Pod Insights Stuff You Should Know Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan: Miracle is Right About this episode Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan were one of the most amazing non-magical duos in history. Imagine living trapped in your own mind – unable to see or hear – and then imagine learning to read, traveling the world, and becoming an ambassador of peace.
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1:37 Speaker 03 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.
1:46 Josh Clark? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know. I think this is a long time coming addition.
1:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, how have we not covered Ann Sullivan and Helen Keller at this point? It's kind of weird.
2:03 Josh Clark? I don't know, but this is the kind of thing that's like, yeah, we still got a few years left in this, you know?
2:07 Speaker 02 Totally. And we're not, we're not scraping the bottom of any barrels here.
2:11 Josh Clark? No, we're not even dipping into the top of the barrel yet, everybody. It's still full of pickles.
2:18 Speaker 02 That's right, or cream that has risen to the top.
2:21 Josh Clark? Oh, that's even better. Pickles and cream.
2:25 Speaker 02 Right, but we're talking about Helen Keller and Ann Sullivan.
2:30 Speaker 02 You probably know who these people are, but if you don't, just very quickly, we should say that Ann Sullivan was a teacher of a young girl and others along the way, but mainly known for her work with a young girl starting from the age of six named Helen Keller, who lost her sight and hearing as a 19-month-old from what is likely bacterial meningitis, even though we don't know for sure. And it's one of the great, inspiring stories of all time, and especially one that came early on to show to the rest of the world, who at the time didn't think that people that had these kinds of afflictions like blindness and being deaf. Like, if you had both of those, they were basically like,
3:15 Speaker 02 "We're gonna send you to an institution because we can't teach you anything, you know? You can't see, you can't hear. We're sorry."
3:22 Josh Clark? Yeah, and at those institutions, they likely died. A lot of them died just from neglect or abuse or all sorts of different reasons, just because they were unable to see or hear. And by this time, there was education for the deaf, there was education for the blind. But like you said, the deaf-blind were considered like, there's just no way you can teach them. And the reason why is because the only senses they have are touch, smell, and taste. That's about it. And they're just like, "We don't know how to teach anybody by taste." Like, you just can't do anything with them. So when you really start to put yourself in Helen Keller's position, totally cut off by the world, or from the world,
4:08 Josh Clark? it's just mind-boggling and as inspiring as it gets to stop and think about what Ann Sullivan actually did. And then what Helen Keller was able to do after Ann Sullivan did her thing initially.
4:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. One of the great relationships and partnerships of history,
4:28 Josh Clark? Yeah.
4:28 Speaker 02 world history, and certainly American history. There had been some schools in place, and there was one recorded deaf-blind person who had learned language. It was a woman named Laura Bridgman. In the 1830s, she worked with a guy named Samuel Gridley Howe, and he founded what's known as the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, which will come into play in this story. But he taught her, and this is what Ann Sullivan would teach Helen Keller, something called the manual alphabet, which is, as Lisa Simpson would say, tappa, tappa, tappa, where letters correspond to taps on a palm. And that is how you, you know, very sort of slowly teach somebody language without, with them not being able to see or hear.
5:13 Josh Clark? Yeah, they figured out how to teach somebody language just through touch, which is impressive in and of itself. But the fact that Laura Bridgman had learned that, it was a, it was considered like a curiosity, an anomaly, like this is not, like that didn't extend to the idea that you could teach deaf-blind people anything generally, right?
5:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, and we should say that Ann Sullivan was vision impaired herself, and that's how she ended up knowing Laura Bridgman from that Perkins School for the Blind.
5:43 Josh Clark? Right. And let's talk a little bit about Ann Sullivan. She had an extraordinarily rough life. Leading up to about age 14, she was born in 1866 to parents. Her mother was invalid. Her father abandoned them right after her mother died, when she was, I think, eight. By this time, she had lost most of her vision. She had suffered an eye infection. And so she and her brother, Jimmy, they have no, they're, she's eight, and now she's in charge of her little brother. She's blind, and there's no one helping them any longer. There's no one looking out for them. It's up to her to look out for the both of them
6:27 Josh Clark? in any way she can. And so they had to move into a public poorhouse in Tewksbury.
6:32 Speaker 02 That's right. And we should point out, she's vision impaired at this point. I think until she was an adult, she suffered full blindness.
6:39 Josh Clark? Okay.
6:41 Speaker 02 But, you know, rough life. This poor house was awful. There were rumors and reports of cannibalism at the shelter. It was filthy. They were constantly just threatened and in danger, you know, health-wise and otherwise. And there was an inspection at one point of a state board of charities, and a little teenage Ansullivan actually convinced them, she had no formal education, convinced a government official who was on-site there to send her via tax dollars to that Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, where she enrolled and would eventually graduate as valedictorian of her class.
7:19 Josh Clark? Yeah. And just to get that point across, when she was 14 is when she was sent to Perkins School. She lived in a poor house for six years. Her brother died four months after they moved there when he contracted tuberculosis. She'd had an incredibly rough life. Her first formal education came at age 14, when she went to Perkins, and six years later, she was valedictorian. Again, despite being unsighted. Like, her story in and of itself is incredibly inspiring, but it just picks up from there.
7:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. And the reason we sort of mentioned the Perkins stuff, because, like I said, that's where she met Laura Bridgman, and notably, that's where she learned that manual alphabet, because she wanted to converse with Laura Bridgman. So Keller, like I said, probably lost her sight and her hearing from bacterial meningitis, is what they suspect.
8:13 Josh Clark? Yeah.
8:14 Speaker 02 She was born in 1880. She was completely developmentally on track when this happened, at 19 months old. So her life just took a really unfortunate turn. And so, from the moment that she was 19 months old, until she was six, she was, you know, what some people might call in a trapped state. She was just living in her mind, unable to communicate. Her parents, you know, she reacted very frustratingly, probably not surprisingly, and got increasingly violent with her tantrums. And by the time she was six, her parents were like... I don't know that we can handle this safely anymore. We don't want to institutionalize her.
8:56 Speaker 02 So they reached out somehow. I think her mom had just remembered like reading something about Laura Bridgeman and that Perkins School. And I think this is before Helen was even born. And so they, I guess, hopefully, put in a phone call to Alexander Graham Bell and said, first of all, thank you for this invention. This is pretty cool that we can call you the inventor.
9:20 Josh Clark? And he said, bully, bully.
9:21 Speaker 02 He said, bully, bully. And then they said, but I know you're active in deaf education and I know your son-in-law runs the Perkins School. What do you think about our daughter? It's a pretty tough case.
9:33 Josh Clark? Yeah. And he was like, this is, I think this is just the job for the Perkins School. So he pulled some strings. And that kind of makes it sound like, the Perkins School's in Massachusetts. Helen Keller's family was from Alabama. It sounds like her family was wealthy. They were not. Her father was a captain in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. After the Civil War, her family was left poor. So they were not wealthy. I think they had land and everything like that. But she was not nearly as destitute as Ann Sullivan. But I think it's worth the point that as she grew and started living her life, she supported herself. It was, she didn't come from a wealthy family.
10:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. In the meantime, while, you know, when she gets into school there, Ann Sullivan had already gotten a job offer from Perkins. She was a great student there. She knew that manual sign language. And they said, well, you should just work here. And so on March 3rd, 1886, Helen Keller would meet Ann Sullivan and later call that her soul's birthday.
10:34 Josh Clark? Yeah. So Ann Sullivan was basically sent by Perkins to Tusconbia, where the Kellers lived in Alabama. And she, when she got there, I mean, almost immediately, Helen threw a tantrum.
10:50 Speaker 02 Yeah.
10:50 Josh Clark? So Anne Sullivan got to see firsthand, right off the bat, like, this is going to be tough. This girl has learned, because her parents are letting her do this. She's learned to express herself through violence, through anger, through intimidation, through the threat of throwing another tantrum if she doesn't get her way, or she can't, someone's not listening to her or something. And Anne Sullivan was a scrappy Irish lass, who identified very quickly, like, if I'm going to get through this girl, that stuff has to end immediately.
11:26 Speaker 02 Yeah.
11:27 Josh Clark? And so they were like, she spent about the first week essentially physically overpowering Helen whenever she threw a tantrum. And by the end of the week, had lost a tooth. I think she'd been punched many times. They went through it. But apparently, after just a week, Helen learned, like, okay, this lady's not going to put up with that. I should probably try a different tack. And it seems like from that point, she had gained Helen's trust, and now they could start with Helen's education.
12:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, you think about it. Helen Keller didn't, she couldn't even figure out who this person was, all of a sudden.
12:07 Josh Clark? Right.
12:07 Speaker 02 This new person in her life.
12:09 Josh Clark? Yeah.
12:09 Speaker 02 Who is now physically restraining her.
12:13 Speaker 02 I mean, that was sort of Sullivan's philosophy. She talked about, the gateway was obedience, basically. Eventually, you'll get to love and knowledge, but at first, I have to have to sit on this girl.
12:25 Josh Clark? Right.
12:26 Speaker 02 You know?
12:26 Josh Clark? Yeah. I mean, she's like, she broke a tooth from me. Give me a break.
12:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, very encouragingly, and this is something as someone who's always believed in the healing powers of the great outdoors, getting Helen outside was a very big deal and a very good sort of second step. Because they could explore nature. It calmed Helen down immediately, and that's where her senses of smell and touch could really be engaged.
12:52 Josh Clark? She's later said, Helen did, that if you're deaf and blind, then out in the sun is the best place to be. Because you can really feel it, you know?
13:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:03 Josh Clark? So it didn't really occur to me, like I knew that this is a really big deal that Anne Sullivan was able to teach Helen Keller, but it didn't occur to me until I was researching this, that that wasn't even the first step. The first step, like if you're teaching a kid something, they're in school, you're saying, okay, now we're going to learn the alphabet. Here's the alphabet. This is what you use the alphabet for, to spell words. This is what this word means for this, right? This is the word for this thing. They know that you're teaching them, so they're understanding that, they're accepting that information.
13:35 Speaker 02 And that's still hard.
13:36 Josh Clark? It is, that's hard in and of itself.
13:38 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:39 Josh Clark? There was no way for Anne Sullivan to explain to Helen Keller, I'm here to teach you language.
13:47 Speaker 02 Right.
13:48 Josh Clark? She had to essentially figure out how to break through to Helen Keller, so that Helen Keller realized what was going on now and could take it from there, could start to learn. So there was this enormous obstacle before Helen Keller could even begin to learn, which was to understand that she was being taught.
14:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:08 Josh Clark? And to understand that what she was being taught was language, that things had words associated with them. This was brand new to her because again, she was 19 months old when she lost her sight and hearing, so she hadn't learned this stuff yet.
14:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, it's astounding that this worked, quite frankly, and it's due to the hard work and as we'll see, the fact that Helen Keller, it turns out, was brilliant. So she starts tap-a-tapa-tapa into Helen's palm every chance she gets. She'd hand her a doll, tap-a-tapa-tapa, D-O-L-L. She gives her some water, tap-a-tapa-tapa, W-A-T-E-R. And like you said, you know, for a while, Helen's probably like, what is this person doing?
14:53 Josh Clark? Yeah.
14:54 Speaker 02 Tapping on my hand all the time. Eventually, she's doing it so much, she learns to associate like, oh, when I get water, I'm getting these same taps. And eventually, there's like a literal aha moment where she gets it and she's like, wait a minute, I understand this, this person is... Is representing a word for the thing that I'm experiencing by tapping into my palm. And she said it was, uh, she said Helen's face lit up like it was a complete revelation.
15:24 Josh Clark? Yeah, um, this very famously happened at a water pump. They, they were on one of their, um, outdoor walks or hikes, I guess. And, um, they came upon the water pump and she said somebody was pumping water. And Anne stuck Helen's hand into the stream of water coming out of the spout and was tapping the same letters, W A T E R, and just kept doing it over and over and over and over. And that's what finally Helen just put those things together. It just clicked, like you said. And, um, that's, there's a statue of her that was unveiled in the Capitol Rotunda in 2009, and it is of her as an eight-year-old girl, standing at this water pump, basically
16:07 Josh Clark? commemorating that incredibly just moving moment, but also incredibly unlikely moment that she got it, she just got it. And now she was able to, to start to learn from there.
16:21 Speaker 02 That's incredible. So, um, it went really pretty quickly from that point. She learned 30 words by the end of that day, uh, had vocabulary of a few hundred words within a few months. And by the time, this started when she was, was six and into seven. By the time she was eight, uh, she had taught her, uh, to read words by feel. She was, she was writing, she was composing sentences and writing in block letters, um, which is an astounding rate of speed, uh, considering her, her scenario. Um, and maybe that's a good time for a break?
16:55 Josh Clark? Yeah.
16:56 Speaker 02 All right, we'll be right back. Things are off to a, a really quick start and we'll see what happens next with Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan.
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20:38 Josh Clark? Okay, Chuck, so like you said, Ann Sullivan quickly figured out that Helen Keller was a gifted child. She just had to learn how to learn, and once she learned that, she just took off, like you said. By the time she was a teenager, she was reading, I think, five different languages. She wrote poetry, and she was in public speaking. She did public speaking as a teenager on what's called the Chautauqua Lecture Circuit, which was a movement to essentially bring culture and interesting topics to people who lived in rural areas, who otherwise might not be exposed to that kind of stuff, to give them something to talk about. And she lectured on this circuit. She appeared on this circuit with Ann Sullivan as a teenager.
21:23 Josh Clark? I think before this, though, she made her way to the Perkins School, right, for her formal education.
21:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, there were three kind of big things that followed education wise. Between, what is that, like eight years, between 88 and 1896. She went to that Perkins School, like you talked about, got that formal education. She also went to a specialist at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf, so she could learn to speak. And then, the third one, they moved to New York City, so, and you know, Anne's along every step of the way, as we'll see, obviously.
21:56 Josh Clark? Right.
21:57 Speaker 02 So Helen could go to the Wright-Humerson School for the Deaf, where it would continue to sort of improve her speaking, and she could learn to lip read. And this is like, Sullivan's there, tap-a-tap-a-tapa every step of the way. When she goes on the lecture circuit, she's tapping questions, like during Q and A, and then Helen would tap the questions back to Sullivan, and she would translate for the audience. As we'll see, this would lead to some suspicion that it was all just an act, which is, you know, fairly upsetting, because what they did was remarkable, but this would all end up with Helen Keller eventually wanting to go to college.
22:36 Josh Clark? Yeah, and just stepping back for just a second, you mentioned how she learned to lip read, and that doesn't make any sense, because she could, she was totally blind. She lip read by putting her thumb on, say, Anne Sullivan's voice box, around, like, under her chin. She put a finger on her lips, and then put another finger on her sinus cavity, and through feeling what the lips were doing and the vibrations the vocal box was making, she could discern essentially what the person was saying. That's, that's how she learned how to lip read, and eventually, that's one of the ways that she learned to talk, although she found it a failing of her life that she was never able to speak clearly enough
23:19 Josh Clark? that just a stranger on the street could understand her.
23:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, so she, like I said, she wanted to go to college, she goes to, she wanted to go to Radcliffe, it's the Harvard-Sister School. And so Anne Sullivan arranges for her to go to a prep school to get her ready for this, for the entrance exams. And, again, translating all the curriculum, tapping out those lectures, tapping out the books, like, reading basically to her, into her hand. And then translating back to the teachers, she's there every step of the way when she gets into and attends Radcliffe College, where she eventually would graduate cum laude in 1904 as the very first person with deaf blindness to earn a college degree.
24:01 Josh Clark? And like you said, there were scoffers who were like, what is this? There's this woman who's like helping her. Is this, is this really a thing? And like you said, it is upsetting, but the amount of study and attention that was paid to these two, there's just no way they could have kept up a fraud like this for 50 years. It's quite clearly settled that Helen Keller and Ann Sullivan really did all the stuff that they were thought to do.
24:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. And we don't want to get into this, but we, just so we don't get emails, we will mention that just like this week, there is a really idiotic TikTok trend that started among Generation Z where they have put forth that Helen Keller did not even exist. And it's idiotic and ableist. And so the only reason we mention is so we won't get emails about it, but we don't want to talk more about that.
24:57 Josh Clark? Yeah. Good point. So we should say that Helen Keller and Ann Sullivan, by this time, they weren't, they weren't just famous among deaf blind advocates or blind advocates or deaf advocates or anything like that. They were in that circle. They also were in academia because they were studied. And but by this time, she's a teenager still, I think, or early twenties after she graduates from Radcliffe. They're world famous. Like everyone knows who Helen Keller and Ann Sullivan are.
25:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. I mean, they knew the Rockefellers, they knew Henry Ford, they had met with US presidents, they met Charlie Chaplin when they would eventually film starring themselves as themselves, the movie Deliverance in 1918. They knew Mark Twain. The, the book and eventually play title and movie title, The Miracle Worker, came from Mark Twain. He's the one that coined that term when he wrote a letter to Ann Sullivan calling her that. But all this to say, I think that put a strain on Ann Sullivan's marriage. During this period, she got married to a guy named John Macy. He was a Harvard professor. And he actually helped Helen Keller write The Story of My Life, her autobiography.
26:14 Speaker 02 But they, you know, they were married for a little while. The marriage didn't work out. And I think a lot of it probably had to do with just their fame and their travels. And it was, it was just a strain on the marriage, it seemed like.
26:26 Josh Clark? Yeah, apparently I saw a documentary called Becoming Helen Keller. It was really good, but it crushed Ann Sullivan when John Macy left. And, you know, Helen grieved along with her. She said it took a really long time. Helen, like almost exclusively referred to Ann as teacher. So she was like, it took, it took teacher a really long time to basically get over that. She may never, she may have never really gotten over it. But they, they were a pair again at this point. So they were in a movie, as you said. Helen learns very quickly, like, I like being on stage. This is kind of fun. It's a rush. She apparently could feel the vibration in the floor and through the air and knew when the audience was clapping.
27:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, you know, interestingly, we can sense through the vibrations and through the air when a Stuff You Should Know tour show is 40% full.
27:20 Josh Clark? That's right, man. That's right. But she loved that. She thrived on that and it energized her.
27:29 Speaker 02 That's cool.
27:29 Josh Clark? Yeah, she really liked it. She was also, one of her things was they would demonstrate, you know, how she learned and how she communicated through Ann. But she would deliver in like these, these demonstrations, like inspirational messages. This is the kind of message she's decided to take to the world rather than like, get hello to me. She's like, you're paying me all this attention. Why don't you pay attention to yourself and how great you can be too? At the same time, she was shining a massive spotlight on how few opportunities the disabled community in the United States and around the world had at the time. And she was directly responsible for changing those attitudes.
28:12 Speaker 02 So by the time they hit the stage for real and go on the vaudeville circuit, which is not something I knew until we did this kind of research, it was pretty amazing. They had a third member of their group, you know, their, their, their star was, has risen, risen so much, they were like, we need an assistant.
28:29 Josh Clark? Yeah.
28:30 Speaker 02 And so they hired Polly Thompson in 1914, and they were known as the Three Musketeers. So now they were a trio, traveling around on the vaudeville circuit. They had a three act, act, where, and they told their story. They did a 20 minute bit where Anne had a monologue, sort of giving you the background. It was almost like a live podcast, looking at it.
28:51 Josh Clark? Mm-hmm.
28:51 Speaker 02 Keller would come in and demonstrate the process, like how she learned to speak. They would kind of show people how it happened, say some of those inspirational words, like you were talking about. And then, obviously with Anne translating, she would do a little Q and A. This sounds a lot like our show, actually.
29:07 Josh Clark? It is, yeah. We were using the Helen Keller model of live shows.
29:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, except hers was sold out with roaring audiences.
29:14 Josh Clark? Yeah, they were performing in front of thousands and thousands of people.
29:18 Speaker 02 That's amazing.
29:19 Josh Clark? One of the things in that Q and A, there's a list that they compiled, and this list was compiled after they retired from vaudeville. So like, these were, they documented questions and answers that they got. And one of the ones, so there's one, what's, what do you, what's your definition of politics? Was the question one of the audience members asked, and Helen said, "The art of promising one thing and doing another."
29:45 Speaker 02 Very famous saying.
29:47 Josh Clark? I saw another one, too. "Can you feel moonshine?" You know, like she could feel sunshine, and she says, "No, but I can smell it."
29:55 Speaker 02 I saw that coming.
29:57 Josh Clark? So, I mean, like, she was a great wit. And like, Anne Sullivan was translating this. Remember, whenever we're talking about, like, Helen Keller saying something or doing something, Anne Sullivan is standing there, holding her hand, tapping into her hand. Like, even though she learned Braille, and how to write in block letters and all that, that was still the chief form of communication, because Anne Sullivan was so good at essentially translating in real time what was going on.
30:26 Speaker 02 Just say it once.
30:28 Josh Clark? What?
30:30 Speaker 02 Tapa, tapa, tapa.
30:32 Josh Clark? I can't do it as good as you. It keeps cracking me up every time you do.
30:37 Speaker 02 So they eventually get off the vaudeville circuit in 1922. So they had a good run of a handful of years and was tired, basically. She was, you know, older than Helen and so she kind of lost the pizzazz for it. So they went home for the rest of the 1920s. They still lectured, they still traveled, they still did lobbying and then fundraising and stuff like that. Obviously, working with all their, the causes you might expect, like the American Foundation for the Blind. Also became very socially active. And we'll talk at the end of, you know, a little bit about Helen Keller's later work as a, as a social activist, which was pretty vast.
31:13 Josh Clark? Yeah.
31:14 Speaker 02 But they, they were traveling all over the world at this point and everyone loved them. Maybe we should take a break, though, because, you know, like every story of every great partnership, it was a little more complicated than it might seem on the surface.
31:27 Josh Clark? Yeah.
31:28 Speaker 02 All right, we'll be right back.
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32:06 Josh Clark? Or discover Toyota's off-road lineup, including the iconic 4Runner and Land Cruiser, designed to go beyond the everyday. And with Toyota's proven reputation for quality and reliability, plus hybrid power on many models, you can get more for every mile and drive for less along the way.
32:22 Speaker 02 That's right. And long after you leave the lot, your Toyota keeps delivering with great resale value. So you could trade in for more when you're ready for your next Toyota. From a great deal today to a great value tomorrow, a Toyota is right for you. Shop toyota.com for deals and details, or stop by your local Toyota dealer today. Toyota, let's go places.
32:46 Josh Clark? You know, eating is a huge part of our lives. It fuels us, it brings us together, and it's one of life's great pleasures. But once a meal's over, we don't think much about what happens next unless something starts to feel off, because what we eat and how our bodies respond to it is complicated.
33:02 Speaker 02 That's right. From the very first bite, food kicks off a chain reaction. Signals moving between the gut, the brain, and the immune system. The constant back and forth we can't see and often don't fully understand. So we want to introduce to you Eating Interrupted, a new podcast from iHeart Ruby Studio. It's hosted by longtime journalist and Crohn's patient Cynthia McFadden. Eating Interrupted explores everything from food allergies and intolerance, and why they seem to be on the rise, to how digestion changes as we age, and what it's really like to live with a chronic GI condition.
33:30 Josh Clark? Through personal stories and expert insight, listen in to unpack what it means when your body doesn't always respond to food the way you expect, and what science is now revealing about why. Listen to Eating Interrupted on the iHeart app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
33:49 Speaker 04 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
33:52 Josh Clark? Hey, this is Josh and Chuck from Stuff You Should Know.
33:55 Speaker 02 That's Alan Goya, planning engineer at AT&T, and he's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, redefining the fan's experience, and Alan's master plan made it all possible.
34:11 Speaker 04 It was going to rival anything that was already built, and that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
34:19 Josh Clark? That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.
34:25 Speaker 05 Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.
34:30 Speaker 02 And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.
34:34 Speaker 05 To actually see the whole stadium light up and data's flowing is a beautiful thing.
34:38 Speaker 04 What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.
34:42 Josh Clark? AT&T, connecting fans to what they love.
34:45 Speaker 06 Connecting changes everything. AT&T.
34:58 Speaker 02 All right, so we promised talk, nothing salacious or anything like that.
35:02 Josh Clark? No, thankfully.
35:03 Speaker 02 But you know, anytime you're working that closely with someone over that many years, there are going to be some, you know, it can get complicated and it was, it was complicated for them.
35:11 Josh Clark? Except with us.
35:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. I mean, they were lifelong partners, but they were reliant on each other in a way that maybe wasn't always the healthiest for, for either of them. Like Helen wanted to get married when she was in her mid 30s. She was engaged to a journalist named Peter Fagan, but Anne didn't think she should. And so she got together with her parents, who also didn't think that she should, and they kept her from getting married.
35:37 Josh Clark? Yeah. And there's a quote from Helen who basically publicly embraced that decision and was like, yeah, it was the right decision. She said, "Love makes us blind."
35:47 Speaker 02 Man, she was sharp.
35:48 Josh Clark? She was super sharp. I seriously, go watch that, for everybody, go watch Becoming Helen Keller. I think it's about an hour and a half, and it is a really great documentary.
35:58 Speaker 02 So, you know, I mentioned not healthy for either of them. So Helen was dependent on Anne, obviously. Anne was also dependent on Helen because Helen was the one who had the benefactors. And, you know, they weren't cutting checks to Anne Sullivan. They were sort of helping to support Helen Keller because everybody loved her and everyone wanted, you know, a little piece of her by, by helping, you know, out with finances. But Anne was basically dependent on Helen financially, her entire life.
36:31 Josh Clark? Yeah, because, I mean, they both made their money on the vaudeville circuit and lectures, but Helen's books were pretty, especially The Story of My Life, her first autobiography, she ended up writing 14 books, Chuck.
36:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's incredible.
36:44 Josh Clark? But it was a really widely read, big bestselling novel. So she definitely made money off of her books. And, and I mean, Anne was just part of it. So I don't think Helen ever held any of that over her head, but she couldn't just be like, all right, so long Helen, good luck. I'm gonna go enjoy the, the good life, eating caviar.
37:07 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We did talk a little bit about the controversy of people poo-pooing them at the time, but we should say kind of specifically that Radcliffe didn't, it seems like they begrudgingly let her into the school.
37:21 Josh Clark? Right.
37:22 Speaker 02 And there were some snobs there that, you know, one of the quotes was, "We should just say outright that Miss Sullivan is entering Radcliffe instead of Helen Keller, a blind, deaf, and dumb girl." So I just, we only mention that because it happened. It's really awful because what they did was nothing short of, well, miraculous.
37:40 Josh Clark? Yeah, and even earlier than that, Chuck, I saw that a lot of the people who were the heads of the Perkins School were essentially, supported a smear campaign that they were frauds because they felt that Ann Sullivan's success overshadowed, you know, the work that the Perkins School had done in educating Helen Keller. They weren't getting enough credit essentially.
38:03 Speaker 02 Right.
38:04 Josh Clark? And then also, there was a lot of classism to it, too, because these were wealthy benefactors who started the school and ran it. And Ann Sullivan was a poor Irish girl who came from the bottom rung of society at the time.
38:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:17 Josh Clark? So what could she do?
38:18 Speaker 02 Right.
38:19 Josh Clark? So, yeah, they were smeared like throughout their life, and they were both aware of this. Like, this wasn't like, kept from them. They were two sharp women, so they knew that this is, everything that they did was questioned, and they knew it, but rather than shout back at their critics or whatever, they just did more and more and proved over and over again that this was, this was all legitimate. That's what makes this story so wonderful, is it actually happened. And when you stop and think about what's actually going on here just past the narrative, it's, like, I've become an enormous fan of Helen Keller and Ann Sullivan, just FYI.
39:01 Speaker 02 You're Stan? Yeah.
39:03 Josh Clark? I guess so.
39:04 Speaker 02 I love it. I am too. I saw that miracle worker when I was a kid, so it had a big impact on me as a youth.
39:10 Josh Clark? I've got it coming up.
39:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's good. Patty, Patty Duke, fantastic.
39:14 Josh Clark? Yeah.
39:15 Speaker 02 And, and Anne Bancroft, right?
39:17 Josh Clark? Yeah, they walk alike and they talk alike.
39:21 Speaker 02 So, in the 1930s, this is when Anne Sullivan's health takes a turn for the worst.
39:28 Speaker 02 You know, she, she had a tough go of it. She never had like the best of health. But in the 1930s, it really went downhill. She had completely lost her sight by 1935. And in 1936, she died from a coronary thrombosis. Helen Keller was right there, holding her hand. Can't imagine what, what she was tapping. Hopefully that was between them. And she was, Anne Sullivan was the first woman to have her ashes interred at the Washington National Cathedral.
39:55 Josh Clark? Wow.
39:56 Speaker 02 And was eventually laid to rest at the chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathea.
40:01 Josh Clark? In the, in the National Cathedral.
40:03 Speaker 02 That's right.
40:03 Josh Clark? That's amazing. It gets even better, as you'll see. This was a huge, huge blow to Helen. Because she lost her best friend, she lost her teacher, remember she always referred to her as teacher? And she lost her, her first and probably strongest bridge to the outside world. Fortunately, Polly had been around for more than 20 years now, so she was more than capable of stepping in and being the bridge between Helen and the rest of the world after Anne died. So it's not like Helen was, you know, just bereft. She was just grief stricken. And one other thing too, there's a New Yorker article from 1930 called Helen Keller at 49.
40:48 Josh Clark? And it's just this profile on her while she's still living. And it's a really good, like, just a, just a peek into her regular life. But she fed herself, she did her own dishes, she dressed herself, she was very, very independent. But when she was trying to communicate with somebody, she, she had to have another person because other people couldn't understand her. And then one other thing Chuck, I realize I'm on a tirade here. But- The reason she couldn't express herself in other ways is because she didn't know sign language, because there was a movement at the time that sign language is not a valid way of communicating, that everyone, including people who couldn't speak, needed to learn
41:28 Josh Clark? how to speak. That was the only way of communicating that was legitimate. So she needed somebody to translate for her because she could never get that down pat. And like I said, her inability to do that haunted her like a great life failing essentially, which is very sad.
41:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, super sad. There is some kind of light here in the form of a trip that she took. Anne wanted Helen, there had been an invitation before Anne died from the Nippon Lighthouse in Japan to do a speaking tour there. And Helen didn't want to leave Anne behind because she was in fourth health at the time. Apparently, in Japan then, about 1.5% of their deaf and/or blind citizens didn't, were not able to be educated or, you know, didn't have access to that. And so after Anne died, Helen honored her by going to Japan and completing that trip with Polly as her companion. They went to 33 cities
42:26 Speaker 02 in 10 weeks, spoke in front of about a million people. And the next year, clearly as a result of this, Japan started expanding their public services for education and their accessibility programs for people with all sorts of other abilities.
42:45 Josh Clark? You said that Helen Keller went to Japan in 1938. She went again in 1948 after World War II and was essentially the first ambassador to begin healing between the United States and Japan after she toured Hiroshima and came back and told everybody what she saw.
43:03 Speaker 02 Nice. So I think it was like a few decades that Helen Keller went on after Anne Sullivan passed. She lived all the way till 1968, which I don't think I knew. She passed away on June 1st, kind of in her sleep in 1968. And she was laid to rest with Anne and Polly, who died eight years previous at Washington National Cathedral. So that trio, the three musketeers, lived together in perpetuity, which is super sweet.
43:33 Josh Clark? Yeah, it is super sweet. And you mentioned The Miracle Worker with Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft. They both won Academy Awards for it. It's just a- Again, I haven't seen it, but it's just this beloved story.
43:44 Speaker 02 It's great.
43:44 Josh Clark? And it basically ends after she starts to learn, right? Like, she's a young girl the whole time, correct?
43:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I was a kid, so I can't remember if there's like a coda or anything like that. But it's, yeah, it's about their sort of early days together. And certainly, I mean, there's more movies to be made. If someone wanted to make a movie about her activism later in life, that would be really something, right?
44:09 Josh Clark? Yeah, we should talk about that because there's a, there's a narrative that formed around her that everybody wanted, which was Helen Keller was this angelic, pure girl who overcame incredible odds and proves that if you work hard enough, you can, you can accomplish anything. And she realized that that's what people wanted, so that's kind of the part that she acted publicly. But this was after she had tried to take the limelight that she was in and cast it on a bunch of different social movements that she was genuinely involved in and like genuinely cared about. There was a bunch of them, actually. So even after she kind of stopped talking about them publicly, she was still involved in this stuff for the rest of her life.
44:54 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. I mean, she was involved in, in the civil rights movement 50 years before the civil rights era, during the Jim Crow era. And, and you know, as you pointed out, she was an Alabama kid whose dad was a Confederate officer. And they didn't, they didn't like her doing this stuff, not, not her parents necessarily, but just people in other family in Alabama. They didn't like it. They didn't like that she was working with the NAACP. She was a founding member of the ACLU and also a staunch socialist and borderline communist at one point.
45:29 Josh Clark? Yeah, she was a member of the Socialist Party and she appeared at rallies with Ann. And then she found that the socialists weren't effective enough in defending workers' rights. So she joined up with the Industrial Workers of the World, which was more radical, contained lots of anarchists. And it was like, if, if being a socialist was scandalous, like being a wobbly was like really scandalous, and she was. She was a card carrying member. She was also hugely into women's rights. She was a suffragist because remember she was very active before women even had the right to vote in the US and I believe the UK. And she also talked publicly about stuff that you weren't supposed to talk about,
46:14 Josh Clark? but for really important reasons, right?
46:19 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, who's gonna tell Helen Keller to stifle?
46:23 Josh Clark? That's exactly right. Like, she got away with a lot of stuff that someone who wasn't deaf-blind would have not gotten away with.
46:31 Speaker 02 Oh, for sure. She would talk about birth control in public way before anyone would. Venereal diseases, for sure, especially gonorrhea, because that, at the time, would cause blindness in infants when a mother would pass it along at birth. And so she was in like the pages of Ladies' Home Journal in the 40s and 50s, talking about rates of blindness because of gonorrhea. And that's just not the kind of thing that appeared in those kind of magazines at the time.
46:59 Josh Clark? No, and there's one other thing. Being a women's rights advocate, she had a quote that I saw in that documentary. It was, "Women's inferiority is a man-made issue."
47:12 Speaker 02 Oh, man. She's just like a t-shirt factory.
47:15 Josh Clark? So, let's, yeah. Nice. Yeah, well, let's make that a "Stuff You Should Know" t-shirt, huh?
47:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, but, you know, give her credit, of course.
47:25 Josh Clark? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
47:27 Speaker 02 Dot, dot, dot, Josh Clark.
47:28 Josh Clark? Right. So, I mean, Chuck, she couldn't possibly get any better than this, right?
47:36 Speaker 02 I mean, could she?
47:37 Josh Clark? She could.
47:38 Speaker 02 You got something else?
47:38 Josh Clark? I do. I have two things.
47:39 Speaker 02 Okay.
47:40 Josh Clark? One, she loved dogs. She always had a dog. In fact, when she was living in Queens later in life, she had eight of them. That's great in and of itself.
47:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's enough.
47:51 Josh Clark? But in the lead-up to World War II, her books had been translated into German, and they didn't like that. The Nazi party didn't like it. So, her books were among some of the ones chosen to be burned at Nazi rallies.
48:05 Speaker 02 That's a feather in your cap.
48:07 Josh Clark? Heck, yeah, it is. So, she was this-
48:10 Speaker 02 I'd like to think that we'd have our book burned.
48:11 Josh Clark? I would like to think so, too.
48:13 Speaker 02 Yeah.
48:14 Josh Clark? So, she was this amazing person that all of this other stuff just gets overlooked, because, again, her story typically stops at that water pump after she gets it, right? And she just led this incredibly full, rich life.
48:30 Josh Clark? What, I guess she was like 80 years old when she died? And, yeah, she was just a genuinely amazing person.
48:38 Speaker 02 I think Josh Clark has a crush.
48:42 Josh Clark? Maybe.
48:43 Speaker 02 You're a smitten kitten.
48:44 Josh Clark? I am. Tapa, tapa, tapa.
48:48 Speaker 02 Oh, there we go.
48:50 Josh Clark? You got anything else?
48:51 Speaker 02 No, sir.
48:52 Josh Clark? Okay. That's it for Helen Keller and Ann Sullivan and Polly Thompson. And let me say one other thing, Chuck, because it's not talked about like it's just a matter of course. She wrote her own stuff after, like later in life, using Braille typewriters. So, I mean, she was just this fully competent person. I'm just gonna keep adding facts until you start listener mail.
49:20 Speaker 02 Hey, guys. Love your show on data centers.
49:25 Speaker 02 I was giving you one more chance.
49:26 Josh Clark? Helen Keller was essentially a walking data center.
49:31 Speaker 02 People, but want to let you know, people working from remote locations using IBM terminals actually happened in the early 1980s, and I was one of them. I worked remotely from home, writing my dissertation in 1983. My equipment was an IBM 3030 computer terminal, a 1200 baud phone modem, a mainframe housed at a remote location, in my case, at Philips North America in New York City.
49:55 Josh Clark? Wow.
49:56 Speaker 02 The software I used was an IBM program called Script. I think I remember Script, actually.
50:01 Josh Clark? Oh, I do. I do.
50:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's like pre-WordPerfect.
50:04 Josh Clark? Yeah, on floppy disks, right?
50:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, it had to be.
50:09 Speaker 02 It was before WordPerfect would come into common usage, but Script was basically using one step up from machine language. For example, if you wanted to indent for a new paragraph, you would type
50:22 Speaker 02 period IN5 to make it, you know, indent five spaces. Or for double space, it was period, it looks like LL2, and so on for all formatting. If it sounds primitive and cumbersome, it was, but far better than an electric typewriter as you could correct anything without using wideout. So it was progress in a sense and actually saved a huge amount of time for me. So it was long before 2008 that people got to work remotely, though it was rather primitive. Thanks for another great episode. That is from Danielle Greenberg.
50:53 Josh Clark? Very nice, Danielle.
50:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was pretty funny.
50:56 Josh Clark? It was funny. Antiquated, I guess, is what you call it today. Danielle, right?
51:02 Speaker 02 That's right.
51:03 Josh Clark? Thanks again, Danielle. And if you want to be like Danielle and send us a great email that takes us down memory lane in some ways, you can do that. Send it off to [email protected] .
51:16 Speaker 03 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
51:32 Josh Clark? Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places. Introducing Voices of Vivart. Vivart is also known as its generic name, F-Gar Tegamod Alpha F-Cab, and this new show features firsthand stories from people living with a rare disease.
52:13 Josh Clark? Hosted by Andrew Stratton, these perspectives highlight that life is more than a moment, a condition, or a tough day. Living with a rare disease can be challenging, but it does not define the Voices of Vivart. In these episodes, they share their stories, from diagnosis to working with their care team on their treatment plan. Listen to Voices of Vivart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's play a quick game. When I say Carnival Cruise, what comes to mind? Maybe a buffet, maybe a lively Lido deck, or maybe you've already decided cruising isn't for you. But we can assure you, a Carnival Cruise isn't what you think. From casual bites to five-star dining, laugh-out-loud comedy, a relaxing spa, and unforgettable shore excursions, Carnival
52:56 Josh Clark? has everything you want in a vacation. So take another look, then book your next getaway at carnival.com. Ship's registry, the Bahamas, and Panama.
53:05 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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