Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Behind the Scenes Minis: Society for Disastrous Accidents About this episode Holly talks about the many, many organizations that Joaquín Torres-García formed. Tracy discusses how there was no plan in place before the SL-1 accident to deal with radioactive bodies.
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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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0:10 Holly Frey? 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.
0:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Every episode, you'll get to know Deanna, her guests, and even yourself a little better. No lectures, no know-it-all hosts, just real people being real.
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2:45 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
2:56 Holly Frey? Hello and happy Friday. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy B. Wilson. We talked about Joaquin Torres Garcia this week. Yep. This is one of those times where my forgetful brain takes a minute to put together what a thing is in terms of references, because I had said at the top of the episode that I was trying to work on another Latin American artist and I kind of sputtered out because there just was not enough material that I could get my hands on that was in English. Right. And so I was like, who are other Latin American artists? And I had done some searching
3:36 Holly Frey? online and consulting lists and I saw his name and I was like, oh, that's interesting. And I started reading about him. And then I started looking through my pictures that I took when we were in Barcelona at various museums. And I'm like, oh, there's his work. There's his work again. I already had him on my list. I just forgot. Yeah. Listen, the brain is what it is. But I'm so glad that I came back to him because I really enjoyed learning more about him, even with a Madame Blavatsky jumpscare. She's everywhere. That woman, I told you before we started, listen, she had good marketing because she literally is everywhere influencing everybody for a pretty wide period of time.
4:20 Holly Frey? It's strange, but also hilarious. Yeah. I marvel, I said it while we were recording, Torres Garcia was the busiest bee in the hive. Yeah. He was always. Hustling like, and I don't mean that in a pejorative sense, but he was always like, teaching, forming new schools of art, forming new publications of art, writing his own books about art theory, painting things, finding new forms of art that he could do. But what I really marveled at was how much he and many of the artists in his circle really love to form societies and orgs. They're just like, I know, let's form another society.
5:01 Holly Frey? And I found myself sitting there imagining like, were they just sitting around at like a cafe and they were like, you know what we need? One more society.
5:16 Holly Frey? But it makes me chuckle a little bit. And again, I don't mean that in a negative way. I just, there's a lot of groups.
5:24 Holly Frey? It's also really interesting that like, some of those, even as he was very much rejecting some of the European schools of thought, a lot of those societies were forming in very Eurocentric places where a lot of the other artists were like, I'm going to mimic the great masters. Just interesting. I didn't mention it in the episode because I have issues with Picasso. As many people do, for the reasons that he was not a great human being. But there was a funny story that came up several times while I was researching where when he was in Paris, when Torres Garcia was in Paris, where Picasso also was at the time, in the
6:07 Holly Frey? 19 teens, and he started talking about, I might go to New York. Picasso was like, New York is a void. Don't do it. Which just tickled me a little bit. Here's my other big thing from this episode. Max Ernst.
6:23 Holly Frey? He came up a million times.
6:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
6:25 Holly Frey? Max Ernst has been on my list for a very long time. I have a Max Ernst inspired tattoo. He is the artist whose work made me want to get tattoos in the first place.
6:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
6:37 Holly Frey? I love his work. Un sombre de beauté is one of my favorite things. I keep putting it aside for reasons I don't entirely know. Possibly because I don't want to find out something horrible about him.
6:49 Tracy V. Wilson? Sure.
6:50 Holly Frey? But as I was working on this, and he kept coming up in exhibitions with Torres Garcia. He kept coming up in like other social circles, et cetera. I'm just like, I see you, Max Ernst. I'm coming for you. I swear I will do that episode at some point. It's almost like he's haunting me. Just fine. Max Ernst, welcome to the show at some point in the not too distant future. I'm going to knock it out just so I will stop being, you know, inundated with it.
7:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
7:24 Holly Frey? Anyways, I think it's interesting that we don't get a lot of Torres Garcia in. I didn't, I don't remember talking about him in any of my art history learnings as a student. And he was super important, so it's kind of weird. Um, but I'm, I'm glad to have the opportunity to talk about him a little bit.
7:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
7:44 Holly Frey? A little bit. His, his wife founded, uh, the museum that is named for him, uh, in Uruguay. And that seems like a very cool place, even though a lot of his stuff, uh, did get, did get destroyed in that fire elsewhere. Uh, but they do a lot of other artists, of course, there as well. So if we're ever there, guess where I'm going?
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12:52 Tracy V. Wilson? We talked about the SL1 nuclear reactor incidents on the show this week.
12:58 Holly Frey? Yeah, not the most peppy story.
13:00 Tracy V. Wilson? No.
13:02 Holly Frey? Happy holidays, everybody.
13:06 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, one of the things that I, I think might have been going on in some of the, some of the things that were like, there are giant holes in the safety plan is the fact that there really had not been an incident like this in the United States since nuclear energy had first been developed. There had been other accidents. We have talked about that. We talked about them in the Demon Court episode, but that was not like a nuclear reactor failing in some way. And there have been other, obviously, nuclear reactor accidents since then, but this was the first one. And if I recall correctly, it had been something like 19 years that,
13:50 Tracy V. Wilson? that critical reactor, or that nuclear reactors had existed. And so that might have led people into a false sense of security slash complacency. But still, what do we do with radioactive bodies in the event of an accident seems like something that should have been planned for as a possibility.
14:15 Holly Frey? Yeah.
14:16 Tracy V. Wilson? At a site that was specifically for developing prototypes for nuclear reactors.
14:21 Holly Frey? Yeah, it's one of those things where I find myself wondering, like, was this just such an unpleasant possibility to contemplate that no one brought it up, thinking they didn't want to be the guy that suggested to their superiors that their system was gonna fail?
14:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
14:39 Holly Frey? And thus, things went horribly awful?
14:42 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
14:45 Holly Frey? But I don't know.
14:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. One of the things that I found alluded to in some of the things that I read for this episode, which I didn't put into the core of the episode, because it was something that I felt.
14:58 Tracy V. Wilson? I felt like I couldn't really substantiate was that the Army was more permissive of the SL1's various problems. And that had the Navy been making decisions about it in this whole sort of interplay among the different branches of the military, that the Navy would have shut it down way before. Prior to this incident happening, like as soon as the stickiness problem revealed itself, that the Navy would have been like, I'm out.
15:31 Holly Frey? Tracy trying to start a fight on this behind the scenes.
15:34 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, we're gonna have a behind the scenes between the Army folks and the Navy folks. But I'm just saying, and I was like, is this the truth? Or is this like reflective of attitudes about the different branches of the military among one another?
15:49 Holly Frey? Right.
15:50 Tracy V. Wilson? I don't actually know. I watched a number of videos as, well, I was preparing for this. And the one that was an Atomic Energy Commission kind of brief on the accident that had had the recreation of what they were doing when it happened, had the weirdest tone to me. It was definitely a product of its era, that era being the 1960s. And it really felt like a video that one might find in a derelict government building in a Fallout video game.
16:29 Tracy V. Wilson? And I like, there were other, other videos that were also made by the Atomic Energy Commission that I watched that had a similar vibe to them. And then there was one, as I was trying to confirm whether people said Dewline, or whether they spelled it out D E W line. And I watched a video that was on the Dewline that had been made while it was in use, that had many minutes of like, like Cold War scaremongering.
17:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Before we got to the first mention of the Dooline, and that a little bit reminded me more of my early childhood. And you know, the final stages of the Cold War and how people would talk about the Soviet Union and nuclear capabilities and all of that. And I got very frustrated with that one in particular because I was like, just say Dooline.
17:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Say it.
17:35 Holly Frey? Say the thing I need to know how to say.
17:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
17:38 Holly Frey? I beg.
17:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. A couple of random notes that I also had. We have a history in the United States of describing areas where nuclear testing or other nuclear work was going to happen as empty or uninhabited. And that has been false. And really, there were indigenous people living there.
18:01 Holly Frey? Right.
18:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Like that happened with the Manhattan Project and it happened with various like nuclear weapons tests. And has had devastating effects on those communities. There's also a whole additional side of this that we talked about in the Demon Corps episode about the role of indigenous people in mining radioactive materials to be used in nuclear fuel, all of this. So I went down a rabbit hole of trying to be like, was this surrounding area really empty or not?
18:31 Holly Frey? Right.
18:32 Tracy V. Wilson? And it was not something that I found a conclusive answer to. I found some very sort of couched in what Wikipedia editors call weasel words.
18:45 Tracy V. Wilson? About like, if there were sheep or cows grazing nearby, they might have been affected. And I'm like, well, but were there? It was so tremendously cold that night that I think it would have been very difficult for any living thing to just be out exposed in the temperatures. But like, I don't really know. And then the last thing is that this incident tying into how it's really seemed like there were various safety things that should have been in place earlier is now an example that gets used in, in basically training about safety and like failure prevention.
19:26 Tracy V. Wilson? And I read a quote that was by Brian O'Connor, Chief of Safety and Mission Assurance at NASA in a slide deck about this that was about the Cold War era, applying today's thing that people say about knowledge workers of move fast and break things, of having almost that same mentality during Cold War technological advancements. And the quote was, quote, "While the temptation or pressure to implement new technology can be great, premature use can end in premature failure." And I just really liked that quote.
20:05 Holly Frey? Yeah.
20:07 Tracy V. Wilson? That's totally true. Premature use can end in premature failure.
20:14 Tracy V. Wilson? So Adrian, I hope you were happy with the episode that we did.
20:18 Holly Frey? Ho, ho, ho.
20:20 Tracy V. Wilson? I think Adrian would like a multi-part Netflix special or something also. There is a whole book about it. I just closed my outline. What is the name of the book? The book was one of the last things that I read in the, in the research of doing all this, having already read and made tons of notes that was based off of government reports. And so the name of the book was Idaho Falls, The Untold Story of America's First Nuclear Accident. And it has more of a, you know, human account of it rather than the many military reports.
21:05 Holly Frey? Right.
21:06 Tracy V. Wilson? Which read like military reports.
21:10 Tracy V. Wilson? So yeah, that's probably the last nuclear accident we'll talk about for a while, because a lot of the nuclear accidents are a lot more recent than we talk about on the show.
21:20 Holly Frey? Yeah. Also, as a personal favor to me, if something horrible happens in someone's life and there are rumors about the nature of what was going on in their lives before it happened, please don't hound them and bug them about it for years afterwards, because that's disgusting.
21:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
21:38 Holly Frey? Hi, I know you're grieving your husband, but was one of you cheating? Is there something going on?
21:42 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
21:42 Holly Frey? No, it doesn't matter. You don't need to know that information.
21:47 Tracy V. Wilson? It was an intentional decision on my part not to include the names of any of the wives. All three of the men were married, two of them had children, one's wife was pregnant. And I don't think any of the people involved are living at this point, although their children may be. And the fact that people were, like, they did kind of become this focus on something they really didn't have anything to do with. I was like, I'm not going to name them specifically because I don't, I feel like I don't want to add, even though they're, at this point, probably deceased, add to the spectacle of people hounding them for many years. In one case, one of them had, like, gotten married and
22:31 Tracy V. Wilson? was sort of trying to move on with her life, and it kept being brought back up.
22:36 Holly Frey? Rude.
22:38 Tracy V. Wilson? And
22:38 Holly Frey? Gross and rude.
22:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Again, a lot of, lot of documentation of this reactor having issues before any of it happened.
22:46 Holly Frey? Yeah.
22:48 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. So if you'd like to send us a note about this, or in some way, we're at [email protected] . Whatever is happening over the course of your weekend, I know a lot of people are moving into hardcore getting ready for Christmas holiday mode. Not everyone, but you know, if that's what's coming up in your world, I hope that all goes really smoothly. And if you've got travel coming, that goes well. We'll be back with a Saturday classic tomorrow and something brand new on Monday.
23:25 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.
23:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Deanna Flores is a flag football star, a trailblazer, an entrepreneur, and now host of a new podcast.
23:46 Holly Frey? 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.
23:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Every episode, you'll get to know Deanna, her guests, and even yourself a little better. No lectures, no know-it-all hosts, just real people being real.
24:03 Holly Frey? 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. 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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