Episode 147: Shipwreck Kelly

the memory palace

Nate DiMeo

Radiotopia, Publicradio, History, Natedimeo

4.8 • 7.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 September 2019

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia, a collective of independently owned and operated podcasts.

A note on shownotes. In a perfect world, you go into each episode of the Memory Palace knowing nothing about what's coming. It's pretentious, sure, but that's the intention. So, if you don't want any spoilers or anything, you can click play without reading ahead.

Anyway...

Music

We hear Vaggvisa by Henrik Lindstrand.
Then Kestrel, off the album by the same name from Caoimhin O Raghallaigh.
Ljuva mekaniska jag by 1900.
A loop from When it's Time to Go, by Buddy Fo & his Group.
A bit of Movement II from Martynov, "Come in!" by Vladimir Martynov.
Making Love in the Apartment from Krysztof Komeda's score to Rosemary's Baby.
And the Mistral Noir, from Daniel Herkedal.

Notes

There's a lot written about Kelly and his times, none more enjoyable than Bill Bryson's in One Summer: America, 1927.
The best academic book that touches on Kelly and his times is Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture in the 1920s and 30s, by Carol Martin.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is the memory palace.
0:04.0	I'm Nate Demet.
0:07.3	The thing about the Titanic, he just made that up.
0:11.4	There is no Alvin Kelly on the ship's logs.
0:13.6	But who can say about the other sinking ships?
0:16.8	The other maritime disasters he claimed to have survived.
0:19.9	The ones he said earned him the nickname Shipwreck Kelly.
0:23.6	But why should the truth get in the way of an all-time nickname like Shipwreck Kelly?
0:28.4	Besides, if you saw him do his thing, that thing that made his name, made it one of the
0:33.4	most famous names in America for a time.
0:36.3	If you saw him shimmy up a flagpole, no tools, no harness like it was nothing up and
0:41.5	up 100 feet, two in some town square or some traffic circle up and up all the way to
0:47.2	the top, he certainly looked like a sailor.
0:51.4	You could just picture him climbing up a mast, swinging from the rigging, see him up in
0:56.1	the crow's nest, keeping watch for sails or whales or icebergs.
1:01.0	And then when he stood up on top of that flagpole, which was in no way made for standing on,
1:07.8	and then casually smiled and waved and maybe did a little dance, you could believe this
1:13.6	was a man who could have survived any number of shipwrecks.
1:17.7	That kind of strength, that kind of balance, that DM Carpe angioid de Vive.
1:24.2	Shipwreck Kelly.
1:25.3	The name just fit.
1:26.8	But it was what happened next, what always happened next, when he'd sit down there on the top
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

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

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