535: Origin Story 2014

Ira Glass

Pino Audia teaches in the business school at Dartmouth, and he researches something that we took up in an episode of our show a couple weeks ago. He researches the question, how do entrepreneurs get created? And at some point, he noticed that his students and many of his colleagues actually have an opinion about this. They believe entrepreneurs make themselves.

You know, you head off on your own, you write a business plan, you start in your own garage. And the garage, by the way, is not a metaphorical garage. It is a garage-- a literal garage. 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, who 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 Steve Wozniak was at Hewlett Packard when they started Apple in Jobs' 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 the 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

Well, today on our show, origin stories. We love them so much that sometimes it is hard not to make them up. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. Act One of our show today, Madman. Act Two, Silent Partner. Act Three, Wait, Wait, Don't Film Me. Act Four, Bill Clinton's Seven-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 copy writer. He wrote "Timex Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking." He named Earth Day "Earth Day." It falls on his birthday, April 22nd. 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 "Kaynig," 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 are 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. [? An ad ?] 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's version of history, but he's not. There's the photographer Carl Fisher, who worked with George Lois for more than 30 years, and shot many of the most famous Esquire covers. Carl Fisher says George has taken credit for cover ideas and photographs that were Carl's, and talked in detail about certain photoshoots.

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 photoshoot in New York for this famous cover where she's pretending to shave her face. But Fisher 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 Shelley 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 at 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 Master 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's 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, in so far 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's 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 like 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

We first ran this story back in 2009. Sarah's dad, Julian Koenig, just recently died in June. He was 93.

Sarah Koenig is one of the producers of our program. In two weeks, we're actually launching a brand new show, and Sarah is the host of that show. Yes, This American Life is putting out a second weekly program.

We have a new show. It's a podcast. It's called Serial. The idea is that instead of different stories and a different theme each week, every episode of Serial brings you back to the same story, and you hear the next chapter.

We've been working on this for a year. We are very excited to bring it to you. We are giving you two episodes to start.

It's in two weeks. October 3rd. You can sign up for free downloads and hear a sneak preview at serialpodcast.org, or on the iTunes store. That's serialpodcast.org, spelled not like the breakfast food.

Coming up, Peter Sagal, long before Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, his lost years in Havana. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, we choose a theme, 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. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, Silent Partner. One of our producers, Sean Cole, visited Chad's Trading Post, a restaurant filled with frilly knickknacks in Southampton, Massachusetts. It's a restaurant with a very distinct origin story.

Sean Cole

The first time my girlfriend Mary Ellen and I walked into Chad's Trading Post, she noticed that only boys work there, and thought it was weird. Normally, she said, in a place like this, a small country restaurant, you only see girls working. She pointed to the cover of the menu, which read, "Dedicated to and operated proudly in the memory of Chad D. McDonald, 3/12/74 to 3/11/90."

She leaned in to me and whispered, do you think the owner hires only boys because they remind her of her son? I certainly thought this was possible, and sad, in a way that makes you feel embarrassed for that person. Then a man came over and poured us some coffee.

And when he turned around, there, in huge white letters, on the back of his blue polo shirt, it said, Chad's brother. Do you think that's what they call all the managers here, I asked Mary Ellen. Do you think that's really Chad's brother? Then another friendlier manager type came over and asked us how we were doing, and if we needed more coffee. And I noticed his shirt.

Sean Cole

This is the story of Chad's Trading Post. From the time he was 12, Chad and his brothers and a few friends had always talked about starting a small restaurant together when they graduated high school. They planned out menus. Chad's father took him looking for locations. But Chad died in a shooting accident two days before his 16th birthday.

Chad's father Glenn, his brothers Scott and Cory, and his best friend Mike tell the story.

Sean Cole

In 1993, the year Chad would have graduated from high school, the year he and Mike and his brothers and his father had planned to open a restaurant, they decided to open Chad's Trading Post.

Sean Cole

In all of the interviews I've ever heard and seen of an emotional nature, the person answering questions doesn't begin to cry until well into the interview. Chad's dad began crying before I even turned on my tape recorder. I asked him for a quick tour of the restaurant.

It's a nice place-- homey, even froofy, though all the men who created it are tattooed, muscly, working-class guys, Chad's father included.

Sean Cole

This photo originally showed the two babies in Glenn's arms, but they had the photographer alter the photo, insert Chad's head over Glenn's.

Sean Cole

Glenn showed me a painting in another corner of the restaurant. It was the comedy and tragedy masks from the cover of Motley Crue's album Theater of Pain, Chad's favorite record. After he died, Chad's friends and brothers adapted the design into a memorial to him.

It appears on their shirts. Two brass masks hang over the door, smiling and frowning. A huge flag with the masks hangs in the breeze outside, too heavy to flutter. Chad's brother Scott calls them "the faces."

Sean Cole

They've tried to stay as close to Chad's vision of the restaurant as possible. He never specified decor, so they've had a free hand there. He and Mike actually drafted a menu for the place, and the families kept about half of it. The other half was slow baking recipes that no customer would ever wait for.

Chad was also a lot of fun, everyone says. A lot of fun. A comedian. And they say that's why they joke around so much at Chad's Trading Post.

Scott says when he sees a heavyset customer that comes in a lot, he says, hey, tubby. He builds towers of little creamer packages on the bald head of another customer. Glenn throws crumpled up napkins at his employees. They have water fights. All this levity in a place that's essentially a large roadside memorial that serves massive omelettes.

Sean Cole

Because I've got to say, I mean, when I was here with Mary Ellen, we didn't know anything about the restaurant either, obviously. We just found it. And the first thing we saw was the menu, and then we saw the back of Scott's shirt. It was a little creepy, in a way.

Sean Cole

I think I can safely say I have never seen any other family keep someone alive to this degree. They've gone out of their way to construct a world where they couldn't possibly forget Chad. A jumbo-sized photo of Chad stood behind Scott and his wife at their wedding.

They believe Chad has protected their lives in serious accidents-- that he brought Mike's son through a recent infection unscathed. Chad's room is the same as it was the day he was shot in it, with two exceptions. They took down the girlie pictures from the wall, and they replaced the carpet.

Before they did all this, right after Chad died, they all say they were lost. Mike said he wanted to crawl into a hole. Scott and his father had to make a deal with each other-- that neither would kill himself. Scott and Cory went into counseling. Scott says it didn't help much.

Sean Cole

What made it better-- what Glenn says saved them-- was starting the family business-- Chad's business.

Sean Cole

In Northampton, where I used to live, there's a couple, and they own a cafe. And at one point, they had a child who lived 19 days. And after they disconnected him from life support, they built a shrine in their restaurant for him. Pictures of him connected to white tubes dotted the walls and beams. And his father, a musician, would perform a song at the cafe-- weekly, as I remember it-- comparing his son to a salmon and to the Messiah.

And some of us, at first, though we knew it had to be hard, felt a little embarrassed for them, as though this tragedy had driven them a little crazy. I think it's hard for us to know exactly what to do or say when we see public mourning like this, because we see it so rarely. The intensity of it is shocking. It's too naked.

And usually, we think that if you hold onto someone after their death this way, you can't live your own life. But clearly, you can.

Ira Glass

Sean Cole is a producer of our program. In the years since we first broadcast this story, Chad's Trading Post closed down. The family kept Chad's memory alive in a new restaurant called Chad's Good Table 10 minutes away. Then they sold that restaurant off in 2011.

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 start 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

Oh, honey.

Ira Glass

Act Four, Bill Clinton's Seven-Year-Old Brother. So reporter Mary Wiltenburg spent a year writing about two boys-- brothers who were born in a Tanzanian refugee camp, and then resettled in Georgia in 2006. 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 seemed to have settled in. But his little brother Igey was still struggling to understand his own origin story-- to get his seven-year-old brain around who he was and where he came from.

At this point, Mary has spent so much time with these two boys that she's more than a reporter. She's more like a member of the family. Anyway, 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 swingset 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'd 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 the 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 he 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.

Mary Wiltenburg

And then at some point this spring, Igey just went back to being Igey. A lot of things happened for him at once. His green card arrived. His reading took off. It took me a while to notice that John had vanished.

His teachers don't remember, either, exactly when he stopped correcting them. But by the last month of school, he was taking his turn in the semicircle with everyone else. No drama. Just, my name is Igey, and I'm from Congo.

And suddenly, he was volunteering details about his life in the camp. Games he played, his mud brick house. Igey seemed to be making peace with his past and his name. And he moved on to other burning seven-year-old questions.

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 could 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 was 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 kind of blew his mind.

Ira Glass

Mary Wiltenburg. She wrote about Igey, Bill Clinton, and their family for the Christian Science Monitor. You can read more of her reporting about them at littlebillclinton.csmonitor.com.

Ira Glass

Well, 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. Production help from JP Dukes.

Seth Lind is our operations director. Emily Condon's our production manager. Elise Bergerson's our office manager. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs the website. Music help from Jessica Hopper.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. 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 I 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. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Torey Malatia, who hears himself quoted in these credits every single week and says--

Ira Glass

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