In My Footsteps: A Gen-X Nostalgia Podcast

Episode 126: When Bird Poop Was Big Business on Cape Cod; Rescue 911 Traumatizes 90s Kids; Obscure Advertising Mascots; New Year's Podcast Resolutions(1-3-2024)

• Christopher Setterlund • Season 1 • Episode 126

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Happy New Year!
Throughout history there have been some odd ways to make money. For a time in the 19th century one such way was the collection and selling of bird poop, otherwise known as guano. In Episode 126 we will take a deep dive into the Pacific Guano Company of Woods Hole, Massachusetts, luckily from a safe distance. Why were bird droppings considered big business on Cape Cod back in the 1800s?
Jumping ahead well over a century children of the 1980s and 1990s will either smile with warm memories, or recoil in childhood fear as we go way Back In the Day to reminisce about the informative yet terrifying docudrama series Rescue 911. Hosted by William Shatner and with an intro that can still send chills up your spine this show included reenactments of incidents and included real 911 calls.
Some advertising mascots have withstood the test of time. However for every Ronald McDonald, Tony the Tiger, and Pillsbury Doughboy there are ones the came and went in a flash or were just plain forgotten. This week's Top 5 is all about obscure and forgotten advertising mascots.
There will also be a brand new This Week In History and Time Capsule featuring the abject failure that was the attempt at making Daylight Savings Time permanent.
As this is the first show of 2024 there will also be some podcast-related New Year's Resolutions to share.
For more great content become a subscriber on Patreon or Buzzsprout!
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Speaker 00:

Hello world, and Happy New Year! This is the In My Footsteps Podcast, I am Christopher Setterlund, coming to you from the vacation destination known as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and we are kicking off 2024 with episode 126. I've made a resolution to make this podcast excellent. Let's hope I live up to it and I don't break it during the show. There's a lot of news and notes about the podcast for the coming year, so we'll dive into that. We're going to start the show off with the story of when animal poop was big business. with the story of Cape Cod's Pacific Guano Company. We're going to go way, way back in the day for kids of my age and around my age. We're going to deal with some old wounds as we look at another show that scarred us as kids, that being Rescue 911. There's going to be a brand new top five that are going to look at some obscure and weird, lesser-known advertising product mascots. And there'll be a brand new This Week in History and Time Capsule looking back at the bane of some of our existences, that being daylight savings time and the one year that it went into effect many months earlier than it should. All of that is coming up right now on episode 126 of the In My Footsteps podcast. So I start off the podcast, I start off the new year saying I'm going to Make a resolution to make this show excellent. And the first thing we're going to talk about the big subject is animal poop. I don't know if that's raising or lowering the bar for all of you, but I digress. I hope everyone had an excellent new year, an excellent end to the big holiday season. It also ends my favorite time of year that started right after Labor Day. Now it's the bleak and cold winter until late March. Have any of you out there set New Year's resolutions? Mine is basically to do as much as I can with the podcast and my content creation and YouTube and writing and such. And it's not really a cop-out, but I don't know what that resolution looks like. I've put my money where my mouth is. I bought myself a brand new laptop. By the time you're hearing this podcast, I'll have it. It's a lot faster, a lot more storage. Because I've noticed when recording and editing podcasts and videos, sometimes my brain is faster than the computer goes. That being basically saying like I thought my laptop was starting to hold me back. So it's like putting an investment into myself. For all of you Patreon subscribers, episode four of the exclusive member-only podcast is now up on Patreon on Buzzsprout. It's filled with the fever dream random topics you've come to know and love, including the worst things I've spilled on myself when I worked in restaurants, singing servers at Subway, my niece misspelling YouTube and getting you porn instead, and a whole lot of others that you can hear about if you become a Patreon subscriber. It's a great way to support the podcast, to support my content work. And another one of my resolutions is to try to do as much as I can for those Patreon subscribers. Give as much as I can over there for those of you that actually open up your wallets and support me. If becoming a subscriber isn't feasible for you, you can easily support the podcast by sharing it, spreading the word around. I'm getting better at that myself. In fact, I just ordered these brand new business cards that I'll be bringing to author events. They include the podcast logo, but new. They also include a QR code. So somebody can come to one of my events, grab my business card, open their phone up and go right to the podcast. I figure I'm cutting out that time that they put the card in their pocket, drive home and forget about it and just throw it in the trash. A big thing that might be coming up, there's no definite timetable on this, is I am looking at doing a short-form video podcast for YouTube. It would be totally separate from this. It would be something like a weekly wrap-up. I even ordered a ring light to make sure I would look good on these videos. But the concept is similar to the subscriber bonus episodes of the podcast. Because I love sharing the random stories from my life, and I just want to collect mine and share them. And I'll do some sort of picture-in-picture, like a news broadcast with pictures of whatever I'm talking about. They're likely to be 15, 20 minutes. But like I said, there's no timetable on it. But that's something that is likely coming in 2024. And last but not least on the updates for the podcast and for content, Coming in March is a pair of tournaments I'm putting together as kind of a takeoff of the March madness in college basketball. Cape Codders, past, present. This is really geared towards you as I'm doing the top 16 Cape Cod restaurant establishments of the past and Cape Cod nightlife of the past. I've got brackets all made up. I'm going to do tail of the tape for the matchups. There'll be polls up all over social media, up on YouTube. So you all can vote on these places to see who wins as the king of Cape Cod restaurants of the past and the king of nightlife. The caveat is all of these places are closed. The nightlife, I kind of stick to the golden age from the 60s through the early 90s. The restaurants, it's more free-flowing. You'll see when it comes up, but I'm so excited. I think it'll be a lot of fun. But coming up now is something that's just as much fun to talk about, bird droppings. So let's kick off episode 126 with the time when bird poop was big business and the story of Cape Cod's Pacific Guano Company. For nearly a century and a half, Cape Cod has been one of the premier vacation destinations in America. Its combination of miles of pristine beaches, along with world-class restaurants, accommodations, and shops have made it a favorite of solo travelers, couples, and families from all across the globe. From Chatham to Provincetown, from the Cape Cod Canal to the Atlantic Ocean, There is no shortage of wonderful places to visit and stay. The summer resort is a staple of the Cape, with generations of families either having a second home or visiting the same area year after year. Many of these places lay along the waterfront and have been romanticized over the decades as the playground of the wealthy. One of the original summer resort areas, though, had a very different journey to the present. Not many such areas can say their roots lie in the droppings of seabirds and bats. This is the story of Woods Hole's Penzance Point and the guano that paved its way to a private community. The narrow finger of land that today is known as Penzance Point sits at the western end of Woods Hole. It is approximately 110 total acres in size, and today is the location of some of the most expensive homes on Cape Cod. In the mid-19th century, it was a completely different story. At that time, the strip of land was known as Long Neck. In the late 1850s, the oncoming Civil War, coupled with the whaling industry's decline in the eastern United States... saw an abundance of idle clipper ships that had once been used for trade with Asian countries. An idea was hatched by some of these ships' captains based out of New York and Boston to put them to use. Asa Shiverick Jr., whose father and uncles had built some of the ships, led the charge along with Prince Sears Kroll to create a new business on Cape Cod featuring fertilizer, also known as guano. Shiverick and Kroll moved from Dennis to Woods Hole in 1859 and joined up with the Boston firm of Glidden and Williams. They chose Longneck as the location of their new company to be called the Pacific Guano Company. It had been used only as a sheep pasture up until that time, and the spot was chosen due to it being a natural deep water harbor capable of holding larger clipper ships. The building of the factory dramatically altered the tiny village of Woods Hole. Nearly 200 workers were hired to create the factory. A large dormitory, some small homes, and a Roman Catholic church were built to accommodate them. The product created by the factory, guano, came mostly from seabird droppings. It had begun seeing an uptick in popularity during the early 1850s as a better alternative to manure as fertilizer. So popular did guano become that in 1856, Congress passed the U.S. Guano Act, essentially allowing any American citizen the ability to lay claim to any uninhabited guano-filled island in the world for the purpose of harvesting the product. After its creation, the Pacific Guano Company staked its claim and began getting ready for work. The new company chose Howland Island an island roughly 520 acres in size and located 1,700 miles southwest of the Hawaiian Islands to mine for guano. And for those of you with some knowledge of history, yes, the Howland Island that they chose is the same island that famed pilot Amelia Earhart was looking for when her plane disappeared in 1937. The Pacific Guano Company's factory, located about 500 feet west of the present-day Woods Hole Yacht Club, was finished and put to immediate use in 1863. Soon after opening, Azariah Kroll came aboard as the company's chemist to add improvements to the guano, making it an even more effective fertilizer. One of these such improvements was adding scrap from local fish markets to the guano. However, as you can imagine, the combination of bird poop and fish scraps did not make Woods Hole a pleasant-smelling village. 33 ships were used during the first few years of mining guano for fertilizer. Six were lost on their return voyage, while two others were captured by the Confederate Navy during the Civil War. In total, It only took about four years before Howland Island was basically mined out. So in 1867, the Pacific Guano Company moved on to Swan Island in the Western Caribbean and Navassa Island located 30 miles west of Haiti. The company hit its peak after purchasing Chisholm Islands in South Carolina, which was rich with rock phosphate. This provided another option besides bird droppings and fish scrap. It also led to a second Pacific Guano Company factory being built in Charleston, South Carolina in September 1869. The railroad was extended into Woods Hole in 1872, along with a new stone bridge across the Eel Pond Channel. 200-pound bags of fertilizer were loaded onto the train cars and shipped out. The Pacific Guano Company even had its own booth at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. As the 1870s ended, annual sales at Pacific Guano topped 50,000 tons. It seemed as though the prosperity would never end. However, we all know that would not be the case. A diminishing amount of sites to mine guano would coupled with an increase in the advent of artificial fertilizers, began to take its toll on Pacific Guano. In 1889, shortly after an accident involving a worker, word began getting out that the company was in peril. Its liabilities at the time were listed at $3.5 million, or about $116.8 million when adjusted for inflation to 2024. Despite that terrible news that was unleashed at a stockholders' meeting in March 1889, there were assurances that the company would be able to meet its guano demands for the year. But it was actually a harbinger of terrible things to come, and in August 1889, the company was forced into bankruptcy and both factories ceased operations. Two years later, in June 1891... The entirety of the property and Long Neck as a whole was purchased by Horace Kroll and William Nye. The factory itself and most of the buildings associated with Pacific Guano were leveled, although a few were purchased and floated to different locations. The dormitory that had been built was moved and became known as the Breakwater Hotel. After developing the land for a year, Kroll renamed it Penzance for a similar area in Falmouth, England, and put 18 lots up for sale. Over the decades that followed, Penzance Point became one of the most exclusive areas of Cape Cod. In December 2019, a 9.6-acre estate was put up for sale on Penzance Point with a listing price of $25 million. It was one of the most expensive homes ever listed on Cape Cod and got sold. I did some digging and I couldn't find any other homes that were listed currently that were more expensive. In fact, I couldn't find any that were listed at all. So Penzance Point seems a lot like Great Island on Cape Cod, that once you get a house there, it kind of stays in the family. After decades of life being dominated by the Pacific Guano Company and its odors of seabird droppings and fish scraps, Woods Hole became known as a hub of the scientific community shortly after the company's demise. The last remnant of the Pacific Guano Company, the Breakwater Hotel, survived until 1960 when the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory purchased and demolished it for further expansion of the lab. And although there's no gates or guard shack like Great Island, there is a sign as Bar Neck Road turns into Penzance Road in Woods Hole. telling you it's a private community and not to enter and to turn around. And since there's nothing of the Pacific Guano Company left out there, I would not recommend anyone go out there snooping around. It's all very rich private homes. But there are plenty of other great places to check out in Woods Hole. It's tiny, but it's a hidden gem on Cape Cod. This week in history, we are going back 50 years ago this week to January 6th, 1974 and the unmitigated disaster that was the attempt to make daylight savings time permanent. Ah yes, daylight savings time, the bane of a lot of people's existence. Turn the clocks back. Turn the clocks forward. Daylight savings time was first implemented in America in 1918. with the Standard Time Act, which was a wartime measure for seven months when the U.S. was involved in World War I. This was to add more daylight so that people could conserve energy resources, which makes a lot of sense. Again, this wartime daylight savings time came around again during World War II, which again makes sense. More daylight means less electricity you use, etc. It became permanent in 1966. Thanks to the Uniform Time Act of 1966. Originally, Daylight Savings Time began on the last Sunday of April and ended on the last Sunday of October. In 2005, that was extended to what we have today, which is the second Sunday of March we spring forward and the first Sunday of November we fall back. In 1974, there was an ongoing gasoline shortage in America. So a law was signed by President Richard Nixon, an experiment, you could say, to extend daylight savings time to permanent status. It was initially going to be a two-year experiment. See how things went with permanent daylight savings time. Spring forward and never fall back. It was thought that maximizing the evening sun might mitigate this gas crisis. And in a poll in December 1973, 79% of Americans were in support of this permanent spring forward daylight savings time. Boy, they regretted that instantly. By February 1974, so a month after this went into effect, the support for this daylight savings time bill dropped to 42%. The main issue was that even though it would be lighter later in the afternoon... You have to pay for that at some point. And that meant longer, dark periods in the morning in the winter, which was dangerous for school children. Think about it now, this time of year. It gets light around 7. That's about sunrise. So imagine sunrise closer to 8 o'clock. Some schools delayed opening until it was light out. And in Florida, sadly, 8 students lost their lives in traffic accidents because of the extra darkness in the morning. The two-year experiment of permanent daylight savings time lasted a whopping 10 months. And in October 1974, new President Gerald Ford signed legislation to reverse this bill. The rumor was, even though people obviously hated it, that it didn't seem to really help with energy consumption and might have led to more gasoline consumption. So it was a total failure. And here we are 50 years later. Every year we spring forward and fall back. More and more people talk about just getting rid of daylight savings time, going to permanent standard time. I'm all for that. I don't know where you fall. I could do without sunsets at four o'clock. But if worse comes to worse, we at least know that we'll fall back again. But 50 years ago this week in history, they attempted to make daylight savings time permanent and it failed in spectacular fashion. And now it's time for a brand new time capsule. Let's look at what was going on in the world of pop culture 50 years ago this week, January 6, 1974, as daylight savings time was becoming permanent. The number one song was The Joker by Steve Miller Band. This was off of the album The Joker. This song was number one for one week and was the first of three number one songs Steve Miller Band had. Rockin' Me went to number one for one week, and then Abracadabra in 1982 went to number one for two weeks. So that was probably their biggest hit. The number one movie was The Exorcist. This is widely seen as one of the greatest horror movies of all time. It's a supernatural horror starring Linda Blair as young Reagan McNeil, who is possessed by the devil. This is one of those movies I can't do justice to describing it. If you haven't seen it, go out of your way to see it. If you don't like horror, just cover your eyes at certain points. It's 78% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and made over $441 million at the box office in its release 50 years ago. According to boxofficemojo.com, which has an all-time list of the box office, the money made by movies when adjusted for inflation, The Exorcist ranks as the ninth highest-grossing film ever. And if you want to know the other films on that adjusted-for-inflation box office list, I did a whole top five on that way back in episode 75. The number one TV show was The Waltons. This was a historical drama TV show based during the Great Depression and World War II about a family in rural Virginia, the Walton family. It's well known, even if you've never seen the show, for all the families saying goodnight to each other at the end. Especially Goodnight John Boy. When I think of the Waltons, that's the first thing I think of. In total, the show was on for nine seasons and 221 episodes, with the show lasting from 1972 to 1981 and spawning several reunion movies. And if you were around back then, 50 years ago... You're in school. Maybe you've got to figure something out for your science class, your science fair. Well, you're in luck if you're near a Radio Shack or have a Radio Shack catalog because you can get yourself a 65-in-1 electronic project kit known as the science fair. According to the ad, you can build yourself real electronics, but it's safe. Build yourself alarms, intercoms, radios. demonstrate the theories of space age electronics, and more. You can get all of this for $19.95 or about $124 when adjusted for inflation to 2024. I don't know if it's any safer than those old real chemistry kits that had the radioactive material in them, but in doing my research, I didn't find anything about people getting killed from these science fair project kits, so they were probably safe. That'll wrap up a brand new time capsule, a brand new This Week in History. We go from the abject failure of daylight savings time trying to be permanent to some weird, lesser known, obscure advertising product mascots. Not all of these were abject failures, but I think you'll have a hard time remembering some. So let's check those out right now. So for every legendary product mascot that withstood the test of time, like Ronald McDonald, the Pillsbury Doughboy, Tony the Tiger, and countless others, for every one of them, there's just as many that came and went, or came and were just failures and had to be replaced, or just were lost to time. And this week, we're going to go through the top five products obscure and lesser-known advertising product mascots. These aren't relegated to any specific time period, and there may be a time that I do a second list because there were more that didn't make the cut. So with most of these top five lists, as you know, there are some honorable mentions to kind of whet your appetite for what's coming. So honorable mentions for the top five obscure lesser known mascots include the Blue New from Combo Cereal. This was mainly from the 1970s. And being a child of the 80s that was raised on Sesame Street, I had to check to be sure because there was Gary Gnu who told you the Gnus on Sesame Street. So I had to check if the G was silent. I'm like, no, it's silent. So there you go, behind the scenes. Other honorable mentions include Happy Ho-Ho, which was the mascot for the Ho-Ho's brand of snack cakes. Literally looked like a chocolate version of Twinkie the Kid. The Cheetos Mouse, which was the mascot for the Cheetos brand snack chips before Chester Cheetah came along. The Country Crock Hands, which were those two stupid hands. man and woman, the couple that would be just caressing each other while they were trying to get the country crock spread for their bread and whatever else. I'd say they were more annoying than lesser known. And finally, there was Cecil, which was the angry machine from the grins and smiles and giggles and laughs serial where those four characters tried to make Cecil laugh. But those were some of the honorable mentions. Now let's get into the actual top five. Do you remember any of these? Number one is Mr. O from SpaghettiOs. This came out in the early 1980s. It's a puppet, but I'm trying to think of how to describe this, but it looks like a sperm with a SpaghettiO wrapped around its head. It is the weirdest, creepiest looking thing ever. where it's this white worm with a head and arms, but a Spaghetti-O wrapped around its head. At least they gave the line, uh-oh, Spaghetti-Os. So I guess Mr. O wasn't a total failure. But I don't remember this lasting that long, maybe a couple of years. You can find commercials with this character in them, whether he's with some chef promoting a new product or getting kidnapped by Mr. Bad Lunch. Number two, is the Quiznos sponge monkeys. If you had forgotten about these from about 20 years ago and I have put them back into your mind, I apologize. Much like Mr. O, I don't know how to describe these things. They look like gerbils with big googly eyes and human-like mouths with large teeth and weird voices and they sing. Here, this'll help.

Speaker 03:

There,

Speaker 00:

now do you remember them? They were like 2004, and they didn't last long because I think they gave little kids nightmares seeing those things bouncing around the screens. It reminded me of something that should be on Adult Swim or maybe Ren and Stimpy. And although I loved Quiznos, especially when we had a couple on Cape Cod, seeing those weirdo things would not make me want to buy their subs. Number three was Crinkles the Clown from Sugar Rice Crinkles Cereal. You want to talk about something that will give kids nightmares. He came around in the mid-1950s for post-sugar rice crinkle cereal. He's a clown. He looks a little bit like Bozo, if that is a reference that you understand. He's got very much a Pennywise vibe to him. It could be that the commercials are all black and white, so it makes him look more menacing. The irony is, for as weird and creepy and overly enthusiastic about his cereal that Crinkles the Clown was... When they replaced him in the 1960s, he was replaced by a boy named So Hai, who was a stereotypical racist depiction of a Chinese boy. So it's like they went from bad to worse. Oh, and the cereal was overloaded with sugar and that was their big selling point. So this was definitely a product of the past. Number four was Dunkey from Dunkin' Donuts. Long before there was Fred the Baker in the 1980s, there was Dunkey. Literally a creature made out of all different donuts. Crawler arms, a donut head. And he kind of lives inside this yellow Dunkin' Donuts teacup. He's a little cute, a little weird. He was introduced in 1954 and only really lasted through about 1960. When I first saw the pictures of Dunkey, it reminded me a little bit of the original McDonald's mascot, Speedy, who was a regular human body with what had to be a hamburger head wearing a little chef's hat. That one almost made the cut for this list. And finally, number five on the list of top five obscure and lesser-known advertising product mascots is Milton the Toaster. from Pop-Tarts. He was around basically through the 1970s. A white toaster with a red button you would push down to toast the Pop-Tarts that doubled as a nose. I have no memories of this. I think this mascot was gone long before I started watching TV. So I'm thinking people a few years older than me would have memories of Milton the Toaster. And if you remember Milton and you miss him, Funko actually makes a Funko Pop of Milton the Toaster. So there you have it. Some of the most obscure and some lesser known product mascots. Like I said, they didn't land in any specific date range. You're looking at mascots from the 50s all the way up to 20 years ago. Do you remember any of these? I'm sorry about the Quiznos sponge monkeys. But the other ones, do you remember any of them? Or are there some that I missed that you want me to do in a part two of this? And I'll be back next week with a brand new top five filled with more pleasant memories of nostalgia or maybe nightmare fuel like Crinkles the Clown. Who knows? I'll decide on the way. When you're a kid growing up, you have memories being made, things being imprinted on you that will stick with you well into your adulthood. It goes beyond memories of people and places and things. Certain songs, commercials, TV shows, they seep into your subconscious when you see them growing up. Many of them, when you encounter them when you're grown up, can bring you back to a simpler time and bring a smile to your face. and others that terrified you as a kid can bring back those memories as well. So we're going to go way, way back in the day and look at one of those shows whose theme song still gives me chills and brings back certain memories. And I'm sure it's the same for some of you that are of my age group. So let's look at the docudrama known as Rescue 911. See, did the soundtrack, did it bring back memories? For those of you that know the show, I was trying to think of a softer way to describe the fact that this show terrified me when I was younger. Rescue 911 is one of a series of shows that fall into that reality-based drama type show. I did a deep dive into Unsolved Mysteries back in episode 116, if you want to go check that out. By the time Rescue 911 came out in September 1989, I was already familiar with Unsolved Mysteries. I was almost 12 years old, right in that sweet spot where you were old enough and smart enough to know that these things, like Rescue 911, those were real events, and that made them scarier. And in the future, I'll do other deep dives into some of the other shows of that time period, like America's Most Wanted, maybe a dive into Cops. But they're all kind of that escapism where even though the stories are real and they could always happen to you, you never know. But at least when you're watching the TV show, there's that barrier so that when you shut the show off, you can look around and say, oh, my life's pretty good. So the Nuts and Bolts, for those of you who don't know what the Rescue 911 show was, it was on for seven seasons from 1989 through 1996. with a total of 186 episodes and two specials. In actuality, the first ever Rescue 911 show was April of 1989 that was a special, and then it became a series in the fall. Those of us that grew up with the show, we remember it was hosted by William Shatner. But interestingly, the original choice was Leonard Nimoy, so another Star Trek legend. But it was because Leonard Nimoy had hosted the In Search Of show, which was kind of the precursor to Unsolved Mysteries in the late 1970s through the early 80s. That's a show that if you've never seen it, go out of your way to find those old shows, In Search Of. I'll probably have to do a deep dive into that now. I'll put that on my list. But they decided to go with Shatner for Rescue 911 because he portrayed a police officer on the TV show TJ Hooker.

Speaker 01:

Sometimes a decision made in an instant can drastically affect the lives of those around us. I'm William Shatner. Tonight, true stories of caring people who make a difference on Rescue 911.

Speaker 00:

The show's episodes were laid out in segments with each one featuring a real 911 call, most of them very serious. And that's what made them the scariest was it was the real voices on the phone saying, Whereas Unsolved Mysteries, for the most part, it was reenactments. So you knew it was actors portraying things. And yeah, there were actors doing the scenes in Rescue 911, but it wasn't the actual horrific sounds as things were happening. In the United States, the 911 emergency phone number was first established in Alabama in 1968 as a way for people in emergencies to bypass the normal police telephone number. And yeah, every now and then you get phone calls that are stupid. People calling 911 because their order was wrong at a restaurant or something. But for the most part, it's very serious stuff. So the TV show reflected that. And me being 12, 13 years old watching this show, there was very little reprieve where there was something funny where you could kind of breathe in. It was mostly gripping the couch arm and saying, oh God, I hope these people are all right. It was mostly... Car accidents and crimes and fires, people choking on things, and typically reenacted, but they had the real telephone call going on. Now, I, when I was putting together this segment for the podcast, I had one story from Rescue 911 that was the first one that popped into my head. For those of you that know the show, when you think of Rescue 911, what's the first story that comes to your mind? It might be the same as me. It might be different. For me, it's the story of the kid that falls with their toothbrush in their mouth and the brush goes through the roof of their mouth. Oh, God, just thinking about it even now, 30-something years later. But there are other ones that just traumatized me as a kid. The little boy getting stuck on the escalator and getting strangled as his clothes got stuck in the bottom. There's a little girl that gets stuck in a storm drain overnight. The one with the little kid that gets his face blown up in the propane heater, and they show him having to get the mask, the skin graft. I'm not going to keep listing these, but I've been researching to find the most infamous or famous well-known segments from the show, and they're giving me trauma again in my 40s seeing them. Because even though there's happy endings with the vast majority... It's not like all of the people involved are just 100% okay. A lot of them have things that happen to them that are permanent, like the little boy with his burns. I know that the main purpose of the show was to inform people, maybe get people to be a little more careful just in everyday situations. But things like the kid with the toothbrush, I mean, that traumatized me. I didn't leave from standing in front of the bathroom sink with my toothbrush forever. Thank you for watching. One of the most well-known segments on the show, and one that I don't think I appreciated as a kid, but it's very timely, it was when the murder of Carol Stewart happened in Boston, with her husband Charles being wounded, claiming that it was a robbery attempt by an unknown black man, when in reality it was Charles was the perpetrator, and once things started falling into place, he killed himself like a coward. The Carol Stewart murder was one of the first that I remember growing up. This was October 1989, so during the first season of Rescue 911. And their camera crew just happened to be in Boston at that time filming stuff for the show. And by all accounts of the people that were there, it was kind of a dull and boring shoot. Nothing was going on. And they get word of this shooting happening. So as the police are arriving at the scene with Carol Stewart being near death and Charles Stewart being wounded, the Rescue 911 camera crew was there. So they're filming while medical attention is being given to Carol Stewart, who was pregnant, and Charles at the same time. I said that this is kind of a timely part of this segment because there's a new Netflix documentary coming called Murder in Boston, The Untold Story of Charles and Carol Stewart. So that kind of tied in with why I wanted to talk about Rescue 911 this week. I've heard nothing but rave reviews about that documentary. So if you've got Netflix, definitely check it out, especially if you're not familiar with the case. The gist of it was Charles and his brother had murdered Carol, blamed it on the carjacker. There was no carjacker. There's a lot to it. Definitely check out the documentary. It's a three-part series. That episode, though, of Rescue 911 that they were filming on the night when the murder happened aired on February 27th, 1990. It's episode 20 of the first season. You can find it on YouTube easily. It's a very haunting episode, and the coincidence of the Rescue 911 people just being there to capture this in almost real time, it's really weird. The show was a ratings hit for the most part, finishing in the top 20 for the season in both season 3 and 4. It was always Tuesday nights at 8 p.m., especially through the first six seasons. Then they changed the time slot in season 7, and the ratings fell off, and that was it. You'd sit down Tuesday at 8, there'd be the disclaimer from William Shatner to get you already scared.

Speaker 01:

This program contains true stories of rescues. All of the 911 calls you will hear are real. Whenever possible, the actual people involved have helped us reconstruct the events as they happened.

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And then it was off to the races. There's been talk over the years of a potential reboot, most notably in 2018, with William Shatner coming back to host it. But I guess there was trouble getting consent from victims to be filmed while things were going on. So it just fell apart. Reboots are never as good as the original. So I say if you're interested in Rescue 911 or if you want to go back down memory lane, find those shows on YouTube. Or you can go to Pluto TV. They have their own channel where it's 24 hours a day of Rescue 911. If you watched it growing up, what were the segments that traumatized you most? I gave you a few of mine. Just imagine being a kid at that time. And you had Unsolved Mysteries, Rescue 911, America's Most Wanted, and Cops all on at the same time. Well, not at the same time, but you know, on the schedule at that point in time. It was both a great time to be a kid and a horrible one if you have nightmares. And that's going to wrap up episode 126 of the podcast, the very first of 2024. I hope everyone's new year is getting off to the best start possible. Like I said at the top of the show, for all of you subscribers on Patreon and Buzzsprout, the newest episode, the newest bonus episode of the podcast is up there. If you want to become a subscriber, you can do so. It's a great way to support the podcast, support my work in general. But you don't have to because it's just as important to share the podcast, go and leave reviews. Five-star ratings are every bit as good as subscriptions. And we'll see. As time goes, I'm going to try to do more for those subscribers, as well as more additions in the overall content creation game. So I will keep you updated. You can find me all over social media, Instagram and threads, my YouTube channel. Go and subscribe. I just shared a great video segment from episode 124, the dedication to the craft, nighttime photography. It's great because it's got a lot of actual pictures I took to go along with stories and some AI created photos that I love to sprinkle in there. I use the AI to create things that I can't take photos of. So for example, when I talk about going out to Stage Harbor Light half drunk to take pictures at night, and climbing up the weather station where the osprey nest was. I don't have any photos of me jumping out of the osprey nest terrified, so I had to create one. You have to go watch to see what it looks like. And as I go on with YouTube this year, I'm trying to get a little more adept at animation stuff to make my videos stand out more. And I'm going to try to do more content that is specific to YouTube. Like I said, maybe a short form video podcast, but also videos with voiceovers from me that are specific to YouTube. Because I do a lot of segments from the podcast and I either add a few visuals or a static cover art screen to it. I don't need to have a million subscribers and a million views on every video. But more eyes on my work is always what I want, so I'm always looking to improve. Next week, we are back for episode 127. I'm going to tell the story of the creation of Cape Cod Hospital and what came before it leading up to its creation. We're going to go way, way back in the day for a fever dream of laughs. as I review a 1983 McDonald's training video based around how to cook the new Chicken McNuggets. This segment might be best paired with some sort of edible. If you go watch the video, you'll know what I mean. There'll be a brand new top five featuring the top five forgotten 1980s cartoons. Boy, these will bring back a lot of flashbacks to a lot of you of my age group. And there'll be a brand new This Week in History and Time Capsule centered around the beginnings of photography, all coming up next week on episode 127 of the In My Footsteps podcast. I know that this is the time of year where it's just cold and longer nights and dreary a lot of the time, especially in the Northeast where I'm from. But do your best to get out there when the sun shines. Get that vitamin D because this is that time of year with seasonal depression where sometimes you feel like you just want to hibernate until the end of March when spring comes around. But do a little micromanaging. Lean into the things that make you happy. Focus on those to get you through those darker days. There are a lot of winter days that are just terrible. But I guess it makes us up here in the Northeast appreciate spring and summer and fall. And I'll be here shelling out the content week after week, whether it's the podcast or YouTube videos. So stick around. 2024, I'm going to try to make the best year yet for all of this stuff. And remember, in this life, don't walk in anyone else's footsteps. Create your own path and enjoy every moment you can on this journey we call life. Because after this moment, the next moment's not guaranteed. Thank you all again for tuning in. Happy New Year. This has been the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund. You already knew that. And I'll talk to you all again soon.

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Christopher Setterlund

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