Eponymous Foods: Full Bars

0:01 Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. It's Halloween time. We're doing a Halloween edition of Eponymous Foods. And what that means is candy bars. Yeah. This one is a little bit caveated because... Most candy bars are named for the person who invented them and ran the company that produced them.

0:35 So it's not that thrilling. Not a lot of surprises, although their stories about them are often very interesting. There is one little surprise in the mix that just tickles me to no end. But just know you're going to recognize almost all of these names. And two of today's eponymous candy bars are very closely related. That is a family story. which also includes some other candies that are going to be familiar to listeners. And I guess if you really wanted to bend the rules, you could say there is also an eponymous one in there. Really, the whole episode, though, is about family stories. It's kind of like two different family stories. One features two candy bars that are eponymous, and one features another. I'm saving my

1:19 very favorite for the last one. And to be frank... There were several candy companies all getting their start in the early part of the 20th century that still dominate the industry. So this is in some ways also an origin story of the U.S. candy trade. We'll start with Franklin Clarence Mars, who was born on September 24th, 1883 in Glenwood, Minnesota. Some accounts say he was born in Hancock, Minnesota.

1:47 That's a little more than 27 miles west of Glenwood. And then others say that it was in nearby Newport, Minnesota. You might even see other neighboring towns cited as well. It's just a little fuzzy. His parents were farmers, and as a child, Frank had polio, which kept him indoors instead of outside helping to run the farm. While he was inside with polio, his mother taught him to make candy, specifically hand-dipped chocolate, but also other confections. And this often comes up as what really ignited Frank's interest in candy.

2:28 And at the age of 19, Frank Mars took over a candy distribution company in Minnesota. That was a wholesale operation that was called Taylor's Molasses Chips, and it provided candy stock to shops in Minneapolis. Also in that same year, which was 1902, Frank got married to a schoolteacher named Ethel G. Kissick, and the couple had a son named Forrest Edward Mars in March of 1904. Ethel and Frank did not stay married. It's not clear when they divorced, but it was sometime before 1910 or maybe in early 1910.

3:04 Their son Forrest went to Canada to live with his grandparents after the divorce. That year, Frank married his second wife, another Ethel. This time it was Ethel Veronica Healy. They're believed to have gotten married in Washington State, but this is another instance where there's just not a specific available.

3:25 The two of them were mentioned as having eloped in 1910 in one of Frank's obituaries. We do know that whether it was before or after the marriage, Frank Mars moved to Tacoma, Washington. There, in 1911, he started making buttercream candy in his kitchen and selling it. Just in case you don't know what that is, that's kind of like the, it's not a nougat, but it's a similar texture, like a little buttery and confectioner's sugar and usually additives that flavor it inside of a candy shell. You've had these if you had any, like, samplers of candies. Really, though, ethyl was kind of the driving force behind how this little business worked. And when we say driving, I mean that kind of literally. Because she managed to acquire a

4:13 car to drive around selling candy while Frank stayed home and kept up production. And that was actually pretty significant because there were an estimated... 93,863,000 people in the U.S. in 1911, and only 619,500 of them had registered vehicles. So that was about 0.66% of the population. So Ethel being able to get a car and travel around Tacoma to distribute all of their candies would have been a very significant factor in their reach and thus their success.

4:49 And in a very short period of time, the candy was in pretty high demand. However, Frank was not especially good at managing the business, and eventually he went bankrupt. In 1920, Frank moved back to Minnesota, specifically to Minneapolis, to start a candy company there called the Nugget House. Even though this was a company, it was still a really small operation. The starting capital was just $ 400, and the factory was just one room. One of the Nugget House's products was the Patricia Bar, named for his daughter with his second wife. And then over time, the company name changed to Morrow Bar. In 1923, Frank Mars and his son Forrest had a discussion that involved the idea of a malted milk candy bar. So according to Forrest's

5:42 version of the story, they were having malted milks at a drugstore counter when Forrest said, why don't you put a chocolate-malted drink in a candy bar? Forrest was as surprised as anyone when Frank did just that. The idea manifested as the Milky Way. The Milky Way was so successful that the company needed to expand by hiring a sales staff just to handle the huge demand from retailers.

6:10 It made a reported $ 800, 000 in the first year, so that was a pretty wild success for 1923. Six years after the launch of the Milky Way, Frank's company, which had been rebranded and reorged as Mars Incorporated, moved to Chicago, Illinois. As part of this move, Forrest also officially joined the company.

6:33 Chicago made a lot of sense for a growing company, as there were more shipping options for distribution thanks to the railroad access in the city. This was a really astute move for Mars, and the company's success rapidly expanded as they reached markets all through the United States. The year after the move to Illinois, so 1930, the first of our eponymous foods for today was launched, and that was the Snickers bar. Snickers is an eponymous food because it was named after Frank and Ethel's favorite horse. But here's the thing. We don't know much about that horse.

7:09 Even the official Snickers website says the candy was, quote, allegedly named after a horse. And that site shows a photo of a horse that is captioned Snickers Horse and Caretaker. But there's no additional context. One of the other things I saw was that Snickers the horse actually died before the candy hit the market. Again, there's no way to verify it. 1930 seems like a wild time to be launching a new product because that was during the Great Depression.

7:38 But candy is one of those products that often survives economic downturns because it's an inexpensive treat. The Snickers bar was five cents, and because it offered this combination of nougat, caramel, chocolate, and peanuts, it was, like the advertising continues to mention, pretty satisfying. And that made it really popular with pretty much everybody. One of the advertising taglines for it in the early days was candy at its best. That first year, Mars Incorporated made a reported $ 26 million in sales. Yeah, I...

8:17 Kept looking that up in as many places as I could, and they all cited the same thing, so they may have been pulling from the same source. But that's just such a huge number during a depression for a five-cent candy bar. But people really love Snickers, apparently. Coming up, we are going to talk about more candy and more eponymous candy specifically. But first, we are going to pause for a sponsor break. Following the Snickers, Mars Incorporated launched the Three Musketeers bar, which was also hugely successful. Incidentally, it initially came as three pieces of candy, each with a different flavor, kind of like a Neapolitan ice cream.

9:05 One was vanilla, one was chocolate, and one was strawberry. Thus the name Three Musketeers. I really yearn to go back in time and have a strawberry through Musketeers. The ongoing success of the candy business enabled Frank Mars to acquire a lot of wealth at a time when a lot of people were really struggling financially. And one of the ways he spent his money was in the acquisition of property in Pulaski, Tennessee, to set up his own horse farm and cattle ranch. He named that Milky Way Farm.

9:36 His purchases of adjoining land to the original plot were significant enough that they were reported in the papers, and in just a few years, he had put together a large-scale operation. In May of 1933, the Lexington Star reported, quote, the Milky Way Farm is one of the most elaborate estates in the South. In addition to thoroughbreds and trotters, Mr.

9:59 Marr maintains a great stable of show horses, breeds saddle horses on an extensive scale, and breeds and feeds beef cattle. He has one of the largest and strongest herds of shorthorn cattle to be found in the country. headed by three prize-winner bulls imported last summer from the leading herds of England. This write-up goes on to say that the Mars racing horses will start running on tracks in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Illinois as soon as they're ready. As Frank and Ethel were building their farm dreams during the early 1930s, there was tension between Frank Mars and his son Forrest.

10:39 Forrest had not actually ever envisioned a life in the confectionery business. He had first studied mining at the University of California, during which time he worked in the school cafeteria, and apparently he streamlined the menu to achieve a significant cost savings. And he did so much work in the cafeteria that he ended up dropping many of his classes so that he could focus on administrative work there. In the summer, he worked for Camel Cigarettes. He actually got arrested for for papering all of downtown Chicago with Camel cigarette posters one night. That was part of a PR stunt, and Frank had to bail him out of jail. One account places that discussion we mentioned earlier that led to the Milky Way, where they had malted milk together, as

11:26 happening right after that bailout. Forrest later went on to Yale to get an industrial engineering degree. Armed with the knowledge that he gained from this education, Forrest saw a lot of ways that his father, Frank, could improve the business. The candy bars were good, but they didn't always turn out consistently. That was something Forrest thought needed to be fixed.

11:50 He also felt that there wasn't enough structure to the way the workers were managed and things tended to slip through the cracks. And he quickly saw that there were still problems with how his father managed the finances and He had stayed in the black thanks to market appeal and high sales, but he was not being very smart about ensuring long-term fiscal stability for the company. Eventually, Forrest just started making changes without his father's approval, and everything at Mars Incorporated quickly became chaotic. Forrest wanted Frank to give him a third of the company and let him expand into foreign markets, but Frank refused, and in 1932, his son left. He did not leave empty-handed, though. He

12:35 got $ 50, 000 and the rights to produce the Milky Way bar abroad. This ultimately led to Forrest leaving for Europe. While most accounts say that Forrest went to Britain, which he did, he did not go straight there. He actually went first to Switzerland, and he worked for Nestle. There, he learned about European confectionery, specifically chocolate. But what he really wanted to do was build something of his own.

13:03 And that is why he moved to England, to the industrial town of Slough, which is just west of London. There, he developed a candy bar that was based on the Milky Way, but a little bit sweeter. Forrest also concentrated on using the very best ingredients to appeal to European palates. And the flagship product that came out of this is our second eponymous food, the Mars bar. While Forrest was gaining success abroad, his father was on the opposite trajectory.

13:35 According to the Frank C. Maher's entry in the Candy Hall of Fame website, quote, Frank died in 1933 after collapsing on the floor of his Chicago factory. That's a story that gets repeated a lot, but it doesn't appear to be wholly accurate. At the end of 1933, Frank C. Mars did experience a serious health decline, and that may have started with an incident on the factory floor, although that isn't anything that's clearly documented. On April 8, 1934, Frank died in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he had been a patient for 10 days. His cause of death was attributed to a heart attack and kidney disease.

14:19 His close friend, William Flavin, told papers that Frank had been ill for about five months before his death. Frank's body was taken to his Pulaski, Tennessee, estate for burial. The funeral was held at Milky Way Farm. Roughly 11 years later, when the farm was sold, Frank was exhumed and moved to a family mausoleum in Minneapolis. In the wake of Frank's death, his wife, Ethel, and her brother ran the company. This continued the adversarial relationship that Forrest had with his father, as he believed he had a right to a stake in the company, and the family did not agree. Incidentally, Ethel also continued running the horse farm and its breeding program, and their horse Galahadian won the Kentucky Derby in 1940. Forrest Mars was still in

15:11 England when his father died, but he returned to the U.S. in 1939. And by that time, he had grown his British-based company enormously. Not only had the Mars bar taken off and led to additional candy offerings, but he had also diversified the business by establishing a pet food division. But in the U.S., he wanted to develop an idea based on something he had seen in Europe. From the summer of 1936 to early 1939, the Spanish Civil War was playing out, and during that conflict, Forrest was traveling in Spain, and he had met Spanish soldiers. Those soldiers were carrying small pellets of chocolate with a candy coating so that the chocolate would not melt in the heat.

15:57 Forrest Mars envisioned a version of this in the United States, and that led to the development of the M & M. which was sort of an eponymous food, at least if you count initials. Forrest's partner in this venture was R. Bruce Murray, whose father was William F.R. Murray, the president of Hershey. So the M's in M & M stand for Mars and Murray. Initially, just as the candies that had inspired them, M & M' s were made for the military, but soon that expanded into the consumer market. During the same time that Forrest was offering M & Ms to the military, Snickers became a part of U.S. soldiers' ration kits.

16:39 The same things that made it a good deal in the recession meant that it was also good for this usage. And because it was shipping overseas with deployed troops during World War II, it also got introduced to new places. Whether it was just happenstance that both Snickers and M & M' s were sold to the military, or whether it was a competitive move by one or the other or both companies, is a little unclear, but that did occur to me while I was doing this research. With the success of M & M' s, Forrest's business holdings easily surpassed anything his father had built. After his return to the United States, he continued to have incredible success in the U.S. and Europe for more than two decades before he managed to

17:23 acquire the thing he wanted the most, and that was his father's company. After 30 years of back and forth with his stepmother's family, and after Ethel had been dead for some time, Forrest finally convinced them to sell, at which point his company merged with the one his father had started He completely revamped the way that things ran.

17:46 In a matter of days after the purchase, he stripped out many of the executive amenities that he felt cost more than they were worth. He established a core set of values for the company that focused on quality, efficiency, and mutuality. he worked long hours and he expected the same of his employees, but he also increased their pay significantly and everybody got profit share. Yeah, he is reportedly a person that was kind of hard to work for because he just thought, of course, people would be fine with working 10 and 12 hour days sometimes. But also he did try to take care of people. One of the first things he did was get rid of the executive dining room and fired all of the expensive chefs that they had. He was like, we don't need this,

18:33 we'll eat in the cafeteria with everybody else, which I just think is kind of interesting. Yeah, I feel bad for the chefs that lost their job, but also I don't think they needed to have special chefs for the executives. Right, I think that was probably his take as well. Today, Mars Incorporated continues to be a private company with members of the Mars family involved in the board of directors, although my understanding is that none of them are in the very active running the company positions. Its headquarters are in McLean, Virginia, with various divisions having their own primary offices in other locations. According to Forbes, the Mars family is worth $ 129 billion as of the summer of 2026,

19:15 making them the third richest family in America, per the magazine. We have one more eponymous candy to talk about, but first we will hear from the sponsors that keep the show going. Harry Burnett Reese was born on May 24, 1879. His father, Aquila Asbury Reese Jr., and mother, Annie Belinda Manifold Reese, lived in York County, Pennsylvania. And Harry, who went by H.B., was born at home at Frosty Hill Farm.

19:54 He was an only child, and his early life was fairly typical of a kid in a farming family. He mostly helped his father with the crops and with the cows. One of the things H.B. did as a kid that was not very typical of children was building a frog pond. At first, I thought, that sounds fine to me. If I was a kid, I might build a frog pond. No, this was a for-real thing. He was breeding the frogs in that pond. And then when they matured, he would sell them to restaurants in the Baltimore area. So... It's sort of an indication of how he just had a knack for entrepreneurialism, even as a child. And then at the age of 21, Reese married a young woman named Blanche Edna Heysen, who was from a much wealthier family

20:42 than his. For the next several years, H.B. worked multiple jobs, sometimes several at once, in an effort to make a living that could support Blanche and a family. He continued to work in farming and at various factory jobs when he could get shifts. And then for several years, he moved to Virginia to work as a manager in his father-in-law's cannery. All of these income streams became really increasingly important as he and Blanche started having kids because they seemed to be unstoppable about it. They had 16 children, 13 of which lived to adulthood. That is a huge amount of kids. But in addition to that, Reese's mother and his two aunts moved in with them. So this was a very busy home. I read one account that

21:29 said family meals were typically 20 people. And then they would just invite people over. So often it was 40 people having dinner together every night. Wow. That was like the size of our family Thanksgivings when I was younger and everyone was there. But that was the thing that happens not on a regular basis. And it's overwhelming. Yeah, it really was. A little more than 15 years after he married Blanche, H.B. got a job that shifted the trajectory of his life. He was hired by Milton Hershey.

22:05 Because Reese had a dairy background from his childhood family farm and had worked in a dairy in the years that he was moving from job to job, he was put in charge of running the dairies that produced the milk that Hershey was using to make chocolate bars. We're not counting Milton Hershey and the Hershey Bar as one of today's eponymous foods. Milton Hershey is a whole thing.

22:30 He is on the shortlist for a full episode at some point. Reese worked for Hershey for four years before he was laid off with other workers when some of the dairy facilities closed down. Those facilities were considered highly experimental at the time. They used milking machines instead of milking the cows by hand. Yeah, they just decided that was not worthwhile after a while, which makes me chuckle because they had just held on a little while longer.

22:57 They could have been at the forefront of dairy technology. But after that layoff, Reese started his own candy company, which was R & R Candy. And this was something that Milton Hershey supported. The two men had become friends while they worked together. Reese's candies were mostly chocolate-covered nuts and dried fruits. R & R, which operated out of a former cannery, struggled early on because Reese wasn't able to make candy in large enough batches for distribution to retailers.

23:27 So it was like, your candy's good, but unless you can get us this much, we really can't place an order. So he decided he was going to reorg the company with the names Superior Chocolate and Confectionery and sell stock to generate enough money to purchase machinery to address those production issues. But that was too late, and the company soon folded. Soon, H.B. Reese was back to taking whatever jobs he could find mostly mill and factory work. But in 1921, Hershey hired him again. This time he was not working in a dairy, but in the company's shipping division.

24:05 He wasn't working with candy at this job at all, but he was working with it in his spare time as he kept experimenting with ideas that had started to take shape with his own failed company. He came up with two candy bars that he named after his oldest son and daughter, Johnny and Lizzie. He sold these bars, and they were moderately successful, but not so much that he could leave his job at Hershey. But he did really feel like he had something worthwhile. Before long, Reese was convinced that he needed to try starting another candy company.

24:41 He discussed this idea with Hershey, and Hershey gave his blessing. The two of them agreed that Reese would purchase his chocolate from Hershey. So this was probably a mutually advantageous deal. Yeah, I often see it categorized like it's Hershey's way to control things and make sure he's still getting the benefit.

25:01 And he was, but at the same time, that meant Reese didn't have to find a supplier of chocolate. He knew the quality of the chocolate he was getting. Like, there were some benefits on both sides of that. And this new company that he started was called the H.B. Reese Candy Company, and it opened in 1923, with the first offerings being sampler boxes of chocolate assortments. These were made in the Reese's basement, and they were sold at department stores and other retailers, and they did really well. Soon, he had to move his operation out of the family home, and he moved it into the basement of an Italian restaurant that was willing to rent space to him. And he did well enough there that in 1926, he needed

25:43 to build a dedicated production factory. And he also built a home for his very large family right next door to that factory. The most popular chocolates from the assortments were chocolate-covered peanut butter candies. So Reese started to think about how he could expand that specific style's success. He wanted to elevate it in some way. So he started roasting his own peanuts and making peanut butter there at the factory. He created one that was roasted a little longer.

26:15 It had a distinctive, deeper flavor than other peanut butters. And then he coated that with chocolate in a fluted cup shape. And the peanut butter cup was born. And customers loved it. Unsurprisingly. Because it's great. He was only offered, though, as... Part of a candy assortment, not just the cups. It was still mixed in with other stuff at that point. However, we mentioned earlier that Frank Mars launched the Snickers in 1930 and had great success. Reese had a little bit of a harder time with the Depression. He was still in debt for the construction of that factory in his home, and he was a little tight on money. Things allegedly got tight enough at the factory that sometimes he paid his workers in candy, which sounds fun if you're an eight-year-old,

27:08 but for an adult with bills, less so. One of his salesmen, though, made the suggestion that ultimately kept the company afloat. Since the peanut butter cups were the most popular candy in their assortment boxes, that salesman suggested, why don't we just sell these on their own? And Reese liked the idea, and they went to market with individual cups for a penny each. This early version was even called a penny cup. I saw one display of them, and it slightly horrified me because none of them are wrapped. Oh, no.

27:38 It was just like open candy stock, which... I know still happens for things like jelly beans and whatnot, but something about open candy stock for chocolate items really wigs me out. The Penny Cup was so popular that H.B. Reese started offering them in three sizes, at which point they were all branded as Reese's Cups. You could get them at the one-cent size still or a two-cent or five-cent version. Once the Reese's Cup was on the market, the company got on stable financial footing, and so did H.B. Reese.

28:14 I kind of like that you can still get them in multiple sizes, even though I don't think it's a one-to-one of how that worked initially. But the explosive popularity of the peanut butter cup led to imitators, unsurprisingly. And this led also to a lot of litigious back and forth, including Reese trying to use his product's name recognition to demand that stores not sell any of his competitors' peanut butter cups. But that actually led to Reese being sued by one of those competitors. He didn't win. And while he couldn't prevent other companies from making similar products or prevent stores from stocking those similar products, what he could do was print the word original on all of his packaging,

28:58 which he did. And despite there being other peanut butter cups on the market, Reese's sales stayed steady, and they actually even increased. Up to the point that the U.S. became involved in the war, the H.B. Reese company still made a variety of other candies. But the sugar rationing that happened during the war made only one candy still viable for manufacture, and that was the peanut butter-filled Reese's cup.

29:24 Peanuts were not rationed, and the whole thing required less sugar than other candies did. Additionally, at a time when a lot of the workforce was away at war, Reese was able to automate production of the Reese's Cup so that they could continue to be produced with a reduced workforce. This was definitely a temporary situation. At the time, the company really prided itself on the candies being hand-coated. So after the war, they went back to this hands-on method of production and For a while during the war, Reese's Cups were the only things that the company made. Things were going so well for Reese after World War II that in the early 1950s, he decided he needed to expand into a second, brand-new manufacturing facility that he planned

30:14 to have custom-built. The land that Reese purchased for this project was bought from none other than Milton Hershey, and H.B. envisioned what he called his dream plant. He was involved in the planning of it right alongside the architects and the industrial designers, and it was going to be thrice the size of their existing factory, with a design that would allow the company to expand it again in the future if they needed to, without interrupting production. It was also designed with the very latest temperature control systems so that both humans and confections would stay at a consistent temp. H.B.

30:52 Reese did not get to see his second factory completed. While he was vacationing in West Palm Beach, Florida in May of 1956, he had a heart attack. After several days at the hospital, he died on May 16th. While Reese left his property to his sons and daughters, the company was left only to his sons. And things at the company initially seemed okay. In November 1957, newspapers ran stories about the new factory finally opening and how it was the culmination of their father's dream. A write-up in the Patriot News of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, featured a large photo that was subtitled The Reese Family Team, and it showed the Reese sons and it listed out all of their titles.

31:38 Among other design features of this new factory, the write-up touted, quote, The convenience and welfare of the HB Rees Co. employees were considered in the overall planning. There is a spacious cafeteria and locker rooms with showers. Polished hardwood floors add to the appearance as well as comfort of the manufacturing areas.

32:00 The offices are designed to offer the best working conditions. This was all really a pretty huge achievement in factory design. But while everything looked great and in the papers it seemed great, the power structure within the family was getting pretty tense. Yeah, the brothers just could not agree on how to carry on their father's legacy. The factory itself was running well, and it was bringing in more than $ 15 million a year, but not all of Reese's sons wanted to keep the business in the family. After a lot of internal debate, in 1963, the H.B. Reese Candy Company was purchased by Hershey. The brothers got $ 24 million worth of Hershey stock in the deal, and several of the Reese siblings served on Hershey's board. By 1969, the

32:52 Reese's Peanut Butter Cup was the best-selling candy on the Hershey roster, and it remains one of the best-selling candies in the U.S. Of course, there is also the baby sibling of the Reese's Cup that also bears H.B. 's name. That was Reese's Pieces, of course. So he has multiple things that are eponymous, all super delicious. Yeah, so... Happy Halloween, everybody.

33:17 Probably early Halloween if you're listening to this promptly. Stay safe out there with your candy and your trick-or-treating. Yeah. I hope everybody gets full bars when they go trick-or-treating. We are a full bar house at my house, so. I have a story about full bars when we do Friday's Chitter Chatter. Do you have listener mail? I do.

33:39 This is from our listener slash viewer, Bill. who writes, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I just finished listening slash watching your history podcast on Netflix. It was focused on Robert Moses, but you mentioned that only one pavilion at the New York World's Fair had a 24-hour presence, and that was the Vatican Pavilion, but you are not going to go down that rabbit hole. I'm going to take you down it.

34:02 As a young teenager, I visited that World's Fair. The Vatican sent the original Pieta by Michelangelo pre-vandalism to that fair. I bet it had 24-hour protection. I feel foolish because I didn't connect the dots on this. We talked about that whole thing when we did an episode in 2016, I think in February, about the many pietas that Michelangelo made, including that one specifically. And we talked about it going to the World's Fair, but listen, that was 10 years ago.

34:30 I was going to say, a decade ago, I don't remember things from last week on the show. Just in case nobody wants to go look that up. Yeah. That was a super duper cool whole thing that happened. And I think this might be why I wasn't thinking about it being at the World's Fair. I was so fixated on all of the shipping stuff that they did. Oh, yeah.

34:52 Like they made a custom shipping container. They had to x-ray it beforehand because it had had some damage to one of Mary's hands. And they wanted to make sure that was not something that was going to get exacerbated. if they shipped it, it had like a little wire fixative that was connecting the two. Like Eastman Kodak actually did the radiology on that. Like it was a very big deal for the Vatican and the World's Fair. And then there were three nesting cases that were made for it so that while it was on a ship, it was not gonna like, it could move with the ship without the actual statue being rocked too much around. And, of course, it's probably never going to leave the Vatican again. Right. So, dear,

35:36 dear listener, you really got the lucky one because, Bill, nobody else is going to see it in the U.S. again. Yeah. I have seen it twice in Italy. Cried like a baby both times. Yeah, we walked into it, into where it was, and it was there. And I almost just screamed across the room at you, like, Holly, it's the Pieta, which would not have been appropriate and also was not necessary.

36:04 You knew it was there already. I did. I love it. It's not, I think I said it during that episode 10 years ago, it is not my favorite of his Pietas. The one that is my favorite is actually... argued over whether or not he did it, which is Pietà Palestrini, which is in Accademia in Florence. I don't know what it is about that statue. It's unfinished. It's a little bit raw. There's something very moving about it to me.

36:29 It also makes me laugh because people, both times I have been to the cathedral and seen the Pietà, there's always me and one other person really losing their minds. And both times it's been like a clearly very devout 14 year old girl who is probably on track to be a nun and I'm like I feel you and I understand oh I love it I'm here for the art but it's very moving it's very beautiful there's almost nothing like it on earth so bummed that it I mean on the one hand I'm not really bummed that it's not getting shipped around the world that's inherently dangerous bummed that it's in a place that makes it harder for more people to see it but if you can go I highly recommend it it's worth getting through the

37:13 crowd because it's amazing if you would like to write to us about cool art things you have seen or world fairs you've been to or anything you've done, or if you just want to say hi, you can do that at historypodcast at iheartradio.com. If you want to see the resources we use to make this episode and others, you can see the show notes for any of our episodes at missedinhistory.com. And if you would like to subscribe to the show, it is so easy. It's easier than eating a piece of candy. You can do it on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.

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