535: Origin Story

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Speaker 2 Pino Audia teaches in the the business school at Dartmouth, and he researches the question: how do entrepreneurs get created?

Speaker 2 And at some point, he noticed that his students and many of his colleagues actually have an opinion about this. They believe entrepreneurs make themselves.

Speaker 2 You know, you head off on your own, you write a business plan, you start in your own garage. And the garage, by the way, is not a metaphorical garage.
It is a garage, a literal garage.

Speaker 2 Hewlett Packard started it in a garage. Apple Computer had a garage.
Disney, the Patel Toy Company, the Whammo Toy Company.

Speaker 4 It is about big dreams and humble beginnings and success in the face of adversity and doubters.

Speaker 4 And also the idea that, regardless of who you are, regardless of how humble your beginnings are, you can turn something into an immense success story if you work hard. And

Speaker 4 that was the point in time in which I got interested in the story of the garage as a myth.

Speaker 5 A garage is a place of possibilities. It's a place where things can get get invented

Speaker 5 and a place where entrepreneurs begin.

Speaker 2 This is a promotional video that Hewlett-Packard put together after it spent millions to buy and restore the original garage where its two founders started a company that is still one of the largest technology firms in the world.

Speaker 5 In 1938, in a garage in Palo Alto, California, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard set to work to start a new company.

Speaker 5 They had a few hand-operated punches, a used Sears Roebuck drill press that had just made the trip west in the back of one of their cars, and they had a rented flat with a garage.

Speaker 2 Professor Adia doesn't argue with any of this, but he says that when you ask actual entrepreneurs, and this is true in survey after survey, you find that most of them began not by going off into their garage, but by working for somebody else, making contacts, learning the business.

Speaker 4 So this is a very robust finding, which tells us that actually if you want to become an entrepreneur, the obvious thing to do is to first go get a job in an industry you're interested in and learn and then eventually later try to create a company.

Speaker 2 Even Bill Hewitt and Dave Packard weren't exactly outsiders. They studied electrical engineering at MIT in Stanford.
Packard had worked at General Electric.

Speaker 2 A former professor of theirs from Stanford gave them leads and hooked them up, for example, with a firm called Lytton Engineering, who let them use equipment that they didn't own themselves yet.

Speaker 2 Just as, decades later, the founders of Apple Computer, 21-year-old Steve Jobs, was already working at Atari, and 25-year-old Steve Wozniak was at Quitt Packard when they started Apple in Jobs Garage.

Speaker 4 And for example, in the case of Steve Jobs, he benefited greatly from the support that he got from the Atari people because they introduced him to investors.

Speaker 2 Pino Adia, a stretch bed, mentions of garage entrepreneurs or anything like it in other countries and didn't come up with much.

Speaker 2 He says it seems to be a very American idea, very close to other American ideas about opportunity for everybody.

Speaker 2 The Apple and Hewlett-Packard garages have now become such a part of Silicon Valley myth that it's made other tech companies want their own stories like it.

Speaker 2 Google, for example, they did not start in a garage. The founders began working on their search engine in 1996 when they were at Stanford.
They didn't actually move into a garage until 1998.

Speaker 2 They already had investors and they were just in the garage for five months.

Speaker 7 But in 2006, Google bought that garage.

Speaker 2 It's a company landmark.

Speaker 8 It's like no one wants to hear the story of the rich, well-connected guys who meet up at the Marriott conference room to hatch a business plan. You know, there's no romance in that.

Speaker 2 Dan Heath has written about these origin stories in Fast Company magazine.

Speaker 2 He says that one way to measure just how appealing these stories are is to count all the ones that get quoted widely, even though they aren't remotely true.

Speaker 2 For instance, when eBay began, a story circulated that its founder created the company so his fiancée could buy and collect Pez dispensers more easily. Not true.

Speaker 2 One of the creators of YouTube used to claim that the idea for the business came after a dinner party in 2005, where two of the company's masterminds, Chad Hurley and Steve Chin, shot some video and they tried to post it online and found out just how hard that was back then.

Speaker 8 Now,

Speaker 8 that is at a minimum an exaggerated tale. In fact, there's a third founder of YouTube who claims the dinner party never happened.

Speaker 8 And Steve Chin later admitted in Time magazine that the dinner party was embellished to provide a better founding myth.

Speaker 8 And I do want to say that

Speaker 8 while it feels like a little bit of a letdown

Speaker 8 to realize that this dinner party story is not the whole truth,

Speaker 8 I feel like it's a little bit unfair for us to expect more of them than the creation of YouTube. I mean, here's this incredible site, and in some sense, that's not enough for us.

Speaker 8 Like, we want YouTube to have emerged from some kind of everyday experience.

Speaker 8 It's not enough to have the value of their work. We also want there to be a really compelling story that started it.

Speaker 2 Now, in the article that you wrote for Fest Company, you point out that our attachment to these kinds of mythic creation stories is so strong that we have even exaggerated the Christopher Columbus story.

Speaker 8 Well, Christopher Columbus, as we all know, wanted to prove that he could reach India by sailing west. But no one believed his crazy theory that the earth was round.

Speaker 8 And in fact, his own sailors en route were terrified that they were about to fall over the edge of the earth, and they almost mutinied.

Speaker 8 So there's a guy named James Lowen, a professor at University of Vermont, who has pointed out that virtually every element of the story is false.

Speaker 8 That in fact we still don't really know where Christopher Columbus was going.

Speaker 8 There's a a lot of disagreement among historians, and even Columbus' best-known biographer isn't totally sure where he was headed.

Speaker 8 And furthermore, there was no element of, is the Earth round or flat here? Most people at that time already knew that the Earth was round.

Speaker 8 The evidence was there for them to see.

Speaker 8 They noticed that if another ship is receding into the horizon, their hull disappears first, and then the mass later, which implies that there's some kind of curvature in play.

Speaker 8 And again, you know,

Speaker 8 here's a guy who crossed an ocean and became one of the first Europeans to set foot on a new continent. And yet we want more from this guy.

Speaker 8 We want him to, you know, be having hand-to-hand combat with his crew en route. Like we just crave the drama, we crave the obstacles.

Speaker 2 For today on our show, Origin stories. We love them so much that sometimes it it is hard not to make them up.

Speaker 2 From WBEC Chicago, it's This American Life, Act 1 of our show today, Madman. Act 2, Silent Partner.
Act 3, Wait, Wait, Don't Film Me. Act 4, Bill Clinton's 7-Year-Old Brother.
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Speaker 2 This American Life Today Show is a rerun, Act 1, Madman.

Speaker 2 Well, this first story is about a fight over the origin of certain ideas. A fight over who really came up with those ideas.
Sarah Koenig tells a story about her dad, Julian.

Speaker 12 All my life, I've heard the hallmarks of my father's achievements.

Speaker 13 I invented thumb wrestling.

Speaker 12 That was in 1936 when he was a counselor at Camp Greylock for boys. They already had arm wrestling for the boys and leg wrestling.

Speaker 13 But

Speaker 13 we needed another wrestling, and I invented thumb wrestling with the same rules as a hockey puck face-off.

Speaker 13 One, two, three, go.

Speaker 12 It just came to you like just a stroke. Oh, we should use our thumbs?

Speaker 13 It was, yeah, it was

Speaker 13 just a devastating moment.

Speaker 12 The discoveries kept coming. Shrimp, for instance.

Speaker 13 I want to popularize shrimp in America.

Speaker 12 In 1941, my father, a shrimp lover, was discouraged that there were only two places on Broadway in New York where you could get shrimp.

Speaker 12 So then in Biloxi, Mississippi, and bear with me here because this story barely makes any sense.

Speaker 12 So he's in Biloxi on his way to Mexico with some buddies, and he sees this government boat about to go out to track the migratory path of shrimp.

Speaker 12 And he talks his way onto the boat by explaining that he loves shrimp, apparently. And he goes out on this boat and they find the shrimp breeding grounds or some such.
The rest, of course, is history.

Speaker 13 Then, back in New York, I patrolled Broadway at 9-0 Veron

Speaker 13 asking for shrimp, shrimp, shrimp, more.

Speaker 13 And in this way, talking it up, I popularized shrimp. No question about it.

Speaker 3 That seems like really,

Speaker 12 really thin evidence that you popularize shrimp in New York.

Speaker 13 Well, I'm not making any

Speaker 13 claim on the industry.

Speaker 12 My dad does make a claim on the word character, that he came up with the idea to use it to mean a person of unusual or eccentric qualities.

Speaker 13 You have a character in a play, of course, but it wasn't in common usage as he's a character.

Speaker 12 And what made you... Do you remember why you started using it?

Speaker 13 I just shifted it, adopted it. Though Norman Mailer thinks that he developed it, I take precedence.

Speaker 12 According to my father, Norman Mailer also said he invented thumb wrestling.

Speaker 12 Mailer, who died in 2007, was a famous thumb wrestler, but not its inventor, because, as we now know, my dad invented it at Camp Greylock for Boys. And that's the rub.

Speaker 12 You can't prove the origin of any of this stuff, and it's annoying when people like Norman Mailer take credit.

Speaker 12 My dad would like people to recognize him for his contributions to shrimp and character and thumb wrestling, but he's not going to make a stink if they don't.

Speaker 12 His real legacy, though, in advertising, That's another story. That he's willing to fight for, and he has been fighting for it for decades.

Speaker 12 My father was a legendary copywriter. He wrote Timex takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
He named Earth Day Earth Day. It falls on his birthday, April 22nd, Earth Day Birthday.

Speaker 12 So the idea came easily. The magazine Advertising Age made a list of the top 100 advertising campaigns of the 20th century.

Speaker 12 The Marlborough Man is on it, and the Energizer Bunny, Good to the Last Drop from Maxwell House, and the Keep America Beautiful Crying Indian. But the number one ad, the top of the 100 list?

Speaker 12 Think small. That was Volkswagen's American campaign to sell the Beetle in 1959, and my father wrote it.
A picture of a tiny car on a big white page, and some amused, self-deprecating copy.

Speaker 12 That ad was followed by Lemon, another VW ad so iconic and made it onto the TV show Mad Men, the show set in 1960 about an ad agency that's slightly behind the times.

Speaker 12 In this scene, the agency's creative team contemplates the Lemon ad.

Speaker 14 I don't know what I hate about it the most, the ad or the car? You know, they did one last year, same kind of smirk. Remember think small? It was a half-page ad at a full-page buy.

Speaker 14 You could barely see the product. I don't get it.

Speaker 12 At the time, these ads were revolutionary. In the beginning, there was Volkswagen, another famous New York adman wrote.
That was the day when the new advertising agency was really born.

Speaker 12 Here's another scene from Mad Men when Don Draper, the agency's creative director, interviews some new talent. After he looks at their portfolio, he hands it back to them with this line.

Speaker 13 Books good.

Speaker 15 By the way, it has Julian Koenig's fingerprints all over it.

Speaker 12 It's Julian Koenig, actually, my father. And what has irritated him for so long is not that he's not recognized for his talent.
I mean, the people who write Mad Men clearly know who he is.

Speaker 12 It's that some of his best work has been claimed by someone else.

Speaker 13 In my instance, the greatest predator on my work was my one-time partner, George Lois, who is a most heralded and

Speaker 13 talented art director, designer.

Speaker 13 And his talent is only exceeded by his

Speaker 13 omnivorous ego.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 where it once would have been

Speaker 13 accepted that the word would be we did it,

Speaker 13 regardless of who originated the work, the word we didn't evaporated from George's vocabulary and it became I.

Speaker 12 If you've heard of anyone in the advertising industry, it might be George Lois.

Speaker 12 He's well known for a lot of things, but maybe especially for his provocative and funny Esquire magazine covers from the 1960s, like the one of Muhammad Ali posing as St. Sebastian.

Speaker 12 But before that, George Lois worked at Doldane Birnbach, and so did my father.

Speaker 12 In 1960, they both left DDB and joined up with another guy, Fred Papert, to form their own upstart agency called PKL, Papert, Koenig, and Lois.

Speaker 12 George Lois wouldn't talk to me for this story. I'm not going to get into a sophomore fight with a disgruntled ex-partner, he wrote in an email.

Speaker 12 I can't say I blame him. I've had mixed feelings about this fight.
Of course, I want to stick up for my father, take his side.

Speaker 12 But I've also thought there's something inherently undignified about the whole thing.

Speaker 12 Like, it's beneath my father to care whether or not George Lois is taking credit for this or that slogan from 1962. So I never really paid attention to the details, until now.

Speaker 12 Lately, it's been coming up more, or at least more publicly, so I started asking questions.

Speaker 12 According to my father, it all started with the Harvey Prober account. Harvey Prober made elegant modern furniture.

Speaker 12 My dad says he came up with the ad, a beautiful chair with a matchbook under one leg, and the line, If your Harvey Prober chair wobbles, straighten your floor, and a piece of copy that went with it that he thought was very good.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 a year or so later, or a couple of years later,

Speaker 13 Ron Holland, a friend of mine,

Speaker 13 came running into my office to say, George is upstairs with a Japanese editorial writer. They're doing an interview with him, and he's claiming a Hobby Provocere ad,

Speaker 13 that he wrote it.

Speaker 13 So I called George down to my office and remonstrate. That's what men do frequently with him.

Speaker 13 And he says, I never said that. I would never say that.

Speaker 13 And he went back to his office and a little while later, Ron comes bursting into my office saying, George said, I told that son of a gun now how to get off.

Speaker 12 Meaning you, meaning he had told you.

Speaker 13 Told me where to get off.

Speaker 13 So that was really the start of it.

Speaker 12 In 1972, George Lois published a book, the first of many, about his career called George Be Careful. In it, he describes going to the Harvey Prober Furniture Factory in Massachusetts with my dad.

Speaker 12 Each chair was placed on an electronic test platform to be sure it was absolutely level, Lois wrote. Got a book of matches, I asked Julian, a heavy smoker.

Speaker 12 He handed me a matchbook, and I slid it under one leg of the chair on the test platform. I've got the ad, I said.
If your Harvey Prober chair is crooked, straighten your floor.

Speaker 12 Julian scowled and shot back. Ask if your Harvey Prober chair wobbles, straighten your floor.
That was the way the ad ran, and that was the way we built the first red-hot creative agency.

Speaker 13 And none of that ever happened, as described by George. He didn't ask me for a matchbook.
He didn't slide it under the leg of a chair and say, I've got the ad. None of it is true.

Speaker 12 But his makes a better story.

Speaker 13 His is a marvelous story. George is a talented storyteller with a vivid imagination.
The only thing that could exceed it would be the truth.

Speaker 12 There were other instances, also regarding ads that were groundbreaking for their time. A campaign for the New York Herald Tribune, who says a good newspaper has to be dull.

Speaker 12 Some famous Xerox commercials showing a little girl operating a copy machine, and later a chimpanzee doing it.

Speaker 12 Add several people who worked on the account who complained that George literally had nothing to do with.

Speaker 12 Then there's the ad for Coldeen Cough Medicine. The page is entirely black, with just two quotes at different heights, meant to show a couple talking in bed.
John, is that Billy coughing?

Speaker 12 says the wife. Get up and give him some Coldeen, the husband replies.
In an interview 20 years later, George Lois said, The idea for the ad hit me like a brainstorm.

Speaker 12 This was the first time there would be no copy, no package design, no trademark, he said. It was really the beginning of a new creative revolution.

Speaker 12 It was one of those ads that made history effectively.

Speaker 12 Again, my dad is adamant that the whole ad, copy and design, were his.

Speaker 12 There are many possibilities here of what's going on. George Lois could be lying.
Or George Lois could have convinced himself in some way that what he's saying about all this stuff is true.

Speaker 12 Or my dad could be doing the same thing, remembering stuff that happened when it didn't happen. Or, I suppose, my dad could be lying.

Speaker 12 I'd worry about those latter options more if my father was the only one disputing George Lois' version of history, but he's not.

Speaker 12 There's the photographer Carl Fisher, who worked with George Lois for more than 30 years and shot many of the most famous Esquire covers.

Speaker 12 Carl Fisher says George has taken credit for cover ideas and photographs that were Carl's, and talked in detail about certain photo shoots, like about flying to Las Vegas to shoot the boxer Sonny Liston as Santa, Santa, and even placing the Santa cap on Liston's head, or rushing Italian actress Verna Lisi into a photo shoot in New York for this famous cover where she's pretending to shave her face.

Speaker 12 But Fisher says George wasn't there for either shoot. In fact, the Lisi shoot happened in Rome, and he still has receipts to prove it.

Speaker 12 And then there's Shelly Zelaznik, the first editor of New York Magazine. George once told a reporter, quote, my hand on the Bible, I, George Lois, created New York Magazine.
Mr.

Speaker 12 Zelaznik says that's simply not true. He himself remembers making the first dummy front page one hot August night in 1963.
Not only that, he's never met George Lois.

Speaker 12 As for George's version, he told me, I'm at a loss. I don't know why grown-ups do things like this.

Speaker 12 But the story my father objects to the most isn't about ad copy at all. It's personal.

Speaker 12 Peppert Koenig and Lois had gotten the Dutch Master's cigar account, and their TV spokesman at the time was this famous comedian Ernie Kovacs.

Speaker 12 So my dad flew out to LA to meet him, and they hit it off.

Speaker 13 And Ernie and I spent the day together,

Speaker 13 driving around

Speaker 13 and

Speaker 13 lunched together, ended the afternoon in the lobby of the hotel I was staying in, the Beverly Hilton. He was not allowed past the lobby because he had short pants on.

Speaker 13 And then he went off to go to a party that night. And on his way home,

Speaker 13 there being a rain,

Speaker 13 his car skidded and went into a pole and Ernie killed himself.

Speaker 13 I was on a plane back to New York and learned about it the next morning.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 unfortunate

Speaker 13 incident and... but certainly memorable to me.

Speaker 13 And lo and behold.

Speaker 12 Lo and behold, in his 2005 book, Celebrities, which is spelled with a dollar sign instead of a C at the beginning, George tells the story of his lovely poolside lunch with Ernie, his car ride to the airport with Ernie, his red-eye flight back to New York, and his learning the following morning from a stack of stillbound newspapers that Ernie had been killed in a car crash.

Speaker 12 My father has tried to fight back, aggressively at times. For instance, after the Ernie Kovac story appeared in Celebrities, my dad retaliated in the medium he knows best.
He wrote an ad.

Speaker 13 I

Speaker 13 wrote an ad,

Speaker 13 Lo,

Speaker 13 Loa, Lois.

Speaker 12 That's Lois, L-O-I-S.

Speaker 13 And I wanted to print it in the New York Times as a

Speaker 13 book review,

Speaker 13 a public service book review.

Speaker 12 The Times didn't run it, but it did run an ad week, though, toward the back of the magazine, and it got no response.

Speaker 12 Over the years, he and some of his former colleagues have written to reporters at the New York Times and other places, trying to to correct the record, but their letters have mostly been ignored.

Speaker 12 Just last year, a Times story about an exhibit of George Lois' Esquire covers credited him, in the very first paragraph, with Think Small, the Xerox ads with the chimp, and a couple of other campaigns people say George either didn't originate or didn't even work on.

Speaker 12 Finally, the Times printed a short correction, giving Think Small back to my dad, but it was a small victory, three weeks after the fact.

Speaker 12 In the mid-80s, my dad wrote a letter to George directly, threatening to sue, it seems, and received a letter back calling him a sad, tortured, and tragic figure.

Speaker 12 All in all, my father's efforts haven't really done the damage he's hoped, or really any damage at all. He's an indignant basset hound, nipping at the heels of the media's great Dane.

Speaker 12 George Lois is a good talker, with an engaging personality, and he's become something of a spokesman for the advertising industry.

Speaker 12 There are quotes in the newspaper and magazine profiles, exhibits, books. Errors printed once are repeated and repeated.

Speaker 12 So if you look up Think Small on the internet, for instance, you'll find it attributed to Julian Koenig. But you're also likely to learn that George Lois wrote it.

Speaker 11 I liked it when he took credit for accounts he never had anything to do with, because

Speaker 11 that made it almost comical. All the Xerox stuff, Xerox is an account that I got, was done by Sam Scally and I think Mike Chappell.
And George at the end started taking credit for that too.

Speaker 12 That's Fred Pappard, the P of PKL. He was the guy who recruited Lois and Koenig to make a new agency in 1960.

Speaker 12 Now he's one of the guys responsible for redeveloping Times Square as president of the 42nd Street Development Corporation. He knows the stories all too well.

Speaker 12 Xerox, Harvey Prober, Coldeen, Ernie Kovacs, even.

Speaker 12 Fred's in my dad's camp insofar as he knows and believes my dad is telling the truth. But his support more or less stops there.

Speaker 12 And he's categorical on this point, that my dad is himself acting like a nut, wasting his time. They've talked about this on rides to and from the racetrack.

Speaker 11 The reason that Julian should not be fussing about this stuff at this stage is A, nobody gives a s.

Speaker 11 B, anybody that would give a s knows already what it's about. This is what George does is George's thing.
And

Speaker 11 we just got to put a lid on it.

Speaker 11 But

Speaker 11 I've had this conversation with him a hundred times, and he gets really pissed off. So I know he's got to screw loose, too.

Speaker 11 Your father can be a pain in the ass, you know. And even being pesty, if you say to him, Julian,

Speaker 11 off already. We've heard this story now.
We know about the wobbling chair or the wobbling floor. I've forgotten which one.

Speaker 11 If you have no idea how many letters we wrote to the New York Times, to the advertising age, to this and that.

Speaker 11 This is a dialogue between old farts.

Speaker 11 Julian's in another world from these kinds of things. Julian is one of the great thinkers and creators in the advertising business.
If some

Speaker 11 nutcase claims credit, who cares?

Speaker 11 And he doesn't even like me very much. You have to understand that that's where we start.
Well, it's true.

Speaker 11 I mean, I think, because he goes to the river, he goes to the races with me because I have a car.

Speaker 12 My father recognizes that there are only about four people left on earth who care about this stuff. It's just that he happens to be one of them, and he cannot let it go.

Speaker 13 I assume if I were a different personality, I would

Speaker 13 say I know what I've done,

Speaker 13 and those dear and near to me

Speaker 13 know what I have done or not done,

Speaker 13 and let it go at that. But I'm a fallible, fallible fellow,

Speaker 13 and

Speaker 13 obviously with ego of his own, and I resent

Speaker 7 being burgled.

Speaker 12 The odd thing about all this, as my older brother John points out, is that my father has never exactly been a champion of advertising.

Speaker 18 And he never believed he didn't have a, he wasn't a true believer in the business.

Speaker 18 I mean, I remember him saying to me as a kid,

Speaker 14 you know, if you don't find something you want to do and really work at it, you're going to end up like me, a writer of short sentences.

Speaker 18 That's verbatim.

Speaker 18 And so

Speaker 18 it's a little ironic, you know, because he didn't he didn't care. That's the thing, Sarah.
You know, all those years he didn't care because I think he thought it was beneath him.

Speaker 18 And the business in some ways

Speaker 18 beneath him, but was not serious enough to care that much about. And now he does.

Speaker 12 I understand why he cares. He's 88 years old now, so his legacy, understandably, is on his mind.

Speaker 12 And even though he did campaigns for all sorts of good causes-gun control, nuclear proliferation, Robert Kennedy's senatorial and presidential campaigns-my father's not quite satisfied with his life's work.

Speaker 13 Advertising is

Speaker 13 built on

Speaker 13 puffery, on

Speaker 13 at heart deception.

Speaker 13 And I don't think anybody can go proudly into the next world with a career built on deception, even no matter how well they do it.

Speaker 12 You're not necessarily proud that you had a career in the field of advertising and that's your legacy, but you are proud that you were the best in the business at the thing you chose to do.

Speaker 13 I could have said it better myself.

Speaker 12 If he could go back, choose another career.

Speaker 12 My father would have liked to have been an environmentalist of some kind, which is why he'd really like to be remembered for something almost nobody knows he did, naming Earth Day.

Speaker 12 It agitated him to look up Earth Day on Wikipedia recently and not see his name anywhere. So a few days ago, I added it.

Speaker 13 Sarah Koenig.

Speaker 2 We first ran this story back in 2009. Sarah's dad, Julian Koenig, died five years after that.
He was 93. George Lois died a few years after that.
These days, Sarah is the host of the serial podcast.

Speaker 2 She worked as a producer at our show for a decade before that.

Speaker 2 Coming up, Peter Sagal, long before Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, his lost years in Havana. That's in a minute.
From Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

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Speaker 2 This is American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on a program, of course, we choose the theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme.

Speaker 2 Today's show, Origin Stories, where we go back to figure out where things came from. We arrived at Act Two of our program.
Act two,

Speaker 2 Silent Partner.

Speaker 2 So years ago, Sean Cole visited Chad's Trading Post, a restaurant filled with frilly knickknacks in Southampton, Massachusetts. It's a restaurant with a very distinct origin story.

Speaker 20 The first time my girlfriend Mary Ellen and I walked into Chad's Trading Post, she noticed that only boys work there and thought it was weird.

Speaker 20 Normally, she said, in a place like this, a small country restaurant, you only see girls working.

Speaker 20 She pointed to the cover of the menu, which read, Dedicated to and operated proudly in the memory of, Chad D. MacDonald, 31274-31190.

Speaker 20 She leaned into me and whispered, Do you think the owner hires only boys because they remind her of her son?

Speaker 20 I certainly thought this was possible and sad in a way that makes you feel embarrassed for that person.

Speaker 20 Then a man came over and poured us some coffee and when he turned around there in huge white letters on the back of his blue polo shirt, it said, Chad's brother

Speaker 20 do you think that's what they call all the managers here I asked Mary Ellen do you think that's really Chad's brother

Speaker 20 then another friendlier manager type came over and asked us how we were doing and if we needed more coffee and I noticed his shirt my shirt says Chad's best friend logo over on the right hand side and it just tells the customers who we are.

Speaker 22 You got Chad's best friend, you got Chad's brother, Chad's dad, and we had Chad's mom too, but she's doing other things.

Speaker 20 This is the story of Chad's trading post. From the time he was 12, Chad and his brothers and a few friends had always talked about starting a small restaurant together when they graduated high school.

Speaker 20 They'd planned out menus. Chad's father took him looking for locations, but Chad died in a shooting accident two days before his 16th birthday.

Speaker 20 Chad's father Glenn, his brothers Scott and Corey, and his best friend Mike tell the story.

Speaker 17 The boy who shot and killed my son was his younger brother's best friend.

Speaker 24 It was myself and my best friend at the time and Chad, and they were cleaning up the cellar for his birthday. Oh, you were there too.

Speaker 12 Yeah, we were in the kitchen cooking sausage.

Speaker 24 Yeah, we were fucking dinner. But they were downstairs cleaning, and I was upstairs.
My mother had just left, and me and Corey were upstairs cooking dinner.

Speaker 24 And they came up for a break, went into the room,

Speaker 24 and then we heard like a little firecracker go off, you know. And

Speaker 10 then

Speaker 24 the person came out of the room and he had blood on his hands. He's, you know, freaking out.
I shot Chad, I shot Chad.

Speaker 17 The official ruling, which was that Chad picked up a gun, pointed at this fellow, said bang.

Speaker 17 The other fellow picked up a gun,

Speaker 17 pointed it back at Chad, pulled the trigger, and that was all.

Speaker 24 So I called

Speaker 24 911, then I paged my mother, and

Speaker 24 you know, then the police got there.

Speaker 25 I was charged

Speaker 17 for involuntary manslaughter because it was my handgun that ultimately killed Chad, and that I was not aware that he had two of my handguns out of my cabinet in his bedroom at the time.

Speaker 17 And frankly, that was something I should have been aware of.

Speaker 20 In 1993, the year Chad would have graduated from high school, the year he and Mike and his brothers and his father had planned to open a restaurant, they decided to open Chad's Trading Post.

Speaker 25 This is Chad's corner of the restaurant. It notes the menu board.

Speaker 25 It tells you to welcome the Chad's Trading Post family restaurant. It says,

Speaker 25 nobody leaves hungry and lists all the specials of the day. It also has a claimer in the bottom that's named in memory of Chad D.
McDonald with the date of his birth, which is 31274.

Speaker 20 In all of the interviews I've ever heard and seen of an emotional nature, the person answering questions doesn't begin to cry until well into the interview.

Speaker 20 Chad's dad began crying before I even turned on my tape recorder. I asked him for a quick tour of the restaurant.
It's a nice place, homey, even proofy.

Speaker 20 Though all the men who created it are tattooed, muscly, working-class guys, Chad's father included.

Speaker 25 To the left of that

Speaker 25 shows you the last and most recent picture of my son, which was taken about six weeks before he died.

Speaker 25 And are the pictures of the two boys that were named in memory of him.

Speaker 25 I think he's monkey,

Speaker 25 his younger brother's son, who is Ian Chadwick,

Speaker 25 and his best friend's son, who

Speaker 25 is named Chad Michael.

Speaker 20 This photo originally showed the two babies in Glenn's arms, but they had the photographer alter the photo, insert Chad's head over Glenn's.

Speaker 25 And what they did was took the picture and replaced by computer Chad's picture over mine. It's actually my arms holding him, but the rest of it's all Chad.

Speaker 20 Glenn showed me a painting in another corner of the restaurant. It was the comedy and tragedy masks from the cover of Motley Crew's album Theater of Pain, Chad's favorite record.

Speaker 20 After he died, Chad's friends and brothers adapted the design into a memorial to him. It appears on their shirts.
Two brass masks hang over the door, smiling and frowning.

Speaker 20 A huge flag with the masks hangs in the breeze outside, too heavy to flutter.

Speaker 20 Chad's brother Scott calls them the faces.

Speaker 24 Well, this was my first tattoo. I got the comedy and tragedy faces with the Memory Chad banner.
And that was my first tattoo. And I got that, you know, for the obvious reason that

Speaker 24 that's pretty much the family symbol now.

Speaker 24 You know, it started off with my father getting, because this was the tattoo he wanted to get, you know, without the banners, but that's what he wanted to get.

Speaker 24 That's what he planned on getting the following year for his birthday. I mean, he'd already had it planned out, you know.
And so my father came home with it one day and he got it.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 20 you and your dad, though, weren't the only children?

Speaker 24 No, there's

Speaker 24 me and my father, Steve Prisbian,

Speaker 24 Mike Richberg, who still works here.

Speaker 24 My grandmother has the sad face.

Speaker 10 Eric Marwick.

Speaker 24 Yeah, she has it on her chest, too.

Speaker 10 And Eric Marwick, who worked here, has it also.

Speaker 10 And it's good.

Speaker 24 It's nice to see people. There's probably

Speaker 24 altogether 15 people that have his name tattooed on them.

Speaker 24 We used to sit around the kitchen table and take a needle and wrap thread around it and dip it in clear-free ink and tattoo each other with it.

Speaker 24 And there's quite a few people who we masterfully tattooed Chad's name on their arm, whether they like it now or not. It's still there.

Speaker 20 They've tried to stay as close to Chad's vision of the restaurant as possible. He He never specified decor, so they've had a free hand there.

Speaker 20 He and Mike actually drafted a menu for the place, and the families kept about half of it. The other half was slow-baking recipes that no customer would ever wait for.

Speaker 20 Chad was also a lot of fun, everyone says. A lot of fun.
A comedian. And they say that's why they joke around so much at Chad's trading post.

Speaker 20 Scott says when he sees a heavyset customer that comes in a lot, he says, hey tubby. He builds towers of little creamer packages on the bald head of another customer.

Speaker 20 Glenn throws crumpled up napkins at his employees. They have water fights.
All this levity in a place that's essentially a large roadside memorial that serves massive omelets.

Speaker 21 Chad was here, we'd have the place upside down by now.

Speaker 20 How do you mean?

Speaker 21 Oh, and it's in fun, you know,

Speaker 21 we really have fun now, but I think if he was here, you know, we wouldn't have all that tension of his passing on our shoulder.

Speaker 21 You know, the only tension we'd have is how much trouble we're going to get into.

Speaker 20 Yeah, because I got to say, I mean, you know, when I was here with Mary Ella, you know, and we...

Speaker 20 You know, we didn't know anything about the restaurant either, obviously. We just, you know, found it.
And,

Speaker 20 you know,

Speaker 20 the first thing we saw was the menu, and then we saw the back of Scott's shirt, and, you know, I mean, it was a little creepy.

Speaker 21 I've never gotten that response before. Never gotten the response that was creepy.
I always got the response that's, you know, a very nice thing to do.

Speaker 23 It's very genuine, and it's heartwarming.

Speaker 22 I've never gotten creepy before.

Speaker 20 Well, I don't, you know, I just mean that, I mean, it's like there's somebody else here in the restaurant that's not really here. But, you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 It's exactly what it is.

Speaker 22 He's here.

Speaker 21 He's here with us. And

Speaker 21 we kind of have to yell at him once in a while because every time something silly or stupid happens or

Speaker 21 gotta blame somebody and he's one to pull a prank onto me for that. So, oh, he's definitely here.

Speaker 21 But there's nothing creepy about it.

Speaker 20 I think I can safely say. I have never seen any other family keep someone alive to this degree.
They've gone out of their way to construct a world where they couldn't possibly forget Chad.

Speaker 20 A jumbo-sized photo of Chad stood behind Scott and his wife at their wedding.

Speaker 20 They believe Chad has protected their lives in serious accidents, that he brought Mike's son through a recent infection unscathed.

Speaker 20 Chad's room is the same as it was the day he was shot in it, with two exceptions. They took down the girly pictures from the wall and they replaced the carpet.

Speaker 20 Before they did all this, right after Chad died, they all say they were lost. Mike said he wanted to crawl into a hole.

Speaker 20 Scott and his father had to make a deal with each other that neither would kill himself. Scott and Corey went into counseling.
Scott says it didn't help much.

Speaker 24 You know, but that's how it was when it happened. I mean, you didn't know what to do.
You had no idea what to do.

Speaker 24 I walked in the bathroom, I look in the mirror, and I'm just staring at myself in the mirror, and I flipped out and started punching the mirror.

Speaker 24 So now both my hands are cut, and I'm bleeding all over the place, and sitting on the floor crying, and I have no idea why.

Speaker 24 You know, when you're that old and something like that happens, you don't have any idea what to do in any circumstance. You know, walking across a bridge, looking down.

Speaker 7 Yeah, maybe.

Speaker 24 You sit there and think about it for a few minutes.

Speaker 24 It takes a lot out of you. It takes a lot out of your mind.

Speaker 24 And counseling made it worse for a while.

Speaker 20 What made it better, what Glenn says saved them, was starting the family business, Chad's business.

Speaker 7 But is it, I guess, is it healthy?

Speaker 20 I mean, is it...

Speaker 7 I think everybody grieves in a different way.

Speaker 17 For me, it is, because I'm doing something constructive. I was semi-retired and disabled before.
I'm still disabled, but I was just vegging. I was sitting at home feeling sorry for myself

Speaker 17 and doing nothing when the restaurant you know, an idea came up, you know, from his brother Scott, and we started looking into it rather seriously. We found the place.

Speaker 17 It was almost like a breath of fresh air was something we could all do

Speaker 17 in memory of

Speaker 17 his brother

Speaker 17 and have some fun with it. And we have for seven years.

Speaker 17 Healthy? I don't know. I mean, the psychiatrists say many different things.

Speaker 17 People who blithely say things will get better over time have never been here.

Speaker 17 Things never get better.

Speaker 17 They get a little less immediate.

Speaker 24 So we work this in memory of him as a way of keeping him immediate to us.

Speaker 17 Nobody forgets.

Speaker 17 And we get along this way. We get by this way.
The whole bunch of us get by this way.

Speaker 20 In Northampton, where I used to live, there's a couple, and they own a cafe.

Speaker 20 And at one point, they had a child, who lived 19 days. And after they disconnected him from life support, they built a shrine in their restaurant for him.

Speaker 20 Pictures of him, connected to white tubes, dotted the walls and beams.

Speaker 20 And his father, a musician, would perform a song at the cafe, weekly, as I remember it, comparing his son to a salmon and to the messiah.

Speaker 20 And some of us, at first, though we knew it had to be hard, felt a little embarrassed for them, as though this tragedy had driven them a little crazy.

Speaker 20 I think it's hard for us to know exactly what to do or say when we see public mourning like this, because we see it so rarely. The intensity of it is shocking.

Speaker 23 It's too naked.

Speaker 20 And usually we think that if you hold on to someone after their death this way, you can't live your own life.

Speaker 7 But clearly, you can.

Speaker 7 Jean-Cole.

Speaker 2 In the years since we first broadcast this story, Chad's trading post closed down.

Speaker 2 The family kept Chad's memory alive for a while in a new restaurant called Chad's Good Table 10 minutes away, but then they sold off that restaurant.

Speaker 2 These days, his memory is honored by four different boys who have been named after him.

Speaker 3 Act three,

Speaker 2 wait, wait, don't film me.

Speaker 2 Now, this origin story. Our public radio colleague, the host of NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, Mr.
Peter Sagal, used to be a playwright.

Speaker 2 And to give you a sense of the kind of work that he did as a playwright, his most successful play, he says, was about a Holocaust denier and the Jewish attorney who represented that Holocaust denier in court.

Speaker 15 And so it was all, you know, intellectual arguments and drama and involved the Holocaust and questions of the First Amendment law.

Speaker 15 And it came to the attention of this producer, Lawrence Bender, who is most well known for being Quentin Tarantino's producer.

Speaker 15 So he produced, among many other movies, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and so on and so forth.

Speaker 2 Back in the 90s, when all this happened, Bender read Peter's play and liked it and called him up and asked Peter if he wanted to write a movie.

Speaker 2 And Peter basically had been waiting for this phone call from Hollywood forever.

Speaker 15 I mean, there was, I think, the year of 1992, my annual income was $10,000. I was, yeah, this was the phone call that you wait for.

Speaker 2 So after tossing around some different ideas for this film, Lawrence Bender introduces Peter to this woman who he works with, who at 15 had been an American in Cuba when the Cuban Revolution happened.

Speaker 2 Maybe there's a film in that. So Peter starts writing this film that's half romance, growing up film, half politics, about an American teenage girl in Cuba in the 50s.

Speaker 15 And I had no, I didn't know anything about the Cuban Revolution, but one of the things I found out was that everybody involved with it was incredibly young. Castro himself was only 29.

Speaker 15 They were all 17, 18, 19, 20 years old, these guys up in the mountains with him. And one of the things that actually happened was almost as soon as they took over,

Speaker 15 the Cuban Revolution, these wonderful young Democrats, you know, freedom-loving rebels from the mountains, started executing people on television.

Speaker 15 And in my original conception, there were two parallel stories.

Speaker 15 There was Maria, who I called the central character, who had a rebellious, more typically adolescent rebellion going against her own parents.

Speaker 15 And then there was her romantic interest, a character named Josefo, who was a Cuban and was sort of a third-column rebel underground guy living and working in Havana to undermine the regime, sometimes through violence.

Speaker 2 And eventually this film did get made.

Speaker 2 It did. It did.
It finally got made a bit later, and I'm just going to play a clip here from it.

Speaker 7 Oh, God, I love dancing with him.

Speaker 12 Did it ever occur to you that that boy might be be using you? A nice American girl who can be his TV.

Speaker 12 I know that you may love dancing with that boy, but there are more important vectors here, like your family and your future. Why does it have to be either or just because you gave up your passion?

Speaker 12 Why should I?

Speaker 2 So that's a clip from the film.

Speaker 2 You want to just let people know the title of the film?

Speaker 15 The title of the film is Dirty Dancing 2, colon, Havana Knights.

Speaker 2 I have to say, I watched the movie last night. I watched Dirty Dancing 2.

Speaker 7 The whole thing?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 15 There is not a single line of dialogue in that movie that I wrote.

Speaker 2 So how does the film go from political coming-of-age drama to Dirty Dancing to Havana Knights? Well, of course, it's an old Hollywood story. Peter writes his film.
He turns it in.

Speaker 2 They ask him to make it more like, oh, maybe could it be more like Dirty Dancing, Innocent Girl with a Semi-Dangerous Guy.

Speaker 15 And sometimes I think back in the experience and I say, you know, I should have said to them, hey, if that's what you want, I'm really not the guy for it.

Speaker 2 He says, each draft got worse and worse. Even he didn't like it.
Finally, it was shelved.

Speaker 2 Years later, the producer who actually owned the rights to the film Dirty Dancing teamed up with Lawrence Bender to make a sequel, and somebody thought of Peter's old script.

Speaker 2 All the politics of the film got reduced to this one moment where, really unconnected to anything else in the film, somebody attempts to shoot some unidentified political figure at the climax of the dance contest.

Speaker 2 And then later, in a moment of obligatory foreshadowing, our couple talks about whether Castro would ever kick out Americans from Cuba.

Speaker 12 I'm just saying that. What? That I might have to leave?

Speaker 10 Could happen.

Speaker 12 But they wouldn't do that. Not if the whole idea is to give people their freedom.

Speaker 2 Can I ask you what it was like for you to watch the film, for you to sit in a theater and watch the film?

Speaker 15 It was fine.

Speaker 15 It was really fine. Because

Speaker 3 no, no, no.

Speaker 15 I mean this. Let me put it this way.
Before I got that call, this experience had been a failure. I mean, I remember at that time, you know, just lying in bed going, well, I had my shot and I blew it.

Speaker 15 You know, all I ever wanted was a shot. I got my shot and it failed.
I did a bad job. And so then when I got the phone call, I was like, oh, it's going to be made and it's going to be Dirty Dancing 2.

Speaker 15 That's a happy ending.

Speaker 15 That's a much better ending than the ending I thought I had, which was that it was just a disaster.

Speaker 3 Act 4, Bill Clinton's seven-year-old brother.

Speaker 2 So reporter Mary Wuttenberg spent years writing about two boys, brothers who were born in a Tanzanian refugee camp, and then settled in Georgia in the United States in 2006.

Speaker 2 Many of her stories focused on the older brother. nine-year-old Bill Clinton Haddam.
His dad was a big fan of the former president.

Speaker 2 After a tough first year in the United States, Bill seemed to have settled in.

Speaker 2 But his little brother, Igay, was still struggling to understand his own origin story, to get his seven-year-old brain around who he was and where he came from.

Speaker 2 At some point, Mariette spent so much time with these two boys that she was more than a reporter. She was more like a member of the family.
Anyway, here's Mary.

Speaker 26 Igay calls me on the phone almost every day. Sometimes he leaves messages.

Speaker 14 First unheard message.

Speaker 14 Hello, Mary. Um, associated is here, and

Speaker 14 um, the good news is Bill is going to summer school, and I'm not going to summer school. Okay, this is me, Gail.
Goodbye.

Speaker 26 In between the messages, we have long chats. I tape most of our conversations because I'm writing these articles about him and his family.

Speaker 26 And the conversations always seem to start with one of two questions. When can I come to your house? Or when are you coming to my house?

Speaker 26 Hello.

Speaker 26 Mary, you almost here?

Speaker 26 Oh, I'm there.

Speaker 3 I'm going to be there soon.

Speaker 26 I'm in the car right now driving to you and there's a little bit of traffic.

Speaker 3 You're driving girl?

Speaker 7 I'm driving right now.

Speaker 3 You're coming to take a south place. I am, yes.

Speaker 26 So, you know I'm crazy about this kid. He's sweet, nosy, funny.
He's been to my house a bunch since I started doing these stories.

Speaker 26 But the first time he came over, six months ago, he announced to me and my husband and his brother, Bill Clinton, that from now on, the first grader, formerly known as Ige, would be going by his middle name, John.

Speaker 26 I'd already known something was up, because that afternoon, my husband took Ige to the park.

Speaker 26 Ige was up on the jungle gym when a girl about the same age called over from the swing set and asked his name, and he got all weird and wouldn't answer her.

Speaker 26 She thought he hadn't heard her, so she hopped off the swing, came over to the jungle gym, and asked him again, what's your name? Ige got this kind of cornered look and said, I don't know my name.

Speaker 26 But by later that night, he seemed to have made a decision. He was now John.

Speaker 26 In our living room, he struggled to type his new name into a video game. J,

Speaker 26 O, wait, was it J or G?

Speaker 26 Then Bill offered to help, and Ige said, I know how to spell my own name.

Speaker 26 Ige picked up English first and best of anyone in his family. But his teachers say Ige's more confused about where he's from and who he is than other seven-year-olds they've seen.

Speaker 26 And the charter school Ige and Bill attend is about half refugees, so you'd think they'd see a lot of this. Teachers say no.

Speaker 26 Little kids usually realize pretty fast that most people who ask, where are you from, they don't want the whole story.

Speaker 26 And it doesn't really matter if you say you're from Burma, where your parents were from, or Thailand, where you lived in a camp. In first grade, you just pick one and get on with your day.

Speaker 26 But for Ige, where are you from has never felt that simple. All winter he seemed to be revising his story.
First he denied the camp he'd lived in his whole life, hated the word refugee.

Speaker 26 Then he started saying he wasn't from Congo, his nationality, or Tanzania, where he was born, or Africa at all. He'd say, I'm from here, or America.

Speaker 26 Watching TV, he'd point to rich white kids and say, that's me.

Speaker 26 At home, he threw tantrums. At school, he sometimes seemed almost catatonic.
He wouldn't answer questions, wouldn't meet people's eyes.

Speaker 12 His parents, his teachers, everyone felt helpless.

Speaker 26 They didn't know what set him off or how to reach him.

Speaker 26 And he seemed to regress. If he were sitting on the couch, he'd snuggle up or take my hand.
The slightest things made him cry. He seemed lost.

Speaker 26 One night on the phone, I reminded him where he was born, in Tanzania. I'm from Tanzania, he said.
I'm from San Jose.

Speaker 26 Uh-huh. I am?

Speaker 3 Well, that's where you were born.

Speaker 3 I love my phone.

Speaker 26 Well, you were born in Tanzania, and your dad came from Congo, and your mom came from Rwanda.

Speaker 26 So your family has a lot of places where you're from.

Speaker 26 Okay,

Speaker 26 boy. Bye.

Speaker 26 Ike's parents didn't mind calling him John. They were just kind of puzzled.
The idea that you could hate your name seemed like one more baffling thing about America.

Speaker 26 They just had no idea what Ige was going through, and it made Ige feel more distant from them.

Speaker 26 A while back, I was riding with Ige and his parents in their car when he said to me, I don't want to live with my mom.

Speaker 26 I thought it was a setup for one of his jokes, so I said, You don't want to live with your mom?

Speaker 16 Why?

Speaker 8 He said, I want to live with you.

Speaker 26 I said, nah, you don't want to to live with me. Then Ige got all serious and said, but what if I forget my language?

Speaker 26 I said, what do you mean? And he said, if I forget my language, I can't live with them because they won't understand me.

Speaker 26 Later, on the phone, we talked about what it's like for him talking with his mom.

Speaker 26 When you speak English, does she understand you?

Speaker 26 No.

Speaker 26 So maybe you're learning faster, huh? I just forget it right now. Swahili?

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 26 what do you forget?

Speaker 3 Everything!

Speaker 26 And then at some point this spring, Ige just went back to being Igei. A lot of things happened for him at once.
His green card arrived, his reading took off.

Speaker 26 It took me a while to notice that John had vanished.

Speaker 26 His teachers don't remember either exactly when he stopped correcting them, but by the last month of school, he was taking his turn in the semicircle with everyone else.

Speaker 26 No drama, just my name is Ige and I'm from Congo. And suddenly he was volunteering details about his life in the camp, games he'd played, his mud brick house.

Speaker 26 Ige seemed to be making peace with his past and his name. And he moved on to other burning seven-year-old questions.

Speaker 26 What's bingo nights mean?

Speaker 26 Um, you know how you play bingo at school?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 26 It's like a night when a bunch of adults get together, maybe kids too, and they play a game that's like that, only with numbers instead of words.

Speaker 26 Gay, I'm waiting for you.

Speaker 26 Oh, okay. I'll see you soon.

Speaker 3 Goodbye, sister. Bye-bye.

Speaker 26 But just when it seemed like Ige had finally accepted his own name, the other shoe dropped. The last week of school, Ige asked me, um, what does gay mean?

Speaker 26 I told him gay can mean happy, or it can mean when a man loves another man.

Speaker 16 Ige started sobbing.

Speaker 26 We were in his kitchen, and he just collapsed against the fridge. Finally, he choked out what was wrong, and it turned out that some second graders had been taunting him, Ige, you're gay.

Speaker 26 And he told them, that's not a word.

Speaker 26 It was just one more strike against that name. But for now, John hasn't reappeared.
Ige is sticking with Ige.

Speaker 26 The other day, when we were riding in the car, I said some offhand thing about about needing to call my mom.

Speaker 26 Ige said,

Speaker 26 you have a mom?

Speaker 26 I said, yeah, of course.

Speaker 26 He could not believe it. How had he not known about this before?

Speaker 26 This year, it's been hard enough for Ige to put together his own story. The idea that I, wait, everybody, comes from somewhere? It kind of blew his mind.

Speaker 26 Mary Wiltenberg.

Speaker 2 She wrote about Igay, Bill Clinton, and their family for the Christian Science Monitor. Today's show is a rerun and Ige is now 23.
He still talks to his mother in Swahili.

Speaker 2 You can read more of the family stories at marywiltenberg.com.

Speaker 2 Give yourself a break.

Speaker 2 Life wasn't meant to be run.

Speaker 2 Well programmers produced today by Lisa Pollack and myself with Alex Bloomberg, Sean Cole, Jane Marie, Sarah Koenig, Alicia Shipp, and Nancy Updike.

Speaker 2 Our senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Production help from JP Dukes.
Music help from Jessica Hopper.

Speaker 2 Help on today's rerun from Michael Comete, Angelo Dravasi, Catherine Raymondo, Stone Nelson, and Ryan Rummery. Our website, thisamericanlife.org.

Speaker 2 Thanks today to Bob Folkenflick, Matt Holtzman, and Hank Rosenfeld.

Speaker 2 Pinot Adia's research paper, About Garages and Entrepreneurs that I talked about at the beginning of the show, was done with Christopher Ryder.

Speaker 2 Dan Heath, who I also talked to at the beginning of the show, is now host of the podcast, What It's Like to Be.

Speaker 2 This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr.

Speaker 2 Tori Malatea, who hears himself quoted in these credits every single week on our program and says, I never said that.

Speaker 13 I would never say that.

Speaker 2 I'm Ira Gloss. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Speaker 2 Next week on the podcast, This American Life, Daniel Sauce is a comedian. And after one of his shows, a fan walked up and told Daniel that he ended his marriage.

Speaker 2 after watching Daniel's special, even showed him the divorce papers. Then it happened again and again.

Speaker 2 Fans got in touch to say they'd broken up with their partners after seeing Daniel's show.

Speaker 2 The comedy routine powerful enough to end your marriage. Listen if you dare.
Next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.

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