The Public "I"

A PROFESSIONAL

2012-01-27T09:00:00.003-05:00

I hate the image of Lincoln that most Americans hold, the five dollar profile of “The Great Emancipator”. You see, Abraham Lincoln saved the Union and ended slavery not because he was a saint but because he was the greatest politician who has ever occupied the White House. And to those who despise “professional politicians”, my response is they have probably never seen a real professional in action. Such Pols don’t come along often, but when they do, they make the puny impersonations that must usually suffice seem like clowns.

And Lincoln’s professionalism was best displayed in his handling of the biggest clown in his cabinet, a man you have probably never heard of but whose best work you see every day of your life, Salmon Portland Chase. If Chase had been half as smart as he was ambitious, he would have been President instead of Lincoln. That to his dying day he continued to think he deserved to be so, shows what a clown he really was.

Doris Kerns Goodwin has called Lincoln’s cabinet “A Team of Rivals”, but I think of it more as an obtuse triangle. At the apex was Lincoln. He was the pretty girl at the party. His suitors didn’t really want to know him, but they all wanted to have him. On the inside track was the brilliant, obsequious William Seward - the Secretary of State who thought of himself as Lincoln’s puppet master. And the right angle was Salmon Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, born to money and brilliant, but with a stick up his elementary canal. And on Tuesday, December 16, 1862 the competition between these two paramours of Old Abe's banged heads in the head of Senator Charles Sumner, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and leading Senatorial Cassandra.

Sumner had come into procession of a letter written by Seward to the American Ambassador to France. In the letter Seward complained that “…the extreme advocates for African slavery and its most vehement opponents are acting in concert together to precipitate a servile war, the former by making the most desperate attempts to overthrow the federal Union; the latter by demanding an edict of universal emancipation as a lawful and necessary if not, as they say, the only legitimate way of saving the Union.” To Sumner this passage was proof that behind the scenes Seward was not fully committed to destroying slavery and the Confederacy. And it confirmed what he already heard from Chase.

Stephen Oates writes in “With Malice Toward None”, “Chase in particular felt snubbed and resentful…what bothered Chase the most was the intimacy between Lincoln and Seward…In talks with his liberal Congressional friends, Chase intimated that Seward was a malignant influence on the President...that it was (Seward) who was responsible for the administration’s bungling. So it was that Seward became a scapegoat for Republican discontent.” (pp 355-356)

Sumner convened what I call "The Magnificent Seven", the Republican Senate caucus. Once the Seward letter was read out loud, Senator Ira Harris from New York recorded the reaction. “Silence ensued for several moments, when (Senator Morton Wilkinson of Minnesota) said that in his opinion the country was ruined and the cause was lost…” Senator William Fessenden from Maine added his two cents worth. He had been told by a member of the cabinet there was “…a secret backstairs influence which often controlled the apparent conclusions of the cabinet itself. Measures must be taken”, Fessenden concluded, “to make the cabinet a unity and to remove from it anyone who does not coincide heartily with our views in relation to the war.”

It is sad to say there was not a first rate mind in that room. There might have been, but arrogance drops a smart person’s I.Q. by forty points or more. It can drop the average mind to zero. Not one of the seven seems to have suspected they were being manipulated by Chase, that it was Chase who had whispered Fesseneden's ear, and Wilkinsen' s ear as well. But each was convinced they they and they alone held the solution as to how to conclude the Civil War. It is startling to think that men who used an outhouse every day, could be that arrogant.

They skewered up their courage for two days before saddling up and calling on the President at 7 P.M. on Thursday, December 19, 1862. For three hours they harangued poor Mr. Lincoln on the dangers of Seward. Lincoln remained agreeable but noncommittal, and proposed that they meet again the next night. And the amazing thing was that throughout the meeting Lincoln actually had William Seward’s resignation in his coat pocket.

Understand, Seward had not offered his resignation out of nobility. He was a politician. After hearing of the intentions of the Seven, Seward had a flunky deliver his resignation in private, as a back door demand that Lincoln pick Seward over Chase, the genial New Yorker over the prig from Ohio. Of course, the loss of support from New York would poke a fatal hole in Lincoln’s ship of state. So Seward was not expecting Lincoln to pick the prig for the poke

Lincoln’s problem was he also needed the prig. Chase’s handling of the Treasury was brilliant. He was financing the entire war. It was Chase who had begun issuing official U.S. government backed paper currency, greenbacks. That had not been done since the American Revolution. It was Chase who had put the words “In God We Trust” on every bill, and its still there today. Of course, Chase had also put his own face on every $1 bill, as a form of political advertising, but Lincoln was willing to tolerate that because Chase was honest, doing a good job, and because without Ohio, the Union would lose the war.

The other factor was that the whispers about Seward’s “backstairs influence” were false. By December of 1862 it was dawning on even Seward that Lincoln was thinking for himself. When Lincoln had first heard about the Magnificent Seven’s deliberations (from Senator Preston King, the flunky who had delivered Seward’s resignation), the President had exploded. “Why will men believe a lie, an absurd lie, that could not impose upon a child, and cling to it, and repeat it, and cling to it in defiance of all evidence to the contrary?” Lincoln was beset by arrogance from all sides. It seems that everybody in Washington thought they were smarter than Lincoln. But the skinny lawyer from Illinois was about to prove them all wrong.

At ten the next morning Lincoln told his cabinet about the previous night’s meeting. He made no accusations, but Chase immediately blubbered that this was the first he had heard about any of this matter. The President, who had mentioned no names and made no allegations, asked them all, except Seward, to return that night to meet with the Seven. Seward felt the ground giving way under his feet. He had never expected Lincoln might pick Chase. At the same time, Chase was not entirely certain he had.

That night the Seven were now the audience to a bravo performance. Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy (then a cabinet office) recorded the festivities. The President “…spoke of the unity of his Cabinet, and how although they could not be expected to think and speak alike on all subjects, all had acquiesced in measures when once decided. ...Secretary Chase endorsed the President's statement fully and entirely…” There were hours more of talking but right there, when Chase agreed with Lincoln, that was the end of Chase's mutiny. As the Magnificent Seven were leaving the White House a stunned Senator Browning of Illinois asked one the leaders of the mutiny how Chase could tell them that the cabinet was harmonious, after all his talk to them about back stairs influence. The reply was simple and bitter; “He lied.” Chase was done as a malignant political influence in the cabinet. No Republican was going to believe anything he ever said again.

The next morning Lincoln called both Seward and Chase to the White House. Welles was again present, I suspect as a witness for Lincoln. Wrote Welles, “Chase said he had been painfully affected by the meeting last evening, which was a total surprise to him, and…informed the President he had prepared his resignation…“Where is it?” said the President quickly, his eye lighting up in a moment."

“I brought it with me,” said Chase, taking the paper from his pocket…”Let me have it,” said the President, reaching his long arm and fingers towards Chase, who held on, seemingly reluctant…but the President was eager and…took and hastily opened the letter. “This," said he, looking towards me with a triumphal laugh, “cuts the Gordian knot.” An air of satisfaction spread over his countenance such as I have not seen for some time. “You may go to your Departments,” said the President;…(This) “is all I want…I will detain neither of you longer.”

Both Seward and Chase spent a nervous night, not certain as to what Lincoln would do. They had both just been reminded who was in charge of this game. And it was not until a few days later that Lincoln sent a message to both Chase and Seward, saying that the nation could not afford to lose either of their talents. And it did not. Seward never tried to pull Lincoln's strings again. Chase petulantly continued to resign annually until late 1864, when Lincoln could finally afford to take him up on the offer. But never a man to waste talent, Lincoln appointed the clown to the Supreme Court, where Chase’s firm stance for racial equality would have the best influence on America’s future.

And that is what it looks like when a professional is on the job.

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THE ODD LITTLE PREACHER

2012-01-25T09:00:00.003-05:00

I do not believe the Reverend Kelly. But I am not sure if I don’t believe him when he said he didn’t murder those eight people, or when he said he did. What I do know is that five years later, passangers on board the westbound number 5 train, which had pulled out of Villisca, Iowa at 5:19 A.M. that Monday morning, remembered the twitchy, diminutive preacher telling his fellow bleary eyed travelers, that he had left eight butchered bodies back in Villisca. The bodies would not be discovered until almost eight that morning. So if the sleepy witnesses correctly remembered the words spoken to them five years earlier by a strange little preacher they had never seene before, then he was guilty of an unspeakable horror. If they were wrong, he was innocent. Of course, either way, he was crazy as a loon.Villisca is a self proclaimed “community of pride where the rivers divide” (being the West and Middle branches of the Nordaway River), 80 miles southwest of Council Bluffs, Iowa. Montgomery County was settled in the mid 19th century mostly by people from the old Midwest, upstate New York and Pennsylvania, people with names like Bates and Bowman, Kennedy and Hoover, Powers and Preston and Wymore. They arrived on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroad, called by her customers just “The Q”. At the time our story takes place no community in Iowa was more than a few miles from an active passanger rail line. Most of the residents of Villisca either sold services or equipment to the local farmers or worked for the railroad. And it is not likely that in 1912 the little town was much smaller that it is today, when the population is just about 1,000 souls.On the morning of June 10th, 1912, inside the sad looking two story house (now at 323 East 4th.Street) were found the bodies of Mr. Josiah Moore, his wife Sara, daughter Katherine and sons Herman, Boyd and Paul, as well as the bodies of their overnight child guests, Lena and Ina Stillinger. The children were aged 5 through age 12. All the victims were found in their beds, with their heads covered with bedclothes. All had their skulls battered 20 to 30 times with the blunt end of an axe, which was found wiped clean in the downstairs sewing room/bedroom along with the bodies of the Stillinger girls. The ceilings in the parent's bedroom and the children's room upstairs showed gouge marks, apparently made by the upswing of the axe blade.Downstairs little Lena Stillinger’s nightgown was pushed up, leaving her exposed. But doctors said there was no evidence of molestation. There was a bloodstain on her knee and an alleged defensive wound on her arm. A two pound slab of bacon was found, wrapped in a dishtowel, on the bedroom floor. On the kitchen table was a plate of uneaten food and a bowl of bloody water. The medical estimate was that all of the murders had occurred shortly after midnight, the morning of June 10th, 1912.In June 11th, Mr. Sam Moyer was arrested for the murders. He was released on the 15th. On June 20th Mr. John Bohland was arrested for the murders. He was released a few days later. On July 5th, Mr. Frank Roberts (“a negro”) was arrested for the murders. He was released a few days later. On December 28th farmer and victim Sara Moore’s ex-brother-in-law, Mr. Lew Van Alstine, was arrested for the murders. He was released a few weeks later. On July 15th, 1916 Mr. William Mansfield was arrested for the murders. On July 21st he was released. On March 19, 1917, the Reverend J.J. Burris told a Grand Jury sitting in the county seat of Red Oak, that a mystery man had confessed on his death bed to the murders. And then, on April 30th, 1917 a warrant for the arrest of the Reverend George Kelly was issued. He arrived to surrender himself two weeks later, oddly enough on the No. 5 train.

The authorities first became interested in the Reverend (above, on the left) a few weeks after the murders, alerted by recipients of his rambling letters in the village. He had arrived in Villisca for the first time the Sunday morning before the murders, and had attended a Sunday school performance by the Stillinger girls. He had had left Villisca the following day, Monday morning. Two weeks later he had returned posing as a detective, and had even joined a tour of the murder house with a group of real investigators. (There was virtually no control of the crime scene.) The only thing stopping police from arresting him immediately was that it was abundantly clear the Reverend was absolutely crazy.Lyn George Jacklin Kelly (above, again with his wife) was the son and the grandson of English ministers, who, as an adolescent, had suffered a “mental breakdown”. He had immigrated to America with his wife in 1904 and preached at a dozen Methodist churches across North Dakota, Minnesota, Kansas and Iowa. Preaching from the pulpit he was “...a confident, well-versed, and articulate speaker”. But in personal interactions the 5 foot, 119 pound minister displayed “...a nervous demeanor, shifty eyes, and often spoke so quickly that saliva would dribble down his chin”. He had been assigned as a visiting minister to several small communities north of Villisca, where he developed a reputation for odd behavior; late night walks, rumors that he was a peeping tom and unconfirmed stories that he had tried to convince young girls to undress for him. In 1914, while preaching in South Dakota he had advertised for a private secretary. One young woman who responded was informed by return post that Kelly wanted her to type in the nude. He was convicted of sending obscene material through the mail, and spent time in a mental hospital. While there he wrote to the Montgomery County D.A. that he expected at any moment to be arrested for the Villisca murders.Finally, after investigating just about every other possibility, the Grand Jury indicted Kelly for the murder of Lena Stillinger. All through the summer of 1917, while in jail awaiting trial, Kelly was interrogated. The last interview was on August 30th , a marathon session that lasted all night. At 7AM on the morning of the 31st Kelly signed a confession to the murder, saying God had whispered to him to “suffer the children to come unto me.”At trial he recanted, and on Wednesday, September 26 the case went to the jury, which deadlocked eleven to one for acquittal. A second jury was immediately empanelled, and in November the Reverend Kelly was acquitted by all 12 jurors. No one else was ever tried for the murders. And the crime remains one of the most horrific, unsolved mass murders in American history, known simply as the Villisca Axe Murders. Did he do it? I don't know. The passangers on the number 5 train that Monday morning were pretty sure he had confessed to them, three hours before the bodies were discovered. But did they really remember the confession, five years later? Was it really the morning of of the murders? Or had it happened two weeks after the murders, when Reverend Kelly had impersonated a detective? It is enough to shake your faith in any certainty in this world. ( http://www.villiscaiowa.com/)

- 30 -

ET TU, Part One THE CURTAIN RISES

2012-01-22T09:00:00.007-05:00

I believe the murder was set in motion far from the scene of the crime, in modern day Turkey, in a patch of desert about ten miles north of the border with Syria. In 53 B.C.E., this spot of emptiness was called Carrhae, and in Roman history that name is synonymous with shame. It was at Carrhae that 20,000 Legionaries died, and worse, 10,000 were captured, and even worse, it was here that the aristocrat’s aristocrat, the greedy Marcus Licinius Crassus (above), was killed. His death should not have been a great tragedy, as not many outside his immediate family had reason to mourn his demise. But within ten years of his death, the Roman Republic would collapse, and the cause of democracy would be set back two thousand years – and all that occurred because Crassus got what he deserved. I would label all that followed his death, the horrible unintended consequences of a good thing.

Crassus, the richest man in Rome, had also once been a hero. He led the right wing at the battle of Coline Gate, which made Sulla dictator of Rome. He had defeated the slave armies of Spartacus, and lined the Appian Way with 6,000 crucified slaves. Then he had turned to running the finances of Sulla' s brutal regime. Now, at 60, he wanted to be a hero again. His plan to achieve this was to invade Parthia, the empire centered upon present day Iran. But age had not made Crassus more intellectually flexible or humble of spirit. When offered assistance from the King of Armenia, Crassus chose to keep all the plunder for himself.

So, in the spring of 53 B.C., at the head of seven veteran legions and 8,000 cavalry commanded by his son, Publius, Crassus crossed the Euphrates river at Zeugma, and almost immediately started making mistakes. He hired a guide who led him deep into a treeless desert near Carrhea (above), and then vanished. And once the legions were ankle deep in sand and desperately short of water, only then did the Parthian army appear - 10,000 cavalry armed with powerful bows.

Arrows showered upon the massed legions, wounding men and sapping moral. The Roman tactical response was to form the infantry into turtles (testudos) (above), closing ranks tightly, with the center ranks marching beneath their shields, and the soldiers on the edges presenting the enemy with a moving wall. But so strong were the Parthian bows that some arrows even penetrated the turtle's shells. It went on for hours. The turtles could only march in a straight line, and not very quickly under a baking desert sun. Eventually, reasoned Crassus, the Parthian bowmen would run out of arrows. But then he spotted large camel trains approaching, each dromedary carrying a fresh supply of arrows.

In desperation Publius's cavalry charged the camels, but the Parthian's proved adept at shooting while retreating - the famous Parthian shot (above), the sting in the scorpion's tail. Publius was killed and his cavalry scattered. The Parthians closed in again and the arrows continued to shower down upon the turtles. The sun continued to beat down. Eventually Crassus was forced to retreat into the village of Carrhea. After a night without water, his officers forced Crassus to parlay with the Parthian commander. The meeting was a disaster. The deaf Crassus perceived an insult in some Parthian translation, and moved to remount his horse. A Parthian officer grabbed the horses' bridle. A proud Roman pulled his gladius to defend his commander's honor, and the Parthian generals slaughtered the Roman officers, including Marcus Licinius Crassus. After that, the Parthians fell upon the leaderless legions, and effectively wiped them out.

The legend is that after the slaughter, the Parthians poured molten gold into the severed head of the greedy Crassus. It sounds like a terrible waste of a precious metal, but then the war had been a terrible waste of seven irreplaceable Roman legions. But the two men in all the world who understood intuitively what a disaster Crassus' death really was for Rome, were his two greatest competitors.

The sardonic Sulla had nicknamed Gnaeus Pompeius, as Pompey the Great (above). But Sulla had meant it as a joke - whatever else he was, Sulla was a ruthless judge of character. Sent by Sulla to secure the Roman grain supplies in Sicily, the young Pompey had earned another nickname, 'the adolescent butcher'. When the citizens of one small Sicilian village argued his attack upon them was illegal, Pompey responded bluntly, “Stop quoting laws. We carry weapons!” Returning home, Pompey demanded a triumphal parade, usually reserved for military victories. After Sulla's death, the Senate dispatched Pompey to crush a rebellious general. Pompey bribed one of the rebel officers to kill the general, and then eliminated the traitor. His justification was typically blunt. “A dead man cannot bite”. And he claimed another triumph. Sent to crush pirates who were raiding Roman grain fleets, Pompey bought them off, and again, claimed a triumph - Pompey Maximus, indeed.

As the two richest and most ambitious men in Rome, Pompey and Crassus had initially cooperated to strengthen the tribunes. This was not out of some faith in the Republic, but to use the tribunes as a buffer between them. For four hundred years these 'Tribunes of the Plebs' had been a counter-balance to the aristocrats in the Senate. Elected by the whole male population, tribunes could not make laws, but they could veto any law passed by the Senate (above), and lead soldiers in battle. Sulla had reduced the tribunes to a ceremonial post. But Pompey and Crassus, increasingly driven apart by suspicion, paranoia and envy, used the tribunes to enact their policies. And one of the men supported by Crassus for tribune of the people was Gaius Julius Caesar.

Sulla had taken one look at the smart, ambitious young Caesar (above), and marked him down for elimination. Julius avoided Sulla's assassins by joining the army. Once Sulla died, Julius returned to Rome, where Crassus backed his election as a Tribune and then sent him to Spain. While there Caesar had defeated two small tribes. This earned him the right to a triumph. Instead, Caesar asked Crassus for help, meaning money, to run for Consul of Rome.

A Consulship was the executive position in the Republic, the equivalent of an American President. But Romans were so afraid of someone wanting to rule over them as a king, that the term of office was just one year, and there were two equal consuls elected each year. Each had the power of veto over any action by the other. As a result of the election of 60 B.C., Caesar (Crassus' man) was elected. But the other consul elected that year, Marcus Bibulus, was Pompey's man. What this had produced for Rome, was deadlock – every law Crassus backed Bibulus vetoed, ever law Pompey pushed, Caesar blocked. But it was Caesar’s political genius that he saw the way to use this deadlock to increase his own power.

In 59 B.C., Caesar pushed for a law Pompey had long supported, a land reform act that would give farms to Pompey's veterans. Bibulus, who was an aristocrat and a land owner, tried to veto Caesar’s bill, but thugs hired by Caesar drove Bibulus out of the forum, and even dumped a dung bucket on Bilbulus's head. Caesar’s bill passed, and that quickly power in Rome was changed, from a confrontation between two men, into a more balanced government ruled by three - The First Triumvirate. At the end of his term, in exchange for his work bringing peace between Crassus and Pompey, Caesar was appointed Governor of Trans-alpine Gaul, what today is France, for ten years..

Thus the Romans divided their known world between these three men. Caesar went west, to conquer and plunder Gaul with four legions. Pompey, who saw himself as a great general, stayed in Rome, without legions, to guard and plunder the Republic. And the financier Crassus had turned eastward, to conquer and plunder Parthia with seven legions. But in 53 B.C.E. Crassus had gotten himself killed, and the Roman Republic, carefully crafted over 400 years to exist as a balance between opposing forces, was abruptly reduced to a confrontation between two men. It was a contest which must result in the death of one of them.

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THE LIBERTARIAN HERO

2012-01-20T09:00:00.002-05:00

I wish the average modern libertarian could meet Jay Gould, because he was unfettered capitalism in the flesh, “the human incarnation of avarice,” as one minister described him, the Mephistopheles of Wall Street, the robber baron par excellence, “prince of the railroad schemers”, and the man within whom all the theories of the libertarians about capitalism and freedom met the reality of human nature, and got the living tar beat out of it.

He was a “…short, thin man with cold black eyes, a narrow face and, in his maturity, a “full black beard”. Born into poverty, his mother was active in the Methodist Church until her death, when Jay was 10 years old. When he was seventeen, Jay apprenticed himself to a surveyor, Oliver Diston, at the salary of $10 a month. When Jay started issuing his own maps for sale, Diston sued. Jay’s attorney, T. R. Westbrook, managed to have the lawsuit dismissed, but, as one biographer noted, from that day forward, “…there was scarcely a day during his whole life that (Jay Gould) did not have some litigation on his hands.”

His map business made Jay $5, 000, which he invested with Zadock Pratt, a Manhattan leather merchant. Smothering Mr. Pratt in adoration, the 21 year old Jay proposed to write the older man’s biography. That project drew the pair into a partnership in a new leather tannery south of Scranton, Pennsylvania. Using Pratt’s money Jay built an entire company town, which he named “Gouldborough”. He wrote Pratt sycophantic letters, in one describing the organizing meeting for the new community. “Three hearty cheers were proposed for the Hon(erable) Zadock Pratt…This is certainly a memorandum worthy of note in your biography, of the gratitude and esteem which Americans hold your enterprising history.” However Mr. Pratt, who knew a lot more about the tanning business than did the young Jay Gould, had begun to see through the fog of compliments.

Pratt (above) showed up at the plant unannounced in the summer of 1858, to go over the books. He quickly discovered them to be a confusing mess, showing unauthorized risky investments and a private bank which Jay had established in Stroudsburg, apparently using company funds, but without the company sharing in any profits. However, Jay had anticipated this, and had already lined up a richer and more docile partner. When confronted in August by Pratt, Gould stunned the man by offering to buy him out for $60,000. Pratt quickly accepted. The cash for the buyout had come from Jay’s new partner, Charles Lessup.

But it wasn’t long before even the somnolent Lessup began to suspect he was being had. By the fall of 1859 Lessup was panicked by the commitments Jay was making in his name. But it was too late. On October 6, 1859, facing financial disaster, Charles Lessup shot himself. Lessup’s daughters bitterly demanded Jay repay them for their father’s investment, and Jay countered with an offer of a payment of $10,000 a year for six years. He had, of course, neglected to include any interest during the five year delay. Unfortunately for Jay, the families’ lawyers caught the omission. Still, in the early months of 1860, it became clear that Jay was still hiding assets from the family.

Lawyers and 40 deputized men were dispatched to the tannery on Tuesday morning, March 13, 1860. They flashed the legal papers, ushered the workers out and padlocked the doors. They held the place for a little over six hours, until Jay returned from New York. Just past noon some 200 men stormed the building with axes, muskets and rifles. Four men were shot, others were badly beaten, and according to the New York Herald, “…those who did not escape were violently flung from the windows and doors…” As Jay would later boast, ““I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.” The courts would eventually throw Jay Gould out of the tannery, but by then he had shifted his operations to a place more suited to his nature; the unregulated economic free-for-all that was Wall Street.

While North and South battled over slavery, Jay Gould battled over wealth. He formed his own brokerage firm, Smith, Gould and Martin, and made the acquaintance of James “Big Jim” Fisk, who had made his own fortune smuggling southern cotton through the Federal armies, and selling Confederate War Bonds. And even while brave men died by their tens of thousands, this pair joined Daniel Drew, director of the Erie Railroad, in their own, private war.

Their enemy was Cornelius Vanderbilt, who owned every railroad in the east except the Erie. Naturally, “The Commodore”, as Vanderbilt liked to be called, was seeking a monopoly, so he could charge whatever freight rates he wanted, and he began to buy stock in the Erie. Sensing blood in the water, Jay and friends printed up 100,000 shares of Erie stock, which The Commodore promptly bought, and which the board of the Erie – Drew, Fisk and Jay Gould – immediately declared to be worthless.

Bilked out of $7 million, Vanderbilt filed legal papers to examine the Erie’s books. Jay and friends grabbed the company records and retreated to New Jersey, where they re-incorporated. Vanderbilt then had arrest warrants issued for all three men, but since New York law could not touch them in New Jersey, the Commodore began to assemble ships and men to invade New Jersey, all by himself. While the Erie Board prepared to receive the invaders, Jay managed to slide a bill through the New York State assembly making the issuing of worthless stock, perfectly legal, retroactively.

This trick was managed by the simple expedient of giving William “Boss” Tweed (above), the head of political graft in New York, a seat on the Erie board. That brought the Erie War to a temporary end. And if you are feeling sorry for the Commodore, remember that Cornelius himself once said, “Law, what do I care about the law? Ain't I got the power?" Another libertarian hero. The entire bunch were so busy cheating and stealing they barely noticed the end of the Civil War.

With the Commodore’s cash, and further fortified by looting the Erie’s assets, Jay, Fisk and Drew began their own complicated scheme to raise freight rates on the Erie Railroad. In 1869 they began to buy and hoard gold, because raising the price of gold would raise the price of wheat, which would allow them to raise the freight rates they charged farmers for shipping the wheat. As insurance the trio took on another partner, Abel R. Corbin, who happened to be President Grant’s brother-in law. The new partner gave the appearance that “the fix” was in, and other investors jumped on the bandwagon. The price of gold skyrocketed.

When President Grant learned about the manipulations, he immediately ordered the U.S. Treasury to sell $4 million in gold. On September 24, 1869, the sudden influx hit the market like a bomb, and gold dropped 30%. The date would henceforth be known as “Black Friday” - at least until October of 1929. Thousands of investors were wiped out, including Abel Corbin, and an angry mob swarmed the Gould’s brokerage offices, smashing the furnishings and chanting “Who killed Charles Lessup?” Of course the trio of Gould, Fisk and Drew, walked away from the wreckage with an $11 million profit.

Gould's partner Daniel Drew was to be Jay’s next victim. In 1870 Fisk and Gould sold their shares in the Erie to their one time enemy the Commodore for $5 million. The deal gave Vanderbilt his monopoly, but it also revealed that the Erie was bankrupt. And it left Daniel Drew, abandoned by his partners, out $1.5 million. He would die flat broke nine years later, just one more partner and one more victim of Jay Gould.

Big Jim Fisk was saved from a similar fate when, in 1871, a competitor for a woman shot him to death in a New York Hotel. After that Jay was reduced to stealing from lesser partners, such as Major Abin A. Selover, who actually considered himself a friend of Gould’s. It was Selover who introduced Jay to a California friend of his, James R. Keene. After Keene and Selover had both been battered by Gould in a contest for control of Western Union, Jay and Selover happened to meet on the street one day. Jay tried to walk away, but for once in his life, Jay Gould was caught out in the open.

Selover grabbed Jay be the collar and shouted, “I’ll teach you to tell me lies!” The six foot tall Selover then threw Jay to the ground, and then yanked him up again by one hand, dangling him above the stairwell of a below-street level barbershop. With his free arm Selover began slapping the Mephistopheles of Wall Street and shouting, “Gould, you are a damn liar!” Nobody who witnessed the event interrupted to disagree. When Selover finally let go, Gould dropped 8 feet to the stairs. A stock broker the next day quipped, “It was characteristic of Mr. Gould that he landed on his feet.”

Overnight, Abin Selover became the most popular man in New York City. Jay Gould was wise enough not to press charges, since no jury could be expected to convict anyone of assaulting Jay Gould. Henceforth, Jay never went out without a body guard. He began to describe himself as the “most hated man in New York”, but there was a touch of pride in his voice when he said it. Selover eventually went broke, as did Keene. However, when he finally died in 1892, Jay Gould was the ninth richest man in America, worth about $77 million. He died a hero only to those who never did business with him. Gould scoffed at the idea that Wall Street should be regulated. “People will deal in chance….Would you not, if you stopped it, promote gambling?”

It was and is a philosophy which fails to see an advantage to drawing a line between gambling and investing. It is the philosophy of libertarianism. It is the philosophy of unmitigated greed. It was the philosophy of Jay Gould.

- 30 -

SNOUT YOUR WAR

2012-01-18T09:00:00.004-05:00

I don’t know why they called it the “Pig War”. The pig wasn’t mad at anybody. From the sketchy description we have it seems likely he was a Large Black, a breed “…known for its very docile nature, and …unaggressive temperament…”, according to Wikipedia. It would seem more logical then to call it “Lyman Cutlar’s War”, since he was the one with the musket, and he was pretty worked up on the morning of June 15, 1859, when he said he discovered the "scrofa domesticus" rooting in his potato patch. An unidentified male human was, according to Lyman, leaning on Lyman’s fence and laughing at the pig’s misdeeds. So outraged was Lyman that he immediately fetched his musket and dispatched the offending porker to Hog-Heaven, whereupon the human ran into the woods;' or so Lyman said.

Okay, it wasn’t charging Cossacks, and the pig wasn’t Napoleon from Animal Farm. But Lyman was an American and the two-toed ungulant was the property of the English owned Hudson’s Bay Company - and you get the feeling that somebody was looking for an excuse to start a shooting war.

In 1846 the United States and Great Britain thought they had avoided just this kind of trouble by agreeing to a U.S./Canadian border along the 49th parallel westward from the Rocky Mountains to the middle of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The border line on the map then made a jog to the south to allow the already settled Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island to remain on the British side of the border.

The problem was that right in the middle of the strait were the San Juan Islands, the largest of which was the 54 square miles of the island of San Juan. When the original border was drawn nobody in London or Washington knew the islands were even there. But as soon as London realized the truth, The Hudson Bay Company opened a sheep ranch, Belle Vue Farm, on the south coast of San Juan island, and notified the Americans that they now considered all of the San Juan islands to be English property.

The Americans countered, in 1853, by creating Washington Territory, and incorporating the San Juan islands into Washington's Whatcom County. Washington Territory even dispatched a sheriff to San Juan to collect taxes, and arrest the scofflaws, i.e. English citizens. But Charles Griffin, the Belle Vue Farm manager, (and owner of the aforementioned pig) treated the warrent as if it were a joke. The sheriff returned home, dragging 30 kidnapped and bleating sheep as compensation for his failure to place the British Empire under arrest.

And there the situation probably would have remained, except that in March of 1858 gold was discovered in British Columbia. This drew an instant wave of American prospectors, the vast majority of whom did not find any gold. But, over the winter of 1858/59, about 30 of the ambitious, restless but thin-blooded Americans, including one Lyman Cutlar, escaped the brutal Canadian winter along the Fraser River by moving to the more temperate coastal climate of San Juan Island. Once they reached San Juan island, and being belivers in "Manifest Destiny", they immediately started behaving as if they were the landlords, including executing English pigs for eating American potatoes.

This might be the place to point out that I think Layman Cutlar’s story is far too convenient. He claims the pig invaded his potato patch on the very anniversary of the signing of the 1846 treaty - June 15th. Secondly, he mentions a human witness and a fence, both important proof of ownership under American homesteader law. And then there was his behavior post his pork-a-cide.

Lyman offered to pay ten dollars for the deceased little ham hock, a fair price back east. But this being the wilds of British Columbia the British manager, Mr. Griffin (above), demanded one hundred dollars, a more accurate if slightly inflated quotation. When Lyman refused to even counter that offer, an arrest warrant was issued for Lyman Cutlar. And even though the warrant was never executed the local Americans appealed to their local governor of Washington Territory, for a redress of grievances.

That request eventually went to Brigadier General William Selby Harney (above), a native Tennesaen who had inherited Andrew Jacksons hatred of the British and the command of Washington Territory. Harney immediately dispatched 66 soldiers to San Juan, under the command of the mecurial Captain George Picket.

Being a hopeless romantic George Picket arrived on San Juan and announced, “We’ll make a Bunker Hill of it”, even though his orders were to avoid shooting (and evidently not remembering that Bunker Hill was an American defeat). Picket encouraged his men to taunt the British sailors and marines dispatched to keep an eye on the Americans. It seems he was also hoping to start a shooting war.

Pickett's provocative behavior led to British and then American and then to more British reinforcements, until there were five British warships with 2,000 men and 70 cannons anchored off San Juan island, facing less than 500 Americans with 14 cannons. The island had become a powder keg guarded by children playing with matches.

It was at this point that President of the United States, James Buchanan, first learned about the dead pig on San Juan…from the newspapers. He ordered 77 year old General-in-chief Winfield Scott to get out there and get things under control. The President would probably have agreed with the British Admiral who said the players on the scene seemed determined to “…involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig”.

It took the ancient Scott (above) eight months to travel from Washington, D.C. down the Atlantic coast, across the Carribean, on horseback across the Isthmus of Panama and then up the Pacific coast to Washington Territory. But once there, as commanding officer, he quickly negotiated a truce. Both sides agreed to reduce their forces to 100 men each, and, at British insistance, Picket was replaced. Immediately a sensible calm was restored.

Tourists boated out from British Vancouver to observe the dueling artillery practices and stare at the soldiers, while officers from both sides shared whiskey and cigars in farm manager Charles Griffin’s home. I'm willing to bet that they also shared an occasional ham. Certain that an eventual compromise would be reached, and having the distraction of a civil war looming back in America, General Scott wasted no time in returning to Washington, D.C.

But almost the minute General Scott left Washington Territory, General Harney ordered Picket back to San Juan Island to resume his beligerant command. Clearly Harney’s intent was to stir up more trouble. But when word of Pickett’s reinstatement reached Washington, D.C., Harney was immediately relieved of his command. And that was pretty much the end of General Harney’s career. He was allowed to quietly retire in 1863, just about the time that his former junior officer, George Pickett, was directing 15,000 rebels charging across the battlefield at Gettysburg.

If Pickett had succeeded in starting a war with England over San Juan Island in 1860, I have to wonder if he would have still resigned his commission that year and joined the Confederacy. Or perhaps his and Harney’s plan all along had been to distract Washington, D.C. with a war in Washington Territory, making it easier for the South to seccede. There were plenty of Americans in 1860, including Abraham Lincoln’s new Secretary of State, William Seward, who thought a war with England would rally the south back to defense of the American Union, and a few who felt such a war would have the opposite effect.

All such ideas were pipe dreams. It is not an accident that Lyman Cutlar disappeared from history when no war was fought in defense of his potato patch. He also disappeared from San Juan island. The border dispute was finally settled in 1871, when America and England submitted to “binding arbitration”, overseen by Kaiser William I of Germany. And in 1872 The Kaiser awarded the San Juan Islands to America. So America won the islands without anybody else being killed, not even another pig.

Every morning on San Juan Island, Washington state, U.S. Park Service Rangers raise the stars and stripes over the "American Camp" on the south coast of the island, and the the British Union Jack over the north coast. And this is the only spot on American soil where the U.S. government affords honors to a foreign flag, in memory of two nations too sensible to fight a war, and of a pig who gave his life so that others might live.

http://www.nps.gov/sajh/historyculture/the-pig-war.htm

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AIR HEADS Part Eleven Post Mortium

2012-01-15T09:00:00.004-05:00

I wonder how many people worked in the advertising department at the Cole Motor Company in Indianapolis in 1911? Besides supporting Bob Fowler’s “Cole Flyer” transcontinental flight, they also had a big balloon that made appearances at county fairs, and they contributed a share in the founding of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. As their slogan went, “There’s a Touch of Tomorrow in All Cole Does Today”. Well, the touch was not to last forever. Joe Cole (above) had built a fortune in horse buggies before he borrowed enough cash from Harvey Firestone to start his auto company in 1909. He ordered the parts from other manufacturers and assembled them in the Cole building. “A man’s car any woman can drive.”

Joe offered such innovations as “adjustable door glasses” (i.e., removable windows) a 15 foot long dashboard light and a speedometer that read up to 75 mph; unfortunately the car only went up to 45 mph. Bigwigs at General Motors wanted to buy out Cole, and when Joe wouldn’t sell they just bought up his suppliers and gradually cut him off. With the post war recession of 1920-21 Joe realized the jig was up and began a careful liquidation of his company. In 1924, after he closed up his firm, Joe died suddenly. His family rented out the building (above) in Indianapolis and kept the name, "the Cole Building" into the 1970’s; thus faired the man who sponsored Bob Fowler's flight.

After he reached El Paso in 1911, it took Bob Fowler(above) a month just to escape Texas. He crash landed in a rice field outside of Seixas, Louisiana, on Christmas Eve. He landed in New Orleans at about 3 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. It took him until February of 1912 to reach Florida. He landed on the sand at Jacksonville Beach on February 12th, 1912 - not that anybody noticed, what with the Titanic going down just two nights later. Bob would later observe with understatement, “I was the first to start and the last to finish.” It had taken him 116 days and 72 hours of actual flight time to cover the 2,800 miles across America. The very next year Bob Fowler made the first non-stop transcontinental flight – across the 36 miles of the Isthmus of Panama. Bob Fowler was a pretty crafty fellow.

Bob sold The “Cole Flyer” in 1912, and after being used in the movie business for a few years, it was sold again, this time for scrap. The engine is still on display at the Exposition Museum in Los Angles. In 1916 Bob started the “Fowler Airplane Corporation” in his home town of San Francisco. He modified and sold Curtis JN-4’s (“Jennys”) to the U.S. Army as trainers, and after WWI he started Bluebird Airways, a passenger service. He retired to San Jose and died in 1966, at the healthy old age of 82.

Jimmy Ward (above), the ex-jockey who had the good sense to drop out of the amazing race, died in Florida sometime after 1917, allegedly of stomach cancer. He was buried in an unmarked paupers grave. Some of his fellow aviation pioneers collected money to give him a more respectful funeral, but I can find no record of that ever happening. Perhaps somebody down in Florida can correct my mistake.

Cal Rodgers was testing a new airplane on Wednesday April 3, 1912, just off shore of Long Beach, California, when he ran into a flock of sea gulls. The plane banked sharply 45 degrees and slid into the surf, crashing just feet from where Cal had posed grinning in the surf with the “Vin Fiz” the previous December.

The engine broke loose from its mounts and crushed Cal, breaking his neck. He was still breathing when swimmers pulled him from the water, but he died soon after. Cal Rodgers was the 127th death since the Wright Brothers flight in 1903, and the 22nd American aviator killed. Considering the number of people flying in 1912, those were still terrible odds.

Cal's mother, Maria (Rodgers) Sweitzer, took procession of her son’s body and had it shipped back to Pittsburg. There Calbraith Perry Rodgers was buried in Allegheny Cemetery under an elaborate tombstone (above), marked with the words “I Endure, I Conquer.”

Cal’s brother John took procession of the “Vin Fiz Flyer” and had it shipped back to Ohio, to the Wright Brother's shops, to be repaired. He offered the Flyer to the Smithsonian, but they already had a Wright B, so instead, in 1917, the Flyer was donated to the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburg. In 1934 the Smithsonian changed their minds and bought the “Vin Fiz Flyer”. Refurbished and rebuilt, that is the plane that hangs from the ceiling in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

And little Maude was determined to endure and conquer as well. After lengthy court battles with her ex-mother-in-law in California, Maude was awarded legal possession of the “Vin Fiz Flyer”. How could this be? Wasn’t the Flyer back in Ohio, being rebuilt? It was. But the contents of the repair car of the “Vin Fiz Special” contained enough spare parts, many of which may have actually flown sections of the transcontinental voyage, to construct a second “Vin Fiz Flyer” and still claim it as an “original.”

Two years after Cal’s death, and after the court battles with Maria had finally been settled, Maude married Charlie “Wiggie” Wiggin, who had shown such faith and devotion to her Cal; two lonely souls who shared an adoration of another man. “Wiggie”, had, by this time, acquired his own pilot’s license. And Maude and Wiggie made a living for a few years barnstorming their “Vin Fiz Flyer” around the country. And then they quietly faded out of history.

It would be ten years later when Jimmy Doolittle would cross the continent in less than a day - 21 hours 19 minutes, with just one stop for fuel. And as you sit in your tiny passenger seat, crammed four to an aisle, held prisoner on the tarmac for endless hours, forced to use a toilet designed for a diminutive Marquise de Sade, charged extra for a micro-waved “snack”, a pillow, a blanket, a soda or a thimble full of peanuts, even the privlige of using the rest room...

...consider the sacrifices of those who suffered before you; landing in chicken coops, landing in tree tops, landing in barbed wire fences, landing in Texas for day after day. And remember the immortal words of Cal Rodgers; “I am not in this business because I like it, but because of what I can make out of it.” It has become the mantra of every airline passenger world wide.

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THE GREATEST POLTICIAN OF ALL TIME

2012-01-13T09:00:00.002-05:00

I hear the complaints piling up again, about all the crooked, two-faced, lying politicians. And, there always being a coming election, most of these descrptions seem to be coming from the mouths of other politicians. But it seems to me that the objections and the job description are nearly identical. The rules of politics were first laid down at least 2,400 years ago, and they have not been improved upon since. To be successful a politician must first be elected, and second he or she must be re-elected. And the proof of these simple rules was firmly established by the golden boy of ancient Greek democracy, the man who turned hypocrisy, sycophancy, performance and prevarication into an art form, the greatest politician of all time bar none, Alcibiades Alcmaeonidae. It wasn’t that after Alcibiades they broke the mold, it was that Alcibiades was the mold.

His world was shaped by his uncle and guardian, Pericles (above), who defined a great leader as someone who “…knows what must be done and is able to explain it; loves one’s country and is incorruptible.” Having decided that Athens and Sparta were destined for war, Pericles devised a most unusual strategy. He first displayed this strategy in 430 and again 429 B.C. Spartan armies invaded Athenian territory (called Attica), burned crops and villages and took hostages. But the Athenian army refused to give battle. The lost crops did not worry Pericles because he was relying on the Athenian fleet to bring in grain from Egypt and the Ukraine. Pericles’ plan was to frustrate the Spartans by avoiding battle with them until the eventual internal political dissent encouraged them to end the war to Athen's advantage. And it might have worked but for one unanticipated event. A plague arrived on the grain ships from Egypt in 428 B.C. and killed perhaps a third of the population of Athens, including Pericles.

The abrupt vacuum at the top of Athenian politics was an opportunity for the young Alcibiades (above). He was a superstar right from the start. First, he was a real Olympic athlete and “the Adonis of Athens…tall, shapely, remarkably handsome, fond of showy attire and luxurious surroundings…” (p 221, Baldwin Project) He was a powerful speaker whose slight lisp made him all the more endearing. And he seduced women and men with equal ease and equally often. He was the ancient Bill Clinton without the scandal attached to the sex.

At 19 years of age, Alcibiades even beguiled that old pedophile Socrates. Reading Plato’s version of their dialogs is like watching a snake charmer with arthritis toying with a hungry python. Socrates began by berating Alcibiades’ youthful arrogance. “You say you do not need any person for anything …For you think you are the most beautiful and greatest”. But eventually Socrates fell under Alcibiades' spell, calling him “…the greatest of the Greeks.” Still, Socrates shared his bed with Alcibiades only once; if Athens herself had only been that wise Athens would have been better off.

It seems that all that Alcibiades learned from Socrates was that he needed a project worthy of his ambition. And in 415 B.C. Alcibiades suggested a cloak and dagger strike against the island of Sicily, a commando operation to capture Messina and threaten the port city of Syracuse, Sparta’s strongest ally. But Alcibiades’ political opponent in Athens, Nicias, did not want Alcibiades given the chance to succeed. He warned the city council that such an expedition would have to be hugely expensive, requiring as many as 140 ships and 6,000 men. He meant to mock Alcibiade's idea. But to the shock of both Nicias and Alcibiades, the Athenian council voted to fund the massive mission which neither man had wanted, annd then placed both Alcibiades and Nicias in charge of it.

Somehow the two foes managed to assemble the huge force. But Alcibiades should have been more worried when Nicias had not objected that most of the officers appointed to the force were allies of Alcibiades. Because when the Athenians succesfully landed on an empty beach outside of Syracuse they found a trireme from Athens had arrived there ahead of them. It seems the night before the expedition had sailed, somebody had gone around Athens and wacked off all the phalluses on statues of of the god Hermes. As soon as Alcibiades had sailed away, Nicias' allieas had accused Alcibiades of masterminding the sacrilege. And with most of Alcibiades' allies away on the expedition, the Athenian council had ordered Alcibiades home to stand trial for heresy and treason. It was obvious that Nicias was behind this, and Alcibiades had no intention of trusting his fate to the good will of his enemies.

On his way back to Athens, Alcibiades jumped ship at Thurii, and boldly contacted the Spartans. He offered them information on the Athenian expedition’s plans to capture Syracuse. When that information proved correct the Spartans warily agreed to allow Alcibiades sanctuary in their city - what a foolish thing to do.

Alcibiades had made his first betrayal. Once in Sparta, he converted from a luxury loving Athenian into a prime example of Spartan brutality and sadomasochism.

Like any good Spartan politician he began wearing simple clothes and eating cold gruel and exercising in public with the other sadomasochistic Spartans. He advised the Spartans on a strategy that led to the complete defeat of Nicias and the slaughter and capture of the entire Athenian force. In fact Alcibiades had become one of the most respected and trusted Spartans in Sparta - until one morning in 412 B.C. when the Spartan king Agis II came home unexpectedly to speak to his queen and saw Alcibiades jumping out of her bedroom window. Agis II put out a contract on Alcibiades, and the golden boy disappeared, next turning up in Persia, as an advisor at the court of the satrapy Tissaphernes, who had been secretly funding the Spartan war effort against Athens. Alcibiades had just made his second betrayal.

Tissaphernes had been hoping to weaken the Athenians. But now he had begun to worry that the Spartans were getting too strong, which is exactly what he was told by his new political advisor, Alcibiades. On his advice the Persians cut back their cash support for Sparta. At the same time Alcibiades put out peace feelers to his fellow Athenians. He convinced them that he could bring the Persians into the war on Athens’ side. Of course Tissaphernes had no intention of committing his forces until both Greek cities were exhausted. But by the time the Athenians realized this, according to the poet Aristophanes, they yearned for Alcibiades even while they hated him. This was to be Alcibiades’ third betrayal.

The Athenian generals made Alcibiades an Admiral, and he engineered an Athenian naval victory at Abydos, near the Hellespont, and burned the little village of Byzantium. After another Alcibiades victory the Spartans sent home a desperate note. “Our ships are lost. Mindarus (their commander) is dead. The men are starving. We do not know what to do.”

In 407 B.C. Alcibiades made his triumphal return to Athens itself, to cheering throngs and the return of his property, which had been seized when he had changed sides the first time and joined Sparta. All the charges still outstanding against him were dropped. But they were not forgotten.

His last betrayal had convinced the Persians to again fully fund the Spartan war effort. And in 406 B.C. Alcibiades sailed with 100 ships on a mission to assist Phocaea, which was under siege from Spartan forces. While making a scout, Alcibiades left 80 ships at anchor at Notium under his second in command. But while he was away the fool brought on an engagement with the Spartan fleet, and was soundly defeated. His enemies in Athens blamed Alcibiades for the disaster, and he was forced into exile once again, and this time it looked final.

By 404 B.C. Alcibiades was living in retirement with a mistress in Phyrgia, in what is today central Turkey, in a mountain cabin. In the dark of night assassins set the house on fire and murdered Alcibiades as he rushed out side. Says the Baldwin Project, “Thus perished, at less than fifty years of age, one of the most brilliant and able of all the Athenians.”

Some say it was the Spartans who killed him, and some that it was his Athenian enemies. And some say it was the brothers of a Persian woman he had seduced. If Alcibiades did not fit his uncle’s definition of a great leader, still he had been a successful politician for each of the three great powers of his time – Athens, Sparta and Persia. How could you not consider him the greatest politician of any age?

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BATS IN THE ATTIC

2012-01-11T09:00:00.001-05:00

I can’t say she was beautiful, but then photographs are a poor record of personality. The newspapers called her “comely”, which the dictionary defines as “pleasing and wholesome in appearance.” But Dolly Oesterreich (pronounced "Ace-strike") (above) was not wholesome. She was, when our story begins, about 33 years old, an age at which a woman, so we are told, reaches the peak of her sensuality. However, I suspect that Dolly had always been skilled at seduction.

For 15 years Dolly (left) had been married to Fred Oesterreich (right), a man whose only selling point as a husband was that he was wealthy. He owned an apron factory in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he was constantly berating his 60 seamstresses to work faster. He pinched every penny and drove himself as hard as he drove his employees. As a result of his dedication to his job, the Oesterreiches got richer. And Dolly got lonelier. So it should have come as no surprise in 1913, when Dolly asked her husband to dispatch a particular repairman she had seen about the factory, to fix her personal sewing machine.

His name was Otto Sanhuber, and when our story begins, he was all of 17. Again it seems, the photographs do not do him justice. To the casual observer he looked like a mousy milktoast of a man. But Dolly must have recognized that, beyond Otto’s nebish exterior, loomed an undiscovered Hercules of passion.

Dolly answered Otto's knock attired only in a robe and slippers. She showed him to her bedroom, where she kept her Singer. She lounged on the bed while Otto adjusted her bobbin. Dolly brushed back her hair. Otto tightened her belts. Dolly lifted a leg. Otto greased her shuttle shaft. Dolly let her robe fall open. And according to Otto, he threaded her needle eight times that first afternoon.

They began by sneaking assignations in the Oesterrich home while Fred was at work, but a needling neghbor warned Fred about the man who was constantly coming and going from his house. Dolly was forced to hem and haw an excuse. First the love struck pair substituted Otto’s depressing rooms, and then a hotel. But every rendevouses ran the risk of uncovering their affair. Eventually, Dolly conceived a simple pattern for their love. Otto quit his job and moved into the attic of the Oesterreich home. A curtain was thus drawn and there would be no more comings and goings - none visible to the neighbors, anyway.

The thread of Otto’s life had found his spool. The hook of Dolly’s life had found her eye. For three years they pulled the wool over Fred’s eyes. For three years Otto slept above his mistresses’ marriage bed, slipping out of his hidden attic room by day to help Dolly with her housework, and once the dishes were done, to pump her treadle and spin her crank. There were loose threads, of course, that threatened to unfray the fabric of thier affair. But with a little tacking, awl was mended.

Eventually Fred got the notion of moving his factory to Los Angeles, and in 1918 he bought Dolly a grand home on North St. Andrew’s place in that city. Dolly made certain the new home had a tidy tiny attic room, so Otto would feel comforted too. Life was a perfect fit for Dolly and Otto and Fred, as long as Fred never noticed how much it was costing him to feed and clothe one woman.

This happy scene unraveled on the night of Tuesday, August 22, 1922, four years after the move to Los Angeles. Fred and Dolly returned from a dinner party and a fight broke out. Fred lost his temper and actually struck Dolly. And that was when Otto rushed to the rescue from behind his hidden access door, carrying a .22 pistol. The two men struggled. Otto’s gun went off three times, and Fred went down. His string had run out. A few moments later, the police arrived to discover an apparent house robbery gone bad. The husband was dead on the living room floor and the hysterical wife was locked in the hall closet. Still, there was something that made the police suspicous. When sweatered by the cops, Dolly insisted the couple had never fought. The police, many of them married men, knew that had to be a lie, but they couldn't prove it.

Dolly was arrested, and charged (above) with the murder of her husband. While she was in lockup Dolly pleated with one of her lawyers, Herman Shapiro, to do her a tiny favor. Dolly claimed to have an addeled half-brother named Otto who lived in her attic, who must be running short of food by now. Already under Dolly’s beguiling influence, Herman agreed to deliver sustinunce to the man. When he tapped on the hidden attic door, a bespeckeled little face appeared and wolfed down the food, and talked; he talked as if he had no one to speak to for years. He was, in fact, explained Otto, a sewing machine repairman who years ago had come to fix Dolly’s machine and stayed to be her “sex slave”. Otto said nothing about Fred’s murder, but Herman was no fool.

Without knowledge of Otto, the Police case against Dolly fell apart, and she was released. But Herman Shapiro found he cottened to Dolly, and he insisted that before anything happened between them, Otto had to go. So, in 1923, Otto moved out of the attic. He went to Canada. Therehe he married. But, eventually, in search of work, he moved himself and his wife back to Los Angeles. In L.A. he got a job as a porter in a hotel. And all might have lived there happily ever with his devoted wife, if only Herman Shapiro kept his big fat mouth sewn shut.

In 1930, eight years after Fred’s death, Herman finally realized the seducrtess from Milwaukee was never going to marry him, especially after he caught her in a lie, and realized she had taken up behind his back with her business manager, Mr. Ray Bert Hendrick. A lawyer scorned, Herman went to the police and spilled the beans. He confessed the details of his encounter with the man in the attic. The police checked the long since abandoned Oesterreich homes in Wisconson and Los Angeles and discovered Otto’s hidden abodes, and the veil was stripped from their eyes. Dolly's life quickly unraveled. Otto (above, with glasses, center, showing off his hidaway) was arrested, and he talked and he showed. The prosecutors were in stiches. They fitted Dolly for a pair of handcuffs.

Otto was convicted of manslaughter. But, since the statute of limitations for manslaughter was eight years, which had just run out, Otto was released immediately after his conviction. He then faded from history. I wonder if his marraige survived the revolations. Dolly’s trial ended in a hung jury, the majority favoring her aquital. She was never recharged. Dolly (above) lived out the rest of her life living over a garage, surviving on the meger remains of the fortune that Fred had amassed - which would have infuriated Fred, had he not been dead. In the end I guess Otto was still needling Dolly. She did not remarry until 1961, at the age of 75. Her new husband was her long time business manager, Ray Bert Hendrick. She died just two weeks later.

It brings to mind the way that Leo Tolstoy began his novel Anna Karenina; “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. And this family was surely particularly unhappy, because whatever it was that Otto and Fred and Dolly were doing together, they were doing it tailored in their very own ill-fitting way.

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AIR HEADS Part Ten Tail Wind

2012-01-08T09:00:00.002-05:00

I ask you to imagine yourself as the engineer on a westbound freight on the El Paso and Southwest Railroad. It is November of 1911, and the big steam boiler in front of you is a living, soot spewing metal beast with a hot, coal fed craw your stoker has to constantly feed. You climb out of the Rio Grande valley, the empty copper ore cars behind you rumbling around Sierra del Cristo Rey mountain. Then you turn south, coming within yards of the Mexican border at Anapra, before the line swings north again, past “The Lizard”, a basalt dyke basking in the sun on a mountain shoulder (in the distance, above) high above the dieing mining town of Lake Valley. And then, after wending their way between lonely unnamed desert peaks and road cuts, the rails ramp down onto the high Chihuahuan desert floor and the siding and water tower at Mammoth, New Mexico. And that is when you see it. It looks like a giant insect speeding towards you at 40 or 50 miles an hour. But it can’t be. Can it?

In fact it can not. What you are seeing, at a time when most Americans had not yet seen an airplane, is the “Cole Flyer”, piloted by Bob Fowler, using a hand car as a catapult to become airborne, an aviation first. So the engineer can be excused for not recognizing what he saw, as it had never been seen before, ever, in the four billion year history of the earth. It was a desperate measure, tried after Fowler had been trapped in the sand for four days, 16 miles west of El Paso, Texas. The Mexican border was only three miles to the south. And staring head on at the steam engine bearing down on him, Bob Fowler said later he wondered if he was going to become the first pilot in history to crash into a locomotive. Bob lifted off the hand car at the last possible second and became airborne, missing the front of the oncoming locomotive he said, by “…no more than ten feet.” I doubt if the engineer comprehended what he had seen, particularly after it flew off over his head, followed by the shattering crash of the handcar against the breast of the huge iron beast. This makes Bob Fowler the world’s first UFO, if it really happened.

I had my doubts. But according to the New York Times, on July 24, 1904, three New Jersey teenager couples borrowed a similar handcar for a Saturday night “joy ride”. After some drinking and dancing, at about 11 p.m., they found themselves pumping their way across a bridge over the Delaware River with a Lakawana passenger Express bearing down on them. It sounds like a turn of the century version of “Saturday Night Fever”. All the couples jumped to safety, with only one male, Albert Jones, suffering injury, a broken shoulder. According to the Times, the express “barely escaped being wrecked”, but it did escape. So I guess it could have happened the way Fowler tells it. Bob would use a handcar catapult to launch himself three more times on his journey to the Atlantic Ocean. But he would never again come so close to being killed by a locomotive.

Meanwhile, back in Los Angels, Cal Rogers was slowly recovering from his injuries. Propped up in a wheel chair, with both legs in casts, his wife hovering on his right, his mother perched judgmentally to his left and his brother standing back out of the line of fire between them (above), Cal assured the doubtful reporters, “I’m going to finish this flight, and I’m going to finish it with the same machine.” It must have been a contentious press conference, since everyone in the photo looks as if one of them has just stepped in something very unpleasant. I wonder who that could have been?

Cal had, by my rough count, crashed 70 times in crossing the country, (23 times in Texas alone!) or about once every 43 miles. His sponsors must have been fed up with the repair bills. And with all the engine problems of late, Cal must have been a bit uneasy about trusting his life to the skills of the 17 year old Charlie “Wiggie” Wiggen, his new chief mechanic (with Cal, below), since Charlie Taylor had opted out of the little opera being staged aboard the “Vin Fiz Special” back in Texas.

Poor old Cal; one great-grandfather, Oliver Perry, had been the hero of the 1813 battle of Lake Erie. His other great-grandfather, John Rogers, had been captain of the USS Constitution. His great-grand-uncle, Matthew Perry, had sailed four warships into Tokyo Bay and opened Japan to trade in 1853. But Cal’s own father had turned away from the sea and became a cavalry officer, with a rather less distinguished record. He had fought bravely against the Cheyenne in the freezing rain at Slim Buttes in 1876, and even against the Nez Pierce in 1877. But his career had come to a shockingly less than glorious conclusion on August 23, 1878, when he was struck by lightening.

You might say his father's demise left the young Cal with a bit of a negative buzz about him. And then there was the deafness thing, and his mother’s remarriage. So his family history may explain why Cal was so determined to make it to Long Beach, no matter what the obstacles. He explained, in an interview he gave just after reaching Pasadena, “I am not in this business because I like it, but because of what I can make out of it.”

On December 10, 1911 Cal hobbled out to the Vin Fiz one last time. He lashed his crutches to the wing strut, checked his lucky soda bottle and waited while Weggie primed his propellers. Then he rolled (Weggie having replaced the skids with wheels) across the Compton field where he had crashed weeks before, and rose into the air. Twelve miles later he settled down in front of 50,000 people in Long Beach.

After landing, Cal had his plane pushed forward until the wheels were in the surf. Cal Rogers had said he would reach the Pacific Ocean, and now he had. But whether it was in the same airplane was debatable. The only parts that remained of the “Vin Fiz Flyer” that had taken off from Sheepheads Bay, New York on September 17th. were one vertical tail rudder and the oil pan. Nobody was even willing to claim it was the same Vin Fiz bottle hanging off the strut.

On New Years Day, 1912, Cal made a few hundred dollars flying over the Rose Parade (above) and dropping rose petals. He needed the money. Cal and Mable Rogers were now flat broke. Congratulations, to the Winners!

- 30

VOTING REPUBLICAN

2012-01-06T09:00:00.002-05:00

I would say that Bertrand Snell is a shinning example of the “Peter Principle”. Bertrand (above, with his ideological opponent, FDR) started out life as a bookkeeper. Then he successfully ran a cheese factory and a lumber company in upstate New York. He was well qualified to fill both of those jobs. For a time he was the president of a small college. All this success led, in 1915, to Bertrand being elected to Congress. In 1931 he became the Chairman of the Republican National Committee. That led, in 1932, to his being elected Minority Leader in the House of Representatives. And that made him the primary architect of the disaster which befell the Republican Party the first time they ran against the New Deal. In short, it was Bertrand Snell’s fault. Of course, he had some help.

Herbert Hoover not only lost the 1932 Presidential Election but he lost it by almost 18 percentage points. His ineffectualness at dealing with the Great Depression (the stock market crash occurred 6 months into his term) was so obvious that Herbert won only 6 states – Pennsylvania, Delaware, R.I., Vermont, New Hampshire & Maine. And yet Herbert still had hopes he could engineer a come back, even though the New Deal had created six million jobs, had doubled industrial production and sent corporate profits from a $2 billion loss under Hoover to a $5 billion profit under Roosevelt. For one thing, business leaders were not backing Roosevelt, no matter how much he had done for the economy.

On June 9. 1936, Herbert addressed the Republican Convention in the Public Auditorium in Cleveland, Ohio, and did his very best to rally the faithful to his cause. As Time Magazine detailed, “After 15 minutes (of) yelling, shrieking (and) hooting, (Hoover) was allowed to begin. …"Fundamental American liberties are at stake", he said. "Is the Republican Party ready…to cast your all upon the issue?", he asked "Yes!" roared the crowd. "Have you determined to enter in a holy crusade for freedom which shall determine the future and the perpetuity of a nation of free men?" he asked. "Yes!" roared the crowd, in ecstasy.” The faithful went on chanting “Hoo-ver, Hoo-ver, Hoo-ver,” long after Herbert had left the stage.

Noted Time Magazine; “The demonstration could not be stopped for half an hour, even when Speaker Snell tried to introduce a little old lady, surprisingly pert for her 77 years, the widow of President Benjamin Harrison.” Finally Bertrand banged the big gavel and informed the crowd that Herbert had already boarded a train for New York. The floor demonstrations paused for a breath, milled about in confusion for a few moments and then slowly petered out in disappointment.

Except...Herbert had not even left the building. He was waiting just off stage to be recalled by the carefully prepared demonstrations and proclaimed the nominee by acclamation. What Hoover had not counted on was that Chairmand Bertrand had already determined that renominating Hoover would be a disaster for Republicans. Bertrand had decided the party nomine would be Governor Alf Landon, known affectionately to the faithful as “The Kansas Coolidge” - a moniker certain to inspire the base. And there were reasons Bertrand was optimistic about the governor.

Alf was the only Republican governor re-elected in 1934. He had a reputation as a fiscal conservative who cut taxes and balanced the state budget. That made him the Republican wonder-kinde, the perfect man to oppose the “tax and spend” Roosevelt.

There were a few problems with that image, of course. First, Landon balanced the Kansas budgets because he was required by law to balance them, and even that had been possible only because the New Deal had pumped millions of dollars into the Kansas economy to offset the state deficits. Secondly, Alf publicly supported parts of the New Deal, so many parts that he was at odds with the Republican party platform. And the third problem with his choice as the nominee was that Alf was a terrible public speaker. He mumbled. And like any good mid-westerner even when speaking clearly he didn’t blow his own horn very much. As H. L. Mencken noted, he "simply lacks the power to inflame the boobs."

The party platform had been engineered by Bertrand and forty-four year old John Daniel Miller Hamilton, the “crinkly haired” “jut-jawed” G.O.P.’s general counsel, who Republicans felt reeked of “animal vigor.” Hamilton was actually paid $15,000 a year to be the parties’ attack dog. He was described by one fellow Republican as having, “…a seven-devil lust to live and shine under the blessings of the rich”. Hamilton made Alf's nominating speech, and then read a telegram from the Governor promising to support the anti-New Deal platform, which Hamilton had helped to write.

Said the platform; “For three long years the New Deal Administration has dishonored American traditions…has been guilty of frightful waste and extravagance, …it has created a vast multitude of new offices, …set up a centralized bureaucracy, and sent out swarms of inspectors to harass our people. It has bred fear and hesitation in commerce and industry, thus discouraging new enterprises, preventing employment and prolonging the depression….We pledge ourselves: To preserve the American system of free enterprise, private competition, and equality of opportunity.. We advocate: Abandonment of all New Deal policies that raise production costs, increase the cost of living, and thereby restrict buying, reduce volume and prevent reemployment. …”. To read the Republican platform you would have thought the nation was in much worse shape after the New Deal, than before.

Bertrand had a master plan for victory, funded by a $14 million war chest ($207 ½ million in today's dollars), with over a million dollars of that coming from just three families – DuPont, Pew and Rockefeller – and the rest almost entirely from business leaders anxious to prevent further Federal regulations of their business.

And then there was “The Liberty League,” described by one historian as “…the best-financed and the most professionally run…anti-big-government organization ever to come down the pike.” The League raised and spent as much cash as the two established parties combined (30% of it coming from the DuPont family alone). Its national headquarters occupied 31 rooms in the National Press Building and there were 20 state branches. Hamilton confessed later, "Without Liberty League money we wouldn't have had a national headquarters."

The campaign that followed saw the constant Republican repetition of attack. The New Deal became “The Raw Deal”. Franklyn Delano Roosevelt became “Stalin Delano Roosevelt”. William Randolph Hearst asserted in a pro-Landon editorial, “The Bolshevist tyranny in Russian has ordered all bolshevists, communists and revolutionaries in the Untied States to support Roosevelt!" It all sounds so familar, doesn't it?

In late October 1936 the Republican National Committee sent checks for $5.00 to 400 black pastors in Maryland, along with a letter, which began, “Dear Brother,” and then argued that the G.O.P. had always done more to help blacks than the Democrats had.

The Young Republicans organization was founded during this election, to get out the youth vote. And fashion shows were staged to encourage women to support the party. Every show would start with a woman wearing a wooden barrel on suspenders, marked, “If The New Deal Wins”, followed by lovely models in Paris designs, marked “If Landon Wins." Women were expected to be swayed by such "fashion politics".

However, it appears that most Americans saw all of this Republican effort in the same light as FDR did, as illustrated by a story Roosevelt wrote himself for a speech he delivered in Boston. Said Roosevelt, “In the summer of 1933 a nice old gentleman fell off a pier. He was unable to swim. A friend ran down the pier, dived overboard and pulled him out. But his silk hat floated away with the tide. After the old gentleman was revived he was effusive in his thanks. He praised his friend for saving his life. Today, three years later, the old man is berating his friend because the silk hat was lost.”

The election of November 3, 1936 was the most lopsided since James Monroe ran unopposed in 1820. Eighty-three percent of eligible voters showed up at the polls and Roosevelt won almost 61% of their vote. He carried every state in the union except Vermont and Maine, giving rise to the Democratic twist on the old adage, “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont”.

Roosevelt won 532 electoral votes to Landon’s 8. Seventy-one percent of Black Americans voted Democratic, as well as 57% of women, 63% of men, 76% of low income voters, 80% of Catholics and 86% of Jewish voters. After the election the Democrats held the Senate, 75-16, and the House contained 332 Democrats to just 88 Republicans. Things would get even worse for the Republicans in the next few years. John D. Hamilton would say after the election, "The Lord himself couldn't have beaten Roosevelt in 1936, much less the Liberty League."

Maybe; but the election was the death knell of the Liberty League. They lingered into 1940, when the DuPont family finally pulled their funding, and the group then quietly died. Long before that John Hamilton had his own reactionary reckoning. In 1937 Hamilton's wife sued him for divorce, on the grounds of “gross neglect of duty, abandonment and extreme cruelty.” That same year Alf Landon had Hamilton removed as Party Chairman, as Landon rebuilt the party in his own Midwestern less reactionary less idelogical image.

Under Landon's non-red baiting non-FDR hating guidance the party stopped trying to overturn the New Deal and began to climb its way back. The Republicans would gain strength until 1948 when it looked like they were certain to regain the White House. But in that campaign they gloated too much about finally overturning the New Deal, and that public gloating handed Harry Truman his re-election. It was not until Ronald Reagan in his 1981 inaguration speech that the G.O.P again openly called for overturning the New Deal programs like Social Security and the Minimum Wage.

And Bertrand Snell, the Minority Leader of House of Represenatives? He had been one of the few Republicans re-elected in 1936. But he did not run again in 1938. Instead, he went into the newspaper business. He published the Potsdam, New York "Courier-Freeman" and ran it until 1949. He also became the owner of the New York State Oil Company. He was ably qualified for both of those jobs. He died in 1958, while a Republican had finally reoccupied the White House. But even Dwight D. Eisenhower was a RINO in some conservitive eyes. He was accused by the Republican right wing of running a "little New Deal", still just about the worst insult a Republican could imagine.

- 30 -

OLD SMOKEY

2012-01-04T09:00:00.004-05:00

I find it interesting that during the “carboniferous age”, our planet was far more flammable than it is today. About 420 million years ago the air was made up of 40% oxygen, compared to today’s 20%. All this “extra” oxygen came from the exultation of plants which had run such a riot over the earth that they laid down the vast coal beds which we mine today. But this plant-foria also left behind extensive beds of charcoal, hinting at vast forests that had burned before they could become coal. Today, dead wood burns at 150 F. But with twice the oxygen available, that flash point must have been reduced to within a few degrees of the high temperature of a hot summer’s day. The Silurian Age was, in short, a global tinder box, a hell on earth. It was not the kind of world a little bear cub could survive in for very long.

More recent charcoal records tell an equally interesting story. It seems that before the twentieth century there were a greater number of forest fires in North America than since. As long as there was a frontier, flames were used to conquer the land. Native Americans burned swaths of grasslands and forests to trap prey, and Europeans burned them to convert woods into farms and grazing lands. But with the closing of the American frontier – which happened in 1880 according to Professor Jackson Turner - all the land in America became property. It was owned by somebody or some corporation or the government. It was then that fire became not a tool but a threat. It was a brand new way of thinking about fire. For the first time in history humans had made the moral judgment that fire was usually a bad thing.

In 1891, the Forest Reserve Act was signed by U.S. President Benjamin Harrison. It put 13 million acres of forest under Federal protection, so it could be managed to maintain water drainage and lumber sources. Wildfires still remained largely beyond human control, even when humans had started them. In Yellowstone, America’s first National Park, only those 6 to 10 wild fires each year which broke out along the roads were combated, while the 35 fires in the back country each year started by lightning were allowed to burn themselves out; then came the drought year of 1910.

They called it The Great Fire. It was started by lightening on August 20th, with 2,000 fires already burning in the forests of Idaho and Montana. Three million acres burned, as did the towns of Avery, Falcon and Grand Forks, Idaho, De Borgia, Haugan, Henderson, Saltese, Taft and Tuscor, Montana. The smoke was seen as far away as Watertown, New York. Eighty-six humans were also killed, including 28 members of “The Lost Crew” of firefighters.

That fall Henry Graves, Chief of the Forest Service, decided the key to fighting wildfires was the quick arrival at the fire by an adequate, trained force of fire fighters, armed with the proper equipment. And by 1935 enough resources had been committed to this fast response that the new Chief, Ferdinand Silcox, could order that all wild fires reported, must brought under control by 10:00 a.m. the very next morning. By 1939 the Forest Service had even established “Smokejumpers”, men who would parachute into remote back country and with shovels and hand axes, isolate a wild fire and tamp down any smoking embers. And that was when the story turned Hollywood.

On August 13, 1942 Walt Disney released his fifth animated feature film, “Bambi”. In the climax of the movie the adult Bambi and his father struggle to survive a raging forest fire. The Forest Service thought they had a good fit with that dramatic sequence and rented Bambi for use on wildfire warning posters. Unfortunately the movie was a disappointing dud financially, when the forerunners of the NRA protested this “insult to American Sportsmen,” since the movie showed hunters shooting Bambi’s Mommy. Disney decided to withdraw the characters for the duration of World War Two, which meant that the Forest Service had to go looking for another animated spokes-figure.

At the time the most famous firefighter in America was “Smokey” Joe Martin of the NYFD, who had just died in October of 1941, at 86. So the Adverting Council, which drew up the posters for the Forest Service, decided any new spokes-figure should be named for him. The very first poster of the new figure was released on August 9, 1944. It showed Smokey Bear (No “The” in the name) wearing blue jeans and a Forest Rangers’ hat, pouring water on a campfire. Three years later they added the caption “Remember, Only YOU can prevent forest fires.”

On Thursday, May 4th, 1950, sparks from a camp stove started a fire in the Capitan Mountain Range, of the Lincoln National Forest in northern New Mexico. It eventually burned 17,000 acres. One of the crews sent to deal with the conflagration was a unit out of Fort Bliss, Texas. Over a couple of days, while they worked, the men saw a black bear cub running around in the burning forest, and finally, on May 9th, they were able to capture him. He seemed to have been abandoned, was about 3 months old, and was burned and badly singed.

The crew named him “Hotfoot Teddy” and turned him over to local veterinarian Edward Smith, his wife Ruth, and their two children, 15 year old Donald and four year old Judy. Everybody fell in love with Hotfoot, except Judy, who according to her brother, kept expecting the bear to bite her. And yet it was Judy who was used as a prop when the photographer from Life Magazine showed up to take pictures of the little bear with the bandaged feet.

Over night the little cute bear cub had his own comic strip and his own cartoons at the movies. The Forest Service recognized the value of Hotfoot, and he was flown to Washington, D.C., rechristened “Smokey Bear”, and given his own cage at the National Zoo. And there he resided, loping back and forth on his still tender feet until 1976, when he died at the ripe old age of 26. They buried the old guy back in New Mexico, in the forest of his birth. And about the time he died, so did the moral judgment about forest fires being bad.

As the Smokey Bear baby-boomers grew up, a more nuanced vision of fire in the wilderness has taken root. The Forest Service no longer uses the phrase “Forest Fire”, exchanging it for “Wildfire.” In 1965 , 94% of the public approved of the under control by 10 a.m. policy. By 1970 that percentage had fallen to 46%, and by 2004 only 6%. Part of that was probably the cost of fighting the fires; in an average year over 84,000 wildfires burn over 3 million acres, at a cost of over $540 million, and the lives of 16 firefighters.

There is the perception that these numbers are going up, and but it is hard to measure that based on something less than a century of hard data. After all, the “Great Fire” of 1910 burned 3 million acres by itself. In 1988 Yellowstone Nation Park suffered 99,000 acres burned, 36% of the park. But nobody remembers the 1910 fire. Everybody remembers the fire of 1988. That’s human nature, and will never be cured. But...

...British and American statistical studies have come to the conclusion that the fire season has gotten longer by 78 days since the 1970’s. Anthony Westerling of the Scrips Institution summed up the situation this way; “With the snowmelt coming out a month earlier, areas then get drier earlier overall...There's more opportunity for ignition.” As Thomas Swetnam, of the University of Arizona has pointed out that, “Lots of people think climate change and the ecological responses are 50 to 100 years away. But...it's happening now…”

So poor old Smokey was lucky he was not born fifty years later, or he would have been in real trouble. That little cub had few tools for dealing with a fast moving forest fire, and none for climate change - but then neither do we. I mean, could we deal with twice the oxygen level that we have now? It would be helpful, I think, to remember we are not worried about climate change because of what it might mean for Smokey, or even Bambi. We should be worried about what it means for us.

- 30 -

AIR HEADS Part Nine THE WIND MACHINE

2012-01-01T09:00:00.002-05:00

I guess you could say that Charlie Taylor (above) was the first member of the “Final Destination Club”. On September 17, 1908 Charlie was set to take his first flight with Orville Wright when an Army Officer asked if an Army observer could go up next, instead. It was in Charlie’s character to defer to the request and he gave up his seat.

So Lt. Thomas Selfridge was the passanger when the Wright biplane crashed to earth (above). Selfridge was killed on impact. Charlie was the first to reach the crash. He pulled the injured Orville out of the wreckage and then, after the doctors had taken his friend and boss away, it was Charlie who broke down sobbing. But it was also in Charlie’s character that he tore the wreckage apart until he found out exactly what had caused the crash. He was a painfully shy mechanical genius, the man who maintained the “Vin Fiz Flyer” most of the way across the continent. Without Charlie Taylor there would have been no transcontinental flight, and no Wright Brothers either - and they all knew it.

Charlie went to work for the brothers in 1901 at $18 for a sixty hour week in their bicycle shop (above), and he stayed because their personalities fit so well together. Explained Charlie, “The Wrights didn’t drink or smoke, but they never objected too much to my cigar smoking….Both the boys had tempers, but no matter how angry they ever got I never heard them use a profane word…(and) I never let go with anything stronger than heckety-hoo.”

Charlie and the brothers sketched out the world’s first wind tunnel on scrap pieces of paper, and then Charlie built it (above). Without that testing device, powered flight would have had to wait for accidental discovery. What the Wright Brothers and Charlie achieved was not just powered flight, but an understanding of how powered flight was achieved. And that made improvements possible. After letters to automobile manufactures failed to find a suitable engine, Charlie built the first aircraft motor (and only the second gasoline engine he had ever built) from scratch, in just six weeks, using only a drill press, a lathe and some hand tools. At every step of the Wright Brothers innovations, Charlie Taylor was vital to the process.

In 1911 Cal Rogers approached Charlie and offered him $70 a week - plus expenses - to travel with the “Vin Fiz Flyer” across country and keep it in the air (above, Charlie and Cal, repairing the Flyer.). “At the time my wages were $25 a week," explained Charley. "I told him I'd go; then I told ‘Orv ‘about it. He asked me not to quit. I told him I had already given my word to Rodgers and couldn't very well back out. He told me to make it a sort of leave of absence, and to be sure and come back.” And that was how Charlie began what he later called “…my adventures”.

Charlie never had any doubt Cal would make it. He sent his wife and three children ahead to California to await his arrival. But Charlie was no diarist. He left behind no impressions of what it was like to be cooped up with Mable Rogers and Maria (Rogers) Swietzer for all those days and nights. But I am not surprised that Charlie quit not long before matters came to a head between Lucy Belevedere and Mable. I imagine the drama and the emotion made Charlie very uncomfortable. He jumped the train in Texas and hurried on to meet his family in Los Angles. He took his wages from the trip and bought several hundred acres along the Salton Sea. But then Charlie’s wife fell ill in Los Angles and it was almost a year before he could get back to his job in Ohio.

But things had changed. While he had been away Wilbur had died of typhoid fever, in May of 1912. Orville made sure Charlie had a job, but, according to Charlie, “I found it wasn’t like old times….the pioneering days seemed over for me.” Finally, in 1919, Charlie left the Wright Company and returned to California. He opened his own machine shop on his property on the Salton Sea. “I waited for something to happen there,” Charlie said later, “and nothing did.” Except that his wife died and the depression of the 1930's drove him out of business, and he lost his land.

Charlie moved to Los Angeles and found a job working for North American Aviation for 37 cents an hour. He told no one about his past. He was just another production line mechanic. None of his fellow workers knew that he had helped to invent the entire industry. And that was where Henry Ford found him.

Ford was rebuilding the Wright Brothers workshop in Dayton as a memorial, and had hired detectives to track Charlie down. Ford brought Charlie back to reconstruct the wind tunnel and put the original 1903 Flyer back together. In 1941, his work for Ford finished, Charlie quietly went back to California and returned to work in a Defense plant. Then in 1945, Charlie suffered a heart attack. He was never able to work again. When Orville Wright died in 1948 he left Charlie an annuity in his will of $800 a year. By 1955 inflation had reduced that to a pittance, and when a newspaper reporter found Charlie, he was surviving in the charity ward of a Los Angles hospital. Immediately the aviation community raised funds, and Charlie was able to spend his last months in a private hospital.

He died at the age of 88 in 1956. He is buried in the Folded Wings Mausoleum, in Valhalla Memorial Park (above), directly under the approach to Burbank Airport runway 15-33.

Charlie Taylor lived for 48 years after he gave up his seat to a young Army Lieutenant. And he never did learn to fly. And that too was typical for Charlie Taylor, the unsung hero of powered flight.

- 30 -

HUNTING THE BIG UMBER BIRD

2011-12-30T09:00:00.001-05:00

I have to tell you a very dull story. It relates no shootouts, no hangings, no burnings at the stake. This story would make a really bad comic book, er, sorry, graphic novel. Heck, it would make an uninspiring regular novel. And as a television series it is just a non-starter. So it must not be important, huh. And because it lacks all of those dramatic threds to string you, the reader, along, it will never make it on the news networks - which are in fact rarely new. But it really is an important story. And if I try and gin it up a little bit, you may agree. The facts, I assure you, are all accurate.

The central character is a guy named Charles Pollock. He lived in Boston in the 1890’s, a dull town in a dull time. And Charles worked in a bank; dull, dull, dull. But at least he was narcissistic. That made him a little interesting, if only to himself. Then, in 1894, dull dull Charles took a lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court. It was that case which made Charles the hero of the modern anti-tax movement. And here let me suggest you imagine a really big explosion, a sucide bombing maybe, with piles of innocent people dead and dismembered laying all over the place, because, really, the anti-tax movement is just a looney tunes version of suicide bombing- you blow up yourself and everybody around you.

I don't like paying taxes. I never have, I never will. There are some things my taxes have helped pay for that I don't approve of; a couple of wars, subsidies to a few domestic monopolies and some foriegn dictators, to name just a few. But those pale in comparison to the sin of not having a state to protect me and you. And, call them libertarians or anarchists, those who oppose the power of the state to tax its citizens resemble, to borrow a description from Tom Wolf, “…the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.” (“From Bauhaus to Our House”) To whit:

The U.S. government has been taxing income since 1861, as permitted in the Constitution under Article 1, Section 2 ("Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several states…") and Article 1, Section 8 ("The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes,…"). But in 1862 Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, the author of the Dredd Scott decision which had helped to bring on the Civil War, became incensed that money was actually being taken out of his paycheck to help pay for the Civil War. Taney was a very strong believer in slavery and in being treated as somebody special.

And Taney’s objections to paying taxes for the Civil War also struck a cord with those who might not like slavery but who thought they were also special and did not deserve to be paying taxes. We're talking about rich people here, very rich people, who had no compunction about buying politicians to get what they wanted. Buying politicians is what is currently known as free speech, if your logic can somehow equate "buying" with "free" in the same thought without your head disappearing up his own fundamental aperture.

Anyway, in 1872 the rich people had the income tax laws repealed. Unfortunatly for Taney he was already dead and he wasn't getting his money back. Or his slaves. For that he would have to wait until the "Inheritance Tax" could be redefined as the "Death Tax". But I digress...

For the next twenty years the Federal government struggled along supported by import duties alone, which amounted to less than 2% of the nation’s gross domestic product. And yes, that is how we funded government before 1861. But before 1861 we were primarily an agricultural economy, where farm workers do not require much education, where populations were scattered and where all health problems were local, bcause transportation was by foot and horse. After 1861 we were a growing industrial economy. Factory workers required a high school education (or better). They were concentrated in population centers, and railroads were making public health a regional problem. In other words, economic conditions had changed.

Now, besides being unable to support an effective government, import duties (taxes on imports), raised the price of all consumer goods, imported and domestic. In fact, during the 1880's import duties added as much as 48% to the final price consumers paid, for milk, for steel, and for everything in between. This protected domestic companies and allowed them to keep their prices high enough to ensure high profits. Are your eyes glazing over, yet? Picture this; you walk into your local 'speak easy ' and discover that overnight the price of a beer has gone up 50%. You ask the owner what gives. He tells you that he has new suppliers, and the cost of beer from them is 50% higher than it was from the old suppliers. You ask why he switched suppliers, and he explains, "They made me an offer I couldn't refuse."

Congressman William Jennings Bryant of Nebraska labeled high tariffs “socialism for the rich”. “They weep more because fifteen millions are to be collected from the rich than they do at the collection of three hundred millions upon the goods which the poor consume.” But it ain't like they did it in secret.

Between 1871 and 1891 sixty separate bills were introduced in congress to reestablish an income tax. That's right, people were actually fighting for the right to pay taxes. The Republicans, the party in power at the time, beat all of those efforts back. And then in 1893 a new tariff reform bill was introduced by Democratic Rep. William Wilson of West Virginia. Wilson's bill was primmarily intended to lower the import duties on foreign iron ore, coal, lumber, wool and sugar. But the bill also included a minor amendment, introduced by Rep. Benton McMillan from Tennessee, which read, “That from and after the 1st day of January, 1895, there shall be levied, collected, and paid annually upon the gains, profits, and income of every person residing in the United States, derived from any kind of property, rents, interest, dividends, or salaries…a tax of 2 per cent on the amount so derived over and above $4,000” during any five year period (equal to $88,400 today).

The pundits paid little attention to Mr. McMillan’s amendment because so many income tax measures had been introduced so many times before, and none of them ever came to anything. This was because the rich and powerful had a secret weapon, sort of a human tommy gun, a Homo sapian Chicago typewriter, if you will.

His name was Senator Arthur Gorman of Maryland, and he was a tool of the rich and powerful. Gorman helped the opponents of the Wilson bill attach more than 600 amendments which reinstated almost all of the import duties the bill had attempted to lower. It was a St. Vaentine's Day Massacre on the floor of United States Capital building, right in front of God and everybody, as my father used to say.

With the “Tariff reduction” bill thus bullet ridden and bleeding on the floor, no one believed that President Grover Cleveland, who had campaigned on a lower tariff platform, would ever sign the misbegotten bill into law. And he didn’t. He simply let the bill become law without his signature. It didn't cost him anything. At least the tariffs had been marginally lowered. At least he could claim that he had done everything he could to lower prices for working class Americans, while not having to actually do anything to openly offend his rich campaign donors.

But imagine the mobster's shock the next morning to discover that Al Capone had beat the rap for murdering the Bugs Moran's gang, but he was going to jail anyway for income tax evasion. That was the shock felt amongst the rich and powerful. America had returned to a national income tax. And the response was just what you would expect it would be from the rich and powerful. They sued.

The fine print of the accidental income tax law required that all stock companies pay the income tax for individuals before distributing any dividends to them. Dividends were income. And when he received his notice from the Farmers' Loan and Trust Company (because he owned all of ten shares of stock in Farmers’ Loan and Trust) Mr. Charles Pollock was very angry. He was angry enough to hire high priced Wall Street top gun lawyer named Joseph Choate, who filed a lawsuit against the bank claiming the income tax was unconstitutional.

The Massachusetts courts disagreed, as did the Federal courts. They both upheld the law. But somehow Charles Pollock found the money to appeal his lawsuit all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which, to everyone’s surprise, agreed to hear the case immediately.

On April 8, 1895 the court ruled 5-4, in favor of Mr. Pollock. That slim majority was saying in essence that the source of income mattered; salary could be taxed, but income derived from property – rent, interest on savings or dividends paid on stock - were not “apportioned” by population, and thus the government was denied the power to tax it.

The dissenting opinions were intellecutally devstating. Justice Brown wrote that “This decision involves nothing less than the surrender of the taxing power to the moneyed class…Even the specter of socialism is conjured up to frighten Congress from laying taxes upon the people in proportion to their ability to pay them.”

And Justice Harlan argued that the court's majority opinion, “…declares that our government has been so framed that,...those who have incomes derived from...bonds, stocks and investments...have privileges that cannot be accorded to those having incomes derived from the labor of their hands, or the exercise of their skill, or the use of their brains.” These were both powerful arguements. But then the greedy have always been willing to lose the intellectual arguements, as long as they get to keep their money.

Middle class Americans however were outraged. They were infuriated. They were fighting mad. And it would still take 11 years before the will of the people could overcome the power of the “moneyed classes”.

In 1909 President Howard Taft proposed a Constitutional Amendment (in part because he thought it would never pass) to allow a Federal Income Tax. On July 12, 1909 the 16th amendment passed the Congress and was submitted to the states, in part bcause the congress never thought the states would pass it. The amendment was brutally blunt and short. It reads in total, “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” Period. End of Amendment.

Alabama took less than a month to vote for the 16th amendment. Kentucky, South Carolina, Illinois, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Maryland, Georgia and Texas all passed it in 1910. Twenty-three more states followed in 1911, three more in 1912, and six more in 1913.

It was with the vote of the New Mexico legislature, on February 3, 1913, that made the 16th amendment the law of the land. Six states either rejected the amendment or never took it up, but that did not matter. The Constitution only requires that two-thirds of the states approve of an amendment to make it the law.

And so, when some lunatic or confidence man or woman tries to seduce you with a magical scheme to avoid paying taxes, you can now explain to them that, by placing the source of support for the government in the people’s hands, income taxes places the power there as well.

The relevancy of this tale of narcissism to your life may become clearer when you realize that on June 1, 1929 the Farmers Loan and Trust Company named in the lawsuit changed their name to City Bank Famers Trust. And then in 1976 they changed their name again. This time they shortened it to Citibank.

This is the same Citibank that in 2009 swallowed some $320 billion of taxpayer (meaning your) bailout dollars. Oh, as of 1894, Charles Pollock was an employee of Farmers Loan and Trust in their Boston branch. And it seems likely to me that he sued his own employer with their connivance. Looking at history it seems to me that the limits to which the rich will go to avoid paying their fair share of government remains endless. These people just think they are top of the world, ma!

- 30 -

AN AMERICAN TALE

2011-12-28T09:00:00.000-05:00

I bring to your attention one of the great criminal partnerships in America, qualified to stand alongside Frank and Jesse James, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, and the Hunt brothers, Nelson, Baker and Herbert. But would William Miller have achieved fame as a criminal mastermind if he had never fallen under the influence of Robert Ammon? I can assure you… You betcha!

William F. Miller was living proof of the ancient maxim that upon finding yourself in a hole, you should stop digging. In the late winter of 1898 he was a twenty-six year old, “small, pale young man” working out of space rented in a grocery on the corner of Marcy and Park Avenues in the wealthy Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn. Every night William took the elevated train north along Marcy Avenue and then walked to his apartment at 144 Floyd Street, a three story tenement house in the Williamsburg neighborhood. Around him, wedged between factories and breweries, lived some 200,000 second generation German-Americans, each of them, like William, sharing what Thoreau described as “lives of quiet desperation”.

William attended church regularly. He was the father of two 14 year old boys, John and Louis. He was a dreamer. He was a failure. His wife was ill. And if she had known the truth she would have been sicker. William had lost the family nest egg buying and selling stocks in an illegal “bucket” shop, where the profits were made by separating the original “day traders” from their cash. To mantain the image he had of himself, William told his friends that, in fact, he had recently made valuable business connections on Wall Street, and now had the inside “dope”and would soon be rich. The owner of the grocery William rented space from must have felt sorry for the lad, because on Wednesday, April 20th, he gave him all of $10 to invest. William wrote him the following receipt; “Received from Mr. Gus. Brandt; the sum of ten dollars ($10.00) for a one share interest in the “Franklin Syndicate”. Principal guarantied against loss, and may be withdrawn at any time. Dividends to be paid weekly in sums of one dollar and upwards per share until principal is withdrawn. Signed, William F. Miller.”

On Friday, Mr. Brandt handed him another “investment” of $10. And as Brandt nust have expected, William invested the money in food and rent for his family. But on Monday morning he was careful to pay Mr. Brandt $2, which he called a “dividend”. After this apparent success was made known to his employees, and his neighborhood friends, William found himself swamped by small “investments”. And each Monday William would personally deliver the “dividends” to his “customers”. By June, even the practical, pragmatic businessman Mr. Brandt was convinced. He invested $100 in William’s “Franklyn Syndicate”. In Brooklyn the boy was earning a reputation as a financial wizard. . He was overheard on the grocery store’s "pay" telephone arguing with J.P. Morgan, and other Wall Street magicians. Of course, these were imaginary conversations - play acting. But they hint that William was desperate to convince his peers of his success. That seems to have been William's real goal.

With growing confidence, and desperate to bring in enough money to meet his weekly dividend requirements, William began to make the rounds of the brokerage houses on “The Street” trying to sell his new investment plan to professionals. He found no takers, until his rounds led him to the offices of Robert “Bob” Ammon, a Wall Street lawyer with a reputation as advisor to swindlers and confidence men, of which there were on the Wall Street of 1898, no fewer than there are today. Bob Ammon towered over the shallow youth, physically as well as intellectually. He perceived instantly what William was actually selling. He had sold it himself a number of times. But Williams’s “Franklyn Syndicate” had one distinct advantage over all the others Bob had executed; it had William himself as front man.

Taking the boy in hand, Bob Ammon agreed to act as the lawyer and agent for his “Franklyn Syndicate”. He began by making up a list of 1,488 of his previous victims, er, customers, and sent each one the following telegram - collect of course; "To my Depositors: Owing to the enormous success of the Franklin Syndicate, and to the urgent request of a large majority of my depositors, I have decided to incorporate the Franklin Syndicate on December 2nd next, with a capital of $1,000,000….As all depositors are entitled to stock certificates in the corporation, it will be necessary to compare the receipts you now hold with my books, and just as soon as I receive your receipts I will immediately send you your stock certificate to which you are entitled…It is my belief that the Franklin Syndicate shares will be selling at $400 to $500 a share before March 1st next. (But) after December 2nd…I shall open no new accounts for less than $50. All accounts which I now have of less than $50, will have to deposit sufficient to make their account $50…Yours very truly, William F. Miller. P. S. …it is the intention of the Franklin Syndicate (Incorporated) to continue paying 10% a week.”

Now, none of those receiving this telegram had ever heard of the Franklyn Syndicate, nor of William Miller, before. Many who read it laughed at the impertinence, crumpled the telegram and threw it away. But several hundred were intrigued enough to wonder who this man Miller was, who claimed to be able to pay 10% interest a week – 520% interest in a year. And a few were so intrigued they immediately sent cash by return post to the offices of the Franklyn Syndicate. Others felt the need to deliver their money directly to 144 Floyd Street, Brooklyn.

Under Bob Ammon’s guidance, William had taken over the entire third floor of the building he lived in, and hired a staff of twenty-two to open the cash bearing envelopes, and greet the mobs of optimistic investors eager to hand over their meger wealth. The staff spent their time making bank deposits and writing dividend checks. Mr. Brandt was encouraged to write a letter detailing his previous profits from the Syndicate. An article, which was placed in 700 newspapers nationwide, ran under the headline, “Wall Street Astonished. Franklin Syndicate a Big Winner.” In the accompaning article William Miller was referred as “the Napoleon of Finance”. There was no mention of Bob Ammon. In a follow up letter to the investors, William explained, “"…you know there must be a way where one can double their money in a short time, or else there would be no Jay Gould, Vanderbllt…and other millionaires and syndicates who have made their fortune in Wall street starting with almost nothing….The equilibrata of Wall Street is maintained by the fluctuations between the vast army of losers and the privileged few who win…Our 'inside tips' are from the fountain head of speculative interests, and never fail us. This advantage we not only possess here, but over the Washington wire as well.” Of course William had merely signed the letter. It had been written by Bob Ammon.

By the end of October the Franklyn Syndicate was taking in something between $80,000 and $160,000 (today’s equivalent would be $1.5 million to $3.7 million) per week. But the business practices of the Syndicate were unusual enough that two banks closed their accounts, and most others simply refused to do business with them. The press were beginning to get suspicious, as well, identifying the entire project as a pyramid scheme. And Bob Ammon could sense that after a brief few weeks the scam had just about run its course. So one more telegram was issued over William’s name; “We have inside information of a big transaction, to begin Saturday or Monday morning. Big profits. Remit at once so as to receive the profits.” All that week more cash poured in to the offices.

The machinations and sudden growth of the syndicate had reduced William to a nervous wreck. Racked by guilt, followed by private detectives (who may have been real or in the employ of the lawyer Ammon), William was ready when, in late November, Bob suggested, “Billy, I think you'll have to make a run for it. The best thing for you is to go to Canada.” With William’s help, Bob saw that all the funds in the Syndicate’s accounts were now transferred to his own private bank account, "to protect them". The total amount was some $250,000 ($5 million today). Then William boarded a train for Canada under an assumed name, and disappeared.

To the investors, and to those outside the scheme, the collapse of the Franklyn Syndicate was sudden and precipitous. It resulted in injury to thousands of lives, Miller’s wife and children being just three more victims. William had left his family protected only by the promised kindness of Bob Ammon. Bob's kindness extended to only $5 a week to Miller's wife. Bob also assured William’s wife that this pittance was all that he could afford. In fact the syndicate’s funds were safely hidden under Bob’s various nom-de—corporate disguises. And that is the way the story would have ended, except the Montreal police arrested William in December.

He was placed on trial in the spring, and convicted of grand larceny. And on April 30, 1900 William was sentenced to ten years in Sing Sing. And still Miller refused to believe that Bob had betrayed him. To maintain the fraud, Ammon had paid for William’s lawyers, had acted as one himself, and during the trial had increased payments to William’s wife to all of $40 a month. But once the trial was completed and William locked behind the granite walls of Sing Sing, the veil began to slip from poor Miller’s eyes; tuberculosis helped remove that fantasy.

In 1903 William Miller shuffled his way to the witness stand one more time. He was skeletal. He suffered from a hacking cough. He seemed to be dieing. And when he pointed his finger at Bob, the jury believed him. It helped that William willingly confessed his own crimes, and had helped prosecutors locate $60,000 of the stolen cash that had somehow had slipped through Bob's hands. And it helped that Bob was only charged with receiving $35,000, which was all that could be conclusively proven. Convicted, Ammon got five years in Sing Sing. In exchange for his testimony, William Miller had his sentence commuted to time served.

William Miller did not die of tuberculosis. He never got rich, but he stopped trying to. He got a regular job, as a store clerk. And he dropped out of history. The Miller's became just another average American family, struggling to survive in a world that caterd to millionaires. Bob Ammon served his time in Sing Sing, and then he too dropped out of history. He became just another average millionaire, living in nation that considers it impolite to inquire how its citizens attained their wealth, just how much.

- 30 -

AIRHEADS Part Eight Windswept

2011-12-25T09:00:00.003-05:00

I would say there were four truly amazing things about Cal Rodgers’ transcontinental flight of late 1911. The most amazing thing (to me) is that Cal smoked 19 cigars a day during the 49 days it took him to cross America: that's 931 cigars in total. Where did he get them all? How was he still breathing when it was all over, after inhaling all those engine exhaust fumes and all that tobacco smoke? The second most amazing thing is that he burned 1,230 gallons of gasoline to cover 3,220 miles, for an average of 38 miles per gallon; not bad! Detroit couldn’t match that a hundred years later. The third most amazing thing about the flight of the “Vin Fiz Flyer” is that during those 49 days Cal had been actually airborne just three days, ten hours and four minutes of total actual flying time, giving him an average air speed of about 53 miles per hour. That means that he was “grounded” for forty-five days, sometimes because of bad weather, but mostly because of mechanical problems and crashes. And that brings me to the fourth amazing thing about Cal Rogers’ flight. Despite all the bandages he had adorning his body and the leg cast he was wearing after his last crash in Arizona, Cal had survived. He even survived when his engine exploded less than 200 miles from the finish line.

It happened on November 3rd, the day after Cal’s brief meeting with Bob Ward in Arizona. Cal had just left a refueling stop in the desert at Imperial Junction, California, (meaning he had crossed his last state border!) and was climbing out over the expanse of the Salton Sea. Without warning the Number One cylinder in his Wright engine exploded catastrophically. It blew out the entire left side of the engine block, and Cal’s right shoulder and arm were peppered with shrapnel. Screaming pain tore at his consciousness, and Cal’s right arm was almost useless. Somehow, he executed a banking turn over the salt waters and glided the “Flyer” back to Imperial Junction. He managed to land safely, again, with just one arm: Cal had become quite a pilot. After two hours of surgery a doctor was able to remove most of the metal from Cal’s arm.

The engine was destroyed (above), but the “Vin Fiz Special” carried a spare, which “Weggie” was able to install. It took a little longer because the crew was short handed. An explosion of estrogen in the Pullman Car of the "Special had driven The master mechanic Charlie Taylor to quit and jump ship back in Texas. The man who had built the original engine for the Wright Brothers had had left the "Vin Fiz Special" and set out alone for California.

The next day Bob Fowler, heading the other way, was almost across New Mexico when he ran into his own mechanical problems. A clogged fuel line chocked off his engine near the isolated water station of Mastodon, 16 miles lonely outside of El Paso, Texas. There was no town at Mastadon, just a water tank where the single rail line and a siding ran between sand dunes, and it was a very lonely place at the time. It still is, especially since the railroad has "moved on". On satellite photographs today it looks like a drawing, all straight lines through a tan background. It was only a little more lonely in 1911. New Mexico wouldn’t even become the 47th state for another 68 days. Once he was safely down, Bob cleared the clogged fuel line, restarted his motor and tried to get airborne again. But the the Cole Flyer couldn’t break free of the sand and sagebrush. Bob Fowler would have to wait for a shift of the wind. Except, it didn’t shift.

Meanwhile, still headed west, Cal didn’t even wait for his wounds to heal. Early on the morning of November the 5th, wearing an arm sling to match his leg cast, he made the hop from Imperial Junction through the San Gregorio Pass to Banning, and from there on to Pomona, where he made a last refueling stop. And finally, at 4:08 p.m. on Sunday November 5, 1911, Cal Rodgers landed at the Tournament of Roses Park, on the current grounds of Cal Tech. He was met by 10 to 20,000 cheering people, most of whom had paid a quarter apiece to be there. The New York Times reported, ''...a maelstrom of fighting, screaming, out-of-their-minds-with-joy men, women and children.'' Cal was loaded into a car and driven around and around the stadium. And amongst all of the cheering and back slapping, poor deaf Cal kept asking, “I did it, didn’t I? I did it?”

They draped him with an American flag (above), and posed him next to the “Rubenisque” 1911 Rose Queen, Miss Ruth Palmer . And almost nobody who was in that crowd cheering Cal Rodgers had any idea that a deaf man had just flown coast-to-coast. It was quite an achievement. And nobody was prouder of Cal than Mable, unless it was "Weggie", his faithful mechanic, beaming up at him in the photo below.

Cal’s personal victory came a week later, in the Maryland Hotel, when he met with a representative for Mr. W.R. Hearst. W.R.'s pride was burning from the negative publicity over his refusal to extend the $50,000 prizes' time limit. So in an attempt to soften the blow to his reputation, Heast wanted to present Rogers with a trophy, a loving cup. Cal turned it down. He still wanted the money. And he wasn’t going to let W.R. off the petard he had hoisted himself upon.

Unnoticed by the press was that the Armour Meat Packing Company had spent $180,000 (including Cal’s fee of $23,000) to support the flight. And they had paid all this to sell a really terrible soft drink that quickly disappeared after the publicity of the flight died down. Then, on November 10th, the "Vin Fiz Flyer" was in the air again. The city of Long Beach had offered Cal $5,000 to actually complete his journey right up to the Pacific Ocean, in their town. This final flight was going fine until half way there, when the engine quit. Cal landed, fiddled with the Wright engine himself, and started again. And again, the engine coughed and died, this time over Compton. And this time Cal plowed into the ground. And this time he did not walk away. He was pulled unconscious from the wreckage, with a concussion, a broken ankle, broken ribs, an injured back and burns. But his lucky bottle of “Vin Fiz” was still undamaged, hanging from the broken wing strut. By now Cal must have really hated that bottle.

Meanwhile, out in the wilds of Mastodon, New Mexico, Bob Fowler was still stuck in the sand and beginning to think he would never get out. Finally, on the 10th of November, a two man Santa Fe work crew appeared over the horizon, pumping a handcar. And that gave Bob had an idea. He talked to the railroad and they agreed to help him out. Using railroad cross ties they fashioned a platform to sit atop a hand car, and struggled to secure the “Cole Flyer” atop that platform. On the morning of Monday, November 13th, the entire contraption was pushed from the siding onto the main line. Bob Fowler clambered into the pilot’s seat. The motor was started. And with railroad workers running alongside to stabilize the wings, the “Flyer” began to move along the track (below). This was much like the system the Wright brothers had used to launch their orignal flyer, back in 1903.

And just as the Cole Flyer began to pick up speed Bob looked ahead to see a column of smoke rising from the tracks. Instantly Bob realized he was on a collision course with a steam locomotive, headed straight for him. The two objects quickly ate up the ground between them, heading for the most unlikely collision in either aviation or railroad history!

- 30 -

NEXT WEDNESDAY: AMAZING RACE; PART VIII - AN ASIDE

BATTLE OF THE NATIVITY

2011-12-23T09:00:00.007-05:00

I am tempted to call it a primeval struggle, drenched in antiquity, shrouded in religious fervor and destined to feed future conflict until come judgment day, whenever the heck that may be. Except it just ain’t so. It is much simpler than that. The day after Christmas 2007, two rival gangs got into a turf dispute and started a rumble. Somebody called the cops, who managed to separate the combatants, The Jets (AKA the Greek Orthodox Priests), and the Sharks (AKA the Armenian Apostolic Priests) were battling inside the Church of the Nativity, the traditional birth place of the Prince of Peace in Bethlehem, Israel, Palestinian Territories. And nothing about this melee made any more sense than your stndard gang brawl. And yet I blame the French Emperor Napoleon III for the entire mess.

First, a word about all that antiquity – it does not appear to have happened where or when everybody now thinks it did. Roman census or no census, there was no reason for a pregnant Mary to be making a 90 mile donkey ride from Nazareth, on the Galilee plain of northern Israel, to Bethlehem in the mountains just south of Jerusalem, in the west center of Israel. Being the man, Joseph was expected and qualified to speak for his entire family. He would have been the only one required to travel. But why require anybody to travel? The Romans census takers did what census takers still do today - they counted people where they were. That would be where their property was, and where their money was. Why disrupt business all across a rebellious province, in the name of counting people where they were not? It makes no sense.

And there is another problem, an archeological problem. There is no archeology in Bethlehem from that period. The ground under today's Bethlehem contains Iron Age artifacts and Byzantine artifacts, but nothing in between, nothing from the age of Jesus. The village outside of Jerusalem did not exist on the night that Jesus was born.. However, there was another Bethlehem, “Bethlehem Ha Galilit”, Bethlehem of Galilee, just about 7 miles to the west of Nazareth. It seems far more likely that Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem Ha Galilit, than in Bethlehem Judea. But because Bethlehem Ha Galilit no longer existed in the fourth century of the common era, when the Byzantine Christians came looking for Jesus' birthplace, they jumped to the wrong conclusion and picked the wrong Bethlehem. So did the followers of Islam, when they first captured the region in year 627 B.C.E.- which is when things got really complicated.

Well, after the Crusaders were driven out of the Holy Land in 1187 the Muslim rulers did not trust the Roman Catholics, who had invaded them and now made up a majority of Bethlehem Judea’s population. So they split control of the profitable tourist sites in Bethlehm Judea between the Greek and Armenian Orthodox churches, in particular the church built upon the “traditional” site of the birth or Jesus. The Greek Orthodox were given control of one part of the building, the Armenian Orthodox control of another part. This allowed the Ottomans to play the two Christian sects one against the other, and to play them both off the Roman Catholics, who were now the poor relations in town.

And thus some calm was achieved in a region not famous for calm, at least until 1852, when a “firman” (or edict) was issued by Abdulmecit I, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and Caliph of the Muslim World (above). Abdulmecit issued his edict because…well, because first, in 1847 some thug stole the silver star which marked the “traditional” spot of Jesus’ birth, in the floor of the Church of the Nativity, and, more importantly, because the Sultan was weak and because Louis Napoleon III of France was a pompous political hack, who believed that he had been chosen by God to fix, first France, and then rest of the world.

Louis Napoleon III was elected to a ten year term as the first President of the Second Republic of France in December of 1848. He immediately started plotting to follow in his uncle’s imperial boot prints. By early in 1852 Louis had helped to restore the Vatican’s independence in Rome (which pleased French Catholic voters), but he had also insisted that the new Papal government be drawn up along “liberal” lines, to placate the liberal (meaning non-Catholic) French voters. But no Church ever likes to be lectured about liberal policies from secular politicians. Just try it some time and see.

In an attempt to placate the now angry Catholic voters, Louis III suggested that the theft of the star from the Church of the Nativity (five years earlier) proved that the Church of the Nativity was no longer “safe”, and control should be handed over to the Roman Catholic Church for protection - yet another politican declaring a crises which needed his genius to solve. This particular crises pleased Pope Pius IX., who had come to the conclusion that Czar Nicholas I of Russia was intent upon wiping out Catholicism in his country - which Nicholas was, being the head of the Russian Orthodox Chuch.

Louis' demand also pleased Abdulmecit I, because Albdulmecit had the distinct feeling that Czar Nicholas was about to invade Turkey - which he was. So, under Abdulmecit's edict, the keys to the Church of the Nativity were now handed over the representatives of the Roman Catholic Church. At the same time the edict also required the Vatican to maintain the church “in statu quo res errant”, or, “as it was before”. This edict is lingustically important because it popularization the english phrase “status quo”.

Now, all of his life Russian Czar Nicholas I had been told that Russia was a military superpower and protector of the true faith, that faith being Russian Orthodoxy. And Nicholas was not about to allow a mere “politician”, least of all a trumped up “Bonaparte”, to usurp his regal and holy authority. Nicholas demanded the keys to the Church of the Nativity be returned to the Armenian and Greek priests, who would, he was certain, be controled by him. And when the keys were not handed over, he declared war on Turkey - of course, he had been planning on doing that anyway. Britain and France then came to Turkey’s defense. And so Louis’ gambit to impress French voters led directly to the Crimean War, and 118,000 dead; of whom 20, 000 were French, and 73,000 were Russian.

In his rise to power Napolean III (above) had shamelessly played one political faction off another, eventually abolished democracy in his own state, created a throne for himself, invaded Algeria and Vietnam - both of which actions came back to haunt France a century later - and was finally goaded into the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, which resulted in his humiliating defeat, the creation of Germany, Louis’ own overthrow and his death. This guy was the George Bush of 19th century French diplomacy.

The Crimean War also cost Nicholas I his life. While on campaign against Turkey he caught a chill and died of pneumonia on March 2,1855. The Ottoman Sultan, Abdülmecit, lived long enough to see his nation plunged into debt by that same war. By Abdulmecit's death from tuberculosis in 1861, Turkey was flat broke. His succesor was dethroned.

But the war brought on by Louis Napolean III left Pope Pius IX alive but very frustrated. Because France had been distracted by the Crimean War, there was no help from France when Victor Emmanuel took control of Italy in 1860 from the Catholic Church and established the modern secular nation of Italy. But Pius achieved a measure of revenge when, int 1869 he issued the decree of Papal Infallibility and declared the dogma of Immaculate Conception. Together these meant that Mary, mother of Jesus, was born without sin because the Pope said she was without sin. And the Pope was never wrong, because he said he was never wrong. Neither of these were official Roman Catholic dogma until 1869, but it has been church dogma ever since..

But, let us finally return to the Church of the Nativity on December 27, 2007. According to the Associated Press; “....dozens of priests and cleaners came to the fortress-like church to scrub and sweep the floors, walls and rafters ahead of the Armenian and Orthodox Christmas, celebrated in the first week of January... But the clean-up turned ugly after some of the {Greek) Orthodox faithful stepped inside the Armenian church's section, touching off a scuffle between about 50 Greek Orthodox and 30 Armenians. Palestinian police, armed with batons and shields, quickly formed a human cordon to separate the two sides so the cleaning could continue...Four people, some with blood running from their faces, were slightly injured.”

Traditionally both the Orthodox and Armenian churches have recruited their priests for this sacred post from tiny isolated villages scattered across Greece and the Balkans, where Christians (and Muslims) have been slaughtering each other for a thousand years. These naive young men now suddenly found themselves working in intimate contact and sharing the most precious artifacts of their faith with heretics. Nothing in their lives or their training prepared them for any kind of peacful coexsistence.

And the whole thing was Louis Napoleon III’s fault. But try explaining that to a bunch of uneducated foreigners.

- 30 -

AIR HEADS Part Seven Downdraft

2011-12-18T09:00:00.003-05:00

I am impressed with the level of cupidity amongst the participants in this amazing air race. (It means they were avaricious.) Certainly the pilots, Bob Fowler and Cal Rodgers, were risking their lives day after day and deserved some reward for that risk. And now that the prize which had inspired it all had been withdrawn, they had to work for it. At Dallas, where Cal stopped on the night of the 17th of October, and at Fort Worth, where Cal put in two days of flights before 75,000 at the state fair, he sold photo’s and autographs, as Bob Fowler did at his stops - just as musicians do today at personal appearances. And there were always the “Vin Fiz” coupons Cal was still dropping over unsuspecting soda drinkers in cities where he did not land. The Waco Texas Young Men’s Business League offered Cal an impressive fee, so on October 20th he took a long detour south and did several loops (below) around the cities’ sky single sky scrapper.

Even Mable Rodgers had gotten into the act. Dear, sweet, shy, retiring and innocent Mable Rodgers had tried to convince the United States Post Office that the historical nature of the race warranted creating her a special “Post Mistress”, so that she could stamp “Postmarked Vin Fiz Special” on cards and letters bought from her while en route - for a small fee, of course. But when that money making idea failed to inspire Congress to act, and after W.R. Hearst had abandoned the race (and her husband) in Missouri, Mable sent Cal’s brother Robert out ahead to Kansas City to order unofficial oversized “Vin Fiz Flyer” and “Rodgers Aerial Post” stamps, to be sold at a quarter apiece once the Flyer had crossed into Texas.

Buyers would still have to affix official U.S. postage stamps to have anything delivered, and the stamps had been ordered with no glue backing, but Mable was at least trying squeeze every penny out of the insanity she was caught up in. It’s difficult to know if enough stamps were actually sold to cover the cost of printing them, but we do know that only thirteen “Vin Fiz” stamps still survive, eight on postcards, one on a letter and four “off cover”, meaning individually. One of the “off cover” stamps sold in 2006, when the world was still drunk, for $70,000. That amount could have financed the entire flight back in 1911. I guess Mable had the right idea, just bad timing. And I’m certain that Cal's mother, Maria (ne Rodgers) Sweitzer, was certain to reminded poor Mable of her financial gaff, at every opportunity.

Tension was also building in the hothouse of the 66 foot long by 8 ½ foot wide pressure cooker of the “Vin Fiz Special” Pullman sleeping car, with wife and mother-in-law cooped up for endless days together on the endless stretches of track between the way stations of civilization across the American West. The air must have been thick with slights (real and imagined), invective (real and imagined), criticism and denunciations (real and perceived). The two ladies endured each other for Cal’s sake from New York to Chicago. Then mother Maria found an excuse to leave the train. But at Kansas City she rejoined the caravan, only to disembark yet again at San Antonio. The lady was up to something.

Perhaps the expense of printing up the stamps that would not stick came up once too often in the conversations. But whatever the cause, when Maria rejoined the train outside of El Paso, Texas she brought reinforcements – 22 year old Lucy Belvedere, a reputed heiress, and at least in Maria’s mind, an improvement over Mable. I'll bet that dear Lucy could swim. It would appear that Cal was somewhat distracted by the drama building in the Pullman car. In what can only be seen as an sign of that increasing drama , as he approached El Paso, Cal had a near-miss in mid-air with an eagle, or maybe it was a vulture. In any case, on the 24th of October, at Spofford, Texas, Cal’s attention slipped enough to allow his right propeller to strike the ground, sending him into a ground loop that broke the wing and “splintered” both props (above). Through yet another Herculean effort Chief mechanic Charlie Taylor and his first assistant, Charlie “Wiggie” Wiggin, were able to get Cal back into the air the next morning.

Then, just before noon on Friday, October 29th, the object of this maternal verses matrimonial completion, landed at the corner of Duval and 45th street in Austin, Texas (above). Three thousand came out to cheer the hero. And Mable was quoted by a local reporter as saying, “Sometimes I suspect that Calbraith thinks showing affection to a woman would be unfaithful to his machine.” Yes, that was Mable’s concern right then, trapped aboard the sleeping car with her mother-in-law and a woman her mother-in-law clearly saw as her replacement. I wonder if Mable noted ironically to herself that one of the things still holding Cal in the air was her corset, strapped into an upper wing as repair.

In Deming, New Mexico (above), on Halloween, Cal’s ignition system went on the fritz. Can it be any wonder? Still he persevered. He refueled at Wilcox, Arizona on November 1st, and took the short hop from there to Tucson, where he paused just long enough to travel the six blocks by car to the ball park where Bob Fowler’s "Cole Flyer" had landed. They shook hands, but Cal was so rushed the photographers had no time to snap a picture. Being in the air, seated directly in front of a pounding engine hour after hour, must have been the only peace the boy had. But help was at hand. This time Mable would finally showed a nerve equal to her Cal’s. This time she wasn’t waiting to be rescued.

After the refueling stop at Wilcox, Arizona, Lucy Belvedere, mother Rodger's guest, discovered that her entire trousseau was missing from her compartment. As Mother Maria and Lucy digested this horrifying disaster, and pondered who could have absconded with her frillies and lace, shy little Mable quietly informed them that the luggage was not really missing. It was perfectly safe, she said, aboard the baggage car of the east bound train they had just passed back in Wilcox. The trousseau had been placed there by "Wiggie" on shy little Mables' instructions. It was a display of verve and determination that mother Maria had not expected out of her husband's wife. And while Cal struggled for fame and fortune above the unforgiving desert of Arizona, Lucy gathered her few remaining belongings and retreated from the “Vin Fiz Special” via the next east bound passenger train, chasing her corsets and her frillies back into Texas, and out of the pages of history. It seems that at some point in this desert crossing, little Mable had taught herself how to swim.

- 30 -

WARD HEELERS

2011-12-16T09:00:00.002-05:00

I think the end of the Good Times began on a Sunday, November 22, 1905. Marshall Field Jr, was 38 years old at the time, but that was as old as he would ever get. He was the eldest son and heir of one of America’s greatest fortunes when he appeared at Chicago’s Mercy hospital that morning with a gunshot wound to the abdomen. He would die there, just after five o’clock in the evening, five days later. And there has never been a good explanation as to how it had happened.

The official story was that while in his bedroom that morning Marshall (above) had been cleaning his gun, dropped it and the gun had gone off. The butler and a nurse said they had immediately rushed to his aide. But a reporter for the Daily News tried to replicate the accident and an identical weapon refused to discharge. The papers were afraid of losing advertising from the Marshall Field Department stores, the largest retail chain in America, so the public questions stopped there - for the time being.

The Field’s mansions, father’s and son’s, stood next to each other on “Millionaires Row” - Prairie Avenue on Chicago’s south side. The row was home to Pullman, Armour, Sears, and Field, in fact 70 of the most powerful families in the Midwest lived within a square mile of each other, and this was not a place usually visited by public scandal. After the funeral, Marshall’s widow and three children moved in with his father. But it stood no chance of being a happy home. The very next year the elder Field died of pneumonia, and the widow returned to her native England, leaving behind an open wound - caused, many thought, by a section of Chicago called the Levee

Less than a half mile away from the Field’s mansions was the Levee District, home to sin and vice of unsurpassed depravity and popularity, bordered by 18th street on the north, 23rd street on the south, South Clark on the west and South Wabash Avenue on the east. And at its immoral center was the Everleigh Club.

For eight years Ada and Minna Everleigh were “Queens of the Levee”, running one of the most popular brothels in the Chicago. Minna (right) famously greeted each customer with a delightfully wicked, “How’s my boy?”

Their thirty girls catered to an upscale clientele, charging $50 just to get in the front door of 2131-2133 South Dearborn. Once inside the plush parlor, extras were extra. It was common knowledge that Marshall Fields Jr. had been a regular at the Everleigh Club for years, and the rumor was that Marshall had been shot at the club by one of the girls, or had shot himself because he was being blackmailed by one of the "ladies".

To the south of the Club was Ed Weiss’s bawdy house, "The Capital", and to the north was "The Sapphro", run by brother Lou Weiss. In fact, jammed into the Levee were dozens of such houses of prostitution; Dago Franks, French Em’s, Old 92, and in cutthroat competition with the Everleigh sisters was Madam Vic Shaw’s house at Dearborn and Cullerton. In between the houses were opium dens, cocaine factories, gambling joints, peep shows and bars - lots and lots of bars.

Ringmasters of this sin circus, Princes of the Levee, were two men; the big, blustery city alderman, John J. Coughlin (right), and his diminutive doppelganger, Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna (left).

The gimlet eyed “Hinky Dink” (above) received his nickname because he stood just 5 feet tall. He was normally “…glum and quietly dressed”, and usually chewing on a cigar. He was a teetotaler, and his wife was temperance worker. He also was an Alderman, as well as owning and operating several bars and gambling houses in the Levee, the most famous of which was The Workingman’s Exchange on Clark Street.

Here barflies, bums, tramps and the homeless could find beer for a nickel, a free lunch and come election day, a job as a “repeater”. Given pre-marked ballots by “Ward Heelers” who walked the district, these men spread out to various polling places, where they would trade their pre-marked ballots for blanks. They then returned to the Exchange and handed in their blanks for a payment of fifty cents each. While they drank a free beer, their new ballots would be marked and the game would go another round. In twenty years neither "Hinky Dink" nor "Bathhouse" John Coughlin ever lost an election.

“Bathhouse” earned his nickname because he began as an attendant at a bath house, a Levee euphemism for a gambling joint. Coughlin was oversized and overdressed and prone to outbursts of poetry, such as his infamous “She sleeps by the Drainage Canal” and “Why did they build the lovely lake so close to the horrible shore?” His typical “Signs of Spring “concluded, “There are many other signs of spring which come by wireless wire; One of which is Yours Sincerely, who is tuning up his lyre. Just to twang a song to nature 'bout the brooks and fields of green; O, I wonder if I'm understood; I wonder, yes, I ween.”

One of Chicago’s mayors asked Hinky Dink if Bathhouse was just crazy or a drug addict. Hinky Dink replied, “To tell you the god’s truth, Mayor, they ain’t found a name for it yet.” These two men had a genius for skimming protection money from the Levee. Their enforcement arm was the Chicago Police, and in addition to their weekly take of up to a thousand dollars per establishment, they sold tickets to the annual First Ward Ball. In the words of one web site, “Every employee of a house of ill-repute or gambling den, every robber, pickpocket, safe-cracker, and streetwalker, and every bartender, bawdy house entertainer, and low groggery proprietor, all were required to buy tickets…”

The Ball was held each December, and Ike Bloom, owner of “Freiberg’s Dance Hall”, was responsible for selling the tickets. Ike was half clown and half cold blooded killer, whose club was “the most notorious place in Chicago”, which was quite a charge, considering. The ball was billed as a charity, and in 1906, as the press began to unearth the Levee on their front pages, a reporter from the Tribune asked Hinky Dink where all money went. Hinky Dink replied, “Charity, education, burying the dead, and general ward benefits for the people” Asked what he meant by ‘education’, Hinky got a little testy. “It consists of hiring good halls and good speakers to teach the people of the First ward to vote the straight Democratic ticket.” And that was the end of that interview.

Each year the First Ward Ball grew in size and sank in reputation. The 1908 festivity attracted “20,000 drunken, yelling, brawling revelers” who filled the Chicago Coliseum on South Wabash Avenue and clogged the streets outside. When the Law And Order League tried to stop the orgy, they inspired Bathhouse to write, “Strike up the march, professor, and I will lead the way; We'll trip the light fantastic too, until the break of day. Who knows that ere another ball, we'll be outside the city hall; Be gay, but not too gay.” And Hinky Dink groused, “But whenever you hear one of them fellows shouting that Hinky Dink is a menace to society and that he has horns, just keep your hand on your watch. Savvy?”

One newspaper attempted to describe the scene inside the Coliseum. “The crowd was so enormous that when women fainted – a common occurrence – they had to be passed overhead from hand to hand towards the exits. Cigar smoke settled on the floor in such thick fogs that visibility was no greater than 30 feet in any direction. The noise of shuffling feet and murmuring overpowered the sound of the dance band, and fist-fights and shoving erupted in all quarters. When Lyman Atwell, photographer for the Tribune…began setting up his flash and tripod, security notified (Bathhouse) who…personally jumped on Atwell, breaking his camera and knocking him to the ground…

"As usual, things started to get interesting at midnight, when the regiments of madams and their inmates showed up, led by the Everleigh Sisters. This caused another influx of thousands of men to attempt to enter the building…” Hinky Dink lorded over the affair from a table off the main floor. Then, at midnight, Bathhouse, wearing a green jacket, a mauve vest, lavender pants and a stove pipe silk hat led a winding Conga Line called The Grand March. Said the newspsper, “The most infamous party in Chicago history lasted until 5 a.m., when the last drunken revelers staggered out…”

But, since the death of the Fields, the millionaires were speaking with their feet, abandoning their mansions, and moving to the safer Gold Coast and later to the northern suburbs. One newspaper observed that Prairie Avenue had become undesirable to those for whom it was affordable, and unaffordable to those for whom it was desirable. At the same time it seemed the reformers were gaining power. The establishments in the Levee began to scatter. The 1908 First Ward Ball would prove to be the last.

The mayor finally ordered the Everleigh club (above) closed in October of 1911. The sisters walked away with $1,000,000 in cash. Minna took the change philosophically. “If it weren't for married men”, she admitted, “we couldn't have carried on at all, and if it weren't for cheating married women we could have made another million.” Minna died in 1948, Ada died in 1960. She was 93.

Bathhouse John Coughlin served 46 years as a Chicago Alderman. He died in 1938, $50,000 in debt. “Hinky Dink” Kenna spent the last years of his life alienated from his family, living in a suite in the Blackstone hotel, cared for only by a male nurse. He died in 1946. He left behind a million dollars…in cash. His will stipulated that $33,000 of it should be set aside to construct a mausoleum for his grave. His survivors had Hinky’s the will set aside. Instead they marked his passing with an $85 wooden tombstone.

At Hinky’s funeral, half the pews were empty, and few sent flowers. As one old First Ward lobbygog (Ward Heeler) put it, “If you don't go to other people's funerals, they won't go to yours.”

In truth it was not the reformers or the Law and Order League that put the Levee out of business. Few were foolish enough to believe that all those sinners had repented. What killed the sin of the Levee was the coming of Prohibition, which freed the Levee from its confinement, and let it spread out and multiply. The new Prince of Chicago sin was “Big Jim” Colosimo, the man who brought Al Capone to Chicago and who married Victoria Shaw. As Hinky Dink explained, “Chicago ain't no sissy town.” And Marshall Fields Jr. would have certainly agreed.

- 30 -

IN THE NAME OF FANNY ADAMS

2011-12-14T09:00:00.001-05:00

I am not surprised the killer apologized. And on that Christmas Eve morning, when “short drop” Calcraft slipped the noose around his neck, twenty-four year old Frederick Baker probably took comfort from having made the apology. He probably thought he had earnned some credit to carry on his way to meet his final reward. He should not have. The hangman, Mr. William Calcraft, had ushered some 450 souls to their final reward over his fifty year career, and Frederick would be far from his last job, although he would be one of the last public ones. But Calcraft’s technique of dropping his subjects no more than 18 inches insured that Frederick, like all the others, would take from three to four minutes to slowly strangle to death, kicking and writhing in full view of the 5,000 people (mostly women) gathered to witness his well earned demise. And the confession he had made and the denial it included was simply final proof that Fredrick Baker was a liar to the very last moment of his life.

On Tan House Lane in the “…pleasant little market town…” of Alton, stood the modest home of bricklayer George Adams, his wife Harriet (above) and their seven children. You can see the hardness of their lives on their worn faces. And perhaps the terrible grief, too.

Tan House Lane ("x" above) was a back street off the main road (the High Street) which led north from Alton to London, 45 miles distant. The Lane was just 400 yards long and terminated in a flood meadow owned by a man named Hobbs who used to grow leeks there. Beyond, crisscrossing foot paths bisected the hops fields that supported Alton's half dozen breweries and their pubs. One of those footpaths, known as the Hollow, led across fields and farms to the even smaller village of Shalden, some three miles away.

On one hot lazy Saturday afternoon, August 24, 1867, sometime after one thirty, seven year old Lizzie Adams and her year eight year old sister Fanny were playing with their neighbor, eight year old Minnie Warner, in the flood meadow, when a man appeared. He was dressed in a black frock coat, light colored waistcoat and trousers and wore a top hat. The girls immediately realized he had been drinking. Still, the man seemed pleasant enough, and offered Minnie and Lizzie a half penny each if they would run a race to The Hollow, while he and Fanny followed. The two older girls agreed and scampered off. When they were all rejoined at the Hollow the man congratulated the girls and paid them.

He then offered them a full penny if they would go into a nearby field with him and eat some berries. Again, the offer of a penny was strong inducement and the three girls opened the gate and went into the field with the man. They spent some time eating berries, before the man offered Fanny a half penny if she would walk with him to Shalden. Fanny took the coin, but something made her refuse to take the man’s hand. He paid the other two girls their last penny and told them to go home. Then he swept up little Fanny in his arms and carried her away.

We have gained some small insight into the fate of "Sweet" Fanny Adams (above) in the 150 years since her ordeal. The lessons were paid for by the thousands of those innocents who have followed her. According to a study released by Washington state, USA, 44 % of child victims were killed by strangers and 42% by family or acquaintances. Two thirds of the perpetrators had prior arrests for violent crimes, but just half had prior arrests for crimes against children. In 76% of homicide cases involving child abduction, the child was dead within three hours. And in 74% of the cases, the victim was a female under the age of 11. Of course none of this insight explains why Frederick Baker, the drunk man in the frock coat and top hat sexually assaulted 8 year old Fanny Adams, then killed her and then butchered her corpse. The crime itself may be beyond explanation or understanding. And that may be the saddest thing of all about Fanny's brutal death; the idea that there is little we can do or have done to prevent it from happening again and again and again.

Later testimony from his co-workers suggested that Fredrick Baker caved in Fanny’s head with a stone, and by three o’clock had returned to his job as a clerk in the office of Mr. William Clement. Later, around five o’clock, Frederick allegedly walked back to the murder scene and butchered and dismembered the little girl’s corpse. It was done quickly and clumsily. She was decapitated. Her legs and internal organs were scattered in the tall grass, haphazardly. And for some reason Frederick carried her eyes all the way to the River Wye before throwing them in. Did he really think hiding her eyes was going to keep anyone from seeing what he had done?

During the inquest at the Alton Old Town Hall (above) Minnie Warner and Lizzie Adams identified Frederick as the man who had carried Fanny off. Mrs. Harriet Adams and their neighbor, Mrs. Gardner, testified they had met Frederick coming out of the meadow when they first went to look for Fanny, sometime after five. When Alton Police arrested him the next day at his workplace, Frederick’s wristbands were still spotted with blood. It was noted that his pant legs and socks had been wet when he had returned after lunch the day of the murder. And a diary entry found in his desk, read, “24th August, Saturday; killed a young girl. It was fine and hot.”

The Alton Police (standing in front of their station on the High Street, above) knew Frederick from pervious arrests for drunkeness and fighting. It would be testified in his defense that Frederick’s father had “shown an inclination to assault even to kill, his children.” It was also alleged that Frederick had recently attempted suicide after a girl had rejected him, that his sister had died of a “brain fever”, and that a cousin had been in mental asylums on four separate occasions. None of that made a difference. The jury convicted Frederick in just fifteen minutes.

The night before his execution, Christmas eve-eve, Frederick Baker wrote to George and Harriet Adams. He wrote that he was sorry for murdering their Fanny, and had done it in “an unguarded hour” only because she would not stop crying. It was done, he insisted without “malice aforethought” and without “…pain or struggle”. Frederick assured the grieving parents he had not molested Fanny, but he offered no other explanation as to why she had been crying when he had murdered her.

The execution of Frederick Baker, as gruesome as any parent of a murdered child might wish for, did nothing to save the lives of the uncounted children who have followed Fanny. But every child saved during the vital first three hours of an abduction by an Amber Alert, must thank Donna and Jimmy Hagerman, who in 1996 pushed to change the way U.S. police respond to child abductions, after their daughter, Amber Hagerman (below) was murdered. And those children saved by Amber's sacrifice can also thank those who ask questions about these monsters in our midst, rather than simply calling for their blood. Spilling blood may be a just punishment, but it never saved a life.

- 30 -

AIR HEADS Part Six Beauty In Motion

2011-12-11T09:00:00.003-05:00

I suppose you thought she was just a model – I did - or an image without a reality. But she was a real person, a self made woman, and her own invention - a latter day Maria Sharapova in high button shoes; intelligent, talented, ambitious, an author, a dare devil, an adrenaline junkie and a hustler par excellence. You must always remember that she was a hustler to understand how she came to be the personification for a grape flavored syrup that, mixed with soda water, processed “a certain laxative effect”, and had a taste “You have to sneak up on, to get it down,”.

She was the official “Vin Fiz” girl, and that at the age of 36. And if that were her only claim to fame, then hers’ would be a mundane tale indeed. But she was so much more than just a girl on a poster. She was Harriet Quimby (above); theatre critic, photojournalist, screenwriter, film actor, first licensed female pilot in America, the first woman to fly across the English Channel, and yes, she was even sexier in person than the girl on the poster. But who was she really?

The sexy leather outfit was born out of necessity. The Wright Brothers were Midwestern stick-in-the-muds who did not approve of teaching women to fly, and who strongly disapproved of anybody who did. And there were darn few people in the flying business in 1911 who did not pay attention to what the Wright brothers disapproved of. So when Harriet Quimby convinced John Moisant to give her flight lessons, John insisted on secrecy. Whenever they took off she wore a hooded leather suit to hide her femininity.

Of course it did no such thing. There was no way to hide her sex. But when the secret was out, instead of discarding the suit, the usually penurious Harriet turned it into a custom-made icon; “…thick wool-backed satin, without lining. It is all of one piece, including the hood”, as she described it.

Or as a friend noted, “She had the most beautiful blue eyes, and when she wore that long cape over her satin, plum-colored flying suit, she was a real head-turner.” Plumb colored, then; but who was Harriet Quimby, really?

Her family had owned a rock farm in upper Michigan in the 1870’s, and her mother, Ursula (above, center), had supplemented their income by selling “Quimby’s Liver Invigorator” by mail, complete with imaginary testimonials. In the 1880’s the family farm went bust and the family moved to the central coast of California, and then in the 1890’s they moved again to San Francisco. There her father, William (above, left), dispensed herbs and twenty-something Harriet (above, right) re-invented herself as an “actress”, in the nineteenth century definition of that term, as a beautiful bobble on the arm of men who could afford her.

People asked her mother where Hariet had received her education. Ursula alsways said Harriet had been college educated "back east". But no college had a record of her ever attending. Still people wanted to know, because she was famous. Her nude portrait even hung in the sophisticated “Bohemian Club”, until it was destroyed in the San Fransico earthquake of 1906.

But by then Harriet (above) had reinvented her self again; writing articles for the “San Francisco Bulletin”, and, in 1903, moving east to New York City to become a theatre critic, feature writer and photojournalist for “Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly”. But who was Harriet Quimby, really?

She wrote the odd and off-beat stories; “A Woman’s Moose Hunt” and “Hints to Stage Struck Girls”, and wrote on the habits of Chinatown, the life of acrobats and comics and the evils of childhood labor. Over a decade she wrote more than 250 stories, many under nom de plumes. She even wrote screenplay melodramas for D.W. Griffith’s “Biograph Studios” in New Jersey; “Sunshine Through the Dark” (a blind princess has her sight restored by a poet’s kiss), “His Mother’s Scarf” (Two brothers battle over a girl), “The Broken Cross” (boy finds girl, tramp tricks boy, boy goes back to girl) and “Fisher Folks” (a crippled girl marries a fisherman, and heartache ensues.) None of these were cinema masterpieces, or would make film history. But they paid the bills. And they gave Harriet a taste of the movie business. She even acted in one film for D.W. But who was Harriet Quimby, really?

She was vivacious, ambitious, alive and enchanting. Bonnie Ginger, a friend and fan, wrote, “Miss Quimby has…a low voice and a brilliant smile and she runs strongly to overhung bonnets and antique ornaments…She probably wears this sort of thing because she can do it so well”. Harriet lived in a suite at the Victoria Hotel in New York, and kept a suite for her parents there as well. She bought a powerful yellow sports car (her one ostentatious purchase) and sped around town in it.

When she completed her flight training, Harriet wrote that she “…walked over to one of the officials, looked him in the eye, and said ‘Well, I guess I get my license”. And she did, License Number 37. It was, she said, “Easier than voting”, which was quite a joke since women did not yet have the vote. “Was it worth the effort?”, she would write for Leslies, “Absolutely. I didn’t want to make myself conspicuous, I just wanted to be first, that’s all, and I am honestly and frankly delighted.” Was this who Harriet Quimby really was?

As for the romance of flight, Harriet was brutally honest in describing the experience to her Lesilie’s readers… “Not only the chassis of the machine, but all the fixtures are slippery with lubricating oil, and when the engine is speeded a shower of this oil is thrown back directly into the driver’s face.”

Harriet plotted carefully to be the first woman to fly the English Channel, but on the morning after her flight word of the Titanic sinking drove her adventure out of the headlines. So she came home to participate in an air show in Boston, and it was there she took a passenger for a ride in her new French built two seat monoplane.

Near the end if their flight for some reason the passanger stood up and leaned forward in his seat (seat belts being frowned upon as too restrictive). The plane hit an air pocket and the passanger was pitched out of the plane.

Harriet was unaware of this, as he had been sitting behind her. But suddenly she found the planes’ center of gravity had been drastically altered. She fought for control, and for a few seconds she almost succeeded. And then the plane pitched forward and she too was thrown out. The horrified crowd watched as the two bodies tumbled into the mudflats of Dorchester Bay, one in a plum colored flying suit. The passenger died of drowning, face down in the mud of Dorchester Bay. But the girl, the slender, tiny girl...

A man ran into the water, pulled her broken body from the mud flats, and ran ashore (above). But it was too late. Harriet had died on impact; July 1, 1912. The Vin Fiz girl was dead, five months after the plane that had immortalized her image ended its endeavor. But who had she been, really?

We will probably never know. She and her mother had concocted so many stories over so many years that they left the real Harriet in their shadow. And that seems to have been the way that the real Harriet Quimby wanted it.

- 30 -

THE GREAT SILVER HUNT

2011-12-09T09:00:00.001-05:00

I think the best way to describe Nelson Bunker Hunt is this; Archie Bunker with couple of billion dollars in the bank. He does not smoke, drink or gamble. The son of a flagrant womanizer, who openly produced two completely separate families, and a third in secret (fifteen children in total by three women), Nelson is a major financial supporter of Fundamentalist Christian political groups. Nelson was friends with and a financial supporter of both Senator Jesse Helms.of North Carolina and Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. He is also a major financial supporter of the John Birch Society. He collected a thousand thoroughbred race horses and yet always flies coach. He is famous for searching his couch cushions looking to recover lost change, his own and visitors.

Said a family member; “Sometimes he’s brilliant. The rest of the time you wonder whether he’s really there with you or not.” Said a business partner; “He doesn’t just want some of it. He wants it all.” Said his father, legendary oil man Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Jr.; “I could find more oil with a road map, than Nelson could with a platoon of fancy geologists”. Says Nelson himself; “Worrying is for people with strong intellect or weak character.”

But maybe the key to his personality is that Nelson Baker Hunt was born a second son. Nelson’s eldest brother, and his father’s “run away favorite”, Hassie Hunt, was an oil wildcatter and “a millionaire in his own right by the age of 21.” And then this older, smarter brother developed schizophrenia and his desperate father decided to treat him with a lobotomy. Since that "Hail Mary Pass" of treatment, Hassie has been and will be under 24 hour nursing care for the rest of his life. Thus Nelson became the repacement son. But he was never his father’s favorite. And that may explain why one dark night in 1974 Nelson and a staff descended upon New York City in three charted 707 jets, paid for and then transported 40 million ounces of silver to Nelson's leased vaults in Switzerland.

Now, silver is a commodity, like wheat or oil or steel. You can buy a commodity, and you can even sign a contract pledging to buy it at a set price some time in the future. These futures are a bet as to what the price of that commodity will be. The vast majority of futures traders never intend upon taking delivery of the actual commodity. They merely bet on the market, providing producers and buyers a hedge against price fluctuations. In most cases, these bets can stabilize the market, which is good for everybody. And to encourage trading in futures, they are bought at only a percentage of the actual price, called a “margin”. But Nelson was willing to suffer the expense of transportation, storage and insurance, by actually taking delivery on his silver, because he believed in a doomsday fundamentalist theology, that the world’s financial markets were going to collapse. Paper money would be worthless. A commodity like silver would still have intrinsic value.

In 1974 the world wide production of new silver was 245 million ounces, while annual consumption was 450 million ounces. The imbalance (67%) was made up through recovery of “scrap silver”, everything from industrial applications to melting down family heirlooms. But that imbalance also meant that the control of a tiny percentage of the world’s silver could swing the price. This meant that every ounce of silver that Nelson bought and stored in his Swiss vaults was another ounce removed from the market. And that drove the price of the remaining silver up. As the price went up, the silver in Nelson’s vaults increased in value. He cashed in on that increase by using it as collateral for loans, which he used to buy more silver and silver futures. He was gambling that the price would always go up, and he had enough control of the game, called leverage, to insure that it did.

The price rose from $6.22 per ounce in November of 1971 to $11.00 per ounce by the end of 1979. Nelson now controlled 1/3 of all the silver in the world, not sitting in various government vaults. But Nelson’s manipulations had not gone unnoticed. Tiffany took out a full page ad in the New York Times naming Nelson, and stating, “We think it is unconscionable for anyone to hoard several billion, yes billion, dollars worth of silver and thus drive the price up so high that others must pay artificially high prices for articles made of silver.” By the end of December 1979 the price of silver had risen to over $50 an ounce. Five years after that first late night silver flight, the Nelson and his brother, had earned between two and four billion dollars in paper profit from the (by then) 100 million ounces of silver they owned and had future contracts to buy even more.

But while Nelson had been buying silver futures “long”, betting that the price would go up, he was also squeezing the manufacturers who needed silver. They would have to pass their price increases to the millions of customers who used their products, all in the name of higher profits for Nelson Baker Hunt, his family and friends. On January 7, 1980 the United States Commodity Trading Commission, which had oversight of the futures market in America, issued “Silver Rule 7” which increased the margin required for silver futures. Four days later the price of silver had fallen back to $25 an ounce.

As the value of Nelson’s collateral began to plummet, the brokerage house and banks which had made him loans to buy silver futures, now put the squeeze on Nelson. By March they had issued a “margin call” of $100 million on those loans. In effect, Nelson would either have to make that payment, or fulfill the entire contract, and take delivery on and pay for $1.7 billion in silver.

Early on the morning of Thursday March 27th, 1980, before the commodity markets opened, Nelson’s younger brother and partner, Herbert Hunt, placed a telephone call to the chairman of the Futures Commodity Trading Commission and asked him not to open the silver market. The reason given for the extraordinary request was that the Hunt brothers would not be meeting their margin calls that morning – “would not”, Hunt had said, not “could not.” As John Bloom noted in an article he wrote for the magazine “Texas Monthly” “Here was one of the leading spokesman for unbridled free enterprise in America, asking a federal regulator to close a market. If the federal government would not do that, then he simply wouldn’t pay up.”

That day, the silver markets did open. They just collapsed. The price of silver futures fell to $10.20 an ounce. The day passed into history as “Silver Thursday”.

As the Federal government attempted a postmortem, they discovered that Nelson Hunt had assets of $1.5 billion, and now owed $2.43 billion. In addition he owned 6.5% of one of the brokerage houses which had loaned him money on the Silver Futures, a fact never revealed to the Security Exchanges Commission, which regulated those houses. That was illegal. And, the feds also discovered that Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker had met with Nelson several times in an attempt to find funding to save him from bankruptcy. As Time Magazine noted, Volcker’s “continual monitoring of the situation was interpreted by bankers to mean that the Federal Reserve…favored some kind of bailout to keep the Hunts from going under…(which) showed that when big speculators lose millions, “telephone calls come to Paul Volcker for a quick fix.” Those banks put together a one billion dollar line of credit to save, not the Hunt brothers, but the brokerage house he had defaulted. Yes, it has all happened before.

The aftermath to Bunker Hunt’s silver manipulation is also informative. The banks eventually went after the Hunt’s seeking return of another billion dollars lost in their game. Like all good defendants, Nelson countersued, accusing the banks of lending him money because they knew he couldn’t possibly repay it. It was an absurd argument, but it allowed the Hunt’s fifteen lawyers to negotiate a reduction of the repayment. In 1998 a federal jury found both Nelson and Lamar (another brother) guilty of fraud and conspiracy to monopolize the world's silver market. Nelson was banned for life from ever trading in futures again. And finally Nelson Bunker Hunt was forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The extended family remains wealthy and politcally well connected. Nor was Nelson reduced to poverty, either. A reporter for the Dallas Morning News in March of 2009 found the 83 year old living “in relative modesty in a North Dallas house with his wife of 57 years”. Nelson insisted he had no regrets.

In better times, Nelson Baker Hunt said, “People who know how much they're worth, aren't usually worth that much.” Stephen Susman, one of Nelson’s lawyers, said, “These people are gamblers. If you’re a gambler, you take your shot.” Except, of course, these powerful folks always think they have the biggest gun in town.

- 30 -

ELEPHANT DIAPHRAGMS

2011-12-07T09:00:00.004-05:00

I want to begin by stating the facts. When Joe Frisbie died in 1940, his widow, Marina, inherited the family bakery. She continued to run the ovens on Kossuth Street in Bridgeport, Connecticut for another 18 years, baking up to 80,000 pies a day. As was the industry standard at the time, each of the tin pie plates was stamped with the company name, and carried a 5 cent deposit, to be repaid for every pie tin returned to the bakery. In 1958 Marina sold the family business to Table Talk Pies, out of Worcester, Massachusetts, and Frisbie Pies ceased to exist. Table Talk is still in business tho, and bakes 220,000 pies a day. Those are the facts. But despite those facts, somehow the legend has been perpetrated that students at Yale University began throwing the pie tins, and thus invented the Frisbee.

The first problem with this legend is that Yale University is not in Bridgeport. Yale is in New Haven, which is 20 miles further to the north. And that is a very long way to throw a Frisbee. There are other problems with the legend, all of which give me the feeling that the Yale alumni were throwing something around besides pie plates. But despite these facts, an original Frisbie Pie tin still sells on Ebay for about $25 – a 25,000% increase in value, primarily because of its mythical connection to a plastic toy. The non-immaculate conception of the Frisbee is a much more interesting story than the myth.

According to the tale as related by Fred Morrison - to writer Ben Van Heuvelen a few years before Fred’ death - back in 1937 then 17 year old Fred and his fiancé Lucile Nay (that's him, above, but not her) were in her back yard tossing around the lid from a can of popcorn, because they didn’t have a football. The lid’s flight was horribly erratic, and the teenagers made a game out of trying to predict which direction the lid would take on each toss. Over that California winter, the pair began playing the game with various lids and plates, looking for a better “spin”. And one spring afternoon, while they were tossing a five cent pie plate around on the beach, a man approached Fred and asked where he could buy the toy. Fred immediately sold him the lid for a quarter – a 500% profit.

Having been slapped in the face by opportunity, Fred and Lucile bought pie tins in bulk from a local hardware store, and every weekend took them to the beach where they tossed the tins back and forth, to attract a crowd. The resultant sales did not make anybody rich, but this was still the depression, and every quarter helped. Then World War Two changed the world. 1946 found the couple living in an Army surplus tent in San Luis Obispo. (There was a housing shortage.) Fred was pouring concrete slabs for home fuel tanks, and Lucile was working at a Lockheed plant. But Fred couldn’t get the profitable spinning pie plate idea out of his head, and eventually mentioned it to his boss, Warren Franscioni. Now, Warren had been a pilot in the war, like Fred, and he also saw the potential in the product, like Fred. But, it seems that unlike Fred, Warren had been paying attention in ground school, and was familiar with the work of Daniel Bernoulli.

Daniel is one of those little known people who should be more famous, for a number of reasons. I remember Daniel because his father, Johann Bernouli, was the biggest heel in the history of mathematics - a field filled with heels. Despite Daniel’s love of numbers Johann was so jealous of his own son that he forced the boy into medical school. But Daniel refused to give up on math. At one point, father and son tied for a first place prize in physics. Johann was so consumed by jealousy that he kicked Daniel out of the house. Johann then waited until Daniel published the work he had won the prize for, and then Johann rewrote the same material, backdating it, so it looked like the son had stolen from the father. What a heel. Father and son never spoke again.

Of course what most people remember about Daniel Bernouli is that before he was 30 he had laid out the mathematics of flight, two hundred years before they would be put to use; one half the pressure of a fluid, times the velocity of the fluid squared, plus the density of the fluid, equals the Bernouli constant. And that may mean nothing to you, (it confuses the heck out of me) but it keeps airplanes and heliocopters in the air, and, with the spin imparted by a flick of the wrist, keeps a Frisbee floating on the air.

Warren explained the Bernouli laws to Fred, and Fred diagramed the basic pie plate shape, except he added a thick outer edge to mimic an airplane’s wing. He called the angle of that edge as it fattened toward the center of the plate “The Morrison Slope”. The pair then drove down to Glendale, California and showed their drawings to the Southern California Plastic Company. The manager saw the potential for their idea and his imvestment in the company was eight cylinders of a new plastic called Tennite. The pair then drove back up the coast to San Louis Obispo to do some testing. Fred drew eight variations of his original drawing. But before he handed the plastic over to a machinist to carve the drawings into reality, he changed the title on the plans, to disguise the product. He labeled the schematics “Diaphragms for Elephants”. I guess he figured that title would not arouse any curiosity.

Fred and Warren tested the new diaphragms, and delivered the one which flew the best to Glendale. In 1948 the first production run of 3,000 Whirlo-Ways (patent #183626) were squeezed out of the injection molds in just two colors, black and blue. Lucile wrote the copy for the packaging, instructing customers to “Play catch – invent games. Experiment!” In 1951 Warren reenlisted in the Air Force for the Korean War, and Fred and Lucy continued to develop the Whirlo-Ways by themselves.

Marketing now took over. The Whirlo-Ways became Whirloways, Flyin'-Saucers, Flying Saucers, and Pluto Platters. But the basics of the device did not change; it was a thing that, when you threw it, it floated and bobbed and weaved with a grace that a ball can only dream of.

In 1955, while Fred and Lucile were displaying their Pluto Platters in Los Angeles, they were spotted by two falcon hunters, who had formed a company to market their plastic sling shot, intended to propel meat into the air for training birds of prey. They had named their company “Wham-O” after the shout they made when firing their sling shots. But Arthur "Spud" Melin and Richard Knerr were smart enough to realize that most of their slingshots were not being bought by falconers. The problem was they weren’t sure who was buying them.

So they decided to change products, and jumped at the chance to use their meager sling shot profits to buy the North American rights to an Australian bamboo exercise tool which, duplicated in plastic, became the Hula Hoop. Wham-O sold 25 million Hula Hoops in four months, 100 million in two years. In 1956 the pair used their profits from the Hula Hoops to pay Fred and Lucille one million dollars for the patent and the molds of Pluto Platters.

Wham-O’s designers made some minor improvements to the platters, and in 1958, the year after Frisbie Pies shut down, they renamed the Pluto Platter as the Frisbee. Why they chose that name I have never been able to discover to my satisfaction. But I suspect somebody in the Wham-O marketing department was a Yale Alumni. The rest is not just history - its just fun!

- 30 -

AIR HEADS Part Five FRESH WINDS

2011-12-04T09:00:00.008-05:00

I had to do some work to locate the starting point for Bob Fowler’s second attempt at a transcontinental flight. For one thing it has been buried under concrete and asphalt for a century. For another, some histories have mis-labeled it as “Wiltshire Field”, but that seems to have been a "spell check mis-correction" of the name "Henry Gaylord Wilshire". If you are familiar with Los Angeles at all you recognize that name. In 1895 Gaylord bought 35 acres around what would one day become MacAthur Park. Gaylord then humbly allowed the city of Los Angeles (above) to build a road right through the center of his property, on the twin conditions that they not lay down any street car tracks, and that they name it after him. Then he promptly packed up and moved back to New York. He left his name no where else in Los Angles.

Wilshire Boulevard’s beginnings were very humble indeed, bisecting mostly beet fields. In 1910 that made the intersection of Wilshire and Fairfax Avenue an ideal location for an airfield, close to the budding metropolis of Los Angeles (above) - 320,000 citizens already - but open enough to allow pilots to crash regularly without killing the neighbors, because there weren’t any, except for a few deceased Dire Wolves stuck in the tar of the nearby La Brea Tar Pits (below), just down the street. (BTW: "la brea" means tar in Spanish - so the "La Brea tar pits" translates as 'the tar - tar pits').

There should be a plaque in the sidewalk or something at the corner of Fairfax and Whilshire, because not only did Bob Fowler re-start his transcontinental flight from here on October 19, 1911, but it is also where, in 1921, Ameila Earhart took her first flight lesson, in a Curtiss Jenny. In fact, lots of aviation history happened at that corner.

Movie maker C.B. DeMille (below) , in town to direct the first blockbuster “Squawman”, operated an airline out of there for a year or so (Mecury Aviation- above), until his airline went bankrupt.

Then in March 1921 the air field was bought by flyer Emory Roger and his wife, and was renamed “Rogers’ Field”. Emory then started up “Pacific Marine Airways”, in partnership with Sid Chaplin, brother to Charlie Chaplin. They flew Hollywood vactioners to and from Catalina Island, and sold Curtiss airplanes out of a showroom on the field - at least they did until Emory died in a plane crash in November of 1921. Then Emory’s widow ran the field until 1923, when she sold out to developers, and the airfield disappeared. That is what happens to everything historic in Los Angeles, sooner or later.

But that was all in the future in 1911. On October 19, 1911 Wilshire Field was just an open space out at the end of Wilshire.

Late on that October afternoon Bob Fowler, at the controls of his new Wright B Flyer, renamed the "Cole Flyer", lifted off and headed east. He made only 9 miles that first day, landing in Pasadena. But the important thing was that he was back in the race.

Bob’s financial backer, Reed Grundy, had always wanted him to start the race from Los Angeles because the mountains Bob had to cross here were so much lower that the Sierra east of San Francisco, and because the Los Angeles Board of Reality was coughing up a $10,000 bonus if Bob Fowler started from L.A. - okay, Grundy mostly liked L.A. because of the bonus.

In fact, early the next morning, on October 20, as Fowler was preparing to take off from Passadena, he was called to the phone. It was Grundy. He had just been offered another paycheck if Bob made an appearance down Fairfax Avenue from Whilsire Field at the L.A. Motordrome with Barney Oldfield and other big name racer car drivers. But Bob put his foot down and said he’d rather give up flying all together than start this trip a third time. Grundy got the message and Bob flew on to Riverside, California, probably spitting and cursing all the way about what a jackass his manager was. I’m sure NASCAR drivers feel the same way about their sponsors, once in awhile.

In two days of flying Bob Fowler had covered only 69 miles. And the next day, October 21st, went even slower, because he was approaching the San Gorgonio Pass. The pass is only at 2,600 feet altitude, but it runs 22 miles long between the 9,000 foot tall Mt. San Gorgonio and the 11,000 foot tall Mt. San Jacinto, making it one of the deepest passes in the United States. For a cloth and wood airplane flying at between 2 and 4,000 feet above the ground, passing between the towering mastiffs meant dangerous cross winds. The Cole Flyer struggled to make progress, and Bob gritted his teeth and kept going.

Just as the 14,505 foot tall Mount Whitney stands just 76 miles west of Badwater, Death Valley, at 282 feet below sea level, Mount San Jacinto stands less than 100 miles west of the Salton Sink, at 220 feet below sea level (far upper right in the above photo). The line from the Gulf of California, through the Salton Sea, Death Valley (and north to Mono Lake) is the hing along which California is being twisted, torn apart, bent and ripped between the San Andreas Fault and a newly forming rift valley which, eventually, will fill as a new arm of the Pacific Ocean. Someday, in fourteen or fifteen million years, this is going to be the new west coast.

But having finally left this geological drama behind him, Bob Fowler was now over flatlands and flying in cool winter temperatures across the Arizona desert. On October 25th he landed in Yuma, Arizona (above). Finally, after almost sixty days of starting and stopping and starting and crashing, Bob Fowler had escaped California.

Two hundred miles later, following the Southern Pacific Railroad line, Bob landed at Tuscon, Arizona. And there Bob had a brief encounter with a fellow traveler, the only other man on God’s green earth who truly understood what he was going through; Cal Rogers. They were together barely long enough to shake hands, and nobody had time to produce a camera. And then they separated without so much as a backslap or a pause to compare notes: so much for the brotherhood of the air. After all, there was a race on.

- 30 -

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

2011-12-02T09:00:00.005-05:00

I think the basic problem with democracy is that humans are too darn clever for it to ever work efficently. Consider the lesser genius of old John Q. Adams (above), son of a founding father, who, after one term in the White House, won a seat in the House of Repesentatives, which he occupied for another 17 years. It was “Old Man Eloquent”, Congressman Adams, who first dragged slavery onto the House floor for open debate, and then engineered the first compromise which delayed the Civil War for forty years, until the country could survive it – a pretty clever guy. But it was also J.Q. Adams who was clever enough to insist he should not be counted as “present” if he refused to respond when his vote was called for. It was a mattter of principle to John Q, and a matter of temperment. He was just too old to stand up and walk out of the chamber everytime someone asked him to vote on something he wanted to avoid voting on. How could he predict that two generations later, in the hands of hack politicians, this principle would be used to thwart democracy?

They called it a “Silent Quorum”. By October of 1893, when the Senate was trying to repeal price supports for silver, which were costing taxpayers millions of dollars every year, this procedure had become a monster whenever the majority was razor thin. Without a quorum present, (half the membership plus one) no vote was legal, so by remaiing silent when their names would called, the minority could “fillibuster” any action they wanted to avoid losing on. It was a manuever which one particular House member described as a “...peculiar art of metaphysics which admits of corporeal presence and parliamentary absence”. That year, over two days, the U.S. Senate tried 39 times to get the silver price supports removed. And every time the quorum evaporated. A decade later the obstructionists had so honed their craft that this same particular House member calculated that the House of Representatives spent “...a whole month...calling over our own names”. Usually the bills being thus fillerbusted were either dropped, or the delay and deal making required to get them passed held the Congress up to public ridicule. Who ever heard of such a thing?

The 'particular' Congressman who finally broke the filibuster of silence was a fourteen year veteran who knew the lower house of Congress well enough to describe it as “A gelatinous existence, the scorn of all vertebrate animals”. He owned the biggest head in politics (in more ways than one) and the sharpest wit in the Washington. Fifty year old Thomas Brackett Reed (above) was, said a critic, as “ambitious as Lucifer”. He was also a giant - 6'3” tall and 300 pounds – who inspired one who saw strolling to say in awe, “How narrow he makes the sidewalk look.” Republican Thomas Reed once lamented in his measured Maine drawl, “We live in a world of sin and sorrow. Otherwise there would be no Democratic Party.” When accused of mockery by a Democrat, Reed responded, ““I will say to the gentleman that if I ever ‘made light’ of his remarks, it is more than he ever made of them himself.” He described two politicans who annoyed him, this way; “They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.” He was imperious and dictitorial even with friends - a small “d” democratic Robespierre.

Like all political revolutions, newly-elected Speaker Reed's, was inspired by necessity. Specifically, on January 23^rd, 1890, he received the Committee on Elections report concerning the 4^th distict of West Virginia. The Democratic Governor had disgarded the results from two polling places there and delared Democrat James Jackson the winner. The loser, Republican Charles Smith, had appealed to congress, and the committee's Republican majority had labeled the governor's actions so outrageous that it “seems like a farce to argue about it.” As expected, the committee's Republican majoity recommended giving the seat to Smith, and as expected the Democrats wanted to argue about it. Technically Reed had three more than the 166 Republicans needed to achieve a quorum, and push through Smith's election. But if three or more of his party were out sick or away from the floor on constituent or personal business, Reed's working majority would fall to the “tyranny of the minority”. Thomas Reed was determined to do something about that.

Before the session was to begin that noon, on Wednesday, January 29, 1890, Speaker Reed called the two ranking Republican members of the election committee into the hallway behind the Speakers podium, known as the Speakers' Lobby. There Reed warned Joe Cannon from Illinois (above) and William McKinley from Ohio that even with two Republicans dragged from their sick beds, what with several still out sick, one dead and another home with a dieing wife, the Democrats could be expected to use a 'Silent Quorum' to delay or even kill action on their report. Then he informed the midwesterners that he had a plan to force action. (What he did not tell them was that he had recently secured a partnership in a law office, in case his plot blew up in his face and he was forced to resign from the Congress.) Representative Cannon asked when the Speaker intended upon launcing his plan. Reed responded simply, “Now”, and he strode into the chamber.

After the preliminaries for the opening of a session, Edward McPherson, the House clerk, called for a vote on the report of the election committee. The initial results were 162 yeas, 3 nays and 163 not voting. The Democrats immediately called for a “quorum call”. Again Mr. McPherson read out the roll call, pausing after each of the 332 names for a response. All 162 Republicans in the chamber answered “present”. Not a single Democrat in the room lifted his voice. The “Silent Quorum” had again triumphed - or so it seemed. But then Speaker Reed announced ponderously, “The Chair directs the Clerk to record the names of the following members as present and refusing to vote.” And slowly he began to read off the names he had marked down as being in the room.

According to the Associated Press reporter who was present, “Pandemonium broke loose...wild excitement, burning indignation, scathing denunciation...” When Reed called his name, the Democratic war horse William Breckinridge bellowed over the mob, “I deny the power of the Speaker and denounce it as revolutionary!” By now Democrats were spilling into the aisle and pressing toward the podium, “...as if they intended to mob the Speaker.” But imperious, “utterly fearless”, and (said the New York Times) as “cool and determined as a highwayman,” Speaker Reed deigned not to acknowledge their outrage. He just kept reading the the names of the no longer silent minority.

When he called out, “Mr. McCreary”, the sexagenarian ex-Governor of Kentucky and Confederate Colonel, James Bennett McCreary (above), shouted up at the podium, “I deny your right, Mr. Speaker, to count me as present!” Unexpectedly, Thoms Reed paused, and the entire bedlam paused as well, sucking in a breath of anticpation. Gazing down impassivly from atop the massive podium, the New England Buddha pronouced, “The Chair is making a statement of fact that the gentleman is present. Does he deny it?” Representive McCreay was nonplussed. And calmly Reed contiued with his roll call of the principled “absent”. And when he had finished, over the din and angry shouts which again tore the air, he announced he would now give his reasons for the revolution he had just launched.

The Constitution, in Article One, section five, said Reed, dictates that each house of Congress could “...compel the attendance of absent members, in such manner, and under such penalties as each house may provide.” Speaker Reed argued, “If members can be present and refuse to (be)....counted as a quorum, that provision would seem to be entirely negated. Inasmuch as the Constitution only provides for their attendance, that attendance is enough. If more was needed the Constitution would have provided for more.” His words were not going to sway the losing side, but then that was not whom Reed was speeking to. “Are elections a farce and is government by the people a juggle?” he asked. “Do we marshal our tens of millions at the polls for sport? If there be anything in popular government it means that whenever the people have elected one party to take control of the.House or the Senate, that party shall have both the power and the responsibility. If that is not the effect, what is the use of the election?”

Having said his peace, Mr. Reed intoned, “The Chair thereupon rules that there is a quorum present within the meaning of the Constitution.” Breckinridge demanded to make a point of order. Reed dismissed him, saying. “The Chair overrules the point of order”, without even hearing it. “I appeal the decision of the Chair,” shounted the old war horse. Interjected the Republican Lewis Payson from Ilinois' 9^th district, “I move to lay the appeal on the table”. And with a Republican second, the Congress now debated the very idea of Reed's revolution.

It went on for three bitter, angry, frustrated days. And from atop the pryamid of the podium Thomas Reed sat impassive, “serene as a summer morning”, rendering parlimentary decisions which kept the debate moving. Speaker Reed used his gavel so often, he broke it (above). Charles Landis, the Indiana Republican, insited Reed “...did not gag debate, he simply....thought that a man who had a private balloon to inflate should hire a field.” If the Democrats “shouted until the acoustics bled,” wrote Landis, that was merely “prima facie evidence that they were in the vicinity”. In the beginning Republicans were not united, but the Democratic reaction had forced the doubters into the battle line. Even the one Texas Democract who stayed seated while ominously wetting his bowie knife, helped to unite Reed's Republican troops.

Thomas Reed came out of this debate forever bearing the tag of “Czar Reed”. But he also won his point. On Monday, February 3, 1890, the Democrats admitted defeat and simply walked out of the chamber (above). This left the Republicans with just 165 votes - one short of a quorum. An hour later, Republican Joe Sweeny of Iowa, having raced from the train station, walked into the chamnber and announced, “One more, Mr. Speaker”. And with that a quorum was achieved. And the reason for the drama (if anybody still remembered), Charles Smith, was offically elected to the 4^th district House seat for West Virginia, by 166 votes to 0. Twenty-six days later the Supreme Court rejected the Democratic appeal, and the matter was settled.

Reed's Rules gave the Republicans the power to fully enact their programs. And the public fully rejected them. In the election of 1890 Democrats gained the clear and working majority both sides had wanted, and immediately discarded Reed's Rules. Reed's observation on this was, “The House has more sense than anyone in it.” Two years later, the Republicans re-gained ground and it was the Democrats who were facing a intransigent minority, lead by Thomas Reed. The Democrats were forced to now accept and use Reed's Rule for themselves. In response, Thomas Reed said only, “I congratulate the Fifty-third Congress.” And he meant it.

- 30 -

GETTING WHIPPED

2011-11-30T09:00:00.005-05:00

I understand why Ben Halladay was legendary in 19^th century America. “The Stagecoach King” might have been “"illiterate, coarse, boastful, false, and cunning” and “not one to hesitate over the niceties of business ethics”, but he was also a self made man who amassed a fortune in transportation. According to legend, Ben Halladay's legendary business savvy was proven when he challenged several driver applicants to show how closely they could steer one of his coaches to the edge of a cliff. It was a dangerous evaluation, so risky that one applicant refused to even take the test. That was the driver Ben Halladay hired, or so the story went. But the test was a myth. It never happened. But the story does illustrate how difficult it can be to separate truth from legend - like the iconic driver in the myth, the legendary Charley Parkhurst.

The technology Halladay built his empire upon was the iconic Concord Coach (above), famous in thousands of western movies but designed and built in eastern Connecticut. It was one of America's first hi-tech exports, and familiar from Missouri to Oregon, from Australia to South America and South Africa. A ticket for a Concord Coach provided, “...fifteen inches of seat, with a fat man on one side, a poor widow on the other, a baby in your lap, a bandbox over your head, and three or more persons immediately in front, leaning against your knees....” The 3 inch wide leather cross braces, which supported the coach's body, were so effective at dampening road ruts and rocks into Mark Twain's rocking “cradle on wheels”, that many of the passengers suffered from motion sickness. But then the function of the cross braces was to benefit the horses and the coach, not the riders. Concord Coaches did not break down, so the saying went, they wore out.

They called stagecoach drivers “Whips”, although they were not expected to use that device very often. The best drivers, such as the hard drinking, tobacco chewing Charley Parkhurst, steered the 2,500 pound 12 foot long Concord Coach with the sensitive fingers of their left hand, via the “ribbons”, or leather leads to each pair of horses. With his right hand the driver constantly “feathered” the brake, to prevent the coach from crowding the horses. That left no hand free to snap the whip.

Charley Parkhurst (above) was an orphan out of Lebanon, New Hampshire, hired out as stable hand in Worcester, Massachusetts while just six or seven years old . Sleeping in the stables reinforced Charley's affection for horses. Seeing this, the stable owner, Ebeneezer Balch, taught Charley the delicate art of driving two-in-hand, four-in-hand, and even six-in-hand - six horses controlled by three “ribbons” entwined through gloved fingers. Over decades the 5 foot 6 inch Charley became so well known around Providence, Rhode Island as an adept and skilled driver that in 1849 when local businessmen Frank Stevens and James Birch decided to “Go West” to start a stage company, they paid the passage aboard a California Clipper ship for the 38 year old Charley. One of the other travelers, James Duchow, described Charley as “...a very queer fellow indeed”.

The California route favored by Charley Parkhurst was the nine hour 25 mile climb over the Summit Road, winding through the 3,000 foot high Santa Cruz mountains, between San Jose, at the southern edge of San Francisco bay, and Santa Cruz at the northern lip of Monterrey bay. The fare was $5 per passenger. “Six Horse” Charley Parkhurst drove that route for seven years for the California Stage Company, and became known, as his coach rumbled past the isolated cabins along his route, to toss candy to the children. Then one day, unexpectedly, James Birch was drowned at sea and Frank Stevens gave up and sold out. But by then Charley was so well respected in California that every passenger line on the west coast sought out his skills.

The economics of frontier stagecoaches demanded that they have government subsidies - U.S. Post Office Contracts. The California Stage Company was paid $1,000 a year (the equivalent of $23,000 today), for delivering mail between Santa Cruz and San Jose, and similar subsidies kept communications open all the way from San Francisco to the gold fields in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Even with these subsidies, Charley's new employer, the Pacific Express Company, went bankrupt. They were succeeded by the Pioneer Stage Company, a subsidiary of the Butterfield Stage Lines, owned by Ben Halladay. And then in 1866, the Stagecoach King sold out to Wells Fargo, lock, stock and barrel, for $1.5 million ($22 million today).

There was no reason for the Stagecoach King and the reticent Charley Parkhurst to have ever met during the brief time that Charley worked for Ben Halladay, thus destroying the myth of the drivers' test. Besides, Charley was already paid well enough that he was able to invest in a “relay station” just north of Watsonville. He partnered in this with another driver, Frank Woodward. These stations were franchises, which allowed the company to remove from their balance books the riskiest and largest expense of operating a stagecoach line – the feeding and caring for the stock. But the cost to those who took on that risk was illustrated when Charley was kicked in the head while shoeing a horse. He lost the sight in his left eye, and became known thereafter as “One-eyed (or cock-eyed) Charley”.

It was not a surprise that Charley's and Frank's relay station, like most, failed after a year or so. So, after 56 years of an already hard life, Charley was forced to go back to driving. But he was no longer a young “whipper snapper”, and suffered from the bane of all those who make their living with their fingers. Charley was quoted in a Monterrey newspaper, explaining, "Pay's small and work's heavy. I'm getting old. Rheumatism in my bones -- nobody to look out for old used-up stage drivers.” But that would prove not to be so. By 1870 Charley had retired to a small house on Bean Creek outside of Watsonville, a property provided by the Harmon family. His only known close friend, of 20 years, Frank Woodward, often stopped by for a visit, and helped Charley in making deliveries for the neighbors.

“Cockeyed” Charley Parkhurst died at 75 years of age, on Thursday, December 18, 1879. The cause of death was cancer of the tongue, probably a by-product of all the tobacco Charley had chewed for forty-odd years while commanding a Concord Coach. Having come into this world an unwanted orphan, at his death Charley was surrounded by the Harmon family and Frank Woodward. Death must have been a release for the old Whip. His will left $600 to 12 year old George Harmon. But the old driver's story was not yet ended.

When the neighbor women came in out of respect to wash “One-Eyed” Charley's corpse, they discovered that Charley Parkhurst was a woman, born Mary Parkhurst in 1812. Her mother died giving her birth, and her grief stricken father had given the infant up to an orphanage. Was Charley/Charlie a lesbian? The modern assumption is that he/she was. But that may be a modern lens distorting past visions. When Frank Woodward was informed of the discovery, he cursed good and long. But history can never tell us why he cursed.

All we know for a fact is that from the moment Charley Parkhurst had left the orphanage, still a child, he had lived as a man, competed as a man, succeeded as a man. It was his preference, for whatever reason. And perhaps it is truer to Charley's memory to let the matter rest there, as the San Francisco Morning Call put it a week after the old man's passing. “"No doubt he was not like other men, “ wrote the newspaper, but “He was in his day one of the most dexterous and celebrated of the famous California drivers...and it was an honor to be striven for to occupy the spare end of the driver's seat when the fearless Charley Parkhurst held the reins of a four-or six-in hand.” Charley Parkhurst was fondly remembered by almost everyone who had ever known him.

Six years earlier, on September 18, 1873, the Wall Street financial firm of Jay Cooke and Company had unexpectedly declared bankruptcy, and within hours the American economy collapsed into what was called for decades “The Great Depression”. Like hundreds of thousands of others, The Stagecoach King Ben Hallady lost a fortune that day, maybe two. He had to sell three of his mansions, one on K Street in Washington, D.C., another along the Hudson River in upstate New York, and one in Portland, Oregon. That left him with just one. A year later he lost control of a railroad he was building in Oregon, and the bitter old rich man spent the last thirteen years of his life suing the other robber barons who had robbed him. He died on July 8, 1887, at just 68 years of age. He was fondly remembered by almost nobody.

The two lessons I draw from this tale is that, first, all the good do not die young, and second, that secrets only have power over the people who keep them - Oh, and also that the one thing legends are not, is reality.

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AIR HEADS - Part Four - Windy City

2011-11-27T09:00:00.002-05:00

I believe it was with apprehension that Cal Rogers set his “Vin Fiz” flyer down on the Cicero airfield on the afternoon of October 8th, 1911, rather than with a sense of accomplishment. Cal was now officially 21 days out of New York City. He had flown just 1/3 of the distance to California. He had crashed, so far, six times, or about once every 166 miles. At this rate he had to assume he would crash another six times before he reached the foot of the Rockies at Denver, Colorado. And he would either be spending Christmas somewhere in Utah, or dead. The Pony Express was proving faster than the" Vin Fiz Flyer". Upon landing in Chicago, Cal immediately telegraphed William Randolph Hearst to request an extension of the time limit for the $50,000 prize offered by the mogel's newspapers. But Cal could not have known that W.R., as Mr. Hearst liked to be called, had no intention of letting anybody actually win the prize money.

Like most self described “self made” millionaires (such as Donald Trump), William Randolph Hearst was the son of a millionaire. When W.R. was kicked out of Harvard, where the boy had struggled to survive on a $500 a month allowance (the equivalence of $11,000 a month, today), it seemed he was destined for failure – well, as much as the pampered only son of a millionaire could fail - because the only thing bigger than the fortune which W.R. would eventually gain control of, was his ego.

In 1887 W.R. took over the “San Francisco Examiner”, which his father George Hearst had won in a gambling debt. W.R. then sank part of daddies’ fortune into making it the “Monarch of the Dailies”. He hired the best writers and editors that daddies’ money could buy, (such as Mark Twain and later Harriet Quimby) and built a publishing edifice based on the formula of sex plus comic strips equals sales. The first of the Sunday comics printed in color was Hearst's “The Yellow Kid” (above). Thus the origin of the description of W.R.'s style of newspaper as “yellow journalism”. And what was yellow journalism? A. J. Pegler, a Hearst writer, described it this way: “A Hearst newspaper is like a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.” Think, Fox News with ink.

When daddy George Hearst, died in 1891, W.R. convinced his mother to sell off the mining properties on which the family fortune had been built. He used the cash influx to finance his acquisition of the “New York Morning Journal”, where W.R. repeated his "Examiner's" recipe of success - which he had learned, by the way, during a summer internship under Joseph Pulitzer. It makes journalism's"Pulitzer Prize" seem like a mea culpa, doesn't it? And then W.R. began to buy newspapers, eventually 42 of them, with 30 million plus readers. Now he could syndicate his well paid writers and increase his advertising revenues, which he used to promote and publicize his runs for congress, and as governor and mayor of N.Y.C. He failed to win any of those elections. But everything W.R. did was ultimately to promote and publicize W.R., including the Hearst Prize for the coast to coast air race.

W.R.’s interest in flying was typically mercenary. When his editors had approached him with the idea of offering a $50,000 prize for the first transcontinental flight, experts like Glenn Curtiss and Wilbur Wright, warned that aviation was too young to achieve such a lofty goal. In 1910 no plane could stay aloft longer than two hours at a time, and none could travel faster than fifty miles an hour. Airplanes were still made out of wood and wire, for crying out loud. But, on the plus side, offering the prize would fill W.R.'s newspapers day after day, with articles about how it could it be done, who could do it, who didn’t think it could be done, and how many would die trying to do it.

W.R. was awarded a medal from the Aeronautical Society of America for just offering the prize. And W.R. loved to get medals. But paying out the prize money would sell W.R.'s newspapers for one day only. And that was why the Hearst Prize had contained a time limit. It was set to expire on October 17, 1911, before Hearst figured anybody could make it. So, when Cal Rogers’ telegram arrived, begging for an extension, W.R. was in no rush to respond. Cal waited in Chicago for two days for the telegram from Hearst, and he began to suspect he had been had. So with just a week left before the deadline, he decided to force W.R's hand. On October 10th he flew across the flatlands to Springfield, Illinois, then on to Marshall, Missouri. As he arrived in Marshall, far away from any cities fed by Hearst newspapers, Cal found a telegram from Hearst waiting for him. There would be no extension in the time limit. Cal had now flown 1,398 miles since leaving New York, which gave him the record for longest continuous flight. But there would be no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow, just a bottle of Vin Fiz - yuck.

A more mercenary element now influenced Cal’s romantic quest. When the city of St. Louis withdrew its offer of a thousand dollars for landing there, Cal simply bypassed the town, and its Hearst newspaper. Instead he flew on to Kansas City, landing in Swope Park.

Experience was forcing Cal to learn how to handle the money side of the race, as well as well as how to handle his plane. His decided to turn south, to avoid taking the Rocky Mountains head on, and to also avoid Denver and its Hearst newspaper. There were far fewer trees to run into on the Great Plains, which reduced certain dramatic elements in Cal’s landings and take offs. He was also making better time. There were fewer crashes, fewer late night repairs; everbody on the crew was getting more sleep. And at about 9 A.M. on October 19, 1911 the “Vin Fiz Flyer” crossed the Red River into Texas.

And on that same day the race that was no longer a race, became a again.

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A LITTLE HELP

2011-11-25T09:00:00.002-05:00

I apologize, but the closest I can come to describing the drama in the board room of the New York and Erie Railroad on that crisp November afternoon is to recall one of the concocted tribal councils on the “reality” television show “Survivor”. Now, because of the time compression, deleted conversations, subtle “background” music additions and the myriad of other minor manipulations that fall under the label of “editing”, the only common element between a modern day “Survivor” contestant and Mr. Jacob Little, the Antebellum "Napoleon of the Board Room", was that over the span of just a few moments they both stood to win or lose a great fortune. And that has not been a reality for corporate managers in America for so long as to make it hard for modern readers to imagine it was ever true. It ain’t a real game if you are “too big to fail” because then, you can’t lose. And Jacob could.

Jacob Little was called “the original Wall Street Bull”. That was not quite true. The ancient traders, who bought hides from butchers, invented the ‘futures market’, by buying and selling the hides of cattle that had not yet been born. And if farmers thought the prices for hides were approaching the bottom they might hold onto more of their bulls, thus ensuring more cows for next season, when the prices might be better. So, those who expected prices were going up, were expecting a “bull market”. A bull in the stock market is a gambler, aggressive and willing to use his horns to get his way. And that is an apt description of Jacob Little.

Jacob’s contemporary, Henry Clews, claimed that Jacob “…made and lost” nine fortunes on Wall Street. And Matthew Smith, in his book “Sunshine and Shadow in New York” recorded a moment of introspection which Jacob experienced while walking past the mansions surrounding Union Square. “I have lost money enough today to buy this whole square. Yes, and half the people in it,” he said. And that was probably not an exaggeration.

At a time when railroads were the high tech, Jacob Little, tall and slim and “careless in his attire, wearing a hat like that of a farmer, and not a very prosperous one”, was known as the ‘Railway King’. He had realized there was far more money to be made in manipulating railroad stock than in running railroads. Between 1830 and 1855, when the nation quadrupled its miles of railroad track, 125 railroad companies issued stock but never laid a single mile of track. They sold preferred stock and common stock, and several varieties of bonds. And then there was the "futures’ market" in railroad stocks and bonds. There was even an ‘options’ market, which was the buying and selling of promises to buy or sell stocks in companies that might not even exist. This was the Wall Street version of the Wild West; have printing press, will fleece all suckers. And even those railroads that were real, suffered from endless manipulation.

Consider the profitable Norwich and Worchester Railroad in Massachusetts, whose largest stockholders signed a secret agreement to sell their Norwich stock only to each other. This created an artificial shortage of the stock, which drove the price up. The partners agreed to hold their shares until Norwich topped $90 a share. They would then dump the stock and leave the suckers owning a suddenly broke and worthless railroad; As the lawyer Tom Hagan explains in “The Godfather”, “Its just business, Sonny.” Just to keep all the crooks honest, any member of the “cartel” who sold below $90 a share pledged to pay a $25,000 fine to his fellow conspirators.

Jacob Little was one of the largest conspirators in the Norwich stock scam, but he was the smart one. As the stock began to rise, Jacob quietly offered to sell his fellows a portion of his stock at $89 a share. Well, perhaps offer is the wrong word. Because after Jacob had done this several times it dawned on the crafty New Englanders that they had to buy his stock in order to avoid a price collapse of their stock. And once Jacob had unloaded all his Norwich stock at $89 a share, he dutifully mailed a $25,000 check to his “partners”. By then he had profited several times that amount by shafting his partners exactly as they had planned on shafting the suckers. The partners let it be known that if the Bull of Wall Street showed his face in Boston again, they intended on claiming his ears.

It was maneuvers such as that which inspired a handful of the lesser wizards of Wall Street to plot Jacob’s demise. They were his fellow board members on the New York and Erie Railroad, and it seemed to them that Jacob was overextended. You see, besides owning a large chunk of Erie stock, Jacob had recently bought several thousand ‘options’ pledging to buy even more. When those options matured in six months, if the option holders demanded it, Jacob would have to deliver the stock at whatever the price.

Jacob was betting, of course, that the price would go down, and as a board member he had the power to help that happen. But the wizards decided to use Jacob’s genius against him. First, they quietly bought up all of Jacob’s options. And then, as the six months ran out, they began to buy every share of Erie stock they could find, bidding the price up 15 points above the price of Jacob’s options. And Jacob remained so blissfully unaware of the doom that was impending, he actually bought even more options.

The ultimate “Survivor” moment arrived at the 2:00 p.m. meeting on Friday, November 16, 1855. It was the maturity date for Jacob’s options. Jacob was late arriving at the meeting, but even after he finally arrived, the meeting droned on tediously until the board room clock struck 3:00 p.m. The stock market was closed for trading. It was no longer possible for Jacob to buy stock to meet his options. And in the best tribal council fashion, one by one the wizards presented their options to their cornered prey. The stack piled up before Jacob got very impressive. The Napoleon of the Board Room had been broken and broken right before their eyes. But just as Jeff Probst was about to say, “The next person voted off “Survivor....”, Jacob Little pulled an immunity idol right out of his derrière.

Actually he pulled it out of London. Jacob was late to the board meeting because he had stopped in the Erie’s stock transfer room to convert Erie Railroad “convertible bonds”, bought weeks earlier on the London Stock Exchange, into Erie common stock. Such bonds are usually not worth the premium they sell for. If you are going to pay that much, you might as well buy the stock. But in this case the wizards had helpfully bid the price of Erie stock so high, they made the premium more than worth the price. And as Jacob fastidiously signed over each share required to fill the options, he was also diluting Erie Stock so that, when the market reopened in the morning, the stock price took a nose dive. The wizards had been so intent on cutting off the limb that Jacob had climbed out on, that they failed to notice they were out on the same limb. And Jacob had climbed down first.

Clearly somebody had leaked the plot, and, in retrospect that was inevitable. During his 12 years as an independent broker Jacob had built friendships and done favors for local bankers from San Francisco to New Orleans. Somebody was bound to warn Jacob about the brewing coup d’etat. But so brilliantly had Jacob gamed the system that generations of future Wall Street bulls used his trick to transfer future fortunes into their bank accounts at the expense of future generations of suckers, until the rules were eventually changed to require a convertible bond be held for at least sixty days before it could be transferred into common stock.

Most Wall Street fairy tails end the story here, with The Napoleon of the Board Room smiling a winning smile while the image fades to black. But in reality, inevitably, Jacob lost one more fortune than he made. He died flat broke on Sunday, March 28th, 1865. The Board of the New York Stock Exchange adjourned for the day to attend his funeral, but I can not say for certain whether they did this out of respect, or to confirm that Jacob was finally really dead. But I can say it has been the goal of Wall Street bankers and gamers ever since to rig the game so that they never run the risk of dying broke, ever again. And that makes it a very different game than the one that Jacob played.

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TURKEY WARS

2011-11-23T06:00:00.004-05:00

I don’t understand why anyone believes any of the popular myths about Thanksgiving. The truth is our Puritan forefathers were a humorless bunch who showed their devotion to God by going hungry - fasting. Their God was not interested in contentment, just punishment. And the only feasts they had were in the late summer, when food was plentiful. By late November they were already deep into their grain stores, and watery stew. Why would they be saying “thanks” for staving to death?

The mother of Thanksgiving was actually the widow and a poet (she wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb”), Sarah Hale. She was the 19th century version of Martha Stewart. For forty years Sarah was the editor of the prestigious “Godey’s Lady’s Book” magazine. And each November Sarah would bombard her 150,000 subscribers with recipes for Roast Turkey, Turkey stuffing, Turkey gravy, and Turkey stew. Now a lot of selling and some kitchen chemistry was required because 19th century turkeys were scrawny and almost exclusively dark meat. Sarah championed turkey because her middle class homemakers were on tight budgets, and the randy, strutting bird-brains cost less than half per pound what a chicken might cost.

But the real revolution came when, in 1934, the United States Department of Agriculture discovered the key to making turkeys palatable; artificial insemination. In 1932 the average American ate just two pounds of turkey a year. Today that amount is closer to twenty pounds.

But the popularity has come at a price - less sex for the turkey. Today’s buxom white breasted Tom Turkey is too obese to climb atop an equally buxom white breasted hen. Without human intervention, the Thanksgiving turkey would have bave gone extinct; ah, ceste se la guerre. But this brings us to my real topic, which is the year when Thanksgiving became a real la guerre; 1939

It was the third year of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second term as president. And Republicans were determined that he should not get a third term. However they were not in a good position to prevent it, holding only 177 seats in the House of Representatives (to 252 Democrats) and a paltry 23 seats in the Senate (to 69 Democrats). But then in August, Roosevelt handed Republicans an early Christmas present.

In July Franklin had received a visit from Fred Lazarus (above), head of the Federated Department Stores, the single biggest volume retail chain in America, including Macy’s and Bloomingdales in New York City, Filenes in Boston, and Strauss in Brooklyn. Fred pointed out to the President that in 1939, November would have five Thursdays; the second, the ninth, the sixteenth, the twenty-third and the thirtieth. And Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation calling for a day of Thanksgiving - first issued after the battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and re-issued by Presidents every year after - specifically designated Thanksgiving as the final Thursday in November. That final Thursday would be, in the case of 1939, the 30th . The last time Thanksgiving had fallen on the fifth Thursday in November had been 1933. So that year, the Chistmas shopping season, which traditionally began the day after Thanksgiving, was just 20 days long that year, and had proven disastrous. Lazarus wanted Roosevelt to move the Turkey Day forward one week, to give merchants another week to tempt their customers into spending on Christmas. The President had also heard from the National Retail Dry Goods Association, as well as executives of Gimbels and Lord & Taylor.

Roosevelt listened to these pleas, and at a Press Conference held August 14th, he said that “I have been hearing from a great many people for the last six years, complaints that Thanksgiving came too close to Christmas”. Roosevelt reminded the press that Thanksgiving was still not an official holiday, and that each year the President picked the date. And, since "experts" believed that adding another week to the shopping season would increase sales by 10%, Franklin announced, this year, at least, he was moving Thanksgiving to Thursday, November 23rd., the fourth Thursday in November.

The first alarm went off the next day, when Fred Lazarus ran into his younger brother Simon. Simon Lazarus was was ranting over the change because it had disrupted his Ohio State Universities’ Thanksgiving day football game. “What da-n fool got the president to do this?” Simon barked at his brother, who, in fact, was the da-n fool himself. But that was just the beginning.

The Republican attorney general for Oregon, turned to poetry. “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November; All the rest have thirty-one; Until we hear from Washington.” A shopkeeper in Kokomo, Indiana preferred to protest in prose. He put up a sign in his window which read, “Do your shopping early. Who knows, tomorrow may be Christmas.” Republican Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire urged the President to simply abolish winter by fiat. And Methodist minister Norman Vincent Peal got very outraged, charging it was “…contrary to the meaning of Thanksgiving for the president of this great nation to tinker with the sacred religious day with the specious excuse that it will help Christmas sales. The next thing we may expect Christmas to be shifted to May 1st to help the New York World’s Fair of 1940.”

Twenty-three governors went with the President’s switch, and twenty-two did not. Texas and Colorado couldn’t make up their minds and recognized both days as the holiday in question, although the Governor of Colorado, Ralph Carr, announced he would eat no turkey on the 23rd. The 30th was labeled as the Republican Thanksgiving, while the 23rd became the Democratic Thanksgiving, or, as Nucky Johnson, the recently indicted Republican mayor of Atlantic City called Franklin Roosevelt’s holiday, “Franksgiving”.

There were a few real problems hidden under this haze of invented outrage. Calendars could not be changed in time for the 1939 switch over. And schools were suddenly uncertain of vacation schedules. Some families found their holiday dinners split between the two dates. But it turned out that the real problem had been identified by Simon Lazarus, the angry brother.

The headline in the New York Times said it all; “PRESIDENT SHOCKS FOOTBALL COACHES” The coach of Little Ouachita college in Arkansas warned, “We'll vote the Republican ticket if he interferes with our football.'” Chairman of the Athletic Board at New York University wrote to Roosevelt, “…it has become necessary to frame football schedules three to five years in advance, and for both 1939 and 1940 we had arranged to play our annual football game with Fordham on Thanksgiving Day…” And then Roosevelt had changed the date!

A Gallup poll found that 62% of Americans wanted the President’s decision reversed. But it was too late for Roosevelt to change his mind in 1939. And FDR was too stubborn to admit defeat in November 1940, which also had five Thursdays, and was a Presidential election year. Despite the addition of even more politics into the mix, nine states switched from the Republican Thanksgiving to the Democratic one in 1940. That left just sixteen celebrating the “old” Thanksgiving. And that seems to have been enough of a victory for Roosevelt, that looking ahead to November 1941 (also with five Thursdays), he asked New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia to study the sales figures. Was that extra week of shopping really helping the economy? In fact it had, but not very much; certainly not enough, considering all the angst and confusion the move had cost.

In early May of 1941, LaGuardia’s report informed the White House that “the early Thanksgiving date has not proved worthwhile". So on May 20th 1941, Roosevelt set Thanksgiving 1941 as the last Thursday in November. And in a rational world, that would have settled that. But, of course, politicians are not rational beings.

Being lawmakers the politicians in the House of Represnetatives decided to get involved by writting a bill, House joint resolution 41, which justified itself by pointing out that there was nothing to designate the day as a holiday except the annual President's Procamation (which Roosevelt had mentioned at the start of this mess!). Henceforth, the last Thursday in November would legally be Thanksgiving. But when HR 41 got to the Senate, those gentlemen felt compelled to improve upon it. They did this by changing one little word. Thanksgiving would now be, not the last Thursday in November as the House had intended, but the fourth Thursday in November. As Connecticut Senator John A. Danaher pointed out, in four out of five years, the last Thursday in November was the fourth Thursday in November, anyway. The House went along and Roosevelt signed the new law into effect on December 26, 1941. And amazingly, since that date, the Republicans had been determined not to notice that Roosevelt and the merchants won.

No matter what the right wing sympathizers may chortle about on their blog posts, Roosevelt got his earlier date for Thanksgiving. He just called it something else, so the Republicans would swallow the common sense of it without chocking on their own press releases. And that is something we can all be thankful for, in four years out of every five years, anyway.

- 30