Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's just us today and we know from experience that that's just fine. And this is stuff you should know. This guy had his finger in a lot of different pies. That stuff you should know s ten episodes on edition.
Yeah. I mean this is a interesting one because our friend Chad, Chad did our TV show, and Chad is doing a or has done a podcast, a highly fictionalized scripted podcast. Yeah, for our company, for iHeart you know, the company we own. Sure about Tom Slick. And when he was telling me about this, Owen Wilson is voicing it, and Sissy's is in it. I have a small part.
Uh oh really, I didn't know that.
Yeah, yeah, I'll get to that.
I also read that Carlton Fisk is in it.
Uh, I don't think so. The baseball player.
Yeah, no, it's Sissy's basics daughter.
Yeah, Skyler Fisk.
Skyler Fisk guy always confused with Carlton Fisk, the old white Sox player exposu.
I have white Sox, I think, among others. Uh, okay, but anyway, Chad was like, Dude, this guy, like he's the most interesting man that you've never heard of. And I found when I was online researching, like outside of San Antonio and maybe Texas in a broader sense, like there aren't a ton of people who don't think that Tom Slick is just the name of a cartoon that has nothing to do with this guy.
Yeah, did you ever watch Tom Slick when you were younger?
Oh? The cartoon?
Yeah? Sure, I never did. Yeah, I watched a lot of Rocky and Bullwinkle, but I'd never heard of Tom Slick until I started researching this cat.
Yeah, it was like a Georgia of the Jungle Partner right show. But yeah, I just I mean it was even I mean, it wasn't hard to find information online, but it wasn't as easy as a lot of people. And considering all the like kind of crazy extraordinary things he did in his life.
I ran into the exact same issue where like, there's a lot of stuff, I don't even want to say a lot, but there's a substantial enough amount of articles and sources about him online, but they all contain just basically like one off anecdotes. Yeah, and it's like, wait, I don't quite understand, like how did this incident like help form his outlook on life, Like there's not a complete picture of that dude. It drives me crazy, Yeah, because I like to understand the whole thing, you know.
I love how the parts kind of make up a whole, and I feel like with this guy, largely just have parts, even though you know, if I put him together, he's like a jigsaw with a bunch of missing places. But I still can kind of see the picture, and it's that he was a pretty cool and interesting dude and seems to have been a genuinely good dude too.
Yeah. Had Nicholas Cage pulled off the film adaptation of his life, all your prayers may have been answered, my friend.
Yeah, I heard that that one was canceled because he was doing it so weird. Every time Tom Slick ran into a problem or an issue and was upset, Nicholas Cage would just go for like five minutes and it took up. It added like a good forty five minutes to the film. Oh and he refused to let them cut a second of it.
I remember one of the funniest parts of the when Andy Sandberg was doing Nick Cage on SNL.
One of the.
Lines really got me one week was he was on the Weekend Update and they were talking about some movie that came out that he was in, you know, and he's in like fifteen movies a year, and it had all the elements of the Nick Cage movie number one it existed.
Also, Yeah, yeah, I like that guy a lot. Samberg, Nick Catche Yeah, and Andy Samberg is great too. And Tom Slick, Yeah, for sure. I like Andy Samberg, but I hadn't seen I never really watched Brooklyn nine nine. I saw the most work he did in That's My Boy, which I actually loved. Like, I don't think there's a Sandler movie out there that I don't at least.
Like I did not see that, And there are many many Adam Sandler movies that have not seen.
I know.
It's the shame of the podcast.
Yeah, but I did watch the first couple of seasons of Brooklyn nine nine and it's great.
Okay, Well, Adam Sandler wasn't on that as far as I know, so that doesn't.
Count, I don't think. So.
So let's talk about Tom Slick.
Huh, Yeah, I mean one of the problems with Tom Slick is separating fact from fiction because he's one of these guys that lives sort of an extraordinary, curious, filled adventurous life. And right off the bat, the fact that he was born on either May six and I'll so I saw May ninth. It just may have been the
way things were back then. This is in nineteen sixteen, and he was a junior to Thomas Baker Slick Senior, who was a guy that really rubbed off on his son because he had the same sort of adventurous spirit as an oil man.
Yeah, Tom Baker Slick Senior was king of the wildcatters, and a wildcatter is somebody who goes around just drilling oil wells in places where it's not at all clear that there's going to be oil. They're just very hopeful prospectors, right, Yeah, And that's how he spent like his early career and
then finally he just hit pay dirt. It was called I think the Wheeler Won Well in Bristol, Oklahoma, and it became one of the most productive wells in America that was pumping out like over three hundred thousand barrels a day.
I got another stat for you at the time, what would become Cushing oil Field was responsible for two thirds of the oil production in the Western Hymn sphere Man.
So, yes, I guess it goes without saying that Tom Slick Senior made himself and his family rich beyond their wildest dreams. And so Tom Slick Junior grew up a rich kid, and that's a huge thing. That was a huge like part of his formative upbringing. He was extraordinarily wealthy, but he was a rare rich kid that took that wealth and put it to good use and also used it to just totally free himself from, you know, the pursuit of making a profit or turning a dollar or whatever.
He did things because he was curious about stuff, and because he wanted to help humanity.
Yeah, but you know, when you're working that much, obviously you're not going to be around your family as much. Tom had a couple of siblings, and you know, Dad just wasn't around because they lived in Pennsylvania as a family. Obviously, the oil is out west, so Pops was in Oklahoma and Texas most of the time working these long hours, and those long hours did him in when he died
at only forty six years old. Of a stroke, which was a you know, a huge loss for young Tom because he even though Dad wasn't around that much, I get the feeling that he kind of idolized him and really revered him.
Yeah, he definitely followed in his footsteps too in a lot of ways.
Yeah, so he was fourteen years old at the time, and you know, it was a huge loss.
It was. I also saw that he'd become so revered and respected in Oklahoma that when he passed away, the oil derek's in the Oklahoma City field, which is one of the biggest fields in the country, they went silent for an hour. So every oil man in Oklahoma who had a Derek in this field stopped making money for an hour out of respect for Tom Senior. I think that says an enormous amount about him. Or maybe they were just hungry, could have been I guess sure.
So after Dad dies, a mom did something that was you know, pready common back then, or you know, not more common than it feels like it is now, which is marrying your dead spouse's brother or sister. Her brother in law was Charles Erschall because he was married to Tom's sister, Flow, who also died around the same time. This is all just bad luck. Of course, nothing weird went on, and they got together and got married.
Yeah, they had elaborate marriage, like we talked about in the Widow's episode. So from what I can gather, Charles Erschall was a good stepfather to Tom, and Tom was happy to have him. I mean it was his uncle already, right, so he was quite concerned. When he was seventeen, he was home from Exeter, the boarding school for the summer back at Oklahoma City. By this time, the whole family had moved to Oklahoma City and was living in a mansion,
the slick Erschel family. And in July twenty second, nineteen thirty three, while everybody's just kind of hanging out, machine Gun Kelly came knocking on the door with a few of his cronies and said, we are taking Charles Erschel with us. Which one of you, two men is Charles Erschael and Urschel's friend Walter Jarrett was did one of the most stand up things a frank can do when you're being kidnapped.
Yeah, he just stood silently and sort of nudged his nose over towards Erschel.
His eyes are going like way left over here.
No one picked up on that, now I'm kidding. He Neither one of them said anything. And you know, I guess they were sort of together in this, and so they took him both and that, you know, that's what happened. They kidnapped both these guys. They would eventually find Jarrett's ID. So they dumped him on the side of the road and took Erschel to rural Texas, to a ranch and demanded two hundred grand in ransom, which is close to five million bucks today.
Yes, this was a hugely consequential event, right, so that Tom Slick Junior tangentially involved in because when Charles Ershall was being held, he really kept his head about him and depending on who you ask e there, he noted the time of day, the times of day that a train passed by nearby, or that planes flew overhead to try to get an idea of where he was. He put his fingers on everything he could to leave fingerprints, and he also counted the steps anywhere he went when
he was blindfolded. So when he was released, and thankfully he was released unharmed for a two hundred thousand dollars ransom, he was able to tell the FEDS like, hey, here's everything you need to know about going and finding this ranch where they took me, and they did. They found it rather quickly.
Yeah, he was also timing how long the trains were and if you know how many trains are passing in a sort of general area, how big these trains are. I think that allowed them to literally go to train schedules in that part of Texas and figured this thing out. So he was he was a very smart guy. And there were you know, they arrested Machine Gun. Kelly fled, but they arrested the other guys. They were able to track down Kelly in Memphis and he went to Alcatraz for the rest of his life.
Yeah, so not only did he go to Alcatraz, Machine Gun Kelly did. But this is where we talked about in the jaeg Or Hoover episode where G Men was coined because they went to come get him and when they busted in the door, he said, don't shoot g Men, And that's where their nickname came from. Just like we talked about in the Hoover episode, that happened from this.
So this is what I'm saying, Like Tom Slick, his life really spreads out into a lot of different stuff you should know episodes, and yet we'd still never ran across him in our research, which is strange to me.
Yeah, he was a big backer of science. That's something that you're gonna see that kind of pops up again and again in his life right stemming from his just natural curiosity. And he was a very very smart dude.
He went to Yale and was into genetics and was really and this was a time when you know, in the nineteen forties Repolice Believe it or Not magazine and the idea of like cross breeding animals and cryptids and all these things were just it was sort of big news, or if not big news, something people were kind of into at the time. And he supposedly kept a list of like animals that he wanted to try and cross breed.
When he read about a hog goat that was a hote that was living in Arkansas, he drove to Arkansas and bought whatever it was. I don't even know if it was like poor things or what he ended up with, but whatever he brought home, he tried to breed it on his own farm with no luck.
It was definitely not a hog goat because it's physically and genetically and biologically impossible for them to reproduce. So I didn't see what it was either, just that that didn't exist. But that didn't stop him from trying.
Did you really look that up?
I mean, I was like, I got to see this thing and there was nothing. Nothing hope, hog goat, hog goat cross breeding, I know, but I thought like, surely there's there's something that this way. I couldn't find any reference to it. I also saw in some places that he basically like went to go buy it and realized that these people didn't even exist, and certainly the hope didn't exist, but he went and tried it anyway because
he really liked the idea of it. And this was when genetics was really new and cutting edge, and this guy's into it while he's still at Yale, you know.
Yeah. So one of the things he successfully does cross breed is cattle. He looked at the Scottish angus, which is you know, prized for its excellent quality beef. They're very, very fertile. And then he looked at the Brahmin cattle from India and he was like, these things are great. They're disease resistant, they're pest resistant, they are they do well in drought, and they're very very maternal, much more maternal than the angus. So let's get them together. Put
three aids Brahmin with five eighths angus. And this was one of his big noted early successes. When he was in his early twenties. He created the Brangus cattle breed that is still around today and like highly sought after.
Yeah, yeah, I saw that that. People still love that, and it helped introduce the angus cattle into Texas where they would not have done very well before.
Yeah. But here's the thing though, Like this sounds cool like and you think, oh, this guy's like a cattle guy. Now he's a rich kid looking to make more money on this cattle deal. He was doing it because he wanted to introduce a breed of cattle that did better in places where there was drought and there were pests and disease. So one of his business partners was like, he didn't care about making money on this. He just he hoped it would help people in hot countries.
Not just he didn't care. He didn't give quote hoot and hell about making money on brangus.
Well, I wasn't gonna say it.
I say, we take a break and come back, and you meant and he's into cryptids. Let's talk about that in a second.
Okay, all right, we'll be right back.
So I don't know if we said or not, but Tom Slick got he developed a love of cryptids, with that he shared with his father. His father passed on like a love of stories about Locknus Monster, the Abominable Snowman, all sorts of adventurous stuff like that, and like you said, it really rubbed off on Tom Junior, and so at
a pretty early age I think. Yeah, he was still at Yale and with some of his buddies, he packed his red Buick onto a steamership and went to Europe for a summer where they drove around Europe and one of the top things on his list was to go look for the Lochness Monster. And one of the things you'll kind of notice about Tom Slick is that when he's doing these things that today in retrospect seemed very weird and flaky, at the time there was like a
lot of evidence that these things existed. This was nineteen thirty seven. The next year, the Celacanth would be rediscovered. Like it was just kind of in the air that there were things out there that Sidnce hadn't identified yet, and perhaps the Lockness monster was one of them.
Yeah, and the very very famous picture of supposed NeSSI was just three years prior to that, so it was all the rage at the time. Personally, he got married pretty quickly after Yale and got divorced even quicker to his first wife, Betty. I guess long enough to have a son named William, but really took after his dad more ways than one because he was a very busy guy. He was a workaholic. He did spend more time around
his family get the idea that his father did. But if you know, the YETI came calling, he would go find the yetti or try to find the yetti, or if he wanted to open up a new scientific research center, of which he opened geez, how many like five of him while he was alive. Yes, then he would spend his time doing that because it was he thought it was very worthwhile and it.
Was the call of the Yetti. By the way, is er.
Nicolas Cage he played the Yetti and dump slick and the singer right Yeah, it would have been like adaptation.
Yep, exactly. So you said that he was a little closer with his kids than his father. I think one of the ways he did that was on a lot of his adventures, he'd bring his kids along with him, and I know, at least his son Charles Chuck, even Chuck like has very fond memories of going on adventures with his dad. So yeah, he was definitely closer to his kids, at least experience wise, than he was with his father.
Yeah. So one big foray into the scientific side of his life was Science City. It was this dream project that he had had for a long time. It's very sort ofeen mid nineteen thirty's name, I guess. So he opens up Science City, gets the ball rolling. By nineteen forty, they had moved to San Antonio, which is where you'll find Tom Slick Park and Tom Slick Everything basically, which includes a little NeSSI statue which is kind of cool.
Yeah, but you can totally tell it's fake.
Yeah, yes, not the real thing. So he bought sixteen hundred and two acres about eight miles west of San Antonio that would eventually grow to about four thousand acres for the S. Eessar Ranch, which is just a long way of saying SR for scientific research. And he was twenty four years old, and this is where all that brang is stuff happen.
Yeah, and you said that he founded five research facilities in his twenties. Three of them are still around. One of the first ones he established was the Foundation for Applied Research far Faar or Fayre, depending on how you say it, and that is still around. That's now the Texas Biomedical Research Institute. And as we'll see, these things have had like significant contributions to science in the world since they've been around.
Yeah, for sure. And we're all those in his twenties.
From what I understand, this is all over like a few year period.
Yeah, jeez, that's incredible. He tried to enlist in the Navy after Pearl Harbor in nineteen forty one, but he didn't have good eyesight, so they said, you are not fit for wartime duty. So they commissioned him in nineteen forty two as a lieutenant and right away said, all right, you know what you're good at is running big operations. Why don't you go work for the War Production Board and kind of help this idea that we have of changing over factories for making whatever they're making to helping
out with wartime production. From there, he went to DC working for the Board of Economic Warfare, which was actually in Santiago, Chile. And this is where things get a little like who knows what happened because his letters and diaries weren't around. The records from what he did in Chile were destroyed, and we'll never know if or not he was like a spy in South America, which a lot of his family and other people said they thought he was.
I think we know one hundred percent that he was a spy in Chile at the time. Oh really, just from the circumstantial evidence.
Oh okay, yeah, I thought you meant you found something better a man.
You could write a book if you found that. But yes, the family lore is that he was working in South America as basically a Nazi catcher, helping local governments and the US catch Nazis who'd escaped, which happened there. Yes, that's the thing. It happened while he was there. That's one of the operations that was going on in South America. And he was just an American businessman, but he was also in the Navy, and no one knows why he was stationed there. He never talked about it or told anybody.
I would say that that's pretty much certain, because if you combine that with another thing that he may have been operative for or at least related to some operatives, I think that it's pretty certain he was. That's my two cents at least.
All right, So he got married again, this time in nineteen forty seven to a woman twelve years younger. She was eighteen at the time, and they had three kids. They also got divorced. You know, again, he's not around a lot and probably not the most attentive husband when he has all these things going on, and he had he you know, he's somebody I'd look up to in a lot of ways after sort of finding out how he worked, certainly not as a husband, but how he
worked as a curious person. He seems like the kind of guy that he would read and read and read just about everything that he could and just soak up as much knowledge as he could. And when he came across something that piqued his interest in a particular way or that he couldn't figure out, he had the resources and the money and the time to you know, if not solve it, try to solve it by just saying like, all right, pick up the phone, let me call whoever I know, or write a letter to whoever I know
who might be able to help out with this. And then depending on what they say, I might hire some people to go to work and try and figure this stuff out. I might work on it myself and whatever the outcome. He was just about trying. He wasn't afraid of failing. He was just trying to find out stuff and made his best efforts to even if it didn't work out.
Yeah, just finding out that no one seemed to know the answer that was enough for him. You know, of course he wanted to find the answer to the question he was looking for. But yeah, he said, I don't believe in failure, only outcome, like he said, And that's just what a great motto, you know. I mean that just ye completely transforms your outlook on life.
Yeah, I mean, it's to be clear, it is a motto that you can afford when you have that kind of privilege, when you can just be like, hey, I'll fail, Like what's the big rub? Sure, and he had that privilege, but he you know, in his favor. He didn't use that privilege to sit around on a beach and drink coconut drinks like he was trying to better humankind.
Yeah, and I mean, like, yes, that's a great point, but I also think that you can apply it to all sorts of different things in life, you know, not necessarily just your success or your wealth or anything like that.
Yeah, for sure.
So there were a lot of things that he used this technique for that came to fruition. Some things may or may not exist, We're not one hundred percent sure. But one thing that he definitely did in coinvent that did have some consequence to it was what's called a lift slab method of basically creating a concrete roof. Those are very expensive to make. That's very difficult to create them in place on the roof, and he basically figured out a technique to make it on the ground and
then lift it into place. Sounds kind of basic and low hanging, but apparently it saves a lot of cost and it works. So that's a pretty good example of him just kind of putting his mind to figuring a better way out. It's boring, but it's still a good example.
Yeah, I mean that wasn't just for roofs. It was I mean feeble to ten story building. He would build all ten floors on the ground and then hydraulic those suckers up there.
That's man, what can't you do with hydraulics?
And we should also mention the lift slab. It was simultaneously developed by another guy named Philip Utes. Tom Slick got the patent and you know, gets all the glory for that, but a lot of people still call it the Ute's Slick method.
Beautiful.
He developed a breed of mice. This was early in chemotherapy treatments that were very useful in testing. We mentioned that Brangus. I think my favorite is that he had a thing against cowls in your hair, so he invented a hair tonic that could supposedly reverse those calys.
Yeah, in particular Brangus Cowlyx give me her cal stinkless skunks. Apparently. Did you see anything about this? I couldn't really find anything on that.
I found nothing on that.
I don't know if it just went beyond the idea stage. One thing that definitely happened was one of his institutes. It might have been the Southwest Research Institute or the Texas Biomedical Institute, had a huge role in producing some of the first oral contraceptives. That's fairly world altering, sure. And then another one that did not come to fruition was called We're artificial pecans pecans however you want to
say it. He decided that the trees were way too water intensive, especially from the perspective of Texas, and so he wanted to find a way to create pecans that did not need to grow on trees. And like I said, it didn't get anywhere. I cannot, for the life and me find what the heck he made the artificial pecans out of. But he definitely gave it a try.
So we've talked a lot about his, you know, work as a funder of science and a believer in science kind of maybe not weirdly, but he was also a guy that really loved the unexplained and the mystical and was not although he believed in science, he wasn't he didn't necessarily think that those walls couldn't be explored beyond, you know. So he went to India, as a lot of people did in those days who were seeking enlightenment in the fifties, saw people walking on hot coals, supposedly
saw Lamas and Tibetan monks levitating off the ground. This is one of his claims.
He basically went to a Tony Robbins convention.
Does he levitate lamas?
He does all sorts of stuff like this that, yes, he does pseudo scientific things like.
This, or maybe a David Blaine performance.
Yeah.
Yeah, I tried to learn that method, but I did it okay for a little while, but it wasn't great. What levitating, well, the illusion that you're levitating, which is what David Blaine did. It's a trick obviously, isn't it.
Essentially you're basically standing on your toes.
You're standing on one toe. You have people at a certain angle where when you're raising all of your body weight up on the one toe, you're blocking it in with your other foot and like pant leg and so it's all about the angle at which you see it. So you can't see that that one toe is on the ground, but it looks great if you can, if you can do it well.
So I don't understand why you call it levitating. I think you could just get as much awe out of people as saying like, I'm standing on one toe right now. Everybody, how nuts is that?
Yeah, I'm a a tow bodybuilder. I've got the strongest tow right.
So this is a really consequential time in Central Asia, East Asia. In Tibet, the Dalai Lama had been oh, I don't know the word, but basically found and identified just several years before. This is the Dalai Lama as we know him today. And around this time, he was about twenty one, and China had invaded Tibet, and all of a sudden, the Dali Lama found himself is like the head of the Tibetan government. Everybody said, you're the guy, what are you going to do about this? And there
was almost nothing he could do. There were Tibetan freedom fighters, Tibetan resistance rebels, and they were just getting crushed left and right by China. And Tibet was a place where China had invaded. And so now anytime you saw an American you can pretty much guess that if they were CIA, they were backed by the CIA. They were giving information
to the CIA. The CIA had like a twenty year program in Tibet, and one of the things they did was help get the Dali Lama out when it became clear that the Dalai Lama needed to get the heck out and create a government for Tibet in exile, which he still runs today. The CIA helped that happen, and so did in some way, shape or form, Tom Slick had some sort of hand in it.
All right, maybe we should take a break and sounds like a good little cliffhanger and come back and talk about why he may have been over there in the first place. Right after this, all right, So where we left off was a little tease about Tom Sluck potentially maybe helping to get the Dali Lama out of Tibet. Why was he there? He had met him already, so that was a you know, before the break, we were talking about a trip that he took over there. Tossed
that one aside. He goes home, starts living his life, feels a little bit more enlightened, he can meditate a little bit. Sure, worthwhile trip, but he, just like his father, was fascinated by the idea of the Yeti, the Abominable Snowman, and the Himalayas, And like you mentioned earlier, like this was a time when you know, it's kind of right in the middle of all these yetti sidings, there were
new species being discovered. And so he was like, hey, listen, I'm not some some wacko who just you know, believes in these weird cryptis he cryptids? He said, I think there's something out there that maybe like the link between man and animal. And I think there are at least two species. There are the big, tall eight footers with black hair. There were smaller red haired guys. And I think it's like a pre human man that's been basically hidden for thousands of years in the Himalayas.
Yeah, and I mean Westerners have been trying to climb the Himalayas for decades by this time, and as they came back, they would bring stories from the locals about the YETI, the abominable snowman, and so, like you said, like it wasn't just totally like off the charts or super fringe to mount an expedition for this, and he did, and like he was looking for a missing link, remember his fascination with hybridization. He felt like that that's what
those things were. They were a missing link out there. They weren't some undiscovered animal. They were some human relative that had somehow survived in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest or the wilds of the Himalayas, and he wanted to find one. I don't know if he wanted to kill and stuff it because he was a hunter, but he definitely wanted to at least or meet one, shake his hand, buy him a steak dinner. I'm not sure, buy him a Brangus steak dinner.
Pretty good. He actually did change the way that those expeditions went down, because most of those had been kill and catch or catch and kill expeditions for kind of anything like that, and he changed it to more research base and hey, let's see if we can get something alive.
Good. I'm glad so he did. He mounted three different expeditions I think the first one was in the winter of nineteen fifty six, which you're gonna go to the Himalayas in the winter seems like poor planning to me. And while he was there, he found a footprint thirteen inch long, bare footprint, and he made a plaster cast of it and became one of his prize possessions. He actually kept it on his dining room table and like if somebody wouldn't bring it up when they were a
guest at his house. He would just kind of quietly nudge it over toward them until it was like in their face, on their plate even sometimes, and they'd be like, oh, okay, what is this? If I may ask, and he'd say, oh, well, funny you should ask. Let me tell you about this abominable snowman footprint.
Yeah, he actually got a few footprints, and a couple of them were very noteworthy. I mean, they weren't yetty, but they were noteworthy, and that every other footprint had been snowfootprints, and he got a couple out of the mud, which was I guess sort of a bigger deal, and also supposedly brought back some hair samples. Again not a yetty because there's no YETI but he didn't know that at the time. No, give the guy break. He's trying to find what's true and what's not true, just like us.
So two years after the first one he launched a second expedition. This one was like fully kitted out. He and a friend spent plunk down thirty grand in I guess nineteen fifty eight money to fund this expedition. There was a photographer, a documentary filmmaker. There were professional trackers. They brought in a recons since plane. They had tranquilizer guns, which supports your idea that this was not a catch
and kill. And then also he brought three blue tickhounds tick bloodhounds, which are really well known as tracker dogs, and he even put little snow boots on them to help them through the snow, which I thought was very conscientious.
Totally, he didn't go on this one. He just you know, helped fund it because he had bailed on a bus on the previous expedition that had lost its breaks and pretty much tore up his knees permanently from that point. So there are some great pictures of him with his knees all bandaged up, but he's still, you know, smiling away, looking like he stepped out of a Banana Republic ad.
Is he giving the thumbs up?
There was no thumb when he had a cane in his hand.
Yeah. So that second expedition was there for nine months, came home empty handed, obviously, or else we would all know that there was such a thing as the Yetti. And the third and last expedition, this is where the CIA business kind of comes in. He funded two brothers, Peter Burn and Brian Burn, and Peter was a well known outdoorsman hunter and he'd been searching for the Yetti for a couple of decades by this time. So Tom
Slick financed a third expedition with these two brothers. And here we come to yet another stuff you should know episode I guess, the one on the Yetti or the Abominable Snowman, where we talked about this story where a Yeti thumb that was being on being displayed at Pangbosh Temple, the Buddhist monk temple, was stolen, and it turns out it was Peter and Brian Byrn who stole it on behalf of Tom Slick, who asked them to steal it on behalf of doctor Osmond Hill, a primatologist from the UK.
Yeah, and this is this is probably the most famous story about Tom Slick because of a certain coken sp here that we're going to introduce. But he it was actually a finger and a thumb. They gave these guys, these brothers, like another finger to trade, or not trade, but to swap out and hope no one would notice. I guess and said here's you know, here's a thumb. Take it over there, see if you can swap them out. Supposedly, the Burn brothers talked about giving a big donation to
the temple. No one knows exactly what went down, but they left with that yetti thumb and finger and what they were told was a YETI scalp was another piece of piece of YETI. I guess that they got. So. I've seen this a couple of ways and stories. I've seen that a certain Hollywood actor was in on this from the beginning and it was all part of the plan.
And then I've also seen that after this happened, the Burn brothers went to Calcutta and just had dinner with Jimmy Stewart and his wife at the Grand Hotel and were it from there got on board and just said, and my best Jimmy Stewart, if you need help getting the thumb across the border, I can. I can put it in my wife's underwear bag.
That was great. I was really hoping you're gonna do something like that.
It's okay. I used to do a decent one, but it's been a while.
It's good, especially for being rusty. I think the way we told it was that he happened to be there and offered I don't remember knowing that he was supposedly part of the whole thing.
It doesn't really matter, honestly.
No, he definitely smuggled what was thought to be a Yetti thumb across the border out right out of India and his wife's lingerie case back to the UK, where he gave it to doctor Hill, and doctor Hill promptly just stopped talking about it. I guess he probably did some sort of examination and was like, yeah, this is not a Yetti thumb and filed it away in the archives of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, where it was lost until I leave the twenty first century.
And then finally in twenty eleven, Edinburgh Zoo researchers did a DNA test on it and they said this is a human finger and thumb, and they made the little finger gun for the photo that was published all over the world.
Why do I get the feeling at the time if they would have found that thing and thumb in the wear bag at the airport, that she could have just been like, stay out of that, that's my thumb, that's my finger. Stay out of my underwear. They would have just been like, oh my god, I'm so sorry, and like just giving it back to her.
I can't remember where I read it. It was years and years ago. We may have talked about it. But when there's when there's a personal massager found in luggage that's being searched in front of the person, like, I think the TSA is instructed to just pretend it doesn't exist, like they didn't see it.
I can't remember where we are, surely I definitely remember us talking about that.
That was a while ago, so yeah, I think back in the late fifties you could have done the same thing with a yetti finger, considering it was in her underwork case.
Yeah. The other thing that they brought back was that YETI scalp. Obviously not a YETI scalp. It was a type of Himalayan goat. So they struck out on all fronts. Too bad, But perhaps perhaps and I saw definite confirmation that Peter Burn at the very least was helping the CIA get people in and out of Tibet. There was a guy named George Patterson that was doing work like undercover work, and he helped get him in and out. So the idea is that sort of kind of closing
the loop on the Dali Lama. Is that because of Peter Burn's work with the CIA getting people in and out that the New York Times even wrote a story in April of fifty seven called Soviet Cy's espionage in US snowman hunt this YETI I don't know if it was a complete front. I think the are also looking for the Yetti, but they were like, well, since they're over here, we'll do a little bit the CIA work for the guys right exactly?
And I guess it's not definite. But I did see in at least one source that Peter Burn had a real hand in getting the Dolly lam out.
I love that maybe he offered him his literal hand.
He offered him a YETI thumb, come with me, big guy.
So YETI eventually became a bigfoot as far as Tom Slick's passions went, because a little closer to home he could take take the kids on that trip, didn't have to go to the Himalayas. So he became a serious bigfoot hunter, including like hooking up with people who are until very recently, we're still big and noteworthy big foot hunters.
Yeah, one of them was Peter Burn. Peter Burn went on to be one of the big well known big foot hunters. When he went with Tom Slick, that's kind of where he got the taste for it. And he's like, hey, Tom, you go back home. I'm gonna to stay here. And he even wrote a book called The Search for Bigfoot Monster myth or Man. So I think that's a great nineteen seventy six in particular title for a book on bigfoot.
Oh totally. So back to his private life, you know, he got divorced that second time, and after that he was like, you know what marriage is not for me, but what is for me is being a millionaire playboy and you know everything I saw said that he was very upfront with the women that he coborted with and was like, hey, I'm out to have a good time. This is not going to get serious. It's kind of a sort of a touchy way of saying. He had
a lot of girlfriends. At the same time, his niece wrote a book about him and knew a lot about him, and she said that at one point I found a Christmas list from nineteen fifty eight and he would get these lists together, like, hey, get these gifts for these very specific women, send it to Nikit Neman Marcus and like take care of him. So on the fifty eight list he had Annette, Kathy, Cheryl, Cynthia, Irene, Jane, Jerry, Mary, Nancy Nell, Sandra, Silvia, Tony, Topsy, and three Hellens, So
seventeen women scattered all over planet Earth. He was, you know, he was having a good time.
It sounds like it sounded just now like you were halfway through a shell Silverstein poem, especially when Topsy makes an appearance.
You know, yeah, who's Topsy.
There's one other thing we need to mention about him is that he wrote not one, but two books arguing and laying out plans for world peace, which you know, not everybody's got those under their belt. So I read at least one review of it from the fifties and they were like, this is actually pretty good.
Yeah, I mean again doing like the good work. Sadly, that good work in that life was cut very short in a tragic way when a night teen sixty two, he was coming back in a little plane after a peasant hunting in Calgary with some friends and their plane basically disintegrated in mid air and bad weather over Montana. And he died at the same age as his father, at just forty six years old, and is buried at Mission Burial Park there in San Antonio.
Yeah, and like we said, those science foundations that he created went on to do some pretty amazing things. In addition to oral contraceptives, vaccines for hepatitis A through c HIV, AIDS, ebola virus. They had a big role in the COVID vaccine. And they also another one develops things for NASA electric cars, the oil and gas industry. They're the kind who, like they don't make the stuff, they help other people make this stuff through their research.
They make this stuff better.
What company is that, BASF. That's exactly what it is, thinking you.
Yeah. Also again as another coda, he was a great patron of the arts, one of the great art collections of a private American citizen, most of which is at the McNay Art Museum. And like we said, that movie with Nick Cage didn't happen, But the podcast Tom Slick colon Mystery Hunter is out now with Owen Wilson, Yeah, playing Tom Slick and Skyler Fisk and Skyler Fisk and her mom says he's basic, and Chad sent me a list. I mean, it's just sort of a murderer's row of
great actors. And this was literally yesterday, and I was like, huh, I would have loved to have done a voice. So he, yesterday, like an hour after that, said he felt bad, and I was like, oh man, I mean, don't feel bad. I was just kidding, but I always want to do dumb voices. And he about an hour later he said, I got something for you. I was like, really. He was like, can you do it today? He said you're opposite Sissy Spacek and I was like, are we going
to zoom together? And he no, you just record your lines and we marry them to hers. But technically I'll be in a scene with Sissy Spacek playing seventy year old former governor of Texas, Governor Nielsen, not a real person. A lot of this is highly fictionalized. It's a you know, it's a fun podcast. It's not like they stick to the facts when they can, but it's it's an entertaining kind of thing. So if you've never listened to a scripted fictional show, give it a shot, because I listened
to a couple of episodes, and it's super cool. And you can hear me doing my best kind of old old school levon helm accent.
Can we hear it?
Yeah? I guess we could play a clip. Yeah, let's do that, all right, here's a little clip of me, you guys, finally, Governor Chlier. It's so lovely of you to come to this little she big for dad.
Little I heard there might be some reveals about the mysterious Tom Slick. As a kid, I always thought your father lived a double life. Oh yeah, Claire, remember when we had those sleepovers at your house, Sure and your dad. He'd tell us these wild tales about mysteries the world and never known holy men who could levitate a tunnel on the Amazon line with diamonds, the abominable snowman that he said roam the.
Roof of the world.
He told those tales like he lived them, So I guess I thought he always.
Had way to go.
Chuck, Thank you. He was an old Texas guy like that.
Get off my claim, you varmit awesome? So where where can you find this, Chuck? Where can you find this podcast that you're starting in?
I mean, anywhere you can get your podcast.
I guess that's right, isn't that what they say? That's right, it's called Tom Slick mystery Hunter. Right, yeah, awesome, Well Duck I said, yeah, I was just mentioning a podcast that he started in and we've fallen backwards into listener mail.
All right.
I'm gonna call this random fact because that's what Adam called it when he wrote in in the subject line, Hey guys on your Luddites episode, you mentioned some places like Lancaster. Sure, that's the origin of the term sheriff.
I love this or this email?
Sure or Shire, I guess, just like in Lord of the Rings County Reeve. So the county sheriff was originally the shire reeve and was shortened to shere reef or sheriff. All this info was bestowed upon me by a professor of criminal justice at Atulmuss University in the early two thousands. Go Rebels, I've been listening for several years. Look forward every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Keep it cool, guys. That's from Adam.
All right, thanks a lot, Adam. That's a great one. I'd never heard that before in my life, and now I know. And if you want to be like Adam and let us know something we never knew before in our lives but would be happy to know. Please send it to us via email. It's stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
The iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.