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. In the early 1980s, a week before Christmas, a woman walked into a supermarket-sized store

in Tyson's Corner, Virginia, and became so dumbfounded that she started talking to herself.

Where's the robot, she said, and the hairy monster?

A Washington Post story that recounted her muttering did not say she was delusional.

She was simply overwhelmed by a store that had become like McDonald's, an American institution.

Toys are us.

What we are is a supermarket for toys, founder Charles Lazarus once told the post,

we don't have a competitor in variety. There is none. Of course, many other

toy dealers would eventually come along, Target, Costco, Walmart, Amazon. But back in the 1980s,

and for several decades before, Lazarus was right. Nobody could compete. The Toy King,

headlines called him. You might remember one of his advertisements.

The Toy King never aspired. toys, the guy a million toys, the toys, the rocks that I can play with.

The Toy King never aspired to the throne.

He was a cryptologist, of all things.

After serving in World War II, Lazarus returned home to the nation's capital, hoping to start a family.

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