You're Wrong About
You're Wrong About
Baby Jessica with Blair Braverman
On October 14, 1987, 18-month-old Jessica McClure fell down a well in Midland, Texas. This week, Sarah tells our survival correspondent, Blair Braverman, about the community that worked to rescue her, and the nation that watched.
Here's where to find Blair:
Website
Twitter
Small Game [book]
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Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, You Are Good
[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Links:
https://www.blairbraverman.com/
https://twitter.com/blairbraverman
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/small-game-blair-braverman?variant=40090251100194
http://patreon.com/yourewrongabout
https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpod
https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good
http://maintenancephase.com
Sarah: The second they said ‘brave’, I was like, oh no. They're going to rhyme it with ‘cave’.
Welcome to You’re Wrong About the podcast where increasingly we are talking about shopping and survival. Apparently my two main interests. I didn't realize until now that it has become clear. With me today is Blair Braverman. Hello, Blair.
Blair: Hello Sarah. Hello, You're Wrong About.
Sarah: You recently came and talked to us about the crash and survival of Flight 571 in the Andes, which has been, of the episodes that we've released in the past couple of years, or really ever, is one of the ones that people have really freaked out about the most in a positive way, obviously.
Blair: Freaked out how?
Sarah: The response that I love to see about it is like people essentially saying some variation of I was surprised by how deep my emotional response was to this, or like I laughed, I cried, there was a jump scare. People who listen to this show and who come back because they love it for different reasons. But I think that this was like the kind of storytelling that highlights the humanity of the people that it's about, which is just like always rare.
Blair: Well I don't know. I think it's not that rare over here. Part of your big project is taking caricatures and turning them into real people, which is why your show is so moving and I'm happy to be part of it.
Sarah: Yeah. And I'm so happy to have you back. We are going to be doing something today, which kind of merges an area where I feel some kind of sense of stability as a speaker because I've been researching it and obsessed with it for so long, which matches up with what I think of as one of your areas of expertise. So we're going to talk about survival situations when they connect with media circuses, and we're going to talk about three of them.
Blair: Three of them. Oh boy.
Sarah: Three whole circuses. It's a three-ring circus. I guess we are going to talk mainly about the media event surrounding Jessica McClure in 1987, Baby Jessica, as the nation continues to know her. And we're going to talk about two other similar media events for context. But before we get into that, what did the words Baby Jessica mean to you? When I brought this topic to you, did you have any kind of a memory response to?
Blair: I believe she fell into a well. We're really scraping the edges of my knowledge. My husband, who was alive at the time, I was not quite alive yet, said, oh, baby Jessica, she taught me to watch where I walk. He said that rather cryptically, and that is all that I know.
Sarah: That is the true essence of it. And I feel like what people remember is baby Jessica fell down a well and the nation watched as rescue workers tried to save her. But no, she was a baby. She was 18 months old, and she fell down a hole that was eight inches wide.
Blair: Oh my god.
Sarah: I know. You think you know how wide a baby is?
Blair: Eight inches. What is that? Like a basketball width?
Sarah: This is a great comparison. How big is a basketball? Let's look it up on bing diameter. Yeah. Okay. So a basketball is like nine and a half inches wide in diameter, so smaller than a basketball.
Blair: I was picturing a storybook. You know it, you have a bucket that cranks down into the bottom and presumably a human adult could climb down. But this is like a tube.
Sarah: Right? You want one of those like ring wells where even a couple of people can jump down and splash around in there.
Blair: That is what I'm picturing, and I forgot where it came from. It is from the movie, the Ring. That is my mental image. So how long did it take people to realize that she'd fallen in? Did they know immediately?
Sarah: Yeah, they did notice immediately because this happened because she was playing in a relative's backyard who actually ran a daycare out of that house. I just struggle to picture the physics of it. But basically her mother stepped inside to answer the phone. And then when she looked back out again, Jessica had fallen into a tube.
Blair: Oh, God.
Sarah: One of the things about parenthood is that there's so many fears that you know you're gonna have to deal with, or you certainly reasonably assume you will, like school shootings and climate change and super covid, but there's also so much stuff that you don't even think to worry about and then it happens anyway and you're like, oh no, if I had worried about it, maybe I could have stopped it with my brain.
Blair: As someone who gets anxious, that is what my brain is doing all the time, is thinking up the like least likely terrible scenarios and convincing me that it's possible and what I have to do then is talk to my brain and be like, it is extremely likely that your baby will fall into a well. And then stories like this, maybe they get it. They counteract everyone's collective efforts to thwart their anxiety. It proves that the worst-case scenarios happen and cognitive behavioral therapists are really getting a payday from this.
Sarah: And so she falls down the well, and then what? Oh, I'm getting the mail carriers here. Hold on.
Thank you.
Oh, this is amazing timing. Okay, so this is the new, the Rebirth issue of the Believer in beautiful swimming pool blue and lipstick pink.
Blair: Oh, it is gorgeous.
Sarah: There's an interview with Alan Alden here. And then there's an article by Sarah Marshall. And it's me. It's not the Sarah Marshall, who also lives in Portland, who sells Hot Sauce. It's me.
Blair: Okay. Her article is called Violent Delights. She's holding it up to the camera. Oh, there's a bunch of people standing around blood splattered on the floor.
Sarah: It's a nice illustration of the principle cast of Criminal Minds.
Blair: Okay, they're recognizable people, but I didn't recognize them.
Sarah: For the record, I didn't ask for a portrait of the Criminal Minds cast, but I'm delighted that one was made for this issue. And the subhead is ‘the Serial Killer Media Industrial Complex rages on, but what has it taught us? Very little about the crimes in question and much more about ourselves’, which actually kind gives it all away. If people, if someone's like, what's that article about? No one's gonna ask you that, but if someone was, you could be like, oh, it's about how Serial Killer Media is really teaching us about ourselves. They'd be like, wow. So you don't have to read it, but you could.
Blair: But if you read it, you get to go on a beautiful prose journey. It will take you out of your life for a moment and into a beautiful place called Sarah's mind.
Sarah: Ah, you're the best. Wow. I'm really happy I got to share this moment with you, especially because I haven't published anything in two or three years. I think it feels like 50.
Blair: You publish a podcast.
Sarah: It's true.
Blair: If you take your words and make them available to a million people, I think that is publication.
Sarah: It's true. And I love making this show. And I also, when this show feels the best in terms of the words that I am offering, it's when I don't feel like I'm thinking about what I'm gonna say next, it's just being said and I'm along for it. And I feel the same way about writing, that when it's going best and when it feels the most meaningful it's when I'm just like saying stuff without really planning to. How you do five to 10 hours of going through the mechanics of it in order to earn not even an hour, like probably 20 minutes of being lifted out of yourself by the work that you're doing.
Blair: It's the maple syrup metaphor of writing.
Sarah: I don't think I've heard this.
Blair: It's my husband's metaphor. I don't know if it's caught on as a common thing, but if you tap maple trees, you get a bunch of maple sap. Buckets and buckets, and you think you're gonna get maple syrup and then you have to put all the sap in a huge pan on top of a fire and boil and boil. And for every 40 parts of maple sap, you get one part of maple syrup. And that is roughly the ratio of research and work and drafts to finished writing that it takes to get a really good final product. And I imagine podcasts are the same way.
Sarah:I think the podcasts reward cul-de-sacs more, or at least the ones I do are forced to. So that's really nice. But, totally. And just in terms of just brain power generally, I think you have to do so many hours of thinking in order to produce an hour of talking. But all that's to say that I feel like I get similar effects from these different mediums, but writing is like, it feels slightly different. I think probably because it's not connected to performance. Okay. So back to media spectacles. I wanted to open by showing you the media property that educated me about a lot of events of the eighties and nineties which did a kind of brutal parody of the Baby Jessica situation. And that is The Simpsons episode, Radio Bart. Are you familiar?
Blair: I'm not familiar.
Sarah: So Radio Bart is an episode where Bart has a little radio toy, where he can speak into a device and broadcast out a microphone some distance away from him. And so naturally he checks the microphone down a well and pretends to be a little boy who's fallen down the well. And let's watch a little bit together. 3, 2, 1, play.
Recording:
*Singing Interlude*
What are you doing down there?
Look, I'll level with you. There is no Timmy O’Toole. It was just a prank I was playing on everybody.
So it seems we've all been the victims of a cruel hoax perpetrated by a 10-year-old hooligan. The time has come for finger pointing and most of them are squarely aimed at the boy's parents.
It's not our fault. We didn't want the boy, he was an accident.
Homer!
Could you edit that last part out?
Mr. Simpson, we're live coast to coast.
Doh!
Sarah: The people of Springfield are easily whipped up into a frenzy. I'll say that about them.
Blair: I would be easily whipped into a frenzy.
Sarah: I'm most delighted. I think, by the existence in the Simpsons universe of sending our love down a well, which is like a very classic eighties celebrity thing to do. Like We are the World is the most famous example where you're like, world events are happening beyond our control, so we should get a bunch of pop stars together to do a music video about it.
Blair: It really foreshadowed the Covid Imagine video.
Sarah: Yeah. That's the natural conclusion of all of this. And was that for a benefit or something or were they just like, people need to hear us singing Imagine?
Blair: I don't know. I don't know much about it, but it hit at a moment where it did not land. , if we assume they're well-intentioned, which I assume they are, for the most part, they also become targets for everyone to project their anger onto. I thought the Imagine video was out of touch, and I also thought it didn't quite deserve all the anger it was getting, but that anger needed to go somewhere. And in that way it provided a service.
Sarah: Yeah. And also now decades. Hence, I can be like, remember that time fucking Wonder Woman sang Imagine? And so the rescue efforts around Baby Jessica are very big. This is happening in Midland, Texas, which is an oil area and in a development that reminds me a little bit of Armageddon. The rescue effort that ultimately prevails is to dig a parallel shaft to the tiny tube that she has fallen down so that rescue workers can then drill through the rock, separating them from her and pull her out of the tube. And they know that she's alive because they can hear her singing nursery rhymes.
Blair: Oh my gosh.
Sarah: One of the rescue workers says to her, “What does a cat say?” And she says, “Meow.”
Blair: Oh my gosh. I assumed you'd say like they could hear her crying or screaming in terror. What a tough kid. How long was she in there?
Sarah: She was in the well for 60 hours. Which I would imagine was really starting to get into the danger zone.
Blair: How was she not submerged in water? Like how was her head kept afloat?
Sarah: One positive is that there wasn't any water in the part of this tube that she was stuck in, and she was actually like wedged in there. She had one leg wedged up between her and the well, and one pointed down. So she was like in a splits, which is unbelievably uncomfortable to think about. And it's surprising to me that the injuries caused by that weren't immediately catastrophic, nobody was sure what kind of condition they would find her in. But let us go back in time to my other couple of stories and talk about the kind of precedent for success that we have in these events. Before this, there were two major news events that had brought the country together.
So the first of these stories takes place in 1925. Little did I know when I began researching it that this was one of the largest news events in America between the World Wars. This was the story of Floyd Collins, who was a caver in Kentucky, who got stuck in a cave 150 feet from the entrance on January 30th, 1925. He was basically trying to get through a narrow passageway and a rock fell and pinned one of his feet. The efforts to rescue him went on for over two weeks and ultimately became a media circus at which historians have said that tens of thousands of people ultimately were gathered outside of this cave in Kentucky, which is hard to picture, but I don't know, why not?
Blair: How did the news, radio in 1925, newspapers, how was it getting around? It was pre-Twitter, a little bit pre-Twitter.
Sarah: It was several years before Twitter. Yeah, it's a little history fact. But yeah, this was carried on the radio. This was one of the first major news stories to be communicated via the radio as a medium. So this is one of the examples of a story becoming what it was, partly because a medium existed that needed a story like this in order to become meaningful to people.
And this is also a story, I think, that had power over people as it was unfolding. A, because it was, this protracted event where for days and days, people were waiting and wondering, and there are also plenty of erroneous news reports that were like, he's dead. We saved him. Just kidding. We were wrong. I think that there's something about news stories that unfold that rather than being singular events, are ongoing narratives that really are necessary to create that kind of interest in people because it's hard to feel involved in something that has already happened and is over by the time you learn about it.
Blair: There's a kind of immediacy. Maybe I could do something. I think that if I hear something's ongoing, I'm like, are people doing things? Who do I give money to? How do I help if something's ongoing in a very different way, you feel a responsibility?
Sarah: Yeah, and I think that this is also the story of the media technology that we have developed in the past a hundred years, and that has affected our lives in the past hundred years because in these stories we're talking about, the birth of radio as a means of communicating stories, the birth of TV as a way of communicating stories. And with Baby Jessica in the late eighties, the birth of the 24-hour news cycle, which I think now we're finally at the point where that has begun to seem quaint in the face of just hostile social media takeovers as a way of expressing narrative publicly.
Blair: I have an ignorant question. What is the 24-hour news cycle? Does that just mean there's news at all times of day?
Sarah: Basically. Yeah. The 24-hour news cycle is based on the idea that the news isn't something that begins at seven and ends at eight, and where we're like, here's all the stuff that happened today and now weather. And became just here we are, we're on tv. What's the big story? If there's a big story, we're gonna stay with it until it resolves, as opposed to here's our 30 second digest of what happened in the big story today.
Blair: It seems so pleasant to watch the news for an hour a day. Now I will find out what I need to know and then turn it off again.
Sarah: I'm sure when that first started, some people were like, oh, seems like a lot of news.
Blair: Do you think if Baby Jessica happened now, she'd be in commercials within a few weeks after it happened?
Sarah: There's this funny thing now where I feel like kids will achieve some degree of not that level of fame, but like a pretty high level of fame. I'm thinking about the Corn kid.
Blair: I'm thinking of Corn Kid, too. Yeah. And who, luckily, nothing terrible happened to him. He was just really cute.
Sarah: Yeah, exactly. Which I think feels less weird. I think, to me, the thing that stands out to me about the corn kid, we can find out who that kid is. We can find out who his relatives are. We can find out where he lives. Obviously, we shouldn't. I think that from the beginning there has been this obvious power imbalance when a sort of large scale media fascination descends on a normal person.
Blair: Yeah. Yes. And what makes someone not a normal person. Isn't that true? Anytime media descends on anyone or is it like if you are a celebrity and you have a PR team and you have a group of people and a lot of money insulating you that presumably it's a little bit different, but ultimately, they're also people.
Sarah: Yeah. I feel like you stop being a civilian if it's part of your job to be doing this. You were in a movie and you're like, oh, I'm being interviewed by all this media because of that movie I shot. That makes sense.
Blair: Agency.
Sarah: Yeah. If you agreed to have a career that you could reasonably assume this to be part of, you have the resources to provide security for yourself and to create a level of safety. If you don't have experience in that arena, you're at least working with people who have experience about it.
Blair: What about you? If the media descended on you, would you feel like a normal person or would you feel like you've put yourself out here with this podcast and you get what comes?
Sarah: Hm. When I'm like, oh myself, I'm obviously a little baby.
Blair: Baby Sarah.
Sarah: Baby Sarah fell down in her own kitchen like always. And yeah, because the baby Jessica story is something where the media storms a town basically. Where there's so many reporters trying to find places to stay. It's like gnome during the Iditarod actually is a good metaphor.
Blair: Yeah. And everyone's like paying a hundred bucks to sleep on a square of floor.
Sarah: Yeah. It's, who's got a floor?
Blair: Or like the Andy's boys when they got outta the mountains and the reporters got to them before the rescuers did.
Sarah: Exactly. I know. And you would think that being on a glacier would create a buffer between you and the media, but you would be wrong if you thought that. So Floyd Collins, I always thought of as some random guy who went ill-advisedly into a cave. But actually he, in my notes, I just have written down, ‘he was confident. Too confident’.
Blair: Sarah is a radio host from 1925.
Sarah: He was a confident young man. Some say too confident. Because this, relatedly, is also taking place during the cave wars of Kentucky. Do you know about the cave wars? I didn't know about the cave wars.
Blair: What? What are the cave wars? Was he a soldier?
Sarah: He was. He was a soldier in the cave wars. So basically in this area of Kentucky, this is the area around Mammoth Cave, which became a great tourist attraction, especially in the years after World War I when there's more roads in this area, there's increased money for an interest in tourism, people are driving. You get your girl, you get in your model T, you maybe get a little moonshine, and you drive on down to the cave.
Blair: Sounds like a good time.
Sarah: I think so. What this results in as well. Is that a lot of people in this area of Kentucky work as farmers, but there's increasingly less money in farming and agriculture and more money in caves. It's becoming a tourist economy. One of the frontiers down there underneath the ground is, first of all a little piece of geography, which is that there's a town called Cave City, and then a few miles down the road is the entrance to Mammoth Cave. And so if you can find a cave with an entrance that is on the highway along the way to the Mammoth cave entrance, that comes sooner if you're coming from Cave City than you have a really great tourist trap because you can get them to pull over first.
Blair: It's like a gold rush.
Sarah: Yeah. It's a cave rush. It's like when you're driving. In the Redwoods and there's like multiple towns that are like, we have a tree you can drive through, come drive through our tree. And then someone else is like, no, drive through our tree.
Blair: Or wedding chapels in Las Vegas.
Sarah: Yes. So here in the cave wars, people go into caves and rip off pieces of obsidian and carve little souvenirs to sell to tourists on the highway. And at least at some point, Floyd Collins' family makes money selling fried pies to tourists.
Blair: Yum. I want a fried pie.
Sarah: So Floyd has been caving since he was six years old, and he is extremely experienced, and he’s had a lot of close calls before. So according to people who knew him, when he gets trapped, he has reached the point where he seems to think that he can wriggle his way out of anything. This is just something where his foot is pinned by a stone that I think is not even. Hugely heavy. I think it weighs 26 pounds.
Blair: What were the logistics of that? How come he couldn't pull his foot out of a 26-pound rock? It's half a bag of dog food.
Sarah: I think just because of the tightness of the squeeze. But I feel like I'm speculating, maybe. But yeah, so he is in such a tight space that he's brought his lantern out in front of him, but now his arms are stuck behind him. His leg is stuck underneath the rock. He's found ultimately by his brother who goes looking for him. And who's the only person that he initially talks to in the first hours after getting trapped. Because in order to reach him, you have to go on a fairly harrowing journey, 150 feet in from the entrance of Sand cave.
And this happened while he was looking for a way to improve his business, looking for more passages between Mammoth Cave and other caves in the area, looking for caves to bring tourists to. And he has made a big cave discovery in the past of a cave that he calls Crystal Cave, where there are apparently formations of gypsum crystal that are called gypsum flowers.
Blair: Crystal Cave is very good branding because if I were driving down the road and I saw names of different caves, and then one of them was called Crystal Cave, that is the one I would go to.
Sarah: Exactly. I'm interested in why I was surprised to learn that this was so connected to a person's livelihood and the need to support themselves and the need to support yourself through caves.
Blair: It's a workplace injury, one and a long line of capitalism strikes again.
Sarah: Yeah, totally. And so many of the horror stories and the horrible death stories of American history are in workplace deaths and unsafe workplace and workplace accidents and workplace disasters. I wouldn't even call those not violent deaths, right? Because if you die in something like the triangle shirtwaist factory, is it's the violence of industrialization and the violence of the factory doing that to you.
Blair: It's incredibly violent. I guess in this case, he was his own boss, it sounds like, which is better?
Sarah: Most of my information about this I got from a wonderful book called Trapped! And one of the things that book is clear about is that he loved caving and he loved the caves, but also, he needed the caves to continue to make a living in the world because what else are you gonna do? And so after he becomes trapped in the cave, he becomes a tourist attraction himself.
Blair: No!
Sarah: But yeah, it immediately becomes a gathering place for people from nearby who are curious. The story spreads, more people come. Initially you can just wander into the cave and see if you can squirm your way down there.
Blair: Was anyone selling tickets or fried pies?
Sarah: Yeah, there were a lot of concessions trade.
Blair: Really? Did anyone hand him a pie?
Sarah: I don't think he got pie. He got various provisions. They fed him coffee and milk at first. It was also very difficult to feed him because you could go in headfirst, but then you would have to wriggle your way out backwards. So it was hard to bring food through to feed him. But they were feeding him, but he was definitely not getting enough sustenance, especially for the situation he was in because it was 54 degrees consistently.
Okay, this is from Trapped! about the concessions trade. “Virtually everything edible was gobbled up. By noon, the only two restaurants in town hung out bread and water only signs. As one visitor later said, we ate every old rooster in that part of the country. With an eye for business, some enterprising citizens set up concessions at the cave and goad the visitors unmercifully. Newspapers describing the scene later claimed that the crowd ate enough sandwiches to appease an army division and drank sufficient soda water to float a dread knot. Lunch wagons appeared as if by magic, selling hotdogs, hamburgers, popcorn pie, and apples. A tiny hamburger costs 25 cents, five times the normal amount in 1925.”
Do you think that this is just like that as humans, there's just something innate that draws us to stories about people stuck underground? This is my really big question.
Blair: I'll tell you what, I was once buried alive.
Sarah: Well there you go.
Blair: It happened to me once, and that story consistently horrified people more than anything else I can say about anything I've seen in my whole life. And to me it was not very climactic. But I was in a very small coffin shaped ice cave underground trying to stay warm overnight, and then a storm filled in the entrance way. So I was stuck under there. And I was asleep, and I woke up, and knew that I was trapped. But I could hear people above ground looking for me. So I never had a moment where I knew I was trapped, but I couldn't hear people looking for me. And I remember it as not very frightening at all, to be honest, but I understand that is other people's nightmare. So I don't think it's universal. I think it depends. Some of us like small spaces.
Sarah: I like them in certain ways. But yeah, you're making me think about maybe the same way that we have five taste receptors, maybe there's a certain number of basic human fears. Maybe you're a heights person or maybe you're a claustrophobia person. But speaking of the concessions thing, I have always had this basic thought of, for example, something I've written about in the past is that people sold concessions at Ted Bundy's execution, across the road from the prison, and they sold like merch, although the Paul brothers hadn't invented that word yet. Yeah, this is a very ghoulish thing to do, but also the idea of this lack of recognition of the importance of human life. But I imagine actually that the motivator for a lot of that is there's a lot of people standing around. They're gonna be hungry. I'm gonna sell a lot of hamburgers today.
Blair: Where's the line where it becomes sinister? Because people going to the cave isn't necessarily sinister. And then people eating while they're there isn't, people eat, it's a bodily function, but what is it the point where people are like laughing or joking or betting on whether the person gets out? What's the line where it stops being curiosity based in compassion and starts being exploitation?
Sarah: One of the only people whose able to get in and reach Floyd in the first days after he becomes trapped, before they do some work to widen the entrance so that more people can reach him, is a very young reporter named Skeet Miller. His name is actually William, but his nickname is ‘Skeet’ because he's so small. And so he's able to get into the cave and he publishes reports on the situation as it continues that I'm curious as to how much they influence the hugeness of the story, because clearly we're perfectly happy to consume a lot of stories where we can just project our ideas onto a basic framework, but these actually go into the cave itself, and I think, I don't know, to me, they make the whole thing a lot more real.
Blair: What were the articles like? Were they conversations, were they compassionate? Because journalism is a very important service. Just because some media is predatory doesn't mean that it's inherently predatory for media to be there. Where do you sense that this fell?
Sarah: Yeah. And then I feel like there's the question of intent, right? Where it's like there's the concept of the public's need to know. And the fact that shedding daylight on a lot of situations actually is important for keeping public officials doing their jobs correctly, or at least pretending to, or, in this case, having a media spotlight, theoretically at least allows people who have the expertise to help with the difficult situation to see the problem and be summoned to it. There's a real functional use to it.
One of the issues we're dealing with is that any spotlight is by definition too bright at this point. Once the story goes national, it's just become an uncontrollable force and a lot of good can and often will come out of it. And then a lot of stuff will also come out of it. But also like you can't make any attempt to tell the truth at all if you don't risk everything that comes with that kind of attention, potentially falling on your subject. Yeah, it's interesting. Here's the thing about being trapped in a cave.
Sarah: Sentences only Blair can start.
Blair: In many circumstances., if a reporter comes up to you, you can decide whether to speak to them or not. But if you are trapped in a cave and a reporter crawls up to you and you cannot leave.
Sarah: This is a really good point.
Blair: You haven't really consented to the situation. Someone has crawled into your cave and you're like, I literally am trapped. Literally can't get away from you, Skeets. And maybe he runs the company, or maybe he doesn't, but it does seem like he has no way out, right?
Sarah: Like you can't, no comment your way out of that situation. Just excuse me, I have a pie in the oven.
Blair: Excuse me. I'm gonna get into my car and drive away.
Sarah: And I guess like the ultimate, the feeling I have about it all now is like journalism is a necessary fact finding and sharing element of human life, it's not going away. And I think the best we can do is just move with extreme mindfulness about how much force there is behind any kind of national spotlight.
Blair: Yeah, I think that one could differentiate between journalism and a national spotlight. Journalism is reporting, it's bringing new facts into the conversation. It's fact checking, making sure that you're reporting something truthful. It is telling stories that in many cases people want to be told. It is a very basic human desire to be seen and to tell a story in a way so that people will understand what you've been through. I think of those boys in the Andes, and they wanted to tell their story, and they worked with an author to construct a book that would tell the story in a way that felt true to them because they wanted the story to go out on their terms. There's a distinction to be made between journalism and between a media frenzy, which isn't aiming to bring more facts to the conversation, isn't aiming to illuminate, it's just aiming to sell papers to sell ads.
Sarah: And then journalism is something that is often or generally contained within media, sometimes working in concert with its needs and goals and sometimes struggling to work contrary to them.
Blair: And journalism is often hard. That's another distinction we could make. Journalism is hard work. It costs money. It often takes training to know how to do it ethically and precisely. And then you have the hot take machine, which does not necessarily require leaving your chair and is creating an opinion to add to the discourse. I don't know. I wonder if you are the object of a spotlight, like this, how much you can feel the difference.
Sarah: Yeah. I find the technologies of all this so interesting because the last a hundred years really of human inventions generally, but specifically media is what I always look at have allowed us to see what we have always wanted. And we're getting more and more intimate with screens and we're seeing more and more people on our screens every day. And the screens are getting smaller and warmer, and we wear them next to our bodies. We clearly have this overwhelming desire to bring the world closer and closer to us, but then we get so overwhelmed by all the information we're taking in that it just stresses us out and makes us want to go to sleep.
Blair: Do you think it's a desire or do you think it's a compulsion?
Sarah: I think it's a compulsion. Yeah. Because I think it's like a hunger. I think that America, and I'm sure the world, but America is the country that I really know, has been suffering from an epidemic of loneliness for a long time that feels, if not created by at least very connected to this sort of world and capital in which all of the corporate incentives are to squeeze as many hours from us as possible.
And I think it continues to be, or at least to seem like a better deal from capital's perspective if we have less and less of a life or of a social world so that we can derive more and more of our personal value and sense of identity from work. And so having technologies that offer us the illusion of human companionship, I don't think there's a conspiracy or anything, but they're very helpful to that end.
Blair: You can text someone throughout the day and it's still not the same as sitting down and being with them in terms of replenishing your spirit.
Sarah: Yes. It's like if you and I were to spend all week texting, then it would be like we would be feeding each other breadcrumbs throughout the week, which is very nice. But if we were to sit down and actually talk, it would be like ripping into a whole loaf of bread and eating it together, and I know which one I want.
Blair: Yeah, you don't have company, the presence of other people as much. That's what slips out of the way.
Sarah: Yeah. And it seems like technologically we have finally come to the point really in the last 10 years where we can now simulate just being with somebody in a kind of a passive way, through twitch streamers or the stuff on only fans where someone's just like sitting there smoking and you're pretending you're in a bar or whatever.
Blair: Oh, that's so wholesome.
Sarah: YouTube videos where someone's role playing your girlfriend. We know what we need, but we're trying to suck it all in through a screen. And then we're confused about why we're not getting any calories. We're like, I've been drinking these Diet Cokes all day and I'm still hungry.
Blair: Really caffeinated at this point.
Sarah: So this is from Skeets Miller's first story, “Dateline Cave City, Kentucky, February 2nd. Floyd Collins is suffering torture almost beyond description, but he is still hopeful he will be taken out alive, he told me at six 20 o'clock last night on my last visit to him. Until I went inside, I could not understand exactly what the situation was. I wondered why someone couldn't do something quick, but I found out why. I was lowered by my heels into the entrance of Sand Cave. The passageway is about five feet in diameter. After reaching the end of an 80-foot drop, I reached fairly level ground for a moment. From here on in, I had to squirm like a snake. Water covers almost every inch of the ground, and after the first few feet, I was wet through and through. Every moment it got colder. It seemed that I would crawl forever, but after going about 90 feet, I reached a very small compartment, slightly larger than the remainder of the channel. This afforded a breathing spell before I started again on toward the prisoner. The dirty water splashed in my face and numbed my body, but I couldn't stop. Finally, I slid down an eight-foot drop and a moment later saw Collins and called to him. He mumbled an answer. My flashlight revealed a face on which is written suffering of many long hours because Collins has been in agony every conscious moment since he was trapped at 10 o'clock on Friday night.”
And he's got a piece of oil cloth covering his face that I think his brother Homer has supplied him with that is there because there's water dripping on him continuously. He's like soaking wet as well. To me, what stands out about that account, and he'll continue writing dispatches from Sand Cave as the story continues, is that it feels vulnerable on the part of the reporter.
Blair: If anyone ever earned a story.
Sarah: Maybe that's the answer to our journalism ethics question. Are you willing to wriggle through a cold, literally or figuratively, terrifying cave to find out the answer?
Blair: Will you let someone lower you by the heels down an 80-foot dark tunnel?
Sarah: Yeah, and I think I find the story so compelling because I would not do that. I am in awe of anyone who does. And so he is able to survive for about two weeks, but ultimately dies within a few days of the rescue attempt reaching him.
Blair: Oh no. Did they get him out? Did he die in the cave or out of it?
Sarah: He died in the cave and his family retrieved his body a couple of months after the rescue attempt. He held on for so long, he only needed to survive a tiny little bit longer. Just the feeling of the closeness of the whole thing is maddening.
Blair: I know this was 1925, but I guess that's the question: if someone was trapped in that cave in the same way now, do we have different technology to get them out or would it be exactly the same?
Sarah: I would love to know what the situation would be for that story in particular, because I guess it's, how fast can you dig a shaft because they couldn't pull him out because if they had tried to pull him, he would've just pulled apart. We all have, or most of us have, to some extent, narratives about ourselves where we're like, we're the main character.
And I feel like caves are one of the ultimate expressions that nature has for me of just like, no, you're not, you're stuck in a cave. And if you're stuck in a cave and you only have so many hours to remain stuck there if you don't have water or food, or if the elements are too severe, then that's just it. The cave wins. And it doesn't matter that you saved the cat earlier in the screenplay.
Blair: We're all gonna go some way or another. A cave is not that much more dramatic than any of them, I guess. It's just rarer.
Sarah: Yeah, I'm gonna die an old lady, warm in my bed, like in Titanic.
Blair: I thought you were gonna say you're gonna die an old lady in a cave.
Sarah: It could happen. It's not my goal.
Blair: I really thought he was gonna get out. It just seems unjust. It seems if you make it those two weeks, you should have a happy ending.
Sarah: So Skeets Miller wins the Pulitzer Prize.
Blair: Oh, good.
Sarah: This is also, by the way, when this first hits the news, it initially isn't a very big story, partly because national coverage is all about the Nome diphtheria epidemic and the serum run.
Blair: No! At the same time? Yeah. Oh my gosh. They should have sent Balto and Togo in after Lloyd.
Sarah: No rest for the Wicked So in the merchandising around Floyd Collins, there were also a couple of songs, and I am going to play you one of them. Yeah. This was apparently a trend, at least in the country music industry, that when there was a national tragedy, you would do a little song about it.
Blair: Okay. Say when.
Sarah: Okay. 3, 2, 1, play. It's kind of charming.
Blair: This is catchy.
*song plays*
Well come on you young people, and listen while I tell, the fate of Floyd Collins, a lad we all knew. His face was fair and handsome, his heart was true and brave, his body now lie sleeping in a lone and Sandstone Cave.
Sarah: The second they said, ‘brave’, I was like, oh no, they're gonna rhyme it with Cave.
Blair: Someone in the comment says there was a 1990s musical based on this?
Sarah: Yeah, there was. I know there was a musical. So I guess I present this, just so you make what you will of it, because it's such an interesting, to me, little artifact. And also to say that I think the kind of interest that we take in tragedies and disasters and scandals and the stories that continue to compel us most, I don't think that attention has changed. I think we just have different technology to express it with. Fundamentally, we're just these unsophisticated, periant mammals who want to eat a hamburger near a trapped man. Now we're gonna go to a huge story of 1949, which a lot of people referenced when the Baby Jessica story broke.
This is a very similar story of a little girl named Kathy Fiscus. This is from a New York Times article. “Not quite 40 years before Jessica McClure fell into an abandoned well, another little girl, three-year-old Kathy Fiscus, did the same thing in California. She was running a race with her sister and her cousin in a field in a suburb of Los Angeles in 1949 when she slipped into a 14-inch-wide hole and became trapped 95 feet underground. Her cries too, could be heard from the surface, and there was a mammoth rescue effort. 132 volunteers worked for two days while more than 5,000 people came to watch.”
This is a similar story. It's horrifying in a very similar or the same way where it's, God, I have to think about tiny holes in the ground as well.
Blair: It strikes me that these people are coming to watch, we've been assuming a carnival atmosphere. They're right, they're there for the show, but it's hard to know without being there, but I wonder if the mood was more like a vigil.
Sarah: Yeah, and I think that in the Floyd Collins story, it's like arguably there's a number of people, there's a size of crowd, at which point it can't be any one single thing or a density of human energy where any crowd is gonna become like subject to its Rowdiest members. A lot of people were coming in with an attitude of wanting to know what was happening, wanting to see if they could help, in a vigil kind of atmosphere as well as anything else, that was a dynamic there as well.
So this is 1949. TV is about 10 years old. It made its debut at the 1939 World's Fair and it's something that costs about a third the price of a car. So at this point, there are fewer than a hundred TV stations in the country, and the news is not really a big draw because it's like a guy telling you what the news is, but they're not showing you the news. Here's an oral description of the news, which you can also get on the radio, which is cheaper.
Blair: He's like reading you a newspaper.
Sarah: Yeah, no. Sometimes they would literally read you a newspaper.
Blair: And there probably isn't that much programming out there.
Sarah: Exactly. There are only a few hours a day. There's both relatively little that you can do with the technology and relatively little that it's occurred to people to try because you're finding the format. So a lot of theater brought into the home. So at the time that Kathy Fiscus falls into a well, there's a station in LA called KTLA and they decide to do something unprecedented, which is to show people the news. They bring cameras out to the field where she has fallen into the well. No one had ever broadcast live from the scene of a developing story.
Blair: Wow.
Sarah: Right? Like not on television, to be clear. There have been radio broadcasts of developing stories. But yeah, this is the first time that anyone has even had the idea of let's show people what's going on as it's happening.
Blair: That must have blown people's minds.
Sarah: Oh yeah. And I fight it equally mind blowing to try and think of a time before that was possible. Because my sense of the news today is please stop showing me the news. I'm seeing so much more news than I can handle, honestly.
Blair: Could you please summarize it in text?
Sarah: So yeah, this is the moment in American history when TV gets involved in not just breaking the news by saying what has happened, but by showing reality as it is unfolding and therefore affecting reality by depicting it and creating the feedback loop that we still live in and have been tumbling around in for 73 years.
Blair: So what's the response?
Sarah: The response on behalf of the viewers is, this is what helps it to scale to the size. Because people who are in a drivable area are not just hearing that something is happening, they're seeing it. They're seeing the people who are trying to save this little girl. The rescue workers become celebrities briefly.
Another thing that's interesting to me is that KTLA sends a couple of reporters, and they send a guy named Bill Welsh, who is a sports announcer for the station and their boss Klaus Landsberg, whose idea this all is, his advice is you're a sports reporter. Treat it like it's a game. Just do a play by play. It's incredible to me that we know the moment at which that style of broadcasting was born. The CNN style of I can't stop talking because if I stop talking for even a second, this bus is gonna explode.
Blair: I feel like I would have a heart attack watching that for the first time. I would just be like, the immediacy of this is telling me that it is the worst crisis that has ever happened.
Sarah: Yeah, because this is the late forties.
Blair: I guess they had some other recent crises.
Sarah: They do, but you know what that makes me think of is that this is the era of getting the news through newsreels, which are a) showing you something after it has already occurred and been filmed and processed and edited into something polished for you, and b), that elements of newsreels were staged, and that this was a Hollywood product to some extent. It was new to expect to have the unalloyed reality of this camera is at the scene right now showing what's happening at this moment and there's no time for editing.
Blair: Is this something that goes on over time? She's stuck there for a while, or is this like a one-time news report?
Sarah: It is a one-time thing, but it also goes on for a while because the other thing about it is that they just stay on the scene for 27 hours. They're like, we are sticking with it. Yeah. They just stay there until the story is over.
Blair: 27 hours.
Sarah: And ultimately Kathy doesn't make it.
Sarah: But I think it's a story that we might remember more clearly today if it had a happy ending. And also this feeling that I think you are sitting, you are brought together with your family, with people in your neighborhood, and of course in this case, you really are brought together because most people don't have TVs. You have to ask store owners to stay open so you can watch the TV in the story. You have to hang out with your neighbors who have a tv. You have to somehow take part in this communal experience, even if you're watching on a screen far away. And I think just the feeling of people coming together, geographically separated, but all wanting the same thing is a form of secular prayer that most of us take part in, in some way, whether it's with this kind of thing or with sports or elections, which seem like sports when you watch some coverage of them.
Blair: And it's not always secular prayer, I imagine. I mean I've got to think in these cases, so many people are at home praying for the people who are trapped. Because that's all they can do.
Sarah: I don't know, you would think that it would only create positive results if people could feel a sense of responsibility for each other's welfare. But then it's also like everything gets so much more complicated. And also news stories like this don't really seem to inspire us to look around and be like, what about the other people who are suffering, not in a well, but just as part of everyday life. Maybe I should open my heart to other people. I don't think they tend to have that effect. I think the effect is like, that was emotional- back to everyday life.
Blair: Do you think they tend to actually hide the impact of other people's suffering because they diminish it by comparison? Oh, if they're not caught in a well, it's just less dramatic.
Sarah: Yeah, I think they can. One of the quotes about the whole baby Jessica story was from Ronald Reagan saying that he and Nancy had been so invested and Nancy wouldn't stop watching the TV to have a biopsy done until she had seen them rescue her. And Reagan said everybody in America became godfathers and godmothers of Jessica while this was going on. There's nothing intrinsically negative about it. It's just what are we not looking at? Because once you have 50 godparents, probably additional ones can't really do anything. And then Reagan is a great example of a president who cares so much about the kids trapped in wells, but then whose policy negatively affects all the kids not in wells, which is most of them.
Blair: Yeah, that's true. I think it's kind of beautiful about all the godparents. Part of me is like, how would the parents feel, because I feel like there's just weirdos out there and you'd worry that someone would start thinking they actually have more of a connection to your baby than they do and yeah. But in terms of just so many people out there loving someone you love and wishing the best for them, I think it's kind of beautiful.
Sarah: Yeah. I don't know. I feel like that's maybe what's one of the things that compels me is that there's so much sort of beauty of humanity on display, and it's often happening in the same moment as humans being complicated and weird. But all of that context is partly to tell you that, as people are tuning in to watch TV in 1987, as these rescue efforts are ramping up, as we are digging a parallel shaft to try and reach America's baby before it's too late, our precedent for success is, I don't even know if we have one. If there was a giant story about the nation becoming fascinated by someone stuck in a well or a cave or something, and that working out well in the entire 20th century to this point, then I feel like we would've heard about it. The amount of hope that people could have tuning in had to be based on the idea that surely now we have the technology to figure this out because we haven't before.
Blair: And it's so simple. It's someone in the bottom of a well. It's not someone caught up in bureaucracy. It's not someone with an illness we don't understand. It is a person in the bottom of a narrow hole. Everyone can picture wanting to just reach in. People could be at home being like, why don't they try this? Why don't they try that? It's something that we can wrap our heads around. It's like an allegory, almost. It's so simple and so terrible at once. That. still impossible to get someone out.
Sarah: Yeah, it is like an allegory. It's even actually like Gimple the fool in the pickle jar, right? Where it's like you just feel like there's an answer just around the corner. If you stop trying to take so many babies out of the well, you can get your hand free or something.
Blair: I think I've heard that story in a different context.
Sarah: It's normally pickles, to be clear to everyone listening.
Blair: That's the concept where you can't get your hand out of a jar because you're clasping something inside the jar.
Sarah: Yeah, that's how I remember it is like you get your hand stuck in a pickle jar because you try and grab all the pickles at once.
Blair: I always heard that was called a monkey trap. That's how you trap a monkey is that you attach a jar to a table and put some nuts in it.
Sarah: Someone out there is listening who's been trying to trap a monkey and now they're like, thank you.
Blair: You're welcome. You're welcome.
Sarah: Finally. Okay. I'm gonna read you some excerpts from a New York Times magazine article called Death on the CNN Curve, by Lisa Bekin. “Looking over the shoulders of the group monitoring Jessica and the group trying to reach her were the reporters. The ones who arrived earliest, mostly from local newspapers and television stations, were only a few feet away from the two holes, just on the other side of the weather-worn wooden fence. Those who came next quickly realized they needed ladders, and those who came later brought even higher ladders. Once territory was staked with the ladder, it had to be protected. Leaving for the bathroom meant risking a prime spot unless you found someone to guard your ladder while you were gone. For blocks around the site, neighbors filled every available coffee pot and left them on their front stoops for the reporters, along with boxes of donuts, sandwiches, and cold drinks.” Which like, you fools, you should be gouging them.
So in the town of Midland, Texas, there is a paramedic named Robert O'Donnell. He's actually on shift on another side of town when the story begins. So he figures he's not gonna have anything to do with it, and then it continues after he comes home. The baby is still trapped in the well. So he has gotten off duty. He goes over to the house where this is all unfolding and volunteers his help. And so he ends up being the one who goes down the parallel shaft toward this, again, eight inch, smaller than a basketball, tube. Where he finds this, again, not even a kid, a baby, an 18-month-old baby who is doing okay somehow.
Blair: Wow.
Sarah: “He was chosen because he was tall and thin, six feet, 145 pounds. He didn't mention he was also claustrophobic. He laid down on his back and rigged headfirst through the cross tunnel with his arms out in front of him. The air was wet and sticky, and within moments he was bathed in sweat. It was like trying to slither through a tightly wrapped sleeping bag, he would tell reporters later. He inched to the end of the tunnel until he could look up at the shaft that held Jessica. Only the first few feet were lined with the pipe that protruded up into the yard. The rest was raw rock wall.
One of Jessica's feet was dangling down toward Robert, but the other was out of his sight, wedged near her head so she was almost in a split. ‘Juicy, I'm here to help you.’ he said, using the nickname her parents had told him to use. He asked her to move her leg and she did. Satisfied that she probably had no overwhelming spinal injuries, he started to tug on her foot, but she didn't bug. She was wedged in too tight, and he did not have enough room to maneuver. He became resigned to the fact that he would have to leave so that the diggers could widen the tunnel. He promised her he would come back.”
And they almost don't send him down a second time because he seems so upset, but they do decide to send him down again. He brings down a bunch of KY Jelly and uses that to lubricate the wall that she has her leg wedged against. That's how he pulls her out of the tube, and then there she is in the tunnel with him. And I am going to now show you the video the rest of America watched when we saw her lifted out of the tube.
Blair: Okay. So is everyone just at home watching this live?
Sarah: 3.1 million households are, yeah. Her poor parents also, her parents were really young. They're like around 20, I think, at the time, which is just, to be basically a teenager and have to deal with this.
Blair: There's no age at which one would be prepared. Oh my gosh. I don't know if I'm emotionally prepared for this.
Sarah: We might not be. Okay. Okay. 3, 2, 1, go.
Recording:
We interrupt our regular program scheduled to bring you a special report from ABC News.
Alright, Mike. Ironically, in this age of telecommunication, sometimes those of us who are more than a thousand miles away from the scene are closer to the action than those of you who are literally just 50 feet from the scene.
The anticipation in this little town is overwhelming. They have come out, they have supported, they have dug knight and day, they've brought food, they’ve prayed. They've set up a trust fund because this family does not have any health insurance.
These are private individuals who brought their equipment. And let's face it, this is oil country in Texas. Some of the gear that you would need for drilling a quick hole, they have dug that what is an orange yellow shaft that you see toward the right center of your screen.
I'm beginning to hear a cheer or two now. Let's listen.
Oh my gosh. She's out. She's out. Her eyes are open. You can see her eyes open. Bless her heart. She's blinking. Bless her heart. She's blinking. Fifty- Eight hours, exactly. Thank god, 58 hours.
Sarah: Thoughts? Thoughts from the class?
Blair: Oh my gosh. How many people were crying watching that on their TVs when it happened? I do feel it. Look, I watch a video clip on YouTube 30 odd years later, but I get it. I get feeling like her godparent or it just, everyone's rooting so much for that little girl.
Sarah: So it is, it's just this moment of unguarded euphoria for so many people. It's so rare for a large number of people to be brought together, not in opposition to something. It's the thing we're for is the baby and the thing we're against is just like the well.
Blair: I feel a little grateful that this was pre-social media.
Sarah: Oh yeah.
Blair: So that people were consuming the information, they were watching the news, but weren't necessarily all creating their own opinions about it in a public way.
Sarah: Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. Imagining this on Twitter, a thing that people were live tweeting is hard to entertain.
Blair: It would be a distraction.
Sarah: And even as it was, the attention was like more than anyone could handle. And also the fact that this is a new kind of attention. KTLA broadcasting for 27 hours in 1949 didn't create a precedent in news at that point to continue doing that. The news, TV news matured into a reality of it comes on at seven, it goes off at eight, it comes back on at 11, and then, it's on again in the morning and that's your news. You have your time to engage with the news and then you can move on and watch some Andy Griffith.
In 1987, CNN as a channel was seven years old and it had yet to really find an audience and this was what made CNN was baby Jessica being in the well, because suddenly this created the consumer demand and the feeling of wouldn't it be great if there was a channel where they just had to keep telling you the news and they couldn't cut away to something else because there was nothing else. The evolution of that is that Fox News entered our lives in the nineties and after September 11th, in our ramping up to the Iraq war era, it eclipses CNN in terms of relevance and also in terms of viewership numbers. So we've gone from a 24-hour news cycle culture to a 24 hour Fox News cycle culture.
Blair: And what is the shift from CNN to Fox Is? Fox is like, we're gonna tell you the news, but we're gonna also just make you angry and hateful about it. And the news probably isn't real.
Sarah: We always had some amount of room for random speculation in the DNA of the 24-hour news cycle, I think. Because if your job is to just continue talking, you're gonna speculate about stuff and you're gonna talk about what might be happening. Fox has become a place whose primary job is the creation of sentiment, xenophobia and fear of terrorism, and the feeling of antisemitism. A classic.
I think over time they figured out that the best way to get people to watch and to keep watching is to get them in an attitude of fear and of anxiety and of fear mixed with anger and the idea of I have to keep watching because there's a national emergency and we've invented a baby that Hillary Clinton has thrown down a well.
Blair: And it's every day, she's down there everyday.
Sarah: Every day. A new baby called America.
Blair: And what does it do to us? I don't watch Fox News, but to be constantly hyped up like the tension of watching to see if that baby makes it outta the well or not.
Sarah: But it's all of us all the time. Yeah. I honestly believe it has to be bad for heart health. And I know anecdotally of one person who had an elderly relative who was told by their doctor you got to stop watching Fox News. It's bad for you, physically.
Blair: God bless that doctor. Just fighting the good fight one person at a time.
Sarah: Yeah. And so in 1987, before the Bronco chase, it's before the news fracas around Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. It's before Amy Fisher. It's before the Menendez brothers. It's before so many of the events of the late eighties and early nineties that are like really starting to ramp up around this period. This is really at the beginning of all that, various forms of media have always descended in their own way, but this was the first-time people had been descended upon by the cable news apparatus like this.
And speaking of just attention generally, this is another passage from the New York Times Magazine article. “Suddenly, everyone wanted to give things to Jessica. She spent 36 days in Midland Memorial Hospital undergoing six surgeries for severe forehead and right foot wounds, eventually having her smallest toe removed. And all her doctors, the pediatricians, general practitioners, vascular surgeons, and orthopedic surgeons donated their time. The rest of her bill. About $50,000 was paid by anonymous donors.
During her stay, the hospital received an average of 50 calls an hour. Her room, the hallway outside her room, and eventually the entire hospital was filled with stuffed bears, elephants, balloons, flowers, and baskets of fruit. Governor Mario M. Cuomo and his wife Matilda sent a stuffed beaver, which is New York's official animal. When the toy story found out who it was for, they donated a Garfield the cat. A well-wisher, and Vienna sent a chocolate cake. Someone closer to home shipped Jessica a custom-made waterbed. A sharpei puppy, which she named “Shirley” was also a gift. She received enough clothing to last until she was five. She was invited to the Vatican for an audience with the Pope, to throw out the first ball at the Texas Rangers home opener, and to Washington to be the Grand Marshal of the National Independence Day parade.”
She gets ultimately from donations across the country, a trust fund of I believe about $700,000. Which then after the sort of initial euphoria has died down, people then start to be suspicious that her parents are spending too much of it and people are gossiping about them and they bought a new house and how is their marriage doing? In the age before random social media shipping, we still had tabloids. There was still a tabloid speculating that Jessica's mom was having an affair with one of the rescue workers and stuff like that.
Blair: Oh wow. I just, I'm just dying to know how she grew up with all this. What affected her more: being trapped in the well or being faced with so much attention when she was so young.
Sarah: I have some answers for that. I'll tell you first about Robert O'Donnell and then I'll tell you about how Jessica has done since being rescued. Robert O'Donnell struggles a lot with drugs in the years following this into the early nineties, and apparently while watching footage of the rescue workers following the Oklahoma City bombing says those people are going to need a lot of help for a very long time. Presumably in reference to the effect that being a rescue worker and then elevated to that kind of stage had on him where the attention and the money comes and then it goes away. And it's hard to know how big a part that plays in the way somebody struggles. But I don't know that it at least can create the illusion of having more resources than you do and can mix in a very volatile way with whatever else you're already carrying. And so ultimately, Robert O'Donnell takes his own life in 1995. He ends up being one of the casualties of this story.
Blair: Oh. Oh gosh. That's so sad.
Sarah: What strikes me about that is how it might feel to have this giant success held up as who you are, and yet feeling the disparity between, this was your one shining moment, and yet you in reality are a collection of all of the moments when you weren't able to save somebody. After, a huge amount of attention, meeting the president, having a parade, becoming the subject of a TV movie. Ultimately, Jessica's parents do their best to keep her completely out of the public eye, to the point that when she's five or six, she's watching a show on TV that tells a story of a little girl trapped in a well, and she finds it very sad. And then her stepmother tells her that she was the little girl in the well because she has no memory of it.
Blair: Wow. Good job, parents. I wonder how much she was protected in part by her young age, by not having the sense of the size of what was happening to her on a national scale.
Sarah: Yeah. I think I can imagine that helping a lot. 18 months I think is at the very youngest possible age to be forming memories if you can at all. And really, it's like when you're around two, that memory starts to happen. But yeah, the continued presence in your life. Here you are at the White House. Here you are doing these things that if you were a few years older, you would recognize, meaning that you were important in this confusing way. But if you're a toddler, everything is maybe equally giant, right?
Blair: Are we going to the grocery store or are we going to the mall, or are we going to the White House or are we going to my neighbor's house who has popsicles?
Sarah: Yeah. And arguably the popsicles are more important. There are no popsicles at the White House.
Blair: Absolutely.
Sarah: And she is in the public eye very rarely. She was in a follow-up story in People Magazine a few years ago. She has two kids. She still lives in Texas. I feel like the ultimate success story is that she's like a woman in her thirties who I know hardly anything about because she's an ordinary private citizen who once fell into a well.
Blair: Good for her.
Sarah: Good for her. And while Jessica's mom, Sissy, was still even talking to the press. One of the things she said to the AP was, ‘I know everyone loves her, but I love her too, and I just want her to be a kid like all the other kids she goes to school with. If we keep writing the baby Jessica's story, my child will never be normal’. As miraculous to me that Jessica escaped being defined forever in every aspect of her life as the baby in the well, that to me is as miraculous and escape as getting out of the well itself. There are a lot of structural incentives to monetize your child, because honestly, how the hell else are you gonna afford to have a child at this point. And I don't know, we're just getting into a weird area. We've been in a weird area for some time now.
Blair: We're quickly approaching a time when the first child influencers are going to be adults who can tell their own side of the story. And that will be an interesting reckoning.
Sarah: And file lawsuits. That's the one I'm excited for.
Blair: And then we'll all watch the news when it happens.
Sarah: So I've given you a very weird charcuterie board of media and technology and stories that scare me a lot. And now I'm gonna cheat and ask you what your conclusions are or what your thoughts are, having been through all of history, just the whole of the 20th century is told through, stuck in something stories.
Blair: It just me that having your story told by other people is very tricky business and there's a vulnerability to it. And so people who manage to find ways to tell their own story or to create their own story, and maybe that means living privately tend to deal with it better than people who repeatedly have their story told for them. That's what you want for all of these people. Anyone who sort of thrusts into that position is for them to maintain agency. To be able to say, no, get that microphone outta my face, or this is when I'm going to tell you what it was like to be trapped down there. We can't control the walls of the well, but we can control how hard we're pushing people for stories that they may or may not want to tell.
Sarah: That's beautifully said. And it also occurs to me that these were compelling media properties, partly because we had three people who couldn't really speak for themselves. Floyd Collins was an adult, but he was in increasingly tenuous health and delirious part of the time. And then we have a toddler and a baby who cannot be very brisk with the press, really.
I think this is one of the reasons we love dead girl stories as a culture is because the dead girl can't say fuck off. That's not what I'm like, stop telling my story that way. She's ideal because she'll never tell you, you did it wrong. She'll never get litigious. She's dead. And then here I am doing the same thing that I am talking about the sort of ethical stickiness of, trying to tell a real story, trying to tell three stories about people who, through sheer circumstance, ended up bringing the country together, although they would've preferred to not, I'm sure.
Blair: I have a friend who's a taxidermist. And when I first met him we were sitting around having a drink or something around the kitchen counter telling stories and he was talking about taxidermy and he started talking about the incredible pressure that he feels when he is mounting an animal because it is not just an animal that he's mounting, but it is always a story that someone has, that people don't bring a deer or a fish or whatever it is, to the taxidermist necessarily because it's like a good deer. They bring a creature because they're like, this is the last fish that I caught with my grandfather before he died, or the first one I caught with my daughter. It always represents something.
There's always a story and he always hears the story, and then he is responsible for putting that story in physical form, for preserving it in such a way that the story will feel cradled to that person. And it reminded me so much of the responsibility of being a writer. That you are capturing someone's story, or you've been trusted with someone's story, and your job is to make it still feel true and good to that person. Unless they're like some terrible villain and then, take 'em down. But when you're telling stories that want to be told, you have to preserve it right.
Sarah: Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me on this Unpleasant Belly crawl through history, I guess, and you are the person I always want to go through these caves with and you have a book out that I'm obsessed with, I just want to make sure people know about it. What is your book about?
Blair: Thank you, Sarah. My latest book is called Small Game and it's a novel about a survival reality show gone very wrong.
Sarah: If you want something of a thriller, something of a survival story, something of a queer love story it might be the book for you.
Sarah: I want that. And just if you like stuck in a cave stories, if you like feelings, you gotta like one of those two things, right?
Blair: If not, why are you listening to You're Wrong About?
Sarah: It's, yeah, it's true. This is the show where we talk about caves as a way to talk about feelings.
Blair: The caves of the heart.
Sarah: Yeah. I just, I love talking about survival with you. I love talking about feelings with you. I love talking about how survival and feelings are way more connected at every point than maybe our media about survival would suggest. And it just means a lot to me to have you back.
Blair: Oh, I'm so happy to be here. I love those things. And I love you.
Sarah: I love you. And this is our last episode of the year, by the way, as we're recording this to be the last episode of 2022.
Blair: Happy New Year, everybody.
Sara: Happy New Year. You're surviving, you're doing it.
Blair: You made it through the year. There's a little bit of light through the tunnel up ahead.
Sarah: Thank you so much to Miranda Zickler for editing. Thank you to Carolyn for producing the show and for making the show with me this whole year. Look at us. Who would've thought? Not me. If you want bonus episodes, you can hear them on Apple Subscriptions Plus or on Patreon, and we have a new episode out about cereal with Josie Duffy Rice, our most wonderful legal mind on call.
That is it from us. Happy Holidays. What a year we've had together. I'm not gonna say what a great year, but making the show is a great part of it and I'll see you in the next one.