Coffee With Jeff

This is Coffee With Jeff’s last show… of 2016.

Imagine an old man who does a podcast who decides to travel down memory lane and talk about the toys of his youth? Will the younger listeners roll their eyes and listen to something else?

On today’s show I am going to talk about three toys that were incredibly popular in my day; Silly Putty, The Magic 8-Ball, and the Slinky. I am sure that anyone over the age of 40 has played with some or all of these at one time or another.

So, I hope all of you youngsters will forgive me for this episode, but this old man does have a tendency to ramble on, you know. Just be glad I don’t talk about my aches and pains.

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During the American Civil War; James McClintock, Baxter Watson and Horace Lawson Hunley designed and built a submarine to attack Union boats. The sub had an eight-man crew; one to steer the ship and seven to turn the propeller. And – warning! – it doesn’t turn out well. This is the story of the H.T. Hunley!

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In Hollywood, a name alone can attract a big paycheck. It wasn’t always that way. There was a time in the early days of filmmaking that the big studios wouldn’t allow the actors name to be known. They feared their actors becoming stars, because they knew the consequences. This changed with one person, a female actor named Florence Lawrence, who is credited at the first film star in America. She was know as “The Biograph Girl” and she made 300 films for various motion picture companies throughout her career.

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Nancy Wake was born in New Zealand, grew up in Australia and became one of the people wanted by the Germans in France during World War 2. They called her the White Mouse and she was forced to flee to England, only one step ahead of the Nazis! After training as a saboteur, she returned to France to join the French resistance as a fighting force. This is her amazing tale.

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His name was Robert V. Miller but he called himself “Count” Victor Lustig. He sold a machine to duplicate money, robbed money from a bank, was caught, and talked his way out of charges, and then escaped from an escape-proof jail! He was called the smoothest con man in the world but most people know his as the man who sold the Eiffel Tower.

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Linda Burfield was born in 1867. After a failed marriage, she trained to be a doctor … sort of. She never actually went to school, yet she called herself Doctor Linda Hazzard and developed a health procedure using fasting to cure all types of health problems. Starvation was the key to health! And if patients starved to death, and many did, well; at least Linda got to keep all their money!

Linda Hazzard was responsible for a least 14 deaths! Probably a lot more!

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The Blair Witch Project was the Brainchild of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez who, as early was 1993, found that they felt documentaries on paranormal phenomena were scarier than traditional horror films. They went out and rented such things like The Legend of Boggy Creek and Ancient Astronauts, documentary-style movies and began to wonder if hey could do something like that, something with found footage, something is the vain of Leonard Nimoy’s hosted In Search of…

“We loved those,” Sanchez said. “Those grainy pictures of UFOs and Bigfoot? Those were a lot scarier than the movies.”

This week I tell the story of the making of this film.

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It was the perfect great American success story; a down and out family man going from rags to riches with nothing more than his own ingenuity, inventing a game in his basement to support his family during the Depression. It was the story of the world’s most popular board game.

Unfortunately, it was a lie.

This week, we tell the story of Elizabeth J. “Lizzy” Magie; the real creator of the game!

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His name was Charles Rolland Douglass but his friends called him Charley. In the late 50s, he created a machine that every American network needed, and he called it the Laff Box.

If you watched television between 1960 and 1980, you’ve most likely heard his work. He was the guy that added the laughter and applause to sitcoms. You know his work as the laugh track or canned laughter.

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As the age of 4 or 5 he read and fell in love with the H.G. Wells 1896 book The Island of Dr. Moreau, the story of a doctor who creates sentient beings from animals by the way of vivisection. Richard Stanley was disappointed in the previous two film adaptions of the work and dreamed that one day he would be able to make the film right.

In 1996, he got his chance to make a big budget film Doctor Moreau. It didn’t go well!

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