Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Behind the Scenes Minis: Lyon and the Family About this episode Holly talks about the bias against Lyon in his bank robbing trial. Tracy talks about the way other podcasts that cover history are made, and the dynamics of the Manson family.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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0:32 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong?
1:14 Holly Frey? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts.
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2:10 Holly Frey? A trailblazer, an entrepreneur, and now host of a new podcast. In Born to Become with Deanna Flores, she's sitting down with people from every corner of culture to find the whole person behind the public identity. Every episode, you'll get to know Deanna, her guests, and even yourself a little better. No lectures, no know-it-all host, just real people being real. Listen to Born to Become with Deanna Flores, out now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Created in partnership with Geico. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:51 Holly Frey? Hello and happy Friday. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Patrick Lyon and the first US bank robbery this week. I did not know this story in any way at all. I had never heard any aspect of it. And when you told me this is what you were working on, I was also like, oh, a bank robbery? I cannot even think of when is the last time we talked about a bank robbery on the podcast. I know, and I will confess to you, I was actually researching another bank robber when a different bank robbery was invoked as the first bank robbery in the US. And I went and looked for that and I was like, wait a minute, there's one way before this. And so that's how I ended up down this particular rabbit hole, which completely fascinated
3:36 Holly Frey? and engaged me. We did not mention during the show, but Carpenter's Hall still exists. You can even book it for events. I imagine it's pricey, but I haven't looked into it, but that'd be a cool place to do something. One of the things that I didn't put in the outline, but is interesting to me, is that
3:56 Holly Frey? Patrick Lyon was laid to rest next to his daughter Clementina, but not either of his wives. And I wasn't sure why people, I don't know if they ended up in their own family cemeteries or plots? And Clementina was in one that they had started for the Lyons? I'm not sure what that is, but he's with her and not, not either of his wives, which is just kind of interesting. There is a full.
4:29 Holly Frey? Uh, I think it's like, what 130 ish pages. Publication of everything that happened in that trial.
4:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, wow.
4:39 Holly Frey? Uh, which is a lot of testimony, uh, which is why I was saying it becomes so obvious after you keep reading it for a while that it's like, the bank just really didn't like him and decided that that was who had done it and they just dug in and could not be convinced otherwise.
4:54 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
4:55 Holly Frey? And it's like testimony on testimony on testimony of like, he's the most suspicious. And because Cunningham had died, they were able to kind of manipulate his, what would have been his, his side of the story. To shore up their own thing of like, oh, Cunningham would never, ever have done anything wrong with a key. And it's like, the guy that robbed the bank told you that was his guy on the inside.
5:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Like, right.
5:24 Holly Frey? But now you make him like this paragon of virtue. It's so weird.
5:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, that, that part of it reminded me of all kinds of like wrongful conviction, wrongful accusation, stuff that still happens today where the rationale is like, oh, she didn't seem emotional enough when she was telling us about her husband's death. Oh, he seemed to be too focused on the detail of what was happening when that guy was in his shop. And I'm just like, so often, all of that stuff is just encompassed in the breadth of how we experience and express ourselves as humans.
6:07 Holly Frey? Yeah.
6:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh, and then becomes like justification for an entire case against someone.
6:14 Holly Frey? Yeah, it's so weird to me that they're like, how is your memory so good? Well, maybe he just has like a, you know, nearly photographic memory. People do.
6:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Well, and none of what we read seemed all that detailed to me.
6:28 Holly Frey? Right. It's like, well, the guys came over. It would be weird enough if I had, if I were in my little office that presumably did not have a lot of foot traffic and someone related to the business I was doing came over with another friend that I didn't know and we chatted for a minute and then they left and then that unknown person showed back up again while I was with another customer, just walked around by themselves for a little while. I would remember that. That's not. That's a memorable event for most people.
6:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
7:02 Holly Frey? Yeah, it's super duper weird. The minuteness, they keep talking about the minuteness.
7:06 Tracy V. Wilson? I'm like, that just doesn't seem that minute to me.
7:08 Holly Frey? At first I was, I thought I was reading like paraphrases of one person's quote that kept bringing up like specifically the word minuteness and minute. And I was like, no, it just shows up repeatedly. They just somewhere in their whole thing, they were like, he was so minute and that's what they all started repeating.
7:27 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
7:27 Holly Frey? Bizarre.
7:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
7:30 Holly Frey? One of the funnier parts of the testimony to me.
7:35 Holly Frey? Again, it's not funny that he was held wrongfully, but some of the ways that people behave is comedic to me. And especially in context of the world we live in today. And one of the big faux sigh of the whole thing that kept coming up was whether or not Smith, who was the cashier of the bank, ever swore or cursed.
8:03 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
8:04 Holly Frey? That being some sort of marker of whether or not he was a gentleman. And his barber named J, initial J, Riser, was very forthright about like, yes, he swears in my chair all the time. Like, yes, of course he does. And it just was so funny to me that there was a whole side argument going on about whether this person ever used foul language or not. And sitting in the year 2024, where there is a whole lot of wild and woolly stuff going on in the public and political stage, the idea of a fixation on whether someone, you know,
8:47 Holly Frey? ever dropped the word damn as a bomb in a sentence is like, oh, that's, that's so quaint.
8:53 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
8:56 Holly Frey? It's kind of like when we did our episode a while back on James Fair and his affair, his extramarital affair got him drummed out of Congress. And I'm like, how quaint.
9:11 Holly Frey? It's wild to me.
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9:46 Speaker 05 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
9:49 Tracy V. Wilson? Hey, everybody. It's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. 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, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
10:09 Speaker 05 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.
10:17 Tracy V. Wilson? That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.
10:24 Speaker 06 Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.
10:29 Tracy V. Wilson? And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.
10:33 Speaker 06 To actually see the whole stadium light up and data's flowing is a beautiful thing.
10:37 Speaker 05 What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.
10:41 Tracy V. Wilson? AT&T, connecting fans to what they love.
10:43 Speaker 07 Connecting changes everything. AT&T.
10:47 Holly Frey? Deanna Flores, flag football star, trailblazer, broadcaster, and entrepreneur, knows what pressure feels like. She knows what it takes to step up in the moment, and she knows that even the biggest achievement is never the end of the story. In the new podcast, Born to Become with Deanna Flores, she's sitting down with people from every corner of culture, including sports, business, wellness, and entertainment, to find the whole person behind the public identity. Whether she's talking to an athlete on the field, a founder heading into a pitch, or a musician before a show, the conversation starts with... But the official bio ends.
11:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Every episode, Deanna shares her own experiences, questions, and even doubts. Her guests learn from her, she learns from them, and you might pick up something along the way. No lectures, no know-it-all host, just real people being real.
11:33 Holly Frey? Come curious and leave with something you can use.
11:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Listen to Born to Become with Deanna Flores, out now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Created in partnership with Geico.
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12:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Livright, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book.
13:10 Holly Frey? Writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
13:30 Holly Frey? The other fun part is that after painting Lyon's portrait, Niegel's career really took off.
13:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
13:39 Holly Frey? He kind of, even though that portrait was definitely a departure from the accepted style and composition of the time. Like normally, if you were going to get your portrait painted and you hired someone to do it, you wanted to look like a fancy pants unicorn. You wanted to be featured in your absolute best thing, not looking sweaty in front of a blacksmith forge.
14:01 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh huh.
14:02 Holly Frey? But everyone loved that portrait so much and it got so much attention because of its unique qualities that like suddenly he was the it portraitist for a lot of people in Philadelphia and beyond.
14:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
14:16 Holly Frey? Even though most, most people I think today would say this is still like one of his very, or two now of his very best works. But it is quite interesting. I love the pettiness of, no, you put, you put Walnut Street Prison in that portrait with me. You do it. I'm, I'm not letting anybody forget what those weasels did to me. I love everything about that level of pettiness. Anyway, anyway, bank robberies. We'll never know really where that key came from.
14:45 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
14:46 Holly Frey? Somebody had one. We don't know. But since, you know, it uh seemed like Isaac Davis spent a lot of time gawking at the keys while he was there.
15:02 Holly Frey? I mean, that, here's what happens in my head and my fanciful, how did this potentially play out? The what if scenario is, did he send that woman in to engage Lyon in conversation? And then he went in and did it like a really fast, like wax imprint of a key? That's my theory.
15:21 Tracy V. Wilson? I'm reminded of some, uh, some book that I read when I was a child. So I just, I don't remember. Some, somebody in the audience may remember and send us an email. But it was a book that I read like in elementary school years, I think, uh, that involved a kid at a boarding school that needed to break into a place and made an impression of the teacher's key into a bar of soap and then whittled it out of wood. And I'm like, that's, that's what I think happened here.
15:52 Holly Frey? Something, something cool, something cool. Um, but yeah, I'm, I'm delighted that this was one that took you by surprise a little bit. Cause the
16:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
16:03 Holly Frey? It's a, again, not fun that he was wrongfully imprisoned, but it is a fun story.
16:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Yes.
16:09 Holly Frey? In terms of how it all goes and how weird it is. And also who robs a bank and then deposits the money in the same bank?
16:16 Tracy V. Wilson? I thought about that a lot. I was like, what?
16:19 Holly Frey? That was a bless your heart moment.
16:21 Tracy V. Wilson? I'm not saying I would ever rob a bank, but if I robbed a bank, I would not be putting the money in any bank.
16:30 Holly Frey? Right. Definitely not in the same bank.
16:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Not in the bank. Yes. And again, I did not rob any bank. It's wild that a, that a person would take that course of action.
16:45 Holly Frey? It is really, really kooky to me. I, I wish, oh, how I wish that we could get the story of logic on that of like,
16:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Like what, what was the decision-making process there?
17:00 Holly Frey? I know what I'll do. Uh, yeah. And Isaac Davis kind of blips out of the whole thing.
17:06 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh huh.
17:06 Holly Frey? Apparently there was a moment, it gets invoked during the trial record that he had been back, he like left Philadelphia. He up outed. Once they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're pardoned. Um, apparently he had been in Philadelphia at some point early in the 1800s. And at that point, Patrick Lyon was like, does anybody want to question this guy? Like, do you want to get initial information? And nobody did. But I saw in one thing and I wasn't able to verify it. It may have been in the materials I had, but there was a lot of them. So I may have just missed it. That he, Patrick Lyon, had actually gotten Davis to write a letter saying explicitly,
17:48 Holly Frey? Patrick Lyon was in no way connected to that robbery. He did not get involved at all. This is now in writing. It's not just me talking to the bank dudes. And yet, everybody was like, yeah, but still.
17:59 Tracy V. Wilson? We think he did, though.
18:00 Holly Frey? But are you sure? Because we're pretty sure he must, he must have. He's just, he's a mastermind, clearly.
18:07 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
18:07 Holly Frey? Another thing that plays out in the rich fantasy life of my head, in the fictional version of this, in the petty Olympics, is that at one point, one of those weasel's houses burning down.
18:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
18:18 Holly Frey? And Patrick Lyon is like, oh, really? You want a fire truck?
18:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Hmm.
18:22 Holly Frey? Just standing outside the guy's house, watching it burn while he sits with his fire truck apparatus. That's not really how any of that would have worked. But in my head, in the petty comedy of my head.
18:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Right. If you were writing this screenplay, that would be a scene in it.
18:37 Holly Frey? Kind of fair. Like, remember how you held me for months in a root cellar and barely fed me enough to live? And then told my friends they couldn't see me anymore? I mean, I, it's, it seems a little fair at that point.
18:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
18:53 Holly Frey? It seems a little fair. Those are really sad. There's one piece of testimony from one of his friends. It was like, I visited him initially, but then they stopped letting me in. And I had seen him looking worse, but then I couldn't see him anymore. And it's just like, it's so beyond wrongful imprisonment, because at that point, it's just weird and cruel. It's like, you haven't been charged with anything, and yet you get essentially like isolation.
19:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Yeah, that, it's. The comical elements of this episode for me are are kind of counterbalanced by having, you know, read the coverage of so many things about people who were wrongfully convicted or wrongfully accused. And in some cases, like substantial evidence that they did not commit the crime and were then executed for it. And so it's like, well, this goes back all the way to the beginning of the legal system in our country.
19:54 Holly Frey? I mean, this one is nice because in the end, you know, he proves the truth.
20:01 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
20:02 Holly Frey? Takes them for a ride legally and comes out victorious. So it's a little easier to stomach because of all that.
20:10 Tracy V. Wilson? Right, right.
20:11 Holly Frey? If it had ended terribly and he had not, as he feared, gotten out of jail.
20:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Then it would not be a fun episode at all.
20:19 Holly Frey? Right. And he did apparently at one point have yellow fever while he was imprisoned, but he survived it, which is extraordinarily fortunate.
20:28 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
20:29 Holly Frey? Because a lot of people did not. And he also kind of started to advocate in general for people who were held, whether they were, one, he said, there are a lot of innocent men in that jail. And two, they're not getting treatment. Like they're
20:45 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
20:45 Holly Frey? not living in hygienic conditions, even the ones that had a better, I'm air quoting because it clearly wasn't a better situation than what he had. Like, he's like, they're still getting sick. There's still a lot of infection and nobody's being treated or cared for. So I don't know that that really had a direct impact on anything in terms of like improving care. Clearly, you know, there were a lot of people who still felt very comfortable talking trash about him, even after he had lived through that and proven his innocence. But
21:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Right, right.
21:21 Holly Frey? Humans, you disappoint me. But also, when you deposit your stolen money in the place you stole it from, you delight and enchant me.
21:29 Tracy V. Wilson? So weird.
21:31 Holly Frey? It's a mixed bag, but it's
21:32 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
21:33 Holly Frey? fundamentally, like I said, the underdog comes out on top in the end.
21:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
21:38 Holly Frey? Lives a great and wealthy life, sticks it to everybody with his portrait. I love it.
21:48 Speaker 01 OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.
22:17 Holly Frey? Deanna Flores, flag football star, trailblazer, broadcaster, and entrepreneur, knows what pressure feels like. She knows what it takes to step up in the moment, and she knows that even the biggest achievement is never the end of the story.
22:30 Tracy V. Wilson? In the new podcast, Born to Become with Deanna Flores, she's sitting down with people from every corner of culture, including sports, business, wellness, and entertainment, to find the whole person behind the public identity.
22:42 Holly Frey? Whether she's talking to an athlete on the field, a founder heading into a pitch, or a musician before a show, the conversation starts with the official bio ends.
22:51 Tracy V. Wilson? Every episode, Deanna shares her own experiences, questions, and even doubts. Her guests learn from her, she learns from them, and you might pick up something along the way. No lectures, no know-it-all host, just real people being real.
23:03 Holly Frey? Come curious and leave with something you can use.
23:06 Tracy V. Wilson? Listen to Born to Become with Deanna Flores out now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Created in partnership with GEICO.
23:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Livrite, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck.
23:30 Holly Frey? "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
23:49 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us More anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health Versus Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends. Not to cancel them, not to hype them more,
24:33 Holly Frey? but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health Versus Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
24:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jessa have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from
25:35 Tracy V. Wilson? four friends proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
25:58 Tracy V. Wilson? One of the things that we did this week was talked to Toby Ball about the podcast Rip Current. I wanted to talk to Toby for a couple of reasons. One, this all started with Gnomes Griffin, who's one of the producers at iHeart who worked on this show, sending a note to me saying, "Hey, what if Toby were on your show?" And I thought it would be an interesting opportunity, one, to talk about some history that's a little more recent than you and I totally cover. Two, talk about what it's like to make a podcast that's so very different from yours and mine. Because what the two of us do is we, we research the episode and we write the episode and then we record it.
26:40 Holly Frey? Right.
26:41 Tracy V. Wilson? And Rip Current involves a lot more going through archival audio and interviewing a lot more people and all of that kind of stuff. And I personally have not worked on a show that involves that kind of production, but you have.
26:56 Holly Frey? I sure have.
26:57 Tracy V. Wilson? I have not at all, but you, you take on a lot more other projects that work than I do regarding making other podcasts.
27:05 Holly Frey? Yeah.
27:07 Tracy V. Wilson? So I thought that might be an opportunity for our listeners to sort of hear what the behind the scenes is like on another type of podcast that is also talking about history.
27:19 Holly Frey? Yeah. Yeah, those are always tricky. There's a moment early on where I usually, when I'm dealing with something like that, and it's always my own fault. I'm always like, "Here's how we should do this." And then we actually get all the stuff and then I just want to start crying because I'm like, "It's too much to dig through."
27:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Yes.
27:41 Tracy V. Wilson? One of the things that we talked about in the interview was like the process of getting all of the information together. Holly has not heard the interview yet, so I'm telling Holly, Toby's method for putting together his thoughts and his information and his research involves index cards of different colors.
28:03 Holly Frey? Yeah.
28:04 Tracy V. Wilson? And then putting those together. And I got the impression when he said that, that he, that we might think that was an odd thing to do, but I was like, "Oh, no, that was absolutely my process for a long time, until it became easier to move things around with a mouse."
28:20 Holly Frey? Yeah, I still like, I still like handwritten.
28:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
28:25 Holly Frey? I do. Whether it's index cards or I got really into for a while, like just at home, I keep a giant whiteboard.
28:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh huh.
28:34 Holly Frey? And I had at one point, like when we were doing Drawn and I was trying to figure out some of the stuff, I kind of had like this weird numbering system where I would just, as we did an interview, I would number the interview and be like, this is interview number one, this is two, this is three. And then I would stack those numbers into a grid by topic. Where I would be like, that one talked about, you know, early Walt Disney Studios. This one talked about, uh, you know, Termite Terrace and those studios. This one talked about Bugs Bunny, this one did not. And that's how I do. So what a visual is great for me.
29:12 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
29:13 Holly Frey? I can parse it out a little more easily that way.
29:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. There are things that I do, like writing by hand, making a little chart or a list or whatever. But writing things out by hand is so much more laborious for me than typing it.
29:28 Holly Frey? Yeah.
29:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh, that if I can type something, that's usually what I'm going to choose to do. We also had a moment, the two of us, while I was listening to episodes of Rip Current, that I found funny and I thought we would discuss here a little bit. Um, and so, uh, parents, teachers, if you're listening to this with younger people, I'm just going to say maybe skip ahead just a little couple of minutes or I'm not sure. I think this is the Friday episode, so maybe even, uh, this is a place to just, uh, check out of this behind the scenes because we're going to be talking about some Manson family stuff.
30:02 Holly Frey? Right.
30:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Um, so I was listening to, uh, Rip Current, listening to all of the episodes that had come out. So I could prepare for this interview. Um, and there was audio footage of one of the members of the Manson family talking about how, uh, like their, their sexual relationships with each other. And said something like, um, we would have sex with each other and we would have sex with him. We would have sex with each other with him, just like a family. And I was not expecting the just like a family. And I said, what? Out loud.
30:32 Holly Frey? Yeah.
30:32 Tracy V. Wilson? And then when I relayed that experience to you, you were like, did you not know that?
30:39 Tracy V. Wilson? And I was like, I knew the first part, but it was the just like a family that really threw me.
30:45 Holly Frey? Yeah.
30:46 Tracy V. Wilson? And that is when we realized that like our, uh, our familiarity with the Manson family, very different experiences.
30:57 Holly Frey? Yeah. I mean, I have a few, right? I had mentioned that like Manson was another one of those things that got talked about in my house growing up a lot. And that my mom and my two sisters read Helter Skelter together.
31:10 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. And Helter Skelter would not have been a book that was allowed to be in our house.
31:14 Holly Frey? Right. But to be clear, like my sisters are much older than me. It wasn't like my mom was like, hey, 11 year olds, would you like,
31:23 Holly Frey? they were, they were late teenagers at that point.
31:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay. Yeah.
31:26 Holly Frey? Probably junior and senior year of high school.
31:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
31:29 Holly Frey? Remember correctly, but, um, so, so, but then also it's come up in various other points in my life. Like there was a play called Your Children about Charles Manson. That, uh, somebody I knew in college did, I think a staged reading of. So I was just very familiar with that material. But in that way that you think that your experience is universal, I was like, Tracy, what are you, what are you talking about? You've never heard this movie?
32:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. And I was like, I had never, I had never heard that clip. I had never read that as a quote. The first part of it about how they were all like, uh, basically all having sexual relationships with each other and together. That was not the surprising part. It was the then equating that to like a family as though that's all how all families work. And I was like, what is happening right now?
32:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Because I grew up in a household, I would say I was pretty sheltered.
32:31 Tracy V. Wilson? Raised Methodist, which growing up Methodist in North Carolina in the 1970s and 80s, on the spectrum of Protestant religions, I feel like kind of in the middle in terms of how conservative broadly speaking, we tended to be. But also Satanic Panic happened and my mom was very concerned about anything that might lead my brother or me into devil worship. So, anything involving Charles Manson was off the table for being like appropriate to read or talk about.
33:13 Holly Frey? Right. I guess part of it for me too is like, if my mom said that, I'd be like, and?
33:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Well, and I was also very much a rule follower in contexts where the rules made sense to me and I thought they mattered. So like, I did not, I did not do homework that I thought was a waste of my time, even though doing the homework was the rules. But if, if my mom told me that I needed to do a load of laundry every day, then I was gonna do the load of laundry every day.
33:50 Holly Frey? I mean, I think it's safe to say I was a more rebellious child than you.
33:54 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, that's, it seems correct, yeah.
33:56 Holly Frey? I didn't have a ton of respect for anybody. I even remember telling my mom when I was like seven, you don't get my respect just because you're older than me.
34:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
34:09 Holly Frey? Which I feel like you would never have said to your parents.
34:11 Tracy V. Wilson? I know, no, no.
34:13 Holly Frey? Yeah, you can imagine how well that went over.
34:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. I didn't, I didn't start being more rebellious until I was like in my teens and started trying to do stuff like date. But even then, like, there were still, there were still a lot of rules and if I broke the rules, there were definitely consequences for having done that. And I still tended to be like a rule follower in a lot of other ways, so, anyway. The whole exchange made me laugh.
34:46 Tracy V. Wilson? So yeah, yeah. I'm glad I have gotten to do a couple of interviews lately. One of them will not be out yet by the time this episode comes out. So folks can look forward to having another interview soon related to another podcast.
35:03 Tracy V. Wilson? So again, happy Friday, everyone. Whatever's happening on your weekend, I hope it's great. And I hope that you come and join us tomorrow for a Saturday classic and on Monday for something brand new.
35:23 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
35:38 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Next SYMHC Classics: Victorian Orchidelirium Page updated November 7, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated