Hello, this is Matt and McKinley from History Dispatches.

We are the father-son duo bringing you the weird, the wild, the wacky, and the craziest tales from across time.

From the Ice Bowl to the Great Heathen Army, and the head of Oliver Cromwell,

the same head they kept on a pike for three years?

Yep, all here on History Dispatches.

New episodes every weekday. Find out more at History Dispatches.com or wherever you get your

podcast app. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history.

When a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves.

And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans.

I'm Tracy. And I'm Rich. And we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal

era in American history. Look for the Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your

podcasts. Hey everyone. So for this most recent, most notorious encore episode, I chose to revisit my

interview with Taylor Haygood about the life

and death of String Bean, who was tragically murdered along with his wife in 1973.

This interview is a couple of years old. And the book was memorable for me, in part because of my

distinct memories of seeing String Bean on TV.

I remember as a kid watching He-Ha reruns with my grandparents in Bumiji, Minnesota, where my

eldest sister and I spent many of our summers growing up. We also watched a reruns of the Lawrence Welk show, too.

Stringbean was one of a cast of crazy characters, and for those of you familiar with the show,

you can back me up on this. And I had no idea as a young boy that he had been killed years before.

I don't remember anyone telling me,

not that it would have mattered. But String Bean, he was on the show with Grandpa Jones a lot,

...