A Toxic Turkey Day
HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 28 November 2024
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For this Thanksgiving, we're re-airing an HTW classic. This episode originally premiered November 23, 2020.
November 24, 1966. Millions of spectators flood Broadway in New York City to watch the Macy’s Day Parade on Thanksgiving morning. The iconic floats – Superman, Popeye, Smokey the Bear – are set against a grey sky that can only be described as noxious. A smog of pollutants is trapped over New York City, and it will ultimately kill nearly 200 people. How did the 1966 Thanksgiving Smog help usher in a new era of environmental protection? And how have we been thinking about environmental disasters all wrong?
Special thanks to our guest Professor Frank Uekotter, author of The Age of Smoke.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The History Channel, original podcast. |
| 0:04.5 | History this week, November 24th, 1966. |
| 0:11.3 | I'm Sally Helm. |
| 0:16.0 | It's Thanksgiving Day in New York City, and an awkward, top-heavy Superman balloon is floating down Broadway. |
| 0:24.5 | He's first up in the annual Macy's Day parade. |
| 0:28.6 | There are a million people watching in the streets. |
| 0:32.2 | Moms and hats and mittens, kids in checkered coats. |
| 0:35.5 | There are marching bands, ballerinas, people waving pom-poms in front of a |
| 0:39.7 | castle on the Toyland float. On the flower float is the famous Nina Simone. She sings the song, |
| 0:47.0 | Blue Skies. But the skies are not blue in New York City today. They're gray. The clouds look dirty, and after they leave the |
| 0:58.3 | parade, the ballerinas and the marching band musicians and the pom-pom waivers, some of them might |
| 1:04.8 | feel a tickle in their throat. Their eyes might be stinging. They might even find it hard to breathe. |
| 1:12.4 | Because while the Macy's Day parade is happening in Midtown Manhattan, |
| 1:16.8 | the city's air laboratory up in Harlem is recording extremely high levels of pollution. |
| 1:24.6 | New Yorkers have dealt with pollution before, but nothing like this. |
| 1:29.9 | Over this Thanksgiving weekend, the smog will turn deadly. |
| 1:36.4 | By the time all is said and done, close to 200 people will die. |
| 1:46.2 | The killer smog of 1966 forces New Yorkers and people all around the country to finally pay |
| 1:53.8 | attention to the air pollution that they were actually breathing all the time. |
| 1:59.1 | It's hard to talk about sm smoke and smoke and air pollution dangers |
| 2:04.6 | without reflecting on humans' inability to take chronic threats seriously. |
| 2:09.6 | There seems to be something about the modern mind that longs for this kind of apocalyptic vision. |
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