297 Full Stride Trivia

Marcia Smith 0:00
What is the only country to have won the gold, silver and bronze Olympic Medals in croquet?

Bob Smith 0:06
In croquet? Okay, and what did the expression “cold feet” originally refer to answers to those and other questions coming up in this episode of The Off Ramp with Bob…

Marcia Smith 0:18
And Marcia.

Bob Smith 0:19
Smith.

Bob Smith 0:36
Welcome to The Off Ramp. A chance to slow down, steer clear of crazing, take a side road to sanity with fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia. So a country won all three Olympic medals – gold, silver and bronze in croquet.

Marcia Smith 0:53
That is correct. What country Bob?

Bob Smith 0:55
Now, are you telling me they never won any other medals?

Marcia Smith 0:57
Oh, no, just in this particular category, this country, one walked away with everything.

Bob Smith 1:04
They are the croquet experts of the world.

Marcia Smith 1:06
Yes, they are.

Bob Smith 1:06
Would it be Great Britain, the United Kingdom?

Marcia Smith 1:09
No

Bob Smith 1:10
I would think of that because they love croquet.

Marcia Smith 1:13
At least we think they do if you watch our BBC shows, right?

Bob Smith 1:18
Oh, let’s see. Could it be? Could it be India, a country that was a colony?

Marcia Smith 1:22
That’s a good guess. But no.

Bob Smith 1:24
Okay, New Zealand?

Marcia Smith 1:25
No.

Bob Smith 1:26
Australia.

Marcia Smith 1:27
No.

Bob Smith 1:27
Okay, wrong on all counts. What’s the answer?

Marcia Smith 1:30
The answer is, France.

Bob Smith 1:31
No kidding. France?

Marcia Smith 1:34
Among the most surprising athletic endeavors to receive the honor of winning all categories in a sport is the 1900 Summer Olympic Games in Paris.

Bob Smith 1:45
Okay.

Marcia Smith 1:46
Actually, was in Paris. There were a lot of unusual and short lived events that year, including ballooning.

Bob Smith 1:53
Ballooning, that was an Olympic sport?

Marcia Smith 1:55
just one year.

Bob Smith 1:56
Okay,

Marcia Smith 1:57
As croquet was water Motor Sports and live pigeon shooting.

Bob Smith 2:01
I’ve heard of that. I remember we talked about that,

Marcia Smith 2:04
Although usually associated with wealth and leisure, croquet is believed to have originated with French peasants in the 13th century.

Bob Smith 2:12
I didn’t know that!

Marcia Smith 2:13
As for why croquet appeared only once, well, one spectator showed up. Only one spectator bought one ticket for the official game and the 1900 Olympics, people claimed that the game had hardly any pretensions to athleticism.

Bob Smith 2:32
Yes, I think so too. You know, it’s funny, and another one like that, although this would be more interesting to watch, was a tug of war with a rope. That was an Olympic game too.

Marcia Smith 2:40
At least that took strength

Bob Smith 2:41
And at least that probably had people. I mean, the people there participating at least, were more than just one person.

Marcia Smith 2:47
There were 10 people in the sport, and they were all French.

Bob Smith 2:51
Okay.

Marcia Smith 2:51
That’s why they took home all the medals.

Bob Smith 2:53
We are French and we are going to have croquet!0. And then the next time they had the Olympics? No, no, wasn’t there.

Marcia Smith 2:59
No, oh, well, they had a moment in the sun there.

Bob Smith 3:01
That is so funny. And the winner in croquet … is … I could see that. No crowd cheering there.

Marcia Smith 3:08
One person, one spectator. That’s embarrassing.

Bob Smith 3:11
That is very embarrassing. The French couldn’t even pay more people to show up. That’s the hard thing to believe. Okay. Marcia, what did the expression “cold feet,” which we think of as what?

Marcia Smith 3:21
Meaning you change your mind about doing something.

Bob Smith 3:23
Yeah, you’re afraid of something.

Marcia Smith 3:25
Yeah,

Bob Smith 3:25
You’re not going to do it. What did the expression cold feet originally refer to?

Marcia Smith 3:30
Well, cold feet, yeah, I don’t know, lack of circulation. I don’t know Bob, what

Bob Smith 3:37
financial difficulty they believe it’s derived from an Italian idiom to be cold in the feet, which meant to be without money. And when the phrase moved into English, cold feet became an unwillingness to continue in some endeavor because one is out of money.

Marcia Smith 3:52
Yeah.

Bob Smith 3:52
Even in English, it meant that originally, yeah. So those are the earliest examples of cold feet, how to deal with money. Yeah, exactly enough. And the first reference to marriage was in an 1893 novella by Steven crane Maggie, a girl of the streets, in which a character says, I knew this was the way it would be. They get cold feet, meaning they didn’t want to get married.

Marcia Smith 4:14
Okay.

Bob Smith 4:14
And cold feet was used in 1916 to describe people who didn’t want to fight in World War One. So that’s how it came to mean you’re afraid of something.

Marcia Smith 4:23
Yeah

Bob Smith 4:24
But originally it meant you didn’t have the money.

Marcia Smith 4:26
Okay. Bob, there is a California wildflower called the popover californicum.

Bob Smith 4:32
That’s how it’s pronounced?

Marcia Smith 4:33
It’s – I dealt with best I can do. It’s a delicate, orange, red wildflower. What makes it so special Bob?

Bob Smith 4:41
Okay, the way it smells?

Marcia Smith 4:43
No.

Bob Smith 4:43
The – it’s not the aroma?

Marcia Smith 4:45
No.

Bob Smith 4:46
It’s not the texture or the touch?

Marcia Smith 4:48
No.

Bob Smith 4:48
I don’t know what would it be.

Marcia Smith 4:50
It’s also called something easier to say, the fire popping. The fire popping. And that’s because it exclusively comes out after wildfires. It. In California’s Chaparral foothills, oh, its seeds can lie dormant in the soil for decades and decades, waiting for the precise combination of heat, smoke and mineral rich ash that only fire provides. And when those conditions align, fire, poppies bloom briefly and brilliantly, turning barren slopes into living proof that destruction can also bring renewal.

Bob Smith 5:23
All right. Well, that’s good. The fire popping, the fire Poppy. Okay, here’s a question for you. You look back in history on some types of policies, and you could tell were they successful or not. What about this one? Was outlawing alcohol during Prohibition financially sound?

Marcia Smith 5:39
No, no.

Bob Smith 5:41
I’m talking about for the US government. How much money did they lose?

Marcia Smith 5:45
Gosh, lots. My grandpa made a fair amount.

Bob Smith 5:47
Well, yeah, your grandpa was a bootlegger.

Marcia Smith 5:49
Yeah.

Bob Smith 5:49
Let’s get back to the question. Get back to the How much money did the United States lose?

Bob Smith 5:53
A billion dollars. They spent $300 million just trying to enforce programs. Gosh, but they lost $11 billion billion with a B in alcohol tax revenue during the period. So prohibition was a huge loss, an $11,300,000,000 loss for the United States government and in today’s money, that would be worth more than $275 billion.

Marcia Smith 6:18
Not a great idea.

Bob Smith 6:19
Because there’s a policy you put in place, you tried to enforce. It didn’t work. The tax dollars you would have got gone by the wayside. Well, and that’s from britannica.com

Marcia Smith 6:29
Okay, all right, Bob, what do these foods have in common? Okay? Cheddar cheese, lima beans, Fig Newtons, jalapeno peppers, Waldorf salad and Wiener Schnitzel.

Bob Smith 6:42
They were all served at our wedding, weren’t they? All those cheddar cheese

Marcia Smith 6:45
We eloped.

Bob Smith 6:46
Oh, that’s right, okay, um, I don’t know. They’re kind of picnic things.

Marcia Smith 6:50
They have something in common. It has to do with their names.

Marcia Smith 6:54
What again?

Marcia Smith 6:54
Cheddar cheese, lima beans, Fig Newtons, jalapeno peppers, Waldorf salad and wienerschnitzel. Okay?

Bob Smith 7:00
Cheddar is from a town in England. I believe it is.

Bob Smith 7:03
correct. Waldorf Salad comes from the hotel. That’s correct, you’re on the right track. Wiener Schnitzel comes from wiener Viner,

Marcia Smith 7:13
no, it’s Vienna, oh. Vienna, that’s right. Vienna, okay. Lima beans

Bob Smith 7:17
from from Lima Ohio, Peru. Oh. Lima Peru

Marcia Smith 7:21
is called Lima Yes. Lima beans, yeah, Nobody says that.

Bob Smith 7:25
Fig Newtons from Newton, Massachusetts, very good for the Boston suburb. A cookie company named cookies after Boston suburbs, and that was one of them.

Marcia Smith 7:35
Very good. Geez. You got them all.

Bob Smith 7:36
Okay, good.

Marcia Smith 7:37
Well, aren’t you something?

Bob Smith 7:38
No, I said Lima Ohio instead of Lima.

Marcia Smith 7:41
Peru, yeah, but you got the idea that they’re all named after places, speaking

Bob Smith 7:45
of food, Marcia, I’d like to we know that oats were once considered horse food, not good enough for human consumption. What other popular grain was once considered animal food?

Marcia Smith 7:58
Oh, wasn’t that like corn flakes or something? No, no,

Bob Smith 8:02
it was a form of corn. A form of corn.

Marcia Smith 8:05
Yeah, yes, the

Bob Smith 8:06
form of corn we all eat and love and enjoy yellow corn. Yellow corn was once considered unfit for humans to eat. Why it’s so good? Because it wasn’t very sweet. The original yellow corn, originally white corn, that was considered the corn that human beings had, and especially in the south, it was like white corn people, yellow corn pigs, you know, and other animals. And that just wasn’t true in America, the white corn was preferred for humans in Europe and Latin America and parts of Africa as well. But the Minnesota Valley canning company changed all that in 1924 they introduced a new proprietary yellow sweet corn hybrid seed engineered for the canning process corn sweeter than white corn. They aggressively marketed this yellow corn nationally. Their name for it was niblets. That was the original trade niblets, and it was exported and marketed abroad, too. So eventually, people around the world began associating sweet corn with yellow corn kernels. But originally, for centuries, white corn was preferred. Yellow corn was for animals.

Marcia Smith 9:10
Okay, ready for where in the world? Bob, yeah, I’ll give you three clues for each possibility. Okay, its annual Carnival parade is said to be the biggest in the world.

Bob Smith 9:21
Its annual Carnival parade, where in the world is that, like in Rio de Janeiro? Is it? Yes? Okay. Next question, yeah.

Marcia Smith 9:30
The other clues were its home of the coca cabana beach.

Bob Smith 9:33
Obviously, I don’t need the other clues go to another question. What’s the other question?

Marcia Smith 9:37
Okay. Clue one, it had the world’s first electrified metro system.

Bob Smith 9:42
The world’s first electrified metro system was in London.

Marcia Smith 9:47
Wow, yes, you’re right. Okay. Next question, and lastly, clue one, home to the busiest Opera House in the world, Paris. No, oh. Clue two. The dish, curry. Worst originated here India. No curry. Worst, yes, curry.

Bob Smith 10:06
I was thinking of India. Yes, you were worst is German. So is this in

Marcia Smith 10:10
this city? Is the capital city of Germany.

Bob Smith 10:13
That’s where I was going, Berlin. Very good. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Now, Marcia, back to the green giant company. Okay, Green Giant was originally the name of a product of theirs. Green beans actually a new kind of pea. Is what it was. In 1925 they discovered a new pea in English variety called the Prince of Wales. It was big, wrinkly, and as peas go, it was huge, but it was tender and sweet. So the company got behind it. No national brand would touch it, though. They go, well, that’s different than, you know, peas we usually sell. So the company decided to sell it themselves, and they chose the name Green Giant peas. But when they went to trademark it, the US Patent Office said, No, it wasn’t descriptive enough to qualify for protection. So a company liar proposed a work around since the name alone couldn’t be trademarked, he suggested creating a character that could be trademarked, a visual identity. Would that be the jolly green guy eventually became the Jolly Green Giant. Bobby darn now the first giant wasn’t jolly. He was scowling, oh no, and he looked like a white skinned caveman in a bear skin. And it wasn’t until Leo Burnett, their advertising agency, designed him into the smiling, Friendly Giant we know today. And while working on an ad in 1935 Leo Burnett penned the word jolly before the name, and voila, the Jolly Green Giant was born. That was 1935 and 15 years later, had become so successful they named the company that they changed Minnesota Valley canning into green giant foods, Bob.

Marcia Smith 11:41
Where in the world do they still use pigeons to relay messages?

Bob Smith 11:46
They still use pigeons to relay messages? Yes, where in the world is this like in some mountain region where it’s difficult to get point to point communication because they can’t see towers from one to another, so Himalayas or somewhere like that?

Marcia Smith 11:59
No, it’s a coastal state. It’s Odisha in eastern India. They’ve used pigeons to relay important messages in situations where modern lines of communications no longer work. Hundreds of homing, racing and carrier pigeons make up the region’s pigeon patrol. They begin training these pigeons at five or six weeks old, and they can fly up to listen to this 500 miles at a time, geez, at top speeds of 34 miles per hour, that’s amazing. It is. And even with today’s accessible phone and internet service, there’s been no rush to retire the courier pigeons, the birds save lives during catastrophic flooding in 1982 and the aftermath of super cyclone in 1999 so they keep them around just in case there’s catastrophic disorder.

Bob Smith 12:49
How many years have they been doing this? Do you know 1946 Oh, I thought maybe this had gone on for hundreds of years or something. No, they did it right after the war. Yeah.

Marcia Smith 12:58
And a couple pigeon factoids for you, my dear, the number of letters a pigeon can learn from the English alphabet, all 26

Bob Smith 13:06
I didn’t know they could learn letters. I thought they had to carry letters. You’re telling me, pigeons learn letters. Apparently they do. They know all 26 of them actually learn English letters. Yeah. What? Why would they need to know that? And how do we know that they learned the English letters. They picked them out or something. Come on.

Marcia Smith 13:24
The number of pigeon species found throughout the world, 300 Okay, and the winning auction bid for Armando.

Bob Smith 13:32
Talk about me going down a rabbit hole Marsh. You went down a rabbit a rabbit hole on pigeon.

Marcia Smith 13:38
There’s one more thing, oh, dear Armando. Bob Armando is the world’s fastest racing pigeon, and he got the winning auction bid at $1.4 million somebody paid for him.

Bob Smith 13:50
She’s Armando. Armando, the racing pigeon. All right, Marsh, it’s time to take a break now. We’ll be back in just a moment. You’re listening to the off ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith, Okay, we’re back. Armando just brought us a message one of my next trivia questions. As a matter of fact, you’re listening to the off ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith. 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, I think last year it was like 31 countries. So that’s pretty cool. Okay, Marcia, where does the term red herring come from? It goes all the way back to the 15th century

Marcia Smith 14:31
before I was born. Yes, the year

Bob Smith 14:33
before you were born. And even before Armando was born, he flew in with

Marcia Smith 14:39
this just a moment hearing red herring, I have no idea.

Bob Smith 14:43
Okay, well, the red herring is a soft finned bony fish. People who like to eat it have long preserved them by salting and slowly smoking them. And the salting and smoking make herring turn red to dark brown, yeah, and gives them a very strong smell. It’s a smile that dogs love. Uh huh. And that made red herrings ideal diversions for distracting hunting dogs from their trail of their quarry. So if you could give a hunting dog a red herring, they’d go somewhere else instead of where they’re supposed to go, because you didn’t want the dogs to find something that was being hunted. Well, who were these people? Well, probably ne’er do wells. Ne’er do wells. Now, do wells, criminals, scoundrels, trying to keep the king’s dogs from going where they were supposed to go as like law enforcement looking for something with dogs. Okay, okay, so I don’t want them to find something like My Cousin Vinny, who just went off into the woods there. So I’m gonna bring out these red herrings. You mean HERBIE, oh no, I mean Armando, Armando who flew into the woods. Okay, we get it. Let’s move on. All right, moving on anyway. That led to the term red herring, meaning something that diverts attention from the issue at hand. Okay, all right,

Marcia Smith 15:51
it’s time for AKA, also known as, that’s right, popular card game with me, for sure. And the category today is Ford vehicles.

Bob Smith 16:02
Ford, Ford, Brandt, Ford, brand vehicles. That is correct.

Marcia Smith 16:05
Okay, ready, yes. So if I said a Denver football player, what vehicle is it? What Ford vehicle

Bob Smith 16:13
is this a current Denver football player?

Marcia Smith 16:15
It’s not a singular football player. What are the Denver Broncos? Yeah, okay, okay, okay, all right. So, how about Mexican party,

Bob Smith 16:25
Mexican party. And this is a board vehicle, right? A mixing up, oh, Fiesta. That’s correct. Okay, gotcha. How about concentrate? What? Concentrate? What? Oh, sorry, that’s the joke. Okay, I’m sorry, concentrate. We’re not talking about some kind of concentrate. You put in water and it turns into something thinking, thinking, or this is very difficult for me, thinking concentrate, a Ford vehicle. That means concentrate.

Marcia Smith 16:54
Yeah, okay, I’ll give you another clue. How about you get new glasses so you can, oh, focus.

Marcia Smith 17:00
Okay, Ford Focus. Got you Okay, how about this bull sign?

Marcia Smith 17:05
Bull sign, yes, the Ford bull sign, yes. You should know this one we owned, one,

Bob Smith 17:11
oh, the Ford. T What was that car? I love that car. That was the car we bought in the 80s. It was a big, very big platform for them? Yeah, I know I’m trying to think of it. I’m sorry. What’s the name Taurus? Yes, the Taurus. Okay, gotcha.

Marcia Smith 17:27
How about this one? Okay, Columbus or Magellan explorer. That’s right. Okay. Show off biceps.

Bob Smith 17:36
Show off biceps. Show off biceps. Boy, that I’m not getting that one.

Marcia Smith 17:43
Okay, if you do this, look at flex. You’re flexing. Okay, that’s the card called Flex. Oh, okay, and last one, nuclear union,

Bob Smith 17:52
nuclear union, yeah, the nuclear union.

Marcia Smith 17:57
I don’t know. Fusion. The fusion. Fusion.

Bob Smith 18:01
Okay, okay, sorry. All right, those are all Ford lines, vehicle, cars, yeah, okay, okay. All right, thank you too badly, no, it didn’t do too good. All right. I have two questions, yeah, what famous inventor once set a land speed record?

Marcia Smith 18:18
Okay, famous inventor, would it be one of the Wright boys? No, no, not the Wright brothers. No. Would it be one of the car guys? Yes, one of the car guys. Okay, it would be, would it be Ford? Yes.

Bob Smith 18:32
Henry Ford, he garnered publicity for his fledgling Motor Company, the Ford Motor Company, in 1904 by setting a land speed record, he drove for a mile across a frozen lake St Clair, Michigan.

Marcia Smith 18:46
I think I saw pictures of that in a documentary.

Bob Smith 18:48
The lake was solid enough to serve as a makeshift racetrack, but the conditions were brutal. Now, this car had no windshield, no hood or body, a wooden chassis, oh Lord, and an 18.9 liter inline four piston engine producing 80 horsepower, which was enormous at the time. So he went 91 point 37 miles per hour. Again, no windshield, and he didn’t wear glasses. Geez. Louise, very interesting. Okay, all right,

Marcia Smith 19:17
Bob, what is the origin of the phrase keeping danger at bay.

Bob Smith 19:21
Keeping danger at bay. What does that mean, keeping danger at bay. Know what it means, yeah, keeping it away or keeping it at a distance, right? What’s the origin of it? Yeah, was there a bay that somebody was trying to keep some danger in? No, okay. Well, tell me.

Marcia Smith 19:38
At bay originates from the days of medieval hunting, it describes a cornered animal like a stag or a fox or something making its last stand around a bunch of barking hounds. Oh, they’re being Yes. Word Bay refers to the dogs long drawn out barks. The term was transferred to humans in the 14th century. When it started appearing in reference to trying to hold off a dangerous opponent.

Bob Smith 20:05
That makes sense? Yeah, it does Okay. Okay. So now I want to go back to Henry Ford. Here. We told you what his speed was, 91 point 37 miles per hour. All right. Alexander Graham Bell did something like this with a hydro foil boat. Did you know that? No, in the early 20th century, he was already famous for the telephone, but he became obsessed with hydrofoils, boats designed to fly above water, on wing, like structures. And alongside engineer Casey Baldwin, he developed a series of experimental crafts called hydro domes. And in 1919, now, they powered these with airplane engines. So they were pretty powerful, lifted them clear off the water. They had a hydrofoil set a world marine speed record of 70.86 miles per hour on a lake in Nova Scotia. Okay, that’s fast going over water at 70 miles per hour.

Marcia Smith 20:54
I still don’t understand how that works. It floats above the water.

Bob Smith 20:57
How well? It’s just the way that the physics of it works. I’d have to show it to you. Okay, it’s just like, they have those boats over in Hong Kong, in the bay there, they fly across the water. I was on one of those. They’re really amazing. Yeah, when, when you were in Hong Kong, yeah, you go up there to go to Lantau Island. Can’t get there fast enough, so we take and you’re flying across the water.

Marcia Smith 21:17
It’s really smooth, wow. Yeah, I just never understand the principle of it.

Bob Smith 21:21
But okay. Anyway, Bell didn’t pilot that himself, but he was deeply involved in the design, and he described the sensation as as smooth as flying through the air.

Marcia Smith 21:30
All right. Bob on average. How many words do you think the average native English speaking American knows?

Bob Smith 21:38
How many words? Yeah, well, maybe 1000 No 2000 no 3000 44,000 okay, we’re talking under 20. Good.

Marcia Smith 21:49
You’re close now. Oh, really, at age 20, the average American knows about 42,000 words. That is amazing. According to a study published in frontiers in psychology, the vocabulary range typically ranges from 27,000 Words from the lowest 5% of the population to 52,000 words for the top 5% with individuals adding about 6000 more words between the ages of 20 and 60. So you know most of your words at the age of 20, yeah, but you can top it off. I’ve learned a lot of words in the Yeah,

Bob Smith 22:23
but that’s only 6000 more out of you already got. How many 40,000

Marcia Smith 22:27
more than that? You and I are? Probably, yeah, in the upper 40s. I would think,

Bob Smith 22:33
all right, Masha, back to the would you call me? All right, Marsh, back to the entrepreneurs who did incredible things to get attention, you can go back to Wan Hu. He was a mythical Rocket Man in 16th century China. He strapped 47 gunpowder rockets to a chair in attempt to launch himself into space. Good grief. And the story ended with a massive explosion and won. Hu vanished in the smoke,

Marcia Smith 22:59
yeah, into many little, tiny parts. Just amazing. So going back to words, Bob studies show men and women speak roughly how many words a day, how many words on a daily basis?

Bob Smith 23:13
Roughly now they speak a different number a day. Women speak more than men, I think more numbers

Marcia Smith 23:19
of words. That’s a common misconception. Oh, it is, yeah. Oh, I thought we

Bob Smith 23:22
had that as a question. You gave a number of episodes ago where women spoke more than men.

Marcia Smith 23:28
Studies show how many words we use daily. It’s roughly 16,000 words a day we speak.

Bob Smith 23:34
I have a hard time believing that.

Marcia Smith 23:36
Yeah, well, I don’t know. Just record yourself so many guys,

Bob Smith 23:39
I know just they just grunt most of the day. I don’t get it. How could they

Marcia Smith 23:44
there’s hardly any difference between the sexes. According to this study, in the average daily use Contrary to popular belief, Bob that women talk more than we know they do. They talk more than men. You talk more than most men just because you’re affable. A blowhard is what you call me before be nice for the radio podcast. Okay, somewhere in the sea of cable channels, you can still watch detective series Columbo, okay, and it’s still running somewhere. It was an iconic character that made Peter Falk famous for his brilliant, bumbling and mumbling, right, right. But who was first offered the part of the great detective,

Bob Smith 24:25
Bing Crosby? Really, I knew that Bing Crosby was offered that part. That’s right, which I find just as strange as can be.

Marcia Smith 24:32
Yeah, I know it’s just absurd. And you know, you must remember why then he didn’t take it. No, why didn’t he take it? He wanted to focus more on golf of course and the second choice. Lee, J Cobb, oh, okay, but he declined due to prior commitments. It always amazes me, Bob, how you can never picture anyone else playing certain parts right when

Bob Smith 24:55
they own that part well, and they take that part and they make it their own, their own, you know? Yeah.

Marcia Smith 25:00
And so picturing anybody else in that role is back to Bing

Bob Smith 25:03
Crosby, this focus on golf, this led to another thing in, actually, in broadcasting history. Do you know what it was?

Marcia Smith 25:11
Well, the well, golf had something

Bob Smith 25:14
to do with he was golf had something to do with another thing Bing Crosby was very involved with.

Marcia Smith 25:18
He was involved with the sound, wasn’t he with the microphones? No, not with microphones, with the recording,

Bob Smith 25:24
with tape recorders. Yes, yes. He invested in the Ampex Corporation. Machines were brought into the United States from Nazi Germany by the army, and they started, you know, reverse engineering these tape recorders. And they started building tape recorders. And Bing Crosby was one of the investors in that, and he saw that as an opportunity to be able to play golf pretty much whenever he wanted to. Let’s just record the show. Yeah. So that came about as a result of Bing Crosby, and it’s interesting, his first sponsor originally said, No, we’re not going to do that when people will be able to tell then that’s not right. You shouldn’t record that show. We’re going to record it with an audience? Nope, can’t do that. So he left and went to a different sponsor. They lost him. But by the end of that year, everybody was recording their shows. Makes perfect sense, yes, especially if you like golf.

Marcia Smith 26:13
And did they have to record up many times because of the different coastal time? No, they just recorded once. But I mean, before they went to tape,

Bob Smith 26:22
oh, yes, before tape recorders, they had to do the show at least twice. Yeah, yeah. They had different time zones. Yeah, they did it for the East Coast and then for the West Coast. Imagine just doing the whole thing over again. They’d used to go off and they’d have dinner, and then they do the second show. And they sometimes had difficulty policing guest stars for their alcohol consumption.

Marcia Smith 26:38
You know, I think the second shows were always more fun. That’s probably the reason it’s the same thing on Sunday when you go to the matinee or the last show on Sunday night. Yeah, that one really rocks anyway.

Bob Smith 26:50
That’s the other thing that is, as a result of Bing Crosby wanting to play golf, was the we got tape recorders as a consumer product.

Marcia Smith 26:57
Okay, I’m gonna finish up with my two quotes, okay, with good old Oscar Wilde is one. There are only two tragedies in life. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

Bob Smith 27:09
Yes, that’s that’s often the tragedy, isn’t it? Yes.

Marcia Smith 27:13
And Frank Sinatra, speaking to reporters, said, If I had as many love affairs as you give me credit for I would now be speaking to you from a jar in the Harvard Medical School.

Bob Smith 27:28
All right, that’s it for today. We hope you’ve enjoyed our fun facts and tantalizing trivia here by Bob Smith, I’m Marcia Smith. Join us again next time when we return with more fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia here on the off ramp. The off ramp is produced in association with the Cedarburg Public Library, Cedarburg Wisconsin. Visit us on the web at the offramp. Dot show.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai