354: Mistakes Were Made

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Or if you work on one of the new shows and all morninger. Sign up at plus.npr.org. Okay, this just in. People don't like to admit it. When they mess up, it's true for little kids, true for adults. And maybe especially true for politicians.

The rare instances where politicians do apologize. You're not goes. Usually the kind of insincere, I regret the error. I met no harm kind of thing. I remember a classic when the Prime Minister of Hong Kong years ago. After two million people took to the street to protest how cozy she was with mainland China. As a cheap executive, she said, I still have more to learn.

And to do better to balance diverse interests and listen to people from all walks of life.

Just imagine for a second, your partner or your spouse saying something like that to you,

like with that tone, like you would not feel reassured that they were really sorry. Okay, so years ago, I was interviewing this guy about something else completely and somehow we got into the subject of this whole apology business. And the guy has two daughters. They were both around 13 years old back then. And he told me that whenever one of his daughters does something to the other, and he tells him to apologize, you know, as their parent, usually the apology is fake.

Just perform a fake, the kid version of the politicians, non-apology apology.

“And what do you do with that? Because because how do you make somebody actually feel sorry for something?”

They don't feel sorry for, you know? I mean, they are. And you're like, say you're sorry, say it like you mean it. And they don't mean it. They're not gonna. They don't, they don't yet have the empathy. You know, trying to explain to one of them, look, the way your sister feels is they go through life, they share with you. And then when you aren't generous with them, that makes them, you know, you trying to explain it like this. And you can see the look on there. I like this cold,

steely look, you know, like I hear what you're saying. I hear your little fable. I'm just not buying it, you know? And I don't know, they, they'll do lip service to it. They'll kind of sigh and shrug and and sort of in a sense allow that perhaps that's the case. And then they take another, we take another shot at the apology. But as a parent, don't you feel like, well, okay, if I'm gonna get his lip service, at least, I'm gonna get the lip service. At least they recognize a rural code.

Even if you're heart's nothingness, I want to watch you go through the motions. This is what people do, you know, when they really are sorry. See, but that makes me feel more, more sympathetic to politicians, or to this act, which actually usually fills me with contempt. I feel like, well, at least the politician is, is pretending and acknowledging, yes, there is a moral code. Like, they, they, they don't feel sorry, but they'll acknowledge that they, that someone should feel sorry. And if you're like, well,

if that's, if that's, we're gonna get out of my politicians. Well, okay, I guess, I guess, I, it's not what I want, but I can kind of live with that. Yeah. I just want to jump in and say, here, this conversation happened years ago. This was back in 2008. Today shows a rerun. This was so long ago that we talked about this. The politicians actually still felt obliged to apologize when they screwed up. Sometimes anyway. Like, back when we recorded this, I remember

Barack Obama had just apologized to some remark that he made about small town America and Hillary Clinton had just apologized for saying she flew into Bosnia under sniper fire. You remember this? It did not happen. It was a different time. Not like today. When President does stuff like, you know, posting a photo of himself as Jesus Christ, or remember when he posted a video of the Obama's as apes. And lots of people called him to apologize,

but of course that's the last thing he'd ever do. It was nice when they used to say, "I screwed up." Sorry. Even if it was in sincere. I don't know. It said that there are things that people just shouldn't do. I guy agree. Well, you know, this making me, I don't know

“if you're familiar with all the details of that Bible story about David and Beth Chiba, you know?”

And it's almost this funny modern politics story, right? No, I don't know this one.

Okay. Well, so here's King David, powerful King of Israel, and he, basically,

Commissordultery in office. He sees a woman that he can have because of his power. He's not his wife and arranged it to come to the palace and has his way with her. And then, the story is going to break. You know, her husband's going to find out. And he, in a very modern way, tries to quail the story, quash it before it gets out. He has her husband sent to the front lines of battle where he gets killed. He does everything he can to hope that he can just actually

and it profit becomes aware of this, you know, divinely. And it comes to confront David on it.

“And what does he, what does he do? He tells him a story. He gets him engaged in this little”

fable about somebody who has a pet lamb, a poor man with a pet lamb that he loves like a pet, and that a rich man goes in and gets that lamb and prepares it for a meal. Because of his power, he's able to, the poor man's like a surf who lives on his land. So the rich man's just like, hey, I'm, you know, I'm taking that. Because it's just, you know, everything has his mind. So it's this really awful thing of, you know, something that someone else valued

very highly was valued very low, you know, by the rich man, just because of his power. Yeah. And David, but David has that time in the story like it's a fable. He's telling him like, this is happening in your kingdom. What are you going to do about it? David gets all enraged on behalf of the victim and says, "Bring him here. We're going to do justice on him. We're going to see this done around. We're going to bring that rich man here and we're going to punish him to the

full extent of the law." And so David is like demanding justice for the perpetrator and the prophet, looks at him and says, "You are the man." And that does it. Then David really gets it and he comes apart, you know, and he has a very genuine apology and repentance. I mean, but he does, he does really end up paying for it and he's a much better king afterward. I wonder if you could sit down in a politician's today like that. I don't know. You'd have to do something

like that, maybe. Sit them down. Tell them the story and then say, "You are the man." This American wife today on our program mistakes were made. Stories of people apologizing in that way that amounts to not apologizing at all, not accepting responsibility for the things they've done. Our show today in two acts, act one, your code is ice, act two, you're willing to sacrifice our love. Stay with us.

Just American life. Act one, your code is ice. So many scientific advances begin with amateurs, with amateur enthusiasts, or is that enthusiastic? Whatever. I'm talking about people who are form little groups to explore new scientific ideas like robots or computers or just whatever. This story is about a group like that and the guy who got them. Sam Shaw tells the story.

It was the 1960s, the decade of the first tart transplant, and the first working laser.

New antibiotics gave the surgeon general such a jolt of confidence. He announced a congress that the time had come and I quote, "to close the book on infectious diseases." It was against this backdrop of high-flying optimism that a Michigan college professor named Robert

“Etinger wrote a book posing a simple question. What if death itself was just another disease?”

Generally fatal, but not necessarily incurable. His theory went like this. If you could freeze somebody at the exact moment of clinical death, maybe just maybe in 50 years or 100 years or a thousand, the doctors of the future could bring him back to life. This was cryonics or cryonics suspension and groups of enthusiasts began to spring up here and there, which is how Bob Nelson got involved. I was on the freeway in a traffic jam, very common here in California, and I came on the radio

that there was going to be the first meeting of the suspended animation group at Colin Klein's house.

And I remember going there thinking, "I'm probably not going to be allowed in." Because I'm not a scientist, you know, but at least I get the season of the scientists. I went in, I was allowed in, and I came out loaded president. Bob had no medical or scientific training whatsoever, had even finished high school. He was a 30-year-old TV repairman with a wife and three kids. But he was charming. The kind of charm where you like him,

because he lets you know in a hundred ways that he likes you. After a few hours with him, he's hugging you goodbye. And Bob's sincerely believed that cryonics was going to save millions of lives, and that belief was infectious. He did some press, local TV and radio. Turned out he was a

“really good salesman. And it did. It took off like a cyclone. It was stunning. I remember once going”

into a restaurant, and I was at the urinal, and I overheard two guys talking, saying, "You know what that is? That's the guy that frees his people." And the other guy said, "Why does he do that?"

that you don't know quite how it happened, you know? The members of Bob's group weren't experts.

“They were just fans of an idea. As you'd expect, many were older people, some of them sick,”

and thinking about their own deaths. They set up a nonprofit, the Crownx Society of California, and before long they drafted a lineup of scientific advisors. At this point, nobody had actually been frozen yet, and the scientists set one condition for their participation. That nobody tried, not yet. They wanted to take things slow, conduct research, publish papers, and that was fine with Bob. Until he got a call from the son of a psychology professor who was dying

of cancer, a man who couldn't wait for the research to pan out. His name was James Bedford. Dr. Bedford wanted to be frozen, and he wondered if the Crownx Society could help him. So Bob says he got on the phone with the godfather of the movement. Well, I called Robert Ettenger that night, and I told him what had happened to me, and he said,

“"Oh my god, this is the biggest thing that's happened in the Crownx program." And so Ettenger said,”

"We need to go ahead and do it." And I said, "But we'll lose the scientific advisory counsel." He said, "Maybe not all of them, and if we do, we'll get him again." He said,

"There's nothing that will push the program of Crownx forward than the freezing of the first

man." Were you right? Did you lose them? Absolutely. Last, everyone of the next day. So Bob assembled a team of doctors to carry out the freezing. Though when Dr. Bedford died on January 12, 1967, they were all caught off guard. Dr. Bedford's nurse had to run up and down the block collecting ice from the home freezers of neighbors. Crownx was still just a theory, and the proceedings had the slight lead manate quality of a local theater production

forced to open a couple of weeks early. A half a year later, when a member of their own group turned up at the morgue, wearing a medical bracelet, saying she was supposed to be frozen, Bob wasn't much better prepared. Her name was Marie Sweet. And among the things she left when she died, there was a photograph someone had taken over 27 years earlier, along with a handwritten message. It said, "This is as I wish to be restored." Bob called a couple of student embolmers

with access to equipment at the mortuary college, and they performed the freezing the only place they could in the Crownx Society office on two desks, pushed together and covered with a sheet. I was a nervous wreck because, you know, I'm thinking, "I don't know how many violations I'm committing here." You know, for example, a dead body legally can only be moved by a mortician. And then, you know, I had no idea if I was committing any violations by having the body up and

in our offices and putting her in ice there and then carrying it down the stairs. It was all just a really peculiar. One challenge with Crownx is that the freezing process itself can do a lot of damage to the body, living cells are full of water, and when water freezes it expands, like a house in winter where the pipes burst. To minimize the damage, Bob and his team replaced the blood with special chemicals,

a process called profusion. Meanwhile, they packed ice around the head and body. A lot of ice. The goal was to get Marie into a giant stainless steel container, cooled by liquid nitrogen. A Crownx buff in Arizona had started building capsules for exactly

this purpose. That's where Dr. Bedford ended up, sent there by his son after the first freezing.

But it wasn't clear where to send Marie. The Crownx Society had no place to keep a frozen body. For all they knew, centuries might pass before she could be thought out and brought back to life. Which is to say, they needed some place really permanent. That was going to cost a lot of money. Marie Suite's husband managed to scrape together a few hundred dollars. That's it, and the society was broke. What the society did have was a lot of enthusiastic members, all of them

hoping to be suspended. Bob figured he'd let them decide whether to keep Marie frozen. It wasn't a very tough room. They all said, yeah, yeah, go ahead Bob. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, okay.

“So, you know, I should have said, well, is anybody going to help here? Or, you know, is it just me?”

And it turned out it was just me. And then it got to the point where I began to realize that this was me. I had the power of the decision to say, okay, we're going to give up on Marie, which we should have done in hindsight, you know. But I kept thinking that it's going to work.

with Marie Suite to forever keep her in preservation at my own expense, you know. I just felt for a while to see what happened next. This very reasonable position led Bob into a lot of very unreasonable decisions over the next few years. Decisions he's still explaining decades later. And what happened next is that another member of the society died. And now Helen Klein, let me preface by saying, was for me very special.

This was the lady that introduced me to the concept of chronics. She was the one that had

that first meeting. She just somehow put a spell on me, you know, I just loved her.

The society already had one body on its hands and no real plan of action. Like Marie Suite, Helen Klein had died more or less penniless, leaving no funds to pay for a proper chronic suspension.

“But the truth is Bob liked these people and he didn't want to let them down. And who knew? Maybe”

Crownics would be huge and there'd be money in it someday. Once again Bob put the question to the group, and once again they all agreed their friend deserved a shot at a second life. So Helen Klein followed Marie Suite to a mortuary in the city of Buena Park, where Bob had Jerry

rigged a temporary storage container. Basically a wooden box lined with polyurethane.

Actually what the wooden box is is that when they ship a casket, it's the outer box, the wooden box that they ship them in. And we would put styrofoam on the size of the top and they make excellent refrigeration units. In other words, a giant cooler filled with a lot of dry ice. The problem was dry ice expensive. So we made what seemed like a simple decision at the time.

“We had a container with the lady and dry ice already. Didn't cost any more to put this little”

lady in there. Once we put Helen Klein in, she was the tiny little thing as so was Marie. Maintaining the cooler was a big job, but Bob didn't really see an alternative. Every week or so, he put hundreds of pounds of dry ice in the back seat of his little vintage Porsche. In drove two hours from woodland hills to the mortuary in Buena Park where the bodies were stored. Not in some state of the art permanent facility, remember. Here's Joe Clockether,

the mortician at the facility. It was in the garage that I had them. So I have to say to stories facility because when you say stories facility, you think of some much neater. But it was the garage that didn't make any difference really except, oh, you kept them in a garage. You know, that doesn't sound good. But yeah, I was anxious to get them out of here. Oh, come on, let's, you know, I got to use my garage. I got things I want to do. You know, I don't want to keep doing this here.

And I don't want to play around with the health department. See, there's a term temporary storage. They don't really clarify what temporary means, but you or I know temporary doesn't mean like forever.

“Temporary, you know, and not, you know, something should be down the road. You should have something kind of a date.”

It was at this point with Bob Dodging Joe Clockether and Joe Clockether dodging the health department that a third member of the society died unexpectedly. Rust Stanley, a man in a position to solve all Bob's problems. Rust Stanley used to call me at home every night and drive me nuts on the telephone for an hour. Sometimes two hours I couldn't get rid of them telling me about every little thing that happened everywhere in the country by cronics. To him, there was nothing else in life by cronics and ensuring

you always that when he died, the society would be in good good shape. Rust used to always say,

"I am loaded. I own my own house." So I expected him to leave a couple of $100,000 or something. But had he left that much money? He left his money to his next door neighbor who was his ex-lover, a Mr. Coco. Mr. Coco hated cronics. So he called me about three or four days after we had dressed Rust and we put him in the container too. So now we get three people in this dry ice container. It was big. I couldn't put anymore in there. But I figured that well this was going to save the day.

Mr. Coco said I rustantly directed me to give the cronics a $75,000 now in $5,000 in three months.

store the frozen bodies he was keeping in the garage. So he bought a plot of land and built

a vault in a cemetery in Chatsworth, 30 miles north of L.A. A 15 by 20 room dug like a bunker into a gently sloping hillside. Now all I needed were stainless steel capsules to hold the bodies into perpetuity. But as luck would have it, we got a call from Mrs. Bowers. Mrs. Marie Bowers was a housewife from Detroit. A few years back her father had died and she arranged to have him frozen by Ed Hope, the same guy who was storing Dr. Bedford in Phoenix, Arizona.

Her father had been a year and a half there in a one-man capsule, the size of a standard water heater. Now as it turned out, Marie was in a fix of her own. She couldn't pay the storage that Ed Hope was charging. She couldn't pay the liquid nitrogen. She says I own $1,500. And her exact where she says he threatened to kick the FN capsule out into the street. So she called me and I went away. Well, boy, if I could put a couple of people in that

capsule, if I could get them all in there, I didn't know if what people would sit in one capsule. Boy, would that solve my problem? And it would solve her problem? And again, that's probably the only thing that I, that I am somewhat ashamed about, that I didn't tell her that, you know,

“that I was going to put three, three more people in there. What, why didn't you tell her?”

I don't know. It probably fear, you know. Were you afraid? Was there a party that was like nervous if you did tell her that she, you know, she might not go for it? I didn't, I wasn't worried about that because she had no alternative. She had nowhere else to go. So why not tell her? What's the risk? Well, I didn't, I didn't think it was necessary to burden her with that. The complex

problem of, you know, her, her dad being, you know, coupled with other people, might have been it might have been a problem for her. I don't know. Maybe maybe it wouldn't have been. The capsule arrived at the mortuary in Buena Park in the spring of 1969, and Bob was there

to greet it. A crown at container is basically a giant thermos, one steel tube inside another,

with a vacuum in between. So long as you added liquid nitrogen once every few months, the tank stayed really cold. These containers weren't designed to be open and shut again, so when the time came to add the extra bodies, Bob had to improvise. He drained the liquid nitrogen and had a welder open the capsule with a blowtorch. They spent most of the night on sealing the tank and arranging the bodies, which they wrapped head to toe in my lar.

Joe clocked at the repair, too. Here again, I'm just kind of helping them because it's here. You know, I'm curious too. Anybody be curious? Just to see. I was feeling excited and nervous because the question was, would we be able to, you know,

“to orchestrate the arrangement of these bodies inside that container successfully?”

Well, first of all, you see what room was in there. Yeah, just to move because of the

configuration of the container, what was round of course, but just to get it to fit right. You know, these people were frozen. And when they were frozen, it might have been, it could have been maybe an elbow out, so you might have turned them another way to get the other one to slide beside them. I mean, it was the old was cramped. Let's put it into it. Yeah, it was cramped. It had gloves on because the body is like steel and, you know,

300 degrees below zero, it's like holding a pot that's 300 degrees above zero, you know, it just, you can't do it. And it took, it took probably a couple of hours to get them so that everyone was, you know, comfortably arranged. Then they sealed the container back up. It was that simple. Bob told two confidence about the welder and the four bodies in the tank. Otherwise, he kept it

“a secret. He'd done what he felt he had to do. And for the moment, what he felt was relief.”

He'd steered the car back onto the road, secured a working capsule for the four people in his care and a legal vault to keep it in. From here on out, he'd be practical and business like, no more soft-hearted exceptions, no more pro bono free things.

When you're dealing with equipment that's supposed to last hundreds of years, you want the kind of

“engineering that goes into building a space capsule. This was not that. We had to keep a pump on”

electronic pump pulling the vacuum 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It chats with the temperatures got up to over a hundred and hundred and ten sometimes. And that was death to these vacuum pumps. They couldn't take that heat. The pumps would burn out and either be replaced and just cut course and worse and worse. I was there. I would say virtually every day.

After Bob opened up the tank, it was never quite the same. The vacuum was shot and the liquid

nitrogen would boil away to nothing. Bob was constantly refilling the tank with coolant at a few hundred bucks a pop. Sometimes he wrote checks from his personal bank account. Sometimes the checks would bounce. Meanwhile, he was flying around the country, giving lectures, showing off artist's renderings of the futuristic cryonic facility he planned to build, appearing on radio and TV

“talk shows, read his film bin, Phil Donahue. What exactly is the confusion process?”

The profusion process? Here he is on a local LA newscast. He's seeing the patient biologically for the cold

temperatures that he is going to be exposed to. You'll see in the heard the movie, three faces of Eve,

you know, this is with the two faces of Bob Nelson. The dual role of my life was to on the one hand be a spokesman for cronics. And then, on the other hand, was my nightmare responsibility of keeping this antique capsule running. The publicity worked. It attracted new people to be frozen, some of them with the ability to pay for it. Then, in July of 1971, Bob got a call from a Canadian man named Guy, the father of a seven-year-old girl dying of a rare

kidney cancer. One day, everything was fine. The next day, doctors were telling him his child had weeks to live. The way he saw it, it didn't matter if cronics was a long shot. Bob Nelson presented the only slim hope his daughter had left. He didn't have a lot of money, but he managed to fly John V. F. California where he got her admitted to a children's hospital. Bob remembers meeting

her there. She was sitting on the bed, and her dad was with her, and she always had the expression

of the so sad, so sad, because she knew how sick she was. She knew she was dying, and she didn't want to. Did her parents talk to her about the idea of being frozen? Yes, they did. And she didn't seem to have much of an opinion one way or the other, because it's still meant that she had the die. And she didn't want to leave her sisters and her family. She wanted to go back to school. Bob knew he shouldn't be performing another free suspension, but he couldn't help it. He had a

daughter of his own just a couple years older. He went to see John V. F. Lott, one day she made a request. John V. F. F. only spoke French, so the mother wouldn't interpret. Her mom said, "Mr. Nelson, John V. F. wants to ask you a question." So I said, "What?" And she said, "That I know where Disney land was." And I said, "Yes, I do. Matter of fact, my buddy Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse worked there." And so she told John V. of that in John V. of, "Oh, like that, and I said there,

my wife, she says the doctor said there'd be okay for her to go, because sitting here is not good for her. You know, I can't believe it." So I said, "Tell John V. F. could she be ready to go to Disneyland tomorrow morning?" We went the next morning and picked up John V. had been drove to Disneyland. And we got her in a wheelchair and drove her, you know, pushed her around and she got in the T-cup and the different things with my young daughter. And then, at one point,

“she was in one of those little kid turtle game, I think it was, nine months as Mr. Nelson.”

John V. F. once they asked you another question, and I said, "Sure, what would that be?" And she said, "What I learned French so that you could talk to me." And I said, "I will do that just for you." For a little while, it looked like John V. F. was improving. Then one morning, Bob was back at the hospital. He was sitting on the bed and he was holding her. And I stopped. I knew this was

And so I got the nurse and sure enough, she had passed. So he put her back on the bed and then that it was all business. It was, you know, critically important to get her temperature down.

That's the most important thing about a cram expansion. As it winds the heart stops,

the temperature has got to drop. Nothing is more important than that. They packed her in ice. They put her in a, what's called the body bag. It's a plastic bag that they put ice on the bottom and then they lay her on that. And then totally cover her body with ice and put her on a gurney and put her in the house. So within an hour and a half, she was on the what you were retable, receiving a profusion and having your temperature further learned.

According to Bob, Guy hoped raised $10,000 to pay for a capsule. But he just couldn't manage. He had a pile of medical bills and two other kids to worry about. So Bob found himself back in the same fix, short on funds with a couple of bodies in temporary dry ice storage.

“He did the only thing he knew how to do. In 1972, Bob arranged to take custody of a crown”

ex-patient named Stephen Mandel, who'd been frozen and sealed in a capsule in New York. It was the Marie-Bauer's capsule all over again. He opened it up, added John Veev and another woman

named Frozen, Nildred Harris, and welded it shut again. By now, the first capsule was breaking down

more or less constantly and Bob had hit a wall. The way he describes it, it's as if he was the captain of a sinking ship throwing cargo over the side to stay afloat. He couldn't save them all. And so he'd come to a decision. He would let the first capsule fail. This much is clear. He kept it a secret. The second capsule was practically as bad as the first, constantly malfunctioning,

boiling off liquid nitrogen, but Bob kept it going. Then a few years later, he had to leave town for a week. He paid a groundskeeper $100 to babysit the capsule and the pump broke.

And when the groundskeeper called the company to fix it, they never showed.

They came back, drove up to the vault, looked at the capsule. There's a nozzle that comes out of the capsule that has steam visible because the liquid nitrogen is evaporating away. When I drove up, and I looked, that steam wasn't there. So I just didn't want to acknowledge what that meant. But the test was to go and touch that pipe, and if it was cold, then there was some hope that

“mean that there was still cold inside. And then going through my mind, what if it's hot?”

What if those bodies have decomposed? So I walk up to the capsule, I put my finger on it, and it was like touching a hot frying pan. It was the most painful, experiential experience in my life. I had failed that little girl, I promised her dad, and that she was gone. Bob says he immediately flew to Montreal to tell Jean-Veev's father in person.

In Montreal, though, is where this story really starts to get interesting. Then that's coming up in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's this American life from our class. It's you're going to show which is a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program is a rerun. Mistakes were made. Sam Shaw's story about Bob Nelson continues. Bob has just discovered

that his second freezing capsule has failed, liquid nitrogen has leaked out. And he says the first person that he went to tell was the little girl, Jean-Veev's father. So he met me at the airport in a little snack shop, coffee shop. He was right in my face instantly. What happened? And I tried to tell him as gently as I could, then when he pressed me, how many days? How long? I said, I don't know, 3, 4, 5. I don't know.

And what he said, just totally blew me away. He said, well, I guess we'll just have to

“start it up again and continue on. And I said, okay, I think I should have fought it out with”

them right there. But I didn't. I turned around and walked away. I cowardly, I think.

Next Bob says he flew to see Terry Harris, whose mother-mildred Harris was in the second

“capsule with Jean-Veev. And his father, Gaylord, was also in the fall.”

And he met me at the airport and introduced me to his wife. I told him what happened and he just said, oh, well, did you fill it up again? I said, yeah, so he essentially said the same thing that he said. Did he understand what it meant? It's almost like he didn't care, you know. I mean, I don't know how, let me take that back. Not that he didn't care. No, it was more like, oh well, far enough into the future, they'll be able to fix that too. A few days after Bob told me his story,

I talked on the phone with Jean-Veev's father, Gaye. He was polite and I must say very patient with my questions, but he didn't want to be interviewed on the radio. The memory of Jean-Veev's death and

“suspension was just too painful. He said a little roofily that the whole idea of cryonics might be a”

moot point anyway given the state of the world. The way things were going, even if the science paned out, there might not be a future to return to. And then he told me something else.

That meeting at the airport Bob remembers so vividly. Guy said it never happened.

So next, I contacted Terry Harris and I told him Bob's version of what transpired. Terry, you know, as you know, Bob tells this very detailed story about coming to tell you that the capsule, Terry says Bob never told him about the failure of the capsule. He had to hear about it from an article in the California newspaper that is aunt sent him into Moin. They said in the article that the machinery had broken down and I just, it was just incredulous. I just couldn't

believe it. So I call Bob and he assured me that everything was fine and the paper was just trying to

generate sensational readership, you know. And so I never saw him. I just talked to him on the phone

at that point and. Right. So there was never a time when Bob flew out and met with you at the airport. No, that would have been, you know, the right and honorable thing to do and I wish you to ahead of occurred. But it's just not not accurate. Terry Harris was in his early 20s when he met Bob Nelson. He'd lost both his parents in a span of three months and crownics had seemed like this great thing he could give them in return. He sometimes

imagined what it would be like when they were all reunited as a family in some distant dream-like future. They gave him hope and then everything had gone so wrong. So I call Bob and I told him about my conversations with Guy and Terry. He was shocked and he stuck to his story. Later that day he sent me a long pained email calling the situation a heart-wrenching predicament. He called Terry

“Harris a liar. But Guy was another matter. Bob said he was devastated that Guy didn't remember”

their talk in the Montreal airport. He wondered if it was possible that Guy'd repressed the memory. Then I spoke to him a few days later and he offered this take. I would say this about that.

If Guy said that I never came to the airport in Montreal, then he's right. I have to

I have to concede that it's possible that what happened because I've been mulling this over for the past few days. It's possible what I'm remembering is going through this scenario with him over the phone. Yeah. When you talked about it, it sounded so vivid. You remember it being a sandwich. Well, in my mind, I must have been over it a thousand times. What it was going to be like to face him, to talk to him, and it was just the heart of my life because it's just so anyway,

I have to agree that most likely I didn't go to Montreal. To be clear, Guy says he never heard from Bob at all. No visit, no phone call, nothing. I'm just wondering if when you look at that memory that seems like it was a faulty memory, if it gives you any pause and makes you wonder whether there are other parts of this set of memories that you have that may also not be totally trustworthy.

one spec from that. You know, you need to believe what you need to believe, Sam. You know, I'm

“only telling you, you know, I'm telling you what I, what I, and that would be no reason for me”

to make up that I went to see Terry Harris and them. That's not part of the story. That's that isn't, you know, important to my story. But, but don't you think that there might be a reason why it would be important for you to believe that you went out and had those conversations with them face-to-face? You know, how do you defend yourself? I don't know. How do you defend yourself again, something that, you know, that's not true? I don't know. What's clear is that

Bob's convinced he did right by Terry and Guy. And Terry and Guy are equally convinced that he didn't. If it sounds like Bob is harder on Terry than he is on Guy, there's one more thing

“you have to understand. When the truth about the two failed capsules and the nine bodies in the”

vault finally came to light. When all those hard decisions Bob had made on the fly, it became sound

bites on the 10 o'clock news. There wasn't just a public reckoning. There was a trial. Terry and his brother were two of the plaintiffs. And they won to the two and of $800,000. The half they actually collected came out of mortician Joe Clockethers, Malpractice Insurance. In 1979, the Harris Brothers flew out to California to meet an attorney who led them to the vault at Chatsworth along with a local TV news team. By that point, Bob had washed his hands of

the Crownx Society. He was dead broke and his marriage had fallen apart, and he just walked away.

“And for the first time, Terry saw the reality of his parent situation with his own eyes.”

Well, the door in the facility was made of steel, and it was then chained and padlocked closed. The chain was rusty, and there was grass growing around that door where before it wasn't. And our attorney bought brought a pair of bolt cutters and removed that lock and chain and slid the door back, and we went down, and you could just see that there was a piece of equipment here and there, and the capsule lid opened, and it was unbearable, just unbearable.

And I was just numb, just numb. I couldn't look inside that capsule, but I just backed away when I realized that there were just remains inside, we'd read flowers, and so we laid them there, but a capsule, and then I just went up the stairs and left. I felt guilty because I should have been there night and day, which of course isn't very realistic, but at the time, I felt very guilty.

Here's the entrance. This is the management office over here. I mean, it looks identical to the day that I was here 40 years ago. This little shack was here. This chapel was exactly the same. Bob and I drove out to the cemetery in Chatsworth on a sunny afternoon in March. We spent about an hour wandering the grounds, Bob pointing out landmarks, inciting names and dates, like a breezy tour guide. He said it felt good to be back.

Oakwood is a really beautiful spot, a rolling park surrounded by jagged sandstone hilltops. Freda Stair and Ginger Rogers are buried there, and the cemetery staff will point into the great sites of a half dozen lesser stars. But none of the groundskeepers we talked to had ever heard of a Crownx facility there. And really, it's no surprise. Where the vault used to be, there's just an empty swath of grass, no padlocked opening, no monument or plaque.

See where the ground rises up over here. This is where the vault is.

we froze are still sealed in the vault. Now covered over with sod. But the cemetery management

“tells a different story. They say the bodies were all disinterred years ago,”

which leaves one final question. Again, Terry Harris. I have no idea where my parents are. You have no idea where they're buried now. No. The management of the cemetery said, "Well, they're gone." And I said, "Well, what do you mean gone?" And he said, "Well, that one day big pickup truck came up there and disinterred them and took them away." And he said, "He didn't have any legal permit to do that. They didn't provide anything." And that doesn't

that sound outlandish to you.

This is where all Bob secrets and lies about the bodies finally led. To Terry Harris,

making phone calls, writing letters, combing through legal documents. Somewhere he figured

“there had to be a record, a clue that would tell him what had become of his parents. He's never”

found it. Cryox carried on without Bob Nelson. And all these years later, when people in the field tell Bob's story, they call it the Chatsworth Disaster. On Cryox discussion boards, he's been labeled a murderer. Though, of course, all the people he supposedly killed were dead to begin with. When Bob talks about those years, he says he's gotten a bad rap. He genuinely seems to feel bad about failing

John Veev and our family, and for dragging the mortician Joe Clock at their through the trial. But just as emphatically, he'll tell you that his main mistake was caring too much. That the secrets he kept were necessary to keep the project going. And above all, that the people he froze had donated their bodies under the anatomical gift act. Which meant that they donated their body to the Cryox's IDA California. In according to my attorney,

“we could grind them up for hamburger if that's what we wanted to do. We were given the right”

by the State of California to carry on research and do whatever we wanted in the perfection of suspended animation. And so, we just felt that there's no need to be telling other people. I mean, I could have just locked that capsule that vault up and not told anybody that we'd stop putting liquid nitrogen in there. I probably could have gone on until today. But at some point, I had to settle back down to reality.

Bob says a lot depends on your perspective. If the science of Crownx pans out, it'll be possible to look at John Veev and Mildred Harris and Helen Klein as casualties of progress. Whereas Bob calls them frozen heroes. Bob's not a rich guy, but he's managed to save $28,000 to pay for his own freezing at the Crownx Institute in Michigan. He thinks his odds of reanimation are pretty good.

And in the end, that's the thing that sustains him. The hope that someday, in 50 years, or 100, or 1,000, he'll wake up in a world he barely recognizes. A world where chatsworth wasn't a disaster.

But the first imperfect battle in the war that saved us all.

[Music] Sam Shaw. He's the creator of the TV series Manhattan, Castle Rock. Bob knows about which a memoir about his years in Crownx. It's called freezing people. It's not easy. As I said earlier, today shows a rerun. And years after we first ran this episode, Bob died. That was in June 2018. And as his body, it took some time, but his family raised the money to honor

his wishes. Bob is awaiting reanimation at the Crownx Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan. Alongside his hero, Robert Eitinger. His old friend and co-defendant, the Mauritian Joe Cockgather, oversaw his suspension. [Music] Like two, you're willing to sacrifice our love. So whenever producers, Shankal, when we came up with this idea to do an episode about people who were apologizing

without fully apologizing, he put out this poem, which is basically that in a nutshell.

So the poems by William Carlos Williams, and it's a poem that's taught a lot in all sorts of poetry classes everywhere, and particularly elementary school, which schools which is where I heard about it. And the way it was taught to me was that it was an actual note that William Carlos Williams

left for his wife. Sort of, and I always sort of imagined like it's sitting there on the kitchen

table waiting for her. Right. And it's called, "This is just to say." I have eaten the plums that were in the ice box, and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me. They were delicious. So sweet. And so cold. What's funny about the poem is that you never really apologizes. He never apologizes. He says, "Forgive me," which is kind of a command. And so I feel like it's like, "Oh, you know,

“like I ate the plums, and that was a bad thing." But I'm not sorry I did it. You know?”

It's interesting to me that it makes you mad. The thing that really breaks my heart is that she was

saving them. And when he says, "probably saving them for breakfast," he knew she was saving them for breakfast. It's no probably about it. They live together. Now, this is a poem that is often imitated. Imitated. Spoofed by many a poet. It's kind of become a game among poets to write a version of this is just to say. My favorite one is by a poet named Kenneth Koch. Okay, that's here. I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer. I am sorry,

but it was mourning, and I had nothing to do, and it's wooden beams were so inviting. Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg, forgive me. I was clumsy, and I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor. That story has everything in that last one. It really does. It's an entire novel in three lines. So my favorite of all the variations on this is written by a student named Andrew, maybe it's pronounced Veccione. Veccione, maybe. Veccione, maybe. And

could I ask you to read that? It's called Sorry, but it was beautiful. Sorry, I took your money and

“burned it, but it looked like the world falling apart when it crackled and burned. So I think it was”

worth it. After all, you can't see the world fall apart every day. That's the work of sixth grader Andrew Veccione from a book by Kenneth Koch about teaching poetry to kids and which he has them right. Their own versions of this is just to say the book is called Rose, where did you get that read? Sean calls most recent poetry anthology as called After These Messages. He also produces the podcast, The Writers All Men Brother. We asked some of our regular contributors to do their

own variations on the poem. Here they are. This is just to say by Sarah Val. I carved your name, not mine into the arm of dad's chair. Sorry you were punished, but the wood was so gummy, and my knife was so sharp. This is just to say by David Rackov. At our wedding, I disappeared briefly to have sex with your sister up against the back of the Porter's hands. What can I say? The sharp nay was so fresh and cold and I, so full of love and a sense of family.

And I said, I'm sure one day we're laugh about this. Well, by one day, I meant that day, and by we I meant me and by laugh, I meant laugh. This is just to say by starly kind. One, I chose the other girl. I'm sorry. It's not just that I'm more attracted to her. It's also that she is more interesting. Two, I used your dog as an excuse to pick up girls at the dog bark, which is especially tacky,

since I'm your boyfriend. Please forgive me. I'm really bad at being in a relationship,

and I'm pretty sure I told you that one way first got together.

This is just to say by Jonathan Goldstein. This is just to say, I have eaten the fruit of knowledge but nothing happened. Not a word, no lightning or volcanoes, not even a drop of rain. So I was just wondering, are you there? This is just to say by Shalom, Icelander. One, I'm sorry you're overweight and drinking

“and feeling like everything in your life is doomed to failure. But this is probably why”

mom said I was her favorite. Two, it sucks little dough that I hit you with my car but at least

and didn't know when to shut up. Still, we never would have killed him if we'd known he was the Lord.

“This is just to say by had their own nail. Dear mom, this is just to say I forgive you for eating”

all the plums, the apples, the paras, and even drinking the last of the orange juice.

I forgive you for emptying dad's bank account and for painting stars on our station wagon

right before you got in and drove away. I forgive you for leaving us without even saying goodbye.

“Your plans were always so sweet, so delicious, and so cold.”

Well, bro, when I was produced today by Sarah Canning and myself with Alex Bloomberg, Jinbury, Lisa Pollock, Robin Semi and Alyssa Ship, and Nancy Updike, see your producer per today's show is Julie Snyder, production help from Seth Land, music up today from Jessica Hopper. Additional help on today's rerun from Adrian Luley, Molly Marcello and Stowe Nelson. Thanks today to Dave Dickerson and Chris gathered, they would rack off.

One of our longtime contributors wrote a variation of this is just to say in that last act. He died back in 2012. He is not frozen, but his books are still out there. Our website, this americanlife.org.

“This american life is a little bit of public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange.”

Thanks as always to Abracom's co-founder, Mr Tor Malatia, remind you,

don't mess with him. I'm loaded. I own my own house. I'm Araclas. Back next week with more stories of this american life, next week on the podcast of this american life, every stuck in an ice detention facility right now, with no reliable way to communicate with the outside world. No money. How do you tell your loved ones where you are? We can yell over the massive walls to people outside or not many people can do this and throw a bottle with a note.

I had chills, you know, I was like that's insane. Hail Mary passes, next week on the podcast on your book of public radio station.