In My Footsteps: A Gen-X Nostalgia Podcast

Episode 123: 1986 Year In Boston Sports, The Pink House of Plum Island, Weirdest Sears Catalog Products Ever, Woodstock NH(12-6-2023)

• Christopher Setterlund • Season 1 • Episode 123

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Relationships can bring out the best and worst in people. On Episode 123 of the podcast, we look at an urban legend about the worst. The oddly placed Pink House of Plum Island, Massachusetts has two stories behind it. One is said urban legend, while the reality is far sadder.
For those that love a winter wonderland this week's Road Trip has exactly what you're looking for and then some. We travel up to Woodstock, New Hampshire, the home of the spectacular Ice Castles. There is much more to see and do in this Northern New Hampshire gem and we'll discuss a lot of them this week.
Boston is a tremendous sports town. Growing up nearby has been a blessing giving the opportunity to witness many championship seasons and elite-level players. This week we go way Back In the Day as I relive my very first year as a sports fan, 1986. What happened in Boston sports? What happened nationally?
It was once a beloved staple of the Holiday season. The Sears Catalog gave generations of people countless memories. However, all was not sunshine and roses. This week's Top 5 will showcase some of the weirdest products ever sold through the Sears Catalog. Live chickens, anyone?
Plus there will be a brand new This Week In History and Time Capsule featuring the deadly London Smog of 1952.
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Speaker 00:

Hello world, and welcome to the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund, coming to you from the vacation destination known as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and this is episode 123. The holiday season is in full swing. We are in the month of December. We've got a fun episode of the podcast lined up this week, starting with the urban legend. The truth is stranger than fiction story of the pink house of Plum Island, Massachusetts. A Winter Wonderland is in store in this week's road trip as we go up north to Woodstock, New Hampshire. We're going to go way, way back in the day and look at what was going on in the world of sports in 1986, both locally and nationally, as that was the first year that I became a true sports fan. There'll be a brand new Top 5. This is some head-shaking stuff as we look at the Top 5 weirdest Sears catalog products ever released. And there'll be a brand new This Week in History and Time Capsule, all coming up right now on episode 123 of the In My Footsteps podcast. Happy holidays, everybody. I know I asked last week, but has everyone got their shopping done? Luckily, online shopping makes it easier. Wherever you're at, if you're in New England or all across the U.S. or anywhere across the world, have you gotten your first snow of the year? That first snow with a little bit of snow where you get the nice scenery and you can get some great photos, that's all well and good. I'm not as big of a fan of huge snowstorms like I was when I was in school growing up. I don't hate snow, but it's definitely more of an inconvenience than it was when I was a teenager and I just had to shovel the driveway and skip school and have hot chocolate. For those of you listening, when the podcast drops today, December 6th, At 6 p.m., I'll be at the Bourne Library in Bourne, Massachusetts on the Cape, speaking about both my travel and photography books. A week from today, on December 13th, I'll be at the South Yarmouth Library, also at 6 p.m. And then the next day, December 14th, I'll be at the Eldridge Library in Chatham at 5 p.m., All three of these events are on those two books, Cape Cod Travel Guide and Photography Books. So you can come to those events. I can sign books for you. If you want, though, you can go to my homepage, ChristopherSetterlin.com or Amazon. Order any of my nine books. They're great holiday gifts. While we're in the shameless plug department, definitely, if you can, support the podcast. Go become a Patreon subscriber. This past week, the third bonus episode only for subscribers went up live on Patreon and Buzzsprout. It's a fever dream. Looking back at a blog I used to run back 15 years ago, I decided to share a little clip into that madness from this month's newest episode. So here's a little teaser. One that gets me that it's still used a lot now. It used to be on Twitter, now X. Someone would say something that they thought was clever, like one sentence, and then end it with, that's it, that's the tweet. Oh, I want to slap them. Or saying whatever their opinion is and putting truth after it, like that makes it true. Or one's like, sorry, not sorry. Or when people quote someone else and just put this above it, just the word this. And another thing that needs to go while I'm ranting is when people use hashtags to write another sentence. I know that on Instagram, hashtags are supposed to help people find your photo. But if you're writing hashtag just going to the store to meet friends, you could just write another sentence because no one's going to look for that. No one's going to type that hashtag ever. You can get stuff like that and more if you subscribe on Patreon or Buzzsprout. A little bit of a podcast programming note. After this week, I'm going to be kind of pulling back on the road trip segments. Reason being, I was putting out a lot of polls to listeners, gauging what they enjoy most about the podcast. I got a lot of votes for the Cape Cod, New England history stuff. Votes for my retro segments definitely were popular. And a lot of votes for lifestyle stories, the self-deprecating foolishness from my own life. But there wasn't really a lot of love for the road trip segments. And I won't be shelving them permanently. They'll just become a less frequent part of the podcast as I start to shift my gears a little more towards the nostalgia, a little more in the humor department. Because that's what this audience wants as far as people that have responded to the polls. And I've put them all over social media. And of course, if things change, I'll change with them. I mean, I've been doing this podcast over three years now, 123 episodes. So it's just evolution. But I thank all of you who have been listening, who have stuck with the podcast or come in late and have caught up. It's going to be a fun show. So let's kick it off right now with the strange but true story of the Pink House of Plum Island, Massachusetts. Relationships are complicated things. They can bring out the best and the worst in people. They can make a person do things they never thought possible, both in good and bad ways. Crimes of passion and things done out of spite are often associated with relationships gone wrong. One of the greatest spiteful maneuvers done in a relationship is actually tied into Massachusetts history and in fact is seen by countless drivers on a daily basis. It comes in the form of a home, a beautiful stately home decked out completely in pink. It sounds delightful, and in most cases it would be. However, this pink house doesn't reside in a suburban neighborhood or even on a remote estate. No, this pink house sits in a marshy wetland. Allegedly built out of spite by a husband for his soon-to-be ex-wife, this is the story behind the oddity that is the pink house of Plum Island, Massachusetts. So there's an urban legend that surrounds the pink house, and it goes as follows. During divorce proceedings, one of the wife's demands was that she have a house built that was an exact replica of the one she had shared with her husband. But she never specified where to build it, though, which led to the spiteful husband building it upon the marshy area where it still resides today. It was purportedly even built with saltwater plumbing, making it virtually uninhabitable. Now, whether or not the pink house was built as a less than charitable gesture by a divorcing husband, the idea of a spite house is actually very real. It is a dwelling built with the main purpose being to irritate neighboring home or land owners. Examples of this practice can be found in an article on treehugger.com, which I will put a link to in the description of the podcast so you can see some examples of spite houses. That being said, it's never been confirmed as to whether the house built along the Plum Island Turnpike was built from spite or not. So here are the basic facts of the story. Young couple Henry Cutter and Ruth Morin wed in Newburyport, Massachusetts in June 1922 at the home of Ruth's parents on High Street. They lived in a few places around town in the ensuing years, with Ruth giving birth to a son named Henry Jr. in 1923. Perhaps in a bid to give her grandson a permanent home, Henry's mother, Gertrude Cutter, stepped up and purchased a parcel of land in July 1925. This land, previously owned by prominent Newburyport widow Abby Little, sat on the marshy uplands near Plumbush Creek, a little more than a mile from the ocean. It had been previously used for harvesting salt marsh hay, which was hardly a pristine location for a new family home. Though it must be said that during this time, the nearby waterfront of Plum Island was being built up with homes to attract families. On this parcel of land, a two-story house was built in 1925, roughly 150 feet back from the road on the uplands. The home was painted pink, though it's not known why. It was very likely seen as a perfect home to live in for a young family. However, the honeymoon was very short-lived. Behind the scenes, there had already been trouble brewing between Henry and Ruth. This was only exacerbated after moving into the pink house. Once settled in, Henry would routinely disappear. It was said by Ruth he would leave for upwards of a week at a time while she stayed in the house with their son. The pink house was and still is in a wide open area, exposing it to the elements. It was prone to having water in the basement with towels and newspapers being used in the place of curtains. During a 12-day absence by Henry in November 1925, Ruth contacted an attorney who advised her to take her son and everything she believed was hers and leave the pink house behind. So that's what she did. A separation soon followed, with the divorce proceeding citing desertion as the cause. Only after leaving the pink house did Ruth discover the depth of Henry's deception. It turned out that he had been spending a lot of time in the company of a Boston businesswoman named Beatrice Bowery. In addition, Henry would get meals from his mother Gertrude's home while leaving Ruth $2 for food and necessities for the week for both her and their infant son. That $2 is equal to just over $35 a week in 2023 for food and necessities for her and their child. It took more than a decade for the divorce to be finalized, after which Henry married Beatrice. The Cutter family maintained ownership of the Pink House until it was sold in 1947, and before it was sold, the family used it as a summer home for all those years. The pink house was sold four times in eight years, with brackish water in the plumbing being purported as a source of trouble for all of the owners. Milton and Juliet Stott became the sixth owners of the house in 1960 and brought some stability to the property. The home remained in the family's possession until 2011, even though it wasn't lived in after the early 2000s. In 2011, the home and the salt marsh property it stands upon was purchased by the United States Fish and Wildlife slash Parker River Wildlife Refuge. In 2016, there was a close call with the home nearly being razed. Support the Pink House is an organization working to this day to preserve this unique and now historic home. Circling back around to the beginning, despite the urban legend that the pink house was built out of spite by an angry soon-to-be ex-husband, there is unfortunately not much evidence to support that claim. And the reality of the situation is far sadder. Henry Cutter moved his wife and young son into the house and abandoned them there with little money while he lived like a king with free food at his mother's and a new lover on the side. Regardless of why it was built, the pink house of Plum Island is truly a sight to see. It's become a popular spot for photography, painting, and even birdwatching. Located on a marshy upland along the Plum Island Turnpike, it's hard not to stop and stare at this historic and oddly placed home in wonder. For those that live along the North Shore or Boston or anywhere in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Plum Island is a little bit out of the way if you're looking to go find the pink house. I bet some of you listening to this have actually seen it and didn't realize it until hearing this segment. Plum Island is about an hour drive north of Boston, and the area is very reminiscent of the Cape Cod National Seashore. And without turning this into another road trip segment, if you're looking for the pink house, it's right near the Plum Island Airport on the Plum Island Turnpike. Nearly diagonally across from the home is a restaurant called Bob Lobster. It's marshy wetlands, so it's very open. You can't miss this house if you're driving along the turnpike. But if you get to the Plum Island Bridge, you've missed the house. So turn back. But do any of you out there, are you familiar with the Pink House of Plum Island? Which story do you prefer? The urban legend that it was built out of spite or the more sadder reality of the man who basically ditched his wife and son there while he cheated and went and had free food at his mom's? Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, even when the fiction is crazy. This week's road trip is a spot that I've wanted to cover for quite a while, but it also comes down to the timing for this one as we head way up north to the small town of Woodstock, New Hampshire. So I say this road trip segment was an exercise in patience because there's one very important specific thing that I wanted to share about Woodstock, New Hampshire, but it needs to be this time of year. We'll get into that in a moment. Woodstock itself is tiny. As of 2020, the population was 1,434. If you're looking to go up there, for me from Cape Cod, it's about a three-hour drive. So when you're looking to go from Boston, it's about an hour and 50 minutes north of Boston and even just over an hour north of Manchester, New Hampshire. And this road trip will include the village of North Woodstock, New Hampshire as well. It's one big thing as far as I'm concerned for this segment. But not to leave you in suspense, and some of you that are familiar with it already know where I'm going as far as what you need to go see there, and that's the ice castles. So naturally when you hear ice, you know it has to be during winter. So I couldn't do Woodstock, New Hampshire in summer. It had to be this time of year when it's relevant. Visit icecastles.com to get some photos and more information about this, but I'll do my best to explain. It's basically an amusement park of ice. There are ice slides, caverns and archways and crawl tunnels, all lit up in different colors. It's like a winter wonderland, really. The ice castles idea began in 2011, and even though people in New England that are familiar with it associate ice castles with New Hampshire, there's actually locations all across the country where they do this. Colorado, Minnesota, New York, Utah, and Wisconsin all have their own ice castles. It's the same company that does it everywhere. Tickets for this year's ice castles went on sale last week, November 29th. Naturally, with it being ice, a lot of it is weather related. So if it gets really warm, it's going to make it a little different, more wet. I would say if you've never gone, you definitely need to go. December and January are pretty safe bets and even likely into early February, considering it's northern New Hampshire. But check out the pictures of it and you'll definitely want to go. If you're going up to Woodstock, New Hampshire this time of year, December, and you enjoy skiing, you're in luck because Loon Mountain is right nearby. It's only a few minutes drive north of Woodstock in the town of Lincoln, which I covered way back in episode 8 of the podcast. If you're heading over to Loon Mountain, driving on the Kankamagus Highway is another fabulous experience going through the White Mountains. Driving it in the winter... You're taking your health into your own hands. But if you go in the spring and summer, it's beautiful. Although, remember, there's no gas stations for the 30 plus miles of the kink and likely very little, if any, cell phone reception as you drive on it. So just keep that in mind. But the views are worth it. If you're listening to this in the future and it's spring and summer, there's a lot of beautiful scenery to see up in the Woodstock area. Check out the Lost River Gorge and Boulder Caves if you enjoy scenic hiking. The main parking lot is at 1712 Lost River Road in North Woodstock. There's a mile-long boardwalk trail, 11 boulder caves, a treehouse, suspension bridge, and even a giant bird nest. The thing to remember about Lost River Gorge and the Boulder Caves is that that is also weather dependent. So they're closed right now until May of 2024, which is why I said if you're listening to this in the future, you can go. Woodstock, North Woodstock, the main road to get there is Route 3. That's where you're going to find a lot of the shopping, places to stay, places to eat stuff. It's not necessarily a bustling Main Street area. I mean, the town's got a population of just over 1,400. But still, northern New Hampshire, whether it's winter, spring, summer, fall, it's beautiful to visit. In the warmer months, there's the White Mountain Motorsports Park, which is an auto racing track that's at 463 Daniel Webster Highway, which is the other name for Route 3 in North Woodstock. The Pemigawasset River runs right along Route 3, in and around Woodstock, up through Lincoln. There are beautiful scenic views. There are bridges, railroad bridges, road bridges going over the river. If you've listened to the podcast and you heard the Lincoln, New Hampshire road trip segment from Episode 8, you heard me talk about staying at the Pemigawasset If you're going up there and you stay overnight, I mean, the Pemi cabins are great, but in Woodstock, there's a spot called the Wilderness Inn. It's at 57 Main Street, which is also Route 3. Google Maps is quite confusing. This is kind of in the heart, the center of Woodstock. The inn was built in 1912, and it was originally a lumber mills owner's home. Even though it's not on the Pemigawasset River like the Pemi Cabins, they've got all these rooms in the main house, but then they've also got the bungalow, which is separate, and it's got a screened-in outdoor deck with a bistro set. That's what immediately caught my attention. That's where I would stay if I went there. Visit thewildernessin.com to see photos of all the rooms, the bungalow. They've even got their Instagram account hooked up to it so you can see the beautiful scenery that's right there within walking distance. Where to eat after building up an appetite, going to Woodstock and the surrounding areas, that's also dependent on the time of year. If it's summer, you can go and check out Conehead's Supreme Ice Cream. It's at 104 Main Street or literally like a two-minute walk from the Wilderness Inn. Naturally, when this podcast goes live, they are closed because it's winter, and who really wants ice cream in winter? But it's all the classic fare. Homemade ice cream, frozen yogurt, Italian ice, tours of the factory where they make the ice cream right there on the premises. But of course, I'm not going to just leave you with ice cream if you're going up there in winter. You can check out the Woodstock Inn Brewery. Naturally, you can stay there as well, Woodstock Inn, but the restaurant itself is open to the public, all three meals. It's been voted the favorite restaurant in the White Mountains for eight straight years, so they must be doing something right. They have all the classic breakfasts, Eggs Benedict, waffles, French toast, huge portions, craft beers for dinner. Visit woodstockinbrewery.com. You'll get to see pictures of the actual hotel, pictures from the food menu. I'm looking at it now, wishing that I could have pancakes and waffles and omelets and such. If I still haven't convinced you to go up to Woodstock, New Hampshire, no matter what time of year it is, check out visitwhitemountains.com. That's the travel and tourism site for the whole White Mountains region. Who knows, after visiting that website, you might decide to spend a few days in Woodstock and just stay up there for a week or two and just visit all these places up in the White Mountains. I know for me, trips up to northern New Hampshire are very addictive. I go up there and it's hard to get me to come back home. I guess that's the best mark of a good vacation, when you find it hard to leave and come back. Woodstock is a small town nestled in northern New Hampshire, skiing the beautiful ice castles in the winter, hiking at the Lost River Gorge and Boulder Caves and Conehead's Ice Cream in the summertime. Just dress appropriately whenever you go and keep tuning into the podcast because you never know when or where the next road trip will take us. This week in history, we are going back 71 years ago this week to December 5th, 1952 and the beginnings of the Great London Smog. This smog lasted for five days from December 5th through the 9th. It was partially caused by high pressure weather, but also a lot by industrial pollution. This combination of smoke and fog brought London to a standstill you could barely see even during the day. And it was no joke. This smog resulted in the deaths of thousands of people. Thick, dense, yellow fog in London had been a thing the city had dealt with all the way back to the 13th century based on the burning of coal. And as the city expanded into the 1600s, the smog only got worse. People would complain and there were attempts to restrict coal burning, but these laws never were really enforced and didn't do anything. That term smog, which is the combination of smoke and fog, was coined by a Londoner in the early 20th century. The air pollution in London got to crisis levels in the late 19th century due to the Industrial Revolution, and works by Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle at the time painted vivid pictures of London just being foggy all the time. Even as far back as the early 19th century, people on their gravestones had causes of death written on their gravestones as fog-related. For this smog in 1952, cold air was trapped below the warmer air above, so the pollution could not get efficiently released into the atmosphere, so it became stuck down at street level. Stories from the time said some people couldn't even see their feet when they were walking. You imagine trying to drive through that? There were stories of police having to almost shepherd vehicles, like walking in front of them. During and after the smog, there were spikes in pneumonia and bronchitis. Herds of cattle would choke to death and die. Within a few weeks of the smog lifting on December 9th, fatalities were estimated to be around 4,000. However, present-day estimates have that number closer to 12,000. 12,000 deaths from this smog that lasted five days. However, there was good news to come out of this. In 1956, England passed the Clean Air Act, giving incentives for people to switch from coal and actually, for real, restricting coal burning. And it took a while. It took several years. There was actually another pretty bad smog in 1962. But in general, the Clean Air Act is seen as this watershed moment for the environment in Great Britain as a whole. And that catalyst for the Clean Air Act, the terrible London smog, took place 71 years ago this week in history. And now it's time for a brand new time capsule. We're going to stick to that same day while the London smog was descending on England on December 5th, 1952. What was going on in America in the world of pop culture? Well, let's find out. The number one song was It's in the Book by Parts 1 and 2 by Johnny Stanley. This song, quote unquote, is actually a comic monologue based around Little Bo Peep, but it was marketed as a pop song, which made it get all the way to number one, and it sold over a million copies. This might be one of the oldest parody songs, and definitely the oldest, I think, to reach number one on the charts. I may have to do a top five at some point that are the strangest songs to get to number one, but that'll be for another time. The number one movie was Hans Christian Andersen, and you could get into the theater with a ticket costing 53 cents. This movie was a musical starring Danny Kaye, and although it's about Hans Christian Andersen, it's not really a biography. It's more of a fairy tale about him as a fairy tale teller. For those that don't know, Hans Christian Andersen wrote a lot of famous fairy tales. The Ugly Duckling, Thumbelina, The Emperor's New Clothes, and even The Little Mermaid. The movie was a modest success, making $6 million on a budget of $4 million. And it's 83% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and if you like musicals, it's probably right up your alley. The number one TV show was I Love Lucy. It's the early 1950s. What else would be number one? This legendary sitcom starring Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz. The show ran for six seasons and centers around Lucy and her hijinks, a lot of them trying to get into her husband's band. The show was number one in four of its six seasons on the air, and its lowest rating was number three. And if you were around back then, December 1952, perhaps you were looking for some gifts, cheap gifts for people in your life, or maybe just some foolish things that seemed good at the time. Well, you could check out the Brecks of Boston 1952 catalog to find these following things. By the way, Brecks of Boston, it began as a kind of home and garden store and then started doing catalogs. They're actually still open at brex.com if you want to check them out. But if you had the catalog in 1952, you could get yourself this really cool-looking inflatable rain bonnet for $2. Or for the person that's multitasking, you could get yourself the Telerest for $1.98, which is basically you hook your phone into this support that you rest on your shoulder. So instead of resting your... ear to the phone to your shoulder. There's this support thing in between that looks so stupid. And last but not least, you could get yourself some shampoo goggles for a dollar so you don't get soap in your eyes. You wear goggles in the shower. I'll link to the catalog so you can see the pictures of these things. It just makes me laugh. That'll wrap up another time capsule, another This Week in History episode. But the laughs don't stop there. You're going to shake your head in amazement at this week's top five as we look at the top five weirdest Sears catalog products ever. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried. So let's jump into that top five right now. Well, if you're looking to get some holiday shopping out of the way, I got some products for you here. Unfortunately, or more likely fortunately, for this week's top five, these products from the Sears catalog are not available. This was a lot of fun to research and a lot of head scratching at some of the things that were seen as appropriate to be selling through a catalog to the general public. The products in this top five in the honorable mentions range from foolish to money wasting to downright dangerous. But enough teases. As with the majority of these top fives, they're in no particular order. And we've got a few honorable mentions to kind of whet your appetite for what the top five is going to bring. And remember, everything I'm going to mention here was available to be bought through the Sears catalog. Honorable mentions include hand-painted portraits where you would mail in a photo and they would paint it for you and then send it back. Gravestones. which I guess is on anyone's holiday shopping list, mail order houses that they would send you and you could build yourself, and vapor bath cabinets that were basically saunas you stood in with your head sticking out of the top. Yikes. So those were the honorable mentions. Let's jump into the top five with number one, medicine. Now, I'm summing up a few things into this. where you could buy different medicines, especially in the early 1900s. So more untested quack doctor type medicines. There was one from 1902 called Female Pills for Weak Women. For 35 cents a box, women could have everything cured. Irregular periods, heart palpitations. Even partial paralysis would be cured by these weak women pills. If that was true, these pills would still be around now in the hospital. I broke my back. I'm paralyzed. Here, have these pills at some weirdo doctor said work. Oh, but the medicine gets even better. This I couldn't believe. This is what started this whole top five. In addition to weak women pills, they sold laudanum, also known as opiates. This specific laudanum was a mixture of opiates and alcohol. And you could just order this through the Sears catalog. Oh, and they also sold heroin. The Bayer Company sold heroin through the Sears catalog in a vial that said heroin on it. You could get two vials for $1.50. This is Sears, the place in the mall that you would get a washer-dryer used to sell heroin through their catalog. Oh, but wait, it gets better. Number two, live chickens. Yep, that's right. This was in the 1950s. You could buy live chickens in the Sears catalog. Day-old chicks. And they had a four-point guarantee for these chickens, like you were getting a car inspected. They also had ready-made chicken coops and vitamins and feed for them. You could get chickens for as little as 12 cents each. In other Sears catalogs, they sold other animals, fish, dogs. That's, I guess, more normal. I don't know, buying animals through a catalog to get shifty was weird, but the chickens was the weirdest one. Number three, McKinley assassination slides. Because who doesn't want to remember a presidential assassination with slides of the moments after the assassin himself with photos? These are not postcards from visiting paradise. These were specifically in the 1902 catalog as President William McKinley was assassinated in 1901. All you needed was the stereopticon to view slides and you could get these. I guess in the time before television and radio and really before motion pictures, you needed something to occupy yourself. So why not a bunch of slides of after a president was murdered? Number four is the electric belt. This is no ordinary electric belt. It's specifically for men. It's sold for $4 for men who are sick, weak, and discouraged. The discouraged part, I think you know where this is going. Headaches, backaches, nerve pain, or problems in the bedroom. Yep, you would shock your junk bed. to get it working again. This sounds like something that they would have on Jackass, daring someone to get shot in the nuts with a taser or something. And Sears was selling it 100 years ago. And we'll wrap up this crazy trip down memory lane with number five, the Rational Body Brace. This was specifically for women. It was basically a spring-loaded metal belt with a bunch of Braces and belts that forced you into a proper posture. For $2.95, you could get this around the turn of the 20th century. Fix your slouch, strengthen your weakened organs. But what makes this really crazy, and God knows how dangerous it was, was the warning that came with it that said that women should not, under any circumstances, stop wearing the body brace. Before and after confinement. That's how it's listed in the Sears catalog. I couldn't find any stories of this body brace crippling unsuspecting women who bought this. But basically having a metal cage around your body at all times doesn't sound too healthy. But that'll wrap up this week's top five. Luckily, as years went on, the Sears catalog got a lot more normal. Visit searsarchives.com. If you want to check out all of these old Sears catalogs, that's where I get my info from. I'm very transparent. Things that I find, you can find. Go back and look and see at the craziness that used to be shipped out to people all across this country. Well, as they say, time flies when you're having fun. Growing up on Cape Cod and being exposed to all of the Boston-based sports teams, I would say that my years of fandom have definitely been fun. I've seen way more championships than pretty much any other place in this country. I first became a sports fan in 1986. In the years since, I've seen the Boston Celtics win two NBA titles, the Boston Bruins won a Stanley Cup, the Boston Red Sox won four World Series, and the New England Patriots have won six Super Bowls. So for this Back in the Day segment, I wanted to go back to my first year of fandom and see what was going on in the world of sports. In my little bubble in Cape Cod, Boston, New England, but also the country as a whole. It all kicked off with Super Bowl XX. That was where the New England Patriots, who were never good, they were a joke team for most of their existence until 2001. Those of you listening that are 30 and under, you have no idea how spoiled you are by how good the Patriots were. Me growing up in the 80s, they were just awful. There's a reason that when I was in middle school into high school, I was a fan of the Detroit Lions and not the Patriots. It was almost like you didn't want to get beat up in school wearing a Patriots hat. But in Super Bowl 20, the Patriots got there. They were the underdog story coach. Unfortunately, they ran into the Chicago Bears, which was one of the best single-season teams in the history of football. They went 15-1, the famed 46 defense. And God, they smashed the hell out of the Patriots, 46-10. I remember sitting at my Nana's house in the living room, watching the Patriots play, seeing my aunt cry as they got destroyed. It reminds me of the scene in The Simpsons when Homer is Krusty the Clown and he's at the opening of Krusty Burger and the Krusty Burglar comes to steal the burgers and the kids are saying, oh no, it's the Krusty Burglar. And Homer just beats the hell out of them. And one of the kids is crying, stop, stop, he's already dead. That is Super Bowl XX in my memory. In the 86 season, the Patriots actually went 11-5 again. and won the division. And it seemed like maybe they were going to be a good team. Then they got in the playoffs and faced the Denver Broncos and got kicked in the face. And they slowly stumbled down into mediocrity. Check out episode 39 of the podcast if you want to know more about the mediocrity of the Patriots in the 80s. I go all into my fandom going to games and sitting in the bleachers when they stunk. In 86, the Boston Bruins were just a middling team. I wasn't then and never really have been a hockey fan. Sorry to the huge Bruins fans out there. It's just not my favorite sport. I appreciate the talent that it takes to skate and smash into people and be able to shoot the puck. It's like football on skates. It seemed to me in those days the Bruins were always on the cusp of being really good. They made it to the Stanley Cup Finals in 88 and 90, but most of the time they were getting knocked out of the playoffs by the Montreal Canadiens, which ironically Montreal won the Stanley Cup the first year that I was a fan. I did get to go see the Bruins play the Quebec Nordiques at the Boston Garden in 1986. I believe they won in overtime. And that was fun. Oh, and when it comes to hockey, I'm not going to forget the Hartford Whalers, now the Carolina Hurricanes. My mother got us Sports Channel, which is now NBC Sports Boston, to watch all of the Celtics home games. One of the added benefits to getting that channel was Hartford Whalers home games. They had a cool uniform, that kind of teal greenish blue with the W with the whale's tail on the end of it. But they were never good. They were always the B team. Although it was sad when they moved from Hartford to Carolina after the 96-97 hockey season. Although I say that about the Whalers being the B team, and in that 85-86 season, the first year I became a fan, even though they finished two points behind the Bruins in the standings, they won their first round series, unlike the Bruins. In that season, Wayne Gretzky of the Edmonton Oilers scored 215 points. That was and still is the most points scored by any player in any season in hockey. But of course, those of you that are sports fans, who have been sports fans a long time, if you know anything about 1986, if you're from here, there are two things that are going to pop into your head. One very bad, one very good. Let's start with the bad and the Red Sox World Series. The Red Sox that year were a great team. Roger Clemens, Wade Boggs, Jim Rice, Dwight Evans. By this point in time, it was 68 years since they had won a World Series. So when they got there against the Mets, there was a lot of hope. Even though the Mets had icons like Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, the Sox still had a chance. And then that happened. With a 3-2 series lead, one out away, one strike away, the ball got through Buckner's legs. It's one of the most infamous plays in the history of sports, I would say. The Red Sox, it was a stain on them until they won the World Series in 2004. For me, who was a few weeks away from turning nine years old, My stepfather woke me up because he wanted me to be a part of this, to see the Red Sox win the World Series. I was asleep. He pulled me out of bed, had me in front of the TV to watch. Zoom. There goes the ball through Buckner's legs. My mother said I just looked at both of them, shook my head, and walked back into my room. That could have killed my fandom right there. Saying, God, you woke me up from a sound sleep to watch the Red Sox lose in just horrible fashion. I lived so much of my fandom through the curse of the Bambino. The worst part, and I didn't know this until years later, the Red Sox were leading 3-0 in the sixth inning of game seven. So they didn't collapse. They could have won it anyway. It was tough to be a Red Sox fan because I played baseball all through my childhood. And after getting my heart broken in 86, 88, 1990, and them just not being good in the 90s, I became an Atlanta Braves fan for a lot of the 90s. I always laugh because my nephew Landon, who's going to be 16 in a couple of weeks, he's an Arizona Diamondbacks and an Arizona Cardinals fan. And anytime I want to give him grief about being a fan of teams not from here, I remember when I was his age, I was a Detroit Lions fan and an Atlanta Braves fan. So I got nothing I can say to him. But then we get to the good news. The Boston Celtics winning the NBA championship, their 16th title. What a wagon that team was. Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parrish, Dennis Johnson, Danny Ainge, Bill Walton. They went 40-1 at home. and steamrolled their way through the playoffs. Everyone thought it was going to be the Lakers and Celtics again, like it was for the past two seasons. But the Houston Rockets got lucky and won the series, which made it a bit of a letdown because the Celtics just smacked the crap out of the Rockets and won. Even at eight years old, I knew that Hakeem Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson were no match for Bird, McHale, and Parrish. So Celtics and Red Sox were my teams. I was so spoiled. In my first year of fandom, the Celtics, Red Sox, and Patriots were all in their respective championships. And it all seems like yesterday. And then I look up and it's 37 years ago. It's amazing how things have changed. When I started watching sports, there was still the California Angels, the Montreal Expos, the Hartford Whalers, the Quebec Nordiques, the Minnesota North Stars. the Houston Oilers, the St. Louis Cardinals. When I started watching, there were players from the 1960s still playing baseball, like Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan. They hadn't adopted instant replay in football yet. In basketball, you could just beat the hell out of each other going into the lane. There was one of these little ticky-tack hand-check fouls. Sports in general, I think, were way more violent back then because people didn't know the impact it had. You could suplex and clothesline the quarterbacks and football. Hell, back then, some hockey players didn't wear helmets. They were still in the age of going out there with no headgear. But like I said at the top of this segment, I have been lucky and blessed to be a Boston sports fan since 1986. For every Red Sox 86 World Series or the 2003 ALCS against the Yankees or the recent Bruins collapse against the St. Louis Blues or the Patriots losing their perfect season in the last minute of the Super Bowl, there have been countless championships and great moments that I wouldn't trade. I wouldn't want to be a sports fan anywhere else in this country except for Boston. That's going to wrap up episode 123 of the In My Footsteps podcast. Thank you so much to everyone who takes time out of their week to tune into the podcast. I love making these. It's so much fun researching. Editing's not great, but whatever. And then sharing them and marketing them and see what people enjoy. That's why, like I said at the top of the podcast, I'm tweaking things, pulling back a little on the road trip segment based on the responses I got in the polls that I've put out there. If you want to become a subscriber on Patreon, there's links in the description of the podcast. But the best way you can support me is sharing this show, sharing the podcast, telling others about Word of mouth from people that aren't me is even better, because I'm going to market the hell out of this and say it's great, and I believe that. But it means more coming from fans that listen. If you're in need of holiday shopping, I have nine books for sale. Visit ChristopherSatterlund.com or visit Amazon. If you're interested in podcast merch, visit my Zazzle store, CapeCodLiving.com. I just created a new coffee mug with the podcast logo and my famed Hello World scream. You can drink your coffee and hear my voice saying it. The funny thing is that Hello World that I do at the beginning, that actually comes from when I used to get up a lot more early in the morning and go shoot the sunrise and post it all over social media. I would post Good Morning World. Hell, I think I still do that a lot. But it just became a natural progression. There's a little peek behind the curtain as to why I screamed that at the beginning. I'm all over social media, Instagram, threads, YouTube. Oh, go to my YouTube channel. I keep tweaking it. A lot of the videos I post are segments from the podcast or full podcast audio. I'm trying to build more of a following over there. But making podcasts takes time. Making videos takes time. Maybe if someone out there is rich and wants to just sponsor me so I can stay at home and create content, that would be great. But otherwise, I still have a day job that I have to go to most days. I want to make sure I take a moment out to wish a happy 12th birthday to my nephew Lucas. It just passed a few days ago. I hope it was awesome. I hope you did a lot of fun stuff and got spoiled, got to eat whatever you want, play whatever games you wanted, and hopefully some point in the not-too-distant future we'll all get to get together again. Coming up next week is episode 124. And oh boy, this is going to be a great one. I can't wait to put it together already. We're going to have a Dedication to the Craft segment, my photography segment, As I share some of my greatest nighttime photography adventures, plus give a few tips on how to shoot photos at night and all that good stuff. We're going to see the return of me versus AI top five. As I ask chat GPT, what are the most annoying Christmas songs ever written? And we'll keep the holiday spirit going as we go way, way back in the day. And look at the strange Christmas special that was the movie The Christmas Toy, sponsored by Kraft. It's definitely a mind trip. We'll go over that in detail. And there'll be a brand new This Week in History and Time Capsule, all coming up next week on episode 124 of the In My Footsteps podcast. I hope everyone's having a great holiday season. Spend it with as many of the people that mean the most to you as you can. I love this time of year, but as I get older, there's always a twinge of bittersweet because as I see family and friends, I naturally think back to those of both that I don't see anymore, either because they're not around here anymore or they have left this earth. And typically you don't know when the last time is, the last holiday that you'll have with them. So make sure you enjoy each one. And that leads naturally into what I always say at the end. Remember, in this life, don't walk in anyone else's footsteps. Create your own path and enjoy every moment you can on this journey we call life, especially during the holidays, because you never know. Thank you to all of you for tuning in to this episode of the podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund. You already knew that. And I'll talk to you all again soon.

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Christopher Setterlund

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