0:04 [SPEAKER_00]: The greatest author in the history of my home state of Indiana is by most counts, the incomparable Kurt Vonnegut. 0:11 [SPEAKER_00]: Before I ever knew he was a fellow who's your, I had chewed through a dozen of his books in high school, in place of schoolwork, the Bible and everything else. 0:19 [SPEAKER_00]: At some point, you've probably read him too. 0:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Classics like Mother Night, Slotter House Five, Dead I Dick, and others helped me see the world more clearly through difficult years. 0:31 [SPEAKER_00]: They helped me see the world like Kurt Vernigot, which is to say, with kinder, gentler, eyes. 0:38 [SPEAKER_00]: Vernigot always thought of himself as a science fiction writer, and even his more conventional titles tend to have strong sci-fi tones and elements. 0:47 [SPEAKER_00]: He went so far as to create an ultra-ego. 0:50 [SPEAKER_00]: sci-fi hack named Kilgork Trapped, who appears throughout his works as the authors of books, like the Plant Goblins, the protocols, of the Elders of Trauf Modoror. 1:01 [SPEAKER_00]: Like I said, I devoured this stuff, and I thought I'd long since read all of the most bizarre varnished stories. 1:08 [SPEAKER_00]: But this week, our audio engineer Brent found another one, new for me at least. 1:14 [SPEAKER_00]: The story is about the Indiana Bell building, a huge eight-story steel and brick structure in his hometown of Indianapolis that weighed 11,000 tons. 1:24 [SPEAKER_00]: The city wanted to blow it up, Vonnegut wanted to move it instead. 1:30 [SPEAKER_00]: They wanted space for a new building. 1:32 [SPEAKER_00]: He convinced them he can move it over like he was reparking a car using hand operated jacks. 1:38 [SPEAKER_00]: And he promised to be able to do this while the employees of the Indiana Bell telephone company continued working inside it. 1:46 [SPEAKER_00]: He would just create extension lines for gas, heat, electricity and water to trail behind the building like vacuum cleaner cords in order to keep them open and running. 1:57 [SPEAKER_00]: The historical setting for this weird story was 1930, but it's not a novel. 2:03 [SPEAKER_00]: And it was Kurt Vonnegut, the architect, Kurt Senior, who was responsible. 2:08 [SPEAKER_00]: The Kurt we know in love was eight years old at the time. 2:12 [SPEAKER_00]: This was his father, which he described as a dreamy artist, an aloof and distant figure. 2:17 [SPEAKER_00]: This detachment and dreamingness resulted in a series of bad business decisions in a failed marriage with Junior's mother Edith. 2:25 [SPEAKER_00]: The great depression of the 30s combined with Kurt Senior's mistakes had resulted in the loss of the family portion, and also of the social status, Edith had once enjoyed. 2:35 [SPEAKER_00]: The kids were moved into public schools, and Edith just became another poor housewife. 2:40 [SPEAKER_00]: In his city, she once enjoyed as a privileged socialite. 2:43 [SPEAKER_00]: She became an alcoholic, and on the night of May 13, 1944, overdosed on sleeping pills. 2:51 [SPEAKER_00]: Kurt Jr. was the warrant who found her body when he entered her bedroom the following day on May 14th, Mother's Day. 2:58 [SPEAKER_00]: A few months later, Jr. was shipped to the warfront in Europe, and captured by the German Army in the Battle of the Bulge. 3:04 [SPEAKER_00]: He was sent as a prisoner of war to the city of Dresden, right before it was bombed. 3:09 [SPEAKER_00]: Roughly 25,000 civilians were killed and he was required to dig through the rubble for bodies of women and children. 3:16 [SPEAKER_00]: To say the least, it was a bad year for Junior, in one that would shape his world view and his artistic sensibilities for the rest of his life. 3:24 [SPEAKER_00]: But in 1930, everything was going well. 3:27 [SPEAKER_00]: Junior was eight, and Kurt Sr. was a professional success. 3:31 [SPEAKER_00]: The family was wealthy. 3:32 [SPEAKER_00]: Edith had no pill addictions, and everything was looking up for the Vonnegut clan. 3:37 [SPEAKER_00]: The decision to move the bell building was such a popular event in the city of Indianapolis that viewing stations were set up all around the work site. 3:44 [SPEAKER_00]: Hundreds of people stood at the fence every day to watch a small army of workman crank and 11,000 ton building across the concrete. 3:54 [SPEAKER_00]: According to the Indianapolis star, every six strokes of the jacks would shift the building three-eighths of an inch, moving at 15 inches per hour. 4:03 [SPEAKER_00]: All with the fully-staffed offices functioning up above, employees claimed to be unable to feel in the of it, even as the building moved ten feet per day underneath them. 4:13 [SPEAKER_00]: It's such a strange image, this huge building, scooting steadily across the ground. 4:18 [SPEAKER_00]: Actually, when you watch the move, you realize it's more swinging into place. 4:22 [SPEAKER_00]: You can find a jiff of it on our website. 4:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Keep in mind, these jacks were hand operated. 4:27 [SPEAKER_00]: They were assisted by steam, but the bulk of the power came from good old fashioned elbow grease. 4:33 [SPEAKER_00]: According to the star, the actual movement was enabled by a, quote, concrete mat, cushioned by Oregon fur timbers, a 75 ton hydraulic jacks and rollers, and as the weight of the building moved off one roller, workers placed another ahead of it. 4:49 [SPEAKER_00]: Altogether, it took less than 30 days to roll the building into place. 4:53 [SPEAKER_00]: To this day, it's one of the biggest structures ever moved. 4:56 [SPEAKER_00]: It'd be amazing if it happened in downtown Indianapolis today. 5:00 [SPEAKER_00]: It's almost unthinkable for the 1930s. 5:03 [SPEAKER_00]: Kurt Vonnegut's senior did something amazing. 5:05 [SPEAKER_00]: He imagined an impossible solution and actually pulled it off on the first try. 5:11 [SPEAKER_00]: It's the kind of thing most architects and engineers would dream of, captivating an entire city with science and an achievement. 5:18 [SPEAKER_00]: they had to see to believe. 5:21 [SPEAKER_00]: The movement of the Indiana Bell building, which unforgettable, yet almost everyone has forgotten it. 5:27 [SPEAKER_00]: The people who actually remember Kurt Sr. have likely never heard of it, but they remember instead, is what they've heard from Kurt Jr. comments like this, from his novel Bluebeard. 5:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Don't worry about your father, he's a perfectly contented self-sufficient zombie. 5:42 [SPEAKER_00]: While Junior rarely spoke of senior, directly he described him repeatedly in his novels, to the fathers of his protagonists who were distracted, Dreamy Men, never bad people, just never really present. 5:54 [SPEAKER_00]: They were gentle, thoughtful people, but mediocre husbands and fathers. 5:58 [SPEAKER_00]: In another novel, his alter ego kilogor trout explains, your parents were fighting machines and self-pitting machines. 6:05 [SPEAKER_00]: your mother was programmed to ball out your father. 6:08 [SPEAKER_00]: For being a defective money making machine, and your father was programmed to ball out your mother for being a defective housekeeping machine. 6:16 [SPEAKER_00]: They were programmed to ball each other out for being defective loving machines. 6:21 [SPEAKER_00]: then your father was programmed to stop out of the house and slam the door. 6:25 [SPEAKER_00]: There were also good things as in this clear reference to his actual father. 6:30 [SPEAKER_00]: The thing my father was proud of was the errors clock at the intersection of Washington Street and Meridian that made him so happy. 6:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Errors complained because he wouldn't send them a bill. 6:40 [SPEAKER_00]: There was stuff my family had done there, particularly my father and grandfather, that was quite permanent and wonderful, but there's a parable in this for all of us. 6:49 [SPEAKER_00]: At some point in our lives, we start to believe that the most important things about us are the big, impressive historical things, and this is almost never the case. 6:59 [SPEAKER_00]: Our most enduring legacies are defined by our families and the people who needed us most. 7:05 [SPEAKER_00]: by the people who care enough to tell our stories after we're gone, even when we do the amazing and unthinkable, like moving in 11,000 time building, using hand cranks in the middle of one of the biggest cities in America.
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