SPEAKER_01 0:01

The chief mate of the Pequad was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket and a Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or upon one of those feast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen. Those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking, quite the contrary, his pure, tight skin was an excellent fit, and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength like a re-vivified Egyptian, this Starbucks seemed prepared to endure for long ages to come, and to endure always as now. For be it polar snow or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well in all climates.

SPEAKER_02 1:41

Would you call this a blog or a I guess it's technically a substack?

SPEAKER_05 1:44

Yeah, I call it a blog. Substack is coming up. Substacks are a little bit embarrassing sometimes.

SPEAKER_02 1:56

It seems to me like you're something of a Melville gumshoe, like tracking down all these little uh uh interesting little investigative uh uh stories that have to do with Melville. What got you interested in starting this blog?

SPEAKER_05 2:08

Uh the the initial idea was actually uh a podcast. And so a friend of mine had this podcast called The Genealogy Detective, and she would help people find out are they related to this or that um let's not say famous person, but interesting person of history. And I'd always heard that the musician Moby, the electronic uh DJ guy, that he always claimed to be a descendant of Herman Melville. And oh, interesting. It's one of these things I always remembered. I always kind of knew that was a thing, and then one day I was like, this would be a perfect idea for your blog, and I would bet anything he's not related. It just didn't feel right to me, and I don't know why. Uh and so we looked into it and we both did sort of research on Moby's ancestry and Melville's ancestry to see if they met anywhere. Uh and it turns out, of course, that it did not. Uh and this is you know, it's a whole story, but the the short version is that Moby's father died when he was very young, when Moby was two. Uh and so I think a lot of his father's family history got lost in translation when his mother was trying to tell him later in life. He didn't have a relationship with his father, and so it was just a lot of uh telephone games happening. And so his his actual name is Richard Melville Hall, and so it seemed very likely, or you know, it's it seemed plausible anyway. Uh, but no one ever bothered to do the research.

SPEAKER_02 3:29

And so he's now is that uh is that a bipartite uh last name or is that a middle name? A male part.

SPEAKER_05 3:35

Okay. And they named him a nickname him Moby when he was born because you know there's some story about him being a bald white monster of some kind. I don't know. So I just didn't buy it, and yeah, we proved uh that he was not related. We talked to his family that he's actually never spoken to. Like his father's uh uncle, I mean, or Moby's uncle, uh, we talked to him and he's never heard from Moby. He has no idea that he this uncle exists. So it was, I mean, it's sort of this parallel story to Melville's own story because his father was uh somewhat obsessed with their Scottish ancestry and that they were supposedly related to uh the Scottish royalty. And so when uh his father, Alan, when Melville's father, Alan, was um, I think in his twenties, sometime around then, his father, Thomas, sent him over to Scotland to see, can we get some of this royalty money? You know, someone had died and they wanted some inheritance. Uh, and so he he actually put together this enormous genealogical history of his family. And he went to Scotland and he took it to a castle somewhere and he knocked on the door and said, Hi, I think we are owed some money. Uh and they were like, That absolutely not. That's not that's not that's not happening. Whether it's true or not, it's like it's not even 100% clear that it's not true, but he was like, the money's gone. Like, there's there's nothing for you here. And they gave him, I think, a small portrait as like a token gift and said, Please get lost. Something like that. So there's just interesting like genealogical fascinations in both stories, so it kind of made a nice parallel.

SPEAKER_02 5:07

Yeah, uh, and uh so I don't know a ton about the musical uh musical artist uh Moby, but I did see when I was uh pulling up your blog just a minute ago just to check something, that uh he actually has uh an album that has shares the same name as the blog.

SPEAKER_05 5:22

Yes, he does. I didn't actually realize that until after I named uh the blog, but you know what? It I deserve it. Um more than he does. And so yeah, we we tried to get him to comment on the podcast uh through representatives, through a friend of his that we knew. He would not, but people ask him about it now, and so I kind of live in his head uh as the guy. Sometimes his dreams well sometimes now on the on the internet I see people say like, oh yeah, he's Melbourne's descendant, and then someone else will comment on our behalf. Like, no, that was actually disproven. And so I've sort of we've sort of seeped into uh yeah, his his world.

SPEAKER_02 6:01

That's interesting. So so that's what uh initiated so it was a podcast at first, and then it became a blog after that, or what?

SPEAKER_05 6:08

So yeah, it was that was the the impetus, and then I found the recording process uh so uh laborious and tedious that I had all these other ideas, and as we were recording, you know, it took a few months to make, and as I was recording, I was like, oh, that'd be a good idea. This is a really interesting mystery I also never done, or I never think I never found a good answer to. Uh and so I was like, you know what? It's so much easier to just be on my own. I don't have to know any recording software, I don't have to interview people. Uh it's just so much simpler. And then once I kind of got off to the races, every time I'm on one mystery, I come on to, you know, I find three more. And just I find a strange story or a strange name I've never seen before. It just it's it's almost written itself in certain ways. Like it's it's a lot of work. Each each post, you know, can sometimes be weeks or months, sometimes you know, six months of work. Uh but finding the ideas is is more of like, I can't stop finding these ideas.

SPEAKER_02 7:09

Um, that is interesting. Um it's a very interesting blog, and it's worth uh any I think anybody that's uh one of our listeners would enjoy uh perusing it. Um okay, so you start the blog, um it but let's backtrack a little bit. So um you must have become very interested in Melville at some point in order to like have kind of gotten caught this bug where you need to like trace down all this uh Melville-related uh these mysteries. Um so so what's your uh story about uh your introduction to Melville?

SPEAKER_05 7:42

Yeah, my origin story um strangely starts in Madagascar. Uh I was in the Peace Corps uh right after college, and a friend of mine in college had taken a class on Moby Dick, and he said the teacher was just obsessed with Moby Dick, he had a tattoo, and I found this so interesting and strange, and I I could never get that out of my head for some reason. I never took a class with this guy, never met him before, and I always remembered that, and then a year or two later I was in Madagascar and I had a copy of Moby Dick, and I was like, I I need to read this book. Uh and you know, you have all the time in the world in the Peace Corps, you have no distractions, you can kind of just sit down and read the whole thing, start to finish. And I really liked it. It was immediately a favorite, but I didn't feel obsessed with it until a few years later I decided to like I need to read this again. Now that I know the story, I'm not I'm not gonna be surprised by where it goes or where it doesn't go. And the second time it just hit me as like this is the greatest book I've ever read. I probably the greatest work of art in all of history. Like, I I truly became like obsessed to a level that I annoyed everyone around me uh talking about it and trying to get them to read it. And so yeah, it it kind of snowballed from there in just many years of me talking about it incessantly until I found these other outlets, which has been really helpful for my you know friendships and personal relationships.

SPEAKER_02 9:04

Yeah, no, there's a there's definitely a uh a correlation there. So like one of the things I love about doing this podcast is like it's kind of the same way. It's difficult to like be able to talk in the level of detail about like Herman Melville's works with anybody in my like day-to-day life that like I'd like to. Like, you know, I can maybe talk to them a bit about Moby Dick or something, but uh it's hard to find people um that you can spend an hour talking about one chapter of Moby Dick with. And when you find those people, you have to latch onto them. And then you can also get to interview people, and there's like a lot of people out there who are like this and like uh enjoy this show because they kind of can vicariously participate in these conversations that they'd like to, where like very few people in most people's uh day-to-day life have the patience for it. And so I I think it's a fun outlet.

SPEAKER_05 9:52

And it's it's led to a lot of the same kind of thing where I don't, I mean, I well I don't know, cite people or credit them when I talk to them, but I've talked to a ton of scholars just because you know I need to know like what they know. I don't I have a huge like digital library of Melville books, um, but I'm often in conversation with scholars around the world. Um I went to the Melville uh conference last summer in uh Mystic, Connecticut, around Outside Mystic. And so I got to just be around all of the people whose work I've read for years, uh, and they go, Who are you? And I tell them my story, and because I'm a little bit uh I don't say an oddball, a little bit off keel from the rest of what they do. Like I'm not an academic, I don't, you know, I'm not a scholar per se. Um it was uh yeah, interesting to talk to everyone and be like, I have something kind of different that I do with this.

SPEAKER_02 10:41

Yeah, I feel like uh they uh I would expect them to have an appreciation for that because that's a lot a lot like uh Melville. Like Melville didn't have any like real like formal education at that level. Um and he's uh also very much so kind of an oddball that kind of winds his way into the uh literature, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 10:58

Totally. And that's yeah, I it's something I have in mind what I'm writing the blog is that I want this to be as far-flung uh as possible and include anything about Melville that can possibly drag in. I mean, I have a whole series about how there's these 30 uh geographic features in Antarctica that were named for Moby Dick. And somehow, this is one of these things that falls through the cracks because it's not any academic's purview to keep track of this kind of thing or to note when it happens. And so it went completely under the radar for 70 years. No one's ever mentioned this in the Melville world. And I saw this and I was like, I immediately stopped whatever I was doing. I need to see a picture of Mount Ahab right now, or I will die. And I just I I basically did that, and so yeah, I was talking to people in you know, in England, where the um the British Antarctic Survey is headquartered, and then scientists all over Antarctica, and I was emailing with them, like, would you mind going 60 miles inland to take a picture of Mount Ahab for me? And they're like, Of course I'm not gonna do that, that's insane. But you know, through a lot of uh a lot of hard work, I found a lot of pictures, I found the whole history. I was working with their archivist in in um, I think it was in Cambridge. They sent me the original reports, like the notebooks they would carry on their treks through Antarctica, and she scanned every page she made so I could find out like who was responsible for this, who is the Melville fanatic in Antarctica in the 50s when this was happening.

SPEAKER_02 12:25

So that's extremely useful to know. I don't know if you've seen uh the Pequad Pod social media in the last 48 hours, but I've been become uh I've I've gained a new monomania, which is that I need to find somebody who's currently in Antarctica to listen to Pequad Pod, because it's the only continent that I don't have proof that somebody's listened to Pequad Pod. So every other continent somebody's listened to Pequad Pod from, I I know that there's a lot of people in Antarctica who are interested in uh Melville, but I don't they don't track on our uh our metrics whether people in Antarctica have listened or not. And so I don't know. And so that I'll have to mine your uh your uh Rolodex for some people to shop the show to, or like to ask on as a guest.

SPEAKER_05 13:05

It's really I mean what's really been interesting for me personally. I mean, I love research. That's what this is what I do for you know for a living, is I'm a researcher and I I work for documentary films, and so I get to take on you know topics of any kind, even within a single idea for documentary, there might be a million different things that they want to know. Uh and this has been kind of an extension of that, but I get so into whatever I'm doing at the time. And so if I'm writing about an artist, I become that artist's biggest fan for you know two months. When I was writing about Antarctica, I was like, can I somehow finagle a trip to Antarctica and go be the first person to climb these mountains? And I didn't do that, but someone's sounds pretty dangerous, yeah, for sure. But at a certain point, Mel would become secondary to what I'm researching because I just become so fascinated by the history. So yeah, I mean, I just enjoy if no one read it, I would still do this.

SPEAKER_02 14:00

So um the reason that uh, or like the the topic of the day is the most ubiquitous, I would I think you we can argue the most ubiquitous reference to Moby Dick uh in our world today, which is the company's Starbucks.

SPEAKER_05 14:16

Absolutely, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:16

One thing I will I do want to uh before we get started, and this is uh new since we uh arranged this interview, but uh because uh this is an episode about Starbucks, I think it's very important for us to front load the fact that uh right now uh there uh there's a boycott of Starbucks by uh um Starbucks Workers United, which is the the union unionizing uh baristas. Um and so uh one, this is definitely not an ad for Starbucks, and two, I'd encourage all of our uh listeners to respect that boycott um until so the boycott is until uh uh Starbucks recognizes or like uh signs a contract with the union. So I would highly encourage people not to take this and go say, oh, that was interesting listening about Starbucks, and now I have a craving for Starbucks, and then cross that picket line. Please don't cross the picket line, and then we end a peak one pump would rather you know cross the Norwegian maelstrom and then into the perdition's flames than uh cross the picket line. But relevant context before uh going into the this history of the company Starbucks, um, which again there's there's no uh paid product placement here. Uh this is just uh interesting from a historical and a uh sort of like cultural perspective, and the diffusion of like Melville at a particular time that results in like kind of oddly the most ubiquitous reference to Moby Dick being this coffee train.

SPEAKER_05 15:42

For sure, yeah. Yeah, 100% back that.

SPEAKER_02 15:45

Wonderful. Okay, um, so yeah, so uh tell me a bit about what got you interested in this particular uh uh mystery.

SPEAKER_05 15:53

So this was one of the earliest, maybe the first one I started to work on after um the Moby podcast. And it was kind of came from that same idea of after Moby, uh, who is you know named after or nicknamed after Moby Dick. Um this was the other major Melville influence on culture. Uh I was like, you know what, I should look into Starbucks too, because I bet there's an interesting story. And as soon as I I read a single explanation of how they frame where the name came from, I I lost my mind. It was so dumb. It's it made no sense. And again, I couldn't find, and it's it is hard to just Google stuff about Starbucks and find stuff about their history. You know, it's it's too ubiquitous to find anything really. Uh, but I I knew there was something hiding here because for for one, and this is a kind of a theme throughout my in my entire blog. When someone names something after Moby Dick or Melville, you should trust that there is a a crazy Melville fan in there.

SPEAKER_03 16:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 16:54

And they just never it never had that in it. That never in the story was there a Melville fan who said, I want to name my my company after Moby Dick.

SPEAKER_02 17:02

Yeah, yeah. So let's let's uh uh let's stop there for a second. And so if you could give me a little bit about like that early history and then like what the the the official story from the company is on where this name comes from.

SPEAKER_05 17:15

Sure. And so I think like as I was saying, I think a lot of people who read the book, you know, essentially blind, have this same experience which they get to Knights and Squires or whenever Starbucks officially appears first, uh, and they say, wait a minute, Starbucks coffee is named after Moby Dick, and you can Google it, and the first thing you're gonna find on their website is they're absolutely 100% open about the fact that and it says, quote, our name was inspired by the classic tale Moby Dick evoking the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders. So they're completely open. Like, yes, our company isn't after Moby Dick. This is not a conspiracy. But the the early history that you can find about the company, and this is, you know, in the the spirit of this is not an advertisement, but uh it was the company was founded in 1971 by three uh partners, Gordon Bauker, Jerry Baldwin, and uh Zeb Siegel. And they opened in 1971 in Seattle. They actually don't sell coffee yet, they don't brew coffee yet. They sell beans, room equipment, uh, and tea. And actually buy the coffee from Pete's coffee, which they're those people are also uh associated with. Uh and so that was really the only thing I needed to know about you know my part of this history is I don't care what happened to Starbucks later, I don't care what they do now. But I I knew all right, 1971, something around there, Moby Dick enters the frame. They just they decide we want to name this company after Moby Dick. Uh but yeah, like I said, I I know the kind of person who names uh a company after Moby Dick or a pet after Moby Dick. I've done both of those myself. So I I know who those people are. Uh and this idea of, you know, we picked it because it evoked the seafaring tradition of coffee trade. Like that just doesn't make any any sense, really.

SPEAKER_02 18:55

Okay, so uh you you dig a little bit further. What what do you find next? Or like what are uh what's your process here for like uh going beyond the sort of uh uh branding uh material that's on the website?

SPEAKER_05 19:07

So I mean I just started with you know what's on Wikipedia? Like what what do they say? That's sort of like the the very corporate version on the website. What is they how they said before this? Uh and there's a quote on the Wikipedia page. It just says Bauker recalls that a business partner of his, Terry Heckler, thought words beginning with the letters S T were powerful, leading the founders to create a list of words beginning with S T, hoping to find a brand name. And already your eyes should be rolling. This is this is crazy. They chose the word Starbo, S-T-A-R-B-O, a mining town in the Cascade Range, and from there the group remembered Starbuck, the name of the chief mate in the book Moby Dick. Bauker said Moby Dick didn't have anything to do with Starbucks directly. It only it was only coincidental that the sound seemed to make sense. Interesting. Am I alone that this sounds crazy?

SPEAKER_02 19:56

Yeah, I mean, so I guess what I will say is I've never been in a room where, you know, like uh this kind of person is trying to come up with a name for a business. So I don't know what's typical for it. It would be the only thing I would say. Um like kind of this kind of free association. I mean, it sounds odd to me, but yes, continue, please.

SPEAKER_05 20:15

You know, and I have a you know background in not investigative journalism, but I worked for um a political research company, I did opposites in research. So a lot of what you would do, you know, where do you start is a chronology. What is the story now, and where did the story begin? And how has it changed? What new information you know is gained or lost in the years of you know, between these two points. And so immediately I thought, okay, I know a new name. We had the name Terry Heckler, who is a business partner. Uh Starbo. I've never heard of Starbo, a mining town. And immediately I think it's notable that Gordon Bauker, one of the founders, he immediately contradicts what's on the webpage. He said Moby Dick didn't have anything to do with Starbucks directly. So this goes from the evoking the seafaring tradition of the coffee trade to the founder saying, no, no, it had nothing to do with that.

SPEAKER_02 21:06

Yeah, so that's interesting. So you're saying uh this is Gordon Boker? Gordon Bauker Bow Bauker Bauker W K-E-O. Okay, so Gordon Bauker's like basically directly contradictory what honestly to me almost sounds like an AI-generated like tagline here. Uh this name Starbucks evoking the seafaring tradition of coffee.

SPEAKER_05 21:27

Right. And yeah. Be frank, coffee started in Ethiopia. You know, it you could argue it started in the Arabian Peninsula or in like this is in the like the 15, like the 1200s, the 1500s. This there's no seafaring trade in the way that they're describing, as if they were like pirates bringing coffee into America or something. That's just not what Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:49

I don't think like like uh camel caravans is like what immediately comes to mind, like thinking about this extreme versus, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 21:57

Sure. And here's here's another fun fact about Uh the idea that it evokes uh you know the coffee trade is that there already is a really strong connection between whaling and coffee. And that's Peter Folger was one of the early settlers of Nantucket. And so I mean he's there's I think there's like twelve, something like twelve original founders of Nantucket. They are the white founders, I mean. You know, they went to Nantucket, they established a community there. And you know, this is in the 1600s, but many 200 years later or so, uh, one of his descendants goes to California during the gold rush in the 1850s or so, and uh eventually he starts Folgers Coffee. So there's one of the original Nantucket founders' descendants started one of the biggest coffee companies in history, and that is a very strong connection between whaling and coffee. And then they come in and say, No, we want to do it again. We will we want to put our Nantucket uh brand you know in the coffee world. It just it just makes so little sense.

SPEAKER_02 22:59

Yeah, okay. So uh going back uh a bit to Starbo, what's the deal with Starbo? So like we so we got we've got our free association, uh Gab Sesh, trying to come up with a name uh apparently. They're going uh I from what I remember, it sounds like some of them uh somebody had an old mining map somehow in this uh this branding meeting that they pull out and they find Starbo, and then they go from we want an ST word to Starbo to Starbucks is like this layer of the story. So what's the deal with Starbo?

SPEAKER_05 23:32

So that yeah, that's the through line of all the versions that you can find. And so that Wikipedia quote that I read, it came from a through a few different layers, came through a March 2008 interview with Gordon Bauker in the Seattle Times. And so in that one, he gets goes further into that idea about the Starbo mining town. So yeah, it goes through the ST words, and he says, quote, somebody somehow come up came up with an old mining map of the Cascades in Mount Rainier, and there was an old mining town called Starbow. As soon as I saw Starbow, I of course jumped to Melville's first mate, Starbuck, in Moby Dick. Uh so that's so he really leans on this idea that came from this mining mining town. Okay, so now I stop everything. Let's learn about Starbow. The first thing I found was an article in, well not the first thing, but one of the things I found was an article in the Tacoma News Tribune from November 2003, which actually explains it's not even called Starbo. The town was called Storbo. S-T-O-R-B-O. And it wasn't even a town, it was a camp. It was Camp Storbo. Uh it is occasionally misspelled, so I I'll give them that. Uh it was named after Peter Storbo, who founded one of the early mining companies on Mount Rainier, uh, and he named it the Mount Rainier Mining Company. I said, okay, you know, it's real. I verified this is at least must have been a map that said Starbo. I can buy it. Uh this is not totally related to the Starbucks story, but Storbo's name wasn't even Storbo. Uh Peter Storbo's name was actually Peterson, but he moved from uh Peter Peterson. His name was Peter Peterson.

SPEAKER_02 25:08

That's tough, I can understand.

SPEAKER_05 25:10

Well, it's even tougher because he moved from Norway to Minnesota, which incidentally is where I am. Uh, and he said, There's so many Peter Petersons here, I have to change my name. And so he changed his name from Peterson to Storbo, which is not it's a town, not in Norway, but in Sweden across the border. And so there is truly a Storbo uh in Sweden, just on the border with Norway. So again, not directly related, but it's it became more and more hilarious to me that it wasn't Starbucks, it's not Storbo, it's not even Storbo, it's or Starbo, it's Storbo, and that's not even his name.

SPEAKER_03 25:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 25:44

It's just all these layers of nothing, like there's no floor to this story. Just keep you keep digging and it never seems to settle anywhere. So yeah, I mean, I again I I buy the fact there is a map. It'd be hard for me to believe that they named it Starbucks and then created a s a backstory and happened to find a town called Starbo. It just seems so garbled.

SPEAKER_02 26:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 26:09

That it uh the the chronology makes no sense because this this isn't how people think. Especially for people who have never again have never said, I loved the book Moby Dick. And then I went to ST to Starbo to Starbucks. They just never say anything about the book at all. Not even that they read the book, like, oh, I was assigned the book in high school. Like you think at some point, and I looked at every interview that all of them did. So yeah, it it all just made uh a little sense to me.

SPEAKER_02 26:40

Okay, so uh you continue your investigative work. What's the next uh floor down as you're descending into uh these people's minds?

SPEAKER_05 26:49

So you know each of these are new words, new phrases I can put into search, you know, in as keywords I can use in my searches. Uh and so I have Starbo and Storbo. There's also this other idea, and I should read this one. Uh if you Google enough, you'll find an archived page on Starbucks website. It's not taken down, but it's sort of uh a hidden URL, if you will. Like it's it's not the it's still live, is so somewhere on there. So there's this story. In 1971, our founders got together with artist Terry Heckler to define their new brand. Alright, so Terry Heckler, some kind of you know, brand management guy. They wanted the company's name to suggest a sense of adventure, a connection to the Northwest, and a link to the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders. Uh co-founder Gordon Bauker, a writer, initially proposed calling the company Pequad after the ship in Heron Melville's classic novel Moby Dick, but Terry objected. Who wouldn't order a cup of Pequod? P as in it starts with the syllable P. So that's another just like, how did that story, how does that story fit in with anything else that we've heard so far? Right. Not to mention a connection to the Northwest. What is the connection to the Northwest in Moby Dick?

SPEAKER_02 28:05

Yeah, no. Um not yet, none. Nope. Nothing.

unknown 28:11

Nothing.

SPEAKER_02 28:14

I could think of anything at all. Um no, they don't do anything in the Northwest. Yeah. No, uh, that's fascinating. Yeah, that seems to directly contradict the other so i if we had before, okay, ST are strong words like strong, um, then we get starbo the Starbucks. But then basically what you're saying is like here's evidence that before they even got on that, they're already thinking of a Moby Dick related thing with Pequad, which incidentally, I'm glad they did not go with that because it would have made uh our branding much harder if we were competing with well, maybe they wouldn't be as successful if they went with Pequad coffee.

SPEAKER_05 28:49

Well, you could have been Starbucks pod.

SPEAKER_02 28:51

We could have been the Starbucks pod.

SPEAKER_05 28:54

Uh so yeah, this this all just seems like you know, there's five different ideas. Some of them fit, some of them don't. Uh but again, when these stories change, and even if they're changing a tiny bit each time, it's a it's a big red flag that something's not right. Someone keeps forgetting some part of the story.

SPEAKER_02 29:13

Or intentionally, yeah, like intentionally changing for some reason the part. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_05 29:18

All right, so now I have all these keywords I can, you know, kind of get further into like beyond just the Starbucks branding and company stuff. Uh so then I found an interview with uh Gordon Bauker and Jerry Baldwin. They knew each other from the University of San Francisco, they both went there um in the 1960s. So this is at some period, you know, let's say five to ten years uh before they start the company. And now this is 2020, they're doing an interview with their alma mater. Uh the article says essentially the same thing, or the same few ideas about, you know, the seafaring tradition and adventure, whatever. And then it says the name Starbucks, quote, was a nod to Baldwin and Balker's film company, which they called Pequod.

SPEAKER_02 30:06

Oh, fascinating.

SPEAKER_05 30:08

And this just threw me for a real loop because a film company uh has nothing to do with the story as they tell it or have told it for 50 something years, and now I was really confused. Like, because again, still no Melville fan that they identified among them, and they seem really insistent on naming their companies after Moby Dick. Like, I don't know what happened to this company, but okay, they really love this idea of naming after Moby Dick. And you know, one of the things I I I'm trained to do is okay, what company? So I looked up the Washington Secretary of State's business records, the corporation filings. There's no company named Pequod Film. Like there's Pequod uh fishing companies I found, but no film company.

SPEAKER_02 30:52

Ominous uh choice for a fishing company.

SPEAKER_05 30:54

Yeah, it would be. Yeah. And that that comes back around. So now I have another word. I was like, okay, there's a film company, Pequad, I can put all their names in Pequad Film Company. And I come across something actually a few years early, uh earlier, on historylink.org, which I don't really know what this is. It's written by a Seattle Times arts critic named Sheila Farr. Uh, you know, and it's she's kind of going into the history, it's a local company to them. So going into the history of Starbucks, and she writes this in various partnerships together, they tried writing screenplays for King TV's production company and making pre-recorded classical music broadcasts for radio. Baldwin and Bauker, with another pal, had a scheme to make documentary films about American music, jazz blues, folk. They called their company Pequad after they shipped Moby Dick. And as they like to point out, that venture, like the Pequod, sank without a trace. So, you know, I get it. That's cute. But what are we talking about here? This is uh another complete reversal of what I thought I was researching. But the thing that really stood out to me was Baldwin Balker with another pal. And so the other people involved, so Zeb Siegel uh and uh Terry Heckler, they're named in the the rest of the article. So I don't I didn't take this to mean that she was referring to one of them in this article. Right. It was an unnamed other pal. So now I'm really curious uh about this Pequad production. So I know what they wanted to do.

SPEAKER_02 32:29

They wanted to make documentary films about American music, which is so far away from the 1969-ish, 1970-ish, right? That that checks out in my mind. I feel like everybody was doing that. Sure.

SPEAKER_05 32:44

Right. It's it's kind of like Alan Lomax, John Lomax like going around the country recording folk songs.

SPEAKER_02 32:51

Yeah, I feel like there's a couple episodes of the Andy Griffith show where there's somebody shows up into town doing this sort of uh exact idea.

SPEAKER_05 32:59

Okay, interesting. Have not seen those. Uh okay, so now I have another pal. I know more about what they're doing. Uh and I kept digging and I finally found this blog post. And I mean, thank God it exists, because I otherwise I would be just at a standstill. Uh is a blog post by someone named Ed Linebacher, uh, L-E-I-M-B-A-C-H-E-R. Uh and Ed, I found, was that other pal. Oh, okay. Okay, so Ed Met Bauker, they were both freelance writers for Seattle magazine in the late 1960s. And Ed, he went on to have a really interesting career in advertising. He was kind of uh you know in this creative uh commercial space. And again, thank God he wrote this. He wrote a single post about his involvement with Starbucks, the early history of Starbucks. Uh and he outs himself, not only as the friend mentioned in the other article, but he says he was the name, the person that named it Pequad. Just up and tells me the answer to my question. Lovely. So here's what he wrote on his blog. Uh around 1969, I teamed up with friends named Gordon Bauker, another Seattle Mag early regular, and Jerry Baldwin to create a brief Season of Dreams film company intending to write and produce uh a series of films that would document the music of the South. Our pilot project, for which I wrote a quasi-script, introduced the richly varied styles of music to be found across Louisiana, blues, jazz, zydeco, Cajun, gospel, and more. Uh which again is so far from Starbucks Coffee, but this is where Starbucks Coffee begun. Uh and he continues, anyway, I quicksodically quixotically named our supposed film company P Quad Productions a bit of whimsy indicating that the company expected to sink without a trace, uh, as had his namesake, one of the ships, Moby Dick. Uh and he goes on to say it was his proposals were ignored everywhere, uh, and he did nothing with it. Uh he continued freelancing, the other guys moved on, and because this failed, they decided to start a coffee company, which they named Starbucks. And so uh and he actually ends this saying, quote, forget Howard Schultz's version version of history. And Howard Schultz is the guy that bought Starbucks from these the three founders uh sometime in the 80s. So I think at the time I think it was still a a local chain, it was a Seattle Washington chain, but it was not the Starbucks that we know it. Uh so at that point, Schultz bought it. So it says, Forget Howard Schultz's version of history. I know that the Lost Pequad helped trigger that coffee company's soon-to-be famous name. So again, just blew my mind that this was out there. Uh one of the things uh I do most often for documentary films, I've worked on podcasts and other stuff like that, is find people. Uh I just people that haven't been heard from in many years, people who you can't find an email or phone number for, I just find people. Uh and so I found Ed and I I emailed him, and I think immediately he he emailed me back and said he'd love to talk about this. Uh and so I I had a lot of questions for him. What was this this film company? How are you not credited for this? You know, are you upset? I would be if if I named, you know, I looked it up, I think Starbucks is the 37th most recognized brand in the world. Uh you know, and not saying that they couldn't have accomplished that with a different name, but you know, I was very, very eager to talk with Ed. And this is one of actually the few articles that I uh posts that I wrote that I've actually recorded interview with someone for. Um so yeah, Ed did not end up being involved with the coffee company at all. Um, I don't I don't know why, and he didn't seem to be that concerned, uh, even though he could have ended up being a multimillionaire.

SPEAKER_03 36:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 36:55

He seemed very, very chill about uh having just missed being involved in this project. But yeah, he ended up writing, he was a music critic for Rolling Stone for a while. He wrote a few books. Um and he actually I think he had a bookstore, record store uh at Pike Place Market for a long time. Oh okay. Um so yeah, I mean he was happy with his life and career, but I don't know that I could get past it personally.

SPEAKER_02 37:19

So it's kind of like being uh the the original drummer for the Beatles.

SPEAKER_05 37:25

Totally, yeah. Pete Best. I I remember him for that reason because I would be so mad. Yeah. Um so yeah, one of the you know the first things I wanted to ask him was like, tell me the true history. What's what really happened?

SPEAKER_02 37:40

We're about to listen to uh a recording of Ed, um, and I just wanted to let the audience know that Ed has Parkinson's um and speaks rather slowly.

SPEAKER_00 37:50

In the late sixties and early seventies, I was in grad school at the UW, which involved American literature. So we've been studying movie dick. And it was taken with anything about Melville, but I knew that some crazy guy had written this brilliant novel that had uh other divisions within it.

SPEAKER_05 38:51

So he's he's saying this. I'm on mute, and I'm like doing a little dance in my chair because like I said, when you find something named after Moby Dick, I guarantee you you'll find a fanatic. And I'd found the guy, and he just and people with the happy like we talked about at the beginning, people are happy to talk about Moby Dick when they can't get out of their head.

SPEAKER_02 39:11

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 39:11

And this is the way that someone who names a company after Moby Dick talks about it. They talk about I read this book, there's all these possibilities within the book. He was this crazy man who had written this book, and that's how I talk about that's the same kind of language I use when I try to get people to read the book. So immediately I was like, yes, this makes so much more sense. Uh so Ed said he met uh Gordon Bauker sometime around the end of his graduate program, as they're both working as freelancers for Seattle magazine.

SPEAKER_00 39:40

Gordon and I were both working as freelance writers trying to score big in a magazine called Seattle. What's that for magazine and golden friends and golden friends he needs to cook for himself with the birthday or something? And uh we we both have stories with Gordon tends to be a slow and or conscious writer, and I I was just busy freelancer trying to make enough money to survive. That's how we met through the interim Seattle magazine.

SPEAKER_05 41:02

So I didn't get any sense of actual bitterness, but there was a little bit of like I was poor then, I kind of continued to be, I don't know about actually maybe I shouldn't say poor, but a struggling writer. Sure. And he continued being a struggling writer for most of his life. Um and they were close and close enough that his wife would, you know, cook dinner for him on his birthday. And I think after 1971, I'm not sure how much they ever really spoke again. Ed eventually went on to meet uh Jerry Baldwin and Zeb Siegel, and he pitched his idea to make this documentary company. And it was his idea. I mean, I according to him, he was the guy that wanted to do this in part because he had family in the South, and he was kind of looking for a free ticket to go visit them. And so his idea was I want someone to pay for our company to go to Louisiana, I can go say hi to all my cousins, and while we're there, we're gonna record people playing music. And as far as I know, uh the others don't have any reason or any connection to the South. And he says, We were going to go around the country, start with the music of Louisiana because it seems so culturally rich and with different roots. I just saw the possibility that it could be really interesting. The music of America has lots of nooks and crannies to explore if you only had the money to do it. And I had relatives in the South. So again, this idea seems to be coming from him. He was studying American literature in graduate school. He had just read Moby Dick as part of his studies. Um he brings this idea, he wants to name it Pequod.

SPEAKER_00 42:41

And he says, he told me the emphasis for the title of the film documentary company came from me. I never heard Gordon or hear anybody else talk about Pequod. That was just my little joke as a grad student with pretensions to be a writer. And if Gordon used Pequad, he did it because of my interest in what we did. He wasn't reading it or studying it in any capacity. If he told Terry Pequad, he must have decided that he liked the word, if nothing else. I don't recall any of the three having a particular interest in literature.

SPEAKER_02 43:36

So uh and I remember from your uh your post that uh Ed has like kind of a second claim to fame as well.

SPEAKER_05 43:43

So I think for people uh alive in that period, um he was responsible for a lot of the Rainier Beer commercials.

SPEAKER_01 43:57

Oh a whole herd of Rainier Beer.

SPEAKER_05 44:00

Not herds, Audrey. Raineers come in six pack. Wake up, Harley. Harley, Harley, look at the Raineers. But they're they're truly uh bonkers. A lot of them have this running theme. They're kind of in a similar vein to the like the Budweiser frogs, like they would be this these characters that keep would keep appearing, except Ed's were these giant bottles of beer with legs, and they would run through the forest as if they were kind of like a Bigfoot. And it involves kind of like uh um Steve Irwin like chasing these wild wild beer bottles through the forest. Uh there's all sorts of just like really crazy ideas, and I think they gave him the keys to say, you know, make whatever you want. But this was his other claim to fame is he's responsible for these kind of legendary beer ads, uh, if you're around in the 70s and 80s, uh and you know, in Seattle drinking beer.

SPEAKER_02 44:51

No, yeah, it's it's very interesting, like kind of getting the headspace of this place, um, like uh this this character as kind of a through line uh for like both of these uh like very initially, then regionally, but then like with Starbucks like uh transnationally important like uh brands. Um yeah, well that is very interesting.

SPEAKER_05 45:12

Totally. And he that's what his I mean, some of his career was was like a creative consultant for for brands, and he clearly saw uh you know a name in this book that's that just had something to it. It's hard to describe why the name Starbucks is really good. And maybe not Pequad, but you know why? I mean there actually ended up being a Stubb Coffee or Stubbs Coffee. There's a Stubbs barbecue sauce, and there's a an article, I have to find the name of it, but uh it's actually not in any Melville journal or even literary journal or like a journal about literature. It's a in a magazine or a journal called something like the journal of names. It's all about names as uh a concept or something something along those lines. Okay, yeah. And it's really, really fascinating article about Melville and I think Moby Dick in particular, and just what a genius he was for naming things, and how there's so many names in Moby Dick that you kind of take for granted that like they really stick with you. And there's not other characters with these names, and you're never confused about who you're talking about. When you talk about Ahab or Ishmael, you know what book you're talking about. And like there's a lot of books that I love that I couldn't tell you the main character's name. That's probably I have a bad memory, but like there's just something about the way that he comes up with these names that mean so much, they have so much depth to them. Uh and even you know, Moby Dick, like Moby was not a word, it's not a it's a word that he invented for this this character. Yeah, sorry, yeah. Here's the article. It's um from 1998. It's by Ben Rogers, and it's in the the a journal of onomastics. So it's called Names, a a journal of onomastics. So here's what he wrote about uh Moby. And I think that the typical idea is that it came from the word mobile, which is a word that Shakespeare uses. Uh yeah. But here's what he just what he said. Uh as it turns out, Webster's dictionary is central to understanding the relationship between Moby and Mocha, and Melville's emphasis on Moby's white hump. In Melville's edition of Webster's, we find the entry Mocha stone, dendritic agate, a mineral in the interior of which appear brown, reddish brown, blackish or green delineations of shrubs destitute of leaves. So it says an uninspiring definition, but right above the mocha entry is mobile, meaning muffled, covered with a coarse or careless headdress, and also mobile to wrap the head in a hood. So this is in the actual dictionary that Melville was using.

SPEAKER_02 47:46

Oh, interesting. Yeah, and it's uh it comes up in Hamlet as well.

SPEAKER_05 47:50

Yes. So he goes on, uh nearby is also mob, its second definition being to wrap in a cowl or veil. So by adding Y to mob as a suffix, where Y means having the qualities of uh we get Moby having the qualities of being hooded, veiled, or covered, especially about the head. It is the sperm whale's broad head that Melville repeatedly emphasizes human or animal, the mystical brow is as that great golden seal affixed by the German emperors to the dirt their decrees. It signifies God, done this day by my hand. So the snow white wrinkled forehead affixed to Moby's broad firmament of a brow makes him the grand hooded phantom.

SPEAKER_02 48:29

Yeah, yeah, okay. I like that. I like that too. All right, a couple of things for our audience to think about. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 48:35

Yeah. So anyway, just a side note, but that this whole article, to go back, is about how good he is at names. And I think Ed saw something in this just instinctively, that this is a good Pequad's a good name. You know, it's a name, it takes its name from something, but it has a certain something to it. Uh, and he decided on Pequad.

SPEAKER_02 49:00

Well, wonderful. Um, this has been a whole lot of fun. I want to give you the opportunity to talk a little bit more if you want to about your blog, about any of the other interesting uh Melville mysteries you've been uh sleuthing uh uh either uh in the the past or uh recently. Um what else you I I know you found uh a Melville bust, it sounds like yes.

SPEAKER_05 49:20

The Melville Bust was uh for sure the kind of crowding jewel of this project. Um I was on the the Melville Society Facebook page at one point a few years ago, and I had been planning on going to New York uh for a wedding or something. Uh and I saw someone post, hey, the Melville bust that used to be where he was born, it's on uh at the time it was 6th Pearl Street, and so it's now it's Pearl Street still, but there's a skyscraper there. Uh and there was a bust of his head with a plaque saying this is where Melville was born in 1819. And someone said, Hey, it's been missing. Does anyone know where this went? And I kept looking into this and I found it's been missing for eight years. And everyone, you know, every few years someone posts about it and says, Hey, this thing's missing. Does anyone know where it went? And people say, Oh yeah, I saw it there when I went in 2004 or whatever it was. And I said, I mean, this is I've been doing this blog for about a year at this point, and I said, This is like a bad signal to me. I mean, does anyone know this blog was? And everyone just kind of shrugging their shoulders, like that that's when I step in. And long story short, I I found people that could help me in, you know, kind of behind the scenes who didn't want to speak on the record because they knew uh which company had essentially bought the rights to the plaza where it had been, and they decided they didn't want it there, and they took it out and they put it into a storage locker. Oh, geez. So I had to uh yeah, track these people down, and I would just call them all the time and email them until they got back to me. And eventually they said, if you'll stop contacting us, we will send the bus to anywhere you want. And so I've been working with uh both the Melville Society and the people that own Arrowhead, the Berkshire County Historical Society. Uh and the Melville Society doesn't really have a location, there's just a bunch of academics that have had a group. And so Arrowhead said, Yeah, we'd love it. Uh and so they sent it to Arrowhead. I worked, I know, I kind of found a bronze restorer to get it back in shape because it looked pretty bad. Uh, and now it actually sits on the it's like a desk or um I mean a Curdenza, you might say, next to the table where he wrote Moby Dick in Arrowhead.

SPEAKER_02 51:31

Wow.

SPEAKER_05 51:32

So when you go visit his study, look two feet to the left, and that bust is there because uh, I mean, to take a credit, take the credit, you're a you're a hero uh to the Melodian community.

SPEAKER_02 51:44

That's great.

SPEAKER_05 51:45

Because I spent six months tracking this thing down. Uh and so there's a lot of different twists and turns that I just skipped over, but that was the that's the main idea.

SPEAKER_02 51:52

You can hear all the twists and turns if you go to all visible objects on Substack, yes. Um, and you can learn about this mystery and many other ones as well, um, that are uh fascinating little rabbit holes to go down. Um well, thank you very much, Adam, for your time. This has been a fascinating little glimpse into uh the most ubiquitous uh reference to Moby Dick that we see in our daily lives. And again, please don't buy from Starbucks until they have a contract with Starbucks Workers United.

SPEAKER_01 52:23

You've been listening to the Pequot Pot with Tristan Bavel Marquise, Meg Fancher, and Johnny Wiles. Our music is by Lost in the Loop with Sound Engineering by Lauren Aiton. The show's artwork is by Delaney Garrett, and Tristan is on the Sints. We want to say a big thank you to all of our supporters on Patreon. You can join them over at patreon.com forward slash pequag pod for bonus content and for opportunities to help us keep the show running in ship-shaped condition. Ratings and reviews also really help us out, so if you enjoy the show, please do express your thoughts and metaphysical yearnings in the review section wherever you're listening to the show. Tell your friends, tell your foes, tell the white whale on whom you're monomaniacally urged to be revenged. It all helps. Thanks for listening, and until next time, call us the Pequorn Pod.