Strowger and Purple Reign Redux

99% Invisible

SiriusXM Podcasts and Roman Mars

Design, Arts

4.8 • 27.5K Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2013

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you are an undertaker in 1878 Kansas City, and you learn that your competitor’s wife works as a telephone switchboard operator and has been diverting business calls meant for you to her husband, you have a few potential courses … Continue reading →

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.
0:07.0	We have a little different episode for you today.
0:09.0	We have two stories. The first is an update to the Purple Hotel story that was episode
0:14.8	number 58 reported by Gwen Maxi. There have been some significant changes since
0:20.1	we reported that story, so we wanted to update you on that.
0:23.6	But first, I have a short story
0:25.1	that I performed live on the radio on KLW
0:28.6	in San Francisco very, very early in the morning,
0:31.9	but I've never released it as a podcast, so I thought I'd share that one with you today.
0:35.9	Here we go.
0:42.2	Omen Brown Stroger was an undertaker of all things.
0:47.0	Kansas City, Missouri got its first telephone exchange in 1878.
0:52.0	Telephone service is good for local business and the funeral business is no exception.
0:57.1	But at some point, Almond Brown Stroger of Kansas City noticed that he wasn't getting as many calls from potential customers.
1:05.3	He got really suspicious when a friend of the family died and he wasn't even called about
1:09.7	performing the funeral services.
1:12.4	The story goes, and the story is really hard to verify but I'm going to go with it
1:16.7	because I really like it the story goes that after some poking around Stroger
1:22.0	discovered that the wife of a rival undertaker in the area
1:25.9	was an operator for the local telephone company.
1:29.7	At the time, telephones were connected manually by female operators patching lines together on a gigantic
1:35.6	punchboard.
	...

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