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In this episode, we celebrate the diversity and inclusion of pride month with an examination of the world of the paranormal, the world of spiritualism and even the world of the Horror space, and how these dark, liminal spaces are not only super inclusive, but also are currently being used to expore and reveal more LGBTQ+ history. This week we go deep into the cultural phenomenon of gay Ghost Hunters, and LGBTQ+ representation in Haunted Tours. All this and more in this special Pride Month episode of the Family Plot Podcast!
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Have you heard of 'Tail-Gunner Joe' McCarthy and the Red Scare? What about Roy Cohn? These two not only kicked off the Red Scare where they pursued supposed communists in Government and later the military, but also went aafter gays under the theory that they were 'moral perverts susceptible to blackmail.'. Despite no evidence appearing that even one of these people were blackmailed outside the movie Clue (which is complete fiction), thousands of employees were fired between 1953 and the 90's when gay employees were forced out of government positions or fotced to live lives undercover simply because of who they loved. We cover the history of the lavender scare, people who were targeted because of it, a similar case in England where Alan Turing, the father of Artificial Intelligence was convicted of gross perversion for his relationship with another man and was chemically castrated which led to the unraveling of his brilliant mind. All this and more in this, this is why we celebrate PRIDE because we need to remind ourselves just how bad it's been for the LGBTQ during our lifetimes episode of the Family Plot Podcast.
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We have a heck of an episode for you. Arthur is turning 17 and our episode is inspired by the right wing pushback against Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey'. We dig into the origin of the work, what we know of it's 'author' Homer, the real, the mythical, the things that are somewhere in between. We say goodbye to a family friend and gget downright hostile about people judging movies based on trailers in this deep dive into the origins of the Odyssey and all it's attendant mythology in this little bit of history, whole lotta weird imagined horrors episode of the Family Plot Podcast!
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Such An Episode! On Deck we have Jane Stanford, born Jane Lathrop out of Albany New York, she married her lawyer husband who lost everything in a fire, went west to seek his fortune in the Gold Rush and found it selling supplies to miners and settlers. When his wife joined him in San Francisco, he had become a railroad baron. Eventually they had a child and Jane doted on the boy. We won't tell you more here, but there's a death, a poisoning, a university being founded and not necessarily in that order in this powerful episode of the Family Plot Podcast!
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This episode, we go deep into the life, heroism and spectacle that was Audie Murphy. Audie Murphy was a sharecropper's son from Hunt County Texas, small, skinny, barely fed and full of work. When his dad would disappear, he worked, when his mom died, he worked. When his family came apart, he tried military service. He was rejected by the marines, the paratroopers, only the Army would eventually accept the skinny kid from Texas because in the 1940's they needed manpower. We discuss Audie's training and how he went from being an unlikely soldier to the most decorated Combat Infantryman of World War II. He had over twenty medals and barely enough chest to pin them on. He would come home suffering from what we would today call PTSD and tried to build a life. He was invited to LA by actor James Cagney where he worked Westerns and military pictures before being chosen to play himself in the movie To Hell And Back.based on Audie's memoirs. He would marry twice, and become a songwriter with hits like Shutters and Boards. All this and more in this special, All American Episode of the Family Plot Podcast.
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Well, in this episode we dig into our Kansas City Roots. We go to Kansas City in the 1920's where under 'Boss' Pendergast the city was a machine that kept clubs open all night and the liquor flowing. It was a town famous for being a little naive, jazz, good barbecue and something called the Kansas City Stomp. Kansas City had heard rumors of Prohibition and wanted no truck with it. It was into this world that a young man named Charlie Parker, a man who would be nicknamed 'Bird' began to play an alto sax and he would get humiliated and come back stronger. He became a good musician, and then he was in a car accident that broke his ribs and twisted his spine. He was given morphine for the pain and this would start a second addiction, the first was to music. He studied and practiced all he could in recovery and when he emerged he was a different player, he took the town by storm and he would go on to become one of the greats of Jazz and he'd become a big part of a muisc called bebop. So come listen to a local tale of Kansas City and learn how a man became a myth and musical legend in this magical, mythical and musical episode of the Family Plot Podcast
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This episode has so much. We cover the Jewel Box Revue, the drag show that originated in the thirties and toured through the seventies creating a space for drag, female impersonators and gender bent comics in a show that advertised itself as 25 men and 1 girl. We also cover anti-crossdressing laws, the police's informal three article rule and how newspapers at the time published the names of those arrested for cross dressing, performing drag, or even just being openly gay. We talk about how drag shows came up from French cabarets like the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergere and morphed into something different and special in America. We also discuss Club 82, the New York nightspot run by the Gallo crime family that made a safe place in New York for drag long before Pride Marches and rainbow flags. We even discuss how movies like La Cage Au Folles, The Rocky Horror Picture Show,,The Birdcage, Priscilla Queen of the Desert and To Wong Foo, Thanks for
Everything, Julie Newmar owe a lot of their DNA to these early expressions of queer joy and drag glamour. These were some of the earliest safe spaces in America and we owe them a lot. So come along on this celebration of LGBTQ history and found family! It's fun and we guarantee you will learn something! And in case you aare curious, the person bringing us back from commercial is part of an old song by gender bent comedian Rae Bourbon.
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Here we go! Another little bit of history that really matters. In 1942, following Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt signed executive order 9066 which allowed the military designated Military zones and control who lived in them in the United States. The order did not mention Japanese American citizens or concentration camps by name, but effectively that'w who was targeted and what was created in this executive order. Japanese Citizens were rounded up, sent to camps and forced to live in old horse stalls or worse before being transferred to some of the worst hellholes in the country. This is after many were blocked from citizenship or owning land. We go into the why's and howfores in this special Abolish ICE we've seen this crap before episode of the Family Plot Podcast!
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We do a deep dive into the Brazilian Lead Masks Case, a Case that takes us back to 1966 where two dead men are found laying down wearing suits on a hill in Niteroi, they appear to have laid down, put on homemade masks made of lead and simply...died. We look into Brazil at that time, a nation only recently taken over by a brutal military regime,and where burgeoning scientific beliefs intersected with spiritual and metaphyisical ideas leaving a Fortean mystery that echose to this day. They're instructions were simple:
1) 16:30 be at the agreed place.
2) 18:30 swallow capsules,
3) After effect protect metals wait for the signal
But we have no idea what they mean or why? So come dig into this fascinating mystery in this yes-Virginia-sometimes-Histroy-is-fun episode of the Family Plot Podcast.
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We have quite the episode for you here. This time we head back to 1942 to meet a small Jewish family, the Frank family. They are a mom a dad and two daughters living in Germany watching the country become a nightmare for Jews like themselves. Otto, the father, led them over to the Netherlands where he had business contacts. However, soon the Nazis occupied and controlled the Netherlands and the Franks were facing the same persecution they had before. So with great reluctance, they and another Jewish family went into hiding in a secret annex hidden behind a bookcase in Otto's business. Within a few months they were joined by a single dentist. For over a year they hid in the Secret Annex, staying quiet while employees did their thing, only running heat when the employees were gone and terrified at the sounds of frequent break-ins. However, it all came to an end when someone (history has no solid answers for who) reported them, the business was searched, the Annex found,and those hiding were taken away to labor resettlement camps, and from there to concentration camps where all but one were eventually killed. Otto Frank survivved and when he came into possession of his daughter's diary he published it. This is the best record we have for the atmosphere in Germany and Netherlands in 1942 and '43. So join us for a sad yet powerful tale of resistance in this abolish ICE expisode of the Family Plot Podcast!
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In this episode we set the Elevator of History back to 1835 where we witness the ;'penny paperss' papers sold for one cent instead of six that featured stories people WANTED to read, rather than news by and for a political party. These papers brought us separate sections on news, finance, sports and featured on the scene reporting and lurid true crime details. But it was the New York Sun that launched into a six day report of what a famous mathematician, chemist and learned individual was looking at the moon through a legendary telescope and reporting the discovery of the most amazing things including: albino moon-bison, miniature zebras, one horned goats, unicorns and the fascinating bat people of the moon who dwelt in massive temples carved from giant rubies. The public was fascinated by this series of articles until the report, six days later that the telescope had caught a stray sunbeam, magnified it's intensity and set the observatory alight causing it to burn to the ground. In the days and weeks that followed it slowly came out that none of this was true, however, the Sun never printed a retraction and their readership had grown significantly despite the scandal, most new readers stayed. We discuss all this, the Blue Fugates, touch on Orson Welles War of the Worlds and discuss Terry Gilliam's the Adventures of Baron Munchausen in this it can't get weirder than this episode of the Family Plot Podcast!
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This episode is so full of weird tasty historical goodness you'll want a second course. Arthur talks an afternoon with Dean and a vist from his girlfriend and we discuss Toronto and Canada in the 20's and 30's and the introduction of a millionaire with no heirs and a wicked sense of humor who died on October 31st 1936 and for the next ten years set off a fertility contest that became talked about all over the world. All while Toronto desperately tried to hold onto it's Toronto the Good identity in this too much money, a will can be binding and a joke, more fun in Canada than you thought you could have episode of the Family Plot Podcast.
(Slight correction, Dean at one point claims the original Forever Knight was set in New York and filmed in Toronto. What was the blueprint for Forever Knight, starring Rick Springfield was actually called Nick Knight and was set in LA but was still filmed in Toronto.)
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What a show! WWe dive deep into the life of Shirley Temple Black, from her young life as a precocious little girl with a smile, to her mother's enrolling her in the Meglin Kiddies Dance School at the age of three, to her subsequent discovery a few months later, hiding behind the piano when Educational Pictures director Charles Lamont came to the school looking for talent. She at first joined the Baby Burlesks, a somewhat uncomfortable series in which toddlers, clad in costumes above the waist and diapers below recreated onscreen moments from more famous pictures...this led to many unclomfortable moments among viewers. But her performance in Stand Up and Cheer! impressed the directors at Fox who signed her to a simple contract and proceeded to make movies like The Littlest Rebel, Curly Top, Dimples, amd The Littlest Princess where she played an adorable moppet with an unforgettable smile who became the single most bankable star of the 1930's. Not one performer in that era made as much as this singing and tap-dancing little starlet. When she aged out of that kind of role both Fox and MGM tried to repackage heer and she made a handful of films that ranged from watchable to deeply forgettable. MGM released her from her contract and she married her first husband, who was unable to handle the pressure of BEING her husband leading to his drinking and their divorce. Eventually she would marry Charles Alden Black who would be her husband till his death in 2004. She would also become a politician and candidate for congress, a stateswoman and a diplomat during the 70's and 80;s. She would move from this role to a quite life at home, only turning up occasionally in interviews or to collect an honor, though when she was diagnosed with Breast Cancer and eventually got a mastectomy she was very public with her diagnosis, treatment and an advocacy for testing early and frequently, Otherwise she lived a quiet life until she would eventually pass away in the early 2010's. She would be mourned on morning news programs across the country and we dive deep into her amazing life in this Women's History Month special episode.
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In this episode , we look into the life of Emma aka Grandma Gatewood. Born in rural Ohio at the tail end of the 19th Century, she was the 7th of 15 children raised in a one room cabin, sleeping four to a bed, her only moments of peace were walks from her family home. At 19, she met PC
Gatewood, an Elementary school teacher who also treated her with unkindness and violence. Her only escape was to get away, talking walks to escape the violence. She had 11 children with Gatewood until she was divorced from him. Then she raised them as best she could working any job she could get to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. By the time she was in her sixties, she had a goal...to walk the length of the Appalachian Trail. She did so and so much more in this it's never too late keep going episode of the Family P;ot Podcast!!
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In this episode, we set the Elevator of History to the Kentucky portion of the Appalachians where we check out the Packhorse Librarians. Women, funded by the WPA, who brought books into the hoots and hollers of Kentucky, providing reading and kinship in rural communities who otherwise would have no access to books. They traveled on mules and horses carrying books in saddlebags and pillowcases to needy communities and while they only lasted a short time, they helped change rural Kentucky and make it part of the modern world and helped raise the rate of illiteracy from 31 percent to just 5 percent in the 1940s. We cover the history, notable packhorse librarians and do our best to honor the history of these 'book women'.
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Jump on the Elevator of History with us and ride it back to America's involvement in World War I. When the US brought over a segregated unit of Black Men that were mostly a labor batallion, then they were loaned to the French Infantry who gave them French helmets, equipment, weapons and rations and put them on the front lines. For 191 days, the longest of any unit in the war they stayed on the front lines, never giving up ground, always pushing forward and cementing their legacy and their strengths forcing the US Army to reconsider it's segregation and the idea that Black soldiers weren't capable or competent fighters. And while it would take another thirty years to desegregate the US Military, it might not have happened at all without the persistence, dedication and heroism of the Harlem Hellfighters!
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TW - This episode we drop a few 'f' bombs, and a few other words we would not normally use. But we are dealing with an act of domestic terrorism that has been concealed by polite history. We discuss the rRise of Black Wall Street in the Greenwood District of Oklahoma. How discovering oil in the early twenties brought people of all colors to to the young state of Oklahoma unintentionally creating a community of Black entrepreneurs, lawyers, doctors and other professionals,,This created a segregation and suspicion drove them into the community of Greenwood where they built black schools, black theaters, black hotels and black shops. Their community was so good and prosperous that even whites would shop there when they could get a product better or cheaper. However, one night, a young man named Dick Rowland who worked in Tulsa had to use the restroom. Being black, he couldn't go to the bathroom where he worked he had to go to one of the 'Black Only' bathrooms and the closest one was on the top floor of the nearby Drexler Building. The elevator was operated by one Sarah Page and as Dick rode the elevator, it shook briefly, causing Dick to wobble, he grabbed Sarah's arm to right himself, and Sarah, not expecting the contact, yelled as she was very startled. That's it...well Dick left the elebator a clerk saaw him and reported the incident to the police. Police arrested Roland and Black World War I veterans showed up armed, to prevent the vigilante lynch mob from attacking the jail and lynching Dick. It was this event that set off the Tulsa Race Massacre...an overnight series of assaults, unreasonable arrests, theft, arson and murder that devastated the district of Greenwood. And we, along with Carmita from Missing in the PNW and Murder in the PNW, tell this true story from the dark history of America and Oklahoma in this 0h-yeah-this-happened, domestic terror and if-this-doesn't-make-your-blood-boil-nothing-will episode of the Family Plot Podcast
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This week, we step away from doom, gloom and reminders of the fact that we are currently under an authoritarian administration thaat does not value human life and only serves to protect the billionaire class to talk about a magical event that happens every February in the tiny city of Montpelier, Vermont. It seems that, since 2002 when people in Montpelier on Valentine's day morning, they find their town covered in hearts, celebrating love, community and kindness. More than one person has served the role of the Phantom, like the Dread Pirate Roberts, it's a title that gets passed on from time to time. We cover the history of the tiny capital of Montpelier, the history of the Valentine Phantom and how even during a blizzard and the height of the pandemic, the Montpelier Valentine Phantom (or Bandit) was able to cover the town in hearts. So join us for this feel good episode of the Family Plot Podcast!
(PS - The 'Secret Santa' from Independence Missouri was Larry Stewart, a Lees Summit Businessman who passed away in 2007)
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Such an episode. One of three episodes for Black History Month this Month, we cover the amazing life of Frederick Douglass, born a slave, he managed to sneak an education which propelled him to Freedom and so much more. He learned letters and managed to improve his education by challenging white school children and allowing them to correct him, watching men in lumberyards and shipyards mark words on boxes and objects until he could copy their strokes perfectly. We discuss hiss first attempt to escape which got him arrested and his second which earned him Freedom. We discuss his life as a writer, an abolitionist, a public speaker and as a consciense for the country following the Civil War (which was a war about slavery not state's rights...don't be fooled by a racist narrative). We mention how he had the best hair of that era and his lifelong career as a speaker and statesman even touching on earlier mentions on our podcast (episode 232 and 242) and so much more in this, our first Black History Month epiosde of 2026 on the Family Plot Podcast. Also, this week's sponsor quote is a quote from Douglass' 'Fourth of July to a Former Slave' as read by the inimitible James Earl Jones. Credit where credit is due.
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Man this week is a powerful episode. Arthur talks dating, mental health, and art and we share our reasons for supporting the families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and why we support #AbolishIce and #FreeMinnesota. Then we dig into the story of teenager Grace Darling and how she, with a little help from her father, rowed out in a tiny rowboat (specifically a coble) to help 8 people who had survived a shipwreck in the Farne Islands! She was made into a hero by the London press but she never saw the point, after all she had only done what she did to help people who needed helping. And once again, our episode ties into the modern day as Alex Pretti lost his life just trying to help someone, a risk that Grace ran as well. Check out the episode in this 19th century heroism and 21st century heroism have a lot in common episode of the Family Plot Podcast! Plus the return of Edward October as the guide on our Elevator of History!
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