282 Hypersonic Trivia

Bob Smith 0:00
What did Marvel Comics Stan Lee and Dr Seuss collaborate on,

Marcia Smith 0:05
And how much time in an average lifetime does an American spend watching TV? Whoa,

Bob Smith 0:11
answers to those and other questions coming up in this episode of the off ramp with Bob

Marcia Smith 0:16
and me. Marsha,

Bob Smith 0:17
Oh, gosh.

Marcia Smith 0:18
Smith,

Bob Smith 0:20
Oh dear.

Marcia Smith 0:20
Gonna be one of those days.

Bob Smith 0:22
Is this gonna be one of those episodes? Okay?

Bob Smith 0:40
Welcome to The Off Ramp, a chance to slow down, steer clear of crazy and take a side road to sanity with fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia. It’s the podcast for lifelong learners, and we are lifelong learners. Marcia, what did Marvel Comics Stan Lee and Dr Seuss collaborate on, was it a movie?

Marcia Smith 1:01
Well, they collaborated on a number of things.

Bob Smith 1:04
One was a movie.

Marcia Smith 1:05
One was a movie with, was it like with the Grinch?

Bob Smith 1:08
No.

Marcia Smith 1:10
Was it a live action film? Or was it, it was animated?

Bob Smith 1:15
Training films,

Marcia Smith 1:16
Ttraining?

Bob Smith 1:17
Yes. Training films, training back into the 1940s

Marcia Smith 1:21
Really! Training films for the army.

Marcia Smith 1:24
That’s right,

Bob Smith 1:25
They were both classified as playwrights with the second Corps training film division. That’s something, and they collaborated on US military training films during the Second World War. Now, Stan Lee was already a comic book writer, but he would achieve success post war with Marvel Comics, and Theodore Geisel had already published two moderately successful Dr Seuss books, but would have huge success in 1957 with the Cat in the Hat and the government put them to work for the war effort. And they wrote training films, film scripts, and did posters and instructional materials.

Marcia Smith 1:56
Well, very good.

Bob Smith 1:57
And you can find online some comic snafu animated training films that Dr Seuss wrote and Warner Brothers produced. They looked and sound just like Looney Tunes, complete with Mel Blanc’s character voices, but they were humorous films about serious subjects like censorship and espionage.

Marcia Smith 2:15
Oddly enough, at the end, my quote is from Dr Seuss.

Bob Smith 2:18
Oh, really,

Marcia Smith 2:19
Yeah.

Bob Smith 2:19
Okay.

Marcia Smith 2:19
So that’s an interesting overlap today, okay, Bob, how much time in an average American life do we spend watching TV?

Bob Smith 2:28
TV? How much time this is over a period of our entire lifetimes?

Marcia Smith 2:32
Like I think they did, 80 years now,

Bob Smith 2:35
80 years of a lifespan. Okay? So I would say I’m just going to make it a small portion, hopefully. God help us, please, maybe a year at the most of watching television in an 80 year lifespan. What is it?

Marcia Smith 2:48
You’re not gonna like this?

Bob Smith 2:49
No, no, what?

Marcia Smith 2:51
11 years.

Bob Smith 2:52
11 years of your life. If you turn 80, you’ve watched television 11 years,

Marcia Smith 2:57
4000 days, roughly, that’s, the average American spends up to four hours a night, seven days a week. That can really add up if you live to 80. But that’s it. That’s 11 years of watching TV.

Bob Smith 3:13
Where did that come from?

Marcia Smith 3:14
Interesting facts

Bob Smith 3:16
that website, huh?

Marcia Smith 3:17
Yeah, yeah.

Bob Smith 3:17
Gee. I wonder now, if we talk just about screens, would those numbers grow way up with people with, you know, laptops and cell phones,

Marcia Smith 3:25
And especially kids, how much time they spend on a screen. It’s probably disgusting,

Bob Smith 3:30
And book screens, you know.

Marcia Smith 3:31
Yeah, kind of pay the price for that, I’m afraid.

Bob Smith 3:34
Well, I was talking about Stan Lee and Theodore Geisel. Do you know they were members of an eight man creative team, and three of their colleagues were already famous.

Marcia Smith 3:45
Oh yeah, and they were –

Bob Smith 3:47
They were William Saroyan, the short story writer and playwright he’d already won a Pulitzer Prize. Charles Adams, artist, who was drawing cartoons, including Adams Family cartoons for the New Yorker.

Marcia Smith 3:58
Well, that’s quite a group.

Bob Smith 3:59
And Frank Capra, filmmaker,

Marcia Smith 4:02
Wow.

Bob Smith 4:02
Oscar winner.

Marcia Smith 4:03
The army had all these people in one group?

Bob Smith 4:05
Yeah, Frank Capra, who had already directed, It Happened One Night. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and there are three other creatives. We’ll talk about them in a moment.

Bob Smith 4:06
All right, Bob, have you ever heard of the dung hung library?

Marcia Smith 4:17
The dung hung library?

Marcia Smith 4:19
D u n, h, u A N, G,.

Bob Smith 4:21
Dung Hwang, proably.

Marcia Smith 4:22
Okay. It’s in China, and it’s famous for something, and apparently you don’t know what?

Bob Smith 4:28
Okay, no, I haven’t heard of that, right? Where would that be?

Marcia Smith 4:30
In China, somewhere.

Bob Smith 4:31
What is it? Is was a little library of what? Any kind of clue?

Marcia Smith 4:35
Yeah.

Bob Smith 4:35
Any Stan Lee comics there?

Marcia Smith 4:38
No, no. Stan Lee.

Bob Smith 4:39
Any Dr. Seuss?

Marcia Smith 4:41
Let it go.

Bob Smith 4:41
Okay.

Marcia Smith 4:42
It’s also known as the library cave. You ever hear that.

Bob Smith 4:46
No library cave.

Marcia Smith 4:48
Me either? It refers to a hidden chamber within the magayo Caves near Dong hang China that contained, if you can believe it, a vast collection of ancient manuscripts. It was discovered in 1900 and held over 40,000 documents, scrolls and artworks offering invaluable insights into the Silk Roads, religious, cultural and economic exchanges.

Bob Smith 5:15
Wow. It’s kind of the Asian version of the Dead Sea Scroll.

Marcia Smith 5:17
Yeah. It’s just crazy. The cave was sealed for centuries and was rediscovered by a Taoist monk named Wang Yang Lu who was attempting to restore the caves. And he went, Oh, wait, what’s this? How old were some of the documents? Did they? The manuscripts written in many, many languages, provided invaluable insights into the religious, cultural and economic life in the region from the fifth to the 11th century. CE, wow. Can you believe that?

Bob Smith 5:45
Isn’t it great when they come up with treasure chests of things like this? Yes, so they probably are still studying this stuff, right?

Marcia Smith 5:51
Fifth to the 11th centuries. Holy commodity. Yes, what? 600 years? That’s crazy.

Bob Smith 5:58
Anything more about these documents?

Marcia Smith 5:59
No, oh, oh, I just thought you’d like to know, Bob, what do you want to know?

Bob Smith 6:06
Were they just things merchants would have, you know, like, like, invoices or something?

Marcia Smith 6:07
No, no. They were something sealed in the cave to be found probably in the future. But that was, that was discovered in 1900.

Marcia Smith 6:07
You’d think we would have heardabout so it’s kind of like a big time capsule, this cave, yeah, I wonder why we haven’t heard about that much.

Marcia Smith 6:24
Maybe we don’t read enough.

Bob Smith 6:28
I spoke of the Addams Family. You remember that?

Marcia Smith 6:30
I do remember the TV show

Bob Smith 6:32
The Addams Family, yes. How many years was that on TV?

Marcia Smith 6:35
I don’t know.

Bob Smith 6:36
You still see reruns of it.

Marcia Smith 6:38
Yeah, I don’t think I ever really watched it, but it seemed to be around for three years,

Bob Smith 6:42
No only two. Two years, it’s amazing. And ABC hosted it as the Addams Family and The Munsters came out the same time. The interesting thing was, The Munsters had a little advantage on the Addams Family, because The Munsters was done by Universal Studios, and they had the rights to Frankenstein ,Dracula. So that’s why they dressed all their characters to look like Frankenstein Dracula, etc.

Marcia Smith 7:06
I never thought about that.

Bob Smith 7:07
But the Addams Family, they were based on the characters that Charles Addams drew in his cartoons for The New Yorker, and they didn’t have any names when the show started.

Marcia Smith 7:16
Was Morticia one?

Bob Smith 7:17
Yeah, and the New Yorker magazine refused to run any Addams Family cartoons when the TV show started, because they didn’t want to be associated with it. Weird.

Marcia Smith 7:28
So snobby.

Bob Smith 7:31
So I’ve got like, four or five characteristics about this Addams Family show that are interesting. There were three actors from old Hollywood who are regulars on the show. Morticia? You mentioned her name. That was the mother. Who played Morticia? Do you remember?

Marcia Smith 7:46
Carolyn Jones?

Bob Smith 7:47
Carolyn Jones, yes. She was an Oscar nominated actress.

Marcia Smith 7:50
I remember that

Bob Smith 7:51
Jackie Coogan, who was a child actor in the 20s,

Marcia Smith 7:54
Played the thing?

Bob Smith 7:55
Uncle festers, what he plays. And then guess who played granny Frump. She was the mother of Morticia, her seldom seen Mother,

Marcia Smith 8:03
I don’t know. I was gonna say is that the woman in the Waltons?

Bob Smith 8:07
No, no.

Marcia Smith 8:08
I don’t know. Margaret Hamilton?

Bob Smith 8:11
Yes, she played the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. She was on the Addams Family. Also, here’s a very sad part of the story. The actors only received residuals for five episodes, just five reruns, and that’s it. That was the law back then. They didn’t have to pay them for anything more than that, so they received nothing for more than 50 Years of reruns. But the laws have changed since then. Okay, amazing.

Marcia Smith 8:35
Yeah, that’s That’s so sad. Okay, Bob, what causes the sound of thunder?

Bob Smith 8:41
The compression and decompression of the air in the sky from what?

Marcia Smith 8:46
From lightning?

Bob Smith 8:47
Basically, that is correct. It’s shock waves.

Marcia Smith 8:49
Yeah, it kind of expands the air and contracts it from the ligntning?

Bob Smith 8:53
Yeah.

Marcia Smith 8:53
Like, would it be comparable to, say, a sonic boom?

Bob Smith 8:56
Yeah. Shock waves.

Marcia Smith 8:57
Thunder is the loud sound produced by lightning When Lightning Strikes, it heats the air around it to extremely high temperatures, causing the air to expand rapidly, and that creates a shock wave. This shock wave travels through the atmosphere, and we perceive it as the sound of thunder, also other notes. Thunder travels around 1120 feet per second, or one mile every five seconds.

Bob Smith 9:25
Jeez, that’s fast.

Marcia Smith 9:26
That’s why you can count to five after you see lightning, before you hear thunder. And at any given moment on Earth Bob, there are approximately 2000 thunderstorms.

Bob Smith 9:37
So 2000 times lightning is happening minimum, right? Because if it’s a thunderstorm, there’s lightning and, yeah, okay, all right. Marcia, what was the origin of the term Underground Railroad?

Marcia Smith 9:49
What was the origin of that?

Bob Smith 9:50
Yeah, how did it come about?

Marcia Smith 9:52
Oh, gosh, well, I thought it was because they had to wait to be picked up. They kind of went into little. Caves or something.

Bob Smith 10:01
Well, there was a person who came up with it, and there was an incident surrounding it. It’s widely believed that the term originated in 1831, and that was linked to a man named Tice Davids. He was a slave, and he was from Kentucky. He escaped across the Ohio River to freedom. He swam to the Ohio shore near Ripley, Ohio, followed by his enslaver in a boat.

Marcia Smith 10:24
Oh, you’re kidding.

Bob Smith 10:25
Yeah.

Marcia Smith 10:25
He out swam the boat?

Bob Smith 10:27
He out swam the boat. His name, again, was Tice Davids. When Davids vanished from sight, the frustrated slave owner reportedly shouted He must have gone off on an underground railroad. That offhand remark that may have sparked the metaphor. Some people also credit another person with it, an abolitionist. Oh, yeah. And I went back to artificial intelligence and said 1831 that’s pretty early for the railroads in Ohio. The railroads didn’t come to Ohio until 1836 but it was considered a high tech term, railroads. It was new technology. So this is like some magical thing made this guy disappear, some kind of underground railroad.

Marcia Smith 11:06
So how did he disappear?

Bob Smith 11:08
Disappeared in the bushes.

Marcia Smith 11:09
Oh, he just ran, yeah.

Bob Smith 11:10
He ran away. Yeah. Okay, so that led to railroad code words being used. And you know, what were some of those code words, no stations or depots. Those were hiding places on the Underground Railroad. Station masters were people who hid slaves in their homes. Conductors. They were guides along the way, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, agents were sympathizers. These are all terms that escaped slaves used. Slaves. They were called passengers, cargo, fleece or freight tickets indicated slaves were en route, traveling on the railroad. Stockholders were financial supporters who donated to the railroad. And the routes of the railroad were called tracks or freedom trails, and the destination, usually Canada or Northern free states, were called the terminal heaven or the promised land. But those were all code words actually used railroad code words used to hide what was going on. So that’s why the Underground Railroad became a big term. It was not just that term alone. It was all these sub terms that led to the railroads. And there were four main routes. Can you tell me where they were?

Marcia Smith 12:16
No Well, one went to Canada, one went to Chicago, one went to New York. No one

Bob Smith 12:22
went to Canada. You’re right north along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to the northern United States and Canada, South to Florida, and then to the Bahamas, really. So there were people in the Bahamas had ships, and they would take them, Oh, that’s nice. Then west along the Gulf of Mexico into the country of Mexico, and then east along the eastern seaboard into Canada. So there were four main routes. They zigzag. So two went into Canada, right? Mexico, and the other one went down to was the most popular, Bahamas. Well, Canada, of course, I think the one that went up along the rivers was the one because it was easiest to follow. Yeah, makes sense.

Marcia Smith 12:58
All right, Bob, it is time for AKA, also known as, all right, your favorite card game, and the category today is types of birds. Got it? Okay? So if I say Batman sidekick, what bird Am I talking

Bob Smith 13:16
Well, that’s Robin. Of course, that’s correct. This is easy. You got the idea so that don’t ever say

Marcia Smith 13:22
because you’re down the toilet. That’s right. Okay, all right. Next word, gulp,

Bob Smith 13:25
gulp, swallow, a swallow. Yes.

Marcia Smith 13:30
Captain Jack. Captain Jack. What bird am I talking about? Jack the Jack Daniels bird,

Bob Smith 13:36
Jack Sparrow. That’s it. Okay,

Marcia Smith 13:39
the sparrow is a bird. All right. Take cover. Take cover. What? Bird, yeah, so what are you doing when you take cover, you’re crouching down, yeah,

Bob Smith 13:49
or burrowing into the ground. Duck, oh, ducking. Duck, I see take cover. Duck, okay, okay,

Marcia Smith 13:54
all right. Am I gonna get sound effects with Okay? Next one, yes, crazy,

Bob Smith 14:01
crazy. I don’t know what’s that one? Cuckoo.

Marcia Smith 14:06
Oh, cuckoo bird. Okay, okay, poke someone’s butt.

Bob Smith 14:10
Poke someone’s butt, uh huh. What would that be?

Marcia Smith 14:13
Well, I don’t know. I think it’s more of a pinch. Would that help you?

Bob Smith 14:17
No, it’s goose. Oh, geez. Oh my goodness,

Marcia Smith 14:21
somebody. And lastly, three strikes in bowling, also known as a

Bob Smith 14:27
strike spares and full frames, and you got three strikes in a row that was called, I can’t remember. It’s called a turkey. No, I didn’t know that. You did. No, never knew that your dad was such a bowler. Well, he probably did, because he bowled in a league. But any place I’ve been, Turkey is not a good thing, so I don’t associate

Marcia Smith 14:46
it. Well, it’s good in bowling, baby. Okay, all right, I recently

Bob Smith 14:49
saw a rosebud sled from the movie Citizen Kane on the heritage auction site. And I thought, really, that was strange, because, you know, we saw a rosebud sled in the Academy of Motion Pictures Museum in Los. Angeles in 2024 well, how many sleds you think they made as props for that film? Oh, 4555, prop sleds. Three were balsa wood sleds, and they were made for the climactic burning scene, that’s when all of Charles Foster Kane’s materials were being thrown into a fire. Those were lightweight, designed to ignite quickly. On camera, two were burned. They didn’t burn. The third one, it survived. And that was purchased in 1982 by Steven Spielberg for 60,500 words, and he gave it to the museum. That’s the one we saw. Oh, okay. 14 years later, a second sled emerged. It was a pine wood sled that was used early in the film when young Charles Foster Kane is playing in the snow in early 1942 a 12 year old boy Arthur Bauer won that sled in an Archeo pictures contest, and he kept it for 50 years, and when he sold it in 1996 at Christie’s, he got $233,500 for it, a pine wood sled. Not how much? $233,500 Yeah. Wow. And then a third sled. This is the one that just went up for sale by heritage. This is also a pine wood sled, turns out, that’s been in the hands of director Joe Dante, who did Gremlins and some of the other films for more than 40 years. He was filming on the RKO lot, and a crew member offered him this old sled that was headed for disposal, and he recognized what it was. Oh, my so that’s the fate of the five sleds that were done for citizen. Kane. Let’s take a break. Okay, you’re listening to the off ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith. We’ll be back in just a moment. We’re back with more questions. We do this each week for the Cedarburg Public Library Cedarburg, Wisconsin, and then we put it on podcast platforms where it is heard all over the world. Yes, it is. All right, what you got there? Marsh. All

Marcia Smith 16:50
right. So when do you think the first elevator was invented?

Bob Smith 16:55
Well, the first electrical elevator, or just the first elevator, just the first that was probably back in Greek or Chinese times. I thought it was a Greek invention. Ah, all right. What’s the answer?

Marcia Smith 17:06
Yeah, you’re right.

Bob Smith 17:09
Okay, but what’s the year

Marcia Smith 17:10
202 36 BC? That

Bob Smith 17:13
was when the first patent for an elevator was issued. No, it’s just and

Marcia Smith 17:18
it went into 36 BC, yeah. Greek mathematician Archimedes, is that how you say yeah? Archimedes, yeah. He invented the elevator. According to writings from the ancient Roman engineer Vitruvius, that’s the guy who inspired Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Remember that guy? Oh, is that right? Okay, yeah, the Greek mathematician Archimedes invented a primitive elevator back in 236 BC. It bore little resemblance to today’s people movers. It worked via manpower, with ropes drawn around a drum that was then turned up by a capstan, a large revolving cylinder often used to wind ropes on ships. Yeah. Although the attribution was written after he died. The invention makes sense for the great Greek thinker who was famous for his exploration of compound pulley system. So that’s what he’s famous.

Bob Smith 18:10
Isn’t that interesting? So he was a great mathematician, but compound pulley system, so he was really an engineer. That’s more than a mathematician.

Marcia Smith 18:18
And the other guy who created the first modern passenger elevator. You know who that is? That’s Mr. Otis, yes, Elijah

Bob Smith 18:23
Otis, which, I think, actually, he invented the elevator brake. Yeah,

Marcia Smith 18:27
he did that in 1854 and he called it the safety elevator,

Bob Smith 18:32
and he demonstrated it at a World’s Fair. And how did he demonstrate it? I don’t remember. Oh, he got in it. He got in it in a platform, and then he took an ax and cut the rope, and then it fell down and stopped.

Marcia Smith 18:43
Yeah, yeah. Jeez, I want to guess how fast is the fastest elevator in the world travels.

Bob Smith 18:48
Ooh, this is probably one of those big buildings over in Asia, right, correct? Is it like, 30 miles an hour or something like that? Oh, really, yeah.

Marcia Smith 18:58
Well, what is it? 46 miles per hour. That’s really fast when you’re in a box. Oh, my God, 40 feet per minute. After some 150 years of innovation, the world’s fastest elevator can now travel 67 feet in a second. Jeez, the elevator is located in the Shanghai Tower in China, which also includes the longest continuous elevator run at 1898

Bob Smith 19:24
feet. Do they have barf bags in those things, just in case you get a little lift I don’t feel good. Here’s the buttons, and here are the bags buttons and bags buttons, and the bags over here for anybody who gets

Marcia Smith 19:36
sick. But my God, yeah, all right, what do you got?

Bob Smith 19:39
How fast do you need to go inside of a building? That’s my question. Just how busy are you? Did you have to rush from one floor to another?

Marcia Smith 19:47
Very important person? I have to be up there in 46 minutes. 46

Bob Smith 19:51
seconds. Yeah, 46 seconds. All right. Marcia, we were talking about this Signal Corps training film division in World War Two, three. More names that you probably have heard of. Carl Reiner, oh, really worked there. He would become a, you know, comedian and director in TV and movies, yeah. Saul Bass, he’s the graphic designer who was known for the Alfred Hitchcock film title animations. Was famous in the films, you know, vertigo and some of those others, very, very striking. And Irwin Shaw, a short story writer who had become famous in 1949 for the war novel The Young

Marcia Smith 20:24
Lions. There’s something in the water in that unit that’s no nuts that all those no the famous people.

Bob Smith 20:29
What happened was they realized they had to train 1000s and 1000s of people quickly for the war effort, and they thought films, this would be the great way to do it. Let’s do it with films. And all of these people worked on these films. So they were very well produced. They were just like creative masters. The people that they got in there, I found out where this building was. It was in Astoria Queens, and it was originally the Paramount Studios complex built in the 1920s but the government upgraded it. And the amount of money they poured into this in World War Two is amazing. It was not a shoestring operation. You know, it’s like all those army training films I probably look awful, you know. No, they weren’t like that. The government appropriated $4,929,000 for motion picture production and distribution in the first year. Now that was more than the budget for Gone With the Wind, which was the most expensive picture at that time, and then the next year, 1943 the government appropriated $20.4 million that exceeded the entire annual production budget of major studios. For $20.3 million you could fund 20 prestige films, or 40 to 60 a list pictures.

Marcia Smith 21:39
So did they see these as recruitment films, is that why they poured so many into most needed bodies?

Bob Smith 21:44
They were a combination of things. They were training films, like how to repair a truck, for instance. They were also recruitment films, and then they were things that were made for the consumption of people in the United States, like Frank Capra did the Why We Fight series, which explains why are we fighting this war? And they own those studios until 1970 when they sold them, and they’re still active today. No kidding, Sesame Street has been shot there. Orange is the New Black has been shot there. Bird Man and The Bourne Legacy films have been shot there in the same studios. Okay,

Marcia Smith 22:15
here’s a gift for you, Mr. MC history. Okay. It is called the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire Revolutionary era. Name the pamphlet and the author,

Bob Smith 22:27
common sense by Thomas Paine. Now that is a gift. Geez. I you’re not losing it yet, babe. He wasn’t even an American. He was from England. I didn’t, yeah, a lot

Marcia Smith 22:36
of them were, weren’t they? Pamphlet writers? No colonialists. There were

Bob Smith 22:41
people here from all over Europe that fought in that war for the Americans. Yeah, on

Marcia Smith 22:47
January 10, Bob 1776 Tommy Payne published common sense, which argued for Colonial independence from England and a king who wanted to rule America. The pamphlet sold more than a million copies the first year. Wow. And keep in mind, Bob, that there were only a couple million people here at the time. So that’s

Bob Smith 23:08
amazing. Yeah, it’s like, really market saturation. That’s for sure. People

Marcia Smith 23:12
wanted to read it. People wanted to understand why this was all going on.

Bob Smith 23:16
And the not only the people who supported the war, the people that opposed the war. Wanted to read the arguments. Yeah, so you’re right. Yeah, it was just common sense. Well, he wrote numerous ones, and his most famous quote was not from that. It was from when he wrote after that. What’s the famous quote? These are the times the TriMet souls. Oh,

Marcia Smith 23:32
okay, okay.

Bob Smith 23:33
Bob Marsha, I have a question for you. Who is the youngest person ever to earn a million dollars? The youngest person, the youngest person ever to earn a million dollars. And I mentioned his name earlier. You did, yeah. Oh, it was one of those TV guys or movie guys, one of the people in the Addams Family. Oh, yeah. Jackie Coogan. Jackie Coogan, that’s right. He starred with Charlie Chaplin in 1919 in the kid and he was a big, big start in the 1920s he’s the one who’s his family squandered all of his money. You remember that? Oh, that’s right, here’s how big Jackie Coogan was, the world’s richest child actor today. Is young Sheldon. That’s really Ian Armitage, yeah, really, he is the richest child actor today, and at 16, he is a millionaire, but Coogan became a millionaire at age 13, 100 years ago, oh gosh, in the 1920s he earned $4 million that’s the equivalent of $70 million today, and by the time he was 25 he found out it was all gone his father, his stepfather and his mother had squandered it, so he actually ended up suing his mother in 1938

Marcia Smith 24:45
what happened with all the child labor laws after that? They called him the Coogan

Bob Smith 24:49
law, because prior to that time in California, the earnings of a minor belong solely to the parent. So the idea was to come up with some legislation to set aside a portion of that money that. Would be held until the child became an adult. And so that was the Coogan law. But when he sued his mother, which must have been very difficult, all he recovered was $126,000 of the nearly $4 million that he had earned.

Marcia Smith 25:14
Thanks. Ma, wow. All right, Bob, what is tonsurphobia? Tonsur phobia? T o n s u r, phobia.

Bob Smith 25:24
So it’s the fear of tonsers, whatever that is. What I said, Okay, what is ton, sir, you want to just guess t o n s u r, yeah, tons t o n s u r, a ton, sir. What would be a ton? Sir?

Marcia Smith 25:39
Okay, it is the fear of getting a haircut? Oh, yeah. Name this. So the causes you say, well, it’s

Bob Smith 25:47
tonsorial. That’s where it came from. The word tonsorial, yeah? Like a ton sorial parlor was like a place where men went to get their haircuts, really, yeah. Well, aren’t you a phone? I am a fountain of useless information. That’s true. What causes a fear of haircuts

Marcia Smith 26:03
might be a traumatic previous haircut experience. Maybe the barber just stabbed you in the neck with the fears, fear of pain or injury, fear of losing control, for people who dislike being touched or restrained, social anxiety and image issues about how people will view, yeah, haircut, right? So they have all these fears, and then they get this phobia,

Bob Smith 26:26
and they gave it a name, tons or phobia, yes,

Marcia Smith 26:29
okay, that’s something to take to the thing. Bob, how fast is hypersonic?

Bob Smith 26:36
Hypersonic is faster than the speed of sound. So that would be,

Marcia Smith 26:41
how much faster supersonic is the speed of sound? And it but what is hypersonic?

Bob Smith 26:48
Well, it’s, I don’t know. What is it, in terms of, how do you measure that Marsh

Marcia Smith 26:53
Mach Five? It’s five times the speed of sound, which starts at 3836 miles per hour, wow. And it stops right at Mach 10, which is 7673 miles per hour. And beyond Mach 10 goes forever. If you wanted to Mach Five, it’s five times the speed of sun, so I don’t want to go that fast. All right, I’m going to finish up with one Dr Seuss quote, okay, be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind

Bob Smith 27:28
nice, nice word play there from Theodore Geisel, Dr Seuss,

Marcia Smith 27:33
I believe every word of that too. We hope

Bob Smith 27:35
you’ve enjoyed the show today, and we hope you join us next time when we return with more fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia. I’m Bob Smith. I’m Marcia

Marcia Smith 27:43
Smith. You’ve been listening to the off ramp.

Bob Smith 27:48
The off ramp is produced in association with the Cedarburg Public Library Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Visit us on the web at the off ramp. Dot show.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai