5-4 Presents: Unreformed - "The Lucky Ones"

folks!

Following up on our conversation about juvenile rights with Josie Duffy Rice last week, we wanted to share an episode of her new podcast, Unreformed.

Unreformed is the story of how Mount Megs, a reform school in Alabama, derailed the lives of thousands of black children for decades, and what happened after someone blew the whistle.

In the series' debut, we hear from a woman who managed to escape Mount Megs.

She was determined to tell someone about about the abuse she had suffered there, the unlivable facilities, and the grueling labor students were forced to do in the surrounding fields.

But what's most unbelievable about this story is that Mount Megs is still open today.

To hear the rest of the series, you can find Unreformed wherever you get your podcasts.

This podcast episode discusses historical events that include physical abuse against children.

Earlier this year, I drove from Atlanta, where I live, to Montgomery, Alabama.

It's about a three-hour drive, depending on traffic.

I've been to Montgomery plenty, but this time was different.

In fact, I wasn't going to the city of Montgomery, but to a little unincorporated part of the county called Mount Megs.

I was there to set foot on the grounds of an old Alabama institution that I'd spent the last year investigating.

It was hot outside, over 90 degrees.

I drove down a long road looking for my destination.

But other than a few houses, it was mostly empty until you pull up to the entrance.

You know, it's

a long, huge stretch of land right by the highway

in an area of Montgomery where there's really not much, which is sort of saying something because Montgomery isn't the most happened town anyway.

And when you pull in, on your right is a huge stretch of like swampland filled with sticks and scum and mud.

Outside of the entrance to the actual youth center, you just see

gates and barbed wire fence, and

it looks like a prison.

So I drove up the long driveway lined with trees.

I drove past the visitors' building, past the swamp, and up to this massive double gate, the kind built to keep everyone out.

I rolled down my window and I asked the guard if he would let me in.

Hi.

I'm Josie Duffy Rice.

I'm a writer and a journalist, and before that, I went to law school.

I've spent my career focused on the criminal legal system, and I've long been particularly interested in how we treat children accused of crimes.

I'm also from the South.

I grew up in Georgia, and a few years ago, my family and I moved back there.

And on this day, I was in Alabama, outside a juvenile correctional facility, trying to get in.

Since it was founded over 100 years ago, this institution has had many names.

First, it was called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Boys.

Then in 1911, it became the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Lawbreakers.

Eventually, after it went co-ed, it changed its name again to the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children.

As you may have figured from the names, for most of its history, this facility held only black kids.

These days, it's technically named the Mount Megs Campus of the Alabama Department of Youth Services.

But almost everybody just calls it Mount Megs.

Technically, Mount Megs was a reform school for kids.

But what I've discovered is that it wasn't really a school at all.

Mount Meigs was patterned after slavery.

The slave camp, like a plantation.

We didn't have schools.

They didn't have anything.

It was just slave drivers, just slave driving blacks.

Prison for teens.

A penal colony for children.

This is Unreformed:

the story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children.

Episode 1, The Lucky Ones.

Before we talk about what happened at Mount Megs, we have to go back to a boy named Lonnie in Birmingham, Alabama, in the early 1960s.

In the Alabama summers, you can hear the whisper of living things,

the rustle of tiny creatures in the grass, the hum of Katy dids and crickets, the blue jays flitting from one tree to another.

There's a lot to discover if you're willing to look.

And as a kid, Lonnie Hawley was always looking.

On any given evening in 1961, back when Lonnie was 11, you might have seen him in Birmingham, a young boy looking for critters or some interesting piece of litter on the side of the road.

It was like an adventure.

A child on an adventure down the ditches and the creeks.

And seeing

the broken material, the closer you got to downtown, you got a chance to see more and more and more and more waste material that had been flushed down the creek and the ditches.

Lonnie was always finding some unusual thing that someone else had discarded.

He loved finding worms and tadpoles.

He had the mud-soaked curiosity of any 11-year-old boy, and he did this often, ran away to explore, to search.

Lonnie had literally dozens of siblings, but legend has it that he was his mother's scrawniest child.

And I'm the seventh of her 27 children, but the lost one that had to go through the most abuse.

One of 27, but on this night in 1961, Lonnie is basically an orphan.

He lost touch with his family when he was a toddler after a local dancer who was a friend of his mother's noticed how frail he was.

This lady, she was a burlette dancer at the fairground,

saying that she would keep me and she could breastfeed me, you know.

So the dancer took Lonnie in so she could feed him.

But then eventually she too was gone.

In some tellings of the story, the burlesque dancer left him with a couple in exchange for a bottle of whiskey.

That couple, the McElroys, owned a whiskey house and they took Lonnie in.

Back then he was known as Tonki McElroy.

Lil Tonki was the one that was always being mistreated or whatever, but in a sense, Lil Tonki was always the one that was kept silent.

Lonnie was in that house for years.

Mrs.

McElroy was good to him.

She became a surrogate mother.

Even now, Lonnie says that she loved him like he was her own son.

But still, these weren't happy years.

He was alone so often, and Mr.

McElroy was an alcoholic and abusive.

And it wasn't just him.

There were others around Lonnie who would beat him, sometimes badly enough to land him in the hospital.

Lonnie remembers one story from when he was around four years old, when an old man was at the whiskey house drunk.

Lonnie was eating a plate of food.

Was going to be picking off my plate, and I dripped the plate and crawled up underneath the couch.

And he kept reaching under there, and I think I bit him on the arm or on the hand or something.

The man was furious.

And he got mad and went over there and got the poker iron that you stir up the hot coals and stuff with in the heater and chewed the poker iron in my head

and put a hole in my head.

I still feel a knot.

And they had to rush me to the hospital because I was hollering and screaming.

That was the first incident.

of me having to be involved with

hospital was to get this poker iron pulled out of my head.

A few years later, when Lonnie was seven, Mrs.

McElroy died.

Mr.

McElroy was out as usual.

Running around with his other ladies.

It was unexpected, at least for Lonnie.

And he didn't really get it.

No one had taught him anything about death.

So for days, it was just him and her dead body in the house, alone.

It wasn't until Mr.

McElroy got home that Lonnie learned that she was dead.

Say, god damn it, you don't kill my wife.

And he was so angry with me

and he just started beating me.

Lonnie ran out of the house as fast as he could.

I remember grabbing my wagon out from under the house.

and just busting out the fence.

And then, suddenly, Lonnie was hit by a car and dragged for blocks.

And that's all I remember.

The car hit me, drugged me up

underneath it.

After three and a half months in a coma, Lonnie woke up in the hospital.

He didn't want to go back to live with Mr.

McElroy,

but it was kind of the only option.

He had nowhere else to go.

Lonnie got older, and every so often he'd hear whispers or rumors about his birth family.

Someone told him that his mother was living with his brothers and sisters out by the Birmingham airport.

Lonnie wanted to find them, but it was too vague, too impractical.

It's not like a young black boy could just knock on random doors, asking people if they'd seen his mother.

All I could think about

every day, every hour, were my mama and my mama having a bunch of children.

And they lived in across town.

But where was across town?

So for years, Lonnie coped with the life that he had.

He waited until after dark and then explored where he could, when he could.

So no, it wasn't a happy life.

It wasn't carefree or joyful.

But he had his small pleasures, like his adventures in the ditches, exploring, moments of freedom,

until one night when even that was snatched away from him.

And this particular evening, I had got all the way to town.

I was out

doing curfew, and that was reason enough for them to take me to Jubena.

So this was a common thing back then.

You even see it now sometimes, actually, especially in the South.

There were curfews and laws against skipping school and loitering and congregating.

But almost always, these laws were only enforced against Black people.

In Jim Crow, Alabama, these tiny infractions led to countless black children entangled in the criminal legal system.

Like Lonnie, when he was 11 years old, the cops arrested him, put him in the back of the cruiser, and took him to jail for being out past curfew.

Lonnie wasn't the only black kid in the jail.

He wasn't even the only one in his cell.

The others had been arrested for their involvement in the civil rights movement that was brewing in Alabama, especially in Birmingham.

By the time Lonnie got there, they'd been planning their escape.

And joining the jailbreak didn't feel like much of a choice.

Well, you either broke out or got your ass beat because because they weren't gonna leave you behind to tell on them.

They had this ridiculous plan that during lights out, they'd somehow trick a janitor into opening their cell door, steal his keys, and make their great escape.

Somehow it worked.

We took his keys to his automobile and everything and ran out the back entrance of the

juveniles.

The group managed to drive away, their tires screeching in the rain.

But unfortunately, their getaway driver wasn't as talented as he let on.

We didn't know how to drive real good.

So

we were squirriing on the road, and then all of a sudden, he went to throw on brakes and hit the telegram post.

And once he hit the telegram post, he had a rest.

Within moments, they heard sirens.

They took us right back to the juvenile, put us back in the cell, and early that morning, we was loaded up in this truck and took to this place called Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children.

By age 11, Lonnie had already been separated from his family, endured beatings, lost his surrogate mother, received a life-threatening injury to his head, been dragged underneath a truck, spent three months in a coma, and suffered countless other abuses.

But now on the road to Mount Megs, Lonnie was about to enter some of the worst years of his life.

About a year ago, I got an email about Lonnie Hawley.

Now, I had never met Lonnie, but I come from a family of art lovers, so I had heard about him.

Lonnie Bradley Hawley, formerly Tonky, the boy playing in the ditches in Birmingham in 1961,

is now a musician, an arts educator, and most notably, an internationally renowned artist.

By 1980-82, my works had been to 64 cities.

My works had went to the Smithsonian.

Lonnie's art can be found in many other museums, too, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery.

I spent time with him recently in a friend's home in Atlanta.

And his work was everywhere.

Hanging from the ceiling was this incredible sculpture he made from wire, wood, paper, and metal.

Or as Lani puts it, all the things that people throw away.

On the countertop was a small, beautiful sculpture made from sandstone.

Lani is self-taught through and through.

His art comes from the kind of things he used to find in the ditches.

Talking to him, you sense that in his life, art and tragedy are often inseparable.

In fact, the first time he realized he was making art, he was in his 20s after the death of his young niece and nephew.

His family couldn't afford headstones, so Lonnie offered to make them.

I didn't know anything about art or

sculpture or the depictments.

All of those things I learned after

my sister, two children, was buried.

And I started working with this material.

And it was a

sandstone.

I was cutting different shapes and making baby tombstones.

It was a Tuskegee airman came by.

He lived down the street from my grandpa.

He said, you know what you're doing?

I said,

no,

sir.

He said, I've been almost all around the world.

And I've seen a lot of lot of things done.

He said, but that's what you are doing.

He said, you doing art.

Fans of Lonnie's art note that his hardships or his toils and tribulations lay the foundation for all of his work.

In fact, it was those hardships that led to the email in my inbox asking me if I was interested in helping tell this story.

The email wasn't about Lonnie's work or his career.

It was about the three years he spent at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children.

There were no educational facilities there.

You can't stop.

You can never break the line.

You can never slow down.

If you do, you get beat.

We was being treated with some dogs, man.

I mean, boys got raped all the time in my maze.

You'd hit them about 100 to 100 to 100 to two times with a pallet.

And she comes down on your back as hard as she can with every ounce of strength in her.

They beat me to the point that I couldn't even walk.

I couldn't do nothing but crawl.

She had hit me in the head with a bottle and my head was swollen.

She would make me stay on the stairs so I wouldn't be seen.

You'll see these graves over to the side.

They won't tell you.

There's a lot of boys didn't even make it out of Mount Megs.

Over the past few years, We've heard more and more disturbing stories about places like Mount Megs,

institutions for so-called delinquent children, where minors were brutally abused.

These institutions have a long history in America.

For more than a century, children have been shipped off to quote-unquote reform schools.

Some of them, like Mount Megs, are state-run institutions.

Others are expensive reform boarding schools where the wealthy send their wayward kids.

But the thing that they have in common is the abuse.

Many kids ended up dead.

Mount Megs was one of these places.

And yet it has a particularly unique origin story.

It was started in 1907 by the daughter of an enslaved woman.

It was an institution that was meant to reform, to rehabilitate, to get black children out of adult prisons.

But then the state of Alabama took over the school, and it did just the opposite.

Honestly, it's hard to imagine how any kid could have emerged from Mount Megs unharmed.

Much of Mount Megs' history is unknown, especially the early years.

Part of that is due to poor record keeping, maybe to avoid oversight.

Some of it can also be chalked up to bad luck, since what little did exist was burned in a fire in the 1920s.

But mostly, it was probably just negligence or general disregard for the lives of poor black children.

Children are really vulnerable, very vulnerable.

They don't vote.

They don't make campaign contributions.

They don't have political friends in high places that can make things happen.

They're totally at the will of adults.

That's Denny Abbott.

He's 83 years old now, but he was only 21 when he started working in youth corrections and visited Mount Megs for the first time.

That was in 1961, the same year Lonnie was sent there.

Denny is a white guy, like most people working in corrections in Alabama.

And back then, he was responsible for taking both black and white kids to their respective segregated reform schools.

Immediately, he noticed a disparity between the two.

The white kids had a good educational program, and both the boys and girls in the white schools.

They had social services, they had medical services, vocational rehab services.

But Mount Megs?

Mount Megs had none of those.

Zero, not one.

Picture the worst environment for children that you possibly can, and Mount Megs is at the top of that list.

Nobody got a fair shake at Mount Megs, not one kid, and it was a disgrace.

Denny took this job when he was fresh out of college.

It was decent work, stable.

It came with a pension.

But still, he didn't like what he saw at Mount Megs.

It bothered him, so much so that he reported the conditions of the reformatory numerous times to his superiors.

Of course, nothing happened.

And there's a very simple reason why nothing happened.

Nobody cared.

They were black kids.

They almost didn't exist except to do things for white people.

So nobody cared, and nothing ever happened.

Mount Megs was started in 1907, and it still exists today.

And honestly, every era of its history could be its own series.

But there is a reason we are focused on Mount Megs in the 60s.

The school sits right outside outside of what was not just a battleground state, but a battleground city in the fight for civil rights.

Mount Megs is just a few miles away from where Rosa Parks refused to get up from her seat on the bus, where Martin Luther King was arrested, where civil rights leaders like John Lewis marched from Selma.

And while much of America slowly started to improve throughout the decade, Alabama refused.

Mount Megs was at its absolute worst.

That is, until a few brave people tried to change things for the kids there, and the civil rights movement came to Mount Megs' doorstep.

With the help of Lonnie and Denny, we were able to find other children who were sent to Mount Megs in the 60s.

Throughout this series, you'll hear from many former students talking about their time there, including archival interviews recorded in the mid-1990s.

And you'll hear from four survivors in particular.

Among them, they spent almost a whole decade at Mount Megs.

Each year that one left, a new one joined.

Lonnie Holly was the first to be sent to Mount Megs.

there from 1961 to 1964.

Jenny Knox was there from about 1964 to 1967.

Then there's Mary Stevens, who was there from 1967 to 1969.

And Johnny Bodley, who was also sent there in 1967 and stayed until 1970.

And I stand by you

at that tree right there.

That's where I have my breakfast.

I stand there and eat figs.

This is Mary Stevens.

She's a soft-spoken woman, a mother who surrounds herself with photos of her children.

Mary is a gardener, and these days, she enjoys the fruit trees and plants in her garden in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

I love figs.

They're just now coming out.

This is a plum tree.

A lot of plums have fallen off.

I have strawberries.

As a matter of fact, my little one,

the day that he came home, May the 4th, the strawberries were blooming, and there was a big...

Mary is talking about one of her younger sons.

Her biological children are all grown up now.

And a few years ago, she adopted two boys.

And this is a Georgia plum tree that I brought out of Georgia.

Listening to Mary, you can hear in her voice the pride and joy in her home.

She's carved out this quiet life for herself and her children.

It's hard to imagine her at a place like Mount Megs.

But in the late 1960s, she spent 18 months at the institution.

In 1968, Mary and four other black girls decided to run away from Mount Megs.

But they didn't manage to get very far before they were caught.

They were picked up by police and brought to the juvenile detention center.

But it just so happened that this detention center in Montgomery was also where Denny's office was.

Runaways from Mount Megs were not unusual.

Desperate kids ran away all of the time.

But this time, these girls insisted on speaking to someone in charge.

That someone was Denny.

And that meeting would change everything.

After connecting with Lonnie and Mary, we were able to find other survivors of Mount Megs.

Jenny Knox lives in Montgomery.

She's 70 now.

And when we went to her house, she opened the door dressed in her Sunday best.

I was born in the 50s, and that style I like.

This one is a red and white flower dress,

and my red flower belt, and my red sander shoes over there with the glitter, and my necklaces and stuff.

And so I just wanted to dress up for you guys.

And it was awesome.

Jenny is extremely welcoming, a great host.

Jenny is also a devout Christian, and one of the first things you notice when you walk into her house, other than the countless family photos, is her large collection of Bibles.

Her favorite scripture is about mercy, something she was searching for when she was serving time at Mount Megs, not just once, but twice.

My favorite scripture

was what got me through each day

is Psalms 51.

It starts off by saying, have mercy upon me, O God,

according to thy loving kindness, according to the multitudes of thy tender mercies.

Blot out my transgressions,

wash me thoroughly from my iniquities, and cleanse me from my sins.

For acknowledge my transgressions and my sins.

God damn your mouth.

God damn

This is Johnny Bodley.

He also was at Mount Megs in the 1960s.

We recently went to his hometown, about an hour west from where Ginny lives in Selma, Alabama, to a community center called By the River Center for Humanity.

Johnny, who plays the keyboard and the guitar, performed several of his songs there.

Johnny spent a couple of decades in Boston as a musician.

I was in a major popular RB group band up there called the Hypnotics.

I was in Boston, you know, and I was

I had become I had become pretty popular, you know, because of my green abs.

A lot of girls liked me, you know.

If you didn't catch that, Johnny says the reason he's so popular with women is because of his bright green eyes.

After Boston, he moved back to Selma.

Now, Johnny busks almost daily in Selma.

I got down to Alabama.

I became a church musician, you know, play for three churches, you know, piano player, things that I thought I would never

do.

He plays Marvin Gaye and Nat King Cole and Billie Holiday on his Yamaha keyboard or strums on his guitar.

But for the last few years, his main focus has been educating local youth.

I speak throughout the state state of Alabama and other places to young people, you know, about HIVA's prevention because I was HIVA's prevention specialist for a long time.

You know, that's how a lot of young people know me.

Johnny's different than he was when he was younger.

He's more peaceful now.

But trying to repair the damage that was done to him at Mount Megs was a long road.

Mount Megs

makes you worse.

Mount Megs gave you a killing mentality.

Mount Megs turned guys into murderers.

And this mentality that Johnny's describing, instilled in him at Mount Megs,

it upended the lives of countless black children in Alabama.

Last year, when I first heard about Mount Megs, there was one thing that really caught my attention.

It was the way that this institution shaped the rest of people's lives.

Lonnie Holly, Jenny Knox, Johnny Bodley, and Mary Stevens are still, even into their late 60s and 70s, dealing with the psychological and emotional trauma of their time at Mount Megs.

It been with me all of my life.

I'd never been able to get the hardest part of that out of my life.

I was told in Mount Megs that, you know, we'll never be anything.

We'll never amount to anything.

We wasn't going to amount to anything.

You know, I've said to myself,

something had to be wrong with them.

I don't understand

what happened.

And they're also, all things considered, the lucky ones.

For countless others, the trauma Mount Megs inflicted on them irreparably derailed their lives.

Many are locked up, serving life sentences, or even on death row, and others have been executed.

Most of the guys that I knew who was in my migs are deceased now, and some are doing life in prison.

Some was electrocuted.

And it's sad.

I'm one of the most violent persons that you would ever have met in your life.

And those characteristics were instilled in me when I was a 12, 13-year-old child in my migs reformatory.

That is Johnny Mac Young.

He's serving life in prison without possibility for parole for murder.

We'll spend some time with him later in the series.

His story echoes the story of so many former attendees of Mount Megs.

I've been fascinated by, consumed by even, the story of Mount Megs for about a year now.

In some ways, that's pretty on brand for me, given that my professional focus is the criminal legal system.

But in other ways, it's a little different than what I usually do.

I tend to focus on things that have happened recently, or are happening right now.

But this story, the one we're going to tell you, it largely takes place a few decades ago, in the 1960s.

But the more time we spend on this story, talking to people, sorting through archives, putting the puzzle pieces together, the more we realize that this is in fact a story about today.

After all, at this very moment, Mount Megs is still in operation.

This is a story about the people who were children back then and who they became.

But it's also a story about the ones that are children now and the future they face.

I was surprised and a bit ashamed that I'd never even heard of Mount Megs.

I've spent a fair amount of time in Montgomery.

One of my best friends from law school lives there.

Her name is Rachel Judge, and she's a federal defender now, meaning she represents defendants in federal court.

But before this, she spent almost a decade working in the Alabama state court system as an attorney at the Equal Justice Initiative.

She spent her whole career representing people facing the most severe punishments.

Some of her clients were kids when they were sentenced to life without parole.

Many of them spent years of their childhoods in adult prison.

Others are on death row.

So I reached out to her to see what she had to say about it.

I wanted to

ask you a quick question about a project I'm working on

because I thought you might have some insight.

Do you have a second to talk?

Yeah.

Okay, great.

Have you heard of

a place called Mount Megs?

Oh, yeah.

That I mean, that's just right outside of Montgomery, right?

You're talking about that one?

Yeah, the like institution for kids.

Honestly, I hadn't heard of it for a minute.

I always saw the signs driving into Montgomery, but then I had a client, one of my clients who was sentenced to life without parole as a kid.

He spent time there in the late 80s.

So I think tragically that is a place that ends up feeding a lot of kids into the adult system.

And then a number of them even end up on Alabama's death row.

A lot of kids who spent time there and were likely abused there, right, then ended up, like you said, serving life without parole sentences or even on death row.

So it's like crazy to hear you say that.

Well I had a client, he spoke about being shackled on his hands and feet and his waist 24 hours a day for days at a time.

And that's right now, that's 20, I'm sure it was like 2014, something like that.

I can't imagine what it was like in the 60s and 70s.

To imagine it decades ago, it's pretty unfathomable.

We've been trying to figure out how to get into the Mount Megs campus for over a year.

But we basically got nowhere, especially given COVID.

No one was willing to let us in.

So eventually I just decided to go on the off chance that I could just manage to talk my way in once I got there.

But unsurprisingly, my plan didn't work.

Hi.

I've been working on a project about the Mount Megs in the 60s and I was just hoping I could see the campus.

Is there a way we could just drive around it?

So I pulled over outside the gate and walked around a little.

I couldn't stop thinking about the thousands of children, mostly black children, who'd been stuck here, especially back in the 1960s.

How did it happen and what did it take to make the abuse stop?

In this season of Unreformed, we look at what Mount Megs intended to be when it was founded in 1907 and the nightmare that it eventually became.

This is a story of the abuse suffered by the children trapped there.

and what happened after five girls escaped and found someone who decided to do something about it.

This season on Unreformed.

They was literally bent over with their hands pulling garage.

Mr.

Holloway laid him down right in front of everybody and almost beat him to death.

Their slogan was lifting as we climb, this idea that as you climb a ladder, those folk who are at the bottom are still yours.

This model actually worked in the case of a Satchel Page.

I backed up and I kept backing up and I started running.

I was not going back without telling somebody what was going on with me.

I said, you know what?

I can't be the kind of father to my own kids if I walk away from those girls.

I was this liberal Jewish kid coming down from the north and here I am in Montgomery, Alabama doing my thing and I'm going to file civil rights cases.

The absolute denial of basic and fundamental human rights to Negro children who were incarcerated in a concentration camp at Mount Meggs, Alabama.

Mount Meg gave me the foundation for everything that I am.

All that I am now is a product of Mount Meggs.

All that I will be will always be a product of Mount Meggs.

Unreformed, the story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, is a production of School of Humans and iHeartMedia.

This episode was written by Taylor Von Lasley and me, Josie Duffy Rice.

Our script supervisor is Florence Burrow-Adams and our producer is Gabby Watts.

We had additional writing and production support from Sherry Scott.

Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr, Matt Arnett, and me.

Sound design and mix is by Jesse Nyswalner.

Music is by Ben Soley with recordings courtesy of the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture.

Special thanks to Alabama Department of Archives and History, Michael Harriet, Floyd Hall, Kevin Nutt, Van Newkirk, and all of the survivors of Mount Megs willing to share their story.

If you or someone you know attended Mount Megs and would like to connect with us, please email mountmegspodcast at gmail.com.

That's M-T-M-E-I-G-S podcast at gmail.com.