Warning.

The following mini-sode includes discussion of brontosauruses, fortune telling, Larry King, the Flintstones, and America's first licensed astrologer.

It's also conveniently packaged in a list format.

For listeners who don't like their information presented in numerical order, please take care.

For anyone who listens, you know Skyline Drive isn't that political.

But there are sometimes a person just has to stand up for what is right.

And during the course of our reporting, it occurred to us here that there aren't any famous astrologers honored on US postage stamps.

There are, however, brontosauruses...

which were famously considered real when I was a kid, then were declared not real when my cousins were kids, and then maybe they're real again?

I really can't keep track.

Also, there are stamps with Confederate generals on them, which is confusing because why exactly are we honoring a bunch of people who tried to overthrow the government mostly because they wanted to keep slaves.

But maybe most confusing of all, we have the Pony Express on stamps.

This was a failed startup.

It barely lasted a year and a half and it was never part of the US postal system.

So it's kind of like Google issuing a Google Doodle to honor Alta Vista or Ask Jeeves or some other long dead competitor.

So unless you think astrology is worse than fake dinosaurs, racist generals, and complete business failures, I think it's okay to put an astrologer on a stamp.

And if we're gonna pick just one astrologer, I nominate Maxine Taylor.

From Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts, I'm Mangesh Hattikudur.

Welcome to Skyline Drive.

MINISODE ONE: 3 REASONS WE SHOULD PUT MAXINE TAYLOR ON A STAMP ALREADY To be honest, Maxine Taylor shouldn't have had time for me.

She spends her days writing, collaborating on books, and taping predictions for her YouTube channel...

and also filling the extra space in between with oom consultations for clients.

But I think what she heard I was from Brooklyn and visiting my parents in Georgia, she just couldn't resist.

Maxine happens to be tethered to those two places too.

She was born and raised in Brooklyn and has lived most of her adult life not too far from where my folks live.

And I'm so glad she made time for me, because after just an hour with her, I realized how much she's done for the art and practice of astrology here in the United States.

ONE: Maxine made it legal to be an astrologer.

I said, listen, I want to legalize astrology and at some point become an astrologer.

Back then, you practiced astrology in hushed whispers, because we're in the Bible Belt, for goodness sake.

In 1969, soon after Maxine had moved from Brooklyn to Atlanta, she realized that you couldn't get a business license for astrology in Georgia.

It wasn't just Georgia, it was the entire country.

One of the distinctions that seems to be made is between fortune telling and astrology, and so what is it that doesn't sit together with those two ideas.

Oh well, first of all, there's a negative connotation to fortune telling.

It's it's like a gypsy, it's like a rip off, et cetera.

It's not.

I think it's a term used to denigrate.

But if you're able to put people's mind at ease, put their hearts at ease, answer their questions...

and if you come from love, this is a mission.

It's a, it's a labor of love.

And I think that word "fortune telling" is insulting.

Maxine had a vision that she was meant to bring astrology to the forefront.

It came to her in a dream that one of her purposes here on earth was to make people see the worth and astrology and to legitimize it.

So she took her case to the Cobb County Commissioners.

The only problem was no one would give her an appointment.

So for weeks she waited in the lobby without anyone calling her name, and finally she saw an open door.

So she sneaks into the commissioner's office and politely asked him herself.

And to her surprise, he invited her to a commission meeting the following week, just to plead her case in front of a panel.

So Maxine, who's just in her twenties right now, is super nervous about this:

I was scared to death because it was very imposing.

The commissioners were sitting on a dais up high [laughing]...

like judges!

And I didn't know how am I going to convince these people.

Also, the mood in the room is not great.

The Marietta Daily Journal was there and they covered the event and they wrote, "it had been a long Tuesday afternoon full of sewer-angry and water-angry and highway-angry people, and the clock on the walls showed nearly five pm when the girl walked in." Anyway, she finally gets return and she starts by trying to show how astrology is prominent in the Bible.

But she soon realizes that this tact isn't really working well.

So she changes her strategy.

So what I did was I started talking about each sign, and I asked each commissioner what their sign was.

And I described them and introduced humor.

And the whole nine yards, long story short.

And Maxine's charm quickly wins them over.

She explains how the charts take real work.

Like it takes her nearly twelve hours of study before she presents one to a client.

And she explains how she doesn't want to do this as a hobby out of her house.

How she wants a proper office and a business license to go with it.

And one of the commissioners get so intrigued that he asked her if she could predict the best days for going hog hunting.

In the end, the panel was so tickled by the way she sussed out their personalities and connected the stars to their life stories that they decided to give her a license and they only charged her a hundred dollars.

I was able to buy the very first license, uh for astrology, not entertainment, not miscellaneous, not fortune telling, and so what I did was historical.

TWO: Maxine put astrology on TV.

Now.

One of the things I strongly believe is that pop culture has the ability to sway all culture.

So take how we sleep.

For example, middle class couples in America used to sleep in separate twin beds, the way Lucy and Desi did, until sitcoms of all types from Ozzie and Harriet:

I thought you went to bed.

Well I did, but

...

to the Flintstones ...

to the Brady Bunch...

started depicting couples sharing a bed, and this actually affected American bedrooms and buying habits.

But that isn't the only case.

Like when 16 and Pregnant aired on MTV, the teenage birth rate went down by 5.7%.

Joe Biden claimed Will & Grace did more to pave the way to shift America's opinion on gay marriage than nearly anything else.

So if any one thing could make astrology more acceptable to Americans, it's got to be an astrologer on CNN.

Can you tell me how you ended up on the networks in the early years?

Um, CNN was an experiment, like the United States.

It was a grand experiment.

At the time.

CNN is just a startup and the channel is throwing ideas at the wall, trying to figure out what will stick.

And the truth is, Maxine sticks.

Maxine is kind of built for this.

Not only she charming and fun and bubbly, but she's also beautiful and composed.

In college, Maxine had been a regular in beauty pageants and a finalist from Miss University of Florida, And before she switched to doing astrology full time, she'd been an elementary school teacher.

So she kind of knows how to wrangle outside personalities.

In fact, when I was on Larry King Show, he was a gentleman and he was wonderful.

But they felt they had to present a disclaimer.

When I was on, well, I tend to rebel and you might have figured that one out.

UM and I really would get irritated with them.

And this was live TV, and I realized I love live TV because whatever you say, you can't take back...

And in the way Maxine always does, it wasn't long before she started winning people over.

What happened was my predictions were accurate [laughing], and so they stopped criticizing.

And a couple of them asked me to do their charts.

She won't reveal who, but big anchors on the network who would kind of mock astrology or who would publicly distance themselves from it were regularly asking her to do their charts.

I loved being on that team.

Um and I did political predictions.

But at that time I was totally non-political.

I didn't even watch the news.

It was too negative.

Maxine was such a joy that the station still brings her back to comment on astrology scandals and occasionally to make sense of the news.

What in the world's going on?

Oh honey.

Every couple of years, some Yahoo rediscovers the fact that there are two odiacs.

It's that simple, Really, yes, it's that simple.

THREE: She convinced an entire country that things would be okay.

I got a call in 1980-something, and it was from a reporter who also worked for CNN.

I couldn't understand what he was saying, because then we had-- and I don't know if we still do-- what was called coaxial cable.

It was undersea and there was an echo, it was like talking into a tin can.

And he said, um, I would like you to do the chart of Hungary.

This is 1989, soon after communism fell in Poland and a pro-democracy revolution was spreading across Eastern Europe.

And as protests were breaking out in Hungary, a CNN reporter based in Budapest reaches out.

And I laughed because I'm thinking: well, when was this country born?

So I said, well, if you can get me their birth time, because you need an exact birth time to cast a chart...

and the month, day and year, I'll do the chart.

And he said okay.

And I said goodbye and kind of chuckled, thinking I'll never hear from this guy again.

Well, a couple of weeks later he was back, and he was so excited.

He said, we were born today.

On October 23, 1989, the Republic of Hungary officially came into being, ending communism there.

The Berlin Wall would actually fall two weeks later.

It was really an exciting period in history.

He gave me the moment it began and said, okay, will you do the chart?

And I did the chart for the entire country.

A country is an entity-- a living, breathing entity.

Um, and we interpret that chart a little bit differently than we do a birth chart, because we're dealing with not just say short trips, but transportation, communication, the press, etcetera.

Maxine's reading was pretty thorough.

It addressed different areas of how Hungry would evolve, and it not only aired on Radio Budapest, but it was printed in newspapers across the country.

Obviously, there was a rebellion going on.

People were fighting for principles.

Hungary wasn't free, and uh so it was quite an event, quite an event.

I considered that the highest honor, and that was what I realized I wanted to do.

To hug the world.

Maxine Taylor broke all sorts of areas for astrologers in the US.

She created space in this world for professional astrology.

She brought it into the news cycle, and she put the citizens of Budapest at ease by getting the entire country a reading.

Also, she's a total sweetheart.

I love humanity and I love the diversity.

People who are so bigoted-- it's like, can't you see we are all one?

We come in different colored packages, different shapes, different sizes, different beliefs, and when you touch base with somebody on that level, to me, that's heaven.

I love how astrology provides a way for us to connect and how it lets us see people not just in their Instagram perfect lives, but to appreciate them for all their complexity.

In 2023, we're getting new postage stamps to honor snow globes, sailboats, school buses, and pinatas.

And while I'm very much for those things, astrology figures into a out of our daily lives.

From the Reagan episode, we know it's shaped our world and country.

And in a strange way, it gives a lot of us comfort and purpose.

Stamps are a symbol of what we value and what we want to celebrate.

So don't you think between all those sailboats and the snow globes and the pinatas, there might be a little room for an astrologer, too?

I like to think.

So that's it for this week's Minisode of Skyline Drive.

Special Thanks to my team here, Mary, Mitra, Mark, Anna and Dhruv for cobbling this together over the holidays.

And Botany as always for the soundtrack.

Also thank you so much to the lovely Maxine Taylor.

To see her predictions for America or to book a consult with America's first license astrologer, just visit MaxineTaylor.com.

Also a big thank you to my good pal Ben Bowlin for doing this episode's warning.

Ben used to sit across from me at How Stuff Works.

He's the co host of Ridiculous History and Stuff they Don't Want You To Know, two excellent programs, and he just put out a phenomenal new book by the same name, Stuff they Don't Want You to Know.

Go pick one up immediately.

We'll be back with more full episodes very very soon.

I know you have so many shows to choose from, but I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for spending your time with us.

See you soon.