Note: This story contains spoilers for the "S-Town" podcast.

Among those avidly listening to the blockbuster "S-Town" podcast when it was released March 28 was former University of South Carolina Upstate Chancellor Tom Moore.

The podcast, which begins as an investigation into an alleged murder but gradually becomes the story of eccentric Alabama native John B. McLemore, features interviews with Moore, who was McLemore's chemistry professor at Birmingham-Southern College in the early 1980s.

Moore said he’s listened to the seven-hour podcast twice since its release, and has heard stories and learned things about McLemore he never knew.

The podcast begins when journalist Brian Reed, a producer of the radio show “This American Life,” receives an email from McLemore, a Woodstock, Ala., resident. McLemore claims a murder has been covered up by local police, and asks Reed for help investigating the case.

But as the podcast continues, the focus shifts to McLemore himself, and his complicated relationship with the small town where he has lived all his life.

Moore shared with Reed his memories of his brilliant but troubled former student, who would spend hours talking to Moore in his office. The two remained friends for many years, and among Moore's most prized possessions is an exquisite sundial McLemore made for him. Every piece, down to the tiniest mechanism, was hand-forged by McLemore.

"He worked on this between 1984 and 2012," Moore said. "He taught himself how to make an astrolabe, which is incredibly more complicated than a sundial, but to cut out that pattern (was difficult), and it's made for this latitude and longitude. It is site specific."

Here, Moore discusses the podcast, his long friendship with McLemore and McLemore himself:

Hearing new stories

The story that I had not heard at all that didn’t surprise me, but did in how clearly it said something about who John was and how he did things, was the story of the clock guy from Pell City (Alabama) who had that clock from London. It needed a part, and he knew the part it needed, but he couldn’t find it anywhere. He took the clock to John and put the mechanism on the rack in John’s shop, and he (John) grabbed a screwdriver and a pair of pliers and started yanking pieces off and throwing them on the table. The guy nearly had a heart attack. He expected John to set it up there, look at it and study it, and he just immediately started yanking pieces off and throwing them on the table. He said, "I made the biggest mistake of my life bringing this clock to this guy." John looked at it and told him the piece he needed. He got out a piece of steel and cut it to the appropriate size and started filing it with needle files. No design, no diagram, no drawing — nothing — and filed out the piece and fit it to the clock mechanism.

John B.’s house

That environment was just as enigmatic as any place I’ve ever been. There was a lot of property. John wasn’t as into flowers when I knew him and visited the house. There were some gardens and plants but nothing like he established once he was out of school and his clock business really prospered in the 1980s and 1990s. He started buying plants and then opened the nursery with the woman who was the former town clerk. He had a 17th century clock; it was his oldest clock. In the 1990s, it had to have been worth several hundred thousand dollars. It was incredibly rare. It was one of three or four that went on to exist of that type, and it was hanging on the wall in his house. There are other beautiful clocks on the walls of other rooms, and why he chose to keep what he kept I don’t know, but it had to be something about their uniqueness and his ability to acquire them.

First impressions

"What’s he doing here?" I walked into a classroom with 85, 90 general chemistry students, and there is this red-headed, disheveled, total misfit in the Birmingham Southern culture. What is this kid doing here? When he talked, that twang, obviously from a different background than most Birmingham Southern students. Most were from professional homes. A lot of ministers' kids, doctors, lawyers, professionals, business people. Birmingham Southern is a brother institution to Wofford.

Connecting with the disconnected

Knowing John for as long as I did, early on I was really afraid he would commit suicide any day. As I heard threat after threat and it didn’t happen, and I wasn’t surprised it didn’t happen, I became convinced he wouldn’t do it as long as his mother was alive. Why didn’t he leave Woodstock? His mother wouldn’t leave Woodstock, and he wasn’t going to leave his mother. It went hand in hand to me. His mother was more than persona. She reflected that whole history on that property. It was through his mother that he connected to all of that. So I didn’t think he could leave that in any way — by death or by moving — until she was gone. I think he might have become convinced enough that her dementia was bad enough where she wouldn’t really know it. I think John identified with strays. With those who were disconnected.

One of a kind

Nobody had that level of curiosity or resourcefulness. He was by far the most resourceful person I’ve ever known. If he wanted to know something, he would find it out if it was findable, and if he couldn’t find what he wanted to learn, he would figure it out and learn how to do it. Making an astrolabe is the best example of that. That’s ancient geometry, it’s an ancient view of the world and the celestial spheres that nobody thinks like now. And he figured out how to make an astrolabe. The one Brian Reed describes in the podcast hanging in John’s mother’s bedroom, he walked into my office one day at Birmingham-Southern carrying it. He’d been giving me updates, standing at my blackboard telling me where it was and what he couldn’t figure out, thinking I could help him, I guess. One day, he just shows up: "Here it is, doc!" I looked at it and he explained it to me. He had exhausted everything to figure out how to make it and went to every library in Birmingham. He’d been to UAB (University of Alabama Birmingham), Birmingham Public Library, Birmingham-Southern library. Then he wrote a book about how to make an astrolabe. He never finished it, and never got it in anything like a publishable condition. The way John talks and the levels he goes through to explain something, it would’ve taken an incredible editor.