Hi there, this is Jeff Edgers. 50 years ago, the Rolling Stones headlined a free concert that

ended in chaos, violence, and death. It was called Altamont. I spent the last eight months reporting on it

to try to understand what it meant and why everything went so wrong. I talked to everybody I could,

from Keith Richards to the guy who built the three-foot stage.

You can listen to the story now on the All-told podcast.

Get it at Washington Post.com slash podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Hey, history lovers.

I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

One December day in 1955, Colonel Harry Schaup, a highly decorated Air Force commander,

was sitting at his desk in Colorado when the phone rang.

This was not just any old phone call either, which Schaup quickly realized. How? Because Schaup had two phones on his desk, one black, one red. The red one was ringing.

At the height of the Cold War, if you are Colonel Schaup, a commander in the early

iteration of NORAD, America's defensive warning shield against attacks, you don't want

the red phone to ring. It was wired directly to a four-star general at the Pentagon,

and when it rang, things got real.

Very real.

Except this time.

Colonel shout, he barked into the phone.

But there was silence on the other end,

until finally a small voice said,

Is this Santa Claus?

Shoup, by all accounts, was briefly confused and then fully annoyed.

...