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SYSK Selects: What Is a Shotgun House? · Stuff You Should Know

0:00
Speaker 1: Hi, everybody. It's May tenth, two twelve. What No, that
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Speaker 1: just means it's me Chuck picking out a select episode
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Speaker 1: from May tenth, two thousand twelve. What's a Shotgun House?
0:12
Speaker 1: It's cool because I like houses. Welcome to Stuff You
0:18
Speaker 1: Should Know, a production of Five Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
0:28
Speaker 1: Welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
0:31
Speaker 1: Chuck Bryant with me as always, UM, which makes this
0:35
Speaker 1: stuff you should know? The stuff you should Yeah, that's
0:42
Speaker 1: our themes on it. Nice time, Thank you. Um. How
0:46
Speaker 1: are you doing. I'm doing great. I feel like we
0:48
Speaker 1: just did this. I'm looking forward to the show, are you? Yeah?
0:51
Speaker 1: Because it touches on parts of Atlanta in their in
0:54
Speaker 1: its history, which I always loved. And that's as Atlanta
0:57
Speaker 1: man all over the States, all over the States. As uh,
1:02
Speaker 1: the immortal David Byrne put it, you may find yourself
1:07
Speaker 1: living in a shotgun check, you may find yourself in
1:10
Speaker 1: another part of the world. I think even David Byrne
1:15
Speaker 1: didn't realize what he was saying when he put those
1:18
Speaker 1: two lines together. I think he meant them to contrast
1:22
Speaker 1: with one another. But really, if you found yourself in
1:26
Speaker 1: a shotgun check and say the beginning of the nineteenth century,
1:31
Speaker 1: you probably were experiencing both. Yeah. Yeah, but he doesn't
1:36
Speaker 1: tip so now he doesn't care what he said. That's crazy. Um,
1:41
Speaker 1: So Chuck, you remember her, Kane, Katrina Um I killed
1:46
Speaker 1: I believe people. There is a lot of people. Um.
1:51
Speaker 1: And one of the things in addition to all the
1:53
Speaker 1: loss of life and property was a real worry about
1:57
Speaker 1: loss of very um specific type of architecture, the shotgun house.
2:03
Speaker 1: And the reason even though you can find it everywhere
2:06
Speaker 1: from Key West to Chicago to San Francisco, all over
2:09
Speaker 1: the place, you can find shotgun houses Atlanta. UM. The
2:13
Speaker 1: reason why people were worried about losing it in New
2:15
Speaker 1: Orleans because as far as the United States goes, that
2:18
Speaker 1: is where it was born. That's right. And the whole
2:22
Speaker 1: reason anybody would even worry about a shotgun house, if
2:25
Speaker 1: you've ever seen one, you might think, why would anyone
2:28
Speaker 1: care about losing old chotgun houses is because they are
2:32
Speaker 1: routinely cited as the great, possibly greatest contribution by African
2:39
Speaker 1: Americans to American specific architecture and design, and not only that,
2:45
Speaker 1: responsible for the bringing together in many ways of the
2:50
Speaker 1: African American communities due to their things that we're going
2:55
Speaker 1: to talk about. I was going to ruin it. I'm
2:57
Speaker 1: thank you for saving it. That was good man. Okay, Um,
3:01
Speaker 1: you've surely seen a shotgun house. Yeah, let's talk about
3:04
Speaker 1: to some of the features people. We should. Yeah, because
3:07
Speaker 1: there's probably plenty of people out there and people who
3:09
Speaker 1: have seen him and don't know what we're talking about.
3:11
Speaker 1: You're about to go. Oh, if you haven't seen him,
3:15
Speaker 1: then go onto how stuff works dot com and type
3:17
Speaker 1: in what's a shotgun house and you will find some
3:20
Speaker 1: images of shotgun houses in this article that I wrote.
3:23
Speaker 1: That's true. You wrote this years and years ago. I
3:25
Speaker 1: don't think I knew that. Nice job. Shotgun house is
3:29
Speaker 1: long and narrow. Yeah, a lot of times they won't
3:32
Speaker 1: have windows on the side of the house, although in
3:34
Speaker 1: researching this, I saw plenty that do, so it's almost
3:37
Speaker 1: like a throwaway. Sometimes they do, don't, Yes, And the
3:40
Speaker 1: reason why it's because they're often really close together, like
3:44
Speaker 1: I mean, like a foot, a couple of feet. You
3:47
Speaker 1: can maybe walk without turning between two houses. But that's
3:51
Speaker 1: it exactly. Um, they well, you just said they were
3:55
Speaker 1: close to one another. Um, they have high ceilings. They
4:00
Speaker 1: very few of them had indoor plumbing at first. UM.
4:03
Speaker 1: That was usually brought on later um and tacked onto
4:07
Speaker 1: the rear of the house, sometimes crudely. Uh. Typically what
4:11
Speaker 1: you have is a living room, bedroom, bedroom, kitchen, all
4:14
Speaker 1: in a row, all in a straight line, all the
4:17
Speaker 1: doors lining up, interior doors lining up right. So when
4:20
Speaker 1: the front and back door is open, you can see
4:22
Speaker 1: clear through the house, which is one of the reasons
4:25
Speaker 1: why a lot of people think it got its name.
4:28
Speaker 1: You could shoot a gun or a shotgun through the
4:31
Speaker 1: front door and it would exit out the back door
4:33
Speaker 1: without hitting a single wall, and that would hit the
4:36
Speaker 1: house behind it or some poor staff who's coming in
4:40
Speaker 1: and like you point out, Josh, it's a cute story,
4:43
Speaker 1: and it's all over the place. A bet you there
4:44
Speaker 1: are many many tours of New Orleans. I'd say that
4:47
Speaker 1: story is true. May or may not be. It probably isn't. Um.
4:53
Speaker 1: What else is? What else is specific about shotgun houses, chuck? Uh?
4:57
Speaker 1: They aside from being a mada homes, they have certain
5:03
Speaker 1: architectural flourishes that make them distinctive. UM. I think the
5:08
Speaker 1: idea was kind of like, you know, we may be
5:11
Speaker 1: poor and not have the biggest house, but we can
5:14
Speaker 1: certainly adorn the the vent venting greats and what the
5:20
Speaker 1: the arbor that held up the not the arbor brackets,
5:23
Speaker 1: brackets that held up the roof. They would be intricately carved,
5:26
Speaker 1: usually in a gingerbread design, um, which a lot of
5:30
Speaker 1: people kind of criticize or pooh pooed that addition, um
5:34
Speaker 1: as h poor blacks or even before that, slaves just
5:40
Speaker 1: trying to emulate whites. Um, which is not the case
5:44
Speaker 1: because if you trace so, the shotgun house finds its
5:47
Speaker 1: origins in the US and New Orleans, but if you
5:50
Speaker 1: go even further back, you'll find older ones on Haiti,
5:53
Speaker 1: and then even further back you will find something that
5:55
Speaker 1: looks started startlingly similar. Um. In West Africa and in
6:01
Speaker 1: the Yoruba tongue, these houses are called to gun, which
6:05
Speaker 1: means house in Yoruba, or showgun, which means God's house.
6:09
Speaker 1: So probably that's where the name comes from. By the ways,
6:12
Speaker 1: to gun or showgun from the Yoruba dialect, right, which
6:15
Speaker 1: I love. UM. But in these houses they also had
6:18
Speaker 1: like intricate details, but they were more of an African motif.
6:22
Speaker 1: Over time here in the United States, they adopted gingerbreadin
6:25
Speaker 1: or Um Victorian. Yeah, different kinds of carvings, but it
6:30
Speaker 1: is very cool. It's kind of like, this is a
6:32
Speaker 1: very modest, straightforward house, but there's also pretty neat little
6:36
Speaker 1: details we can still have like great pride in it exactly. Um,
6:41
Speaker 1: they were usually in New Orleans. They were typically a
6:43
Speaker 1: few feed off the ground because of the obvious flooding
6:46
Speaker 1: problems there. Um. And this I found and it seems
6:51
Speaker 1: believable to me, but I didn't have time to triple
6:54
Speaker 1: check it. Um. At the time, property taxes were based
6:57
Speaker 1: on frontage, still aren't in are they in New Orleans?
7:02
Speaker 1: If you have a house, you're paying by the um
7:06
Speaker 1: the frontage, which is the width of your house. Yes,
7:09
Speaker 1: and if you are looking at a shotgun house is
7:11
Speaker 1: very narrow, but it's long. Um. And the number of
7:15
Speaker 1: rooms okay, and in New Orleans though they changed it
7:18
Speaker 1: to the number of rooms, they added that on. Yeah,
7:20
Speaker 1: it's both okay, uh. And in New Orleans rooms include
7:25
Speaker 1: hallways and closets, and you're not going to find a
7:28
Speaker 1: hallway or a closet in a shotgun house. So it's
7:31
Speaker 1: also another way to um, I guess keep your property
7:34
Speaker 1: taxes low as well well, And I found that they
7:38
Speaker 1: originally it was just frontage and then so they started
7:40
Speaker 1: building the camelbacks, which is a shotgun house with a
7:44
Speaker 1: second story on the rear of the house only. And
7:47
Speaker 1: then that's when the city said, oh, well we should
7:50
Speaker 1: tack rooms onto this as well, because these smart people
7:53
Speaker 1: have found a way around paying, as you know, property
7:56
Speaker 1: tax pretty smart. Yeah, it does, it makes it makes sense.
8:00
Speaker 1: And also found that the first mentioned in print calling
8:04
Speaker 1: them shotgun houses was in our very own Atlanta Journal
8:06
Speaker 1: Constitution in nine three a classified ad may have been
8:10
Speaker 1: the first time that it was actually named that in print,
8:14
Speaker 1: and it was like shotgun house twelve dollars a month rent. Yeah,
8:19
Speaker 1: twelve bucks. That's not too bad. But you could get
8:21
Speaker 1: a shotgun house about that time a kit for a
8:24
Speaker 1: hundred bucks um. They also allowed for good air flow too,
8:27
Speaker 1: I want to mention, yeah, because you can open up
8:29
Speaker 1: the front and back doors and you got a straight shot. Well,
8:31
Speaker 1: that's one of the reasons why they were adopted in Haiti.
8:34
Speaker 1: Not everybody in Haiti was from West Africa, but that
8:37
Speaker 1: became the predominant style, this West African design house because
8:41
Speaker 1: it fit in really well with the tropics, all right.
8:45
Speaker 1: So well, it made its way from Haiti to New
8:47
Speaker 1: Orleans because of the well in indirectly because of the
8:52
Speaker 1: French Revolution. Right, So French Revolution takes place and you've
8:57
Speaker 1: got UM, liberty, gality, fraternity to all people. That put
9:03
Speaker 1: French planners in Haiti in kind of a pickle because
9:08
Speaker 1: they couldn't grant liberty to their slaves because they wouldn't
9:12
Speaker 1: have any profits any longer. So as they're figuring this out,
9:15
Speaker 1: they're trying to figure out what to do, a guy
9:17
Speaker 1: named Toussaint low Mature makes the decision for him and
9:21
Speaker 1: leads a slave uprising that lasts for many years and
9:24
Speaker 1: basically drives all of the white plantation owners from the
9:28
Speaker 1: island of Haiti, one of the places that they went.
9:31
Speaker 1: And then Haiti became the first UM recognized sovereign maroon
9:37
Speaker 1: nation of freed slaves revolting slaves UM, which is pretty cool.
9:44
Speaker 1: But that also led to, if you go back and
9:46
Speaker 1: listen to our voodoo podcast, a deep and abiding suspicion
9:50
Speaker 1: by whites of Haiti all things Haiti from that point
9:53
Speaker 1: on UM. But so that this slave uprising that led
9:58
Speaker 1: to the UM the freeing of Haiti also led to
10:02
Speaker 1: the white populating of New Orleans. So about that time,
10:06
Speaker 1: if you went to New Orleans, there were about twelve
10:08
Speaker 1: thousand people and a third of them were slaves, the
10:11
Speaker 1: third of them were white, and then a third of
10:13
Speaker 1: them were free blacks. So it's it's real melting pot
10:16
Speaker 1: um And one of the place one of the things
10:18
Speaker 1: that came about from that was people fleeing Haiti bringing
10:22
Speaker 1: the shotgun houses with them, and then it just kind
10:24
Speaker 1: of it was always African American um and it was
10:28
Speaker 1: always associated with African Americans, and it just kind of
10:31
Speaker 1: spread from there to where if you if you came
10:35
Speaker 1: across the working class African American neighborhood like in Chicago
10:39
Speaker 1: or something like that, you're going to see shotgun of
10:41
Speaker 1: houses or Atlanta, like I've mentioned many times. Uh, if
10:45
Speaker 1: if you are local, then you can see these kinds
10:49
Speaker 1: of houses in like the Sweet Auburn district, Cabbage Down
10:52
Speaker 1: and I think Cabbage Town where they were houses for
10:54
Speaker 1: factory workers for the nearby cotton mill offten uh factories. Yeah,
10:59
Speaker 1: it changed hands um. Also, you're gonna find them directly
11:02
Speaker 1: across the street from Martin Luther King's birthplace UM in
11:06
Speaker 1: the King Memorial area. The whole park is UM. There's
11:10
Speaker 1: still people that live in them. Yeah, and they've been
11:12
Speaker 1: pretty well preserved over the Yeah. Yeah, it's very cool.
11:14
Speaker 1: But those were like late nineteenth century built. But it
11:17
Speaker 1: did kind of transition from African American only to working
11:22
Speaker 1: class of all colors. The shotgun house became kind of
11:25
Speaker 1: an emblem of the working class as much as African
11:30
Speaker 1: Americans now. Is a is a row house the same thing?
11:33
Speaker 1: Or is a row house? Just know those are side
11:35
Speaker 1: by side, like touching, sometimes all forming one large building,
11:39
Speaker 1: but then maybe different gables differentiating them. So a shotgun
11:45
Speaker 1: a shotgun house could be a row house, but a
11:48
Speaker 1: row house can't be a shotgun house because den row
11:51
Speaker 1: house indicate like the proximity to one another more than
11:54
Speaker 1: the style of the house. Or no, I think it's both.
11:58
Speaker 1: And then the shotgun house is not supposed to be
12:01
Speaker 1: confused with the railroad house either, yea, which is you
12:05
Speaker 1: enter and there's a long hallway from front to back,
12:08
Speaker 1: and then off of the hallway our rooms apartments. My
12:12
Speaker 1: friend Meredith in New York, in Brooklyn, lives in a
12:14
Speaker 1: railroad department which was always a little weird because like
12:18
Speaker 1: in order for like when I would stay there, I
12:20
Speaker 1: would stay in the living room, and when someone had
12:22
Speaker 1: to go to the bathroom, they would have to walk
12:23
Speaker 1: through the you know, living room to tend to get
12:26
Speaker 1: to the Bathroom's always awkward. Or she could go outside
12:29
Speaker 1: through the hallway and then come back in because she
12:31
Speaker 1: had two doors to her apartment. Got it still does, hi, Meredith,
12:56
Speaker 1: So Chuck, we're talking about where else they spread. There's
12:58
Speaker 1: UM also a lot of in Oklahoma, especially southern Oklahoma. Yeah.
13:03
Speaker 1: And one of the reasons why is because southern Oklahoma,
13:06
Speaker 1: the Oklahoma territory Um before it became a state, was
13:10
Speaker 1: a free black area and a lot of blacks traveled
13:14
Speaker 1: to Oklahoma, moved to Oklahoma to be free, and a
13:17
Speaker 1: lot of runaway slaves maroons is what they are called,
13:22
Speaker 1: formed and integrated with um Native American tribes like the Seminoles.
13:27
Speaker 1: And when these five civilized tribes and making air quotes
13:31
Speaker 1: like furiously um were moved to the Oklahoma territory Um,
13:36
Speaker 1: a lot of blacks went with them, and shockun houses
13:39
Speaker 1: showed up alongside the whole thing, and there's like all
13:43
Speaker 1: black towns are formerly all black towns in southern Oklahoma
13:46
Speaker 1: where it's like shocking houses everywhere. Yeah, so, Chuck, if
13:51
Speaker 1: you ask me, I feel like, now we've reached the
13:53
Speaker 1: point where this is the fact of the show, and
13:57
Speaker 1: I know you're excited about this. Well, it's cool. They um.
14:02
Speaker 1: It's one of the reasons I talked about why the
14:04
Speaker 1: cultural legacy of the shotgun Home had a lot to
14:06
Speaker 1: do with bringing together the African American community is because
14:10
Speaker 1: of a little something called the front porch. Yeah, they
14:13
Speaker 1: didn't exist in the United States before the shotgun House
14:16
Speaker 1: brought it along. So the shotgun houses are typically I
14:18
Speaker 1: mean a lot of them actually were so far forward
14:22
Speaker 1: that they were on the sidewalk, But the ones that
14:24
Speaker 1: weren't had a few feet of grass and then a
14:27
Speaker 1: front porch to hang out on. And in a small house,
14:31
Speaker 1: you're going to congregate on the front porch. And in
14:33
Speaker 1: the evenings, if your neighbors on our front porch five
14:36
Speaker 1: feet from you and they're five feet from another one,
14:39
Speaker 1: then what you have is a big, old, friendly cultural
14:42
Speaker 1: block party going on every evening, and the porch is made.
14:47
Speaker 1: It's a spandrel I guess of the um overhanging roof.
14:52
Speaker 1: And then if you add the fact that in New Orleans,
14:54
Speaker 1: like you said, they were built off of the ground.
14:56
Speaker 1: Some yeah, you have to build steps to go up
14:58
Speaker 1: to it. And then you have a just buy you
15:01
Speaker 1: have a de facto porch. And then yeah, you add
15:03
Speaker 1: a bunch of them together and there you go. So
15:05
Speaker 1: we didn't have porch. So like these huge wraparound porches
15:09
Speaker 1: on old like plantation mansions stoops in New York, like,
15:13
Speaker 1: all of this stuff can be traced back to the
15:15
Speaker 1: shotgun house. Really, yeah, that's crazy, and thank you for that,
15:19
Speaker 1: shotgun house builders. So because one of my favorite things
15:24
Speaker 1: is the front porch or the back porch. Good good porches.
15:27
Speaker 1: It's very important. Yeah, you know, shotgun houses started to
15:31
Speaker 1: wane in the twenties, and it wasn't It wasn't until
15:36
Speaker 1: fairly recently that we knew the history of shotgun houses.
15:40
Speaker 1: That architects um went back and and art historians went
15:43
Speaker 1: back and figured out where this all came from and
15:46
Speaker 1: traced it step by step. I mean it was within
15:48
Speaker 1: the last like a couple of decades um. And they
15:52
Speaker 1: were like, okay, we found some shotgun houses and these
15:54
Speaker 1: are really old, and they date them and they'd be like, Okay,
15:58
Speaker 1: New Orleans is the birthplace. And then somebody be like,
16:00
Speaker 1: have you been to Port of Prince Like they got
16:02
Speaker 1: some they're really really old there, and then they traced
16:04
Speaker 1: them back and then somebody figured out that they were
16:06
Speaker 1: from West Africa. But the new construction in the United
16:11
Speaker 1: States waned in the twenties, and like I said about
16:14
Speaker 1: the turn of the last century, you could get a
16:16
Speaker 1: kit for about a hundred bucks, which also made them
16:19
Speaker 1: really good cheap housing for labor um if you had
16:23
Speaker 1: like a work camp, you exactly um. And they were
16:29
Speaker 1: also really good for disaster relief. Specifically, they made a
16:32
Speaker 1: big appearance in the San Francisco earthquake of nineteen o six. Well, yeah,
16:37
Speaker 1: they needed to put up displaced people. And when you
16:40
Speaker 1: can build a house for a hundred bucks, then you
16:43
Speaker 1: do so exactly. And when it can be pre fabricated
16:46
Speaker 1: and then taking apart in like six large parts, put
16:51
Speaker 1: on a train and sent somewhere and then put back
16:53
Speaker 1: together within like a couple hours, like a waffle house. Yeah,
16:57
Speaker 1: it's exactly like a waffle house. As matter of fact,
17:00
Speaker 1: I think you can go out on a limb and
17:01
Speaker 1: say we wouldn't have the waffle house without the shotgun house.
17:04
Speaker 1: I think you're right, uh little pop culture. Yeah, you
17:08
Speaker 1: already mentioned David Byrne. Uh Coogs, John Mellencamp, My boy
17:13
Speaker 1: Coogs Pink Houses was about a shotgun house. Apparently, his
17:16
Speaker 1: legend has it, he was driving on a busy main
17:20
Speaker 1: road and he saw this little black guy sitting on
17:22
Speaker 1: the front porch of his little pink shotgun house, gave him,
17:25
Speaker 1: gave him a wave, and he said he just looked
17:27
Speaker 1: like he was as happy as could be sitting out
17:29
Speaker 1: on his porch. And uh, I wrote a song about it,
17:32
Speaker 1: that's nice, and and that the album that I was
17:34
Speaker 1: on too, Yeah, I think so great song. Elvis Presley
17:38
Speaker 1: was born in the shotgun house. Oh yeah, in uh yeah, Mississippi,
17:42
Speaker 1: which is where I have family actually, And Aaron Neville
17:46
Speaker 1: grew up in a shotgun house. The incomparable and muscly
17:51
Speaker 1: and Moley. But boy man like I can sing yeah
17:58
Speaker 1: like a bird? Okay, face pretty good, Aaron Neville ask me,
18:16
Speaker 1: it's um shock. Gun houses are making a resurgence too,
18:30
Speaker 1: by the way, are they building them again? Yes, there's
18:32
Speaker 1: this thing called the tiny house movement. Oh yeah, that
18:35
Speaker 1: and the whole idea of living modestly in the house
18:37
Speaker 1: you can afford that UM grants a very small carbon footprint.
18:42
Speaker 1: Shotgun houses fit that bill. I like the tiny house thing.
18:45
Speaker 1: I think. I think actually Emily might have written an
18:48
Speaker 1: article about that. Is that right? If I'm not mistaken,
18:50
Speaker 1: or maybe it was me. Somebody did, somebody in our
18:53
Speaker 1: family did, because I remember I remember it happening. Was
18:56
Speaker 1: it Buckley a few years ago? Yeah? Buckley wrote it. Um,
19:00
Speaker 1: you got anything else, no go, you know, seek out
19:03
Speaker 1: local historic landmarks that might be easily overlooked when you're
19:08
Speaker 1: angry in traffic. Yeah. And when next time you pass
19:10
Speaker 1: a shotgun house, like, stop and look at it, and
19:12
Speaker 1: you'll see some pretty cool little details to it. Ask
19:15
Speaker 1: him to open the door so you can shoot a
19:16
Speaker 1: gun through it. Don't do that. Don't do that. Man,
19:20
Speaker 1: that was a reversal. I was like, no, don't do it,
19:23
Speaker 1: Chuck said, Normally it's the other way around. Uh. And
19:26
Speaker 1: if you're ever in Atlanta, Chuck and I always recommend
19:29
Speaker 1: going to the King Memorial Center, the place where he's buried,
19:34
Speaker 1: where the eternal flame is in all the surrounding area.
19:37
Speaker 1: UM is like a Living Museum Preserved House is just awesome.
19:40
Speaker 1: One of my favorite parts of Atlanta for sure. Um So,
19:43
Speaker 1: if you want to learn more about shotgun houses and
19:45
Speaker 1: see pictures of shotgun houses, you can type the words
19:49
Speaker 1: shotgun house two words into the search bar at how
19:52
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com and that'll bring up this article
19:55
Speaker 1: that I wrote. And I said search bar, which means
19:58
Speaker 1: it's time for a listener now, Josh, I'm gonna call
20:03
Speaker 1: this beast email. Hey, guys, did you did you read
20:07
Speaker 1: this one? Um? I just listened to the Music Sampling Podcast.
20:10
Speaker 1: We got a lot of good feedback on that by man,
20:12
Speaker 1: everybody loved that was and a lot of people offered
20:15
Speaker 1: up like people don't know way more than us, offered
20:18
Speaker 1: up a lot of cool insight. Yeah, we kept getting
20:20
Speaker 1: called out for not mentioning girl talk. I've never heard
20:23
Speaker 1: girl talk, so I don't feel bad. Yeah, but everyone
20:25
Speaker 1: we know about girl talk. Now, Okay, guys that just
20:29
Speaker 1: listened to the Music Sampling Podcast wanted to say how
20:31
Speaker 1: great it was that you featured the Beastie Boys so
20:34
Speaker 1: prominently in the show. I thought i'd share a little
20:36
Speaker 1: story when I met them during the nineteen seven licensed
20:39
Speaker 1: to Ild tour in Las Vegas when I was fifteen.
20:42
Speaker 1: So this girl must be my age because I saw
20:43
Speaker 1: that tour and I was about fifteen. Wow. All right.
20:48
Speaker 1: They performed in a concert hall on the un l
20:50
Speaker 1: V campus, so it was easy to get to the
20:52
Speaker 1: area where their tour bus was because I lived in
20:54
Speaker 1: the bleachers. They were inviting every female they saw back
20:57
Speaker 1: to their hotel for a party, including teen year olds.
21:01
Speaker 1: Well they were only like eighteen nineteen. Still, Well, I know,
21:06
Speaker 1: but you get to be forty and you're like, what's
21:09
Speaker 1: the big difference of five years? Man? That's back then.
21:14
Speaker 1: I'm just saying, it's not like they were like years older.
21:18
Speaker 1: All right, I'm defending their pedophilia. Uh. By the time
21:24
Speaker 1: we got there, the party had taken over the ninth
21:26
Speaker 1: floor and had already been shut down. We got to
21:28
Speaker 1: say hi to m c A before being escorted away
21:31
Speaker 1: by security for curfew violation. But I was determined. I
21:34
Speaker 1: skipped school the next day went back to the hotel,
21:37
Speaker 1: basically casing the joint. I ended up finding m c A,
21:39
Speaker 1: who remembered me from the night before. I said, how
21:41
Speaker 1: do He said, Hi, very nice? What you heard waiting
21:46
Speaker 1: on that one? I ended up spending the whole day
21:49
Speaker 1: with the guys, chatting, playing arcade games, walking over to
21:52
Speaker 1: a seven eleven with a very hungover ad Rock, and
21:55
Speaker 1: even helping load their bags onto the tour bus. They're
21:58
Speaker 1: only nineteen twenty and twenty one at the time. I'm
22:00
Speaker 1: very unassuming, so they weren't getting much attention. I felt
22:03
Speaker 1: like a little sister tagging along with their super cool
22:06
Speaker 1: older brothers. That is very cool. At one point m
22:09
Speaker 1: c a offered me a tour of the bus. We
22:11
Speaker 1: got on and he closed the door and said, now
22:14
Speaker 1: we cannot do all sorts of things that you're going
22:16
Speaker 1: to tell all your friends. We did anyway, he was
22:18
Speaker 1: really hysterical, so he was like he was still a gentleman, unfortunately,
22:23
Speaker 1: and he's like a Buddhist now and he oh yeah. Unfortunately.
22:26
Speaker 1: I had not thought to bring a camera with me,
22:28
Speaker 1: so I have no picks. I did get the auto
22:31
Speaker 1: documentation any of this happened, now, she does, um. I
22:34
Speaker 1: did get their autographs, but the only paper I had
22:36
Speaker 1: in my jacket was old school snoopy valentines I had
22:40
Speaker 1: bought to give up friends. I still treasure my three
22:43
Speaker 1: snoopy valentines each one with their autographs, and she sent
22:46
Speaker 1: pictures of them. That's cool. I stayed until they left
22:49
Speaker 1: around six at night. I naively asked m c a
22:52
Speaker 1: if he would write to me. He answered with an
22:54
Speaker 1: honest no and gave me a very sweet kiss on
22:57
Speaker 1: the cheek. I loved it that they have conceid need
23:00
Speaker 1: to rise in popularity and her given the respect of
23:02
Speaker 1: being true innovators in the field. First. Sure that is
23:05
Speaker 1: Ali Smith and she got kissed on the cheek by
23:08
Speaker 1: a very sweet sounding m c And all of your
23:11
Speaker 1: fifteen year olds out there, you'd better be at home sleeping. Yeah,
23:15
Speaker 1: don't be hanging out with twenty one year old dudes,
23:17
Speaker 1: especially not the girl talk people. Those guys are girls.
23:22
Speaker 1: I think girl talk to a guy. It's dear clear
23:24
Speaker 1: that girl talk to um. Let's see what do you
23:28
Speaker 1: want to call out for? M hmm. Do you live
23:31
Speaker 1: in a shotgun house? No? I guess yeah. If you have,
23:35
Speaker 1: like a house with an interesting history, we did that one,
23:38
Speaker 1: but let's do it again that boy. Um, if you
23:42
Speaker 1: live in a house with an interesting history, or you've
23:44
Speaker 1: hung out with the beastie boys, we want to hear those.
23:47
Speaker 1: You can write to us at uh, let's see. You
23:50
Speaker 1: can tweet to us at s y s K podcast.
23:53
Speaker 1: That's our handle Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should
23:56
Speaker 1: Know is us on Facebook, and you can send us
23:58
Speaker 1: an email to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com.
24:05
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