John Tyler, born in 1790, was the 10th President of the United States. He succeeded William Henry Harrison as President after his death from illness 31 days after assuming the office.
John Tyler had eight children with his first wife, who died when they were in the White House. Two years later, he re-married, and had another seven children. Lyon Gardiner Tyler Sr., John Tyler’s third youngest child, was born 1853. Lyon was his second son with his second wife in 1928. They also has a third son who died in infancy.
Grandson Harrison Ruffin Tyler is still alive today and grandfather John Tyler is the earliest former president to have a living grandchild today.
Producer Sam Zimbalist was no relation to Efrem Zimbalist, but then that made me curious as to see the name origin. It means "a person who plays the cimbalom." Wasn’t aware of such a thing, but I suppose there are lots of musical instruments that aren’t part of most orchestras.
Elderly men marrying a young wife and siring a few late children before death used to be more acceptable and common. A grandson could be born 120-140 years after his grandfather’s death.
We live in an era where death rates are sub-1% until about age 40. When you look at as recent as 1912, a person had a 20% chance of not making it past 10.
Reading a book I picked up over the weekend – Mark Twain’s Tales of the Macabre and Mysterious (edited and collected by R. Kent Rasmussen), I read an excerpt from Twain’s Life on the Mississippi that I had forgotten about. It references the Jibbenainosay, a character i an 1837 novel that was so popular and well-known in its day that Twain didn’t feel he had to add an explanatory note in his 1883 book.
The character appeared in a novel Nick of the Woods: or the Jibbenainosay by Robert Montgomery. It’s the story of an Avenging Terror who killed Shawnee Indians to avenge the death of his family at thir hands. The Avenger is actually the appropriately-named Nathan Slaughter, a Quaker by day. At Night he dresses up in leggings and animal skins and caries a long stick and a knife.
(from the Wikipedia page)
What’s interesting is that the word “Jebbinainosay” is supposed to derive from an Indian phrase meaning “The Spirit that Walks”. That stopped me, because I couldn’t help but think of Lee Falk’s ur-superhero The Phantom, AKA “THe Ghost that Walks”
Did Falk read the novel, or hear about him in some way (the story was dramatized three times for the stage)? When I thought about it, the similarities became obvious. Falk’s character is not the original Phantom, but one of a line, but the original Phantom started out avenging the death of a family member by a group (pirates, in this case). He wears a costume and has a Secret Identity by day.
If there is a link, this pushes the inspiration for costumed heroes back much further than I had always assumed, predating The Shadow (1930) and Dr. Syn (The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh) (1915) and The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905)
Oh, yeah – one other thing. Nathan Slaughter leaves a mark on his victims – he carves a cross into their bodies. It’s like the “Z” that Zorro makes, although Slaughter predates Zorro (1919) by 82 years.
“Nate” Slaughter, I see by a Google search, is also the name of a Wide Receiver who played for the Houston Texans, the Jacksonville Jaguars, and (sorta) for the Arizona Cardinals, and is now a free agent. I wonder if he knows abou his namesake.
Meh, it’s fiction. If we can read comic books about people with paranormal powers, aliens, demons, mutants, and hidden conspiracies going back as far as the creation of the universe, then I could take that story as set in an imaginary universe where North America was originally inhabited by quasi-human “injuns” rather than actual human Native Americans.
Specific signifier wounding was a thing in Native American warfare. Ridgway Glover was a photographer who went West to record the native tribes and was captured by Lakota. He evidently tried to reason with them, since his body was found with a large X incised in the chest, meaning they considered him a coward.
When the women went over the Little Bighorn battlefield they jammed an awl into Custer’s ears to clear them out, so that in the afterlife he’d listen to warnings instead of ignoring them.
I suspect a lot of the real life mutilations were inspired by sensationalistic fiction like Slaughter’s. Lurid tales convinced whites that it was a widespread practice by Indians, so adopted the same against the Indians who in turn used it against the whites. Yay, pulp fiction…
Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s last name is Maltese and means “Father of Chickens” likely because one of his forebearers owned a poultry farm.
I read this in a scientific journal today:
In regulation chess, after each player has moved a piece 5 times each, there are 69,352,859,712,417 possible game positions that could have been played.
Do you have a cite for this claim? It seems quite fantastical to me. There is plenty of pre-Columbian evidence of scalping, for example; and note that it is hardly unique to North America.