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Transcript

Every Family Has Its Secrets · Deep Secrets

0:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Your grandparents are liars.
0:05
[SPEAKER_01]: They have a darkness, and I'm not talking about that one dead tooth.
0:10
[SPEAKER_01]: They have a secret, and I'm not talking about the not so subtle racism.
0:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Grandma and Grandpa can't be trusted.
0:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's funny for how noble and trusting grandparents are known to be.
0:21
[SPEAKER_01]: The first thing my wife and I did after getting home from the hospital with our first born was rank our parents in order of trustworthiness.
0:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Like not your mom after Ambien or not my dad until we've literally tried anyone else.
0:37
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like grandparents will kind of let you know where they want to fall in the pecking order by how endearing their official Grandparent nickname is.
0:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Like in our family, we have Baba, Love, Meema, and Malcolm.
0:50
[SPEAKER_01]: That's my dad's name, Malcolm.
0:53
[SPEAKER_01]: My dad grew up in West Minister, California as one of seven siblings.
0:57
[SPEAKER_01]: All of whom had names that started with the letter, M. Mike Mitch Matt, Mark Mallory, Malcolm, and Melinda.
1:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Seven, seven M's.
1:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Ah, ah, I'm not gonna do the whole count chocolate bit, but you get it, it's a lot.
1:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And as you might have guessed, seven kids fighting for food at the dinner table, led to them all, growing up to be really successful.
1:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Across the board for medical politics, my dad is a world champion cyclist.
1:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, he's in his 60s, has less body fat than Michael Jordan did in his prime.
1:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And if I grew up to be anything like him, I will peak sexually,
1:35
[SPEAKER_01]: we are a crazy big Irish family.
1:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Every game of two touch football that we've ever tried playing has quickly evolved into an aggressive game of tackle, it's the best, and I wouldn't change it for anything in the world.
1:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And for as long as I can remember, my extended family has always been something I've looked forward to sharing with a family of my own one day.
2:00
[SPEAKER_01]: But if Nicole Kidman's last four mini-series roles have taught us anything, it's that every affluent family has its secrets.
2:09
[SPEAKER_01]: and look.
2:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I know everyone has something they're not telling someone.
2:14
[SPEAKER_01]: But what I recently uncovered has me questioning how well I ever really knew, some of the people that loved me the most.
2:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Towards the end of my grandma's life, at least once a week, my dad would grab me or one of my sisters and we'd make the two and a half hour drive from Los Angeles to Banning, California to visit her in the hospital.
2:36
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really interesting what starts happening to the human brain when everything else is closing up shop.
2:42
[SPEAKER_01]: My grandmother claimed to see the ceiling opening up to the heavens.
2:46
[SPEAKER_01]: She was having conversations with people that were not there.
2:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if we're being honest, sometimes you'd make the drive down to spend time with that person you love to find out that they weren't really mentally checked in.
2:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, there was one time, and I'm glad I didn't step out into the hallway for a snack from the vending machine for this one.
3:05
[SPEAKER_01]: On one of our visits, my grandmother admitted to putting up a child for adoption.
3:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Normally, this would be a drop of the mic, but here's the thing, my grandmother had already admitted to putting another kid up for adoption.
3:19
[SPEAKER_01]: So this wasn't a wait, Grandma, no, how could you keep this from us?
3:23
[SPEAKER_01]: What?
3:24
[SPEAKER_01]: It was more of a... Jesus Christ, Grandma.
3:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Again?
3:28
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
3:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Just about the time my dad was getting ready to graduate from high school.
3:33
[SPEAKER_01]: He found out that he had an older sister named Mary.
3:37
[SPEAKER_01]: It's crazy.
3:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And her name started with the letter M. What are the odds?
3:42
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a bit confusing.
3:44
[SPEAKER_01]: When my grandmother admitted to putting another kid up for adoption on her death bed,
3:48
[SPEAKER_01]: We didn't know if she was serious, or if she was still feeling guilty about marry after all these years, but as fate would have it, it turns out, shortly after my grandmother passed away, this mystery child reached out through the Catholic Church wanting to learn about their birth family.
4:04
[SPEAKER_01]: At first, my aunts and uncles had a little bit of trepidation.
4:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Why is this person reaching out now?
4:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Are they in trouble?
4:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Do they need money?
4:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's where the story gets kind of crazy because not only was their new brother not in trouble.
4:19
[SPEAKER_01]: He certainly wasn't struggling for money.
4:23
[SPEAKER_01]: What's crazy is that they already knew who their new brother was.
4:29
[SPEAKER_01]: They'd grown up watching him on TV.
4:32
[SPEAKER_01]: They'd pictures of him on their wall.
4:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Their new brother, my new uncle, his name was Tim Fully.
4:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And he played on the Miami Dolphins 1972 undefeated team, the only undefeated team in the history of the NFL.
4:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Funny enough, for some reason, Tim was always my grandmother's favorite player.
4:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And my dad said it would be like turning 46 and finding out that you related to Tom Brady or Travis Kelsey.
5:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's crazy.
5:04
[SPEAKER_01]: I tell you that because holy shit, that is a secret.
5:08
[SPEAKER_01]: As a parent, I can't imagine shouldering that up until moments before my death.
5:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And I also share this with you because that is not the secret that this podcast is about.
5:23
[SPEAKER_01]: How good are you with a secret?
5:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Not a concept, a real secret.
5:28
[SPEAKER_01]: One with weight, one with consequences.
5:31
[SPEAKER_01]: A secret that could be the difference between your slice of the American dream and full out nuclear war.
5:39
[SPEAKER_01]: How long could you keep that secret?
5:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Could you keep it from your friend, from your wife, from your children?
5:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Hi, my name's Hunter.
5:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a touring standup comedian, a father, a husband, not always in that order.
5:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes you order a different.
5:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not always proud of what the order is, but I hate to start all of this off by lying to you, you know?
6:01
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd like for you to try and put yourself in my shoes.
6:04
[SPEAKER_01]: your young dad, you travel a lot for work.
6:07
[SPEAKER_01]: When you finally get some time off the road, do you, A, make yourself present and available as a father to really spend time with your kids and be a supportive partner or B, commit the cardinal white dude sin of starting a podcast.
6:24
[SPEAKER_01]: podcast, right?
6:26
[SPEAKER_01]: But, but you tell yourself, this isn't going to be another podcast about the benefits of el comate.
6:32
[SPEAKER_01]: You're not going to be an idiot turning tricks for views on the internet.
6:35
[SPEAKER_01]: No, this is going to be a podcast of integrity.
6:38
[SPEAKER_01]: This is going to be a podcast of merit.
6:41
[SPEAKER_01]: This is just going to be a podcast of a dad sitting down with other dads talking about being dads.
6:48
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what this podcast was supposed to be about.
6:51
[SPEAKER_01]: A heartfelt podcast of me sitting down with creative people talking about fatherhood juggling at all while also trying to chase a dream.
7:00
[SPEAKER_01]: But instead, I accidentally uncovered a secret that has me questioning my entire family's history.
7:08
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, imagine accidentally finding out that your grandfather, an unassuming farmer, actually worked for the CIA.
7:17
[SPEAKER_01]: That his entire life was likely a cover story, and that just one of the missions that he was a part of, the National Smith Sonion refers to as a real life, Oceans 11.
7:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, look, I need you to know that I am not a conspiracy person, okay?
7:35
[SPEAKER_01]: I have no idea what temperature is required to melt steel beams.
7:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think we fake the moon landing.
7:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Also, hot take, I think birds are real.
7:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I am not a conspiracy person.
7:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't fall down reddit rabbit holes.
7:52
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't wear tinfoil hat, though to be fair that last one is because I don't want the state
8:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Also, I've got enough on my plate life is throwing a lot at me, it's not like I exactly have time to even become a conspiracy person right now.
8:11
[SPEAKER_01]: It's nice I needed this my wife I we've been having a rough couple years my wife and I um we got we got home from a trip Finding out that we have in our second kid and found a pipe at burst in our house So for the last year and a half we've been living in hotels and Airbnb's While me and my father and law personally have demolished and rebuilt our home
8:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And some of you might be like, Hunter, are you a handy guy?
8:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you a macho, dude?
8:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Fuckin' no, I'm not.
8:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, my name's Hunter.
8:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean,
9:08
[SPEAKER_01]: This all started when my sister talked me out of making another dad podcast.
9:12
[SPEAKER_01]: She said the world does not need to hear from another stand-up comic about fatherhood, especially when you're already on the road three to four days a week doesn't really make you a leading authority when your wife is the one doing all the work, which you know, out, but also fair.
9:28
[SPEAKER_01]: She said we don't need another dad podcast, and then asked a really good question, why don't we just spend a couple weeks trying to learn
9:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, think about it.
9:40
[SPEAKER_01]: How much do we really know about our parents before they were our parents?
9:46
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if this will connect, but I spent so much of my 20s and 30s just trying to define what it meant to be me.
9:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And then my first kid got here and I was like, oh, no, none of it matters.
9:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Does that make sense?
9:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I love my mom and dad, but I have no idea what they were before they were parents.
10:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I know trivia questions about the people that raised me.
10:08
[SPEAKER_01]: What their first car was, who their first kiss was, my parents meant, competing against each other on a game show in the 70s called Family Feud.
10:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's real.
10:19
[SPEAKER_01]: real red flag.
10:20
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, survey says two Christmases.
10:25
[SPEAKER_01]: My parents have a cool story, you know.
10:27
[SPEAKER_01]: My dad used to be a professional motorcycle racer.
10:30
[SPEAKER_01]: My mom used to work for universal studios.
10:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And before that, they both modeled swimwear together.
10:36
[SPEAKER_01]: So they both sound very cool.
10:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And sound like people I would not be friends with in real life.
10:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And maybe that's for the best, maybe there's things that were never really supposed to know about the people that we love the most.
10:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Try my wife and I are still together.
10:50
[SPEAKER_01]: We just celebrated seven years together.
10:52
[SPEAKER_01]: We celebrated her for seven days.
10:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
10:56
[SPEAKER_01]: I love to our wedding.
10:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I love to dress.
10:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I love the open bar.
11:01
[SPEAKER_01]: I love learning that my wife dances like she's a past that I don't know about.
11:08
[SPEAKER_01]: My wife dances like she put herself to school.
11:12
[SPEAKER_01]: She dances like she smells like vanilla and glitter and I like it.
11:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I like the mystique.
11:16
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, sometimes you'll meet a couple and they're just like, gosh, I wish I met you sooner.
11:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Not us.
11:20
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't have that.
11:20
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't.
11:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't need to know anything more than I already did.
11:25
[SPEAKER_01]: I just found out she drove a Hummer in high school.
11:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Makes me want to throw a whole life people together away.
11:29
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't.
11:31
[SPEAKER_01]: No matter who it is, husband, wife, dad, mom, grandma, grandpa are minds to such a great job of filling in the gaps between these character tent poles we drive up.
11:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And we really don't need to know much about someone before they were that someone to us.
11:52
[SPEAKER_01]: This podcast is about one of those people.
11:55
[SPEAKER_01]: One of those people who you know and love and have a full relationship with, but ultimately know very little or nothing about.
12:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Shortly after looking into my dad and his past, it made sense for me to start looking into his dad.
12:09
[SPEAKER_01]: My grandpa, Jim.
12:11
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, how else am I really supposed to understand how my dad parented, understand my dad as a father figure, without understanding the father figure that he stemmed from.
12:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Turns out for how little I knew about my parents, I admittedly knew even less about my grandparents.
12:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I knew my grandpa Jim to be a soft-spoken, gentle, sweet, goat farmer.
12:33
[SPEAKER_01]: There were many summers when my dad would scoop me and my sisters up, throw us on a plane and fly us back east for a couple of weeks to live and work on my grandfather's farm.
12:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I think my dad thought it was character building.
12:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I think he liked the idea of plucking my sisters and I up and flying us outside of Los Angeles, where we could witness what honest work looked like, where people survived presumably without the use of smoke and mirrors.
13:04
[SPEAKER_01]: And we loved it.
13:05
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if you were to pitch me as a teenager on my grandfather's farm, it would have sounded
13:10
[SPEAKER_01]: awful, they only had one old tube television that only got basic cable, and it was only turned on every night, exclusively for watching Wheel of Fortune in jeopardy.
13:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Outside of that, you were on your own when it came to technology.
13:25
[SPEAKER_01]: There wasn't even cell reception.
13:27
[SPEAKER_01]: It's almost like once you arrived at my grandpa's farm, once you drove up that long, gravel, driveway.
13:37
[SPEAKER_01]: You were on another planet.
13:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember the magic of seeing a firefly for the first time.
13:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember the way every floorboard would creak or make a noise when you walked through that old house.
13:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And my sisters and I, we just spend hours and hours running and playing with the animals outside.
13:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Opa was someone I was deeply connected to out of my dad's side at the family when I was 11.
14:05
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the voice of my sister, Caleb.
14:07
[SPEAKER_00]: I was completely obsessed with animals, and I would stay up late reading veterinary books and reading encyclopedias of dog breeds, so spending time on the farm during the summers with all those animals.
14:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And having a family member who's loved for animals mirrored mine felt like a twin flame sort of situation.
14:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Killing is great, but we are different in lots of ways.
14:27
[SPEAKER_01]: One of those ways being that I don't use phrases like twin flame.
14:31
[SPEAKER_00]: He was kind and approachable but introverted and in a way that made him more endearing and he just always came across as the salt of the earth to me.
14:40
[SPEAKER_01]: For some reason, every night for dinner, my grandfather would have a filet, and two glass bottles of coarse life.
14:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Then every morning you would put on the same uniform of denim shorts, white t-shirt, long compression socks, and berkins socks.
14:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And he'd take those two coarse light bottles from the night before sterilize them and head out to feed the goats.
15:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Every morning we go visit each animal pen in the field and he greet each animal might name with such genuine excitement.
15:08
[SPEAKER_00]: His farm was like heaven to us and he was just precious.
15:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I adored him.
15:12
[SPEAKER_01]: I knew my grandfather gem to be kind and simple and that's why I got a little thrown off and confused when I started googling about his past.
15:23
[SPEAKER_00]: We were wanting to talk about generational parenting and how my grandfather's parenting affected my father's parenting and so on and so forth.
15:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So I started with my grandpa and his name is fairly generic, so there was some scrolling involved.
15:34
[SPEAKER_00]: But when I would find pages specifically linked to him, there would be a Google notification informing us that there had been things removed.
15:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm still a little confused by it all and sometimes these warnings would be there sometimes they wouldn't.
15:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes we would even take screenshots to only have them go missing later, but essentially sometimes with certain phrases or questions about my grandfather, my grandmother, the farm, what he did for work.
16:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes these alerts from Google would come up pretty much saying that we weren't being given all of the answers and that we should know our rights as it pertains to the
16:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And the first time I saw it, I didn't think anything up it, but then the third and fourth time I saw it, specifically underpages related to him.
16:18
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it makes you, huh, that's like gunna weird.
16:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, I feel crazy even saying this.
16:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And it bears reminding, I am not a conspiracy person.
16:28
[SPEAKER_01]: But essentially, sometimes when I would Google certain things about my grandfather, Google would tell me, we are a meeting information to you on behalf of the US government.
16:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's when we actually discovered a massive family secret.
16:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I knew my grandfather as a goat farmer.
16:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I know that my grandfather served in the Marines earlier in his life.
16:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I know that he fought in the infamous battle of Eudgema, a battle that he never talked about.
16:56
[SPEAKER_01]: After that, I know that he worked for a company called Global Marine as a Marine engineer, a job that he never talked about.
17:03
[SPEAKER_01]: But Google,
17:04
[SPEAKER_01]: was making my grandfather out to be someone he wasn't.
17:09
[SPEAKER_01]: I have been falling down this rabbit hole, learning things about my family's past that read more like a Tom Clancy novel than an obituary.
17:19
[SPEAKER_01]: just spending hours going through hundreds of Freedom of Information Act reports just sifting through tons of redacted, unpunctuated bullshit to find little nuggets of truth.
17:35
[SPEAKER_01]: This grandpa that was being pitched to me by these documents.
17:38
[SPEAKER_01]: This grandpa that Google did not want to tell me about was somehow smack dab in the middle of one of the greatest American stories never told.
17:46
[SPEAKER_01]: A classic, you know, where America is the good guy.
17:50
[SPEAKER_01]: A story so crazy.
17:52
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't believe it hasn't been turned into a movie yet.
17:55
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a story that somehow involves Howard Hughes, the Titanic, the Watergate scandal, and missing Russian nuclear warheads.
18:04
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean these documents were suggesting that my grandfather was at the center of the CIA's largest covert operation in history, and this isn't hyperbole, this is the mission that literally coined the phrase can neither confirm nor deny, but that couldn't be my grandfather, that couldn't be Jim.
18:24
[SPEAKER_01]: That couldn't be the soft spoken loving goat farmer that I spent my childhood summers playing with.
18:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I couldn't make sense of any of it.
18:34
[SPEAKER_01]: It was coming out of nowhere.
18:36
[SPEAKER_01]: I was looking for any childhood memory that would help snap any of this into focus, anything for my past that would help me make sense of this.
18:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's when I remembered something.
18:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that left me with one big question to try and answer.
18:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that could potentially tie all of this together.
18:57
[SPEAKER_01]: And that question was why did three military planes fly over my grandpa's funeral?
19:05
[SPEAKER_01]: My name is Hunter Hill, and this is Deep Secret.
19:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Hey, thanks for listening to this week's episode.
19:14
[SPEAKER_01]: This series is hosted by myself Hunter Hill, my sister Kaelenhill, and is a nothing to see here production.
19:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Executively produced by Hunter Hill, Kaelenhill, Ed Doesick, and produced by Jess Sunimfeld Jalis.
19:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Video interviews were produced by Kita Mascaro, and if you're enjoying the show, please be sure to follow the podcast, leave us a review, and subscribe wherever you are listening.
19:36
[SPEAKER_01]: It really does make a huge difference, and helps other people discover the story.
19:40
[SPEAKER_01]: You can also join our sub-stack community for exclusive content including source documents, extended celebrity interviews behind the scenes updates, and much more.
19:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And one last thing, every episode that will be coming out as either been recorded in my tiny home office or running and gunning it while out on the road.
19:58
[SPEAKER_01]: So thank you so much for being here as my sister and I unravel this crazy story.
20:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Hope to see you next week as we dive even deeper into this secret.