827: All the King's Horses

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2024

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The things we break and the ones we can't fix.

Prologue: Ira tells the stories of three things that broke–two of them in his own family. (8 minutes)
Act One: A teenage whiz kid invents a new toy for Milton Bradley. Then the trouble starts. (28 minutes)
Act Two: Reporter Dana Ballout sifts through a very long list—the list of journalists killed in the Israel-Hamas War—and comes back with five small fragments of the lives of the people on it. (10 minutes)
Act Three: A skateboarding legend makes a final attempt at a high-flying trick. (6 minutes)

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show.
0:05.4	If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, this American Life.
0:09.4	org.
0:11.8	My grandfather, Melvin,
0:12.8	ran a hardware store in Baltimore that also sold model trains,
0:16.2	and he had a huge, and I mean huge,
0:18.0	train set in the basement of his house on Pimmoga Road that I loved.
0:21.6	This thing was vast, with tunnels and bridges and towns and
0:25.3	streetlights that lit, and the train engines puff smoke as they scooted around the
0:29.1	track on this big wooden platform in the basement in the middle of all this epic amount of
0:34.0	clutter and junk and his tools and for some reason a mimeograph machine and in the
0:38.6	corner of the basement was the filthiest toilet I had ever seen like frighteningly dirty to me as a little suburban kid.
0:45.2	The whole basement was a chamber of chaos and it was the most unsettlingly chaotic thing in it.
0:51.6	But that is not the story I'm here to tell. The story I'm here to tell is
0:56.1	about Melvin and one of his sisters.
1:00.3	Hello, Uncle Bennett? Yes, you got it.
1:04.7	To be sure I was getting the facts absolutely right on this thing.
1:07.7	I called the last person in the family who might remember it.
1:10.3	My Uncle Bennett, here's at home. Yeah, we'll do.
1:15.0	Yeah, we'll do.
1:17.0	Yeah, yeah.
1:18.0	Hello.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from This American Life, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of This American Life and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.