One-Woman Show

move through the Cabinet audiobook. Danish Schwartz, host of the Amazing history podcast Noble Blood, joins me in the audiobook for little conversations in between the topical sections, adding a cool layer of insight into the stories that you'll hear. And of course, the hardcover is available everywhere. I specifically want to mention that Target has gone all in with me on this, putting the Cabinet of Curiosities book into

stores all across the country. Honestly, I'm blown away by the response the book has received in the lead up to launch and here we are, so please, please please grab a copy today, set it aside as a holiday gift for a history lover in your life, or selfishly clutch it to your chest and refuse to let anyone

else touch it. You do you. I'm just grateful that you find listeners are here, supporting the show and spreading the word and pointing friends and family to the book might be the easiest way to share cabinet with others. Find all the links that you'll ever need over at Grimandmild dot com slash curiosities, And again, thank you so much for helping this book become reality. And now on with the show. Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities,

a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. In Monawai, Nebraska, Elsie Isler's tavern is the only place to be. Well, that's because it's the only place, period, because Elsie Isler is the sole

resident of America's smallest incorporated town. Monawai, Nebraska's population is one. Monawai, located just over the border from South Dakota, feels remote and isolated. The county it sits in has just two thousand people living there. It's seven miles to the nearest gas station and sixty to the closest walmart, but Monawai wasn't always that small. The town was founded in nineteen oh two as a stop on the Chicago North and Western Railroad. By the nineteen thirties, it was a bustling

farming community. Back then, the town had a whopping one hundred and twenty three residents, huge by today's standards. Obviously, it had a school, a post office, a church, a grocery store, and even a jail. Over the years, though the world moved past Monawai. Modernization and the high cost of equipment and labor led many farmers to just leave. By the time Elsie and her husband Rudy bought the Monawai Tavern in nineteen seventy one, much of the town's

population had already gone. When the railroad shuttered in nineteen seventy eight, that was the final blow. The population dwindled to just two, Rudy and Elsie. When Rudy passed away in two thousand and four, that number dropped to one. Today, Monowai's main street is an unpaved dirt track. The downtown is completely shuttered except for three buildings Elsie's house, Rudy's library, which runs on the honor system, and the Monawai Tavern

with no noisy neighbors or town meetings. You would think being the last person in Monawai would be peaceful, but you'd be surprised how busy it gets living in an empty town. Ninety year old Elsie spends her days being a one woman town. She is the mayor, treasurer, and librarian, and she pays taxes to herself to keep everything up and running. She secures funding from the state for water and power, and even finds time to approve a liquor

license for herself every year. When she's not running the town, of course, she's running the Monawai Tavern, the beating heart of Monowai. For fifty years, she's been serving up the coldest, not to mention, the only beer in town. Step inside and you'll enter Elsie's world. Elsie is a diminutive figure. She greets customers kind heartedly from the grill. The wood paneled bar is covered with dusty paraphernalia, from vintage road

signs to black and white pictures of the town. The bathroom is an outhouse out back, and above the bar is a handwritten placard that reads, if you are grouchy, irritable, or just playing mean, There will be a ten dollars charge for putting up with you inside the tavern. You will see that while Elsie lives alone, she is far from lonely. Around fifty people stop in each day to grab a burger and chat with Elsie. That number balloons on Sundays when local farmers join the weekly running card game.

She can even count on some of her local patrons to jump behind the bar and wash dishes and sling drinks on a particularly busy night. Although she's got a close crew of regulars from the surrounding towns, people have come to visit Elsie from all fifty states and sixty different countries. Although the town and the tavern have been Elsie's life for the past fifty years, she has no desire to change things now. As she's told reporters, she

adores her life in Monowai. She loves meeting all sorts of people who come to the tavern and tell her about themselves over cheap beers. So if you're driving across Highway twelve in Nebraska and find yourself hankering for a bite, stop in and say hi. You can count on Elsie being behind the bar Tuesday through Sunday morning until night. Business is booming, even if the population is not. Visit London today and you'll get the sense that the city

doesn't truly awaken until after dark. From South Bank to Covent Gardens, dusk brings a flurry of activity. Hobgoers spill out of awnings and congregates on sidewalks, Tourists embark on midnight jack the Ripper tours accosted by hawkers and street performers, and on weekends the night Tube never stops running. But it wasn't always like this. Before the late Victorian era,

poor street lighting made getting around at night difficult. This was true in most major cities, but especially so in Britain's capital, which regularly grappled with waves of green and black fog. These pea soupers, as they were called, grew worse and worse during the Industrial Revolution, when factories and homes pumped smog from burning coal into the sky, creating

a dense, impenetrable haze. In a setting like this, going outside at night was a dangerous proposition, like stepping into a murky nether world populated by criminals and sterious figures. Members of the upper class could avoided as much as possible, but every now and then you didn't have a choice. Say a relative fell ill and you had to fetch a doctor, or maybe you just stayed at your club playing cards a bit later than you intended. And in

these situations, what was a gentleman or a lady to do. Well. If you were very rich, you might have a carriage and a few servants to run ahead with a lantern to light the way, but most other people were out of luck. You couldn't hail a cab in those days, but you could do the next best thing, call on the services of a link boy. These torch wielding children were everywhere in nocturnal London, as commonplace as double decker

buses are today. For a small fee, they would escort you to wherever you needed to go, providing lights and directions so that you wouldn't get lost on the way. The name linkboy comes from an outdated term for the cotton wick on torches that they used. They worked long hours for pitiful pay, typically charging just one farthing per trip that would be roughly a quarter of a penny in today's money, so perhaps it's not surprising that some

bolstered their income by partnering with thieving gangs. It was an easy task for a link boy to lead their clients in the wrong part of town, where older, more dangerous criminals were lying in wait. It's hard to say how often this actually happened, but it was a common enough fear that the link boys quickly gained a reputation for trouble. Over time, they became almost mythical figures, representing

the dangers that haunted London's streets. They were viewed as impish will of the wisps, who were more likely to lead you to your death than to your destination. But however society saw them, the link boys were never demons. Almost all of them were young males who had fallen through society's cracks. Many were orphans trying to survive on the fringes of a city that had never loved them. Each night, they faced dangers that terrified the city's adults

without any kind of supervision or protection. Around the end of the nineteenth century, electric street lights were gradually installed around London. These street lamps were significantly more powerful than the gas lamps that had preceded them, and far more effective at cutting through the city's infamous fog. As a result, getting from points A to point B became easier, and the demand for link boys plummeted. Soon they vanished entirely.

The children who had once lit up London's foggy streets would now earn their bread like the rest of the city's poor, toiling away in dangerous factories. Today, the link boys are all but forgotten. The best evidence that they once existed at all is the metal cones, which can

still be found outside older London houses. Link boys would use these devices, called snuffers, to put out their torches after delivering a client home, and thankfully they live on in a popular expression that we all know today, if someone wanted to say that a person they knew wasn't good enough to be their link boy, they would say, you can't hold a candle to them. It's yet one more piece of evidence of how these children were used, demonized,

and forgotten. They deserve to be remembered for their resourcefulness, their enduring spirits, and still burning long after the city closed its eyes. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey

in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore which is a podcast, book series, and television show and you can learn all about it over at the Worldolore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.