Welcome to episode 1000 of this podcast!
First, thanks for all your support over these one thousand episodes, especially our Patreon backers.
And if you didn’t think we could make it this far, shows what you know!
But then people do often exceed expectations.
Like a guy who this month in 1929 won a bet by proving he could push a peanut all the way up Pikes Peak with his nose.
His name was Bill Williams, and this weirdly specific challenge came after he’d pushed a peanut for nine days in his hometown, because he lost an earlier bet over the outcome of the 1928 presidential election.
After getting some notoriety for that stunt, Williams decided to up the ante: for 50 dollars, he would push a peanut with his nose up Pikes Peak.
Now hiking Pikes Peak is hard enough on its own; the 13.5 mile trip has been described as doing a half-marathon up the side of a mountain.
For most people, pushing a peanut up all that way would be either too grueling or too boring or both.
Not Williams.
It did take him 21 days to make it to the top, and he had to keep replacing the peanut he was pushing because squirrels kept stealing them and running off.
But he did it.
And he wasn’t the only one.
Decades later, in 1963, musician Ulysses Baxter decided he could get some attention by doing the same stunt.
He attached a salad spoon to his nose and it took him just eight days, and his peanut ended up on display at a local museum.
Another peanut pusher came along in 1976, and then in 2022, Bob Salem combined a CPAP mask with a black spoon and finished the climb in a record seven days.
But he made it clear that he was doing this to raise money for charity and not for a bet or just because.
After all, he said, “I’m not nuts.”
Today in 1960, TIME Magazine’s Miscellany column had the story of a truck driver in Richmond, S.J. Bradbury, who opened up his truck’s new license plates to find a note.
It read: “Help. I’m being held a prisoner at 500 Spring St.”
Bradbury checked it out, and that was the address for the penitentiary.
It was worth a try, I guess.
Colorado Springs man hopes to be the fourth person to push a peanut up Pikes Peak with his nose (Colorado Public Radio)
MISCELLANY: Miscellany, may 2, 1960 (TIME)
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