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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson. And I'm Holly Fry. Today, we are going to talk about Jim Thorpe. He was just an incredible all around athlete during his lifetime. He was famous around the world and he topped a lot of lists of the best athletes of the 20th century or even the best athlete of all time.

At the same time, though, news stories and early biographies and in some cases stuff that still floats around today managed to simultaneously praise his accomplishments and also minimize them through racist stereotypes and other falsehoods.

Thorpe made an amazing name for himself in track and field and football at Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

And then he became internationally famous of the 1912 Olympic Games. And we are going to tell his story in three parts, which is not the number it normally comes in that sentence.

I am not I don't think we've ever done a three parter before. We've done four. We've well, yeah, we did that for part mini series on on China, Chairman Mao. And we do, too. On occasion. We do, too. Periodically. It's time we got three. Right. So yes, I was a day I was going to give people the peek behind the curtain, which is a we do that because we have two new episodes a week and if you break it to three, it gets into some scheduling, you know, just like carefulness you have to do.

I also really felt like with this one once I got to the point that I had turned my notes into actual sentences. I looked at it and kind of went, if I try to get this down into two, we're going to have to cut out some stuff that's really important. And I didn't want to do that, so this time we are going to talk about Jim Thorpe's life before and during his time at Carlisle, including some of the context about Carlyle and other similar boarding schools.

Then next time, we will talk about his incredible performance at the 1912 Summer Olympic Games. And then in part three, we will talk about his career after his time as an amateur athlete had ended. And then two big pieces of his story that continued on for decades after his death.

According to Jim Thorpe's own account, he and his fraternal twin brother, Charlie, were born on May 12th, 1888, south of Belmont, in what was at the time Indian Country Today. That is near Prigg, Oklahoma. But there's also a christening record for the twins that list their birthday as May 22nd, 1887. So the year before, Thorpe was saying his birthday was the boys were baptized at the Benedictine Sacred Mission Church using Latin versions of their name carols for Charlie and Jacobus Franciscus for Jim.

Their father, Hiram, was SAC and Fox and Irish and their mother, Charlotte View was Pottawatomie, Kickapoo and French. The boy's ancestors included Sjaak leader and war chief, Black Hawk. After Jim and Charlie were born, they were enrolled as members of the Second Fox Nation, and Charlotte gave them traditional SAC and Fox names. James was Watto Huck and that means light after the lightning or bright path.

Hiram Thorpe was a farmer and a rancher. The family raised horses, hogs and cattle, as well as growing a lot of crops. They lived on land that the Thorpes had been allotted under the General Allotment Act of 1887. That's also called the Doors Act. We've talked about the Dogs Act on the show before. It was the act that broke up land that had been held for indigenous nations, collectively assigning it out to individual tribal members as part of the US federal government's strategy of allotment and assimilation.

Overall, this act was devastating for the tribes and nations that were affected once the land had been allotted, so-called excess land was open up for sale to non-indigenous people. So each member that was eligible would get this allotment and anything left over could be sold. Then huge numbers of people who were allotted land later wound up losing that land for a range of reasons. Some people sold the land because they wanted to or because they needed the money. Others were defrauded out of it or were assigned allotments that just could not be maintained through any reasonable means.

So they weren't able to meet the standards of keeping this land and it was taken from them. This whole process was also geared toward getting indigenous people to assimilate with white culture, including granting people U.S. citizenship once they'd successfully maintained their allotment for 25 years. Although the SAC and Fox Nation lost a huge amount of land as the so-called excess during allotment, the Thorpe family specifically seems to have fared better with this than a lot of other people, including getting an additional allotment in 1891.

This may have been because they already had some connections to the culture that indigenous people were expected to assimilate with, along with about fifteen percent of the second Fox Nation. The Thorpes were regarded by the federal government as progressive. They had adopted to at least some extent, a more white way of life. They were Christian, they spoke English, they lived in a log house, and they were settlers style clothing.

At the same time, they were still an active part of their indigenous community, taking part in festivals and observances and following indigenous traditions and methods for various parts of their day to day lives, like grinding corn into flour.

Their home was fairly isolated, and they didn't have a lot of contact with white people until Jim and Charlie were about six years old.

Jim and his twin brother grew up hunting, fishing, riding and training horses and playing outdoors a lot. Their father also loved sports and physical activity, especially swimming, wrestling and riding. And he really taught his sons about physical fitness and fair play. Jim was bigger and more athletic, and Charlie was smaller and more bookish. But in Jim's words, quote, We were never in the house when we could be out of it. One of their favorite pastimes was to play an almost extreme version of follow the leader.

The leader would do things like climb all the way to the top of a tree and then jump out or like jump into a really fast moving river and swim to the other side.

It's like, follow the leader and Dare had a baby. Yeah, yeah. It is is way more physically involved than any follow. The leader I played as a child and their parents wanted them to be educated. So when the boys were six, Jim and Charlie were sent to the second Fox boarding school. That was a residential school that had been established by Quaker Miss. Canaries on the edge of SAC and Fox territory in 1872. The school's purpose was to convert and assimilate children from the second Fox Nation, or in the words of the 1819 act that provided federal funding to these types of schools to, quote, civilize them.

We'll be talking more about these schools more over the course of this episode. And there is also a lot about their history and development. In our two part podcast on the foreshore, Indian School Girls Basketball team, those episodes came out in twenty seventeen.

Jim and Charlie started at the Mission School in 1893 when they were about six in the mornings, they and their classmates were taught basic English, reading and writing, arithmetic and history, along with religion and white etiquette and social customs. And then in the afternoon they had vocational training with a lot of that vocational training geared toward keeping the school itself running. So the girls cleaned and did laundry and made new uniforms. The boys did manual labor and worked on the school's farm.

Students also wore military style uniforms and did military style drilling. All of this was pretty standard in these kinds of schools, and it was all meant to just erase any trace of their indigenous heritage or culture.

Since Jim and Charlie already spoke English, they have a little bit of an easier time at the Mission School than many of their peers, most of whom spoke only indigenous languages, which were forbidden from being used at the school. But between the two of them, Charlie was definitely the better student, and he helped Jim through the more difficult parts of their studies.

But then in 1897, Charlie contracted pneumonia. Hyrum and Charlotte came out to the school to try to nurse him back to health, but he died at the age of about eight or nine. Charlie and Jim had really been just inseparable. And Jim, of course, was heartbroken and bereft.

Compounding all of this, Hyrum and Charlotte had also been struggling in their marriage. They went through a series of separations that Reconciliation's that was all pretty tumultuous for their children. They had 11 children total, five of whom survived to adulthood.

After his brother's death, Jim started spending a lot of time in the woods alone. He repeatedly ran away from school, making his way back home on foot. That was a trip that took about 20 miles.

That's roughly 32 kilometers. This was not, by the way, unique to Jim at all conditions that these schools were often really poor and students just missed their families. So it was fairly common for students to escape and then flee back home or somewhere else.

Hiram kept taking them back to school only for them to leave again. At one point, Jim even left the school immediately after his father had dropped him off, taking a shortcut that put him outside the door of the family home for his father even got back. So Hiram decided to send Jim to a school that was farther away. And that was Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. That was about 300 miles or 482 kilometers from where they were living to biographies of Jim Thorpe interpret this somewhat differently in Jim Thorpe, World's Greatest Athlete by Robert W.

Wheeler. Part of the goal was definitely to make it harder for Jim to return home. But it was also an act of compassion on Hiram's part as he recognized that Jim was having a hard time staying at a place that he associated so strongly with his late brother. On the other hand, the book Native American Son The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe by Kate Buford, describes Jim siblings as being terrified of their father and Hiram framing this whole decision as almost a threat, saying, quote, I'm going to send you so far away you'll never find your way back.

Yeah, having read both of these books, it's presented as a much crueler decision to me and Kate Buford's book than in Robert W. Wheeler's.

Regardless, though, in 1898, Jim and his older brother George were both enrolled at Haskell Institute. And we will get to Jim's time there and then later on at Carlisle after a sponsor break. This episode of Stuff You Missed in history class is brought to you by Monday, Dotcom, any time you are working on a project, there are so many moving parts, so many things that different people need to take responsibility for and it can be a challenge.

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In the summer and autumn of 2020, the city of Portland, Oregon, became the center of a vast media blitz. Thousands of viral videos showing marching federal agents and police officers tear gas, black clad anarchists and fires went viral all over the Internet. What didn't go viral was the truth, because the story of Portland's Black Lives Matter movement and of the Portland protests of 2020 is so much stranger than I think the mainstream media would ever be willing to cover.

I was there.

And more importantly, the people that I talked to for my new show, Uprising, a guide from Portland, were there through their experiences, you'll learn the truth both about Portland and about what's coming for the rest of the United States in the next few years.

Listen to Uprising, a guide from Portland on the radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Jim Thorpe was about 10 years old when he was enrolled at Haskell Institute and his brother George was 16 at the time.

More than a thousand students were enrolled at the school and they represented between 85 and 90 different indigenous tribes and nations like the SAC and Fox Mission School. Haskell Institute was established to assimilate indigenous children into white culture, separating them from their families and their cultures and customs and languages with classroom instruction in the morning, vocational instruction that kept the school running in the afternoon and military style uniforms and drilling. George left this school not long after they arrived. One of Jim's favorite pastimes at the school was watching football practice.

He was such a constant presence on the sidelines, the team captain, Chauncey Arquette, took notice of him and decided to encourage him. Chauncey went to the school's harness shop and stitched together a football out of pieces of leather and then stuffed it with rags. And Jim started using this homemade football to organize games among the students who were his own age.

After a while, Jim started to do pretty well at high school. There are reports that you'll read that he was not a great student and his report cards say otherwise.

In 1991, though, he heard that his father had been shot while hunting and was gravely injured. Jim decided to go home and he hopped a train when he was found on board and removed. He also found out the train had actually been going the opposite direction of where he needed to be.

It took Jim about two weeks to walk home, and by that point, Hiram Thorpe was out of danger. And while he wasn't exactly pleased to see his son, it meant that Jim was able to help around on the ranch while his father was convalescing. One of Jim's friends also reported that he had really been expelled from school for drinking as all this happened. So it wasn't just that he was going home to see his sick father. The school records are unclear.

They don't confirm or refute this. Yeah, they pretty much say he was not there anymore. Although Jim's father recovered from this injury while Jim was still at home, his mother died from blood poisoning, this might have been a complication of childbirth. It was not too long after she had given birth to her 11th child. Her land allotment was divided up among her heirs, with Jim getting about 20 acres. So with all of this going on, Jim stayed at home rather than being returned to Haskell.

He attended nearby Garden Grove Public School and he worked on the family ranch. But one day he and his brother decided to skip their chores and go fishing. And when they got back, their father whipped them, something that Jim later said he deserved but didn't feel like taking. So he ran away from home, this time going to Texas, where he worked on a ranch until he had earned enough money to buy himself a team of horses. And he described this as wanting to prove himself to his father before he went home again.

Garden Grove didn't really have much of an athletics program, although it was starting track and field and baseball teams. And Jim found once he was back that he just really, really missed football. And at this point, among the indigenous population of the U.S., the school most known for its football program was Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Like the second Fox Mission School and Haskell Institute, Carlisle Indian Industrial School was part of this whole system of schools that were set up to assimilate indigenous children.

It opened in 1879 and was actually the first of these schools to be run by the U.S. government rather than by missionaries or other organizations. Carlyle's founder and the architect of the federal approach toward these boarding schools was Lieutenant Colonel Richard Henry Prad. He had formulated his approach to indigenous education while working with indigenous prisoners of war. After the Red River War in 1875, he set up a program that involved English language and vocational instruction, followed by outplacement into jobs for the incarcerated populus.

They made what he viewed as rapid progress, learning English and adapting to a more white way of life.

And perhaps mind the only way that indigenous people were going to survive. The United States ongoing Western expansion was to abandon their cultures and their languages and all of their tribal ties and instead to fully assimilate into white society. His slogan in this was Kill the Indian and Save the Man. Pratt tried to convince the federal government to fund a program for students and teenagers similar to what he had done with these. He started by teaching a small group of indigenous students at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia.

He later got funding to convert an abandoned cavalry barracks in Pennsylvania into a school like the other schools we've already talked about. Carlisle combined academic and vocational instruction with military style drilling and discipline. On arrival at the school, students who didn't already have English names were given new ones. They were also given haircuts and new clothes with before and after pictures taken to highlight this idea that they were being civilised. Unlike the second Fox Reservation school, which was on the edge of second Fox territory, Carlisle was hundreds or thousands of miles away from where most of its students lived.

The point was to create as much separation as possible between students and their cultures and families, both physical and emotional conditions at Carlisle and other similar schools were often just appalling. Illness outbreaks were common and students often didn't have enough to eat. Classroom instruction was threaded through with the idea that indigenous cultures were backward and even evil. Punishments for rule breaking, including rules that forbade children from speaking in their native languages, are following their own cultural or religious observances could really be abusive.

Today, Carlisle and similar schools in both the U.S. and Canada are rightly seen as horrific and intentional attempt a cultural genocide that tore a hole through the cultural ties and lineages of thousands of indigenous people. Just at Carlisle, nearly 200 students died of disease, malnutrition and neglect. Typically, these children's bodies were not returned to their families. They were given Christian funeral rites and buried there at Carlisle. In more recent years, there have been efforts, sometimes taking years, to have those bodies repatriated to their tribes.

Now, we talked about a few of them on some of our unearthed episodes. Many of the children who went to Carlisle and other boarding schools, including Haskell and including the Second Fox school, they weren't going of their own free will. Often their parents were coerced or threatened into sending their children there, or federal policies toward indigenous people had created really desperate economic conditions for them that just left families with no other choice. Federal officials also took custody of the children of indigenous leaders who were seen as difficult or threatening, keeping those children at boarding schools essentially as hostages.

At the same time, though, in the late 19th and early 20th century, Carlyle also had a certain level of prestige, especially when it came to its athletics program, including among indigenous people. There were parents who sent their children to Carlisle or other boarding schools willingly because for a range of reasons, they thought it was the best option. And in some cases there were students who chose to attend Carlisle or another boarding school for themselves.

Jim Thorpe fell largely into that last category. He already knew about Carlisle and its reputation as an athletic powerhouse, and Carlisle had actually also already heard about Jim. Lieutenant Colonel Pratt had asked the federal Indian agent for second Fox Nation to be on the lookout for athletic talent as far back as 1899. Jim made the decision to go to Carlisle in 1994, and when he told his father about it, Hyrum reportedly said, Son, you were an Indian. I want you to show other races what an Indian can do.

On April 22nd, 1984, not long after Jim arrived at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Hiram Thorpe died of blood poisoning, possibly as the result of a snake bite during a hunting trip, Jim was not able to return home for his father's funeral at this point. By the age of about 16, Jim had lost his twin brother, other siblings and both of his parents. The staff at Carlisle became concerned for him, not so much for the sake of his mental health, but because he wasn't really participating, understandably.

And as the school administration saw it, if a student wasn't participating, they also were not assimilating. So Jim was put into Carlile's outplacement program, which was more typically used for older students during summers or other brake's students would be sent to live with white families out in the community where they would work as domestic or agricultural help.

In June of 1984, Jim was sent to live with a family in Summerton, Pennsylvania, where he would cook and clean in exchange for room and board plus five dollars a month.

Considering the gym had a lot of experience in farming and ranching, this placement didn't entirely make sense and the family expected him to eat in the kitchen rather than with them in the dining room, which made it clear that they did not see him as their equal.

He was moved to a different family in Pennsylvania, where he worked as their gardener, and then he was moved to a home in New Jersey where he worked as a foreman for Native American workers on a local farm. He returned to Carlisle in 1987, and that is when he got involved in the school's athletic program.

We will get back to his time at Carlisle Athletics after a quick sponsor break. Welcome to Beyond the Beauty, a podcast from My Heart Radio, I'm your host, Bobby Brown. I've been in the beauty industry for a long time and I've learned a lot. I have watched makeup, skincare and beauty change more than I ever could have imagined. This season on Beyond the Beauty, I'm exploring the beauty industry past and present. I'm reflecting on my own experiences and I'm talking to some of the biggest and brightest names in beauty today.

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Believe it or not, this is stuff you should know. You know the podcast with over a billion listeners. It's now for your eyes so you can read it. Stuff you should know. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things covers everything from the origin of the Murphy bed to why people get lost preorder at stuff you should know dotcom or wherever books are sold. We're going to talk a little bit about the history of sports, especially football at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the school established a collegiate football program in 1894.

And then not long after that, Lieutenant Colonel Pratt briefly banned the sport after a player broke his leg during a game when students banded together to try to get football reinstated, Pratt finally agreed under two conditions. The first condition was that they had to play fair. There would be no fighting, no slugging other players, even if the white teams were doing it, because their behavior, the Carlisle team's behavior was going to be seen as a reflection on all indigenous people.

The second condition was, quote, that in the course of two, three or four years, you will develop your strength and ability to such a degree that you will with the biggest football team in the country.

To that end, Carlisle hired Glen Warner as coach in 1899. Warner had been nicknamed Pop while serving as team captain at Cornell because at the age of 25, he was the team's oldest member. He had coached college teams before starting at Carlisle, and with the exception of a brief break between 1994 and 1996, he worked as the football coach at Carlisle until 1914.

There are all kinds of ball games that play really important roles in indigenous cultures all over North America. But when Pop Warner arrived at Carlisle, most of his players really did not know much about gridiron football specifically. A lot of them had also been living through years of deprivation. Warner told Pratt that most of his prospective players should really be trying out for beds in a hospital rather than spots on a football team. Warner was genuinely afraid that there was no way that he could shape them into a team that was justify his twelve hundred dollar a year salary.

American football itself was a fairly new sport at this point, having grown out of rugby and soccer. The Intercollegiate Football Association was established in 1877 and was the first intercollegiate athletic conference until 1893. It established and refined the rules of play among its member schools. Other organizations and associations followed, gradually refining a sport into one that was at least hopefully interesting to watch, but not so violent that it killed an inordinate number of players.

Yes, there were times in early American football history when player deaths were a big problem under Pop Warner, the direction Carlisle played a huge part in that overall process of refining the rules of football. In general, Carlile's players were smaller and lighter than the players on their opposing teams, which included the powerhouses of the day like Harvard and Yale. The team itself also tended to have fewer players, so each player spent more time on the field and had less time to rest.

During a typical game was a reduced numbers of players also meant that each player needed to be able to play multiple positions. Since Carlisle had no football stadium, nearly all of their games were away games. And since the team was largely funded through ticket sales, it maintained a really grueling schedule to get to all those games. So Warner coached the team to be quick, coordinated and creative, writing new plays to take advantage of the other team's weaknesses. Some of these were straightforward football plays meant to be coordinated and agile, but others were trick plays that were not, strictly speaking, against the rules, at least not until whichever governing body was in charge at the moment meant to adjust the rules for the following season.

So here are some of the trick plays that Pop Warner used at Carlisle. He had straps sewn to the halfbacks and fullbacks uniforms so that their teammates could literally throw whoever got the ball when the play started. He added what he called a breast protector to the team's uniforms, which he said was to protect their breastbone if a player was blocked or tackled or just fell, this breast protector was padded and oval and it sure did look like a football if you put your arm over it.

And there was also the hidden ball trick in a game against Harvard in 1983, the team gathered into a huddle, only they were facing outward instead of end. And then one of the players shoved the ball up the back of another jersey before the huddle dispersed and ran in different directions. So the Harvard players did not know who had the ball. Warner was not the only coach, and Carlisle not the only team incorporating this kind of trickery. For example, the Carlisle players were generally not at their best during bad weather or in poor field conditions.

Warner's interpretation of this was that the other teams were often highly driven by a sense of school pride. So they played their best in any weather to avoid letting their school down. But the Carlisle players were more about the love of the game, and the game was just not as much fun in the mud, in freezing weather or in the middle of a downpour. As early as nineteen 05, fans from Canton Athletic Club started fire hosing the field to muddy it up before Carlisle games.

As another example, Harvard started using footballs that were the same color as their jerseys, so it would be harder to see who had the ball.

Yeah, over time the rulemaking bodies would be like, No, you can't. You can't be shoving the balls up players jerseys to hide them. So that played an overall part and how the rules of football evolved over the years. Within a few years of its establishment, Carlisle Indian Industrial School's football team was recognized as a force to be reckoned with among the opposing teams and within the indigenous community. Consequently, Carlisle was able to recruit the most athletically skilled players from indigenous nations all over the United States.

They were doing the same thing that other football teams were picking the best and brightest athletes wherever they were. In November 2nd, 1988, right up in the Philadelphia public, Ledger sums up the team. Carlisle grew into, quote, The Indian team, if not the best in America has a most distinguishing factor. It is always fit. At one stage of the season, Yale, West Point, Harvard or Princeton might defeat the Indians. It is nearly always necessary for each of these teams to be at their best when they meet the Indians.

But the Indians can always in any season beat almost any team at any time of the season.

The Indians display the most remarkable form in football prowess to get back to Jim Thorpe and his part in all of this. Not long after he got back to Carlisle after his outplacement, as he was walking to an intramural football game with some of his intermural teammates, he wasn't on a varsity team yet, and he saw members of the varsity track and field team practicing the high jump. He watched as they kept raising the bar an inch at a time and the players tried to jump over, although most of them were able to clear the bar when it was set to five foot eight inches, none of them could clear it at five nine.

Thorpe asked if he could try, which the varsity team found laughable, in his words, quote, I had a pair of overalls on a hickory shirt and a pair of gymnasium shoes that belonged to someone I looked like anything but a high jumper. The track athlete snickered a bit as the bar was set up for me. I cleared to borrow my first try and laughing at the astonished group of athletes went on down to the lower field for the game.

The next day he was called into Pop Warner's office. When Warner asked if he knew what he had done, Thorpe said Nothing bad. I hope Warner told him that he had just broken the school record in the high jump, and Thorpe replied that he thought he could probably do better if he was actually wearing a tracksuit. This feat earned Thorpe a spot on the varsity track team, with Warner telling him that he might want to coach one day. And if he did, he would need to know about track and field to do a good job at it.

We have really focused on football so far, but by this point, Carlisle's athletic reputation involved multiple sports, including track and field. And that reputation had also drawn some criticism, including allegations that Carlisle was fielding players who were not actually students. And while it was true that some of Carlile's players were older than the typical college player and that some of them barely attended classes, the school maintained that all of its players were legal. It did, however, implement a four year limit to how long players could remain on a varsity team in an effort to deflect criticism.

Albert Xen, Dean, who was about to age out of the varsity track team, was assigned to Thorpe kind of as a mentor at the time. X and Dean held most of the school's medals in track and field and at a meet at the end of his first season, Thorpe broke all of those records when the varsity football season started in the fall. Thorpe insisted that he be allowed to play, but Warner objected that he didn't want to put his track star at risk as a compromise.

Warner tried to put Thorpe on the football team as a kicker, and Thorpe would not accept that as being good enough. Finally, exasperated with Thorpe's insistence, Warner basically made him the target for tackling practice. But as his teammates tried to tackle him, he just kept dodging them and flipping them over and then outrunning everyone who was left standing there.

The descriptions of this for multiple people are really like Pop Warner was like, fine, you want to be on the football team, you're going to be the target for this practice. And they did not work out the wave of learner was expecting. So Pop Warner finally relented and allowed Thorpe onto the varsity football team, although he was inexperienced enough as a football player that he spent most of that first season on the bench. He was a backup player to Albert Payne.

I think in one of the biographies I read said that his first varsity football practice was the first time he had worked with an actual football rather than the one that had been stitched together from leather scraps and stuffed with rags. Carlisle finished that season, though, with 10 wins and one loss, and Thorpe started a scrapbook of press clippings about his games, Thorpe returned to both track and field and football at Carlisle in eight, and he started to get a lot more time on the field in football games.

One reason was that a lot of Carlisle players had reached their four year limit and had aged out.

But also Thorpe was just flat out amazing. For example, in Carlile's game against Conway Hull, Thorpe scored five touchdowns and threw a 30 yard pass that led to another score during the first half of the game. Warner finally pulled him out of the game because he felt like they were just humiliating the other team. The final score there was 53 to zero.

At this point, Thorpe temporarily took a break from Carlisle. So that seems like a good point to also take a pause on this episode. We will pick it up next time.

Do you have a little bit of listener mail for us?

I sure do. This listener mail is is from Jean and Jean sent the most wonderful picture Jean wrote in after our episode where I interviewed Dr. Kathryn Sharp Lambeck about Jackie Cochran. And Jean says, Hi, Holly and Tracy, thank you so much for presenting such a thoughtful and entertaining interview with Dr. Landecker about Jackie Cochran as a retired Air Force pilot and Air Force Academy graduate, I feel a deep debt of gratitude to Jackie and the other Women's Airforce Service pilots.

At the same time, I was surprised to find that my career path may not have met with her approval, especially considering I'm married to another military pilot and had two children while actively serving. As with many of your podcast episodes, you dealt honestly with Jackie's integrity, either downplaying her accomplishments nor glossing over her shortcomings. Thank you for presenting women and all your subjects as authentic human beings with faults and flaws that coexist with their impressive feats and important events.

Listening to your podcasts as one of the highlights of my day, and I can't wait to hear what you'll be talking about next. Cheers, Gene from Tampa. And the attachment says, P.S., here's a picture that would probably have Jackie rolling in her grave. It was taken about two weeks before my second son was born. My aunt said that I looked like a cross between a South American dictator and a pregnant Catholic schoolgirl.

Jean Yves is in her uniform. She has all these medals pinned to her her chest area. She's holding a certificate that presumably she has just been awarded and is definitely in the late time of pregnancy. I love this picture. I love the extremely happy look on Genspace. And I love I mean, we didn't talk about this specifically in the episode, but I mean, we talked a lot about Jackie Cochran thinking that women needed to have babies and raise children.

And we didn't really talk about the fact that a lot of women who serve in the military and who fly as pilots also have children and raise them.

That's definitely true. So thank you, Gene, for this great picture and the great email. Thanks to everybody for listening to the show today.

If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, we are at History podcast that I heart radio dotcom. And then we are all over social media and history. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the Apple podcast app, the I Heart Radio App. Anywhere else you get your podcast. Stuff you missed in history class is the production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts for My Heart radio visit by her radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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