Mister Rogers looked into the camera and talked directly to his viewers. Through what he called “TV visits,” Rogers made young children feel like they were being paid attention to.

It was the same with non-TV visits. Friend and journalist Tim Madigan sums it up perfectly with the story of his first phone call with Rogers. Near the end of the conversation, Rogers asked, “Tim, do you know what the most important thing in my life is right now? It's talking to Mr. Tim Madigan on the telephone.”

This wasn’t a performance or an isolated incident. He placed extreme value on even the most passing of human interactions.

It’s easy to dismiss Rogers’ presence as something he was simply born with. After all, he’s just a good guy. While there are certainly characteristics everyone is born with, Rogers had a lonely childhood marked by rejection. This could have led him to spend life chasing importance, instead of recognizing the importance of the person beside him.

For Rogers, being present was a spiritual exercise. Every morning he would read the Bible and then visualize the people he would be meeting that day. While he was an ordained Presbyterian minister, he didn’t lead a church. Rogers never discussed his religious beliefs on his show and very rarely spoke about them publicly.

His habit wasn’t about generating content to build his brand. He wasn’t a Christian influencer or a spiritual guru teaching how to achieve through visualization. This habit was, as author Maxwell King puts it, “...for the goodness of heart to be the best person he could be in each of the encounters he would have that day.”

He had an exercise routine, but it wasn’t about getting better at doing something. It was meant to strengthen his ability to be.

Perhaps the oddest thing about Mister Rogers isn’t his ability to be present with others; it’s that he considered it a practice and not a gift.

His approach is encapsulated by one of his favorite quotes:

L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux [what is essential is invisible to the eye].

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

If you looked at the 8-year-old Rogers, you would have seen a shy, lonely, and overweight kid. He was a target for the bullies who one day chased him shouting, “We’re gonna get you! We’re gonna get you, fat Freddy!”

Author and friend Amy Hollingsworth believes this incident was the moment when the Mr. Rogers we know today was born. Years of sadness and processing the pain led Rogers to vow never to demean and to always find the essential in others—the invisible that mattered more than the visible.

Good Friends

Rogers always turned the lens toward others. Rather than pose for a photo or take a picture with fans, he often took their picture and mailed it along with a touching note.

People commonly describe their initial conversations with Rogers as having their questions turned back on them. A journalist once walked out of his office in mild shock feeling like he was the one who had been interviewed.

Rogers’ approach led to countless friendships. Any interaction beyond a passing hello could end with a decades-long correspondence. Read a biography of Rogers or watch a documentary about him and an unusually high percentage of interviewees are identified as friends.

It seems that friendship is just what happens when you look close enough to see good everywhere.

Good Neighbor

According to Hollingsworth, Rogers said he was angry and resentful toward the bullies for not seeing past his weight and shyness. It got to him when others overlooked the essential Fred—when they didn’t see the value he saw in himself.

In order to find the good in others, he had to first see it in himself. Seeing the best in yourself is an odd thing to do, but as Mr. Rogers put it:

“Evil would like nothing better than to have us feel awful about who we are.”

Sources

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Mister Rogers & Me

The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King

“Can You Say…Hero?” by Tom Junod (skip the paywall here)

“The Mister Rogers No One Saw” by Jeanne Marie Laskas (skip the paywall here)

One of the hardest things to capture about any oddball is all of the equally strange people who influenced them.

It’s like covering a relay race and only discussing the training regimen of the anchor runner.

There’s rarely a thorough record of the contributions from grandparents, neighbors, or teachers. These people get a single sentence buried in the middle of a 500-page biography if they’re mentioned at all.

But their influence is profound. Many of the oddest of oddballs swam against the current because they had seen it done before.

The Odd Neighbor

The legendary children’s TV personality Fred Rogers is a great example of an oddball birthed by oddballs.

His children’s show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, ran for 33 years influencing generations of children with his slow-paced and consistent message of unconditional care. He ended each episode with a version of this message: You've made this day a special day by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are.

Rogers discussed the importance of acknowledging feelings and mental health, decades before it was a cultural talking point. He was a model of kindness and empathy for millions of kids and parents. If you didn’t grow up in the era of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, read comments on any of Fred Rogers’ commencement addresses and interviews to get a sense of his impact.

Whenever there’s a natural disaster, attack, or other crisis, people return to Rogers’ advice to look for the helpers whenever there’s a tragedy because if you look for the helpers, you’ll know there’s hope.

The Odd Family

Fred Rogers’ approach to life and children’s TV was heavily influenced by his family. Some of his most famous lines were first said to him as a child.

It was his mother who advised him to look for the helpers to find hope when he would see a catastrophe in a movie or on the news. Did you grow up with anyone who communicated the concept of hope so succinctly and memorably?

His maternal grandfather used to tell him, “You’ve made this a special day Freddy by just your being yourself. There’s only one person in the world like you.” This was the 1930s or 40s. How many grandfathers born in the 19th Century do you think were dropping lines like that?

Rogers was a sensitive soul. He felt deeply. When something moved him, he didn’t easily forget it. As much as anything, this was the superpower that defined him. It allowed him to see the good and hold onto it tightly.

Odd Taste

The first time Rogers saw his father cry was when his grandfather died. When Rogers’ father died, he cried, “...and way down deep I knew he would have said it was all right.” Seeing his father cry helped him to know it was okay for men to cry.

It would have been just as easy to look at the lifetime his father spent holding it in and think he needed to be a strong example for his family. Would you blame him for feeling a twinge of shame at crying in public over his father’s death? He could have just as easily justified “manning up” and sitting stoically throughout the funeral. Instead, he remembered a single moment when his father was vulnerable and allowed that moment to define his understanding of his father and what he would want to see in his son.

Fred Rogers didn’t just have good examples to follow, he saw the good in everyone, and in doing that, everyone became a good example to follow.

Oddballs aren’t superheroes destined to change history with special powers or unique perspectives bestowed upon them at birth. They merely have good taste when it comes to choosing what heroes they create.

Sources

The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King

Mister Rogers & Me

The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember by Fred Rogers

Tran first peddled chili sauce on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City after the American War. But under the new government, business was difficult, especially for ethnic Chinese minorities like Tran.

With an uncertain future at home, Tran joined a mass of refugees leaving Vietnam, arriving in Los Angeles in early 1980. Within a month, he launched Huy Fong Foods (named after the refugee ship he took out of Vietnam) and was selling a chili sauce he called Sriracha (loosely based on a hot sauce originating from Sri Racha, Thailand).

But America isn’t a hot sauce hotbed. There’s Tabasco and the Southern border can get spicy, but its heart is sweet and creamy. It’s a ketchup town, a mayo metropolis from sea to shining sea, and it was even more so in the 80s.

Bottled ranch dressing was introduced in the mid-80s and by the early 90s it was the top-selling dressing as it evolved from a salad topping to an everything condiment. Americans embraced it as a de facto Christ figure—it ruled over every aspect of their diet. In times of drought, rural Wisconsin families baptized children in it.

If you wanted to plant the seeds of an American business empire, hot sauce wasn’t an obvious first choice. But Tran wasn’t interested in empire-building. “My American dream was never to become a billionaire,” Tran told the LA Times in 2013. “We started this because we like fresh, spicy chili sauce.”

The anti-mayo

Tran set up shop outside of LA’s Chinatown and sold directly to Asian restaurants and markets. He made a hot sauce he liked and could sell to other Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants.

Bottle by bottle, Sriracha became a fixture in Asian-American communities. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a pho restaurant in America that doesn’t have Huy Fong Sriracha on every table, and it’s a popular ingredient in spicy tuna rolls.

In the early days, friends and suppliers suggested changes to boost Sriracha sales. It’s too spicy. Add a tomato base. Make it sweeter. Tran stood firm. “Hot sauce must be hot…We don’t make mayonnaise here,” he said.

With Tran’s middle finger raised proudly in the face of weak sauces, Sriracha had an identity people could latch onto.

This powered the company’s growth through word of mouth, and in 45 years Tran has never paid for advertising. When you buy Huy Fong Sriracha, you’re paying for hot sauce—not billboards or celebrity endorsements.

Sriracha-fication of everything

A flavor doesn’t matter until it’s been condensed into a powder and blasted on a potato chip.

Sriracha matters.

It’s not just on potato chips. There have been Sriracha Doritos, Sriracha nuts, Sriracha Cheez-It snack mix, Sriracha pretzels, and Sriracha popcorn. You can find it in artisanal ice cream, beer, and chocolate.

Sriracha’s reach is so wide, it’s become a sauce within a sauce. It’s been added to ketchup, mayo, mustard, and—you guessed it—ranch dressing (ending ranch baptisms).

Few Sriracha-ified goods are officially sanctioned by Huy Fong Foods. It only makes three types of chili sauce and has a handful of partnerships for other products. Most of this Sriracha craze is driven by competitors because the name Sriracha isn’t trademarked.

Only the green-capped bottle and rooster logo are protected. It’s unclear whether Tran could have trademarked the name Sriracha, but it doesn’t matter. He considers competitors free advertising.

Another benefit of more Sriracha on the shelves is more people can enjoy it. “I know that I cannot make enough of my product to meet the demand, so let them have it and work together for the consumer,” Tran told Bloomberg.

Tran loves Sriracha

Huy Fong Sriracha isn’t the best-selling hot sauce in America (yet), but it may be the most loved. There are festivals, songs, fan art, deep dives on YouTube, and an award-winning documentary. Lexus made a promotional Sriracha version of its 2017 IS sports sedan. Devout followers cover their Sriracha-tattooed calves with Sriracha socks before resting them on plush Sriracha pillows. During shortages, it can sell for 5X the sticker price on eBay.

Huy Fong Foods is valued at over a billion dollars, and long ago reached the exit point for most founders.

Tran could be cruising the world in a chili-pepper-shaped mega yacht. He’s received multiple offers to buy Huy Fong Foods but has no plans to sell. “This company—she is like a loved one to me, like family,” he said. He plans to pass it on to his children, who work with him.

It’s easy to be overprotective with your creation, especially as a refugee who already gave up so much. But Tran embraced the Sriracha copycats, which seems to have helped business.

He could have hired Ricky Martin to squirt Sriracha on his chest while encouraging viewers to live la vida loca, or hired Ogilvy to organize a PR blitz on the health benefits of replacing Hellman’s Mayonnaise with Huy Fong Sriracha (get the Hell out of my sandwich).

Why would he need that? If you love something, it’s easy to envision other people loving it too. And other people really love Huy Fong Sriracha.

The oddest thing about David Tran is that he sells $150 million in hot sauce a year because he loves the hot sauce more than he loves selling it.

Sources

An oral history of David Tran, UC Irvine Southeast Asian Archive

Sriracha - documentary short

The Best Idea Yet podcast - “Sriracha: From Smuggled Gold to Hot Sauce Billions”

Sriracha hot sauce purveyor turns up the heat

The Great Sriracha Battle Is Coming to America

The highly unusual company behind Sriracha, the world’s coolest hot sauce

What really caused the sriracha shortage?

How Did The Sriracha Shortage Happen?

Sriracha: Track the incredible journey of a red hot sauce

A Chili Sauce to Crow About

Ranch baptism photo courtesy of Midjourney (also ranch baptisms aren’t real)

Had Elizabeth Cotten died before turning 62*, her daughter, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren would have mourned. The families she worked for would have sent condolences and wiped tears off their children’s cheeks.

Someone would have eulogized her buttermilk biscuits and chicken n’ dumplins at length. Between anecdotes of her childhood mischief, a Baptist preacher would have assured the crowd she’d received her heavenly reward.

God knows she earned it.

But if she had died before her 62nd birthday, a lot wouldn’t have happened. There would be no statue or park bearing her name. The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Pete Seeger wouldn’t have covered her songs. Her family wouldn't have inherited a Grammy.

How to Lose a Guitar in 40 Years

Elizabeth Cotten spent most of her first 80 years working as a maid, cooking, cleaning, and watching children. Domestic work was one of the few options available to a poor Black girl born in the 1890s.

But there was music at home. Her brother had a banjo, and when he left, she saved the money she made cooking and cleaning to purchase a Stella guitar.

The left-handed Cotten (Nevills at the time) never bothered restringing her right-handed guitar. Instead, she flipped it and taught herself to play upside down. When she was 11 or 12, she wrote what would become her biggest hit — “Freight Train.”

She was a grandmother before anyone outside of family and friends heard it. She had other priorities to take care of.

When Cotten joined the Baptist church, the deacons told her she couldn’t play those “worldly” ragtime songs and serve God. While she disagreed with the church leaders, it didn’t matter. She was a wife and mother before turning 18. With dishes to wash, laundry to clean, and skinned knees to mend, she played guitar less and less.

One day she put her Stella down and didn’t pick another one up for nearly 40 years.

The change was so gradual that Cotten couldn’t recall what happened to that old guitar.

The Lost Child is Found

In the early 1940s, Cotten left her alcoholic husband and moved to Washington D.C. to live with her daughter and help raise the grandchildren.

She took a seasonal job selling dolls at the sprawling Lansburgh’s department store. One day a young girl wandered off and got lost.

Cotten found the girl crying for her mother. At this point in her life, she must have wiped away thousands of tears in the decades she spent caring for her child, grandchildren, and the children of all those she worked for. Still, she hated seeing kids cry. When she returned the lost child, Cotten was crying too.

The mother gave Cotten her phone number and told her to call if she needed work, the family could use a hand around the house. She had grandchildren to support, so she took the job.

Cotten had no idea she was about to spend the next decade working for American folk music royalty.

That mother was composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, who had married Charles Seeger (the father of the legendary folk singer Pete Seeger from a previous marriage). They were both musicians and at the forefront of studying and documenting American folk music.

If you were going to put someone in a place where they could rekindle their love of music, you couldn’t create a better home than the Seegers’. They had nearly every type of stringed instrument, and musicians were always coming and going. Half of their children had long careers as folk singers and songwriters (Mike Seeger and Peggy Seeger, the lost child).

The children grew close to her, calling her “Libba” when they were too young to pronounce her name properly. Between baking cakes and washing dishes, Libba relearned the guitar.

When the children had their music lessons, she would steal Peggy’s guitar, close the door, and play. Slowly, her childhood love of playing music came back.

Libba’s Taken Care of

Libba’s clandestine jam sessions went unnoticed until one day when she began, “…to enjoy it, like I used to.” She was playing the blues that she couldn’t at the Baptist church, and singing “Freight Train,” but louder than usual. Mike and Peggy barged in, “We didn’t know you played guitar!” They asked her to play that “Freight Train” song again and to teach it to them.

The Seeger kids were her first fans outside of neighbors and family. The children washed the dishes so they could listen to her play. As adults, they introduced her to the world.

When she was in her mid-60s, Mike Seeger produced and recorded her first album. Many of her earliest professional performances were with Mike. Peggy brought “Freight Train” to Europe, where Libba later toured. Pete had her on his TV show.

In the 1980s, Libba started collecting honors and award nominations, winning a Grammy at 90 years old*. She’s still the oldest woman to win a Grammy.

In 2022, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the Early Influences category. For what it’s worth, Rolling Stone lists her as the 36th-best guitarist of all time.

The oddest thing about Libba Cotten is, she achieved so much because she had no plans for success.

A more ambitious musician would have ignored a dead-end job offer to help wash the dishes. Someone with focus and direction wouldn’t have time to find their lost child.

Instead of having a dream, Libba took care of the kids, until one day, the kids took care of her.

If she had never recorded a song, never set foot on a red carpet, and never played a show outside her front porch, she still would have been adored by her biggest fans.

*I couldn’t find a consensus on her age, but she was most likely born between 1893-95.

Sources

Stella & Me documentary

2023 Peggy Seeger interview clip

Elizabeth Cotten’s appearance on Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest show

Homemade American Music documentary

Libba: The Magnificent Musical Life of Elizabeth Cotten

He was knee-deep in the six-year process of bringing Hamilton to life and the phrase “death doesn’t discriminate” popped into his head. There on the A train, he writes it down. It grows. The chorus comes to him, and he knows it’s describing Aaron Burr.

When he gets to the party, he shakes his friend’s hand saying, “Happy birthday. I gotta go,” and leaves. Miranda finishes “Wait for It” on the train ride home.

Speaking about moments like this he says, “What are you going to do? Lose that idea because you decided to have a drink with your friends? It’s not worth it.”

Of all the excuses you’re comfortable using to skip out on a social engagement or to duck out of a party early without saying goodbye, would “I have an idea” make the list? Imagine a friend declining your invite because they felt inspired by a short phrase (trust me, bro, it has potential).

Perhaps the oddest thing about Lin-Manuel Miranda is, he has nurtured the ability to respect an idea before it has the respect of the world.

Sources

Lin-Manuel’s Q&A at the Bronx Theater High School

Huge thanks to Billy Oppenheimer’s Six at 6 newsletter for putting that chat on my radar.

Shin Dong-huyk may be the only person born in a North Korean prison camp to escape the country.

He lived in Camp 14, a sprawling gulag roughly the size of Chicago. It’s one of North Korea’s most severe prison camps, often referred to as a total control zone. Once you enter, you don’t leave.

Prisoners are subjected to extreme abuse and can be beaten, raped, or killed at the whim of the guards. Lying and stealing are essential for survival, but prisoners are encouraged to spy on each other. You can earn additional rations or easier work for snitching when others steal food or slack at work.

Shin lived under these rules from birth. When he overheard his mother and brother planning an escape, he told a guard. He hoped for a reward but also was angry they would put him in danger. Under North Korea’s three generations of punishment rule, a family member’s transgressions can be deadly for you. This is one reason few North Korean athletes or diplomats defect. Many suffer in gulags because an uncle fled the country or fought for the South in the Korean War.

After revealing his mother and brother’s escape plans, Shin was taken to a detention center, and interrogated and tortured. He believes the guard took the credit for himself. Months later, Shin was brought to the front of a large crowd that was common for executions. He thought his time was up, but instead was forced to watch his mother’s and brother’s execution. At the time, he didn’t feel remorse or sadness, only anger.

In this environment, you’d think everyone would be planning an escape — even if they don’t act on it out of fear. But Shin never dreamed of the outside world. He didn’t know there was an outside world. It wasn’t until he was a young adult working in the camp’s textile factory that his perspective was changed by a prisoner named Park. Park was a former member of North Korea’s elite and had traveled outside of the country. Shin loved Park’s stories, especially the tales about food.

Learning about the outside world, and the thought of having a full belly led Shin to consider escape. For the first time he wanted freedom, and hunger drove him to join Park in a daring escape (where Park was killed by an electric fence).

Journalist Blaine Harden spent years interviewing Shin for his 2012 book Escape From Camp 14. It was a hit. Shin met dignitaries and world leaders. He was featured in a 60 minutes segment. His story spawned a U.N. inquiry into human rights abuses in North Korea.

It’s the perfect metaphor for life. Discovering new worlds — new possibilities — is what motivates us to change. This is what Oddballs do.

The only problem is, Shin lied. Three years after the book was published, he confessed to Harden that he had more to tell. Chunks of the story I thought was so odd aren’t true.

Shin’s lies

And it wasn’t Shin’s first deception. When he arrived in South Korea, he lied about his role in his family’s execution (this first version of his story was published in a 2007 memoir). For the 2012 book, Shin admitted to Harden that he was the reason they were executed. But three years after the book was published, Shin came clean again (Harden has an updated forward for the book posted online, and it’s fascinating.).

Shin hadn’t only exposed his mother’s and brother’s escape plans, he signed a document falsely accusing them of murder. He wasn’t just looking for a reward, he was jealous of how his mother favored his brother.

Shin also knew about life outside the camp and had escaped twice before his final attempt. He made it to China during the second escape before being caught and sent back. This is the reason for the worst of his torture, which was far more traumatic than he initially shared. He maintains he was born in Camp 14, but now says he spent most of his life in Camp 18, a less restrictive prison that was easier to escape from.

There are questions about Shin’s life we may never have definitive answers to. But many experts and defectors believe the crux of his story, even if details and timelines have changed and are unverifiable. He has scars from the torture and telltale bowed arms — common for prison camp survivors — from a childhood of hard labor and malnutrition. His experience aligns with other defectors and many details are highly plausible.

Trauma experts weren’t surprised Shin’s story changed. It’s a common occurrence with survivors. He was ashamed of the way torture had broken him. He hated himself for what he had done to his brother and mother. Harden says he often described himself as an animal learning to be human.

The strange truth about guilt or shame is, you feel them most intensely when you’re progressing. Just like Shin, Megan Phelps-Roper was born into a prison she escaped from in her twenties, the Westboro Baptist Church — one of the most hateful groups in America. Do you think she felt more guilt when she was protesting funerals, or when she started questioning what she was taught? Feeling guilt can be a sign you’re escaping prison, and Shin has escaped many physical and mental prisons in his life.

As Shin confessed his lies, Harden noticed, “He seemed relieved to be correcting a story he felt had become a kind of prison.”

Perhaps the oddest thing about Shin’s life isn’t the physical circumstances escaped, but that he didn’t stop progressing from one guilt to the next.

Sources

Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden

New forward for Escape from Camp 14

Camp 14: Total Control Zone - A documentary largely based on the version of Shin’s story that was published in Escape from Camp 14

Horace Grant was a key member of the early 90s Chicago Bulls teams that won three straight NBA championships. He was consistently the third-best player on the team behind Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. Good but not legendary.

What Grant may be best known for is his signature look, oversized athletic goggles. If he wasn’t 6’ 10” and wearing an NBA jersey, he’d look like someone who would be worried about getting their lunch money stolen. His vision was just above the legal threshold for driving in Illinois.

Anyone who’s worn Rec Specs knows how uncomfortable they can be. They hinder your peripheral vision, can fog up and it doesn’t feel great when they get hit. Eventually, Grant had corrective eye surgery but continued wearing the goggles without the prescription lenses.

Several years ago, he shared during a Reddit AMA the reason he didn’t drop goggles:

The most generous thing you can do is embrace the oddest part of yourself because it gives others the freedom to be who they are.

It’s not hyperbole to say Horace Grant’s goggles meant more to some people than Michael Jordan’s fadeaway jump shot.

Each robe was given to him by a card-carrying Klan member he befriended who subsequently left the KKK. By his estimates, Davis has helped roughly 200 people leave the KKK and similar groups. Dozens of those have given him their robes on the way out. Many of those he fostered out the door of hate were high-ranking members, and at least one leader shut down his entire chapter when he left.

His strategy is surprisingly simple, absolutely insane, and sometimes controversial – befriend them. 

From a foundation of trust, he can slowly unravel the hate and ignorance with truth. He uses every tool you or I would use to build a meaningful relationship: Respect, kindness, understanding, trust, acceptance, sacrifice, fun, food, listening, time, and honesty. But he applies them in ways I can’t fathom.

Davis is a professional musician. When a Klan friend wasn’t allowed to rent a bus to attend a Klan rally, Davis let him borrow his band’s tour bus and had the group over for dinner afterward.

I don’t know what to make of this or of Daryl Davis.

Some civil rights activists hate what he does and feel that he’s helping to normalize extremist groups. Some white supremacists hate what he does and won’t ever change their minds.

But it’s hard to argue with the results. I believe that trust, dialog, and understanding are how we move forward in a divided world, but I never considered it would be used in this way. I can’t imagine how I’d feel seeing him cozy up to the Klan if they had burned my community to the ground and murdered my family and friends.

On the other hand, Davis doesn’t give hate in the face of hate, and he’s reached out to the worst kind of untouchable. These aren’t people society has rejected, these are groups that have rejected themselves by choosing their beliefs and actions. And Davis still approaches each white supremacist without judgment.

Odd, isn’t it?

Even if you don’t believe in his tactics, the world needs more Oddballs like this. We need more teachers, parents, and bosses who practice kindness and seek to understand, even when it’s not practical. We need more neighbors we can have dinner with even when our beliefs differ. And we need more people who empower change by removing judgment from their lives.

Many of the most important institutions in Central Pennsylvania have ties to the Hershey Company. The best theme park is Hersheypark. If you or your kid have a tough-to-figure-out illness, you go to the Penn State Hershey Medical Center. The Milton Hershey School is a pre-K to 12th grade private school serving low-income students. The students live on campus and everything is free: Meals, housing, medical care, and extracurricular activities. All of that, and everything from Hershey PA’s Hershey Kiss capped streetlights to the Hersheypark Stadium (where I saw Creed on their Human Clay tour) could look a lot different if it weren’t for one guy and his name isn’t Milton Hershey

Before Milton Hershey built a milk chocolate empire, he made a small fortune starting the Lancaster Caramel Company after several failed candy-related ventures. When he sold the company in 1900, he kept the rights to a subsidiary, the Hershey Chocolate Company. At the time, chocolate in America wasn’t what we are used to today. It was a bitter baking chocolate, or a powder used for drinking or coating candy. Hershey had tasted European milk chocolate, seen its popularity there, and believed it was the future. He believed in it so much that he bought 1,200 acres of farmland in the middle of nowhere in Central Pennsylvania for a factory. People called him crazy.

Hershey had a bigger problem than what people thought of him — he hadn’t cracked the code to mass-produce milk chocolate. Specifically, he still needed to figure out how to condense milk so it would mix with the other ingredients properly.

At the time, Hershey had a milk chocolate product, but it spoiled quickly and couldn't be sold outside of Lancaster. The Swiss had mastered the process but weren’t sharing their secrets. Hershey got to work with his team figuring out how to condense milk while the factory was being built. They worked long hours heating milk, adding sugar, cleaning up the failed experiment, and doing it again the next day.

The chocolate factory was taking shape, one of the 150 feet tall smokestacks was nearly finished, and the walls were going up. Hershey still hadn’t discovered the proper way to make sweetened condensed milk. “It appeared that the men building the plant would finish before the recipe was found,” writes Michael D’Antonio in his biography of Hershey.

Enter John Schmalbach.

Schmalbach was an employee from Hershey’s factory in Lancaster. He arrived on site in the evening and got to work that night, slowly heating the milk and sugar until he had a mixture that worked with the other ingredients. It took time to verify Schmalbach's process, but in less than a day he had discovered the breakthrough. Schmalbach’s process for condensing milk was different from what the Swiss were doing, which made it easier to manufacture, and it had a long shelf life. However, the fermented milk fat gave Hershey’s chocolate a hint of a sour aftertaste that has defined American chocolate ever since (Europeans say American chocolate tastes like vomit, but honestly there’s nothing we could do to make them happy).

As far as I know, there are no statues of John Schmalbach, and no tree-lined avenues bearing his name, and I get it. The amount of experimenting and hard work that came before and after Schmalbach’s insight is immense. It takes a lot of ordinary straightforward work to get an idea from its start to the finish line, but you need an Oddballs insight at key moments along the way.

Depending on which account you read, an inanimate object may have done just as much to avert the crisis as Arkhipov. Although it most likely had an OddShapeⓇ and could be worth a profile of its own (new newsletter dropping soon😂). Arkhipov received a posthumous award for what he did, so it was important. I’m just not certain of the facts and what – if any – lessons there are.

All of that is to say, I want to do more research and talk to some people who’ve studied the first-hand accounts. So I’m shifting Oddballs to a monthly send. I want more time to explore dead ends and not have to force something that doesn’t fit or rush an idea that needs more time to breathe.

See y’all at 7:17 p.m. on Sunday, Apr. 14th.

Semmelweis’ story is usually boiled down to a genius who died of rejection. The reality is more nuanced. The establishment rejected him, but he also missed opportunities to have his ideas accepted and self-sabotaged others.

He sent insulting letters calling those who didn’t believe him murderers. He never published his work in a medical journal, which led to misunderstandings. He eventually wrote a book but it was drowning in arrogance, convoluted, and meandering. The translator of the first English version of it wrote, “If Semmelweis had only spent more time in clearly stating his views and less in argument, his book would be twice as good and half as long.” He also never used a microscope and only performed a few rudimentary experiments. These did nothing to further his theory about the source and prevention of childbed fever.

Some argue this is the reason Semmelweis didn’t have a lasting impact on the medical community. It wasn’t until others rediscovered and elaborated on what he found that everyone looked back and realized he was ahead of his time. But everything he needed was right there beside him, hidden in his friends.

Some who believed in him went on to have distinguished medical careers. Ferdinand Hebra was one of Semmelweis’ closest allies and is considered a father of modern dermatology. Hebra navigated the office politics of the day and established a new medical field, he certainly could have helped Semmelweis spread his ideas. The Vienna Medical School was at the cutting edge of technology, and Semmelweis’ peer, Joseph Hyrtl, was a disciple of one of the school’s leading microscopists. What would his experiments have looked like with a cutting edge microscope at his side? It was over a decade after Semmelweis started washing his hands before Pasteur connected microbes to disease. Author Sherwin B. Lund wrote of a possible Semmelweis and Hytrl pairing, “they might even have anticipated [Louis] Pasteur.”

Whatever the reasons, Semmelweis never fully leveraged those around him and at times, pushed people away. The worst instance was when he left Vienna for Hungary without saying a word to anyone. He had been approved for a teaching position in Vienna, but behind closed doors the terms changed and with the final job offer he was restricted from teaching with cadavers. His friends were shocked and he was so embittered, he burned all his bridges on the way out of town.

In a commencement speech at the University of Houston, Arnold Schwarzenegger laid out his belief that the self-made man is a myth — no one can succeed without help. This was a lesson Semmelweis never figured out, he went to the edge of what he could contribute and no further. If he had explored the generosity tucked away in his friends, would we be drinking Semmelweised milk?

After his death, Semmelweis’ body was sent to the Vienna General Hospital for an autopsy. He was taken apart and diagnosed in the same place where he cracked the code of childbed fever.

His wife was told he died from a blood infection stemming from a hand injury. The symptoms of his infection so closely matched those of childbed fever that some have noted the “poetic symmetry” of his life and death. The hand he washed, killed him. He prevented infection and lost his life to it.

But Semmelweis’ end had as much tragedy as poetry, and his death is more complicated. The details are murky but evidence suggests he was beaten by the asylum staff and left with untreated wounds. His funeral was small. None of his family was there, and among the few attendees were brothers that some researchers described as, “ … among Semmelweis’s bitterest enemies.”

As sad as that ending is, Semmelweis’ story grew to legend. This was largely because his ideas were correct, but I believe something else added to his mystique. Semmelweis had a hoard of quiet admirers.

I haven’t found proof of this, but those working closely with him would have seen evidence that would have been hard, if not impossible to deny because there’s a detailed log of his exploits. He was able to solve childbed fever in part because the Vienna General Hospital kept excellent records. After his death, the childbed fever mortality rate at a clinic he had led increased six-fold. But there wasn’t anything to gain by speaking highly of him, and in certain circles, there was a lot to lose. Better to put your head down, stay silent, and move on with your life, even if you respect the guy.

Was it a combination of guilt and respect that brought his opponents to his funeral? What if those same feelings — even if unacknowledged — seeped into the office gossip? Did the staff performing the autopsy choose to highlight the hand injury and infection to create a touch of a storybook ending to an otherwise tragic end? I like to imagine Semmelweis’ former colleagues retelling his story, and like a game of whisper down the lane, it slowly grows into a myth that matches their hidden opinion of him.

Oddballs have a crowd cheering them on, but it’s often filled with silent supporters.

“When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” - Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone

Note: You’ll need to read the full Ignaz Semmelweis story for this to make sense, you can read it here.

Ignaz Semmelweis was an outsider.

He was part of a minority group in Hungary which was viewed as a second-class region by the ruling Austrians. His family had just worked its way into the middle-class. He spoke German, but it was a dialect that would have betrayed his identity. 

While the University of Vienna was a prestigious medical school, Semmelweis had no family or class reputation to protect and few expectations to live up to. He may have even had a chip on his shoulder, especially after he was twice rejected for assistant positions with prestigious doctors in some of the top fields of study at the time. He ended up as an assistant in the maternity ward, not the place you’d go to launch a rock star medical career in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. 

Being an outsider meant he didn’t have to fall in line with social pressures. If he failed to navigate office politics and his career advancement stalled, his family name wouldn’t have been tarnished. When others blamed childbed fever on the weather or the air quality, he was free to question. He let his curiosity carry him from one dead end to the next and took notes along the way. He had room to be the oddball who washed his hands at a time when everyone knew doctors were clean.

It would be a huge oversimplification to say being an outsider is the reason Semmelweis saved so many lives (how many others had similar backgrounds?), but it gave him an advantage. At its core, childbed fever wasn’t only a medical problem – it was a human problem. There’s a deeply human aversion to letting go — to change. He had less to let go of. 

The leading minds couldn’t pinpoint the problem. It must be the ventilation. The quality of the walls was blamed. Some even suspected breast milk leaks because the pools of pus they found inside victims of childbed fever resembled rancid breast milk.

Semmelweis wasn’t well connected. He wasn’t a standout student. He wasn’t the type of person who would have been voted most likely to succeed. But he had curiosity and dedication to the craft.

Amid all the theorizing, Semmelweis noticed something, the rates of childbed fever differed drastically between the first and second wards of the hospital. The main difference between the wards was the first was staffed by doctors and the second by midwives. The midwives had a fraction of deaths. He tried honing in on what they were doing differently and implementing those practices, but had few results.

The turning point for Semmelweis was when his mentor accidentally pricked himself during a routine autopsy and died of childbed fever within days. That’s when it clicked – cadaver poisoning. The Vienna General Hospital is home to the Medical University of Vienna, and at the time the doctors and professors at the university would regularly dissect the dead to further their research. Semmelweis suspected invisible particles were being transferred by doctors to mothers. 

This was before the germ theory of disease was on anyone’s radar. He didn’t have the whole story, but he had enough to act on. Although Semmelweis couldn’t see the particles, he devised a revolutionary solution – handwashing. A lime solution removed the cadaver smell, and if you didn’t smell like a dead body that meant you weren’t carrying unseen cadaver particles. As part of his standards surgical instruments were washed, doctors wore fresh clothes, and bed sheets were changed more often. 
The results were astounding. Rates of childbed fever in the first ward where the doctors worked dropped dramatically to levels comparable to the second ward where the midwives worked. 

The response from the medical community was equally astounding. Although he had supporters, some of the most prominent medical professionals wouldn’t believe it or couldn’t accept that they were to blame. They were gentlemen – clean and genteel. Doctors didn’t take lives, they saved them. One doctor who learned of Semmelweis’ practices delivered his niece before he started washing his hands. She died of childbed fever a few days later. When he saw how effective Semmelweis’ tactics were at combating childbed fever, the guilt drove him to suicide.

When you’ve built a career and reputation on a belief, it’s hard to let that go. Many of Semmelweis’ peers would have had the work of large chunks of their careers undone by what Semmelweis was proposing. Imagine having a well-researched paper or famous lecture on childbed fever published in a prestigious medical journal, only to be told you’re wrong by some young Hungarian. If what Semmelweis was saying was true, what had once been a point of pride – something you could build a career on – would become a permanent record of your error.

When it came to convincing people, Semmelweis didn’t do himself any favors. He was often defensive and harsh and only grew more unhinged over the years. When he moved back to his native Hungary and took over a maternity ward, cases of childbed fever hit rock bottom. But he was also disliked by the staff. At times, his co-workers sabotaged his work or ignored his protocols and childbed fever would re-emerge to take more lives before Semmelweis could reassert control.

Slowly, Semmelweis began to lose his grip on reality. His moods swung wildly. He would talk to himself or imaginary people. He was a family man with children but began openly sleeping with a prostitute. At a staff meeting when he was asked to give an update on the progress of filling an open position, Semmelweis recited the midwife oath. 

Some believe he was suffering from the symptoms of undiagnosed syphilis. Others say he had a form of early-onset Alzheimer's. Always feeling attacked, and always being on the defensive certainly didn’t help with the stress and paranoia. Whatever the reason, it got so bad his wife consented to have him committed to a mental hospital back in Vienna. 

The day he was admitted to the mental hospital was the last time his wife saw him alive. He was dead within two weeks. The details of his death are murky, but he was likely beaten by the hospital staff when he tried to escape or had a mental breakdown.

Semmelweis and his work were largely forgotten until Louis Pasteur and others identified the microbes behind childbed fever. He was eventually given his due and became a national hero in Hungary. The medical university in Budapest was renamed in his honor.

As tragic as his end was, there’s a lot to learn from Semmelweis' story, which we’ll take a look at over the next few weeks.

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