383: Origin Story

Ira Glass

Pino Audia teaches in the business school at Dartmouth, and he researches, among other things, the question: How do entrepreneurs get created? And somebody noticed that his students and many of his colleagues actually have an opinion about this. They believe entrepreneurs make themselves. You know, you bravely head off on your own. You write a business plan. You start in your own garage. And that garage, by the way, is not a metaphor. Hewlett-Packard started in a garage. Apple Computer had a garage. Disney, the Mattel Toy Company, the Wham-O Toy Company.

Ira Glass

This is from a promotional video that Hewlett-Packard put together after it spent millions to buy and restore the original garage where its two founders started what is now the largest technology firm in the world.

Ira Glass

Professor Audia doesn't argue with any of this. But he says that when you ask actual entrepreneurs, and this is true in survey after survey, you find that most of them began not by going off into their garage, but by working for somebody else, making contacts, learning the business.

Ira Glass

Even Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard weren't exactly outsiders. They studied electrical engineering at MIT and at Stanford. Packard had worked at General Electric. A former professor of theirs from Stanford gave them leads and hooked them up, for example, with a firm called Litton Engineering. He let them use equipment that they didn't own themselves yet. Just as, decades later, the founders of Apple Computer, 21-year-old Steve Jobs, was already working at Atari, and 25-year-old old Steve Wozniak was at Hewlett-Packard when they started Apple in Job's garage.

Ira Glass

Pino Audia has tried to find mentions of garage entrepreneurs or anything like it in other countries and didn't come up with much. He says it seems to be a very American idea, very close to other American ideas about opportunity for everybody. The Apple and Hewlett-Packard garages have now become such a part of Silicon Valley myth that it's made other tech companies want their own stories like it.

Google, for example. They did not start in a garage. The founders began working on their search engine in 1996 when they were at Stanford. They didn't actually move into a garage until 1998. They already had investors, and they were just in the garage for five months. But in 2006, Google bought the garage as a company landmark.

Ira Glass

Dan Heath has written about these origin stories in Fast Company magazine. He says that one way to measure just how appealing these stories are is to count all the ones that get quoted widely, even though they aren't remotely true. For instance, when eBay began, a story circulated that its founder created the company so his fiancee could buy and collect Pez dispensers more easily. Not true. One of the creators of YouTube used to claim that the idea for the business came after a dinner party in 2005, where two of the company's masterminds, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, shot some video and then tried to post it online and found out just how hard that was back then.

Ira Glass

For today on our show: origin stories. We love them so much that sometimes it is hard not to make them up. And so today on our show, we bring you three origin stories, true ones. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass.

Act One of our show today: Mad Man. Act Two: The Secret Life of Secrets. Act Three: Wait Wait-- Don't Film Me. Act Four: Bill Clinton's 7-Year-Old Brother. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One. Well, this first story is about a fight over the origin of certain ideas, a fight over who really came up with those ideas. Sarah Koenig tells a story about her dad Julian.

Sarah Koenig

All my life, I've heard the hallmarks of my father's achievements.

Sarah Koenig

That was in 1936 when he was a counselor at Camp Greylock for boys. They already had arm wrestling for the boys and leg wrestling.

Sarah Koenig

The discoveries kept coming. Shrimp, for instance.

Sarah Koenig

In 1941, my father, a shrimp lover, was discouraged that there were only two places on Broadway in New York where you could get shrimp. So then in Biloxi, Mississippi-- and bear with me here, because this story barely makes any sense. So he's in Biloxi, on his way to Mexico with some buddies, and he sees this government boat about to go out to track the migratory path of shrimp. And he talks his way onto the boat by explaining that he loves shrimp apparently, and he goes out on this boat, and they find the shrimp breeding grounds or some such. The rest, of course, is history.

Sarah Koenig

My dad does make a claim on the word "character," that he came up with the idea to use it to mean a person of unusual or eccentric qualities.

Sarah Koenig

According to my father, Norman Mailer also said he invented thumb wrestling. Mailer, who died in 2007, was a famous thumb wrestler, but not its inventor. Because as we now know, my dad invented it at Camp Greylock for boys. And that's the rub. You can't prove the origin of any of this stuff, and it's annoying when people like Norman Mailer take credit.

My dad would like people to recognize him for his contributions to shrimp and character and thumb wrestling. But he's not going to make a stink if they don't. His real legacy, though, in advertising, that's another story. That, he's willing to fight for, and he has been fighting for it for decades.

My father was a legendary copywriter. He wrote "Timex Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking." He named Earth Day "Earth Day." It falls on his birthday, April 22. Earth Day, birthday. So the idea came easily. The magazine Advertising Age made a list of the top 100 advertising campaigns of the 20th century. The Marlboro Man is on it and the Energizer Bunny, "Good to the Last Drop" from Maxwell House and the "Keep America Beautiful" crying Indian.

But the number-one ad, the top of the 100 list? "Think Small." That was Volkswagen's American campaign to sell the Beetle in 1959, and my father wrote it. A picture of a tiny car on a big, white page and some amused self-deprecating copy. That ad was followed by Lemon, another VW ad so iconic it made it onto the TV show Mad Men, the show set in 1960 about an ad agency that's slightly behind the times. In this scene, the agency's creative team contemplates the Lemon ad.

Sarah Koenig

At the time, these ads were revolutionary. "In the beginning, there was Volkswagen," another famous New York ad man wrote. "That was the day when the new advertising agency was really born."

Here's another scene from Mad Men when Don Draper, the agency's creative director, interviews some new talent. After he looks at their portfolio, he hands it back to them with this line.

Sarah Koenig

It's Julian Koenig [PRONOUNCES KOENIG AS KAY-NIG] actually. My father. And what has irritated him for so long is not that he's not recognized for his talent. I mean, the people who write Mad Men clearly know who he is. It's that some of his best work has been claimed by someone else.

Sarah Koenig

If you've heard of anyone in the advertising industry, it might be George Lois. He's well known for a lot of things, but maybe especially for his provocative and funny Esquire magazine covers from the 1960s, like the one of Muhammad Ali posing as Saint Sebastian. But before that, George Lois worked at Doyle Dane Bernbach, and so did my father. In 1960, they both left DDB and joined up with another guy, Fred Papert, to form their own upstart agency called PKL: Papert, Koenig and Lois.

George Lois wouldn't talk to me for this story. "I'm not going to get into a sophomoric [BLEEP] fight with a disgruntled ex-partner," he wrote in an email. I can't say I blame him. I've had mixed feelings about this fight. Of course I want to stick up for my father, take his side. But I've also thought there's something inherently undignified about the whole thing, like it's beneath my father to care whether or not George Lois is taking credit for this or that slogan from 1962, so I never really paid attention to the details. Until now. Lately, it's been coming up more, or at least more publicly, so I started asking questions.

According to my father, it all started with the Harvey Probber account. Harvey Probber made elegant modern furniture, and my dad says he came up with the ad, a beautiful chair with a matchbook under one leg, and the line: "If your Harvey Probber chair wobbles, straighten your floor," and a piece of copy that went with it that he thought was very good.

Sarah Koenig

In 1972, George Lois published a book, the first of many, about his career called George, Be Careful. In it, he describes going to the Harvey Probber furniture factory in Massachusetts with my dad.

"Each chair was placed on an electronic test platform to be sure it was absolutely level," Lois wrote. "'Got a book of matches?' I asked Julian, a heavy smoker. He handed me a matchbook, and I slid it under one leg of the chair on the test platform. 'I've got the ad,' I said. 'If your Harvey Probber chair is crooked, straighten your floor.' Julian scowled and shot back: 'Ass [BLEEP]! If your Harvey Probber chair wobbles, straighten your floor.' That was the way the ad ran, and that was the way we built the first red-hot creative agency."

Sarah Koenig

There were other instances also regarding ads that were groundbreaking for their time. A campaign for the New York Herald Tribune: "Who says a good newspaper has to be dull?" Some famous Xerox commercials showing a little girl operating a copy machine, and later, a chimpanzee doing it, ads several people who worked on the account have complained that George literally had nothing to do with.

Then there's the ad for Coldene cough medicine. The page is entirely black with just two quotes at different heights meant to show a couple talking in bed. "John, is that Billy coughing?" says the wife. "Get up and give him some Coldene," the husband replies.

In an interview 20 years later, George Lois said, "The idea for the ad hit me like a brainstorm. This was the first time there would be no copy, no package design, no trademark," he said. "It was really the beginning of a new creative revolution. It was one of those ads that made history, effectively." Again, my dad is adamant that the whole ad, copy and design were his.

There are many possibilities here of what's going on. George Lois could be lying. Or George Lois could have convinced himself in some way that what he's saying about all this stuff is true. Or my dad could be doing the same thing, remembering stuff that happened when it didn't happen. Or, I suppose, my dad could be lying. I'd worry about those latter options more if my father was the only one disputing George Lois' version of history. But he's not.

There's the photographer Carl Fischer, who worked with George Lois for more than 30 years and shot many of the most famous Esquire covers. Carl Fischer says George is taking credit for cover ideas and photographs that were Carl's and talked in detail about certain photo shoots, like about flying to Las Vegas to shoot the boxer Sonny Liston as Santa, and even placing the Santa cap on Liston's head. Or rushing Italian actress Virna Lisi into a photo shoot in New York for this famous cover where she's pretending to shave her face. But Fischer says George wasn't there for either shoot. In fact, the Lisi shoot happened in Rome, and he still has the receipts to prove it.

And then there's Shelly Zalaznick, the first editor of New York magazine. George once told a reporter, quote: "My hand on the Bible, I, George Lois, created New York magazine." Mr. Zalaznick says that's simply not true. He himself remembers making the first dummy front page one hot August night in 1963. Not only that, he's never met George Lois.

As for George's version, he told me, I'm a loss. I don't know why grownups do things like this.

But the story my father objects to the most isn't about ad copy at all. It's personal. Papert, Koenig and Lois had gotten the Dutch Masters cigar account, and their TV spokesman at the time was this famous comedian Ernie Kovacs. So my dad flew out to LA to meet him, and they hit it off.

Sarah Koenig

Lo and behold, in his 2005 book $elebrities, which is spelled with a dollar sign instead of a "C" at the beginning, George tells the story of his lovely lunch with Ernie, his car ride to the airport with Ernie, his red-eye flight back to New York, and his learning the following morning from a stack of still-bound newspapers that Ernie had been killed in a car crash.

My father has tried to fight back, aggressively at times. For instance, after the Ernie Kovacs story appeared in $elebrities, my dad retaliated in the medium he knows best. He wrote an ad.

Sarah Koenig

That's Lois, L-O-I-S.

Sarah Koenig

The Times didn't run it, but it did run in Adweek, though toward the back of the magazine, and it got no response.

Over the years, he and some of his former colleagues have written to reporters at the New York Times and other places trying to correct the record, but their letters have mostly been ignored. Just last year, a Times story about an exhibit of George Lois' Esquire covers credited him in the very first paragraph with "Think Small," the Xerox ads with the chimp, and a couple of other campaigns people say George either didn't originate or didn't even work on. Finally, the Times printed a short correction, giving "Think Small" back to my dad, but it was a small victory three weeks after the fact.

In the mid '80s, my dad wrote a letter to George directly, threatening to sue, it seems, and received a letter back calling him a sad, tortured and tragic figure.

All in all, my father's efforts haven't really done the damage he's hoped or really any damage at all. He's an indignant Basset Hound, nipping at the heels of the media's Great Dane. George Lois is a good talker with an engaging personality, and he's become something of a spokesman for the advertising industry. There are quotes in the newspaper and magazine profiles, exhibits, books. Errors printed once are repeated and repeated. So if you look up "Think Small" on the internet, for instance, you'll find it attributed to Julian Koenig, but you're also likely to learn that George Lois wrote it.

Sarah Koenig

That's Fred Papert, the P of PKL. He was the guy who recruited Lois and Koenig to make a new agency in 1960. Now he's one of the guys responsible for redeveloping Times Square as president of the 42nd Street Development Corporation. He knows the stories all too well: Xerox, Harvey Probber, Coldene, Ernie Kovacs even.

Sarah Koenig

Fred's in my dad's camp insofar as he knows and believes my dad is telling the truth. But his support more or less stops there. And he's categorical on this point, that my dad is himself acting like a nut, wasting his time. They've talked about this on rides to and from the racetrack.

Sarah Koenig

My father recognizes that there are only about four people left on Earth who care about this stuff. It's just that he happens to be one of them, and he cannot let it go.

Sarah Koenig

The odd thing about all this, as my older brother John points out, is that my father has never exactly been a champion of advertising.

Sarah Koenig

I understand why he cares. He's 88 years old now, so his legacy, understandably, is on his mind. And even though he did campaigns for all sorts of good causes-- gun control, nuclear proliferation, Robert Kennedy's senatorial and presidential campaigns-- my father's not quite satisfied with his life's work.

Sarah Koenig

If he could go back, choose another career, my father would have liked to have been an environmentalist of some kind, which is why he'd really like to be remembered for something almost nobody knows he did: naming Earth Day. It agitated him to look up Earth Day on Wikipedia recently and not see his name anywhere. So a few days ago, I added it.

Ira Glass

Sarah Koenig is one of the producers of our program.

Coming up, a dead man's kid versus the US Supreme Court. That's in a minute. Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show, we choose a theme and bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show: origin stories, where we go back to figure out where things came from.

Ira Glass

We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, The Secret Life of Secrets.

This week, when the Attorney General appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he told them that any day now, he'll be delivering the Administration take on how to change the state secrets privilege. And I don't know about you, but for me, every time this comes up in the news, I have to be reminded what the hell the state secrets privilege actually is in the first place. And every time I read about it and relearn it, I think to myself, oh, right. That's one of those legal things that anybody can understand.

Basically, it's this: If you are suing the US Government, the Government can claim that taking your case to court would reveal sensitive national security information. If they do that, simply by making that claim, they can get your case thrown out of court. The judge won't even usually look at the evidence to see if the Government is fibbing.

Democrat and Republican presidents have both used this to get all kinds of cases dismissed. Under the Bush administration, this increased dramatically. They got judges to throw out lawsuits regarding the torture and rendition of detainees in the War on Terror, over Guantanamo, over the wiretapping of American citizens.

Ira Glass

This is Barry Siegel, a reporter who wrote about the true story of US v. Reynolds for the LA Times and later in a book called Claim of Privilege. It is very possible that if we could somehow send his book back in time to the year 1953 and let the Supreme Court justices read what really happened in US v. Reynolds, they would have decided the case differently. Some important facts have come to light in the last half century about the case.

As a public service right now, in case any of you hearing my voice do someday get teleported back to the year 1953, we present now the true origin of US v. Reynolds.

Ira Glass

Because the Government would not comply with his order to turn over the accident report, the judge declares the widows the winners in this case by default. An appeals court agrees. It gets to the Supreme Court, whose decision you already know. It overturns the lower two courts, finds in favor of the Government, says the Government does not have to hand over the accident report once it claims that this would reveal state secrets.

But understand what happens next. There's an important thing you need to keep in mind about this Supreme Court decision.

Ira Glass

This is Judy Loether. Now, of course, she's grown. She lives in a town not far from Boston.

Ira Glass

Over the years, she'd go into little spurts of looking into this. She exchanged letters with a man who had survived the crash. She went through her father's old papers and technical manuals. And then in the late 1990s, she got a computer and started searching the internet. She learned all about B-29s and about the bomb site device that her dad worked on as an engineer. It made her feel closer to him to see pictures of these things that he had made. She printed stuff out. She kept it in a notebook. And then one night in February 2000, she sat down at a computer.

Ira Glass

All of these reports had been declassified in the 1990s.

Ira Glass

Instead of that stuff, what was in the accident report was a stark, very detailed account of Air Force negligence. There was a lot of negligence. This particular B-29 had a history of trouble: fuel leaks, faulty engines. It had been repeatedly grounded. The engines on all B-29s had a tendency to overheat and were supposed to get special heat shields installed to fix that, but this plane never got them. On this flight, the engines caught fire, and the pilot made some errors that compounded that problem and sent the plane into a spin.

Disturbed and saddened, Judy thought that she should share this document with other families from the crash, and from newspaper clippings, she learned of another woman whose father died that day: Susan Brauner. When she met Brauner, it was Brauner who told her about the Supreme Court decision.

Ira Glass

In his reporting, Barry Siegel lists some of the other kinds of cases that have fallen under the state secrets privilege since this precedent was set. "In 1990," he writes, "families of 37 crew members who were killed by Iraqi missiles hitting the USS Stark sued the contractors responsible for the ship's antimissile system. The Government said trying the case would reveal state secrets, and this got it thrown out of court.

In 2000, a CIA employee sued the agency for gender discrimination. The Government said trying the case would reveal state secrets, and this got it thrown out of court.

In 2003, a senior engineer said a Defense contractor had submitted false test results on an antimissile vehicle. The Government said trying this case would reveal state secrets and got that thrown out of court."

And so, Siegel says, "Its disturbing that in the case that made all this possible-- US v. Reynolds-- the Government said that it couldn't turn over an accident report because this would reveal state secrets. But there seemed to be no state secrets at all in the accident report. At that point, it wasn't even a secret that B-29s were having these terrible mechanical problems.

Ira Glass

As for Judy, the more she thought about it, the more she was bothered by the fact that the Government's lawyers back in the 1950s must have read the accident report themselves, so they must have known that the Air Force was negligent. But when the lower courts found them negligent and awarded the widows some money, these Government lawyers kept appealing that decision, all the way up to the Supreme Court.

Ira Glass

So Judy and two other families from the crash went back to the Philadelphia law firm that had originally represented her mom and the other widows back in 1953. And together, they filed a new petition in the Supreme Court. Not asking that US v. Reynolds cease to be a precedent. Too many other cases had agreed with the finding in Reynolds that that wasn't really an option. And the goal wasn't to overturn the state secrets privilege. Instead, they wanted the court to acknowledge that the Government had lied about the contents of the accident report, that the Government had committed fraud before the Supreme Court, and they wanted the court to award monetary damages that should have gone to the widows back then.

Ira Glass

The Solicitor General, of course, the administration's lawyer who deals with the Supreme Court.

Ira Glass

The Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Ira Glass

The court said, in this case, that they wouldn't just take the Government's word about whether there were secrets in the documents being discussed. The Government would have to show the documents to the judges, one by one, in private.

Ira Glass

In 2008, Judy Loether testified before Congress. And when Senators Edward Kennedy and then Republican Arlen Specter introduced a bill to regulate the state secrets privilege once and for all, a bill that would tell judges not just to take the Government's word when it claims that a state secret is involved in the case, but actually look at the evidence to be sure that it's true, they cited what happened in Reynolds.

This is from the press release, quote: "Recently declassified information about the Supreme Court's leading decision on the state secrets privilege-- US v. Reynolds-- provides an early example of executive abuse of the privilege. That kind of abuse will no longer be possible under the State Secrets Protection Act."

A version of the bill came out of a House subcommittee this week. The bill's on the schedule to be marked up next week by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

[MUSIC - "FRIENDS AND ANCESTORS" BY NEDELLE]

Ira Glass

Act Three. Wait Wait-- Don't Film Me.

Now, this origin story. Our colleague at WBEZ and the host of the public radio show Wait Wait-- Don't Tell Me!, Mr. Peter Sagal, used to be a playwright. And to give you a sense of the kind of work that he did as a playwright, his most successful play, he says, was about a Holocaust denier and the Jewish attorney who represented that Holocaust denier in court.

Ira Glass

Back in the '90s when all this happened, Bender read Peter's play and liked it and called him up and asked Peter if he wanted to write a movie. And Peter basically had been waiting for this phone call from Hollywood forever.

Ira Glass

So after tossing around some different ideas for this film, Lawrence Bender introduces Peter to this woman who he works with, who at 15 had been an American in Cuba when the Cuban Revolution happened. Maybe there's a film in that. So Peter starts writing this film that's half romance, growing-up film, half politics about an American teenage girl in Cuba in the '50s.

Ira Glass

So how does a film go from political coming-of-age drama to Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights? Well, of course, it's an old Hollywood story. Peter writes his film. He turns it in. They ask him to make it more like-- oh, maybe could it be more like Dirty Dancing? Innocent girl with a semi-dangerous guy?

Ira Glass

He says each draft got worse and worse. Even he didn't like it. Finally, it was shelved. Years later, the producer who actually owned the rights to the film Dirty Dancing teamed up with Lawrence Bender to make a sequel, and somebody thought of Peter's old script. All the politics of the film got reduced to this one moment where, really, unconnected to anything else in the film, somebody attempts to shoot some unidentified political figure at the climax of the dance contest. And then later in a moment of obligatory foreshadowing, our couple talks about whether Castro would ever kick out Americans from Cuba.

Ira Glass

Act Four. Bill Clinton's 7-Year-Old Brother.

Reporter Mary Wiltenburg is in the middle of this yearlong series that she's writing for The Christian Science Monitor about two boys, brothers who were born in a Tanzanian refugee camp and then resettled in Georgia two and a half years ago. Many of her stories are focused on the older brother, nine-year-old Bill Clinton Hadam. His dad is a big fan of the former president.

After a tough first year in the United States, Bill seems to have settled in now, but his little brother Igey is still struggling to understand his own origin story to get his seven-year-old brain around who he is and where he came from. At this point, Mary has spent so much time with these two boys that she is more than a reporter. She's like a member of the family. Here's Mary.

Mary Wiltenburg

Igey calls me on the phone almost every day. Sometimes he leaves messages.

Mary Wiltenburg

In between the messages, we have long chats. I tape most of our conversations because I'm writing these articles about him and his family. And the conversations always seem to start with one of two questions: When can I come to your house? Or when are you coming to my house?

So you know I'm crazy about this kid. He's sweet, nosy, funny. He's been to my house a bunch since I started doing these stories. But the first time he came over, six months ago, he announced to me and my husband and his brother Bill Clinton that from now on, the first grader, formerly known as Igey, would be going by his middle name: John.

I'd already known something was up, because that afternoon my husband took Igey to the park. Igey was up on the jungle gym when a girl about the same age called over from the swing set and asked his name, and he got all weird and wouldn't answer her. She thought he hadn't heard her, so she hopped off the swing, came over to the jungle gym, and asked him again, What's your name? Igey got this kind of cornered look and said, I don't know my name. But by later that night, he seemed to have made a decision. He was now John.

In our living room, he struggled to type his new name into a video game. J- O- wait, was it J? Or G? Then Bill offered to help. Igey said, I know how to spell my own name.

Igey picked up English first and best of anyone in his family. But his teachers say Igey's more confused about where he's from and who he is than other seven-year-olds they've seen. And the charter school Igey and Bill attend is about half refugees, so you think they'd see a lot of this. Teachers say no. Little kids usually realize pretty fast that most people who ask where are you from, they don't want the whole story. And it doesn't really matter if you say you're from Burma, where your parents were from, or Thailand, where you lived in a camp. In first grade, you just pick one and get on with your day.

But for Igey, where are you from has never felt that simple. All winter he seemed to be revising his story. First he denied the camp he'd lived in his whole life, hated the word "refugee." Then he started saying he wasn't from Congo, his nationality, or Tanzania, where he was born, or Africa at all. He'd say, I'm from here, or, America.

Watching TV, he'd point to rich, white kids and say, That's me. At home, he threw tantrums. At school, he sometimes seemed almost catatonic. He wouldn't answer questions, wouldn't meet people's eyes. His parents, his teachers, everyone felt helpless. They didn't know what set him off or how to reach him. And he seemed to regress. If you were sitting on the couch, he'd snuggle up or take my hand. The slightest things made him cry. He seemed lost.

One night on the phone, I reminded him where he was born: in Tanzania. I'm from Tanzania?, he said.

Igey's parents didn't mind calling him John. They were just kind of puzzled. The idea that you could hate your name seemed like one more baffling thing about America. They just had no idea what Igey was going through, and it made Igey feel more distant from them.

A while back, I was riding with Igey and his parents in their car when he said to me, I don't want to live with my mom. I thought it was a setup for one of his jokes, so I said, You don't want to live with your mom? Why? He said, I want to live with you. I said, No, you don't want to live with me. But then Igey got all serious and said, But what if I forget my language? I said, What do you mean? And he said, If I forget my language, I can't live with them, because they won't understand me.

Later on the phone, we talked about what it's like for him talking with his mom.

And just when it seemed like Igey had finally accepted his own name, the other shoe dropped. The last week of school, Igey asked me, um, what does gay mean? I told him gay can mean happy, or it can mean when a man loves another man.

Igey started sobbing. We were in his kitchen, and he just collapsed against the fridge. Finally, he choked out what was wrong, and it turned out that some second graders had been taunting him: Igey, you're gay. And he told them, that's not a word. It's just one more strike against that name. But for now, John hasn't reappeared. Igey's sticking with Igey.

The other day, when we were riding in the car, I said some offhand thing about needing to call my mom. Igey said, You have a mom? I said, Yeah, of course. He could not believe it. How had he not known about this before? This year, it's been hard enough for Igey to put together his own story. The idea that I-- wait, everybody comes from somewhere? It kinda blew his mind.

Ira Glass

Mary Wiltenburg of The Christian Science Monitor. She's working on a book about Igey, Bill Clinton and their family.

Our program was produced today by Lisa Pollak and myself with Alex Blumberg, Sean Cole, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Alissa Shipp and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Our production help Randy Dixon. Seth Lind is our production manager. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Thanks today to Bob Folkenflik, Matt Holtzman and Hank Rosenfeld. Pino Audia's research paper about garages and entrepreneurs that I talked about at the beginning of the show was done with Christopher Rider. Dan Heath, who we also talked to at the top of the show is the co-author of the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Barry Siegel's book from Act Two of our show is just out in paperback. Claim of Privilege is what it's called.

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International WBEZ. Management oversight for a program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who hears himself quoted in these credits every single week and says, "I never said that. I would never say that."

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

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