Time Tellers

July 16, 1969: a roar of five F‑1 engines, a million on the beaches, and half the planet holding its breath. This episode opens at the launch pad and plunges listeners into the raw, immediate tension of a mission that was never guaranteed to succeed — alarms that nobody expected, split‑second decisions, and a tiny team of people whose choices would decide whether humanity ever returned from the mo...

A dollar disappears into a vending machine, you give it a little love tap—and suddenly you’re committing a crime. This episode opens on that absurd moment and follows the surprising logic of a law that treats a well-meaning nudge as criminal property damage while your stolen cash quietly vanishes. From there we speed off onto the water, where Kansas forbids shooting rabbits from motorboats (paddle...

December 1968 had splintered a nation—assassinations, riots, a war that refused to end. Into that fracture climbed three men in a rocket, not just to test hardware but to answer a Cold War gamble. This episode unfolds the quiet terror and impossible daring of Apollo 8: the hurried decision to send an untested Saturn V, the gut‑clenching 16‑minute radio blackout behind the moon, and the fragile hum...

Step into Iowa where everyday objects become the center of legal drama: a stick of margarine can land a restaurateur in court, substitute sugar packets can stand accused of being illicit pills, and a child’s lemonade stand once required government paperwork. This episode follows the human stories behind these unlikely statutes — the restaurateurs baffled by a butter-first law, prosecutors wielding...

On a golden Florida evening in January 1967, three astronauts climbed into Apollo 1 for a routine ground test. What began as a plugs-out rehearsal became a nightmare: a spark in a pure-oxygen cabin turned ordinary materials into fuel, and in less than 30 seconds the capsule ruptured. In this episode we weave the technical failures, the human stories, and the mounting pressures behind the disaster...

Walk into a curious chapter of Midwestern law where metaphors collide with statutes. In this episode we follow the trail from the odd—shooting fish with a gun or explosives is outlawed by Indiana conservation code—to the almost-mythic: one town’s old rule that black cats must wear bells on Friday the 13th. We unpack which claims are ceremonial, which are lightly apocryphal, and which are codified...

Intro music fades in—tense and cinematic. Dun, dun, dun. On a Friday night in October 1957 a tiny metal beep sliced through the air and the world changed: Sputnik was orbiting Earth, and with it came panic, possibility, and a race that would reshape history. From the morally tangled genius of Wernher von Braun to the anonymous brilliance of Sergei Korolev, from Laika’s lonely orbit to America’s bu...

Imagine wandering into a cheese factory after a long day and deciding it’s the perfect place for a nap — only to be told you’ve just broken the law. That absurd image sets the stage for this episode, where we follow odd, funny, and surprisingly practical rules that lurk inside state codes. We open on the Sanitary Food Preparation Act in Illinois, tracing how a sensible public-health rule about sle...

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Welcome back to Time Tellers. In this episode, Renee and Dan guide listeners through the White House’s dramatic transformations—from James Hoban’s original plan and the 1814 burning to Teddy Roosevelt’s 1902 modernization, Truman’s gutting rebuild, Jackie Kennedy’s museum-quality restoration, the rise of fortress-like security, and the present controversy over a glass-walled ballroom that tore dow...

Dan's legal tip of the day opens with a dark, oddly comic mystery: Idaho forbids cannibalism — punishable by up to 14 years in prison unless it was the only way to survive — drawing a line between Donner Party desperation and Hannibal Lecter horror. With dry wit and vivid detail, Dan turns statutes into stories, testing where law, morality, and survival collide. From a 1907 blue law banning Sunday...

Step into an episode that treats paradise like a courtroom—Hawaii’s sun-drenched beaches, strict billboard bans and the bizarre law against putting coins in your ear become the stage for a series of odd legal tales. We weave through real statutes, urban legends and half-remembered advisories, turning statutes into stories and sparking the question: what makes a law strange enough to tell? Along th...

There’s a secret list—not published, not searchable—that could be written from the small choices you make every day: connecting to an unlocked Wi‑Fi, ripping a DVD for your tablet, picking up a feather on a hike, or sharing a song in a café. This episode follows ordinary people through three surprising worlds—digital life, federal lands, and the modern economy—showing how well‑meaning habits can u...

Walk into this episode and find yourself led down a string of bizarre-but-true local laws in Georgia: an origin story about ice cream in back pockets tied to 1800s horse thieves, a surprising statute that treats llama treks like high-risk activities shielded by liability rules, and municipal ordinances that actually control where chickens can cross the road. Blending folklore, historical detective...

Join us on this intriguing episode of Time Tellers as we delve deep into the history and controversy surrounding one of America's most debated timekeeping practices - Daylight Savings Time (DST). From its satirical origins with Benjamin Franklin to modern legislative battles, discover the stories of innovators and policymakers who have influenced this biannual tradition. Explore how World Wars and...

Picture it: it’s Sunday, you’re a single woman with a packed parachute and a rumor that Florida will throw you in jail for jumping. We trace that laughable — but persistent — town‑ordinance legend, wade into the surprisingly real 1989 ban on dwarf tossing, and follow the paper trail from folklore to statute as lawmakers grapple with dignity, consent, and safety. Then the storm rolls in: during hur...

It starts at that late hour when confidence outpaces judgment: a fridge opens, a tab snaps, and a can hisses like a dare. From an ancient emperor’s accidental tea to communal yerba paste and the patent-medicine tonics of the 1800s, people have always hunted wakefulness—switching from ritual and necessity to branding and aspiration. This episode follows the winding trail from tea-stoked monks and c...

Imagine getting arrested for whispering in church — a $20 fine under a statute that sounds like it belongs in the powdered wig era. In this episode we tour Delaware’s odd legal museum: whispering bans, pants-policing in Luz (or is it Lewis?), and curfews that turned trick-or-treating into a cautionary tale about parenting anxieties. Through sharp storytelling and vivid scenes — a hypothetical 15-y...

Imagine a ragtag college hockey team toppling the world’s greatest machine, a skater rewriting the limits of the human body, and ceremonies reworked after judges and governments collide — all in the same icy season. This episode stitches together those moments across a century of Winter Games, tracing how medals and mythology grew alongside corruption, boycotts, and geopolitics. From Lake Placid t...

In the 1940s two men in Connecticut were selling what looked like pickles but failed the simplest of tests — drop one from a foot and if it doesn't bounce, it isn't fit for sale. Health inspectors relied on that dramatic bounce test to protect public health, a shorthand rule rooted in real cases even if not written word-for-word into the law. But the episode isn't just about cucumbers. Hartford on...

Imagine a navy sailing into a peaceful harbor, Marines ashore and the American flag raised—only to discover a newspaper proving there is no war. In this episode, Time Tellers follows Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones as a string of assumptions, fear of being late, and a system that rewards decisive action nearly turns a mistake into international crisis. We trace the story from Monterey’s surreal...

In Colorado, weather isn’t just forecast—it’s permitted. Follow the surprising path from ski-resort water worries to cloud-seeding airplanes and the paperwork that makes engineered snow legal, plausible, and surprisingly bureaucratic. In Boulder, a run of couch fires near student housing turned a strange hazard into law: no indoor furniture on porches. It’s a small regulation with a big human stor...

When you draw a heart, you think of love — but the Valentine's heart looks nothing like a human heart. In this episode, Renee and Dan follow a surprising trail from ancient medicine and plant seed pods to medieval devotion and the rise of print, asking how a simple, abstract shape became the world's shorthand for affection. This is a brisk, curious story of symbols and survival: fertility, faith,...

On a Valentine’s Day special, Time Tellers traces the strange and powerful history of when love wasn’t private but political: a right doled out and denied by statutes, courts, and customs. From colonial Virginia bans on interracial unions to eugenics-era restrictions, criminal sodomy raids, and the heartbreak of lost children, this episode stitches together the laws that decided who could marry, t...

Step into a tour of the delightful and absurd: Mark Twain’s frog tale meets the real-life rules of small-town America. At the Calaveras County Fair frogs leap for glory, but a blunt public-health line separates sport from supper — if a frog dies mid-jump it cannot be eaten and must be disposed of, a pragmatic and strangely moving rule to prevent disease. Then we pivot to civic theater: Chico’s sym...