My Family Spent 4 Months Playing Battleship in a Cornfield
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2024
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, the story itself is the stuff of legends...a sunken steamboat, buried treasure, and the drive of a group of AC repairmen to become "rich beyond rich" even if it meant going into over a million dollars worth of debt. Matt Hawley tells the story of his family's quest to dig up the steamboat Arabia from the middle of a corn field.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:14.0 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, |
| 0:18.5 | the show where America is the star and the American people. To search for |
| 0:23.0 | the American Stories podcast, go to the IHeart Radio app to Apple Podcast or wherever you get your |
| 0:30.2 | podcast. Up next a story about a modern day treasure hunt that involves whiskey and in an interesting place, the fields of Parkville, Missouri. |
| 0:41.0 | Here to tell the story of the hunt is Matt Hawley of the Steamboat Arabia Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. |
| 0:48.5 | Take it away, Matt. |
| 0:49.4 | Believe it or not, there's not a lot of people looking for steamboats. |
| 0:52.8 | It takes a certain blend of crazy to go after steamboats, and the Holleys have just that right blend. |
| 0:58.0 | My dad, David, he, my Uncle Greg and my grandfather Bob, they worked in HVAC. |
| 1:05.0 | So they fixed air conditioners, refrigerators, AC units for people in the Kansas City metro area. Just a blue collar family. |
| 1:15.0 | And one day, my dad took a service call to fix an air conditioner. He met a unique guy. You know, |
| 1:22.6 | we would probably look at him and say he's kind of a conspiracy theorist. My dad walked into this guy's house |
| 1:28.7 | and passed a room and saw pictures of Bigfoot on a wall, UFOs on the other, and tables with |
| 1:36.2 | maps just everywhere, which is scribblings, notes kind of just all over the place. And my dad, he wasn't |
| 1:41.3 | really interested in Bigfoot or the UFOs, but he's looking at these maps all over the tables. |
| 1:47.3 | And he just said, you know, what are all these little dots that you've indicated? |
| 1:51.2 | And the guy says, well, these are all steamboats that have sunk in the Missouri River. |
| 1:55.9 | And if someone goes down and if they find a boat and they sell everything they find, they will be rich beyond rich. |
| 2:04.6 | And my dad thought that was a pretty cool idea. That sounded more fun than fixing another furnace or air conditioner. |
| 2:10.6 | So my dad fixed the guy's unit, gets in his truck and calls up my grandpa and my uncle on their little CB radios and says, guys, meet me at |
| 2:19.5 | Jerry's. I got a story for you. So they all go to a fast food restaurant named Highboy. He was owned |
... |
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