827: All the King's Horses
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeaped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. My grandfather, Melvin, ran a hardware store in Baltimore that also sold model trains. And he had a huge, and I mean huge, train set in the basement of his house on Pimlico Road that I loved. This thing was vast, with tunnels and bridges and towns and streetlights that lit.

and the train engines puffed smoke as they scooted around the track. On this big wooden platform in the basement, in the middle of all this epic amount of clutter and junk and its tools and for some reason a mimeograph machine. And in the corner of the basement was the filthiest toilet I had ever seen, like frighteningly dirty to me as a little suburban kid. The whole basement was a chamber of chaos, and it was the most unsettlingly chaotic thing in it. But that is not the story I'm here to tell. The story I'm here to tell

is about Melvin and one of his sisters. Hello? Uncle Bennett? Yes, you got it. To be sure I was getting the facts absolutely right on this thing, I called the last person in the family who might remember it, my Uncle Bennett. He was at home. Wait, hold on for one second. Yeah, will do. Yeah, yeah. Hello? Hello?

Hello? Yeah, Rene? Rene has been his girlfriend. They live together. Her name is Rene. She doesn't... She wasn't sure if I was home. All right, anyway. Wait, wait. Is she in the house when she called you? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess you're getting this. These are older people who do not want to be bothered to cross the house or yell from room to room. Anyway, the story. The story that I'm here to tell about my grandfather, Melvin, and his brothers and sisters.

Let me just give you the family geography here. He's one of four kids. And for the purposes of this particular story, you should imagine them in two competing teams. There are the two older kids, Melvin and Dorothy, and the two younger kids, Ray and Calvin. Okay. Melvin and Dorothy, Ray and Calvin. It's 1964, and their mom dies. The four kids are all in their 40s and 50s at this point.

And then, just after she died...

And there was China, right? Like, the thing that I always heard is that there was China and silverware. Again, the two older kids, Melvin and Dorothy. The two younger kids, Calvin and Ray...

Took all the good stuff. Yeah, and then my father was really upset about it. Yeah, and Dorothy too, right? Yeah. This, Bennett explained to me, was apparently typical behavior for Ray. Ray was always, like when she was growing up, they used to say that at dinner, she would take the biggest piece of meat. Yeah, yeah. And then the way I remember it is that, like, she takes the stuff, they fight about it, and they never spoke to Ray again. No. No.

Didn't talk to her. Didn't talk about her. No, it was just too aggravating, you know? Calvin, meanwhile, Ray's partner in this family heist, Calvin was a baby in the family, 13 years younger than the next oldest kid. And the way that I always heard it, nobody held this against Calvin because everybody knew that Ray could just push him around and get him to do whatever she wanted. So Calvin was around. I remember Calvin conning around doing little magic tricks for me, a charity crab feast that Dorothy used to organize all through my childhood. But not Ray.

It really was like Ray never existed, was never spoken about. Off in Florida, I and my sisters met her only one time. Bennett, her own nephew. Bennett only met her once, on a trip to Miami, after he was married. And I called Ray, and she and Uncle Irvin came up, picked us up, and took us to Wolfie's. I mean, which is a deli restaurant. Yeah. That was the only contact I ever had with her my whole life. And then I remember when Melvin died...

Ray not coming to his funeral. No, of course not. And I remember being so stunned by that, that a person could be in such a fight with their own sibling that they wouldn't show up at their funeral. Oh, it happens all the time, Ira. And it's usually over money. ♪♪

I think this story really got to me when I was a kid and I first heard it because it was the very first glimpse I had at the idea that you can destroy things completely, like totally wreck them beyond repair with somebody you know so well. I mean, I guess I'm lucky, you know, that I lived in a family where something like this would be so rare. But still, for me personally, that has been a hard lesson to hold on to. When I was married and things were going badly and we were in counseling and trying to patch it together for so many years, like more years than I want to admit here on the radio,

And I think part of it was because I just had this feeling like we are not people who get divorced. Like we are bigger than that somehow. My mom was a marriage therapist. Like I just couldn't accept. I think we both couldn't accept that we had just broken things between us so badly that there was no coming back from it. I just didn't want to admit that. Which brings me to Humpty Dumpty. I didn't know this, but some of my coworkers with little kids at home were talking about how unsettling Humpty Dumpty is to some of those kids.

Laura said that at the doctor's office there's a poster, and their two-year-old saw it, and after that was like, someone can break and not go back together? And then remembered it when they went back to that office a year later. Zoe's son, Max, is two and a half. I want to go back together. You want it to go back together? Yeah, to fix it. You want to fix Humpty Dumpty? Yeah. You cannot do it.

We posted a thing on social media about this and got a ton of responses from parents whose kids were terrified of Humpty Dumpty. One said her preschooler couldn't stand to see her crack eggs in the kitchen because it reminded her of the nursery rhyme. Another said her two-year-old spent weeks asking if he could recreate the story with an egg from the fridge, which they did, like a few times, puzzling over the impossibility of putting an egg back together once it's cracked.

A few people wrote to talk about how it messed them up as kids. To picture Humpty Dumpty, left there in pieces on the side of the road, sad look on his face. A woman named Isabella wrote, I wondered if he had to exist conscious in his cracked state forever, or if he would slowly die, because he seemed to be still alive after he had cracked. There's something about that image of someone broken so badly that nothing can fix it, that things can go so wrong, the finality of that, before you understand all the bad things that can happen in the world, how things come apart,

and people you love can die, and you will die, before you get to any of the entropic, messy chaos of our world. With its blackened toilets and its long-ago trashed model trains, you get this glimpse, this fat, cartoon, overdressed egg man smashed to tiny bits of shell and goo. Today on our program, people who hit a moment when things shatter apart, now they make sense of it and not go to pieces themselves.

From WBEZ Chicago, this is American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. Sometimes there's a really specific moment when things fall apart. And you know exactly what the moment was, but you're left with no idea how or why it happened, or more important, how to put the thing back together.

David Kestenbaum found a family that happened to. A father and son, years ago. And the son has thought about it ever since. The son in this story, his name is Peter Akko. And I don't usually love hearing people's dreams, but this is how our interview started. Can I tell you my dream last night? Yeah. Oh, yeah. You know I've been sort of worrying about this. I dreamt that I pulled into a store, ran inside to pick something up, and when I came outside...

There was a guy standing there and he had disassembled my entire car and the pieces were just all over the parking lot. And I was like, what did you do to my car? Why did you take it apart? And he goes, it was broken. We needed to fix it. And then I woke up and I was like, OK, I'm the car and you're the guy. I'm happy to be the guy. Let's take the car apart. The whole story starts here. When Peter was a kid, his dad got a kind of dream job.

This was in the late 70s. When I was 11, he got a job at the Milton Bradley Company. Like the toy company. Yeah, the toy company as a toy inventor. Oh, my God. Yeah. Well, that's what I thought, too. I was in sixth grade and this was like, you know, super street cred.

to go in and say, you know, my dad works at Milton Bradley because they were a big deal back then. But they were a big deal, you know, for 100 years. In fact, my dad, you know, moved into his cubicle and he was next to the guy who claimed to have invented chutes and ladders. So I don't think that's true, but the guy was old enough that it's possible. The job was exciting for Peter's dad, too. His dad had always been searching for a way to be successful.

And success was the thing he imagined happening all at once. He saw himself as an inventor. And if he just had the right idea, the world would notice. His ship would come in. He actually read a lot of books about ships and captains. Anyway, his previous attempt at conquering the world had not gone so well.

He'd created these kind of cardboard models of famous landmarks that he tried to sell as kits. You know, my mom and I and him, I was an only child, and the three of us would go out to the garage with hair dryers and kind of shrink wrap these cardboard model kits and put them in UPS boxes. And, you know, that was our life for a few years. And then it just died. You know, it just died. And so he was struggling because he saw himself as an idea guy. Right.

And so when he got the chance to, you know, go to Milton Bradley and be a game designer or a toy designer, I think he was super excited. The one bad thing about the job was that Milton Bradley was 90 miles from where they lived in Massachusetts.

So his dad would just work there the whole week, only come home on the weekends. You know, I was in sixth grade. I hated it. I hated seeing him leave on a Sunday and then, you know, return the following week. And it was a long week and I really missed him. So Fridays when he pulled into the driveway, like I was ecstatic. I just was so happy to see him. And he'd always come home with a box of stuff. And the stuff in that box, it was kind of magical.

This was 1977, and in that box were circuit boards and wires. Milton Bradley was making some of the first electronic games. Their big hit was Simon. Basically, an electronic version of Simon Says, a kind of chunky frisbee-shaped thing with four big buttons, red, blue, green, yellow, that would light up. And it made these kind of square wave tones that were really distinctive. It would play a sequence, you'd have to remember it and play it back.

Okay, even back then it was a little boring. I'll be honest. I don't think there were any parents saying like, I can't get my kid off the Simon. But it did feel like you were holding some object from the future. Just to press the buttons and hear these kinds of sounds for the first time, Peter and his dad would sit around in this sort of attic room at this big table and just mess around with this stuff.

Opening the toys up for me and seeing the circuit board and understanding that like, you know, this little circuit board was playing the game of Simon. I would get in there with a screwdriver, pull it out and then start, you know, playing around with it and like changing the resistor here or there. You could make it speed up and suddenly it was like generating electronic music at high speed and flashing lights. It just felt halfway between technology and magic, you know, and I think for both of us, that was super exciting, you know.

They'd build little electronic kits together, which could get kind of tense. His dad liked to follow instructions. Peter, not so much. They'd share little discoveries with each other. Like when Peter realized you could take the spring from a ballpoint pen, put it across the terminals of a nine-volt battery, and the electricity flowing through it would make it glow like the filament in a light bulb. But more than anything, it was a way to spend time together. Week after week, when his dad would come home, this was their routine. They'd go up to the third floor and just be together.

sitting side by side at this big drafting table. And then one day, as Peter thinks he remembers it, a kind of remarkable thing happened in that room, something that changed their lives. It was just Peter there that day in the workshop. What I remember is he had gone back to work on a Monday morning and left behind a box of stuff. And in that box was a bunch of circuit boards for different things, including a Simon circuit board.

And I remember pulling it out and connecting it up to some batteries and, you know, just tinkering around with it, playing around with it. And then I remember just looking at the lights and thinking like, well, let me unsolder the lights and see if a motor will work there. Because we had these little hobby motors laying around. So I took off the, you know, the four lights and then I connected two motors to where two of the lights had been.

and tried it again, and the motor spun. When the lights would have lit up, the motor spun, and I was like, that's cool. In his memory, he then had another idea. I wonder if you could use those motors to make the wheels turn on a little car. Then the Simon board would be controlling a car.

That would be neat. You know, there was a mode in the Simon game where you could tell it which lights you wanted. You could program the pattern yourself. So I was like, well, you could program left motor, right motor. And so it's like a programmable car. A programmable car.

You could punch some buttons on it, tell it you wanted it to drive forward, turn right, drive some more, turn left, and it would go and do it. My dad came back on the following Friday, and I was excited to show him, you know, this little thing I'd built. And he took a look at it, and it wasn't like, you know, the symphony started playing. He's like, that's really cool. That's a good idea. And I was like, cool, you think I have a good idea. That's awesome. His dad brought the idea into work.

And Milton Bradley started to develop it as an actual toy, with Peter's dad leading the team. His dad would update him when he got home, like, our little thing is still moving forward. And as it got further along, he'd bring home these kind of handmade prototypes of it. The toy that was taking form was sort of a tank dump truck kind of thing. You could program it to carry something to a place and drop it off.

All on its own. I remember one problem they had was the they couldn't get the tank to go perfectly straight. I remember my dad, you know, having this eureka moment, you know, one day and being like, oh, and he put two magnets opposing each other on the end of

of the shaft that wasn't on the wheel so that the motors lined up with these magnets and the magnets grabbed each other without actually touching and kept the motors moving at exactly the same speed. It was brilliant, you know, and he had like those little victories. Imagine that over a nine month period where you just keep figuring it out and then it works and then it's successful.

Milton Bradley sold lots of them. Quite a few in Glenside, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. I remember them popping up in friends' houses after Christmas. And those ads were all over TV.

Big Track, rolling across the floor in the suburban living room and delivering an apple to dad. Big Track for your child from MV Electronics, transporter sold separately. Sales? Best estimate I was able to find? $40 million. This project, it gave Peter's dad the thing he'd been wanting. A real success. But people are complicated. He was on top of the world. And I know he felt good. He came home and felt good. But that started to sour him.

as he started to realize how much money the company was going to make from this toy. Because this was his ship that was supposed to come in. I think he saw it at first. I think he was perfectly happy to be seen as, you know, the guy in charge of a project within a corporate framework that's doing well. And as the stakes got higher and, you know, the kind of calls from his mom, every Sunday his mother would call saying,

and she was never satisfied with where he was in life. I think she would have been really happy if he had been a doctor or a lawyer. And I think for him, he started to sort of see that he could prove himself with this project. And his self-worth, I think, became really tied up with the success of this project. Peter's dad was frustrated. He had brought this toy into existence, but in the end, it would be the company's success, not his.

The toy was a big hit, but it wasn't going to make his dad rich. Peter would overhear his parents talking in the next room, his dad increasingly unhappy. And, realizing there wasn't going to be any glory for him, he quit the dream job. He thought about legal action, but of course he couldn't sue Milton Bradley for taking his idea. He was an employee, so the company owned everything he created. Which is pretty much how it works at any company. But at some point, Peter's dad talks to a lawyer.

And one of the things he says to the lawyer is, hey, you know, the whole idea for Big Track, I didn't come up with that. It actually came from my son, from Peter, who was not a Milton Bradley employee. Then the lawyer says to him, well, you know, a kid can sue a corporation. A kid can sue a corporation. A kid can sue a corporation. And I know this because my mom had kept diaries her whole life.

And I found the diary from the time this was all happening. And she had just noted in there, Steve says, lawyer said, a kid can sue a corporation. And that is how the lawsuit, Peter Ako, 13-year-old boy, versus the Milton Bradley Company, came to be. ♪

The basis for the lawsuit was that if Peter, the kid, had come up with the initial idea for this multi-million dollar toy, then he was owed royalties. It could be a lot of money. I asked Peter if the prospect of being a kid suing a giant corporation felt scary. He said, "Not really, though maybe it should have." He said it felt thrilling. Kinda awesome.

A big fancy Boston law firm took their case. And that firm decides we're going to take this case on contingency. We actually think this has a really good chance. And, you know, you guys won't have to pay anything but the court costs or the Xerox costs. So at this point, my dad is ecstatic and we're both ecstatic. Like I'm now playing a really important role in the both of us getting what's due for this idea, you know.

Peter says looking back, he was just coming into that age where you're really craving some kind of identity. Now he had one. Teenage Wizkit. I'm, you know, just about to go into high school. And suddenly, you know, I have to take time off from school to go meet with lawyers, you know, and give a deposition. And, you know, now everybody, you know, at my school knows what's going on. And it's really exciting. You know, it's like I'm at the center of it.

Two years went by of preparation, legal back and forth, and finally the court date approached. Peter and his dad would take long walks around the block with the dog, both kind of excited by it all, going over the story he would tell in court. And then there was one night, the night Peter's thought about and puzzled over for years. We had a dinner conversation that, like, changed my life. I'm not trying to be dramatic. I just, it's like...

I look back at the sort of the little pieces that had to move into place for this all to go south, and they're so small. To understand what happened, you need to know two things. First was that before bringing the lawsuit, Peter's dad had signed a document making it so that legally he no longer had financial responsibility for Peter.

This was at the recommendation of the lawyers. It made it so that, as far as the jury would be concerned, this would be about Peter, not his dad trying to get money through him, even though it kind of was. It would also help protect any money they won. That's the first thing you need to know. Here's the other thing. My mother and father didn't have a smooth marriage, and that's an understatement. They fought a lot. By the time I was born, and certainly by the time I was a teenager...

you know, they spent a lot of time and energy trying to upset each other. And if you put that into the soup, along with the fact that my mother now, you know, has taken financial control of me and I am the plaintiff in this lawsuit, you know, we all sit down to dinner soon after that agreement my mom, you know, signed. And we're sitting around the table and

you know, it's the three of us. It's a tiny family. We're all sitting there staring at each other. And my mom says something to the effect of, well, you know, if you win now, Peter, you know, this money will be yours to control. I mean, I'm just your guardian, but, you know, it's not the family's. It's really yours. And I think she knew exactly what she was saying. She was, you know, absolutely using it to get under my dad's skin. And, you know, my dad was not a drinker, but

if he had a beer or two, he would get very grumpy and he'd had a couple beers and he looks at her and then I sort of missing what's going on, pick it up. And I'm like, yeah, dad, maybe I'll share the money with you if I win. But you know, it really is. I am the plaintiff. And I don't know, I guess if you could see a fuse blow in my father's head, you would have seen it because he kind of took a breath. He said, yeah,

You know, the real truth, Peter, is that I invented big track, not you. I just told you you did it so that we could bring this lawsuit. And I just remember the bottom falling out. And, you know, I don't know. It's at that moment to be, I think I was 14 and have my dad look at me and say that it was amazing how easy it was for me to question everything.

and just feel like everything that had led up to that moment was a bunch of BS. There was something about him staring at me and saying that, that I just doubted everything. Like that moment he remembered, hooking the Simon board up to the motors. When exactly did that happen? Was it really before his dad had started on the project at work? Or was he doing it after his dad began working on Big Track?

Like maybe what he remembered was him trying to copy the thing his dad was doing. Also, at this point, this was a family story they had told many times. Maybe it had grown in the telling, and the telling had created its own version in his head. He had all these doubts. You know, I'm not a whiz kid, you know? This is... I've... I've been, you know, used. I don't know. It's really hard for me to talk about. I guess what I felt at the moment was outrage...

Because I believed that I had done it, but also at the same exact moment, tremendous doubt. I remember going later to my mom that night and being like, what's going on? What do you remember? And the thing that drove me crazy was rather than instantly say like, oh, that's a terrible thing your dad did. Like this is, this is, you know, he's just in a bad place or whatever I would have wished her to say. Instead, she got super vague and she's like, you know, I don't know what happened.

The court date got closer and closer. His dad had said this confusing and upsetting thing. Peter didn't know what to make of it. And he was all alone with that. The hardest part about it was there was no third-party grown-up to weigh in

And help me. I couldn't tell the lawyer, hey, listen, my dad said this. What do you think? Like, I had to keep that absolutely to myself and move forward. And my dad did the same thing and my mom did the same thing. And we kind of, you know, moved on from that dinner conversation as if nothing had happened.

I would be in public with my dad and we would be telling the story of the trial and talking about how excited we were. And he would be smiling with genuine pride at the fact that his kid was the reason we were, you know, he was able to sue the company and we were going to get justice. Like he was genuinely proud of me in those moments. And then, you know, we'd be alone together and I'd bring up the conversation. He just couldn't talk about it.

The trial finally happened. His dad very invested in it. Hated the opposing lawyer. Saw him as truly evil. Peter says the whole trial, he wasn't really wondering if they would win. He was looking for clues to what his dad had said, what the truth was. Eventually, Peter took the stand and swore on the Bible. He says at that moment, it was the part of him that believed it, swearing the oath. He told the story he remembered to that moment in their little workroom at home.

His lawyer had him take apart a Simon with a screwdriver on the stand, pull out the circuit board, which seemed to impress the jury. It's worth noting that the trial was around the time the movie War Games came out. That's the one where a kid saves the world from nuclear catastrophe because he understands the computers controlling the nuclear weapons better than the adults do. Not surprisingly, the press showed up to the trial. The headline writes itself.

Teenager sues Milton Bradley. Let's see. Dedham Mass, a 16-year-old high school boy from Brookline, claims that the toy maker, Milton Bradley Company, owes him royalties for a robot tank he claims he invented when he was 12. Oh, my God. That's you. That's me. Okay, now read the other headline. Royalties denied to boy who claims toy his idea.

So you guys lost. We did. What do you remember about that day? Ugh. Dark day. Literally. It was raining. It was raining.

After the verdict came down, they went out the back of the courthouse to avoid the press. The three of them, mom, dad, and him. There was a phone booth on the way out. And my dad, because he couldn't wait, stepped into one and called his mom. Wow. And then he came out, and we all just got in the car. We drove home, and we pulled into the driveway, and we got out of the car, and my dad just kind of walked to the porch, and he sat down on the steps, and he said,

And he just burst into tears. And I'd never really seen him cry before. And, you know, it was hard. But I do remember feeling a weight lifted. Not just that the trial was over and we didn't have to worry about that, but that all the stuff that had swirled around the truth and the real truth and my dad and me and that we could just move on, you know?

I'm pretty sure this isn't the goal of the US legal system. But losing this case, it made their lives better. Peter says losing saved them from being the worst versions of themselves, freed them from something bad. And like three programmable cars, everyone was on a new trajectory. His dad turned left, his mom went right, they got divorced. Peter finished high school and moved away to college. His dad began a whole new life after that, where he seemed much more at peace.

He remarried, got a degree in education, worked with kids and Legos, inventing stuff. But that moment, it really broke something. Peter says there was always a hint of competitiveness between him and his dad. It would come up when they talked about where he might go to college. Was his school better than his dad's? Or when he was little, when they'd roughhouse? They both kind of wanted to win. There was a tinge of aggression to it, he says. And that night at dinner, it was like it flipped some switch between them.

Those moments they used to have hanging around in the workroom, happily tinkering together, those were gone. And what was left was a feeling that they were not exactly on the same team anymore. It was this kind of lingering sense that we had been thrust into something that made us adversaries and competitors, and we never came out of it. And I came to hate that. I hated that when I would...

sort of achieve something in my life, like get a new job or whatever, I would hesitate telling my dad because it almost seemed to wound him. What we had been through, I think, had changed both of us and kind of broke something that we never got back. You know, we never got back an empathy. Peter is pretty sure he knows what the truth is about who came up with the idea for Big Track. Maybe it was clear at the time, but it was hard to see as a kid.

Hard to feel it with confidence anyway. The truth, the only thing that really makes sense, is that Peter had come up with the idea for the toy. In the trial, some of his dad's co-workers testified that he had come into work and said as much. And it was a thing that, as a family, they had talked about before the lawsuit. That this little idea Peter had was being turned into an actual toy, and how cool that was. But that night at dinner, it was a hard fact for his father to have thrown in his face. And so he said what he said. His dad's way of moving past it was just to keep moving.

Years passed. Peter had kids. His dad would come visit. Really enjoyed being a grandfather. And I remember thinking, like, this is the dad I remember before that trial. You know, before all of that started, I remember a kind, you know, sharing, open, curious guy. And it was nice to kind of revisit that. But I would occasionally say to him,

Do you ever want to talk about this? Because I think about it a lot. And the few times I would bring it up, he would just block. He would just say, I don't, I can't. There's nothing to talk about. Why do you think he wouldn't just tell you which was the truth? I don't know. Part of me feels that, you know, he did something that he was ashamed of and just couldn't talk about that piece of it.

The lawsuit did come up one last time, in a very strange way, almost like the universe was trying to put the pieces back together. After my dad got cancer, he came out a few times to visit, and one of those times, we had a great visit, and I took him to LAX, and it was back when you could go to the gate with people. And I went to the gate with him, and we're sitting at the gate, and I hear this voice across the room, and it's the attorney for Milton Bradley.

No way. And he's standing there with a younger woman, I'm assuming his daughter. And my dad just tenses up because he sees it and I see it. And I don't know why, but I just stood up and I walked over to the guy and I shake his hand and I introduced myself. And he's like, oh, Peter, how are you? And I say,

you know, oh, I'm fine. My dad's here. And he's like, oh, wonderful. And he walks with me over to my father. And my father at this point is kind of a deer in the headlights. And I helped my dad, you know, stand up and they shake hands. And I mentioned, you know, I live in Los Angeles. And he says, yeah, my, you know, my daughter's out here now. And he goes, I always knew you'd be a success, Peter. That's wonderful. And, you know, my dad said, yep, I'm really proud of him. And, you know, then we just sort of said goodbye. And we sat down and

The attorney got called to first class and went on board. And then we sat there and didn't really say much. And then my dad got called on to coach and off he went. And that was, you know, one of the last times I saw him. The earliest known version of the Humpty Dumpty rhyme. It's not the same as the one you know. It may have been a riddle about an egg or it may have been a poem about a person. It went like this. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

Four score men and four score more could not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before, which I read differently from the one we know. You can't put a broken thing back together. It's just going to be different. David Kestenbaum is our senior editor. Coming up, a man, not an egg, falls off a very high wall, and he does not look around for either King's horses or a King's man. Imagine that. That's in a minute on Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

This is American Life from Ira Glass. Today's program, All the King's Horses, about things broken so badly they cannot be put back together. We have arrived at Act 2 of our program, Act 2, the 95. This next story is about somebody examining something very broken, something documented in a list assembled by the Committee to Protect Journalists, of journalists who've been killed in the Israel-Hamas war. It's the largest number of journalists who've died in any conflict since they started counting.

The list gives each person's name, where they worked, circumstances of their death, sometimes a few more details, but often that's all. Reporter Dana Balout has been reading about the people on the list, watching their work, talking to their colleagues, trying to piece together who they were and what was lost when they died. Here she is. I first started noticing the journalists dying on Instagram. I'm a journalist, I'm Arab, and I've reported on war. A big part of my community is other Arab journalists who do the same thing.

And when someone dies, news travels fast. Recently, I pulled up the list that the Committee to Protect Journalists has been keeping and looked at it for the first time. There are 95 journalists and media workers on it as of today. Almost everyone on it is Palestinian. Scrolling through, I started to get angry. These were the people carrying the burden of documenting this whole war. Israel's not allowing foreign journalists into Gaza, except on rare occasions with military escorts.

These people's names are being buried in a giant list that keeps growing. What I want to do is lift some of them off the list for a moment and give you a glimpse of who they were and the work they made. I'll start with Sari Mansour.

Saadi was the director of Al-Quds News Network, and he posted a 22-second video on November 18 that was a report from the war, but it also gave me a picture into his marriage. Saadi's wearing his press vest and looks exhausted. He's explaining that cell service and the internet keep getting cut off, and it's often impossible to text or call anyone, including his wife.

So they've resorted to using handwritten letters to communicate while he's out reporting, sending them back and forth with neighbors or colleagues. He ends the video with a picture of one of these letters from his wife. In it, she writes, Me and the kids stayed up waiting for you until the morning, and you didn't come home.

We were really sad. I kept telling the kids, look, he's coming. But you didn't show up. May God forgive you. Come home tomorrow and eat with us. Do you want me to make you kebab or maybe kapseh? Bring your friends with you, it's okay. And give Aziz the battery to charge. What do you think about me sending you handwritten letters with messenger pigeons from now on? Ha ha ha. I'm just kidding. I want to curse at you, but we're living in a war. Too bad. Okay, I love you. Bye.

A few hours after he shared that letter, Saadi and his co-worker Hassoun As-Saleem were at Saadi's home when they were killed by an Israeli airstrike that hit his house. His wife and kids, who weren't there, survived. Gaza's tiny, and the journalist community is really close. Reading the list, you can see all the connections between people. Like with Brahim Lafi. Brahim was a photojournalist, one of the first journalists to die. He was killed while reporting on October 7th.

He was just 21, still new to journalism. On his Instagram, you can see that in his posts just a few years ago, he was still practicing his photography, taking pictures of coffee cups and flowers. Then, he started doing beautiful portraits and action shots. You can really feel him starting to become a journalist. Clicking around on Instagram, I found a tribute post about Brahim from his co-worker Rushdie Sarraj.

In this photo, Brahim's staring intently at the back of a camera, his face lit up by the light from the viewfinder. He looks so young. The caption reads, "My assistant is gone. Brahim is gone." Rushdie himself was a beloved journalist and filmmaker, and I know that because he's also on the list. He was killed just two weeks after Brahim. I read the tribute post to him too. I saw this over and over again. Journalists posting tributes, who were then killed themselves soon after.

and a tribute goes up for them. And then the pattern continues. Something else I saw over and over on the list, journalists later in the war who'd become aware that they could be making their last reports. They'd say it at the beginning of their videos, and those were the hardest to watch, especially when it was true. One video like that was posted by Ayat Khadoura. Ayat was a freelance journalist and video blogger.

Her videos before the war covered a wide range from what I can tell. Interviews about women in politics. She even appeared in a commercial for ketchup-flavored chips. She clearly liked being in front of the camera. Once the war started, Ayadz pivoted to covering bombings and food shortages. On November 20, she posted a video report from her home. You can hear the airstrikes hitting very close to where she is.

It's scary. She's saying, this is likely my last video. Today, the occupation forces dropped phosphorus bombs on Beit Lahiya area and frightening sound bombs. They dropped letters from the sky ordering everyone to evacuate.

Everyone ran into the streets in the craziest way. No one knows where to go. My family and I are split up. Myself and a few others are still at home, but everyone else has evacuated.

They don't know where they're going. The situation is so scary. What's happening is so tough, and may God have mercy on us. And then she begins to cry, and the video stops. She was killed later that day. Targeting journalists, in case you didn't know, is a war crime.

So far, the Committee to Protect Journalists has found that three of the journalists on the list were explicitly targeted by the IDF, the Israeli military. Investigations by The Washington Post and Reuters, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations have also raised serious questions in these three cases. And the Committee to Protect Journalists is investigating 10 other killings.

When we reached out to the IDF for comments, they said, quote, "The IDF has never, and will never, deliberately target journalists." That's the answer they always give in these situations. Meanwhile, dozens of seasoned reporters have fled Gaza. Journalists who worked for Al Jazeera, the BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters, Agence France-Presse. So many media offices were demolished in Israeli airstrikes that the Committee to Protect Journalists stopped counting.

It's not just individual lives that have been destroyed. It's an entire infrastructure. The name on the list that was hardest for me to look at was Issam Abdullah. Because I'd crossed paths with him once. Issam was a Lebanese journalist, a video journalist for Reuters for many, many years. He had just won an award for coverage of Ukraine. I'm Lebanese and still report there sometimes. And I'd worked with Issam a couple of summers ago. He helped me film a sort of random story in Beirut's.

I was interviewing this entrepreneur who'd started a sperm freezing company after an accident where he spilled a tray of hot coffee on his private area, burning himself. I know, ridiculous. It was a really silly shoot. Right after we said cut and started to wrap, Issam started this whole bit about being in his late 30s, reconsidering his own sperm quality and everything he now realized he was doing to hurt it. And no one could stop laughing. It was a really good day that felt good to remember.

and to remember him that way. Aysam was killed by the IDF on October 13. His death was one of the three that the Committee to Protect Journalists has identified as a targeted killing. He was fired upon by an Israeli tank while standing in an empty field on the Lebanon-Israel border with a small group of other journalists. Everyone was wearing press vests with cameras out. They were covering the Hezbollah part of this war. A few other journalists were injured in the attack, which was captured on video.

The IDF says they were responding to firing from Hezbollah, not targeting the journalists. But multiple investigations, including by Reuters, the United Nations, Amnesty International and the AFP, found no evidence of any firing from the location of the journalists before the IDF shot at them. The journalists in the group and video footage confirmed that there was no military activity near them. I'd only met Aysam once, barely knew him, but it affected me so much when he died.

I know that he understood the risks of his job, but somehow it still felt so random and unfair that he would be struck down like that, following the rules, wearing his press vest and helmet, and a pack of reporters on a sunny day in an open field. I find myself thinking about him all the time. His last Instagram post was commemorating another journalist, this iconic reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, who'd been killed by the IDF.

When I first saw that post in October, I thought how ironic because a week later, Aysam also was killed by the IDF. But then, after spending time reading the list, I realized how common this had become. I still haven't finished going through the list and looking up the people on it. I keep finding things that stick with me, like the funny way this one radio host would cut off a caller who was rambling on for too long. A tweet from reporter Alaa Abdullah that quoted Sylvia Plath.

It read, What ceremony of wars can patch the havoc? I'm going to keep going down the list, even though this radio story is over now, just for myself, my own way of bearing witness, which is, in the end, all that these journalists were trying to do. Reporter Dana Ballou is a journalist and documentary filmmaker. Her story was produced by Diane Wu. I don't know what I felt, like the fire in my heart.

This song is by Lena McCool, a Palestinian musician. It's called Recording 801. Act 3, A Great Fall. Okay, so there are lots of ways to break something. And skateboarding is a pretty good one.

David Kestenbaum, who of course you heard earlier in the show, has been obsessed with this one short video of a skateboarder that he keeps watching over and over. The skateboarder stands at the top of a ramp. The wall of the ramp goes straight down at first, then curves into a flat section, then up again on the other side. It's like an enormous U. You could easily break something from that height. He leans forward. It's 13 and a half feet down. One other number you should know, 52.

That's how old he is in this video. 52 years old. It's Tony Hawk, trying to land a trick that he used to do all the time when he was younger. He goes down the ramp, up the other side, spins in the air, and falls onto his knees. He's wearing pads, slides to the bottom, then climbs the stairs to try again. But, same thing. I was never a skateboard kid. They were too cool for me. I know Tony Hawk is like the most famous skateboarder in the world, but I've only gotten into him now that he's over 50.

On social media he writes these funny little scenes from his life, like this one: "Kid at skate park. Are you Tony Hawk?" "Me." "I am." "Him." "No you're not." "Okay, I'm not." "But are you, for real?" "I am, for real." "I thought you'd look younger." "Me too." So the trick he's trying to do in this video, it's called an "Ollie 540." Basically you go down the ramp, up the other side of the U, then down again, that a couple times, until you get enough height.

Then, through some kind of magic, at like 15 feet in the air, you spin one and a half times with the board turning underneath you. But without grabbing the board, you don't touch it with your hands. Like you and the board are just rotating at exactly the same speed. And then somehow you try to land on your skateboard without breaking any bones. Hip, I think he says there.

He's written that the trick has gotten scarier as he's gotten older, just committing to the landing at the end. He wrote, "My willingness to slam unexpectedly into the flat bottom has waned greatly over the last decade." One of the things I like about this video is it's basically a collection of failures, over and over. It's edited so you can't see how many tries, but it's a lot. He looks tired and just so human. After one fall, he sits there on the ground, looks up, and swears.

The next attempt literally goes sideways. He slides out the end of the ramp and takes out a camera there that's filming. "Sorry, I broke everything." Shy grin, he checks to see if his finger is okay. Cut to Tony Hawk at the top of the ramp again. Deep breath, skateboard over the void again. Plunges down, up the other side, down, up into the air, around, and he lands it. Let's the board go flying.

Covers his face with his hands, drops to his knees, and says this. I'm kinda sad. I'm kinda sad, he says. One of the film crew fist bumps him. Damn! Perfect! I'm like a little, I'm a little sad. That was the last one. Yeah. I never had much finality to anything, but that definitely was the last one I'll ever do. Fuck it. I'm happy I made it. Thanks guys for hanging in there with me.

The title of the video when it got posted was Tony Hawk Lens' Last Ever Oli 540, Aged 52. I tear up every time I watch this, in part because we're basically the same age. He's one year older. Something happens when you're around 50. You can't do things you used to do, because stuff hurts. I used to love to run, really love it. I can't anymore. Four knee surgeries. And walking around, I noticed things I didn't used to.

So many people with little hitches in their steps, working around some bit of pain in a knee, a hip. I reached out to Tony Hawk back when the video came out. I wanted to talk about it. Apparently he did not decline my interview request. So this is going to be a short story. I'll just say this. A friend told me recently about a doctor who'd gone to work in a small town, ended up treating a lot of older people. And he noticed that the way it would go was that first one thing would go wrong. You'd fix it.

Then a different thing would go wrong. He'd fix that. Then two things would go wrong at once. And then another. Eventually, enough things would break that that's the end. He also said something else. That's the good version, he said. That's the one you want. The one where you get to keep going long enough that all the parts break. ♪

David Kesterbaum is still making radio stories at 54. Tony Hawk, a year after that video, broke his femur, but after surgeries, he's still skateboarding. I broke everything. F it, I'm glad I made it. Enough to break all those. Baby, you know you can't save it. All the king's horses can't save it. All the king's horses can't save it.

Our program is produced today by Fia Bennett and Lily Sullivan and edited by Laura Starczewski. The people who put together our show today include Bim Adelumni, Chris Bender, Zoe Chase, Sean Cole, Michael Comete, Aviva DeCornfield, Bethel Hopte, Cassie Halle, Valerie Kipnis, Rudy Lee, Seth Lynn, Tobin Lowe, Catherine Raimondo, Nadia Raymond, Safiya Riddle, Ryan Brummery, Alyssa Shipp, Chris Rosertala, Marisa Robertson-Textor, Matt Tierney, and Nancy Opdyke. Our managing editor is Sarah Abderrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emmanuel Berry.

Sam Geller wrote the song that you're hearing right now for this episode. Special thanks today to Sharif Mansour, Rushdie Abululuf, Yumna El-Sayed, Anand Kuzmar, Reza Abdulrahim, Ahmed Mukadama, Carrie Law, Clayton Law, Howard Palliter, Randy Murray, Karen Glass, James Bennett II, Matthew Snyder, Michelle Kanna, and everybody who wrote to us about Humpty Dumpty trauma, including Anne Mastu, Heidi Shin, Brendan Shiflett, Sky Wenhold, Kelly Gartzyk, Julie Davidson, and Isabella Gower.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream over 800 episodes of our show for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to local public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torrey Malatia. You know, he has started saying my name so much. Like, at the end of every sentence he says, Torrey, people do not usually talk to each other this way.

He said, Oh, it happens all the time, Ira. Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life. Can't save me.