Gooey death and destruction is no laughing matter. Follow the tragic chain of events that led corporate greed for war profiteering to devastate a crowded immigrant neighborhood. In this episode, our Place of Legend is now a public playground just off busy Commercial Street in Boston, where a small green plaque affixed to a low wall near the public bocce court tells of the “Great Molasses Flood” in exceptionally unemotional terms. Blaming the disaster on “structural defects” in the storage tank and “unseasonably warm temperatures,” the inconspicuous knee-level plaque conceals far more than it reveals. For the suspects in the Great Molasses flood were variously identified as bomb wielding anarchists, corner-cutting metal workers, and the inexplicable act of a perplexing God. The real cause was that profits were more important than human lives to the executives of the Purity Distilling Company and their heartless actions remain to this day far more vivid in local neighborhood lore than in the deadpan text of a plaque placed at the site of the horror by the highbrow Bostonian Society. Listen to the sticky story of Boston’s industrial disaster — which traces its way through the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the trenches of WWI battlefields, and the run on liquor experienced on the eve of Prohibition. Music and FX Credits * Lava Loop, by Audionautics. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. https://freesound.org/people/Audionautics/sounds/133901/ * Pirate ship at Bay, by CGEffex. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. https://freesound.org/people/CGEffex/sounds/93678/ * Medley of American revolutionary war music, by Sturbridge Colonial Militia, under a Creative Commons Public domain mark (1.0). https://archive.org/details/MusicOfTheRevolutionaryWar/Medley.mp3 * World War 1 Trench Warfare Battlefield Sounds, by paulbogus. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. https://freesound.org/people/paulbogush/sounds/345723/ * Creaking Metal Soundscape 2, by Speedenza, Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. https://freesound.org/people/Speedenza/sounds/203925/ * Rodeheaver, Homer A, H. S Taylor, and J. B Herbert. [Debrewer’s big hosses illustrated Temperence song]. Video. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200197656/ * Train crash, by CGEffex, Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. https://freesound.org/people/CGEffex/sounds/94178/