Tom Slick: Not the Cartoon
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and it's just us today. And we know from experience that that's just fine. And this is Stuff You Should Know. This guy had his finger in a lot of different pies that Stuff You Should Know has done episodes on, edition. Yeah, I mean, this is a...

Interesting one, because our friend Chad, Chad did our TV show and Chad is doing a or has done a podcast, a highly fictionalized scripted podcast for for our company, for I heart, you know, the company we own. Sure. About Tom Slick. And when he was telling me about this, Owen Wilson is voicing it and Sissy Spacek is in it. I have a small part.

Oh, really? I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. I'll get to that. I also read that Carlton Fisk is in it. I don't think so. The baseball player? Yeah. No, it's Sissy Spacek's daughter. Yeah. Skylar Fisk? Skylar Fisk. I always confuse her with Carlton Fisk, the old White Sox player or Expos? White Sox, I think, among others. But anyway, Chad was like, dude, this guy, he's the most interesting man that you've never heard of.

And I found when I was online researching, like outside of San Antonio and maybe Texas in a broader sense, like there aren't a ton of people who don't think that Tom Slick is just the name of a cartoon that has nothing to do with this guy. Yeah. Did you ever watch Tom Slick when you were younger? Oh, the cartoon? Yeah. Sure.

I never did. Yeah. I watched a lot of Rocky and Bullwinkle, but I'd never heard of Tom Slick until I started researching this cat. Yeah, it was like a George of the Jungle partner show. But yeah, I just, I mean, it was even, I mean, it wasn't hard to find information online, but it wasn't as easy as a lot of people and considering all the like kind of crazy, extraordinary things he did in his life. I ran into the exact same issue where like there's a lot of stuff.

I don't even want to say a lot, but there's a substantial enough amount of articles and sources about him online. But they all contain just basically like one-off anecdotes. Yeah.

And it's like, wait, I don't quite understand. Like, how did this incident, like, help form his outlook on life? Like, there's not a complete picture of that dude, and it drives me crazy. Yeah. Because I like to understand the whole thing, you know? I love how the parts kind of make up a whole, and I feel like with this guy, I largely just have parts. Even though, you know, if I put them together... Mm-hmm. You got a whole. He's like a jigsaw with a bunch of missing places. But...

I still can kind of see that picture, and it's that he was a pretty cool and interesting dude and seems to have been a genuinely good dude, too. Yeah. Had Nicolas Cage pulled off the film adaptation of his life, all your prayers may have been answered, my friend. Yeah. I heard that that one was canceled because he was doing it so weird. Every time Tom Slick ran into a problem or an issue and was upset, Nicolas Cage would just go, Ah! Ah! Ah!

For like five minutes. And it took up, it added like a good 45 minutes to the film. And he refused to let them cut a second of it. I remember one of the funniest parts of the, when Andy Samberg was doing Nick Cage on SNL. One of the lines he really got me one week was, he was on the weekend update and they were talking about some movie that came out that he was in, you know, and he's in like 15 movies a year.

And he went, it had all the elements of a Nick Cage movie. Number one, it existed. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I like that guy a lot. Sandberg? Nick Cage. Yeah. And Andy Sandberg's great too. And Tom Slick. Yeah, for sure. I like Andy Sandberg, but I hadn't seen, I never really watched Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Yeah.

I saw the most work he did in That's My Boy, which I actually loved. Like, I don't think there's a Sandler movie out there that I don't at least like. I did not see that. And there are many, many Adam Sandler movies I have not seen. I know. It's the shame of the podcast. Yeah. But I did watch the first couple of seasons of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and it's great. Well, Adam Sandler wasn't on that as far as I know, so that doesn't count. I don't think so. So let's talk about Tom Slick, huh? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, one of the problems with Tom Slick is separating fact from fiction because he's one of these guys that lives sort of an extraordinary, curious-filled, adventurous life. And right off the bat, the fact that he was born on either May 6th and I also saw May 9th, it just may have been the way things were back then. This is in 1916, and he was a junior to Thomas Baker Slick Sr.,

who was a guy that really rubbed off on his son because he had the same sort of adventurous spirit as an oil man. Yeah, Tom Baker Slick Sr. was king of the wildcatters, and a wildcatter is somebody who goes around just drilling oil wells in places where it's not

at all clear that there's going to be oil. They're just very hopeful prospectors, right? And that's how he spent like his early career. And then finally, he just hit pay dirt. It was called, I think, the Wheeler One Well in Bristow, Oklahoma. And it became one of the most productive wells in America. It was pumping out like over 300,000 barrels a day. I got another stat for you. At the time, what would become Cushing Oil Field was responsible for

for two-thirds of the oil production in the Western Hemisphere. Man. So, yes, I guess it goes without saying that Tom Slick Sr. made himself and his family rich beyond their wildest dreams. And so Tom Slick Jr. grew up a rich kid. And that's a huge thing. That was a huge, like,

part of his formative upbringing. He was extraordinarily wealthy, but he was a rare rich kid that took that wealth and put it to good use and also used it to just totally free himself from, you know, the pursuit of making a profit or turning a dollar or whatever. He did things because he was curious about stuff and because he wanted to help humanity. Yeah. But, you know, when you're working that much, obviously you're not going to be around your family as much. Um,

Tom had a couple of siblings and, you know, dad just wasn't around because they lived in Pennsylvania as a family. Obviously, the oil is out west. So Pops was in Oklahoma and Texas most of the time working these long hours.

And those long hours did him in when he died at only 46 years old of a stroke, which was a huge loss for young Tom because he, even though dad wasn't around that much, I get the feeling that he kind of idolized him and really revered him. Yeah, he definitely followed in his footsteps, too, in a lot of ways. Yeah. So he was 14 years old at the time. And, you know, it was a huge loss.

It was. I also saw that he'd become so revered and respected in Oklahoma that when he passed away, the oil derricks in the Oklahoma city field, which is one of the biggest fields in the country, they went silent for an hour. So every oil man in Oklahoma who had a derrick in this field stopped making money for an hour out of respect for Tom Sr. I think that says an enormous amount about him. Or maybe they were just hungry.

It could have been, I guess. Sure.

Her brother-in-law was Charles Urschel because he was married to Tom's sister Flo, who also died around the same time. This is all just bad luck, of course. Nothing weird went on. And they got together and got married. Yeah, they had a leveret marriage like we talked about in the Widows episode.

So from what I can gather, Charles Urschel was a good stepfather to Tom, and Tom was happy to have him. I mean, it was his uncle already, right? So he was quite concerned. When he was 17, he was home from Exeter, the boarding school, for the summer back at Oklahoma City. By this time, the whole family had moved to Oklahoma City and was living in a mansion, the slick Urschel family.

And on July 22nd, 1933, while everybody was just kind of hanging out, Machine Gun Kelly came knocking on the door with a few of his cronies and said, we are taking Charles Urschel with us. Which one of you two men is Charles Urschel? And Urschel's friend, Walter Jarrett, did one of the most stand-up things a friend can do when you're being kidnapped. Yeah.

Yeah. He just stood silently and sort of nudged his nose over toward Urschel. Right. His, his eyes are going like way left over here. Uh, no one picked up on that. No, I'm kidding. He, neither one of them said anything. And, you know, I guess they were sort of together in this. And so they took them both. Uh, and that, you know, that's what happened. They kidnapped both these guys. Uh,

They would eventually find Jarrett's ID. So they dumped him on the side of the road and took Urschel to rural Texas to a ranch and demanded 200 grand in ransom, which is close to five million bucks today.

Yes, this was a hugely consequential event, right? So that Tom Slick Jr.'s tangentially involved in. Because when Charles Urschel was being held, he really kept his head about him. And depending on who you ask, either he noted the time of day, the times of day that a train passed by nearby or that planes flew overhead or

to try to get an idea of where he was. He put his fingers on everything he could to leave fingerprints. Um, and he also counted the steps anywhere he went when he was blindfolded. So when he was released and thankfully he was released, uh, unharmed for a $200,000 ransom, um,

He was able to tell the feds, like, hey, here's everything you need to know about going and finding this ranch where they took me. And they did. They found it rather quickly. Yeah, he was also timing how long the trains were. And if you know how many trains are passing in a sort of general area, how big these trains are, I think that allowed them to literally go to train schedules in that part of Texas and figure this thing out. So he was a very smart guy, right?

And they were, you know, they arrested...

Machine Gun Kelly fled, but they arrested the other guys. They were able to track down Kelly in Memphis, and he went to Alcatraz for the rest of his life. Yeah. So not only did he go to Alcatraz, Machine Gun Kelly did, but this is where we talked about in the J. Edgar Hoover episode where G-Men was coined because they went to come get him. And when they busted in the door, he said, don't shoot, G-Men. And that's where their nickname came from, just like we talked about in the Hoover episode. Yeah.

That happened from this. So this is what I'm saying. Like Tom Slick, his life really spreads out into a lot of different Stuff You Should Know episodes. And yet we still never ran across him in our research, which is strange to me.

Yeah, he was a big backer of science. That's something that you're going to see that kind of pops up again and again in his life. Right. Stemming from his just natural curiosity. And he was a very, very smart dude. He went to Yale and was into genetics and was really, and this was a time when

You know, in the 1940s, Ripley's Believe It or Not magazine and the idea of like crossbreeding animals and cryptids and all these things were just it was sort of big news or if not big news, something people were kind of into at the time. And he supposedly kept a list of like animals that he wanted to try and crossbreed when he read about a hog goat.

that was a hoat that was living in Arkansas. He drove to Arkansas and bought whatever it was. I don't even know if it was like poor things or what he ended up with, but whatever he brought home, he tried to breed it on his own farm with no luck. It was definitely not a hog goat because it's physically and genetically and biologically impossible for them to reproduce.

So I didn't see what it was either, just that that didn't exist, but that didn't stop him from trying. Did you really look that up? I mean, I was like, I got to see this thing. And there was nothing, nothing. Hoat, hog, goat, hog, goat, crossbreeding, nothing like that. I know. But I thought like, surely there's something that this was. I couldn't find any reference to it. I also saw in some places that...

He basically went to go buy it and realized that these people didn't even exist. And certainly the hoat didn't exist, but he went and tried it anyway because he really liked the idea of it. And this is when genetics was really new and cutting edge. And this guy's into it while he's still at Yale, you know? Yeah. So one of the things he successfully does crossbreed is cattle. He looked at the Scottish Angus, which is, you know, prized for its excellent quality beef products.

Um, they're very, very fertile. Uh, and then he looked at the Brahman cattle from India and he was like, these things are, are great. Uh, they're disease resistant. They're pest resistant. They are, they do well in drought and they're very, very maternal, much more maternal than these Angus. Oh yeah. So let's get them together. Uh,

put three-eighths Brahman with five-eighths Angus. And this was one of his big noted early successes when he was in his early 20s. He created the Brangus cattle breed that is still around today and like highly sought after. Yeah. Yeah, I saw that people still love that. And it helped introduce the Angus cattle into Texas where they would not have done very well before.

Yeah, but here's the thing, though. Like, this sounds cool. Like, you think, oh, this guy's like a cattle guy now. He's a rich kid looking to make more money on this cattle deal. He was doing it because he wanted to introduce a breed of cattle that did better in places where there was drought and there were pests and disease. So one of his business partners was like, he didn't care about making money on this. He just he hoped it would help people in hot countries. Not just he didn't care. He didn't give, quote, a hoot in hell about making money on Brangus.

I wasn't going to say it. I say we take a break and come back. And you mentioned he's into cryptids. Let's talk about that in a second, okay? All right. We'll be right back. I'm inside being Josh.

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So I don't know if we said it or not, but Tom Slick, he developed a love of cryptids that he shared with his father. His father passed on a love of stories about Loch Ness Monster, the Abominable Snowman, all sorts of adventurous stuff like that. And like you said, it really rubbed off on Tom Jr. And so at a pretty early age, I think, yeah, he was still at Yale. And with some of his buddies, he packed his red Buick,

onto a steamer ship and went to Europe for a summer where they drove around Europe. And one of the top things on his list was to go look for the Loch Ness Monster.

And one of the things you'll kind of notice about Tom Slick is that when he's doing these things that today in retrospect seem very weird and flaky, at the time, there was like a lot of evidence that these things existed. This was 1937. The next year, the coelacanth would be rediscovered. Like it was just kind of in the air that there were things out there that science hadn't identified yet. And perhaps the Loch Ness Monster was one of them.

Yeah, and the very, very famous picture of supposed Nessie was just three years prior to that. So it was all the rage at the time. Personally, he got married pretty quickly after Yale and got divorced even quicker to his first wife, Betty, I guess long enough to have a son named William, but really took after his dad in more ways than one because he was a very busy guy. He was a workaholic.

He did spend more time around his family, I get the idea, than his father did. But if, you know, the Yeti came calling, he would go find the Yeti, or try to find the Yeti. Or if he wanted to open up a new scientific research center, of which he opened, jeez, how many, like five of them while he was alive? Yes. Then he would spend his time doing that, because he thought it was very worthwhile, and it was.

The call of the Yeti, by the way, is... Nicholas.

Nicolas Cage? He could have played the Yeti and Tom Slick in the same movie. Right, yeah. That would have been amazing. Just like adaptation. Yep, exactly. So you said that he was a little closer with his kids than his father. I think one of the ways he did that was on a lot of his adventures, he'd bring his kids along with him. And I know at least his son Charles, Chuck even, Chuck,

Has very fond memories of going on adventures with his dad. So, yeah, he was definitely closer to his kids, at least experience-wise, than he was with his father. Yeah, so one big foray into the scientific side of his life was...

Science City. It was this dream project that he had had for a long time. It's very sort of 19, mid 1930s name, I guess. So he opens up Science City, gets the ball rolling. By 1940, they had moved to San Antonio, which is where, you know, you'll find Tom Slick Park and Tom Slick everything, basically. Right. Which includes a little Nessie statue, which is kind of cool. Yeah, but you can totally tell it's fake.

Yeah, yeah, that's not the real thing. So he bought 1,602 acres about eight miles west of San Antonio. That would eventually grow to about 4,000 acres for the ESSAR, E-S-S-A-R Ranch, which is just a...

long way of saying SR for scientific research. And he was 24 years old. And this is where all that Brangus stuff happened. Yeah. And you said that he founded five research facilities in his 20s. Three of them are still around. One of the first ones he established was the Foundation for Applied Research, FAR, F-A-R, or FAIR, depending on how you say it. And that is still around. That's now the Texas Biomedical Research Institute.

And as we'll see, these things have had significant contributions to science and the world since they've been around.

Yeah, for sure. And were all those in his 20s? From what I understand, this is all over like a few year period. Yeah. Jeez, that's incredible. He tried to enlist in the Navy after Pearl Harbor in 1941, but he didn't have good eyesight. So they said you are not fit for, you know, wartime duty. So they commissioned him in 1942 as a lieutenant.

and right away said, all right, you know what you're good at is running big operations. Why don't you go work for the War Production Board and kind of help this idea that we have of changing over factories from making whatever they're making to helping out with wartime production. From there, he went to D.C., working for the Board of Economic Warfare, which is actually in Santiago, Chile. And this is where things get a little like...

Who knows what happened because his letters and diaries weren't around. The records from what he did in Chile were destroyed. And we'll never know if or not he was like a spy in South America, which a lot of his family and other people said they thought he was. I think we know 100 percent that he was a spy in Chile at the time. Oh, really? Just from the circumstantial evidence.

Oh, OK. Yeah. I thought you meant you found something. Oh, man. You could write a book if you found that. But yes, the family lore is that he was working in South America as a basically a Nazi catcher, helping local governments and the U.S. catch Nazis who'd escaped.

Which happened there. Yes, that's the thing. It happened while he was there. That's one of the operations that was going on in South America. And he was just an American businessman, but he was also in the Navy. And no one knows why he was stationed there. He never talked about it or told anybody. I would say that that's pretty much certain.

Because if you combine that with another thing that he may have been an operative for, or at least related to some operatives, I think that it's pretty certain he was. That's my two cents at least.

All right. So he got married again, this time to in 1947 to a woman 12 years younger. She was 18 at the time and they had three kids. They also got divorced. You know, again, he's not around a lot and probably not the most attentive husband when he has all these things going on. And he had he you know, he's somebody I look up to in a lot of ways after sort of finding out how he worked. Certainly not as a husband, but.

how he worked as a curious person. He seems like the kind of guy that he would read and read and read just about everything that he could and just soak up as much knowledge as he could. And when he came across something that piqued his interest in a particular way or that he couldn't figure out, he had the resources and the money and the time to, you know, if not solve it, try to solve it by just saying like, all right, pick up the phone, let me call

who I whoever I know or write a letter to whoever I know who might be able to help out with this. And then depending on what they say, I might hire some people to go to work and try and figure this stuff out. I might work on it myself. And whatever the outcome, he was just about

trying he wasn't afraid of failing he was just he was just trying to find out stuff and made his best efforts to even if it didn't work out yeah just finding out that no one seemed to know the answer that was enough for him you know of course he wanted to find the answer to the question he was looking for but yeah he said i don't believe in failure only outcome like he said and that's just what a great motto you know i mean that just completely transforms your outlook on life

Yeah. I mean, it's to be clear, it is a motto that you can afford when you have that kind of privilege, when you can just be like, hey, I'll fail. Like, what's the big rub? Sure. And he had that privilege, but he, you know, in his favor, he didn't use that privilege necessarily.

To sit around on a beach and drink coconut drinks like he was trying to better humankind. Yeah. And I mean, like, yes, that's a great point. But I also think that you can apply it to all sorts of different things in life, you know, not necessarily just your success or your wealth or anything like that. Yeah, for sure.

So there were a lot of things that he used this technique for that came to fruition. Some things may or may not exist. We're not 100% sure. But one thing that he definitely did co-invent that did have some consequence to it was what's called a lift slab method.

of basically creating a concrete roof. Those are very expensive to make. It's very difficult to create them in place on the roof. And he basically figured out a technique to make it on the ground and then lift it into place. It sounds kind of basic and low hanging, but apparently it saves a lot of cost and it works. So that's a pretty good example of him just kind of putting his mind to figuring a better way out. It's boring, but it's still a good example.

Yeah. I mean, that wasn't just for roofs. It was, I mean, if he built a 10-story building, he would build all 10 floors on the ground and then hydraulic those suckers up there. That's, man, what can't you do with hydraulics? Yeah.

And we should also mention the lift slab. It was simultaneously developed by another guy named Philip Utes. Tom Slick got the patent and, you know, gets all the glory for that. But a lot of people still call it the Utes-Slick method. Beautiful. He developed a breed of mice. This was early in chemotherapy treatments that were very useful in testing. We mentioned that Brangus, I think my favorite,

is that he had a thing against cowlicks in your hair, so he invented a hair tonic that could supposedly reverse those cowlicks. Yeah, in particular, Brangus cowlicks. Come here, cow. Stinkless skunks, apparently. Did you see anything about this? I couldn't really find anything on that. I found nothing on that. I don't know if it just went beyond the idea stage.

One thing that definitely happened was one of his institutes, it might have been the Southwest Research Institute or the Texas Biomedical Institute, had a huge role in producing some of the first oral contraceptives. That's fairly world-altering.

Sure. And then another one that did not come to fruition was called artificial pecans, pecans, however you want to say it. He decided that the trees were way too water intensive, especially from the perspective of Texas. And so he wanted to find a way to create pecans that did not need water.

to grow on trees. And like I said, it didn't get anywhere. I cannot for the life of me find what the heck he made the artificial pecans out of, but he definitely gave it a try. So we've talked a lot about his, you know, work as a funder of science and a believer in science. Kind of, maybe not weirdly, but he was also a guy that really loved the unexplained and the mystical and was not, though he believed in science, he wasn't

He didn't necessarily think that those walls couldn't be explored beyond, you know. So he went to India, as a lot of people did in those days who were seeking enlightenment in the 50s. Saw people walking on hot coals. Supposedly saw llamas and Tibetan monks levitating off the ground, is one of his claims. He basically went to a Tony Robbins convention. Does he levitate llamas?

He does all sorts of stuff like this that, yes, he does pseudoscientific things like this. Or maybe a David Blaine performance. Yeah. Yeah. I tried to learn that method, but I did it okay for a little while, but it wasn't great. What? Levitating? Well, the illusion that you're levitating, which is what David Blaine did. It's a trick, obviously. Isn't it essentially you're basically standing on your toes? Yeah.

You're standing on one toe. You have people at a certain angle where when you're raising all of your body weight up on the one toe, you're blocking it with your other foot and, like, pant leg. And so it's all about the angle at which you see it. So you can't see that that one toe is on the ground. But it looks great if you can do it well. So I don't understand why you call it levitating. I think you could just get as much –

all out of people is saying like, I'm standing on one toe right now, everybody. How nuts is that? Yeah. I'm a toe, a toe bodybuilder. I've got the strongest toe. Right. So this is a really consequential time in Central Asia, East Asia, in Tibet. The Dalai Lama had been,

Oh, I don't know the word, but basically found and identified just several years before. This is the Dalai Lama as we know him today. And around this time, he was about 21. And China had invaded Tibet. And all of a sudden, the Dalai Lama found himself as like the head of the Tibetan government. Everybody said, you're the guy. What are you going to do about this?

And there was almost nothing he could do. There were Tibetan freedom fighters, Tibetan resistance rebels, and they were just getting crushed left and right by China. And Tibet was a place where China had invaded. And so now anytime you saw an American, you can pretty much guess that if they weren't CIA, they were backed by the CIA. They were giving information to the CIA. The CIA had like a 20-year program in Tibet.

And one of the things they did was help get the Dalai Lama out when it became clear that the Dalai Lama needed to get the heck out and create a government for Tibet in exile, which he still runs today. The CIA helped that happen. And so did in some way, shape or form, Tom Slick had some sort of hand in it.

All right. Maybe we should take a break. It sounds like a good little cliffhanger. Mm-hmm. And come back and talk about why he may have been over there in the first place, right after this. Inside the HR.

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Sign up at WorkMoney. Get money-saving tips. Skip the rent. Get more rich. Sign up at WorkMoney.org slash MoreRichContest for your chance to win $50,000. This election season, the stakes are higher than ever. I think the choice is clear in this election. Join me, Charlemagne Tha God, for We The People, an audio town hall with Vice President Kamala Harris and you, live from Detroit, Michigan, exclusively on iHeartRadio. They'll tackle the tough questions, depressing issues, and the future of our nation. We may not

see eye to eye on every issue, but America, we are not going back. Don't miss this powerful conversation with Vice President Kamala Harris. Tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific on the free iHeartRadio app's Hip Hop Beat Station. All right. So where we left off was a little tease about Tom Slick potentially maybe helping to get the Dalai Lama out of Tibet. Mm-hmm.

Why was he there? He had met him already. So that was, you know, before the break, we were talking about a trip that he took over there. Toss that one aside. He goes home, starts living his life, feels a little bit more enlightened. He can meditate a little bit. Sure. Worthwhile trip. But he, just like his father, was fascinated by the idea of the Yeti, the abominable snowman in the Himalayas.

And like you mentioned earlier, like this was a time when, you know, it's kind of right in the middle of all these Yeti sightings. There were there were new species being discovered. And so he was like, hey, listen, I'm not some some.

wacko who just, you know, believes in these weird cryptids, he said, I think there's something out there that may be like the link between man and animal. And I think there are at least two species. There are the big, tall eight footers with black hair. There are smaller red haired guys. And I think it's like a pre-human man that's been basically hidden for thousands of years in the Himalayas.

Yeah. And I mean, Westerners have been trying to climb the Himalayas for decades by this time. And as they came back, they would bring stories from the locals about the Yeti, the abominable snowman. And so, like you said, like it wasn't just totally like off the charts or super fringe to mount an expedition for this. And he did. And like he was looking for a missing link. Remember his fascination with hybridization? Yeah.

he felt like that's what those things were. They were a missing link out there. They weren't some undiscovered animal. They were some human relative that had somehow survived in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest or the wilds of the Himalayas. And he wanted to find one. I don't know if he wanted to kill and stuff it because he was a hunter, but he definitely wanted to at least catch one.

Or meet one, shake his hand, buy him a steak dinner. I'm not sure. Buy him a Brangus steak dinner.

Pretty good. He actually did change the way that those expeditions went down because most of those had been kill and catch or catch and kill expeditions for kind of anything like that. And he changed it to more research based and, hey, let's see if we can get something alive. Good. I'm glad. So he did. He mounted three different expeditions. I think the first one was in the winter of 1956, which.

You're going to go to the Himalayas in the winter. It seems like poor planning to me. And while he was there, he found a footprint, 13-inch long bare footprint. And he made a plaster cast of it and it became one of his prized possessions. He actually kept it on his dining room table. And like if somebody wouldn't bring it up when they were a guest at his house, he would just kind of quietly nudge it over toward them.

until it was like in their face, on their plate even sometimes. And they'd be like, oh, okay, what is this? If I may ask. And he'd say, oh, well, funny you should ask. Let me tell you about this abominable snowman footprint. Yeah, he actually got a few footprints and a couple of them were very noteworthy.

I mean, they weren't Yeti, but they were noteworthy in that every other footprint had been snow footprints. And he got a couple out of the mud, which was, I guess, sort of a bigger deal. And also supposedly brought back some hair samples. Again, not a Yeti because there's no Yeti. But he didn't know that at the time. No.

Give the guy a break. He's trying to find what's true and what's not true, just like us. So two years after the first one, he launched a second expedition. This one was like fully kitted out.

He and a friend spent, plunked down 30 grand in I guess 1958 money to fund this expedition. There was a photographer, a documentary filmmaker. There were professional trackers. They brought in a reconnaissance plane. They had tranquilizer guns, which supports your idea that this was not a catch and kill. And then also he brought three blue tickhounds.

Tick bloodhounds, which are really well known as tracker dogs. And he even put little snow boots on them to help them through the snow, which I thought was very conscientious.

Totally. He didn't go on this one. He just, you know, helped fund it because he had bailed on a bus on the previous expedition that had lost its brakes and pretty much tore up his knees permanently from that point. So there are some great pictures of him with his like knees all bandaged up. But he's he's still, you know, smiling away, looking like he stepped out of a Banana Republic ad. Is he giving a thumbs up?

There was no – well, he had a cane in his hand. Okay. Yeah. So that second expedition was there for nine months, came home empty-handed, obviously, or else we would all know that there was such a thing as the Yeti. And the third and last expedition, this is where the CIA business kind of comes in.

He funded two brothers, Peter Byrne and Brian Byrne. And Peter was a well-known outdoorsman, hunter, and he'd been searching for the Yeti for a couple of decades by this time. So Tom Slick financed a third expedition with these two brothers. And here we come to yet another Stuff You Should Know episode, I guess the one on the Yeti or the Abominable Snowman.

Where we talked about this story where a Yeti thumb that was being displayed at Pangbush Temple, the Buddhist monk temple, was stolen. And it turns out it was Peter and Brian Byrne who stole it on behalf of Tom Slick, who asked them to steal it on behalf of Dr. Osmond Hill, a primatologist from the U.K.,

Yeah, and this is probably the most famous story about Tom Slick because of a certain co-conspirator here that we're going to introduce. But he – it was actually a finger and a thumb. They gave these guys, these brothers, like another finger to trade – or not trade, but to swap out and hope no one would notice, I guess. And said, here's a thumb. Take it over there.

See if you can swap them out. Supposedly, the Byrne brothers talked about giving a big donation to the temple. No one knows exactly what went down, but they left with that Yeti thumb and finger. And what they were told was a Yeti scalp was another piece of...

piece of Yeti, I guess, that they got. So I've seen this a couple of ways in stories. I've seen that a certain Hollywood actor was in on this from the beginning and it was all part of the plan. And then I've also seen that after this happened, the Byrne brothers went to Calcutta and just had dinner with Jimmy Stewart and his wife at the Grand Hotel. And Stewart from there got on board and just said, and my best Jimmy Stewart. Yeah.

If you need help getting the thumb across the border, I can put it in my wife's underwear bag. That was great. I was really hoping you were going to do something like that. It's okay. I used to do a decent one, but it's been a while. It's good, especially for being rusty.

I think the way we told it was that he happened to be there and offered. I don't remember knowing that he was supposedly part of the whole thing. It doesn't really matter, honestly. No, he definitely smuggled what was thought to be a Yeti thumb across the border. Right, out of India in his wife's lingerie case back to the UK where he gave it to Dr. Hill. And Dr. Hill promptly just stopped talking about it, I guess,

He probably did some sort of examination and was like, you know, this is not a Yeti thumb and filed it away in the archives of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, where it was lost until I believe the 21st century. And then finally, in 2011, Edinburgh Zoo researchers did a DNA test on it and they said this is a human finger and thumb. And they made a little finger gun for the for the photo that was published all over the world.

Why do I get the feeling at the time if they would have found that thing in thumb in her underwear bag at the airport that she could have just been like, stay out of that. That's my thumb. That's my finger. Stay out of my underwear. They would have just been like, oh, my God, I'm so sorry. And like just giving it back to her. I can't remember where I read it, but it was years and years ago. We may have talked about it. But when there's –

When there's a personal massager found in luggage that's being searched in front of the person, I think the TSA is instructed to just pretend it doesn't exist, like they didn't see it. I can't remember where we – surely we talked about that. I definitely remember us talking about that. That was a while ago. Okay. So, yeah, I think back in the late 50s, you could have done the same thing with a Yeti finger, considering it was in her underwear case. Yeah.

Yeah. The other thing that they brought back was that Yeti scalp. Obviously, not a Yeti scalp. It was a type of Himalayan goat. So they struck out on all fronts. Too bad. But perhaps, perhaps. And I saw I saw definite confirmation that Peter Byrne, at the very least, was helping the CIA get people in and out of Tibet. Yeah.

There was a guy named George Patterson that was doing work, like undercover work, and he helped get him in and out. So the idea is that sort of kind of closing the loop on the Dalai Lama is that because of Peter Burns' work with the CIA getting people in and out, that the New York Times even wrote a story in April of 57 called Soviet Sees Espionage in U.S. Snowman Hunt. Hmm.

This Yeti, I don't know if it was a complete front. I think they were also looking for the Yeti, but they were like, well, since we're over here, we'll do a little bit of CIA work for the guys. Right, exactly. And I guess it's not definite, but I did see at least one source that Peter Byrne had a real hand in getting the Dalai Lama out. I love that. Maybe he offered him his literal hand. He offered him a Yeti thumb. Come with me, big guy.

So Yeti eventually became Bigfoot as far as Tom Slick's passions went because a little closer to home. He could take the kids on that trip, didn't have to go to the Himalayas. So he became a serious Bigfoot hunter, including like hooking up with people who are until very recently were still big and noteworthy Bigfoot hunters.

Yeah. One of them was Peter Byrne. Peter Byrne went on to be one of the big, well-known Bigfoot hunters when he went with Tom Slick. That's kind of where he got the taste for it. And he's like, hey, Tom, you go back home. I'm going to just stay here. And he even wrote a book called The Search for Bigfoot, Monster, Myth or Man.

So I think that's a great 1976 in particular title for a book on Bigfoot. Oh, totally. So back to his private life, you know, he got divorced that second time. And after that, he was like, you know what? Marriage is not for me. But what is for me is being a millionaire playboy. And, you know, everything I saw said that he was very upfront with the women that he cavorted with and everything.

was like, Hey, I'm out to have a good time. This is not going to get serious. Uh, it's kind of a sort of a touchy way of saying he had a lot of girlfriends at the same time. Uh, his, his niece wrote a book about him and knew a lot about him. And, uh, she said that at one point I found a Christmas list from 1958 and he would get these lists, uh, together like, Hey, get these gifts for these, uh, very specific women, uh,

send it to Neiman Marcus and like take care of them. So on the 58 list, he had Annette, Kathy, Cheryl, Cynthia, Irene, Jean, Jerry, Mary, Nancy, Nell, Sandra, Sylvia, Tony, Topsy, and three Helens.

So, 17 women scattered all over planet Earth. He was, you know, he was having a good time, it sounds like. It sounded just now like you were halfway through a Shel Silverstein poem. Especially when Topsy makes an appearance, you know? Yeah, who's Topsy? There's one other thing we need to mention about him is that he wrote not one, but two books arguing and laying out plans for world peace.

Um, which, you know, not everybody's got those under their belt. So I read at least one, um, uh, review of it from the fifties and they were like, this is actually pretty good. Yeah. I mean, again, doing like the good work, uh, sadly that, that good work in that life was cut very short in a tragic way. Uh, when in 1962, uh,

He was coming back in a little plane after pheasant hunting in Calgary with some friends. And their plane basically disintegrated in midair in bad weather over Montana. And he died at the same age as his father at just 46 years old and is buried at Mission Burial Park there in San Antonio. Yeah.

And like we said, those science foundations that he created went on to do some pretty amazing things in addition to oral contraceptives, vaccines for hepatitis A through C.

HIV, AIDS, Ebola virus. They had a big role in the COVID vaccine. And they also another one develops things for NASA, electric cars, the oil and gas industry. They're the kind who like they don't make the stuff. They help other people make the stuff through their research. They make this stuff better. What company is that? BASF. That's exactly what I was thinking of.

Yeah. Also, again, as another coda, he was a great patron of the arts, had one of the great art collections of a private American citizen, most of which is at the McNay Art Museum. And like we said, that movie with Nick Cage didn't happen, but...

The podcast Tom Slick colon Mystery Hunter is out now with Owen Wilson. Yeah. Playing Tom Slick. And Skylar Fisk. And Skylar Fisk and her mom, Sissy Spacek. And Chad sent me a list. I mean, it's just sort of a murderer's row of great actors. And this was literally yesterday. And I was like, I would have loved to have done a voice. So he yesterday, like an hour after that, said,

He felt bad, and I was like, oh, man, don't feel bad. I was just kidding, but I always want to do dumb voices. About an hour later, he said, I got something for you. I was like, really? He was like, can you do it today? And he said, you're opposite Sissy Spacek. I was like, are we going to Zoom together? And he went, no, you just record your lines, and we marry them to hers. But technically, I'll be in a scene with Sissy Spacek

Playing 70-year-old former governor of Texas, Governor Nielsen. Uh-huh. Not a real person. A lot of this is highly fictionalized. It's a fun podcast. It's not like they stick to the facts when they can, but it's an entertaining kind of thing. So if you've never listened to a scripted fictional show, give it a shot because I listened to a couple of episodes and it's super cool and...

You can hear me doing my best kind of old school Levon Helm accent. Can we hear it? Yeah, I guess we could play a clip. Yeah, let's do that. All right, here's a little clip of me, you guys. Finally!

Oh yeah?

Claire, remember when we had those sleepovers at your house? Sure. And your dad, he'd tell us these wild tales about mysteries the world had never known. Holy men who could levitate a tunnel on the Amazon lined with diamonds. The abominable snowman that he said roamed the roof of the world. He told those tales like he'd lived them, so I guess I thought he always had.

Way to go, Chuck. Thank you. He was an old Texas guy like that. Get off my claim, you varmint. Awesome. So where can you find this, Chuck? Where can you find this podcast that you're starring in?

I mean, anywhere you can get your podcast, I guess. That's right. Isn't that what they say? That's right. It's called Tom Slick Mystery Hunter, right? Yeah. Awesome. Well, Chuck said, yeah, I was just mentioning a podcast that he starred in and we've fallen backwards into listener mail. All right. I'm going to call this random fact because that's what Adam called it when he wrote in in the subject line. Hey, guys, on your Luddites episode, you mentioned some places like Lancaster, sure.

That's the origin of the term sheriff. I love this email. Sure, or shire, I guess. Just like in Lord of the Rings, County Reeve. So the county sheriff was originally the Shire Reeve and was shortened to Sheriff. All this info was bestowed upon me by a professor of criminal justice at Ole Miss University in the early 2000s. Go Rebels. I've been listening for several years. Look forward to every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Keep it cool, guys. That's from Adam.

All right. Thanks a lot, Adam. That's a great one. I'd never heard that before in my life, and now I know. And if you want to be like Adam and let us know something we never knew before in our lives but would be happy to know, please send it to us via email at stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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