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Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim & Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable. And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. In just four years, it will be a century since the dawn of the Great Depression, that moment when the high-flying spirit of the 1920s crashed hard into economic disaster. While the number of people who have living memory of the Depression are few, it still looms large in our cultural memory. Describing it to people today who weren't alive to experience it evokes images of bread lines, sepia-tinted photographs of poverty, and vagabonds hopping trains to make it to the next town. These images are, of course, accurate, but there's something that always gets left out of the story of the Great Depression. Really, of the story of any major economic tragedy. People still want to have fun, in whatever way they can. So today, let's walk through a couple of American pastimes that grew out of the Great Depression. They're mere shadows of their former glory now, but at the time, they were quite an event. And I'm referring, of course, to a sport known as donkey ball. No, the name was not misleading. It's not a euphemism either. It's a way of playing sports that arose from rural communities in the 1930s involving live donkeys. We don't really know which came first, but we have a number of written records of both donkey basketball and donkey baseball. Donkey basketball is played with four players on each team, all of whom have to be on the back of a donkey. Some versions have a pair of players on foot in the very center of the court who have to fight over the ball to begin the game, but in all versions, the rules remain the same. You must be holding your donkey at all points in the game. You can only shoot baskets from the back of your donkey, but you're allowed to dismount your donkey in order to get the ball so long as you always have a hand holding onto the bridle. Most modern games have helmets, but it's safe to assume that the earliest games weren't so cautious. Now, donkeys might be dangerous animals when provoked, but ideally games would be played with calmer donkeys, which makes the game flow at a very deliberate pace. But that doesn't mean that the games are slow, per se. Stubborn donkeys often threw their players or refused to cooperate with the rules of the game, something that lends the game its own particular entertainment value. Donkey baseball follows a similar set of guidelines. Everyone besides the pitcher, batter, and catcher is on a donkey. When the batter hits the ball, they have to mount a donkey to run the bases. The main challenge of the game is to make sure that the donkeys are on the same page and not wandering off on their own while the humans are trying to catch a grounder or throw the ball into home. The leagues for both donkey
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basketball and donkey baseball were amateur, usually run by local civics groups raising money for charitable projects. But as is often the case, business-minded Americans took the concept and ran with it. Certain donkeyball businesses toured the country, providing trained donkeys to whoever wanted to play the sport. The only requirement for participation was that all players must be over 18, for the risk of injury was not, um, insignificant. Donkeyball, in all its forms, was at the peak of its popularity in the 1930s and 40s, but it did persist past the middle of the century, even as it became more of a niche sport. In the late 20th century, there were even a couple of Amish donkey baseball leagues who played alongside local police and fire departments. It's all very quaint, but of course nothing that involves this much animal use is without controversy. For decades now, animal rights groups have been attempting to make donkeyball illegal for animal cruelty reasons, and this has led to several state-level restrictions of the sport. It's relatively obscure now, but it's certainly not forgotten. And you still might catch a game of donkey ball in some Midwest fall fairs, depending on where you live, every now and then. It's perhaps unsurprising that this tradition would be a difficult one to snuff out. If there's one thing that we know about Americans, it's that we love sports that are both dangerous and have a tendency to make an ass out of the players. Music One of the most important inventions of the 20th century was discovered by complete accident, and it was all thanks to a candy bar. In 1945, an engineer named Percy Spencer walked into work at Raytheon, one of the world's leading defense technology companies. Percy had worked there for 20 years and was highly respected in his field, but he didn't have the background of a typical engineer. He was an orphan who had quit school in the 5th grade to work in a factory. As a teenager, he had taught himself about electricity so he could take a job installing an electric system at a local paper mill, and it had sparked, no pun intended, I promise, a lifelong passion that led him to a job at Raytheon. Percy's bosses saw his lack of formal education as an asset. He had a natural curiosity and a creative approach to problem-solving, which led him to notice things that other trained engineers might overlook. At that moment in 1945, though, Percy was working with magnetrons, which might sound like a transformer, but are actually high-powered vacuum tubes used in military radar systems. He walked through the laboratory to one of the active magnetrons, spent a while fiddling with it, and then stopped to chat with a co-worker. And before he knew it, it was lunchtime, and so he went back to his desk to take a break. Now, Percy had a snack in his pocket, the same thing that he brought to work every single day— a candy bar. He'd been looking forward to it all morning, but when he pulled it out of his pocket, he realized that it had melted. While many people would have just thrown the candy bar away and dismissed it as bad luck, Percy's mind started turning. He was curious as to why the candy bar had suddenly melted that day, when the laboratory was the same temperature that it had always been. He wondered if it had to do with the energy emanating from the magnetron that he had been standing next to all morning. And there was only one way to find out. The following day, Percy brought a different snack to work. Unpopped popcorn. He stood next to the magnetron with the kernels in a bowl, ignoring the baffling stares of his co-workers until the kernels began to pop. Percy's theory seemed to be correct. The magnetron was emitting enough energy to heat objects placed nearby, even though it didn't actually feel hot. After a few more experiments, Percy understood how this was happening, and he realized, that there was a very important application for this discovery. Two years later, Raytheon released the first model of Percy's new invention, the Radarange. These massive six-foot-tall machines harnessed the radiation emitted by magnetrons for high-powered heating. The original models were so bulky and expensive they were only sold to businesses, but as technology improved over the following decades, smaller models were marketed to the public. At first, household consumers were a bit wary of this strange, newfangled technology, but it was so convenient and time-saving, it quickly caught on. And by the 1980s, the machines could be found in over half of all U.S. houses. You almost certainly have one of them in your kitchen right now. The energy produced by the magnetrons is called microwave radiation, and Percy's world-changing invention was the microwave oven. I hope you enjoyed today's guided tour through the Cabinet of Curiosities. This show was created by me, Aaron Manke, in partnership with iHeart Podcasts, researched and written by the Grim & Mild team, and produced by Jesse Funk. Learn more about the show and the people who make it over at grimandmild.com slash curiosities. You'll also find a link to the official Cabinet of Curiosities hardcover book, available in bookstores and online, as well as ebook and audiobooks. And if you're looking for an ad-free option, consider joining our Patreon. It's all the same stories, but without the interruption for a small monthly fee. Learn more and sign up over at patreon.com slash grim and mild. And until next time, stay curious.