Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeaten ed in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, this american life at org.
My grandfather melvin, a hardway st. Bottom on that, also sold model trains, and he had a huge and I mean huge train set in the basement of his house on pim gero that I loved. This thing was vast with tunnels and bridges and towns and street.
Is that lip and the train engine pull smoke as they scooted around the track on this big wouldn't platform in the basement, in the middle of all this epic amount of cotton and junk and his tools, and for some reason, a biograph machine, and in the corner of the basement with 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 unsettling, the 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.
I go bit.
yes. yeah.
To be sure I was getting the facts absolutely right on this thing. I called the last person of the family who might remember IT my a bit is at home. Yeah, do .
yes. Hello, hello, my name, business.
girlfriend I love together .
SHE doesn't SHE SHE wasn't about so .
is SHE in the house and he .
called you, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I guess you get in this. These are older people who do not want to be bothering to cross the house or yell from a room to room. Anyway, the story, the story, I am here to tell my grandfather, melvin, and his brothers and sisters.
Let me just give the family geography here. He's one of four kids. And for purposes of this particular story, you should imagine them into competing teams.
There are the two older kids, melvin and Darcy, and the two Younger kids, ray and calvin. Okay, elvin dvi ran calvin, it's one thousand nine hundred and sixty four, and their mom dies. Four kids are all in their forties and fifties at this point. And then just after he died.
what happened was ray came up fu florida.
and calvin .
and ray started taking things out of the house, the solar tea service. I remembred that he had a dining room, whatever he had of the value they took.
And there was china, right? Like the thing that I always heard is that there is china .
and silver ware. You wear things like that. They just came in like, like ords of locusts. And my father got nothing. And dorthy apparent, allegedly got nothing again.
The two other kids, melvin and Darcy IT, do Young to your kids govern. And ray took .
all the good stuff.
yeah. And Darcy, too right.
yeah. This, that explained me.
IT was apparently typical behavior for me.
Rain was always like when he was growing up this to say that at dinner SHE would take the biggest piece of meet.
yeah. yeah. And and then the way our bread is that like SHE takes the stuff, they fight about IT. And they never spoke to ray again.
No.
didn't talk to her, didn't talk about her.
But you know.
calvin will raise partner in the family highest. Calvin is a baby in the family, thirteen years Young to the next to his kid. And the way that I always heard IT, nobody heard this thing. It's calvin, because everybody knew. We just push him around and getting to do ever SHE wanted.
So calm was around.
Remember calvin calling around doing a magic ics for me, a charity, crab fees, said darthuil, to organized all for my childhood, but not great. IT really was like great. Never existed, was never spoken about offord. I am my sisters, matter only one time. Ban IT her own nephew, ban, or only matter once on a trip to miami after he was married.
And I called her and see if government came up, picked us up and took her. So fe army, which is a delhi restaurant.
and that was the .
only contact ever happens from my own life.
And then I remember when melvin died. Rain are coming to his funeral.
No.
and remember being so stand by that that a person could be in such a fight with their own sibling that they wouldn't shop with their funeral.
What happens all the time over and it's using over over.
I think this story really got to me when as a kid, and I first heard that, because IT was the very first gLance I had at the idea that you can destroy things completely, like, totally reckon, on a repair with somebody you know so well. I mean, I guess i'm lucky you know that I was in family with something like this would be so rare. But still, for me personally, that has been a hard life and hold on to when 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 the one would meet 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 therapies like I just couldn't accept.
I think we both couldn't accept that we just broken things between us. So bad way that there was no coming back from IT. I just I just didn't want to .
admit that which .
brings me to empty, empty. I didn't know this, but some mico workers with little kids at home, we're talking about how unsettling humpty dumpty is to some of those kids. Gara said that at the doctor's office there's a poster in their two year old side, and after that was like, someone can break and not go back together and then remembers IT when they were back to the office year later. There is some max is two and half.
Together.
you wanted to go back together.
This you .
want to fix.
Humpty dumpty, you cannot do IT.
We posted a thing on social media about this and got a ton of response from parents. Those kids were terrified. Humpty dumpty, once at a press o couldn't stand this year, crack eggs in the kitchen because IT reminded over the nursery rime.
Another said her two year roads spent weeks asking if he could recreate the story with an nag 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 want to talk about how to mess them up as kids. To picture humpty dump ty left there in pieces on the side of the road, sad walking on face, woman name isabela road. I wonder if he added to exist conscious and his crack state forever, if he would slowly die because he seemed to be still alive .
after IT cracked.
There's something about that image of someone broken. So bad with that nothing can fix IT. The things goes so wrong. The finality of that before, if you understand all the bad things that can happen in the world are things come apart and people you love can die.
You will die before you get to any the entropic messy caves of our world, which is black and toilets and its long ago trashed model trains, you get this glimpse, this, this bad cartoon, overdressed egg man smashed a tiny bits of shell and go today on our program, people hit a moment when things shadow apart. Now they make sense of IT and not go to pieces themselves. Be easy. chicago. This is american. Live on our glass.
Stay with us.
That one toy r us. Sometimes there's a really specific moment when things fall apart and you know exactly what the moment was, but you will have with no idea how or why IT happened or more important, how to put the thing back together. David kiss and found a family that happened to the father and son years ago, and the son has .
thought about IT ever sense the sun in this story. His name is Peter ocho. 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, you know, i've been sort of worrying about this.
I dreamed that I pulled into a store, ran inside to pick something up. And when I came outside, there is a guy standing there, and he had disassembled my entire car. And the pieces were just all over the parking lot.
And I really 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, okay, i'm the car and you are the guy.
I'm happy to be the guy. Let's take the car apart. The whole stories starts here. When Peter was a kid, his dad got a kind of dream job. This was in the late seventies.
When I was eleven, he got a job at the milton company.
like the toy company.
yeah. The toy company as a toy inventer.
Oh my god.
yeah. Well, that's what I thought too. I was in six grade, and this was a super street read to go in and saying, you know, my dad works of milton bradley.
E, because they were a big deal back hand, but they were a big deal, you know, for a hundred years. In fact, my dad moved into his cubicle and he was next to the guy who claimed to have invented shoots and ladders. So I don't think that's true, but the guy was old enough that it's possible .
the job is exciting for Peter's dad too. His dad do has been searching for a way to be successful and successful the thing he imagined happening all at once. He saw him self as an inventor.
And if he just had the right idea, the world would notice his ship would come in, actually read lot of books about ships and captains. Anyway, his previous attempted conquer world had not gone so well. He created these kind of cardboard models of famous landMarks that he tried to sell.
As kids 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. Know that that was our life for a few years, and then I just died. No, IT just died. And so he was struggling because he saw himself as an idea, a guy. And so when he got the chance to, you know, go to melton broadly and be a game designer or toy designer, I think IT was super excited.
The one bad thing about the job was that milton bradley was ninety miles from where they lived, the massage sets. So as dad just work there the whole week, only come home on the weekends.
I, you know, always in six 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 them. So friday is when he pulled in the driveway like I was eaten tic, 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 one thousand nine hundred and seventy seven. And in that box where circuit boards and wires, milton bradlee was making some of the first electronic games. Their big hit was Simon, basically an electronic version of, Simon says, a kind of chunky, frisby shape thing. 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 the back.
Okay, even back then, I was 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 are holding some objects from the future just to press the buttons and hear these kinds of sounds. For the first time, Peter in 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, know, this little circuit board was playing the game of Simon, I would get in there with a screw driver pulled out, and then start playing around with them. And like changing the resister here, there you could make IT speed up. And suddenly I 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 kids together, which could get kind of tense. Is that would like to follow instructions, Peter? Not so much. They 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 ninfa battery, the electricity flowing through IT would make you glow like the filament in a light bub. But more than anything, that was a way, 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 world tub.
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 bunches of circuit boards for different things, including assignment circuit t board. And I remember pulling IT out and connecting up with some batteries, and, you know, just tinkering around with IT, playing around with IT ends.
Then I remember this looking at the lights and thinking, like, well, let me on sort of the lights and see if a motor will work there, because we had these little hobby motor's lying around. So I took off, you know, the four lights, and then I connected two motor's so where two of the lights had been, and tried IT again, and the motor spon when the lights would have lit up the motor's spon. And I was, like that.
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 name.
There was a mode in the Simon game, or you could tell IT which lights you wanted. You could program the pattern yourself. So is like what you could program. Left motor. It's like a .
programme mobile car, a programmable car. You could punch some buttons on IT. You wanted IT to drive forward, turn right, drive some more, turn left. And I would go and do IT.
My dad came back on the following friday, and I was excited to show them, you know, this little thing i'd built. And he took a look at IT. 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 to work, and millton bradley started to develop IT as an actual toy, with Peters dad leading the team. His dad was updated when he got home, like our little thing is still moving forward. And as he got further along, he'd bring home these kind of handmade prototypes of IT, the toy that was taking form, or sort of a tank dump truck kind of thing. You could programme IT to Carry something to a place and drop IT off on a zone. I remember .
one problem. The head was the, they couldn't get the train to go perfectly straight. I remember my dad, you having this eureka moment, you know, one day and being like, oh, and he put two magnets, uh, opposing each other on the end 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 motor's moving in exactly the same speed.
IT was brilliant. You know, he had like those little Victories. Imagine that over a nine months, you period where you just keep figuring that out and then IT works and then it's successful.
This is big track, the computer activity track from mb electronics programme, enough to sixteen commands. And big track will advance, turn and fire live lasts.
Milton bradley, lots of them, quite a few in glenside pencil, ana, where I I remember them popping up in friend's houses after Christmas. And those ads were all over TV big track rolling across the floor in the suburban living room, delivering an .
apple to dad from electronics transport separately sales.
best investment. I was able to find forty million dollars.
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 as he started to realize how much money the company was gonna make from this toy because .
this was his ship that was supposed to come in.
I think he saw 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, and he was never satisfied with where he was in life, I think he would have been really happy if he'd been a doctor, her 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 the end IT would be the company's success, not his. The toy was a big hit, but I wasn't going to make his dad rich. Peter would over hear 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 a milton broadly for taking his idea use employee. So the company owned everything he created, which is pretty much toward to any company.
But at some point, Peter dad talks to a lawyer, and one of the things he says to the lawyer is, hey, you know, the whole idea for a big track. I didn't come up with that. I actually came from my son, from Peter, who was not a million bradlee employee.
Then the lawyer says to him, well, you know, a kid can see a CoOperation.
A kid consumer CoOperation.
a kid consumer CoOperation. And I know this because my mom had had kept diaries her whole life, and I found the diary from the time, uh, this was all happening. And he had just noted in their, Steve says a lawyer said a kid consume corporation that .
is how the lawsuit Peter occa thirteen year old boy versus the milton bravely company came to be.
The basis for the lawsuit was that if Peter of the kid had come up with the initial idea for this million, million dollar toy and he was old, royalties could be a lot of money. Ask Peter for the prospect of being a kid showing a giant corporation felt scary he said, not really, though maybe I should have he said he felt thrilling, kind of 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. Um and you know you guys won't have to pay the anything but the court costs or the zero ocs costs. So at this point, my dad is eaten tic. Um and we're both esthetic like i'm now playing a really important role in the both of us getting what's do 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 we had one teenage with get you know just about .
to go in a high school um and suddenly you know I have to take time off from school to go meet with lawyers you know and give a deposition and 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 sa of IT two .
years would buy a preparation legal back and forth and finally the court data proceed. Peter and his dad would take long walks around the block with the dog, both kind of excited by at all going over the story he would tell in court and then there was one night, the night Peter thought about and puzzled. Over three years we .
have 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 IT had to move in the 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 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 as dad, trying to get money through, even though kind of was IT would also help protecting the money they want. 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 spend a lot of time on and energy trying to upset each other yeah, 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 plaintive in this lawsuit, you know, we all sit down to dinner soon after that, a agreement my mom no signed, and we're sitting around the table, you know, to three of us, to 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 families.
It's really yours. And I think SHE knew exactly what he was saying. He was seen absolutely using IT to get under my dead skin.
And you know, my dad was not a drinker, but if he had a beer too, 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, yet, dad, maybe i'll share the money with you if I win, but you 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 won't seen IT because he kind of a took a breath.
He said, you know, the real truth, Peter, is that I invented big track, not you. I just told you you did that so that we could bring this lawsuit. And I just remember the bottom falling out. and. You I don't know, it's at that moment to be. I think I was fourteen and how my dad look at me and save that IT was amazing how easy IT was for me to question everything and just feel like everything that had made 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 locking 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 truck?
Like maybe what he remembered was him trying to copy the thing as dad was doing? Also, at this point, this was a family story that had told many times. Maybe IT has grown in the telling, and the telling had created its own version in his head hit all .
these doubts. You know, i'm not a with kid. You know, this is I i've been you used. I don't know I it's really hard for me to talk about I I guess what I felt at the moment was outraged because I believe that I had done IT but also, at the same exact moment, tremendous doubt.
I 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 washed her to say. Instead, SHE got super vague and she's like, you know.
I don't know what happened. The critic got closer and closer. His dad said this confusing and upsetting thing. Peter didn't know what to make of IT, and he was all alone. With that.
the hardest st part about IT was there was no third party grown up to weigh in and helped 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 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. No, he was able to see the company and we were gonna 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. So I is truly evil.
Peter says the whole trial, he wasn't really wonderful ing if they would win. He's 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 I was the part of him that believed IT wearing the oath. He told the story.
He remembred to that moment in a little workroom at home, his lawyer had him take apart assignment with a screwdriver on the stand, pull out the circuit board, which seem to impress the jury is 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 melton railway.
Uh, it's a data mass. A sixteen year old high school boy from brookline claims the toymaker milton bradley company owes him royalties for a robot. Tankee claims he invented when he was twelve.
Oh my god, that's you. That's me. Okay, now read the other headline.
Royalties denied the boy who claims toy his idea. A sixteen year old high school student who claim ed, he invented a toy robot tank at the age of twelve, has lost his bid for two million in royalties from milton gradi company. A north, a superior court jury decided there was no valid written contract between the toymaker. And Peter ocho, son of Stephen occa, who worked until one hundred and seventy eight, is a senior game designer for milton bradley.
So you guys lost.
We did.
What do you remember about that day?
Dark day literally was raining.
After the verdict came down, they went out the back of the courthouse to avoid the press. Three of them, mom, dad and him, there is a phone booth on the way out.
And my dad, because he couldn't wait, stepped in the one and called his mom and and then he came out, and we all just gotten the car. We drove home and we pulled into the driveway, and we got out of the car in my dad just kind of walk to the porch and he SAT down on the steps and he just burst into tears and i'd never really seen him cry .
before um and .
you know IT was IT was hard but I do remember feeling a weight lifted not not just that the trial was over and we didn't have to worry about that, but that all the stuff that is swelled 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 U. S. Legal system.
But losing this case, IT, made their lives Better. Peter has losing. Save them from being the worst versions of themselves.
Freedom from something bad. And like three programmable cars, everyone was on a new trajectory. His dad turned left his moment, right? They got divorce. Peter finished high school and moved away to college.
His dad began a whole new life after that, where you see much more at peace if you married, got a degree in education, worked with kids and legos, inventing stuff. At that moment, IT really broke something. Peter says there was always a hint of competition ess between him and his dad.
He would come up when they talked about where you might go to college, was his school Better than his dad or when he was little? When they're rough out, they both kind of wanted to win. There is a tinge of aggression to IT, he says. And that night at dinner, if I get flipped some switch between them, those moments they used to have hanging around in the workroom, happily tinkering together, those are gone. And I was left was a feeling that they were not exactly on the same team anymore IT 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, I get a new job or whatever.
I would hesitate telling my dad, because IT almost seemed to wounded 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 was hard to see as a kid, hard to feel that 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 coworkers testify that that they'd come to work and said as much. And there was a thing that as a family, they had talked about before the lawsuit, that this little idea ahead was being turned into an actual toy, and how cool that was. But that night at dinner, I was a hard fact for his father had 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 past, Peter had kids his dad would come visit. Really enjoyed being a grandfather.
I 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 a lot. And the the few times I would bring IT up, he would just, he would just black. 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 .
my feels that you know he did something that he was ashamed of and just couldn't talk .
about that piece of IT. The losses t 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 I, we had a great visit, and I took him to lax, and I was back when you could go to the gate with people, and I went to the gate with him, him when we're sitting at the gate, and I hear this voice across the room. And it's the attorney for men. Bradley.
no.
and he's standing there with a Younger woman. I'm assuming his daughter and my dad just tenses up cause he sees IT and I see IT and I 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 is like, oh, Peter, how are you and I say, you know, oh um i'm fine.
My dads 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 mention, you know, I live in los Angeles and he says, yeah, no. My daughters out here now and because I always knew you'd a success, Peter, that's wonderful and you know, my dad said, yeah, i'm really proud of him and you, then we just need to say goodbye. And we SAT down, and the attorney got called to first class, went on board, and then we SAT there and didn't really say much. And then my dad got called on to coaching off you went. And that was see to one of the last time I saw on.
The early is no inversion of the humpty dumpty. Rm, it's not the same as the one, you know, may have been a little about nag or IT may have been a poem about a person IT went like this, humpty dumpty, sad on the wall. Humpty dumpty had a grade 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 put a broken thing back together is just going to be different.
They have a customer as a senior and editor coming up. A man, not an egg e falls off a very high wall and he does not look around for other king's horses or a kingsman. Imagine that that's in a minute in chicago bbb, a radio when our program continues.
This american life from her class, today's program, all the king's horses, about things broken so badly they can help people back together. We have arrived in at two of our program act to the ninety five, this next series, about somebody examining something very broken, something documented at list assembled by the committee to protect journalists of journalists who have been killed in the israel hamas war. It's the largest number of journalists who died in any conflict since they started calling. This gives each person's name, where they worked, circumstances of their death, sometimes a few more details. But how often that's all reporter did in blue is been reading about the people on the list, watching their work, talking to their colleagues, trying to be together, who they were, and also, as they died here, SHE is, I first started .
noticing the journalist dying on instagram. I'm a journalist. I, B. And ever reported on warm. 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 ninety five 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 are not allowing foreign journalists in together, 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 list for a moment and give you a glimpse of who they were and the work they made. I'll start with sati month.
ID sdi was the director about code news network, and he posted a twenty two second video on november, a team that was a report from the war. But he also gave me a picture into his marriage. Sad is wearing his press best and looks exhausted.
He's explaining that sell service and the internet keep getting cut off, and it's often impossible to texter call anyone, including his wife. So they've resorted using hand and letters to communicate while he's out reporting, sending them back and forth with neighbors or colleagues. Pham, and was certainly he.
He ends the video with a picture of one of these letters from his wife and 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.
My god, forgive you. Come home tomorrow and eat with us. You want me to make you come up or may be up to bring your friends with you is okay and give hazier the battery to charge.
What do you think about me sending your hand and letters with messenger pigeons from now on? Ha, ha, ha, i'm just kidding. I wanna crs at you, but we're living in a war.
Too bad. Okay, I love you. bye. A few hours after he shared that letter, sadi and his coworker has soon as city more at saddle's home.
When they were killed by israeli air strike that hit his house. His wife and kids weren't there, survived. Gaza, tiny, and the journalist community is really close.
Reading the list, you can see all the connections between people like with bohem laughing. But hem was a photo journalist, one of the first journalist to die. He was killed while reporting on october seven.
He was just twenty one, still new to journalism on his instagram. You can see that in his post 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 the hem from his co worker. Rushy said rush in this photo, but him staring intently at the back of a camera has faced little up by the light from the view fighter.
He looks so Young. The caption reads, my assistant is gone, but a hum is gone. Brushed 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 about him.
I read the tribute post to him too. I saw this over and over again, journalist posting tributes, who are then killed themselves soon after, and attribute 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 would become aware that they could be making their last reports they'd said at the beginning of their videos.
And those were the hardest to watch, specially when I was true. One video like that was posted by iat huda, idt, was a freeLanced journalist in video blogger. Her videos before the war covered a wide range, from what I can tell, interviews about women in politics.
He appeared in a commercial for catch player chips. SHE clearly likes being in front of the camera. Once the war started, I had pivoted to covering bombings and food shortages.
On november twenty, SHE posted a video report from her home. You can hear the air strikes hitting very close to where he is. It's scary.
SHE saying, this is likely my last video today. The occupation forces dropped Foster s bombs on bitter hia area and frightening sound bombs. They drop letters from the sky, ordering everyone to evacuate.
Everyone ran into the streets in the crazy st way. No one knows where to go. I. can.
Buy 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 what the action will have, and which had actin would have, oh yeah, we have a and then SHE begins to cry in 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 I, D, F, the israeli military investigations by the washington post on orders. Human rights watch and the united nations have also raised serious questions in these three cases, and the committee to protect journalists is investigating ten other killings. When we reached out to the idea for comments, they said, quotes. The idea has never and will never deliberately target journalists. That's the answer they always given .
these situations.
Meanwhile, dozens of season reporters have fled gaza. Journalists who worked for all genera, the BBC, the york times, the washington post, voters, a. John's from press.
So many media offices were demolished in israeli air strikes at the committee to protect ourn's sts. Stop 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 I, sam abdulla, because i'd cross passed with him once. I son was a lebanese journalist, a video journalist for orders for many, many years. He had just won in award for coverage of ukraine.
I'm leones and still report there sometimes. And i'd worked with, I am. A couple of summer ago, he helped to me film the sort of random story in beirut.
I was interviewing this entrepreneur who had started a firm 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 shoots right after we said cut and started to rap.
I some started this whole bit about being in his late thirties, reconsidering his own sperm quality and everything. He now realized he was doing to hurt IT. No one could stop laughing.
He was a really good day that felt good to remember and to remember him that way. I son was killed by the idea on october thirteen. 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 on israel border with a small group of other journalists. Everyone who was wearing press vests with cameras out. They were covering the huzza 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's geting. The journalists multiple investigations, including by rodders, the united nations, m ney international and the A.
F P, found no evidence of any firing from the location of the journalist before the of shot at them. The journalists in the group and video footage confirmed that there was no military activity near them. Had only met I, sam 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 I still felt so random and unfair that he would be struck down like that following the rules, wearing his press best and helmet in 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 is iconic reporter. Shooting a bowley would been killed by the idea.
When I first saw that post october, I thought, how ironic, because a week later I saw also was killed by the df. 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 color who was rambling on for too long, a tweet from reporter I love the love 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 gu is journalists and documentary film ker. Her story was produced I am wool.
I see to for.
的 树干。
The song is by ginna cool palestinian musician. It's got recording idle one, actually a great fall. Okay, there are a lots of ways to break something. Skateboarding is pretty good one. David cason, who of us you heard earlier in the show, has been obsessed with this one short video of the skate border that keeps watching over and over.
The skate water stands at the top of a RAM. The wall of the rap goes straight down at first, then curves into a flat section, then up begin on the other side, is like an enormous you. You could easily break something from that height.
He leaned forward, its thirteen and a half feedback. One of the number you should know, fifty two beat oli, is, in this video, fifty two years old. It's tony hawk trying to land a track that used to do all the time when he was Younger, 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 A skateboard kid. They're too cool for me. I know tony hawk is like the most famous skateboard in the world, but i've only gotta indu m now that he's over fifty and social media, he rates these funny little scenes from his life, like this one kid at gate park.
Are you tony hawk me? I am him near nine. Okay, i'm not.
But are you for real? I am for real. I thought you would look Younger. Me too.
So the trick is trying to do in this video is called an only five forty. Basically you go down the rap, up the other side of the you, and down again that a couple times until you get enough hate, then through some kind of magic IT like fifteen feet in the air, you spend 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 in the board just rotating IT exactly the same speed. And then somehow you try to land on your skate board without breaking any bones. Hip, I think he says there he's written that the trick has gotten scarier as he's gotten over there 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 things I like about this video is is basically a collection of failures over and over. It's edited so you can 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 area and takes that a camera there, that film.
在。 I broke everything shy. Grin, he jack, to see if his finger is okay. Cut to tony hawk at the top of the ramp again, deep breath skate board, over the void again, plunges down up the other side, down, up into the air around any lens IT. Let's the board .
go flying.
cover his face with his hands, drops to his knees and says this. My kind of sad, he says one of the film crew of fish bombs in. I think perfect.
I'm like a lot and all sad. Yeah, that I never had much finality to anything, but that definitely was last one I ever do. You have been made IT.
Thank you guys hanging in there with me. The title of the video when I got posted was tony hawk. Lens is last ever only five, forty, aged fifty two.
I tear up every time I watched this, in part because we're basically the same age. He's one year older. Something happens when you're around fifty.
You can't do things you used to do. Stuff hurts. I used to love to run, really love IT. I can't anymore for ney surgeries.
And walking around, I noticed things I didn't use to so many people with little hitches in their steps, working around some bit of pain in a knee, hip and reach 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 just say this. A friend told me recently about a doctor who gone to work in a small town ended up treating lot of older people.
And he noticed that the way I would go with that, first one thing would go wrong, you'd fix IT. Then a different thing would go wrong, mean, fix that. Then two things would go wrong at once, and then another, eventually enough things would break that at the end. He also said something else, that's the good version. He said, that's the one you are on, one where you get to keep going long enough that all the parts break.
David cast beam is still making radio stories at fifty four tony hug. A year after that, video broke his fear after the surgeries, he's to escape putting.
Problem was booed today by fee band in a lily sulfate, and I did by gar cheskin, the people put together on saturday, and could be out of women Christians. So a change on home, Michael, comedy with config. Haley, I really we and cater my mondo, not sophya.
Romi was a ship, Christa of gum, R. C. Robber's texter materia. And that are managing A A senior ads. Executive editor is a main al berry. Sam geller wrote the song that you're hearing right now for this episode. Special thanks today.
This is a reef monster which apple of hua elsie ma ha Carry law, clan law, Howard palter, Randy murray, glass James and the second, and everybody who wrote to us about humpty dumpty trauma, including and master brand and shift with sky went hold. Kelly gardner, yc, july Davidson and isabela gour, our website, this american lived out org, we can stream over eight hundred episodes of our show for absolutely free. This american life is still over to local public radio stations by P R.
X, the public radio exchange that your programs cofounder, MMA. He has started seeing my name so much like at the end of every sentencing, he says, I am toy people do not usually talk to each other. This, he said.
what happens all the time?
I have a class back next week. More stories of this american life.
I can to say 的 西北。