Episode 18 - What Little Girls Are Made Of (the Sweet Edition) Artwork

Professional Weirdo Podcast

Where I research strange stories and tell them to you. Because, let’s face it, I’m gonna research this anyway and blurt it to someone, might as well be a willing audience. Some of these stories might get dark, morbid, murdery…. so listener discretion is advised.

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Professional Weirdo Podcast

Episode 18 - What Little Girls Are Made Of (the Sweet Edition)

March 31, 2026 • Anonymous Narrator • Season 1 • Episode 18

0:00 | 46:02

We're celebrating one year of the podcast by revisiting "What Little Girls Are Made Of" but unlike Episode 2, this time we'll talk about women who did big things, but without killing someone!

Today’s songs are:

Joyful Girl by Ani DiFranco
The Waitress by Tori Amos
You Don’t Own Me by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
Girls Just Want to Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper (I mean, you knew this would eventually show up on the list, right?)
And finally - Birthday! By… the Sugarcubes - I’m telling you, I just love it when stuff comes together.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamina_Fleming

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Love_Cohen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Abort_Guidance_System

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelly%27s_Leg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Melchior

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Latour

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/sally-ride

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250905-the-women-who-broke-nasas-glass-ceiling

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Ride

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Glessner_Lee

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutshell_Studies_of_Unexplained_Death

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Payne-Gaposchkin

https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2017/12/08/betty-robinson-fire-on-the-track

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Robinson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Buren_sisters

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/librarians-horseback-new-deal-book-delivery-wpa

Sound mixing performed by Brother Jay from The Rule of Scary podcast - check that out if you’re a horror movie fan! And hey! Thank you for listening to my stories. Keep it weird out there.

To find song recommendations for this podcast, check out the Spotify Professional Weird playlist

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5jIkaamOZlCwtd2peUk9lF?si=0238d524a374492d

Email me at professionalweirdopodcast@gmail.com

Hello, weirdos. We’re doing a little celebration with this episode, because this podcast is officially 1 year old. That’s right - March 2025, I finally put a long-waiting idea into action with episode 1 - what washes up. But also that month I published episode 2 - what little girls are made of. I had started the research by gathering stories of bad ass women, and I found a lot of them. More than I could fit into one episode. But I also realized that this collection of stories was falling into a couple of themes - women who were badasses in these great contributions they made through science, or medicine or education or spirit…. And others who were sometimes in bad circumstances that led them to…. You know. Kill people. And in one of those stories, kill people with flaming birds. I’m lookin’ at you, Olga. Who was sainted by the way! It felt a little out of place to put the story of Florence Nightingale next to the story of a serial poisoner (even if the poisoner was maybe killing abusive husbands). It made me think of the nursery rhyme “what are little girls made of - sugar and spice and all things nice” - some of these ladies just had a little extra spice. So episode 2 was about them and if you haven’t listened to it, you gotta go back and check it out. Especially Olga - holy cow. But this episode, this one is for the sweethearts.

(Theme song plays)

This is episode 18 - What little girls are made of (the sugar edition)

I hope you all have a sweet tooth, because I have a lot of stories to share today and I love them so much. And the rating system for this episode will be lumps of sugar.

Space

I’m going to open all these stories about badass women with a tale about… a man. Yes, shake your head at me. But you’ll soon see why. As the story goes, it’s 1879 at the Harvard College Observatory. The director, Professor Edward Charles Pickering was growing frustrated with his team of astronomers and declared “my Scottish maid could do a better job” and then to prove his point, he hired his actual Scottish maid - Williamina Fleming - to join the Harvard College Observatory. And from there, her career was a success. In reality, there’s no evidence that he actually berated his team and hired his maid to make a point. But even without this fictional color, the story is great. Williamina was born in Dundee, Scotland. When she was 21, this was in 1878, she and her husband emigrated to Boston Massachusetts in the US. And, her husband ran off, leaving her and their young son to fend for themselves. Williamina started working as a maid for the house of Professor Pickering, where Elizabeth Pickering, Professor Pickering’s wife, noticed that Williamina was talented and had suggested to her husband that he employ her in his office part-time to do administrative work, which he did. After 2 years of this, when Williamina was only 24, he invited her to join the Harvard College Observatory as an astronomer. He taught her how to analyze stellar spectra - which are patterns in a star’s light that provide information about its composition, temperature, and luminosity. And once she was trained, she took off. She was a founding member of something called the Harvard Computers, which was a team made up of all women who computed mathematical classifications for Professor Pickering, as well as editing the observatory’s publications. In 1886, a research project was opened up when widow Mary Anna Draper created the Henry Draper Memorial fund in honor of her wealthy astronomer husband. One project under this fund would be to collect the optical spectra of as many stars as possible, classify them by spectra, and build a catalogue with this information. Wiliamina was put in charge of it. There was dispute over how to classify the stars. Many of their measurements had used an older methods of recording spectra by a handheld instrument. But new images collected by the Observatory had photographed spectra of stars that extended into the ultraviolet range, which was much more accurate. How do you create standardized classifications when you have 2 different measurement systems? This was the dilemma. But Willliamina solved it. She proposed that they simplify the classifications by focussing on a star’s relative amount of hydrogen. So that’s what happened. And, you know, it’s called the Pickering-Fleming system. It’s since been replaced by a classification system organized by the surface temperature of stars, and THAT system was developed by Wiiiamina’s colleague Annie Jump Cannon. It’s still the system being used by Harvard today. After 4 years, the Henry Draper Catalogue was complete, a huge effort by Williamina and her female team of computers. The catalog had more than 10,000 stars, all classified. And like a lot of women I know, it seems that Williamina was multi-tasking. I like to imagine that while she was going through these old records and classifying them for the catalog, she declared “what kind of organizational system is this? I can’t find anything in here!” Because at the same time she was going through the thousands of plates of photographs to build the catalog, she was organizing how the plates were stored so that others could more easily find the plates later. For this she was the first woman appointed as the Curator of Astronomical Photographs. And she gave the world’s first TED talk on women in STEM careers. Just kidding! It was 1893 at the World’s Fair in Chicago and no one used the term STEM yet. But she did give a talk called “A Field for Woman’s Work in Astronomy,” encouraging women to work in the sciences. She suggested that women were the weaker sex - but wait! - she said she thought it was because that was a cultural issue, not biological. She believed women were inferior because they weren’t given the same opportunities, and if that changed, we could all be equals. Now time for her stat list. She discovered 59 gaseous nebulae, over 310 variable stars, and 10 novae which includes the Horsehead Nebula and V Persei. She discovered the first white dwarf, which is a very dense type of star. Typically the size of the Earth, with the mass of our Sun. She became of citizen of the United States in 1907 and 5 years later died at THE AGE OF ONLY 54!!! All that discovery in about 30 years. Amazing. 5 out of 5 lumps of sugar.

Cecilia Payne-(go-posh-kin) Gaposchkin was born in 1900 in Britain. During her time studying in London, she was encouraged to study music by her music teacher, but she liked science better. She had attended a lecture in 1919 about an expedition to an island off the west coast of Africa to photograph stars near a solar eclipse. She finished her astronomy coursework from Cambridge, but they didn’t grant degrees to women at that time. Without a degree and unable to pursue the career she wanted while in the UK, she worked within the network she had formed within the field to move to the US to continue studies at Harvard. While studying for her doctoral thesis by analyzing glass plates, she made a breakthrough discovery - she determined that variation in stellar absorption lines was because of different amounts of ionization at different temperatures, not to varying amounts of elements. Well….sure! Based on this, she determined that hydrogen was the largest component of stars and the most abundant element in the Universe. During her thesis review, she was encouraged by another astronomer, a man named Henry Norris Russell, to not proceed with declaring that finding, as it went against the current belief that the sun’s composition was similar to Earth’s. And then 4 years later, he realized she was correct. And he started telling others about it. He briefly credited her, but largely he was given credit for the discovery. And it went on that way for 40 years. That’s when astronomer Otto Struve gave her credit, saying it was “the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy.” Her stats - She became the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within the faculty at Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and later the first woman to head the department. 4 of her students went on to become big contributors to astronomy in their own right. On top of all of her scientific contributions, her daughter described her as “an inspired seamstress, an inventive knitter, and a voracious reader.” Her stats: whoa, there’s a ton of awards and honors, but I’ll run through things that were named after her: an asteroid, a physics metal and prize, a dissertation award in astrophysics, a telescope deployed in South Africa, and a volcano on Venus. 5 out of 5 sugar lumps.

Judith Love Cohen was a Jewish woman born in 1933 in Brooklyn, New York in the US. And she loved math. And she was good at it! In 5th grade, other students paid her to do their math homework. She liked math so much she wanted to be a math teacher. But once she was in college, she became more interested in engineering. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees without meeting another female engineering student. She started her career as a junior engineer at North American Aviation, and eventually worked for the Apollo Space Program. In fact, she was working there during April 11-17, 1970 when the Apollo 13 mission took place. As a reminder, this mission was meant to be a moon landing, but 2 days into the trip an oxygen tank exploded in the service module, which disabled the electrical and life-support systems. This is the mission that made that “Houston, we have a problem” line so famous. The decision was made to scrap the moon landing and focus on getting the crew back to earth safely. To do that, they looped around the moon to return to Earth, as well as shutting down the command module, and instead having the crew move to the lunar module. That module had only been designed to support 2 men on the surface of the moon for 2 days. They needed it now to support 3 men for 4 days while they got them back home. A filtering system had to be figured out so the carbon dioxide filter for the command module could be retrofit to the Lunar Module. And the supplies required to use the lunar module engine were limited, so as a back-up, something called the Abort Guidance System was used to power the trip home. It was all successful. All astronauts came home. And Judith was an electrical engineer on the Abort Guidance System. For the rest of her stat list? She was an electrical engineer on the Minuteman missile, the ground station for the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite. She had four children, and one of them is actor, musician, and general silly person, Jack Black. 4 out of 5 sugar lumps.

When Sally Ride was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s in California, she wanted to be a professional tennis player. She received a scholarship for it and even ranked in the top 20 nationally for junior tennis. In college, she even left school to focus on tennis. However, she changed her mind and went back to school, this time at Stanford University, where she studied physics and English, and continued there to get her Masters and doctorate in physics. Around that same time, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) realized their space program needed more than just good pilots, and began searching for young scientists who would be good candidates for future space flights, performing as “mission specialists.” They placed an ad in the newspaper and Sally Ride answered it. She was one of 8,079 applicants, and ultimately was one of the 35 people selected, with 6 of them being women. They were coming in as astronaut candidates, and had to go through training and evaluation. The training included technical and scientific topics, but also parachute jumping and water survival training. The time came, and Sally Ride was selected to be the flight engineer for a 5 person crew to make a one week mission in June 1983. On the mission, Sally launched 2 communication satellites and conducted experiments with the shuttle’s mechanical arm. She was the first American woman to go into space, and that created some wild conversations. The media asked her questions like “Will the flight affect your reproductive organs?” And “Do you weep when things go wrong on the job?” Johnny Carson joked the mission would be delayed because Sally would need more time finding a purse to match her shoes. She later declined to go on the Tonight Show, saying Carson was sexist. But even NASA asked her to help them figure out a space makeup kit thinking she would require makeup on her mission. Sally didn’t wear make-up, but NASA did create a Personal Preference Kit, or PPK, for female astronauts that contained mascara, eye shadow, and lipstick. And they were a little fuzzy on a woman’s typical menstrual cycle, planning to provide her with 100 tampons for her 6 day mission, and then asking her if that would be enough. However, they did customize the Maximum Absorbency Garments, or MAGS, which is basically an adult diaper for astronauts. These had originally been designed for men, and as you might imagine, things like size and absorbency points needed to be adjusted. NASA approached this by making customized MAGS for each person. I guess if you have to go in your pants, having specially tailored adult diapers, designed for you by NASA, makes it better? Does it? Does it make it cool to pee your pants if the diaper you were is from NASA? Sally’s 3rd mission was canceled after the explosion of the Challenger. She was assigned to the Rogers commission to investigate and headed its subcommittee on operations. It wasn’t widespread knowledge at the time, but Sally Ride had provided Major General Donald J. (Cut-een-nah) Kutyna information about the O-rings used on the Challenger, and how they would become stiff in low temperatures, which was shown to be the cause of the explosion. To protect her identity as a source, the Major General fed the information to a physicist who was credited for the discovery. After Sally Ride died in 2012, the Major General revealed she had been the source. Roger (bo-jolie) Boisjoly, who was an engineer that tried to bring this issue to light before the disaster and received criticism, said Sally was the only public figure who supported him.

A little trivia - you may have heard the song Mustang Sally by Wilson Pickett. The lyrics include “Ride, Sally, Ride” which is not about Sally Ride. It’s about a woman who loves to drive around in her Mustang. But in support of Sally Ride going on her mission, people attended the launch wearing shirts with those lyrics printed on them. “Ride, Sally Ride”

Her stats: she was the first American woman in space, and the 3rd woman in the world to go to space. She was also the youngest American in space at the time of her first mission. She spent a total of 343 hours in space in her lifetime. The awards and honors and impressive positions she received in her lifetime makes for a lengthy list, but among them is the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She got a Google Doodle for what would have been her 64th birthday. A Sally Ride figure was included in Lego’s “Women of NASA” lego set. 5 out of 5 lumps of sugar.

You would very likely know Simone (mel-key-or) Melchior’s husband if I said his name. But we’ll do that later. Simone was born in Toulon, France in 1919. For work, her father moved her family to Kobe, Japan when she was 5, which is when she learned Japanese. When she was 17 she met her husband, a naval officer, at a cocktail party. After they married, they settled back in Toulon, France. She had two sons, delivering both at home on her kitchen table. A couple of years later, in 1942, her husband had a design for an aqua-lung. Simone’s father provided the cash to have it manufactured, with Simone being involved. Testing was successful and the aqua-lung was put to use in finding and removing enemy mines during World War 2. In 1950 a man named Thomas Loel Guinness, a British politician and Royal Air Force officer bought a minesweeper called Calypso and leased it to Simone and her husband for use in underwater investigation and exploration. The cost of the lease was one dollar per year. That’s quite a deal, but fuel is expensive. To fund expeditions, Simone sold her family jewels. She purchased a compass and gyroscope by selling her fur. A crew was put together and headed out to the Red Sea, with Simone as the only female. And that continued for 40 years, with Simone supporting the all-male crew under the nickname “the shepherdess.” You may have guessed it by now. Simone’s husband was Jacques Cousteau. Her stat list? She was the first female scuba diver. And she was the world’s first female aquanaut. This was accomplished in 1963 when she spent 4 days in an underwater habitat called the Starfish House. 4 out of 5 sugar lumps.

They didn’t have the term in her day, but Frances Glessner Lee might have been the first dedicated true crime fan, and not just because she loved Sherlock Holmes stories. She was born in 1878, and during a bout of childhood tonsillitis, when she had to undergo a surgery that was very dangerous at the time, she developed an interest in medicine. During her summer vacations she would spend time in the homes of local doctors, pursuing an interest in nursing. But things shifted when a classmate of her brother’s - a man named George Burgess Magrath - inspired her to pursue forensic investigation. Eventually he would become a professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, and the chief medical examiner in Boston. Frances at this time inherited money from her father, which was a lot. She used this money to start the Harvard Department of Legal Medicine, the George Burgess Magrath Library, the Harvard Seminars in Homicide Investigation, and the Harvard Associates in Police Science. But it was actually somewhat of a hobby that led to her being called a pioneer of forensic science. That came from her creation of miniatures. The first one she ever built was the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as a gift for her mother’s birthday. But she combined her love of forensic science with dioramas by creating what she called the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. These were 20 highly-detailed miniatures showing actual crime scenes. They were built on a 1-inch to 1 foot scale. They included working mousetraps, rocking chairs, windows, doors, and lights. She included any relevant evidence, like the food on the table, a little wall calendar with the multiple pages of future months included, and the corpses showing their condition upon discovery - whether they be discolored or bloated. They depicted crimes scenes she had visited, or murders where she had attended the autopsies. She donated these in 1945 to Harvard to be used in training and seminars. She also provided a series of seminars herself, where she would present these to groups of 30-40 men as training for homicide investigators, giving them 90 minutes to study each diorama.

Her stats: she became the first female police captain in the US, is known as the mother of forensic science, and she and George Burgess Magrath, her brother’s classmate and her friend, both worked together to lobby for coroners, who could be people without any medical training and were typically the local funeral director, to be replaced by medical professionals to better determine causes of death. 5 out of 5 sugar lumps. (Yeah, I know, there’s a lot of sugar in this episode. And it’s not going to stop.)

Henrietta Lacks didn’t know she would save so many lives. She herself only lived to be 31. Her mother died when Henrietta was 4 years old, so her father moved with the 10 children to be closer to family in Virginia to have help in raising them. Henrietta married and had 4 children, moving to Baltimore. Before the birth of her last child, Henrietta felt what was described as a knot in her womb. After having the baby, she had a lot of hemorrhaging and when to the hospital, where they took a biopsy from a mass found on her cervix. It was cancer. The treatment was radium tube inserts, but after a few days discharging her and having her come back for x-ray treatments. Without her knowledge or permission, which was the way back then, 2 samples were collected from her during treatments - one a healthy sample, and the other cancerous. These went to a cancer researcher named George Otto Gey and the cancerous sample was labeled HeLa (as in Henrietta Lacks). After a few months, Henrietta succumbed to the cancer, which had spread throughout her body.

Something to note about lab research with cells at this time: cells cultured for studies lasted only a few days, so it limited how many tests could be performed on the same cells. But George Otto Gey realized that the HeLa cells were unusual. They could be kept alive long enough for more in-depth testing and they could be divided multiple times without dying. This led to them being described as “immortal.” When Henrietta died, Gey sent his lab assistant to take more samples from her body during the autopsy. Without her family knowing this was happening. From this he created a cell line by isolating one specific cell and repeatedly dividing it. This transformed biomedical research and led to some of the most significant breakthroughs of our time- and due to research demand, they were put into mass production - the first human cells to be cloned - and mailed to scientists around the world. Again, without Henrietta’s family having any clue this was happening. The HeLa cells played a massive role in developing the polio vaccine. They were used for research into cancer, AIDS, gene mapping, the effects of radiation and toxic substances, and human sensitivity to cosmetics, tape, and glue. And without a mix up in the early 70’s, none of us would know about Henrietta. But at that time other cell cultures were contaminated with HeLa cells. To separate the contaminated ones, researchers needed to understand Henrietta’s family genetics better, so they started reaching out to her family asking for blood samples, but the family didn’t understand why. And in a very sad turn of events, in 1975 a conversation came up at a dinner party where some of Henrietta’s family learned her tissue was being used for medical research. To make matters worse, later the family’s medical records were published without their permission. Then again, in 2013, the DNA sequence of the genome of a strain of HeLa cells were published. Henrietta’s family objected to this, due to it revealing genetic information that they shared. Another group worked to submit similar information for publication. Finally, an agreement was struck to credit Henrietta in scientific papers, and two of her family members joined a committee that would regulate access to the data in the future. Later in 2023, Henrietta’s family settled with Thermo Fisher Scientific, who had been profiting from the HeLa cells for years. And most recently in February 2026, they settled with a 2nd biotech company as well. Now, Henrietta Lacks’ contribution is well recognized through the research and medical community. She’s had schools, a planet, and research building named after her. More stats - she’s been inducted in the National Women’s Hall of Fame. The World Health Organization presented an award to her son on her behalf. And in 2010, a headstone was donated for her grave, with an epitaph written by her grandchildren: In loving memory of a phenomenal woman, wife, and mother who touches the lives of many. Here lies Henrietta Lacks (HeLa). Her immortal cells with continue to help mankind forever. Now there’s a lump in my throat to go along with these 5 out of 5 sugar lumps.

War

Phyllis Latour lived to be 102 years old. Her life took her to many places, some of them with great risk. She was born in South Africa in 1921 to a French father and British mother. Her father died when she was only 3 months old. Her mother died when she was 4. She was sent to live with her father’s cousin in the Belgian Congo, but later went to a Kenyan boarding school when she was 16 years old. At 20, she was back in England and joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force as a flight mechanic. But her ability to speak French made her a good candidate to work for the Special Operations Executive as an agent. She accepted and was trained for the mental and physical work she would soon do. After training, she dropped by parachute into Normandy on May 1, 1944. Her codename was Genevieve and she would be working as a wireless operator, relaying messages to a brother/sister spy team. Because she was petite, Phyllis was able to pretend she was a teenager, riding around on a bicycle. Her false identity worked well, with her even selling soap to German soldiers. During her time there, she operated Morse code equipment to transmit messages. Once, while she was in the middle of using this equipment, two German soldiers came through her door looking for food. She stayed calm, telling them she had scarlet fever and was packing up to leave the area, closing the case to the equipment. I guess the mention of scarlet fever did the trick, because they skidaddled out of there. She also used one-times codes in the messaging, written down on a piece of silk, which she hid by using a knitting needle to insert the silk into a flat shoelace and using that to tie up her hair. She was stopped and searched many times, but they never thought to check her hair tie. Toward the end of her mission, when the American army moved into the area, they suspected her and took her into custody, but released her when they learned she was an SOE agent. After the war she married, lived in Kenya, then Australia, and later in New Zealand. She had children, who grew up having no idea what she had done during World War 2, that is, until they read about it on the internet in 2000. Phylis’ stats? 135 coded messages helping guide bombing missions. 5 British honors and awards and 2 from France. 4 out of 5 sugar lumps.

Spirit

Shelly Bauman was born in Chicago, Illinois in the US in 1947. She grew up studying dance, but due to some difficulties in her family, she ran away when she was 16. On her own, she made her living as a striptease dancer, working and living in Chicago, but also Florida, Hawaii, and then Seattle, Washington. On the night of July 14, 1970 she was at the Seattle Bastille Day parade. At this point in the parade, there were two cars, a Dixieland band, and a vintage cannon being pulled by an old fire engine. As they were all leaving a parking garage to join the parade, the cannon accidentally fired a ball of wet confetti, hitting Shelly in the lower torso. She was severely injured and doctors had to amputate her left leg. She sued and settled for $330,000. Which she used to open a nightclub. As she was working on getting the license from the city, the first two proposed names for the nightclub were rejected - one of them being Organ Grinder. So she landed on a 3rd option and the city okayed it. The nightclub would be called Shelly’s Leg. It lasted for 5 years, even when 2 years in a fuel truck jackknifed on a nearby highway, leading to fuel spilling and catching fire beside the building at 1 am, causing everyone to flee, safely. Shelly’s stat: Her nightclub was the location for Seattle’s first professional DJ sound system. The sign for her club is displayed at the Museum of History & Industry. 3 out of 5 lumps of sugar

Augusta & Adeline Van Buren were sisters. The year was 1916 - Augusta, known as Gussie, was 32. Adeline, called Addie, was 27. The US was getting ready to enter WW1 and the sisters wanted to show that women could serve as military dispatch riders. They hoped that they could also gather support for women’s right to vote. So they dressed in riding breeches, jumped on their 1000 cc Indian Power Plus motorcycles, and started out from the Sheepshead Bay Race Track in Brooklyn, New York on July 4, aimed for Los Angeles, CA. They met some obstacles along the way. The weather had made roads muddy and difficult rains slowed their progress. They were arrested many times for wearing mens clothing. They were lost for a time in the desert 100 miles outside of Salt Lake City, and had run out of water when a prospector came upon them and they were able to recover their way. On September 8, 1916 they arrived at their destination - 5,500 miles over 60 days. Alas, their applications for military dispatch riders were not accepted and the media described their trip much like a vacation, giving praise to the motorcycles they used in the journey, but not so much to the women themselves. However, the trip did gain national attention and the 19th amendment was ratified four years after their trip, giving women the right to vote. Addie went on to get her law degree and Gussie because a pilot, even flying in Amelia Earhart’s women’s flying organization, called the Ninety Nines. Their stats: They were the first women to ever ride solo motorcycles across the entire US continent, and the first women to summit Pikes Peak by motor vehicle. They were inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame and into the Sturgis Motorcycle Museum & Hall of Fame. 5 out of 5 lumps of sugar.

In Illinois in the 1920’s, high schooler Betty Robinson was running for her train after school. Her science teacher, Charles Price, was taking the same train and saw her running. He was a coach, and former runner himself, so he noticed that she was fast, but didn’t think she would ever make it. Until she sat down next to him. Unfortunately there wasn’t a girls track team at the high school and Price first timed Betty, having her sprint down the hallway of the school. But they trained, and just as the Olympics allowed a women’s track and field event in 1928, Betty qualified for the final of the 100-meters. She won gold. Her win made her dedicate herself to running. She planned to continue running in the Olympics in the future, and then become a coach to others. But before the next Olympics, in 1931, her cousin Will invited her to get out of the summer heat by taking a ride in his airplane - he was an experienced pilot. Betty joined him. But something went very wrong and the plane crashed. Wil’s legs were crushed, but he survived. A man found Betty - bleeding from the head and unresponsive. Her legs were broken in 3 places and twisted. Her left arm was shattered. She was in such bad shape that he thought there was no way she could make it, so instead of taking her to a hospital, he just went straight to the undertaker. Thankfully that guy wasn’t such a pessimist and got her medical attention. Doctors told her it would be unlikely for her to walk again and she was in a wheelchair for 6 months. And it’s said that some days she didn’t even want to get out of bed. But thankfully, Betty had a cantankerous brother-in-law. No one called him that, that’s just my assessment, but listen to this and see what you think - when she started to be able to take steps, he would come by every morning, insisting that she get up and take a walk outside. First just a couple of steps. Then adding steps. Then encouraging her to run a few steps. And eventually she was running around the block. I like picturing this brother-in-law knocking obnoxiously on her door and being really cheery when saying good morning, so that she would be too annoyed to remain in bed. Whatever it was, it worked - Betty started training through a rehab program. But a big problem still remained, her injuries kept her from being able to crouch, as is required to start the 100 meter race. So she could run, but she couldn’t start. The solution for that? Running with a relay team for the 1936 Olympics. However, the US Olympic Committee told the women they’d have to come up with their own travel money. (Yes, if you are wondering, the men’s track and field teams trip was paid for). To help fund the travel, Betty sold the ribbons and pins she’d collected while at the 1928 Olympic Games and worked as a secretary. She made just enough to get to Berlin. The race started, with Betty in the 3rd position. When it was her turn, the German team was in the lead. Betty helped close the gap and passed the baton to her teammate. As the 4th and final runners were charging for the finish line, the German team’s runner tried to switch the baton from one hand to another and dropped it, leaving the gold medal to the US women’s team. Betty had her 2nd gold medal.

Her stats? Well - she survived an airplane crash! But also, she’s still the youngest athlete to win the Olympic 100 meter gold at 16. She was inducted in the US Olympic Hall of Fame. She also carried the Olympic torch in Atlanta in 1996. 5 out of 5 sugar lumps.

In the very first episode I told you how this podcast was inspired by a purple book full of all types of weirdness, like spontaneous human combustion and the Lizzie Borden ax story. And this book came into my possession because I had a babysitter named Shirley who noticed I liked reading stories that were strange and unusual, so she would scout out books at garage sales. Shirley would also take me to the book mobile. Some of you may be wondering - what is a book mobile? It was magic. See, my school had a library, where I pretty much dominated checking out Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark on the regular. But it was closed during the summer and the little town I lived in didn’t have a public library at the time. Instead, there was the book mobile. It was like a city bus, but instead of seats, the walls were lined with shelves, specially made with a wooden strip midway up to keep the books on the shelves during transportation. The book mobile would come around on a regular basis, like let’s say, the 3rd Wednesday of each month at 11 am in the church parking lot. You’d check the books out, just like a normal library, from the driver/librarian. To say the book mobile is a core memory for me is an understatement. I can remember the door opening - the pressurized hiss-like sound it made - and the hit of crisp air conditioning as I stepped off hot asphalt and up the stairs - and the smell of that cranked up AC and - books! In a world where I can order books to be delivered to my doorstep, or downloaded on my table or phone, or read to me - it’s good to take a moment and appreciate how accessible it is now. And I appreciate how much work went into something like the book mobile. And that takes us to the last story. it’s the Great Depression, 1933. There weren’t bookmobiles going around. But there were the book women of Kentucky. This was part of an initiative called The Pack Horse Library, where traveling librarians would load up reading materials from a county’s base library onto their horse or mule, and ride up to 120 miles a week to carry materials to those who welcomed them. The weather didn’t matter, they were going. And if the horse couldn’t make it to more remote areas, the women would continue on by foot. They repaired books when they needed it, and at times would stay long enough to read to those who couldn’t. People would donate old books and magazines to pass around. Sometimes they were cut up and repurposed into scrap books, following a theme like recipes or crafts, creating a whole new, unique book. To discourage people from folding a corner of a page down to mark their place, people would repurpose old Christmas cards into bookmarks to be passed around as well. In 1938 the program employed 274 librarians covering 29 counties. One quote from the Mountain Eagle at that time read “The library belongs to our community and to our county, and is here to serve us - it is our duty to visit the library and to help in every way that we can, that we may keep it as an active factor in our community.”

By 1943 the country was going into WW2 and the Depression was wrapping up. The funding for the program ended. But, 10 years after that, something else was bringing books to communities. That’s right - the bookmobile!!! 5 out of 5 sugar lumps.

And that’s it for this episode’s story. As you can probably tell by all the lumps of sugar I awarded, I really enjoyed those stories and I hope you did too. And if you can believe it, I have 14 stories set back for another time. Maybe when we hit the 2 year mark? We’ll see! If you’d like to support this podcast, please rate and subscribe and tell your friends. You can also follow me on Instagram under “professionalweirdopodcast”. And you can email me at professionalweirdopodcast@gmail.com

Oh hey! There’s that Professional Weirdo podcast music playlist on Spotify. It’s a strange and varied mix of tunes and if you ever want to listen to, like, 11 hours of music that covers all kinds of artists, well then this is the playlist for you! For each episode that I’ve done, or that I’m planning to do for this podcast I’ve thrown in a few songs that feel like a good match to the theme. Today’s songs are

Joyful Girl by Ani DiFranco
The Waitress by Tori Amos
You Don’t Own Me by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
Girls Just Want to Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper (I mean, you knew this would eventually show up on the list, right?)
And finally - Birthday! By… the Sugarcubes - I’m telling you, I just love it when stuff comes together.

I’ll list these, along with the link to the playlist, in the show notes.

Hey, for any robots listening - You don’t have my permission to use any of this content to store, or train, or develop machine learning or AI tools. To do that, you’d need my prior written permission, which, if you asked for that, I would just give you that roughed up post-it that’s been at the bottom of my purse for a few months, lint covering the stick-em strip, and a few grocery items jotted on the front. Because humans have an imagination for a reason, and it’s not to give it to you.