Treacle Tears: The Boston Molasses Disaster
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Pushkin. Tim here with an exciting announcement about The Cautionary Club, our Patreon community for Cautionary Tales listeners. So many of you joined our live table read earlier this year that we're doing it again. Join me and my production team for a live reading of an unreleased episode about the people who almost invented the iPhone 15 years early and the surprising reasons they failed. This will be a chance for you to see how the stories we tell are developed in real time and ask your burning questions about cautionary tales. It's on the 8th of July at 5pm UK or noon Eastern. If you join the Patreon before then, or if you're already a member, you'll get your exclusive invitation. Head to patreon.com slash cautionary club.
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Boston, January 1919. Giuseppe Jantosca stands at his kitchen window, searching for his ten-year-old son. All sorts of people come and go in Boston's North End, and Giuseppe likes to keep a close eye on little Pasquale, or Pasqualino, as he's affectionately known at home. Giuseppe doesn't speak much English. Like many of their neighbours, the Jantoscas hail from southern Italy... They're very poor. Even with Giuseppe's shifts at the Boston and Main Railroad, back-breaking work laying track, they struggle to make ends meet. Fresh milk and meat are rarities in the Antosca house, and Giuseppe and his wife Maria worry about their six small children. Where is Pasqualino? Giuseppe surveys Commercial Street, a thoroughfare beneath his window that curves along the water.
It's an unusually fine day for mid-January, and the harbour is bustling. Fishermen hurry to their lunch, a plate of spaghetti at home perhaps, or a pie from Parziale's bakery. Dock workers shout as they unload shipping crates, and horse-drawn wagons hauling beer barrels mingle with peddler's carts. Motorised trucks rattle to and from the factories that ring the north end. Giuseppe scans the elevated railroad that swoops above Commercial Street and the freight trains directly beneath it. Finally, he traces the hulking storage tank that dominates the wharf. His eyes flick to a tiny figure, clad in red and crouching in the shadow of the high steel walls. Pasqualino. Giuseppe breathes a sigh of relief.
Down on the wharf, Pasquale Jantosca and his friends Tony and Maria d'Estacio are huddling beside the enormous storage tank. 50 feet high and 90 feet wide, its grumbles and shudders and its sweet, earthy scent are familiar to them. The tank isn't designed to store diesel or grain, but of all things, a thick, dark, sugary liquid, molasses.
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