Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
So I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's just the two of us and we're gonna do just fine.
I have a good feeling because this is stuff you should know. We've been at it for decades now.
Not decades, well, in different decades.
Right, that's how people get you. Yeah, they say stuff like that.
That's right, Big CoA for this one. It is about a very gruesome tragedy that we're gonna detail, and we're gonna talk about a little bit of the gruesome stuff, but not get to you know, detailed, because it was a terrible tragedy. But we just want to alert listeners, especially our younger listeners, that some of this stuff is pretty terrible. That is the events of the High Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri in nineteen eighty one.
Yeah, and that was just one year after that hotel opened.
Right, that's right.
This is the High Regency, a forty five story, seven hundred room hotel that opened in July of nineteen eighty It was a part of a big suite a complex called the Crown Center. Huh Yeah, the Crown Center complex, and it had retail, had housing, all kinds of stuff owned by the Hallmark Corporation.
That's where the Crown came from. Because remember if you turn a Hallmark card over sometimes it says Crown.
Well then their logo is a Crown.
Oh yeah, that too. But this hotel, Chuck.
If you go back and look at pictures of it pre disaster, it was magnificent. Like if you looked up, you would see that there was a high hall a walkway right over your head. And that was actually one of three that were kind of like the signature design of this atrium at the High Regions see Kansas City.
That's right.
And like we said, this thing had been open for about a year when the collapse tragedy occurred. During one of their they were hosting these weekend tea dances, which apparently were very popular in town. It was sort of an antiquated old school thing that they did, but the people of Kansas City ate it up and they were just growing bigger and bigger with every weekend. And on this particular weekend they had, you know, as they did, they had a live band playing, and I saw anywhere
from I saw a thousand people in different places. This is one of those things where like every time you see a different video, you'll get different numbers and different things, and these can be a little frustrating sometimes. But at least a thousand, yeah, and maybe as many as two thousand people there hanging out, partying and dancing in the lobby.
Yeah.
I mean, if you see there's footage of it, because I think one of the local TV stations was doing a human interest piece on how popular these this dance had becomes Friday night dance, and that place was packed with people, not just in the atrium on the floor, but also up at the terrace restaurant and on those three walkways that span the entire length of the atrium from one side to another on the second, third, and
fourth floors. So there was a ton of people. And the number I most commonly saw was fifteen hundred, so I guess everybody else split the difference.
Yeah, so it's crowded, it's packed full of people. A little after seven o'clock, the band comes back from a break to play their final big number of the dance contest. And you know, when you look at interviews with people from the time, they all describe hearing three loud popping noises or snapping noises. They sounded like, you know, some people said they sounded like gunshots going off.
In very quick success.
Floors the walkways of on floors four and two collapsed fully these cement and we're going to go over you know why this happened and what these are all were made of, but you know, steel and concrete, and it was super heavy and collapsed on hundreds and hundreds of people below.
Yes, so these each one I think, weighed something like thirty two tons, each of these walkways did, and one was above the number. The fourth story walkway was directly above the second story walkway, so much so that the second story walkway was dangling from the fourth story walkway. So in the fourth story walkway gave it came down, the second story hit the ground first, the fourth story
walkway hit the second floor. So there was like a stratum or a strata of layers of destruction of debris and people were pin chuck beneath two thirty two ton walkways that were in four segments. So each segment wasn't thirty two tons, but it was enough to really do a lot of damage, like immediately, like apparently it happened in the blink of an eye basically, and I mean, like it's really tough to get across, like how much
of a tragedy this was. Like there were couples dancing that were killed simultaneously by this stuff, So that means that there were people in Kansas City who lost both parents all at once, or lost one parent, or lost a friend. Like a lot of people were impacted by this tragedy and it just happened in just the blink of an eye.
Yeah, I mean it ripped from the ceiling and they just collapsed. The eyewitness accounts if you see any of the either contemporaneous footage or they've done interviews with people since and like follow up documentaries and such, it's just awful.
Everyone talked about how in like the some people set up to like five seconds afterward, it was just complete silence, like obviously the every the band had stopped and there was just a brief moment of nothingness and then all of a sudden screaming, wailing people in some of the most horrible pain and circumstances that you can imagine, which again we're going to get to a little bit, But it's if you really want to dive into the down the rabbit hole of what all happened to these folks,
you can you can look this stuff up online.
Yeah, there's there's actually a lot of really well written articles on it from out of Kansas City.
But the the in.
That chaos that ensued almost immediately, there were a lot of people pinned underneath. There were people who've been injured by debris, and then there were other people who were nearby and were just dazed and weren't really injured at all, but just couldn't believe what they'd just seen. And then there was a small kind of cadre people among the witnesses who just kind of immediately sprang into action. And
we you see footage of the immedia affrom at. You see men in suits and women in dresses like trying to pick through the debris and get people out of there as fast as they can. And all of this just started even before the fire department and police department showed up to start to take charge of things. People just immediately some people had an impulse to go in there and help.
Yeah, it was and you know, we should mention that the fire Department of the Cops. Everyone got there really really fast. Yeah, apparently they were also close to hospitals. I think there were three, it was called Hospital Hill, three hospitals that were really nearby that started taking people on. They were working, you know, basically into the night and into the next morning, with a final death toll of one hundred and fourteen people perished and more than two
hundred were injured. And I think they still listed as an American history, at least the largest structural disaster in history.
That it was until September eleventh, the largest in American history, and then it became the largest accidental structural disaster in American history. So, yeah, one hundred and fourteen people dead, one hundred and eleven like basically dead on the scene. Three more people who were gravely injured died later on from their injuries. And the people who survived there were incredibly survivors who were pinned under these walkways as slabs
of concrete, but they were in terrible shape. And there was a man named Mark Williams who was a survivor, and he's if you read about this or watch videos on it, he's very prominent. He's a very outspoken type of guy, and he talked a lot about being rescued. He was the last person rescued all the way at four thirty am, but he was at the bar that was directly beneath the walkways and realized what was happening
and started to run. Those walkways fell so fast that apparently he didn't even get his first stride, but his legs were astride and so he was smushed down into a split and that's where he stayed until four thirty am. And this happened at like seven pm, and he survived. He managed to live. And there were other stories like that too, a little eleven year old boy who was
pulled out of the rubble. A few people I think six or seven or something like that were did manage to survive, but the vast majority of people who were on or under the walkways when they collapsed died.
Yeah, there was.
There were situations where they had to amputate arms and legs on the spot just to get people out of there and give them a chance at living, and they did this kind of thing with chainsaws. There was one and this is really gruesome, but there was one horrific story of a guy that was, you know, trying to pull someone out and the guy's arm just comes off and he's holding it, and the officer on charge said,
the guy just set it down and left. And you know, we'll get to the PTSD that obviously followed, but a lot of these first responders, you know, there were some suicides later on. There was alcoholism and drug use and lives and shambles because they didn't have stuff, like you know, they went to work the next day. They weren't like, all right, we need to get you into counseling quick
like and start taking care of you. And that's one of the big changes that came out of this was PTSD therapy for emergency responders.
Yeah, and it had an impact on the entire city. I mean, people who weren't there, people who didn't even know people who were there, were still impacted for years and years. It just had it just left a blotch on the city. It was just such a horrible tragedy. And there are a couple of other stories that stuck
out to me of the people who died. One that did was a woman named Lynn Vander Hayden who's twenty two, and she would just happen to be walking through the lobby on her way to the Revolving restaurant on the top of the hotel. She was just passing through and she died. And then another one that stood out as a man named Oscar Grimm, who pushed his wife Joan out of the way and she lived and he died. But he managed to act that quickly that he was
able to save his wife's life. His last act on earth was to save his wife's life, which I think is remarkable.
Yeah, that's amazing. So they turn the you know, it basically becomes a war zone. Immediately, they turn one room into a triage center. They turned one room into a temporary morgue. They're trying to get people out of there and into the parking lot. It is summertime, so was still daylight during the initial efforts, but as darkness fell,
the power had been blown. So then it becomes dark overnight when they're still you know, sort of digging through there, either trying to get dead bodies out or trying to get people out that are still just wailing in the darkness. And not only that, but the sprinkler system had torn apart and a water pipe burst and for about fifty minutes this. You know, parts of this room were filling up with water, and you know, let's say you're trapped in a very small, confined space is filling up with water.
There were survivors that said they thought they were going to drown all of a sudden.
I didn't see that anyone definitively did drown, but the people on the bottom of the pile were definitely in danger of it for sure. It took forty five minutes, I think, to finally turn the water off forty eight forty eight and then but there was a quick thinking fire chief. I don't know if it was a deputy chief I saw. I didn't get their name, and there were a bunch of deputy chiefs there, but they were like, we need to bulldoze these front doors because they're acting
as a damn. So they bulldozed the doors and let the water out and kind of saved the day. But that was I mean, imagine being pinned beneath this rubble and now you might accidentally drown.
Like what a day.
Yeah, it was. It was a tragedy that still looms large.
And maybe we should take a break and talk about what happened and why this happened right after this.
So, Chuck, there were so many people and very fortunately, like you said, they were near a few hospitals, but they ended up requiring seventeen emergency rooms for this.
Yeah.
They construction companies came in and were donating forklifts, they were donating cranes, people were donating their own personal equipment. Everybody basically came and chipped in. You mentioned those front doors being knocked down. They ended up knocking holes through the entire front of the hotel, not holes like there was no front of the hotel because they had to
get a crane in there eventually. Because all the equipment that they were trying to get forklifts, I mean, you name it, to try and lift these concrete slabs, it was just pushing everything out of the way. So they ended up having to bring in, like, you know, the most heavy duty construction crane you can imagine to pull these things up eventually.
So I saw, Chuck that like there were all these amazing acts of people of generosity, of heroism, and just
people coming together. And I also saw from some of the people who were involved that within our of the tragedy, the mood did like a one to eighty, and people started to want to know what happened, what had gone wrong, and who was to blame, because it was very clearly something had gone terribly wrong with the structure of those skywalks, and people wanted to know why because again, this was just such a catastrophic loss of life it was almost incomprehensible.
But it started to settle in that it had happened and that somebody somewhere was to blame and people wanted to know.
Yeah.
So what they eventually figured out, and this was after some pretty amazing investigation by the National Bureau of Standards which is now the National Institute of Standards and Technology. They were I mean they did they X rayed material, they did metallurgical examinations of steel, they did, you know, physics tests, They did everything you could imagine to figure out what went wrong and what they landed on. It turns out they didn't really need to do any of
those tests. It was a design change that was, as it turns out, basically rubber stamped. The original design of these walkways that were again two and four were suspended above each other, and floor number three, which didn't collapse, was just offset from that one kind of over the
center of the atrium. But the original design called for these skywalks to be held together with one, you know, group of continuous steel rods that went through both floors, and all the sets of these hollow beams threaded with nuts. But this was like, you know, forty five feet or
so of threaded rod. And they said, you know what, threading wears out, and if you thread a nut forty five feet, that's a long way, and eventually by the time you get to where you want to go that things are not going to be as strong as it needs to be. So they changed the design to basically hang the second floor from the first the fourth floor using two sets of rods instead of one continuous set, which basically double the weight of what everything was hanging
on on floor four. There's a great YouTube video. I believe the guy is English. His name is Tom Scott, but he got an engineer, this guy named Grady from Practical Engineers, who put it like this. Imagine a long rope that two friends are hanging on. One person's hanging
above the other. That's fine. Then imagine that same rope with the same two people hanging but in this case, the second person is hanging from the other person's ankles, so the total weight is the same, but the stress on that first person or in this case, that first top fourth floor is different.
Yeah.
I saw a guy named Bill Quip Klapman who said flagpole instead of rope. So I think that kind of demonstrates Chuck that because it's such an easy analogy that you could have looked at these designs and I mean you specifically and me and been like, are you sure this is the same as what you guys originally had, Like as far as the math goes, it was, I wouldn't have So it was so radically different, But at the same time, it seemed like, yeah, it's a no brainer.
Of course that's what you're gonna do, because not only are those could those threads wear out? Like how you're gonna have to put the entire skywalk on each of those six threads, those six hanging rods threaded hanging rods, Like you're gonna have to slide them down, and of course you're gonna damage some of those threads and then they're totally useless. You won't be able to screw those nuts all the way up to the bottom of the skywalk any longer. So what you're gonna do? You just
cut it in half. It makes total sense. It's still the same general design. The two skywalks are hanging from the ceiling, but like you said, now, the second floor skywalk is hanging from the fourth floor skywalk. That was a catastrophic mistake because the skywalks themselves were in no way, shape or form designed to hold up their own weight, and they were attached on either end to basically portals that led to the hallways that continued on the fourth,
second and third floor on either side. Those connections to those portals were in no way, shape or form designed to hold the walkway up. So I think I said. They spanned the entire length of the atrium, which is one hundred and twenty feet, So these were one hundred and twenty feet long skywalks, and they had brass handrails at waist high, and then between that and the skywalk was class It was super cool looking, super late seventies early eighties design.
Right.
They were attached to the end hallways on either side, so they were basically like the hallways were just suddenly stripped of everything around them except for the part you walked on, and that's what crossed to the tre It's pretty cool. And they were attached to the hallways that continued on either side through portals, and the actual span itself was held aloft by three box beams that were
perpendicular to the length of the walkways themselves. Right, So you had basically it looked like a kid swing, but three of them, and then you had the walkway spanning those three things. Does that make sense?
I think so.
So the walkway was held up by those three box beams that were held aloft each by two hanging rods, and it just it just couldn't do it. What's surprising to me is that it lasted a full year after it opened.
You know, yeah, I mean, I guess we could go over the load bearing here. That seems to be a pretty good place for it. The NBS, like I said, he was doing the investigating. They you know, they did testing. They built their own version of this stuff, and they went and found that the load bearing capacity for just one individual connection was eighty one killo newtons, which I've never heard of before.
To clear things up, chuck, a kill a newton is equal to one kilogram meter per second squared, So I'm.
Sure that clears it up for everybody. Right, And that's just the you know, that's called the dead low. That's the way to the structure itself. If you have people on it, obviously it's going to be a lot different. And there were a lot of people on this. They were up there having a good time and dancing and partying.
They said that would add another eleven killo newtons, So eventually you get to a total you know, by the time it collapsed, a total weight of ninety five killer newtons, which was fourteen more than it was even supposed to hold to begin with.
Right, that's just like, that's how it was in reality. The thing that makes it even worse to me is that that doesn't meet code at all. Like code is that you would have to basically double that amount of load bearing capacity to have passed inspection. And yet these things passed inspection.
Oh at the time it was double yes.
Yeah, yeah, that wasn't a change. Like this thing passed inspection despite the code requiring it to be able to support one hundred and eighty one killer newtons. Like you said, they were able to support eighty one killer newtons. So
it was a terrible design. And the only explanation was that the actual explanation that when they changed that design from the singular rods, which is two guys hanging separately on a fire pole or a rope rather than hanging on their ankles, when they changed it, no one did the calculations to see if it would hold up. And that is exactly what happened.
Yeah, they you know, they did.
Of course, something like this happens, you're gonna inspect, like the welding, you're gonna inspect the steel.
I know.
They subpoened the actual steel manufacturer and the welding company and the GC and like basically everybody involved. And what they found was this thing basically like the welds would eventually rip. They had these two sort of sea bracket beams that they welded together to form one hollow, squared beam, and the rods ran through the middle of these and those did split, and the bolts basically pulled. You can see pictures where it just pulled right up through the
center of them. But they said that this would have happened anyway even if it was like a solid steel beam and not too welded together.
It wasn't because the welds.
It wasn't because of anything basically other than the fact that this design change made it almost inevitable.
So this design change was done by the steel fabricator on what are called shop drawings, and shop drawings are basically like a close up explanation of exactly how you're supposed to manufacture what the engineer or the architect wants right, And the steel fabricator says that they called the architect in charge, a guy named Daniel Duncan, and got his approval over the phone to change the rods from one single rod to two rods split in half.
And that was it.
There was no no one on the steel fabricator side did the calculations, and yet they stamped their approval on it. Dan Duncan didn't do the calculations, and yet he stamped his approval on it. And then a guy named Jack Gillham, who was the art of the engineer of record who Dan Duncan worked for and was in charge of this project, he didn't do the calculations and he stamped a steal of approval on that change as well. So it made it through. It made it through the process. That it's
supposed to go through. And when you're sitting there building this, or when you're sitting there putting all this together and you're looking at this and it's got all three stamps that it's supposed to have, you're pretty sure that it's the way it's supposed to be. People don't stop and question that kind of thing, or at least they didn't during this construction phase.
Yeah.
I think that's so important to remember, because I think people stop all the time and say things aren't safe and that we should revisit stuff. Yeah, but they didn't hear there was even apparently, you know, in interviews after the fact, there were crew from the build site that we're saying like they saw these beams sort of stressing and bending a little bit when they were putting this thing together. There was a collapse earlier, a huge section of the roof collapse on this building in the middle
of the night while they were building it. So this was a project that already had sort of one near tragedy averted on its hands, and it was just sort of pushed through and no one spoke up. And of course I'm not blaming the builder who saw the steel, but like, you know, everyone should be able to stand up and say and not just assume that someone else knows what they're doing when it comes to a project like this.
Yeah, I think that's essential, and I think that this disaster actually kind of helped change that too. That was one of the things that did change. So I'd say, Chuck, we take a break and come back and talk about some of the fallout from this.
All right, let's do it.
So before we broke, you mentioned a guy named Jack Gillham, who was the engineer in charge of the project.
Gillham would go on to be a public speaker.
He later went on to say, you know that the problem this is a quote was so obvious that a first year engineering student could have figured it out too.
Little, too late.
Obviously, there was a tribunal form by the Missouri Board of Professional Engineers in nineteen eighty four in the years following that ruled it they were grossly negligent. The phone approval was obviously grossly negligent, and there was quote a conscious indifference to professional duty.
So how does that happen?
It was a time where there was a lot of production and construction being rushed through, not just there but all over the place the late seventies in the early eighties, it just seems like there were a lot of fast track projects. There wasn't as much oversight, there weren't as many rules in place, and there was a lot of stuff ed. Who helped us out with this pointed out the Kemper Arena roof collapse in seventy nine. The Hartford Civic Center had another collapse in the year before in
seventy eight. The chat Plain Towers in Miami that collapsed in twenty twenty one, they were built in that time, in the late seventies and early eighties, So it just seems like it was a time where you know, people were probably just rushing around trying to make money. Greed is always a factor, I think in stuff like this and just trying to build bill build.
So yeah, but.
Yeah, and there were it was a cascading chain of failures to not pass the buck, to actually stop and look at things. But you can really lay at the most at Duncan and Gilliam's feet, and that tribunal that Gillam went through found, like you said, that he was grossly negligent, But the way that they proved his negligence was that his firm had a policy that the engineer of record on any project had to verify all plans and all changes them before stamping.
It with approval.
And the fact that he had failed to meet his own requirements, that tribunal said, that's proof positive that you were negligent in this. And then they also said, apparently he had a lot of pushback that he was giving. He would not accept responsibility. He deflected it at every turn, and it was so his attitude about it was so cavalier.
They said that.
They cited it as an additional breach of professional obligations. It was that bad that, like his refusal accept responsibility, was yet another piece of negligence that happened after the fact.
Yeah, and you know, if all this stuff sounds criminal, none of it rose to any kind of criminal proceeding.
It was a civil legal quagmire.
Like we said, it was owned by Hallmark Cards, this building and the ones around and there were one hundred and thirty plus lawsuits. They didn't all get together and kind of go after them together, which you know sometimes can happen.
They were fragmented.
Some people went at it alone, some people got together with you know a few other people. And there were one hundred and thirty suits plus total, seeking more than three billion dollars in damages. The hotel costs fifty million dollars to build to begin with, like the entire operation, And depending on the cases, they always settled, sometimes kind of right up until they were supposed to go to trial. But they did settle all of them in various ways.
There was a woman named Winfred Witscher who got five hundred dollars because her face got cut. There was a widow and four kids of Henry Botnan who got six hundred thousand dollars. Different federal courts would come in or different judges would come in and basically say all right, let's let's get together on a large settlement when it ended up being one thousand dollars to basically anybody who could prove they were there period, like whether or not
they were injured. If you could prove you were there, you would get a thousand bucks.
Yeah, and I guess waive any right to sue after that point. Well, sure, But they ended up paying out something like one hundred and forty million dollars. Most of it came from Hallmark.
Yeah, I saw one fifty well, and that's.
In early eighties dollars, I believe, right.
Yeah, I mean not close to the three bill.
No, no, no, for sure.
But they Hallmark ended up paying out, mostly because they were the ultimate owner of that hotel, and from what I saw, they were. There was a guy who was suing Hallmark, but Hallmark settled, and the lawyer had done all this extensive research and discovery and it basically found that Hallmark was really more culpable than anyone thought, and
Hallmark's Hallmark settled. The thing never got published, but I got the impression that's why Hallmark ended up spending the most money out of anybody to settle these claims.
And the.
Whole experience just tore the town apart because there were people who wanted to get to the truth and wanted, you know, retribution, and apparently the business community really wanted to kind of sweep it under the rug for a lot of different reasons. But I think a lot of the boosters were like, this is a black eye on the city. I saw it described as and the Kansas City Star and the Kansas City Times said no, no, no,
we're going to report on this. Even in the face of community pushback, I guess, and they won pulisers for their reporting for local reporting because they got to the bottom of what actually happened.
Yeah, there was a guy, like you said, there was a news crew on the scene anyway for the tea dance, and this cameraman was filming a lot of the aftermath, and he had people there that were victims that were coming up trying to like rip his camera away and start a fight with the guy, saying he shouldn't be shooting that stuff. But people came to his defense in
the moment. What I don't get is how I mean, I know Hallmark ultimately will pay because they were the parent company, But how did someone say they were more culpable than when it's really obvious that it was a design change that was rubber stamped by this design firm, Like, what did Hallmark? It's not like they ran that up the greeting card chain and they said, yeah, let's do that.
This is the impression I have that the whole thing was fast and loose and cutting corners was in part because Hallmark or the subsidiary Hallmark owned the hotel, was cheaping out and one of the one piece of evidence I saw that kind of puts that together was from Gillham, who one of his defenses was I asked for on site in spaces, at the metal fabricators, at the job site, everywhere, and Hallmark wouldn't shell out the extra money to make that happen. Had there been an inspector on site, then
this would have never happened kind of thing. So I think one of the reasons why the business community wanted to sweep it on the rug is Hallmark is the It was, at least at the time, the far and away the largest employer in Kansas City, very much beloved. A lot of people owed their livelihood to Hallmark, Their kids went to college because of Hallmark. It was a really well regarded company. And apparently that that was that facade or whatever, that image was attacked by the Times
in the Star. And that was one reason why some people were so against that reporting, because even if you didn't have anything to hide, but you still had an affinity for Hallmark because they were your employer, you might be upset at the news for reporting that kind of thing.
Even sure, a lot of the many millions of dollars were ear Mark for charities that Hallmark donated to as part of.
These plea deals.
Hyatt actually sued for four million dollars, but not Hallmark. They sued the design firm. They sued twelve different parties, including the design firm, the GC, the steel manufacturer that I could not find out what happened with those lawsuits, which was really frustrating.
But there were lawsuits all over the place.
Yeah, it was a mess. And as you would expect, and like I said to this, the shadow hung over the entire city for a decade. Apparently it came in a really terrible time because the city had just gone through a burst of prosperity, I think, and this hotel was kind of a symbol of that, and so it kind of really shook the foundations of this kind of
exuberant Kansas City. Like you know how like when you're the more excited you are, the more happy you are, the harder you fall when something comes along and just completely undermines that. I get the impression that that was kind of what up into Kansas City. It took a long time for it to recover. It wasn't until two thousand and eight that they even managed to erect a memorial because Apparently there's so many people who didn't want to think about it or talk about it or memorialize it.
But somebody, some of the survivor's family or some of the victims' families got together and created a memorial at a park just a block or so away, and Hallmark kicked in twenty five thousand dollars.
That's right to build the memorial itself.
It is still there, the higher regency is and those that atream is still there, and the walkway on the second floor is still there. Of course, it's not held up by it's not suspended. It is held from underneath by columns and obvious And you know, I mentioned the PTSD for first responders. That was a big push after this, and then also just you know, a general tightening up of and this wasn't just in Kansas City, this was
an international incident. So it really shook up the industry as far as how fast and loose things were going overall.
Yeah, I know the asse. The American Society of Civil Engineers came out and said, unambiguously, if you're the engineer of record, you have to verify every single change or you are completely responsible for anything that happens as a result of that. It's on you, like, just want to make sure we're clear about that. And that was that was a change that came directly from that and from Gillham himself.
Well, the buck has to stop with somebody.
It was a situation where everybody was finger pointing and when when you can point to a single decision that that caused this and not like well it was sort of this and this and this right like that these things had had they not even had that tea dance, eventually they would have collapsed.
They just weren't built correctly.
Yeah, it's uh, it's nuts.
I saw that even the original design wouldn't have met code for holding up people, wouldn't have reached those killing newtons that it needed.
You got anything else, No, I got nothing else. Big shout out to the people of Kansas City. I hope to do a show there one day. We did go to Lawrence, Kansas and Saint Louis in the general area, but we have not hit Kansas City yet.
So we'll do that one day.
Yes, one day we will for sure. And since Chuck just promised Kansas City we're going to come to a show. Of course, he unlocked listener mail.
I'm gonna call this just something a little lighter.
I think we could use it, yeah, because we inadvertently well, I'll just read it. Hey, guys, been listening to the show for about six years. My first time writing in to highlight an ongoing mistake that is nonetheless hilarious and I assume completely unintentional. During the twenty two Halloween episode, Josh voice one of the great characters in English literature, Megal in the toll House. But in subsequent episodes, when you guys, namely Chuck, tries to get Josh to do
the voice, he refers to him as Smiegel. Spiegel, of course, is the hobbit from the Lord of the Rings who's corrupted by the One Ring and eventually transformed into Gollum. After hearing this, I went back and red listened to the twenty twenty two Halloween episode again, and I can sure I can assure you that the toll House is
even better second time around. First, and now I can just imagine a mixture of Josh and Andy serkis narrating the dialogue of Smiegele Gollum as the Meagle character in question. I almost didn't want to write in because of this to make you aware of.
This hilarious error.
Though I assume someone will eventually beat me to it, but not true. Josh Bills Borrow, you were the first to write in. We did get a couple of people that wrote in after you though that Yeah, he were first, Ease and Josh is from Madison, Connecticut.
Way to go, Josh, thanks for that.
Thanks to everybody who wrote in to say the same thing, because it is pretty hilarious.
Maybe that's why I'm if I Migle's been off.
I've been accidentally doing sgle proughly. So well, we'll get to the bottom of that, everybody. I promise Megel will be back someday.
Someday.
Uh And if you want to get in touch of this, like Josh at all did, you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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