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Ray and Charles Eames: More than Chairs · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just doing our
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: usual chatting it up here on the podcast that we
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: like to call stuff you should that's right.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: I'm pretty excited about this one.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, this is your pick, right.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: Uh, yeah, this is one I've been wanting to do
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: for a long time.
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: Well, here we are, Charles, here we are. Well, I'm
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: glad you're excited. I'm excited too. It's a pretty cool topic.
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: The Eames, Charles and Ray Eames, Ray and Charles Eames.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: Depending on how you want to say, it doesn't matter
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: because any way you slice it, they were equals.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, if you don't know who we're
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: talking about, we should probably say so right off the
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: bat they are, or I guess they should say we're
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: a married couple who kind of I don't know if
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: they changed the face of design, but they were certainly
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: very influential and design and you know all they did
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: all kinds of things in their career, but what they're
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: most known for is their design of simple, eye pleasing
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: and back then affordable furniture.
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not even sure it was particularly affordable back then,
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: but that was definitely their goal. They wanted to make
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: the best for the most, for the least. They really
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: tied into the ethos that they were working in, which
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: was immediately post war economic boom America.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I saw that there. And this was in their
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: great documentary Eames Colon, The Architect and the Painter from
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: twenty eleven filmmakers Jason Kohne and Bill Jersey. I've seen
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: it twice. Now.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: That's an American Masters one, isn't it.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I think picked it up, but I
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: don't think it originally was. But I'm not sure. But
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: I saw it back in twenty eleven, I guess, and
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: then watch it again yesterday and today. But they said
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: that it was, you know, definitely sort of middle to
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: upper middle class people were who could afford to buy
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: their stuff at the time. But it wasn't for the
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: lofty super rich.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: Right, But it also wasn't for your average Joe Schmoe
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: with a mortgage and all that.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: Right, Well, all some stuff was okay.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: So you said that they didn't necessarily change the face
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: of design.
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: I don't know.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: I'm not one hundred percent sure. I guess looking back
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: with hindsight, the way that people treat them today, they're
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: revered like gods. Yeah, for sure, But I guess maybe
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: at the time contemporaneously they were part of a larger push.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: Like they worked with Aerosarinin he was a huge, hugely
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: influential architect and designer. They worked to Charles Nelson, a
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: hugely influential designer. They were part of like this vanguard,
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: I guess of you modernist design again, using kind of
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: like industrial readily available, mass producible materials, but applying really
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: really like legitimately artistic talent and vision and design to
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: the whole thing.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: You know, I had no idea until just now that
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: Charles Nelson Riley also worked in design.
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: He did. He said, I can't even do it. I
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: can't do it in person. You me probably could. One
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: of our dogs is named Charlie, named after Charles Nelson
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: Riley when she was a kid.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: Oh man, I mean, if that's not a joke, for
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: I mean, gen X is the low end of that joke.
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: Did you see his One man Show? No, they did
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: a documentary of his One Man's Show that he did
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: before his death. And it's good, very touching, poignant, like
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: Charles Nelson Riley with a little bit of his guard down.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: M I'd like to see that.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, check it out. But let's say we go back
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: to the beginning and we'll let everybody else decide whether
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: they change the face of design or not.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: All right, we'll start with well, let's start with Bernice
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Alexandra Kaiser, and we were like, who the heck is
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: that her family called her re Ray and that eventually
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: just got shortened.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: To Ray got sick of that hyphen.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah. She was born in Sacramento in nineteen twelve, and
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: she ended up being interested in a lot of things,
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: as did her future husband Charles, but she was largely
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: an artist and largely a painter, even though she was
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: into engineering and obviously design and all kinds of stuff
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: like that, But she was basically a painter and would
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: eventually study under a gentleman named Hans Hoffmann, very famous
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: German expressionist, and was a bit of a rabble rouser
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: in the art community early on, and that she was like,
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: she was in a group called American abstract artists that
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: would do things like Pickett if they didn't you know,
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: have art shows that represented different kinds of artists.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, apparently militancy toward modernist ideas was kind of a
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: through thread for people who were into modernism, like they
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: really were in the face of tradition and bucking that
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: whole thing, and part of that was kind of like
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: a militant approach to it, which I guess includes picketing
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: art galleries. Right, yeah, but she was part of that
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: movement before Pollock and d'cooning. Is it to coooning or cooning?
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: I think it's decooning.
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, before those guys, even like a decade before those
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: guys came into it, she was part of like that
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: first wave. So yeah, she was legit abstract artists. And
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: then her husband was born five years previously, I think
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: in nineteen oh seven in Saint Louis, Missouri. Just missed
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: the World's Fair. Oh when was that nineteen oh four?
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: Wow, well he might have gone.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: Have you ever seen meet me in Saint Louis?
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: Oh wait years three years prior? Sorry, that would be impossible, right,
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: I was like, they could have taken a three year old, Yeah.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: But they couldn't have taken a negative three year old.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: I know they tried.
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: I guess technically, I guess they did if that sperm
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: had just stayed in the same place and that was
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: the same page and they just were frozen in time
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: essentially reproductively.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: Oh boy, yeah.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: At any rate. He was born in Saint Louis in
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: nineteen oh seven and he wanted to be an architect,
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: essentially out of the gate. He studied architecture at Washington
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: University in Saint Louis and he got kicked out. He
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: left Slash got kicked out after about two years of
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: study because he was also a militant modernist and at
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: the time the training he was receiving was not so
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: I described as bos art and it was not modernist
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: at all, and they were like, get out of here,
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: you hippie bozo. So he did.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: He did not stop him though, he was like, you know,
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: I'm still going to be an architect, Like, how often
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: does anyone say, let me see your degree. It's true
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: when you're just sing a house, I know. So, even
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: though he didn't technically have the professional, you know, school
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: credentials finished, he started practicing with a guy named Robert Walsh.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: He was very good at it early on, and everyone
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: was like this guy, you know, did you see his degree?
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: I didn't see his degree, but I'm not going to
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: ask because you should see the way he draws up
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: a house.
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he would hand off his drawings with this probably
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: won't fall down.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: And I think that was Frank Loyd, right, Okay. In
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: nineteen twenty nine he got married for the first time
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: to a woman named Katherine Warman. They were college sweethearts,
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: I guess, and had a daughter who had end up
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: being the only sired child for Charles Eames. He never
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: had a kid with Ray. Her name was Lucia, and
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: he was doing such a good job that there was
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: an architect. You mentioned his son, Arrow Saranon earlier, but
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: the architect, the father, I guess, Eliel Saranon, said Hey,
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: I like what you're throwing down there, Why don't you
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: come on out to Michigan, to the Cranberry Academy of
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: Art in Bloomfield Heels Hills, and why don't you become well,
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: first of all, come out for a fellowship. But you know,
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: as you'll see, Charles Eames was very ambitious guy, and
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: before you know it, he was the director of the
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: industrial design program there.
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he was supposedly thinking he was just going to
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: go there and take it easy and kind of regather, regroup,
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: and they're like, no, you're too talented. You need to
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: head all this up at Cranbrook.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: I believe, right, which is very key because that is
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: where Rey Ray ended up.
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm working together at Cranbrook. They got into one
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: of their early materials, probably the material that made them
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: famous at least initially but still is kind of associated
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: with their design, plywood. Plywood. They were like, plywood, We're
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: going to start making things out of plywood. Just watch.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: And I think at the time plywood doesn't have quite
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: the connotation that does now, like the stuff you just
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: kind of lay over your attic rafters and crawl on like.
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: It was a little more high tech than that, but
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: not that much more so. The idea of taking plywood
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: and turning into a beautiful organic design that also was
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: functional too, it was kind of groundbreaking.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Arrow and Charles and then Ray assisted
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: on this project. Entered a chair into a Museum of
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: Modern Arts nineteen forty one organic Design and Home Furnishings competition,
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: and they won. Even though this chair was technically a failure,
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: they were you know, they realized the reason they love
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: plywood is that they could bend it in two different directions.
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: They won because they found love.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: Probably so, but you could, you know, you could curve
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: wood pieces that weren't plywood. But what you couldn't do
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: is curve a wood piece and then curve it again
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: in a different direction. Right, But they found that with
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: plywood you basically could. But it was pretty early on
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: in this process. So their chair where the back met
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: the seat would splinter, which is no good. But they
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: ended up covering it in fabric to hide that something
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: that you'll see. They did not like fabric later in
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: their designs. They thought it was sort of old fashioned.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: It was expensive, and they were trying to make stuff
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: a little more affordable. But they covered this thing and
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: fabric to hide that, and they won the competition. But
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: the chair was even though it won the competition, it
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: was a failure in that it was it could not
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: be mass produced basically as is.
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I saw. Another stage of their plywood bending molding
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: design was that they figured out that they could bend
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: it even further if they cut like a slit in
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: the middle of it.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: Oh okay, and they would make it.
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: Almost like a keyhole slit, so it looked like a
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: design element, but really it was allowing them to mold
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: it a little further than than before. They were just
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: what they were doing throughout like the late twenties and
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: through the whole thirties and into the forties, they were
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: experimenting with bending plywood to their will, essentially come here plywood. Yeah,
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: so that was I think. Did you say Ray helped
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: on that particular one.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, she worked with them, and that's where they, you know,
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: fell in love.
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So Charles and his first wife, Catherine, divorced I
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: think after about eleven or twelve years of marriage, and
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: he went after Ray pretty much immediately after, and they
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: got married in nineteen forty one. And right after they
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: got married in nineteen forty one, they did what any
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: self respecting artist was doing at the time. They looked
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: westward and got into some gelapi or other and drove
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: out to California.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they're like, forget it, New York, We're going.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: To La Also, I should say, I'm presuming they drove,
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: but knowing me and the streak I'm on lately, they
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: definitely flew. And everyone knows that they flew except me.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: Oh come on, So they went to La I'm with you, man.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: They drove their butts to California.
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: Thanks, Chuck, You're so supportive of me.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: And I like to like the Beverly Hillbillies. Charles was
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: on top of a rocking chair.
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: Right, and Ray had the shotgun in her lap.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Can you imagine? I mean that setup was very insane.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: There's a gun in a lap, There's an elderly woman
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: in a rocking chair on top of a truck.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah, but that's the hillbilly way. They don't care.
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: They'll they'll they'll look danger in the face and laugh
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: all the way to California.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: So they get to California, they started making connections, obviously
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: pretty quickly out there to the southern California modernist scene,
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: which was just getting going pretty hoppin'. A very key
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: person they met and befriended was a guy named John Intenza,
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: who published Arts and Architecture magazine, and they ended up
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: designing twenty six different covers over like a five year period.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: That's a lot.
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: That's about half.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm not a big math guy, but is it
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: a monthly.
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, if it was monthly that's sixty issues over that
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: five years, and if they did twenty six, it's almost
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: half of them.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: As soon as I said was it monthly? I immediately
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: panicked the name that I had just said was Arts
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: and Architecture monthly.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: No, you did, and it's just Arts and Architecture quarterly.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: All right, oh quarterly. So they designed a bunch of
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: those covers. Intenza became a big sort of supporter of theirs.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: And they also met a guy, an architect named Richard Neutra,
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: who said, hey, I designed these killer apartments in Westwoode,
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: the Strathmore apartments, and you should live in one of
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: them because Orson Wells will live there too.
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Strathmore makes me think of like some new skyscraper,
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: but it was like a two story house ish structured,
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: I think, divided into three apartments. And they're still on
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: the market these days.
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: So they're very nice looking.
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: They are. They're very cool. So they just started making
• 13:48
  Speaker 2: connections right off the bat, but they weren't really making
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: any money, and Charles ended up well, they were doing
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: two things. They were spending all of their free time
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: working at home in their apartment, which they can burn
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: it into like a working studio bending plywood. There's a
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: legendary machine called the Kazam Machine that no one seems
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: to know exactly how it worked, but they used it
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: to mold plywood. To bend plywood. Part of it involved
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: a heavy balloon and a bicycle pump that would provide
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: the shape that it would be molded against. But somehow
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: it also used electricity. So Charles climbed an electrical pole
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: and tapped into the electricity. Very very unwise thing to do,
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: and luckily he survived. But that's how that's how broke
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: they were. They were stealing electricity to power their Kazam
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: machine in their studio where they were still working on
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: plywood designs.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it used heating coils, so that had to have
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: been what took all of the juice. Sure, and you know,
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: applying heat to bin something is a pretty tried and
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: true method. So I don't know about the air pump
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: the balloon. I can picture, uh huh, but I don't
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: know what that bike pump did it blew up the balloon. Yeah,
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: And if you look at the Kazam machine, it's it
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: looks almost like a tique lounge chair that hasn't been
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: finished yet.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: Exactly exactly. It's dancing right along the line of a
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: wick a wheelchair. So I'm not a big fan of it.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Like I would have come in like a dummy
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: and said, you're trying to design a chair with this thing,
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: look at it. Just sit in it. That's right, You've
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: got your chair.
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: But they called that the Kazam machine as a reference
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: to Alec Kazam, because you would put in like plywood
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: and glue and something magically different would appear.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: Out Kazam with a exclamation plant. Yeah, sure after kazam,
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: not after machine.
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: That's right, although they should have used two and been
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: like Kazam machine.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: Well, that would conjure something very deadly, so I guess.
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: So.
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: Like I said, they were pretty broke, and Charles ended
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: up taking a job at MGM designing sets. I believe
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: could not for life of me find out what films
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: he actually worked on. But while there he was not
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: happy about that. He wrote to a friend that all
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: hope for the future is lost, but I get a
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: regular paycheck. So he was also taking materials that he
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: found from his work back home too, to use in
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: their home studio. But he also made I think a
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: lifelong friend in director Billy Wilder.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah and great.
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Billy Wilder. Isn't he Chad our director from the
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: Stuff You should Know TV Show's favorite director?
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: Oh?
• 16:23
  Speaker 3: Is he?
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: I think Chad said The Apartment is his favorite movie
• 16:26
  Speaker 2: of all time.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: It's a great one. That's what our pal Scott Ackerman
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: chose for a movie crush.
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, there you go.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: So yeah, one of the great movies. And Billy Wilder
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: did all kinds of great movies.
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: You had me at Sunset Boulevard, Yeah, exactly. So the
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: em Shase the reason Billy Wilder figures into it, aside
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: from like, wow, there's the name drop right there. The
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: em shase, which is a very famous well shave lounge
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: decked out in leather with like a pillow to go
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: under your caves and everything. It's to me, it looks
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: like what your psychologists would use while they gave you
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: a guy innecological exam. It's like a cross between a
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: couch and your shrink's office and an exam table in
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: your doctor's office.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: Oh well, just a word of advice if your psychologists
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: trying to give you a gynological kind of logical exam.
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: That's exit stage left. Quickly. Yeah, so, yes, thank you
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: for taking my joke and turning it really dark.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, I just want to make sure everyone
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: understood clearly.
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: But the reason Billy Wilder inspired the Eames Shays is
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: that he would take naps on sets, and apparently there
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: was one that bless him that Charles Eames witness where
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: Billy Wilder was taking a nap on a six by
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: twelve inch plank that was stood up on two saw horses.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: That's where he was napping. That's no good, no, So
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: Charles was like, I need to help my friend here.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: All right. I think that's a good time for a break.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: You get Billy Wilder asleep in the corner one of
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: those psychologists chases.
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: No, this one's straight. It's not the other one. The
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: curvy one's the lush chaise.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: Oh really, because I saw the chase was the curvy one.
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: Now there's two. One of the curvy one is called
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: lush chaise. The emshaise, the original em shase is like
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: it looks like one of their like aluminum group leather
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: upholstered chairs, but laid out essentially flat.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: Oh Billy Wilder should stuck around.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: I'm telling you my my description of it was like
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: spot on.
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: In my head, though it made more sense for the
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: Curby one. Your description.
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess so if you wanted to be really comfortable.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: All right, we'll take a break and we'll be right back.
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: And stub with Joshua John. All right.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: So World War two rolls around, and this was a
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: bit of a shift for everybody in the world, probably
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: but certainly for the Eames family. Southern California is very
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: was and still is very big in defense manufacturing, and
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: the military said, hey, this plywood stuff is really something.
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: Have you seen this plywood?
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: We like to you know, it's lightweight, it's you know,
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: can be bent in two different directions out here if
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: you have a kazam machine and we're into it. And
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: they knew a guy named Wendell Scott, an old friend
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: of Charles's, who was a Navy doctor. They got together
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: for a visit. He saw this kazam machine and he said,
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: wait a minute. We've been using these metal leg splints
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: for war and these things are no good that they're
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: not good for protection in the field. We need metal
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: for other things. And we think that you might be
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: able to or I think you might be able to
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: build some better wooden splints out of bending plywood.
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's exactly what they did. They recruited a
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: friend that Charles had made an MGM, a theater designer
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: named Margaret Harris, and together with them and Intenza, they're
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: pretty much their benefactor by this point. In Los Angeles,
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: they created a wooden splint for the US Navy that
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: was lightweight. It had strategic holes in it that made
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: it extra light weight, but also you could run straps
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: through to strap the leg to the splint. They were stackable,
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: very very important. So it was mass producible, it was
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: extremely mobile, it was lightweight, but it also looked kind
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: of nice. I mean, as far as leg splints go,
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: it's an attractive legs point.
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: It was called the Transportation egg splint. Egg splint, Oh, my.
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: Lord, Transportation Egg's Benedict leg splint.
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: And they made five thousand. The Navy ordered five thousand
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: of these things, so all of a sudden they had
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: a little money coming in.
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because at ten dollars per that's what they charged. Yeah,
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: they could have that'd be a million dollars a million
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: dollar order.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: That's a lot of dough.
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: And that's not my math. I just went ahead and
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: converted it to today's dollars. That's what I.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: Oh, okay, I was about to say, here we go.
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: Five thousand times ten is a million.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: So such money that they were able to form a
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: company called the Plywood I'm sorry, deply formed wood Company.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: They had a little office in Venice Beach at the time,
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: and they sold that thing. They didn't want to be
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: in that business, really, so they built it and they
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: sold it to a company based out a mission called
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: Evans Products. Charles worked there for a little while, headed
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: up the molded plywood division. And then the big, big
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: change in their life came in nineteen forty three when
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: they opened up what they called nine oh one, which
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: was their office. It's still there today at nine oh
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: one now it's Abbot Kenney Boulevard. Back then it was
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: West Washington Boulevard in Venice.
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: Gotcha. So, yeah, the leg splint thing was not just
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: a little boondoggle we went on. The reason it was
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: important was they made a bunch of contexts. They got
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: a lot of business experience, they got a little money,
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: and they essentially that's what gave them the foundation to
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: move up from being broke theater designers who were just
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: kind of working in their apartment to legitimate furniture designers
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: who now had their own business in office.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean they got equipment too, and materials they had.
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: They were pretty set up there at nine oh one,
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: for sure, And if you watch the documentary or just
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: know about nine oh one, it was a it was
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: a bit of a kind of a crazy wonderland to
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: work at. Some of the designers there said it was
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: like working at Disneyland. It was fun. There weren't sort
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: of regular routines. There weren't stuffy staff meetings. It was
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: just one of those places where, you know, long before
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: you know, every tech office in the world was like,
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: let's have a ping pong table and you know, skittles
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: all over the place. They had a sort of a
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: classy version of that in nineteen forty three, which was
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: not how offices worked back then, even creative offices.
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, as we'll see. One of the things they're also
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: known for is they made a line of toys. And
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: the reason they also kind of forade into toys is
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: because at least two Charles, but I think also to
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: Ray as well. Charles often like gets the quotes, but
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: they were in such sink that I assume in a
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: lot of cases, Ray probably felt at least similar, if
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: not the same. But in this instance, Charles had some
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: quote about how play is actually serious business, that that's
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: the kind of thing that unlocks curiosity. Just doing an
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: activity simply for the activity's sake just kind of resets
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: the brain and the mind. So I'm not at all
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: surprised to hear that their office was was like that,
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: because that's just what they seemed to do. They would
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: just do stuff learn by doing all the time.
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Another reason they went into things like toys and
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: then later filmmaking, as we'll see, is he didn't as
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: great as his reputation was. He didn't want to be
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: chair guy.
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: Sure, plus he really liked toys.
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but he's so good at chairs.
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: Right. Well, that's the thing, like when you hear the
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: word emes like almost probably eighty percent of the time,
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: if not more, the next word is chair. Yeah, because
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: the chairs that they designed are so iconic and the
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: first one that they hit the market with. So they
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: opened the office in nineteen forty three. By nineteen forty six,
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: they had a chair in mass production. At first with
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: that Evans products. But eventually Evans is like, we don't
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: really know what we're doing. We're more of the leg
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: splint producers. Maybe you guy should talk to Herman Miller.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's what they did.
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: They came up with the Eames Chair would, the ECW.
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: Nowadays it's called the LCW the lounge chair would and
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: it's molded bent plywood on a plywood base and it
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: is gorgeous and it's actually super comfortable without a lick
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: of padding on it.
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's you know, they figured out if you mold
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: something just right to where the human body can function
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: well in it. And they were into form, but they
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: were very much into function. They did not want some weird,
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: fancy looking thing that's not fun or comfortable to sit on. Ever.
• 25:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Ray had a quote and I assumed Charles probably
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: felt the same way, is that what works is better
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: than what looks good. The looks can change, but what
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: works works, and there's a ton of wisdom in there.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: That was actually Ray, That's what I said. Oh, oh oh, okay,
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: I didn't get the joke.
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: I've made a reference to the joke where I went
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: on some horrible tangent earlier about Yeah, I was about
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: to do it again. So thank you for saving everyone.
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: So Herman Miller you mentioned, this is a big deal
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: because the Herman Miller company out of Michigan was great
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: at making furniture. They were producing modernist furniture. Oh boy,
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: did we already have a big mistake with Charles Nelson?
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: I don't know. I guess maybe maybe I said Charles.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: All right, Well, George Nelson is who we're talking about,
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: very iconic designer. In fact, in my little studio here,
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: I'm looking at a George Nelson clock.
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: Which one.
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: The one that is rounded wood?
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like the balls on the end, the ball clock.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: I mean it's like someone took a round ball made
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: of wood and then sliced the first third of it
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: off and that's a clock face.
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: I got you, Okay, Yeah, we have the eye clock.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: The eye clock. I think I know which one you're
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: talking about.
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: It it looks like an eye and the like the numbers.
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: It doesn't have numbers, but you know, like the little
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: lines that go to the numbers. It has those, but
• 26:54
  Speaker 2: they're in some crazy, weird spread out positions, but they
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: still keep time. It's really amazing. But yeah, George Nelson's
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: very well known for creating a lot of super fifties clocks.
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think any of his clocks had numbers,
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: if I'm not mistaken, because he was kind of like,
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: you don't need a number if you know what o'clock
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: looks like and how to read it. Yeah, And you
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: know that's another reason this one's fun for us, because
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: both of us love this stuff.
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, So for George Nelson, go look up Nelson clocks,
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: look up Nelson bubble lamps. Probably seen those before. The
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: Nelson platform bench and then the swag leg desk. Those
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: are some of his best designs. But in addition to
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: being a designer himself, he also he was one of
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: those A plus people who recruited other A plus people
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: to work with him. Yeah, and one of the groups
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: of A plus people he recruited were the emes, and
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: they started working with George Nelson at Herman Miller essentially
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: as like independent contractors, just probably exclusively sending their designs
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: to Herman Miller to be produced.
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: That's right, And could you imagine if we didn't have
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: little slip ups, we've never gotten to Charles Nilson, Riley sidebar.
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: Man you just found the silver lining to that thousand emails.
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: So and that's a good lesson to people to never
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: stop the podcast right in the middle to email us
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: a correction. Sometimes we catch things. So they're working together
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: now they're working for Herman Miller. This is a sort
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: of a match made in heaven because they had the
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: smarts and the experience to like mass produce and pump
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: out these great designs. On Herman Miller side, they had
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: these amazing designers now working for them, and they, like
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: you said, you know, from the beginning they were trying
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: to create these sort of simple, stylish but you know,
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: practical pieces and as we'll see, you know, things that
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: would end up going in schools and bus stations and
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: stuff like.
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: That and airports. So if you go to an airport
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: today and you see like that long row of chairs
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: that you just sit in while you're waiting at the gate,
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: and they're all connected by metal. They have a leather back,
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: a leather seat in two you know arms. That's that's
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: an EMES design there the air I can't remember the
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: sling Group chair is what they're called. And they're still
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: in production. So if it's not an actual legitimate emes. Yeah,
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: set of chairs, it's a knockoff of it. That's how
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: ubiquitous there stuff is. It was like everywhere, like most
• 29:22
  Speaker 2: of the stuff we're talking about. If you can't bring
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: it to mine, I will bet that if you go
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: look it up, yeah, probably seen it before.
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean their stuff is either literally all over
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: the place or just in spirit in a lot of places.
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: Just ubiquitous in America, yeah for sure. Maybe elsewhere, but
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: I don't I don't get to travel much.
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: I know, I haven't traveled that much either. It's always
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: for tour.
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: For Ray's side, she was an amazing artist, a great painter.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: She ended up working, you know, in adding a lot
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: of fun and design elements to the things that were happening.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: If you watch a documentary, you definitely get the sense
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: that she she's the one that kind of held it
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: all together. She had a great attention to detail. So
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: like as far as the company, you know, functioning as
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: a as a company and not just a funhouse of
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: like kids designing things. You know, as far as the
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: staff goes, she kind of kept things on the rails
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: and also provided a lot of fun and color and
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: textural detail and you know, if you watch interviews you
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: know with them over the years on YouTube, she's always
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: standing behind Charles, of course, and she doesn't say much
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: on camera. It's always him and his name is the
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: one that's up there, and it gets a little frustrating,
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: but it was the fact of the matter is it
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: was just a time in the nineteen fifties where even
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: though Charles would say things like anything I can do,
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: Ray can do better than me. It's just how it was.
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: Then she took a bit of a back seat unfortunately.
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and yeah, there's no other way to put it.
• 31:00
  Speaker 2: It's just how it was. There's a very famous clip
• 31:02
  Speaker 2: of them on an NBC show called Home that was
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: hosted by the actress Arlene Francis, And in this clip,
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: it's like I think nine or eleven minute like segment
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: on the show. Yeah, they actually debuted, Yeah it is.
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: They debuted one of their famous chairs, which we'll talk
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: about in the second, the Eames lounge chair. But Arlene
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: Francis is even like almost cattily dismissive of Ray, and
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: Ray is just sitting there likes has to have a
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: big smile on her face, because that's what you're expected
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: to do. But she was just sidelined, just pushed to
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: the side in this interview. Despite yeah, over the years,
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: like Charles just being like, no, this this, this one's
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: not behind me, she's right next to me, Like we're equals,
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: we're partners where you do this together. The society was
• 31:46
  Speaker 2: just like, that's that's not true stuff.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, she's kind of like I'm paraphrasing, but the overall
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: vibe was in the brief time she was allowed to speak,
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: was tell me how you support your husband that kind
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: of thing exactly. Yeah. So they're making all kinds of
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: things collapsible sofas, fiberglass shell chairs, those were very, very famous.
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: If you look up there and I think this one
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: wont to Design Award for moment as well. In nineteen
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: fifty there molded fiberglass armchair. Look that thing up and
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: you'll say, oh that chair.
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the one that I've sat in in every school
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: cafeteria ever at the bus station. Like if you see
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: like a seat that's plastic and kind of molded to
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: fit your form, that was the Eames fiberglass armchair.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, And again songs upholstery, they would end up
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: using leather, as we'll see here in a second. But
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: most of this early stuff was like aluminum molded fiberglass
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: and don't forget plywood, plastic, plywood, wire mesh stuff like that.
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, which, to me, that's what I don't like about
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: their design. It has too much of an industrial flavor,
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: which is exactly what they're going for. They were trying
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: to show like, you can you can come up with
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: beautiful design that's affordable using mass produced, you know, materials,
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: and so that's what they were doing. But it just
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: looks a little industrial to me. And then it has
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: that veneer of like fifty years, which makes industrial products
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: like somehow creepy. So some of their actual vintage stuff
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: I'm not crazy about. But there's a really cute segment
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: on Antique's road Show if you want to see one
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: of the EMES storage units, one of their earliest ones,
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: if you look up Herman Miller storage unit Fort Worth,
• 33:38
  Speaker 2: there's like a five or six minute segment where this
• 33:41
  Speaker 2: woman is told that something she paid fifteen dollars for
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: is worth like twenty thousand dollars. Oh wow, I love
• 33:47
  Speaker 2: Antiques Roadshow.
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great show. And another thing that was
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: great about their designs with these chairs in particulars that
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: they were stackable. I think they may have learned from
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: that egg splint that if you make something stackable, that
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: that's very handy if you have to clear a cafeteria
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: for a school play or dodgeball.
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: Right exactly. So that was their their genuinely affordable breakthrough,
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: and they actually kind of, from what I can tell,
• 34:15
  Speaker 2: left molded plywood largely behind. That's not entirely true, but
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: they really went, you know, full bore on molded fiberglass
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: and then plastic because it really did fulfill a lot
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: of the service their purposes they wanted, including affordability. Like
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: that first chair of theirs, Time magazine named it the
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: chair of the century. Before the century, it was even
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: halfway through, Like that's how much of a splash it made.
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: And they were making it for like the average person
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: to be able to buy. But it was still in
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: today's dollars, like a five hundred and twenty five dollars
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: like single chair, you know what I mean, So it
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: wasn't exactly affordable. When they started to get into fiberglass
• 34:53
  Speaker 2: and plastic, then they were making chairs that the average
• 34:55
  Speaker 2: person could afford.
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: I wonder if like when they made that announcement. How
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: many chair designers and builders were just like, well, what's
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: the point and just threw their chair into the fireplace.
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: Like I guess I'll go into toys. Damn it. They're
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: into toys too.
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: So you said they moved away from plywood, but not
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: before this iconic chair that you mentioned briefly earlier.
• 35:21
  Speaker 2: That's why I corrected myself.
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: The Eames lounge, which was molded plywood. It was fabric.
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: The very first one that was introduced on that show
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: was rosewood, plywood and black leather. And this is the
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: one that made them famous. It came with an ottoman
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: or I guess. I don't even know if you had
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: to buy it separately back then, but it was. It's
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: a gorgeous chair. I mean, they're the ones they sit
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: on on Shark Tank. They are copied heavily. I imagine the
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: knockoffs are not nearly as good. But I don't own one,
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: but I've always wonted one, and I think one day
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: I might have to splash down for one.
• 36:00
  Speaker 2: There's this one that I covet that was owned by
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: orvile Reddenbacher, which just somehow makes it even more like
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: mid century. Amazing.
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: Do you imagine eating popcorn in that thing? Watching a movie?
• 36:12
  Speaker 2: So yeah, there's this guy who is, like, you know,
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: he refurbished an Atomic Ranch, or it's on the magazine,
• 36:19
  Speaker 2: the internet magazine Atomic Ranch. But that kind of like
• 36:22
  Speaker 2: mid century space age house he refurbished, and he has
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: that orval Reddenbocker knockoff. It's actually a knockoff of the
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: Eames lounge. He has it, and he said they eat
• 36:32
  Speaker 2: popcorn in it.
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: Amazing.
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: I think so too, And I don't know why. I
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: don't even know how I first heard about it, but
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: I covet that particular chair. It's great.
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: You know, one day, Josh, I'm gonna really roode for
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: you to get that chair.
• 36:46
  Speaker 2: Thank you. I can't wait till that day starts. Let's
• 36:51
  Speaker 2: talk about that chair a little bit. Oh sure, okay,
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: well here I go. So the chair itself was different.
• 36:59
  Speaker 2: It was multiplied with like you said, but it was
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: upholstered in leather like I think also you said. But
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: it was meant to be exceedingly comfortable. And the way
• 37:06
  Speaker 2: that Charles Putt is supposed to have the warm, receptive
• 37:10
  Speaker 2: look of a well used first Baseman's Myt, which definitely
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: gets that across. No, they're super duper comfortable, especially if
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: you remind yourself like I'm actually sitting on polster plywood here, right.
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: They have become so iconic and so associated with the
• 37:28
  Speaker 2: mid century modern aesthetic, and in particular it's almost like
• 37:33
  Speaker 2: a signal or a code for someone who is powerful
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: captain of industry. Like it's like a mover and a
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: shaker of that era if you're doing like a period piece,
• 37:43
  Speaker 2: so much so that when is it. Matthew Wiener, who
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: is the showrunner for mad Men Winer weinerslov He said,
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: We're not using the Eames lounge in our show. It's
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: just such a cliche. It shows up everywhere, and mad
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: Men is like, of course it's going to show up
• 38:02
  Speaker 2: in mad Men. So was he very wisely was like, Nope,
• 38:04
  Speaker 2: we're not doing that. But he went with a different
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: Eam set, the Emes Aluminum group, which is equally cool.
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: But in a different way.
• 38:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I definitely like the other one better. But this
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: was more of an office chair. You've seen it before
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: as well, no padding on the arms, but it was
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: it's like a ribbed, ribbed leather. I promise you look
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: this thing up and you'll go, oh, that thing exactly
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: that held Don Draper's butt for however many years.
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: And also, I mean, depending on how hip your workplaces,
• 38:36
  Speaker 2: you might have a knockoff of this in your office.
• 38:39
  Speaker 2: Like it's really that's something that happens in design a lot.
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: Somebody comes up with an iconic design and then everybody
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: rips it off. That's just the part of the industry.
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, I feel like that's another breakpoint. Yeah yeah,
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: all right, hepcat. We're going to be right back at
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: this and josh will pick up after the break with toys,
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: learn and stuff with Joshua John stuff.
• 39:22
  Speaker 3: You shine up, all right, Chuck.
• 39:38
  Speaker 2: Let's talk toys, because, like I said, they considered play
• 39:42
  Speaker 2: serious business because of what it could do to unlock you.
• 39:45
  Speaker 2: And they were playful people for sure. Yeah, before we
• 39:48
  Speaker 2: talk about toys, let's put that on the back burner
• 39:51
  Speaker 2: for a second and talk about their architecture work, because
• 39:54
  Speaker 2: remember Charles was a crypto pseudo architect for a while,
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: an outlaw architect, I guess, yeah, And this was an
• 40:01
  Speaker 2: age where you could work with other amazing designers in architects.
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: And remember they were friends already with aerosaranin So they
• 40:12
  Speaker 2: worked with him on at least one house called case
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: Study House number nine, and that's a pretty famous house,
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: but it is nothing compared to Case Study House number eight,
• 40:22
  Speaker 2: which is in fact the house that Ray and Charles
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: Eames designed and ended up living in.
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the case Study Houses. We'll say what it is.
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: But I've had this on my list for like ten
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: years to do.
• 40:35
  Speaker 2: Oh it's so neat.
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: Took it in.
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: It's beautiful, But what to that house?
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really neat.
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: But the Case Study program was a program sponsored by
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: Art and Architecture magazine where they built these houses. I
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: think there were thirty six designs, not just the Eames,
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: all sorts of architects. Right over the course of like
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: twenty one years, they built twenty six of these houses,
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: and eighteen of them are still as is a handful
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: of being destroyed, which is awful. Yea, and maybe more
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: awful a handful of them when you look up, like
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: the list says something like, you know, renovated. I'm paraphrasing
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: to a country renovated so much that you can't even
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: tell it's what it was.
• 41:26
  Speaker 2: Gotcha, Yeah, for sure, But we're going.
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: To do one on the case study houses in that program.
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: It was pretty amazing. But out of this came case
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: Study eight, where like you said, the Ames lived in
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: the Pacific Palisades. It was initially called the Bridge House
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: because it was going to be cantilevered out over this
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: big grassy meadow toward the sea because you could see
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: the ocean there. And Charles at one point reconsidered along
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: with Ray, and they said, hey, we're doing that thing
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: that you're not supposed to do an architecture, which is
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: take this beautiful area and just like plunk a house
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: down in the middle of it. And he fell in
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: love with that meadow and he decided to change the
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: complete design of it instead of cantilevering it out over
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: this meadow, make the meadow this big beautiful front yard basically,
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: and they came up with they scrapped the Ridge House
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: and came up with the design for number eight, which
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: was this very beautiful, square, flat roofed, colorful, amazing house.
• 42:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So apparently Ray was a fan of Mandria. And
• 42:27
  Speaker 2: you can tell because these are two giant squares made
• 42:31
  Speaker 2: of glass and steel, and then they have panels in
• 42:34
  Speaker 2: some places where you might have a window, and those
• 42:37
  Speaker 2: panels would be colored like yellow or blue or red
• 42:40
  Speaker 2: or white like a Mandria painting. But they were the ones.
• 42:45
  Speaker 2: I don't know if this house is the one that
• 42:46
  Speaker 2: introduced it. It's possible. The idea of like soaring ceilings,
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: of huge open space floor plans, it was like a
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: it's a modernist masterpiece. But one of the things that's
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: so great about it is that Ray decorated it to
• 43:04
  Speaker 2: the hilt with art objects, gifts from friends, paintings, sculptures,
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: folk art, weavings, everything you can think of. It was
• 43:14
  Speaker 2: just such a busy room. There's like leopard skin rugs
• 43:18
  Speaker 2: and just weird stuff everywhere. And this was entirely counter
• 43:22
  Speaker 2: to the trend at the time, which was if you
• 43:24
  Speaker 2: were modernist, you're also minimalist. There in yeah, you can't
• 43:27
  Speaker 2: extract one from the other, and she did, and that
• 43:30
  Speaker 2: was a huge contribution to modernism because a lot of
• 43:33
  Speaker 2: people are turned off, including me, are turned off by minimalism, like,
• 43:36
  Speaker 2: can't stand it. It's an awful, awful way to live,
• 43:39
  Speaker 2: I think, And she was like, hey, you can be
• 43:41
  Speaker 2: modernists and not be minimalist, you know. So she's credited
• 43:46
  Speaker 2: with that as being probably her greatest contribution, solo contribution
• 43:51
  Speaker 2: to modernism is the design choices she made in that house.
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, whimsical and warm. I love it. It's pretty amazing.
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: Like you said, they all did case study house number
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: nine on the same lot as number eight. Intinda himself
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: would live in number nine, and he also designed his
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: old buddy Billy Wilder's house. He said, Hey, I love
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: that that flat board that you gussied up for me.
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: Can you make me a flat house? And he said sure.
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: And so this house in Beverly Hills, where Billy Wilder
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: and his wife Audrey Young lived, is another gorgeous, you know,
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: flat roofed, sort of square, boxy, brilliant design.
• 44:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very cool. And they also planned eucalyptus trees
• 44:35
  Speaker 2: all around it, and I think at least on one
• 44:38
  Speaker 2: of them, there's swings that you can swing on when
• 44:41
  Speaker 2: you're there. When we went, we didn't we just showed up.
• 44:44
  Speaker 2: We didn't make reservations and there was no one there,
• 44:46
  Speaker 2: so we had the place to ourselves. We weren't able
• 44:48
  Speaker 2: to go inside, but you know, we peeked in the
• 44:50
  Speaker 2: windows and all that.
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: It's all windows, pretty the whole thing.
• 44:53
  Speaker 2: I know, you really could, he think though, it's definitely
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: worth visiting, Chuck, I think you'd love it.
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: Oh totally. Is there so many things in LA that
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: I was either unaware of or too broke to do that.
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: I try to do those things when I go back now.
• 45:06
  Speaker 2: Nice.
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: So Ray is busy also working on side gigs, designing
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: textiles and fabrics and patterns. A couple of her most
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: famous ones that Waverley Products picked up is called c
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: Things Sea Things, which is whimsical and fun, just like
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: she was a little starfish and sort of amba like things.
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: And then she was very famous for something you still
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: see a lot today called the Emes Dots, which is
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: this design that are dots with interconnected lines. It's simple stuff,
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: but iconic.
• 45:41
  Speaker 2: Yes, if you're into west Elm stuff, you have seen
• 45:44
  Speaker 2: this design before or some version of it for sure. Yeah.
• 45:48
  Speaker 2: So toys, toys, I think it's time to talk about
• 45:52
  Speaker 2: toys in particular. They had one called the Toy Yeah,
• 45:56
  Speaker 2: and it was a set of like these vinyl panels
• 45:59
  Speaker 2: that you would frame with dowels and then connect to
• 46:02
  Speaker 2: other panels with other dowels, and they were either square
• 46:06
  Speaker 2: or triangle. I think they're about three feet across, and
• 46:12
  Speaker 2: the whole point of it was you can build all
• 46:14
  Speaker 2: sorts of structures out of it. You can use it
• 46:16
  Speaker 2: to build the wings of a theater and pretend you're
• 46:18
  Speaker 2: on a stage like it was. You were intended to
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: use your imagination, even though in the instructions it shows
• 46:25
  Speaker 2: you some ideas and how to build some stuff. But
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: it was a toy for everybody, like for all ages.
• 46:31
  Speaker 2: And that was I think the first one they came
• 46:33
  Speaker 2: up with.
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that was in fifty one. They had the House
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: of Cards as well, which is produced in fifty two.
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: It's a deck of cards. The patterns on them are beautiful.
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: All the cards are different things. It's not like just
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: a single pattern deck. But they had notches. It's a house,
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: you build it, so they had notcha so you could
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: build it into these very emsy looking square structures the
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: way the nachas are built. And I was like, I'm
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: gonna buy one of those from myle pal Josh, oh thanks.
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: I went to It's not coming Dowork. Okay, I went
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: to Etsy. That original back is thirty two hundred bucks.
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: So amen, that's a lot of money for a deck
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: of cards.
• 47:16
  Speaker 2: Well, yeah, it so okay, well, then you can get
• 47:18
  Speaker 2: me one of their musical towers instead.
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: Ah. Yes, they were very well known for this being
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: in their office. Is still there today. It is a
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: vertical xylophone. Yeah, and you drop a ball down it, yeah,
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: like plink and yeah, and it just sort of bounces
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: its way down, hitting different notes on the way down,
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: which is just super fun.
• 47:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And all the notes are rearrangeable too, which is
• 47:39
  Speaker 2: just sweet. There's only three of them in existence, so
• 47:41
  Speaker 2: I presume it might even be more than a House
• 47:43
  Speaker 2: of cards toy.
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: You can buy me that.
• 47:46
  Speaker 2: So in addition to toys to furniture, the Emes were
• 47:51
  Speaker 2: they were just creative, creative people through and through, and
• 47:54
  Speaker 2: they saw design everywhere. They had a collection of almost
• 47:57
  Speaker 2: a quarter of a million slides, and they would create
• 48:01
  Speaker 2: these slide show or multimedia presentations juxtaposing like a shell
• 48:05
  Speaker 2: with like a an interstate overpass and be like, look
• 48:09
  Speaker 2: at how similar this is. They were just into all
• 48:13
  Speaker 2: that kind of stuff. And so they've found a lot
• 48:15
  Speaker 2: of full film in like another phase, kind of like
• 48:18
  Speaker 2: the end phase of their career together, which was coming
• 48:22
  Speaker 2: up with movies, exhibits and presentations essentially.
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so they found work in a few different ways.
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: They ended up being sponsored or I guess hired by corporations.
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: Notably IBM was one of them to create you know,
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: kind of industrial films here and there, multi media projects.
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: It wasn't like, you know, how you can get your
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: hand caught in a printer or anything like that. All
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: kinds of different stuff, very creative things. One of the
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: most famous films they made, probably the most famous, it's
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: called Powers of Ten. I did a prototype film in
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: nineteen sixty eight called a rough sketch for a proposed
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: film dealing with the powers of ten and the relative
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: size of things in the universe, shot at Miami in
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: black and white, and then made a final version. They
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: worked on this thing for a long time. It's based
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: on a book by a Dutch Dutch teacher named Keys
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: Boca called Cosmic View, Colan the Universe and forty Jumps.
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: But the final version they shot on the shores of
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: Lake Erie. I'm sorry, boy, I almost screwed that one
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: up Lake Michigan in Chicago. The final version was in
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: seventy seven. It was in color. It was called Powers
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: of Ten colon a film dealing with the relative size
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: of things in the universe. And what that all means
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: is they start with a simple overhead shot of this
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: couple next to Lake Michigan having a picnic, and then
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: it just keeps zooming back by Powers of ten, narrated
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: the whole time by a gentleman MIT physics professor named
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: Philip Morrison and Cameron Crow, the director very much inspired
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: by Billy Wilder. He opens Jerry Maguire with a very
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: similar thing. And I guarantee you he took this from
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: the EMES project.
• 50:12
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'm sure like it was. Yeah, it's just
• 50:16
  Speaker 2: neat and if you think of it, you're like, yeah,
• 50:18
  Speaker 2: of course, it's like somebody was going to stumble on
• 50:21
  Speaker 2: this sooner or later. But I don't know how much
• 50:23
  Speaker 2: that is just because they put it out there initially.
• 50:27
  Speaker 2: But they would zoom out, I think, all the way
• 50:29
  Speaker 2: until it was like ten to the tenth power, fifteenth
• 50:32
  Speaker 2: power something like that. That is, so the entire known
• 50:36
  Speaker 2: universe was encompassed and then zoomed all the way in
• 50:39
  Speaker 2: back to that guy laying on a picnic blanket in
• 50:42
  Speaker 2: Chicago and then threw his skin into like a proton
• 50:46
  Speaker 2: and a carbon atom.
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: I think, yeah, super cool. It's nine minutes on YouTube.
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: It's very very much worth watching it.
• 50:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you could watch it ten times in an hour
• 50:54
  Speaker 2: and a half if you wanted to. Yeah, but it
• 50:58
  Speaker 2: is very cool and it is YouTube, and it is
• 51:00
  Speaker 2: definitely worth watching. And that's definitely what they were known for.
• 51:03
  Speaker 2: But they made I think one hundred and twenty five films,
• 51:05
  Speaker 2: and like I said, they made exhibits for museums, some
• 51:08
  Speaker 2: of which are still around right now. They just did
• 51:11
  Speaker 2: all sorts of really cool things, like if they had
• 51:13
  Speaker 2: an idea, they would explore any medium that they thought
• 51:17
  Speaker 2: best got it across. They were just not afraid of
• 51:19
  Speaker 2: taking risks. And I didn't realize that about them. I
• 51:24
  Speaker 2: didn't know anything about until I met you mean, then
• 51:26
  Speaker 2: I started to learn about, you know, furniture design and
• 51:30
  Speaker 2: all that, and then from researching this, I got to
• 51:33
  Speaker 2: know them better. And I just I just think there
• 51:36
  Speaker 2: I admire them a lot more than I did before
• 51:38
  Speaker 2: I started researching this, just because they were so varied
• 51:42
  Speaker 2: in their pursuits. I just think they're neat.
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, And you know, it was a great love
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: story on one hand, but we do need to just
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: sort of mention kind of the darker side, which is
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: when I was talking to you about this, you made
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: a joke about like people buried in their basement or
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: something not that dark. Okay, but you know, when you
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: run a design concern, your name is the one that's
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: on it. Sometimes it was Charles and Ray, usually just Charles,
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: but there they had a whole team of people that
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: worked on this stuff, these young designers that work for
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: them that you know, they never got any credit, and
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: they kind of talked about that. Some people felt exploited.
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: Some were like, yeah, we were exploited, but we also
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: exploited their name because we worked for the hottest design firm.
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: And it was sort of a give and take. And
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: that's just sort of the deal. Your name doesn't go
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: up there if you're on the team that creates the
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: thing that the person whose name is on the you know,
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: the placard on the office door, they're they're going to
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: get the credit still happens a lot. People are better
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: these days about giving credit down to staff. Back then,
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: not so much. And then the other thing is Charles
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: very very sadly had some affairs. Notably had a pretty
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: pretty heavy love affair with a woman named Judith Wexler,
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: who he you know, he was so far into it
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: that he was like, I want to sell nine oh one,
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: I want to get divorced, I want to move to
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: New York, I want to marry you. I want to
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: have a baby. And she broke it off because she said,
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: you couldn't do that to Ray, because they were friends
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: as well.
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: Man the Middle century.
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, Ray knew about the stuff. It was
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: a time where divorce wasn't as popular and it was
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: tough for her. She apparently dealt with it very privately.
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: But you know they stuck together until the end.
• 53:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, man, Yeah, wow, I didn't know about that either.
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but worth mentioning until you know. Charles died in
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight.
• 53:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Something sweet about that is Ray died exactly a
• 53:53
  Speaker 2: decade later, on August twenty first, nineteen eighty eight. And
• 53:57
  Speaker 2: she spent that decade basically archiving in or organizing and
• 54:00
  Speaker 2: documenting all the work they did together. And then I
• 54:03
  Speaker 2: guess she realized or felt like her work was done
• 54:05
  Speaker 2: and said, Ray out.
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah. She passed from cancer. He died of a heart
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: attack on a consulting trip in Saint Louis. And you know,
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: they were very beloved. The people. He didn't have any employees.
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: It sounded like they didn't absolutely love them. I think
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: some of them were a little salty about credit here
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: and there, But to a person, they were all like
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: it was a magical time. They were magical people, and
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: it was just a great thing all the way around.
• 54:33
  Speaker 2: Well, I'm definitely I'm glad we included the dark side.
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: Then you can't white watch that stuff.
• 54:38
  Speaker 2: You know, it's true. You got anything else, Chuck.
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: I got nothing else. Look forward to case study House podcasts.
• 54:46
  Speaker 2: Okay, podcasts are short stuff.
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: I think I think we could probably stretch that one
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: out to a full no problem, because hey, what's better
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: than sitting around and listening to a show described the
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: way something looks?
• 55:01
  Speaker 2: Do it? And since Chuck and I just negotiated whether
• 55:04
  Speaker 2: that episode would be a short stuff or a full
• 55:06
  Speaker 2: length episode, it's time for listener mail.
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: All right, I'm going to call this a reminder to Sandwich.
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: This is from Aaron Burke. Hey, guys, recently found your show.
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: I've gotten into it. I started to listen to the
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: most recent and then I thought, well, maybe I should
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: have the whole experience and start at the beginning. These
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: early episodes are a little unsatisfying because I know the
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: finely tuned show that you've achieved after fifteen hundred episodes.
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: My question is, what would you recommend for new listeners.
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: Start at the beginning, work backwards, go to episode one
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: seventy seven as of now, I'm starting at day one,
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: and that is from Aaron Burke and Erin. I let
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: Aaron know which episode this is going to be on
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: so he could hear it. But what we recommend is sandwiching.
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: That is, listen to the latest one and then listen
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: to the earliest one, and then work forwards and backwards
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: until you meet in the middle. For the reasons of
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: compare and contrast. It's fun to hear the show now
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: and how much has changed, but also you don't want
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: to miss out on announcements and live show stuff and
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: you know changes that happen, although there's really not many.
• 56:14
  Speaker 2: No, no, there's no changes whatsoever these days.
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: But we think the sandwich method is pretty fun.
• 56:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's been the recommended version or method for the
• 56:24
  Speaker 2: whole time, I think.
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: Essentially, right, yeah, but you know, do it how you want.
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: That's what we think.
• 56:29
  Speaker 2: Sure, Yeah, each their own, right.
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, So who is that Aaron Burke.
• 56:35
  Speaker 2: Aaron, however, you listen to the entire catalog of Stuff
• 56:39
  Speaker 2: you Should Know, we hope you enjoy every single minute
• 56:42
  Speaker 2: of it. And if you want to be like Aaron
• 56:44
  Speaker 2: and get in touch with us and ask us for
• 56:46
  Speaker 2: some advice of some sort, do it. You can send
• 56:49
  Speaker 2: it in an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
• 56:56
  Speaker 2: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: For more, podcast to my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.