US President James Buchanan was a notorious lush in his own day:
What’s amazing about this is that anyone noticed. Prior to the coming of the railroads, after which agricultural surplus could more easily be shipped to market, the United States was a nation of drunkards who were normally introduced to hard cider at the age of five. Awful as this sounds today, it was actually safer than drinking water, which usually resulted in cholera epidemics.
One of Lincoln’s secretaries (John Hay, I think) wrote in his diary that the President would sometimes show up in his nightgown late at night and consume mass quantities of drinking water from a White House cistern. Apparently, they were using a different source of water than when Harrison and Taylor were in office.
My bold.
Collected rainwater, maybe?
Two of the most legendary female folk singers have ties to two of the most legendary reclusive writers:
Judy Collins’s godfather is her father’s best friend, Holden Bowler, who served with Jerome David Salinger in the Navy and was the inspired for the name of his most famous character, Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caufield.
Joan Baez’s younger sister Mimi married Richard Farina, who attended college with was was a good friend of Thomas Pynchon. After Farina’s death, Pynchon remained friendly with Mimi until she died.
A couple things I found out after reading Astronaut Jim Irwin’s book “To Rule the Night”. Early in his days of getting trained to become a Air Force pilot, Jim quickly lost interest with flying while in flight school. Main reason it would seem, was he didn’t like the bumpy air in Hondo, Texas! ;D. He actually tried quitting but when he was told his only way out was to sign something saying he was afraid of flying, he decided to stick with it. I thought it was a bit hilarious that some rough air put a damper on his career ambitions considering once he got over it what he was in store for.
I also found out that due to a bit of a communication mix-up in preparing the Falcon ascent stage for the planned de-orbit burn, the LM PPK was inadvertently not transferred to the CM and left on board the LM. The mistake wasn’t found out until after the LM impacted on the moon. Among the items now strewn across the lunar surface was all kinds of personal items from friends and family and at least a hundred 2-dollar bills. Plus one friend had Irwin include the fellas wedding ring in the PPK. I always wonder if sometime in the future when/if lunar colonies are established and more extensive EVA’s are carried out if they will find any of those items.
Btw, here’s a great video of 4 of those Apollo LM ascent stage impact sites along with the S-IVB"s that were deliberately crashed into the moon:
In 1957 a 10 year old boy in California waited patiently for a pro football game to end and for his hero, Jim Brown to come to the locker room so he could get Brown’s aurograph. When Brown asked the young boy his name, he replied “Orenthal James. My friends call me O.J.”
That lovely, inspirational tale was printed in the first Chicken Soup for the Soul book,copyright 1993. You have to wonder how the authors felt about it a year later.
Maybe. The reference is from this book, which I don’t have with me at the moment:
I’d have to check the text to see if there’s a more detailed description of the container, but I suspect it was similar to the one described by Laura Ingalls Wilder in recounting her first train trip.
How they kept the cistern/container/tank filled, I don’t know.
Well if there’s ONE place you don’t need to be worried about bumpy air…
Winston Churchill couldn’t understand why people were so squeamish at the idea of using poison gas on the savage tribes making trouble in the colonies.
Here’s a link which recounts the theory of contaminated water, but blames it on the poor sewage system in Washington in the 1840’s. It said it wasn’t resolved until the 1850’s, or a decade before Lincoln arrived at the Capitol.
Interestingly, the article also theorizes that the bad water also killed James Polk, who died shortly after leaving office.
He was also a lifelong bachelor who lived with Rufus King, Franklin Pierce’s Vice President, who was know as Buchanan’s “better half”. They were sometimes referred to as “Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy”.
At the age of 45, Wilbur Wright died of typhoid fever after consuming a seafood dinner while in Boston on a business trip. It’s believed sewage from the city contaminated the offshore beds of the shellfish that were served at his hotel.
In reading about the Wright Brothers, I was surprised to learn the family had moved around in the Midwest (I always thought Wilbur and Orville were born and raised in Dayton, OH), and that they had a number of siblings. I knew about their sister Katharine, who acted as their secretary, but didn’t realize they had two brothers who lived to adulthood and another sister and brother (twins) who died in infancy.
Both Zachary Taylor (who would later become 12th president of the United States) and Jefferson Davis (future president of the Confederate States of America) were stationed at Fort Snelling, at the junction of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, in the late 1820s. Davis would eventually elope with Taylor’s daughter.
Also at Fort Snelling were Dred Scott (whose owner was the post surgeon for three years) and Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin (inventor of the rigid airship, who was in the United States as an observer during the American Civil War).
When Churchill was informed at Chequers that Rudolf Hess, Deputy Fuehrer of the Third Reich, was in British custody after flying to Scotland on a harebrained peace mission, he put off dealing with the matter so he could watch the movie scheduled for that night, The Marx Brothers Go West.
America’s second in command at Fort Sumter when it was shelled by Confederate forces, the first shots of the Civil War, was Abner Doubleday (nicknamed “old 48 hours” by the troops), who was long credited with inventing baseball. This belief is now generally discredited, but Abner did grow up in Cooperstown, N.Y, where the baseball hall of fame is located.
One that surprised me was Abraham Lincoln. I knew he was born in Kentucky (near Jefferson Davis’ birthplace) but he’s so associated with Illinois, I had always assumed the Lincoln Family relocated there when Abraham was young.
But that’s not the case; the Lincoln family lived in Kentucky until Abraham was seven. And when they left the state, they moved to Indiana. They remained there for fourteen years and Abraham Lincoln was twenty-one when he finally arrived in Illinois.
Maybe not a well known historical figure but in the movie “Saving Private Ryan”, Tom Hanks was portrayed as Captain Miller in charge of “C” Company, 2nd Rangers. I read Robert Black’s “The Battalion: The Dramatic Story of the 2nd Ranger Battalion in World War II” awhile ago and that’s when I found out the actual man in charge of “C” Company, 2nd Rangers was Captain Ralph Goranson. When he landed at Omaha in the neighboring sector to Dog Green called “Charlie” and made the dash to the relative safety of the shingle area, he felt numerous bullet impacts while doing so. When he finally made it and had time to look for wounds he counted 9 bullet holes in his gear and clothing but was miraculously untouched. Then a grenade landed at his feet and he barely got out of the way in time. Even though he lost half his men during the landing, he led an assault up some cliffs and started to take out enemy positions that were decimating the troops at Dog Green. He survived the war and lived to the ripe old age of 93 passing away in 2012.
While he didn’t invent baseball (it’s been around in one form or another for a long, long time), I believe he did promote it as a form of recreation among Union troops and probably drew up a set of basic rules for the modern game.
Based on his pictures, I always thought that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was small and delicate.https://www.google.com/search?q=percy+bysshe+shelley&rlz=1CAJFEX_enUS828US828&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=fWI6UnBGbRRbYM%253A%252CVngXfTRP1xWjXM%252C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kQG6HWiHD37rntwxbJmeqVippkxCg&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi8jIDNkp3kAhVFpFkKHZ_UDSkQ_h0wGHoECAwQCQ#imgrc=KOsNDbo9eDnm4M:&vet=1
In fact as I found to my surprise he was almost 6 feet tall and athletic.
Oscar Wilde was very tall, 6’3"
And I always thought that Stalin was tall. I was surprised to find he was actually around 5’5" and had several methods of making himself look taller including boots with masked heels (his father and grandfather were shoemakers). It looks like I was taken in by his propaganda machine:
Stalin also insisted that Mikheil Gelovani, an actor given Stalin’s personal blessing to portray him in films and other propaganda, not accept roles that would require him to portray “a mere mortal” because of how similar in appearance the two men were (though Gelovani was reportedly much taller).
To maintain this illusion in face-to-face meetings, Stalin also took to wearing boots with cleverly masked, significantly raised heels and would often pose for photos while standing on a raised platform or positioned well in front of or above those around him. Of course, few of Stalin’s subordinates would dare ever make fun of Stalin’s penchant for trying to look taller, and the propaganda machine continually depicting him as having “characteristics akin to those of a god,” according to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, no doubt helped them rationalize Stalin’s need to maintain the image. *
And for anyone interested in facts about presidential health, here’s a good site: Medical History of American Presidents | DoctorZebra
In the musical 1776 new delegates for New Jersey arrive at the Continental Congress and the head of the delegation informs Franklin that his son has been taken into custody. “Well, how is the little bastard?” Franklin asks, and when told he’s doing fine Franklin doesn’t worry about it anymore?