This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nick Tamayo.

There are things missing from the official government report

published in 1966, seven years after the incident

at documents, though there are no redactions and no known conspiracy.

But the report does not tell us which song, Peter Tripp,

than a 32-year-old resident of New York City employed as a disc jockey,

played first when he began his shift at the microphone

at a glass booth in Times Square. It may well have been this one. By the vocal group The Platters,

they ask. by the vocal group The Platters. As that single was the most popular in the country on that day, the 20th of January 1959,

as it still would be the following week, Trip was scheduled to sign off some 200 hours later,

having not slept a wink that whole time.

This is the kind of thing people were doing all the time that, or at least trying to.

The papers of mid-century America were virtually filled with word of some publicity seeking

want to be someone attempting some feat of endurance or skill, the record-breaking huluhooper or pogostick hopper or bubble

gum bubble blower.

It was an era of modest wonders, and of brief cresting crazes rising up to lift Americans from all walks of life out of the ordinary and into the light.

In the craze, it seems, then crusting among the nation's disc jockeys, was trying to stay awake for some insane amount of time.

When Peter Tripp awoke at 11.30 a.m. from the last sleep he would be allowed to enjoy for more than eight days and nights and headed into work in a makeshift

studio that had been set up in a military recruiting booth to begin his assault at the

record for sleeplessness. There were two other DJ's, both in Florida Florida trying to do exactly the same thing.

There was a guy in Tallahassee, another in Jacksonville.

Each of these three men was doing it for publicity.

...