In My Footsteps: A Gen-X Nostalgia Podcast

Episode 142: 90 Years of The Three Stooges; Had You Lived in 1800 Film; Discontinued Sodas; Seinfeld(5-1-2024)

• Christopher Setterlund • Season 1 • Episode 142

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Celebrating the 90th anniversary of the iconic comedy group The Three Stooges. An educational short film about life in 1800. Some long-forgotten discontinued sodas.
Episode 142 of the podcast covers a lot of ground.
It begins with a look at the Three Stooges and their legacy in comedy as their very first short film Woman Haters debuted 90 years ago this week. Though it is nearly impossible to sum up the impact of Moe, Larry, Curly, and the rest, in one segment, we will at least have some laughs trying.
From the debut of comedy legends to everyday life more than two centuries ago. We will go way Back In the Day in two ways. Not only is there a history lesson about life in 1800, but it is through the lens of life in 1969. This is Had You Lived Then...America In 1800 an educational short film that will make you appreciate the luxuries of the 2020s.
There are some staples of beverage coolers in convenience stores. Some sodas feel like they have been around forever. This week's Top 5 will not be featuring any of those. Instead, we will look at the discontinued sodas over the decades that tried, and ultimately failed, to make a dent in a Coke and Pepsi world.
There is also a brand new This Week In History and Time Capsule which celebrates the birthday of the one and only Jerry Seinfeld.
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Speaker 02:

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 142. We have entered May. Boy, the weather is finally turning around. We're going to have a lot of fun this week. We're going to kick it off with a look back 90 years at the debut of the very first Three Stooges episode and a little bit about the impact of the Three Stooges just in pop culture and the world in general in the last almost century. We're going to go way, way back in the day and go back even further. You thought 90 years going back for the Stooges was a We're going to go back and review an educational short film about what it was like to live in the year 1800. There's going to be a brand new top five that are the top five discontinued sodas of the last century. Did you drink any of these? And there'll be a brand new This Week in History and Time capsule centered around the birthday of the comedy icon Jerry Seinfeld. All of that coming up right now on episode 142 of the In My Footsteps podcast. Welcome to May, everybody. This is the time of year where... Everything's bloomed. Everything's green. I hope wherever you are, the weather is nice enough that you can be outside. Maybe you're outside right now listening to this. Whether walking through the woods, sitting on your porch, sitting at the beach. I want to say thank you to all of you who are listening. All of you that have checked out any of the episodes leading up to now. A big shout out as always to my Patreon subscribers, Leo, Laurie, Mary Lou, and Ashley. If you want to become a subscriber on Patreon, $5 a month gets you access to monthly bonus podcast episodes, including one that actually drops today. It's weird to have two podcast episodes drop in the same day, but these main shows go live on Wednesdays, and then the bonus episodes for Patreon subscribers go live the first of the month, so there you go, they coincide. Patreon subscribers also get early access to YouTube videos, early access to the main podcast, a bit of a programming note and a bit of a heads up. I've been talking for weeks, maybe months, about doing this weekly wrap-up podcast that would be a video podcast. And I tried to record it. I actually recorded a prototype, I guess, where I talk about the week in review. It goes with my initial impressions 2.0 blog. But there's been a lot of problems with video quality, editing, trying to put in green screens and overlays and all this technical stuff. So I've had to kind of scrap it for now. Because ultimately, the solution to this would be to buy a new camera specifically to film these podcasts. And although it would be fun and I want to do it, it's not in the budget really right now. So I guess you'll just have to deal with this podcast and reading the blog. Another little bit of programming note, I guess, is I'm starting to pull back on my YouTube videos. Mainly because they take a long time to put together and I'm not getting the return on investment that I'd hoped unless I pay for promotion, which kind of defeats the purpose. So it's not that I'm not going to be doing YouTube videos anymore. I mean, the podcast will be up there weekly. But those of you that are content creators, entrepreneurs, you know that if you put lots and lots of time and effort into something and you don't get the return you'd hoped for, At some point, you've got to kind of cut bait and look at other things. So I'm going to do a lot more marketing promoting of this podcast and working on that. And then if I have chances, I'll do YouTube videos. It all could change. Who knows? But let's jump into the podcast with something that I'm very excited to talk about. as the week of this podcast will celebrate 90 years of the very first Three Stooges short entitled Woman Haters. So let's talk about the Stooges, their impact on pop culture and each other with slaps and eye pokes and all that good stuff coming up right now on episode 142 of the In My Footsteps podcast. Three Blind Mice, the song that is forever entwined with the Three Stooges as it's their intro song to all of their shorts. Kids, I would say more little boys, growing up from the 1930s, probably even to now, are at least somewhat familiar with the Three Stooges comedy team. And that's why when doing a podcast that's nostalgia more geared toward Generation X, the Three Stooges count because they were still so important even through all of our childhoods. For those of you that have no idea who they are, the Three Stooges were a slapstick comedy team. They began in Vaudeville, which was essentially a traveling variety show for all intents and purposes. in the late 19th century through the early 20th century. Slapstick is literally what the Three Stooges were. They would beat the hell out of each other, specifically Moe towards his compatriots. The original Stooges, Moe, Larry, and Curly, are iconic. They're silhouettes. You know who they are if you're familiar at all with the Three Stooges. Moe had that Dutch boy hairdo, the straight hair, kind of a bowl cut. Larry was balding, but he had really curly hair, whichever was left on his head. And then Curly, he had no hair, a shaved head. The Three Stooges as a comedy team proper began in 1922, where the lead was a man named Ted Healy, and he was kind of the Moe character before Moe was who he was. And Ted Healy had Moe as his sidekick. And then eventually Moe's brother, Sam, who was better known as Shemp, he came along. Then Larry Fine came along. Shemp went to pursue an acting career, solo acting career. So that's where Moe's youngest brother, Jerome, who became known as Curly, came in. Curly originally had long hair and a mustache. And they made him shave his head and get rid of his mustache to give him that unique look. And his voice, the famous Curly voice, wasn't his real voice. He had to make that high-pitched noise. His regular voice was a lot lower. After a few years of Moe, Larry, and Curly as kind of the underlings to Ted Healy, the Stooges left to go on their own. It was more or less amicable of a split with Ted Healy. Healy died under mysterious circumstances in 1937. There's a lot of controversy surrounding his death. But the Three Stooges themselves, Moe became the leader, and they signed a deal with Columbia Pictures in 1934. And like I said, it was 90 years ago this week that the very first Three Stooges short film was released. Short films were usually anywhere from 15, 20, 25 minutes long. And for the Three Stooges, they were all kind of slices of life adventures of those times in the 30s and 40s and 50s. The Stooges were usually bums working some job they weren't good at, and they would screw up and get fired. Or there'd be period pieces where they either were in the Old West or they were in medieval times and were knights. The first ever Three Stooges short was entitled Woman Haters, and it debuted in theaters on May 5th, 1934. Out of all 190 Three Stooges shorts that were released between 1934 and 1959, Woman Haters is kind of an outlier because it's essentially a musical short film where the Stooges belong to a club called the Woman Haters Club. And Larry ends up getting engaged to this woman and getting married secretly. So there's lots of singing. There's lots of music. Even the slapstick comedy, the slaps and eye pokes and such, there's no sound effects with them. So it feels a lot different. It must have been successful, though. I mean, they ended up doing 189 more shorts. The Three Stooges for me growing up, it was very easy to get into those shorts. The plots were pretty simple. And then there was all the slapstick. There was just, they would slap each other, poke each other's eyes, punch each other. And there would be these cartoonish violent moments. Things like Curly getting sawed in the head or someone getting whacked in the face with a sledgehammer. And it would be funny because the Stooges were kind of indestructible. You'd get hit in the face with a sledgehammer and Moe would go down for like five seconds and get back up. The popularity of the Three Stooges made it where Columbia wanted more and more of these short films, which was beneficial. They didn't take that long, theoretically, to shoot and edit and get out into theaters. And at their peak with Curly in the late 1930s and early 40s, they would be making 8 to 10 short films a year. So you're talking about 6 weeks, 8 weeks in between at most. I say they were easy to make for the studio. I'm sure it was rough on the actors. They had stunt doubles for a lot of stuff as the years went on, but there were earlier ones where the Stooges were doing their own stunts. There's one short, pardon my scotch, it's an early one, came out in 1935, and Moe is up on a table, they're carpenters, and Larry ends up sawing through the table and Moe falls down, lands on his ribs on the broken table. You have to imagine that didn't feel good. I can say in all honesty that during my youth, I never mimicked the Three Stooges in school or with siblings. I never tried to poke eyes or slap or hit someone on the head with something. But I could see where that could be an easy sort of game to play for impressionable kids. But I was exposed to the Three Stooges from an early age, and there was no fear from people that I might imitate it. The Three Stooges actually had one of their short films nominated for an Academy Award. So they're an Oscar nominated comedy trio. Men in Black from 1934, which is one of their very first short films. Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard working in the hospital. There are so many classic Stooges films, Stooges moments, that there'd be no way I could even get most of them into a segment for the podcast. Every time I start to think of a classic moment, like the Pop Goes the Weasel, where Curly's a boxer, but when he hears that music, he gets superhuman strength and beats everyone up, then I think of more stuff. Like when they're trying to find the lost mine, Curly's got a gold finder. It's basically an arrow that will seek out gold. And they find the lost mine and they're down in there digging and just beating each other up with shovels and picks. I can only speak for myself, but I think a lot of people would find the Three Stooges to be... Not just nostalgia, but the warm, fuzzy feeling, easy to sit back and watch and just enjoy, and they're still, they hold up so well, even up to 90 years later. Just think about where the world was when the Three Stooges first released Woman Haters 90 years ago this week. In the midst of the Great Depression, television wasn't a thing yet, talking motion pictures had only been out for, what, five years? And yet, all these decades later, the comedy holds up. I think everyone associates the Three Stooges as molary and curly. Sadly, that workload, their popularity, kind of became their undoing. Because Columbia Pictures, they wanted this quick output of short after short. And Curly started suffering from health issues in the mid-1940s, 1945. And they wouldn't give him the time to go home and recover anymore. Finally, after a really serious stroke while filming the Halfwits Holiday short film, Curly had to retire. They thought he'd come back, but they brought Shemp back in, who had been off in Hollywood doing his own solo career. And so Shemp returned to the group in 1947. They thought it was temporary, but Curly never got better, and he ended up dying in 1952. It was around this same time, 1952, 1953, that the Columbia Pictures shorts department slashed their budget a ton. And if you watch the Three Stooges, the Shemp ones that are from 1952 and before are of the same quality as the Curly ones were, meaning that it was basically all newly shot footage. There was actually scenes where they would be out besides being in just one room. But then after they slashed the budget, there was a lot of rehashed footage. They'd be in the same scenery all the time. And that made the quality of the shorts really suffer. And then Shemp died of a massive heart attack in 1955. And they thought that was it for the Stooges. They used old Shemp footage and they used a fake Shemp to kind of complete more and more shorts. Then they brought in Joe Besser. The less said about him, the better. And finally, they brought in Curly Joe, and they started doing movies, full-length feature films in color. With the advent of television and the Three Stooges getting put into syndication on television, it renewed their popularity, which made those full-length feature films possible. And that popularity, it really hasn't waned. Like I said, I can remember in the 1980s watching the Three Stooges, typically Sundays at my Nana's, watching them. They'd be on TV 38 WSPK here. They're easy to find on YouTube. There's a Three Stooges channel. It's the Three Stooges Plus. I think that's the official Three Stooges YouTube channel. And they're going through right now, adding in short after short. I think they're up to 1948 with Shemp. So they're still good. I know everyone associates Curly with the best ones, and it's true, they are. But the early Shemp ones, I have gotten to appreciate more. I can't deny that once they slash the budget for shorts, they really aren't as good. But the Shemp ones from 1947 through, like, 1952, they're still good. All of this started 90 years ago this week with Woman Haters, the very first Three Stooges short with singing songs and no sound effects for the beating each other up. And this segment was kind of a breeze through. Like, I really gave you quick CliffsNotes of the Stooges. So if you want a more in-depth look at maybe the Stooges with Curly or specific eras of the Stooges... I can always do that. I'd have no trouble talking about the Three Stooges more on this podcast because they were a big part of my childhood in the 80s and 90s. And like I said, if you're not familiar with the Three Stooges, I would say pick any Curly at random and just watch and you'll get an appreciation for their talent. Because all you have to do is look at the ones that try to imitate the Stooges and see how they're nowhere near as good and it'll make you appreciate the originals. This Week in History, we are going back 70 years ago to April 29th, 1954, and the birth of comedy icon and legend Jerry Seinfeld. Whenever I research This Week in History segments, I try to find something relevant, something fun to talk about. When I saw it was Jerry Seinfeld's birthday this week, it gave me an excuse to talk about the TV show Seinfeld. Seinfeld was born in Brooklyn, New York, so naturally the Seinfeld TV show takes place in New York. He had toiled away in the stand-up circuit for years before getting this TV show. When the show came out, I honestly had no idea who Jerry Seinfeld was. I didn't see him on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I didn't start watching The Tonight Show until the second-to-last year that Carson was on it, in 91'. The Seinfeld show, when it debuted, was called the Seinfeld Chronicles. It premiered on NBC on July 5th, 1989. So 35 years ago, coming up in July. That first season, it was a mid-season replacement, so it only had five episodes. And even the second season was shorter, with only 12 episodes. But it was off to the races. Once the word got out about this show, which They call it a show about nothing, because so many of the episodes have these mundane, random topics, but they're made so funny. One of the main examples people give about the iconic humor of the show coming from mundane events is the Chinese restaurant, where the whole episode they're waiting for a table in a Chinese restaurant, and all kinds of humorous shenanigans happen. It's such a great episode. And much like the Three Stooges that I just talked about, it would be impossible to cram Seinfeld into a segment on the podcast. Although I might end up doing a deeper dive in a couple of months when it hits 35 years since the debut, so put a pin in that. But the show defined must-see TV. Once the show settled into its Thursday night at 9 slot... For its fifth season, the show was no lower than number three in the ratings ever again, routinely averaging 30, 35, 40 million viewers a week. It made icons out of all the main characters, Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer. It put all kinds of catchphrases into the cultural zeitgeist. Honestly, there's dozens of famous lines from Seinfeld episodes that are used everywhere. In its nine seasons, there were 180 episodes of Seinfeld. So popular was this show that when it ended after nine seasons, the cast was offered millions to do a 10th season, like millions per episode. People were clamoring for new Seinfeld content so much that that in season seven of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which co-creator Larry David, that was his next show, when it came out that they were going to do a Seinfeld reunion and scripted show there, I mean, that was huge. That was in 2009. You can find on YouTube an edited version where they basically make the Curb Your Enthusiasm show into a new Seinfeld episode, if you're interested. All of that incredible work content from the Seinfeld show, a lot of it from his own life, wouldn't have been possible without Jerry Seinfeld, who celebrates his 70th birthday this week. Now it's time for a brand new time capsule. We're going back 26 years ago this week to April 30th, 1998. Seinfeld was getting ready to wrap up. The newest episode that aired was the Made episode. which was the 175th out of 180 episodes. So let's see what was going on in pop culture back then. The number one song was Too Close by Next. Boy, this song always makes me laugh. It makes me think of Maui, who basically was my second father I worked with forever in restaurants. Such a hugely important influence on my life and just who I was as a man. But this song always made him laugh. Because it's basically a song about a guy dancing with a girl and he gets a little too excited. Wink. I'll let you go and listen to it and find out what I'm talking about if you don't know. The song was off of their album Rated Next. and it spent five non-consecutive weeks at number one, and obviously was their only really major hit song ever. The number one movie was He Got Game, and you could get into the theater with a ticket costing $4.69. This is a sports drama movie starring Denzel Washington and Ray Allen, NBA player. Ray Allen was Jesus Shuttleworth. with Denzel Washington as his father, getting out of prison for a week to try to convince his son to come to the governor's college. And if he does, to play college basketball there, the warden of prison says that he'll give Denzel a shortened sentence. Interestingly, even though it was critically acclaimed, the movie was a box office failure, losing money. But the movie's really good, the soundtrack is really good, with loads of songs from Public Enemy on there. So I'd say check it out. The number one TV show was Merlin Part 2. I couldn't believe it wasn't Seinfeld. This was part two of a TV movie, so there was Merlin Part 1 the week before. It starred Sam Neill, and it's about Merlin the magician in the Dark Ages. I was so disappointed it wasn't Seinfeld, because it just tied in so well, but I couldn't pretend. And if you were around back then... 26 years ago, you wanted to be cool, hanging out on the street, waiting for a phone call. You need to get yourself a pager, and you could look in the Radio Shack catalog, get yourself a real neat pager. You've got high-tech pagers, state-of-the-art, that could save up to 20 numbers. Those are $69.99. You got cheaper ones that could store up to 16 numbers. Those are $49.99 on sale all through Motorola and all totally irrelevant today. Does anybody out there have a pager? Did you have one? Did you save it and keep it like it was going to come back in style? Well, we're going to wrap up this week in history and time capsule. And speaking of going out of style, we're going to look now at the top five discontinued sodas and see if any of you drank any of these. I used to drink soda all the time growing up. 80s, 90s, most of the 2000s. What the hell with water for being hydrated? I needed cola, caffeine, carbonation, sugar. I tried pretty much every soda that would come out while I was growing up just to see if it was any better than ones that I already liked. But when it all came down to it, I stuck to a few that I enjoyed. My favorite was Mountain Dew. People that know me, family, friends when I was growing up, that was my main thing. And then I thought I was getting smarter and healthier by drinking diet Mountain Dew. No sugar, but all kinds of ingredients you couldn't pronounce on the back. But for all of those big successful soda brands that came out, I mean Coke, Pepsi, there were some that tried and failed and went away pretty quick. And that's what we're going to talk about here. The top five discontinued sodas. I did a lot of research to find not just random offshoots of known sodas like Sprite Remix that were more recent. I wanted stuff all throughout the annals of soda history. I can tell you honestly, the top five and the honorable mentions, I think three of these I'd actually heard of. All the rest were totally new to me. So I'll be interested to hear if any of you drank any of these. This top five, like most of them, it's in no particular order. And there's several honorable mentions. So let's start off with those. Honorable mentions for discontinued sodas include Slice, the original, not the one that came back a couple years ago, the original Slice. Hubba Bubba Soda, which was based around the Bubblegum Company. Patio Cola, which basically became Diet Pepsi within a couple of years. Lifesavers Soda, which was based, again, around candy. And finally, Like Cola, which was a low-caffeine soda created by the same people that made 7-Up in the early 1980s. So there are the honorable mentions. Did you drink any of those? I mean, I did with Slice, but we'll see with the top five. I can guarantee that probably none of you drank one of these, and I'll let you know when we get to it. But let's start off the top five with number one, Rondo. Rondo was a lightly carbonated, citrus-flavored soft drink introduced in 1978 by the Schweppes Company of ginger ale fame. It was known for its marketing slogan, Rondo the Thirst Crusher, with a hand crushing a can. Like it was supposed to appeal to tough guy men that they're going to drink lightly carbonated citrus soda. This did not last long. It probably was around for about five years before being discontinued. I guess there weren't enough tough guys to drink Rondo soda. Number two is Coca-Nola. This one none of you drank because Coca-Nola came out in 1904 as a direct competitor to Coca-Cola. That's why it sounds so similar. It was kind of genius marketing because it sounds like Coca-Cola and they put it in glass bottles that looked and could be mistaken for Coke pretty easily. The people that made Coca-Nola tried to market it towards the lower class people with less money like anyone could afford it, where Coca-Cola was for the upper class people. It was said that during that first decade of the 1900s, there was up to 150 imitators of Coca-Cola. And so there were lawsuits to shut these down, and that's what ended up happening to Coca-Nola. Within a couple of years, it was shut down. But could you imagine someone today creating a product that rhymed with another famous product? If people thought lawsuits were bad 100 years ago, they'd be shut down before they even opened the first bottle today. Number three is Aspen Soda. Aspen Soda was created by the Pepsi Company. It was an apple flavored soda that first came out in 1978. This was supposed to be a soda marketed towards sophisticated people. And it was out essentially the same timeline as Rondo. So you've got Rondo for tough guys and you've got Aspen soda for sophisticated people. It's said to have failed because despite it being marketed towards sophisticated people, that people just preferred citrus sodas to apple. Interestingly though, Pepsi, when they discontinued Aspen in 1982, they didn't stop with fruit-flavored sodas. They created the Slice line of sodas in 1984 as another way to kind of capture on that flavoring that Aspen didn't do. They obviously should have marketed Aspen soda towards skiers. That's the first thing I thought of. They could have literally stolen the Juicy Fruit commercial. Get your skis shined up and then they're drinking soda. Come on. Number four is OK Soda. This is from the 90s and directly marketed towards Generation X. I vaguely remember this. as it was created by the Coca-Cola Company, and it debuted in 1993. So I was 16, right in the middle of that anti-establishment teenage angst. So having a product marketed towards me, with the neo-noir cans, with this abstract art, just people's faces on it, and the word OK. On one hand, I can kind of understand wanting to market towards this younger generation, but it's also kind of heavy-handed as to what they thought Generation X wanted. One of the taglines for OK Soda was, what's the point of OK? What's the point of anything? Which I guess kind of does sum up the Gen X mindset, but I guess we weren't all looking for soda because that failed within two years. Before I was out of high school, OK Soda was done. Interestingly, I never had this soda, but people compared it to the Graveyard Soda Fountain Cocktail, which basically is a bit of everything that's there at the soda fountain. I remember calling it Swamp Water up here, but I guess Graveyard. Either way, that's what OK Soda was supposed to taste like. And finally, number five on the top five discontinued sodas is Worms. This was created by the Ladco Company in 1974. The people that created Ladco, they had worked for Pepsi. The cans had a cartoon boy on it with a sign that said worms. One of the soda cans said, I like worms. Another one said, best worms you ever tasted. This soda did not last long. There's conflicting reports as to whether Pepsi had a hand in this. And there's purported to be commercials for this soda, but I haven't found any. I haven't found any descriptions of what it tasted like. I would hope it's not Worms. But it's supposed to be an idea from the How to Eat Fried Worms books. I did find Cherry Cola as one of the flavors, but I don't know if there were more. I guess they figured kids of the 70s would find it fun to drink a soda that was called Worms. Maybe they should try it again in the 2020s and make one like silverfish soda or earwig soda. See if people want to drink those. But that wraps up the top five. Did you drink any of these? There's a good chance you at least heard of a few of these. I mean, OK Soda was out until the mid-1990s, so that's not that long ago. But a lot of these are 80s sodas that failed. But we're going to go from... discontinued sodas of the 20th century to what it was like to live at the turn of the 19th century. So let's look at this classic educational film from Periscope Film called Had You Lived Then? America Around 1800. This one will be for history lovers and nostalgia lovers combined. You've noticed over the last few months of the podcast as I've gotten more deeper into the nostalgia aspect that I've been adding in educational film reviews, training video reviews, even a full-length documentary review. I do my best to research ones that I remember as a kid, but also ones that I don't remember from before I was born that seem like they'd be interesting to watch and review and share. This one is one that I was interested in as we look at the educational film called Had You Lived Then? America Around 1800 by Periscope Film. And this is from 1969. Periscope Film is a goldmine as far as educational films go. They've got dozens that are from the 40s, 50s, 60s. So if you're older than me, you know, if you're in your 50s and 60s, you'll probably remember a lot of them if you go to their website or their YouTube channel. This film is just over 15 minutes in length, so perfect for showing school-aged children with short attention spans. And it's going to be a look back more than 160 years from when it was filmed to what a typical day in the life of an American was around the year 1800. So I'm going to dive into that in a minute here. But one thing as an aside, for those of you that love these educational films, the old ones from the mid-20th century... You can download high quality copies of all of these different movies just by registering at their page and it's free. You just put in your email and a password. It'll definitely come in handy for me as I do more of these educational film reviews as the podcast goes forward. This film definitely looks like it's from almost 60 years ago. It's got that classic grainy type footage. And it starts with a horse and buggy going down a dirt road. The narrator gives you a brief overview of what it would have been like to live back then, more where you would live, where he says 90% of people that lived around 1800 lived either on or right near a farm, with only 10% living in an actual city like New York, Boston, or Philadelphia. And a couple of minutes are spent showing various... Homes from that time period. Since there's so many that still exist, if you go around New England, there's dozens and dozens of homes from the 1700s that are still standing. It's after a couple minutes that we learn that the main characters of this educational film are going to be the Wilson family. They live in this muted, pinkish house that looks like it would be from that era. A six-room home.

Speaker 00:

The Wilson family lived in this six-room home adjoining a farm. Upstairs were three bedrooms. In each, besides the bed, there were also a few chairs, a dresser, and a washstand. Tucked snugly into the base of the parents' bed was a trundle in which a small child could sleep.

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Now there's a female narrator giving you the list of what's in everyone's bedrooms. Besides the bed and a few chairs, a washstand, which I'm assuming would be a basin filled with a little bit of water to clean yourself with, since they didn't have running water or indoor plumbing back then. It's amazing. The female narrator, she's got a very soothing, pseudo-British voice. She doesn't have the accent, but it's one of those where you can hear she could easily lapse into a British accent. But she describes the parents and how they would have to sleep in the wintertime, not only under a couple of heavy blankets, but wearing nightcaps and full woolen underwear like you were sleeping in clothes you would go out sledding in today. Watching this, especially at the beginning when they're talking about what it was like living through the winter in 1800, really makes me appreciate living when I do now. They talk about the wash stand and there's a picture that in summer you'd have water that was fine, but in the winter overnight it would freeze. So the two suns have to bring up fresh water that's been melted at the fireplace. Even if you're not interested in history, watching this video will at least make you appreciate the comforts of home that we have in the 21st century. They explain how to make your own soap because that's what you had to do back then. And it's a mix of ash and rainwater and cooking grease. I don't know about you. I don't know how any of that stuff combined cleans you off. And they show in this the soap, the bar of soap they're using is brown. So is that what they do? They wash with ash and cooking grease? I mean, God, how would that smell? Smell like bacon? I guess that would be alright. And then of course it gets worse if you don't like being around your family back then. You've got to all take baths in the center of the living room next to the fire. You imagine being a teenager. I guess it would be normal back then. But having to get scrubbed in front of everyone in the living room. They go into detail about how important the fire was in the fireplace and how basically this Wilson family, and I'm assuming everyone that lived back then, kept the fire going 24-7. Even at night, they wouldn't put it out. They would just cover it with ashes so it wouldn't burn the house down. You imagine that being a full-time job, basically just keeping a fire going for years on end? For those of you that grew up in New England or Massachusetts, this area, this film will give you a lot of Plymouth Plantation vibes, which I mean in a good way if you enjoy that type of stuff. I find it neat to see them using a toaster that's basically a metal rack that they shove next to the fire and turn it. They show Mrs. Wilson having to move all kinds of heavy stuff in the kitchen because everything weighed a ton back then, firewood and pots and such. But then they show her making her own butter, making her own bread.

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Mrs. Wilson had to make her own butter. First she'd put fresh cream into a wooden container and then churn and churn and churn.

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But then Mr. Wilson bought a new kind of churner which hung from a rocker. Whoever walked by gave it a sharp kick. That kept the rocker going and the cream churning.

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The stereotypical sitting and churning the butter, the stick in that kind of wooden container. But then they get this newfangled invention that's an automatic butter churner. where it looks like a triangular container hung on a stand, and it rocks back and forth, and they show the kids going by. They say every time you go by, you have to kick it to keep it moving, so they're just walking by kicking this butter stand. The video then leaves the inside of the house as Mr. Wilson starts his day, and they say that basically everybody back then, unless you lived in a major city, had a farm and then also had a side job. either lawyer or owning a general store, but you were a farmer as well. When they show him riding into town with his horse and buggy, they talk about how they're going a lazy four miles an hour. That's essentially a fast walk. And that's the top speed back then. I guess you didn't know any better about speed. It's like on one hand, things were simpler and lazier. kind of slow going back then. But on the other hand, everybody had a million jobs to do all the time. And because having actual cash on hand for people buying at the general store was rare, they did bartering, which is basically bringing in something else to trade for whatever you wanted. That's something I wish they had still today. Go into a store. I need this six pack of socks. That'll be $8.99. Well, I don't have that, but here's a bag full of tennis balls. Can I trade these for them? They show some of the common things that you would get at this general store. There was a flat iron that had a compartment that you could shove a hot piece of iron in so that you could iron clothes easier. I laughed at the hitching weight.

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Hitching weights like this one permitted drivers to secure their horses where there were no hitching rails or posts. The driver would carry the weight with him, put it on the ground at his destination and attach it with a strap to the bit in the horse's mouth.

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So it's a stone with a hook on the top that you would drop on the ground and then tie to your horse. So it's like an anchor. And I look at the weight. I don't know how much it weighed. 10 pounds? 20 pounds at most? How much does a horse weigh? You think a 10-pound weight's gonna stop it if it wants to leave? Next, they bring you into the one-room schoolhouse, which was a new thing at the time that all kids were taught. Because as they say, the blacksmith, which all the boys seem to want to become a blacksmith, he warns them, go to school and learn to read and write. I wish I had. Like, he's all sad. It's neat. They show the little boy writing on a slate. So it's a mini chalkboard basically in front of him. And then they talk about the books that they would read about the alphabet and morals and history. And because this is the 1960s, the little boy liked the story of Sir Walter Raleigh. And they explained that he was the first European to try smoking. That's what he liked about him. They say that the sister went away to a boarding school in Boston. They talk about how you get around going to the cities in such long distances because there were no trains. It was a stagecoach. You fit nine people in a stagecoach that looks not too much bigger than a van. And they say you couldn't be late for these because they started early, 5 a.m. or sometimes even earlier, 3 a.m., I'm assuming buses today run 2, 3 a.m., but it's weird to hear that at 1800. Because the roads back then were dirt and filled with holes, the stagecoach driver would have to yell at people to lean to one side or the other to help avoid tipping over. In

Speaker 01:

those days, roads were muddy and full of ruts and holes. The coach often came dangerously close to tumbling over. The driver would call out, ladies and gentlemen to the left, please. And then, now to the right. You can be sure that everyone quickly followed orders.

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It's said that the daughter's trip from her home in New York to Boston took 46 hours. How long does it take by car to get from New York to Boston? Four hours, maybe? Again, I know they didn't know any better about time and distance, but boy, that would be a long time to do anything. The video then explains about stopping at inns and boarding houses, where the fire was going all the time again, and it's always about men and their pipes. They make sure to say that women couldn't be where the men drank, they had to go to somewhere else. When it comes to excitement back then, they said there were barn dances, there'd be corn husking, but then the female narrator says most of the time they passed away the nights quietly. So just sitting, looking out the window, or talking to each other. Or if you were really privileged, you could play checkers with slices of corn cob instead of the chips. And as it gets near the end, they talk about having a couple of times a year, they would have parties at their house, at the Wilson's house. Then they would open up the parlor, which this room is brightly lit with candles. It looks like it's even got carpeting, a couch, a piano, which compared to the rest of the house, it looks like it doesn't belong. But yet they'd only go in there a couple times a year. That doesn't make sense. I'd only be in that room. It wraps up by saying that Around 1800, nothing was perfect, the country was new and starting to grow. They tied that in by saying the youngest daughter that would play the piano, her playing was like the country, not perfect, so they make fun of her. That's how it wraps up, Had You Lived Then, America around 1800. Again, they don't tell you who's in the film, so I couldn't tell you who Mr. and Mrs. Wilson were, or the two kids... I don't remember seeing this as a kid in elementary school. It wouldn't have been that old. I started school in 1983, so this was 14 years before that. I could see it being shown still. But for those that like history, it teaches you about 1800. And for those that like nostalgia, it's 1969 teaching you about 1800. And I'll link to the video itself in the description of the podcast if you want to check it out on YouTube. But that wraps up another educational film review. I've got tons more, and I'll be sprinkling them in as we go along with more old training videos, which are a lot of fun too. And that'll wrap up episode 142 of the In My Footsteps podcast. Like I said, thank you so much to everyone who tunes in. I've been doing this show now three and a half years. Like I said, over 140 episodes. And it's a lot of work. It can be a lot of work to come up with compelling topics to talk about and research and record, edit, then posting it, marketing it. And I know there's thousands and thousands of podcasts out there. And there's a lot of podcasts that cover the same ground as me. Nostalgia, Generation X type nostalgia. So I do my best to make myself stand out. Find me all over social media. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel. I might not be posting as many podcast segment videos, thorough ones with a lot of animations, because like I said at the top of the show, they take a lot of time and effort and the return on investment just isn't there. So I can use that time better. more stuff with this podcast, more stuff with the Patreon and Patreon subscribers. $5 a month. It gets you the access to the monthly bonus episode, which went up today. If you're going to be on Cape Cod, May the 24th is my next book event for Searching for the Lady of the Dunes at the West Dennis Library. 1 p.m. It's a Friday. The time isn't ideal, but when it comes to doing events for my books, I'm always very appreciative of locations that want me to come and speak there, so I do my best to be accommodating for them. If you're interested in any of my nine books, visit my website, ChristopherSetterlin.com. If you want to learn more about the Lady of the Dunes murder case that is 50 years old, go to theladyofthedoons.com. I built that website so you can see the difference between the skills of an actual talented graphic designer like my friend Barry that created the Christopher Sederlin site and then my hack skills putting together something. I will say as far as books go, I had said I wanted to take 2024 off from any sort of writing because I had three books come out last year. But I am starting to get a little bit of an itch. And I have an idea for a potential 10th book. And I like that nice round number. So I may have news about that coming up in the months ahead. Next week is going to be episode 143 of the podcast. And I've got a good one lined up, at least in my opinion. Restaurant Storytime 8, Get Out Before It's Too Late. That's next week. I'm going to talk about the most toxic work environment I've ever been a part of. There may be a little bit of ranting going on with that, but it's going to be a lot of fun. I've waited to share this for a while. We'll go way, way back in the day and look at the sweet pickles books that Gen X kids will definitely remember. And there'll be a brand new top five that are forgotten musical artists of the 1990s that were actually great. So I'm going to have to do a lot of research, listen to a lot of music. Boy, it's tough. All that and more is coming up next week on episode 143. In just a few days from when this podcast goes live, May the 4th, I'll be running my first race in almost seven years. Running is going to be kind of a relative term, but this was one of the goals that I had set for myself for 2024, was to get back into running and running races. For those that don't know, I used to be a serious runner. Borderline elite. I don't want to pat myself on the back, but I was good. And this is going back seven years, eight, nine years. But I got injured and I didn't realize how bad the injury was to my right hip. And it caused a lot of trouble with my left leg. And eventually over time, it got to a point where I could not run like I used to. And it was very discouraging. Because I was the best version of myself physically then. And it's gone downhill and I'm older. So it's harder to get back there. And I'm not back there. But I'm at least going through that process. And even though this first race that I'm back running, it's only a 5K, which is 3.1 miles. It's not a super long distance. It's meaningful and symbolic. At least I hope it's going to be. As kind of opening a door and starting a new chapter. Because I might not ever be what I was as a runner. And I have no delusions that I'm going to get back there years older and with pre-existing injuries now. But as a trainer, I tell my clients that I want to get them to the best they can be with what their body gives them now. And I'm going to actually put that advice and use it on myself. And it all starts in a few days. I haven't been training super heavy. I kind of want to do the race and get that vibe and be there and feel it and see where my head is at coming out of it. Maybe it starts a whole new chapter of running. Maybe it's a one and done. But either way, I'm doing it. And I'm sure in a future podcast, I will share how the race went and how things are going. But at least I'm doing it. I'd rather try and fail and suck. then not do it and wonder for years what could have been. So just remember, in this life, don't walk in anyone else's footsteps. Create your own path and enjoy every moment you can because you never know what tomorrow brings. This has been the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund, but you already knew that. And I'll talk to you all again soon.

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