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Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to sports and from business to history and everything in between, including your story. Send them to Our American Stories dot com. They're some of our favorites. We love telling you quirky stories from our history here on the show.
And this one comes to you from Bill Bright, a friend from New Hampshire. It's a story of the best, worst counterfeiter in American history. Emmerich Jutner, also known as Edward Mueller, who lived near Broadway and West 96th Street in Manhattan, eluded the counterfeiting laws from 1938 to 1948 longer than any other maker of the queer in American history. The first 63 years of Jutner's life were upright and respectable, short, blue eyed, white haired, mustachioed and blessed with a winning, if toothless, grin. Jutner had learned the rudiments of photo engraving in his native Austria. After emigrating to America at 13, he worked as a building superintendent while tinkering with numerous unsuccessful inventions. With his children grown, the newly widowed Jutner retired in 1937 to the Upper West Side, where he lived with his mongrel terrier. He worked as a junk man, picking up discarded appliances and old tires from vacant lots with a pushcart. But he wasn't making enough to live on and soon found himself nearing destitution. So, using his ancient engraving skills, he photographed a dollar bill and recorded the images on sensitized zinc plates, which he then etched in an acid bath.
With a little retouching and a small hand press, he was ready to make more money by, well, making more money. The U.S. Secret Service, which has chased counterfeiters since 1865, protecting presidents became part of their mission only in 1901, first noticed Jutner's activity when a phony one dollar silver certificate turned up at a cigar store on Broadway near 102nd Street. Even as the agency opened a new case file numbered 880, agents felt everything about the bill was unusual. No one in recent times had considered singles worth the trouble to counterfeit. More importantly, the bill was obviously laughably bad.
While U.S. currency was printed on 75% cotton and 25% linen stock with red and blue fibers of various lengths embedded in the paper, Jutner had used cheap bond paper from some corner store. The numbers were fuzzy. Many of the letters were misshaped or illegible.
Washington's portrait was, as the Secret Service itself reported, poorly executed. Washington's right shoulder blends with the oval background. The left eye is represented by a black spot.
The right eye is almond shaped. But the bogus singles kept turning up. Those that could be traced have been passed to the subway and elevated lines and newspaper vendors, bartenders, and other small businesses that handled hundreds, if not thousands, of one dollar bills daily. Jutner carefully passed his fakes only at busy times, such as rush hour on the subway.
A five cent fare paid with a phony dollar yielded a 95 cent profit. And as the Secret Service later learned, Jutner never spent a stake in the same store twice and passed only one or two bills a day. By December 1939, file 880 contained some 600 counterfeits.
The bills grew worse with time. While touching up the plates, Jutner misspelled the president's name as W-A-H-S-I-N-G-T-O-N. Washington. Nonetheless, he kept passing bogus singles throughout World War II despite successive Treasury publicity campaigns. Apparently, many of those who found themselves holding a Jutner counterfeit kept it as a souvenir instead of turning it over to the government. By 1947, the Secret Service held over 5,000 of Jutner's phony singles. Yet, despite what New Yorker writer S. Sinclair McKellway called, a manhunt that exceeded in intensity and scope any other manhunt in the chronicles of counterfeiting.
Despite thousands of interviews and hundreds of thousands of flyers, the agency didn't have a clue to his identity. A few weeks before Christmas 1947, Jutner's apartment caught fire. New York's bravest, in extinguishing the blaze, piled the old man's junk in an alley where a sudden snowstorm buried it.
The homeless old man stayed in Queens with his daughter while his apartment was being repaired. On January 13, 1948, several neighborhood youths noticed some 30 strange-looking $1 bills lying about the alley. Unlike countless businessmen who had accepted Jutner's signals, the kids instantly realized the bills were bogus.
One of their parents took some to the West 100th Street Station House, where detectives identified them as counterfeit. The Secret Service quickly identified the tenant, whose singed furnishings had been dumped in the alley, and arrested Jutner when he returned to his apartment a few days later. Jutner had succeeded because he passed no more bogus singles than necessary for his survival, only knocking off a few bills whenever he needed food or helped paying his $25 monthly rent. Blandly admitting everything, Jutner was sentenced to a year and a day and fined $1.
He was released after four months to live with his daughter and her family. After McElwey profiled him in The New Yorker, 20th Century Fox filmed Mr. 880, with Edmund Gwen, renowned as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street, in the title role. Jutner made more money from the film than he had as a counterfeiter. And great job on that, Robbie, and thanks to Bill Bryk, our friend from New Hampshire, for delivering this story. And my goodness, one dollar at a time. Not 20s, not 100s.
Dollar at a time. This man had, if anything, great discipline. And what a great story. And we love telling, well, sort of funny stories. I mean, our whole team was laughing at this one.
It was quite amusing. Bill Bryk, thanks so much again, our friend from New Hampshire. And Emmerich Jutner's story, the best worst counterfeiter in American history, here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation.
A monthly gift of $17.76 is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That's OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories. And this next story, well, it's a great social entrepreneurship story.
And we often delineate between the two. Some people go into business to make money. But so much of the great work in this country is philanthropic work for the community and for the betterment of people's lives, filling the gaps.
Well, that's what social entrepreneurship does. And this next story is brought to us by our own Joey Cortez. Every kid is born curious. And we do a damn good job saying, don't climb on that. Don't put that in your mouth. Of course, we have to put those guardrails up. But if you think about how we raise our kids, don't do this, don't do that, don't see this.
Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't. And what do kids want to do? Explore. They want to taste it. They want to touch it. They want to try it. And we do a good job for little kids, like trying to kill their curiosity.
Right? You're listening to Nicole Small, an extraordinary Dallas woman who orchestrated the massive merger between Dallas's three then existing science, natural history and children museums, and became the head of the new Perot Museum. She must have caught some kind of science bug when working at Perot because she now runs the IF-THEN initiative, encouraging young girls to pursue careers in STEM, careers in science, technology, engineering and math by highlighting stories of inspiring women in STEM. But in truth, she didn't catch any science bug at all.
She's had it since she was a little girl. I grew up in Dallas. My father was at the medical school here, so I had this upbringing where I was exposed to a ton of science.
What I didn't know then was that that would have a deep influence on my life. I think sports for me was a huge thing growing up. I mean, sports is just an incredible way that I think parents enable their kids to go out there. My parents always taught me it's how you win and how you lose. That's integrity and character, right? And competition is really important because that's how you learn to fail sometimes.
You cry and then you look around and you're like, no one else is crying. I better get up and keep going. I got hurt playing high school soccer, made it to college, played two years in college, and I was a soccer player. That's who I was and what I did. My injury got a lot worse. An orthopedic surgeon said to me, do you want to hike, bike and ski the rest of your life or do you want to play another year or two of soccer?
What's your trajectory? And I was like, well, but I'm a soccer player. That's like what I do. And he said, well, you better figure out how to do something else then because this is you're not going to be able to do all these things the rest of your life. And that was a pretty painful moment when everything you've worked for just kind of gets taken away. I think my parents felt sorry for me for about five minutes and said, OK, sorry, you've had a great run.
That's awesome. But like, what are you going to do about it now? And not in an unkind way by any means. You cannot change the past. You cannot change the situation.
What are you going to do about it? You make the best out of your situation. And so you move on with life. And like I said, it doesn't always go the way you plan it.
And sometimes awesome things happen that are unplanned. So I graduated from college and I had an opportunity to go work for McKinsey & Company, which is a consulting firm, and got the greatest business education ever. Worked really hard, but in a good way. Everybody should understand what it means to work hard, too.
Right? I had just the incredible good fortune to work for great people and great clients. And one of my projects was working for a natural history museum. I was the low man on the totem pole and McKinsey had offered to do some pro bono work for a local natural history museum in Dallas.
So they offered me up and my job was to go look at museums and figure out what made a great science museum. We had in Dallas built a natural history museum at the Texas State Centennial in 1936. And we still had the exact same museum. Dallas had 250,000 people when that museum was built. Now we've got 6 or 7 million in our metroplex area. The city had outgrown the museum. Kind of what they'd say, stones and bones museum.
We've got kids in the 21st century that learn everything on their phones. So you've got to think about how to stay competitive, right? It's like any other business. We like to say that nonprofit is a tax status, not a business plan. So for everybody who tries to run their business, you know, as a charity, it turns out you actually have to make money.
No margin, no mission, right? So we had to figure out how to build an institution. They wanted to build an institution that actually, you know, could make money, could serve people, could make sure that they were meeting their mission, right?
So of inspiring the next generation. And like a typical consultant, I finished the deck, handed it to my partner. We presented it to the board at the museum and said, good luck.
We hope you guys can go build a new museum one day. And I thought that was the end of it. But yet that was just the beginning.
I didn't know that. Nicole went on to Northwestern's business school, where she started and sold her own company with classmates. She then made her way back to Dallas for love and for marriage, and unexpectedly made her way back to the Museum of Natural History. They said, Do you want to come help us build that museum you talked about? And I said, I don't know anything about museums, but I know how to start things.
I can write business plans, and I'll help consult for a while. And a while turned into a while. 13 years, to be exact. This project was no small feat, and it metamorphosized into something far greater. I was a young woman taking over an old natural history museum, and there were challenges for sure. And I came in from a startup, from the for-profit world, and it took me some time to culturally adjust. It probably took people some time.
They would tell you to culturally adjust me. Business plans in hand and expectations to work long hours, Nicole came in like a bull in a china shop. But it turns out that with her background, she would be the perfect person to face the challenges ahead. We had three museums in Dallas. There was a science center, a natural history museum, and a children's museum, who all had their own brands, had their own constituents.
All of them wanted to go from good to great. And what we recognized was that our constituents would be better off if we had one great museum versus a few good ones. Some would tell you it took 10 years to get the merger done, and we spent a lot of time working to try to figure out how to encourage the teams of three different museums that it would be better off for our community, that it was actually better for the mission that the business was a single entity over time. That while we were all three nonprofits, you know, no margin, no mission, you can't survive as a business, you can't get your mission out the door.
And if there was a way to combine the three together, we could have a stronger margin and then we could have a stronger mission. And we really wanted to aspire to build a from scratch brand new museum. And the only way that was going to get done was if we did it together.
We were better together. So we spent hours and hours and hours and it was painful along the way. Someone at the time said this was as easy as merging Exxon and Microsoft, right? And there were three little tiny nonprofits, but it's hard because people are really passionate. But we got this merger done and we had already bought some new lands. And we began to envision, gosh, if you could build a museum from scratch to meet sort of the 21st century needs of how you inspire the next generation workforce and get kids in the community passionate about science and you make it fun and you make it engaging and you make it smart.
What would that look like? We were able to construct an exhibition design team, an architecture team, a construction team that we put together, frankly, right before the 08 crash. And so imagine deciding you're going to raise $200 million, buying an expensive piece of land on the edge of downtown Dallas, being well into that project, being into design documents with the Pritzker prize-winning architect who was incredible, Tom Main, to work with three exhibition design firms. And then the market, the bottom completely falls out of the market in the middle of it. We're dead in the water. There's no way. We're never going to raise $200 million.
It's impossible. And what we saw at that bottom was incredible hope. This incredible realization that if ever we needed to invest in our kids, if ever we needed to think about how the U.S. was going to remain competitive, we needed to make sure that this project kept going. I think you asked me earlier if I ever cried. I cried when I fell off the beam when I was eight. And I think I cried when the market crashed because I just thought, gosh, there went our dream. It's over. There's no way this will ever happen. But people really rallied.
And I had the good fortune of witnessing that, you know, sometimes when you're challenged, that resilience thing, it's kind of real. Nicole Smalls, who we're listening to, the co-founder of If Then Initiative, and the former CEO of Perot Museum, more of this remarkable story, her story, here on Our American Stories. Soon millions will make Medicare coverage decisions for next year, and UnitedHealthcare can help you feel confident about your choices. For those eligible, Medicare annual enrollment runs from October 15th through December 7th. If you're working past age 65, you might be able to delay Medicare enrollment depending on your employer coverage.
It can seem confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Visit uhcmedicarehealthplans.com to learn more. UnitedHealthcare, helping people live healthier lives. 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 continue with our American stories and Nicole's small story. We left off with the stock market crashing, casting doubts on this bold endeavor to merge Dallas's three main museums. While their team weathered the storm, Nicole was about to enter darker territory. Got diagnosed with breast cancer about a year before we opened the museum.
Definitely a shocker. And had an incredible team of doctors who were able to put me through a year of treatment, chemo, radiation, all of the above and saved my life. Made me ever more passionate about science and investing in science and also, you know, put your priorities in order. Silver lining and all that, right, is you also see the great good in people when you go through tough things. That makes me want to cry more than being told I'm sick is how grateful I was. I had friends flying in from my two business partners who I had started a company with, showed up many times, sat through chemo with me, college friends, high school friends, my kids' friends' moms who jumped in to help make sure my kids were fed or got where they needed to go. People were incredible. Truly, truly incredible. Random acts of kindness were just, you know, and I feel very indebted, right, to whom much is given, much is expected and that can be used in a lot of ways.
And for me in that circumstance, I was unfortunately the recipient of a yuck diagnosis, right? But I was a recipient of such incredible kindness that I will forever hope and aspire to be as good of a person as those people were to me and to my family. It really restores your faith in humanity if you ever think about losing it. To go through difficult things sometimes brings out the best in people and so that was a pretty incredible thing.
And I got to keep working, some days better than others, and God, that museum kept me going, my kids kept me going, my husband kept me going, and so, you know, knock on wood, if you can see me, I'm knocking on wood, you can hear that, I really don't want to do that again. While I was at the museum, we had to buy land and we were incredibly fortunate to be introduced to Lida Hill. She was associated with the company that made the first gift to buy the land for the Perot Museum and was just really inspired by her passion and commitment to making the world a better place, to science, and I was just really taken with her spirit. And along the way, she was really, really involved in our committee to build the museum, so we worked together for about ten years. And through the process of building museums, she became a member of the Giving Pledge, which is the Warren Buffett Bill Gates pledge to commit to give away a majority of your wealth to make the world a better place. And she was like, yeah, not only am I going to take the pledge, I'm going to give it all away. Oh, and by the way, I'm going to do it all while I'm alive.
Because it's not fun to do it after you're dead, so I might as well do it now. So she just got this incredible kind of character and spirit and integrity. She's also a breast cancer survivor and was incredibly supportive when I was ill. And when she'd first taken the Giving Pledge, I said, gosh, I love, I'm in my dream job. I didn't know it was my dream job, but it was my dream job to run this museum. What an incredible privilege. And I said, but boy, helping you give your money away, that's a fun job for someone too.
Not knowing that I would have that opportunity one day. So we visited and I had an opportunity to join her team and do a lot of the work that I've been doing at the museum, focusing on how to inspire the world around science, but do it maybe with her and in support of her on even a larger scale, as she wants to give all her capital away and her tagline with science is the answer, which is kind of awesome, right? So the privilege to come support her in helping do the philanthropy to make the world a better place was an incredible personal opportunity. And by the way, I've been at the museum 13 years. Great institutions need leadership change too, right? It's like you don't want to be the quarterback that stays a little too long and is a little, you know, overstays their welcome. And so I left to join our team in 2014 and been there five years.
And it's been an incredible ride. So I worked for a museum for so long and talked to kids and watched how they interacted. And when we were building the prayer, we thought a lot about this idea of giving kids visibility into career opportunities, because again, if you can't see it, you can't be it. It's not new news that we have a leaky pipeline for women in STEM. And so we began to really think about are we tackling this women in science challenge in the right way? And again, you can look at the pipeline from little girls all the way up to Nobel laureates.
It leaks the whole way. If you leave half of the brains on the table, are we solving the problems we need? Are we giving everyone the best opportunity?
I mean, we're not, right? It's just inherent in problem solving that you want as many great minds trying to solve problems. And by the way, it's proven over and over that bringing a diverse set of skills and brains to the table gives you different perspectives. Imagine a little girl like me who always wanted to be a soccer player, but I was never going to be a pro athlete, right? But if I knew I could work for the U.S. women's soccer team and be an orthopedic surgeon or a data scientist and find my love of science with my love of soccer, how cool is that?
I didn't know that was an option when I was growing up, right? What if you're into fashion and you found out that we just interviewed the head of persons who was explaining to us that, you know, if you don't know the golden rule and the Fibonacci sequence, how can you design things, right? You have to know math to design. So if you're interested in fashion, by the way, you should probably study math.
How do you measure to cut fabric? How do you think about material science? If you want to cure cancer one day, did you know that there's lots of jobs, right? You could be a research scientist, you could be a clinician, you could work for a pharma company. How many jobs are out there to cure, you know, cancer one day?
We have met so many cool, amazing, inspirational women. Some are 22, some are 82, some are, you know, biochemists, some are marine biologists, some work for gardening companies, for Google, all sorts of things, right? So we realized that if we could just show more little girls what their opportunities were, then we might be able to begin to widen the pipeline. So one of the things we noticed was, gosh, was there an opportunity to work with lots of different sectors to show little girls that STEM was everywhere, to both amplify the girls who were already interested in science to make sure they had visibility into what their options were, to girls who thought they weren't interested in science because they didn't know really what that meant, they were told they weren't good at math when they were little, they thought it wasn't for them, they thought being a scientist was only one thing, right? A lot of kids have a vision of a scientist and they draw Albert Einstein or they draw someone in a lab, which is incredible work, right?
That's how we're carrying cancer. But if you're a kid who likes to be outdoors all the time or likes to be in the ocean all the time, like, maybe we should show them they could be a marine biologist one day. So we recognized that there was an opportunity to bring together thought leaders across sectors to create what we're calling the IF-THEN initiative. If we support a woman in STEM, then she can change the world. This initiative is about inspiring young girls and connecting them to amazing role models, funding women in science, funding women scientists, and then helping them tell their stories. We're going to have some badass women, too, that people are just like, I mean, not only do I want to be here when I grow up, like, I just want to be friends with her because she's so fascinating and cool and interesting and real, right? The other thing about these women is they're real, so a lot of them have families, a lot of them are adventure scientists, a lot of them work in labs, a lot of them, some of them won a Nobel Prize, some are going to be 22-year-old post-docs that an 18-year-old could look at and say, oh, okay, I can see myself in her shoes because that's not that far away. So they're real, and we're going to tell their real stories. Real stories, and we do that here every day, and we know that the power of stories is the imitative power. We can see ourselves in the characters, and the more diverse those characters, the more people in America actually see themselves.
If you can't see it, you can't be it, we heard Nicole Small say earlier. And so her life's mission is to bring more women to the sciences, to technology, engineering, and math, known as STEM. And you can see all the great work of the If Then Initiative at ifthenshecan.org. That's ifthenshecan.org. They have great stories of women in STEM. It will be a tremendous resource for you, your children, and your community.
This is Lee Habib, Nicole Small's story, here on Our American Story. Soon millions will make Medicare coverage decisions for next year, and UnitedHealthcare can help you feel confident about your choices. For those eligible, Medicare annual enrollment runs from October 15th through December 7th. If you're working past age 65, you might be able to delay Medicare enrollment depending on your employer coverage.
It can seem confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Visit uhcmedicarehealthplans.com to learn more. UnitedHealthcare, helping people live healthier lives. 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. This is our American Stories, and our next story is about a condiment all of us know and use, mustard. In Middleton, Wisconsin, there's a museum dedicated to this stuff. Here to tell the story is the founder of that museum, Barry Levinson. Take it away, Barry. I don't know if you know, according to the National Condiment Research Council annual report, ketchup is now the leading cause of childhood stupidity in America.
Just telling you. Hi, my name is Barry Levinson, and I am the founder and curator of the National Mustard Museum in Middleton, Wisconsin, and this was not what I planned on doing when I was much younger. I actually was a lawyer at one time. I was head of the criminal appeals division for the state of Wisconsin, but the curse that I had upon me was that I am originally from Massachusetts, which means, of course, I am a diehard Red Sox fan.
I grew up having my heart broken year after year. In 1967, they made it to the World Series. I remember it clearly. They lost in seven games. In 1975, they also went to the World Series, lost in seven games. Then came 1986, and at the time I was here in Wisconsin doing criminal appellate work, and the Red Sox were in the World Series, and I told my friends, this is the year. There's no doubt that they had Roger Clemens, they had, oh my gosh, I think they must have had, they had some great players then. And it was game six. The Red Sox were ahead by two runs. Victory seemed assured, but of course, they lost. One thing led to another.
I was devastated, but it was still game seven, and game seven came, and of course, they lost. I was so depressed. I couldn't sleep, so I went to an all-night grocery store, an all-night supermarket, just to walk, and I had no idea why I was there. It was 2.30 in the morning, and I was pushing an empty cart up and down the aisle. Suddenly, I was in front of the condiments. I remember going past the pickles and the olives, the relishes, the mayonnaises, the ketchups, nothing. I was in front of the mustards, and I heard a voice that said, if you collect us, they will come. That's how I began my journey collecting jars of mustard. I think that night, that morning, I think I bought about 10 or 11 different mustards. I remember, I think I bought French's mustard. I definitely, I think the first one was Plachman's mustard. There were maybe 10 or 11 that I got, and I said, I'll never be lonely again because I will meet up with all the other mustard collectors in the world.
Little did I know there weren't any, but that didn't deter me. That's when I began collecting jars of mustard. It was 1986, but I still had a little bit of common sense, so I didn't quit my job because I figured I needed another sign, and I got it. I got another sign about six months later.
It was actually April 20, 1987. I was arguing a case at the United States Supreme Court. You could look it up, Griffin v. Wisconsin, and on the way over to the court, leaving my room at the Hyatt, I saw a discarded room service tray, and on it was a little jar of mustard, and it was unopened.
I saw it, and I said, aha, I don't recognize it. And I'm thinking, okay, would it be theft for me to take this jar of mustard that could be reused by the hotel, but one which the hotel was not really expecting to get back? So I think I did what every good lawyer would have done. I took it, right? And I brought it with me to the United States Supreme Court and argued that case with that jar of mustard in my left pants pocket. This was a case that all of my colleagues said, there's no way you're going to win this.
Well, I won five to four. I'm sure there was the mustard that made a difference. And it was at that time that I knew I needed to plot and plan my exit from law, and one day I would found the National Mustard Museum, which I did.
And it opened in, let's see, it would have been April of 1992, and it's been growing ever since. And we have over 6,000 different mustards. We have a lot of, I think, pieces of great mustard art, old mustard tins, old mustard pots, old mustard advertisements, because mustard goes back centuries. And if you know that mustard before antibiotics and aspirin was probably the most popular prescribed medicine that doctors used. And I think if you're looking for the origin of what we know as mustard, go back to about the 12th or 13th century, where you will find the monks of the old Burgundian town of Dijon.
Get it? Dijon? But the monks were making what we know as mustard.
Curiously, there are no Dijon factories within the city limits of Dijon. One of the things we do at the Mustard Museum is we coordinate the International Worldwide Mustard Competition. It's held every year. We've been doing it for about 20 years. And mustards arrive from all over the world, because mustard is universal.
It's something that almost every culture knows about and uses. And every year, there are about 300 different mustards that are judged blind in 17 different categories, because that's the beauty of mustard. There's sweet mustards, there's Dijon mustards, there's grainy mustards, there's herb mustards, there's fruit mustards, there's exotic mustards. There's a specific category for deli mustards, and we taste those with pastrami. There's so many different flavors, curry mustards. We have tasted chocolate mustards.
That's, I think, the beauty of it, and you can find different uses, of course, for all of them. Now, one of the things, though, that we have found here in the U.S. is that it's sometimes difficult to get children to eat mustard. And in France, it has never been a problem. Children grow up eating good, strong mustard. But I don't know if it's this thing about people just like sweet, mild things. That's a real problem, and probably the number one selling condiment is salsa. Ketchup, I think, comes in number two.
Mustard, and of course, you have to remember, a serving of mustard, it doesn't take a lot of mustard to give a lot of flavor, so you're not going to need as much. I mean, you need a lot more ketchup. And I don't understand why, here in this country, people insist on dipping French fries in ketchup. It's just, it makes no sense. And there are people who, believe it or not, will put mayonnaise on a corned beef or pastrami sandwich.
You know, and that, I mean, that to me should be illegal. Also, people who put ketchup on hot dogs and bratwurst, no, you just don't do that. You know, for example, in Chicago, you know, which is famous for the Chicago hot dog, which has yellow mustard, not brown mustard, neon green relish, sport peppers, celery salt, maybe a little wedge of tomato, a pickle. It's really one of the great taste treats of Chicago.
There are many hot dog stands in Chicago. If you go into them and you ask for ketchup, they will refuse to serve you. Good for them.
Good for them. One of the things that we've done, that I've done, is I've written a children's book called Mustard on a Pickle. And it's about a little boy who loves mustard so much that he puts it on everything. I'll give you a little taste of it. Is that okay?
Okay. I like mustard on my toast. I like mustard on a roast. But what I really like the most is mustard dribbled on a ghost. Can you be trusted without mustard? I don't think so. You would stink so.
Don't get flustered. Eat your mustard. I like mustard on a pickle. I would even pay a nickel for just a teeny tiny squirt of mustard on my uncle's shirt. Everything tastes good with mustard, even plums and frozen custard. I like mustard in the air and mustard at the county fair, putting Dijon on a bun, slurping yellow in the sun.
That's mustard on a pickle. So this is what I do. It's just kind of an exciting thing to do. And I love just being at the museum with all my mustards. And what a great piece of work by Monty Montgomery, our producer from Hillsdale College, by the way, a graduate of Hillsdale College. And find such great quirky stories for us. My goodness, this was a really good one.
From going and arguing cases in the U.S. Supreme Court. And by the way, attributing a winning argument to the mustard in his pocket to founding the National Mustard Museum in Middleton, Wisconsin. We're talking about Barry Levinson and we thank him for telling his story about his love affair with mustard. By the way, my mom was a huge collector of these old purses made of metal and they were beautiful and she collected thousands of them. And we've done the Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum, a mother and daughter combo who went around the country finding salt and pepper shaker combos. Also, we've done the Mascot Hall of Fame, the story of the National Mustard Museum, here on Our American Stories.
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It's Dramos. You may know me from the recap on LATV. Now I've got my own podcast, Life as a Gringo, coming to you every Tuesday and Thursday. We'll be talking real and unapologetic about all things life, Latin culture, and everything in between from someone who's never quite fit in. Listen to Life as a Gringo on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by State Farm.
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