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The Mennonite National Anthem · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.
0:20
Speaker 2: Lester Glick's diary, July twenty eighth, nineteen forty five.
0:28
Speaker 3: This morning I looked in the mirror and hated what
0:31
Speaker 3: I saw. My face is now emaciated, sad, and flecked
0:36
Speaker 3: with black dots.
0:39
Speaker 2: Lester Glick was one of the thirty six young men
0:41
Speaker 2: who signed up for the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. Unlike so
0:45
Speaker 2: many of his counterparts, Blick did not leave an oral
0:48
Speaker 2: history of his experience at the Library of Congress. All
0:52
Speaker 2: we have is what he wrote in his diary. This
0:57
Speaker 2: entry is from late in the study, after months of hunger.
1:02
Speaker 3: My nose is bony, my cheeks protrude, my lips are
1:07
Speaker 3: big and flabby. My fluffy, wavy hair has become coarse
1:12
Speaker 3: and straight. My comb is always laden with globs of
1:15
Speaker 3: loose hair. I can count my ribs in the mirror,
1:19
Speaker 3: and my collar bone sticks out as though dislocated. My
1:23
Speaker 3: arm muscles have dwindled that I could reach around my
1:26
Speaker 3: arm above the elbow with my thumb and third finger.
1:32
Speaker 3: I am so weak I can scarcely walk. I am tired, discouraged.
1:38
Speaker 3: My life has all been drained from me.
1:43
Speaker 2: And here is what Lesterglick wrote on October nineteenth, the
1:46
Speaker 2: second to last day of the experiment.
1:49
Speaker 3: To day turned out to be the worst day of
1:52
Speaker 3: my life. This evening, Doctor Taylor called me into his
1:56
Speaker 3: office and told me I have developed a tuberculosis lesion
2:01
Speaker 3: on the apex of my left lung. I am to
2:04
Speaker 3: go home, enter a sanatorium, and begin a six month
2:08
Speaker 3: rehabilitation program. I couldn't have received any worse news. My
2:16
Speaker 3: tuberculosis came into sharp focus. However, as we gathered for
2:19
Speaker 3: the last supper celebration, all of the subjects, in fear
2:23
Speaker 3: of my dread disease, moved away from me and I
2:27
Speaker 3: sat alone, completely isolated from the others.
2:38
Speaker 2: My name is Malcolm Glowell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
2:41
Speaker 2: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is the
2:47
Speaker 2: final episode of our look at the Starvation Experiment run
2:50
Speaker 2: by Ansel Keys during the Second World War. Today, I
2:55
Speaker 2: want to tell a story of Lester Glick, the story
2:58
Speaker 2: of what happened to him after the experiment and how
3:02
Speaker 2: he made sense of all the suffering he had been through.
3:12
Speaker 2: Just tell me a little bit about your father.
3:14
Speaker 4: First of all, so I look very much like him.
3:17
Speaker 4: He had dark, curly hair, he was about five five
3:22
Speaker 4: I think maybe five six if we if he stood
3:25
Speaker 4: on his tiptoes, maybe he was down to one hundred
3:28
Speaker 4: and fourteen pounds at his lowest weight.
3:31
Speaker 2: Lester Glick died in two thousand and three, but I
3:34
Speaker 2: spoke with two of his children, that's.
3:36
Speaker 4: His daughter Chris, and he was a very thin man
3:42
Speaker 4: until he got out of the starvation experiment. I mean
3:46
Speaker 4: before he went there, he was thin, but then he
3:49
Speaker 4: had an eating disorder the rest of his life, so
3:52
Speaker 4: he gained and lost hundreds of pounds throughout the rest
3:56
Speaker 4: of his life. He was kind of roly poly as
3:58
Speaker 4: how I remember him.
4:01
Speaker 2: After I spoke to Chris, I called up Lester Glick's son, Byron.
4:05
Speaker 2: How do you think the experience and being involved in
4:09
Speaker 2: that experiment changed him completely?
4:17
Speaker 5: And not at all. It's clear to me that Daddy's
4:22
Speaker 5: relationship with food and with his body was utterly and
4:30
Speaker 5: completely disordered and changed by the starvation experiment. In that regard,
4:37
Speaker 5: he never got over the starvation experiment. And Dad talks
4:43
Speaker 5: as he was talking about his struggles with his way
4:47
Speaker 5: that he never this is just amazing to think about.
4:55
Speaker 5: He never got over being hungry. He was always hungry
5:00
Speaker 5: even when he had all the food he wanted. That
5:03
Speaker 5: something had happened in his physiology that broke the connection
5:10
Speaker 5: between his stomach and his brain and it never cured.
5:16
Speaker 4: You know, I never saw my father cry, but I
5:19
Speaker 4: saw him as close to tears when he would talk
5:22
Speaker 4: about that experience.
5:25
Speaker 6: It's making me cry. Like he would always keep candy
5:31
Speaker 6: underneath his seat his the driver's seat in the car
5:34
Speaker 6: because he always wanted to have food close to him
5:38
Speaker 6: just in case he got hungry, and he described starvation
5:44
Speaker 6: as the worst deprivation there is for humankind.
5:52
Speaker 5: As a kid, sometimes I felt like he was detached.
5:58
Speaker 5: Looking back on it, I think he was scared, and
6:04
Speaker 5: he was scared because he had experienced things that most
6:09
Speaker 5: people don't experience. I think my dad was scarred in
6:13
Speaker 5: the same way you hear about veterans being scarred about
6:16
Speaker 5: active war. That there's just some stuff you can't explain
6:22
Speaker 5: and you can't control, and it's scary. And part of
6:35
Speaker 5: me wishes that my dad had never had to experience that,
6:40
Speaker 5: that he had had a sweeter life than he had,
6:43
Speaker 5: and he had a pretty sweet life. He had a
6:47
Speaker 5: good life. He would say he had a good life,
6:54
Speaker 5: but He paid a price for what he believed, and
7:00
Speaker 5: he kept paying that price his whole life. He was
7:06
Speaker 5: an amazing man.
7:14
Speaker 2: Byron and Chris both know what their father went through,
7:17
Speaker 2: but they also know what he became as a result.
7:24
Speaker 2: For as long as scientists have puzzled about human physiology,
7:28
Speaker 2: they've wondered how the body responds to extended deprivation. When
7:34
Speaker 2: you don't eat enough, you get weak. We all know that,
7:37
Speaker 2: but beyond that, the details quickly get complicated, and those
7:41
Speaker 2: critical details obsessed ansel Keys as he set out to
7:45
Speaker 2: design the starvation experiment. In twenty twenty one, the journal
7:50
Speaker 2: Obesity Reviews devoted an entire issue to the legacy of
7:53
Speaker 2: Ansel Keys. The issue was organized by a physiologist at
7:58
Speaker 2: the University of Freberg in Switzerland. His name is Abdul Dulux.
8:04
Speaker 2: Give me an example of a question that is very
8:06
Speaker 2: difficult to answer in your world.
8:09
Speaker 7: Right from the beginning of nineteen hundred, from prisoners of wars,
8:15
Speaker 7: from people being mild nourished and recovering that there was
8:19
Speaker 7: a tendency for body fat to be recovered faster than
8:24
Speaker 7: lean mass and muscle mass and so forth. And this
8:27
Speaker 7: was quite a problem because when you think of you
8:31
Speaker 7: are rehabilitating a patient who has that's a cancer or
8:35
Speaker 7: infection or wherever that they lose weight because of the disease.
8:40
Speaker 7: When you have to make them recover, you would prefer
8:44
Speaker 7: them to recover tissue, organ, muscle, because that's where the
8:49
Speaker 7: functionality is critical. Right, But they have problem to recover
8:55
Speaker 7: muscle mass, muscle function, and relatively ease to recover fat,
9:02
Speaker 7: and especially in the abdominal area, which is where the
9:05
Speaker 7: bad fat is situated.
9:07
Speaker 2: Muscle is a lot more important to regaining your health
9:10
Speaker 2: than fat. But the body wants to recover fat first
9:13
Speaker 2: after extended weight loss, and not just a little fat.
9:17
Speaker 7: Not only they recover their fat faster, but they recover
9:22
Speaker 7: more fat than the lost So what I mean, So
9:26
Speaker 7: they recover more weight and it's mostly fat.
9:32
Speaker 2: Why does the body do that? And is there something
9:34
Speaker 2: that science could do to make the body switch tactics
9:37
Speaker 2: and build lean muscle instead. You could imagine all the
9:41
Speaker 2: areas where the answers to these questions would be useful.
9:44
Speaker 2: Keys was focused on people suffering from malnutrition during the war,
9:48
Speaker 2: concentration camp survivors, for example. That's one area Delu mentioned.
9:53
Speaker 2: People recovering from serious illness, cancer patients after chemotherapy. That's another,
10:01
Speaker 2: but as also people trying to recover from eating disorders,
10:04
Speaker 2: people struggling with obesity, trying to maintain weight loss. Eighty
10:08
Speaker 2: five to ninety percent of those who lose weight gain
10:11
Speaker 2: it back. We need to understand that process. But there's
10:16
Speaker 2: a problem. There's no easy way to do good experiments
10:19
Speaker 2: on starvation and his aftermath. I mean, how would you
10:22
Speaker 2: do it? You need to carefully control what people eat,
10:25
Speaker 2: when they eat, how much they eat, and you have
10:28
Speaker 2: to do that for months on end, because nothing useful
10:30
Speaker 2: about diet can be learned from a few weeks of observations.
10:34
Speaker 2: You can't run experiments with prisoners or people locked up
10:37
Speaker 2: in a psychiatric hospital, because that would be unethical. You
10:43
Speaker 2: need people who consent to be starved and have the
10:46
Speaker 2: discipline to follow up on their commitment. But how do
10:49
Speaker 2: you find people who fit that profile? A few years ago,
11:01
Speaker 2: the National Institutes of Health organized something called the Calorie Study,
11:05
Speaker 2: where one hundred and forty three adults signed up for
11:08
Speaker 2: two years of stringent dieting. The goal was for them
11:12
Speaker 2: to cut their caloric intake by twenty five percent, and
11:16
Speaker 2: they received quote an intensive lifestyle intervention to foster adherents,
11:21
Speaker 2: individual counseling, group sessions, consultants. How much caloric intake did
11:27
Speaker 2: the volunteers end up cutting from their diets when all
11:29
Speaker 2: was said and done, not twenty five percent, twelve percent.
11:34
Speaker 2: After all that effort, the volunteers, on average only got
11:38
Speaker 2: half way to their goal. And can you blame them?
11:43
Speaker 2: It's just too much to ask someone to give up
11:45
Speaker 2: a quarter of the calories they consume and to do
11:48
Speaker 2: that every day for months on end. Except that is
11:52
Speaker 2: if we're talking about anseel keys as guinea pigs. Abduldulou
11:57
Speaker 2: told me that when he started working in the field
11:59
Speaker 2: of obesity and metabolism almost thirty years ago, he quickly
12:03
Speaker 2: realized that the best source of data on some problems,
12:06
Speaker 2: and in some cases the only source of data, was
12:10
Speaker 2: the Minnesota Starvation Experiment ANCIL. Keys kept meticulous, comprehensive records
12:17
Speaker 2: on what six months of starvation looked like, and then
12:19
Speaker 2: Keys collected another mountain of data that could help answer
12:23
Speaker 2: questions about body fat once the volunteers started eating normally again.
12:28
Speaker 7: What we know about the human body of a normal
12:31
Speaker 7: weight person reacting to starvation is based on the Minnesota experiment.
12:37
Speaker 2: The Minnesota experiment is the gold standard. I did have
12:41
Speaker 2: a thing in my podcast this season where I asked
12:45
Speaker 2: researchers for their magic wand experiment, which is the experiment
12:49
Speaker 2: that they would do if I gave them a magic
12:51
Speaker 2: wand and they could wave away all logistical, financial, practical, ethical,
12:57
Speaker 2: whatever constraints. And I'm curious, if I gave you a
13:01
Speaker 2: magic wand, what is the diet or nutrition study that
13:04
Speaker 2: you would do?
13:05
Speaker 7: You mean ethica also is uh, we forget about it
13:09
Speaker 7: to try to do a similar study. But now we
13:12
Speaker 7: have so much more technology. We can monitor physical activity,
13:18
Speaker 7: a lot of the changes of function functional, whether it's muscle,
13:24
Speaker 7: whether it's immune function, and all that.
13:30
Speaker 2: What you're saying is you'd simply redo the Minnesota study,
13:33
Speaker 2: only this time use modern methods to gather an order
13:37
Speaker 2: of magnitude more data. Right, The whole point of a
13:43
Speaker 2: magic wand experiment is that it's the experiment you could
13:46
Speaker 2: never do in real life. Ansel Keys did the perfect
13:49
Speaker 2: experiment without a magic wand. And why was Ansel Keys
13:53
Speaker 2: able to do that? Because he was lucky enough to
13:57
Speaker 2: find volunteers willing to starve themselves to the point where
14:01
Speaker 2: their faces were flecked with black dots, their noses were bony,
14:04
Speaker 2: their cheeks protruding, their hair coarse and straight, and following
14:09
Speaker 2: out in big clubs.
14:11
Speaker 7: This is e and really really really huge contribution to humanity,
14:18
Speaker 7: to humanity, and they were not forced.
14:20
Speaker 8: To do it.
14:27
Speaker 2: When the US entered World War two, Lester Glick was
14:29
Speaker 2: twenty three years old, he declared himself a conscientious objector.
14:34
Speaker 2: He had grown up in a Mennonite family, attending one
14:37
Speaker 2: of the historic peace churches where pacifism is a tenant
14:40
Speaker 2: of faith. Glick was assigned to Ipsilenty, Michigan, to the
14:44
Speaker 2: State Mental Hospital. He was the night charge attendant on
14:48
Speaker 2: the active tuberculosis ward. Then one day he saw a
14:53
Speaker 2: notice on a bulletin board.
14:55
Speaker 1: And at the top there was a statement that said,
14:59
Speaker 1: will you starve that they be better fed. So Lester
15:05
Speaker 1: Glick would have seen this that spoke to him in
15:08
Speaker 1: his langu.
15:09
Speaker 2: Which that's Dwayne Stoltzless, a historian at the same men
15:13
Speaker 2: in Night school. Lester Glick once attended Goshen College.
15:18
Speaker 1: I think when I was hungry, did you feed me?
15:21
Speaker 1: When I was thirsty? Did you give me something to drink?
15:24
Speaker 1: It is that kind of language. So it very much
15:27
Speaker 1: is responding to Christ's invitation to go out into the world,
15:34
Speaker 1: not to stay in your church, but to go out
15:38
Speaker 1: into the world and to do good work and be
15:42
Speaker 1: judged by those actions.
15:47
Speaker 2: Matthew twenty five, verse thirty five, the same crucial verse
15:51
Speaker 2: I talked about a few episodes ago in talking about
15:54
Speaker 2: refugees and acts of kindness. My friend Jim Leptisen, who's
16:00
Speaker 2: a Menonite pastor, calls Matthew twenty five the national anthem
16:03
Speaker 2: of the Mennonite Church, the verse that defines the Mennonite
16:07
Speaker 2: religious calling to welcome this stranger, to clothe the naked,
16:11
Speaker 2: and to feed the hungry.
16:14
Speaker 1: For Mennonites certainly of luster Glicks generation, but I would
16:20
Speaker 1: say across generations, the reading of Matthew twenty five is
16:27
Speaker 1: a literal reading. It is a powerful invitation to step
16:37
Speaker 1: out of your comfort zone and go to places that
16:40
Speaker 1: are dangerous and risky and uncomfortable in order to do good.
16:50
Speaker 8: And this is another front spread over the face of America.
16:55
Speaker 8: Like the other fronts, it is big and complicated, so
17:00
Speaker 8: big that only a few men in the whole nation
17:03
Speaker 8: can understand its real capacity for waiting war.
17:10
Speaker 2: So Lester Blick moved to Minneapolis and took one of
17:13
Speaker 2: the long line of cots that ansel Keys had set
17:15
Speaker 2: up underneath the school's football stadium. He became a guinea pig.
17:27
Speaker 2: Now did lester Glick understand in that moment what he
17:30
Speaker 2: was getting into. Of course not nobody did. That's the
17:34
Speaker 2: point of an experiment. The subject commits to an uncertain outcome.
17:39
Speaker 2: But over the course of his long year in Minneapolis,
17:42
Speaker 2: he documents in his diaries his descent into a kind
17:46
Speaker 2: of hell.
17:49
Speaker 1: He is just one of the kindest, most gracious people.
17:52
Speaker 1: But as he writes about his experience, he writes about
17:55
Speaker 1: getting really angry, angry with the officials in charge because
17:59
Speaker 1: they've taken away his allotment of bread. You know, he's
18:03
Speaker 1: no longer getting the two slices he thought he was
18:05
Speaker 1: going to get because he's not losing weight fast enough.
18:10
Speaker 2: Back when lester Glick had been working at the State
18:12
Speaker 2: mental hospital in Michigan, he wrote with pride about the
18:15
Speaker 2: connections he made with patients who could not speak. He
18:19
Speaker 2: loved to work with patients and help them. But now
18:23
Speaker 2: in his hunger, he was becoming isolated, antisocial. He started
18:28
Speaker 2: to dislike the company of his fellow guinea pigs, and.
18:32
Speaker 1: So there is the separation that starts to take place,
18:36
Speaker 1: as breakdown in relations that is not at all in
18:39
Speaker 1: keeping with the real luster Glick, but it was the
18:44
Speaker 1: new Mault nourish Luster Glick who was separated from all
18:52
Speaker 1: the people around him.
18:54
Speaker 2: He understands that what it means to be hungry is
18:57
Speaker 2: not a momentary physiological deficit. It is a profound and
19:04
Speaker 2: overwhelming deprivation on every level.
19:09
Speaker 1: It's a deep isolation and an isolation that goes against
19:16
Speaker 1: the building up of community that he's been a part
19:20
Speaker 1: of since childhood. That church community, the family community was
19:27
Speaker 1: had shaped who he was in the most basic ways.
19:33
Speaker 2: In the bit of scripture so essential to Mennonites. For
19:36
Speaker 2: I was hungry, and you fed me, Lesterglick now understands
19:40
Speaker 2: what hungry means. It's not just calorie deprivation, it's the
19:45
Speaker 2: absence of any kind of sustenance. And then at the
19:50
Speaker 2: end of his time in Minneapolis, he discovers he has
19:53
Speaker 2: developed tuberculosis as a result of his ordeal.
20:03
Speaker 4: So daddy's plan had been to go to medical school
20:06
Speaker 4: when he was in college, and he was going to
20:08
Speaker 4: be a doctor. And then when he got TV during
20:11
Speaker 4: the starvation experiment, that his doctors told him that he
20:15
Speaker 4: couldn't withstand the rigors of medical school and medical education
20:18
Speaker 4: and then medical practice, and so they advised him to
20:22
Speaker 4: do something else, and he chose social work.
20:25
Speaker 2: His life took a profoundly different turn.
20:28
Speaker 4: He got a master's and then he got his PhD
20:31
Speaker 4: at Washington University in Saint Louis because he felt like,
20:36
Speaker 4: as he practiced social work that social work education was
20:40
Speaker 4: what his calling was. So he wanted to teach other
20:43
Speaker 4: people how to practice social work with the principles of
20:52
Speaker 4: loving kindness and not just as a sort of mechanical
20:57
Speaker 4: practice of obtaining services for people.
21:01
Speaker 2: Glick started a school of social work at Goshient College,
21:04
Speaker 2: his alma mater in Indiana. He went on to start
21:07
Speaker 2: another school of social work at Syracuse University, then one
21:10
Speaker 2: of the University of Southern Mississippi. He's a social work
21:14
Speaker 2: school planter.
21:15
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, that's exactly right.
21:19
Speaker 2: Inglick's self published memoirs, there's a chart called places I
21:23
Speaker 2: Have called Home, which takes up an entire page. Thirty
21:26
Speaker 2: eight addresses in all Webster Groves, Missouri, South Main Street, Coast, Indiana,
21:31
Speaker 2: Ramsey Avenue, Syracuse, New York, Montague Street, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, criss
21:36
Speaker 2: crossing the country his entire adult life in pursuit of
21:41
Speaker 2: the hungary.
21:43
Speaker 4: One of the things, one of the practices that he
21:46
Speaker 4: in forrest t while we were growing up, is that
21:50
Speaker 4: he wanted us to know what hunger was like as well,
21:52
Speaker 4: so we could be empathic for people who were not
21:55
Speaker 4: able to eat like we were. So Wednesdays, every Wednesday,
22:02
Speaker 4: all we could eat was white rice all day, and
22:06
Speaker 4: we had limited servings. Some of my first memories was,
22:10
Speaker 4: you know, reading rice on Wednesdays, and then I mean
22:13
Speaker 4: I did that until I went to college.
22:16
Speaker 2: How did you and your siblings feel about that? Did
22:20
Speaker 2: you understand the point of it?
22:23
Speaker 4: I don't think we did, except we knew how important
22:27
Speaker 4: it was to our father, and we laughed about it
22:30
Speaker 4: and kind of kidded him about it. But I don't
22:32
Speaker 4: remember any of us ever saying this is stupid, we're
22:35
Speaker 4: not doing this. We just we did it.
22:37
Speaker 2: It's not a trivial thing. If you're hungry to be fat,
22:42
Speaker 2: It's one of the greatest services you can do to
22:44
Speaker 2: another human being.
22:50
Speaker 4: When he was dying. They lived in a little retirement community,
22:54
Speaker 4: and they had these little individual sort of apartments where
22:59
Speaker 4: people could live that were freestanding. And Daddy, he always
23:06
Speaker 4: was a gardener. He had a really great green thumb,
23:09
Speaker 4: and so he had a large garden where he provided
23:14
Speaker 4: fresh vegetables for all the people in the twelve little
23:17
Speaker 4: units where they lived. And when he got sick that year,
23:21
Speaker 4: he couldn't maintain his garden anymore, and he was very
23:24
Speaker 4: concerned about where his neighbors were going to get their
23:26
Speaker 4: fresh vegetables if he wasn't able to provide them for him.
23:31
Speaker 2: The more time I've spent looking at the starvation experiment,
23:34
Speaker 2: the less I've understood why so many people in the
23:37
Speaker 2: scientific community are uneasy with what happened. People say, nothing
23:41
Speaker 2: like that could and should be done today. But why,
23:46
Speaker 2: what exactly is it about the experiment that is so
23:49
Speaker 2: incomprehensible to us today. I think the answer is that
23:53
Speaker 2: we focus far too much on what was given up
23:55
Speaker 2: in the moment by the volunteers, and we forget about
23:59
Speaker 2: what was gained down the road as the result of
24:01
Speaker 2: that suffering. The Minnesota experiment left a permanent mark on
24:16
Speaker 2: nearly every one of its participants, they understood something about
24:20
Speaker 2: food and hunger that they hadn't before their experience. Of
24:24
Speaker 2: the eighteen who left their oral histories with the Library
24:27
Speaker 2: of Congress, seven signed out for something called Heifer's for Relief,
24:32
Speaker 2: a program that after the war, shipped livestock from America
24:35
Speaker 2: to Europe. The volunteers took trips back and forth across
24:39
Speaker 2: the Atlantic, taking care of the animals. Another Minnesota participant
24:44
Speaker 2: worked in relief camps after the war. Sam Legg, one
24:47
Speaker 2: of the leaders of the Guinea Pigs, worked with the
24:49
Speaker 2: Quakers to buy food for the Hungary and post war Europe.
24:52
Speaker 2: Marshall Sutton traveled to the Middle East to feed refugees
24:56
Speaker 2: in Gaza. Several more went to Divinity School. Another man
25:00
Speaker 2: spent thirty years as a missionary in South Africa, Mozambique,
25:04
Speaker 2: and Kenya. And Lester Glick set out to plant social
25:08
Speaker 2: work schools throughout the United States, feeding the hungry in spirit,
25:14
Speaker 2: but also just the hungry, because after his year in Minneapolis,
25:18
Speaker 2: he no longer made a distinction between spiritual and physical deprivation.
25:26
Speaker 2: In his diary of his experience in Minnesota, Lick wrote,
25:29
Speaker 2: when he was deep into the starvation phase.
25:32
Speaker 3: Books on starvation tell us that hungry people eat clay wood, bark,
25:39
Speaker 3: unclean animals and often become cannibalistic. Yesterday I took the
25:45
Speaker 3: lead out of a pencil and began chewing the wood.
25:51
Speaker 3: It tasted all right. For some crazy reason, I crave
25:56
Speaker 3: raw horseradish, sassafras roots, and rabbit meat. I think about
26:02
Speaker 3: how cannibalism is a terrible option for a starving person
26:06
Speaker 3: and try to put it out of my mind, but
26:08
Speaker 3: I can't seem to stop thinking about it.
26:14
Speaker 2: You don't really get over of feelings like that. The
26:16
Speaker 2: best you can do is channel them into something else.
26:21
Speaker 2: For Glick, it became cinnamon rolls. After his year in Minnesota.
26:27
Speaker 2: He became obsessed with them. He cut out a picture
26:31
Speaker 2: of cinnamon rolls from a magazine and carried it with
26:33
Speaker 2: him at all times. It was in his wallet until
26:36
Speaker 2: the day he died.
26:38
Speaker 5: So Dad was known for his cinnamon rolls. He made
26:48
Speaker 5: these deep fried cinnamon rolls that were just amazingly delicious things,
26:55
Speaker 5: and he would make literally thousands of roles. There's a
27:00
Speaker 5: picture of me or one of my siblings sitting at
27:06
Speaker 5: the kitchen table and the tables covered in rolls. There
27:09
Speaker 5: are roles on the counters behind.
27:11
Speaker 1: Us, and.
27:14
Speaker 5: Dead took great delight in taking those roles to people,
27:18
Speaker 5: of bringing them into church and people enjoying them. And
27:23
Speaker 5: it's kind of a microcosm of what Dad was up
27:27
Speaker 5: to his whole life, of giving people some kind of
27:33
Speaker 5: sustenance that brought them to an unexpectedly good place.
27:42
Speaker 2: Byron was in a little office in his home in Wisconsin,
27:46
Speaker 2: remembering his father, who had been dead for twenty years.
27:49
Speaker 2: But there was something in that specific memory of the
27:53
Speaker 2: cinnamon roles that moved him. Yeah, yeah, Byron, this has
28:00
Speaker 2: been I have one last request of you. Sure, I
28:04
Speaker 2: would like you can you read that passage from Matthew
28:10
Speaker 2: give me King James.
28:12
Speaker 1: That's too properly.
28:15
Speaker 5: Actually, let me run get a bible.
28:19
Speaker 2: He left the room and came back with a family heirloom,
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Speaker 2: his grandfather's Bible, battered leather bound, handed down from his
28:27
Speaker 2: grandfather to his father and from his father to him.
28:32
Speaker 2: Byron look for the passage in Matthew, the Mennonite national anthem.
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Speaker 5: For I was in hungered and you gave me me.
28:42
Speaker 5: I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was
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Speaker 5: a stranger, and you took me in naked and he
28:51
Speaker 5: clothed me. I was sick and he visited me. I
28:56
Speaker 5: was in prison and you came unto me. Verily, I say,
29:02
Speaker 5: unto you, insomuch as you have done it onto one
29:06
Speaker 5: of the least of my brethren, you have also done
29:11
Speaker 5: it unto me.
29:26
Speaker 2: That's beautiful. Yeah, Byron, thank you so much. This has been.
29:32
Speaker 2: What a wonderful What a wonderful father old man. Revisionist
29:54
Speaker 2: History is produced by Elabi's Linton Leam and Gesteu and
29:58
Speaker 2: Jacob Smith, with Tolly Emlin. Our editor is Julia Parton.
30:02
Speaker 2: Our executive producer is Mei LaBelle. Original scoring by Luis Garra,
30:06
Speaker 2: mastering by Flon Williams, an engine by Nina Lawrence, fact
30:11
Speaker 2: checking by Beth Johnson, voice acting by Tim Heller. Special
30:17
Speaker 2: thanks to the Pushkin Crew. Hatherefeine, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor,
30:21
Speaker 2: Sean Karney, Morgan Ratner, Mary bes Smith, Jordan McMillan, Carl Migliori,
30:26
Speaker 2: Maya Knig, Royston Deserve, Danielle Lacan, Nicole Morano, Isabella Nervaya's
30:33
Speaker 2: Letal Mollaude John Schnar's Jason Gambrel Amanda k Wong, Kezatan
30:39
Speaker 2: and of course our fearless leader bel Hafe. Jacob Weissberg.
30:44
Speaker 2: I'm Malcolm Glappo.
30:58
Speaker 1: Machabour.
31:04
Speaker 2: If you target towns and cities, it's as clear as
31:08
Speaker 2: day that they're will be civilian victims. In nineteen forty five,
31:14
Speaker 2: the US firebomb Tokyo, destroying a quarter of the city
31:17
Speaker 2: and killing more than one hundred thousand people. I wrote
31:21
Speaker 2: about this infamous bombing campaign in my audiobook The Bomber Mafia,
31:26
Speaker 2: and one of the survivor's voices we Hear, is from
31:28
Speaker 2: a project called Paper City. Paper City is now out
31:33
Speaker 2: as a groundbreaking feature documentary. Director Adrian Francis explores what
31:39
Speaker 2: we choose to remember and hope to forget. To find
31:43
Speaker 2: out more, visit papercityfilm dot com and follow at Paper
31:48
Speaker 2: City Tokyo on social media.