SPEAKER_19: Radiolab is supported by Apple Card. Apple Card has a cash-back rewards program unlike other credit cards. You earn unlimited daily cash on every purchase, receive it daily, and can grow it at 4.15% annual percentage yield when you open a savings account. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on iPhone. Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC terms apply.
SPEAKER_31: Listen to support it. WNYC Studios. This week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, the
SPEAKER_28: novelist Jennifer Egan on how we could end the enormous problem of homelessness if we had the will to do it. That's The New Yorker Radio Hour. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_04: Hey, it's Latif. This week, we are rewinding to an episode from about a decade ago before I was actually on staff, but it's an episode I know so well. It's as classic an episode of Radiolab that there is with a cast of all-star producers, Pat Walters, Lynn Levy, Sean Cole. Man, it's good. And not only is it a kind of a timeless episode, but it being August, the fact that people are maybe going on vacation or just trying to get out of the heat, you know, people getting away from their lives felt kind of a natural rerun to play. So I hope for you that this episode, Escape, helps you slip away from whatever it is you need to slip away from, even if only for an hour or so. Enjoy. Wait, you're listening? Okay.
SPEAKER_25: Alright. Okay. Alright.
SPEAKER_15: You're listening to Radiolab.
SPEAKER_09: Radiolab. From WNYC. C.
SPEAKER_25: C? Yeah.
SPEAKER_30: C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. C. Yeah. What is this?
SPEAKER_12: Just wait. Escape. Designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure.
SPEAKER_12: Okay. So this is an old time radio show from the 1940s, late 40s.
SPEAKER_15: I figured that. It's called Escape and it always starts the same way, you know, with that phrase. I love
SPEAKER_15: how they say it. And here's what's great about this show and why it seems like a good way to start this show, our show, is that immediately after they say that phrase, they then present you with a scenario from which there seems to be no escape. You are hanging by your fingertips on the sheer face of an ice cliff.
SPEAKER_12: Here's one. Suspended a thousand feet above instant death with your strength running out and with no chance for escape. There's a million of these.
SPEAKER_30: You are aboard a Chinese junk when aground off the coast of Borneo. You are lost in the London fog. You are a passenger aboard a submarine. You are the subject of an experiment. Nazi agent aimless terror. Gigantic department store. No escape. No escape.
SPEAKER_15: Wait, one more. One more just for kicks.
SPEAKER_30: You are trapped in a remote valley of the Andes. Walled in by sheer rock residences. And surrounding you, closing in on you, is a band of blind men who watch your eyes. How could you not listen to that?
SPEAKER_15: What is better than like a story where the walls are closing in on you and you don't know what you're gonna do, what am I gonna do, what am I gonna do, what am I gonna do, and then suddenly, escape. It's like the best story ever. That's true. So, you ready? Okay. This hour, we offer you three bizarre scenarios,
SPEAKER_17: true stories, of people and planets, trying, yearning, to
SPEAKER_15: escape. Will they make it?
SPEAKER_17: And if they do, what are they escaping to?
SPEAKER_15: Okay, enough of that. I'm Jad. I'm Robert. This is Radiolab. And to start, let's talk about escape artists.
SPEAKER_17: Because why not, right? I mean, this is an escape show. Exactly. The most famous escape artist in history is probably Harry Houdini. And our first story is kind of a Houdini story. It comes from our producer, Pat.
SPEAKER_15: Yes. It's about a guy whose nickname is Little Houdini, right? Yeah. I heard the story from my friend, Ben.
SPEAKER_11: Hello. Like months ago. How are you, brother? Ben, your journalism friend. My journalism friend, yeah. I'm a reporter with the Tampa Bay Times.
SPEAKER_10: In Florida. But our story begins at the Tourney Center Penitentiary.
SPEAKER_11: And only Tennessee. That's where we caught up with Little Houdini. He was between escapes, you could say. A couple of guards walked us into this huge cafeteria. Sat us down at this little tiny table and brought out Chris. Chris Gay. That's his name?
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. Do you interview my brother and everything? Yeah, we talk to him. Everything come okay? Atari.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. I guess the first thing I noticed was he was even smaller than I expected him to be. He was going to be little.
SPEAKER_11: You know, nickname. But, uh... He was a very little Houdini. A short little guy. Maybe 5'5".
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, 140, 130. His prison uniform was pretty baggy on him. He was wearing a white ball cap. And he had a big smile stretched across his face. Escaping.
SPEAKER_07: I think it's actually addictive, I think. Addictive?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, I think it is. But I think what's addictive about it, it's a way to punch him in the stomach and say,
SPEAKER_07: hey, this can be done. I can do this. I may not have been there. Y'all might have told me I can't do nothing in my life. More people in law have told me that. But I know I can do it.
SPEAKER_10: How many times have you escaped?
SPEAKER_07: Probably about 13.
SPEAKER_10: 13?
SPEAKER_15: 13. Out of jail. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: And I'm fortunate to all 13, I made all 13. I did a little research to see how that compares to other Houdinis.
SPEAKER_10: And there are a few people who come close. As far as I was able to find out, nobody alive has that many escapes. Could we say pretty safely that he's the greatest jail breaker alive?
SPEAKER_10: I'll go ahead and call him that, yeah.
SPEAKER_07: So I got away from him and... Pretty much without even asking, Chris began to list his escapes.
SPEAKER_11: He has escaped every way you can imagine.
SPEAKER_10: I slipped my handcuff off and went to the air ducts, went out the back, in between the razor wire,
SPEAKER_07: jumped the fence, pulled all my clothes off, set my boxer shorts. Like, handcuffs.
SPEAKER_10: He said picking a handcuff key is one of the easiest things he's ever done. Sure enough. He's used everything from a pen spring to a safety pin even once. A zipper thing.
SPEAKER_07: Made a handcuff key out of my zipper. He scrambled out windows, ran outdoors, climbed over walls, snuck under walls, drilled through them.
SPEAKER_11: He's faked suicide twice. He's tricked the cops by drawing up fake escape plans, fooled their dogs by... Covering his clothes in pepper. Bunch of pepper. Another time he didn't have any pepper, but... He had found some roadkill.
SPEAKER_07: It stunk. It didn't smell like a skunk. And he rubs it all over his body to erase his scent.
SPEAKER_10: Pretty good at hiding, too. He's heading to the trees, jumped down a trap door that he cut on the floor of his trailer. Once he hid in a grave.
SPEAKER_11: It was a shallow grave. Beside a dead body. Another time he... Ended up on a college campus someplace outside Atlanta. And he hid out on top of an air duct for two days.
SPEAKER_10: Until the coast is clear.
SPEAKER_11: But one of the interesting things about Chris is that even though he's been doing this for 20 years... There's never a record of him assaulting anyone.
SPEAKER_10: No.
SPEAKER_07: I refuse to do it. Stole things, but pretty much only things to help him run.
SPEAKER_11: I always refuse to go in somebody's house.
SPEAKER_07: I always refuse to go in somebody's garage.
SPEAKER_10: He says he's got rules for himself about how he breaks the law. Almost like a code.
SPEAKER_11: In fact, the story that got Ben interested in Chris in the first place is kind of the perfect example of this. This was a few years ago, in 2007.
SPEAKER_10: Ben got a press release. From the Florida Highway Patrol to be on the lookout for, you know, Chris Gay.
SPEAKER_11: According to the press release, here's what happened. Chris had been locked up in Alabama when he got a telephone call from his family. He said that my mom was, uh, was dying.
SPEAKER_11: He had cancer. So he faked suicide, busted out of the prison transport van that was bringing him to the hospital, stole a truck, and just started driving home. He was going to see his mom.
SPEAKER_10: To pay his last respects. They didn't expect her to live very long.
SPEAKER_07: As he comes around the bend in the road to where his mom lives, he's driving a Walmart tractor trailer,
SPEAKER_11: and he's got, like, a dozen cops on his tail. When I get down there, I run off the road.
SPEAKER_10: Crashes a truck into a field near his mom's trailer. Jumps out of the truck. Just as I was running toward the house, they started jumping out of the cars and running toward me.
SPEAKER_10: And just before he makes it inside, they chase him into the woods. And he disappears.
SPEAKER_11: Without seeing his mom, who would end up dying before he could see her. A few days later, Chris turns up in Daytona Beach. Driving a tour bus that belonged to Crystal Gayle.
SPEAKER_10: The country singer? Yeah.
SPEAKER_15: He stole Crystal Gayle's tour bus? In Tennessee. And then drove it to Florida. Yeah.
SPEAKER_11: You get this press release and you think, what?
SPEAKER_10: I thought, uh, how do you mess with a story like this? So Ben writes a story for the newspaper.
SPEAKER_11: Big news. And pretty soon?
SPEAKER_15: Tonight, a luxury tour bus that normally carries...
SPEAKER_11: TV news people are on it. It took off. He's an escape artist and something of a folk hero. And soon Chris became something of a folk song. Literally. The week Chris got caught, a Grammy Award winning bluegrass picker named Tim O'Brien put out a song.
SPEAKER_10: Called, The Ballad of Christopher Daniel Gayle.
SPEAKER_13: Pretty soon a famous Hollywood director...
SPEAKER_11: Bought the rights to the movie. They were originally trying to get Johnny Depp to do it, but they fit in...
SPEAKER_07: It's perfect.
SPEAKER_10: Here's the underdog making a run for it, for what seemed at that time to be really good intentions. And part of me thought, you know, this is awesome, but it's also...
SPEAKER_11: I mean, there's gotta be more to this story. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_10: Who's this guy really? And...
SPEAKER_11: Why does he keep running?
SPEAKER_10: You wanna tell us where we're going? Going to Buckeye Bottom Road to talk to Atari Gay. Atari is Chris's older brother. He says he can tell us the whole story about how they grew up.
SPEAKER_10: Here we are.
SPEAKER_11: Chris grew up in a small trailer out in the middle of nowhere, west of Nashville.
SPEAKER_10: There are some junk cars off in the woods.
SPEAKER_11: We find Tari hanging out with a couple buddies, drinking some beers. Y'all have any certain things you wanna know about or anything?
SPEAKER_03: And we start talking about what it was like when they were kids.
SPEAKER_11: We lived in a little bitty trailer down there. He points off into the woods across the street. On this land. It was Chris and Tari. They had a little brother named Eddie who went by Cotton, and then there was Leanne. Leanne Gay.
SPEAKER_05: The eldest. His older sister.
SPEAKER_11: Cotton's in jail, so we weren't able to interview him, but Leanne and Tari both told us that growing up in that trailer was hard. We grew up like mountain people, you know.
SPEAKER_05: No electricity, no running water, did their wash in the river.
SPEAKER_11: There wasn't always much food around.
SPEAKER_05: There used to be a big field of plums. A big plum thicket. We'd go down there and we'd eat.
SPEAKER_11: But you can't live on plums. A lot of days we would be hungry.
SPEAKER_05: Leanne remembers lying in bed one night and she couldn't go to sleep because her hunger
SPEAKER_10: pangs were so bad. And Tari said, here, this will help you. And he ripped up a little thing of notebook paper.
SPEAKER_05: Gave it to Leanne.
SPEAKER_10: He said, just chew it up real good and swallow it and it will help you. And for Chris and his little brother Cotton, those were the good days.
SPEAKER_11: Because when my daddy and her separated, Mom and Dad got a divorce and the family split apart.
SPEAKER_11: Tari and Leanne went to live with Mom.
SPEAKER_10: Chris and his little brother Eddie, who were 10 and 11 at that point, moved in with their dad.
SPEAKER_11: And their dad.
SPEAKER_03: Dad, he really wasn't, you know, I don't guess. He just wasn't no provider. He wasn't around very much.
SPEAKER_11: Uh-uh.
SPEAKER_10: I mean, he was a deadbeat dad. Yeah. He got where he would get off work on Fridays and he wouldn't come home for weeks at a time.
SPEAKER_07: He'd tell them to go, if they was hungry, to go steal from churches.
SPEAKER_05: Sometimes they'd hike through the woods to their grandfather's house, their mom's dad, who Chris says hated him and his little brother Cotton.
SPEAKER_11: We would go down there and he got where he started making us fight each other.
SPEAKER_07: And if we fist fought each other in the winter, we got something to eat. He was mean. So that was their life.
SPEAKER_11: Beating each other up for food. He had dogs. He had sickies dogs on us.
SPEAKER_11: So one night, one of them went and found their dad's rifle, an old .22.
SPEAKER_11: And a tube sock full of rusty bullets.
SPEAKER_10: And went out behind the barn, uh, lit a tire fire, and, uh, made a suicide pact. Cotton was gonna shoot Chris in the forehead and then shoot himself. And Chris closed his eyes and Cotton put the gun to Chris's forehead. Chris heard him whimper and he opened his eyes and Cotton said, I can't do it. And Chris said, well, let me, let me, let me do it. He took the gun and he put the barrel to his brother's head and he couldn't pull the trigger either.
SPEAKER_15: And they were 10 and 11 at this point? 10 and 11.
SPEAKER_11: Man. And Ben says if you take a step back, you can see that it's right about here, at this point, that Chris and his brother start to steal. Like really steal. They started out like I said on bicycles and then they went to, I guess, four wheelers and motorcycles.
SPEAKER_03: It was all stuff with wheels. Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: Chris remembers going with Cotton to sit on a bluff. That was on Interstate 40.
SPEAKER_07: We would go, uh, watch the trucks go by. And they would dream about getting in a, in a semi and driving far away.
SPEAKER_03: And then they went to, I guess, four wheelers and motorcycles and cars and it gradually got bigger and bigger and bigger. Until one day when Chris was 17, he stole a, uh, a semi.
SPEAKER_11: Didn't even really know how to drive it.
SPEAKER_07: But, uh, I climbed up and decided the keys was in it. So I started it up.
SPEAKER_11: And from there, there was really no looking back. Can I pause you right there before you continue?
SPEAKER_10: Let me just name some modes of transportation and you tell me yes or no, what you've stolen. Yeah. A semi. Yeah. A bulldozer. Yes. Skid steer. Skid steer. Tractor. Backhoe. Anything that flies? I actually got in a helicopter once and, uh, we got in there, started flipping switches and we finally got, we got the blades where it rotates, but it was at a low, low thing.
SPEAKER_07: We got scared and got out of it. Point is, this is his life for more than two decades.
SPEAKER_11: Stealing things that move, getting caught, and escaping. Stealing things that move, getting caught, and escaping. Until eventually, he became that guy on TV. A little Houdini who has police on the run in six states.
SPEAKER_11: But then one night, something happened that seemed like it might break this loop forever. He met a girl. Yes.
SPEAKER_06: Yes. Her name was Missy.
SPEAKER_10: She was waiting tables at a little campsite diner. He thought she was cute. And Missy? He's a smooth talker, I'll give him that.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. She liked the way he talked. And I was taken right off the bat. A few months later. I got pregnant with my daughter and me and him. We moved in together and for a while, life was really good.
SPEAKER_11: We had a little money in the bank and I was working good for a regular instruction.
SPEAKER_07: Had a good paying job, running a bulldozer. I was actually going to school in Lebanon to get my CDL license. We had a nice trailer and it had a refrigerator.
SPEAKER_06: Did you like it? Yeah, I really liked it.
SPEAKER_06: As a matter of fact, I was talking to my daughter last night. We came real close with my daughter. She remembers it like it was yesterday. He got her a dog. She named him Blackjack. First puppy she ever got.
SPEAKER_07: That right there was the best moments and happiest days of mine in his life. Ever.
SPEAKER_11: But then, things got complicated. One day when Chris and Missy were driving in the car together. We were going right through the middle of Nashville and...
SPEAKER_06: Chris says, look, I got to tell you something.
SPEAKER_11: I stole something. I stole a bobcat tractor.
SPEAKER_11: From a construction job. I sold it. To make ends meet.
SPEAKER_11: As soon as she heard that Missy whipped her head around. And I hit him with a Big Mac right in the middle of Nashville on I-24.
SPEAKER_06: A Big Mac? Yes, I did. It was only funny for a little while.
SPEAKER_10: A couple days later... Somebody toad on me.
SPEAKER_07: I got arrested.
SPEAKER_06: He stayed in jail for about two years. Then escaped. I don't know how exactly.
SPEAKER_11: Before long, he stole again. And ended up back in jail again.
SPEAKER_06: And Missy, I stayed by his side. Again.
SPEAKER_10: She was determined. He'd come home from these escapes saying... I just hated being locked up.
SPEAKER_07: Hated being away from you guys.
SPEAKER_11: I didn't want to be away from my kids and I didn't want to be away from Missy.
SPEAKER_07: Each time he got locked up, Missy would write him letters.
SPEAKER_11: I would send him money because I worked the whole time I was pregnant with my 13-year-old.
SPEAKER_06: What kind of work were you doing? Worked on a sanding line. Sanded rocking chairs. Chris, meanwhile, was thinking about his next escape.
SPEAKER_10: And when he came charging through the front door...
SPEAKER_11: Stinking of roadkill. Telling Missy that again he had escaped... I stayed with him. Again.
SPEAKER_06: But this time... I started asking for check stubs on a weekly basis. And adding hours up that he'd been gone from time he left the house. Which I would knock down riding time there and from. You were keeping tabs on it. Yes I was.
SPEAKER_11: She went so far as to take $5,000 out of the bank account that they shared and buy a trailer for them to live in. One that wouldn't move. You know, I was trying more or less to make him do right.
SPEAKER_11: And it seemed like it was working. But then one night... Chris came in after work and sat down in the living room with Missy and their daughter to watch some TV.
SPEAKER_06: Next thing we know we heard a loud beating at the door. Well, you know, I jump up and he jumps up and next thing I know he was moving that kitchen table and sliding it out. Next thing I know he raises the rug up off the floor and he jumps down in there and he says, cover it back up. So I cover it back up, put the table back and answer the door. And they came in and they walked all around the house. And they left.
SPEAKER_11: So you bought this house to keep him still and he'd cut a trap door in it? Yep.
SPEAKER_06: He stayed up on his trailer the whole time. They were walking over top of him.
SPEAKER_25: Wow.
SPEAKER_06: I guess it was more or less I was young, I knowed, but I was also in denial. But eventually something happened that kind of forced her to admit just how bad things had gotten with Chris.
SPEAKER_06: The day before Halloween, Danielle and her daddy had went down to Walmart and she had picked out a little witch outfit. Because she was old enough and then you know she was four. You know, trick or treating for a four-year-old, that was a big thing. The next morning, it's Halloween. Her daddy looked at her and said, well, baby, I'm going to work. I'll say this afternoon, you know, I get home, we'll get your outfit on you and we'll go trick or treating up in Nashville. And that afternoon, Danielle was sitting on the back step and she was just sitting there in a white T-shirt. And I asked her, I said, Danielle, what are you doing? I'm waiting on my daddy to get home, mama. He said, we're going to go to Nashville and we're going to go trick or treating. I said, okay, he'll be back in a little bit. And she sat there and she sat there. And he never came home that night.
SPEAKER_10: You, um, I don't really hear like, I don't hear a lot of bitterness from you. No. Is that accurate? Yes. Why?
SPEAKER_06: Well, as far as me being upset with Chris or hating Chris. Yes, ma'am. Is that what you're asking me? Yes, ma'am.
SPEAKER_06: How could you not forgive Chris? Eighteen years. That's how long I've known that boy. And I have seen firsthand where he lived, how he lived. I'm a fighter. I go to church. My kids go to church. I learned to forgive people. And Chris has had a hard life. He needs help. Help that I can't give him.
SPEAKER_10: You thought for a while that you could give him that help. Yes, I did.
SPEAKER_07: I should have been there for my kids. It would take a lifetime of making this up. You know, making up what I've done.
SPEAKER_15: So what do you make of this story, Pat?
SPEAKER_11: Well, somewhere along the way for Ben and I, this story really became about the simple question, can a person like Chris, you know, grew up the way he did? Can a person like that change? Or do you just never escape a childhood like that? People live with how they grew up.
SPEAKER_11: You ask Missy, she says, If two kids and a wife that he loves, if we can't stop him, I don't know what can.
SPEAKER_11: But when we asked Chris, he said, It's in my mind I'm going to change and I'm not only going to change, I'm working to change.
SPEAKER_07: Really? Of course he has said that before.
SPEAKER_11: Truthfully.
SPEAKER_10: What's different this time? You know, I'm doing classes I don't have to take, I'm taking every one of them.
SPEAKER_07: I'm taking how to be a better daddy. I'm taking everything. As a matter of fact, when I come up for parole this month, I'm going to ask them, Can I go ahead and complete another nine month program?
SPEAKER_15: Wait, is he saying he's going to ask them to keep him in jail? Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: It's 20 years of running. He's asking the parole board not to let him go. Which made me think, I don't know, maybe.
SPEAKER_11: And Ben, what do you think?
SPEAKER_10: I don't think there's any way that Chris changes. I think he's, you know, unfortunately doomed to stay in this cycle. Which sucks, you know? I'm sort of ashamed that I have that opinion.
SPEAKER_11: Why? I mean, why do you think you feel that way? I mean, my dad was pretty similar to Chris in many ways.
SPEAKER_10: Really? My father abandoned me when I was a young boy. And I got reacquainted with him when I was a teenager. At that point, he was a very sad alcoholic who often made big mistakes. And I played high school football. And near the end of the year, my senior year, they put out this highlight tape. So I took that highlight tape to his trailer in Slick, Oklahoma. And after shooting a lot of tequila, we sat down on the couch together and I put the tape in. And we were watching, you know, watching me play football. And not long into it, my dad starts sobbing. Just bawling. Tears running down his face. And I look over at him and he says, I wish I could have been there. And I wanted nothing more in that moment and today than to ask him, Why weren't you? And I think in some way, I get that opportunity in this job to ask my dad that question.
SPEAKER_11: Ben says his dad never answered that question. And after that day where they watched that football tape, nothing changed. Ben got older, graduated from college, got married, had kids, and his dad never showed up for any of it. So he says when he's talking to a guy like Chris,
SPEAKER_10: in some ways, I'm sitting across the table from my own father. Which doesn't give him a lot of hope. The only ounce of encouragement that I have, honestly, is if we find out that Chris has indeed, when given the chance to get out of jail, said, No, thank you. Maybe that gives me an ounce of hope.
SPEAKER_11: And a couple weeks ago, Ben got a letter from Chris. Can you just stay? Can you read it for me? Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: He says, Dear Mr. Montgomery, Thank you for your letter. I am doing well. I went up for parole. And yes, I did ask them to let me go through the program. The final decision was to parole me upon completion of the program. I will complete it on October 4th, 2012.
SPEAKER_15: So he's staying.
SPEAKER_10: Well, I better get this in the mail. Thank you again for writing. I hope to hear from you again. Your friend, Christopher Daniel Gay.
SPEAKER_25: Thanks to our producer, Pat Walters, and to Ben Montgomery.
SPEAKER_17: His story on Christopher Daniel Gay is in the Tampa Bay Times, which you can find online. And we've got a link to it from our website, radiolab.org.
SPEAKER_25: We will return to escape in just a moment.
SPEAKER_19: Lulu here. If you ever heard the classic Radiolab episode, Sometimes Behave So Strangely, you know that speech can suddenly leap into music and really how strange and magic sound itself can be. We at Radiolab take sound seriously and use it to make our journalism as impactful as it can be. And we need your help to keep doing it. The best way to support us is to join our membership program, The Lab. This month, all new members will get a T-shirt that says Sometimes Behave So Strangely. To check out the T-shirt and support the show, go to radiolab.org slash join. Radiolab is supported by Capital One. With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See Capital One dot com slash bank. Capital One N.A. member FDIC. Radiolab is supported by Apple Card. Apple Card has a cash back rewards program unlike other credit cards. You earn unlimited daily cash on every purchase, receive it daily and can grow it at 4.15 annual percentage yield when you open a savings account. Apply for Apple Card in the wallet app on iPhone. Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC. Terms apply.
SPEAKER_02: After but her emails became shorthand in 2016 for the media's deep focus on Hillary Clinton's server hygiene at the expense of policy issues, is history repeating itself? You can almost see an equation again, I would say, led by the times in Biden being old with Donald Trump being under dozens of felony indictments.
SPEAKER_27: Listen to On the Media from WNYC. Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_15: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krelwitz. This is Radiolab and today we offer you Escape.
SPEAKER_17: We're talking about escape. Stories about people being trapped and then getting out, getting free.
SPEAKER_15: And in our last segment we met a guy for whom, well, the escape itself became a trap.
SPEAKER_17: But now we're going to take our escape motif to a much bigger scale. And we're calling this, by the way, the outer limit. Because in this one we're going to the outer limits of the human imagination.
SPEAKER_15: It began for us when we spoke with this writer. Yes, I hear you booming.
SPEAKER_31: Ed Dolnick is his name and he told us a story about...
SPEAKER_15: So this is Isaac Newton's story for the most part.
SPEAKER_15: And it's a story that involves the earth, the heavens, God, humanity, and you might as well throw in the apple. The one thing everybody knows about Newton is that an apple fell from a tree and bonked him on the head.
SPEAKER_31: Which isn't true, I was told, right? Isn't that apocryphal?
SPEAKER_15: It's probably not true, but it's a story that Newton himself told.
SPEAKER_31: Oh really? Because Newton, according to Ed? All his life had this notion that he was different from other people. Not only different, but better. He had a pipeline to God. God was whispering secrets, the secrets of creation into his ear. No one else had been blessed in this way. Other people's role in life was simply to bog him down. Not what I would call the most modest guy.
SPEAKER_17: No. But... At any rate...
SPEAKER_31: Our story begins around 1665. Newton is at Cambridge, he's a student.
SPEAKER_15: And Cambridge is hit by the plague. They send everybody home because although nobody understands how the disease works,
SPEAKER_31: they know that if people are crowded together, they tend to all get it. So everybody go your separate ways. This is kind of an enforced summer vacation or something?
SPEAKER_17: Right. And he's like 19 or 20 at this point? He's 21, 22.
SPEAKER_15: Okay.
SPEAKER_31: Newton goes home to his mother's farm.
SPEAKER_15: Mom is like, cool, now you can help me on the farm, but... He says, uh, no. Because he has a plan. He brought some books home. A bunch of textbooks. And he locks himself in his room. And sets himself not only to having mastered all the science that had ever been done,
SPEAKER_31: but to plunging on ahead of everyone else on his own, motivated by this religious faith that everything in the universe was set up by a god who wanted someone to crack the code. Newton believes he's the one. What was he doing in his room?
SPEAKER_15: Was he sitting there with a thousand giant textbooks? All that's known is that he did this. He just went into his room and came out with what we're about to talk about. He came out with how gravity works, how light works, how rainbows work, how the tides work.
SPEAKER_31: And then, having done all this... In a f*** summer he did all this? Yes! What did you do on your summer vacation, Jatt?
SPEAKER_17: I know, like my summer, I learned how to fold sheets like Marines do. Which I thought was pretty good, too. Right. So after having one flash of insight after another, Newton now sets his mind to one of the great problems of all time, which for our purposes we will call the problem of the moon. And just to set this up... What everybody before Newton and Galileo thought is there are a bunch of ordinary things here on Earth, like rocks,
SPEAKER_31: and they behave in the ordinary way that we know. You know, pick up a rock, let go... It falls! And there are a bunch of much more different mysterious, elegant, perfect things in the sky. Like the moon, which doesn't fall, it just floats there.
SPEAKER_17: So one could conclude that the moon has its own separate set of laws.
SPEAKER_15: There are one set of laws that work here on Earth and another set that work in the heavens,
SPEAKER_31: and there's no reason it should be the same set of laws any more than New York's laws should be the same as Paris's laws.
SPEAKER_15: Kind of makes sense, actually. Heavenly things float, earthly things fall. But then here's where the problem begins.
SPEAKER_17: Newton and a bunch of people at that time had gotten ahold of this newfangled thing called a telescope. And one of the things they saw...
SPEAKER_31: Was that the moon wasn't this mysterious, heavenly body that they... It was a big rock. A regular, lumpy, potato-ish rock.
SPEAKER_15: Uh-oh. People were like, huh.
SPEAKER_17: But Newton being, of course, Newton thought, now wait a second.
SPEAKER_31: If the job of a rock is to fall, and if the moon is just another rock... Why doesn't it fall down? Exactly so. What's it doing sitting up there night after night?
SPEAKER_15: Good question. And it's at this point that Newton, sitting in his room or wherever he was, we can imagine, makes a crazy mental leap. We got back to a little thought experiment that Galileo had come up with. Which initially might not make much sense, the connection. But it pays off.
SPEAKER_31: And here's the setup. You've got someone standing in a big field with a gun that he's about to shoot. And next to that person with his gun is a person holding in his hand a bullet.
SPEAKER_15: So you've got a person holding a gun and a person holding just a bullet side by side.
SPEAKER_31: And the bullet in the hand and the bullet in the gun are exactly the same height above the ground. And now somebody says, ready, aim, fire. And at the instant he says fire, the man with the gun shoots that bullet horizontally. And at that same instant, the man next to him holding the bullet in his hand opens his hand. And the bullet drops. So there's one bullet zipping along and then falling.
SPEAKER_17: And then the other one just falls.
SPEAKER_31: Right. We shoot the bullet out of the horizontal gun and we drop the bullet from right next to the gun. At the same time. Both bullets will hit the ground eventually. But when they do, they'll be far apart. And Galileo's riddle was, which of those bullets hits the ground first? Well, I mean, everybody would know that the one that would hit the ground first is the one that you just dropped.
SPEAKER_17: Because the other one has to go all that distance. So this is a hard riddle.
SPEAKER_31: And the answer is...
SPEAKER_15: Wait, why is it such a hard riddle? Because I would think that the bullet you drop is just going to hit first. The gun's got to go all the way. No. Those two bullets both hit the ground at the exact same instant.
SPEAKER_01: Really?
SPEAKER_31: That's an experimental fact.
SPEAKER_17: The bullet from the gun and the bullet from the finger lands at the same time? Yes.
SPEAKER_31: This bullet that's shot horizontally, it doesn't go like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff. It doesn't go straight, straight, straight, straight, and then fall. It's curving as it goes. And the thing that causes it to curve as it goes, of course, is gravity.
SPEAKER_15: It's the same gravity that is pulling the bullet that you drop. Same gravity, same pull, same speed. So counterintuitively, when you drop a bullet and it falls for this long... When you fire the gun, it'll also fall for that long. Even though it ends up a mile away. See? That was Galileo's riddle. And that's as far as Galileo took it.
SPEAKER_31: Newton looked at that and he said something smart.
SPEAKER_15: First thing he said is, okay, this field? Let's not pretend that this is some... Perfectly flat field that goes on forever.
SPEAKER_31: No. We're on the Earth. And the Earth is round.
SPEAKER_15: And what roundness means is that the ground curves away below horizontal.
SPEAKER_17: So really what's happening is that as the bullet is shooting across the field and falling to the Earth, the Earth at the same time is very gradually curving away from it. Now, of course, most guns, you know, they don't shoot the bullet very far.
SPEAKER_15: And at that short distance, the field is still pretty much flat. But here's what Newton thought. What if you could find...
SPEAKER_17: Just the right gun... That could shoot that bullet not just across a field but across like thousands of miles. And what if... As it falls...
SPEAKER_15: That bullet curves down towards the Earth... In just the same way as the Earth is curving.
SPEAKER_31: Away from it. In this scenario... The bullet that we've shot will keep falling and falling and falling, but the Earth keeps falling and falling and falling away from the bullet. So the bullet falls forever, the Earth curves forever, the picture never changes. So the bullet then does what? The bullet is in orbit. Hundreds of years before Sputnik and other satellites, Newton has invented the satellite. And on top of that, he said, when we see rocks like the Moon that are not falling, the reason we think they're not falling is because we misunderstand. Really, just as the gun launched a bullet on Earth, and it goes and never falls, God, who was presumably a terrifically strong pitcher, launched the Moon around the Earth at just such a rate that that would continue in its circle around us. Forever. This is a perpetual dance. The partners are bound together, but they never come close, and they never break up either. It's this endless round...
SPEAKER_17: From which there is no escape. What this does, what Newton did, is take the Moon out of the domain of poets and musicians
SPEAKER_31: the golden orb and this kind of thing, and lasso it to the same rules that we use here on Earth. In other words, what he showed is that in a very real way, there's no separation between us and the heavens.
SPEAKER_15: The same set of laws does govern everything. It's one universe, and I've explained it all.
SPEAKER_31: Once you figure out the laws of gravitation, then you can send spacecraft to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, anywhere. Out there.
SPEAKER_15: If you're a radio lab listener from way back, you might recognize that voice. That's Anne Druyan. Hi. One of the first stories we did, actually, I interviewed her about working on the famous golden record. You remember this? Sure. So the idea at the time was to put this record on the Voyager capsule, send it into space, and on the record would be all of these sounds that represented us.
SPEAKER_22: A kiss of mother's first words to her newborn baby. Oh, come on now. No, it's not.
SPEAKER_15: In any case, Anne was the one who was in charge of choosing all the sounds to put onto that record. She and Carl Sagan worked together on that project. And here's the thing. We stopped our story as the rockets took off, but obviously that was just the beginning of the story. And the Voyager capsules right now are about to make a kind of escape that Newton could have only dreamed of. Okay. And our producer, Lim Levy, has been following the story.
SPEAKER_15: Ow. Yeah, just turn it down. So pick it up where we left off. Okay, so the point of the mission wasn't really to deliver this record.
SPEAKER_20: It was to go out and look at all the planets in the outer solar system. So starting in 1977, these two little spaceships, two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and 2, went racing away from Earth, snapping pictures. And so every time Voyager would reach another planet, you know, all of the Voyager people would get together,
SPEAKER_22: go into the imaging room and see the pictures come from the outer solar system. Do you remember seeing them? I remember as a child seeing Life magazine.
SPEAKER_21: You know, I was seven when Voyager was launched, so. This is Merav. I'm Merav Ofer, professor at Boston University. As a grown-up, she became part of the Voyager team.
SPEAKER_20: All the pictures that you know as a kid, you look at the books and to see what, how Neptune looked, how Jupiter looked.
SPEAKER_22: You know, just complete revelations. Saturn. The image of Saturn. Technicolor. Like pink and like reddish. Turquoise colors. Yellow and those rings.
SPEAKER_20: Just spectacular. They could see active volcanoes on one of the moons of Jupiter. Finally, that vision of Neptune.
SPEAKER_22: This like blue jewel. Really blue.
SPEAKER_21: It all came from Voyager. We had no idea how they looked like before Voyager. Neptune was the last big cool planet and it was the last thing they were supposed to photograph.
SPEAKER_20: After that, the cameras were going to be shut off to save energy.
SPEAKER_21: But, Cal-Sagan convinced them to turn Voyager back to Earth and take a final picture. So, on Valentine's Day, 1990, one of the ships slowly rotated so it was facing back to Earth.
SPEAKER_20: And it snapped a picture. One last picture.
SPEAKER_27: Describe it. So, it's mostly empty.
SPEAKER_20: It's pretty dark. You can see sort of streaks of light coming from the sun. And then, you honestly wouldn't notice it if it wasn't pointed out to you. But down in one corner. Kind of suspended in a sunbeam.
SPEAKER_22: There is a very small dot. Blue. A pale blue dot. That was us. In Carl Sagan's words. Everyone you ever knew, everyone you ever loved, every superstar, every corrupt politician. Just everyone in all of history. Everything. The sum total.
SPEAKER_22: Think of the rivers of blood that have run. So that one indistinguishable group could have momentary domination over a fraction of that pixel.
SPEAKER_20: It was one of those really rare images. Every single day I would hear from people who take that pale blue dot so deeply to heart.
SPEAKER_22: It was a complete reframing.
SPEAKER_21: After that, the cameras were turned off.
SPEAKER_20: But here's the thing. The ships kept going. Going. Going. Going. Drifting through the darkness. Going. Going. Going. Even though they weren't taking pictures anymore, they were using their other senses. Little instruments that detect how many particles are around, what the temperature is. So they were hurtling through this empty space really fast, measuring, sending that data back. And scientists like Berraff were there listening and waiting.
SPEAKER_15: For what?
SPEAKER_20: Was not clear. But they knew at some point these capsules would get to the edge.
SPEAKER_15: The edge of what?
SPEAKER_20: The solar system. The solar system has an edge? I thought it was just a big spiral. It has an edge. It's like a bubble. See, the sun has a wind.
SPEAKER_21: Every star has a wind, but the sun has its own wind. That blows out through the solar system. It's very fast. It can be between 400 to 800 kilometers per second.
SPEAKER_20: Anyway, it blows out from the sun, past all the planets, and it keeps everything else out.
SPEAKER_15: Oh, so it's like blowing up a balloon. Yeah, exactly. The wind gives it a shape.
SPEAKER_20: Right. So these little things are cruising out towards this edge, wherever it is. Scientists don't quite know where it is or what it is. The guys in the control room are like pinging the ships. They're like, hey, what's up? What do you see? And the ships are like, nothing. How about now? Not much. Now? Nothing.
SPEAKER_15: And how long before they actually see something? Fourteen years.
SPEAKER_20: Oh, man. That's like driving through Kansas, but like a million times worse.
SPEAKER_15: But there comes a day, end of 2004, where they've stopped listening for a little while
SPEAKER_20: because NASA only has so many antennas and they have to use them to listen to everything. So for a little while, the Voyager team's like, okay, you guys over there can use the antennas. We're going to lunch. Yeah, I mean, it's not like anything's happening. Nothing's happening anyway. It's been 14 goddamn years. Knock yourself out. You guys, it's cool. And they come back a few hours later, start listening again, and...
SPEAKER_21: It's happened very sudden. Everything is totally changed.
SPEAKER_20: Really? All of a sudden?
SPEAKER_21: Boom. The speed of the wind dropped from around 380 kilometers per second to 100.
SPEAKER_20: Instantly. Like just all at once. Instantly. And then everything out there started to get messy. Very turbulent.
SPEAKER_21: Much more turbulent than before. Particles are also behaving a very different way. And the fields are very weird.
SPEAKER_15: The fields?
SPEAKER_21: The magnetic field.
SPEAKER_20: So just like the sun has a wind? The sun has a magnetic field as well. The field starts at the sun and then curves out in this kind of graceful arc through the solar system.
SPEAKER_21: And how the sun rotates creates what people call a biavena skirt.
SPEAKER_20: You know how like a skirt will flare if you spin around real fast? That's apparently kind of what this field looks like. But way out there, it seemed like the skirt had started to fray. Maybe tear a little. Threads had broken off and seemed to be floating around on their own, not connected to anything.
SPEAKER_15: So what does this all mean? I mean if the fields are breaking down and the wind is dying down, and you said the wind is what actually creates the space of the solar system, does this mean we're out? No.
SPEAKER_20: I kind of thought that was what was happening, but no. It's not out. And it's not quite in. It's in the edge of the bubble. It's in the edge?
SPEAKER_15: Yeah, but it's not like a little thin edge.
SPEAKER_20: It's a thick edge. So the edge isn't just a little line that you cross, it's a place.
SPEAKER_15: Yeah.
SPEAKER_20: And while we listened, the two Voyager ships moved through this edge for several years.
SPEAKER_21: Then something very interesting happened. That the wind on Voyager 1... ...stopped.
SPEAKER_15: Like completely stopped?
SPEAKER_20: Yeah.
SPEAKER_15: So now we're out? No.
SPEAKER_20: No.
SPEAKER_21: I mean... This is what people thought. But the other measurements... ...like temperature, the number of particles, the magnetic field...
SPEAKER_20: ...doesn't tell us that we are out of the bubble.
SPEAKER_21: Nature surprised us again.
SPEAKER_20: So now we think there's a place at the edge of our solar system. Right at the edge. The edge of the edge. That's utterly still. No wind at all. A pause. People are calling it a stagnation layer.
SPEAKER_21: And there is a big discussion why this layer exists and how thick it is.
SPEAKER_20: And by how thick it is, she means when will it end? Because once we get past this... So has anything ever crossed this boundary before?
SPEAKER_21: No. This would be the first man-made object to leave any star. And Voyager is like right there, smiling, touching that boundary. You know, you only do those things first once.
SPEAKER_20: Like your first kiss. Your first taste of alcohol. Your first time driving a car. The first time you see the ocean. These things open up a whole new world. First time out of the solar system.
SPEAKER_15: So when is it going to freaking happen? It might have happened while we were talking.
SPEAKER_20: We're thinking from now, any moment now, next couple of months...
SPEAKER_21: ...or three years from now, four years from now. It's close.
SPEAKER_20: Every day I open my Google alert for Voyager and I look and see... ...did it happen today? Do you really? It happens before the show goes out I'm going to be pissed. Yeah.
SPEAKER_15: Every day? Yeah. It's the first thing you do in the morning?
SPEAKER_20: Oh. Alright, good.
SPEAKER_25: Like the third thing.
SPEAKER_19: This is Lulu now. So it's been years since that piece first aired. And Murav, did it cross over? Did it? It did. It did.
SPEAKER_24: It was 25th of August, 2012. The Voyager 1 crossed. Wow, so it was just a few months after that. It was really, really close. And what did it find? So it's still. It's still? Yeah. All the particles that come from the sun disappeared.
SPEAKER_18: It's really like an edge.
SPEAKER_24: And then you're entering to the realm of interstellar medium that is, you know, the stuff that comes from other stars. If you could put it in sound, you will see a lot of turbulence and then when you cross the edge, it's much quieter.
SPEAKER_19: Oh, so it did find an even deeper quiet. Right, right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_18: I do really like to just think about and imagine that little spacecraft out there floating in the stillness, in that silence.
SPEAKER_19: Radio Lab is supported by Capital One. With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision that's banking reimagined? What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See Capital One dot com slash bank. Capital One N.A. member FDIC. Radio Lab is supported by Apple Card. Apple Card has a cash back rewards program unlike other credit cards. You earn unlimited daily cash on every purchase, receive it daily and can grow it at 4.15 annual percentage yield when you open a savings account. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on iPhone. Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC. Terms apply.
SPEAKER_15: Hey, I'm Chad Iboomron. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radio Lab and today we're talking about... Escape. Escape. And in this last story, I have a feeling that this guy actually does kind of make it through.
SPEAKER_17: This is a true... Yeah, I think he does. Honest escape. But he does it in the most original and most unusual way. Here with the story is our producer Sean Cole. So the story starts in the late 50s.
SPEAKER_15: There was this little boy in Richmond, Texas.
SPEAKER_14: He's seven or eight years old and he's just sitting at home dialing various numbers on his parents' telephone. Just to see what happens. He was on a long distance call to information, you know, 555-1212 and just an area code. This is Phil Lapsley. I first heard Joe's story from him.
SPEAKER_09: And he heard very faintly in the background a tone and he just started whistling along with it.
SPEAKER_14: And all of a sudden he heard a... Curcune. Curcune.
SPEAKER_09: Curcune. Curcune. Curcune. Curcune. Curcune. Curcune. Curcune. He heard a... Curcune. And the call went away.
SPEAKER_14: And it turns out that the tone in the background of the phone and his corresponding whistle was 2600 hertz. Musically it's about 7th octave E.
SPEAKER_15: So he has perfect pitch?
SPEAKER_14: Yeah, and he was weirdly smart, as you'll soon discover. Anyway, he thinks to himself... That's very odd. Well, that happened once.
SPEAKER_09: I wonder if it could happen again. Does it again. He didn't even really know exactly what it was at the time.
SPEAKER_14: But he does it again. And again.
SPEAKER_09: He didn't think it was particularly useful for anything. He does talk about walking past somebody at a payphone when he was 7 or 8 years old and whistling this tone. And having the phone call disconnect on the person. Wow, that's like having superpowers. That really is. Yeah.
SPEAKER_17: Which means he could be a little walking bomb. He could go to Grand Central Station where there are many people sitting in phone booths. And he could make them all lose their phone calls. And no one would know. Right, but it was more than just a cool trick for him.
SPEAKER_14: This discovery was the beginning of a kind of escape.
SPEAKER_16: What were you scared of when you were little? I bet something scared you, but there were things that sure scared me.
SPEAKER_14: That's Joe. I don't remember how old I was, but...
SPEAKER_14: It's all we have left of him, in fact. He died in 2007. But he left behind hours and hours of recordings of his voice. Phone recordings. And as you listen to them... I was afraid, you know, something might happen.
SPEAKER_16: I crawled out of the bed, went and found the books on the floor and get sittin'.
SPEAKER_14: You pretty quickly realized that the little boy in that room who was playing with the phone, he was kind of desperate. Really? He went to this Catholic school for the blind. Was he blind? He was born blind. Wow. And when he was there... Back in the fall of 1955... Things got pretty bad.
SPEAKER_16: A lot of the nuns whipped me and my sister really hard, you know, and shook us. Only one did the sexual abuse. She used to have me get on the table. And then she would get up on the table and lie down. She did the bad touching. Things were pretty bad at home, too.
SPEAKER_14: Daddy would slam Mother and hurt her and break things.
SPEAKER_16: There'd be lots of scary sounds and stuff at night. Sometimes I'd hug my phone up close and listen to the dial tone. The soft hum and the dial tone that was always there. It was a nice warm tone.
SPEAKER_09: It never yelled. It never fought. What a wonderful thing a telephone is.
SPEAKER_16: It was just a nice way for him to comfort himself.
SPEAKER_09: Especially during those long nights.
SPEAKER_15: And so, how exactly did the whistling thing he was doing... How did that help him? Yeah.
SPEAKER_14: Well, it takes a few steps to explain, but it turns out that that tone was the key word in a hidden mechanical language that controlled the phone system. He wasn't supposed to be able to hear it at all, in fact.
SPEAKER_14: It was an internal signal, probably bleeding over from another line. And when a long distance line was idle, when there was no call on it, this tone would be being played continuously.
SPEAKER_09: Basically, the tone means that the line is free.
SPEAKER_14: And silence on the line means there's someone trying to make a call. So say you're in New York and you want to call LA. You pick up your phone. The circuit's got this tone on it, marking the circuit as idle. Dial the LA number, and at that point, your line takes away the tone for just a moment. It goes silent. And LA goes, ah! New York wants to make a phone call. And then LA drops its tone, and the New York and LA machines talk to each other.
SPEAKER_14: So that's one discovery. Another discovery is that you can dial a phone by just tapping the hook switch, that little button where you hang up. Tap that three times, dial the number three. Seven times, dial the number seven. And so then Joe thought, wait, pulses, tones? Maybe if you were to make little bursts of tone, so something like...
SPEAKER_09: For six.
SPEAKER_25: For two.
SPEAKER_14: As Joe demonstrated on a web show called Hacks or Radio. For nine.
SPEAKER_09: If you were to do something like that, maybe you could actually dial a call.
SPEAKER_16: Are you whistling that? Yeah.
SPEAKER_14: And you could. I'm impressed. That's how you actually make a call. That's exactly how the phone system used to send calls back and forth. That was its language. That's right.
SPEAKER_09: Joe learned how to speak telephone. Which is amazing.
SPEAKER_14: I mean, I think that's amazing. But isn't he just dialing the phone with his lips as opposed to using his fingers?
SPEAKER_15: Yes, true.
SPEAKER_14: But Joe made one more little discovery that would change his life forever. See, if you first dialed a number like long distance information, 555-1212,
SPEAKER_09: the telephone company doesn't charge for calls for information. So what he figured out was that once you get the operator on the line,
SPEAKER_14: if you then whistled to disconnect... But only for a little bit. Only for a second or two. The line nearly disconnects, but it doesn't all the way. It just sits in this kind of limbo waiting for instructions, waiting to be used. Huh.
SPEAKER_13: And you can... ...re-route your call by whistling the digits you wanted to dial...
SPEAKER_09: ...and make a free call. Because the phone company, again, thinks that you're still connected to information and it's not charging you for that.
SPEAKER_14: It was like having an unlimited plane ticket to anywhere. Joe could call anywhere he wanted for free. This is a telecom announcement.
SPEAKER_14: And explore.
SPEAKER_24: The number you have called is not connected.
SPEAKER_14: Listen. Take him to a unit for that. And so he started calling all over the world. Even broken number numbers, just to hear the different voices. Please check the numbers before calling again.
SPEAKER_17: I used to do this, by the way. Did you really? My sister and I would get on the phone. We could call information. That was a free service. Yeah. And we said, hello, information. Can you please contact us with Toronto? And then we'd get the Toronto operator. And then we'd say, Toronto, could you please get us in contact with Churchill, Ontario, which is way up north. Then the Churchill lady would come on and say, could you please put us in charge with Ignignuk, which is some Inuit place. And they'd transfer you to the northernest place. We would be talking to a person in the Arctic for nothing. Wow. It was the sense of going long distance for free. Now imagine you're a blind kid doing that.
SPEAKER_14: In an abusive home. You can't even run away. I think the phone represented freedom.
SPEAKER_09: It represented a place that was under his control. He could be an expert in it. It was a place that he could do all sorts of things that maybe he wasn't so easily able to do in real life.
SPEAKER_15: So what happens next? So things get a little bit better for Joe as he gets older.
SPEAKER_14: His mom takes him out of the Catholic school once she finds out that the nuns are beating him. He never told his parents about the sexual abuse. He gets more and more savvy with the phone. And then finally he goes off to the University of South Florida where he starts showing off. It started out that Joe told a student that he could whistle a free phone call.
SPEAKER_09: And the student said, no you can't. He said, want to bet? So they bet a dollar and Joe whistled a long distance call for him. And before long there were crowds of 40 kids who were following him around wanting to see him do this parlor trick. And then he whistled up this one particular fateful call.
SPEAKER_14: He was trying to whistle somebody in New York, which is area code 516.
SPEAKER_09: But instead he wound up in Canada, which is 514. You can see if you're whistling calls you could easily get off by one or two beeps. So he wound up talking to an operator in Canada. And the operator in Canada put his call through to New York, but then actually managed to listen to the call. And then the student was talking about the whiz kid who put the call through for him. And telephone company security ended up tracing it back to the University of South Florida. It was just a gossipy operator who told on him.
SPEAKER_09: Well gossipy or security conscious depending on how you view it. Fun ruining, that's how I view it.
SPEAKER_14: So Joe's busted. He nearly gets kicked out of school and the whole thing causes just enough of a stir that people find out.
SPEAKER_09: The local school newspaper wrote an article about it. And it got picked up by a wire service. Next thing you know there are newspaper articles and publicity and... And here's the weird thing, as news travels... Did you see this article about the blind kid in Florida who can do this?
SPEAKER_14: It turns out Joe wasn't alone. There were all of these other Joe and Grussias out there. Hacking the phone system too.
SPEAKER_28: You know, you mean I'm not the only one? You mean there are other people who are interested in this as well?
SPEAKER_09: They weren't whistling.
SPEAKER_14: Some of them would use these little machines called blue boxes that would make the tones. A couple of kids actually modified a toy whistle from a box of Captain Crunch. And because Joe got caught they all started to find out about each other. That really ended up being the focal point for a whole generation of phone freaks.
SPEAKER_29: This is NBC Nightly News. Phone what? Phone freaks. Phone freaks will tell you phone freaking began with a blind young man named Joe and Gresia. One thing he discovered was that he could whistle his own calls.
SPEAKER_09: And before long people were actually calling Joe and Gresia and a network starts to form. Then the phone freaks started finding broken vacant number recordings. So for example you dial a non-working number and you get the usual telephone company recording. You have reached a non-working number and...
SPEAKER_24: But it turns out some of those were broken in such a way that the volume level was very low.
SPEAKER_09: And if multiple people called the same number they could talk.
SPEAKER_16: ...or dial the operator. Joe?
SPEAKER_09: Joe. Teenage kids would call in and it turned into a party line. Kind of an annoying one because you had this announcement that was repeating every 30 seconds. But it still allowed teenage kids to talk to one another.
SPEAKER_15: Wow, so this is it. I mean he found his tribe basically. Yeah.
SPEAKER_14: And he would call the conference lines and talk with them about phones and freaking and everything. But that really wasn't what he was after. And I think it's an interesting thing because...
SPEAKER_09: So say you're a lonely kid and you start playing around with the phone or you start playing around with Scrabble or whatever it is. You get really obsessed about something, right? Through the magic of that thing you end up meeting other people. You sort of have a choice to make at that point. Choice one is embrace the community. Choice two is, well that's nice. It's great that there are other people and I get some stuff from that. But you know, I found this thing. My telephone, my Scrabble set, whatever it is I'm obsessed by. And I'm still obsessed by it. And it seems to me like he sort of made the choice to go for the thing.
SPEAKER_14: It's not that he didn't like the community but he was still searching for something. Esquire magazine, 1971.
SPEAKER_09: March of 1971 is when he moved to Memphis. Reporter. In that month he had done very little long distance phone freaking from his own phone.
SPEAKER_13: He had begun to apply for a job with the phone company. Yeah, he went there intending to get a job and be a man as he put it.
SPEAKER_13: And he wanted to stay away from anything illegal. Ingressia. Quote, any kind of job will do. Anything as menial as the most lowly operator. That's probably all they'd give me because I'm blind.
SPEAKER_08: He wanted to be a telephone man. He wanted to take his lunchbox to work. He wanted to get a paycheck. He wanted to be a real person like everybody else. This is Steven Gibb, one of Joe's best friends. He lived in a couple places. The first one was, you know, just imagine Skid Row. I mean it was, it was, you know, he woke up one morning when the heat went out and he stepped on a dead frozen rack because he ended up sleeping in his coat. I mean, you know, that's all he could afford.
SPEAKER_14: And he can't get arrested in Memphis. You know, he can't get a job to save his life. So he decides to get arrested, literally, by doing this very, very elaborate public freak where he gets a bunch of his freaking friends on a conference call and he starts dialing up foreign embassies. Like the armed services in Moscow. And pretended that he was calling as a radio host and that all of his friends were his studio audience. Hi, this is, you know, so-and-so from this radio show.
SPEAKER_08: Do you have time to talk and be on the air with us today? Oh, great. Because he wanted to stay on the phone line so that the phone company could trace him because he says they're not really speedy. You know, he wanted to give him a lot of time to catch him. Two weeks later is when he walked out the door and, you know, the FBI came up and said, Joseph Ingresia.
SPEAKER_15: And why did he do this? Because he was trying to get the phone company to pay attention or something? That's right. That's right.
SPEAKER_17: In the hopes that he would get a free meal in jail? Or? No, in the hopes that he would get a job.
SPEAKER_14: With the phone company? That's right. What a weird way to go about it. And amazingly, it worked. Really?
SPEAKER_08: Yeah. He got four job offers. All phone jobs. So he got a job at a little independent Millington telephone company.
SPEAKER_09: And he started cleaning telephones. Anything from cleaning phones to servicing equipment. Any kind of job will do.
SPEAKER_13: But any kind of job wouldn't do.
SPEAKER_14: He really didn't like it. It's that kind of thing where you realize your lifelong dream and then you think, wait, I can dream anything I want. I can dream bigger than this.
SPEAKER_09: And so in 1975 and 76, he moved to Denver. Denver. Where every dream is in reach.
SPEAKER_14: Paid for by the committee to promote Denver.
SPEAKER_08: And he started hot-knobbing with all the telephone guys and going to the public utilities commission. And that's when he started working for Mountain Bell. Mountain Bell Telephone.
SPEAKER_09: And that's when he started freaking for the man.
SPEAKER_14: And so he worked as a network troubleshooter.
SPEAKER_09: And at this point he had such an intimate knowledge of all the little clicks and pops of the phone system that he could tell from those noises what was going on in the network.
SPEAKER_09: How your call was being routed. If there was a problem somewhere along the line, what the problem was. Maybe even where it was.
SPEAKER_14: Wow. Strictly from listening. Strictly from listening. That's right. This was listening to the dial tone times nirvana.
SPEAKER_16: And he demonstrated his powers on the New York radio station WBAI. There was a show called Off the Hook.
SPEAKER_16: That's a nice sound. Oh it drops off on number five EFS. I forgot.
SPEAKER_15: Wow. He's like a Jedi master.
SPEAKER_14: Yeah. He's made it. And so he quit. What? Gave up the job for his friend.
SPEAKER_15: But it sounds like he finally got what he wanted. I think like he became the master of the world that he had escaped into.
SPEAKER_14: But he never really dealt with the world that he had escaped from. Meaning what? That little boy, that broken little boy that he was, still needed a kind of fixing in a way that wasn't going to be... You know, no job is really going to solve that. So? So...
SPEAKER_14: It's my turn. It's my turn. He moves to Minneapolis on June 12th because 6-12 was Minneapolis' area code. And he basically becomes a kid again.
SPEAKER_08: Just everything he did from that point on, other than his phone, had to do with children. He'd visit with children who were terminally ill. He'd just visit with children in general.
SPEAKER_14: I've got a recording at home. In fact, I was listening to it last night before he came to the interview.
SPEAKER_08: I was laughing and giggling because all these little girls were coming up and they were saying, Hi, hi. Hi.
SPEAKER_25: Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi.
SPEAKER_08: Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. And he actually started talking a little more to me about his being abused and missing out on his childhood. And he was at a seminar, an uplifting seminar. And the instructor said something on the order of, I'm paraphrasing, like, Tell me how you feel right now. And he screamed and yelled and threw up his arms and said, Joy bubbles.
SPEAKER_14: And in that moment he decided that he would actually go by that name. Joy bubbles. You mean he changed his name?
SPEAKER_15: He legally changed his name to Joy bubbles, all one word.
SPEAKER_14: And it was around this time that he decided and announced that he wasn't going to be an adult anymore. His old name in his past was gone and he wanted to be five years old.
SPEAKER_08: Five years old forever.
SPEAKER_14: And then he started doing this. Gosh, it's May already.
SPEAKER_16: Well, I'm glad you called stories and stuff. This is your storyteller, Joy bubbles, here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. You know those recordings I mentioned at the beginning?
SPEAKER_14: They're all from the show that Joe recorded every week. He called it Stories and Stuff. And instead of broadcasting it, he'd record the episodes to an answering service and then you'd call a number and listen to it on the phone.
SPEAKER_16: Hello, kids and chidults. I think a chidult is part child and part adult. Well, hello, hi and hello. This is Stories and Stuff. You've reached Stories and Stuff. This is Joy bubbles here in Minneapolis. That's all one word. Don't you dare split it. Joy bubbles is another word. And this may be too armchair psychoanalytical,
SPEAKER_14: but it really feels as though it's the kind of show that he needed to hear when he was a kid. Like the new five-year-old was trying to go back and say something to the five-year-old from the early 50s. Something akin to, it's okay. In the end, it's going to be okay.
SPEAKER_16: Yeah, there is help. If you'd like an imaginary friend, a bunch of them come that are just looking for somebody to love and play with and talk to. And so all you have to do is any quiet day, just get quiet and ask for one. Know that the kind you like will come and they'll be with you for as long as you want them, as long as you need them, for a lifetime and beyond.
SPEAKER_23: Radiolab was created by Jad Abourad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Suzy Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Blum, Becca Bresler, Rachel Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nandusabundam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khare, Ana Roskowitz-Paz, Sarah Sambak, Arian Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Bo En Wong. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.
SPEAKER_26: Hi, this is Susanna Colling from Washington, D.C. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, the Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. WNYC Studios is supported by On Being with Krista Tippett.
SPEAKER_01: I'm Krista Tippett of On Being, where we take up the big questions of meaning for this world now. In our new podcast season, we're going to have a different human conversation about AI and also the intelligence of our bodies, grief and joy, social creativity and poetry, and so much more. A conversation to live by every Thursday.
