This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

We have a little different episode for you today. We have two stories.

The first is an update to the purple hotel story that was episode number 58 reported by Gwen Maxi.

There have been some

significant changes since we reported that story. So we wanted to update you on that.

But first I have a short story that I performed live on the radio on KLW and San Francisco.

Very, very early in the morning.

But I've never released it as a podcast. So I thought I'd share that one with you today.

Here we go.

Almond Brownstrotcher was an undertaker of all things.

Kansas City, Missouri got its first telephone exchange in 1878.

Telephone service is good for local business and the funeral business is no exception.

But at some point, Almond Brownstrotcher of Kansas City noticed that he wasn't getting as many calls from potential customers.

He got really suspicious when a friend of the family died and he wasn't even called about performing the funeral services.

The story goes, and the story is really hard to verify, but I'm going to go with it because I really like it.

The story goes that after some poking around,

Stroger discovered that the wife of a rival undertaker in the area was an operator for the local telephone company.

At the time, telephones were connected manually by female operators patching lines together on a gigantic punchboard.

Someone would pick up the receiver asking for the local undertaker in general or even Stroger in particular,

and in this case, the unscrupulous operator would only connect the call to her husband's undertaking business.

Not, Distroger's.

And Stroger figured it out.

...