Remembering Rita (episode 314)

AI Generated Shownotes

Chapters

Transcript

Jake:
[0:04] Welcome to Hub History where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the Hub of the universe.

Introduction to Rita Hester

Jake:
[0:14] This is episode 314, remembering Rita. Hi, I’m Jake. This week, I’m talking about the Alston murder that inspired the transgender day of remembrance. Calling attention to the epidemic of violence against trans people and black trans women in particular. I had this topic on the production schedule for November long before the election. But I made the mistake of sitting down to start writing on election day and finishing up the episode in the days after which means that this episode is gonna be short dark and very likely depressing.

Jake:
[0:52] I think this is also the first episode where I’ve written about events that took place within my memory here in Boston. So there are gonna be some meandering personal asides as well. I moved to Boston about a year before a trans woman named Rita Hester was brutally murdered in her Austin apartment in 1998. Our lives overlapped in a few coincidental ways and yet I was totally unaware of her life and death until years afterward. Rita’s killing uncomfortably paralleled a series of murders of black trans women in Boston and a larger pattern of victimization across the country. There was a spontaneous outpouring of grief and outrage in response to Rita’s death leading to impromptu rallies in the days that followed and the creation of a more formal day of remembrance starting 25 years ago this week.

Acknowledging Supporters

Jake:
[1:46] But before we talk about Rita Hester’s life and death, I just want to pause and say thank you to everyone who supports hub history on Patreon. We’re heading into dark and uncertain times again and there are gonna be a lot of worthy causes vying for your support in the months and years to come. This podcast relies on your support for everything from research databases and A I tools to web hosting and security to mics and cables. So I hope you’ll consider sponsoring the show for as little as $2 a month. Of course, after donating to your famous anti Trump is cause to everyone who’s already supporting the show. Thank you. If you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, it’s easy. Just go to patreon.com/hubor or visit hubor.com and click on the support us link and thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors.

Jake:
[2:44] Before we get into the meat of the show. I also want to start this episode with a bit of a dedication. Jesse Thorn is a podcaster who I’ve admired for a very long time. He’s probably best known for his N PR show bullseye where he’s proven to be a fantastic interviewer of pop culture figures from rappers to actors, to comedians, to writers, to poets. But I first came across his work as the very funny bailiff in the court of Judge John Hodgman. I’m sitting down to record this the morning after I attended a live taping of the Judge John Hodgman podcast at the Coolidge Corner Theater where I was lucky enough to have a chance to go on stage. And Jesse Thorn both told me to shut my pie hole, which is one of his catch phrases on the show and also smeared an apple pie cheesecake all over my face. I think that episode will air in December and I’ll give you a heads up about it here.

Personal Reflections on Rita

Jake:
[3:42] Doubt that Jesse is ever gonna hear this show. But aside from being an expert and insightful interviewer and a hilarious comedy sidekick, Jesse Thorn is also the father of a trans kid, especially after working on this episode, it broke my heart a little bit. When at the end of the show, Jesse Thorn started tearing up and maybe even crying a bit on stage or talking about being away from his family on tour on election day and then waking up the next morning and having to have a video conference with his wife and their pediatrician to see what they could do to keep their child safe after the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, Jesse, this is for you and for everyone who loves a trans person and worries about them and just wants them to be safe.

Jake:
[4:32] I’ll start out by saying that I’m always a little bit nervous when I talk about an event in a community that I don’t belong to. I always want to be sure that I’m talking about people as respectfully as possible. And that goes double when I’m speaking about the dead. I’m a middle aged straight white guy. But I find it easy to empathize with gay men and lesbians starting from this very basic premise that I love my wife. And I think that all people deserve to experience that love no matter who they feel it for and society should defend that love. I know the issues are more complex than that, but that at least gives us a shared foundation. If I’m being honest, I’ve had to work harder to find an emotional common ground with trans people. I’ve never been the most manly man out there, but I’ve also never felt like my gender identity as a man was somehow mismatched with the male sex that I was born as. So let’s just start with the shared understanding that all people deserve to live as their authentic selves and they deserve to be safe while doing it.

Jake:
[5:44] All that at the top of the show so that you dear listener know that while I’ll share some news articles from the nineties that are going to use dated uh now transphobic language, even thin, transphobic language. I hope that my own words that I’ve written here and that I’m going to speak will be respectful if I get some of that wrong. Uh Please feel free to write in, tell me what I got wrong, what I can do better next time. And if you’re the type of person who doesn’t think that trans people deserve dignity, respect and safety.

The Murder of Rita Hester

Jake:
[6:15] This is a perfect time to go find a different episode.

Jake:
[6:21] On November 30th 1998 the Boston Globe reported on the city’s 34th homicide of the year which took place on Park Vale Ave two nights before that Park Vale is a residential street. It runs parallel to Harvard Ave in Alston for one long block of nearly identical three story brick apartment buildings. It runs between Brighton Ave and calm. A lot of the surrounding streets are lined with bars and restaurants, but Park Vale itself is typically a lot quieter than those surrounding blocks. That quiet was shattered on the evening of Saturday, November 28th with the Globe reporting before he was stabbed to death in his Alston apartment, William Hester was a nightclub singer and a party thrower. A man who sported long braids and preferred women’s clothes according to neighbors, until his body was found on Saturday. Many in the building on Park Vale Avenue believed Hester was a woman. Police declined to answer questions about Hester’s apparent double life. They said they were focusing their investigation on his final hours. Hester who lived in his bottom floor apartment for several years was often seen taking care of his black cat or entertaining friends, sometimes angering upper floor tenants with late night loud music.

Jake:
[7:44] The language in that article is pretty much the opposite of how we’d speak of a similar incident. Today. We wouldn’t use Rita’s dead name. We wouldn’t misgender her and we just generally speak or write more respectfully. Instead of treating her death like a spectacle, it seems easy to chalk this up to our changing times, or, you could say to rampant political correctness, if you’re the sort of person who thinks that being respectful to people is only something one does out of some sense of political correctness that’s thrust on you unwillingly fine.

Jake:
[8:18] There’s plenty of evidence though that people in 1998 who did not sit on the Globe’s editorial board were a lot more forward thinking and accepting than those who did, on December 3rd of that year, someone named George Kirstein wrote a letter to the editors of the globe chiding them for how they portrayed Rita. I found your characterization of Rita Hester, degrading and potentially misleading, throughout your coverage of the incident. You refer to Hester as he in the transvestite. A significant number of people live as the opposite gender and are socially perceived by all they meet as that gender, to reduce Rita Hester’s life and dignity to the level of quote, a man and women’s clothes is disingenuous and disappointing.

Jake:
[9:07] According to the globe and other early reports, the police found no sign of forced entry into the garden level apartment suggesting that Rita may have known her kill her. At least two neighbors heard the sounds of a struggle in Rita’s apartment, but neither called the police until one of them heard her yell for help. When the police arrived, they found her on the floor with at least 20 stab wounds in her torso. In a history of the trans day of remembrance written in 2020 Kate Sosin of NBC News wrote Rita Hester fought like hell. The story was written in blood. The phone had been ripped from the wall, half a shoe print, not Rita’s mark, the bloody floor, the locks on the front and back doors had been left intact, leading neighbors and police to believe her killer had been invited in. Police don’t clean crime scenes. Families can hire specialized crime scene cleaners, but Hester’s family didn’t have the thousands of dollars that would cost, they walked into our first floor apartment to find blood all over the walls and the floor. Hester’s siblings and her best friend Brenda Wynn cleaned the apartment themselves trying to spare Hester’s mother, Kathleen Hester the sight.

Jake:
[10:31] The Globe’s editorial staff must have learned a little bit from the feedback that they got after their earlier reporting. Because in an article published in February 1999 that announced a reward for information leading to Rita’s killers. They refer to her as Rita parenthesis, William Hester, in the article, police state that they had few leads, but they were focused on searching the overgrown lot behind her apartment building which led down to the parking lots behind Harvard Ave businesses that a killer might have escaped through. They also include the detail that she was last seen alive at the Silhouette Lounge on Brighton Avenue just around the corner from her apartment. Kate son’s profile for NBC continues at 4 p.m. Hester called a friend, another trans woman who lived in Alston. Hester told the friend that she was headed to the silhouette lounge, a dive bar just around the corner from her apartment. The friend took a nap before heading over to meet Hester shortly after 7 p.m. Quote, I walked to the silhouette and I see your street was blocked with cops and I’m like what happened? I have a bad feeling. The friend recalled.

Jake:
[11:46] Officers responded to a call about a fight at Rita’s address at 6:12 p.m. On November 28th and were dispatched seven minutes later. According to a Boston Police Department report, when they found Hester, she was still alive on the floor, she had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest. More than an hour passed between the time the police were dispatched and an ambulance took her to Beth Israel Hospital where she died of cardiac arrest.

Jake:
[12:17] Rita Hester was born on November 30th 1963 on the same day that President Kennedy was killed in Dallas. According to Kate, son’s reporting, there was never a time in her life when Hester wasn’t Rita. According to her younger sister, Diana, as far as Diana can recall, her big sister didn’t have a particular coming out as trans move. I kind of always knew just the very feminine ways that she was in everything she said, adding that her family embraced her sister’s transition, my entire family, you know, even my nieces and nephew, everybody knew Rita. She added it was very receptive was no issue whatsoever. You know, it was fine.

Jake:
[13:06] The Hester’s lived in Hartford but as Rita grew up and grew more confident in her identity, Hartford was too small for her. In soy’s article, Diana Hester says that Rita was no longer safe in Connecticut after suffering some assaults. So she moved to Boston in her early twenties. An article in the Boston Phoenix describes her as having glossy black waist length braids, voluptuous candy, apple, red lips and eyelashes so long, they could almost create a Breeze.

Jake:
[13:38] Son’s profile says that Rita was drawn to the rock scene that was centered in Alston and in his book, The Hub of the Gay Universe past podcast guest, Russ Lopez confirms that Rita was a regular at some of the same rock bars where I like to hang out in those days. One woman recalled that Rita Hester was statuesque and glamorous, usually clad in her favorite colors, black and purple, perhaps the slinky tube dress adorned with ruffles. She was a familiar figure both at Alston bars such as the model cafe and the silhouette lounge and at Jacque’s cabaret, another friend finally remembered that Hester liked to wear opera length gloves with rings on top, big pieces of costume jewelry. Bunratty, the model and the sill or silhouette. We dive bars around Austin where in the late nineties I’d go and hang out with punks and metal heads.

Jake:
[14:37] I moved here in 1997 and I started hanging out in Alston regularly after living on Farrington Ave for a few months after a while. The model became my main night spot at the time. One of my good friends was in a band that won some Boston Music Awards and they seemed to be on the brink of making it big. We’d all go to the model after they practiced at the Sound Museum just up the street to drink Jamison shots and PB R tall boys.

Jake:
[15:05] I’m not exactly 100% sure if I was a regular at the model when Rita was still going there. It honestly could have been a year or so after her death across town though, in the Bay Village neighborhood, Jacques was and remains one of Boston’s most venerable gay bars, when she wasn’t hanging with the Rockers in Alston. Rita Hester was watching drag shows at jocks and performing in them at least until she got herself blacklisted in a phoenix profile. Rita’s friend Jessica Piper said, I remember watching her do this strip show at Jock’s where she would spin and spin, picking up so much speed that you could hardly notice that with each turn, another article of clothing came off until she stopped spinning. And there she stood in a bra and thong panties. She got banned from dancing there because they said her show is too risque as flamboyant as she was. She had her act together. She lived her life her way and she was totally in control of it.

Jake:
[16:13] Jito Suarez remembered Rita Hester from the bar scene and told Kate Soin, she was a very smart, bright young lady and she was a shining star. Whenever she arrived at Jacques, her presence would be noticed by anyone. She was so elegant, as beautiful as she was. She would not try to make anyone else look less. A few weeks after the murder, Brenda Wynn, a bartender at Bunratty who became Rita’s best friend told the Phoenix, she loved music and dancing and unlike many transsexuals, her word in 1998 she wasn’t afraid to go to straight bars and clubs to have fun. Everything she did and everything she wore was extravagantly wonderful. On November 26th, Rita celebrated Thanksgiving at the family home of Brenda Wynn.

Rita’s Life and Legacy

Jake:
[17:08] Two days later, Rita was dead. She was murdered two days before her 35th birthday, and her killer remains free as we approach her 61st.

Jake:
[17:21] She was murdered two days before her 35th birthday and her killer remains at large as we approach her 61st, Rita Hester was murdered six weeks after Matthew Shepherd, the 21 year old college student who was beaten to death near Laramie Wyoming, extensive press coverage of his death helped to draw attention to how pervasive hate crimes against gay people are in America. That the prevalence of crimes against transgender people and black transgender women in particular still went mostly unreported. Monique Thomas who was another transgender black woman was murdered near Fields Corner in Dorchester in September of the same year, 25 year old George Stallings was convicted of second degree murder in her case and remains in prison. But her death was mostly ignored by the media activists and friends of Rita noted the discrepancy especially when they remembered the parallels between Rita’s murder and the death of Chanel Pickett who was murdered three years and eight days before Rita Hester.

Jake:
[18:30] At about 5 a.m. on November 20th, 1995 2 young men woke up to the sound of screaming and crashing coming from their third roommate’s room in their shared apartment on Chandler Street in Watertown, right on the Belmont line. When asked the roommate, William Palmer claimed that everything was fine, but they were skeptical and pretty worried. So they went to an attorney’s office to ask for advice. And the attorney called the police when the cops broke down the door, they found 34 year old Chanel Pickett dressed in a blouse and jeans with her wig nearby. She’d been straggled to death again, using the insensitive language of the era. The globe reported that her encounter with Palmer had begun at a combat zone bar the night before.

Jake:
[19:20] Prosecutors allege that Palmer was at the Playland Cafe in the combat zone when he met Pickett and Pickett’s twin brother Gabriel also a transsexual awaiting sex change surgery. Palmer drove with them back to their Washington Avenue home in Chelsea where the group snorted cocaine. Palmer then took Roman Pickett who went by the name Chanel back to his Chandler Street apartment said Adrian Lynch, an assistant Middlesex district attorney there. He discovered Pickett was a man and strangled him during a scuffle. Lynch said Gabrielle Chanel’s twin sister who had transitioned at about the same time as Chanel bristled at that characterization of her sister’s death telling the globe, he didn’t kill her because he didn’t know he’s saying that to cover up. He’s been in Playland several times. He knew exactly what she was.

Jake:
[20:16] Other patrons of the Playland Bar confirmed that Palmer was a regulator. Other patrons of the Playland Bar confirmed not only that Palmer was a regular, but that he preferred to pick up trans women. One said that she’d been on four dates with him before he met the picket twins. Nonetheless, the prosecution team’s assertion that Palmer flew into a rage when he discovered Chanel’s birth sex made it easy for Palmer to put forward a trans panic defense essentially claiming that he was unable to control his rage. When he made the discovery, he later changed his story saying that Chanel was

The Context of Violence

Jake:
[20:53] alive when he fell asleep. And so she must have died from an overdose. A jury found him not guilty of murder but convicted him of assault and battery.

Jake:
[21:05] The year 1995 had seen a spike in violence against LGBT. Bostonians. Fenway health reported a 36% increase in violent attacks and murders statewide that year with Chanelle Palmer’s murder, among the 83 reported incidents with a slight bump in visibility in the press. The gay newspaper in News weekly published a quote from one member of the trans community about what lenience in the Palmer case would mean I’m afraid of what will happen if he gets off lightly. It’ll just give people a message that it’s ok to do this. This is a message we cannot afford to send.

Advocacy and Protest

Jake:
[21:47] The quote was attributed to Rita Hester, trans women like Chanel Monique and Rita were mostly ignored by the media. And as we’ve seen, they were consistently misgender dead named and belittled in the limited press coverage. Their deaths garnered Rita’s friends were outraged by the globe’s references to her as quote, a man who preferred women’s clothes working with radical groups like queer revolt and lesbian Avengers. They led protests at the offices of the Boston, Herald and Bay Windows. A paper devoted to Boston’s gay community that had still consistently misgender. Rita in its reporting.

Jake:
[22:31] The protest at the Herald is another weird way that my life almost intersected with readers. When I was in college. I worked as a security guard at the Herald for a while. I worked the four to midnight and sometimes midnight to eight shifts at the old Herald complex on Harrison Ave, walking my rounds with an old fashioned wind up watchman’s clock that had matching keys chained to the wall at certain points to prove that I’d been there and drinking coffee from a terrible vending machine to stay up all night. For listeners who’ve been in Boston for less than a decade. The Herald headquarters used to be where the ink block is now roughly bounded by Harrison Traveler Street, Albany Street and Harold Street. If you’re heading south on I 93 look for the whole foods on your right as you pass through the south end.

Jake:
[23:21] In those pre big dig days, I take the red line to Broadway and walk across the bridge to the Herald. I can’t remember exactly when I started at the Herald, but I worked there by December 1998 when the protest was held. I don’t remember Rita’s protest, but I know I was there because I worked another protest at the Herald that same week after one of their columnists called Puerto Rico America’s Caribbean dog patch. In retrospect. It’s just crazy to me how close I got to these incidents, but I didn’t notice anything that was happening in the world around.

Jake:
[24:01] To try to get people like me to notice organizers like Gwendolyn Ann Smith, founder of the web project, Remembering Our Dead and Nancy,

Community Response to Loss

Jake:
[24:10] Narro host of the cable access show, Gender Vision Work to keep Rita’s name, front and center. And that started with a benefit concert at Jacques on December 13th and a march and vigil in Austin on December 4th that drew about 250 Mourners, in a paper published by the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition Mangione recalled the somber tone among the Mourners who gathered just six days after Rita Hester’s death.

Jake:
[24:40] On Friday evening, the model cafe in Austin was packed for the speak out which was held in the larger of the cafe’s two rooms, waiting respectfully outside with the motorcycle police who would conduct traffic during the procession was Boston police detective Mullen who was seeking any information about the murder that attendees might be willing to offer. I started to speak out by announcing that the purpose of the event was to honor and remember Rita and that those who wish to express their feelings about the press coverage would have an opportunity. Another evening during the speak out, most comments were focused on grief at losing Rita, George Anthony, the bar owner spoke of the many friends Rita made with their warm and welcome presence, thoughts that were echoed time and again, by those who knew her, particularly dramatic was the testimony of Rita’s mom, Kathleen, whose tremendous passion hushed everyone in both rooms. After testifying to the strength of her love for her child and bemoaning her loss, she collapsed into a grief induced faint which had everybody present holding their breath. She revived readily though and was gently help to her seed.

Jake:
[25:54] When there were none left who wanted to speak. The crowd moved outside, lit candles and formed up behind Rita’s family. The procession followed Miss Hester who carried on in her grief the whole way along busy Brighton Avenue for the several blocks to Park Vale Avenue where Rita lived and died, turning up Park Vale. The noise of traffic was replaced by an eerie silence against which M Hester’s moans and cries stood out in stark relief, echoing off the apartment buildings which stood like canyon walls on either side of us.

Jake:
[26:30] The large procession stopped in front of Rita’s residence, filling the street. Rita’s family members were struck with grief at our proximity to where she lived. Mourners laid flowers and candles at the doorstep and placed a memorial sign facing the street. Finally, we all joined Kathleen in a prayer at the doorstep and the procession moved on making a circle around the block to travel back to the model cafe by the most visible route. Recalling that first informal remembrance in Edge Boston. A decade later, Michael Wood wrote at that first vigilant Alston Cerrito Suarez were called the mood was so peaceful. It was so strong and magnificent. For Suarez. It felt like one of the first times the local transgender community came together to demand its full civil rights when organizers were searching for an MC for the Boston day of remembrance. Several years later, she signed on without hesitation. It was personal. I’m not talking about just another transgender person. I’m talking about a person. I actually knew, I knew her character and I knew her heart. I’m doing it for her. Said Suarez, we must speak for her.

Establishing a Day of Remembrance

Jake:
[27:51] The next year. In 1999 Gwendolyn Smith was the driving force behind more formal marches and vigils that were held in both Boston and San Francisco on November 20th, the date of Chanel Pickett’s murder. That date has since been enshrined as a formal day of remembrance, which is now honored in over 200 cities around the world in the face of unprecedented violence against trans women. In 2021 President Biden issued the first presidential statement on the trans day of remembrance which opened this year. At least 46 transgender individuals in this country and hundreds more around the world were killed in horrifying acts of violence. Each of these lives was precious. Each of them deserved freedom, justice and joy. Today on the transgender day of remembrance, we mourn those we lost in the deadliest year on record for transgender Americans as well as the countless other transgender people disproportionately, black and brown, transgender women and girls who face brutal violence, discrimination and harassment.

Jake:
[29:04] A study by the Williams Institute found that transgender people are over four times more likely to be victims of violent crime than Cisgender people and the National Coalition of anti violence programs reports that transgender women, particularly black transgender women are disproportionately targeted for violence and murder. So far in 2024 the human rights campaign has identified at least 27 transgender murder victims in the United States, of which 48% were black trans women like Rita Hester Chanel Pickett and Monique Thomas. But you’d never know that from watching the political ads this year which have consistently painted transgender women as predators lurking in the shadows, waiting to attack unwitting Children. President Elect Trump made transphobia a key strategy in his election campaign.

Political Climate and Trans Rights

Jake:
[29:58] He vowed to ban trans people from playing sports to ask Congress to pass legislation declaring that only two genders exist to decertify hospitals that provide gender affirming care, and to deny a ma recommended care to trans kids.

Jake:
[30:15] This appears to have been part of a winning strategy by Republicans nationwide to demonize trans people who make up at most about 1% of the American population painting them as a clear and present danger to that narrow slice of American culture that Republicans actually care about now. Thanks to their efforts, it seems like a huge chunk of our populace is angry and they’re afraid of a menace that doesn’t actually exist.

Jake:
[30:42] When I worked at Boston Children’s Hospital. We pretty routinely had bomb scares and other threats from people who falsely believe that the doctors there performed gender affirming surgeries on kids against the will of their parents or without the parents’ knowledge, to date, only one of the people behind those threats has been identified and prosecuted, at the time. I reassured myself by saying that anyone who was threatening to blow up a children’s hospital was definitely on the wrong side of history. Now, they have an ally in the White House.

Jake:
[31:19] In 2022 the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture commissioned a mural of Rita Hester. It’s on a city owned property adjacent to the Jackson Man School and across Cambridge Street from Twin Doughnuts. It’s just a couple of blocks from the sill where Rita was last seen alive and a couple more from the apartment where she died. This year’s vigil for the trans day of remembrance was held at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral across from Boston Common on Saturday the 16th, the day before this episode will air. I’m recording this before the event, obviously. But if it holds true to past remembrances, it’ll include a tribute to Rita, a ceremony honoring trans leaders and then a somber candle lighting with the names of trans murder victims will be read.

Jake:
[32:07] Let’s hope that list doesn’t grow too quickly in the years to come to learn more about Rita Hester and the other victims who inspired the Trans day of remembrance. Check out this week’s show notes at hubor.com/three 14. I’ll have links to the news articles that I quoted from the Globe Herald in Phoenix on the murders of Rita Hester and Chanel Pickett Kate Soy’s 2020 profile of Rita Hester was incredibly well written and very empathetic. So if you only follow one link from this week’s show notes, make it that one, along with that profile, a link to Russ Lopez’s book on Boston’s LGBT Q history. And my past interview with him also linked to Michael Wood’s article about Rita’s murder for Edge Boston and the paper by Nancy Nioro about early efforts to remember Rita and to get the media to report on her respectfully.

Resources and Further Reading

Jake:
[33:04] Plus now make sure to link to the 2021 White House statement on the Trans day of remembrance as it seems like we probably won’t have another one for a very long time.

Jake:
[33:15] After Trump’s first election in 2016, co-host Emerita Nikki and I devoted many maybe even most of our early podcast episodes to highlighting the bigotry and hypocrisy behind the Trump is movement. We produced episodes about Boston’s violent response to past dangerous immigrant groups like the Italians and the Irish. We compared his anti Muslim rhetoric to Boston’s anti Catholic past. And we looked at the history of Boston pride and marriage equality. Later in the first Trump presidency, we had to highlight the importance of vaccines and other public health measures for obvious reasons. And then we had to explain how literal Nazis from Boston tried to overthrow our constitutional democracy in 1940 replace it with a fascist dictatorship under the banner of America first.

Jake:
[34:05] Now Trump’s back with a bigger mandate than ever. And I’m assuming trends in the undecided house races continue total control of all three branches of government.

Closing Thoughts and Contact Information

Jake:
[34:16] And I just don’t know if I have the energy left to do it all over again.

Jake:
[34:23] If you want to get in touch with us, you can email podcast at hubor.com. We are Hub History on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram though. I don’t know how much longer I can post on Twitter in good conscience at the moment. I don’t post much on Mastodon, but you can find me there as at hub history at better dot Boston or just go to hubor.com and click on the contact us link while you’re on the site. Hit the subscribe blank and be sure that you never miss an episode. If you subscribe on Apple podcasts, please consider writing us a brief review, if you do drop me a line and I’ll mail you a hub history sticker as a token of appreciation. Oh, if you’ve been commenting on episodes on Spotify, but you didn’t see your comments show up. Sorry about that. I just recently realized that Spotify allows comments but needs me to approve them. So thank you to Steve Justin Skirvin and Sophia for leaving comments that I didn’t know were out there.

Jake:
[35:36] That’s all for now. Stay safe out there. Listeners.