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

In the 1940s, the White House was on the verge of collapse. Not politically, the actual house.

The structure had been around for 140 years, and it creaked and popped under the weight of decades of renovations.

In a 1946 letter to his wife, President Harry Truman, clearly spooked by all the weird sounds, wrote, quote,

The damn place is haunted, sure is shooting.

And so, three years later, Truman and the first family moved across

the street to Blair House, and the inside of the White House was demolished. Everything but the

exterior walls came down and was put back together in a painstaking three-year process. How did the

White House even get to that point?

Well, when the place was built over 200 years ago,

it was lacking certain modern conveniences,

and they got added in a hodgepodge of improvements over the years.

John Quincy Adams made an early renovation to the mansion,

bringing pumped water so he could water his

garden. His successor, Andrew Jackson, was the first to get running water inside. A bathing room

was added soon after. Miller Fillmore installed the first flush toilets, and his successor,

Franklin Pierce, built the first modern bathroom, and his successor, Franklin Pierce, built the first

modern bathroom. Some might say that was Pierce's most notable achievement in office.

The White House was a pioneer in telephone technology.

The first telephone was installed less than a year after Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone prototype.

Rutherford B. Hayes was president.

The Providence Journal reported that the president listened to his first call with a gradually increasing smile and then

...