And then I ended up writing two books on the Battle of
- 23:41Gettysburg. It just always I've been studying Gettysburg for thirty years. I went
- 23:47there as a kid. One was on five. Actually, there were five
- 23:51young men who grew up in Gettysburg and ended up fighting for the Confederate Army
- 23:55in the Battle of Gettysburg. They were foreign avengers in their home time,
- 24:00and nobody had written that it was. So I called the title of that
- 24:02as Gettysburg Rebels. And then I wrote another get Armistead and Hancock. There's
- 24:07an Armistead again. There was a Confederate general and a Union general, Lewis
- 24:11Armistead and Winfield Scott Hancock, very good friends before the war. Not only
- 24:15not only did they face each other in the war, they faced each other
- 24:18and pickets charge at Gettysburg. And just writing I thought that then encapsulized the
- 24:22whole history of the Civil War. You have these two guys who surved together
- 24:26in the army as friends in the US Army, I bought together in the
- 24:30Mexican War, and here they are in the most famous attack of the Civil
- 24:33War, the Battle of Gettysburg, facing each other and they both were wounded
- 24:37by the others troops. So I do try to dig into some of these
- 24:41stories that in my old newspaper days would have been feature stories and expand on
- 24:45those. So hopefully people who aren't even really into the total like deep history
- 24:51of the Battle of Gettysburg, where the War of eighteen twelve, this is
- 24:53a story that maybe you can enjoy. All. I gotta ask you this
- 24:56because again I'm a sports guy. So you went from the ice ring,
- 25:00the sport you know, the ring, the skating ring, to to maybe
- 25:03Gettysburg reenactment. Is that kind of the vibe I'm getting from you. I
- 25:07would they when and whenever the Penguin season ended, whether that was with a
- 25:11loss or a Stanley Cup, the next weekend, I went to Gettysburg.
- 25:17That was that was how I I uh calmed down from the season. So
- 25:22yeah, I always uh it's it's only about three and a half hours from
- 25:25where I lived. So it's it's an easy trip. It's always been a
- 25:29big part of my life, and that's why it's kind of interesting at the
- 25:30end now that I've figured out writing books, you know, to be able
- 25:33to write about it and enjoy it that way, to do that research in
- 25:37it, and it actually there's a there's a productivity to it, and I
- 25:41want to keep going. But this book on the Flag just came out,
- 25:45so I'm focused on this for a while and doing some interviews like this and
- 25:48podcasts and book talks and and it's it's it's a fun part of it getting
- 25:55out and meeting people and talk to them about this story again that a lot
- 25:57of them tell me already heard that they didn't know a lot about. So
- 26:02that it's it's rewarding to know that you're providing some information that maybe people who
- 26:06are interested in history didn't know before. All Right, that leads me on
- 26:10my next question. I love how you set that up because I got to
- 26:11ask, and I've never really asked a historian this, but what does it
- 26:15mean to you to preserve the American history through your writing? Oh, it's
- 26:21it's it's I've had a great professional career, but this is the most rewarding
- 26:25part of my life. You leave a little bit of yourself and I've always
- 26:30loved American history so much. And now that you're able to make, you're
- 26:33able to make It's a very small contribution, but you're able to make a
- 26:37contribution and years from now people. You know, I always said sometimes in
- 26:42the modern context, if we don't do the research now, we might not
- 26:47be able to find those things in fifty years. So you're also thinking,
- 26:51maybe no one would ever have looked at this star Stangle banner story. Maybe
- 26:53no one would have looked at the armistated family. I just kind of stumbled
- 26:56into it, and it is. It is very rewarding. You don't it's
- 27:00a hobby for me. You don't do it. You might make a little
- 27:03bit of money, that's not your motivation. You do it because you love
- 27:07it and you can interact with people and see that they react to it.
- 27:11That's the best part of this. It's it's having people read it and learn
- 27:15and getting that feedback that that keeps you going. All right, Then I
- 27:19got to ask you this, because obviously you've now covered Baltimore, You've covered
- 27:22Gettysburg. What about the history of the steel city. Will you ever cover
- 27:26your hometown? I don't know. People have asked me that to write book
- 27:32of Pittsburgh. Who knows. I'm wide open. One thing I can't even
- 27:36tell you, Alex though. There are always people and especially your friends and
- 27:38family members, you know, when they know you write books, they why
- 27:41don't you write about this? Why don't you write about that? There have
- 27:45been a couple of ideas that I had that I started and I just didn't
- 27:48feel it, even though it was interested in the topic. You really it's
- 27:52a lot of work. It's fun, it's a hobby. I enjoy it,
- 27:55but it is a lot of work. It's a lot of time,
- 27:57and you have to love the story, and you kind of know that as
- 28:02soon you're you're a little bit in, maybe a couple of chapters, and
- 28:04I've started a couple of books a couple of chapters, then it's just it't
- 28:07feel right. So I think that's part of it. You have to love
- 28:11it, so you never know. The next book has never planned. I've
- 28:15always allowed myself to stumble onto these these other books, so we'll see what
- 28:19happens. There's still a lot of history here in Pittsburgh, but there might
- 28:23just be something of of of traveling for research that intrigues me too, So
- 28:27I'm I'm an open campus on Well, have you ever come to New York.
- 28:30Let us know. We'd love to talk with you more. One last
- 28:33thing, favorite rendition of the national anthem that I could play to end the
- 28:37segment today. You know, I just there are so many of them.
- 28:41So there have been so many great wines that the s forty events, you
- 28:44know, the Whitney Houston people talks about that talk about it. I just
- 28:48I like this straight, dramatic, patriotical I really do. And then people
- 28:52have had great versions of it. But just it's the it's the song.
- 28:57When I hear the music and I think about the flag, that's what inspires
- 29:00me. So well, I know there are some famous ones. I just
- 29:03like the you know, the basic, straightforward version of the anthem, the
- 29:07one I the one that I grew Grewden Millwood love as a kid. So
- 29:12I don't know if that's a that's a very exciting answer, but I just
- 29:17it makes me. It makes me stand at attention whenever I hear Tom McMillan.
- 29:22Thanks so much, and we'll definitely have you back on the Alex Garrett
- 29:23Podcast Network,