Winston Churchill: Walking With Destiny, Uncle Bud's Last Days and The Man Who Milks Snakes for a Living

This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

And you can go to I Heart Radio's app or wherever you get your podcasts to listen to the show. Speaking of a slightly American people, there are two British prime ministers with interesting connections to our country. Boris Johnson was born in New York City. So too was Winston Churchill's mother, who was born more accurately, more precisely in Brooklyn. Here to tell the story of Churchill is English historian Andrew Roberts, the author of Churchill Walking with Destiny.

Take it away, Andrew. On the 10th of May 1940, Winston Churchill became prime minister at about six o'clock in the evening. But on the morning of that day at dawn, Adolf Hitler invaded in the West, attacking Belgium and Luxembourg and Holland shortly afterwards also to invade France. And Churchill said of that day, I felt as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been a preparation for this hour and for this trial. One of the things that gave him this tremendous sense of destiny was the very many brushes with death that he had had in his life. He had nearly died of pneumonia at the age of 10. He had nearly died in a drowning accident on Lake Geneva, nearly died also in a house fire. He'd been involved in two car crashes and two plane crashes.

He was very nearly run over by a taxi in New York as well. And of course, those were all in peacetime. And in wartime, of course, he had endless brushes with death as well. He once said that there's nothing more exhilarating in life than to be shot at without result. And he was shot at without result from his 21st birthday in Cuba all the way through to when he was an ex-cabinet minister in the First World War in the trenches. Churchill was involved in the last great cavalry charge.

He took part in this cavalry charge at the Battle of Omdemann in September 1898. He killed four dervishes on that day. It was a tremendously vicious and bloody melee. And he very nearly was killed himself. And Churchill was captured in 1899 and put in a prisoner of war camp. And he, in a great sensational prison escape, managed to climb over the wall and cross 300 miles of enemy territory and get back to British controlled territory. And on one occasion during the First World War, he went outside his trench, his dugout of his trench.

And a German whiz-bang high explosive shell came and hit the dugout and decapitated everyone inside. So he saw war close up. He knew the horrors of it. He knew the pain of it. He knew the sheer terror of it.

And so when he sent men into battle himself later on, he knew exactly what he was doing. Winston Churchill grew up at the very apex of Victorian society. He was the grandson of the Duke. He was born in a palace, and not just any old palace. Blenheim Palace is the grandest of all the British palaces. In fact, when King George III went around it, he said, we have nothing like this, meaning the royal family had no palaces anything like so grand as Blenheim.

And it's true. Yet it doesn't necessarily mean that his childhood, for all the entitlement of that and the privilege, was a happy one because his relationship with his parents was always extremely difficult. Churchill's father, Lord Randolph Churchill, who was a very successful Victorian politician, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer, was somebody who never saw the incipient greatness in Winston Churchill, never really thought very much of him at all, and actually treated him very often with contempt. Despite being despised by his father, Churchill did not allow that to affect him, and he continued to love his father, even after his father's death in 1895 when Churchill was 20 years old. And he wrote his father's two-volume biography, he sought out his father's friends to hear anecdotes about his father, he adopted his father's political views, the Tory democracy, and his father's way of actually holding himself.

He very much loved his father and saw his whole life as an attempt to impress the shade of his long-dead father. Winston Churchill's mother, Jenny Jerome, was born in Brooklyn, but she was very un-American really in regard to her motherhood, owing to the fact that she never took much notice of her children, either Winston or Winston's younger brother Jack. She was going to parties constantly, she was a great society beauty, but she was not somebody who spent very much time with her children, to the point that in the year 1884, when Winston was 10 years old, she only spent six hours with him in the first six and a half months of that year. Just as with his father, his mother's taking no notice of him didn't allow Churchill to hold it against them. He worshipped his mother, he continued all his life to help her and to bail her out financially and to love her, and he said when she died that she shone for me like the evening star, brilliant but at a distance, which I always think is a terrible thing to have to say about one's mother. But Churchill was very unlike the other Victorian aristocrats of his age and class and background in that he was willing to show emotion.

They didn't like to do that, they had stiff upper lips. He on the other hand would actually cry on some 50 occasions in public during the Second World War, and so I think he was more of a sort of throwback to an earlier aristocratic era, the Regency era, when people didn't mind wearing their hearts on their sleeves, and this was a strength really because although people were surprised when they saw him cry in public, nonetheless they knew that it meant that he was feeling genuine emotions and not just bottling it all up. And you're listening to Andrew Roberts tell the story of Winston Churchill and his mother. My goodness, what a story about his mother. Let's just say not a very present mother, and yet he held it not against her at all.

She shone for me like the evening star, brilliant but distant. When we come back, more of this remarkable figure, not afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve and lead with emotion, here on Our American Story. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation, culture, and faith, are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses.

Go to hillsdale.edu to learn more. I know everything there is to know about running a coffee shop, but for small business insurance, I need my State Farm agent. They make sure my business stays piping hot, and I stay cool and confident. See, they're small business owners too, so they know how to help you best. State Farm is in your corner and on it. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

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It's easy. Simply go to Geico.com or contact your local agent today. And we continue with our American stories and with British historian Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill walking with destiny. And you can get the book by just going to your bookstore, calling them up. They'll order it for you. And we love to support our local bookstores.

And if not the bookstores, wherever you get your books. Let's pick up now where we last left off with Andrew Roberts talking about Winston Churchill. Churchill was the, not only the first person, but actually for a long time in the 1930s, the only person to warn against Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. And I think that the thing that he had that helped him enormously in this foresight was partly that he was a phyllo Semite. He liked Jews. He'd always got on with Jews all his life. His father had liked Jews.

He'd gone on holiday with them. He was a Zionist. He welcomed the Balfour Declaration of 1917, giving a homeland to the Jews in Palestine. And so he had an early warning system when it came to Hitler and the Nazis. The second thing was that he was an historian and he had seen in the threats to British independence from countries that wanted to invade Britain from the 16th century onwards, the same kind of tropes that you see with the Nazis and the dangers that they pose.

Thirdly, he had faced fanatics in his own life, Islamic fundamentalist fanatics on the northwest frontier and in Sudan and fanatics elsewhere in his career. And so he was better placed than a lot of the 1930s prime ministers who had never seen any fanaticism in their lives before at all. As well as having tremendous physical courage, Winston Churchill had very strong and profound moral courage because even though in the 1930s he was ridiculed in the press, he was shouted down in parliament, he was attacked by even people on his own side in parliament, he was lambasted by people who thought he was a warmonger and so on. He never changed the warning of the threat posed by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. He carried on saying the same thing regardless of what anybody said about him. And I think that that's one of the greatest aspects of his career in many ways, was this extraordinary capacity for self-belief.

He never for a moment took any notice of opinion polls, he never hired a speechwriter, he never hired a spin doctor, he wrote all of his own speeches even when he was prime minister in his 80s. And he wasn't somebody who was a natural public speaker, he put a lot of effort into it. He would practice again and again, sometimes he would actually practice speeches for as many hours as there were minutes in the speech. And this finally produced a sublime oratory, an oratory that was able to thrill the allied countries and certainly the British people and drive them on to ever more effective action. And that very much does come down to this sense of rhetoric which he had worked on since he was a 20 year old boy really.

And finally it came to its flourishing of course in the Second World War. And Churchill was once asked about the techniques, the sort of secrets of the trade as it were. And he said really there were three things. The first was that you need to keep your sentences short, don't have too many sub-clauses in the sentence otherwise people lose the track of them. Then he said keep your words short, don't show off how clever you are by using long words, instead use the shortest words you possibly can in a sentence. And also if possible use old English, try to use language that is perfectly understandable by the English people for the previous millennium.

Words that come from the Anglo-Saxon and when you have all of those three things together in a sentence they are much stronger and they make the point much more vividly than long-winded sentences with lots of foreign words and long words. And the British people trusted Winston Churchill and that was tremendously important. Of course it is always important with any politician but they knew that because he didn't have spin doctors and speech writers and other people who were influencing him from the outside that what you heard from Winston Churchill came straight from him.

What you saw was what you got. That put him in a tremendously strong position when he became Prime Minister because they knew that he had been warning for a decade throughout the 1930s about Adolf Hitler and Nazism and the rearming of Germany and so on and therefore they trusted him. He showed personal and physical courage all the way through his life and so it was only to be expected that he certainly did in the Second World War as well. He would go to the front whenever he possibly could. He had to be held back by his soldiers and staff on many occasions from getting too close to the front. He would go up onto the Air Ministry roof during the London Blitz so as the shrapnel and the bombs were flying he would be up there.

His wife and his advisors hated it when he would do this but he felt it was absolutely necessary to be as close to the action as possible as he had been all the way through his life. It was also tremendously brave that Winston Churchill spent so much time travelling. He was in many ways the person who kept the big three together of Roosevelt and Stalin and he did that by travelling 110,000 miles outside the United Kingdom during the Second World War, very often within the radius of the Luftwaffe. He crossed the Atlantic which of course was filled with U-boats.

He went in unpressurised cabins. On one occasion his plane was struck by lightning in the middle of the Atlantic and if the instrumentation had gone down that would have been the end of him but it was a classic example really of his tremendous courage all the way through the Second World War. Some historians have claimed that Winston Churchill was opposed to D-Day.

This is absolute rubbish. Really since June 1940, so the same month that we were flung off the continent, he was already ordering the Chiefs of Staff to look into plans for getting us back onto the continent. What he didn't want though was an early, over-hasty and even more dangerous attack across the Channel before the Battle of the Atlantic was won and before there was complete air superiority over Normandy. Winston Churchill lost the general election of the 26th July 1945 even though the war against Japan was still going on and the war against Germany had only been won in that May. And this has surprised an awful lot of people because he was personally very popular in Britain but we have a parliamentary system whereby he's only standing for one constituency, which of course he won, but where the Conservatives were standing in all of the constituencies and they were very unpopular, not least because they had been the government in power at the time of the outbreak of the Second World War, they had been responsible for appeasement, they were the largest party in the national government in the 1930s. And so it wasn't Winston Churchill who was personally being punished by the British electorate, it was the Conservative Party that he led, but nonetheless that did mean that he was forced out of office.

His wife Clementine said to him on that day that it might be a blessing in disguise and Churchill replied, well from where I'm sitting it seems quite remarkably well disguised. Winston Churchill very much considered himself to be half American because of his mother, but he also very much considered his views to be American, his belief in democracy, his belief in human rights. These are things that he recognised were very powerful transatlantic concepts and ones to which he dedicated his life. He visited America no fewer than 16 times and had visited well over 40 states by the time he became Prime Minister. And so he knew America far better than other politicians. And a great job on the production by Monty Montgomery and a special thanks to Andrew Roberts and again his book is Churchill Walking with Destiny and my goodness to have travelled 110,000 miles during combat. The physical and moral courage of this man, remarkable. What really struck me most is that he had no pollster and he wrote his own speeches.

The story of a remarkable life, Winston Churchill's story here on Our American Stories. I know everything there is to know about running a coffee shop, but for small business insurance, I need my State Farm agent. They make sure my business stays piping hot and I stay cool and confident. See, they're small business owners too, so they know how to help you best. State Farm is in your corner and on it. Like a good neighbour, State Farm is there.

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Take it away, Brent. I sat at Tinga's kitchen table, listening to an album from the band and reflecting on my life with my Uncle Bud. He lay asleep, wiped out in the last days of his battle with pancreatic cancer.

He had just been diagnosed on April 8th. It was now May 10th. Tinga needed to go to work and left me to sit with Bud. I had arrived in Louisville on May 8th for a final visit and to help in any way I could. I opened my laptop to do some work, thought better, and instead opened a story I had written about the first visit with our kids to Louisville in 2006. A gush of emotion overcame me as I read the story. We had eventually made three more summer trips to see Bud and Tinga.

Every one of them was a precious time. Since I had arrived, Bud had slept much of the time. My intention to time my visit when he was still comfortable had failed. He could muster up his strength to sit with me and talk a few hours each day. I labored over what to discuss with him. I wondered what he would want to talk about.

I let him take the lead as much as he wanted and initiated some discussions about topics I wanted to discuss from a list I had made when he first broke the news to me. Then one morning that labor ceased. I heard Bud stirring and found he had gotten into the shower. After he finished and returned to bed, I pulled up a chair beside him, and about the time he said, How you doing, son? I broke down, trying to control my emotions.

I looked away and sensed him waiting for it to pass. Once it did, I told him that what I liked about writing was the fact I could look back at what I had written, see what I was thinking at the time, and see the change between then and now. He asked what had changed, and from that we launched into a two-hour conversation. It was wonderful. It was relaxing.

There was no labor. We discussed what matters most. I told him that part of his influence on my life was that he had done his best to impart what he had learned from life to me, and that had shaped the way I think.

It was an impressive feat on his part, given the fact that while we are similar in temperament, we are drastically different in some core beliefs. When I saw he was tiring, and as the time approached for the hospice nurse to arrive, I left him to rest. The nurse arrived a little late, but once she left, Bud wanted to talk more. We sat another few hours, and he poured out more thoughts, many of them about his struggles with his relationship with his father. This would become a routine over the next few days.

Bud would rest in bed, then muster the strength to either get up or have me sit by his side and talk. Many of the conversations revolved around the major events and relationships that shaped his life, molded his thinking, and drove him to do certain things. We discussed how the tingle blood from his grandfather Asher had been passed on to his father Elias, to Bud, to me through my mother, and now to my sons Elias and Asher. That blood seems to produce very complicated, multifaceted men.

We could put our fingers on that imprint in every one of the men I just mentioned. As we talked, I could easily identify the tingle influence in my life. That blood produces men who seem to end up carrying a great weight due to the minds it creates and the actions it tends to lead us to. We talked about how that weight was finally lifted, at least partially, in the life of Bud at the age of 44.

He described it as being freed from a chain, freed from bondage, having that great weight lifted off his shoulders. That concern of mine, of what to discuss with my uncle, resolved itself. It appeared we both wanted to discuss the same thing, the things that had the greatest impact on our lives, the things that shaped who we had become. I made it clear that he had done a great deal to shape who I had become. Among the many influences in my life, part of who I am has to do with our tingle blood. Part of it has to do with his lifelong attempt to share what he had learned in life. I felt like, in these last days, he wanted reassurance he had accomplished a positive influence to some degree.

It was easy for me to do that. In these last conversations, he was reminding me of who I am. Yes, I am a Timmons, and that influence is for another story, but I am also a tingle. I have understood that influence since my teenage years. In talking to Bud, it only became more apparent.

We have our faults, yes, but working through those faults makes us better men. The very act of working through them makes us stronger. I had come to help Uncle Bud and Tinka in Bud's last days. Instead, it was Bud who helped me. He reminded me that it takes a lifetime to complete the work of influencing those around us.

It is slow and calculated work, and requires great patience and determination, and when the work is done, we can rest, knowing we have completed the task. It was his last great gift to me. Thank you, Uncle Bud. The day before I was to leave, I asked whether the timing of my departure was good, wondering whether I should linger a while longer. He said, There is life at your home that you need to attend to, and here there is death. You need to go home.

While I conceded that the time to return home was right, I disagreed with the idea that here there is death. There is only the passing of your physical body, Bud. Your life will continue to be with us.

You have worked a lifetime to make sure of that. And a great job on the production by Monty Montgomery, and a beautiful piece of storytelling about Brent Timmons' Uncle Bud. And by the way, if you enjoy this story, you can find Brent's other stories, as well as all of our stories, on OurAmericanStories.com. And we love to hear stories that are more eulogies than anything else and remembrances. And particularly in these most core relationships in our lives as fathers, as mothers, as siblings, as aunts and uncles, and grandparents, because this is where most learning occurs. So much of the fundamental learning in our lives occurs. If you have any of those stories, send them again to OurAmericanStories.com, because you are the stars of this show, too. You are listeners. Brent Timmons' story about his Uncle Bud's last days here on Our American Stories.

Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time. I know everything there is to know about running a coffee shop, but for small business insurance, I need my State Farm agent. They make sure my business stays piping hot, and I stay cool and confident. See, they're small business owners, too, so they know how to help you best. State Farm is in your corner and on it. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

Call your local State Farm agent for a quote today. Doing household chores can already be time-consuming and tedious, and there's nothing more daunting than facing piles and piles of laundry that need to be done. I mean, that can be overwhelming for anyone. So if you want to get those larger laundry loads done right and get back to your life, try all free clear mega packs. All free clear mega packs are bigger packs with two times the cleaning ingredients compared to a regular pack so that you can tackle any laundry load without the worry. All free clear mega packs are also 100% free of perfumes and dyes and they're gentle on skin, which is great for any family's sensitive skin needs. Which, my family, we definitely have sensitive skin. So the next time the whole family gets home from long vacation or you get the kids back from summer camp or whatever the situation is that's caused this big pile of dirty clothes, just know that all free clear mega packs, they have your back.

Purchase all free clear mega packs today and conquer any laundry load for all fabric types. And we're back with our American stories. Up next, Madison brings us a story from Nathaniel Frank.

Nathaniel is the CEO and founder of mToxins Venom Lab, which extracts high volumes of snake and scorpion venom for the production of anti-venom. Here's Nathaniel with a story of how he got involved in his unique career. So I grew up in Northeastern Wisconsin and about six years old, I became just obsessed with reptiles. And that was because a neighbor had given me an old Peterson's field guide and I would flip through it and go out and try to find all the animals that were in our region that were in there. And it just started a lifelong passion for these animals. In those field guides as a child, there were pictures of a type of snake called a coral snake that absolutely fascinated me. And I always said, one day I'm going to work with them. In about 2011, I started keeping coral snakes and I was keeping a type of coral snake that was incredibly rare.

I was the only one keeping them in the United States at the time. And a scientist from Australia had seen that on Facebook and said, can you provide me some samples of that venom? It was really learning under fire, which I would never recommend to anyone. But a gentleman who had been producing venom since the 60s kind of took me under his wing and worked with me on safety and what I needed to do to be able to do that. And we did and it led to a very successful scientific publication.

Then the question was what else can you provide me? So it turned into providing venom from a hundred different species at one time and it grew very quickly. And that led into providing venom to pharmaceutical companies. And that's now our main source of revenue, providing venoms for Asia, the Middle East, South America and all of Africa.

The process is really quite simple and it's been done the same way for a very long time. You take a sterile vessel, you put a membrane over the top that the animal can bite into. And from there we grab and restrain the animal. Now a snake is at its most desperate situation when you're grabbing it. Typically their first instinct is to flee. One of their last instincts is to use their venom. So we try to be gentle and some of them are intelligent enough to know the process is happening. So a lot of them know what to expect and we try to condition them by they give their venom, they get fed right after. So it's almost like a reward.

So they bite naturally into the vessel and release their venom. And from there it goes into a purification process and then it's turned into a freeze-dried powder. And that's how the scientists around the world and the pharmaceutical companies use it. mToxins Venom Lab opened in 2011 and in its beginning years it was very small. Almost no one in the community even knew it was there. But in 2016 mToxins became a high production facility and gained a lot more attention.

It's become an enormous success with the community. We're treated with the utmost level of respect by the city and by its residents. We have a very serious level of preparedness here with the fire department, with the police department, the local hospitals know us. Our state's poison control knows us because if you can imagine Wisconsin poison control getting a call that someone's been bitten by a black mamba or a king cobra, the first thing to do is roll your eyes and assume it's not anything like that. So one day I was extracting from several black mambas and I rest a finger on their nose.

So I had that animal in my hand. I'm pressing on its nose and I lifted the animal before I lifted my finger and I actually lacerated my finger with the snake's fang. So anytime that you believe you've been snake bitten, you know, the first rule is get to the hospital as quickly as possible.

And of course we have the antivenin on hand. But basically I waited to see because that animal had just released its venom. Did I get any venom in my system? Am I okay? Well, then I started to lose control of my tongue and my eyelids and eyes were drooping. I was salivating. And so then we got to the hospital. I received four vials of antivenin and went home that evening and had dinner with my family. But that wasn't the first accident he'd had with one of the snakes.

It's a little ironic and actually kind of funny despite the severity of it. But in 2015 I was extracting venom from a snake from Africa called a stiletto snake. And we were doing these extractions to do a scientific paper that proved that there's no antivenin that can be used to treat that bite.

And I had my right hand placed in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I actually accidentally pushed my finger onto its fang and we had to take what's called the flight for life, our emergency helicopter, down to a huge hospital in the southern part of the state. And of course we knew there was nothing that could treat it.

So it was all pain management for 48 hours in ICU. But it still makes me laugh the irony that we knew we couldn't be treated and there we are with an envenomation. We have a very strict thing that we actually, another venom producer used that we adopted, which is the I'm safe pilots checklist.

So we go through that checklist. But before I walk in that room, I like to remind myself that we don't want it to happen again, which it will. They'll eventually be another bite. It's just the nature of the business.

But to prevent that, to keep my family from having to go through it with me. This hurts a lot of people's feelings, but snakes don't have a part of the brain that shows emotion or connection. Lizards do.

They become bonded to their keepers and things like that. But snakes can't do that. It's all about how tolerant is that animal being. Now, there's a lot of YouTube stars right now, people that want to be like Steve Irwin and educate, but they'll take these deadly animals and they'll handle them in a very reckless way. Naturally, it's not a matter of if, but when they're going to get bitten and it's going to be ugly.

One of them I'm extremely close friends with and he has a young daughter and every time he would post a video doing something stupid with a dangerous animal, I'd send him a picture of his daughter because just because you have anti-venom, it doesn't mean you're out of the woods. There can be lots of secondary infection. You know, you could be bitten by one of these snakes and it turns out you had a pre-existing condition you never knew about. And the next thing you know, you're on dialysis or you're dead.

It's not worth it. But the general public loves it because they believe they're seeing a bond between an animal and a person. And that's, it's not scientifically possible. When you get asked, what do you do for a living? And her answer is extract venom from deadly animals. You get a variety of reactions. A big one is are you serious? That's one.

And why in the heck would you want to do that job? People are really interested in the backstory. Nathaniel allows visitors to come in and see for themselves. We're not like any other zoo. I feel that in our educational center that that sparks a whole different level of interest and investment from the kids that are watching us from behind the glass and stuff. It's just pure awe because these kids are nose to nose with cobras and mambas and rattlesnakes. What we want to see are more people working in conservation, more people studying venom to find more legitimate medicinal uses.

That's kind of our goal. Just in Africa alone, there's hundreds of thousands of bites a year. A large number of the antivenom for Africa is donated. And I've been fortunate enough to see our antivenom save people's lives over there. It's a humbling experience to be a part of and something that we're very proud of. It's what keeps us going every day.

I think if six year old me knew that this was the path that I was going to end up on, I don't think I would have believed myself. We just try to approach it with a great deal of humility and always remember the goal is to save people's lives, not to fill our egos or anything like that. It's just all about saving lives. And a great job on that piece by Madison. And a special thanks to Nathaniel Frank, CEO of M Toxins Venom Lab. When he was six years old, he told us he was obsessed with reptiles.

He knew then that his dream would be working with these animals. We learned also snakes don't like being grabbed and also snakes don't have emotion. But I love the incentives that venom for food program and how we ultimately train these snakes to basically do some good. And in the end, that's what it's all about saving lives. If you live near snakes or you're in snake country, antivenom is at every hospital and it literally saves lives. The story of Nathaniel Frank, CEO of M Toxins Venom Lab here on Our American Stories.