The History of Ice in the United States

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too.

In the opening scene of the 2013 Disney film, "Frozen," ice harvesters methodically saw through the ice on a frozen lake, loading massive blocks of the slippery substance onto a horse drawn sleigh and then hauling it off, presumably to be used by the people of Arendelle to preserve their foods and keep cool in the summer months.

Although the reality of ice harvesting was almost certainly less musical, and probably a lot less romantic, the basic mechanics would have been similar. As early as 1000 BCE, the Chinese were storing food in cellars, with blocks of cut ice to preserve freshness.

By the time Frederic Tudor was born in Boston, Massachusetts, one day after the end of the American Revolution, on September 4, 1783, it was common for wealthy families like his to have their servants labor all winter hefting ice out of the lakes and rivers to store in ice houses on their property, structures built into the earth that could keep the ice cool into the summer months. Tudor's innovation was to ship the ice much further afield, to places that didn't have frozen winter months in which to harvest their own ice. After traveling to Cuba, where he fell ill with a high fever, Tudor knew firsthand how useful and profitable ice might be in the tropics. Despite a lackluster response from potential investors and ridicule by Boston newspapers, by 1806, Tudor had figured out how to ship the ice, keeping it elevated and sealed to prevent melting, and he sailed the ice 2000 miles to Martinique. What he hadn't considered was what to do with the ice once he got there, since there were no ice houses in a place with no ice. Selling the ice directly off the ship, Tudor ran into another problem: customers unfamiliar with ice who were upset when it melted. Eventually Tudor solved both his infrastructure and his marketing challenges, and by the time he died in Boston at age 80 in 1864, the Ice King was a wealthy man, having proved the naysayers wrong.

Tudor wasn't the last ice innovator whose ideas were considered ridiculous. John Gorrie was born just 20 years after Frederic Tudor, in a warmer climate than Tudor, although sources disagree on whether that climate was in South Carolina or somewhere in the Caribbean. Working as a doctor's apprentice in South Carolina, Gorrie treated patients suffering during fever season. After medical school, Gorrie moved to Apalachicola, Florida, where he annually treated an unrelenting tide of patients suffering from yellow fever. He became obsessed with finding a way to mechanically produce ice to ease their suffering. When he succeeded, and revealed his invention to the world in 1844, many people didn't believe him, and those who did, found the idea of creating ice, blasphemous. Unlike Tudor, Gorrie died deeply in debt, in 1855.

Gorrie may have been ahead of his time, but it wasn't by much. By the 1860s, manufacturers in the United States were producing ice, using designs by European inventors, who may have been borrowing from Gorrie's ideas.

Whether naturally harvested or artificially produced, Americans loved their ice. In New York City alone, there were 1500 ice wagons carrying ice and icemen across the city by the 1880s. Those ice men carried the gigantic blocks of ice not just from the truck to the building, but also up flights of stairs to apartments with iceboxes. An icebox was like a compact personal ice house in someone's kitchen. Usually constructed of wood or metal, the icebox would hold an ice block in a compartment at the top to keep the food stored within the contraption cold. Even insulated with sawdust or cork though, the ice would eventually melt, so the icemen needed to deliver those blocks frequently. People soon realized the possible implications of burly icemen toting those 50 pound blocks right into housewives' kitchens every week. The 1907 song, "All She Gets from the Iceman Is Ice," written by Arthur Lamb and Alfred Solman, plays on this idea. Ice delivery wasn't solely the realm of brawny men, though. During World War I, as those men headed off to war, pairs of women lugged the 50 to 100 pound blocks into people's homes.

Relying on ice delivery meant relying on companies that could and did artificially create ice shortages in order to price gouge. A 10-day heatwave throughout the northeastern United States in 1896, demonstrated how dangerous those monopolies could be. Charles W. Morse, owner of The Consolidated Ice Company, had gobbled up all of the other ice companies in the region, and raised prices 100%. Poor New Yorkers couldn't afford ice at those prices, and they died in alarming numbers during the heatwave, with four times as many New Yorkers dying of heat in those 10 days in 1896, as died in the Great Chicago Fire in 1871. New York Times reporters found that Consolidated Ice had over three times as much ice as it claimed, and was raking in record profits during the heatwave. The investigation came too late to save the victims.

The ice companies finally lost their monopolies though, with the advent of electric refrigeration. Fred W. Wolf of Fort Wayne, Indiana, produced the first home refrigerator in 1913, which consisted of an electric cooling device in place of the ice block in an ice chest. Within a few years, it was being mass produced and marketed as "The Electric Iceman." A whopping 90% of homes in the United States had electric refrigerators by 1957. Chilled food was so important to Americans that they even wanted to take it on the road with them. In December, 1953, Richard C. Laramy was awarded US patent number 2663157A for a portable ice chest for storing foods and the like.

Today, Americans consume about 400 pounds of ice a year each, and around half of Americans in a recent survey identified themselves as "ice obsessed." Frederic Tudor would be proud.

Joining me now is writer Dr. Amy Brady, author of, "Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks -  A Cool History of a Hot Commodity."

Hi, Amy. Thanks so much for speaking with me today.

Dr. Amy Brady  11:31  
Hi, Kelly, thank you for having me.

Kelly  11:34  
I am really excited to talk about I ice. I want to start by asking how you came to write this book. Tell me a little bit about what got you started.

Dr. Amy Brady  11:45  
I've been a reader of and occasionally a contributor to journalism and other types of writing about the climate crisis. And so that was at the top of my mind back in 2018, when I was visiting family back in my home state of Kansas. There was a horrible heatwave that year that gripped the planet. And it was so bad that it knocked the power out of my family's house where I was visiting. So we went to a nearby gas station that was operating on a generator to try to cool down. And as I was filling my cup with ice in preparation to have a nice, cold glass of iced tea, it suddenly just occurred to me. What an irony that a phenomenon that's eliminating ice on the planet drove me to seek out and consume ice. And I started thinking about that relationship between ice on the poles and ice in our everyday lives, wondering where did ice in our kitchens, where did the idea of that even come from? And I couldn't find a satisfactory answer. So I dove into archives and other places of research. And slowly a history started to reveal itself, and I couldn't believe how weird and fascinating it was. 

Kelly  13:08  
So, ice, of course, has been around for way longer than humans. This could be an enormous, enormous series of books. How do you decide in a book like this, what to focus on, where to tell the story, what to not tell, because, you know, there must be a lot of choices to make?

Dr. Amy Brady  13:28  
There were so many choices, because you're right, ice intersects with so many different areas of our lives. But what I was really interested, the question I was really interested in answering was, why is there ice in everybody's kitchen, or at least every American's kitchen or almost every American's kitchen? Especially since if you go to a home almost anywhere else in the world, that's not necessarily the case. It certainly isn't the case that ice is the default in a glass of water or tea or lemonade that you might order at a cafe in one of these international locales. So what is it about America's unique obsession with ice? And I realized, in order to answer that question, I had to go all the way back to the dawn of the American ice trade, which was the you know, the the beginning of an industry that convinced Americans that we all needed to have ice in our kitchens and in our cafes, and in our restaurants. And that, of course, begins with the story of Frederic Tudor, who launched the American ice trade. And once I found that origin point, I knew I kind of the rest of the shape of the story started to make sense.

Kelly  14:43  
So let's talk about Frederic then, a fascinating guy who has a genius idea, also could have been not genius if it hadn't worked. He seems like quite the the risk taker here. So can we talk quite a bit about this? I found this so fascinating this idea that, you know, not just selling ice, but selling the idea of ice, selling the allure of ice, you know, really, this incredible for the ad maker. In a way you could imagine him on Madison Avenue or whatever. So  can you talk a little bit about him? And you know, what, what do we know about him? How do we know it? And then you know, what, what is this story that really revolutionizes really American culture? 

Dr. Amy Brady  15:31  
Yeah, so Frederic Tudor was that son of a judge, that's a very wealthy family, who grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. And because the Tudors were a wealthy family, they had land. And because they had land, they had access to what was called an ice house. And an ice house, they weren't really houses at all, they were more like deep wells that went deep into the ground, where it's always around 55 degrees Fahrenheit, regardless of the time of year. I'm a writer, not a physicist so I don't know why that's the case, but it's true. And so, you know, they had servants who carved blocks of ice out of the nearby lake, and stored it in the ice house. And so, Tudor understood the comfort of ice. If you wanted to cool down on a hot day, he could chip some ice off, put it in a drink. If he injured himself, you know, he could hold an ice cube to a swollen joint or a wound. When the Tudor family hunted, you know, they needed a place to store and preserve their meat. So they would preserve it between blocks of ice. This is really important to explain, because even for people who lived in cold climates back then, not everybody could use ice in the same way because you needed a place to store it. Right. So that meant that the use of ice in this way was only for people who lived in the north, where ice formed naturally, and for people who had a lot of money. And so Tudor landed on the idea, "I could make a killing, if I can figure out how to ship ice from the northern climates to people who are living in warm, tropical climates. And once they get a taste for it, they're they're going to fall in love with it, and you know, make me even richer than I am." This was his thinking. So when he had first announced his idea, you know, everybody thought he was a madman for even suggesting it because nobody had ever tried to ship ice for long distances before. But he figured out by recreating the physics of an ice house in the hull of a ship, he could keep most of the ice preserved and intact for for weeks at a time, which was amazing. But what he didn't consider is that once he landed in, you know, the American southern states and territories, he also first brought it actually to the Caribbean, that once he got there, folks wouldn't just know what to do with ice, because it to look at a cube of ice in early 19th century say Cuba was like looking at a unicorn. You know, nobody had ever seen it before, let alone how to use it. So he had to figure out, you know, how to convince people to use the ice. And then he also had to build an infrastructure because there were no ice houses, not even among the wealthy. There were no ice boxes, you know, that came later. You know, there was there was none of that. So he had to first you know, get the idea. Then he had to figure out how to ship it and then he had to be that you know, madman you know Mad Ave, you know, advertising man that you get suggested by convincing people that ice is something they could use and benefit from in their everyday lives. And it took him almost a decade before he was a success. I will be honest with you, I probably would have given up long before he did. It was failure after failure after failure until he figured it out. 

Kelly  18:55  
I just love this idea of him like walking into the tropics or whoever he was sending in people being like, "What is this block of cold stuff? Why would we want it?" One of the things of course, he stumbled on was this idea of cocktails and how you can change drinking culture with ice, which is still very much the case today. Can you talk a little bit about that, both from the historical perspective, but then there's a lot of interesting things happening even today that you write about in the way that ice is used in cocktails?

Dr. Amy Brady  19:32  
Yeah, so this was one of my favorite parts of my research because I got to taste cocktails, to figure out what to write about. So one of the ways in which Frederic Tudor convinced people that ice was relevant to their everyday lives, was to show them how to use them in drinks. So for example, when he first arrived in Havana, which he did long before he actually came to the southern United States, he knew one thing from his previous times there, which is that nobody on the island of Cuba trusted him. But they all trusted their local baristas because cafe culture was dominant in Cuba at this time. And so when he arrived, he went into all the local cafes, and he gave ice to the baristas for free on one condition: that they would allow him to show them how to mix their proprietary drinks of say Cuban rum and lime juice or what have you, over ice. And then he said to them, "Because you have this ice for free, you can start you can sell it at the same cost as the lukewarm drinks that you've been serving for a century or more. And let's just see what people like better." And you can't argue with a drink on the rocks. And neither could you know, early 19th century Cuba. And very quickly, people took to these new icy cocktails, and very quickly, the baristas started selling out and then started purchasing ice from Frederic at an ever increasing price. And then once Frederic succeeded in the Caribbean, he turned his eye towards the southern United States. He resisted going there first, because in his mind, if he succeeded there, quickly, somebody else would get the idea and become a copycat investor and start selling ice as well. So he wanted to figure out all the kinks first, you know, in the place, it was much harder to get to and trade with. But now he's figured it out. So we turned his eyes to the United States. And the first city that he wants to turn into what he called an "ice city" was New Orleans. And that's because of where New Orleans is on the map. Right? It's just about 100 miles, you know, up the river from the gulf. It was one of the largest trading ports in the northern hemisphere during this time. And so that's a very appealing place to bring a ship filled with ice. So when he first arrived in New Orleans, what he realized is that this is a city in the midst of wild transition. Right? There are people that are from all over the world, all different cultures, bringing their food, their drink recipes, and they are ready for experimentation. So when this weird northerner shows up with these blocks of ice, it just gives New Orleans bartenders one more element to experiment with. And they took to it like, I don't know, a fly to honey, they couldn't wait. And you know, within just a few years of Frederic arriving with ice using that same technique that he used with the Cuban, Cuban baristas, they had created the Sazerac, different twists on, you know, the Whiskey Smash, you know, all the big drinks that we now associate with New Orleans, you know, thus creating an American cocktail culture that to this day really doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. It is, cocktails are uniquely an American art form, all thanks to ice and Tudor.

Kelly  23:04  
Well. And of course, harkening back to what you said at the beginning about the climate crisis and the irony of this thing that's reducing natural ice, you know, driving us to icy drinks. That's it's still an ongoing problem, right? I saw something you wrote in Scientific American about, I think, climate friendly cocktails or something. Can you talk a little bit about that, and how, now that we've moved beyond just using natural ice, which is what Frederic Tudor was using to using produced ice, how really climate unfriendly it is to make ice?

Dr. Amy Brady  23:40  
Sure, well, so the ice trade sparked an appetite for ice across the United States. And over time, technology evolved so that, you know, the independent iceboxes gave rise to electric refrigeration. And electric refrigeration is wonderful for all kinds of things. And I was certainly would never tell somebody give up your refrigerator, let alone your icemaker. Right. But the one downside to refrigeration and freezing technology is that it's taking a toll on the planet. Collectively, the cooling industry contributes, you know, more CO2 to the atmosphere than the airline industry. That's mind boggling to me. And so with that in mind, it's appropriate to ask, right "What what can what can we do? What can the average person do? What can, you know, the restaurant owner do to just to be a little more mindful about living as gently as possible on the planet?" And so, you know, the thing about it, and let me preface it by saying this, this isn't the restaurant industry's problem to solve. Right? There are much larger issues when it comes to the climate crisis. There are bigger actors, right? However, you know, if you are interested in cocktails and you do want to make a tiny difference, you know, there are things that you can do, you know, including you to know, mixing pre batched cocktails and pre diluted cocktails, because the thing about ice in cocktails is that it functions in two different ways. It cools the drink, yes, but also it dilutes it to an appropriate amount, so that the other ingredients can open up their flavors and mix in a way that's really pleasing. And so by pre diluting and pre chilling, you don't have to use ice every time you mix a cocktail, and then just dump it down the drain, which is often what happens. Also, you know, ice machines are, they draw a lot of energy, just like our regular refrigerators do. So, you know, finding ways to minimize ice means you know, smaller ice creations, smaller ice output, which ultimately means also drawing less energy. So there's lots of things that we can do, you know, in our in our homes. In our homes, you know, there are ways to turn off your automatic icemaker so it's not running constantly, which is the default, which is why you can get ice at three in the afternoon or three in the morning. But you know, if you just turn it on for the times of the day that you you know that you're awake, and in preparation of using ice, you can save energy that way too. So there's there's lots of things that we can do. And there's also as I write in my book, there are new technologies being developed and will soon likely be scaled up that do away with typical refrigerants that we use now, and also, which just draw considerably less energy than most typical appliances do now. So I'm really hopeful for the future that we can, you know, make our ice and drink it too. 

Kelly  26:49  
So to get to that point where we had mechanized produced ice, you write about John Gorrie, who's super interesting, probably less well known than, not that I knew who Frederic Tudor was either, but you know, at least some people knew who he was. Could you talk a little bit about John Gorrie? And John Gorrie is one of the people who I think comes off best you know there's a lot of people in your story who are out to make money no matter what and John Gorrie is really seems like he's he's out to help people like he has really good intentions.

Dr. Amy Brady  27:21  
I like to think so. You know, we don't know as much about Gorrie as we do about Tudor, largely because you know, Gorrie's papers were lost in a fire a century or more ago. And so we just don't have the same extant records that we do around Tudor and his business and his family. But John Gorrie is an interesting figure. He died young, he died in his 50s, and he died from a disease, a malaria disease, probably yellow fever, that he was trying to fight by using ice. So, in the 1840s, John Gorrie went he moved to Apalachicola, Florida, which is a tiny town off the Gulf Coast of Florida. And he went there because yellow fever, which ravaged the American South every year was worse there, because it's surrounded by swamps and mosquitoes, and mosquitoes transmit the disease. But nobody knew that. And Gorrie said, "I  knew it was bad there," but he didn't know why. So he wanted to help people. And what he realized as he was trying to figure out how is the best way I can help these, you know, the hundreds of hundreds of people that I'm treating every year, is he looked at when the disease was really bad, and when it got better. And he noticed that it came and went with the seasons. It was worse in the summer months, and it waned in the cooler months. And he thought, "Well, if I can get my patient's body to mimic the cycle of the season, that is I can get it cool when it's really hot with fever, maybe I can cure them of yellow fever." This is 1840s Florida. Florida wasn't even a state yet. Gorrie, despite being a doctor and we associate doctors with lots of money today, he was not a wealthy man. And ice had just arrived in Florida via Tudor's ice trade, and was very, very expensive. Locals referred to it as white gold. So Gorrie knew the only way he was going to be able to create enough ice to cool down all these people, was if he learned to make it himself. So after years of trial and error, he finally came up with the prototype, and it created ice. And he thought when he announced his discovery to the world, he was going to be met with you know, gratitude and excitement. And instead, he was met with cries of blasphemy, people saying things to him like, "How dare a mere man create ice? Only God Almighty can create ice!" And despite getting a patent for his machine, which later became very useful to the world, he died of yellow fever relatively young, completely penniless, and with his reputation in tatters. It's a tragic story that also ultimately changed the world.

Kelly  30:08  
And Gorrie, of course, isn't the last person to use ice in medical, you know, that continues on even today. You write about some really horrifying stories of medical experiments to see, you know, what does it what does it do to the body to make it very cold? And, you know, I think there's some really promising things it can do. But the the ethics, the medical ethics are just really horrific. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Amy Brady  30:36  
Yeah, well, you know, to be to be fair to at least some of the doctors back then, there, there wasn't an ethics board, you know, the way that there is today. And also, they just didn't know, right, what extreme cold did to the human body. So when they were doing experiments, such as, you know, soaking a naked person suffering from, you know, cancer in a tub of ice water for hours at a time, you know, they just, they didn't understand hypothermia, they didn't understand the skin damage that can come from that they didn't understand. They do learn, but they didn't, they didn't get it. And what those early experiments showed is that, you know, ice actually can have a positive effect on the body. And it led to things like therapeutic hypothermia that, you know, some hospitals utilize today. It's still experimental, but it involves, you know, lowering the body temperature of somebody who's suffered a catastrophic event like heart a heart attack, or a brain injury, until the body can stabilize, so that the doctors can can do their work to save that person. You know, those experiments also lead to things like cryotherapy, which is a process of injecting ice crystals into the body to either remove something from the skin or in some cases to actually treat cancer tumors that are otherwise difficult to, to take to treat. So there's, it's great in some ways, but then there are also there are some real blights in history. A lot of the experiments that American doctors were doing, you know, by time we get to the 1940s, you know, they were discovered by the Nazis, who inflicted horrors, on, you know, on victims, on Jewish people and other victims to test out, you know, what extreme cold does to the body and it's absolutely horrific. And it's actually because of that, that many countries, United States included, banned the the study of hypothermia and the effects of ice on the body for decades. And then when even when it wasn't banned, there was still such a reticence to to take it up again. And to an extent, I mean, doctors are still wrestling, wrestling with that today.

Kelly  32:53  
So a less horrific part of the history of ice, of course, is ice and sports, which, you know, we take for granted, I think. Nowadays, we've got the Winter Olympics, you know, it just seems natural. It is a little odd to think the first person who thought, "I'm gonna, you know, strap on something on my feet and go gliding across slippery ice," seems a little strange in retrospect. Could you talk a little bit about the history of these ice based sports? And of course, they start out on more natural surfaces on frozen lakes and things and then move indoors as we have the capacity to, to do that.

Dr. Amy Brady  33:31  
Yeah, so you know, ice skating, ice sports, they have origins all over the world. In my book, I focus mostly on America, because if I didn't put boundaries around my book, this book would have gone on for, you know, 1000s and 1000s of pages. And nobody wants to read that, except maybe me. So I focused primarily on, you know, the American interpretation of things like ice skating, hockey, speed skating, curling, which is takes place on the weirdest sheet of ice. But yeah, what's really interesting about the history of ice sports is that when we go back to again, the 19th century when ice skating in particular became really popular. And then extra popular once mechanical ice became a thing and allowed people to skate indoors, regardless of the time of year, almost anywhere in the country, even if ice doesn't form naturally there. What we see is a really interesting effect on courting rituals. So ice skating, perhaps because it's outdoors, and it's surrounded by so many other types of people, it's a very visible activity. Young couples often went to skate because they could escape the watchful eye of a guardian. And it was on the ice that you know, couples got to know each other, but also because you know, they were skating can be kind of a dangerous thing,  you don't want to trip on your clothing, you know, women's skirts started to get, to hike up, so that, you know, they wouldn't trip. But also they could show off those ankles, you know, to their to their partner, as they skated around the rink. And then as skating evolved, you know, it continued to challenge gender norms. You know, the history of ice skating is really, really interesting. When we go back and look at the split that happened between, you know, male and female skating teams, and how judges looked for ways to differentiate the two that were based on, you know, more conventional or traditional movements that are associated either with masculinity or femininity. You know, ice skating is just yeah, it's just one of the most fascinating sports that I've ever had the pleasure of researching.

Kelly  35:56  
So let's talk a little bit about curling and the ice. And what I found so interesting was both with that, and when you're talking about speedskating, like the idea that there's stuff that science still doesn't quite know why it works, the way it works, is really kind of fascinating for something that is as basic as ice that's been around forever. So could you talk talk a little bit about curling? Again, this is one of those, like, how did somebody ever first think, "I'm going to sweep the ice, and that's going to affect how something happens." But in particular, the treatment of the ice, this pebbling that they do to make it work, but it's it's really fascinating. So could you talk a little bit about that, and that sheet of ice that you just mentioned?

Dr. Amy Brady  36:39  
So unlike most ice sports, which are which take place on the smoothest plane of ice that we can create, ice is never perfectly smooth, but it's pretty smooth. Curling is different in that it's pebbled, and what that means is that before every curling match, it's somebody's job to go out on the sheet of ice with a pack full of water and a spray like a spray spout, and to move it back and forth over the ice so that the ice becomes covered in these frozen droplets of water. It's called pebbling. And that is critical to the sport of curling, because curling involves taking a heavy piece of stone, it's usually called the stone or the rock, and glide it or push it down the sheet of ice, it glides down the sheet of ice to the opposite end to a target that's called the house. But it's never thrown in the perfect line. It's always spun just slightly, so that there's a slight curve to it. It allows for certain aspects of control. It's also a way of knocking your opponent's rock out of the way. But what's so interesting about that throw is that in most other probably every other surface on earth that I know of, when you take an object, and you give it a twist, you know that let's say it's a twist clockwise, that object will actually spin counterclockwise across the surface. You know, you can try it at home. Take a glass of water, kind of spin it, you know, on a on a table, and you'll see what happens, right. But in curling, the opposite happens, the stone actually spins in the same direction as the, the turn that the thrower uses when they when they throw the rock. And scientists have no idea why, like why does it behave this way? Some think it has something to do with the the pebbling effect of the ice and how that affects the friction between the pebbles and the bottom of the rock. You know, other folks think it has something to do with ice itself, and the fact that you know, the very top of it is something called a quasi liquid layer. It's not frozen. It's not water. It's something in between. But nobody really knows or understands why. Yeah, and yet, you know, we've been playing, humans have been playing the sport for centuries.

Kelly  39:15  
And you got to try curling right while you were researching for the book?

Dr. Amy Brady  39:20  
I did. And let me say before I actually tried curling, I watched the women's curling team on the Olympics like so many other people.  I loved it. But what I think I loved about it is that of all the sports that are played during the Olympics, that's the one I thought I can do, because it looks like bowling on ice. I'm not a great bowler either, but I can do it. When I actually tried curling, it is so much harder. And it took me a good 30 minutes before I could stay upright to even get the rock down, down the the sheet. Yeah, I fell multiple times much to the amusement of onlookers. But it was a lot of fun. And now I have mad respect for curlers everywhere. It's much harder than it looks. Way to go athletes! You are you are true athletes.

Kelly  40:13  
I love it. So there's a million other stories in this book that we're not going to get to including things like Theodore Roosevelt and ice delivery people and all sorts of interesting things. So how can listeners get a copy of the book? 

Dr. Amy Brady  40:27  
Oh, thank you for asking. So "Ice" is available at any place that sells books. I encourage listeners to go to their independent local bookstore. You can also get it online through, you know, through Amazon or bookshop.org. Or you can go to my website, AmyBradyWrites.com, which has lots of links to places you can also purchase the book.

Kelly  40:52  
It's got delightful pictures in it, too.

Dr. Amy Brady  40:55  
Thank you. Thank you. Those pictures were fun to find.

Kelly  40:57  
Yeah. Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about?

Dr. Amy Brady  41:02  
I would say that if any of your listeners have book clubs, and virtual or otherwise, and you want me to pop in via zoom or if we're relatively local, in person, I'm always happy to do that and to sign copies.

Kelly  41:17  
Excellent. Well, Amy, thank you so much. This was it was a wonderful read and it was really fun to speak with you. 

Dr. Amy Brady  41:25  
Thanks Kelly for having me. This was fun.

Teddy  42:42  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. You can find the sources used for this episode @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate and review and tell your friends.

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